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carolinehayter

With Many Colleges Closed, Will Students Turn Out To Vote? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...lege-students-turn-out-to-vote

politics US trump voting election pandemic students

shared by carolinehayter on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Despite a legacy of low turnout, college students — and young people in general — could be a decisive voting bloc in this election. Already, nearly 5 million Americans, ages 18 to 29, have cast early votes, a far higher number than at this point in 2016.
  • College students more than doubled their rate of voting between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, according to research from Tufts University.
  • In the 2016 presidential election, 48% of college students voted. Experts predict that percentage will grow this year. A poll on Monday from Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that 63% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they would "definitely" vote in the election. In 2016, that number was 47%.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • "No matter who you're voting for, you should express your civic duty and vote
  • If Rosenow and many of her college-age peers turn out, they could have an important impact: Young people make up 37% of eligible voters, according to census data analyzed by the Brookings Institution.
  • And in some states, the number of college students can affect a tight race: The state university system in Wisconsin enrolls about 170,000 students, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost that state by 22,177 votes.
  • The unknown variable, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic and how it has disrupted the academic year. More than 40% of U.S. colleges are fully or primarily online for the fall semester, and that could have a big impact on turnout,
  • campus closures, plus the attempts to suppress the college vote by limiting polling places, could dampen the growth in voting rates researchers were expecting.
  • While total registration of young people has exceeded 2016 levels, in more than a dozen states registration among first-time voters — 18- and 19-year-olds — is lower than in 2016.
  • That doesn't surprise Rosenow at the University of Rochester. "COVID changed our whole mindset in terms of getting out the vote and trying to get students to register," she says. Usually her organization sets up tables in common spaces or on the quad, "and then I just pretty much scream at other students to get them to vote."
  • Rosenow says there's been a lot of confusion about mail-in voting since students live all over the country and the process can be hard to navigate.
  • But Thomas is still optimistic: College students thrive on social media, she notes, and have become adept at creating communities online.
  • Following protests this summer, Thomas also expects that many young voters are fired up: "Activism is so high right now that it may actually be counteracting some of the downside of COVID," she says, "This generation really cares, and if they can be told the many reasons why they do need to vote, I think they will."
carolinehayter

With 'husbands' remark, Trump has sealed his fate with women (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump politics US Culture pandemic sexism opinion

shared by carolinehayter on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • As President Donald Trump pleaded for the support of suburban women at a Michigan rally Tuesday evening (amidst a pandemic and economic crisis that have caused a mass exodus of women from the workforce), he argued that he deserved their votes because "we're getting your husbands back to work."
  • The implications here -- that he believes all women have or should have husbands and that workplaces are the province of men -- are so sexist and outmoded that they will likely alarm American women who have long become accustomed to inappropriate treatment from their commander in chief.
  • Biden's support among White women (the ones Trump is clearly angling for when he says "suburban") is 18 points higher than that of Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump four years ago. But, with these latest remarks, the President has probably put the final nail in his own reelection chances with many women voters.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names.
  • misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.
  • A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.
  • Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.
  • rump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others
  • His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks
  • Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center
  • This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women
  • moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic.
  • But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence.
  • Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes.
  • They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.
anonymous

2016 Nonvoters, a Key Prize for Biden and Trump, Turn Out in Droves - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-trump-biden-early-voting.html

politics trump

shared by anonymous on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • In Pennsylvania and other battlegrounds, both parties are succeeding in coaxing infrequent voters off the sidelines. The all-important question is who does it better.
  • I’m petrified of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi getting power and doing all this stuff that’s going to totally destroy the economy,”
  • secret weapon,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Mr. Walsh called polls showing the president trailing “a joke,” adding, “He will do nothing but gain in the areas he won last time.”
  • About one in four of the 1.3 million registered Democrats who have voted did not vote in 2016.
  • But that is partly because Mr. Trump has made mail-in ballots toxic to many of his supporters through his frequent (and unfounded) claims that mail voting is ripe for fraud.
  • Although it is impossible to know how a person voted, the voter file unlocks a trove of information, including a voter’s age, race, sex and history of past voting. In states without partisan registration, the firm models voters’ likely party preference based on other information.
  • The Biden campaign said that Mr. Trump’s share of voters has not grown even if he is turning out new supporters.
  • showed Mr. Biden with a seven-point lead over Mr. Trump. Pennsylvania’s districts were redrawn two years ago; Mr. Trump lost the equivalent of the new Seventh District to Mrs. Clinton by one percentage point.
  • Ms. Sanchez had to work last week during the final debate, but she plans to catch up with a recording. Depending on what she sees, she said, she will make up her mind about whether to cast a ballot or not.
clairemann

Why Joe Biden Is Bullish in Battleground Michigan  | Time - 0 views

time.com/...michigan-swing-state-joe-biden

US trump election policy politics gop

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Trump spent most of 2016 in a one-way fight with Detroit’s automakers. He hammered them for moving jobs to Mexico and for shuttering iconic factories that were long linked to Detroit’s core identity.
  • Republicans a slim win in the state for the first time since George H.W. Bush carried it in 1988.
  • Four years later, Michigan’s economy has, quite simply, not seen the promised benefits of a Trump presidency. Despite Trump’s rhetoric that America’s Black voters had nothing to lose by backing him, racial disparity in the state is still staggeringly deep.
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  • Blacks are six times more likely than whites to live in economically distressed areas in this state.
  • Among the 12 Michigan counties that went from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, these disparities are getting worse by a two-to-one margin, according to one study out just this week
  • Michigan’s manufacturing legacy is still a point of pride for the state’s residents and a source of near-nostalgia for voters who remember when General Motors’ 2.1-million-square foot plant in Warren provided a lifetime gig with tremendous benefits.
  • During the primary in 2016, Trump visited Warren for a boisterous rally, promising harsh tariffs for automakers taking parts of their business abroad. “You’re going to pay a 35% tax every time you ship a car, truck or part into the United States,”
  • He handily won the state’s primary a few days later. He’d repeat the victory eight months later against Clinton.
  • Voters there should brace for more rosy talk about a roaring economy and revitalized auto industry — despite Michigan having 4,700 fewer jobs in the auto industry than when Trump took office. That’s almost a 12% dip.
  • Michigan’s economy as a whole is in trouble, too. Sixteen percent of Michiganders live in economically depressed areas, outpacing every state in the region but Ohio
  • Of the 60 surveys included in Real Clear Politics’ polling universe, Trump has led in just four, and they’re all from the same Republican-leaning pollster. At this point, Biden’s advantage in Michigan — up 6.5 percentage points — is roughly twice as strong as Clinton’s final polling standing before she lost the state by less than 11,000 votes.
  • A review of Kantar/CMAG data accessed through the Wesleyan Media Project shows Biden’s side has aired almost 12,000 more ads than Trump since Oct. 12. In all, Michigan voters have seen more than 22,000 ads in the last three weeks.
  • The New York Times/ Siena College poll of Michigan, released this week, shows 69% of Michigan Republicans plan to vote in-person on Election Day, while 28% of Democrats said the same.
  • And Trump has been here before — and he is his best closing pitchman. It will just require Michigan voters to once again believe the President can solve the state’s legacy economy with bluster and nostalgia.
clairemann

Yes, Texas Could Go Blue This Year | Time - 0 views

time.com/...texas-blue-biden-trump

US politics election trump gop Texas

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The outcome of the 2020 Presidential election is more uncertain than any in modern history—and nowhere is that uncertainty on better display than in Texas, a state that could very well go Democratic for the first time since 1976.
  • “If I were to guess, I would say 10-15% who vote in a Republican primary aren’t true Republicans,” Ryan says, adding that the percentage might be a notch higher for Democratic primaries, particularly in more partisan areas where the primary is functionally the general election.
  • (to quote Frank Drake, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that’s “a wonderful way to organize our ignorance).
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  • The polls in Texas are all over the place, ranging from a 7-point margin for U.S. President Donald Trump, who won the state by 9 percentage points in 2016, to a four-point Biden victory.
  • Turnout in Texas this year will greatly surpass any previous cycle. In 2016, just shy of 9 million Texans cast a vote for president, amounting to 51.4% of the voting-eligible population, according to the United States Election Project.
  • Many more voters are expected to turn out on Nov. 3. A recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that 75% of respondents consider it safe to vote in person on Election Day, though there’s a rift along party lines: 57% of Democrats said they felt safe compared to 91% of Republicans, suggesting Trump voters are more likely than Biden voters to vote in person.
  • “significantly different electorate than in 2016,” says Joshua Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Nationwide, the conventional wisdom that higher turnout benefits Democrats does not hold up when one considers President Trump’s core base
  • As of Wednesday, early voters with a history of voting in a Republican primary outpaced those who voted in Democratic primaries by 6 points, though the largest percentage voted in neither.
  • both shifted Texas from leaning or tilting Republican to a genuine toss up, while the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato places it in “Leans Republican,” just one category to the right.
  • “They’re only afraid of extremely high turnout.” Meanwhile, he says that Democrats have long held that Texas “is not a Republican state. It is a non-voting state.”
  • This is a particularly common misconception regarding eligible Hispanic voters, plenty of whom, polling by Blank’s organization and others suggests, are generally supportive of the Republican Party.
  • There is a strong possibility that Democrats will retake the Texas House of Representatives this year, which Republicans have controlled—along with the Texas Senate and governorship—since 2003.
  • the Texas Democratic Party has widened the front in terms of slating better candidates. For more than a decade, Blank says, the Party was “catch as catch can” in terms of finding viable candidates for district races, a process that restarted every cycle, with many seats going uncontested
  • “If you’re a candidate who loses narrowly but runs again, it gives you a lot more parity with the Republican incumbent,” Blank says.
  • Arguably the more relevant question is: how many Texans who otherwise would not have voted are excited about local candidates, and are thus more likely to vote and perhaps boost Biden?
  • More to the point, those on the ballot for state races, Blank says, form an organic field operation across the state, armed with their own volunteers and knowledge of their districts that a statewide or national campaign could never generate from scratch.
  • Whether that’s enough to make a difference is, of course, ultimately unknowable before the election. When I asked Sabato why he was keeping Texas in the “Leans Republican” category, he said that “I’ve been hearing every four years that Texas is going Democratic, and it never happens.”
  • Austin Q. Sarker-Young on 31 Oct 20
     
    Dear Claire, While I appreciate the optimism, I think the Democratic Party has cried victory too early this year, and claiming that Texas could go blue simply reinforces this. The Democratic Party seems to have gone a little too far on the offensive, much in the same way as they did in 2016, and this could have disastrous results for the cause of Joe Biden. As for your evidence, I do not trust Larry Sabato, since his prediction given right before election night in 2016 was WILDLY wrong (Clinton 322 - Trump 216). In that prediction, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/our-final-2016-picks/), he predicted that Wisconsin was a "Likely D" and said "Lean D" for the myriad swing states that we all know went for Trump that year. When it comes to Sabato's 2020 predictions, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/2020-president/), a great many of the states he marks as toss-up or lean Democrat went Republican in 2016. We also all remember the "Blue Wave" disappointment of 2018 that took the House but failed to take the Senate. Considering all this, I have reason to be quite skeptical of what pollsters say. And my opinion? I cannot have one yet. As of today, and probably even at the end of election day on November 3, the final winner of the election is unknowable.
katherineharron

How Donald Trump is intentionally making things more difficult for Biden - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 19 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump continues to howl on Twitter -- between rounds of golf -- spreading the lie that he won the election he lost, and promising he will be in the White House come January.
  • the first family has canceled plans for Thanksgiving in Florida to instead stay in the White House he'll leave in just more than two months.
  • But across the government Trump oversees -- with actions at the Pentagon, inaction on the economy and denialism about the pandemic -- the President and his allies are undercutting President-elect Joe Biden and harming the American people, even as none of them acknowledge that they're about to be replaced.
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  • Trump's been busy firing officials who admit anything counter to the election-fraud narrative
  • Trump's administration is:Further removing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq in the final days of Trump's time as President.Contemplating new terrorist designations in Yemen that could complicate efforts to broker peace. Rushing through authorization of a massive arms sale that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East.Planning a last-minute crackdown on China.Floating the idea of a last-minute military strike on Iran, according to The New York Times.Building a wall of sanctions that make it difficult for Biden to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal Trump scuttled.Sending Mike Pompeo on the first-ever official visit by a US secretary of state to an Israeli settlement.
  • Here's what expires in December without further action:Provisions to beef up unemployment insuranceA deferral on student loan payments A paid family leave provisionCoronavirus relief funding for states whose tax base has been decimatedAnd a moratorium on evictionsTrump could potentially address these items with executive orders if he were to focus on them. Regardless, the first major political fight of Biden's presidency is likely to be this standoff with either a narrowly Republican- or Democratic-controlled Senate.
  • Trump also signed a temporary delay on payroll taxes this year.
  • The most important of these various nails left under the couch cushions is Trump's steadfast refusal to accept the legitimacy of Biden's win, an ultimately futile bit of pique, since Biden will take the oath of office and Trump will no longer be President in January.
  • It's clear many of Trump's followers are all-in in their disbelief of the election results. If Republican orthodoxy is that Biden is not a real president, it will legitimize and even demand standing in the way of his efforts to govern in the next four years, and endanger the democratic process.
  • If Biden is to govern as a uniter, as he's promised, he'll first have to find a way to reach people being groomed to believe the counterfactual notion that he's an election thief.
  • Republicans will argue Trump was similarly set up for failure by sour Democrats, but that's a false equivalence, since Democrats from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on down acknowledged Trump's victory in real time.
  • That term from above -- bunker mentality -- is an interesting one for White House aides to anonymously self-apply. I've always associated it with Adolf Hitler's end, in the bunker, surrounded by sycophants -- rejecting facts in the face of certain defeat.
  • They have shown that winning -- even flattering Trump's fragile ego -- means more to them than the survival of our democracy.
carolinehayter

Angela Merkel's message to Joe Biden - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...le-in-america-november-10-intl

merkel biden trump US politics Policy

shared by carolinehayter on 20 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Angela Merkel's faith in America was deeply shaken when Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016.
  • The German Chancellor who grew up behind the Iron Curtain was quicker than most to perceive his threat to the kind of US global leadership that has traditionally underwritten European security. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Merkel may well have opted not to run for a fourth term. But she would not retire with Trump in the White House, seeing him as a peril to the West, its common values and security architecture like NATO.
  • A sense of relief four years later pulsed through her congratulatory message
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  • "We Germans and Europeans understand that we must take on more responsibilities in this partnership in the 21st century. America remains our most important ally, but it rightfully expects more effort from us to guarantee our own security and to defend our values around the world," Merkel said.
  • Her greeting envisages America returning as an assertive global leader to tackle the "major challenges of our time" like climate change, the pandemic, terrorism, trade and the economy, "side by side" with Europe.
  • "Joe Biden brings with him decades of experience in domestic and foreign policy. He knows Germany and Europe well,"
  • The "Chancellor of the Free World" does not plan to run for reelection again. That could leave Biden as one of the last active politicians whose worldviews were shaped by the Cold War.
  • Not enough strategic thinking has been done so far on either side of the Atlantic on how to evolve the world's most effective alliance for the 21st century, especially with the US increasingly looking to China as its most important foreign policy issue.
  • The end of Trump's "America First" nationalism buys the West a little time to accelerate that thinking.
cartergramiak

The Upshot on Today's Polls - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...presidential-polls-trump-biden

history trump us gop biden

shared by cartergramiak on 30 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • In the wake of Tuesday’s messy debate, we got a different kind of survey: a so-called instapoll. People tell a pollster they will watch a debate and agree to take a poll after it’s over. These surveys are quirky in some ways, but they do a decent job of gauging a debate’s effect. This time, the news was generally good for Joe Biden.
  • CNN found that Mr. Biden won the debate, 60 percent to 28 percent, while CBS News and an early cut from a Data for Progress poll found far closer seven- and 12-point leads for Mr. Biden.
  • But a closer look in this case raises the possibility of good news for Mr. Biden. His favorability rating improved by a net four percentage points, compared with how the same respondents answered before the debate. The president’s rating declined by a net four points.
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  • The results are kind of useful. Historically, the winner of these polls tends to gain in the real polls over the next week. John Kerry, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton all picked up a couple of points after debate performances that instant polls suggested they won.
  • The big picture: It’s hard to say anyone clearly won the debate last night, and that’s a win for Mr. Biden. He was the front-runner heading into the debate, and it was the president who needed a win to try to narrow the race. None of the instant poll results, whatever their merit, do much to dispel that view.
Javier E

Trump suggested naming Ivanka as 2016 running mate: Rick Gates book - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-8d05-9beaaa91c71f_story.html

trump 2016 anti-democratic politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • While the Trump who emerges from Gates’s book has a short temper and a shorter attention span, Gates largely argues such traits are positives — attributes of an unorthodox politician, he says.
  • he notes in his book another moment in the campaign that he believes resonated with some voters, even if it horrified the political class: the answer Trump gave in the final debate of 2016 when asked whether he would accept the election results.
  • “I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?” Trump told moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. He has echoed that response in similar statements this year, refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses in November.
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  • At the time, Gates suggests, the campaign did not dwell on whether the answer was undemocratic or problematic but instead on their view that it was effective.
  • While the Washington establishment thought Trump’s answer was terrible, Gates writes, the campaign viewed it differently: as a statement that would appeal to voters who appreciated “Trump’s breaking with protocol, his ‘fearlessness’ when it came to challenging the status quo.”
xaviermcelderry

Six Takeaways From the First Presidential Debate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...debate-takeaways.html

Trump Biden Election Debate

shared by xaviermcelderry on 30 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Shouting, interruptions and often incoherent cross talk filled the air as Mr. Trump purposefully and repeatedly heckled and blurted over his rival and the moderator alike in a 90-minute melee that showcased the president’s sense of urgency to upend a race in which polls show him trailing.
  • The impact on the race of the messy affair — given that 90 percent of voters say they are already decided — is an open question.
  • He bulldozed Mr. Biden and the moderator, Chris Wallace, throughout the evening. But his goal, other than making for a convoluted contest, was less clear. Mr. Trump seemed principally focused on undercutting and disorienting Mr. Biden, rather than on presenting an agenda or a vision for a second term in the White House.
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  • The former vice president was strongest and most comfortable on the issues that he has focused on overwhelmingly in the last six months: the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic downturn.
  • Like it was for Mrs. Clinton, it was at times a hard attack for Mr. Biden to answer. But unlike her, he had Mr. Trump’s record to slash at.“He’s going to be the first president of the United States,” Mr. Biden countered at one point, “to leave office having fewer jobs in his administration when he became president.”
  • The president declined to condemn white supremacists again on Tuesday, despite being asked directly by Mr. Wallace if he would do so.
  • Mr. Biden has staked himself to a steady lead in the race largely due a historic gender gap: Women are supporting him far more than Mr. Trump, and by a far greater margin than Mr. Trump’s advantage among men. While Mr. Trump tried at times to explicitly tailor his points to suburban women, who have been at the center of his demographic erosion, his bullying performance seemed unlikely to win them back.
  • Mr. Biden labored to get his points in over Mr. Trump’s stream of interjections, turning directly to the camera for refuge from a scrum that hardly represented a contest of ideas. But Mr. Biden did not stumble, contradicting months of questions from the Trump campaign about his mental fitness, and Mr. Trump seemed to do little to bring over voters who were not already part of his base
  • “I’ve seen better-organized food fights at summer camp,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist. “But Trump needed a clear ‘W,’ and he didn’t get it.”
  • Mr. Biden’s own performance was mostly adequate. He swallowed some of his own lines, and Mr. Trump talked over others.
  • Before the debate, Mr. Wallace had said that, if successful, his job was to be “as invisible as possible.” He sometimes managed to recede, though at other times he was caught up in the shout-fest. Rarely did he exert control over the chaos. “If you want to switch seats?” he offered gamely at one point to Mr. Trump.
  • Eventually, after Mr. Biden suggested he condemn the Proud Boys, a far-right organization widely condemned as a hate group, Mr. Trump declared, “Proud Boys: Stand back and stand by.”
  • Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said: “The problem is not that Trump refused to condemn white supremacy. It’s much worse. It’s that he acknowledged he was their leader by telling them to ‘Stand by.’”
  • Mr. Biden’s delivery was not always forceful. He did occasionally lose his cool and succumb to Mr. Trump’s barrage of taunts. But he mostly emerged unscathed, and for most Democrats, anything but a loss was welcomed as a clear win.
Javier E

Opinion | At His Core, Trump Is an Immoralist - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-ethics-immorality.html

trump morality politics history crisis savage disruption

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Hibbing’s book, based on reporting, focus groups and surveys, is an attempt to understand what motivates the most enthusiastic Trump supporters.
  • The most ardent ones, he notes, are not economically marginalized, not submissive, not authoritarian, not religious or conventionally conservative. They have a strong concept that there is a core America, a concept which I suppose you could summarize as white, rural, John Wayne, football and hunting.
  • They feel that core America is under existential threat from people they view as outsiders: immigrants, Chinese communists, cosmopolitan urbanites and people of color. They see themselves as strong and vigilant protectors, defending the sacred homeland from alien menace.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • People who feel themselves under threat have a high tolerance for cruelty in their leaders: A little savagery to defend the homeland might be a good thing.
  • But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. He is first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty, betrayal and cheating long before he put on political garb.
  • The nationalists relish Trump’s disruption, his savagery. Some everyday conservatives — homeowners, parents, shopkeepers — feel in their bones that some new danger is afoot.
  • In this presidential campaign, Trump’s nationalist platform — trade, immigration — has faded into the background while his immoral nature has taken center stage
  • What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he’ll do to America in a second term.
  • this election has devolved to certain key questions: Does America still have a moral core, a basic framework that makes this a decent place to live? Will we let Trump and his felons drag us to moral chaos?
  • During Tuesday night’s debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump’s vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human conversation impossible
  • You can see this separation in the polls. Fourteen percent of Trump’s 2016 battleground state supporters are not sure they will support him again. Only 16 percent of white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016; 28 percent now support Joe Biden, according to an August Fox News poll.
  • Some Republicans see Trump’s immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But his immorality is voracious, a widening gyre that threatens the basic stability of civic life. If he undermines this election, and his Republican enablers let him, he’ll approach what comes next with appalling ferocity.
  • “There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”
rerobinson03

Election Showed a Wider Red-Blue Economic Divide - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-red-blue-economic-divide.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 12 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Local voting patterns in the presidential election showed a narrowing of several traditional divides. Preliminary vote totals indicate that the partisan gap of urban versus suburban places shrank, along with the traditional Democratic advantage in heavily Hispanic counties. Whites and nonwhites are now in somewhat greater alignment in how they vote.
  • That makes the resilience of the economic divide all the more striking. In fact, the gap between red and blue counties in their education levels, household incomes and projected long-term job growth did not just persist; it widened.
  • Based on counties with at least 98 percent of estimated votes reported, the correlation between a swing away from President Trump and the college-educated share in a county was 0.49.
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  • More educated places, which leaned strongly blue to begin with, voted even more Democratic in 2020 than they did in 2016.
  • A more educated work force bodes well for future local economic success — and places with brighter prospects swung toward Joe Biden.
  • Jobs requiring more education are projected to grow faster and be at less risk from automation. Counties where more jobs are “routine” (in the sense of being at greater risk from automation) voted strongly for Mr. Trump in 2016 and even more so in 2020, while counties with fewer such jobs swung toward Mr. Biden. Similarly, counties with a mix of occupations that are projected to grow faster voted even more strongly for Mr. Biden in 2020 than for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
  • Not only did places with brighter economic prospects swing more toward Mr. Biden, but places with a stronger economy during the past four years did, too.
  • Overall voting patterns tend to change very little from election to election.
  • Put another way, only 7 percent of counties
  • swung more than 10 points in either direction between 2016 and 2020.
  • Many more places swung toward Mr. Biden relative to 2016 than toward Mr. Trump, but the most significant local shifts were toward Mr. Trump. These included heavily Hispanic areas in Miami-Dade County and along the Texas border, and the more heavily Mormon counties of Utah and Idaho
  • Both denser and more sprawling suburbs of large metros swung toward Mr. Biden by around five percentage points, while more traditionally Democratic urban counties didn’t shift much either way. Non-metropolitan, largely rural counties also shifted little.
delgadool

Why Polling on The 2020 Presidential Election Missed the Mark - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lection-polls-trump-biden.html

election trump history politics

shared by delgadool on 13 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • And most polls underestimated President Trump’s strength, in Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin and elsewhere. Instead of winning a landslide, as the polls suggested, Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Mr. Trump by less than two percentage points in the states that decided the election.
  • “This was a bad year for polling,” David Shor, a data scientist who advises Democratic campaigns, said. Douglas Rivers, the chief scientist of YouGov, a global polling firm, said, “We’re obviously going to have a black eye on this.”
  • This year’s misleading polls had real-world effects, for both political parties. The Trump campaign pulled back from campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin, reducing visits and advertising, and lost both only narrowly. In Arizona, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator Martha McSally’s re-election campaign said that public polling showing her far behind “probably cost us $4 or $5 million” in donations. Ms. McSally lost to Mark Kelly by less than three percentage points.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • People’s decreasing willingness to respond to polls
  • Some types of voters seem less willing to respond to polls than others, perhaps because they are less trusting of institutions, and these voters seem to lean Republican.
  • A much-hyped theory that Trump supporters lie to pollsters appears to be wrong or insignificant. Polls did not underestimate his support more in liberal areas, where supporting Mr. Trump can be less socially acceptable, than in conservative areas.
  • Although Literary Digest’s sample of 2.4 million respondents was enormous, it was not representative. The magazine’s circulation skewed toward affluent Americans, who were more hostile to Roosevelt and the New Deal than most voters. A less prominent pollster that year, George Gallup, had surveyed many fewer people — about 50,000 — but he had been careful to ensure they matched the country’s demographic mix. Mr. Gallup correctly predicted a Roosevelt win.
  • In 1948, the pollsters’ luck ran out. They continued to overestimate the Republican vote share, reporting throughout the campaign that President Harry Truman trailed his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. This time, the election was close enough that the polls pointed to the wrong winner, contributing to perhaps the most famous error in modern journalism, The Chicago Tribune’s banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
  • Nearly every poll showed Hillary Clinton to be leading Mr. Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The leads were big enough that her campaign paid relatively little attention to those states. But she lost all three narrowly, giving Mr. Trump a stunning victory.
  • One factor was largely unsolvable: Late-deciding voters, accurately identified as undecided in polls, broke strongly for Mr. Trump.
katherineharron

Biden carries Arizona, flipping a longtime Republican stronghold - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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election

shared by katherineharron on 13 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • For just the second time in more than seven decades, a Democrat will carry Arizona in a presidential election, a monumental shift for a state that was once a Republican stronghold.
  • CNN projected on Thursday that President-elect Joe Biden will carry Arizona,
  • Biden's win in the state that propelled Republican leaders like Barry Goldwater and John McCain to national prominence could foretell problems for the party going forward.
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  • Three key shifts in the state helped Democrats this year: a growing Latino population that leans Democratic, a surge in voters moving to Arizona from more liberal states like California and Illinois, and the way suburban voters have starkly broken with a Republican Party led by someone like Trump.
  • Arizona, by going blue, is moving closer to its neighbor to the northwest -- Nevada, where Democrats have taken control of almost all aspects of government
  • Maricopa is the fastest-growing county in the country, transforming over the last two decades into a sprawling mass of metropolitan hubs, sun-scorched planned communities and bustling strip malls.
  • "Maricopa County won the state of Arizona for Mark Kelly and Joe Biden," said Steven Slugocki, chair of Maricopa County's Democrats. "Here in Maricopa, we committed our resources to contact voters of color, women and traditionally underrepresented groups throughout the state. Our strategy proved to be effective."
  • Biden is just the second Democrat to win Arizona since 1948, when Harry Truman won. Bill Clinton narrowly won the state in 1996, but Arizona moved further right in the next two decades, electing hard-line immigration proponents like Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and passing laws like SB 1070, a controversial state law that required officers to make immigration checks while enforcing other laws if "reasonable suspicion" of illegal immigration exists.
  • The Democratic victory builds on the work by grassroots organizations on the ground in Arizona, many of which focused on the state's growing Latino population by uniting around the opposition to Arpaio and the immigration crackdown
  • "This year was a victory for the decade-plus of work in this state," said Laura Dent, the executive director of Chispa Arizona
  • "It has been a decade-plus of building and the sustained work of organizing between electoral cycles have been critical."
  • Dent said the organizing around SB 1070 was a "catalyst" for these groups to unify around something and "build that collective power" on display this year
  • "I thought by 2024, Arizona would be for real a swing state," said Yasser Sanchez, an immigration lawyer who volunteered for Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and worked for McCain's 2016 reelection to the Senate before rejecting a Trump-led Republican Party and helping organize Latino voters for Biden. "Every time I heard it would be before, I thought that was wishful thinking."
  • Looming over Biden's victory is the legacy of McCain, an Arizona stalwart whose "maverick" conservatism carried a coalition of Democrats, independents and Republicans for years in the state.
  • Trump to double down on his mocking attacks of the Republican senator, even after he died in 2018. This, along with comments Trump reportedly made about military members and veterans, spurred McCain's widow, Cindy McCain, to back Biden, an endorsement that was front page news in the state.
  • But Arizona was considered so reliably red in 2014 that a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California-Los Angeles dubbed Mesa -- a sprawling suburb east of Phoenix -- the "most conservative American city."
  • "Ten years ago, if you wanted to be politically relevant and if you wanted your vote to have an impact, you were foolish to be registered as a Democrat because they failed to field a candidate for some offices," said Mesa Mayor John Giles, a registered Republican in a nonpartisan job. "And even then, it was just volunteering to get killed in the general by the Republican."
  • "I am hoping to change the state blue," Schaefer said after casting her ballot. "Believe me, I have tried to turn everybody that I can possibly turn."
  • "Trump is dangerous for the country," Hudock said after voting days before the election. "In the last four years, Republicans have shown their true colors. ... I just wish there was a centrist party.
  • That quickly changed as the virus spread throughout the state, with more than 160,000 cases and 3,600 people dying in Maricopa County alone.
  • Biden's win in Arizona was not for a lack of trying on Trump's part. The President held seven events in the state in 2020. Biden held one event after the Democratic National Convention over the summer, a bus tour around Maricopa in October.
Javier E

Opinion | What the Asian-American Coalition Can Teach the Democrats - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asian-american-democrats.html

diversity inequality justice race class coalition Asian-American culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Asian-Americans have built this political coalition not in spite of identities, but because of identities. Their success is a rebuke to those who denigrate “identity politics” and call for emphasizing class over race or identity.
  • The cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s insight is evergreen: “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” The creation of race and the exploitation of racial difference has always been a part of capitalism. This is why any call for privileging class over race is fundamentally mistaken at best and dishonest at worst.
  • the problem is not necessarily with identity politics per se. The problem lies in Mr. Trump’s conjoining of white identity politics with economic policies that favor the wealthy and a political strategy that includes demonizing other races
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  • The Asian-American coalition, by contrast, is demanding policies that in some way address those who are struggling and in need, and who are often people of color.
  • “Asian-Americans converge in several notable ways, including experiences with discrimination, voting behavior and attitudes on policies ranging from environmental protection to gun control to higher taxation and social service provision.”
  • The question for the Asian-American coalition, as for the Democratic Party as a whole, is what constitutes economic justice: the Clinton-Obama neoliberalism of favoring Wall Street and trade deals, with insufficient attention paid to the middle and working classes?
  • Or a more robust form of economic redistribution that would tax the wealthy at a higher rate, eliminate or greatly reduce student and medical debt, expand health insurance and child care, bolster public schools and enhance access to higher education?
  • As today’s Asian-American coalition sees it, no policy can be carried out effectively without paying attention to identities and differences
  • The majority of Asian-Americans, for example, support affirmative action, recognizing that it is needed to reduce inequities not only for African-Americans and Latinos but also for Pacific Islanders and poorer Asian-Americans.
  • Group interest and self-interest sometimes align and sometimes don’t, but solidarity entails that a coalition’s members sometimes seek justice for themselves, and sometimes for others.
  • A crucial lesson of the Asian-American coalition is that although celebrating diversity can sometimes draw attention away from issues of economic inequality, that does not mean that a focus on diversity, difference or identity ignores economic inequality. On the contrary, economic inequality in this country has always been built on racial differences.
  • Only the affirmation of racial differences, harnessed with a robust approach to economic justice, can help alleviate the many economic problems this country faces.
Javier E

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...imate-change-losing-earth.html

global warming failure environment politics climate change history crisis

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.”
  • Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush.
  • It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster.
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  • If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.
  • Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.
  • There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.
  • The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal
  • ‘This Is the Whole Banana’ Spring 1979
  • here was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” a 1968 essay published while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” One of the most potentially devastating such weapons, he believed, was the gas that we exhaled with every breath: carbon dioxide. By vastly increasing carbon emissions, the world’s most advanced militaries could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse.
  • the Jasons. They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C.I.A, to devise scientific solutions to national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats.
  • Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged
  • During the spring of 1977 and the summer of 1978, the Jasons met to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by 2035.
  • The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, “The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” was written in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: Global temperatures would increase by an average of two to three degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of North America, Asia and Africa”; access to drinking water and agricultural production would fall, triggering mass migration on an unprecedented scale. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, was the effect of a changing climate on the poles. Even a minimal warming “could lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet contained enough water to raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.
  • MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon-dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age — in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy: In his 20s, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm.
  • They were surprised to learn how few senior officials were familiar with the Jasons’ findings, let alone understood the ramifications of global warming. At last, having worked their way up the federal hierarchy, the two went to see the president’s top scientist, Frank Press.
  • Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon-dioxide roadshow. Beginning in the spring of 1979, Pomerance arranged informal briefings with the E.P.A., the National Security Council, The New York Times, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Energy Department, which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier at MacDonald’s urging
  • . Out of respect for MacDonald, Press had summoned to their meeting what seemed to be the entire senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and national security. What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed the character of a high-level national-security meeting.
  • MacDonald would begin his presentation by going back more than a century to John Tyndall — an Irish physicist who was an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work and died after being accidentally poisoned by his wife. In 1859, Tyndall found that carbon dioxide absorbed heat and that variations in the composition of the atmosphere could create changes in climate. These findings inspired Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and future Nobel laureate, to deduce in 1896 that the combustion of coal and petroleum could raise global temperatures. This warming would become noticeable in a few centuries, Arrhenius calculated, or sooner if consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase.
  • Four decades later, a British steam engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar discovered that, at the weather stations he observed, the previous five years were the hottest in recorded history. Humankind, he wrote in a paper, had become “able to speed up the processes of Nature.” That was in 1939.
  • MacDonald’s history concluded with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, advised every president on major policy; he had been a close colleague of MacDonald and Press since they served together under Kennedy. In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, Revelle concluded that “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions.
  • After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.
  • On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.
  • If Charney’s group confirmed that the world was careering toward an existential crisis, the president would be forced to act.
  • Hansen turned from the moon to Venus. Why, he tried to determine, was its surface so hot? In 1967, a Soviet satellite beamed back the answer: The planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide. Though once it may have had habitable temperatures, it was believed to have succumbed to a runaway greenhouse effect: As the sun grew brighter, Venus’s ocean began to evaporate, thickening the atmosphere, which forced yet greater evaporation — a self-perpetuating cycle that finally boiled off the ocean entirely and heated the planet’s surface to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit
  • At the other extreme, Mars’s thin atmosphere had insufficient carbon dioxide to trap much heat at all, leaving it about 900 degrees colder. Earth lay in the middle, its Goldilocks greenhouse effect just strong enough to support life.
  • We want to learn more about Earth’s climate, Jim told Anniek — and how humanity can influence it. He would use giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. They would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that mimicked our own. These digital simulacra, technically called “general circulation models,” combined the mathematical formulas that governed the behavior of the sea, land and sky into a single computer model. Unlike the real world, they could be sped forward to reveal the future.
  • The government officials, many of them scientists themselves, tried to suppress their awe of the legends in their presence: Henry Stommel, the world’s leading oceanographer; his protégé, Carl Wunsch, a Jason; the Manhattan Project alumnus Cecil Leith; the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody. These were the men who, in the last three decades, had discovered foundational principles underlying the relationships among sun, atmosphere, land and ocean — which is to say, the climate.
  • When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos.
  • The discrepancy between the models, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected light; if snow melted in a warmer climate, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly before dawn, Arakawa concluded that Manabe had given too little weight to the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled in 2035 or thereabouts, global temperatures would increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the most likely outcome a warming of three degrees.
  • within the highest levels of the federal government, the scientific community and the oil-and-gas industry — within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet — the Charney report would come to have the authority of settled fact. It was the summation of all the predictions that had come before, and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed it. Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm three degrees Celsius
  • The last time the world was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.
  • After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own dedicated carbon-dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. Only Exxon was asking a slightly different question than Jule Charney. Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.
  • “It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program,” Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.”
  • Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon-dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker predicted that fossil fuels would have to be restricted, whether by taxation or fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress, calling carbon dioxide “the No.1 long-term environmental problem.” If presidents and senators trusted Broecker to tell them the bad news, he was good enough for Exxon.
  • The company had been studying the carbon-dioxide problem for decades, since before it changed its name to Exxon. In 1957, scientists from Humble Oil published a study tracking “the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” contributed to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution “from the combustion of fossil fuels.” Even then, the observation that burning fossil fuels had increased the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was well understood and accepted by Humble’s scientists.
  • The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade association, asked the same question in 1958 through its air-pollution study group and replicated the findings made by Humble Oil. So did another A.P.I. study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute a decade later, in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000 and ultimately “serious worldwide environmental changes,” including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas.
  • The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government — nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement — seemed worried?
  • Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until this generation of employees was safely retired? Worse, the solutions seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?
  • That June, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which directed the National Academy of Sciences to start a multiyear, comprehensive study, to be called “Changing Climate,” that would analyze social and economic effects of climate change. More urgent, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to propose climate policy.
  • On April 3, 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Gordon MacDonald testified that the United States should “take the initiative” and develop, through the United Nations, a way to coordinate every nation’s energy policies to address the problem.
  • During the expansion of the Clean Air Act, he pushed for the creation of the National Commission on Air Quality, charged with ensuring that the goals of the act were being met. One such goal was a stable global climate. The Charney report had made clear that goal was not being met, and now the commission wanted to hear proposals for legislation. It was a profound responsibility, and the two dozen experts invited to the Pink Palace — policy gurus, deep thinkers, an industry scientist and an environmental activist — had only three days to achieve it, but the utopian setting made everything seem possible
  • We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
  • The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was.
  • William Elliott, a NOAA scientist, introduced some hard facts: If the United States stopped burning carbon that year, it would delay the arrival of the doubling threshold by only five years. If Western nations somehow managed to stabilize emissions, it would forestall the inevitable by only eight years. The only way to avoid the worst was to stop burning coal. Yet China, the Soviet Union and the United States, by far the world’s three largest coal producers, were frantically accelerating extraction.
  • “Do we have a problem?” asked Anthony Scoville, a congressional science consultant. “We do, but it is not the atmospheric problem. It is the political problem.” He doubted that any scientific report, no matter how ominous its predictions, would persuade politicians to act.
  • The talk of ending oil production stirred for the first time the gentleman from Exxon. “I think there is a transition period,” Henry Shaw said. “We are not going to stop burning fossil fuels and start looking toward solar or nuclear fusion and so on. We are going to have a very orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”
  • What if the problem was that they were thinking of it as a problem? “What I am saying,” Scoville continued, “is that in a sense we are making a transition not only in energy but the economy as a whole.” Even if the coal and oil industries collapsed, renewable technologies like solar energy would take their place. Jimmy Carter was planning to invest $80 billion in synthetic fuel. “My God,” Scoville said, “with $80 billion, you could have a photovoltaics industry going that would obviate the need for synfuels forever!”
  • nobody could agree what to do. John Perry, a meteorologist who had worked as a staff member on the Charney report, suggested that American energy policy merely “take into account” the risks of global warming, though he acknowledged that a nonbinding measure might seem “intolerably stodgy.” “It is so weak,” Pomerance said, the air seeping out of him, “as to not get us anywhere.”
  • Scoville pointed out that the United States was responsible for the largest share of global carbon emissions. But not for long. “If we’re going to exercise leadership,” he said, “the opportunity is now.
  • One way to lead, he proposed, would be to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and regulate it as such. This was received by the room like a belch. By Scoville’s logic, every sigh was an act of pollution. Did the science really support such an extreme measure? The Charney report did exactly that, Pomerance said.
  • Slade, the director of the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, considered the lag a saving grace. If changes did not occur for a decade or more, he said, those in the room couldn’t be blamed for failing to prevent them. So what was the problem?
  • “Call it whatever.” Besides, Pomerance added, they didn’t have to ban coal tomorrow. A pair of modest steps could be taken immediately to show the world that the United States was serious: the implementation of a carbon tax and increased investment in renewable energy. Then the United States could organize an international summit meeting to address climate change
  • these two dozen experts, who agreed on the major points and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but they were sunk by objections and caveats.
  • They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place. “The guide I would suggest,” Jorling wrote, “is whether we know enough not to recommend changes in existing policy.”
  • Pomerance had seen enough. A consensus-based strategy would not work — could not work — without American leadership. And the United States wouldn’t act unless a strong leader persuaded it to do so — someone who would speak with authority about the science, demand action from those in power and risk everything in pursuit of justice.
  • The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president.
  • ‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ November 1980-September 1981
  • In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could “permanently and disastrously” alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to “a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.” Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.
  • After the election, Reagan considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. “We’re deliriously happy,” the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about a quarter
  • Reagan “has declared open war on solar energy,” the director of the nation’s lead solar-energy research agency said, after he was asked to resign). Reagan appeared determined to reverse the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, before undoing those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.
  • When Reagan considered closing the Council on Environmental Quality, its acting chairman, Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, wrote to the vice president and the White House chief of staff begging them to reconsider; in a major speech the same week, “A Conservative’s Program for the Environment,” Baldwin argued that it was “time for today’s conservatives explicitly to embrace environmentalism.” Environmental protection was not only good sense. It was good business. What could be more conservative than an efficient use of resources that led to fewer federal subsidies?
  • Meanwhile the Charney report continued to vibrate at the periphery of public consciousness. Its conclusions were confirmed by major studies from the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Every month or so, nationally syndicated articles appeared summoning apocalypse: “Another Warning on ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ ” “Global Warming Trend ‘Beyond Human Experience,’ ” “Warming Trend Could ‘Pit Nation Against Nation.’
  • Pomerance read on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 22, 1981, about a forthcoming paper in Science by a team of seven NASA scientists. They had found that the world had already warmed in the past century. Temperatures hadn’t increased beyond the range of historical averages, but the scientists predicted that the warming signal would emerge from the noise of routine weather fluctuations much sooner than previously expected. Most unusual of all, the paper ended with a policy recommendation: In the coming decades, the authors wrote, humankind should develop alternative sources of energy and use fossil fuels only “as necessary.” The lead author was James Hansen.
  • Pomerance listened and watched. He understood Hansen’s basic findings well enough: Earth had been warming since 1880, and the warming would reach “almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century, leading to the familiar suite of terrors, including the flooding of a 10th of New Jersey and a quarter of Louisiana and Florida. But Pomerance was excited to find that Hansen could translate the complexities of atmospheric science into plain English.
  • 7. ‘We’re All Going to Be the Victims’ March 1982
  • Gore had learned about climate change a dozen years earlier as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he took a class taught by Roger Revelle. Humankind was on the brink of radically transforming the global atmosphere, Revelle explained, drawing Keeling’s rising zigzag on the blackboard, and risked bringing about the collapse of civilization. Gore was stunned: Why wasn’t anyone talking about this?
  • Most in Congress considered the science committee a legislative backwater, if they considered it at all; this made Gore’s subcommittee, which had no legislative authority, an afterthought to an afterthought. That, Gore vowed, would change. Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama: villains, victims and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three, with the chairman serving as narrator, chorus and moral authority. He told his staff director that he wanted to hold a hearing every week.
  • The Revelle hearing went as Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.”
  • That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.
  • There emerged, despite the general comity, a partisan divide. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans demanded action. “Today I have a sense of déjà vu,” said Robert Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania. In each of the last five years, he said, “we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet they had failed to propose a single law. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research is clear. It is up to us now to summon the political will.”
  • Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than at Gore’s first hearing on the greenhouse effect. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding for carbon-dioxide research despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaned the burning of fossil fuels and argued passionately that science should serve as the basis for legislative policy
  • the experts invited by Gore agreed with the Republicans: The science was certain enough. Melvin Calvin, a Berkeley chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. “You cannot do a thing about it when the signals are so big that they come out of the noise,” he said. “You have to look for early warning signs.”
  • Hansen’s job was to share the warning signs, to translate the data into plain English. He explained a few discoveries that his team had made — not with computer models but in libraries. By analyzing records from hundreds of weather stations, he found that the surface temperature of the planet had already increased four-tenths of a degree Celsius in the previous century. Data from several hundred tide-gauge stations showed that the oceans had risen four inches since the 1880s
  • It occurred to Hansen that this was the only political question that mattered: How long until the worst began? It was not a question on which geophysicists expended much effort; the difference between five years and 50 years in the future was meaningless in geologic time. Politicians were capable of thinking only in terms of electoral time: six years, four years, two years. But when it came to the carbon problem, the two time schemes were converging.
  • “Within 10 or 20 years,” Hansen said, “we will see climate changes which are clearly larger than the natural variability.” James Scheuer wanted to make sure he understood this correctly. No one else had predicted that the signal would emerge that quickly. “If it were one or two degrees per century,” he said, “that would be within the range of human adaptability. But we are pushing beyond the range of human adaptability.” “Yes,” Hansen said.
  • How soon, Scheuer asked, would they have to change the national model of energy production? Hansen hesitated — it wasn’t a scientific question. But he couldn’t help himself. He had been irritated, during the hearing, by all the ludicrous talk about the possibility of growing more trees to offset emissions. False hopes were worse than no hope at all: They undermined the prospect of developing real solutions. “That time is very soon,” Hansen said finally. “My opinion is that it is past,” Calvin said, but he was not heard because he spoke from his seat. He was told to speak into the microphone. “It is already later,” Calvin said, “than you think.”
  • From Gore’s perspective, the hearing was an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of “CBS Evening News” to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Calvin said that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and Gore mocked Reagan for his shortsightedness. Later, Gore could take credit for protecting the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, which in the end was largely preserved.
  • 8. ‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ 1982
  • Following Henry Shaw’s recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global-warming research. It donated tens of thousands of dollars to some of the most prominent research efforts, including one at Woods Hole led by the ecologist George Woodwell, who had been calling for major climate policy as early as the mid-1970s, and an international effort coordinated by the United Nations. Now Shaw offered to fund the October 1982 symposium on climate change at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty campus.
  • David boasted that Exxon would usher in a new global energy system to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. He went so far as to argue that capitalism’s blind faith in the wisdom of the free market was “less than satisfying” when it came to the greenhouse effect. Ethical considerations were necessary, too. He pledged that Exxon would revise its corporate strategy to account for climate change, even if it were not “fashionable” to do so. As Exxon had already made heavy investments in nuclear and solar technology, he was “generally upbeat” that Exxon would “invent” a future of renewable energy.
  • Hansen had reason to feel upbeat himself. If the world’s largest oil-and-gas company supported a new national energy model, the White House would not stand in its way. The Reagan administration was hostile to change from within its ranks. But it couldn’t be hostile to Exxon.
  • The carbon-dioxide issue was beginning to receive major national attention — Hansen’s own findings had become front-page news, after all. What started as a scientific story was turning into a political story.
  • The political realm was itself a kind of Mirror World, a parallel reality that crudely mimicked our own. It shared many of our most fundamental laws, like the laws of gravity and inertia and publicity. And if you applied enough pressure, the Mirror World of politics could be sped forward to reveal a new future. Hansen was beginning to understand that too.
  • 1. ‘Caution, Not Panic’ 1983-1984
  • in the fall of 1983, the climate issue entered an especially long, dark winter. And all because of a single report that had done nothing to change the state of climate science but transformed the state of climate politics.
  • After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon-dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of scientist-dignitaries — among them Revelle, the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, one of the intellectual architects of Cold War game theory — would review the literature, evaluate the consequences of global warming for the world order and propose remedies
  • Then Reagan won the White House.
  • the incipient report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan administration, the warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the academy’s elders to explain what it was.
  • The committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg — a Jason, presidential adviser and director of Scripps, the nation’s pre-eminent oceanographic institution — argued that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with certainty, or else it would be too late.
  • Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major interventions in national energy policy, taken immediately, might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic and social consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it.
  • Government officials who knew Nierenberg were not surprised by his conclusions: He was an optimist by training and experience, a devout believer in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, one of the elite class of scientists who had helped the nation win a global war, invent the most deadly weapon conceivable and create the booming aerospace and computer industries. America had solved every existential problem it had confronted over the previous generation; it would not be daunted by an excess of carbon dioxide. Nierenberg had also served on Reagan’s transition team. Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections, but his views — optimistic about the saving graces of market forces, pessimistic about the value of government regulation — reflected all the ardor of his party.
  • That’s what Nierenberg wrote in “Changing Climate.” But it’s not what he said in the press interviews that followed. He argued the opposite: There was no urgent need for action. The public should not entertain the most “extreme negative speculations” about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report). Though “Changing Climate” urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended “caution, not panic.” Better to wait and see
  • The damage of “Changing Climate” was squared by the amount of attention it received. Nierenberg’s speech in the Great Hall, being one-500th the length of the actual assessment, received 500 times the press coverage. As The Wall Street Journal put it, in a line echoed by trade journals across the nation: “A panel of top scientists has some advice for people worried about the much-publicized warming of the Earth’s climate: You can cope.”
  • On “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather said the academy had given “a cold shoulder” to a grim, 200-page E.P.A. assessment published earlier that week (titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”; the E.P.A.’s answer, reduced to a word, was no). The Washington Post described the two reports, taken together, as “clarion calls to inaction.
  • George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser. Keyworth used Nierenberg’s optimism as reason to discount the E.P.A.’s “unwarranted and unnecessarily alarmist” report and warned against taking any “near-term corrective action” on global warming. Just in case it wasn’t clear, Keyworth added, “there are no actions recommended other than continued research.”
  • Edward David Jr., two years removed from boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science that the corporation had reconsidered. “Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels — petroleum products, natural gas and steam coal,” David said. The American Petroleum Institute canceled its own carbon-dioxide research program, too.
  • Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited “Changing Climate” as evidence that “the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO₂ greenhouse effect.” If the academy had concluded that regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon protest
  • 2. ‘You Scientists Win’ 1985
  • 3. The Size of The Human Imagination Spring-Summer 1986
  • Curtis Moore’s proposal: Use ozone to revive climate. The ozone hole had a solution — an international treaty, already in negotiation. Why not hitch the milk wagon to the bullet train? Pomerance was skeptical. The problems were related, sure: Without a reduction in CFC emissions, you didn’t have a chance of averting cataclysmic global warming. But it had been difficult enough to explain the carbon issue to politicians and journalists; why complicate the sales pitch? Then again, he didn’t see what choice he had. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and Moore was his connection to the Senate’s environmental committee.
  • Pomerance met with Senator John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, and helped persuade him to hold a double-barreled hearing on the twin problems of ozone and carbon dioxide on June 10 and 11, 1986
  • F.Sherwood Rowland, Robert Watson, a NASA scientist, and Richard Benedick, the administration’s lead representative in international ozone negotiations, would discuss ozone; James Hansen, Al Gore, the ecologist George Woodwell and Carl Wunsch, a veteran of the Charney group, would testify about climate change.
  • As Pomerance had hoped, fear about the ozone layer ensured a bounty of press coverage for the climate-change testimony. But as he had feared, it caused many people to conflate the two crises. One was Peter Jennings, who aired the video on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” warning that the ozone hole “could lead to flooding all over the world, also to drought and to famine.”
  • The confusion helped: For the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, global-warming headlines appeared by the dozen. William Nierenberg’s “caution, not panic” line was inverted. It was all panic without a hint of caution: “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (the front page of The Washington Post); “Scientists Predict Catastrophes in Growing Global Heat Wave” (Chicago Tribune); “Swifter Warming of Globe Foreseen” (The New York Times).
  • After three years of backsliding and silence, Pomerance was exhilarated to see interest in the issue spike overnight. Not only that: A solution materialized, and a moral argument was passionately articulated — by Rhode Island’s Republican senator no less. “Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect can no longer be treated solely as important scientific questions,” Chafee said. “They must be seen as critical problems facing the nations of the world, and they are problems that demand solutions.”
  • The old canard about the need for more research was roundly mocked — by Woodwell, by a W.R.I. colleague named Andrew Maguire, by Senator George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. “Scientists are never 100 percent certain,” the Princeton historian Theodore Rabb testified. “That notion of total certainty is something too elusive ever to be sought.” As Pomerance had been saying since 1979, it was past time to act. Only now the argument was so broadly accepted that nobody dared object.
  • The ozone hole, Pomerance realized, had moved the public because, though it was no more visible than global warming, people could be made to see it. They could watch it grow on video. Its metaphors were emotionally wrought: Instead of summoning a glass building that sheltered plants from chilly weather (“Everything seems to flourish in there”), the hole evoked a violent rending of the firmament, inviting deathly radiation. Americans felt that their lives were in danger. An abstract, atmospheric problem had been reduced to the size of the human imagination. It had been made just small enough, and just large enough, to break through.
  • Four years after “Changing Climate,” two years after a hole had torn open the firmament and a month after the United States and more than three dozen other nations signed a treaty to limit use of CFCs, the climate-change corps was ready to celebrate. It had become conventional wisdom that climate change would follow ozone’s trajectory. Reagan’s E.P.A. administrator, Lee M. Thomas, said as much the day he signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (the successor to the Vienna Convention), telling reporters that global warming was likely to be the subject of a future international agreement
  • Congress had already begun to consider policy — in 1987 alone, there were eight days of climate hearings, in three committees, across both chambers of Congress; Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had introduced legislation to establish a national climate-change strategy. And so it was that Jim Hansen found himself on Oct. 27 in the not especially distinguished ballroom of the Quality Inn on New Jersey Avenue, a block from the Capitol, at “Preparing for Climate Change,” which was technically a conference but felt more like a wedding.
  • John Topping was an old-line Rockefeller Republican, a Commerce Department lawyer under Nixon and an E.P.A. official under Reagan. He first heard about the climate problem in the halls of the E.P.A. in 1982 and sought out Hansen, who gave him a personal tutorial. Topping was amazed to discover that out of the E.P.A.’s 13,000-person staff, only seven people, by his count, were assigned to work on climate, though he figured it was more important to the long-term security of the nation than every other environmental issue combined.
  • Glancing around the room, Jim Hansen could chart, like an arborist counting rings on a stump, the growth of the climate issue over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the center of things. Former and current staff members from the congressional science committees (Tom Grumbly, Curtis Moore, Anthony Scoville) made introductions to the congressmen they advised. Hansen’s owlish nemesis Fred Koomanoff was present, as were his counterparts from the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Rafe Pomerance’s cranium could be seen above the crowd, but unusually he was surrounded by colleagues from other environmental organizations that until now had shown little interest in a diffuse problem with no proven fund-raising record. The party’s most conspicuous newcomers, however, the outermost ring, were the oil-and-gas executives.
  • That evening, as a storm spat and coughed outside, Rafe Pomerance gave one of his exhortative speeches urging cooperation among the various factions, and John Chafee and Roger Revelle received awards; introductions were made and business cards earnestly exchanged. Not even a presentation by Hansen of his research could sour the mood. The next night, on Oct. 28, at a high-spirited dinner party in Topping’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, the oil-and-gas men joked with the environmentalists, the trade-group representatives chatted up the regulators and the academics got merrily drunk. Mikhail Budyko, the don of the Soviet climatologists, settled into an extended conversation about global warming with Topping’s 10-year-old son. It all seemed like the start of a grand bargain, a uniting of factions — a solution.
  • Hansen was accustomed to the bureaucratic nuisances that attended testifying before Congress; before a hearing, he had to send his formal statement to NASA headquarters, which forwarded it to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval. “Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.”
  • By all appearances, plans for major policy continued to advance rapidly. After the Johnston hearing, Timothy Wirth, a freshman Democratic senator from Colorado on the energy committee, began to plan a comprehensive package of climate-change legislation — a New Deal for global warming. Wirth asked a legislative assistant, David Harwood, to consult with experts on the issue, beginning with Rafe Pomerance, in the hope of converting the science of climate change into a new national energy policy.
  • In March 1988, Wirth joined 41 other senators, nearly half of them Republicans, to demand that Reagan call for an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the world total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming.
  • Al Gore himself had, for the moment, withdrawn his political claim to the issue. In 1987, at the age of 39, Gore announced that he was running for president, in part to bring attention to global warming, but he stopped emphasizing it after the subject failed to captivate New Hampshire primary voters.
  • 5. ‘You Will See Things That You Shall Believe’ Summer 1988
  • It was the hottest and driest summer in history. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. Two million acres in Alaska incinerated, and dozens of major fires scored the West. Yellowstone National Park lost nearly one million acres. Smoke was visible from Chicago, 1,600 miles away.
  • In Nebraska, suffering its worst drought since the Dust Bowl, there were days when every weather station registered temperatures above 100 degrees. The director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment warned that the drought might be the dawning of a climatic change that within a half century could turn the state into a desert.
  • On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth. “I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” Hansen said.
  • Hansen had just received the most recent global temperature data. Just over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise. “I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” Hansen said.
  • Hansen returned to his testimony. He wrote: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He wrote: “1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” He wrote: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
  • “We have only one planet,” Senator Bennett Johnston intoned. “If we screw it up, we have no place to go.” Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, called for the United Nations Environment Program to begin preparing a global remedy to the carbon-dioxide problem. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat of Arkansas, previewed Hansen’s testimony, saying that it “ought to be cause for headlines in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.” The coverage, Bumpers emphasized, was a necessary precursor to policy. “Nobody wants to take on any of the industries that produce the things that we throw up into the atmosphere,” he said. “But what you have are all these competing interests pitted against our very survival.”
  • Hansen, wiping his brow, spoke without affect, his eyes rarely rising from his notes. The warming trend could be detected “with 99 percent confidence,” he said. “It is changing our climate now.” But he saved his strongest comment for after the hearing, when he was encircled in the hallway by reporters. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”
  • The press followed Bumpers’s advice. Hansen’s testimony prompted headlines in dozens of newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, which announced, across the top of its front page: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”
  • Rafe Pomerance called his allies on Capitol Hill, the young staff members who advised politicians, organized hearings, wrote legislation. We need to finalize a number, he told them, a specific target, in order to move the issue — to turn all this publicity into policy. The Montreal Protocol had called for a 50 percent reduction in CFC emissions by 1998. What was the right target for carbon emissions? It wasn’t enough to exhort nations to do better. That kind of talk might sound noble, but it didn’t change investments or laws. They needed a hard goal — something ambitious but reasonable. And they needed it soon: Just four days after Hansen’s star turn, politicians from 46 nations and more than 300 scientists would convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, an event described by Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times as “Woodstock for climate change.”
  • Pomerance had a proposal: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2000. Ambitious, Harwood said. In all his work planning climate policy, he had seen no assurance that such a steep drop in emissions was possible. Then again, 2000 was more than a decade off, so it allowed for some flexibility.
  • Mintzer pointed out that a 20 percent reduction was consistent with the academic literature on energy efficiency. Various studies over the years had shown that you could improve efficiency in most energy systems by roughly 20 percent if you adopted best practices.
  • Of course, with any target, you had to take into account the fact that the developing world would inevitably consume much larger quantities of fossil fuels by 2000. But those gains could be offset by a wider propagation of the renewable technologies already at hand — solar, wind, geothermal. It was not a rigorous scientific analysis, Mintzer granted, but 20 percent sounded plausible. We wouldn’t need to solve cold fusion or ask Congress to repeal the law of gravity. We could manage it with the knowledge and technology we already had.
  • Besides, Pomerance said, 20 by 2000 sounds good.
  • The conference’s final statement, signed by all 400 scientists and politicians in attendance, repeated the demand with a slight variation: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2005. Just like that, Pomerance’s best guess became global diplomatic policy.
  • Hansen, emerging from Anniek’s successful cancer surgery, took it upon himself to start a one-man public information campaign. He gave news conferences and was quoted in seemingly every article about the issue; he even appeared on television with homemade props. Like an entrant at an elementary-school science fair, he made “loaded dice” out of sections of cardboard and colored paper to illustrate the increased likelihood of hotter weather in a warmer climate. Public awareness of the greenhouse effect reached a new high of 68 percent
  • global warming became a major subject of the presidential campaign. While Michael Dukakis proposed tax incentives to encourage domestic oil production and boasted that coal could satisfy the nation’s energy needs for the next three centuries, George Bush took advantage. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared on the shore of Lake Erie, the first stop on a five-state environmental tour that would take him to Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s home turf. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect,” he said, “are forgetting about the White House effect.”
  • His running mate emphasized the ticket’s commitment to the issue at the vice-presidential debate. “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue,” Dan Quayle said. “We need to get on with it. And in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”
  • This kind of talk roused the oil-and-gas men. “A lot of people on the Hill see the greenhouse effect as the issue of the 1990s,” a gas lobbyist told Oil & Gas Journal. Before a meeting of oil executives shortly after the “environmentalist” candidate won the election, Representative Dick Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, warned, “It’s going to be very difficult to fend off some kind of gasoline tax.” The coal industry, which had the most to lose from restrictions on carbon emissions, had moved beyond denial to resignation. A spokesman for the National Coal Association acknowledged that the greenhouse effect was no longer “an emerging issue. It is here already, and we’ll be hearing more and more about it.”
  • By the end of the year, 32 climate bills had been introduced in Congress, led by Wirth’s omnibus National Energy Policy Act of 1988. Co-sponsored by 13 Democrats and five Republicans, it established as a national goal an “International Global Agreement on the Atmosphere by 1992,” ordered the Energy Department to submit to Congress a plan to reduce energy use by at least 2 percent a year through 2005 and directed the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the feasibility of a carbon tax. A lawyer for the Senate energy committee told an industry journal that lawmakers were “frightened” by the issue and predicted that Congress would eventually pass significant legislation after Bush took office
  • The other great powers refused to wait. The German Parliament created a special commission on climate change, which concluded that action had to be taken immediately, “irrespective of any need for further research,” and that the Toronto goal was inadequate; it recommended a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions
  • Margaret Thatcher, who had studied chemistry at Oxford, warned in a speech to the Royal Society that global warming could “greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope” and that “the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”
  • The prime ministers of Canada and Norway called for a binding international treaty on the atmosphere; Sweden’s Parliament went further, announcing a national strategy to stabilize emissions at the 1988 level and eventually imposing a carbon tax
  • the United Nations unanimously endorsed the establishment, by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of scientists and policymakers, to conduct scientific assessments and develop global climate policy.
  • One of the I.P.C.C.’s first sessions to plan an international treaty was hosted by the State Department, 10 days after Bush’s inauguration. James Baker chose the occasion to make his first speech as secretary of state. “We can probably not afford to wait until all of the uncertainties about global climate change have been resolved,” he said. “Time will not make the problem go away.”
  • : On April 14, 1989, a bipartisan group of 24 senators, led by the majority leader, George Mitchell, requested that Bush cut emissions in the United States even before the I.P.C.C.’s working group made its recommendation. “We cannot afford the long lead times associated with a comprehensive global agreement,” the senators wrote. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. The self-proclaimed environmentalist was now seated in the Oval Office. It was time.
  • 8. ‘You Never Beat The White House’ April 1989
  • After Jim Baker gave his boisterous address to the I.P.C.C. working group at the State Department, he received a visit from John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff. Leave the science to the scientists, Sununu told Baker. Stay clear of this greenhouse-effect nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Baker, who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff, didn’t speak about the subject again.
  • despite his reputation as a political wolf, he still thought of himself as a scientist — an “old engineer,” as he was fond of putting it, having earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. decades earlier. He lacked the reflexive deference that so many of his political generation reserved for the class of elite government scientists.
  • Since World War II, he believed, conspiratorial forces had used the imprimatur of scientific knowledge to advance an “anti-growth” doctrine. He reserved particular disdain for Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” which prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death if the world took no step to curb population growth; the Club of Rome, an organization of European scientists, heads of state and economists, which similarly warned that the world would run out of natural resources; and as recently as the mid-’70s, the hypothesis advanced by some of the nation’s most celebrated scientists — including Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider and Ichtiaque Rasool — that a new ice age was dawning, thanks to the proliferation of man-made aerosols. All were theories of questionable scientific merit, portending vast, authoritarian remedies to halt economic progress.
  • When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.
  • Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead convened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
  • While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, took a new proposal to the White House. The next meeting of the I.P.C.C.’s working group was scheduled for Geneva the following month, in May; it was the perfect occasion, Reilly argued, to take a stronger stand on climate change. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.
  • Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the American delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Very soon after that, someone leaked the exchange to the press.
  • A deputy of Jim Baker pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker, who had observed Reilly’s infighting with Sununu. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.”
  • 9. ‘A Form of Science Fraud’ May 1989
  • The cameras followed Hansen and Gore into the marbled hallway. Hansen insisted that he wanted to focus on the science. Gore focused on the politics. “I think they’re scared of the truth,” he said. “They’re scared that Hansen and the other scientists are right and that some dramatic policy changes are going to be needed, and they don’t want to face up to it.”
  • The censorship did more to publicize Hansen’s testimony and the dangers of global warming than anything he could have possibly said. At the White House briefing later that morning, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater admitted that Hansen’s statement had been changed. He blamed an official “five levels down from the top” and promised that there would be no retaliation. Hansen, he added, was “an outstanding and distinguished scientist” and was “doing a great job.”
  • 10. The White House Effect Fall 1989
  • The Los Angeles Times called the censorship “an outrageous assault.” The Chicago Tribune said it was the beginning of “a cold war on global warming,” and The New York Times warned that the White House’s “heavy-handed intervention sends the signal that Washington wants to go slow on addressing the greenhouse problem.”
  • Darman went to see Sununu. He didn’t like being accused of censoring scientists. They needed to issue some kind of response. Sununu called Reilly to ask if he had any ideas. We could start, Reilly said, by recommitting to a global climate treaty. The United States was the only Western nation on record as opposing negotiations.
  • Sununu sent a telegram to Geneva endorsing a plan “to develop full international consensus on necessary steps to prepare for a formal treaty-negotiating process. The scope and importance of this issue are so great that it is essential for the U.S. to exercise leadership.”
  • Sununu seethed at any mention of the subject. He had taken it upon himself to study more deeply the greenhouse effect; he would have a rudimentary, one-dimensional general circulation model installed on his personal desktop computer. He decided that the models promoted by Jim Hansen were a lot of bunk. They were horribly imprecise in scale and underestimated the ocean’s ability to mitigate warming. Sununu complained about Hansen to D. Allan Bromley, a nuclear physicist from Yale who, at Sununu’s recommendation, was named Bush’s science adviser. Hansen’s findings were “technical poppycock” that didn’t begin to justify such wild-eyed pronouncements that “the greenhouse effect is here” or that the 1988 heat waves could be attributed to global warming, let alone serve as the basis for national economic policy.
  • When a junior staff member in the Energy Department, in a meeting at the White House with Sununu and Reilly, mentioned an initiative to reduce fossil-fuel use, Sununu interrupted her. “Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil-fuel use?” he asked. “Because of climate change,” the young woman replied. “I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again,” he said. “If you don’t have a technical basis for policy, don’t run around making decisions on the basis of newspaper headlines.” After the meeting, Reilly caught up to the staff member in the hallway. She was shaken. Don’t take it personally, Reilly told her. Sununu might have been looking at you, but that was directed at me.
  • Reilly, for his part, didn’t entirely blame Sununu for Bush’s indecision on the prospect of a climate treaty. The president had never taken a vigorous interest in global warming and was mainly briefed about it by nonscientists. Bush had brought up the subject on the campaign trail, in his speech about the White House effect, after leafing through a briefing booklet for a new issue that might generate some positive press. When Reilly tried in person to persuade him to take action, Bush deferred to Sununu and Baker. Why don’t the three of you work it out, he said. Let me know when you decide
  • Relations between Sununu and Reilly became openly adversarial. Reilly, Sununu thought, was a creature of the environmental lobby. He was trying to impress his friends at the E.P.A. without having a basic grasp of the science himself.
  • Pomerance had the sinking feeling that the momentum of the previous year was beginning to flag. The censoring of Hansen’s testimony and the inexplicably strident opposition from John Sununu were ominous signs. So were the findings of a report Pomerance had commissioned, published in September by the World Resources Institute, tracking global greenhouse-gas emissions. The United States was the largest contributor by far, producing nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, and its contribution was growing faster than that of every other country. Bush’s indecision, or perhaps inattention, had already managed to delay the negotiation of a global climate treaty until 1990 at the earliest, perhaps even 1991. By then, Pomerance worried, it would be too late.
  • Pomerance tried to be more diplomatic. “The president made a commitment to the American people to deal with global warming,” he told The Washington Post, “and he hasn’t followed it up.” He didn’t want to sound defeated. “There are some good building blocks here,” Pomerance said, and he meant it. The Montreal Protocol on CFCs wasn’t perfect at first, either — it had huge loopholes and weak restrictions. Once in place, however, the restrictions could be tightened. Perhaps the same could happen with climate change. Perhaps. Pomerance was not one for pessimism. As William Reilly told reporters, dutifully defending the official position forced upon him, it was the first time that the United States had formally endorsed the concept of an emissions limit. Pomerance wanted to believe that this was progress.
  • All week in Noordwijk, Becker couldn’t stop talking about what he had seen in Zeeland. After a flood in 1953, when the sea swallowed much of the region, killing more than 2,000 people, the Dutch began to build the Delta Works, a vast concrete-and-steel fortress of movable barriers, dams and sluice gates — a masterpiece of human engineering. The whole system could be locked into place within 90 minutes, defending the land against storm surge. It reduced the country’s exposure to the sea by 700 kilometers, Becker explained. The United States coastline was about 153,000 kilometers long. How long, he asked, was the entire terrestrial coastline? Because the whole world was going to need this. In Zeeland, he said, he had seen the future.
  • Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., has a habit of asking new graduate students to name the largest fundamental breakthrough in climate physics since 1979. It’s a trick question. There has been no breakthrough. As with any mature scientific discipline, there is only refinement. The computer models grow more precise; the regional analyses sharpen; estimates solidify into observational data. Where there have been inaccuracies, they have tended to be in the direction of understatement.
  • More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it
  • Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.
  • When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians.
  • The mustache-twirling depravity of these campaigns has left the impression that the oil-and-gas industry always operated thus; while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the ’70s and ’80s were hardly good Samaritans, they did not start multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to distort the truth or try to brainwash children in elementary schools, as their successors would.
  • It was James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 that, for the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, made oil-and-gas executives begin to consider the issue’s potential to hurt their profits. Exxon, as ever, led the field. Six weeks after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change, created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own
  • The American Petroleum Institute, after holding a series of internal briefings on the subject in the fall and winter of 1988, including one for the chief executives of the dozen or so largest oil companies, took a similar, if slightly more diplomatic, line. It set aside money for carbon-dioxide policy — about $100,000, a fraction of the millions it was spending on the health effects of benzene, but enough to establish a lobbying organization called, in an admirable flourish of newspeak, the Global Climate Coalition.
  • The G.C.C. was conceived as a reactive body, to share news of any proposed regulations, but on a whim, it added a press campaign, to be coordinated mainly by the A.P.I. It gave briefings to politicians known to be friendly to the industry and approached scientists who professed skepticism about global warming. The A.P.I.’s payment for an original op-ed was $2,000.
  • It was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 14 other trade associations, including those representing the coal, electric-grid and automobile industries
  • In October 1989, scientists allied with the G.C.C. began to be quoted in national publications, giving an issue that lacked controversy a convenient fulcrum. “Many respected scientists say the available evidence doesn’t warrant the doomsday warnings,” was the caveat that began to appear in articles on climate change.
  • The following year, when President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, the A.P.I. invested $1.8 million in a G.C.C. disinformation campaign. Senate Democrats from oil-and-coal states joined Republicans to defeat the tax proposal, which later contributed to the Republicans’ rout of Democrats in the midterm congressional elections in 1994 — the first time the Republican Party had won control of both houses in 40 years
  • The G.C.C. spent $13 million on a single ad campaign intended to weaken support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed its parties to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent relative to 1990 levels. The Senate, which would have had to ratify the agreement, took a pre-emptive vote declaring its opposition; the resolution passed 95-0. There has never been another serious effort to negotiate a binding global climate treaty.
  • . This has made the corporation an especially vulnerable target for the wave of compensatory litigation that began in earnest in the last three years and may last a generation. Tort lawsuits have become possible only in recent years, as scientists have begun more precisely to attribute regional effects to global emission levels. This is one subfield of climate science that has advanced significantly sin
  • Pomerance had not been among the 400 delegates invited to Noordwijk. But together with three young activists — Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club, Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Stewart Boyle from Friends of the Earth — he had formed his own impromptu delegation. Their constituency, they liked to say, was the climate itself. Their mission was to pressure the delegates to include in the final conference statement, which would be used as the basis for a global treaty, the target proposed in Toronto: a 20 percent reduction of greenhouse-gas combustion by 2005. It was the only measure that mattered, the amount of emissions reductions, and the Toronto number was the strongest global target yet proposed.
  • The delegations would review the progress made by the I.P.C.C. and decide whether to endorse a framework for a global treaty. There was a general sense among the delegates that they would, at minimum, agree to the target proposed by the host, the Dutch environmental minister, more modest than the Toronto number: a freezing of greenhouse-gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Some believed that if the meeting was a success, it would encourage the I.P.C.C. to accelerate its negotiations and reach a decision about a treaty sooner. But at the very least, the world’s environmental ministers should sign a statement endorsing a hard, binding target of emissions reductions. The mood among the delegates was electric, nearly giddy — after more than a decade of fruitless international meetings, they could finally sign an agreement that meant something.
  • 11. ‘The Skunks at The Garden Party’ November 1989
  • It was nearly freezing — Nov. 6, 1989, on the coast of the North Sea in the Dutch resort town of Noordwijk
  • Losing Earth: The Decade WeAlmost Stopped Climate Change We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts. By Nathaniel RichPhotographs and Videos by George Steinmetz AUG. 1, 2018
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Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion
  • Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s
  • A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.
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  • In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.
  • Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.
  • Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common g
  • When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.
  • This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society
  • under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still
  • We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.
  • The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.
  • The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.
  • Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice
  • A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here.
  • I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.
  • Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill Clinton.
  • The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.
  • The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism.”
  • Nations with low social trust—like Brazil, Morocco, and Zimbabwe—have struggling economies.
  • We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos
  • The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together.
  • The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation.
  • The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.
  • For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations
  • Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.
  • moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody.
  • This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.
  • It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them
  • Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a decade.
  • Millennials and members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment, knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young. It has produced a crisis of trust.
  • Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of what is the right thing to do in different situations
  • gh-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.
  • When you look at research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust. In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship is catalyzed.
  • Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality, because people feel connected to each other and are willing to support a more generous welfare state.
  • People in high-trust societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.
  • Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see.
  • As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”
  • During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars, Americans expressed high faith in their institutions
  • In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.
  • By 1994, only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing.
  • Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of people who were actively and poi
  • sonously alienated—who were not only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate
  • In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.
  • In most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say so—the numbers have actually risen.
  • In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,”
  • Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.
  • There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful.
  • Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be.
  • Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.
  • Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons
  • As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time.
  • high national trust is a collective moral achievement.
  • High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.
  • Unsurprisingly, the groups with the lowest social trust in America are among the most marginalized.
  • Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in American history; their distrust is earned distrust
  • In 2018, 37.3 percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted, according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of Black Americans felt the same.
  • People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place.
  • In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to Gallup.
  • The second disenfranchised low-trust group includes the lower-middle class and the working poor.
  • this group makes up about 40 percent of the country.
  • “They are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is trying to trick them, that the world is against them,”
  • the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.
  • In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted
  • Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.
  • A mere 10 percent of Gen Zers trust politicians to do the right thing.
  • Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them.
  • Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.
  • “values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away
  • Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home
  • the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.
  • By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth
  • First, financial insecurity
  • As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
  • Next, emotional insecurity:
  • fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.
  • Then, identity insecurity.
  • All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.
  • liquid modernity
  • Finally, social insecurity.
  • n the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed?
  • Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”
  • In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.
  • Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.
  • People plagued by distrust can start to see threats that aren’t there; they become risk averse
  • Americans take fewer risks and are much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year has dropped by 56 percent
  • People lose faith in experts. They lose faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa,”
  • In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed
  • People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security.
  • fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind.
  • When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do.
  • By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.
  • From the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April, Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low point as during the Great Recession
  • These kinds of drops tend to produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab Spring.
  • The emotional crisis seems to have hit low-trust groups the hardest
  • “low trusters” were more nervous during the early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping, more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public authorities were responding well to the pandemic
  • Eighty-one percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.
  • Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe. And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them
  • The president downplayed the crisis, and his administration was a daily disaster area
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a scared public.
  • The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval process.
  • In nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan, and count on citizens to comply with the new rules.
  • In low-trust nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning, less compliance, less collective action, and more death.
  • Countries that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their leadership.
  • South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system was never really implemented.
  • For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They become more ineffective still.
  • On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system
  • On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy
  • In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.
  • In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s hard to get out of.”
  • Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to loathe them, even to think that they are evil
  • 55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths
  • Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people.
  • This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government.
  • institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to, social roles to fulfill.
  • By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed,
  • Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves.
  • People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand.
  • The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.
  • The Failure of Society
  • The coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but everyone in the group is better off if all group members further the common interest.”
  • Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain (unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off. It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.
  • While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed
  • in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body.
  • Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value
  • When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.
  • The Crack-up
  • This wasn’t just a political and social crisis, it was also an emotional trauma.
  • The week before George Floyd was killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death, the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent
  • By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time since Gallup started measuring, in 2001
  • In another poll, 71 percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the country, and just 17 percent said they were proud.
  • By late June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the existing order.
  • The most alienated, anarchic actors in society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events. The distrust doom loop was now at hand.
  • The Age of Precarity
  • Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.
  • The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat.
  • This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.
  • From risk to security.
  • we’ve entered an age of precarity in which every political or social movement has an opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality, risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from downside dangers
  • In this period of convulsion, almost every party and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.
  • From achievement to equality
  • In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy
  • Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.
  • From self to society
  • If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group.
  • The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”
  • From global to local
  • When there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows away from Washington to cities and states.
  • From liberalism to activism
  • enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason. Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.
  • Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is justice and moral certainty.
  • liberalism’s niceties come to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle
  • The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.
  • The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.
  • How to Rebuild Trust
  • Historians have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health. The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between 1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.
  • In both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.
  • But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own, at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic action.
  • As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations: the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and on
  • After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces; and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local government.
  • The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and social-science expertise were valued.
  • Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution?
  • I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things.
  • The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.
  • The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s?
  • social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter.
  • Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.
  • Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.
  • For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust
  • But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped.
  • By David Brooks
Javier E

A Solution to China Is the West's Biggest Challenge - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629465

world order west challenge security EU NATO authoritarian failure

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • fully understanding the invasion of Ukraine is impossible without considering the geopolitical environment in which it is taking place. Russia is emboldened in its quest to recapture lost influence in Europe partly because of its alliance with China and the calculation that American power is giving way.
  • China’s rise challenges the notion of the West itself. Where the Soviet Union posed a direct threat to Western Europe, China threatens America’s liberal democratic protectorates on the other side of the world: Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and others. Suddenly to think of the West comprising only the two sides of the North Atlantic no longer makes much sense. If there is a “West” today—a free world allied to the U.S.—it stretches from Western Europe to the Far East and Australasia.
  • unlike in the ’40s, Western institutions show little sign of changing to meet the new reality. The old order has been so solidly constructed that it appears to have trapped its defenders, who are unable to muster the energy, ambition, or imagination to build anything new.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Like the Holy Roman Empire that was once dismissed as being neither Holy, Roman, or an Empire, the Western alliance today is neither Western nor an alliance.
  • the policies that led to these failures were supported by the apparently functioning political consensus that Blair, Clinton, and others now believe needs to be resurrected to protect Western strength.
  • Since the turn of the century, the U.S. and its allies have lost one war, failed in at least one other, and seen the American-centered financial system implode, imposing huge costs on ordinary voters, many of whom have seen their industries hollow out and their wages stagnate.
  • All the while, the West’s central foreign-policy calculation—that trade and engagement with China and Russia would see these two powers liberalize, democratize, and take their place in the (American-led) international order—has collapsed under the weight of its absurdly utopian assumptions
  • this idea grew into what is the European Union today, in which German economic might is managed through a common market, with common rules and a common currency set by a common institution. Germany is the undisputed leader of the EU, the biggest, wealthiest, and most productive economy on the continent, yet France and Germany remain the closest of allies.
  • You cannot blame voters for their loss of faith in a system that has failed them and enriched a country that Western leaders now say is the main threat to global democracy.
  • this order gave us Trump and Brexit, and facilitated the rise of Putin and Xi. The world that confronts the West today exists not because the West had too little faith in itself, but because it had too much.
  • In the U.S., pressure was mounting for a collective European response to the continent’s crises. Monnet argued that the only way to stop the cycle of Franco-German antipathy from reasserting itself was to remove the source of tension—Germany’s industrial might. France could not simply requisition German coal and steel production, so Monnet suggested that it be Europeanized, managed by a new High Authority that looked out for the interests of Europe generally, not Germany or France specifically.
  • The proposal’s genius was that it created a policy out of a need, but did so in a way that smuggled a revolutionary idea into a living, breathing institution. The policy itself was small enough to be politically acceptable
  • et it was based on a radical idea: supranationalism. Suddenly, under Monnet’s plan, national interests would become common interests, and so German power and wealth would not become an existential threat to France.
  • they rarely offer an explanation as to why the West lost its faith in itself and became so apparently dysfunctional. Bad leaders did not emerge from nowhere, nor did voters suddenly became stupid.
  • The lesson for Western leaders is to find a similar combination of pragmatism and idealism based on a reasonable analysis of the global balance of power.
  • The most obvious power play America can make to contain China’s rise, for example, is to seek to split up its emerging alliance with Russia.
  • such a policy, debatable only a few months ago, now seems almost impossible—destroyed by Putin’s bloody megalomania.
  • An alternative would be to accept the reality of this new authoritarian axis and endeavor to protect Western democracies from it.
  • The problem is, the more the West builds a democratic alliance against China and Russia, as U.S. President Joe Biden has suggested, the more the West strengthens the very alliance that it fears. And if the world descends into a new cold war, the West will be forced to buddy up to decidedly undemocratic regimes
  • A less radical suggestion is for the U.S. to become the center of the Venn diagram where the two circles of Europe and Asia overlap—an offshore balancing power that has a foot on each side of the world, guaranteeing stability but allowing Europe to take the lead in the West while it corrals a new, more cohesive alliance in the East
  • To do otherwise would be to remake the mistakes of the past 20 years, when hubristic assumptions about the triumph of a universal liberal order wormed their way into policy making, with disastrous consequences.
  • what remains clear is that not building anything new to meet the reality of the changing circumstances risks allowing Chinese power to grow even more.
  • This economic hole has to be filled if the West is to mean anything. Greater economic tools need to be available with which the free-world can defend itself
  • whatever new organization or framework—if any—is created to empower the broader Western world in its rivalry with China must reflect the reality of power as it exists today. It must build on shared interests, not utopian idealism
  • there appears to be little appetite in Asia for its own NATO, little appetite in the U.S. to become even more committed to other countries’ defense, and little appetite in Europe to seriously step forward and allow such a notion to be viable.
  • It is now a common argument that if the leading military powers in the Western world—the U.S., Britain, and France—had shown more commitment to their mission, the world would be safer and more orderly.
Javier E

The American retirement system is built for the rich - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tirement-ira-inequality-budget

retirement system rich wealth IRA benefits inequality politics history policy tax tax shelter

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • While loudly and proudly proclaiming that their goal is to nurture nest eggs for the working class, lawmakers have constructed a complex of tax shelters for the well-to-do. The lopsided result is that as of 2019, nearly 29,000 taxpayers had amassed “mega-IRAs” — individual retirement accounts with balances of $5 million or more — while half of American households had no retirement accounts at all.
  • according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 10th of households reap a larger share of the income tax subsidy for retirement savings than the bottom 80 percent.
  • It’s working out just fine for the financial institutions that manage assets in IRAs and 401(k)s. The combined amount in those vehicles reached $21.6 trillion at the end of 2021 — up fivefold since 2000 — and the more money that pours in, the more that managers collect in fees
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran — who held tax policy roles at the Treasury Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — calls the current state of affairs “the great American retirement fraud.”
  • Secure 2.0 would take the fraud to a new level: Its congressional supporters have engaged in Enron-style accounting gimmicks to mask the bill’s effects on deficit
  • from the outset, IRAs were a generous gift to the upper class. At the time, very few low- and middle-income individuals could afford to stash $1,500 in a retirement account each year — median income for U.S. households was $11,100 in 1974 — so the people taking full advantage of the new IRAs tended to be relatively rich
  • since the benefit was structured as a deduction, it was worth more to taxpayers in higher income brackets.
  • In the nearly half-century since, Congress has continually expanded the amount that individuals can pour into tax-deferred savings accounts.
  • Now, the JCT estimates that 401(k)s and other similar defined-contribution plans cost the federal government $200 billion per year.
  • individuals can contribute up to $6,000 per year to an IRA ($7,000 if age 50 or older), plus $20,500 to a 401(k) ($27,000 for 50-year-olds and up), with their employers potentially chipping in to bring the 401(k) total to $61,000 ($67,500 for the over-50 set).
  • In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, 58 percent of taxpayers with wage income made no contribution to 401(k)-style plans, and less than 4 percent bumped up against the contribution cap.
  • As of 2020, approximately 63 percent of U.S. households had no such accounts.
  • I calculated that an individual who made the maximum 401(k) contributions since 1990, investing exclusively in an S&P 500 index fund, would have more than $7 million in her account today.
  • When JCT released data last summer showing that 28,615 taxpayers had accumulated $5 million or more in IRAs, lawmakers cried foul. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is the top tax writer in the House, lamented the “exploitation” of IRAs. “IRAs are intended to help Americans achieve long-term financial security, not to enable those who already have extraordinary wealth to avoid paying their fair share in taxes,”
  • (The very largest IRAs, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s reported $5 billion account, result from a different loophole: the ability of founders and early-stage investors to stuff IRAs with start-up stock
  • Forbes revealed more than a decade ago that Thiel and another PayPal co-founder were using their IRAs to shelter entrepreneurial earnings; the Government Accountability Office flagged the IRA-stuffing phenomenon in 2014; and rather than clamping down, lawmakers from both parties sat on their hands.)
  • The Secure 2.0 bill, sponsored by Neal, doubles down on the inequities of the status quo. It will inevitably result in even more of the mega-IRAs that Neal and other Democrats decry.
  • Under current law, taxpayers must begin to take withdrawals from their 401(k)s and traditional IRAs at age 72. (It had been 70½ before Secure 1.0, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019, raised the age by a year and a half.
  • Secure 2.0 would bump that up to age 75. The change would mean that taxpayers with supersize IRAs could enjoy three extra years of tax-free growth before they needed to take money out
  • Lower-income retirees wouldn’t benefit because they don’t have the luxury of holding off on withdrawals, which they need to cover living expenses.
  • Another provision would lift the cap on 401(k) catch-up contributions at ages 62, 63 and 64 from $6,500 to $10,000. Factoring in employer matching contributions, that would raise the maximum 401(k) inflow to $71,000 per year.
  • if lawmakers were genuinely concerned about retirement security for people who need it, they wouldn’t start by aiding taxpayers who can afford to save more each year than most Americans earn. The higher limit on catch-up contributions will simply allow high-income taxpayers to race further ahead.
  • The top-weighted benefits of Secure 2.0 might be tolerable if they were offset by other tax increases on the rich — if this were all just moving money from one deep pocket to another. But the items audaciously labeled as “revenue provisions” in the bill generate revenue as real as Monopoly money.
  • The Rothification provisions in Secure 2.0 bring $35 billion of revenue into the 10-year window — ostensibly offsetting the cost of the bill’s giveaways — but the $35 billion is pure make-believe: It comes at the expense of an equivalent amount of revenue down the road.
  • If lawmakers from either party were truly concerned about the plight of low-income retirees, they would focus on strengthening Social Security, which actually provides a safety net for older people, rather than adding more deficit-financed bells and whistles to retirement accounts for the rich.
lilyrashkind

Presidential approval tracker: How popular is Joe Biden? - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...how-popular-joe-biden-n1277509

politics us approval tracker

shared by lilyrashkind on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden’s presidency has been dominated by historic challenges — a resurgent Covid pandemic, an uncertain economy and the American military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
  • But how will these events affect his approval rating?
  • Bookmark this page to see if Biden’s approval rating will follow suit. The chart below shows his approval rating history, along with those of former Presidents Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
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