The GOP scamming of rural Trump voters continues. A new study shows the latest.

The GOP scamming of rural Trump voters continues. A new study shows the latest.

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

Yesterday at 10:07 a.m. EDT

It has long been central to Republican mythology that Democrats have nothing but seething contempt for the rural and small-town inhabitants of the Real American Heartland. Republicans sometimes pair this with vile lies about Democratic proposals that would deliver economic benefits to those regions, turning their residents against them.

An important new study of the distribution of benefits from a major new policy from President Biden and Democrats — the expanded child tax credit — illuminates the repulsiveness of this scam with unusual clarity.

The new analysis from the Niskanen Center finds that the expanded child allowance — which has started delivering up to $300 per child per month to most U.S. households with children — will shower outsize benefits on residents of rural and less populous states and will deliver a disproportionately large relative boost to their local economies.

Story continues below advertisement

Every congressional Republican voted against the covid-19 rescue bill, which created the current child allowance by temporarily expanding the previously existing child tax credit to poorer and working-class families, making it much more like a universal program.

And every Republican will likely oppose extending the expanded child allowance. It’s now set to expire next year, and Democrats hope to extend it until 2025 in the $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill they want to pass through the Senate via reconciliation.

While just about all Republicans supported the previous version of the child tax credit, and the policy has a bipartisan history, the rub here is that the expansion of it to poorer families — which Republicans oppose — will itself have an outsize impact on rural residents and red states.

Story continues below advertisement

The study quantifies this in a useful way. It analyzed the new policy’s state-by-state impact by looking at the net amount added by the expansion to the total each state gains under the previous policy.

Its key finding: Although more populous states with more families with children stand to get more in total overall funding than smaller and sparser states do, the latter states still stand to get more in new benefits per capita.

About 35 million families have started receiving their first monthly payout from the U.S. government in an expanded income-support program. (Reuters)

That’s because the smaller and less populous states tend to have more poor residents as a percentage of overall population, and have larger average family sizes, Niskanen finds. The result: The total amount added by the expansion, relative to population size, is higher in those states.

Story continues below advertisement

As it is, the fact that more populous states will get more overall money also benefits red America: Niskanen finds that two of the three states that will get the most in funds are Texas and Florida (along with California).

This gets even more interesting when you break the funding down per capita in each state. The study finds that the first nine states that will gain the most per capita from the expanded child allowance are all red states.

And, because red states tend to have lower economic output, they will receive a larger injection of funds as a share of their GDP as well:

As the report concludes: “The CTC provides the largest relative benefit to rural states with lower economic output.”

This dynamic is also starkly illustrated by the study’s breakdown of benefits received in metropolitan vs. non-metropolitan regions, as a share of their GDP:

Because poor and working-class families will use much of the money to “increase household consumption on goods and services,” it will crank money into non-metro economies at a higher percentage of overall GDP in them, the report concludes.

Story continues below advertisement

“This suggests the CTC expansion will deliver a substantial boost to rural economies across the country,” the report says.

Samuel Hammond, a Niskanen policy analyst, illustrates the point with a thought experiment. Because the GOP base is made up of so many older voters, he notes, Social Security is a government program that provides a huge boost to rural and red America.

“If Social Security were abolished, no one doubts that rural America’s economy would collapse,” Hammond told me. “The expanded child tax credit runs that thought experiment in reverse.”

That has big implications for our perennial debate over the divergence between metropolitan and non-metro America. Conservative populist senators love to valorize non-metro America as the “great American middle” while bashing “cosmopolitan elites,” and Republicans denounce Democrats as elitists for pointing out that non-metro regions are stagnating economically.

Story continues below advertisement

Meanwhile, Republicans are busily rebranding themselves as the “party of the working class” by contrasting Trump’s supposed “economic populism” with the Democratic Party’s alleged “cultural and economic elitism," all to keep Trump voters engaged.

But it’s the party of elitist coastal cosmopolitanism that supports a new policy that would inject a big economic boost into rural and non-metro regions. Republicans, by contrast, have insisted it will lead to “fraudulent” payments and even denounced it as a “government handout.”

In this, Republicans are reverting to a decades-old approach — pushing canards about the safety net that appear designed to play on fear and loathing of the urban underclass to help advance a plutocratic agenda. Whatever happened to Trump’s “working-class” GOP makeover?

Story continues below advertisement

“The perception that these programs mostly benefit the urban poor is very outdated,” Hammond told me. “The modern Republican coalition has a lot of working-class voters and families in rural America.”

“The child tax credit expansion is going to be huge for rural working-class communities,” Hammond continued. “It’s strange to see Republicans oppose spending money even when it goes to their own constituents.”

The route to stealing the 2024 election begins with a simple step

The route to stealing the 2024 election begins with a simple step

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 3:51 p.m. EDT

It seems increasingly plausible that we’ll see an effort to steal the 2024 presidential election if the Democratic candidate wins by a margin close enough to permit it. Indeed, whether this effort does or does not end up happening, a host of bad actors are already laying the groundwork for it right now, via the execution of a simple mission.

That mission is to come up with new ways to discredit the very idea that our elections are capable of rendering procedurally legitimate outcomes. That is the necessary precondition for any future effort to overturn an outcome that doesn’t go to Republicans’ liking.

This basic thought emerges from Jane Mayer’s New Yorker exposé of all the dark money funding the ongoing assault on democracy. Mayer shows how the money from “wealthy reactionaries” who bankroll conservative causes is now funding efforts by right-wing groups to sow doubts about the U.S. electoral system, pass new voting restrictions and launch sham “audits” of 2020 vote counts.

Story continues below advertisement

But while the money angle is noteworthy, what also deserves attention is the core insight motivating these efforts. It’s that the question of whether voter fraud can or cannot be proved is irrelevant.

Instead, those making such accusations need to create just enough confusion to enable well-placed Republicans to say the actual outcome of a given election is fundamentally unknowable. The coin of the realm is not concocted proof; it’s manufactured uncertainty. This is what will lay the groundwork for attempting to overturn a future election.

This idea is threaded throughout Mayer’s piece. For instance, the chairwoman of Arizona’s Republican Party has hailed the sham “audit” of votes there as a “domino” that, once fallen, will potentially inspire more audits in other states.

Story continues below advertisement

This audit is being run by a firm whose CEO has already pushed nonsense about the election being stolen from Donald Trump. It is pretty obvious that this audit will miraculously show that the vote count was dubious or fraudulent. This will be conclusively debunked, but that’s irrelevant: The manufacturing of fake reasons to keep alive baseless impressions of uncertainty, in the full knowledge that they are manufactured, is the thing that matters.

As one Republican defender of democracy tells Mayer: “If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos.” We know the “analysis” is preordained to do just that, because that’s the whole point of it.

In another example of this, one of the lawyers who pushed Trump’s lies about 2020 blithely tells Mayer that the Georgia outcome was dubious. “I don’t think we can say with certainty who won,” she says, adding: “The only remedy is a new election.”

Story continues below advertisement

We actually can say with certainty who won Georgia, but here again we’re seeing a dry run at inventing new ways to say an outcome is unknowable, which would then justify efforts to resolve the outcome in some other way.

Among these, of course, might be a GOP legislature sending rogue electors to Congress in defiance of their state’s popular vote. This could be justified by claims that the vote count was too dubious to be resolved conclusively.

To be sure, many of these bad actors are fringe characters. But not-so-fringy Republicans in other states, such as Wisconsin, are responding to Trump’s rage at them for failing to produce evidence that the outcome was dubious by expanding efforts to “find” that evidence.

Story continues below advertisement

As always, Trump himself has demonstrated how all this is supposed to work. Last week, the news broke that he privately urged the Justice Department to declare the election’s outcome corrupt even though the department had found zero grounds for concluding anything like this.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me,” Trump told a senior department official, per that official’s notes on the conversation.

Trump did not expect the department to reverse the results; he wanted the department only to help manufacture doubts about them. If conditions are right, this could very well be the playbook next time.

To be clear, those conditions may not materialize at all. If they do, such efforts very well may not come to fruition. And they would probably fail if they did.

But we shouldn’t be under any illusions: We’re seeing new test runs at manufacturing exactly the sort of uncertainty needed to execute such a scheme unfold as we speak.

Perspective | Is Fox News to blame for American rage?

Perspective | Is Fox News to blame for American rage?

The Fox News logo is seen outside News Corp. headquarters in Manhattan on Feb. 26, 2021. (Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post)

Today at 6:02 p.m. EDT

5

0

A good rule of thumb for discerning readers: Take Kevin Drum seriously. As a blogger, then as a columnist for the Washington Monthly and Mother Jones, Drum has always been an honest broker of analyzing social trends. His thesis that America’s crime wave in the latter 20th century was due to the effect of lead exposure on children was interesting. Drum has also been willing to entertain counterarguments to that thesis. The point is, when Drum arrives at a conclusion to explain a social trend, it needs to be taken seriously.

Drum’s latest essay for Mother Jones, titled “The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage,” asks why the American body politic started getting so gosh-darn polarized beginning in the early 21st century. His primary answer is Fox News: “We need to look for things that (a) are politically salient and (b) have changed dramatically over the past two to three decades. The most obvious one is Fox News.”

Discerning individuals should read the whole thing. Again, it is to Drum’s credit that this is not the only hypothesis he considers in this essay. The bulk of his efforts is devoted to assessing alternative causes: the surge in such conspiracy theories as birtherism and QAnon, the growth of social media, the possibility that things have just gotten worse in this country. He rejects all of them for sound reasons. Conspiracy theories are a hardy perennial in American history, and a constant can’t explain variation. Social media postdates the increase in U.S. polarization. And no matter what you hear from your most partisan friends, there are a lot of ways that the United States is better off now than a generation ago.

Story continues below advertisement

Fox News meets the proximate trigger requirements: It launched just before the increase in polarization, and its animus toward liberals and the state has persisted. Drum writes, “The conservative media ecosystem includes talk radio, websites, email newsletters, and so forth. But all of these outlets had only a temporary effect in the early ’90s before fading out in the face of a booming economy. Only Fox News has had an enduring impact.”

So, is Drum right? I had to pore over a lot of the same data when I was researching “The Ideas Industry.” The way I would put it is that Drum is not wrong. But there are three omitted elements of the story that complicate his narrative.

First, the bulk of the political science research shows that elite polarization preceded mass polarization by a few decades. So one of the things that is going on in the 25 years before the turn of the century is that partisan elites are trying to radicalize their wings of the party. In that sense, Fox News is an outcome and not a cause of that elite polarization. Sure, Rupert Murdoch is at fault, but so is Newt Gingrich.

Story continues below advertisement

Second, Drum argues that the rise of Fox News is the causal factor in the dramatic decline of trust in the federal government after 2001, and I am not sure I buy that thesis. The precipitous decline of trust in government occurred while the GOP controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency; these were years when Fox News was cheerleading the Iraq War and downplaying Hurricane Katrina. It seems difficult to parse out how Fox News could be responsible for that decline in trust at the same time that its “fair and balanced” coverage always privileged the GOP.

Finally, and most importantly, even if Fox News was the primary cause of political antipathy, the feedback effects are now so powerful that Murdoch is no longer in command. The first data point that this was true came in 2015, when Donald Trump got the best of his feud with Fox News after Megyn Kelly had the impertinence to ask him a challenging question during a debate.

After that dust-up, I wrote, “Fox News has cornered the market on conservative news coverage on television. But if the network were to ever alienate a significant chunk of its viewers, one could envisage a disintegration of viewership.” Drum confirms that point in his essay, noting that Fox News began hyping its attack on critical race theory after “facing flagging ratings and increased competition from the even more far-right outlets Newsmax and OAN.” In other words, Fox now promotes partisan rage because otherwise it loses viewers (as happened when it aired the select committee hearings last week on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot).

Story continues below advertisement

The lesson Fox News learned after the November 2020 election and Jan. 6 insurrection is that its viewers will defect to Newsmax or OAN if they are, you know, told the truth about Trump’s lies. And Fox News cannot afford to lose those viewers.

Drum’s essay is a powerful brief against Fox News, and I do not entirely disagree with it. But Drum presents it as though Fox News still has agency to alter its course. There are a few data points that might support that belief. In the main, however, Fox News can no longer afford to cross the #MAGA bandwagon. Its agency and influence have been denuded.

To use an MCU analogy: I can buy that Fox News triggered Bruce Banner’s rage and turned him into the Incredible Hulk. What I doubt is that Fox News is as powerful as Natasha Romanoff in getting the Hulk to turn back into Bruce Banner.

Why has Biden's bipartisanship worked?

Why has Biden's bipartisanship worked?

(Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

Most political scientists, journalists, progressive activists, and Democratic Party staffers were deeply puzzled by Joe Biden’s repeated pledges during the 2020 campaign to bring a spirit of bipartisanship back to Washington. Speaking personally, I am cynical about politics and never had a problem with Biden saying that stuff, but I did worry that he might actually believe it and found it reassuring when he brushed Republicans aside and just wrote a partisan American Rescue Plan.

And yet now Biden appears to be on the cusp of delivering a significant bipartisan infrastructure plan, raising the prospect that we all overlearned the lessons of the Obama years and there are situations where bipartisanship is possible.

Slow Boring readers will already be familiar with the Secret Congress Hypothesis which states that bipartisan progress is more possible on lower salience issues. And I think some of the factors at play in Secret Congress are relevant to the infrastructure deal. But this was not a Secret Congress play per se. It did get onto the front pages of the newspapers, Biden was seen as personally involved, and it is in some sense clearly a “win for Biden” of the sort Republicans are supposed to be determined not to deliver.

I think there are a few factors we can see in play here, including a potentially successful use of arbitrary anchoring by the White House, a veteran senator’s savvy about how to give the legislators room to legislate, and a trend toward policy moderation in the GOP caucus. But fundamentally I think one strength Biden has on Capitol Hill in 2021 compared to Obama in 2009 is that he seems so much weaker. Nobody is talking about Biden cementing a new permanent Democratic majority. Republicans are actually super-confident that they can take the House in the midterms without needing to catch any particularly lucky breaks. So while they’re obviously not going to roll over and start greenlighting legislation they hate, they don’t have quite the backs-against-the-wall determination to stop Biden at all costs.

What Biden didn’t do — sell out

There is of course one classic pattern for a president to achieve bipartisan legislation that we saw a lot of during Donald Trump’s final year in office — you just sell out to the opposition party.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, taking an infographic that compares what was in Biden’s original proposal to what’s in the BIF, sort of offers that interpretation of what happened. He gained bipartisanship at hefty substantive cost.

But that’s not really what happened here at all. Progressives never had $400 billion in subsidies for home and community-based care. And they never had $363 billion in clean energy tax credits. They hypothetically could have gotten those things on a party-line vote if they persuaded moderates it was a good idea, but progressives haven’t given up their ability to persuade moderates that those things are a good idea. The optionality of throwing stuff in a future reconciliation package remains. Now, how much of this stuff will they in fact be able to convince moderates to do? I’d hesitate to make any strong predictions. But it’s clear that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are both fully open to doing some of this in a reconciliation bill.

And that’s really the genius of the BIF from the White House’s point of view. The legislation itself is non-trivial, and I recommend Joshua Freed’s breakdown of the billions of dollars in important climate programming here. It’s also not an earth-shattering piece of legislation. But in the NFL when you score a safety, it’s not just that you get two points (which isn’t that many) — you also get the ball back.

Now contrast this with Trump’s legislating during the Plague Year where he got stuff like the Families First Coronavirus Act and the CARES Act done by basically just agreeing to Democratic ideas. He didn’t let Democrats run the table of course, and lots of stuff progressives favored didn’t make it into those bills. But the White House didn’t get Democrats to throw in a capital gains tax cut or anything. The nature of the bipartisanship was “Trump wanted Covid relief bills to pass so he could get re-elected, so Nancy Pelosi got Trump to agree to a lot of spending Republicans would normally oppose.” This worked out great for America and is a real template for getting things done in Washington.

But it’s not what Biden did. The BIF is like the CARES Act in terms of substance rather than in terms of process — it’s recognizably a Democratic bill as edited by Republicans rather than something with big wins for the GOP.

One thing that worked — anchoring

The Obama administration frequently annoyed progressives by coming to the table with proposals that seemed pre-compromised. He wouldn’t just say “we want to spend a bunch of money to expand health insurance” and then be willing to reshape that to try to secure Republican votes.

He would start out by offering something that was designed to sound like a reasonable bipartisan compromise. This was highly effective at making Barack Obama seem like a reasonable person, but it never once caused a dozen Republican senators to jump up and say “that sounds great, Mr. President, let’s do it!”

Biden, by contrast, has been throwing long bombs. He followed up a very expansive American Rescue Plan with two different proposals — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — that were both enormous. The BIF, as Rep. Bowman was saying, is tiny compared to the original Jobs Plan proposal. This means Republicans can hold their head high and say that by negotiating in good faith and preempting the idea of an AJP reconciliation bill, they really accomplished something.

Now one way I would distinguish this from sloppy invocations of the Overton Window is that while Biden’s proposals were very large, they were defensible on their own terms. The policies he outlined make sense, the tax increases he proposed to pay for them are carefully crafted to be politically popular, and while some of his ideas poll better (clean water infrastructure) than others (electric vehicle subsidies), none of them are politically toxic. Anchoring on the big number worked in part because the content was reasonable and popular. If Biden had proposed a big carbon tax and used it to fund unconditional student debt relief, that would have generated a backlash. But rolling a whole bunch of popular ideas together let him bargain down in the way that Obama’s critics had hoped.

Extreme flexibility

The other difference between the approach Biden took here and the way Obama dealt with bipartisan negotiations is that Obama was a lot more opinionated.

Obama was quite open to compromise, and in some ways was willing to make bigger ideological concessions than Biden was. But he also had pretty specific ideas of what it was he was trying to accomplish. Indeed, just as liberals have complained for years that Obama would do too much to pre-compromise his proposals, something I hear from Republicans who worked on these processes is an annoyance that Obama would essentially tell them what he thought they should want out of a deal.

And if you accept the premise that Republicans care about long-term deficits and the incentive effects of marginal tax rates, the grand bargain he was offering them was super-reasonable. It just turns out that they don’t, in fact, really care that much about that stuff.

Compared to that, the BIF is a total mess conceptually that pays for new spending mostly with gimmicks and handwaving. This does not “achieve conservative ends” in a high-minded sense, but it achieves the (apparent) actual goals of Republican Party politicians. What’s more, while there is progressive stuff in here, I wouldn’t say that it represents either the best progressive ideas or the most popular progressive ideas. It’s basically “the progressive ideas that Republicans didn’t insist on killing.”

Which is to say it’s a true triumph of backroom dealmaking where nobody really knows exactly what went down or why, but everyone was evidently able to level and say what they really want.

That’s the part where I think you should look if you want to credit Biden’s legislative experience or see the value of having a veteran lobbyist like Steve Richetti on the team. You don’t get a deal by being the smartest person in the room; you get a deal by making deals.

Half a dose of Secret Congress

For the sake of personal vindication, I’d like to say this deal is part of the Secret Congress trend, but to be honest I don’t think that’s a defensible interpretation. This was a reasonably high-profile initiative that Biden was associated with.

However, I do think we saw a few Secret Congress themes.

One of them is that the actual work here did seem pretty secretive. We didn’t have the hype and hoopla of the Super Committee and the key negotiators didn’t do much public position-taking. The other is that while the process was hardly secret, it also wasn’t all that high-profile. The news environment has been plenty full of Covid news, Republican messaging is mostly about crime and immigration, Twitter fights are mostly about whatever people think critical race theory is, and in general we haven’t seen BIF-focused content going viral or doing great numbers for cable news hosts.

And I do think it’s relevant that a few weeks ago the deal seemed to come together, Biden took a huge victory lap, and then the deal immediately collapsed.

It continues to be the case that bipartisan dealmaking is a good news cycle for the incumbent president, but that makes it inherently difficult for members of the other party to agree to anything. You don’t necessarily need to operate in secret, but you do need to work around that fundamental mismatch.

This brings us to the paradoxical virtue of Biden’s seemingly weak position.

Republicans were terrified of Obama

In 2008, Barack Obama beat a celebrated war hero 53-46 and carried Ohio, Iowa, Indiana (!), Florida, and North Carolina. John McCain won Missouri by a narrower margin than Biden won Arizona or Georgia. Democrats had 59 and then eventually 60 Senate seats and huge majorities in the House.

Republicans were legitimately terrified that Obama might put together a two-year run that included a V-shaped economic recovery, new laws strengthening labor unions, an immigration amnesty that accelerated the demographic transformation of the electorate, and then kind of leave them in the dust. Nobody was so foolish as to think the laws of politics were repealed and Democrats could sustain those 2009 majorities forever. But the point is their majorities were so big that you could have easily had Republicans gain seats in 2010 while Democrats stayed in charge of Congress.

So much of what’s happened in the subsequent years of American politics stems from the fact that Obama didn’t pass those pro-union laws, didn’t get the comprehensive immigration reform done, didn’t get the V-shaped economic recovery, and got drubbed specifically in a critical redistricting year.

Biden is not scary in the same way. Democrats could put up one of the best incumbent party midterm performances ever and still lose the House over redistricting. The current iteration of the Democratic Party coalition is at a hopeless disadvantage in the Senate. Republicans have an entrenched majority on the Supreme Court. And the pivotal Democratic senators are crystal clear that they have no intention of changing the filibuster in order to create new states. Biden himself is old, and Republicans believe (likely correctly) that his successor will be much easier to beat.

None of this means they are eager to work with him and cut deals. But the reluctance to deal is driven more by sincere differences of opinion and less by a sense of a desperate need to treat everything like a fight to the death. The GOP has what they think is a viable road to victory, and that road doesn’t preclude them from passing a few bipartisan bills.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse already sucks

GIAN M. VOLPICELLICULTURE02.08.2021 06:00 AM

Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse already sucks

Facebook’s Metaverse ambitions reveal an alarming lack of imagination and a less alarming love of tech buzzwords

GRAEME JENNINGS - POOL/GETTY IMAGES

The Zuckerverse is coming. Just over a week ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, in a long interview with The Verge, that his social network is readying itself to become “a Metaverse company”.

First floated in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the Metaverse is an idealised immersive successor of the internet – a virtual space where billions of users will move, interact, and operate across myriad different but interoperable worlds and situations, always retaining their avatar identities, virtual possessions, and digital currencies. It is hard to pin the Metaverse down (more on this later), but the shape one can make out amid the cyberpunk mist is some version of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One meets Fortnite, meets virtual reality, meets blockchain. A game-y galaxy that seamlessly fuses with the Meatspace. What matters is that Metaverse is now the buzzword du jour, and that Facebook wants a piece of it. The bad news is that Zuckerberg’s Metaverse ambitions sound boring as hell.

ADVERTISING

Time and again over the interview, Zuckerberg dropped language that seemed to have been cribbed straight out of some stuffy consultancy’s 40-page insights report. He waxed lyrical about the Metaverse’s ability to increase “f​​ocus time and individual productivity”. He coined the dreary formula “infinite office”, a supposedly desirable scenario in which Metaverse-dwellers conjure up multiple virtual screens on their Oculus VR headsets in order to multitask like pros. Zuck was “excit[ed]” (!) about the Metaverse’s potential for organising VR office meetings.

Metaverse evangelists and open-source advocates have been fretting about Big Tech’s invasion of the Metaverse, about how the usual suspects – Facebook, Google, etcetera – would consolidate their stranglehold on the digital world, harvesting our data and re-enacting the rote practices of surveillance capitalism and the attendant ills of misinformation, manipulation, and gatekeeping. But Big Tech’s incursion into the Metaverse might end up being much less of a super-villainous power grab, and simply make the Metaverse an uncool snoozefest – a hybrid between Heavy Rain’s goofy detective-work ARI glasses and a cringy rendering of an Accenture blogpost. When Microsoft starts talking about the endless opportunities of an “enterprise metaverse”, you know that there will be no fun to be had.

The idea of Metaverse was always liable to be captured by corporate squares, if anything because there is no clear-cut definition of what it is even supposed to be. The Metaverse’s ur-texts – Snow Crash and arguably Ready Player One – are sci-fi novels that cannot really form the base for rigorous research. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball has come closest to a systematic study of what makes a Metaverse, while leaving some room for interpretation of what we’ll eventually see when the thing comes through. It is only natural that Facebook and Microsoft decided to propose their vision for whatever the buzzword will transmogrify into, but it is also dispiriting that they were so unimaginative.

One crucial element that seems to be always spoken quietly in almost all analyses of the Metaverse is its nature as crisis technology. While most Meta-prophets expect this virtual universe to evolve almost naturally from technological progress and societal dynamics, they don’t really explain why someone would want to spend all this time there. In its fictional incarnations, however, the Metaverse is desirable because the alternative – i.e. Earth – is insufferably dark. In Snow Crash, people run amok in the Metaverse while the world is a violence-ridden anarchical mess dogged by mafia cartels and hyperinflation; in Ready Player One, a global underclass living in squalid shanty towns plug into the Oasis (Cline’s version of the Metaverse) for days on end in the hope of winning an in-game scavenger hunt.

While the Metaverse-as-nuclear-shelter narrative might be a tad too catastrophist, it is not by chance that the Metaverse really started entering the public discourse in 2020, as the pandemic was raging across the globe, forcing most people indoors and outlawing all but essential human contact. Of course you want to jump into the Metaverse when you’re idling away your days at home glued to a screen, and when a lot of the things you do – “researching” QAnon conspiracy theories, trading GameStonks on Robinhood, playing with Technoking Musk and his doggie memes – already look like mixed-reality games anyway. More to the point, of course you’ll want better meetings and better multitasking chops when you’re once again stuck indoors as the Omega variant circulates, in 2051.

Zuckerberg and Microsoft are nodding to that world, the forever virus world, when they envision their enterprise Metaverse of infinite offices and exciting meetings. But in the same breath they are erasing what’s exciting and even liberating about the Metaverse and what it could offer to the people seeking refuge from a crisis. Not only the fun and the experimentation with different identities and appearances – but the creation of entirely new professions, economic models and political communities. In his analysis, Ball posits the possibility to “create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of ‘work’ that produces ‘value’,” as one of the lynchpins of the Metaverse.

What exactly this work will look like is anybody’s guess at this stage; less of a guess is who will be doing that work. The thing is – there is another crisis apart from the pandemic that might encourage a lot of people to repair to the Metaverse, and it is essentially generational in its nature. In a world – mostly the Western world – dogged by gerontocracy, one where the levers of political and economic power are firmly in the hands of unmovable boomers, one where Donald Trump can realistically consider a 2024 run and where Alan Rusbridger can become an editor-in-chief again, younger generations might as well decide to up sticks, untether themselves from the world economy and build a new economy somewhere else – one where they can literally create the top positions they always aspired to, earn oodles of digital currency, and maybe buy a virtual house which looks almost as good as the brick-and-mortar one they struggled to afford. In a way, this is exactly what a lot of second-wave cryptocurrency projects, from DeFi to NFTs, claimed to be about. (Of course, that did not always pan out.)

The fashioning of an entirely new economy remains the most revolutionary promise of the Metaverse. Zuckerberg sort of hinted at that in his interview, claiming that the Metaverse he plans to contribute to building might be a boon for creators, content producers, and developers. But his general keynote – his infinite office spiel – is a red flag, one that looks alarmingly like productivity software kitted out with VR glitter. If that were to prevail, the real threat to the Metaverse will not come from the overbearing Zuckerverse – but from Zuckerberg’s lame Suckerverse.

.

The Existential Anxiety of Cable News After Trump

The Existential Anxiety of Cable News After Trump

July 31, 2021

Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse! As I’ve mentioned before, this twice-a-week private email is just the prelude to the new media company we’ve been building, Puck, which we will be revealing next week. In the meantime, make sure you’re following us on Twitter and Instagram. And share the sign-up love.

“There Is This Absence”: The Media’s Life After Trump, Part II

In the weeks since I wrote about what the transition from the Trump presidency to the Biden administration has entailed for White House reporters, I’ve gotten some questions about what the change has been like for the people on our television screens. After all, the Trump era was so painfully perfect for television, especially the 24-hour cable news industry. While some of us may have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of outrage sludge gushing from the White House, it was ideal for cable news, as if there were custom-made sluices channeling all that bile right to the studios across town, up by Capitol Hill. The giant maw of cable must be fed at all times, and it requires a very specific kind of diet: eyeballs, of the loyal and addicted variety. And what feeds the addiction? Drama. Fear. High stakes. There’s a reason for the cliché that networks like CNN love covering plane crashes: it’s true.

Donald Trump was the daily equivalent of fifteen plane crashes. Every day felt like it could be the last day of the Republic, but also like the season finale of the messiest season of Real Housewives. The eyeballs were pouring into the maw in record numbers and the ratings reflected it. As one reporter told me for that first article, “Trump has been good for many journalists professionally, myself included.” It was great for the producers, too: content was plentiful and the line-up of every show was obvious, no need to scramble to fill holes. It was great for the anchors, who became celebrities for their stern sermonizing in defense of the most basic tenets of civilization. It was great for the White House reporters, whose faces appeared constantly, leading seemingly every show, thereby reminding their corporate bosses just how indispensable they were and how highly compensated they should be.

And then he was gone. What would cable news do without him? How would it fill all that airtime? “I think the difference in the Biden age is there’s a lot more time to fill,” said one cable news host. “Trump’s abuses could have filled every hour of every newscast—and they often did. So I feel that absence in terms of planning a program. There is this absence, there’s no doubt about it.”

Others are finding the adjustment difficult in other ways. It was easy to point out how the Trump administration, with all its norm-busting outrages, was transgressive. With the Biden administration, you have to work harder to find possible misdeeds. Not only are they fewer and further between, they are also less obvious, more deeply buried. “It has been a challenge to try to maintain the tone of accountability and the tone of rigor with the Biden administration because you don’t have the surface rhetoric,” said another cable news anchor. “With Trump, there was such low-hanging fruit,” the anchor went on. “With Biden, it’s behind the scenes and you have to dig into it to find it. The Trump administration was so easy to cover—the tantrums, the tweeting, etc.” (Said yet another cable news anchor, “Sometimes the Biden administration tries to slide by accountability, because Oh, they’re not as bad as the Trump administration.”)

“I don’t miss it, for the sake of democracy, I don’t miss the unpredictability,” said one television reporter. “But I don’t have trouble finding folks who tell you they’re bored. On the twelfth infrastructure story, you’re like, okay, can we do something else?” During the Trump era, the reporter was on air several times a day. Now, whole days pass when they never appear, the kiss of death for a television career if it goes on too long. This doesn’t make them nervous, they claimed.“I don’t measure my career by the number of hits I do.” But I have to wonder.

“There are some anchors who just can’t quit Trump,” said another television reporter, though they declined to name these offenders, limiting themselves to saying they’re “primetime anchors both at CNN and MSNBC.” But Don Lemon, Erin Burnett, Chris Cuomo, and Rachel Maddow are hardly the only ones; they’re just the most visible.“If Donald Trump is reading this,” said MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, “he’ll be delighted to know there’s still interest in him.”

​

​

When I began talking to people for this story, I assumed that there would be a fair amount of the same cynicism that I heard from the print White House reporters who skyrocketed to fame during the Trump era. By and large, those journalists resented Trump for every obvious reason, from inciting an insurrection to making them work on Sundays. But many also fully recognized that he had transformed the economics of their careers, usually for the better.

I assumed I would encounter a similar admission from TV journalists. Trump’s presidency reversed a long erosion of the industry, and turned MSNBC and CNN, in particular, into cash machines. Fox News, while hardly comparable as a journalistic organization (I did not interview anyone who worked there), historically spun off more than a billion in profit. During the Trump years, though, both liberal-leaning networks nearly caught up. And while CNN has boasted of hiring hundreds of people to staff its new streaming effort and Chuck Todd is doing a press tour to promote the news value of Peacock, the NBC streaming service, it’s hard not to imagine a future where executives, producers, anchors, and correspondents are renewed for less or replaced by younger, cheaper talent. Consumer behavior is changing fast, and a new compensation model is likely to follow.

Yet I did not hear this fear—or these calculations—from the people I spoke to. Instead, most expressed a sense of personal relief and professional liberation. “I think there’s opportunity for journalists to cover all the stories we missed while we were talking about Trump,” Hasan told me. “I’ve tried my best to bring foreign policy back to my show because there’s a lot happening in the world that isn’t Trump. We devoted a whole hour to the war in Gaza. We’ve covered Pegasus, Navalny, Saudi. We’ve covered Egypt, India.”

Hasan has always had an interest—and specialization in—foreign policy, a topic that is said to be (cliché alert) uninteresting to navel-gazing Americans. But he’s been pleasantly surprised to find that his viewers have bucked these expectations. “All of our stuff on foreign policy flies,” Hasan said. “There’s a hunger for these things and it all depends on how you tell the story. The opportunities are there.” As for the idea that journalists miss the Trump story? “It’s funny, and it’s a little bit true, but it’s also insulting to the thousands of people who are out there covering all these incredible stories,” Hasan replied. “I’m embarrassed by all the stories we missed.”

“The Trump show has now been relegated to a side stage,” said the first anchor. “And it’s not as inherently newsworthy because he doesn’t have power right now. So if you’re blocking out an hour of television, you’re less likely to lead with Trump. You’re making news judgment decisions to lead with something else. Sometimes, I don’t know what to lead with anymore. It’s freeing!”

Kara Swisher has called the current ethos “straining to get back to normal,” and it was hard not to hear that same sentiment in these journalists’ voices, even when they were speaking anonymously. “I think that the Biden administration is easier to cover and that would be the case if it were any politician than Trump,” said another network anchor. “It’s just more normal. You get to cover policy instead of assaults on institutions. We get to have more meaningful stories instead of just fire alarm stories. We get to talk to people about how policies are affecting them, whether it’s economic policies or public health policies instead of just fact-checking bullshit all the time. I don’t miss any of it. I do not get a rush from it. Honestly, it was traumatizing.”

“Now there’s so much substance,” said the second anchor. “There’s immigration reform, events overseas, like in Afghanistan and Russia. Whereas previously, all of those other stories had to be pushed to the side. There was such a high bar to break through the noise. Given the unprecedented nature of Trump, I understand why there was the obsession with him. It was such a norm-shattering presidency, and the coverage reflected that. It’s refreshing that we could now take a step back from the day-to-day DC politics and try to look for and pursue the stories that we didn’t get to cover before.”

“Refreshing” was a word I heard from everyone I interviewed. Getting to focus on policy, rather than endless scandal, is refreshing. Having the time and space to report more deeply on a subject is refreshing. Not having to drink from a firehose is, ironically, refreshing. “One of the things that’s been refreshing is I got to go to the border three-four times, doing very in-depth pieces,” said the first television reporter. “If there’s something I really want to dive into that’s policy-related, I can do that. I don’t have to be tethered to the chair or the camera here.”

Another television reporter told me that, in the absence of the chaotic Trump presidency, they’ve been able to travel for stories, getting to know the country that so many of us spent four years puzzling over from the confines of the coasts. Now, they could finally come to understand the America that made Donald Trump possible. Ironically, in the years he was in power, the reporter said, “there’s no way [the bosses] were going to let me out of the city because he was always going to do something crazy, and then we would’ve been shit out of luck.”

​

​

What’s also refreshing is the slaking of intra-network rivalries, between the White House reporters, the stars of the Trump show, and their colleagues who felt eclipsed by it all. The relative calm of the Biden era “allows non-White House reporters to get on TV more,” said the second television reporter. “Under Trump, barring a major disaster, the White House team was the center of the network. They’re still extremely prominent, but there has been an evening out of the playing field, in terms of air time. I do think there were a lot of times when there were issues that would’ve gone to a correspondent that had covered it every day, but there was always a White House/Trump angle to it, so the White House team could always lay claim to a story that would’ve been covered by someone else.”

I asked the reporter, who did not and does not cover the White House, if I heard a certain bitterness in their voice. There are few things more frustrating in journalism than being a television reporter who runs around reporting all day, only to get bumped from the line-up. How long would the bosses keep a reporter whose face they never saw on the air?

The journalist demurred. “There was certainly frustration among some reporters,” they finally said. “There were definitely moments where there were stories that I felt like I should get because they were stories I was covering on a daily basis, but I understood that the news was coming from the White House. There was a bit of resignation that that was going to be the case.”

​

​

I’m not the first person to have noticed, with more than a little schadenfreude, that cable news ratings have gone off a cliff in the last quarter: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC each lost at least 30 percent of their audiences. CNN ratings were down 45 percent. For all the refreshment of getting to be a real journalist again, were these television personalities at all nervous that far fewer people were watching them now? Their audience already skewed older, a demographic that has passed the peak of its earning potential. The average age of the cable news viewer is 68 and the pharmaceutical ads that run on the network toll for them. How long could the bean counters maintain the current headcounts at the current (wildly inflated) salaries?

“We are back to a 2014 mode of cable news, when there’s not one overwhelming storyline,” said the first anchor. “And people who are stressed out about the ratings declines just don’t remember the pre-Trump era of cable news. These people should take a nap, take a breather. This is cable news. It’s a rollercoaster, it’s up and down, it always will be. The Trump up was more dramatic than most. Are people stressed? Some are. But the average CNN producer is not, because they know that this is just how this is. 2020 was always going to be the peak because of the presidential election, the pandemic, and cord-cutting.” The anchor added that CNN president Jeff Zucker “is so clear about not paying too much attention to ratings and he’s been very clear about that to staff.” (Of course, seven years ago, CNN was in a different place economically, before cable-cutting really accelerated. CNN is highly dependent on dwindling cable and satellite subscription fees, and it’s hard to imagine that its new streaming service can make up the difference.)

The industry insiders I spoke to rationalized the ratings drop-off in different ways. “There’s this simplistic notion that Trump was good for ratings,” said the second news anchor. “I think people genuinely felt that their democracy was threatened and it made citizens more engaged and consume the news differently than in previous administrations. Now that that perceived threat has subsided, I think that people are saying they can take a mental break. Next year, during the election, I think the attention will bump back up.”

“I think there was a captive audience during Covid because they were trapped in their homes and they were concerned about the direction of the country,” said the third anchor. “I am fine with there being a lull. It’s a sign that people are getting back to their usual lives, and that’s a good thing.” The last few years had put a lot in perspective for this anchor. “There are things that matter more than ratings,” they said.

In the end, Washington is flexible, its journalists even more so. Perhaps it’s because they know the Trump story isn’t really over, it’s just taking a nap—and these reporters are just catching their breath at halftime. Trump is still a story, one TV reporter put it, “because he still has Kevin McCarthy’s nuts in hand.”

​

​

That’s all for today, friends. There will be another letter next week, as well as more news about Puck. In the meantime, good night, tomorrow will be worse.

​

Julia

Brexit's Feared Diplomatic Crises Have Begun

Brexit's Feared Diplomatic Crises Have Begun

Parting ways with the EU has left Boris Johnson’s government facing foreign-policy setbacks in Gibraltar, the Channel and Ireland.

By Max Hastings

August 1, 2021, 4:00 PM GMT+9

Rocked.

Rocked. Photographer: Matt Cardy/Getty Images 

Among the arguments that persuaded British people like me to oppose Brexit was that it would create a raft of new diplomatic headaches the U.K. does not need, in exchange for an anemic sort of new “freedom.”

True, the European Union is a mess: I do not think it can survive into the next decade without radical upheaval. But it was always inevitable that, if the British were the ones to break up the party, our spurned partners would punish us. And they are.

Even as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic, it is confronted by a number of prospective crises that represent fallout from Britain’s departure from the EU. 

First up is tension between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar, a running sore for the Spanish since Britain acquired “the Rock” at the entrance to the Mediterranean by conquest in 1704. It is a historical anomaly that the Union Flag still flies over this 2.6-square-mile enclave, albeit no more so than the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or Spain’s North African toehold at the tip of Morocco. 

The Spanish find it insulting that the British cling to this fragment of their country. There have been repeated outbreaks of feuding, ranging from exchanges of insults to border closures. The Rock has endured several sieges, including one in 1727-28, of which an unnamed British soldier kept a diary:

Here is nothing to do nor any news, all things being dormant and in suspense, with the harmless diversions of drinking, dancing, reveling, whoring, gaming and other innocent debaucheries to pass the time — and really, to speak my own opinion, I think and believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were not half so wicked and profane as this worthy city and garrison of Gibraltar.

Things haven’t changed so much: The U.K. government for years found it politic to ignore Gibraltar’s shady reputation as a mecca for money laundering and online gambling.

The British and Spanish became somewhat more courteous to each other about the issue when they were fellow EU members, but Madrid has never relinquished its claim. A Gibraltar settlement was postponed in the 2019 Brexit treaty negotiations, but the European Commission in Brussels is proposing a new deal, whereby the Rock and Spain would enjoy a customs union and friction-free border, under EU rules.  

The proposal would have almost no practical implications, but is anathema to Johnson’s nationalist government. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, asserts that the EU proposal “seeks to undermine the U.K.’s sovereignty over Gibraltar.” All that is certain about this dispute, concerning a territory with but 34,000 residents, is that it needlessly amplifies aggravation between Britain and Spain.

Logic suggests that the U.K. should cede the territory, which no longer has any possible strategic value. I urged this on Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary in the 1990s, when he bemoaned to me the hair-raising secret service reports detailing criminal activity bankrolled through Gibraltar.

But I am not a politician. The view of successive British governments about such things — including the refusal to surrender the Falkland Islands to Argentina — is that to quit Gibraltar would enrage jingoistic opinion at home for no political benefit. 

Thus I am ruefully confident that Britain will still lord it over the Rock and its most famous inhabitants, a colony of Barbary macaques on its lofty eminence, visited by generations of British sailors and tourists, when I am carted away to the grave. The more neurotic a nation becomes about its place in the world, the more likely it is to cling to micro-symbols. 

Further north, the balmy weather brings across the English Channel from France a flotilla of boats and endless ferry-loads of trucks delivering illegal migrants — roughly 8,000 already this year, four times the total for all of 2019 — most from Africa.

The French are struggling to cope with even larger numbers of economic fugitives, and are no doubt delighted to see as many as possible journey onward to the land of the “Rosbifs.”

It was widely predicted — by French President Emmanuel Macron among others — that Brexit would remove the last vestige of French support for curtailing cross-Channel migrant traffic. So it has proved. In July, the British pledged more than $75 million to France to step up its border patrols, but no sensible person expects this will end the daily regatta headed toward the White Cliffs of Dover. 

What was called, a century back, the Entente Cordiale has become much less than cordial.

And so to Ireland, focus of the most serious of the border disputes besetting the Westminster government, and one threatening the re-ignition of communal violence. Going back to the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson and his colleagues have dismissed the obvious impossibility of reconciling Brexit with the terms of the Irish Good Friday peace agreement, as a mere technicality. 

Those who know Ireland well have always recognized as reckless Tories’ insouciance. The 1998 Good Friday deal, ending three decades of strife, acknowledged the legitimate aspirations of Northern Irish republicans to pursue a united nation — by peaceful means instead of terrorist warfare. 

The Brexit treaty signed by Johnson’s government kept open the border between the Republic of Ireland to the south — still an enthusiastic EU member — and Northern Ireland by agreeing to enforce customs checks on goods that move across the Irish Sea to and from the U.K. mainland. This is to avoid compromising the integrity of the EU single market.

Northern Ireland’s vociferous unionists, however, feel betrayed by the Mother Country, left to become part of the Irish Republic. There has been rioting in working-class Protestant areas. Many refuse to accept the agreed phase-in of customs checks in the Irish Sea, arguing that these infringe their rights as U.K. citizens, and even consider the entire Irish Protocol a breach of the Good Friday agreement.

Rory Montgomery, a former Irish representative to the EU, wrote: “Trust in this British government’s good faith, never high, is now minimal … on all sides in Northern Ireland.” 

For good reason: Many Conservative Party leaders have come to support the unionists’ stance that allowing the European Court of Justice to arbitrate disputes over the Irish Protocol is a breach of U.K. sovereignty. David Frost, Johnson’s intemperate Brexit minister, demands a rewrite of the Brexit agreement’s Irish customs provision. Since Frost himself negotiated that treaty, this is pretty rich.

Johnson declared recently that Northern Ireland is a part of the U.K. in exactly the same fashion as are its other constituent parts: England, Scotland and Wales. This is simply untrue. No U.K. prime minister since Irish Partition in 1921 has sought to pretend such a thing. Modern British governments have acknowledged that Northern Ireland remains a part of the U.K. — as long as that is the wish of its own people. And polls have shown a majority in the north now favors holding a referendum on exactly that proposition.

The disagreement over the Brexit treaty protocol is fraught with perils for both Northern Ireland and the U.K. government. International opinion, notably including that of the government of U.S. President Joe Biden, is unlikely to favor Johnson. He is demanding changes in a treaty his ministers negotiated and his country signed, simply because it is proving impossible to reconcile it with his domestic political promises. 

Unless Britain treads very carefully indeed, which recent events suggest that this government is not good at, militant Irish Republicanism could revive, the killing on the streets resume.

In all this, we must retain a sense of proportion. In the grand scheme of things — compared with U.S. confrontation with China, Afghanistan threatened with anarchy, Russian disruption of the democratic West — none of the friction points between Britain and the EU threatens an immediate or severe crisis. It was always inevitable that Brexit would generate issues and disputes. 

But the tensions involving Gibraltar, migration and Northern Ireland highlight the perils facing Johnson’s nation as a consequence of having made the historic choice to go it alone. The standard-bearers for Brexit made grandiose claims that it would “set Britain free” to develop its full potential. But freedom can also bring loneliness. Johnson is accumulating foreign adversaries — not quite enemies, but people who do not wish him well — much faster than he is winning allies and admirers.

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the BBC and newspapers, editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, and editor of the London Evening Standard. He is the author of 28 books, the most recent of which are "Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy" and "Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943."