Personally, I Prefer Having Fewer Nazis on Twitter / Jordan Weissmann

Personally, I Prefer Having Fewer Nazis on Twitter

Jordan Weissmann — Read time: 8 minutes

Skip to the content

Future Tense

Personally, I Prefer Having Fewer Nazis on Twitter

A downtown building with a sign that says @twitter

Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Like pretty much any journalist who compulsively wastes too much of their life on Twitter, I’ve had my fair share of unpleasant experiences with the site. In part, that’s because I’m Jewish, and I occasionally find my mentions flooded by antisemitic trolls who think it’s the height of wit to throw an echo around my name—as in “we see you (((weissmann)))”—in response to some tweet they don’t like. It’s a hazard of the site that you learn to live with.

Thankfully, Twitter’s Nazi problem has felt a little less severe in recent years. Back during the 2016 election, when Donald Trump’s first run for the White House helped turn social media into a white supremacist jamboree, having some anonymous groyper tell me to jump in an oven was just another day at the office. These days, something I say really has to go viral and reach a large swath of right-wing accounts before the bigoted shitposters start to show up in numbers.

Suffice it to say, I’m feeling a little bit apprehensive about what exactly Elon Musk plans to do with Twitter, assuming he actually closes his deal to buy the company. The Tesla and Space X founder describes himself a free speech “absolutist” and has regularly criticized the site’s content moderation practices for supposedly trampling on discourse. There’s now a widespread assumption he’ll try to loosen those policies.

“I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” he recently tweeted. “If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.” In practice, that would mean allowing all sorts of hate speech and grisly, violent material Twitter currently bans, a prospect that seems to be exciting the hard right. A number of banned neo-Nazis tried to set up new accounts shortly after the news of Musk’s deal broke, though they were quickly kicked off.

How much could Musk undo? Quite a bit. In its early days, Twitter had an anything-goes attitude toward content moderation. But, spurred on by the harassment campaign unleashed by Gamergate and the toxicity of the 2016 election, it began to take a more proactive approach on issues like harassment, hate speech, and misinformation, using a combination of more stringent policies and new platform features that helped make it a leader in the industry.

Some examples: It got more aggressive about banning accounts and booted hard-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones well before competitors like Facebook. It partnered with academics to try and measure the health of conversations on the platform, rolled out safety features to prevent harassment, and put in place policies to combat transphobia, such as banning “deadnaming.” In 2020, it expanded its policy against hateful conduct to bar “language that dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity and national origin” and permanently banned former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. It started labeling misinformation and has also worked to limit lies about COVID, barring Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account for flouting those policies. And of course, it famously dumped Donald Trump from the platform.

It’s hard to say objectively how much of a difference these steps have made to daily life on the platform. But experts in the field say the changes have made a serious difference. Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told me she’s seen a major drop in the number of hate groups operating on the platform. “There are far, far, far fewer of them on Twitter today than there were before,” she said. ”And I think those who have stayed on have been inhibited from saying more extreme things.”

Twitter’s regular transparency reports, which document its rules enforcement actions, also show the company has gotten more aggressive policing hate speech. In the first half of 2021, it removed more than 1.6 million pieces of content for violating its hateful conduct policies, almost 2.5 times as much as it removed in the first six months of 2018—which is a bigger jump than you’d expect just based on its overall user growth. It’s removing 18 times more material for violating its policies regarding “sensitive media,” a category that includes extreme violence and sexually explicit material, but also hate symbols such as swastikas. The company is also suspending accounts more frequently.

Chart showing increase in Twitter enforcement actions from 2018 to 2021

Jordan Weissmann/Slate

“Twitter today is different from 2016,” Adam Conner, vice president for technology policy at the Center for American Progress, put it to me. “I am not going to stand here and tell you that Twitter is a perfect place, but it is better than it was.”

If Musk actually applied a First Amendment standard to Twitter’s content moderation, the vast majority of this material would stay up. Under the Constitution, Americans are essentially allowed to indulge in all the hate speech they like, and can advocate violence as long as it doesn’t cross the line into direct threats against individuals or incitement to immediate action. (So you can talk about how great you think it is to burn churches and synagogues, as long as you don’t tell a crowd to go burn down a Black church or synagogue down the street.) “I would say the vast majority of the speech that is currently banned [on Twitter] could not be banned under the First Amendment,” Catherine Ross, a law professor at George Washington University who studies free speech issues, told me.

With that said, it is difficult to imagine that Musk would actually try to apply a First Amendment standard to Twitter’s content moderation. For starters, it would turn the platform into a cesspool that would alienate a lot of users and scare away advertisers. Aside from letting the racists run wild, it’d mean letting people advocate terrorism, share graphically violent content like videos of beheadings, and even trade digitally fabricated child pornography, all of which count as protected speech under the Constitution.

Second, it would be wildly impractical. Laws about hate speech vary by country, and the majority of Twitter’s users reside outside of the United States. A European Union official has already warned that Musk will have to follow the EU’s new Digital Services Act, which fines companies up to 6 percent of annual sales per violation if it fails to police hate speech and harassment. He’ll also have to deal with the U.K.’s own online safety laws. Unless Musk wants to impose a different set of rules for every nation, his hands are somewhat tied.

Finally, he’s hinted here and there that he doesn’t particularly want to make Twitter an alt-right paradise again. Musk has complained about specific policy decisions by Twitter he saw as discriminating against conservatives, such as how it handled the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and was angered by the site’s decision to suspend the conservative satire site the Babylon Bee for violating its policies against anti-trans harassment. But in a tweet responding to conservative media mogul Ben Shapiro, he said: “I should be clear that the right will probably be a little unhappy too. My goal is to maximize area under the curve of total human happiness, which means the ~80% of people in the middle.”

The point, however, is that there is plenty of room for Twitter to backslide and return to being a much less pleasant place to have a conversation. As one of its deeply addled regular users, I’d find that pretty unfortunate. Personally, I prefer the place with fewer Nazis around.

Reading Is Fundamental

Reading Is Fundamental

By Jonathan Chait, &c.

April 29, 2022.

 

There is a certain strand of conservative who loathes Donald Trump and even considers him a menace to democracy — but also believes the problem is entirely one of personality and temperament. Trump is personally unfit for the role, and, to the extent that other Republicans who support him are implicated, it is evidence that they are personally gutless and weak.

I have been making an alternate case since 2016. Yes, Trump is an outlier in his admiration for dictators and willingness to lie and cheat. But he reflects a broader ideological evolution within his party. The history of the conservative movement is replete with forthright arguments against democracy — which the American right has always seen as a threat, because it enables the majority to threaten the property of the wealthy minority through regulation and redistribution.

This theory explains, among other things, why so many Republicans have ultimately chosen to support Trump over his Democratic opponents. They are not all cowards. Rather, they think, whatever his shortcomings, Trump poses a less severe threat to freedom and liberty, because he endorses lax regulation and low taxes on the rich.

The conservatives who treat Trump’s unfitness as entirely personal obviously don’t agree with this analysis. In general, I’ve found that they don’t take it seriously. They have a mental model that begins and ends with the idea that the problem is one of temperament. To the extent that they have come into contact with any broader critique of right-wing authoritarianism, they dismiss it as obvious bad faith. How can we take liberal complaints about Trump seriously, they wonder, if they make similar complaints about other Republicans?

This was the response some of the National Review crowd has given to my critique of Ron DeSantis’s extremism — the mere fact that I would make this charge at all against a non-Trump Republican exposed my complaints about Trump.

Dan McLaughlin.

Who had January 14, 2022, in the inevitable first Jonathan Chait column on how DeSantis is worse than Trump pool? Collect your winnings.

Photo: @baseballcrank/Twitter

 

Notice how any evidence of ideological contagion that implicates the broader party is simply treated as a self-refuting allegation.

Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis is a classic archetype — an anti-Trump conservative whose critique of Trump runs one inch deep. Lewis has encountered my argument about DeSantis as a competent Trumpist and, in particular, his critique of democracy. It has left him flabbergasted and angry:

After years of being told that Trump was a unique threat to American democracy that justified a popular front to oppose him, the goal posts are moving again.

Take for example, New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who previously suggested that it’s “plausible” Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987. During a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast, Chait cited DeSantis’ Obama-era book, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, as evidence that DeSantis isn’t committed to democracy.

According to Chait, American conservatives have always believed that the New Deal was unconstitutional and that redistribution is the biggest threat to liberty. And because redistribution can be enacted via the democratic process, Chait surmises that conservatives don’t like democracy.

The most revealing thing about this response is that Lewis writes that I surmise DeSantis distrusts democracy because it enables redistribution. Surmising was unnecessary. DeSantis writes this himself plainly in his book many, many times. The apocryphal founders’ quote, “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic,” is the thesis of DeSantis’s book.

Of course, Lewis has a right to question my interpretation of the book. But there’s no evidence in his column that he has read the book or even my article — which is not one of the many links he includes. Lewis writes that he heard my argument on a podcast, and that seems to be the extent of his research on the question.

He goes on to complain that my argument about DeSantis, or the parts of it he was able to pick up from the podcast, “feels like a bait-and-switch.” The media should have been “serious, judicious, honest, fair” but instead: “They tried to run up the score. They took cheap shots.”

I try to be serious, judicious, and so on, but I don’t know what kinds of arguments can persuade people who don’t read arguments. Large segments of the conservative intelligentsia that resisted Trump are going to return to the fold when he departs the scene, because they consider any questioning of the regular conservative movement’s commitment to democracy to be unfair on its face.

Learn more about RevenueStripe...

There was a small crack in the façade after DeSantis openly punished Disney in retribution for its opposition to his anti-gay law. A handful of conservatives expressed their dismay — with NR’s Phil Klein calling the maneuver “Gangster Government.”

However, on the whole, DeSantis paid little for his thuggery. On the contrary, he was rewarded for it by the mainstream media with a host of stories pondering the populism of it all. The New York Times ran a story headlined “Punishing Disney, DeSantis Signals a Lasting G.O.P. Brawl With Business.” The Washington Post’s analysis was headlined “GOP’s cozy ties with big business unravel as DeSantis unloads on Disney.”

But DeSantis is not signaling hostility to corporations. He is not challenging the party’s approach to regulation, taxes, or labor. He is simply showing he is willing to exempt corporations that step out of line politically from the general regime of favorable treatment.

A good way to explain the difference is to examine this method in extremis. Vladimir Putin is very cozy with big business in Russia. But Putin has taken some extremely harsh stances toward large firms and their owners. He has seized their assets and thrown them in prison. Is this “populist”? No, it’s simply authoritarian.

Obviously, DeSantis has not gone anywhere close to as far as Putin. What he has demonstrated, however, is proof of concept of the method. He can intimidate firms that defy him politically. His party will support him. And the news media will even treat him like a populist for it. What reason is there to think he won’t do much more of this as president?

In a widely shared post, the left-wing writer Michael Hobbes expressed a popular progressive stance on the value of Twitter as a forum that has elevated the voices of “previously marginalized groups.”

Michael Hobber

@RottenInDenmark/Twitter

I think we'll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds.

April 27, 2022, Twitter Web App.

 

If we follow the most intuitive understanding of the term “marginalized groups,” this is the complete opposite of reality. The New York Times studied this dynamic and found that Twitter magnifies the voices of disproportionately white college-educated liberals. It marginalizes the views of Black and non-college-educated voters.

This all became glaringly evident during the 2020 presidential primaries, when almost nobody on Twitter supported Joe Biden — until it turned out the Democratic Party electorate looked very different. That same dynamic has repeated itself in numerous elections that have exposed the vast gulf between the white college-educated simulacrum of the Democratic electorate on Twitter and the brick-and-mortar version.

Yes, Twitter has been terrific for me. I enjoy the site as a way to make lots of jokes, find stories that might otherwise not come to my attention, and promote my work. If Twitter had never been invented, my career would probably be in worse shape. Of course, I’ve never been marginalized.

Now, it is true that Twitter has elevated the views of politically marginalized groups — specifically, people with very left-wing views. And those groups have gained dramatically greater levels of influence over the media, culture, and politics as a result. That is a change that has had some positive and some negative results.

But let’s be honest: What it actually means in practice is that it has made the Democratic Party, the news media, and culture more responsive and accountable to the views of white college-educated progressives like Michael Hobbes. And it has grown less responsive and accountable to the views of Americans who are working class and people of color.

John E. McDonough spoke with a long list of right-wing activists and policy influencers to try to figure out what Republicans want to do about health care now that their effort to repeal Obamacare has failed. In the main, he finds, writing for Politico, that they have no stomach left to try another full-scale repeal and will instead chip away at the coverage protections by carving out cheaper plans for healthier individuals.

Here’s one sentence that stood out to me. McDonough was inquiring as to whether Republicans would finally consider opening up the entire country to Medicaid expansion. The answer was simple: “No conservative experts with whom I spoke would openly disagree with the holdout states.”

Republicans, of course, deemed Obamacare a socialist monstrosity that was bound to collapse. As part of their efforts to sabotage and destroy the law, they organized to pressure Republican states to refuse to take funds from the federal government supplied by the law to expand Medicaid coverage to low-income citizens in their states. Several states have since quietly joined, but 12 holdouts remain including Florida, Georgia, and Texas.

Obviously, this refusal is extremely harmful to low-income people in those states — millions of whom cannot get health care as a result. But it is also harmful to others. Hospitals have to pay more, because when uninsured people end up in the emergency room, the hospitals are not allowed to deny them coverage but have no way to collect the cost. (The patients, of course, are worse off relying on emergency rooms than if they had access to regular care.) Employers are likewise worse off, because their workers are not being subsidized with insurance that could keep them healthy. Republicans are generally sympathetic to hospitals and employers — it’s just that their desire to help them is outweighed by their desire to hurt low-income people who lack insurance.

Conservatives used to try to make the counterintuitive argument that going uninsured was somehow better for people than being on Medicaid — relying for this case on one underpowered study that has since been contradicted by multiple other sources of data. There is a huge amount of research now that shows Medicaid expansion has a broad swath of completely intuitive benefits for states that take it. Their citizens are healthier and have more financial security and economic mobility.

Public opinion certainly isn’t holding back Republicans. When advocates have managed to get it on a ballot, Medicaid expansion has passed — even in deep-red states. It’s extremely popular.

Opposition to Medicaid expansion is a test of commitment to the conservative movement’s anti-government creed. It is as good an indicator as can be found of the GOP’s unique extremism on the role of the state — it is the only major right-of-center party in any democracy across the globe that refuses to acknowledge that access to health care should be universal for all citizens.

The party’s method to holding the line on further Medicaid expansion is avoiding the question and keeping it out of the public debate. That is why McDonough’s answer — they would not “openly disagree” with the holdout states — is so revealing. The party’s cadre of health-care policy may understand that there is no viable alternative policy path to providing minimal access to basic health care to low-income people in the holdout states — which are inflicting cruelty on their most vulnerable citizens. But conservative-movement discipline requires them to not speak out against it. If they said something publicly, they would lose their influence within the party.

The center left has directed a lot of justified criticism at the left for what Matt Yglesias calls “coalition brain” — a mentality that prioritizes maintaining peace in your party’s coalition at all costs and, therefore, suppresses the channels for exposing error. The key thing to grasp is that this mentality took over the Republican Party so long ago that none of its members can even imagine a world that operates differently.

April mailbag

April mailbag brings May takes

The Twitter takeover, my fake job, and a world without Pearl Harbor

Matthew Yglesias

2 hr ago

28

26

Contrary to rumors, there will be no Boring Company takeover of Slow Boring — we are committed to diversity and competition in the boring space.

Benjamin Howard: With Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter in the news, what do you think is the most important corporate takeover in US history?

That question is probably too hard, because what I think is underrated are influential early-stage acquisitions that you don’t necessarily think of as being a huge deal at the time. When Instagram was purchased for $1 billion, the conventional wisdom was that Facebook was massively overpaying in a clear sign of a tech stock bubble (I was at Slate at the time, and arguing that this was a perfectly reasonable buy was a Slatepitch) while in retrospect it was a very shrewd and influential business move.

Google buying YouTube seems like a really big deal to me since if YouTube were an independent company, I think it would be a company that we talk about a lot.

City of Trees: Last Saturday, Milan and some of us commenters had a robust dicussion on the concept of class. Do you find the concept useful? If so, do you think it should be more in-depth than the typical American understanding that's limited to the amount of income/wealth one has? Should it also include aspects like the Marxist bougie/prole distinction, levels of education, cultural factors, or anything else?

I think it would be interesting to see someone try to sketch out in some detail the class structure of the United States as defined pretty literally in terms of people’s relationship to the means of production — and accounting for the fact that in the contemporary economy, this is more complicated than a dichotomy of “workers vs. owners.”

We have a home-owning majority and a large renting minority. We have a partially overlapping stock-owning majority and a large share-less minority. We have a majority that doesn’t receive any explicit welfare state benefits and a minority who do. And because the welfare state is tilted heavily toward the elderly who also tend to own capital in the form of stock and especially houses, we don’t necessarily have a large block of “capital-less workers who love the welfare state” to be the foot soldiers for a certain style of left politics.

Ryan: Diplomacy, the game. Thoughts? Have you played? What is the best country? What is your preferred first move?

It’s been a while now since I’ve played, but my favorite is to play as Germany. I like the classic F Kie —> Den, A Ber —> Kie, A Mun —> Ruh to start. But of course it all depends on your conversations.

Casey Adams: A lot of people died from COVID. While many of them were older, a lot of people 55+ are/were employed. How much of the current economic issues are related to COVID deaths?

The U.S. has had about a million Covid-19 deaths, of which roughly 75 percent were among people over 65, so I would say 250,000 people is probably the upper bound of missing workers due to Covid-19 death. That’s considerably smaller than the decline in immigration over the course of the pandemic years, so I don’t think the mechanical impact of deaths is a particularly important part of the puzzle.

A bigger deal is that even though most Americans are not highly Covid-cautious, some are. And for the highly Covid-cautious, lots of jobs have not only become more undesirable due to Covid-19 risk, but lots of things you can do with money (eat out, travel, go see a movie) have also become less desirable. That I think is a non-trivial double blow to labor force participation. All that said, I would emphasize that the jobs recovery has been very strong, and fundamentally, I don’t think either reluctance to work or the Covid-19 death toll is having a large impact on current economic issues. The missing immigrants, by contrast, do have an impact in part because they are the people who are generally willing to move to random places in search of work, so they are very helpful at filling gaps.

Jim Barnett: Counterfactual history: what would (or wouldn't) have happened if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor?

It’s hard to know what to say here without knowing why Japan didn’t attack Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were trying to conquer China, and the United States, in an effort to stop or punish them, had put major sanctions on Japan to deny them access to oil and other natural resources. They decided that a good way to get around this would be to take over what’s Malaysia and Indonesia today. Then they either thought that attacking those places would inevitably lead America to declare war on Japan, or else that it was logistically impossible to invade Malaysia and Indonesia without also attacking the Philippines, and attacking the Philippines would mean war with America. Either way, since war with America was inevitable, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a clever idea.

So we have some options:

Attack the Philippines without attacking Pearl Harbor — this doesn’t seem like it makes a big difference to history.

Attack the Dutch and British colonies in Southeast Asia without attacking the Philippines. If you look on a map, this would have left the Japanese in a weird position logistically, which I guess is why the military didn’t want to do it.

Just don’t attack China!

Now obviously the right policy for Japan was (3). The effort to conquer China was totally pointless and even leaving aside the larger war, the Japanese authorities never had a viable way to occupy and administer the Chinese territory they controlled.

But I guess (2) is the more interesting counterfactual because it seems likely to me that the Japanese were just mistaken and the U.S. wouldn’t have done much to escalate for the sake of the Dutch East Indies. We would have continued the pre-Pearl Harbor pattern of progressively increasing assistance to the Allies, and I think ultimately that the USSR and the British Empire could have beaten Germany with Lend-Lease Aid. But the war lasts longer, and post-war Europe is much more Soviet-dominated. At that point, the United States probably needs to reconcile itself to making friends with the Japanese Empire as part of an anti-Communist strategy.

Alec Arellano: Building on last week's question about your connection to Judaism, to what extent/in what way(s) do you identify as Latin? Asking as a fellow Cuban American, and one reflecting on his own identity in this regard.

I feel really torn about this. We have in America (or at least in the urban northeast where I’m from) a kind of standard script for a person to claim a white ethnic identity like Irish or Italian without it necessarily meaning a huge amount.

And that’s kind of the relationship that I would like to have with Cuba and Cuban identity. I feel a certain kinship to Cuban food, am a little disproportionately interested in Cuban history relative to its objective importance, was super annoyed by Samuel Huntington’s assertions of a deep “civilizational” divide between the United States and Latin America, took some personal offense at racist attacks on Sonia Sotomayor, and named my son Jose after my grandfather.

But I also don’t want to be someone who is seen as trying to take up space that more properly belongs to someone else. To put it another way, I think it’s odd that in this era of heightened concern with representation, there are no Hispanic New York Times columnists, and I think it’s doubly-odd that nobody ever talks about how there are no Hispanic New York Times columnists. I feel Latin enough to be annoyed by this but maybe not Latin enough to think that hiring me would address the issue. Even that’s contingent, though. When I was 23, I was invited to be on a panel at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and at the time I thought to myself, “maybe I should join NAHJ and take Spanish classes and really assume the identity of ‘Hispanic Journalist’” but ultimately I ... didn’t do that.

Tracy Erin: Is there any hope that Evan McMullin will beat Mike Lee in Utah? If I would vastly prefer Evan McMullin to be one of the Senators from Utah should I be donating to his campaign or would my money be used more effectively in some other way?

McMullin’s odds are super low just given the national political climate. But if you support the concept of this style of politics where Democrats stand down in non-competitive races and back anti-Trump figures, then I think a McMullin contribution couldn’t hurt.

But in that vein, I would also strongly consider sending some money to Lisa Murkowski, who is in a tough race but has a legitimately good chance of winning. Attach a note explaining why you appreciate her and what you wish she would do to be even more worthy of your support.

Kevin Heller: What are your thoughts on the idea to do school year-round instead of breaking so long for summers. It's an idea that I haven't heard about recently but I remember it from years ago. My understanding is the main purpose is to avoid significant learning loss that occurs during summers, particularly in lower income households. I personally like the idea but I imagine school unions would push back hard. I am not a parent myself and can see it as more of a mixed bag from that angle.

In the abstract, I think it’s clearly a good idea. The issue is that unless you want all your teachers to quit, it’s very expensive to implement. DCPS experimented with year-round schooling for a few years, and my understanding from people who worked on it is that they found there were benefits, just not commensurate with the cost. So they shelved the program and focused on building out preschool availability for three-year-olds.

Nate: Repeat question: what do you actually do for the Niskanen center? What do they expect from fellows?

They pay me $0 and I provide a roughly commensurate amount of labor.

So what’s the point? Well among other things that they do, think tanks try to build intellectual communities and affinity groups. And writers (at least some of us) like to be members of intellectual communities and affinity groups. It’s nice to have a squad, some people you know, a regular happy hour invite, something to put in your Twitter bio, etc.

Brad: You talk a lot here about the need for more housing in a lot of our major coastal cities, zoning for density, and things like that, but one thing I'm not entirely sure of is the size of the change we're talking about here. What would a city like Seattle or San Francisco look like if we actually built enough housing there to meet demand? Would it be closer to converting a few of the city's longer, low-density residential streets into larger avenues lined with condos, or are we talking about tearing down entire neighborhoods of single family houses and turning them into high-rise apartments?

I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that there is no decision-maker who could tear down an entire neighborhood of single-family houses and turn them into high-rise apartments. If you passed a law that said “a high-rise apartment building can be built anywhere in the District of Columbia,” then you’d wake up the next day and find that most people don’t want to sell their homes. You’d also find that a single-family lot isn’t large enough to build a high-rise apartment on anyway; you’d need to buy multiple adjacent lots, and the opportunity to do that is rare.

But over the years a bunch of ADUs would get built, and some single-family home parcels might get turned into rowhouses or duplexes or maybe even a low-rise apartment. Over time, of course, some people would pull things together and build new high-rises. But even though right now there is unmet demand for urban living, it’s not like it’s an infinite amount of demand — the suburbanists are right that all else being equal, most people prefer a detached single-family house. So in some respects I think the aggregate scale of the change might be pretty modest. The key thing is that a small amount of unmet demand can have a disproportionate impact on prices.

Owen Minott: What do you think of the job Mayor Bowser has done as mayor/do you think she deserves reelection?

She absolutely deserves reelection because her main opponent, Robert White, is running on ending mayoral control of DC Public Schools and handing it over to a separately elected school board. The subtext for this is that the teacher’s union wishes D.C. had handled Covid-19 more like the west coast board-controlled cities that kept their schools closed throughout the 2020-2021 school year rather than reopening. They are wrong, mayoral control is good for accountability, and I’ll be voting for Bowser.

Given that, I’d like to cheerlead for her tenure, but to be honest, I think it’s been a pretty uninspired eight years that’s lacked signature achievements. But you could do a lot worse than Bowser, and the guy she is running against specifically is promising to be worse.

Andy D: What's your take on the WMATA fiasco? On the one hand, WMATA is terrible. On the other, is the alleged potentially catastrophic underlying problem actually bad enough to justify crippling service when there was only one incident over like 4 years? What should we hope for here?

There are a number of management issues with WMATA, but on this specific point I really wish we could at least see the cost-benefit math in terms of safety vs. service levels tradeoffs. A lot of people die in car wrecks on highways and we could save lives with a 40-mile-per-hour speed limit. The downside is people would go slower. Part of auto-centric policymaking is that we don’t treat safety as an absolute trump card; we treat people’s ability to get around as important on its own right.

So you take X number of train sets out of service and that gives you some safety benefit. But how much extra driving does it create and how many road accidents do we predict from that extra driving? How many deaths due to air pollution? I honestly have no idea, but I’d like to see decisions made with reference to some explicit math.

KZ: There was a map of available Airbnbs in New Orleans going around recently, with people blaming the company for high housing costs. I'm reflexively skeptical of this explanation because the people putting it forward typically seem to be doing so in an effort to explain why we don't actually need to build any more new housing. However, the basic premise of Airbnb raising prices by cutting into the already constrained housing supply doesn't seem inherently implausible to me, and I can't deny there are a lot of orange dots on that viral map. As a good YIMBY, how should I feel about Airbnb? My prior is that people should generally be able to do what they want with their property, including renting it out if they so choose, but if the effects on prices really are as dramatic as the detractors say then maybe strict regulations make sense in the short term.

If you believe that supply and demand matter for housing (which I do), then I think you have to believe that Airbnb increases housing costs.

That said, suppose New Orleans shut down all its hotels. Well, that would reduce housing costs by crushing the city’s economy. Tourism is a big deal in New Orleans! By the same token, by opening the city up to more visitors, Airbnb is a boon to the New Orleans economy. Does it put more pressure on the housing supply? Sure. But “allow more housing” + “allow Airbnb” generates a virtuous circle of prosperity (construction jobs, tourism jobs, tax revenue, etc.) while “try to stop people from visiting the city” seems counterproductive.

Andrew Robinson: Is there space in the popularism movement for people who dislike overly popular things? Relatedly, when is the last time you waded through the crowds at peak Cherry Blossom? Did you enjoy it?

I’ve actually never been to see them at peak bloom.

But I think this is a really important one. Popularism is a point about electoral politics, but I think there’s actually way too much popularism in cultural criticism in the United States. You get more clicks by writing about stuff that’s popular, and fans of popular stuff don’t like to hear that they are wrong, so there is an objectively strong material incentive to write upbeat fanboyish stuff about the MCU rather than do the traditional work of film criticism. And to me that’s a bad trend; a bug in internet culture rather than a feature.

Stephen F: What ever happened to Terrorism? Not only was it a constant fear throughout the 2000s, it was the subject of the biggest political and culture war debates of the era. Now it's hardly even mentioned in the news, politicians don't run on it anymore, and I can't remember the last time I saw an op-ed about it.

Several other hot debates of the aughts — Stem Cells, Social Security Privatization, Evolution in Schools — seem to have disappeared entirely from the conversation. Even early-2010s issues like Occupy Wall Street or NSA spying appear to have faded away.

So I guess the bigger question is — which of today's issues and debates will be considered irrelevant in ten years?

On the specific question of terrorism, I suspect that the main thing that happened to terrorism is there was a big youth cohort in the Arab world that’s now aged out of its violence-and-mayhem phase. Even at Peak Terrorism, the number of people actually involved in doing terrorism was extremely small, so it just kind of faded away.

The larger point about the shifting issue landscape is correct and I think people forget this. There are always a lot of “what happened to Glenn Greenwald?” takes, but you might as well ask “what happened to the policy debates that were salient when Glenn Greenwald first became prominent in the media?” The news agenda changed a lot! In terms of today’s issues, it’s almost too easy because for the past 18 months a huge dividing line of American politics has been between the vaxxed-and-relaxed and the vaxxed-but-not-relaxed, and we are definitely not going to be arguing about this in the 2028 presidential election. Personally, I am someone who loves being in the mix with events in the news. But I would encourage everyone to try to ground their overall political identity in the enduring axes of political conflict — I am a secular person and a person who believes in the merits of redistributive taxation and the welfare state. The exact prominence of those questions ebbs and flows, but they always come back around.

28

26

Share

Write a comment…

Marie KennedyWrites Post-Woke ·1 hr ago·edited 1 hr ago

Re: WMATA… This TED talk from Mike Rowe (the dirty jobs guy) has always stuck with me. https://youtu.be/IRVdiHu1VCc I think the “vaxxed and not relaxed” could benefit from repeated viewing, along with anyone who can’t understand why Democrats are bleeding working class voters.

1) Safety is never really first. If safety came first, we’d all never leave the house. (Oh, wait….) I’ve worked in manufacturing environments where electrochemical solutions were dissolving away titanium, where metal scraps or powder could conceivably spontaneously combust, or high-powered lasers were micro-welding nickel. If safety were really first, we’d shut the whole enterprise down.

2) Most people who work in these jobs and take pride in getting shit done don’t appreciate conference room lectures from people with desk jobs about how much Desk Job cares about their safety. Nor do they appreciate the mask scolds. Every man for themselves.

Don’t get me started on this “psychological safety” bullshit, either.

11Reply

4 replies

Peter S1 hr ago

I think the decline of terrorism also has something to do with the absolute military defeat and decapitation of Al-Qaeda and ISIS by the US and its Allies.

7Reply

24 more comments…

Ask me stuff

The launch of a new experiment

Matthew Yglesias

Jan 18

593

1,033

The media's lab leak fiasco

A huge fuckup, with perhaps not-so-huge policy stakes

Matthew Yglesias

May 26, 2021

173

500

Tema Okun's "White Supremacy Culture" work is bad

Prestigious universities and worthy nonprofits shouldn't push nonsense

Matthew Yglesias

May 10, 2021

375

381

In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics

Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile

Matthew Yglesias

Feb 14, 2021

287

474

Democrats are sleepwalking into a Senate disaster

Business as usual will produce a huge GOP majority

Simon Bazelon

Apr 11

112

380

The "cancel culture" debate is dumb

We ought to argue about substance not process

Matthew Yglesias

Jan 28, 2021

369

517

Meritocracy is bad

America is good at elevating "the best" people; the problem is that's a bad idea

Matthew Yglesias

Mar 16, 2021

259

436

Welcome to Slow Boring

In spite of all!

Matthew Yglesias

Nov 14, 2020

148

243

Mancur Olson at the end of history

The West can win while barely trying

Matthew Yglesias

Apr 7

109

128

What's wrong with the media

The young/urban/educated bubble in an era of growing polarization

Matthew Yglesias

Nov 19, 2020

157

309

See all

© 2022 Matthew Yglesias

Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice

Publish on Substack

Get the app

Substack is the home for great writing

Why I’m still not taking crypto seriously

Why I’m still not taking crypto seriously

Ben Hickey illustration of a confused clown trying to juggle crypto coins 

© Ben Hickey. 

It may be the latest political and financial obsession, but cryptocurrencies remain something with no inherent value

JEMIMA KELLY. 

Receive free Bitcoin updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Bitcoin news every morning.

I keep on being told that it’s time I took crypto seriously. Crypto, goes the refrain, has “gone mainstream” — from BlackRock to UBS, every major investor is at the very least “exploring” it these days, while the big firms have tens of millions of retail investors each.

Governments are bullish, too: Britain is taking a “forward-looking approach” with the chancellor hoping to turn the country into a global crypto hub, putting the UK right up there with El Salvador, where bitcoin is now legal tender. I can joke, but if I haven’t bought into crypto, then the joke is actually on me, or so people keep saying.

And yet, try as I might to take it seriously, I keep on coming up against new ways to find crypto absurd. This week the comedy came courtesy of the nominatively determined Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and founder of crypto exchange FTX, a company recently valued at $32bn. On Monday, Bankman-Fried, himself recently valued at $24bn, appeared on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast and was asked to explain how a newish crypto phenomenon called yield-farming works.

Yield-farming — a rather complex practice that essentially offers investors a chance to turn their crypto into more crypto, by borrowing money from the customers, giving them a “governance token” in exchange, and farming out this crypto into other coins and “DeFi” projects offering high yields — has long raised eyebrows. That’s not just because of the unusually high returns it promises, but also due to concerns that retail investors don’t really understand it and thus are not fully aware of the risks involved. You might think therefore that Bankman-Fried, whose platform offers this very thing, might try to dress it up as a grown-up financial product.

Not so much. Bankman-Fried, using the analogy of a box to describe one of these yield-farming platforms, explained its value proposition thus: “This is a valuable box as demonstrated by all the money that people have apparently decided should be in the box. And who are we to say that they’re wrong about that?” He then described how all this becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, because once investors start feeling bullish about it, the token becomes more valuable and they “go and pour another $300 million in the box . . . and then it goes to infinity. And then everyone makes money.”

Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, clearly rather stunned, pointed out that Bankman-Fried seems to be saying something along the lines of: “Well, I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good.”

Bankman-Fried’s comments have been widely mocked, and they are indeed risible, but what is perhaps funnier is that what he is describing can be applied to the rest of crypto, too. I have long compared crypto to a Ponzi scheme, though there are some differences, such as the lack of a central administrator.

Crypto, like Bankman-Fried’s box, has no inherent value; it is worth simply what everyone has decided that it’s worth. And just like this box, which as the FTX founder explains can be created “in like five minutes with an internet connection”, crypto tokens can be made just as easily. This why there are now almost 20,000 cryptocurrencies out there, making a mockery of the idea of digital scarcity.

But still, there’s always the “crypto is just like the internet in the early 90s” argument, right? Aside from the fact that comparing crypto to the biggest technological breakthrough of the past century purely on the grounds that nobody understood the internet at the start, either, feels like a bit of a non sequitur, the early 90s seem to be dragging on a bit. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen told a conference back in 2014 that bitcoin felt like the internet in 1994; by 2019 he said it felt like 1992 — presumably we are now somewhere around the 1991 mark.

Could there, though, be an argument that, despite all this, it makes sense to put a bit of money into crypto? Sure, there might be a risk that it could all go to zero, but that is a known risk; there is also the risk that it could go up multiple times and you miss out. Might that not be reason enough to take it seriously?

For that to be valid, one would have to imagine that crypto did no harm, when it is in fact a negative-sum game. Aside from the environmental harm, and the billions lost in outright scams, it is impossible to count the number of people who have been given false hope.

So no, sorry, I won’t take crypto seriously — either as an asset or as a form of money, which are in fact two contradictory propositions. In fact, I won’t take it as anything other than as a serious risk to society, and perhaps something to bleakly laugh at now and again.

Get alerts on Bitcoin when a new story is published

Get alerts

Are Black Voters Punished for Their Loyalty?

Are Black Voters Punished for Their Loyalty?

Yes, they vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But that doesn’t mean they lack influence over the party.

By Jonathan Bernstein.

No doubt.

Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty

I strongly recommend an article about Black politics by Alex Samuels over at FiveThirtyEight. There’s a lot of important stuff here about why Black voters are underrepresented. The stuff that matters? Unlike other groups, such voters face the reality of anti-Black sentiment, so that any party that delivers benefits perceived as helping them risks facing a backlash from other parts of the electorate. Samuels cites quite a bit of research backing this effect up that can’t just be wished away. It’s real, and it has real political consequences.

But I somewhat disagree with the framing of the article, which suggests that Black voters have minimal leverage because the overwhelming majority of them are reliable Democrats. I think that’s exaggerated. The truth is that all voters as individuals have extremely limited leverage. Sure, parties sometimes adjust their policy agenda and priorities in search of support from hypothetical median voters, or those who are perfectly balanced between the two parties. More often, however, they’ll simply seek out popular positions and hope for the best. So if Iowa is a swing state, parties will tend to support corn; if Louisiana is contested, they’ll tend to support oil and gas interests — positions that appeal to very large groups, that is, rather than to narrow segments. They’ll avoid unpopular policies and support popular ones if all else is equal. But all else is rarely equal.

That’s because parties aren’t simple machines narrowly focused on winning. Instead, they’re made up of organized groups. And those groups jostle and position to raise their profile within the larger party, and in doing so win more nominations, hold more offices, and elevate the things they care about in the party’s agenda. As individuals, taking no political action other than showing up on Election Day, Black voters (like any others) have little leverage. But to the extent that they form organized groups within the party and become party actors and get involved in party affairs, they can and have won a great deal of influence. Yes, that influence is limited by the hostility discussed above. Party actors, Black ones included, are reluctant to take unpopular positions. Still, it’s a mistake to conceptualize the Democratic Party as some alien monolith that exists entirely apart, so that voters’ only choice is to take it or leave it. That’s just not how it works. Parties are permeable; voters can become party actors by simply getting involved; and if they do that as part of an organized group, changing a party is surprisingly easy. Especially for those who bring valuable resources with them, and there’s no resource more valuable than reliable party voters.

Involvement in parties isn’t the only way that organized groups can achieve political goals. Independent interest groups can influence the parties and directly lobby elected officials. Social movements can mobilize large numbers of people and have at times successfully changed the direction of policy through demonstrations and other direct action. The point is that very little happens in U.S. politics or any democracy because of individuals acting as just-plain-voters — but getting more involved, and acting with others, can often achieve surprising results.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that victory is guaranteed: The nature of democratic politics is that there are always at least temporary winners and losers. The U.S. system probably makes it easier than most for people to get involved meaningfully, especially (as Samuels points out) at the state and local levels; it also is a system with a strong bias toward incremental change, so big wins can be hard to come by and post-election frustration is even more of a central theme than in most other democracies. All of this is true for every group and every individual; Black citizens, again, face obstacles that others do not.

But it’s a real mistake to consider any group trapped by its strong allegiance to a single party. To the contrary: Active participation in a political party is a source of group strength, not weakness.

The Russia-Ukraine War: What Historical Analogies Make Sense?

The Russia-Ukraine War: What Historical Analogies Make Sense?

Read time: 4 minutes 

By Robert Farley.

April 27, 2022

Which analogies are we using to understand the Russia-Ukraine War? Yuen Khong’s pioneering work in Analogies at War described how policymakers tend to think in terms of analogies when faced with new international crises. We understand the world through stories as much as through data, and when faced with uncomfortable or unfamiliar situations policymakers tend to reach for stories that they understand.

The choice of analogy tends to reflect generational concerns (policymakers who came of age during World War II tend to favor Munich analogies, those who cut their teeth in the early Cold War tend to think in terms of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and so forth), but also the motivated bias of practitioners (people reach for analogies that suggest their endeavors may enjoy success).  Other scholars have built upon Khong’s work; for example, Eric Mosinger runs through several World War II analogies that have informed Western thinking about the war since it began two months ago. 

The Russians have purposefully attempted to activate analogic thinking by declaring that their purpose is to “denazify” the Ukrainian government, a claim intended to remind soldiers and civilians of the Second World War. The Ukrainians, for their part, have borrowed and repurposed other analogies from Soviet history, including the historic defense of Stalingrad. Analogies do not truly belong to anyone in a proprietary sense, it would seem.

One ready analogy remains the “Winter War,” waged between Russia and Finland in the winter of 1939-1940.  As I discussed in a previous column, the Winter War offers a narrative of defiance in the face of overwhelming odds and a testament to what a small but dedicated country can accomplish when fighting tenaciously on the defensive.  However, Russia won the Winter War; the Red Army picked itself up off the floor, rethought its approach, and recapitalized its forces, then undertook a war-winning offensive that not only pushed the Finns out of the disputed territory but threatened Finnish sovereignty.  This analogy is surely attractive to the Russians at this point, not so much for the humiliating defeat part but rather for the recovery and resurgence bit. That Russia produced some 2800 tanks in 1940 to replace its losses and likely has not yet produced 28 tanks in 2022 suggests a degree of caution, however. 

On the other hand, sits the Kerensky Offensive. In the late winter of 1917 revolutionaries overthrew the Romanov Dynasty, ending centuries of imperial rule and threatening to take Russia out of World War I.  Heavy allied pressure immediately fell upon the new Provisional government, led by Alexander Kerensky, to continue the war and indeed to launch an offensive against the forces of the Central Powers. The offensive, launched in July 1917 and conducted in what is now Western Ukraine, was intended to replicate the success of the 1916 Brusilov Offensive (indeed, it was led by the same General Aleksei Brusilov) and reassure that British, French, and Americans of Russian commitment to the war.  

Unfortunately for the Russians, while continuing the war still enjoyed some popular support, but the Imperial Army had been badly battered by three years of conflict and was in no mood to continue.  Discipline, which had been brutal under the Czars, was in full collapse as reforms sharply reduced the latitude of officers. The Russian system of munitions supply was also nearing collapse because of industrial unrest and a lack of raw materials. The offensive was launched in late June but made only hesitant progress against German and Austro-Hungarian forces. Within two weeks the Germans had counter-attacked, erasing Russian gains and pushing Russians forces back beyond their starting points. By late July the army was in full collapse. The Germans advanced as rapidly as their logistics and the technology of 1917 would allow.

The analogy draws some support from stories of disaffection within the Russian ranks, but it bears mention that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has already outlasted the Kerensky Offensive by more than a month. Russian troops may have low morale, but evidence indicates they’re still better off than the beleaguered forces Brusilov had at his disposal in July 1917. Still, the idea that the Russian Army might simply collapse of its own weight is attractive to Ukrainians and to others who want to see Russia fail. 

Russia

Russian troops fire rocket artillery during an exercise at the Luga training ground (Leningrad region), dedicated to Missile Troops and Artillery. Photo: Konstantin Morozov / mil.ru

This war is generating its own stories, which will eventually become narratives, which will eventually become analogies that will inform the behavior of future policymakers. The loss of Moskva will become a cautionary tale; Ukrainian heroism on the approaches to Kyiv will become a story of national virtue; the beleaguered defenders of Mariupol will become kinfolk of the final holdouts at Masada and the Alamo. 

The visibility of the war, which continues to dominate foreign policy news around the world, will undoubtedly make it a touchstone for how people think about war and peace for decades to come. 

Do Americans Still Care About Democracy?

Do Americans Still Care About Democracy?

The concept is so popular that it’s now used in marketing language. But have we really accepted all it involves?

A new era.

Photographer: Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency.

by Jonathan Bernstein.

April 27, 2022.

U.S. citizens should think a bit more about democracy. What brings this on was a quote from Kam Ghaffarian of Axiom Space, after his crew completed a successful, fully private mission to the International Space Station — an achievement he called “part of democratizing low-Earth orbit.” I saw later that the former NASA astronaut Mike Lopez-Alegria, who commanded the mission, also referred to it as “democratization.” 

There’s good news and bad news here.

My first reaction was that this was ridiculous. Lopez-Alegria ferried three rich people to space, and they paid handsomely for the experience. I’ve generally thought that partially privatizing space is a good idea, but c’mon: Wealthy space tourists are much poorer symbols of democracy than (say) Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride and the rest of the astronaut corps — along with the politicians who sent them to space and the voters who elected those politicians. We shouldn’t neglect the role of private enterprise even back then, when the government had the dominant role. The U.S. economic system was among the winners of the space race. Overall, however, there’s nothing more democratic than a polity collectively choosing and achieving a policy goal. And most of those astronauts had very ordinary backgrounds; there’s something sad about a conception of democracy that would exclude Ride and include those with the means to buy their way into space.

On the other hand? I doubt that any of the people pitching private space missions as “democratizing” have given much thought to any of that. They are, most likely, using the word because it’s one that people like. That’s … sort of good news? Democracy in the U.S. has been under attack, including at least some explicit arguments that it’s a bad thing. Some of these arguments aren’t new at all, including the incorrect and ahistorical claim that the U.S. is a “republic, not a democracy.” Even demonizing the word “democracy” itself has deep roots in U.S. history. The founding generation, which looked to Rome as its example, shared a long historical suspicion of democracy despite strongly favoring popular government.

If that’s confusing, it may be because people in the U.S. have not always been careful about learning exactly what democracy is, despite generally being enthusiastic about it. Democracy is broadly a system of government in which the people rule, but that leaves a lot of room for complexity and complications, including the fact that not all of the people can possibly get their way all of the time.

Indeed, figuring out how to accept losing — elections, policy debates, even fights over symbols — while still supporting the underlying process turns out to be an extremely important element of democracy. That’s why democratic rituals, such as presidential general-election debates, can be valuable even if they’re worthless in terms of educating voters. It’s why President Donald Trump’s rejection of election rituals — such as conceding defeat, congratulating the winner and participating in the presidential transition — was such a big deal, even putting aside his overt efforts to overturn the results.

To put it bluntly: Perhaps we can be ignorant of the nuances of democracy — important as they are — as long as we fully support the larger concept, and we accept the basic idea that it sometimes involves losing. Overall, I can’t help but wish that our civic education was a lot more thorough and effective, and that U.S. citizens had a better sense of their own system of government. And I suspect our failures in that regard really are vulnerabilities. But if we still are enthusiastic about democracy, enough to try to use it to sell all manner of things, including private space flight? Maybe that’s a meaningful starting point.

At least I hope so.

Thread Reader Eliot A Cohen

Thread Reader

Eliot A Cohen

13h • 8 tweets • 3 min read

This excellent thread by @MarkHertling got me thinking about a question: why has the analysis of this war by retired generals such as him, @general_ben and @edwardstrngr, and first rate military historians such as @PhillipsPOBrien been superior to that of the Russian military.1/8

Unroll available on Thread Reader

.analytic community? This requires serious research, & am helping launch some, because its an important question. But here are some initial hypotheses: experience, particularly of high level command in a shooting war sensitizes one to all the intangibles mentioned 2/8 

.in @MarkHertling’s thread. And to the nitty gritty detail that those in the back room of war making, such as @TrentTelenko also provide. They look for different things, and detect different things than the analysts. 3/8 

The military historians know that Churchill was right when he said “Always know, no matter sure you are that you can win, that there would not be a war if the other fellow did not think he also had a chance.” They proved more sensitive to a lot of the same things the generals 4/7 

know - morale, various dimension of leadership, i.e. the intangibles. And importantly: neither group shared the disdain for the Ukrainians that the analytic community seems to have had. The analysts - particularly those from the quant world and lacking either the 5/8 

experience or the historical depth were bewitched by numbers without knowing how to look behind them, by technology, without knowing whether it was reliable, available, prepared for, maintainable etc.; and above all doctrine. As many of us intellectuals do, they 6/8 

also way overvalued ideas, in this case doctrine. Maybe too they found it hard to think that the giant, fierce, cunning powerful beast they were studying was actually myopic, arthritic, confused, clumsy, and stupid - though even more vicious to the weak than they had thought. 7/8 

The point is not to settle scores here. It is, rather, to say that good judgment is invaluable, and poor judgment is dangerous, and that one of the greatest and scarcest virtues out there is self scrutinizing, self critical intellectual humility. 8/8 

• • •

Donald Trump's re-election is a dire threat to free speech.

Donald Trump's re-election is a dire threat to free speech.

It's much worse than petty library bullying.

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 11 minutes.

April 26, 2022.

A friend recently told me that he thinks the concept of “free speech” has become coded as right-wing over the past few years thanks to debates about content moderation on social media platforms.

I don’t know how true this is, but the specific instance of Elon Musk suggesting that under his hypothetical ownership Twitter would have less aggressive content moderation produced some fairly unhinged reactions. Mehdi Hasan called it “problematic,” the Washington Post published a piece about experts clapping back at Musk’s vision, and he was criticized in The Verge and by Kara Swisher in the Times. What’s weird about this hostile reaction is that Musk has not conveyed any information about his desire to change Twitter content policies other than to say he wants to be more supportive of “free speech.” The phrase itself seems to have triggered people, not because of its vagueness or indeterminacy, but because of the notion that anyone who says they are for free speech must be a bad person.

Which is nutty to me. Personally, I think free speech is good.

I also don’t think it’s obvious what the right kind of distribution and moderation model for Twitter is. I think my preference would be to return to the old-fashioned model where users see all and only the tweets of people they follow. And I think there should be very little moderation. I don’t like to see algorithmic amplification of misinformation, but I also don’t trust Twitter to decide which information is misinformation. Suppose they’d cracked down aggressively on pro-mask speech back in March 2020 when the experts were trying to discourage mask usage? Some folks are too hung up on a constitutional law point — the first amendment right to free speech does not apply to Twitter — and insufficiently attentive to the basic Millian point about the benefits of an open exchange of ideas.

But beyond Twitter moderation policies, it’s crazy to cede the terrain of free speech to the right when there is an extremely clear and present danger to free speech from the Republican Party. And I think many of the liberals who make that point tend to lean on the wrong examples to illustrate it. Having petty bullies running a school system is not great, but it’s also not going to be the end of the republic.

What really might be, though, is Trump’s clearly articulated and semi-implemented plan to use his control over the regulatory state to dominate the commanding heights of American media.

The thing I don’t worry about as much

Out-parties always exhibit a surge in grassroots activism, and with Joe Biden in the White House, a lot of conservative activism is aimed at orchestrating library purges.

Walton County Public Schools in Florida has ordered nearly 60 books removed from school libraries, including two famous works by Toni Morrison, “The Kite Runner,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “Normal People,” “The God of Small Things,” and a book I’ve never heard of called “The Purim Superhero.”

This stuff is bad.

You can see in progressives’ response to these purges that we all do, in fact, acknowledge that there is value to free speech and intellectual inquiry separate from constitutional issues. Nobody has a first amendment right to have their book stocked in a school library (my books aren’t in Walton County Public Schools libraries, as far as I know), and people will inevitably disagree about which books are the books worth stocking. And while I have no problem with a school library stocking Charlaine Harris’ “Dead Until Dark,” I’m also not going to go to the mattresses for it as a classic of world literature. But “The Bluest Eye” is a staple of high school curricula for a reason, and if you’re purging it from your library, something is wrong with you.

But while I would urge you to vote against local officials who act this way, I do not think that small-town politicians being close-minded and prudish is a super-alarming social trend. This is the way of the world. The reason many of us have a harsher reaction to the faculty, staff, and students of elite universities adopting wildly overblown ideas about “harm” and “safety” with regard to the speech of others is that we’re concerned these institutions have real social and cultural cachet in a way that the Walton County School Board does not. So I think a different kind of focus on elite institutions and top-tier left-wing intellectuals is warranted.

In terms of who is coded how, it is important to remember that the scolding, book-banning rightwingers that some of us remember from the 1980s and 1990s haven’t vanished just to be replaced by a new set that loves free inquiry. They’re somewhat diminished in number and clout, but very much still trying to rid their little worlds of any hint of “harmful” content.

But the big, truly scary right-wing threat to free speech is coming from a completely different direction.

Trump conducted big-time regulatory abuses

Back in the fall of 2017, AT&T bid to take over Time Warner, the company that owns, among other things, CNN.

As I said at the time, this was a dumb blunder by AT&T. Many times over the course of business history, the executives of a profitable-but-boring company have decided that it would be fun to buy a movie studio. If you own AT&T, your meetings are about spectrum auctions and permitting for cell phone towers. But if you own Time Warner, you get to go to the Oscars, hang out with movie stars, and be in meetings where people talk about Batman. People like to buy movie studios. There was no business advantage to this merger, but also no harm to consumers.

There are also a lot of people running around who want to change antitrust doctrine and move away from the past 40 years of antitrust analysis, and they were eager to object to this proposed merger as part of an effort to revive old-fashioned legal skepticism of vertical integration.

And they got what they wanted from the Trump Justice Department, which sued to block the merger. When the suit came down, there were basically two interpretations. One was that the Trump administration had decided that progressive antitrust reformers were correct and the government should adopt a whole new antitrust doctrine that would be much harsher on mergers. The other was that Trump was just mad at CNN and trying to abuse his power to stop them. The courts ended up ruling against the government, and outside of the business press, the case was never a huge story. But several years later, Jane Mayer reported that Trump did in fact call John Kelly and Gary Cohn and demand that they come up with a pretext for blocking the merger.

More tellingly, I think, the Trump administration waved through the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile and also Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox. These were both much more straightforward cases from the standpoint of traditional merger analysis. It’s not totally shocking that a pro-business Republican administration would approve them, but a Democratic administration might not have (especially the Sprint/T-Mobile one), and certainly a GOP administration that wanted to break with conventional conservative politics and pursue aggressive antitrust litigation would have challenged them. This is just to say that Trump didn’t try to block the AT&T/Time Warner merger because he believed in a new and more expansive antitrust doctrine. He had his administration pick that idea up arbitrarily in an effort to punish Time Warner for daring to run journalism he disliked.

Return of the JEDI

What makes this especially scary is that even though Trump failed, he didn’t abandon his effort to misuse federal power for the purposes of censorship.

The Pentagon, looking to get into the cloud computing game, put a tender out for something called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud, an enormous $10 billion contract. Everyone thought that Amazon was the leading candidate to win the contract, but there were rumors that Trump wanted the Defense Department to give it to someone else because he doesn’t like Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post. And in 2019, the Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft instead. Amazon sued and won in court with the argument that the contracting decision reflected the improper influence of the White House. But an April 2020 DOD Inspector General report said there was no clear evidence of misconduct, though it also said the White House didn’t really cooperate with the investigation and the IG couldn’t fully complete its work.

It should also be said that in the spring of 2020, Trump fired five cabinet agencies’ inspectors general, so I do not have high confidence in the integrity of the Trump-era IG process.

But beyond that, the idea that the president thought it would be a good idea to punish Amazon for the Washington Post’s reporting isn’t really a “secret” that we need an inspector general to suss out. I knew that’s what Trump wanted to do because he said so publicly. Time and again the secret to Trump’s scandalous behavior was doing the misconduct out in the open. There’s no need to write a secret memo saying “abuse regulatory authority to punish independent media companies” when you can just tweet it.

The risk is huge

Trump was ultimately not very successful in his effort to use the power of the state to crush journalism. He was in general a low-efficacy president who struggled to fully fill the thousands of political appointee jobs with true Trump loyalists. And of course the political appointees themselves can be stymied by the bureaucrats and the permanent state. The other thing about Trump is that he was pretty unpopular his whole time in office, and I think most observers judged that the odds of him losing in 2020 were fairly high. So under the circumstances, Bezos stood tall, CNN continued to pursue ratings, and overall press coverage of Trump was very critical.

And the judicial system continued to uphold the rule of law not least because most Republican Party judges — including Trump’s appointees — were basically pre-Trump figures who are ideologically committed to free markets.

But the risks of a second Trump term are larger. Most notably, there is now a broader cohort of Republican Party politicians in state government in places like Georgia and Florida who’ve grown comfortable with the idea of using policy to punish corporations for disagreeing with them. So the circle of Republicans who’d be inclined to sincerely agree on the merits that taking action against Amazon to punish the Washington Post is a good idea has expanded. Second, over time Trump has been able to somewhat expand his circle of loyalists and get better at identifying his true friends. Third, while during his first term I think a lot of people expected Trumpism to pass, it’s now clear that the future of the GOP is largely on this ideological trajectory and also that in the medium term we should expect Republicans to maintain an iron grip on the Senate.

I think progressives have been a little disinclined to fully go to bat for CNN and Jeff Bezos because to the left, these giant corporations are not sympathetic in the way that small-town librarians are. But exactly because we are talking about huge anonymous corporations, we should not expect them to behave heroically in the future. If Comcast decides that it will get better regulatory treatment if it finds some pretext to lay off Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, they will. If securing the future of Blue Origin requires Bezos to shut down the Washington Post, he will. Mark Zuckerberg is not going to sacrifice his vision of dominating virtual reality for the sake of a sentimental attachment to freedom of the press. We know major American companies routinely accede to Chinese censorship requests in exchange for favorable regulatory treatment there, and they will do the same here if they feel they have to.

A warning, not a prediction

I’m trying to be more measured in my commentary about the future, so let me be clear: I’m not saying “Trump wins the election and then uses his control over the regulatory state to crush press freedom” is a super likely scenario.

But there’s a chance, because — among other things — Peter Thiel (who doesn’t believe in democracy) is recruiting a new crop of authoritarian candidates, some of whom are going to be in Congress next year. Here is J.D. Vance openly telling journalists that his hope for a second Trump term is to trash the rule of law entirely:

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Would Trump actually do this? Probably not. But what are the chances? Ten percent? Twenty percent? That seems plausible to me. After all, without blowing the 1/6 putsch into more than it really was, it was still pretty insane. And though it briefly looked like other GOP leaders were mad enough about it to freeze him out, he ultimately slinked away with no punishment. He’s faced no punishment for his corrupt hotel operation, his kids have faced no accountability for their corrupt dealings with the Saudis, and the GOP structure is, if anything, more onboard for lawless attacks on political enemies than they were before.

And worst of all, I think in a crisis a lot of progressives won’t really be willing to stand up for the rule of law and free speech because they’ll thrill to the idea of attacking billionaires. But Trump won’t go after the economic elite by taxing them; he’ll punish rich people who own independent media outlets or support causes he disagrees with by coddling regime allies. It’s a very serious threat to freedom of speech and deserves to be recognized as such. Much more so than clashes about libraries or public schools, the question of who owns the means of media production and distribution and whether they are able to operate independently from the White House is a critical question about free inquiry and free speech. Yet it is rarely discussed outside of tedious business stories.

Jan. 6 Committee Should Stop Dragging Its Feet

Jan. 6 Committee Should Stop Dragging Its Feet

The longer hearings are delayed, the less effective they’ll be — and the more cynical the whole effort will look.

Wrap it up.

Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg

April 25, 2022, 8:30 PM GMT+9

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has once again delayed its public hearings; the latest estimate is that they’ll happen in June.

It’s possible that there’s a good reason that the committee has been so slow. I’ve speculated that its members mistakenly think that their report is more important than it is, or that they think they need to have every piece of the puzzle solved before moving on to public hearings. But maybe there’s something else that we don’t know.

What I can say is that there are real costs to waiting.

First, the committee must contend with the argument that January 2021 is ancient history, and that filling in the details of what happened isn’t as important as confronting any number of current or future challenges. To be sure, this is a phony argument. An attempt to overthrow the Constitution is a grave matter, especially considering that many of those involved, including former President Donald Trump, are still involved in politics — and, for that matter, seeking to purge the Republican Party of anyone who resisted Trump’s scheming. But there’s no question that the “ancient history” charge rings true to a lot of people, including many of those the committee members most want to reach. And the longer the probe takes, the stronger that argument will seem.

Second, speaking of the audience for these hearings? Democrats are pretty much all convinced that what happened was a major threat to the republic, while Trump’s strongest supporters will never agree that he did anything wrong. But weak Republicans and true independents might be open to new information. So will those in the news media who pride themselves on being neutral between the parties. For those folks, the closer the hearings are to the midterm elections the more they’ll seem like a ploy to win elections. Never mind that such hearings aren’t a very convincing method of electioneering. The point is the closer we get to elections, the more people looking for excuses to blame both sides for being “political” will find one, rather than confronting the reality that a former president and a significant portion of his party have turned against democracy and the rule of law.

Third, it appears that the committee members are trying to learn as much as they possibly can before moving to a public presentation of the evidence. To do so, they’re using subpoenas and trying to compel people to present evidence. That’s all fine. What hearings potentially can add is public pressure on witnesses. We can be certain that the committee is going to make some of those who have refused to testify look bad, just because their stonewalling will look like a coverup. On top of that, those who have complied with the committee will no doubt tell a version of the story that makes them look good at the expense of others. Those others may feel the risks of testifying are not, after all, as dangerous as leaving a one-sided story out there uncontested. There’s no guarantee that this dynamic will actually produce new compliance and new information, but it’s certainly plausible, and there’s no real way to know until things get started.

For any of this to matter the hearings have to go on for an extended period, which is yet another reason to get started sooner rather than later. They also must be compelling to watch. I’m less worried about that. The setup of the committee — small, and filled with people who take their charge seriously — should work very much in its favor. And yes, the substance, even more than a year later, remains shocking, distressing and very, very important.

You've reached your free article limit. Already a subscriber or Bloomberg

Macron wins one for democracy, but the far right still looms

Macron wins one for democracy, but the far right still looms

E.J. Dionne Jr. — Read time: 4 minutes

Columnist |

Emmanuel Macron, France's president, waves to supporters following the second round of voting in the French presidential election in Paris, France, on Sunday. (Nathan Laine/Bloomberg)

The robust victory of France’s middle-of-the-road President Emmanuel Macron in Sunday’s election is good news for the Western alliance on behalf of Ukraine and bad news for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Macron’s reelection is also a triumph for the European Union and a setback for those who would weaken it or break it up.

And the defeat of far-right leader Marine Le Pen dealt an important blow to nationalist forces in Europe focused on limiting immigration and marginalizing immigrants, particularly Muslims. It was thus a victory for democracy as well.

The size of Macron’s margin — projected at 59 percent to Le Pen’s 41 percent — was more comfortable than many of his supporters expected even two weeks ago, when Macron and Le Pen advanced to the decisive round.

Story continues below advertisement

It reflected Macron’s success in making the dangers of a Le Pen presidency more salient to key voter groups than their frustrations with inflation, their sense that he is out of touch, and a conviction among progressives that while he promised five years ago to be neither right nor left, he governed more from the center-right. To woo the left, Macron softened his stance on economic questions, notably his proposals to raise the eligibility age for social security.

Macron was especially effective in tying Le Pen to Putin. While Macron’s quest for better relations with Putin brought him criticism from the Russian dictator’s adversaries in the West, Le Pen’s closeness to Putin (and her party’s financial ties to a Russian bank) gave the incumbent a fat target, which he hit squarely during their debate last week. Macron’s insistence that Le Pen’s proposals were racist, divisive or unworkable did the rest.

But Sunday’s good news carried qualifiers and caveats, and Macron used his victory speech to acknowledge the “anger” in a country full of “doubt and division” and pledged to fight for a “more just” nation in which “no one will be left by the wayside.”

Story continues below advertisement

Despite the size of Macron’s projected victory, it fell short of his 66- to 34-percent defeat of Le Pen in 2017. Le Pen’s efforts to transform herself from a dangerous far-right zealot to a friend of the French working class bore fruit. Exit polls showed her especially strong among working-class voters. The fact that so many are now willing to support a candidate of the ultraright suggested how economic distress bred by anger over social and economic change has eroded what the French call the “Republican Front” — the alliance in support of a tolerant, democratic republic.

You're following E.J. Dionne Jr.'s opinionsFollowing

Marine Le Pen’s projected vote is more than double the 17.8 percent that her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the predecessor party to his daughter’s, won in the 2002 runoff against then-president Jacques Chirac.

Signs of anger at Macron on the left included relatively low turnout in areas won by leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who ran just behind Le Pen in the first round of voting two weeks ago. Faced with a choice between a challenger they saw as a fascist and an incumbent they regarded as a friend of big business and the wealthy, polls found that four Mélenchon voters in 10 either abstained or cast blank ballots.

In Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class region outside of Paris with a substantial Muslim population, Mélenchon won overwhelmingly in the first round. As of 5 p.m. Sunday, according to the Europe Elects Twitter feed, Seine-Saint-Denis’s turnout was the lowest in the nation at 45 percent.

Story continues below advertisement

This points to the major challenge Macron faces in French legislative elections that will be held in two rounds on June 12 and June 19. Many lukewarm Macron voters might express their discontent by opposing National Assembly candidates of the president’s party. The political leaning of the French prime minister, who enjoys considerable power, is determined by who controls the Assembly.

If Macron’s Republic on the Move party loses its majority, Macron could be faced with a fractured and unruly parliament, the need for elaborate negotiations and possibly, although it’s a long shot, a prime minister hostile to his program.

Even before Sunday’s vote, Mélenchon began campaigning for the prime minister’s job, urging voters to support his radical left party as a check on whoever won the presidency. The legislative elections will also be a test of whether the parties accustomed to governing France before Macron’s 2017 breakthrough — the center-right Republicans and the center-left Socialists — can stage a comeback after being crushed in the first presidential round.

Story continues below advertisement

None of this, however, should detract from Macron’s extraordinary achievement. A loner who broke with the major parties and, from scratch, built a novel coalition of the center managed to win a decisive reelection in a time of deep discontent and uncertainty. He prevailed in a nation that has not looked kindly on incumbents for decades.

And through his victory, he saved Europe from political catastrophe.

Historians' first verdict on Trump: You're fired! But there's more to it than that

Historians' first verdict on Trump: You're fired! But there's more to it than that

"The Trump presidency was not an aberration but the culmination of more than three decades in the GOP's evolution." So writes historian Julian Zelizer, seeking to answer the question of "how the 'Party of Lincoln' had become the 'Party of Trump." That also sums up the shared perspective of more than a dozen historians contributing chapters to "The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment." 

Trump's presidency "was not some one-off that will automatically result in a course-correction," Zelizer writes, "but a period of deep-seated conflict that profoundly wounded our polity. When his term was done, the Trump presidency cemented some of the biggest fault lines in the nation." 

This book comes as a welcome corrective to the news media's eternal puzzlement over Trump: It's a rich collection that significantly expands perspectives, beyond the familiar media frames, across a wide range of topics. But two crucial elements are missing. It lacks a blunt account of how conservatism's decades-long policy failures opened the way for Trump, and it doesn't provide a nuanced account of the ways Trump's presidency was both a historical culmination and a potential breaking point, shifting America to a form of competitive authoritarianism — in which elections still occur, but are not significant in determining who holds power.  

That hasn't happened yet, and it's arguably not a historian's job to address the abyss that still lies ahead. As Zelizer explains, this volume is intended to be a first draft of history, "part of an ongoing conversation" that "will continue to evolve in perpetuity." But if American democracy continues to crumble, that conversation will inevitably take a darker turn.

Zelizer describes the book's chapters as falling into four groups, six that "focus on the institutional and coalitional foundations on which the Trump presidency was built," five that "explore the roots and impacts of Trump's domestic policies," three that do the same for his foreign policies, and four that "look at the political and policy forces that checked and weakened" Trump's presidency — and ultimately ended it.

Setting the stage: What made Trump possible?

Zelizer's chapter in that first group sketches a broad evolutionary argument, stressing how "increasingly conservative voices tied to a grassroots movement pushed their way to the top of the party," with many Trumpian elements — the personalized attack politics of Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich, the contempt for expertise of the George W. Bush administration — largely in place long before Trump took center stage. It's a solid beginning for the book that follows, but what's notably missing is the role of elite funders and the institutions and organizations they created to shape, nurture and mobilize that movement. The role of the radicalized religious right is also notably absent, which is a surprising omission considering the role of white evangelical support and Christian nationalism (e.g., dominionist leader Lance Wallnau's book "God's Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling") in cultivating support for Trump. 

He says little about conservative media, too, but that side of the story is well covered by Nicole Hemmer ("Messengers of the Right"), whose chapter, "Remade in His Image: How Trump Transformed Right-Wing Media" is one of the strongest for its combination of historical scope and nuanced detail. Hemmer begins in the 1950s with publications like National Review and radio shows like "The Manion Forum," whose host promised, "Every speaker over our network has been 100 percent right-wing. … No left-winger, no international socialist, no one-worlder, no communist will ever be heard." 

The ideological purity and isolation of that statement set the tone for so much that followed, with the rise of populist right-wing talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Hemmer's account reflects how seamlessly Trump's manipulations fit into the larger dynamic in which media figures radicalize their audiences through feedback loops that have grown exponentially more powerful, marginalizing those who are unwilling or unable to keep up.  

Angus Burgin's related chapter, "The Crisis of Truth in the Age of Trump" is descriptively apt, noting that Trump "promised from the outset to deal with a slew of fictitious problems…. And he promised his audiences a fictitious future." But Burgin is needlessly constrained when he agonizes that "the central concern raised by the crisis of truth in the age of Trump was not — despite his obvious admiration for those in positions of despotic power — about an excess of authoritarianism but rather about a possible excess of democracy. ... [H]ad the evolution of our media environment created a need for heavier-handed regulation?" 

Burgin notes that Jürgen Habermas has "expressed an enduring faith in the prospects for reasoned debate in an age of information abundance," but does not connect that such faith with recent work being done to vindicate it, such as Chris Bail's "Breaking the Social Media Prism" and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen's paper on promoting online "truth, autonomy and democratic discourse." 

Three chapters on substantive demographic politics follow. The most crucial is Kathleen Belew's on "Militant Whiteness in the Age of Trump," followed by Geraldo Cadava's "Latinos for Trump" and Leandra Zarnow's chapter on "Trump's feud with feminists" and the "triumph" of conservative women. Belew explains a key source of Trump's strength, while the two others explore why Trump and the Republican Party's alleged demographic weakness is not quite what many liberals and leftists imagine. Crucially, Belew illuminates the relationships between white power, white nationalism and white supremacy: 

White power refers to a branch of the larger militant Right, a coalition that also includes some violent conservatives who say they are not motivated by race. White power is both white supremacist and committed to violence. White nationalism, on the other hand, can refer in common usage to two very different things. One is the idea that there is something about America that is, and should be, intrinsically white, and that people pursuing policy making should ensure that this remains so.... The second use of the term refers to people seeking a white homeland (also sometimes called white separatism).

That sets the stage for explaining what happened under Trump: 

[T]he Trump years featured both a white nationalist policy project helmed by people in the administration and a white power social movement that believed many of the same claims about whiteness but wished for a white ethnostate, ideally through the overthrow of the country. … White power and white nationalism both fall under a broader category: white supremacy. This refers not only to people who have racist belief systems (overtly or covertly) but also to a broad array of systems, histories, and infrastructures that continue to contribute to racial inequality even when individual racism is absent.

This kind of analysis is crucial to understanding not just what Trump and his allies were (and are) actually doing, but also how to respond to backlash obfuscations like the "critical race theory" moral panic, which intentionally collapses the distinctions Belew carefully draws.

Trump's outreach to Latinos, although misunderstood by many liberal observers, may be "the most ordinary part of an extraordinary presidency, drawing on a GOP playbook going back to Ronald Reagan.

Cadava calls Trump's Latino outreach "perhaps the most ordinary part of an extraordinary presidency," drawing on a GOP playbook dating back to Reagan's 1980 campaign, when a trio of Mexican-American advertising and media executives identified four things as core characteristic of the Hispanic Republican: "religious devotion, a tireless work ethic, anticommunism, and the related belief in free market capitalism as the best path to prosperity." While Trump certainly differed from Reagan in many important ways — most notably on border and immigration issues — this playbook remained essentially intact. As Cadava writes, "the understandable and justified media coverage of the outrages of the Trump era obscured the more mundane but effective ways that Trump built Latino support with his persistent focus on immigration, the economy, religious freedom, and the supposed rise of socialism within the Democratic Party." 

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Zarnow's chapter begins with the worldwide Women's March the day after Trump's inauguration, which may have begun with white women's gut reactions on social media but matured into a sophisticated centering of diverse, marginalized identities. After setting the stage, however, she echoes Cadava's historical parallels: 

No president since Ronald Reagan offered right-wing women more opportunity to be political insiders with a direct channel to the West Wing. For this personal success, they were grateful and devoted. "I've never felt anything but respected and empowered by him to do my job," professed Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Zarnow goes on to note that the "language of empowerment Sanders uses here, like color blindness, has been deployed by conservatives as a device to counter how much the mass feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s successfully shifted the gender landscape in the United States." That's true, of course. It's equally true that Trump has a long history of employing and promoting women, precisely because they're almost universally undervalued and are a great source of underpaid labor, as are the undocumented immigrants he has often employed at his various projects and properties. Neither Zarnow nor Cadava appears to notice that telling comparison.

Domestic policies

Three of the five chapters on Trump's domestic policies also emphasize the centrality of race. Two do so specifically, "Immigration Policy and Politics Under Trump" by Mae Ngai and "From Color-Blind to Black Lives Matter" by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Race also figures centrally in "The Rhetoric and Reality of Infrastructure During the Trump Presidency" by Jason Scott Smith, which mentions white supremacy in its second sentence.

Ngai's primary focus is giving shape to Trump's savage, shambolic immigration policies, whose wanton cruelty is more widely understood than their sheer scope and volume. "Altogether, some one thousand changes in immigration policy were made by rule modifications, directives, form changes, memos, certifications, executive orders, presidential proclamations, pending rule changes, and other bureaucratic actions," she writes. 

Ngai also provides concise historical context, first by noting that nativism tends to emerge during "periods of [economic] expansion associated with large structural transformation, or what economists call sectoral change," which "engender[s] anxiety as opportunity looms simultaneously large and elusive for portions of the population."  

Immigrants do not create such change, nor do they generally "replace" native-born workers, but they do tend to work in newly expanding sectors. Ngai also notes that upsurges of nativism are "symbiotically linked — politically and structurally — to contemporaneous surges of racism and racial oppression of African Americans."

But specific episodes require specific analysis. "In our time, racism against immigrant communities of color, especially Latino communities, is the fundamental core of nativism," Ngai writes. "But open racism became impolitic in the post-civil rights era. It became dressed as a complaint against 'illegal aliens,'" providing a veneer of legitimacy unwarranted by facts on the ground: Most Latinos in the U.S. are citizens, and undocumented workers overwhelmingly take jobs that citizens or documented workers don't want. 

"Nativism has been a staple of conservative politics since the 1980s," she writes, but Republican opinion was split between "business interests, which wanted to exploit immigrants, and racial and cultural nationalists, who wished to expel them." By 2016, the latter had triumphed, she notes, but without exploring the reasons why — which goes back to the missing analysis of conservative policy failure. 

Smith's infrastructure chapter follows and is closely related. "Trump's pledge to rebuild the nation's infrastructure was by far his most popular campaign promise, but it was one that went seemingly unfulfilled," Smith notes, leading some conservatives, like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, to dismiss Trump. Nonetheless, he continues: 

Trump's rhetorical commitments to infrastructure in fact underwrote a sea change in the legal mechanisms and policing practices of the federal government, changes with profound consequences, particularly for immigrants, asylum seekers, and people of color. … Trump used the language of infrastructure as a strategic weapon, as historian of rhetoric Jennifer Mercieca has perceptively observed: to unite supporters, divide opponents, and avoid accountability for his words and deeds.

Trump's infrastructure plan was his most popular campaign promise, and the one he never even tried to fulfill — except for the piecemeal construction of a border wall.

Gallup found at the time of Trump's inauguration that his infrastructure plan was his most popular campaign promise, rated "very important" by 69% of Americans, compared to just 26% who felt the same about building his border wall. The former promise "to rebuild the nation's network of roads, bridges, and airports" exemplified "Trump's optimistic appeal to an earlier era," Smith writes, while the border wall signified "a turning away from America's founding myth of the open frontier, embracing instead reactionary populism and racist nationalism." Yet it was the one piece of infrastructure Trump actually delivered on, if only in pieces and largely by pilfering funds authorized for other reasons. Smith calls it "a powerful example of how rhetoric successfully transformed reality." 

Taylor's chapter is less about Trump's specific policies on race and more a historical analysis examining "how Trump's ascendance was rooted in the mainstream in the aftermath of the Black movement in the 1960s." She begins by pairing a description of Trump's campaign announcement, with its invocation of Mexican "rapists," with the nearly simultaneous racist murder of nine Black parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, whose perpetrator reportedly declared, "I have to do it. You're raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go." The two claims had much in common, Taylor provocatively observes: 

The invocation of rape, by Roof and Trump, was a graphic and brutal envisioning of white men as the feminized victims of rogue outsiders who have taken advantage of a flaccid state ill equipped for war, unable to protect its borders, soft on crime, and generally weak and unable to function effectively, the result being white Americans shoved from the security of their position in the social hierarchy, cast about, and unsure of what the future holds.

This was fantastical, of course, and Taylor proceeds to trace what happened in reality: First the trajectory from Nixon to Bush by which "conservative politics pushed the bounds of racist innuendo, framed as color blindness," and then the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. In that period, "more than 240,000 Black families lost their homes," while the Occupy Wall Street movement "sharpened the focus on systemic crisis, pivoting away from the fixation of the political class on the behavior and morality of the poor and the working class."

That also dovetailed with the publication of Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow," which "drew the public's attention to the systemic factors fueling young Black men's disproportionate arrests and incarceration," and coincided with a wave of videos showing the police killings of Black men. That led to the Black Lives Matter movement which marked, Taylor writes, "the emergence of a new Black Left" and coincided with the rise of a broader "new left" that created "pressures not only on liberalism but also on the Right to more sharply rebuke new demands for expanding government after years of neglect": 

A space beyond the color-blind innuendo of the post-civil-rights era emerged for more direct and racist attacks on entire groups of people, cultures, and religion as a way for the Right to more clearly distinguish itself. This was not necessarily in reaction to these new movements, but developed in reaction to the Obama presidency, which became a dress rehearsal for a later brand of Trumpism.

Two more chapters on domestic policy have distinctly different flavors. Bathsheba Demuth's "Against the Tide: The Trump Administration and Climate Change" juxtaposes the international scientific community's call for "urgent and fundamental departure from business as usual" with the scant attention given to climate issues in the 2016 campaign, even facing the hottest year on record, intensified climate activism and 15 domestic weather events that each caused over $1 billion in damage. Demuth situates Trump's climate denialism in the framework of GOP anti-regulatory politics, paired with intensifying youth climate activism, epitomized by the Sunrise Movement and the climate strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg. It isn't just Democrats or liberals who are concerned with climate issues, Demuth notes: In 2019, two-thirds of registered Republicans under age 35 "described themselves as worried about climate change, an 18-point increase over five years."

Demuth observes that the Trump administration's last-minute sale of Arctic oil and gas leases — which actually occurred on Insurrection Day, Jan. 6, 2021 — was supposed to bring in almost $1 billion to help pay for Trump's 2017 tax cuts. But major fossil-fuel companies declined to bid, and the sale netted less than $15 million. In many ways, she writes, this "was a fitting summation of Trump's climate change stance: hasty, unpopular, a policy relic from a different century.... It was emblematic of how out of sync Trump, and many in his party, had become."

A last-minute sale of Arctic oil and gas leases — which actually occurred on Insurrection Day, Jan. 6 — was meant to bring in $1 billion to help pay for Trump's tax cuts. It was a total bust, netting just $15 million.

In her chapter "The Gilded Elevator: Tech in the Time of Trump," Margaret O'Mara chronicles an epochal shift from the period when tech had been celebrated to one where it's criticized from all sides. Although Trump's use of social media clearly makes him a central figure in this narrative, O'Mara contextualizes him as very much a product of his environment, particularly the focus on "engagement," which is most effectively activated through fear and rage. 

There have always been significant contradictions in the tech realm, as explored in Paulina Borsook's classic "Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech," but they have remained remarkably well-contained until recently. "America's high-tech regions may have been some of the most Left leaning in the country, but the industry itself was built by Reaganomomics, growing large in a four-decade era of tax cuts, deregulation, pro-employer labor laws, and a laissez-faire approach to anti-trust enforcement," O'Mara notes. 

"These companies had long branded themselves as a nobler strain of capitalism, able to make money and do good at the same time," she continues, but that image crumbled during Trump's term. "Because of their market-gobbling business models and the fractious politics of Trump's America, these moguls and their companies faced stiff political headwinds from both the progressive left and populist Right," yet ended the Trump years "richer and more entrenched in American life than ever."

International affairs and foreign policy

Two of the three chapters on global matters are strikingly different, due partly to the subject matter — China and the Middle East — while the third, Jeffrey Engel's "No More Mulligans: Donald Trump and International Alliances," mentions but fails to develop a crucial theme that arguably could undergird this entire book: Trump's 1990 admission to Connie Chung, "I'm a non-trusting person."  

Engel contrasts this with Dwight Eisenhower, who once said, "Patience, tolerance, frankness, absolute honesty in all dealings, are absolutely essential." Trump's fundamental distrust of everyone not only informed his foreign policy ("Our allies take advantage of us far greater than our enemies," "We must as a nation be more unpredictable" and so on), but everything else he has ever done — which is a crucial part of his appeal. It's axiomatic that you can't run a healthy society on this basis, still less forge successful international alliances. America's post-World War II success relied on leading broad coalitions, Engel notes, and "Trump's approach to international alliances and international organizations, therefore, eroded the very cooperative ethos that made the America of Trump's youth the world's greatest power in the first place."

After surveying the chaos Trump sowed, Engel concludes: "The world might have been willing to give the United States a new chance to revert back to the mean in 2009," as signaled by Barack Obama's utterly unearned Nobel Peace Prize, but "is unlikely to so fluidly offer a new chance this time around."

James Mann's "Trump's China Policy: The Chaotic End to the Era of Engagement" offers a clear structural framework — there were three phases to Trump's policy and three factions of China hawks among his advisers (as well as some free-traders) — while Daniel Kurtzer's chapter on Trump's Middle East legacy describes an episodic "series of tactical maneuvers without an underlying strategy." In both cases, Trump was driven primarily by wanting to repudiate prior policies, but different timeframes are highlighted: From Richard Nixon onward, in the case of China, and the post-9/11 period in the Middle East. 

That latter decision avoids many of the darker complexities of America's history in the Middle East, or its ludicrous claims to support democracy. Kurtzer concludes with an unsurprisingly negative view of Trump's record, writing that he "left behind a more dangerous Middle East, in much worse shape than what he inherited," but does nothing to connect those failure to the longer trajectory of flawed American policy in the region.  

In the case of China, Mann observes that "Trump often operated with bipartisan support" on policy questions, "because American views on China were changing." At the same time, "Trump's pronouncements on China also set loose some of the darker forces that he displayed elsewhere: demonization, conspiratorial thinking, and a strain of racism, along with some self-dealing for the family business." 

Mann divides Trump's policy into three phases: a year of tentative maneuvering with the Chinese regime, followed by two years of negotiations which were abruptly upended by the COVID pandemic. His advisers were split between free traders who represented the waning continuity of bipartisan policy and three distinct factions of China hawks: those focused on trying to end China's restrictive trade practices; more political advocates "focused less on specific policy actions than on nativist rhetoric"; and the less visible but often more influential national security hawks at the Pentagon, FBI, CIA and Commerce Department. 

Of course there was one more faction: the Trump family itself, particularly Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, whose "role and influence on China policy waned, after reports were published of some of their business dealings." Mann's framework makes more sense of Trump's China policies than anyone could reasonably expect and helps situate it within the broader reassessment of the U.S.-China relationship. 

Countervailing forces and the end (for now)

The book's chapters dealing with the "forces that checked and weakened" Trump are necessarily more diverse — but perhaps not diverse enough. Beverly Gage's chapter, "'Nut Job,' 'Scumbag,' and 'Fool': How Trump Tried to Deconstruct the FBI and the Administrative State," is focused on Trump's battles against the FBI, for example, though it does provide some historical background along with a few references to his broader attacks on other federal agencies. But there's no discussion of Trump's widespread practice of appointing acting officials in order to wreak havoc both within the executive branch and in terms of congressional oversight.  

Merlin Chowkwanyun's chapter on Trump's response to the COVID pandemic is carefully considered, but ultimately in a way that implicitly lets our ex-president off the hook. "I situate Trump's inaction in three contexts: state and local autonomy, cultures of antiexpertise, and resource misallocation and inequality," Chowkwanyun writes, and that proves to be a sensible analytical framework. He offers a sensitive nuanced treatment of the ways that anti-expertise culture can be constructive, as with the rise of the women's health movement or HIV/AIDS and environmental justice activism.

There's no way to separate Trump's culpability for the pandemic from "larger social forces," because he amplified and exacerbated those forces at every turn, making it impossible for others to act responsibly.

That nuance is absent at a higher level, however. After identifying the three contexts, Chowkwanyun introduces "the 60/40 question: If you had to apportion culpability, how much would you lay at the feet of Trump and how much at the larger social forces in which he operated?" In fact, there's no way to separate Trump's culpability from the larger social forces because he repeatedly amplified, intensified and exacerbated the worst of those forces at virtually every turn, making it difficult if not impossible for others to act responsibly. A better question might be: How much did Trump do to exacerbate existing problems, and how many did he create on his own?

The first section of Michael Kazin's chapter, "The Path of Most Resistance: How Democrats Battled Trump and Moved Left" is tellingly entitled "Herbert Donald Trump?" Kazin begins in the late 1970s, when "the Democrats' nearly half-century reign as the majority party ended." (Neither party has held a consistent majority since.) From that point onward, "the election of a Republican president and large GOP gains in Congress had always persuaded [Democratic] party leaders to shift rightward." 

But Trump differed from his GOP predecessors by being uninterested in "developing a coalition that could forge a new Republican majority," preferring to cultivate his MAGA movement instead. This kept his popularity numbers in the low 40s, where "he could not scare Democratic politicians" into echoing him. Instead, many identified with the anti-Trump "Resistance," whose "inchoate nature became a strength instead of a liability," allowing for a wide range of expression. 

Translating this into electoral politics was more complicated, of course. In the end, for Democrats the 2020 election "spelled relief instead of deliverance from the dilemma of how to build an enduring new majority," Kazin writes. If there is a winning formula for Democrats in the years ahead, he suggests it must lie in a rearticulation of "moral capitalism," a touchstone of successful Democratic Party politics throughout its history.

In "Impeachment After Trump," Gregory Downs notes both the supposed ubiquity of reverence for the Constitution and the harsh reality of constitutional destruction. Trump's Senate trials, he writes, 

were, by and large, paeans to the Constitution, although often homages to quite different constitutional interpretations. Democrats voted for conviction to save the Constitution from abuse. Republicans claimed their acquittal honored the Constitution's high standard for impeachment.

In the end, Trump's acquittals "raise the specter that future political leaders will know that they have almost complete impunity as long as they retain the support of their base, no matter what the Constitution says." 

The underdeveloped back story here is that since Nixon and Watergate, the GOP has increasingly become an anti-democratic party. Downs' account of how things have changed avoids stating that clearly, with both-sides commentary that is factually true but misleading: There was increased talk of impeachment under both Bush and Obama, with roughly similar polling support — but Bush was accused of fraudulently leading the nation into a disastrous war, whereas Obama was falsely accused of having been born in Kenya. In the Trump era, Downs writes, "It was clear that impeachment talk was central to U.S. politics and that actual impeachment might never work." In other words, the Constitution has been amended — if not nullified — without making any changes to its text.

This points to the larger problems that surround the Trump presidency. American democracy as we've known it is suffering a fundamental breakdown, unlike anything seen since the Civil War. While this volume provides a rich collection of historical insights, I was haunted by what's missing that might help address that threat: For instance, the broader comparative perspective found in Federico Finchelstein's "From Fascism to Populism in History," the longer cross-cultural historical perspective of Edmund Fawcett's "Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition," the psychological dimensions found in Ian Hughes' "Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy" or Steven Hassan's "The Cult of Trump," and the social, cultural and economic dynamics in Peter Turchin's "Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History." 

While "The Presidency of Donald J. Trump," has important insights to offer, it should be read alongside these works and others like them, if we truly want to engage with the most basic questions about whether our nation can long endure.

Read more on America's 45th president and his numerous fans: