Month: February 2020

Dear liberal white women: Do you enjoy pasta carbonara, getting together with friends, and learning about your complicity in racism? If so, you’re in luck. Professional social justice activists Saira Rao and Regina Jackson are willing to come to your home, eat your food, and interrogate you and your gal pals to the point of tears.

And get this: The cost is a mere $2,500.

Sadly, I’m not making this up. Amazingly, white women are paying. According to a must-be-read-to-be-believed article in The Guardian, Rao and Jackson—who are Indian American and black, respectively—have already attended 15 “Race to Dinner” events in which they demand that attendees confess their racism and admit they are part of the problem.

“If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao said. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”

For someone who stylizes herself as an anti-racism activist, Rao engages in constant racial stereotyping. Her Twitter feed reads like satire in the vein of Titania McGrath, a self-aware parody account (at least from what I can recall of it before she blocked me). For Rao, everything and everyone is racist—especially white women, whom she does not like one bit. Some highlights:

pic.twitter.com/ufp85HltJh

— Confirmed Miscer (@ManDaveJobGood) February 2, 2020

To be absolutely clear, the Race to Dinner events do not feature actual racists. They are attended by well-meaning people who have somehow allowed themselves to become convinced that their souls are impure. Consider the testimony of one dinner host:

“I want to hire people of color. Not because I want to be … a white savior. I have explored my need for validation … I’m working through that … Yeah. Um … I’m struggling,” she stutters, before finally giving up.

Another attendee, Morgan Richards, “admits she recently did nothing when someone patronizingly commended her for adopting her two black children, as though she had saved them.” This is very problematic:

“What I went through to be a mother, I didn’t care if they were black,” [Morgan Richards] says, opening a window for Rao to challenge her: “So, you admit it is stooping low to adopt a black child?” And Richards accepts that the undertone of her statement is racist.

One more:

Erika Righter raises her tattooed forearm to her face, in despair of all of the racism she’s witnessed as a social worker, then laments how a white friend always ends phone calls with “Love you long time.”

“And what is your racism, Erika?” Rao interrupts, refusing to let her off the hook. The mood becomes tense. Another woman adds: “I don’t know you, Erika. But you strike me as being really in your head. Everything I’m hearing is from the neck up.”

Righter, a single mother, retreats before defending herself: “I haven’t read all the books. I’m new to this.”

Rao and Jackson have certainly come up with an interesting gimmick for their grift, though there’s nothing novel about trying to convince people they are wicked and sinful—in need of a kind of absolution that only the grifter can provide (for a cost). Indeed, intersectional activism occasionally feels akin to a religion, to the extent that it emphasizes the internal brokenness of human beings and the fallen state of the world.

It’s tempting, then, to observe Rao and Jackson and thus write-off the entire concept of progressive activism on race. But in truth, they are such ridiculous caricatures that probably the most appropriate response is simply to pity the gullible people whom they’ve swindled.

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Oil derricks, it turns out, are named (indirectly) after someone named Derrick—not an oil man, though, but a hangman: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word (which originally referred to hangmen and gallows) comes from

Derrick, the surname of a noted hangman at Tyburn c1600. 

I did not know that.

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Surely we can do better than this.

Last night’s Iowa caucuses were a total disaster. Candidates spent millions of dollars, volunteers canvassed for months, and the media spilled untold amounts of ink, pixels, and TV time building up to the first nominating contest in the 2020 Democratic primary—but it was all for naught, as the Iowa Democratic Party totally fumbled the one event that puts the state on the political map. Someone will eventually be declared the winner, but it will hardly matter by then. Campaigns have moved on to New Hampshire, and the news cycle will quickly move on to tonight’s State of the Union address and the next primary contests. Any bounce (or lack thereof) coming out of Iowa has been rendered meaningless.

Already, the mess is prompting calls for the Democratic Party to abandon the caucus format in Iowa, or to replace Iowa as the first state to vote, or both. (For more on all that, read Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman’s obituary for the Iowa caucuses here.)

But that prompts an obvious follow-up question. If Iowa doesn’t go first, which state (or states) should?

The two most common answers to this question—either that the first state to vote should be demographically representative of the country as a whole, or that we should move to a national primary that does not elevate any state above the rest—are both wrong. In each case, those changes would merely replace the problems caused by the Iowa caucuses with a different set of biases. Iowa (and New Hampshire) ought to be replaced as the “first-in-the-nation” caucuses and primaries, it’s true, but both major parties should take this opportunity to implement a system that voters can trust to be fair to all candidates.

To understand why replacing Iowa with another state won’t work, you have to understand the arguments against having Iowa vote first. These aren’t new, even though they will get renewed attention after Monday’s mess. In a nutshell, the argument goes like this: Iowa is too white and too rural to be an accurate microcosm of the country as a whole, and letting it go first every four years is unfair to candidates whose appeal might be greater in states that more accurately reflect America. The demographics are indeed striking. Iowa’s population is 90 percent white, while the country as a whole is 61 percent white.

Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, has pinned at least some of the blame for his failed presidential campaign on the demographics of Iowa (and New Hampshire, the first primary state, which is also 90 percent white). “We can’t as a Democratic Party, continually and justifiably complain about Republicans who suppress the vote of people of color, and then turn around and start our nominating contest in two states, that even though they take their role seriously, hardly have any people of color,” Castro said in November.

But that identity-based critique must grapple with the fact that Barack Obama in 2008 scored a surprise upset over Hillary Clinton in Iowa—a victory that propelled Obama to the nomination and the presidency. Ironically, Clinton may have been better off in 2008 if the first state to vote was a more diverse, traditionally “blue state” where the Democratic Party establishment held more sway.

The problem, then, isn’t that Iowa unfairly penalizes certain candidates. It’s that giving any state the power to vote first creates a set of biases that affect the rest of the race.

That’s not solved by letting another state jump to the front of the line. Sure, California has the most registered Democrats. Illinois is the state that, demographically, best matches the Democratic Party’s national profile. Ohio is the swingiest swing state and a longtime political barometer. But having a big state—like California or Ohio—go first would grant a huge home field advantage to certain candidates. And would anyone in their right mind trust Chicago Democrats to handle the crucial first primary without controversy?

So why not try the opposite approach? If no single state should go first, make all of them vote at the same time. The idea to hold a “national primary” has been around for more than a century, and it probably never made more sense than it does now—since candidates can take advantage of technology to be in many places at once.

A national primary, however, comes with its own set of biases—ones that would boost wealthy candidates, like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. One of the major benefits of the current, state-by-state format is that it tests would-be presidential campaigns in a variety of ways—you have to win with small-scale retail politics in Iowa and New Hampshire, sell a national message on Super Tuesday, and identify where and when to invest resources without wasting them on states that can’t be won. Campaigns that navigate that gauntlet successfully are, in theory, the best poised to win a general election. A national primary might elevate campaigns that can saturate the airwaves from coast-to-coast, but would make other campaign infrastructure less important.

There’s probably no perfect way to structure a primary election, but the best ideas strike a balance between giving one or two states too much influence while still forcing winning candidates to navigate a geographically and demographically diverse process.

As recently as 2008, the Republican National Committee was considering exactly such a plan. Known as the “Delaware Plan,” this reform was floated at the 2000 and 2008 national conventions. It would have sorted the states by population into four groups. The smallest states, by population, would share a single primary election day, followed by a second election for the next largest states, and so on.

Letting the least populated states vote first would preserve the traditional retail politics of Iowa and New Hampshire, but would create a playing field that stretches from Maine to Alaska. Only candidates who survived those early tests would be able to compete for the big prizes in the final round of the process, when states like California and Texas would have their say. A variation on the Delaware Plan, known as the Ohio Plan, would also have small states voting in the first cluster, but would mix the subsequent clusters so the largest states by population didn’t always have to wait to go last.

There are still some explicit biases in letting some states go first every time, and—as proposed to the RNC in 2008, at least—the Delaware Plan would preserve Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status.

Still, that’s a step in the right direction. Clustering states into a series of primaries so that, for example, 10 states vote at a time in five sets of elections with each election separated by a month, would prevent any one outcome (or any one major screw-up) from defining the first step in the nominating process. It would also create a more dynamic competition by forcing campaigns to make strategic choices—instead of spending months focused on Iowa and New Hampshire, candidates would have to put their chips in a variety of places for the first round of voting.

The process could be made even more fair if the clusters of states are chosen by lottery. That was the basis of a bipartisan idea pitched by Debbie Dingell, the wife of late Michigan congressman John Dingell (D), and Saul Anuzis, then-chairman of the Michigan GOP.

Under the Anuzis-Dingell Plan, the 50 states would be sorted into six geographic regions. A lottery would be held to determine which states would vote on each of five primary election dates, each separated by a month. Each date would include 10 states—with at least one state, and no more than four states, from each of the six geographic regions.

It’s complicated, sure, but no more complicated than the current process. It would provide a different, randomized map for each primary season—forcing campaigns to adapt their opening messages for an audience that’s bigger than a mere 240,000 voters in Iowa cycle after cycle.

The only real drawback to a major reform like one of these is that it would have to be imposed from the top down. The DNC or RNC would have to do some serious arm-twisting to get states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina to agree to a system in which they lose their primo spots—and one in which they might end up being among the final states to vote. It would require overriding the state parties to a degree that might make the national committees (and should make libertarian-minded people) a little uncomfortable.

And these reforms would do nothing to fix the real problem at the heart of America’s presidential election system: that the winner is given too much power—an outcome that raises the stakes of any procedural tinkering far higher than they should be.

It’s unlikely that there’s any flawless presidential primary system. Still, last night’s debacle in Iowa should stoke a real conversation about creating a more sensible and fair nominating process before 2024.

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Last year, California became the second state in the union to pass statewide rent control. But that wasn’t enough for some activists, who’ve succeeded in putting a new, more expansive rent control initiative on the ballot this year.

The California Secretary of State’s office announced on Monday that the Rent Affordability Act had earned enough signatures to qualify for the November 2020 ballot. The measure is being sponsored by Housing Is A Human Right, a project of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF).

“Housing affordability and homelessness are the most pressing social justice and public health emergencies in our time,” AHF President Michael Weinstein said in a press release. “We’ll face a tough road ahead but are ready for the fight—and victory!—for all Californians and for housing affordability.”

This is round two for AHF, which was also the primary backer of the state’s last rent control ballot initiative in 2018, Prop 10.

That measure went down in flames, receiving only 40 percent of the vote. In the wake of its failure, the legislature passed a rent control law that capped rent increases at 5 percent plus inflation for buildings older than 15 years.

What that bill did not do was repeal the Costa-Hawkins Act, a state law that forbids local governments from imposing rent control on buildings constructed after 1995 and guarantees landlords the right to raise rents as much as they want on vacant units.

That was a major disappointment for tenant activists who wanted lawmakers to go farther. Weinstein himself criticized the rent control bill that passed as too weak, telling the Los Angeles Times, “it won’t stop the homeless crisis which is being caused by people losing their homes or being evicted…it won’t advantage working people and people on fixed incomes who need affordable housing.”

AHF’s initiative would thus largely eliminate Costa-Hawkins, allowing local governments to impose rent caps that are lower than the state’s existing ones. It would also limit the amount landlords could raise rents on vacant units to 15 percent over a three-year period.

In addition, the ballot initiative would expand rent control to single-family homes and condominiums that are owned by people with more than two housing units in their possession. Current law exempts single-family homes and condominiums, except for those owned by corporations or real estate investment trust funds.

The ballot initiative has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who said it “will allow California cities to pass sensible limits on rent increases and protect families, seniors, and veterans from skyrocketing rents.”

Neither landlords nor labor unions are happy about the ballot initiative, however.

Both the California Apartment Association (CAA), a landlord trade group, and the State Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents construction trade unions, have issued strong condemnations of the measure.

The initiative would “block the path towards future investment in the construction of affordable housing units for the working class,” said Cesar Diaz of the Construction Trades Council.

Tom Bannon, who heads up the CAA, was even more blunt, saying in a press release that Weinstein is “abusing the statewide initiative process to impose extreme forms of rent control and satisfy his extreme form of NIMBYism.”

This sets the stage for another contentious, expensive campaign. AHF spent $21 million supporting Prop 10 in 2018. Opponents spent $72 million to counter the measure.

Critics contend that rent control limits the construction of new units and encourages the owners of existing ones to convert them to pricier, but unregulated, condos.

That’s less of a concern for Weinstein, AHF, and other left-wing activist groups, however. They see speculation, not supply constraints, as the cause of California’s housing problems.

Indeed, in the same press release announcing that the Rent Affordability Act qualified for the ballot, Weinstein also dissed the recently failed SB 50—which would have legalized four-unit homes statewide and mid-rise apartments near transit—as “deeply flawed.”

If recent history is any guide, this latest rent control ballot initiative will likely fail. Unfortunately, the fact that it exists at all speaks to the growing popularity of the worst idea in housing policy.

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