Hi,
The number of options for any daredevil who wants to learn a foreign language is truly dizzying: Duolingo, Memrise, paper flashcards, textbooks, 1 million apps, and so on. Each one of them screams 'I am the one you need, babe. Pick me! I will show you what the good time means!'
But is the variety really that good for you (hint: it's not)?
Imagine the following:
You finish your work, get home and sit all worn-out in your comfy armchair. Suddenly, you start feeling this intrusive urge. The urge to LEARN.
So you think to yourself, "What should I start with? A book? An app? Or maybe an option no. 43?" After all, there are so many choices!
The clock keeps ticking, and you can't seem to make up your mind. Then you say with your best British accent "perhaps tomorrow."
Let's analyze what happened between your initial thought to learn and the moment when you gave up.
One thing which becomes instantly clear is that it isn't your ordinary quiz show, where you get to choose from a couple of available options. The potential answers are A, B, C all the way to Z. Heck, a single piece of paper, with 10 words on it, is treated as yet another learning material.
The growing confusion in your head immediately awakens your biggest opponent - your brain. It jumps in on the action, gently whispering to your ear. "You are not taking my glucose away."
This is the exact moment when you start feeling a knot of resistance in your stomach. As a result, you come up with ridiculous excuses as to why you shouldn't learn right now, and finally, you give up.
What's the simplest way to avoid this cognitive trap?
Limit the number of learning resources to the minimum. Don't hamster them. Just use what's necessary for your current level.
Dealing with overwhelmedness is just one of many language learning strategies I have created throughout the years to help me and my students learn languages in record time. You can find all those strategies in my course Vocabulary Labs.
Vocabulary Labs contains 15 modules and over 160 units which will explain you step-by-step how to rapidly acquire vocabulary and grammar, and first of all - how to become a truly independent and effective language learner.
Here are some of the things you will in Vocabulary Labs:
• what kind of mistakes hinder your learning and how to avoid them
• the EVA method which will guarantee you 100% recall (that's a big promise but I definitely deliver)
• how to optimize your reading. Learn new vocab from texts without spending too much time.
• my system for mastering grammar of any language (over 15 strategies which can be used in conjunction with each other so you can control your own grammatical correctness without any extra help)
• how to become fluent by speaking with yourself (including methods for double-checking that what you're saying is correct
• how to find language partners so you don't have to pay for teachers/conversations
• how to surround yourself with a language so you maximize your total learning time and language gains.
• how to combine passive and active learning to get the best benefits
• how to use logic in learning to avoid unnecessary memorization
• how to improve your listening comprehension so you can understand asap
• how to use music in language learning. Learn and have fun! The module includes lots of different apps to automatically find interesting artists and lyrics.
• general learning strategies and strategies for specific language levels (A1-A2, B1-B2, etc.)
• Vocabulary Labs Cookbook - includes a lot of language specific resources so you don't waste time looking for them (currently available for German; Finnish, Swedish, Polish and Spanish are coming up soon).
• and many more
- Vocabulary Labs comes with a 60-day guarantee. If you don't find it to be helpful, simply e-mail me, and you will get your money back without jumping through hoops.
- What's more, you will have my full support so you can rest assured that you will be able to get the most out of it. It's not one of the courses where you are left to your own devices.
- Oh, and you get lifetime access to it as well. You can use it at the pace which you find convenient. That also means that you get a lot of cool updates per year to make your learning even more effective.
- Also, I will be checking on you via e-mails for 12 months after you complete the course (aka a naggin' mamma package).
P.S. The course closes on Sunday at 9 am (GMT+2), or Saturday 11:59 (PT) and it won't be back up for some time. My students have my full support and that requires time - there are only so many people I can help at the same time. Here is how to join.
P.P.S. Here are previous e-mails in case you missed them.
• Why so many people fail at language learning
• Terrible learning strategies that kill your progress
• The universal guidelines to structure your language learning
Talk to you soon,
Bartosz
Monday, January 28, 2019
Universe of Memory 03: The universal guidelines to structure your language learning
Hi!
Just like in nature, there is a specific order to things in learning languages. Those who violate it are doomed to pay the terrible price - they will inevitably flounder about and usually give up.
Here is how you can tell that it's happening to you:
• 1. Your current language routine is very haphazard.
• 2. You keep starting and stopping because you really don’t know what you are doing.
• 3. You really struggle to come up with a daily learning schedule, especially one that is intense.
• 4. You have difficulty allocating your time.
Is there any way out of this madness? Yes. But as always, it's very different from what you usually hear.
Probably you've seen recommendations of this kind - read 10 minutes, then talk to somebody for 15 minutes, then do your flashcards, and watch TV series for 20 minutes.
That's crazy to expect from anyone to follow this kind of a learning plan. One sensible look at it should tell you that the cognitive load for any learner, in this case, will be through the roof!
There are way better solutions. Here are some strategies which I suggest to my Vocabulary Labs students:
• 1) At any given level, always prioritize vocabulary acquisition. Your vocabulary size is the single best predictor of how fast you will improve all the other language competences.
• 2) Always concentrate on learning actively. Once you feel frazzled, move on to passive learning.
• 3) If your goal is to communicate, ignore reading at A1-B1 levels. You can't talk to someone unless you understand them.
• 4) Once you achieve your basic fluency (usually around a B2 level), talking to others stops being a good learning strategy. Words used in conversations tend to be very repetitive and thus such an approach won't get you much further.
Of course, there are many other guidelines which, if implemented, will significantly optimize your learning and give it a nice structure. The feeling of knowing what to do every day is definitely very liberating and will help you restore your sanity.
Tomorrow I will show you some ways in which you can deal with overwhelmedness.
P.S. The Enrollment to my course Vocabulary Labs is open. This is the only course on the market which will give you deep insight into all the aspects of learning a language, especially learning vocabulary and grammar. Vocabulary Labs will both simplify and accelerate your learning.
The course is based on the immutable principles of memory and will optimize your learning in every possible way. It doesn't matter how fast or slow you want to learn. Vocabulary Labs gives you all the tools to pursue your goals with maximal efficiency. So far it has been used successfully by participants from over 20 countries to learn over 40 different languages (e.g. German, Tibetan, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Burmese, etc.).
Contrary to the most solutions on the market which offer you a chaotic bunch of methods, Vocabulary Labs guides you through all the complexities of the language-learning process in a step-by-step manner.
P.S. 2 - Here are two previous e-mails in case you've missed them.
• Why so many people fail at language learning
• Terrible learning strategies that kill your progress
Talk to you soon,
Bartosz
Just like in nature, there is a specific order to things in learning languages. Those who violate it are doomed to pay the terrible price - they will inevitably flounder about and usually give up.
Here is how you can tell that it's happening to you:
• 1. Your current language routine is very haphazard.
• 2. You keep starting and stopping because you really don’t know what you are doing.
• 3. You really struggle to come up with a daily learning schedule, especially one that is intense.
• 4. You have difficulty allocating your time.
Is there any way out of this madness? Yes. But as always, it's very different from what you usually hear.
Probably you've seen recommendations of this kind - read 10 minutes, then talk to somebody for 15 minutes, then do your flashcards, and watch TV series for 20 minutes.
That's crazy to expect from anyone to follow this kind of a learning plan. One sensible look at it should tell you that the cognitive load for any learner, in this case, will be through the roof!
There are way better solutions. Here are some strategies which I suggest to my Vocabulary Labs students:
• 1) At any given level, always prioritize vocabulary acquisition. Your vocabulary size is the single best predictor of how fast you will improve all the other language competences.
• 2) Always concentrate on learning actively. Once you feel frazzled, move on to passive learning.
• 3) If your goal is to communicate, ignore reading at A1-B1 levels. You can't talk to someone unless you understand them.
• 4) Once you achieve your basic fluency (usually around a B2 level), talking to others stops being a good learning strategy. Words used in conversations tend to be very repetitive and thus such an approach won't get you much further.
Of course, there are many other guidelines which, if implemented, will significantly optimize your learning and give it a nice structure. The feeling of knowing what to do every day is definitely very liberating and will help you restore your sanity.
Tomorrow I will show you some ways in which you can deal with overwhelmedness.
P.S. The Enrollment to my course Vocabulary Labs is open. This is the only course on the market which will give you deep insight into all the aspects of learning a language, especially learning vocabulary and grammar. Vocabulary Labs will both simplify and accelerate your learning.
The course is based on the immutable principles of memory and will optimize your learning in every possible way. It doesn't matter how fast or slow you want to learn. Vocabulary Labs gives you all the tools to pursue your goals with maximal efficiency. So far it has been used successfully by participants from over 20 countries to learn over 40 different languages (e.g. German, Tibetan, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Burmese, etc.).
Contrary to the most solutions on the market which offer you a chaotic bunch of methods, Vocabulary Labs guides you through all the complexities of the language-learning process in a step-by-step manner.
P.S. 2 - Here are two previous e-mails in case you've missed them.
• Why so many people fail at language learning
• Terrible learning strategies that kill your progress
Talk to you soon,
Bartosz
Bartosz 05 (Jan. 22): Terrible learning strategies that kill your progress
Hi!
If you have ever struggled to remember vocabulary, know that you're not alone. Many people feel that they need to work on their memory or get some good strategies for learning their target language.
No wonder. The whole learning process sometimes seems like the seventh circle of hell. Every time you learn a new language, you forget the ones you've learned previously.
Or you learn a language and feel quite confident. That is until you realize that you are forgetting the words you already know. So you make a smooth transition into the eight circle of hell, and you start experimenting. Duolingo, Memrise, shadowing, etc. You try out all these wonderful apps and methods, but you still feel that you're spinning your wheels.
Here are a couple of strategies which will help you get unstuck.
1) Limit your passive learning.
I get it. 98% of online "experts" tell you that it's the best way to progress. It's not. Very far from it. Let's talk about facts, not opinions, for a second.
Is reading that effective? Think again.
"Horst, Cobb, and Meara (1998) specifically looked at the number of words acquired from a simplified version of a novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, which had 21000 running words. The novel was read in class during six class periods. It was found that the average vocabulary pick-up was five words."
"Lahav (1996) carried out a study of vocabulary learning from simplified readers. She tested students who read 4 readers, each one of about 20 000 words, and found an average learning rate of 3–4 words per book"
Both reading and listening have a very important place in the learning process but not when you just start to learn.
You will always learn the fastest if you:
• a) first learn actively until you get exhausted
• b) and then learn passively as much as you want to.
2) 'Train how you fight, fight how you train.'
Marines' motto is one of the best tips which will guide you towards the success in your learning. If you want to learn fast, your learning method should be as similar to the real application of languages as it's only possible.
Let's assume that you want to learn your target language to communicate. Communication means that you need to learn a word and build a sentence with it using the appropriate grammar rules. Your default learning method(s) should include all those elements.
Now, a couple of quick questions for you:
Does Memrise, or any spaced repetition software or app, meet these criteria or are you just mindlessly reviewing flashcards? Mostly without any context.
What about your typical flashcards, mnemonics, favorite websites, etc.? Not really, right?
What if you use pre-made decks or other lazy solutions? That's another hard no.
If you don't train how you fight, you're wasting unnecessarily tons of hours each year. Or you don't make any progress at all.
3) Stop exceeding the capacity of your short-term memory (aka memory span).
Your short-term memory is the bottleneck of the learning process. If you strain it too much, you will suffer some nasty consequences. Migraines, general disgust towards studying are among the most popular ones. And let's not forget about rationalizations.
If you have ever felt the sudden urge to plaster your walls rather than to buckle up and start learning, then you know what I am talking about.
How to deal with it?
The simplest solution is to always divide vocabulary you want to learn into smaller chunks. You want to learn a word only in the minimum viable context. It's the kind of context which contains only the necessary information needed to boost your chances to memorize the said word.
If you want to learn the German word 'der Stuhl (chair);, don't try to memorize it in the following phrase: 'Ich habe einen sehr schönen und teuren Stuhl gekauft.' Rather go with 'Ich habe einen Stuhl gekauft'.
Just these three strategies should help you learn much faster and save you countless hours.
Tomorrow, I will show you how structuring your language studies in the right way can further increase your learning pace.
----
P.S. My course Vocabulary Labs has just opened. It's a comprehensive learning system that teaches you step-by-step everything about learning vocabulary, learning strategies for different levels, mastering grammar, improving your listening comprehension and much more.
All with a humble (and extensive) support of yours truly and a 60-day guarantee. If you're stuck or simply want to learn fast(er) then you simply won't find anything better in the language learning world. Here is how you can join.
----
P.P.S. Here is my yesterday's e-mail in case you missed it.
• Why so many people fail at language learning.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Bartosz
If you have ever struggled to remember vocabulary, know that you're not alone. Many people feel that they need to work on their memory or get some good strategies for learning their target language.
No wonder. The whole learning process sometimes seems like the seventh circle of hell. Every time you learn a new language, you forget the ones you've learned previously.
Or you learn a language and feel quite confident. That is until you realize that you are forgetting the words you already know. So you make a smooth transition into the eight circle of hell, and you start experimenting. Duolingo, Memrise, shadowing, etc. You try out all these wonderful apps and methods, but you still feel that you're spinning your wheels.
Here are a couple of strategies which will help you get unstuck.
1) Limit your passive learning.
I get it. 98% of online "experts" tell you that it's the best way to progress. It's not. Very far from it. Let's talk about facts, not opinions, for a second.
Is reading that effective? Think again.
"Horst, Cobb, and Meara (1998) specifically looked at the number of words acquired from a simplified version of a novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, which had 21000 running words. The novel was read in class during six class periods. It was found that the average vocabulary pick-up was five words."
"Lahav (1996) carried out a study of vocabulary learning from simplified readers. She tested students who read 4 readers, each one of about 20 000 words, and found an average learning rate of 3–4 words per book"
Both reading and listening have a very important place in the learning process but not when you just start to learn.
You will always learn the fastest if you:
• a) first learn actively until you get exhausted
• b) and then learn passively as much as you want to.
2) 'Train how you fight, fight how you train.'
Marines' motto is one of the best tips which will guide you towards the success in your learning. If you want to learn fast, your learning method should be as similar to the real application of languages as it's only possible.
Let's assume that you want to learn your target language to communicate. Communication means that you need to learn a word and build a sentence with it using the appropriate grammar rules. Your default learning method(s) should include all those elements.
Now, a couple of quick questions for you:
Does Memrise, or any spaced repetition software or app, meet these criteria or are you just mindlessly reviewing flashcards? Mostly without any context.
What about your typical flashcards, mnemonics, favorite websites, etc.? Not really, right?
What if you use pre-made decks or other lazy solutions? That's another hard no.
If you don't train how you fight, you're wasting unnecessarily tons of hours each year. Or you don't make any progress at all.
3) Stop exceeding the capacity of your short-term memory (aka memory span).
Your short-term memory is the bottleneck of the learning process. If you strain it too much, you will suffer some nasty consequences. Migraines, general disgust towards studying are among the most popular ones. And let's not forget about rationalizations.
If you have ever felt the sudden urge to plaster your walls rather than to buckle up and start learning, then you know what I am talking about.
How to deal with it?
The simplest solution is to always divide vocabulary you want to learn into smaller chunks. You want to learn a word only in the minimum viable context. It's the kind of context which contains only the necessary information needed to boost your chances to memorize the said word.
If you want to learn the German word 'der Stuhl (chair);, don't try to memorize it in the following phrase: 'Ich habe einen sehr schönen und teuren Stuhl gekauft.' Rather go with 'Ich habe einen Stuhl gekauft'.
Just these three strategies should help you learn much faster and save you countless hours.
Tomorrow, I will show you how structuring your language studies in the right way can further increase your learning pace.
----
P.S. My course Vocabulary Labs has just opened. It's a comprehensive learning system that teaches you step-by-step everything about learning vocabulary, learning strategies for different levels, mastering grammar, improving your listening comprehension and much more.
All with a humble (and extensive) support of yours truly and a 60-day guarantee. If you're stuck or simply want to learn fast(er) then you simply won't find anything better in the language learning world. Here is how you can join.
----
P.P.S. Here is my yesterday's e-mail in case you missed it.
• Why so many people fail at language learning.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Bartosz
The Party Declines / The Niskanen Center / Jacob Levy
January 18, 2017
The Party Declines
by Jacob T. Levy
For just over forty years, the Republican Party had a famously orderly succession to its leadership. From 1968 until 2012, every non-incumbent presidential nominee was, in one sense or another, the next in line, as either
This lent even raucous Republican presidential nomination races an aura of seriousness and stability. The nomination sometimes went to someone who was once a rebel within the party (such as Ronald Reagan or John McCain), but only after he had put in some time in the organization, been given a thorough second look by the electorate, and developed into something more like a respected elder statesman.
Well, things continue until they don’t.
The 2016 election exposed grave vulnerability and fragility in the American party system. One major party was successfully hijacked by an extremist outsider in the face of initial opposition from a huge portion of the party’s elites and elected leaders. The other party came surprisingly close (if still not objectively very close) to meeting the same fate—and if Bernie Sanders had the advantage over Donald Trump of long experience in the Senate, his relationship to the Democratic Party was even more attenuated than Trump’s relationship to the Republican Party. (Sanders formally became a Democrat for the first time only in order to run in the primaries, and in the Senate he still identifies as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.)
It is little appreciated how much liberal democracy depends on strong parties, and a revitalized, re-understood liberalism adequate to the moment will have to overcome a traditional distaste for partisan politics.
Seventy-five years ago the political scientist E.E. Schattscheider wrote that political parties are “the orphans of political philosophy.” For more than a decade, a handful of political theorists led by Harvard’s Nancy Rosenblum (full disclosure: my undergraduate advisor) have been working to integrate an appreciation for parties and partisanship into our understanding of what healthy democratic government is like. The election of 2016 showed how urgent that task is; as political scientist Julia Azari has been arguing for months, “the defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong.”
I suggested in my previous essay that “voting patterns didn’t change enough between 2012 and 2016 to justify big claims about new national moods or about Trump’s distinctive appeal. I believe the consequences of this election will be deeply abnormal. But the voting behavior that brought it about was, in the end, very normal.” That normality was the strong partisanship mentioned by Azari. 89% of Democrats voted for Clinton, 90% of Republicans for Trump. Those figures are down a touch from 2012—both major parties lost more voters to third parties than in 2012—but considering the year of headlines about how unpopular both candidates were, the result is stark.
For a while in the Fall it seemed that Trump would alienate enough Republicans to suffer a sizeable loss to Clinton. But those alienated Republicans had mostly shifted their voting intentions to third parties, not to Clinton, and most of them came home again by election day. Which is to say, we should start by understanding that partisans are very, very likely to vote for their own parties’ candidates, regardless of those candidates’ personal merits or indeed the substance of their views. Republicans will even vote for an opponent of free trade and of the postwar western alliance who grossly offends against conservative Christian sexual mores, if that’s who is at the top of their ticket.
The most important political science book of 2016, Christopher Achen’s and Larry Bartel’s Democracy for Realists, shows that we should expect this. Systematic political beliefs, ideas about policies, and views about the state of the world don’t drive decisions about what party to support among most voters most of the time. It’s the other way around: the initial judgment call about which side I’m on (a judgment call that is often shaped by intergenerational habits or membership in identity groups: which party is the party for people like me?) then leads me to bring my beliefs, ideas, and views into line with those that prevail on my side.
This is in part a matter of economizing on information, which we all do, because we have to. No mind could contain the information needed for sufficiently-informed decisionmaking about the countless policies decided by a modern government, and no life contains enough hours to study it, even if the mind could contain it. But it’s not just a matter of low-information voters using parties as a substitute for judgment.
Achen and Bartels show that the adjustment of beliefs (even about factual questions) to match the party’s often increases with greater information and education; it takes some sophistication to correctly understand which side of an issue one’s party is on, after all.
All of which is to say: once Donald Trump got the nomination, there was a real chance of his being elected. (Note that this means no one should ever wish for, and they certainly shouldn’t engage in, strategic cross-party voting to help a major party to nominate a truly disastrous candidate. The other party’s candidate starts with a very large part of the electorate that’s almost sure to vote for them; and that could well put them close enough to a plurality that they’re a stock market crash, a terrorist attack, or an FBI letter away from winning. Although there is now some debate about this finding, Achen and Bartels argue that there’s strong evidence that weather or even shark attacks can jiggle the needle.) In the face of strong partisanship among voters, a lot depends on the strength and quality of the parties as institutions in shaping nomination outcomes.
The question, then, is how did Trump win the nomination?
The immediate answer involves a lot of nervous, feckless, or opportunistic Republican elites waiting for other Republican elites to do the risky work of seriously opposing him, or just taking for granted that he’d implode of his own accord like previous vanity and novelty candidates like Herman Cain had done. In the fall of 2015 Trump flirted with the possibility of running as a third-party candidate if he didn’t like how the Republican establishment treated him; and any of his rivals who took direct aim at him became the target of his mud-wrestling style of politics. (Ted Cruz stood out for the shamelessness of his strategy: hug Trump close and actively praise him, the better to be able to sweep up his support once, presumably, other Republicans had done the work of taking him down.)
Democratic elites, in their capacity as superdelegates, at least faced some pressure to get off the fence and declare for a candidate, allowing Clinton an early show of strength. The Republican Party doesn’t have superdelegates to defend the party’s organizational interests, and Republican officeholders were extremely slow to endorse or rally around any candidate. The RNC seemed so unnerved by the third party threat that its leadership sat on their hands.
Enumerating these bad decisions is just the detailed way of saying: it turned out that the party establishment didn’t have enough organizational strength to be able to repel the invader. An RNC more confident in the party’s strength would have made different choices. Republican officeholders and donors with a clearer sense of partisan coherence might have rallied around one alternative and pressured others out of the race soon enough to matter.
In other words, while we can easily imagine smarter, earlier, and braver action by party elites that would have changed the outcome, suggesting that the party might not have been organizationally impotent, the party elites managed things so haplessly in part because they were organizationally weak and didn’t have tools they were confident in.
In an important new paper, NYU law professor Samuel Isaacharoff argues that the ability of American parties to effectively coordinate political action has been undermined by reforms and legal restrictions including the decline in patronage, the increasing reliance on primary elections (I would add, especially “open” primaries), and campaign finance reform that disproportionately targets highly-visible fund-raising by the parties themselves. The result is “hollowed out” institutions that are vulnerable to “hostile takeover.” Presidential campaigns end up standing substantially on their own in organizational terms, and remake the party afterwards if they win. Trump had notoriously little organizational contact or useful coordination with the RNC in the summer and fall; it turned out not to matter as much as nearly all pundits expected.
Why should we care?
The expectations of the founders notwithstanding, parties aren’t a pathology. There is no case of anything resembling democratic politics in a large modern nation-state that doesn’t involve party competition. Parties aggregate ideas, interests, and ideologies into medium-to-large coalitions, offering information to voters that is even approximately manageable. (Imagine if responsible voting involved not only a mastery of millions of pieces of information about thousands of policies, but also finding out about where the dozens of candidates who appear on a typical ballot—from president to dogcatcher—stood on each of them.) Parties encourage tradeoffs and turn-taking among the groups that make up those coalitions, providing rewards for moderation and patience. And they monitor both their own politicians and the other side’s politicians for gross malfeasance or misgovernment.
A party has a longer time horizon than does an individual politician, and doesn’t want to be tarred with an individual politician’s sins. The individual politician may have an interest in short-term corruption, demagogic popularity, and personal power, but their own party has an interest in keeping them in check. And if their own party forgets about that interest, the opposition is there to remind them.
The elites in the Republican Party spent late 2015 and 2016 showing every sign of knowing that Trump was bad for their party. They simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do enough about it. As voters and as people we should hold them responsible for their failure, but as citizens trying to understand the current state of affairs and looking for routes toward improvement, we should worry about the institutional weakness their failure revealed.
Democratic government needs parties; parties do not need democracy. As a method of integrating large numbers of people into organized mass politics, the party has also been a tool of authoritarianism and totalitarianism—indeed, party organization is one of the key ways in which modern totalitarianism differs from pre-modern tyranny.
In other words, the fact that we need parties as such is the beginning, not the end, of responsible analysis here. We need healthy and competing parties with reasonably responsible elites operating under rules and institutions that encourage ongoing responsibility. The breakdown of parties like that is an easily-overlooked piece of the fragility of free societies—for example, when they become vehicles for the organization of mass support for one strongman, instead of coalitions of cooperating groups brought together by groups of intermediating elites. Parties are only semi-formally a part of the state, and at first glance don’t seem like a part of its constitutional machinery, but their weakness or breakdown becomes weakness and breakdown in the system as a whole.
Isaacharoff’s paper analyzes parties through the model of the corporate business firm. This is useful and illuminating. As Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast have argued, there’s something important in the early-19th-century conjunction of the rise of mass-membership partisan democratic politics and the transformation of the corporation from a monopolistic tool of mercantilist power into an organizational form open for anyone to access in a competitive market. That is, modern competitive democracy and modern competitive commercial capitalism are both part of what they call the “open access order” in which access to organizational tools that solve collective action problems is widely available.
In classical liberal or libertarian social thought, the commercial corporate firm is an object of constant analysis; but when it comes to firms’ political counterpart, that body of thought looks more like political philosophy than like political science, and parties are nowhere to be found. (A thinker like F.A. Hayek might mention that he identifies as an Old Whig to signal what his commitments are, but the sense of the Whigs as a political party doesn’t play any part in that.) I would argue that this is of a piece with classical liberal social theory’s neglect of democratic political processes and indeed of political science as a whole. Classical liberals rightly don’t believe that politics is the most morally valuable thing in the world, but the liberal order that encompasses such values as freedom of religion and speech, due process of law, and open commerce is structured and protected by its political environment. That order is acutely vulnerable when those political structures fail. Our colleagues in economics (and in law-and-economics) do constant valuable work analyzing which legal rules and institutional forms best allow the commercial corporate firm to fulfill desirable economic functions—and which are most likely to become perverse institutional failures. Liberal political thought desperately needs to pay as much attention to the firm’s political counterpart.
I haven’t offered solutions here. I hope to develop ideas about solutions in this space over the next year. But treatment comes after diagnosis. We have to start by understanding that the dangers faced by the political and constitutional order have a lot to do with the weakness of the parties that we rely on to to make that order function.
—
Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill University; author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom; a blogger at Bleeding Heart Libertarians; and a Niskanen Center Adjunct Fellow and Advisory Board Member.
The Party Declines
by Jacob T. Levy
For just over forty years, the Republican Party had a famously orderly succession to its leadership. From 1968 until 2012, every non-incumbent presidential nominee was, in one sense or another, the next in line, as either
- the most recent Republican vice-president,
- the runner-up in a previous contested Republican primary, or
- the namesake son of the previous Republican president.
This lent even raucous Republican presidential nomination races an aura of seriousness and stability. The nomination sometimes went to someone who was once a rebel within the party (such as Ronald Reagan or John McCain), but only after he had put in some time in the organization, been given a thorough second look by the electorate, and developed into something more like a respected elder statesman.
Well, things continue until they don’t.
The 2016 election exposed grave vulnerability and fragility in the American party system. One major party was successfully hijacked by an extremist outsider in the face of initial opposition from a huge portion of the party’s elites and elected leaders. The other party came surprisingly close (if still not objectively very close) to meeting the same fate—and if Bernie Sanders had the advantage over Donald Trump of long experience in the Senate, his relationship to the Democratic Party was even more attenuated than Trump’s relationship to the Republican Party. (Sanders formally became a Democrat for the first time only in order to run in the primaries, and in the Senate he still identifies as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.)
It is little appreciated how much liberal democracy depends on strong parties, and a revitalized, re-understood liberalism adequate to the moment will have to overcome a traditional distaste for partisan politics.
Seventy-five years ago the political scientist E.E. Schattscheider wrote that political parties are “the orphans of political philosophy.” For more than a decade, a handful of political theorists led by Harvard’s Nancy Rosenblum (full disclosure: my undergraduate advisor) have been working to integrate an appreciation for parties and partisanship into our understanding of what healthy democratic government is like. The election of 2016 showed how urgent that task is; as political scientist Julia Azari has been arguing for months, “the defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong.”
I suggested in my previous essay that “voting patterns didn’t change enough between 2012 and 2016 to justify big claims about new national moods or about Trump’s distinctive appeal. I believe the consequences of this election will be deeply abnormal. But the voting behavior that brought it about was, in the end, very normal.” That normality was the strong partisanship mentioned by Azari. 89% of Democrats voted for Clinton, 90% of Republicans for Trump. Those figures are down a touch from 2012—both major parties lost more voters to third parties than in 2012—but considering the year of headlines about how unpopular both candidates were, the result is stark.
For a while in the Fall it seemed that Trump would alienate enough Republicans to suffer a sizeable loss to Clinton. But those alienated Republicans had mostly shifted their voting intentions to third parties, not to Clinton, and most of them came home again by election day. Which is to say, we should start by understanding that partisans are very, very likely to vote for their own parties’ candidates, regardless of those candidates’ personal merits or indeed the substance of their views. Republicans will even vote for an opponent of free trade and of the postwar western alliance who grossly offends against conservative Christian sexual mores, if that’s who is at the top of their ticket.
The most important political science book of 2016, Christopher Achen’s and Larry Bartel’s Democracy for Realists, shows that we should expect this. Systematic political beliefs, ideas about policies, and views about the state of the world don’t drive decisions about what party to support among most voters most of the time. It’s the other way around: the initial judgment call about which side I’m on (a judgment call that is often shaped by intergenerational habits or membership in identity groups: which party is the party for people like me?) then leads me to bring my beliefs, ideas, and views into line with those that prevail on my side.
This is in part a matter of economizing on information, which we all do, because we have to. No mind could contain the information needed for sufficiently-informed decisionmaking about the countless policies decided by a modern government, and no life contains enough hours to study it, even if the mind could contain it. But it’s not just a matter of low-information voters using parties as a substitute for judgment.
Achen and Bartels show that the adjustment of beliefs (even about factual questions) to match the party’s often increases with greater information and education; it takes some sophistication to correctly understand which side of an issue one’s party is on, after all.
All of which is to say: once Donald Trump got the nomination, there was a real chance of his being elected. (Note that this means no one should ever wish for, and they certainly shouldn’t engage in, strategic cross-party voting to help a major party to nominate a truly disastrous candidate. The other party’s candidate starts with a very large part of the electorate that’s almost sure to vote for them; and that could well put them close enough to a plurality that they’re a stock market crash, a terrorist attack, or an FBI letter away from winning. Although there is now some debate about this finding, Achen and Bartels argue that there’s strong evidence that weather or even shark attacks can jiggle the needle.) In the face of strong partisanship among voters, a lot depends on the strength and quality of the parties as institutions in shaping nomination outcomes.
The question, then, is how did Trump win the nomination?
The immediate answer involves a lot of nervous, feckless, or opportunistic Republican elites waiting for other Republican elites to do the risky work of seriously opposing him, or just taking for granted that he’d implode of his own accord like previous vanity and novelty candidates like Herman Cain had done. In the fall of 2015 Trump flirted with the possibility of running as a third-party candidate if he didn’t like how the Republican establishment treated him; and any of his rivals who took direct aim at him became the target of his mud-wrestling style of politics. (Ted Cruz stood out for the shamelessness of his strategy: hug Trump close and actively praise him, the better to be able to sweep up his support once, presumably, other Republicans had done the work of taking him down.)
Democratic elites, in their capacity as superdelegates, at least faced some pressure to get off the fence and declare for a candidate, allowing Clinton an early show of strength. The Republican Party doesn’t have superdelegates to defend the party’s organizational interests, and Republican officeholders were extremely slow to endorse or rally around any candidate. The RNC seemed so unnerved by the third party threat that its leadership sat on their hands.
Enumerating these bad decisions is just the detailed way of saying: it turned out that the party establishment didn’t have enough organizational strength to be able to repel the invader. An RNC more confident in the party’s strength would have made different choices. Republican officeholders and donors with a clearer sense of partisan coherence might have rallied around one alternative and pressured others out of the race soon enough to matter.
In other words, while we can easily imagine smarter, earlier, and braver action by party elites that would have changed the outcome, suggesting that the party might not have been organizationally impotent, the party elites managed things so haplessly in part because they were organizationally weak and didn’t have tools they were confident in.
In an important new paper, NYU law professor Samuel Isaacharoff argues that the ability of American parties to effectively coordinate political action has been undermined by reforms and legal restrictions including the decline in patronage, the increasing reliance on primary elections (I would add, especially “open” primaries), and campaign finance reform that disproportionately targets highly-visible fund-raising by the parties themselves. The result is “hollowed out” institutions that are vulnerable to “hostile takeover.” Presidential campaigns end up standing substantially on their own in organizational terms, and remake the party afterwards if they win. Trump had notoriously little organizational contact or useful coordination with the RNC in the summer and fall; it turned out not to matter as much as nearly all pundits expected.
Why should we care?
The expectations of the founders notwithstanding, parties aren’t a pathology. There is no case of anything resembling democratic politics in a large modern nation-state that doesn’t involve party competition. Parties aggregate ideas, interests, and ideologies into medium-to-large coalitions, offering information to voters that is even approximately manageable. (Imagine if responsible voting involved not only a mastery of millions of pieces of information about thousands of policies, but also finding out about where the dozens of candidates who appear on a typical ballot—from president to dogcatcher—stood on each of them.) Parties encourage tradeoffs and turn-taking among the groups that make up those coalitions, providing rewards for moderation and patience. And they monitor both their own politicians and the other side’s politicians for gross malfeasance or misgovernment.
A party has a longer time horizon than does an individual politician, and doesn’t want to be tarred with an individual politician’s sins. The individual politician may have an interest in short-term corruption, demagogic popularity, and personal power, but their own party has an interest in keeping them in check. And if their own party forgets about that interest, the opposition is there to remind them.
The elites in the Republican Party spent late 2015 and 2016 showing every sign of knowing that Trump was bad for their party. They simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do enough about it. As voters and as people we should hold them responsible for their failure, but as citizens trying to understand the current state of affairs and looking for routes toward improvement, we should worry about the institutional weakness their failure revealed.
Democratic government needs parties; parties do not need democracy. As a method of integrating large numbers of people into organized mass politics, the party has also been a tool of authoritarianism and totalitarianism—indeed, party organization is one of the key ways in which modern totalitarianism differs from pre-modern tyranny.
In other words, the fact that we need parties as such is the beginning, not the end, of responsible analysis here. We need healthy and competing parties with reasonably responsible elites operating under rules and institutions that encourage ongoing responsibility. The breakdown of parties like that is an easily-overlooked piece of the fragility of free societies—for example, when they become vehicles for the organization of mass support for one strongman, instead of coalitions of cooperating groups brought together by groups of intermediating elites. Parties are only semi-formally a part of the state, and at first glance don’t seem like a part of its constitutional machinery, but their weakness or breakdown becomes weakness and breakdown in the system as a whole.
Isaacharoff’s paper analyzes parties through the model of the corporate business firm. This is useful and illuminating. As Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast have argued, there’s something important in the early-19th-century conjunction of the rise of mass-membership partisan democratic politics and the transformation of the corporation from a monopolistic tool of mercantilist power into an organizational form open for anyone to access in a competitive market. That is, modern competitive democracy and modern competitive commercial capitalism are both part of what they call the “open access order” in which access to organizational tools that solve collective action problems is widely available.
In classical liberal or libertarian social thought, the commercial corporate firm is an object of constant analysis; but when it comes to firms’ political counterpart, that body of thought looks more like political philosophy than like political science, and parties are nowhere to be found. (A thinker like F.A. Hayek might mention that he identifies as an Old Whig to signal what his commitments are, but the sense of the Whigs as a political party doesn’t play any part in that.) I would argue that this is of a piece with classical liberal social theory’s neglect of democratic political processes and indeed of political science as a whole. Classical liberals rightly don’t believe that politics is the most morally valuable thing in the world, but the liberal order that encompasses such values as freedom of religion and speech, due process of law, and open commerce is structured and protected by its political environment. That order is acutely vulnerable when those political structures fail. Our colleagues in economics (and in law-and-economics) do constant valuable work analyzing which legal rules and institutional forms best allow the commercial corporate firm to fulfill desirable economic functions—and which are most likely to become perverse institutional failures. Liberal political thought desperately needs to pay as much attention to the firm’s political counterpart.
I haven’t offered solutions here. I hope to develop ideas about solutions in this space over the next year. But treatment comes after diagnosis. We have to start by understanding that the dangers faced by the political and constitutional order have a lot to do with the weakness of the parties that we rely on to to make that order function.
—
Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill University; author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom; a blogger at Bleeding Heart Libertarians; and a Niskanen Center Adjunct Fellow and Advisory Board Member.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Trump’s Cruel Proposal to End the Shutdown The New Republic / by Matt Ford
Trump’s Cruel Proposal to End the Shutdown
The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 56min
Senate Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday announced the first hint of progress in negotiations over the government shutdown. The chamber has scheduled procedural votes on two separate bills for Thursday: one that would fund the government through February 8, and one that represents President Donald Trump’s opening bid for ending the standoff. Some experienced Capitol Hill observers are underwhelmed by the news:
Senate reaches critical deal to take failed cloture votes
— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) January 22, 2019
I know this is an agreement to take two failed votes, but am I missing something?
Isn’t it tougher on Senate Republicans to vote against a clean CR to reopen government than it is for Senate Dems to vote against wall money + immigration changes + government funding?
— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) January 22, 2019
A breakthrough, then, this is not. That would require a good-faith proposal from the president. Instead, he has put forth a lopsided deal that was reportedly crafted in negotiations between Vice President Mike Pence, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—hardly a stirring example of bipartisanship. Democrats rightly will reject it on Thursday, just as Republicans likely will reject the proposal to reopen the government while negotiations over the wall continue.
As expected, the proposal includes $5.7 billion in funding for Trump’s proposed wall along the southern border. In return, it would grant a three-year extension to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields roughly 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation. It also offers to extend the Temporary Protected Status program, which protects thousands of immigrants who have fled natural disasters or civil wars in their home countries.
It was Trump himself who, over the last two years, ordered an end to DACA and placed TPS recipients at risk for deportation, so his shutdown offer amounts to a hostage-taking. Since the extensions would be temporary, he wouldn’t even be releasing the hostages. But Trump still pitched his proposal as a moderate, sensible solution to the deadlock. “Border security, DACA, TPS, and many other things—straightforward, fair, reasonable, and common sense, with lots of compromise,” he told the country in an address from the White House on Saturday.
When Senate Republicans published the full legislative text of the proposal on Monday night, it soon became clear that their bargain had no hope of becoming law. Immigration lawyers and experts quickly discovered that the proposal would rewrite the DACA and the TPS programs to water down both their scope and their protections. The bill would also impose onerous new restrictions on some asylum applications that, if enacted, may violate U.S. humanitarian treaty commitments. The bill doesn’t show a way out of the shutdown standoff through compromise and conciliation. If anything, it makes compromise even less likely than before.
Trump’s proposal would create a new form of legal status called “provisional protected status” for DACA and TPS recipients. The bill would only apply to TPS recipients from four countries: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Pending expirations for recipients from Nepal and Sudan are still set to lapse without congressional action, while protections for recipients from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that expired in 2017 won’t be renewed. (Sudan’s status was scheduled to expire last November, but a federal judge ordered that it be kept in effect last October.)
Rather than simply extend the current legal status for DACA and TPS recipients, Trump’s proposal would essentially require them to reapply for it—this time, under legal thresholds normally used for immigrants suspected of marriage fraud. Other parts of the bill appeared to be aimed at dissuading asylum applications in the first place. One unusual provision, for example, would also require TPS recipients to reimburse the federal government for any tax credits they benefited from while living in the United States. Since some TPS recipients have lived in the country for more than a decade, those costs could be a crushing financial burden. David J. Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute, wrote on Twitter that the provision was “totally unprecedented in the history of immigration law.”
Most of the changes to asylum law focus on Central American minors, a group of applicants whose requests for asylum have drawn the most coverage in recent years. Under current law, anyone seeking asylum can apply regardless of whether or not they entered the country with legal authorization. Trump, hoping to keep asylum-seekers from first entering the U.S., issued an executive order barring applications from those who didn’t present themselves at a port of entry. But a federal judge in California blocked the order from going into effect in November, and the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to overturn that injunction in December.
Trump’s proposal essentially asks Congress to let it do what the courts won’t allow. A key provision would require Central American minors to submit applications for asylum at U.S. processing centers in their home countries or neighboring ones, thereby undermining the entire premise of the legal right. “Asylum is a form of relief for people who are being persecuted in their home countries and the authorities there are unable or unwilling to protect them (or are the source of the persecution),” Gabriel Malor, a contributor to The Federalist, wrote on Twitter. “You can’t condition asylum on people remaining in the place where they are persecuted.”
Under the bill, only 50,000 Central American minors would be allowed to apply for asylum each year, and only 15,000 of those applications would be accepted. Determining which applicants would be granted asylum wouldn’t be left to immigration courts, but Department of Homeland Security officials. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration lawyer and analyst for the American Immigration Council, noted on Twitter that the bill explicitly shields those officials’ conclusions from judicial review by the federal courts.
The draconian terms make the proposal a non-starter for Democrats. So why make it at all? Trump, a reality-TV maven at heart, has never shied away from placing theatricality ahead of reality. By proposing an end to the shutdown, no matter how far-fetched it may be, he is hoping to shift public pressure onto the Democrats by casting them as the obstructive ones. (Polls show that Americans largely blame Trump and his party for the shutdown and its worsening effects.)
It’s not unusual for dealmakers to make an aggressive opening offer that can be pared back during negotiations. What’s striking about Trump’s proposal isn’t its boldness, but its underlying malice. The North Star of the president’s immigration policy has always been cruelty towards those who pass through the system. By pitching such an extreme proposal, Trump is essentially asking Democrats and the American public to participate in that cruelty to a degree of their own choosing. The only moral choice is to not participate at all.
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Monday, January 21, 2019
The huge problem with Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe that no one talks about | Will Bunch
The huge problem with Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe that no one talks about | Will Bunch
Updated: January 20, 2019 - 2:06 PM
by Will Bunch
If you watched even a few minutes of cable TV news on Friday, you could almost catch a whiff of gunpowder emanating from your flat screen -- and you heard the word “bombshell” more often than a night of Dick Cheney “shock and awe” over Baghdad. A “game-changer” was the other phrase that got tossed around frequently as TV’s talking heads struggled to dissect a report from Buzzfeed News alleging that federal prosecutors had evidence that President Trump had “directed” his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations for a Trump Tower Moscow during the heat of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Indeed, if anything else happened Friday -- killer floods, a new “murder of the century” -- the nation would not have heard about it. The implication was that Buzzfeed’s report was the “smoking gun,” the one thing that would end Trump’s presidency, even if some viewers couldn’t help but wonder why that line wasn’t crossed with Trump’s firing of FBI chief Jim Comey or the revelation of the June 2016 Team Trump-Russia confab at Trump Tower NY or Cohen pleading that Trump “directed” a felony campaign-finance violation. Then, at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, the real chaos erupted.
Related stories
The special counsel’s office led by Robert Mueller -- with a penchant for speaking in public somewhere between Greta Garbo and Marcel Marceau -- shocked journalists with a statement that said elements of the Buzzfeed article are “not accurate,” although it wasn’t clear if that meant the sourcing of the information or the entire premise. (Buzzfeed News is defiantly standing behind the article.) After that, the Buzzfeed affair devolved into a Rorschach test for how one perceives Trump, the Russia scandal, and the media. The Team Mueller statement was certainly a chance for the president and his allies to crow about “fake news.” The Trump Resistance take was a) the oddly worded Mueller denial didn’t necessarily mean the essence was wrong and b) to recall a famous 1972 Watergate incident in which Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were also attacked as “fake news” for a mistake in an article that would soon be swamped by the proof of Richard Nixon’s massive corruption.
In other words, there was probably some wishful thinking on all sides. The only thing most Americans can say with certainty as the Buzzfeed incident still reverberates is that citizens don’t really know any more now than we did last Thursday on the question that increasingly consumes the nation: Is our president a crook? It’s a good time to take a step back and talk about some deeper issues around the American moment we’re living through -- and the outsized role that we’ve given to Mueller and his investigation.
I believe the Buzzfeed article generated such a media frenzy not only because of the explosive nature of the allegations but because The Establishment -- Beltway insiders in the media and on Capitol Hill, even a growing number of Republicans -- is coming to realize what more than half of everyday citizens have known for exactly two years, that Donald Trump is not fit to serve one additional day as our president, and that the risk accelerates with each day he remains in the Oval Office. It’s an existential crisis for the American Experiment that runs much deeper than Trump and Russia (or “Rusher,” as Trump might say) and that many in the D.C. crowd are, in fact, complicit in. And yet no one knows how to get out of this mess. The idea of Trump caught red-handed committing a “high crime” was their easy way out, and Mueller is their deus ex machina.
Let’s stipulate right now that America is in the midst of overlapping crises that are worse, arguably, than anything we’ve seen since 1861, and that the question of Trump’s criminality -- while a vitally important one -- is only one piece of the puzzle.
America is facing a political crisis -- with major chunks of the federal government now shut down for a month with no end in sight, with 800,000 workers struggling to get by, with many of them working for no pay in a nation that supposedly abolished slavery 154 years ago, and with Trump not able to end the crisis as long as he’s in thrall to right-wing talk radio hosts.
America is facing a moral crisis -- as shown by families seeking the legal right of asylum instead getting ripped apart at the U.S. southern border, with thousands of children held in inhumane tent cities or even cages, or by the growing number of hate crimes from coast to coast, like this week’s “Make America Great Again” harassment at the Lincoln Memorial of a proud Native American hero, in a nation where simply chanting the president’s name (“Trump! Trump! Trump!”) is now a symbol of white supremacy.
America is facing an unprecedented crisis of confidence -- thanks to the growing, impossible-to-ignore evidence that a president who was elected with an assist from an often-adversarial in Russia may in fact be an agent, consciously or unconsciously, of that foreign power who is consistently advocating policies that aren’t in the best interest of the United States yet somehow benefit Vladimir Putin.
America has faced down a lot of big crises in its history. Over just the last 100 years, think about moments like the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, or Watergate. We survived those crises through both the strength of our institutions (New Deal legislation, civil rights legislation, the Supreme Court ruling on Nixon’s tape) and the moral courage of everyday citizens who marched in places like Selma. But with the monumental crisis of the most dangerously unqualified president in American history, the institutions that solved the problems of yesteryear have instead helped get us here -- a corrupt, complicit and cowardly Congress, a politically warped judiciary and an numbed electorate that’s been “entertained to death.”
And so our nation has turned its lonely eyes toward Robert Mueller, who plays right into every all-American Gary Cooper myth that a tall, silently stoic cowboy can ride into a lawless town and mete out frontier justice. The Mueller myth has only grown over the 20-months-and-counting of his slow, methodical, secretive investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, Team Trump’s collusion with Russia, a possible White House cover-up, and related matters. Congress and other key players have used the existence of the Mueller probe as an excuse for inaction on the dangers posed by Trump. But Friday’s chaos should have been a wake-up call for the nation. America cannot Mueller its way out of its problems.
Mueller worship has blinded the majority of Americans who oppose Trumpism to some fundamental truths. Among those is the reality that Mueller and his team aren’t perfect and occasionally reek of arrogance. Whatever emerges about Buzzfeed’s original reporting on Michael Cohen, Mueller’s aides could have acted better both when contacted prepublication and in their vague statement Friday night. (And Big Media is showing its embarrassing tendency to defer to authority by giving all the weight to Mueller’s statement even as Buzzfeed aggressively stands by its reporting.) More importantly, Team Mueller is -- nearly two years into this -- excessively secretive, as we’ve seen from pages after pages of thick black redactions. No one truly knows when Mueller might issue his final report, or whether the public will even see it.
Journalism is under fire today, but the foundational premise of investigative reporting is that it abhors a vacuum -- whether that vacuum is a small town city hall that’s serving real-estate developers instead of the public, or the American political system punting on evidence that the president of the United States may have committed high crimes. Journalists from Buzzfeed News, McClatchy, or other newsrooms are aggressively trying not just to get inside the Mueller probe but the underlying evidence because the public is demanding answers that we’re not getting answers from anywhere else in the system.
I understand what the growing network of legal beagles who’ve become TV and internet stars say about this -- that Mueller is playing it by the book, and that releasing any information before every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed might not only jeopardize future convictions but risk undermining the authority that Mueller’s final report would need in order to convince such a politically polarized nation. But the legal-industrial complex that takes over TV every night consists of carpenters looking at every Trump problem as a nail to be hammered by the criminal-justice system. Meanwhile, the public is starting to feel the tension between Mueller’s tortoise-like probe and the crisis at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that is rapidly spiraling out of control.
Think about Watergate. Yes, there were robust criminal investigations by special prosecutors Archibald Cox -- fired in the notorious “Saturday Night Massacre” -- and Leon Jaworski that convicted more than 40 people, including an attorney general and the White House chief of staff, but that wasn’t what took down Richard Nixon or helped America get beyond the scandal. Instead, it was a combination of nationally televised public hearings where citizens saw the key players -- especially White House counsel-turned-whistleblower John Dean -- for themselves, and then a thorough (and also public) impeachment process where Nixon’s sins were debated by Democrats and Republicans. Yes, it was a different time. There was more trust in the media, less partisan trench warfare among the public, and a lot more courage, especially from Republicans willing to break from their party.
But it’s time to acknowledge the problem with the Mueller probe -- that it’s not going to get America out of this mess. The only thing that can do that is an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, a process that will be not secretive but transparent, not legalistic but democratic in its nature.
This week, the Atlantic published a remarkable piece by historian Yoni Applebaum that lays out the case for the impeachment process to begin. He argues that some mythology about the way that the major impeachment inquiries of the past -- Nixon, Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson -- played out has blinded us to the essential role that an impeachment process can play in airing a crisis like the current mess, even if the ultimate outcome is not Trump’s removal from office.
The crux of Applebaum’s argument is this powerful paragraph. “It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits -- to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system -- accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.”
Until this month, Republican control of the House -- and their fealty to the Trump-Fox talk radio axis -- made that a mathematical impossibility. Now that Democrats control the lower chamber, it is imperative that they conquer their decades of political timidity and exercise their Constitutional duty -- to investigate the president’s fitness to complete his term. And these investigations should be conducted largely in public, in the same manner as the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings. News that Cohen will testify in public in early February is only a start. The American people demand -- and deserve -- much, much more.
Let’s stop waiting for Bob Mueller to come down from the mountaintop. It’s time for the American people, our leaders, and our battered system to relearn how to climb that mountain ourselves.
by Will Bunch
Posted: January 20, 2019 - 2:06 PM
Will Bunch | @will_bunch | bunchw@phillynews.com
Updated: January 20, 2019 - 2:06 PM
by Will Bunch
If you watched even a few minutes of cable TV news on Friday, you could almost catch a whiff of gunpowder emanating from your flat screen -- and you heard the word “bombshell” more often than a night of Dick Cheney “shock and awe” over Baghdad. A “game-changer” was the other phrase that got tossed around frequently as TV’s talking heads struggled to dissect a report from Buzzfeed News alleging that federal prosecutors had evidence that President Trump had “directed” his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations for a Trump Tower Moscow during the heat of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Indeed, if anything else happened Friday -- killer floods, a new “murder of the century” -- the nation would not have heard about it. The implication was that Buzzfeed’s report was the “smoking gun,” the one thing that would end Trump’s presidency, even if some viewers couldn’t help but wonder why that line wasn’t crossed with Trump’s firing of FBI chief Jim Comey or the revelation of the June 2016 Team Trump-Russia confab at Trump Tower NY or Cohen pleading that Trump “directed” a felony campaign-finance violation. Then, at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, the real chaos erupted.
Related stories
The special counsel’s office led by Robert Mueller -- with a penchant for speaking in public somewhere between Greta Garbo and Marcel Marceau -- shocked journalists with a statement that said elements of the Buzzfeed article are “not accurate,” although it wasn’t clear if that meant the sourcing of the information or the entire premise. (Buzzfeed News is defiantly standing behind the article.) After that, the Buzzfeed affair devolved into a Rorschach test for how one perceives Trump, the Russia scandal, and the media. The Team Mueller statement was certainly a chance for the president and his allies to crow about “fake news.” The Trump Resistance take was a) the oddly worded Mueller denial didn’t necessarily mean the essence was wrong and b) to recall a famous 1972 Watergate incident in which Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were also attacked as “fake news” for a mistake in an article that would soon be swamped by the proof of Richard Nixon’s massive corruption.
In other words, there was probably some wishful thinking on all sides. The only thing most Americans can say with certainty as the Buzzfeed incident still reverberates is that citizens don’t really know any more now than we did last Thursday on the question that increasingly consumes the nation: Is our president a crook? It’s a good time to take a step back and talk about some deeper issues around the American moment we’re living through -- and the outsized role that we’ve given to Mueller and his investigation.
I believe the Buzzfeed article generated such a media frenzy not only because of the explosive nature of the allegations but because The Establishment -- Beltway insiders in the media and on Capitol Hill, even a growing number of Republicans -- is coming to realize what more than half of everyday citizens have known for exactly two years, that Donald Trump is not fit to serve one additional day as our president, and that the risk accelerates with each day he remains in the Oval Office. It’s an existential crisis for the American Experiment that runs much deeper than Trump and Russia (or “Rusher,” as Trump might say) and that many in the D.C. crowd are, in fact, complicit in. And yet no one knows how to get out of this mess. The idea of Trump caught red-handed committing a “high crime” was their easy way out, and Mueller is their deus ex machina.
Let’s stipulate right now that America is in the midst of overlapping crises that are worse, arguably, than anything we’ve seen since 1861, and that the question of Trump’s criminality -- while a vitally important one -- is only one piece of the puzzle.
America is facing a political crisis -- with major chunks of the federal government now shut down for a month with no end in sight, with 800,000 workers struggling to get by, with many of them working for no pay in a nation that supposedly abolished slavery 154 years ago, and with Trump not able to end the crisis as long as he’s in thrall to right-wing talk radio hosts.
America is facing a moral crisis -- as shown by families seeking the legal right of asylum instead getting ripped apart at the U.S. southern border, with thousands of children held in inhumane tent cities or even cages, or by the growing number of hate crimes from coast to coast, like this week’s “Make America Great Again” harassment at the Lincoln Memorial of a proud Native American hero, in a nation where simply chanting the president’s name (“Trump! Trump! Trump!”) is now a symbol of white supremacy.
America is facing an unprecedented crisis of confidence -- thanks to the growing, impossible-to-ignore evidence that a president who was elected with an assist from an often-adversarial in Russia may in fact be an agent, consciously or unconsciously, of that foreign power who is consistently advocating policies that aren’t in the best interest of the United States yet somehow benefit Vladimir Putin.
America has faced down a lot of big crises in its history. Over just the last 100 years, think about moments like the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, or Watergate. We survived those crises through both the strength of our institutions (New Deal legislation, civil rights legislation, the Supreme Court ruling on Nixon’s tape) and the moral courage of everyday citizens who marched in places like Selma. But with the monumental crisis of the most dangerously unqualified president in American history, the institutions that solved the problems of yesteryear have instead helped get us here -- a corrupt, complicit and cowardly Congress, a politically warped judiciary and an numbed electorate that’s been “entertained to death.”
And so our nation has turned its lonely eyes toward Robert Mueller, who plays right into every all-American Gary Cooper myth that a tall, silently stoic cowboy can ride into a lawless town and mete out frontier justice. The Mueller myth has only grown over the 20-months-and-counting of his slow, methodical, secretive investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, Team Trump’s collusion with Russia, a possible White House cover-up, and related matters. Congress and other key players have used the existence of the Mueller probe as an excuse for inaction on the dangers posed by Trump. But Friday’s chaos should have been a wake-up call for the nation. America cannot Mueller its way out of its problems.
Mueller worship has blinded the majority of Americans who oppose Trumpism to some fundamental truths. Among those is the reality that Mueller and his team aren’t perfect and occasionally reek of arrogance. Whatever emerges about Buzzfeed’s original reporting on Michael Cohen, Mueller’s aides could have acted better both when contacted prepublication and in their vague statement Friday night. (And Big Media is showing its embarrassing tendency to defer to authority by giving all the weight to Mueller’s statement even as Buzzfeed aggressively stands by its reporting.) More importantly, Team Mueller is -- nearly two years into this -- excessively secretive, as we’ve seen from pages after pages of thick black redactions. No one truly knows when Mueller might issue his final report, or whether the public will even see it.
Journalism is under fire today, but the foundational premise of investigative reporting is that it abhors a vacuum -- whether that vacuum is a small town city hall that’s serving real-estate developers instead of the public, or the American political system punting on evidence that the president of the United States may have committed high crimes. Journalists from Buzzfeed News, McClatchy, or other newsrooms are aggressively trying not just to get inside the Mueller probe but the underlying evidence because the public is demanding answers that we’re not getting answers from anywhere else in the system.
I understand what the growing network of legal beagles who’ve become TV and internet stars say about this -- that Mueller is playing it by the book, and that releasing any information before every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed might not only jeopardize future convictions but risk undermining the authority that Mueller’s final report would need in order to convince such a politically polarized nation. But the legal-industrial complex that takes over TV every night consists of carpenters looking at every Trump problem as a nail to be hammered by the criminal-justice system. Meanwhile, the public is starting to feel the tension between Mueller’s tortoise-like probe and the crisis at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that is rapidly spiraling out of control.
Think about Watergate. Yes, there were robust criminal investigations by special prosecutors Archibald Cox -- fired in the notorious “Saturday Night Massacre” -- and Leon Jaworski that convicted more than 40 people, including an attorney general and the White House chief of staff, but that wasn’t what took down Richard Nixon or helped America get beyond the scandal. Instead, it was a combination of nationally televised public hearings where citizens saw the key players -- especially White House counsel-turned-whistleblower John Dean -- for themselves, and then a thorough (and also public) impeachment process where Nixon’s sins were debated by Democrats and Republicans. Yes, it was a different time. There was more trust in the media, less partisan trench warfare among the public, and a lot more courage, especially from Republicans willing to break from their party.
But it’s time to acknowledge the problem with the Mueller probe -- that it’s not going to get America out of this mess. The only thing that can do that is an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, a process that will be not secretive but transparent, not legalistic but democratic in its nature.
This week, the Atlantic published a remarkable piece by historian Yoni Applebaum that lays out the case for the impeachment process to begin. He argues that some mythology about the way that the major impeachment inquiries of the past -- Nixon, Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson -- played out has blinded us to the essential role that an impeachment process can play in airing a crisis like the current mess, even if the ultimate outcome is not Trump’s removal from office.
The crux of Applebaum’s argument is this powerful paragraph. “It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits -- to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system -- accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.”
Until this month, Republican control of the House -- and their fealty to the Trump-Fox talk radio axis -- made that a mathematical impossibility. Now that Democrats control the lower chamber, it is imperative that they conquer their decades of political timidity and exercise their Constitutional duty -- to investigate the president’s fitness to complete his term. And these investigations should be conducted largely in public, in the same manner as the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings. News that Cohen will testify in public in early February is only a start. The American people demand -- and deserve -- much, much more.
Let’s stop waiting for Bob Mueller to come down from the mountaintop. It’s time for the American people, our leaders, and our battered system to relearn how to climb that mountain ourselves.
by Will Bunch
Posted: January 20, 2019 - 2:06 PM
Will Bunch | @will_bunch | bunchw@phillynews.com
Thursday, January 17, 2019
A coal baron's takeover of the EPA is nearly complete, by Emily Atkin (TNR)
newrepublic.com
A Coal Baron’s Takeover of the EPA Is Nearly Complete
By Emily Atkin
5-6 minutes
A few weeks after President Donald Trump moved into the White House, he received a memo from one of his biggest campaign donors: Robert Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, America’s largest private coal company. Emblazoned with the words “Action Plan,” it was essentially a wish list of all the environmental regulations Murray wanted Trump to get rid of.
Nearly two years later, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is on track to fulfill almost all of Murray’s requests. And the Senate is on the cusp of allowing one of Murray’s most trusted former lobbyists to lead the effort.
On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a confirmation hearing for Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Wheeler has been effectively running the agency as acting administrator since July, when Scott Pruitt resigned amid a deluge of ethical scandals. But Trump only formally nominated Wheeler to lead the EPA last week, triggering a confirmation process that Democrats are using to shine light on an unsavory fact: As a lobbyist for Faegre Baker Daniels, Wheeler earned more than $700,000 working for an industry he’s in charge of regulating.
The Republican-controlled Senate is unlikely to care about this potential conflict of interest, because they’ve confirmed Wheeler before; his ascent to EPA acting administrator was an automatic promotion from his Senate-confirmed role as deputy administrator. But Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse used Wednesday’s hearing to argue that Wheeler had hidden information from the Senate about his relationship with the coal company.
During his confirmation hearing in November 2017, Wheeler said he “did not work on” Murray’s “Action Plan” for Trump, did “not have a copy” of it, and that he only saw the plan “briefly at the beginning of the year.” These comments were featured Wednesday on a large poster board held by a Whitehouse staffer.
epw.senate.gov
As The Washington Post later revealed, Wheeler attended a meeting in March 2017 with his then-client, Murray, and Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry. “The action plan was right there in the room,” Whitehouse said while his staffer displayed the photographic evidence.
epw.senate.gov
Whitehouse then showed a photo of Perry and Murray at the end of the meeting, embracing in a “bear hug.”
“That’s not me, though,” Wheeler said.
“No, that’s your client, Mr. Murray,” Whitehouse replied.
epw.senate.gov
Good government advocates say it’s not inherently unethical for a former industry lobbyist like Wheeler to lead the EPA. What’s unethical, they say, is if the former lobbyist continues to work for the benefit of their former client instead of the public.
Murray seems to believe Wheeler will continue to do what he wants. “He worked for me for 20 years,” he told Politico last year. “Didn’t want to lose him. But the country has him.” And so far, he’s right. As Mother Jones reported on Wednesday, “The last major action Wheeler took before his agency shut down late last month was remove the legal justification for the EPA’s regulation for mercury, arsenic and air toxics, a move that weakens the EPA’s position in a court case pursued by, yes, Bob Murray.”
The key question for the Senate is whether Wheeler, as the head of the EPA, would willfully ignore the public interest in order to please his former client. Senate Democrats certainly think he would, which is why they spent much of their time Wednesday grilling Wheeler on climate change and criticizing him for weakening several Obama-era rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Wheeler has proven to be a quieter, less controversial figure than Pruitt—and potentially a more effective one. Under Wheeler’s rule, the EPA has proposed weakening methane pollution limits for oil and gas producers and air pollution limits for cars. The agency has also proposed new greenhouse gas regulations to replace the ones implemented by Obama’s EPA, which could be worse for the climate than having no climate rules at all.
Pruitt was planning on doing all those things, too. But many have argued that Wheeler understands the administrative and legal processes better than Pruitt, and thus can implement deregulatory rules that more effectively benefit industry and withstand court challenges. And unlike Pruitt, Wheeler hasn’t been making daily headlines for booking expensive first-class travel, keeping secret calendars, or installing $43,000 soundproof booths.
Wednesday’s hearing didn’t alter that impression. Wheeler proved that he’s deeply knowledgeable about the energy industry and EPA regulations, and that he’s more politically adept than his predecessor. When Senator Bernie Sanders asked him about climate change, he did not deny its reality. “I would not call it the greatest crisis, no sir,” Wheeler said. “I would call it a huge issue that has to be addressed globally.” It was an innocuous response that lent itself neither to outraged headlines nor furious tweets from his soon-to-be-boss.
A Coal Baron’s Takeover of the EPA Is Nearly Complete
By Emily Atkin
5-6 minutes
A few weeks after President Donald Trump moved into the White House, he received a memo from one of his biggest campaign donors: Robert Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, America’s largest private coal company. Emblazoned with the words “Action Plan,” it was essentially a wish list of all the environmental regulations Murray wanted Trump to get rid of.
Nearly two years later, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is on track to fulfill almost all of Murray’s requests. And the Senate is on the cusp of allowing one of Murray’s most trusted former lobbyists to lead the effort.
On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a confirmation hearing for Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Wheeler has been effectively running the agency as acting administrator since July, when Scott Pruitt resigned amid a deluge of ethical scandals. But Trump only formally nominated Wheeler to lead the EPA last week, triggering a confirmation process that Democrats are using to shine light on an unsavory fact: As a lobbyist for Faegre Baker Daniels, Wheeler earned more than $700,000 working for an industry he’s in charge of regulating.
The Republican-controlled Senate is unlikely to care about this potential conflict of interest, because they’ve confirmed Wheeler before; his ascent to EPA acting administrator was an automatic promotion from his Senate-confirmed role as deputy administrator. But Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse used Wednesday’s hearing to argue that Wheeler had hidden information from the Senate about his relationship with the coal company.
During his confirmation hearing in November 2017, Wheeler said he “did not work on” Murray’s “Action Plan” for Trump, did “not have a copy” of it, and that he only saw the plan “briefly at the beginning of the year.” These comments were featured Wednesday on a large poster board held by a Whitehouse staffer.
epw.senate.gov
As The Washington Post later revealed, Wheeler attended a meeting in March 2017 with his then-client, Murray, and Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry. “The action plan was right there in the room,” Whitehouse said while his staffer displayed the photographic evidence.
epw.senate.gov
Whitehouse then showed a photo of Perry and Murray at the end of the meeting, embracing in a “bear hug.”
“That’s not me, though,” Wheeler said.
“No, that’s your client, Mr. Murray,” Whitehouse replied.
epw.senate.gov
Good government advocates say it’s not inherently unethical for a former industry lobbyist like Wheeler to lead the EPA. What’s unethical, they say, is if the former lobbyist continues to work for the benefit of their former client instead of the public.
Murray seems to believe Wheeler will continue to do what he wants. “He worked for me for 20 years,” he told Politico last year. “Didn’t want to lose him. But the country has him.” And so far, he’s right. As Mother Jones reported on Wednesday, “The last major action Wheeler took before his agency shut down late last month was remove the legal justification for the EPA’s regulation for mercury, arsenic and air toxics, a move that weakens the EPA’s position in a court case pursued by, yes, Bob Murray.”
The key question for the Senate is whether Wheeler, as the head of the EPA, would willfully ignore the public interest in order to please his former client. Senate Democrats certainly think he would, which is why they spent much of their time Wednesday grilling Wheeler on climate change and criticizing him for weakening several Obama-era rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Wheeler has proven to be a quieter, less controversial figure than Pruitt—and potentially a more effective one. Under Wheeler’s rule, the EPA has proposed weakening methane pollution limits for oil and gas producers and air pollution limits for cars. The agency has also proposed new greenhouse gas regulations to replace the ones implemented by Obama’s EPA, which could be worse for the climate than having no climate rules at all.
Pruitt was planning on doing all those things, too. But many have argued that Wheeler understands the administrative and legal processes better than Pruitt, and thus can implement deregulatory rules that more effectively benefit industry and withstand court challenges. And unlike Pruitt, Wheeler hasn’t been making daily headlines for booking expensive first-class travel, keeping secret calendars, or installing $43,000 soundproof booths.
Wednesday’s hearing didn’t alter that impression. Wheeler proved that he’s deeply knowledgeable about the energy industry and EPA regulations, and that he’s more politically adept than his predecessor. When Senator Bernie Sanders asked him about climate change, he did not deny its reality. “I would not call it the greatest crisis, no sir,” Wheeler said. “I would call it a huge issue that has to be addressed globally.” It was an innocuous response that lent itself neither to outraged headlines nor furious tweets from his soon-to-be-boss.
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