Inflation

 I'm travelling and needed to get a leaky tire fixed. Sitting in the waiting room, I heard two people talk about prices. It was interesting in that they were saying they "couldn't eat out every night." Were people eating out every night in 2019? Nevertheless, inflation is a real issue, less so because of actual economic conditions than vibes, but there are underlying aspects of inflation that make it tricky.

The first fact is that inflation has returned to "good" levels. The economy is growing, wages are rising and that entails some mild inflation. The problem is that prices are rising from their inflated levels vis a vis 2019. A 2.5% inflation rate on a higher basis feels like more inflation. It will take a year or more for people to normalize the new price structure.

The second issue is housing. My tire shop friend was talking about how he keeps chickens. About a year ago, we saw a massive spike in egg costs that was not only part of the overall inflation picture, but was accelerated by avian flu. There were simply fewer chickens. Now, there are enough chickens, because it only takes a few months to turn chicks into layers. Housing is waaaaay stickier. Plus, we have raised inflation rates to tackle inflation.

These high interest rates have done a good job of corralling inflation, but if you're in the housing business, it's been brutal. High rates mean that average people can't buy housing. (You can add in private equity buying homes to be Airbnbs, he typed from his Airbnb.) This makes it really hard to find financing to build new housing, and the lag time between wanting to build housing and actually having new housing units is a lot longer than turning chicks into layers. Plus, if you own a small home and want to upgrade, you really can't afford the new mortgages, so you stay in your small home. This means that smaller, cheaper homes aren't even on the market.

The decision to avoid a recession was likely the right one. Given the energy crisis created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we could have had the sort of stagflation that Europe is seeing, if we hadn't have stimulated the economy the way we did.

Still, we'd better hope that people's perception of inflation starts to change over the next 9 months. Just to make sure about next November.

Deep In Trumpsylvania

 The wife and I are National Park aficionados and she had never been to Great Smoky Mountain, our nation's most visited park. We have spent the last two days staying in a cabin in Gatlinburg, TN, and this is the heart of Trump Country. Is there offensive anti-Biden merch everywhere? You bet there is! Is the average skin tone somewhere between alabaster and sunburned? Why, yes it is! Are there Confederate flag earrings for sale? Need you ask?

Look, these people are not demons. They are almost always incredibly nice to you as individuals. But hoooo boy, I'm not sure how any of them survived Covid, as they seem to be a walking inventory of co-morbidities.

In America, it certainly seems as if health is a strong predictor of class standing. The smoking, the gargantuan amounts of calories, these are going to have impacts on their lives. It's not really a surprise that the opioid epidemic hit these communities the hardest, as they certainly don't seem that healthy to begin with. 

I doubt there is anything that can be done about this, as there's a belligerent, defiant streak here, but it really doesn't have to be this way. 

These are good people poisoned by bad ideas. 

Bummer

 Joe Manchin's retirement means that the margin for error in next year's Senate races is pretty damned small.

Hopefully Dobbs helps flip a few red and purple states.

More Grumpy Old Man

 Martin Longman examines the controversy over the required teaching of To Kill A Mockingbird in Washington State schools. I agree with him that allowing each teacher or school to teach or not teach the book is the right decision, but the arguments made against requiring the book were terrible. The idea that the book does not represent the Black experience or speak to a Black audience is accurate. Neither, presumably does Huckleberry Finn, Crime and Punishment or The Scarlett Letter. The idea that a book must speak to your experience is simply a faulty way of looking at literature. If anything, you read to expand your understanding of the world beyond your personal experience. 

The idea that To Kill A Mockingbird does some sort of harm or is pernicious towards a student is part of the overall balkanization of education. Now, should Washington State schools also teach Beloved or The Bluest Eye? Abso-fucking-lutely. Not because it would necessarily validate the lived experience of Black students but precisely because it might expand the horizons of White students.

The world does not exist to make you feel good about yourself. It does not exist to place you in the center of your own universe. Education should make you intellectually uncomfortable.

Tea Leaves

 Last night's election results were pretty damned good for Democrats. (And my wife won re-election to the town council!) The immediate question is what this means for NEXT November.

Reading a few different accounts, the analysis I'd offer is this.

- Last night's showing does not preclude Biden struggling for reasons specific to Biden - namely his age and the unfair estimations of his handling of the economy.

- It does suggest that the polity is not lurching rightwards on social or economic issues. Those wedge issues are helping Democrats.

The argument that the Anti-Biden Democrats are making is that Biden is actually a drag on the ticket and replacing him with some version of himself that's 15 years younger would mean an easy victory next year. I guess that's plausible as a thought exercise, but who is this mythical Younger Biden that can sate every Democratic constituency? If "inflation" is the reason that Biden is polling below Generic Democrat, then wouldn't Harris be tarred with the same brush? 

The counterargument is basically that Biden will be the nominee and Trump will be the nominee. In that matchup, the hypothetical Generic Democrat is not on the ticket, but you have to choose between an old Biden and an old and openly fascist Trump, who might very well be in jail. The results from last night shows that people are generally not outraged by the status quo, as incumbents did pretty well. The only aspect of the status quo that they are outraged by is Dobbs. Trump is indirectly the author of Dobbs, and hammering him (and Mike Johnson) on this issue should only help Biden.

I do think that Biden's soft polling comes from two sources. The first is the famous aphorism, "Democrats need to fall in love, Republicans only need to fall in line." Even if Biden were a decade younger, he's not going to make Democrats swoon, but as the election gets closer, they will turn out for him. The second is the general fickleness of the younger voters that put him in the White House, in particular. There are a number of reasons why his numbers are soft with them, which I simply don't think will hold water for 12 months, again when contrasted with Trump (or even DeSantis). Young people don't like his Israeli policies, but wait until they hear what Trump and Generic Republican has to say about Palestinians and Muslims in general.

The most salient takeaway from last night is that the social issues that Republicans thought could win them control of the federal government are not going to work. While people cite inflation as being awful, consumer confidence is kind of all over the place, giving a mediocre but not bad reading on the economy. Even a slight improvement in people's estimation of the economy could turn the policy landscape decisively against Republicans. 

Of course, people don't vote policy, they often vote "vibes". Even so, the "vibes" of electing Trump again would have to be fairly unappealing. People - I do believe - when faced with Grampa Joe and Agolf Twittler will pick the boring old guy over the revanchist fascist.

The polls weren't wrong about the 2023 election. But the polls about 2024 aren't predictive yet.

I Guess I'm A Grumpy Old Man

 Kids these days...

Yglesias takes a look at the illiberalism of today's youth. I think I mentioned having a conversation with my son about Hamas that was truly disturbing. Josh Marshall noted that a lot of kids get their "news" from Tik Tok and that could explain some of the stark opinions the under 40 crowd have about this conflict.

However, there's some fertile ground there, with Ruy Teixeira takes on how "identity politics" has led to some poisonous ideas: 

Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

I've certainly seen some of this on my end of academia. I think there's some important truths in intersectionality, in terms of being empathetic to other people's perspectives borne of lived experience. Teixeira went on to attack Ibram Kendi's anti-racist work. I greatly enjoyed Stamped from the Beginning, but his subsequent work on ideas for policy have been...impractical and I think counterproductive. He goes on to attack the idea of equity, which is that we need equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity. 

I do think that equal opportunity is both preferred, but hard to achieve. How can we determine how structures are thwarting our idea of equality? It's tough, and I think elements of CRT and Kendi's work are helpful. What they are not is absolute truth. What's more, I don't agree with equity (equality of outcomes) as a principle. Few Americans do, I would wager. Equity has been tried and...it's track record is not great.

Yglesias does push back on the particularly vitriolic Teixeira piece. He returns, of course, to his NIMBY hobby horse, but as a way of illustrating how "equity" is usually just bullshit, too. He notes that, for instance, closed schools hurt poorer (and therefore minority) communities, but leftists tended not to care. In part that was to support teachers, which I think Yglesias totally ignores, but it was also a reaction to Trump not taking Covid seriously. 

A better example is how the Climate Left continual fucks up actual ways to improve the climate situation, most notably by shuttering nuclear power plants. Efforts that the Climate Left would want to put in place to combat putting carbon in the atmosphere would disproportionally effect poorer communities, which skew towards people of color. Hell, the very reason Biden isn't leading in the polls is because people wish things cost as much as they did four years ago. Never mind that people are earning more and buying more and consumer confidence is high, they don't like that things cost more, and now the Climate Left wants to jack up the price of energy? Where's the equity there?

The problem with much of this Leftist identity politics is that you start to see obvious conflicts between agendas. Inter-factional warfare is and always has been the standard of behavior amongst the Left in any polity, but now that they have a bit more power than they typically have, we are seeing how dysfunctional it can be to make policy decisions based on academic ideas like equity. Whose equity? When?

Back to Hamas, the idea that October 7th was "justified" because Jews are, what, White is historically bonkers. Every country is born in blood. Israel is no exception, but it is a recognized state and an actual democracy with civil rights and liberties. Hamas is a terrorist organization linked to Iran and Russia. How in the hell can anyone who has a "Hate has no home here" sign in their yard support Hamas? Because they have decided that Israel are "oppressors" and Hamas is therefore justified in committing atrocities based on that "fact."

The reality of Israel's occupation is way more complicated than that. The occupation is wrong and should end, but that should not lead to Hamas running Gaza. We saw what ISIS did when they took over places, and Hamas would be pretty similar. To pretzel oneself into supporting Hamas because Israel is wealthier and more powerful than Palestinian communities is to reach for the single assumption that the occupation is the entire and sole reason Palestinians are poor. Hamas and even the Palestinian Authority are not good at governing. And Israel is also wealthier and powerful than Jordan, Lebanon, Syria...you name it. Why? Because goddamnit, liberal democracy works.

Some of this is cyclical. However, the stakes going into the 2024 election are so catastrophically high that we have narcissistic ideologues like Cornell West running spoiler campaigns and grifts off the outrage of young people who have been trained to expect equity rather than equality from a world that it never, ever going to accommodate them.

I'm reminded, in the end, of the excesses of Campus Leftism in the 1960s that helped spawn a backlash that led to Nixon and Reagan. While both of those men were horrible presidents, their threat to American Democracy was slight. Trump's threat is real and imminent.

Is Trumpism Facism?

 Paul Campos looks at Umberto Eco's essay on what constitutes fascism and sees a lot of overlap, but not a perfect match. He revisited that today, too.

I've always been a little reticent to describe Trumpism as pure fascism, but the label - while somewhat inaccurate - felt much more appropriate after 1/6. 

Christo-fascism, White Christo-Nationalism...They don't exactly roll off the tongue. I think identifying the importance of a form of political evangelism is critical to understanding Trump. The obvious unreasoning nature of the movement has its same roots in much of evangelical belief, in fact it's a triumph of "belief" over reason and evidence.

There have obviously been fascist movements in America since fascism emerged as an ideology in the 1920s. However, the presence of White Nationalism is as old as the republic. I actually think that most instances of religion being used as a political organizing tool is actually not about religion as a doctrinal or dogmatic principle, but as a stand in for a form of ethnic conflict.

Anyway, Trump's assault on the Constitution is part of the unreasoned belief that America is a White Christian nation and while it has roots in America, it really needs to be rooted out next November.

Weaker of the House

 My Johnson...sorry, Mike Johnson...is about to run into the same problem every Republican Speaker has faced since the emergence of the Chaos Caucus in 2010: Republicans don't understand that our government is designed to run on compromise, and therefore we are going to get an unnecessary government shutdown around the holidays.

While Longman places this at the feet of the House caucus, I think it's worth considering how almost no one values the idea of compromise anymore. In fact, before the Chaos Caucus took over last fall, the Democratic House and the nearly evenly split Senate managed to pass a bunch of compromise bills (the so-called Shadow Congress). They only did so because no one was paying attention. As soon as the idea of some sort of compromise legislation became public, it would be impossible to pass.

We have this rickety, archaic 18th century form of government that isn't working because one party assumes that marginal control of one half of one branch means they get to call the tune. There are echoes of this in leftist complaints about Biden not being able to give everyone a pony, but it's much stronger on the right. Put another way, there is no way the House GOP's behavior would pass a middle school civics class.

Defenseless

 Trump's day in court was largely an unstated admission that he has no legal defense. Some of it is his aspirational mafioso personality, but a lot of it is that he has no real legal defense in any of his cases. His only chance is to run out the clock, shoot for mistrials and hope he gets re-elected so he can make his myriad crimes go away.

As Aaron Blake notes above, this should make for close reading by the other judges overseeing all of Trump's other trials (OK, not Cannon, she's a hack). Trump is going to come in, behave like the thundering, suppurating asshole that he is and hope he can get a mistrial, which will push things off until after he (hopefully for him) gets re-elected.

Yeah, I've seen the Times poll. I do think a lot of those young people come home if it's Biden v Trump. But I know it will happen if he get convicted of a crime.

Spite Voting

 Great thread here on the self-defeating calls from Muslim leaders to either boycott voting for Biden or even voting for Republicans. I had a similar discussion with my eldest son, who's so pissed about even the existence of Israel (based on bullshit, online information) that he says he doesn't want to vote for Biden. It's a long time to election day, and I doubt that this will hold as a position for a full year, but if you care about the plight of Palestinians, then you cannot vote for Republicans/Trump, and if you don't vote, you are effectively voting for Trump.

Does it suck that your choices are one guy who's a supported of Israel who wants to see a two state solution and one guy who wants to ban Muslims from traveling to this country and nuke Gaza? Yeah, it does. But that is the choice.

Anti-Semitism and the Left

 Josh Marshall has a thoughtful essay on the rise of anti-Semitism since October 7th. There's one point I'd like to expand upon that's been intruding on my thoughts recently. Why have campuses become such hot beds of frankly odd theories about how the world works? 

In Marshall's piece, he notes how odd it is to refer to Israel as a "colonial" nation. A colony is, by definition, when one country overthrows and takes political control over another territory that it has no plans to annex. It will always be separate from the imperial center. Israel has no external imperial center. There isn't another Jewish state somewhere imposing imperial control over Palestinians. And if you believe that, then you're probably engaging in anti-Semitic tropes about shadowy Jewish power.

There are all sorts of leftist theories about how everything, everywhere is about racial subjugation, which allows them to force a very inapt racial lens on Israel. Most of the debates about Critical Race Theory are nonsense, since it's a very specific legal theory. What does begin to approach a true argument is that there are a lot of academics in the "justice" field who do apply CRT to everything. 

Now, there are certain really good applications of CRT. For instance, grandfather clauses were used to exempt Whites from literacy tests under Jim Crow. The actual text never mentioned race, but as CRT argues, you have to look beneath the text and see if race actually does motivate these laws. Same with voter ID laws that disproportionately effect poorer minorities who might not have drivers' licenses. 

I think the flaw comes fundamentally from how especially advanced academics seem to work. If you go to college and get a BA or BS, you'll certainly focus on certain things and most students are in college looking for fungible skills. My sons are studying architecture and probably some sort of business oriented field. Now, I don't like this! There's a lot of value in a classic liberal arts education that gets lost with simple pre-professional training and accrediting. 

However, once you start on your Masters or PhD in a field - especially the Humanities and Social Sciences - you really have to start digging absurdly deep into theory and very specific applications of those theories. Sure, you have to guard against confirmation bias and a host of other cognitive fallacies, but it's all but inevitable that you become a partisan of your academic theoretical perspective. As Marshall notes in his essay, Israel is not Jim Crow America or Rhodesia; it's its own thing. 

And therein lies the rub. If you've studied post World War II liberation movements, then Palestinian liberation is just the same thing in a different context. 

But it's not. The context matters.

So you have people in thrall to their theories - usually fairly left wing, because that's where the approval of the academy does lie - who force new experiences through old theories. 

I sit at the intersection of two, really three, different academic fields of study. I specifically study US History, Comparative Government and now International Relations. Can I pinch hit and teach a course on Bourbon France for a colleague? Sure. It's high school. But those are my fields.

International Relations is really about the study of theories used to explain the world. I started in college as wanting to major in IR, but the preference for theories that ultimately failed to account for how things always work was frustrating my teenaged brain. Comp Gov exists at the intersection of theory and case studies. You have various theories about how different governmental types might work and then you compare them to see what's similar and what's different. In US History, I have to know Colonial History and the end of the Cold War.

So, in September I'm teaching early revolutionary America in one class then turning around and teaching the basic terminology of political economy. In December, I'm teaching the case study of democracy in India and Reconstruction America. In May, it's Realist Foreign Policy concerning the UN during A block and race relations of the '80s and '90s in B Block.

All of this means that if I try and become a true expert on one thing, I'm lost when it comes to the other 97% of my teaching. In many ways, that's not true in college, and certainly not PhD programs. 

Being a "generalist" or perhaps more expressively a true student and teacher of the liberal arts means that I'm not locked into any theoretical perspective. What's more, when I think about whether I would've liked to get a PhD, I generally think, "nahhh." I like being able to bounce from topic to topic. However, there are very much people who love to dive really deep into a subject and become a true expert. 

Isaiah Berlin referred to "foxes and hedgehogs" when describing learners. I'm a fox. I know a little bit about a lot of things. A hedgehog know a lot about one big thing. A fox's knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep; a hedgehog is an inch wide and a mile deep. As a fox, let me say that we absolutely need hedgehogs. I want my oncologist to be a hedgehog. It's pretty clear that "academia" preferences hedgehogs. 

A social scientist once compared the predictive ability of foxes and hedgehogs and foxes turned out to be must better prognosticators, primarily because they were so much more comfortable with doubt. 

I think that's where I'm going with all this. Hedgehogs are legitimate experts on a subject matter and their expertise clouds them to the fact that they really aren't very comfortable with the complexity and messiness and unpredictability of the actual world.

The Israel-Palestine situation is not complex, not nuanced. It's paradoxical. Both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. Both have a right to press for or preserve their existence in the face of violence. Hamas is awful. Netanyahu and the Israeli Right is awful. The idea that a neat theory about race or colonialism applies here is simply not true. The intractability of this issue is because of this fundamental paradox.

I would bet that if you spoke to academics who studied the Middle East or adjacent fields, they would tell you this. It's the people who have developed their expertise elsewhere and especially those who have access to a "little theory" who are making the maximalist claims in a situation that really does need that right now.

The Party Of Ideas

 Back around the time Reagan ascended improbably to the presidency, there was a coterie of right wing thinkers, generally lumped into the bin of neoconservatives, that provided an intellectual veneer for the broadly libertarian, nationalistic and vaguely racist policies that distinguished Reaganism. They called the Republican Party at the time, the Party of Ideas.

Jon Chait has found the similar group for Trump. I have used the term "party of ideas" ironically to describe a party with one policy idea: cut taxes and regulatory burdens on the rich. That's pretty much been the only thing that holds the Republican Party together. Trump really only accomplished one legislative goal: a massive tax break. The idea that the Chaos Caucus could actually pass legislation by compromising with the Senate and/or White House is laughable on its face. 

What's more concerning is whether Chait is right in predicting that the strain of anti-democratic, anti-liberal (as in liberty) thought on the right is poised to take over the entire Republican Party. It's certainly tempting to see the entire GOP as being the Cult of Trump and okey dokey with January 6th. The voices within the electoral arm of the GOP who opposed Trump's illegal and unconstitutional power grab have mostly been driven from office. They've either lost primaries or retired before they could. 

I guess as an optimist, my feeling is that the GOP is about 40% authoritarian, 40% traditional Republicans (still sucky) and 20% clueless partisans. I also think that a decisive repudiation of Trumpism both in the courts and at the polls would go a long way towards breaking the ascendency of naked authoritarianism on the right. 

Now, all right wing politics have a tendency towards hierarchies and authoritarianism. The hallmark of rightist politics worldwide is a contempt for democracy. The roots of the Red-Brown coalitions or horseshoe theory is the contempt the Far Left and Far Right have for the mundane and often frustrating work of electoral democracy. The most striking example of this is how American and European leftists have taken a shine to fucking Hamas. "Queers for Hamas" appears to be a real thing, not a sly piece of satire. 

This contempt for democracy is, in its own way, understandable for people who have no historical vision and perspective. Yes, democracy is frustrating. It leads to compromise, which has been accurately described as a condition by which you don't get what you want, but are assuaged by the fact that the other side didn't get what it wanted either. 

The new First World Problem is that you can generally get exactly what you want all the time. I just went to Amazon and I can get Icelandic Cod Oil delivered to my home by Sunday. I don't really know if that's usually tough to find, but I'm guessing you can get just about anything you want in a consumer experience delivered to your door. We have online leftists decrying their poverty while ordering DoorDash. 

All of this means that we have a polity that increasingly wants everything they want right now. On the right, this consumer power is directly contradicted by their increasingly irrelevant cultural power. The culture has completely turned against "traditional values," especially if those traditional values turn out to be bigoted. Since so much of conservative politics has become culture war issues, this series of defeats means that they see the culture and therefore the political landscape as irreparably lost. The idea expressed in the "Flight 93 Election"  acknowledges how the cultural and political landscape is moving away from traditional cultural conservativism, so therefore they must seize and hold power, regardless of the will of the people. Does anyone doubt what the result would be of a national plebiscite on Roe v Wade would be?

If the optimist in me is right, Biden wins reelection, Democrats hold the Senate and regain the House, precisely because the GOP has become authoritarian - Dobbs, 1/6, Trump's crimes - and the GOP has an internal reckoning. When the Democrats went into the long exile of 1968-1992, they moved to the center with Bill Clinton. The tragedy of 2016 was that Trump won such a fluke election and convinced the normie GOP that he had some secret sauce. His secret sauce was the misogyny that swirled around Hillary Clinton in Rust Belt working class communities. 

If the GOP gets whupped next November, it will be because of Dobbs and all the various issues surrounding 1/6. It will be because a majority of Republicans have decided that Trump represents their last hope against not only Democrats but democracy. Hopefully, that starts the GOP upon the road to Damascus and their redemption as a center-right party.

Keep An Eye On Retirements

 Two fairly establishment Republicans are retiring in the wake of the Chaos Caucus Dysfunctional Clown Show. Some of this is simply personal disgust with what the GOP has become, maybe most of it. But if they are seeing polling and fundraising numbers that have them alarmed, that's another reason to retire.

The public polling we see has proven in the last 8 years to be pretty meh. The internal polling is usually more rigorous. So, keep an eye out for more Republican retirements. It could be disgust with the authoritarian cult of Trump, but it could be that they see a tough road ahead and would rather retire than lose.

Biden And Israel

I like Jon Chait's analysis of what Biden is doing with regards to Israel and what it means for American politics. As I mentioned yesterday, the fractured nature of our civic life has tended to pit people against each other, taking maximalist positions often tied to identity politics. It isn't just a policy position people hold, but something intrinsic to who they are as a person.

What Biden is doing feels largely correct, given that we only see the public facing parts of the policy. The public embrace of Israel and condemnation of Hamas was right. What I believe - reading between the lines - is Biden's subsequent efforts to rein in the most extreme responses from Israel are largely not working, but we can't know what the IDF would be doing if Biden had not first embraced them.

What's more, Palestinian civilian casualties are a goal of Hamas. That's why they attacked Israel on October 7th; that's why they place military targets in hospitals and refugee camps. Doing that - human shields - is a war crime, but it's not nearly as dramatic a war crime as when Israel hits those targets without considering the cost in civilian lives. 

I would hope that if the IDF doesn't start getting its shit together and stop hitting refugee camps that Biden can use his early embrace to then more forcefully condemn Netanyahu's pogrom against Palestinians.

Finally, Chait is right that the idea that Muslim Americans would look at Biden's embrace of Israel and conclude that they should vote for...Donald Trump is just baffling. 

UPDATE: Martin Longman does a good job of pointing out how everything is just awful and there are no good options for Biden or really anyone. The reality is that this is a perfect storm for critics. They have no responsibility for proposing a plausible solution, the existing situation is terrible and everyone is pissed at everyone.

NPIs

 Nothing brings out Bad Yglesias more than Covid Hot Takes. The fact that he's channeling Nate Silver, himself a fountain of Covid Hot Takes, isn't a promising start. His argument seems to be that things like masking and social distancing didn't work, but his argument is muddled, because he often points out that they did work. As he notes, the bans on large gatherings was a good idea, but we had a mess of rules and enforcement for things like masks and dining.

Then he says, and this is his hobby horse, that school closings were bad. How much of this is because he has a school age kid...I don't know. But the argument that banning large indoor gatherings was good, but schools should have been open is nonsensical. 

When we opened in the fall of 2020, it was with a LOT of trepidation and precautions. As a boarding school, we could effectively isolate large parts of the population - the boarders. We created "pods" of kids who could be together and we tested every person on campus every week. Many students were remote, as we had to teach in hybrid classes. Now, the broad point that this was "bad schooling" does, I think, hold water. We continue to see gaps and lags in student learning, especially incoming students. So even with a hybrid system, we saw learning loss. 

The solution to this was not to open schools, but to build into schooling an additional year for Generation Covid. Some students could navigate independent learning better than others, and maybe they wouldn't need or want that additional year, but you can't argue that banning large gatherings is good...and then argue for packing students into classrooms. Sure, the students would likely be fine if Covid broke out among them, but they would bring the disease home and the teachers would get sick. A lot of teachers are older, frankly, in many public schools. 

So, banning large gatherings is good to save lives, but lets reopen schools and if some teachers die, well...whatever.