Month: March 2022

“While mainstream economists, think tanks, and journalists obsess over every tenth of a percentage point of inflation and unemployment,” writes Eli Cook at The American Prospect, “profit analyses remain something you find only in shareholder reports, IRS filings, or Bloomberg consoles.”

As with warning employees not to compare pay packages, the ownership class is very touchy about discussing its profits. That tradition in this country goes back over a century and a half, Cook explains:

We live in a capitalist economy driven by the profit motive. Yet, ironically, the study of profits remains a shockingly neglected subset of the economic discipline. No Nobel Prize in Economics has ever been given to the study of profits. Economists classify their publications into countless categories (the Journal of Economic Literature’s J3 code stands for “wages, compensation and labor costs”), yet there is no category for profits. The American Economic Review last published an article with the word profits in the title in 2014. It was about the Japanese textile industry at the turn of the 20th century. As for metrics, while Carroll Wright’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is still going strong, there is no Bureau of Capital Statistics.

Ignoring profits is not just an intellectual problem, but a political and social one. Never has it been more glaring. As anyone not living in a cave has heard, consumer prices have risen in the past year. (We know this thanks to the consumer price index, or CPI, invented by Wright.) Yet far less known to most Americans is that around the same time as this consumer price increase, there was a staggering jump in corporate profits.

Matt Stoller readers knew that. But the topic seems taboo among mainstream economists.

Current inflation is not caused by corporations gouging customers, no. Never. Conventional, capital-driven wisdom is that “the government’s expansionist fiscal and monetary policies, which made workers too powerful, raised wages too high, and led to higher consumer prices, as demand outran supply.” The answer, profiteers assure us, is too cool, the economy “by weakening workers’ purchasing power by cutting spending, raising interest rates, or lowering wages.”

Motivated reasoning? Meet motivated economic reporting.

If economics were a more diverse discipline, Americans would be hearing a very different story, one in which the starting baseline for modeling the economy is not the assumption of perfectly competitive markets but rather corporate concentration and asymmetrical market power. According to this approach, large corporations are often not “price takers” but “price makers,” and increasing profits by raising prices is not a theoretical impossibility but an empirical fact familiar to most anyone who has ever run a large business.

You think white people are threatened by demographics shifting political power away from them? Watch how the ownership class reacts to workers increasing theirs.

I worked the summer after high school in a cotton warehouse rebailing waste from test bundles. During a break, one of my co-workers joked on the dock about starting a union. After break time, he was called into the office and told he’d best stop talking that shit.

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Decades of moral panics, conspiracy theories, mass delusions, and the unrelenting marketing of propaganda hit home for me yesterday. What is real?

In Russia’s seige of Mariupol, Ukraine, an air strike on Wednesday destroyed a theater in the city. According to the Associated Press and other reports, seemingly none from reporters on the scene, perhaps as many as 1,200 civilians had been sheltering in the basement. Women and children. The Russian word for “children” was written on the pavement on each end of the theater in letters large enough to be visible in satellite photos. Earlier images from inside circulated. An image of the destroyed structure shot by Sergei Orlov, the city’s deputy mayor, accomplanied the Associated Press and BBC reports, plus a cell phone video shot from shelter across the street.

The world recoiled in horror.

Russia denies bombing the theater.

Ukraine’s ombudswoman Ludmyla Denisova said on Telegram that people had survived. Ukrainian parliament member Sergiy Taruta said the same, Sky News reported:

“People are coming out alive,” Mr Taruta wrote on Facebook, though he did not say how many. And it was unclear if there were injuries or deaths among those inside.

A city mayoral adviser, Petro Andrushchenko, said “now the rubble is being cleared”, adding: “There are survivors.”

Al Jazeera reported Thursday, “local officials are confirming that … 130 people have been successfully rescued from that shelter.”

Where are they, the survivors, the bodies?

I refreshed the reports and searched repeatedly on Thursday and again this morning but found the few sketchy reports repeated over and over. No new pictures or video. The attack was Wednesday.

“More than a day after the air strike, there were no reports of deaths,” according to Reuters early today. Accompanying photos were provided to AP by the Azov Battalion, per Al Jazeera, “a far-right all-volunteer infantry military unit whose members – estimated at 900 – are ultra-nationalists and accused of harbouring neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology.”

Fog of war?

If the reports are propaganda from the Ukrainians, the good news is that maybe 1,200 innocents did not die. But I worry that the truth bleeds from another of its thousand cuts.

After so many years of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, I’m witholding judgment on the veracity of the Mariupol theater reports until there is more substance than statements from government officials. Even from ones I’m inclined to support. It’s creeping me out.

This feeling too is awful.

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American talking heads need to stop their bellicose demands for the US to get into a shooting war with Russia. We are already walking a fine line and the possible consequences are devastating on an existential level. This report from Max Fisher should sober them up:

A major war raging on Russia’s and NATO’s borders. Increasingly bold Western military support. Russian threats of direct retaliation. A mood of siege and desperation in the Kremlin. Growing uncertainty around each side’s red lines.

As Russia and NATO escalate their standoff over Ukraine, nuclear strategists and former U.S. officials warn that there is a remote but growing risk of an unintended slide into direct conflict — even, in some scenarios, a nuclear exchange. “The prospect of nuclear war,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, warned this week, “is now back within the realm of possibility.”

Leaders on both sides emphasize that they consider such a war unthinkable, even as they make preparations and issue declarations for how they might carry it out. But the fear, experts stress, is not a deliberate escalation to war, but a misunderstanding or a provocation gone too far that, as each side scrambles to respond, spirals out of control.

The war in Ukraine heightens these risks to a level not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in some ways is potentially more dangerous than that, some experts say.

NATO forces, intended as defensive, are massing near Russian borders that, with much of Russia’s military bogged down in Ukraine, are unusually vulnerable. Increasingly paranoid Kremlin leaders, faced with economic devastation and domestic unrest, may believe that a Western plot to remove them is already underway.

Russia has said that it considers the weapons and other increased military aid that Western governments are sending to Ukraine tantamount to war, and has implied that it might strike NATO convoys. Over the weekend, Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian base mere miles from Polish territory.

“Those are the things that make me really concerned about escalation here,” said Ulrich Kühn, a nuclear strategist at the University of Hamburg in Germany. “The chance for nuclear weapons employment is extremely low. But it’s not zero. It’s real, and it might even increase,” he said. “Those things could happen.”

The Kremlin has turned to nuclear saber-rattling that may not be entirely empty of threat. Russian war planners, obsessed with fears of NATO invasion, have implied in recent policy documents and war games that they may believe that Russia could turn back such a force through a single nuclear strike — a gambit that Soviet-era leaders rejected as unthinkable.

The outcome of such a strike would be impossible to predict. A recent Princeton University simulation, projecting out each side’s war plans and other indicators, estimated that it would be likely to trigger a tit-for-tat exchange that, in escalating to strategic weapons like intercontinental missiles, could kill 34 million people within a few hours.

Alexander Vershbow, NATO’s deputy secretary general from 2012 to 2016, said that Western leaders had concluded that Russian plans to use nuclear weapons in a major crisis were sincere, raising the risk from any accident or misstep that the Kremlin mistook for war. With Russian forces struggling in a Ukraine conflict that Moscow’s leaders have portrayed as existential, Mr. Vershbow added, “That risk has definitely grown in the last two and a half weeks.”

Murky Red Lines

Since at least 2014, when Russia’s annexation of Crimea led to high tension with the West, Moscow has articulated a policy of potentially using nuclear weapons against any threat to “the existence of the state itself.”

Russian statements have subsequently expanded on this in ways that may make the country’s nuclear tripwires easier to inadvertently cross. In 2017, Moscow published an ambiguously worded doctrine that said it could, in a major conflict, conduct a “demonstration of readiness and determination to employ nonstrategic nuclear weapons,” which some analysts believe could describe a single nuclear launch.

Evgeny Buzhinsky, a retired member of the Russian military’s general staff, has described the aim of such a strike as “to show intention, as a de-escalating factor.” Some versions call for the blast to hit empty territory, others to strike enemy troops. The next year, Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, said that Russia could use nuclear warheads “within seconds” of an attack onto Russian territory — raising fears that a border skirmish or other incident could, if mistaken as something more, set off a nuclear strike.

A 2020 Russian government paper seemed to expand these conditions further, mentioning the use of drones and other equipment as potentially triggering Russia’s nuclear red lines. These policies are designed to address a problem that Soviet leaders never faced: a belief that, unlike during the Cold War, NATO would quickly and decisively win a conventional war against Russia.

The result is a reluctant but seemingly real embrace of limited nuclear conflict as manageable, even winnable. Russia is thought to have stockpiled at least 1,000 small, “nonstrategic” warheads in preparation, as well as hypersonic missiles that would zip them across Europe before the West could respond. But Russian military strategists continue to debate how to calibrate such a strike so as to force back NATO without triggering a wider war, underscoring concerns that threading such a needle may be impossible — and that Moscow could try anyway.

Escalation Risks

“The escalation dynamics of a conflict between the U.S. and Russia could easily spiral into a nuclear exchange,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, an analyst of Russian military policy. Partly this is because, unlike Cold War proxy battles, Ukraine’s war is raging in the heart of Europe, with NATO and Russian forces massed a relatively short drive away from Moscow and several Western capitals. Partly it is because of Russia’s lowered nuclear threshold and heightened sense of vulnerability.

But Moscow also seemingly believes that a sort of NATO-Russia conflict has already begun. Russian strategic doctrine is designed in part around a fear that the West will foment economic and political unrest within Russia as prelude to an invasion. With Mr. Putin now facing economic devastation and rising protests, “A lot of the pieces of their nightmare are already coming together,” said Samuel Charap, who studies Russian foreign policy at the RAND Corporation.

In these circumstances, Moscow could misconstrue NATO’s troop buildup, or steps of military support for Ukraine, as preparations for just the sort of attack that Russian nuclear policy is designed to meet.

“Between volunteers from NATO countries, all this NATO weaponry, reinforcement of Poland and Romania,” Mr. Charap said, “they might connect dots that we didn’t intend to be connected and decide they need to pre-empt.”

In such a climate, a few mishaps or miscalculations — say, an errant strike or clumsy provocation by one side that sets off a stronger-than-expected retaliation by the other — could escalate, in only a few steps, to the point of triggering Moscow’s fears of an attack.

This is why NATO and especially the Americans have to be very careful what they say and what they agree to do in this awful conflict. It’s why we were unable to intervene in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Syria etc. Nuclear weapons changed the nature of war.

Just be glad that narcissistic ignoramus Trump isn’t in charge. Thinking about that will give you nightmares.

I’m posting this long conversation between various smart people talking about the various dangers to our democracy. It’s much more complicated than we realize. And frankly, the solutions they offer seem impossible to me. I wish it weren’t so, and maybe I’m just pessimistic. I guess I’m pinning my hopes on it burning out rather than turning into a real civil war. Anyway:

Early last year, Freedom House, an American organization that since World War II has warned against autocracy and repression on the march around the world, issued a special report on a country that had not usually warranted such attention: its own. Noting that the United States had slid down its ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina and Mongolia — the report warned that the country faced “an acute crisis for democracy.” In November, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an influential Stockholm-based think tank, followed suit, adding the United States to its list of “backsliding democracies” for the first time.

The impetus for these reassessments was Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that followed. But as the reassessments themselves noted, those shocks to the system hardly came out of nowhere; like the Trump presidency itself, they were both products and accelerants of a process of American democratic erosion and disunion that had been underway for years and has continued since. In states across the country, Republican candidates are running for office on the platform that the 2020 election was stolen — a view held by about three-quarters of Republican voters. Since the beginning of 2021, Republicans in at least 25 state legislatures have tried, albeit mostly unsuccessfully, to pass legislation directly targeting the election system: bills that would place election oversight or certification in the hands of partisan legislatures, for instance, and in some cases even bills specifically punishing officials who blocked attempts to overturn the 2020 election outcome in Trump’s favor. And those are just the new developments, happening against a backdrop of a decade-long erosion of voting rights and a steady resurgence of political extremism and violence, and of course a world newly at war over the principles of self-​determination and democracy.

How bad is it, really? We convened a panel of experts in an attempt to answer that question: political scientists who have studied the lurching advances and retreats of democracy in other countries and the dynamics of American partisanship; a historian of and activist for civil rights in the United States; and Republican legal and political operatives who guided the party to victories in the past and are now trying to understand its current state.

The Panelists:

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.”

Benjamin Ginsberg practiced election law for 38 years, representing Republican candidates, elected officials and party committees. He is co-chair of the Election Officials Legal Defense Network, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a lecturer at Stanford Law School.

Sherrilyn Ifill will step down this month after nearly a decade as president and director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund.

Steven Levitsky is professor of government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of “How Democracies Die.”

Sarah Longwell is a founder of Defending Democracy Together and executive director of the Republican Accountability Project. She is also the publisher of The Bulwark.

Lilliana Mason is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the SNF Agora Institute. She is the author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.”

Charles Homans: Steven, when you and Daniel Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” in 2018, you considered the possible futures ahead of us as a country after Donald Trump’s presidency. And you concluded that the likeliest scenario was maybe not the worst outcome — full-blown authoritarianism — but a moderately grim one: an era “marked by polarization, more departures from unwritten political conventions and increasing institutional warfare.” How do you think that prediction holds up?

Steven Levitsky: I think it was broadly right. Trump didn’t consolidate an autocracy. But things got a lot worse more quickly than we expected. Even though our book was considered a little on the alarmist side when it was published, I think we were insufficiently alarmed.

We did not anticipate the rapid and thoroughgoing Trumpization of the Republican Party. We did not consider the Republican Party to be an antidemocratic force when we wrote the book in 2017. Today I consider the Republican Party to be an antidemocratic force. That’s a big change. We thought that there were elements in the party capable of constraining Trump four years ago. We were wrong. And we never anticipated anything remotely like the attempted presidential coup of 2021.

Sarah Longwell: I agree. When I co-founded Republicans for the Rule of Law An outside spending group started by a band of prominent Trump-dissenting Republican activists during the lead-up to Trump’s first impeachment, Republicans for the Rule of Law aired ads urging congressional Republicans to “demand the facts” about Trump’s efforts to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. in 2018, I looked at Trump’s victory in 2016 and thought, OK, this is an accident of history. I would have told you that Trump is a cancer on the party, but if you cut him out, you know, there’s enough institutional memory that the party will bounce back. But Trump metastasized, right? He reconstituted much of the party in his image. In 2022, there are hundreds of mini-Trumps running for office.

That Jan. 6 happened isn’t the most surprising part. What is most alarming is that Trump wasn’t held accountable for it, and that the party has decided today that, even after he incited an insurrection, he should still be the leader of the party. People like Tim Scott — people that you might have said, “These are the good, reasonable, post-Trump Republicans,” the people I counted on to constrain him — are now happy to be considered for his vice-presidential candidate and to endorse him for 2024.²2Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina, was asked by Fox News in February if he would consider joining Trump’s 2024 ticket. “Everybody wants to be on President Trump’s bandwagon, without any question,” he replied.

Sherrilyn Ifill: I think that it’s really important for us not to begin with Trump. I have repeatedly described Trump as an accelerant. But he was able to accelerate something that already existed. One of the issues that I’ve been most frustrated by is the failure of so many of those who really study democracy, and who see themselves as people who are committed to democracy and democratic ideals, to see the signs that were quite apparent long before Trump came into office. Things like voter suppression against Black voters, or police officers killing unarmed Black people with impunity, were treated as a race issue and not a democracy issue, when if we saw them in any other country, we would recognize them as indicators of something being wrong with a democracy.

Carol Anderson: With Obama, there was this narrative: “Woo, we have crossed the racial Rubicon! We have overcome! We put a Black man in the White House!” Without looking at the data that shows that a majority of white people did not vote for Barack Obama and that they have not voted for a Democratic candidate for president since 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

Ifill: Our democracy was in terrible trouble when we had a Black president and a Black attorney general, and there was this thin veneer that we were moving in one direction. I remember at the time being in a meeting with President Obama and saying: “Let me explain to you what is happening in Texas. Let me explain to you what’s happening in Alabama.”³3During the Obama presidency, the N.A.A.C.P. and other organizations sued to block new voter-ID laws in Texas and Alabama on the grounds that they deliberately discriminated against Black and Latino voters. The Alabama law was upheld, but in Texas a federal court sided with the N.A.A.C.P., and the state wrote a replacement bill. After the Supreme Court decided the Shelby County v. Holder case, which removed the preclearance provision, a critical provision from the Voting Rights Act,⁴4“Preclearance” required states with documented histories of discriminatory voting procedures — most of them former Jim Crow states in the South — to submit any proposed changes to their election procedures to the Department of Justice. there was this wave of voter-suppression laws that were happening around the country with very explicit statements from Republican leaders of those states, saying, “We’re free and clear now.”

The Legal Defense Fund and other civil rights organizations were litigating cases in 2014 in Texas and North Carolina. And in both of those cases, you had courts saying that the legislatures had passed these laws for the purpose of discriminating against Black voters.⁵5In addition to the Texas voter-ID case, civil rights organizations sued North Carolina over the Republican-led Legislature’s 2013 omnibus elections bill, which imposed strict voter-ID requirements, restricted early voting and eliminated same-day voter registration — measures that a panel of federal judges, in overturning the law, ruled targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.” That’s kind of a big deal. That sounds to me like a democracy problem. That is a problem that existed before Trump.

[long discussion of the failure of the For the People Act and legislative mistakes with voting rights]

Lilliana Mason: The important thing is to remember that the parties are not static objects. They have been changing consistently and gradually in a single direction since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Republicans and Democrats had to work together to pass that legislation, but the legislation itself was a signal to Southern white conservative Democrats that this was maybe not their party anymore. But because partisanship is such a strong identity, it took a generation for those people to not just leave the Democratic Party but join the Republican Party. That process happened so gradually that it was sort of hard to see for a lot of people. What Trump did was to come in and basically solidify that trend.

For a recent article, I worked with co-authors to look at data from interviews conducted with people in 2011 and then again in 2016, 2017, 2018. You can predict who’s going to like Trump in 2018 based on their attitudes in 2011 toward African Americans, Latinos, L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and Muslims. And those are people coming not just from the Republican Party; they’re also coming from the Democratic Party, they’re independents. Trump basically worked as a lightning rod to finalize that process of creating the Republican Party as a single entity for defending the high status of white, Christian, rural Americans.

It’s not a huge percentage of Americans that holds these beliefs, and it’s not even the entire Republican Party; it’s just about half of it. But the party itself is controlled by this intolerant, very strongly pro-Trump faction. Because we have a two-party system, we effectively empowered 20 to 30 percent of the country that is extremely intolerant and doesn’t really believe in democracy; we’ve given them a whole political party. And the last time we did that was really around the Civil War.

Homans: Sarah, I’m curious how that squares with your experience. You’ve spent the past several years working in various organizations to mobilize opposition to this faction within the Republican Party, but you’ve also been regularly conducting focus groups to explore why Trump has elicited so much support within that party.

Longwell: I still try to really remain optimistic about the goodness and the decency of a lot of Americans and of parts of the Republican Party. I have to. I mean, the old Republican Party did support the Voting Rights Act. But there was this recessive gene in the party that went through the Pat Buchanans and Sarah Palins. The party would say, “Palin can have the vice presidency” — like, she’ll be a nationalist-populist type, and that’s going to sate this recessive gene. And of course, Trump turned it into the dominant gene.

But I don’t want to let Democrats off the hook entirely here. You know, when I started doing the focus groups, I would ask G.O.P. voters who really didn’t like Trump why they voted for him. And the No. 1 answer you would get was: “I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted against Hillary Clinton.” A lot of that is the longstanding hatred Republicans have for the Clintons and probably a bit of sexism as well. But there is also a reaction to a Democratic Party that is moving left and has a more difficult time appealing to swing voters. It is increasing negative polarization: I hate their side more than I like my side. And the cultural-war stuff is so much of it now. Whether it’s critical race theory, defund the police or the fight over using pronouns, Democrats often sound like aliens to many voters — including Black and Latino voters. Republicans have been increasing their support among minorities, because often these groups are more culturally conservative in ways that wedge them off from the current Democratic Party.

Ifill: We’re only talking about political parties. And in my view, that’s part of the problem, because a democracy has many, many elements that hold it together. You need a functioning fourth estate. You need transparency, you need good information, you need education, you need the professions. I mean, I’ve been on this tear about my profession, the legal profession, and how much it has been part of this. We have to be looking at our professions, we have to be looking at the faith community, we have to be looking at our educational system. All of those are elements of what is going to decide the future of American democracy.

Levitsky: I take your point, Sherrilyn, but I think there is a difference. I think that for all the many weaknesses of other institutions, there is nothing within the judiciary, the media and the professions comparable to what is going on in the Republican Party.

Ifill: I agree with you, but I don’t think it’s possible to imagine creating a healthy democracy just by politically overcoming one party without also addressing the weakening of the other institutions that are supposed to constitute a check on the excesses of political parties. How would it have happened without the excesses in our media, the 24-hour megaphone of Fox News and One America News Network? How would it have happened without these other unravelings that actually aided and abetted it, without the judiciary itself? Without the disinformation that social media has allowed on those platforms?

Levitsky: But it’s entirely possible to polarize and break down without social media, right? We did it in the 1850s and 1860s. The Chileans managed to do it in the 1970s; the Spanish did it in the 1930s. And cable media exists in democracies across the world today, and only our Republican Party is going over the railing. I’m not saying the media is performing well, but I think that the central problem is the Republican Party.

Ginsberg: If it’s the Republican Party’s fault and the Republican Party’s fault alone, what’s the solution? What can you do about it? You have to recognize that the Democratic brand is as toxic in rural America as the Trump brand is in the salons of Manhattan and Northwest D.C. There are lots of solutions being proposed, but they’re being discussed only by people who agree with one another. I mean, there’s nobody in this conversation, with the possible exception of Sarah, who has the ability to impact the Republican Party at this point. The country is so divided that the red team and the blue team are not talking to each other, and the dismissal of one side by the other is not going to solve the problem.

And this divide goes beyond the political. There’s a much more fundamental and basic shift that has taken place in the country over the last 50 years, and that’s the “Big Sort” that Bill Bishop has described. We now have a country where people are more and more wanting to live with people like themselves. Now, that certainly has an impact in our politics, but it’s not being driven by our politics. It’s being driven by something deeper. ⁹9In his influential 2008 book “The Big Sort,” the journalist Bill Bishop described the increasing self-segregation of Americans, with people of similar religious and political views and education levels growing more geographically concentrated since the 1970s.

Homans: Lily, one detail that I found fascinating in your book “Uncivil Agreement” is that according to survey data, since 2008 partisan enmity has increased much more rapidly than disagreement over the parties’ policy positions, which hasn’t changed that dramatically since the late 1980s. At this point, our arguments are not primarily about what the parties stand for but whom they stand for.

Mason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy.

White Democrats and Republicans had basically identical levels of racial resentment in 1986; today they’re 40 points apart. So one of the most passionate divides that we’re seeing between the parties right now, more than it has been in decades, is, does systemic racism exist? Does systemic sexism exist? Have we done enough to overcome it? Have we gone too far? When Trump made that an explicit conversation instead of a dog whistle, we actually had to start talking about it. And now we’re having this extremely difficult conversation as a country, and it’s never going to go well. It’s just not. There’s no possible way for us to have this conversation and stay calm and rational and reasonable about it. We’ve never done it before. It’s just very messy, and it’s going to be messy, and it’s going to get even uglier than it currently is.

Homans: With that in mind, we should talk about the resurgence of overt political violence that we’ve seen in this country in the last two years. Obviously this is a country that’s had a whole spectrum of political violence over the course of its history, even its relatively recent history. But the thing that really struck me in 2020 was that we saw things that really looked like partisan violence.

Levitsky: From a comparative perspective, it is really troubling to see mainstream parties’ reactions, or lack of reaction, to acts of political violence. You’re right, Charles, we’ve seen periods of violence before — a lot of violence in the late 1960s and early ’70s, for instance. But it was not partisan violence in the same way that we’re potentially seeing now. And one of the things about democratic breakdowns in Europe in the ’20s and ’30s and in South America in the ’60s and ’70s is that without exception, they were preceded by periods of paramilitary violence that was tolerated, condoned, justified, sometimes encouraged by mainstream political parties.

When acts of violence occur, mainstream parties need to close ranks in defense of democracy. The left, right and center need to stand up and, essentially in unison, publicly and forcefully denounce these acts and hold perpetrators accountable. That’s what needs to be done. And in cases when that happens, like Spain during its 1981 coup attempt or Argentina during its 1987 military uprising, democratic institutions can be shored up. But when one or both mainstream political parties is silent or winks at — or encourages or gives a fist pump to — acts of political violence or declares it “legitimate political discourse,” that is a really troubling sign.

Anderson: What we’re seeing, I liken it to a land, sea and air attack. The land attack is on voting rights. That is one of the ways that you begin to undermine democracy. The sea attack are these attacks against teaching critical race theory and “divisive” topics, so you can erase people from American history and erase the role of various people in American history. And the air attack is the loosening of gun laws that we’re seeing in Texas, Tennessee and Georgia.¹⁰10Texas and Tennessee both passed laws allowing for permitless carrying of firearms in 2021; the Georgia State Legislature passed a similar bill this year. This is a full-blown assault on American democracy that’s going after voting rights, that’s going after education and that is reinforcing political violence as an acceptable method of bringing about your political aims. That’s where we are, and that’s why this moment is so dangerous.

Ifill: I will share with you some of the most depressing moments for me in the past two years. One, of course, was Jan. 6 — and as you said, Sarah, not just Jan. 6 but the subsequent lining up of Republicans to say this was OK or to be silent. The second one was during the massive protests that happened following the release of the video of the killing of George Floyd, when the administration assembled a constabulary that stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with masks on. We didn’t know where they were from, whether they were National Guard. We had no idea what their names were. Their badges weren’t visible. There was something so antidemocratic, something so crude about that, that truly frightened me.

And then the third one was the killing by Kyle Rittenhouse of two people in Wisconsin, and the reaction to that — because again, I’m presuming, whatever you believe happened in the interaction, that most of us who are parents would rather our children not have killed people by the time they’re 18 years old. That was a kind of an article of faith among us, as parents: that he would have been treated as a child who engaged in a traumatic activity, and not instead hailed as a hero. The Republican Party had been the party that regularly wagged its fingers at the Black community about our family values, and his mother was greeted with a standing ovation at a G.O.P. dinner. These were the three moments where I thought, This is so off the rails. The places where I would have thought, you know, some Republicans might say enough is enough.

Homans: Ben, you worked for the Republican Party for decades as an election lawyer. Did the way in which the party metabolized Trump’s response to the 2020 election, and the Jan. 6 attack, surprise you?

Ginsberg: The whole thing, honestly, has shocked me. It’s not so much the elected officials who were giving the fist pumps on Jan. 6, because they were sort of predictable in doing that. It’s the many people within the party whom I know and have known for years who are good, decent, principled people, who are silent. It’s the silence of the Republican Party that is most surprising to me and most upsetting. We’ve described the problem in this conversation, but the much more difficult part is figuring out what to do about it. I think that’s what Sarah and I as Republicans have a particular obligation to do. But I don’t know how you bring the people within the Republican Party who should be speaking out to do exactly what you say, Steve, which is to make clear that this violence and election denial is not acceptable.

Homans: Steven, one clear takeaway from “How Democracies Die” is that the resolution to democratic crisis really has to come from within the party that is incubating the anti-democratic movement. This was what the center-right parties in Germany and Italy failed to do in the 1930s, which delivered Hitler and Mussolini to power. But other European center-right parties in Sweden and Belgium, for instance, succeeded in expelling fascist movements within their ranks in that same period.

Levitsky: But I think the Republicans will not reform themselves until they take a series of electoral defeats, major electoral defeats — and given the level of partisan identity that Lily describes, and given an electoral system that is biased toward the Republicans through no fault of their own, that’s not going to happen.

Ginsberg: Well, part of that is, to me, a completely inexplicable series of strategic decisions by the Democrats. To much of the country, the current Democratic disarray does not present a viable alternative. I mean, I hate to go back to the small politics of it all, but honestly, look at what the Democrats in Congress have done legislatively in this session. They control all three branches of government, but they’re constantly squabbling among themselves and failing to pass much of their agenda. I know these debates over the issues they’re having among themselves are heartfelt. But as a strategy, their infighting only makes sense if they’re either trying to lower expectations for 2022 and 2024 — which they have done masterfully — or if they’re trying to reward Republicans for bad behavior, which is what the polls say they’re about to do in the 2022 elections. The Republicans are the bad actors right now, that’s absolutely accurate and true, but the Democratic Party is contributing to this by its own fecklessness and failing to present a viable alternative.

Levitsky: Some of that is obviously true. I think what’s needed in the short term to preserve democracy, to get through the worst of this storm, is a much broader coalition than we’ve put together to date. Something on the lines of true fusion tickets that really brings in Republicans — maybe not a lot of the electorate, but enough to assure that the Trumpist party loses. That would mean bringing in a good chunk of that Bush-Cheney network that’s out there — that in private says the same things that I’ve said, but that has thus far been largely unwilling to speak out publicly — and having them in many cases on the same ticket.

And that means something that we have not seen enough of in the last couple of decades, which is real political sacrifice. It means that lifelong Republicans have to work to elect Democrats. And it means the progressives have to set aside a slew of policy issues that they care deeply about so that the ticket is comfortable to right-wing politicians. And we’re nowhere near that, neither in the Bush-Cheney network nor in the Democratic Party. Having talked to a number of Democratic elected politicians, I can tell you that we are nowhere near Democrats being willing to make those kinds of political sacrifice. But that is what is needed.

Longwell: Republicans have to lose elections, and the Democrats have to build a sufficient pro-democracy coalition, one that spans from Liz Cheney to Liz Warren, to defeat this authoritarian version of the Republican Party. My criticism of Democrats is this: I’ve always been focused on the national debt. Big issue for me; real deficit hawk over here. I still care, but I now have higher-order concerns because I think American democracy is at stake. If you believe that the Republican Party is the existential threat that we have all just laid out, and I agree that it is, then the only thing to do is win elections and defeat antidemocratic Republicans.

And right now, this insane authoritarian party appears poised to kick Democrats’ butts in 2022. Why? Democrats keep putting forward unpopular ideas. We’re being told they’re popular, but they’re not. Voters weren’t interested in “transformational change” from the Build Back Better plan. They wanted Covid under control. They wanted gas prices to be lower. They don’t want runaway inflation. Even voter ID is popular — and I’m not saying you should run on voter ID, but there needs to be a sense among Democrats of, how do we reach the swing voters on the center-right that do think the Republican Party is going too far? Why aren’t they talking to Republicans from the beginning about how to put together a voting rights bill that could pass?

Ifill: I agree with you that the big tent is the way, but I’m skeptical that we get there on the kind of logical proposals that in the past might have attracted a coalition. Going back to the voting bill: The summer of 2021 was devoted to giving Joe Manchin a chance, which he requested, to shop to Republicans a more modest and pragmatic bill, which did include voter ID. We realized that that’s what people like. I think we’re at a point right now where the offer of the sensible deal does not seem to be the kind of thing that people are prepared to coalesce around because of just what you described. There’s a kind of a madness in the air. There’s a kind of a decadence.

But can I ask — because I rarely get this opportunity and Ben is here — I’m wondering, what do you see? Are there avenues to get in to the party that you have known and to tap into some remaining moral integrity and vision of people who are in that party?

Ginsberg: Your question does point up the problem. I’m not at all in lock step with the current Republican Party, but I’m as close as many on the left get to interacting with a partisan Republican. We are so polarized that the different sides just are not talking to each other at all. It seems to me that if there is an avenue that’s going to work, it has to be that we all swallow hard and again start talking to people with whom we really don’t agree, and maybe think we don’t respect, to see if there is common ground. We need, as a country and as individuals in communities, to take the really difficult step of figuring out how to start having those conversations.

Longwell: Part of what has changed is that Republicans have decided that it’s no longer important to be tethered to the truth. Even if Republicans don’t explicitly repeat Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, they help add credibility and fuel to his claims by auditing elections and pushing bills under the guise of “election integrity” even though there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020. Just ask Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr. You guys know who is most worried about democracy being under attack?

Mason: Republicans.

Longwell: Republicans! There’s a good CNN poll on this that asks, do you think American democracy is under attack? 46 percent of Democrats said “yes,” 46 percent of independents said “yes” and a full 66 percent of Republicans said “yes.” That’s because Republicans labor under the delusion that the 2020 election was stolen. So they are the most concerned about democracy. The people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 thought they were fighting for democracy.

So “democracy” can be kind of an opaque term for voters. The public doesn’t really care about democracy the way we are talking about it in this conversation. And one of the reasons I reach for politics as the best solution is that there has to be a lever by which we defend democracy by winning elections.

Mason: One possible scenario is that we are just in the middle of this very bumpy part of a very necessary road that we have to drive down. And ultimately, we might get to a better place, to a smoother part of the road, or the wheels fall off the car, right? We just don’t know what’s going to happen now because we’re in the middle of it. It feels totally chaotic because it is chaotic. And Trump’s presidency allowed us to see that for the first time.

Ifill: Something that we underestimate, that Trump sold, he sold a kind of freedom. Those rallies, you know, “punch him in the face,” “grab women by the P” — what he offered is: “You know how you’ve been in these meetings, and you’ve been wondering whether to call the person Black or African American, or felt uncomfortable making a joke that might seem sexist? You don’t have to worry about that anymore. Just be you, man. Just be you.” He sold that. And that was incredibly attractive.

Mason: On the other hand, we’ve never explicitly talked about equality in a productive way without also encountering violence. True multiethnic democracy is an elusive goal, and it’s not clear that we know how to get there.

Anderson: What is so scary is that, you know, what generally happens is that if you have a common enemy, it causes a coalescence among these disparate groups. Covid-19 was that common enemy, and instead, you saw greater fissioning between folks, greater division with this common enemy that has killed almost one million Americans. We couldn’t pull it together. We couldn’t rally around. We couldn’t agree on basic facts. That fissioning tells me how in trouble we are. I worry greatly about our democracy because where we should be able to see us coming together, instead of a “we” moment it is an “I” moment. And we’ve got to get to the “we.” We have got to get to the “we.”

Homans: I wonder, though — is there a “we”? I’ve been thinking about this, watching the war in Ukraine, which, besides bringing the matter of democracy’s global health to the fore, has so clearly centered on the question of how nations define things like cultural identity, sovereignty and an agreed-upon history — and what they define them against. Are Americans anywhere close to having a shared answer to that question themselves? Have these events changed your thinking at all about the fragility — or resilience — of democracy, or suggested any lessons we should apply to the United States?

Levitsky: I think it’s too early to tell. This is precisely the sort of issue that should bring our leaders together, as it has in most Western democracies. It certainly is good to see many leading Republicans taking a strong stance against the Russian invasion, but I am skeptical that the MAGA faction will come around in any serious way. And given the extremism of the Republican base, it’s hard to imagine many Republicans giving Biden the support he needs. In short, I’d be mighty pleased if Russian militarism helped bring our parties together, but I’d also be somewhat surprised.

Homans: Is there any reason to think there’s an alternative to the very bumpy road ahead that Lily talked about?

Levitsky: The crossroads that American democracy is at right now are pretty damn close to unique. I mean, we are on the brink of something very new and very challenging. So it is not easy to find solutions, best practices elsewhere; the creation of a truly multiracial democracy is uncharted territory.

Nobody here mentioned what’s going on the red states right now. The laws they are passing in places like Texas and Florida are so so extreme and the allegedly good Republicans seem inclined to go along with it that I have to believe that Democrats running against critical race theory an d “defund the police” isn’t going to get the job done. If they’ll go along with the grotesque authoritarian power grab of Ron DeSantis, I’m afraid this notion that if only the Democrats will stop being so “woke” they’ll come over just can’t be right. No one of good will and a conservative bent could possibly back DeSantis’s move to tell private businesses that they are not allowed to say anything to their employees that will make them fell bad about themselves (as white people.) No one who believes in law and order would go along with siccing vigilantes on pregnant people, teachers and LGBTQ kids.

I guess I just buy the idea that if only Democrats would just stop being Democrats Republicans would vote for them. I have yet to ever see that ply out the way they think it will. They just move further right. Ever. Goddamned. Time.

I don ‘t have the answer but it isn’t that. Maybe nuclear war will bring us all together.

NEW: time for a Covid situation update

Cases and hospitalisations are rising again across much of the western world.

What’s driving the rise, and should we be worried?

What’s behind the rise?

Some blame governments dropping restrictions, but the answer is the same as always: it’s the virus. Specifically the BA.2 Omicron strain.

Here are UK hospitalisations, split by variant. That mystery resurgence? Not so mysterious with this context added.

And when the virus changes the narrative, it doesn’t just change it in one country, it changes it everywhere.

Here’s same chart, but for Europe & US.

It’s the same story. What looked like mystery double-peaks are now clearly a BA.1 peak followed by BA.2.

And for those of you in the US looking at that last chart and saying “what resurgence? everything seems fine here”, here’s a closer look at what’s happening beneath the surface of that apparently flat trend.

We’ve been here before, and I think we know what happens next by now…

So, BA.2’s transmissibility advantage over BA.1 is driving the resurgence.

Next question: should we be worried?

The good news here is that analysis by @UKHSA has found that:

1) Infection with BA.2 is no more likely to result in hospitalisation than BA.1

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1060337/Technical-Briefing-38-11March2022.pdf

And 2) vaccines (specifically boosters) are just as effective against BA.2 as against the original BA.1 strain

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1061532/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_11.pdf

So while a resurgence is never good news, BA.2 is Omicron just as BA.1 was, so we have a decent idea of what that looks like in terms of severe disease & death

The BA.2 wave will still cause deaths, but with high levels of immunity, the tolls will be dwarfed by pre-vaccine waves

We can also revisit those earlier charts:

Denmark & Netherlands are already descending from BA.2 peaks, so we know that what goes up, comes down.

The height of BA.2 peaks varies. Denmark’s piggy-backed on BA.1 and rose higher. Netherlands came after and reached a similar height

Lots of factors will affect the specifics in any given country, including levels of immunity and mixing behaviour.

On that latter point, most of us have been taking things a little easier in recent weeks, with behaviour shifting back towards pre-pandemic norms.

The number of people working remotely, avoiding large indoor gatherings etc, is at or near an all-pandemic low across western Europe

And it’s a similar story in most countries in terms of masks and total numbers of close-contacts, both of which are about as close to 2019 levels as they have been, or heading that way fast.

Here’s our story on behaviour trending back to the old normal:

https://www.ft.com/content/abb2f882-0eff-42df-969a-a02f22f3a4a1

So while the coming BA.2 wave shouldn’t be a crisis for any country with high immunity levels, it does perhaps serve as a useful illustration of where we (well-vaccinated countries) are with Covid now, two-and-a-bit years into the pandemic:

Vaccine rollouts have been enormous successes, immunity levels are high. As a result, any given Omicron infection has a similar fatality risk as seasonal flu, and we’re mixing indoors again. In that sense we’re as close to 2019 as we have ever been https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1501886435145699328

But…

What BA.2 is demonstrating is that we’re still in a very different infectious disease environment to where we were before Covid.

To be clear, I don’t say this to worry anyone: I say it in the hope that that people are *less* surprised/worried when this and future waves unfold.

As @ewanbirney put it to us, before Covid we had 4 coronaviruses circulating in the population. Now we have 5, and the 5th is especially transmissible.

As @zorinaq shows below, that means we get more waves of Covid in any given year than we got flu waves

As we clearly see here, Covid waves are driven 100% by seasonality. There was an admittedly short spring and summer in late February, but now we are entering winter again

Scientists say we are on our 7th winter in 2 years. pic.twitter.com/tXKRoVITir

— Marc Bevand (@zorinaq) March 15, 2022

So, as we showed in our story last week, despite Covid being less lethal than it has ever been, the overall risk of infection, post-viral syndrome (long-Covid), severe disease and death remains markedly higher than it was in 2019

In Jan/Feb 2022, Covid is still increasing the winter respiratory death toll by around 50% compared to a typical year.

As we know, vaccines and Omicron have made Covid far less lethal on a per-infection basis, but sheer volume of infections means *risk of death remains elevated* pic.twitter.com/7GpTATqm1v

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 10, 2022

Our behaviour continues to trend towards 2019 levels. For many people, life feels quite normal, and I’m the last person who would say “you can never go back to normal! precautions forever!”

But in terms of infectious disease environment, this *is* a new normal, not the old one.

Ultimately, the questions — not only with BA.2, but with Covid more broadly in the months & years ahead — are what Covid’s typical annual toll on public health will be, whether we fully appreciate this, and whether we (and our healthcare systems) are resourced for the new normal.

As @AdamJKucharski put it to us, acute spikes are unlikely, but chronic plateaus could be very uncomfortable too

https://www.ft.com/content/abb2f882-0eff-42df-969a-a02f22f3a4a1

Finally, I just want to touch on another issue that I think BA.2 highlights:

Throughout the pandemic there has been a tendency to try to explain the virus’ dynamics by pointing to nice neat explanations around government policy. Mask mandates, dropping isolation etc.

While those things certainly have impacts, there are two things to note:

• First, they pale into significance compared to the impact of new variants, whose emergence we have relatively little control over. Not everything can be blamed on a person/policy

• And second, despite two years of evidence to the contrary, we continue to attribute to policy what is better understood as people making independent decisions in response to the status of the pandemic, with policy being just one influence.

As @_nickdavies put it to us:

Originally tweeted by John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) on March 17, 2022.

I think that last is exactly right. In a society with a social contract everyone would be concerned with their fellow humans, particularly the vulnerable ones who are under 5 over 60, and people who have medical conditions and we wouldn’t have childish tantrums over something as insignificantly inconvenient as masks and vaccination requirements. Unfortunately, we not only don’t have a social contract, our legal system has decided the federal government doesn’t have the right to require businesses or schools to require anything either. With many states and localities being unwilling to exercise their own prerogatives, people are free to do whatever they want whether they put others at higher risk or not.

On the other hand, we have vaccines and we have some treatments and we are in much better shape to confront these new variants so those of us who bother to use these mitigation features and are willing to wear a mask to the grocery store when case levels are high and gather outside as often as possible in nice weather, we can carry on fairly normally. That’s new normal, not old normal.

And I think the scientists are working like crazy to create new vaccines that will work even better as well as develop more treatments in case you do catch the virus. But we’re not there yet and we’ll just have to take some precautions if we don’t want to give this to unsuspecting vulnerable people or get it ourselves.

.@Schwarzenegger has a message for the Russian people. pic.twitter.com/AIOxoCQyrX

— attn (@attn) March 17, 2022

That’s very good. I don’t know if anyone will believe Schwarzenegger isn’t a propaganda shill but it’s worth a try. I never underestimate the power of celebrity to make people pay attention. Not anymore …

There are a lot of plans afoot to get past the information blockade in Russia right now and hopefully they will work. This is a good start.

The Atlantic’s Ed Yong on the US government basically throwing up its hands on COVID and apparently deciding to accept massive illness, death and disability because well, we’re tired of the whole damn thing:

All epidemics trigger the same dispiriting cycle. First, panic: As new pathogens emerge, governments throw money, resources, and attention at the threat. Then, neglect: Once the danger dwindles, budgets shrink and memories fade. The world ends up where it started, forced to confront each new disease unprepared and therefore primed for panic. This Sisphyean sequence occurred in the United States after HIV, anthrax, SARS, Ebola, and Zika. It occurred in Republican administrations and Democratic ones. It occurs despite decades of warnings from public-health experts. It has been as inevitable as the passing of day into night.

Even so, it’s not meant to happen this quickly. When I first wrote about the panic-neglect cycle five years ago, I assumed that it would operate on a timescale of years, and that neglect would set in only after the crisis was over. The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed both assumptions. Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary. Time and again, neglect has set in within mere months, often before the panic part has been over. The U.S. funds pandemic preparedness “like Minnesota snow,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me in 2018. “There’s a lot in January, but in July it’s all melted.”

Or, as it happens, in March.

This week, Congress nixed $15 billion in coronavirus funding from a $1.5 trillion spending bill, which President Joe Biden then signed on Tuesday. The decision is catastrophic, and as the White House has noted, its consequences will unfurl quickly. Next week, the government will have to cut shipments of monoclonal-antibody treatments by a third. In April, it will no longer be able to reimburse health-care providers for testing, vaccinating, or treating millions of uninsured Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated and infected. Come June, it won’t be able to support domestic testing manufacturers. It can’t buy extra doses of antiviral pills or infection-preventing treatments that immunocompromised people are banking on but were already struggling to get. It will need to scale back its efforts to improve vaccination rates in poor countries, which increases the odds that dangerous new variants will arise. If such variants arise, they’ll likely catch the U.S. off guard, because surveillance networks will have to be scaled back too. Should people need further booster shots, the government won’t have enough for everyone.

To be clear, these facets of the pandemic response were already insufficient. The U.S. has never tested sufficiently, never vaccinated enough people, never made enough treatments accessible to its most vulnerable, and never adequately worked to flatten global vaccine inequities. These measures needed to be strengthened, not weakened even further. Abandoning them assumes that the U.S. will not need to respond to another large COVID surge, when such events are likely, in no small part because of the country’s earlier failures. And even if no such surge materializes, another infectious threat inevitably will. As I wrote last September, the U.S. was already barreling toward the next pandemic. Now it is sprinting there.

The virus is moving too. Cases are shooting up across Western Europe, auguring a similar rise in the U.S., as has happened in every past surge. (A third of the CDC’s wastewater sites have detected upticks in coronavirus samples this month, although such data are noisy and hard to interpret when levels of virus are low.) Meanwhile, mask and vaccine mandates are being lifted. Contact tracing and quarantine policies are being discontinued. The CDC’s new guidelines recast most of the country as “low risk” and left the most vulnerable individuals with the burden of protecting themselves. Some experts supported the guidelines on the grounds that testing, treatments, and other defensive tools were available—and, as promised in Biden’s recently unveiled national plan, would be strengthened even further. But those promises were always contingent on congressional funding; without it, those residual layers of protection evaporate too. For half a year, Biden, administration officials, and several prominent public-health voices have encouraged optimism because “we have the tools” to fight the virus. The first half of that catchphrase now seems doubtful.

As The Washington Post and others have reported, the funding meltdown occurred because Republicans were skeptical about the need for further COVID funding. Their counteroffer was to repurpose unspent pots of money that had already been set aside for state-level pandemic responses; Democrats refused, and coronavirus aid was omitted from the bill entirely. It is reasonable to ask for accountability in spending, but this particular line of reasoning is familiar. In 2016, Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion to fight Zika, but Republicans refused, arguing that such funds should be cannibalized from a pot that was set aside for the 2015 Ebola outbreak. In 2018, Donald Trump asked Congress to rescind $252 million that was leftover in that pot, which he billed as an example of “irresponsible federal spending.” In fact, those funds were an investment, left deliberately untouched so that the U.S. could more quickly respond to future outbreaks (such as the one that began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo exactly as Trump issued his call). The U.S. clearly grasps the concept of preparedness during peacetime: It spends at least $700 billion a year on its military, more than any other country. But when thinking about infectious diseases, vital preparations for the future are routinely seen as unnecessary excesses of the present—even in the middle of a pandemic…

But hey, we’ve got 350 million people in the country and only a million have died from this disease in the last two years. Clearly, we can spare a few million more, amirite?

I don’t think the administration is guilty of dropping the ball here. The congress blocked this funding. Today Biden announced a new COVID “czar” Dr Ashish Jha. Maybe he’ll be able to persuade the congress to do more. Unfortunately, I’ll guess that Joe Manchin will stand with the Republicans on this if they try to go through reconciliation. He’s determined to stop anything the Democrats want at this point.

But it’s absolutely true that Americans just want to stop hearing about any of this, keep burying the dead and get on with it. Masks are icky, you see, and people want to party. And if the vaccine protection wanes well, hopefully your immune system is good enough to hold off severe illness until the bureaucrats can decide if you are eligible to get another one.

I hope you are all boosted (as much as they’ll let you) and have a good supply of N-95s. And I hope you’re feeling lucky. It’s every man for himself.

Fog of war and all that. Early reporting on any development surrounding Ukraine should be treated with skepticism.

Fired for unknown reasons

An investigive reporter from the Dutch Bellingcat investigative group has breaking news this morning (still unconfirmed by other agencies):

Three independent sources report that the deputy chief of Russia's Rosgvardia (a unit of RU's interior army which has had tremendous losses in Ukraine), Gen. Roman Gavrilov has been detained by FSB. Gavrilov had also previously worked in FSO, Putin's security service.

— Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) March 17, 2022

A Russian government news outlet quickly contested the report, saying that Gavrilov was not detained, merely “fired for unknown reasons.” State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein says “he recently spoke to him personally,” per the report. Personally!

Deep s**t

Detained or merely fired….

While it's hard to guess what exactly the purge/reshuffling at the top of the siloviks will result in, one thing is clear: it's doubtless that Putin recognizes the deep s**t this operation is in. I.e. it's so bad that he changes horses in midstream – a big no-no during war.

— Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) March 17, 2022

Ukraine officials report survivors from the Mariupol theater attack, but no deaths are confirmed. A basement bomb shelter may have survived the attack. Local officials say hundreds may have been sheltering there, “including children and elderly people.”

Reuters:

Petro Andrushchenko, an adviser to the city’s mayor, said some people had survived the blast.

“The bomb shelter held. Now the rubble is being cleared. There are survivors. We don’t know about the (number of) victims yet,” he told Reuters by phone.

He said rescue work was under way to reach survivors and establish the number of casualties, which was still unknown.

Russia has denied bombing the theatre.

Again, fog of war. Still awaiting images of survivors and bodies. Not to be grisly, but to confirm reports from the site are not exaggerated.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

World reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — ahem, “special military operation” — means statements from Putin and the Kremlin get prominent play in the news lately. Aside from his invoking his nuclear arsenal to intimidate the rest of Europe, what’s particularly unnerving is how hard it has become to tell which way the right-wing propaganda is flowing. Is it from Russia to the U.S. or vice versa?

Putin and Putin fanboy Donald Trump are sounding a lot alike these days.

Russia being “cancelled,” for example. Granted, the first reference I spotted was George Takei wondering aloud after the assault began how long it would take the American right to complain that “Russia is being canceled” (Feb. 28). Not long.

Tyler Cowen, economist and director of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, weighed in with a Washington Post op-ed, “Cancel Culture Against Russians Is the New McCarthyism” the next morning (March 1). By that evening, Monica Crowley was parroting it back to Jesse Watters on Fox News.

https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1499041366696992772

The next morning, the head of Russian foreign intelligence had latched on.

https://twitter.com/PaulSonne/status/1499421918629404681?s=20&t=I8OVACNLZchszfzcwhSe5w

By Wednesday, March 16, even as his forces attacked apartment buildings in Ukraine, refugees fled, and children died, Putin compared the West to Nazi Germany and claimed it is “trying to ‘cancel’ Russia by banning ‘Russian music, culture and literature.’”

Putin’s whine sounds so much like the American right that the two become indistinguishable. At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 26, Trump complained that if he only announced he would not run again in 2024, “the persecution would stop immediately.” Democrats and the media would move on “to the next victim.” Other speakers complained they had been “cancelled.” Polling just before the invasion showed more support for Putin among Republican than for Joe Biden, the U.S. president.

Putin’s grievance, especially, does not have to make sense except to him, Yale historian Timothy Snyder told Ezra Klein in discussing his 2018 book, “The Road to Unfreedom.” Putin’s recent speeches and writing reflect a “desperate effort” at explaining himself and his reasons for invading Ukraine. Putin “has this tone of the person who is sitting next to you at the bar and who knows everything,” Snyder says. “When, in fact, what’s going on is quite loopy.”

In Putin’s mind, the “only way to repair the world, to heal the world, to bring all the pieces back together is for there to be a certain kind of Russia,” Snyder explains:

I think Russian national identity is extremely confused and you can understand the need for Ukraine as a kind of shortcut, as a kind of way of resolving all these problems. Because you can say, well, I mean, this is a kind of dumb analogy, but you can say, well, the only problem with my life is I don’t have somebody else, you know? But anybody who says that is probably incorrect. And what Putin is saying — if we kind of reduce all the philosophical stuff down to a very simple proposition, he’s saying, Russia is not itself without Ukraine.

But if you’re not capable of being yourself without attacking and absorbing, violently, someone else, some other country, the real question might be about you, the real question might be about how you see the world, how you’re living in the world. So I think there’s a serious problem with Russian national identity. 

Putin possesses a mystical (and ahistorical) vision of lost unity between Russia and Ukraine. One Russia with one leader, and “none of this messy business about counting votes. There’s none of this messy business about people having different opinions.” No messy union of separate republics attempted in the last century. Never mind that there was never one Russia, one civic nation with any sense of itself as such. Just a former empire that spans 11 time zones and multiple cultures, not all Christian and Caucasian.

Putin “is beginning from the premise that the world is wrecked and, therefore,” Snyder explains, “we need charismatic acts of violence to generate the sort of healing and unity.” If that sounds uncomfortably like the “tree of liberty” reasoning of the MAGA and U.S. militia movements, it should.

Where words fail to persuade, says Snyder, the fascists’ way for cutting through the confusion is “a transformative act of violence” that will “speak for itself.”

Like that’s the thing which actually makes sense, right? That’s the thing that makes sense of the world. So I do think there’s a connection here between a deep commitment to something, which can’t actually be explained, but which can be acted upon. And I think this is another reason why when we reason about Putin, we shouldn’t be reasoning from our own premises.

We should at least start from where he’s starting from. Because there is a logic here. You know, the logic is cutting through the confusion, undoing the fragmentation. I may not be able to think it all through, but I’m going to show you that I can act it all through. The world may not be the way I describe. I may not be able to gather up in my paragraphs, but I can gather it up in my paratroopers. I can make it make sense. Watch me make it make sense.

“Make Russia Great Again” would fit on a red cap. That helps explain the affinity of the American right for Putin’s aggrieved strong-man act.

Here in the U.S., our right wing operates increasingly along the same premise. A country once great is broken. There was once something called America that stood for freedom, a certain kind for a certain kind of people. If it cannot be fixed through the “messy business about counting votes,” maybe fixing the vote is justified. (Accuse adversaries of doing it while doing it yourself.) And if that fails, perhaps a transformative act of violence like that attempted on Jan. 6, 2021.

Do they imagine one leader who, “by way of his clear decisions and actions, asserts, embodies, creates this unity on the scale of a nation.”

We, the rest of us, should stop accepting the right’s invocation of freedom without probing what they mean by it. Freedom for whom? Freedom for what? What do the people confidently expounding beside us at the bar actually mean by it?

For all the America iconography on display at Trump rallies and trucker protests, one begins to suspect that the “philosophy” behind them resembles Putin’s mystical vision of restoring a Russia that never was. How does the American right envision a “a more perfect union”? Is their vision backward-looking like Putin’s or forward-looking like the framers’?

Please, do go on.

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I’ve been waiting for this study. It’s obvious that many countries have not been able to accurately record the death toll from COVID-19, and there are some who have kept the official counts low for their own purposes. This is how scientists usually assess the death toll:

Last week, a consortium of health researchers published a harrowing report that reframed the magnitude of loss during the COVID-19 pandemic: an estimated 18.2 million people have lost their lives during the pandemic, they estimate, which is three times the official global death toll of 5.9 million COVID-19 deaths.

Researchers landed on the higher number, which was published in an analysis in The Lancet, based on their calculation of the number of “excess deaths.” The term excess deaths refers to deaths that were above what would be expected on average over a given time, meaning that they were either caused directly or indirectly by the pandemic. The researchers looked at the difference between the number of deaths recorded from January 1, 2020, until December 31, 2021, and the number of expected deaths based on previous trends.

This report is the first estimate of global excess deaths to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

“Our estimates of COVID-19 excess mortality suggest the mortality impact from the COVID-19 pandemic has been more devastating than the situation documented by official statistics,” the authors wrote. “Official statistics on reported COVID-19 deaths provide only a partial picture of the true burden of mortality.”

Nearly one million of those deaths are from right here in the good old USA. And we aren’t done yet.