Miscellany Central: May 2021

Friday, May 28, 2021

Free markets are creating a major free speech problem

Integration with China was supposed to spread our values; it's done the opposite

Matthew Yglesias

May 28

Comment

(Wang Gang/VCG via Getty Images)

Former wrestler John Cena has apparently been learning Mandarin Chinese for years, which led to him giving a Chinese-language promotional interview to a Taiwanese television station for the forthcoming movie “Fast & Furious 9.”

Due to, I believe, the circumstances of the pandemic, F9 was released in certain East Asian markets weeks before its scheduled arrival in the United States. So doing the Taiwanese promotion was important, and Cena told TVBS that “Taiwan is the first country that can watch F9.”

It’s of course an important point of the delicate international situation that Taiwan is technically not a country but rather a part of China that happens to be governed by a totally different government than the government of the rest of China. And if, I dunno, the Secretary of State slipped up and referred to Taiwan as a “country,” you might well expect him to apologize and clarify that he’s not trying to start any wars. But when normal people are speaking, you know, it’s a country.

But not according to Cena, who ended up doing a groveling apology video.

Twitter avatar for @tony_zy

Tony Lin 林東尼

@tony_zy

Per popular request, here's Mr. John Cena's apology video with English subtitles. I kept all the incoherence in the video, as well as the curious absence of what he's actually apologizing for Image

May 25th 2021

108 Retweets315 Likes

I am not into hawkish foreign policy and I don’t want to see a new Cold War with China. I don’t want to see the military budget go up, and I really don’t want to see a resurgence of proxy wars in poor countries the way we had in the original Cold War. Indeed, I would even hope that despite the very serious differences in our political systems that the U.S. and Chinese governments can find ways to better collaborate in the future on problems like climate change and pandemic control that inherently have international aspects.

That being said, it seems really clear at this point that the original premise of U.S.-Chinese economic integration got one important point backward. Rather than trade and development allowing for some spread of American liberal norms into China, it is doing the reverse, and western multinationals’ commercial interests in China are inducing them to impose Chinese speech norms on the West. And we ought to try to do something about it.

Global integration — the God that failed

One of the last pieces of legislation that Bill Clinton signed during his term of office was a bill establishing Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China and paving the way for China’s integration into the World Trade Organization.

On a basic economic level, this gave American companies more confidence that China-based supply chains would endure for the longer term so they could make money by doing more business there. I think it’s fair to say that most policymakers at the time underestimated how big of a deal this would be in practice because American tariffs were already very low. Some of the people who were involved in negotiating the deal at a high level also tell me that they specifically worked to ensure that the next administration would have policy levers to slow the tide of Chinese imports if things proved too disruptive, but the Bush administration simply chose not to use them.

Either way though, in directional terms, the opening of normal trade to China achieved its main economic goals — Americans got a bunch of cheaper stuff from China, and American companies made money selling things to Chinese people.

But at the signing ceremony in October 2000, then-Speaker Dennis Hastert said the deal was about more than money: “you know what — we open it up so that we can exchange ideas and values and culture. And that's an important thing.”

Clinton laid out this argument at greater length during his remarks:

Of course, opening trade with China will not, in and of itself, lead China to make all the choices we believe it should. But clearly, the more China opens it markets, the more it unleashes the power of economic freedom, the more likely it will be to more fully liberate the human potential of its people. As tariffs fall, competition will rise, speeding the demise of huge state enterprises. Private firms will take their place, and reduce the role of government in people's daily lives. Open markets will accelerate the information revolution in China, giving more people more access to more sources of knowledge. That will strengthen those in China who fight for decent labor standards, a cleaner environment, human rights and the rule of law.

This idea that trade, development, and democratization would all move together was always controversial. But from what I can remember of the debates at the time, even the sharpest critics of trade with China underestimated exactly how wrong Clinton would be about this.

For starters, it proved much easier on a technical level to censor the internet than I think non-technical people realized 20 to 25 years ago. But what’s worse is that modern technology, especially since the growth of the smartphone industry, is basically a huge surveillance machine. In the west, that machine is basically used for targeted advertising, which can sometimes feel “creepy” but that I don’t think has a ton of real downsides. But in the People’s Republic of China, it’s been used to craft a more intrusive authoritarian state than the worst dictators of the 20th century could have dreamed of.

But here’s what’s worst of all: not only is the internet failing to smuggle free speech into China, Western companies’ desire to make money is smuggling unfree speech out of China.

There are no Chinese movie villains

International intrigue is a common cinematic plot device. There are lots of movies about spies and assassins and terrorists attacking the White House and all sorts of other things. One would expect that just in the ordinary course of such matters, someone would make a movie where the bad guy is an agent of the Chinese government. After all, I assume that in the real world, the U.S. and Chinese intelligence agencies tussle here and there doing whatever the boring real-world equivalent of cool movie spying is.

For a while, the general understanding about this was basically that the PRC would not let you show your movie in China if it made them mad, so film studios told the stewards of big tentpole films and franchises to not do stuff that would cut them off from the China market.

That’s kind of lame, but it also seems to fall within the scope of pretty normal business operations. But last year, Ben Smith reported that Apple’s formal guidelines for original Apple TV+ content include that you cannot portray China in a negative light:

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for internet software and services, who has been at the company since 1989, has told partners that “the two things we will never do are hard-core nudity and China,” one creative figure who has worked with Apple told me. (BuzzFeed News first reported last year that Mr. Cue had instructed creators to “avoid portraying China in a poor light.”)

And Smith says that Disney+ has essentially the same policy:

So far, Apple TV+ is the only streaming studio to bluntly explain its corporate red lines to creators — though Disney, with its giant theme park business in China, shares Apple’s allergy to antagonizing China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

What’s disturbing about this is that while “you can’t sell this particular movie in China” certainly hurts that movie’s marketing prospects, it’s not like it’s impossible to make a profitable film or TV series without selling it to China. It’s one thing to say “look, we’re so invested in the James Bond franchise that we don’t want to lose any opportunities to market it.” It’s another thing entirely to say “we are categorically going to refuse to make anything that antagonizes the Chinese government.”

The implication is that Chinese pressure has stepped up. That they’re not just telling Disney that if they make a movie the PRC disapproves of then that movie won’t air in China, but that they will retaliate against Disney’s overall business interests. Of course on some level, we can’t really know what’s going on inside these companies or in their conversations with Chinese leaders. But some things that we can see are disturbing.

China is extending its reach

The incident that shocked me was when Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey tweeted in solidarity with Hong Kong and turned the NBA upside down.

One striking thing about this, to me, is that Morey was writing in English on a platform that is illegal in China. Obviously, the Chinese government would get mad if American athletes tried to use their platform in China to communicate anti-regime messages to Chinese people. And while Americans don’t need to be happy about PRC efforts to curtail our communications with Chinese people, to an extent, that’s just life. But what got the NBA in hot water with China, and thus Morey in hot water with the NBA, was communicating in English to other Americans about China.

This has, in turn, provoked a big conservative hue and cry every time LeBron James or another NBA player speaks out about a social justice issue in the United States — “why won’t you speak up for the Uighurs?”

As a critique of James, I don’t think that makes sense. The reason NBA players don’t criticize China is that the owner of the Rockets, Tilman Fertitta, threw Morey under the bus when China retaliated for Morey’s tweet against Fertitta’s business interests. But as a critique of the NBA as an institution, it makes a lot of sense. Not in the lib-owning sense that they ought to shut up about domestic social justice issues, but in the sense that Uighur Lives Matter and it sucks that the NBA’s commercial interests in China have created a situation where league personnel cannot say things, in English, to other Americans, about human rights issues in China.

A lesser-noted but very telling incident occurred in 2018 when Mercedes-Benz quoted the Dalai Lama on its Instagram account only to be forced into a groveling apology.

Twitter avatar for @julian_quincey

Julian

@julian_quincey

Mercedes-Benz apologise to China for quoting Dalai Lama on social media, thus viewing things from only one angle and becoming less open.

goo.gl/RHx5Ar

Image

February 6th 2018

9 Retweets24 Likes

What’s striking here, again, is that it’s not like Mercedes was smuggling anti-regime propaganda into China. All of Instagram is banned in China.

This again is to say that the PRC is not just censoring content in China. They are censoring content in the West. And it’s not clear what the limiting principle is.

This slope could keep slipping

Morey’s Tweets, the Mercedes Instagram account, and John Cena’s promotional interviews are kind of trivial.

But Disney doesn’t just make movies, they own ABC, and ABC has a news channel. NBC Universal puts out movies and wants access to the China market, but they also run MSNBC and NBC News. CNN is owned by the same conglomerate as HBO and the Discovery channel. So far, all these news stations still run critical reporting about China, and good for them.

Obviously, one reason it’s relatively easy to bring a sports league to heel on this sort of thing is that providing rigorous, objective information about the situation in Hong Kong is very far from the NBA’s core competency. I don’t think Mercedes should apologize for quoting the Dalai Lama, but it was also a kind of odd thing for them to do — it’s a luxury car brand. By contrast, news stations need to report the news and a lot of the news about China is not flattering. So they stand much stronger there. But for how long? These are for-profit business enterprises. China seems to be expanding the aggressiveness with which it pushes the envelope. And at the end of the day, the ability to show Marvel movies in China means a lot more to Disney’s bottom line than the editorial integrity of ABC News.

I also worry a lot about Apple in this regard. Privacy features on smartphones are very much at the core of Apple’s business. And as the New York Times has revealed in some brilliant reporting, Apple ultimately decided to completely sell out on this — with the selling out thus far limited to their Chinese customers.

But Apple has also become a significant player in media, not just with Apple TV+, but with podcasting and the Apple News app. And while Apple News is a pretty big deal in news, it’s just not that big of a deal to Apple.

John Gruber had a thoughtful post on the China/privacy issue that closed with the observation that it’s disingenuous to argue that Apple should have refused to comply without “acknowledging that Chinese iCloud users would not benefit in any way by Apple pulling out of the country.” And I do agree with that. But what I think we saw with the movie studios and the NBA is that the compromises ultimately don’t stop there. You start by saying “look, it’s not like refusing to comply with Chinese censorship would help the Chinese audience” and next thing you know you’re apologizing for stuff you said on Taiwanese television or tweeted in English or posted on Instagram. Gruber also notes that totally separate from sales to China, “the elephant in the room is Apple’s reliance on Chinese manufacturing,” which raises the question of whether Apple really could pull out of the China market without suffering crippling retaliation against its supply chain.

That strikes me as something of a mutually assured destruction situation where neither Tim Cook nor Xi Jinping really wants to find out what happens if China threatens to shut Apple’s manufacturing down.

My main point about this is just that if we know Apple is willing to compromise on the core privacy features of its core device business for the sake of its relationship with the PRC, we should be moderately skeptical that they will forever stand firm against pressure to muck with Apple News — just as we should be skeptical about the long-term integrity of news products whose owners already compromise free expression in their entertainment products.

Nothing is changing

There’s a feeling in D.C. that there’s a new, post-Trump China hawk consensus in town.

But I would note that as is often the case with bipartisan consensuses, this tends to reflect narrow interest group politics rather than a real sense of the national interest. The total failure of the post-9/11 counterinsurgency fad could be a big threat to the defense sector’s desire to earn gobs of revenue, and the new China hawk consensus solves that problem. From here on out, any military agency that wants money just needs to talk about the China threat rather than the terrorism threat and the gates are open.

China has also become a useful bugbear in trade politics. A lot of Trump’s protectionist measures had an anti-China focus, and Biden has basically kept them all in place.

People with short memories often see this as Biden adopting Trump’s view, but I think it’s more accurate to say that Trump adopted the longstanding view of congressional Democrats, most of whom voted against NAFTA, against PNTR with China, and against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But critically, protectionist politics are not genuinely anti-Chinese. The TPP was supposed to be, among other things, a U.S.-centric trade bloc that deliberately excluded China. And Trump put tariffs on certain exports from Taiwan, which is the opposite of getting tough on China. Biden has kept those tariffs in place, though, because they are general protectionist politics and have nothing to do with China.

That’s all great if you’re trying to sell military equipment or you own a steel plant and want to charge higher prices. But Cena’s climbdown shows that the rash of stories from 2019 where luxury brands apologized for selling a t-shirt that listed Taiwan as a separate country from China haven’t actually changed anything. When the video game company Activision Blizzard punished a pro player for speaking out on behalf of Hong Kong, they were roundly condemned, but nothing actually happened.

Rather than fixing the 2019-era issues, China seems to have successfully entrenched a new norm where multinational corporations and most celebrities know to preemptively self-censor. These apology stories are a bad look for everyone, so it’s just overall better to know to steer clear of offending China — if you do that, then you never need to apologize, and you don’t take the crap in the U.S. for having done so.

Normal citizens should worry

I normally agree with Richard Hanania about foreign policy issues. But when Josh Hawley sent out a press release about Cena, Hanania characterized it as a topic that “affects basically nobody in America except rich athletes and entertainers wanting access to a large market so they can be even more rich and famous.”

To me, the problem here is characterizing this as a purely optional thing on the part of entertainers.

Could Cena have really said no to the demand to apologize, or would he have found himself permanently blacklisted? One big problem here is that many of the key actors are just publicly traded companies. Comcast — in the conventional American understanding — has an obligation to maximize profits, which means not letting Universal Pictures take moral stands that cost its movies the Chinese market, which means not hiring actors who take moral stands. And all the other movie studios are in the same boat.

Two things follow from that. One is that just because you’re a rich actor who could easily get by with less money doesn’t mean the option to make a bit less money and retain your principles is actually on the table. The real choice may be to give up your entire livelihood.

The other thing is that, of course, lots of people who currently or aspirationally work in the movie business aren’t famous. So far, we don’t know about China monitoring the Twitter feeds of obscure actors and complaining about random things they’ve said. But nothing is stopping them from doing that. And this, after all, is the big miscalculation we made about globalization, information technology, and authoritarianism. Digital technology makes it easier than ever to monitor what people are saying.

Today, Mercedes apologizes for quoting the Dalai Lama in an Instagram post. But suppose the person who made that post put it up on her personal Instagram account. Would China complain to Mercedes about that? Smith caught Apple with a formal policy of no China content on Apple TV+, but while I assume Apple doesn’t have a formal rule against an Apple executive saying “ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang is bad,” clearly none of them will or would say it. So how far down the line does that go? The nature of chilling effects is that you don’t want to find out. Probably the manager of the Apple Store in San Antonio could post a “Taiwan is a country” meme on Instagram without fear of anything bad happening. But do you want to risk that?

High-level executives, famous actors, and rich athletes are the most likely to be noticed and get in trouble. But the things that happen to famous and privileged people send a signal to the rest of society, and I think Hawley is basically correct to see this as a troubling trend. But it needs a solution.

Polarization will end us

My problem with Hawley’s release is that instead of talking about some kind of idea to break the collective action problem that has led Hollywood to this point, his statement says “Joe Biden, ‘The Squad,’ and the rest of the Democrat Party has made a point to bow down to the Chinese Communist Party at every turn.”

This is simply false.

Here on April 6, 2020, for example, Ilhan Omar led a congressional letter to American CEOs demanding that they do more to separate themselves from the use of forced labor in China. Her co-signatories include Reps. Rashida Tlaib, James McGovern, Andy Levin, Jan Schakowsky, and Jamie Raskin — all Democrats. Legislation aiming to impose U.S. sanctions on top Chinese officials associated with human rights abuses against Uighurs passed the House 431-1 later that spring over mild objections from the Trump administration.

The problem we are having with China is not that Democrats are bad or that Republicans are bad, but that the kind of measures Congress has been willing to contemplate have very low efficacy. Beyond that, it is moderately challenging to think of policy measures that have high efficacy and acceptable costs.

To get there, legislators are going to need to try to actually address the issue and not just use it to lob tomatoes at each other or call various people hypocrites. The fact is that all the bad stuff that’s happening with regard to China and speech flows very naturally from the basic logic of capitalism. If you let factories dump toxic waste into the water to save money, then companies that do that will gain market share, and managers who refuse to do it will be booted by activist shareholders. Disney and Apple and Comcast and Mercedes and Versace and Activision are all doing what they are supposed to do given the current trade and regulatory policies, and the situation will keep getting worse unless the policies change.

So what should we do? A boring but earnest place to start would be with some good old-fashioned congressional hearings. What guarantees can executives give us that the compromises they’ve made on entertainment products won’t extend to the news? And what guarantees about entertainment have they given to the Chinese government? I think ultimately, members of Congress should make the point that the downside of television news coming under the control of Chinese censors for the American people is extremely large, while the upside of U.S.-based conglomerates gaining access to the lucrative Chinese box office is modest. So even if the censorship risk is low, the cost-benefit isn’t there, and unless the companies can offer very clear guarantees, we should look at passing laws that would break up these conglomerates.

Of course, a single round of hearings isn’t going to fix things here. But defining problems is an important part of solving them. And that, to me, starts with a bipartisan acknowledgment that something has gone awry here. And that what has gone awry does not reflect individual weakness of will but the unintended consequences of a bipartisan change in China policy that happened over 20 years ago.

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The Biden Administration's Demographic Diversity Is Where the New Progressivism Meets the Old Democratic Party

THURSDAY, MAY 27, 2021

History was made on Wednesday when the daily White House briefing was delivered by Karine Jean-Pierre, the chief deputy press secretary, filling for press secretary Jen Psaki. The briefing itself was not unusually newsworthy. But Jean-Pierre was the first openly gay or lesbian person ever to fill the role, and the first Black woman to do so in three decades. The Biden administration proudly publicized this milestone, which attracted significant media notice including a post-briefing televised interview with Jean-Pierre by MSNBC's Joy Reid.

The White House's enthusiastic promotion of Jean-Pierre's turn at the briefing podium fits a larger pattern. Biden and his team have been especially devoted to presenting themselves as commited to increasing demographic diversity in government. This theme dates back to the 2020 campaign; Biden promised to choose a female vice presidential nominee near the end of the Democratic primaries and ultimately signaled, prior to the selection of Kamala Harris, that he would probably name a woman of color as his running mate. Since then, Biden has claimed credit for unprecedented aggregate representation of women and racial minorities in senior administration positions, as well as a long list of individual history-making appointments: the first-ever female treasury secretary and director of national intelligence; the first-ever Black secretary of defense; the first-ever Native American and openly gay Cabinet members; the first-ever transgender sub-Cabinet appointee; the first-ever all-female White House communications team. (Biden has also promised to name the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, but an opportunity has yet to arise.)

This emphasis can be seen as attempting to satisfy contemporary progressive activists' intense interest in categorizing individuals by social identity and judging the fitness of an organization by counting the members of historically disadvantaged groups within its ranks. But there's nothing new about a president, especially a Democratic president, working to ensure the visible representation of his party's major constituencies. Franklin Roosevelt was the first chief executive to appoint a woman to the Cabinet, and Lyndon Johnson the first to appoint a Black Cabinet secretary. Bill Clinton, hardly a left-wing purist, promised "a Cabinet that looks like America" during the 1992 campaign, and ultimately appointed the first-ever Asian-American secretary and the first women in history to serve as attorney general and secretary of state.

For Biden, attending to and publicizing the demographic composition of his administration can simultaneously accommodate the traditional organized interests of his party and appeal to ideological activists who increasingly prize social group diversity as a core political value. With narrow congressional majorities and the Senate filibuster presenting serious long-term obstacles to the administration's ambitious legislative agenda, Biden's appointment decisions may turn out to be an important way for him to satisfy the priorities of multiple blocs of supporters.

Of course, diversity in government can mean more than one thing. Biden's administration contains no top Republicans or independents, and the only member of his Cabinet whose educational credentials are limited to a single bachelor's degree is Marty Walsh, the secretary of labor. The dominant substantive ethos of the Biden presidency is a technocratic liberalism that appears to prevail across its senior personnel regardless of ethnic or gender identification. But this merely reflects the current state of the larger Democratic Party, where fundamental ideological divisions have eased over time even as the number of component social groups seeking representation only continues to grow.

When it comes to knowing U.S. history, we should all be ‘woke’

Washington Post

Opinion by

Michael Gerson

Columnist

May 28, 2021 at 4:16 a.m. GMT+9

Flags fly under the Gateway Arch near the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis in June 2018. (Matt Miller/For The Washington Post)

In the evangelical Christian tradition, you generally know when you’ve been “saved” or “converted.” It comes in a rush of spiritual relief. A burden feels lifted.

But how does one know if he or she has become “woke”? How does one respond to this altar call and accept this baptism?

It’s a question that came to mind as I read “The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States,” by Walter Johnson, a history professor at Harvard University. I grew up in St. Louis, in a placid, White, middle-class suburb. At school, I was inflicted with classes in Missouri history that emphasized the role of the region in the exploration and settlement of the American West. I visited the Museum of Westward Expansion in the base of the Gateway Arch, which glorified the sacrifices of American pioneers.

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“The Broken Heart of America” is a strong antidote to such lessons. In this telling, St. Louis was “the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness” and “the morning star of U.S. imperialism.” It was the military base of operations for the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the Upper Midwest. It was the home of vicious lynch mobs and racial redlining. “Beneath all the change,” Johnson argues, “an insistent racial capitalist cleansing — forced migrations and racial removal, reservations and segregated neighborhoods, genocidal wars, police violence and mass incarceration — is evident in the history of the city at the heart of American history.”

William Clark was not only an intrepid explorer, he was the author of treaties that removed more than 81,000 Indians from their homelands. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton was not just the populist voice of “the West,” he was the father of “settler colonialism” and an apologist for slavery. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — but merely a few days before he had ordered the execution of 38 Dakota men, which “remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States.” The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was a festival of white supremacy, in which the organizers “assembled living human beings in a zoo.”

And so on. My first reaction, honestly, was to bristle. Was every character in the American story a villain? Must one accept Marxist economic and social analysis to believe in social justice? Is every institution and achievement with injustice in its history fundamentally corrupt and worthless forevermore?

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It is my second thought, however, that has lingered. Historians such as Johnson might dwell on historical horrors and put them into narrow ideological narratives, but the events they recount are real. The U.S. government’s Indian wars were often conducted by sadists and psychopaths such as William S. Harney (who beat an enslaved woman named Hannah to death because he had lost his keys and blamed her for hiding them). A White lynch mob murdered a free Black man named Francis McIntosh in 1836, burning him alive while he begged his tormentors to shoot him. Over two days in 1917, a mob of Whites in East St. Louis murdered scores of their Black neighbors and destroyed hundreds of buildings, in a horrible preview of Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre.

And it’s true that white-supremacist ideology pervaded institutions and systems — labor policies, construction contracts, city planning, racist policing, the exclusion of Black children from public pools. Place names I know well — Ladue, Kirkwood, Webster Groves — were scenes of exclusion, oppression and petty cruelty.

How to process all this? If being “woke” means knowing the full story of your community and country, including the systemic racism that still shapes them, then every thinking adult should be. And books such as Johnson’s are a needed corrective to history as pious propaganda. But for a fuller explanation of what patriotism means in a flawed nation, there are more reliable guides.

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Frederick Douglass, for example, felt incandescent anger at the “hideous and revolting” hypocrisy of the free country where he was born into enslavement. He said in 1852: “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States. … The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense and your Christianity as a lie.”

For Douglass, however, this founding crime did not discredit American ideals; it demonstrated the need for their urgent and radical application. He insisted that the Constitution was “a glorious liberty document.” He drew encouragement from the “great principles" of the Declaration of Independence and the “genius of American institutions.” He challenged the country’s hypocrisy precisely because he took its founding principles so seriously.

How can you love a place while knowing the crimes that helped produce it? By relentlessly confronting hypocrisy and remaining “woke” to the transformational power of American ideals.

What is historic preservation for?

Utopia should look new

Matthew Yglesias

May 27

Comment

I have been a homeowner in the Logan Circle Historic District for years now, and I find complying with the rules to be financially costly, logistically annoying, and antithetical to the District of Columbia’s stated goals in terms of ecological sustainability and housing affordability.

Unfortunately, historic preservation policies are very miscellaneous — even the different historic districts around D.C. have different rules — so I always find it challenging to say anything rigorous about them in general.

Mostly, I think the idea that public policy should put an extremely high weight on avoiding changes to the external appearance of things is inherently toxic to the idea of progressive politics, which is about making things change for the better. The Star Trek vision of 2258 where the Golden Gate Bridge is covered in solar panels and Marin County is dotted with cool towers is the way forward.

So I was really excited when Aaron Carr, the founder and executive director of the Housing Rights Initiative, tweeted “Historic district advocates have long contended that neighborhood landmarking is a boon for affordability, but one thing you should know about this claim is that it is a lie. Here's a list of 29 studies that show that district landmarking increases the cost of housing.”

After all, the best kind of empirical evidence is empirical evidence that backs up a position you already strongly hold!

But I poked around at a couple of the studies and then had Marc go through a bunch more of them (thanks, Marc!), and what’s mostly happening is that Carr is doing a fun kind of discourse jiu-jitsu. Preservation advocates just really like old stuff, so they want to encourage states and cities to adopt preservation rules. And then to reassure developers and homeowners, they produce all these studies showing that historic districts raise real estate values. So now along comes Carr to say — “aha! historic districts are bad for affordability!”

It’s a good trick, but it actually raises an interesting question that is bigger and more profound than my specific quibbles with the historic district: Are high property values good? Here I think I want to agree with Carr that the politics of “adopt this regulation because it will enrich incumbent homeowners” is bad, while also maintaining that there is something to the normie homeowner view that you want to see the value of the property you own go up rather than down. And it all does sort of tie back to preservation!

Land and houses

My dad has a vacation house in Brooklin, Maine where I’ve gone for most of my life, so I sometimes look at real estate listings there. Here’s a non-coastal vacant lot for sale for $47,000.

If you buy that land and put a mobile home down on it, then you’ve got yourself a place to live. Now if you buy the land, and then buy the mobile home, and then immediately decide you want to flip the parcel, you will probably be able to sell the combined land-and-home for more than $47,000 because the home is worth something. But if you live in the mobile home for a year, that premium is going to decline. If you live there for five years, it will decline more. A mobile home is like a car or a table or a boat — it gets less valuable over time. The land underneath your mobile home, by contrast, might get more valuable. Today it’s pretty cheap because non-coastal land in rural Maine is generally cheap, even if it’s in a town that has lots of coastline and lots of expensive homes.

But suppose that changes. Maybe thanks to remote work, lots of people who own vacation houses in Brooklin start spending more of the year there, which has positive spillovers to the local economy and drives up the price of the inland plots, too. Well now the value of your land is going to rise, and you’ll be in luck.

The normal way to talk about this, though, is to say that “house prices in Brooklin went up.” That’s because most people — and certainly the kind of people who dominate policy conversations — buy houses that are bundled with land, rather than buying vacant lots and mobile homes.

But I don’t think that changes the fact that houses, considered physical objects, are always going down rather than up in value. I think about my house, which over the course of a few years of living here has needed to have its dryer replaced, has twice needed serious water damage repaired, has twice had to have holes that mice were creeping in through plugged, has once needed an HVAC system replaced, and has once needed to get some ducts redone. A house is a disaster of an investment — constantly breaking. When Redfin says the value of the house has gone up, what they mean is the value of the land underneath the house has gone up.

Old houses, preservation, and affordability

If you think of the price of a dwelling as essentially the joint cost of land and a house, then I think you can see where the idea of preserving old structures as boosting affordability comes from.

If you walk around my neighborhood, you will find some buildings like this one that are old, downscale-looking, and probably relatively affordable.

By contrast, a newer building like this is going to be more expensive.

These buildings are very close to each other so they should have the same land cost. But the new building is nicer, more valuable, and more expensive.

But the reason regulations prohibiting teardowns of old buildings don’t preserve affordability is that they can be purchased and renovated into upscale units.

Now what is true is that if you didn’t have just historic preservation rules but a total ban on residential investment, then the declining value of the structures would wholly or partially offset the rising value of the land and keep the units cheap.

But this would be a terrible housing affordability strategy — you’d essentially be deliberately trapping people in squalid conditions. In “Homelessness is About Housing,” I advocated in favor of re-legalizing old-fashioned rooming houses and Single Resident Occupancy buildings that were pretty squalid on the grounds that a squalid dwelling is better than being out on the streets. But mandatory squalidness is not a good idea.

So I don’t like preservation as an affordability strategy for that reason. But I am also not fully on board with Carr’s idea that low house prices are good, because land being super cheap can also be a form of squalidness.

High housing demand is good

Another affordability strategy for Logan Circle would be to dismiss our elementary school’s awesome principal and get rid of all the teachers, stop maintaining the parks in the neighborhood, close the Shaw Library, shut down the Green Line of the Metro, and tell the police to never patrol here and just respond to 9-1-1 calls.

After all, bad transportation, high crime, crummy schools, and all-around low-quality city services will absolutely make housing cheaper. But making housing more affordable by making a neighborhood a worse place to live is a terrible idea. Conversely, this paper claiming to show that a historic district policy in Kalamazoo, Michigan raised property values might just be showing that it made Kalamazoo a nicer place to live. I haven’t been to Kalamazoo and can’t speak to the situation there in detail, but it would be very unusual for a small midwestern city to be suffering from the kind of acute housing shortages that we see on the coasts or in Denver.

In general, trying to make Kalamazoo a place where more people want to live is a perfectly reasonable goal for Kalamazoo policymakers, and it is one that will necessarily push up land values.

But what has to happen when more people want to live in Kalamazoo is that you build more housing units. Depending on exactly how that new building is done, property values might go up or down. But for example, a law allowing homeowners to build accessory dwelling units on their property is clearly going to increase property values because the ADUs generate rental income. But it also ameliorates housing scarcity and improves affordability by increasing the supply of homes.

The right question to ask about historic preservation and affordability is “How is it impacting supply?” There’s an incredible variety of preservation policies out there and also a variety of local contexts.

What’s really troubling to me are situations like the one shown on the map above, where historic preservation is used as a kind of super-zoning. All of Ward 3 in Washington D.C. should be rezoned for more density, but they do normally allow dense development right by the Red Line metro stations. Yet here we have a low-slung strip mall (Sam’s Park & Shop) and a parking lot directly adjacent to the Cleveland Park Metro that cannot be redeveloped because it’s a historic strip mall.

Know what you’re trying to do

All that being said, I think it would be foolish to look at Sam’s Park & Shop and say that the problem there is preservation per se. The problem of Sam’s Park & Shop is that people in the neighborhood prefer to block new development, and the political system is designed to prioritize hyper-local desires for exclusion over other kinds of goals.

But as another example, we keep having various skirmishes at the Historic Preservation Review Board with regard to solar panels. Under pressure, they keep softening their opposition and no longer strictly prohibit front-facing panels. Nonetheless, this is what they’ve come up with:

The board went on to approve front-facing solar panels for Preister’s Takoma house. It didn’t come without a cost — Preister had revised his design to use a “solar skin” which will make the panels blend in more with the roof, but with a 10% increase in the price of the project and reduced efficiency, which gives him fewer of the solar credits that defray the cost of solar installations.

The preservation board still wants any future such front-facing solar installations to come before them at a hearing, at least for now. That’s because the board wasn’t yet ready to give a blanket approval for such things or let the preservation staff approve them.

The Board is being unreasonable here, but the problem is bigger than the Board. The city government needs to decide whether or not, all things considered, it wants to promote green energy. City officials say they want to promote green energy. City officials have even enacted several subsidy schemes designed to induce people to put solar panels on their houses. But if you actually go to do it, the preservation board may raise your costs by 10% while also reducing the amount of power your panels generate while also wasting tons of time by making you come to meetings.

That’s because the actual rules the city has on the books make “things should look old” into a trump card, at least when you’re talking about activities inside historic districts. Is that a good idea? If the mayor were to list her top five priorities for the city, would she tell you that “make things old-looking” is really high up there? I don’t think that she would. But the rules are what they are. Because my roof tilts backward, I was able to get rooftop solar panels approved without a problem, but when I wanted to install modern, energy-efficient windows, I was told I had to go with a more expensive, less-effective design that better copycats the look of old windows.

Again, do the city’s elected officials in fact believe it is more important to make things look old than to promote energy conservation? I’m skeptical. But that’s what the rule says.

And to me, that’s the fundamental off-the-rails nature of historic preservation policy in the United States — a failure to set goals and priorities. If you’re in Kalamazoo and you are trying to raise real estate values in hopes of attracting new inbound residential investment with some preservation scheme you believe will accomplish that, then knock yourself out. Or if your city has some particular old building that’s super cool and you want to spend public funds on saving it, then sure. But if your city has housing scarcity, then you need to repeal the rules that impede the construction of new units. And if you want to transform the energy system that undergirds our economy, then things are going to have to look different.

“New things are bad” is not a sound basis for making policy, and “new things should look like old things” is borderline absurd.

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The lines that keep getting crossed in international politics

Washington Post

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

May 25, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

What happened in Belarusian airspace over the weekend was bad. Russia’s reaction to it was worse.

A security dog checks the luggage of passengers in front of Ryanair Flight 4978, which was carrying opposition figure Roman Protasevich, in Minsk, Belarus, on Sunday. (Onliner By Handout/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

Image without a caption

Over the weekend Belarusian authorities diverted Ryanair Flight 4978 from Greece to Vilnius from its flight path with a fake bomb threat. The plane was closest to the Vilnius airport and standard operating procedure would have meant the plane would have landed there. Instead, Belarus forced the plane to land in Minsk. It did this with the assistance of a MiG-29 fighter jet designed to coerce the pilots into landing.

Once the Ryanair flight was on the ground, Belarusian authorities arrested Roman Protasevich, an opposition journalist, along with his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. All told, five people exited the plane in Minsk, with three of them likely agents of the Belarusian KGB. According to the BelTA state news agency, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko personally ordered the fighter escort that forced the commercial jet to land.

In the history of commercial air travel, there have been terrorist hijackings and the accidental shooting down of civilian planes by militaries. This — a recognized state using military force to ground a plane and then abduct a passenger — is something new and altogether unsettling. The chief executive of Ryanair eventually described the event as a “state-sponsored hijacking.”

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It was definitely illegal. Over at the Monkey Cage, Yuval Weber explains, “Belarus is a signatory to the 1971 Montreal Civil Aviation Convention and the 1988 Airport Protocol, which obliges it to suppress unlawful acts to civil aviation.” Weber also explains why this event does not compare to the 2013 grounding of Evo Morales’s plane. Social media attempts to make comparisons to that event do not really hold water:

After an inauspicious first start, European officials are now reacting negatively and vigorously. According to the New York Times, “The Lithuanian government called for Belarusian airspace to be closed to international flights in response to what it called a hijacking ‘by military force.’ ” My Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor has an excellent roundup of initial reactions. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also issued a strong condemnation.

If anything, however, the full implications of this incident are not completely appreciated. The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman explains:

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Belarus is a small country with a population of just under 10m. But this hijacking and kidnap by the Lukashenko regime sets a dangerous global precedent. It will be watched closely by much larger countries that also like to pursue their domestic enemies overseas — in particular Russia (which is Belarus’s closest ally), China and Iran.

Passengers flying from Europe to Asia will often have glanced at their flight maps and realised that they are crossing over Russia or Iran. What was once an interesting geographical observation may now be a cause for slight concern. If even tiny Belarus can demand that a plane divert to Minsk, what is to stop the Iranians from compelling a plane to land in Tehran, or the Russians from forcing a jet down over Siberia?

Russia is of particular interest for a variety of straightforward reasons. After Lukashenko’s grip on power was threatened, Russia was his security lifeline. Russia’s response to this action will be pivotal for any coordinated global response. Furthermore, anyone who has flown to Asia or the Middle East from North America is keenly aware that Russian airspace is usually involved. If the Russians approve of what Belarus did, it means they conceive of it as a possible course of action.

Unfortunately, initial Russian reactions are not encouraging on this front. According to my Post colleagues Michael Birnbaum and Isabelle Khurshudyan: “a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said that ‘what’s shocking is that the West calls the incident in the airspace of Belarus “shocking.” ’ ” They go on to note:

A number of Russian officials praised the move. Lawmaker Vyacheslav Lysakov wrote on his Telegram that it was a “brilliant special operation” by Belarus’s state security services. Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the government-funded TV channel RT, formerly Russia Today, said on Twitter that Lukashenko “performed beautifully,” adding that she is envious of Belarus.

If Russia supports Belarus on this, it will only be the latest incident in which Russia has demonstrated a willingness to violate long-standing norms of behavior in international politics. From its forcible seizure and annexation of Crimea to its targeted assassination campaigns in the United Kingdom, the pattern is clear. As Anne Applebaum noted in the Atlantic:

This is a story that belongs alongside the Russian use of radioactive poisons and nerve agents against enemies of the Kremlin in London and Salisbury, England; Saudi Arabia’s brutal murder of one of its citizens inside a consulate in Istanbul; Iranian assassinations of dissidents in the Netherlands and Turkey; and Beijing’s kidnapping and detention of Chinese nationals living abroad and foreign citizens of Chinese origin. The human-rights organization Freedom House calls these new practices “transnational repression,” and has compiled more than 600 examples.

All of these cases form part of what is becoming a new norm: Authoritarian states in pursuit of their enemies no longer feel the need to respect passports, borders, diplomatic customs, or—now—the rules of air-traffic control.

Putin will be meeting with Lukashenko next week in Sochi. I suspect he will provide Lukashenko his support. And yet another small piece of civilized norms will crumble into dust.

The GOP is going hog-wild in the states. If only Democrats in D.C. did the same.

Washington Post

Opinion by

Paul Waldman

Columnist

May 27, 2021 at 2:02 a.m. GMT+9

Ask any Republican in Washington and they’ll tell you they are standing amidst a rushing river of progressive policy changes, desperately trying to hold back the socialist onslaught emanating from the Biden administration and congressional Democrats.

But the truth is that the months since Biden took office and Democrats won total control of Congress has been characterized by a remarkable degree of restraint.

If you want to see what it looks like when a party really uses its power, you have to turn your gaze to the state level, particularly in a few places where Republicans have firm control of state government despite enjoying only tenuous majorities of support among the voters.

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Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas, where Republicans are right now engaged in a bacchanal of far-right legislating. Here’s some of what they’ve passed through one or both houses of the state legislature in recent days:

A bill allowing anyone over 21 without a felony record to carry a handgun, with no permit, background check, or training required.

A bill that bans abortions after 6 weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant.

A “trigger” bill that would ban nearly all abortions, including those resulting from rape and incest, if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

A bill that would require a voter initiative if a city with over 1 million residents (of which there are four in Texas, all run by Democrats) tried to reduce its police budget by even a single dollar; another bill would financially punish any city of over 250,000 that reduced its police budget.

A bill mandating that any school that is donated a sign reading “In God We Trust” must display it in “a conspicuous place in each building of the school.”

A bill forcing pro sports teams to play the national anthem at every game.

A bill aimed at banning schools from discussing critical race theory.

A bill forbidding cities from banning the use of natural gas in new construction.

A bill dictating how the state’s largest counties distribute their polling places, which would have the effect of reducing the number of polling places in many Democratic areas and increasing them in many Republican areas.

One of the most aggressive voter suppression bills seen anywhere this year.

I believe in Texas they refer to that as “going hog-wild.”

It’s not just Texas, either — this combination of purely symbolic right-wing legislation (mandating the national anthem be played) and bills that could have powerful practical effects (voter suppression, encouraging further gun proliferation) is being repeated in state after state.

And while it happens in states that won’t elect Democrats any time soon, often it’s places like Texas, Arizona, or Georgia — where Republicans are in charge but may not be for long — where legislators are passing bills to assure their base that they’ll make their state as inhospitable to liberals as possible. In many cases that means targeting liberal cities (every conservative state has a few) in an attempt to deprive them of the ability to make their own rules.

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You’ll struggle to find an analogy on the other side, cases where Democratic state legislatures have enacted a frenzy of extreme leftist legislation. The closest thing is what has happened in Virginia after Democrats took control of the legislature in 2019 — but in that case a change in power precipitated the legislative push, as the state party finally could act on pent-up policy demands.

Which raises the question: Why now? Why are Republicans in state legislatures so eager to push the limits in 2021?

One answer may lie in the nationalization of politics at every level. Now all politics is about the two parties and their contrasting visions, all the way down to the race for dog catcher.

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So a state Republican Party — especially in a state like Texas that is trending more Democratic — will decide that feeding the base red meat to keep them energized seems like the way to keep a hold on power, especially when Democrats are in charge at the federal level.

Now imagine if Democrats in Congress were that aggressive with their new power. President Biden would have triumphant ceremonies signing new laws that would expand abortion access, guarantee voting rights, create a public health insurance option, and much more.

But what laws has Biden actually signed? There has been one major piece of legislation, the covid relief bill. And some smaller bills — for instance, a bill that adds sesame to the list of major allergens for the purposes of food labeling. You may have missed that one.

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But all told, Biden has signed only 14 bills into law this year.

The biggest reason is of course the Senate filibuster. In the House, Democrats have passed some significant bills, including statehood for Washington, DC, and electoral reform, but without a change to the filibuster, the chances any will become law are somewhere between slim and none.

Yet most of those bills are quite popular — and in any case, they constitute the clear agenda with which Democrats won the White House and Congress.

In the states, Republicans are saying, “We’d better pass every last thing we’ve ever wanted.” But in Washington, many Democrats act as though the most important thing is to be cautious and not do too much. Maybe they should learn from those Republicans.

Many right-wing populists strut their manliness. Why does India’s Modi stress his softer side?

Washington Post

The Monkey Cage

By Amrita Basu

May 26, 2021 at 6:00 p.m. GMT+9

Not all populism is gendered in the same way

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a public rally on March 7 ahead of West Bengal state elections in Kolkata, India. (Bikas Das/AP)

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the aggressive masculine style of many populist leaders. Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump defended risky, macho behavior and characterized protective measures as effeminate and unmanly.

But as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrates, another style of populism is possible. Modi depicts himself him not as a man’s man, but as a modern saint. The differences between the public persona of Modi and other populist leaders tells us a lot about how populism can vary across countries — and how in this case it is rooted in the specifics of India’s history.

Some populist leaders have turned coarseness into a ‘style.’ Modi is different.

Gender norms are crucial to understanding both populism and politics more broadly. When populists appeal to the public, they can reinforce traditional gender norms — or, like Modi, they can subvert these norms.

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Many modern populists have built public images around aggressive maleness. For example, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte often employs violent misogynistic language, telling a group of former communist rebels to shoot female rebels in the genitals and linking his love of his people with his sexual prowess. When a female lawmaker accused Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro of rape, he responded that she was too ugly to rape, and he has said it would be better to be dead than gay. Russian President Vladimir Putin has joked publicly about raping women, boasted about his country’s prostitutes, and ridiculed menstruation. Former president Donald Trump bragged about groping women and boasted of his sexual prowess and purportedly high testosterone levels.

Unlike these populist strongmen, Modi has sometimes venerated femininity and women, drawing on his interpretation of Hindu values. Modi’s leadership style involves displaying feminine-identified traits such as selflessness, humility, and devotion. After his 2019 election campaign, he draped himself in a saffron robe and meditated overnight in a cave. He has made it clear that he prefers silence to bragging and that he is a vegetarian, teetotaler, celibate, and ascetic.

Sporting a flowing beard and long hair, Modi looks more like a sage than a politician. While other populists make homophobia and sexism into a selling point, Modi supports certain trans rights, albeit specifically for the Hindu trans community, and Muslim women’s rights, as a way to promote Hindu superiority over Muslims. He has depicted himself as favoring women’s empowerment, and condemned violence against women, female feticide and discrimination against girls.

This is a different style of populism

Feminist scholars have argued that norms about gender and about the division between public politics and private life are more fluid than we might think. This helps us to understand how Modi has sought and achieved intimacy with the masses. Instead of simple machismo, Modi looks to inspire trust by embodying both masculine and feminine attributes. He flaunts a 56-inch chest and claims to have a wrestler’s body, communicating his muscular approach to national security and ability to supposedly protect the Hindu majority from purportedly traitorous religious minorities. This helps him justify his unilateral decision-making and disdain for representative institutions. But Modi also implicitly aligns himself with women when he depicts himself as small, humble, insignificant, and a political outsider who is dedicated to the well-being of the nation.

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This gender-ambiguous identity means his political allies can describe him as “a god’s gift for India” and “a messiah for the poor,” while also allowing Modi to imply he is deferentially yielding power to the people when he wants to deflect responsibility for failed policies.

Modi is drawing on — and subverting — Gandhi’s approach to nationalism

Modi’s style shows that populists often draw on specific features of their national history and culture. In some societies, marriage and family are considered essential prerequisites for holding political office. In India, by contrast, marriage and family life are considered distractions from public service.

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Modi claims to be the heir to Mohandas Karamchand (“Mahatma”) Gandhi, the founder of modern Indian nationalism, despite their radically divergent views; for example, Gandhi abhorred violence against Muslims while Modi has encouraged it. He has learned from Gandhi’s androgynous style and opposition to untouchability. Modi’s public appeal draws on Gandhi’s fusion of asceticism, religious and moral power, and self-sacrifice. Thus when Modi wanted to shame post-independence Congress leaders for their elitism, he launched a major campaign “Swacch Bharat” (Clean India) on Oct. 2, 2014, Gandhi’s birthday. Modi himself swept the streets of Delhi with a broom, a task generally performed by the lower castes in the public sphere and by women in the home.

Modi’s style gives us reason to devote greater attention to the way populists communicate with their followers by displaying both masculine and feminine attributes.

Scholars have identified the way women populist leaders, including Marine Le Pen in France, Sarah Palin in the U.S., and Alice Weidel in Germany, have used femininity and maternalism to soften the harsh images of their parties — but have not examined the ways some powerful women leaders combine male and female attributes. Take Mamata Bannerjee, the populist leader of the Trinamool Congress, India’s fourth-largest political party. Banerjee describes herself as Bengal’s daughter and identifies with the interests of minorities and women. However, she also deploys her identity as a single woman from a lower-class background to challenge the stereotype of the respectable maternal, married Bengali woman; in doing so, she adopts the aura of a gritty, abrasive street fighter who isn’t afraid of challenging Modi.

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Modi faces new difficulties. His popularity has been dented by public anger at the enormous wave of coronavirus deaths. Modi has been characteristically and purposefully silent. Both he and his populist challengers will combine masculine and feminine imagery to justify policies, appeal to followers, and attract new supporters, in ways that will surprise those whose understanding of populism begins and ends with Trump.

Amrita Basu (@Basu2Amrita) is the Paino Professor of Political Science and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College and author most recently of Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She is writing a book on populist leadership.

Read all TMC’s India analysis at our India Classroom Topic Guide.

Rarely has the GOP fixation on race shown all its ugly facets like this

Washington Post

Opinion by

Dana Milbank

Columnist

May 26, 2021 at 7:53 a.m. GMT+9

Republicans chose a special way of observing the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. They tried to vote down a highly qualified Black woman who had been nominated to run the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

From “I can’t breathe” to “I won’t confirm.”

President Biden had set a deadline of Tuesday for Congress to enact legislation to counter police brutality. But while the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act almost three months ago, Republican objections have bottled up negotiations in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office said the timing of Tuesday’s vote was a coincidence. (He had been trying to get a confirmation vote for nominee Kristen Clarke since she cleared the Judiciary Committee two weeks ago, but faced a Republican filibuster.) Still, Democrats were happy to point out the convergence.

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The Floyd murder by a Minneapolis police officer set off “a fight for justice,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “And here in the Senate, we will continue that fight when we vote to confirm the first Black woman to ever lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division.”

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the majority whip, also cited the Floyd anniversary in urging his colleagues to “consider the historic importance of this moment.”

Republicans considered. And then all but one (Susan Collins of Maine) voted not even to allow Clarke a confirmation vote — and, when that failed, voted by an identical tally against confirming Clarke. Not a single Republican spoke against Clarke on the floor Tuesday, not even when Durbin yielded to them for a final summation. Republicans in both the Senate and the House had other things they wanted to talk about on the Floyd anniversary.

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who previously floated the antisemitic notion that Jewish space lasers cause forest fires, began the day on Twitter by likening covid restrictions to the Holocaust.

On the Senate floor, John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber, gave a speech denouncing House-passed legislation for, among other things, “banning voter ID and other safeguards against voter fraud.” Such “safeguards” have been found repeatedly to disenfranchise Black voters disproportionately.

Soon after Thune’s speech (and before the Clarke votes), Republican senators rose in near lockstep to oppose the confirmation of Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the first Black woman tapped to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Only five of the 50 Republican senators supported this health-policy veteran.

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Speaking out for voter-ID requirements? Stalling racial-justice legislation? Opposing two overwhelmingly qualified Black nominees? And all this while publicly ignoring the anniversary of the Floyd murder?

Racism isn’t just a factor in Republican politics. It is the factor. But rarely has it been on display in all its ugly facets as it was on Tuesday.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) on April 14 asked Justice Department nominee Kristen Clarke about a college opinion piece that she said was satirical. (Senate Judiciary Committee)

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s vote, Republicans had falsely portrayed Clarke as a defund-the-police wacko. Never mind that Clarke had the endorsement of dozens of police chiefs and the Major Cities Chiefs Association. And never mind that Clarke, educated at Harvard and Columbia, has had a storied career with the Justice Department, the New York attorney general’s office, the NAACP and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. So desperate were they for material to use against her that they highlighted a letter she co-wrote 27 years ago, at age 19, to her college newspaper — and even that was taken out of context.

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Last month, Republicans employed a similar smear against Vanita Gupta in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the nomination of the highly qualified Indian American woman to serve as the No. 3 Justice Department official over similar objections. (In her case, they took issue with a nine-year-old op-ed.) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who used the “defund” cudgel, called Gupta and Clarke “two of the most radical nominees ever put forward for any position in the federal government.”

“Look behind the smokescreens and remember that the No. 1 strategy of the Republican Party for 2022 is to keep voters from voting,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) charged Tuesday on the Senate floor. “And guess what? Ms. Clarke will run the voting rights section of the [Justice] Department, and Ms. Gupta . . . will supervise her.”

It’s not just a 2022 phenomenon. As The Post’s David Nakamura reported, Republicans have blocked the civil rights division from having a Senate-confirmed chief for eight of the 16 years of the Clinton and Obama presidencies — going all the way back to when Republican senators ridiculed Clinton nominee Lani Guinier, who is Black, as the “quota queen,” and the opposition to her was summarized as “strange name, strange hair, strange writings.”

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The family of George Floyd, invited to the White House Tuesday by Biden, also made the rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Karen Bass (Calif.) and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.). The only Republican on the Floyd family’s schedule, reportedly, was the GOP point man on police legislation, Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) — the chamber’s lone Black Republican.

Perhaps that’s just as well. In the year since Floyd’s murder, Republicans’ actions have only disgraced his memory.

The media's lab leak fiasco

A huge fuckup, with perhaps not-so-huge policy stakes

Matthew Yglesias

May 26

Comment

As I believe I have said before, I spent the month of February 2020 intensely focused on covering the seemingly imminent victory of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary. I dedicated approximately 0% of my journalistic energy to covering what was, in retrospect, the clearly more significant story of a novel coronavirus outbreak starting in Wuhan, China and clearly spreading to other parts of the world.

I was aware of the virus in much the way that I am aware of the National Hockey League, but I wasn’t paying attention to it as a journalist. The first piece I published on Covid on March 12 holds up pretty well I think, but it was way too late in terms of the kind of tough travel restrictions that, in retrospect, the country needed.

Due to not paying any attention, I missed the furious initial skirmish in what’s become the Long Discourse Wars over the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than originating naturally in bats.

What happened is that Tom Cotton raised this idea in February in his capacity as a China hawk, and then again in March as part of a nonsensical attack on Joe Biden. He got shouted down pretty hard by scientists on Twitter, by formal institutions, and by the media. Then this kind of pachinkoed down into being a politics story where writers and fact-checkers who didn’t cover science at all “knew” that this was a debunked story that right-wingers were pushing for their nefarious ends. I think it’s increasingly clear that this was a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse-policing, and there is in fact a serious scientific question as to where the virus came from — a question that we will probably never be able to answer because the Chinese government has clearly committed to one viewpoint on this and isn’t going to allow a thorough investigation.

A separate question that’s less clear to me is what follows from this in terms of policy. You can break this down into three questions:

Suppose the media had been more open to Cotton’s point back in February 2020 — what would we have done differently?

Suppose definitive evidence arises this Friday that the virus in some sense came from the Chinese lab — what would we do differently going forward?

Or suppose definitive vindication of the zoonotic origin theory emerges — what difference would that make?

I think in all three of these cases, the answer is basically that nothing would be different. This is not to apologize for the bad coverage but, if anything, to underscore how egregious it was to lean so heavily into the Tom Cotton Is Wrong narrative. The subsidiary premise of that narrative was always that Cotton was doing something extremely nefarious. But while Cotton does indeed have a lot of opinions I disagree with, it’s just not true that this lab leak idea is now or ever was very closely linked to any hot-button policy controversies.

The situation in January 2020

Looking back on the media fiasco side of this, it seems to trace back to statements Cotton made at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on January 30. This appears to have been a hearing with senior military commanders from U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Southern Command. I think talking about a virus outbreak in China probably sounded like a bit of a crank thing to do, but Senators say weird stuff at hearings all the time.

Cotton said that the Chinese government had been lying about the severity of the outbreak all month and that their story linking the outbreak to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market was dubious.

Twitter avatar for @SenTomCotton

Tom Cotton

@SenTomCotton

China claimed—for almost two months—that coronavirus had originated in a Wuhan seafood market. That is not the case. @TheLancet published a study demonstrating that of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including Patient Zero. Image

January 30th 2020

4,297 Retweets6,755 Likes

Cotton’s remarks were not widely covered at the time, but this basic claim seems to me to have been well within the range of establishment consensus views.

He was referring to an article in the Lancet, a very establishment publication. Max Fisher at The New York Times used that same Lancet article to do a piece arguing that the virus situation in Wuhan illustrated the flaws in China’s authoritarian governance model — that local officials would not circulate “bad news” if it would be seen as unwelcome to top leaders.

Julia Belluz at Vox did a piece about the Lancet study and a few other pieces of evidence that Chinese leaders weren’t telling the truth.

“These discrepancies add new urgency to a question many are already asking,” she wrote. “Did China downplay the outbreak early on? And if so, why?”

Her article surveys various experts and moots several theories, including Fisher’s. But she also raises Cotton’s argument that this was perhaps deliberate malfeasance:

A third explanation is that China was purposely playing down the health emergency, as it did during the SARS outbreak of 2003. Back then, China was heavily criticized for reacting slowly, withholding information about the outbreak for too long, and putting economic considerations ahead of public health. The virus eventually killed 774 people and infected more than 8,000.

“The fact that the Lancet report is different from the official early Chinese account does raise enormous concerns around the truthfulness of information coming out of China,” said Steven Hoffman, director of the Global Strategy Lab and a global health professor at York University. “If China did intentionally withhold information, that would not only be bad for public health but also illegal under international law. It would be a violation of the International Health Regulations, a legally binding treaty that covers how 195 countries respond to outbreaks like this one.”

The Lancet piece came out on January 24. Fisher wrote on January 25. On January 26, a piece in Science ran that was titled “Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally.” Belluz wrote on January 27, and Cotton spoke and Tweeted on January 30.

But Cotton did one thing that those other sources didn’t do — he speculated a little. At the end of that clip he says “we still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

That is all not only true, but entirely consistent with what mainstream media was reporting at the time. But then things went horribly off the rails.

February 2020, inventing a “conspiracy”

Cotton’s statements did not get any immediate coverage, but several days later David Choi at Business Insider wrote them up with the headline “Republican senator suggests ‘worse than Chernobyl’ coronavirus could've come from Chinese ‘superlaboratory.’”

Choi’s piece is one of those things that happens on the internet when the story is totally accurate but also doing a lot of sensationalization for clicks. What Cotton said at the hearing is that the Chinese government’s official story about the seafood market was wrong, which was something that was at the time also being floated in Vox and The New York Times and Science and the Lancet. Where Cotton differed from the consensus is that he attributed this to malice, which is not what the scientific articles said (but also isn’t a scientific question) and was not the NYT’s preferred interpretation of events.

But that was the actual parameter of the debate; Fisher thought this illustrated a point about the abstract functioning of systems while Cotton thought it illustrated a point about the malign intent of a foreign adversary. Belluz, a science journalist rather than a foreign policy writer, entertained both interpretations as consistent with the facts. And it seemed like a fairly classic foreign policy sort of argument. Throughout history, hawks see malice and threat behind everything that happens, while more dovish people tend to see misunderstanding and confusion. You can imagine the Tom Cotton of 1914 talking somewhere in Vienna about the Serbian government’s obvious complicity in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand while the Max Fisher of the time says the difficulty controlling the Black Hand and its operations reveals the fundamental weakness of the Serbian state.

What Choi did was not exactly accusing Cotton of spreading a conspiracy theory about Chinese bioweapons, but just sort of locating his remarks as adjacent to other people’s conspiracy theories and misinformation:

Cotton was referring to China's first Biosafety Level 4 lab, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which investigates “the most dangerous pathogens,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While Cotton qualified his remarks by saying “we still don't know where” the virus originated, his comments come amid numerous conspiracy theories about the virus's origins — including one that says the virus “originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program.”

The amount of false information spreading across social-media platforms has prompted several companies, including Facebook, to limit the reach of such posts. In a statement, Facebook said it would display “accurate information” and notify users if they are suspected of sharing false or misleading information.

So now we have leaped from “everyone agrees the Chinese government’s claims were wrong but Cotton is an outlier in claiming they were deliberately wrong” to “Cotton’s views should be associated with conspiracy theories and misinformation,” even though his core factual claim was not particularly different from what anyone was else was saying. Then things blew up, thanks not so much to a Sunday show interview as to tweets about an interview.

“Rumors about a Chinese bioweapon”

On February 9, Margaret Brennan interviewed China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, about the virus outbreak. During the course of the interview, she said to the Ambassador that Cotton “suggested that the virus may have come from China’s biological warfare program — that’s an extraordinary charge, how do you respond to that?”

I’m not sure that’s really the best characterization of what Cotton said, but it’s not wildly wrong either.

And Cui’s reply was pretty restrained and honestly very diplomatic considering that Cotton is a big hawk and China’s propaganda messaging is often heavy-handed and clumsy.

I think it’s true that a lot is still unknown and our scientists — Chinese scientists, American scientists, scientists of other countries — are doing their best to learn more about the virus. But it’s very harmful, it’s very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people. For one thing, this will create panic. Another thing is that it will send up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things that will really harm our joint efforts to combat the virus. Of course, there are all kinds of speculation and rumors. There are people who are saying that this virus are coming from some military lab [sic] — not of China, maybe in the United States. How can we believe all these crazy things?

Then Brennan asks him squarely “where did the virus come from?” to which Cui responds, “We still don’t know yet, it’s probably — according to some initial outcome of the research — probably coming from some animals, but we have to discover more about it.”

So at this point, Cui’s official position is that we don’t know where the virus came from, but it was probably an animal. And Cotton’s position is that we don’t know where the virus came from, but it might have been the lab. Cui says it is irresponsible to speculate about the lab, while Cotton says the speculation is good. Cotton is not, I think, saying the virus was Chinese biowarfare — he is saying the PRC is not trustworthy. The PRC ambassador’s position, obviously, is that he is in fact trustworthy.

But whoever writes up the exchange for the Face The Nation Twitter account goes with Cui “dismisses #coronavirus conspiracy theories pushed by @SenTomCotton that it’s being used as biological warfare as ‘absolutely crazy.’”

It seems to me that Cotton did not say the virus was being used as biological warfare.

But Cotton’s Twitter account fired back.

Twitter avatar for @SenTomCotton

Tom Cotton

@SenTomCotton

.@ambcuitianki, here’s what’s not a conspiracy, not a theory:

Fact: China lied about virus starting in Wuhan food market

Face The Nation @FaceTheNation

NEW: @AmbCuiTiankai dismisses #coronavirus conspiracy theories pushed by @SenTomCotton that it's being used as biological warfare as "absolutely crazy." WATCH --> https://t.co/26D4r67Kj9

February 9th 2020

884 Retweets1,699 Likes

Twitter avatar for @SenTomCotton

Tom Cotton

@SenTomCotton

Fact: super-lab is just a few miles from that market

Where did it start? We don’t know. But burden of proof is on you & fellow communists. Open up now to competent international scientists.

February 9th 2020

490 Retweets1,310 Likes

Cotton doubled-down on the idea that China “lied” (as opposed to was just wrong) because he’s a China hawk and he pressed for more openness “to competent international scientists.”

Politico then wrote up the interview (but really the tweets rather than the actual interview) in fairly sensationalistic terms, saying that “when asked about comments made last week by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) — who, according to Brennan, suggested the virus may have come from China’s biological warfare program — Cui did not mince words” then quoting the part of Cui’s statement that started with “it’s very harmful.”

I have to insist, though, that Cui really was kind of mincing words. If you watch the video, there is no epic slam on Tom Cotton — he is deflecting diplomatically.

But then Blake Hounshell from Politico tweeted about the article about the tweets about the interview, calling it “wild” that Cotton was “spreading rumors about a Chinese bioweapon,” which just didn’t happen.

At this point, Cotton had achieved what’s really the greatest achievement possible for a Republican Party politician — he was unfairly maligned by the MSM.

The “debunked” “fringe theory”

I think it’s important to remember that at this point in American history, the Covid issue was not polarized the way that it is today.

On January 27, Joe Biden published a USA Today op-ed calling the outbreak a major crisis, but his presidential campaign seemed to be on the ropes at the time.

By contrast, Trump’s message was that everything was fine thanks to his confidence in the Chinese government:

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the context for Cotton’s February 16 appearance on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox show.

Cotton does not believe that it’s all going to work out fine, that the Chinese have everything under control, or that President Xi is worthy of all this praise. He thinks that Biden is right and the outbreak is a very serious problem. Cotton is going on television mostly to do the “Audience of One” thing where, because Trump doesn’t read briefing documents, the best way to persuade him of something is to go on television. And because the conservative movement is totally dysfunctional in terms of its relationship to Trump, Cotton does not say squarely that Trump is wrong. Instead, he gushes with praise for Trump’s restrictions on flights from China but says we should do even more. And he emphasizes that the Chinese government is not trustworthy — though again totally leaving out how gullible and obsequious Trump is being.

Here’s what Cotton says in the interview specifically about the lab:

Here’s what we do know: this virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market…So we don’t know where it originated, but we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says. And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.

This is provocative, but not so different from what Joe Biden (who, again, at this point was the enemy progressives were trying to beat in a primary) would say 10 days later:

What I would do were I president now, I would not be taking China’s word for it. I would insist that China allow our scientists in to make a hard determination of how it started, where it’s from, how far along it is. Because that is not happening now.

But while Biden’s remarks were mostly ignored, Cotton’s caused several prominent media outlets to fly off the handle.

Paulina Firozi at the Washington Post wrote a story headlined “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.”

But the theory Firozi cites as being debunked is the theory that the virus was deliberately engineered as a weapon. That’s not what Cotton said, and indeed the text of her story seems to acknowledge that he didn’t say that.

Yet Cotton acknowledged there is no evidence that the disease originated at the lab. Instead, he suggested it’s necessary to ask Chinese authorities about the possibility, fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.

A similar piece by Alexandra Stevenson in the New York Times is headlined “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.”

But again, the article is overwhelmingly about people who are not Tom Cotton saying something different from what Tom Cotton said. Stevenson’s piece is also a reminder that this was a different era of Covid politics, because one of the reasons she gives for doubting that it’s a deliberately engineered bioweapon (which again, is not what Cotton said) is that the virus isn’t really that big of a deal because younger and healthier people don’t have much to fear from it.

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

Within a month or two, of course, the Covid discourse would become the subject of partisan polarization and this media critique of Cotton would become the consensus Republican view — Covid was no big deal.

Checking fake facts

Cotton essentially failed in his effort to persuade Trump, and as far as I can tell assimilated himself to the emerging GOP consensus that a few hundred thousand dead here and there is not a huge problem.

Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom of the media shifted in the opposite direction — that the pandemic was a really big deal and people should take stern countermeasures against it. At the same time, the “fact check” complex started taking an increasingly hard line against laboratory origin theories that it claimed had been debunked by scientists.

Among actual scientists, it is much less clear to me what the conventional wisdom ever actually ways. Politifact’s now-retracted fact check deeming lab leak theorists to have their “pants on fire” ran in September 2020. Also in September of 2020, Boston magazine ran a profile of Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute, who believes the virus escaped from the biolab in Wuhan. It’s clear from the article that while Chan perhaps had a minority viewpoint, this was the kind of thing that was the subject of ongoing disagreement among researchers. And the main thing about it, as best I can tell, is that we just have a long history of viruses crossing from animals to humans so virologists’ baseline belief about a new virus is going to be that it came from animals.

When New York Magazine ran its lab leak theory story in January 2021, I tweeted disparaging things about it only to be told quietly by a number of research scientists that I was wrong and plenty of people in the science community thought this was plausible.

By March, Biden was in office and his team was arguing that China was not being sufficiently forthcoming about the origin of the virus. In May, a distinguished group of scientists called for a more rigorous inquiry.

Because there is obviously a big media fuckup angle to this story, the two biggest deal accounts for a lot of media-skeptics are Donald McNeil making the case for a lab leak and Nicholas Wade making the case for a lab leak because those are both veteran science reporters who got “cancelled.” But I do think it’s important to try to understand exactly who got what wrong here. My best assessment is to agree with Josh Rogin that this is a case of a smallish group of reporters and fact-checkers proclaiming a scientific consensus where none ever really existed.

Twitter avatar for @joshrogin

Josh Rogin

@joshrogin

To anyone saying there is a "scientific consensus" about the origin of the coronavirus - Robert Redfield is a scientist. There is no consensus. Stop writing that falsehood into your stories, please.

March 28th 2021

294 Retweets1,459 Likes

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.

What is actually at stake here?

Beyond the genuinely catastrophic media fuckup, the actual policy stakes in this controversy are less clear to me.

On Monday, I wrote that alcohol taxes should be raised, citing research about crime and liver disease. If new research emerged indicating that alcohol was more or less harmful than I previously thought, I would revise my estimate of the optimal alcohol tax.

By contrast, the stakes in the lab leak fight seem to be political. In 2014, Olga Khazan wrote an Atlantic article calling for stricter curbs on “gain of function” research at labs. Kelsey Piper wrote an article with a similar thesis in 2019 for Vox. If people believe the lab leak is true, that will bolster their case rhetorically. But I found Kelsey’s article persuasive when she wrote it — and I will continue to think she’s correct even if lab leak theory is eventually debunked.

Then there’s China policy. Cotton is a huge foreign policy hawk. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is a lab leak fan and also a big foreign policy hawk. Lab leak theory could bolster anti-China politics. That being said, even if lab leak is false, it’s not that hard to find evidence for the proposition that the PRC regime is bad. They crushed Hong Kong. They’re running concentration camps in Xinjiang. My position on China is we need “One Billion Americans” in order to stay number one forever, and I’m not going to change that view. Rand Paul says this whole episode proves that Dr. Fauci is bad, but again, that’s what he already believed.

I hope the prior zillion words establish that I’m not trying to be an apologist for the bad media coverage of this issue. But there is a difference between a factual controversy where a change in facts affects people’s views and a factual controversy that is mostly about raising or lowering the status of different people and arguments. And this, I think, is a case of the latter. Evidence in favor of leak theory lowers the status of the media and raises the status of Tom Cotton but doesn’t drastically alter the policy landscape.

The perils of Twitter

Beyond the gross irresponsibility of the earliest media coverage, I think the story of Dr. Chan and her struggle to be heard illustrates the perils of expert dialogue on social media.

Social media is truly social in the sense that it features incredible pressures to form in-groups and out-groups and then to conform to your in-group. Unless you like and admire Cotton and Pompeo and want to be known to the world as a follower of Cotton-Pompeo Thought, it is not very compelling to speak up in favor of a minority viewpoint among scientists. Why spend your day in nasty fights on Twitter when you could be doing science? Then if you secure your impression of what “the scientists” think about something from scanning Twitter, you will perceive a consensus that is not really there. If something is a 70-30 issue but the 30 are keeping their heads down, it can look like a 98-2 issue.

I do not know a lot about science, so I will not opine how generally true this may or may not be.

But in economics, which I do know well, I think it’s a big issue. If someone tweets something you agree with, it is easy to bless it with an RT or a little heart. To take issue with it is to start a fight. And conversely, it’s much more pleasant to do a tweet that is greeted with lots of RTs and little hearts rather than one that starts fights. So I know from talking to econ PhD-havers that almost everyone is disproportionately avoiding statements they believe to be locally unpopular in their community. There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution.

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