The Dive - 3/1/21
Quote of the Month
“When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,
Let him combat for that of his neighbours;
Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,
And get knock’d on the head for his labours.
“To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,
And is always as nobly requited;
Then battle for freedom whenever you can,
And, if not shot or hang’d, you’ll be knighted.”
- Lord Byron, [Thoughts on Freedom]
My recent scribblings:
1. How professional national progressive organizations and activists fail local groups and leaders
Why you should read it: In The American Prospect, social scientists Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo report on the inability of Trump-era progressive groups like Indivisible to effectively connect with grassroots groups.
“More than any other part of the massive post-2016 resistance surge, the newly formed Indivisible network looked as if it might play a unique civic role, bridging long-standing divides between national and local levels and perhaps filling in the crucial middle tier of state-level and regional coordinating bodies. Building civic ties alongside the Democratic Party at all levels portended an enormously constructive achievement for the American center-left. Unfortunately, Indivisible, so far, has not realized that potential. Since 2017, national Indivisible leaders have raised tens of millions of dollars from major donors, but have not devolved significant resources away from Washington, D.C., to empower democratically accountable state and local leaders. Instead, Indivisible directors have invested most of their resources into running a large, professionally staffed national advocacy organization, leaving local groups and networks largely on their own. This shift in priorities comes at a time when persistent organizing by locally rooted groups between as well as during elections remains more urgent than ever.”
“As one observer noted to us, virtually all early [Indivisible] staffers were former mid-level nonprofit professionals or campaign operatives, and the key originators had worked in hierarchical House staff offices where there are clear overriding goals: making the boss look good, communicating his or her policy goals, and winning primary as well as general elections. Once the early Indivisible Guide and map attracted huge attention and cascades of website ‘clicks,’ the young founders set out to hire friends and peers like themselves to provide ‘guidance,’ and catapulted them into a larger version of the kinds of offices to which they were accustomed. Quickly raising and spending millions of dollars, they did new versions of what was familiar without any real experience at managing a huge organization, much less at training mostly older and often more experienced grassroots organizers and volunteers. We have heard many stories about the awkward cross-generational dynamics at work here. Sometimes the grassroots group participants regard the young D.C. crew with appreciative maternal pride; at other times, they take offense at dogmatic instructions or brush off the young professionals’ suggestions as naïve or inappropriate.”
Why it matters: “Repeatedly from late 2017 to the present, D.C. Indivisible leaders have signed and publicized letters and petitions negotiated with fellow progressive advocacy executives—usually missives berating Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate leader Chuck Schumer for making legislative compromises or taking insufficient action on behalf of progressive goals. As they have explained in various venues, D.C. Indivisible executives leaned into symbolic advocacy politics because they see it as the best way to move the Democratic Party toward the left… National advocacy campaigns, of course, are most effective when linked to widespread and persistent local constituency pressure. Members of the House and Senate pay more attention to their own grassroots. Yet as Indivisible directors orchestrate advocacy petitions and issue ‘calls’ for supporters to pressure Congress, local groups in their network have increasingly paid little heed. As one grassroots leader explained, she simply ‘files away the emails [from D.C. headquarters]’ so her group can continue with local and state projects. Even when their concerns parallel national priorities, local activists usually approach issues in less ideologically hectoring ways—for example, by holding a community forum on practical environmental issues or engaging local churchgoers in discussions of racial justice and refugee assistance. As they became less interested in the incessant national calls, some groups decided to drop their formal Indivisible affiliations. ‘We are changing our name!’ the leader of one such group explained in the summer of 2018. ‘Our original purpose, name, and many activities were informed by the Indivisible Guide,’ but ‘we have had very little involvement with the national Indivisible Organization” and ‘we have found ourselves increasingly involved with engagement rather than resistance.’”
2. Why environmental activists embrace nuclear power to fight climate change
Why you should read it: For the New Yorker, writer Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow profiles Mothers for Nuclear, an environmental group that advocates for nuclear power as a main method to reduce carbon emissions and combat global warming.
“On December 8, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech at the United Nations General Assembly… The first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States opened four years later, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. In the following decades, dozens more were constructed. There are currently fifty-six nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. They provide the country with roughly twenty per cent of its electricity supply— more than half of its low-carbon electricity… Since 2013, eleven American reactors have been retired; the lost electricity has largely been replaced through the burning of fossil fuels. At least eight more closures, including Diablo Canyon’s, are planned. In a 2018 report, the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that ‘closing the at-risk plants early could result in a cumulative 4 to 6 percent increase in US power sector carbon emissions by 2035.’”
“Nuclear energy scrambles our usual tribal allegiances. In Congress, Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Sheldon Whitehouse have co-sponsored a bill with Republican Senators John Barrasso and Mike Crapo that would invest in advanced nuclear technology and provide support for existing plants that are at risk of closure; a climate platform drafted by John Kerry and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez included a plan to ‘create cost-effective pathways’ for developing innovative reactors. And yet some environmental organizations, including Greenpeace and Climate Justice Alliance, deplore nuclear energy as unsafe and expensive… The pro-nuclear community is small and fractious. There are debates about how large a role renewables should play and about whether to focus on preserving existing plants or developing advanced reactors, which have the potential to shut down automatically in the event of overheating and to run on spent fuel. (These reactors are still in the experimental phase.) There are also differences in rhetoric. At one end of the spectrum is [Michael] Shellenberger, who seems to see mainstream environmentalists as his main adversaries; his newest book is titled ‘Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.” His recent commentary decrying what he calls the climate scare has been widely circulated in right-wing circles and has perplexed some pro-nuclear allies. At the other end is Good Energy Collective, co-founded, recently, by Jessica Lovering, Shellenberger’s former colleague at the Breakthrough Institute. Her organization situates itself specifically on the progressive left, and is attempting to ally itself with the broader environmental movement and with activists focussed on social and racial justice. Mothers for Nuclear falls somewhere in between: their tone is less combative than Shellenberger’s, but [Mothers for Nuclear’s Heather] Hoff and [Kristin] Zaitz often seem frustrated with anti-nuclear arguments and, in their social media feeds, point out the downsides of renewables—an emphasis that may turn off some of the people they are trying to persuade. (They believe that nuclear power should do most of the work of decarbonization, supplemented by renewables.)”
Why it matters: “Our energy system is in flux. There are innovations under way in the renewables sphere—advances in battery storage, demand management, and regional integration—which should help overcome the challenges of intermittency. Nuclear scientists, for their part, are working on smaller, more nimble nuclear reactors. There are complex economic considerations, which are inseparable from policy—for example, nuclear power would immediately become more competitive if we had a carbon tax. And there are huge risks no matter what we do.”
3. Why “Buy American” is necessary
Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar pushes back against critics of President Biden’s “Buy American” policies, saying that dire political necessity outweighs economic efficiency.
“…purely economic arguments ignore the political challenges facing the Biden administration, which are arguably greater than Franklin Roosevelt faced in the 1930s. This president has to grapple not only with a raging pandemic but also calls for racial justice, stark class divides, an environmental crisis and — most crucially — a loss of trust in government among swaths of the electorate… Over the next 18 months, before the US midterms, Mr Biden has to convince Americans that his administration exists to serve them broadly, not just the 10 per cent of households who own more than 80 per cent of the stock market. If he can’t and the Democrats then lose control of Congress, his ability to achieve much of the rest of his agenda, which includes re-engagement with the rest of the world, will vanish.”
“Right now, many Americans see recent decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, as having been too focused on global rather than local interests. There’s strong evidence to support that conclusion… The lower cost of imported goods has not offset the fact that the rising price of other things that define the middle class — education, healthcare and housing — have eaten away at any income growth enjoyed by most households over the past two decades. That, rather than models of Ricardian trade economics — which arguably don’t account for the complexity of Chinese state capitalism or financialised global markets — is the lived reality of swing voters. This US administration has to keep its eyes on both.”
Why it matters: “Nor is the US the only part of the world looking out for itself. Europe’s new trade deal with China may be good for German exporters (as is the contentious Nord Stream gas pipeline project with Russia). But it’s hardly consistent with those high standards in labour and human rights that Europe purportedly supports… Mr Biden’s ‘Buy American' plan isn’t some silver bullet solution to the economic woes of this new world. But it is a politically smart nod to the fact that we are in one.”
4. How COVID-19 boosts right-wing populism in Europe
Why you should read it: For The New European, British journalist Nick Cohen details how the failings of the European Union’s vaccination efforts give a shot in the arm to ailing right-wing populists across the continent.
"To say the radical right is deceitful and malevolent is to state the obvious but miss the point. I do not mean to discourage you from fighting it. Go ahead, please, be my guest. But however righteous your anger, never forget that the ultra-nationalist wave does not only draws its power from the appeal of racism. Its prospects depend on the failures of the mainstream politicians liberals support to deliver… At this moment, no mainstream failure is greater in Europe than the failure of the European Union to deliver a vaccination programme.”
“What applies to the professional ignoramuses of the press applies to the calculating ignoramuses of far right politics. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump in the US, and many others denied and then downplayed the pandemic because they were strongmen who did not want to concede power or share the spotlight with scientists. They knew that once they did the aura of the great man delivering decisive leadership would vanish… But the underlying assumption is that the 'grown-ups in the room' can deliver. The European Commission could not. It had no expertise in health and no expertise of drawing up deals with global pharmaceutical companies… It wanted to prevent vaccine nationalism rising among competing EU countries as they fought each other for scarce supplies. A laudable aim, but you have to be able to put laudable aims into practice. The EU could not and so ended up with nationalists uniting against the EU.”
Why it matters: “Contrary to predictions, Covid has added weapons to the far-right’s arsenal. Its revival illustrates truths that are too often forgotten in the heat of partisan warfare. You should always ask hard questions of your side. You should never make excuses, however intensely the urge to focus all your anger on the right becomes. On the contrary, you should demand more of the men and women you support than of your enemies because when your friends fail your enemies succeed.”
5. Why QAnon parallels the Satanic panics of yore
Why you should read it: Stanford religious history Ph.D Daniel Gullotta outlines the uncanny similarities between the Satanic panic of the 1980s and the QAnon madness of today for The Bulwark.
“QAnon is on the political fringes but its beliefs about mysterious Satan worshipers fall into a well-established pattern of Christian theology concerning conspiracies dating back to the medieval church and the witch hunts of the early modern era. The fear that children are being morally corrupted, sexually abused, and physically harmed is one of the most recognizable Satanic conspiracy tropes. In the witch trials of early modern Europe, accusations of killing infants and harming young children were common. For centuries, Jews throughout the Holy Roman Empire and Reformation Europe were accused of ritually murdering Christian children for magical purposes and cannibalism. Under stress and torture, both men and women—but mostly women—confessed to such Satanic crimes as using babies’ blood for spells, murdering children at witches’ sabbaths, and having sex with the devil… Often, Satanic panics occur in the context of apocalyptic environments. Storms, famine, and war were common precursors for witch hunts in the medieval world. The Salem witch trials were preceded by the devastation of King Philip’s War and the political unrest of the Glorious Revolution. Before the Satanic panic of the 1980s in the United States, there had been more than a decade of political upheaval, economic recession, and energy disruption, not to mention the sexual revolution and a quickly changing youth culture.”
“The past several years have again been a time of unsettledness—of war, recession, the tumultuous Trump presidency, constant talk of planetary ecological ruination, and now a global pandemic—so no one should be surprised that fears of Satanic activity have once again sprouted up… One of the reasons why doomsday thinking is important to the promulgation of Satanic panics is how it complements a feeling of intensified persecution. On issues ranging from abortion to marriage to drugs to how history is taught, many conservative Christians feel like cultural walls are closing in on them—a feeling of persecution encouraged by talk radio, cable news, and online personalities. Liberals may disregard these concerns as overblown and progressives may consider them illegitimate, but many conservative political and religious figures find themselves hopeless or even panicked.”
Why it matters: “…we have reason to hope that QAnon will eventually spend itself out. If the Satanic panics of the past can teach us anything, it is that many of these individuals—including many whose beliefs are bizarre or seem like they must be ironic—are sincere in their convictions and mean well. They want wrongs to be righted and they want justice to be done. But eventually, they will move on. We don’t know when that will be; it’s entirely possible that the climax of QAnon already came on January 6, or perhaps the movement will linger on for years in ever-shifting forms. But Satanic panics tend eventually to peter out, and to be looked back upon with some mix of shame and horror.”
6. Why we shouldn’t worry about inflation, an continuing series
Why you should read it: New York Times economics columnist Binyamin Appelbaum contends that “fear of inflation has become a greater threat to the American economy than inflation itself.”
“The Biden administration wants to spend $1.9 trillion to combat the coronavirus and its economic effects. Congress is grappling with the details, some of which certainly could be improved. But the plan also faces opposition on the grounds that spending so much could revive inflation… These warnings should sound familiar because we’ve been hearing them for 40 years. The threat of inflation has been invoked repeatedly as the justification for placing limits on federal spending, for restraining the pursuit of full employment and for limiting the economic power of workers.”
“It is a tired refrain that seems to be sung mostly by those whose views were forged during the stagflationary 1970s. But we live in an era of anemic inflation, and changes in the economic landscape since the ’70s have significantly reduced the chances of a revival, including the watchfulness of the Federal Reserve, workers’ loss of bargaining power and the effects of globalization… Aggregate measures of economic growth, like gross domestic product, get the headlines. But the rise of G.D.P. in recent decades has not lifted all boats, and the restoration of G.D.P. growth is not the same thing as helping those who have suffered during the pandemic. Telecommuters with their retirement savings in the stock market are doing fine, at least in financial terms. Meanwhile, the Fed estimates the unemployment rate for the bottom quarter of households is more than 20 percent.”
Why it matters: “The boldness of the Biden administration, and of the Fed, shows that many in the government understand the need to stop fighting the last war. It’s not the 1970s anymore. But Democrats hold the Senate by a single vote. The fate of the Biden plan rests on all of their willingness to shoo away the ghosts of stagflation.”
7. How Democrats screw up by marketing race-blind policies as racial equity initiatives
Why you should read it: Slow Boring intern Marc Novicoff assembles the data to show that Democrats and progressives take popular, race-blind economic policies and frame them in unpopular racial equity jargon.
“None of the actual ideas are bad ideas. We should raise the minimum wage. We should cancel some student debt. We should give more money to poor people (baby bonds are just one way of doing this). We should help small businesses during a pandemic… But the premise of this style of argument seems to be that there are lots of people who are skeptical of race-neutral social welfare programs who will become more enthusiastic about them when the policies are framed as winners for racial equity… If you pair this with questions on racial issues, you see that there are far more tax hike enthusiasts with conservative views on race than tax hike skeptics with progressive views on race.”
“There’s an argument that race-specific appeals are somehow critical for generating Black turnout. But even if you look only at Black voters, the same trend holds: There are farmore populists than woke capitalists… In 2020, Black voters propelled the least-woke candidate, Joe Biden, to a primary win after he struggled immensely in the first three states (none of which had large Black populations). The second most popular candidate among Black voters was the begrudgingly woke Bernie Sanders… Obviously having the first Black president on the ticket did a lot for turnout [in 2008 and 2012]. But there’s just no real evidence that sporadic Black voters are looking for large amounts of explicit race talk.”
Why it matters: “Racial issues are fashionable in progressive circles, so it’s useful in intra-progressive status competitions to say that your pet issue has a racial equity angle. But this approach risks losing many more cross-pressured voters than it has any chance of winning… So I don’t think this should be taboo to say: Americans, on average, are in line with (or even to the left of) Democrats on economics, but they are not in line with the Democrats’ new focus on making everything about race, including the very economic ideas that give them a fighting chance to win elections.”
8. Why colonizing Mars is a dumb idea
Why you should read it: In The Atlantic, journalist Shannon Stirone takes issue with SpaceX head Elon Musk’s fantasies of colonizing the Red Planet.
“[Musk] couldn’t be more wrong. Mars? Mars is a hellhole. The central thing about Mars is that it is not Earth, not even close. In fact, the only things our planet and Mars really have in common is that both are rocky planets with some water ice and both have robots (and Mars doesn’t even have that many)… Musk thinks that Mars is like Earth? For humans to live there in any capacity they would need to build tunnels and live underground, and what is not enticing about living in a tunnel lined with SAD lamps and trying to grow lettuce with UV lights? So long to deep breaths outside and walks without the security of a bulky spacesuit, knowing that if you’re out on an extravehicular activity and something happens, you’ve got an excruciatingly painful 60-second death waiting for you. Granted, walking around on Mars would be a life-changing, amazing, profound experience. But visiting as a proof of technology or to expand the frontier of human possibility is very different from living there. It is not in the realm of hospitable to humans. Mars will kill you.”
“Musk is not from Mars, but he and [the late astronomer Carl] Sagan do seem to come from different worlds. Like Sagan, Musk exhibits a religious-like devotion to space, a fervent desire to go there, but their purposes are entirely divergent. Sagan inspired generations of writers, scientists, and engineers who felt compelled to chase the awe that he dug up from the depths of their heart. Everyone who references Sagan as a reason they are in their field connects to the wonder of being human, and marvels at the luck of having grown up and evolved on such a beautiful, rare planet… Musk has used the medium of dreaming and exploration to wrap up a package of entitlement, greed, and ego. He has no longing for scientific discovery, no desire to understand what makes Earth so different from Mars, how we all fit together and relate. Musk is no explorer; he is a flag planter.”
Why it matters: “Legitimate reasons exist to feel concerned for long-term human survival, and, yes, having the ability to travel more efficiently throughout the solar system would be good. But I question anyone among the richest people in the world who sells a story of caring so much for human survival that he must send rockets into space. Someone in his position could do so many things on our little blue dot itself to help those in need.”
9. What we can learn from ancient Rome’s history of climate change and disease
Why you should read it: For the New York Times, Oklahoma professor Kyle Harper explains how ancient Rome coped with a changing climate and pandemic disease - and what we today might learn from the experience.
“Drawing parallels between ourselves and the Romans is a favorite parlor game of history buffs, though among professional historians, it can seem a bit uncouth to tap into our training to treat Rome as a mirror of our own times. But there is a serious side to these parallels, too: The way we understand the past inevitably shapes how we understand the present. What we can learn from reflecting on this chapter of ancient Rome is not so much an example to follow or neatly packaged solutions for our own crises, but a different sensibility, an awareness of what a powerful force nature has been throughout human history.”
“The pestilence under Commodus was part of a pandemic known as the Antonine Plague. It first appeared during the reign of Commodus’ father, Marcus Aurelius… Which microbe was responsible for the Antonine Plague remains unclear, though most specialists believe that the likeliest culprit is an ancestor of the smallpox virus. The Antonine Plague is one example of a broader lesson that becomes clear in the study of human disease: Many of the most vicious microbes of human history are not altogether very old. They emerged and evolved on human time scales, in recent millenniums and centuries — and in response to the opportunities we inadvertently presented them. A second lesson is that human health and animal health are inseparable. Our relationship with the environment reverberates back upon us, sometimes with destructive force… Even without understanding the microbiology of the disease, the Romans knew that the Antonine Plague had come from without, that it was something new that had appeared with terrific fury. They believed that the pestilence had been unloosed by their own soldiers on campaign beyond Roman borders, inside what is now Iraq. More likely, the germ simply spread along the bustling trade routes that connected virtually the entire Old World. The Romans carried on a vigorous commerce with East Africa, the Near East and India and China beyond. As it happens, the first documented direct contact between Rome and China fell in the very year the Antonine Plague broke out under Marcus Aurelius. Though nothing compared with our ‘flat’ world, the Romans lived through one of the most important phases in the long history of globalization. Then as now, exposure to disease was one of its unintended consequences”
Why it matters: “Retracing the role that nature played in Rome’s history reminds us that we, too, are ecologically fragile, the fate of our society only partly under our control. A sense of our fragility should not make us fatalistic. Rather, it should inspire us to be less complacent. Even with all the tools of modern biological science, we could not have predicted exactly when and where a new pandemic would emerge. But we were warned, and those warnings went unheeded, in part because we told stories about ourselves implying that we had been freed from nature, that we were immune from the patterns of the past… History is powerful because we can identify with the hopes, follies and sorrows of those who have come before us. In recognizing the limits of their power in the face of nature, we can also acknowledge our own. It is a lesson we would do well to heed. The Antonine Plague wasn’t the last lethal pandemic the Romans faced. And Covid-19 won’t be ours.”
Odds and Ends
How the COVID-19 pandemic left a huge cache of dinosaur fossils stuck in the Sahara Desert…
Why dogs belong in the White House…
How Iraqi archaeologists and their international partners are doing their best to preserve what remains of the ancient ruins of Babylon…
Why British archaeologists think Stonehenge was dismantled and relocated from a previous site in Wales…
How an Indian immigrant and Star Trek fanatic became America’s most experienced Mars rover driver...
Music of the Month
“Disintegration,” the title track from the morose 1989 album by the Cure.
“Raining Blood,” a Tori Amos cover of the Slayer thrash-metal classic from her 2001 album Strange Little Girls.
“Just a Lover,” the final song from Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams’ surprise recent record Flowers for Vases/descansos.