Miscellany Central

Saturday, April 3, 2021

Why Madison Cawthorn’s hypocrisy should have Democrats celebrating

Opinion by

Paul Waldman

Columnist

April 1, 2021 at 4:15 a.m. GMT+9

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.). (Photo Courtesy of the Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images) (Handout/Photo Courtesy of the Committee )

With Americans enjoying their stimulus checks and expecting a wave of new government spending, even Republicans who opposed it all want to steal some credit. Perhaps not surprisingly, this makes the Democrats who had to overcome that opposition to get that spending passed positively flabbergasted.

But they shouldn’t spend too much time mocking and criticizing Republicans for their hypocrisy. They ought to welcome it.

Few seem more worthy of mockery than Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), one of the generation of Republican officeholders who consider lawmaking an irrelevant distraction from their primary job of going on Fox News to yell about how Democrats are dragging us all to hell. Here’s what he’s telling his constituents:

This is truly cause for celebration.

We are in a moment when the proper role and place of government is a matter of particularly consequential debate, with President Biden and Democrats seeking not only to dramatically expand the federal government’s footprint but reorienting it away from some of the presumptions that have held sway in Washington since the Reagan era. Democrats are starting to win that debate, and if Republicans want to help them, that’s all to the good.

For decades, one of the core axioms of political science and public opinion has been that as a whole, Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. They say they dislike government in the abstract, but it turns out they like almost everything government does.

So they say “big government” is bad, but they also want government to spend more on defense and health care and environmental protection and food safety and education and infrastructure and on and on.

Both parties play to these preferences: Republicans say they’ll get government out of your hair and off your back (often without specifying precisely how you’re supposedly being oppressed), while Democrats say they’ll keep all those important government benefits coming.

While the operational/ideological distinction is certainly meaningful, in truth the public is warmer toward government, even in the abstract, than you might think. Last year the Pew Research Center asked respondents whether they preferred “a bigger government providing more services” or “a smaller government providing fewer services,” and a bigger government won by 52 percent to 45 percent. Even 25 percent of Republicans said they wanted a bigger government.

Obviously the parties differ on which services they prefer — Democrats are much more likely to want more spending on Medicare, while Republicans are much more likely to want more military spending, and both like infrastructure. But there’s something for everyone.

And every time a Republican such as Cawthorn talks about how great it is that government is spending money in his district, he’s making the Democrats’ case for them.

That doesn’t mean he’s going to lose to the next Democrat that comes along saying they can more effectively bring home the bacon to Cawthorn’s heavily Republican district. But in the big picture, you’d rather have even Republicans setting the expectation that government should be doing things in the places people live that will have a positive impact on their lives.

When it happens, Democrats should draw more attention to it. For instance, one of the most ideologically consequential parts of the American Rescue Plan was an increase in the child tax credit that made it refundable (making it available to parents with little or no income tax liability) and will send it out as monthly checks. No drug testing, no work requirements, no bureaucratic red tape meant to humiliate people and make the benefit hard to obtain — just regular money to help you raise your kids.

It was the most emphatic rejection of the punitive GOP approach to government benefits we’ve seen in years. And while it was being debated, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah — he of the offshore accounts and the car elevator — had a similar proposal that was even more generous. While Romney got some praise from Democrats, he should have been given a party at the White House to celebrate the new bipartisan safety net paradigm.

To be clear, Republicans have hardly abandoned their contempt for government as a general matter. But when they find it in their own interests to portray the federal government not as the heartless boot-heel of oppression but as the kindly hand of support, it ought to be welcomed, no matter how hypocritical it is. It means Democrats are winning.

Biden’s big bet: He’s found the kryptonite that will defeat Trumpism

Opinion by

Greg Sargent

Columnist

April 1, 2021 at 1:34 a.m. GMT+9

If you read the official summary of President Biden’s new $2 trillion infrastructure package, which he will introduce Wednesday, what’s striking is its air of what you might call forward-looking nostalgia.

It’s nostalgic in its emphasis on boosting public investment to levels not seen since the prosperous 1960s, and in its faith that vast brick-and-mortar public works will restore national greatness.

But it’s forward-looking in its vow to direct such spending toward challenges such as climate change, racial inequities and the needs of the new, multiracial, care-economy-oriented working class.

This points to a big bet embedded in the new plan: That in this combination lies a kind of kryptonite that will further weaken Trumpism, that amalgam of plutocracy and reactionary authoritarian nationalism, fueled by hallucinatory anti-leftism, that continues to hold large swaths of the opposition in its thrall.

Biden’s plan envisions an ambitious overhaul of the U.S. economy, rebuilding roads, bridges, sewer systems and electric grids. It would expand digital infrastructure such as rural broadband and retrofit the future decarbonized economy, incentivizing renewable energy and electric cars, packaged as industrial policy to stay competitive with China.

But beyond the details, what’s notable is its sheer ambition. As Jim Tankersley notes:

The scale of the proposal underscores how fully Mr. Biden has embraced the opportunity to use federal spending to address longstanding social and economic challenges in a way not seen in half a century. Officials said that, if approved, the spending in the plan would end decades of stagnation in federal investment in research and infrastructure — and would return government investment in those areas, as a share of the economy, to its highest levels since the 1960s.

You can’t miss the nostalgia about the economy between World War II and the subsequent neoliberal revolution. The summary cites the vast public investments and national projects that buoyed that economy, while blaming public under-investment for debilitating America since.

The plan “will invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the Space Race,” the summary vows, lamenting that “public domestic investment as a share of the economy has fallen by more than 40 percent since the 1960s.”

But the plan also vows to subsidize a new green economy that creates jobs and addresses both environmental racism and rural needs. If successful, this could give working people a stake in a future oriented toward decarbonization and combating structural racism.

It also promises to rebuild the “care economy” and boost the wages of caregivers, who are “disproportionately women of color.” This recognizes that the multiracial working class, that of health-care workers servicing aging America, faces different challenges from the hardhat white working class our politics valorizes, as Gabriel Winant notes.

What’s audacious is how idealized a vision this is of what a broad Democratic center-left alliance can achieve. Yes, the left is calling for still more spending. Yes, moderates have their own objections. Yes, this plan faces immense hurdles. Yes, we should wait until the economists dissect its details and inevitable shortcomings.

But in its broad strokes, it at least aspires to unite the values and priorities of a very broad ideological swath of Democrats. (In another time, it would have appealed to moderate Republicans, too.)

Which is where Trumpism comes in.

Trumpism’s deranged anti-leftism

Right now, while Democrats are rolling out the most ambitious policies in a half century, Tucker Carlson, the Trumpist right’s leading commentator, has sparked a week-long debate with a segment on how the left’s extremism might provoke the right into fully embracing fascism.

The softer version of this argument, embraced by some right-leaning intellectuals, is that a form of leftist intolerance has been loosed upon the land that might contribute, albeit not as much as the authoritarian right, toward pushing the country into civil collapse.

But as John Ganz argues, that misses the fundamental asymmetry here: We might be heading toward a different fate, in which the progressive forces in our country successfully “preserved institutions” while the “most reactionary were trying to destroy them.”

This helps illuminate the possibilities in this center-left alliance. While Trumpists fantasize about a monolithic, rampaging left pushing the country over the edge, we’re seeing center and left working hard to secure ambitious public investments to solve vast public problems.

If this can in some measure succeed, which is hardly assured, it could weaken the hold of that deranged anti-leftism on the imagination of so many.

Big public investments as the answer

Economist Mike Konczal notes that Trumpism has multiple elements. It involved a plutocratic sellout of the public interest — via vast high-end tax cuts for the rich and a deregulatory spree that showered benefits on employers and corporations.

It also promised that this would help working families (by making employers stronger) while vowing to protect workers from immigrants, pointy-headed climate regulators and cosmopolitan globalist elites.

But this vision fails workers, because it “doesn’t actually provide real security,” Konczal told me, and won’t accept that our capitalist order cannot address the “large-scale market failures that only the public can address.”

“Ultimately, it points all our resources in the wrong direction,” said Konczal, the author of a book on the need for a robust new progressive economics.

“The real problem is capitalism writ large," Konczal told me, "which does not invest sufficiently in the infrastructure the public needs, does not invest in family security and the also-necessary infrastructure of care work, and cannot handle large-scale challenges like climate change.”

By contrast, Konczal noted, the Biden plan broadly embodies the ideal that the better answer is “large-scale public investments in these key issues, done in the right way.”

Could huge public investments help flush Trumpism out of the body politic? With luck, we’ll soon find out.

The GOP attack on Delta reveals an ugly side to the culture war

Opinion by

Greg Sargent

Columnist

April 1, 2021 at 11:49 p.m. GMT+9

A Delta Air Lines jet outside a terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in October 2016. (David Goldman/AP)

An extraordinary event took place in Georgia on Wednesday night. Republicans sought to cancel a tax break for Delta Air Lines, the state’s biggest employer, as punishment for the heresy of criticizing the new voter-suppression law Republicans passed last week.

And a top Republican has openly, blithely confirmed that this was exactly the motive.

This latest turn in the Georgia voting wars is wretched in its own right. But it also helps clarify some larger national themes: the profound phoniness of many GOP screams about “cancel culture” and “woke” corporations, and the ugly nature of GOP culture-warmongering, which has grown all-consuming.

What happened is that the Georgia state House voted late Wednesday to rescind a tax break on jet fuel that is a lucrative benefit for Delta, after Delta condemned Georgia’s new voting law.

That measure, which GOP Gov. Brian Kemp signed last week, bans third-party groups from sharing food and water with those in voting lines, places new restrictions on vote by mail, and curbs drop boxes and mobile voting units. Much of this appears aimed at African American voters.

Delta denounced the law, claiming it “could make it harder for many Georgians, particularly those in our Black and Brown communities, to exercise their right to vote,” and that it is “based on a lie” about voter fraud.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution picks up the story:

Kemp and other GOP leaders say they were caught off guard by the opposition, and the Georgia House retaliated by narrowly voting to end a lucrative tax break on jet fuel during the final, frenzied day of the legislative session.

The move fizzled in the Georgia Senate. But note this extraordinary quote from the GOP House leader, also courtesy of the AJC:

“They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them,” said House Speaker David Ralston, adding: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You got to keep that in mind sometimes.”

That could not be clearer: If you bite us, we will stop feeding you. Translation: Republicans tried to rescind the tax break as direct retaliation for criticism of the law.

The point here is not to lament Delta’s plight. Delta will continue enjoying its tax break (which has traditionally been backed by lawmakers in both parties). And Delta’s opposition to the law came after voting rights activists accused it of not opposing the law forcefully enough.

Rather, what’s at issue is the conduct of GOP leaders. These ostensible public servants, who are supposed to make decisions like this in the public interest (a quaint notion), expressly employed their legislative power to punish a private company for criticizing their efforts to restrict the franchise and for defending the rights of fellow Georgia citizens.

Underscoring the point, the Georgia House GOP leader went before reporters and conspicuously declared he’d cracked open a can of Pepsi. This looked like retaliation against Coca Cola, which is also headquartered in Georgia, and also released a statement condemning the new law.

Corporate ‘wokeness’ has its place

It is easy to discern cynical motives when corporations offer public displays of “wokeness.” They can seem designed to distract progressive forces from pursuing measures that would have meaningful distributive or regulatory consequences for them.

But on race, corporate expressions of social liberalism have played an important historic role. As Samuel Hammond details, there is a long history of corporations recognizing profit potential in public displays of solidarity with marginalized groups — they bring in new customers. But, crucially, such moves actually do help move the culture in a salutary direction, because the “mainstreaming power of commercialization” helps extend “social recognition” to those groups.

Importantly, in some these cases, they have also sparked a backlash, often from White America. Something like this dynamic may be unfolding in Georgia, as Republicans seek to punish Delta and Coca Cola for condemning GOP efforts to suppress African American political participation.

Beyond all that, this episode neatly exposes how effortlessly conservative objections to “woke” corporations can slide into purely instrumental GOP power plays.

It’s sometimes said conservatives are understandably rebelling against liberal cultural power imposed via corporate “wokeness.” But when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sided with the unionization of workers at Amazon, he revealed this was only intended as punishment against Amazon for its supposed social liberalism, which he slammed as an affront to “working-class values,” declaring himself spokesman for a mythical working class that’s monolithically conservative.

And in this Georgia example, the retaliation against corporate social liberalism is actually designed to facilitate the active disempowerment of large numbers of people, to rig electoral outcomes in the GOP’s favor.

Endless culture-warmongering

What’s more, for all the whining about “cancel culture,” here Republican leaders tried to punish private companies for expressing opinions critical of them. We’re seeing this elsewhere, as Republicans rage against businesses for exercising their right to decide whether to serve people who haven’t been vaccinated against the coronavirus and how to protect themselves against dangers posed by them.

This is meant to thrill conservative voters who are vaccine-skeptical and/or have adopted the Trumpist mythology that covid-19 was never a big deal. As David Frum writes, the culture war has grown so all-consuming that to appease various such “cultural blocs,” GOP politicians are “willing to sacrifice everything,” including fealty to the “freedom to operate a business.”

Something like this, too, is now playing out in Georgia. The GOP war on voting rights in Georgia has already been clarifying in all kinds of ways. But now what it’s revealing is getting a whole lot worse.

correction

An earlier version of this article mistakenly featured a photograph of Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon at the state Capitol in Atlanta. The article has been updated.

The GOP strategy for defeating Biden’s new plan actually refutes itself

Opinion by

Greg Sargent

Columnist

April 2, 2021 at 11:49 p.m. GMT+9

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) speaks to reporters after the Senate Republican lunch on Capitol Hill. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

With Democrats gearing up to try to pass President Biden’s massive $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan, the GOP strategy for defeating it has coalesced around two arguments, if you can call them that.

The first is that it constitutes scary socialism. The second is related to the first: The plan’s left wing nature is why Democrats are preparing to pass it without any GOP support. In other words, the Democratic intention to go it alone itself should persuade voters of its extremism.

But the GOP strategy actually refutes itself, in an intriguing but revealing way. The very fact that today’s Republicans keep preposterously painting the plan as rabidly extreme shows how unwilling — or unable — they are to acknowledge the thoroughly mainstream nature of much of it. And that’s exactly why Democrats will likely have to pass it alone.

Axios reports that Republicans have developed a “battle plan” to paint the proposal as a “multitrillion dollar far left wish list.” Central to this is the claim that only a tiny fraction will be spent on real infrastructure, which only includes “roads, bridges, waterways, ports, and airports.”

GOP leaders have amplified this. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky insists the proposal “would spend more money just on electric cars” than on all those categories combined.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California dismisses it as a “kitchen sink” of “wasteful progressive demands.” And another top Republican warns of an “out-of-control socialist spending spree.”

But in certain ways, this strategy really underscores just how extreme the GOP has become on these issues.

The ‘real’ infrastructure canard

First, the idea that “real” infrastructure only includes those limited physical categories is absurd to the point of extremism.

The plan would spend $174 billion on electric vehicles, including outfitting 500,000 electric vehicle stations and making municipal and federal government vehicles electric. It would spend $165 billion on upgrading transit and rail systems, and $180 billion on research and development focused on clean energy and climate change.

If this isn’t “real” infrastructure, that’s just another way of saying the GOP simply will not reconcile itself to the need to shift to a decarbonized economy and way of life, and to the need to fund the infrastructure to facilitate it.

This makes the current GOP extreme relative to the party’s own past. Back during the Eisenhower era — the last time public investments approached the level now envisioned — many Republicans supported such investments.

But, crucially, they backed such investments not just to shore up existing infrastructure, but also to create conditions for the development of technologies that would shape future economies.

As political scientist Jacob Hacker puts it, at the time most congressional Republicans “were supportive of huge R & D investment in the technologies of the future,” which took forward-looking risks that ultimately produced foundational knowledge that later “transformed our economy.”

Relative to this, the idea that real infrastructure can’t include investments in a decarbonized future economy is a departure. And given the urgency Democrats ascribe to this transition, how can they work with Republicans who refuse to accept this as a fundamental aspect of infrastructure development? The GOP claim reveals these core differences as unbridgeable.

Republicans are unreachable

It’s true that Democrats want to spend money on things like beefing up our caregiving infrastructure. So a reasonable position for a few Republicans might be to eschew those things, while supporting a separate bill that only rebuilds roads, bridges, waterways and ports.

But even here, given that Republicans seem to have ruled out supporting Biden’s call to fund it all with a corporate tax hike, it’s hard to see many Republicans supporting anything other than infrastructure via a tax-break-and-privatization scheme.

Perhaps a real public investment could be deficit-funded, but Republicans are screaming that we can’t do that either. Which would require Democrats to go-it-alone there, too, via the simple majority reconciliation process.

Yet the very fact that Republicans are refusing any tax hikes or deficit spending, while denouncing these plans as socialism, also underscores that they are the outliers. As Paul Krugman puts it, Biden’s plan would only take us a fraction of the way back to the era during which many Republicans fully embraced such things:

In fiscal terms it would represent a partial return to the Eisenhower era, when we had much higher government investment as a share of gross domestic product than we do now, and also much higher tax rates on both high-income individuals and corporations.

Economist Justin Wolfers recently illustrated this very vividly in chart form:

Yet Republicans are claiming that the very fact that Democrats are even thinking about going it alone shows that Democrats are the ideological outliers:

But what’s the alternative for Democrats to “going it alone?” It’s to agree in advance to dramatically scale down their agenda in the mere hope of winning a few Republicans.

The GOP argument undercuts itself. Democrats need to prepare to act alone precisely because Republicans are so unreachable for so much of what Democrats want to do. This shows the extremism of Republicans, not Democrats.

In the end, what’s really driving Democratic preparations to act alone is what you might call a new realism. It’s a recognition that today’s GOP has drifted away to a place — whether out of evolving principle or tactical calculations, either of which indicates the party’s extremism — where there is zero chance Republicans can support anything close to what Democrats see as urgently needed.

Democrats will likely have to do this alone, and the GOP’s own strategy confirms that this is actually the reasonable course of action for them to take.

What a scorching John Boehner book excerpt says about today’s GOP

Opinion by

Paul Waldman

Columnist

April 3, 2021 at 2:04 a.m. GMT+9

Former House speaker John Boehner. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Former speaker of the House John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) was nothing if not colorful, and in an upcoming memoir, he has some scores to settle. Among other things he uses the phrase “total moron” to describe members of his own party and calls Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) the “head lunatic” of GOP extremists.

In “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” Boehner also highlights something important about the nature of power within the Republican Party: how it worked when he was its leader in Congress, in the Trump years that followed and today. Sometimes that power has been exercised to the party’s great political benefit, while at other times — like right now — it threatens to consume the GOP.

Boehner describes a revealing 2011 exchange with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), far-right bomb-thrower and future presidential candidate, who demanded a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee; he rebuffed her:

Her response to me was calm and matter-of-fact. “Well, then I’ll just have to go talk to Sean Hannity and everybody at Fox,” she said, “and Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and everybody else on the radio, and tell them that this is how John Boehner is treating the people who made it possible for the Republicans to take back the House.”

I wasn’t the one with the power, she was saying. I just thought I was. She had the power now.

She was right, of course.

Boehner describes the evolution of conservative media between the early 1990s and the Obama years as a descent into “Looneyville,” but what really changed was the nature of the relationship between that media and the Republican Party.

In those earlier years, conservative media amplified the GOP’s ideas, spreading them to a wide audience and converting people to the conservative cause. But over time, the media tail came to wag the political dog.

What Boehner really shows us is how the world we live in now came to be. Today, conservative media isn’t just a locus of power on the right. Its own needs, preferences and incentives set the party’s agenda to a greater extent than ever.

That’s why so many of the key voices in the Republican Party today are concerned not primarily but entirely with their next media appearance, rather than the work of lawmaking. While there have always been “show horses” in Congress, the party is now oriented almost entirely toward whatever keeps the Fox viewers from changing the channel.

So while Democrats pass trillions of dollars in new spending, Republicans spend all their time whining about “cancel culture” and trying to make life miserable for transgender kids. Instead of conservative media amplifying the party’s message, it’s the other way around.

You could argue that because they’re in the minority, Republicans have no way to put their policy preferences into action anyway, so they might as well shout about Mr. Potato Head. If they controlled even one house of Congress they could mount endless bogus Benghazi-style investigations to paint a Democratic administration as corrupt.

But they can’t, so there’s no margin in knowing or caring about policy. In that situation, those most adept at the performative aspect of politics inevitably rise to prominence.

But what Boehner reveals here is that this was true even when the party was in power. What Boehner calls “the crazy caucus of the GOP” was already taking over when he was speaker, foreshadowing their increased dominance when the ultimate performative politician — Donald Trump — became president.

And so, with complete GOP control of Washington in 2017, you didn’t see the emergence of serious conservative policy wonks making lasting and consequential change. While it might have happened here and there — Stephen Miller succeeded at making immigration policy as racist and cruel as possible — for the most part the crazy caucus was still in charge.

Who were the dominant Republican figures of the era, beyond Trump himself? People like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), known for their endless Fox appearances and maniacal loyalty to Trump. They weren’t concerned with how to use power to create change; they just wanted to Own the Libs.

Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the party’s leader in Congress and nobody’s idea of a telegenic presence, turned out to be an absolute dud as a legislator. After easily passing a tax cut for the wealthy and corporations (not exactly hard to do), he managed no further legislation of consequence.

In many ways, you can draw a straight line between Newt Gingrich, the central Republican figure of the 1990s, through the tea party, then through Sarah Palin, then through Trump, and finally to the Jan. 6th rioters and far-right extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). Boehner shows us how this through line really started to unravel.

All those figures wanted to make politics as coarse and bitter as possible, and define Democrats as not just wrong but evil. The conflict between the right and the left, Gingrich once told a conservative audience, “has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars.”

But each of them had a different relationship to power. Gingrich wanted it desperately. Palin tossed it away to pursue a doomed TV career. Trump came to it by accident and couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it, other than line his pockets. And the media-obsessed Republican figures of today? They hardly even care about it at all.

It’s not that, say, Cruz wouldn’t very much like to be president. But people like him are so focused on whipping up the angriest portions of the GOP base and generating clicks and retweets that they can’t be bothered to produce any kind of meaningful policy project, let alone figure out what it would take to make it happen.

As Boehner’s story highlights, things began to go awry for Republicans long before now. If the stars align, the “crazy caucus” might allow them to stumble their way to victory again, as they did in 2016. And along the way, the destruction will continue piling up.

How Russia and China are attempting to rewrite cyberworld order

Opinion by

David Ignatius

Columnist

March 31, 2021 at 8:07 a.m. GMT+9

Washington Post

Chinese Communist Party diplomat Yang Jiechi speaks at the U.S.-China talks in Anchorage on March 18. (Frederic J. Brown/AP)

China’s top diplomat had an interesting rejoinder to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s call in Anchorage this month to “strengthen the rules-based international order.” Such an order already exists, answered Politburo member Yang Jiechi. It’s called the United Nations.

Many people have grown used to thinking of the United Nations in recent decades as an annoying talk shop, created with the noblest intentions but increasingly a morass of bureaucracy and mutual back-scratching. But for China and Russia, the United Nations is increasingly the venue for unsubtle power plays — often ignored by the United States — that could shape the new world order that’s emerging.

Yang’s March 18 riposte in Anchorage is worth studying, because it reveals a broader strategic design: “What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called rules-based international order.”

The United Nations can be a pain, like one of those community meetings that become dominated by die-hards who are willing to stay later and talk louder than their neighbors. But it’s a game that the United States has to play, and skillfully, lest our adversaries hijack global institutions that retain some legitimacy.

Cyberspace is the best example of a domain where authoritarian nations, led by China and Russia, are using the United Nations to craft new rules that could undermine Western norms of openness and democracy.

Here’s how the process works: In December 2019, while a Donald Trump-distracted world was looking the other way, Russia won approval from the U.N. General Assembly to begin drafting a global treaty to combat cybercrime. The United States said back then that it had “very serious concerns” that such a treaty would “stand against fundamental American freedoms,” but it lost the vote, 79 to 60.

Work on the new U.N. treaty hasn’t started yet because of the coronavirus pandemic. The first drafting meeting is scheduled for May. If completed and ratified, the treaty would replace the 2001 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime. That document was crafted by the Council of Europe and ratified by 65 nations, including all the leading democracies — but never endorsed by Russia or China because they considered its provisions too intrusive.

Another example of gaming the U.N. system is Russia’s creation (with Chinese support) of a U.N. cyber discussion body called the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG), with all 193 U.N. member states, intended to work in parallel with the smaller, 25-member Group of Governmental Experts that had been issuing reports on complex tech issues.

Andrei Krutskikh, a top cyber adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, crowed at an OEWG meeting last month that the group represented “the triumphant success of Russian diplomacy,” according to a March 13 report by Tass, the state-owned Russian news service. He accused unnamed nations of “whipping up of the international situation in the field of information” — presumably a reference to American allegations about Russian hacking in the 2016, 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections and Moscow’s role in the devastating SolarWinds hack.

Russia may hope that the Open-Ended Working Group eventually supplants the smaller experts group, which could turn what should be technical discussions about Internet and telecommunications security into a political stalemate.

The Russians (again with Chinese help) had tried to take over Internet governance through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) back in January. This putsch to depose the private consortium of experts known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, was backed by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who claimed in an Aug. 12, 2020, statement that “the U.S. fully controls the Domain Name System used to resolve IP-addresses.” The ITU, thankfully, ignored the Russian proposal.

On such obscure U.N. battlegrounds lies the dreary but essential work of protecting the “rules-based order” for promoting an open and secure Internet. The raiders are mobilizing. In a little-noticed March 26 statement, Putin announced Russia’s intent to dominate oversight of cyberspace.

“Largely thanks to our efforts, information security has become an item on the U.N. General Assembly’s agenda,” Putin boasted in a statement to Russia’s Security Council. “We believe it is necessary to conclude universal international legal agreements designed to prevent conflicts and build a mutually beneficial partnership in the global cyberspace.” That language is chilling, when you realize he’s talking about rules written largely by China and Russia.

It’s breathtaking, really. The nations that have subverted the Internet most aggressively now want to police it, setting their own standards. Fighting back in this case requires patience and persistence — and a willingness to sit through endless meetings where the order that the United States and its global partners created a generation ago is under slow, relentless attack.

As Georgia’s new law shows, when Black people gain local power, states strip that power away.

By Domingo Morel

April 1, 2021 at 8:45 p.m. GMT+9

Washington Post

Think of Michigan officials taking over Flint’s water supply

Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon (D) after Georgia State Troopers arrested her for attempting to knock on the governor's door after he signed a bill enacting sweeping new restrictions on voting. (Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP)

Last week, Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill that drastically changes election laws in the state, after Black voters turned out in unprecedented numbers during both the November 2020 general election and the state’s January 2021 runoff election. Some observers argue this bill was passed to tamp down Black political empowerment, as some of its provisions will mostly affect voters of color, such as bans on offering food or water to citizens waiting in long lines to vote.

SB 202 also includes a provision that allows the state to take elections management away from local governing authorities. In Georgia, as in most states, county authorities manage many administrative functions of running elections. The new law allows the Republican-controlled legislature to appoint a majority of members to the State Board of Elections, which can then take over county boards of elections that they declare are underperforming. SB 202 already singles out Fulton County, a majority-Black jurisdiction that overwhelmingly voted for Democrats.

Georgia’s takeover plans fit a long history in which states take over local functions when Black communities are gaining political power, my research finds. Here’s what I found when examining state takeovers of school districts as a case study.

In many cities, school boards were the first outposts of Black political power

Critics claim that SB 202 legalizes voter suppression tactics reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, when state-sanctioned racist policies and violence prevented Black Americans from voting. But while Jim Crow’s horrors may be particularly familiar, fewer Americans realize that states have continued undermining Black political participation and power in the years since. Such policies have persisted throughout American history. In particular, states have been responding to Black political power by taking over local authority since the 1990s in cities throughout the U.S. — specifically to get around federal laws designed to end Jim Crow.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as Blacks gained majorities of city populations and federal laws banned voter discrimination, the number of elected Black city officials increased significantly. In the 1970s, cities like Atlanta, Detroit, and Newark voted Black members onto their city councils and elected their first Black mayors. Even before that, however, Black communities elected members to local school boards. In many cities, schools and school boards became beachheads of Black political power.

As Black communities gained representation and power in cities, they also mobilized to gain more resources for their public schools. After the Supreme Court ruled in the 1973 decision San Antonio Independent School District v Rodriguez that the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect the right to equal funding for schools, communities began fighting for equitable school funding at the state level instead of federally. By the 1980s, communities were winning state court cases to secure more resources for their schools.

To stop Black communities’ push for equity, state legislatures took over school districts

At the same time that many communities appeared close to winning more adequate funding for their schools, state legislatures began passing laws that allowed them to take over school districts that were not meeting state-defined performance standards. By the early 2000s, cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Newark, Oakland, and Philadelphia, among others, all had their school districts taken over by their respective states.

Proponents argue that these takeovers were necessary to improve schools and were not motivated by political or racist intentions. However, my research finds that takeover policies have been highly political and racialized.

First, although many school districts in the U.S. have academic challenges, nearly 90 percent of school takeovers occur in majority communities of color, particularly Black communities.

Second, between 1980 and 2000 — the years in which the takeover policy was developed and spread — plaintiffs won school funding cases in 18 states. After those court decisions, in 14 out of those 18 states, legislatures passed laws that allowed them to take over local school districts. The four states that did not do so were Montana, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming — all states in which the average Black population is less than 1 percent.

Third, passing state school-district takeover laws was a partisan effort. Over 90 percent of state takeover laws passed under Republican governors.

Finally, when states take over local school districts, they take various approaches to existing school boards. In some instances, the locally elected school board remains intact. In other cases, the locally elected school board is abolished and replaced with a state-appointed board. My research shows that states abolish locally elected school boards disproportionately in majority-Black communities. Although majority-White communities rarely have their local districts taken over, in 70 percent of the cases when they do, they get to keep their elected school boards. Conversely, in majority-Black communities, the state abolishes locally elected school boards in roughly 80 percent of its takeovers.

Local takeovers affect Black communities’ futures

When states have taken over municipal functions beyond the schools, they have harmed Black communities. In what may be the most well-known example, after Michigan took control of Flint’s governance, Republican state officials made decisions that exposed nearly 100,000 mostly Black residents to lead poisoning in an ongoing water crisis.

The state takeover of Georgia’s local boards of elections, like the takeover of school districts and municipalities, will undermine Black political participation and power — potentially putting Black communities, and democracy, in peril.

Domingo Morel (@DomingoMorel) is an assistant professor of political science Rutgers University — Newark and author of “Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy” (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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