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People could no longer say, ‘I don’t see color. We’re post-racial.’ People went, ‘No, systemic racism is here.’ Eva Paterson, Yes on Prop 16 co-chair

For years, the group didn’t see the numbers it needed to overturn it. But the pandemic’s outsized effect on people of color and the police killing of George Floyd, Paterson believes, helped tip the scales for the first time. 

“People could no longer say, ‘I don’t see color. We’re post-racial,’” she said. “People went, ‘No, systemic racism is here.’”

Polls earlier this month showed it trailing badly, fighting an uphill battle with conservative white and Asian Americans who believed it would hurt them in university admissions, even though its proponents say no quotas will be established. 

He recently praised President Donald Trump as the nation’s first truly “color-blind” president. The campaign’s biggest donation came from an Austin, Texas, group, called Students for Fair Admissions, which gave $50,000.

“One thing Prop. 16 has done, even before people vote yes or no on it, is reveal California’s true face. It’s not one we should be proud of,”

Paterson isn’t too fazed by those polls. She said the campaign always knew it wouldn’t get a majority of support on the measure without helping people see through the confusing ballot language.

Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the Golden State Warriors and other cultural icons in the Black community, from Tracee Ellis Ross to Dwayne Wade. It’s also racked up endorsements from nearly every major newspaper in the state and The New York Times. 

A new poll by David Binder Research found that it’s currently tied at 45% yes and 45% no, with 10% undecided. The campaign also pointed to a new Capitol Weekly poll showing it ahead 53-47.

“I was a part of 30 Black students admitted in my class in 1972 at Berkeley Law,” Paterson recalled. “The year after affirmative action was eliminated, there was not one Black student admitted to Berkeley Law. Not one.”

One of the biggest misconceptions with affirmative action, Paterson said, is that it gives employment or educational opportunities to people who are under-qualified. In reality, she argued, there are discriminatory factors at play that make some candidates simply appear more qualified than others.

White students at well-funded high schools, for example, have more access to Advanced Placement courses than Black students at schools with less funding.

While the ban on affirmative action is often discussed in the context of school admissions, it has left its mark elsewhere, too. 

Students from both schools could get an A grade in every class, but the students with access to AP courses will have an inflated grade point average because of the way those grades are weighted.

Before 1996, the California government used to award nearly a quarter of its public contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses. When Prop 209 disbanded that program, those businesses lost out on around $825 million a year, according to a study from the Equal Justice Society.

“If you’re not forced to look beyond your comfort zone,” she said, “then people of color and women don’t get in the door.”

As a federal appeals judge, Judge Barrett has often ruled in ways friendly to employers. She has joined rulings that stopped a case in which the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission objected to a company that allegedly assigned workers to particular geographic locations based on race and ethnicity and that limit the scope of laws prohibiting age discrimination.

In the following decades, the court became publicly associated with liberalism and civil rights. But just as the conservatives of an earlier generation recognized that the courts could be used to override majorities that pushed for limitations of property rights, in the summer of 1971, the lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the United States Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.”

Soon after, Richard Nixon nominated Powell for the Supreme Court; he was a justice for 15 years, and his rulings helped to expand the First Amendment rights enjoyed by corporations, paving the way for Citizens United.

But these cases in themselves are less significant than the underlying question: Will the Supreme Court become once more what it was in the early 20th century

And it could mean that — as has so often been the case in recent years — workers, ordinary citizens and the very possibility of democratic governance will again lose out.

First, let's be clear that the Court could and likely will decide the SB8 case without saying anything about the continuing vitality of the abortion right. That's easy to see if a majority holds on procedural grounds that neither the U.S. nor the abortion providers (in the companion case) can bring suit for injunctive relief. If the federal court plaintiffs lack standing or a cause of action, or if the Court holds that state court judges are not proper party-defendants, or that for injunctive relief to be effective it must--but is not permitted to--run against private non-parties, then the Texas law will remain in effect pending resolution in state court and a possible eventual return to the US Supreme Court posing the question whether a six-week ban is permissible on the merits.

For the U.S. and/or the abortion providers to win, at least one of the Justices who might vote to overrule Roe v. Wade in Dobbs would need to nonetheless allow a challenge to SB8 to go forward. Why would they do so? Perhaps they'll see the case in purely procedural terms. If the stakes were lower, it would be relatively easy to imagine any Justice thinking Case X is ripe for overruling but until we overrule it, state legislatures must abide by it.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that that happens--say that next month the Court rules 5-4 that the Fifth Circuit was wrong to lift the preliminary injunction in the DOJ case. Then suppose that a different 5-4 majority or a 6-3 majority rules in late June that the Mississippi law is constitutional but that they're not deciding whether to overrule Roe (even though they would have de facto overruled much of Roe). At that point the news coverage would indeed likely be muddled. Is there still a constitutional right to abortion? When? Where? Pro-choice activists might have a harder time mobilizing voters based on Dobbs if there is also floating around the notion that the Supreme Court had invalidated the Texas law just a few months before--even though that would have been only a procedural holding.

(2) Quite apart from the substance, the procedural grounds for reinstating the injunction are strong. I acknowledge that there are genuine questions of standing, causes of action, remedy, proper defendants, and more, but the bottom line for me is fairly straightforward: As I argue in the column, the case fundamentally presents a question whether states and other government actors can use trickery to evade their constitutional obligations. Tax law has a substance-over-form principle that should be universal. Texas has made no secret of the fact that it crafted SB8's trapdoors with the clear purpose of preventing lawsuits and thus chilling the exercise of a constitutional right. Permitting this kind of evasion and defiance will invite more.

“S.B. 8 was designed to nullify this court’s precedents and to shield that nullification from judicial review,” wrote Brian H. Fletcher, the acting solicitor general, in the federal government’s brief. “So far, it has worked: The threat of a flood of S.B. 8 suits has effectively eliminated abortion in Texas at a point before many women even realize they are pregnant, denying a constitutional right the court has recognized for half a century.”

Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, filed a single brief in both cases, arguing that neither the federal government nor the providers were entitled to sue. The right way to challenge the law, Mr. Paxton said, was for abortion providers to violate it, be sued in state court, and present constitutional or other arguments as defenses.

“Where, as here, a state enacts a blatantly unconstitutional statute, assigns enforcement authority to everyone in the world and weaponizes the state judiciary to obstruct those courts’ ability to protect constitutional rights,” the brief said, “the federal courts must be available to provide relief.”

The law effectively deputizes ordinary citizens — including those from outside Texas — allowing them to sue clinics and others who violate the law. It awards them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.

The patient may not be sued, but doctors, staff members at clinics, counselors, and people who help pay for the procedure or drive patients to it are all potential defendants. Plaintiffs do not need to live in Texas, have any connection to the abortion or show any injury from it, and they are entitled to at least $10,000 and their legal fees if they win. Defendants who win their cases are not entitled to legal fees.

“If Texas is right, no decision of this court is safe,” he wrote in his brief. “States need not comply with, or even challenge, precedents with which they disagree. They may simply outlaw the exercise of whatever constitutional rights they disfavor; disclaim enforcement by state officials; and delegate the state’s enforcement authority to members of the general public by empowering and incentivizing them to bring a multitude of harassing actions threatening ruinous liability — or, at a minimum, prohibitive litigation costs.”

the press for using the term “shadow docket”, a term coined by a conservative law professor. All Justice Alito succeeded in doing, however, is proving his sensitivity to the public discourse about the court.

Most recently, Justice Samuel Alito gave a speech at the University of Notre Dame that can only be described as an attempted takedown of the press.

“beyond recognition” in order to “justify” reimposing juvenile life without parole. The court rejected its own decisions in cases decided just nine and five years ago respectively. When precedent is so blatantly ignored, it is difficult to explain the court’s change in direction but for politics.

Such a claim of ethical clarity just isn’t credible when it is uttered on stage right next to the person most responsible for the partisan gamesmanship that packed the court. What Justice Barrett did succeed in doing with her remarks is to confirm just how closely justices listen to the public narrative about the court – and how sensitive they are to it.

The justices, through their own actions and words, have demonstrated their vulnerability to public pressure in support of court reform. Turns out, justices do not like being told they have no clothes on.

As the court delves into its new term, it should have no doubt that all eyes will be upon it. If they want to escape it, rather than hoping the press will be cowed into submission, the justices of the court might consider fulfilling the mission of the institution they embody, by upholding constitutional rights and respecting judicial norms.

Grassroots movements don’t have a great track record, he wrote. “

Some marchers went into party politics: One participant from Maine—a woman who’d never done anything political but vote before attending the Women’s March—went home and became the chair of the Maine Democratic Party. Only a fraction of the marchers kept taking their cues from the Women’s March organization itself. And that makes sense: The Women’s March encompassed an almost unbelievably broad array of concerns.

Some did run for office, and some won. The march itself encompassed a diverse coalition of interest groups and the convention that followed, in October 2017, hosted workshops on the messier aspects of political organizing.

The members of that group threw themselves into the fight against partisan gerrymandering and worked to pass a state ballot initiative for an independent redistricting commission. Now, the Michigan maps have been redrawn. Though it’s impossible to measure how much the Women’s March contributed to that outcome, it unquestionably played a part.

Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics.”

They were everywhere: at fashion shows, cutting in front of rank-and-file participants at events, on magazine covers that they complained were not distributed widely enough. They accepted awards, posed for glamorous photo shoots, and fought a two-year battle to trademark the phrase “women’s march,” which they eventually dropped.

Organizers of marches are rarely given such disproportionate credit for their events’ success. Seasoned activists know that power of a grassroots movement lies not in its branding or executive leadership structure, but in the people who show up and sustain it. And yet, the Women’s March foursome quickly claimed to speak for something far more decentralized and organic than their own narrative would suggest.

But the organizers of Women’s March didn’t get that memo. The nonprofit that grew around it treated its four leaders — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Bob Bland, and Linda Sarsour — as celebrities, the visionary trailblazers at the head of a cohesive political movement.

But the Women’s March organization didn’t do much to refocus all that attention on the thousands of local organizers and millions of marchers who gave the march its meaning.

So when Mallory and Perez drew criticism for their support of noted sexist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, it was no big stretch for critics to use the leaders of the Women’s March to smear the entire movement.

The groundswell of women looking for community and purpose after Trump’s election needed some guidance—literally, marching orders. They did not need a clique of unelected spokespeople.

They had come to the Women’s March not as a unified people following a leader with a specific set of demands, but as individuals with a variety of related grievances, wanting to express a broad feeling of dismay at the direction the country was headed.

Many of them were inspired to undertake a deeper political education and find their place in other movements, including the fight to save the Affordable Care Act and the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020. In an alternate timeline, with no Women’s March to warm them up, would many of the white people at those Black Lives Matter marches have shown up at all?

The most memorable subsequent actions of the Women’s March—the groups that traveled to D.C. to beg their senators not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the marches in the streets to protest the end of Roe v. Wade in Texas—what did they accomplish?

Protests and marches reassure people that they’re neither alone in their anger or fear, nor crazy for being angry and fearful. They introduce demonstrators to new friends and networks of political activity. There’s nothing like the rush of standing in a chanting crowd, sweating or shivering with thousands of people who share one’s outrage, to revive flagging willpower.

I’m sure there are plenty of Women’s Marchers who heaved a sigh of relief and went “back to brunch” after Joe Biden took office, thinking the work was done. But I don’t think that’s the prevailing view among the people who first woke up to politics when Trump became president. They watched, as we all did, as right-wing rioters took the Capitol last Jan. 6. They’re witnessing the dissolution of a broad voting rights bill at the hands of two Democratic senators. They’re watching abortion rights disintegrate in Texas and across the South. And they’re living through the hottest years in recorded history, bracing for the next hurricane or forest fire, as the people with the power to save life on Earth as we know it look the other way.

In this moment, under those conditions, with five years of hindsight, the Women’s March looks nothing short of revolutionary.

We may need to forget our pressing worries over inflation and gasoline prices just long enough to take to the streets, with unceasing frequency and in greater numbers, in order to make our beliefs and our voices heard.

the greatest shock of all would be to wake up one morning and find that while we were driving the kids to soccer practice and enjoying that welcome after-work cocktail, more and more of our rights had been stripped away, as has happened in so many countries in which democracy vanished, overnight and in darkness –when, as it were, no one was looking. The overturning of Roe v Wade should shock us even more than it already does – shock us into looking beyond the dance floor of the Titanic and spotting that iceberg, looming in our path, not so very far away.

Leaders in the deeply conservative Utah say they need the law to protect women's sports. As cultural shifts raise LGBTQ visibility, the lawmakers argue that, without their intervention, more transgender athletes with apparent physical advantages could eventually dominate the field and change the nature of women's sports.

he team is also partially owned by NBA all-star Dwyane Wade, who has a transgender daughter.

The looming threat of a lawsuit worries school districts and the Utah High School Athletic Association, which has said it lacks the funds to defend the policy in court. Later Friday, lawmakers are expected to change the bill so state money would cover legal fees.

The group Visit Salt Lake, which hosts conferences, shows and events, said the override could cost the state $50 million in lost revenue. The Utah-based DNA-testing genealogy giant Ancestry.com also urged the Legislature to find another way. The American Principles Project is confident that states with bans won't face boycotts like North Carolina did after limiting public restrooms transgender people could use. It focused on legislation in populous, economic juggernaut states like Texas and Florida that would be harder to boycott, Schilling said.

Friday's deliberations came after more than a year of debate and negotiation between social conservatives and LGBTQ advocates. Republican sponsor Rep. Kera Birkeland worked with Cox and civil rights activists at Equality Utah before introducing legislation that would require transgender student-athletes to go before a government-appointed commission.

The proposal, although framed as a compromise, failed to gain traction on either side. LGBTQ advocates took issue with Republican politicians appointing commission members and evaluation criteria that included body measurements such as hip-to-knee ratio.

But the ban won support from a vocal conservative base that has particular sway in Utah's state primary season. Even with primaries looming, however, some Republicans stood with Cox to reject the ban.

Ready for more bad infectious diseases news? There's an outbreak of bird flu making its way into U.S. poultry flocks. If the virus continues to spread, it could affect poultry prices — already higher amid widespread inflation. The price of chicken breasts this week averaged $3.63 per pound at U.S. supermarkets — up from $3.01 a week earlier and $2.42 at this time last year, the Agriculture Department says.

The latest data from the USDA show 59 confirmed sites of avian flu across commercial and backyard flocks in 17 states since the start of the year. That figure includes chickens, turkey and other poultry. The USDA identified a case of avian flu in a wild bird in mid-January, the first detection of the virus in wild birds in the U.S. since 2016. Wild birds can spread the virus to commercial and backyard flocks. By Feb. 9, the virus had been identified in a commercial flock in Indiana.

The last major avian flu outbreak in the U.S. was from December 2014 to June 2015, when more than 50 million chickens and turkeys either died from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) or were destroyed to stop its spread.

Whether the 2022 avian flu will affect the price of eggs and poultry depends on how widespread it becomes, says Ron Kean, a poultry science expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences. "In 2015, we did see quite an increase in egg prices," Kean told Wisconsin Public Radio. "The chicken meat wasn't severely affected at that time. We did see quite a loss in turkeys, so turkey prices went up. So, we'll see. If a lot of farms contract this, then we could see some real increases in price."

For producers who suspect their flock may be affected by avian flu, the USDA has a guide to the warning signs, including a sudden increase in bird deaths, lack of energy and appetite, and a decrease in egg production. If a flock is found to be infected by bird flu, the USDA moves quickly — within 24 hours — to assist producers to destroy the flock and prevent the virus from spreading.

A new Virginia state law prohibiting mask mandates in public schools does not apply to 12 students with disabilities whose parents challenged the law, a federal judge has ruled. Last month, the parents of 12 students across Virginia asked the court to halt enforcement of the law, saying it violated their rights under the federal American with Disabilities Act. The law, signed by newly elected Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, went into effect March 1; it gives parents a say over whether their children should wear masks in school.

The group of parents have children whose health conditions range from cystic fibrosis to asthma that put them at heightened risk for COVID-19.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which was one of several legal organizations that filed on behalf of the plaintiffs, said the injunction served as a "blueprint."

In a statement, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said the ruling affirms that "parents have the right to make choices for their children."

When Judge Katanji Brown Jackson entered the Senate chamber this week to face questions on her readiness to join the Supreme Court, she did so as the first Black woman in the nation's history to be nominated to that position. For many Black law students and professionals, including a group of 150 who traveled from across the country to watch the historic hearing, Jackson's rise to likely associate justice gives a message of profound hope for what they too might one day be able to accomplish.

Dudley was one of 100 law students selected nationwide to attend a series of events and watch parties for Jackson's nomination, hosted by the progressive organization, Demand Justice. The group also included 50 public defenders — a nod to Jackson's own background in that field. "I see a lot of myself in her. I see a lot of my friends in her, and I wanted to be there to support," Dudley said, calling Jackson "overly qualified to sit on the Supreme Court."

The cohort of legal professionals cheered on Jackson as she faced questions from Republicans about her past cases, particularly those relating to child sex abuse, and on what school of thought she would bring to determining the constitutionality of high-profile cases. Republicans had vowed to oppose President Joe Biden's nominees to the court, and when news of Justice Stephen Breyer's imminent retirement broke, the GOP quickly mobilized to attack potential nominees who might replace the longtime liberal justice on the bench.

Particularly, some sentencing decisions in child pornography cases drew GOP fire. But Jackson's measured responses throughout the three days of questioning solidified the support of many onlookers, who reveled in what it would mean to have a Black woman sit on the bench for the first time in the court's 233-year history. "The fact of the matter is that I'm the father of three black girls, right? And to be able to tell them that finally, someone who is Black — female nonetheless — is finally on the precipice of a mountain that has never been climbed before by any other Black woman, is huge," said Edrius Stagg, a third-year law student at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — whose break from Democrats on a number of politically fraught votes had worried some as to whether he would support Biden's nominee — announced on Friday he would vote in favor of Jackson's confirmation, all but assuring her path to join the bench.

For some, the optics of seeing Jackson — a Black woman — defend her credentials to a group of largely white, predominantly male detractors, was a familiar scene. It has played out, students said, in workplaces the world over and across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Booker called the attacks on Jackson's record "dangerous" and "disingenuous," noting the complexities of cases that had been boiled down to their basest points in order to damage Jackson's image.

"I'm not gonna let my joy be stolen," he continued. "Because I know, you and I, we appreciate something that we get that a lot of my colleagues don't." And while Jackson's opponents peppered her with politically polarizing questions, her supporters grew even more convinced that Jackson was qualified for the job. "To see her hold her composure and just answer the questions just to the best of her capabilities was just really great to see," said Jasmine McMillion, a third-year law student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University College of Law.

To the uninitiated, the fact that Bankman-Fried saw a special urgency in preventing killer robots from taking over the world might sound too outlandish to seem particularly effective or altruistic. But it turns out that some of the most influential E.A. literature happens to be preoccupied with killer robots too.

Holden Karnofsky, a former hedge funder and a founder of GiveWell, an organization that assesses the cost-effectiveness of charities, has spoken about the need for “worldview diversification” — recognizing that there might be multiple ways of doing measurable good in a world filled with suffering and uncertainty

The books, however, are another matter. Considerations of immediate need pale next to speculations about existential risk — not just earthly concerns about climate change and pandemics but also (and perhaps most appealingly for some tech entrepreneurs) more extravagant theorizing about space colonization and A.I.

there’s a remarkable intellectual homogeneity; the dominant voices belong to white male philosophers at Oxford.

Among his E.A. innovations has been the career research organization known as 80,000 Hours, which promotes “earning to give” — the idea that altruistic people should pursue careers that will earn them oodles of money, which they can then donate to E.A. causes.

each of those terse sentences glosses over a host of additional questions, and it takes MacAskill an entire book to address them. Take the notion that “future people count.” Leaving aside the possibility that the very contemplation of a hypothetical person may not, for some real people, be “intuitive” at all, another question remains: Do future people count for more or less than existing people count for right now?

MacAskill cites the philosopher Derek Parfit, whose ideas about population ethics in his 1984 book “Reasons and Persons” have been influential in E.A. Parfit argued that an extinction-level event that destroyed 100 percent of the population should worry us much more than a near-extinction event that spared a minuscule population (which would presumably go on to procreate), because the number of potential lives dwarfs the number of existing ones.

If you’re a utilitarian committed to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the arithmetic looks irrefutable. The Times’s Ezra Klein has written about his support for effective altruism while also thoughtfully critiquing longtermism’s more fanatical expressions of “mathematical blackmail.”

In 2015, MacAskill published “Doing Good Better,” which is also about the virtues of effective altruism. His concerns in that book (blindness, deworming) seem downright quaint when compared with the astral-plane conjectures (A.I., building an “interstellar civilization”) that he would go on to pursue in “What We Owe the Future.”

In both books he emphasizes the desirability of seeking out “neglectedness” — problems that haven’t attracted enough attention so that you, as an effective altruist, can be more “impactful.” So climate change, MacAskill says, isn’t really where it’s at anymore; readers would do better to focus on “the issues around A.I. development,” which are “radically more neglected.

In his recent best seller, “What We Owe the Future” (2022), MacAskill says that the case for effective altruism giving priority to the longtermist view can be distilled into three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.”

“Earning to give” has its roots in the work of the radical utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” has been a foundational E.A. text. It contains his parable of the drowning child: If you’re walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, you should wade in and save the child, even if it means muddying your clothes

Extrapolating from that principle suggests that if you can save a life by donating an amount of money that won’t pose any significant problems for you, a decision not to donate that money would be not only uncharitable or ungenerous but morally wrong.

Singer has also written his own book about effective altruism, “The Most Good You Can Do” (2015), in which he argues that going into finance would be an excellent career choice for the aspiring effective altruist. He acknowledges the risks for harm, but he deems them worth it

Chances are, if you don’t become a charity worker, someone else will ably do the job; whereas if you don’t become a financier who gives his money away, who’s to say that the person who does become a financier won’t hoard all his riches for himself?

On Nov. 11, when FTX filed for bankruptcy amid allegations of financial impropriety, MacAskill wrote a long Twitter thread expressing his shock and his anguish, as he wrestled in real time with what Bankman-Fried had wrought.

“If those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community,” MacAskill wrote in a Tweet, followed by screenshots from “What We Owe the Future” and Ord’s “The Precipice” that emphasized the importance of honesty and integrity.

I’m guessing that Bankman-Fried may not have read the pertinent parts of those books — if, that is, he read any parts of those books at all. “I would never read a book,” Bankman-Fried said earlier this year. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”

Avoiding books is an efficient method for absorbing the crudest version of effective altruism while gliding past the caveats

For all of MacAskill’s galaxy-brain disquisitions on “A.I. takeover” and the “moral case for space settlement,” perhaps the E.A. fixation on “neglectedness” and existential risks made him less attentive to more familiar risks — human, banal and closer to home.

there’s little reason to enserf or enslave a worker (not quite the same thing, but let’s leave that aside) if labor is abundant and land is scarce, so that the amount that worker could earn if he ran away barely exceeds the cost of subsistence.

But if land becomes abundant and labor scarce, the ruling class will want to pin workers in place, so they can forcibly extract the difference between the value of what workers can produce — strictly speaking, their marginal product — and the cost of keeping them alive.

Yet serfdom wasn’t reimposed, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. One thought, however, is that holding people captive in order to steal the fruits of their labor isn’t easy.

In fact, the real historical puzzle is why high wages didn’t always lead to widespread slavery or serfdom

serfdom in the West had more or less withered away by around 1300, because Western Europe was overpopulated given the technologies of the time, which in turn meant that landowners didn’t need to worry that their tenants and workers would leave in search of lower rents or higher wages.

But the Black Death caused populations to crash and wages to soar. In fact, for a while, real wages in Britain reached a level they wouldn’t regain until around 1870:

Labor was scarce in pre-Civil War America, so free workers earned high wages by European standards. Here are some estimates of real wages in several countries as a percentage of U.S. levels on the eve of the Civil War:

Indeed, slaveholders and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was a bad thing. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union address, the slave interest in effect demanded that Northerners “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”

Notice that Australia — another land-abundant, labor-scarce nation — more or less matched America; elsewhere, workers earned much less.

Landowners, of course, didn’t want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans came as indentured servants — in effect, temporary serfs

landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: Because they looked different from white settlers, they found it hard to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor whites who might otherwise have realized that they had many interests in common. Of course, white southerners also saw slaves as property, not people, and so the value of slaves factored into the balance sheet of this greed-driven system.

again, the dynamic was one in which greedy slaveholders used and perpetuated racism to sustain their reign of exploitation and terror.

Because U.S. slavery was race-based, however, there was a limited supply of slaves, and it turned out that slaves made more for their masters in Southern agriculture than in other occupations or places

Black people in the North were sold down the river to Southern planters who were willing to pay more for them, so slavery became an institution peculiar to one part of the country.

As such, slaves became a hugely important financial asset to their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they cultivated, and may well have accounted for the majority of Southern wealth.

Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth

Hence the rise of serfdom as Russia expanded east, and the rise of slavery as Europe colonized the New World.

But Northerners wouldn’t do that. There were relatively few Americans pushing for national abolition, but Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery in their own territories

This wasn’t as noble an act as it might have been if they had been confiscating slaveholders’ property, rather than in effect waiting until the slaves had been sold. Still, it’s to voters’ credit that they did find slavery repugnant.

And this posed a problem for the South

Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was about states’ rights should read Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation consisted of free states, so the slave states in effect demanded control over free-state policies.

This should sound familiar. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states that have banned abortion have grown increasingly frantic over the ability of women to travel to states where abortion rights remain; it’s obvious that the right will eventually impose a national abortion ban if it can.

For a long time, the South actually did manage to exercise that kind of national control. But industrialization gradually shifted the balance of power within the United States away from the South to the North:

So did immigration, with very few immigrants moving to slave states.And the war happened because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were not willing to play the role of police for the South” in protecting slavery.

So yes, the Civil War was about slavery — an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom

And there’s no excuse for anyone who pretends that there was anything noble or even defensible about the South’s cause: The Civil War was fought to defend an utterly vile institution.

“People used to talk about politicians trying to control our bodies,” she said. “Now it’s, they have no business getting involved in these medical decisions, these politicians don’t have medical expertise, they’re making these laws, and they’re not basing it on health care or science.”

Seventy-three percent of independents who support abortion rights said stories about women almost dying because of bans would affect how they vote.

“Now it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant,” she said. “It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.”

Anti-abortion groups have responded by trying to carve out a difference between “elective abortion” for unwanted pregnancies — which they want banned — and “maternal fetal separation” in medical emergencies. (The medical procedure is the same.)

Opponents have long stigmatized abortion as something irresponsible women use as birth control or because they care more about their careers than having children. “When the focus shifts to the dangers that abortion bans inflict on pregnant people,” said Reva Siegel, a constitutional law professor at Yale who has written extensively about the country’s abortion conflict, “it’s easier for Americans to talk about.”

Technology and criminal law have flipped the script, she said.

Before Roe legalized abortion nationally in 1973, the law allowed more leeway for what were considered “therapeutic abortions.” Doctors, often solo practitioners, could use their good faith judgment to provide them. Even the Southern Baptist Convention supported abortions in cases of fetal deformity or when a woman’s physical or mental health was at risk.

Now, the threat of prosecution, $100,000 fines and loss of their medical licenses have chilled doctors and hospital systems in treating women with pregnancy complications. More often than not in some states, lawyers are making the decisions.

In Georgia, she said, more people opposed the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy once they were told that this meant two weeks after the average woman misses her period — not, as her own partner believed, six weeks after conception. Some voters, she said, believed that six weeks meant six weeks after women found out they were pregnant.

In their place, Trump’s stump speech has become dominated by grievances about the wrongs he believes have been done to him and his promises to get even for them. It doesn’t quite create the festive atmosphere of eight years ago, when many attendees were clearly having a great time. Where the new, more prosaic feeling lacks the uplift of the past, though, it has still managed to generate enough enthusiasm

The lack of catchy slogans might not matter if they were just slogans. But in 2016, they were a symbol of Trump’s willingness to talk about things that other candidates, including other Republicans, shied away from.

Regarding the war in Gaza, he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the conflict to end quickly—but on Israel’s terms.

He had several such policy positions, including breaking with the bipartisan consensus on free trade, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare, and claiming to have opposed the Iraq War from the start.

The focus on the wall also showed that he was willing to deploy (putatively) “commonsense” ideas that other politicians weren’t. This helped Trump to appeal not just to Republicans but to disaffected voters of all stripes

Where Trump once trumpeted his appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he is now fumblingly trying to formulate a position on abortion that doesn’t alienate either his base or swing voters, mostly relying on ambiguity

Trump is emphasizing fewer big transformational ideas compared with 2016. His promises are a scattershot collection of ideas targeted at particular segments of the electorate: ending taxes on salary earned from tips, defending TikTok (a platform he once tried to ban), declassifying files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rolling back fossil-fuel regulations. Although he promises to clamp down on the border and deport undocumented immigrants, you won’t catch a “Round ’em up” chant at his rallies. And Project 2025, his allies’ proposal to overhaul the federal government by massively expanding political patronage, doesn’t lend itself to a bumper sticker.

Trump allots a great deal of his stump speech to mocking Biden as incoherent and senile (sometimes awkwardly) while also warning that Biden’s administration has made the United States a failed nation, and that his reelection could be fatal to the country. The disconnect between the images of Biden as doddering fool and as evil schemer is one that Republicans have struggled to reconcile but that Trump has concluded doesn’t need resolving.

Grievance is not a new note at Trump rallies, but four and eight years ago, he used to talk about other people’s grievances and promise to redress them. Now the grievances are largely his own

One big problem for Clinton was the criticism that she had no compelling goal for her candidacy other than that she wanted to be president. Trump’s campaign now is about nothing so much as his desire to be president.

Even Project 2025 is about the accumulation of executive power itself, rather than any particular policy goal