The gift of Ye by Rod Graham

www.editorialboard.com

The gift of Ye

Rod Graham

7 - 8 minutes

One of the easily understood and fun activities in a sociology class is the “breaching experiment.” The purpose of the breaching experiment, introduced by late sociologist Harold Garfinkel, is to illustrate the taken-for-granted informal rules that we live by in our daily lives. 

Imagine this: 

You go into a store that gives free samples. There is no sign anywhere saying that samples are one per customer. Indeed, you see customers take a sample and come back a few minutes later to grab another. So you decide to stand there and eat all the samples. You may even talk with the server as you wait patiently for them to replace the ones you’ve just eaten.  

What would happen in that scenario? 

    He’s an internationally known, independently wealthy megastar who is now spewing antisemitic rhetoric in public spaces. Whether public utterances are because he’s going through mental health issues is up for debate. Of interest here is his breaches and what his behavior means for others. 

You’d get the side-eye by customers – even the same customers you just saw come back for seconds! You’d might be asked to stop eating samples, to which you could mention there’s no sign saying one per person. At some point, a manager would be called. You’d be asked to leave the store.  

Why all the fuss? Who gives a damn about some free samples that are probably just overstocked items the store wants to move anyway. 

Because you breached an unwritten rule governing how we interact. It feels wrong to the people who witness it. The task is to figure out what’s been breached, usually by getting people to explain why the breach feels wrong. 

Kanye West, hereafter “Ye,” is a walking breaching experiment. 

He’s an internationally known, independently wealthy megastar who is now spewing antisemitic rhetoric in public spaces. Whether public utterances are because he’s going through mental health issues is up for debate. Of interest here is his breaches and what his behavior means for others. 

Ye has given us a gift. the Right frequently attacks progressives for their willingness to label many phrases and symbols as hate speech. Here is Ye doing something that, for people on the left and right, feels wrong.

If it hurts me and mine

The rapper tweeted recently a photo of a swastika inside the Star of David. The tweet was deleted, and Elon Musk – the new owner of Twitter – suspended Ye’s account. The suspension was not by way of a formal process of report and review but done ad-hoc. Musk simply chose to suspend the account. Musk said Ye “violated our rule against incitement to violence.” 

So much about this did not make sense to me, initially.

For one thing, hate speech has gone up since Musk’s takeover. What makes this tweet worthy of Musk’s ordering Ye’s account suspended? What line did this tweet cross that other forms of hate speech do not? Are other images of a swastika inside the Star of David deleted from Twitter? I’d say no, as there are many copies of Ye’s tweet still on the platform. 

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More puzzling is a comment Musk made on Twitter Spaces about his decision: “I personally wanted to punch Kanye, so that was definitely inciting me to violence. That’s not cool.” Um, wait a minute!

I thought the whole “incitement to violence” justification was because the antisemitic violence was aimed at Jewish people – not Elon Musk.

It gets more confusing when we consider Musk’s handling of an equally polarizing figure, though much less famous, James Lindsay. 

Lindsay popularized the phrase “OK groomer.” Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter deemed it hate speech. It links being queer to pedophilia. Lindsay’s continued use led to him being permanently banned. Musk reinstated Lindsay’s account, and Lindsay promptly continued using the phrase. 

This is free speech now, I guess. 

The only answer I can come to is that Musk sees hate speech not through the lens of a vulnerable group possibly being attacked because of the speech. Instead, he sees hate speech through a lens of personal grievance. 

If the speech hurts him or someone he cares about, it’s hate speech. If the speech is directed elsewhere, no matter how vulnerable, it’s free speech. 

Will I lose votes?

Recently Donald Trump invited Ye, along with nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to his Mar-a-Lago estate for a pre-Thanksgiving meal. 

The meeting was ripped by Republican darling and likely next Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The meeting was “not merely unacceptable, it’s just wrong,” said Netanyahu recently on “Meet the Press.”. 

Some members of the GOP spoke out. “There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy,” said Mitch McConnell. “Anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, is highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”

Few would disagree, but my next thought was not be how dining with someone spewing hate speech impacts a person’s career advancement. That would be farther down the line after thinking about what the dinner means for the group that the speech effects. You know, actual Jews.

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For Republican lawmakers, hate speech is more about what a condemnation means politically than what it means for a vulnerable group. The “credit” of disavowing hate speech must be balanced alongside the “debit” of cozying up to the GOP’s most popular VIP or not alienating similarly minded voters.

PBS asked 57 GOP lawmakers if they condemn the dinner. The response was far from universal, with a surprising number either not responding or performing some type of political calculation. Consider this grammatically incorrect but illustrative response from Senator John Thune: “Well, that’s just a bad idea on every level. I don’t know who is — who’s advising him on his staff, but I hope that whoever that person was got fired.”

The right’s understanding

The gift of Ye, if we can call it that, is showing us ways in which the right understands hate speech and the calculation that goes into condemning it. 

Ye put antisemitism out in the open, forcing people to put their down dog whistles and to stop with the obfuscatory deliberations on what free speech means for democracy. They had to make a choice in context.   

Ye as breach experiment shows the right seeing hate speech through an individual, egocentric lens. That’s a subversion of what hate speech should be about: recognizing the link between words and violence and the need to protect vulnerable minorities by placing boundaries on that speech. 

That is not how the right sees it. 

For many people on the right, the decision of condemning hate speech begins and ends with their own personal interests. 

What I learned co-founding Vox

What I learned co-founding Vox

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 12 minutes

What I learned co-founding Vox

Talent is scarce, training is hard, and the competition is smarter than you want them to be

I mentioned recently to former Book Club guest Brad DeLong that I needed some fresh ideas, and he suggested writing about what I learned from my time co-founding and working at Vox.com.

To revisit that period of my life is to revisit a time when I learned an enormous amount about myself, business, friendship, and everything else, so much so that I can hardly conceptualize it. I’ve approached the subject with trepidation that anything I try to say will spiral into a sprawling epic the length of Moby Dick. But it’s a subject that’s been rattling around my head for a long time, and I recently gained some clarity when I mentioned offhandedly to a younger journalist that I thought I’d failed with Vox and she was surprised because Vox is still there, running articles and putting out podcasts and employing lots of people. And while I don’t love every Vox article, they are producing a lot of great stuff like Rachel Cohen on abortion rights referenda and education in the midterms and Li Zhou breaking down the actual content of the congressional marriage equality bill.

Quitting a good job that I liked at Slate to launch a new website was a ton of hard work and a huge pain in the ass! I only did it because I had insanely high ambitions, and I think Ezra and Melissa felt the same way — the current state of the site is a failure only relative to these ambitions.

Ezra ended up as a New York Times columnist with a popular podcast, obviously at the top of the game. But before Vox he ran a popular section at The Washington Post, and achieving his current stature probably didn’t require the detour into running Vox. The point of launching Vox was to accomplish something bigger than adding one more website into the mix. We thought we had ideas around explainers and different ways of thinking about journalism that could genuinely disrupt and dominate, changing the way journalism works. That didn’t happen.

The folks who run Vox Media, Jim Bankoff and Pam Wasserstein, are smarter about business than I’ll ever be, and they have what I think is a reasonable plan to build a large-scale digital media portfolio, of which Vox is just one part. I assume most people who read Polygon don’t think of it as closely aligned with The Cut. And while I can see that The Ringer, while not part of Vox Media, uses Chorus to power its website and Concert to serve its web ads, this is so inside baseball that I’m not sure most people who work there even know.

So when I say that I think that we failed, I’m not dumping on the current Vox management team or editorial staff, who are doing a good job executing a reasonable strategy — it’s just not the strategy we set off with. There’s no innovative editorial project along the lines of our long-abandoned cardstacks. They don’t really do explainers anymore. You’d be hard-pressed to describe what differentiates a Vox article from an Atlantic article or a Slate article or an article on any other quality website. As I wrote in “The Regrettable Death of the Slatepitch,” there has been an incredible flattening of the content landscape, and Vox has become part of that flattening rather than an alternative to it.

This post is my effort to unpack how we fell short of those aspirations.

Hiring is hard, training is harder

One of the things that a lot of us old-time blogger types are good at is writing a lot of words across a broad range of subjects. And those are complementary skills: writing a lot is easier when you can veer across subjects, and veering across subjects is easier when you can execute stories relatively quickly. This was not an important aspect of the analog journalism skillset because editorial staffers had to fight to obtain precious column inches. In digital, the space is limitless, so it’s generally good to do more.

And our vision for Vox really revolved around embracing this aspect of digital more fully than existing publications — we wanted to cover a wide range of topics with more depth and more speed, taking advantage of digital tools but also the timelessness of the web. The founding group included a tight-knit group of very talented digital journalists who all knew each other, were familiar with each other’s work, and were basically on the same page in terms of what we wanted the site to be. And we thought this was scalable — that it would be relatively easy to hire a lot more people and train them based on this vision and our methods.

This was basically wrong.

We did launch right out the gate with some fantastic high-volume writers and video visionaries, and over time Vox has continued to add amazing people, including since I left. But I would say that at least on the text side (video may be different), there was never a point at which a change in investor sentiment that allowed us to double or triple the pace of hiring would have let us easily fill those slots with more great folks. There were people ready and willing to do high-quality, fast-paced analytical journalism across a range of policy areas at the same level as the original group that came over from the Post, but it was a modest number, and many of them already had good jobs at other publications and were hard to poach. Training people who didn’t have the knack for it right off the bat was just massively more difficult than I expected — it turned out we didn’t have any “secret sauce” methodology we could reliably impart to new journalists to make them do work that was Ezra-esque.

When someone is really new and raw, there’s plenty a more experienced person can do to help improve their work. And everyone benefits from good editing and the feedback of other smart people. But just as after 20 years in this industry and plenty of opportunity to work with great editors, I’m still no good at writing narrative features, there was no simple trick to help people develop into the type of journalists we needed if they just didn’t have the instinct for it.

After an initial spurt of enthusiasm for investment and expansion, things pretty quickly pivoted to caution. And while that was disappointing on some level, I think it was clearly the right call. There just wasn’t any amount of money that would have made it possible to rapidly achieve the kind of scale we’d hoped for.

Programming the platforms

The other gaping conceptual problem is that while I believe there was and is an audience for the kind of broad explanatory journalism we wanted to do, there weren’t customers for it. Journalists like to think of our audience as the customers, and one thing I love about Slow Boring is that here that really is true.

But Vox’s readers weren’t customers; Vox was an ad sales business.

And Vox didn’t have the kind of tightly wound sales-audience relationship that you see with a niche product like Playbook or Axios, in part because our aspiration was to create a disruptive mass-market product. There’s another world in which Vox never launches, and Wonkblog at The Washington Post is built out into a somewhat more robust version of itself, a policy-oriented alternative to those kinds of politics-first D.C. publications. But that wasn’t what Ezra wanted to do — the whole point of leaving the Post was to not just do incremental expansion of Wonkblog.

In practice though, it turns out that to get a really big web audience, you need broad distribution from Facebook and Google. In Vox’s early years, Facebook was a dominant source of traffic. Thanks to changes at both companies, the balance shifted heavily in favor of Google by my final years there.

In both cases, to an extent that meant bending to the editorial vision of a different company. To serve the needs of advertisers, you needed to serve the needs of the platforms, and that meant we just weren’t masters of our destiny. Whatever the merits or flaws of the cardstack idea, it never had a chance because it didn’t work with Facebook on a technical level. And people to this day underrate the influence of these companies on the structural properties of the content you consume. Everyone complains about having to read through a few hundred words before getting to the recipe you wanted. But that was because Google gave priority to recipe pages that were structured like real articles. Then there was a time when the big news organizations were structuring lots of stuff as live blogs because Google was giving priority to live blogs.

There’s no sense in blaming the platforms for the problems this engendered. The underlying issue is that the web advertising audience has so little economic value that the customers demand a gargantuan scale. On video and audio, the audience is more valuable on a per-person basis (or at least has been so far), and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the best manifestations of Vox were often in video and podcast form. You can serve the audience well when the audience is valuable.

But this platform dependence made product innovation essentially impossible. It was also editorially constraining. I think it’s very under-appreciated by people in the technology industry that most of the media trends they deplore are direct consequences of Facebook’s influence over journalism in the mid-2010s. The huge shift in media sensibility that happened during this time was absolutely not what editors and senior figures in the industry wanted to see. Even in retrospect I don’t really understand why this was the case, but objectively speaking, hard-core identity politics and simplistic socialism performed incredibly well on Facebook during this period. That doesn’t mean journalists started pretending to be left-wing to get clicks. But people who had some authentic left-wing opinions found that writing on the subjects where they were the most left tended to generate the most traffic, and early career journalists with authentic leftist views outperformed their colleagues. So you ended up with this whole cohort of discourse structured around “Is Bernie Sanders perfect in every way or is it problematic to vote for a white man?” as the only possible lens for examining American politics and society.

The triumph of the New York Times

The dream of executing a low-end disruption on the incumbent news media was also undermined by the fact that the New York Times just refused to be disrupted.

Part of my vision for disrupting the New York Times was a belief that they’d find it beneath their dignity to write webby headlines or to copy gimmicky explainer article formats, but their digital transformation project was very smart and forceful, and they just did it even though some people at the Times didn’t want to.

We also kind of hoped that by not respecting the line between news and editorial, we’d create a situation where our staff was considered unhireable by prestige news outlets. After Max Fisher wrote a smoking hot take like 2015’s “Israel's dark future: Democracy in the Jewish state is doomed,” surely he’d be appropriate for op-ed work only. But they not only hired him and Amanda Taub away from Vox, but they also had the vision to create a whole new editorial product — the Interpreter — for the two of them to write, blurring the editorial/opinion line in just the way that Vox articles did. And once Max and Amanda left, I think it was clear to everyone that “get a good job offer from the New York Times” was a great capstone to a successful career at Vox. They hired Sarah Kliff and Brad Plumer. They hired our wonderful behind-the-scene editor Eleanor Barkhorn. They hired Jim Tankersley and Jane Coaston. And ultimately, they hired Ezra.

Because the New York Times is imperfect and because the New York Times is also the most important journalism institution in the world, people are constantly mad at them about one thing or another (me, too!) which tends to distract attention from how damn smart they’ve been.

But the Times has an editorial strategy that works at a large scale, even though there aren’t 100 Ezra Kleins in the world. They bundle and integrate different forms of excellence from across the journalistic landscape. Choire Sicha, who pioneered a very different kind of digital journalism, was an influential editor at the Times and Ben Smith who ran Buzzfeed had a brief but spectacular run there as a media reporter. The best conservative columnist in America — not just one who writes things liberal NYT readers agree with, but one who succeeds in writing things that are genuinely hard to dismiss and make them squirm — works for the New York Times. They have enough scale to have a substantial brand advertising revenue stream, but it’s a subscription-based business that generates a lot of revenue from readers. Indeed, the fact that their readers are paid subscribers only serves to increase the audience’s value to advertisers — it’s proof that New York Times readers actually care about and value the New York Times.

It seems silly to say that combining paid subscriptions with advertising is a genius business idea since it’s how basically every daily newspaper worked. But pulling it off in the digital space wasn’t easy, it wasn’t obvious there was a path to success there, and making it work has involved a lot of editorial flexibility and smarts.

What did we learn here?

The biggest lesson I took away from all of this is that launching and running a business is hard.

It’s hard primarily because it stacks a bunch of different medium-difficulty problems on top of each other — you need a product that people want but also a revenue strategy that supports it, and you also need to be good at recruiting and retaining good people. You need some good luck, but part of that is having a lot of situational awareness about how the world is changing so you can “make your own luck” rather than just hoping things will break a particular way. You can have a good idea and a great team (which is what we had), and it still doesn’t really work because there’s so much more to it than that.

One of my most neoliberal shill beliefs is that journalists and academics and intellectuals tend to underestimate businesspeople because they underestimate how difficult this stuff all is. And I think that leads to errors of political judgment.

Now to be clear, an appreciation for the intelligence and savvy of businesspeople doesn’t mean you need to genuflect before them or do everything they want in politics. A business executive being extremely smart and savvy is consistent with him pushing for tax and regulatory favors that are good for him personally but bad for society, and the right response is to say “no.” But I think you see every time a successful business person gets involved in a public controversy, the instinct on the left often isn’t a firm, respectful, “no, that idea doesn’t serve the public interest,” it’s to denigrate the person’s competence or intelligence and suggest that we ought to take the rich guys down a peg. I don’t think that’s right analytically. And I also don’t think it’s reflective of how more economically egalitarian societies function. The distribution of material resources in Denmark is much more equal than in the United States, but the executives of leading Danish business enterprises are still a really big deal in Danish society and their opinions carry weight.

At the same time, I wish everyone who’s critical of “the media” (i.e., everyone) would take more seriously the fact that media enterprises are businesses, and they are subject to commercial forces and pressures.

That’s not to excuse bad articles, which absolutely run, but it is to say that if your model of decision making doesn’t foreground the basic business model issues, you’re misjudging the situation.

How the GOP’s Plutocracy Works With Its Authoritarianism / Chait

How the GOP’s Plutocracy Works With Its Authoritarianism

Nov. 5, 2022

By Jonathan Chait

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

There is a myth that the Trump-era Republican Party has grown hostile to business and accumulated wealth. Several things have contributed to this confusion. Educational polarization has driven more college-educated voters to the Democrats, and more non-college-educated voters to the Republicans, resulting in Democrats winning greater support from affluent voters. Trump ran in 2016 as a critic of Republican dogma on taxes and health care, though he reverted to partisan form once in office. And the left and right alike have emphasized the GOP’s “populist” cast, for different reasons. The left has used Trump’s alleged populism to indict Democrats for their neoliberalism and timidity, while the right has utilized the theme to depict Democrats as elitists.

More recently, Republicans like Ron DeSantis have openly threatened corporations, contributing to the idea that they represent some philosophical break with its tradition of business regulation and low taxes for the rich.

There has been a change in the relationship between business and the GOP. But the change has little to do with policy. Republicans have come to feel threatened by the (still occasional) impulses by corporate America to endorse socially liberal or small-d democratic ideas: condemning racism, shunning members of Congress who refused to accept Trump’s election defeat, opposing restrictions on voting rights, and so on. The party’s response is to demand political allegiance in exchange for policy support. The policies themselves have not been revised.

I’ve seen a few news stories over the last few days that illuminate this relationship. One is a report in Axios that Kevin McCarthy has told U.S. Chamber of Commerce board members that “the organization must undertake a complete leadership change and replace current president and CEO Suzanne Clark.” This is occurring even though the Chamber is working to put Republicans in control of the House. McCarthy’s demand is that the Chamber go beyond mere support for his party and actually let Republicans run the operation from the inside.

“I’m a pro-business guy. I thought y’all used to represent small businesses across America,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise said. “Unfortunately, they’ve kind of veered away from that. We’re trying to try to get them to come back to their roots.”

A second story is a Politico report on Ron DeSantis’s fundraising operation. The Florida governor has amassed a staggering $200 million war chest, Hoovering up cash from wealthy Republicans across the country. This is one reason why I take DeSantis’s chances of defeating Donald Trump in the 2024 primary more seriously than most: He has unified the party’s donor class behind him like no candidate has since George W. Bush in the 2000 cycle.

Political reporting, as per its custom, presents this story in glowing terms — raising money is a marker of success and momentum. But it is also a sign that DeSantis is thoroughly aligned with the policy priorities of the party’s wealthy donors. Those fundraisers are venues for the candidate to privately convey his worldview and policy commitments, and to give the donors a privileged opportunity to make their case to him. We can be pretty confident that DeSantis is not using these transactions to tell his patrons that he’s bringing down the elites.

A final story is a Washington Post profile of Art Laffer, one of the most influential policy entrepreneurs in world history. Laffer played a key role in inventing supply-side economics, the doctrine that posits that upper-bracket tax rates have fantastically large effects on economic growth, to the point where cutting rates under existing conditions can be expected to actually increase revenue. Laffer’s most remarkable achievement is creating a kind of theological rubric to promote this idea even as world events have disproven it for more than 40 decades.

The Republican Establishment greeted Donald Trump’s rise with varying degrees of discomfort. But Laffer and the supply-siders embraced him wholeheartedly from the beginning and have never wavered. The Post asked Laffer if even the January 6 insurrection gave him pause. “I really don’t have enough information to make any type of judgments on that,” Laffer replied. On what? asked the Post. “Whether he stole the election, all this controversy, this brouhaha going on. And I don’t really find it interesting enough for me to want to delve into it.”

It would be far too reductive to suggest that the Republican Party’s authoritarian turn is driven by its plutocratic economic policy. But its opposition to redistribution is certainly one of the motivating forces. The idea that the right’s authoritarianism is “populist,” and somehow anti-plutocratic, is the opposite of reality. The two strands work closely together.

The legal case against Harvard’s affirmative-action policies creates an embarrassing problem for progressives: The policies entail systemic discrimination against Asian American applicants, who are treated systematically worse than members of any other group, including whites. The policy exposes a deeply uncomfortable fissure between the political themes preferred by the left, which treat people of color as a bloc with common interests, and a reality of an educational system in which Asian Americans outperform every other group on the aggregate.

There is a fascinating effort to resolve this tension. Columbia sociologist Jennifer Lee argues in the New York Times that, contrary to research finding that Asian American students perform better than other groups because their parents require them to put in more effort, their success is actually the product of favorable treatment by teachers. “K-12 teachers and schools may actually give Asian Americans a boost based on assumptions about race,” she argues. It is only fair colleges discriminate against Asian Americans in order to correct for the discrimination in their favor: “Race-conscious policies provide a mechanism to address this and other biases, and help level the field of opportunity for a diverse student body.”

The mechanism of this pro–Asian American bias, according to Lee, is that the stereotype of Asian American success causes teachers to assume Asian American students are bright and therefore place them in honors and Advanced Placement courses. This favorable treatment putatively gives Asian American students an advantage over whites or other groups.

I am not a sociologist, and I am not in any position to assess the validity of this finding. But I am extremely skeptical that it comes anywhere close to explaining Asian American overachievement, and I would be very surprised if this finding holds up over time.

First, this analysis fails to explain where the positive stereotype came from. It’s not like white Americans always considered Asian people to be smarter than them. Leading up to and in the opening stages of World War II, the United States and Britain consistently underestimated Japan’s military because they held racist assumptions that the Japanese were too dumb and backward to carry out sophisticated military operations. The idea that white Americans suddenly decided Asian people were not dumber but smarter, and then created an unequal environment that permitted Asian Americans to thrive, seems highly fanciful.

Second, if it is true that positive stereotypes are causing Asian American students to thrive, this finding would seem to have extremely important ramifications for American education policy. After all, the claim is that schools can yield enormous achievement gains merely by raising the standards and expectations of their students. It suggests they have found the academic Holy Grail. If people took this seriously, they would be looking to replicate the magic for other groups. Instead, this research is being used primarily for the single purpose of justifying discrimination against Asian American college applicants.

Despite my qualms, I support affirmative action. I sympathize with the agonizing position faced by supporters grappling with its trade-offs, including making Asian Americans bear a disproportionate share of the burden. The left’s impulse has been to deny this facet of the program, insisting discrimination against Asian Americans is a myth. The Harvard lawsuit has exposed the plain truth.

The temptation now will be to retreat to the defense outline by Lee: Okay, discrimination against Asian Americans is real, but it’s fair because it only offsets discrimination in their favor. The only people who are going to accept this logic are people absolutely desperate to avoid acknowledging a fissure in the progressive line. Most are going to find it an insult to our intelligence. Whatever position liberals find ourselves retreating to after the Supreme Court likely deals a fatal blow to affirmative action in admissions, it can’t be this.

Russia is an issue where the ideological spectrum is not so much a horseshoe as a closed loop where the left and right extremes are completely indistinguishable. David Bromwich, a left-wing literature professor, writes about Russia in the Nation, long a clearinghouse for the most credulous strains of Russophilic commentary.

Bromwich repeats the familiar claims about the war — Russia was provoked by the west, Ukraine is nationalistic and corrupt — before launching into a qualified defense of Putin’s regime. Bromwich considers it offensively wrong to describe Russia as “totalitarian”:

Do the people who call “Putin’s Russia” a totalitarian state affix any answerable meaning to the word “totalitarian”? Russia indeed has a heavy-handed authoritarian government whose censorship and obstruction of dissent have greatly increased since the start of the war. Even so, there have been protests inside Russia; the crowds have not been fired on, and most of the persons involved have not been arrested.

“Most of the persons involved have not been arrested” is a phrase that invites certain obvious questions, though Bromwich does not explore them. I would agree that the regime is not “totalitarian.” Its combination of media control, fantastical nationalism, genocidal rhetoric, war crimes, and terrorizing of critics with violence seems at least arguably fascist.

But Bromwich implies that Russia cannot be fascist, because it fought the Nazis in World War II:

Some 21 million Soviet citizens were killed in World War II, and — though we find the fact hard to acknowledge — the Soviet Union itself was responsible, more than any other country, for the victory over fascism. The journalists and professors who have called Russia a fascist country are playing a poisonous game with words.

This is Putin’s own justification — fascism by definition excludes Russian nationalists and therefore describes anybody they oppose. Poisonous word games, indeed!

Is the Supreme Court turning the Constitution into a homicide pact?

The Hill

Steven Lubet, Opinion Contributor — Read time: 4 minutes

by Steven Lubet, Opinion Contributor - 11/30/22 8:00 AM ET

It looks as though there will be no end to the fallout from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen holding that gun control regulations are “presumptively” unconstitutional unless they are sufficiently “analogous” to a 19th century law. The Court’s requirement of a close historical comparator has turned out to be almost impossible to satisfy, causing lower courts to invalidate or question otherwise reasonable laws prohibiting the obliteration of guns’ serial numbers and firearm possession by convicted felons or domestic abusers.

Most recently, a judge held that the absence of a “historical tradition of sufficiently analogous regulations” limited New York’s ability to restrict bringing concealed weapons onto others’ private property.

Meanwhile, mass shootings have continued at an alarming rate, occurring almost twice daily since the announcement of the Bruen decision, at homes, businesses, schools, shopping centers, parties, bars and night clubs, street corners, hospitals and a Fourth of July parade, often with legally obtained firearms, including semi-automatic rifles.

It did not have to be that way. In 2008, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an “individual right” to possess firearms. Two years later, the Court made it clear that the right to “keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense” is applicable to the states as well as the federal government.

Those decisions still left the scope of the Second Amendment right to be determined. In other circumstances, even fundamental constitutional rights may be subject to valid limitations when the government can currently demonstrate a sufficiently “compelling interest” to survive “strict scrutiny.”

A similar approach to the Second Amendment would have allowed lower courts to at least consider the value of existing firearms laws in relation to the constraints they impose on gun owners. But even that modest evaluation has been foreclosed by the Supreme Court’s command, as one judge put it, “that a gun regulation’s constitutionality hinge solely on the historical inquiry [as the] only consideration.”

The Court’s embrace of an exclusively historical method of constitutional review represented an ideological triumph for Justice Thomas, who had been pushing for it in a series of dissenting opinions for years. In one solo dissent, for example, Thomas argued that judicial bias in a death penalty case should have been determined according to the “historical treatment of judicial disqualification” as it stood in 1768, under which “a judge was disqualified for direct pecuniary interest and for nothing else.”

The Court’s majority fortunately rejected Thomas’s extreme position, applying contemporary due process principles to hold that “there is an impermissible risk of actual bias when a judge earlier had significant, personal involvement as a prosecutor in a critical decision regarding the defendant’s case.”

In another solo dissent, Thomas claimed that minors have no First Amendment right to “access speech” because “historical evidence shows that the founding generation believed parents had absolute authority over their minor children.” In support, he cited a series of sermons and child-rearing guides dating from 1646 to 1790, some of which admonished parents to “suppress their children’s natural depravity,” while others urged only “close monitoring and carefully planned development.”

From these sources, Thomas, alone among the justices, concluded that the First Amendment conferred no rights on children in 1791 and therefore continues to exclude them today.

Determining the “practices and beliefs of the founding generation” from 18th century child-rearing guides, however, makes as little sense as drawing conclusions about modern American eating habits from self-help diet and nutrition books. In both cases, the purpose of the books has been to improve behavior, not document it. If anything, the hectoring of parents by ministers and other authors suggests that young people in the late 18th century had access to more reading material than the most rigid disciplinarians deemed wise.

Thomas has ultimately succeeded at a long game, but his victory comes at a severe cost. Under Bruen’s holding, a gun regulation must be invalidated unless a court can locate “a well-established and representative historical analogue” dating to the 19th century. Reasoning from a silent record is perverse. The absence of an historical counterpart does not mean that a particular firearm limitation would have been considered unconstitutional by the framers, but only that they found it unnecessary, if they thought of it at all.

One judge has already ruled that domestic abusers cannot be prohibited from gun possession because there were no such laws in an age when domestic battery was regarded as an unprosecutable family matter. And high-capacity magazines were unknown, and would have been thought impossible, in the era of muzzle-loading muskets.

There is no logical, sensible or moral reason to confine today’s gun laws to the provisions favored by 19th century property owners, other than a dogmatic commitment to so-called originalism, no matter how much carnage follows. In 1949, Justice Robert Jackson famously cautioned, “there is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” Justice Thomas has at last assembled a majority that now appears bent on turning the Second Amendment into a homicide pact.

Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the author of “The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerrilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship” and many other books.

Americans Love to Hate Their Politics

www.bloomberg.com

Americans Love to Hate Their Politics

David A. Hopkins

5 - 6 minutes

In the 2018 midterm elections, 50% of eligible US citizens turned out to vote. Because Americans are always less inclined to show up at the polls in years when the presidency isn’t on the ballot, half of the nation feeling sufficiently motivated to vote was a remarkable event. Heading into this year, the question among political scientists and other analysts was whether the 2018 surge would prove to be a one-time spike or reflect a more enduring change in citizen behavior.

Now the votes are nearly all in, even in the habitually slow-counting states of California and Arizona, and we have an answer: According to data collected by Michael P. McDonald of the University of Florida, an estimated 47% of eligible voters cast ballots in 2022. And the questions are what explains this change, and what it means.

First, the history. That 47% is a slight decrease from 2018, but it’s still notable. Aside from 2018, according to McDonald's data, turnout has not reached 50% in any midterm contest in the 100 years since women were granted the right to vote in 1920. In fact, except for 2018, turnout hasn’t been as strong in a midterm election since 1970 — just before the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. The turnout rate was even higher in states with traditions of robust civic engagement or especially competitive races this year, reaching 55% in Pennsylvania, 59% in Michigan, 60% in Wisconsin, and 61% in Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon.

The record turnout of 2018 was explained at the time as one of many unique consequences of Donald Trump’s election. Trump wasn’t the only recent president who provoked angry citizens to build a national movement to defeat his partisan allies in a congressional midterm election; the anti-Trump “Resistance” resembled similar countermobilizations during the presidencies of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. But Trump’s distinctive ability to galvanize his supporters — even in an election in which he wasn’t on the ballot — appeared to produce high turnout among his own party as well, allowing Republicans to gain seats in the Senate even as they lost control of the House.

It made sense to view the voting boom in 2018 as a logical response to the ascent of a president who dominated the political world like no other figure in memory, producing unusually strong emotional responses among adherents and detractors alike. But that explanation just makes the continued surge in 2022 more puzzling.

President Joe Biden not only fails to stimulate the unprecedented personal fascination that Trump inspired on both sides, but he also lacks even the symbolic or charismatic importance of other immediate predecessors such as Obama, Bush and Clinton. Biden hasn’t attracted a visible legion of passionate devotees, nor has he inspired his opponents to form a successor to the Tea Party movement.

In other words, what drove Americans to the polls last month probably wasn’t Joe Biden.

A likelier explanation is that we have entered an age in which politics has become an unusually focal element of American life. Even after Trump’s departure from office, political issues and conflicts have remained central topics of national interest and discussion. And as the perpetual competition for office between Democrats and Republicans becomes increasingly associated with wider national debates over the direction of American culture and the status of American democracy, the perceived stakes of even non-presidential elections seem to be on the rise.

When turnout rates started to decline in the 1980s and 1990s, concerned observers often argued that this mass withdrawal from politics reflected popular distrust of government and disillusionment with politics. But participation levels have rebounded in the last few elections without a corresponding improvement in Americans' views of government. Instead, the increased sharpening of party differences has convinced more and more citizens that they should really care which side gains political power. Even in the increasing number of states and districts where there isn’t much competition, Americans still increasingly feel motivated to express themselves by heading to the polls.

That is the silver lining, if there is one, of today’s bitter, culturally charged partisan warfare: It has made civic engagement more meaningful for millions of citizens, proving that — for all its other problems — polarization can be the antidote to political apathy.

Anti-Dutch Mailbag

www.slowboring.com

Anti-Dutch Mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

24 - 30 minutes

Folks, the Netherlands is in many ways a hard country to hate. But this weekend it is our patriotic duty as Americans to hate the Dutch. No more going Dutch. No Dutch ovens. No double-Dutch jump rope. I saw a big display of gouda cheese at our local Whole Foods and felt ashamed on behalf of the whole neighborhood. It’s a time for moral clarity.

Edward: Could you share a little insight into how you choose which questions to answer or not answer?

No.

Eli: I don’t know how much of this has been tongue-in-cheek on your part, but some things you’ve tweeted suggest you think healthy friendships between men look different from healthy friendships between women, or at least can function without the kinds of deep conversations and airing of emotions that many people see as essential to a friendship. That hasn’t been my experience – my friendships with men and my friendships with women look pretty similar, and I noticed your tweet from today in particular because over Thanksgiving I met up with multiple male friends primarily to talk. We talked about life events, careers, relationships, and politics. I know I’m atypical in having more close friendships than the average US man, but is there a reason to believe my friendships with men aren’t typical intermale friendships? Do you believe that men in fact are less into getting together and chatting than women, and if so do you believe that contemporary anxiety over male loneliness is overstated, and if so why?

I know this has become a contentious subject in recent years, but my slightly banal opinion is that men and women are different, on average, in some pretty important ways, while at the same time there are lots of exceptions and zones of overlap.

One of those differences is that relative to women, men prefer to center their interactions around some kind of (perhaps pretextual) activity. I could get into elaborate, somewhat speculative theories about why this is, but it seems to me to be pretty well-established that this difference exists, even though there are also obviously exceptions. Something that is less well-established but I think is interesting is that I suspect gender difference in friendship styles interacts with the huge technological advances in home entertainment in a way that is probably bad for men. If your style of friendship is organized around the idea that you explicitly need to directly converse with each other about personal matters, then it’s just going to be obvious on its face that streaming video home alone is not a viable substitute. And cheaper communication technology means it’s easier and more convenient than ever to keep up a running dialogue via text or to do a phone call or video chat.

But if your friendships are more activity-based, then the fact that the relative quality of alone-at-home activities is rising compared to going-out activities is going to significantly disrupt your friendships.

John from VA: You've written a lot about popularism, but you also advocate for some unpopular policies because you think they're good ideas. How do you decide which policies to try and persuade people on and which to throw up your hands and say, "It is what voters say it is"? Obviously, we all have opinions about what really matters, but what's your framework for drawing that line, if there is one?

I feel like I get some version of this question every week so I’m going to keep trying to explain myself better. It might be easiest to look at Maggie Hassan, who just crushed it in her reelection campaign, as a good example of what I mean. She won in part because of a weak opponent, but in part because of tons of ads like this one touting her fiscal responsibility and status as “the most bipartisan senator.” I’m told this ad in particular — highlighting her work on prescription drug prices and surprise billing, but also her bipartisanship and willingness to stand up to President Biden — was extremely effective at persuasion, given that it aired so late in the campaign when persuasion is hard.

The thing about this is that Hassan, with all due respect, is an extremely generic Democratic Party senator. But what she has presented here is a fully accurate, if highly edited, version of herself that is designed to appeal to cross-pressured voters. This idea is so boring that I can’t believe there is a raging, years-long internet controversy about it. But let’s be clear, that’s what Hassan is doing — she’s not firing up the base, she’s not trying to inspire a hypothetical constituency of leftist young people, she’s not promising big structural change, and she’s not engaging in viral cultural war content. And it works really well. I would like to see Democrats bring more of this energy into their communications strategy and earned media rather than just ads. And to acknowledge that while this works really well in New Hampshire, if you want a Senate majority, you need to be competitive in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Iowa, which are more conservative than New Hampshire. And that’s probably going to mean putting more meat on the moderate bones than Hassan did. But the basic formula of “publicly emphasize your most popular stuff, quietly do your most important stuff, and acknowledge there are tradeoffs” applies everywhere and carries the critical implication that activists and advocates should not engage in pressure campaigns aimed at forcing candidates to publicly avow controversial stances.

Estate of Bob Saget: Favorite and least favorite airport?

I’m an airport enthusiast, so I can’t just narrow this down to one simple favorite since there are so many dimensions of airport excellence.

For example, DFW is really well-optimized to make transfers. Especially if you’ve flown through it more than once, you understand how it works, and you understand how to get where you’re going. They’re able to manage a very large volume of flights on tight schedules. It’s impressive and it works well compared to the chaotic layouts of IAH or O’Hare. At the same time (and in part for the same reason), it totally lacks character and is a kind of weird, unpleasant place. Now, for most people on a connecting flight, the goal ideally is to not be spending a ton of time waiting in the airport and DFW is fit for purpose there. But if you do have a long connection, then the incomprehensibility of O’Hare isn’t a big problem and the fact that it has great food options is a big plus. I’ve had genuinely good times waiting for flights in Chicago.

Internationally, the airport I’ve been to that’s always praised is Changi in Singapore, which I agree is excellent. But my sleeper choice is Copenhagen, which has a lot of classic Nordic architecture and design, great ground transportation links to the city, and a weirdly large number of upscale luxury stores that make you wonder if a lot of people are making spur-of-the-moment Hermes purchases at the airport. Plus lots of Legos!

Walker: Do you think LBJ is underrated as a President? The vast majority of the American welfare and regulatory state is tied to legislation that LBJ passed as President.

What makes this so tricky is that I don’t really have a clear sense of to what degree we should attribute either the successes of the Great Society or the failures of the Vietnam War to Johnson relative to a replacement-rate president. The sort of great Boomer Kennedy Mythos is built around the idea that Vietnam was an eccentric Johnson mistake, while the Great Society was just continuity with JFK or baseline Democratic Party stuff.

I’m not sure that’s right. But for a long time it was paired with a conservative view that the Great Society was some huge mistake, which truly left LBJ friendless. I think looking back you can say the biggest and most important Great Society programs (Medicare and Medicaid) were clearly successful, and while there were flaws in some of the smaller programs, ultimately we have done much more to build on the LBJ foundation than to roll it back. An interesting thing about historical memory is that while basically nobody these days would defend the Roosevelt administration’s internment policy or find his silence on anti-lynching legislation acceptable, a lot of people are also very willing to yadda yadda past it and evaluate him primarily in light of his domestic policy returns. Johnson in a curious way arrived in our memory pre-cancelled as the Vietnam Guy when I really think it’s a pretty comparable situation — a very serious policy error that mostly amounted to going along with the prevailing politics of the era when the prevailing politics were just badly wrong.

Dave Coffin: Is there any political appetite for actual compromise gun control legislation? E.G. something like a federal license for semi automatics that includes universal background checks and a red flag provision in exchange for CCW reciprocity and removing suppressors and short-barreled rifles from the NFA. Or do all roads of gun control end at confiscation for the foreseeable future? It really seems like the gun control states and cities should be looking to deal on the stuff that is obviously on the SCOTUS chopping block anyways.

Compromise seems like the wrong frame for thinking about this because it assumes that Republicans are facing some pressure to compromise when they just aren’t. The relevant issue is more like “given elite Republicans’ sincerely held empirical beliefs and values, can you convince them that there’s anything good to do regarding guns?”

The big thing I think liberals don’t get is that we are really talking across a conceptual void about the normative status of non-criminals amassing firearms. To liberals, that’s something you might grudgingly accept as non-harmful. But conservatives see it the way most Americans see alcohol. People mostly think it would be bad if you couldn’t enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, meet friends for a drink at the bar, or enjoy a restaurant meal cross-subsidized by high-margin alcoholic beverages. They feel Qatar not allowing beer sales at World Cup matches is very eccentric and meaningfully detracts from the fan experience. People obviously don’t deny that drunkenness also causes a lot of problems, but they see tremendous positive good associated with recreational consumption of alcohol, and in addition to whatever specific qualms they have about specific anti-booze policies, they would view any intervention by people who don’t share their booze-is-good values as inherently suspect. By the same token, gun owners view basically anything Democrats could possibly say about guns as inherently non-credible and a manifestation of what they (accurately!) see as Democrats’ fundamental belief that the positive good theory of household gun ownership is insane.

So for something to happen, I think it either needs to be led by Republicans or else Democrats need to learn to do a much better job of pretending to believe in the positive good theory. I notice that Mitt Romney and other LDS politicians do not seek out every heart-wrenching story of an innocent person killed by a drunk driver and then tweet about the high cost of widely available alcohol.

To the extent that there’s something progressive politicians in progressive jurisdictions can do, I think it’s to push for much more aggressive policing efforts to deter illegal gun carrying. But note this means not just seizing the guns, but punishing the gun carriers — in other words, it’s tough on crime politics, not gun control.

Sam Taylor: Do you have any hot takes on Singapore? The reason I ask is it takes hugely idiosyncratic approaches to a broad range of issues, making it ripe for hot takes. Some examples of its uniqueness

    Personalised retirement accounts rather than pensions (CPF)

    Mass government subsidised housing (HDB)

    Multiracialism not Multiculturalism (where racial groups are homogenised and given explicit rights)

    Successful state capitalism in Temasek and GIC

    Use of exchange rates to manage inflation not interest rates

Taking these out of order, I think (5) is actually not idiosyncratic but pretty typical of small countries. In a lot of ways, I think monetary policy is much more intuitive when you think about small countries, where it operates primarily through an exchange rate mechanism. In terms of Temasek, I keep meaning to do a post about sovereign wealth funds, which I think are underrated. On (1) and (2), you have an incredible success story that I just don’t think has any real application to the United States. On independence, Singapore started out as a very capital-poor country that also did not seem like a very attractive destination for global investment. A big part of its success as a developmental state was promoting high levels of domestic savings and channeling that savings into domestic capital investment. A risk for a lot of small countries is even if you get a burst of good economic news, that gets plowed into a short-term consumption boom and/or people moving their newfound wealth into offshore investments. Singapore did an amazing job of averting that, it’s just not actually a problem that we face.

Singapore’s racial policies are interesting. Americans tend to lack comparative perspective on racial or ethnic issues. We’re of course familiar with the fact that various forms of straightforwardly repressive or discriminatory regimes exist around the world. But people typically don’t realize the sheer range of ideas about what equality might look like. Singapore leans much harder than the United States on reifying race as a formal legal concept where you have to make an official statutory declaration of your racial identity and then you’re allowed to change it once (but only once!) and your selection has a lot of formal consequences. That’s almost like a gesture toward the idea of doing “separate but equal” except they then have a lot of mandatory integration — there’s no such thing as a stigmatized Malay or Indian ghetto. But it also means that every neighborhood is majority-Chinese. In the U.S. of course we would never mandate neighborhood-level ethnic composition, but our official discourse never confronts the question of what we think the ideal is — would it actually be desirable to eliminate all ethnic enclave neighborhoods in the name of integration?

Sheridan: In light of the FTX collapse, do you think that regulators should try to regulate & work with the crypto industry more, or continue to largely ignore & shun it?

I’ve always had mixed feelings about this because it’s a little hard to say what the goal of crypto regulation would be. The whole crypto regulation conversation leapt very quickly into debating specific positions (CFTC vs. SEC, etc.) without a moment to talk about the principles we are trying to enact.

But that’s important. There’s plenty of scope for disagreeing about how the stock market should be regulated, but that comes within a sphere of broad consensus that it’s useful to the economy for companies to be able to stage IPOs, which in turn means it’s useful to have broad and deep markets in which to trade shares of stock. We then face questions about what kind of rules of the game will set the stage for successful stock markets over the long run — we want markets that safeguard the interests of middle-class investors, that are attractive to global capital, and that suit the needs of established businesses, but that are also friendly to newcomers, etc. By the same token, there is a lot of gambling and speculation on commodity markets, but the existence of commodity markets both helps commodity users manage their risk and helps incentivize producers to scale production to meet demand.

But what is the purpose of cryptocurrency regulations? What are we trying to accomplish? I’m not sure.

Nilo: What do you like about the District that makes you prefer it to New York City?

Three virtues of D.C. that don’t detract from the things the Big Apple stans like about NYC:

    D.C. is smaller — it’s easy to get from my house to any neighborhood in the city, and it’s also easy to leave the city and go apple picking or whatever. New York is a logistical nightmare.

    I personally enjoy the fact that D.C. is full of federal employees and people who work in policy-adjacent fields — I am constantly learning interesting things from the people I meet.

    The D.C. area has a high median income, which is great for economic opportunity, but there are more billionaires living just in Manhattan than there are in all of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia combined, and that relative paucity of super-rich people is nice. 

Now the flip side is that New York’s combination of scale, diversity, and extreme wealth means it contains the largest number of pockets of true excellence across a huge range of categories. I just don’t find that in my day-to-day life I’m especially bothered by the fact that I don’t have access to better soup dumplings, better live theater, or a wider range of art galleries. Like most middle-aged parents, I’m more constrained by time/exhaustion/logistics than by the objective presence or absence of interesting things to do. I also of course enjoy the Magnetic Fields song “Washington, D.C.”

David Margolis: The DC Auditor just released a report that says Dept of General Services is not using its Salesforce platform properly (or at all). Consequently DCPS principals have no idea if their repair requests are being handled. Tweet here from DCist:

Yet another example of poor governance in progressive cities. This could just be more fodder for a riff that you and Ezra are both good at. But I’m struck by the extent of the management problems across the city agencies in DC - and their imperviousness to modern public management techniques. Do you think the Bloomberg / KPIs for everything model is universally applicable or is the problem somewhat spiritual? Would a greater sense of civic connectedness inspire a worker to care more about uploading a real photo of completed work instead of a stock photo — and how can we cultivate that sense in a world of tight budgets and partisanship?

I’m glad to see this story out in the open because from what I’ve heard from a few people involved in the school system, the state of this maintenance stuff is genuinely awful.

Ducking the big-picture question here, I think the main issue the DGS situation poses is that it’s good to think more seriously about when it makes sense to have functions in-house versus when it makes sense to outsource because you see errors in both directions. An issue that recurs in transit construction cost inquiries is that American transit agencies have zero in-house capacity to plan and manage projects so they’re left depending on consultants. It’s hard to build effective public sector institutions, but when it comes to a function like planning and executing a subway, there’s basically no alternative.

By contrast, you look at Tyler Elementary School’s broken air conditioners and pest control problems and there is absolutely a way to address these issues without building a highly effective Department of General Services — you’d just pay a private company to fix the HVAC. There is a robust private market in providing these kinds of services, and while it’s certainly possible that a centralized public agency could do better, if you don’t happen to have an excellent public agency on hand you could just contract out and focus on achieving excellence in areas that are more inherently public.

Chris: If you went back to the Medieval age and had to advise political leaders on how to rule, what insights from a millennium of philosophy, political science, and economics would you impart to them? Assume their goal is to build a strong and prosperous country, but also to retain their own power.

I think this would be a very frustrating experience. Like I’d be sitting there, aware that it is possible to boil water and use the steam to power an engine, but I actually have no idea how to build a steam engine. And I could tell you a lot of great facts about the geography of the world, but I’m pretty sure you need a sextant in order to sail across the ocean in an efficient way, and I don’t know how to build one.

What could I actually pull off with my actual level of knowledge? I’m not really sure, except at the margin to urge the ruler to be more positive about manufacturing, commerce, and finance as various decisions came to light. My extremely amateur impression is that all that stuff was broadly considered low-status and disreputable compared to tilling the land and fighting on horseback. But even without any incredible feats of innovation, a medieval country could raise its income by encouraging investment in mills and being friendly to commerce and trade.

Vince A: Is the biggest obstacle to a female presidential candidate the media? I get the sense that female candidates (Democrats especially) get the Al Gore treatment every time. Tons of “likeability” stories and focus on gaffes. Very little positive coverage and much swallowing of GOP attack points.

OTOH, is there a pattern of overperformance among female Democrats with a strong element of lower-middle class markers in their public persona? Perolta, Davids, Klobuchar, Baldwin and Gluesenkamp Perez all seem to support this. Gluesenkamp Perez filmed campaign ads in her auto repair shop and pulled off the biggest upset of the cycle.

I don’t think there is any clear evidence of a systematic electoral penalty for women. Now before people get too mad, I want to distinguish a couple of other claims:

    All candidates get criticized, and women candidates in particular face criticism that is sexist or misogynistic in nature.

    Candidates are evaluated through a gendered lens.

Both of those things can be (and in fact are) true without it being the case that women systematically face an electoral penalty. It’s all a question of who you run and how. And here I think the problem for Democrats is that a certain kind of white-collar professional woman has a good amount of clout in Democratic Party politics and the specific women who these women are most enthusiastic about are not necessarily the most broadly appealing women in politics. Barack Obama is Black, but he has a very white-friendly political persona. Pete Buttigieg is gay, but he has a very straight-friendly political persona. The most successful women in politics probably won’t be the ones whose personas are most appealing to college-educated feminists — it’s going to be, as you said, women with a bit more of a working-class vibe.

Jason S: Considering how impotent modern medicine still is, isn’t it wild how the world cannot come together to spend an order of magnitude more on medical treatment and research? Mortality and morbidity are our common enemy. We shouldn’t need malevolent aliens to bring us together.

I wouldn’t say that modern medicine is “impotent,” but I agree that medical research is underrated.

The note I would add is this isn’t just a question of money, it’s a question of medical ethics, which has a pretty dubious anti-research bias. I really recommend Alan Wertheimer’s book on this.

Matt Hagy: Do you have take on the looming railroad strike and Biden calling on Congress to avert that by passing a bill to require the unions to accept the tentative contract?

I don’t have a super-hot take on this other than the observation that the unions themselves deprioritized sick leave over wages in their bargaining, which is one reason they ended up with a contract that doesn’t have sick leave. If you leave that context out, you’ll misunderstand the situation. When Vox workers unionized and bargained for their first contract, they chose to prioritize a generous parental leave program, which is how they ended up getting one. They probably could have gotten a slightly better deal in terms of health benefits if they’d been willing to accept less on parental leave, but what the union wanted was a strong parental leave program, so that’s what they got. The rail unions like the sick leave as a talking point, but did not prioritize it in practice in bargaining — they did get a 25 percent raise, though, which is not nothing.

Patrick Bringley: You mentioned somewhere that writing and publishing your last book was emotionally trying. What was it that threw you for a loop? Any advice for someone whose first book publishes in February? My expectations change by the hour, so I’m working on ignoring them…

I wish I had advice but I mostly just have a lament. You work so hard on a book! And then it’s out in the world and … not that big a deal to most people.

Cameron Parker: There was a Darrel Owens tweet you recently responded to about how the internet made people stupid. Doesn’t seem to me like the modal person is dumber and also doesn’t seem like the people on the fringes are either. Has anyone gotten dumber from the internet, or are they just wrong more, or neither?

I think the idea that people are stupider or worse-informed than they used to be is really underbaked. In the past, educational attainment was lower, it was dramatically harder to look things up, and the general quality of prestige media was much worse — read newspaper articles about policy debates from the 1990s and they’re just awful.

What I do think is true is that the internet, and especially Twitter, has a perverse way of amplifying dumb ideas relative to normal ones. Like if someone were to tweet tomorrow “I’ll almost certainly vote for whoever Republicans nominate in 2024 because I generally agree with the GOP preference for lower taxes and tighter restrictions on abortion,” that take would sink like a stone. But if someone were to say “I’ll almost certainly vote for the 2024 GOP nominee because that’s the only way to stop the mass child abuse cult that’s taken over the Democratic Party,” that would generate tremendous discourse. The issue here isn’t that people are dumber, but that we pay more attention to the most inflammatory things that are said on any given day.

Is the Supreme Court turning the Constitution into a homicide pact?

thehill.com

The Hill

Steven Lubet, Opinion Contributor

6 - 7 minutes

It looks as though there will be no end to the fallout from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen holding that gun control regulations are “presumptively” unconstitutional unless they are sufficiently “analogous” to a 19th century law. The Court’s requirement of a close historical comparator has turned out to be almost impossible to satisfy, causing lower courts to invalidate or question otherwise reasonable laws prohibiting the obliteration of guns’ serial numbers and firearm possession by convicted felons or domestic abusers.

Most recently, a judge held that the absence of a “historical tradition of sufficiently analogous regulations” limited New York’s ability to restrict bringing concealed weapons onto others’ private property.

Meanwhile, mass shootings have continued at an alarming rate, occurring almost twice daily since the announcement of the Bruen decision, at homes, businesses, schools, shopping centers, parties, bars and night clubs, street corners, hospitals and a Fourth of July parade, often with legally obtained firearms, including semi-automatic rifles.

It did not have to be that way. In 2008, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an “individual right” to possess firearms. Two years later, the Court made it clear that the right to “keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense” is applicable to the states as well as the federal government.

Those decisions still left the scope of the Second Amendment right to be determined. In other circumstances, even fundamental constitutional rights may be subject to valid limitations when the government can currently demonstrate a sufficiently “compelling interest” to survive “strict scrutiny.”

A similar approach to the Second Amendment would have allowed lower courts to at least consider the value of existing firearms laws in relation to the constraints they impose on gun owners. But even that modest evaluation has been foreclosed by the Supreme Court’s command, as one judge put it, “that a gun regulation’s constitutionality hinge solely on the historical inquiry [as the] only consideration.”

The Court’s embrace of an exclusively historical method of constitutional review represented an ideological triumph for Justice Thomas, who had been pushing for it in a series of dissenting opinions for years. In one solo dissent, for example, Thomas argued that judicial bias in a death penalty case should have been determined according to the “historical treatment of judicial disqualification” as it stood in 1768, under which “a judge was disqualified for direct pecuniary interest and for nothing else.”

The Court’s majority fortunately rejected Thomas’s extreme position, applying contemporary due process principles to hold that “there is an impermissible risk of actual bias when a judge earlier had significant, personal involvement as a prosecutor in a critical decision regarding the defendant’s case.”

In another solo dissent, Thomas claimed that minors have no First Amendment right to “access speech” because “historical evidence shows that the founding generation believed parents had absolute authority over their minor children.” In support, he cited a series of sermons and child-rearing guides dating from 1646 to 1790, some of which admonished parents to “suppress their children’s natural depravity,” while others urged only “close monitoring and carefully planned development.”

From these sources, Thomas, alone among the justices, concluded that the First Amendment conferred no rights on children in 1791 and therefore continues to exclude them today.

Determining the “practices and beliefs of the founding generation” from 18th century child-rearing guides, however, makes as little sense as drawing conclusions about modern American eating habits from self-help diet and nutrition books. In both cases, the purpose of the books has been to improve behavior, not document it. If anything, the hectoring of parents by ministers and other authors suggests that young people in the late 18th century had access to more reading material than the most rigid disciplinarians deemed wise.

Thomas has ultimately succeeded at a long game, but his victory comes at a severe cost. Under Bruen’s holding, a gun regulation must be invalidated unless a court can locate “a well-established and representative historical analogue” dating to the 19th century. Reasoning from a silent record is perverse. The absence of an historical counterpart does not mean that a particular firearm limitation would have been considered unconstitutional by the framers, but only that they found it unnecessary, if they thought of it at all.

One judge has already ruled that domestic abusers cannot be prohibited from gun possession because there were no such laws in an age when domestic battery was regarded as an unprosecutable family matter. And high-capacity magazines were unknown, and would have been thought impossible, in the era of muzzle-loading muskets.

There is no logical, sensible or moral reason to confine today’s gun laws to the provisions favored by 19th century property owners, other than a dogmatic commitment to so-called originalism, no matter how much carnage follows. In 1949, Justice Robert Jackson famously cautioned, “there is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” Justice Thomas has at last assembled a majority that now appears bent on turning the Second Amendment into a homicide pact.

Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the author of “The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerrilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship” and many other books.