In Pennsylvania, the Big Lie Is Spreading Its Roots

In Pennsylvania, the Big Lie Is Spreading Its Roots

As election-deniers become more involved in local politics, they are bringing with them the propaganda and conspiracies of national politics. 

By Francis Wilkinson

30 October 2022 at 7:00 pm GMT+9

As the elderly woman hesitated at the top of the auditorium steps, a college student in a blue suit and pink tie materialized, lending his arm and guiding her to a seat. The woman’s slightly less hobbled friend beamed at the display of youthful gallantry. It was not the only Norman Rockwell moment I observed at a debate earlier this month in Gettysburg, Pa., that great rampart of American republicanism.

Three candidates for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives — an incumbent Republican, a Democratic challenger and a libertarian outsider — responded to questions posed by a local worthy. The politicians were mostly polite. The crowd of about 200, largely older and overwhelmingly White, was mostly respectful. The evening seemed to provide a respite from the tortured politics of 2022.

Until the poison was released. About midway through the hourlong debate, after local taxes and infrastructure and education received their two cents, the moderator posed the question that doubles as an open wound: “Do you think the 2020 election was free and fair?”

Representative Dan Moul, who has been in office since 2007, gave an answer perfectly designed to undermine democratic faith. “Who’s ever going to know?” he replied.

Describing former President Donald Trump’s crowd of 30,000 at a 2020 rally in nearby Lancaster, Moul said it seemed improbable that such a popular figure could have lost the election. (Almost 7 million votes were cast in Pennsylvania in 2020; Joe Biden received about 80,000 more than Trump.)

U.S. President Donald Trump's rally in Pennsylvania

A Trump campaign rally at Lancaster Airport

Photographer: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Moul also reported having seen “government footage from cameras mounted on government buildings with people walking up to drop boxes at 3, 4 o’clock in the morning with handfuls of ballots and shoving them in.”

After the debate, I asked Moul where I could obtain the government footage he had described. He said he didn’t have access to it. He directed me instead to watch a thoroughly debunked conspiracy movie produced by a professional propagandist.

Trump-inspired election denial is, of course, part of the national landscape. Moul’s claims echo not only Trump but the commonwealth’s top Republican leaders, including gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, a White Christian nationalist who was at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Former President Trump Holds Rally In Support Of 'Pennsylvania Trump Ticket'

Doug Mastriano, Republican gubernatorial candidate for Pennsylvania

Photographer: Bloomberg

Like the contours of the Gettysburg debate, with its customary format and folkways, the shape of local politics in 2022 is eminently familiar: Meetings are convened. Petitions are presented. Campaigns are waged. Votes are taken. It might be easy to convince yourself that nothing has gone awry.

But the content of local government has grown ugly and dangerous. In small towns and counties across Pennsylvania, the pernicious shockwaves of 2020 are not a distant phenomenon. Local officials, many of them Republicans trying to do an honest job, are increasingly squeezed between the lies of Republican elites and relentless attacks from local activists who treat the lies as to-do lists.

The resulting pressure, directed at local targets with no easy means of escape, is immense. “These people just contrived one thing after another,” Gary Eichelberger, a Republican commissioner in Cumberland County, told me when I first spoke to him not long after the Jan. 6 attack.

Cumberland is in the south-central part of the state’s geographic “T” (basically all the area outside metro Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Pennsylvania Republicans have dominated the T for generations. It has proved to be fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. “They started rumors that there were bags of ballots coming in, phony ballots that were coming in, and they had people observing our building and circling our building,” Eichelberger said. “They were chasing our mailman.”

“They started rumors that there were bags of ballots coming in… They were chasing our mailman.”

The delusions proved too profitable to abandon. “They’re just going to keep coming back and coming back,” Eichelberger told me last month. “At least for the ringleaders, it does not appear that they’re really seeking facts and answers. They’re trying to keep this ball rolling.”

MAGA activists, spurred by a state group called Audit the Vote PA — whose “audit” is riddled with errors, according to one investigative report — are “pressure-testing these folks to see how far they can push them,” said Kyle Miller of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group founded after the 2016 election.

Former President Trump Holds Campaign Rally In Pennsylvania To Support Local Candidates

At a Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Sept 3. 

Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America

Elected officials who prove uncooperative face accusations of corruption and the prospect of MAGA challenges for local offices, with control of local election infrastructure included in the spoils. In the meantime, MAGA activists spread rumors and demand actions to confirm voter fraud that no credible investigators can detect. They overwhelm local governments with information requests about suspicious ballots, phantom voters and compromised election machinery.

Forrest Lehman, election director of Lycoming County, said he has spent hundreds of hours responding to conspiracy-fueled demands for information. By his calculation, Pennsylvania has lost some 600 years of collective election administration experience in the past couple years, with election directors or deputy directors resigning in more than half of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.

relates to In Pennsylvania, the Big Lie Is Spreading Its Roots

In Luzerne County, where Trump beat Joe Biden 57% to 42% in 2020, the county election director left in August. He had lasted eight months in the job, which is two months longer than his predecessor made it.

Threats of violence are common. “I’ve become more of a recluse,” Melanie Ostrander, the election director of Washington County, south of Pittsburgh, told me. “You kind of worry when you go out.”

Small-town government is under siege. And until elections produce the kind of results that MAGA activists approve of, it will likely remain so. Audit the Vote PA is training poll watchers to supervise Pennsylvania election sites. Mastriano has proposed requiring every Pennsylvania voter to re-register, a move that would make it easier to exclude those inclined to vote incorrectly. If elected governor, he has promised to appoint a secretary of state who will manage elections from a reliably MAGA perspective. Republicans in the Pennsylvania General Assembly are ginning up a constitutional amendment to tighten restrictions on voting.

Of course, if Mastriano or Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Mehmet Oz lose their elections in November — Mastriano has trailed consistently in polls while Oz appears to be in a tight race — the result will be further proof that the system is corrupt and needs to be overthrown. Rolling Stone reports that “Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the ‘election integrity’ of Democratic strongholds,” including Philadelphia. Public officials who refuse to join the MAGA chorus will be subject to renewed attacks.

Former President Trump Holds Rally In Support Of 'Pennsylvania Trump Ticket'

Trump and Oz at a rally.

Photographer: Bloomberg

In testimony last year before the US Senate, former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, described the symbiosis between elites and activists as a “vicious cycle” in which elected officials lie to their constituents and the deceived constituents then demand action “to fix something that never happened to begin with. Then elected officials use those demands as an excuse to do something.”

Pennsylvania was once a bastion of Republican moderates such as governors Dick Thornburgh and Tom Ridge. But the party belongs to the likes of Trump and Mastriano now. The consequences of that transformation threaten to warp the party, the commonwealth and the nation for years to come.

***

The agenda for the Oct. 20 county commissioners’ meeting in Washington County was neither surprising nor contentious. Prayer, pledge of allegiance, approval of meeting minutes. There were commendations for a couple of sheriff deputies (punctuated by jokes about a remarkably unruly law-enforcement canine in attendance). Then followed a series of rapid-fire unanimous votes by the two Republicans and one Democrat approving contracts for software upgrades, real-estate appraisals, disability insurance and the like. The commission, led by Republican Diana Irey Vaughan, moved efficiently.

As at every meeting, time was set aside for public comments. The citizens who rose to speak, however, were markedly less interested in county affairs. One way or another, public comments were all variations on the theme of Donald Trump, who won 61% of the vote in Washington County in 2020.

A woman “respectfully” requested that the commissioners instruct the elections director to “segregate any undated mail ballots” for next month’s election. (The validity of undated ballots is a source of bubbling conflict in the state; the county had already decided to segregate those ballots from others, pending clearer legal guidance.) That was as close to a local issue as the public comments produced.

relates to In Pennsylvania, the Big Lie Is Spreading Its Roots

A man rose to criticize false claims of election fraud, then segued into a tally of close Trump associates who have been convicted of crimes. A woman delivered an impressively learned sermon on the nature and history of fascism. Another woman, articulate and forceful, lambasted the commissioners for failing to open up voting machines to public inspection, and for generally destroying the sanctity of the vote in Washington County.

“So do something! Count something by hand!” she urged them. “You can’t just let this go on like this. I mean, why would we think that the 2022 midterms are going to be any different?”

It was actually a slow day at the commission, comment-wise. Since the 2020 election, local citizens have been showing up at meetings, every other week, to demand that their local government refashion itself to serve the lies and confirm the conspiracy theories that animate them. Their frustration is palpable. So are their threats.

“Election integrity is the No. 1 issue, but as it stands right now, every one of you has to go,” one activist told the commissioners at their meeting on Dec. 16, 2021. “The people are fed up and they’re not taking this. I’m just trying to give you advice because we’re not going to go anywhere — and there’s a lot of us. Most can’t come because of work, but don’t underestimate the support of this. That is my friendly advice.”

Before he turned from the microphone, he offered a final comment: “Merry Christmas.”

“Why would we think that the 2022 midterms are going to be any different?”

Bracken Burns was a Democratic commissioner in the county until 2012. He presided at meetings “literally every other week for 16 years,” he said. Few people bothered to attend, and those who did were generally looking for help with a specific local problem.

After November 2020, the character of the meetings changed. “I’ve been to a couple of them,” Burns said, “and they just make me physically ill.”

Attacks on county government, which serves more than 200,000 residents, are also coming from inside the house. Brenda Davis, the clerk of courts, has waged a persistent war on the commissioners, promoting conspiracy theories and bucking commission directions. Davis, who eventually was held in contempt for refusing to follow a court order, was part of a MAGA wave that swept local elections in 2019. She is also a local promoter of Douglas Frank, an Ohio election conspiracist with whom Washington County commissioners agreed to meet last February.

Frank, whose work has been repeatedly exposed as junk, claimed the county’s election was “hacked” and that county voting machines were subject to “control chips.” The commissioners found him unpersuasive. Their resistance merely provided additional evidence that local government, like state government and federal government, can’t be trusted.

Protestors Active In Philadelphia As Pennsylvania Ballot Count Continues

Outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, Nov. 6, 2020.

Photographer: Chris McGrath/Getty Images North America

Commissioner Diana Irey Vaughan has grown accustomed to functioning in an ever-expanding fog of doubt. Still, she moves quickly and decisively, extending crisp, warm, greetings to the people she encounters walking the halls of government. After 27 years in office, she exudes confidence and competence. A registered Republican since she moved to the area in 1984, she might object to being likened to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but Vaughan has a similar woman-in-charge aura. She bluntly labels persistent falsehoods about the election, many of them generated by her own party, as “propaganda.”

Whether creators and consumers of propaganda will join to end Vaughan’s political career is an issue for next year’s elections. “The story next year in Pennsylvania is going to be what happens in local primaries for county commissioner when you have election-denying candidates running,” said Forrest Lehman, the elections director of Lycoming County. “They want to be in charge of the elections.”

Like some local officials elsewhere in the state, Vaughan took the initiative to review allegations of irregularities, spending hours investigating. “I personally looked into over 500 allegations of wrongdoing,” she said. Only two, she said, had any potential merit, and neither indicated systemic fraud. She turned her findings over to the district attorney.

“My own party slammed down on my desk a list of individuals who they claimed were deceased but had voted,” Vaughan told me. “We found every one of those individuals very much alive.”

Vaughan’s detective work produced only scorn from people who want their fantasies confirmed. For many of her constituents, the knot of lies and resentments, which they press and knead like worry beads, is too tight for even the most dedicated public official to unravel.

“My own party slammed down on my desk a list of individuals who they claimed were deceased but had voted.

We found every one of those individuals very much alive.”​​​

At the county commission meeting I attended, after the local woman had implored the commissioners to just “do something,” I followed her to the exit and asked if she would speak to me. She asked who I was writing for. After rolling her eyes at my answer, she said I wouldn’t dare go “against the narrative” of the powerful mainstream media.

I asked her if there was something larger than an election that she feared had been stolen from her. (There is ample research that lost social status, and fear of further losses, is a driver of MAGA political reaction.) She accused me — perhaps justly this time — of seeking to impose a narrative on her.

Then she made an offer: If I would first agree to watch a film about voting machines, she would agree to speak to me.

We eyed each other for a while in silence. Her preferred conspiracy film was different from the more popular one I had been encouraged to watch earlier in the week in Gettysburg. I hadn’t heard of it. I envisioned the tedium of sitting through more polarizing nonsense. And I imagined the Berlin Wall of mental checkpoints that would meet any question that I posed to her.

I told her that I wouldn’t watch a conspiracy movie as a precondition to conversation, no doubt confirming her suspicions about the system. We did not speak again.

***

Donald Trump Trailer in PA

Along I-76 in western Pennsylvania.

Photographer: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc.

 

Democracy promotion used to be a project of US institutions engaged in foreign nations. Democracy groups are now working in Pennsylvania and other states as well. I spoke with half a dozen leaders in the movement over the past month. Each was working on safeguarding the 2022 election in Pennsylvania. The high stakes and heavy workload had not induced despair. But confidence was not overflowing.

“Normally, truth is the answer to lies,” said Al Schmidt, the former Republican commissioner in Philadelphia who now runs the Committee of Seventy, a good-government organization founded in Philadelphia more than a century ago. “But we’ve only seen that to be of limited success. It’s a lot easier to fool someone than to convince someone that they’ve been fooled. And we’ve had about a third of Americans who have been fooled for a very long time.”

Conservative activists have been producing bogus allegations of voter fraud for decades. There is a well-traveled claim, for example, that a state election in Missouri in 2010 was decided by “50 votes cast illegally by citizens of Somalia.” A Missouri court found in 2010 that “credible evidence proves that there was no voter misconduct and there was no voter fraud with regard to this election.”

Yet the lie about dark-skinned foreigners casting illegal votes still motors around the propaganda track. You can read it, right now, on the website of the Heritage Foundation, where a Supreme Court justice spoke just last week. The false claim about Somalis appears under the byline of Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage senior legal fellow who testified under oath in 2018 that he doesn’t know of a single US election decided by noncitizen votes.

Trump may be a singular liar, but he has had many allies in his campaign to discredit democracy. His own attorney general, William Barr, was lauded for contradicting Trump’s claims of widespread fraud in December 2020. But Barr had previously spread scurrilous claims about mail ballots and fraud, actively sowing doubt about the 2020 election before votes were cast. He then permitted Trump’s lies to fester for weeks after the election before finally stating that the election was legitimate.

Former Attorney General Barr Speaks At The Federalist Society

Former US Attorney General William Barr.

Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images North America

Fighting falsehoods has grown more difficult as the media has fractured and right-wing infotainment has become a closed loop. Most democracy organizations are focused elsewhere — on blunting the most egregious, public symptoms of anti-democratic fervor, such as intimidation efforts or laws and administrative actions designed to restrict voting. Addressing root causes of American conservative disaffection is largely beyond their capacity.

The job of democracy activists, nearly all of whom work for nonpartisan organizations, is further complicated by the reality that American democracy is increasingly a partisan commitment. “We are a nonpartisan organization,” said Al Schmidt, “and I’m very sensitive to perceptions that we would be considered anything other than nonpartisan. That’s a challenge when so much of the propaganda seeking to undermine confidence in elections is coming from my party, the Republican Party.”

Many groups, including Common Cause and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, participate in an Election Protection Coalition, which is modeled on efforts that began during the 2020 election, when it became increasingly apparent that Trump did not intend to relinquish power voluntarily. The various groups have divisions of labor — communications, courts, voter registration and the like.

“So much of the propaganda seeking to undermine confidence in elections is coming from my party, the Republican Party.”

Kadida Kenner is chief executive officer of the New Pennsylvania Project, a voting-rights organization that primarily does voter registration. Democracy, she said, remains too “abstract” to mobilize many of the people her group seeks to engage. “We can’t get to the nitty-gritty of civic education if we can’t get past the first few obstacles, which are the pocketbook issues,” she told me.

Democracy needs active institutions to promote its interests and defend it against enemies, foreign and domestic. But the work of repair is going to have to extend beyond institutions, courthouses and big cities. The US Capitol was attacked on Jan. 6, 2021. Local county seats are fending off less violent, but no less insidious, attacks on a regular basis — with far fewer resources to blunt the blows. Conservative counties, where many credible leaders will face MAGA opponents in GOP primaries, are especially worrisome.

Trump Supporters Hold "Stop The Steal" Rally In DC Amid Ratification Of Presidential Election

A scene from Jan. 6.

Photographer: Samuel Corum/Getty Images North America

 

Coaxing tens of millions of Americans back to democratic commitments is a grueling task. I missed a quiet opportunity with the woman I met in Washington County. I don’t mean to suggest that I would have breached her formidable defenses; of the two of us, she was likely the more certain of her beliefs. But the ebb and flow of democracy takes more effort one day than another. The cost of little failures — unrepaired frays, unventured conversations — is higher today than it was 20 years ago, or 40.

By its nature, democratic work falls to ordinary people, town by town, citizen by citizen. A Gettysburg Republican told me that the real conflict in her local party is not over Trump or his lies about voter fraud. Neither topic, she said, is much discussed. Instead, the division is between those Republicans who look at Democratic neighbors as civic equals and viable friends, and those who consider Democrats an enemy that must be crushed. In Gettysburg, a battle rages. The tide appears to run against the republic. The consequence of failure is a whirlwind.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Share this article

headshot of Francis Wilkinson

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was an editor for the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist. @fdwilkinson

Conspiracy Theories Are Not a Partisan Phenomenon

Conspiracy Theories Are Not a Partisan Phenomenon

Some voters may have some crazy beliefs, but all voters have some legitimate concerns — and those are what politicians should be addressing.

John Fetterman in a diner in 2018. 

John Fetterman in a diner in 2018. 

Photographer: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post

On a trip to Marietta, Ohio, last week for a speaking engagement, I found myself practicing the lowest form of journalism: interviewing voters in a diner. It was an IHOP, to be precise.

This is not the kind of work I normally do, and I had no intention of interrupting a couple of burly, bearded, older men who were just trying to get their coffee refilled. But they were seated next to me and firing off some incredibly hot takes about how diesel prices have increased five-fold in the past couple of years (not true) and how President Joe Biden’s efforts to moderate the price of oil with releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve have left the US vulnerable in the coming war with China (not really checkable, but unlikely). They also compared the FBI to the Gestapo (fact check: mostly false).

So I had to get their takes on the midterms. The short answer is that voters are complicated, with some crazy views and some rational ones. The slightly longer takeaway is that politicians, especially Democrats, should try to appeal to their not-so-crazy side.

One comforting-to-progressives version of this story is that these midwestern Republicans are drowning in a sea of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories. The less comforting version is that they are also ex-Democrats who almost certainly believed in crazy conspiracy theories when they voted for John Kerry in 2004 — and Barack Obama in 2008.

And as much as they hate Biden (who is senile and being manipulated behind the scenes by a cabal of leftists led by Kamala Harris), their core conspiratorial vision sees “something deeper going on here.” As one of the diners told me: “My dad said it’s been happening a long time. Back to ever since they killed Kennedy. Eisenhower, he warned about the military complex. And three years later they kill a president.”

This is of course a classic left-wing conspiracy theory popularized in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. I said my grandfather told me the same thing, and pitched them on the notion (alluded to in Stone’s followup movie Nixon) that it was no coincidence Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered only after he too turned against the war.

It was this bonding moment that led to our discussion of their history of voting for Democratic candidates in the aughts. And that led to me ask why they’d turned against the party, first tentatively voting for Mitt Romney and then enthusiastically for Donald Trump.

They had a lot of conspiratorial, misinformed or downright wrong things to say about this. They clearly had middling (at best) levels of engagement with the news. Most of their information came from lowbrow right-wing sources that fed them exaggerated tales of Democratic Party radicalism, failed to describe the contents of the Inflation Reduction Act and wildly mischaracterized the specifics of issues such as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

But underneath several layers of nonsense was a coherent thesis: Democrats had become more hostile to fossil-fuel extraction at a time when hydraulic fracturing had been a boon to the economy of southeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. At the same time, Republicans became less supportive of free-trade policies that had been bad for the Rust Belt economy.

They weren’t unreachable for Democrats — I wanted to ask them about Tim Ryan’s Democratic Senate campaign, but they were in town from Pennsylvania, a just a couple hours’ drive away.  They had broadly positive things to say about Democratic Senate candidate  John Fetterman, though they were also concerned that he “ain’t right in the head.”

Many of the specific things they had to say about politics were wrong or overblown, but in broad conceptual terms they were right. In 2004, for example, Kerry ran on a platform that expressed aspirations of “energy independence” and which slammed George W. Bush for lacking “a plan to end America’s dependence on Mideast oil.”

To an environmentalist, Kerry’s denunciation of Bush policies that left the US “shackled to foreign oil” sounded like a commitment to progressive priorities such as electric vehicles, renewable energy and mass transit. But what Kerry said was also compatible with the idea that a huge increase in domestic oil and gas production was desirable.

If you were the kind of semi-informed conspiracy-minded Democrat who believed the military-industrial complex murdered JFK to keep the Vietnam War going, you’d be likely to read Kerry’s ambiguous statements through a generous lens. By 2020, the US oil and gas revival was real, and the only thing the Democratic platform had to say about it was this: “We support banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters, modifying royalties to account for climate costs, and establishing targeted programs to enhance reforestation and develop renewables on federal lands and waters.”

It’s easy to see why this platform pivot could have induced voters in places where oil and gas extraction have powered growth to rethink their political commitments.

The point here is not to excuse the views of right-wing conspiracy theorists. But it is easy to dismiss voters as brain-poisoned by misinformation when the truth is that most voters on both sides are not especially well-informed, and never have been.

My two diner companions were conspiracy-minded xenophobes back when they were voting for Kerry and Obama. And though they absolutely have some retrograde cultural views, 15 years ago they might have been good fits for the Democrats’ secular coalition. In the intervening years, Republicans reached them by changing their stance on trade, while Democrats lost them by changing their stance on fossil fuels.

Almost everything else, including changes in media diet and the odd-to-me conceptualization of Trump as the heir to Eisenhower’s skepticism of the military-industrial complex, follows from a pivot that was grounded in genuine shifts in party positions.

Opinion. Data. More Data.Opinion. Data. More Data.Opinion. Data. More Data.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email.

Sign up to this newsletter

Which is just to say that you don’t need to idealize the electorate, or pretend that ordinary voters are carefully weighing the nuances of every candidate’s policy platform, to realize that a party’s vision makes a real difference. Democrats have tended to do worse with less-educated voters over the past 10 years, so they are risk of falling into a trap: They think that they have lost these voters because they are less informed. But what matters is what voters do with the information they have.

People tend to be most knowledgeable about the things they care the most about — so real shifts in those areas are more likely to change voting behavior. Even if people also claim to believe all kinds of other absurd things, too.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Matthew Yglesias at myglesias4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net

How the far right borrowed its online moves from gamers

How the far right borrowed its online moves from gamers

Ina Fried — Read time: 3 minutes

Illustration of a glitchy MAGA hat.

Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios

The key template that the far right and former President Trump's MAGA movement have used to organize online came not from the world of politics but from gaming, a leading misinformation researcher argues in a new book.

Catch up quick: Gamergate, in 2014, pitted some male gamers against the leaders of a movement to make video games more inclusive of women. As part of the conflict, online mobs deployed techniques and tactics that were later taken up by the Trumpist right, including the use of memes, false allegations and coordinated harassment.

Driving the news: Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, traces these connections in a new book, "Meme Wars," co-written with Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg.

Why it matters: The far right learned from Gamergate and other online movements how to use social media attacks to achieve real-world political gains in ways that many key institutions — from journalism to government to tech — are still struggling to understand.

In particular, Donovan notes that Steve Bannon saw firsthand the power of Gamergate while running Breitbart News.

Bannon took notes from the gaming controversy as well as from movements on the left, like Occupy, to develop strategies to apply in mainstream politics in Trump's 2016 campaign and from the White House.

That expanded the use of online attack methods on a wider range of issues and, more recently, made them a significant part of mainstream right-wing politics.

As one recent example, Donovan points to the entirely false but oft-repeated notion that some schools and workplaces allow people to identify as cats and use litter boxes.

The absurd falsehood has been used by dozens of Republican candidates and elected officials to further a broader attack on transgender people.

Be smart: By understanding the tactics and impact of Gamergate, Donovan says individuals and institutions can better evaluate possible responses to the current "meme wars" that include a wide range of racist, sexist and homophobic tropes .

Donovan identifies memes — visual references that reduce complex issues to a cartoonish, often childish shorthand that's endlessly repeated in online forums — as a particularly effective means of spreading misinformation.

Memes send a powerful signal to those who are clued into a particular controversy but are often missed or ignored by the masses, as was the case throughout Gamergate.

Trump himself is something of a meme, Donovan told Axios in a recent interview.

He's a TV tycoon recycling lines like "lock her up" and "build the wall" that echoed slogans from earlier far right movements, signaling to potential followers that he was on their side.

"People could very quickly get behind them and feel as if they were being seen," Donovan said.

Between the lines: In some cases those posting the memes are themselves seeking to inspire others to violence, but even when that's not the direct intent, real-world violence can follow.

Donovan notes that the man who killed 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 cited online videos by YouTube creator and gaming personality Pewdiepie as inspirations. "I often make the argument these things are inconsequential until they are not," Donovan said.

State of play: Gamergate had severe consequences for individuals who were directly targeted in the course of its fights, but its impact wasn't immediately felt in the broader political landscape.

Now, though, similar techniques are being used to intimidate and harass entire groups of people, most prominently transgender youth and adults.

In some cases, it's also translating into risks of real-world violence, such as bomb threats against Boston Children's Hospital or a planned attack at a Pride event in Spokane, Washington, that was thwarted by the arrest of 31 white nationalists.

The bottom line: "Social media becomes this amplifier of harassment," Donovan said. "Instead of a few people on your back who don't like what you are doing, you have tens of thousands of people."

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to say that the Christchurch shootings happened in two mosques, not two churches.

Go deeper

Hope King, author of Axios Closer

What Twitter users want from Musk

Illustration of a megaphone in front of a busy patterned background showing emojis, social media notification, and text windows

Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios

Public figures are speaking out about Twitter's change in ownership, with sentiments ranging from enthusiastic support to despair.

Why it matters: Like Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk will likely be bombarded with a continuous flood of user feedback — particularly about what content is allowed and what's not — and his responses will likely reveal patterns and inconsistencies in decision making along the way.

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/20/gamergate-right-online-harassment-joan-donovan-meme-wars?utm_source=pocket_mylist

Spooky mailbag

Spooky mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 16 minutes

Spooky mailbag

Dune sequels, Midnight, and more talk about the Panic of 1873 than you were expecting

No offense to those who enjoy it, but Adult Halloween was always my least favorite time of the year. One of the greatest things about being a parent is finally being able to get out from under that and become just a supervisor at Kid Halloween, walking around while some youths score candy. That’s the reason for the season.

Emma: Given what you have written in the past about the downside of bringing up race in campaign messaging, what do you make of Ian Haney Lopez and Heather McGhee's research that when the left ignores race, Republicans will predictably bring it up—either overtly or as a dog whistle—and split the electorate? Haney Lopez's research in particular seems to suggest that progressive messages ignoring race and just talking about popular policies are actually less effective than messages fusing race and class into a "better for everyone" proposition. Thoughts on the research and this approach?

I like McGhee’s book a lot, but I find the dialogue around “race-class narrative” to be a little bit vexing.

When I first encountered RCN, I thought I agreed with it because I took it to be addressing a very real dilemma of Obama-era politics. Obama would often advance a very sound economic agenda only to be greeted with racial provocations from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who was constantly saying the Affordable Care Act was reparations. Obama’s main approach was to try to duck the issue and not take the bait. What I took RCN proponents to be saying was that this is a limited strategy that meant the only messages on race people were hearing were the Limbaugh messages. But they agreed that it would be unproductive to sideline the health care issue in favor of arguing with Rush about racism. The idea of RCN was to acknowledge the racial provocation and try to expose it as a tool of class domination, while ultimately returning to the economics-focused substantive agenda.

The tendency I have been most critical of is the one where progressives play the Limbaugh role, and say things like “High Hardship Among Black and Latinx LGBTQ Renters Underscores Need for More Housing Vouchers.” Who is that an argument for?

So I thought I was basically agreeing with RCN’s analysis, but leading RCN people have made it clear that they don’t agree with me. I think that’s partly because Haney López seems to take a very expansive view of what constitutes a racist “dog whistle” in American politics. It is obviously possible to discuss topics like immigration and crime in highly racialized or racist ways. But I also think it is pretty clear that people of all ethnic backgrounds get upset when people get shot in their neighborhoods, dislike more low-key forms of disorder (street urination, verbal harassment, shoplifting), and at a minimum struggle with the logistical aspects of coping with a big influx of asylum-seekers.

Philip Wallach: Given your emphasis on politics as the art of the possible, and securing incremental gains rather than taking moral stands that lead to political losses, what is your take on the Radical Republicans of the 1860s and Reconstruction more generally? The old-fashioned view characterized Radical Republicans as oblivious to the political realities of the South (and bent on revenge). That’s now mostly dismissed as Southern apologism, but maybe there’s something to it, even for those of us who think the Confederacy was abominable? Was there a path to biracial Southern politics?

First off, while Radical Reconstruction was ultimately abandoned and thus in some sense “failed,” it’s important in Slow Boring terms to say that it didn’t backfire and somehow leave the cause of civil rights worse off than it was under Andrew Johnson’s policies.

Second, looking back on the politics of the 1870s and 1880s, it seems to me that Reconstruction was in fact the most important issue of the day. I’ve often criticized Biden-era Democrats for not setting priorities in a clear or reasonable way. But it was totally reasonable for the Grant administration to prioritize Reconstruction over pursuing GOP goals on the tariff or whatever else they were up to. So in a narrow sense, I don’t think the Radical Republicans did anything wrong.

In a broader sense, though, they didn’t actually accomplish what they set out to accomplish, so there is an interesting question of how things could have turned out differently.

Academic historians don’t like to formally consider counterfactuals, which I think is unfortunate. But one way of putting the “old” view of Reconstruction is that it was always doomed to fail for some racist reason — freedmen were incapable of self-government or peaceful coexistence of people from different racial groups was impossible — so the Radicals were foolish to try and only caused harm. I think the “new” view tends to be equally fatalistic, just putting the blame on racism — white supremacist ideology was too deeply ingrained in American civic culture — and holds up the Radicals as noble (albeit doomed) heroes. But I do wonder about contingency.

One scenario to consider is what would’ve happened if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t dumped Hannibal Hamlin from the ticket in 1864 in favor of Jackson the War Democrat. In the original 1860 GOP ticket, Lincoln was the midwestern moderate and Hamlin was there to provide representation to the more hardline faction of the party. Lincoln swapped Hamlin for Johnson to help secure re-election, but in the end the 1864 election wasn’t very close. The Lincoln-Hamlin ticket maybe wins a bit more narrowly but they still win. And now instead of Lincoln’s assassination bringing to power a white supremacist Democrat, it puts a Radical in office at a time when the military is still publicly mobilized and the population is primed for vengeance. I think a Hamlin-led Reconstruction would have been much harsher from the outset, potentially featuring things like real land reform that could have led to a durable Reconstruction order.

The other is that as best as I can tell, GOP political fortunes were dealt a heavy blow both in the 1874 midterms (where Democrats gained the House majority) and in 1876 by the fallout from an economic crisis known as the Panic of 1873. The quality of economic data from this era is not great, but Andrew Jalil’s paper on the history of American banking crises suggests it kicked off a pretty serious recession. Could this have been prevented? I don’t know — historians seem a little uncertain as to why the panic happened at all. But Grant did veto a controversial piece of legislation in 1874 known as the Inflation Bill and the economy instead experienced deflation. Perhaps if they’d given it a better name like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Grant would have signed it, the economy would have prospered, and the Reconstruction coalition would have stayed in place longer.

So the real lesson here, as always, is that the best thing you can do as an incumbent is make flawless decisions about macroeconomic management. But it’s hard.

Trace: If the Weeds were to have a reunion episode to do a Weeds Time Machine episode, what trio would you be most interested to be on a panel with again, and what esoteric piece of legislation from the country's history would you be most interested in having a discussion of the ramifications of that we're still living with today?

I think it’d be a blast to get together with Ezra and Sarah to talk about the Social Security Amendments of 1965 (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid) or go really nuts and do the Coinage Act of 1873 (which Milton Friedman says really was bad, as the Bryanites would later go on to argue) with Dara and Jane.

srynerson: I've seen it said, many, many, many times over the years that cutting taxes for upper income households has basically no stimulus effect. However, with inflation having shot up this year, I've seen a bunch of people including yourself: argue that part of the way inflation can be brought down is raising taxes on upper income households. To be blunt: if upper income tax cuts don't stimulate consumption in any meaningful way, then how they can have any broad inflationary effects?

The basic argument is that rich people have a lower marginal propensity to consume so shifting their taxes has less demand impact than putting money into or out of the hands of people of more modest means.

I accept that basic theory, but during the long disinflationary era I always thought progressives were understating the stimulative potential of tax cuts for the rich. In 2012, I wrote that Mitt Romney winning would generate better short-term growth via larger budget deficits. In 2018, I wrote that Donald Trump deserved credit for pursuing stimulative fiscal policies. Back when I thought president-elect Biden was going to be faced with a GOP-controlled Senate, I said he should strike a deal on tax cuts with Mitch McConnell to stimulate the economy. So I plead personally innocent of inconsistency or hypocrisy here — I think rich-people tax policy has a meaningful influence on the demand situation and I’ve always said that.

Lisa: What did you think of Midnights? Favorite / least favorite tracks?

It’s pretty great. I think my favorite Taylor Swift is still the mid-period Red/1989 phase, but I have “Midnights” provisionally penciled in after those two. “Vigilante Shit,” “Anti-Hero,” “Snow On the Beach” — great stuff.

I’m not really sure why this is bothering me but the similarity between the chorus of “Vigilante Shit” on the new album and this 2007 song from CSS called “Music is My Hot Hot Sex” keeps bugging me. Why should that bother me? I don’t know. And I assume most people who hear this album will not be familiar with the work of a no-longer-extant Brazilian band from 15 years ago.

Zach Thomas: What are your thoughts on approval voting versus ranked choice voting? They are both on the ballot for Seattle primaries this election (currently our primaries are ‘top two.’) I like the potential of ranked choice voting to get more moderate people in office, though some say approval voting is better or worse on that account. What do you think?

Approval is better. With ranked choice you can get a scenario where Rightist gets 35%, Leftist gets 35%, and Centrist gets 30% and the winner comes down to who was the more popular second choice for Centrist voters. Under approval voting, the Centrists should just win. Of course the real answer is that we should have proportional representation and not bother figuring out how to optimally structure elections for single-member districts.

Greg Ellingson: Should Jerome Powell plead with the young couples of America to move in together to lower OER?

Yes, if you and your girlfriend are currently maintaining separate residences, you owe it to The Economy to either move in together immediately or else recognize that it’s not working out and break up so you can find someone else to cohabitate with. But note this doesn’t work if you move into a 2br and use the spare as a home office. A 1br + den is fine, but the idea is to economize on housing. But won’t the extra spending on what you save on rent just fuel inflation in other areas of the economy? Yes — that’s why you need to put the money into a Series I bond to start saving to make a downpayment on a house.

Estate of Bob Saget: Any thoughts on Hanania's piece A Psychological Theory of the Culture War?

I’ve always thought it’s a little funny that cultural conservatives are much more likely to talk about the importance of IQ than are cultural progressives, but there’s a very robust finding that higher IQ people have more progressive cultural views.

Hanania’s piece is one of the few cases I’m familiar with of a conservative acknowledging this inconvenient point, but I don’t think he quite wrestles it into submission in a convincing way. Of course to some extent progressives have the even worse end of this paradox, since they simultaneously clearly do believe they are smarter than conservatives while also being ideologically committed to denying that intelligence is a meaningful concept. That leads to the tedious idea that if we could only correct everyone’s “misinformation,” they would come to agree with us about everything.

James: Exactly how much of the blame for democrats upcoming losses in the midterms falls at the feet of woke politics?

I think you could argue that “woke politics” contributed to the rise in crime in 2020 and to the slow recognition that this was a problem in 2021 and that clearly hurts Democrats. But I think the more straightforward way of saying it would be that the run-up in crime over the past few years has hurt Democrats.

Broadly speaking, I think Joe Biden has actually done a really good job of defusing the political correctness issue as both a matter of substance and politics. The bad news is that inflation-adjusted incomes are falling! Democrats are actually holding up remarkably well given that context.

JD: This is a question about Dune. How do you treat the sequels? I read the first one when the movie came out and was really eager to see where the story went from there. Dune extensively builds out an interesting world and group of intriguing characters, and culminates in a dramatic final series of events. And then... Oof. It's just a few hundred pages of Paul mumbling to himself in a castle and comparing himself to Hitler (a reference that should not be very salient on Arrakis)? And noticing how hot his adolescent sister looks naked? I was stunned to find out that there are several more sequels beyond that point. As I am new to Dune fandom, I'm not really sure how we as a people treat the rest of the books. Do we pretend they don't exist? Do they get better? Are we supposed to find them charming because we're attached to the characters? And, most importantly, should they be adapted into films?

So in defense of Dune Messiah, I first read these books when I was a kid, and I didn’t really understand Dune until I read Dune Messiah. I think from an older, more mature perspective, Messiah is a kind of bad book because it’s dedicated mostly to telling you what you should think about the events of Dune.

And Dune is actually a very sophisticated book that shows you what you should think, if you read it correctly. But I read Dune as a 12-year-old reading an uncomplicated Hero’s Journey about a young warrior who overthrows an evil empire and avenges his dead father — exactly the way I interpreted Star Wars when I first watched it. So to me, Dune Messiah’s slightly hacky approach was good. But Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune are substantially better books. Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, the final two of the books that he actually wrote, get really weird. But I like them.

In terms of adaptations, Dune Part I is a long movie at just over 2.5 hours, and it also doesn’t have a proper end at all. It’s just pretty literally “we have to stop the movie now because it’s too long, please come back for the sequel.” I hope the sequel will be great, and we’ll have what amounts to a great, annoyingly long five-hour movie. But I think you could craft an interesting and exciting 90-100 minute movie out of the kind of boring book of Dune Messiah. Then Children of Dune would also be a great movie. The difficult question is the fourth book, which involves coming up with a non-laughable way to depict a human-sandworm hybrid.

MosesZ: How would the existence of dragons affect zoning laws?

This is my biggest problem with House of the Dragon. Game of Thrones (and the books Martin has managed to actually finish and publish) worked best with the dragons kept largely off-stage and somewhat hypothetical. We got a pretty grounded, “realistic” story with sporadic magical elements.

But as dragons are really in the foreground of HOTD, it raises a lot of sort of annoying questions about how exactly this works that the show doesn’t have answers for. Like at King’s Landing, the dragons are in the dragon pit. And on Dragonstone, they live in the caves of the Dragonmont. But when young princes ride their dragons to Storm’s End to treat with the Baratheons, how does the dragon parking work? Are there trained valets just sitting around at every major castle? It would be boring to dedicate large amounts of time to exposition about dragon logistics. But it makes the stories much less compelling and much closer to “please don’t think too hard about it” superhero movie fare.

Matt F: Matt, as a philosophy major, you seem to have a great grasp of economics and you explain the issues to us laypeople better than most economists. Since the economy is a major issue now with interest rates, inflation, etc, I'd love to read more from you on this, but I'm curious how you developed your base economics knowledge comes from?

I’m glad you think I understand it, I always worry economists will disagree! But I’ve been interested in the subject for a long time and have always been able to benefit from conversations with my grandfather and my uncles Paul and Andrew who are all economists. Plus shout-out to Geoffrey Gund, my AP Economics teacher in high school.

But the other thing I did in the early years of my career was read a bunch of undergraduate economics textbooks. I read both the Greg Mankiw and the Krugman/Wells intro textbooks very thoroughly, and then when they came out also gave the Cowen/Tabarrok and Wolfers/Stevenson textbooks more of a skim. There’s a lot of repetition and overlap between these books, which is why once you’ve already read two you find yourself starting to skim. But to an extent, that overlap — the stuff that these guys all agree on — is what “economics” is. Then there are a lot of working economists who, using the tools of their training, have developed a lot of ideas. But I think the core point is that even though these writers have a lot of different interests and ideas and very different personas as economics columnists, there really is a core corpus of knowledge and ideas that constitutes the fundamentals of economics.

Ignacio Marquez: Apart from the immigration debate, which is mostly confined to Central America (and now Venezuela), Latin America as a whole, and especially South America, is basically absent from mainstream American political discourse. Is this a missed opportunity for the US? Should US foreign policy be any different towards the countries in the Americas? Or is it just what is is, i.e., just not that relevant a continent absent a big crisis?

Once back in the peak War on Terror days, I was at a conference in Los Angeles and very tired after a day of travel and jet lag and speaking on a panel that went for 90 minutes before the Q&A started. Then someone from the audience asked why we hadn’t said anything about South America and I blurted out “because it’s less important than the other continents.” Which was tough but, I think, an accurate assessment of the state of things in 2007.

In 2022, though, as policy is reorienting around great power conflict with China, I do think American policymakers need to reassess that. The fact that no Latin American countries have joined the sanctions against Russia doesn’t have a huge practical impact, but I do think it’s a “bad look” for the West in terms of the values we claim to be upholding with this venture. My sense is that rightist political tendencies in Latin America have a lot of substantive sympathy for Vladimir Putin, while leftist tendencies are very skeptical of American hegemony, so we’ve stranded ourselves with no friends and a situation in Brazil where Bolsonaro and Lula disagree about everything except that neither will support the U.S. line on Russia. This seems like something we need to work on.

My big idea is that part of a post-“engagement” approach to China should be actively encouraging supply-chain migration to Latin America. Outsourcing certain manufacturing tasks to poorer countries makes a lot of sense. And we should encourage that to mean Mexico and Colombia and Brazil, not flip from excessive integration with China to a doomed charge for autarky. I’d also like to see Latin America get more routine high-level respect from the American government. Have we had a Spanish-speaking Secretary of State? A presidential visit to the Anglophone Caribbean? You started with “apart from the immigration debate,” but I think the centrality of the immigration debate to American politics underscores how odd the general neglect of the region is in the United States since it turns out that events in Venezuela and beyond do end up influencing us very directly. And it would be good to see that acknowledged comprehensively, rather than just as a distant echo of a domestic political disagreement.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/spooky-mailbag?utm_source=pocket_mylist&isFreemail=false&post_id=80475018&publication_id=159185&utm_medium=email

Abortion Bans Go Hand in Hand With a Draconian State

Abortion Bans Go Hand in Hand With a Draconian State

Badhwar, Neera K. — Read time: 9 minutes

Abortion Bans Go Hand in Hand With a Draconian State

Advocates of limited government who want to protect the unborn should rely on moral suasion, not force

Wikipedia. Creative Commons.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs. Wade this summer, abortion has become a major issue on the midterm campaign trail. Thirteen red states have banned abortion from conception without exceptions for rape or incest. Many others have proposed bans that are facing legal challenges. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is pushing a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks with some exceptions, overturning his party’s long avowed commitment to states rights, especially on this issue.

It is not surprising that the religious right would push such bans given that it has discarded its compunctions about using state power to accomplish its ends. What’s more surprising is that many adherents of limited government favor them too, because they believe the state has a legitimate role in protecting the “rights” of fetuses. While a moral case against abortion to change the hearts and minds of women contemplating abortions would be consistent with their limited government commitments, legal bans simply aren’t. Such bans would inevitably unleash an invasive and draconian state on would-be mothers, their doctors and beyond.

Consider the first difficulty in enforcing an abortion ban: abortion is often indistinguishable from a miscarriage. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, “Fifteen to twenty percent of all pregnancies (or approximately 1 million a year in the U.S.) will end in a miscarriage or stillbirth.” A government that criminalizes abortions will need to be vigilant about every pregnancy loss. Was it really a miscarriage—or was it an abortion? (More on this later.)

Even though Roe protected abortion rights till the point of viability of the fetus, some zealous prosecutors managed to criminally charge women who had miscarriages on the mere suspicion of a self-induced abortion. According to a 2018 report, there are about 40 different ambiguous laws in various states that prosecutors have used to charge women. Women are not safe even in a progressive state such as California where the law explicitly states that they can’t be prosecuted for the loss of a pregnancy for any reason. There have been two instances when zealous prosecutors in the Golden State criminally charged women after they had stillbirths that their doctors judged had been caused by drugs. The defense attorneys failed to point out in one case that the woman could not be charged under existing California law. And the judge either ignored the law or was ignorant of it, just like the doctors. (In the first case, the prison sentence was overturned after the woman had served four years in prison; in the second case, it was dismissed.)  When the state thinks it is justified in moral policing, it will have a tendency toward becoming draconian even when the law itself is not the problem, as is the case here. But that problem will be infinitely worse when the law actually empowers the state to do such policing.

Absolutism: Feature, Not a Bug, of the Pro-Life Movement

The pro-life movement has long given mixed signals about the exceptions it would allow in an overall ban. But even before the end of Roe, the momentum to ban all abortions, except when a mother’s life was endangered, had been gaining strength. For example, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio some years ago declared that exceptions for rape and incest were anathema to him—only to recant  when his Democratic opponent in November, Val Demings, challenged him during their lone debate.

But regardless of Rubio’s vacillations, the fact of the matter is that the more extreme “no exceptions except for mother’s life” position is the only one consistent with a commitment to fetus rights. Why? If a fetus has as strong a claim to life as a child, then the fact that the fetus resulted from rape or incest or that the fetus has severe anomalies, cannot justify an abortion. Even if rape or incest victims were minors or mentally disabled women, the standing of the fetus wouldn’t be vitiated.

But does the lone exception for a mother’s life (not her health, mind you) that extreme abortion opponents right now allow afford enough protections for the mother’s life? Not really, because it is not always clear that a mother’s life is in danger even if it is. When a woman is hemorrhaging and sepsis is likely to set in, the danger is clear-cut and the state may allow an abortion. But what if the danger is not imminent, and it’s possible that the fetus will be expelled naturally? Inevitably, in such situations, with the threat of prison looming, many doctors will be unwilling to take the risk of performing an abortion if there is any ambiguity about its necessity.

This is not a theoretical worry. When prosecutors started charging doctors on the suspicion of overprescribing pain medicines, scores of doctors stopped prescribing them. The Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that doctors can’t be charged when they are acting in good faith has once again freed doctors to act in accordance with their best medical judgment. But till then, many pain patients either lived in constant pain or turned to the black market and bought drugs adulterated with heroin or fentanyl, a potent killer. (One pain patient recently killed his doctor for leaving him in constant pain, before killing himself.)

Likewise, one should expect many doctors to stop performing life-saving abortions when the danger to the mother is probable, or even certain but not imminent, out of fear of prosecution, even if it is technically allowed under the law. After Texas passed the 2021 Heartbeat Act, the notorious law that gave private citizens the right to sue anyone who performs or enables an abortion, a woman with an ectopic pregnancy was turned away by her own doctor as well as a hospital—even though such a pregnancy is a death sentence for both mother and fetus if an abortion can’t be performed in a timely fashion. 

Sure, the doctors deserve some blame for being overly self-protective and not doing their job in such a clear-cut case, especially since the Texas law does allow an abortion in a medical emergency or when a pregnancy “poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” But the medical emergency exemption does not cover pregnancies that are threatening to women with pulmonary hypertension or certain other health problems. Low-income, rural women with such conditions who don’t have access to good doctors that can oversee their pregnancies would face charges if they get an abortion or risk their lives if they don’t. Either way, their agency to determine their own treatment will be seriously compromised.

(The only potential hope for such women who live in states that restrict or ban abortion is the federal 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. This law requires hospitals to perform an abortion when a doctor’s best clinical judgment deems that it is needed “to stabilize a pregnant patient’s emergency medical condition.” The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services declared in July 2022 that EMTALA overrides all state laws to the contrary and applies to all hospitals that participate in Medicare. However, Texas has challenged the ruling and others may follow.)

The Slippery Slope to Criminalizing Pregnant Women

Although the pro-life movement right now is trying to accomplish its ends mainly by cracking down on abortion providers, women are still getting ensnared in the prosecution’s crosshairs. There have already been instances when prosecutors have tried to “subpoena women’s medical records and private social media files” as part of their criminal investigations into abortion providers, raising all kinds of privacy concerns, as The New York Times has reported.

Also, many in the pro-life movement claim that they don’t intend to enforce abortion bans by going after pregnant women, only providers. But just as exceptions to the ban are not sustainable under an abortion regime, neither is this line. Indeed, there is already a movement of “abortion abolitionists” pushing charges against mothers. Their argument is simple: the fetus is a person with rights equal to that of a child, hence the mother who kills it is a criminal, and must be treated as such. The fact that, like the vast majority of people, the mother disagrees with the basic premise is of course immaterial to them.

Nor are women seeking abortions the only ones who are going to be affected by an abortion ban—potentially all pregnant women are. If one accepts the notion that a fetus is a person worthy of legal protections, then anything that a pregnant woman does that endangers the fetus could become fair game for state oversight. Civil rights attorney Cynthia Conti-Cook worries, “Pregnant people’s decisions—to self-medicate, to not medicate, to seek substance abuse treatment, to drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes—are all decisions that could be criminalized.” Indeed, notes columnist Sam Levin in The Guardian, “Pregnant women have been criminalized for falling down stairs; giving birth at home; exposing a fetus to dangerous ‘fumes’; having HIV; not resting enough during the pregnancy; not getting to a hospital fast enough while in labor; being the victim of a shooting; and self-inducing an abortion.”

The all-important requirement of mens rea has been eliminated in many of these cases. Of course, the elimination of mens rea is not inherent in an abortion ban; and no one who cares about justice would support it. But Congress and state legislatures often pass laws without the requirement of mens rea.

Punitive State Locks Hands with Surveillance State

An abortion prohibitionist regime is likely to not only lead to the growth of the punitive state against women, it’ll also unleash an intrusive surveillance state. The nature of a pregnancy and the pregnant woman’s relationship to a fetus would practically invite that. Pro-life activists liken laws against abortion to laws against murder, except they ignore that in the case of murder, the perpetrator and victim are distinct individuals with distinct bodies. But in the case of abortion, the perpetrator and the victim inhabit the same body. It is for this reason that it becomes hard to distinguish between a miscarriage—an accidental death—from an abortion—an intentional “killing.” Doing so would require close surveillance of women and their bodily functions. For example, notes Conti-Cook, the state could follow the “digital trails” that pregnant women leave during web searches if it suspects that they might have injured their fetus. However, in the case of actual murder, it is not as hard to distinguish between an accidental death and a murder, which is why there is less need for a surveillance state.

There is another reason why laws against murder don’t lead to an all-powerful state but anti-abortion laws would. Everyone agrees that murder is wrong. That is far from the case with abortion. To the contrary, 61% American adults believe that abortion is not wrong and should be legal under most circumstances. So banning abortion would create a generalized suspicion of women of childbearing age, their doctors and potentially friends and family who might be enabling them.

But the irony is that even though a draconian state is likely to grow like mold under an anti-abortion regime, it might not significantly help the pro-life movement’s efforts to protect fetuses. Under Roe, the abortion rate steadily went down for 40 years, as David French, a pro-lifer, admits, namely because of a shift in cultural attitudes.

Limited government advocates who oppose abortion should use non-coercive means to persuade supporters of reproductive rights. Legal bans will only invite a Leviathan and violate their political commitments without advancing their cause.

This piece has been adapted from Badhwar’s essay at ProSocial Libertarians.

Neera Badhwar is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, and Senior Researcher at Mercatus Institute. She continues to write about philosophical issues, but also has a new interest: writing children's stories.

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/abortion-bans-go-hand-in-hand-with?utm_source=pocket_mylist&isFreemail=true&post_id=81099463&publication_id=461280&utm_medium=email

“Originalism Is Intellectually Indefensible”: Eric Foner on the Enduring Myth of the Colorblind Constitution

ballsandstrikes.org

“Originalism Is Intellectually Indefensible”: Eric Foner on the Enduring Myth of the Colorblind Constitution

By Cristian Farias

17 - 22 minutes

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made waves earlier this month when she used her perch to offer a vision of racial equality that stands at odds with how the Supreme Court often treats matters of race. The justice’s lengthy remarks, which came during oral argument in Merrill v. Milligan, an important redistricting case that could weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965, felt like a mini-history lesson on Reconstruction and the constitutional amendments that were ratified during that period. “I don’t think that the historical record establishes that the founders believed that race neutrality or race blindness was required,” she said.

Jackson’s colloquy drew praise from commentators, some of whom noted that she was employing “progressive originalism” to advance a robust defense of racial equality under the law—which the Supreme Court has all but declared must be colorblind and not give a boost to people who have been historically marginalized on account of their race. With affirmative action in the sights of a reactionary supermajority, her insights on the Fourteenth Amendment may prove ever more valuable.

Beyond legal doctrine, I wanted to know what Eric Foner, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Reconstruction, thought about Jackson’s take on this history. “I am of two minds about Justice Jackson’s remarks,” he told me in an email. “I am not a believer in originalism and do not want to operate on terrain constructed by the conservative justices. Originalism is intellectually indefensible. But if you are going to talk about history you had better get it right, and she does a much better job of that than those who believe the architects of Reconstruction were colorblind.”

There was a lot to unpack there, so the two of us spoke on the phone to talk some more about Jackson, the sham of originalism, the current Supreme Court’s selective reading of history, and what he might tell the liberal justices if he had their ear.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Why is originalism problematic from a historical perspective?

Eric Foner: There is no important document in the world that has only one original meaning or one original intention. Let us take the Fourteenth Amendment: It’s ambiguous. It is full of generalities—general principles, which is fine. They have to be worked out, whether it’s “due process of law,” or “privileges and immunities.”

Those phrases meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. These things were fought over. They were contested. And one of the points I make when I write about this is that the whole search for this generally looks purely at the debates in Congress, and therefore completely eliminates any Black voice. What did African Americans who are the subject of the Fourteenth Amendment in many ways—what did they think these ideas these phrases meant? And what did they think of the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment? Without Black legislators in the South, under Radical Reconstruction, voting to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment. And they must have had their own ideas about what they were doing, what they were trying to accomplish.

But you never get that in these discussions. And I just think it’s a misconceived effort. There’s nothing wrong with figuring out what people were trying to do. That’s part of the historical effort to understand the time period. But to think that there’s one original meaning is just foolish, in my opinion.

So you wouldn’t even concede the point that originalism is a tool rather than the tool to interpret the Constitution.

[Laughs] You know, I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a law professor. I’m not a constitutional scholar, although I play one on TV sometimes. But, you know, people can use all sorts of tools. But even if there were a single original intent, I don’t think we should accept the premise that that is what should govern an essential part of our political and legal system right now. I’m a believer in what they call the living Constitution; you apply these principles at the present, not by going back to figuring out what in 1866 Senator Jacob Howard or Charles Sumner, or for that matter, Jefferson Davis thought about what the Fourteenth Amendment meant.

And the idea that in the Dobbs decision, that somehow we are excluded from policies that didn’t exist a century and a half ago, is completely antidemocratic. But that’s what the Supreme Court says on gun control. Justice Thomas’s opinion [in Bruen, which expanded the Second Amendment right to bear arms in public spaces, says], “No, well, they didn’t pass the kind of laws that they passed now back then. So we can’t do it now.” Ridiculous, in my opinion.

Link to: Read more

A Black Woman Supreme Court Justice Exposes the Legal System’s Biggest Lies

I’m glad that you brought up Dobbs. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Because if you read Justice Alito’s opinion, there’s not even a pretense that it’s a so-called originalist opinion. He goes through some doctrinal legal analysis, but there was nowhere even an attempt to define what liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment means. And for that reason, then you wonder: What are we even doing here?

It’s a kind of reverse originalism, that decision. It’s just saying, “Well, the absence of pro-choice legislation 200 years ago should determine what we do now.” So, yeah, I think it’s ridiculous that it’s a straitjacket on public policy. But this seems to be where we’re heading. What about the right to privacy? Does that exist? It’s not mentioned, as we all know, by a word in the Constitution, but it’s become part for the last 50 years of our concept of law and politics.

The Dobbs opinion makes clear that the conservative justices pick and choose what they want the Constitution to mean, based on the policy outcomes that they prefer. What do you make of this current of progressive lawyers and academics who perhaps want to play on that terrain with the conservative justices, and try to divine a progressive understanding of the Constitution on originalist grounds. Is that a fool’s errand?

Yeah, in my humble opinion. Not because it isn’t logical, in many ways. I just got in the mail that book … What is it called? I have it right here on my shelf. Yeah, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, by William Forbath and Joseph Fishkin, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about. Is that good history? I’m not sure—I respect them very much. But I’m not a constitutional historian.

My point is, there is a lot of leeway within the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment and the Thirteenth Amendment, actually, for public policies far more far-reaching than this court would ever agree to. And of course, every one of those three amendments ends with a section saying Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment. Not the Supreme Court, not the secretary of state or somebody — Congress. But over time, the Supreme Court has asserted its right to overrule what Congress decides, even though the Constitution textually, specifically gives it to Congress.

It’s pretty clear why: They didn’t trust the Supreme Court. How could you trust a body which had produced the Dred Scott decision not that long before? They didn’t want the Supreme Court meddling around with what Congress decided was necessary in order to uplift former slaves into equality. But that’s what’s happened.

If that’s the case, Congress should consider other laws. But if they’re all going to get knocked down by the Supreme Court, then I guess it’s not worth the time to pass these laws. In my book on these three amendments, I pointed to a very long book, published in the 1880s, by a group of Black lawyers, severely criticizing the Supreme Court and its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and putting forward a different vision. You know, a different vision of things like the right to employment, the right to an education, as being part of liberty and privileges of citizens and things like that.

That’s part of the original intent, also—part of the original debate. We can choose which part of the historical record we want to emphasize and act on. That’s why I don’t like this originalist thing—because it’s a straitjacket limiting public policy.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Since this reading, or this interpretive method, is a straitjacket, as you put it, then how — and you’ve already told me that you’re not a judge, or a legal scholar — but how should then a liberal vision of the Constitution be? How should they interpret these amendments?

The Warren Court did a pretty good job of that. They took these principles—not the specifics, the principles—and said, “How do we apply that principle at the moment, at the current time?” How these originalists can accept Brown v. Board of Education has always been very mysterious for me. You know, it’s not an originalist decision. In fact, the Supreme Court explicitly said—[Chief Justice Earl] Warren explicitly said, “We don’t know what the people intended in 1866. We’re interested in what we should do now.” That’s how I would interpret it.

And as you put it yourself, in your own writings, the people who ratified the Reconstruction Amendments seemed to be fine with segregated schools, so long as Black kids also had a shot at it.

Yeah, but why should that lead us to say, “Well, schools are fine in 2000,” or something? But again, whose intent is it really? Or whose originalism? Is it just judges of the time? Or just members of Congress of the time? One of my favorite quotes about Reconstruction was printed in the autobiography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, where she says that Reconstruction was a time when the fundamentals of government were debated all up and down the society, in churches, at every fireside—people were debating these things in their homes. And yet you never get a sense of that—that they were trying to work out what these principles meant. And there’s no single original meaning that one can devise out of this. Unfortunately, I’m not one of the nine people figuring this out.

And yet let’s try to be strategic here: If you had the ear of Justice Jackson and the two other liberal justices, what would you tell them, besides don’t play with the master’s tools?

I’m a historian. I’m certainly not going to tell them, “Don’t look at history. Don’t think about history.” As [Justice Jackson] points out, the history of the Reconstruction Era is something everybody should know about. And if you’re interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment, you really need to know what was going on in the country in the aftermath of the Civil War and the end of slavery.

But I would say this: Don’t accept the premise that that is the grounds on which we can determine whether a piece of legislation is legitimate or not.

Link to: Read more

The End of Affirmative Action Is the Supreme Court’s Next Big Gift to the Conservative Legal Movement

This came up at the argument in Merrill v. Milligan, and it’ll come up again later this month when the court considers affirmative action policies. Why is it that, at least among the conservative justices and lawyers, this idea of colorblindness in the Fourteenth Amendment holds so much appeal?

It holds appeal because it’s a way of sticking it to the liberals. After all, it’s [Justice John Marshall] Harlan, who used that phrase in a dissent [in Plessy v. Ferguson, which rendered separate-but-equal accommodations constitutional]. One thing that’s not mentioned is the Supreme Court has never decided that the Constitution is colorblind—there’s never been five people who have said, “No, the Constitution is completely colorblind.” There may be now. But it’s their way of blocking or preventing any kind of affirmative action, so to speak, to uplift. They’re not interested in trying to uplift the status of African Americans in this country. And this gives them a weapon. Because it’s very hard to argue against it — “Oh, no, yes, the Constitution actually should be color-biased, it should be in favor of one group by color and not another.” It’s very hard to argue against the abstraction of colorblindness.

There were plenty of people during Reconstruction, who, yes, thought that the law and the Constitution should be colorblind. On the other hand, as [Jackson] points out, there were plenty of people who thought specific laws trying to assist the former slaves were totally legitimate under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Colorblindness is not the only original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was the original meaning in the eyes of some people, but not a lot of others.

One phrase that Justice Jackson used in her colloquy during the Milligan argument was that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was meant to ensure African Americans would have the same rights as those “enjoyed by white citizens.” And that itself is almost a rejection of colorblindness, because it uses race to uplift the race that was historically left out.

That’s a very good point. I mean, that’s an amazing thing in that law—it’s an amazing law to begin with.

But yes, to say that all citizens must enjoy the same rights as white persons was a complete repudiation of the history of the United States up to that point. Up to that point, white people enjoyed far more rights than any other group of people had. For the law now to say, “No, no, you can’t do that”—whiteness now becomes not a form of exclusion, but a standard that must apply to everybody. You want to know what basic rights in terms going to court, or testifying, or whatever, that non-whites should enjoy—look at what white people have. And then that’s the same thing that non-whites ought to have.

That’s certainly color-conscious. But you know, most people don’t even know what’s in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. So I’m glad she reminded people of that.

Group portrait of the first Black Senator, H.M. Revels of Mississippi, and Black members of Congress, 1871 (Archive Photos/Getty Images)

The current justices, both so-called originalists and the ones that are not so committed to that project—are there any analogues with the Reconstruction justices that you could think of? Are they similar or different from how the Court operated in the era?

It was so different back then. The Court didn’t exercise nearly the power—people didn’t say, “Oh, well, let’s see what the Supreme Court says,” you know? The Supreme Court was a much more minor institution at that time. And the justices—a couple of them were still on the Court who had voted in the Dred Scott decision. Most of them by this point were Republicans, but of various stripes. They were feeling their way, just like everybody else. One of the worst decisions of that period came really early, the Slaughterhouse decision in 1873, which kind of cut off the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thomas is an interesting guy. Thomas wants to get rid of Slaughterhouse and resurrect the Privileges and Immunities Clause, which I would like to think on also, because I think that opens the door for many assertions of people’s rights. Thomas probably feels the same way, but he’s more interested in other rights than I am.

I don’t think he’s really interested in applying that clause to, say, undocumented immigrants.

No, hardly. But I think that clause opens up all sorts of possibilities. What are the privileges and immunities of citizens? Let’s take one example, which was actually debated a lot at that time: the right to an education—that the right to an adequate education is a privilege of citizenship, and it must be enforced in the states. And the Court has never gone anywhere near that.

But remember, they’re in the shadow of slavery. The denial of education, of literacy, to slaves was one of the many atrocities under slavery that was on their mind. You want to be an originalist? Go back and look what Jacob Howard said about this. But, you know, the Court has never wanted to go down that road.

Perhaps a project for Justice Jackson, especially in this moment of retrenchment, if she’s interested to look to the future for a counter-counterrevolution, would be to look at the works of those Black intellectuals and radicals from Reconstruction and try to revive some of that project.

That’s what I call for in my book on all this, The Second Founding. It ends by saying that there are other visions of jurisprudence out there, rooted in the history, not just made up out of whole cloth. And one of these days, maybe the Supreme Court will rediscover that jurisprudence. I’m not too optimistic right now. But you never know.

I’m not optimistic either. And to be clear, maybe she has to use the podium and her dissents to articulate it. That’s the only way.

Absolutely. She’s got two brilliant colleagues—[Justice Elena] Kagan and [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor. All of them know this history very well. But, as I said, I don’t believe that that is the determining factor in what legislation is allowable under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Those amendments can be resurrected. There is no reason they shouldn’t be resurrected as much more vigorous assertions of the basic rights of all Americans, but particularly the descendants of former slaves.

This conversation is a co-publication with The Emancipator, a project of The Boston Globe. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Cristian Farias is a legal journalist and a senior editor at Inquest. His coverage of the Supreme Court and the legal system has appeared in Vanity Fair, New York magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Slate, among others.

More by this Author

Ross Douthat and the Dismissal of the Authoritarian Turn by Jonathan Chait

Ross Douthat and the Dismissal of the Authoritarian Turn

 &c by Jonathan Chait

Ross Douthat has spent the Trump era dismissing the argument from numerous liberals (especially me) that the Republican Party is sliding dangerously into authoritarianism. As his position has grown more challenging, his argument has mutated repeatedly and now has finally crossed a threshold into, or at least flirting with, outright support for authoritarian rule.

To understand the evolution of his stance, it is worth tracing the argument as it has evolved over time. Rebutting David Frum’s warning that Trump was undermining democracy, Douthat wrote in 2018, “I am not convinced by his overarching theme of looming crisis, his hour-is-late tone and the frequent implication (however hedged and qualified) that Trump might be on his way to establishing a regime to rival the populist authoritarianisms of other unhappy countries.” Trump was nasty, he conceded, but too silly and undisciplined to pose any serious threat.

Two years later, in the spring of 2020, he argued that Trump was not only incapable of seizing illegitimate power but uninterested in doing so. “Great men and bad men alike seek attention as a means of getting power, but our president is interested in power only as a means of getting attention.” Needless to say, his conclusion that Trump had no interest in power was an all-time historical misjudgment.

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

 

On the eve of the 2020 election, Douthat asserted that his theory was about to be tested conclusively. “Three weeks from now, we will reach an end to speculation about what Donald Trump will do if he faces political defeat, whether he will leave power like a normal president or attempt some wild resistance,” he proposed. “Reality will intrude, substantially if not definitively, into the argument over whether the president is a corrupt incompetent who postures as a strongman on Twitter or a threat to the Republic to whom words like ‘authoritarian’ and even ‘autocrat’ can be reasonably applied.”

It turned out Trump did indeed crave power. To Douthat’s credit, when Trump did the precise thing Douthat said he wouldn’t, he confessed that his predictions had missed the mark. In December, 2020, he admitted surprise at “the sheer scale of the belief among conservatives that the election was really stolen, measured not just in polling data but in conversations and arguments, online and in person, with people I would not have expected to embrace it.” Following the insurrection, he conceded, “When I predicted three months ago that there would be no Trump coup, I should have showed more imagination.”

But soon thereafter, he reverted to his old line. The danger had passed, and liberals were overreacting. The Republican Party was placing Trump’s lie that he had won at the center of its agenda. But not to worry. “Meanwhile, at the state level, the Republican-backed bills that purport to fight voter fraud are obviously partially sops to conservative paranoia — but as such, they’re designed to head off cries of fraud, claims of ballots shipped in from China or conjured up in Italy,” he wrote in June 2021. “That sort of heading-off strategy may fail, of course, but for now, exercises like the Arizona audit have mostly divided grass-roots conservatives against one another rather than set up some sort of Tea Party wave that would sweep out all the quisling legislators who failed to #StopTheSteal in 2020.”

A “Tea Party wave that would sweep out all the quisling legislators who failed to #StopTheSteal in 2020” is almost exactly what has transpired. Republicans have lost all will to deny Trump’s lies; the brave few who have dared to contradict them have been almost uniformly drummed out of the party. Big-lie enthusiasts have organized to elect candidates for governor and secretary of state and flooded the election-counting apparatus — which depends on the goodwill of sane, competent volunteers — with crackpots. But never mind.

In an interview in February of this year, Douthat allowed that an election crisis might in fact occur, and it “would be bad, but it’s different from saying, ‘Here are the 17 structural forces that are going to turn the United States into Viktor Orbán’s Hungary,’ which is not — as far as I can see — going to happen.”

So, yeah, maybe there would be an attempt to steal the next election, but it’s not as if, should Republicans manage to win, they were going to run some kind of Orban-esque competitive authoritarianism, right?

Flash forward to the present and — as I describe in a recent feature story — this is precisely the goal of a large and influential group of conservative intellectuals and Republican elected officials including not just Trumpists but also the leading alternative to Trump. I’ve seen conservatives roll their eyes at the term semi-fascist, but I haven’t seen any fundamental challenge to my description of either the belief system or the tactics now taking hold of the right. They are more or less up front about their belief that Republicans should employ methods they would consider oppressive if used against them. The right is largely abandoning the whole notion that American politics and government requires some neutral set of rules and norms.

Douthat’s most recent column doesn’t question my analysis, either. He simply retorts that liberals are doing the same thing. You can read his parade of alleged horribles, some of which are legitimate complaints, others exaggerations, but which, even if accepted in toto as correct, would not come close to equaling the Republican Party’s authoritarianism.

And even if they do, notice how much he is now conceding. “Indeed, much of Trump-era conservatism is convinced that worrying too much about classical-liberal niceties is a sucker’s game,” he argues. “But anyone who imagines that Trumpism took shape in isolation needs to understand how this ‘don’t be a sucker’ attitude has been reaffirmed and strengthened by progressive governance that seems equally unconcerned about neutrality or fairness.” So Douthat allows that a large and probably dominant faction of the conservative movement is authoritarian, but liberals bear much of the blame.

Douthat’s contention is that the conservatives weren’t authoritarian until recently, only becoming so in response to provocations from the left. This is eerily reminiscent of the analysis he once made of Sarah Palin — first denying she was an ignorant demagogue and then, when that denial became impossible to sustain, insisting she only became one, tragically, in response to her enemies.

Only this time, there’s no tragically. He is now proposing, or at least toying with the case, that conservative authoritarianism is justified as a response to the left’s offenses. “To give up the weapons of state power that your opponents are using so freely,” he argues, “feels, inevitably, like unilateral disarmament.” Once Republican authoritarianism ceased to be undeniable in his mind, it also ceased to be unacceptable.

Douthat is a wonderful columnist, and his critiques of liberalism are often deeply incisive. His point that progressives are also capable of illiberal overreach, and that this overreach can contribute to a cycle of radicalism, is well taken. But he has consistently leaned on a series of small-scale observations that are narrowly correct — such as Trump’s apparent lack of seriousness about governing — and drive him to diametrically wrong conclusions about the larger dynamic.

First he brushed off the Republican Party’s authoritarian turn as unlikely. Then it was containable, then inevitable, then, finally, necessary. In the course of four years, Douthat has talked himself, step by step, into defending what he once dismissed as an unrealistic nightmare.

Shadi Hamid — who is, God help us, a fellow at the Brookings Institution — has also consistently scoffed at the idea that the Republican Party poses any kind of threat to democracy. Hamid’s arguments are considerably cruder than Douthat’s. His most recent argument consists of a logical syllogism. If the Republican Party is authoritarian, then the only logical response is to use authoritarian measures against it. And since Democrats are not calling for a legal ban on the Republican Party, it follows that they do not actually believe the Republicans are authoritarian:

 

 

Yes, he is arguing that a situation where one party is committed to democracy and the other is not is conceptually impossible. If the evidence of the Republican Party’s illiberalism is so overwhelming that the best Hamid can do to deny it is to construct a logic game so absurd even a stoned college freshman would laugh at it, we’re in trouble.

One revelation I’ve had about the climate-justice movement is that many of its ideas are not merely unrealistic but directionally wrong. In particular, the movement wishes to enhance the ability of local community activists to block new infrastructure when, in fact, those blockages are a key impediment to the green-energy transition.

I wrote a column about this recently. The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas, who is more deeply versed in the issue, wrote a better version of the same argument. Both argue that a failure to successfully liberalize the permitting process will mean that at least 80 percent of the greenhouse-gas reductions in the Inflation Reduction Act will fail to materialize.

Brad Johnson, a climate strategist and formerly the founding executive director of Climate Hawks Vote and editor of ThinkProgress Green, writes a response in his newsletter for the Intercept. Here is the entire, unabridged text of his response. I am omitting nothing:

RETROGRADE ECOMODERNISTS: The ecomodernist gang, licking its wounds after failing to push through Joe Manchin’s fossil-fuel fast-tracking bill, continues its push to redefine climate action to mean deregulated industrial capitalism, based on the argument that some people are worth more than others. Hmm.

The reliably dangerously wrong Jonathan Chait published the unhinged “The Climate-Justice Movement Is Helping Neither the Climate Nor Justice” in New York, a Vox Media outlet.

And The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Desmas (formerly Vox) cites fracking booster and Koch cog Eli Dourado1 in a wild screed attacking environmental justice (“Not Everyone Should Have a Say”). Surprise, surprise: both Desmas and Dourado were attendees of the 2022 Breakthrough Institute Ecomodernism conference.

I’m guessing Chait and Desmas are not attending this Thursday’s WE ACT for Environmental Justice gala, which will honor Dr. Beverly L. Wright, Jessica Ottney Mahar, and Mychal Johnson.

In summary, his rebuttal consists of the following points:

1) I am “dangerously wrong” and my article is “unhinged.”

2) Demsas, whom he calls “Desmas,” includes among her multiple sources somebody who approves of fracking and once attended a conference with her.

3) Neither Demsas/Desmas nor I are likely attendees at an environmental-justice gala. (Johnson concedes this is merely a guess, but I can confirm it is correct.)

That’s the entire rebuttal. It is not just that Johnson has a bad argument or even that he has bad reasons for his argument. He appears not to understand what a “reason” is.

It would be unfair to the climate-justice movement to suggest Johnson’s reasoning skills are typical of its professional advocate class. Still, the fact that arguments like this can be published professionally tells you something about the quality of thought that prevails in this movement.

Multiple House Republicans have vowed that, if they gain a majority, they will hold the debt ceiling hostage to force the Biden administration to make spending cuts. They attempted the same gambit the last time they won control of the House under a Democratic president. “The November elections will likely give Republicans control of the House of Representatives as a platform from which to oppose the Democratic-controlled White House,” I wrote recently. “And one thing Republicans will do with this power, in all probability, will be to try to provoke a crisis in order to extort Democrats into accepting spending cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.”

The libertarian writer Matt Welch objects. He insists not only that Republicans won’t do this but also, even more bizarrely, that they have never done this:

I do, however, have at least some standing to judge the accuracy of this recent headline from New York Magazine political columnist Jonathan Chait: “Republicans Plan Debt Crisis to Force Cuts to Medicare, Social Security: They do this every time.”

Reader, they do not do this every time.

On November 4, 2014, Republicans won back control of the United States Senate for the first time since 2007, ushering in the only fully oppositional Congress of Barack Obama’s presidency. On November 5, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), said, “Let me make it clear: There will be no government shutdowns and no default on the national debt.”

The main confusion here lies in Welch’s apparent failure to understand that the House and the Senate are different legislative bodies. I will break this down in simple terms. The 2010 elections gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives. This meant Republicans now had the opportunity to block debt-ceiling increases. They attempted to do so. The government managed to avoid a default, but it was a near-run thing. The near default frightened the business community, and when Republicans won control of the Senate in 2014, McConnell came out against debt-ceiling extortion.

Welch is quoting McConnell’s statement to attempt to show that the debt-ceiling hostage negotiations of 2011 never occurred. But they did occur. I did not write that Senate Republicans provoked a debt-ceiling crisis, nor did I predict that Senate Republicans would do so if they won control. I was writing about the House of Representatives.

Of course the problem is that, since raising the debt ceiling requires Congress to pass a bill, this necessitates the ascent of both the House and Senate. The Senate’s aversion to holding the bill hostage is nice, but the House’s professed desire to withhold support is the veto point.

If Welch remains confused, I suggest he study this short explanatory video.

Learn more about RevenueStripe...

MORE FROM JONATHAN CHAIT