Category: US politics

It depends on whom you ask

September 14, 2023

media, US business, US politics
The MacArthur Foundation made this announcement last week:

A coalition of 22 donors today announced Press Forward, a national initiative to strengthen communities and democracy by supporting local news and information with an infusion of more than a half-billion dollars over the next five years. Press Forward will enhance local journalism at an unprecedented level to re-center local news as a force for community cohesion; support new models and solutions that are ready to scale; and close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice.

Since 2005, approximately 2,200 local newspapers have closed, resulting in 20 percent of Americans living in “news deserts” with little to no reliable coverage of important local events. Press Forward seeks to reverse the dramatic decline in local news that has coincided with an increasingly divided America and weakening trust in institutions.

“We have a moment to support the reimagination, revitalization, and rapid development of local news.”

National, regional, local, and issue-specific partners co-designed Press Forward with the aim of deploying significant new resources to the field through greater coordination and peer learning. Informed by insights and feedback from leaders and practitioners in the field, this multi-funder collaborative aligned on a set of shared values to guide their grantmaking: prioritizing transformation, centering community needs, growing with equity, ensuring accessibility, and preserving the editorial independence of news gathering organizations.

Initial Press Forward partners are The Archewell Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln, Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, Mary W. Graham, Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media Group, Heising-Simons Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Joyce Foundation, KFF, Knight Foundation, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Lumina Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Outrider Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

“We have a moment to support the reimagination, revitalization, and rapid development of local news. We are prepared to support the strongest ideas and seed new ones; build powerful networks; and invest in people, organizations, and networks with substantial resources,” said John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation. “The philanthropic sector recognizes the need to strengthen American democracy and is beginning to see that progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts.”

While philanthropic support for journalism has grown over the past decade, overall giving to local news falls short of what is needed. Press Forward funders are ready to move from individual grantmaking strategies to a shared vision and coordinated action that ensures individuals are informed and engaged on issues that affect their everyday lives.

Press Forward partners have identified the following priorities and have committed to making grants in one or more of these four areas of focus:

STRENGTHEN LOCAL NEWSROOMS THAT HAVE TRUST IN LOCAL COMMUNITIES

There is a growing movement of community-focused journalism across the nation that is shifting how the critical stories of our time are being told. We need to make bold investments in local news organizations and the networks that support and grow them.

ACCELERATE THE ENABLING ENVIRONMENT FOR NEWS PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION

We need to scale the infrastructure required to support a thriving independent local news sector, expanding shared services and tools—from legal support to membership programs.

CLOSE LONGSTANDING INEQUALITIES IN JOURNALISM COVERAGE AND PRACTICE

We must move resources to newsrooms and organizations that are improving diversity of experience and thought along with the availability of accurate and responsive news and information in historically underserved communities and economically challenged news deserts.

ADVANCE PUBLIC POLICIES THAT EXPAND ACCESS TO LOCAL NEWS AND CIVIC INFORMATION

We need new frameworks and robust coalitions to advance policy ideas that expand access to news and information while strengthening the First Amendment and protecting the editorial independence of local journalists. Investments in nonpartisan public policy development, analysis, and advocacy are needed at the local, state, and national levels.

Press Forward is independent of ideology and plans to work with More Perfect, a bipartisan initiative that is advancing five interrelated democracy goals, one of which is Access to Trusted News and Information.

Jason Cohen sees something different:

A coalition of 22 groups, including prominent left-wing organizations, have pledged more than $500 million to fund local media publications over the course of five years, according to an announcement posted on Thursday.

The new coalition is called “Press Forward,” and many of the groups in it appear to have a left-wing bias based on their funding and initiatives, although the group states it “is independent of ideology.” The coalition plans to reverse the downward trajectory of local news outlets and “close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice,” according to the announcement of its formation.

Since 2005, about 2,500 newspapers have ceased operations, according to The New York Times. This number is rising and many that are still in business have been forced to reduce staff.

Press Forward will allocate the $500 million to fund grants to support local newsrooms, provide resources to diverse publications and assist in developing collaborative tools such as legal support and membership programs, according to the announcement.

The MacArthur Foundation is leading the coalition and has pledged $150 million in grants, according to the NYT. It has frequently contributed to left-wing organizations such as Planned Parenthood, Tides Foundation and Environmental Defense Fund, according to its grants database, giving more than $5 million to each, according to InfluenceWatch.

Knight Foundation is also donating $150 million and has previously given over $1.2 million to nine universities and nonprofits to “combat disinformation in communities of color” in 2022, according to its website.

The other 20 groups are contributing the remainder of the over $500 million, one of which is Democracy Fund, an organization run by left-wing billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Democracy Fund provided a $130,000 grant to Center for Internet Security to fund a “portal” that was used to flag and censor social media content containing “misinformation” during the 2020 election, according to tax records obtained by independent journalist Lee Fang.

Furthermore, the Ford Foundation is a member of the coalition, an organization that helped launch the Black Feminist Fund in 2021 with $15 million in seed funding, according to its website.

Another member of the coalition is Archewell Foundation, which is run by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

“Press Forward seeks to reverse the dramatic decline in local news that has coincided with an increasingly divided America and weakening trust in institutions,” according to the announcement.

Moreover, the groups in the coalition “aligned on a set of shared values to guide their grantmaking: prioritizing transformation, centering community needs, growing with equity, ensuring accessibility, and preserving the editorial independence of news gathering organizations,” according to the announcement.

“The MacArthur Foundation has been funding public service journalism for several decades with a core belief that no-strings-attached, general operating support to news outlets best preserves editorial independence, serves democracy, and gives news outlets the freedom required to cover the news and serve their audiences as they see fit,” a spokesperson for the MacArthur Foundation told the DCNF. “The funding we provide comes without expectations or requirements on coverage priorities, and always will.”

“Knight Foundation believes that in order to deliver on its promise to American democracy, news organizations must be independent, and journalists must be free to report about issues without influence from others,” Knight Foundation Director of Communications Rebecca Dinar told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation and Archewell Foundation did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Does giving money to left-wing organizations make the donor left-wing?

The story has few comments, two of which are:

It’s anti-democracy and anti-American to bribe or politically influence the free press.

They should save their money. The media is already in the bag for the Leftist Democrat Party.

There are two pieces of legislation in Congress to supposedly help the media — one to force social media companies to compensate newspapers for links to their stories, and one to provide payroll tax credits to cover journalists’ payroll taxes. Once upon a time newspapers and broadcasting companies could not receive government aid for what were obvious First Amendment reasons. But media companies got the same PPP loans that non-media companies got. What are the implications of media outlets getting government money?
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How an immigrant nation should treat immigration

September 14, 2023

International relations, US politics
Jonah Goldberg:

The most interesting, and possibly significant, political story right now is the revolt of blue city Democrats over immigration. I really should have led with this and I intended to get here sooner. But what’re you going to do?

I’ll zip through the normal punditry just to set the scene. A bunch of border state Republican governors and Biden’s own Department of Homeland Security, sometimes cooperatively and sometimes not, have sent scads of asylum seekers from the border to big cities. And it’s becoming a massive problem because it turns out that, not counting some rhetorical excess, the Republicans were right. The massive influx of poor migrants was a huge humanitarian crisis that was an unfair drain on the resources of states like Texas and Arizona. I didn’t like the use of these migrants as political props, but sending them north to cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington wasn’t simply a stunt. It was a reasonable response to a crisis being disproportionately borne by a handful of states asked to carry the burden of a national problem requiring a national response. Democrats love to talk about shared burdens, and their bluff was called.

Democrats, particularly Democrats in big urban centers, also loved to talk about how immigration is all upside and anyone who disagrees is a bigot, a nativist, a xenophobe, and just plain mean. That’s why they virtue-signaled their “sanctuary city” policies when such virtue signaling was cheap—both literally and figuratively.

Now, it’s a crisis that could destroy New York City, in the words of Mayor Eric Adams.

While I have compassion for the migrants and for the taxpayers alike, I have zero sympathy for the politicians who preened about their moral superiority to those concerned about uncontrolled immigration.

And that’s what I find interesting and valuable in this crisis. Again, like the Trekkers talking among themselves, a lot of blue-staters talked about immigration as if all decent and reasonable people agreed with them. Now that they see some of the costs of their own stated principles, they’re freaking out. And rightly so.

Part of the reason Democrats could demagogue the issue of immigration is that they saw only upside for themselves electorally. It’s not necessarily true that they all thought they were importing reliable Democratic voters, but the belief that they would end up being reliable Democratic voters made it much easier to demonize people who saw the downside of runaway immigration.

Just to be clear, it was never true that America was anti-immigrant (at least not in the last half-century). As Jim Geraghty notes, “Every year since the millennium, between 703,000 and 1.2 million immigrants have been granted legal permanent residence, also known as getting a green card. Green-card holders are permitted to live and work in the country indefinitely, to join the armed forces, and to apply for U.S. citizenship after five years — three if married to a U.S. citizen.” America has up to 50 million immigrants living here. Add first and second-generation Americans together and we’re talking about between a quarter and a third of the total population.

By the way, I love it when people accuse China hawks of being “xenophobes.” You know what share of (Han-Supremacist) China’s population is composed of immigrants? .1 percent.

As much as I hate the phrase “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” the value in this crisis is that it may teach Democrats that cost-free rhetoric isn’t actually cost-free if actually translated into policy. The best thing that could happen for immigration policy is for Democrats to recognize the downsides of immigration. The next best thing would be for Republicans to recognize the upsides of immigration. And while this is definitely a “both sides” point, it’s not symmetrical. Because the American status quo is wildly, unprecedentedly, and almost uniquely pro-immigrant already.

It’s a bit like all of the verbiage about free speech. Right and left seem to trade the baton on who is for or against free speech every couple years, or days, depending on the issue (“Book banners!” “Twitter censors!” etc.), but the crusaders on both sides almost always fail to recognize that whatever the censorial outrage du jour, it’s always against the backdrop of the fact that America is wildly pro-free speech as a matter of culture and law.

Anyway, if both parties could recognize—in the halls of Congress and on dumbass cable shows—that there are significant trade-offs inherent to immigration policy, that would be a huge step toward actually forging an immigration policy, and enforcing it. And making cosseted blue state Democrats recognize this fact where they live could be an important first step toward that.

… it’s slowly dawning on Democrats that their identity politics-infused assumptions of the electorate are starting to melt in the heat of reality. It’s official: Democrats have a nonwhite voter problem, as Ruy Teixera writes in his essay, “It’s Official: Democrats Have a Nonwhite Voter Problem.” For a long time Democrats have acted like nonwhite voters are axiomatically “the base.” That’s changing. And that’s good.

And that leads me to the thought experiment I wanted to get to but will instead just drop in your lap alongside sentient dolphins and mandatory voting. “What if nonwhite voters voted just like white voters?”

Even baby steps in this direction would shake the Democratic Party to its core. It’s really hard to accuse the opposing party of racism and xenophobia when the opposing party has roughly the same demographic makeup of your party. The more interesting question in some ways is, what would happen to the Republican Party? But I’ll leave that for you guys to discuss.
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The Journal Sentinel beclowns itself

September 14, 2023

media, US politics, Wisconsin politics
First, Tunku Varadarajan:

Tina Descovich found herself surrounded by “Muslim dads.” The scene was a school-board meeting late last year in Dearborn, Mich. Local parents were angry about sex-themed books at the school library, which they regarded as “pornography.”

After chatting with Ms. Descovich for a few minutes, a Dearborn dad realized she was a founder of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit parents’ rights group that came into being on Jan. 1, 2021. He shook his head and told her she didn’t “seem like a racist at all.”

“That’s because I’m not,” she replied.

With its dogged focus on school reform, hostility to teachers unions and opposition to Covid shutdowns and mandates, the group is hated on the left and typecast as far-right—or worse—by much of the media. I speak with Ms. Descovich, a 49-year-old mother of five, at Moms for Liberty’s headquarters here, between Miami and Jacksonville. Seated with her is Tiffany Justice, 44, the group’s co-founder and a mother of four. The modest office has no external signage to identify its occupants. Both women have received such a deluge of threats—by email, voicemail and even handwritten letters—that there’s a deputy at the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office whose main job is to review each one. “Someone calling himself Satan writes to me every week,” Ms. Descovich says wryly. “He lives in Denver.”

A more influential antagonist is the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, founded in 1971, has a storied history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan via civil lawsuits and cooperation with law enforcement. The media uncritically describe it as a civil-rights group, even though in recent decades its has shifted its focus to smearing conservative organizations as hate groups.

In June it labeled Moms for Liberty as “extremist” and “antigovernment.” It stated in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” that the organization’s “primary goals” are to “fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place” for students who are “Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.”

Ms. Justice says that is a lie, and accuses the SPLC of having “put a target on the back of every American parent, every American mom.” She says the designation is “meant to be used as a weapon against us” and asks: “Are any government agencies using the designation as a way for them to do more surveillance on us, or to somehow try to curtail our actions as an organization?”

Moms for Liberty may sue. Ms. Justice says the group is “exploring every legal option” and has “retained the best plaintiff-side defamation firm in the United States to hold the SPLC accountable for their hateful targeting of our members.” U.S. law makes it difficult for plaintiffs to win defamation lawsuits, and judges have dismissed other cases against the SPLC. But in 2018 the group paid Maajid Nawaz more than $3 million to settle his claim that it defamed him by labeling him an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

The SPLC’s smear appears to have done damage. Moms for Liberty had planned an event last month at Milwaukee’s Italian Community Center. “After an inquiry from the Journal Sentinel,” wrote Rory Linnane, a reporter for that paper, “Bartolotta Restaurants, which books events for the center, said it would not be hosting any Moms for Liberty event.” The first words in Ms. Linnane’s article were “Moms for Liberty, a group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an extremist antigovernment organization . . .”

In Davis, Calif., a librarian shut down a Moms for Liberty meeting on grounds that a speaker who objected to male athletes competing against women and girls violated a rule against “misgendering.” Again, local news coverage prominently cited the SPLC’s designation.

The mission of Moms for Liberty, Ms. Descovich says, is to “unify, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” She came up with the group’s name, while Ms. Justice wrote its catchiest slogan: “We do not co-parent with the government.”

They met in 2019, three years after each was elected to her local school board—Ms. Descovich here, in Brevard County, Ms. Justice immediately south, in Indian River County. Ms. Descovich had been a Republican, Ms. Justice a politically unaffiliated “floater,” but both were impelled by personal experience to get involved with school politics.

Ms. Descovich’s eureka moment came in 2014 when her son was in seventh grade. “I started seeing assignments coming home that were concerning,” she says. “He brought home an assignment that I have to this day. He got 100-plus on it, and the teacher had said, ‘Great job!’ When he handed it to me, he said, ‘I got an A.’ . . . It was a ‘wanted’ poster for Christopher Columbus, for ‘crimes against humanity.’ ”

She was so shocked that she spent “months buying every book I could find on Christopher Columbus, reading everything I could, trying to figure out what had changed since I’d studied history.”

Ms. Justice says that for her, “it wasn’t so much curriculum as the physical condition of my kids’ school.” Hallways would flood; roofs leaked; tiles would dislodge and fall onto classroom floors and desks—and rodents infested the place. “We were in a PTA meeting, and a rat ran up a half-wall.”

The school’s principal wouldn’t raise the issue with higher-ups. “She said she didn’t want problems with the district,” Ms. Justice says. “But it was really more about the fact that she didn’t want anyone paying too much attention to her school. Because we had a literacy rate for African-American students that was in the low 20th percentile, and the school still got an A from the grading system in the state.”

Ms. Descovich adds that her son got the highest possible grade on his end-of-class exam in seventh grade even though he missed half the answers. At that, the two moms dissolve in laughter.

“School districts do two things well,” Ms. Justice says: “They protect themselves and they celebrate themselves. And they find ways to celebrate themselves so that they can protect themselves.” The statistics may be “devastating”—almost half of Florida fourth-graders can’t read at grade level—but no one pays a price, and plausible remedies are foreclosed. “Thanks to union contracts,” Ms. Descovich says, “if you want to give bonuses to your teachers who are willing to serve in your poorest schools, you can’t do it.”

Why is their group called Moms for Liberty rather than something less neuralgic for the left—say, Moms for Education? “Because it’s about parental rights,” Ms. Justice swiftly answers. The group’s focus is “more than schooling. You have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of your children.” That includes their medical care and “their moral and religious upbringing. And that’s a right that the government doesn’t give you and can’t take away.” Growing more impassioned, she says she’s “fighting for the survival of America, to protect the role of a mother, to protect the autonomy of a parent.”

Transgender ideology is a particular concern. The “first big attack” on parental rights, Ms. Descovich says, happened in 2019, “with the ‘procedural guides,’ which started appearing in districts all across Florida.” These guides excluded parents from all conversations about “pronouns, restrooms, locker rooms, overnight field trips.” Teachers got the green light “to lie to parents.” In 2022 the Florida Legislature turned the light red by enacting the Parents Bill of Rights.

When Covid hit, “this was a whole new thing,” Ms. Descovich says. “We see the districts taking more and more authority away from parents.” On March 13, 2020, the state ordered Florida schools to close for two weeks, and they remained so for the rest of the school year.

“We go to virtual,” Ms. Justice recounts. “There’s no accountability for teaching. There’s no accountability for learning. I don’t know how we graduated all these kids. It was Crazytown until Gov. DeSantis announced on June 6, 2020, that schools in Florida would reopen—period, end of story, full time.”

Yet the shutdown did end up bringing accountability. Watching their kids’ classes on Zoom, parents became far more aware of what their children were learning—“or not learning,” Ms. Justice says. Ms. Descovich heard “stories after stories of parents’ jaws dropping at the lessons being taught and streamed into their own homes. We like to say that when we served on school boards, we saw behind the education curtain. And then 2020 happened, and all of America saw behind the curtain.”

Moms for Liberty began as a Florida group, then “exploded,” in Ms. Justice’s telling. It has 300 county chapters in 46 states and “120,000 active on-the-ground moms.” There are now 275 Moms for Liberty-endorsed school-board members nationwide.

Expansion has its pitfalls, especially for a decentralized grass-roots group like Moms for Liberty. In June an Indiana chapter apologized for publishing in its newsletter a quote attributed to Adolf Hitler: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

“First of all,” Ms. Justice says, removing her glasses and rolling her eyes emphatically, “we’re not pro-Hitler.” Ms. Descovich repeats the point “for the record,” before continuing: “We knew we were going to be growing by chapters and that the chapters were going to have autonomy. And that every now and then an average mom, who’s never been political, is going to step in it.”

It puzzles both women that parental rights excite fevered opposition. “Why do they hate us? That’s a good question,” Ms. Descovich says. Ms. Justice responds: “Because we’re upsetting the balance of power.”

Moms for Liberty takes on “human issues,” Ms. Descovich says, “not partisan ones. Children learning how to read in school, that’s a human issue. Parental rights—how is that partisan?” But if “the people in power, the educational establishment, can keep us divided against each other based on race or religion or gender, then we’re easily controlled, right?”

Explaining why this issue is so potent, Ms. Descovich says, “Once a parent loses the right to direct the upbringing of their child, we’ve lost everything. You’ve lost your family. You’ve lost your community. You have lost the basic unit of society.” Ms. Justice adds: “The reading proficiency rates we have in America right now pose the greatest national-security threat of anything for the future of this country. If you have a nation of children and adults who cannot read, where does that leave America?” She promises that Moms for Liberty are “going to fight like hell.”

As Ms. Justice furrows her brow at the prospect of battle, Ms. Descovich leaps in to point out that Moms for Liberty call themselves “joyful warriors”: “Yes, we’re going to fight, but with a smile on our face. We’re going to fight like heck, of course—Tiffany says ‘hell,’ I say ‘heck’—but we’re going to do it with a smile on our face, because our children are watching us do this.”

Mike Nichols adds:

The Journal Sentinel’s odd reliance on the SPLC and its insulting bias against Moms for Liberty went on and on from there. The original story by reporter Rory Linnane apparently no longer appears on the paper’s website. But you can read an updated version here.

A truly objective news story would have at least noted that much of America has another perspective of both the SPLC and Moms for Liberty. …

Including the Milwaukee paper that somehow seems oblivious to the SPLC’s own history of smears and controversies. More background here or in lots of other places. Just do a little reporting.

Varadarajan called out Linnane, the Journal Sentinel reporter who wrote the smear, by name, and that’s fine. But newspapers are not like blogs or Substack offerings. When I worked at the Journal Sentinel as a reporter and columnist many years ago, every piece was seen by multiple editors, none of whom were shy and most of whom were well-informed and tried hard to be objective. I never knew the political leanings of most of the people I worked with and they never knew mine until I applied for a columnist job.

If there’s still some sort of editing process over there, they have far worse problems than a biased reporter. It’s an institutional issue.

Or they’re just so short-handed the reporters are on their own. If that’s the case, they should just make unedited reporters into left-wing columnists — and label them as such.

And yet Gannett (owner of most daily newspapers in Wisconsin) is hiring a reporter to cover Taylor Swift. Really.
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There are no “real Americans”

September 13, 2023

US politics
Jonah Goldberg:

Another of my favorite thought experiments is, “What if voting were mandatory?” This is a more practical question, not least because there are lots of people who support the idea. I’m so intrigued by the idea, I’ve written a few columns on the subject.

Now, as a constitutional and philosophical matter, I still don’t like the idea. Compelled voting is like compelled speech. And such compulsion is, in the words of Lord Acton, “icky.”

For me, the primary appeal of this idea is that it would dispel any number of myths, often most dearly held by advocates of mandatory voting. For generations, many on the left have convinced themselves that if everyone voted, Democrats—very left-wing Democrats—would benefit. I think this idea goes back to the Myth of the General Strike, which held that if everyone stopped working, capitalism would come crashing down and the masses would get to divvy up the spoils. I don’t think this is what the author of this myth, Georges Sorel, actually believed. He just thought it was a useful idea for rallying the masses. But lots of folks have always (falsely) believed that if the masses achieved political consciousness and recognized their inherent interests, we’d have super-terrific socialism for as far as the eye can see.

A similar idea lurks, often unspoken, in the idea of massive voter turnout (which is different from universal turnout). It’s the bedrock assumption buttressing Sen. Bernie Sanders’ understanding of politics. Everywhere he goes he sees working class folks—and a lot of hippie grad students—who want what he’s selling, so he assumes that all the Joe Six Packs and grad students who didn’t show up to his town hall agree with him, too. Or at least that they can be convinced to agree with him if properly educated about their class interests.

But this is just a colossal error in logic. For example, let’s stipulate that Star Trek conventions have people from a lot of walks of life—construction workers, accountants, stay-at-home moms, Asians, African Americans, gay people, whatever. The thing is, no one goes to a Star Trek convention and thinks everyone who didn’t show up wants to dress up like a Klingon, too. But in politics people often erroneously treat a big crowd as a representative sample of the much, much bigger crowd that didn’t show up. I will always remember Ted Cruz insisting Americans wanted Obamacare repealed because “everywhere” he spoke, the audiences wanted to repeal Obamacare—as if the people who loved Obamacare were likely to turn out for a Ted Cruz town hall in Abilene.

The truth is that it’s a pretty settled issue among political scientists that if everyone voted, the final results would look pretty similar. Think of it this way: A good poll will ask a representative sample of maybe a couple thousand people. And from that poll, we have a very good picture of what 331 million people think. Well, a presidential election has like 150 million people voting. That’s a huge poll sample. It would be weird if the other 100 million people eligible to vote broke down decisively in favor of one party or another. “Simply put,” political scientists Benjamin Highton and Raymond Wolfinger wrote in 2001, “[American] voters’ preferences differ minimally from those of all citizens; outcomes would not change if everyone voted.” Ten years earlier, Stuart Rothenberg published his study, “What If Nonvoters Voted.” He concluded, “There is no compelling evidence that nonvoters are so distinct from voters that they constitute a bloc ready to alter the fundamental balance of power in this country.”

But here’s where I disagree with that analysis. While mandatory voting wouldn’t yield a socialist nirvana or new MAGA republic, and while it wouldn’t yield particularly shocking results in the short term, over time it would profoundly change the incentive structure for parties and candidates.

The problem with what we might call the Myth of Voter Turnout is that both parties believe it’s true. Democrats are obsessed with goosing turnout because many of their key voters, chiefly African Americans and young people generally, are low-propensity voters, so they rightly assume that getting more of those voters to the polls would help them. But there’s no evidence that high voter turnout always benefits Democrats. Republicans—like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin—often benefit from high turnout. Still, as a general proposition, both Democrats and Republicans think that if more people show up at the polls it will benefit Democrats.

But there’s a big difference between getting more of your voters to the polls and getting all voters to the polls.

A second thing I like about the idea of mandatory voting is that it would take away a lot of the power from people who yammer the most about how the majority of Americans are on their side. Democrats and Republicans operate from the false assumption that they are the sole tribunes of the “American people.” Democrats tend to think they don’t have supermajorities in Congress because hordes of voters, mostly black and brown, are “disenfranchised.” Republicans often talk about how there’s a “silent majority” that needs to be awakened in order to prove that “real America” is with them (which is, ironically, a very Sorelian idea). And, I should point out, the MAGA types have added a conspiratorial bonus claim that any election they lose was “stolen” by the Deep State or George Soros or Something. Trump says he won in a landslide and his useful idiots take it as gospel, guaranteeing they’ll keep losing.

The activists who offer the most extreme version of these various claims love to wrap themselves in the mantle of authentic democracy. Whenever I talk about the problems of primaries and small donors, all of my hate mailers and tweeters tell me how I just want the elites (or the Joooooz) to run everything and that I want to deny “the people” their say in our democracy. Well, what could be more democratic than everybody voting? Again, I don’t like the idea of compulsory voting, but there’s nothing undemocratic about it. All of the problems with forcing people to vote fall under the rubric of “illiberal,” not “undemocratic.”

If everyone voted, the activists who serve as the gatekeepers of the primary system would, over time, lose power. How so? I’m glad you asked. Because of polarization and the stranglehold the bases have on the parties, most politicians are more worried about getting the nomination and not being primaried. Once they have the nomination, they no longer look to win over the median voter the way they traditionally did. Instead, they simply try to gin up turnout from their core constituencies. This logic has infected presidential politics. This was Obama’s strategy in 2008 and 2012, and it was how Donald Trump ran and won in 2016—and how he ran and lost in 2020.

But if everyone voted, getting more of your most committed supporters to the polls would be a waste of resources because they’re going to vote anyway. Instead, the incentive would move back to persuading an actual majority of Americans, not just a supermajority of your most committed voters. Spending all of your time on the minority of voters totally sold on your B.S. would be idiotic, because they’d vote no matter what. You’d need to look outside your most committed voters and persuade people who are turned off by such pandering.

Right now—and I do mean literally right now—both parties are poised to nominate candidates whom most Americans don’t want to vote for. Both are working on the assumption that they’ll be able to win by turning out enough true believers and/or people who hate the other party more. That calculation works only in a system where base turnout is the priority. When 100 percent turnout is guaranteed, the math changes. And eventually, the parties would respond by nominating candidates with broader appeal. Sure, candidates would still try to make voters angry, but their arguments would be more generalized to appeal to broader categories of voters and on less niche issues.

Think of it this way. If you actually believe that everyone who turns up at the Star Trek convention represents the views and aspirations of everyone who doesn’t, you might run for president by promising to follow the Prime Directive. “Let us not question the wisdom of the founders of the Federation!” Or you might run as a candidate who thinks the Prime Directive has outlived its utility. This Wilsonian Trekker would argue that we’ve outgrown such rigid rules. We need a Kirk-like warrior who knows when intervention is in the interests of the Federation and good for the backward aliens we encounter out in the galaxy.

You know what would happen to that candidate out in the real world? They’d be escorted off the debate stage by security, if they were ever allowed on it in the first place. The last thing we’d hear is, “My Vulcan nerve pinch! It does nothing!”

A similar dynamic is at work in many of the bluest and reddest quarters of America. When Kari Lake ran for governor, she held a rally in which she asked if anybody in the room voted for John McCain. “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” Lake asked. “Alright, get the hell out,” she said, before adding, “boy, Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?”

This is like the Trekker candidate saying, “Anybody in here a fan of Benjamin Sisko and Deep Space Nine? All right, get the hell out.”

I still chuckle at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s super PAC vowing to primary Joe Manchin in West Virginia in the hope of finding the “next AOC.” Because you know, West Virginia, where Trump got twice Biden’s share of the vote, is hungry for an AOC clone. Why not just run a candidate dressed like a Romulan?

In short, big chunks of the Republican and Democratic bases are so high on their own farts they think they can defenestrate the impure from their ranks, a belief that is only made possible by thinking that you don’t need them to win because “real America” is already in your column.
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Corruption vs. evil

September 12, 2023

International relations, US politics
Richard Vigilante:

Chiang Kai-Shek was corrupt. Unworthy of our support. The commies got China.

Battista was corrupt. Unworthy of our support. The commies got Cuba.

Ngo Diem and then a succession of South Vietnamese leaders were corrupt. Unworthy of our support. The commies got Vietnam.

The Shah was corrupt. Unworthy of our support. The Mullahs got Iran.

If I worked my memory, or Google, hard enough I’m sure I could come up with more.

Or I could just go with the big one, subsuming all others:

The United States was conceived in corruption. Time to go.

This stuff used to come from the left. These days the “national” right is right along with them:

“Ukraine is corrupt, it deserves what it gets.”

No, they would never say it that way. That would be like saying the Chinese deserved Mao. No one would buy that. And no one will buy that any nation deserves to be conquered by what Russia has (again) become, the global champion of state brutality and disregard for human life.

To mention Mao or Putin would be to invite into the argument the three most important words in the English language: “compared to what?”

No competent propagandist does that.

Instead, they always say ‘because [NAME of PRO-AMERICAN GOVERNMENT] is corrupt, we can’t support them. We must remain morally pristine.’ Or, more crudely, ‘we don’t like our taxpayer dollars being stolen.’

The corruption charge is perfect as propaganda, because it is always true.

Without any specific evidence, I can confidently tell you right now [NAME OF ANY GOVERNMENT ON EARTH, EVER] is corrupt. This will always be true.

“Corrupt” as used in propaganda is rarely specified, even more rarely quantified and never, ever compared. A guilty verdict is conveniently inevitable. To be innocent one must be a virgin, a status difficult to retain and impossible to regain.

But no, they’ll say, that’s not what we mean! We’re talking like really corrupt, like sleazeball corrupt. So corrupt that our alleged allies will blow the support we give them and lose anyway.

And that’s all she wrote. ‘They’ll lose anyway’ was lights out for Chiang, Battista, Diem, the Shah, and now Zelenskyy. ‘They would have lost anyway’ makes them no loss at all.

Note though that now the propagandists have put themselves at (slight) risk by allowing the argument to shift to quantities.

Because governments free of corruption have never existed and will never exist, if the propagandists advocate corruption as grounds to withhold our support, the burden should be on the accusers to demonstrate its relevance. Logic, justice, and due regard for our own national interest demand quantification and comparison, an answer to “compared to what?”

That never happens, probably the defense realizes that debating degrees of corruption is a loser for the defense. Not a virgin? Must be a slut. Let’s avoid the argument.

Understood. But not responding to the corruption charge has never worked either.

The real problem may be that the defense does imagine its response in terms of a debate. That’s a mistake. The corruption charge is not a debate case, but propaganda. What is needed is counterpropaganda.

In response the defenders of Ukraine should be shouting at the top of their lungs: how dare you use this crude libel, for which you offer no proof, to justify selling out the Ukrainian people to the Russians when you know very well the Russians will kill even more Ukrainians in the aftermath of victory than in the achievement of it.

Show us the crime that is worth such a punishment. Shame on you for a blood libel!

This is a shouting match, not a courtroom. In a shouting match the only defense is to shout the louder. The GOP lost in 2022, largely on abortion, because some response is always better than no response. It does no good to say “better off not bringing it up” when you are not in charge of what comes up.

The corruption charge is a vile distraction from what the bugout boys are really advocating. Having first assured Ukraine of our full support, opposed negotiations, armed them, cheered them on and armed them some more, they now propose to abandon them to an enraged and desperate enemy.

Yes, we should never have enabled and encouraged a war we were unwilling to fight. We should never have done most of what has passed for U.S. foreign policy since 1989. Three and a half decades of culpable incompetence have perilously undermined our power while leaving perhaps a million corpses behind.

What’s done is done. We will live with it. As blood cannot wash away blood the corruption canard will not wash the blood from our hands. It will only increase the flow.

Forget all the talk of breakthroughs on the battlefield. They will be reversed with U.S. government’s next inadequate, penny-pinching response to desperate war. Ukraine is on the cusp of defeat, conquest, and genocide. The corruption canard merely hastens the day.

This reads like the 1991 Louisiana governor election between Democrat Edwin Edwards, who was well known for his corruption, and Republican David Duke, grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans and two of Edwards’ former GOP opponents for governor went into Louisiana and campaigned for Edwards, and a popular bumper sticker read “Vote for the crook. It’s important.”
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Embarrassing his country worldwide

September 12, 2023

International relations, US politics
Roger Kimball:

What time is it? A bit like the emperor Domitian, Joe Biden seems confused about the time. Warned by an omen that his death would come at midday, Domitian daily pestered people around him with that question, relaxing only after the dreaded hour had passed.

Alas, his caution availed him not. One day in September 96 AD, a treacherous servant lied to Domitian about the time, inducing him to let down his guard. A knife-wielding steward did the rest.

I am not sure that President Biden is still possessed of a guard he can drop. But if his recent performance in Hanoi is any indication, he does seem to be confused about the time of day. “Good evening, everyone. It is evening, isn’t it? This around the world in five days is interesting. Well, one of my staff members said, ‘Remember the famous song, Good Morning, Vietnam?’ Well, good evening, Vietnam.”

It was a feeble effort to make a joke, emphasis on “feeble.” The president’s increasingly wary aides took the hint. They had been holding their collective breath as he rambled on. “Lying dog-faced pony solider,” “John Wayne,” “my brother,” “climate change,” “worse than nuclear war.”

“We talked about stability,” Biden slurred, “we talked about the Third World, excuse me, the Third World, the uh, uh the Southern Hemisphere has access to change…”

This wasn’t going well. You can’t talk about “the Third World” in polite company anymore. Suddenly, Biden’s mic was cut and the dulcet tones of his press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre intervened: “Thank you everybody. This ends the press conference. Thanks everyone.” Unaware of what happened, Biden maundered on for a few seconds. Then, like Nietzsche’s Last Man, he gazed vacantly about him and blinked. Then he shuffled slowly off stage and disappeared behind the drapery.

The leader of the free world, ladies and gentlemen! A few days earlier in New Delhi, Biden stumbled over the name of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: “Mohamet bin Slam, excuse me, Mohammad bin ’Slam.” Cringe.

It has long been obvious that Joe Biden is really only “Joe Biden,” an empty, crepuscular pantomime, frail, querulous, gibbering. His performance on the world stage these last few days reinforces the sense that the United States has entered a penultimate, even a posthumous state. Certain rituals are still performed, but the gestures are tired, empty, rote.

Back in the 1940s, Cyril Connolly warned that it was “closing time in the gardens of the West.” He was premature. But the embarrassing spectacle of Joe Biden at the G20 meetings suggests that the appropriate response is not interrogative but imperative, not “What time is it?” but “Turn out the lights.”
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Shut it down

September 12, 2023

US politics
Eric Boehm:

The monthslong debate over raising the debt limit is barely in the rearview mirror, and already it’s time for another round of brinksmanship over the federal government’s fiscal future.

This time the stakes are a possible government shutdown at the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. That will happen unless Congress and President Joe Biden agree on a budget before then—which is highly unlikely—or agree to pass a short-term continuing resolution, which is how these fights are usually resolved.

The complicating factor is that some Republican members of the House are threatening to use a possible shutdown as leverage to push a variety of their preferred policies.

Some of those demands reflect important concerns about the fiscal state of the government and the growing budget deficit. The House Freedom Caucus wants to revisit the debt limit deal made by Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) earlier this year, in the hopes of lowering spending levels for future years. Members are also demanding an end to what they call a “blank check” of military aid and funding for Ukraine.

But the group’s demands also include more funding for a wall on the border with Mexico, new limits on which immigrants can be granted asylum, and a crackdown on the FBI. Some members of the group are attaching even-less-related issues to the budget negotiations: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for example, told constituents last week that she would not vote to fund the federal government unless the House opens impeachment proceedings against Biden, CNBC reported.

Whether or not Biden deserves to be the subject of an impeachment inquiry, making these sorts of but-wait-there’s-more demands only serve to distract from the essential debate here: the one over the federal government’s unsustainable fiscal trajectory.

And unsustainable it is. The national debt is now larger than the American economy, something that’s never happened outside of a few brief years during World War II. The budget deficit for the first 10 months of this fiscal year added another $1.6 trillion to the debt, and the short-term nature of most government borrowing means higher interest rates are adding fuel to this fiscal fire. By the end of the decade, interest costs on the national debt will exceed the size of the military budget and will only keep growing. And then there’s the Social Security crisis looming in the early 2030s.

It’s unfortunate that the only group of lawmakers trying to slam the brakes on federal spending is constantly being distracted by other, less important issues. Because, when it comes to the country’s fiscal status, the Freedom Caucus is pretty much right.

“[People] say, ‘The Freedom Caucus is a danger,’” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told Axios earlier this week. “No, the danger is the status quo.” As Axios also notes, Paul is not the only senator who seems sympathetic to the Freedom Caucus’ maneuvers, though the majority in the upper chamber seems unwilling to consider a government shutdown. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has indicated that the Freedom Caucus is essentially McCarthy’s problem to solve.

While we wait to see what happens next, it’s worth considering how this new fight over a possible government shutdown reveals the foolishness of governing from crisis to crisis. Biden and McCarthy had an opportunity to head off some of the federal government’s major fiscal problems earlier this year but instead settled for a debt ceiling deal that largely maintained the status quo—the new limits on discretionary spending do virtually nothing to solve the deficit, spending, or entitlement issues facing the country.

This year’s federal budget deadline presents an even better opportunity for beginning the difficult process of solving those problems. At the very least, lawmakers should ask why federal spending has ballooned from $4.8 trillion to more than $6.2 trillion between 2018 and 2022, and how that increase in spending is driving deficits higher.

Punting on those tough questions doesn’t make any of them go away. Instead, it will only create another crisis in a few months, and another opportunity for groups like the House Freedom Caucus to leverage the debate.

This is no way for a serious country to govern itself. It’s fine to worry about the consequences of a government shutdown, but at some point Congress has to start worrying about the consequences of keeping the government open if doing so requires ongoing borrowing at unsustainable rates.
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The Democowards

September 11, 2023

US politics, Wisconsin politics
Richard Vigilante:

The comic Covid anxieties of a Democrat doctor who should know better raised chuckles at several conservative media sites this week.

Apparently, the healthy, middle-aged doctor’s reaction to a scratchy throat was to so obsess on his possibly Covidious peril that instead of staying home in bed he trudged—unmasked because his supply had run out—from one drugstore to another in a frustrated quest for Covid home tests, exposing any number of store clerks to the deadly rumor, to determine whether he should panic even more. He did eventually find a test but then worried on that he had not secured more because apparently multiple serial tests are needed to be sure.

Amusing certainly, but it made me think about a phenomenon I’ve been observing most of my life and wonder if all along I had got it wrong.

Liberals are constantly proclaiming themselves frightened of something. It’s the most common tactic of the woke. Why else demand “safe spaces” in places the normal do not fear to tread?

Here’s the thing, though. For many decades whenever liberals proclaimed themselves terrified, I assumed they were only pretending, or at most engaging in the willful suspension of disbelief that makes horror movies entertaining.

I thought they were making it up in order to score political points or generate that frisson of faux heroism.

My first signal of this came from receding echoes of the McCarthy Era.

Though I am now quite old, the Senator and I shared this mortal coil for only seven months before he shuffled it off for good, making me no sort of eyewitness. Still, just about all the liberals I ever knew as a young man—a group confined exclusively to out-of-town teachers at my public high school as I grew up in an amazingly right-wing neighborhood attending General Douglas MacArthur High School—at one point told me tales of how terrified they had been in the days when Sen. McCarthy roamed the earth.

This seemed silly. After all the principal outcome of the Senator’s claims to have detected an abundance of Communist agents in U.S. government was that he was persecuted from that day until his death, censured by his own party and President, eventually to expire in an alcoholic stupor, a danger to no one.

My suspicions grew because the liberals who told the story invariably cited their fear as proof of the Senator’s fearsomeness, like a child insisting his fear of monsters in the closet were proof they were there.

(I pause to note McCarthy was right. He hadn’t made up “the lists.” He was given them by FBI whistleblowers after the Truman Administration, at first diligent in pursuit of Roosevelt era infiltrators, later refused to go after commie spies for which the Truman folk might be blamed. Dem leaders freaked when they heard McCarthy cite “the lists” because they knew they were real. The whole story can be found in Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans.)

After McCarthy, liberals seemed to do it over and over, decade after decade, louder and louder with each iteration, for a succession of issues. Always the same argument: we’re frightened, therefor you must be a danger.

This seemed to partly account for Trump Derangement Syndrome. Liberals’ claim to fear that Trump would overthrow the Constitution seemed largely a cover for their actual shredding of it. Liberals professed to be terrified of Trump’s words, outstripped them in their own anti-democratic deeds.

Anyway, that was my theory: liberals were no more cowardly than the next guy, just oddly willing to pretend to cowardice to win an argument.

The Democrat doctor has moved me to reexamine history. Maybe liberals aren’t pretending. Maybe they really do frighten easily.

Early in pandemic days, cowardice did seem possibly the simplest and most efficient explanation for liberal Covid weirdness. A look at the timeline suggests that opposing liberal and conservative reactions to Covid predated their ideological association. Only after each side observed the behavior of the other did that behavior become a battle flag. Even before that liberals really were more frightened, and conservatives really were more relaxed.

Perhaps this divergence afterward came to appear ideological because it naturally aligned with liberal submissiveness to government and conservative skepticism toward it. Maybe liberals masked up and locked down not primarily because they like being dominated, but because they really were afraid.

This might also explain liberal hysteria about global warming or even nuclear winter (for those old enough to remember). On the right, we have gotten the habit of seeing green panic as contrived because it so obviously aligns with socialism, as the nuclear winter willies so obviously aligned with being soft on the Soviets.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Maybe they are just scared of shadows, including their own.

One reason I have suspected the opposite, that liberals pretend to be afraid in order to achieve some other goal, is that I have assumed that if people really were afraid they would be loathe to admit it lest they appear cowards.

Consider student resistance to the Vietnam war. In truth it would have been perfectly normal, thoroughly healthy to say “I don’t want to go to war because like any normal person I don’t want to die. If my country had been attacked, to defend her I would put my fear aside. But I feel no obligation to do so because some politicians think this war is good ‘policy.’ “

Who could object?

Instead, the anti-war types went on and on about how their real objection was to the morality of the war, not to the prospect of dying but the burden of killing. They cheered for Ho Chi Minh. At the end some argued the draft dodgers were the real heroes and should be the ones getting a monument.

Would they have made such an argument if their fear had not hung heavy on their consciences? And does that suggest equally that when people do claim fear, some other motive actually prevails?

But perhaps all that is wrong. Perhaps they aren’t pretending. Perhaps they really are just afraid?

A wise friend of mine long ago told me I would never understand an opponent unless I started by believing he believed what he said.

Dorothy is dumbstruck when the Lion, terrifying a moment before, breaks out in tears as Dorothy scolds him. His behavior seems to make no sense. But then she realizes it does. He’s just afraid.

People afraid of guns, afraid of diseases, afraid of men who act like men, afraid of being given more of their own money to decide what to do with themselves, afraid of giving people more power instead of the government — yes, that’s the Democratic Party today. Cowards.
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The next g-g-g-generation

September 7, 2023

US politics
Stephen Daisley:

American politics has become a tug-of-war between two generations. Boomers (and those older) dominate positions of power even as their capacity diminishes. Eighty-year-old Joe Biden has repeatedly displayed signs of frailty and confusion but, as far as we know, he’ll be running for re-election in 2024.

Over on Capitol Hill, eighty-one-year-old Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to freeze during public remarks and ninety-year-old Dianne Feinstein faces calls to retire from within her own party. While mental impairment is no impediment to serving in the United States Senate — if anything, it’s probably an advantage — the upper house is older than it has ever been. The average age in the Senate today is sixty-five. There are eight serving senators who were born during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.

Millennials frustrated by this gerontocracy want the boomers to shove off so their generation can take power and dramatically lower the median age in DC. New blood would be no bad thing but would going from rule by boomers to rule by millennials really be an improvement?

On the left, it would see leadership of the Democratic Party pass from the generation of acid, amnesty and abortion to the generation of privilege, pronouns and police abolition. On the right, the Republican torch would go from tax-cuts-for-Jesus Reaganbrains to Viktor Orbán fans who think they’re terribly edgy.

In the round, it would mean replacing the most coddled, entitled, insufferably certain generation in American history with the generation that comes a close second. Which brings me to my proposal for solving, if not all, then quite a lot of America’s problems: put Generation X in charge.

Gen X — those born between 1965 and 1980 — have the perfect political hinterland, forged in the fiery crucible of absolutely nothing. They had no war to protest, no draft to dodge. No counter-culture, no “Helter Skelter.” By the time they came of age, politics had escaped from the dread clutches of relevance and returned to its rightful place as the preserve of nerds, sociopaths, egomaniacs and other descriptions of Hillary Clinton.

Instinctively post-racial, mostly unfussed about private preferences, casually skeptical of authority, if Gen X has a political philosophy it is the great cause of not giving a fuck. Some might call them slackers but I consider them the chillest generation. The last to make a proper go of smoking, the last to do any drinking worth the name and the last to actually enjoy sex, which given the backdrop of AIDS is impressive. Besides, how can you not love a generation whose twin enthusiasms were cocaine and exercise?

Gen-Xers made careers for John Hughes and Cameron Crowe and Robert Zemeckis. They couldn’t get enough of watching their likenesses sliced up by summer-camp stalking psychos. They made hits of lowbrow sex comedies like Porky’s and Spring Break — and if you want to know why that’s super problematic, some joyless hall monitor called Melissa at VICE or the New Republic will explain in 1,000 breathless words.

They read Bret Easton Ellis and Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis — and Alice Walker, because someone had to. They Vogued and Walked Like An Egyptian and pretended to understand what Michael Stipe was on about. They found their sound in The Smiths and Tracy Chapman and Prince, and we’ll just gloss over the whole U2 thing. They started grunge bands in their parents’ garages and some of them ended up playing their music on MTV back when MTV played music.

Fine, Gen X is less buttoned up than the generation that came before and after. It has eclectic and easygoing tastes in popular culture. But are these really qualifications for running the world’s most powerful country? In a word, yes. In a Gen X word, duh.

Take the economy. There’s no better generation to lead on this than the one that falls smack-bang between boomers and millennials. The former entered a less competitive labor market, with fewer qualifications and those who did attend college paid a lot less for it.

They benefited from more job security, cheaper housing and a more active government, born into the economic stability fostered by the New Deal and coming into adulthood in time for the Great Society. Their grandchildren’s generation, in part because of boomers’ voting patterns in the Eighties and Nineties, came of age amid recession, precarity and pared back government.

Gen X understands both experiences, having shared in some of the boomer-era benefits while taking some of the hits that landed on millennials. They are well-placed to strike a balance between economic growth, competition and innovation, on the one hand, and economic security, social protection and an enabling state, on the other.

Ditto on another defining challenge, climate change. Gen Xers grew up appreciating the value of fossil fuels but also seeing their escalating impact on the planet. They are the ideal cohort to find a middle ground between carbon-clingers resistant to change and doom-mongering idealists who would shutter entire industries overnight. As for the culture wars, Gen X is the generation most likely to practice a laidback liberalism that says do what you want, think what you want, and say what you want, but you don’t get to decide what anyone else does, thinks or says.

There is an alternative to government of, by and for the nursing home and the dismal competing visions of those who would supplant the current order, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s wokeocracy on the left and Vivek Ramaswamy’s neo-Trumpism on the right. Between boomers’ self-enrichment and millennials’ identity-obsessed illiberalism there is a generation that can lead America with cool heads. A generation that can fix some of the mistakes made by boomers and head off some that millennials are itching to make. Everybody wants to rule the world, according to a seminal band of the era, but only Gen Xers should be allowed to.

This is not a new concept. In 2017 Peter Weber wrote:

What would a Gen X president have to offer? You may still think of Generation X as the slackers from such ’90s classics as Singles, Reality Bites, and, well, Slackers. But that was then. Now, they’re the tough, no-nonsense former latchkey children. “Gen-X did not inherit the military structure of the Greatest Generation, the class structure of the Silent Generation, nor the automatic economic growth given to the baby boomers,” GOP consultant Brad Todd wrote in The Atlantic last year. “Instead, they inherited the latchkey kid autonomy that came from a skyrocketing divorce rate, and the adult career uncertainty ushered in by post-industrial economic transition.”

As a generation, Pew tells us, Gen X is politically about halfway between the more conservative boomers and the more liberal millennials — whether that’s a shifting-right-with-age phenomenon or something deeper is presumably to be determined. But it seems more complicated than simply occupying the political center. “It was Gen Xers who popularized the phrase ‘socially liberal, economically conservative,’” generational researcher David Rosen wrote at Politico in January 2016, “an ideological orientation reflecting their underlying distaste for authority.”

If that’s true — tax cuts and gay marriage? — it isn’t true for Gen X’s political footprint. The most powerful Xer, Paul Ryan, is socially conservative and economically very conservative. Ditto Ted Cruz, the Gen Xer who came closest to the presidency. If the Greatest Generation lived in the penumbra of FDR and the boomers in the brief-hot glow of JFK, Gen X grew up with Jimmy Carter — a proximate doppelgänger of Mister Rogers — and especially Ronald Reagan.

The Republican Gen Xers venerate Reagan, but they’re offering a purified version of Reaganism, sort of like the Gipper was a band and they’re going to play only his best albums, original vinyl, on their political turntables. They probably genuinely love trickle-down economics, but as a practical matter, this Reaganphilia makes political sense, too, because the Republican Party, and especially the part of it that votes in primaries, is older and more more conservative than the general public (and Gen X). …

The important difference between Gen X and its demographic older and younger siblings is in tone, though, not policy. It isn’t that Gen X doesn’t have its own aspirations, it’s just that, collectively, it has seen the limits of ideological windmill-tilting and moral preening and recognizes the value of pragmatism. “If generations could be said to have mottos,” Rosen argues at Politico, “Gen X’s would almost certainly be Nike’s omnipresent corporate slogan: Just Do It.”

Boomers had a dream; Gen X has its own dreams but what it really wants is a plan. It has mortgages and car payments and kids to put through college.

… the two main political parties being what they are, the best shot for achieving a Gen X America lies in compromise, finding common ground between a vibrant Gen X right and Gen X left. Real compromise used to happen in Washington — say, when Reagan worked with the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass major immigration and tax reform. It has been rarer since the boomers took over Washington in 1995, but it could happen again, if we can move past their decades-old ideological blood feuds. …

So, when the boomers finally retire (with their Social Security checks financed by Gen X and millennials), there’s a chance for a new politics in Washington. But for that to happen, Gen X needs good politicians. Trump’s last-gasp-boomer presidency is drawing candidates willing to take a leap of faith toward Congress in 2018, and so maybe that is when Gen X will gain a House majority. But the midterms are a year away, and Gen X is still Gen X.

“Though much derided, members of my generation turn out to be something like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca — we’ve seen everything and grown tired of history and all the fighting and so have opened our own little joint at the edge of the desert, the last outpost in a world gone mad, the last light in the last saloon on the darkest night of the year,” Rich Cohen writes in Vanity Fair. “There never were enough of us to demand the undivided attention of advertisers and hitmakers, we have been happy in our little joint, serving from can till can’t astride the Sahara. We have been witnesses, watching and recalling.

Being on the oldest end of Generation X and as someone suggested more than once to run for … something …

… I find this amusing on the eve of my high school’s 40th class reunion, as well as this 2022 piece from Ben Jacobs:

It’s a drowsy rainy Thursday at the Iowa State Capitol, and Iowa State Representative Cherielynn Westrich is speaking to a school group about how a bill becomes a law. The state Legislature is out of session, and only a handful of members are lazing about the chamber catching up on correspondence. Westrich, a petite cheery blonde, is just finishing up explaining how a lawmaker can summon a legislative page to their desk if they have a specific request to add to a bill. Her audience is a group of about two dozen middle school-aged kids seated on the floor in the back corner of the room.

Just then, another legislator, Steve Holt, interrupts with a smirk. It’s a school group from his district but he had left Westrich babysitting them for a few minutes. “You all know a fun fact about Rep. Westrich?” he asks. “She was in a famous rock band when she was young; you can find the videos on YouTube.”

Westrich then tries to explain her past to the school group of children too young to remember Kanye West at the VMAs, let alone the mid-90s alternative rock scene. “Well so, you guys know who Madonna is? Madonna signed my band to her record label, and we toured all around the world and got to play all the big coliseums like Madison Square Garden, and then we had videos — you guys know about MTV? — we had two of them, and you can still find them online from a long time ago back in the 1900s.”

The children laugh politely, and then it is time for them to go back to their school bus. Both their tour of the Iowa State Capitol and brief excursion into ‘90s nostalgia were over.

But, for Westrich, neither was. The first term Iowa Republican was a Zelig-like figure in ‘90s pop culture. She worked for Flea, played with Spike Jonze in her first band and turned down the opportunity to appear on “Jackass.” But she’s perhaps best known for playing keyboard with the Rentals, a ‘90s band that scored a single hit with the song “Friends of P.” while touring the world with performers like Blur and Alanis Morissette.

Now, 20 years later, after getting inspired to enter politics by former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Westrich is a solidly conservative state representative from blue-collar southeast Iowa who is pro-gun and anti-vaccine mandate. It may be an unusual trajectory for someone who played moog synthesizer in a popular alternative rock band, but, given the politics of people in her generation, it actually might not be unusual at all.

Gen Xers, which can be roughly defined as those born between 1965 and 1980, came of age under President Ronald Reagan amid the end of the Cold War. The popular image of Generation X has never quite fit in within any easy political framing. It’s the generation that produced grunge rock and gangsta rap but also reached cultural consciousness at the height of the “greed is good” 1980s memorialized in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. In fact, if there was any popular image of this generation’s politics, it was that they were apolitical. The slackers depicted in Richard Linklater movies or the grunge rockers in flannel were almost devoid of political inclination save a generalized cynicism and MTV’s “Choose or Lose” campaign, which was designed to simply convince young voters that politics matters at all. After their first election in 1984, they bounced back and forth in presidential elections — although exit poll data doesn’t always provide a clear generation breakdown — but were never at all particularly progressive and veered to the right of the nation as a whole.

And there were always hints of a more right-wing inclination culturally even if they may have been camouflaged by the less politically charged atmosphere at the time. The first major political depiction of this cohort was on the sitcom Family Ties, where Reagan-loving teenager Alex P. Keaton clashed with his liberal boomer parents. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini put it to Politico, “the MTV generation has always been a little bit more conservative.”

Now, though, there is no confusion: Generation X is safely Republican. One model from 2014 measuring only white voters through the 2012 election shows those born in the mid-to-late 1960s being the most Republican-leaning of all, more so than the older Boomers and Silent generation. In a poll released in late April by Marist/NPR that separated voters by generation, Generation X had the highest level of disapproval for Biden and were the generation most likely to say they would vote for a Republican candidate in the midterms if they were held that day.

While voters have historically tended to be more conservative as they age, that has accelerated with Generation X. In fact, Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, told me that Generation X has now become the most conservative generation, surpassing the Boomers in their rightward tilt.

Some of this has to do with broader historical forces that were out of anyone’s control. The political atmosphere in which voters first cast ballots and became politically aware leaves a lasting impact through their lives. As Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told me, “If you first became aware of politics during Reagan/[George H.W.] Bush/Clinton era, you’re more likely to lean a bit more to the right.” This was a time when even Bill Clinton was proclaiming “the era of big government is over

Westrich, born in 1966, fits in with the oldest and, according to some studies, most conservative tranche of this generation. The first presidential election she would have been eligible to vote in was Reagan’s 1984 landslide, and she would have come of age at time in which there were few strong personalities defining the Democratic Party. Exit polls from that year show Reagan improving by 15 percentage points over 1980 among voters under 30, which was the biggest change in any individual demographic that year.

For Westrich, the ‘90s were not particularly political times either. There was no discussion of Newt Gingrich or Hillarycare on the tour bus. Instead, it was a nerdy nomadic experience going from city to city and country to country. In lieu of political talk, Westrich and fellow keyboardist Maya Rudolph (who would later become famous on Saturday Night Live) would make humorous videos on their Super 8 camera.

For her, even joining the band was the result of a series of accidents. It was a side project of Matt Sharp, the bassist from Weezer. In the year leading up to the release of Weezer’s hit debut, the Blue Album, Sharp had some downtime. He used it to record a demo with some friends. A small punk rock label got a hold of it and became interested. Sharp roped in two friends, one of whom was Westrich, to pretend to be the band behind the demo.

It worked, and the two, along with Weezer’s drummer, Patrick Wilson, and the guitarist from Westrich’s band at the time, Rod Cervera, started recording an album before ever playing any live shows together.

The result was repeated rehearsal sessions at a studio broken up by games of hacky sack while Ronnie James Dio, the former lead singer of Black Sabbath who was recording in the same building, sat in and watched.

At the time, Westrich stood out for her hobby of repairing vintage cars rather than any political inclinations. As Sharp recalled, “there weren’t too many Moog-playing … mechanically inclined synthesizer players in the alternative landscape of 1995.”

In fact, Sharp couldn’t really recall much political engagement at all at that time. “We were quite young and had our minds on other things and don’t think any of us were too engaged in that stuff.”

Westrich didn’t recall any political conversation either. She said at the time she “felt like politics was for rich people.” “Everyone in politics had money,” she said, “and I just felt that was never going to be for me because I grew up … without a lot of money.” She couldn’t even recall any candidate who had ever really inspired her before Trump and described her past votes as just “picking between the lesser of two evils” and often just voting against incumbents of either party.

In the decades since leaving music, Westrich reached an entirely different niche of quasi-celebrity as a mechanic on Overhaulin’, a reality television show where a team of auto mechanics surprises someone by rebuilding their car into a custom hotrod. Westrich took great pleasure in noting to me that while there were other women on the show, she was the only fully-fledged mechanic who actually worked on the cars.

Westrich’s introduction to politics didn’t come until 2016. Having recently moved to Ottumwa, Iowa, to be with her long-term boyfriend, she was coaxed into volunteering for Trump’s general election campaign by a friend with whom she worked out. In Westrich’s telling “she kept talking about making phone calls and knocking doors for Trump and asking me to go and I kept saying ‘no thanks.’”

Eventually, though, she relented and went to Trump’s campaign office.

She found that she enjoyed the process of engaging with voters. “It was fun talking to people,” she said, and she enjoyed able to give them good information. “They really weren’t doing their homework,” she said of the voters she talked talk to. “They felt informed because watching evening news, but really weren’t able to go beyond that.”

It was an unlikely path to a political career, and in keeping with her roots, she often sounds less like a savvy political insider and more like an average voter who is still figuring out which party is right for her. Her thoughts on her own political journey also shows how Gen X voters square their conservative views with the independent streak one also finds in the alternative culture they gave a name to.

Although she was attracted to politics by Trump and voted for him twice, she has not embraced the personality cult around him and struck discordant notes about the 45th president at times. She certainly didn’t like his temperament, but she made clear that she was still a fan of his policies, pointing to achievements like “supporting our veterans” and “getting innocent people out of prison.” She also praised him as “the first candidate who was anti-establishment enough that I took a second look at him.” “I thought he may be someone that was actually different from the Clintons and Bushes,” she said.

In her recollection, her interest in Trump was prompted by his positions on trade. However, looking back six years later she confessed, “I’m going to forget all the facts.” She tried to recall: “I did my research back then into what was happening with Paris Trade Accord [a reference to the climate agreement that the Obama administration had entered into] and things … I didn’t like it, and Trump was against it. I said, ‘Ok, great.’”

This is roughly consistent with Bonier’s analysis of Gen X voters, which has found that they are very concerned about the economy, somewhat concerned about retirement (although nowhere near as much as Baby Boomers) and not terribly concerned about issues like the environment or guns. These general trends were echoed by John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard University’s Kennedy School who found that on economic issues, Generation Xers leaned far more to the right than any other generation.

Her journey to supporting Trump was also a typical one for Gen Xers, As Anderson explained Trump in particular had an effect polarizing politics along generational lines. Younger voters broke heavily towards Democrats while older voters broke heavily towards the GOP.

From there, Westrich was recruited to run for office by local activists in what was a traditional Democratic area in and around Ottumwa against an eight-term incumbent. Although she lost on the first try in 2018, Westrich won in 2020.

In her first term, she’s sponsored legislation to ban vaccine mandates, to prohibit libraries from making obscene materials available to minors and to nullify federal enforcement of gun control laws in the state. Now, in 2022, she is expected to easily win an open state senate seat created as a result of Iowa’s non-partisan redistricting process.

Yet, despite being a Republican elected official, she still maintains a certain insistent independence. In fact, she insisted that she had kept her independent registration until two weeks before her first election until she was told that Iowa election law did not offer her much of a choice. She still insisted that she votes for “the person,” not “the party.” “That may disappoint some Republicans,” she said, but “you have to elect the people who will do the right job.”

In the past, that meant she would deliberately switch back and forth to vote against incumbents “just to get them out of power.” Now, in reality, as an incumbent herself, that meant she was still just supporting Republicans.

Westrich’s journey may be unusual in its details, but it still captures the political arc of her generation. Increasingly, the demographic base of the American right will be those too young to remember Watergate but too old to have spent much if any of their childhood on the Internet. It’s not just their life experiences that differ from other generations. At a time when American politics is increasingly polarized around education and racial views, Generation X maintains higher rates of racial resentment than succeeding generations while still having lower rates of educational attainment..

In 2012, Paul Ryan, who is perhaps the most politically successful Gen Xer so far, was the subject of bewildered stories when it was reported that his favorite band was Rage Against The Machine, the anti-capitalist rap metal that had multiple triple platinum albums in the 1990s. In response, the band’s guitarist, Tom Morello, called Ryan everything “we’ve been raging against.”

That may have been true, but it was also a hint of the politics to come. Gen X is full of contradictions, but not surprises — at least not when it comes to politics. In 2024, and probably for many years afterward, the fate of the GOP will rest safely in the hands of Gen Xers such as Westrich. First they were latchkey kids and then they were slackers — but now, they’re Republicans.

Paul Ryan for president? The GOP could do worse, except in the opinion of Trumpers who, it must be said regardless of the polls, are backing a candidate who lost in 2020, whose backed candidates mostly lost in 2022, and who will lose in 2024 if he’s the GOP nominee. Of course, Florida Sen. Maco Rubio, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Utah whatever-he-was Evan McMullen all ran in 2016, and all obviously lost to Trump.

The GOP presidential field now includes from my g-g-g-generation South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, 57; former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 51; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 44; and former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, 44. There are also former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, 57; Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, 56; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, 51; and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, 46, who might run or might change his mind, in Sununu’s case, against running.

Whatever you think of those on the preceding two paragraphs, each seems unlikely to drop dead tomorrow due to age, or make you question their faculties or mental state. They and we of Gen X have gone through three cataclysms in our adult lives — 9/11, the Great Recession, and COVID — in which national leadership left a great deal to be desired. Some of us may have learned from them.
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Conservatism vs. populism

September 7, 2023

US politics
National Review:

Former vice president Mike Pence took aim at former president Donald Trump and his “populist followers and imitators” during a speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday titled, “Populism vs. Conservatism: Republicans’ Time for Choosing.”

Pence told a crowd at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College that Republican voters “face a choice” between conservative principles and the rising populist movement. He said populists are replacing limited government and traditional values with “an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage.”

Pence warned that leaning into populism could lead to a future where “our party’s relevancy will be confined to history books.”

“It may live on in some populist fashion, but then it will truly be, in a cruel twist, Republican in name only,” he said.

“Will we choose to go down the path of populism and decline? I believe we stand at a crossroads,” Pence said. “I have faith that Republican voters will once again choose the good way.”

Pence took direct aim at his former running mate. “The Republican Party did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015,” Pence said, referring to Trump’s presidential announcement at Trump Tower in New York.

“Donald Trump, along with his populist followers and imitators — some of whom are also seeking the Republican presidential nomination — often sound like an echo of the progressive they would replace in the White House,” Pence said.

He also suggested Trump’s position on entitlement reform is “identical” to President Biden’s.

Trump called on Republican lawmakers not to “cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security” when they began negotiations with President Biden and Democrats over a measure to raise the debt ceiling in January. “Cut waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere that we can find it, and there is plenty of it. . . . But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it,” Trump said at the time.

Pence went on to criticize Florida governor Ron DeSantis for having “used the power of the state to punish corporations for taking a political stand he disagreed with.” The comment seemingly referred to DeSantis’s ongoing feud with Disney, which filed a lawsuit against the governor and other state leaders in April accusing them of participating in a “targeted campaign of government retaliation” against the company that began last year when it spoke out against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law.

Pence, meanwhile, also called political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy “one of former president’s populist protégés” and knocked his support for raising the inheritance tax.

But the former vice president’s advisers told reporters ahead of the speech on Tuesday that the former vice president’s remarks are not directed specifically toward Trump or Ramaswamy. It would be “much too small an interpretation” of his speech to focus on any one political figure, the advisers said.

They also accused former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott of claiming to be classical conservatives while adopting some populist views. “Which might be even more dangerous, because it seems like it’s pandering,” an adviser said.

Pence warned that the move toward populism over conservatism could strip America from it’s role as a global leader and erode constitutional norms.

While some may question how Pence can distance himself from the populist movement after having served with Trump, the former vice president said: “When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. And together, we did just that. But he and his imitators make no such promise today.”

Pence’s speech, which is a callback to Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid, comes weeks before the second presidential debate is set to take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
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Category: US politics

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