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Thursday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 18 comments

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Ukraine Losing and Growing Demoralized

While the West dithers, Russia is doubling down.

James Joyner · Wednesday, April 17, 2024 · 33 comments

POLITICO Europe opinion editor Jamie Dettmer declares, “Ukraine is heading for defeat.”

Just ask a Ukrainian soldier if he still believes the West will stand by Kyiv “for as long as it takes.” That pledge rings hollow when it’s been four weeks since your artillery unit last had a shell to fire, as one serviceman complained from the front lines.

It’s not just that Ukraine’s forces are running out of ammunition. Western delays over sending aid mean the country is dangerously short of something even harder to supply than shells: the fighting spirit required to win.

Morale among troops is grim, ground down by relentless bombardment, a lack of advanced weapons, and losses on the battlefield. In cities hundreds of miles away from the front, the crowds of young men who lined up to join the army in the war’s early months have disappeared. Nowadays, eligible would-be recruits dodge the draft and spend their afternoons in nightclubs instead. Many have left the country altogether.

As I discovered while reporting from Ukraine over the past month, the picture that emerged from dozens of interviews with political leaders, military officers, and ordinary citizens was one of a country slipping towards disaster.

Even as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine is trying to find a way not to retreat, military officers privately accept that more losses are inevitable this summer. The only question is how bad they will be. Vladimir Putin has arguably never been closer to his goal.

“We know people are flagging and we hear it from regional governors and from the people themselves,” Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff, told POLITICO. Yermak and his boss travel together to “some of the most dangerous places” to rally citizens and soldiers for the fight, he said. “We tell people: ‘Your name will be in the history books.’”

If the tide doesn’t turn soon in this third year of Russia’s invasion, it will be the nation of Ukraine as it currently exists that is consigned to the past. 

For a war of such era-defining importance, the scale of Western leaders’ actions to help Kyiv repel Russia’s invaders has fallen far short of their soaring rhetoric. That disappointment has left Ukrainians of all ranks — from the soldiers digging trenches to ministers running the country — weary and irritable. 

There’s much more, but you get the idea.

Nor is Dettmer alone. There have been a series of articles in recent days sounding the alarm.

International relations professors Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko (“Ukraine is losing the war and the west faces a stark choice: help now or face a resurgent and aggressive Russia,” The Conversation):

Ukraine is now experiencing a level of existential threat comparable only to the situation immediately after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. But in contrast to then, improvements are unlikely – at least not soon.

Not only have conditions along the frontline significantly worsened, according to the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, but the very possibility of a Ukrainian defeat is now discussed in public by people like the former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command, General Sir Richard Barrons.

Barrons told the BBC on April 13 that Ukraine could lose the war in 2024 “because Ukraine may come to feel it can’t win … And when it gets to that point, why will people want to fight and die any longer, just to defend the indefensible?”

This may be his way of trying to push the west to provide more military aid to Ukraine faster. Yet the fact that the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, publicly accepts that to end the war Ukraine will have to negotiate with Russia and decide “what kind of compromises they’re willing to do” is a clear indication that things are not going well for Ukraine.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner (“Ukraine could face defeat in 2024. Here’s how that might look“):

The former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command has warned that Ukraine could face defeat by Russia in 2024.

General Sir Richard Barrons has told the BBC there is “a serious risk” of Ukraine losing the war this year.

The reason, he says, is “because Ukraine may come to feel it can’t win”.

“And when it gets to that point, why will people want to fight and die any longer, just to defend the indefensible?”

Ukraine is not yet at that point.

But its forces are running critically low on ammunition, troops and air defences. Its much-heralded counter-offensive last year failed to dislodge the Russians from ground they had seized and now Moscow is gearing up for a summer offensive.

Defense One’s Patrick Tucker (“Europe is already planning for what happens if Ukraine loses. It’s ugly.“):

A Ukrainian loss, which could happen very soon if U.S. weapons don’t arrive, would ramp up Russian efforts to destabilize the governments of NATO countries and increase defense spending across the alliance, among other disastrous effects, Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s Defense Minister, told reporters Friday.

When U.S. officials like President Joe Biden talk about why Ukraine matters, they rely on broad notions of democracy and the continuation of the international order—without specifically explaining what a Ukraine loss would mean for ordinary Americans. Perhaps because of this, Americans are evenly split on the question of whether the United States is doing too much for Ukraine.

Pevkur said one of the deliverables from last year’s NATO Summit in Vilnius was new battle plans for Eastern European countries should Ukraine fall.

“These plans address these different scenarios,” he said. “Of course, for obvious reasons I cannot be very specific, but I can assure you that these plans are shaped by looking at the possible Russian posture in our neighborhood.”

One of the likely consequences of a loss, he said, is a much larger and more dangerous Russian military.

“Russia has published on their plan for the reconstitution and build up their army. It says that they will have 1.5 million people in the army,” including a new Army corps in the country’s northwest corner, near Estonia, he said. That will mean two to seven times as many tanks, armored personnel carriers, air defense systems, etc., very close to the border of Europe, hesaid.

That military buildup will continue to put pressure on Western democracies, including the United States, to increase their defense spending, he said. “We see that the Russian war budget today is around 30 or 31% of their state budget. But this is only the military spendings. When we add to that what they are also the spending on…some other state services, which are directly linked to security, then we will see that this budget goes to 35 to 40% of the state budget.”

Russia has basically adapted its entire economy and society for war. That increases the likelihood of a direct confrontation in order to justify the buildup.

“The Russians have actually managed to really ramp up the defense industry capability, put it on a war footing. Then the unfortunate and quite dark logic arises from that: Once you’ve done all these things, once you’ve ramped up your economy or put it on a war footing, then there’s not an easy way of going back. So they will probably have to maximize,” he said.

The Economist’s Charlemagne columnist, Stanley Pignal (“What happens if Ukraine loses?“):

To ask “what if Ukraine loses?” was once a tactic favoured by those looking to berate its Western allies into sending more money and weapons. Increasingly the question feels less like a thought experiment and more like the first stage of contingency planning. After a gruelling few months on the battlefield, gone are last year’s hopes of a Ukrainian counter-offensive that would push Russia back to its borders and humble Vladimir Putin. These days it is fear that dominates: that an existing stalemate might crumble in favour of the invader, or of Donald Trump coming back to power in America and delivering victory to Russia on a silver platter. Although a vanquished Ukraine has become a less far-fetched prospect, it is no less frightening. Sobering as the return of war on the continent has been, a successful invasion reaping geopolitical rewards for Mr Putin would be much worse.

A defeat of Ukraine would be a humbling episode for the West, a modern Suez moment. Having provided moral, military and financial succour to its ally for two years now, America and Europe have—perhaps inadvertently—put their own credibility on the line. That they have sometimes dithered in delivering this support would make things worse, not better: further confirmation, among sceptics of liberal polities, that democracies lack what it takes to stand up for their interests. In Russia but also China, India and across the global south, Ukraine’s backers would be dismissed as good at tabling un resolutions and haggling over wording at eu and nato summits but not much else. The colouring by atlas-makers of Ukrainian land into Russian territory would cement the idea that might makes right, to the benefit of strongmen far and wide. George Robertson, a former boss of nato, has warned that “If Ukraine loses, our enemies will decide the world order.” Unfortunately for the Taiwanese, among others, he is probably right.

Nowhere would feel the brunt of this humiliation more than the eu, the pinnacle of liberal international norm-setting. Ukraine’s neighbours moved less fast than America in providing support. But in the European slow-but-steady way they feel they have done as much as could be asked of them. By sending arms (including using eu money to pay for weapons, a first), propping up Ukraine’s finances, taking in millions of refugees, applying a dozen rounds of sanctions against Russia and weaning themselves off its piped gas, the bloc’s politicians have pushed out the boundaries of what initially seemed possible. If it proves not to have been enough, plenty will ask whether the union at its core is fit for purpose. Populists—and Putin fans—in the mould of Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Marine Le Pen in France will crow that theirs is the best way. Currently there are divisions between the hawkish eastern fringe and others in the bloc. If Ukraine loses, those will metastasise into recriminations and bitterness. Emmanuel Macron in France, a newly minted hawk, has set the tone by warning of “cowards” holding Europe back.

The geopolitical fallout of a Ukrainian defeat would depend on the shape of any peace settlement. This in turn would hinge on military dynamics or the mindset of Mr Trump, should he be elected again. If Ukraine’s ammunition-constrained army crumbles and somehow Russia controls not just its eastern territories but the whole country, perhaps under a Belarus-style puppet regime, its aggressor will in effect share over a thousand more kilometres of borders with the eu. Should defeat be more limited—including annexation of territory, but a still-functioning “rump” Ukraine—nerves would still be set jangling. How long would it be before Mr Putin finished the job? Millions more Ukrainians might seize the opportunity to leave. The future shape of the eu would change: the promise of enlargement to Ukraine presupposed a comprehensive victory. The western Balkans, whose own bid to join was revived by the war, would surely be left in limbo too.

Beyond the feeling of culpability and shame, a sense of fear would pervade Europe. Might there be a further attack? Would it be on a nato country, forcing allies into action? Further attempts at conquest would at least be a possibility. Mr Putin has alluded to Nazism in the Baltics, echoing the pretext he used to invade Ukraine; the trio also have a large Russian-speaking population. A year ago the joke was that Russia’s claim of having the best army in Europe was ludicrous: it didn’t even have the best army in Ukraine. Fewer think that today, given Russia’s ability to keep supplying its men—not to mention supplying more men—faster than its adversary. A victorious Russian army would leave Mr Putin commanding the only fighting force with the battle-hardening and 21st-century warfare skills to take territory; if he controlled the Ukrainian state he would control two such military machines. Against him stand war-shy Europeans, perhaps with flaky American backing and depleted armouries. Might Poland or Germany find they will need their own nuclear deterrent?

On the one hand, depending on unlimited and indefinite external support for one’s war effort is a pretty good indication that you’re destined to fail. On the other, most of the countries that have pledged such support are pretty wealthy and have a strong interest in seeing Russia weakened, if not defeated—to say nothing of the moral and humanitarian interests at stake.

While Barack Obama infamously ridiculed Mitt Romney for saying Russia was our number one geopolitical foe, it was almost certainly correct at the time. (As Romney himself has acknowledged, China has clearly assumed that mantle since.) Both the Trump and Biden national security strategies have placed Russia in that status, with the latter calling them “an acute threat.” Yet various aid bills with bipartisan support have failed to make it through a Congress held hostage to some reactionaries with an unfathomable Putin fetish.

But, of course, the United States isn’t the only power of aiding Ukraine, much less the one that has the most to lose from a Russian victory. Our NATO allies haven’t exactly matched their rhetoric with support, either.

A timely movie recommendation

A Man For All Seasons goes to the heart of our current political season

Kingdaddy · · 22 comments

A Man For All Seasons goes to the heart of our current political season

Last night, I re-watched A Man For All Seasons, which is an acutely timely movie. This telling of the fall of Thomas More focuses less on Henry VIII, and more on the corruption of institutions and people. Henry’s monomaniacal demand for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon played on people’s ambitions and weaknesses, turning them against people who stuck with their faith in both the wording and the spirit of the political and legal forms. The movie’s two poles of morality are More, whose adherence to principles in a debased age leads ultimately to his execution, and Richard Rich, a vacuous office-seeker who gets greater and greater rewards for his participation in the warping of the laws in pursuit of More.

In the final courtroom scene, Rich, recently appointed as Attorney General of Wales, perjures himself, claiming that More privately told him that Parliament did not have the authority to back Henry’s claim to be the head of a newly reformed English church. (More had remained silent on the subject, refusing to either support or deny Henry’s arguments for divorcing Catherine and beginning the split from “the Church of Rome.”) After his false testimony, More poses the following question to Rich after his testimony: “For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales?”

The parallel to today’s vacuous office-seekers is fairly obvious.

Another highlight from the movie (and the play on which it was based) is this exchange:

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

The relevance of this warning to members of the Leopard Eating People’s Faces Party is also obvious.

There are many other salient moments for our times in the play. For example, the weak, useless, nervous courtiers accompanying Henry VIII, when we first see him, are both hilarious and disturbing. The different ways of bending to Henry’s will — enthusiastically, in the case of Cromwell; opportunistically, in the case of Rich; and ambivalently, in the case of the Duke of Norfolk — fit neatly into Tim Miller’s taxonomy of Trump collaborators. And there’s more (More?), such as stellar performances from great actors like Robert Shaw, Leo McKern, and John Hurt.

I strongly recommend giving it a watch, whether you’ve seen it before, or not.

Wednesday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 36 comments

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Republicans Are Again Threatening To Remove Their Speaker

It must be another day that ends in a "Y"

Matt Bernius · Tuesday, April 16, 2024 · 24 comments

Less than a month ago, just before the Easter Recess, Marjorie Taylor Green filed a motion to have Mike Johnson vacate his position as Speaker of the House. At the time, I noted that it didn’t appear that it had the support to go to go anywhere at the time. That was then, this is now. This morning, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News, who broke the story about MTG’s motion, shared the following on x-tter:

Massie is a member of the House Rules Committee and wields a lot of power within the Republican Caucus. Massie has since confirmed this story on his x-tter feed:

This decision seems tied to Johnson’s attempt to bring Foreign Aide funding for Israel, Taiwan, and most importantly for this fight–Ukraine–up for a vote. Former President Trump has publicly announced that he does not want Republicans to make any border or Ukraine funding agreements until after the election.

Johnson has since publicly stated he is not resigning, setting up a battle within the razor-thin House Republican Majority. On the one side, we have Trump’s strongest supporters in the House who don’t want any legislation moving forward that entails any form of compromise. On the other side, you have moderate Republicans, including those in more competitive districts and those interested in actually governing, who have signaled that if the House doesn’t vote on these aid packages in some form, they will take the unusual step of bringing the Senate bill to the floor via a discharge petition.

Beyond all that, there is a question of what the Democrats will do. Johnson will need their support to stay in the Speakership. Plus, they’re not sure how to react to them finally not being the party that is constantly in “disarray.” Well, other than popping popcorn and dreaming of the solution to this mess being “Speaker Jefferies”–which while still unlikely seems a bit more possible as of today.

SCOTUS Rejects Appeal of BLM Leader Sued For Attack by Protestor

A longstanding precedent may be in jeopardy.

James Joyner · · 7 comments

AP (“Supreme Court rejects appeal from Black Lives Matter activist over Louisiana protest lawsuit“):

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed a lawsuit to go forward against a Black Lives Matter activist who led a protest in Louisiana in which a police officer was injured. Civil rights groups and free speech advocates have warned that the suit threatens the right to protest.

The justices rejected an appeal from DeRay Mckesson in a case that stems from a 2016 protest over the police killing of a Black man in Baton Rouge.

At an earlier stage of the case, the high court noted that the issue was “fraught with implications for First Amendment rights.”

The justices did not explain their action Monday, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a brief opinion that said lower courts should not read too much into it.

The court’s “denial today expresses no view about the merits of Mckesson’s claim,’’ Sotomayor wrote.

At the protest in Baton Rouge, the officer was hit by a “rock-like” object thrown by an unidentified protester, but he sued Mckesson in his role as the protest organizer.

A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in 2017, but a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the officer should be able to argue that Mckesson didn’t exercise reasonable care in leading protesters onto a highway, setting up a police confrontation in which the officer, identified in court papers only as John Doe, was injured.

In dissent, Judge Don Willett wrote, “He deserves justice. Unquestionably, Officer Doe can sue the rock-thrower. But I disagree that he can sue Mckesson as the protest leader.”

If allowed to stand, the decision to allow the suit to proceed would discourage people from protesting, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote, representing Mckesson.

“Given the prospect that some individual protest participant might engage in law-breaking, only the most intrepid citizens would exercise their rights if doing so risked personal liability for third-parties’ wrongdoing,” the ACLU told the court.

Lawyers for the officer had urged the court to turn away the appeal, noting that the protest illegally blocked the highway and that Mckesson did nothing to dissuade the violence that took place.

SCOTUSBlog’s Amy Howe (“Court declines to intervene in lawsuit against Black Lives Matter organizer“) adds:

At issue in Mckesson was whether DeRay Mckesson can be held responsible for the officer’s injuries when he did not directly harm the officer himself but instead organized the demonstration and, the officer said, “knew or should have known” that violence would result.

The case is one with which the justices were already familiar. In 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit allowed the officer’s lawsuit to go forward. Mckesson then appealed to the Supreme Court, where he argued that the lawsuit against him was barred by the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., which limited the NAACP’s liability for a nonviolent protest that it organized.

In November 2020, the court sent the case back to the 5th Circuit with instructions to seek guidance from the Louisiana Supreme Court on whether state law would in fact allow Mckesson to be held liable.

After the Louisiana Supreme Court issued an opinion indicating that, under the facts alleged by the officer, a protest leader could be sued for negligence, a divided 5th Circuit issued a new opinion allowing the lawsuit to go forward. Doe had alleged, the majority wrote, that Mckesson had “organized and directed the protest in such a manner as to create an unreasonable risk that one protester would assault or batter” the officer.

[…]

Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a statement regarding the court’s decision to deny review. She noted that since the court of appeals issued its decision, the Supreme Court in Counterman v. Colorado “made clear that the First Amendment bars the use of an objective standard like negligence for punishing speech, and it read Claiborne and other incitement cases as demanding a showing of intent.” Because the Supreme Court may turn down cases “for many reasons,” Sotomayor stressed, the denial of review in Mckesson’s case “expresses no review about the merits of” his claim. Moreover, she added, the court of appeals should “give full and fair consideration to arguments regarding Counterman’s impact in any future proceedings in this case.”

Vox’s Ian Millhiser is less sanguine, crying “The Supreme Court effectively abolishes the right to mass protest in three US states.”

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will not hear Mckesson v. Doe. The decision not to hear Mckesson leaves in place a lower court decision that effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Under that lower court decision, a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act.

It is possible that this outcome will be temporary. The Court did not embrace the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision attacking the First Amendment right to protest, but it did not reverse it either. That means that, at least for now, the Fifth Circuit’s decision is the law in much of the American South.

[…]

Everyone agrees that this rock was not thrown by Mckesson, however. And the Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982) that protest leaders cannot be held liable for the violent actions of a protest participant, absent unusual circumstances that are not present in the Mckesson case — such as if Mckesson had “authorized, directed, or ratified” the decision to throw the rock.

Indeed, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out in a brief opinion accompanying the Court’s decision not to hear Mckesson, the Court recently reaffirmed the strong First Amendment protections enjoyed by people like Mckesson in Counterman v. Colorado (2023). That decision held that the First Amendment “precludes punishment” for inciting violent action “unless the speaker’s words were ‘intended’ (not just likely) to produce imminent disorder.”

The reason Claiborne protects protest organizers should be obvious. No one who organizes a mass event attended by thousands of people can possibly control the actions of all those attendees, regardless of whether the event is a political protest, a music concert, or the Super Bowl. So, if protest organizers can be sanctioned for the illegal action of any protest attendee, no one in their right mind would ever organize a political protest again.

[…]

Like Mckesson, Claiborne involved a racial justice protest that included some violent participants. In the mid-1960s, the NAACP launched a boycott of white merchants in Claiborne County, Mississippi. At least according to the state supreme court, some participants in this boycott “engaged in acts of physical force and violence against the persons and property of certain customers and prospective customers” of these white businesses.

Indeed, one of the organizers of this boycott did far more to encourage violence than Mckesson is accused of in his case. Charles Evers, a local NAACP leader, allegedly said in a speech to boycott supporters that “if we catch any of you going in any of them racist stores, we’re gonna break your damn neck.”

But the Supreme Court held that this “emotionally charged rhetoric … did not transcend the bounds of protected speech.” It ruled that courts must use “extreme care” before imposing liability on a political figure of any kind.

[…]

And what, exactly, were the “unreasonably dangerous conditions” created by the Mckesson-led protest in Baton Rouge? The Fifth Circuit faulted Mckesson for organizing “the protest to begin in front of the police station, obstructing access to the building,” for failing to “dissuade” protesters who allegedly stole water bottles from a grocery store, and for leading “the assembled protest onto a public highway, in violation of Louisiana criminal law.”

Needless to say, the idea that the First Amendment recedes the moment a mass protest violates a traffic law is quite novel. And it is impossible to reconcile with pretty much the entire history of mass civil rights protests in the United States.

The Supreme Court’s declining to intervene in an ongoing matter is hardly novel; their taking a case is the exception, not the rule. And, if Sotomayor is not sounding alarms, it strikes me as prudent to withhold judgment. Maybe the Supremes just want the case to ripen.

Still, based on what I see in these reports, it doesn’t make sense that Mckesson should be liable for the actions of the protestor. Yes, leading the crowd onto a highway to shut it down is a criminal act unprotected by the First Amendment. Case after case after case has upheld the right of states and municipalities to place reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on protests. But committing a relatively minor act of civil disobedience surely isn’t incitement to murder and there’s no evidence of which I’m aware that Mckessen otherwise encouraged violence. Starting a protest against police violence in front of a police station surely falls short of that.

Trump’s Jury

Is it even possible to find 12 impartial citizens to judge a figure so infamous?

James Joyner · · 52 comments

NYT (“No Jurors Picked on First Day of Trump’s Manhattan Criminal Trial“):

The criminal trial of Donald J. Trump, the nation’s 45th president and the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, started Monday with potential jurors assembling in a drab courtroom in New York City while Mr. Trump looked on.

Mr. Trump was charged in Manhattan, a deeply Democratic county and his former home, with falsifying nearly three dozen business records in an attempt to cover up a payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who has said she had a brief sexual encounter with him in 2006.

[…]

The trial, which is expected to last weeks, has a fascinating list of potential witnesses: Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer turned apostate, who made the payment; Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who says she, too, had an affair with Mr. Trump; and Hope Hicks, a former aide to Mr. Trump. Ms. Daniels herself may testify.

Before any of that happens, a jury must be selected, a winnowing that began Monday.

[…]

It’s easy to forget how long it takes to do a little in legal settings. On Monday, the morning session was dominated by maneuvering by prosecutors and the defense, even as prospective jurors waited. By lunch, they were still waiting.

Jury selection could take days or weeks, and the trial itself may take two months. The Passover holiday could cause delays, Justice Merchan said, though he might make some of that up by holding hearings on court matters on Wednesdays, which was previously going to be an off day.

By afternoon, prospective jurors finally made their way into Justice Merchan’s courtroom. He warmly welcomed them, introduced the lawyers and Mr. Trump and read them a summary of the case.

Justice Merchan asked if any believed they could not be fair and impartial to the former president. Of the 96 prospective jurors in the room at that time, more than 50 raised their hands. They were immediately excused.

The remaining jurors were each asked 42 questions. By the end of Monday, 11 jurors had been questioned and two more were excused: a woman who said she could not be fair and a man who said his child’s wedding date could conflict with the trial.

As a Virginia resident, I’m not in the potential jury pool. Do I have very strong feelings about Trump? I can’t imagine the sentient adult who doesn’t. Could I be “fair” in hearing his case? I guess that depends on one’s definition. I would certainly vote to acquit him, despite my feelings about him, were the prosecution to fail to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt. But Trump, reading my volume of writing on him, certainly wouldn’t think he was getting a fair trial if I was one of the dozen judging his fate.

Beyond that, while it would surely be quite interesting to be involved in such a high-profile case, I would do pretty much everything in my power to avoid being trapped in a courtroom for months. To say nothing of the likelihood of Trump and his minions encouraging the harassment of my family and myself.

It seems likely that this jury will be comprised entirely of people who really, really want to be on it. Some will have very strong opinions about Trump that they’re hiding. Others will be hoping to cash in on the experience. Maybe some will just want to be part of history. That’s not exactly conducive to justice.

Tuesday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 27 comments

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Taxing ‘The Rich’

It's a relative thing.

James Joyner · Monday, April 15, 2024 · 49 comments

Richard Rubin and Joe Pinsker for WSJ (“‘I Don’t Think of Myself as Rich’: The Americans Crossing Biden’s $400,000 Tax Line“):

President Biden is back on the campaign trail, and so is his favorite tax-policy number: $400,000.

In his successful 2020 presidential run, Biden pledged to protect households from tax increases if their income was below that threshold. He reupped the promise for his re-election bid and is planning to draw tax-policy contrasts with Republican rival Donald Trump in a Tuesday speech in Pennsylvania.

If Democrats have any power next year, the $400,000 cutoff will be the floor in negotiations over who pays more and who doesn’t. Have income below that and you will be spared. Above that line, and your 1040 is on the menu as Democrats seek trillions of dollars for new programs and middle-class tax cuts.

Republicans are campaigning for extending expiring tax cuts enacted in 2017 at all income levels, while Biden and Democrats say they will protect at least the bottom 97% of households from higher taxes. The competing antitax pledges appeal to voters’ pocketbooks while limiting debate to the top sliver of households and restricting policymakers’ ability to generate revenue.

In particular, the Biden pledge’s persistence highlights shifting political coalitions as affluent suburban voters drift from the Republican Party. Biden’s promise helps Democrats reassure upper-middle-class Americans that they can vote for the party without risking their bank accounts. But it also limits Biden’s tax policies and gives critics a ready target.

Notably, Biden isn’t adjusting the $400,000 to account for inflation during his first term, keeping the round number he started with. That amount in May 2020, when Biden articulated the plan, is equivalent to more than $487,000 now.

Because of inflation and economic growth, the pool of $400,000-and-up households increased to 3.4 million in 2022, up 33% from 2019, according to census data analyzed by the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington, D.C., think tank. The percentage of households above that line climbed to 2.6% from 2.1%.

[…]

Biden’s pledge is often interpreted as a bright line between “middle class” and “rich,” but it wasn’t intended that way. According to administration officials, $400,000 was set so middle-class households can see they will be comfortably below it.

“It put in very precise terms who was intended to benefit,” said Ben Harris, a campaign aide during 2020 and an assistant Treasury secretary in the Biden administration. “It was less a definition of who was rich and more a value judgment about rewarding work and labor.”

Compared with the full population, households with incomes above $400,000 are more likely to include children, and they are disproportionately white and Asian-American. They are also concentrated in urban areas. In Washington, D.C., in 2022, 6.1% of households were above the line; in Mississippi, 0.8% were.

As the headline suggests, the report includes anecdotal quotations of folks who are just over the $400,000 line who don’t think they’re “rich” because they worked hard to get where they are rather than inheriting wealth. A representative example:

In Louisville, Ky., $400,000 feels like plenty to David Deyer.

“We have it pretty nice in the Kentucky area,” Deyer said. He and his wife are about $25,000 under the threshold.

The 33-year-old, who works in business development for an HVAC contractor, said they can travel internationally and make monthly charitable donations on par with their mortgage payments.

Deyer said he could afford higher taxes but doesn’t think of himself as rich. He and his wife make coffee to avoid Starbucks and buy fruit based on what is on sale.

“​​We’re not extravagant people with high-end country-club memberships or a private jet or anything like that,” he said. He declined to say who he is voting for.

Objectively, a $400,000 household income is rich even in the DC area; the median is $117,432. It’s fantastically so in Louisville, where the median is $63,114. Indeed, I’m shocked that a 33-year-old with a seemingly mundane job brings in that much. At the same time, a lot of upper-middle-class folks clearly think that they’re just working stiffs and that “the rich” are the people with wildly lavish lifestyles that they can only dream of.

While Rubin and Pinsker are clearly trying to paint the Biden proposal in a bad light, they actually have a reasonable point. The $400,000 threshold that was trotted out in the 2020 campaign indeed hits a lot more people—and represents a lower point on the income curve—now than it did then. If the point is public policy and not rhetorical, the number should adjust for inflation.

For that matter, it’s long been obvious to me that the number should be regionally adjusted. While $400,000 is a high household income even in San Francisco (median $136,689), basic subsistence is simply much more expensive in some parts of the country than others. Indeed, the federal government has long understood this, including rather sizable locality pay adjustments for its own employees, which currently range from 45.41% in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area to $17.11% in the Reno-Fernley area.

Him and 51 Percent of America

An anti-Trump Republican endorses Trump.

James Joyner · · 40 comments

Aaron Rupar highlights this exchange on ABC’s This Week on Sunday:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Just to sum up. You support Trump for president even if he’s convicted in the classified documents case. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he’s lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he’s convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?

CHRIS SUNUNU: Yeah. Me and 51 percent of America.

GS: Governor, thanks for your time this morning.

This is simultaneously frustrating and entirely understandable.

Sununu is clearly a relative moderate who would much prefer a traditional Republican nominee over Trump. He endorsed and campaigned for Nikki Haley this cycle. Yet, Trump overwhelmingly defeated Haley and all other comers to easily win the nomination for a third straight time.

So, Sununu has a choice: endorse the candidate he undoubtedly prefers and which the citizens of his state will almost certainly choose in November, Joe Biden, or continue to have a plausible future in elected politics. He’s a 49-year-old four-term* Republican governor who’s too conservative to be viable in a Democratic primary. If he wants to run for the Senate or the White House some day, he’ll have to do it as a Republican.

In my ideal world, political leaders would willingly risk their careers for the greater good. That’s the essence of statesmanship. And, certainly, keeping Donald Trump out of the White House is a worthy hill to die on. Realistically, though, Sununu endorsing Biden will do next to nothing to achieve that goal and he knows it. So, fecklessness is more attractive than leadership.

_____________
*He’s only been governor since 2017, as New Hampshire has two-year terms.

Iran’s Intent and Israel’s Next Move

Two related questions.

James Joyner · · 31 comments

The early speculation on Iran’s attack on Israel was that it was a shot across the bow for the domestic audiences that was intended to fail in order to avoid massive escalation. That may well be mistaken.

SEMAFOR‘s Jay Solomon (“Iran sought mass casualties in Israel strike, U.S. officials say“):

Iran’s weekend aerial attack on Israel was designed to cause mass casualties and infrastructure damage, senior U.S. officials said, an assessment that complicates deliberations on how to respond to Tehran and its military allies in the coming weeks.

The Biden administration on Sunday hailed a unified defense of Israel that included U.S., U.K. and French air power and allied Arab states, such as Jordan. Their anti-drone and anti-missile capabilities, combined with Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, shot down 99% of the more than 300 munitions Tehran and its proxies fired into the Jewish state from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen on Saturday.

Senior U.S. officials said neutralizing the assault was a strategic victory for Israel and its partners, and opens a window to de-escalate tensions in a Middle East region already on edge from Israel’s six-month war in the Gaza Strip. Iran’s operation came in response to Israel’s April 1 attack on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus that killed two Iranian generals.

“With the support of a number of partners, including the U.K. and France, the United States enabled Israel to spectacularly defeat this unprecedented attack,” a senior White House official said on Sunday. “[The Iranians] were clearly intending to destroy and to cause casualties. That was their intent.”

Iranian diplomats and military officials said on Saturday that they weren’t seeking to launch new strikes, provided there were no Israeli reprisals. “The matter can be deemed concluded,” Tehran’s United Nations mission said in a statement.

But Israeli government officials said that Tehran had crossed a clear red line by attacking Israel directly from Iranian soil for the first time in history. They also said the nature of the targets — believed to be major civilian areas and military infrastructure —required a response if their country is to restore deterrence against Iran and its regional allies.

Yaroslav Trofimov, the Chief Foreign-Affairs Correspondent for WSJ (“Analysis: Israel Repelled Iran’s Huge Attack. But Only With Help From U.S. and Arab Partners.“) adds:

Saturday’s Iranian strike on Israel was huge by any standard. Tehran launched more than 170 explosive-laden drones, around 120 ballistic missiles and about 30 cruise missiles, according to Israel. The damage could have been catastrophic. As it turned out, almost all were intercepted.

That success was due to a combination of Israel’s sophisticated air-defense system and critical assistance provided by the U.S. and other Western and Arab partners. American, British and Jordanian warplanes played an especially important role in downing drones. Most of the Iranian drones and missiles were destroyed before they even reached Israeli airspace.

Whether Israel and its supporters can replicate that performance under the conditions of an all-out war—this weekend’s salvo from Iran, clearly telegraphed in advance, was the opposite of a surprise attack—is an open question, as is Israel’s ability to defend itself without outside help.

That is a key consideration as Israel and the U.S. consider responses to what is a new strategic reality, created by Iran’s first direct military attack on Israeli territory since the Islamic revolution of 1979. Israel’s war cabinet met in Tel Aviv on Sunday as the country’s leaders weighed their options, and Western officials said they believed Israel’s response could come quickly, as soon as Monday.

Striking back hard on Iranian soil could invite far more devastating retaliation. But not responding at all, or too weakly, could also erode deterrence, making Israel and others more vulnerable to future Iranian barrages.

“Iran has started a new phase. It has stopped hiding behind proxies and has now become exposed to a direct attack from Israel,” said Nadav Pollak, a former Israeli government analyst teaching at Reichman University. “Going forward, Israel is not going to be able to sit quietly and intercept everything.”

Interceptors, particularly the Arrow and Patriot systems used against ballistic missiles, are extremely expensive and are limited in quantity. The U.S. Congress, by stalling the military aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, has created an additional complication.

Saturday’s attack, which Tehran says was carried out in retaliation for a suspected Israeli strike on April 1 that killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers, including two generals, at an Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus, has used up only a tiny fraction of the Islamic Republic’s vast arsenal of drones and missiles.

Crucially, Tehran has also kept in reserve its Lebanese proxy force, the Hezbollah militia, which has thousands of missiles and rockets. And, while only a handful of Iranian missiles got through on Saturday, causing minor damage to Israel’s Nevatim air base, the Iranian military has drawn valuable intelligence from observing how Israeli and U.S. air defenses operate.

“Iran was testing the missile-defense system, the resolve of the regional countries, the resolve of the United States,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “Out of all of this comes a great risk. When two powerful parties engage in direct hostility, no one knows where this thing goes.”

The commander of the IRGC, Hossein Salami, portrayed the Saturday barrage as creating a new strategic equation: Every Israeli attack on Iranian interests in the region will be met with a direct Iranian attack on Israel. This is, of course, a red line that Israel, which has been fighting against Iranian proxies for decades, cannot accept.

As it considers its response, however, Israel must also weigh the interests of its Arab partners, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Despite popular anger over the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians during Israeli military operations in Gaza, Jordan and other partners helped Israel fight off Iranian missiles and drones on Saturday.

“Our regional partners stepped up despite six months of very significant tension between them and Israel, and between them and the United States as they begged the United States to do something to restrain the Israelis,” said Steven Cook, a Middle East analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Cook said that no matter how much countries in the region may dislike Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they dislike Iran’s government more.

Solomon adds his own analysis:

Iran’s attack brought into plain sight a conflict with Israel that’s played out largely in the shadows in recent decades. But as Tehran’s military reach and capabilities grow — including the near mastering of nuclear weapons technologies — Israeli military planners are debating whether any further delay in confronting Tehran directly will come at Israel’s peril.

[…]

Israel has watched Iran vastly grow its network of military proxies and partners — called the Axis of Resistance — to virtually encircle the Mediterranean country. The power of these armies has become brutally clear in the six months since the Palestinian military group Hamas, with Iranian money and arms, invaded southern Israel and killed 1,200 people. Iranian allies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria have sprung to life to back Hamas, often through strikes on Israeli and American targets. U.S. defense officials said these militias also took part in Saturday’s attack.

The sophistication of the Iranian axis’ weapons and tactics have also vastly improved. Saturday’s attack included ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as one-way attack drones that Iran has mastered building in recent years, and exported to allies globally. Iran and its most powerful regional ally — the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah — have also grown battle-hardened backing Syrian President Bashar al Assad in his war against internal opponents.

Current and former Israeli officials said this weekend that the prospect of a future Iranian attack using nuclear or chemical weapons-tipped missiles and drones shows the threat Tehran poses to their country’s long-term future. So while a counter strike might not happen this month, it will come at some point, they said.

[…]

Some foreign policy experts who’ve engaged with Iran questioned whether the country’s leadership was really seeking to inflict significant destruction in Israel. They noted that Tehran gave warnings for more than a week that Iran’s military intended to strike, and this included communications to the U.S. through Arab and European partners.

“Official and unofficial US-Iran back channel diplomacy…helped prevent this crisis from spiraling out of control,” wrote Suzanne DiMaggio of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has led back-channel discussions with Iran in recent years.

The evidence here is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, it’s quite likely that the Israel defenses—augmented by substantial external support—were more robust than Iran forecast. On the other, Iran did in fact warn of the strikes ahead of time and left assets in reserve. It’s plausible that Iran intended much more damage than was actually done and yet primarily intended this as a test run.

What is clear is that Iran and the United States have repeatedly demonstrated through their actions over a substantial period of time that they very much want to contain the conflict to nuisance levels. Neither has the slightest interest in crossing the threshold into all-out war.

It’s considerably less clear whether the Netanyahu government shares that reluctance. From their perspective, Iran is at war with Israel and has been for decades. They’re growing more powerful year by year and almost certainly have the capacity to become a nuclear power whenever they choose. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Israel ignored Biden’s warning and decided the time to dispense with the threat was at hand.

Monday Morning Tabs

Gotta clear 'em all!

Steven L. Taylor · · 28 comments

• Via ABC News: RFK Jr. says he has ruled out Libertarian run for president.
• Via NPR: If convicted this year, Trump could lose the right to vote for himself.
• Via TNR: The Shady Right-Wing Threats to Keep Biden Off Some State Ballots. Huh! Sounds awfully national to me! Who knew?
• See, also, WaPo: States warn Biden could miss ballot. Dems say exceptions have been made for GOP.
• Via WaPo: Small-time investors in Trump’s Truth Social reckon with stock collapse. I hear tell that there is a sucker born every minute.
• Meanwhile, via CNBC: Marjorie Taylor Greene won’t say what happened to her Trump Media stock.
• Via Axios: Latine is the new Latinx. No doubt, this means Democrats are doomed…or something.
• Vi a WaPo: Biden administration cancels another $7.4 billion in student loans.
• Via NPR: Florida blocks heat protections for workers right before summer. Because of course it did.

Tax Day Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 37 comments

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Iran Attacks Israel

Some initial thoughts.

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, April 14, 2024 · 41 comments

Via the AP: Israel says Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles, 99% of which were intercepted.

Booms and air raid sirens sounded across Israel early Sunday after Iran launched hundreds of drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in an unprecedented revenge mission that pushed the Middle East closer to a regionwide war. A military spokesman said the launches numbered more than 300 but 99% of them were intercepted. 

Calling the outcome “a very significant strategic success,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Iran fired 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles. Of those, several ballistic missiles reached Israeli territory, causing minor damage to an air base. 

Rescuers said a 7-year-old girl in a Bedouin Arab town was seriously wounded in southern Israel, apparently in a missile strike, though they said police were still investigating the circumstances of her injuries.

Note that the attack was forewarned by Iran (as reported by Axios, among other sources). This is in retaliation for Israel’s attacks on Iran’s Syrian consulate which killed several high-ranking Iranian military officials (see the BBC: Why has Iran attacked Israel?).

Some initial thoughts.

• This is a serious event, insofar as it is a clear escalation of the regional conflict and represents the first direct attack of its kind by Iran on Israeli territory.
• However, given the advanced warning and likely clear knowledge by Iranian officials that the attack would likely be dramatic but also toothless, I can’t help but think that the goals here were more about domestic Iranian politics than actual military goals.
• Iran is acting like it has done its thing and will not attack again unless there is a counterattack.
• Still, this is a dangerous game.
• On one level, I understand the Iranian need to retaliate for the attacks on their consulate. But I also have to wonder if this isn’t a major miscalculation insofar as it will strengthen US support for Israel at a moment wherein there was some domestic wavering.
• As a result, I would expect that the odds of action by the US Congres has radically increased.
• See also: Fox News, White House says US support for Israel is ‘ironclad,’ will ‘support their defense’ amid Iran attack.
• It will likely also strengthen Netanyahu’s domestic position.

Side note, nothing like a little silly propaganda by an authoritarian government (via the BBC):

Iran’s state TV repeatedly aired a video of a fire in Chile today, claiming that it was footage of missiles successfully hitting targets in Israel.

The clip, run several times during the live coverage of Iran’s retaliatory attack, shows a motorway in the foreground while a huge fire turns the night sky red. 

[…]

But the footage is neither recent nor related to Iran’s retaliatory attack against Israel.

The BBC has found the original version of the clip posted to TikTok in February, showing a fire in Vina del Mar, Chile.

More updates from the BBC here.

Lazy Sunday Tabs

Steven L. Taylor · · 13 comments

• Via The Atlantic: The Unrelenting Shame of the Dentist. The part of the piece that I really hit me was the upselling. I have long found it to be incredibly offputting that when you got to the dentist it feels like they are just looking for ways to squeeze some more money out of you. As the piece notes, it does not really feel like a medical visit.
• Via USAT: ‘Unprecedented’ and ‘stunning’ number of Trump administration alums oppose his reelection. The drip, drip, drip continues. But the real test is going to be how vocal they are all willing to be.
• Ross Douthat in the NYT: This Is Probably Not the Deal the Pro-Life Movement Bargained for With Trump.
• Via The Atlantic: The Country That Tried to Control Sex.

Sunday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 50 comments

Trump and the Politics of Abortion

The GOP caught the car and now doesn't know what to do.

Steven L. Taylor · Saturday, April 13, 2024 · 37 comments

I found this David French column in the NYT to be largely spot-on: The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Movement.

The traditional pro-life argument comes from different religious and secular sources, but they all rest on a common belief: From the moment of conception, an unborn child is a separate human life. Yes, the baby is completely dependent on the mother, but it is still a separate human life. The baby’s life isn’t more important than the mother’s — which is why the best-drafted pro-life laws protect the life and physical health of the mother — but it possesses incalculable worth nonetheless. Absent extreme circumstances, the unborn child must not be intentionally killed.

[…]

From that standpoint, the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in February holding that the state’s wrongful death statute applied to embryos frozen and preserved as part of the in vitro fertilization process should not have been surprising at all. If state law can declare an unborn child to be a separate human life, then of course that would apply to all unborn children, including those conceived as part of fertility treatments. Even though the embryos are frozen and exist outside the womb, they are still human — no less human than those created through conventional means.

But I have many pro-choice friends who would read the paragraphs above and scoff. They have good-faith disagreements about when an embryo or fetus becomes a “person” entitled to legal protection, and they disagree about the intentions of the pro-life movement. They argue that the pro-life movement is about power and control. It’s about seeking to constrain the choices women can make, to keep women in the home, and to maintain male dominance. The rhetoric about the value of all life and the rhetoric of self-sacrifice is a ruse. At the end of the day, the pro-life argument is a weapon to be wielded against people Republicans don’t like.

Without any doubt, the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision was absolutely the logical conclusion of the basic pro-life stance. Indeed, the IVF process itself is antithetical to the core of the pro-life position since the embryos do not all lead to births.

And yet, how did a lot of pro-life Republicans, including the governor and many legislators in my state of residence react?

Let’s review the events since the Alabama court’s decision. First, Alabama Republicans panicked. The Republican-dominated Legislature raced to pass a law that granted I.V.F. clinics sweeping immunity from the state’s wrongful death statute. Alabama also has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country. As my newsroom colleague Emily Cochrane politely put it, the vote “demonstrated the intense urgency among Republicans to protect I.V.F. treatments, even if that meant sidestepping the thorny contradictions between their pledge to protect unborn life and fertility treatment practices.” At the conclusion of I.V.F. treatments, unused embryos are often discarded and destroyed.

Moreover,

On Wednesday, Trump reversed his previous position supporting a 20-week ban on abortion; he announced that he would not support a national abortion ban if he wins the presidency, and he said the policy should instead be left up to the states. This is a traditional pro-life position, but only if you also urge states to use their autonomy to pass pro-life bills. Instead, Trump’s advice to voters was to “follow your heart” and “do what’s right for your family, and do what’s right for yourself.” It’s “all about the will of the people,” he said.

This is the most pro-choice position a Republican presidential candidate has taken since at least Gerald Ford.

This is 100% correct. If abortion is murder, which is the essential pro-life position, this cannot be about following one’s heart or just leaving it up to the states. As French notes, the only reason pro-lifers have been pro-states’ rights on this issue is that strategically they wanted Roe gone so that they could first get their way in conservative states and then do all that they could to make abortion illegal nationally. The argument that we should get rid of Roe to return the choice to the state legislatures was always (from an anti-abortion POV) a tactical move meant as part of a broader strategic goal of a national ban. If that national band could come about via a SCOTUS ruling or a federal law, then states’ rights be damned.*

As French notes:

So where is the Republican pro-life consensus today? Philosophically, the movement is breaking. There is no coherent pro-life argument for why a state should prevent women who become pregnant through natural means from destroying an embryo while protecting the ability of families who create an embryo through I.V.F. to either destroy it or keep it frozen indefinitely.

At the same time, poorly drafted abortion regulations have placed a terrible spotlight on conservative states, with many examples of punitive laws placing women who are suffering miscarriages and other pregnancy complications in profound danger. This harsh approach undermines pro-life arguments that the movement does, in fact, love both mother and child.

This also brings us back to something I quoted from French above,

I have many pro-choice friends who would read the paragraphs above and scoff. They have good-faith disagreements about when an embryo or fetus becomes a “person” entitled to legal protection, and they disagree about the intentions of the pro-life movement. They argue that the pro-life movement is about power and control. It’s about seeking to constrain the choices women can make, to keep women in the home, and to maintain male dominance. The rhetoric about the value of all life and the rhetoric of self-sacrifice is a ruse. At the end of the day, the pro-life argument is a weapon to be wielded against people Republicans don’t like.

I think that there is actually a great bit of truth to these critiques. I don’t think they tell the entire story, but it is very, very hard to look at what is unfolding before us and not see this as at least part of an overall truth.

I will pause here and note, as I have before at various times, that I used to be profoundly conservative in my religiosity. Indeed, there is some alternative universe in which present me would be more like David French in my intellectual and religious outlook than I currently am. Indeed, French and I are the same age and I have a pretty strong sense that we would have had similar views back in our youth. Weirdly, one of the main things that have profoundly affected my viewpoints is moving to Alabama and living here for almost 26 years but I just found out that French was born in Opelika, AL, which is less than an hour from where I sit typing these words.

I suppose I am one of the odd Americans who has changed my mind on a number of key topics, and abortion is one of them. Some time ago I came to the conclusion that individuals should be able to make this choice for themselves. Moreover, the profoundly horrifying stories of women who have had to endure terrible medical circumstances post-Dobbs have only confirmed this position.**

Indeed, as I look retrospectively I remember a me who thought it was all pretty straightforward. But that is simply not the case. And while I can hear any number of people say things like it is all so easy: simply don’t have sex outside of marriage! I know that reality is not that simple. Not by a long shot.

French’s column reminded me that I realized a long time ago that there was an internal contradiction in the notion that there was any room in a pro-life position for supporting exceptions for incest or for allowing room for IVF. If a fertilized egg is equivalent to a human being in the fullness of that notion then there is no room for a saying that an egg fertilized from rape or incest is morally different than an egg fertilized by any other means. The only morally acceptable exception, if one truly believes that a zygote is a human being with full rights is when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother because then you have to make a decision between the two (or, more likely, if the mother dies the zygote/embryo dies, too).

Beyond any of that, as sad as a miscarriage is, most people simply do not treat them the same way they treat the death of an infant. To be clear: I am not trying to minimize the pain of a miscarriage. But from a personal point of view, and based on personal experience, I would note that one of our children was originally a twin, but that one twin didn’t make it past a very early stage. My wife and I (and especially my wife) found this to be hard news. But I also can say that what grief we felt about that fact, was nothing compared to what grief we would have felt had that child been born and then died. I just know that to me it would not have been the same thing. Again, I say that fully acknowledging that many people suffer great grief over miscarriages and I am not trying to minimize it. I am simply noting that societally we do not treat miscarriages the way we treat the death of children after they have been born and that my own personal experience mirrors this fact.

From a theological point of view, I was always struck, too, that if the fetus is innocent, and yet has a soul, it goes to heaven, yes? Of course, if one is a Calvinist,*** some do and some don’t but that’s up to God, anyway (and in that case, it isn’t even about giving a specific person the chance to choose salvation or not). It is all, to me at least, a dog’s breakfast of weird contradictory, if not blatantly unjust, notions.****

At any rate, the point of all of this is to agree with French on a couple of levels.

The first is that yes, the pro-life position in the United States is rife with contradictions. Even French, whom I think to be principled on this issue, inadvertently admits he holds some contradictions:

I’m grateful for I.V.F. I have very close friends who conceived their children that way, but the law should not treat I.V.F. embryos substantially differently and worse than embryos conceived through natural means. But that’s exactly what the Alabama Legislature chose to do.

Again, if all embryos are human beings, IVF destroys some human beings. I am not sure how one can be deeply pro-life and be “grateful” for IVF. IVF and the pro-life position as defined by French himself strikes me as being clearly at odds with one another.

Ultimately I think that there are people who deeply believe that abortion is wrong. I also think that a lot of people who are opposed to legal abortion are actually more focused on stopping certain sexual behaviors than they are worried about pregnancies (let alone truly concerned about babies post-birth). I think, too, there is a clear patriarchal motivation behind quite a bit of this. Female autonomy is clearly feared by many. This is true whether they admit that to themselves or not.

Ultimately, we are also seeing here at least two clear political facts.

First, a lot of people do not think deeply about even their allegedly deeply-held “beliefs.” Instead, they are more malleable than they realize and often hold contradictory views when push comes to shove. Along these same lines, holding a specific view is often more a signifier about one’s partisan team than it is about really having reached those beliefs first and then choosing a team.

Second, elite behavior affects mass behavior. Trump’s foray into a pro-choice position (whilst couching in the magic words of “states’ rights”) is leading to supporters doing the exact same thing.

This reminds me of a niche meme some political science acquaintances like to share on Twitter:

This refers to the work of political scientist Philip Converse. A summary of one of his articles can be found here.

I would note the following as it pertains to this discussion (especially varying portions of 3-5):

Converse classifies voters into the following categories based on their understanding of basic ideological differentiation between ideas:

1. Ideologues: These respondents relied on “a relatively abstract and far reaching conceptual dimension as a yardstick against which political objects and their shifting political significance over time were evaluated” (p.216).
2. Near Ideologues: These respondents mentioned the liberal-conservative dimension peripherally, but did not appear to place much emphasis on it, or used it in a way that led the researchers to question their understanding of the issues.
3. Group Interest: This group did not demonstrate an understanding of the ideological spectrum, but made choices based on which groups they saw the parties representing (e.g. Democrats supporting blacks, Republicans supporting big business or the rich). These people tended to not understand issues that did not clearly benefit the groups they referred to.
4. Nature of the Times: The members of this group exhibited no understanding of the ideological differences between parties, but made their decisions on the “nature of the times.” Thus, they did not like Republicans because of the Depression, or they didn’t like the Democrats because of the Korean war.
5. No issue content: This group included the respondents whose evaluation of the political scene had “no shred of policy significance whatever” (p. 217). These people included respondents who identified a party affiliation, but had no idea what the party stood for, as well as people who based their decisions on personal qualities of candidates.

And, therefore,

Converse also found that the mass public does not seem to share beliefs in any predictable way with elites or that the voting patterns of the people at the lower end of the scale are following the patterns of the ideologues and near ideologues who have a firm grasp of the issues.

So, to use those classifications, most voters will just roll with these changes rather than reassess their partisan allegiance. At a minimum people, in the main, do not choose parties based on policies. Instead, they end up following their parties even as those parties change on specific policies (among other implications).

Of course, Trump can still claim the mantle of the Roe slayer, which helps him with the hardcore pro-lifers, but it doesn’t help him with a huge swath of the population, as French notes:

It’s no wonder, then, that the pro-life cause is in a state of emergency so soon after its greatest legal triumph, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It has lost every referendum since the Supreme Court decided Dobbs, including ballot measures in red states like Kentucky, Kansas, Montana and Ohio. Early polling indicates that Florida’s proposed pro-choice referendum may well cross the 60 percent threshold needed to pass and overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban. In fact, a majority of Republican voters appear to support the referendum.

Not to mention the lack of policy efficacy:

Even more ominously from a pro-life perspective, the abortion rate rose under Trump, and the total number of abortions has actually increased since the Dobbs decision.

I cannot think of a bigger “dog caught the car” moment than the GOP’s current dilemma with abortion.

*Just like with slavery, states’ rights in the abstract are not the issue. The slave states were pro-central government when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act, for example. Dred Scott was an anti-states’ right decision, for that matter.

**A few examples:

• Via the BBC: She was denied an abortion in Texas – then she almost died.
• Via NPR: New abortion laws changed their lives. 8 very personal stories.
• Via ABC News: Delayed and denied: Women pushed to death’s door for abortion care in post-Roe America.

***If I could pick one (and it is certainly more complicated than that) theological notion that utterly broke my brain in terms of my own theological views, it was Calvinism. Not only do I find key components of it, well, abhorrent, but if God has already determined who is saved and who isn’t, then what does any of this even matter?

****This paragraph probably only makes sense if you understand various aspects and variations of evangelical Christianity.

Some Polling Progress for Biden

The gap is closing in the latest NYT/Siena College Poll.

Steven L. Taylor · · 42 comments

Via the NYT: Biden Shrinks Trump’s Edge in Latest Times/Siena Poll.

Yes I, know, this is just one poll.

It is also a registered voter poll.

The states are what matter.

It is still early.

There are all kinds of caveats.

Still, this comports with what I think will ultimately be the tale of this election. Specifically: Trump has a ceiling and he has little chance of moving beyond it. As people get closer and closer to having to make an actual choice, a chunk of those undecideds will migrate to Biden.

I will feel admit that this assertion is a mix of analysis based on evidence and part of it is driven by hope.

Saturday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 69 comments

A Photo for Friday

"In Profile"

Steven L. Taylor · Friday, April 12, 2024 · 11 comments

“In Profile”

February 20, 2024

Pike Road, AL

TGIF Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 80 comments

Line of the Day

"State's rights" edition.

Steven L. Taylor · Thursday, April 11, 2024 · 29 comments

The only thing I can say for sure that this clip tells me is that someone has convinced Trump that just saying “state’s rights” over and over again vis-a-vis abortion will make the controversy go away.

Spoiler alert: that isn’t going to work.

Thursday Tabs

Some of these have been piling up for a while.

James Joyner · · 26 comments

• AP, “More than half of foreign-born people in US live in just 4 states and half are naturalized citizens.” When geographic profile maps are basically just population maps.
• Nate Silver, “Sonia Sotomayor’s retirement is a political IQ test.” Wherein a data scientist concocts elaborate indexes to demonstrate that a 69-year-old woman could die and that it matters.
• Daniel Pink, “Why not pay teachers $100,000 a year?” Because it would be really fucking expensive?
• CBC: “CSIS warned the Prime Minister’s Office in 2023 that China ‘clandestinely and deceptively’ interfered in [Canadian] elections.” It’s not just American elections that are being targeted.
• The Verge, “President Biden is now posting into the fediverse.” Well, someone on his staff is, anyway. Whatever the hell the fediverse is.
• NPR, “Japan will give new cherry trees to replace those lost in D.C. construction.” A 1912 gift from Tokyo has become a Capitol tradition.
• Antenna, “Do NFL Sign-ups Stick Around?” When people sign up for streaming apps in order to watch sporting events, they tend not to cancel at the first opportunity. A staggering 71% of those who signed up for Peacock for the AFC Wild Card are still paid subscribers. Ditto 68% of those whos signed up for Paramount + during the Super Bowl.
• Former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, “United States v. Apple (Complaint).” The government’s case against Apple is novel. My main takeaway is how often these cases come too late in a product cycle, just as the industry in question is about to shift.
• Former Random House executive managing editor Benjamin Dreyer, “If you’re still using these dated words, you’re not alone.” Not what I was expecting. It’s a column about words that hang on even though the technology that inspired them has not.
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “Stomach bug norovirus surges in Texas and US, causing vomiting, diarrhea.” I guess Texas really is a whole ‘nother country.

Faith In Democracy on the Decline

People around the world are more skeptical about governing institutions.

James Joyner · · 16 comments

When I saw the AP headline “Study finds voters skeptical about fairness of elections. Many favor a strong, undemocratic leader,” I was unsurprised. It left me unprepared for the lede:

Voters in 19 countries, including in three of the world’s largest democracies, are widely skeptical about whether their political elections are free and fair, and many favor a strong, undemocratic leader, according to a study released Thursday.

While democratic backsliding is, of course, a phenomenon with which I’m familiar, I was surprised at the extent to which it was impacting popular attitudes globally.

The report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, concluded that “democratic institutions are falling short of people’s expectations.” The 35-member organization promotes democracy worldwide.

”It is past time that people’s perceptions are centered in conversations about the future of democracy; this analysis is a small but important first step towards that effort,” the Stockholm-based organization wrote.

The surveys had a margin of error hovering around 2-4% and the number of respondents in each country was around 1,500. The sole exception was the Solomon Islands, where the small population meant they had a representative sample of 526 people, IDEA said.

A launch ceremony is scheduled for 1100 Eastern (1700 CEST), when I shall be boarding an airplane. Presumably, the full report will appear on the page soon thereafter. The 2023 report is here.

The methodology seems reasonable enough at first blush—although perhaps a bit too reliant on internet polling. And some of the questions are about satisfaction with life in general more so than about institutions.

In 17 countries, fewer than half of the people are satisfied with their governments, International IDEA found. The survey included three of the largest democracies — Brazil, India and the United States.

In eight countries, “more people have favorable views of ‘a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament or elections,’” the institute said, adding that India and Tanzania stand out as countries “with relatively high levels of support for a ‘strong leader.’”

In only four countries do “a majority feel they are doing better economically than their parents,” according to the 95-page study titled “The Perceptions of Democracy Survey.” It added that in the majority of countries, minorities are more doubtful about electoral credibility than others.

The poorest in Brazil, Colombia, Romania, and Sierra Leone, are more likely to approve of the government’s performance than the rest of the population, IDEA said.

When it comes to judicial systems, in 18 countries “fewer than half of the people believe that the courts ‘always’ or ‘often’ provide access to justice.” Iraqis have more faith in access to justice (28% ‘always’ or ‘often’) than Americans (26%). Denmark is the only country where a majority of people feel that courts often or always provide equal access to justice, said IDEA.

Its report was based on surveys made in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Gambia, India, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Lithuania, Pakistan, Romania, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, South Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania and the United States.

Even setting aside the validity of polling under repressive regimes, there are obvious baseline issues. While there are all manner of reasons to be skeptical about the US judicial system—elected judges at the state and local level, partisanship at the federal level, and disparities based on income and race come immediately to mind—it’s almost certainly fairer than Iraq’s. But our expectations are—not unreasonably—higher.

The survey also highlights what social scientists call performance-based legitimacy. While Westerners, and certainly Americans, are trained to think of these things in terms of institutional design and adherence to the rule of law, most people care more about outcomes than process. If the people feel relatively prosperous and safe, they don’t much care about the details.

Cancer Vaccine Looks Promising

Trials of mRNA treatments are going well.

James Joyner · · 10 comments

From a completely unrelated story, I was alerted to a stunning report in SEMAFOR (“Hopes rise for mRNA cancer vaccine after Moderna trial shows promise“):

Hopes for a successful cancer vaccine were boosted this week after pharma company Moderna announced that its mRNA cancer vaccine, which was developed to target melanoma, might also treat a form of head and neck cancer. Currently, mRNA vaccines are only approved for treating COVID, though researchers are racing to apply the technology to other diseases.

The development, which sent Moderna’s share price soaring, adds to scientists’ recent discoveries of more ways to use cutting-edge messenger RNA technology, expanding on the lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data from an early trial showed a greater overall survival rate for patients who took Moderna’s cancer vaccine alongside immunotherapy treatments, the pharma giant said.

The pandemic prompted the rapid advancement of mRNA vaccines, which give the body instructions for manufacturing bits of pathogens so that it recognizes them in future.

This is followed by snippets from the National Cancer Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Nature, and other highly credible sources. I’m combining them here for ease of reading.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm around mRNA right now,” a doctor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute said in 2022, during the COVID-spurred boom in vaccine development. mRNA vaccines beyond Moderna’s have shown promise in early trials, with researchers also reporting a positive response from patients with pancreatic cancer. An mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer recently showed promise in early clinical trials, seemingly reducing the risk of the cancer returning in patients who had surgery to address it.

“From a scientific point of view, we are entering the golden age of vaccines,” former Biden administration COVID response coordinator Ashish Jha told Axios last month, though he cautioned that we’re also entering a time of extreme vaccine hesitancy. “That contrast — that contradiction, almost — is very odd and we have a lot of work to do,” Jha said.

And mRNA innovations don’t stop at traditional medical development; machine learning researchers are using AI language models to decode mRNA and try to make more effective vaccines.

mRNA technology may also be able to treat propionic acidaemia, a rare, life-threatening metabolic disorder where patients can’t digest certain proteins and fats because they’re unable to produce the necessary enzyme. But the promising new drug from Moderna helps the body make that enzyme, raising hopes of a new class of drugs that could treat a wide range of conditions. A physiologist told Live Science the development was “very encouraging,” saying it provides hope for treating other similar diseases. However, physicians warned Nature that this development was just “a first step in the right direction.”

This is getting next to no play elsewhere. Indeed, the latest reports from AP and NYT mentioning mRNA at all are from last October, when Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work. WaPo reported that as well, of course, but also had a January 2024 report about the Florida surgeon general calling for an end to mRNA vaccines because, well, Florida. Reuters is touting the jump in Moderna stock prices but not the results themselves.

So, two things.

First and most obviously, caution is warranted. Moderna obviously has a huge stake in the outcome here and the announcement is already doing wonders for its stock prices. This is still early days in the trial. But it sounds promising, indeed.

Second, and more depressingly, it occurred to me even before I was reminded of the Florida story that, because of the hysterical politicization surrounding the COVID vaccines, we could wind up in a society where Democrats and blue staters are relatively free of the scourge of cancer while Republicans and red staters continue to die needlessly.

Arizona Republicans Block Abortion Ban Fix

They can't help themselves.

James Joyner · · 31 comments

So, yesterday, the news was full of stories like this one from Axios (“Republicans rush to distance from ‘”‘disaster’ Arizona abortion ruling“):

Republican lawmakers and candidates for Congress are scrambling to create distance between themselves and an Arizona Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday upholding a near-total ban on abortion in the state.

[…]

Driving the news: The Arizona court, which is composed entirely of Republican-appointed justices, ruled 4-2 that an 1864 law making it a felony to perform an abortion supersedes the 15-week ban state legislators passed in 2022.

• The 19th-century law provides exceptions only to save the life of the mother.

What they’re saying: Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), who represents a seat President Biden won in 2020, called the ruling a “disaster for women and providers” in a statement posted to social media.

• Ciscomani said the 15-week ban “protected the rights of women and new life,” but the territorial law is “archaic.”
• Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), another Biden-district Republican, said the issue “should be decided by Arizonans, not legislated from the bench,” urging the state legislature to “address this issue immediately.”
• Kelly Cooper, a Republican running to challenge Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.), called for the state legislature to “begin work immediately on reinstating” the 15-week ban.

Zoom out: It’s not just Arizonans weighing in to voice disagreement. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said she was “appalled” by the “Draconian” ruling, telling Axios: “Hard pass.”

• “This is an awful ruling,” said Biden-district Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.). “I care about the difficult choice women have to make, said I would reject a national abortion ban, and kept my word.”

Zoom in: Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told Axios he’s “counseled our members … [to] explain to your constituents what your abortion position is.”

• He added: “Democrats are spending a lot of energy and money lying about our positions, and I think in that case if you disagree with any ruling, you ought to be vocal about it.”

• A GOP strategist working on House races told Axios, “Republicans have been crystal clear where they stand, and they must continue to articulate their commonsense position.”

For those who hadn’t been paying attention, the Dobbs decision meant that the states were suddenly back in control of abortion policy for the first time in half a century and several states, including Arizona, had some very old laws on the books. (Although, in Arizona’s case, the 1864 law was actually reiterated in a 1973 law just after Roe‘s passage.) Arizona quickly passed a new law in the aftermath of Dobbs, but the Arizona Supremes ruled that, for highly technical reasons of statutory interpretation, the new law didn’t supersede the old one.

To the extent that the old law was a problem and Arizona Republicans wanted to replace a near-total ban with a ban after 15 weeks, the solution was quite simple: pass yet another law clarifying that contravening laws were hereby repealed. Easy. Peasy.

So, I wake up this morning to this from the NYT (“Arizona Republicans Thwart Attempts to Repeal 1864 Abortion Ban“):

A decision by Arizona’s highest court upholding an 1864 ban on nearly all abortions created chaos and confusion across the state on Wednesday. As abortion providers were flooded with phone calls from frantic patients, Republican lawmakers at the State Capitol blocked efforts to undo the ban, prompting angry jeers from Democrats.

Democrats, who seized on the decision to resurrect the 160-year-old ban as a pivotal election issue, tried to push bills through the Republican-controlled Legislature to repeal the ban, a move they said would protect women’s health and freedom, and also force Republicans to take a formal vote on the law.

But Republican leaders in the Senate removed one bill from the day’s agenda on Wednesday, legislative aides said. In the House, a Republican lawmaker who had called for striking down the law made a motion to vote on a Democratic repeal bill that has sat stalled for months. But Republican leaders quickly scuttled that effort by calling for a recess, and later adjourned until next Wednesday.

Democrats on the Senate floor yelled “Shame!” and “Save women’s lives!” as their Republican colleagues filed out of the chamber.

“I don’t see why we wouldn’t move forward,” said State Senator Anna Hernandez, Democrat of Phoenix. “Are they serious about this or are they not?” she said of the Republicans. “Are they just backpedaling when they realize they’re on the losing side of a policy battle?”

Despite the pressure from Democrats and some Republicans to undo the law, it was uncertain whether Republican leaders, who narrowly control both chambers of the Legislature, would allow any immediate action on proposals to repeal the ban.

Representative Teresa Martinez, a Republican and abortion opponent, criticized Democrats for trying to force a vote a day after the court’s ruling. She called their chants and shouts extremist and insurrectionist behavior.

“We do not want to repeal the pre-Roe law without first having a conversation about it,” she said in a floor speech. “There is no reason to rush on this very important topic. We must listen to all viewpoints thoroughly. We cannot do that when our colleagues are acting in the way they did this morning.”

The Senate president and House speaker, both Republicans, issued a joint statement emphasizing that the court’s ruling had not yet taken effect and probably would not for weeks, as the legal fight over the 1864 law heads back to a lower court for additional arguments over its constitutionality.

Sigh.

While the 15-week ban is controversial, it’s in line with policy throughout the developed world. Only 4% of abortions in this country (and 4.8% in Arizona) come after that point in the pregnancy. Indeed, 93.1% nationally (and 91.2% in Arizona) come by the 13th week. Essentially no one supports a complete ban, let alone one with draconian punishments for women. Yet these idiots can’t get out of their own way.

Thursday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 44 comments

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The Great Wealth Transfer!

As the Silents and Boomers die off, their assets will be redistributed.

James Joyner · Wednesday, April 10, 2024 · 20 comments

YahooNews senior editor Mike Bebernes ominously proclaims, “America’s ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ is underway. How will it impact the country?” It turns out to be something rather routine.

As a generation, baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, have done very well for themselves.

Blessed with the good fortune to have entered adulthood at the start of an era of exploding housing values and sustained stock market growth, the roughly 20% of Americans who fall into the boomer generation have amassed $80 trillion in cumulative wealth — nearly as much as all other living generations combined. With the oldest boomers now approaching 80, some of that wealth has started to be passed down to younger generations, marking the early stages of what’s become known as the “Great Wealth Transfer.”

In the coming decades, economists estimate that the children of boomers, most of them millennials born between 1981 and 1996, stand to inherit as much as $70 trillion to $90 trillion in real estate, stock, cash and other assets in the U.S. alone. It’ll be enough to make millennials “the richest generation in history,” according to one recent analysis.

So . . . old people are dying and leaving money to their kids? The horrors!

Yes, the oldest Boomers (including Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump) were born in 1946 and have or will turn 78 this year. The youngest, born in 1964, have or will turn 60; most of them should have a lot of years ahead of them. So, even though the Boomers were a huge generation, the transfer of wealth will be slow.

I’m also struggling a bit with Bebernes’ (actually, likely KnightFrank’s Liam Bailey‘s) math. The early Boomers presumably mostly had kids when they were in their 20s, so roughly 1966 to 1976. That would make the kids Xers, not Millenials. The parents of the oldest Millenials, assuming an average age of 25, would have been born in 1956 and just hitting retirement age.

Not everyone stands to benefit, of course. The wealthiest 10% of Americans hold the lion’s share of the country’s assets, so their heirs are in position to take in the majority of the wealth that will be passed down.

Sure. Then again, many of the super-rich, who hold a stunning share of the wealth, are relatively young and aren’t going to be transferring that wealth any time soon.

But that still leaves tens of trillions of dollars that will be transferred to the children of middle-class, and even some lower-class, boomers.

The amount of wealth that’s set to change hands is so massive — two or three times America’s annual gross domestic product — that experts say it will have an impact not just on the economy, but also on our culture and politics.

That strikes me as a stretch. Yes, it’s a ton of money. But it’s going to be transferred over a very long period of time. And, again, inheriting money isn’t something the Boomers invented.

Some experts view the Great Wealth Transfer as millennials’ best hope for making up the economic ground they’ve lost after enduring two recessions, the coronavirus pandemic and recent cost increases that have made things like homeownership increasingly out of reach. With their increased wealth, millennials — along with some Gen X-ers (born 1965 to 1980) and Gen Z-ers (born 1997 to 2012) — will have the buying power to shape the country to fit their tastes and political worldview.

Again, it’s going to be a long time before Millenials start inheriting money in drives. And I suspect most Xers who are going to buy a house have already done so.

But others fear that the Great Wealth Transfer will only serve to further entrench inequality by ensuring that only the children of the well-off benefit from the gains made by older generations. Many in that camp argue for stronger inheritance taxes to help distribute boomers’ wealth more equitably throughout the country.

Wealthy people put their assets into trusts to shield them from inheritance taxes. But, yes, families with the wealth to do so tend to invest a lot of money into their children throughout their lifetimes, giving them substantial advantages over those whose parents can’t do so.

Colonel Ralph Puckett, 1926-2024

A legendary soldier is gone at 97.

James Joyner · · 4 comments

Washington Post, “Ralph Puckett dies at 97; Army Ranger belatedly received Medal of Honor“

Retired Col. Ralph Puckett Jr., an Army Ranger who received the Medal of Honor in 2021, 71 years after the valiant combat actions in the Korean War for which he was decorated, and who became one of the most honored soldiers in U.S. military history, died April 8 at his home in Columbus, Ga. He was 97.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Jean Puckett.

At age 94, Col. Puckett traveled to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor, leaving behind both his wheelchair and walker to stand straight as President Biden draped the military’s top award for valor around his neck. The decoration for Col. Puckett was years in the making, championed by close and influential friends in the military community who wanted to upgrade his Distinguished Service Cross. He had been presented with the DSC, the second-highest award for valor, soon after a fierce battle on a Korean hilltop.

Starting on Nov. 25, 1950, then-1st Lt. Puckett and fellow soldiers with the Eighth Army Ranger Company assaulted and took command of Hill 205, frozen high ground about 60 miles from the Chinese border. It was near the outset of what became known as the Battle of Chongchon River, in which senior U.S. commanders were caught by surprise by China’s full-scale entry into the Korean War.

To succeed in his objective, he was credited with deliberately braving enemy machine-gun fire to help his men locate and kill a Chinese sniper.

The Chinese launched swarming wave attacks of small-arms and mortar fire for hours in bitterly cold temperatures. The American soldiers were outnumbered 10 to 1, according to Army accounts, but Lt. Puckett, despite being wounded by a hand grenade, helped his men defeat five successive Chinese counterattacks that stretched into the early morning of Nov. 26.

On the sixth Chinese counterattack, the Rangers were overrun after Lt. Puckett was told that further artillery fire was unavailable to support them. He and his men engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and Lt. Puckett suffered additional wounds from mortars that left him unable to move. He ordered his soldiers to abandon him to enable them to have a better chance of withdrawing alive.

Two privates first class, Billy G. Walls and David L. Pollock, carried him to safety. They later received the Silver Star for their valor in saving him.

In an oral history project, Lt. Puckett recalled seeing Chinese soldiers attacking U.S. service members with bayonets 15 yards away from him when Walls and Pollock arrived by his side. He said that he was glad the men disobeyed his order to leave him.

“I wouldn’t be talking to you today,” Lt. Puckett said. “They saved my neck.”

New York Times, “Col. Ralph Puckett Jr., Belated Medal of Honor Winner, Dies at 97“

Col. Ralph Puckett Jr., who was belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor in May 2021 for his exploits seven decades earlier, commanding vastly outnumbered Army Rangers in a battle with Communist Chinese troops during the Korean War, died on Monday at his home in Columbus, Ga. One of the most highly decorated servicemen in the history of the Army, he was 97.

[…]

In addition to the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest decoration for valor, Colonel Puckett held a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions during the Vietnam War, along with two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars and five Purple Hearts in his 22 years of military service.

In February 1992, he was inducted into the newly established Ranger Hall of Fame. Located at Fort Moore, Ga. (formerly Fort Benning), it honors members of a unit that continues to carry out some of the Army’s most dangerous missions.

In April 2023, President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea awarded his country’s highest decoration for bravery, the Taegeuk Order of Military Merit, to Colonel Puckett and two other veterans of the Korean War (one honored posthumously) on a state visit to Washington marking the 70th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korea bilateral alliance.

[…]

Colonel Puckett was hospitalized for 11 months but turned down a medical discharge and returned to combat in Vietnam.

In August 1967, serving as a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division, he earned the Distinguished Service Cross for having “exposed himself to withering fire” in rallying his undermanned unit to vanquish Viet Cong forces in a firefight near Duc Pho, South Vietnam.

When a man dies at 97, decades after retiring from his chosen profession, it’s seldom tragic. In Puckett’s case, he was still an active contributor right up until the end.

I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the man but a friend, a recently-retired Army infantry command sergeant major, met him a few times over the years, first as a young sergeant and shortly after his retirement. He recounts that Puckett would recognize him and call him by name despite his being quite junior and undergoing rather substantial change in appearance over time. Puckett was, until quite recently, a routine participants in activities at the Ranger School, marching alongside trainees younger than his grandchildren.

As I noted when he was awarded the Medal of Honor, he was also incredibly forward-thinking. For example, he was vocally supportive of the first women to undertake Ranger training.

We don’t deserve men like him. Every once in a while, we get one anyway.

Wednesday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 70 comments

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Warren: ‘Ample Evidence’ Israel Committing Genocide

When does humanitarian catastrophe become something more?

James Joyner · Tuesday, April 9, 2024 · 66 comments

POLITICO (“Elizabeth Warren says she believes Israel’s war in Gaza will legally be considered a genocide“):

Sen. Elizabeth Warren believes international officials could find that Israel’s assault on Gaza legally constitutes a genocide, she said during an event at a local mosque last week.

“If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so,” Warren (D-Mass.) said Friday while taking audience questions during an event at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts. A video of Warren’s comments posted on X by a GBH News reporter began circulating Monday. Warren’s office confirmed the senator’s remarks to POLITICO.

The video is embedded here:

Warren was asked about a ruling from the International Court of Justice that found it was “plausible” Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza, and about her own opinion on the matter. A spokesperson for Warren said in a statement to POLITICO Monday that the senator “commented on the ongoing legal process at the International Court of Justice, not sharing her views on whether genocide is occurring in Gaza.”

Warren has faced pressure from her left flank since the start of the crisis in Gaza. The progressive senator initially voiced full-throated support for Israel in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. But as international criticism built over Israel’s military response, far-left groups began protesting outside of her offices and Cambridge home, calling on her to advocate for a lasting cease-fire in Gaza and to stop further U.S. military aid to Israel.

Warren has grown increasingly vocal in her criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration in recent months. In January, she floated the idea of imposing restrictions on military aid to Israel, saying on X that the U.S. “cannot write a blank check for a right-wing government that’s demonstrated an appalling disregard for Palestinian lives.” In the wake of the Israeli drone strikes that killed seven aid workers last week, including a U.S.-Canadian dual citizen, Warren told CNN that Congress “has a responsibility to act,” and “cannot approve the sale of arms to a country that is in violation” of U.S. laws, including laws surrounding access to humanitarian relief.

At the mosque, Warren said the focus on the war in Gaza should go beyond a “labels argument.”

“For me, it is far more important to say what Israel is doing is wrong. And it is wrong,” she said. “It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend to your will. It is wrong to drop 2000-pound bombs, in densely populated civilian areas.”

Times of Israel (“US Sen. Warren: World Court has ‘ample evidence’ to find Israel guilty of genocide“) adds:

United States Sen. Elizabeth Warren believes Israel will be found guilty of genocide in the International Court of Justice, according to comments she made at a Boston mosque last week.

“If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so,” the Democratic senator could be seen saying in a video her staff posted to social media on Monday, in response to a question from the audience on whether she thinks “Israel is committing a genocide.”

[…]

Proceedings are ongoing in the ICJ, in The Hague, the Netherlands, to examine South Africa’s claim that Israel’s aerial and ground offensive in Gaza, launched after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, is aimed at bringing about “the destruction of the population” in the Palestinian enclave.

Israel rejects the accusations as false and libelous, saying it respects international law and has a right to defend itself after some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages amid wholesale acts of brutality and sexual assault.

Warren is a first-rate legal scholar, although one who specializes in bankruptcy law, not international humanitarian law. While I have substantial training in the latter, I’m by no means an expert and there’s frankly rather little precedent against which to judge this case.

The UN Office on Genocide Prevention provides this background:

Genocide was first recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 by the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/96-I). It was codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). The Convention has been ratified by 153 States (as of April 2022). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly stated that the Convention embodies principles that are part of general customary international law. This means that whether or not States have ratified the Genocide Convention, they are all bound as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law. The ICJ has also stated that the prohibition of genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (or ius cogens) and consequently, no derogation from it is allowed.

Israel is, in any case, a signatory to the convention (since March 1950), as is essentially every developed country on the planet save (for reasons I don’t know) Japan.

The definition of the crime of genocide as contained in Article II of the Genocide Convention was the result of a negotiating process and reflects the compromise reached among United Nations Member States in 1948 at the time of drafting the Convention. Genocide is defined in the same terms as in the Genocide Convention in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 6), as well as in the statutes of other international and hybrid jurisdictions. Many States have also criminalized genocide in their domestic law; others have yet to do so.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

They go on to emphasize that

The popular understanding of what constitutes genocide tends to be broader than the content of the norm under international law. [emphasis mine] Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:

1. A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
   • Killing members of the group
   • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
   • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
   • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
   • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.

Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted – not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial.”

The definition is incredibly unhelpful. It is impossible to wage a war and not “destroy, in whole or in part,” the adversary. It is inherent in the exercise. Hell, even if Israel were magically able to kill only Hamas fighters, leaving not a scratch—or even inflicting serious mental harm—on any other Palestinian, they would still be destroying part of a national group.

And, indeed, the Application from South Africa seems to demand that there be no killing at all.

. . . must cease forthwith any acts and measures in breach of those obligations, including such acts or measures which would be capable of killing or continuing to kill Palestinians, or causing or continuing to cause serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians or deliberately inflicting on their group, or continuing to inflict on their group, conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part . . .

This is sheer lunacy. While Israel has quite possibly committed war crimes by insufficiently protecting Palestinian noncombatants—and in cutting off electricity, food, and fuel to the civilian population–there is simply no question that it has the right to use military force against Hamas fighters in the wake of the October 7 massacre. None.

Conducting a war in a densely populated urban setting has, predictably, led to a humanitarian disaster. The ICJ has summarized the extent of the horrors ably.

While it’s quite arguable that Israel could and should have taken additional steps to mitigate said disaster, it’s simply indisputable that, if it had the intent to wipe out the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, it could easily have done so long before now. They have reportedly killed some 30,000 people, some significant number of whom were Hamas fighters and thus legitimate military targets. There are some 600,000 people in Gaza. That’s a humanitarian nightmare and, again, quite possibly a basis for war crimes charges. Genocide, however, is an absurd claim.

Tuesday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 65 comments

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Age Inversion in American Politics?

Suddenly, old voters are aligning Democrat and young ones Republican.

James Joyner · Monday, April 8, 2024 · 47 comments

POLITICO (“The polls are suggesting a huge shift in the electorate. Are they right?“):

Something weird is happening beneath the overall stability of the early 2024 polling — and it’s either a sign of a massive electoral realignment, or that the polls are wrong again.

Polls show former President Donald Trump is ascendant with the youngest bloc of the electorate, even leading President Joe Biden in some surveys, as less-engaged young voters spurn Biden. Meanwhile, Biden is stronger with seniors than he was four years ago, even as his personal image is significantly diminished since he was elected last time.

That would be a generational shift: For decades, Democratic presidential candidates have overwhelmingly won young voters, and Republicans have done the same with the other end of the electorate. Poll after poll is showing that’s flipped this year.

If these changes are real, it would have profound effects on the coalitions both campaigns are building for November. No Republican has won young voters since George H.W. Bush’s landslide victory in 1988, and no Democrat has carried the senior vote since Al Gore hammered Bush’s son, George W. Bush, on Social Security in 2000.

Or something’s wrong in the polls — and the mirage of an “age inversion” is really a warning sign of a structural problem in the 2024 election polling.

That would be a signal that the polls are once again struggling to measure the presidential race accurately after underestimating Trump in the previous two presidential elections. Maybe the young-voter numbers are wrong, and the polls are understating Biden; or maybe the older-voter numbers are wrong, and Trump is even stronger than he appears; or both.

“Seems like we know how to poll white, middle-aged people really well,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling for the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics and an expert on polling young voters. “But if they’re younger, older, Black, Hispanic — there seems to be no consensus about what’s the best practice these days.”

There’s a longstanding concern that, as most of us move away from landline phones to being cellular-only, polling will become less accurate. I, for one, have my phone set to automatically reject callers who aren’t in my phone’s contact list.

The thing is, despite a spate of columns arguing otherwise, polls have continued to be pretty damn accurate at predicting the outcomes of American elections. Thus, I’m inclined to believe that the “inversion” being shown in the polls is real and part of the larger sorting going on in our politics.

Just last week, a new NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College national poll showed Trump 2 points ahead of Biden among Millennial and Gen-Z voters, while Biden led overall among voters 45 years and older, including those in the Silent and Greatest generations.

That’s a weird framing. Silents (the generation Biden himself is in) were born between 1928 and 1945 and thus between 79 and 96 years old! The “Greatest” Generation were born between 1901 and 1927, and are thus between 97 and 123; there aren’t all that many of them left.

A Fox News poll last month showed Trump leading Biden among voters under 30 by a whopping 18 points in a head-to-head matchup — and by 21 points with independent and third-party candidates included.

I tend to dismiss Fox’s polls. And both of the cited surveys are of registered voters, thus without a likely voter filter. Still, to the extent others are showing the same thing, I’m inclined to think it’s a real phenomenon. Alas . . .

Not every poll shows a perfect age inversion.

Biden is at just 50 percent among voters under 30 in the Wall Street Journal’s national and swing-state polling. While that’s still about 10 points ahead of Trump, it’s a significant decline compared to the 2020 election — and roughly equal to his vote share among seniors, 48 percent.

A Quinnipiac University poll released last week had Biden 20 points ahead of Trump among voters under age 35, close to the president’s margin in 2020 according to exit polls and other estimates of voting subgroups. But that survey also had Biden ahead by 8 points among voters 65 and older, which would be a significant reversal from recent elections, when Republicans won older voters.

So, the polls are not particularly consistent on this. That may simply be a function of their using different age cohorts. Or the fact that the margin of error is very much higher for subsamples than for the whole polling sample.

On paper, it might seem like a good trade-off for Biden: Young people turn out to vote at significantly lower rates than seniors. According to census data, 48 percent of voters under age 25 participated in the 2020 election, compared to 73 percent of those between the ages of 65 and 74, and 70 percent of those 75 and older.

But winning over older voters doesn’t appear to be boosting Biden in the polls, which show him essentially neck-and-neck with Trump, with the Republican narrowly ahead in most swing states.

That’s just a non-sequitur. Expressing a preference and taking action are two different things. If the gains among old voters are roughly the same as the losses among the young, the way to bet is that this is a net gain in turnout.

Regardless, Nate Cohn is running with the inversion theme and has a cute explanation for it (“How ‘All in the Family’ Explains Biden’s Strength Among Seniors“):

Mr. Biden’s strength among seniors might be surprising, but the likeliest explanation is deceptively simple: At every stage earlier in their lives, many of today’s seniors voted Democratic. They just got older.

To understand why, consider Archie Bunker, the working-class “lovable bigot” from the 1970s hit sitcom “All in the Family,” and his TV family.

[…]

It’s not unreasonable if Archie is your image of an older voter. As recently as 15 years ago, every single voter over age 65 was born before the end of World War II and came of age before the cultural revolution of the 1960s that shaped the views of many baby boomers voters for a lifetime.

Archie’s generation was the only one that reacted to the 2008 nomination of Barack Obama by shifting right: A higher share of them voted for John McCain in 2008 than for George W. Bush in 2004.

But in 2024, Archie shouldn’t be your image of a senior. Archie would be 100 years old today; his generation, called the Greatest Generation, has almost entirely died. The generation that came after Archie’s — the conservative Silent Generation, who grew up during the popular Eisenhower presidency in the “Leave It to Beaver” 1950s — has mostly died, too. Just 20 percent of the Silent Generation is alive today.

Instead, you may be better off thinking of Michael and Gloria. They are boomers, and they would be in their 70s today.

As a result, today’s seniors bear little resemblance to those from 10 or 15 years ago. Today, Madonna is a senior. So are Ellen DeGeneres and Katie Couric. By Election Day, Magic Johnson will be 65. ​Even though they may not feel like older voters to you, these boomers are the new seniors.

All together, boomers will make up more than 70 percent of seniors in 2024, up from zero percent when Mr. Obama — himself a baby boomer — won the presidency in 2008.

It’s an obvious point but one that analysis often misses: age, income, and other categories aren’t static. The Silents and Greatest are quickly dying off and being replaced by Boomers and Xers in the older ranks. It’s natural that they’re going to have different ideological views than their parents and grandparents.

Likewise, while it’s hard for me to understand why Trump would be appealing to someone under 35, that young cohort has endured wave after wave of systemic shock, from the Great Recession to COVID. While Biden is trying to help with various policy proposals (like student loan forgiveness), he represents The Establishment in a way that Trump simply doesn’t.

A Chart to Ponder

Liquefied Natural Gas edition.

Steven L. Taylor · · 36 comments

Via the US Energy Information Agency:

I am no expert on fossil fuels or energy as a general matter. However, the data continue to show that, contrary to narratives from the Trump campaign and its supporters, the US is not cutting back. Indeed, the data continues to show the opposite of cutting back.

But, you know, why let facts get in the way of a narrative?

Monday Morning Tabs

Steven L. Taylor · · 3 comments

• Via Politico: Trump promises a ‘deal’ on abortion that will please everyone. It likely doesn’t exist. Narrator’s voice: “It definitely doesn’t exist.
• Via Axis: Trump: Would be a “great honor” to be jailed for gag order violation. Says guy who knows the odds of being jailed are near to zero.
• Via The Hill: Former GOP rep says Trump ‘appeals to the worst of us,’ calls on Biden ‘to recognize the moment’. He does indeed.
• Via The Hill: RNC chair: We’re ‘going to be in the room’ when votes are cast, counted in November.
• Via NBC News: Trump’s $50 million gala set to double Biden’s triple-president fundraiser. Now do their comparative legal costs…
• Via The Intelligencer: Melania Trump Is Back — But Maybe Not for Long.
• Via the AP: Former Trump officials are among the most vocal opponents of returning him to the White House. Familiarity breeds contempt, I guess.
• Via the AP: Rudy Giuliani can remain in Florida condo, despite judge’s concern with his spending habits.
• Via The Guardian: No Labels national director says he will vote for Joe Biden.

Will Biden’s Israel Policy Matter in November?

Many Democrats are worried about the fallout.

James Joyner · · 19 comments

POLITICO (“Democrats fear Netanyahu may have undermined Biden’s image among voters“):

When the Israel-Hamas war broke out six months ago, it represented the kind of global crisis that President Joe Biden told voters he is uniquely equipped to confront.

But as the U.S. struggled to prevent the conflict from spiraling into a humanitarian catastrophe, some of Biden’s close advisers and allies began worrying that rather than bolstering his image as an experienced global leader, the president’s steadfast support for Israel’s offensive risked further complicating his argument that the election is a choice between his competent moral clarity and former President Donald Trump’s chaos.

Those concerns have been echoed in a series of interviews and statements from prominent Democratic and Democratic-aligned senators, including Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders, in recent days. And they have been an unstated undercurrent to the White House’s decision this past week to issue a stark threat to Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu that U.S. support could evaporate without major changes following a strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers.

[…]

“It has undermined one of his most important assets against Trump,” Matt Duss, a former top foreign policy adviser to Sanders now at the Center for International Policy, said of Biden’s handling of the war up until this week. “Biden’s reputation was — agree or disagree with him — he’s a decent guy, he’s an empathetic guy, he’s an honest guy. But this policy has been a cruel policy.”

The Israel-Hamas conflict is not the first complex Middle East crisis to challenge Biden’s political and diplomatic skills. The White House faced mounting criticism in 2021 over its pullout from Afghanistan, with Biden facing questions over the planning as well as, more broadly, whether he was fulfilling his own pledge to be a force for global stability. His poll numbers stumbled badly and have never fully recovered.

The parallels are not exact, not least because U.S. troops are not involved in the war in Gaza. But nearly three years later, Democrats fear once more that the president is being hampered by his handling of a conflict overseas.

“I applaud President Biden for successfully urging Prime Minister Netanyahu to open another border crossing from Israel to allow robust delivery of humanitarian aid,” said Kaine, a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy. “But this was an obvious solution that should have happened months ago.”

Biden’s “current approach,” Kaine added, “is not working.”

[…]

Still, there is persistent worry in Democratic circles that the visceral images emerging from Gaza each day are denting enthusiasm among Biden voters. Most visibly, the worsening humanitarian situation has angered an important part of Biden’s base — young voters, Arab and Muslim Americans and progressives — outraged by the U.S.’s inability to stop the unfolding horrors. Biden now faces protests nearly everywhere he travels, as well as concerns that a Democratic Convention this summer will be consumed by voter anger in the streets.

There are also indications that Americans are souring on Biden’s handling of the conflict more broadly. Just 47 percent of Democrats approved of Biden’s Middle East strategy in March, according to a Gallup poll, down from 60 percent last November. Among independents, the president’s Middle East approval rating sat at 21 percent.

Those warning signs permeated Biden’s inner circle in recent weeks. One senior adviser, granted anonymity to discuss confidential conversations, said leading up to Biden’s confrontational call with Netanyahu on Thursday that there was worry Biden’s difficulty in controlling his Israeli counterpart could undermine his claim to steady competence in voters’ eyes, and elevate Trump’s arguments for projecting a brasher — if far more erratic — image on the world stage.

“I think there’s great awareness that the U.S. position [toward the war] has been damaging to its standing internationally,” said Ivo Daalder, CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Daalder, who is close to senior administration officials, added that up until now, Biden has viewed his support of Israel as a deep-seated principle. “But the fact is, Bibi has provoked him so much that he may finally change.”

WaPo‘s Karen DeYoung (“Six months into Gaza war, Biden confronts the limits of U.S. leverage“) adds:

International support for Israel in the immediate wake of Hamas’s invasion — which saw the killing of about 1,200 Israelis and the taking of around 250 hostages — has turned to outrage and charges of Israeli war crimes. To much of the world, the U.S. backing for Israel’s war effort has left the administration morally compromised, even complicit in the destruction and death.

At home, in what is already a contentious election year, Biden is stuck between a Republican Party demanding support for Israel at all costs, and increasing numbers of Democrats demanding he stop the steady stream of weapons sent to Jerusalem. His campaign stops are frequently disrupted by pro-Palestinian protests.

Administration officials maintain that things, as bad as they are, would be worse still had they not successfully pushed for changes in Israel’s war tactics, and persuaded Netanyahu to lift his government’s embargo on all supplies of food, water and fuel into Gaza. The negotiation that won a week-long cease-fire in November and brought about half the hostages home was a bright spot, one they had hoped would be followed by a longer and more significant pause in the fighting.

[…]

“The influence of any outside party — even one that has theoretically on paper an enormous amount of influence on Israel — is limited,” said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former diplomat who spent nearly three decades working on Israeli-Palestinian relations in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“The Middle East is literally littered with the remains of great powers who believed they could impose their limits” on the actions of those who live there, Miller said.

Many factors make this situation unique. Though Biden has had a complicated relationship with Netanyahu, the president is said to have a deep-seated, personal commitment to Israel that goes back to his first years as a U.S. senator. But Netanyahu “is trying to save his political skin by performative opposition to Biden in his approach to Gaza,” said Jeffrey Feltman of the Brookings Institution, who served as top official on the Middle East at the Obama administration’s State Department before becoming U.N. undersecretary for political affairs.

Losing U.S. support in the past “would be an almost insurmountable obstacle for an Israeli politician,” Feltman said. And unlike Washington’s prior interventions to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the United States has no leverage at all against Hamas, a terrorist organization that is still holding upward of 100 hostages, including a handful of Americans.

[…]

Miller, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, sees little way out for the administration. Asked where the war would be six months from now, with the U.S. election just weeks away, he said, “I would like to think the kinetic phase of Israel’s ground campaign is over. More hostages are out, more humanitarian aid is in. But you still can’t get around the reality that Israel is determined to kill the leadership of Hamas.”

I remain skeptical that Biden’s handling of this crisis will have much of an impact on November’s election. With rare exceptions, American voters simply don’t care much about foreign policy. While polls are great at showing the direction of sentiment, they typically don’t tell us much about intensity and salience.

The exception, perhaps, is Michigan, with its huge Arab population. Once a reliable Republican state, it has gone for the Democratic nominee in every election since 1992 except 2016, when it went incredibly narrowly (47.5% to 47.3%) for Trump over Hillary Clinton. It flipped back blue in 2016, going 50.6% for Biden and 47.8% for Trump. It’s possible that anger over what’s happening in Gaza could put the state back in Trump’s column.

In a rational world, the fact that Trump is considerably more bellicose in his support of Netanyahu than Biden should mitigate whatever damage the war has done. We do not live in that world.

Further, Miller is right: there’s really only so much Biden can do to shape Israeli policy. We could, I suppose, refuse to provide more military support. But, first, Congress may well not allow that to happen. And, second, that would likely be more politically damaging than the current stance.

Monday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 53 comments

It’s Not Rage, It’s Resentment?

Rural Americans are misunderstood!

James Joyner · Sunday, April 7, 2024 · 64 comments

Colby College political scientist Nicholas Jacobs, who last year co-authored a book with Columbia University Press titled The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, has a feature in POLITICO Magazine titled “What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything.” It’s long but, essentially, it argues that a competing book that misrepresents the literature is getting a lot of play.

The setup is long:

If you’ve been watching television or tracking trending topics over the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen or read something about “white rural rage.” This is owed to the publication of a new book, White Rural Rage, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, whose thesis is that white rural Americans, despite representing just 16 percent of the American electorate, are a “threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Schaller gave this unvarnished assessment of the rage he sees overflowing in the heartland. Rural whites, he said, are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” He called them, “the most conspiracist group,” “anti-democratic,” “white nationalist and white Christian nationalists.” On top of that, rural whites are also “most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”

This premise has triggered a backlash towards rural voters from some on the left. Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, said she’s tired of handling rural voters “with kid gloves,” and time has come to pop the “racist, homophobic, sexist bubble” they all live in. Daily Beast columnist Michael Cohen agreed, writing that “these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.” David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief at Mother Jones, piled on, agreeing that “white rural voters [are] the slice of the public that endangers the constitutional future of the republic.”

This latest obsession with rural rage is nothing new. After 2016, when rural voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania put former President Donald Trump over the top, Democrats tried to figure out why they had gone so sour on the Democratic Party. Some liberal thinkers called out the left’s reflexive condescension and dismissal of rural voters that escalated during the George W. Bush administration and peaked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her dismissal of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Some said the party should increase attention to rural issues and nearby rural communities.

But don’t be misled. The publication and widespread celebration of White Rural Rage among progressive circles is doing something different than those post-2016 post-mortems. It is not an attempt to understand the needs and concerns of rural America. Instead, it’s an outpouring of frustration with rural America that might feel cathartic for liberals, but will only serve to further marginalize and demonize a segment of the American population that already feels forgotten and dismissed by the experts and elites.

The people doing the work of protecting democracy in rural America recognized this immediately. The morning of the MSNBC interview, I woke up to a mountain of messages and threads from rural organizers, community activists and local officials from across the country. Each one was distressed over what they considered the authors’ harsh and hurtful accusations about the communities they cherish and strive to uplift.

What seemingly set apart this book is that the authors claimed to have data backing up their assertions. “We provide the receipts,” Schaller said in the interview. What is their data, my friends and colleagues asked, and why do they get it so wrong?

Imagine my surprise when I picked up the book and saw that some of that research was mine.

Hmm.

I’m an academic who studies rural Americans and lives in rural Maine. My job and passion is to pore over reams of data, including some of the largest surveys of rural voters ever conducted. Sitting on my computer are detailed responses from over 25,000 rural voters that I have conducted over the last decade and used to publish a range of peer-reviewed and widely cited research. And I’ve done it all largely to make sense of why rural voters are continually drawn to the Republican Party.

But the thing about rage — I’ve never found it.

The problem with this “rage” thesis is much larger than the fact that my research, and that of others, is being misinterpreted and misunderstood. What the authors are getting wrong about rural America is exactly what many Democrats have been getting wrong for decades — and appear to be doing so again in this critical presidential election year.

While I’m also a political scientist, I’ve followed this debate mostly through the media over the last eight years or so and certainly see plenty of evidence for the rage thesis. But, it turns out, Jacobs is making what at first seems like a semantic argument but is really something different.

Academics can and do disagree on what is motivating non-college-educated whites to vote for Donald Trump. I don’t pretend that we have settled on a single answer. I do know that there is something particular about Trump’s appeal in rural America and that demographics alone do not explain it. In rural America, women are more likely to vote for Trump; so are young people; so are poor as well as rich. Place matters.

But ruralness is not reducible to rage. And to say so is to overlook the nuanced ways in which rural Americans engage in politics. They are driven by a sense of place, community and often, a desire for recognition and respect. This, as I have recently argued in a new book, is the defining aspect of the rural-urban divide — a sense of shared fate among rural voters, what academics call a “politics of place,” that is expressed as a belief in self-reliance, rooted in local community and concerned that rural ways of living will soon be forced to disappear.

In recent years, that rural political identity has morphed into resentment — a collective grievance against experts, bureaucrats, intellectuals and the political party that seeks to empower them, Democrats.

Yes, such resentment is a real phenomenon in rural areas. But words matter; rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms. Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize.

This comports very much with my own understanding of what’s happening—indeed, going well before the rise of Trump. There’s a longstanding view, that we saw at least as far back as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in 1992, that “real Americans” and their values are being increasingly marginalized.

This is, in one sense, a combination of sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. But those labels are too dismissive and, indeed, compound the problem. The society is changing at a rapid pace, highlighted and exacerbated by modern communications technology.

Research both by me and by others has illuminated how resentment is driven by the complex rural identity that, while occasionally intersecting with national political currents, is rooted in the unique context of rural life. Rage, both as a soundbite and as presented in the book, oversimplifies and misrepresents these debates. And so does the assumption that all the holders of these views are white, and that this rage is motivated by racism. Racism exists in all parts of the country and is embedded in American politics. But what the research shows is that while there are deep and persistent racial resentments in rural communities, despite a slight correlation between the two, rural resentment is an attitude distinct from racial prejudice.

The link is to a September 2022 article in Political Research Quarterly Jacobs co-authored with B. Kal Munis titled “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide.” I don’t have time to dissect it but the Abstract says this:

Drawing on a unique battery of questions fielded on the 2018 CCES and in two separate surveys—one in 2019 and the other during the 2020 election—we study the extent to which Americans feel animus toward communities that are geographically distinct from their own and whether these feelings explain Americans’ attitudes toward the two major political parties and self-reported vote choice. We report results on how place-based resentment predicted vote choice in the 2018 midterm and 2020 general elections and how those feelings relate to other widely studied facets of political behavior such as partisanship and racial resentment. Rural resentment is a powerful predictor of vote choice in both election years examined.

A January 2023 review essay by NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall (“The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs“) cites that article and several others:

In her groundbreaking study of Wisconsin voters, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prompted a surge of interest in this declining segment of the electorate. She summed up the basis for the discontent among these voters, saying, “It had three elements: (1) a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, (2) a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources and (3) a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”

David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, described how the urban-rural partisan divide was driven by a conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s in his book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.”

[…]

In retrospect it is clear, Hopkins goes on to say, that “the 1992 presidential election began to signal the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”

Hopkins compares voter trends in large metro areas, small metro areas and rural areas. Through the three elections from 1980 to 1988, the urban, suburban and rural regions differed in their vote by a relatively modest five points. That begins to change in 1992, when the urban-rural difference grows to roughly 8 percentage points and then keeps growing to reach nearly 24 points in 2016.

“For the first time in American history, the Democratic Party now draws most of its popular support from the suburbs,” Hopkins writes in a 2019 paper, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992-2018.” Democratic suburban growth, he continues, “has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”

[…]

Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University whose research — presented in “The White Working Class” and “Majority Minority” — focuses on cultural and class tensions, has a different but complementary take, writing by email that the rising salience of cultural conflicts “was accelerated when the Clinton administration embraced corporate neoliberalism, free trade and moved Democrats toward the economic center. Many differences persisted, but the so-called third way made it harder to distinguish between the economic approaches of Democrats and Republicans.”

[…]

One of the dangers for Democrats, Gest continued, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and white-adjacent members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”

Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis, political scientists at Colby College and Utah Valley University, argue that mounting rural resentment over marginalization from the mainstream and urban disparagement are driving forces in the growing strength of the Republican Party in sparsely populated regions of America.

In their 2022 paper “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide,” Jacobs and Munis contend that an analysis of voting in 2018 and 2020 shows that while “place-based resentment” can be found in cities, suburbs and rural communities, it “was only consistently predictive of vote choice for rural voters.”

In this respect, conditions in rural areas have worsened, with an exodus of jobs and educated young people, which in turn increases the vulnerability of the communities to adverse, negative resentment.

[…]

In their 2022 paper “Symbolic Versus Material Concerns of Rural Consciousness in the United States,” Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Zack Crowley, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, sought to determine the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.

Trujillo and Crowley conclude that “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” Stands on what they call symbolic issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”

While rural America has moved to the right, Trujillo and Crowley point out that there is considerable variation: “poorer and/or farming-dependent communities voted more conservative, while amenity- or recreation-based rural economies voted more liberal in 2012 and 2016,” and the “local economies of Republican-leaning districts are declining in terms of income and gross domestic product, while Democratic-leaning districts are improving.”

The Trujillo-Crowley analysis suggests that Democratic efforts to regain support in rural communities face the task of somehow ameliorating conflicts over values, religion and family structure, which is far more difficult than lessening economic tensions that can be addressed through legislation.

[…]

A May 2018 Pew Research Center report, “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” found large differences in the views and partisanship in these three constituencies. Urban voters, according to Pew, were, for example, 62 percent Democratic and 31 percent Republican — the opposite of rural voters, 54 percent Republican and 38 percent Democratic. Fifty-three percent of those living in urban areas said rural residents have “different values,” and 58 percent of those living in rural communities said urban residents do not share their values. Sixty-one percent of those living in rural communities said they have “a neighbor they would trust with a set of keys to their home” compared with 48 percent in urban areas.

[…]

Those whom [Saint Joseph’s University sociologist Maria] Kefalas and [her late husband Patrick J.] Carr defined as “stayers” shaped “the political landscape in Ohio, Iowa, etc. (states where the public university is just exporting its professional class).” The result: “You see a striking concentration/segregation of folks on both sides who are just immersed in MAGA world or not,” Kefalas wrote, noting that “people who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don’t know anyone who supports Trump or won’t get vaccinated. It’s not open warfare. It’s more like apartheid.”

Urban-rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.

Geographic barriers between Republicans and Democrats — of those holding traditional values and those choosing to reject or reinterpret those values — reinforce what scholars now call the calcification of difference. As conflict and hostility become embedded in the structure of where people live, the likelihood increases of seeing adversaries as less than fully human.

That’s a long way of saying that Jabobs makes a strong point here: the scholarly literature presents a picture of something that 1) long predates Trump, 2) is way more complicated than rage, racism, or the like, and 3) is rooted in real grievances.

Back to Jacobs’s POLITICO essay:

I sympathize with the idea that, as Schaller and Waldman and many other commentators have pointed out, in terms of policies, Democrats arguably do more for rural areas and rural residents than Republicans do. After Democrats passed Obamacare, rural residents stood to gain the most in states that expanded Medicaid, but two-thirds of uninsured rural residents missed out because they lived in states that refused to expand coverage — and those states were almost exclusively governed by Republicans. Paul Krugman is often quick to point out that “ because rural America is poorer than urban America, it pays much less per person in federal taxes, so in practice major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside.” And it is true that the Biden administration is currently overseeing billions in new federal spending that is disproportionately going to rural communities across America.

So, the problem Democrats haven’t been able to solve isn’t policy; it’s politics. And Democrats who give in to the simplistic rage thesis are essentially letting themselves off the hook on the politics, suggesting that rural Americans are irrational and beyond any effort to engage them.

That would be a massive mistake, one that does truly threaten democracy. Democrats have an opportunity to do better in rural America. We need them to do better, not because Democrats’ policy fixes are always the solution, but because our political system only works when competitive elections hold officials accountable. One-party dominance throws the system off-center, misrepresents interests, sows distrust.

So, this is frustrating, right? Democrats are objectively offering up and even passing programs that are trying to address the grievances rural Americans have and are being thwarted by Republican politicians whose interests are served by stoking the grievances. And it’s Democrats who need to change?!

Given that these folks may well hold the key to the swing states, probably so.

The first step for Democrats is to start thinking — and talking — about rural America right.
Reading White Rural Rage won’t help with that. The authors have no expertise in rural issues and conducted no original research for the book. They approached the topic as journalists and committed the same errors countless reporters have made when they share with the outside world what they saw from a few days traversing some small town in “ flyover country” — an occurrence all the more routine as local newspapers in rural America shutter.

So, we have some resentment of a different sort here. Which, like the other, is understandable: painstakingly-researched university press books by scholars presenting original data tend to get less public traction than those written by media hacks.* The Rural Voter, at 488 pages and doubtless replete with hundreds of footnotes and complicated data presentations, is likely a less scintillating read than a popular press (Random House) book written by professional storytellers weaving together a narrative from secondary sources. And, of course, being a columnist for the Washington Post is a hell of better platform for promoting a book than an assistant professorship at a liberal arts college. Especially when the book plays to the prejudices of other columnists and talk show hosts.

The authors of White Rural Rage make two persistent types of error in analyzing the data on rural Americans.

First, they routinely fall victim to the logical fallacy of composition when they attribute group characteristics to individuals. For example, they suggest that since authoritarianism predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries, and rural residents support Trump, rural residents are the most likely to be authoritarian. (That’s like concluding that because Massachusetts tends to vote Democratic, and Massachusetts is a wealthy state, wealthy people must vote Democratic … but the opposite is true.)

As it happens, the opposite seems to be true in this case as well; leading authoritarian experts find no geographic dimension to growing authoritarianism in the U.S., and the study the authors cite early in the book to “prove” that rural residents are “more likely to favor violence over democratic deliberation” says nothing about violence, or deliberation or authoritarianism. Work by scholars they cite actually shows the opposite, too: Rural residents are less, not more, likely to support political violence.

I must admit, that’s a result I find highly counterintuitive. Rural areas, certainly in the Deep South, have long been associated with “honor cultures,” which tend toward violence to defend against perceived disrespect.

This same logical fallacy comes into play when they weave together a string of facts about Christian nationalists: Because white evangelicals are most likely to support Christian nationalist beliefs, and because 43 percent of rural residents identify as evangelical, they assert that the hotbed of Christian nationalism is in rural communities. The same goes for their assertions about QAnon. Perhaps the worst guilt-by-association error is found right in the title; even in the reddest of rural counties, 20 to 30 percent of voters — still largely white — routinely support Democrats. One might ask why, given all the supposed rage, are some rural Americans still voting for Democrats, election after election? You wouldn’t know it from the title or press tour, but Schaller and Waldman must frequently hedge their bets in the text, acknowledging that just a minority of rural residents often believe the most headline-grabbing factoid.

I’m not sure I understand this objection. Is anyone arguing that all rural Whites are enraged and voting Republican?

The second persistent error is that they cite polling data with little attention to issues of quality, which less sloppy scholars would question to make sure their conclusions were valid. For instance, some of the most salacious data points on race and immigration are taken from polls with just a few dozen rural residents; anyone trained in statistics would recognize that is too small a sample size to consider the result representative or reliable. The “birther” claim they like to throw about — that rural residents are more likely to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States — comes from a “study” by a polling firm called Public Policy Polling, a firm with dubious credentials that not only seems to exist primarily to lampoon conservative voters, but that also, in this case, drew results about “rural America” from just two states.

And I’m not cherry-picking examples. I’ve reviewed every publicly available survey and poll the authors use, have published my concerns on each one here, and have concluded that only two surveys in the entire book conform to basic standards of survey research and even attempt to try and present an accurate picture of rural America.

So, this is damning. One presumes this is a function of 1) the authors having a preconceived thesis and 2) the dearth of high-quality polling on the matter. Since the available low-quality polls mostly supported their thesis, they were obviously right.

What’s more, the rage thesis conflicts with findings from more rigorous research. As recently as January of this year, my colleague Dan Shea and I searched for exactly these types of attitudes. Interested in whether President Joe Biden’s campaign message about democracy being on the line would resonate with rural voters, we tested the hypothesis, drawing on a representative sample of rural voters.

Bottom line: The “threats” to democracy just aren’t there. Our research found that just 27 percent of rural voters — including 23 percent of rural Trump voters — think that if the opposing candidate wins in November, “people will need to take drastic action in order to stop [Biden or Trump] from taking office.” That’s the exact same proportion — 27 percent — as voters in urban and suburban areas who hold the same view. Nor are rural voters more likely than urban voters to say that the opposing party is a “threat to the future of America;” while 38 percent of rural Trump voters strongly believe that about Democrats, 36 percent of nonrural Biden voters think that same thing about Republicans.

To be sure, 27 percent isn’t a negligible number of people in a country of 330 million. But the threats to democracy that lurk in America are not specific to rural areas. Importantly, and often overlooked by the rage peddlers, is the flip side of those numbers — that more than 60 percent of both sets of voters, a strong majority of Americans, both rural and urban, do not hold those attitudes.

This shoddy analysis and faux expertise does real damage. It is clear that the overwhelming portrayal of rural America as angry and irrational feeds into and amplifies the divisions between rural and urban Americans, overshadowing the shared challenges and aspirations that cut across these geographic lines.

So, on the one hand, this is a fair criticism. In a vacuum, it makes no sense to say rural American rage is a danger to democracy when we find exactly the same proportion of folks living in urban and suburban areas saying the same thing. On the other hand, we have rather considerable evidence, with the Capitol Riots as the most obvious example, of MAGA types engaging in actual politically-motivated violence.

Here’s some of what the research, properly understood, does tell us about rural America.

Rural communities, much like disadvantaged neighborhoods in urban areas, are more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions, a challenge compounded by the closure of local hospitals and a shortage of health care providers. Rural economies often struggle with limited employment opportunities and infrastructure deficits, issues that should resonate with many post-industrial urban areas facing similar challenges. Additionally, educational disparities persist across the U.S., with rural schools facing funding shortfalls and teacher shortages that parallel urban struggles to provide equitable educational opportunities.

And it is this divide I find particularly troubling — that so many rural and urban areas suffer from similar ailments but remain politically divided. It is not one solved by the new rage peddlers.

I don’t think Waldman and Schaller claim they’re solving a problem, merely pointing one out. Still, to the extent they’re misrepresenting the problem, they’re pointing us in the wrong direction for solutions.

I can anticipate the frustrated Democratic response: “We tried to give them what they want, and they continue to vote against their interests.” Waldman said as much in 2022: “One thing you absolutely cannot say is that Democrats don’t try to help rural America. In fact, they probably work harder at it than Republicans do.”

I agree, to a point. Rural voters do not give Democrats credit for much good. And rural voters may indeed support policies and politicians that seem, from an outside perspective, to undermine their own economic interests.

However, that is exactly what a focus on resentment helps us to understand. This is not rage against the people trying to help. Nor is it an excuse. Resentment, instead, asks us to consider how rural voters’ choices are frequently rooted in values and place-based identities that place a strong emphasis on self-reliance, local control and a profound sense of injustice regarding the lack of recognition for rural contributions to society.

There is no “mystery” to it. Rural Americans often prioritize their way of life over immediate economic gains that are often promised (and not always delivered) by policy solutions. My research suggests that their perceived resistance to certain policies, and especially a political party that advocates for a multitude of governmental correctives, is a complex reaction stemming from years of economic transition, dislocation and yes, harm from policies they were told would help.

Again, my amateur understanding of the problem is roughly the same as Jacobs’ expert analysis. While I’m decidedly not like these people in so many ways—as evidenced by having moved far away to find better professional opportunities—I’ve been around enough of them to understand their deep sense of place, interspersed with family ties, cultural values, and the like.

Those values are absolutely under assault and have been for a very long time. But I don’t see how Democrats—who hold different values—can fix that problem. Sure, avoiding blunt talk about “deplorables” and “clinging to God and guns” would be helpful at the margins. But, if the core values of the party are about diversity, equity, and inclusion then they are diametrically opposed to rural values, which are inherently about, well, clinging to a vision of America rooted in an increasingly distant past.

Pushing for full equality for LGBTQ folks can certainly be done in a way that doesn’t insult traditionally-minded folks. Calling them bigots and homophobes is simply going to make them defensive. But, at the end of the day, pushing for full equality for LGBTQ folks inherently clashes with the deeply-held values of rural America. There’s just no way around that.

Sure, “Hollywood didn’t kill the family farm and send jobs overseas. … College professors didn’t pour mountains of opioids in rural communities,” as Schaller and Waldman write. But rural people do know that federal agriculture and trade policies pushed by Democrats and Republicans did destroy many rural economies. Rural people do know that liberal elites stood by as rural students became one of the least likely groups to attend college, and one of the most likely to drop out. So they benefit from Obamacare and vote against it; can rural people contain multitudes, too?

But liberal elites have been the ones pushing the “everybody needs to go to college” mantra since, what, 1945? The problem, aside from going to college generally requiring leaving the rural areas and being increasingly expensive, is that higher education is increasingly at odds with rural values. It’s always been the case that education pushes toward modernization and away from traditional thinking. But, as rural and urban/suburban values diverge, that pressure is exacerbated.

Taken as a whole, rural voters are not merely reacting against change — be it demographic or economic. They are actively seeking to preserve a sense of agency over their future and a continuity of their community’s values and social structures. Some might call this conservatism, but I think it is the same thing motivating fears of gentrification in urban areas, or the desire to “keep Portland weird.” Place matters for a whole bunch of people — but especially for rural folks.

Sure. But all of these efforts tend to fail. People with money will be able to buy up older downtown buildings and renovate them, pushing up property values and pushing out those who can’t afford the taxes. As places like Portland and Austin become more desirable, folks with money will move there from around the country and they will homogenize. Rural areas are likely more resistant to change but, as noted earlier, that tends to result in a brain drain wherein those with the most talent move to where they can actually get ahead.

There’s a great lyric in Blackberry Smoke’s “One Horse Town”

In the tiny town where I come from
You grew up doing what your daddy does
And you don’t ask questions you do it just because
You don’t climb too high or dream too much
With a whole lot of work and a little bit of luck
You can wind up right back where your daddy was

Those who want more have to saddle up their pony and leave.

Consider the fact, as I discuss in my book, that rural Americans are the most likely to say that if given the chance, they would never want to leave their community, while at the same time they are the most likely to say that children growing up in their specific community will have to leave in order to live productive lives. Could any single policy solve that dilemma?

Nope.

Instead of a politics that seeks to understand and represent these contradictions, the left wants to simplify ruralness into something it’s not. In the immediate aftermath of 2016, blaming rural people was a way to make sense of the surprise of Trump’s election. 

But this, of course, goes both ways. When Republicans lose, they blame California. Indeed, they do it even when they win. In 2016, they responded to people pointing out that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by some 3 million votes by saying, “Yeah, but that’s just because of California,” as if residents of our most populous state don’t count.

There is a general tendency among the readers of the New York Times and viewers of MSNBC to think about politics in purely transactional terms: We give you these benefits, you give us your votes. And rural voters, as Waldman is right to note, aren’t living up to that supposed bargain.

But this flies in the face of what research on resentment actually tells us. For many rural residents, the solutions they seek may not always come neatly packaged as government policies, white papers or policy briefs pumped out of a campaign war room. I’ve found that resentments exist because self-reliance and local problem-solving is intrinsic to rural identity, and self-reliance is something by nature resistant to government policies emanating from Washington, D.C.

While I, again, sympathize with this assessment of the situation the fact of the matter is that these people actually aren’t self-reliant. By definition, being self-reliant means not needing to be propped up by support from the taxpayer.

What rural communities may desire are empowering strategies that allow them to shape their own future — support that bolsters local leadership, encourages community-driven initiatives and provides the tools and resources necessary for them to address their specific challenges in a manner consistent with their values. That isn’t rage, nor is it a threat to democracy.

Sure. But nobody is claiming that these desires (however they might be met) are a threat to democracy. They’re worried that the attitude that those who don’t share their values aren’t real Americans and that their votes therefore shouldn’t count is a threat to democracy. And, again, there’s a hell of a lot of evidence for that position.

Shockingly, there’s still a whooooole lot more to the feature. But I think you get the idea.

While Jacobs is persuasive that “White Rural Rage” is a misdiagnosis of the problem, I’m more than a wee bit skeptical that the Democratic Party can somehow effectively respond to the grievances of rural America without abandoning the core values of their own base. The gap between the two is a canyon, not a fissure.

UPDATE: Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper has a related piece in The Atlantic titled “An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America.”

White Rural Rage is a screed lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the authors appeared on Morning Joe, the book inspired an approving column from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, and its thesis has been a topic of discussion on podcasts from MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and the right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk. The book has become a New York Times best seller.

It has also kindled an academic controversy. In the weeks since its publication, a trio of reviews by political scientists have accused Schaller and Waldman of committing what amounts to academic malpractice, alleging that the authors used shoddy methodologies, misinterpreted data, and distorted studies to substantiate their allegations about white rural Americans. I spoke with more than 20 scholars in the tight-knit rural-studies community, most of them cited in White Rural Rage or thanked in the acknowledgments, and they left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.

White Rural Rage illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits. That this book was able to make it to print—and onto the best-seller list—before anyone noticed that it has significant errors is a testament to how little powerful people think of white rural Americans. 

Ouch.

UPDATE II: See also my December 2009 post “Ressentiment Creep,” a reaction to a coinage by Julian Sanchez. The phenomenon in question is decidedly not new.

*Which, incidentally, is grossly unfair to Schaller. While he’s probably best known for his time as a columnist for the Baltimore Sun (2007-2016), he earned his PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina in 1997 and has been a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County since 1998. His major scholarship is on partisanship and is certainly pro-Democrat.

Biden Could Be Left Off Ohio Ballot

But almost certainly won't be.

James Joyner · · 7 comments

ABC News (“Biden could face challenges getting on Ohio general ballot“):

There could be potential general election ballot access concerns for President Joe Biden in Ohio, the state’s Secretary of State’s office said in a letter to Ohio Democratic Chair Liz Walters on Friday.

In the letter, obtained by ABC News, legal counsel for Secretary of State Frank LaRose sought clarification for “an apparent conflict in Ohio law” between the Democratic National Committee’s nominating process and the deadline by which the party’s presidential nominee must be certified to the Secretary of State’s office.

The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to convene on Aug. 19, which will take place more than a week after the Aug. 7 deadline to certify a presidential candidate in Ohio, the office flagged according to state code, which would create a problem for Biden’s eligibility.

“I am left to conclude that the Democratic National Committee must either move up its nominating convention or the Ohio General Assembly must act by May 9, 2024 (90 days prior to a new law’s effective date) to create an exception to this statutory requirement,” legal counsel Paul Disantis wrote in the letter, requesting a quick response on a solution to become compliant with state law.

The Ohio Democratic Party confirmed to ABC News that they received the letter and are in the process of reviewing it.

Copied on the letter were top Ohio Democrats: Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo and Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio.

Now, as. practical matter, Biden is unlikely to win Ohio, so it’s probably a moot point. While the state, rather remarkably, voted for the national winner in every contest between 1976 and 2016, it voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 and is very likely to do so again.

Still, it’s absurd that the nominee of one of our two major parties—and the sitting President, no less—would be left off the ballot because the party convention took place after some absurdly early deadline.

The obvious instinct here is to chalk this up to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose being a Republican and thus trying to tip the scales in favor of his party. But 1) the deadline is one set by the state legislature and 2) he’s calling everyone’s attention to the problem four months before the deadline so that the issue can be resolved.

Nor, it turns out, does it appear that the Ohio legislature intentionally screwed over the Democrats here. It’s a longstanding provision in Ohio law and the Columbus Dispatch notes in its report that,

In 2020, both major parties scheduled their conventions for after Ohio’s deadline, which requires the nominee names 90 days before the election. Knowing this glitch was in the offing, state lawmakers in 2019 added a one-time change, shortening it to 60 days before the election.

My next thought was that the August 7 date is an artifact of a time when the party conventions were earlier. A quick Google search reveals these dates for party conventions:

• 2008: Democrats August 25-28, Republicans September 1-4,
• 2012: Republicans August 27-30, Democrats September 4-6
• 2016: Republicans July 18-21, Democrats July 25-28
• 2020: Democrats 17-20 August, Republicans August 24-27
• 2024: Republicans July 15-18, Democrats August 19-22

So, no, their being held before August 7 is a rarity; it’s only happened once in the last five cycles. It does appear, however, that the Democrats are gaming the system this year, putting their convention a month after the Republican convention rather than the next week, as is customary.

By the way, the order is set by a longstanding custom: The party that holds the White House holds its convention second.

The obvious solution here is for Ohio to move their deadline a month, to September 7, which would have accommodated all of these nominations). Alternatively, they could change the law to allow the parties another means of certification. There has not been a contest in the primary era where both parties’ nominees weren’t known well before August 7.

Regardless, I’m confident that President Biden will appear on Ohio’s ballot this year. Most likely, the state legislature will issue another “one-time” fix. Otherwise, I can’t imagine the courts would allow this to stand.

Sunday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 12 comments

Nope Labels

Who could have seen this coming?

Steven L. Taylor · Saturday, April 6, 2024 · 14 comments

Via Dan Balz at WaPo (No Labels wanted a centrist ticket. Polarization, Trump stood in the way.):

For decades now, various politicians have sought to tap into and energize what they see as a moderate middle of the electorate into a viable political movement. For decades, those efforts have come to naught. The latest evidence came a few days ago after No Labels — formed as a bipartisan, centrist organization — gave up its search to field a presidential ticket for 2024.

The quest by No Labels was premised in part on the idea that many Americans are dissatisfied with having to choose between President Biden and former president Donald Trump, the two oldest candidates ever to run for president and, combined, the least popular. In that environment, some thought there was an opening for an independent alternative, and some polls lent credence to the idea.

The effort, however, was doomed almost from the start by perceptions that a No Labels ticket would become a spoiler, with no chance of winning the election and every chance of helping to reelect Trump. 

Let me start with the Trump part and then move on to the broader picture (I don’t really address his polarization angle, but largely agree with them–go to his piece to see those). Yes, there were concerns that a No Labels candidate could help Trump. I am not sure I fully even bought that argument, but that is speculation anyway because it is hard to know the answer to that question without even knowing who the candidate was. However, I will confess that I have some sympathy for the position of preferring fewer third-party candidates in this cycle so as to make the choice as stark as possible.

Having said that, the main problem for NL was not Trump (or even polarization), it was the mushy, unclear nature of their goals and the bottom-line fact that there was no one they were going to find to run who was going to have any chance of success.

There simply isn’t this magic route to Centerville wherein a Moderate Centrist is able to draw from the left and right and then win. This is the pundit class’s fantasy about the fiscally conservative and socially liberal candidate who can square the circle and bring balance to the Force.

This is not how it works.

Balz provides the following description of this fantasy:

The concept of a moderate middle of the electorate has long existed. Some politicians have called it a “sensible center” or a “radical middle,” as if it were some kind of sleeping giant within the electorate just waiting to be awakened by the right idea or a charismatic leader.

Two thoughts. First, when I think of he “sensible center” I do not think of charisma. Second, if you movement thinks that the thing it needs to launch itself is a “charismatic leader” then the product must not be all that great.

Inherent in this thinking is the notion that there is a robust middle and that dissatisfaction with the Rs and the Ds as reflected in polling (such as this poll from Gallup from last year: Support for Third U.S. Political Party Up to 63%).*

But Balz rightly notes:

But many who call themselves independent actually lean toward one party or the other and vote loyally as a result — 81 percent, according to a 2019 Pew Research study. As the study said, “Independents often are portrayed as political free agents with the potential to alleviate the nation’s rigid partisan divisions. Yet the reality is that most independents are not all that ‘independent’ politically.”

That same study also underscored the lack of coherence among true independents. Fewer than 10 percent of Americans were labeled as fully independent, according to Pew, and this group “has no partisan leaning.” Beyond that, they were seen as less engaged politically — less likely to be registered to vote and less likely to vote if registered.

That is hardly a broad or stable foundation upon which to build a centrist movement.

Indeed.

I would note that while voters frequently state that they wish they had better choices, their ultimate behavior does not demonstrate that those preferences are especially intense. If Democrats, in the main, truly wanted a different candidate, the primaries would have been a different story. Voter behavior versus stated preferences, is ultimately what matters.

I may sincerely prefer something other than one of the two meals in the refrigerator. But the proof of exactly how much I really don’t want to eat either is my willingness to go to the trouble of cooking something else/being willing to leave the house to obtain a different option.

I may sincerely prefer a third movie to watch, rather than the two you rented from the video store, but if I want to watch a movie and I am unwilling to get in the car to go get another one, I am stuck with what you’ve brought to watch. **

I heard an analyst on NPR this morning state that No Labels wanted a “bipartisan” candidate. This type of analytical framing is a great example of how even someone smart about American politics can be captured by the narratives of American politics. This tracks with No Label’s own language of wanting a “unity candidate”–with the “unity” clearly being between Ds and Rs. The notion that No Labels (or any third party) should be seeking a candidate with “bipartisan appeal” is so captured by the notion that our system is binary that it misses the point that a third party ought to be forming its own partisan identity. It should be a truly new party. Yes, such a party might draw from the voting pools that currently go R or D, but the bottom line remains that as long as third party attempts (and fantasies) are largely conceived of somehow just borrowing parts from the two mainline parties, it just shows how deeply we cannot get beyond the duopoly.

At the most basic level: if we are going to continually talk about a new party in terms of “bipartisanship” then we are demonstrating that we don’t really understand what a true new party should and could mean.

I would note, too, that we only really have this conversation around the presidency in any serious national way. To be honest, this is really not about forming parties, as much as it is providing labels to what amount to various independent candidacies. I will caveat that by noting that the Libertarians, Greens, and a few others do attempt to run at the local level. But that is the extent of serious attempts at third-party formation, and they are pretty anemic in comparison to party systems elsewhere.

Consider the fact the No Labels wasn’t really offering, even at the fantasy level, anything especially new. It was, let’s get a moderate Democrat (Joe Manchin) to run. Or, let’s get a moderate Republican (Larry Hogan) to run. That isn’t creating a new alternative vision for America. It is just hoping that people will vote for leftovers instead of for the main dishes that they claim not to like (but will end up consuming with some level of gusto when the table is set).

While I understand, from a simplistic understanding of the median voter theorem, that many moderate Democrats should, in theory, prefer Manchin to Biden (and certainly to Trump) because of ideological proximity and that if Biden is more liberal that Manchin (he is, but not radically so, I would argue) then if the distribution of voter is more towards the moderate middle than the mildly center-left then a lot of voter should prefer Manchin. Likewise Hogan should appeal to more moderate Reps and even some centrist Dems.

But this overestimates the degree to which voters simply pick the person most closely linked to their precise point on a simplistic ideological spectrum. First and foremost, reality really isn’t a simple spectrum from left to right (and people also have multiple issues that they care about–and therefore we are talking spectra, not a single spectrum). Second, the calculation of who can win comes into play, and being the incumbent president (or a previously sitting president) kind of matters. Third, there is a panoply of other variables, like the fact that Manchin pissed off (that’s the technical term) a lot of Democrats for his behavior in the Senate, Hogan doesn’t exactly have a magnetic personality, and is not widely known, and so forth.

There is also the pesky way we elect the president. For a third-party candidate to win, that candidate would have to be able to not just appeal to the theoretical center of the country as a whole, but to the specific centers of multiple states, each of which has a different left-right distribution than the country as a whole (sometime wildly so).

I would be moderately more sympathetic to these appeals to theories of the median voter if we had a national popular vote with plurality winners or even a run-off system. The mechanics of the Electoral College really cut against viable third-party candidates, despite the fact that the Framers thought that there would be a bunch of candidates and the House would have to choose. But, as I have noted many times, it never worked the way they thought it would (see, for example, How Hamilton saw the Electoral College).

*I, for one, support the notion of a third party. I would like to see more options. But that also does not mean I am going to vote for a third-party candidate in 2024 just for the pleasure of doing so. Ultimately, most voters will behave just as I will, whether they think very deeply about it or not.

**This example brought to you via a wormhole in spacetime from the year 1993. I rejected a similar time warp example of which of the shows that were on TV in 1976 you had to choose from.

US Preparing for Iranian Retaliatory Strike

The dance continues.

James Joyner · · 7 comments

CNN (“US preparing for significant Iran attack on US or Israeli assets in the region as soon as next week“):

The US is on high alert and actively preparing for a “significant” attack that could come as soon as within the next week by Iran targeting Israeli or American assets in the region in response to Monday’s Israeli strike in Damascus that killed top Iranian commanders, a senior administration official tells CNN.

Senior US officials currently believe that an attack by Iran is “inevitable” – a view shared by their Israeli counterparts, that official said. The two governments are furiously working to get in position ahead of what is to come, as they anticipate that Iran’s attack could unfold in a number of different ways – and that both US and Israeli assets and personnel are at risk of being targeted.

A forthcoming Iranian attack was a major topic of discussion on President Joe Biden’s phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday.

As of Friday, the two governments did not know when or how Iran planned to strike back, the official said.

A direct strike on Israel by Iran is one of the worst-case scenarios that the Biden administration is bracing for, as it would guarantee rapid escalation of an already tumultuous situation in the Middle East. Such a strike could lead to the Israel-Hamas war broadening into a wider, regional conflict – something Biden has long sought to avoid.

It has been two months since Iranian proxies attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria, a period of relative stability after months of drone, rocket and missile launches targeting US facilities. The lone exception came on Tuesday, when US forces shot down a drone near al-Tanf garrison in Syria. The drone attack, which the Defense Department said was carried out by Iranian proxies, came after the Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus.

“We asses that al-Tanf was not the target of the drone,” a defense official said Tuesday. “Since we were unable to immediately determine the target and out of safety for US and coalition partners, the drone was shot down.”

This is a bizarre dance but one that’s been going on for more than four decades. The parties are at war in all but name but none want it to escalate to catastrophic levels.

Iran, like so many others in the region, is vying for power and influence. The use of proxies (most notably Hezbollah and Hamas but there are many others) and irregular forces (the IRGC and its Quds Force) are their primary military tools. They’ve killed hundreds of Americans over the years, including at least 608 in Iraq alone. It’s less clear how many Iranians we have killed, directly or indirectly, but likely more given our support for Iraq during the decade-long Iran-Iraq War.

Israel’s targeting of Quds Force leadership is perfectly reasonable and, indeed, presumably expected. But that doesn’t mean Iran won’t respond. Even totalitarian regimes have domestic politics and they can’t be seen to let Israel get away with the attack. Israeli leaders are fully aware of this. The question is whether it will be a proportional response or one that seriously escalates the shadow war. My strong guess is the former.

Saturday’s Forum

Steven L. Taylor · · 28 comments

A Photo for Friday

"Rising"

Steven L. Taylor · Friday, April 5, 2024 · 4 comments

“Rising”

February 22, 2024

Pike Road, AL

If Inflation is Down, Why Are Prices Up?

Shockingly, most people aren't economists.

James Joyner · · 51 comments

WSJ’s Grep Ip: “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data.”

In The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll of swing states, 74% of respondents said inflation has moved in the wrong direction in the past year.

This assessment, which holds across all seven states, is startling, sobering—and simply not true. I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year.

In the 12 months through February, inflation, according to the century-old consumer-price index, was 3.2%, compared with 6% a year earlier. Use a slightly different time horizon, or a slightly different measure (such as the index the Federal Reserve prefers) and you get similar results. Take out food and energy—or for that matter look only at food and energy—and inflation is still down.

So, on the one hand, Ip is right. Inflation is definitely down from a year ago. Were I asked that question, I would have answered it “correctly.” I’m a trained social scientist, follow the news incredibly closely, and am thus understand what the question means.

But I don’t blame the 74% who got the answer “wrong.” This isn’t a case where “feel” something that just ain’t true. No, ask a normal person whether inflation has “moved in the wrong direction,” they aren’t going to compare rates but rather directions. And, since prices are noticeably higher, it’s moving in the wrong direction.

People, almost surely wrongly, expect that an end of inflation means that prices should be going down. And, hey, it happens sometimes. Gas prices are in fact down from where they were a year or so ago (but higher than they were a month or so ago). Egg prices, too, have gone down. But all sorts of things are still much higher priced than they used to be.

Indeed, Ip acknowledges this later in the piece. Sort of.

It’s tempting to chalk this up to a misunderstanding. Lower inflation means the level of prices is still rising, just more slowly than before. People sometimes conflate inflation with the level of prices and believe inflation is getting worse because the price level keeps going up (it rarely goes down).

A recently released Brookings Institution study by Harvard University economist Stefanie Stantcheva sheds light on exactly how people think and feel about inflation. It found that half of respondents defined inflation correctly, as rising prices. The other half defined it incorrectly, mentioning such things as “price gouging” or “overpriced everything.” So, some people might conflate high prices with high inflation. But enough to explain our survey results? Doubtful.

I mean, if nothing else, this explains roughly 50%. That means we just have to explain 24%. And, again, an instinctive answer isn’t necessarily a rational one. If folks had been asked “Is the rate of inflation higher or lower this year compared to last?” we’d have a much better gauge of understanding the thing Ip is trying to understand.

By 47% to 41%, more Journal poll respondents think their investments or retirement savings went in the wrong direction in the past year—a period in which the stock market roared to record highs, home values held steady or rose, and interest on savings went up.

The average customer retirement account at mutual fund giant Vanguard grew 19% last year. True, that didn’t make up for the 20% decline in 2022, especially after inflation. But it hardly qualifies as the wrong direction.

By more than 2-to-1 (56% to 25%), respondents said the economy had gotten worse rather than gotten better over the past two years. That is difficult to square with robust employment growth, unemployment near its lowest in half a century, or growth in gross domestic product, which actually accelerated last year.

So, look, we have to factor negative partisanship, the Fox News effect, and all manner of other things into the polling data. But, as the just-passed Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explained, humans are naturally much more loss-averse than is rational. The massive rise in prices—followed by the massive hike in interest rates to combat inflation—was a crushing blow to people’s investments and retirement savings. Any money in a savings account was suddenly worth significantly less than it was. Homes, which are most people’s only source of wealth, were suddenly much harder to sell. For that matter, buying a cheap retirement home in Florida or some other warm, low-tax state suddenly became out of reach for millions.

It’s not at all unreasonable, then, that people factor that into to their reaction to polling questions that gains in the stock market, much less the GDP. Indeed, I follow this sort of thing much, much more closely than something like 95% of Americans and I couldn’t tell you what the GDP is without Googling it.

Again, Ip seems to acknowledge humans aren’t homo economicus before expecting that they should be:

To be sure, inflation and shortages were severe from 2021 through early 2023 and the improvement in the data since might not have been enough to erase those bad memories. Still, there is evidence people actually do notice things getting better around them. Surveys by the University of Michigan, for example, find consumer confidence has risen.

Moreover, while respondents rate the national economy as bad by a significant margin, they rate their own state’s economy as good by almost as much.

This is reminiscent of how voters tend to assign low marks to Congress but high marks to their own representatives. But the definition of a good Congress depends a lot on your politics, whereas the definition of a good economy ought to be somewhat objective. Everyone (except a few central bankers) wants lower unemployment. And swing states’ economies have largely tracked the nation’s.

I’m closer to homo economicus than most. I’m analytical by nature, reinforced by training. Nor do I watch Fox News or listen to right-wing podcasts and the like. But my impressions of the economy are still far more based on my personal experience than broader trends.

So, for example, I’m aware of the unemployment figures and welcome low unemployment. But, so long as my wife and I maintain our jobs, that really doesn’t much factor into my sense of how things are going. Like most, I’m irrationally aware of fluctuations in gas prices. I’m pretty well aware of grocery prices, especially meat prices, as I do most of the grocery shopping. I know that the price of new and used cars is still radically higher than it was two or three years ago. Ditto restaurant prices, even at the sort of places where I might go grab lunch.

And another thing: my sense of time on these things is much more vague than my sense of direction. I suspect that’s true of most people. So, polling on “the last year” is likely not to line up very well with the actual data. It’s just not how we’re wired.

Finally, at the point of the column where most would have stopped reading, Ip gives us this:

All of this suggests that the bad vibes about inflation and the economy are interlaced with a deeper pessimism about the country—what I’ve previously called “referred pain.”

Stantcheva’s study shows that inflation evokes broader feelings of injustice. People tend to believe that prices rise faster than wages, that companies raise prices because they can but don’t raise wages because they don’t have to, and that the rich always do better with inflation. (Those things are true at times but not over long periods of time.)

Stantcheva told me that, while inflation clearly generates bad feelings, bad feelings about the country or the economy might make them more pessimistic about inflation. For instance, her study finds that, whereas economists associate lower unemployment with higher inflation, the public believes weak growth, high unemployment and high inflation all go together. As one survey respondent said: “To me, inflation is when the economy is more than just hurting. It’s when it’s too tough just to keep positive.”

This is well outside my professional expertise but it rings true to me. Human beings are complicated creatures. Our perceptions are based on a whole lot of things, not just the data economists collect.

Biden Ratchets Up Pressure on Israel

A two-level game where unconditional support has conditions.

James Joyner · · 13 comments

The White House (“Readout of President Joe Biden’s Call with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel“):

President Biden spoke by telephone with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The two leaders discussed the situation in Gaza. President Biden emphasized that the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable. He made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers. He made clear that U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps. He underscored that an immediate ceasefire is essential to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians, and he urged the Prime Minister to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home. The two leaders also discussed public Iranian threats against Israel and the Israeli people. President Biden made clear that the United States strongly supports Israel in the face of those threats.

That’s the whole readout.

WaPo (“Biden warns Netanyahu the situation in Gaza is ‘unacceptable’“):

President Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday that the United States would reassess its policy toward the war in Gaza if the Jewish state does not take immediate steps to address the disastrous humanitarian situation in the enclave and protect aid workers.

“In the coming hours and days, we will be looking for concrete, tangible steps that they’re taking,” said White House spokesman John Kirby.

[…]

It marked the first time Biden has indicated a willingness to reassess his unwavering support of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, as pressure grows among prominent Democrats to condition weapons sales to Israel as the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 33,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The president’s rhetoric has grown increasingly sharp regarding Israel’s handling of the crisis, but until now he had not directly warned Israel of consequences if it does not change course.

It also marked a rare moment in recent decades when the United States has suggested its support for Israel was anything but unconditional.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated the message in Brussels on Thursday. And Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a close Biden ally and a staunch supporter of Israel, said the United States is “at that point” where conditions must be placed on military aid to Israel.

The changing dynamic comes as Israel plans to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where up to 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering in decrepit conditions after fleeing there under Israeli orders. U.S. officials have warned Israel against a major campaign in Rafah that would endanger numerous civilians.

“If Benjamin Netanyahu were to order the [Israel Defense Forces] into Rafah at scale … and make no provision for civilians or for humanitarian aid, I would vote to condition aid to Israel,” Coons said on CNN. “I’ve never said that before. I’ve never been here before.”

Despite the explicit warning, the White House offered no details about how it would assess whether Israelhad complied with Biden’s demands, or how U.S. policy could change if the administration determined it had not done so.

“If we don’t see changes from their side, there will be changes from our side,” Kirby said. “But I’m not going to preview what that might look like.” He declined to say whether Washington might suspend military aid to Israel.

Among the changes Biden wants to see, Kirby said, are “a dramatic increase in humanitarian aid getting in, additional crossings opened up, and a reduction in violence against civilians.” He added that the United States expected to see Israel not just “announcing” changes, but “executing” and “implementing” them.

Later Thursday, Israel announced initial steps to address Biden’s demands. They included opening the Ashdod port for direct delivery of aid into Gaza; opening Israel’s Erez crossing to help facilitate the delivery of aid into northern Gaza, where law and order has collapsed and aid groups have warned that famine is already underway; and increasing aid deliveries from Jordan.

NYT (“Israel to Add Gaza Aid Routes as Biden Hinges Support on Civilian Protection“):

President Biden threatened on Thursday to condition future support for Israel on how it addresses his concerns about civilian casualties and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, prompting Israel to commit to permitting more food and other supplies into the besieged enclave in hopes of placating him.

[…]

The statement was the sharpest the White House has issued on Israel’s conduct in the six months of its war against Hamas, underscoring the president’s growing frustration with Mr. Netanyahu and his anger over this week’s killing of seven aid workers by Israeli military forces. But while the president repeated his call for a negotiated deal that would result in an “immediate cease-fire” and the release of hostages taken by Hamas, White House officials stopped short of saying directly that he might limit U.S. arms supplies if not satisfied.

By the middle of the night in Jerusalem, Israel made its first gestures to Mr. Biden. In a statement, the government said it would increase aid deliveries to Gaza, including through the port of Ashdod and the Erez crossing, a checkpoint between Israel and northern Gaza that Hamas attacked on Oct. 7 and Israel had kept closed ever since. The statement did not say when the crossing would be reopened.

Biden administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private call in more detail, said that Mr. Netanyahu agreed to additional commitments intended to assuage the president. Among others, the officials said, Israel would promise to institute more measures to reduce civilian casualties and to empower negotiators brokering a temporary cease-fire deal in exchange for the release of hostages.

[…]

The president has long refused to curb the arms flow to influence Israel’s approach to the war. Mr. Biden said after Hamas killed 1,200 people and took hundreds of hostages in October that his support for Israel was “rock solid and unwavering.” While he has increasingly criticized what he sees as the excesses of the military operation, he has until now stuck by his vow.

But with rising agitation on the political left, particularly in electoral swing states like Michigan, even some of Mr. Biden’s closest Democratic allies are coming around to the view that Washington should exercise more control over the weaponry, including Senator Chris Coons, a fellow Democrat from Delaware and confidant of the president.

Times of Israel (“Blinken warns: Israel risks becoming indistinguishable from Hamas if it doesn’t protect Gaza civilians“):

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warns that Israel risks becoming indistinguishable from Hamas if it continues to fail to protect civilians amid the Gaza war.

“What happened after October 7 could have ended immediately if Hamas had stopped hiding behind civilians, released the hostages and put down its weapons, but Israel is not Hamas. Israel is a democracy; Hamas, a terrorist organization. Democracies place the highest value on human life, every human life. As it has been said, whoever saves a life, saves the entire world,” Blinken says during a press conference in Brussels, quoting a Jewish proverb.

“That’s our strength. It’s what distinguishes us from terrorists like Hamas. If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.”

“Right now, there is no higher priority in Gaza than protecting civilians, surging humanitarian assistance, and ensuring the security of those who provide it. Israel must meet this moment,” Blinken said.

He notes “important steps” Israel has taken to allow aid into Gaza, but clarifies that “the results on the ground are woefully insufficient and unacceptable,” with 100 percent of Gazans facing acute insecurity.

“This week’s horrific attack on the World Central Kitchen was not the first such incident. It must be the last,” the top US diplomat warns.

This is, I believe, a classic example of what the political scientist Robert Putnam calls a “two-level game.” Essentially, any diplomatic negotiation has to take into account both the foreign policy aims of the parties and the various domestic political pressures at work. This greatly complicates the notion that international relations involves unitary actors seeking to maximize the national interest. There are, in fact, multiple views of the national interest that have to be appeased.

In this case, while I genuinely believe Biden and his foreign policy team are distraught about civilian casualties in Gaza—and were particularly angered by the attack on the World Food Kitchen aid workers—I do not for a second believe that they believe “there is no higher priority in Gaza than protecting civilians.” And, certainly, they’re not foolish enough to believe they can make that Israel’s policy.

But Biden is facing increasing pressure from within his domestic constituency. As has been widely reported, the junior members of his own foreign policy team is much more pro-Palestinian than the old heads. And, as noted in several of the above news reports, that’s true of a significant portion of the Democratic voting base. They have to be appeased.

For that matter, Netanyahu is facing significant pressure at home over the war. Not only are people worried about the fate of the hostages who have been held captive for six months but there’s a significant faction that wants a more humane policy. He’s also being condemned almost across the board by world leaders, including some who actually matter to him. He may be an unmitigated asshole but he’s not an idiot.

So Biden puts out a readahead of a 30-minute phone call that includes some tough language and gets Netanyahu to make some symbolic gestures. This appeases the domestic constituencies of both parties. Biden can take credit for “getting tough” with Israel and Netanyahu can get credit with soft-liners for the gestures while telling hard-liners that his arm was being twisted.

I would be interested in knowing the substance of the other 28 minutes or so of the call. That would tell us what the real policy preferences of the two men are.

Friday’s Forum

James Joyner · · 55 comments

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