Lab leak is not a debunked conspiracy theory and never has been

 Lab leak is not a debunked conspiracy theory and never has been

The truth is we’ll just never know

The Department of Energy is not the first agency that comes to mind when most people think about America’s Intelligence Community. But as many an Energy Secretary has discovered to their chagrin, the DOE generally plays second fiddle to the Interior Department in terms of what most people think of as “energy policy.” Interior controls the vast federal lands of the American West that are the site of so much of our oil and gas drilling. These same broad vistas are also some of the best locations for utility-scale wind and solar projects and where, with appropriate regulatory changes, we could potentially unlock vast stores of geothermal energy.

Where DOE is truly the undisputed king is the realm of nuclear weapons and related research and science.

And because nuclear weapons are very much the kind of thing that spies are interested in, the DOE has a small but robust Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, whose “distinctive contribution to national security is the ability to leverage the Energy Department’s unmatched scientific and technological expertise in support of policymakers as well as national security missions in defense, homeland security, cyber security, intelligence, and energy security.”

The federal org chart is messy, and the United States doesn’t have a Science Ministry. Because Energy oversees a network of labs and generally does a lot of science and research, it tends to be where “science stuff” that doesn’t fit comfortably under the NIH umbrella ends up.

And that is how the DOE came to make headlines over the weekend with their conclusion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus probably leaked from a lab in China. The frustrating thing about intelligence agencies is they don’t come out and tell you explicitly what their information is, so it’s always hard to tell whether they are totally full of shit. Does this mean the virus did, in fact, leak from a lab? I don’t know, and it seems very unlikely that we will ever know.

But the headlines here represent another opportunity to try to reboot the conversation around a story where the gap between reality and the discourse has been extraordinarily wide.

Lab leak has always been taken seriously by the U.S. government

I tweeted this back in January and got a lot of people in my mentions yelling at me. But then White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted it, so I think I was basically right.

Biden has always taken the lab leak theory seriously.

Trump, on the other hand, was flaky and weird around Covid-19. He would alternate between his racist “China virus” routine and insisting the virus was no big deal. Some factions of his administration were very seriously pursuing a lab leak theory while others were pursuing crank cures. Before deciding the virus was no problem at all, Trump had a brief period as a serious Covid hawk who implemented a short-lived nationwide economic shutdown. But before that, he was insisting that everything was fine thanks to his confidence in the Chinese government:

2/7 Tweet: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!”

2/7 remarks: “I had a great conversation last night with President Xi. It's a tough situation. I think they're doing a very good job.”

2/10 Fox Business interview: “I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control.”

2/10 campaign rally: “I spoke with President Xi, and they’re working very, very hard. And I think it’s all going to work out fine.”

2/13 Fox News: “I think they've handled it professionally and I think they're extremely capable and I think President Xi is extremely capable and I hope that it's going to be resolved.”

Biden, who is better than Trump at not being totally chaotic, was saying back in February of 2020 what he’s consistently said all along: “What I would do were I president now, I would not be taking China’s word for it. I would insist that China allow our scientists in to make a hard determination of how it started, where it’s from, how far along it is. Because that is not happening now.”

China has never provided that kind of access to American scientists, and they never will. To be clear, the fact that the PRC has not allowed this level of American access is weak evidence of a cover-up; the Chinese government has many other compelling reasons not to let American officials snoop around their biolabs. But it means that there is a huge cloud of uncertainty hanging over this whole affair. But Biden was curious about this angle as a candidate and he was curious as president, ordering an Intelligence Community review during his first year in office, only to have them come to the boring conclusion that we don’t really know and probably never will.

There’s a very clear political story here, which is that Trump was skeptical of China on Covid-19 in his very chaotic Trump-like way and Biden is skeptical in his low-key way. The American government, meanwhile, is also skeptical. In that prior review, four IC agencies concluded with “low confidence” that it was zoonotic, while one agency (now known to be the FBI) said with “medium confidence” that it was a lab leak. The FBI is now joined by DOE (with only “low confidence”) in believing it’s a lab leak. But there are 17 component agencies to the IC, so by far the majority verdict here is “it’s hard to say.”

The parallel reality of discourse

Unfortunately, that story is not the version that’s told in the discourse. As I detailed in “The Media’s Lab Leak Fiasco,” many people writing articles on the internet back in the heady days of February 2020 convinced themselves that there were only two theories of Covid-19’s origins:

It was a crossover from animals.

It was an engineered Chinese bioweapon.

They then insisted that because those were the only options, anyone saying not-1 was saying 2, and 2 was a fringe conspiracy theory. Because this was back before Covid polarization set in, New York Times articles accusing Senator Tom Cotton of baselessly spreading the second theory debunked it in terms that sound today like a conservative arguing that Covid-19 is no big deal:

Although much remains unknown about the coronavirus, experts generally dismiss the idea that it was created by human hands. Scientists who have studied the coronavirus say it resembles SARS and other viruses that come from bats. While contagious, so far it appears to largely threaten the lives of older people with chronic health issues, making it a less-than-effective bioweapon.

The third theory, the one the Intelligence Community takes seriously and that Cotton actually floated, isn’t that SARS-CoV-2 was designed as a weapon (it’s true that it wouldn’t be a very good weapon) but that it is something researchers were studying in the lab — either a natural bat virus brought to Wuhan by Chinese virus hunters or something cooked up for research purposes.

But on the plane of discourse, everyone kind of missed this possibility for a few months back in 2020, and it became hardened conventional wisdom in certain circles that the view of Joe Biden, the FBI, and a healthy minority of the Intelligence Community was a right-wing conspiracy theory. To be clear, though, “some lab guys fucked up” is not a conspiracy. And the idea that the PRC government was squirrelly and non-transparent about Covid-19’s origin isn’t a theory — it’s clearly what happened.

Is it kind of crazy to allege that Chinese scientists might be scouring the country trying to dig up deadly viruses and even make new ones in labs? It does sound like a crazy thing to do. But this is what virologists around the world think they should be doing with their time. And that, I think, is the actual crux of the issue here.

We need to scrutinize dual-use virus research

Lab leak theory has always been of interest to two communities: China hawks and critics of “gain of function” virology research.

The China hawks have basically swept the field in American politics these days, so they hardly need the Covid origins issue. This means we’re left with the critics of risky virus research.

I’ve been saying for years that I thought the strong critics here were putting too much emphasis on lab leak theory. Realistically, they aren’t going to change their minds about the policy question, even in light of incredibly persuasive evidence for the zoonotic origin of Covid-19. It’s true that definitive proof of a lab leak would be a useful cudgel for cracking down on dangerous research. But to quote myself, people have known since long before Covid-19 that dangerous viruses leak from labs:

Lab leaks are just not that rare. Martin Furmanski, writing for the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in 2014, recounted that “at least 80 cases and three deaths were the result of three separate escapes of the smallpox virus from two different accredited smallpox laboratories” over a 15-year period during the global eradication campaign.

Furmanski also documents leaks of foot and mouth disease, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and H1N1 influenza. In the 1970s, a significant anthrax outbreak was caused by leaks from a Soviet lab. He was writing not in the context of the Covid pandemic but of the near-miss with SARS, observing that “there have been six separate ‘escapes’ from virology labs studying it: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and in four distinct events at the same laboratory in Beijing.”

This information should give us a reasonably high Bayesian prior that Covid-19 was a lab leak. But we should also be clear that even if Covid-19 was not a lab leak, the policy concern is that containing viruses in labs seems to be hard. Outside of the particular house of mirrors created by Covid polarization, this is a point you’d think would be almost conventional wisdom among progressives. If you can see why people might worry that freight train companies underinvest in safety relative to what the public interest requires, the exact same kind of worries apply to virus research. Except the downside risk of virus lab accidents is even larger than the downside risk of train derailments (unless the train happens to be carrying dangerous virus samples).

Back in January, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity wrote a long series of recommendations for applying a stricter and more uniform set of safety rules to biolabs. We should take their recommendations.

There’s no point in getting into the weeds on this or pretending I know how to manage virology labs, but there are two high-level points that I think people need to understand. First is that with any regulatory proposal, you need to consider not just benefits but costs. And an important consideration here is that while the downside of virus lab accidents is almost unbounded, the benefits of this kind of research seem pretty minimal. It would be really good to have more scientific research into virus countermeasures. But the big stumbling blocks are the rules around clinical trials. We don’t need to do dual-use work cooking up deadly pathogens in order to speed vaccine research — we need to prioritize speedier vaccine research.

Second is that when you see a loud chorus on virology Twitter telling you that this whole lab leak thing is a debunked conspiracy theory, yes, these are subject-matter experts you are listening to. But as is often the case in regulatory disputes, the people with the subject-matter knowledge are also interested parties — they don’t want more regulatory scrutiny. This is certainly their right, but it seems awfully unpersuasive to me, just like their effort to convince the world that the lab leak question has been settled.

The main divide right now is between the kind of China hawks who think support for Ukraine is helpful to a China containment policy and those who think it’s counterproductive. Nobody is arguing for a return to Bush/Obama engagement-style policymaking, not least because the main opponents of the New Cold War consensus also didn’t like the Bush/Obama approach to trade with China.

Misinformation isn't just on the right

Misinformation isn't just on the right

I don’t have any specific commentary to offer on the recent meltdown at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government centered on misinformation expert Joan Donovan.

But the incident seems like a good opportunity to write about my annoyance at the way the “misinformation” construct has been wielded in the Trump era as a kind of partisan cudgel and all-purpose excuse.

It’s unfortunate, because I really do believe that media is an important factor in politics and that in particular, the dynamics of right-wing propaganda media on cable and talk radio are crucial to understanding the world we live in. But beyond that, the general subject of what people know about politics, what they think they know, and how that matters is interesting.

In a democracy, those who govern are accountable to a mass public that overwhelmingly comprises people who don’t think much about politics and policy and who really don’t know much about it. That real-world citizens are not idealized deliberators is a really important aspect of how society functions, and it’s important that everyone who cares about such things try to understand it.

And there’s a lot of interesting work being done on these questions. One of my favorite ideas, borrowed from David Schleicher, is that we should concentrate more power in the hands of governors and less in state legislatures. A mostly uninformed public does seem to pay at least some attention to what’s happening at the level of governor, while almost nobody has any idea who their state legislator is — most people simply use that vote as a referendum on the president. I’m really looking forward to my friend Emily Thorson’s forthcoming book on systematic policy misperceptions among the mass public. As someone who wants to make people more informed with my own work, I’m very interested in Brendan Nyhan’s research into which tactics are effective at correcting misinformation.

But this whole genre of genuine inquiry into public opinion dynamics has gotten derailed, I think, by the sort of goofy idea that Donald Trump was swept into power by a tidal wave of “misinformation” or the conceit that it’s constructive to analyze GOP outreach to Hispanic voters primarily through the “misinformation” lens.

The thing that makes this sort of superficial analysis so seductive is that it’s not exactly wrong. Most people really are very poorly informed about politics and policy. A lot of campaign messaging is pretty misleading. A lot of media coverage is sloppy and propagandistic. It’s also true that as a result of education polarization, over the past few cycles, Democrats have mostly done worse with relatively uninformed demographic groups (poor white people, working-class Hispanics) and better with relatively well-informed high-SES whites. This is to say that if you set out to find misinformation among people voting Republican, it’s not hard to do so. But it’s a totally unprincipled inquiry unless you take a systematic look at misinformation, in which case you’ll see it’s hardly confined to Republicans.

There’s a lot of progressive climate misinformation

I think the most salient example of this is climate change, where you not only have rightists spreading insane conspiracy theories (Trump used to say it was a Chinese hoax), but you also have a lot of very influential wrongheaded ideas on the left.

Perhaps the most prominent version of this is the idea that the world faces a hard tipping point to climate apocalypse sometime around 2030. This is routinely debunked (here’s Scientific American) but keeps popping up. As is often the case with misinformation, the problem arises in large part because elite communicators say things that are a little confusing or misleading. This NPR headline “Earth has 11 years to cut emissions to avoid dire climate scenarios, a report says” sounds superficially similar to AOC’s “The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” But the report is not measuring humanity’s time to avert human extinction — it’s measuring humanity’s time to avert the 1.5 degrees of warming adopted as a global target in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. We will almost certainly end up with more warming than that, and this will lead to, among other things, irreversible harm to low-lying island nations. But it’s not the actual end of the world (just ask David Wallace-Wells). And even more importantly, there are no magic tipping points.

The misperception about this really is broadly influential, though.

“Don’t Look Up” was marketed as a climate change allegory, and it’s very explicitly about a genuine extinction-level threat with a specific near-term tipping point. If you conceptualize climate change as having those features, then the behavior of major world governments with regard to climate seems bizarre and borderline insane. That then encourages a lot of performative radicalism, inattention to cost-benefit analysis, and conspiratorial thinking about why elected officials won’t do what you want them to do. We have pretty good evidence that a non-trivial number of young people are experiencing meaningful psychological distress based on the misperception that they are going to grow up to live in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Many, many people don’t realize that accounts of RCP 8.5 climate scenarios are not intended to represent “business as usual,” and that the world has been moving steadily away from this worst-case scenario outcome for some time.

I also think many people don’t realize that natural disaster deaths have become much rarer over time because for most people, the benefits of living in a richer world with better technology far outweigh the hazards of living in a warmer world.

Again, none of this is to deny the scientific facts of climate change: greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global climate shifts that are on net harmful, and it’s important that we take further action to reduce those emissions. But it’s actually a substantially different situation than the one a lot of progressives seem to think that we are in.

Meanwhile, in addition to overstating the most likely consequences of the status quo, it’s common to hear grossly exaggerated accounts of the ease of getting to net zero with current technology. That’s often paired with undervaluing energy in general, with the overall result that the climate left is less enthusiastic about actually deploying zero-carbon energy than it should be and also more hostile to fossil fuel use than it should be. These are errors that have had meaningful policy and political impacts, but that get totally ignored in a misinformation discourse that locates misinformation exclusively on the right.

“Hands up, don’t shoot”

A few years ago, both Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris commemorated the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri by tweeting that Brown was murdered by a police officer.

Twitter avatar for @ewarren

I thought nothing of those tweets when I read them only to find out from my colleague German Lopez that the Obama DOJ investigation of the Brown shooting exonerated the cop in question:

Brown died about 150 feet from Wilson’s vehicle. He was shot six times. No gunshot was confirmed to hit Brown from behind.

The physical evidence suggested that Brown reached into Wilson’s car during their physical altercation and, very likely, attempted to grab the officer’s gun. The most credible witnesses agreed that Brown moved toward Wilson before the officer fired his final shots — and there simply wasn’t enough evidence, especially given the struggle at the car, that Wilson wasn’t justified in fearing for his life when he fired the shots that killed Brown.

Although some credible witnesses suggested Brown raised his hands up before he died, witnesses who disputed major parts of Wilson’s side of the story were discredited by the physical evidence and when they changed their accounts.

The report said all this was “corroborated by bruising on Wilson’s jaw and scratches on his neck, the presence of Brown’s DNA on Wilson’s collar, shirt, and pants, and Wilson’s DNA on Brown’s palm.”

Brown’s death sparked massive protests in a community that was predisposed to believe the worst about the local police. Those protests spurred federal investigations both of the specific incident and of the department more broadly. The pattern-or-practice investigation into the department unearthed a lot of troubling conduct and racism, which explains why many people in the local community were predisposed to believe the worst about Wilson. But the investigation into the specific shooting suggests that in this case, the predisposition was wrong and the early story that Brown was shot while saying “hands up, don’t shoot” is totally unsubstantiated.

While the protests themselves were sparked in part by viral misinformation spreading on social media, they did lead to a lot more awareness among white liberals of the problems of police misconduct. But nobody on Team Warren or Team Harris was aware of what this specific DOJ investigation concluded — and neither was I.

One suggestive survey indicated that about 40-50% of liberal or very liberal people believe 1,000 or more unarmed Black men are shot and killed by the police in a typical year. I have a lot of qualms with the methods used in that survey, which I think encouraged overestimation across the board. But if nothing else, it demonstrates that a huge share of the population is operating with very little factual information about a subject it purports to believe is very important. This is not unique to liberals or the topic of police misconduct —it is, rather, fairly typical of average citizens’ general lack of engagement with policy or facts.

And to return to my original point, we do our own understanding a disservice if we convince ourselves that misinformation is a strictly partisan or one-sided phenomenon.

There’s centrist misinformation, too

A theme I’ve returned to several times recently on Slow Boring is that a lot of misguided-at-the-time Obama-era ideas about deficit reduction are warranted from the vantage point of 2023.

That’s part of the reason I’m such a cranky centrist here in 2023, writing my scolding “both sides” column about how progressives fall for misinformation, too. But critically, one big reason all this centrist deficit reduction stuff got discredited was the huge, wildly misguided deficit reduction push coming from centrist elites at the depths of the Great Recession. This push involved a lot of accurate-but-misleading rhetoric that muddied the waters between short-term and long-term concerns. It featured shoddy, bias-confirming empirical research purporting to show that depressed labor force participation was about video games (it turned out to just be demand). A misguided panic about the idea that Disability Insurance was depressing labor force participation (again, it turned out to just be demand) was also in the mix. And a fat finger Excel spreadsheet error committed by highly prestigious economists became the basis for an elite panic about a supposed debt:GDP tipping point.

All those tragic economic policy errors occurred just a few years after centrist national security elites convinced themselves (and the country) that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons program and that the U.S. government had the capacity to rebuild Iraq as a friendly democracy.

I think it’s very clear that Trump’s followers were and are possessed by a lot of conspiracy theories and misinformation. I also think, as I argued above, that the leftist faction that has become increasingly influential in the Democratic Party has fallen for a decent amount of misinformation. But if you want to understand the role of misinformation in destabilizing the sensible center of American politics, I think you primarily have to point the finger inwards at the one-two punch of Iraq and the Great Recession in which establishment elites, gassed up on their own misinformation, badly mismanaged the country.

We need a richer understanding of human fallibility

The moral of all these stories is that people are prone to bias-confirmation and groupthink, and the mass public tends not to pay much attention to policy issues, even ones they find interesting enough to march in the streets about.

This is a kind of tragic aspect of the human condition and not a specific failure of your political enemies.

I think back sometimes at my own misinformation on the Michael Brown point. A big part of the reason I didn’t know the truth about this is it didn’t matter to me, practically speaking. During the five years or so between the Ferguson protests and Lopez’s articles about the tweet, I didn’t write anything for which the DOJ inquiry into the shooting was relevant. I was actually so disengaged from this topic that when I started work on this 2019 article making the case for increased police funding, I was a little surprised to learn how controversial the thesis was. After all, I was making the case for the merits of federal police funding initiatives that were pushed by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and opposed by Donald Trump. The progressive conventional wisdom had moved on from that Clinton/Obama consensus without me realizing it, but I hadn’t moved on even though I also didn’t realize Wilson had been exonerated — it wasn’t actually policy-relevant, so I hadn’t been paying attention.

And the average citizen has much less reason than I do to pay attention to news developments.

This is why people mostly don’t do it and thus why people are pretty misinformed. Ideally, actual U.S. Senators and their communications teams would take a second to say “wait, are we sure this is true?”, just as in my police funding piece I didn’t type from pure memory — I actually looked into the research and got my facts in order before writing.

But all kinds of political elites act impulsively or irresponsibly at times. Or they share things like that NPR article, which was perfectly accurate but also played directly into a widespread misconception. These problems, unfortunately, are not unique to any one faction or party — they are part of life.

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THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

Hi there, here’s what you need to know for the week of February 24, 2023, in 10 minutes.

THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

① It may not seem like it in the news lull, but Republicans keep galloping toward the extreme

② Given their poor performance in elections, it's tempting to interpret this as the last gasp of a dying authoritarianism, and thus nothing to fear

③ On the other hand, have you ever seen a horror movie?! the presidential election is still a coin flip, which makes complacency about authoritarianism very risky

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FLOP CULTURE

It’s been a bad week for right-wing culture warriors. Bad in that their aggression and bad faith have failed to pay political dividends recently. And (I’d guess relatedly) in that their toxic internal culture has trained them to push ever rightward no matter what, admit no error, even when that entails embracing terrible extremism.  

On its face it might seem like this places Democrats in a strong “don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake” position. But I want to stress test that assumption a bit.

① FOX HUNTING

You could see how the GOP’s rightward ratchet works in real time over the past several days. Last week, the lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems filed a motion for summary judgment in their defamation case against Fox News. That is, they asked the judge to find in their favor based on the overwhelming evidence they’ve amassed that Fox executives and the network’s highest-profile personalities knew they were lying when they promoted Donald Trump’s slanderous election-theft claims. 

Their findings are irrefutable. They obtained internal communications showing that all the key decision makers and hosts knew Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories were insane, but chose to fan them anyhow for fear of angering him, alienating their audience, and harming their business. Tucker Carlson in particular left a lengthy trail of evidence that he knew the truth, but nevertheless believed the network should lie. He even advocated for firing a Fox News correspondent who had the audacity to fact check Trump. Lies rewarded with money, truth punished by professional death.

We’ve been behind the scenes at Fox before. We’ve seen over and over how blurry the line is between them and the Republicans they seek to influence and promote. But we’ve never been offered such a damning view of how intentional their propaganda is, of how conscious they are of what they're doing. Their imperatives to appease Trump, help Republicans, and pander to their audience are cardinal, and will never give way to whatever remnant guilt any of them feel about lying. If an exposé of a major mainstream or liberal news outlet revealed corruption anywhere near this extensive, that outlet would be ruined. 

The powers that be on the right, by contrast, show no indication that they care in the slightest, or fear that they’ll suffer any meaningful consequences for embracing this kind of mass deception. Days after the depths of Carlson’s depravity were revealed (or confirmed, if you prefer) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy granted him exclusive access, over the long-stated objections of the Capitol Police, to all January 6, 2021, security-camera footage. Some 40,000 hours. 

I can’t think of a clearer way for McCarthy to admit that the unaired video is a political nullity. If it contained even a moment of exculpatory footage, McCarthy would’ve given it to almost anyone else, anyone with even a shred of credibility outside the walled garden of Fox News primetime. But he gave it to Carlson, this week of all weeks. It’s his way of saying Carlson’s still a proud member of his team, that he’s thrilled Carlson misled millions of Americans about the 2020 election, and that he’s happy to work with Carlson to sanitize the insurrection or make yet more Fox viewers think the insurrection was justified. 

Meanwhile, McCarthy’s most important ally in the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), outlined her vision for a red-state secession from the union, Trump is at the vanguard of a right-wing effort to portray the train derailment in East Palestine, OH, as part of a liberal war on white working-class people, and most of the party decided to attack Joe Biden for while he was visiting the war zone in Ukraine. Rightward, march.

② YOU OOZE, YOU LOSE

There are two main ways to look at all this. 

One is to observe that Republicans keep trying to turn everything into culture war, in increasingly contrived, confusing, and off-putting ways, and it keeps not working very well. In that light, you might see the last gasps of a dying authoritarianism. You might interpret it, a la Josh Barro, as yet more evidence that we’re “turn[ing] back the political clock to a more normal time, before Donald Trump made everything weird.”

Democrats fared extremely well in a handful of off-cycle elections this past Tuesday. A new Lake Research Partners report concludes that in the swingiest parts of the country where presidential elections are decided, a fairly standard Democratic economic message holds up better against Republican culture-war attacks than against a more old-school Republican economic message attacking Democrats over gas prices, inflation, deficits etc. 

This is all consistent with the picture that emerged in November, when there was more or less an inverse relationship between how closely swing-state Republicans were associated with Donald Trump and the right-wing culture war apparatus and how well they fared in their elections. MAGA got wiped out.

With all that as a backdrop, why not just let Republican agitprop run wild, let them make Marjorie Taylor Greene the face of the party’s future? Why not proceed as if the clock has already been wound back to 1996, stick stubbornly to the Social Security script Biden used a couple weeks ago in his State of the Union address, and enjoy the spoils?

It might work, but…

③ TOO MANY CROOKS

The other way to look at it is that national elections are still essentially coin flips, so it's extremely dangerous that one party is in the midst of a fasc attack.

One thing I found kind of amusing about the Lake Research study is that it tests two Republican messages (one economic, one culture-based) against a monolithic Democratic message that is naturally economic in nature. I don’t know if that simply a reflection of the party’s clear predilections (i.e. why bother testing a Democratic culture-war message when the party doesn’t run on culture wars) or of a methodological fallacy (since economic messages are obviously the most effective, we won’t waste our time testing other kinds). Either way it means we’re still flying a bit blind about what Democratic messages best answer Republican attacks. 

Except…I’m not sure that’s true. We have at least some reason to believe that broadly-appealing Democratic “culture war” attacks—that is, efforts to seize cultural high grounds of patriotism, ethics, equal rights, decency, etc. rather than left-wing cultural avant-gardism—are the most effective ones in the party’s arsenal. (cf. 2022)

By contrast, the track record of Mediscare-style economic appeals is mixed. What worked well for Bill Clinton nearly 30 years ago, and for Barack Obama when he had the good fortune of running against the austere Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan ticket, didn’t work so great for Democrats in 2010 and 2014, and if the lesson of 2022 for Republicans is that creating distance from Trump is good, and bog-standard economic attacks work better than culture-war attacks, then Democrats ought to be prepared for a fight in which Republicans apply those lessons. 

Political professionals generally agree that Republicans settled into this mode of picking culture-war fights about everything, hoping some go viral, because their economic agenda is so rigidly regressive and solicitous of the wealthy, they want to talk about anything else. And that in turn suggests Democrats should work assiduously to wrest national discourse back to the GOP economic agenda. I think that captures a real dynamic, but it’s not an iron law. Expecting rigid economic appeals to normie voters to work in all circumstances creates a single point of failure, which Republicans can attack by adjusting their own tactics and stated policies, or which animal spirits and saboteurs can attack by darkening the economic outlook between now and 2024.

The GOP is an institution purpose-built to abuse power to generate propaganda, in order to accumulate more power to generate yet more propaganda, and then to repeat the cycle until Republicans have accumulated enough power to legally strip rights from their political enemies and cut rich-people’s taxes. Ron DeSantis has traduced the first amendment in Florida, jailed innocent people for voting, and kidnapped migrants in other states to dump them thousands of miles away, and (for whatever it's worth 20 months out) he leads Joe Biden in most head-to-head polls for the presidency.

As McCarthy demonstrated this week, Republicans are in the process of abusing power to generate a fog of disinformation about what happened on January 6. Perhaps they think they can fight that issue to a draw, and perhaps they’re wrong about it, but if Republicans want to resurrect the national dialogue about the failed Trump coup, Democrats have a choice. They could cede the stage to Republicans, let them remind America about the attack on the Capitol, assuming everyone's views are already fixed. Or they could welcome Republicans to relitigate January 6 and be ready to win that fight all over again. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seems to understand that there’s some tension here, and may be feeling out ways for Democrats to fuse economic and culture-war appeals. 

I’d only add that whatever approach he and the party settle on, they should keep in mind that while GOP culture-war attacks don’t always knock 'em dead with voters in survey and focus-group settings (or even at the ballot-box this week) they also don’t operate on that one, dumb channel alone. Fulminating about spy balloons and gas stoves might not be the GOP’s golden ticket to winning elections, but it does leave an imprint on the Democratic Party, which has been unable to rebuild its reputation in the heartland despite flooding the middle of the country with money and jobs and a manufacturing revival. That may have something to do with the fact that Republicans saturate those same regions with poisonous lies about Democrats, which Democrats often leave unrebutted. 

“Our brand is pretty damaged in these places,” warns the Lake Research report. Well, how do we think that happened?

In Ohio, Republicans capitalized on an information and messaging void to lay blame for the derailment and toxic pollution at the feet of Democrats who, we’re meant to believe, have turned their backs on white working-class communities like East Palestine. We can all soothe ourselves by assuming that this line of attack goes to far, particularly when Republicans lapse into alienating and dangerous race-war rhetoric. That it will backfire automatically. But it's a mistake to assume voters will get there on their own, without the help of Democratic culture warriors reminding them that these are liars and crooks, the worst people to listen to in the midst of a disaster; the worst people to darken the door of U.S. politics in our lifetimes. We may not be able to trust them to oversee Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. But that’s not just a matter of their policies being unappealing—it’s that they’re untrustworthy all the way down.

My hero/guru Theda Skocpol and I spoke for over an hour about modern Republican culture warring, its roots in the Tea Party era, and how Democrats can best counter it. She’s brilliant, and the whole conversation is worth your time (even if you think you’re really special).

Greg Sargent has a couple ideas about how Democrats can kick the legs out from under the Kevin McCarthy/Tucker Carlson insurrection revisionism specifically.

Also, another caveat. Democrats may be doing very well in special elections, and even midterm elections on their current course, but those are lower-turnout elections than presidential elections, and Democrats have underperformed the last two presidential elections, catastrophically so in 2016.

Read Jim Fallows on his old boss Jimmy Carter, now reaching the end of his life.

New York Times politics desk, at it again.

After visiting Kiev, Biden counterprogrammed a speech by Vladimir Putin in Moscow with a speech of his own in Warsaw. It created a contrast between high democratic ideals and solidarity on the one hand and Putin’s hatred of LGBT people and drag queens on the other. Almost like a microcosm of American politics, if Putin led the GOP, which…well…

The person helping House Republicans draw up a list of ransoms they can demand in exchange for letting the debt-limit hostage go is Donald Trump’s former OMB guy, a rightwing maniac who got up to his ears in the Ukraine shakedown, and now cheerleads Republican culture wars.

Imagine a couple conservative media impresarios, vibin’...

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Yaroslav Trofimov | Ukraine Is the West’s War Now

Essay | Ukraine Is the West’s War Now

By Yaroslav Trofimov

The Western military supplies that had been shipped to Kyiv in previous weeks, such as Javelin antitank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, were the kind of arms that small bands of Ukrainians would need for an insurgency after the Russian occupation. Ukraine’s requests for the heavy weapons that it needed to wage a conventional war to prevent such an occupation had been turned down.

Ukraine was not completely on its own, of course, and the U.S. was already laying the groundwork for serious economic sanctions on Russia. But Western engagement was carefully calibrated—and designed to avoid any appearance that the Western alliance had tried and failed to avert the downfall of Ukraine by military means.

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A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.

“In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”

image

President Biden visits Kyiv for the first time since the Russian invasion and meets with members of the Zelensky government at the presidential palace, Feb. 20.

Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/Getty Images

The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia. It’s a more ambitious commitment that carries much higher risks—but also strategic rewards—for the Western alliance.

By repelling the initial Russian onslaught, the Ukrainians have punctured the myth of Russia’s military invincibility and proved that helping Ukraine isn’t a quixotic endeavor. Just as importantly, the horrors inflicted by Russian troops in Bucha, Mariupol, Izyum and other parts of Ukraine have jolted public opinion in North America and Europe, spurring heretofore reluctant governments into action.

“Nobody thought the Russians would start a medieval war in the 21st century,” said Sen. James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This conflict is going to change the face of Europe as much as World War II did.”

It’s not just the fate of Europe that is being decided on the battlefields of Ukraine, where Russia has regained momentum after a mobilization last fall and is launching renewed offensives. In Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, the West’s geopolitical adversaries are calculating whether the U.S. and its allies have the stamina and cohesion to defend the rules-based international order that has benefited the West for decades.

The West will deliver more weapons to Ukraine in the next few months than they did in the whole of 2022.

In particular, the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea is closely linked to the West’s record in Ukraine. “Beijing is watching closely, to see the price Russia pays, or the reward it receives, for its aggression. What is happening in Europe today can happen in Asia tomorrow,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned the Munich Security Conference this month. “If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get what they want. This will make the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable.”

The Munich conference capped several weeks in which the U.S. and its allies have dramatically expanded the scope of their military aid, an indication that Mr. Putin’s expectation that the West will eventually tire of helping Ukraine hasn’t materialized just yet. In fact, they will deliver more weapons to Ukraine in the next few months than they did in the whole of 2022. As British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in Munich, “Now is the moment to double down on our military support.”

On Monday, Mr. Biden highlighted the growing Western resolve as he traveled to Kyiv to meet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Unveiling yet another U.S. weapons package, valued at $460 million, he recalled the pessimistic predictions of February 2022. “One year later, Kyiv stands and Ukraine stands. Democracy stands,” Mr. Biden said. “The Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”

Javelin antitank missiles were among the first weapons the U.S. sent to aid Ukraine after the Russian invasion last February. A Ukrainian soldier shoulders a Javelin in Zaporizhzhia province in the southeast, an early focus of the Russian attack, April 28, 2022.

Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal

Stinger portable air defense systems were also among the weapons the U.S. sent in the early weeks of the invasion. Ukrainian soldiers stand by with the weapon in Bakhmut, in recent weeks the site of some of the most intense fighting of the war, Dec. 29, 2022.

Pierre Crom/Getty Images

M777 howitzers arrived from the U.S. in the spring. A Ukrainian artillery unit uses an M777 on Jan. 9, 2023, to respond to Russian shelling of Kherson, the southern regional capital initially captured by Russia and then retaken in November by Ukrainian forces.

Pierre Crom/Getty Images

U.S.-made Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) were sent to Ukraine during the summer. A launch truck fires a missile from a field somewhere on Ukraine's southern front in September, 2022.

Tony Overman/The Olympian/Associated Press

France contributed its Caesar self-propelled howitzers starting in May, among other weapons sent by European countries. Ukrainian forces fire a Caesar at Russian positions in the east, Dec. 28, 2022.

Sameer Al-DOUMY/AFP/Getty Images

The war in Ukraine isn’t likely to end anytime soon. Both sides believe they can win on the battlefield, and little room exists for peace negotiations. Ukraine is preparing offensives to regain the roughly 18% of its territory still occupied by Moscow, including the Crimea peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas region that Mr. Putin seized in 2014. Russia has declared four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls, to be its own sovereign territory and seeks, at the very least, to conquer those lands. Mr. Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, indicated that his aspirations remain much broader, referring to Russia’s “historical territories that are now called Ukraine.”

A year into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Ukraine’s own military industries have been shattered by Russian missile strikes, and its reserves of Soviet-vintage weapons are running out. By now, Kyiv can keep fighting only as long as Western assistance continues apace. Though public support for Ukraine has proven remarkably resilient in the U.S. and Europe, there is no guarantee that the mood won’t shift in the future, especially if there is a serious economic downturn.

“The next months will be very critical. If, say, another Ukrainian offensive fails, if it becomes the public narrative that it’s going to be a stalemate, support in the West might drop—perhaps not substantially, but some of the politicians will see the writing on the wall,” cautioned Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.

Since the war’s first days, Mr. Zelensky has taken advantage of his skills as an actor and communicator to speak directly to a variety of audiences worldwide. He has addressed university commencements, music festivals and sports tournaments in an effort to make Ukraine’s fight for freedom into a moral and emotional issue rather than yet another foreign-policy problem. His approach has clearly paid off.

image

Ukraine’s President Zelensky (left) and U.K. Prime Minister Sunak pose with a British Challenger 2 tank offered to the war effort, Feb. 8.

Photo: Andrew Matthews/Pool/Associated Press

“In diplomacy, morality is part of the public narrative, but rarely part of the real decision-making process. But Ukraine’s case was one of the examples in history when you can argue that sympathy based on moral arguments was a game changer,” said Mr. Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister. “Some governments acted the way they did not merely based on their practical considerations but under enormous pressure of their public opinion. And that public opinion was based on moral compassion for the victim of the aggression.”

Mr. Putin has tried to counter the Ukrainian message by appealing to fear. On the first morning of the war, he alluded to nuclear weapons to deter the West from helping Ukraine. “A few important, very important, words for those who may be tempted to interfere in the ongoing events,” Mr. Putin said sternly. “Whoever attempts to meddle, and even more so to create threats for our country, for our people, must know that Russia’s response will be immediate, and will cause you such consequences that you have never encountered in your history. We are ready for any turn of events. All required decisions have already been made.”

The Biden administration took a gradualist approach to arming Ukraine that White House officials have described as ‘boiling the frog.’

Since then, the Russian president and his senior aides have repeatedly brandished the nuclear threat. They implied in September, for instance, that attempts by Ukraine to regain territories annexed by Russia, such as Kherson, might be met with a nuclear strike. Ukraine reclaimed Kherson in November.

“Putin is threatening Armageddon, and the Russians are doing it all the time, sometimes in oblique ways and sometimes in a more direct way,” said John Sullivan, who served as U.S. ambassador in Moscow until September and was surprised during his tenure by how frequently his Russian interlocutors casually raised the prospect of nuclear war. “But when you actually poke at that and provide weapons gradually over time, there hasn’t been the catastrophic response that Putin promised.”

Though Mr. Putin’s nuclear blackmail didn’t fully succeed, it did prompt initial restraint in Western military support for Ukraine. In the first several months after the Russian invasion, the Biden administration took a gradualist approach that White House officials have described as “boiling the frog.” As the U.S. began to introduce new weapons systems, it did so slowly and, initially, in limited numbers. None of these individual decisions were of sufficient scope to provoke a dramatic escalation by Moscow. But over the past 12 months, the cumulative effect of these new weapons has transformed the balance of power on the battlefield and enabled a string of strategic Ukrainian victories.

The U.S. announced last month that it will send 90 Stryker armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine. A Stryker takes part in joint training exercises with the U.K. and Nordic and Baltic countries in Niinisalo, Finland, May 4, 2022.

Roni Rekomaa/Bloomberg

The U.S. and Germany are both providing U.S.-made Patriot surface-to-air missile systems to Kyiv. German soldiers work with a Patriot launcher module in Zamosc, Poland, Feb. 18, 2023.

Omar Marques/Getty Images

Germany and other European countries announced last month they will send German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Polish and Ukrainian soldiers are seen on a Leopard 2 during training at the Swietoszow military base in Poland, Feb. 13, 2023.

WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP via Getty Images

After sending more Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine in the first weeks of the war, Washington provided M777 howitzers in the spring and Himars missile systems in the summer. The U.K., Poland, Germany, France and the Netherlands have also contributed large arsenals of comparable weapons, such as the French-made Caesar and German-made Panzerhaubitze self-propelled guns. These supplies allowed Ukrainian forces to stop Russian advances in the Donbas region over the summer and to push back with offensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions during the fall.

Now, Patriot air-defense batteries, Abrams and Leopard tanks, and Bradley and Stryker fighting vehicles are on the way, aiming to enable Ukraine to regain more ground in another offensive this spring. In an indication of the next likely milestone, some NATO allies, such as the Netherlands, are already pushing to provide Ukraine with a fleet of F-16 jet fighters, a move considered an outlandish fantasy just a few months ago.

“If you look at the arc of Western involvement, no one would have predicted where we are now six months ago, and the same goes for six months before that. It’s a crisis response that has evolved into a policy—a policy that, probably, no one would have prescribed at the outset,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. who has urged caution on arming Ukraine.

See more...

There are risks to such a reactive approach, he added. “The West is also the frog that is boiling itself. With each incremental increase in assistance, qualitative or quantitative, we become accustomed to that being normal, and the next one doesn’t seem so extreme,” Mr. Charap said. “There is a dynamic here where we become desensitized to what is going on. We are in a bit of a slow-moving spiral that shows no signs of letting up.”

Other analysts and policy makers argue that the true danger lies in excessive caution over accelerating Western military involvement. “We have been slow in delivering certain capabilities. We keep climbing the stairs, but it goes through a tortuous process, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “It has taken the Pentagon a long time to come to the realization that Ukraine can win, and will win, especially if we give them what they need. There has been all too much defeatist hand-wringing.”

The current Western dedication to Ukraine’s struggle for independence is striking when compared with the prevailing attitudes of the relatively recent past. Back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush viewed Ukraine’s desire for freedom as a dangerous nuisance. That year, just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse, he delivered to the Ukrainian parliament his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, urging Ukrainians to abandon “suicidal nationalism” and permanently remain under the Kremlin’s rule.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Is the U.S. doing too much or too little to support Ukraine against Russia? Join the conversation below.

In 2014, after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and triggered a bloody war in the eastern Donbas region, covertly sending troops and heavy weapons across the border, the American and European response was limited to sanctions that only marginally affected Russia’s economy.

At the time, President Barack Obama resisted calls to help Ukraine militarily as he sought Mr. Putin’s cooperation on his presidency’s main foreign-policy priority, the nuclear deal with Iran. Ukraine, Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Atlantic in 2016, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” All the evidence of the past 50 years, he added, suggested that Russian (and Chinese) decision-making wouldn’t be influenced by “talking tough or engaging in some military action.”

Mr. Biden, speaking in front of U.S., Polish and Ukrainian flags to a cheering crowd in Warsaw on Tuesday, had a different message. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” he pledged. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

The War in Ukraine, One Year On

News and insights on where the war is headed one year after Russia's attack on Ukraine, selected by the editors

Don't worry about a mailbag

Don't worry about a mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 15 minutes

Don't worry about a mailbag

A lot of crime stuff in this one!

Slightly abbreviated mailbag this week since we’re on vacation, but greetings from Jamaica! The only good news the world needs this week is that Jon Tester is running for re-election:

Now we need many, many legislative votes in which Tester owns the libs by standing up for gas stoves.

Max Power: I've been following your twitter arguments about license plate enforcement, and it had me thinking about the trend on the left against enforcement of anything. On the related issue of pedestrian safety, I hear a lot of lefties arguing that street design, not traffic enforcement, is the key. Because big street design changes are expensive, lefties can always argue that pedestrian deaths would decline if only we invested enough in street design changes. I'd be interested in a mailbag answer or a full article digging into this design vs. enforcement question as well as the consequences of lefty anti-enforcement views on a broader variety of topics. And on a related note, is a European-style traffic enforcement system that's mostly done by cameras more or less effective than the traditional American style of traffic enforcement by police physically pulling drivers over?

I did a column this week on the license plate issues, but I didn’t really go into traffic enforcement “versus” street design because it’s a classic false dichotomy.

In the limiting case, something like the really generous bike lines in Copenhagen would have absolutely no impact on cyclist safety if the motorists who broke the rules, drove their cars in the bike lane, and ran people down operated with total impunity. At the same time, even Denmark has highways, and the highways have posted speed limits, and it’s a matter of public safety whether or not people follow the rules.

So while I definitely support improving street design where appropriate, the idea that it’s a feasible alternative to enforcing traffic rules doesn’t make sense. What’s more, while I have no doubt that a majority of license plate scofflaws are “only” trying to get away with speeding, being able to identify vehicles is very important for investigating drive-by shootings, carjackings, organized shoplifting rings, and other instances in which criminals use cars. The D.C. Council has adopted policies severely curtailing police car chases, which has annoyed a lot of officers but which has a real public safety rationale. But especially if you’re not going to chase cars, you need to be able to reliably identify them!

I do think the real issue here is a broad tilt on the left against enforcement of any kind, and it doesn’t really make sense.

For example, I’m not particularly surprised by the latest research indicating that mask mandates in the United States didn’t do much to stop the spread of Covid-19 — nobody was enforcing the rules! Which isn’t to say that I necessarily think we should have tried to have much stricter enforcement of Covid NPIs. But if you will the end, then you have to will the means. Especially in urban areas, there is an inherent conflict between drivers’ intuitive sense of what’s a safe operating speed and what creates a safe environment for non-motorists. If you want to achieve safety, you need to coerce the motorists a bit into driving more slowly than they would like.

Disinterested: Yeah, MattY, can you do a piece on "broken windows" and why it's generally been written off? It was the top trend in policing at exactly the time crime bottomed out.

Obviously the causes of crime are complex, but it's pretty hard to write off this correlation! It's getting a lot harder to go "it was lead, QED."

This is an interesting topic that I should write a longer piece on at some point. For now, though, just let me flag that people refer to three different ideas as “broken windows”:

Allowing visible signs of disorder in public areas signals permissiveness to young men, who then engage in acts of serious violence. Therefore to curb violent crime, we need a harsh crackdown on non-violent sources of public disorder.

To reduce shootings, it’s important that people not be carrying concealed firearms. But because concealed firearms are concealed, you can’t tell who is carrying them. Therefore to curb violent crime, we need a harsh crackdown on non-violent crimes, which creates a constitutionally valid reason to search people for guns.

To reduce shootings, it’s important that people not be carrying concealed firearms. Since shootings are very disproportionately committed by young Black and Hispanic men in a relatively small number of high-crime neighborhoods, it makes sense for police to randomly stop people who fit the profile who are in or near the high-crime neighborhoods and stop & frisk them for weapons.

My view is that (1) is hard to empirically substantiate, (2) is true, and (3) is unconstitutional racial discrimination that rightly angers the victims and their families. I also don’t think it’s a huge surprise that when the NYPD was made to stop doing (3), crime continued to fall because it simply freed up more manpower for (2). But then anti-enforcement activists conflated (3) with (2), pushed for less (2), and shootings and murder went way up. Then there was a political backlash, the NYPD is back to doing (2), and murder is falling again.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that despite Ron DeSantis’ posturing, New York City is dramatically safer than urban Florida — even at the 2021 nadir, the NYPD was still much better at deterring gun-carrying than Florida police departments because New York has stricter gun laws and more cops. But in line with the previous question, I think the big takeaway here is that liberals are right that gun laws are an important determinant of homicide incidence, but this only works if you’re willing to do what it takes to enforce the gun laws. In practice, that means arresting people for relatively minor crimes in order to search them for guns.

lindamc: I was just thinking about that post today while hiking in the park and seeing multiple instances of dog poo put in bags but then left on the ground (in the bags). This is something I first noticed during the 2020 lockdown and have since seen over and over again in different parts of the country. I don't understand it.

I have not noticed this personally, but it raises another important dimension of the broken windows theory.

I do not believe the evidence for Broken Windows 1 is very strong. In other words, I don’t think there’s a convincing reason to believe that a crackdown on illicit dog poop will have important benefits in terms of reducing shootings and murders. But the other argument for police crackdowns on “quality of life” infractions is just that they improve quality of life. Strictly enforcing rules and norms around things like dog poop and litter make our public spaces more pleasant, and it’s good to have pleasant public spaces.

The pandemic link, I think, is that there was probably never a time in which cops were heavily involved in dog poop enforcement. Instead, this was mostly a matter of norms. But during Covid, society’s most conscientious and rule-oriented people were spending unusually large amounts of time at home, so the composition of public spaces shifted radically. That would normally call for a stepped-up level of police involvement in ensuring orderly conduct, but instead we had a police pullback and then a big increase in more serious crimes that required police attention. It’s probably going to take a while to fully rebuild pro-social norms. But to my point about the license plates, everyone has a personal role to play in re-establishing norms of good behavior. Go scold someone!

EKG2mdfCWWnO: Matt, you have been making the point recently that the audience is partially responsible for many criticisms of mainstream news. You also frequently like to say things like “Facebook employees should find something more productive to do with their lives.” These two points seem contradictory.

How come Frito Lay scientists and Facebook engineers are morally culpable for the choices consumers make with their products, but NY Times headline writers (who A/B test headlines exactly like social media companies) get to throw up their hands because the audience doesn't want real news? When are people responsible for their own choices and when are they not?

I sincerely don’t understand what the contradiction is.

Every human being is morally responsible for 100 percent of the choices that they make.

People are often interested in the question “why do so many bad articles get published?” and the answer is “the audience does not reward the practice of publishing good rather than bad articles.”

These are not contradictory statements.

What I’ve said about Facebook is that many of the people who work at Meta are very smart, very hardworking people with extremely valuable engineering skills that could be employed at worthwhile companies to accomplish worthwhile things. In other words, the people hard at work to make Instagram slightly more compulsive could also probably be improving the IT available to the health care sector or tackling any number of other socially significant software and engineering problems. This is not really true of the typical bad-articles-writer whose skills are not particularly useful or valuable. So while I think it’s bad to spend your life feeding the audience’s appetite for bad articles, it’s not necessarily as wasteful as expending your tech skills on making smartphone apps more addictive.

That said, I think journalists who have the capacity to write good articles but feel like the structural incentives of the industry compel them to do bad articles instead have an obligation to try to seek out better business models. My aspiration as a Vox co-founder was to do that and build a new, better model for journalism. I think Vox produced a lot of good material over the years (and also some bad), but we fundamentally did not succeed at changing the game — instead, the game changed us. So now I’m on Substack trying something different, writing for a much smaller but more dedicated and actually paying audience.

Jake Mulcahy: Where do you stand on the proper historical assessment of Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the domestic policy sphere? On the one hand there’s Dylan Matthew’s view that Carter’s unfamiliarity with Washington and fiscal conservatism led him to needlessly alienate Congressional Democrats at a time of hefty majorities and squander the opportunity to pass universal health care, a job guarantee and other progressive priorities.

On the other hand there’s the view that by appointing Volcker as Fed Chair and deregulating airlines, trucking, energy, banking (and beer), Carter altered the structure of the US economy more fundamentally than Reagan and in a way that his successor is ultimately given credit for.

I personally think that most of the deregulation, the Volcker appointment and even blocking the job guarantee was good, but fumbling health care and other priorities with such a large majority means he won’t be remembered as a transformative or ‘great’ President.

This is one of those things where “it’s both.”

From the standpoint of the hard left, Carter was almost all bad: he squandered large congressional majorities and failed to achieve any major progressive policy goals but also kicked off neoliberal deregulation in a major way. From the standpoint of the right, I think Carter looks the way George H.W. Bush now looks to some on the left — like a guy who actually did some pretty good stuff and did you the favor of being unpopular and losing. From my standpoint, Carter did a decent number of good things on the regulatory front but also totally mismanaged his relationship with Congress and squandered a chance to achieve good things for the welfare state.

Sam Elder: What is your honest assessment of the job Pete Buttigieg has done as Secretary of Transportation? From the outside, it feels like there have been an abnormally large number of transportation-related crises during his tenure, including the supply chain issues, the threatened rail worker strike, Southwest Airlines’ meltdown, and most recently, the train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio. On top of those, there is also the ongoing rollout of funding from the infrastructure deal. Has he handled this unexpectedly high-profile set of responsibilities well?

What I liked about Buttigieg’s appointment is that it ensured people would actually care what the Department of Transportation does and subject its leadership to some scrutiny, while creating a situation in which the DOT leadership had meaningful incentives to do a good job.

And I think this is basically working.

Obama’s two transportation secretaries were, to be frank, awful. They squandered huge sums of money on the dumbest shit imaginable (the streetcar boom!), they approved a really bad airline merger, and they both rotated out to become lobbyists. But nobody cared about those guys so nobody noticed. People do care about Buttigieg, so he’s ended up with a worse reputation despite doing an objectively better job. So in terms of my personal theory of the case, I think it’s broadly been successful. I do feel bad for Buttigieg personally because I think this deal isn’t necessarily working out well for him. But, like, he did not derail the train. And the DOT isn’t the agency responsible for environmental cleanup.

Scott Rada: Many writers such as you have a side-hustle as a cable news contributor. Have you ever done that — or even been approached?

I really don’t enjoy doing TV, and I’m not good at it.

In order to secure a contract as a contributor, you need to spend a long time saying yes to bookers who want you to come on for free. You need to do a good enough job that they keep asking you back, and you need to say “yes” frequently enough that you’re someone the bookers think to call. I gave up the aspiration to get good enough at this to be a paid contributor a long time ago, so now on the rare occasion that I do get asked I usually say no, which in turn means I rarely get asked.

Ant Breach: So it's coming up to a year now since Russia invaded Ukraine, after its initial illegal annexation of Crimea and intervention in Donbas in 2014.

Your foreign policy priors up until then were — to use a very flawed and simplistic American framing — relatively dovish and seem from the outside to have become more hawkish over the past year. How do you think your worldview on foreign policy, the West, Europe etc. has changed over the past year?

I think it’s important to flag here that even though nobody talks about it anymore, Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was extremely controversial at the time and subject to harsh criticism. I supported it. I also supported Donald Trump when he stepped in to set policy on that course. And prior to that, I criticized Barack Obama’s endless can-kicking on Afghanistan and his military intervention in Libya. So to the extent that I previously had an image as “dovish” and it’s shifted to an image as “hawkish,” it’s largely because the situation has changed.

I’ve actually become very confused by the people who seem to see the Biden administration’s policy as uber-hawkish when he’s actually the first president of the 21st century to not have large numbers of American troops fighting in an active war zone. Imagine if after U.S. troops left Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army had stood its ground and halted the Taliban advance with the U.S. agreeing to keep supplying the ANA with ammunition. Then people would have said Biden’s Afghanistan policy was both dovish and also an incredible success story. After the U.S. withdrawal, people started acting like “but the Taliban is really bad” was a conversation-ending argument about the merits of an open-ended American military presence there. That, to me, was crazy, and an open-ended American military presence in Afghanistan was too high a price to pay for the sake of keeping the Taliban at bay. But the Taliban really are bad! If the government of Afghanistan was able to beat them with just supplies and training, that would have been great. The problem was, they weren’t.

Meanwhile, on Ukraine, nobody is saying that American troops need to go there and fight or that the U.S. government should be providing close air support to Ukrainian soldiers. It’s just that the “hawkish” position on Ukraine (give them supplies and training) is the same as the “dovish” position on Afghanistan (don’t have American troops on the ground or planes in the air).

So personally, I think my views are more consistent than a lot of those flying around in the discourse.

But there is one specific subject on which I’ve changed sides. Back when the conflict was limited to Donbas, my view was that it wasn’t very smart for the United States to give Ukraine tons of military aid. Europe really needs to take primary responsibility for the defense of Europe, and for that to happen, the United States can’t be the perpetual safety net. Republicans criticized Obama for this, and I defended Obama. Then when Trump became president, Democrats were radicalized against Putin because of the email hacking, and there was a bipartisan move to increase aid that I didn’t think was very wise. Based on the way the war has played out over the past year, though, I don’t mind so much that Europe engaged in a lot of free-riding on American military assistance because Europe carried a much heavier load in terms of the macroeconomic cost of the war. So I used to worry a lot about European free-riding with regard to Russia, and I’ve come to worry less about it. Now as we enter year two, though, I think the balance of considerations is shifting again somewhat. Having made it through the first tough winter, the economic cost to Europe should decline, and material assistance to Ukraine needs to shift to becoming a primarily European responsibility over time.

Eric C: I'm convinced by your argument that making smoking more difficult and socially ostracizing was a primary driver of reducing smoking overall. In my opinion, though, what made enforcement work was the messaging around secondhand smoke — it changed smoking bans from a nanny-state-ish ban on individual choice to a public health issue that made non-smokers push for changes.

What's the equivalent messaging around obesity prevention? Is focusing on the impact on healthcare spending too opaque? Should we be attacking food companies more for candy advertising? Should we have airlines enforce passenger size requirements with the same verve they enforce baggage size requirements?

I think that’s exactly the problem.

The secondhand smoke issue was used as a lever to enact public health policies whose benefits were primarily paternalistic. I think this probably involved overstating the health harms of secondhand smoke, but there really are harms. On top of that, secondhand smoke is a bona fide nuisance — it smells bad — which motivated people to crack down. Junk food just isn’t like that, so it’s a harder issue.

Lost Future: Does the US really benefit from the dollar being the reserve currency of the world? I won't try to summarize the arguments that it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but supposedly the disadvantages are that it pumps up the value of the dollar- thus hurting our exports, thus ultimately hurting our industrial base/manufacturing employment/manufacturing technological edge. Michael Pettis, for instance, has made a career out of tweeting some variation of this argument like every single day for years now. Slightly more mainstream folks like Noah Smith have said that, at a minimum, if we had a weaker dollar we'd have a stronger export sector.

Does this argument hold water? Would America be exporting more (and hence building more stuff here in the US) if we weren't the reserve currency? Is this a goal we should be pursuing?

I think this is overstated — American seigniorage increases the trade deficit, but you can have higher or lower export volumes even with the deficit constant. I find that people mix up net and gross a lot in these issues.

WC: How convincing did you find Will MacAskill’s argument in What We Owe the Future that we need to keep enough coal and oil in the ground to allow humanity to rebuild in the case of civilizational collapse? Did his argument affect your views on carbon capture and whether, despite helping with climate change, it enables us to squander one of humanity's lifelines?

With regard to coal, I think it’s pretty convincing. I also think current policies put us on a trajectory to leave plenty of coal in the ground.

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For firms, climate and deforestation becoming part of bigger ‘nature’ issue

For firms, climate and deforestation becoming part of bigger ‘nature’ issue

BY CHRIS RUSSELL

Japan Times

STAFF WRITER

Dec 18, 2022

As companies ramp up their action on climate change, they need to be approaching it as part of one larger “nature” problem by also factoring in issues such as deforestation and biodiversity.

That was one of the underlying messages that Thomas Maddox, global director of forests and land at environmental disclosure body CDP, stressed in a recent interview.

While deforestation has worked its way up the corporate agenda, driven in part by shocking images of a burning Amazon and growing concerns over the production of palm oil, companies may still be tempted to treat their responsibilities on climate and forests as separate issues.

“Really, we need to be seeing this as one issue: It's essentially that we demand too much from our environment, and we chucked too much waste back into our environment,” Maddox says. “Sometimes … you will actually have different departments with competing budgets — one on biodiversity, one on climate, one on water, one on social issues — whereas of course it would be much more effective to be treating all of these in one.”

The basis of that connection is the key role forests play in climate change. Notably that comes in terms of contributing to it when trees are cleared or burned — about 11% of global carbon emissions stem from deforestation and forest degradation, according to the U.N. Environment Programme — and absorbing greenhouse gases when they’re not. If the emissions caused by deforestation were treated as those of a country, they would rank only behind the U.S. and China in terms of carbon output, the U.N. agency adds.

But forests also increase resilience to warming-caused extreme weather, help lower temperatures and improve biodiversity, among other things.

More companies are making the link, however. According to Maddox, that realization is being driven by a greater understanding of climate change and the extent of damage caused to the natural world. On top of that, more companies are beginning to appreciate what environmental degradation means for their business — a World Economic Forum report published in 2020 found that $44 trillion of economic value, or more than half of global gross domestic product, was moderately or highly dependent on nature — as well as how they can actually profit from taking steps sooner.

“There's a recognition that companies are starting to get on top of climate risk, but there's this other big risk around nature — which includes biodiversity, which includes deforestation, which includes water issues — and companies are really recognizing, ‘Right, we need to get on top of this,’” Maddox says.

“It's about the recognition of how big the problem is, recognition of how it relates to climate, recognition of how big a sort of global economic issue it is, and then recognition of how it's actually impacting companies on a day-to-day basis.”

Thomas Maddox, CDP's global director for forests and land, says that although companies are starting to take action on deforestation, they need to go much further and work much harder. | COURTESY OF CDP

Thomas Maddox, CDP’s global director for forests and land, says that although companies are starting to take action on deforestation, they need to go much further and work much harder. | COURTESY OF CDP

But there is still more to be done.

“Companies are kind of testing the water and starting to get active in (forests), but they need to go much further and work much harder,” Maddox says. “I don't think there's any disadvantage to having a supply chain with zero deforestation — there are many, many advantages, and it ticks multiple environmental goals in one go.”

Still, deforestation continues apace. Loss of tropical forests remained “stubbornly high” in 2021, according to the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch, with 11.1 million hectares of tree cover lost, almost half the size of Honshu. Emissions from the loss of the most biodiverse and carbon-dense tropical forests were equivalent to India’s annual emissions from fossil fuels — the third largest.

Action on deforestation at the international level has nonetheless been on the agenda. At the COP27 U.N. climate talks in Egypt last month, forests for the first time got their own section in the so-called cover text, which can signal political considerations.

And as part of a flurry of announcements on the issue coinciding with COP27 and a Group of 20 meeting, Brazil, Congo and Indonesia — the nations with the three largest areas covered by rainforests — pledged to put together a “funding mechanism” to help prevent deforestation. Another concerned the launch of the Forests and Climate Leaders’ Partnership, which involves 26 countries and the European Union and seeks to enhance cooperation on reversing and halting deforestation by 2030, building on the Glasgow Climate Pact.

Separately, the EU earlier this month agreed on a new law prohibiting the sale of coffee, beef, soy and other commodities that are linked to deforestation around the world, with companies’ necessary due diligence based on a risk rating.

“(The legislation) certainly raises the bar for other countries to follow,” Maddox says. “We are also happy it covers all deforestation — not just illegal deforestation,” setting it apart from equivalent legislation elsewhere.

“Whilst it is the highest benchmark we have at present, we still want more,” he adds. “We would like to see the risk rating system go down to a more granular level.”

But fundamentally, Maddox sees environmental disclosures such as those made to CDP as being crucial to driving change. For investors and businesses, the disclosures mean they are able to make more informed decisions about where they are putting their money or who to have as clients, which in turn can prompt companies to take stronger action. In addition, the disclosures can also act as a guide for best practices for companies and give them a clear indication of how they are performing from one year to the next.

Over 18,700 companies — including listed firms worth a combined $60.8 trillion — made disclosures through CDP in 2022. In particular, businesses disclosing on forests rose 20.5% from 2021.

“It's just such an important step for driving change — if we don't know where we are, we just don't have a hope of improving things,” Maddox says.

The once and future carbon tax

The once and future carbon tax

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 10 minutes

The once and future carbon tax

Enthusiasm for carbon pricing was misguided 15 years ago — but its time will come!

These days I find myself very close, intellectually, to the positions on climate and energy articulated by the Breakthrough Institute. When I had some downtime last fall at their annual Ecomodernism conference and wanted to know more about the group’s history, I found an insightful quote about the group from a review of their 2007 book, “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.”

It turns out I wrote the review, which I suppose means I’m becoming both senile and egomaniacal.

My argument back in 2007 was that the Breakthrough team was largely correct in their analysis of public opinion and the inevitable failure of doomsday argumentation, but that they were wrong to infer from this that carbon pricing was a dead end. In fact, I argued that carbon pricing was a natural complement to an ecomodernist strategy:

But whatever the shortcomings of their rhetoric, environmentalists have a very good reason to push for some limits, however much of a downer that message might be. Global warming is caused by carbon emissions and can be contained only by reducing them. Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s preferred alternative huge investment in alternative energy doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, without mandatory curbs on emissions, it might not work. For another thing, emissions caps would effectively provide a subsidy to less polluting alternatives, one that would be harder for lobbyists to manipulate and that wouldn’t require lawmakers to pick winners among various possible technologies. Finally, even as a matter of crass politics, Nordhaus and Shellenberger neglect a basic point: the hard part about gaining support for a new initiative isn’t convincing people of its value but finding the money to pay for it. The conventional solutions to global warming posed by the “politics of limits” taxing carbon emissions, or issuing tradeable emissions to carbon-producing firms conveniently raises revenue that could be used to pay for the very projects the authors wish to see.

The past 15 years of political and policy development have obviously not vindicated my view here.

At the time “Break Through” came out, skepticism about carbon pricing was a kind of rightist dissent from the conventional progressive political wisdom, but it’s now become conventional wisdom on the left. There are huge gaps between the ecomodernist view and those of the mainstream environmental movement, but everyone agrees that we need to move beyond the aughts-vintage conversation around carbon pricing.

That being said, I think that why I was wrong is interesting.

In 2007, environmentalists were pushing carbon pricing as the solution to climate change, and the Breakthrough guys were arguing that this politics of limits was doomed, and instead, we needed an ecomodernist politics of abundant and progressively cleaner energy. I argued that the ecomodernist position was largely right about climate change, but that the skepticism of carbon pricing was misguided as a matter of fiscal policy. From the vantage point of the winter of 2007-2008, I saw the country as necessarily entering a “politics of limits” phase with regard to the federal budget and thought that the “it also generates revenue” aspect of carbon taxation was its killer app.

But a few months later, the world experienced a global financial crisis, a prolonged recession, and a spell of super-low interest rates. By the time the labor market had just about recovered, we slammed into a pandemic. “The world is about to see 15 years of low and falling interest rates” was not the actual thesis of “Break Through,” but it is what happened, and that low-interest environment set the stage for a world in which I was totally wrong about carbon pricing. But the fiscal situation is changing again, and I think it’s time to revisit this controversy in light of present-day politics.

With unemployment low and interest rates rising, there is a strong case on the merits for deficit reduction.

Republicans will push for reduction to come exclusively from spending cuts because their party’s top priority is low taxes on the rich.

Democrats will rightly resist this and insist that any serious deficit reduction package must include a revenue component.

Well, guess what raises revenue without really increasing marginal taxes on the rich very much? A consumption tax. But why would Democrats ever agree to a consumption tax rather than a more popular soak-the-rich tax? They might do it because they want a bipartisan deal, but elite Democrats are also highly motivated by climate change. So what’s a regressive (and therefore GOP-friendly) tax that also helps address climate change?

My friends, let me tell you about carbon pricing.

The fiscal crisis that didn’t come

At the time, I was more or less in agreement with the mainstream leaders of the Democratic Party who thought that George W. Bush’s fiscal policies were highly irresponsible.

In the name of “compassionate conservatism,” Bush agreed to modest increases in domestic discretionary spending, notably increasing federal K-12 spending as part of the No Child Left Behind initiative. He also put forth not one but two large regressive tax cuts. He added a new prescription drug benefit to Medicare with no fiscal offset. And he launched two medium-sized wars, undertook a bunch of non-military anti-terrorism spending, and increased the base defense budget. The closest his administration came to trying to confront the problems of this “spend more while taxing less” approach to fiscal policy was the failed 2005 effort to privatize Social Security. But this failed. It failed so badly, in fact, that no specific plan ever emerged. But most of the plans that did get written, like the one Mike Pence put together with Paul Ryan, actually made the deficit much larger because they diverted payroll tax revenues into the new private accounts without cutting benefits for the currently elderly.

Most Democrats were very critical of this, thought it would end in tears, and anticipated that deficit reduction to clean up the mess would be a major theme of the next Democratic administration.

I did not personally spend a lot of time in 2007-2008 thinking critically about whether or not this forecast was true. It was simply the case, as a matter of policy reporting, that Democrats wanted to reduce the deficit, so anything they did would have to fit within a deficit-reduction framework. And indeed both the Affordable Care Act (which passed) and the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill (which did not) were structured to reduce the deficit. Within the confines of that deficit reduction mandate, I do think carbon pricing makes a ton of sense. Any amount of money spent on decarbonization will generate more decarbonization if it’s financed by a carbon tax rather than some other way.

And even though Waxman-Markey ultimately failed, that argument was a key reason it was able to pass the House. At the time, a pure investment-and-innovation bill — whether structured as a lefty “Green New Deal” or as an ecomodernist program — would have failed due to the clout of deficit hawks inside the Democratic Party.

Especially after Republicans took the House in the 2010 midterms, it was deficit hawks rather than environmentalists who were imposing a misguided politics of limits on the country. You could imagine a world in which the bipartisan dealmaking of 2011-2013 was focused on something that combined the corporate tax cuts that became the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the climate-focused tax credits that were the centerpiece of the Biden-era IRA and called it an economic growth package. The deficit would have been much larger, but the economy would have grown faster and unemployment would have been lower, and the country would have been on a larger emissions path. I spent this whole period tearing my hair out — why were Democrats and Republicans at each others’ throats over how to reduce the deficit at a time when there was no need to reduce the deficit? — but the politics were what they were.

Once Trump came around, the politics of all this flipped. Not only did Republicans do their normal thing where they stop caring about fiscal discipline when they’re in the White House, but Democrats decided that Obama-era deficit politics were dumb. Now, mid-Biden, we find ourselves in circumstances that have once again changed.

A new deadlock

The State of the Union moment when Joe Biden called out the Rick Scott plan to phase out Social Security and Medicare was, I think, a triumph for the White House.

Republicans screamed indignantly and heckled, which I think set up a multi-faceted win for Democrats. One part is that it essentially forced Biden to go off-script and ad lib, which would not normally be appropriate at a State of the Union but which wound up demonstrating that he can do it, putting a lot of minds at ease about his age. The other is that it generated several big national news stories focused on Social Security and Medicare.

I think something Democrats need to steel themselves for, psychologically, is that due to the various biases of the mainstream media, the semantic content of news stories focused on Social Security and Medicare is likely to be less favorable to them than the content of news stories that are focused on K-12 curriculum battles. Nevertheless, it’s still the case that “the parties are fighting about Social Security and Medicare” is a better national narrative for Democrats than “the parties are fighting about whether Disney is too woke.” Persuadable voters care a lot about Social Security, health care, and other boring fiscal stuff that are challenging to drive attention to and where elite media doesn’t have strong progressive bias. But that means it’s important and good to find smart, creative ways to highlight the conservative movement’s position on these topics and the awkward contortions Republicans go through to square their ideological commitments with their practical political imperatives.

In terms of substance, though, Biden is also revealing to Republicans something important about themselves. Back when Obama was president, they thought they could safely ignore his entreaties to grand bargain because they would just sweep into power and implement this full Paul Ryan agenda on a party-line basis.

The Trump era showed that’s very unlikely. It’s fine for backbenchers like Ron DeSantis to vote rapid-fire for slashing Pell Grants and privatizing Medicare and throwing millions of people off Medicaid and eliminating federal funding for libraries to carry braille books and a dozen other things. But as a governing agenda, this is tough. If you actually do want to constrain the endless upward pressure on federal spending, you are probably going to need a bipartisan deal. And that would mean coming to the table on taxes. For now, Biden is rightly sticking to poll-tested proposals to tax the rich that violate every conceivable GOP taboo. His partners are never going to agree to any of this, but that’s not the point. The point is to show both the world and congressional Republicans that, unlike the GOP, Democrats actually do have a viable plan to govern the country — pass deficit-reducing bills that heavily feature higher taxes on the wealthy. This plan makes sense on the merits, it’s politically sustainable, and “tax the rich instead of cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid” is a great issue for Democrats.

Everything old is new again

Of course, positing that a bipartisan deficit reduction deal combining mild cuts in entitlement spending with a big new tax on carbon emissions is likely to happen would be borderline insane. You might as well throw a high-minded revenue-raising income tax reform into the mix while you’re at it. Can you imagine today’s Republican Party agreeing to any of this?

I mean, probably not.

But the fact that this would let the country address its fiscal issues in a way that corresponds to both parties’ elites’ top priorities means that it’s at least a little bit interesting. The key problem in the past is that it turned out there was no actual reason on the merits to address those fiscal issues. Today’s deficit situation still isn’t so dire as to automatically force big painful changes, but a smaller deficit would definitely be helpful. And we are growing closer with every passing year to the moment when existing law will mandate cuts in Social Security benefits to correspond to the exhaustion of the Social Security Trust Fund.

That means over time, big fiscal choices are going to become more and more salient, and we’re going to be stuck dealing with the politics of budgetary limits. That’s a world in which a lot of Obama-era ideas that didn’t pan out are due for a comeback. The fact that we had this huge fake freakout back during his presidency has, I think, bequeathed a bad reputation to all kinds of ideas that were premised on the notion that we’d been in an era where austerity budgeting made sense. But now we really are in an era where austerity budgeting makes sense. So it’s worth thinking about which kinds of austerity measures are most reasonable on the merits, and I’d say a carbon tax belongs high on that list.

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