&c. by Jonathan Chait

&c. by Jonathan Chait

 

 

Last month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tree, a spectacular national park in California. There was a giant wind farm straddling the freeway between my hotel and the park, and surprisingly, driving through it was nearly as awe-inspiring as the park itself. The rows of giant, gleaming turbines set against the mountains looked beautiful, but more than that, they conveyed the sensation of productivity in a way that I found almost mesmerizing. Without even consciously thinking about it, you can see energy being produced literally from out of thin air.

My reaction may not be unique. More importantly, it may have some real political salience. A new paper finds that wind turbine construction “generated large electoral benefits for (pro-renewables) Democratic candidates: every megawatt of additional wind power capacity over statewide trend increased the Democratic vote share in U.S. House elections by 0.03 percentage points.” It likewise found, studying the content of press releases by candidates of both parties, that adding wind turbines makes the representatives of those districts friendlier to green energy.

Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

 

The idea that living near wind turbines would make you feel friendlier to the Democratic Party would have seemed fanciful to me before I experienced it up close. One of the things Build Back Better would do is fund more clean energy. And while the main point is obviously to replace fossil fuels with zero-emission energy sources, House Democrats might keep in mind that wind turbines in their districts also serve as very large, effective political advertisements for the value of clean energy.

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The Democratic Party’s traditional ritual of post-defeat recriminations is already well under way. Jamelle Bouie argues that the party’s left wing is not to blame for the Biden administration’s trevails because “Progressives are not actually in the driver’s seat of the Democratic Party.”

I certainly wouldn’t give progressives anything close to sole responsibility for the party’s decisions. My argument in a feature last fall assigned blame to both the party’s left and right wings, each of which has screwed things up in its own special ways. But Bouie’s case seems to absolve the left almost completely, on the grounds that there “was a battle for control of the Democratic Party, and the moderates won. They hold the power and they direct the message.”

Bouie is a brilliant analyst, but I see two major problems with this argument. First, the reality he’s describing would make more sense if Biden treated the left as a discredited enemy and disregarded its ideas. But the actual record is quite different. After winning, Biden — fearing a reprise of 2016, when spiteful Bernie Sanders die-hards protested his convention and helped Donald Trump win — went to unprecedented lengths to mollify the left. He formed a “unity” task force with supporters of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to craft a new platform. In contrast to the typical pattern of nominees pivoting to the center after winning a primary, Biden pivoted away from the center.

This pivot to the left was widely acknowledged at the time. “We don’t need to pivot to get independents because he already appeals to independents,” a Biden adviser told Politico. “These are ideas that we feel should appeal to Bernie’s voters that are well in keeping with Joe’s principles.” Delighted but stunned progressives were writing columns with headlines like “Joe Biden Is Pivoting to the Left. What? Why?”

Second, unpopular activists and policy proposals either inside or outside a party structure can push voters away, even if they don’t win a factional fight. In 1996, even though Republicans nominated staid establishmentarian Bob Dole, Bill Clinton still successfully defined him as a supporter of the radical anti-government policies advocated by the “revolutionary” Republicans who loathed and distrusted him. In 1968, Democrats nominated pro-war, non-counterculture, and very mainstream liberal Hubert Humphrey, yet Republicans still associated him with the antics of anti-war demonstrators. The fact those demonstrators were protesting against Humphrey, while a bitter irony to the Democrats, did not fully insulate them.

Progressive activists made a strategic choice to inject left-wing slogans and proposals into the national dialogue. Their calculation was that it would energize Democratic turnout (a hope premised on an erroneous belief that marginal voters had left-wing views) and would tug the national conversation leftward. Democratic elected officials believe, with at least some evidence, that decision blew up in their face.

The left’s incentive now is to deny these choices had any impact on the national environment. But they did. They got political reporters talking about Medicare for All, socialism, defunding the police, and the Democratic Party’s move to the left. That was the goal. The problem all along was that it avoided facing up to the fact that introducing unpopular ideas into the political dialogue has a real downside.

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As the Republican Party has grown increasingly hostile to democratic norms and principles, there has been growing interest in studying the pro-authoritarian roots of the conservative movement. Joshua Tait, a scholar of the conservative movement of the mid-20th century, has made an important contribution.

Writing for the Bulwark, Tait excavates the conservative movement’s commentary about Fransisco Franco’s regime in Spain. Tait’s thorough overview finds a great many influential conservative intellectuals wrote favorably about Franco — not merely as a Cold War ally, but as a domestic bulwark against liberalism and secularism.

It’s not a matter of simply cherry-picking one or two editorials that didn’t age well. The conservative movement as a whole admired Franco’s regime and had no principled democratic objection to the methods he used to maintain power. It’s another piece of evidence that Donald Trump’s rise is more a reflection of the conservative movement’s takeover of the Republican Party than a repudiation of the movement’s allegedly democratic legacy.

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There’s a substantial and growing body of research over the last half-dozen years showing that public charter schools generate tremendous learning gains for urban students. Two interesting new studies came out this week that support and enhance this conclusion.

One national study of school systems by the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) finds that increasing charters to 10 percent of the district leads to a “2-4 percentage point increase in high school graduation rates, a 6 percentile increase in math scores, and 3 percentile increase in reading scores.” A Fordham Institute study of metropolitan finds:

1. On average, an increase in total charter school enrollment share is associated with a significant increase in the average math achievement of poor, Black, and Hispanic students, which is concentrated in larger metro areas.

2. On average, increases in Black and Hispanic charter school enrollment share are associated with sizable increases in the average math achievement of these student groups, especially in larger metro areas. 

3. On average, an increase in total charter school enrollment share is associated with a significant narrowing of a metro’s racial and socioeconomic math achievement gaps.

I’ve found that, when I mention the evidence of charter school success to liberals I know, they will immediately raise the objection that charters are merely skimming better students from traditional public schools. This objection has been resolved in many ways (most convincingly, I believe, in New Orleans, which converted its entire system to charters and yielded major gains).

But if you’re still not convinced, these two new studies both address the same objection in a different way. They look at larger systems – REACH examines school districts and Fordham looks at entire metropolitan areas. If charters were merely skimming off good students, then the overall systems would see little gain by charter growth – the system would merely be redistributing better students to charters. But instead, adding charters produces systemwide gains. Indeed, this evidence supports the hypothesis that competition from charters forces traditional public schools to improve.

(Obligatory caveat: My wife is a consultant for a nonprofit organization whose clients include both charters and traditional public-school systems. Her employer does not engage in advocacy and strives for neutrality and thus would strongly prefer I avoid writing about the subject at all. By covering this subject, I am undermining, not advancing, her professional interests.)

These effects are a big deal. Closing the achievement gap is hard. Public charter schools obviously don’t solve every social problem in the world, but they are a really powerful tool for advancing educational equity. We need to stop listening to fatalists who say public schools can’t do any better and use the tools we have to give underprivileged urban kids a real chance to develop their potential.

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