Trump Would Have Been Disastrous for the Fight for Democracy in Brazil and Ukraine

www.theunpopulist.net

Trump Would Have Been Disastrous for the Fight for Democracy in Brazil and Ukraine

Nicholas Grossman

10 - 12 minutes

Photos (cropped): Joseph Sohm, Salty View, Dmytro Larin, Yasamin Jafari Tehrani; Shutterstock

Two countries resisting the global trend of democratic backsliding are Brazil and Ukraine. But if Donald Trump were currently in the White House, democracy would have had less of a fighting chance in either. During Trump’s presidency, it was often unclear whether America was on the side of democracy or autocracy abroad (or even at home).

Some overestimate America’s clout in the world, but as the world’s largest economy and military power, America’s words and actions influence others. Brazil’s predicament is driven primarily by domestic causes, so America’s impact in that country is limited to the example America sets and the leaders it chooses to support or oppose. Ukraine’s problems, on the other hand, are the result of a foreign authoritarian’s aggression. So America can have a more direct impact through weapons and information sharing.

Under Trump, America might have abdicated on both fronts.

Let’s start with Brazil.

Brazil does not have a strong history of democracy, especially compared to the United States. Its democratic institutions are newer and more fragile, the norms of elections unsettled, and civilian control of the military less ingrained. From 1964 to 1985, the country was a military dictatorship.

So in 2021, when then-President Jair Bolsonaro—a right-wing, nationalist populist nicknamed the “Trump of the Tropics”—took a leaf from Trump’s playbook and started muttering about voter fraud and attacking the media in anticipation of losing the 2022 presidential election, it raised concerns he might attempt a coup. In the months leading up to the election, Bolsonaro claimed, “The Army is on our side.” After he lost narrowly to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his supporters held rallies calling on the military to keep him in power. A few days before Lula’s victory was certified, Bolsonaro warned the military was the last barrier between Brazil and socialism.

But, as it turns out, Brazilian military leaders weren’t interested in overthrowing their country’s democracy for Bolsonaro. And the Biden administration strongly supported that instinct.

In July 2022, three months before the election, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke at an Americas-wide defense meeting in Brazil and stressed the need to respect civilian officials’ authority over the armed forces. In September, the U.S. Senate, led by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, unanimously passed a resolution in support of Brazilian democracy. For months leading up to Brazil’s Oct. 2 election and the subsequent Lula-Bolsonaro runoff on Oct. 30, the Biden administration complemented Austin’s public words with private communications along diplomatic, military, economic and intelligence channels. As Robbie Gramer reported in Foreign Policy, top officials from the White House, Defense Department, State Department and even CIA held meetings and calls with their Brazilian counterparts to try to head off any effort by Bolsonaro to subvert the election result. 

After the runoff, Biden quickly recognized Lula’s win, calling the election “free, fair and credible.” This anticipated Brazil’s top military brass’s joint statement a week and a half after the runoff warning that all political disputes had to be resolved in accordance with democratic rule of law. 

It is reasonable to believe that this all-hands-on-deck American diplomacy played a role in Brazil’s military and other national elites’ deciding against supporting a Bolsonaro coup.

Trump would have done none of this if he were president. He, after all, was on record praising Bolsonaro when they were both in office. In 2020, Trump hosted Bolsonaro at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, and endorsed the Brazilian president’s reelection bid. In August 2021, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a member of Brazil’s Congress, traveled to South Dakota to meet former Trump aide Steve Bannon and others, telling them that his country’s electronic voting system was “ridiculous” and vulnerable to mass fraud. After his father’s failed bid for reelection, Eduardo schlepped to Florida and held separate meetings with Bannon and the former president, reportedly discussing ways to challenge Brazil’s election. Fox News’ top-rated host Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, backed Bolsonaro’s baseless claims that Brazil’s election was “rigged.” Likewise, MAGA influencers—including Donald Trump Jr., Bannon, former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller and Jan. 6 rally organizer Ali Alexander—pushed claims about election fraud. They even encouraged Brazil’s Jan. 8 riots, both in advance and as they were happening, with Bannon openly celebrating the violence.

Had Trump and his acolytes been in control, there is little doubt they would have egged Bolsonaro on. Whether that would have worked, one cannot say. But Trump’s statements and actions would have sown doubt and confusion in the ranks of Brazilian elites, which could have only redounded to the benefit of Bolsonaro supporters who didn’t want to recognize the election results. Meanwhile, Brazil’s military leaders may have been more reluctant to make a democracy-respecting decision if the commander in chief of the Western Hemisphere’s dominant military had been siding with Bolsonaro, rather than warning them against intervening to reinstall him.

Brazilian democracy may not have slid all the way into autocracy, but it may well have inched closer.

Now let’s turn to Ukraine.

The Biden administration made it a priority to help Ukraine as much as possible without triggering a wider war and has thus far succeeded. The United States has given Ukraine over $27 billion worth of military aid, including advanced equipment, such as the HIMARS rocket artillery system that Ukrainian forces have used to hinder Russian military logistics behind their lines. European countries have sent about $10 billion worth of weapons too, including tanks. Biden has been outspoken about the moral and strategic reasons for defending Ukrainian democracy, articulating the dire long-term implications for the world if Russia’s aggression is allowed to succeed. Without American support, it is hard to see how Ukraine might have stopped and partially reversed Russia’s military advance, as it did last fall.

By contrast, when Russia invaded its neighbor last February, Trump, at that point a year out of office, called Putin a “genius” and praised him for his “savvy” move in a gushing radio interview.

This was in keeping with Trump’s affection for authoritarians when he was in office (remember his love letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un?), particularly Putin. In 2018, he even publicly sided with Russia’s autocrat against the U.S. intelligence community on questions of Russian intelligence operations targeting U.S. elections. (A bipartisan report from the Republican-chaired Senate Intelligence Committee released in 2020 supported U.S. intelligence’s account with considerable detail.)    

According to Trump staffers, he considered withdrawing from NATO multiple times during his presidency, noting he didn’t see the point of the alliance. In 2020, Trump reportedly said he wanted to pull out of NATO (as well as America’s alliance with South Korea). When top aides argued that it could harm his reelection bid, he reportedly said, “We’ll do it in the second term.”

Whether or not Trump would have followed through, we may never know. But it’s safe to say Trump never would have gone to bat for Ukraine. Apart from his admiration for Putin, he also has disdain for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy because Zelenskyy refused to oblige Trump when Trump asked him to manufacture an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. Trump withheld military aid that Congress had authorized—and he had signed—to Ukraine pending Zelenskyy’s compliance, which led to his first impeachment. Trump eventually removed the hold, but only after getting caught trying to extort Zelenskyy.

It is conceivable that Putin might not have invaded Ukraine if the NATO-skeptical Trump were America’s president. But it is equally conceivable that anticipating little American pushback on his imperial designs, Putin would have been even more emboldened. It is also possible that Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians would’ve been less defiant without the United States on their side, and the war would have been quickly over. But that would have spelled the end of Ukraine’s fledgling liberal democracy, added a destabilizing threat to America’s allies in Eastern Europe and encouraged aggressive authoritarians worldwide.

The more likely scenario is Ukraine would have resisted fiercely, but would have faced longer odds and won fewer battles due to less American support. And the absence of American aid would have left too big a hole for Europeans to fill. They also would have been warier about intervening in the first place if the U.S. president were shrugging and saying “not his problem”—or worse, echoing Putin’s rationalizations, as Trump and the MAGA right have often done.

In short, if Trump were in office, the West likely would have splintered instead of unifying to isolate Russia, making Putin’s aggression far less costly to him. Perhaps the U.S. Congress would have picked up the mantle that Trump dropped and insisted on standing up to Putin by approving veto-proof sanctions against Russia, as it did in 2017. But a president unwilling to deliver can find many ways to thwart the will of Congress.

Moreover, Trump would have approached his second term with much greater confidence. He was reportedly preparing a purge of civil servants in various agencies, including the State Department, effectively stacking these agencies with loyalists. This would’ve allowed him to overcome the institutional constraints he experienced in his first term and exercise far more personal control over foreign policy.

If Donald Trump were still president, there is a much greater likelihood that Russia would be occupying Ukraine and that Brazil would be a Bolsonaro-led military dictatorship.

America can be awfully hypocritical when it comes to sticking up for democracy abroad, as its support for authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chile, Panama and other countries richly testifies. Still, the cause of liberal democracy is much better off without Trump in the Oval Office.

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Dark Times for Academic Freedom in the Sunshine State

www.persuasion.community

Dark Times for Academic Freedom in the Sunshine State

Amna Khalid, Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

6 - 7 minutes

(Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.)

    “Typical DEI training includes unscientific claims.”

    “The growth of DEI bureaucracies has fueled bureaucratic bloat.”

    “DEI offices… are in fact a threat to academic freedom.”

We agree with these three claims. They come from a recent Manhattan Institute Issue Brief about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in public universities. The lead author, Christopher Rufo, is a pivotal figure in the nation-wide anti-Critical Race Theory movement and the brains behind Ron DeSantis’s wholesale efforts to remake Florida’s system of public higher education.

As professors, we have long been skeptical of conventional DEI initiatives. We’ve argued that diversity training is ineffective, often counterproductive; that the push for more DEI administrators has swelled the ranks of unnecessary middle management; and that DEI offices have a pernicious predilection to undermine academic freedom.

So we must be on board, then, with DeSantis’s new initiative to prohibit Florida colleges and universities from using any funding to support DEI initiatives? To the contrary. This measure, in our view, is inseparable from a broader assault on academic freedom in Florida. From the “Stop WOKE Act” to the installation of six new conservative trustees at New College (including Rufo himself), DeSantis and his allies are waging an aggressive, highly orchestrated campaign against faculty expertise, faculty autonomy and faculty governance.

DeSantis and Rufo have framed this campaign as a form of heroic resistance to so-called “woke indoctrination” and the “illiberal takeover” of higher education by DEI offices and left-wing ideology. But make no mistake: whatever you think of their diagnosis of higher education’s problems, the solutions they are advancing are profoundly illiberal in their own right and should be roundly rejected by everyone who believes in the powers of persuasion and the virtues of academic freedom.

The American Association of University Professors first formalized academic freedom in the United States in a 1915 report. The “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” placed faculty governance at the heart of academic freedom, asserting that professors hold the primary responsibility for educational matters ranging from the curriculum to hiring and promotion. The authors of the AAUP report were especially concerned about trustees and, in the case of public institutions, state legislators playing politics and interfering with the “unfettered” pursuit of knowledge. Academia, according to the declaration, was a place where expertise and professional competence should be the coin of the realm. 

Expertise and competence don’t appear to count for much in DeSantis’ top-down, directives-driven program for higher education reform. On top of eliminating funding for DEI, key features include prohibitions against teaching CRT and “identity politics,” as well as a directive to align universities’ missions to “Florida’s existing and emerging workforce needs.” In a further blow to faculty-led university governance, the proposed legislation empowers institutions’ presidents and boards of trustees to “take ownership of hiring and retention decisions, without interference from unions and faculty committees” and “to conduct a post-tenure review of a faculty member at any time with cause.”

But academic freedom is effectively meaningless if faculty, who are the experts in their areas, are cut out from the hiring process. Presidents and trustees simply do not have the requisite expertise to make judgment calls about the needs and requirements of academic departments and programs. The fact that presidents and board members are increasingly political appointees (think the half-dozen new trustees at New College) makes these provisions even more alarming.

At a recent press conference, DeSantis justified his proposal as a necessary corrective to the left-wing “political agenda” currently being imposed on higher education. Rufo, who spoke after DeSantis, applauded the move to defund campus DEI programs, declaring that “the purpose of a university is not to push political activism.”

But the plan from Rufo and DeSantis is itself a multi-pronged campaign to impose a deeply conservative political agenda: an attempt to fight politicization with politicization. Watch this recent Rufo video titled “The Conservative Counter-Revolution Begins in the Universities” and it’s abundantly clear that he sees college campuses first and foremost as culture war battlegrounds. It’s high time, he maintains, that conservatives organize to “recapture territory” and “reverse” the alleged “leftwing ideological dominance” at public universities in Florida and other states.

Rufo declares that Florida is “a beacon” for other states when it comes to transforming colleges and universities. This is a genuinely frightening prospect. It’s not just academic freedom that is on the line: the basic integrity of public higher education is at risk. In a response to a recent tweet from Steven Pinker criticizing DeSantis’s culture war approach to higher education, Rufo, true to form, tells it like it is: “Sorry, buddy… We’re in charge now.”

What’s happening in Florida is a power play. While we are deeply skeptical of many DEI initiatives, we recognize that DEI needs to be reformed—and indeed transformed—from within the university itself, with faculty taking the lead. Even if you find Rufo and DeSantis’s criticisms compelling, top-down change by state diktat is never the answer.  

Amna Khalid is Associate Professor of history at Carleton College.

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder is Associate Professor of Educational Studies at Carleton College.

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Biden has been tougher on China than Trump

Biden has been tougher on China than Trump

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 12 minutes

Biden has been tougher on China than Trump

Reality matters more than mean tweets

A new episode of Bad Takes is available today! It’s about a YouTube star who paid for 1,000 blind people to be able to see and then aired their emotional post-op reactions. His critics argue blindness isn’t necessarily a “problem.” We call this a clear-cut bad take that misses the bigger point about access to revolutionary medical procedures.

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion regarding what America should do in response to the apparent Chinese spy balloon. It’s the kind of situation where specific factual details that are necessarily clouded by secrecy are genuinely very relevant — we don’t know everything the U.S. government knows about PRC espionage or about U.S. surveillance in China or about direct countermeasures or about quiet diplomatic talks or a dozen other relevant things. It’s a frustrating situation, journalistically, because officials aren’t going to share everything they know or that the government is doing. Even most of the information that leaks off-the-record is itself a kind of “official unofficial” communication rather than true whistleblowing. We just don’t know.

But when I read headlines like “Republicans paint Biden as soft on China as surveillance balloon soars over U.S.” or about how “pressure mounted on President Joe Biden to hit back at Beijing,” I think it’s clear that the political debate about China policy is happening in an information environment that really lacks context about the actual policymaking.

The audience for content about domestic political fighting is much larger than the audience for content about U.S. foreign policy. As a result, many more reporters cover domestic political fighting than U.S. foreign policy, and columnists dedicate many more pieces to domestic political fighting than to U.S. foreign policy. To be clear, this last category very much includes me — I am not throwing stones, just making an observation about the system in which we are all embedded. The upshot is that a casual news consumer is much more likely to hear about China policy in the context of domestic political fighting about China policy than in the context of actual policymaking.

Suppose that instead of sending a spy balloon over U.S. soil (and/or losing control of a balloon that was supposed to just poke around nearby), China acted to deliberately cripple some sector of the American economy. That would’ve been a bigger deal, objectively speaking, than the balloon thing. And yet last October, the Biden administration imposed sweeping export controls on high-end computer chips. These moves were not unprecedented (the Trump administration issued several rounds of semiconductor-related export controls), but they were much larger and more dramatic than anything that had come before. Matt Sheehan from the Carnegie Endowment wrote in November that “with the latest rules, the U.S. government is betting that it can so deeply undermine China’s semiconductor fabrication capabilities that it won’t matter how motivated or well-resourced China’s efforts are to create its own semiconductor industry — they simply won’t be able to catch up.”

At the same time, Sheehan noted that it wouldn’t be easy to make these restrictions stick because “many leading SME and component companies are headquartered in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea” and those countries aren’t necessarily as into economic war on China as the United States is.

But guess what? On February 2, I read “South Korea chip sales to China almost halve in January under US pressure” and on January 31, “U.S. official acknowledges Japan, Netherlands deal to curb chipmaking exports to China.” The Netherlands piece of this is particularly important because a Dutch company called ASML is essentially a single point of failure for the global chip supply chain. The company makes the lithography machines needed to make chips, and if China can’t get these machines, that’s a whole other domestic industry they need to create. The headline is about the U.S. “acknowledging” the deal with Japan and the Netherlands precisely because the exact contours of the deals are somewhat secret, and the arrangement with the Dutch seems to have cut out the European Union in order to smooth the decision making.

All this is much more significant than a balloon. But it’s collectively received dramatically less coverage.

Not because “the media” refuses to report on it (I’m linking to stories in the media), but because actual U.S. foreign policy is a much smaller swathe of “the media” than Yelling About Politics. And because you, the audience, do not click as much on those stories, there is a tendency for neither the humans who decide what to put on television and front pages nor the algorithms that decide which stories to promote to amplify this coverage. The result is a vague sense that maybe Biden is soft on China or not doing much on this front, when the reality is that policymaking has gotten much more hostile to China than it was under Trump, even though Trump really did adopt a more hawkish line on China.

Trump was a halfhearted China hawk

American elites’ views foreign policy tend to range from hawks who want to see more U.S. involvement abroad (generally with heavy undertones of American moral exceptionalism) to doves who view America as a neo-imperial power that imposes harms on the world. Part of Trump’s political success is that he articulated a third view, one that is reasonably widespread among the general population but badly underrepresented among elites: a sense that the United States is being taken advantage of and victimized by foreign countries.

This viewpoint can sound “dovish” in its complaints about forever wars in the Middle East or the squandering of funds on Ukraine, but proponents often pivot to hawkish discourse about bombing the shit out of ’em and we should have taken the oil.

During the 2004 campaign, John Kerry had a line about how “we shouldn’t be opening fire stations in Baghdad and closing them in Boston” that I remember as having been extremely controversial among left-of-center intellectuals. Objecting to the war in Iraq on the grounds that we were being too generous to the Iraqis and should’ve been more selfish wasn’t the correct line on the war. Except I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Kerry, like Trump, over-performed in the midwestern swing states and did better in Iowa and Ohio than he did in the national popular vote. Trump was also, like Kerry, a strong critic of free trade agreements that hurt midwestern manufacturing.

In terms of China policy, this led Trump to be sharply critical of the Clinton/Bush/Obama consensus on China. But the specific nature of the critique was heavily focused on the idea that the trade deficit was bad.

Ideological China hawks have some overlap with this mercantilist view of China. But these are genuinely very different ideas. If your big complaint about the old bipartisan consensus is that it was bad for American manufacturing exports, then you’d hardly want to impose stringent export controls on U.S. high technology. The whole point was to try to export more to China. And you saw this very clearly with Trump. His signature China policy move was the imposition of a stringent set of taxes on Chinese imports. This was genuinely a tough China policy in that the intended purpose was to coerce the PRC government into making concessions. But the concessions Trump obtained in his January 2020 breakthrough negotiation were “China has committed to buying an additional $200 billion worth of American goods and services by 2021 and is expected to ease some of the tariffs it has placed on American products.”

If you’re assessing toughness in the abstract, this is an example of successfully coercing a partner into doing what you want. But the desired outcome here was just to sell China a bunch of stuff. It wasn’t a strategic win in terms of U.S. geopolitical goals, because Trump didn’t believe in those goals. That’s why in the critical early days of the Covid-19 outbreak, Trump’s message was specifically that everything was fine thanks to his confidence in the Chinese government:

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

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

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

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

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

Trump had gotten what he wanted from China (which ended up not actually buying the stuff they promised Trump they would) so he pivoted to lavishing praise on Xi. Trump promised to run the government more like a businessman and in this respect, I think he really did that. He looked at U.S.-China trade as a positive-sum venture. He thought his predecessors had allowed the PRC to get an unduly large share of the surplus of that venture. And he thought that with a mix of tough-minded willingness to walk away from the table and unprincipled willingness to suck up to a vile dictator, he could secure a better deal. But beyond that, he didn’t care. John Bolton even says Trump encouraged Xi to build concentration camps for Uighurs. Biden’s approach to China, by contrast, is focused on real ideological and great power competition from China.

Biden has focused on containing China

Biden’s approach, as you would expect from someone who is very much a veteran of American elite foreign policymaking, is much more concerned with actual geopolitical containment of the People’s Republic.

Within that sphere of discourse, he’s not a maximalist China hawk the way some members of Trump’s circle (Mike Pompeo, for example) were. And of course, as with all administrations, he contains a range of views and conflicting priorities. But the general policy orientation has been to avoid reversion to the old bipartisan consensus while also dropping Trump’s apparent desire to quash the dispute with China if they’ll agree to buy some stuff. Instead, Biden is acting on the assumption that China will in the near future seek to militarily dominate its neighbors in an effort to prevent that from happening. That’s why he’s restricting exports to China, not just imports from China.

And the hallmarks of this containment policy are everywhere:

The Biden administration made a deal to supply Australia with nuclear submarines and has stood fast on this in the face of Chinese objections.

Biden is very proud of the time he spent convincing Japan to boost its military spending.

South Korea has also agreed to increase defense spending.

Just last week an agreement was reached on U.S.-India aerospace technology sharing that would allow GE jet engines to be produced in India.

There was also an agreement last week about the U.S. securing expanded access to military bases in the Philippines.

Vietnam is now looking to diversify its military procurement away from Russia.

Biden keeps making “gaffes” where he says the U.S. has a defense commitment to Taiwanese independence and then staff cleans it up and says there’s been no official change in policy.

Similar balloon episodes occurred during Trump’s presidency, spurring Biden-era increases in American surveillance, which is why this most recent balloon was spotted.

Again, the news media has dutifully covered all these developments — that’s why I know about them and why I’m able to link to those stories — but none have been major news stories that broke through on television or had political analysts opining about what it all means.

The balloon, by contrast, was huge news. But it’s just patently clear that all this stuff is a bigger deal, strategically, than any balloon or possible balloon countermeasures. The U.S.-China trade relationship remains a big deal economically, but it’s now clear to any company on either side that the future is in more strained commerce rather than deeper ties. And the entirety of U.S. foreign policy in the region has been re-oriented around China containment. Part of what drove me crazy about the incredibly harsh coverage Biden got for the Afghanistan withdrawal was the failure to see how these things are connected. The mission in Afghanistan left the United States deeply dependent on Pakistan’s good will to maintain the logistics. But prioritizing the containment of China requires us to build stronger ties to India and wean them off their traditional alliance with Russia. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama complained bitterly about the dysfunctional U.S.-Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship, and by withdrawing, Biden has cut the Gordian Knot and allowed us to focus on China.

Meanwhile, the other Biden era story that has obviously made headlines is the war in Ukraine.

And here a lot of right-populists who fancy themselves China critics have put their heads in the sand and declined to see that the Russia-Ukraine issue is related to China-Taiwan. Logically, these things don’t have to be related; I’m not a huge believer in the idea that showing determination in one place magically transfers credibility halfway around the world. But it’s clear that all the most relevant actors see these issues as linked — China is clearly helping Russia, and it’s not a coincidence that the non-NATO countries sanctioning Russia are the European neutrals plus Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The war in Ukraine is in part a proxy war, and that’s just how it is until Moscow decides to change direction and pivot away from a course that threatens to turn Russia into a distinctly junior partner in an alliance with China.

Constructive vs. destructive GOP China hawkery

Of course you can’t take the politics out of politics, and the opposition party is going to make political hay out of spy balloons and whatever else.

But a big question on U.S.-China competition going forward is whether the parties cooperate constructively on China-related issues or Republicans are so eager to beat up the Biden administration that they make cooperation impossible. I think the braying about the balloon is an example of the latter. Certainly causing a huge debt ceiling crisis for no real reason at all is not a great sign.

On a positive note, though, Kevin McCarthy stocked the new China Select Committee with a group of mostly non-clownish members. They also seem to be setting this committee up in part specifically to do policy work that’s segregated from various Hunter Biden investigations and show trials. That seems smart. That said, if Republicans insist on undermining material support for Ukraine in order to appease Tucker Carlson, that will be bad.

The biggest area where Republicans could intervene constructively, though, would be by pushing Biden to think harder about his trade policy.

Right now, Biden is pursuing a kind of mixed strategy that’s one-part strategic competition with China, one part naked protectionism. Noah Smith argues for a policy of “friendshoring” rather than Buy American — in other words, trying to make sure that our supply lines lead to reliable partners rather than trying to make sure we are producing everything at home. I’ve argued before that we should be specifically trying to outsource low-wage work to poorer countries in the Western Hemisphere rather than “bring jobs back from China.” This is an area where I think Biden tends to say the right thing but not always do the right thing, and political pressure to align all the specific choices with the stated strategic aims would be very helpful.

Either way, though, partisan politics isn’t going to vanish. And the broad trend in which more attention and coverage is given to partisan nonsense than to U.S.-Netherlands talks over export controls is also likely to remain. But even if most people mostly pay attention to partisan clashes, I do wish the people who cover the partisan clashes would take the time to read their colleagues’ coverage of actual foreign policy and acknowledge, for example, that whatever Republicans say about spy balloons, the Biden administration has been very hawkish on China. More hawkish than any prior administration! Perhaps they should go further than they have or perhaps they’ve gone too far already, but any sane debate needs to start with the recognition that the old bipartisan consensus has been ditched and that Biden is pursuing China containment more vigorously and more rigorously than Trump ever did.

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The pandemic is still upending the economy in surprising ways

The pandemic is still upending the economy in surprising ways

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 9 minutes

The pandemic is still upending the economy in surprising ways

Remote work created a housing boom which has depressed labor force participation

Lane Brown wrote an article for Curbed asking a good question: how can rents be up in a city like New York if the population still hasn’t fully recovered to its pre-pandemic level?

Unfortunately, the answer the piece suggests is that it’s a conspiracy whereby landlords are somehow colluding to keep units off the market in order to drive up rents. There’s no evidence for this, it’s extremely hard to see how landlords could possibly pull it off, and it’s somewhat hard to square with the fact that the same basic trend is visible everywhere.

And it’s too bad, because in macro-political terms, I do think it’s good for leftists to appreciate that one way for property owners to enrich themselves is to collude to restrict the supply of housing. They can’t really do this in the way that Brown suggests, but they of course can directly access the political system to impose zoning and other land use restrictions that curb supply. This doesn’t particularly explain New York City price trends over the past two years. But looking at the past 20 or 50 years, it’s absolutely true that property owners colluding to block supply is central to the story. They just do it by blocking new construction, not by warehousing existing units.

But what explains the short-term trend? How can demand be up even if the quantity of people is down?

I think this actually has a pretty straightforward explanation: population and relative rents are down in places like New York and San Francisco because of remote work. Absolute rents are up everywhere, and that’s also because of remote work. Thanks to remote work, fewer people want to live with roommates, more people want spare rooms to use as home offices, and many people have benefitted from a mix of rising wages and diminished commuting costs, allowing them to afford more square feet per person.

There’s reason to believe that remote work will have significant long-term benefits, but the very sudden shift in commuting patterns has happened much more quickly than the building stock can adjust. And a lot of other phenomena are downstream of that. Homelessness has risen in many places, for example, because your home office has displaced someone poorer than you from a bedroom.

And it’s even impacting the labor market. This increase in housing demand has meant rising costs for renters, but older people with lots of home equity scored a financial windfall as home prices boomed. What do older people do when they reap an unexpected asset price windfall? Well, some of them retire earlier than they otherwise would have. And Jack Favilukis and Gen Li calculate that this accounts for all of the post-pandemic decline in older workers’ labor force participation. It’s not that people have re-evaluated the meaning and purpose of life or that their work ethic has collapsed. It’s not fear of Covid. It’s that remote work boosted white collar workers’ desired level of housing consumption faster than the construction industry could add housing, creating a windfall for incumbent homeowners who then chose to take the windfall in the form of earlier retirement.

The wealth effect

The basic idea is pretty easy to understand. If I found a duffel bag full of money in a forgotten closet, I might splurge on something or save it for a rainy day.

But suppose you’re a 65-year-old regional manager who was planning to retire in 18 months when you become eligible to claim your full Social Security benefits. Well, if you get a cash windfall that’s plenty to live on for those 18 months, you might just say fuck it and retire a bit early. Why not? You’ve worked hard your whole life, your job is not particularly glamorous, and you don’t like dealing with annoying Zoomers at work.

I’m a little annoyed by the Favilukis and Li paper’s title, “The Great Resignation Was Caused by the COVID-19 Housing Boom,” because the Great Resignation was a dumb meme. To the extent that it refers to anything real, I think we should see it as referring to the pandemic-era boom in quitting one job in order to take another. That’s a real thing that happened; it’s the means by which higher labor demand translates into higher wages in an economy when few workers have a labor union that can negotiate raises in a less chaotic way.

What they are looking at instead is the rise in early retirements.

Beyond the title, though, it’s a good paper, and it shows a few different things:

From 2011-2021, higher price growth leads to lower labor force participation for older homeowners.

Higher house price growth has very little impact on the labor supply of younger homeowners.

Higher house price growth has very little impact on the labor supply of older renters.

The conclusion is that, in general, older homeowners use home equity windfalls to enter early retirement or semi-retire.

They then exploit the fact that the house price boom hit different metro areas differently, more muted in New York than in Boise for example, to create a counterfactual scenario of how age-specific labor force participation would have evolved if 2020 and 2021 home price trends had been the same as they were in 2019. The big difference is this thin pink line rather than the thick red one — showing we would have had substantially more old homeowners in the workforce without the home price boom.

Note that the big changes here are among people who are older. But this is important. As Lydia DePillis and others have written, the post-pandemic decline in labor force participation is overwhelmingly a story about older people. I’ve become enough of a cranky old person to be entertained by Adrian Wooldridge’s musings on legal marijuana and work ethic but statistically, the story about seniors retiring thanks to a wealth boost is a much bigger deal.

Sudden change is hard on the economy

The economics of the Covid era keep surprising us.

The initial negative blow to the economy from the pandemic was obviously a supply-side issue. But there was a lot of concern, including from me, that lost income due to the supply shock would create a lingering demand shortfall and a long, slow recessionary slog. That didn’t happen. Policymakers did such a good job of stimulating the economy that in broad GDP terms, it’s almost like the pandemic didn’t happen. We finally achieved a full employment economy in the winter of 2019-2020, so it would’ve been natural for growth to slow down a bit and we would have arrived basically just where we are.

But of course the pandemic did happen (you probably remember it), so the specific way this played out was kind of weird. People got lots of financial assistance from the American Rescue Plan and especially from the CARES Act, and most households spent less money pre-vaccine than they normally do. That led people to build up a big savings buffer that we’ve been collectively spending down since the fall of 2021.

When everyone tries to spend an unusually large amount relative to what they earn, you get what Jason Furman points out — an economy where real wages have fallen despite workers’ enhanced bargaining power from low unemployment.

This comes down to timing. People spent 2022 trying to make up for consumption they deferred back in 2020. But restaurants don’t have a time machine that can get people who were furloughed back in 2020 to work extra shifts in 2022. It will work out in the long term — the actual white-knuckle, scary stuff already happened — but the temporal mismatch is very awkward.

The same is true on the housing front.

Even if the pandemic had never happened, remote work would’ve clearly become more popular over time. But if that had happened gradually, we would have seen a collapse in new office construction, but not necessarily soaring vacancies. And rather than a sudden surge, we’d have seen a gentle increase in housing demand, an increase that would have re-employed the disemployed office builders doing residential construction instead.

But because it all happened at once, we ended up in an awkward situation. White-collar workers are consuming more square feet per capita of housing, which has left other people sleeping in the streets of downtown office districts that are full of half-empty buildings. Meanwhile, older homeowners reaped an unexpected windfall and retired early, increasing inflationary pressure on the labor market. A lot of the stuff that’s happening now seems distant from the pandemic in a way that “restaurants are closing because of a virus” wasn’t. But the shock keeps rattling around, with tertiary consequences all over the place.

Excess savings have diminished a lot now, and asset prices have been depressed by rising interest rates, so I expect the particulars of this early retirement surge to start fading soon. But the impact on the housing market itself will linger.

The built environment needs to change

To go back to where we started, with Brown’s piece, one straightforward implication of the rise in housing demand is that unless cities allow for new construction, their populations will fall.

We’ve seen this as a long-term trend in a lot of cities anyway. Both Washington, D.C. and Boston saw their populations crash for several decades after peaking in 1950 due to broad suburbanization trends. But over the past generation, they’ve rebounded — albeit not all the way up to 1950 levels. So how do these cities manage to be expensive when they accommodated more people 70 years ago?

Well, the average household size has fallen. A two-bedroom apartment that once accommodated mom, dad, and two kids is now likely a DINK couple and a home office or maybe a pair of roommates. A four-bedroom family house that used to accommodate two parents and five kids now might have two children, each with their own bedroom plus a playroom.

There’s nothing wrong with that; society is becoming more affluent and people are enjoying the fruits of material abundance. On the exurban fringes of our metro area, newly built homes are bigger than the newly built homes of 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. And there’s no reason in principle that expensive central cities couldn’t be adding square footage to keep pace. But it would require significant regulatory changes. Big towers full of one-bedroom apartments could get the young professionals out of group houses and open older dwellings up for families. Changes to the rules about staircase requirements in apartment buildings could make it easier to build spacious three-bedroom floor plans in high rises. Changes to rules barring windowless bedrooms would make it cheaper to convert offices to apartments, creating some economical (albeit awkward) dwelling opportunities for people.

But if not, they’re going to be stuck with a very awkward combination where the residential population falls, rents are rising somewhat anyway, downtowns stay perpetually half-empty, and office landlords stop putting money into keeping up their properties.

As far as I can tell, municipal officials everywhere are vaguely aware that there’s a problem here, and they’re all tinkering around the margins with tax abatements for residential conversions and such. But at the same time, there’s a lot of magical thinking around these dynamics, as reflected in that Curbed piece that fails to acknowledge the reality of a world where demand for residential square footage is up and office square footage is down. The speed of that change is awkward for any city, but it’s made much more awkward by bad, inflexible policies that, to the best of my knowledge, no place has actually fixed.

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The case for a land value tax is overwhelming

The case for a land value tax is overwhelming

Natural resources are quite different from the capital stock created out of human effort

MARTIN WOLF

I have long been a supporter of taxing land value. Such a tax would be economically efficient and morally just. But it has been politically impossible: the landowning interest, which now includes a large part of the population as owner-occupiers, has been too strong. This is a tragedy. Now that western politicians are struggling with low growth, stressed public finances, high inequality, intergenerational tensions and an unstable financial system, they need to consider such a fundamental change in what is taxed.

The idea of taxing the rental value of land is most closely associated with the 19th-century American Henry George. But Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill, all shared the same view. Thereafter, foolishly, economists began to incorporate land (which includes all non-produced natural assets) into produced capital. This then led to the neoclassical “two factor” models of the economy, which are grossly misleading. As a result, taxes on land were increasingly considered in the context of taxes on wealth, even though natural resources are quite different from the capital stock created out of effort and foregone consumption.

A paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in 2021, entitled “Post-Corona Balanced-Budget Super-Stimulus: The Case for Shifting Taxes onto Land”, provides a superb overview of all the relevant arguments for today. Its authors have also provided an excellent summary in VoxEU.

The moral case for separating the return on natural resources from that on other assets is that the former pre-exist human efforts. Their value depends on the latter, but most definitely not on those of their owners. The land under my house has, for example, increased enormously in value over the past few decades. I did nothing to earn this. It was the result of the efforts of all those who contributed to making London richer, including, of course, the public at large, through their taxes. A large part of the agglomeration value of productive cities is in this way captured by those who happen to own the land.

In economics, it has long been understood that it is sensible to tax factors of production whose supply is unaffected by its price. The stock of reproducible capital is the opposite of that. In a globalised economy with free movement of capital, such assets are extremely hard to tax, as is also true for mobile human capital. In both cases, the attempt to do so risks reducing the supply of capital and so incomes. But it is not hard to tax land, which is by definition immobile.

A further argument for taxing away much of the rental value of land is that the credit system now mainly finances land ownership. In this way, rents on land are converted into interest on unproductive debt. Speculative bubbles in land also drive the credit cycle, to devastating macroeconomic effect.

Not least, many governments now need to raise more revenue, ideally in ways that do not reduce prosperity. Again, socialising much of the yield on land is an obvious way to do this. Moreover, the tax base is huge: in the US and UK, the value of “non-produced assets” is more than half of total assets. The same is true in many other countries.

None of this would matter much if in practice the potential gains from shifting away from taxes on produced capital and labour were not large. But they are. The authors of the paper estimate from one simple model that an increase in the tax rate on the value of land from a level of 0.55 per cent to 5.55 per cent, with reductions in taxation of produced capital and labour of 28 and 10 percentage points, respectively, would raise output by 15 per cent relative to trend. If policymakers want to promote growth, this is an obvious place to start: tax unearned rent far more and capital formation and people’s work far less.

The political power of landowners, big and small, is why the longstanding arguments of great economists have been ignored for so long. But there is also the intellectual mistake of mixing land together with produced capital as if they were the same thing. Some argue, in addition, that valuing land is practically impossible. But this point is incorrect. As the paper shows, it is possible to value land if governments wish to do so.

Evidently, there would be sizeable transitional problems, not least the changes in the valuations on which mortgages have been agreed. One way around this could be to introduce the new taxes on land only on values above those of today. Another would be to phase in the new taxes slowly.

Crucially, if there exist reforms able to make the country as a whole better off it is in principle possible to compensate the losers we care about and still make everybody else better off. There are few such policies. Be bold. Try this one.

martin.wolf@ft.com

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“A Fundamental Violation of Basic Human Rights”

“A Fundamental Violation of Basic Human Rights”

An interview with Loretta J. Ross.

Loretta J. Ross (Molly Crabapple)

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the Christian right rejoiced. Although the decision didn’t end abortion in the United States, it generated new possibilities for abortion opponents while setting back the feminist movement. The increasing criminalization of abortion has forced doctors and patients into impossible contortions. In Ohio, a ten-year-old girl fled the state to end her pregnancy. In Louisiana, where abortion is tightly restricted, an ob-gyn said that a hospital lawyer prevented her from performing a medically necessary abortion to remove a fetus that wasn’t viable; instead, she had to induce delivery. The patient “was screaming—not from pain, but from the emotional trauma,” she said in an affidavit. 

For people who can become pregnant, the situation is not likely to improve from here. We cannot count on the courts. The police are the enemy, and politicians can be fickle allies at best. What, then, can we do? To answer this question and more, I turned to one of the nation’s leading feminist activists, Loretta J. Ross. A cofounder of SisterSong, a reproductive rights organization led by people of color in the South, Ross is a recent MacArthur Foundation grantee for her landmark work in reproductive justice. As the MacArthur Foundation observed on its website, Ross worked alongside other women of color in 1994 to help design a framework that links the right to have a child or not to the right to raise a child in safety—an outcome that demands access to healthcare, housing, and a clean environment, among other necessities. Ross spoke with me the day after the midterm elections offered feminists some hope that public opinion had turned against the anti-abortion movement.

Sarah Jones: I thought we could begin with the question that I think many people had after the Supreme Court announced the Dobbs decision: how do you think we got here, to the end of Roe v. Wade? 

Loretta J. Ross: Well, we got to the end of Roe v. Wade because of Republicans. Since the 1970s, they have been committed to building a base, putting together people who are opposed to immigration, people who are opposed to integration, people who are opposed to women’s rights and feminism, and people who are opposed to gay rights. They called that group “the moral majority,” but there is nothing moral, or majoritarian, about them. They made a commitment to engage in culture wars as a way of marching back into power and trying to permanently hold onto it. The manipulation of the culture wars, particularly around abortion rights, is a base-building strategy for people who want to pack the Supreme Court to protect themselves from criminal prosecution for their corruption.

They’ve learned that they’re out of step with the rest of the country. They have to cheat, because they can’t compete. And that’s why we’re seeing all this voting rights suppression, not only targeting Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters, but young voters. Eighteen-to-twenty-nine year olds in the 2020 election voted for Biden, not Trump. The results were particularly surprising with the white portion of that group, who didn’t vote for the candidate that most represented white supremacy. So you’re seeing the shutting down of voting precincts that are near colleges, and people who are going to school out of state not being allowed to mail in ballots. 

Jones: The end of Roe occurred alongside the growth of this resurgent, far-right movement. How should we understand the relationship between them? 

Ross: They really do believe that white men are an endangered species, and so they’re trying to achieve through coercion something that they cannot get any other way: to compel more white women to have more babies. They want to push white women out of the job market, because there aren’t enough jobs to go around. They want them to have more babies, so that they can at least try to increase the size of the white population, which is supposed to become a minority in a few short decades. I don’t think they care about the number of Black and brown babies being increased. They kill the ones we have. 

The good news for us, if there is any, is that they’re not smart enough to use incentives instead of coercion. The Nazis incentivized the white birth rate by giving people down payments on mortgages for their houses, giving women and children free healthcare and child care. 

Jones: Austerity could function as a wedge issue for them, if they wanted to manipulate it, but they’re not. 

Ross: Exactly.

Jones: In your work with SisterSong, you helped to create the “reproductive justice” framework. What are its distinguishing characteristics? How is it different from the choice framework?

Ross: Reproductive justice overlaps with the pro-choice movement, in our first tenet: fighting for the right not to have a child, which includes supporting abortion, birth control, and evidence-based sex education, as well as abstinence. 

Because it was created in 1994 by twelve Black women, the second tenet focuses on the reproductive oppression we particularly experience, which is sterilization abuse and medical racism. We have to fight equally hard for the right to have the children that we want to have and the conditions under which we want to have them. The fight for these conditions benefits everybody. We fight to resist unnecessary cesarean sections, for example. We fight for the right to use midwives and doulas, or to have our birth plans respected once we go to the hospital, or to have doctors listen to us, when we know our own bodies well and tell them what’s going on with us. That’s the second tenet. 

The third tenet of reproductive justice is something that both the pro-choice and the pro-life movements neglect: the human right to raise your children in safe and healthy environments. Both the pro-life and the pro-choice movement focus on the pregnancy. They don’t focus on what happens once the pregnancy is over: what happens if you don’t have a bedroom to put that child in, or you don’t have clean drinking water for your child, or if you have to deal with gun violence in school, or the school-to-prison pipeline, or tax policies that mean certain schools get underfunded while some are overfunded. Reproductive justice is the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to raise a child in a safe and healthy environment. 

Ten years after we first created the framework in 1994, SisterSong’s queer people of color caucus decided that they wanted a fourth tenet on bodily autonomy, gender identity, and sexual pleasure. One of the things I really admire about the reproductive justice framework is its capacity for expansion and adaptability. Even though it was created by Black women, it’s a very universal theory, because it’s based on the idea that everybody has the same human rights. When Indigenous women talk about reproductive justice, they talk about sovereignty as a reproductive justice issue, the same way that immigrant women talk about citizenship and immigrant rights as reproductive justice issues. We use intersectionality as a way to determine what our vulnerabilities are, so that we can enjoy the same human rights as people without those vulnerabilities. A way that I frequently put it is that every child has a right to an education, but a blind child might need her books in braille. You have to pay attention to her special vulnerability in order for her to get to the same right that the sighted children have. Intersectionality is the process, but human rights are the goal. 

Jones: In Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, which you cowrote with Rickie Solinger, you emphasize the importance of breaking our silence. After Roe fell, I think there was a moment, at least for me, maybe for others, where it was hard to believe our stories still had any power. I’m wondering how you feel about that. What power do our stories really have?

Ross: For fifty years, we feminists believed that there was so much power in telling our stories, because we were dealing with people who didn’t know what women went through. But I have to say, since the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, I’ve slowly and reluctantly realized that it’s not that they don’t know; it’s that they don’t care. 

But we still have to tell our stories, because we have to normalize talking about abortion, and talking about it within our families and communities. We have to make it possible for abortion providers to talk about what they do for a living without fear or shame. Before we talked about abortion accessibility and legality. And since the overturning of Roe, we in the reproductive justice movement have known that our number one task is to center the most vulnerable people to make sure that they don’t die because of lack of access, whether it’s by transporting them to other states where they can access services or smuggling them abortion pills, at the same time that we’re conducting the legislative and political fight. But we’ve also got to talk about abortion acceptability.

Jones: You mentioned Indigenous women and reproductive justice earlier. The Supreme Court just heard arguments in Brackeen v. Haaland, which is going to have huge stakes for tribal sovereignty and the Indian Child Welfare Act. Are there connections between this case, and its implications for Indigenous families, and the Dobbs decision?

Ross: Since America was founded as a settler-colonial state, the goal has been for Indigenous people to reproductively disappear. The attacks on the Indian Child Welfare Act are nothing more than a continuation of that same genocidal strategy of trying to depopulate a land so that the people who are the true owners of that land aren’t there to protest their removal and their erasure. We’ve had 500 years of removing Indian children from their tribes and their families. That process needs to stop. Tribal sovereignty and reproductive sovereignty are linked. Because when you can control the fertility of women in a community, you control the community.

Jones: One argument that you often hear from the anti-abortion side has to do with the history of eugenics, which they cite as a reason to end abortion. 

Ross: They still believe in eugenics for everybody who’s not white. These are the people who won’t lift a vote to support feeding children once they’re here. How are you supposed to believe that they care about the fate of children? They weaponize abortion as a way to secure political power. They don’t really care about these issues.

Jones: The fall of Roe opens the door to the criminalization of abortion. But what does the criminalization of abortion mean for the right to become and stay pregnant? 

Ross: Too many pregnancies end in miscarriage, yet every miscarriage is going to be read as a criminalized abortion. It is anti-science, anti-woman, anti-truth, and anti-evidence for people to assume that every pregnancy results in a wanted child. That simply is not true. They’re even putting women’s health at more risk by denying them life-saving medical procedures, because of “the health of the fetus.” It started with criminalizing women who were abusing substances like drugs or alcohol. Now, it’s criminalizing women who are seeking treatment for cancer, or lupus, or fetal development that’s not going well. We’re going to see more and more of that. 

Jones: How can we respond effectively to this war on our rights, given that the courts and the police are against us? 

Ross: As a Black woman, I never had the luxury of assuming the Supreme Court was going to be a source of my liberation, because it has disappointed me too many times. There was a brief period in the late 1950s and ’60s, when we thought we were marching toward freedom, and then we had the backlash of the ’70s, and we’ve been pushed back almost ever since with the Court’s decisions, on voting rights and many other issues. We have to work morally to make sure that people understand that they have a human right to control their bodies and be self-determining; we have to work politically to make sure that abortion remains a voting issue, so that people understand that women’s human rights are on the ballot and are important. At the same time, we also should help pass the Equal Rights Amendment; thirty-eight states have ratified it, and yet Republicans are pulling procedural blockages. And of course, we have to make sure that we elect people who are willing to affirm women’s human rights rather than violate them. We have to work on all these fronts at the same time. 

Jones: Are there any points in the recent past where feminist strategy has failed, or didn’t keep up with the urgency of the moment? 

Ross: There are certainly things to criticize feminist strategy for, but I try not to blame the victim. Republicans do what they do because of who they are, not because of what we do. Yes, I think the feminist movement could’ve done more work on class issues, because its failure to consolidate poor white women into our base left them to be organized by the opponents, even if they walk into our clinics to get services. I think that the feminist movement could’ve had a stronger intersectional analysis, because if you don’t understand issues that intersect with gender, like white supremacy and its impact on reproductive politics, everything will confuse you. So, yes, there are many things we could do better. But Roe didn’t fall because of anything we failed to do. 

Jones: Conventional political wisdom often pits abortion against “kitchen table” issues and the economy. As I understand it, reproductive justice holds that this is a false dichotomy. How should it change the way we talk about abortion not just among our family and friends, but on the campaign trail, too? 

Ross: To put it in plain economic terms, if you want to raise your child and provide for a college education, every child you have is going to cost you about $200,000. 

Jones: That’s a lot of money. 

Ross: How many years will it take for you to make $200,000 for a child?

Jones: A long time. 

Ross: Exactly. Instead of talking about this as just a women’s human rights issue, we need to talk about it as an economic justice issue as well. Many don’t recognize or accept that a lot of people choose to have an abortion simply because they can’t afford another child. There’s nothing sadder than someone who feels that they have no choice but to terminate a wanted child simply because they can’t afford them. The inability to continue an unplanned pregnancy because you don’t have the economic means, healthcare, the ability to stay in school when you get pregnant, job security, or even a bedroom to put a child in—all of those things affect reproductive decision-making. 

Jones: We’re speaking the day after the midterm elections, which didn’t go quite as badly as a lot of people were afraid they would, and it seems like abortion was actually a winning message for a lot of politicians. Do you see any signs of hope in that? 

Ross: We should put it to the voters. Because the Republicans are afraid of direct democracy. They know that their only currency, their only register, is lies. They have to manipulate people into being afraid of things that aren’t true. I think that we can learn from what happened in Kansas and Kentucky; even in these decidedly red states, Republicans have overplayed their hands. There’s one constituency, pro-choice Republican women, that they totally forgot about, like they didn’t matter. There aren’t enough Democratic voters in either of those states to have made those outcomes possible. 

Jones: It seems like the bodily autonomy argument is really powerful. I grew up evangelical, and it’s what changed my mind completely on the subject of abortion. 

Ross: I was listening to people being interviewed in Kentucky, and the thing that they, particularly the older women, kept saying was, “It shouldn’t be harder for my granddaughter than for me.” That’s a legitimate feeling. I feel the same way. I had more access to an abortion as a sixteen year old in 1970 than I would have now.

Jones: It’s a frightening time to be thinking about having a family.

Ross: I’m really surprised that the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision before the midterms, because it was a gift to the Democratic Party: a mobilization opportunity that has turned around and bit the Republicans in their asses. 

Jones: How do you think we reach people who might be troubled by what they’re hearing and seeing after Roe, but they don’t necessarily think of themselves as feminist? 

Ross: Would you like someone else, who you don’t even know, telling you what to do with your body? Whether to have kids or not? This is such a fundamental violation of basic human rights. So, you don’t have to be a feminist to care about whether or not somebody else should control your body. Since when did you like being passive over enslavement?

Sarah Jones is a senior writer for New York Magazine and a member of Dissent’s editorial board. Her first book is forthcoming from Avid Reader Press.

Loretta J. Ross is an associate professor in the Program of the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. From 2005 to 2012, she was the National Coordinator for SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. Ross is the co-author of Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice (2004). Her forthcoming book, Calling in the Calling Out Culture, is due out in 2023.

Windy City mailbag / Matthew Yglesias

Windy City mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 13 minutes

Windy City mailbag

Big cars, language change, and the case for more conspiracy theorists

I’m on a brief trip to Chicago this week so didn’t answer quite as many mailbag questions as I normally do — but first, a bit of happy news.

There’s been a steep decline in homeless veterans, the labor market remains strong, remote work is saving people a lot of time, Massachusetts towns are up against a zoning reform deadline, and productivity is up.

JeffD: Why are cars/SUVs/trucks getting bigger? Why are more people driving SUVs? Is this a policy failure and if so can the failure be reversed?

I live in a dense city and when I drive, I often end up parallel parking on the street. I also own a very small garage that opens onto a narrow alley. Under the circumstances, I actively prefer the size of my Prius to a larger car that would be more difficult to park and maneuver around the alleys.

But that’s an unusual situation. Most people live in the suburbs and park in parking lots, and from that standpoint, a bigger vehicle is better for the boring reason that you can put more stuff in it. Sure, most of the time you don’t fill it up with stuff, but sometimes you do — and when you do, it’s nice to have a truck/SUV/car that can fit a lot of stuff and/or passengers. Now of course a bigger vehicle is more expensive to buy and also more expensive to operate since it’s less fuel-efficient. That’s a good reason to not buy the very biggest vehicle on the market. At the same time, the average income in the country has risen and fuel efficiency has improved, so people can afford larger vehicles on average.

Which is to say I think vehicles have gotten larger mostly for the same reason that houses have gotten larger — we’re getting richer!

Now I think this rightly bothers people who are cognizant of pedestrian safety issues. The larger vehicles are much less safe for everyone on a bike or on foot who needs to share space with these behemoths. Arguably the larger vehicles are safer for the people inside them, but even here it seems like an arms race dynamic. The bigger the other cars on the road get, the less safe your small car is, and the more you need to upsize, which makes things less safe for others.

Beyond pedestrian safety, though, there’s a more mundane issue with big vehicles: they inflict more damage on roads. A long time ago in a political climate far, far away, the federal gasoline tax was established as the main means of financing road construction. At the time, gas consumption was a pretty pure function of how many miles you drove and how heavy your vehicle was. That’s no longer true because engine technologies vary so much and electric vehicles, in particular, burn zero gasoline while being incredibly heavy and obviously occupying space on the road.

Conceptually, what we need to do is move to a system where we have:

A gas tax for pollution externalities that’s unrelated to road funding.

A tax on vehicle miles traveled that’s adjusted for vehicle weight and serves as the road funding workhorse.

Separate congestion charges on select roads.

This would not by any means end the trend toward vehicles getting larger, but it would at least address the downsides of big vehicles in an appropriate way. But how do you get from here to there? I have no idea.

Paul: I'm currently using stable diffusion AI to do power point art for me instead of blank space or clip art. Josh Barro is doing something similar on his substack. What do you see as the most important AI uses in the short to medium run?

All this stuff with music, art, text, etc. generation is very interesting, but I don’t think will amount to very much economically in the near term.

But what could be a huge deal (if someone makes it work) is something like a medical advice chatbot. Not necessarily an “AI doctor,” which would pose a lot of regulatory issues and require the model to be able to interact with the physical world. But a greatly improved version of Dr. Google that combines powerful technology with oversight from some kind of group of actual medical professionals. At a certain point in any given chat, Dr. GPT might well end up telling you that you need to go into an office and see a real doctor. A lot of the time, though, people don’t really need medical treatment. What they need is authoritative medical advice about home remedies, what to watch for, when to worry, etc.

A pure tech company like OpenAI probably can’t craft something like this that people would consider credible or acceptable. But it’s a huge opportunity for a doctor-led startup that’s using language model APIs.

My thoughts on this turn to medicine because when you’re asking about the significance of AI, you need to ask not only “what does it seem like computers could do soon?” but also “where are the actual constraints in the economy?” I assume we’ll have whole AI-written novels soon and musical compositions people enjoy and lots of other stuff in that kind of cultural consumption space. But the American economy is not currently constrained by an objective lack of entertainment options. There are already tons of perfectly adequate novels that nobody is reading, new albums that nobody is listening to, etc. So while flooding the zone with new cultural outputs is going to be a dizzying experience, it’s not transformative.

And when you look at constrained sectors like energy and primary commodities, I don’t think AI is a big short-term help. Computers aren’t going to lay eggs; the biggest constraint on housing is policy.

But on health care, we really do have an objective shortfall of medical practitioners. This is, to be sure, partly policy-induced. But it is also something that technological improvements really could help us with, even without revolutionary breakthroughs in computer interactions with physical objects. But it will raise a lot of regulatory questions. An AI isn’t going to be allowed to write a prescription, at least not at first. But medical practices may want to do “AI-informed prescribing” where the bulk of the patient interaction is with a model, and the doctor signs off on the conclusion. People will of course want to know where the line is between judiciously using technology to increase productivity and running an abusive pill mill, and to what extent the doctor is using AI to increase his productivity versus an arrangement where in effect the doctor is working for the AI. After all, it’s the robo-doctor who is making all the decisions, and one’s ability to obtain clients and stay on the right side of regulators ultimately comes down to the quality of the robo-doctor’s decision-making. The human doctor is just there for compliance purposes.

Rusty: Is there any connection between the higher real wage growth in the bottom half of the income distribution and lowered immigration in recent years?

We’ve seen improving relative wages at the bottom, which is plausibly related to immigration, but real wages have been falling as a result of inflationary pressures.

Neither of those trends is exclusively due to immigration, but it does contribute to both. And that illustrates my main point about immigration restrictions, which is that they cause tremendous deadweight loss and, like other restrictions on labor supply, are an extremely leaky bucket of redistribution. We ought to be trying to find ideas that advance equality and efficiency, not ideas that shift relative wages in favor of low-income people by making everyone poorer.

MikeCD: Over the past decade or so, what, if any, changes to the generally accepted language we use around race/gender/etc. do you think have been meaningfully good?

It's easy to get annoyed by people being sanctimonious about using more inclusive language, but I also think it's hard to dismiss it all as just a “shifting code of manners” used to signal one's elite status.

I sincerely do not think that linguistic changes are significant in and of themselves, but there is social significance in the distinction between people who participate in changing norms and those who refuse to do it as a way of signaling their overall allegiance to older ideas and values.

There was this very funny and since-deleted AP tweet where they called for the use of person-first language for people experiencing Frenchness alongside people with mental illness. Everyone made fun of them, and they apologized. But the whole reason they made this mistake is that they were taking the person-first trend too seriously, as if there’s some deep logic to it when it’s actually profoundly arbitrary.

But to be clear, just because something is arbitrary doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. If I hear someone in 2023 talking about “the Jews,” my inclination is to think that person is probably an antisemite. But my late grandmother talked about “the Jews” all the time — and she was Jewish. That’s how people from her milieu talked. They talked like Archie Bunker who, like my grandma, was an outer-boroughs New Yorker of a certain vintage. Archie Bunker, of course, was a huge racist. But people didn’t talk that way because they were racist, and there’s nothing inherently racist about the language they used. But it came to be understood that “talking like Archie Bunker” was a racist kind of way to talk, and while it’s hard to get old people to change their ways, younger people shifted their speech patterns. To anachronistically refuse to go along with the trend increasingly marks you out over time as someone who is deliberately refusing to stay up-to-date.

Saying “the French,” by contrast, doesn’t convey anything at all about you, and French people aren’t agitating for any kind of change. It’s all arbitrary.

One recent change I like is the rise of Black with a capital B. I don’t think this accomplishes anything particularly meaningful, but it does strike me as more logical — it’s the name of an ethnic group like Hmong or Roma and not the description of a color. But of course the shift to Black has created a new logical consistency issue where most outlets say “white” instead of “White” because we’re uncomfortable, as a society, with the idea of cultivating whiteness as an ethnic identity. That strikes me as a reasonable thing to be uncomfortable with, but I assume the tension will need to be resolved at some point.

Edward: On Jan. 18, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order titled “Creating Opportunities by Prioritizing Work Experience for State Government Jobs.” In doing so, the Keystone State became the latest state to abolish the requirement of college degrees for most of its government positions.

I think this is a great thing both practically and politically. It reduces the need for unnecessary education that taxpayers later pay for through loan forgiveness and it sends a message to non-college educated voters that you’re valuable too.

What do you think about this and do you think more Democrats will follow suit?

Definitely a good idea and immediately endorsed by the New York Times, so I do think the trend will spread. What’s not yet clear to me is how much difference it makes in practice.

Tom Hitchener: I'm a bit confused about your running line about "conspiracy polarization" and how it's a problem that conspiracy theories are now mostly found on the Right. I don't know if this is just a bit, or maybe just a personal preference, but if it's an actual political point, why should I as a Democrat prefer that my side have more cranks than it does now? Aren't normie voters turned off by weirdos? So aren't Democrats' electoral fortunes helped if the weirdos are mostly on the other side?

It’s a question of balance.

You don’t want your party’s image to be dominated by the idea that its leaders are all cranks and conspiracy theorists. At the same time, there are lots of people who don’t have super-strong views on the main issues (taxes, abortion, guns) that dominate political conflict but do have strong views on topics like “have UFOs been visiting the Earth routinely?” or “is agribusiness poisoning us with seed oils?”

It’s good to try to get some of those people’s votes. This means it’s good to have some of your party’s figures associated with at least some of these ideas.

But I’d also just say one reason I talk about this a lot is that I think most people don’t talk about it enough. Most liberals, it seems to me, experience the Trumpian transformation of the Republican Party as a pure example of the GOP getting more extreme. And there is certainly an element of that happening. But if that’s your only lens for understanding the past 10 years of American politics, you’ll end up with the wrong impression.

The fact that JFK conspiracy theories and 9/11 trutherism have shifted from the left to the right might be something that you think speaks well of contemporary Democrats and poorly of contemporary Republicans. But it’s definitely something that helps explain shifts in the electorate.

If in 2004 you were describing a guy who thinks the government never fully came clean about who brought down the towers or the CIA’s connections to Lee Harvey Oswald, who thinks the FDA is too in bed with Big Pharma for vaccines to be 100 percent trustworthy, who’s getting into lots of diet fads, and who thinks the mainstream media is much too close to the intelligence community, you’d be describing a John Kerry voter. This guy probably doesn’t attend church regularly, doesn’t think the government should cut Social Security and Medicare, and thinks abortion should be legal, even though he’d never in a million years describe himself as a feminist. He thinks political correctness is kind of dumb, he thinks NAFTA was a disaster, and he thinks both parties are too soft on illegal immigration. That guy is a Trump voter in 2020. In part because Trump moved right on immigration, but in part because Trump moved left on Social Security and Medicare, and in large part because the conservative movement became much friendlier to socially isolated weirdos with strong anti-establishment leanings.

You might say “well, we’re better off without that crank’s vote.” But are we? Sherrod Brown isn’t better off without him, and abortion rights aren’t better off without Sherrod Brown.

Gabe Stanton: What do your days look like? Do you endeavor to work 9-5 ish or is it more like “when the moment strikes” kind of work?

It’s honestly pretty variable. Some of that is based on the day of the week (Tuesday mornings I record “Bad Takes,” Monday afternoons I take my son to swim lessons) but a lot of it is the ups and downs of other people’s schedules. Some days I just sit at my desk typing. Other times I meet people for lunch or coffee or get invited to something official downtown. But to generalize, I guess I would say that relative to someone working a 9-5 schedule, I’m more likely to do midday errands and more likely to knock off early, but it’s not unusual for me to work late at night or early in the morning.

Mutton Dressed as Mutton: I just finished the book “Strangers To Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” which I read on your recommendation. I found it to be a haunting and at times harrowing book. I also found the themes and conclusions to be somewhat slippery, which I suspect may in part be the author's intention. You raved about this book. What did you take away from it?

It’s a nonfiction book, but it has a very literary sensibility and it’s written as narrative, so it doesn’t have an incredibly clear thesis statement followed by a lot of charts that are designed to support the argument. That’s part of the pleasure of actually reading the book and it’s one reason I enjoyed it — I read a lot of more typical nonfiction material for my job, but I prefer to read stuff that’s different to relax and also to an extent to expand my mind.

Given all that, I somewhat hesitate to put words in Aviv’s mouth by saying what I think the takeaway is, because she’s clearly chosen not to write it that way.

But what I think she’s trying to draw attention to is the extent to which the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is a recursive process in which efforts to define problems end up shaping identities and behaviors. I think it’s now broadly accepted that while there have been men having sex with other men forever, the “gay man” as an identity is a relatively recent concept. And the widespread acceptance of that concept is even more recent. In the early days of what was called at the time the “Homophile Movement,” same-sex attraction was classified as a mental illness by most psychiatrists. And that mental illness concept was itself a change from earlier ones. But over the past couple of generations we’ve had not only a revolution in gay rights, but also a revolution in our understanding of gay identity. That’s a change in how society views gay men, but it’s also a change in how gay men view themselves and a change in how people view themselves influenced by how they actually behave.

Aviv is basically generalizing this point to all kinds of behaviors.

She writes about her own experience with anorexia and how part of the treatment of anorexia is defining the ailment and defining an identity around it. And I think the project is not to debunk the concepts in contemporary psychiatry, but to at least complicate them somewhat by drawing attention to the ways in which the reification of these concepts feeds back into the underlying pathologies.

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