Radio Silence

 I'll be travelling and unlikely to post much.

Enjoy Biden's America.

Is This It For America?

 When I read stories like this, I wonder if we have reached the end of the American democratic experiment, as such. We have a sizable portion of the population that is simply batshit insane, and there is no other way to describe them. They are unmoored from reality.

The thing is, that's nothing new. We have had the Klan running state governments. We have had John Birchers and Branch Davidians and militias before. The bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City is still historically fresh. 

I do wonder if the new interconnectivity of the Internet age has acted as a force multiplier for the craziness. I read an article where someone in Upstate NY was getting death threats from Louisiana, because he had a mask mandate in his business or some nonsense. Basically, someone does something like have a mask mandate, it get picked up by a local crazy person and then it becomes an underground cause celebre in the Fever Swamps. I doubt very much that these Internet Tough Guys ever actually do anything, but I can also see a spiraling set of violent acts that makes it impossible to live with this crazy fuckers any more. 

As the piece above notes, there's a certain fervent craziness in the bluest states. It's there that evangelical, racist white people feel legitimately under threat. I think it dawned on them first that they are no longer a majority in this country. If we do see a descent into violence, how do we separate out the violently insane from the conservative who has simply soaked too long in the nightmarish swamps of Fox, OANN and NewsMax? 

I would frankly love it, at this point, if they all decided to move to the Idaho or Wyoming and declare independence. Good riddance. 

Crime Is The Left's Blindspot

 Yglesias takes on what comes next in the "defund" debate that is largely over. One of his most salient points is a larger point about "Black Lives Matter" that is largely ignored by those who focus on the very real issue of police brutality: the absence of prosecution when it comes to crimes against Black people.

It's too early to tell if the current reversal of violent crime numbers is a glitch or a trend, but it's not too early to think about how to craft better police policy that would address either option. One of the most underrated causes of the conservative resurgence from 1970-1990 were public perceptions about crime.

Here's where the Left - especially the Far Left - loses the thread. If you're a self-styled revolutionary who wants to abolish capitalism, you're blind to the fact that most people work hard to provide as comfortable a life for themselves and their family as they can. They want all of that protected. Any perception that crime is spiking will increase their support for people like Trump who blather on about American Carnage. 

Defund the Police was always a terrible slogan, because it did not say what it seemed to say, which is police abolition - though there were absolutely those who believed in police abolition. All of that got wrapped up in the idea of getting rid of the police, which I believe led to some of Trump's surprise strong showing among Black and Latino men. 

America needs to rethink how we do policing. And we absolutely need a counterweight to police authority. We need an independent panel in the DOJ who can investigate police brutality. District Attorneys are not the right people to do that. 

We also need to create the various entities that reform activists wanted: crisis social workers, community based policing, more body cameras. 

And we will need to pay police more so that we get better police. I'm not sure why that's complicated, but it is. 

Trolling Or Threatening

 When you read these stories, your first thought is how far gone a certain segment of our polity is. While Trump was more symptom than cause of the Rightist Rot in America, he certainly has normalized a sort of violent rhetoric that was largely absent from mainstream politicians.

But I also think that most of these people are cowards and blowhards and do not represent a real threat to the people they are harassing. However, it only takes one person to act on this, and I'm afraid it's just a matter of time before someone gets killed.  Or rather get killed again.

Confusing Inputs and Outputs

 This Matthew Yglesias piece is about how the SAT is an unfortunate scapegoat in a worthy cause. I think it hits on an important point when we discuss structural racism in America. The argument goes that the SAT is racist because Black and Brown students do worse. It strikes that the actual relationship is that the SAT exposes the outputs of structural racism in the US. If that is true, and I think they evidence suggests that it does, then blaming the test itself is exactly the wrong lesson to take if you are trying to end the impact of racism in education. 

The advantages that college educated parents can confer on their children - when it comes to something like the SAT - are legion. Making the jump to be the first person in your family to attend college is a mammoth undertaking. We should be looking at improving those odds. Blaming the test is exactly backwards, but it allows us to say to the world, "Look, we are addressing the racism in the system!" when really, you're simply finding a new way to avoid the actual work.

This Is So Critical

 Biden is trying to undo the evisceration of the professional civil service.

Most people's unpleasant interactions with government come at the state level. So there is a reflexive anti-bureaucrat strain in American culture. But a professional bureaucracy staffed by experts is critically important in a complex modern society. For instance, critics attacked the Biden administration for not reuniting families separated at the border, but that requires a staff of professional, bilingual child welfare workers. If you want real action on climate change, you're going to need climate scientists. 

If Biden can refresh the federal bureaucracy, especially with younger people - decades of antigovernmental rhetoric has left a greying federal workforce - that would constitute a transformative (if largely invisible) moment in our national life.

What's Their Play Here?

 The House very narrowly passed a bill that would beef up Capitol security, because "the Squad" either voted against it (Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar) or abstained (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman). 

I get that they are strong "defund the police" people. I also get that the bill passed anyway. But what are they doing here? The Capitol Police literally saved their lives. Several of them have complained about feeling threatened by the gun-toting idiots in the GOP caucus, like Marjorie Traitor-Greene and Lauren Boebert. Who do they think is protecting them?

It's possible that leadership allowed this symbolic vote, but it just looks like shit if you're trying to paint the GOP as being unified in opposition to common sense measures surrounding January 6th. 

With friends like these...

I'm Dubious

 I believe Donald Trump will actually be indicted, when the indictment is entered and not a moment before. I very much believe he SHOULD be indicted - at the very least for tax fraud - but I'm struggling to see it happen, given the institutional pressures to not indicted a former president, no matter who that shitbag might be.

Crisis Camouflage

 Jon Chait looks at the failure of the GOP to take climate change seriously and therefore the way it imperils policy, because you don't have the usual push-pull that allows for a wider range of options. The only party offering any solutions to climate change is the Democrats and they have some less than optimal ideas, because every solution comes with tradeoffs that hurt a constituency somewhere.

In particular, he notes environmentalist opposition to nuclear power. This has struck me, too. I get that nuclear power can be catastrophic when it goes wrong, and states that prioritize cheap nuclear power are flirting with disaster, as at Chernobyl and Fukushima. However, if you are serious about de-carbonizing, you need fission reactors. Period. Yet, we see Germany taking their reactors off-line. Why?

The fact is that certain segments of any activist group are wedded to their prior assumptions and goals. An example that briefly overwhelmed rightist media was the idea that Biden will ban beef. He will not. However, animal rights activists are correct when they say that industrial farming of meat is bad for the environment. That's not REALLY why they want to ban beef; they had that position anyway. But the climate crisis is an opportunity to advance their agenda. 

John Kerry, Biden's climate czar, said that technologies don't exist yet that will dramatically help us solve climate change. Think carbon sequestration. If we had a way to pull large quantities of carbon out of the air and store it underground, that could make a huge and immediate impact. It is unlikely to solve the overall issue, but it would be hugely helpful. However, if you see in the climate crisis an opportunity to solve other issues - the malfeasance of multinational petrochemical companies, suburban sprawl, meat eating, unfair labor practices and environmental racism - then a carbon sequestration technology would undermine the urgency of your pet issue.

If you care about climate change, you should be hopeful for large scale carbon sequestration, new forms of nuclear power and/or geoengineering. If you are using the climate crisis to advance a separate agenda (part of the problem with the "Green New Deal.") then you might actively oppose the most promising route to solving the climate crisis.

So...UFOs....

 I guess they are a thing.

My basic question is that we have a technology that can somehow traverse the vast distances of space to come spy on us (presumably) but they can be captured by radar technology? If they can master space travel, why would they need to hang out in our airspace?

Which Came First, The Chickenshit Or The Yegg?

 Martin Longman makes the case that perhaps the worst part of Trump's win was that he recast the GOP in his image. Not the racism and naked greed, so much. That was always there. It was Trump's rampant and really unique disregard for objective reality. I suppose so, but that was certainly true of the Bush Administration, too. The Bushies felt they could bend reality to their will, whereas Trump's version is even less tethered to reality, but the epistemological closure was there decades ago. (And it does exist in quarters of the left, as well.) 

All politicians hedge the truth, but the party of Nixon/Watergate; Reagan and Bush/Iran Contra, Bush/WMD and Trump/gestures wildly at everything is less a sharp break than a steady decline.

The Honor System vs Immunology

 The question prompted by the CDC's surprise announcement that you don't have to wear a mask if you're fully vaccinated is "How do I know the maskless person next to me is really vaccinated?"

This misreads the statement by the CDC and the nature of emerging from the pandemic and the typically shitty way that the CDC, the WHO and other public health institutions have communicated with the public.

If you are fully vaccinated, you are basically immune from the virus. Even if you do get a "breakthrough infection" it will be mild. So, that person standing next to you without a mask might as well be masked, because you are basically immune.

The problem is not so much that I - as a fully vaccinated person - will get sick. Right now, my youngest son is a few days away from the Dos Dose, so we are about 17 days away from family unit immunity. At THAT point, I will feel pretty free to discard my mask. As it is, I feel weird about doffing the mask, because there is a social etiquette involved. If you're wearing one, I will wear one.

Once my family is fully vaccinated, we can go about without a mask and it would be roughly the same as if we were masked. That, I think, is the meaning of the CDC's new guidelines. 

However, the goal needs to be getting to 75-80% vaccination. At the moment, the most urgent populations have mostly been vaccinated, and the so-called "slowdown" has stabilized. There are various clever ways that state and local governments and private institutions are incentivizing vaccinations, but the "vaccine passport" would be the gold standard...and also something we aren't going to do. Biden is not going to expend political capital to create a massive partisan backlash over FREEDUMB!!!1!1 

Ideally, telling people that if they get fully vaccinated, they can drop the masks would dramatically incentivize getting the vaccine, but we know full well that a certain segment is simply going to drop their masks and risk spreading the disease. My hope is that the CDC and Biden Administration is looking at data that suggests that 25% simply won't get the vaccine and says, "Fuck'em." You don't need that many people vaccinated to still get to herd immunity. It really sucks for the immunocompromised who can't take the vaccine, but I guess that's just the breaks. 

Pretty much we are at a place where if you want a vaccine, you can get a vaccine. Easing the hurdles still needs to be done - mobile clinics, clinics at churches and schools - but we will get to that 75% number in June, I think, maybe July. 

So, those unvaccinated assholes who want to come cough in my face? I'm bulletproof and you're still an asshole.

Right Wing Kleptocrats Are A Real Problem

 Josh Marshall has an astute take on the ongoing violence in Israel and how it actually plays into Netanyahu's desire to hold on to power and evade criminal charges for corruption. Trump's desperate desire to stay in the White House was equal parts narcissistic wound and the knowledge that he broke a shit ton of laws. The idea of a peaceful transfer of power in Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary or Poland is remote; in Russia, it is inconceivable. 

The old structures of the Cold War are gone. Some have recast the global conflict of the post-Al Qaeda years as Liberal Democracy v Authoritarianism. More helpful would be a clear camp between corrupt kleptocrats - Putin and Trump certainly, but there are a host of others, including regimes as disparate as Venezuela's, Iran's and Netanyahu's - and countries that follow some rule of law.

That is the fundamental schism in the world in 2021. "Populism" is simply a tactic used to cover for the kleptocrats. 

Madam President

 Elizabeth Warren published a book that lays the cause of her defeat in the primaries largely at the feet of sexism. Jon Chait had a problem with it, but I think Matthew Yglesias has a better take on it. The problem is that Yglesias glosses over a critical fact: almost every female Head of Government has been a Prime Minister. (I said several times during the primary that I thought Warren would make an outstanding Prime Minister.)

In a parliamentary system, you vote for a party as much as an individual. There is usually a separate figure who serves as Head of State - either elected or hereditary - and the PM is a product of working his or her way up the professional ladder. When a voter in Birmingham or Toronto or Auckland or Berlin goes to the polls, they vote for the party they want to see running things by voting for a member of the parliament (or in some cases simply the party; in New Zealand you vote on both). This removes the personality question largely off the table. 

Presidents are elected based on some form of personal charisma. You (and I) may find Trump loathsome, but he clearly had and has a charismatic hold on people. His sneering belligerence was a selling point as much as a liability. The President is a representative of the entire nation and - among other things - Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces. There are a ton of sexist assumptions that weigh on a presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton that simply don't apply to Jacinda Arden, Teresa May or Angela Merkel. 

The general pattern of history shows that we break the color barrier before the gender barrier, but I hope we get there sooner. However, our first female president will largely be bound by the same constraints that Obama was bound by: taking care not to poison the well for future candidates. One reason Biden can be bolder than Obama is that "Old White Guy" doesn't have to worry about establishing a bad precedent for other Old White Guys. 

We currently have a female Speaker of the House. I would love for Warren to succeed Schumer as Majority Leader some day, but maybe that's Amy Klobuchar's future. The simple tautology of "we won't have a female president until we have a female president" is a reflection on how we elect people to that office and the sexist assumptions that we rely on when we do.

I don't know how much sexism cost Warren. I know Hillary Clinton won more votes than Donald Trump. I know the electoral dynamic that gave us 2016 is not solely about sexism and perhaps we should refrain from risking a loss in 2024 or 2028 until that long awaited demographic transition occurs (or the GOP gets less batshit insane). Ideally, 2028 is Harris vs Traitor-Greene and we can tease simply misogyny out of it.

I very much want to see a Madam President, but right now I fear for any Republican return to power, given the toxic, anti-democratic nature of their current beliefs. How much am I willing to risk? That question is not unreasonable nor are the underlying assumptions about how sexist biases influence the selection of president, because it is the presidency and not the prime ministership.  

It Won't Matter

 It's doubtful the current lawsuit against the NRA will lead to the abolition of the NRA. It is probable that ongoing litigation will expose the NRA as being a hopelessly corrupt set of self-dealings, back scratchings and outright graft.

It seems pretty clear Wayne LaPierre is - in addition to being a merchant of death - is just a garden variety crook and aspiring kleptocrat. The NRA existed to bilk the rubes of their rubles to perpetuate gun and ammunition sales by scaring them about the abolition of gun rights. They then used that money to buy help elect Republicans and live high on the hog. It's no different than what Trump has done, looting the bank accounts of his cultists to pay to stop things he's lying about happening.

Eventually, it boils down to this: 

-The modern "Conservative Movement" is a series of grifts, and in order to keep the grift going, you have to keep the marks scared and angry.

Lots of people point to Fox and its warped brethren at OANN and NewsMax as the problem, but they are often just the hosts for the fear-based grifting. The election of Marjorie Traitor-Greene isn't the PLAN, it's the BYPRODUCT of this approach. Once you scare the right people enough, they will do anything to make the boogeyman go away and protect themselves from American Carnage. Fox is the vessel, not the originator. It's origins trace back to Richard Viguerie and the John Birch Society newsletters. 

If you disbanded the NRA tomorrow, it would simply arise again in a different form. The gun-humping ammosexuals would demand someone come and take their money and nurture their fears. As we are seeing with the rise of OANN, Fox is not the root cause and mover of conservatism's descent into delusional madness, it's simply an amplifier for this existing phenomena. 

It would be a nice scalp to take down the NRA. It would be emotionally satisfying and maybe a small percentage of gun humpers would change their mind when they discover they were duped. Every soul turned from the Dark Side is a soul saved.

But the enduring fact is that those duped by conservatism seem to want to be duped.

More Of This

 Vox has a particularly good explainer of where we stand with Covid. In particular, it notes that most doctors who are fully vaccinated are basically not worrying about Covid anymore. They continue to mask and distance and avoid crowded indoor places, because the risk isn't zero, but they are done fretting about it. I no longer go to bars anyway, so why should I start now?

One thing I keep returning to is the difference between "mitigation" and "suppression." 

Suppression is what New Zealand and a few other countries (mostly islands, but Vietnam and South Korea seemed to get there) managed to do. You basically eliminate the virus in your population. Our school was able to suppress the virus due to rigorous testing. We did not have a serious case all year.

In order to spread, the virus must exist in a population (duh). The virus cannot spread in a population that doesn't have the virus. This is obvious, but this is the goal and outcome of suppression. The current uptick in cases in South Korea is less about what is happening in Korea, but rather importing the virus back into an environment where it had been largely suppressed.

Mitigation is simply blunting the impact of the virus. We will distance and mask so that the virus spreads with difficulty and hopefully doesn't get us sick at all. But societally, people will still get sick and some will die, because we aren't taking the drastic measures necessary to suppress it (actual lockdowns and quarantines, not the half measures we actually took).

The vaccine is our opportunity to suppress the virus, both in the US and globally. That's it.  That's the plan.

I don't think that plan has been adequately explained to those Americans who are vaccine reluctant (as opposed to the perfervid clutch of anti-vaxxers). The idea of "returning to normal" is intoxicating. We are planning on travelling in a few weeks. Exciting! But imagine a world where we suppress the virus and don't have to worry about it anymore. 

That's the goal and I don't think it's been adequately explained.

States Matter

 David Ignatius might be too optimistic by half in predicting that the Middle East might be entering a "peace of exhaustion." But we have seen in history long cycles of wars that eventually end when belligerents realize that wars are ultimately destructive. Reaching the Clausewitzian realization that war must have a political end, a war that does not make you safer is a bad war. The Middle East has been fighting for decades a series of wars and proxy wars that have not made them safer. 

(Let us take a moment to remember that the impetus for many of these wars was the disastrous military policy of the Bush Administration. We can all applaud Liz Cheney's principled stand for objective truth without forgetting her and her family's role in the bloodbath that is the modern Middle East.)

As Ignatius blithely breezes over, Israel is an "outlier" in this pivot to peace, but I would argue the collapse of Syria is another one. That conflict is unlikely to end even with the withdrawal of proxy supports. The reason the Emirates and Iran can reach a quiet cease fire is because both are states. The Kurds, the various ethnic groups of Syria and the Palestinians are not states. It is their lack of statehood that leaves them both more vulnerable and more reckless. 

For years, the Turks have signaled that Kurdish statehood is a bright line for them. But then again, recognizing the Armenian genocide was a bright line and we traipsed over that one easily. If Erdogan pokes us again, poke back, and recognize Kurdish independence. My guess is that a Kurdish state would be an better negotiating partner is reining in Kurdish terrorism. A Kurdish state has something to lose.

A similar situation exists for Palestinians. Sure, there is the problem that a Palestinian state would want all of Israel, but having a Palestine gives them something to lose. Right now, they are freed from responsibility to manage and maintain an independent state. The ability of Hamas to provide ANY social services makes them legitimate in a territory that is among the most impoverished and constrained in the world.

Israel has basically abandoned the two-state solution, but our policy has not changed and we have not acknowledged that it has changed. We will not, however, be able to pressure Israel as long as Hamas is launching rockets at population centers. (Not that we say anything about Israel doing the same.)

A weak, small Palestinian state is still something that Palestinians could seek to support and protect. A true government would give Israel and others someone to talk to. 

We have known for years that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the two state solution. Israel has abandoned that. Even as the Gulf States extend feeble feelers to Tehran, and we see the possibility of broader peace, I fear that the situation in Israel is on the verge of a third Intifada. 

Can The GOP Survive Without Trump?

 When you read about how figures like Lindsay Graham or Kevin McCarthy broke with Trump on January 6th and then came crawling back within days, you can't help but wonder why. I get that the GOP primary electorate is the Trumpenproletariat and you can't allow too much daylight between yourself and then fever swamps of Trumpistan. But you don't have to strip Liz Cheney of her leadership position. That's a choice.

There is already pre-emptive freaking out by Democrats - who are naturally poised to freak out over anything since Florida 2000, Ohio 2004 and 2016 - that Dems will lose the House in 2022. They point to "history, " like 1994 and 2010. But the Republicans added House seats in 2002, and disregarding that result because it's Republicans is just...bad history. An incumbent party can absolutely build on its majority in the first midterm election.

I have to wonder if the GOP leadership sees what I think I see. They got smoked in 2018, and they got smoked in places they usually win. Then they ran unexpectedly well in 2020, but a lot of those margins were really, really small. If they are, in fact, losing high frequency college educated White voters, then they need the energy of the Trumpenproletariat. 

Max Weber described three forms of legitimacy: rational-legal, traditional and charismatic. Trump drew on all three, actually. He won the electoral college in 2016 (rational-legal), he relied on Herrenvolk mythology of America's past (traditional) and he represented and was perceived as a personal savior by his cultists. But it is his norm-smashing cult of personality that continues to have a hold on the GOP. It is that cult of personality that has persisted, even as Trump himself has disappeared almost miraculously from the broader public eye.

It looks to me like the GOP leadership is basically admitting that they cannot win without buying into the Trump personality cult. They are reliant on his seemingly magical ability to motivate a certain class of voter. Biden, however, made real inroads into WWC voters last fall. The loss of Hispanic support is not something I see as permanent. I think in South Florida it was the Socialist Boogeyman and general support for the incumbent president. Hispanic voters are very sensitive on immigration issues and are not in favor of "open borders." When Bolivarian Socialism and open borders do not materialize under Biden, I imagine he will do about as well as Clinton in 2024 amongst Latin voters. Biden won slightly more College Degree Whites that Trump, but it wasn't a landslide. 

If we look at the overall picture, we see this: Republicans have won the popular vote once since 1988. They have been over-represented in Congress and the White House because of the excessive rural tilt of our electoral system and partisan gerrymanders. Even Trump's victory in 2016 was a minority victory, but it was a victory.

How can the GOP keep a group of voters - who famously did not show up for Mitt Romney in 2012 - showing up for them down the road? They have basically hitched themselves to Cult 45, and in the process locked themselves into cultivating that group of voters at then expense of every other group.

Going into 2022, the central question will be - as it always is during a midterm - is who will show up at the polls. The wrinkle is how will the events of January 6th resonate that far in the future? Stripped of his Twitter megaphone and the trappings of office, Trump risks becoming a parody of the fallen caudillo. Cult 45 seems to make up about 30-35% of the population. The GOP absolutely needs them to vote, but will courting them leave the other 65% cold?

The People's Front of Judea

 Monty Python's bit about the People's Front of Judea remains an incisive satire of Leftist politics despite being 40 years old. The reason is that there are left and right psychologies. If you are more reliant and respectful of hierarchies, you are more likely to be right wing. If you are more tolerant of openness, you are more likely to be left wing. Obviously, the further left you go, the closer you get to anarchy and the further right you go, the closer you get to fascism, but there is a grey area in between those extremes.

Matthew Yglesias's latest missive on the subject of the intellectual problems with some of the anti-racist consultants focuses on Tema Okun. In it, he focuses on the fact that what Okun is attacking are hallmarks of more traditional ways of thinking and structuring societies. She describes efforts to put results over process as inherently racist. Because society is systematically racist, anything that society has produced in inherently racist. So teaching grammar is racist. 

As Yglesias notes, some of the things she decries are, in fact, bad. Perfectionism and closed-minded obedience to authority can be damaging, but they are not "racist." However, if you can convincingly label something as racist, you basically shutdown any criticism of the criticism. Basically, if we take Okun and others as being intensely anti-hierarchical, then their positions make sense, but they are also fundamentally unworkable. Label them as "anti-racist" and suddenly people will pay attention.

There is a reason anarchism fails. Society is based around rules, and those rules undergo constant negotiation among the members of that society. Sometimes those rules stifle people. Sometimes those rules are unfair. Sometimes those rules are indeed racist. We should get rid of racist rules!

However, let's look at a slide from Okun's work:

Most of these are simply things taken too far and they are all basically an argument against people having authority by simply labelling decision making as authoritarian. Yglesias calls this an almost perfect COINTELPRO psy-op designed to make progressive organizations impossible to function. It does suck when decisions are made by my bosses that impact my life and work. I would like it if that didn't happen. However, the absence of decision making is arguably worse.

The most famous recent attempt at anarchism was that Portland autonomous zone that grew from a subset of people protesting police brutality towards Black people, but were really just anarchists who hate cops. They wound up shooting Black people. Meanwhile, people were alarmed at how well Trump did amongst Hispanic and Black voters, given how empirically racist he is. While I believe much of that was simply the advantage of incumbency, both incumbency and "Defund the Police" alarmed a certain segment of Black and Brown communities who rely on police to keep some sense of order (or are themselves police). Anti-hierarchical thinking is not, itself, a racial characteristic.  

In effect, we are looking at the intellectual mindset of a certain type of White (Okun is White) Progressive as a default for anti-racism, but it seems more like anti-authoritarianism smuggled in under the laudable goal of fighting racism. And if you argue against this...well, you have a racist mindset.

Some of this is simply the way a lot of energy on the Left is spent creating bizarre neologisms like "Birthing People" to describe mothers. In his analysis of his friend objecting to "Birthing People," Paul Campos does admit that there is a problem, but I think he identifies the wrong one. Here's the passage:

These arguments aren’t completely baseless — people do in fact have anxieties about unintentionally giving offense because of shifting semantic practices — but they are almost always wildly overstated. I really like Bill, and very much admire how he was willing to pretty much upend his entire political world view in response to America’s right wing horrorshow. Nevertheless, is he really worried that he, or people like him, will get criticized for not using the term “birthing people” instead of “mothers?” Is this actually going to happen to anybody?

The issue is that, yes, you will, and secondly, this is really, really bad politics - if by politics we mean the competition for power. 

There is a very laudable goal in wanting to reckon with and address centuries of systemic racism in this country. While there are African Americans and other minority groups who hold those Anti-Black racist ideas, too, I think we are safe in admitting that the overwhelming problems with racism in America (and Europe) is White people. 

So the project needs to be: have fewer racist White people. 

You're not going to do that this way. 

When I think about successful movements by historically disadvantaged groups, they almost always appealed to some sort of universal value. The reason MLK and the Civil Rights Movement was successful in winning voting rights was because voting is a central value and practice of equal citizenship, which should have been American practice all along. Similarly, "same sex marriage" was unpopular, but "marriage equality" and "love is love" were more popular. 

Ultimately, successful politics is about addition, and the strange, Chomksyite focus on narrowly parsing language to reflect academic standards of increasingly Byzantine terminology is basically the Judean People's Front arguing about what to argue about. It's politics by division.

Will a compromise police reform bill end racism in America? Of course not, but neither will Defunding the Police. That compromise bill will very likely lead to fewer African Americans dying at the hands of police, though, and I consider that a good thing. 

In the year since George Floyd, my school has had to reckon with the fact that we don't address or see certain racist behaviors in our midst. There was an Instagram account set up to air these problems, and it was incredibly painful to read. We have done a lot of "training" on this issue, and some of it is valuable in shining a light on blindspots that we have as an overwhelmingly White faculty. However, the biggest problem we have is that we have a handful of racist and racial insensitive rich White kids who feel no qualms about behaving really, really badly. 

In order to make our school less racist, we have to address student behavior. There are certainly things we need to do differently as a faculty and we have worked a lot over the past year to do that. Has it been successful? I hardly know. Have we reached the students that we most need to reach? I think the answer has to be a firm no. 

Much of this work is basically appealing to people who are already concerned about racism. It STARTS from the position that America - and therefore our school - is inherently racist and goes from there. And parts of our school ARE inherently racist. That's not an unreasonable position, but it is not a universally shared position. The problem with too much of the Anti-Racism training is it spends a great deal of time thinking it can change certain aspects of language, when they first need to reach the very people who are causing most of the problems. It is, in fact, the sort of perfectionism that Okun decries.

A lot of this is rambling over a lot of terrain, so I'll try and summarize. 

- Political perspective is a combination of cultural identifier and psychology, and Leftist politics has a definite psychology.
- The anti-hierarchical psychology is using a needed moment about racism to advance an agenda that has little to do with racism.
- By focusing on narrow, semantic distinctions (Faculty Lounge Politics, in James Carville's phrase) the very agenda of anti-racism misses the ability to practice "politics of addition" and instead falls into the traditional left-wing trap of "politics of division."

I can only write this, because no one reads this blog. If I were to advance this position as a White man - sorry, White, cisgendered, heterosexual man, we have to keep drawing those lines - in a faculty meeting, I honestly don't know what would happen to my career. 

Genuinely Concerning

 I'm not an alarmist. Studying history makes you see the ebb and flow of events over time and provides a comforting perspective that bad things don't last.

However, the purge of Republicans who have even the slightest grasp of reality and respect for American democracy is legitimately concerning, because in a two-party system, a Trumpist Party if guaranteed a disproportionately high number of votes relative to what its actual strength should be. 

There are plenty of "Republicans" who are skeptical that the current iteration of the Republican Party is, in fact, an anti-democratic, neo-fascist personality cult. After all, Democrats cancelled Dr. Seuss and made that kid in your son's high school transgender, so they can't be trusted to run things. The real fascists are those who want to mandate vaccines and masks to squash the pandemic, not the people who stormed the Capitol and have spent the intervening months catering to Trump's Big Lie.

As Josh Marshall notes, the really scary thing is that - having purged the Liz Cheneys and Brad Raffensbergers from their posts - there will be no one with the objectivity and commitment to the Constitution and democracy to allow for a smooth transition in 2024. 

If it becomes apparent to people like Cheney and Romney that they are effectively persona non grata in the GOP then they must break away and form a new party. They must run candidates at every level of government - state houses, House, Senate - in order to deny the GOP majorities and the ability to become a full-on Trumpist movement. Yes, it will mean massive losses for "conservatism" in general, but there is zero chance casual Republicans will listen to the evidence of the degradation of their party from someone like me or MSNBC or the NY Times. 

The Right Wing political movement must have a civil war to destroy itself and save American democracy.  Anyone want to lay odds on that happening?

Masters Of The Universe

 Tom Wolfe coined the phrase "Masters of the Universe" to describe the Wall Street nouveau riche of the 1980s in his book Bonfire of the Vanities. It was one of those times were someone was being ironic and the target of the irony missed the point. Many Wall Street types took it as a complement. Since that time, the Very Rich have come under increasing scrutiny, and rightfully so. I can remember arguing with a friend about executive salaries in the last '90s, but I doubt we'd have the same argument now.

Recently, we got a taste of how the Very Rich think, when one of them wrote a tone deaf Op-Ed piece about the perils of wanting to work remotely even after the pandemic is over. Obviously, we do not know the long term implications of viable remote work exposed by Covid. There are some jobs that can remain hybrid work situations between the office and home. Cathy Merrill said, be careful what you wish for; if you're not in the office it's easier to fire you or make an independent contractor.

Unsurprisingly, the staff at the Washingtonian, which she owns, has rebelled. They read this as a threat to their jobs, since journalism is precisely the sort of job that can be hybrid. Her response, "Oh, I wasn't talking about YOU." displays an almost sociopathic disregard for her fellow human beings.

It also exposes a reality of the early 21st century economy.

The largest drivers of economic growth are "creative" jobs that require a certain intellectual capital. These jobs exist in certain "ecosystems" like Silicon Valley, Boston, even Bangalore. They need the interaction of certain types of people. On the other hand, we can increasingly make those places virtual. There is no reason why Silicon Valley needs to remain a thing. 

Merrill's point about being reduced to contract work and the denial of benefits is something the "non-creative" classes have been dealing with for the last couple of decades. The basic extinction of pensions and extended benefits is something many workers know all too well.

There is no reason why Social Security couldn't be more generous or health insurance couldn't be a public good except that these Masters of the Universe don't want to pay for it. The rise of Boutique Socialism among younger people is precisely a byproduct of a world that rigs the rules in favor of the very few. 

This is unsustainable.

Getting to 80%

 Any hope of 95% of Americans getting the vaccine foundered long ago on the shoals of American scientific stupidity. There are some people who legitimately cannot get vaccinated, but that's a small percent of people. How do we get people vaccinated to get to the herd immunity figure of 80%?

Despite their noisiness, it's not anti-vaxxers who are introducing a drag on immunizations. To this point, my wife and I are vaccinated, our youngest son is getting his second Pfizer shot next week and our eldest son had the J&J shot this past week. Our eldest is extraordinarily needle-phobic, and his decision to gut it out and get the shot impressed the hell out of me. He was able to get it at a pharmacy right around the corner, with no wait to get his nerves up. Our youngest is getting it done at a state drive-thru facility that is frankly a pain in the ass. It took about an hour and a half for the whole process, whereas my wife and I and our eldest breezed right through in about a half an hour. 

I'm convinced that "friction" plays a huge role in our increasingly complicated lives. Any little hiccup can delay taking needed action. I hate talking on the phone, especially if there is a phone tree involved, so efforts that require me to "press five" will reduce my incentive to make the call in the first place.

Vaccines have reached the phone tree stage, with the motivated people increasingly being vaccinated. Even my eldest - who has an abiding terror of needles - was motivated to get the shot (but he wasn't getting the two shot regimen under any circumstances). 

There needs to be a plan to reduce the friction points in getting the vaccine, and there needs to be some mandatory vaccinations, including schools and certain jobs. Bring the shots to the workplace. Start bringing them to churches on Sundays. That's got to be the next step.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias and I are apparently on the same wavelength, as we wrote about the same thing. One aspect he brought up was mandatory vaccines for the military and police. As he moved in to talking about kids being mandated for school, he noted that medical personnel might find it immoral to mandate vaccinated reluctant and low risk populations like children when the virus is raging through India and they need shots now. As Yglesias notes, this is true, but political impossible. 

He also notes what I have been noting that medical advice is poorly aligned with human psychology and incentivizing vaccine uptake. 

He points to this chart:

This is a great example of terrible advice.

Why do I need a mask to go to a baseball game? Yesterday, I got my haircut and I wore a mask, but...why? I'm vaccinated. There's a slim chance I get a mild case of Covid, true...but...slim...mild. 

We all want to get back to "normal." Yesterday, I also ate inside a restaurant in NYC. I wore my mask until the food arrived and popped it back on when the waiter came over.  All the while, I was thinking: Why? Especially once my sons vaccinations have really set in, I'm not risking anyone. 

I suppose the question of whether a vaccinated person can still spread the disease needs to be answered, but the early evidence seems to be: not really.

If you want to get shots into arms, you need to show WHY getting the shot will make your life better. This chart ain't it.

Psych 101

 The Liz Cheney Saga proves that if Donald Trump wants to be the GOP nominee, he will be.

Does he want to be?

I don't know enough about malignant narcissism, but it seems to me he would not want to expose himself to the shame of losing again. My understanding is that narcissists try and avoid embarrassment. The primary reason Trump refuses to concede is that his narcissism makes that impossible. However, he DID lose and somewhere inside that rancid sack of Diet Coke, Adderall and pureed hamburdlars he know he lost.

The people who claim to know him, assert that he never really wanted to be president when he ran in 2016. He just wanted to run, be defeated by some Silver Spoon shit like Bush and then launch something akin to OANN. He then won and had to do actual work for the first time...which he did not do...was miserable and then was humiliated by a guy even older than him.

So, his ideal stratagem in 2024 is to feint a run and get the parade of toadies and sycophants that constitutes today's Party of Lincoln to slobber and fawn all over him. He will do his Volkstrum rallies, because he likes those. The more he can have his ass kissed without actually having to do any work the more it is in his sweet spot.

But he could win the nomination again by accident. He could feint a run and everyone clears the field for him. If he wins the nomination, he could absolutely win the presidency, as we saw in 2016. However, I really feel like his grip over independents has weakened considerably. He ended his Reign of Error with an approval rating of around 34% and largely stayed there.

Basically, a third of our countrymen are part of a cult of personality surrounding a grifter and shitstain of a human being - literally among the worst persons this country has coughed up.

But I don't think he can grow from that level. The support he can count on could win him the primary, but I don't think it gets him close to winning the presidency, so it's in GOP elites interest to keep him on the sidelines.

Things can change, but this feels like a solid guess.

Liz Cheney Is A Symbol, Not A Hero

 Liz Cheney - as conservative a member of Congress as you are likely to find - is going to be bounced from her leadership position. As this reader notes, Trump has largely and mercifully receded from most people's minds. He's just...gone. Yet, for the Republican Party, he remains the essential figure, the center of gravity for the entire party.

This is the party, of course, whose platform in 2020 was simply "Trump is our living god!" Every opportunity to put this treasonous, grifting fucktwaddle in the rearview mirror has largely been put aside. Liz Cheney is not being heroic in opposing Trump's Big Lie that he won the election that he clearly lost. She is sticking to her principles that coups are bad and counting votes is good, which used to be a completely uncontroversial opinion in America. It's as if Cheney came out foursquare in support of puppies and the rest of the GOP disowned for for that.

Focusing on Cheney as a symbol of all that has gone wrong with the GOP does not - as some people on Twitter have suggested - mean lauding Cheney. I suppose I admire her decision to make a stand on principle, even though that principle should not require taking a stand that will cost her.

That the GOP can turn on and devour the daughter of a former Vice President and a stalwart conservative because she isn't sufficiently loyal to Trump is entirely a story about the degradation of the Republican Party. Its collapse into an authoritarian personality cult is largely complete.

When my Dad was still alive we would argue politics a LOT. I think back on those arguments and realize that more often than not, I was right (which I can say, because he can't argue back). Every bad thing I said the Republican Party was...it has shown itself to be. It is the snarling, ignorant viciousness of Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson. In his last months in 2017, he sort of admitted that my basic criticisms were right, and I have to think he would be appalled at what one of our parties has become. He would have been opposed to much of the direction of the Democratic Party on cultural issues, which he had the luxury of not having to care about, but I wonder where he would have landed.

There are likely a few people out there like my father, who can't find a home in either party. Ideally, they splinter off into a third party. My father voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. Johnson is a flake, but he's not a fascist. If George Soros really wanted to spin a conspiratorial web, he would be creating a viable Center Right party that would appeal to people like my Dad, not to win elections, but to splinter the Right and prevent the nightmare of a return to power of someone like Trump in 2024.

Back in 2016, I was asked if Trump could win, and I answered that he could, because he was the nominee of a major party, but that he was unlikely to. Like so many, I missed his appeal to Karl Rove's "Missing White Voters." Still, he was never able to win a plurality of support either in voting or in polling. In 2016, we assumed that the GOP establishment could force its voters to swallow Jeb Bush, but those voters rebelled and have discovered the splenetic power of having a standard bearer of pure, unadulterated hatred towards their enemies. 

We are destined, due to our electoral system, to have two parties. We are not destined to have THESE two parties. It is critically important that the party that would purge Liz Cheney, of all people, because she will not bow down to a graven image, carved from margarine and dipped in fake gold, is not allowed to hold the levers of power until they get their shit together. Starting a spoiler third party is a necessary first step.

More On Faculty Lounge Jargon

 Matthew Yglesias takes on Carville's slamming "Faculty Lounge Politics" in a way that I think helps re-focus the problem of left of center politics right now. Yglesias says it's not about faculty lounges (which...of course it's not) but rather what he calls the "BA Bubble." Basically most people staffing offices and writing about politics are young and college educated and most Americans are neither.

He's talking about a form of epistemological closure on the Left. While he doesn't mention "Defund the Police," that's a great example of a complicated policy proposal that may or may not have some merit that gets swallowed up by a bad slogan designed to appeal to the activist base - which is younger and more educated than the average voter. 

Broadly speaking, a lot of Democratic policies are popular. If those ideas are communicated in a resonant way - which Biden seems pretty good at doing - then you build your coalition. If they are wrapped in language that falls flat, you lose voters. A "path to citizenship" is reasonably popular. "Open borders" is most definitely not.

If you want to talk about racism outside the walls of academia, you have to change your language. You have to talk about bigotry and prejudice and how the opposite of that are American ideals of decency, kindness, charitability and freedom. Talking about "privilege" and "systems of oppression" is not going to reach the very people you need to reach. 

Resistance Is FUBAR

 The Times wrote a story about how we are unlikely to reach herd immunity, at least in certain areas. Parts of the country - New England, California -  will be largely vaccinated by the summer, whereas other areas - the South, Plain and Mountain West - lag dangerously far behind.

Obviously, if you're vaccinated, you're pretty safe. But the possibility of variants is very real. A certain amount of risk is acceptable, but this is a completely unnecessary risk! Get the damned shot!

Paul Campos makes the point that we have not made the vaccine skeptical pay a price for their stupid stubbornness. The Moron Caucus in the GOP is pre-emptively whining about "vaccine passports," so it's inevitable that any even mildly coercive measures will fail. Maybe carrots works better than sticks? A $300 cash payment to every eligible adult who got the shot?

The cost of humoring these bozos is potentially quite high.

Does Policy Matter?

 Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic lays out the thinking among Democratic strategists on how to avoid losing the House in 2022. Basically, the thinking is that incumbent presidential parties lose seats in the first midterm and Biden's best chance of retaining control of the House is to "Go Big."

There are solid policy reasons for Going Big, not the least of which is the fact that Dems will more likely than not lose the House. Get your big ticket items locked in. The country needs a lot of work, so let's do a lot of work.

I'm not sure the political calculations hold water.

Let's say Biden is able to get 80% of his current agenda passed. Massive new spending programs, a booming economy emerging from the pandemic, popular tax increases on the rich...most of it gets done. Will that make an actual difference with an electorate that is increasingly polarized?

One trend we saw in 2016 and 2020 was the emergence of the Hidden Trump voter and the Suburban Democrat. In 2018, those Suburban Democrats flipped the House. Overwhelmingly college educated, those voters show up in midterms and have been a reliable source of off year electoral gains for Republicans. If that demographic has really and truly switched allegiances, then the usual GOP advantage in midterms could be blunted. Similarly, if the GOP is shrinking into a band of aggrieved Trumpists, what happens when Hair Furor isn't on the ballot? The more GOP House members have to embrace Trumpist rhetoric and QAnon fucknuttery, the more those Suburban Voters slip away.

More generally, the idea that some policy achievement actually drives people's vote doesn't seem to hold true. Presumably, if a president and his party achieves something that benefits a huge portion of the electorate, then they will benefit. That doesn't always happen. 

People vote their tribe and we aren't through determining what the post-Trump tribal landscape is.

The biggest advantage the GOP has is redistricting. However, the Census was likely flawed and the result is very few seats actually changing. This piece by The Hill lays out some scenarios. Some takeaways.

First, we know the GOP will lose a seat in West Virginia. The Hill posits that because California uses an independent commission Democrats will lose a seat. More likely those Orange County battlegrounds remain battlegrounds, but with one fewer seat. 

Next, they say that NY will redistrict away a GOP seat, which is most likely, but that Pennsylvania - which will use the Democratic Governor and GOP Assembly, the Democrats will likely lose a seat. Maybe. Conor Lamb is immediately vulnerable, but he's won twice already.

Ohio is already egregiously gerrymandered. In 2020, it went 53-45 to Trump, but it has a delegation that packs that 45% of Democrats into 4 of the 16 districts. By losing a seat, it will be harder to pack them in there. Most likely, they retain their four seats and one current seat becomes a battleground.

Illinois could wind up with an additional Democratic gerrymander that deprives the GOP of one of their southern districts. Michigan is a commission based redistricting, so it's anyone's guess.

Colorado is likely an additional Democratic seat (plus, Boebert has to lose, doesn't she?) and Oregon might go either way, as the GOP has a say in redistricting there. Most likely, Colorado adds a Dem seat in the Front Range and Oregon adds a competitive seat.

Montana is tricky. Will the western part of the state with Bozeman, Missoula and so on trend purple? Democrats can win in Montana. Dividing the state in two (via commission) could lead to a competitive seat there.

Texas is running up against the physical limits of gerrymandering and North Carolina's court has already thrown out one GOP gerrymander. Florida is...damn...can we stop caring about Florida?

Basically, the GOP will have a gerrymander advantage in Georgia and maybe Arizona - two states trending purple. But Democrats will be able to gerrymander Virginia and possibly Illinois. 

All you need a is a one vote majority in the House. If Democrats can hold on to high frequency voters in the suburbs, and Trumpists stay home without their Orange Messiah on the ballot...buoyed by a rebounding economy...I don't think it's out of the question that Democrats survive the 2022 midterms.

Every Accusation Is A Confession

 The more you see a conservative complaining about some sort of sexual libertine behavior, the more likely she or he is to be a perv.