Miscellany Central

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

A Typology of the New Right

www.theunpopulist.net

A Typology of the New Right

Shikha Dalmia

19 - 24 minutes

Shutterstock. Photo ContributorDiy13.

The conservative movement as we knew it pre-Trump arose in the heyday of the Cold War when the threat of Soviet communism loomed large in the American political consciousness. The movement was famously described by Ronald Reagan as a three-legged stool with each leg representing a different faction, to wit: religious/social conservatives, foreign policy hawks and fiscal conservatives/libertarians.

It has always been obvious that there was a lot of inner tension between these three factions that needed to be assiduously ignored to prevent the movement from collapsing. Libertarians, for example, had little in common with social conservatives and vice versa. Meanwhile, neo-conservatives’ internationalism clashed with Pat Buchanan-style paleo-isolationism. And the libertarian commitment to laissez faire economics—opposition to state interventionism in the economy or using economic policy as a tool to advance foreign policy objectives—was a problem for both paleos and neos.

What kept the stool together, however, was the fear of an external leftist enemy that each side feared for its own unique reasons. This is not to deny that there was also some genuine common ground between them. Indeed, to the extent that they all took America’s founding project seriously, none of these factions were fundamentally illiberal—or whatever streak of illiberalism they might have had was kept in check by the competing commitment to this project.

Trump’s arrival changed all that. The new right, which started taking shape even before Trump, is in a different mood altogether. Its unifying force is not the leftist enemy abroad, but the leftist enemy within. And it doesn’t just fear this enemy, it hates it. Indeed, the new right’s dislike of the domestic left is so great that it is rethinking America’s historic foreign policy commitments in light of it. If you have been puzzled by the post-Trump right’s love fest with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin despite his invasion of the liberal democratic and pro-West Ukraine, it is because Putin has declared himself the enemy of the woke left that he claims is destroying Western civilization of which he is now the self-avowed champion.

In contrast to the previous one, this has four identifiable factions. It is, if you like, more a table than a stool. But not, for all that, more stable because the four legs are uneven. In fact, were it not for the various factions’ joint hatred of their common leftist enemy, there would be less to keep the coalition standing than with the previous conservative movement.

I would label the four factions as follows: Flight 93ers, the Integralists, National Conservatives and Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros. It has become fashionable to club them all together under the term post-liberal right because they all oppose liberalism—but this is misleading because they oppose it in different ways. The Flight 93ers, for example, consider themselves the true liberals, in contrast to the left. The Integralists are really pre-liberals. The other two—NatCons and the redpillers— might more legitimately be considered post-liberals— given that they want to replace liberalism with some order that has not existed previously.

Flight 93ers

This faction is named after the infamous Flight 93 essay that Michael Anton wrote in the Claremont Review of Books under the pseudonym of Publius shortly after Trump landed the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Claremont Review is the premier publication of the Claremont Institute, the flagship of the West Coast Straussian school of political philosophy. In contrast to East Coast Straussians, many of whom broke away from Trump, the Claremonsters, as they had long been called, went the other way. They weren’t without qualms about Trump but still submitted to him enthusiastically. Anton’s Flight 93 essay played an important role in convincing the Claremont Institute and the broader conservative establishment, at a time that it was still in shock over Trump’s primary win, that it needs to abandon its squeamishness and rally around him. Four years later when Trump launched his Big Lie, the Claremonsters supplied him with not just bogus arguments to justify his claims but also the notorious John Eastman, the legal brains behind the scheme to get Vice President Mike Pence to reject Biden state electors so that they could be subsequently switched with Trump state electors.

To understand how odd these machinations were, consider that Claremont Straussians have long regarded the American Constitution as a sacred document, a crowning accomplishment of humanity that managed to combine both the concern for virtue characteristic of the ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle and the emphasis on liberty and prosperity found among modern Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, David Hume and others. Just like their leader and founder, the late Harry Jaffa, they consider America’s Founding Fathers as gods among men. They also worship Abraham Lincoln whose statesmanship abolished slavery—and fully delivered on the Constitution’s promise of liberty for all—while keeping the Union intact.

So how did Lincoln lovers end up embracing Trump?

It is unclear, actually, if Jaffa, a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, would have ever gone along with his institution’s pro-Trump turn; his son insists that he would not have. But his Claremont heirs’ annoyance with what they see as the anti-Americanism of the progressive left has grown into a burning rage over the years. They consider the left’s depiction of America as a racist, sexist, and homophobic country—despite the heroic efforts that have been made to abolish slavery and Jim Crow—as intolerable blasphemy. They have always seen the left’s demands for special privileges for minorities and women as a perversion of the constitution’s promise of equal rights. Then, on top of this, when the leftist elites who control the media, academia, the government bureaucracy, Hollywood and other commanding heights of the culture use their power not just to press their anti-American agenda but, in their woke arrogance, silence objectors like them through a regime of censorship, political correctness and cancellation, they are incensed. Denying the left control of the state, arguably the last remaining bastion of power, became a paramount concern for them.

Whatever Trump’s character and other flaws, they paled in comparison to his big virtue, namely, his unapologetic and no-holds-barred willingness to take on the left and obliterate it. So letting him charge the cockpit as the passengers of that ill-fated 9/11 plane did and take control of the plane from a Hillary or a Biden was all that mattered. Sure, Trump might run the country into the ground but from its rubble a true liberalism could once again emerge.

What distinguishes Claremonsters from the other factions of the new right is that they alone see themselves not as anti-liberals but adherents of the true liberalism. The illiberal subversion of elections to install a strongman like Trump, in their book, is a temporary measure to crush the left and return America to a true, originalist commitment to individual liberty and limited government.

Integralists

Defending any kind of liberalism is emphatically not the integralist project, however. Whereas Claremonsters see progressive leftism—its attacks on institutions of ordered liberty such as the family, churches and schools—as a perversion of liberalism, integralists see it as a natural outgrowth of the political individualism enshrined in the Constitution.

So whereas the Claremonsters eventually want to restore limited government, integralists have no such plans. If Patrick Deneen, a professor at University of Notre Dame and a leading integralist, is to be believed, the source of America’s current travails, its communal and moral breakdown, lies in the Declaration of Independence itself. In it, Jefferson officially renounced the goal of a single “telos” or political end for the country and granted each individual the “liberty” to pursue his or her own happiness in their own way. This meant untethering individuals from communal and religious moral constraints to launch their own “experiments in living”—to use the language of John Stuart Mill—and find their own bliss. Nothing irritates them more than Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous quote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty, is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” As far as they are concerned, one can draw a direct through line between this kind of thinking and the rise of sexual promiscuity, pornography, abortion and radical demands for gender self-authorship of the woke movement. And like the other three factions, integralists hate the progressive elite that advances and defends transgender surgeries and multiple pronouns.

Integralists are all Catholic and integralism is a very old doctrine that authorizes the state to promote the earthly common good as ordained by God. In pre-18th Century Catholic Europe, it meant the state would act to ensure that the faithful baptized their children—and came down hard against heretics and apostates. Just as in Islamic sharia states currently, Biblical tenets were the basis of civil law then.

Of course, Catholics are a minority in America and so Catholic Europe can’t really be a model for this country. But the integralists do aspire to a return to some kind of a pan-Christian confessional state that uses its muscle to ban abortion, gay marriage and other progressive aims and that allows preferential expression of Christianity in the public square. Other religions wouldn’t be prohibited but they would not enjoy state support. Their role model in this is Hungary’s Viktor Orban who is taking affirmative steps to restore Christian domination in his country by barring Muslim immigration and embracing natalist policies to encourage Christians to have more babies and boost their demographic footprint.

If integralists could turn back the clock to some halcyon period in America, it would be 17th and 18th Century Puritan New England where a thick and unified community used a muscular government to impose widely shared religious norms or understanding of the common good. Deneen, along with his fellow integralists Gladen Pappin and Adrian Vermeule, has started a Substack publication called The Postliberal Order to develop their integralist critique of modernity and liberalism. But for the sake of truth in advertising, they should have called it the Pre-Liberal Order given that what they are really hankering for is pre-modern 18th Century Puritan New England (the closed thing in America to Catholic Europe).

(To understand the nuttiness of these Catholic intellectuals using bad boy Trump, the very embodiment of the ruggedly atomistic spirit of Appalachian “backcountry” Scottish-Irish settlers, to return America to a communal New England Puritan Protestant order, read this fascinating account by Tanner Greer, “The Problem of the New Right.”)

National Conservatives

NatCons have become a kind of umbrella organization under which all the other anti-liberal ideologies have coalesced. It started off as a global ideological movement entertaining a wide variety of critiques of liberalism but in America it has morphed into something of a MAGA organ, workshopping an anti-immigration, anti-market, and anti-woke agenda. Specifically, American NatCons want to break up tech companies, defund the left, impose trade barriers, build a border wall, increase the size of the child tax credit and put God back in schools.

In their third annual convention held in Miami in September, they had speakers uttering sentences like: "Wokeism is not a fever that will pass but a cancer that must be eradicated." Their dream is to elect a contingent of Republicans who are committed to using state power to, as Hillsdale College's David Azerrad, declared, “defund and humiliate the institutional centers of power of the left...and reward friends and punish enemies."

National Conservatives held their first conference five years ago. If one is going to pick one figure and one moment that launched this movement it would be Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony with his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism. Its central aim is to discredit liberal internationalism and make the moral case for nationalism.

His rap against liberalism is that it is a fundamentally imperialistic ideology because it claims to be founded on universally applicable political doctrines. That, he says, leads to a crusading moral universalism that denies the validity of alternative principles of national self-determination based on local, cultural commitments. Liberalism judges every polity by whether it respects individual rights and allows religious pluralism. That bars the state from using its power to protect indigenous ways and customs. Instead of nurturing citizens of a nation with strong local blood, soil and cultural attachments, liberalism encourages individuals to see themselves as citizens of the world. Cosmopolitanism is a dirty word for him—as it had become for many on the MAGA right. Ironically, Hazony’s critique of liberalism is a warmed over version of the anti-globalization left’s slams against capitalism which, it alleged, obliterated local ways and homogenized every country in the image of the West.

Hazony does not reject liberalism out of hand. He thinks it might be suitable when local conditions warrant—for example in a naturally diverse and multicultural community. But in Hazony’s post-liberal world, liberalism is merely one legitimate possibility among many. When a dominant majority exists, it should be allowed free rein to determine its destiny. It can choose a religious, linguistic, ethnic or cultural principle around which to order itself depending on the self-understanding of the majority. So if India’s dominant Hindu population chooses to jettison its liberal commitments and become an explicitly Hindu nation, that is fine. Also kosher is America declaring itself a Christian country with English as its only official language—as is Israel remaining a Jewish nation without pressure to accord equal rights to non-Jews. Hazony says that in such regimes, minorities wouldn’t be persecuted. They would be tolerated—but not awarded equal rights. In other words, they’d have to accept their second-class status.

Hazony’s project is to create the moral space for a variety of nationalisms in which nation-states are allowed to organize themselves around the dominant will. And he dismisses as “elitist” liberals who insist that the rights of minorities and immigrants be respected in a polity. His streak of populism is pretty evident.

Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros

If Hazony is the godfather of the NatCon movement, then a long-haired dude called Curtis Guy Yarvin— who wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug—is the godfather of this movement. He was a math prodigy growing up, embarked on his PhD in computer science at a young age but dropped out. While working in Silicon Valley, he started writing a blog called Unqualified Reservations under his pseudonym in 2007, so fully eight years before Trump’s arrival.* He had a regular upbringing by secular liberal parents—his father had Jewish roots and his mother was a Westchester WASP. Many of the terms and concepts that gained popularity in the alt-right and then entered the political bloodstream along with Trump were coined by him.

Yarvin believes that a complex of progressive elite institutions—the press, academia and the federal bureaucracy or the Deep State—run the country and exercise control more totalitarian than authoritarian China—a country that he admires precisely because it is so openly authoritarian in contrast to liberal states that mask their true intentions behind mind-numbing pieties. He calls this complex of institutions “The Cathedral” and he believes that their ideology permeates everyone and everything. Just like the computer-generated dream world in the movie Matrix, the power of The Cathedral is invisible because it is ubiquitous; it controls the psyche by penetrating it. And like in Matrix, those who are willing to swallow a bitter “red pill” can see the unsettling reality that The Cathedral is trying to keep hidden from them.

The Cathedral is a sinister, pop version of Plato’s cave, but what is this deep dark truth that one discovers after being red pilled? That progressive elites use the language of equality and justice to give special privileges to women and minorities to keep themselves in business while robbing men, especially white men, of even the vocabulary to protest their loss of freedom or the unfairness they are forced to endure. It’s all an elaborate ruse to keep the truly good subservient to a false progressive ideology. Mencius Moldbug believes that democracy and freedom are inherently at odds because democracy is based on notions of equality—while freedom would lead to the emergence of natural hierarchies based on physical and mental strength. Democracy, with all its talk of equality of individuals and equal rights, is a leveling force designed specifically to subjugate the masculine and the meritorious. Instead of valorizing the strength and virtue, democracy renders such people—aka men—impotent and defenseless, forcing them to submit to the utter mediocrity of The Cathedral. Nothing incenses the Tech Bros more than the spectacle of Senate geriatrics that get not the first thing about digital technology raking, say, Mark Zuckerberg over the coals on camera at a Congressional hearing. (Not that Zuckerberg is their big hero; that distinction would go to Elon Musk.)

Mencius Moldbug, who has made an hour-long appearance on Tucker Carlson, has had a deep influence on Peter Thiel and was even rumored to have a line to Steve Bannon, wants to tear down the whole liberal edifice and replace it with a techno-state in which corporations run the country like their private holding. In other words, he wants a kind of Dutch East India Company on steroids. So if, under fascism, the state directs private industry toward its ends, in the Moldbug world private industry directs the state towards its goals.

Moldbug was deeply influenced by Hans-Herman Hoppe, who subscribes to a perverted version of the libertarian Austrian School of Economics. This would be comical if it were not so dangerous given that key figures of this school like Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek (who has been a deep intellectual influence on me) are among the most eloquent defenders of liberalism—and ardent opponents of authoritarianism, having witnessed the rise of the twin evils of communism and fascism.

Moldbug is an autodidact. But a crop of anarcho bros that popped up in his wake have had formal training in political philosophy from top schools around the country. Damon Linker at Eyes on the Right has written extensively about some of them, but the most prominent perhaps is Yale PhD Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) who has developed a huge following among young, white men of the reactionary bent. Just like Moldbug, BAP’s animus is directed at those whom he calls “bugmen”—reminiscent of Nietzsche’s last men—because they are filled with ressentiment against those who are more beautiful, powerful and stronger than them and therefore want to tear them down. In a calculated bid to provoke fear against the left, BAP has gone so far as to compare the anti-male and anti-white rhetoric of the new left to the “extermination”-level anti-Tutsi propaganda that the shorter, phenotypically African Hutus in Rwanda deployed before massacring the more European-featured, taller Tutsis (never mind that the extermination of the Tutsis was possible only because they were a reviled minority in an illiberal state that did not offer them protections from the depredations of the Hutu majority, precisely the kind of polity that BAP disses.)

If integralists have a problem with liberal secularism, the anarcho bros are upset with liberalism’s democratic egalitarianism. They don’t have a beef with religious pluralism like the intergralists—or even gays (Thiel, their fan and benefactor, is gay, after all!). They have an obsession with biology and natural differences and are far more concerned with feminist—and to a lesser extent, racial—demands for equality. They are at core Neitzcheans who believe that a good society is one that is ruled by the principle of meritocracy in all its forms—not equality, a creed for losers.

For them, as some of their other New Right partners, liberalism is a degraded and degrading system that empowers the wrong people.

* The innumeracy in the original sentence has been fixed!

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Slow Self-Driving Car Progress Tests Investors’ Patience

Tim Higgins — Read time: 5 minutes

https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-are-losing-patience-with-slow-pace-of-driverless-cars-11669576382

Updated Nov. 28, 2022 1:10 pm ET

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After years of ambitious targets and bold promises, investors are growing impatient with the pace of driverless-car development, applying pressure on an industry that had become accustomed to latitude and piles of cash from investors.

Auto makers in recent weeks scaled back plans for the technology amid new pressure to curb expenses during an economic slowdown. An influential hedge fund also has questioned Google-parent Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG -1.38%decrease; red down pointing triangle yearslong effort to advance self-driving technology, an endeavor that has proven thornier than many experts predicted just a few years ago.

Activist investor TCI Fund Management this month sent a letter to Alphabet questioning the company’s continued spending on its self-driving unit, Waymo.

“Waymo has not justified its excessive investments, and its losses should be reduced dramatically,” Christopher Hohn, TCI managing director, wrote in the letter. Waymo declined to comment.

Waymo has benefited from the patience of Alphabet, which began work on driverless cars more than a decade ago. The unit began raising money from outside investors in 2020—a move that sparked speculation that Waymo was preparing a spinoff as a stand-alone company.

Waymo operates driverless cars in a ride-hailing service for paying customers in the Phoenix metro area, and is expanding into San Francisco and Los Angeles. Last month, Waymo Co-Chief Executive Officer Tekedra Mawakana talked about the challenges of safely deploying the new technology.

“This really is about being patient in the learning but being precise in our execution,” Ms. Mawakana said. “This is a really long-term opportunity.”

Intel Corp. INTC -2.10%decrease; red down pointing triangle last month took its Mobileye car-tech unit public in an initial public offering that valued the company at $23 billion on the first day of trading—well below the $50 billion its leaders had initially targeted.

Ford Motor Co. F -2.49%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Volkswagen AG also recently retrenched on their autonomous-vehicle efforts, in late October pulling the plug on their joint investment in driverless-car firm Argo ARGO -1.83%decrease; red down pointing triangle AI.

The two rival car companies had invested billions of dollars in the startup late last decade, when both had fully robotic cars at the core of their plans for future services and revenue streams. Each company said it plans to redeploy resources to technology considered more viable in the near-term, such as driver-assistance systems and automated approaches that allow vehicles to pilot themselves in limited situations with a human driver engaged.

“It’s become very clear that profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are still a long way off,” said John Lawler, Ford’s chief financial officer.

Meanwhile, a driverless-delivery startup, Nuro Inc., this month disclosed it would reduce staff by about 20%, citing difficulties raising new funds.

The shift in sentiment is a change from a few years earlier, when a wide assortment of companies from the Motor City to Silicon Valley were betting on self-driving technology to disrupt the car industry and unlock billions of dollars in new revenue.

A $1 billion deal by General Motors Co. GM -2.67%decrease; red down pointing triangle to acquire an autonomous-vehicle startup called Cruise was one of many such efforts, as companies competed to lock in talent and assure investors they were preparing for the future.

Tesla Inc. TSLA 0.03%increase; green up pointing triangle CEO Elon Musk promised in 2016 to demonstrate a vehicle traveling in fully autonomous mode from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017—a date that came and passed without such a public display. His vision and promises for driverless vehicles have helped bolster Tesla’s stock to make it the world’s most valuable auto maker.

The industry’s enthusiasm began to waver in 2018, after a test vehicle being used by Uber Technologies Inc. UBER -2.60%decrease; red down pointing triangle struck and killed a pedestrian. The incident led to more scrutiny of the technology and highlighted the safety challenges involved in turning a vehicle over to a robot.

As some companies move from demos to deployment, it is clear that for now, a complex and costly back end of maintenance and operations is required to run these networks of vehicles.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said in October he was no longer assigning any value to GM’s Cruise driverless-car business in his valuation of the auto maker’s enterprise value.

He told investors he expected GM’s losses on the unit—which he currently estimated at $2 billion a year—to possibly double in the next few years. “We believe GM might realize that their investment in Cruise is a ‘sunk cost’ and should move on,” he wrote.

Even amid the pessimism, many analysts say that autonomous technology still holds great potential, creating difficult decisions for car makers weighing future needs, particularly for electric-vehicle development.

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GM remains bullish on driverless cars, and has said that long-term, sustained investment is needed to make them a commercial success. Earlier this year, GM deepened its support of Cruise, spending $3.45 billion to buy out SoftBank Vision Fund L.P.’s stake and provide its self-driving car division with additional capital.

A spokesman for GM said the company disagrees with Mr. Jonas’s assessment, pointing to recent comments from General Motors CEO Mary Barra, saying she believes Cruise is now a leader in autonomous vehicles.

“Every car maker will need an autonomy strategy, just like they all need an EV strategy,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Loup Ventures, a venture-capital firm specializing in tech research. “We are likely five years away from an inflection point, and companies that want to reap the benefits need to be aggressively investing in that tech today.”

—Mike Colias contributed to this article.

Appeared in the November 29, 2022, print edition as 'Investors Lose Patience With Driverless Cars'.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company Ghosts Cities Across America

Ted Mann and Julie Bykowicz — Read time: 11 minutes

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Monday, November 28, 2022

Cities shouldn't reject growth in the name of climate mitigation By Matthew Yglesias

Cities shouldn't reject growth in the name of climate mitigation

By Matthew Yglesias

Building housing and transit is good despite construction emissions

In the United States, spending on mass transit is normally opposed by the political right, which is suspicious of spending money in general and has ideological and lifestyle objections to spending on mass transit in particular.

And beyond political opposition, American political institutions struggle to identify and fund projects that are cost-effective in terms of ridership. That’s in part because our construction costs are structurally very high, so even a project that would clearly generate large ridership (like Phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway) has astronomical costs. And it’s partly because we have a land use paradigm that’s very hostile to transit usage, so we get things like Los Angeles building out a subway network without upzoning along the corridors.

In Germany, the cost situation is better and the historic land use patterns are different, so a city like Berlin has plenty of opportunities to pluck relatively low-hanging transit fruit.

Sadly, Alon Levy reports that in Berlin, opposition to this kind of expansion comes not from the political right (which is relatively unimportant in big city politics anyway) but from the left, especially the Green Party which has developed the view that U-Bahn expansion is bad for climate change. The logic is that expanding the U-Bahn involves pouring a lot of concrete, the embedded emissions in concrete are relatively high, and even a well-used mass transit project won’t necessarily displace a large enough number of car trips for the carbon math to pencil out.

Levy argues narrowly that the Greens are just miscalculating the emissions benefits of mass transit, offering the cross-sectional argument that “the scale of the difference in emissions between cities with and without extensive subway systems is too large for this to be possibly true.” Per capita emissions in New York, for example, are much lower than the American average. And Germany, which has much more extensive transit in its mid-sized cities than we do, has lower per capita emissions than the United States. Even within Germany, Berlin’s emissions are much lower than the national average.

I think that’s all correct, but it also doesn’t really get at a core issue here.

The Greens’ point is that concrete involves high emissions. So if you could get everyone to just stop building new stuff, that would achieve a lot of emissions reduction. The problem with this vision is that the impact on global living standards of nobody pouring any new concrete ever would be quite bleak. And very few people around the world are prepared to embrace the kind of degrowth ideology that would underwrite the idea that “don’t build any new stuff ever” is a reasonable solution to climate change. Instead, we see a selective application of degrowth ideology imposed not on the world writ large, but on arbitrary sub-sections of it in rich countries where environmentalists happen to have unusual amounts of political clout. And sometimes the result, as with blocking Berlin transit expansion, is environmentally perverse. Other times it’s economically tragic. But either way, it’s bad in a big-picture ideological sense, not just in a picky project-by-project sense.

The Berlin transit situation

Let’s start with Berlin. The city obviously has an unusual history, with its growth trajectory derailed by the Cold War situation. Among other things, that’s left it with a transit system that is a little underdeveloped in some slightly boring ways.

The neighborhood of Märkisches Viertel near the edge of the city, for example, has a big social housing development of 17,000 apartments that were built in the 1960s. And the development is kind of close to the Wittenau station where Line 1 of the S-Bahn stops and intersects with the terminus of Line 8 of the U-Bahn. But the station doesn’t genuinely serve the neighborhood. A very short extension of U8 would be easy to build, connect a dense neighborhood to a very high-quality mass transit network, and do a lot of good.

The presence of a good number of this kind of small opportunity distinguishes Berlin from D.C., where I live.

All of WMATA’s existing lines already terminate in fairly low-density suburban areas. You could extend these lines further, but that would only generate meaningful ridership if you paired it with significant land use changes. And in almost all cases, if you wanted to increase ridership by changing land use rules near suburban Metro stations, you could do that near the stations that already exist. Good WMATA expansion projects involve things that are relatively difficult and expensive, like new tunnels through the center of the city. I’d love to see that stuff happen, but it’s a different ballgame than Germany’s opportunity to extend existing lines into dense urban neighborhoods. Berlin also has the opportunity to do some short expansions that would have significant network benefits.

For example, U1 and U3 terminate at Warschauer Strasse in a very dense area. Building a 0.8-mile extension to Frankfurter Tor with one stop in the middle wouldn’t revolutionize transit access in the neighborhood, but it would create a lot of new opportunities to make useful transfers and take advantage of the city’s full network.

U3 in the southwest of the city, similarly, could benefit from a very short extension that would link it up with an S-Bahn line. Connections like these would let some people get around town faster, relieve some pressure on central city infrastructure, and ultimately increase system-wide capacity.

The point is that there are a bunch of projects in Berlin that have relatively large transportation benefits per unit of concrete poured.

Levy says that supporting growth — and particularly transit growth — in an already transit-rich city is worth the environmental cost of pouring that concrete. I think that is absolutely true. It’s only true, though, if you accept that in general growth is good, in which case the climate lens leads us to ask “what kind of new infrastructure is best for sustainability?” But if you talk yourself into the idea that maybe everyone will just give up on growth, then things look different.

Small, poor places have low emissions

While it’s true that Berlin has relatively low emissions compared to the rest of Germany, there’s a sense in which Germany as a whole is a catastrophic climate failure compared to places like Mexico, Indonesia, and Kenya.

Normal people don’t think this way — Indonesia hasn’t achieved lower emissions than Germany thanks to some clean energy revolution. Jakarta is making some belated investments in mass transit, but its system certainly isn’t better than Berlin’s. The secret to Indonesia’s emissions success is just that Indonesia is poor.

Per capita emissions are important for understanding the structure of national economies, but of course the atmosphere doesn’t care about per capita. And in terms of raw emissions, Germany’s big problem is that it’s not only rich, but it’s also a pretty large country.

This is just to say that if you’re monomaniacally obsessed with climate change rather than seeing it as one issue among several, the solution is clear: you want as few people as possible and you want them to be poor.

Despite a certain amount of rhetoric to the contrary, I think very few people actually are emissions monomaniacs. But the sporadic application of this line of thinking is an important trend in environmentalism. It’s given rise to the intellectual fad around degrowth, which is prominent enough to be a permanent fixture on op-ed pages, even if it doesn’t wield political influence. And, as we see in Berlin, it supports the notion that the left should apply degrowth logic to specific geographies where it wields an unusually large amount of political power.

The right way to look at Berlin is to say that Berlin is a good example of a relatively low-emissions place for a big, rich city, and if there are ways to grow Berlin’s population and economy while reinforcing its low-emissions characteristics, the city should embrace those opportunities. Small, high-value U-Bahn and S-Bahn expansions absolutely fit the bill, even though pouring concrete results in emissions. But a big part of the reason that’s the right answer in climate terms is that even if Berlin opts out of growth, the world isn’t going to. People who otherwise might live in Berlin and enjoy a convenient transit commute will live in the suburbs and enjoy the convenience of driving instead.

Some ideas that aren’t politically feasible on a global basis should be tried locally where the politics are different. American cities and states should try to move ahead with preschool for four-year-olds and child allowances for families, even if Build Back Better is dead in Congress. These are good policies on their own terms, and implementing them and making them work could have a politically useful demonstration effect. But “we can’t convince everyone to stop pouring concrete so we’ll just stop pouring concrete in our city” doesn’t have this quality. The concrete goes elsewhere — to worse projects — if you refuse to use it for good ones.

We need to try to solve the industrial emissions problem

Now all that said, the Berlin Greens are getting something important right — it’s a big problem for the dream of a net zero world that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with pouring concrete are so large.

It’s tempting to focus on the pieces of the emissions puzzle that have well-understood solutions and pretend that all we need is more political will. That’s how you get people throwing cans of soup in art museums and portraying the climate issue as one pitting narrow special interests against the will of the people. There are absolutely apsects of climate change that can be addressed with the application of willpower. We know that riding a metro has fewer emissions than driving your car, which is why cheap metro expansions that generate high ridership are a win. It’s also why liberalizing land use in places where there is abundant transit capacity is an easy win.

But we just do not currently have a feasible means of creating large amounts of zero-emissions concrete. And “just don’t do construction projects” isn’t an acceptable answer. A better answer, I think, is that with regulatory changes, we could use mass timber instead in many situations.

There are plenty of other promising lines of research in terms of industrial decarbonization. A British group has an idea about using waste heat from steel production to make cement, for example. There’s also the notion that you could burn pure hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons to generate industrial heat. Right now the economically dominant way of making hydrogen is to burn natural gas (“blue hydrogen”), but optimists think that if the installation costs of wind and solar power keep falling, it should be cheaper and cheaper to make hydrogen via electrolysis with the renewables as the source for the electricity. Then you could use “green hydrogen” in industrial processes.

There’s a concatenation of ifs there, but if it all worked out, this would be a way to in effect store the extra energy generated by wind/solar during peak production periods in order to solve other decarbonization programs. Will that pan out? I don’t know. The other big lines of research that I’m aware of are from a Swedish facility that’s at the leading edge of using carbon capture technology at the source to create a net zero plant. But in part precisely because it’s unclear whether any of this will ever pan out, I think it’s important to keep supporting direct air capture projects, which right now are too expensive to be commercially appealing at mass scale but which could cut some Gordian knots around these things.

Rather than “don’t build low-carbon transportation infrastructure because building things causes emissions,” the right answer is “yes, build low-carbon transportation infrastructure while also continuing to work on industrial decarbonization.”

Partial equilibrium doom

Just in advance of Thanksgiving, the New York Times published a profile of Les Knight, who is apparently an advocate for human extinction.

If I were to try to explain the difference between “media institutions have an ideological bias toward the left” and “media institutions are inverse versions of Fox News in terms of partisanship,” I think this story would be Exhibit A. The Times is clearly interested in platforming fringy and absurd leftist ideas in a way they’re not for the right. But at the same time, this platforming does no favors to the actually existing Democratic Party, which is led by a Biden administration that is focused on addressing climate change through industrial policy, technology-neutral innovation, and other growth-oriented strategies.

I myself didn’t know how to respond to the profile. If I’d seen lots of people praising Knight, I’d have argued with them. But I mostly just saw people dunking on him in one of those social media frenzies whereby everyone gets mad and it’s not clear if the thing they’re getting mad about is even important.

The main thing I think I’d say is that Knight-style ideas have basically no sway over any significant political domain, and it’s okay to not worry about them. But what’s true is that somewhat arbitrary splinters of anti-humanism lodge in little corners of the climate debate — like entertaining the hypothesis that maybe nobody should ever do any large-scale transportation projects and that’s why Berlin shouldn’t expand the U-Bahn. In America, the parallel error is that when D.C. adopts climate goals for the city, it focuses on reducing aggregate emissions rather than acknowledging that anything that increases D.C.’s population would reduce American emissions.

In other words, it’s not that anyone is actually adopting human extinction or degrowth as a climate strategy. But the leading-edge climate jurisdictions are declining to acknowledge that they care more about climate than most places, so anything they do to voluntarily curb local growth won’t solve the global climate issue and may not even be helpful. Adding people to a rich country’s transit-oriented cities and improving their transportation networks is very good climate policy if you take a global view of the situation and keep in mind that those cities are the places where the electorate is most interested in climate change. But that means making progress requires tuning out the eco-doomers and human extinction advocates — the world is going to keep growing whatever people who care about climate change say and do. By rejecting partial equilibrium doomer views, we can ensure it grows faster and greener than it otherwise might.

Twitter’s $5bn-a-year business hit as Elon Musk clashes with advertisers

Top brands abandon social media platform as billionaire owner berates chief executives who have curbed spending

Montage of Elon Musk and various corporate logos

A top advertising agency executive said of Elon Musk, pictured: ‘He seems to put off even those advertisers who wanted him to succeed’ © FT Montage/Bloomberg/AFP via Getty Images

Twitter’s $5bn-a-year business hit as Elon Musk clashes with advertisers on twitter (opens in a new window)

Hannah Murphy in San Francisco, Alex Barker and Arjun Neil Alim in London

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Elon Musk’s tumultuous reign at Twitter has led to a damaging rift with top brands and marketers, with the social media company’s $5bn-a-year advertising business hit by tensions over content moderation and resources.

Multiple top advertising agencies and media buyers told the Financial Times that nearly all of the big brands they represent have paused spending on the social media platform, citing alarm at Musk’s ad hoc approach to policing content and decision to axe many of its ad sales team.

Musk, meanwhile, has sought to personally call chief executives of some brands that have curbed advertising in order to berate them, according to one senior industry figure, leading others to instead reduce their spend to the bare minimum required so as to avoid further confrontation with the billionaire entrepreneur.

After several waves of job cuts and departures, Twitter’s ads business team has shrunk so much that many agencies no longer have any point of contact at the company and have received little to no communication in recent weeks, according to four industry insiders.

Some brands have been unable to get feedback on how previous campaigns have performed because of the staffing shortages, one media buyer said. Others are complaining Twitter’s ads systems have also become buggy, making it difficult or even impossible to run campaigns.

“It is quite unique. The turmoil, the damage, nothing of this magnitude has happened before. Never,” said a senior executive at a big four advertising agency.

“He seems to put off even those advertisers who wanted him to succeed,” another top advertising agency executive said.

Musk is under pressure to draw revenues from Twitter, as he faces $1bn in annual interest payments after loading the company with $13bn of debt to help fund his acquisition of the business.

On October 27, the day he closed his $44bn deal to buy Twitter, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive sought to reassure marketers that the platform would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” despite his plans to relax content moderation restrictions.

Soon after, he conducted rounds of calls and meetings to reassure top ads agencies and brands. One email, sent in early November and seen by the Financial Times, said of Musk: “He’s one of the greatest innovators in the world, and he understands our platform and product at a level that few people do. He wants to ship exciting things, and he wants to do it quickly.”

In the meetings, Musk appeared across all the details of how the platform is run, two agency executives said, impressing brands with his knowledge. “He knows more than [former chief executive] Jack Dorsey ever did. He has immersed himself very deeply in the business,” a senior executive at a top advertising agency said.

However, the relationship soon soured after Musk laid off more than half of the company’s 7,500 workforce, upending Twitter’s ads sales team and trust and safety team, and heightening concerns that misinformation and hate speech could proliferate on the platform.

Groups such as General Motors, Volkswagen, Carlsberg and General Mills have announced they would be pausing spending on the platform given the moderation concerns.

Many in the advertising industry have struggled to keep track of the changes. Robin Wheeler, who started heading up Twitter’s ads sales business under Musk after the former chief Sarah Personette resigned, left the company last week. Bloomberg reported that Wheeler was fired by Musk after refusing to sack more people in the ad sales team. Twitter and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

To the team and my clients….you were always my first and only priority. 🫡

— Robin Wheeler  (@robinw) November 19, 2022

Musk’s own use of Twitter — including reposting conspiracy theories and interacting with controversial accounts — has also unnerved brands who fear their content being placed next to toxic posts.

The self-described “free speech absolutist” has further irked advertisers when he relaunched Twitter’s premium subscription service, Twitter Blue, as its “blue tick” feature was abused by impersonators, targeting politicians and brands such as Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin. He initially paused the rollout of the service until there is a “high confidence of stopping impersonation”, saying on Friday that he would aim to launch it the following Friday.

Last week, Musk also began to reverse certain permanent bans of high-profile figures, such as former US president Donald Trump, despite previously pledging not to do so until he had convened a content moderation council of experts.

When asked on Tuesday why he reversed the bans without setting up the council as promised, Musk said “a large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition”. He added: “They broke the deal.” Several left-leaning groups have been pressuring brands to pull their spending.

The shake-up appears to have had a knock-on effect on Twitter’s advertising technology. Gabby Krite, head of digital operations at The Kite Factory, which used to spend “hundreds of thousands” of dollars per year on the platform, said she was experiencing technical difficulties in placing or changing advertising campaigns. “Tech issues on campaign management . . . mean it’s completely unreliable as a platform to use,” she said.

Analysis by left-leaning non-profit Media Matters suggested 50 of the top 100 advertisers — accounting for $750mn in advertising in 2022 — had paused or announced their intention to pause spending since Musk took the helm, and a further seven had reduced spending to a trickle. Those 50 advertisers accounted for $317mn of Twitter’s $5bn in revenues in 2021, Media Matters said.

Agencies too have put out directives. In mid-November, Omnicom Media Group recommended clients pause spending on the platform, according to three people familiar with the move, following a similar recommendation from Interpublic. Last week WPP’s GroupM raised their assessment of the risk of advertising on the platform to “high risk”, two people familiar with the situation said.

Omnicom declined to comment. Interpublic and GroupM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It is unclear if and when brands will return. “It’s hard to have criteria [for returning to the platform] when Musk manages by tweet and something changes on the platform every day that causes advertisers concern,” said an executive at another advertising agency.

“Musk’s best chance of bringing advertisers back to Twitter is to appoint a new CEO,” said Darren Savage, chief strategy officer at Tribal Worldwide. “Particularly, one who understands what Twitter is, has the credibility with advertisers, and users — and is then left alone to do their job.”

Sunday, November 27, 2022

The content moderation battle is a failure of innovation by Anil Dash

anildash.com

The content moderation battle is a failure of innovation

Anil Dash

5 - 6 minutes

The content moderation battle is a failure of innovation

Photo by Skye Studios / Unsplash

If a company is debating whether a user's account should be suspended, they've already failed to build a modern platform that follows best practices. Why are today's billionaires competing for control of tech that’s broken by design?

It’s unusual to see the most powerful people in tech all bickering about who can control bad, broken technology. But that’s what’s happening on Twitter and elsewhere as we’re seeing people assert that’s there’s a debate over content moderation or free speech.

That’s not true, of course. We're not currently seeing a debate about "free speech". What we're actually witnessing is just a debate about who controls the norms of a social network, and who gets free promotion from that network. The only reason that big names like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are able to distort the conversation so badly is because today's major social networks are incapable of building a state of the art social platform online. It’s an especially egregious since we now have decades of examples of how to do so successfully.

An innovative social platform would be distinct from today's platforms in many significant ways:

A platform can anticipate and preemptively prevent the most common harmful and toxic behaviors online, cutting off the path to those actions metastasizing into their worst forms, such as organized systemic harassment.

A platform can use all available signals to judge who should have promotion and privileges on the platform, including giving more access and amplification to those who have shown a consistent history of positively engaging with others. And those who misbehave on the platform would be managed with a community management strategy that's informed by the principles of restorative justice, incentivizing good behaviors while also taking into account a person's history of community contributions on other platforms as well.

A platform can offer a clear and explicit understanding of how its business model affects behaviors on the platform, including when the economic model of the community encourages the company to overlook, or even amplify, destructive behaviors. By shifting to clearer methods of monetization, and de-emphasizing coercive or extractive models like surveillance-based advertising, an innovative platform can align the needs of the business with what's best for users and for the internet at large.

A platform can have an honest and publicly-articulated set of standards for content, including drawing the important distinction between what's possible to share and what gets amplified, promoted, sponsored or subsidized by that platform. Understanding the importance of defaults (including default settings in apps) can mean that the most people get the best experience the majority of the time, and also reroutes the disingenuous and dishonest gaming of the refs that constitutes most of contemporary discussions about moderation policy.

A platform can make informed and intelligent tradeoffs about scaling vs. community health. Understanding that growth-at-all-costs tends to enable the worst dynamics online, and increases the odds that the platform will find itself overseeing users in a political, cultural, or social context that they're not equipped to manage well. By planning for controlled, managed, understandable growth, a platform can radically increase the likelihood of its users and community being a net positive for the internet.

A platform can be part of a more competitive market that's well-regulated, interoperable, and accountable to policy makers and the public. In this way, the failings of any one network or community don't have to be the problem of the entire internet or media ecosystem.

There are many more examples of ways social platforms can be better run, of course. But the key point here is simple: The tech tycoons who accept the current design of social networks, and simply want to buy control over those systems, are propping up a failed approach.

At a technical level, we can imagine many architectural or systemic changes that might improve this state of affairs. But fundamentally, the problem is not one of technology — it's about tech culture not seeing social innovation as being as important as technical innovation. You can use well-established, thoroughly-tested existing technologies and build a modern, high-performance, healthy and responsible large-scale community online. Many have done so, for years.

But no amount of money, no amount of new technology, and no amount of PR hype will solve the problems of today's major social networks, especially not at the behest of billionaires whose biggest complaint about the big tech platforms is simply that they're not the ones in control of them.

Saturday, November 26, 2022

Morning Digest: Democrats win control of Orange County, a GOP bastion, for first time since 1970s

m.dailykos.com

Morning Digest: Democrats win control of Orange County, a GOP bastion, for first time since 1970s

by Daily Kos Electionsfor Daily Kos ElectionsDaily Kos Staff

19 - 24 minutes

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Daniel Donner, and Cara Zelaya, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

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Leading Off

● Orange County, CA Board of Supervisors: Orange County Democrats learned Thursday that they'd won their first majority on the Board of Supervisors since 1976 in this longtime conservative bastion when Republican state Sen. Pat Bates conceded to Democratic incumbent Katrina Foley. Foley's 51-49 win for a four-year term gives Democrats a 3-2 majority on a body where they didn't have a single member just a few years ago, though party leaders aren't entirely happy with how this year's contests played out.

That's because Supervisor Doug Chaffee, who has often sided with his GOP colleagues over Foley, held on 55-45 against the candidate backed by the county Democratic Party, Buena Park Mayor Sunny Park. "He becomes almost like Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court," political science professor Jodi Balma said of Chaffee, who was already characterized as a moderate when he took office four years ago as the only Democrat on the Board. Balma added, "You're going to have two sides, and Chafee is the kingmaker of where the county goes."

Things were less acrimonious in the all-Democratic race for District 2, which is the first majority-Latino Board seat in county history and was open because Foley ran in the new District 5. Santa Ana Mayor Vicente Sarmiento leads Garden Grove Councilwoman Kim Bernice Nguyen 51.6-48.4 with most of the ballots counted; Sarmiento had the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Foley, and the county party, while Kim had the backing of prominent progressive Rep. Katie Porter, the sheriff deputies union, and GOP Supervisor Andrew Do. Do and fellow Republican, Don Wagner, both won four-year terms in 2020 and thus weren't up this time.

Foley, who flipped a GOP-held seat in a 2021 special, ran for the new District 5 to succeed termed-out Republican Supervisor Lisa Bartlett, who lost the June top-two primary to challenge Democratic Rep. Mike Levin in the 49th Congressional District. This coastal seat, according to data from Dave's Redistricting App, backed Biden 52-46, but Foley only represented about 30% of the new district. She also very much looked like the underdog after she took just 42% of the vote in the June nonpartisan primary as Bates and two other Republicans grabbed the balance.

The Democrat, though, put together what she called "a coalition of unlikely allies," including the well funded deputies union. The Orange County Register also says Foley's supporters included "organizations representing the county's deputy sheriffs and public defenders, representatives of business and environmental groups, and health care workers' unions as well as hospital administrators." It was enough to give her party control of the local government in a large and increasingly diverse county that never voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in all the time between FDR's 1936 landslide and Hillary Clinton's 2016 countywide win.

Republicans held a monopoly on the Board of Supervisors for much of this long period, though Democrats briefly enjoyed a resurgence during the Nixon era. The change began in 1968 when Robert Battin, whom a local historian would later say "had a much more liberal agenda than anything they had ever seen in Orange County," became the first Democrat to hold a seat since the Great Depression.

Four years later, Battin's party undertook what the Los Angeles Times characterizes as "a concerted effort to break a Republican monopoly on county politics." It worked: While the Yorba Linda-born Nixon carried the county 68-27 during his 49-state landslide, two more Democrats joined Battin to take a majority in a county already known nationally as a conservative stronghold.

However, the party was soon beset by a major scandal involving Democratic power player Louis Cella, a hospital developer who was ultimately convicted of tax evasion and Medicare fraud. Several other prominent local Democrats found themselves in hot water as well including Battin, who was found guilty of using his county staff on his failed 1974 run for lieutenant governor; Battin, who spent 30 days in prison, always affirmed his innocence and called the county district attorney the "chief soldier of the Orange County Republican Mafia." Republicans retook their majority in 1976, and they wouldn't relinquish it until 2022.

Democrats still maintained a presence on the Board for another 10 years, but the GOP held all five seats after the 1986 elections. Democrats would win exactly one supervisor contest over the following three decades when Lou Correa was elected in 2004, but he left just two years later after being elected to the state Senate. Correa tried to return in a 2015 special but lost to Do by 43 votes; Correa the following year won the state's 46th Congressional District, which he still holds. Team Blue regained a spot in 2018 after Chaffee pulled off a tight victory, and he'll likely be the most powerful member of the new Democratic majority.

Georgia Runoff

● GA-Sen: Republican Herschel Walker launched a transphobic ad against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock during an airing of “Sunday Night Football," the night after five patrons were murdered and many others were wounded at an LGBTQ bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Walker’s spot features him sitting next to Riley Gaines, a collegiate swimmer who misgenders trans competitor Lia Thomas by telling the audience, “My senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male … a man won the swimming title that belonged to a woman, and Sen. Warnock voted to let it happen.” Gaines starred in similar commercials earlier this year against Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat who overcame her state’s red hue to win re-election this month.

Walker and his allies at the Senate Leadership Fund are also each airing commercials claiming that Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock serves as pastor, evicted low-income tenants from its apartments. Warnock’s campaign has said that a private company, rather than Ebenezer’s church foundation, manages the apartments, and further insists “that there have been no evictions at the property and that Reverend Warnock has nothing to do with its day-to-day operations.”

Warnock, meanwhile, is running his own commercial featuring the return of an old friend from 2020, Alvin the beagle. As the senator walks Alvin he says of his opponent, “You’d think Herschel Walker would want to explain what he’d do in the Senate if he actually wants to represent Georgia. Instead, he repeats the same lies, trying to distract from what we all know is true about him.” Warnock, just like he did two years ago, throws a small plastic baggie of unmistakable provenance into the trash after predicting that Georgians “will see his ads for what they are,” a statement his co-star barks in agreement to before licking the senator’s face.

A different Warnock ad features the Democrat talking about the importance of character and how important it is to do “the right thing simply because it’s the right thing, and doing it over and over again.” This spot doesn’t mention Walker and his many scandals.

Uncalled Races

● AZ-AG: Garrett Archer, a data analyst for local news station ABC15, reported on Monday afternoon that all ballots statewide had finally been tallied, leaving Democrat Kris Mayes with a 510-vote lead over Republican Abraham Hamadeh in the race for Arizona attorney general. With more than 2.5 million votes cast, Mayes' margin amounts to just 0.02%—well inside the 0.5% that triggers a mandatory recount.

Such a recount won't take place until after Dec. 5, when results are certified. But despite the very close race, a recount is not likely to change the final outcome since, as election law expert Quinn Yeargain points out, county officials have already conducted hand-counted audits and found only minimal discrepancies.

Arizona has only ever held one recount in a statewide general election in its history, and it was a very long time ago. In 1916, not long after Arizona entered the union, Democratic Gov. George Hunt appeared to lose his bid for a second term by just 30 votes to Republican Thomas Campbell, who went on to serve as governor for almost a full year until the state Supreme Court ruled that Hunt had in fact won by 43 votes and reinstated him. Arizona was far, far smaller, then, however, as just 56,000 votes were cast in that race.

If Mayes' victory stands up, she'll help make history in another way, too. Axios' Jeremy Duda notes that this will be the first time since 1978 that Arizona Democrats have simultaneously held the offices of governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. This year, all three positions were open, and since the governorship and the attorney general's post were held by Republicans, Democratic victories in both of those races represent red-to-blue flips.

Election Calls

● CA-22: Incumbent David Valadao has turned back Democratic Assemblyman Rudy Salas 52-48 with almost all of the vote counted; Biden took this Central Valley seat 55-42, but Team Blue often struggles with midterm turnout in this region. Valadao and Washington Rep. Dan Newhouse are the only House Republicans who will be going back to Congress after voting to impeach Trump in 2021.

● CA-34: Rep. Jimmy Gomez has won a tight rematch against his fellow Democrat, David Kim, 51-49 with most of the vote counted. Gomez two years ago fended off Kim, a former prosecutor who had not generated much attention, only 53-47, and the incumbent was determined not to get surprised for 2022. While Kim once again campaigned as an ardent progressive in this safely blue seat in downtown Los Angeles, Gomez sent out mailers declaring the challenger was running "with QAnon-MAGA support."

Gomez' campaign argued this attack is fair because Kim in 2020 received the backing of Republican Joanne Wright, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who failed to advance out of that top-two primary. The congressman's team said that Wright's beliefs were already public back then, while Kim declared that Gomez was misleadingly making it sound like he's gotten support from QAnon acolytes for 2022.

● CO-03: Democrat Adam Frisch said Friday that he was conceding to far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert even though an automatic recount will still take place next month after their shockingly close contest. Frisch explained, "Colorado elections are rock solid and if historical precedent of recounts in the state holds, it is unlikely to change more than a handful of votes … So rather than continue with a narrative that the recount could alter the fact that we came up 554 votes short, we are choosing to move forward with honesty & humility."

Frisch told The Pueblo Chieftain afterwards that he wasn't ruling out seeking a rematch in 2024 after his 50.1-49.9 defeat in a western Colorado seat Trump took 53-45 two years before.

● IA Auditor: State Auditor Rob Sand will be the one Democrat left in statewide office now that Republican Todd Halbur has conceded. Sand outpaced Halbur 50.1-48.9, and while the Republican initially announced he'd seek a recount, he said Friday he "lacks the resources and manpower" to pursue it. Halbur made it very clear he blamed the state party, declaring, "This leaves me with no other option than to abandon this recount effort just as the State GOP organization has abandoned my campaign."

Sand's 2,900-vote victory leaves him as Iowa's most prominent Democratic elected official after this month's midterms. Republicans won close races against a pair of 10-term incumbents, Attorney General Tom Miller and Treasurer Michael Fitzgerald, while Zach Nunn's victory against Rep. Cindy Axne means that Iowa will send an all-GOP delegation to both chambers of Congress for the first time since the 1950s.

● Alameda County, CA District Attorney: Civil rights attorney Pamela Price, a progressive who initially trailed for days after election night, has defeated prosecutor Terry Wiley 53-47 in the officially nonpartisan race to succeed Wiley's boss and ally, retiring incumbent Nancy O'Malley. Price, who ran as a criminal justice reformer, will be the first Black person to serve as top prosecutor for this large Bay Area county, which is home to Oakland and Berkeley.

Senate

● AZ-Sen: Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego said last week of a potential primary campaign against incumbent Kyrsten Sinema, "I'm answering that in 2023. We're still in 2022."

● CA-Sen: Rep. Adam Schiff has confirmed that he's interested in running for the Senate should his fellow Democrat, 89-year-old incumbent Dianne Feinstein, retire.

● ME-Sen: The Bangor Daily News says that Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, will announce sometime next month if he'll seek a third term.

● TX-Sen: Republican incumbent Ted Cruz confirmed that he'd seek a third term in 2024, though he didn't rule out campaigning for president at the same time.

Cruz would be able to simultaneously seek both posts thanks to the machinations of none other than Lyndon Johnson, who convinced the state legislature in 1959 to pass what was nicknamed the "LBJ Law" ahead of the majority leader's planned White House campaign. Johnson was indeed on the ballot the following year for Senate and on the national party ticket, though only as John F. Kennedy's running mate.

Governors

● LA-Gov: Republican Bill Cassidy said Friday that he would remain in the Senate rather than enter next year's all-party primary for governor. His colleague, Sen. John Kennedy, recently expressed interest in his own campaign, and a Cassidy-Kennedy matchup may have marked the first time in American history that two sitting U.S. senators ran against each other for governor.

Another prospective GOP candidate, state Sen. Sharon Hewitt, said last week, "I think we'll probably be in a position to make a decision in January."

● MO-Gov: The GOP firm Remington Research Group has conducted a very hypothetical poll of the 2024 GOP primary for governor on behalf of the political tipsheet Missouri Scout that finds Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft beating Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe 44-10, with state Sen. Bill Eigel at 4%.

Kehoe himself announced all the way back in March of 2021 that he'd be running to succeed his boss and fellow Republican, termed-out Gov. Mike Parson. Ashcroft, for his part, has been talked about for years as a likely contender, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said last week that he's "planning a run." The secretary of state is the son of John Ashcroft, a former governor and senator who was George W. Bush's first attorney general.

Eigel, for his part, said in September that he was forming an exploratory committee. The Missouri Scout's Dave Drebes identified the state senator as an "ultra-conservative" who is "not well known outside political circles."

House

● NC-13: Republican Bo Hines has submitted FEC paperwork for a potential 2024 bid less than two weeks after his 51-49 loss to Democrat Wiley Nickel, though these super-early filings from defeated candidates often have more to do with resolving financial matters from their last campaign than they do about the future.

Indeed, while some observers treated a similar filing from Colorado Democrat Adam Frisch's last week as a sign that he's planning a rematch against far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert, Frisch himself said he'd taken this step so that he could raise money ahead of an automatic recount. The Democrat went on to concede a short time later (see our CO-03 item), which he acknowledged makes his new campaign paperwork "moot" for now.

Hines, unlike Frisch, knew his fate on election night, and also unlike Frisch, he hasn't spoken publicly about his intentions. (Frisch, by contrast, hasn't ruled out a second go-round. You always want to hear it from the proverbial horse's mouth whenever you can.) But recounts aren't the only reasons why candidates might file again with the FEC.

Back in the spring of 2019, for instance, former Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder filed for what his team immediately confirmed would not be a rematch against the Democrat who had just defeated him a few months earlier, Rep. Sharice Davids. Instead, a consultant explained that the FEC flagged a recent refund from the landlord Yoder used for his last campaign, requiring the ex-congressman to nominally declare his candidacy for 2020 in order to properly accept that reimbursement.

Of course, Hines may be filing to run in 2024 because he actually wants to run in 2024, especially now that North Carolina Republicans have the power to re-implement the gerrymanders they've already made clear are coming. That's because, while the state Supreme Court's previous Democratic majority instituted a congressional map for just the 2022 cycle, the GOP's new 5-2 majority on the bench can greenlight whatever boundaries the Republican legislature devises for the rest of the decade. (State law does not give Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper a veto in most redistricting matters.)

Still, observers need to be careful when seeing new FEC filings before concluding that someone is preparing a bid. This holds true both for defeated candidates and victorious incumbents who want the option to fundraise for the future whether or not they've decided to undergo another campaign. And as we're reminded every cycle, some politicians—including some who are not in either position—will file with the FEC only to decide later on not to run after all.

● WV-02: State Treasurer Riley Moore, who hails from one of the most prominent Republican families in the state, announced Monday that he'd run to succeed Rep. Alex Mooney, a fellow Republican who is giving up this safely red seat in order to challenge Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. Moore is the grandson of the late Gov. Arch Moore, while his aunt is Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. The younger Moore, for his part, lost re-election to the state House in 2018 but rebounded two years later by unseating longtime Democratic Treasurer John Perdue 56-44.

Moore is the first notable Republican to kick off a bid for what, thanks to Mooney's early Senate kickoff last week, is currently the only House race in all of America where the incumbent has already said they won't be running for re-election in 2024; Illinois Rep. Chuy Garcia is campaigning in next year's race for mayor of Chicago, but he'd be able to turn around and seek another term in the House should it fail. West Virginia's 2nd District, which is based in the eastern and northern portions of the state, backed Trump 68-31.

There are numerous other Mountain State Republicans who could join in, though another statewide elected official is sending mixed signals about his interest. Attorney General Patrick Morrissey, who lost to Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in 2018, quickly responded to Mooney's launch by saying he was eyeing the 2nd District in addition to a rematch with Manchin, a bid for governor, and re-election. Morrissey again said days later he was "seriously evaluating a run for the U.S. Senate and governor," but this time, he didn't mention the House as a possibility.

Legislatures

● VA State Senate: Virginia Democrats quickly settled on a nominee in the upcoming special election for the vacant 7th District, selecting Virginia Beach Councilman Aaron Rouse at a party gathering late last week. A second Democratic hopeful, former state Del. Cheryl Turpin, apparently failed to file proper paperwork, leaving Rouse as the party's only candidate. He'll face Republican Kevin Adams, a Navy veteran and first-time office-seeker who was likewise the only GOP contender to emerge.

The special election will take plan on Jan. 10 to fill the seat previously held by Republican Jen Kiggans, who defeated Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria in the 2nd Congressional District earlier this month. The race is being held under the old lines for the 7th District, which Biden won 54-44 but Republican Glenn Youngkin carried 52-48 in the governor's race in 2021. If Democrats prevail, they'd expand their narrow 21-19 majority in the Senate to a wider 22-18 advantage. Both Rouse and Adams have also announced plans to run again next year in the new 22nd District, the considerably bluer successor to the 7th.

Mayors

● Chicago, IL Mayor: Alderman Raymond Lopez announced Monday that he was ending his campaign against Mayor Lori Lightfoot and would instead seek re-election to the Chicago City Council.