Reassessing Suburban Voters

 A lot of what we think about suburban voters is wrong. 

Loudoun County, Va., which became ground zero of stoking panic about education and critical race theory by the incoming governor, Glenn Youngkin, has become an example of many different political ideas, but they can’t be understood outside the local context. In the 1990s, over 80 percent of Loudoun County’s students were white. Today that number has dropped to 43 percent, after a large influx of Asian American and Latino families. Youngkin’s strong showing in Virginia’s suburbs, then, should be seen not only as a triumph of manipulation and messaging by the G.O.P. but also as the most recent nationwide response to demographic changes in the suburbs.

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Youngkin’s strategy exposed oversights and misconceptions within the Democratic Party — its fundamental misunderstanding of Asian American voters and the ways in which it tends to focus on race and inequality in urban areas while mostly ignoring what’s happening right outside city limits.

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a lot of folks who ended up in the suburbs didn’t move by choice. The central city got too expensive. So the rents and tenements that used to be accessible to low-income people, those got snapped up. In Detroit they got turned into downtown lofts. And many low-income people started to move outside the city because that’s where affordable housing was.

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We know that now, in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, the majority of Black residents live in the suburbs. Now the majority of immigrants live in the suburbs. Now the majority of Latinx and Asian Americans live there. But most news media, when they say “suburban,” they mean “white.”

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it also raises the question of what coalition politics are going to look like. So many folks have assumed, because the suburbs are becoming more Black, more brown, more poor, that they’re just going to vote straight-line Democrat. And I think when we look, we actually see that there are moments in which the Republican Party has made significant inroads in terms of mobilizing suburban voters of color. It varies significantly by racial and ethnic group. Black folks remain solidly Democratic in the suburbs.

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Many residents, across race, have said one of the reasons they left the city was because of the safety net — the safety net was a burden that took more taxes away from them.

There are now more poor people in suburbs than in central cities, which means these problems have cropped back up for these same suburban residents. They have to reckon with the thing that they tried to escape.

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We’re going to be forced to reckon with where people are because the narrative has been marching along for 20 years. We just haven’t been paying attention. You hear it arise more and more around elections, but you’re going to see it when we try to figure out how to deal with national poverty, with food insecurity, with transportation and infrastructure. Because the conversation has exclusively assumed people of color are in cities and white folks are in the suburbs. So I hope that people get shaken out of that misconception. But I think we have another 20 years before that happens.

Political Targeting Notes

 Suburbia is not white anymore. Successful Democratic candidates need to build multi-ethnic coalitions.

Every R voted against BBB in the House, including our own.

R like Dan Newhouse doesn't want you to have:   

Galapagos Tortoise Genome

Long life. Cancer Free.

Galapagos giant tortoises are some of the longest-living animals on Earth, but how do they pull off the feat? A new study has examined the genome of the species and found that they pack plenty of duplicate genes, which may protect them from aging-related diseases like cancer.

Supply Chain Problems are Labor Problems

The world's freight transportation problems were teetering on the edge before the pandemic. Then they cratered under COVID restrictions.

Long before the Ever Given, a 220,000-ton container ship, blocked the Suez Canal in March, transport industries had issued a blunt public warning that a trade logjam was unavoidable if conditions for sailors, drivers and pilots were not improved. To keep trade moving, workers urgently need fast-tracked visas, the return of flights to and from ports and vaccinations. Instead, the opposite happened. Draconian travel bans and limited access to vaccinations have had a devastating impact on transport workers’ well-being and safety. Crews have not been allowed to disembark ships without the right vaccination paperwork, so leaving or joining a ship has become impossible: Hundreds of thousands of them have been trapped on their vessels, with some working months beyond their initial contracts. Thousands of truck drivers at international borders have also been forced to sit for days in freezing temperatures without access to food or medical facilities. Pilots of cargo planes have faced extensive quarantines after completing international flights, meaning long periods away from their families.

This ill treatment may push many workers out of the sector, exacerbating the shortfall in labor that underpins the chaos.

Rittenhouse Reasoning

Kyle Rittenhouse self-owns his own case. 

At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.

This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe.

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The guns failed to deter attacks against their owners. According to the defense, Rittenhouse’s gun was a reason Rosenbaum pursued him. And Grosskreutz’s gun was the reason Rittenhouse shot him.

The guns failed any notion of proportionality or moderation. Prosecutors pointed out that Rittenhouse quickly fired four shots at Rosenbaum. Even if Rittenhouse felt genuinely threatened by Rosenbaum, why hadn’t Rittenhouse stopped shooting after the first shot, which could have immobilized Rosenbaum without killing him? (A defense “use of force” expert implied that the gun shot too quickly for him to pause and reassess the threat between shots.)

If you believe Rittenhouse’s defense, the gun also failed at a more basic level, that of ordinary product safety. Rittenhouse had his rifle strapped to his body but was still worried that it could be taken from him. How useful is a gun that can be pulled away from you by a guy who is also hitting you with a skateboard?

And finally, the guns failed at their most vaunted purpose, helping the good guys fight the bad guys. If Rittenhouse was your good guy, what good did his gun do him? How did it help anyone in the community he was trying to protect? It got two people killed, one person injured, and Rittenhouse himself facing charges of homicide. 

There's also this from the Arbery trial.

Seeing Around Corners or Through Tissue

A new holographic technique can do amazing things by bouncing lasers of opaque objects.

"It's like we can plant a virtual computational camera on every remote surface to see the world from the surface's perspective," Willomitzer said.

For people driving roads curving through a mountain pass or snaking through a rural forest, this method could prevent accidents by revealing other cars or deer just out of sight around the bend. "This technique turns walls into mirrors," Willomitzer said. "It gets better as the technique also can work at night and in foggy weather conditions."

Civil War by Other Means

Republicans will do anything if it harms Democrats, even if it hurts their own people.

“It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other,” he says. “Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules.”

Republicans pass photo ID laws knowing they could disenfranchise not just Democratic women, but their own.

Republicans hold pandemic relief hostage. prolonging their supporters’ suffering if it will harm Democrats.

Republicans refuse time-tested practices for fighting a global pandemic, and promote Covid denialism and crank cures while hundreds of millions of their own supporters die.

Now in Michigan, Republicans have found a new way to harm their own voters on the prospect that they will harm Democrats more. Having failed to override Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) veto of their proposed voting restrictions, they hope to eliminate 20 percent of voting places statewide.

Texas Evangelicals Prepare for a Post-Roe World

These fine examples of Christianity prepare to use the travails of unwanted pregnancy to bring sheep into their perverted fold.

The idea of providing a place for single, pregnant women harkened to a time before abortion became legal and so-called “homes for unwed mothers” were often the only option for women—mostly White women—to give birth in secrecy and avoid social scandal. The homes were often run by institutions such as The Salvation Army, orders of Catholic nuns, and evangelical churches. They were often bleak places where women were assumed to need reform and were sometimes abused and shamed, the kind of subjugation that advocates of legal abortion aimed to end.

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she envisioned her own maternity ranch in almost utopian terms. To her, it would be a place of liberation and Christian development in accord with the beliefs she had refined at her church, one of the many popular megachurches in suburban Dallas that tended to be conservative in values, modern in style, with praise bands, coffee shops and names such as the Door and the Well.

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By the time that lawyers were arguing over the heartbeat law at the U.S. Supreme Court, Aubrey had raised more than $120,000, a figure that continued to rise.

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“If I can offer these moms and babies a safe, structured first year of life, of calm and stability — that can change whole generations,” Aubrey said, and as she headed back toward her car, she started describing another vision, one that was even larger than a maternity ranch.

“What if Texas ends up becoming a model for the future?” she said. “What if Texas meets this shift in culture? And instead of having high abortion rates, what if we help single moms to become stronger moms, to become successful?”

She imagined what that would look like. Churches helping. Christians opening their homes. Christian safe havens all over Texas. Maybe all over America.

Vaccination for Alzheimer's

Research has found a way to vaccinate in such a way that the body attacks and eliminates the form of amyloid that is related to the disease. 

Cats Be Tracking You

Even when you are across the house, they keep track of you with their ears.

Don't Panic

We need to hold the course through this blip of inflation.

current events don’t look anything like the 1970s. Instead, the closest parallel to 2021’s inflation is the first of these surges, the price spike from 1946 to 1948.

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So what can 1946-48 teach us about inflation in 2021? Then as now there was a surge in consumer spending, as families rushed to buy the goods that had been unavailable in wartime. Then as now it took time for the economy to adjust to a big shift in demand — in the 1940s, the shift from military to civilian needs. Then as now the result was inflation, which in 1947 topped out at almost 20 percent. Nor was this inflation restricted to food and energy; wage growth in manufacturing, which was much more representative of the economy as a whole in 1947 than it is now, peaked at 22 percent.

But the inflation didn’t last. It didn’t end immediately: Prices kept rising rapidly for well over a year. Over the course of 1948, however, inflation plunged, and by 1949 it had turned into brief deflation.

What, then, does history teach us about the current inflation spike? One lesson is that brief episodes of overheating don’t necessarily lead to 1970s-type stagflation — 1946-48 didn’t cause long-term inflation, and neither did the other episodes that most resemble where we are now, World War I and the Korean War. And we really should have some patience: Given what happened in the 1940s, pronouncements that inflation can’t be transitory because it has persisted for a number of months are just silly.

The Guarantee Clause

JAMELLE BOUIE explains how the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution could be the ultimate authority in the fight against gerrymandering. It says Congress is obligated to guarantee that state governments are republican and representative of people.  This clause was the basis for the federal government to take apart Jim Crow.

It is not too much to say that the Republican Party has cleared itself a path to nullifying the votes of millions of Americans. What, if anything, is there to do about it?

Here, I think it is worth looking at one rarely discussed section of the Constitution.

In Article IV, Section 4, the Constitution says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

Much of this is straightforward. The federal government is obligated to protect each state from foreign invasion — a legitimate threat in the early days of the United States, when the nation faced foreign powers on its northern, southern and western borders (as well as British naval power) — and is obligated to quell domestic uprisings, from the rebellions that rocked the United States as it existed under the Articles of Confederation to the slave revolts that struck terror into the hearts of the Southern planter class.

But what, exactly, does it mean for the federal government to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”?

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As James Madison explains it in Federalist No. 43, it means that “In a confederacy founded on republican principles, and composed of republican members, the superintending government ought clearly to possess authority to defend the system against aristocratic or monarchial innovations.”

He goes on: “The more intimate the nature of such a Union may be, the greater interest have the members in the political institutions of each other; and the greater right to insist that the forms of government under which the compact was entered into, should be substantially maintained.”

Of course, there’s no real chance in the modern era that any state will become a “monarchy” or “aristocracy” in the 18th-century sense. So why does the Guarantee Clause matter, and what does it mean? How does one determine whether a state has maintained a “republican form of government”?

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In his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan cited the Guarantee Clause in his brief against Louisiana’s Jim Crow segregation law. If allowed to stand, he wrote,

there would remain a power in the States, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the blessings of freedom; to regulate civil rights common to all citizens, upon the basis of race; and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community, called the people of the United States, for whom and by whom, through representatives, our government is administrated. Such a system is inconsistent with the guarantee given by the Constitution to each State of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

In this vision of the Guarantee Clause, the touchstone for “a republican form of government” is political equality, and when a state imposes political inequality beyond a certain point, Congress or the federal courts step in to restore the balance.

Truth About the Build-Back-Better Banking Regulation

IRS already know how much wage-earners make because of W-2's. For people who earn their money in other ways, it isn't so easy and that's where the largest offenders of our tax laws operate. The Build-Back-Better legislation modestly expands the IRS purview to include the annual gross in-flows and out-flows of  large bank accounts.

The right-wingers are drumming up scare stories about this and of course lots of people are biting the hook. Don't be taken in by the lies.

New Take on Fusion Energy

Typical proposed fusion reactors plan to take the energy out of the reactor by generating steam and driving turbines. The Helion model uses the change produced in the plasma flux when a fusion occurs to generate an outgoing electric current directly in the magnets that are confining the plasma. I think this might be a game-changer.

Preserving Democracy and Freedom

An interview with Sebastian Junger as he talks about the price and reward of freedom and democracy.

“For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for if not died for. That raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed.” Shortly after that, you say, “The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”

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The great thing about a democracy is if you think that the government is overreaching — and the government’s great at overreaching ... I mean, it’s not like it doesn’t do that. I get it. — But if you think that that’s the case, you have recourse. You can go to the courts or you can vote the bastards out. You can go to the polling booth.

But the one thing you can’t do in a democracy is use violence to change an outcome. As soon as you use violence to change that outcome, you’re actually creating the opposite of a democracy. You are on the road to fascism.

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How do we maintain our autonomy in the face of a more powerful group?

Sometimes that more powerful group is your own government. The labor movement 100 years ago, there were totally disenfranchised foreign workers working in the textile mills in Massachusetts, and they faced down the National Guard and the corporations and the government, and they got the laws changed.

One of the ways they did that was incorporating women into their ranks. Once you put women on the front line of a protest, the cops often do not dare use mass violence. They’re way more willing to do that against men. As one frustrated policeman said in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, he said, “One good cop can handle 10 men. But it takes 10 cops to handle one woman.” That changed the tactical dynamic on the streets that allowed those protests to succeed.

The Red Death Is Real

As vaccinations have been rolled out, the gap in compliance between red and blue geographies has become more and more apparent.

The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Here's the picture

They Had A Game Plan

The Bulwark published a piece on the Claremont Institute's war game plan for overthrowing our democracy. It's an exercise that uses large swaths of right-wing fantasy and wishful, magical thinking about how our government actually works. Fortunately, they were wrong about so many things and sadly, they came really close nonetheless.

despite the authors’ pretensions to scholarship and rigor—“for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism”— the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right.

Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government—aided by citizen “posses” of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office.

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The exercise ends with crude myth-making: the noble and sacrificial decision by a “Republican member from an at-large delegation” suffering from “life-threatening wounds” who, “understanding what is at stake, demands to be transported to the House for the state delegation vote and arrives in a heavily guarded convoy.”

This isn’t a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.

Democratic Elitism

 From David Brooks. Some points, but he fails to address the problem of conservatives espousing fundamentally destructive ideas.

When Democrats seem to be magnifying the education establishment’s control of the classroom and minimizing the role of parents, there’s going to be a reaction. Some of the reaction is pure racism, but a lot of it is pushback against elite domination and the tacit ideology.

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If Republicans can find candidates who oppose the blue oligarchy but without too much Trumpian baggage, they can win over some former Biden voters in places like Virginia and New Jersey.

Democrats would be wise to accept the fact that they have immense social and cultural power, and accept the responsibilities that entails by adopting what I’d call a Whole Nation Progressivism.

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Democrats need a positive moral vision that would start by rejecting the idea that we are locked into incessant conflict along class, cultural, racial and ideological lines. It would reject all the appurtenances of the culture warrior pose — the us/them thinking, exaggerating the malevolence of the other half of the country, relying on crude essentialist stereotypes to categorize yourself and others.

It would instead offer a vision of unity, unity, unity. That unity is based on a recognition of the complex humanity of each person — that each person is in the act of creating a meaningful life. It would reject racism, the ultimate dehumanizing force, but also reject any act that seeks to control the marketplace of ideas or intimidate those with opposing views. It would reject ideas and movements that seek to reduce complex humans to their group identities. It would stand for racial, economic and ideological integration, and against separatism, criticizing, for example, the way conservatives are often shut out from elite cultural institutions.

Who's in Control?

David Foster Wallace predicted the binge culture of today. First it was simply video-on-demand. Then recommendations based on prior viewing. Now it's predictive analytics. It takes strong conscious effort to climb up out of our selected ruts. Not only do the algorithms look at what you like, but they are able to group you with other users like you and make suggestions based on the things people in your cohort like.

In the post-modern age, helped by technology, we dream of achieving 24/7 joy. But behind the joy are the algorithms. In 2012, for instance, when Sarandos commissioned a political drama for Netflix TV called House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, predictive analytics helped justify his decision. “It was generated by algorithm,” Sarandos told me. “I didn’t use data to make the show, but I used data to determine the potential audience to a level of accuracy very few people can do.”

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This “if you liked that, then you’ll like this” facility has become commonplace in the new millennium, tailoring cultural supply to your tastes. And yet, customized culture such as that devised at Netflix risks creating what internet activist Eli Pariser in 2010 called “filter bubbles”: each of us isolated intellectually in our own informational spheres.

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What Netflix’s notorious binge culture results in is flow by another means, more efficient and more insidious— insidious in that we seem to be getting what we want all the time, and we suppose we have liberated ourselves from the gatekeeper of TV (schedulers), only to be ruled by another, much more sophisticated group of gatekeepers, whose task is to keep us watching while at the same time suggesting that viewers are being liberated by being given more choice.

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What fascinated Wallace about this passage was not so much the parodic regress—the tourists watching the barn, Murray watching the tourists, Jack watching Murray, us watching Jack watching Murray watching the tourists watching the barn—but Murray’s assumption of the role of scientific critic at a remove from the culture of gawping. Wallace’s sense was that we’re all gawpers now, lens-dangling barn-watchers as much as pop-cultural theorists. The most absurd aspect of this parodic regress is the person who thinks he can stand outside it, observing with ironic detachment.

Sports Fandom and Political Polarization

Perhaps you've noticed that there appear to be similar tribal similarities in how people identify with a sports team and a political party.

the creation of a sports fan has a number of requirements, including a specific geography, family affiliations and the sense of kinship one may get from being a fan of a team. She said that in many ways, sports fandom “forms similar to other kinds of identity, where you start associating with folks who have something in common. And then you can feel support from them. You feel that sense of winning when your team wins, or that sense of defeat when your team loses.”

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Duncan elaborated on how our connections to our political identity are markedly similar — our political understanding is largely based on where we are and with whom we socialize.

“When your political party wins, same as when your team wins, you feel that sense of winning yourself. Or when your team loses, you feel that loss similarly.” She added that based on her research in sports and politics, those kinship ties also affect how we perceive bad news about our favorite teams.

“You know it’s going to take more than simple facts for you to believe that your hero of a sports coach has actually looked the other way while sexual abuse happened. Or it’s going to take more than just facts for you to realize that your political party isn’t headed in the same direction or doesn’t share your same values,” she said.

So what could reshape someone’s sports fandom or, by extension, political affiliations? Duncan told me that while some shifts happen when something takes place that “cracks through your sense of reality” and raises questions about how and why you think the way you do, the way many people change in their sports fandom or political alignment often stems from a literal, physical shift.

“We see shifts in political alignment or sports team fandom if you shift to maybe a completely different geographical area where your social structure, those around you, thinks differently,” she said. If you grew up in a very liberal area and moved to a place that’s more conservative, your views might change, or at least your views on what the people now around you believe might change. And your sports fandom might change if you moved to a new town with different sports allegiances — lessening your hate for your traditional rivals as well.

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I am proud of my willingness to be wrong, but I’ve noticed that I have a troubling propensity to excuse my own wrongness in the face of evidence by saying that hey, well, those guys are probably even more wrong than I am.

That’s not reason. That’s fandom.

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watching Michigan play Michigan State today and probably saying many things that perhaps I would not repeat in the paper of record — fandom makes you do some very, very stupid things.

Disinformation Attacks

An analysis of the disinformation about COVID shows that certain communities were singled out for attacks by certain antagonists.

Some reports suggest that some of the anti-vaccine activity spotted online had roots in disinformation campaigns that were linked to the Russian government. On June 8, GroupSense analysts said they agreed with the assessment of another research firm, known as Graphika, that an anti-vaccine cartoon posted to a website devoted to promoting far-right conspiracy theories was “consistent with a pro-Russian disinformation campaign.” That campaign was attributed to people linked to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency.