Miscellany Central

Friday, April 2, 2021

We need to talk about UFOs again

Daniel W. Drezner

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

April 1, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

Yes, this is being published on April 1. No, this is not a joke column.

A filmgoer takes a picture of the poster for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” before a 40th anniversary screening of the film at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles in 2017. (Chris Pizzello/AP)

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has probably written close to 2,000 columns since coming to The Washington Post. Among those that generated a steady stream of responses was one from 2019 headlined “UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact.” That column did not say that aliens have visited Earth. Among the things it did say was that there literally are objects flying around that no one, including U.S. Navy pilots, can identify, and we have to puzzle out what that means.

In the two years since that column appeared, the U.S. government continues to tiptoe toward the normalization of the idea of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Last year the Department of Defense released three videos (one recorded in 2004 and the other two in 2015) of U.S. Navy pilots seeing something and having no idea what it was. In its news release, the Pentagon said, “the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified,’” putting the U in UFO.

The Pentagon went further in August 2020, announcing the establishment of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force. Beyond developing a new abbreviation that is less loaded than UFO, the Pentagon explained, “The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”

Then, 10 days ago, former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe went on Fox News and made a whole bunch of claims about what the U.S. intelligence community knew about UAPs, including that a Pentagon report would soon be released revealing even more information. According to the New York Post’s Tamar Lapin and Jackie Salo:

“There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” he told host Maria Bartiromo. “Some of those have been declassified.”

“And when we talk about sightings,” Ratcliffe continued, “we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.”

“Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

Still, it would appear that in June there will be an official U.S. government report acknowledging the existence of UFOs or UAPs or whatever you want to call them.

It is increasingly respectable to acknowledge that unidentified aerial phenomena are a thing. But this leads to a few follow-up questions. Does this evidence point toward the prospect of extraterrestrial observation of our planet? If so, how should we feel about that?

I am not going to speculate on the first question beyond noting that if Harvard astrophysicists are making that suggestion about interstellar phenomena, perhaps we need at least to consider the possibility that these UAPs might also be extraterrestrial in origin.

The more interesting question is how we should respond to this. There has been increasing apprehension on the part of some very smart people about contacting extraterrestrials. In 2010, Stephen Hawking told the Discovery Channel, “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.” Similarly, physicist Mark Buchanan argued in 2016, “Any civilization detecting our presence is likely to be technologically very advanced, and may not be disposed to treat us nicely. At the very least, the idea seems morally questionable.”

If UAPs are extraterrestrials, however, this is a different scenario: It is not humans contacting extraterrestrials but rather those extraterrestrials actively observing us. Furthermore, they seem to be doing so in a way that is not destructive.

That is promising! Observation without the intent to destroy suggests a civilization that is much less violent than, say, Spanish conquistadors.

Furthermore, it might be better for U.S. national security if these UAPs turn out to be ETs. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told the New York Post, “Frankly, that if it’s something from outside this planet — that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this activity.”

I get the concern from physicists that technologically advanced extraterrestrials might behave as powerful human civilizations have in the past. But maybe the concerned physicists should engage a little more with social scientists. The assumption is that powerful, technologically advanced civilizations will act in a destructive manner. That is possible, but perhaps civilizations that reward destructive entrepreneurship are less likely to generate the technological wherewithal for interstellar travel. And if those UAPs are ETs, maybe there is more hope for interstellar relations than either scientists or science fiction envision.

Antitrust law is the key to making the NCAA pay student-athletes

By Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute, an antimonopoly research and advocacy group.

April 1, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. GMT+9

The courts have long protected the NCAA. A new Supreme Court case might change that.

A Final Four banner across a street in Indianapolis. (Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

A day after Gonzaga and UCLA won their Elite Eight contests and joined Baylor and Houston in the Final Four of men’s college basketball, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, a case that could remake college basketball and football in the United States. In Alston, a group of basketball players (both men and women) and football players challenged, on antitrust grounds, the NCAA’s rules prohibiting pay to players and won a partial victory, with the district and appellate courts striking down the NCAA’s ban on payments tied to education. As the players successfully argued, the NCAA’s caps on player compensation restrain competition among colleges for athletes’ talents.

The NCAA now asks the high court to reverse the judgment in favor of the players and grant it an effective antitrust immunity. (The Open Markets Institute, where I serve as legal director, filed an amicus brief in support of the players.) At oral argument, several justices expressed skepticism that colleges, operating through the NCAA, should have the right to collusively cap compensation to the athletes who draw millions of fans, under the guise of “amateurism.” They were right to do so. The NCAA is, in effect, an employer cartel that deprives the predominantly Black basketball and football players of a fair share of the revenue they generate. Wednesday’s arguments further exposed the weakness of the NCAA’s position, showing that it absurdly upholds the supposed interests of its fans at the literal expense of the athletes it employs.

The NCAA is a peculiar institution. Many of its Division I colleges and universities run highly lucrative basketball and football programs. The NCAA and the major conferences produce tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue from the two sports. Member colleges, however, share only a small portion of this revenue with the players because they agree not to pay the players a wage and cap their compensation at a scholarship covering tuition, room and board and ancillary expenses of college attendance. Because not all players receive full scholarships, some have reported not having enough money to obtain food and other necessities. Whereas professional basketball and football players earn about 50 percent of league revenue in salaries and benefits, their college counterparts receive less than 20 percent of their sports’ revenue in the form of scholarships. Where does the remaining 80 percent of revenue go? In part to coaches like Alabama’s Nick Saban and Kentucky’s John Calipari, who each make around $10 million a year.

Ordinarily, the NCAA’s conduct would be clearly illegal under the antitrust laws as an association of employers collusively holding down the compensation of its workers. Until recently, however, the NCAA successfully used a 1984 Supreme Court case to defend its wage-fixing. In NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, the court struck down the NCAA’s rules that prevented top football programs from entering into separate television broadcasting contracts. In passing, it also praised the social value of amateur athletics. The NCAA has since persuaded several courts that this throwaway line in a decision invalidating the NCAA’s restraints on TV contracts protected its restrictions on compensation for players.

Despite the NCAA’s expansive interpretation of Board of Regents and earlier victories in litigation, the players in Alston challenged the NCAA’s rules against paying players and won at trial. They successfully defended this victory on appeal. A district judge in California and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that the players showed that the NCAA’s restraints hurt them. In the absence of these restraints, colleges would compete for players’ talents by offering wages, salaries and benefits.

The courts, however, denied the players justice in full measure. They permitted the NCAA to introduce justifications of its restraints on player compensation. While rejecting most of the NCAA’s rationalizations, the lower courts did credit one of them: According to the NCAA, a nontrivial segment of college sports fans value watching college sports because the players do not receive competitive compensation in the way professional athletes do. In other words, capping player compensation is a way in which the NCAA differentiates its basketball and football from the NBA, NFL and WNBA. Because of this consumer “benefit,” the courts only invalidated the NCAA’s restraints limiting compensation to “education related payments.” The courts kept the NCAA’s general ban on wages and salaries for players intact. Under the ruling, colleges can compete for basketball players by granting scholarships for future graduate study, but not by offering, say, a $150,000 annual salary.

Simply put, the courts preserved the NCAA’s collusive system because fans purportedly value it. In essence, the courts catered to the viewing public’s supposed desire to watch athletes who do not receive fair competitive pay — a taste for exploitation that has a clear racial element. In research published in 2015, most Black sports fans supported paying players, while only about 20 percent of White fans favored this change. Notably, White viewers who expressed the strongest anti-Black racism were the most opposed to colleges paying players.

The exploitation itself is racialized, too. In 2020, nearly half of players in football and women’s basketball and more than 55 percent of players in men’s basketball were Black. In contrast, the highly paid coaching and athletic director ranks were mostly White. The historian Taylor Branch analogized the system of compensation and control in college basketball and football to plantation slavery and colonialism.

Wednesday’s 90-minute oral argument in Alston seemed to favor the players. Several justices noted the exploitative character of the NCAA and expressed skepticism about the justifications offered by the NCAA’s lawyer, Seth Waxman, who served as solicitor general in the Clinton administration. Justice Clarence Thomas asked why the NCAA collusively limits the pay of players, but not coaches. He wondered if there is any principled distinction between the two classes.

Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh, meanwhile, homed in on the huge sums of money generated by college basketball and football and the paltry compensation to players, sounding unpersuaded by the NCAA’s repeated invocation of “amateurism.” Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Elena Kagan noted the wage-fixing of NCAA members, with Gorsuch adding the NCAA has “monopsony control over the labor market.” In comparison, the justices’ questioning of the players’ counsel focused on the feasibility of remedies for the NCAA. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, adopting the most pro-NCAA posture over the 90 minutes, feared that a victory for the players could initiate the unraveling of the entire NCAA system.

There is reason, though, to hope that the majority will ultimately find that the lower courts did not go far enough. Our antitrust laws protect workers and other producers, just as much as they protect consumers. As a court of appeals judge in 2001, now-Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “A horizontal conspiracy among buyers to stifle competition is as unlawful as one among sellers.” Furthermore, courts are not free to tolerate employer collusion in a labor market because it ostensibly serves consumers in another market. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1972 antitrust ruling, “If a decision is to be made to sacrifice competition in one portion of the economy for greater competition in another portion this too is a decision that must be made by Congress and not by private forces or by the courts.” Employers like the NCAA have no right to hurt their workers to supposedly cater to viewer preferences.

Impatience and habit during a pandemic

Daniel W. Drezner

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

March 31, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

A health-care worker administers the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at a vaccination clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on March 4. (Jennifer Gauthier/Bloomberg)

The end of March means my monthly pandemic diary is now one year old. I was not sure how long it would last when it began in March 2020, but the idea of a whole year of pandemic life seemed inconceivable.

A quick recap of the gamut of reactions the novel coronavirus has generated over the past year:

As the first year of the pandemic comes to a close, this past month has been about my impatience with ending this phase of life.

Things are getting better! A larger fraction of the population is now vaccinated against covid-19. All of the reporting shows that by June the United States will have a surplus of vaccines rather than a surplus of people wanting to get vaccinated. It is wonderful to see the exit out of the pandemic year.

People in my orbit are getting their shots. My parents are fully vaccinated, as is my wife. Over the past month it has been delightful to see so many friends and colleagues post selfies of getting jabbed.

I will confess to having one small, self-interested question: “When in the name of all that is holy do I get my shot?!”

The vagaries of vaccine distribution have made me appreciate the mixed blessing of living in Massachusetts during a pandemic. There is widespread acceptance of mask mandates and social distancing and the power of vaccines. Unfortunately, this also means that the state has been much slower in opening up vaccinations to the general population. In contrast to, say, Tennessee or Alabama, more folks here want to be vaccinated. The queue is longer. Those of us who are not over 65 or do not have comorbidities or are not an essential worker will have to wait until April 19 at the earliest.

My rational brain says that is fine. It is an objectively good thing that I am young and healthy enough not to be considered a high medical risk. I do not need the vaccine the way more vulnerable demographics need it.

Psychologically, however, my need feels pretty desperate. I keep thinking about the scene in “Jaws” when Robert Shaw’s character Quint relays the story of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the shark feeding frenzy that followed. Once the rescue plane arrive, he said, “that was the time I was most frightened, waiting for my turn.”

That is how I feel now. I have spent a year circumscribing my daily life to avoid getting sick and getting others sick. To contract the disease now, when the way out is partially illuminated, would be a rebuke of everything sacrificed in the past 12 months. As a nascent fourth wave emerges in my state, activities I have done regularly over the past year, like grocery shopping, fill me with a dread I have not felt since last spring. It is not rational but that does not mean it’s not real.

What makes this all worse is the claustrophobia of my daily life. In the year before the pandemic I had visited Moscow, Munich, Beijing, Dubai, Chicago, Toronto and Bryce Canyon. In the past 12 months, my universe has shrunk to my house, its environs, and the occasional local errand.

It is impossible not to obsess over the minutiae of daily life in a way that I was previously too busy to notice. Some gurus and psychologists think this is healthy, a way of staying ever-present in the moment. It’s true, I have become much more attentive to the changing of the seasons and the cycle of nature. But there’s a dark side to that kind of attentiveness: noticing that I am slightly better than my wife at preparing our morning coffee or loading our dishwasher, for example. Her realization that she is slightly better at almost everything else in our quotidian existence is also a thing.

Ordinarily, these small things would not be noticeable. When there is nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, they feel more important. So for the love of God, someone in this commonwealth give me a vaccine and give it to me soon. I am weary of my small world. I want so much for it to become big again.

Biden might just understand public opinion better than his critics

Opinion by

Jennifer Rubin

Columnist

April 1, 2021 at 11:30 p.m. GMT+9

President Biden arrives at Pittsburgh International Airport on Wednesday. (Evan Vucci/AP)

News pundits have been predicting a reckoning for President Biden: He’s risking his agenda with a big tax plan! Paying for infrastructure is politically perilous!

Maybe not. The latest Morning Consult/Politico poll finds that “voters broadly support this expanded notion of infrastructure, with measures like increasing housing options for low-income families garnering the support of 70 percent of registered voters, including 87 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans.”

Gosh, it’s just like Biden’s covid-19 stimulus package. Republicans in Congress are dead-set against it, but a lot of their own voters think it is a fine idea.

Other progressive priorities get varying levels of support. According to the poll, 63 percent of respondents support using money for climate change research, while 60 percent support free community college. Expanding the country’s electric vehicle charging network gets 59 percent.

The kicker: The bill is more popular with the tax hikes than without them. “57% of voters say they’d be more likely to support Biden’s infrastructure plan if it were funded by tax increases on those making over $400,000,” the poll found. “47% of voters say they’d be more likely to support the $3 trillion proposal if it were funded by increases to the corporate tax rate.” Only 27 percent support infrastructure without tax hikes, which appears to be the GOP’s stance. A plurality of Republican voters (42 percent) — well short of a majority — favor that approach. (Remember the good old days when Republicans cared about debt?) Among independents, 52 percent support the plan with tax hikes while only 26 percent support an infrastructure bill without them.

The media, it seems, are caught in a Republican framing of policy that does not match reality. There is not a hue and cry over a mammoth infrastructure bill. To the contrary, it is super popular. And Republicans might want to stop harping on the tax increases: Those make the bill even more popular.

In a sign of confidence, Biden said in his rollout speech, “The American Jobs Plan is a once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we have seen or done since we built the Interstate Highway System and won the Space Race decades ago.” In other words, its size is a feature not a bug. We invest now because of huge returns down the road.

Republicans’ 2017 bet on huge tax cuts for richer Americans and for corporations not only failed to pay for themselves; there is little evidence they had any significant, long-lasting benefit for the economy. If you are going to bet on future returns, why not get bridges, roads, internet and other tangible benefits?

I have previously suggested that the pandemic and recession, much like the Great Depression, may have shifted the country’s politics. Voters want more government. They are not shy about saying who should pay for it. (Perhaps the hundreds of billions of stimulus dollars handed out to corporations left many voters thinking corporations should start paying more.) If that is so, Biden is not taking a big risk; he is playing it safe. It may be Republicans who are playing with fire in opposing popular legislation, just as they did on the relief plan. (The shift in opinion on more activist government may explain why Biden gets a 57/39 percent favorable/unfavorable rating, while Republicans in Congress get a dreadful 36/55 favorable/unfavorable rating.)

And if Republicans are banking on Biden’s immigration policies to carry them to victory, they might want to reconsider. While 35 percent of voters care about issues such as jobs, the economy, taxes and spending, only 15 percent care about security issues, of which immigration is only one item.

We will see how other polls register (the Associated Press-NORC poll gives Biden a 61 percent approval rating, and 73 percent approval for his handling of the pandemic), and how voters react when they learn more about the plan. However, it is a good bet to say that Biden’s vision is, once again, far more popular than that of Republicans. No wonder the GOP is forever reverting to inane cultural memes.

Did the Democratic Majority emerge after all?

By Matthew Yglesias. SlowBoring.com.

March 31, 2021.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) walks to start a press conference at the US Capitol on March 10, 2021 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

I had Ruy Teixeira on the Weeds last week, mostly to talk about Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters in 2020 and his new project, The Liberal Patriot.

But Teixeira is probably still best known for his 2004 book with John Judis, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which is one of those books that’s widely referenced years after publication but typically in a kind of caricature form. Obviously, the Democratic majority that Teixeira and Judis forecast — driven by the growing nonwhite share of the electorate and the increasing liberalism of college-educated professionals and big metro areas — did not exactly emerge.

Nevertheless, the big demographic trends that the book is about did emerge, and they played out roughly the way they forecasted.

Some other things broke less favorably. But broadly speaking, I want to defend the relevance of the book’s main ideas.

The baseline matters

Let’s start with the title, which was a deliberate reference to Kevin Phillips’ 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority.”

Phillips’ thesis was that the superficially close race between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey in 1968 concealed the larger crackup of the New Deal coalition (as witnessed by the strong vote for George Wallace), and that Republicans were now prepared to become the dominant party.

The GOP then went on to win four out of the next five presidential elections, control the Senate from 1981-86, and control the House never.

This was broadly considered to be a vindication of Phillips’ thesis, because even though the Democrats had the upper hand in Congress to preserve their majority, they had to give a lot of ground. The Carter administration did not have any huge signature legislative achievements, instead thwarted by nearly unified Republican control of the government. And in 1981, House Republicans formed a de facto coalition with a faction of conservative Democrats known as the “Boll Weevils” to pass some major bills, including Reagan’s signature tax cut. What’s more, in contrast to today’s emerging political norms, Democrats during this period mostly deferred to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush on the cabinet and judicial appointments. The deference wasn’t universal (see Robert Bork), but it was also broad enough that decades later people still remember Robert Bork rather than say “cry more cons, if you want to confirm judges try winning the Senate.”

I think that’s a useful baseline-setting, just to remind us that the “Republican majority” that emerged during its period of emergence was itself a sometimes tenuous thing.

Since the Judis/Teixeira book came out:

Democrats won three out of five presidential elections.

Democrats controlled the Senate 2007-15, and then again 2021-present.

Democrats controlled the House 2007-11 and again 2019-present.

That’s a stronger congressional result than Republicans had in the era of the “Republican majority.” And while it’s a weaker presidential result, that’s only because Trump won in 2016 despite Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote.

What’s more, Democrats won a majority of the House vote in 2012. And they won a majority of the Senate vote in 2016 and 2018.

Judged by how many people voted for whom, it’s a decent Democratic majority that emerged:

Excel table showing winners of Presidency, House, and Senate by party during election years

Now of course that’s not the system we have, so Democrats’ actual results are less impressive. But to me, this looks like the Judis/Teixeira thesis ended up wrong for a mostly unexpected reason — the growth in the geographic skew of the electoral system.

That’s especially true because policy has been evolving to the left during this period.

Policy has shifted to the left

Back in 1999, Senate Republicans blocked Bill Clinton’s effort to appoint an out gay man to be Ambassador to Luxembourg just because he was an out gay man. Literally no other reason was given.

By 2004, the United States has an out gay ambassador to Romania (Michael Guest) confirmed by the Senate, but George W. Bush is campaigning on the idea that we needed to amend the Constitution to prevent courts from saying there is a constitutional right to marriage equality.

By 2008, the issue has become dicey enough that John McCain isn’t talking a lot about the federal marriage amendment but Barack Obama is still saying marriage is between a man and a woman.

By 2012, Obama endorses marriage equality and still wins Iowa and Ohio.

By 2016, it’s the law of the land. Trump doesn’t really talk about it, and the policy debate has moved onto the “T” part of LGBT rights.

It’s a very dramatic transformation, though by the same token, it’s one that hasn’t been matched on other issues. And certainly many people feel the country has moved to the right on economics. You could maybe make that case if you use some baseline from the far distant past, but if you take 2000 as the baseline for the Democratic Majority’s emergence, then it’s clearly wrong.

Thanks to state and local minimum wage increases, for example, the average minimum wage is actually the highest on record, even though the federal minimum wage has stagnated.

The welfare state has also expanded considerably during this period.

Medicare benefits expanded under George W. Bush, and then the Affordable Care Act kicked off a major round of Medicaid expansion.

We’ve had (depending on how you want to count it) two or three rounds of EITC expansion.

There was a big SNAP increase nobody talks about in 2008.

The Child Tax Credit has gotten larger and also more generous to families with very low incomes (and at least temporarily, it’s getting even more generous thanks to Biden).

This has not transformed the United States into France or Sweden. If you look at government social benefits as a share of GDP, you’ll see this was drifting up under Bush, spiked because of ARRA and the Great Recession, but then plateaued under Obama at a new, higher level that Trump did not reverse. Then came the CARES Act and the pandemic, and it exploded (first chart). If you cut out the CARES era, the Obama expansion is more notable (second chart).

graph of federal government current transfer payments: government social benefits: to persons/GDP

The number is going to jump up again as Biden’s Rescue Plan phases in, and then down as it phases out. But if Biden is able to accomplish anything at all in terms of making ARP ideas permanent, then the number will settle at a higher level than its Obama/Trump plateau.

In other policy areas, the incarceration rate has fallen and the Black/white gap in incarceration rates has fallen faster. Environmental rules and clean technology have advanced, leading to large falls in airborne lead (93%), carbon monoxide (65%), nitrogen dioxide (51%), ozone (21%), and about a 40% reduction in fine particulates, depending on exactly how you measure. And whether looked at on a consumption or a production basis, our greenhouse gas emissions have fallen pretty sharply, especially since Obama took office.

graph of production vs. consumption-based CO2 emissions in the US from 1990 to present

Now on all these things, you could say “it’s not enough.” And it’s not enough! There’s too much pollution in this country, too much child poverty, too many people lacking health insurance, and too many people locked up in cruel conditions.

But again, it’s not like the conservative movement achieved all its goals during the Republican Majority era. The point is they won a lot of elections, and the arc of policy bent in their direction. During the past 20 years, the opposite has happened — Democrats mostly won, and policy mostly bent in their direction.

Predictions are hard — especially about the future

To me, one big lesson of revisiting the book is that it’s a reminder of just how difficult it is to make accurate forecasts about politics.

I think Judis and Teixeira got so many big analytic points right. But their book is mostly remembered as wrong because its topline forecast was, in fact, wrong, and it was wrong for two subtle, interrelated reasons. One is they didn’t appreciate the extent to which the growing liberalism of college-educated professionals living in big metro (one of the big things they predicted correctly) areas would, over time, actually change Democratic Party ideology in a way that repelled non-college white voters who’d been okay with Al Gore. The other is they didn’t account for how this would intersect with the skews of the electoral maps.

This all really comes together on immigration, which has become a sharply partisan issue in a way that it just wasn’t at the time they wrote their book.

Here was the 2000 Democratic platform on immigration:

We must punish employers who engage in a pattern and practice of recruiting undocumented workers in order to intimidate and exploit them, and provide strengthened protections for immigrant workers, including whistleblower protections. Doing so enhances conditions for everyone in the workplace. We believe that any increases in H1-B visas must be temporary, must address only genuine shortages of highly skilled workers, and must include worker protections. They must also be accompanied by other immigration fairness measures and by increased fees to train American workers for high skill jobs. The Democratic Party is committed to assuring an adequate, predictable supply of agricultural labor while protecting American farm workers who are among the poorest and more vulnerable in our society. We reject calls for guest worker programs that lead to exploitation, and instead call for adjusting the status of immigrants with deep roots in the country.

And here was the 2000 GOP platform:

The education reforms we propose elsewhere in this platform will, over time, greatly increase the number of highly qualified workers in all sectors of the American economy. To meet immediate needs, however, we support increasing the number of H-1B visas to ensure high-tech workers in specialized positions, provided such workers do not pose a national security risk; and we will expand the H-2A program for the temporary agricultural workers so important to the nation's farms.

You can see an embryonic form of today’s divide in the Democrats’ “call for adjusting the status of immigrants with deep roots in the country” — i.e., today’s path to citizenship.

But in the 2000 version of the debate, the Republicans are calling for an increase in H-2A guest workers and the Democrats are proposing amnesty for the existing undocumented population as an alternative to that. Meanwhile, Republicans back more H-1Bs while Democrats sound more skeptical.

Clearly, the implicit forecast that the terms of the immigration debate would remain similar was wrong. But this stuff is hard to predict!

What’s next?

All this is why I try not to make big predictions about the future of politics.

I think one can say very firmly that the odds are not on Democrats’ side in terms of retaining congressional majorities in the 2022 midterms. That’s just a pretty crude extrapolation from the history of midterms, but what else are you going to go with? And then, you can see from the 2024 map, a 50-50 vote split will lead to a Republican trifecta. Heck, a 51-49 vote split will probably lead to a Republican trifecta.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to get a Republican trifecta in 2025; it’s just that we can now see that elections happen on a slanted playing field.

But if that trifecta emerges, what happens next? The honest truth is I have no idea. I think it’s clear from 2018 and 2006 (and even in some ways 1982) that any time Republicans try to actually roll back the welfare state, they provoke a massive backlash. But with a larger majority, they might succeed in doing it anyway. Would success provoke a bigger backlash than failure? Will the next Republican president be even less beholden to free-market ideology than Trump and not even try?

It seems to me that it’s basically impossible to know. So much of contemporary politics is shaped around Republicans continually pursuing an economic policy agenda that isn’t popular — that’s something that hasn’t changed since Teixeira and Judis’ writing. But why shouldn’t it change? And if it did change, does that count as a win for progressives, or will it usher in a new Republican Majority era?

I don’t want anyone to dunk on me in 2035, so I just won’t offer a clear prediction.

I worked on political ads at Facebook. They profit by manipulating us.

By Yaël Eisenstat

Yaël Eisenstat is a visiting fellow at Cornell Tech in the Digital Life Initiative and a former elections integrity head at Facebook, CIA officer, and White House adviser.

November 4, 2019 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

The company can’t avoid damaging democracy.

Facebook chairman and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a House Financial Services Committee hearing last month. (Erin Scott/Reuters)

I joined Facebook in June 2018 as “head of Global Elections Integrity Ops” in the company’s business integrity organization, focused specifically on political advertising. I had spent much of my career working to strengthen and defend democracy — including freedom of speech — as an intelligence officer, diplomat and White House adviser. Now I had the opportunity to help correct the course of a company that I viewed as playing a major role in one of the biggest threats to our democracy.

In the year leading up to our 2016 election, I began to see the polarization and breakdown of civil discourse, exacerbated by social media, as our biggest national security threat; I had written about that before Facebook called. I didn’t think I was going to change the company by myself. But I wanted to help Facebook think through the role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.

A year and a half later, as the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it’s clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won’t fix the most serious issues. The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers aim at us, showing each of us a different version of the truth and manipulating us with hyper-customized ads — ads that as of this fall can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign. As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, it can’t avoid damaging democracy.

* * *

Early in my time there, I dug into the question of misinformation in political advertising. Posting in a “tribe” (Facebook’s internal collaboration platform), I asked our teams working on political advertising whether we should incorporate the same tools for political ads that other integrity teams at Facebook were developing to address misinformation in pages and organic posts. It was unclear to me why the company was applying different policies and tools across the platform. Most users do not differentiate organic content from ads — as I clearly saw on a trip to India, where we were testing our ad-integrity products — so why did we expect users to understand that we applied different standards to different forms of content that all appear in their news feeds?

The fact that we were taking money for political ads, and allowing campaigns and other political organizations to target users based on the vast amounts of data we had gathered, meant political ads should have an even higher bar for integrity than what people were posting in organic content. We verified advertisers to run political ads, giving them a check mark and a “paid for by” label, and I asked if that gave the false impression that we were vouching for the validity of the content, boosting its perceived credibility even though we weren’t checking any facts or trying to halt the spread of false information.

Most of my colleagues agreed. People wanted to get this right. But above me, there was no appetite for my pushing, and I was accused of “creating confusion.” Leaders in the business integrity organization rejected some of the solutions my team was building to try to address highly consequential problems, particularly if the solutions were not “scalable.” Every election has a different set of challenges and local realities, so scalability is antithetical to truly solving the issues affecting individual elections around the world.

Ultimately, I was not empowered to do the job I was hired to do, and I left within six months. I don’t know if anybody up the chain ever considered our proposals to combat misinformation in political ads. But based on the company’s current policy allowing politicians to lie in ads, and the dissent letter signed in late October by more than 250 Facebook employees disagreeing with the policy, it seems clear that they did not.

As we now know, paid advertising was just a small fraction of the Russian activities ahead of the 2016 presidential election, and social media affects civil discourse and warps democracy in many other ways. But how Facebook decides to handle the current controversy is the biggest test of whether it will ever truly put society and democracy ahead of profit and ideology. The dissent letter referred multiple times to all the hard work the “product teams have made in integrity over the last two years” and said they “don’t want to see that undermined by policy.” This is a very real tension at Facebook: I repeatedly saw passionate and thoughtful work in my own group not make it past the few voices who ultimately decided the company’s overall direction.

During my interviews, I was asked whether I thought the company should ban political ads, and at the time, the answer was obvious to me. I said that although it seemed like the easiest solution, banning political advertising on the world’s largest social media platform would tilt the scales toward incumbents who already had disproportionate access to media, especially in countries with dictatorial regimes; Facebook would risk squashing the voices of smaller parties and candidates. This is the one point on which I agreed with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s defense of political advertising in his speech last month.

Micro-targeted data intended for advertising on social media is being used to to change power structures globally, says Philippine journalist Maria Ressa. (The Washington Post)

But couching the issue as simply a question of free speech is both disingenuous and an intentional distraction. Many of the fixes found in the company’s new ad transparency rules are laudable and necessary, but the core issue will not be solved before 2020 without addressing the fundamental, systemic problem the business model causes.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said in a Bloomberg News interview on Oct. 30 that the company is leading on transparency in political advertising and providing all the relevant information in the “ad library.” But true transparency would include information about the tools that differentiate advertising on Facebook from traditional print and television spots, and in fact make it more dangerous: Can I see if a political advertiser used the custom audience tool, and if so, if my email address was uploaded? Can I see what “look-alike audience” advertisers, who are trying to find other users with similar data as their original targets, are seeking? Can I see a true, verified name of the advertiser in the disclaimer about who paid for the ad? Can I see if and how Facebook’s algorithms amplified the ad? If not, the claim that Facebook is providing a level playing field for free expression is a myth.

Free political speech is core to our democratic principles, and it’s true that social media companies should not be the arbiters of truth. But the only way Facebook can prevent abuse of its platform to harm our electoral process is to end its most egregious targeting and amplification practices and provide real transparency.

Banning political ads would unleash larger problems, such as determining what is an “issue ad” and stifling the ability of advocates on issues such as climate change to advertise. But allowing candidates to spread disinformation using sophisticated targeting tools that exploit our data cannot be the only other option.

Facebook seems to think it is: Now the company says it will let politicians lie in ads in the upcoming British elections, too. It’s clear that the company won’t make the necessary fixes without being forced to, either by advertisers that refuse to spend money on Facebook’s platforms until it cleans up the spread of misinformation and other harmful content; employees who continue to demand accountability and responsibility from their leaders; and, most immediately, the government.

The “culture of fear,” nasty political campaigns and extreme rhetoric are not new in American society. But the extent to which social media platforms have fueled and exacerbated these factors — by using our emotional biases to keep our eyeballs on their screens, to vacuum up our data and sell their targeting tools to advertisers — has tilted the playing field toward the most salacious and fanatical voices.

Whether politicians should run fake ads, who should decide whether claims are true and who should govern the Internet are important questions that society will continue to debate. But those are different matters than whether companies should profit from providing politicians with potent information-warfare tools to blast us with disinformation. The answer there is clear: We can’t afford to let them anymore.

Biden’s brand of bipartisanship

Daniel W. Drezner

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

March 30, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

The White House is attempting to redefine what the term means. Will it work?

A rainbow above the Washington Monument on Sunday. (Samuel Corum/Bloomberg News)

The first two months of Biden’s term have seen some bipartisanship. Biden has met with a variety of Republicans. The GOP has been more cooperative than one might have expected back in January. Biden’s Cabinet appointments have been approved with bigger majorities than Donald Trump’s. (Though that might be because they were more qualified.) And there have been other areas where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has demonstrated more flexibility than headlines would suggest.

By conventional metrics, however, not so much with the bipartisanship. Despite loose talk during the campaign of appointing a Republican or two to the Cabinet, Biden refrained from doing so. His big piece of legislation to date, the American Rescue Plan, was passed by Congress with nary a Republican vote.

When asked at last week’s news conference about whether he was rejecting bipartisanship, Biden’s response was politically interesting: “I would like Republican — elected Republican — support, but what I know I have now is that I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”

This is a novel way of describing bipartisanship. Biden’s logic is that if he enacts policies that a significant fraction of Republican voters support, then it is bipartisan. In this polarized era, will this revamped definition hold up?

First, it is worth assessing whether Biden is correct about his support from Republican voters. The evidence is mixed. A new ABC News/Ipsos poll shows that 75 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of vaccine distribution — including a majority of GOP voters. Sixty percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the economic recovery, although that comes with only 23 percent of Republican support. On the latter, however, even elected Republicans acknowledge that they lost the narrative.

Biden’s polling on border and gun-control issues is less stellar. But as CNN’s Harry Enten points out, voters are less concerned about those issues compared to the pandemic and the economy: “Biden’s secret to success is simple: he’s addressing the issues Americans care about, while his weaker issues are those that most Americans don’t seem as worried about.”

So let’s grant that Biden’s signature policies so far have been popular enough to earn the bipartisan label. The question is: In a highly polarized moment, will Biden be able to translate his moderate popularity in these areas into bipartisan support for future initiatives?

He might! Focus groups of Trump voters suggest much less antipathy toward Biden and his policies than toward Barack Obama. (I’ll let you figure out why.) Polling also suggests portions of the GOP might be attracted to Biden’s infrastructure plan.

The other thing worth noting is that Biden is still extremely strong with both his Democratic base and independents — more than Trump has been with the GOP base. This might explain why swing Democrats are sticking with Biden.

This new framing of bipartisanship might have more legs than many would have suspected back in January. It will work as long as the issues Biden focuses on are important and resistant to partisan framing (like, say, framing infrastructure as an excuse for tax hikes).

The paradox for Biden is that the more successful he is at addressing the pandemic and the economy, the more difficulty he could encounter in building bipartisan coalitions to address other problems. Political Science 101 would suggest that if Biden gets credit for ending the pandemic and restoring a strong economy, that popularity should translate into greater political capital for other problems in the queue.

Political Science 301 offers a cautionary warning: Solved problems fade from view. Biden is appropriately addressing the issues voters care about. But if the pandemic and the economy evolve as expected, voters will quickly bank those successes and focus on thornier problems — like immigration.

The big question, then, is whether Biden can use his agenda-setting power to focus on outstanding issues that are broadly popular and avoid issues on which the public is highly polarized. There are reasons to doubt any president’s ability to do this. But if Biden has one political gift, it is finding the median position on an issue and moving to that spot. The next few years will show whether that gift is enough to govern.

Friday, April 2, 2021

Thursday, April 1, 2021