Trump declared a war on the media. Now proxy battles are being waged in American courts.

Trump declared a war on the media. Now proxy battles are being waged in American courts.

Margaret Sullivan — Read time: 6 minutes

Yesterday at 7:00 a.m. EST

From the start of his presidential bid, Donald Trump took full advantage of the public’s growing mistrust of the mainstream press. The journalists tirelessly chronicling the near-daily scandals erupting from his White House were “scum,” he taunted. They were dishonest, he insisted. They were “the enemy of the people.”

His adviser Stephen K. Bannon memorably called the media “the opposition party.” Plenty of Americans agreed: These days, even local TV reporters are likely to be blasted as “fake news” as they try to cover school board meetings.

Now, more than a year after Trump’s presidential term ended, three volatile lawsuits forged in the culture-war fire he stoked are making their way through the legal system.

All are defamation suits, and the mere names involved suggest just how hot those flames may get: Sarah Palin, the right-wing lightning rod who gleefully slammed the “lamestream media”; Project Veritas, the hidden-camera “sting” outfit that targets journalists and liberals; Fox News, the conservative cable network that morphed into the Trump White House’s propaganda office; and the New York Times, the pillar of elite journalism that became the object of some of Trump’s most scalding attacks — and is now the defendant in two of the cases.

Each case has the potential to alter the media business or the practice of journalism, for better or worse. It’s no coincidence that they come at a time when anti-press sentiment is rampant, and not just among conservatives. Public trust in the news media, as well as other institutions, has plummeted over the past 50 years.

“You can’t take it for granted these days that members of a jury, or even judges, believe that we need a robust free press,” Elizabeth Spiers, a writer and political strategist who, 20 years ago, co-founded Gawker, told me last week.

She watched that dynamic play out a few years ago when a Florida jury awarded local hero Terry Bollea, better known as professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, a huge monetary award — millions more than he had sought. His invasion-of-privacy suit was against Gawker, which had posted parts of a tape showing him having sex with the then-wife of radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. The payout sent the original Gawker into bankruptcy and eventually out of business, a cautionary tale for media companies of all stripes whose decision-makers would like to think that First Amendment ideals resonate in American courtrooms.

The cases involving Fox News also reflect the media culture wars, but from the other side of the divide. Two large voting-technology companies — Smartmatic and Dominion — are suing Fox News, claiming that their reputations were unfairly damaged when the network handed a megaphone to conspiracy-theory-spouting guests, including Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, who falsely accused the companies of helping to rig the 2020 election against Trump.

As big and potentially damaging as they are, the Dominion and Smartmatic suits could end up being settled before trial. Fox News certainly has plenty of motivation to pay to make them go away. (In both cases, Fox News has said that it was simply covering newsworthy comments of public interest, made relevant because the Trump campaign was protesting the results of the election.) But no matter the outcome, they could prompt Fox News and similar media companies to exert significantly more caution about spreading political lies. If so, this would be the rare case of Fox News being held accountable for the damage it does.

The long-term effects of the Project Veritas case — which claims the Times defamed the group with two news articles characterizing their tactics as deceptive and possibly part of a disinformation campaign — are harder to suss out. Already, there has been a major development that worries press advocates: A trial judge ruled that the paper is not allowed to publish certain information it obtained about Project Veritas. Such a ruling, known as “prior restraint,” is highly unusual and cause for legitimate concern.

But perhaps most potentially consequential is Palin’s suit against the Times over a 2017 editorial that inaccurately drew a connection between her political rhetoric and the shooting that gravely injured then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed six others in 2011.

The editorial, aggressively rewritten by an editor on a tight deadline, was assigned in the hours after another mass shooting, this one at an Alexandria, Va., baseball field, in which then-House majority whip Steve Scalise was seriously wounded. The error was corrected after it sparked a Twitter firestorm upon publication. “Are you up? The right is coming after us,” the editor, James Bennet, wrote in a panicky-sounding midnight email to the author of the editorial, as chronicled in the Columbia Journalism Review. (Bennet, former top editor of the Atlantic, resigned from the Times in 2020 after his op-ed section published an inflammatory opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton [R-Ark.]; Bennet acknowledged he had not read it first.)

It’s not inconceivable that Palin v. Times could make its way to the Supreme Court. If it does, an unfulfilled promise of Trump’s — that he would “open up” the libel laws — might come to pass. Most legal experts scoffed when Trump, both as candidate and president, declared that he wanted to make it easier for aggrieved public officials, such as himself, to sue news organizations and “win lots of money.”

Despite his bluster, the legal foundation on which those laws are built is still standing. That’s the 1964 Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that gives significant protections to news organizations when they are sued by public figures, requiring that plaintiffs prove “actual malice” or “reckless disregard” for the truth — in other words, that they published information knowing full well that it was false and proceeding anyway. The Times’s swift correction of its mistake strongly suggests there was no reckless disregard for the truth, just sloppy editing and poor judgment.

But, in today’s fraught atmosphere, it’s an open question whether judges and juries will see it that way.

“It seems like a sure bet that the press-friendly standard for libel the Times v. Sullivan case established is in for a serious challenge,” said Nicholas Lemann, a professor at Columbia Journalism School and staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.

After all, as Lemann noted in an email to me, the current Supreme Court already “has shown that it is eager to revisit, and possibly reverse, the great liberal victories of the 1960s and ’70s,” and Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas both have publicly said they would like to reconsider Times v. Sullivan.

Trump’s appointment of Gorsuch and two other conservative justices could put the former president’s fingerprints all over such an outcome, one that could cause a long-standing press rights standard to be weakened. That would be extremely regrettable, from my point of view. Journalists, being human, inevitably make mistakes; those mistakes should be acknowledged and corrected but, at least when public figures are involved, not harshly punished.

“It would be a bitter irony if Sarah Palin, of all people, proves to be the vehicle through which the media are taken down,” wrote Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy on Boston’s WGBH last week. Ironic, he explained to me later, because of the emptiness of Palin’s past anti-media rhetoric and the overall weakness of her suit.

The case was moving toward jury selection last week when Palin tested positive for the coronavirus, causing a delay. (Her infected status didn’t keep the former Alaska governor — who announced last year that she would submit to the vaccine “over my dead body” — from dining a second time at a Manhattan restaurant, where she had already flouted a proof-of-vaccine mandate.) The trial is scheduled to start again on Thursday.

It’s bound to be a wild ride. And, in this political atmosphere, it may end up being an extremely consequential one.

Read more by Margaret Sullivan:

What would a 2024 Trump coup look like? A new paper offers a worrying answer.

What would a 2024 Trump coup look like? A new paper offers a worrying answer.

Greg Sargent — Read time: 4 minutes

January 26, 2022 at 10:47 a.m. EST

As lawmakers debate how to “Trump proof” our elections against a rerun of 2020, a difficult question has emerged as pivotal to these efforts: What strategy might be most likely to succeed in subverting a future presidential election where Donald Trump’s corrupt scheme failed?

A new paper by an election law specialist seeks to answer this question with a “realistic risk assessment” of the 2024 presidential election. Even if the scenario it outlines is extreme, it deserves attention, because it raises very vexing points about weaknesses in our election system.

Understanding these weaknesses has concrete utility right now. It will help shape Congress’s efforts to shore them up via reform of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, or ECA, which governs how Congress counts presidential electors.

Here’s the unsettling reality: If the ECA isn’t revised, under certain scenarios, all it would take for a future effort to succeed is a single corrupt GOP governor and a GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

There are several routes for a future effort to succeed. Considering the likelihood of each is central to getting ECA reform right.

Right now, efforts in Congress to revise the ECA are focused mainly on the possibility of a rogue House and Senate refusing to count legitimate electors, as Trump attempted to pull off in 2020.

This new paper offers another possibility. This one would simply require Republicans to capture the House and for the right Trumpist Republican to win a key swing-state governorship.

Imagine that former senator David Perdue becomes Georgia governor, after winning a GOP primary against Gov. Brian Kemp, who is under fire from Trump supporters precisely because he refused to overturn the 2020 results. Imagine Speaker Kevin McCarthy controlling the House on Jan. 6, 2025.

If a Democrat won the state by a slim margin, and the election came down to it, Perdue could send a rogue slate of electors based on a fake pretext of election fraud, and the GOP-controlled House could simply count those electors. A Democratic Senate might object, but under the ECA, both chambers must object to a slate of electors to invalidate it, so it would stand.

Would courts intervene? Yes, they might command Perdue to send the rightful electors.

But the paper suggests that at such a point, someone like Perdue — already far down the road of lawlessness — might ignore the court’s command and send the fake electors anyway.

The GOP House could count them regardless of the court’s command, the paper posits. At that point the Supreme Court could decide this is a political question and decline to intervene. Game over.

Is this far-fetched? True, a lot would have to fall into place. But note that Perdue has explicitly said he wouldn’t have certified Joe Biden’s electors in 2020. That means he’s campaigning on an implicit openness to such a scheme. Given that implicit promise, the pressure on him to carry it out would be immense.

Also note that in swing states such as Pennsylvania, GOP candidates for governor are campaigning explicitly on their willingness to side with Trump’s lies about 2020. Would one execute such a scheme where GOP legislatures refused to before? We don’t know, but it’s certainly plausible. And do you want to rely on someone like Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis to do the right thing?

Still, the point here is not to argue this scenario is likely. It’s to understand the weaknesses in the system in order to reform it. And it’s obvious such glaring weaknesses are not tenable.

Here’s the conclusion that emerges: Reform must thwart corruption at both the state and congressional ends. At the state end, one emerging solution in the Senate would trigger heightened judicial review when a state government fails to follow preexisting procedures in appointing electors.

But as noted, a GOP governor could ignore this, and a GOP House could play along. So Seligman suggests a second backstop: In an ECA reform bill, Congress could explicitly direct the Supreme Court to review Congress’ count after the fact, making it less likely to decline to intervene.

Meanwhile, at the congressional end, reform must address the other possible scenario floated above: a corrupt House and Senate refusing to count the correct electors sent by a non-corrupt governor and legislature.

Ultimately, getting ECA reform right will require balancing efforts to address all these threats. This is an extremely difficult problem. Some pundits are having a grand old time mocking those who are thinking through such scenarios. Their time would be more productively devoted to figuring out how to fix the system to avert such a meltdown, however unlikely it seems.

OPINIONS ON THE 2024 ELECTIONS

Pastor Tony Evans leads his flock toward danger with anti-vaccine rhetoric

By Michael Gerson 

Columnist

January 27, 2022 at 4:23 p.m. EST

Opinion | Pastor Tony Evans leads his flock toward danger with anti-vaccine rhetoric

Activists and faith groups protest against vaccine mandates in Washington on Jan. 23. (Shuran Huang/For The Washington Post)

While conceding that “vaccines help,” Evans goes on to argue that “you should have a choice, whether it’s natural immunity or whether it’s therapeutics. You shouldn’t be mandated to put chemicals in your body. But you should be free to if you choose to. So our issue is against mandates, not against vaccinations if you choose to. … People don’t know what to do, so stuff keeps changing because God keeps messing stuff up. … So whatever decision you make, be able to trust God with it.”

This position — which assumes that God introduces an element of uncertainty into the conclusions of science to expose human arrogance — is intended to justify a reasonable middle ground of personal choice on vaccination. The problem? It is a theological absurdity based on a bald-faced deception in service to a dangerous ideology.

From the most recent data, we know that covid-19 boosters have an effectiveness of 90 percent to 95 percent against severe disease or death. According to a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine by Minal K. Patel: “This means that if the absolute effectiveness of two vaccine doses is 90%, the absolute effectiveness of two doses plus a booster is 99 to 100%.”

Whatever this is, it is not a basis to argue that “people don’t know what to do.” People know exactly what to do to prevent — and nearly eliminate — the risk of severe disease and death from a nasty pathogen. Two doses plus a booster is as close as medicine comes to the ironclad certainty of protection.

This creates certain moral responsibilities for those in positions of influence. If they claim that strong scientific conclusions are actually in doubt, they are engaged in deception. If they address this issue without affirming the urgency of universal vaccination, they are condemning a portion of their audience to the risk of needless death.

The whole idea that chemical inputs should never be “mandated” is to misunderstand both the history of public health and the nature of a common good. Required, routine vaccination of schoolchildren has been one of the great success stories of modern medicine. Highly contagious diseases such as mumps, measles, chickenpox and whooping cough are now rare in the United States, while polio and smallpox have been eliminated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that routine child vaccination will prevent an estimated 936,000 deaths in American children born between 1994 and 2018. This “pro-life” achievement is celebrated by a vast chorus of the living.

Maintaining public health is, in part, a matter of public authorities influencing what chemicals are introduced into which bodies. Heroin and fentanyl? Nope: bad for individuals and society. Alcohol? Not until you’re 21. Childhood vaccines? Yes, absolutely.

The coronavirus booster — which saves people from death and serious illness, at a minuscule risk — falls easily into the third category. It is now considered controversial not because of deepened theological reflection on the part of evangelicals but because of the right-wing populist fetishization of autonomy and “choice.” And pastors pulled along in this political current are sources of deadly misinformation and of terrible, reckless, foolish advice.

We tend to think that deferring to individual choice is somehow a “neutral” position. But in the case of covid, Evans and others are not asking us to choose between the views of two groups of citizens. They are creating circumstances that will result in the spread of a sometimes deadly virus. This is not neutrality. It is sabotaging a society they should be serving.

A vague discomfort with the field of medicine goes back to the early days of the Christian church. “Many thought the sick should rely only on God for healing,” the historian Robert Louis Wilken writes in “The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity.” “Turning to a physician for cure was a sign of lack of faith in God’s power.”

Yet Christian teachers such as Origen of Alexandria vigorously disputed such assumptions. “God, creator of human bodies,” Origen argued, “knew that such was the fragility of the human body that it could be subject to different kinds of maladies and injuries.” So it made sense that “if the body is assailed by sickness, there would be cures.”

In the covid crisis, by the grace of God, there are cures.

Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony grievances and ancient myths

Perspective | Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony grievances and ancient myths

The Russian leader doesn’t want to believe Ukraine exists. But that’s not how modern nations work.

A soldier's uniform was propped up in November at a Ukrainian army checkpoint near a bridge in eastern Ukraine, close to the front line with pro-Russian separatists. 

A soldier's uniform was propped up in November at a Ukrainian army checkpoint near a bridge in eastern Ukraine, close to the front line with pro-Russian separatists. (Guillaume Herbaut/Agence VU)

Image without a caption

January 28, 2022 at 9:09 a.m. EST

Last July, Vladimir Putin supplied the mythical basis for Russian war propaganda in an essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The essential idea is that Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv. At the time, the city was a trading hub of Viking slavers who were gaining dominance over local Khazars. It takes some fanciful thinking to see here a reason for Russia to invade Ukraine in the 21st century, as it seems prepared to do. The absurd particulars, though, are less important than the principle. If countries can claim other countries on the grounds of millennial myths, the modern state system ceases to exist.

Putin’s idea is that Ukraine is a fraternal nation because of how he personally feels about the past. This is known as imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy. People who speak of other nations as little brothers wish to be Big Brother. Whether Ukraine is a nation or not is a question for Ukrainians today, not for imaginary Russians in an imaginary past. In Putin’s presentation, though, the West is to blame when Ukrainians don’t answer the question the way he would like. He seems to believe that Ukrainians would share his view about “historical unity,” if only the West would get out of the way.

Russian propaganda depends upon myths and counterfactuals, all spun in the direction of Russian greatness and innocence. Putin writes that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the principle for deciding the borders of its constituent republics should have been: “Take what you brought with you.” In history as it actually happened, however, it was the Russian republic of the U.S.S.R. that brought about the end of the Soviet Union. The whole point was to liberate Russia from what was then understood to be the burden of supporting the periphery. Boris Yeltsin, the man who achieved this, accepted the borders of the Soviet Russian republic as Russia’s. As Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, Putin knows all this very well. Today he is dreaming of the Russian Empire that the Bolsheviks destroyed. But it “brought” nothing to the U.S.S.R. It no longer existed. And it was never a Russian nation-state. Its dynasty and much of its elite was of non-Russian origin; most of its population spoke languages other than Russian, and few of those who did speak Russian would have known what a nation was before the Bolsheviks made their revolution in 1917.

What Ukraine “brought” with it was the shape of the Soviet Union itself. The Bolsheviks were cosmopolitans aiming for the whole world. The wars that followed taught them the importance of the national question. The U.S.S.R. they founded in 1922 was a communist party-state, but it took the form of a federation with a Ukrainian republic, a Russian republic, a Belarusian republic and Caucasian republics. This reflected a general understanding that Ukraine was a country that had to be acknowledged. As an indirect result of the need to recognize other national questions, Russia was created as a republic of the U.S.S.R. It was this unit that Yeltsin extracted from the Soviet Union 30 years ago.

A politics that begins with myths of innocence is a politics that ends in violent resentment. The propaganda of loss is meant to set up the permanent presumption that Russia is a victim. That Russians suffered in the 20th century is, of course, beyond all doubt. People living in the Russian republic of the U.S.S.R. died in terrible numbers under Stalinism and during the German occupation. Those are incontrovertible facts. But they are exploited by the Kremlin to create a sense that only Russians suffered, and therefore only Russian leaders may judge others. “Genocide” and “fascism” become magic words which, when pronounced, liberate Russians to do whatever they want, including invade their neighbors.

And yet people inside the Ukrainian republic of the U.S.S.R. suffered more in the 20th century, both from Stalinism and from the Germans. Ukrainians today have as much right to remember the past as Russians do. Their idea that the experience of World War II justifies respect for legal boundaries is in harmony with the United Nations Charter and with international law generally.

After World War II, the U.S.S.R. established an outer empire in Eastern Europe. These communist replicate regimes were joined in a military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. Russian propaganda today uses another family metaphor to describe its former members: Russian diplomats speak of former Soviet republics and onetime satellite states as “orphans.” During its existence, the Warsaw Pact was used to invade one of its own members — Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Soviet Union also invaded Hungary all by itself in 1956 and intervened in East Germany in 1953. The Solidarity movement in Poland was crushed by the local communist regime, since the Red Army was bogged down in the invasion of Afghanistan at the time. After the revolutions of 1989, the member states of the Warsaw Pact all applied to join NATO, for reasons that everyone, including Russian leaders, understood perfectly well at the time.

When Russian leaders claim today that NATO has betrayed Russia, they tap that same mythical vein of violated innocence. On May 27, 1997, Russia signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act. It was acknowledged by all parties at the time that NATO would expand and was open to “all emerging European democracies.” Just four days later, Russia signed a treaty with Ukraine, recognizing its borders. Moscow may disapprove when former Warsaw Pact members or former Soviet republics apply to join NATO, but such desires are not a result of Western iniquity or broken promises. They are a result of Soviet and then Russian behavior. NATO membership was not popular in Ukraine until Russia invaded the country in 2014. Not surprisingly, most Ukrainians these days wish their country belonged to a powerful defensive alliance.

Now that NATO membership has majority support in Ukraine, former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev refers to Ukrainians as “vassals.” Russian propaganda made similar moves to solidify a certain mind-set before the last invasion. In early 2014, a major Kremlin theme was the idea that Ukraine was a “failed state” that required Russians to repair it. A state that claims that another state does not really exist is behaving as an empire. Ukraine is as much a state as Russia, a basic fact that Russia itself recognized until it invaded eight years ago. Until then, there was nothing at all in Russian diplomacy to question Ukraine’s existence, borders or right to sovereignty.

In invading Ukraine and annexing territory in 2014, Russia violated international law in general and its agreements with Ukraine in particular. Perhaps most poignant among these was the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. At that time, Ukraine was the third-largest nuclear power in the world, based on the number of nuclear weapons in its territory. It agreed to give up all of its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from the United States, Britain and the Russian Federation. Given this record of invading countries whose security it has guaranteed, it is worth asking if Russia would respect future agreements, especially those it signed while threatening further invasion.

In the Kremlin’s thinking, Russia is a victim because Ukraine exists, and a victim again because Ukraine has a foreign policy. The aggressive assertion of innocence goes still further. Putin also claims that Russia is a victim of today’s Ukraine because of the diminishing influence of Russian culture in the country. In his article from last summer, he equates the reduced sway of Russian culture and language in Ukraine to an attack on Russia by a weapon of mass destruction. In the real world, the Russian language is in no danger: The globalized Internet favors Russian over Ukrainian in Ukraine, and most television is in Russian. What has changed with time, especially since the invasion of 2014, is the popular attitude toward language: The percentage of Ukrainian citizens who identify as speakers of Russian has declined. Younger people are now more likely to identify themselves as native speakers of Ukrainian. No Ukrainian policy ever led to as much Ukrainization as Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The whole notion of invading a neighbor to protect an ethnic group is more than suspect. This was the rationale given by Hitler to dismantle Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the reason given by Stalin for the invasion of Poland in 1939. If Russia believed that people in Ukraine were threatened because of their culture, it had legal routes it could have pursued before 2014; it didn’t.

People who speak Russian in Ukraine are far freer than people who speak Russian in Russia. One such person is the president of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky, whose best language is Russian, defeated his predecessor Petro Poroshenko in a democratic election in 2019. In Russia, a political rise of this kind is impossible. Putin’s rival Alexei Navalny, the victim of an assassination attempt by the Russian secret services, is now in a prison that resembles a concentration camp.

So all this Russian propaganda is untrue, but even if any of it were true, it would not justify invasions and threatened invasions. Is it meant to serve ideology or strategy? What we know for sure is that Russia’s leaders, whatever the ideology or strategy might be, believe in psychology. The one consistent element of Russian propaganda is that Russia has suffered and that it is the West’s fault — your fault. When Russia does something inexcusable, you are meant to be shocked, blame yourself and make concessions.

Shock and guilt will not lead to peace. Security cannot be gained by chasing myths into a netherworld where Russians are always innocent, Ukrainians do not exist and Americans should take the blame for it all. If Russia gets what it wants by behaving badly and programming others to take the blame, expect more of the same in years to come.

Time spent negotiating since December has helped bring Russian demands toward something that can be parsed, if not accepted. It is important — and this does seem to be happening — that American positions extend the field of subjects so that both sides can find starting points beyond the doomed terrain of fantasies of innocence and guilt. To be sure, something is wrong in the European security architecture — just ask the Ukrainians. What that is, and how it might be repaired, will require multiple starting points, the participation of multiple partners and a good deal of time.

&c. by Jonathan Chait

&c. by Jonathan Chait

 

 

Last month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tree, a spectacular national park in California. There was a giant wind farm straddling the freeway between my hotel and the park, and surprisingly, driving through it was nearly as awe-inspiring as the park itself. The rows of giant, gleaming turbines set against the mountains looked beautiful, but more than that, they conveyed the sensation of productivity in a way that I found almost mesmerizing. Without even consciously thinking about it, you can see energy being produced literally from out of thin air.

My reaction may not be unique. More importantly, it may have some real political salience. A new paper finds that wind turbine construction “generated large electoral benefits for (pro-renewables) Democratic candidates: every megawatt of additional wind power capacity over statewide trend increased the Democratic vote share in U.S. House elections by 0.03 percentage points.” It likewise found, studying the content of press releases by candidates of both parties, that adding wind turbines makes the representatives of those districts friendlier to green energy.

Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

 

The idea that living near wind turbines would make you feel friendlier to the Democratic Party would have seemed fanciful to me before I experienced it up close. One of the things Build Back Better would do is fund more clean energy. And while the main point is obviously to replace fossil fuels with zero-emission energy sources, House Democrats might keep in mind that wind turbines in their districts also serve as very large, effective political advertisements for the value of clean energy.

_____

The Democratic Party’s traditional ritual of post-defeat recriminations is already well under way. Jamelle Bouie argues that the party’s left wing is not to blame for the Biden administration’s trevails because “Progressives are not actually in the driver’s seat of the Democratic Party.”

I certainly wouldn’t give progressives anything close to sole responsibility for the party’s decisions. My argument in a feature last fall assigned blame to both the party’s left and right wings, each of which has screwed things up in its own special ways. But Bouie’s case seems to absolve the left almost completely, on the grounds that there “was a battle for control of the Democratic Party, and the moderates won. They hold the power and they direct the message.”

Bouie is a brilliant analyst, but I see two major problems with this argument. First, the reality he’s describing would make more sense if Biden treated the left as a discredited enemy and disregarded its ideas. But the actual record is quite different. After winning, Biden — fearing a reprise of 2016, when spiteful Bernie Sanders die-hards protested his convention and helped Donald Trump win — went to unprecedented lengths to mollify the left. He formed a “unity” task force with supporters of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to craft a new platform. In contrast to the typical pattern of nominees pivoting to the center after winning a primary, Biden pivoted away from the center.

This pivot to the left was widely acknowledged at the time. “We don’t need to pivot to get independents because he already appeals to independents,” a Biden adviser told Politico. “These are ideas that we feel should appeal to Bernie’s voters that are well in keeping with Joe’s principles.” Delighted but stunned progressives were writing columns with headlines like “Joe Biden Is Pivoting to the Left. What? Why?”

Second, unpopular activists and policy proposals either inside or outside a party structure can push voters away, even if they don’t win a factional fight. In 1996, even though Republicans nominated staid establishmentarian Bob Dole, Bill Clinton still successfully defined him as a supporter of the radical anti-government policies advocated by the “revolutionary” Republicans who loathed and distrusted him. In 1968, Democrats nominated pro-war, non-counterculture, and very mainstream liberal Hubert Humphrey, yet Republicans still associated him with the antics of anti-war demonstrators. The fact those demonstrators were protesting against Humphrey, while a bitter irony to the Democrats, did not fully insulate them.

Progressive activists made a strategic choice to inject left-wing slogans and proposals into the national dialogue. Their calculation was that it would energize Democratic turnout (a hope premised on an erroneous belief that marginal voters had left-wing views) and would tug the national conversation leftward. Democratic elected officials believe, with at least some evidence, that decision blew up in their face.

The left’s incentive now is to deny these choices had any impact on the national environment. But they did. They got political reporters talking about Medicare for All, socialism, defunding the police, and the Democratic Party’s move to the left. That was the goal. The problem all along was that it avoided facing up to the fact that introducing unpopular ideas into the political dialogue has a real downside.

_____

As the Republican Party has grown increasingly hostile to democratic norms and principles, there has been growing interest in studying the pro-authoritarian roots of the conservative movement. Joshua Tait, a scholar of the conservative movement of the mid-20th century, has made an important contribution.

Writing for the Bulwark, Tait excavates the conservative movement’s commentary about Fransisco Franco’s regime in Spain. Tait’s thorough overview finds a great many influential conservative intellectuals wrote favorably about Franco — not merely as a Cold War ally, but as a domestic bulwark against liberalism and secularism.

It’s not a matter of simply cherry-picking one or two editorials that didn’t age well. The conservative movement as a whole admired Franco’s regime and had no principled democratic objection to the methods he used to maintain power. It’s another piece of evidence that Donald Trump’s rise is more a reflection of the conservative movement’s takeover of the Republican Party than a repudiation of the movement’s allegedly democratic legacy.

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There’s a substantial and growing body of research over the last half-dozen years showing that public charter schools generate tremendous learning gains for urban students. Two interesting new studies came out this week that support and enhance this conclusion.

One national study of school systems by the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) finds that increasing charters to 10 percent of the district leads to a “2-4 percentage point increase in high school graduation rates, a 6 percentile increase in math scores, and 3 percentile increase in reading scores.” A Fordham Institute study of metropolitan finds:

1. On average, an increase in total charter school enrollment share is associated with a significant increase in the average math achievement of poor, Black, and Hispanic students, which is concentrated in larger metro areas.

2. On average, increases in Black and Hispanic charter school enrollment share are associated with sizable increases in the average math achievement of these student groups, especially in larger metro areas. 

3. On average, an increase in total charter school enrollment share is associated with a significant narrowing of a metro’s racial and socioeconomic math achievement gaps.

I’ve found that, when I mention the evidence of charter school success to liberals I know, they will immediately raise the objection that charters are merely skimming better students from traditional public schools. This objection has been resolved in many ways (most convincingly, I believe, in New Orleans, which converted its entire system to charters and yielded major gains).

But if you’re still not convinced, these two new studies both address the same objection in a different way. They look at larger systems – REACH examines school districts and Fordham looks at entire metropolitan areas. If charters were merely skimming off good students, then the overall systems would see little gain by charter growth – the system would merely be redistributing better students to charters. But instead, adding charters produces systemwide gains. Indeed, this evidence supports the hypothesis that competition from charters forces traditional public schools to improve.

(Obligatory caveat: My wife is a consultant for a nonprofit organization whose clients include both charters and traditional public-school systems. Her employer does not engage in advocacy and strives for neutrality and thus would strongly prefer I avoid writing about the subject at all. By covering this subject, I am undermining, not advancing, her professional interests.)

These effects are a big deal. Closing the achievement gap is hard. Public charter schools obviously don’t solve every social problem in the world, but they are a really powerful tool for advancing educational equity. We need to stop listening to fatalists who say public schools can’t do any better and use the tools we have to give underprivileged urban kids a real chance to develop their potential.

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Tucker Carlson’s pro-Russia rants give Republicans exactly what they deserve

Opinion | Tucker Carlson’s pro-Russia rants give Republicans exactly what they deserve

Fox News host Tucker Carlson. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

With Biden set to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, a striking new report from Axios captures the problem Carlson has created. Republicans are split between those who want to attack Biden as weak by demanding a more bellicose stance toward Russia as it masses for an invasion of Ukraine, and MAGA-friendly Republicans catering to Carlson’s pro-Russian stance.

This conflict, however, is being widely misrepresented as one pitting conventional GOP “hawks” versus Trumpist “isolationists.” Something more pernicious is going on: The Carlsonian stance is perhaps better understood as alignment with a kind of right-wing Internationale, a loose international alliance of authoritarian nationalists who despise liberal internationalist commitments.

Carlson has gone to extraordinary lengths to buttress Putin’s perspective on the brewing conflict. His depictions of Putin’s fears of NATO expansion into Ukraine are larded with great sympathy for Putin’s plight.

As Axios reports, this is driving a split among Republicans that has become an issue in GOP primaries:

GOP operatives working in 2022 primary races tell Axios they worry they’ll alienate their base if they push to commit American resources or troops to help Ukraine fight Russia.

Some very high profile 2022 GOP candidates are toeing this line. They include J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, who are running for Senate in Ohio and Arizona. And numerous House Republicans are adopting this line as well.

Incredibly, Carlson is a key reason for this. As Axios reports: “GOP offices have been fielding numerous calls from voters echoing arguments they heard on Carlson’s 8 p.m. ET show.”

While Carlson piously suggests he is driven by a desire to prevent U.S. lives from being wasted abroad, he has also suggested we should take Russia’s side. He has even attacked U.S. media figures for suggesting Ukraine is a U.S. ally whose territorial sovereignty should be defended.

What’s amusing about this situation — if “amusing” is the right word — is how Republicans are struggling mightily to get around the complications this creates.

Right now, the Biden administration is threatening sanctions to deter a Russian invasion and has rebuffed Putin’s demand for a veto on Ukraine joining NATO. But Biden has also hinted at diplomatic off-ramps by suggesting such a move by Ukraine is far off.

The problem for Republicans under Carson’s influence is they want to keep attacking the Democratic president’s posture as “weak.” But Carlson has complicated this by requiring them to oppose doing anything at all toward Russia in defense of Ukraine.

To solve this, those Republicans are seeking a new safe space. It entails hitting Biden as “weak” on Russia but without getting specific about what they think the United States should do toward Russia in Ukraine’s defense, since detailing that would attract Carlson’s ire.

Underscoring the absurdities here, one GOP aide candidly notes that GOP candidates are adopting that balance to keep Carlson happy, but without going “full Tucker.” Yet Carlson himself won’t allow this. He’s calling on GOP voters to punish GOP primary candidates who don’t fully toe his line:

“I really hope that Republican primary voters are ruthless about this,” Carlson told Axios, and vote out any Republican “who believes Ukraine’s borders are more important than our borders.”

In other words, to remain in Carlson’s good graces, Republicans must comprehensively abandon any defense of Ukraine toward Russia. But how can Republicans revert to their usual attack on the Democratic president as “weak” no matter what he does, if they must adopt the posture that the U.S. must do nothing at all?

Really, this couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer scoundrels.

The best way to understand this situation is provided by the progressive perspective on it. Capitol Hill progressives see certain positive elements in Carlson’s influence on Republicans, in particular the willingness to pump the brakes on the typical Washington rush into hawkishness and displays of “strength.”

But the progressive view is that Carlson’s positive influence ends there. Whatever Carlson’s genuine proclivities toward sparing U.S. lives and treasure in foreign conflicts, his unwillingness to defend Ukraine’s sovereign right to determine its own fate, and his apparent willingness to abandon Ukraine to Russian aggression, are rooted in far less admirable instincts.

“Tucker’s argument against escalation is essentially based on the idea that Ukrainian lives don’t matter,” Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), told me. By contrast, Duss notes, progressives “are wary of military escalation” but support using other “policy approaches and tools” because "Ukrainian lives do matter.”

Indeed, unlike Carlson, progressives believe defending Ukrainian sovereignty has immense stakes. As a Center for American Progress paper details, to uphold the liberal democratic order and to deter creeping strongman authoritarian nationalism, the U.S. should be prepared to deploy maximal soft-power leverage.

But this may be exactly why Carlson opposes defending Ukraine at all costs: He sees Putin as a kind of ally in that international cabal of right-wing nationalists. As Duss told me: “In the Carlson-MAGA worldview, Putin is an avatar of white Christian nationalism.”

So Carlson’s pull on the GOP base is far more pernicious than merely being a new “isolationism.” But regardless, in denying Republicans the space to reflexively blame the Democratic president for “weakness” without saying how they would handle an intensely complex geopolitical situation, it’s giving them exactly what they deserve.

The presidency has changed. Biden needs to adapt.

The presidency has changed. Biden needs to adapt.

Perry Bacon Jr. — Read time: 6 minutes

By Perry Bacon Jr.

Columnist

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Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EST

I wrote last week that Joe Biden’s approach to the presidency is outdated and ineffective. Now, I will offer an alternative path.

American presidents were once the leader of the whole country. Congress used to pass legislation on major issues across party lines. The federal judiciary used to be somewhat balanced in its rulings. Policies and budgets are by far the most important tool available to any politician. And in the old political world, the one where Biden spent most of his career, a president had a lot of power to direct the country through his policies and budgets — particularly one whose party controlled both houses of Congress.

We are so, so far from that old world.

Today, Republicans and conservative Democrats are blocking Biden’s agenda on Capitol Hill, GOP judges are stopping his major executive actions, and governors in red states are blunting any initiatives that haven’t already been stopped by Congress or the judiciary. Biden can still get some things done in traditional ways: He can, for example, appoint liberal judges, reach bipartisan agreements on incremental legislation, use the executive branch to advance some small-bore initiatives and help limit the spread of the coronavirus. Perhaps some version of the Build Back Better Act will eventually pass.

But a lot of the opportunities for a president to push forward his agenda are increasingly out of reach.

That said, I think the president has three big opportunities before him — and if he takes all three, he can reinvigorate his presidency.

First, Biden should take as many executive actions as he can. David Roberts, author of a newsletter on clean energy and politics called Volts, argued before Biden even took office that the president should “run a blitz.” “He should launch so many simultaneous reforms that there’s no time for right-wing media to make up lies about all of them or for the Supreme Court to hear them all,” Roberts wrote for Vox. It’s time for the blitz.

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Second, Biden should use his informal power aggressively. We live in a celebrity-driven media age in which everyone is constantly checking their phones and consuming new information. As president of the United States, Biden is a mega-celebrity who controls the biggest, most prestigious microphone in the world.

Biden has a great opportunity to articulate a compelling vision for 2022 America and push the country toward it. He can visit the headquarters of companies that pay their blue-collar workers a decent wage and offer parental and sick leave, encourage Americans to purchase products from these companies and urge other businesses to emulate them. He can implore others to adopt and support initiatives that are meaningfully improving Americans’ lives right now, such as the privately funded universal basic income program happening in the Atlanta area or the historically Black colleges that are forgiving the loans of some students.

counterpointA presidential president is present

He won’t be showing up with much new money or legislation — the traditional politicians’ tools. But Biden can provide rhetorical support to the kinds of changes that he wants to see in the United States. In turn, more people will hear about initiatives and projects that Biden talks about, and Democrats in particular are likely to donate and otherwise support causes blessed by the president.

One caveat: Biden cannot be his usual, “rah-rah, everything is great, let’s all come together” self in taking this approach. The media is more likely to cover conflict, and unfortunately, more Americans are more likely to tune in if there is tension. So Biden should seek out righteous fights. He should hold events with election administrators and school board members who have been threatened by Trumpian crazies for just doing their jobs. He should make an appearance with the Black authors who have had their books banned by state-level Republicans.

In particular, as Jeff Hauser and Max Moran of the Center for Economic and Policy Research argued recently in the journal Democracy, Biden should be “fighting against big corporate malefactors on behalf of the average American.” Biden should be constantly looking to shame companies into better behavior and to promote the work his administration is already doing to help workers and fight monopoly power.

Third, Biden should leverage his popularity and influence in blue America. In our hyper-polarized age, it’s hard for the president to get anyone from the other party to support him — but he remains popular among those who did vote for him. In many ways, Biden is the president of only blue America, but that’s more than half of American adults, 70 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product, the vast majority of its big cities, its most populous state (California) and virtually the entire industries of education, entertainment, Big Tech and philanthropy.

There are plenty of blue cities and states and businesses in those states that have lackluster sick-leave and parental-leave programs and limited child-care and prekindergarten options. So Biden and his team should concentrate on getting key planks of his agenda adopted at the city and state levels wherever they can. If Biden wants to take on problems such as Internet misinformation, gun violence and college affordability, he can have enormous influence just meeting with big-city mayors, university administrators and tech industry figures, almost all of whom likely support him.

I would love to see Biden spending less time talking to Republican senators and more time with people such as MacKenzie Scott, Melinda Gates, Ford Foundation head Darren Walker, LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey and others with money and influence who are likely to embrace causes that Biden points them toward. And he could be lifting up the work of innovative leaders including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who are taking on major problems such as racial inequality at the city level.

There is a precedent for the approach I’m describing: the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama was in a similar situation to Biden’s: He faced a Congress where his agenda was stalled, and GOP-appointed judges and governors in red states trying to blunt his every move. Those were not two years where Obama shaped the United States much through federal dollars or policy.

But he still articulated big ideas, such as free community college, and helped them gain traction in blue areas. He embraced the Black Lives Matter movement, reassuring White Democrats who were at first wary of it. He showed up for his supporters, most notably in his moving speech in 2015 in Charleston, S.C., after a white supremacist killed nine Black people at a church. He took on righteous conflicts. When several Republican presidential candidates were touting bigoted proposals to limit refugees from majority-Muslim countries from coming to the United States, Obama forcefully attacked them. And although he couldn’t get much of his agenda through Congress, Trump, too, also was fairly effective in using executive power, his megaphone and his influence in red states to push his goals.

Following this road map won’t necessarily save Biden’s presidency electorally. I’m not sure how he can boost his poll numbers or prevent Republicans from winning in 2022, because electoral outcomes are both complicated but also somewhat structural. (The party that doesn’t control the presidency pretty much always wins the midterms.) I want Biden to save his presidency for the good of the country, in particular for the people who voted for him. He should stand with them, defending their rights and doing whatever he can to improve their lives, instead of wasting more months courting Republicans, conservative Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and voters who are never going to support him.

Joe Biden probably can’t have the presidency of his dreams. But he can still have a presidency that helps a lot of Americans with their dreams.

Chuck Schumer should call the Baileys

Chuck Schumer should call the Baileys

Has primaryphobia led the majority leader astray?

Matthew Yglesias

I’m worried about Chuck Schumer. Not for him personally — I think he’s thriving. But I’m worried about his leadership of the Senate Democratic caucus, which I think has been unsound in a way that is pretty unexpected from one of the shrewdest operators in American politics.

And it’s not that I worry he’s lost his touch. I worry that he’s deploying his prodigious shrewdness to prop up his own personal political standing rather than on behalf of the caucus — guarding his left flank against a hypothetical primary challenge, and making sure that he does not personally get blamed by progressive groups for the inevitable disappointments of governing.

That’s smart on some level. He’s been remarkably successful at keeping those groups happy with him, even as they become increasingly agitated about the state of the world. But that’s a dysfunctional dynamic. The majority leader is supposed to carry weight on behalf of the caucus, not shift the blame to other people.

Personally, I really like Schumer and have been reluctant to write about this. One of my formative political memories was back in the late 90s when my dad, who was very left-wing all my life, told me he was backing Schumer in a primary over two more liberal rivals because he thought it was important to pick the most electable candidate to beat Al D’Amato and win the Senate seat. It was a very Slow Boring moment and encompasses a lot of the values that I believe in. A few years later, I worked as an intern in Schumer’s office, reporting to his then-communications director Bradley Tusk. I learned a lot from them, and a lot of my current ideas about politics are based on the wisdom Schumer tried to instill in his team.

But I think an obsession with heading off an AOC primary challenge has led him to abandon those insights. And the country really needs him to give the Baileys a call.

Schumer has successfully shifted the weight

Back on July 28, Joe Manchin outlined a series of red lines for Build Back Better in a memo that he signed. Schumer himself co-signed the letter, acknowledging to Manchin that he understood where the pivotal senator stood.

The letter is ambiguous on certain points, but includes a few missives that are very clear and seemingly relevant:

$1.5 trillion in new spending, with revenue above that dedicated to deficit reduction

Inclusion of a Manchin-authored opioid bill called the LifeBOAT Act

But having signed the letter, Schumer then kept it secret until Burgess Everett revealed its existence on September 30.

How hard would it be for Democrats to write a bill that conforms to all of Manchin’s stated red lines in that letter while also advancing critical progressive goals? I think not that hard. Here are the numbers we’ve run previously on a deficit-reducing version of BBB, essentially mashing up Kyrsten Sinema’s revenue-side red lines with Manchin’s spending-side red lines.

What does this get you? A lot. For $1.74 trillion you can:

Meet the Biden administration’s greenhouse gas emissions objectives.

Cut child poverty by about 20%.

Deliver two very popular items by capping insulin prices and helping the elderly with expanded Medicare coverage.

Safeguard the country against future pandemics.

Increase access to both preschool and Medicaid.

That would be a really good list of Joe Biden's achievements. So what’s the problem?

A bill like that would disappoint advocates who wanted a major investment in subsidized child care. It would disappoint advocates who wanted a paid leave act. And even though it would reduce child poverty, it would disappoint Child Tax Credit advocates because it shrinks the CTC to fit Manchin’s specifications.

In failing to put a bill like this on the table, Schumer did not actually achieve paid leave or a larger CTC or a big child care subsidy. But he also did not personally disappoint the advocates for those programs. Instead, he tossed the hot potato to the House of Representatives. Then the House wrote a bill that instead of cutting down to $1.5 trillion in spending by picking programs, used a lot of phase-out gimmicks to toss the hot potato to the Senate. Then Schumer tried to get the Senate to pass the House bill, even though it violated the terms of the memo that he himself had agreed to with Manchin.

If Schumer did what I think he should have done, then some progressive advocacy groups would be mad at Schumer. Schumer instead chose a course of action that got all the relevant advocacy groups mad at Manchin instead. And when this led to deadlock, instead of hammering something out with Manchin, he pivoted to a doomed voting rights push, which again had the effect of making people mad at Joe Manchin rather than Chuck Schumer.

An extraordinary squeeze play

Normally one of the perks of controlling a legislative body is that you get to set the agenda. In a normal legislature, that means you only bring bills to the floor for a vote when you have the votes and know that you will win. Due to the supermajority rule in the Senate, that’s not always the case. But still, there are basically two cases when it makes sense for the majority to bring an idea to the floor:

They want the bill to pass and they have the votes to pass it.

They want to focus media attention on a subject that unites their party while dividing and embarrassing the opposition party.

Schumer’s voting rights pivot achieved the opposite, driving media attention to an embarrassing intra-party division while placing zero pressure on any Republicans. Let me quote Friday’s Punchbowl newsletter on how extraordinary this was:

The New York Democrat, however, deliberately exposed Manchin and Sinema to a tidal wave of public recrimination over the filibuster vote. We’re not sure we’ve ever seen a party leader do that to their own colleagues. Democratic senators now are openly discussing primarying the two of them in 2024. Schumer isn’t tamping down that talk publicly. In fact, Schumer seemed to encourage it when he declined to weigh in on an intraparty challenge earlier this week. Schumer needs their votes the rest of this year. So how will that work out?

So what was the upside of this? To Democrats, nothing.

It hurt the party, and I think it (not surprisingly) angered Manchin, who is now saying his earlier offer is no longer necessarily on the table.

That’s a huge setback for poor children. It’s a huge setback for future generations who’d benefit from green energy and preschool. It’s a huge setback for all kinds of progressive causes. But, again, it has absolved Schumer of the personal culpability for picking and choosing among different programs and selling his choices to the caucus and to the party.

And make no mistake, the selling part would be tough. I think Patty Murray and Kirsten Gillibrand would be very upset if Schumer made a deal with Manchin that spent $1.5 trillion on new programs but $0 on paid leave or child care. I think Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow would be very upset if Schumer made a deal with Manchin that eliminated specific union-friendly proposals related to electric vehicles from the House bill.

But this is legislative leadership as it’s been traditionally defined. You, the leader, work something out that is acceptable to the people whose votes you most need. And then you squeeze the rank-and-file members with the (correct!) argument that from the Murray/Gillibrand/Peters/Stabenow perspective, this is much better than the status quo. And then Murray and Gillibrand and Peters and Stabenow tell their interest group allies that Schumer is an asshole who sold out their issues, but what can you do? The leader carries the weight. He absorbs the caucus majority’s anger rather than forcing the marginal members to absorb it. And then when that’s done, he absorbs the advocacy groups’ anger rather than forcing the caucus to absorb it. And then legislation passes and things get done.

Schumer has instead played a masterful game of evasion, where between a White House ask of $3.4 trillion in new spending and Manchin’s willingness to embrace $1.5 trillion in new spending, we are now looking at potentially compromising on $0 in new spending — and no voting rights bill, by the way — but with Manchin absorbing all the anger. What’s odd is that Schumer himself has long been one of the leading advocates of the (correct!) idea that Democrats self-sabotage by letting the hot-house atmosphere of the professional progressive movement and edgy urban leftists dictate party strategy.

Call the Baileys

In his 2007 book “Positively American,” published after he successfully spearheaded Democrats’ 2006 Senate campaign efforts, Schumer explained that he likes to run ideas about political tactics and strategies past his imaginary friends Joe and Eileen Bailey. They were a 45-year-old married couple living in Massapequa on Long Island earning $75,000 a year with three kids in the local public school system.

Progressives spent years bitterly mocking the idea, and certainly the “ask the Baileys” gut-check is both a bit cringe in concept and somewhat flawed in execution. But it also served the fundamentally valuable purpose of trying to get staffers to pull their heads out of the climate of progressive groupthink and recall some basic truths about the world. And Schumer, whatever else you might think of him, is historically really good at winning elections. In 2004, he ran 13 percentage points ahead of John Kerry’s margin in New York State. Six years later during the disastrous 2010 midterms, he still managed to run a bit ahead of the margin Barack Obama posted during his 2008 landslide. And in 2016, he ran 11 points ahead of Hillary Clinton.

And the Baileys weren’t just a conceit in the book. As Eric Schultz, Schumer’s former spokesman, recalled to the Washington Post back when he worked in Schumerland, “he was always asking ‘what would the O’Reillys think.’” And, indeed, Schumer is so attentive to the demands of marketing that when he took over the DSCC, the O’Reillys became the Baileys to clarify that he wasn’t talking about a niche ethnic audience.

I think the right way to think about the Baileys exercise is in the same spirit as my Post-It note proposal (and again, the similarity is not a coincidence — my only job in practical politics was working for Schumer).

I’ll just quote myself:

So much in politics is uncertain or difficult that I think even professionals tend to underrate the upside to doing things that are obvious and easy.

Back in 1992, James Carville supposedly hung a sign in Clinton campaign headquarters that said, “it’s the economy, stupid.” By the same token, Democrats today could improve their performance enormously if every staffer’s computer monitor had a Post-It stuck to it that said “the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb.”

The Baileys were 45 in the book, but that was 2007. They’d be 59 or 60 today. And in 2020 dollars they’d be earning about $100k rather than $75k.

So it’s roughly the same idea. The only technical flaw in the construction of the Baileys is that Schumer wants them to be swing voters (he says they voted for Clinton twice, then Bush twice) but he also wants them to be New Yorkers, so they live in Massapequa, and that actually makes them to the right of the typical resident of Nassau County. For national political purposes, they should really live in the suburbs of a smaller midwestern city like Grand Rapids or Madison.

What would the Baileys think?

For various reasons, I like the implementation details of my Post-It proposal better than Schumer’s “what would the Baileys think.” But they both provide a valuable function, which is to try to get Democratic staffers out of their highly localized pocket of conventional wisdom.

In demographic terms, Democratic staffers are all younger-than-average college-educated residents of big cities who mostly socialize with other younger-than-average college-educated residents of big cities. In those particular social circles, it’s taken for granted that transforming the United States into a European-style welfare state would be desirable, and the big question about the Democratic Party is whether it’s too full of lame sellouts. And Schumer’s point is that out in Massapequa, there’s actually a great deal of status quo bias, and the big question about the Democratic Party is whether it’s going to raise your taxes or be excessively indulgent of counter-cultural radicals.

The Baileys, critically, are unfashionable and uncool. Even though they’re only 30 minutes from Manhattan, “they don’t go into town very often.” They’re also deeply conventional people. Joe’s hobby is golf. Eileen likes to shop. They are unironically patriotic and get mad about flag burning. What’s more, while they are not bad people (Schumer says they donated money to Hurricane Katrina victims), they’re also kind of selfish — or as he puts it, “not driven by communal goals over self-interest. To them, there is nothing wrong with seeking what is good for yourself and your family.”

So what would the Baileys think about Build Back Better?

I think they’d think it’s … fine.

The revenue comes from rich people, which is good.

It does something about climate change but doesn’t seem like it would make the Baileys change their lives in any particular way, which is good.

They’re glad their one friend with diabetes might get some help with his insulin, and while they’re not on Medicare yet and don’t need hearing aids, the Baileys are realists and see some upside for them here.

All this other stuff doesn’t help them because their kids are too old by now, but maybe there’ll be grandkids soon and I guess preschool sounds like a good idea.

That said, the Baileys aren’t marching in the streets for this. And where the Baileys come from, one trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money, and the idea that Democrats are saying it’s maybe not enough money sounds odd. If the package got smaller, that would be perfectly reasonable. And they’re not super excited about any of these elements, so you could really ditch anything and they’d be fine.

The Baileys also think this Jim Crow 2.0 stuff is awfully weird.

Twitter avatar for @SenSchumer

Is curtailing early voting access really the same as Jim Crow? Is same-day registration really necessary to preserve American democracy? For most of their lives New York hasn’t had this, and it seems fine. Democrats seem to be saying that what the Republicans want to do will be bad for Black people. And while the Baileys would not vote for a guy wearing a white hood and burning a cross, they are also not Black — they want to vote for politicians who seem fired-up about helping middle-class white suburbanites.

Mostly, the Baileys are glad that Trump is gone, frustrated that Biden did not succeed in crushing the virus, and feel like they got a bit bait-and-switched. They heard a lot during the primary about how progressives didn’t like Joe Biden and thought he wasn’t going to be ambitious enough, but now Democrats actually seem very ambitious — I guess that’s how politics is. They figure they’ll probably vote Republican in November to bring some balance to things.

Why did Schumer change his mind?

Back in April, Ezra Klein interviewed Schumer, and in their discussion about the Baileys, Schumer laid the groundwork for his current conduct as Majority Leader.

He makes two key arguments — one is a kind of economic anxiety explanation of Trump voters. He says Joe and Eileen voted for Trump in 2016, while in 2020 Joe voted for him again but Eileen voted for Biden.1 And Schumer doesn’t say they did it because they agreed with Trump about immigration or because they thought Democrats’ post-Ferguson embrace of police reform was risky.

It’s all about economics:

And that is why they were willing to try a Donald Trump. They had thought that government had failed them and not done — now what has changed? Well, in 2000 they were much less worried about their kids future, paying for college, what kind of job they’d have, what kind of profession they would go into. In 2000, they were much less worried about their parents who weren’t that old and how they were going to take care of them.

In 2000, they were less worried about their own job security. The world is changing so fast that they’ve seen lots of their friends laid off, medical office closed, insurance company not doing that well, or there’s a new line of insurance. The sunny American optimism, which the average person has had for centuries in America, was fading. And that is the reason.

I mean, I asked myself the question, it was a seminal moment for me, why did the Baileys vote for Donald Trump in 2016? Why did so many Americans vote for Donald Trump in 2016 and even still in 2020? And my answer was sort of simple. And that was that they lost faith that the path that had always been laid forward was there any more.

Schumer makes his second argument when he explains how he felt when he realized that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had won:

And it hit me hard, how the deep responsibility is on the shoulders of our Democratic majority, however slim. And we had three imperatives, one was substantive, dealing with income, dealing with climate, dealing with college, dealing with jobs, dealing with the future, and make it OK. The second was a political imperative, so many people said, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who I vote for.

We had the opportunity to show people that when they voted for us it would make a difference, that we would do the things we promised, most notably checks, vaccines in the arm, opening up schools, opening up businesses. But the third was almost moral, and I felt that, if we didn’t produce the kind of bold progressive change that would turn that pessimism we talked about, that sourness in the land, back to some hope — no one expected us to snap our fingers and make it all better at once, but they expected a real path — that we could either re-elect Donald Trump in 2024 or someone worse, a dictator, somebody who would just manipulate people because they didn’t have some hope for the future.

This, I think, is exactly the line of thinking that the Baileys are supposed to block.

Schumer is describing an agenda to impress his daughter’s friends from college — people who probably voted for Warren in the primary and think her dad is a boring old hack. But did the Baileys really turn to Trump because of a lack of bold progressive change?

Schumer, writing about the Baileys in 2007 before Colin Kaepernick’s famous protests, specifically called out Joe’s reverence for the national anthem ritual as a distinguishing characteristic and discussed their reverence for authority:

Socially, the Baileys are not anti-authority; in fact, they respect authority. They attend church regularly, though not every week. They accept the structure brought to their lives by religion, work, and governmental institutions. They want these structures to be successful and strong, and are leery of those who seem to always criticize them.

To me, these sound like people who voted for Trump because of his law-and-order politics, then flipped in 2020 because the chaos and incompetence was too much, and they thought Biden would be a steady hand. They’re not necessarily against the progressive change in Biden’s platform, but their doubt about Biden is that he might empower the kind of people who spent the summer of 2020 doing apologetics for rioters, not that he won’t deliver big structural change. In the short term, they care a lot about inflation and would like to see Biden bring it down. They’re not idiots and they realize there may not be that much that he can do here, but if he were to impress them by doing something, that would be the thing for him to do.

Schumer’s new problem

The basic arguments Schumer made to Klein don’t align with a political science understanding of who Obama-Trump voters or Trump-Biden voters are or what motivates them. It also doesn’t align with his own prior portrayal of the Baileys, what they care about, and what leads them to vacillate between the parties. In fact, his portrait of the Baileys is an extremely prescient portrayal of the kind of person who Trump could win over.

And I frankly don’t believe that Schumer would have such a weak grasp of politics as to genuinely believe that the key to Democratic victory in 2024 is to deliver on a progressive interest group wishlist. Schumer is too good at politics for that. When you see a brilliant political thinker saying stuff that doesn’t make sense, you’ve got to figure that something else is going on.

Here are some headlines:

“Does Chuck Schumer Have an AOC Problem?” [Atlantic, 1/18/2020]

“Schumer quietly nails down the left amid AOC primary chatter” [Politico, 2/1/2021]

“Chuck Schumer Appears to Be Scared of a Primary Challenge From the Left (Good!)” [Jezebel, 2/8/21]

For a long time, I discounted the idea that Schumer could be genuinely worried about this. We saw Andrew Cuomo (pre-scandals) easily beat back a progressive primary challenger in 2018 and Eric Adams prevail in a primary in New York City this past fall. In what possible universe is Schumer losing a primary to AOC? A lot of people on Capitol Hill and in the Schumerland Extended Universe say he has this primary worry, but it just didn’t make much sense.

That being said, as unlikely as it is that he could lose a primary by angering the left, it seems even more unlikely that he would lose to a Republican. So arguably, the correct thing for a really astute political mastermind to do is ignore his own insights about how to appeal to the median voter and focus his energy on shoring up his left flank. It’s just a bad choice for America.

As a longtime Schumer admirer, I don’t want to believe that this is what’s going on. But I do think it fits the facts, and I don’t like it.

I hope I’m wrong, though, and instead Schumer really was just taken over by a fit of progressive enthusiasm after the dramatic events of January 2021. But if that’s right, then the best thing for him, for his caucus, for the Biden administration, and for the country would be to get back in touch with the Baileys — and spread the gospel of Baileyism among all the staffers on Capitol Hill — and try to bring things back down to Earth. Joe Manchin is not going to make all progressives’ dreams come true. But he might make some dreams come true. To get there, though, we’d need a caucus leader who’s willing to make the deal and be the half-a-loaf guy who people get mad at.

Harry Reid, representing a reddish state, had much tougher home state politics than Schumer’s worst nightmares. But he always did a good job of managing those issues on his own time and making the right choices for the caucus. Schumer, it seems to me, is not really doing the job in a responsible way.

The worst of omicron might have passed. But the pandemic isn’t over.

The worst of omicron might have passed. But the pandemic isn’t over.

Ashish K. Jha — Read time: 4 minutes

By Ashish K. Jha

Today at 4:36 p.m. EST

Cars wait in line at a drive-through coronavirus testing site at Churchill Downs in Louisville on Jan. 10. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

Ashish K. Jha is dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

The United States has likely passed the peak of its omicron wave. Case numbers are declining in our country’s most populous states and, if they follow the trajectory of decline seen in South Africa and Britain, we could return to a much more manageable rate of infections within a month.

These upcoming months will feel like a reprieve, and rightly so. Restrictions likely will be eased as we go back to a new sense of “normal.” But we also must remain prepared for what’s ahead — because there is little reason to believe that the pandemic is over.

What is ahead? First, it is possible, though unlikely, that the delta variant returns and co-circulates with omicron in different populations, contributing to ongoing infections and hospitalizations. Whether delta makes a comeback or not, cases are likely to remain seasonal. That means we are likely to see surges in Southern states this summer (as people there spend more time indoors) and in Northern states next fall and winter as the weather turns cold again. Further, we could easily see the rise of a new variant that might be more contagious or deadly.

The bottom line is that as the omicron surge subsides, we will enter a period of uncertainty, with low levels of infections but hard-to-predict surges, either from the current variants or new future variants. As such, we must use the months ahead to prepare.

First, tens of millions of Americans, including a majority of children, remain unvaccinated, and even more have not received a much-needed booster. Efforts to reach the un- and under-vaccinated must continue. Beyond that, we need an Operation Warp Speed 2.0 to aggressively study new variant-specific vaccines as well as intranasal vaccines that stimulate mucosal immunity, key for preventing infections and pan-coronavirus vaccines. We don’t know which of these will work, but we must make the investment to study and build them.

Second, testing is key to being prepared. Last year, as infections fell, testing production waned and eventually dried up. When more testing was urgently needed during the most recent surge, capacity had to ramp up almost from scratch. We can’t make that mistake again. We must ensure that we have a large national stockpile of in-home rapid tests, and we should continue to ramp up production of raw materials, including reagents. These efforts must also anticipate a transition toward broad tests capable of detecting not only the coronavirus but also other common respiratory ailments to help our health system triage different infections.

Third, new therapeutics from Pfizer and Merck, along with monoclonal antibodies and other intravenous antivirals, must be a cornerstone of managing infections during future surges. These treatments can substantially reduce the severity of infections, but while each of these therapies has demonstrated efficacy, we don’t have the doses we need, and the doses we do have are not being distributed equitably.

By the time the next variant arrives, all Americans should have access to antiviral treatments immediately after testing positive. We must have enough doses on hand, access to rapid tests (because these therapies must begin soon after symptoms emerge) and clear clinical pathways to ensure any American can access them. Their potential to substantially blunt the next wave justifies significant investments in effective protocols and stockpiles, including making treatments free to people who test positive.

Finally, there is the issue of communication. This pandemic has polarized our nation, with much of the United States splintering into two camps: those who believe the pandemic is over, and those who believe we will be in this pandemic forever. Unfortunately, the virus will continue to challenge us for some time, but it need not dominate our lives. We need to clearly communicate the moment we are in, the actions people should take during periods of low infection and the temporary measures we might need during future surges (mask-wearing, testing, etc.). The lack of clear communication has meant that at every point in the pandemic so far, we were either over- or underreacting, and both have costs. Our leaders must do a better job of communicating where we are, what is to come and how best to prepare.

Attention to these crucial areas will ensure that Americans need never return to the protracted disruptions of school, work and public life. It will also allow us to begin the long task of building a new, healthier normal, even as we continue to manage the virus. And we should help Americans understand that the worst of the pandemic is behind us and that we have the tools to manage future surges, no matter what Mother Nature sends our way.

Pro-lifers, RIP. The pro-death movement is born.

Pro-lifers, RIP. The pro-death movement is born.

Dana Milbank — Read time: 4 minutes

By Dana Milbank

Today at 7:53 p.m. EST

Columnist |

The weekend began with the March for Life. It ended with a march for death.

Anti-vaccine activists decided to piggyback on Friday’s annual antiabortion march in the capital by having a “Defeat the Mandates” rally on Sunday. Combined, the two groups of (mostly) conservative activists engaged in a demonstration of mass inconsistency.

Friday’s crowd invoked the mantra of the pro-life movement: “A child, not a choice.” Sunday’s proclaimed the mantra of the abortion rights movement to oppose vaccines: “My body, my choice.”

Friday’s crowd endorsed the most obtrusive of big-government mandates, laws telling women they can’t make their own reproductive decisions. Sunday’s argued that health decisions must be made by patient and doctor, not government.

Friday’s crowd pleaded for the lives of the most vulnerable. Sunday’s demanded the right to infect the most vulnerable by eschewing vaccines and masks in shared spaces.

It was enough to make one wonder: Does taking ivermectin cause people to lose their sense of irony?

The crowds weren’t the same but, collectively, the two rallies captured the hypocrisy of the right at this moment: Protect the unborn, but feel free to infect — and perhaps kill — innocent people already born, including, er, pregnant women. And yet both movements claim to be operating under the authority of “God’s mandate” and “God’s law,” as the anti-vaccine speakers repeatedly put it. God works in mysterious ways, indeed.

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In a rare moment of self-awareness at the anti-vaccine rally, JP Sears, the event’s emcee, quipped that because of his belief in natural immunity to the coronavirus, “I kind of feel like a flat-Earther.”

In a sense, the dual events showed the changing nature of the political right. The March for Life, in its 49th year, is where the right has been; the march for death shows where it is going. The former, held potentially on the cusp of the long-sought overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, was a joyful assembly; the latter was paranoid and rage-filled.

The well-curated March for Life program avoided harsh language about “baby killers” in favor of calls for compassion. “Every life is worthy of our prayer and our protection, whether in the womb or in the world,” the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Elpidophoros said before his opening prayer. “We can and we must make the case for life both born and unborn, by our example of unconditional love. … We march with compassion, we march with empathy, with love, with our arms extended to embrace all.”

Unconditional love? Embrace all? The angry speakers at the march for death didn’t sign up for that. They railed against medical boards, peer-reviewed journals, vaccine and antiviral manufacturers, expertise of any kind. They declaimed enemies seen and unseen trying to deny them their freedom.

“There are powerful forces against us,” Richard Urso, an ophthalmologist, warned the crowd. “Does anybody trust the news media?”

“Anybody trust the CDC and FDA?”

Pierre Kory, a doctor who promotes the horse dewormer ivermectin for covid-19, added that the sinister “they” are also “killing us with censorship and propaganda” and “manipulating the minds of millions.” Dr. Kory’s prescription: “We must live free or we will die.”

The speakers took turns releasing medical disinformation.

One suggested breathing exercises to combat covid-19. Another repeated false claims that vaccines cause autism.

“The vaccines are killing 15 people for every person it might save,” proclaimed entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, contrary to the facts. “We will kill 100 kids for every child we might save.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. misinformed the crowd that “if you take the vaccine, you have a 21 percent increased chance of dying over the next six months.”

The conservative activists made common cause not just with the liberal Kennedy gadfly but with the Nation of Islam and one of the outspoken antisemites in its leadership, Rizza Islam. “You used the Black community yet again to push poison,” he said of those who promoted the lifesaving vaccines. “You pimped the Black community and played everyone else.”

Islam passed on Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s vaccine view, too: “If you attempt to force this on us, we will take this as a declaration of war.”

Anti-vaccine leader Del Bigtree rounded out the proceedings by calling for Nuremberg trials for crimes against humanity. “Mark my words: We will hold Tony Fauci accountable, we will hold Deborah Birx accountable, we will hold Joe Biden accountable, but unlike the Nuremberg trials … we are going to come after the press.”

So this new incarnation of the right, after it’s done exercising its absolute right to spread illness and death, will prosecute — and execute — scientists, political opponents and journalists?

Pro-lifers, RIP. The pro-death movement is born.

On STEM, give Biden credit for his efforts to repair the national reputation that Trump trashed

On STEM, give Biden credit for his efforts to repair the national reputation that Trump trashed

By Catherine Rampell

Columnist

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Today at 6:50 p.m. EST

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As president, Donald Trump trashed this country’s reputation as a desirable destination for the world’s science, tech and entrepreneurial talent. President Biden deserves credit for his recent attempts to repair it.

In the absence of more sweeping immigration reform, which Congress has been unable to enact for decades, Biden’s actions are critical. At least if we hope to again make our country a welcoming place for high-value talent.

Trump adopted many awful immigration policies that undermined U.S. moral standing and geopolitical interests. Family separations, Muslim bans and sundry human rights abuses got a lot of attention. But the Trump-era immigration choices that likely did the most to undermine our long-term economic interests were probably more obscure.

These generally involved making life hell — or at least purgatory — for the foreign-born scientists, scholars, engineers and entrepreneurs trying to contribute to the U.S. economy.

For example: There was the Nobel laureate denied a “genius” green card on the grounds that the applicant hadn’t sufficiently proven any exceptional ability; and the harassment of skilled immigrants through demands for expensive and duplicative paperwork, and then capricious executive orders that trapped their spouses and children abroad. There was the slowing of visa and work-permit processing, which injected greater uncertainty and cost into the hiring process for both immigrant workers and their would-be employers.

The number of international students enrolled at U.S. colleges had been rising steadily for more than a decade before Trump took office. But between the academic years 2015-2016 and 2019-2020 — i.e., more or less right before the coronavirus pandemic severely ratcheted down college enrollments — enrollment of international students in the United States fell about 5 percent.

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Other countries saw the opportunity we were leaving on the table — and seized it: In Australia, over roughly the same period, international student enrollment rose by 50 percent. In Canada, by 70 percent.

Canada has also worked hard to make its visa process for skilled immigrants exceptionally smooth and fast, with many temporary visa applications for high-skilled foreign professionals approved within two weeks. A comparable applicant to the United States can wait months to be approved — if they’re lucky enough to win the lottery that allows their application to even be considered.

Our main high-skilled worker visa program is capped (and oversubscribed); Canada’s isn’t.

Other countries have tried hard to lure these immigrants to their shores because international talent has been key to America’s enduring leadership in science, tech and business.

Immigrant researchers and entrepreneurs have historically made outsize contributions to the U.S. economy and innovation. (Our national defense, too, if you consider, say, the Manhattan Project.) Since 2000, immigrants have been awarded 40 of the 104 Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. A fifth of current Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants. Highly skilled foreign-born workers create more job opportunities for Americans.

And international students disproportionately study the STEM fields that U.S. employers demand — and that U.S.-born students are less willing to take up.

The Biden administration knows all this. And it knows that our convoluted immigration system — dysfunctional even before the Trumpers got ahold of it — must improve if we’re to win back this talent. Especially if we hope to compete with China, which has been churning out STEM graduates.

So, last week, the White House announced some initial steps to make it easier for STEM-trained immigrants to come to or stay in the United States.

Some were basic “housekeeping”-type changes, such as updating the list of academic disciplines that count as STEM; students who come to the United States for bachelor’s or graduate degrees in these fields are eligible to work here longer after graduation. Graduates in 22 fields that should have been on the STEM list long ago — such as data science or environmental geosciences — will be eligible for this extra work and training period.

Another new policy aims to encourage more private-sector businesses to hire STEM researchers as exchange visitors, through a program that historically has been used mostly by universities and nonprofits.

The administration also clarified criteria for “extraordinary ability” visas in science and other fields. Previously, eligibility for these so-called genius visas had been somewhat murky — for applicants and government adjudicators alike — and so relatively few people bothered submitting applications.

Establishing more transparent, objective and predictable criteria should encourage more qualified immigrants to seek these legal pathways to entry. “We think there’s a lot more eligible people out there than are applying,” an administration official said.

Biden is extending his hand to the students and workers that other economies have been furiously recruiting. The question is whether those coveted emigres — insulted, abused and jerked around by the U.S. government in recent years — are willing to accept it.

Behind the latest GOP restrictions on race teaching: A hidden, toxic goal

Behind the latest GOP restrictions on race teaching: A hidden, toxic goal

Greg Sargent — Read time: 4 minutes

By Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 10:52 a.m. EST

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Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election persuaded Republicans that there’s political gold in attacking teachers for supposedly indoctrinating the nation’s children about race. So in GOP-controlled state legislatures, efforts to place new restrictions on teachers are accelerating.

But behind these efforts lie specific trends that could prove particularly toxic. The risk: They may make teachers believe they are on such thin ice that they end up whitewashing the U.S. past rather than dare to communicate hard truths about it.

That’s the key takeaway from a new report from PEN America on the latest batch of restrictions moving forward in GOP legislatures. The report shows that these efforts are expanding and getting more pedagogically pernicious in their goals.

The report’s top-line finding: Dozens of proposals have already been introduced this month to limit how our nation’s racial past and present are taught. That’s striking enough, but what’s underneath these efforts also matters.

There are three important features of these efforts, the report finds. The first is sloppy drafting: Many leave terminology vaguely defined, such as the idea that certain “concepts” are in some vague sense off limits. The second: Many explicitly target teachers’ speech and require direct punishment of speech that’s deemed a violation.

The third: Many come with a “private right of action,” allowing parents and citizens to seek to levy their own punishments against teachers, such as suing them in court. Put all this together, and the aim seems to go beyond the traditional exercise of state authority to set curriculums.

Instead, this seems to treat teachers as subversive internal threats who must be zealously rooted out at any deviation from orthodoxy. The vague drafting of prohibited concepts, combined with threats of action and/or punishment, seem structured to make educators feel constantly at risk, chilling the range of discussion.

“This is about putting the fear of God into teachers and administrators,” Jeffrey Sachs, the political scientist who authored the new report, told me. “Teachers are going to avoid discussing certain topics altogether — topics related to race, sex and American history that as a society we might want to discuss.”

For example, the report cites a proposal in the Indiana legislature that would prohibit use of any materials that “include” concepts such as the notion that the United States was “founded” as a “racist nation” or that it is “irredeemably” racist.

During an Indiana state Senate committee hearing on Jan. 5, Republican Sen. Scott Baldwin said impartiality is necessary when teaching about Nazism and fascism. (Indiana General Assembly)

Another Indiana proposal would bar teachers from using materials that “include” what it describes as “anti-American ideologies.” The report notes that the bill text doesn’t describe what these might be.

“A parent could complain that a teacher’s lecture about the Jim Crow era or about the persistence of racism and sexism in American life constitute anti-American ideology, and must be punished with the full force of the law,” Sachs told me.

Something like this already happened. Tennessee parents objected to the teaching of a book that portrayed the Jim Crow era in blunt and graphic terms, insisting it would make kids “hate their country.” Tennessee law prohibits teaching “concepts” that might make someone feel “discomfort” due to their race.

A ban on teaching a supposed “anti-American ideology” could open up more such objections, Sachs told me. This label, he said, might be applied to anything a teacher says that betrays someone’s “personal idea of what constitutes the nation and its values.”

All this points to a deeper question. Let’s say you accept objections to the idea that the U.S. founding was inherently white-supremacist or that our national experiment is irredeemably doomed to fall short of our founding values. Even so, why should teachers fear raising such concepts in classrooms, if only as ideas that have been debated throughout U.S. history and still are?

Some of these laws ban the “concept” that the United States is “irredeemably racist or sexist,” and some ban the idea that slavery and racism represent anything more than full-scale betrayals of our “authentic” founding. Proponents sometimes cite Martin Luther King Jr.’s belief in the ultimate promise of America’s founding in justifying this.

But things are not this simple. King described Whites as “the oppressor” and Blacks as “the oppressed.” He said “we must not consider it unpatriotic” to ask whether the U.S. needs a “radical restructuring” precisely because its current trajectory may not ultimately realize its founding principles.

“King said he hoped America could live up to its stated ideals, but nevertheless he wrestled with whether that was possible,” historian Kevin Kruse tells me.

Yolanda Renee King, 13, on Jan. 17 called on young people to fight for an end to the filibuster in order to pass voting rights legislation in the Senate. (The Washington Post)

As Sam Adler-Bell explains in an important essay on these laws, one of their goals is to place that very inquiry by King — whether that was possible, whether that is possible — beyond the reach of pedagogy, to remove it from the agenda entirely.

Similarly, some abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, believed white supremacy undergirded the Constitution itself. Irredeemably so, in fact.

The question is whether teachers may fear that offering materials that treat these questions as up for debate is itself too risky, Kruse noted. But don’t we want kids to learn that these questions really were seen as up for debate by great historical figures?

“We shouldn't shy away from this more complicated, more accurate picture,” Kruse told me. “Democracy is an ongoing project, and we should all be wrestling with whether our actions live up to our ideals.”

Judging by the way some of these laws and proposals are drafted, however, this seems to be exactly what they’re designed to discourage.