Monday, July 31, 2023

NOT EVERYTHING IS TRUMP'S FAULT, PART LXXXVIII Read time: 5 minutes

 


Monday, July 31, 2023

NOT EVERYTHING IS TRUMP'S FAULT, PART LXXXVIII

CNN's Ella Nilsen tells us that some Republicans now understand the seriousness of climate change and the need to address it, but they can't actually do anything because of one person:

Deadly heatwaves are baking the US. Scientists just reported that July will be the hottest month on record. And now, after years of skepticism and denial in the GOP ranks, a small number of Republicans are urging their party to get proactive on the climate crisis.

But the GOP is stuck in a climate bind – and likely will be for the next four years, in large part because they’re still living in the shadow of former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.


Even as more Republican politicians are joining the consensus that climate change is real and caused by humans, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has driven the party to the right on climate and extreme weather. Trump has called the extremely settled science of climate change a “hoax” and more recently suggested that the impacts of it “may affect us in 300 years.”


It's this argument again: The GOP is a reasonable party that's been mesmerized by a madman. All we have to do is break his spell and everything will be normal. Sorry, but no.

Judging from her LinkedIn, Nilsen is in her early thirties -- but she still should know that the Republican Party has been denying the seriousness of the climate threat for decades. She does refer to "years of skepticism and denial in the GOP ranks," but she also says that "Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has driven the party to the right" on climate. But the party has been far right on climate for decades.


In the 1992 presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush referred to the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Al Gore, as "Ozone Man." George W. Bush beat Gore for the presidency in 2000 and subsequently


scorned the Kyoto agreement on global warming ... neutered the Environmental Protection Agency [and] filled his Administration with people like Philip A. Cooney, who, in 2001, left the American Petroleum Institute, the umbrella lobby for the oil industry, to become chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he repeatedly edited government documents so as to question the link between fuel emissions and climate change.

The 2008 GOP platform said:

Republicans caution against the doomsday climate change scenarios peddled by the aficionados of centralized command-and-control government. We can — and should — address the risk of climate change based on sound science without succumbing to the no-growth radicalism that treats climate questions as dogma rather than as situations to be managed responsibly.

A robust economy will be essential to dealing with the risk of climate change, and we will insist on reasonable policies that do not force Americans to sacrifice their way of life or trim their hopes and dreams for their children.


(Translation: Drill, baby, drill!)

Nilsen quotes a Republican who's Very Concerned about climate change:


“As Donald Trump is the near presumptive nominee of our party in 2024, it’s going to be very hard for a party to adopt a climate-sensitive policy,” Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, told CNN. “But Donald Trump’s not going to be around forever.”

So what did the GOP platform say about climate in 2012, when Romney ran for president against the incumbent, Barack Obama?

The current Administration's most recent National Security Strategy reflects the extreme elements in its liberal domestic coalition.... [T]he strategy subordinates our national security interests to environmental, energy, and international health issues, and elevates "climate change" to the level of a "severe threat" equivalent to foreign aggression. The word "climate," in fact, appears in the current President's strategy more often than Al Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, radical Islam, or weapons of mass destruction.

In his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican convention, Romney said:

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise...is to help you and your family.

What if Trump weren't the front-runner this year? Would the GOP be magically transformed into a climate-aware party? What does the #2 candidate in the race have to say about the climate?

“What I’ve found is, people when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways. We’re not doing any left-wing stuff,” [Ron] DeSantis said....

“Be very careful of people trying to smuggle in their ideology. They say they support our coastline, or they say they support, you know, some, you know, difference, our water, environment. And maybe they do, but they’re also trying to do a lot of other things,” DeSantis said, without elaborating on the alleged “other things.”


Also:

While governor, DeSantis has adopted bills banning Florida’s cities from adopting 100% clean energy goals and barred the state’s pension fund from making investment decisions that consider the climate crisis due to what he called a corporate attempt to “impose an ideological agenda on the American people”. He has also attacked the US military for being “woke” for warning about the national security risks posed by climate impacts.

What about that nice Tim Scott?

... he has opposed most policies that would curb carbon dioxide emissions. During the Obama administration, Mr. Scott challenged a regulation that would have required utilities to move away from coal and adopt wind, solar and other renewable power. During the Trump administration, he argued for dumping the Paris Agreement. And last year, he voted against President Biden’s expansive climate and health legislation that will invest about $370 billion in spending and tax credits over 10 years into clean energy technologies.

How about that young up-and-comer, Vivek Ramaswamy? He said this to Fox's Maria Bartiromo in March:

... we've shot our own fossil fuel industry in the foot, and it is because of this climate religion, but the dirty little secret, Maria, that not a lot of people know is the climate religion actually has nothing to do with the climate. It is all about power, control, dominion and apologizing for America's own success.

... What they really want to do is punish America and establish this agenda of global equity, which also allows China to catch up to us, and I think it's important we have a president who sees through that. Republicans dance around this issue a little bit too delicately. I say it expressly: we need to abandon climate religion in America. Yeah, that's the easiest step to unshackle our economy.


The Republican Party was hostile to action on climate change before Trump and it will be hostile to action on climate change after Trump. We can have a successful Republican Party or we can have a livable planet. There's no third option.

How the Culture War Co-Opted a Free-Market Zealot Francis Wilkinson | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes

 

How the Culture War Co-Opted a Free-Market Zealot

Analysis by Francis Wilkinson | Bloomberg

July 26, 2023 at 7:50 a.m. EDT


WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 30: House Freedom Caucus memebers (L-R) Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) announce they would oppose the deal to raise the debt limit during a news conference with fellow caucus members outside the U.S. Capitol on May 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. The conservative lawmakers urged their fellow House Republicans to vote against the compromise between Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and President Joe Biden that would avert a government default. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America)

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“We’re all about economic growth.” So says the website of the Club for Growth, the political action group that Politico once called “the pre-eminent institution promoting Republican adherence to a free-market, free-trade, anti-regulation agenda.”


Indeed, the Club was founded more than two decades ago as a political engine for ultra-free-marketers. But in a July 20 “strategy memo” from Club for Growth Action, its super PAC, you can see what that entails in the Year of Our MAGA 2023. The group announced that it is prepared to spend $20 million in the 2024 election cycle to support a group of House Republicans that it calls the “Patriot 20.”


The Patriot 20 includes such leading economic thinkers as Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who failed to vote on the debt ceiling this year after arriving at the Capitol once the roll call was closed, and Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, a former dentist who is now a full-time conspiracy theorist with an uncanny habit of linking arms with anti-semites. Others on the list include Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican who takes his job as a legislator so seriously that he introduced more than 500 bills in a single day earlier this year; the shape-shifting Representative Anna Paulina Luna, whose personal history seems unusually inventive; and Scott Perry, the congressman from Pennsylvania who was an especially eager supporter of Donald Trump’s attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of the US.


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Like other big players in Republican politics, the Club appears to have concluded that politicians whose only skill is setting fires, or pouring gasoline on those set by others, can be useful allies. “That’s sort of their strategy — that the prairie fire is going to help us because we’re going to burn down some things we want to burn down, or the smoke’s going to confuse enough that we can get some things done,” said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina. “But it’s just such a dangerous strategy. Because you cannot control where the prairie fire is going.”


Of course, Trumpism, and the people drawn to it, has made it increasingly difficult to participate in national Republican politics without consorting with some questionable characters. But the Club for Growth had initially set out to be a beachhead restricted to economic libertarianism. It was agnostic on the most contentious social issues, such as abortion, which it ceded to other factions in the GOP coalition. Over time, however, the Club has become just another vector for far-right culture warriors and agitprop performance artists, albeit one fueled by vast sums of money. 


Democracy skeptic Peter Thiel and right-wing anti-tax crusader Richard Uihlein are among the billionaires who have funded the group, which spends millions every election cycle on behalf of right-wing candidates. It may be that candidates who think mostly about their next shock video or conspiracy tweet are not so much the candidates whom the Club is stuck with, but rather precisely the candidates whom the Club prefers.


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Club leader David McIntosh has had a sometimes bumpy relationship with former President Trump, but he also signed a letter after the 2020 election tacitly validating Trump’s lies about fraud and encouraging Trump to keep up his bogus fight for “election integrity.” Like election lies, culture war can be a useful distraction from deeply unpopular economic policies that serve the very wealthiest people in the nation. Those happen to be the policies that the Club holds most dear.


As University of Michigan political scientist Robert Mickey told me a few months ago, Republicans can’t make credible economic appeals to voters because GOP policies are designed to benefit the likes of Thiel and Uihlein. As a result, “they double down on right-wing populist appeals.”


Maintaining a bunch of raging MAGA heads and conspiracy crackpots in the House GOP conference is bad for democracy and governance. Many in the Patriot 20 appear dedicated to making the House ungovernable — even for conservatives — under Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But rage and reaction may be good, at least short term, for the billionaires who fund the Club for Growth. They seem less interested in “economic growth” writ large than in personal power and very personal wealth. For the Club for Growth, paeans to the free market are all well and good. But a stable of legislators who double as circus performers is apparently better.



New York Republicans Have Found Something to Fight For Jonathan Bernstein | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes

 


Democracy Dies in Darkness

New York Republicans Have Found Something to Fight For

Analysis by Jonathan Bernstein | Bloomberg

July 26, 2023 at 8:49 a.m. EDT


They didn’t do anything when Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy made all sorts of unwise promises to his party’s radical wing in order to get his job in January. They went along with the radicals’ demand for a vote to slash spending on popular programs in April during the debate over raising the debt limit. And they failed to stand up to their radical colleagues this month on a slew of disruptive amendments to the defense-authorization bill.


Now, however, House Republicans in swing New York districts appear to have found something to fight for: state and local tax deductions.


The catch is that the bulk of the Republican conference is from states that do not benefit from the deduction and strongly oppose expanding it. Whether this is an ideological position (against the inconsistent treatment of income) or a political one (to punish states where Republicans do not do well) isn’t important. What matters is that, so far, these New York Republicans have been unwilling or unable to cut a deal, leaving the tax bill stalled. With no support from Democrats, the bill needs virtually unanimous backing from the tiny Republican majority.


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There’s nothing unusual about members of the House fighting for their districts’ interests, even if those interests do not align with those of the nation.(1) Indeed, one of the strengths of Congress is that so many different interests are represented, and neither chamber blindly follows ideological or partisan preferences. US democracy works in part by ensuring that even electoral losers — that is, members of the minority party  — still have meaningful representation.


No, the problem here isn’t that New Yorkers and Californians are fighting for their constituents. It’s that they’ve surrendered on everything else.(2)


Throughout this Congress, the most radical group within the Republican Party has operated on the assumption that it does not have to negotiate within the party. Why cut deals when they can simply bully mainstream conservatives into giving them what they want? Granted, this approach doesn’t actually affect policy, since the Republican House cannot bully the Democratic Senate or president. Instead, the pattern — at least for must-pass legislation — is that the House first passes extremist bills, then eventually goes along with a compromise, with radicals opposing the final bill and blaming the rest of the party for selling them out.


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That puts Republicans in swing districts in the miserable position of having voted for extreme initial versions of bills that will offend moderates, and for more watered-down final bills that will offend conservatives. It’s true that they don’t have a lot of good choices. But they certainly could have told leadership that they simply would not go along with extreme legislation, or worked to make initial bills more reasonable — either within the party or through deals with Democrats. Of course, that would break the party’s unity, but any bill that passes the Senate and gets signed by President Joe Biden, such as the debt limit deal, is going to do that anyway.


Meanwhile, these swing-district members appear to be sitting back and letting the radicals foment a government shutdown this fall, which is quite likely to be a popular disaster for the party in general and its most vulnerable members in particular. But at least they’re willing to take a stand against their party’s tax-cut bill. That gives them something to brag about — unless (or until) they wind up caving on that, too.


(1) In this case, “fight for” might actually be too strong a phrase. What House Republicans from New York are doing is insisting on restoring the deduction as part of the House’s tax-cut bill, which has no chance of going anywhere in the Democratic-majority Senate.


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(2) To be sure, some of the radicals’ least popular ideas, such as pulling out of NATO, have been defeated on the House floor, giving members in swing districts an opportunity to build (relatively) moderate conservative records by opposing those amendments. But plenty of unpopular provisions have either passed with their votes or were tucked into bills they voted for.



America’s Colleges Are Also Facing a Housing Crisis Matthew Yglesias | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes



Democracy Dies in Darkness

America’s Colleges Are Also Facing a Housing Crisis

Analysis by Matthew Yglesias | Bloomberg

July 30, 2023 at 8:39 a.m. EDT


A blockbuster new research paper on college admissions confirms in dramatic detail what nearly everyone has long suspected: The elite admissions game is played on a tilted playing field that gives students from wealthy families substantially higher odds of admission than less-privileged students with similar academic credentials.


The findings are interesting, but more striking to me is the broader public fascination with high-stakes college admissions. That’s driven in part by the observation, confirmed by the researchers, that graduates of the most prestigious schools — which they consider to be the Ivy League(1) plus Stanford, the University of Chicago, MIT and Duke — are overrepresented in the top 1% and certain other prestigious social roles even relative to their students’ test scores.


But it also reflects a kind of artificial scarcity of slots at the top schools. As one of the authors, David Deming, observes in his newsletter, every year there are 30,000 to 35,000 students with scores of either 1550 (on the SAT) or 34 (on the ACT), but there are only 20,000 slots in these 12 schools. At the same time, globalization and the rise of a global middle class have only increased the level of international interest in the crown jewels of the American higher education system.


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There is a relatively simple way to reduce the tensions and build on one of America’s great national strengths: Make these schools larger. And the main obstacle to doing that isn’t necessarily some quasi-conspiratorial effort to preserve exclusivity. It’s the much more banal force of NIMBYism.


Harvard, for example, has expanded its campus footprint aggressively in Boston in recent years because that’s where it’s been able to get permission to grow. But the historic center of the university is in Cambridge, on the other side of a river, so the expansion doesn’t include new dorms for undergraduates or the larger class sizes they could accommodate. Yale, located in much poorer and more growth-friendly New Haven, has built new residential colleges and expanded admissions.


Dartmouth’s administration developed an ambitious plan to create new transitional housing while existing dorms were renovated, allowing for greater enrollment — but it was squashed by faculty opposition to the location, more than a mile from the existing center of campus. Why not build someplace closer? Because closer housing sites “have a degree of complexity which makes them difficult to unlock,” a Dartmouth vice president told the local Valley News. Translation: It would be more expensive and time-consuming to build near the center of town.


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Thus the quintessential local issue of zoning squabbles ends up generating a national scarcity of elite college admissions slots, fueling zero-sum competition and ultimately reducing America’s ability to increase global “exports” of its best-in-class high-end higher education product.


In a 2008 paper on land use trends, economists Ed Glaeser and Bryce Ward looked at towns that include a top-50 university. They found that in the 1990s, such university towns became sharply more hostile to permitting new housing — an unintended, under-discussed and unconsidered shift in US higher education policy that’s made it harder for universities to expand along with population.


The national and even global significance of US colleges and universities is yet another reason why state governments ought to take a larger role in land-use policy and overrule local stakeholders. It is entirely understandable that longtime residents of Hanover, Princeton or Cambridge might oppose new dorms because they will bring more traffic and less parking. What’s harder to understand is why economic-development officials in New Hampshire, New Jersey or Massachusetts aren’t advocating more vigorously for campus expansion and all the new jobs it would bring.


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Quality universities are engines of economic development, and both their teaching and research missions are inherently tied to specific locations. Letting them grow where they already are — and allowing new complementary residential and commercial development near campus — is too important to allow the people who happen to live close-by have veto power over the whole thing.


So am I saying that the key to redressing this longstanding social, economic and educational injustice is … zoning reform? Not even I would go that far (though as I like to point out, better zoning can help solve a lot of problems). Still, over and above all the other questions around the future of US higher education, one thing is clear: There is an oversupply of highly talented students. America’s best schools should expand to accommodate them — and the states in which they are located ought to make the policy changes needed to let them grow.



The GOP pays a price for its extremism. But Biden does, too. By E.J. Dionne Jr. — Read time: 4 minutes

 


Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion The GOP pays a price for its extremism. But Biden does, too.


Columnist|

July 30, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT


President Biden speaks during the Truman Civil Rights Symposium at the National Archives Building on Thursday. (Evan Vucci/AP)

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Republicans might be damaging their long-term prospects with extremist tactics, but Democrats must confront an unhappy reality: The GOP’s merciless personal and ideological warfare, particularly in the House, is making it much harder for President Biden to sell his achievements.


The poisonous nature of our politics nurtures a sense of exhaustion with public life that works against any incumbent, especially one trying to convince voters that the government is making their lives better. As members of the party that believes in public action, Democrats are especially hurt by a mood of frustration and cynicism.


The ferocity of the GOP’s attacks on Biden also fuels public doubts about the president and affects media coverage, even when journalists carefully fact-check Republicans’ claims. A two-minute report on a congressional hearing will inevitably air whatever charges some right-wing committee chair makes. They lodge in memories no matter what might be said during those 120 seconds to debunk them.


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Then there’s Biden’s signature promise to bring the parties together and end the chaos of the Trump years. The president’s problem: Bipartisanship is inherently a two-way street. One party can destroy the other side’s ability to achieve it simply by saying no. “The party in power pays a higher price for the other side’s obstructionism,” said Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster, though she added that the GOP suffered from its extremism in the three elections since 2018 and would likely do so again next year.


One party can also sow chaos if it wishes. “Biden wants to be known as, and is, a force for stability,” said Geoff Garin, another Democratic pollster. “But when the news is dominated by nuttiness, it’s hard to see stability.”


Nothing would do more to throw Washington into turmoil than an impeachment fight against Biden. So it should surprise no one that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is floating the idea. Notice all the innuendo packed into two sentences he offered to reporters last week: “We continue to gather more information. We’re finding more and more.”


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What information? McCarthy didn’t say. But he’ll be happy if voters imagine there must be something behind this assertion beyond pandering to his caucus’s most extreme members.


Biden has been struggling to boost his approval ratings ever since his polling numbers suffered a one-two punch from the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 and the inflation spike of 2022. Some polls early this year found most Democrats preferring he not seek reelection.


The GOP’s efforts to insert often unsupported accusations into the news cycle muddle Biden’s comeback campaign. “If you’re Biden, you have a really good story to tell,” Garin told me, “but it’s almost impossible to communicate effectively in this media environment.”


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With voters yet to give Biden credit for large-scale job creation on his watch, the ebbing of inflation and the large investments he pushed through Congress, the president has branded his economic strategy as “Bidenomics” to tie his administration to the restoration of prosperity and normalcy after the pandemic.


It is Biden’s answer to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” reelection campaign in 1984, the phrase that defined a powerful television ad that subtly reminded Americans of the high inflation and rising unemployment under his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. The analogy works on many levels, including Reagan’s approval ratings in late July 1983, when two Gallup polls showed them around 42 to 44 percent. That’s roughly where Biden is now.


Biden is also consciously rebuffing Reagan’s trickle-down economics, arguing that government intervention in the economy is essential to “growing the middle class,” the magic words meant to appeal to the diverse coalition the president needs to assemble.


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Getting this message across is vital, said Navin Nayak, president of the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund. His group’s research shows Republicans have a “built-in, decades-long advantage as the party that’s focused on the economy that makes it harder for Democrats to break through.” Democrats, he added, “don’t talk enough about the economy,” and their economic goals are unclear to voters.


Nayak sees the “Bidenomics” push as an antidote to both problems. Most voters disagree with Republican policies, he said, but they know what Republicans are for on the economy: cut taxes, lower spending, scale back regulations. If Biden is to have a recovery akin to Reagan’s, his campaign will have to reverse the perceptions of the two parties and dispel 2022’s memories.


This will not be an easy climb. A Morning Consult poll this month found 68 percent of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track; only 32 percent think it’s on the right track.


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The promising news for Biden is that the “right track” number was up eight points from about a year ago, and it rose 13 points among Democrats, from 41 percent to 54 percent.


Preventing this trend from taking hold is why Republicans are doing all they can to accentuate the gloomy. If their over-the-top attacks on Biden make you want to give up on politics, GOP leaders will be able to declare “mission accomplished.”


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Two women — Democrats, centrists, national security experts — aim higher. By Jennifer Rubin — Read time: 4 minutes


Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Two women — Democrats, centrists, national security experts — aim higher


Columnist|

July 31, 2023 at 7:45 a.m. EDT


Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) at an Oct. 25 campaign event in Dumfries, Va. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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Spurred into national security service, tested after 9/11 and mobilized by their horror over the results of the 2016 presidential election, a crop of highly capable Democratic women ran for the House and won in 2018. They impressed their peers and constituents not only on national security issues but also with their pragmatic centrism. Two are now poised to move onto the national stage.


Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) has announced she is running for Senate, and Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) is reportedly preparing to run for governor in 2025. As I learned in researching my book, their motive for running for office was grounded in the same genuine devotion to public service that motivated their prior service.


Once elected, they got a boost from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Having spent years on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pelosi well understood how essential national security credentials are for women with ambitions for national leadership. Pelosi assigned Slotkin to the Committee on Homeland Security and Committee on Armed Services. Spanberger, as a freshman, was put on the Committee on Foreign Affairs. By 2021, Slotkin chaired a Homeland Security subcommittee. By 2023, Spanberger was on the Select Intelligence Committee, just as Pelosi had been for years.


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There are obvious parallels in the two women’s careers. Slotkin served in the CIA, followed by stints in the State and Defense departments. Spanberger served in the CIA before running in 2018. Both have won three tough election fights in competitive districts. Then-Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney (R) endorsed both in 2022.


Given their districts and their national security backgrounds, it’s not surprising they both earned reputations as moderate Democrats who are reliable votes for bipartisan legislation (e.g., the bipartisan infrastructure law) and staunch advocates for abortion rights and reasonable gun safety laws. However, they also have been willing to tangle with the left flank of the party on national security and spending.


As the New Republic reported, “Slotkin opposed student debt assistance on a vote supported by 93 percent of the caucus, voted against 85 percent of her caucus on whether the United States should even study the impact of its sanctions on other countries, voted to overturn locally enacted criminal justice and voting rights reforms in Washington, D.C., and even voted against 94 percent of her caucus to bar security clearance from anyone who has used cannabis.” She also opposed Medicare-for-all and abolition of the death penalty.


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And both have championed good-government reforms despite opposition from party leadership. Spanberger introduced and Slotkin co-sponsored a bill to bar members of Congress and their spouses from individual stock ownership.


Spanberger and Slotkin, models for fellow Democrats worried about losing the heartland and/or working-class White voters, refute the GOP talking point that Democrats are a bunch of socialists. At a time when deep tribalism pervades politics and the Republican Party has descended into reactionary nationalism, these are the sort of politicians (akin to Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana) who can appeal to Democrats, independents and the kind of normal Republicans whom defeated and indicted former president Donald Trump alienated.


That leaves Spanberger and Slotkin well positioned to win statewide in states with a history of electing moderate Democrats (e.g., Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark R. Warner in Virginia, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow in Michigan). Their brand of pragmatic, center-left politics also potentially makes them viable on the national stage. Recent presidential elections have turned on fewer than 100,000 votes spread over swing states such as Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Down the road, you could image either winning these states.


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The two congresswomen possess something else as well. Having spent time with both since 2018, I’ve observed that they come across as decent, normal people who are at ease with other decent, normal people outside the Beltway. They speak succinctly and directly, without political jargon or empty sound bites. Comfortable in their own skin, they lack the air of self-importance and the grandiosity that afflict many politicians.


Given that neither has yet to win any race beyond the House, one should be careful of long-range predictions. However, as one Democratic insider said of Spanberger, “She’s too big a talent for the House. If she wins, she’s immediately a national figure.” The same can be said of Slotkin.


The country (and the Democratic Party) surely could use pragmatic, authentic women as adept at purple-state politics as they are at national security policy.


I don’t recognize the intolerant, illiberal country Israel is becoming. By Max Boot — Read time: 6 minutes


Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion I don’t recognize the intolerant, illiberal country Israel is becoming


Columnist|

July 31, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EDT


Israeli police use a water cannon to disperse demonstrators in Jerusalem on Monday. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

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It’s never been harder to be a supporter of Israel. I should know; I‘ve been one as long as I can remember. In fact, I almost became an Israeli myself. When I left the Soviet Union with my mother and grandmother in 1976, we made lengthy stopovers in Vienna and Rome, where Israeli representatives tried to convince us to move to the Jewish state. It was a tempting offer, but since my mother spoke English, not Hebrew, we went to the United States. Yet while growing up as a Jewish kid in the Los Angeles suburbs, I still formed a fast attachment to Israel.


I came of age on stories of hard-working kibbutzim turning desert soil green and heroic Israeli soldiers rescuing hostages at Entebbe. At my bar mitzvah in 1982, I even gave a speech in defense of Israel’s ill-fated invasion of Lebanon — which says little about my perspicacity as a budding pundit but much about my devotion to Israel.


As an adult, I made numerous trips to Israel and marveled at the vibrancy of its culture. I always found Jerusalem, groaning under the weight of thousands of years of history, to be slightly oppressive, but Tel Aviv is a bustling, modern beach city where an ex-Angeleno can feel at home. My mother became so smitten with Israel that she spent months living there and spoke of moving there after her retirement from UCLA. (Sadly, she never got the chance: She died in 2018.)


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Yet, while I retain affection for Israel, I often feel as if I do not recognize what it has become. This is a familiar feeling for me, since I am similarly befuddled by modern America: How did we turn into a land of book banners and covid deniers? Both Israel and the United States have been disfigured by the rise of populist rabble-rousers who have tapped into ugly and unsavory prejudices.


While our far-right president was narrowly unseated in 2020 and is now on the comeback trail, Israel’s far-right government remains firmly in control despite its exceedingly narrow winning margin. It just flexed its muscles by passing a law that will prevent the Supreme Court from overturning legislation on the grounds of unreasonableness — an admittedly subjective standard but one that has limited the ability of settlers to seize more land in the West Bank and of the ultra-Orthodox to be exempted from military service.


Hundreds of thousands of outraged Israelis have taken to the streets to protest not just a change in their country’s laws but in its very character. The secular, socialist Israel of my youth is fast disappearing. In its place is a far wealthier country — but one that is turning intolerant and illiberal.


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There was, admittedly, always a tension between the Zionist and democratic strands of the state — tension that became especially pronounced after 1967 when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank with all of their Palestinian inhabitants. But, in recent years, religious extremism and ultranationalist ideology have moved from the fringes of Israeli politics to the center of power. The political parties representing Jewish settlers make no secret of their desire to annex the entire West Bank — which would entrench a military occupation that has been denounced by human-rights groups as an Israeli version of “apartheid.” And the political parties representing the ultra-Orthodox make no secret of their desire to repress women’s rights and LGBTQ rights and to impose theocracy on secular Israelis.


The Israeli cabinet now includes extremists such as Itamar Ben Gvir, a follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism. His cabinet colleague, Bezalel Smotrich, a self-described “fascist homophobe,” has advocated separating Jewish and Arab women in maternity wards, called for outlawing Arab political parties (which represent 2 million Arab Israelis), and incited the ethnic cleansing of Arabs in the West Bank.


Presiding over this extremist coalition is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a narcissist of few fixed convictions. Like former president Donald Trump, Netanyahu does not necessarily share many of his followers’ beliefs: Who, after all, imagines that an inveterate playboy like Trump is actually a firm foe of abortion or that a secular Israeli like Netanyahu actually wants to convert his country into a theocracy? But both Trump and Netanyahu cater to extremists to win and hold power — especially when doing so is essential to help them to escape the criminal charges they both face.


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As finance minister twenty years ago, Netanyahu did much to create Israel’s reputation as a “start-up nation” by cutting government spending and deregulating the economy. Yet his new government is massively increasing subsidies for ultra-Orthodox schools and seminaries which produce graduates ignorant of math, science or English and unwilling to either serve in the military or pursue careers in business. The ultra-Orthodox, the fastest-growing part of the population, have already become a significant drag on Israel’s economy — and the new government subsidies, a group of Israeli economists warn, “will transform Israel … to a backward country in which a large part of the population lacks basic skills for life in the 21st century.”


Meanwhile, the soldiers and entrepreneurs who do the most to strengthen Israel, economically and militarily, feel increasingly alienated from the far-right state. Tech entrepreneurs are threatening to cut ties with Israel, and reservists in elite military units are threatening not to report for duty. Amos Malka, a retired major general who formerly commanded military intelligence and ground forces, recently said: “If I was serving now on the General Staff I would ask to immediately resign and a minute later explain I can’t serve a regime becoming a messianic extreme dictatorship.”


As a longtime supporter of Israel, I am filled with despair watching these developments and knowing that the United States is seemingly helpless to change Israel’s trajectory despite the $3.8 billion a year that Washington provides to the Jewish state. Netanyahu simply ignores President Biden’s wise advice to seek consensus before moving forward with major changes to the political system. Will he listen to Biden’s warnings not to annex the West Bank?


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The United States and Israel are even increasingly at odds in their foreign policies, with Israel refusing to offer more than token support to Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. Netanyahu is also trying to block Biden from reviving the badly needed Iran nuclear deal. Incredibly, during his current term in office, Netanyahu may wind up meeting the president of China before the president of the United States.


Israel is now an increasingly illiberal, and difficult, ally: the Hungary of the Middle East. That’s why it makes sense to discuss a phaseout of U.S. military aid to Israel, as was suggested to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof by two former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer and Martin Indyk. Israel is strong enough to stand on its own, and the United States should not be subsidizing policies that are anathema to so many Americans — and Israelis.


Israel remains freer than its neighbors, and it still has large numbers of citizens who are willing to take to the streets to defend its liberal, democratic values. The protesters give me some hope for its future. But it is simply not the same nation I fell in love with more than 40 years ago. I am sad about what has already happened to Israel and worried about what will happen next. Like many Americans, I simply cannot support it as unreservedly as I once did.


It’s not racism. It’s anti-antiracism. Paul Waldman

 — Read time: 5 minutes


Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion It’s not racism. It’s anti-antiracism.


Columnist|

July 31, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT


Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) speaks at the Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia on June 30. (Hannah Beier for the Washington Post.)

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When you see some of the positions taken by the Republicans running for president on issues that touch upon race, it can be hard to ascribe to them anything but the ugliest motives.


Why, for instance, would Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former vice president Mike Pence each announce their intention to change the name of an Army post to honor a Confederate general? Why would DeSantis advocate for new school standards in his state that appear to present slavery as a brief and salutary job training program?


Some will simply answer, “Racism.” But there’s a more complicated answer that better explains what’s happening on the right. The true commitment of today’s Republican Party is not to racism (though there are plenty of genuine racists who thrill to what the GOP offers, and especially to former president Donald Trump). It is to what is best described as anti-antiracism.


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In a sense, anti-antiracism is its own ideology. It holds that racism directed at minorities is largely a thing of the past; that whatever racism does exist is a product only of individual hearts and not of institutions and systems; that efforts to ameliorate racism and promote diversity are both counterproductive and morally abhorrent; and, most critically, that those efforts must not only be stopped but also rolled back.


Listen to conservative rhetoric on book banning, affirmative action, teaching history or any of the ways race touches their war on “wokeness,” and you hear this theme repeated: We must stop talking and thinking about racism, and most of all we must stop trying to do anything about racism.


Virtually all racists, of course, would also be anti-antiracists. But there are also millions of people who are not racist yet who are fervent anti-antiracists. That’s the conclusion of some fascinating research from a pair of political scientists, Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer.


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Their research explores people’s agreement with ideas such as “As a country, we have done everything that we should do to equalize wealth and income between Black people and White people,” and “People these days can’t speak their minds without someone accusing them of racism.”


Adherence to these kind of anti-antiracist ideas has become “a matter of partisan identity,” going to the core of “what it means to be a Republican,” Wetts told me. “More than 80 percent of White Republicans endorse these views at very high levels.” In fact, in Wetts and Willer’s analysis, the only variable that predicted support for Trump more strongly than anti-antiracism was whether you identified as a Republican.


That helps explain why Republican candidates are so determined to call attention to their efforts to dictate what can be said about race in classrooms, to punish companies for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), or even to undo attempts to stop honoring the Confederacy.


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Those efforts are happening on both the national and local levels. In Missouri, for instance, a new conservative majority on a suburban school board last week revoked a resolution the board had passed in 2020 to “promote racial healing.” It might not have much practical impact, but they were determined to make a point.


For some people, “opposition to antiracism is a way of expressing racial animus without explicitly endorsing it,” Wetts said. For others it’s about “distaste, anger and frustration with antiracists themselves,” an expression of revulsion against liberals and everything they want to do. Anti-antiracism is one more way to own the libs.


Feelings have become central to the way conservatives think about race; it’s no accident that many of the laws regarding critical race theory passed in conservative states explicitly outlaw discussions in schools that could make students feel “guilt” or “discomfort.” Anti-antiracism is fueled by White people’s unease with the growing diversity of American society, the knowledge that they’ve lost their dominant position — and to boot, liberals keep trying to make them feel bad.


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But most of the anti-antiracism efforts are meant to win the support of people who have little or no personal experience with the supposed excesses of antiracism.


Their primary audience is “people whose life experiences never collide with this kind of antiracism stuff,” says Ashley Jardina, a political scientist and author of “White Identity Politics.” The states that have passed laws limiting discussions of race in the classroom “have long had pretty conservative school boards and state legislatures that dictate what’s being taught” in public schools, Jardina says, so students were already getting an extremely thin education on America’s racial history. The party’s base is White people without college degrees; most of them never took a class on Black history or had to sit through DEI training.


This is a vital part of the anti-antiracism picture: Though anti-antiracists are convinced they are beset on all sides by liberals demanding they atone for racism they believe is an artifact of history, they’re only likely to encounter critical race theory or DEI when watching Fox News or listening to conservative talk radio. Wetts and Willer’s research shows that anti-antiracism is highly correlated with consumption of right-wing media.


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It is easy to see why Republican politicians think anti-antiracism is so potent. It allows people to claim a commitment to equality while opposing policies meant to achieve actual equality. It enables them to proclaim their own victimhood, which has become absolutely central to the conservative worldview. And it reinforces borders of racial identity, which can be a powerful motivating force in politics.


Which is why all the GOP presidential candidates — even the non-White ones — will trumpet their commitment to anti-antiracism, even if they won’t call it by name. By now, the Republican base expects nothing less.


OF COURSE THE BOTTOM FEEDERS ARE SPREADING THE RUMOR THAT BARACK OBAMA KILLED HIS CHEF

No More Mister Nice Blog / by Steve M. / July 31, 2023 at 03:39AM
You'll probably want to decontaminate yourself after I tell you this, but -- unsurprisingly -- the lowlife scum at Gateway Pundit are implying that Barack Obama killed his private chef. Jim Hoft writes:
Obama Spotted at Golf Course with Bandaged Fingers, Days After Mysterious Paddle Boarding Accident Claims the Life of His Personal Chef and Friend

Just a week following the unexpected and rather tragic death of their personal chef and friend, Tafari Campbell, the Obamas were spotted out and about, seemingly unscathed and unaffected.

Barack and Michelle Obama were spotted at the Vineyard Golf Club and Farm Neck Country Club, respectively, according to exclusive photos obtained by Daily Mail. The pictures are the first public glimpse of the Obamas since the loss of their dear friend and personal chef.
The Daily Mail story says that Michelle "was seen receiving a consoling hug from a female friend on the [tennis] court," which doesn't exactly square with "unscathed and unaffected." But go on, Jim:
Dressed in a green polo shirt and white shorts, Barack Obama was seen engaged in a round of golf at the exclusive Vineyard Golf Club. The former president, noticeably bearing bandaged fingers, which causes speculations online.

Citizen journalist Travis of Flint, Michigan wrote, “just days after his personal chef and friend died in a very mysterious paddle boarding accident, Barack Obama appears to have injured fingers and a black eye. We still don’t know who the other person was and Obama loves paddle boarding. I think we can all guess what happened at this point!”




I don't know what (if anything) is going on with Obama's eye, but the taped fingers don't mean Obama's hands are injured. Many golfers tape their fingers, among them Tiger Woods. Woods tapes the middle finger of his right hand and wears a glove on the left; Obama, who's left-handed, has a glove on his right hand and tape on a couple of fingers of his left.

I don't know much about Travis_in_Flint, the "citizen journalist" Hoft quotes, but it clearly doesn't take much to establish a rep on that side of the aisle. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, and while I'm sure many of them are bots, his followers include Sarah Palin, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, Lara Logan, Lou Dobbs, Moms for Liberty, and Ron DeSantis's spokes-sniper, Christina Pushaw.

I don't know what's creepier in the Gateway Pundit comments. Is it the haters' favorite insinuations about the Obamas, that he's secretly gay and she's a man named Mike (or isn't even human)?
Sounds like Obama, Michael and the Chef got lost in the "FOG OF A GAY BUBBLE BATH" Nothing worse than a pissed off Sasquatch in an interrupted gay bubble bath on Martha,s Vineyard, (AKA home of we love migrants)

****

A la Paul Pelosi. Demoncrats sure have media and police protection to run interference when they get caught in their gay trysts that end up violent.

****

The former president, noticeably bearing bandaged fingers
They need to be careful with gerbils, they have sharp teeth.
(Homophobes love the urban legend that gay men routinely put gerbils up their butts.)

Or is it the insinuation that because the Obamas play golf and tennis, they hate white people?
The Obamas hate Whitey but have no trouble appropriating White culture in every way. Tennis. Golf. Martha's Vineyard.

****

Both in white outfits too.

****

Martha’s Vineyard will look like a Detroit shopping mall after enough Obamas move in.

****

They identify as white. Hence they are racists.

****

While wearing white supremacist hat, shorts, belt, socks and sneakers...

****

they hate "whitey" .. because it makes them $$$$ ... they are no different than all the other racists across this country in charge of hiring, admissions, and promoting the big lie ....

****

And they were propelled by stupid whites made to feel guilty if they didn’t vote for a non white, non American candidate. They owe everything to whites. And like all black Rats, chose a pristine white enclave to live in. So much for blm.
(In fact, parts of Martha's Vineyard have been getaway destinations for Black people since the nineteenth century.)

I don't expect this rumor to go mainstream -- though who knows? Meanwhile it's the Clinton Death List, version 2.0.

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Saturday, July 29, 2023

Israel's Land Grabs in the West Bank are Helping Justify the Far-Right Government's Power Grabs. By Emily Tamkin


Tolerance of harsh measures in the occupied areas has distorted Israeli politics


Emily Tamkin

Jul 28, 2023

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Israel's Land Grabs in the West Bank are Helping Justify the Far-Right Government's Power Grabs

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View of a Jewish Settlement in the West Bank.

Shutterstock. Evanessa


Late last month, after the United Nations and the European Union voiced concern over violent attacks by Jewish settlers against Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined them. “Calls to grab land illegally and actions of grabbing land illegally, are unacceptable to me. They undermine law and order in Judea and Samaria and must stop immediately,” he said at a cabinet meeting, using the biblical terms of the regions that make up the West Bank. At the same meeting, he touted his record of having “doubled” settlement construction in the West Bank, and as having done so “despite great and unprecedented international pressure.”


But the pressure was exerted because such construction is illegal. And herein lies the paradox facing Netanyahu, as violence in the West Bank continues: Informal illegal land grabs and violence are happening within the context of formal illegal land grabs and violence.


The Continuing Cycle of Violence


First, the scope of the violence: United Nations’ experts said that 2022 was the deadliest year in the West Bank since 2005 when tracking started. Some 150 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces; 33 of them children. The experts also said that 2022 was the sixth consecutive year of increased settler attacks. “Armed and masked Israeli settlers are attacking Palestinians in their homes, attacking children on their way to school, destroying property and burning olive groves, and terrorizing entire communities with complete impunity,” they said.


This year is on pace to be still more violent. According to the Associated Press, as of late last month, 137 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank so far this year. Meanwhile, 24 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians. Earlier this summer, an Israeli raid on Jenin in which five Palestinians were killed was followed by Hamas gunmen killing four Israelis. This was followed by Israeli settlers rampaging through the town of Turmus Ayya, reportedly setting roughly 30 houses on fire.


To be sure, the violence is not only by the settlers. Earlier this month, an Israeli man and his two daughters were wounded in a shooting in the comparatively calm southern West Bank. This followed a shooting at the Hamra junction in April and another one in Huwara in February. The Palestinian Authority has been criticized by the United States and Israel for the “Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund,” which they say motivates Palestinians to commit violent acts. And, as the International Crisis Group has reported, “In the past couple of years, a new generation of armed groups has arisen among West Bank Palestinians, drawing fire from both Israel and the Palestinian Authority ... They are driven by an inchoate but profound frustration with the status quo—from the Palestinians’ own ineffective leadership to the brutality of the ever-deepening Israeli occupation and an ailing economy.” The report noted that the groups do not yet pose a major security threat, but rather are “the tip of an iceberg, having tapped into the deep-seated disaffection in Palestinian society.”


No Such Thing as a ‘Legal’ Settlement


The construction of settlements—overwhelmingly Jewish Israeli civilian communities—in the West Bank despite the protestation of the international community did not, of course, begin with Netanyahu. As the Israel Policy Forum notes, in 1967 after the Six-Day War, Israel reestablished Kfar Etzion, a Jewish community in the West Bank that was the site of a massacre of 127 Jews in 1948. The community, which was not granted to Israel under the partition plan, was reconquered and occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, many religious Zionists settled in the West Bank who to date maintain a religious claim to the territory in its entirety.


Formal construction slowed in the 1990s and 2000s—but over 100 illegal outposts were still erected during that time. Though these were illegal under not just international but also Israeli law, some were legally recognized by the Israeli government later. This past winter, for example, Netanyahu announced he would recognize 10 illegal West Bank outposts.


Throughout this entire period, various international actors, among them U.S. presidents, have protested the continued construction of settlements. George H.W. Bush stopped billions in loan guarantees to build housing while clashing with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. (But as Eric Alterman recounts in “We Are Not One,” when Yitzhak Rabin returned to office in the early 1990s, Bush approved the guarantees and allowed for the completion of 11,000 in-progress housing units in the West Bank). “CLINTON SCOLDS ISRAEL ABOUT SETTLEMENTS,” reads a 1996 Washington Post headline in all caps. “Bush criticizes settlements on Israel visit,” reads a 2008 headline from the Guardian. The Obama administration famously declined to block an anti-settlement U.N. Security Council resolution in December 2016. Even former U.S. President Donald Trump, who moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, cut aid to Palestinians, and closed the Jerusalem consulate that gave Palestinians a link to Washington, told Netanyahu to “hold back” on the settlements. (Netanyahu was, in fact, the one on who Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump were all calling to stop settlement expansion.)


That president after president would express concern over settlements is not surprising. After all, the West Bank has not formally been annexed, and so is not formally under Israeli sovereignty. The ostensible goal of the settlements is security. In practice, however, they have meant a massive upheaval of Palestinian communities. But even the security rationale is dubious given that the settlements require over half of Israeli Defense Force troops to be positioned in the West Bank—and 80% of them to defend the settlers. The settlements also run counter to the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” and bars “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.” Setting aside the fact that Israeli settlers and Palestinians are treated far from equally under the law (Palestinians in the West Bank, for example, are subject to military law), the continued construction of settlements, formal and informal, is and always has been illegal—as well as ongoing.


Israeli and Palestinian Rights Aren’t Separable


It is said that the dissolution of Israeli democracy for Israelis is a byproduct of the treatment of Palestinians generally and the occupation specifically: That you cannot occupy a people for decades and expect that not to seep into your own body politic. That what happens in the West Bank will eventually be reflected in Jerusalem. In the same way, the rhetoric and ambitions of politicians in Jerusalem empowers settlers in the West Bank.


Does it matter that Netanyahu declares that settlers grabbing land is “unacceptable” when the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says that the United States’ support for the two-state solution is “suicide” and the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, declares, “We will not compromise on the Land of Israel. We will not compromise on any step. We will not compromise on any hill, on any outpost. This is ours”?  


Smotrich also said last month that violence by Israeli settlers is not terrorism, while Ben Gvir, who was made national security minister weeks after threatening Palestinians in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah with a gun, said, “We have to settle the land of Israel and at the same time need to launch a military campaign, blow up buildings, assassinate terrorists. Not one, or two, but dozens, hundreds, or if needed, thousands.” Netanyahu formed a coalition with Smotrich and Ben Gvir, after all, and this is what they believe. Why would their empowerment not be reflected in the actions of settlers?


The prime minister—and not only the prime minister—in the past year—and not only the past year—has shown that violent land grabs are, in fact, wholly acceptable. They’ve been accepted over and over again, both informally and formally, by a public divided between those who think that the settlements are good, those who don’t care and those who have minimal say in Israeli society.


Israel has been engulfed in mass protests in recent weeks. But these protests are not about the occupation—and settler violence—but about the right-wing government’s plans to reform the judiciary. But the two issues are not unrelated. On Monday, Justice Minister Yariv Levin defended the first part of the judicial reform (or judicial coup, as its critics call it), which abolished the “reasonableness” standard that the High Court uses to prevent corruption and block government decisions that exceed its authority. But every example he offered of the High Court’s illicit interventions involved the court’s defense of anti-occupation activists or Palestinians.


It should come as no surprise that the same officials who turned a blind eye to land grabs by settlers are now themselves grabbing power from the judiciary.


© The UnPopulist 2023


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REVIEW: The Education of Beth Moore. By Andrea Turpin


currentpub.com

13 - 16 minutes

Moore’s memoir sheds light on a moment. It also, quite simply, sheds light.

All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir by Beth Moore. Tyndale House Publishers, 2023. 304 pp., $27.99

I used to look down on Beth Moore. Mind you, I didn’t know anything about her. What I really looked down on was “women’s ministry” in general and the idea of purchased curriculum in particular: Why separate women out? And if you do, why watch a video of a teacher on a stage? A local teacher could bother to study the Bible herself. Of course, I hold a seminary degree.

Then in Spring 2014 I signed up for an evening women’s Bible study. I wanted to meet more people at church and Bible studies were separated by sex. The evening crowd had a day job, so I figured I might have more in common with them. They happened to be doing a Beth Moore study. Specifically, the anniversary version of Beth Moore’s very first published Bible study—on the Tabernacle.

I may be judgmental, but I am also fair-minded. Turns out Beth Moore is an exceptional Bible teacher. I’m grateful I had this realization as background for the events of 2016 that put her on an even bigger stage, for different reasons.

Those events constitute the context of her memoir, the “why now.” In brief, Beth Moore was a beloved Bible teacher to many, many evangelical women, especially to those in her own beloved Southern Baptist Convention. And then she wasn’t. Her crime? Calling out the evangelical men who defended Trump after he bragged about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tapes.

All My Knotted-Up Life reads like a novel, complete with foreshadowing and callbacks. Because that is how Moore understands her life: an apparently chaotic story scripted by the hand of a loving Author. For the same reason, Moore writes about herself and others with both clear-eyed honesty and compassion.

Eight of its twenty-two chapters focus on Moore’s upbringing. Here we find the origins of some of the things for which she is most famous—for starters, her deep Arkansas expressions. My personal favorite, about someone denying the truth: “I knew he was lying like a plump cat on a warm windowsill.” Also, not surprisingly, her commitment to the Southern Baptist Convention. SBC churches were her harbor in the storm of her tumultuous upbringing. 

Less well-known, that tumultuous upbringing itself. Moore had previously alluded to her experience of sexual abuse. As a result, countless women confided to her the same. Here we learn the perpetrator was her father. 

She treats this part of her narrative with the sensitivity of a sexual abuse survivor: Rather than discuss his actions in any detail, she writes about how it affected her, using the recurring metaphor of the storm. She also writes about how life with her father affected her mother, which in turn affected the children. Her mother suffered a mental break at exactly the time Beth needed her the most. Beth would later suffer a similar break for about a year in her thirties, when the inner dam holding back the storm’s accumulated floodwater finally burst.

The heart of the book starts with a chapter on her call to ministry followed by a chapter on her marriage to Keith. The tangled but verdant life that follows grows from these two seeds, both planted during her college years. Unlike Beth, neither species fell within the Southern Baptist genus.

While serving as a church camp counselor, one day Beth experienced the overwhelming presence of God at the cabin bathroom sink. Despite the rarity of charismatic experiences in SBC circles at the time, she and her mentors interpreted this event as a call to “work for God” in some capacity. Her options as a Southern Baptist woman in the 1980s were missionary or teacher of women or children.

A few years later, Beth married cradle-Catholic cussing Keith rather than her clean-cut high school boyfriend from a Leave it to Beaver church family. She had been too afraid to share her real background with a man whose life seemed perfect. That, and she fell madly in love with Keith and he with her. He supported her working for God—if she didn’t become a nun.

Keith’s life was very much not perfect. At age two, he and his three-year-old brother accidentally ignited a fire in their garage. He made it out alive, his brother didn’t. Emotionally, he would live with PTSD and bipolar disorder that colored his life even more than sexual abuse colored Beth’s.

Beth subsequently experienced two more clarifying calls to ministry, one external and one internal. On-brand for her personality—and her hair—Beth led a church aerobics ministry. After speaking at a women’s event on “Making Fitness Count for Christ,” one of the SBC’s very few prominent women’s speakers suggested that Beth might be fit to join their ranks. Soon, Moore realized that motivational speaking only helps people grow so far. She experienced God calling her to attend a substantive Bible study. On Day One the (male) teacher’s obvious love for God’s Word sparked a flame of longing within her to go and be likewise. Years only fanned it higher and higher.

Meanwhile, she gave birth to her beloved daughters. Here is Moore: “I wanted two things desperately. I wanted my family, and I wanted ministry. I wanted to raise my own children. I also wanted women to catch a fever for the Scriptures. I loved being home, and I loved being on the road. I adored my two little girls, and I also adored cracking open a Bible with a room full of females.”

She got both. Moore narrates the founding and growth of her Living Proof Ministries and its partnership with Lifeway, the SBC’s publishing arm. Together they produced nearly twenty women’s Bible studies and completely packed multiple arenas. Simultaneously, Moore maintained close, warm relationships with her husband and daughters that continue to this day.

Of particular interest to me as a historian of gender, religion, and higher education is that Moore narrates her training for teaching thousands upon thousands of women. When she first set her hand to the plow, she sought out a seminary degree at the Houston branch of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. In the memoir, she credits her decision not to return for a second semester to the fact that it did not offer courses compatible with her children’s school hours. Elsewhere she has added that the temperature there for women was not the warmest. Either way, the SBC did not at the time prioritize equipping women to teach.

So Moore prioritized equipping herself. She got tutoring in Greek. She secured a few more formal classes. Most significantly, she purchased or borrowed every Bible commentary she could find that believed in the divine inspiration and authority of the Scriptures and “that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and very God who came in the flesh and, though he knew no sin, was crucified for our sins, raised from the dead, ascended to God’s right hand, and will one day return.” She also read rabbis such as Abraham Joshua Heschel. The result of her training was deep and broad historic Christian orthodoxy, but decidedly not a purebred Southern Baptist outlook. 

Her sex and her non-traditional education made her less than welcome among some denominational movers and shakers. But so long as she bowed to male leadership—literally, she tried to make herself shorter around short men—she kept her ministry.

Her rapid descent from popularity when she finally stood up straight caused Moore to become a historian of her own life. The final chapters of the book, about the upheavals since 2016, start with a history of politics and gender within the Southern Baptist Convention since the 1980s. Alongside this history she places her own, which both tracks and defies it. 

This uneasy pairing is the value of history to memoir, and memoir to history. Moore’s individual story only makes sense in the wider context of the history of politics and gender in both the USA and the SBC. At the same time, her individual story does not reduce her to mere pawn of social forces; it demonstrates, rather, one’s ability to choose.

Noting that beliefs about gender and race often intertwine, Moore makes a good faith effort to grapple with the role of racism in her life, from Arkansas to Texas to the SBC. The narrative fit is awkward at times, but perhaps that’s fitting for a Southern white woman. Always touched by the realities of race, and never graced with an easy life herself, Moore nevertheless had the privilege of not making those questions central—until she found herself marginalized in a way similar to her Black brothers and sisters.

Moore had always embraced Southern Baptist “complementarian” gender theology. After all, her pastor and his wife modeled a healthy marriage. But also, the thought that male headship in home and church might not be Scripture’s intent simply never occurred to her because it would mean forfeiting her ministry within the SBC. 

Still, it caused strain. Beth and Keith were not the traditional Southern Baptist couple. Keith did not care to participate in church life beyond attendance (when it wasn’t deer season). But he actually supported her calling so much that, to honor her interpretation of “male covering,” he always prayed for her before she taught. Even at a whisper, in a deer blind.

Meanwhile, many male denominational leaders were straight-up mean to Moore. At SBC events at which both spoke, they refused to talk to her backstage and ridiculed her onstage. She excused it at the time as a combination of her lesser formal education and their different, but honest, interpretation of complementarian theology. She thought they were attempting to be faithful to God’s Word, and just missing the mark a bit.

She was wrong. Criticizing Trump’s defense of sexual assault and evangelicals’ defense of his comments led to a barrage of hate calls, hate mail, and hate tweets. Pro-life herself (“though I lacked the guts to be overly pious about it because it’s a wonder I hadn’t ended up with an unwanted pregnancy”), Moore understood the political complexities. She also understood the ties between the Southern Baptist “Conservative Resurgence” and the Religious Right. On balance, she concluded: “All this time, I’d accepted the rampant sexism because I thought it was about Scripture. . . . [But this did not] evidence fruit of the Holy Spirit. . . . [This] was about power. This was about control. This was about the boys’ club. You lied.”

Things would only get worse two years later when Moore delivered the sermon at an SBC church on Mother’s Day. The SBC was reckoning with a recent exposé of how some denominational leaders had knowingly covered up sexual abuse, with survivors numbering in the hundreds. Suddenly, Southern Baptist leaders were more concerned with whether a woman occasionally preaching violated biblical gender roles than whether a man assaulting women and children did.

During these exact years, roughly 2015 through 2020, a vicious bacterial infection left Keith physically and psychologically incapacitated. Beth endured all of these attacks without her husband’s support. Indeed, she feared that she had lost him forever. It’s enough to make even the skeptical believe in spiritual warfare.

Finally, Moore left the denomination that had been her home, her family, her haven from the storm. But she did not leave Jesus.

And, she notes, Jesus did not leave her: “I needed neatness from God. What I got was a tangled-up knot. . . . [but] in all the bruising and bleeding and sobbing and pleading, my hand has been tightly knotted, safe and warm, with the hand of Jesus. In all the letting go, he has held me fast.”

As Beth tells it, her story belongs equally to Keith, with whom she shares her tightest earthly knot. The book closes with two ways their spiritual lives have become more tightly intertwined since leaving the SBC. First, they ended up at an Anglican church: a mixture of the Catholic forms of Keith’s childhood and the evangelical theology of Beth’s. Both find nourishment there and love attending together. 

The second story, about their house, I won’t spoil. Moore perceives both chaos and order in her life, the latter plotted patiently by her Lord. It would be easy to read such order into our lives. But narrative flourishes of this kind would be difficult for us to concoct, and especially to time. 

One thing stood out to me from Moore’s Tabernacle study: The Israelites could not store manna overnight; it would rot. They had to gather new manna every morning. Consequently, Moore got up every day before dawn to spend time in Bible reading and prayer, to receive her daily bread from Jesus’ hand. And she has yet to stop, throughout all her knotted-up life.

These days, many mornings she shares what she has learned on Twitter. Sometimes she calls out sin in the church, but her tweets overwhelmingly concern not what she is against, but what she is for: Jesus. They emanate love for him and confidence in him and desire for others to know him too.

Beth doesn’t know me from Eve, to borrow her repeated phrase, but my review copy was signed: “To Andrea— I’m honored to share these pages with you. My prayer is that something of my story will enrich something of the reader’s story. With love, Beth.”

It has, Beth. Thank you.

Andrea L. Turpin is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University and author of A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1817-1917 (Cornell, 2016). She is a recipient of a 2022 Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant for Researchers for work on a book manuscript about how Protestant women’s organizations navigated the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century.

Image: Living Proof Ministries

Midsummer mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias


www.slowboring.com

23 - 29 minutes

I really do not care for the late-July D.C. heat, and unlike many parts of the world, we aren’t even experiencing a particular temperature outlier at the moment. I just don’t like it!

In happier news, my man Martin O’Malley is getting tapped to run the Social Security Administration — he would’ve won! It’s nice to see the Justice Department actually go after legacy admissions and not just use it as whataboutism. Paris is cleaning up the Seine in advance of next year’s Olympics. Consumer confidence is rising. Much-bemoaned “gentrification” really does reduce aggregate segregation, and it seems like the Teamsters got a great new contract for UPS drivers.

Kevin Barry: There was recently news in NYC that 50% of people stopped on NYPD's new fare beater enforcement program had open warrants. Jibes with what you've said about enforcement.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that turns out to be an overestimate based on some kind of selectivity in terms of where the enforcement is happening, but yes, this is something the legendary police chief William Bratton always said — that fare enforcement was a good way of catching people with open warrants and illegal handguns.

I think it’s really sad that this wisdom, which I believed had become well-established by the mid-aughts, was forgotten over the course of the teens. One of the big dilemmas of law enforcement is that there’s a disjuncture between the crimes that seem really important (shootings, home invasions, car thefts) and the crimes that are easy to detect. The easiest way to resolve that would be to significantly degrade everyone’s right to privacy, which people don’t like. A more appealing solution, in some quarters, is to do a lot of racial profiling — you can “efficiently” focus the invasions of privacy on young Black and Hispanic men. But I think this is immoral and degrades the legitimacy of the system in an unsustainable way. This leaves you with what I think is the best option, which is to try to be strict about unambiguous rule violations like improper license plates and fare evasion, not just to create general orderly vibes but specifically because it’s an opportunity to do warrant enforcement and generate prosecutable gun charges.

Jonathan Salmans: I recently attended a presentation on Pittsburgh's land bank. Since Pittsburgh's population has declined there are a number of neighborhoods with blighted, vacant or tax delinquent properties. A number of considerations were discussed on how to handle the situation. Some considerations are, should Pittsburgh just auction properties to the highest bidder or should some consideration be given to other factors, such as their financial ability to rehabilitate the property and address blight, or should priority be given to low income people or to people who have been living in that same neighborhood. Should Pittsburgh use local funding to subsidize property demolition or rehabilitation? When proposals are made to upzone more desirable parts of Pittsburgh, people at the public meetings say it would be better if the development occurred in neighborhoods with vacant properties. If Pittsburgh upzones desirable neighborhoods, is there a risk it would worsen vacant property issues in less desirable neighborhoods. Is this a drawback to upzoning in metro areas that have seen population loss? (I wouldn't see this as a reason not to upzone, but maybe there should be a fee on new construction to demolish blighted structures).

Taking the last part first, I am always struck by the sheer range of logically incompatible reasons people offer to avoid the conclusion that regulatory constraints on housebuilding are bad. These arguments often cite strange second-order bank shot impacts, and I think it’s important to try to re-orient the conversation around the economic fundamentals of deadweight loss.

This is a chart from an economics textbook illustrating the deadweight loss of imposing a quantitative quota on oil production, but it works just as well for a quota on housing production. An important thing to note is the yellow box — a transfer of welfare from consumers of housing to producers of housing.

A lot of what people argue about is encompassed in that yellow box — maybe the regulatory restrictions are good for homeowners. Or in the case of Pittsburgh, maybe there are specific benefits for homeowners and landlords in blighted neighborhoods.

These effects obviously do matter, but it’s important not to ignore the gray triangle of pure economic loss caused by forcing the economy into an inefficient pattern. If you want to see your country — or your city or your state or whatever — become more prosperous, then it’s good to try to identify large gray triangles of deadweight loss and shrink or eliminate them. Because housing is such a large share of the overall economy, it is the largest source of gray triangles in the American economy. So if you’re thinking about how to make Pittsburgh a more prosperous, more dynamic city that offers more opportunity to its residents, then I think you should really focus on the first-order growth benefits of allowing construction where demand is high and not worry so much about second-order impacts. It’s challenging to predict what the exact neighborhood-level impact of upzoning would be on every Pittsburgh neighborhood (and it’s going to depend in part on what happens in other cities), but we can say pretty confidently that Pittsburghers will have more job opportunities and higher incomes with upzoning and the city will have more tax revenue at its disposal.

There is reasonably good evidence that fixing up vacant buildings and blighted lots has public safety benefits, so I do think that’s a reasonable use of public funds, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a detailed cost-benefit analysis of how it stacks up to other ideas. Paul Grogan’s old book “Comeback Cities” talks about the benefit of supporting neighborhood-level organizations that do this kind of work in part with sweat equity, which is an interesting idea.

The auctions piece just seems like a straightforward tradeoff. If you sell property exclusively to long-term residents of the city, those residents get a windfall financial benefit. Delivering financial benefits to residents seems like a reasonable thing for a city government to do. On the other hand, if you sell to the highest bidder you could create a larger aggregate financial windfall. If it were me personally, I would sell to the highest bidder and use the revenue for something broadly beneficial. But you can’t take the politics out of politics, and if compromises get made around this, it’s not that big of a deal.

Cameron Parker: San Francisco seems to be moving closer to establishing a public bank, or at least it's getting momentum in the political discourse. The idea seems to be there's a gap in credit provision that commercial banks aren't filling. Do you have any thoughts about public banks in this or other contexts?

The woman who is leading this charge mounted a failed primary challenge against Scott Weiner, so I’m instinctively skeptical that she has her finger on the pulse of what San Francisco needs.

But thinking about public banks in general, there are really two kinds of things that banks do that we might be interested in. On the one hand, they provide a lot of retail financial services to consumers — checking accounts, debit cards, and other stuff like that. On the other hand, they do lending.

The SF Public Bank proposal seems very focused on the lending side, on the idea that — as you say — there is some major gap in credit provision that isn’t being met by the private sector. I’m really pretty skeptical. San Francisco is not like an obscure corner of the world that’s being overlooked by major existing firms. My vision of the credit provision side of a case for public banking is that you might be worried about extraction of capital from your community. Like suppose everyone suddenly gets very interested in lithium mining and you have lithium, so a mine gets opened and there’s a bunch of investment in meeting the immediate needs of the mining operation, but also a bunch of people — the mine owners but also workers and some local stores and whatever else — are suddenly making money. They deposit some of the money they make in their bank, but then the workings of global capitalism dictate that the savings mostly end up financing investment opportunities elsewhere. This is maybe good for the world, but also maybe bad for your state or country, so you set up a public bank or other mechanisms to try to ensure that locally created savings are re-invested locally.

SF Public Bank has this rhetoric about reinvestment that matches that narrative, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an account of San Francisco’s problems.

There are enormous amounts of capital available for investment in San Francisco, not just for venture capitalists but also for extremely boring things like construction projects. But there are also enormous regulatory barriers to actually executing on those capital investment opportunities. The solution is to listen to Scott Weiner and change the regulatory environment to make it easier for financial capital to be transmuted into physical capital. “How do we generate more investment in San Francisco?” is honestly one of the most trivial policy problems in the world. The difficulty is that a lot of people don’t want additional capital investment because additional investment would mean altering the built environment, more traffic, and increased parking scarcity. That’s an important argument about which I obviously have strong feelings, but that’s really the whole debate.

I think a lot of people don’t really understand that “economic growth” and “real estate development” are essentially the same thing. But look at any place that’s experienced growth and you see a ton of new buildings. If San Francisco’s poorest residents were richer, they would have larger homes and more stuff, and that stuff would need to be physically located somewhere. If they had access to more and better health care services, those services would need to be provided by doctors and nurses who would need to live somewhere and who would also need offices and clinics to work in.

I think a much more promising venue for public banking is actually on the retail side. The government manufactures physical currency as a public service so that people can get money and buy stuff. But in the contemporary world, it is very inconvenient to rely primarily on physical currency for transactions. And oftentimes our ability to provide public services is compromised by the fact that it’s difficult to make financial payments to unbanked people. Or we want to have a bike share system but we need to find a way to make it accessible to the unbanked. I think the most natural thing to say would be that 2023 is not 1823 and we need to provide basic checking accounts to everyone as a public service. I wrote about this way back in my February 2021 post “The Federal Reserve Should Give Everyone a Bank Account,” and I think it holds up.

Captain Mal: I think most people (Matt included) agree that Matt has moderated on policy since the inception of Slow Boring. As such, I'm interested in getting Matt's current take on the utility and practicality of a wealth tax, especially as it relates to this case.

I was trying to think how much have I really moderated and was recalling a recent conversation I had with a friend where he said all he really wants is to “make America 2012 again,” except with full employment. I agreed with him in the sense that I liked 2012-vintage politics and think a lot of progressive discourse innovations since Obama’s second term have been bad. But I didn’t actually agree with that as a policy agenda. Going back to the day after Obama’s re-election, I was happy that he won but I wasn’t satisfied with the policy status quo. Just in terms of conventional partisan lib ideas, I wanted to see higher taxes and more generous public services, I wanted to see more emphasis on developing zero-carbon energy sources, I wanted comprehensive immigration reform, I wanted marriage equality, and I wanted employment non-discrimination for LGBTQ people.

Since that time, we won in court on marriage and employment discrimination, we got the zero-carbon energy investments via the Inflation Reduction Act, and we have moved the needle only slightly on the welfare state and immigration. We’ve also lost ground on abortion rights in an unfortunate way.

So I’d say that Obama-style liberalism is still markedly left of the status quo (though somewhat less so), and that it’s still where I am. A bunch of new stuff has come up that I am mostly skeptical of, but it’s not like we actually won all of those Obama-era fights (we won some of them!) or that I’ve given up on them.

That being said, the wealth tax is in fact an idea that I have become less supportive of over the past 10 years specifically in response to the changing macroeconomic situation. I worry a lot more than I used to that a wealth tax would be a highly inflationary way of raising revenue because you’re basically giving rich people a “use it or lose it” dare with regard to their amassed financial resources. In the context of secular stagnation, ultra-low interest rates, low inflation, and stubbornly high unemployment, this didn’t seem like a problem to me. But today, part of taking a victory lap on full employment is that we need to be more measured in our thinking about the economic consequences of more spending — whether that’s private spending or public spending. What we want to do is actually shift consumption possibilities away from the rich to the poor, to families with kids, to people with unmet health needs, etc., and I’m not sure that a wealth tax would actually accomplish that.

Sean: Annie Lowery keeps citing this 8 year old paper that claims if zoning rules were much more relaxed New York City would have over 60 million people. That would be by far the most populous city in the world (nearly twice the population of Tokyo) and be way denser than even Manila. That just seems wildly implausible. Even 100 years ago when Manhattan was at its densest and people were living in absolute squalor it only had a little over 2 million people. For this paper to be accurate Manhattan would have to have well over 10 million people. Do that many people actually want to live in NYC? And if not, should journalists keep throwing this paper around?

The claim is about the New York metro area, not about New York City.

And as a gut-check, given that the United States has 2.6 times Japan’s population and is also growing faster, it makes sense to me that New York in some sense “should” be bigger than Tokyo. Now would it really grow that large with more relaxed land use rules? I doubt it, because you would hit transportation capacity bottlenecks. Tokyo is so large in part because of Japanese land use, but in part because Japan has great transportation infrastructure.

These are, in principle, solvable problems. If New York could build rail transit at the costs paid by Sweden or Denmark, there are innumerable new subway lines and extensions that it would make sense to build, along with an extensive five-line S-Bahn system overlaid on it. Those would be massive upgrades to capacity, but it’s also worth emphasizing that with currently available technology, New York could greatly increase the speed of its regional rail. To offer some illustrative figures, while right now a trip from White Plains to Grand Central station takes nearly an hour, that could be cut to 38 minutes. You could do the LIRR trip from Hempstead in 33 minutes instead of 51. Those kinds of infrastructure improvements paired with upzoning would lead to booming demand for apartments near suburban rail stations. This would also, in effect, expand the size of the metro area, fully incorporating New Haven to the north. Similarly, if you could get to Trenton in an hour on the train rather than 90 minutes, and that extends the metro area to the south.

The point is, just as the vast majority of people in the current New York metro area live in the suburbs, so would the vast majority of the residents of Mega New York. Man of them would live a kind of “urban” lifestyle where they take a train to work, but lots of them would just live in central New Jersey and work in dentists’ offices or elementary schools that are also in central New Jersey.

In terms of Manhattan, though, it does seem to me that the population “should” be far higher than its 2.3 million peak way back in 1910. After all, the population of the country has risen enormously since then. And as you say, achieving that level of density back then involved people living in squalor. Today, they’d be living in those nice, shiny, super tall apartment buildings. There’s tons of spare subway capacity on the B and C lines by the Upper West Side and tons of old brownstones and rinky-dink tenement buildings. You could easily replace all that with much larger, more modern buildings and incorporate dramatically more people into the neighborhood while increasing the square footage per person. How many people really want to live like that? We don’t know for sure. What we do know is that housing prices are higher in New York than in D.C. or Boston, even though wages are lower. People have, in other words, an affective preference for living in New York rather than other smaller-but-richer northeastern cities.

WC: What crimes are you willing to admit that your friends have committed during your adult life? Did you ever confront any of your friends and urge them not to commit said crime? Did you ever consider snitching on any of them? I understand that virtually nobody lives their life in a way that perfectly aligns with their values. But if you've turned a blind eye to the transgressions of people in your network, how do you square that with your belief that our laws should generally be enforced?

I can only think of non-violent drug crimes, which I think are the category of crimes everyone feels most wishy-washy about. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone I know has committed tax crimes — they seem reasonably common and I know a lot of people — but nobody’s told me that in an actionable way. People did used to sometimes tell me about borderline abusive tax deductions they were claiming, but I was humorless and scoldy about it and now nobody tells me stuff. But I sincerely don’t think my friends are going around with illegal concealed handguns, settling interpersonal disputes with violence, or stealing things.

Bennie: A lot of economic policy debates — especially in the areas of trade, immigration, automation, minimum wage, “welfare” — tiptoe around an uncomfortable question. What do you do for people who may be good at performing well-defined repetitive tasks, but lack the creative, analytical or organizational aptitude that is generally a prerequisite for personal economic success?

To put it slightly more bluntly: Politically, do people of low abilities or achievements need to be comforted and told that they are “victims”?

I would put this differently.

What I think is going on is that in any given policy argument, you have on the one hand a direct literal argument about public policy options and their likely impacts. But what you also have supervening on the argument is a kind of meta-argument about who is valued and whose status deserves to be higher or lower. And a lot of people, on a practical level, are more interested in the meta-argument about status than they are in the specific argument about public policy.

So for example, if I were to say “Elon Musk is an incredibly smart, incredibly hard-working person with a ton of intrinsic motivation to accomplish great things in life who cares more about the long-term future of humanity than he does about his personal comfort,” left-wing people would get angry at me. And if I said in general “the vast majority of successful business people in America are smart, hard-working people with a lot of intrinsic motivation who care more about the long-term and less about their personal comfort than the average person,” they would get even angrier. But the straightforward implication of this for public policy is that higher taxes on the rich will have minimal economic downsides, since Musk and his colleagues aren’t really out there grinding for the sake of the next $100,000 worth of personal consumption.

There’s just a bit of a disjuncture between the policy question (“will taxing the rich increase average welfare?”) and the status issue (“are rich people worthy of more or less admiration?”), and a lot of discourse is more focused on the status question.

Flipping this around to where you started, I think an unfortunate aspect of contemporary American life is that we’ve accepted a broad norm that the right way to raise the status of a group of people is to emphasize the idea that they are victims across one or more important dimensions. This used to be something that conservatives complained about a lot because of their sense that progressives were doing it too much with regard to racial minority groups. But over time, the right got increasingly invested in doing the exact same thing, just inverting the identity groups or inventing new ones. The problems with this strategy, though, are the ones that the right identified in the first place — whatever a person’s circumstances in life, he will end up in a better place if he learns to cultivate an internal locus of control, a sense of resilience, and an ability to express gratitude. If you want to express the idea that a group of people deserves help, it’s useful to talk about how the system is rigged against them. But if you actually want to make them better off, that’s a bad strategy.

Anders: Clearly in light of your recent column, there is some movement afoot in Canada for a high speed rail corridor between Toronto and Quebec City (hitting Ottawa and Montreal). Early planning signs seem discouraging — “Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, the Liberals' Quebec lieutenant, said a fully high-speed rail corridor — called for by some politicians in that province — that hits peaks of up to 300 km/h is not feasible, given the number of stops the trains will make.” What should Canada do?

Comparing Toronto-Quebec to the northeastern United States, Toronto is about the size of Philadelphia, Montreal is smaller than Boston, Ottawa is like Providence, and Quebec City is about the size of the Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury metro area. In other words, it’s like doing the northeast corridor without New York, D.C., or Baltimore, which is a lot less appealing.

Now one thing that I outline in the post is that it’s possible it would make sense to build a spur not just from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh but extending further to Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago. I don’t think it’s 100% clear from the existing data that this is true, but it might be true. And if it is true, then I think it would definitely make sense to build HSR from Toronto west to Detroit (which is about the size of Montreal) and Chicago (which is much larger). If that line existed, then further extending it to Montreal really would make sense because you’d be getting the onward connections to Detroit and Chicago for free. A further extension to Quebec City seems dubious to me just because it’s really small, but I think Canadian political considerations might dictate doing it anyway, which seems fine. Long story short, I could imagine a world where building this Canadian Corridor made sense, but it’s contingent on stuff happening in the United States and going well.

But I also want to return to one of the core points of that earlier post, which is that improving New York City’s rail connections with cities that are either nearby (Pittsburgh), large (Chicago, Atlanta), or both (D.C.) has a specific purpose in terms of freeing up airport capacity to run more flights to other places. I’m not sure there are equivalently strong reasons to think building fast train connections from Toronto to Montreal or Chicago is important. If you want a Toronto-centric train project to get excited about, I think the idea of upgrading the Go Transit commuter rail to S-Bahn standards — which they are sort of doing under the name Go Expansion — is potentially very valuable, especially if complementary land use changes are made.