MTG’s dream deserves a serious response

If we don’t want a “national divorce”, we need to start discussing ideas rather than trolling each other.

During my week off from writing the Sift, I preached a sermon about democracy to the Unitarian Universalist church I attend, First Parish in Bedford Massachusetts. My theme was that ultimately democracy rests not so much on processes and laws as on a shared spirit among the People: a desire to be united as equals, and to work together to govern ourselves. If a People has that spirit, it will come up with sound democratic processes for choosing leaders and making laws. But if it doesn’t, the best processes in the world will ultimately turn into empty rituals.

In the course of that talk, several ideas came up that aren’t relevant to what I want to say in this post. But I closed with a plea to try to overcome polarization: Democracy rests on an assumption that your fellow citizens are (not totally, but to a considerable extent) rational beings, capable of listening to each other and changing their minds. If you come to the conclusion that they’re not, then democracy stops making sense: Why go through all this public discussion if nobody’s listening? Why protect your opponents’ freedom of speech if nothing they might say could possibly make a difference?

In that part of the talk, I was echoing themes from Anand Giridharadas’ recent book The Persuaders. In the long run, democracy can’t survive just by each side rabble-rousing its base to get a big turnout, while rejecting as heretics anybody who isn’t in 100% agreement. That’s a path towards civil war, not democracy. Real democracy is a messy process of coalition-building: I may not agree with you on everything (or even like you much), but I can work with you on this and compromise up to here. “Politics makes strange bedfellows,” says the proverb.

Since I was talking to UUs, I could invoke the Universalist side of our heritage. Universalism centers on the doctrine of universal salvation: God is not going to give up on any of God’s creatures by condemning them to eternal damnation. [1] Today, Universalism typically gets a more secular interpretation: No one is ever beyond hope; even the most unlikely people can turn their lives around. The final line of my talk expresses a Universalist faith applied to politics:

No matter how stubborn they are or how many times they have been hoodwinked, no one is completely incapable of seeing Truth.

MTG’s divorce. As luck would have it, my faith was tested almost immediately: The next day, Marjorie Taylor Greene started tweeting about a “national divorce“.

We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.

For obvious reasons, most people interpreted this tweet as a call for secession — more or less what the confederate states did in 1861. Mitt Romney, for example, responded like this:

I think Abraham Lincoln dealt with that kind of insanity. We’re not going to divide the country. It’s united we stand and divided we fall.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham also protested: Ronald Reagan came from California and Donald Trump from New York, so conservatives should be careful about exiling those states to a different union.

But taking people seriously as potential partners in democracy means letting them clarify their views. If your goal is to turn people against each other, you jump on any poorly worded statements your opponents make and go off to the races, spinning them into something monstrous (as Fox News often does with unfortunate liberal slogans like “defund the police” [2]). But if your goal is to move forward as a self-governing people, you welcome the possibility that your opponents’ statements are actually not as horrible as they may sound at first. [3]

So on Tuesday, MTG posted a 13-tweet storm that elaborated on her “national divorce” idea. In this version, it’s clearly not a Confederate-style secession, but more like a return to the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution replaced: It’s a federalism where the role of the national government is drastically reduced and the sovereignty of the states correspondingly increased. She emphasizes the rhetorical differences between red and blue states, but nothing in her plan makes a formal division of the union into two camps. Rather, every state is divorced from every other state, forming a loose confederation rather than a nation. “Red” and “blue” would be tendencies rather than separate countries.

The main part of the “divorce” model that stays in the restatement is the justification:

irreconcilable differences: inability to agree on most things or on important things

Liberals and conservatives look at the world so differently, she claims, that they can’t come to any mutually acceptable compromises at the national level. So let’s remove those issues from the federal government and push them down to the states.

I have no idea how serious she is about this, but I imagine this vision appeals to a significant minority of the country. (As I said in my sermon: “Leaders may act in bad faith, but many follow them in good faith, believing what they have been told.”) So I think it calls for a reasoned response [4], which I’ll make in a series of small points that lead up to my main reason for opposing the idea.

This is not going to happen anytime soon, so everybody should calm down. This kind of reorganization would require a sweeping constitutional amendment, which would need to be ratified by 38 states. So any bloc of 13 could prevent such a thing from happening. According to one measure, the 13th most liberal state in the country is New Jersey. So here’s a rule of thumb: If you can’t picture some conservative amendment being ratified in New Jersey, it’s not going to happen.

With that in mind, MTG’s proposal should not be treated as an imminent threat. As Jamelle Bouie puts it, she “has a dream”. For comparison, Bernie Sanders dreams of an America that looks more like Denmark. We should be able to talk about such visions without losing our minds.

Most states aren’t any more monolithic than the US as a whole. As Bouie points out, Americans don’t split neatly into red states and blue states, so it’s far from obvious that you can dodge partisan discord by pushing decisions down to the states. [5]

And if it makes sense to push decisions down to the states, why not further — to the cities or towns or counties? If it’s wrong for the United States to shove liberal ideas “down our throats” in red Georgia, isn’t it also wrong for red Georgia to shove conservative ideas down the throats of blue Atlantans? The same question would apply to Texas/Houston, Tennessee/Nashville, Missouri/St. Louis, and so on.

In addition, one of MTG’s other proposals — that Democrats who migrate from blue states to red states should have to wait five years to vote — indicates that she lacks confidence Georgia will stay red for much longer, if everybody who lives there gets to vote.

A national divorce would be an economic disaster for the red states. Most conservatives understand (and disapprove of the fact) that the government taxes high-income individuals to pay benefits to low-income individuals. But they seldom connect the dots and realize that in the aggregate, government taxes people in high-income states to pay benefits to people in low-income states.

In general, red states are low-income states, and are being subsidized by higher-income blue states. If you list states by per capita income, the richest red state, Alaska, doesn’t show up until #14. If you look at the list in the other order, blue New Mexico is #47. Then you find some Biden-supporting purple states near the middle: Georgia (#32), Nevada (#29), and Michigan (#26). Otherwise, the bottom half of the list is entirely red. [6]

According to SmartAsset.com, the states most dependent on the federal government economically are West Virginia, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, and Alaska. The least dependent is Connecticut.

The federal government is big because that’s what the American people want. A decades-old paradox in American polling is that Americans will tell you they want the federal government to spend less, but when you ask specifically about the programs the government spends almost all its money on — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense — they’re all popular. People like to imagine that trillions of dollars can be slashed from the budget without taking away anyone’s healthcare or job or pension, but it’s just not true.

One way Greene shrinks the federal government is by sharply reducing America’s role in the world:

The federal government would have to maintain the Department of Defense but it would need to return to it’s original purpose. The United States border and our national security would be the border the DoD would defend.

Periodically, isolationism becomes popular, but it always eventually gets outweighed by a stronger national trait: Americans hate bullies. Support for Ukrainians is high right now because Russia is trying to bully them. But suppose that support fades and we pull back from all our foreign entanglements, as MTG wants. I’ll make a prediction: As soon as refugees start arriving from Chinese-occupied Taiwan and Russian-occupied Poland, Americans be asking why our leaders let that happen.

Nobody likes this divorce proposal better than America’s enemies do. Splitting the United States into fifty pieces with an isolationist foreign policy would be a dream come true for China, Russia, Iran, and a bunch of other bad actors around the world.

Her glowing vision of red states’ post-divorce future is not based in reality.

Think about the inherent contradictions in this sentence:

Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times, and LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education while blue states could have government controlled gender transition schools.

Red states will ban all sorts of things. There will be an official state ideology about gender, and speaking out against it will be branded as “lies” or “indoctrination”. [7] If parents have other ideas and try to raise their children accordingly, they may be cited for “child abuse” and risk having their children taken away by the state. Banned theories don’t even have to be false, just “confusing”. (If that’s the criterion, I propose banning quantum mechanics from state universities.) Free performances freely attended will be outlawed if state bureaucrats disapprove.

And yet, it’s the blue states that will have “government control”.

But MTG’s vision of crime and safety is where she goes furthest into fantasy.

Crime rates would be very low. Red state citizens would be safe. Criminals would be locked away swiftly when they broke the law. Justice would be served.

Policing is mostly under state and local control now, so we can look at actual results rather than into our imaginations. The states with the highest murder rates are all red states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee. When USA Today ranked states by violent crime, red Alaska was the most dangerous state. Six of the seven red states listed above — not Mississippi, interestingly enough — were also in the top 10, which was filled out by blue New Mexico and purple Nevada and Arizona.

The least dangerous states were in the Northeast: Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. New York was 25th, right in the middle, and less dangerous than Florida (21st).

And if you’re worried about you or your children getting killed with a gun, you’ll want to seek out states with sensible gun laws: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Hawaii, Rhode Island. Stay away from Alaska, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma.

Police officers would be well trained, paid, equipped, and seen as heroes once again, not portrayed as racists thugs.

Remember that economic disaster I warned about? Under the divorce settlement, red states would almost all have severe budget problems, which would probably lead to cuts in police pay and equipment. As for police being “portrayed as racist thugs”, that’s not being pushed down from Washington, it’s bubbling up from the outraged Black citizens of cities like Memphis and Louisville. (If you remember, the George Floyd protests happened while Trump was president, so the national government was not pushing them.)

Maybe red states will be able to quell that outrage with the kind of top-down thought control they’re already starting to practice: If nobody is allowed to learn about racism or discuss anything in racial terms, maybe nobody will notice that cops keep killing Black people for flimsy reasons. But achieving that kind of result will require a lot of repression. Banning a few textbooks won’t get it done.

Her vision is a response to the Right’s failure to convince the majority of Americans. If you want to drastically shrink the federal government and shift responsibilities to the states, the easiest way to do it is to rewrite to the federal budget and change the laws. Greene is in Congress, so she can propose such a thing any time she wants.

But it wouldn’t pass, because that’s not what the American people want. That’s why Republican fantasies of a much-smaller federal government revolve around terrorist tactics like threatening to push the United States into default. (As a gangster might put it, “Do what we want or the world economy gets it.”)

If their ideas were popular, they could have run on another “Contract With America” last fall. They could have publicized a detailed and drastically reduced budget proposal, swept into office with large majorities in both houses, and dared President Biden to veto a plan the American people had just endorsed.

But in fact Republicans still have not specified the cuts they want, even vaguely, because they know that the more specific they get, the less popular their proposal will be.

MTG knows the electorate is against her, so she wants to change the electorate. Her ideas can’t win on the national level, so she wants to shift the playing field to the states — but not to the cities, where (again) she would lose. She’s not expressing a principled position, she’s venue shopping.

The real reason I don’t like this? I’m an American. So far, I have the feeling that I’ve just been nibbling around the edges of the divorce proposal. Practicalities aside, what really engages my emotions here is the symbolism: What Greene is arguing, at its most basic level, is that we should all go back to identifying with our separate states rather than with the United States.

This was a popular view before the Civil War, when people started seeing “the United States” as singular rather than plural. (Before the War, an American was likely to say, “The United States are …”. After, popular usage changed to “The United States is …”.)

According to the American Battlefield Trust:

Because of his reputation as one of the finest officers in the United States Army, Abraham Lincoln offered Lee the command of the Federal forces in April 1861. Lee declined and tendered his resignation from the army when the state of Virginia seceded on April 17, arguing that he could not fight against his own people. 

Lee’s “people” were Virginians, not Americans. That’s what Greene wants to go back to: fifty sovereign entities loosely amalgamated for defense and a handful of other purposes. Ex uno, plures.

That’s not how I feel. In my lifetime, I’ve lived in four states: Illinois, Michigan (for college), back to Illinois (grad school), Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and then back to Massachusetts. But none of those moves felt like a change of identity, because all along I’ve been an American.

I still carry with me a hodge-podge of local loyalties: I root for Michigan State’s sports teams, and still have a soft spot for Chicago’s Bears and Cubs, even though the Patriots and Red Sox long ago captured my primary affections. (Inexplicably, I was always a Celtic fan, back to the days of Bill Russell and John Havlicek. Michael Jordan arrived in Chicago just as I was leaving.) I have friends all over the country, and can’t imagine thinking of them as foreigners. When I go to the national parks, I don’t feel like a tourist: The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone — they’re mine, because I’m an American.

Boston has a great old state house, but it will never spark the feelings I get from the US Capitol. Ask me who my governor was on some date in the past, and I’ll probably have to look it up. But I know all the presidents. (When I was Eurailing across the continent in the 1980s with a friend and my future wife, we tried to list them and came up one short. A few cars down, we found a tour group of American teachers, who remembered Rutherford B. Hayes.) What states do the US Olympic athletes come from? I have no idea and little interest in finding out. They’re Americans, like me.

Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene is tired of being an American and wants to identify as a Georgian instead (at least until Georgia finishes turning blue). But I don’t even know what you call somebody from Massachusetts. (Moving.com suggests “Massachusettsans”, which is a mouthful. When I lived in New Hampshire, we called them “Massholes”.)

In short, it’s important to me to keep being an American. No matter how annoyed I sometimes get with Greene and her MAGA allies, or how mystified, embarrassed, and occasionally horrified I am by what’s been going on lately in red-state legislatures, I’m not interested in a divorce.

Maybe we should try counseling. I’ll bet a counselor would recommend that we stop trolling each other.

[1] Back in the 3rd century, the Christian theologian Origen taught that even the devils in Hell would eventually see the light and be brought back into unity with God. Personally, I don’t believe in literal devils or a literal Hell, but I see an awe-inspiring beauty in Origen’s vision.

[2] Rolling Stone explains defunding the police like this:

When cities start investing in community services, they reduce the need to call police in instances when police officers’ specific skill set isn’t required. “If someone is dealing with a mental health crisis, or someone has a substance abuse disorder, we are calling other entities that are better equipped to help these folks,”[Lynda] Garcia [from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights] says.

Virtually no one who says “defund the police” means that they want to let violent criminals run wild. So if that’s the position you’re arguing against, you’re avoiding the real issues.

[3] President Biden was practicing this attitude during the State of the Union, when he accepted Republicans’ outcry that they didn’t intend to cut Social Security. “So folks,” he said, “as we all apparently agree, Social Security, Medicare is off the books now, right? All right, we got unanimity.”

Similarly, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg allowed former President Trump to claim that he had nothing to do with rolling back safety regulations on trains, which may have contributed to the rail disaster at East Palestine. Rather than accuse Trump of lying, Buttigieg graciously invited bipartisan unity: “So if he had nothing to do with it, and they did it in his administration against his will, maybe he could come out and say that he supports us moving in a different direction.”

Of course, you can interpret this kind of talk as some sort of political judo, using your opponents’ own momentum to wrong-foot them. But whatever the motive, if both sides practiced such judo, they would stumble towards agreement rather than dig in for trench warfare.

[4] A lot of the tweetstorm looks like trolling to me, and in the spirit of democracy I refuse to troll back, though I will use this note to parry unfair attacks. Her expectations of what blue states will do are almost all based on some demonic fantasy about what liberals want. For example:

In a National Divorce, the left could achieve their dreams of total and complete lawlessness.

Really? Somehow liberals are both tyrannical and lawless. We plan to institute a police state as soon as we get done abolishing the police.

And blue states would be free to allow illegal aliens from all over the world to vote freely and frequently in their elections like the DC city council wants. Dead people could still vote. Criminals in jail could vote that is if blue states even have jails or prisons anymore. Maybe blue states would let kids vote too. I mean why not, if the left says children can chop off their genitals or breasts, surely the left would let them make permanent important adult decisions like voting.

Again, I’m not sure who says “children can chop off their genitals or breasts”, and I suspect she’s just making that up. (A vanishingly small number of minors — under 18 but definitely not “children” any more — are having gender-related surgeries after their parents have had extensive consultations with psychologists and medical professionals. I suspect this is like the vanishingly small number of third-term abortions: Each individual case has unique circumstances that might evoke your empathy if you knew them.)

Non-citizens are not voting in our elections. As I first noted in 2013, dead people voting is a zombie myth that never dies no matter how often it gets debunked. And there’s probably somebody somewhere who would substantially lower the voting age, but I’m not sure who they are.

blue states would likely eliminate the anthem and pledge all together and replace them with anthems and pledges to identity ideologies like the Trans flag and BLM. Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools. I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so why not.

Most Democrats I know doubt that Antifa really exists, at least in the form conservatives imagine. I have not heard a single elected Democrat say “I support Antifa”, and I doubt MTG has either. If there’s a flag specific to trans people (rather than a rainbow flag that represents everyone) or a pledge of allegiance to BLM, I don’t know about them.

[A commenter has pointed out that there is a trans flag, which (as I said) I didn’t know about. It looks like this:

But nobody has ever suggested that I pledge allegiance to it.]

I will confess that she has me pegged in one way: I think “The Star Spangled Banner” sucks as a national anthem. I’d happily replace it with “America the Beautiful”, which is not only singable but is also about our country rather than about a piece of cloth. But that’s a personal gripe, and I don’t know how many other liberals agree with me.

Anyway, I interpret this kind of trolling as an effort to turn Americans against each other rather than solve problems. I have parried a few unfair attacks, but I refuse to strike back with, say, a Handmaid’s Tale vision of the dystopia MTG might prefer. Both sides should try to deal with what their opponents actually say before launching hyperbolic attacks.

[5] Kansas, for example, is about as red as any state. But last summer a referendum to give the legislature power to ban abortion failed by a wide margin.

[6] People who believe that conservative government promotes economic growth need to account for Mississippi: A Democrat has been governor of Mississippi for exactly 4 of the last 31 years, and yet that state has been near the bottom of just about all economic rankings that whole time.

[7] This is already happening in Florida, and is being widely imitated in other red states. Florida’s Don’t-Say-Gay and Anti-WOKE laws contain lists of banned ideas that teachers can be fined or even imprisoned for telling their students about. No blue state has laws anything like this. Liberals also have been known to object to certain books, but only conservatives want to imprison librarians.

February 27, 2023 – 10:16 am Categories: Articles | Comments (25)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The big topics to cover from the last two weeks are: the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine war, what lessons to learn from the East Palestine derailment, and what the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit has revealed about Fox News, plus a bunch of culture-war issues like Scott Adams arranging his own cancellation, the Right’s ability to manipulate the allegedly liberal media, Tennessee’s ban on drag performances, and the publisher’s editing of Roald Dahl books.

But I spent my week off preparing and delivering a sermon about democracy, which closed with the idea that those of us who want to save democracy need to keep reaching out to folks on the other side of the partisan divide. (Sadly, the other side doesn’t need to reach out. Polarization serves the authoritarian cause well.)

That was Sunday, a week ago yesterday. The next day, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted her now-famous call for a “national divorce”, and then followed that up with a more detailed walk-back that calls for an Articles-of-Confederation-style government with a weak and tiny national government and fifty sovereign states.

Now, I don’t usually respond to MTG, because I think she’s another Trump-style grifter. When she says something, I have no idea whether she’s serious, she’s conning her marks, or she’s just trying to troll people like me. But whether she’s making her proposal in good faith or not — and I suspect not — I think a lot of Americans read her tweetstorm and honestly thought that her vision sounded pretty good.

So if I’m going to practice what I’ve (quite literally) been preaching, I need to offer those people a response. That’s this week’s featured post. It should be out between 9 and 10 EST. The other stuff will be in the weekly summary, which should appear noonish.

February 27, 2023 – 8:48 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Contrasting Temperaments

NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. THE NEXT NEW POSTS WILL APPEAR ON FEBRUARY 27.

If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.

– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This week’s featured post is “Choose your enemies well“.

This week everybody was talking about the State of the Union

In the featured post, I describe why Biden’s speech was strategically brilliant. Joe Biden will never have Barack Obama’s skillful delivery, but Tuesday he pulled off a maneuver Sun Tzu would have appreciated: He occupied an easily defended position and then baited his opponents into attacking him there.

One thing I forgot to mention about Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Republican SOTU response: She painted Biden’s America as a dystopia and blamed Democratic policies. I was struck by this quote:

After years of democratic attacks on law enforcement and calls to defund the police, violent criminals roam free while law-abiding families live in fear.

It’s worthwhile to look up the states with the highest homicide rates in the country, as of 2020 (the most recent year I could find statistics for): Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, and Arkansas. All have Republican legislatures, and only one (Louisiana) has a Democratic governor. So whatever might be causing violent crime, I doubt it’s Democratic proposals for police reform.

and the earthquake

I don’t have anything to add to the mainstream media reports. The death toll continues to rise as would-be rescuers dig bodies out of the rubble. It’s currently up to 36,000.

and House Republicans’ hearings

When Republicans took control of the House, the big thing they promised (other than the debt-ceiling hostage crisis currently scheduled for June) was investigation. A few of their planned topics are legitimately things Congress should look into, like how people defrauded Covid relief programs and whether there was a better way to withdraw from Afghanistan. Good hearings on these topics could generate lessons for future Congresses.

But most of what McCarthy & Company have planned is political theater, meant to popularize and legitimize right-wing conspiracy theories: Anthony Fauci’s role in creating the Covid virus, the Twitter/FBI conspiracy against Trump, some previously unenumerated set of crimes that Hunter Biden’s laptop supposedly proves, and so on.

Kevin McCarthy’s problems securing the speakership delayed opening night, but now the hearings are underway. Sadly for him, though, they’re not going according to plan. You see, unlike the auditions that Fox News has been airing for two years now, the actual hearings include Democrats, some of whom are quite smart and do their homework. (My favorite source for clips from these hearings is to follow Acyn on Twitter.)

For example, House Weaponization Committee Chair Jim Jordan called “expert” witness Jonathan Turley to testify that

The Twitter Files raise serious questions of whether the United States government is now a partner in what may be the largest censorship system in our history. The involvement cuts across the Executive Branch, with confirmed coordination with agencies ranging from the CDC to the CIA. Even based on our limited knowledge, the size of this censorship system is breathtaking, and we only know of a fraction of its operations through the Twitter Files.

But then Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz made him admit that he doesn’t actually know anything beyond the cherry-picked claims the rest of us have seen.

DWS: Mr. Turley turning to you. Have you ever worked for Twitter?
Turley: No.
DWS: Do you have any formal relationship with the company?
Turley: No.
DWS: Do you have any specific or special or unique knowledge about the inner workings of Twitter?
Turley: Nothing beyond the Twitter Files and what I read in the media.

In this clip from the House Oversight Committee, AOC interviews Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter’s content moderation team. She reviews then-President Trump tweeting that AOC and three other women of color in Congress should “go back where they came from”, and gets Navaroli to verify that:

  • At that time, Twitter’s content moderation guide specifically mentioned telling immigrants to “go back where you came from” as an example of banned abuse.
  • A higher official at Twitter overrode the content-moderation team’s assessment that Trump was in violation of the site’s policy.
  • Within days, that example was removed from the content moderation guide.

AOC: So Twitter changed their own policy after the President violated it, in order to essentially accommodate his tweet?
Navaroli: Yes.
AOC: Thank you. So much for bias against the right wing on Twitter.

That hearing was supposed to focus on a nefarious conspiracy between Twitter and Democrats in government to suppress free speech. But in fact the most striking case was of Trump trying to get a tweet by model Chrissy Tiegen removed because she called him a “pussy ass bitch”. (Trump can dish it out, but he can’t take it. Maybe that’s because he’s a … no, I won’t repeat it.)

And then there’s this epic rant by Rep. Jared Moskowitz. No single quote stands out; it’s just an end-to-end takedown. Along the way, he mentions this recent article from the WaPo, describing the direct financial benefits that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have gotten from their relationship with Saudi Crown Prince MBS. The corruption described is much less speculative than what Hunter Biden is accused of.

The House Oversight Committee’s hearings about the border are also revealing more than Republicans expected. This full hearing is three hours, but if you skip to 1:40, you can hear Scott Perry (of 1-6 conspiracy fame) question John Modlin, chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector. Perry quotes statistics showing that more migrants were apprehended at the border after Biden took office, and then badgers Modlin to tell him “what changed?”, clearly fishing for a condemnation of the Biden administration. Instead, Modlin explains that during post-arrest interviews, migrants said that they thought the border was open now.

Perry: The migrants said that they thought the border was open, right?
Modlin: Yes.
Perry: Why did they think that?
Modlin: They thought that, sir. … well, I don’t know. What they told us was that they had heard it was open. Sir, in my experience, it only takes a few people to say the right words, and it travels.

Why did they think the border was open? I don’t know, Scott. Maybe it’s because lying about Biden’s “open border” policy has been a major Republican talking point. (In the last Congress, for example, a number of Republicans introduced the “Close Biden’s Open Border Act“.) Maybe migrants think the border is open because they listen to people like you.

George Santos is not unique. There also appear to be problems with the story Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) tells about herself.

but I want to give you an example of what “sifting” means

Every week, I see upsetting headlines that I decide are not worth your attention. This week, I ran across one so perfect that I thought I would highlight it as an example of the kinds of links you should ignore when they appear on your news feed: “Bill would ban the teaching of scientific theories in Montana schools“.

I have to confess that my first reaction was “Bill Who?”. But then I clicked through and read the article and the proposed legislation it’s based on.

Here’s what it’s about: A newly elected member of the Montana Senate introduced a truly stupid two-page piece of legislation that would limit K-12 science classes to teaching “scientific fact”, which it defines as “an indisputable and repeatable observation of a natural phenomenon”. Anything else is a “theory”, which is “speculation and is for higher education to explore, debate, and test to ultimately reach a scientific conclusion of fact or fiction”.

The bill looks like an attempt to get theories like evolution or climate change out of the K-12 curriculum. But the author clearly has no idea what “fact” and “theory” mean in a scientific context. A fact is something immediately observable, like where Jupiter is in the sky at a particular moment. A theory is a model that explains facts; the solar system, for example. (You can never “observe” the solar system. You can just observe where the planets are.) And no matter how many facts go into forming a theory, or how often a theory is confirmed by observation, it never becomes “indisputable”. (Think how many times Newton’s laws were confirmed by experiment before scientists started testing them near the speed of light, where they don’t work.)

So the whole idea that science chews on theories until they become “fact or fiction” is misguided. Theories and facts are two different kinds of things; one never becomes the other. (The missing word here is hypothesis, which is an insufficiently tested theory. Science tests hypotheses against observations until they are either disproved or become increasingly trustworthy.)

OK then, it’s a dumb bill that would, among other things, ban Montana schools from teaching kids about the solar system. But why do I say you shouldn’t concern yourself with it? Wouldn’t this be a terrible law?

Yes, of course it would. But so far it’s just one ignorant man spouting off. If you live in Great Falls and he happens to be your senator, you should care. But nothing about the bill indicates that it’s on its way to becoming law. It has one sponsor. It has been heard by the relevant committee, which took no action on it. And the bill’s official record already includes a “legal review note“; two lawyers working for the legislature point out that it would violate the Montana constitution, which doesn’t give the legislature this kind of power over curricula.

Conclusion: Don’t waste your energy getting upset about this bill.

Every week, I see stuff like this and decide not to call it to your attention. Thought you should know.

and you also might be interested in …

Every day or two now, we hear about another atmospheric object that the Pentagon is shooting down. There’s still no good explanation of what they are, who put them there, and what they were intended to do. The Atlantic Juliet Kayyem offers a simple if still speculative explanation: Maybe we’re seeing more of these objects because we’ve started looking harder.

Mike Pence has been subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith. This move opens up all kinds of speculation: about how close Smith is to charging Trump for his role in instigating the January 6 riot, whether Trump will claim executive privilege to prevent Pence’s testimony, and so on.

When it comes to Trump’s legal jeopardy, I’m just about done with speculation. Wake me up when somebody — whether it’s Smith or prosecutors in Georgia, in New York, or somewhere else — either file charges or announce that they’re not filing charges.

Meanwhile, more classified documents have turned up at Mar-a-Lago, including some that were scanned onto an aide’s laptop.

I’m growing increasingly suspicious of all the Kamala-Harris-has-a-problem columns I’ve been seeing in the NYT and elsewhere, almost from the moment she was sworn in. I didn’t support Harris when she ran for president in the 2020 primaries, and she wouldn’t be my first choice in 2024 if Biden decides not to run. But I’m not sure what standard she is failing to meet as vice president. I mean, was Mike Pence such a dynamic presence in the Trump administration?

The typical vice president stays in the background. George H. W. Bush’s main duty in the Reagan administration was to attend funerals of foreign leaders. Biden and Obama seemed to have a good relationship, but it was never particularly clear what Biden did in the administration. (Biden was often the comic relief, as in this cartoon about the trillion-dollar coin.) Al Gore was overshadowed by Hillary Clinton. Dick Cheney was a power-behind-the-throne in the George W. Bush administration, but that never seemed like a good thing. And the less said about Dan Quayle the better.

So what’s wrong with Kamala Harris? In my view, the most important duty of a VP is to avoid any appearance of conflict with the president. Otherwise, people with guns might get the idea that they can change the course of the nation by killing the president, as Leon Czolgosz did when he shot President McKinley and put Teddy Roosevelt into office. Done right, the vice presidency is not a job that lends itself to carving out a charismatic public persona.

I admit, Harris is not making a great case for why she should be president after Biden. But no VP does; if a current VP runs for president, the race almost always hinges on the popularity of the current president. So the more criticism of Harris I see, the more I suspect she is being judged by some special woman-of-color standard that hasn’t applied to any previous VP.

Twitter sounds like a terrible place to work these days. Recently, Elon Musk called a meeting to get an explanation of why his account’s engagement numbers are tanking. One of the engineers provided such an explanation: Musk is becoming less popular. Internal Twitter statistics say so, and so does his Google Trends score, which peaked at 100 in April and is now down to 9.

Musk had been looking for some way that Twitter’s algorithms are biased against him, which turns out not to be true. He fired the engineer.

It sounds like Jim Crow is coming back in Mississippi:

A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials. … The appointments by state officials would occur in lieu of judges and prosecutors being elected by the local residents of Jackson and Hinds County — as is the case in every other municipality and county in the state.

The bill isn’t law yet, though. It still has to be passed by the state senate and signed by the governor.

The alleged purpose of the new system is to deal with Jackson’s crime problem. Why new funding has to go through a new state-appointed system rather than the existing Jackson system has not been adequately explained.

“This is just like the 1890 Constitution all over again,” [Black Democrat Rep. Ed] Blackmon said from the floor. “We are doing exactly what they said they were doing back then: ‘Helping those people because they can’t govern themselves.’”

The greenhouse effect that causes global warming is more complicated than I thought.

The price of electric vehicles is coming down and should continue to fall, according to the NYT. Three factors are coming together:

  • Production costs are falling, due to new mines opening and supply chains sorting themselves out.
  • Competition between manufacturers is increasing, as legacy car manufacturers like Ford and GM expand their offerings.
  • The Inflation Reduction Act included EV rebates.

A bit of right-wing rhetoric I haven’t decoded yet: Instead of talking about China, right-wingers talk about “the Chinese Communist Party”. One typical example comes from Marc Thiessen‘s column the WaPo:

Instead of using his speech this week to report to the American people on the recent incursion of a Chinese spy balloon and lay out a strategy to confront the danger posed by the Chinese Communist Party, Biden made only an elliptical reference

I see this again and again — and the Right doesn’t do this kind of thing by accident — but I don’t have an explanation: Why isn’t it “the danger posed by China” or even “posed by President Xi”? Anybody out there know?

and let’s close with something tiny

Every year, Nikon runs a variety of photo contests, including one devoted to microphotography. Winners are collected on Nikon’s Small World web site. Winning photos are unfailingly beautiful, even if you can’t begin to figure out what you’re seeing until you read the caption. This one, for example, is “blood vessel networks in the intestine of an adult mouse”.

February 13, 2023 – 12:34 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (14)

Choose your enemies well

Biden’s State of the Union wasn’t pretty.
But it probably accomplished more than any SOTU in my lifetime.

This year’s State of the Union was a lesson in the difference between strategy and tactics. President Obama’s SOTUs, like all his speeches, were tactically outstanding. Watching him deliver them was like watching a gifted athlete in his prime. His voice perfectly pitched, his phrases perfectly timed, Obama raised emotion, evoked idealism, and occasionally managed to communicate an idea that was supposed to be too nuanced for this medium. If you had supported him, or even just identified with him as your president after he was elected, you felt pride: This is the man who leads my country.

Joe Biden will never be able to do that. Having struggled his whole life to overcome a childhood stutter, he will always look on a major speech as something to get through rather than an opportunity to shine. After more than half a century in politics, he still sometimes stumbles over his written text, puts emphasis on the wrong words, and races through sentences he ought to drive home.

But that cloud’s silver lining is an aura of authenticity: Biden must be telling it like it is, because he doesn’t have the artistry to lead us astray. Trump is glib and audacious enough to pitch any kind of snake oil, but Biden would never be able to get those words out. It’s already hard enough for him to tell you something he thinks is true.

Tuesday’s speech was vintage Biden. It was too long. His voice was not engaging. And I could easily picture his speechwriter grimacing as the President ruined well-crafted lines that must have looked so good on the computer screen.

And yet, Biden knew his audience, knew his opponents in the room, and delivered a speech that was strategically brilliant. He occupied a strong defensive position and invited his opponents to attack him there, knowing that they would be unable to resist. As Sun Tzu put it:

If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.

The sound base of Biden’s speech is that he had a good story to tell: record low unemployment, lower drug prices, bipartisan support to rebuild America in ways Trump had promised but never delivered, bringing manufacturing jobs back, the first new gun regulations in decades, NATO reunited against Russian aggression, bipartisan support for research that helps our technology companies compete with China, and a minimum tax to prevent trillion-dollar corporations from paying nothing. He even had good news to tell about the negative parts of the picture: Inflation, the deficit, and Covid are all trending in the right direction.

But rather than unleash a Trump-style brag about his “yuge” accomplishments, Biden was more than willing to share the credit with Republicans.

Folks, as you all know, we used to be number one in the world in infrastructure. We’ve sunk to 13th in the world. The United States of America — 13th in the world in infrastructure, modern infrastructure.

But now we’re coming back because we came together and passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — the largest investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. …

And I mean this sincerely: I want to thank my Republican friends who voted for the law. And my Republican friends who voted against it as well — but I’m still — I still get asked to fund the projects in those districts as well, but don’t worry. I promised I’d be a President for all Americans. We’ll fund these projects. And I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.

He then looked forward, with plans to address everyday problems large numbers of Americans face: protect Social Security and Medicare, end junk fees and surprise medical bills, restore the child tax credit, help seniors stay in their homes, reduce student debt, and move forward in ways that unite us rather than divide us. Here’s how he presented the often-divisive issue of police reform:

We all want the same thing: neighborhoods free of violence, law enforcement who earns the community’s trust. Just as every cop, when they pin on that badge in the morning, has a right to be able to go home at night, so does everybody else out there. Our children have a right to come home safely.

But getting back to Sun Tzu: It’s one thing to occupy a position you can easily defend. The real trick, though, is to get your opponent to attack you there. Biden managed that by pointing to a true fact most Republicans would like American people to ignore: Rick Scott’s proposal to sunset all government programs every five years, which he presented in a glossy brochure last year when he was chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Biden pointed out an obvious consequence of Scott’s plan:

Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans — some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset.

That set off a storm of protest from the Republican side, which Biden accepted at face value and made sure the American people took note of: In spite of what they’ve said many times in the past, Republicans don’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Folks — so, folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the — off the books now, right? They’re not to be touched?

All right. All right. We got unanimity! Social Security and Medicare are a lifeline for millions of seniors. Americans have to pay into them from the very first paycheck they’ve started.

So, tonight, let’s all agree — and we apparently are — let’s stand up for seniors. Stand up and show them we will not cut Social Security. We will not cut Medicare.

Popular as that position might be, though, it’s still impossible to square with a goal most Republicans are unwilling to give up on: They can’t achieve a balanced budget without tax increases if entitlement programs are off the table. [1]

But no matter how they protested on national TV Tuesday night, apparently some of them still do want to make cuts. Here’s Senator Mike Round (R-SD) on CNN yesterday. (I’m quoting at length to be as fair to him as possible.)

I kind of look at Social Security the way I would at the Department of Defense and our defense spending. We’re never going to not fund defense. But at the same time, every single year we look at how we can make it better. And think it’s about time that we start talking about Social Security and making it better. We’ve got 11 years before we actually see cuts start to happen to people that are on Social Security. It can be very responsible for us to do everything we can to make those funding programs now and the plans right now so that we don’t run out of money in Social Security, and that it continues to provide all the benefits that it does today. Simply looking away from it and pretending like there’s no problem with Social Security is not an appropriate or responsible thing to do. So I guess my preference would be: Let’s start managing it.

That is the line I expect to hear more often as the budget/debt-ceiling battle heats up: It’s completely impossible to make even the richest Americans pay more tax (as Biden proposes), so the trust funds will have to run out of money. [See note 1 again.] When that happens, benefit cuts are coming whether anyone wants them or not. Let’s accept, then, that cuts are inevitable and make it better by managing those cuts — so that billionaires can go on paying lower tax rates than truck drivers and nurses. (They won’t say that last part out loud.)

So that’s the significant policy achievement of Biden’s speech: He got Republicans to paint themselves into a corner on an issue the voters care about.

But there was also a significant political achievement: Biden stage-managed a bit of theater that framed his administration and his Republican opposition in the terms he wants.

Throughout the speech, Biden himself was calm and even generous. He thanked Republicans for their contribution to the bipartisan bills passed these last two years. [2] And he invited further cooperation

To my Republican friends, if we could work together in the last Congress, there’s no reason we can’t work together and find consensus on important things in this Congress as well.

I think — folks, you all are just as informed as I am, but I think the people sent us a clear message: Fighting for the sake of fighting, power for the sake of power, conflict for the sake of conflict gets us nowhere.

That’s always been my vision of our country, and I know it’s many of yours: to restore the soul of this nation; to rebuild the backbone of America, America’s middle class; and to unite the country.

When Republicans responded to parts of his speech with catcalls and angry yells of “Liar!”, Biden took it in stride: They were enraged, he was not. And if they no longer held the views he had just (correctly, and with documentation) attributed to some of them, then he was happy to accept their agreement: “I enjoy conversion,” he said. [3]

The theatrical aspect of the SOTU made something clear to the American people: If there’s a problem with incivility and extremism in Washington, it’s a one-sided problem. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the rest of the shouters made a mockery of the Republican SOTU response, in which new Arkansas governor and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said:

The choice is between normal or crazy.

Anybody who had been watching what happened in the House chamber had no doubt that this is true. But Sanders has clearly chosen Team Crazy, not Team Normal. And while Biden hoped for unity with “my Republican friends”, Sanders fanned division and doubled down on Trump-style trolling.

President Biden and I don’t have a lot in common. I’m for freedom. He’s for government control. At 40, I’m the youngest governor in the country. At 80, he’s the oldest president in American history.  I’m the first woman to lead my state. He’s the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.

And she painted conservatives as the innocent victims of that “woke mob”.

We are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols…all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is—your freedom of speech.

Definitely, if I’m ever offered 15 minutes of national TV time, I’m going to use it to complain that I don’t have freedom of speech.

What has happened here is that President Biden has stolen a trick from Trump, but implemented it in a cleverer way. Whenever the news cycle is going against Trump, he picks a fight with someone his base is inclined to hate: the Squad, or Colin Kaepernick, or LeBron James. The content of the fight doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter that Trump’s attack is usually unprovoked. Trump just knows that a fight between him and AOC plays well to his base. (Ron DeSantis is doing the same thing now: It doesn’t matter that he’s totally in the wrong about Black history or banning LGBTQ books. DeSantis vs. Black or gay or trans activists is a good look for him as he gets ready for the 2024 Republican primaries.)

So Biden comes out of the SOTU with Marjorie Taylor Greene yelling “Liar!” at him for saying something true and reasonable that she didn’t like. It’s a good look for him — not just in front of the progressive base, but in front of the American people.

[1] A point sometimes made by this blog’s commenters is that Social Security and Medicare have their own taxes and trust funds, and so are not technically part of the deficit. However, current estimates say that the Social Security trust fund runs out of money in 2035, and Medicare runs dry in 2028. If there are no tax increases by then — something Republicans always assume — either benefits are cut at that point or money to pay for them has to come out of the general fund.

Budget bills are only binding on the current year, but they typically project ten years ahead. A perennial Republican goal is to pass a budget bill that sees the annual deficit go away in the final year the 10-year window. So while the problem with Social Security is still over Congress’ horizon, the projected Medicare shortfall is relevant.

[2] There’s actually quite a list.

You know, we’re often told that Democrats and Republicans can’t work together. But over the past two years, we proved the cynics and naysayers wrong.

Yes, we disagreed plenty. And yes, there were times when Democrats went alone.

But time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together. Came together to defend a stronger and safer Europe. You came together to pass one in a once-in-a-generation infrastructure law building bridges connecting our nation and our people. We came together to pass one the most significant laws ever helping victims exposed to toxic burn pits.

And in fact, I signed over 300 bipartisan pieces of legislation since becoming President, from reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act to the Electoral Count Reform Act, the Respect for Marriage Act that protects the right to marry the person you love.

[3] An aside: This back-and-forth, where Biden interacted with his opponents off-the-cuff — and ate their lunch in the process — should permanently put to rest all the nonsensical claims that Biden has dementia and is just reading words off a screen.

February 13, 2023 – 10:21 am Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Politically, the big event that happened this week was the State of the Union address. It was a uniquely Biden performance. Obama’s speeches were nearly always works of art: soaring oratory, full of idealism and inspiration, delivered with perfect timing and phrasing. Trump’s speeches were snake-oil pitches, designed to exhaust the fact-checkers to the point that many falsehoods went unanswered. And he always spoke only to his half of the country while doing his best to troll the other half.

Biden doesn’t have the skill to take either approach. His lifelong struggle not to stutter means that a long speech is something to get through rather than an opportunity to shine. His brand is bipartisan unity, not demonization of the Other, so he can’t rabble-rouse. And yet, Tuesday’s speech arguably accomplished more than any SOTU in my lifetime. It was not brilliantly delivered, but it was brilliantly conceived. Biden pulled off a masterful bit of strategy (which is why this week’s quote is from Sun Tzu).

The featured post examines the speech in detail. It should post maybe around 10 EST.

The weekly summary also covers the first hearings of Kevin McCarthy’s House, which did not go as planned. It turns out that (unlike when Republicans appear on Fox News) House hearings also include Democrats, some of whom are quite clever — and do enough homework to notice when the facts are on their side. In contrast to my usual summaries, this one will include a detailed example of the kind of headline you should not pay attention to. Then there are the UFOs the Air Force keeps shooting down, Mike Pence getting a subpoena from the special counsel, and a few other things. That should be out a little after noon

February 13, 2023 – 8:43 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Gains and complaints

Our merchants frequently complain of the high wages of British labor as the cause of their manufactures being undersold in foreign markets; but they are silent about the high profits of stock. They complain about the extravagant gain of other people; but they say nothing of their own.

– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

This week’s featured post is “How did we get $32 trillion in debt?“. It’s a somewhat nerdy look at the history of the national debt, preparing the way for posts later this spring about what (if anything) can or should be done about it.

This week everybody was talking about police reform

Some issues in America wear me down. Mass shootings are one. They’re almost a constant feature of American life; if you forget to pay attention to one, don’t sweat it, because there will be another one soon.

Once in a while one is so much more horrific than the usual run of mass shootings — Columbine, Sandy Hook, that Las Vegas music festival, Uvalde — that national attention lingers for more than a day or two. And for a little while, in spite of all experience, I think, “This can’t go on. Now something will have to change.”

Then nothing changes, and I feel foolish for imagining that something would. And it gets a little harder to raise my interest the next time.

Police killing innocent people of color (or even an occasional innocent white person) is another issue that wears me down. Last week I mentioned Tyre Nichols’ death, but didn’t give it the attention it deserved. I had been worn down. I mean, I’ve already lived through the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. And I got focused on each of them for a while and thought something would have to change.

And I can’t even say that nothing has changed. Derek Chauvin is in jail for killing Floyd, and his anticipated release date isn’t until 2035. So in this age of cellphone cameras, a cop can’t get away with killing a guy slowly in front of witnesses any more. That’s something. Tyre Nichols’ killers were fired and charged pretty quickly, and that’s something too. It rises above the very low bar set in the past.

But NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie put his finger on what I think is the core issue: “the institution of American policing lies outside any meaningful democratic control.”

What little accountability exists for American police is easily subverted. Internal-affairs departments are often more interested in exonerating colleagues than investigating misconduct, and police unions do everything they can to shield bad actors, attack critics and secure more due process for cops accused of abuse than their victims ever get. … Without a strategy to curb or break the cartel power of police departments — meaning their ability to undermine, neuter and subvert all attempts to regulate and control their actions and personnel — there is no practical way to achieve meaningful and lasting reform, if that is your goal.

In our current media and political culture, it’s way too easy for opponents of reform to frame the discussion as a dichotomy of bad choices: Either you are pro-police (which means you defend their right to kill people with little accountability) or you are anti-police (which means you want to abolish police and leave Americans at the mercy of violent criminals). What gets lost in that framing is any distinction between good policing and bad policing. Surely there must be some way to support police trying their best to do a difficult and dangerous job without giving bullies-with-badges carte blanche to beat or shoot anyone who looks cross-eyed at them. There has to be a way to empower a police department to protect the community without licensing it to prey on the community.

The Atlantic’s David Graham:

Since the rise of Black Lives Matter, activists had been pressing for reform of the troubled police department, yet starting in 2020, Memphis also saw a sharp rise in violent crime, including murder. The result was a city that was both underpoliced and overpoliced. Memphians, especially Black ones, complained of rampant crime and unchecked gang violence, and they didn’t want to defund the police. But they also reported that officers were focused on rinky-dink arrests and pretextual stops instead of violent crime, and feared that they or their family members would be brutalized by police—a fear that Nichols’s death chillingly validates.

Last week I linked to a clip of Tucker Carlson telling his audience that Antifa was using the newly released Tyre Nichols video as a pretext to start riots across the country. (The riots didn’t happen.) Apparently, that segment and many others on Fox News were based on a poster of dubious provenance that was said to be “circulating in the underground of New York City”.

Where that poster actually seems to have circulated was on right-wing sites trying to frighten their audiences. Disinformation researcher Caroline Orr has been able to trace the image through right-wing media back to NYPD sources, but hasn’t been able to find any earlier references. She describes it as a “likely disinformation narrative”.

One fact about the current era that conservatives are desperate to ignore, deny, or explain away is that right-wing political violence is a much bigger problem than left-wing political violence. (“Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”) So any potential for left-wing violence is going to spread widely on the right, whether there’s any basis for it or not.

and Kevin McCarthy’s revenge

Thursday, the House voted on party lines to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from from the Foreign Affairs Committee. Ostensibly, the removal was a punishment for past anti-Semitic remarks, but it was a fairly transparent reprisal for the Democratic House majority removing Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar from committees in the previous Congress.

Previously, McCarthy had removed Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee, which is a select committee that the Speaker has arbitrary power over. Again, reasons other than revenge were given, but the WaPo awarded McCarthy four Pinocchios for them. Schiff was the lead House manager in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, and Swalwell was on the Judiciary Committee for both impeachments. That’s what this is about.

Nancy Pelosi had used her power over select committees to refuse to seat possible Trump conspirators Jim Jordan and Jim Banks on the January 6 Committee. MAGA Republican Rep. Chip Roy compared McCarthy’s reprisal to pitchers throwing at batters in baseball: “My view is, you hit my guy. You come to the plate, we’re gonna pop your guy.”

By making this a tit-for-tat situation, House Republicans are denying that any standards apply to their behavior. Jim Jordan was refused a seat on the January 6 Committee because, as a likely witness, he had a conflict of interest. (Jordan later defied a subpoena from the committee.) Gosar and Greene were cited for promoting violence against other members of Congress: Gosar posted a video in which he killed Democratic colleague AOC. Greene told a crowd that Nancy Pelosi deserved the death penalty for treason. None of the sanctioned Democrats did anything remotely similar.

If the tit-for-tat logic continues to motivate Republicans, soon we can expect them to impeach Joe Biden for something-or-other.

Ilhan Omar represents Minneapolis and part of its suburban ring. She was first elected to Congress in 2018, and in November was elected to her third term with 74% of the vote. She is a Muslim who was born in Somalia. Her family fled the Somali civil war, and she spent four years in a refugee camp. Her family came to the United States in 1995, when she was 12. She became an American citizen at age 17.

Omar has played a unique role on the Foreign Affairs Committee, as Peter Beinart explained in the NYT, describing her as “the only person who consistently describes American foreign policy as it is experienced by much of the rest of the world.” She does not immediately assume that American actions are motivated by the commitment to freedom and democracy our officials claim, but reminds her colleagues of uncomfortable facts about the repressive governments we have sometimes supported.

Across the world, many people encounter American foreign policy when they see a drone flying overhead, a hospital that U.S. sanctions have deprived of medicine or a dictator’s troops carrying American-made guns. Ms. Omar asks the kinds of questions that these non-Americans — whether they reside in Pakistan, Cuba or Cameroon — might ask were they seated across from the officials who direct America’s awesome power. She translates between Washington and the outside world.

Whether you always agree with her or not, she has a point of view that Congress needs to hear.

and a balloon

This week’s dumbest story was the Chinese spy/weather balloon that floated from Alaska to the Carolinas before being shot down by an F-22 on Saturday. Currently, the Pentagon is trying to recover the equipment, which fell into 47-foot-deep water.

What makes it a dumb story is that none of us have the information we need to evaluate the situation, and possibly we never will. What were the Chinese looking for? Were they in control of the balloon or was it a runaway, as they claimed? What could a balloon tell them that their spy satellites can’t? Did it pose any actual threat?

I know of no way to answer those questions, short of getting myself hired by the NSA or some other agency with the appropriate clearances. Since that’s not going to happen, I can compare the US government’s official version to the Chinese government’s official version and decide who I want to believe, if anybody. Or I could just make something up.

Hardly anybody who has been commenting on TV knows any more than I do, so the balloon turned into a pure Rorschach test on whether or not you trust the Biden administration. I more-or-less do, so I’m willing to believe that watching the balloon for a few days and then shooting it down before it returned to international waters was a sensible response. If you don’t trust the Biden administration, on the other hand, you might disagree with me and imagine all kinds of dire scenarios.

But neither of us know anything.

and you also might be interested in …

There’s been a major earthquake centered in Turkey with effects extending into Syria. I don’t do breaking news on this blog, so you might want to check a source that does.

The January jobs report came out: The economy added 517K jobs in January, far more than analysts had expected. That pushed the unemployment rate down to 3.4%, which is lower than at any time during the Trump administration. The last time unemployment was this low was May, 1969.

It’s weird that Biden gets so little credit for this. Vox discusses how hard it is to find economic optimism, in spite of numbers that look pretty good.

Mike Pence wants credit for being “part of it when George W. Bush proposed Social Security reform in 2005”, and still wants to “give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account”.

That was an extremely unpopular idea back in 2005, and I can’t quite imagine why Pence thinks it will be more popular now. Elder care is a problem in the real economy, not the financial economy, and nothing magic happens when you move financial responsibility for it from the public to the private sector. Such a move can only “take us off this trajectory of massive debt” if it means that some people will be left without care.

It’s also a bad idea on the individual level. Fundamentally, Social Security is an insurance program, not a pension program. The risk it’s supposed to insure you against is having no money after you’re too old to earn more. Putting that money in the stock market, which might collapse at precisely the moment you need it, increases your risk.

Over decades, investing in the stock market can make the difference between a passable retirement and an enviable one. But the stock market is for money you can afford to lose. Your old-age-cat-food money, on the other hand, should be guaranteed by the government.

and let’s close with some ingenuity

I don’t want to get into a discussion of the practicality of this. (I mean, what do you do with all that plastic wrap after you’re ready to break camp?) But I have to admire the inventiveness involved in turning 10 rolls of plastic wrap into a wilderness shelter.

February 6, 2023 – 12:30 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (11)

How did we get $32 trillion in debt?

Your high school teachers probably didn’t tell you how big a role the national debt has played in American history.

President Biden and Speaker McCarthy met Wednesday to begin talking about next year’s budget, future policies on taxing and spending, and raising the ceiling on the national debt — which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says has already been reached and will become a crisis in a few months, probably by June.

Biden and McCarthy each framed their meeting differently. McCarthy presented it as the beginning of a negotiation over raising the debt ceiling, while Biden insists that (while he is eager to discuss the other issues), he will not pay ransom to House Republicans to avoid sending the United States into default.

President Biden made clear that, as every other leader in both parties in Congress has affirmed, it is their shared duty not to allow an unprecedented and economically catastrophic default. The United States Constitution is explicit about this obligation, and the American people expect Congress to meet it in the same way all of his predecessors have. It is not negotiable or conditional.

We probably haven’t heard the last of this issue, so I think it’s worth spending some time to get past the slogans and talking points. Four weeks ago I explained what the debt ceiling is, and came to the conclusion that it shouldn’t exist at all. The US and Denmark are the only countries that have a formal debt ceiling, and Denmark doesn’t play politics with its ceiling the way we do. In essence, the debt ceiling is a self-destruct button built into our government. Pushing the button would benefit no one, except possibly our enemies (though I doubt even China wants to see us default on the bonds it holds). But politicians can threaten to push the button (as McCarthy and his caucus are threatening now) to try to extract concessions. In essence, McCarthy is like the terrorist who hijacks an airliner and threatens to blow up the plane he is on unless his demands are met.

There is also good reason to believe that the Republicans are not acting in good faith, as I have regularly suggested in weekly summaries. They painted the national debt as an existential threat to America’s future during the Obama administration, and then conveniently forgot about it for four years under Trump. Now that Democrats have the White House again, debt is back to the top of their agenda.

But even after we recognize the bad faith and illegitimate tactics, we shouldn’t just ignore the issues Republicans are raising. (Once in a while, the airline terrorist might have a legitimate point, and his demands might be worth considering after the plane and its passengers are safe.) The strength of the Republican position politically is the American people’s intuition that this can’t go on forever. We can’t keep piling up trillions of new debt every few years. Or can we? What would go wrong if we did? And what warning signs should we be looking for, to know if or when we’ve pushed the debt too high?

I don’t want to obsess over this topic, but if Janet Yellen is right we have a few months to think about it before the crisis hits in June. So I have a series of articles planned, which will come out sporadically between now and then. The first was the debt-ceiling post I already mentioned. In this second post, I’ll look at the history of the national debt, which plays a bigger role in America’s story than your high school teachers probably led you to believe. (In general, high school history is bad at weaving economic history into its larger narrative.)

In later posts, I’ll talk about the various impacts people expect the national debt to have, and whether any of their predictions have manifested or show signs of manifesting anytime soon. And finally I’ll discuss what we might do if we were actually serious about getting the debt under control.

So let’s look at history:

English debt and colonial taxes. Prior to the Great Depression, just about all economists believed that government debt should be temporary. Once in a while, it was inevitable that some extraordinary event (like a war) would require more spending than a government could reasonably collect in taxes, and then it made sense to borrow. But once peacetime came, that debt should be repaid to quickly as possible. Big powers did not always do this, but that was a bad practice symptomatic of a failing state.

As we’ll see, it’s almost impossible to separate ideas about government debt from ideas about what money is. In the era of the American colonies, and for some while afterwards, money was gold or other precious metals. So when England took on debt to pay for the Seven Years War (1756-63, a conflict which included the French and Indian War in North America), the King was borrowing physical gold from people who owned it. (Today, we often forget the consequences of gold’s physicality. For example, rebuilding San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906 involved American and British insurance companies paying enormous claims. Gold had to physically move from London and New York to the West Coast, creating monetary shortages that led to the financial panic of 1907. The US created the Federal Reserve in 1913 largely to avoid similar monetary problems in the future.) (I’ll bet your high school American History class never connected the Fed to the San Francisco Earthquake.)

England’s attempt to repay its war debt led to the Stamp Act of 1765 and other taxes on the American colonies. This was part of the “taxation without representation” that brought on another war, the American Revolution.

As the American Revolution was happening, Adam Smith was revolutionizing economic thought, particularly the idea that national wealth meant the accumulation of gold. If gold were truly wealth, then the richest country in the world would be Spain, which had extracted huge amounts of precious metals from its American colonies. But instead, it had been England that prospered. A large chapter of The Wealth of Nations was devoted to urging England to rethink its colonial policy, particularly with regard to India. What if, rather than trying to extract goods, England managed India with the goal of creating a vibrant economy?

The ten-dollar founding father. One of the United States’ first political battles was over how to handle the debts of the Revolutionary War. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, had a fairly modern vision of the role government bonds could play in a banking system, as well as an expectation of the role foreign investment would play in developing the resources of the American continent. So he wanted the state war debts consolidated into a national debt, which he would be in no hurry to pay off, beyond keeping up interest payments.

Thomas Jefferson, whose battle with personal debt lasted his entire life (and was one of his excuses for why he couldn’t free his slaves), took a more traditional view:

Hamilton’s plan was highly criticized, most notably by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to Washington in 1792 complaining about Hamilton’s ideology, “I would wish the debt paid tomorrow; he wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing where with to corrupt & manage the legislature.”

War debts. Jefferson’s successor James Madison pulled the plug on Hamilton’s Bank of the United States in 1811. But then the War of 1812 drove the national debt to the previously unimaginable sum of more than $100 million. Managing that debt led to the creation the Second Bank of the United States in 1816. Andrew Jackson liquidated the second bank in 1836, and used the proceeds to pay down the national debt (the last time the US has been virtually debt-free). That move created a sudden contraction in the money supply, leading to the Panic of 1837 and a subsequent depression. (The panic, in turn boosted American emigration to the new Republic of Texas. Southerners who had borrowed to buy land and slaves, and now could not repay those debts, could let the banks reclaim their land, but take their slaves to Texas where creditors could not follow them.)

Repaying debt as soon as feasible was still the conventional wisdom during and after the American Civil War. The war cost the United States about $5.2 billion, an awesome sum in those days. That cost was financed partly by borrowing; the national debt rose from $65 million to $2.6 billion. In addition, the government issued about $400 million in paper money not backed by gold or other precious metals, known as “greenbacks”.

This was widely seen at the time as a bad practice that only an emergency could justify, so after the war the government began gradually paying down the debt (to $2.4 billion by 1870 and $2.1 billion by 1900) and (more quickly) withdrawing the greenbacks from circulation. Once again, the result was a deflationary contraction that centered on the Panic of 1873, but continued for several years after — basically, a preview of the Great Depression. (Lots of events that show up in high school US History textbooks stem from this national trauma. One reason Reconstruction ended in the 1870s was that economic problems closer to home caused Northern Whites to lose interest in Southern Blacks. Subsequent fights over currency and coinage led to the Free Silver movement and William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896.)

The debt leapt again during World War I, reaching $27 billion, but decreasing to $17 billion by the start of the Great Depression. (The numbers from my various references don’t match exactly, but do agree on general trends. I’m not sure why.)

Keynes and the Fed. After the Depression and World War II, when the debt exploded to $270 billion, John Maynard Keynes formulated a new theory of how governments should handle debt, focusing his attention on the business cycle rather than the war/peace cycle. Keynes saw capitalist economies as plagued by boom-and-bust cycles caused more by human behavior than by external forces like flood or famine. Government spending, in Keynes’ view, should be a counterweight to those cycles: In bust times, when everyone is hoarding their resources against an uncertain future, the government should borrow and spend to keep the economy moving. In boom times, when people are spending freely and borrowing against anticipated income that may never appear, the government should slow things down by running surpluses and paying off debt.

The Federal Reserve plays a similar role by managing the money supply through the banking system. It expands the money supply and lowers interest rates during busts and does the opposite during booms. (One fed chair said his job was to “order the punch bowl removed just as the party was really warming up”.)

The Fed era, and the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, led to a new understanding of what money is. Today, dollars are no longer based on anything in particular. You can exchange a dollar for some other currency, but if you want gold or silver (or bitcoin), you’ll have to pay the market price, which varies wildly. Nixon is widely believed to have said “We are Keynesians now.” He could just have accurately have observed that all dollars are now greenbacks.

Today, dollars are little more than the way the international monetary system keeps score, and the Fed can create dollars simply by changing the numbers in its spreadsheet. This is why it is nonsense to talk about the US “going bankrupt” in any other way but Congress refusing to allow the Treasury to pay its bills (i.e., what McCarthy is now threatening). The US owes dollars, and dollars are whatever the Fed says they are. Worrying about the Fed running out of dollars to buy bonds from the Treasury is like worrying about the scoreboard at the Super Bowl running out of points.

The ultimate threat of fiscal irresponsibility (which we’ll get into in the next post in this series) is not national bankruptcy, but inflation combined with the much vaguer threat of people and countries and corporations choosing to drop out of the dollar-denominated economic system.

Similarly, Japan is not going bankrupt, because it owes yen that are defined by the Bank of Japan. Things are a bit more complicated for members of the European Union, because the individual members owe euros, which are defined by the European Central Bank, controlled by EU as a whole. (That’s how Greece got into trouble during the Great Recession. The ECB could have loaned Greece any number of euros, but chose not to.)

It has always been politically easier to increase spending and cut taxes than to cut spending and increase taxes, so in practice Keynesianism resulted in a slow-but-steady increase in the national debt, from $255 billion in 1951 to $475 billion in 1974. The Ford/Carter “stagflation” years pushed the debt up to $900 billion by 1980. Then came the Reagan-Bush years, when supply-side economists like Arthur Laffer promoted the (false) theory that tax cuts would pay for themselves by stimulating economic growth. (Laffer is still around and still preaching nonsense. There is a theoretical level at which high taxes so totally stifle an economy that cutting them would produce more revenue in the long run. But there’s no evidence American taxes are anywhere near that level, which is why tax cuts keep leading to deficits.)

The Clinton surplus. Because cutting taxes actually decreases revenue (duh), by the time Clinton took office in 1993, the debt was over $4 trillion and increasing rapidly. (Bush’s last budget, FY 1993, showed a $255 billion deficit, down from a then-record of $290 the previous year.) Bill Clinton and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich both saw the deficit as a problem, so a combination of restrained spending and increased taxes lowered the deficit every year, until FY 2000 showed a $236 million surplus. Clinton’s last budget, FY 2001, had a $128 billion surplus, and no annual federal budget has been in surplus since. (The Clinton/Gingrich plan refutes the Republican mantra that raising taxes can’t be part of deficit reduction, because Congress will just spend the new revenue. A combination of higher taxes and spending restraint is the only method that has ever successfully brought the budget into balance.)

Partly the Clinton surplus disappeared for Keynesian reasons, in response to the dot-com-bust recession of 2001. But also supply-side economics was back, and Bush II viewed tax cuts as a universal remedy for any economic ill. So the deficits did not disappear as the economy recovered, setting a new record of $413 billion in FY 2004, and still at $161 billion in FY 2007.

Trillion-dollar deficits. So a large structural deficit was already built in to the federal budget when the Great Recession started late in 2007. The FY 2009 budget deficit was already projected at over $1 trillion when Barack Obama took office in January of 2009, and his Keynesian stimulus package pushed it up to $1.4 trillion. Obama’s trillion-plus deficits of FY 2010 and 2011 were similarly justifiable in Keynesian terms, and they began to decline after the recession ended, getting down to $442 billion by 2015. The increases of the final Obama years were less justifiable, but Obama handed President Trump a growing economy and a $665 billion deficit in FY 2017.

Once again, though, tax cuts were supposed to pay for themselves and didn’t, so Trump proposed (and his Republican allies in Congress voted for) large and growing deficits in boom times, reaching $984 billion by FY 2019, the budget year that ended in September 2019, four months before the Covid pandemic hit the US.

When Covid shut down much of the economy, massive government spending prevented the cascading bankruptcies that characterized the “panics” of the pre-Keynes era. So Trump should be cut some slack for the $3.1 trillion deficit of FY 2020 and Trump/Biden should similarly catch a break for the $2.8 trillion deficit of FY 2021. Biden then cut the deficit to $1.4 trillion in FY 2022, and the current year, FY 2023 (ending September 30), is projected to have a $1.2 trillion deficit.

And that’s how the national debt arrived at the current debt ceiling of $31.4 trillion in January.

What harm does the national debt do? Intuitively, it seems like owing money can’t be good, and the bigger the debt, the worse it should be. But most people’s intuition is based on their experience of household finance, which differs from the US government’s situation in important ways (like that the government controls the currency it owes). So over the decades, repeated predictions of debt-induced apocalypse have not been fulfilled, to the point that it becomes hard to take them seriously.

I’m sure that if we could go back to, say, 1990, and tell economists then that the national debt would be $31.4 trillion in 2023, (rather than the $4 trillion they owed then), many would refuse to believe us. Surely the sky would fall long before the debt reached that level. And if it hasn’t fallen yet, what makes us think it ever will?

At the same time, though, people who model things have learned to be wary of infinity. The universe is full of patterns that work up to some point, but then stop. In aerodynamics, things change as you get close to the sound barrier. Air friction doesn’t seem like a big deal when you run, but if you fall from space it might burn you up. In physics, laws that seem perfectly sound in everyday life start failing near the speed of light. Maybe there’s something like that in economics, so that debt does no harm until some point X, and then things start to go wrong.

But where would X be? Measured in what units? And can we get any more specific about the “things” that might start to go wrong?

Those questions are where the next post in this series will begin.

February 6, 2023 – 11:03 am Categories: Articles | Comments (26)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

In the same way that a short note sometimes turns into a long post, this week’s plan for a featured post has turned into the first of a series. Or actually the second: Now that I see the series, I recognize “The Debt Ceiling: a (p)review” as the first.

My motive is that I’m tired and depressed by the low quality of public discussion about deficits and the debt. We throw back and forth talking points about “maxxing out the national credit card” and “refusing to pay our bills” without ever thinking deeply about why we owe $32 trillion, whether a (still growing) debt that size will eventually cause any problems, and (if we decide that it is a problem) what options we have for doing something about it.

I suspect that (pending research I haven’t done yet), I’m not far from where Joe Biden is: He wants to come to some long-term agreement about fiscal policy, rather than keep governing through a series of continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills. But he knows he can’t have that conversation while Kevin McCarthy’s finger hovers over the economy’s self-destruct button.

Anyway, today’s featured post was originally supposed to be a few paragraphs about how we accumulated this debt. But the history of the national debt turns out to be an interesting topic in its own right, providing insight into how fiscal policy has intersected with the rest of American history. (I’ll bet you didn’t know the role the San Francisco Earthquake played in the creation of the Federal Reserve.) “How did we get $32 trillion in debt?” still needs some work, so I’ll predict it shows up about 11 EST.

The weekly summary includes a discussion of police reform following Tyre Nichols’ murder (that also threatened to turn into a featured post), the House vote to kick Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee, the ridiculous panic over the Chinese spy balloon, January’s surprisingly strong jobs report, and a few other things. It should show up a little after noon.

February 6, 2023 – 8:50 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (4)

Absurdly dangerous

We cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger. … Absurdity always makes you think something is more benign than it is.

– Jon Stewart, on George Santos

This week’s featured posts are “Gas stoves, freedom, and the politics of distraction” and “How can Democrats win back rural America?“.

I will warn you that this week’s summary is unusually long, being the first one in three weeks. I used the time away from the Sift to focus on public speaking. One talk: “Whatever happened to the citizen journalist?” examines the good and bad ways the internet has changed news, using the history of the Weekly Sift as an example of (what I hope is) good change. I also led a church service, but the YouTube isn’t up yet.

These last three weeks everybody was talking about the new Congress

In an otherwise disappointing set of midterm elections for Republicans, they did manage to eke out a small majority in the House of Representatives. They did that largely by running against inflation and crime, while GOP candidates who focused on election denial and other extreme MAGA issues tended to fail — unless (like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz) they were in districts that any Republican could win.

But now that Kevin McCarthy has secured the speakership, we’re hearing virtually nothing about inflation and crime (probably because Republicans never had a plan to deal with either). Instead, the focus has been on setting up a debt-ceiling crisis to force Democrats to agree to long-term cuts in Social Security and Medicare, as well as getting revenge on Democrats and on government officials who investigated the crimes of President Trump.

The sleight of hand reminds me of a passage in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas?.

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization.

Republicans could have run on cutting Social Security so that billionaires and corporations can keep the benefits of the Trump tax cuts. But they would have gotten clobbered, so they didn’t.

Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) gives the new GOP House majority credit because “We fired 87,000 IRS agents.” I’m glad to see the 87K IRS agents incident come to a successful conclusion. I am reminded of the Khrushchev quote that provides the title for Rick Perlstein’s book The Invisible Bridge:

If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.

On a party-line vote, the House established a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which will be chaired by Jim Jordan, a suspected January 6 conspirator who defied a subpoena from the January 6 committee. Its Republican members will include numerous election-deniers, and even Scott Perry, who is alleged to have sought a pardon from Trump for his role in the attempted coup.

If you want to consider what “weaponization of government” really looks like, read the NYT’s look back on the Durham investigation and the Durham/Barr relationship. You can expect Jordan’s committee to serve the same purpose Durham’s investigation did: It will provide plenty of fodder for Fox News hosts to speculate about the horrible crimes and scandals the committee is about to uncover, but it won’t actually uncover anything significant. Afterwards, regular Fox-watchers will believe that it did find something, but they either won’t be able to give you details about whatever it was, or they will recall testimony that in fact never happened.

(Occasionally I still see people wearing t-shirts pledging to remember Benghazi, and I always wonder how much of what they recall is real.)

George Santos has been the comic relief of the new House majority. Every few days has produced either the explosion of some outrageously false claim he made, or evidence of some grift in his past.

So far, the GOP and Speaker McCarthy have been unable or unwilling to remove Santos, partly due to McCarthy’s small majority (which can’t afford to lose Santos’ vote), and partly because grifting is now deep in the party’s identity.

and violence

It was a bad week for squeamish viewers of the news. Video from January 7 of Memphis police beating Tyre Nichols (who died from his injuries) was released. And we also got to see video of the Paul Pelosi attack. California has also had six mass shootings in January.

The Nichols video led to protest marches over the weekend, but they seem to have stayed peaceful, with rare exceptions that Fox News naturally highlighted. (The worst they could find was a guy who was arrested in New York for kicking in the windshield of a police cruiser. He and two others were arrested. The police were unharmed.)

I suspect that the reason the protests were peaceful was that Memphis has taken the incident seriously. It fired the five officers quickly, and has now arrested and charged them with second-degree murder. It also has disbanded the unit the officers belonged to. Now we’ll see if the city (and other cities) follows up with police reform.

A point the press sometimes misses is that public anger usually isn’t about the event itself, but about the official response to the event. If the public is confident that the institutional response will be prompt and appropriate, protest isn’t necessary.

The most irresponsible coverage I saw came from Tucker Carlson, who (based on apparently nothing) warned his viewers that Antifa would be organizing riots in major cities.

These riots, of course, did not happen, and it’s not clear that an organization called “Antifa” with the capability of organizing a national string of riots even exists. Tucker did an amazing job of making his lack of any actual facts sound ominous:

Antifa is being organized. By whom? We don’t know. Why don’t we know? To do what? We can’t say right now. But we know for certain that in cities across the country right now, Antifa is mobilizing to commit violence. This is a political militia. So the question is: Who’s benefiting from it? Those are the people you ought to be asking questions of.

Maybe, though, we don’t know much about Antifa because there’s not much to know. Maybe it’s not an organization, but just a label that Fox attaches to certain kinds of events, including a lot of events that don’t happen.

and the Georgia grand jury

Earlier this month, the Georgia grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to reverse Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result submitted its final report. Tuesday, a judge yielded to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ request to keep that report sealed for now, so we don’t know whether the grand jury recommended any indictments for Trump or any of his henchmen. (This was a special grand jury impaneled to investigate, but without the power to indict.)

Willis, however, has seen the report, and her reasons for keeping it sealed implied charges are coming for someone:

Willis argued Tuesday that disclosing the report now could violate the rights of potential defendants and could negatively affect the ability to prosecute those who may be charged with crimes.

The airwaves are full of speculation, but I think we just need to wait and see. Willis said a decision on criminal charges is “imminent”, which could mean days or weeks, but probably not months. That’s the extent of my speculation. If you want more, the Christian Science Monitor does a good job of presenting why Trump might or might not be charged.

and classified documents

Biden’s classified document problem muddied the waters, and now Mike Pence’s similar issue threatens to turn it all into a farce. I stand by what I wrote last week, and extend the argument to cover Pence: While the Trump, Biden, and Pence situations have a surface similarity that makes them politically difficult, they are unrelated legally, and I hope the Justice Department pursues the three investigations separately. Whether or not Trump committed indictable crimes has no bearing on whether Biden or Pence did.

Some writers are trying to turn this into a discussion about overclassification and the bloated system of classified documents. Those are legitimate concerns, but I don’t see the relevance. Whether you have one classified document or a thousand, you should take care of them, even if nothing in them seems all that important.

It’s like stop signs. When you’re driving in the middle of the night, it seems really stupid that there are all these stop signs. But you should stop anyway.

and China’s declining population

One of the odder stories of the last few weeks has to do with China losing population. You’d think this would be a positive development, given how hard China has worked over the years to control its population. A flat or declining population in China could be the harbinger of a flat or declining world population. That would lessen the human strain on the planet’s carrying capacity, and maybe lead to a future of abundance rather than destitution.

Strangely, though, most coverage of the story was doom and gloom. The NYT framed the decline as a “demographic crisis“, and followed up with an explanatory article two days later: “Why China’s Shrinking Population is Cause for Alarm“.

The alarms ringing at the NYT include (1) fewer young-adult Chinese could force businesses to move factory work to other countries (like Mexico and Vietnam); and (2) fewer Chinese consumers could shrink the global market for goods. In addition, there’s the internal-to-China problem of elder care, caused by the combination of low birth rates and higher life expectancy.

But I’m having trouble seeing the “cause for alarm”. If more Chinese are, say, living into their 80s, that probably means that many Chinese in their 70s are still pretty spry, and might be able to do some caretaking themselves. And if the world needs less production because there are fewer people consuming stuff, that just doesn’t seem like a problem to me.

Wired shares my sanguine attitude. For a variety of reasons, its article explains, countries that fall below 1.5 children per female have a hard time returning to replacement-level fertility. But while that means the population on average gets older, it doesn’t have to become proportionately sicker, more feeble, and less productive.

Fears about population aging are often guided by the false idea that older people are homogeneously ill, dependent, and unproductive. In fact, the average health of people over 60 has improved dramatically over the past decades. … We recently calculated the health-adjusted dependency ratio—the proportion of adults with the same or more aging-related disease burden as the global average 65-year-old—in 188 countries. Using this measure, we could demonstrate that many of the world’s chronologically oldest countries have the same or even lower aging-related burden than many of the world’s chronologically youngest countries. Our work suggests that China can effectively stay younger by investing in the health of its aging population.

In summary:

Measures that improve education, productivity, and health across the lifespan would ease the transition to a world with fewer children. It is possible for China—and the rest of the world—to decline and prosper.

A declining population will require some adjustments. But on the whole, I suspect it presents an easier set of problems than endless growth.

A side note: China’s success in controlling its population means that India’s population should pass China’s sometime this year.

and gas stoves and other nonsense

That’s covered in one featured post.

but you might want to think about rural rage

and that’s the topic of the other.

and parents whose children question their gender identities

The NYT had a thought-provoking article “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know“, focusing on parents’ anger at teachers and schools when their kids start “socially transitioning” at school (using a different name, going to a different bathroom, etc.) and no one tells the parents. Columnist Michelle Goldberg followed up with “Trans Kids Deserve Private Lives Too“.

OK, I understand that there’s a lot here I can’t relate to from my own experience: I’ve never struggled with my gender identity and I’ve never been a parent. But there seems to be one point that the complaining parents (both in the article and in the comments) are refusing to grasp: The important communications problem is between them and their kids, not between them and the school.

Again and again, parents cast the school as taking an active role:

But dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they — not the parents — knew what was best for their children. They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home.

But the “intervention” here is just respecting the student’s confidence. (Goldberg raises the example of whether teachers should tell Muslim parents that their daughter has stopped wearing a hijab at school.) If a student is talking to a school counselor about gender issues, that’s because the student raised those issues. Counselors are not roaming the halls looking for kids they can convince to change gender.

To me, the idea that a child’s teachers are all agents of the parents sounds horrible. Children of my friends have occasionally shared secrets with me, and I have always kept them. As long as they weren’t planning to commit suicide or harm someone else, I hope I always would. It’s normal for kids to have thoughts they believe their parents wouldn’t approve — I certainly did — and it’s a blessing to have other adults you can talk to.

If parents are concerned about their child’s gender identity, they should talk to their child directly, not expect teachers the child has trusted to betray that trust.

I ran the note above past a friend who is trained to counsel youth on gender issues, and they pointed me to the book Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon, which you can look at here.

Solomon, who is gay, is writing about the challenges of parent/child relationships where the child differs from the parent in some way that the parent finds hard to accept. He introduces the useful distinction between vertical identity (the traits that parents and children share that make identification in both directions easier) and horizontal identity (the ways they differ that make identification harder).

Every child, he proposes, has some of both. So in his model, cis parents of trans children are experiencing a magnified version of a problem that every parent faces. I like this model because it encourages empathy for all concerned. Solomon writes:

There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the  widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together, is at best a euphemism to comfort prospective parents before they get in over their heads.

My friend also pointed out why understanding the wide range of gender identities might be useful to someone who feels uncomfortable in their assigned gender: If all they know is the male/female dichotomy, they may interpret their discomfort to mean that they must be of the opposite gender, rather than something more nuanced. My friend attributed at least some of the examples of detransitioning — undoing a gender transition later in life — to this sort of confusion. (A recent Atlantic article urges us to take the detransition phenomenon seriously, while also not exaggerating its frequency.)

and you also might be interested in …

Trump will soon be back on Facebook, and probably Twitter too. He was banned partly for spreading misinformation, but mostly for fomenting violence on January 6. We’ll see how long he can go before fomenting violence again, and how the platforms will respond when he does.

If you believe, as I do, that his act is getting old even for some people who have supported him in the past, then giving him more exposure might work against him now.

Ukraine will get tanks: American M-1s (eventually), German Leopard IIs, and British Challengers.

At the moment the front line in this war is mostly static, with a slight momentum for the Russians. Both sides are expected to launch offensives when the weather improves. The Economist (behind a paywall) has been generally pro-Ukrainian in its coverage, but recently it sounds like it’s spinning some disturbing facts. In an otherwise upbeat article about Ukrainian prospects, it says:

Ukraine’s edge in battlefield manpower is eroding, now that the Kremlin has mobilised 200,000-300,000 soldiers and may soon call up more. With Russia’s arms factories working triple shifts, Ukraine cannot outmatch it in brute firepower, given the West’s depleting stocks of arms.

I am uncomfortably reminded of the American Civil War. For a moment, put aside your feelings about the morality of either war and just look at the military situation: The North was richer and more populous than the South, so it had tremendous advantages in a war of attrition. The South generally had better leadership and higher morale, so it enjoyed much early success.

The war turned in the North’s favor when General Grant took command and accepted that if the war became a meat grinder, Lee’s army would be ground up first. He made a horrifying decision, but it did lead to victory.

I don’t think Dianne Feinstein (who will turn 90 in June and is rumored to be suffering mental decline) has announced her retirement yet, but Democrats are lining up to compete for her Senate seat in 2024. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter have already announced, while Ro Khanna and Barabara Lee are making up their minds.

I’ve always liked Schiff, but my unresearched impression is that Katie Porter is something special. It’s early, though, and the campaign may change my mind.

In other way-too-early election news, Ruben Gallego is challenging Kyrsten Sinema in the Arizona Democratic Senate primary. Republican Kari Lake has tagged him as “the AOC of Arizona“, which she seems to think is an insult.

The arrest of Charles McGonigal, the former head of counter-intelligence in the FBI’s New York office, opens up lots of room for speculation about what happened in 2016. Allegedly, McGonigal was being paid by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was also the guy who paid Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort millions of dollars.

Two moments when the FBI’s New York office may have tipped the scales in Trump’s favor stand out: (1) James Comey reopening the Hillary-email investigation just days before the 2016 election, allegedly out of fear the New York office would leak something, and (2) the NYT’s influential pre-election headline “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia“, which was based on anonymous “law enforcement officials”.

Timothy Snyder thinks there’s something there, but Marcy Wheeler disagrees. I don’t know enough yet to say. (Snyder’s blog is on Substack, which will ask you to subscribe, but let you read the post even if you don’t.)

The Miami Herald has a report on the teacher-training sessions for teaching the State of Florida’s new civics standards. (It’s paywalled, but you should get one article free.) The training was described by one teacher as “straight-up indoctrination”. Another commented: “It was a bit different than a typical training. [Previously, trainers would] show us how to teach the information. But this time, instead of being shown how to implement the standards, they kind of went the opposite way. They presented this history as if none of us had learned it before.”

Basically, slavery and church/state separation are minimized, originalism is presented as the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution, and the importance of Christianity in founding the US is emphasized. These are supposed to be taught as facts, not as issues knowlegeable people disagree over.

Maybe you’ve seen those billboards claiming that a fetus has a heartbeat 18 days after conception. They’re usually accompanied by a picture of a baby, or maybe a fetus that looks almost fully formed.

I’ve been glad to see recent articles in both The Guardian and the NYT give a more realistic view of what gets removed from a woman during an early-term abortion. At five or six weeks, “the embryo is not typically visible to the naked eye”. What shows up in a post-abortion tissue examination is mostly the gestational sac, which is still tiny and looks nothing like a baby.

The image below is after seven weeks, and the gestational sac is about 3/4 of an inch wide.

Patients may come in for an abortion fearful at this stage, having read through forums or looked at images online. “They’re expecting to see a little fetus with hands – a developed, miniature baby.” Often, she says, “they feel they’ve been deceived.”

On Vox, Ian Milhiser writes about the sudden resurfacing of laws that became irrelevant after the Roe decision, which haven’t been looked at by courts at least since 1973, and possibly a lot longer. Today, many of these laws would probably be considered unconstitutionally vague (like when they use terms like “indecent”). But they’re suddenly applicable again, even though nobody is sure what a court would say they mean. One such law is the 1873 Comstock Act, which says:

Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose … Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier.

But current DoJ policy

argues that the Comstock Act should be read narrowly to permit abortion-inducing drugs to be mailed “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” This memo signals that, at least as long as President Joe Biden holds office, the DOJ will not prosecute mifepristone manufacturers and mail-order pharmacies under the Comstock Act — although it remains to be seen what happens if a Republican takes over.

Milhiser summarizes:

So, to summarize, abortion providers face a crush of older and uncertain restrictions, many of which can at least plausibly be read to prohibit them from performing very basic tasks — such as receiving a supply of mifepristone in the mail. State lawmakers have prepped a wide range of bills adding new restrictions to medication abortions. And the federal judiciary and many state courts are dominated by Republican appointees who reasonably can be expected to read abortion restrictions expansively, regardless of what the law actually says.

That’s bad news for anyone who needs a medication abortion.

Rhonna McDaniel won a fourth term as Republican National Committee chair, defeating Harmeet Dhillon. Dhillon, a Sikh woman, faced what Politico called a “whisper campaign” targeting her faith. She tweeted:

To be very clear, no amount of threats to me or my team, or bigoted attacks on my faith traceable directly to associates of the chair, will deter me from advancing positive change at the RNC, which includes new standards of accountability, transparency, integrity, and decency.

After supporting a presidential candidate who called for a “total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States“, Dhillon must have been horribly shocked to discover religious bigotry inside the GOP. Perhaps she should consider joining the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

and let’s close by getting out the vote in an important election

Voting is open to name the next set of Minnesota snowplows. My choices: Best in Snow, Han Snowlo, Mighty Morphin Plower Ranger, Sleetwood Mac, Plower to the People, and Alice Scooper.

January 30, 2023 – 12:51 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

How can Democrats win back rural America?


Rural voters increasingly resent Democrats,
but Republican policies aren’t helping them.

Not so long ago, Democrats got big majorities in the cities, which Republicans balanced by carrying the suburbs, small towns, and rural areas by narrower margins. More recently, Democrats have continued dominating the cities, but MAGA policies and incivility have made the suburbs more competitive (especially by alienating educated women). Now Republicans make up the gap with big majorities in rural areas and small towns.

Two recent NYT articles have focused on how they do that, and whether Democrats can do anything about it. Thomas Edsall’s “The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party is Not Coming from the Suburbs” lays out the problem:

The anger and resentment felt by rural voters toward the Democratic Party are driving a regional realignment similar to the upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Edsall presents Wisconsin as a prime example. Senator Ron Johnson is pro-insurrection, believes climate change is “bullshit”, and wants to make cutting Social Security and Medicare easier by shifting those programs from “mandatory” to “discretionary” spending. If you’re an urban or suburban voter, you might think those positions would make him an easy target. But in fact he narrowly won reelection in 2022 by running up huge margins in rural counties. Clearly, people think differently there.

Edsall cites the book The Politics of Resentment by University of Wisconsin Professor Katherine Cramer, who attributes the rural conservative surge to three factors.

(1) a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, (2) a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources and (3) a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.

So a straightforward approach to winning rural areas back would be for Democrats to stop doing those things. But Paul Krugman points out a serious problem with that strategy: Strictly speaking, none of those three beliefs are true. There are many government policies (farm subsidies, special programs to support rural housing, rural utilities, etc.) that focus on rural areas; the federal government spends far more on rural areas than it gets back in taxes; and the respect gap runs mostly in the other direction: Democratic politicians hardly ever denigrate small towns or denounce rural values the way that Republicans target New York City or San Francisco.

It’s a problem that Democrats face across the board: How do you convince people that you’ve stopped doing things you’ve never actually done? How do you respond to parents upset about public schools teaching critical race theory or grooming children to be gay or trans, when public schools don’t actually do those things? How do you stop discrimination against Christians when in fact there is no discrimination against Christians? (Examples to the contrary are nearly always cases where Christians are not getting the special rights they feel entitled to.)

Given that level of misperception, it’s hard to even approach the problem without thinking in a paternalistic way that any Democratic constituency would resent: Consider about how justifiably upset the Black or Hispanic communities get when White “experts” ignore their policy preferences and instead tell them what they “should” want.

I come from the kind of community Edsall and Krugman are talking about: Illinois’ Adams County voted for Trump nearly 3-to-1 in both 2016 and 2020. It’s in the IL-15 congressional district, where a MAGA congressional candidate tallied 71% last fall.

And in some sense I represent the root problem: I grew up there, got an education, saw no attractive opportunities, and moved away to have a successful career in the suburbs of Boston. At my high-school reunions, the primary divide is between those who left and those who stayed. (It’s no wonder being “left behind” plays such a large role the Evangelical mythology popular in rural areas. The fantasy of being raptured to Heaven while unbelievers suffer the tribulations must be a very satisfying turnabout.)

The problems of rural America are very real and deserve national attention, so it’s completely understandable that rural Americans would channel their discontent into a political party. Sadly, though, they’ve united around a party that wants to feed them myths and flatter them rather than do anything that might help.

Cutting safety-net programs like Medicaid will do significant damage in places like Adams County, while Biden’s infrastructure package includes quite a bit of investment in rural areas. Conservative anti-vaccine conspiracy theories have contributed to higher Covid death rates in Trump-supporting counties, and that’s just the latest chapter in a longer-term story of anti-public-health policy choices in red states.

I know I overuse Weimar analogies (which come easily to mind as I’ve been binging Babylon Berlin and reading Philip Kerr novels) but it’s hard to ignore the parallels: Germany really had lost a war, its economy suffered badly in the dislocations of the 1920s, and what opportunities still existed were centered in the cosmopolitan cities rather than the nativist countryside. But the defeat-excusing stab-in-the-back myth was not true, Jews and libertine urban culture weren’t the real problems, and fascism was not the answer.

Likewise today, fascism won’t provide an answer to the real challenges rural and small-town America faces. But I’m not sure how to help rural and small-town voters figure that out.

January 30, 2023 – 10:57 am Categories: Articles | Comments (24)

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