The Weekly Sift

This week I’m introducing something that might become a regular feature, called “Three Misunderstood Things”. The idea is to take three stories in the news, and to explain as concisely as I can some aspect of the story that is widely misunderstood. I’m testing it out this week by discussing misunderstandings of (1) the case (which goes to the Supreme Court in the fall) of the baker who wouldn’t make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, (2) why Mitch McConnell can’t just skip over ObamaCare repeal and move on to tax reform, and (3) how much we know about the minimum wage’s effect on jobs. I’m thinking that should be out around 10 EDT.

Before that, say 9, I’ll have the featured post out: “Yes, TrumpCare Will Kill People”. I’ve believed this for a long time, but haven’t been saying it because I didn’t feel like I could defend the link between being uninsured and dying: Some studies seemed to establish such a link, while others denied it. But recently a study-of-studies came out and removed my doubt.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: the Senate going home for the holiday without voting on TrumpCare, the first clear link between Russian hackers and the Trump campaign, parts of the Muslim Ban going into effect, Trump’s voter suppression commission starting its work, and Trump’s attempt to distract us all from that news with outrageously offensive tweets. I’ll try to get that out around 11.

For a long time, I’ve been pointing to conservative violence and conservative violent rhetoric. So it was a shock to hear that someone I probably would have agreed with on a lot of issues had gone to the park where the Republican congressional baseball team was practicing and started shooting.

Public shootings should be wake-up calls, and so I spent a big chunk of this week thinking about what people like me need to wake up to. As usual, I think conservatives went overboard in their responses, acting as if violence were a purely liberal problem they have nothing to learn from. I don’t see any reason to give in to that view, and yet I don’t want to dodge the issue with the kind of yeah-but-the-other-side-is-worse response that we hear far too often from both sides. I still think the other side is worse, but so what? That doesn’t absolve us from working on our piece of the problem.

The result of that meditation is this week’s first featured post, “Political Violence is Our Issue Too”. It should be out shortly.

The other thing that caught my attention this week was the Virginia gubernatorial primary, which was supposed to be a neck-and-neck battle for the future of the Democratic Party between an establishment candidate endorsed by all the top Virginia Democrats and an upstart progressive supported by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The establishment candidate won easily.

That outcome cemented a set of doubts that has been growing in my mind for some while: I keep hearing the argument that the progressive revolution has all the youth and the energy and is the wave of the future, and that the out-of-touch centrist establishment just needs to get out of the way. But I wonder: When is all that youth and energy going to start translating into votes?

Not being all that young myself, I’ve lived through a lot of liberal crusades. From McGovern to Nader to Kucinich, I keep running into the delusion that the Left is far more popular than it actually is. So with regard to today’s progressive movement, I’m in a prove-it-to-me mood. Somebody’s going to have to win something, preferably something the establishment can’t win, before I’m going to take all this rhetoric seriously.

I think about the Tea Party, and about Trump, who I regard as their candidate. Nobody got out of the way to make room for them. They took over the Republican Party by winning elections. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable test. Anyway, much more of that argument will appear at around 10 EDT in the second featured post “Why I’m Still Skeptical about the Progressive Revolution”.

Look for the weekly summary to be out about noon.

The big story this week was Trump announcing that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change. It was amazing (in a bad way) to listen to his speech, because the gist of it was so divorced from actual reality: In one sentence, he described the agreement as both “nonbinding” (true) and “draconian” (false).

However, the explanation of why this was such a bad move suffered from a similar problem, especially in the eyes of low-information voters: If the agreement is nonbinding, why is it such a big deal? How can a bunch of nations stating their good intentions be so important that disavowing it has apocalyptic consequences? That disconnect, plus an inclination to distrust “liberal experts” anyway, made the criticism of Trump’s action ring false among people who are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

What is needed, I decided, is not a deep legal analysis of the agreement, or a review of the evidence for climate change, or a description of the horrors that a few more degrees of global average heat could unleash. What we really need is a simple example from everyday life that illuminates what the Paris Agreement is and does.

I happen to have one handy. I just got done serving on the committee that organizes my church’s annual pledge drive. Like Paris, the pledge drive is voluntary, nonbinding, and vitally important to the survival of the church. The parallels actually run pretty deep. If you want to get technical, they’re both devices for building trust among a large number of individual decision-makers in the presence of a free-rider problem.

So that’s this week’s featured post: “The Paris Agreement is like my church’s pledge drive.” It should be out before 9 EDT. The weekly summary links to a bunch of other commentary on Paris, reviews the week’s progress on the Russia investigation, covers polls on both the Georgia special election and UK parliamentary election, and discusses the Kathy Griffin and Bill Maher blunders, plus a few other things, before closing with the best news I’ve heard in some while: Animaniacs is coming back. That should be out by 11 or so.

I’ve got two featured posts planned this morning, both having something to do with trying to proceed responsibly on the Trump-Russia scandal.

The Clinton impeachment in the late 90s was what hardened me as a Democrat. Before that I’d been a mostly left-leaning independent, but I had voted for a number of moderate Republicans over the years, and I went through a real decision process on every election. But when Republicans in Congress misused the impeachment power so badly — and virtually none of them dissented from that effort — their whole party became dead to me. It seemed obvious that having an extra-marital affair and then lying about it wasn’t what the Founders had in mind as an impeachable offense.

Now, as impeachment talk starts to swirl around Donald Trump, but we don’t yet know the full extent of what he did, I think it’s important to examine myself for hypocrisy, and do what I can to guard against a similar partisanship. So this week I set myself a challenge: Can I spell out a vision of impeachment that I’m both willing to apply to Trump and prepared to live by the next time there are accusations against a Democratic president?

My answer to that question is in the article “What is impeachment for?”, which should be out between around 9 EDT.

A second post comes out of a question a commenter raised last week: How will we know if we’ve gone off the rails on Trump conspiracy theories the same way that Republicans did on Benghazi conspiracy theories? My first response was that it’s way too early to be making those comparisons. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Republicans — not the puppet-master types, but the rank and file who are still genuinely enraged about Benghazi and really believe that Clinton and/or Obama got away with murder — made their key mistakes early in the process, right about where we are now with Trump/Russia.

So I wrote “Step Around the Benghazi Trap”, which still needs some work, but should be out by 11.

The weekly summary is more focused on the immediate news: the special counsel, the Russia leak, what Trump’s Saudi-Arabia speech tells us about policy changes, Roger Ailes died and Bill O’Reilly might be coming back, and some other stuff, before closing with a caption contest for that weird-glowing-orb photo. I’ll predict it for noon.

I’m back home again in the eastern time zone, operating on my usual schedule.

Last week I linked to some other people’s responses to the Bret Stephens’ NYT column “Climate of Complete Certainty“, in which he denounced environmental activists for making claims beyond what the underlying science justifies, but oddly named no environmental activists and specified no unjustified claims. That left his critics in the odd position of feeling like they needed to argue, but not really knowing what to argue against.

This week it dawned on me how to understand that column: as an illustration of Jason Stanley’s model of propaganda. The best propaganda, Stanley argues, doesn’t lie; it just activates false ideas that are already sitting in the minds of its target audience. I reviewed Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works a couple years ago, but his ideas are worth looking at again now that we have such an excellent current example. So the featured post this week will be “Climate of Propaganda” and should be out before 8 EDT.

A second post is a short note that outgrew its space, on the odd ceremony at the White House Thursday celebrating Trump’s executive order defending “religious liberty”, i.e., the one that is supposed to end the persecution of Christians by the IRS and other federal agencies. Since that persecution doesn’t exist, and since the order stopped well short of the unconstitutional things Trump had promised (like ending enforcement of LGBT rights), the religious leaders attending Trump’s ceremony were actually celebrating the fact that the conman they support has conned them. I’ll describe that scene in “Much Ado About Religious Liberty”, which should appear around 9.

The weekly summary has some important news to cover: France decided not to go fascist, raising the possibility that the Trump election was the peak of the global fascist momentum. The House passed TrumpCare, and House Republicans celebrated at the White House as if it had become law. One House Republican told a town hall meeting “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” I think we’ll hear that line a lot in the 2018 campaign, so I’ll examine the evidence against it. New Orleans is having a divisive and potentially violent argument about removing Confederate statues. There’s some other stuff, and I’m still looking for a closing. So that probably appears between 11 and 12.