Another week, another bumbling trade declaration from President Donald Trump. After a very confrontational G-7 meeting, observes Veronique de Rugy, Trump threatened to cut all member countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—off from the U.S. market if they don’t reduce their tariffs on American exports. He told the press, “It’s going to stop, or we’ll stop trading with them.”
As a reminder, this whole drama started when President Trump imposed stiff steel and aluminum tariffs on everyone, including our closest trading partners, friends, and security allies. Adding insult to injury, he argued that imports from these friendly countries are a security threat to the United States, even though the Department of Defense said they are not.
The president’s ignorance about economics and trade is well-documented. These recent threats are yet more evidence.
California state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Democrat, wants to force firms based in the Golden State to add women to their boards. A bill she has introduced would require all publicly traded firms to have at least one female board member by the end of 2019 or face fines. Firms with five directors would have to have two female board members by the end of 2012, and companies with six or more directors would have to have at least three female board members.
Rapidly rising sea levels that inundate the coastlines where billions of people live is one of the more worrisome concerns associated with climate change. A new report in Nature suggests that the rate of melting of crucial Antarctic ice sheets has tripled during the past 25 years and is accelerating sea level rise. The melting is the result of warmer ocean waters undermining glaciers grounded on sea bottoms around Antarctica and increased surface melt from warmer air temperatures. If all of the glaciers on the southern continent were to melt then sea level would rise by 58 meters (190 feet).
In its Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that average sea level rose by 7.5 inches between 1901 and 2010. The IPCC also reported that sea level very likely rose at a rate of about 1.7 millimeters (0.07 inch) per year between 1901 and 2010, but had accelerated to 3.2 millimeters (0.13 inch) between 1993 and 2010. If the rate does not increase, that would imply that sea level would rise by an average of 10 inches by 2100. In fact, that is the IPCC’s low end estimate while its high end projection is nearly 39 inches depending on how much extra carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere during the rest of this century.
A February study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on satellite altimeter data that sea level rise at 3 millimeters per year has accelerated at a rate of 0.084 millimeters since 1993. If sea level continues to change at this rate and acceleration, the researchers estimate that average sea-level rise by 2100 will be closer to 24 inches than 10 inches in 2100.
In the new Nature report, a team of researchers has reviewed 24 different studies on the melting trends in Antarctic ice sheets. Overall, they find that since 1992, the frozen continent has lost about 2.7 trillion tons of ice into the oceans raising sea level by an additional about 7.6 millimeters (0.3 inch) during that period. Basically, the current rate of melting in Antarctica has boosted the sea level rise by 0.3 millimeters per year since 1992. However, the losses in the last five years have tripled over what they were in the first five years of the period. This roughly suggests that Antarctica glacial melting is now adding about 0.5 millimeters per year to sea level rise.
So adding that to 3.2 millimeters yields an annual increase of 3.7 millimeters annually. At a constant rate that would increase average sea level to nearly 12 inches by the end of this century. Not good, but hardly a catastrophe.
The IPCC’s high end projection of 39 inches implies that sea level rise would have to average 12 millimeters (0.48 inch) per year from now until 2100. In its article on the new Nature study, the Washington Post reports, “In a controversial 2016 study, former NASA scientist James Hansen and a team of colleagues found that Earth’s sea level could rise above one meter (or 3.3 feet) within 50 years if polar ice-sheet loss doubles every 10 years. A tripling every decade, were it to continue, would reach that volume of sea level rise even sooner.”
That would imply an annual sea level increase of more than 20 millimeters (0.78 inches) per year; 7 times the current ratae and more than ten times the rate experienced during the 20th century. But as the Post notes, “There is no proof the current rate of change in Antarctica will continue. Scientists can’t see the future, but they do fear continuing and even worsening losses.”
The Los Angeles Unifed School District has lost more than 245,000 students in the past 15 years—so many that, if you gathered them all together, they would be one of the 10 largest school districts in the United States.
Where are they all going? Many to the city’s charter schools, which have exploded in both popularity and effectiveness. But the migration to better alternatives has left taxpayers paying ever higher amounts to an education system that is educating fewer and fewer students. On the current tragectory, the school district will face a $422 million shortfall by 2020, driven in large part by its $15 billion in unfunded health care benefit liabilities for current workers and retirees.
The district has been happy to blame the charter school exodus for its ongoing financial problems, but a report released Wednesday by the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this blog) examines the district’s structural deficit, which is “forged from hiring surges, burgeoning and unaddressed pension and benefit obligations, unadressed low attendance, overextended facilities, and antiquated management and financial structures.”
No wonder more parents and students are leaving for charter schools and other alternatives. Charter school enrollment in Los Angeles has more than doubled since 2010, and another 41,000 students are on charter school waiting lists.
But while student enrollment has declined by about 10 percent, the LAUSD has seen a 16 percent increase in non-teaching administrators.
Rather than blaming charter schools—or, worse, taking steps to limit students’ ability to leave—the school district should right-size its operations to better serve the students left behind. To do that, the study suggests an overhaul of the district’s long-term debt obligations, a reduction of staff, strategic school closures to minimize overhead costs, and giving principals of individual schools more authority over their budgets.
None of this should come as news. Many of these problems and some of these solutions were outlined in a 2015 report by the district’s Independent Financial Review Panel. For example, if employees and retirees had to cover just 10 percent of their health insurance premiums, the district could save $54 million annually.
Three years later, the problems have only gotten worse—and the Independent Financial Review Panel’s suggestions have only gathered dust.
“The days of district monopoly and residential assignment have given way to parent choice, forcing public schools to compete for students—a real win for families,” write the authors of the Reason Foundation report. “Rather than casting blame, the LAUSD needs to recognize that the structural deficit demands immediate attention.”
In 2002 Colorado passed a set of campaign finance regulations that allowed private citizens to target other people’s political speech, launching very expensive (to the targeted) legal investigations. The law is structured so that even when complaints are judged baseless, the defendants end up on the hook for their legal costs.
The Institute for Justice (IJ) sees this as a violation of Coloradans’ First Amendment rights. “With no oversight by any government official to screen out frivolous or legally insufficient complaints,” the group argues, “the system is rife with abuse, with disgruntled politicians or their allies routinely filing complaints to silence or intimidate those who would dare to criticize them.”
Tammy Holland had twice been sued for daring, without forming a political committee, to pay for newspaper ads criticizing the “common core” approach to education and suggesting that voters scrutinize school board members and candidates. The suits came from school board members themselves. In 2016, IJ helped Holland sue Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams over the state’s campaign finance law.
A law that incentivizes politicians to sue their citizen critics is pretty clearly bad policy irrespective of constitutional questions. As Holland said in a press release from IJ, “All I did was ask my neighbors to get engaged in a local school election, and I got sued two times by people who didn’t like what I had to say. It was incredibly intimidating. Nobody should be able to sue their neighbor for talking about politics.”
This week U.S. District Judge Raymond P. Moore decided that the private-party provisions of Colorado’s campaign finance laws do indeed violate the First Amendment. There is, he wrote, “nothing reasonable about outsourcing the enforcement of laws with teeth of monetary penalties to anyone who believes that those laws have been violated.”
To Moore, the key problem is that “by any construction the laws that any person is being asked to enforce involve political speech.” Because of that, “the enforcement provisions should be subject to strict scrutiny,” and to meet that standard the state “must show that the enforcement provisions advance a compelling state interest.”
But Colorado’s secretary of state “made no attempt” to do that. Furthermore, the “defendant provides no evidence that the enforcement provisions are narrowly tailored….This is perhaps not surprising given that defendant concedes there is no evidence that its interests could not be served equally well by a system different to the one contained in the enforcement provisions.”
Moore therefore granted summary judgment to overturn the law. He went on, in case of future appeal, to discuss some evidence Holland presented indicating that the current structure of Colorado campaign finance enforcement freezes some people’s willingness to engage in political speech.
Moore didn’t find this argument super-impressive, but he added that “there is at least some evidence of the character and magnitude of the asserted injury. That is more than can be said for evidence of the precise interest(s) defendant has put forward as justification for the burden imposed by the enforcement provisions.”
“Yesterday’s ruling recognizes that Colorado cannot authorize ‘any person’ to police their neighbors’ political speech,” IJ Senior Attorney Paul Sherman said. “Under the First Amendment, nobody should have to fear being sued by their political opponents merely for expressing their opinion on the issues that matter most to them.”
In recent years, Colorado’s campaign-finance laws have been exploited in increasingly disturbing ways. In 2015, for example, Campaign Integrity Watchdog dropped a case in exchange for a $4,500 “settlement“—paid not to the State of Colorado, but to Campaign Integrity Watchdog directly. And in 2016, the same company sought to extract $10,000 from a state political party, warning that otherwise, “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”…
“By outsourcing enforcement to the world at large, Colorado’s campaign-finance system became a tool for corruption and speech suppression,” said IJ Attorney Sam Gedge.
Bitcoin has revolutionized money. Now the technology behind bitcoin could change how we conduct elections too.
At least that’s what Voatz wants to do. This Boston-based startup claims that it can use blockchain technology to bring greater security and privacy to the democratic process.
Jonathan Johnson—president of Medici Ventures, the venture capital firm that invests in Voatz—claims the blockchain can improve what he says is a terribly inefficient electoral system. In a talk at the conservative Heritage Foundation this week, Johnson said it could usher in an era of “remote, digital, safe and secure voting.”
The blockchain is a sort of a decentralized digital ledger, allowing data to be stored on many servers rather than on one server, as is customary on the World Wide Web. Anyone on the blockchain network has access to this data, which acts as a bulwark against centralized control and malevolent hackers.
Voatz thinks this can address ongoing concerns about the accuracy of American elections, as different groups worry about everything from Russian hackers to padded voting rolls.
For example, two counties in West Virginia used the software this year to allow active-duty soldiers stationed abroad to participate in the primaries without forfeiting their right to a private ballot. Using biometric scanners to verify identity, county clerks were able to send the correct ballots to the soldiers, who then selected the candidates of their choice, all on their phones. For the first time ever, voters were able to see that their vote was counted for who they voted for, all while protecting the privacy of the voter.
After raising a whopping $2.2 million, Voatz worked with West Virginia for their pilot project during the May 8 primary. Johnson expects Voatz to soon be adopted statewide for active-duty soldiers.
Voting on the blockchain could alleviate concerns for people across the political spectrum. Conservatives genuinely concerned with voter fraud can rest easy knowing that the blockchain is extremely difficult to hack, by virtue of its decentralization—and that with biometrics, voter fraud is virtually impossible. Leftists worried about voting access will be happy to hear that the system would let anyone with a smartphone vote quickly and easily, even on workdays.
And libertarians should be pleased to see an increase in government transparency. Citizens will finally be able to make sure their votes go to the candidate they voted for, as opposed to merely hoping that the government, an institution with a reputation for incompetence, is handling their ballots responsibly.
Last week voters in San Francisco overwhelmingly approved a ban on the sale of “flavored tobacco products,” including e-cigarettes. Several other local governments in California have recently imposed similar bans, and New York legislators are considering a bill that would prohibit the sale of “flavored e-liquid.” Supporters of these measures, who say they want to protect teenagers from the temptations of vaping, give no weight to the interests of adult smokers who use e-cigarettes to quit, a process in which flavor variety plays an important role.
As in the controversies over “alcopops” and marijuana edibles, the prohibitionists argue that banning sales to minors is not enough; the government should also ban any feature that appeals to teenagers, even if it also appeals to adults. To justify that demand, they implausibly portray adolescent vaping as a growing public health emergency.
Three days after more than two-thirds of San Francisco voters agreed that mandating flavorless e-liquid was a reasonable response to the rising popularity of e-cigarettes among teenagers, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published survey data showing that in 2017 vaping declined among middle school students and remained steady among high school students after falling in 2016. E-cigarette alarmists were so flummoxed by reality’s failure to fit their narrative that they insisted the survey must be wrong. “Study Says Vaping by Kids Isn’t Up,” read the Associated Press headline, “but Some Are Skeptical.”
The skeptics had heard that teenagers are Juuling in schools across America, and they figured all that press coverage should translate into higher vaping rates. They suggested that survey respondents might not have realized Juul e-cigarettes are e-cigarettes.
The questionnaire used in the CDC’s National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) described e-cigarettes as “battery powered devices that usually contain a nicotine-based liquid that is vaporized and inhaled,” adding that “you may know them as vape-pens, hookah-pens, e-hookahs, e-cigars, e-pipes, personal vaporizers or mods.” The questionnaire’s list of “brand examples” included NJOY, Blu, Vuse, MarkTen, Logic, Vapin Plus, eGo, and Halo. But not Juul! So maybe adolescent vaping really did go up last year.
The yearning for bad news is palpable in this passage from the A.P. story:
Last year, Juul became the top-selling e-cigarette brand, with more than $650 million in retail sales. That’s due at least partly to aggressive marketing through Instagram and other social media, [Georgia State University researcher Jidong] Huang noted in a recent article in the journal Tobacco Control.
More data is needed to see how much of those sales were to kids, he said in an interview.
“But looking at the sales data, I think it’s hard to say the use of e-cigarettes among teens is steady or declining,” he said.
The fact that Juul grabbed more market share, of course, does not necessarily mean vaping became more common among teenagers, even assuming that they are disproportionately attracted to that brand.
Putting aside the recent decline in adolescent vaping, the percentage of teenagers who use e-cigarettes frequently has always been low. In the 2015 NYTS, for example, just 0.6 percent of middle school students and 2.5 percent of high school students reported vaping on 20 or more days in the previous month, and almost all of them were current or former smokers. To the extent that teenagers who otherwise would be smoking are vaping instead, that is an unambiguous gain in public health terms, since the latter habit is much less hazardous.
Despite the constant warnings that increased experimentation with e-cigarettes would lead to more smoking, consumption of conventional cigarettes by teenagers stubbornly continues to decline, reaching a record low last year in the Monitoring the Future Study, which began in 1975. According to the NYTS, the incidence of past-month smoking among high school students fell from 15.8 percent in 2011 to 7.6 percent in 2017.
Given these numbers, banning e-cigarette flavors is not likely to confer a measurable health benefit on teenagers and may even have a negative effect if it discourages those who smoke from switching to vaping. When you expand the analysis to include adults, the probability of harm increases, since vapers often report that flavor variety helped them quit smoking.
The Food and Drug Administration acknowledges that point. Last July, when it delayed implementation of its e-cigarette regulations, the agency said it was seeking public comment on “the role that flavors (including menthol) in tobacco products play in attracting youth and may play in helping some smokers switch to potentially less harmful forms of nicotine delivery.” In March, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb elaborated on the public health benefit of e-cigarette flavors in March:
We must also consider how best to address flavors in non-combustible products like e-cigarettes—given both their clear appeal to youth but also the potential role certain flavors may play in helping some adult smokers transition to potentially less harmful tobacco products.
I’ve talked to ex-smokers, who’ve told me that they quit cigarettes altogether and that they now vape. And they’ve also told me it was the flavors that helped them make that transition off combustible cigarettes. Now I know anecdotes aren’t the same as data. And the ANPRM [Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] specifically seeks data on this issue. But these personal stories are important to me as we shape our overall approach to smoking cessation.
In a 2014 survey by E-Cigarette Forum, three-quarters of adult vapers preferred flavor categories other than tobacco, including fruit (31 percent), bakery/dessert (19 percent), and savory/spice (5 percent). Two-thirds of the ex-smokers said nontobacco flavors were important in helping them quit. According to a 2013 study reported in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, smokers who switch to vaping tend to prefer tobacco-flavored fluid initially but later switch to other flavors. Most reported using more than one flavor on a daily basis and said the variety made the experience more interesting and enjoyable.
Critics nevertheless view sweet flavors are inherently suspect. After the San Francisco ban passed, a researcher toldBusiness Insider “most scientists believe flavorings are used to target teenagers.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) likewise argues that the FDA should not tolerate e-cigarettes that taste good:
The craze among kids for e-cig flavors that resemble whipped cream, candy and cookies is not only a bad trend; it is a recipe for disaster that is fueling an outright addiction that appears to be getting worse, not better….It is high time to ramp up the pressure on and by the FDA so quicker action to rid the marketplace of kid-friendly e-cig flavors is taken. While the FDA has thankfully begun to move on this epidemic, those actions are slower moving compared to the wildfire spread of e-cig use among kids.
Let’s leave aside the fact that “the wildfire spread of e-cig use among kids” perceived by Schumer coincides with what the CDC says is a decline in e-cig use among kids. The more fundamental problem is that Schumer seems incapable of conceiving that “kid-friendly e-cig flavors” also appeal to adults, which makes vaping more attractive as a harm-reducing alternative to smoking. The implication is that banning those flavors could be deadly to smokers who would otherwise switch. Anyone who ignores that prospect is only pretending to care about public health.
Libertarian-leaning Republican congressman Mark Sanford got primaried in South Carolina last night by immigration hawk and late-breaking Donald Trump endorsee Katie Harrington, whose main line of attack on Sanford was that he was disloyal to Trump. But that was just one event in a day unusually swollen with reminders that the modern GOP at the national level is not welcoming to libertarian ideas.
Take two issues that we’ve been banging on about at Reason for years: tariffs, and Congress’s paralytic fear of doing even its minimal constitutional duty. In a remarkable speech yesterday, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who is retiring at the end of his term this year, combined the two issues in a damning indictment of his colleagues’ cowardice. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Corker charged, blocks all amendments—including one Corker introduced last week requiring congressional approval for “national security” tariffs—because “Well gosh, we might poke the bear” (meaning the president). Watch:
Not to be overly tautological, but it’s difficult for even the most libertarian-leaning legislators to get meaningful stuff done if they are prevented from legislating.
Then there was the defeat last night of liberty-movement Republican Nick Freitas in the Virginia GOP primary for U.S. Senate at the hands of Confederate monument enthusiast and recent Paul Nehlen fan Corey Stewart, who is fond of saying stuff like “I was Trump before Trump was Trump” and tweeting jibber-jabber like this:
All of the above was enough for Daniel McCarthy to write the latest version of “How Donald Trump eclipsed the ‘libertarian moment.'” McCarthy’s grim conclusion: “The revolution begun by Trump in 2016 is continuing at the state and congressional levels. And the Ron Paul revolution begun by Senator Paul’s father now seems marginal, if not utterly defeated—a remarkable reversal of fortune from just four years ago.”
Politicians respond to incentives, and right now the imperative Republican incentive is to kiss Donald Trump’s ring. Less than 15 months ago, Trump was warning that “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!” Last night, as one Freedom Caucus incumbent lost to a Trump-backed challenger and a Rand Paul–backed Senate candidate lost to a #MAGA nationalist, Freedom Caucus stalwarts Reps. Mark Meadows (R–N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program not to sulk but to talk about possibly impeaching Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for his role in overseeing the Mueller investigation. They have gotten on the team.
Libertarian policy goals will still sometimes be met under Trump, some of them intentionally, some not. He will continue deregulating and appointing some good judges, may yet contribute to genuine peace on the Korean peninsula, and has proven surprisingly malleable on marijuana enforcement and prison reform. But as an organizing body, particularly anywhere near the levers of federal power, the GOP is an increasingly unreliable ally to libertarians.
Your daily reminder that Republicans hate libertarians, no matter what party they’re in. https://t.co/Cq1qY93mjg
Daniel McCarthy, in his essay, provides some interesting food for thought about the unsatisfying-to-many penchant among libertarians for calling balls and strikes in a more emotional age of with-us-or-against-us polarization:
The other great issue at the libertarians’ disposal, smaller government, simply never mattered in the ways they thought it did. Anti-government sentiment was most powerful with Republican voters as an expression of anti-elitism and resistance to a government run by a liberal Democrat like Barack Obama. Emphasizing cutting government on principle, as libertarians did, would never be as effective as emphasizing fighting the liberals, with or without shrinking the state. Trump was not the most anti-government candidate, but he was the most anti-left. The libertarian position, by contrast with Trump, seemed like just a more thoroughgoing version of what every other supposedly conservative Republican believed about cutting government….
Urgency matters in politics, and Trump is a master of creating a sense of urgency in both his supporters and his opponents—as Michael Anton’s “Flight 93” essay and the left’s continual cries of “authoritarianism!” have shown. Ron Paul did create a sense of urgency in his campaigns, largely by capitalizing on powerful issues that had been ignored by the establishment in both parties, such as disastrous wars with bipartisan support and the mysteries of the Federal Reserve. The elder Paul said a further financial meltdown was imminent. But Trump outflanked the libertarian line in this respect as well. And today the most urgent question in American politics, the one that quickens pulses the most, is simply whether you are for or against Trump. Mark Sanford has said he’s not really anti-Trump, but that he simply applies to Trump the standards that derive from his libertarian-ish principles. If those standards lead to a good grade for Trump, Sanford is happy to apply it. If not, then not. But his kind of abstraction and fixity, whatever its merits in other respects, cannot convey a sense of urgency. The libertarian way proves over time to be oblivious to circumstances and psychological conditions, which are in fact the essence of real politics….
Those who look to the likely rout of Republicans like Corey Stewart in November as the shock that will turn the Republican Party against Trump are profoundly misunderstanding what the GOP has been going through for a decade, which is a search—whether through libertarians or nationalists or whomever else might arise—for the perfect anti-establishment vessel.
Or as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) put it to me last year, “How could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”
Things seemed so much more hopeful back in late 2000, just before what turned out to be an impossibly close election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Throughout that campaign season, pundits and observers weren’t overly concerned with hyper-partisanship and extreme polarization, like they are today. The big concern was that, relatively speaking, the American people really didn’t give enough shits about a contest that was being hyped as “the most important” of our lifetime. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government created a “Vanishing Voter Project” and Rock the Vote warned second-wave baby boomers and Gen Xers that “Your vote is your voice” and “If you don’t vote, it’s just like voting for the winner.” Even with the contest tightening in the fall, the presidential debates turned out to be “borderline ratings bomb[s],” as viewers refused to tune in.
To me back then, such “apathy” was nothing to be upset about and pretty easily explained. Politics is an ugly, zero-sum game. Who wants to fixate on that? Writing in Reason‘s December 2000 issue (which came out just before the November election), I concluded that the “AWOL electorate”—voter-participation rates had declined over the past 40 years—was a sign that something was right in America:
The center of gravity in American life has shifted away from partisan politics and into other areas of activity in which individuals (and groups of individuals) have far greater hopes for gaining satisfaction. The big story in American life over the past few decades is not the decline in voter participation but the ever-increasing proliferation of options, of choices, and of identities in everyday life.
At virtually every level and in every way, there are both more options and, as important, acceptance of more options than there were 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago—something clearly evident from indicators ranging from rising interracial marriage rates to increasing acceptance of alternative sexual orientations to increased access to higher education to telecommuting to relaxed dress codes in the workplace.
Well that didn’t last long, did it? Sure “the ever-increasing proliferation of options, of choices, and of identities in everyday life” has proceeded apace. Facebook offers more gender identities than Baskin Robbins has ice cream flavors. But over the past decade and a half, politics has come barking back to the center of our everyday life like a pit bull going to town on a chihuhaua. Despite winning just 46 percent of the popular vote, Trump has divided America into a dizzying array of confusing and mutually exclusive tribes. There’s the Resistance, of course, but also the NeverTrumpers, and the MAGAs, and the anti-anti-Trumpers, and on and on. In less then 20 years we went from newscasters worrying over low voter turnout to tense debates over Nazi punching. Everything is political today, even what sort of fast-food chicken you scarf down. Witness the pushback against Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s recent purchase of a sandwich at Chick-fil-A (Boost is a cash-back program run by another Dorsey company, Square):
To paraphrase Chick-fil-A’s advertising slogan: Eat Mor Krow, Jack. The entrepreneur’s timeline quickly filled up with critics slamming him for, among other things, the sin of patronizing “a notoriously anti-gay company” during Pride Month. Dorsey quickly apologized, tweeting, “You’re right. Completely forgot about their background.” It’s worth noting that it’s not exactly clear that Chick-fil-A, though it gives to various Christian nonprofits that oppose gay marriage, is “anti-gay” in any meaningful way. But that debate is secondary to how quickly and extensively so many people now place political values on virtually every aspect of their private and public lives. Yes, there have been low-grade boycotts against fast-food joints (such as Domino’s, for the anti-abortion views of its founder), but what was once a Seinfeld punchline is now standard-operating procedure at every office watercooler in the country:
Donald Trump didn’t cause the return of politics to the center of everyday life, but he is exploiting the hell out of it. Part of this new normal is surely the fault of social media, so in a way it’s only fair that Twitter’s boss gets called out. Virtue-signaling, or publicly identifying with a particular cause at little or no cost to one’s self, is a feature and not a bug of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. The same hashtag campaigns and filters that show solidarity with, say, France after a terrorist attack also allow for everyone everywhere to be vilified or beatified through association.
But social media is far from the only, or even the most important, cause for the repoliticization of everyday life. The 2000 election, so close that it was essentially settled by a coin toss, introduced an unmistakable arbitrariness into the once-sacrosanct activity of voting for president. We’d all heard the stories of how LBJ cheated his way into his Senate seat way back when, or how Jack Kennedy’s father bought him the 1960 election, but we didn’t really believe it, did we, or take it so seriously? Even as we were still working through unsettling electoral epistemology, the 9/11 attacks plunged America and the world back into History with a capital H. Beyond all the invasive rules and regulations mandated by Congress and a new Department of Homeland Security, every stray utterance, wink, nod, or lapel pin was studied for occult meaning. Just days after the attacks, President Bush declared that you are “either with us or against us.” Donald Rumsfeld welcomed “a new Cold War” that, just like the original one, was predicated on binary, oppositional thinking and clear-cut, uncomplicated allegiances. At the same time, vast swaths of our culture became politicized, just as chess matches, piano recitals, and the Olympics had been during the twilight struggle between the Soviets and Team USA. The results were often sadly hilarious. Who else remembers the time celebrity cook and talk-show host Rachel Ray was accused of signaling her Al Qaeda masters during a Dunkin Donuts ad by wearing a keffiyah, the “the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad”?
And it wasn’t just the right who went crazy looking for the enemy within. The prophet of hope and change, Barack Obama, passed his signature health care law on strict party lines rather than deal with the opposition and was known to symbolically exile large swaths of Americans as “bitter” folks who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” If you’re not with us, said Bush, Obama—and Jesus—you’re against us.
Whether we recognize it or not, we remain on a sort of Cold War footing that attacks complexity, nuance, and engaged conversation and replaces it with simplicity, slogans, and shouting matches. It happens at pro football games, on college campuses, on cable TV, and, of course, in Congress and legislatures everywhere. Trump is an acknowledged master not just of being divisive but of fouling everyday life with politics.
How long can this continue is anybody’s guess. As politics becomes more rancid and ubiquitous in all parts of our lives, the main parties are losing market share. In 2001, 32 percent of us identified as Republican, 36 percent as Democrats, and 26 percent as independents. In 2017, those figures came in at 26 percent, 33 percent, and 37 percent. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump came close to winning a simple majority of the popular vote. Political scientist Morris Fiorina has declared the first two decades of the 21st century a second “Era of No Decision,” similar to the late-19th-century period when control of the White House and Congress flipped back and forth for years. Eventually, the parties will realign and reconfigure into more effective coalitions, or they will be replaced by groups that are able to represent shared voter interests on issues such as trade, regulation, lifestyle freedom, crime, and more. When domestic partisan political advantage is again stable, it will be easier for us to leave culture alone and allow for more differences within our political coalitions again. When the Democrats had a lock on Congress for decades, after all, they could allow for more types of Democrats. And as the ideological and policy legacy of 9/11 fades in the face of multipolar world order in which the E.U., China, Russia, the United States, and others wield less and less unequivocal power, international agreements and relationships will need to be humbler, smaller, and less overarching, thus reducing the stakes rather than constantly raising them to red alert, us-against-them levels.
Even as he personifies the toxic blending of politics and culture and demonstrates how to wield power by blurring the two spheres, Donald Trump also points to a solution and endpoint. He has had successes as president: passing a large and increasingly popular tax cut, reducing regulatory drag on a number of industries, and producing some real breakthroughs in foreign policy. Yet he remains stubbornly unpopular and, more to the point, resolute in showing how mostly ignorant he is when it comes to a basic understanding of how the government and Constitution function.
For many, such revelations are terrifying, the equivalent of opening the captain’s room and finding a monkey manning the controls. But that’s not the only possible response.
As Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto has said, Trump “is a refreshing reminder that the guy that’s in the White House is another human being. The power of the State is way too exalted. Bringing that power back to human scale is an important part of what needs to be done to correct the insanity that’s been going on in the post-war era, where you have these large institutions that control all aspects of our lives.” The plain fact is that Trump is far more like other recent presidents than most of want to acknowledge. But as his tenure continues, we’ll be forced come to terms with that revelation and how little we like living in a world where everything is, first and foremost, a political statement. As Jack Dorsey can tell you, that’s no way to live, especially in an ostensibly free country. The world is very different from when I was writing in 2001, but it’s a still a world of ever-expanding possibilities and identities. A rigid us-against-them mentality can’t last forever.
What’s a politician to do when it’s clear that people will vigorously resist attempts to restrict their lives? Well, you could empower government officials to arbitrarily punish anybody who might help them exercise their freedom. That’s the approach favored by three Democratic members of Congress, who appear to see the path to limiting private firearms ownership in harassing gun dealers and subjecting them to the whims of government officials.
Not that they’re the only legislators to wield regulations as bludgeons, but it’s always a lousy idea, writes J.D. Tuccille.
Another week, another bumbling trade declaration from President Donald Trump. After a very confrontational G-7 meeting, observes Veronique de Rugy, Trump threatened to cut all member countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—off from the U.S. market if they don’t reduce their tariffs on American exports. He told the press, “It’s going to stop, or we’ll stop trading with them.”
California state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Democrat, wants to force firms based in the Golden State to 
Rapidly rising sea levels that inundate the coastlines where billions of people live is one of the more worrisome concerns associated with climate change. A new report in Nature suggests that the 
The Los Angeles Unifed School District has lost more than 245,000 students in the past 15 years—so many that, if you gathered them all together, they would be one of the 10 
Bitcoin has revolutionized money. Now the technology behind bitcoin could change how we conduct elections too.
Last week voters in San Francisco overwhelmingly 
Things seemed so much more hopeful back in late 2000, just before what turned out to be an impossibly close election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Throughout that campaign season, pundits and observers weren’t overly concerned with hyper-partisanship and extreme polarization, like they are today. The big concern was that, relatively speaking, the American people really didn’t give enough shits about a contest that was being hyped as “the most important” of our lifetime. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government created a “Vanishing Voter Project” and Rock the Vote warned second-wave baby boomers and Gen Xers that “Your vote is your voice” and “If you don’t vote, it’s just like voting for the winner.” Even with the contest tightening in the fall, the presidential debates turned out to be “borderline ratings bomb[s],” as viewers refused to tune in.
What’s a politician to do when it’s clear that people will vigorously resist attempts to restrict their lives? Well, you could empower government officials to arbitrarily punish anybody who might help them exercise their freedom. That’s the approach favored by three Democratic members of Congress, who appear to see the path to limiting private firearms ownership in harassing gun dealers and subjecting them to the whims of government officials.