Why Voting Isn’t A “Privilege”

Why Voting Isn’t A “Privilege”

The Constitution refers to “the right to vote,” and courts and state constitutions agree: it belongs to all Americans.

by Joshua A. Douglas

July 30, 2021

The attack on voting rights isn’t coming solely from onerous new voter restrictions in various states and narrow Supreme Court rulings. It’s also in the way that we, as a society, talk about the right to vote.

In a new survey, the Pew Research Center found that fully 42 percent of those asked believe that “voting is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited if adult U.S. citizens don’t meet some requirements.” Although 78 percent of Democrats recognized that voting is not a “privilege” but a fundamental right, only 32 percent of Republicans agreed. There was also a clear racial divide, with minorities more likely to recognize the fundamental nature of the right to vote.

We can take some comfort that 57 percent of those surveyed acknowledged that voting is a right and not a privilege. But the 42 percent who disagreed represent a troublingly large minority.

The belief that voting is a “privilege” suggests that it’s somehow better to have fewer voters—which of course just means voters who agree with a certain ideology, with predictable racial and other demographic effects on who can more easily satisfy restrictive voting rules. The solution to the concern about so-called ignorant voters isn’t to shut them out of the process but to improve civics education. Moreover, this myopic view of democratic participation ignores the value of voting to our system of government, the lessons of history, and the proper understanding of our Constitution.

The Supreme Court explained as early as 1886 that voting is “regarded as a fundamental political right, because preservative of all rights.” Voting protects all other rights: we can’t enact legislation until we elect representatives to serve in legislatures. If we dislike government policies, then the way to fix them is to “throw the bums out” and vote in someone else.

To be sure, the Court in that long-ago case also said the right to vote is “not regarded strictly as a natural right, but as a privilege merely conceded by society, according to its will, under certain conditions.” But it followed that statement directly with the one noting that the right to vote is a “fundamental political right” [italics mine]. As the Court put it in 1964, “The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.” The Court reasserted the “fundamental nature” of the right to vote in Bush v. Gore, which essentially decided the 2000 presidential election—though the Court did not actually protect the right to vote robustly in that case.

History has favored greater expansion of the franchise as we’ve recognized the unfairness inherent in denying voting rights to certain groups. The argument was not that Black people, women, and 18 year-olds had jumped through the hoops necessary to “earn” the “privilege” of voting. It was that denying them the right to vote demeaned their dignity and made them unequal in our democratic republic. We rejected literacy tests and other voter registration requirements because of their discriminatory nature. The fight for easy access to the ballot is not over, but it shouldn’t be about who can clear unnecessary hurdles.

And even though the Constitution doesn’t confer the right to vote explicitly, it does mention and protect it several times—providing that states may not deny the right to vote because of someone’s race, sex, inability to pay a poll tax, or age. The Supreme Court’s case law has noted the importance of equality in access to the ballot. It’s true that the Court has construed that protection too narrowly, but nowhere has the Court endorsed a constitutional principle that suggests people must “earn” the “privilege” of voting. In addition, almost every state constitution contains a provision that explicitly confers the right to vote on the state’s citizens. There are, of course, limited voter qualifications rules, such as age, citizenship, and residency requirements. But once voters satisfy these minimal definitional rules, there should be no further restrictions on their access to the ballot. Yes, this proper understanding of our foundational right calls into question felon disenfranchisement rules and other voter restrictions, especially given their racist history and current disparate impacts.

In the Constitution and elsewhere, it’s called the right to vote, not the privilege to vote. But our rhetoric has not tracked this reality, leading to those alarming survey results. We cannot acquiesce to a debate that legitimizes calling the right to vote a mere “privilege.” It is not. To the extent that everyone does not accept this truth, we must reform civics education to better teach the history of the struggle for voting rights and its modern day implications.

Driving is a privilege. We license people after they pass a driving test. But there’s no parallel test to participate in our democracy—nor should there be. The Declaration of Independence says that a government derives its powers from the “consent of the governed.” That includes all of us.

How Can We Neutralize the Militias?

How Can We Neutralize the Militias?

Steven Simon

Steven Simon is the Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His book The Long Goodbye: The US and the Middle East from the Islamic Revolution to the Arab Spring will be published in 2022.

Jonathan Stevenson

Jonathan Stevenson is a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Managing Editor of Survival. (August 2021)

Members of a militia group outside the office of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer during a protest against her Covid stay-at-home order

Seth Herald/Reuters

Members of a militia group outside the office of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer during a protest against her Covid stay-at-home order, Lansing, April 30, 2020. Three of them were later charged with being involved in a plot to kidnap her, attack the state capitol building, and incite violence.

As the House impeachment managers proved, Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to act violently not just in the days leading up to the siege of the Capitol on January 6 but for weeks, months, even years preceding it. Republican partisanship prevented the Senate from convicting him of “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” But there is no doubt that Trump harnessed and inflamed an armed and loyal far-right movement—one driven by white supremacist and antigovernment conspiracy theories, enraged by largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests, and irritated by Covid-19 restrictions—to storm the Capitol in order to stop Congress’s certification of Joseph R. Biden’s election as president.

Since most participants in that movement still believe that Biden’s victory was fraudulent and that a liberal “deep state” has usurped the country, the US will continue to face the threat of insurgency from American citizens organized into armed militias that are willing and able to commit acts of terror. Wittily but not in jest, the international relations scholar Daniel Drezner has likened the GOP to Hezbollah: “a political party that also has an armed wing to coerce other political actors through violence.”

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There is considerable mainstream skepticism about just how dangerous these militias are. First, many assume they are feckless, disorganized, and mostly engaged in self-dramatizing theater. Media images of motley militia members bedecked in Hawaiian shirts and tactical web vests on the steps of the Michigan State House in April 2020 tended to confirm this view, as did the horns-and-fur crowns and painted faces sported by some of the January 6 rioters. Second, the militias may possess millions of semiautomatic rifles, but they do not have armor, aircraft, heavy weapons, or significant numbers. They can neither seize and hold territory nor tactically defeat US military forces in open battle, so they cannot be considered a serious threat to the republic.

Many militia members are ill-informed and undertrained weekend warriors and armchair crackpots, but some are not. Timothy McVeigh, the main perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, was smart, disciplined, and effective. But whether militias are any match for the military and law enforcement is beside the point. The main damage done by militia violence, beyond its actual victims, is to social cohesion.

From this perspective, peace and stability in the United States depend not only on broadly law-abiding Americans and a measured response from Congress to this threat—which are far from guaranteed—but also on the professionalism of the American military and law enforcement agencies. They face significant obstacles. Most members of Trump’s far-right base interpret the Second Amendment’s cryptic enshrinement of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” as guaranteeing practically unlimited personal gun ownership, though both historically and in its constitutional context that right is intended to support the people’s capacity to raise a “well regulated Militia” whose function has long been fulfilled by state national guards.

Trump supporters claim, however, that national guards have been co-opted by the deep state and the time has come to raise what they contend are constitutionally sanctioned militias. Some state legislators are trying to circumvent prohibitions against private paramilitary groups by proposing laws that would effectively deputize private gun owners as members of volunteer state militias.

Regardless of legal considerations, leading militia figures like the white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member Louis Beam in the early 1980s have elaborated guidelines for grassroots covert action such as “leaderless resistance”—that is, actions undertaken by individuals or small cells without elaborate, hierarchical command structures. McVeigh’s operation was the prototype for such efforts, which are hard for law enforcement to infiltrate. New technologies will make militias able to operate on a more clandestine basis, and therefore more difficult to detect and interdict. Charismatic politicians like Trump are needed mainly to inspire—or “script”—revolutionary violence, not to provide operational assistance. Members of armed militias, though they constituted a small minority of the mob that carried out the Capitol attack, were disproportionately involved in organizing it. As of June, most of the roughly thirty participants charged with conspiracy crimes—the most serious ones—were members of the chauvinist, anti-immigrant, and white supremacist Proud Boys or the antigovernment Oath Keepers or Three Percenters. Early on, federal prosecutors determined that nine members of the Oath Keepers planned and orchestrated the attack.

These groups are reminiscent of the Order—a violent group that sought to establish an exclusively white homeland in the western United States in the early 1980s until the FBI dismantled it—but may have learned from their forerunner’s mistakes. These included committing nonpolitical felonies like robbery and counterfeiting, which gave law enforcement a clear basis for arresting them, and recruiting face-to-face, which the Internet has made unnecessary. They are also galvanized by the demographic prospect of a nonwhite majority that will deprive “real Americans”—essentially, white ones—of firm dominion over the country, which they believe belongs to them. Furthermore, they appear to be forging unsettling relationships with government officials, elected and otherwise. For instance, Janet McGeachin, Idaho’s lieutenant governor and a candidate for governor, allegedly told a militia leader that he was “going to have a friend” in office. And Paul Gosar, a five-term Republican congressman from Arizona, has maintained a close and open political relationship with Nick Fuentes, the leader of the white nationalist group America First, giving the keynote address at a conference it hosted in February.

These factors are eroding the government’s effective monopoly on the use of force. The substantial neutralization, if not the actual disarmament, of domestic militias is required to ensure that the US remains a stable democracy. While the country obviously has not descended to the level of present-day Iraq or Lebanon or Troubles-era Northern Ireland, these are ominously suggestive examples. Lebanon has no functioning state, and Northern Irish governance was effectively militarized for a generation. In all of these cases, privatized armed forces competed and sometimes colluded with state authorities and perpetuated instability. Once unleashed, armed pro-state groups are notoriously difficult to suppress.

The rejoinder that those places differ from the United States because they faced conflict tantamount to civil war is cold comfort given that the political polarization in the US today is comparable to that during and just after the Civil War. In the US, dangers are multiplied by the high level of gun ownership and the ease of purchasing firearms, which make the leaderless resistance advocated by the late-twentieth-century militia theoreticians and now epitomized by the far right, anti-authoritarian Boogaloo Bois—they of the Hawaiian shirts—all the more practicable.

Furthermore, Trumpism is tightly linked to race—one of the “values” issues that acutely divide Americans, alongside abortion, gender rights, and immigration. The depth and toxicity of its white Christian nationalist roots make its challenge to American liberalism all the more intractable. It reflects what the sociologist Philip Gorski has described as “the confluence…of demographic decline and apocalyptic thinking.”

2 Apocalyptic movements can be quietist: the end is near, and it’s just a matter of waiting it out and preparing oneself spiritually for the end of time and the kingdom of God. But they can also be activist, implacable, and violent, if they see the apocalypse as something that must be set in motion by human action, either to show God that His subjects are worthy of redemption, or because they think that the inevitable should be accelerated. And the expectations of apocalyptically minded groups can be highly resistant to change.

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The racism inherent in Trumpism naturally inspires nonwhite Americans to consider whether they should be prepared to defend themselves. White Americans have been hoarding weapons for years, and the current racial tensions have caused a spike in gun ownership among Blacks. It is worth remembering that the historic spiral in firearms purchases in twentieth-century America began in the late 1960s, when the Black Panthers’ theatrical but very real call to arms prompted both whites and Blacks to flock to gun shops. The emergence of Black militias like the Rise of the Moors—eleven members of which were arrested after an armed standoff in Massachusetts in early July—has intensified since 2009. This trend increases prospects for armed civil conflict between nonstate groups, which would be harder to stymie than one-sided, far-right aggression.

There is a strong likelihood that Trump, whether or not his influence over the Republican Party fades, will continue to incite his fanatical base, including militias. He has burnished a new version of the “lost cause” myth of Confederate nobility, the cause now being an election allegedly stolen by a Democrat-dominated deep state, and added a nostalgic appeal to the legend of rustic white masculinity.

4 The fact that strongly Republican state governments like Georgia and federal institutions like the Senate and the judiciary—including the Supreme Court—dismissed his claims will not persuade his followers. Like the original myth, this one trades on the tribalism of its adherents.

To make matters worse, transnational connections among far-right organizations are burgeoning, much as they did among jihadist groups earlier this century, reflecting the power of the Internet to unite disparate and dispersed but like-minded extremists. US allies as well as adversaries are providing momentum. Ukraine appears to be a recruiting hub, while Moscow is employing a range of measures to cultivate right-wing extremists in order to undermine Western political institutions. The American organizers of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 had been in contact with representatives of a Russian white supremacist group since 2015. Music festivals and ultimate fighting contests have become gathering places for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

The events of January 6 have been considered from almost every angle—as a coup d’état, a revival meeting, a be-in, a riot, even a super-spreader—but not sufficiently as an intelligence failure. Looking at January 6 as a kind of surprise attack can reveal a great deal about what happened and what must be done to prevent future assaults on democratic institutions.

In the parlance of intelligence, there are two kinds of warning. Strategic warning is the inference of a prospective attack based on general conditions. For example, Washington officials knew by the spring of 1940 that war with Japan was probable in the near-to-medium term, as Tokyo was increasingly likely to respond to the effects of US sanctions by going on the offensive. Tactical warning consists of indications about where, when, and how a specific action will occur. The absence of tactical warning in 1941 made the attack on Pearl Harbor a genuine surprise.

The United States certainly had strategic warning of the January 6 attack, reaching back over 150 years. A national security threat from armed domestic right-wing groups surfaced with the Klan and like-minded groups during Reconstruction, and the US government contained it essentially by tolerating Jim Crow, which was fueled by the lost-cause myth. Resentment of government abuses such as the supposed betrayal of US soldiers in Vietnam and race-war prophecies like the one retailed by William Pierce in The Turner Diaries (1978) kept far-right extremism percolating and dangerous, as did rising calls for gun control and lethal confrontations between federal agents and extremists in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993; the Oregon standoff with the Bundy family in 2014; attacks on churches and synagogues; and the emergence of new militias. Since 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected America’s first Black president, the number of active groups has increased from thirty to more than two hundred. By 2011, right-wing militia members numbered well over 100,000 nationwide, and their political, recruitment, and paramilitary activity spiked during the Trump administration

For several years, the FBI has recognized that the terrorist threat from domestic far-right extremists is on a par with that from jihadists. In a 2008 intelligence assessment released by WikiLeaks, it judged that “although individuals with military backgrounds constitute a small percentage of white supremacist extremists, they frequently occupy leadership roles within extremist groups and their involvement has the potential to reinvigorate an extremist movement suffering from loss of leadership and in-fighting during the post-9/11 period.”

5 The leak of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security intelligence analysis on right-wing domestic extremism, which implicated predominantly Republican voters, enraged Republican members of Congress, who forced Secretary Janet Napolitano to quash the department’s work in that area. Since then, current and former members of the military have increasingly offered militias purloined intelligence and tactical training, as well as channels for recruiting members whose military expertise would be of significant operational value. A former Marine Corps recruiting sergeant became the leader of Vanguard America, whose members marched in Charlottesville in 2017.

Before January 6, 2021, unlike before December 7, 1941, the government also had extremely specific tactical warning. On October 6, less than a month before the election, the Department of Homeland Security released an assessment that “Domestic Violent Extremists” presented “the most persistent and lethal” threat to the country.

6 The intelligence was not actionable insofar as it did not specify January 6 as the day of the assault, though the Capitol could be inferred as a target. Also in October, fourteen men linked to the Michigan-based, anti-government Wolverine Watchmen, six of whom were plotting to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, were arrested on federal terrorism, conspiracy, and weapons charges. Two were involved in the armed occupation of the Michigan State Capitol in April 2020 protesting Whitmer’s Covid-19 restrictions, now seen by some as a dress rehearsal for the January 6 invasion. The place and time of the attack were unambiguous. The president himself had publicly encouraged his supporters well in advance—inviting them in a December 19 tweet: “Be there, will be wild!” in Washington on that date—and refusing to concede that Biden had legitimately won the election. Trump supporters posted online plans to come to D.C. on January 6 and indicated what weapons they would carry.

Given such ample strategic and tactical warning, why was the assault on the Capitol a surprise? Why was there no adequate preparation? A primary factor was that throughout his time as president, Trump refused to denounce right-wing extremists, downplayed the threats they posed, and exaggerated jihadist and antifa ones. In response to Black Lives Matter protests in the spring and summer of 2020, he mobilized an ad hoc federal force through the Department of Homeland Security to support right-wing counterdemonstrators, many of them members or supporters of armed groups.

7 The Trump administration was also willfully blind to, or subtly encouraged, the systemic racism that has become increasingly manifest in US law enforcement.

In light of the disastrous implications of a successful surprise attack for vital political institutions, we need to understand what went wrong in the intelligence failure of January 6 and find remedies that, among other things, would be impervious to political manipulation by a malign president. A bipartisan January 6 Commission, proposed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi along the lines of the 9/11 Commission, was a sensible vehicle for this inquiry, but it was blocked by the Senate, forcing her to create a far less empowered House select committee. The Biden administration is seeking to ensure that in the future timely strategic and tactical warnings can be translated into rapid action. The most effective remedies will need to be federally legislated—a challenging proposition for a divided Congress, many of whose members appear to have conspired with the rioters or justified their actions after the fact.

The most urgent concerns are militia infiltration and gun availability. Militias have penetrated some military organizations and law enforcement agencies, and need to be purged from them. For example, about 10,000 current and former employees of the US Border Patrol are members of a Facebook group that has shared racist and anti-immigrant memes. The Oath Keepers boast that tens of thousands of its members are current and former law enforcement officers and military veterans. According to Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now at the Brennan Center for Justice, the Bureau has consistently downplayed the threat of infiltration, casting it as mainly an operational impediment to specific criminal investigations and the safety of agents and informants, and relegating enforcement to state and local police forces that may themselves harbor far-right sympathies.

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At the command level, the US military and the federal security agencies now appear largely safe from right-wing extremism. But at least some junior officers who subscribe to militia ideas are on career paths to general and flag officer rank, just as some of the Border Patrol racists on Facebook are angling for senior positions. There is no guarantee that four-stars or senior civilian officials with the rectitude, fortitude, and constitutional understanding of General Mark Milley—the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who bolstered the government against a possible coup attempt by Trump after the election—will be around to do it again in the future. Although federal organizations have pledged to expel extremist members, they can’t be counted on to follow through: similar assertions of resolve have arisen with respect to eliminating ingrained racism, but formidable obstacles, such as unions and free-speech prerogatives as well as institutionalized racism, make effective self-regulation a daunting proposition for them.

Some fifty military veterans or active-duty service members have been charged with crimes in connection with January 6, including at least eight charged with conspiracy. At least twenty active or retired law enforcement officers are facing charges, and several Capitol Police officers appeared to allow insurrectionists to proceed past barriers. Yet even after the shock of that day had registered, military and law enforcement organizations appeared reluctant to investigate extremism within their ranks. The Pentagon has acknowledged that white supremacism has become more prevalent in the military and that trained military personnel are prized recruits for extremist groups, and it has launched efforts to purge them. The Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III recently ordered the military services to assess the extent of the problem and formulate measures for addressing it.

Armed members of the Boogaloo Bois in front of the Oregon State Capitol during a ­nationwide protest called by far-right groups in support of President Trump and his claim of electoral fraud

Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/AFP/Getty Images

Armed members of the Boogaloo Bois in front of the Oregon State Capitol during a ­nationwide protest called by far-right groups in support of President Trump and his claim of electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Salem, January 17, 2021

In his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Merrick Garland—who led the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing—stated that combating domestic extremism would be his top priority. But the Pentagon may find it difficult to balance operational priorities with self-policing, and it is impractical for the Justice Department to regulate the country’s myriad military forces and law enforcement agencies on a case-by-case basis. Congress will need to step in with legislation mandating self-policing by each bureaucratic entity and systematic oversight and accountability.

The United States can learn a great deal from Germany. Its aggressive postwar reckoning with its Nazi past suppressed the far right there for fifty years and, notwithstanding the recent rise of the Alternative for Germany party and more extreme right-wing groups, they remain politically constrained. But Germany has experienced resurgent Nazism and white supremacism in its military and police forces. As of October 2020, German domestic intelligence had documented 1,400 cases of far-right extremism among soldiers, police officers, and intelligence officers over the course of three years, including twenty embedded in a platoon of the elite Special Forces Command antiterrorism unit, whose arsenal was missing 48,000 rounds of ammunition and 135 pounds of explosives. Also uncovered were target lists of 25,000 pro-refugee politicians drawn from police databases. In response the German government has enacted sweeping measures against racism and right-wing extremism and dedicated more than a billion euros over the next three years to interagency programs aimed at blunting right-wing threats and preventing radicalization.

Gun control is an even tougher problem than infiltration. By some estimates, there are over 400 million privately owned guns in America—the equivalent of more than one per person. A relatively small number of Americans own the large majority of firearms, many expanding their arsenals with the election of each Democratic president. Extremists can train at camps employing live-fire exercises right under the noses of law enforcement. The prospect of stricter gun control—such as “red flag” laws allowing law enforcement officers to seize firearms from those considered a public safety risk—has only increased the militancy of these groups. On balance, however, the shock of January 6 may have expanded the scope for significant gun-control legislation—in particular, more rigorous background checks and a federal ban on assault weapons, automatic weapons, and high-capacity magazines. Yet large-scale deradicalization and confiscation are not likely. That leaves US government authorities with a standing strategic warning and an urgent need for tactical warning on an ongoing basis.

The experience of fending off a comparably intractable transnational terrorist enemy has afforded the US government some useful institutional wisdom. Domestic and intergovernmental counterterrorism relationships—in particular, those that involve intelligence sharing—forged after September 11 for addressing jihadists could be reoriented toward new far-right threats. Furthermore, governments have understood that jihadists’ absolutist goals—such as the West’s withdrawal from Muslim lands and their submission to Islamist domination—were not amenable to negotiation or other forms of political suasion. The same goes for the aims of right-wing extremist groups. White supremacism and neo-Nazism, for instance, are flatly unacceptable under American political principles, and QAnon and “Stop the Steal” grievances are premised on outright falsehoods. No political settlement mollifying those with such beliefs is plausible.

This calls for an emphasis on civic education, among other things. Reversing or preventing Muslim radicalization through “strategic communication” was always a daunting challenge because it had to be pursued in countries with starkly different cultures. The substantially domestic provenance of right-wing threats should make them more susceptible to educational initiatives aiming to discredit pernicious notions such as “white replacement theory,” “race realism,” or bans on teaching critical race theory that justify and normalize white supremacism. In particular, a focused federal effort may be needed to counter propaganda like The 1776 Report, produced by an advisory commission appointed by Trump, which defends America’s founding on the basis of slavery and compares progressivism to fascism.

After early pessimism, American and European analysts came around to the view that even al-Qaeda and the Islamic State were to some degree deterrable. Although right-wing extremists have outlandish objectives, they can still be dissuaded from pursuing them by the promise of retaliation (deterrence by punishment) or by the effective foreclosure of political success (deterrence by denial). And indeed, a number of the participants in the Capitol riot, now facing incarceration, have appeared frightened and contrite. Congress’s insistence on certifying Biden’s victory as soon as possible after the mob breached the Capitol undoubtedly had some deterrent effect, which punishing and shaming complicit elected and other officials would strengthen.

Nevertheless, the unprecedented historical spectacle of the Capitol insurrection also looms as a durable tool of recruitment for far-right militias, so enforcement and prevention are paramount. There is a temptation to draft legislation more clearly defining domestic terrorism and strengthening the means to combat it. But, in contrast to the poor preparation for January 6, the apparent effectiveness of the law enforcement response to the event suggests that existing laws are largely sufficient. Muscular new ones could even be politically counterproductive. When the Provisional Irish Republican Army rose to prominence in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, the British government established an array of “scheduled offenses” applicable to IRA militants that distinguished them from “ordinary decent criminals.” This helped them burnish their status as “freedom fighters” and—once tried, convicted, and incarcerated—as “prisoners of war.” That, in turn, only made it easier for them to gain political traction as principled revolutionaries through Sinn Fein, their political counterpart. The prospect of right-wing American convicts whipping up populist fervor through strategically calculated hunger strikes based on their POW status, as the IRA did in 1980–1981, is not an attractive one.

Neither is that of assassination. Being effectively afforded special status as revolutionaries gave Irish republican militants both the political cover and the incentive to stage increasingly violent and politically provocative operations, such as the assassination of Lord Mountbatten and several members of Parliament and the near assassination of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The proliferation of death threats to American politicians—including Pelosi, Vice President Mike Pence, and others as the January 6 insurrection coalesced—underscores the salience of this problem in the US today. An assassination or two could cause social tension to descend into civil conflict.

Some new legislation is under consideration to facilitate intelligence collection and dissemination in order to preempt domestic terrorist attacks. But if national politics tilt farther to the right, passing laws that criminalize the sorts of things political organizations do short of violence—particularly involving speech and assembly—and increasing domestic law enforcement and intelligence gathering would only reinforce the impression of a repressive and antidemocratic state. It’s more sensible and important for federal, state, and local agencies to formulate accurate threat assessments that provide the information required to apply existing laws robustly and target extremists discriminately—as they have mainly with respect to jihadist threats through the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

Because right-wing extremists constitute such a significant part of Trump’s base, his administration resisted pursuing or endorsing any such assessments, instead focusing narrowly on Islamist extremists despite their relative inactivity, and later on antifascist groups despite their largely nonviolent character and lack of cohesion, even as right-wing threats came to dominate the counterterrorism efforts. President Biden moved quickly to remedy this neglect, ordering the director of national intelligence to work with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to comprehensively assess the threats from domestic extremism, which they found to be heightened. The administration’s comprehensive, multi-agency strategy for combating it, announced by Attorney General Garland on June 15, is a product of that effort.

9 Genuine bipartisanship in Congress and a stronger national consensus would give such measures teeth but seem unlikely to materialize in the near future.

It is imperative that the US government resist the impulse to respond militarily to the threat of right-wing violence and that it sustain a law enforcement approach. This may seem obvious, especially given that the US armed forces are generally forbidden to intervene in domestic security matters and are resolutely apolitical, a position reasserted following Trump’s attempt to enlist them during the Lafayette Square episode last June. By comparison, in dealing with the rise of the IRA, the British government militarized the conflict and thereby escalated it. It took about six years for London to see the wisdom of law enforcement “normalization,” by which time it was too late to fully tamp down the elevated level of violence. The Troubles endured for twenty-five years.

The overarching lesson for America is to stick to criminalization and strictly civilian law enforcement, both to preserve civil liberties and to avoid provoking even more extreme reactions. A small core of far-right extremists may survive counterterrorism enforcement efforts in the medium term. If US law enforcement can substantially stop infiltration and generate better intelligence for tactical warnings, though, the right-wing threat is not likely to be more resistant than that of other lethal groups—mafia families, spy rings, the Hell’s Angels—that have been dismantled one search warrant, wiretap, and indictment at a time.

—July 21, 2021

To means-test or not to means-test

To means-test or not to means-test

Better fewer programs, but better

Matthew Yglesias

Jul 30

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(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Something people like to argue about on the internet is whether programs should be means-tested or universal. It’s often not entirely clear what’s meant by this, since universalists tended to praise the pandemic direct cash transfers, but they were in fact means-tested. The fact that a means-tested program appealed to people who say they don’t like means-tests suggests that the conversation actually admits of some nuance.

But to lay my cards on the table, in principle I do not like means-testing.

To me, ideal program administration is like a library or a park or a bus — there for everyone. Some of these programs charge user fees under certain circumstances. But there’s no “sorry, buddy, you’re too rich for the library.”

And I think there are two main reasons for this. One is that income-verifying everyone before they can check books out of the library would be annoying. The other is that it’s sort of useful to benchmark public services in terms of “do politically empowered middle-class people find this usable?” If your library is so crappy that only the most destitute people actually use it, then you are providing the poor with a really bad library. If your library is popular with users from all walks of life, then that means you have a good library.

This idea, however, bleeds into a popular-on-the-internet idea that I don’t really think holds up, and it’s the idea that universal programs are more politically sustainable. The phrase often used here is that “programs for the poor become poor programs” — i.e. the first on the chopping block because their users aren’t politically powerful enough. I think that view of politics is much too simplistic and makes people think that means-tested programs get created because their designers are idiots or something. The much simpler reality is that taxing the non-rich is very politically unpopular, and while taxing the rich polls better, it’s still an uphill political struggle. Faced with competing priorities, there’s always a strong case for trying to do things cheaper.

Means-tested programs do fine

Just to take an example, here’s spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as a share of GDP over time. What you’ll see is that it fluctuates a lot with the business cycle, and also that it’s become a slightly bigger program over time. So even though the early-Reagan peak in unemployment was a little bit higher than the Great Recession peak, SNAP spends much more during the Great Recession and subsequent recovery than it did during the early Reagan years.

I use this not because SNAP is the greatest program success story in the world, but because it has so few of the characteristics that people casually associate with political sustainability. It goes only to the poor, it doesn’t come with work requirements, and it’s almost as flexible as cash assistance.

Yet it endures for three crucial reasons:

Status quo bias is just enormous in politics and changing things is hard.

Voters actually are fairly sympathetic to the plight of the poor and want to help.

Everything benefits some non-poor person, and in this case grocery chains and Walmart lobby on behalf of SNAP.

The same basic dynamic exists for tons of means-tested programs. Medicaid has expanded dramatically since its inception, the Earned Income Tax Credit has become more generous, and the maximum Pell Grant size has risen. The Affordable Care Act’s subsidized exchanges turned out to be less successful than the law’s architects had hoped (a huge share of the good done by the ACA turns out to have been the Medicaid expansion), but they have proven durable, and they got a temporary increase in generosity from the American Rescue Plan that may prove sticky.

With any one of the examples of a means-tested program that’s expanded considerably over the past 30 years, you can pick nits.

Child Tax Credit (pre-Biden) and Earned Income Tax Credit are designed to exclude the poorest.

SNAP has really only grown a tiny bit.

Healthcare programs are so different from cash that people may evaluate them differently.

But I think the aggregate picture is just overwhelming. There is a general tendency toward welfare state ratchet where program expansions are hard but program rollbacks are harder. And it’s also worth saying that universalistic programs aren’t necessarily immune from rollback — back in the high water of right-wing politics during Reagan’s first term, even Social Security got cut a bit.

Means-testing is fine as a political strategy; the problems are of substance.

It’s hard to make means-tested programs work

The one means-tested program that really did get rolled back was Aid To Families With Dependent Children, which as we have discussed before was so sharply means-tested that a poor woman who got a job would see a dollar-for-dollar replacement of earnings with lost benefits.

With modern programs, we are much smarter than that and schedule the phase-outs to be considerably more gradual. Still, because you have multiple different programs that all have their own phase-out schedule, the overlap can become a big deal. Melissa Kearney and co-authors for the Hamilton Project found that “a low-income, single parent can face a marginal tax rate as high as 95 percent” when they looked at this about eight years ago.

There was a big flurry of talk about this back in Obama’s second term, and Robert Greenstein and Sharon Parrott published a corrective noting that even though this is theoretically possible, it’s actually a rare situation. Due to lack of funding, only a quarter of households who are eligible for Section 8 housing assistance actually get it. And funding for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program is so stingy that only a vanishingly small minority of eligible families actually get help. Program uptake for the other means-tested programs is better than that, but it’s not 100% in any case. The upshot is that this Kearney-type scenario is actually pretty rare and you shouldn’t let those kinds of dramatic pictures dominate your view of the welfare state.

Still, I think concerns about the incentive impact of phase-outs should exist even if we’re talking about de facto marginal tax rates of 50 or 60% rather than 90.

When you’re talking about really rich people, I think it’s easy to tell a story where high rates don’t significantly impact effort. The executives at Apple and Google and Facebook and the big partners in private equity, hedge fund, and VC firms all obviously like money. But they’re also playing a game of status and competition with each other in which money serves as a kind of scorekeeping. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t planning a big new purchase if Facebook stock has a great year in 2021. He’s a competitive and driven person in a high-status role and he wants to rule the world. When these guys do step away from their companies, it’s normally to try to become even more famous and important as philanthropists, not to go sit on the beach.

But a person earning 150% of the federal poverty line isn’t doing a fun or glamorous job. She’s working for a living. Getting into the 95th percentile of diligentness among her coworkers and garnering a promotion into a higher-paying role doesn’t land her on the cover of magazines. She’s not going to be invited onto podcasts to speculate about whether we’re living in a simulation. The point of her efforts would be to earn more money. And when a huge share of those extra wages gets clawed back in the form of lost benefits, that’s a real bummer.

What’s more, one of the main reasons this isn’t as big of a problem in practice as it could be in theory is that the system is so confusing and people don’t necessarily realize what the phase-outs are.

A world of hassles

Back to the Greenstein/Parrott piece: they are making a valid point but also a poor defense of the system. After all, the fact that only a quarter of Section 8 eligible families actually get housing vouchers is bad. Progressives, including at CBPP, have spent years calling for full funding of Section 8 and praising the Biden campaign for promising to try to deliver it. Ideally, we’d want to see SNAP, EITC, and CTC participation at 100%. We want everyone to participate in the ACA exchanges. And if we achieved those goals, the marginal tax rate problem would get worse.

The causation here also goes in both directions.

In practice, outside of a few cities you rarely see an affluent person riding the bus in the United States. But to exclude the rich from the bus would require that everyone provide income verification before boarding, which would be a huge pain. The need to pass various income and asset tests is hardly the only administrative burden in the American welfare state, but it is a significant one. As Annie Lowrey writes eloquently, these burdens constitute a collective time tax that has manifestations for people all up and down the income ladder but that tends to fall especially harshly on the poor.

But the healthcare system is a very salient middle-class example. Providing healthcare primarily through employers means that maintaining continuous coverage requires an annual modest hassle around re-enrollment and a larger set of paperwork every time you switch jobs.

The upside you get for this is lower taxes. Instead of paying a Value Added Tax that would raise the cost of all the goods and services we buy, non-poor Americans accept lower salaries (because employers are subsidizing our health insurance), lower take-home pay (because we’re paying premiums), and higher out of pocket costs. But we also have to do all this paperwork. It strikes me as a bad trade, all things considered. Yet the aggregate size of the healthcare system is so large that a big bang transformation feels clearly infeasible. With smaller programs that’s not the case. But the lure of low taxes remains.

Taxes are very unpopular

Proponents of a more social-democratic model of governance tend to talk as if Democrats are just being dupes and morons by proposing programs with complicated phase-ins or weird backdoor subsidies rather than cleaner spending or taxes. Who cares if some rich people who don’t really need help get benefits; you can just make them pay taxes!

And indeed you can, but politically speaking, raising taxes is really hard. For starters, any kind of tax increase on the non-rich is politically toxic. Carbon taxes are a great idea, but they literally poll worse than defunding the police. Congestion taxes, similarly, are conceptually unimpeachable, but we’re only now on the verge of implementing them in New York City alone because the politics is so tough.

Taxing the rich polls much better, but the toxic politics of taxing the non-rich perversely make it difficult to tax the rich. Because the thing that polls well is not “highly progressive revenue increases,” it’s “literally no non-rich people need to pay more.” So something like treating capital gains as ordinary income, which overwhelmingly hits the rich, doesn’t qualify because some non-rich people do have capital gains. Then, even when you successfully gerrymander your tax proposal to only hit the rich, you start getting complaints about specific classes of rich people. A farm that generates a low six-figure income is worth millions of dollars, but can we really pass an estate tax increase (or close the stepped-up basis loophole) on “family farms?”

Now my view is yes, we can tax the family farms. And the small business owners too. But that’s in part because I don’t share the intuition that it’s inappropriate to ever raise taxes on middle-class people. Given the level of inequality in the United States, I’d like to see tax increases be progressive in the sense of generally falling hardest on the rich. But I’d also like to see an efficient, well-designed tax code rather than one with dozens of carveouts to try to make sure that only the most villainous of fat cats are paying more.

But that’s just another way of saying that the reason Democrats don’t govern like social democrats is that very few people in America actually have the social-democratic ethic.

And by the way, that extends to a lot of soi-disant leftists. You’ll find democratic socialists denouncing gasoline tax increases everywhere they’re proposed. In the abstract, these people will often praise the Nordic social model. But in Sweden, the gas tax is nearly $2.50 a gallon, which not only raises revenue but helps explain why Stockholm has such high mass transit ridership for a city of its size. There is just no political movement in America that is actually pushing this agenda because there’s nowhere in the country that it’s viable.

The value of focus

Given that means-tested programs aren’t doomed politically and that tax revenue is scarce, I am sympathetic to the argument for means-testing as a way to save money.

I would note, though, that with the expanded Child Tax Credit, the Democrats parked themselves in an odd place. By excluding the richest 3% or so of the population, they didn’t really save that much money. But you still generate the full administrative burden of income eligibility. It would really make more sense to either not means-test at all, or else to means-test more aggressively and reduce the cost.

In this case, my preference would be to avoid means-testing. I think eliminating the administrative burden is valuable. But I also like that without a means-test it is a pure subsidy to larger families, which I think makes sense conceptually.

My critique of where Biden-era Democrats are going is that it seems they are trying to advance on too many fronts simultaneously. Setting aside climate-related goals and democracy-related concerns to just focus on the welfare state, they are trying to tackle the CTC but also ACA subsidies and also making Medicare more generous while also addressing college affordability and increasing child care subsidies and also also a big new home care subsidy for the elderly or disabled and also also also doing big expansions of housing assistance and federal assistance to poor schools.

On some level, what’s not to like? This is all fine as an aspirational agenda. But when aspirations crash into reality, you need to cut some stuff. And the current thinking in the party seems to be that if you can implement your dreams, you should do half-assed versions of everything.

That to me does not make sense. The 2020 elections neither gave Democrats gigantic congressional majorities nor terrified the GOP into feeling it had to support a progressive agenda. That’s too bad. But Democrats can still do some stuff. What I’d like to see them do is to take their best idea, the expanded CTC, and make the biggest and best possible version of it. Then these other ideas can live to fight another day. But right now, we’re in a universe where the moderate members really don’t want to vote for $6 trillion in tax increases, and the leadership doesn’t want to tell anyone “no.” But that kind of politics of prioritizing coalition management over decision-making isn’t going to ever get us out of the hole.

But fundamentally, I don’t think there’s a super-easy answer here. The same narrow congressional majority that makes it hard to raise $6 trillion also means that nobody’s vote is dispensable. And while Joe Biden is a very effective politician on some levels, he’s not a visionary who’s pounded the table on behalf of specific ideas. So I think we’re probably stuck with an undesirable muddle.

Will Covid-19 become endemic, and what would this mean?

Will Covid-19 become endemic, and what would this mean?

Originally published 27 July 2021, based on a twitter thread. Slightly edited version with citations posted on 28 July 2021.

Peter English's random musings

(For a list of my blogs relating to Covid-19 and a disclaimer, see here.)

(For links to the other questions and answers about Covid-19 vaccines, see here.)

There's been a lot of talk about Covid-19 becoming "endemic".

Which means it circulates normally.

It doesn't mean "trivial" or unimportant.

Polio was endemic in many countries in the mid-twentieth century.1 So was smallpox, but for a much longer period.2 Both caused death and disability.

Populations which had been exposed to them had lower mortality rates; but that didn't mean the disease was trivial.

Sometimes the lower mortality rates related to the age at which you get infected.

The "childhood diseases" that everybody got used to include (among others) measles, mumps, rubella, varicella (chickenpox), and pertussis (whooping cough).3-7

If you get measles, chickenpox or mumps after puberty it is generally much more serious. But getting it as a child of, say, 4-9 years of age, it is much less so. (Not trivial. Mumps caused a lot of deafness, for example.8)

And rubella - german measles… (Aside - the rash is similar to a measles rash; "germane to", meaning similar, mutated into "german". Possibly the name stuck because people thought it meant "German" - we do have a dreadful habit of blaming nasty diseases on our neighbours, and naming them accordingly. But the name has nothing to do with Germany.)

Rubella is a mild disease. OK, a few people with rubella get idiopathic thrombocytopaenic purpura - a frightening name for a generally mild, self-limiting (gets better by itself) condition; and some get transient joint pains; but overall it's pretty insignificant. Except…

While the fetus' organs are forming, rubella infection can cause devastating harm known as "congenital rubella syndrome" (CRS), if the mother catches the virus while pregnant.9 (Ironically, given the suggested-but-debunked association between the MMR vaccine and autism, one of the few known causes of autism is CRS!10)

Zika may be similar. Remember all those babies in Brazil with microcephaly?11-13 The disease has been endemic in parts of Africa for decades. There, nearly everybody gets infected before they're old enough to get pregnant. And it's only when you are infected for the first time during pregnancy that it causes fetal anomalies.

Perhaps, as the infection becomes endemic in Brazil, the same will happen.

Another infection that it endemic in most of the world is pertussis – whooping cough.7 14 Some time, if you're looking for an interesting rabbit hole to go down, look up the common names for this disease worldwide. Some names (eg "100 day cough") accurately describe the typical duration of the symptoms. Others - including "whooping" describe the sound of the coughing.

"How can pertussis be endemic?", you ask. "We vaccinate against it?"

Unlike vaccination against, say, measles, which provides excellent, long-lasting (probably usually life-long) immunity, pertussis immunity doesn't last as long. With the less reactogenic acellular vaccines we switched to in 2004, immunity lasts about a decade, two if you're lucky.

(As an aside… If you test people who have been fully vaccinated some years ago, but who have been exposed to a measles case - eg a staff member on an paediatric ward - you sometimes - quite rarely - find the virus' DNA in their nasopharynx, and sometimes they have extremely mild symptoms, perhaps a slight rash. They have an attenuated form of measles. Very rarely indeed they can be infectious to others, although usually only to very close/intimate contacts.15 16)

So, if you're vaccinated against pertussis as an infant (in the first year of life), there's a good chance you'll catch the infection in your teens or later. The "epidemic cycle" continues, with peaks of infections every few years.

People who have prior immunity tend to get much less ill. They have "attenuated disease". But they can still be infectious.

We don't worry too much about the fact that they can be infected: many will have a persistent, annoying cough that can last for about 100 days. It can be very unpleasant, but they won't usually get seriously ill.

What we do worry about is if they infect small babies.

In the first 3 months of life, pertussis can be very serious. A small baby’s tiny airways can easily be blocked by mucus caused by the infection. As the airways (and the baby) get larger, the airways are less likely to be blocked. But in small babies it can block off their oxygen supply, so they die or suffer brain damage.

That's why we now vaccinate pregnant women. They're usually already immune - their immune system has been "primed" by previous vaccination, so when they encounter the vaccine their immune system rapidly produces large amount of antibodies (as it would if they encountered the disease).

These antibodies pass through the placenta and into the fetus' blood stream; and they can persist for months after birth, protecting the baby until after it has been vaccinated and can produce its own defences.

So… Some diseases are endemic, but vaccination allows us to live with them relatively safely. Others have been effectively eliminated through vaccination.

What are the prospects for Covid-19?

Since it first spread widely in human populations, in late 2019 and early 2020, the virus has changed. More infectious ("transmissible") variants have - because they're more transmissible - largely replaced the original variants.

Ideally, we'd achieve "herd immunity".17 But the more infectious the disease, the higher the proportion of the population that has to be sufficiently immune to not be infected, or at least, to not pass the disease on to others if they are infected.

Recent estimates suggest - well, here's @DGBassani's take on a (preprint) paper:18 19

"The transmissibility of Delta means that vaccination of 87.5% of the population with a highly efficacious vaccine against infection (95% efficacy) is necessary."

It's not quite as simple as "87.5% of the population", of course. People in their teens and twenties have (on average) a lot more contact with other people than people aged 0-10 or >50 years.

So it's particularly important that this age group is well-vaccinated if you are to have any chance of stopping the spread of the virus through vaccination.

We do not, at present, routinely offer Covid vaccination to people under the age of 18 in the UK, and until we do, there's no chance of herd immunity.

Even if we reach herd immunity thresholds of immunity in the UK, this could be undermined by even more transmissible variants. (It could also be undermined by vaccine escape variants - but I expect that these can and will, in due course, be prevented by tweaking the vaccines.)

And we will continue to see the disease spreading widely in other parts of the world where the disease is not under control - generating new variants, and importing cases into the UK.

It will be some years before transmission of the virus is fully controlled in the UK through vaccination. It will therefore become "endemic".

But will it remain a serious infection?

Of course, that depends how you define "serious".

Once most people have been vaccinated, or had the disease and acquired natural infection, some will still become infected (sometimes referred to as breakthrough infection, or "vaccine failure"). But it is likely that relatively few of them will require hospital infection, critical care (ICU), or will die.

What we don't know yet is what proportion will have "long covid"; or how serious or long-lasting these will be.

Burden of disease

In public health we talk about "burden of disease". This includes hospitalisation, critical care, and deaths. But it also includes all the adverse consequences of the disease.

It includes GP consultations. It includes economic consequences: time off work to look after a sick child; consequences for the patient.

We know that a fairly high proportion of patients admitted to hospital have significant organ damage.20 21

Some suffer "cognitive deficits" (can't think as well):22

Long covid, by definition, continues for months after the initial infection, and can impair people's lives for months, maybe years.23-30

The long-term consequences of Covid-19 may limit people's ability to contribute to society through working, earning, paying taxes, volunteering…

All of these consequences contribute to the "burden of disease".

And these consequences might persist for years - possibly for the rest of the person's life. The "cost" of such persistent sequelae can add up to become very significant.

The highly infectious delta variant is overwhelmingly the predominant strain in the UK at present (and likely soon, if not already, in the world).

With highly infectious variants like the delta variant, it will be much harder for people who are not immune (not vaccinated or it didn't work) to avoid infection, and all the short- and long-term consequences of the disease.

As Covid-19 becomes an endemic disease, there will continue to be cases, some of whom will have serious acute (short-term) illnesses, and some will have long covid.

Exactly what the burden of disease will be when it becomes endemic is hard to predict. It is likely to remain high enough to justify attempts to reach herd immunity through vaccination - which will require vaccination of children.

Future of Covid vaccination

It may be that Covid-19 vaccines will become part of the routine childhood schedule, if prior immunity means that any subsequent infections cause (mostly) only mild disease.

It is too soon to know if we will need boosters, either occasionally (as with eg tetanus and polio);1 31 or if we will need regular revaccination with new vaccines that have been tweaked to address new variants that can escape protection by previous vaccines (as with influenza).

Non-vaxxers may not be anti-vaxxers

Non-vaxxers may not be anti-vaxxers

G. Elliott Morris

Data journalist

Much has been made of the Americans who choose not to get their covid-19 vaccines. The disproportionately Republican group was led early on by a president who played down the virus, which may have caused complacency among his followers about the need for full-scale inoculations, and by aligned media personalities who also resisted vaccinations. Some still remain opposed. According to The Economist’s weekly polling with YouGov, nearly 40% of Republican-leaning adults said last autumn that they would not get a vaccine when it became available. The proportion firmly opposed is now closer to 30%. Over the same period, the share of Democratic holdouts has fallen from roughly 15% to 5%.

Yet little attention has been paid either to political independents or to people who are “unsure” about vaccinations. As our report from Arkansas this week shows, vaccine hesitancy can have diverse and long-term causes, and firm opposition is different from simple reluctance. Political leanings are not the only factor. Throughout the pandemic, YouGov’s numbers have revealed that independents are roughly as resistant as Republicans to getting vaccines, yet many more are “not sure” about the shot, rather than stalwartly opposed. As of July 27th, 14% of independents said they were undecided on the vaccine, compared with 13% of Republicans and 9% of Democrats. Over the past month, political independents make up 25% of all anti-vaxxers, and a similar share (23%) of undecideds. Focusing on them could boost overall rates of inoculation.

While independents are less opposed to vaccination than Republicans are, their opposition is also less driven by nefarious conspiracy theories. Among Republicans, 32% believe the American government is using the vaccine to microchip the population; a smaller 18% of independents and 14% of Democrats believe the same lie. (That percentage is a bit of a stunner; it is made all the more shocking by the fact the margin of error is just three points.) This, presumably, means that independents who are not in thrall to this theory would be receptive to a public information campaign about the safety of jabs. 

This week we also used a statistical model to assess the biggest causes of hesitancy—defined, simply, as whether someone was unvaccinated. We can perform the same calculations to predict whether someone says they are “not sure” about getting their jab. Using the demographic profiles of some 24,000 Americans, we have discerned that black Americans are particularly likely to be reluctant about—rather than opposed to—the covid-19 vaccine. After that, people who pay attention to the news only “now and then”, who never married or who live in exurban towns are also more likely to be unsure, controlling for other factors. We have differentiated already between the “jabs” and “jab-nots”, but focusing on persuading the “not sures” could produce higher returns on investment for policymakers.  

Checks and Balance

Checks and Balance

The best of our coverage of American politics, delivered to your inbox every Friday

JULY 30TH 2021

Tamara Gilkes Borr

US policy correspondent

I realised in Little Rock, Arkansas, last week that if circumstances were different, I too might be an “anti-vaxxer.”

From my bubble of Washington, DC—where most people are vaccinated—I flew to Arkansas expecting the worst. Whereas DC has an inoculation rate of 55%, Arkansas is way behind, 36%. Early this month, the only health-sciences university in Arkansas, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, published a report describing the situation with covid-19 as “a raging forest fire.” Its hospital was near capacity with seriously ill covid-19 patients. So, despite being fully vaccinated, I double-masked on the plane though only one was required. In the hotel lobby, I was the only masked customer. I scurried off to my room. Restaurants overflowed with maskless patrons: I ate mostly alone in the sweltering heat and humidity on the outdoor patios. I shook my head condescendingly: how could people willingly put themselves in danger?

After a few days spent speaking to public-health officials, policymakers and everyday residents, I understood a little better. At a vaccination clinic, I met an African-American man, who worked for the police department, while he was waiting to get his last shot. He explained that his wife and child were vaccinated, but he was dragging his feet. His wife nagged him every day, so he finally decided to do it. He was visibly hesitant, but clearly complying for his family’s sake.

Later I met a married couple, both white, both self-proclaimed “hard-headed” conservatives, in the waiting area after they received their first shot. The husband wore an American flag on his baseball cap and on the bandana covering his face. His wife explained why they had not got vaccinated before: “I didn’t like the way it was being pushed,” she said. She explained that she was scared about “both options”: getting the jab and contracting covid-19. He laughed as he recounted why he was not vaccinated, but explained his overall concern: “They rushed it through so fast. I just wanted to see how it shook out.” His wife decided they should get the jab after two friends got seriously ill from covid-19.

Putting faces to the term “anti-vaxxers” made such people’s hesitancy a lot harder to dismiss. I could not ignore the fear in their voices. They were not irrationally yelling about conspiracy theories. Behind their eyes, I could sense concern and distrust. They felt “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” They did not know which was worse: potentially getting ill from covid or potentially getting sick from the vaccine.

And if I am honest with myself, I was also nervous about the jab—and maybe that helped me to empathise with the people I met in the clinic that day. I had known I would get the vaccine once it was available, but I was grateful that I had a few months to grapple with the decision before I was eligible. When I finally got an appointment, I dutifully drove the 90 minutes to get there. Sitting in the waiting room, I was uneasy: I have always hated getting shots. When the nurse called my name, I turned to my sister, took a deep breath, and half-jokingly whispered: “Pray for me.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes as I walked into the room, but she was nervous too. I knew it was the “right” thing to do. But the truth is that peer pressure played an outsized role in my decision. Along with logic and reason, it got me to that clinic. Yet it was hard to ignore the feeling in the pit of my stomach.

We all deserve access to the information and people that help us to make the right decisions for ourselves. Getting the vaccine is not exactly fun. Few of us enjoy spending time in a cold, antiseptic medical room. Few relish the feeling of metal piercing their skin. Following up for a second shot is annoying. And some have suffered side effects that have cost them time off work. But peer pressure and overall knowledge about what’s good for my health got me over the line.

Unfortunately many Americans lack both that pressure and that knowledge. Less than half are proficient in reading, and only one-eighth are considered “health literate”. Over one-third struggle to follow basic health tasks, like following directions for taking prescription drugs. And many do not have access to proper health care: one in eight skipped going to the doctor last year because of the cost. Add to this the mistrust sown about the vaccine by conservative politicians and media pundits, and America was bound to have a vaccination problem.

Would I be vaccinated without peer pressure and education? As an African-American woman who was the first person in her family to go to college, maybe not. After failing for generations to provide many of its citizens with good education and health care, America is facing the consequences. Little Rock taught me that any of us could be an anti-vaxxer.

Why Biden Is Succeeding Where Trump Failed

 Why Biden Is Succeeding Where Trump Failed

The infrastructure deal that eluded the former president is now within reach. Give credit to a new Congress.

Progress.

Progress.

Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/Getty

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The two-track infrastructure deal that advanced this week has a long way to go before any White House signing ceremony, and there are plenty of ways it could still collapse. But its supporters have good reason to be optimistic at this point — and we’re already getting some explanations for why these bills may well pass while former President Donald Trump’s infrastructure initiative never got anywhere.

In the New York Times, Jim Tankersley has an early analysis that I suspect will become conventional wisdom. He’s certainly correct that one big difference between Trump and President Joe Biden is that Biden stayed focused on his legislative goals, while Trump was easily distracted. It’s also true that Biden’s long experience mattered.

But I want to push back some against president-based explanations. The biggest difference, after all, between 2017 and 2021 is that Trump was attempting to advance a policy that many Republicans opposed, and even those who supported it generally ranked it low on their priority list. Republicans come to Washington, if they care about policy, to pass tax cuts, reduce government spending, slash regulations limiting business and achieve the party’s agenda on social issues. Democrats, on the other hand, have wanted to pass the items in the two infrastructure bills for many years, and almost all of them have at least one high-priority policy in the package.

That’s not all. People mock Democrats for having unusually old leaders in Congress, especially in the House, but no one should doubt the competence of Speaker Nancy Pelosi in particular and of House and Senate Democrats as a group. The leadership team has experience passing complex legislation that Republican Speaker Paul Ryan and his team simply didn’t have. The same goes for key committee posts. And while both parties have trouble keeping their various factions working together, there’s no Democratic equivalent to the nihilism of the House Freedom Caucus. Ideological outliers such as Senator Bernie Sanders, or even “Squad” leaders Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, have strong pragmatic streaks and are almost certainly prepared to compromise on behalf of their goals.

None of that has anything to do with Biden or Trump. Congress matters; parties matter. And presidents must play the hands they’re dealt when it comes to both, with only a very limited ability to do much about it.

Even when it comes to the executive branch, presidents share the presidency with many others. Biden, to his credit, has built a competent team of professionals from the chief of staff down, where Trump was unusually bad at personnel decisions. But Biden had one large advantage over Trump: Democrats had only been out of the White House for four years, and the previous president from their party was generally competent and professional. They were ready to govern. Trump could’ve done a lot better, but he was stocking the first Republican presidency since George W. Bush’s economic and foreign-policy misadventures. (It didn’t help that many Republican governing professionals didn’t want anything to do with Trump.) 

As for Biden’s willingness to work with Republicans? White House spin would have us believe this was his secret sauce learned from years of effective legislating in the Senate. I’m sure that’s helping, but the truth is that the choice of a bipartisan approach had nothing to do with the president; it was Senator Joe Manchin’s price for supporting this bill. The real credit goes to the people at the White House or on Capitol Hill who sold the Democrats on the very clever two-bill solution to a tricky legislative problem.

None of this is intended to knock Biden, who I think has handled infrastructure well so far, or to make excuses for Trump. It’s just to push back against overstating the role of the president in legislating — and, really, in governing.

1. Dave Hopkins on the importance of party-aligned media for Republicans.

2. Robert Manduca, Nic Johnson and Chris Hong at the Monkey Cage on the historical roots of the infrastructure bills.

3. Mark Z. Barabak talks with political scientist Tom Mann.

4. Patrick Svitek on the House special election in Texas this week.

5. Anne Applebaum on Mike Lindell.

6. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Bill Dudley on Biden’s potential choices for the Federal Reserve.

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‘Ted Lasso’ is infrastructure

‘Ted Lasso’ is infrastructure

I’m only partly kidding.

By 

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

Yesterday at 2:05 p.m. EDT

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has had a difficult time tracking the multiple infrastructure bills before Congress, as well as the likelihood of their passage. My vague understanding is that there is a bipartisan bill of physical infrastructure such as road and bridge repair that may or may not pass this week. Then, after that, there is a Democrats-only reconciliation bill to fund “human” infrastructure, “priorities not covered by a bipartisan proposal, such as child care, health care, education and additional climate change-related provisions.”

This is all well and good, and it will be interesting to see what sausage, if any, Congress manages to churn out. If the human infrastructure bill is Dems-only, however, let me offer a friendly amendment that would improve the resiliency of the body politic: subsidies that enable everyone to watch “Ted Lasso” on Apple TV Plus.

Another subsidy for a megacorporation? I mean, yeah, sure, but that’s how pork-barrel bills work. The more important thing is that everyone in the United States needs to watch “Ted Lasso.”

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Past Dan would have been appalled at such a suggestion. Last fall, I began noticing friends and follows on social media suggesting that this Jason Sudeikis show was a must-watch because it was “uplifting” and “heartwarming” and such. These sound like good adjectives, but, to a discerning television viewer, they made the show sound mawkish and cloying. As the coronavirus pandemic was worsening, and the November election was looming, I was not in the right head space for that kind of program.

Then, in February, with family members in the ICU and my spouse hanging on by an emotional thread, I suggested we give the show a try. By then, the raves about “Ted Lasso” were coming from a truly heterogenous set of folks. So we watched.

To be blunt, it rescued us. In our darkest hour, this show made us feel better. And we are hardly the only ones. I have talked to numerous people who found this show during their darkest moments of the pandemic and viewed it as an emotional life raft. If that is not human infrastructure, then I do not know what is.

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For the uninitiated, the premise of “Ted Lasso” is simple. In a plot device borrowed from “Major League,” a divorcée inherits an English football club and, in an act of spite toward her former husband, hires a Division 1-AA American football coach named Ted Lasso to run the team, with the express intent and expectation that he will run it into the ground.

Except that Ted is not quite what anyone expects. On first impression, he seems like an out-of-his depth over-optimistic American. That impression is not completely wrong — but it’s mostly wrong. Ted is like a sweet Vidalia onion: There are layers of depth with surprising flavors and sensations, and the deeper you look, the more likely you are to cry a little. Here’s one example from Season 1.

I recognize that this write-up of the show makes it sound, well, mawkish and cloying. Here’s the thing, though: It’s not. Ted is not a “Mary Sue” character: He’s a good coach, but he also has his flaws. He wrestles with them and sometimes loses. But as Catherynne Valente noted, “He is a deep and well-rounded, complex character whose default setting is simply kind. I wish we could all be like that.”

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Furthermore, “Ted Lasso” is replete with other interesting characters who go on their own journeys. Brett Goldstein is brilliant as foul-mouthed, emotionally intelligent veteran Roy Kent, who has a brilliant R-rated rant in the first episode of Season 2 that every single person in the audience should hear. Juno Temple plays Keeley Jones, a social influencer dating AFC Richmond’s best player, in a sympathetic way, which I did not think was possible for any character whose occupation was “social influencer.”

The second season began last week. If you have not watched the show and can afford the Apple TV Plus subscription, check it out (“For All Mankind” is pretty good, too). For those of you who cannot afford it, call your senator. In a time of low social trust, this show is slam-dunk infrastructure.

Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual.

Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual.

By 

Margaret Sullivan

Media columnist

July 28, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book titled “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy.

In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage.

Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the now-in-vogue terms “both-sidesism” or “false equivalence,” but they laid out the problem with devastating clarity (the italics are mine):

“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”

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Nearly a decade later, this distortion of reality has only grown worse, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s rise to power and his ironclad grip on an increasingly craven Republican Party.

Positive proof was in the recent coverage of congressional efforts to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

The Democratic leadership has been trying to assemble a bipartisan panel that would study that mob attack on our democracy and make sure it is never repeated. Republican leaders, meanwhile, have been trying to undermine the investigation, cynically requesting that two congressmen who backed efforts to invalidate the election be allowed to join the commission, then boycotting it entirely. And the media has played straight into Republicans’ hands, seemingly incapable of framing this as anything but base political drama.

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“ ‘What You’re Doing Is Unprecedented’: McCarthy-Pelosi Feud Boils Over,” read a CNN headline this week. “After a whiplash week of power plays . . . tensions are at an all-time high.”

Is it really a “feud” when Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy performatively blames Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to seat Republicans Jim Jordan and Jim Banks — two sycophantic allies of Trump, who called the Jan. 6 mob to gather?

One writer at Politico called Pelosi’s decision a “gift to McCarthy.” And its Playbook tut-tutted the decision as handing Republicans “a legitimate grievance,” thus dooming the holy notion of bipartisanship.

“Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” a Washington Post news story observed. (“Can it really be lost on the Post that the Republican party has acted in bad faith at every turn to undermine every attempt to investigate the events of Jan. 6?” a reader complained to me.)

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The bankruptcy of this sort of coverage was exposed on Tuesday morning, when the Jan. 6 commission kicked off with somber, powerful, pointedly nonpolitical testimony from four police officers who were attacked during the insurrection. Two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, even defied McCarthy’s boycott to ensure their party would be sanely represented.

This strain of news coverage, observed Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review, centers on twinned, dubious implications: “That bipartisanship is desirable and that Democrats bear responsibility for upholding it — even in the face of explicit Republican obstructionism.”

This stance comes across as both cynical (“politics was ever thus”) and unsophisticated (“we’re just doing our job of reporting what was said”). Quite a feat.

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Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan. They want to defend themselves against charges of bias. So they equalize the unequal. This practice seems so ingrained as to be unresolvable.

There is a way out. But it requires the leadership of news organizations to radically reframe the mission of its Washington coverage. As a possible starting point, I’ll offer these recommendations:

Toss out the insidious “inside-politics” frame and replace it with a “pro-democracy” frame.

Stop calling the reporters who cover this stuff “political reporters.” Start calling them “government reporters.”

Stop asking who the winners and losers were in the latest skirmish. Start asking who is serving the democracy and who is undermining it.

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Stop being “savvy” and start being patriotic.

In a year-end piece for Nieman Lab, Andrew Donohue, managing editor of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, called for news organizations to put reporters on a new-style “democracy beat” to focus on voting suppression and redistricting. “These reporters won’t see their work in terms of politics or parties, but instead through the lens of honesty, fairness, and transparency,” he wrote.

I’d make it more sweeping. The democracy beat shouldn’t be some kind of specialized innovation, but a widespread rethinking across the mainstream media.

Making this happen will call for something that Big Journalism is notoriously bad at: An open-minded, nondefensive recognition of what’s gone wrong.

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Top editors, Sunday talk-show moderators and other news executives should pull together their brain trusts to grapple with this. And they should be transparent with the public about what they’re doing and why.

As a model, they might have to swallow their big-media pride and look to places like Harrisburg, Pa., public radio station WITF which has admirably explained to its audience why it continually offers reminders about the actions of those public officials who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Or to Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn’s letter to readers about how the paper and its website, Cleveland.com, refuse to cover every reckless, attention-getting lie of Republican Josh Mandel as he runs for the U.S. Senate next year.

These places prove that a different kind of coverage, and transparency about it, is possible.

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Is it unlikely that the most influential Sunday talk shows, the most powerful newspapers and cable networks, and the buzziest Beltway websites will change their stripes?

Maybe so. But, to return to Ornstein and Mann in 2012, it’s a necessity.

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” they wrote.

They probably couldn’t have imagined the chaos that followed November’s election, the horrors of Jan. 6, or what’s happened in the past few weeks.

The change they called for never happened. For the sake of American democracy, it’s now or never.

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For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan

Democrats can’t count on voters being mad enough about suppression to overcome it

Democrats can’t count on voters being mad enough about suppression to overcome it

The so-called ‘backlash effect’ from voting restrictions is far from guaranteed.

By Charlotte Hill

Charlotte Hill is a research fellow with the UC Berkeley Institute for Young Americans and the Berkeley People Lab.

Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The Biden administration, for example, suggested this month that Democrats might counter the Republican voter suppression machine with some savvy grass-roots organizing. But there is also growing enthusiasm about these laws’ supposed “backlash effect.”

New York Times correspondent Nate Cohn, for example, has argued that voter suppression bills, such as the one passed by Georgia’s state legislature this year, are unlikely to depress turnout in part because they “may backfire by angering and energizing Democratic voters.” Former Barack Obama speechwriter David Litt followed suit, writing in the Atlantic that voter ID laws may have “created an equal and opposite backlash, driving turnout among the groups intended to be suppressed” — and that Democrats should therefore embrace a compromise bill proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin III that includes a national voter ID requirement.

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But while telling voters about suppression can sometimes motivate them to show up at polling places, this backlash effect is far from guaranteed.

This “backlash” concept emerged as the result of several political science studies, which found that strict voter ID laws have only modest effects on aggregate turnout. A popular explanation for this puzzle is that the targets of suppression feel so incensed by attempts to quell their vote (or the votes of those in their political coalition) that they cast ballots at even higher rates than before.

In the most famous of these studies, Democratic voters who read an article about voter ID laws’ suppressive effects felt angry, and this anger boosted their intentions of voting in an upcoming election. In a separate study of real-world political behavior, Hispanic Americans whose voter registrations were officially challenged by the Florida government during an attempted voter purge in 2012 went on to vote at higher rates — suggesting that feeling personally targeted was enough to drive up turnout.

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But that does not hold true for all groups affected by voter restrictions. Take the young, for example. Americans younger than 30 are notorious for voting at lower rates than older age groups. Even in the historically-high-turnout 2020 general election, only half of young adults cast a ballot. But turnout is significantly higher among college-educated young people, especially those of color — and they overwhelmingly voted for Joe Biden last November in the presidential election.

Increasingly, Republican-controlled legislatures are closing campus polling places, limiting early voting at colleges and universities, banning the use of student ID cards to meet voter identification requirements and making it harder for young adults to request mail-in ballots. Democratic members of Congress introduced a new bill last August to protect young adults’ voting rights, citing “efforts to disenfranchise youth” that “could have lasting effects for decades to come.”

In a randomized controlled experiment, I looked at how people reacted when they learned about a spate of new state bills aimed at driving down youth turnout. Using the survey firm Lucid, I recruited a U.S. Census-balanced sample of nearly 4,900 individuals to take an online survey earlier this year. I randomly assigned participants to read one of three hypothetical news articles: a control article without any information on voter suppression, an article about voter suppression that did not name any particular identity group as the target, or a similar voter suppression article that specified young people as the intended targets. I then measured how angry the article made people feel, as well as how likely they are to vote in the upcoming 2022 midterm election.

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The results were dismaying. While learning about youth suppression generally did make people angry, it did not make people more likely to want to vote. (Neither did learning about suppression without an explicitly named target.) Most concerning, information about youth suppression did not even boost voting intentions for young adults themselves — the individuals who stand to lose the most.

Intriguingly, one specific set of people did exhibit a backlash effect after learning about youth suppression: young adults who strongly identify with their age group. But this group was relatively small. Most people simply didn’t identify strongly with their age group. By contrast, people do tend to hold strong partisan and racial identities — a difference that may explain why suppression targeting Democrats or voters of color has provoked a stronger backlash effect in the past.

My research highlights a real danger in assuming that voter suppression targeting a group with a strongly held collective identity, such as Black Americans, will evoke the same backlash as suppression targeting a group with a weaker collective identity, like young people. This is particularly concerning when it comes to suppression targeting racial minorities, as Hispanic and Asian Americans have historically scored lower on standard measures of group identity than Black Americans. It is far from clear that restrictive laws targeting these groups will evoke so much anger that they flood the polls.

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Despite the best hopes of some observers, telling voters they are being suppressed will not always be sufficient to counteract that suppression. In the case of bills targeting young voters, that messaging appears entirely ineffective. As debate continues over which legislative or political tools can successfully combat these restrictions, simply counting on voter backlash may just be wishful thinking.

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