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Sunday, April 12, 2020

I have little to add to the comments below, and frankly am exhausted and want to put this week behind me. Seems like I could have found more on Bernie Sanders, the end of his campaign, and the consolidation behind Joe Biden. Still seems premature for that, not least as Biden continues to be such an underwhelming front-runner. I watched only a few minutes of Steven Colbert's interview with the Pod Saves America crew last week. They're usually sharp guys, but their "ecstasy" over Biden's win seemed awfully rehearsed and forced. They all previously worked in the Obama White House, and one couldn't help but think they're lining up for new jobs under Biden.

Looks like Joe Biden won the Alaska Democratic primary, 55.31% to 44.69% for Bernie Sanders. The primary was conducted by mail. No results yet in last week's messy Wisconsin primary. Biden was averaging about 53% in polls there. We've voted by mail in Kansas, where the primary is run by the party, not by the state. Ballots here are due May 4. We voted for Sanders. Ranked choice was an option here, but in a two-person race, I didn't see any point in offering a second choice (which could only have been Elizabeth Warren; with five names on the ballot, had I ranked them all Biden would have come in fifth).

I've seen some tweets touting Warren as a VP choice, and I wouldn't object. Indeed, I think she would be very effective in the role. I'm reminded of a business maxim I associate with David Ogilvy, who passed it on to his middle management: if we always hire people greater than ourselves, we will become a company of giants; if we hire people lesser than ourselves, we will be a company of midgets. Biden would probably prefer a safe, mediocre pick like Tim Kaine (or Joe Biden), but this is one chance to rewrite his story (assuming his handlers let him).

Some scattered links this week:

• Kate Aronoff: An airline bailout should have more strings attached than a harp: "The industry was a hot mess before the coronavirus. Cash plus more deregulation will only make it worse."

• Dean Baker (also see blog): Why do economists have such a hard time imagining open source biomedical research?

• Zack Beauchamp: Why Bernie Sanders failed: "The Sanders campaign and his supporters bet on a theory of class politics that turned out to be wrong." Did it? Until Super Tuesday, Sanders had made significant gains among white and Latin working class voters, even while losing most of his professional class support to Elizabeth Warren. As for blacks, South Carolina isn't a very representative measure. Sanders had won the first three hard-fought primaries, and continued to gain support through Super Tuesday. What hurt him there (and in South Carolina three days earlier) was the blind-sided convergence of all "moderate" voters behind Biden, on top of $500 million of saturation advertising by Michael Bloomberg (who entered the campaign expressly to stop Sanders). Then it became impossible to campaign as the coronavirus pandemic shut much of everything down (including voting). I suppose it is true that focus on class has been temporarily suspended with the entire economy in free fall, but when we assay the damage, I expect class schisms to bounce back sharper than ever. Not soon enough for Sanders to ride a wave to the White House, but that doesn't mean his strategy failed -- more like it was more necessary, and more promising, than most people realized. Other postmortems and testaments on the Sanders campaign:

  • Jedediah Britton-Purdy: Bernie Sanders's campaign was trying to save American democracy.

    It was astonishing to hear the Sanders campaign described, as it routinely was in the mainstream press, as angry, bellicose, even a Trumpism for the Left. To be anywhere near the campaign -- to know any of the people going door to door and making regular small donations -- was to understand that it was idealistic in spirit, hopeful in tone, generous in its sense of possibility. It modeled what you might call patriotism for adults, disillusioned patriotism without exceptionalist bullshit. . . .

    [W]hat stopped Sanders from taking control of the party was voters' doubt that American democracy could build a bridge to a better world. For decades, the Right has attacked and denuded the state, while liberals have fought for half-measures, accepting the premises and quarreling over specific applications and results. Pundits and party leaders identify political wisdom as world-weary acceptance that you don't hope for too much, that politics is all small increments and ideological compromise.

    It is hard to ask people to vault over everything they've been old stands between them and the life they would like to believe is possible. It is especially hard when Donald Trump's destructive presidency has made #Resistance, rather than transformation, the essentially defensive posture of the American center and center-left.

  • Elizabeth Bruenig: Bernie Sanders was right: "Goodbye to an honest man's campaign."

  • Holly Otterbein: 'No one went for a knockout blow': Inside Bernie's campaign nosedive: "Many of Sanders' aides and top allies are convinced they should have gone for Biden's jugular."

  • Nate Silver: Sanders -- and the media -- learned the wrong lessons from Trump in 2016.

  • JC Pan: The profound simplicity of Bernie Sanders's vision:

    At best, that contention -- that Sanders's vision of a less apocalyptic future for everyone required to work for a living was so far-fetched that Democrats shouldn't pursue it -- was a profound failure of imagination and a cowardly preemptive compromise in a political landscape already defined by so much senseless inequality and despair. At worst, it was the logical rejoinder of the same wing of the Democratic Party that engineered ugly schemes like welfare reform and rushed to deregulate Wall Street in the 1990s. Though neither of Sanders's bids for the presidency succeeded, they exposed in their course the smallness and callousness of that Democratic elite, and broke their chokehold on the party, even if only for fleeting moments.

  • Derecka Purnell: Bernie Sanders' political outsider savviness was his strength -- and weakness.

  • Bhaskar Sundara: Bernie Sanders' political revolution is not over.

• Julian Borger: Peter Navarro: what Trump's Covid-19 tsar lacks in expertise, he makes up.

• Philip Bump: Trump is entering the 2020 general-election season with key demographics moving away from him. If all these groups are moving against him, who's moving for him? Nonwhite R+6 (but still more D than any other line), $50-100,000 R+3 (richer are D+5, poorer D+2 but much more D). White, no degree is still heavily R, but relative shift is D+17. Age 65+ is D+16, flipping from R to D. Biggest shift is white, college at D+25, so maybe presenting yourself as a moron isn't working so well.

• Susie Cagle: 'A disastrous situation': mountains of food wasted as coronavirus scrambles supply chain.

• Ryan Grim: Mike Bloomberg's firm that ran his presidential campaign is bidding to take over Joe Biden's. So Bloomberg couldn't buy the election from the voters, but maybe he can control it anyway? Maybe Hawkfish isn't directly controlled by Bloomberg, although their business relationship isn't very reassuring -- nor for that matter is their track record. I thought one of the great strengths of the Warren campaign was their home-grown organization, free from the corporate angles that plagued Hillary Clinton's campaign, and that failed Bloomberg so badly. If I were advising Biden, I'd start by looking at how he could pick up as much organization support from Warren and Sanders as possible.

• Fabrizio Hochschild: To fight Covid-19, cyberattacks worldwide must stop immediately: Author is UN Under Secretary, and he has a point. I've long thought we need an international crackdown on cyberwarfare and cybercrime, but the major players seem to think they're winning, or deterring enemies, or at least can't get hurt much. On the other hand, one big thing the pandemic is forcing us to do is to do more work through networking, and that's likely to continue to increase even if it becomes possible to relax social distancing rules.

• Sean Illing: Can a pandemic remake society? A historian explains.: Interview with Walter Scheidel, author of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.

• Kalewold H Kalewold: Biden's first concessions to the left are pathetic.

• Roge Karma:

  • Coronavirus is not just a tragedy. It's an opportunity to build a better world. Interview with Frank Sowden, author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, and previous books on malaria and cholera in Italy.

  • Michael Lewis explains how the Trump administration puts us all at risk of catastrophe. Lewis's book The Fifth Risk goes into various federal government agencies and finds dilligent people there working hard and smart to manage various kinds of risks -- if you're lucky, you'll never hear about those people, because they're doing their jobs. But he waited until Trump got elected to go looking, so it's more like a tour of endangered species and habitats, as Trump systematically installed hacks and lobbyists, spreading graft and incompetence everywhere. Lewis describes Trump as a "destroyer of trust." I never really appreciated the importance of trust until I read George P Brockway's brilliant The End of Economic Man: Principles of Any Future Economics, where the first thing he wrote about was how everything else depends on trust.

• Alex Keyssar: Activists have been trying to change the electoral college for more than 200 years.

• Ezra Klein: I've read plans to reopen the economy. They're scary. "There is no plan to return to normal."

• Sheelah Kolhatkar: How private-equity firms squeeze hospital patients for profits.

• Markos Kounalakis: How Viktor Orbán is taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis.

• Paul Krugman:

  • American democracy may be dying: "Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner."

    Yet the scariest news of the past week didn't involve either epidemiology or economics; it was the travesty of an election in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court required that in-person voting proceed despite the health risks and the fact that many who requested absentee ballots never got them.

    Why was this so scary? Because it shows that America as we know it may not survive much longer. The pandemic will eventually end; the economy will eventually recover. But democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we're much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize.

    Krugman offers Hungary as an example, where an elected leader and party used their power to make it virtually impossible for any other party to regain power, then used the pandemic as an excuse to award itself even more extraordinary powers. Republicans have clearly shown the same contempt for democracy, most obviously in their gerrymanders, their voter suppression laws, and their court packing. But you have to also cite the Democrats of the DNC and Congressional leadership, who have repeatedly nudged the levers of power to get their favored candidates nominated. Moreover, both parties have refused to lift a finger to reduce the influence of money in elections. Perhaps the most flagrant flouting of money ever was Bloomberg's $500 million -- not enough to buy election for one of the most contemptible politicians in America, but instrumental in prodding the Democratic Party to go for Biden. Related here:

    • Jamelle Bouie: Trump wants 50 Wisconsins on election day: "The GOP has turned voting in person into a death threat."

    • Gail Collins: Trump hates having too many voters.

    • David Daley: Wisconsin proves it: Republicans will sacrifice voters' health to keep power.

  • Will we flunk pandemic economics? "Our government suffers from learned helplessness."

• Robert Kuttner/Katherine V Stone: The rise of neo-feudalism: "The private capture of entire legal systems by corporate America goes far beyond neoliberalism. It evokes the private fiefdoms of the Middle Ages." Reminds me that Michael Lind came up with the equation, noting that libertarianism had indeed been tried, but at the time was called feudalism.

  American democracy today is under assault on multiple fronts. The autocratic incursions of the Trump administration are only the most urgent and immediate. But the private capture of public regulatory law is more long-term and more insidious. If we are to get our democracy back, once we oust Trump we need to begin to reclaim public law from neo-feudalism.

• Lauren Leatherby/David Gelles: How the virus transformed the way Americans spend their money. Big bump for groceries around mid-March, as everything else falls off -- travel, most of all.

• Eric Levitz: Trump's Labor Department fights to protect workers from benefits.

• Eric Lipton, et al: He could have seen what was coming: Behind Trump's failure on the virus: "An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response."

• Jonathan Martin/Maggie Haberman: Trump keeps talking. Some Republicans don't like what they're hearing. "Aides and allies increasingly believe the president's daily briefings are hurting him more than helping, and are urging him to let his medical experts take center stage." Related:

  • Peter Baker: In Trump's marathon briefings, the answers and the message are often contradictory: "The president does not need adversaries to dispute his statements. He does that all by himself.".

  • Robert Mackey: Trump's ridiculous behavior at pandemic briefings baffles a watching world.

  • Tom Nichols: With each briefing, Trump is making us worse people: "He is draining the last reserves of decency among us at a time when we need it most."

    Daily, Trump's opponents are enraged by yet another assault on the truth and basic human decency. His followers are delighted by yet more vulgar attacks on the media and the Democrats. And all of us, angry or pleased, become more like Trump, because just like the president, we end up thinking about only Trump, instead of our families, our fellow citizens, our health-care workers, or the future of our country. We are all forced to take sides every day, and those two sides are always "Trump" and "everyone else."

  • Jennifer Senior: Call Trump's news conferences what they are: propaganda.

    Sometimes, I stare at Deborah Birx during these briefings and I wonder if she understands that this is the footage historians will be looking at 100 years from now -- the president rambling on incoherently, vainly, angrily, deceitfully, while she watches, her face stiff with the strangled horror of a bride enduring an inappropriate toast.

• Dylan Matthews: 9 ideas Joe Biden should steal from his Democratic rivals. The big one is Bernie Sanders' coronavirus plan (which includes a temp draft of Medicare for All), but casting a wide net comes up with generally good ideas from all over (like two from Michael Bennett). Only one I have reservations about is "Cory Booker's plan to ban factory farms" -- I'm not opposed but not convinced either. But I should note that a Tyson plan last year to open a chicken factory near Wichita got killed by public opposition.

• Jane Mayer: How Mitch McConnell became Trump's enabler-in-chief.

• Bill McKibben: Will the coronavirus kill the oil industry? Well, not if Trump has anything to say about it: Oil nations, prodded by Trump, reach deal to slash production.

• Sean Moorhead: I'm a Bernie volunteer. Here's how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters.

• Sohale Andrus Mortazavi: American politics is broken. Liberalism can't fix it. Review of Ezra Klein's new book, Why We're Polarized. A friend recommended that book to me, and I've just cracked it open, so I'll have more to say on it later.

• Bob Moser:

  • Welcome to the Trumpocalypse: "Maybe the administration would take a bit more care with the coronavirus pandemic if it weren't loaded with folks who are looking forward to the end of the world."

  • Power to the person: Chuck Shumer, who's almost as big a threat to democracy as Donald Trump.

• Anna North:

  • Every aspect of the coronavirus pandemic exposes America's devastating inequalities.

  • The shift to online learning could worsen educational inequality. Or more to the point, economic inequality will affect the quality of online learning, increasing economic inequality.

• Rae Nudson: When targeted ads feel a little too targeted: "How do you outrun something that's designed to follow you everywhere?"

• Alex Pareene: Democrats decide, again, not to try anything new.

• Mitchell Plitnick:

  • Gantz agrees to join Netanyahu in unity government -- what does it mean?

  • How racism is fueling Israel's political paralysis.

• Gareth Porter: How generals fueled 1918 flu pandemic to win their World War: "Just like today, brass and bureaucrats ignored warnings, and sent troops overseas despite the consequences."

• Andrew Prokop: Why Sanders didn't replicate Trump's upset primary victory. Focuses on minor technical issues, like "Trump won the last early state before Super Tuesday. Sanders didn't." The real difference was that Sanders was a threat to the cozy coterie of Party leaders and donors, one that aimed to change the focus and strategy of the party (while making them expendable), whereas Trump never threatened elite Republicans. They may have doubted that his tactics would work, but the more he won, the more they acquiesced -- and in victory they got the same spoils any other Republican candidate would have delivered.

• Nathaniel Rakich: Here's what voters told us about voting in Wisconsin's primary.

• Robert Reich: American billionaires are giving to charity -- but much of it is self-serving rubbish.

• Brian Resnick: Why it's so hard to see into the future of Covid-19.

• James Risen: Under cover of Covid-19, Donald Trump ramps up his war on truth-tellers.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • How Trump turned ventilators into a form of patronage.

  • Trump is woefully confused about why more coronavirus testing is vital. He's also woefully stupid, and utterly indifferent to how his actions affect anyone other than himself, but you already knew that.

• Katharine Q Seelye: William R Polk, historian and middle east envoy, dies at 91. I read, and recommend, his 2007 book, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq -- the point he tried to make obvious was that Iraq's revolt against American occupation wasn't fundamentally different from the American revolt against Britain in 1776.

• Jack Shafer: Behind Trump's strange 'invisible enemy' rhetoric: "By branding coronavirus as a hidden menace, he deftly absolves himself of responsibility for its spread." Some kind of branding campaign? It also builds on a long tradition of paranoid fantasies, which have often proved useful for those who would trample rights to privacy and such.

• Patrick Sharkey: The US has a collective action problem that's larger than the coronavirus crisis: "Data show one of the strongest predictors of social distancing behavior is attitudes toward climate change."

• Barbara Slavin: Trump administration piles on sanctions as the rest of the world helps Iran confront COVID-19.

• Danny Sjursen: Trump's own military mafia. Notes that both the Secretaries of State and Defense (Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper) graduated from West Point, class of 1986, and finds many more of their classmates in positions of power.

• Joseph E Stiglitz: A lasting remedy for the Covid-19 pandemic's economic crisis. Also of interest in the NY Times Book Review interview with Stiglitz: The Nobel-winning economist who wants you to read more fiction.

• Marina Villeneuve/Lori Hinnant: NYC death toll eclipses number killed in World Trade Center on 9/11.

• Alex Ward: 3 European countries are about to lift their lockdowns: "Is it too soon?" The countries are Austria, Czech Republic, and Denmark, and the "lift" is more of a gradual rollback. There are also political pressures to open up Spain and Italy, both hit especially hard (Italy had the world's highest fatality count, until the US passed it), but the WHO is strongly advising against relaxing lockdowns.

• Washington Monthly: What is Trump wins? Subject of a special issue of the magazine that once thought it would be clever to describe themselves as "neoliberals" -- I'd suggest an alternate title, Thinking About the Unthinkable. The component pieces follow. Aside from the Clark and Gastris pieces, all the others are basically saying that Trump and his minions will continue to do the things he's done (or in some cases tried to do) in his first term, and that they will be more effective and more damaging over time -- often referring back to something that deserved its own piece: Trump's packing of the courts.

  • Wesley K Clark: Can the liberal world order survive another four years of Trump? Here's one I don't worry about, as the old "liberal world order" was never much more than a racket to allow first American and now world oligarchs to exploit the far corners of the world, and to eventually pauperize their own formerly wealthy countries. Trump's only change here has been to reduce the reliance on cant and cliché, making America's subservience to naked capitalism even more explicit. It's telling here that the former NATO commander starts by declaring that "For more than 70 years the United States has maintained its powerful grip on western Europe" -- rather than talk about historic alliances and shared values and the like. Clark's position is that we should spend more money on the military. It's not clear why he thinks Trump thinks otherwise.

  • Francis Fukuyama: What would a second Trump term do to the federal bureaucracy?

  • Ryan LaRochelle/Luisa S Deprez: How Trump would gut the social safety net with a second term.

  • Julie Rovner: How Trump could take away Obamacare with a second term.

  • Rachel Cohen: How Trump could dismantle workers' rights with another four years.

  • Gaby Del Valle: Trump's second term immigration agenda.

  • David Cole: Can civil rights and civil liberties survive a second Trump term?

  • Paul Glastris: Why a second Trump term will not be a horror movie: a fairly technical distinction, I'm afraid.

    To many people, the Trump presidency has felt like one long horror movie. To me, it's been more like a thriller: disorienting, appalling, emotionally wrenching, but not disempowering. Almost every insane or diabolical decision the president has made has been met with countermoves -- by the courts, civil servants, voters, Nancy Pelosi -- that have frequently lessened the impact and fortified my faith that all is not lost.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • States resisting stay-at-home orders are playing a dangerous game.

  • The debate over a post office bailout, explained: "Republicans want privatization, Trump wants to stick it to Amazon."

  • Trump administration orders insurers to make Covid-19 immunity tests free to patients.

  • Stimulus measures should be made automatic now, before Republicans flip-flop on deficits again: "Act now to protect against next year's austerity mania."

  • US rocked by 6.6 million more initial unemployment claims last week: "That's not quite as bas as the record 6.9 million initial claims from the previous week," but until new jobs open up, these numbers accumulate, a total of 16.8 million over three weeks.

  • Joe Biden will have a very hard time winning over the Berniesphere: "The problem isn't his platform, it's that he's not trusted." Depends on what you mean by "winning over." Getting the votes shouldn't be hard, although not everyone who favored Sanders is ideologically aligned on the left. Getting them to campaign for Biden is harder, although the pitch I'd recommend is to get them to support the party ticket, which means focusing on Republicans across the board, not just on Biden vs. Trump. I'm not going to campaign, because that's something I just don't do, but I know people who do, and they'll work against the Republicans, especially Trump. Getting them to like Biden is a bigger ask, and I don't see that happening until Biden starts understanding the problems people on the left are most sensitive to, and appreciating that the left has better solutions than the center or the right. I expect this to happen somewhat, because it's clear to me that the answers are on the left. But Biden's track record doesn't offer much reason to hope. One point I will grant is that he has deeper personal empathy with the party base than the last few nominees (I'd say since Bill Clinton, but that's only because he was so practiced as faking it -- something that was beneath his wife and beyond Obama). On the other hand, no Reagan-era Democrat has been more willing to compromise the party base's interests when donors beckon, and there's no evidence that he's learned from past mistakes [insert long list here]. But another thing to understand about the left is that it's driven by issues, not candidates. That much of the left rallied to Sanders is because he offered a practical way to advance left issues, but win or lose leftists would find their causes still need their efforts, and that could well put them in opposition to Democratic leaders (Sanders even).

  • Bernie Sanders's campaign is over, but his legacy is winning: "Sanders ignited a movement that pulled the Democratic Party leftward."

  • Study: Small increases in air pollution make coronavirus much more deadly: "Countries with more air pollution see higher Covid-19 fatality rates."

  • The tech sector is finally delivering on its promise: "The internet has been a productivity bust -- until now, when it's emerged as vital."

PS: Right after I posted Weekend Roundup, I noticed a pretty inflammatory tweets

Reza Aslan @rezaaslan: Breaking news: @DemSocialists endorses Trump for President.

DSA @DemSocialists: We are not endorsing @JoeBiden.

I'm not a member of or in any way involved with DSA, but I don't see any problem with them, as an organization, not endorsing Biden, especially at this time. (Had I been involved, I would have advised them keeping the door open by adding "at this time.") Assuming Biden is the Democratic Party nominee against Trump, I wouldn't be surprised if they endorse Biden as the November election approaches. That would be consistent with what I assume is their raison d'être, which is to advance socialism within the Democratic Party and to support the Democratic Party in general elections.

However, non-endorsement now (4-5 months before the convention) doesn't even remotely imply a preference, let alone an endorsement, for Trump, so Aslan is just being deliberately, provocatively stupid. Sadly, he's not alone in this regard, as I've run into a constant stream of presumed Democrats who are so hepped up on attacking what Howard Dean memorably called "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- an obsession that actually does little more than further discredit "centrism" in the eyes of those who actually care about progressive reforms for real and pressing problems. It's especially hard to credit that people engaging in this kind of innuendo or slander think they're actually helping Biden (or helping defeat Trump -- by the way, I'm not doubting their sincere loathing of Trump, although they do like to doubt others, as Aslan does above).

Relevant to but not directly à propos of this, I noticed this tweet (and later a follow up):

'Weird Alex' Pareene @pareene: I truly thought the fact that no one really feels personally invested in a Biden presidency would make the timeline a bit less wild this time but it's actually somehow worse because they're already preemptively blaming you for him losing

'Weird Alex' Pareene @pareene: (To be clear I do not believe it's a fait accompli he will lose which makes it even weirder that we're already on the recriminations stage.)

By the way, good chance I will eventually write an endorsement for Biden before November's election, much like the one I wrote for Kerry in 2004. But not until he is definitively the nominee, and not until it's reasonably close to the election time. And sure, it's going to focus more on how bad Trump is than on how good Biden will be, because the former is proven, while the latter is at best hypothetical, and not strongly grounded in the track records of Biden and whoever is likely to be involved in his administration.

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