Culturally relevant pedagogy is good. By Matthew Yglesias

Culturally relevant pedagogy is good. By Matthew Yglesias

Score one for Team Woke

Matthew Yglesias

December 30, 2020. 

It’s the last Slow Boring post of the year! I don’t think this site has been in existence long enough to warrant a lot of self-reflection and rumination. But I’m very happy that a lot of you have signed up and that this is going to be a sustainable business — many thanks to everyone who has subscribed or who has gifted a subscription. And of course, if for some reason you’re sitting around the week after Christmas wanting to buy more gifts for people, then I wouldn’t stand in your way!

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Today I wanted to zig a little from my brand as a woke-skeptic to defend an idea that I’ve seen take a lot of criticism lately but that I think is well-grounded in theory and evidence — the idea that we should change the content of school curricula to incorporate more voices and characters that reflect the students being educated.

A lot of different stuff happens in the name of social justice

The University of Michigan has put out an inclusive language guide that includes some clearly reasonable ideas (don’t call people “honey”) and some utterly absurd ones (don’t say “picnic” based on a fake etymology). Beyond the specific content of the list is, I think, the larger absurdity that many universities that are simultaneously strapped for cash, bankrupting their students, and underpaying their faculty are investing large sums of money in diversity, equity, and inclusion teams ($10.6 million to 82 diversity officers, of whom 76 are on the prestige Ann Arbor campus) to come up with this sort of thing.

Josh Dunn 

@professordunn

When I see the University of Michigan’s list of naughty words, I just wonder how we’re supposed to teach Hegel. 

December 26th 2020

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There are also left-wing K-12 teachers who are sharing ideas on social media about how to replace some of the traditional “dead white man”-type books on the curriculum with newer texts featuring a more diverse set of authors and subjects and more contemporary values in terms of content. A lot of the people doing this use jargon about how you need to “decolonize” things and otherwise adopt language that is off-putting to a lot of the same people who find the above list to be absurd.

Which is to say that both of these ideas — micromanaging language use on an elite college campus and pushing to diversify the content of K-12 curricula in majority-minority schools — are manifestations of The Great Awokening, and the way the game is played, you are supposed to be pro-woke or anti-woke and decide about specifics on that basis.

I am often anti-woke.

But I have to say that the handful of people I know who are educators all believe firmly that “culturally relevant pedagogy” works and that their students are more likely to read and learn when they are given authors and characters who look and sound like them. The people I know who tell me this use restrained, normal language like “Hispanic kids don’t see a lot of representation of themselves in pop culture so they think it’s really compelling when we give them books that do that.” They are also addressing a very practical problem, which is that it’s really bad for your outcomes in life if you don’t learn to read and write well, but a lot of kids don’t.

Anecdotes, of course, are not data. And the whole evidence base on this topic is a little bit disappointingly thin. But what’s out there seems to me to clearly support the woke position: on the whole, incorporating culturally relevant pedagogy and ethnic studies material into the curriculum helps kids learn.

This is a terrible thing to introspect about

My old friend Sara Mead always made the point to me that it’s dangerous to discuss K-12 policy with normies because everyone went to school and has an opinion about it, even if they haven’t done any research or given it serious thought.

And that seems to really be the case here, where I’ve seen a tremendous number of professional writers stand up for the enduring value of teaching the classics primarily by talking about the value to them of reading the classics.

Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 

@thomaschattwill

I’m so thankful my black father who escaped real segregation through the magic of books suggested I read James Baldwin and Earnest Gaines and Shakespeare and Maupassant and Maimonides and Aesop’s fables and never would have thought to segregate the world of literature like this. 

Madison Payton @MadisonPayton2

You don't have to read white literature to be" well rounded" or "play the game" or be "educated" or "competitive." I tell my students, spark notes these texts for references BUT let's read literature that is more relevant and inclusive to our community #DisruptTexts

December 27th 2020

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Less purely retrospectively, Kay Hymowitz pointed out to me that Frederick Douglass didn’t need a culturally relevant curriculum to become an intellectual giant.

Kay Hymowitz 

@KayHymowitz

@mattyglesias IDK any research on topic, but worth remembering Frederick Douglass didn't read BIPOC authors; he read Dickens, Shakespeare, Bible, etc. Baldwin read Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. Understanding past=reading influential works

December 28th 2020

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I’m inclined to say that the life story of Frederick Douglass shows us that extraordinary people can overcome extraordinary hardships, but this has limited relevance for helping us to understand how to best help basically normal people overcome normal hardships.

In introspection mode, I could say that being given a little Dostoevsky to read as a teenager was transformative for me. I took a high school class on Russian literature, then when I was 17 I lived for two months over the summer with a family in Nizhny Novgorod. I took two more Russian literature classes in college, and by far my favorite recent novel is Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, which is on the theme of being really into classic Russian novels. Russia, Russia, Russia. I’m not a very arty or literary person, but I can give you takes on Tolstoy’s lesser novels or on Andrei Bely’s modernist masterpiece Petersburg and if you bring up The Master and Margarita, I’m going to want to tell you about Bulgakov’s more obscure science fiction novella Heart of a Dog.

By contrast, Shakespeare never did it for me and I found the high school class where we had to read The Odyssey incredibly annoying.

So out with the bard, in with Notes From Underground? You can’t make policy like that. But there’s some decent research to suggest that culturally relevant curriculum design does help get students more engaged.

Relatable material is good

For a solid, non-woke theoretical introduction to the concept I would recommend David Brooks who has long maintained that one reason boys on average do worse than girls in school is that the people who design curricula don’t pay enough attention to what boys are interested in:

It shouldn't be any surprise that according to a National Endowment for the Arts study, the percentage of young men who read has plummeted over the past 14 years. Reading rates are falling three times as fast among young men as among young women. Nor should it be a surprise that men are drifting away from occupations that involve reading and school. Men now make up a smaller share of teachers than at any time in the past 40 years. 

Dr. Leonard Sax, whose book "Why Gender Matters" is a lucid guide to male and female brain differences, emphasizes that men and women can excel at any subject. They just have to be taught in different ways. Sax is a big believer in single-sex schools, which he says allow kids to open up and break free from gender stereotypes. But for most kids it would be a start if they were assigned books they might actually care about. For boys, that probably means more Hemingway, Tolstoy, Homer and Twain. 

This is a conservative writer talking about boys, but it’s the exact same representational logic you’ll hear on the left. If the teaching workforce is dominated by women who assign a lot of books that reflect female interests, then it will be disproportionately boys who feel bored and check out. Well, if it’s all white people assigning books about white people, what do you expect is going to happen?

That’s theory. What do we really know? Unfortunately, there has not been a ton of research focus on this topic. But here are some findings:

Tucson ran a politically controversial Mexican-American Studies program that the state legislature eventually killed, but logistic regression analysis suggests that taking the MAS course was associated with greater likelihood to pass Arizona’s standardized testing regime and greater odds of graduating high school.

A fuzzy regression discontinuity study of an ethnic studies course for ninth graders suggests that enrolling in the course “increased ninth-grade student attendance by 21 percentage point … and credits earned by 23 [i.e., about 4 additional courses passed in the ninth grade].”

Back in 2012, we got an honest-to-god randomized control trial of culturally relevant training for second-grade math teachers focused on Alaska Natives, and the modules “significantly improved students’ mathematics performance, with relatively robust effect sizes (0.82 and 0.39 standard deviations, respectively, both statistically significant at the .001 level).”

I particularly like this last study because it would be very easy to make it sound absurd. Even more so than language arts, on some level math is math, and you don’t need Yup’ik cultural context to know that 7 x 9 = 63.

And yet, it turns out that teaching children is a non-trivial task that is related to, but not identical to, understanding the content itself. You can have ways of doing it that are more or less effective. And sensitivity to cultural content seems to make a difference. At the collegiate level, Nicholas Bowman’s meta-analysis of studies finds that “students who take at least one diversity course have greater gains in their general interest in ideas and effortful thinking than those who take no courses” but that beyond one there are no further effects.

It’s important to actually research things

They probably don’t care what I think, but my advice to proponents of decolonizing language arts curricula would be to remember that in a democracy, they need to communicate these ideas to an electorate that is mostly white, mostly over 50, and mostly did not graduate from college.

I think a phrase like “we need to give kids material that’s interesting to them, which means stuff they identify with” is probably more compelling than a highly politicized vow to combat white supremacy.

But people on both sides of this argument have an obligation to take curriculum development seriously and actually study which ideas work and which don’t. There has been an incredible proliferation of diversity training programs in a variety of contexts, most of which don’t achieve anything useful and some of which actually backfire. Yet on the flip side, here we have evidence that culturally relevant curricula do achieve something useful. The excesses of the Great Awokening have produced a kind of moral panic where any sign of “woke” language or prioritization of social justice concerns in a somewhat unfamiliar context is immediately dismissed. The Tucson MAS course was seemingly the victim of a right-wing cancel culture that shut down an effective pedagogical tool for political reasons.

Teaching children is hard, and not every idea that flies under the banner of culturally relevant pedagogy will be effective. Its proponents should be rigorous and make sure their ideas continue to be tested — expand the successful math curriculum for Alaska Natives to other marginalized groups and run the RCT again to check and see if you’re doing it right. But skeptics need to engage with evidence; “everyone should be as smart and self-motivating as Frederick Douglass” is not a real answer.

If you’re of a centrist or center-right perspective, it might be interesting to you to learn that the widely praised KIPP charter school network believes in culturally relevant pedagogy, and I think there’s a good chance they know what they’re talking about.

The common culture

Some people are going to not care about any of this and say that we just need to have a common culture founded on the great books and that’s that.

I don’t think I can refute that idea, but I do think it’s important to complicate it slightly by noting that we are further from this ideal than most people realize. There are no books at all that are near-universally assigned in the United States, and it’s been that way for a long time — the United States is a country that believes very deeply in decentralized administration of schools. Recall that the Common Core, which was very much not a national curriculum, prompted a huge freakout mostly from the right just because it vaguely hinted at possibly someday looking something like a national curriculum.

So that’s a fine debate to have; maybe we should have a national curriculum, and maybe that curriculum should feature a set roster of canonical works.

But that’s a genuinely separate debate that has a totally different set of institutional adversaries and considerations. It is probably true that strong proponents of culturally relevant pedagogy would be suspicious of a national curriculum push that would make it harder for schools in, say, the South Bronx to try to achieve cultural relevance to their students. By the same token, the conservatives who were mad about the Common Core would dislike both the centralization on principle and also the reality that a national curriculum would inevitably reflect a political sensibility that’s several clicks to the left of the typical small town or rural community.

Realistically, I think it’s not going to happen.

And speaking as someone who spent the Obama years being annoyed by conservative hostility to any steps toward curricular standardization, the cultural relevance literature has made me appreciate the merits of the traditional conservative preference for decentralized institutions. It obviously wouldn’t make sense for every second grade teacher in America to get trained in a pedagogical method optimized for Alaska Natives. But that’s no reason we shouldn’t do it for the people who do have large numbers of Alaska Natives in their classroom. This is a huge, diverse country with tens of thousands of public schools all serving different communities, and it makes sense for them to have a differentiated approach.

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AB1 min ago

Good arguments! As an addition, one thing that's often off-putting about attempts to replace books is not the books being replaced (e.g., Shakespeare, Homer), but rather what they're replaced with - not Eastern Classics or Native mythologies, but young-adult books written by the same people criticizing the curriculum. That is, there's a conflict of interest - you want Shakespeare replaced so there's more room for your book instead!

Of course that's not every criticism, and there is an argument to be made that "modern" books are more relevant, but that argument doesn't appear to be made too often. Personally, I believe there is often timeless, universal wisdom in any of the classics, Easter, Western, what have you. For example, were the argument that Homer should be replaced with Gilgamesh, I think I could more easily believe the stated intentions of some of the most vocal advocates were the actual intentions.

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New Yang City: How to transform NYC into a UBI paradise. By Matthew Yglesias

New Yang City: How to transform NYC into a UBI paradise. By Matthew Yglesias

4 hr ago

December 30, 2020

Hey folks, happy Wednesday. Going to talk about something a bit off the beaten path today.

Andrew Yang has filed paperwork to run for mayor of New York City, and through the weird happenstance of our times, it seems likely that he’s going to emerge as the Great Moderate Hope in a sea of progressive contenders. That includes hiring Bradley Tusk*, one of Michael Bloomberg’s campaign managers, to consult for him.

I think we probably know what a neo-Bloombergian campaign looks like, and it probably doesn’t involve advocacy for a municipal-level universal basic income. And that, in turn, is probably for the best since I think Yang’s presidential campaign had a lot of appealing qualities, but his whole automation schtick is wrong.

I think UBI could be a promising theme for a mayoral campaign, though. Not because of automation, but because of the fiscal situation in New York. The city finds itself faced with a pandemic-induced budget crisis and clearly needs to rethink a thing or two; it also appears to collect far more in per person taxes (about $8,427 in 2017) than other large, heavily Democratic cities such as Los Angeles ($4,692), Chicago ($4,668), and Boston ($4,270) without offering public services that seem commensurately superior. And these other cities are not exactly low-tax jurisdictions.

The standard conservative prescription for this sort of thing is that cities should clamp down on spending (mostly at the expense of public sector workers) and reduce taxes. But especially in a city like New York, the politics of pitting billionaires against teachers, firefighters, garbagemen, and cops are not very compelling. Instead, the city could continue collecting taxes at a high level (after all, billionaires, commuters, and tourists are paying a large share of the taxes) but reduce spending to efficient levels and pay the surplus out to citizens as a kind of mini-UBI.

The big city business model

There’s a perennial cliche where some businessman type says that if you put him in charge, he could fix everything by running the government like a business. And then there’s a perennial counter-cliché where someone explains that the government is nothing like a business.

But I actually do think there’s a sense in which local government is kind of like a business.

A local government, for starters, is financially constrained — it can’t just run big open-ended deficits. And local governments need to compete with other localities for tax base. And most of all, local governments mostly spend money on the direct provision of services in a way that creates feedback to the tax base. People pay good money to live in towns with quality school systems, so an investment in better schools could “pay for itself” by boosting tax revenues. There’s an idea called Tiebout Competition, which holds that for exactly this reason, different localities will compete against each other to offer the optimal combination of tax rates and service levels. And while that’s obviously not exactly how anything works, I do think it at least approximately characterizes the functioning of America’s suburban jurisdictions.

But big cities are different.

The lucky ones, like New York, are heirs to industry clusters that create value. Others, like Miami, benefit from good weather and proximity to beaches. Los Angeles has both. Essentially all cities attract commuters and people who visit for the nightlife and entertainment amenities without actually living there. To an extent, all those transients increase costs (they use the transportation infrastructure, the fire department needs to deal with them, etc). But on net, they are clear contributors: they don’t send their kids to school, for starters, and police and fire needs mostly scale with land area rather than population.

Now, of course, there are also unlucky cities like Detroit or Cleveland, which have seen their one-time industrial base evaporate and are now locked in a cycle of population decline. The problems facing these cities are very serious and you can find extensive discussion of that in One Billion Americans. Suffice it to say this discussion is not about places like that.

The lucky cities, if you didn’t know anything about politics or the real world, might be expected to follow a “business model” in which they have lower tax rates than suburban jurisdictions since they can milk the surplus generated by the central business district to maintain equally good services. Of course, that’s not really what happens. Instead, big cities attract a lot of residents with left-wing political commitments who tolerate higher levels of taxation. That surplus is then spent on more generous welfare programs and public sector jobs.

The fiscal picture in New York

Up until the pandemic, the basic business model of New York was working really well.

Demand for living in the city was both high and rising, as witnessed by high and rising housing costs. New York’s population was shrinking before the pandemic, which sounds bad. But note, again, that this was not due to falling demand (which would show up in falling prices). Instead, rising demand for NYC living was bidding up prices to the point where the number of people living there was falling. From a business model standpoint, this is good. Instead of a working-class family of four occupying a two-bedroom apartment, you might have a Dual Income No Kids professional couple that both pays more in taxes (dines out more, etc.) and consumes less in public services (no school).

Now it turns out that to actually compare different American cities’ tax situations is very challenging because American cities differ considerably in their basic functions — Los Angeles and Chicago are inside their respective counties, while Philadelphia and Jacksonville are counties, New York encompasses five counties, and Columbus encompasses parts of three different counties.

The good news is that the Lincoln Land Institute has done the hard work of creating Fiscally Standardized Cities — i.e., you look at all the local government functions that happen inside the boundaries of the city — so that you can make meaningful comparisons. Then, you can look at tax revenue across the fifteen largest Fiscally Standardized Cities (recall these are municipalities, not metro areas) and see that New York has a lot of tax revenue.

That was the situation as of 2017, at any rate. I should be clear: about $650 of that revenue is due to New York State’s unique system of forcing local governments to contribute to the state’s Medicaid program. Still, even accounting for Medicaid, New York takes in more money per resident than any of the other biggest cities.

Today, New York is facing a huge budget hole caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. If that turns out to be because of one-off losses of tax revenue due to reduced commuting, food sales, and entertainment during 2020, then the city will clearly find a way to cope. But the risk for New York is that a year-long experiment in remote working seems likely to create a structural reduction in demand for Manhattan office space. Not that the city’s main business precincts are about to become ghost towns out of I Am Legend, it’s just that they are going to become cheaper. Some companies will decide they don’t need the expense, and landlords will need to cut prices to tempt in some new tenants who were previously priced out. This could also create a structural decline in the demand for New York housing when people who previously needed to live in NYC don’t need to anymore, now that their job is permanently partially (or fully) remote.

On a lot of levels, I think a cheaper New York will be welcome. In 2003, Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit proclaimed his city “poor but sexy” (i.e., affordable to artists and cool people) and there’s really something to that. Coolness often emerges in urban areas as a result of a negative economic shock. When people say they want to “keep Austin weird,” they are recalling a specific moment in the city’s life associated with a Texas real estate bust. And an exodus of businesses from Montreal due to Québec’s language policies set the stage for an indie rock boom.

But in basic fiscal terms, it’s a problem.

New York has been parceling out the surplus to local government workers during the pre-pandemic boom, and that’s not sustainable if the city stops booming. Here’s an eye-opening chart from Eric Kober at the Manhattan Institute:

And that’s just wages. Teacher benefits in New York are 69 percent more costly per pupil than in Boston, the second-costliest big city, and more than double any other large school district (the way the city’s own budget data works, they record “pensions and fringe benefits” as 18 percent of city spending). That kind of thing is only sustainable if property tax revenue keeps growing faster than inflation, which it no longer is.

Pay the surplus out to people

Conservatives will look at these facts, shake their heads at the profligacy of America’s big cities, and curse the evils of public sector unions (except police unions, where left and right will switch their opinions). But by the same token, conservatives don’t live or vote in big cities like New York, so it doesn’t matter what they think. As long as the city’s economy is doing well, it’s fairly easy for unions to beat landlords and billionaires in a pitched fight for the use of the city’s fiscal resources.

And during the Bill de Blasio era, the idea that the city needed to worry about its competitiveness would’ve seemed particularly risible to the electorate.

If New York finds itself in an acute fiscal crisis, the voters may have no choice but to do what conservatives want, but it seems like a shame for a city to ricochet between profligacy and austerity without a middle ground as a city that’s generous without being wasteful.

A more durable commitment might be to say that the city wants to get spending under control, and then if revenues grow in the future, the default will be to pay the money out as UBI checks to its citizens. That doesn’t mean you can never raise spending. But it does mean that the question of higher spending — whether that’s higher salaries or a subway expansion or anything else — becomes the question of “would you rather have this thing or would you rather have more money?” That application of a cash alternative is a natural source of political discipline.

Some math:

The Census says New York has about 8.3 million residents

Yang’s presidential campaign proposed $1,000 per month for every adult citizen

About 4.9 million New Yorkers are adult US citizens

Paying them all $1,000 per month would cost about $58 billion per year

In the 2017 Lincoln numbers, New York collected about $71 billion in taxes (there’s also a bunch of state and federal grant money in the mix for all cities).

Obviously, that’s pretty unaffordable as is. Just tacking a UBI onto the city’s existing spending would require a huge expansion in the budget.

That said, if New York managed to cut its revenue needs down to median Fiscally Standardized City, it would free up $45 billion per year in extra money! That’s not enough for Yang’s $12,000 a year UBI, but it would be enough to give every adult US citizen in New York $9,242 per year.

Grow the surplus

Of course, this is all a bit fanciful. But as a way of thinking about urban policy, I think it could be constructive. For example, while it’s basically impossible to get directly comparable data on mass transit spending, obviously New York City is maintaining a giant transit system that other places don’t have. If you combine state and local money, New York State spends $1,121 per person per year on transit, which is way more than Massachusetts, the third-highest state, with its $505 per person per year. But in this case, you really are getting a more robust transit network.

But as I detailed in “Fixing The Mass Transit Crisis,” it’s not like all this money is going to super useful services — they use two-person crews to operate subway trains and multiple conductors on commuter rail. Basically nowhere in the world does the former, and none of the high-performing regional rail systems in Europe or Asia do the latter. The MTA is also paying 30 percent more than Boston’s MBTA per passenger mile of bus service. For that matter, there’s also the question of fares. Right now, fares are a source of revenue, but they’re not set at a revenue-maximizing level. That’s in part because extra revenue gets captured by the workforce and in part because it’s seen as a social service benefit to low-income people. If you’re living in the UBI city, you try to maximize the efficiency of your labor arrangements and maximize the farebox revenue, and then the surplus kicks out to the public and that’s what protects low-income people.

My obsession, obviously, is with housing.

New York could easily generate more market-rate construction by rezoning. Even with prices falling due to the pandemic shock to demand, New York remains more expensive than the average American city, and the price of housing is above replacement costs. Right now, market-rate construction doesn’t make a big fiscal contribution to the city because builders get the 421-a tax exemption. But that, in turn, is tied up with parking requirements, the city’s effort to get in-kind payments in the form of affordable housing, rules discouraging the use of cranes (this creates extra jobs but raises costs), and other regulations. It’s such an ouroboros of rent-seeking that it’s not really in the interests of a typical New York voter to try to unlock the potential economic surplus here. If you untangle one bit, it’ll just flow to someone else.

But in the UBI City, you scrap the tax exemption and take a hard look at regulatory barriers to building. More buildings —> more property tax revenue (and when the residents move in, more sales and income tax revenue, too) —> more UBI money for you.

UBI City everywhere?

I don’t think this necessarily works as a general formula for urban governance. The whole point here is that New York is collecting an unusually large amount of tax revenue. But it is worth saying that San Francisco — the New York of the West — collects even more revenue per capita, seems to me to have worse public services, is also facing a potentially large post-pandemic shock to its tax base, and is better supplied than NYC with tech industry UBI enthusiasts.

But if a big UBI-centric push for economic government did take off in those two cultural flagship cities, that could help encourage the Seattles and Bostons and DCs of the world to take a harder look at their own business model.

Most American cities, unfortunately, are not lucky enough to have the problems of New York or San Francisco.

Sunbelt cities are actively competing with each other to try and grow, and we have lots of Rust Belt cities fighting, often unsuccessfully, to stave off decline. New York looms so large in our media consciousness that NYC problems sometimes get mistaken for “city problems” in a way that doesn’t make sense. Philadelphia is going to be suffering some kind of negative hit to demand for Center City office space, and it’s going to need to navigate that without the fiscal buffers that New York and San Francisco enjoy.

So don’t take any of this too seriously. But I do think that everyone knows urban governance is broken in the United States, and the same-old-same-old isn’t going to fix it. I’m not a particular UBI enthusiast in general, but it’s an interesting framework for thinking about these problems and possibly creating a new path forward.

* Full disclosure: I was Tusk’s intern 20 years ago when he was Chuck Schumer’s communications director — we have not spoken about Yang or this race.

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Lance Hunter3 hr ago

Welp, we can go ahead and get ready for Yang's campaign trying super-hard to make "New Yang City" a meme...

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1 reply by Matthew Yglesias

Jason Settle2 hr ago

This post is in the same vein as your very first one (Make Blue America Great Again) https://www.slowboring.com/p/make-blue-america-great-again

which captured my imagination. Rather than spend 95% of political energy on national politics, why aren't we progressives using say half the energy on state and local matters, using our giant advantages in state legislatures and in municipal councils to actually get progressive programs in place?

We need a big crop of state and local candidates running on a platform of "make government more efficient so that we can have more stuff". Why hasn't this happened?

Lack of the liberal equivalent of "the conservative gentry"? (which is small business owner -types who know how to get things done and supply the money and candidates for most Republican-held offices)

Lack of attention by liberals on state/local politics?

Deep systemic issues that prevent easy reform of local governments? Combined with a huge fear of unions?

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Half Poulantzas, Half Kindlebergerby Henry Farrell



Half Poulantzas, Half Kindleberger

by Henry Farrell, jacobinmag.com

The deserves a wide audience, but there are gaps in its theory.

Photo by: Making of Global Capitalism

Once upon a time, international political economy (as it is studied by American international relations professors) and international political economy (as it is studied by Marxists and marxisants) knew each other well. The realist Robert Gilpin, whose book on international political economy is still assigned in PhD seminars, disagreed with Marxism, but took it for granted that it was one of the major approaches in the field. Admittedly, studying the international economy through the lens of politics, as both Marxist and non-Marxist international political economists wanted to do, was seen by some as faintly subversive. Peter Gourevitch’s famous (among international relations scholars) article on how international forces shaped domestic economies was not notably ideological, but was nonetheless rejected as “Marxist claptrap” by one of the leading journals in the field.

Now, the American school of international political economy is highly respectable, and (not coincidentally) dull and middle-aged. No-one in their right mind would accuse the modal article in International Organization (the leading journal in the field of international political economy today) of being dangerously radical. Then again, no-one who was not already a specialist academic would be likely to pick it up in the first place. The mainstream of American international political economy has cast off both its more radical connections and its ambitions to speak to larger debates. Marxists and radicals continue to work on international political economy, but they are largely ignored by the dominant figures in the field.

This is a pity — as Panitch and Gindin’s book shows, there’s a lot that they could learn. And if most standard issue international political economy scholars don’t know much about Marxists, the opposite is not necessarily true. Panitch and Gindin not only know the debates among radicals, but have read very widely across the field of IPE, engaging with (and often usefully repurposing) the ideas and empirical material that they find useful.

I learned a lot from their book, and will be assigning it to my students. Still, I think there’s room for useful argument. To be clear, Panitch and Gindin are clearly far better read in the debates that I follow than I am in the debates that they follow. This means that some (and perhaps most) of the disagreement below is of the “why didn’t you write the book that I would have written if I were you” variety, so discount it as you think appropriate. I’m almost certainly not the audience they imagined that they were writing the book for. Yet their account of the entanglement between American imperium and neo-liberalism conceals as well as reveals. There are some causal relations — arguably quite important ones — that are invisible to it.

Maybe the best place to start is to look at the resonances between The Making of Global Capitalism and a book which has interesting similarities (they don’t cite it, perhaps because it is only indirectly about political economy) — Kal Raustiala’s Does The Constitution Follow the Flag? The political valences of the two books are quite different. I suspect that Raustiala is a liberal with the usual liberal attachment to free markets. Panitch and Gindin — not so much, obviously. However, the stories that they tell have striking similarities. Both are arguments about the construction of American empire. Both emphasize the crucial role of the US regulatory state in building up this empire. Raustiala is writing to chastise globalization boosters who don’t pay sufficient attention to regulatory power. Panitch and Gindin, I imagine, have at least half an eye towards correcting crude accounts which emphasize the power of international corporations and capital, and nothing but. Yet their correctives point in roughly similar directions

Where they diverge is in their account of more recent history. Raustiala’s story is one of how American rule is qualified, although not entirely supplanted over time. As the European Union and its member states develop their own regulatory apparatus, they began to challenge the US. It isn’t as easy for the US to bully through as it used to be — European regulators, who often take their lead from European capitalists, have their own interests. He suggests that this makes a world in which there are at least two important regulatory powers, not one. Raustiala doesn’t explore the implications at any enormous length. However, Dan Drezner, in a recent book, argues that this means that when the EU and US agree on regulation, they are able to dominate everyone else, and that where they do not agree, the likely result is rival standards and uncertainty.

Panitch and Gindin’s account instead emphasizes how continued American imperium and domination and global capitalism continue to reinforce each other, melding Nicos Poulantzas and Charles Kindleberger to each other. From Poulantzas (and Engels, and others in the Marxist tradition), they take a conception of the state as a crucial organizing element which carries out the kinds of domestic coordination that capitalists themselves find difficult or impossible. From Kindleberger, they take an emphasis on the need for one state to act as hegemon in order to sustain a given international economic order (Kindleberger, of course saw this in more benign terms than do Panitch and Gindin). This leads them to focus not on tensions between states as a source of change. Instead, the motor of change is the gradual accumulation of contradictions in a particular economic model, and the efforts of actors (most particularly the US state) to resolve those contradictions in ways salutary for the continued health of capitalism and capitalists.

Sometimes, this results in terrific insights. Panitch and Gindin’s account of the role of the US state in the UK’s decision to apply for IMF funds is excellent, enlightening, and largely new to me (perhaps it shouldn’t be — I’m not a real specialist in this area). They have smoking gun evidence that goes a long way to elucidate the relationship between the US state, the US’s perception of business interests, and the UK state’s responsiveness. Much of the time, it plays the same useful organizing role that any big theory of politics or economics plays — it provides an account of change that is helpful in transforming complexity into order, but that is contestable. Here, I (as a non-Marxist, but someone who gets value from Marxist work), see it as roughly comparable to non-Marxist accounts (say, the aforementioned Gourevitch, or Ronald Rogowski’s work), where one does not have to completely agree with the analysis to find it extremely helpful. Sometimes however, it seems to me to unduly discount things that are important, but that don’t fit easily with the broader theory. This isn’t a major disqualification — any ambitious and genuinely interesting theory of the world has to do this kind of shoehorning. Still, it does provide a starting point for critique, useful discussion, and, perhaps, further elaboration.

From my perspective, Panitch and Gindin’s account could most usefully be criticized for its relative lack of attention to conflicts between different states (and the economic and other interests that they represent). The relationships that they describe are overwhelmingly one way. The US, acting on behalf of an internationalized capital class, promotes neoliberalism. Other states gradually come to acquiesce.

Obviously, there’s a lot to this story. But there is also a lot that it doesn’t explain. Take, for example, monetary relations between the US and Europe. Panitch and Gindin downplay both John Connally’s famous dictum to the Europeans that the dollar was “our currency, but your problem,” and the US’s notorious penchant of offloading its adjustment problem onto unhappy allies. They go on to write about how Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (which is now wreaking havoc) was benignly encouraged by the US, implying that it is another, reasonably straightforward product of US hegemony. Yet this only tells a small part of the story. As Harold James’ recent book (rooted in a detailed examination of the archives) argues, the EU’s economic and monetary union was a product less of encouragement by the US hegemon than of European fears of what that hegemony implied for them. European central bankers and politicians worried — with cause — that the US would continue to offload its economic problems onto them, and that they would have no good way to respond, unless they came together to create a counter-balancing force.

One could tell similar stories in other sectors of the economy. Panitch and Gindin are obviously no fans of academic social democrats who see in Europe a kinder and gentler form of capitalism that might plausibly be sustained. This is fair enough on the macro level — European social democracy is taking a beating. Yet some of the differences between European and US models of capitalism are being sustained, and perhaps even strengthened as, for example, German banks retreat from their forays into US munis. And it’s here that their account is the weakest. It provides a fine and valuable account of the roughly similar changes across advanced industrialized states which sum up to neo-liberalism. But it doesn’t do nearly as well at explaining the variation — which practices survive and which do not; which countries succumb and which remain different. Telling that story would require different theories than the ones that Panitch and Gindin provide us with.

I have a personal interest in one aspect of this variation — how cross national coalitions can reshape domestic political institutions. As Panitch notes in an interview with , his and Gindin’s account acknowledges these kinds of relationships as more conventional accounts do not.

The interpenetration of capital across the Atlantic is a big element in the story. The varieties of capitalism school totally miss this, by the way. They treat each country as a watertight compartment, except for noting that everyone has to be competitive.

This is exactly right. However, their account of these coalitions has its own limits. They look at interpenetration in order to explain how neo-liberalism isn’t simply imposed on countries from without — it often is driven too (or perhaps instead) by a clamor from inside, as domestic capitalists become increasingly internationalist, in response both to interpenetration and assiduous encouragement from the US. Doubtless, this explains a lot of the changes we see today. However, again, it doesn’t explain variation particularly well. Capitalists have created cross-national alliances on some issues. On others, they have continued to fight against each other.

It seems to me hard to explain this unevenness from within Panitch and Gindin’s own theory. But here, they and other Marxists might look to the work of non-Marxist scholars like Helen Callaghan. Callaghan finds that European businesses have been very happy to cooperate across borders in order to fight against rules mandating increased worker participation in the firm. This benefits both the businesses in the countries where there is no worker participation (they continue to be less constrained) and businesses in the countries where participation is already legally required (they may find it easier to roll back their domestic rules in the future, and can threaten to relocate their business elsewhere in Europe if their workers start acting up). In contrast, businesses in different countries will have diverging interests over rolling back protections against takeovers.

A shared interest in preserving the right to manage fails to ensure intra-class cohesion because one manager’s freedom to fend off unsolicited bids directly conflicts with another manager’s freedom to make hostile acquisitions. Under conditions of a non-level playing field, those already subject to domestic constraints on their freedom to defend themselves stand to gain from an EU-wide spread of their constraints because it increases their ability to make hostile acquisitions abroad. Those not subject to domestic constraints stand to lose the freedom to fend off unsolicited bids.

Or, put differently, increasing interpenetration does not necessarily result in increasing cross-national solidarity among capitalists. Investigating the circumstances under which capitalists join arm-in-arm across borders, and those under which they will continue to fight each other requires a different kind of analysis of interpenetration than the one Gindin and Panitch provide us with. Differences of interest across states and across economic interests within those states remain important, and sometimes become even more pronounced as a result of increased interpenetration.

Again, this isn’t to downplay Panitch and Gindin’s very substantial contribution to our understanding of how the international economy works today. I hope they take it as the compliment that I intend when I say that their book deserves an audience among non-Marxists as well as Marxists. Nor is it to deny Panitch and Gindin’s impressive command of a wide and varied literature. It is to say that there are important aspects of neoliberalism that their theory doesn’t capture very well, including some quite important variation in the take-up of different aspects of neoliberalism across different states. Better dialogue between Marxist and conventional IR approaches could have great benefit for the latter (especially if it pushes standard international political economy accounts to really pay attention to power relations). But it might have some benefit for the former too.

The Nationalist Roots of White Evangelical Politics. By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

The Nationalist Roots of White Evangelical Politics | Dissent Magazine

From its origins, white evangelicalism has been marked by a vision of a Christian America, driven to overcome its perceived enemies.

A T-shirt sold alongside Trump merchandise in 2019 (Gilbert Mercier/Flickr)

From its origins, white evangelicalism has been marked by a vision of a Christian America, driven to overcome its perceived enemies.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins ▪ Spring 2020

White evangelicals remain some of Donald Trump’s most steadfast supporters. Their strong support for the president in the last election—roughly 81 percent voted for him—puzzled many liberals; they found it hypocritical for evangelicals to support someone whose lifestyle so egregiously contradicts their puritanical moralism. But the group that seemed most surprised was the evangelical leadership.

Take Daniel Reid, former editor of InterVarsity Press, one of the major evangelical publishing houses: “How can Trump have gotten eighty-one percent? I don’t know a single person at InterVarsity who voted for Trump.” Mark Galli, the former editor-in-chief of Christianity Today—the flagship magazine of evangelical thought—echoed this sentiment last December in an editorial that called for Trump to be removed from office in light of the impeachment hearings. He and his colleagues had “done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view,” but no longer could. The problem with today’s evangelicals, said Galli in response to the negative reception of his editorial, is their “widespread ignorance” and “ethical naïveté.” Evangelical historian Thomas Kidd has even questioned their religious credentials: “I suspect that large numbers of these people who identify as ‘evangelicals’ are really just whites who watch Fox News and consider themselves religious.”

When they do acknowledge that a significant amount of support exists, evangelical intellectuals like Galli are drawn to cultural explanations for the reactionary white populist surge that they claim has only recently overtaken their movement. The faithful, so the argument goes, avoid extremes when they attend church regularly and adhere to orthodox theology. When these practices break down, chaos and crisis await.

The argument that the gospel can serve as a source of moderation in politics has a long tradition in religious thought. Had Catholic orthodoxy not been compromised by the medieval Church, the Reformation would have had little appeal. Had fin-de-siècle Europe not been swept over by a wave of secularization, workers would have continued to keep faith in paradise in another world, rather than putting their hopes in totalitarian regimes that promised paradise in this one.

White evangelicals, according to this perspective, have substituted the real truth of the gospels for an exclusionary religious nationalism. The absence of a deeper theological and spiritual foundation contributes to a sense of grievance and resentment. For Never Trump evangelicals, this cultural drift explains the wide gulf that separates evangelical Protestant theology from the rank-and-file’s political beliefs. The moral failings of churches, then, are distinct from their central theological doctrines. But it’s harder than evangelical intellectuals think to separate religious doctrine and history from the problems of contemporary racist nationalism on the right. As far back as the founding moment of the United States, the evangelical movement has depended on the nation-state for its survival. Its salvific mission is deeply connected to a theology of exclusionary Christian nationalism.

What is evangelicalism? While it can prove difficult to find a simple definition for a global movement involving scores of denominations and ethnic groups, scholars and religious leaders today most often point to the “Bebbington Quadrilateral,” named for historian David Bebbington. In his 1989 book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Bebbington laid out four core principles: 1. Conversionism, or the belief that lives need to be transformed through a “born-again” experience and a lifelong process of following Jesus; 2. Activism, which expresses the gospel through missionary and social reform efforts; 3. Biblicism—a high regard for and obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority; and 4. Crucicentrism, or a stress on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for the redemption of humanity.

While the Bebbington Quadrilateral has become the standard definition of evangelicalism, it offers little insight into why white evangelicals have been drawn to right-wing populism. The crisis in understanding only deepens when we learn that, according to some Pew polls, increased church attendance correlates with higher levels of support for Trump. Yet African-American evangelicals hold these exact same doctrinal beliefs and vote for the Democratic Party (as do many Latino evangelicals). This helps Never Trump evangelicals to avoid implicating theology, but it doesn’t help explain white evangelical support for the president. A historical approach to the relationship between doctrinal belief and political principle—political theology—can help make sense of these patterns.

Since Luther’s Reformation, the bulk of Protestantism has hedged its bets for survival on the goodwill of kings and nation-states. A threat to the nation, in turn, has often been viewed as a threaten to Protestantism itself. This is true of the history of Protestant evangelicalism, which has deep roots in U.S. history. From its origins, white evangelicalism has been marked by a vision of a Christian America, driven to overcome its perceived enemies. Seventeenth-century New England Puritans understood their wars against indigenous peoples “as a cosmic struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness,” argues sociologist Philip Gorski. “Bloody conquest and violent apocalypse—this has been the basic recipe for religious nationalism American-style ever since.” During the American Revolution, evangelical leaders who supported independence portrayed the war against the British as a struggle between God and Satan, or Moses and the Pharaoh; the Loyalists they branded as “infidels.” Through the Civil War, evangelicals in the South drew a connection between the holy American nation and racial hierarchy, appealing to the Bible to defend the institution of slavery. During Reconstruction, Southern white evangelicals remained completely silent on lynching and enforced segregation.

These connections between white supremacy and evangelical political theology found new expression in the 1970s. For decades now, evangelicals have railed against “big government” as a threat to religious freedom. The origin story of the religious right usually begins in 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade. But, as historian Randall Balmer has argued, it was the Civil Rights Act, not abortion, that provided the first push for Southern white evangelicals to mobilize as a cohesive political force. When the government moved to withdraw tax exempt status from segregated private schools, evangelicals opposed it by becoming a powerful voting bloc in the Republican Party. Many evangelicals have sought to suppress this history. Balmer, a longtime contributor to Christianity Today, stopped writing for the magazine after Galli—now celebrated for his anti-Trump stance—became editor. Galli, said Balmer, “didn’t appreciate the fact that I persisted in pointing out that the Religious Right was born not out of concern for abortion … but to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions.” In 1983 the Supreme Court ruled that discriminatory private schools were ineligible for federal tax exemptions. But while they may have lost that particular battle, the religious right succeeded in becoming a significant political force.

The religious right’s Faustian bargain with the GOP isn’t a new feature of the Trump era. It is a position taken for close to half a century, with the hope that the GOP would support this exclusionary political theology: the idea that the United States is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, with a Christian Constitution, whose enemies (internal and external) are enemies of Christ.

I grew up in an evangelical home, attended a multi-ethnic evangelical church, and graduated from an evangelical bible college and seminary. At my church, sermons and even church membership statements regularly emphasized racial reconciliation and diversity. Nevertheless, the idea of the United States being founded as a nation destined by God for salvific purposes, and threatened by atheists and secularists on all fronts, was still commonplace. This is a political theology propagated on Christian radio, Christian television, and through Christian fiction. In this narrative, the country is caught up in a cosmic struggle against the demonic forces at work in the secular world and the Democratic Party. Many, especially within the more Pentecostal strains of the movement, believe deeply that prayer can actually change the outcome of elections.

Although I have long since left this world, I wondered if Trump’s nomination would throw a wrench in the single-minded commitment to defeating Democrats, given the concern evangelicals expressed about Trump’s lifestyle during the primary. But because white evangelicals are the biggest supporters of the Republican Party, it ultimately came as little surprise that they threw their support behind him. What did surprise me is how quickly many evangelicals—including leading theologians such as Wayne Grudem—provided detailed theological defenses of Trump.

The most well-known argument, the so-called Cyrus defense, holds that just as God used the ruler of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, as a vessel to free Jews from the Babylonians, so can God use the ungodly Donald Trump as a vessel to free Christians from the captivity of a secular state. The conservative Supreme Court justices he appoints will overturn Roe v. Wade and protect Christian religious freedom from the LGBTQ movement. This is actually a longstanding Christian defense for ungodly political leaders, even used by German Christians who supported Hitler. Its emergence in the Trump era demonstrates how quickly evangelicals abandoned their apprehension to embrace a figure they believed could overcome their enemies.

The reach of this political theology extends worldwide. In recent years, white American evangelicalism has successfully been exported to places like Brazil and Bolivia, where evangelicals have become the chief political defenders of right-wing leaders such as President Jair Bolsonaro and Jeanine Áñez. The World Congress of Families, a U.S.-based evangelical organization designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has found an eager audience in post-Soviet Russia, where wealthy conservatives have joined forces to promote the traditional family and to slow or repeal legislation granting rights to LGBTQ people. Many evangelicals now see Putin as a defense against the decadence of secular Western culture.

Evangelical leaders have long been aware of the nationalism and racism present in their movement. They’ve ignored it, presumably because it is inconvenient and also because they never imagined someone like Trump would have a chance of being elected. But the Cyrus defense isn’t watertight. The hesitance about nominating Trump, which many evangelicals—not only the leadership—expressed during the Republican primary, suggests the seeds of a sense of responsibility that could lead to a rival political theology. We have ample evidence that scriptural reasoning can be integrated into a wide variety of political persuasions.

Part of the challenge, however, is that evangelicalism is a populist movement that transcends denominational lines and ethnicities. A theological reform movement would be difficult to realize given the movement’s diversity and fluidity. Unlike the Catholic Church, evangelicalism is not centralized, and there is no official membership statement, which is one reason it has proven so difficult, if not impossible, to define. Moreover, evangelical institutions of higher education, such as Wheaton College or Calvin University, and evangelical publishing houses, such as Eerdmans Publishing or Baker Books, are enclaves of the Never Trump evangelical intelligentsia; they are not representative of the populist backlash that marks so much of evangelicalism, and as such are out of touch with it. Randall Balmer has even called for Never Trump evangelicals to break from the movement entirely and start a new group that he calls Sojourners Christians.

Given this situation, perhaps the only hope for reform lies with the ethnic diversity of evangelicalism. There are indications that the number of African-American and Latino evangelicals will remain steady or increase, whereas the children of white evangelicals are defecting from the movement. In this diversity lies the possibility of a real historical reckoning. There is an urgent need for something like the New York Times’s “1619 Project” dedicated to the history of evangelicalism in this country—a project to unpack the racism, nationalism, and violence bound up in the structures of the largest and most politically influential religious group in the United States. Such an undertaking might not sway millions to reconsider their political theology overnight; but it could reveal whether evangelicalism can be reformed.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is the managing editor of Modern Intellectual History and postdoctoral fellow in the history department at Dartmouth College. He is writing a book for Yale University Press titled Religion and Human Rights in a Populist Age.

The Nationalist Roots of White Evangelical Politics | Dissent Magazine. By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

The Nationalist Roots of White Evangelical Politics | Dissent Magazine

From its origins, white evangelicalism has been marked by a vision of a Christian America, driven to overcome its perceived enemies.

A T-shirt sold alongside Trump merchandise in 2019 (Gilbert Mercier/Flickr)

From its origins, white evangelicalism has been marked by a vision of a Christian America, driven to overcome its perceived enemies.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins ▪ Spring 2020

White evangelicals remain some of Donald Trump’s most steadfast supporters. Their strong support for the president in the last election—roughly 81 percent voted for him—puzzled many liberals; they found it hypocritical for evangelicals to support someone whose lifestyle so egregiously contradicts their puritanical moralism. But the group that seemed most surprised was the evangelical leadership.

Take Daniel Reid, former editor of InterVarsity Press, one of the major evangelical publishing houses: “How can Trump have gotten eighty-one percent? I don’t know a single person at InterVarsity who voted for Trump.” Mark Galli, the former editor-in-chief of Christianity Today—the flagship magazine of evangelical thought—echoed this sentiment last December in an editorial that called for Trump to be removed from office in light of the impeachment hearings. He and his colleagues had “done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view,” but no longer could. The problem with today’s evangelicals, said Galli in response to the negative reception of his editorial, is their “widespread ignorance” and “ethical naïveté.” Evangelical historian Thomas Kidd has even questioned their religious credentials: “I suspect that large numbers of these people who identify as ‘evangelicals’ are really just whites who watch Fox News and consider themselves religious.”

When they do acknowledge that a significant amount of support exists, evangelical intellectuals like Galli are drawn to cultural explanations for the reactionary white populist surge that they claim has only recently overtaken their movement. The faithful, so the argument goes, avoid extremes when they attend church regularly and adhere to orthodox theology. When these practices break down, chaos and crisis await.

The argument that the gospel can serve as a source of moderation in politics has a long tradition in religious thought. Had Catholic orthodoxy not been compromised by the medieval Church, the Reformation would have had little appeal. Had fin-de-siècle Europe not been swept over by a wave of secularization, workers would have continued to keep faith in paradise in another world, rather than putting their hopes in totalitarian regimes that promised paradise in this one.

White evangelicals, according to this perspective, have substituted the real truth of the gospels for an exclusionary religious nationalism. The absence of a deeper theological and spiritual foundation contributes to a sense of grievance and resentment. For Never Trump evangelicals, this cultural drift explains the wide gulf that separates evangelical Protestant theology from the rank-and-file’s political beliefs. The moral failings of churches, then, are distinct from their central theological doctrines. But it’s harder than evangelical intellectuals think to separate religious doctrine and history from the problems of contemporary racist nationalism on the right. As far back as the founding moment of the United States, the evangelical movement has depended on the nation-state for its survival. Its salvific mission is deeply connected to a theology of exclusionary Christian nationalism.

What is evangelicalism? While it can prove difficult to find a simple definition for a global movement involving scores of denominations and ethnic groups, scholars and religious leaders today most often point to the “Bebbington Quadrilateral,” named for historian David Bebbington. In his 1989 book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Bebbington laid out four core principles: 1. Conversionism, or the belief that lives need to be transformed through a “born-again” experience and a lifelong process of following Jesus; 2. Activism, which expresses the gospel through missionary and social reform efforts; 3. Biblicism—a high regard for and obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority; and 4. Crucicentrism, or a stress on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for the redemption of humanity.

While the Bebbington Quadrilateral has become the standard definition of evangelicalism, it offers little insight into why white evangelicals have been drawn to right-wing populism. The crisis in understanding only deepens when we learn that, according to some Pew polls, increased church attendance correlates with higher levels of support for Trump. Yet African-American evangelicals hold these exact same doctrinal beliefs and vote for the Democratic Party (as do many Latino evangelicals). This helps Never Trump evangelicals to avoid implicating theology, but it doesn’t help explain white evangelical support for the president. A historical approach to the relationship between doctrinal belief and political principle—political theology—can help make sense of these patterns.

Since Luther’s Reformation, the bulk of Protestantism has hedged its bets for survival on the goodwill of kings and nation-states. A threat to the nation, in turn, has often been viewed as a threaten to Protestantism itself. This is true of the history of Protestant evangelicalism, which has deep roots in U.S. history. From its origins, white evangelicalism has been marked by a vision of a Christian America, driven to overcome its perceived enemies. Seventeenth-century New England Puritans understood their wars against indigenous peoples “as a cosmic struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness,” argues sociologist Philip Gorski. “Bloody conquest and violent apocalypse—this has been the basic recipe for religious nationalism American-style ever since.” During the American Revolution, evangelical leaders who supported independence portrayed the war against the British as a struggle between God and Satan, or Moses and the Pharaoh; the Loyalists they branded as “infidels.” Through the Civil War, evangelicals in the South drew a connection between the holy American nation and racial hierarchy, appealing to the Bible to defend the institution of slavery. During Reconstruction, Southern white evangelicals remained completely silent on lynching and enforced segregation.

These connections between white supremacy and evangelical political theology found new expression in the 1970s. For decades now, evangelicals have railed against “big government” as a threat to religious freedom. The origin story of the religious right usually begins in 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade. But, as historian Randall Balmer has argued, it was the Civil Rights Act, not abortion, that provided the first push for Southern white evangelicals to mobilize as a cohesive political force. When the government moved to withdraw tax exempt status from segregated private schools, evangelicals opposed it by becoming a powerful voting bloc in the Republican Party. Many evangelicals have sought to suppress this history. Balmer, a longtime contributor to Christianity Today, stopped writing for the magazine after Galli—now celebrated for his anti-Trump stance—became editor. Galli, said Balmer, “didn’t appreciate the fact that I persisted in pointing out that the Religious Right was born not out of concern for abortion … but to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions.” In 1983 the Supreme Court ruled that discriminatory private schools were ineligible for federal tax exemptions. But while they may have lost that particular battle, the religious right succeeded in becoming a significant political force.

The religious right’s Faustian bargain with the GOP isn’t a new feature of the Trump era. It is a position taken for close to half a century, with the hope that the GOP would support this exclusionary political theology: the idea that the United States is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, with a Christian Constitution, whose enemies (internal and external) are enemies of Christ.

I grew up in an evangelical home, attended a multi-ethnic evangelical church, and graduated from an evangelical bible college and seminary. At my church, sermons and even church membership statements regularly emphasized racial reconciliation and diversity. Nevertheless, the idea of the United States being founded as a nation destined by God for salvific purposes, and threatened by atheists and secularists on all fronts, was still commonplace. This is a political theology propagated on Christian radio, Christian television, and through Christian fiction. In this narrative, the country is caught up in a cosmic struggle against the demonic forces at work in the secular world and the Democratic Party. Many, especially within the more Pentecostal strains of the movement, believe deeply that prayer can actually change the outcome of elections.

Although I have long since left this world, I wondered if Trump’s nomination would throw a wrench in the single-minded commitment to defeating Democrats, given the concern evangelicals expressed about Trump’s lifestyle during the primary. But because white evangelicals are the biggest supporters of the Republican Party, it ultimately came as little surprise that they threw their support behind him. What did surprise me is how quickly many evangelicals—including leading theologians such as Wayne Grudem—provided detailed theological defenses of Trump.

The most well-known argument, the so-called Cyrus defense, holds that just as God used the ruler of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, as a vessel to free Jews from the Babylonians, so can God use the ungodly Donald Trump as a vessel to free Christians from the captivity of a secular state. The conservative Supreme Court justices he appoints will overturn Roe v. Wade and protect Christian religious freedom from the LGBTQ movement. This is actually a longstanding Christian defense for ungodly political leaders, even used by German Christians who supported Hitler. Its emergence in the Trump era demonstrates how quickly evangelicals abandoned their apprehension to embrace a figure they believed could overcome their enemies.

The reach of this political theology extends worldwide. In recent years, white American evangelicalism has successfully been exported to places like Brazil and Bolivia, where evangelicals have become the chief political defenders of right-wing leaders such as President Jair Bolsonaro and Jeanine Áñez. The World Congress of Families, a U.S.-based evangelical organization designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has found an eager audience in post-Soviet Russia, where wealthy conservatives have joined forces to promote the traditional family and to slow or repeal legislation granting rights to LGBTQ people. Many evangelicals now see Putin as a defense against the decadence of secular Western culture.

Evangelical leaders have long been aware of the nationalism and racism present in their movement. They’ve ignored it, presumably because it is inconvenient and also because they never imagined someone like Trump would have a chance of being elected. But the Cyrus defense isn’t watertight. The hesitance about nominating Trump, which many evangelicals—not only the leadership—expressed during the Republican primary, suggests the seeds of a sense of responsibility that could lead to a rival political theology. We have ample evidence that scriptural reasoning can be integrated into a wide variety of political persuasions.

Part of the challenge, however, is that evangelicalism is a populist movement that transcends denominational lines and ethnicities. A theological reform movement would be difficult to realize given the movement’s diversity and fluidity. Unlike the Catholic Church, evangelicalism is not centralized, and there is no official membership statement, which is one reason it has proven so difficult, if not impossible, to define. Moreover, evangelical institutions of higher education, such as Wheaton College or Calvin University, and evangelical publishing houses, such as Eerdmans Publishing or Baker Books, are enclaves of the Never Trump evangelical intelligentsia; they are not representative of the populist backlash that marks so much of evangelicalism, and as such are out of touch with it. Randall Balmer has even called for Never Trump evangelicals to break from the movement entirely and start a new group that he calls Sojourners Christians.

Given this situation, perhaps the only hope for reform lies with the ethnic diversity of evangelicalism. There are indications that the number of African-American and Latino evangelicals will remain steady or increase, whereas the children of white evangelicals are defecting from the movement. In this diversity lies the possibility of a real historical reckoning. There is an urgent need for something like the New York Times’s “1619 Project” dedicated to the history of evangelicalism in this country—a project to unpack the racism, nationalism, and violence bound up in the structures of the largest and most politically influential religious group in the United States. Such an undertaking might not sway millions to reconsider their political theology overnight; but it could reveal whether evangelicalism can be reformed.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is the managing editor of Modern Intellectual History and postdoctoral fellow in the history department at Dartmouth College. He is writing a book for Yale University Press titled Religion and Human Rights in a Populist Age.

Fintan O’Toole: Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands

Fintan O’Toole: Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands

2020 in review: Donald Trump will continue to unleash racism, nativism and a fear of government

Saturday, December 26, 2020

The big question to be answered about Donald Trump is why he did not do two things that might have seemed obvious: infrastructure and war. File photograph: Getty

 

“In my beginning”, wrote TS Eliot in Four Quartets, “is my end.” This, at least, can be said of Donald Trump: he will leave the White House as he entered it, strangely unaltered by four years as president.

His hairstyle has been toned down. His demeanour – malign, self-obsessed, reckless of truth and decency, revelling in the harm he has done and can still do to the norms and institutions of democracy – has not. 

This continuity is ominous. Trump was able to upend American politics before he was in office. There is every reason to think he will still be able to do so after he is replaced by Joe Biden on January 20th.

It is useful to go back to the period in 2016 when Trump was where his successor is now: the victor in the election but still not president. For it was in this interregnum that Trump took a single action that was scarcely noticed at the time but that, more than any other, defined his presidency.

That action had both the political destructiveness and the personal brutality that would become familiar as the primary weapons in Trump’s armoury. It consisted merely in ordering a load of ring-binders full of carefully compiled documents to be dumped. 

It was the day after Trump’s victory party, held of course in the garish Trump Tower in Manhattan. Chris Christie, who was still governor of New Jersey, a successful Republican in a heavily Democratic state, was the man with the 30 bulging binders.

In them was the transition plan, the crucial details of how a Trump administration was going to work, including shortlists of pre-vetted candidates for all the top jobs in the administration, as well as timetables for action on key policies and the drafts of the necessary executive orders.

It had taken a team of 140 people assembled under Christie’s chairmanship nearly six months to create the plan. 

Fired with immediate effect

When Christie arrived at Trump Tower, he was met by Trump’s then consigliere, Steve Bannon. Bannon told Christie that he was being fired with immediate effect “and we do not want you to be in the building anymore”. His painstaking work was literally trashed: “All thirty binders”, as Christie recalled in a self-pitying memoir, “were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again”.

With Trump, the personal and political could never be separated and both were equally at work here. The personal was silverback gorilla stuff, humiliating Christie was a sadistic pleasure and a declaration to established Republicans that Trump was the boss of them all now.

The political message was one that took longer to sink in. A transition plan implied some kind of basic institutional continuity, some respect for the norms of governance.

At the beginning, as at the end, the idea of an orderly transition of power was anathema to Trump.

Why? Because a timetable for action and a commitment to appoint, to the thousands of positions filled by the incoming president, people with expertise and experience, would constrain him. He was not going to be constrained.

Too many people did not get this. It is hard, after such a relentless barrage of outrage and weirdness over the last four years, to remember what the broad consensus about Trump was at the beginning of 2016.

It was that he wouldn’t be nearly as bad as he looked. To adapt the old saw about campaigning in poetry but governing in prose, he had campaigned in Gothic horror but he would surely govern in the realistic novel.

The sheer weight of the office would alter him. The “adults in the room” would keep him under control. He might be let out now and then to howl at the moon, but inside the White House he would be broken in as a house-trained conservative. The institutional superego would cage his rampant Id.

At worst, Trump would do nothing. He’d sit around eating cheeseburgers and making calls to Fox News, while the serious people got on with serious things.

All of this was to grossly underestimate Trump. He may have done plenty of the cheeseburgers and Fox News stuff. But he also kept his eye on the great strategic prize: the creation in the US of a vast and impassioned base for anti-democratic politics.

The big question to be answered about Trump is why he did not do two things that might have seemed obvious: infrastructure and war.

One of the things that was genuinely appealing about Trump in 2015 was that he said something that everyone knows but that American politicians avoid acknowledging because it is too downbeat.

This truth is that the infrastructure of the richest country in the world – the roads, railways, bridges, dams, tunnels – is woefully substandard. Trump said this and promised to fix it. Polls showed that two-thirds of voters approved.

Did not start a war

But he didn’t fix it. He presented a plan in 2018 for a relatively tiny $200 billion investment (supposedly to be supplemented by $1.5 trillion of private money). It went essentially nowhere.

The other thing he didn’t do is war. For all his belligerence and violently nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, Trump didn’t start a new war or escalate an existing one, which makes him unusual among modern presidents.

Arguably, these two things – building infrastructure and starting a military conflict – might just have got Trump re-elected. So why did he not do either of them?

His personal laziness is certainly one explanation: galvanising and directing such huge efforts is hard work.

But there is a deeper reason. Great building projects and military engagements validate the idea of government itself. Trump’s overwhelming instinct was to destroy that idea.

It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.

He left important leadership positions in government departments unfilled on a permanent basis, or filled them with scandalously unqualified cronies. He appointed people to head agencies to which they had been publicly hostile.

Beneath the psychodrama of Trump’s hourly outbursts, there was a duller but often more meaningful agenda: taking a blowtorch to regulation, especially, but by no means exclusively, in relation to the environment.

This right-wing anarchism extended, of course, to global governance: the trashing of international agreements, withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, sucking up to the leaders of mafia states, and open contempt for female leaders like Angela Merkel and Theresa May. 

With this discrediting of democratic governance, it is not just that we cannot disentangle the personal motives from the political ones. It is that the replacement of political institutions by personal rule was precisely the point.

Trump’s aim, in the presidency as in his previous life, was always simple: to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted. That required the transformation of elective office into the relationship of a capricious ruler to his sycophantic courtiers.

In this nexus, the madder the better. Power is proven, not when the sycophants have to obey reasonable commands, but when they have to follow and justify the craziest orders.

Wild swings of position

There is no fun in getting your minions to agree that black is black. The sadist’s pleasure lies in getting them to attest that black is white. The “alternative facts” that Trump’s enabler Kellyanne Conway laid down at the very beginning of his administration are not just about permission to lie. They’re about the erotic gratification of making other people lie absurdly, foolishly, repeatedly.

Trump’s wild swings of position were all about this delight in the command performance of utter obedience.

To take just the most outlandish example, Kim Jong-un could be transformed from the Little Rocket Man on whom Trump would unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” to “Chairman Kim” with whom, in his own words, he “fell in love”.

His followers, like old Stalinists desperately tacking to the shifting winds of the Moscow line, agreed that Trump’s opposites were equally brilliant.

The price of this form of power is the undermining of any form of democratic deliberation. Democracy is not just about voting – it is a system for the rational articulation of ideas about the public good. Trump set out to lay waste to that whole system, from the bottom up, poisoning the groundwaters of respect for evidence, argument and rationality that keeps it alive.

The power of his instinct was that he knew how to tap into a hatred of government that has been barely below the surface of American culture since before the foundation of the US.

Votes for autocracy

That instinct proved sufficiently well attuned that he got nearly 75 million votes in November, even while his malign incompetence was killing his own people. He got those votes, moreover, having made it abundantly clear that he would never accept the result of the election unless he won. They were votes for open autocracy.

This is his legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.

In this end is his new beginning. Stripped of direct power, he will face enormous legal and financial jeopardy. He will have every reason to keep drawing on his greatest asset: his ability to unleash the demons that have always haunted the American experiment – racism, nativism, fear of “the government”.

Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands. It is, for him, not goodbye but hasta la vista. Instead of waving him off, those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his heart.

How to be less full of shit. By Matthew Yglesias

How to be less full of shit

Hey folks, hope everyone had a Merry Christmas.

I realize that in the future I should probably be explicit about holidays and days off. So, for the record, there won’t be a New Year’s Day edition of the newsletter.

This hasn’t been the typical slow news week at the end of the year, but I’m not sure I really have a ton to add to the coverage of the Covid relief bill standoff. The bill is good, a bigger bill would be better, and the president is an immature jackass. I’m glad he signed it, though, which will be good for Americans in need and also open up space for some of the normal year-end reflections.

In terms of my personal growth, I think the most important book I read in 2020 was Philip Tetlock’s Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, which came out five years ago. I’d read his earlier book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? and liked it a lot, but somehow the title of Superforecasting turned me off of reading it when it first came out.

But it’s a really good book.

It’s got a lot to say about the people who are good at predicting things, which turns out to be a somewhat complicated subject. But to me the most gripping and broadly relevant insight of the book is pretty simple, so simple in fact that once it was pointed out to me, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t always known it.

But it goes like this: people who are good at predicting things actually try to check whether or not their predictions are any good. It’s just like anything else in life. Unless you actually pay attention to what you’re doing, you won’t do it well. So how do you do that? Well, here’s how a disciplined predictor of things would behave:

If you’re inclined to offer a prediction, make sure to write it down. And be really specific about what you’re predicting.

And even though there’s necessarily going to be an air of false precision to it, give your prediction a numerical possibility. When you say “X” is going to happen, does that mean you’re saying it’s like a 99 percent near-certainty or a 51 percent more-likely-than-not.

Then go back periodically to check whether the things you predicted would happen did, in fact, happen.

The key thing is that “good predicting” doesn’t mean that everything you said would happen does in fact happen. Rather, good predicting means that if you predict 10 different things each with 70 percent confidence then 7 of them should happen. If all 10 happen, you’re being under-confident in your forecasts. If none of them happen, of course, your predictions are garbage.

I’m not particularly interested in trying to train myself to become a superforecaster. But this is interesting nonetheless because basically nobody does it.

Twitter is full of bullshit

I’ve been thinking about Tetlock’s book over the past couple of months as I witnessed a bunch of people worry that Trump was going to pull a coup, then some saying that his post-election antics were an attempted coup, while others dunk on the coup-worriers and say the whole thing was hysterical, and then others dunk on the dunkers for being more worried about democratic vigilance than Trump’s assaults on democracy.

Applying some Tetlock Thought to this whole discourse would have taken it in a very different direction:

First you define terms: “coup” is a colorful and not totally inappropriate term, but what we were discussing here was not a military seizure of power but a judicial effort to throw out absentee ballots and flip the election result.

Then you ask exactly what the prediction is. Ex ante there was some chance that Trump would just win the election. There was also some chance of a huge Biden landslide. The coup prediction was that conditional on neither of those being the case, there was some odds of the Trump Coup happening.

So then, what odds exactly? 90 percent chance of coup? 10 percent chance?

My strong sense is that a structured conversation along these lines would have led to a more restrained conversation in which almost everyone agreed that a Trump Coup was pretty unlikely but not so unlikely that one should dismiss all concern about it.

But nobody tried to engage in anything like that, because the people “predicting” things on Twitter are mostly just BSing. There’s a set of people who like to raise the alarm about GOP misconduct, and there’s another set of people who like to scold liberal hysterics.

I’ve been trying to discipline myself to actually say what I mean rather than toss off vague predictions — what’s true about this whole “stop the steal” mishegas is that the quantity of Republican Party politicians who’ve gone along with it is a disturbing portent, not that it ever seemed likely to succeed.

But that really is my main takeaway from the study of predictions: don’t predict so much stuff! Predictions are commonly used as one form or another of bad faith rhetorical device in punditry. People predict doom for politicians as a way of saying they don’t like them or predict failure of political tactics as a way of saying they don’t approve of them. Or they’ll issue dire prophecies of doom as a way of saying they want to get people more concerned. This encourages sloppy thinking. And its alarm-raising form is particularly harmful. If you think back to January 2020 it was perfectly reasonable to think the new virus in Wuhan wouldn’t become a global pandemic. But a 15 percent chance of a global pandemic is really bad! We need people to be able to discuss moderately improbable bad events without sounding like the boy who cried wolf.

Trying my hand at some predictions for 2021

The flip side of resolving to do fewer tossed-off predictions is that I did think it would be instructive to try my hand at some rigorous predicting. As I sat down to do this, I immediately got apprehensive.

I have no real experience with trying to do proper forecasting, so the odds are that my skill level is low. I kept thinking this list stands a good chance of turning out to be really embarrassing. But that’s actually the point. It feels potentially embarrassing because writing down explicit predictions with odds means I’ll be held accountable if I turn out to be wrong. Yet that’s the discipline — it’s only by doing something with accountability that you get the possibility of improving.

So here goes, 25 predictions for 2021:

Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races (60%)

The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia (95%)

Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating (70%)

Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% (60%)

US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century (80%)

The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent (80%)

The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent (80%)

Lakers win the NBA championship (25%)

Joe Biden ends the year as president (95%)

Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule (60%)

A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court (70%)

The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US (60%)

Substack will still be around (95%)

People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable (80%)

Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon (90%)

Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon (70%)

Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent (70%)

Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent (90%)

Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary (60%)

No federal tax increases are enacted (95%)

Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt (80%)

United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance (80%)

Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations (70%)

US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs (70%)

Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members (70%)

The basic picture, as I think you can see here, is that I think the economic situation in 2021 will be good, the Biden administration won’t have the congressional support needed to do much controversial stuff, and as a result, he’s going to be seen as a popular and successful leader. But the whole point of this is to make some specific predictions instead of that vague forecast.

We’ll check back in a year and see how I did.

Lessons from 2020 (that I can't yet prove). By Seth Masket

Lessons from 2020 (that I can't yet prove)

By Seth Masket

December 24, 2020

Mischiefs of Faction

An early attempt at campaigning while socially distant

The year 2020 threw a lot at us. While (hopefully) the year will remain a fairly unique one in our history, surely there are some useful political lessons we can draw from it. So what follows is an incomplete list of lessons we’ve learned that I’m pretty sure are true but can’t yet prove empirically.

1. Covid cost Trump the election

Given how close the election was in a number of swing states, any number of things could have plausibly changed the outcome. But Covid undoubtedly scrambled things a good deal. Trump was trailing Biden by roughly 4 points prior to the pandemic and by roughly 8 points by June. Assuming we can trust those numbers, a lot of Trump’s 4-point decline was probably the result of an uncontrolled and deadly virus, tens of thousands of deaths, and an economy that swiftly shifted from solid growth to deep recession. Honestly it’s stunning that such a dramatic shift in the country’s well-being would only hurt the incumbent by four points, but given how close presidential elections are these days, that’s plenty.

Relatedly, had Trump pushed for a Covid relief bill in the fall, instead of scuttling a deal in a steroid-induced stupor, that might have been enough to save his presidency. What's more, had Trump temporarily signed over presidential authority to Pence during the few days he was in the hospital being treated for Covid and more manic than usual, that deal might have gone through, and Trump might well have won reelection.

2. Biden was the right nominee for Democrats

Democrats were unusually obsessed with electability in the 2020 presidential nomination contest, and they came up with Joe Biden. One of the big problems with electability, of course, is that we never really get to test it; we can’t run the 2020 election again with Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. But from what little polling evidence we have from back during the nomination contest, Biden outperformed other Democratic candidates against Trump by just a hair, and he won states like Arizona and Georgia and Wisconsin by just that hair.

Sometimes you don’t need to go with the most electable candidate — it might be worth nominating someone closer to your desired policy preferences even if that shaves a little off their vote. But in 2020, it looks like Democrats didn’t have any vote margin to spare.

3. BLM protests made a huge difference in policy, less so in the election

The protests that erupted all across the country in large cities and small towns following the killing of George Floyd at the end of May drew enormous attention and fundamentally changed how Americans talked about race and policing. We also saw a number of cities and states make substantive changes in how policing is conducted, changing liability laws, outlawing some deadly police tactics, and more. It’s difficult to directly demonstrate that the protests themselves caused these policy changes, rather than them occurring as a response to Floyd’s killing, but it’s plausible.

My impression is that the Black Lives Matter movement made significant changes in the way policing is done, although probably had less of an impact on the election than many expected, as attitudes toward the protests polarized in a predictably partisan way fairly quickly. Yet the movement showed a lot of strength and will likely exert considerably more influence over the Democratic Party and the Biden administration than it likely would have if the protests of this past summer hadn’t occurred.

4. Trump is an underperformer

Trump’s effect on elections is tricky. He seems to have a particular knack for boosting turnout among Republican leaners who don’t always show up to vote. But he underperformed economic forecast models in 2016, and was far less popular during his first three years than an incumbent should be who presides over strong economic growth, low unemployment, and relative peace abroad. It’s really hard to decide what the “fundamentals” were in 2020: the economy was on a rollercoaster, GDP and disposable income moved in opposite directions for a while, and the pandemic was functionally unprecedented in a presidential election year.

But Trump has a knack for alienating people he doesn’t need to alienate. His racism, sexism, pettiness, and generally unorthodox style of speaking, tweeting, and governing may excite a substantial chunk of the electorate, but it likely mobilizes even more people against him. American voters have a broad range of indifference about the personalities and behavior of their leaders, and will generally reward the party in power or punish it based on the conditions of the country and those in their own lives. But Trump operates outside that range, which is part of the reason he lost, despite a huge Electoral College bias in his favor, even while Republicans in Congress and state legislatures had a pretty decent election.

5. Covid cut short the Democratic nomination contest

Joe Biden was already the likely Democratic presidential nominee after Super Tuesday in early March. But Bernie Sanders was in a position to run the sort of campaign he ran in 2016 — a long insurgency unlikely to succeed but able to draw attention to him and the policies he cared about. It didn’t happen. Sanders and Biden debated in mid-March, Sanders turned in steadily weaker numbers in later primaries and caucuses as Covid cases increased, and he withdrew in early April. Why?

At least part of this is likely because of the legacy of 2016; Sanders didn’t want to be perceived as having divided the party costing it two elections in a row. But also, the pandemic changed his political calculations. It was no longer possible to hold large rallies, which are Sanders’ lifeblood. It also wasn’t at all clear what a Democratic convention might look like, which made any chance he had at influencing the party and its nomination even more murky. What’s more, a continued campaign was dangerous, not only to his supporters, but also to Sanders, who’d suffered a heart attack just a few months earlier. Covid may have helped unify the Democratic Party and avoid a similar spectacle to 2016.

Hopefully we'll get some more evidence on these questions in the year to come. In the meantime, here's wishing you all a happy and healthy new year.