Miscellany Central

Thursday, May 6, 2021

Why is Japan failing so badly on vaccinations?

Washington Post

Opinion by William Pesek

May 5, 2021 at 2:58 a.m. GMT+9

On my list

William Pesek is a Tokyo-based writer and author of “Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan’s Lost Decades.”

A nurse receives the first dose of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine at Fujita Health University Hospital in Toyoake, Aichi prefecture, central Japan, on March 8. (Kyodo News via AP)

A nation famed for first-world logistical competence is running dead last among the 37 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development members, the club of wealthy nations. This dismal performance isn’t just imperiling the Olympics — or the world’s third-biggest economy. It’s challenging basic notions about whether Japan can change at all.

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“Japan’s 1.6 percent rate of vaccination puts it on par with Myanmar, a failed state — not exactly a ringing endorsement of Tokyo’s shambolic rollout,” quips longtime Tokyo resident Jeff Kingston, head of Asia studies at Temple University’s local campus. “This is an own goal of epic proportions.”

There are many explanations for why Japan has been so glacial about inoculating its population (which is aging faster than any other in the world). One is that Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s Liberal Democratic Party was betting on domestic drugmakers to come up with a homegrown vaccine. When none materialized, Tokyo joined the long line of other nations competing to source vaccines from outside suppliers.

A labyrinthine approval process hasn’t helped. Tradition-bound Tokyo has long required pharmaceutical companies to do soup-to-nuts clinical trials locally, rather than incorporating studies and data done elsewhere. So far, only Pfizer’s vaccine has gotten a green light from the authorities. Moderna and others are still trying.

Over the past 15 months, Japan often stood out as a coronavirus success case. As of May 4, the country has recorded just over 10,000 deaths in a population of 126 million. That has reduced the urgency for vaccines or a robust testing program. Japan also has a lively “anti-vaxxer” movement. Skepticism dates back to the 1990s amid unproven concerns about shots for measles, mumps and rubella.

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Japan’s medical establishment is as conservative as they come. While many Americans turn to CVS and Walgreens for shots, the Japanese often expect only doctors or registered nurses to administer them. Dentists raising their hands are being told to stand by.

As infection rates jump anew, Japan’s 20-year battle against deflation is in grave peril. In mid-2020, Suga’s predecessor, Shinzo Abe, tossed more than $2.2 trillion, roughly 40 percent of gross domestic product, at a cratering economy.

During his eight years in power from 2012 to 2020, Abe had pledged to completely remake the economy. The country’s dismal vaccination results are merely the latest evidence of the hollowness of his promises. The insularity, red tape, bloat, opacity and aversion to foreign ideas Abe’s party pledged to reform are still very much with Japan today. And public frustration is rising fast.

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If Abe, and now Suga, had moved earlier to internationalize labor markets, incentivize innovation, empower women and take on a change-averse bureaucracy, Japan might not be last in the developed-nation class on vaccinations. Its economy wouldn’t be losing ground as China sprints by.

Now Japan faces its very worst fear: flopping on the world stage.

In 2013, when Abe made his pitch to the International Olympic Committee, he won by billing Tokyo as a “safe pair of hands.” How ironic to see Japan lagging on vaccinations far behind Turkey, which had proposed Istanbul for 2020.

Ironic, too, to see an event Japan sold as the “Recovery Olympics” highlighting its unreadiness for prime time. Sexism scandals among top Olympic officials have made global headlines — reminding onlookers why Japan lags Angola and Sri Lanka in gender equality.

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Meantime, bureaucratic tussles among government agencies are sowing epic confusion. No one really seems to understand the latest rules on testing, quarantine and contact-tracing protocols, which foreign staff can fly in with athletes, or whether locals can attend events. Now even the torch relays meant to drum up Olympic enthusiasm have veered into farce — with cancellations over infection fears. In one relay alone last week, in southwestern Kagoshima, at least six staffers were diagnosed with covid-19.

By delaying vaccinations, Japan has left the Olympics vulnerable to new variants, some probably yet to be discovered. The 80,000 athletes and support staff are set to arrive this summer in one of the world’s most densely populated cities from all corners of the globe where they can mix and match viral variants. Gee, what could go wrong? Not surprisingly, as many as 80 percent of Japanese think 2021 isn’t the time to risk a giant superspreader event that history might judge harshly.

If the Games do happen, there might be some national pride knowing that few places could have pulled them off in the face of such adversity. But even if the Japanese succeed, the feel-good factor is likely to be short-lived. The only thing worse than an Olympics marked by asterisks or footnotes is one with a death count.

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That’s indeed where Japan finds itself on vaccines — more in league with the Philippines and Thailand than with Asian success stories such as Singapore and South Korea. It’s not a good look for a country that was hoping to use the Olympics to profile its status as a good global citizen.

How GOP rage at Liz Cheney makes a future stolen election more likely

Washington Post

Opinion by

Greg Sargent

Columnist

May 6, 2021 at 12:03 a.m. GMT+9

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Image without a caption

Rep. Liz Cheney’s fate appears sealed: Republicans are set to oust the Wyoming Republican as the No. 3 in the House GOP leadership, and will most likely replace her with Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, whose loyalty to Donald Trump remains unquestioned.

This is being widely depicted as a battle over the past, and over Trump. Most accounts portray it as a sign that in today’s GOP, fealty to the former president is a bedrock requirement, denouncing his lies about 2020 has become unacceptable, and telling the truth about the Jan. 6 insurrection is disqualifying.

All that is true, but the forward-looking dimension to this story is getting lost. What also seems unavoidably at stake is that the GOP appears to be plunging headlong into a level of full-blown hostility to democracy that has deeply unsettling future ramifications.

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Loyalty to Trump and his lies isn’t the most important thing Republicans are asserting here. Instead, Republicans may be unshackling themselves from any obligation to acquiesce to future presidential election outcomes they don’t like — that is, liberating themselves to overturn those outcomes by any means necessary.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) now appears to back Cheney’s removal. He has said privately and publicly that he has lost confidence in her, because she’s threatening the GOP “message” and imperiling hopes to “win the majority.”

Cheney has only dug in harder. A Cheney spokesperson denounced her GOP enemies for wanting to “perpetuate lies about the 2020 election and attempt to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6.”

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This comes after Cheney told GOP colleagues that those lies are “poison in the bloodstream of our democracy" and that Trump’s insurrection “is a line that cannot be crossed.”

Cheney has also urged Republicans not to turn “their back on the rule of law.” And she insists that the commission examining Jan. 6 should focus on the insurrection, not on leftist extremism that Republicans are hyping to muddy the waters around their ongoing radicalization.

So why is all this disqualifying? The soft version of this spun by Republicans is that it will muddle the GOP messaging effort to win the House, which relies on portraying Democrats as the Real Extremists.

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But there’s plainly a darker factor at play. Whatever Cheney’s other flaws — her neoconservatism, her association with another assault on the rule of law amid the war on terrorism — she’s demanding something important from fellow Republicans.

It’s this: A full and unequivocal renunciation of the lie that the election’s outcome was dubious. A complete and unambiguous reckoning with the fact that Trump absolutely did try to incite mob violence to rupture the peaceful conclusion of his election loss to stay in power illegitimately.

And Republicans are angry because Cheney is focusing too much attention on the GOP failure to do any of these things.

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Now consider what else we’re seeing. Some Republicans are increasingly asserting a willingness to overturn future elections: Rep. Jody Hice’s primary challenge to the Georgia secretary of state is driven by the promise to use his power to invalidate future outcomes.

Other Republicans are asserting the freedom to keep alive the fiction that the election was stolen forever. In Arizona, a GOP-sponsored recount is underway that’s plainly designed to manufacture fake evidence bolstering that false conclusion.

This combination is toxic: Republicans are untethering themselves from any obligation to recognize future legitimate election outcomes, which will provide the rationale to overturn them, a freedom they are also effectively in process of appropriating. Cheney is insisting on a GOP future premised on a full repudiation of these tendencies, and getting punished for it.

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Guess what: These same House Republicans might control the lower chamber when Congress is counting electors after the 2024 presidential election.

“We should start to very much worry about what Jan. 6, 2025, looks like,” Edward Foley, a renowned election law scholar and a Post contributing columnist, told me.

Time to worry about Jan. 6, 2025

Imagine a 2024 election decided in one state, where a GOP-controlled legislature sends electors for the GOP candidate in defiance of a close popular vote. The same House Republicans who punished Cheney — many of whom already voted against President Biden’s electors, but now control the House and have continued radicalizing — could vote to certify that slate.

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There are many possible scenarios here — a lot would turn on whether the governor in that state was a Democrat, on what the Senate did, and on how the Supreme Court sorted out the mess.

But as Foley told me, it’s plausible that “you could have an outcome that is inconsistent with what the voters themselves wanted.” However it turned out, Foley added, the dispute itself “would be a major crisis.”

This places burdens on Democrats. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me that this obliges Democrats to level with voters about the threat Republicans pose to democratic stability.

“If Cheney is ousted, Democrats will have to make the radicalization of the GOP a major part of the 2022 conversation,” Rosenberg said.

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And as elections scholar Rick Hasen told me, Democrats should try to get patriotic Republicans to support revisions to the Electoral Count Act, to make it “harder for a legislature to send a separate slate when there was no problem with how the election was run."

Cheney’s ouster should prompt this, along with a much greater public and media focus on the brute reality of the GOP’s fundamental turn away from democracy.

“The core component of the democratic process is that we count the votes as cast,” Foley told me. The punishing of Cheney, Foley concluded, suggests that the Republican Party might be institutionally “abandoning the very essence of democracy.”

Global supply chains will be fine

Washington Post

Daniel W. Drezner

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

May 5, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

Yet another global political economy ‘crisis’ I can’t get worked up about.

Shipping containers at the Port Jersey Port Authority Marine Terminal, which is part of the busiest container port on the East Coast, the Port of New York and New Jersey, in Jersey City, N.J., in April. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

Remember six weeks ago, when that container ship blocked the Suez Canal and everyone interpreted it as a sign of excessive globalization? Turns out everything sorted itself out. It worked out so well that I bet you cannot even remember the name of the ship that got stuck. As I noted at the time, “This is not an all-or-nothing crisis, but rather one in which prices react to real-world shocks and private-sector actors will respond to shifting incentives.”

I bring this up because those concerns about excessive globalization have again gravitated toward global supply chains, particularly in semiconductor chips. This has been a running theme of the past year of pandemic. Throughout 2020, consultants and business publications were banging on about the need to think about supply chain integrity in response to shocks like covid-19.

This concern has increased in recent weeks. Manufacturing output growth in the United States slowed last month because automakers face semiconductor chip shortages. “60 Minutes” did a big story this past weekend on the problem, with Lesley Stahl asserting in her voiceover, “Covid showed that the global supply chain of chips is fragile and unable to react quickly to changes in demand.” Stahl’s report also raises the specter of geopolitical risks posed by Taiwan’s dominance of the semiconductor industry.

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This is a cudgel that CNN and other outlets have also wielded. The thing is, Stahl’s own reporting undercuts her hyperbole about fragile global supply chains. As Kevin Drum noted:

Why is there a shortage of chips? Is it because we’ve outsourced everything to the wily Chinese folks on Taiwan? You’d think so after inhaling Lesley Stahl’s inane reporting, except for the fact that she inadvertently allowed the chairman of Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC a brief moment to give the game away: “In March 2020, as COVID paralyzed the U.S., car sales tumbled, leading automakers to cancel their chip orders. So TSMC stopped making them.”

Oh. So it has nothing to do with Taiwanese fabs vs. American fabs or global supply constraints or any of that. Nor is it related to a possible invasion of Taiwan or the fact that Intel may or may not have made good decisions about its future business. It’s because American car companies canceled their chip orders and never bothered to reinstate them. Then in December, when car sales “unexpectedly” began to rebound, they panicked and realized what they had done. You’d think these guys had never done an economic forecast or used an MRP system before in their lives.

Fortunately, contra to Drum’s fears, it would seem that the car manufacturers might have been the outlier. According to one recent survey of supply chain decision-makers, 91 percent of respondents expressed confidence in their own supply chain. Eighty percent said they were investing in inventory capacity in 2021 to improve resiliency.

That last point is important. While “just in time” management cut costs for final producers, it redistributed some of those costs to intermediate producers, who wound up either holding extra stock or finding other ways to cope with demand-side fluctuations. The Financial Times’ David Keohane, Claire Bushey and Joe Miller report that the latest surge in demand for chips has triggered a debate about whether suppliers or final producers will shoulder the costs of carrying inventory:

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Jean-Marc Chéry, chief executive of STMicroelectronics, said that his customers, whether carmakers or car part suppliers, will need to hold more inventory or agree to more non-cancellable contracts to make supply more predictable and reduce the risk of shortages.

That would mark a shift from the current system where chipmakers hold excess inventory to accommodate the sector’s just-in-time supply chain.

“If they expect the semiconductor [suppliers] to be the bank, to keep having a big working capital to support them, they can forget it,” said Chéry.

Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal’s Sean McLain reports that auto manufacturers are coming around to a similar view, deciding it is worth stockpiling some inventory:

Executives say they don’t want to replace just in time entirely, because the savings are too great. But they are moving to undo it to some degree, focusing on areas of greatest vulnerability. They are seeking to stockpile more critical parts, especially if they are light and relatively inexpensive yet irreplaceable like semiconductors.

Ford’s chief executive, Jim Farley, said he was looking at keeping more inventory. “Most other industries use safety stock for critical components like chips,” he said at an event hosted by Automotive News. “And many of these companies pay for chips upfront, years and years ahead of the capacity requirements.”

Three decades in the car business hadn’t prepared Mr. Farley for this year. “It’s shocking to me how much I’ve learned about the supply base,” he said.

Much like the complaints about the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal, this is a “bad news caused by good news” kind of story. The FT story confirms the “60 Minutes” point: “The chip shortage was caused by an unexpected rebound in demand for cars that coincided with a booming consumer electronics market.” Demand surged in the last quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021. As vaccines spread across the developed world, demand will likely spike even further. Still, much like the recent Suez crisis, firms are responding to shifts in prices. In other words, this is a problem that is sorting itself out.

It is worth noting the dogs that are not barking in any of the detailed reporting on global supply chains. There are no issues with importing goods from the Pacific Rim. There are no reports of concerns about disruption due to geopolitical risks. Indeed, despite all the hyperbole surveys of firms do not show geopolitical risk anywhere near the top of the concern queue.

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To repeat a theme: global supply chains are not fragile and the geopolitical risks to them have been exaggerated. The current shortages are caused by producers underestimating demand and lacking the immediate inventory to respond. One lasting effect of covid-19 will likely be the increase of buffer stocks by final producers to ensure this problem does not recur.

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts is well aware of the problems associated with weaponized interdependence. That does not mean that every supply chain hiccup is reason for hyperventilation. This problem is sorting itself out.

Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Contemporary China vs. Imperial Japan

By Noah Smith

May 3, 2021

Mostly they're nothing like each other.

In discussions of the emerging U.S.-China rivalry and military tensions in East Asia, it’s pretty common to see people draw parallels between the China of the 2020s and the Japanese Empire of the 1930s. The reason is obvious — they’re both in East Asia and they both had bad relations with the U.S. But although there are a few minor, scattered similarities, mostly the two nations are just utterly different.

The differences — economic, cultural, historical, geographical — are too many to enumerate, but I see three big ones that especially matter when thinking about the possibility of a U.S.-China conflict. These are:

governmental structure and institutional distribution of power

size

military culture and experience

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One-party state vs. chaotic anocracy

This post was actually inspired by a book I recently read: Richard McGregor’s The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. Though it’s almost a decade old at this point, many of its insights about the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the other institutions of Chinese society probably still hold.

The key idea that ties the entire book together is that China’s governance is extremely centralized — not in terms of Beijing versus the provinces, but in terms of the distribution of power across institutions. Businesses, courts, the military, local governments, and other social institutions that in other societies might represent alternative sources of ideas and authority are dominated by the CCP. This is done in some cases through formal governmental structures, but usually via informal, backchannel contacts — kind of like a local mafia organization might control local businesses. The CCP is essentially one giant mafia with tentacles in every piece of the country. This creates many advantages and disadvantages, some of which McGregor lays out.

But that sort of governmental structure is utterly different from what prevailed in pre-WW2 Japan. (Two good sources here, if you want to start reading about what Japan was like at this point, are Marius Jansen’s The Making of Modern Japan, and John Toland’s The Rising Sun.) Although Americans might have conceived of Japan as a sort of hive mind controlled from the top down by the Emperor, in fact it was nothing of the sort. The Emperor occasionally wielded power, and certainly commanded respect, but often reigned at an Olympian remove — such a remove, in fact, that in many cases it’s not even clear whether his power was real or notional.

In addition to the Emperor, Japan had a number of semi-autonomous institutions that competed with each other over the boundaries of their often-overlapping spheres of influence. These included the Japanese military, large business conglomerates called zaibatsu, and the country’s official parliamentary government (which was democratically elected for a while, then came under military control). Other groups also mattered — the Genro, a group of elder statesmen who advised the Emperor and meddled in politics, and various rightist ideological factions that ended up launching multiple coup attempts and helping to instigate the conquest of Manchuria.

Japan was thus an anocracy, and a highly confused, chaotic one. How this shambolic confusion of competing organizations and interests managed to take over much of Asia and contend militarily with the world’s leading powers is a fascinating tale that deserves a much longer treatment.

But the upshot here is that in Imperial Japan, no one was really in charge, and that made dealing with Japan incredibly difficult. You could make peace with the Japanese government, and then an independently operating Japanese military force motivated by rightist extremism might just invade you anyway. You could negotiate with one part of the government while another part had already decided to attack you. You could present a list of surrender demands, but to whom? Eventually World War 2 ended only when the Emperor stood up and exerted more than nominal authority, overruled his generals, survived a military coup attempt against him, and made the final decision to surrender.

In contrast, in China, someone is in charge, and his name is Xi Jinping. Not only does the Party rule China, but Xi rules the Party, and most observers seem to agree that he has consolidated personal power to an extent not seen since Mao. He has crushed rivals, rooted out corruption, and extended state control over business and the economy.

That could make China easier to deal with than Imperial Japan was, because in China there’s a real negotiating partner — if they decide to talk to you. With Imperial Japan, there was nothing to do but wait until the more radical elements within the chaotic power structure forced the country to do something crazy, then clean up the mess.

But China’s more centralized party control could also make it a more formidable opponent than Japan. The Japanese Empire’s war effort was hampered by deep inter-service rivalry, rogue military units, and poor coordination at the top. China, in contrast, would probably run like a well-oiled machine, thanks to the pervasive coordinating ability of the CCP and the dictatorial power of Xi.

China is big, Japan is small

Demographically, geographically, and economically, contemporary China couldn’t be more different from Imperial Japan, because the former is huge while the latter was small. Here, just for fun, is a visual population size comparison between the two countries (where population is proportional to 2d area):

China has 11 times Japan’s population, and 25 times its land area. There is just no comparison between the size of these countries. It’s like Germany versus El Salvador.

That means several very important things. First of all, it means that China would be a much, much more formidable foe in a war.

Japan lost its war against America the minute America decided to fight it. On the eve of war, Japan had about 35% of the U.S.’ per capita GDP, and about 55% of its population, for somewhere around 1/5 of its total productive power. As you might expect, America massively outproduced Japan during the war, and outnumbered Japan in terms of fighting men as well. Japan fought very hard, but after the first six months or so, the ultimate outcome was not in doubt.

Comparing modern China to the U.S., the per capita GDP ratio is not too different from the Japan-U.S. ratio in WW2 — about 22% in nominal terms and 36% in PPP terms (it’s not clear which matters more for military spending). But in terms of size, China dwarfs the U.S., with about 4.35 times our population. The U.S. would NOT be able to outproduce or outnumber China the way it outproduced and outnumbered Japan — in fact, it might be the other way around.

But at the same time, China’s bigness will also probably make it less interested in territorial conquest. Japan, being small, had to take over other countries in order to have the natural resources required to contend with other great powers. China might want to conquer Taiwan and take a few islands away from Vietnam or Japan or the Philippines for reasons of national pride, but it has much less of a need for conquest for the sake of resources.

That’s not to say China is fully self-sufficient in resources, of course; it’s not. It will need to guard its oceanic supply lines through the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, and develop alternative land routes as well (which is part of what the Belt and Road project is about). That could lead to conflict. But China doesn’t really need to go out and conquer anyone in order to become a great power; it’s already titanic.

China’s enormous size, coupled with globalization, also means that it’s much more central to the global economy than Imperial Japan was. Japan was a tiny peripheral player in international supply chains'; China is the world’s largest exporter and largest manufacturer, and the supplier of crucial tech equipment like 5G to much of the world. Economic integration doesn’t necessarily prevent wars — remember, Germany and the UK were each other’s largest trading partners on the eve of WW1 — but it could act as a brake on martial bellicosity.

Repression vs. conquest

Japan’s need for resources and internal institutional and ideological ferment combined to drive it to seek external conquests — Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and then China and Southeast Asia. As a result, its military had a lot of experience in fighting wars, including more-or-less continual warfare during the 1930s. This made the Japanese military, especially the Navy, very competent. It also contributed to the dangerous sense of entitlement and independence among military units that ended up dragging Japan into wars, enabling numerous atrocities, and pissing off pretty much the entire rest of the world.

China, on the other hand, has been pretty much at peace since its failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979. Other than the minor “salami slicing” tactics of harassment and territorial encroachment in the South China Sea and the occasional bloody border clash with India, its military has little experience fighting wars. That could make it more cautious in terms of leaping into a major war over Taiwan or other disputed territory. It also, thankfully, means that China doesn’t have the unhinged destructive culture that the Imperial Japanese Army developed.

Instead of oppressing foreigners, China has been repressing its own people — surveilling everyone, crushing Hong Kong, putting Uyghurs in camps, and so on. It might be that China, like the USSR during parts of its history, is too busy with internal repression to go in search of external conquests.

So what does it all mean?

Summing up these big differences, I come away with two basic conclusions. First, China seems less likely to start a world war than Imperial Japan. China has much less of a need for external conquest, its military is not used to conquering places, and it has centralized, consolidated rule that will not let it be pushed into war by rogue factions. Other than a general sense of having been oppressed and humiliated by the West, China has none of the motives for war that Imperial Japan had.

BUT, if China does end up going to war with the West — or even have a protracted Cold War type struggle — it will be an infinitely more dangerous foe than Japan ever could have been. It’s far larger, with endless manpower and manufacturing capacity and vast stores of natural resources. And it has a fearsomely effective and centralized decision-making apparatus. The U.S. was able to overcome Imperial Japan alone, while fighting a two-front war; against China, it could probably only hope to prevail with a significant number of powerful allies.

The politicians who tried to overturn an election — and the local news team that won’t let anyone forget it

Washington Post

While Sunday shows keep booking the lawmakers who undermined democracy — triggering the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol — one public radio station set out to keep that fact in the foreground. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

The journalists at WITF, an all-news public radio station in Harrisburg, Pa., made a perfectly reasonable decision a few months ago.

They decided they wouldn’t shrug off the damaging lies of election denialism.

They wouldn’t do what too many in Big Journalism have done in recent months: shove into the memory hole the undemocratic efforts by some Republican elected officials to delegitimize or overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Too many Sunday news shows repeatedly book the likes of Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson without reminding viewers how these members of Congress tried to undo the results of the election — and encouraged the Trumpian lies about election fraud that led to the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol less than four months ago. A rare exception is CNN’s “State of the Union,” which hasn’t booked a single member of the so-called Sedition Caucus since January.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) criticized President Donald Trump in January for not quelling the Capitol riot. Now McCarthy says he did enough. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

“There’s a kind of clubby atmosphere on these shows, part of the Beltway Bubble mentality, in which it’s become almost impolite to raise the topic of the insurrection,” Princeton University history professor Kevin Kruse told me.

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“CBS This Morning,” for example, sent out an email alert last week touting its exclusive interview with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), one of the seven senators who voted against certifying the election results in Pennsylvania. Scott blasted President Biden for “spending us into oblivion” and mocked him for not achieving bipartisanship — yet interviewer Anthony Mason never mentioned that Scott had literally tried to overturn Biden’s election.

“109 days after Jan. 6, ‘history will remember’ is a complete joke,” Matt Negrin of “The Daily Show” tweeted last week. He added: “These media outlets want you to forget.”

But Harrisburg’s WITF has gone a different route: They want you to remember.

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Months before the election, the station’s reporters and editors were already deeply alarmed by what they saw unfolding. “We could see the disinformation really taking hold, this idea that the only way President Trump could lose is if the election were rigged,” Tim Lambert, the station’s news director, told me last week.

The deadly culmination of that anti-democratic lie, the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, solidified their thinking. In late January, the station — whose newsroom includes six reporters and two editors — posted an explanatory story stating that they would be regularly reminding their audience that some state legislators signed a letter urging Congress to vote against certifying the Pennsylvania election results, and that some members of Congress had voted against certifying the state’s election results for President Biden, despite no evidence to support their election-fraud claims.

These elected officials, WITF reminded its audience, either knowingly spread disinformation or flat-out lied in an effort to keep Trump in office.

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“This was an unprecedented assault on the fabric of American democracy,” the statement said.

The station has stuck to its pledge in its day-to-day coverage ever since, by simply and without fanfare including boilerplate language about how lawmakers conducted themselves during the attempts to overturn the election whenever they are mentioned in the course of regular news coverage.

For example, a recent story about a state legislator’s efforts to get Pennsylvanians vaccinated was accompanied by a sidebar of text about the lawmaker in question.

“State Sen. Ryan Aument (R—Lancaster) was one of 17 Republican state senators who signed a Jan. 4 letter that asked Congress to delay electoral college certification because, it said incorrectly, SCOTUS ‘is to hear Trump v. Boockvar in the coming days.’ On Jan. 11 SCOTUS refused to fast-track the case. The election-fraud lie led to the attack on the Capitol.”

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On-air stories use similar language as a tagline at the end of news segments.

Many Republican senators who planned to object to the 2020 election results had previously accused Democrats of trying to overturn the 2016 election results. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

The station’s effort has been generally well received, said Scott Blanchard, editor of StateImpact Pennsylvania, a public-media collaboration, who joined in the planning.

“We struggled because this is not the normal thing,” Blanchard told me. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘Does this mean we are not independent journalists?’ ” But ultimately, he and Lambert — and the WITF reporters — felt that sustained accountability was paramount.

“We’re out on a ledge here,” Lambert remembers thinking. Both he and Blanchard hoped other news organizations would join them. “But it’s been radio silence,” Lambert said.

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To be sure, other news organizations, including The Washington Post, are covering the aftermath of the election fraud lies and the insurrection, sometimes in innovative ways, as NYU professor Jay Rosen recently wrote. ProPublica has established a “democracy beat,” and a nonprofit news organization, Votebeat, focuses on election integrity.

But I’d like to see more accountability. So would Princeton’s Kruse. “There’s a tendency in the political media to get caught up in the story of the day and not dwell on the things that need to be reckoned with,” he said.

If it were up to him, Kruse would prescribe a simple rule for network TV producers thinking about putting election denialists on-air: “Don’t book them, as long as they haven’t publicly retracted.”

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The Harrisburg station expects to continue its practice at least through the 2022 elections and possibly through 2024. If legislators change their minds, the station will reflect that in their language, but it won’t simply wipe the slate clean for them.

“Elected officials are going to run on this,” Blanchard said. “This is an example of their judgment.”

In other words, no memory hole. No “let’s just move on.” And, sorry, no amnesty.

For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan

The mask slips, revealing the truth about the GOP voter suppression game

Washington Post

Opinion by

Greg Sargent

Columnist

May 3, 2021 at 11:04 p.m. GMT+9

Republicans are responding to their 2020 losses by doing everything they can to restrict the size of the electorate wherever possible, in ways they think will advantage them. To disguise this ugly game, they’ve rolled out all sorts of disingenuous talking points, claiming they want to restore “confidence” in our elections or, even more absurdly, to ensure “election integrity.”

But every now and then the mask slips, making the truth about these efforts even harder to deny.

Such a moment comes courtesy of this great new report by Amy Gardner of The Post, about the new voter suppression bill in Florida that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign. The bill would make it harder to vote by mail in numerous ways, adding curbs on the use of drop boxes and requiring voters to reapply for absentee ballots with each two-year election cycle.

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Some Florida Republicans now fear this could unintentionally make it harder for Republican voters to cast ballots. They worry about the provision requiring reapplication for mail ballots every two years — rather than every four years, as previous law had it — fearing it will confuse voters who expect ballots to be sent to them automatically during midterm elections.

This could have a pronounced impact on seniors and members of the military, Republicans fear. Both are GOP-aligned constituencies, and both rely heavily on vote-by-mail.

It turns out some Republicans wanted to address this problem in a surprising way:

One former state party official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations said some Republicans briefly discussed whether lawmakers could exempt those two groups from the provision requiring voters to request mail ballots every election cycle. “Key lawmakers said, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” the former official said. “It would raise equal protection problems.”

Now, the damage is done, he added. “Now, you’ll have military personnel who might not think they have to request a ballot who won’t get it. And we’ve got senior voters who have health concerns or just don’t want to go out. They might not know the law has changed, and they might not get a ballot, because they’re not engaged.”

This Republican source says Republicans were so worried that this key provision would dampen participation that they talked about getting lawmakers to exempt two of their key constituencies from it, and to selectively apply it to other voters. It wouldn’t pass legal muster and didn’t go anywhere.

That’s quite a glimpse into the mind-set of Republicans supposedly motivated by a pious desire to restore election integrity!

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As it is, the new provisions would heavily target African American and newly registered voters, according to University of Florida political scientist Daniel A. Smith, whose calculations show that those demographics disproportionately relied on vote-by-mail in 2020.

However, Smith’s research shows Republican voters also relied to an unexpected degree on vote-by-mail — hence these new GOP fears. As Smith notes: “The GOP leadership has discounted any collateral damage, calculating that the benefit to the party outweighs any harm done to its party faithful.”

The truth here is plain to see: Florida Republicans are trying to make it harder for the opposition’s voters to participate, to the point where party operatives even floated the idea of exempting their own voters from provisions that would accomplish this.

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But, unable to manage that, they’re calculating that in the end, any impact on their own voters will be outweighed by the benefits of the impact these efforts will have on the other side. No matter how you cut this, the real aim is to make it harder to vote, and hope for the best.

By itself, this might not mean much, except for one thing: Republicans can’t furnish any genuine public interest rationale for what they’re doing.

Notably, a lead sponsor of the Florida measure was recently pressed on claims of voter fraud that are supposed to justify these efforts. He replied: “I don’t know, but I’m sure it was going on."

Meanwhile, the ubiquitous nonsense that these measures are necessary to “restore voter confidence” in the 2020 election and our electoral system is falling apart.

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Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) was recently asked to justify this, given that Donald Trump and Republicans themselves have relentlessly undermined that confidence. She admitted there’s no basis for doubting the 2020 outcome, and dissembled wildly to explain why voters should nonetheless lack confidence anyway.

And in Arizona, Republicans have commissioned a recount of votes in populous Maricopa County, justified by this same supposed goal of restoring confidence. But the recount is being conducted by a contractor whose chief executive has promoted nonsense about fraud in the election.

Both of these give away the game: The real aim is to continue undermining confidence in our electoral system, often as justification for more voter suppression, not to restore it.

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What’s striking is that this effort to undermine their own voters’ confidence in the electoral system is now consuming the GOP. Republicans who dared to vouch for the integrity of the 2020 outcome are facing censure and condemnation, and this is becoming a dividing line in GOP primaries.

“A significant chunk of the Republican primary electorate appears to be driven with incredible intensity by the belief that the election was illegitimate,” Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University who specializes in election law, told me.

Bottom line: The GOP claim that voters need their confidence restored is, if anything, only further undermining that confidence. So this quest to create a fake justification for more voter suppression is also pushing the GOP primary electorate further to the right.

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There’s no indication that this ongoing radicalization will abate anytime soon. And one can only guess at the damage it will ultimately unleash.

Elected Republicans are lying with open eyes. Their excuses are disgraceful.

Washington Post

Opinion by

Michael Gerson

Columnist

May 4, 2021 at 5:35 a.m. GMT+9

President Donald Trump speaks at a rally on Jan. 4 in Dalton, Ga. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

“Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!”

— “Henry IV,” Part 1, Act 5

For the activist base of the Republican Party, affirming that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential contest has become a qualification for membership in good standing. For the party’s elected leaders, accepting the clear result of a fair election is to be a rogue Republican like the indomitable Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) — a target for Trump’s anger, public censure and primary threats.

Nothing about this is normal. The GOP is increasingly defined not by its shared beliefs, but by its shared delusions. To be a loyal Republican, one must be either a sucker or a liar. And because this defining falsehood is so obviously and laughably false, we can safely assume that most Republican leaders who embrace it fall into the second category. Knowingly repeating a lie — an act of immorality — is now the evidence of Republican fidelity.

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This kind of determined mendacity requires rolling out the big guns. Said the prophet Isaiah: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.”

Moral clarity against lying is sometimes made harder by our loose application of the term. When public figures disagree with you in their analyses of tax policy, or welfare spending or Social Security reform, they’re generally not lying. They’re disagreeing. When it’s revealed that someone was previously wrong about an issue — even on a grave matter of national security — it doesn’t mean he or she was lying all along. It means that person was wrong.

“To preserve the meaning of words,” said Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), “is the first responsibility of liberalism.” Precisely because principled disagreement is essential in a democracy, we can’t attribute every difference to deception. This form of false witness is a tool of polarization and a method of dehumanization.

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It’s important to keep perspective about the stakes of any given lie. There is reason the English language has so many words to describe the shades of culpability in a deception. You can equivocate, or dissemble, or palter, or mislead, or prevaricate, or fib, or perjure. There are mortal lies and venial lies, cruel lies and merciful lies. Context matters.

Speaking of perjury, almost any GOP response to charges of deception will eventually include the words “Bill Clinton.” In a time of rampant whataboutism, Republicans often point out that Clinton was a spectacular liar defended by his party. What they fail to acknowledge is that many elected Democrats criticized his lying under oath, even as they opposed his impeachment. Clinton was not insisting his supporters share in his immorality to show their loyalty (though that might have had some appeal when it came to other human failures).

The context for Trump’s lies has been particularly damning. When Trump falsely asserted that Barack Obama was born in Africa and thus illegitimate as president, it was permission for racism. When he claimed he saw Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on Sept. 11, 2001, it was a vicious lie to feed a prejudice.

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But the lie of a stolen election is the foundational falsehood of a political worldview. Believing it requires Trump’s followers to affirm the existence of a nationwide plot against him and his supporters — a plot led by ruthless Democrats and traitorous Republicans, and ignored or endorsed by useless courts and a complicit media. The claim’s plausibility is not the point. Does it really make sense that Attorney General William P. Barr, who found no evidence of election fraud that could have changed the result, was in on the plot? Were the conservative judges Trump appointed who dismissed his rubbish lawsuits really out to get him?

Such considerations don’t seem to matter. In the 1930s and ’40s, was it plausible that the democratic leaders of Weimar Germany had stabbed their own country in the back and betrayed its people? Or that an international conspiracy of powerful Jews was controlling world events?

Trump’s lie is not the moral equivalent of fascist propaganda. But it serves the same political function. A founding lie is intended to remove followers from the messy world of facts and evidence. It is designed to replace critical judgment with personal loyalty. It is supposed to encourage distrust of every source of social authority opposed to the leader’s shifting will.

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The people who accepted this political mythology and stormed the Capitol were not lying about their views. They seemed quite sincere. And who knows what Trump really thinks? When a congenital liar surrounds himself with sycophantic liars, he can easily lose radio contact with reality.

No, it is the elected Republicans who are lying with open eyes, out of fear or cynicism, who have the most to atone for. With the health of U.S. democracy at stake, their excuses are disgraceful.