He was acting drunk but swore he was sober. Turns out his stomach was brewing its own beer.
Add to list
Add to listAdd to list
A man started showing signs of intoxication but swore he hadn’t been drinking. His stomach was producing alcohol — a condition known as “auto-brewery syndrome.” (Deborah Jaffe for the Washington Post)
Police and doctors didn’t believe the 46-year-old man when he swore that he hadn’t had alcohol before he was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.
His blood alcohol level was 0.2, more than twice the legal limit for operating a car. He refused a breathalyzer test, was hospitalized and later released. But the facts remained in contention.
Then researchers discovered the unusual truth: Fungi in the man’s digestive system were turning carbohydrates into alcohol — a rarely diagnosed condition known as “auto-brewery syndrome.”
In people with the syndrome, fermenting fungi or bacteria in the gut produce ethanol and can cause the patients to show signs of drunkenness. The condition, also known as gut fermentation syndrome, can occur in otherwise healthy people but is more common in patients with diabetes, obesity or Crohn’s disease.
AD
AD
“A person is intoxicated from this fermenting yeast, and it’s a horrible illness,” said Barbara Cordell, a researcher of auto-brewery syndrome and the author of “My Gut Makes Alcohol.”
The condition has rarely been studied and is diagnosed infrequently. Researchers at Richmond University Medical Center in New York, however, wrote in the journal BMJ Open Gastroenterology that they believe the syndrome is underdiagnosed.
The condition made news in 2014, when the driver of a truck that spilled 11,000 salmon onto a highway claimed to have auto-brewery syndrome. The next year, a New York woman was charged with driving under the influence after she registered a blood alcohol level that was more than four times the legal limit, CNN reported. A judge dismissed the charges after being shown evidence that she had auto-brewery syndrome.
The man in the Richmond University study, whose identity was not released, had started taking antibiotics in 2011 for a traumatic thumb injury. That’s when the weird symptoms started: depression, memory issues and aggressive behavior that was uncommon for him.
“Everybody thought that he was a liar, he was a closet drinker,” said Fahad Malik, a doctor and the lead researcher on the study.
After his arrest on a drunken-driving charge, the man’s aunt remembered hearing about a similar situation addressed by a doctor in Ohio. She bought her nephew a breathalyzer to test his blood alcohol levels and persuaded him to go to Ohio for treatment.
Doctors there gave the man a carbohydrate-heavy meal and watched his blood alcohol level shoot up to 0.57. He left on strict orders not to eat carbs — commonly found in bread, pasta and beer, among other foods — but soon started having flare-ups again. When his intoxication at one point caused him to fall and suffer a brain bleed, the doctors again refused to believe that he hadn’t been drinking.
AD
AD
The man contacted the authors of the study, which was published in August. They prescribed him an antifungal drug that got rid of his symptoms until he relapsed from eating pizza and drinking soda. Doctors eventually found a combination of treatments that, combined with regular checks of his blood alcohol level, enables the man to stick to a normal diet without exhibiting symptoms.
People with auto-brewery syndrome may smell like alcohol or feel too tired to work or spend time with family. Some patients are unemployed because of the condition, Malik said, and others skip meals to be sober for longer periods.
Nick Hess, 39, said his auto-brewery syndrome makes him oscillate each day between intoxication and a hangover. He said he had to drop out of college because of his symptoms and is appealing a DUI conviction. He suffers from vomiting, headaches and other symptoms every day.
Hess, of Columbus, Ohio, said his wife didn’t believe that he hadn’t been drinking when he started exhibiting symptoms. At one point, he said, she started recording him to ensure he wasn’t sneaking alcohol. What she saw, Hess said, was just him playing video games all day.
“She would watch me wake up and sit on that couch from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep and progressively get more and more drunk,” he said.
Cordell said her husband had auto-brewery syndrome for six years before they discovered why he sometimes slurred his words and lost coordination. If he ate a carb-heavy food such as ice cream at night, Cordell said, he usually showed signs of intoxication by the next afternoon.
AD
Auto-brewery syndrome seems to be caused by antibiotic use altering a person’s fungal growth, but Cordell said researchers don’t know why few people who take antibiotics contract the condition. Other drugs, environmental toxins or preservatives in foods also could cause auto-brewery syndrome by disrupting the body’s normal balance of bacteria.
AD
Early symptoms of auto-brewery syndrome may be mood changes, brain fog and delirium, instead of signs of intoxication, according to the Richmond study. Some symptoms of auto-brewery syndrome can mimic other conditions or medical events, such as hypoglycemia or a stroke, Cordell said. She recommends that people who suspect they have auto-brewery syndrome get a breathalyzer so they can test their blood alcohol levels when symptoms manifest.
If someone becomes seriously intoxicated from auto-brewery syndrome, Cordell recommends first seeking treatment for potential alcohol poisoning. Blood alcohol levels in people with auto-brewery syndrome can reach five times the legal limit, she said. Antifungal medications, probiotics and low-carb diets can treat the condition.
AD
Cordell runs a support group for about 200 people with auto-brewery syndrome and said roughly 500 people from around the world have contacted her about the condition since 2015.
“I think there are a lot more people suffering than we even know,” she said.
"All this means that private colleges like Hampshire are struggling to find enough students able or willing to pay their high sticker prices, and the situation is only likely to get worse. Because of low birthrates following the Great Recession, Carleton College economist Nathan Grawe predicts that the four-year-college applicant pool is likely to shrink by almost 280,000 per class, over four years, starting in 2026, a year known in higher ed as “the Apocalypse.” As youth populations decline everywhere but the southern and western United States, colleges in New England and the Midwest will find it increasingly hard to lure students, particularly those able to pay. ....
If the economic troubles of elite liberal arts institutions have you mock-playing an air violin, consider the consequences. For one, there’ll be fiercer competition for spots at the most prestigious schools — a sport already so gruesome, actress Felicity Huffman is doing jail time for gaming it. For another, there will be fewer opportunities for low-income students who rely on generous financial aid packages at small liberal arts colleges as one of the few tickets into the upper class. It may also mean the retreat of the only part of higher education that is uniquely American. Residential liberal arts colleges are rare in other parts of the world. For more than 200 years, they’ve made American higher education an exceptional laboratory for fostering empathy, creativity and innovation. We’ve gotten so used to them, we may not notice what we’ve lost until it’s gone. "
On any given day, the Trump campaign is plastering ads all over Facebook, YouTube and the millions of sites served by Google, hitting the kind of incendiary themes — immigrant invaders, the corrupt media — that play best on platforms where algorithms favor outrage and political campaigns are free to disregard facts.
Even seemingly ominous developments for Mr. Trump become fodder for his campaign. When news broke last month that congressional Democrats were opening an impeachment inquiry, the campaign responded with an advertising blitz aimed at firing up the president’s base.
The campaign slapped together an “Impeachment Poll” (sample question: “Do you agree that President Trump has done nothing wrong?”). It invited supporters to join the Official Impeachment Defense Task Force (“All you need to do is DONATE NOW!”). It produced a slick video laying out the debunked conspiracy theory about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Ukraine that is now at the center of the impeachment battle (“Learn the truth. Watch Now!”).
The onslaught overwhelmed the limited Democratic response. Mr. Biden’s campaign put up the stiffest resistance: It demanded Facebook take down the ad, only to be rebuffed. It then proceeded with plans to slash its online advertising budget in favor of more television ads.
Sign Up for the Morning Briefing
Get what you need to know to start your day, delivered to your inbox.
That campaigns are now being fought largely online is hardly a revelation, yet only one political party seems to have gotten the message. While the Trump campaign has put its digital operation firmly at the center of the president’s re-election effort, Democrats are struggling to internalize the lessons of the 2016 race and adapt to a political landscape shaped by social media.
Mr. Trump’s first campaign took far better advantage of Facebook and other platforms that reward narrowly targeted — and, arguably, nastier — messages. And while the president is now embattled on multiple fronts and disfavored by a majority of Americans in most polls, he has one big advantage: His 2020 campaign, flush with cash, is poised to dominate online again, according to experts on both ends of the political spectrum, independent researchers and tech executives. The difference between the parties’ digital efforts, they said, runs far deeper than the distinction between an incumbent’s general-election operation and challengers’ primary campaigns.
The Trump team has spent the past three years building out its web operation. As a sign of its priorities, the 2016 digital director, Brad Parscale, is now leading the entire campaign. He is at the helm of what experts described as a sophisticated digital marketing effort, one that befits a relentlessly self-promoting candidate who honed his image, and broadcast it into national consciousness, on reality television.
Brad Parscale, President Trump’s campaign manager, at a rally in Dallas last week. He was Mr. Trump’s digital director in 2016, overseeing an often incendiary web operation.CreditAnna Moneymaker/The New York Times
The campaign under Mr. Parscale is focused on pushing its product — Mr. Trump — by churning out targeted ads, aggressively testing the content and collecting data to further refine its messages. It is selling hats, shirts and other gear, a strategy that yields yet more data, along with cash and, of course, walking campaign billboards.
“We see much less of that kind of experimentation with the Democratic candidates,” said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University who tracks political advertising on Facebook. “They’re running fewer ads. We don’t see the wide array of targeting.”
The Trump campaign, she said, “is like a supercar racing a little Volkswagen Bug.”
The Democrats would be the Volkswagen. They are largely running what other experts and political operatives compared to brand-loyalty campaigns, trying to sway moderates and offend as few people as possible, despite mounting research that suggests persuasion ads have little to no impact on voters in a general election.
The candidates, to be sure, are collectively spending more on Facebook and Google than on television and are trying to target their ads — Mr. Biden’s tend to be seen by those born before 1975, for instance, while Senator Bernie Sanders’s are aimed at those born later. But without the same level of message testing and data collection, the Democrats’ efforts are not nearly as robust as Mr. Trump’s.
Democratic digital operatives say the problem is a party dominated by an aging professional political class that is too timid in the face of a fiercely partisan Republican machine. The Biden campaign’s decision to tack from digital to television, they say, is only the most glaring example of a party hung up on the kind of broad-based advertising that played well in the television age but fares poorly on social media.
The digital director of a prominent Democratic presidential campaign recounted how he was shut down by an older consultant when pressing for shorter, pithier ads that could drive clicks. “We don’t need any of your cinéma vérité clickbait,” the consultant snapped, according to the digital director, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid risking his job.
Other digital consultants and campaign officials told similar stories, and complained that the Democratic establishment was too focused on winning over imagined moderates, instead of doing what the Trump campaign has done: firing up its base.
“It’s true that anodyne messaging doesn’t turn anyone off. But it doesn’t turn them on either,” said Elizabeth Spiers, who runs the Insurrection, a progressive digital strategy and polling firm.
Advertisement
Republicans are “not messaging around unity and civility, because those things don’t mobilize people,” Ms. Spiers said, adding that while everyone may want to live in a less divided country, “nobody takes time off work, gets in their car and drives to the polls to vote specifically for that.”
Image
Trump campaign ads have tapped into the impeachment inquiry, using it to fire up the president’s base.
Facebook Favors the Angry
Far more than any other platform, Facebook is the focus for digital campaign spending, and it is in many ways even friendlier turf for Mr. Trump’s campaign than in 2016.
Since then, many younger, more liberal users have abandoned the platform in favor of Instagram, Snapchat and various private messaging apps, while older users — the type most likely to vote Republican — are still flocking to Facebook in droves. People over 65 now make up Facebook’s fastest-growing population in the United States, doubling their use of the platform since 2011, according to Gallup.
In a speech this year in Romania, Mr. Parscale recalled telling his team before the 2016 election that Facebook would allow the campaign to reach the “lost, forgotten people of America” with messages tailored to their interests.
“Millions of Americans, older people, are on the internet, watching pictures of their kids because they all moved to cities,” Mr. Parscale said. “If we can connect to them, we can change this election.”
Facebook also favors the kind of emotionally charged content that Mr. Trump’s campaign has proved adept at creating. Campaigns buy Facebook ads through an automated auction system, with each ad receiving an “engagement rate ranking” based on its predicted likelihood of being clicked, shared or commented on. The divisive themes of Mr. Trump’s campaign tend to generate more engagement than Democrats’ calmer, more policy-focused appeals. Often, the more incendiary the campaign, the further its dollars go.
Provocative ads also get shared more often, creating an organic boost that vaults them even further ahead of less inflammatory messages.
“There’s an algorithmic bias that inherently benefits hate and negativity and anger,” said Shomik Dutta, a digital strategist and a founder of Higher Ground Labs, an incubator for Democratic start-ups. “If anger has an algorithmic bias, then Donald Trump is the captain of that ship.”
A Facebook spokeswoman disputed the notion that ads got more visibility just because they were negative, and noted that users were able to flag offending ads for possible removal.
The company, since the 2016 election, has invested heavily to prevent Russian-style interference campaigns. It has built up its security and fact-checking teams, staffed a “war room” during key elections and changed its rules to crack down on misinformation and false news.
But it has left a critical loophole: Facebook’s fact-checking rules do not apply to political ads, letting candidates spread false or misleading claims. That has allowed Mr. Trump’s campaign to show ads that traditional TV networks have declined to air.
One recent video from the Trump campaign said that Mr. Biden had offered Ukraine $1 billion in aid if it killed an investigation into a company tied to his son. The video’s claims had already been debunked, and CNN refused to play it. But Facebook rejected the Biden campaign’s demand to take the ad down, arguing that it did not violate its policies.
At last count, the video has been viewed on the social network more than five million times.
Image
An ad seeking contributions for Mr. Trump’s re-election bid.
The 2016 Playbook
In the wake of the 2016 election, some on the left sought an explanation for Mr. Trump’s victory in the idea that his campaign had used shadowy digital techniques inspired by military-style psychological warfare — a “Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine,” as one article described it — created by the defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The theories around Cambridge Analytica have never been fully demonstrated, however, and there is a far less nefarious explanation: The Trump campaign simply made better use of standard commercial marketing tools, particularly Facebook’s own high-powered targeting products.
An internal Facebook report written after the 2016 election noted that both the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent heavily on Facebook — $44 million for Mr. Trump versus $28 million for Hillary Clinton. “But Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex,” the memo said, and were better at using Facebook to bring in donations and find new voters. For instance, roughly 84 percent of the Trump ads focused on getting voters to take an action, such as donating, the report said. Only about half of Mrs. Clinton’s did.
At the same time, the Trump campaign sought to tailor its ads more precisely to specific voters, the report said, with a typical Trump message targeted at 2.5 million people, compared with eight million for the Clinton campaign. And the Trump team simply made more unique ads — 5.9 million versus 66,000.
“We were making hundreds of thousands” of variations on similar ads, Mr. Parscale told “60 Minutes” last year. “Changing language, words, colors.”
The idea, he said, was to find “what is it that makes it go, ‘Poof! I’m going to stop and look.’”
For the left, the Trump campaign’s mastery of social media in 2016 represented a sharp reversal. From the blogs of the mid-aughts to Netroots Nation, the digital activists who helped propel Barack Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012, the left was seen as the dominant digital force. The Democrats had an array of tech-savvy campaign veterans who were adept at data mining and digital organizing, and had overseen the creation of a handful of well-resourced digital consulting firms.
Starting with the 2016 primaries, the Trump campaign reversed the trend. While the more traditionally minded Republican operatives signed on to work for the party’s more traditional candidates, such as Jeb Bush, the Trump campaign found itself reliant on “the outliers, and a lot of them truly believed in digital,” said Zac Moffatt, chief executive of Targeted Victory, a Republican digital strategy firm. “It was a changing of the guard, strategically.”
The Republicans’ 2020 operation — with more than $150 million in cash on hand, according to the latest filings — appears to have picked up where it left off.
The Trump campaign’s intense testing of ads is one example. It posts dozens of variations of almost every ad to figure which plays best. Do voters respond better to a blue button or a green one? Are they more likely to click if it says “donate” or “contribute”? Will they more readily cough up cash for an impeachment defense fund or an impeachment defense task force?
The president’s re-election effort is also making use of strategies common in the e-commerce world, such as “zero touch” merchandise sales. T-shirts, posters and other paraphernalia are printed on demand and sent directly to buyers, with the campaign not required to make bulk orders or risk unsold inventory. Sales of these items amount to a lucrative source of campaign fund-raising, and the zero-touch technique allows the campaign to move fast — it was able to start selling T-shirts that say “get over it” a day after the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters to do just than when it came to Ukraine.
Image
Trump merchandise, sold here at a rally in Albuquerque, has been a lucrative source of fund-raising for the campaign.CreditErin Schaff/The New York Times
Perhaps most important, the Trump campaign is spending to make sure people see its ads, emails, texts, tweets and other content. In the week the impeachment inquiry was announced, for instance, the campaign spent nearly $2.3 million on Facebook and Google ads, according to data compiled by Acronym, a progressive digital strategy organization that tracks campaign spending. That is roughly four to five times what it spent on those platforms in previous weeks, and about half of what most Democratic front-runners have spent on Facebook and Google advertising over the entire course of their campaigns.
The president’s team has also invested heavily in YouTube, buying ads and counterprogramming his opponents. In June, during the first Democratic primary debates, the Trump campaign bought the YouTube “masthead” — a large ad that runs at the top of the site’s home page and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per day — to ensure that debate viewers would see it.
The Trump campaign “is always re-upping their ad buy. As soon as an ad runs out, another one goes in,” Ms. Edelson said, adding, “No one is waiting for next month’s marketing budget to kick in.”
Glamour Shots Only
Democrats are struggling to match more than the sheer volume of content coming out of the Trump campaign. Interviews with Democratic consultants and experts revealed a party deeply hesitant to match the Trump campaign’s intense and often angry partisan approach.
Most of the Democratic Party is “not even fighting last year’s war — the war that they’re fighting is 2012,” said David Goldstein, chief executive of Tovo Labs, a progressive digital consulting firm.
Mr. Goldstein offered an instructive anecdote from the 2018 midterm elections. That spring, Tovo signed on to do online fund-raising for Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for governor in Florida. Tovo wanted to build on the work it had done the year before in Alabama, where it claimed to have depressed Republican turnout by running ads that showcased conservatives who opposed the far-right Senate candidate Roy Moore. The ads did not say they were being run by supporters of the eventual Democratic winner, Doug Jones.
Mr. Goldstein hoped to bring the same edge to Mr. Gillum’s campaign and came up with ads that “were really aggressive.”
“We wanted to provoke people,” he said.
One was a particularly buffoonish caricature of Mr. Trump holding the world in his palm. “As Florida goes in 2018, so goes the White House in 2020,” read the tagline.
The ad was aimed at far-left voters deemed most likely to be motivated by the prospect of pushing Mr. Trump from office, and the response rate was high, Mr. Goldstein said. But a few days after it went up, the campaign manager saw it and “freaked out.”
“This is entirely unacceptable,” the campaign manager, Brendan McPhillips, wrote in an email on April 6, 2018.
Image
Andrew Gillum, a former Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, in Miami this year. Two people on his campaign clashed over the tone of an ad.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
In Mr. Goldstein’s telling, the campaign manager feared offending voters whom Mr. Gillum hoped to sway. Mr. McPhillips was not mollified when Tovo explained that the ad was targeted only at voters thought to be deeply anti-Trump. He wanted ads that were focused on his candidate, not produced to elicit an emotional response with images the campaign considered crass.
Mr. McPhillips ordered Tovo to immediately stop running the ads. He said Tovo could only use images approved by the campaign. Tovo left soon thereafter.
The approved images — “standard glamour shots of the candidate” — would work for a newspaper ad or television spot, Mr. Goldstein said, but were not “going to drive clicks and provoke people to take action.”
God, that theory sounds distressingly plausible. And I don't even think it's because of Trump Corp business interests in Turkey (although that might play a role). I think it's just that Trump knows how unpopular any military casualties are, ever, and so wishes to avoid military confrontation at all costs, lest it affect his reelection (he's probably more worried about losing than I think any incumbent, even he, ought to be). I mean, I'd support that coming from a president who was a principled pacifist who seeks to minimize military engagement as much as possible. But I would not support an absolute pacifist who refused to ever use the military at all, and I certainly wouldn't support a cowardly non-use of the military purely for personal gain.
I keep trying to check out some cool hikes I've read about in this area, and it keeps catching on fire and closing for several years before I can. Sigh.
FOREST ORDER NO. 05-01-19-04
EMERGENCY CLOSURE
ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST
Pursuant to 16 USC 551 and 36 CFR 261.50%3Aa%3A and %3Ab%3A, and to protect natural resources and provide for public safety, the following acts are prohibited within the Angeles National Forest. This Order is effective from October 12, 2019 until May 1, 2020.
Saddle Ridge Closure Order Exhibit A and B
We’ve been busy the past few weeks tracking public opinion on impeachment, launching our new NBA metric (RAPTOR!) and dealing with about a million breaking news alerts a day. So I’m not going to give you one of those grandiose overviews of the Democratic primary. Maybe we’ll be more in the mood for one after this week’s debate.
Nope, I just want to make a narrower point: Joe Biden is still doing reasonably well in the polls.
Elizabeth Warren’s doing well, too! She probably hasn’t overtaken Biden in national polls, yet, but it’s pretty darn close — close enough that she was momentarily ahead in one national polling average (from RealClearPolitics) last week. You’d certainly rather be in Warren’s shoes than Biden’s in Iowa and New Hampshire. (Although not in South Carolina, and the Super Tuesday states aren’t so clear.) In fact, if you want to argue that she’s the most likely nominee, I don’t have any real problem with that. I also don’t have any real problem if you think it’s Biden, or that it’s too close to call.
But Warren’s gains have come mostly at the expense of the rest of the field — from Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, in particular — and from other candidates, such as Cory Booker, whose campaigns never really took off in the first place. Relatively little of Warren’s increased support has come from Biden, whose topline numbers have mostly been steady.
In fact, Biden’s numbers haven’t declined at all since President Trump’s phone call with Ukraine became the dominant political story. We can see this by taking a before and after comparison of polls that have come out in the past couple of weeks. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact date when Ukraine and impeachment rose to the top of the news. But Monday, September 23, when seven first-term Democratic members of Congress published an editorial calling for Trump’s impeachment over allegations that he encouraged Ukraine to investigate Biden and and his son, was probably the closest thing to an inflection point. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came out in favor of an impeachment inquiry the next day; that Wednesday, the White House published its summary of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.) So here are the results from nine pollsters who have conducted a national poll since Sept. 23.17
National Democratic primary polls since Sept. 23
Average results of Democratic primary candidates in national polls conducted after Sept. 23, 2019, op-ed calling for Trump’s impeachment
Candidate
Fox
Har
YG
Q’pac
M.C.
IBD
Ipsos
Mon.
DFP
Avg
Biden
32%
36%
25%
26%
33%
26%
21%
25%
23%
27.4
Warren
22
16
28
29
21
27
15
28
36
24.7
Sanders
17
14
13
16
19
10
16
15
15
15.0
Buttigieg
4
6
5
4
5
7
4
5
6
5.1
Harris
5
6
5
3
6
3
4
5
5
4.7
Yang
2
2
3
3
3
3
3
2
3
2.7
O’Rourke
3
3
1
1
3
2
2
1
2
2.0
Booker
2
2
1
2
2
0
1
1
2
1.4
Klobuchar
2
1
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1.3
Castro
1
2
1
1
1
1
0
1
0
1.0
Gabbard
1
0
1
0
1
1
1
0
1
0.7
Steyer
1
1
1
0
1
0
0
1
0
0.6
Only candidates who have qualified for next week’s debate are listed in the chart.
FOX = Fox News; HAR = HarrisX; YG = YouGov; Q’PAC = Quinnipiac University; M.C. = Morning Consult; IBD = IBD/TIPP; MON. = Monmouth University; DFP = Data For Progress / YouGov Blue
In an average of those polls, Biden’s still on top at 27.4 percent, with Warren in second at 24.7 percent. I don’t necessarily buy that Warren pulled ahead of Biden last week, as the RCP average briefly showed; for some reason, RCP’s average didn’t include HarrisX, which is usually one of Biden’s better polls. It’s also sort of a moot point, though. There’s no national primary, and if Warren keeps gaining ground at the rate she has been over the past few months, she’ll surpass Biden eventually.
What there hasn’t been, though, is much sign of a decline in Biden’s numbers, despite all the media narratives constantly predicting one. Here was the most recent pre-Ukraine version (all interviews conducted before Sept. 23) of those same national polls.
National Democratic primary polls before Sept. 23
Average results of Democratic primary candidates in national polls conducted before the Sept. 23, 2019, op-ed calling for Trump’s impeachment
Candidate
Fox
Har
YG
Q’pac
M.C.
IBD
Ipsos
Mon.
DFP
Avg
Biden
29%
32%
25%
32%
32%
28%
22%
19%
23%
26.9
Warren
16
20
19
19
20
24
11
20
22
19.0
Sanders
18
15
15
15
19
12
16
20
15
16.1
Buttigieg
5
5
8
5
5
5
4
4
7
5.3
Harris
7
5
5
7
6
6
4
8
17
7.2
Yang
2
2
3
3
3
1
3
3
2
2.4
O’Rourke
4
2
3
1
3
0
2
2
2
2.1
Booker
3
3
2
1
3
4
3
4
2
2.8
Klobuchar
2
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1.2
Castro
0
1
1
0
1
1
1
2
1
0.9
Gabbard
0
1
2
1
1
0
1
1
1
0.9
Steyer
1
1
0
0
1
0
1
0
N/A
0.5
Only candidates who have qualified for next week’s debate are listed in the chart.
FOX = Fox News; HAR = HarrisX; YG = YouGov; Q’PAC = Quinnipiac University; M.C. = Morning Consult; IBD = IBD/TIPP; MON. = Monmouth University; DFP = Data For Progress / YouGov Blue
So Biden was at 26.9 percent on average in the pre-Ukraine polls … and he’s at 27.4 percent now. There’s been no decline at all, obviously. Warren has gained quite a bit of ground, though, having gone from 19 percent to 24.7 percent. Where is that support coming from?
Biden is steady, and Warren is gaining, post-Ukraine news
Average results of Democratic primary candidates in national polls before and after the Sept. 23, 2019, op-ed calling for Trump’s impeachment
Candidate
Before Sept. 23
Since Sept. 23
Change
Biden
26.9%
27.4%
+0.6
Warren
19.0
24.7
+5.7
Sanders
16.1
15.0
-1.1
Buttigieg
5.3
5.1
-0.2
Harris
7.2
4.7
-2.6
Yang
2.4
2.7
+0.2
O’Rourke
2.1
2.0
-0.1
Booker
2.8
1.4
-1.3
Klobuchar
1.2
1.3
+0.1
Castro
0.9
1.0
+0.1
Gabbard
0.9
0.7
-0.2
Steyer
0.5
0.6
+0.1
If a pollster has published multiple polls in that time frame, only the most recent poll was counted. Only candidates who have qualified for next week’s debate are listed in the chart. Totals may not add up exactly due to rounding.
Some of it has come from Harris, whom Warren is competing with for college-educated voters. Some has come from Sanders. And some of it may have come from second-tier candidates such as Booker, whose solid debate performances seem to have been forgotten and who is back to just 1 or 2 percent in the polls. YouGov’s polling of early-state voters suggests that relatively little of it has come from Biden, on the other hand.
If there’s a bit of bad news for Warren, it’s that she’s already picked off a lot of the low-hanging fruit. She can perhaps grab a few more Sanders voters, especially if some are concerned over the heart attack he suffered two weeks ago. But Sanders has already lost around two-thirds of the voters that he had in 2016, so the ones that remain with him may be a relatively hardy lot. Meanwhile, there aren’t that many more Harris supporters to win over.
That’s not to say that it’s all going swimmingly for Biden, either. Although his topline numbers haven’t changed much, Warren has surpassed him on measures of enthusiasm, she tends to have better favorability ratings than he does, and, obviously, Iowa and New Hampshire are huge potential liabilities for Biden if he loses them.
But our thesis about Biden’s candidacy has never been that he’s the most perfect candidate or has run the most flawless campaign, but rather that he commands deep loyalty from constituencies that often receive little coverage from media elites, including seniors, non-college-educated whites, African Americans and moderates. There aren’t many signs that these voters support Biden solely because of name recognition, or that their support is otherwise superficial. In fact, Biden — like Warren — often does better among voters who are paying the most attention to the campaign.
Now, if you want to argue that the 70 percent of Democrats who don’t have Biden as their first choice are cooling on him, I think you’re on firmer ground. And that could absolutely be a problem for him if he and Warren — perhaps along with other candidates — are scrambling to pick up additional supporters after the early states.
To a first approximation, though, Biden’s numbers have been quite steady. Other than a post-announcement bounce, when he briefly surged to near 40 percent, he’s been somewhere between 26 percent and 32 percent in the RCP average for literally the entire campaign:
In contrast to certain other campaigns, which naively thought that Biden’s support might just up and disappear, Warren’s team has caught up to him the hard way: by building a coalition of around 25 percent of the Democratic electorate on her own, including many voters that were initially skeptical of her.
Empirically speaking, the mid-to-high-20s in the polls tends to be a fairly robust and sustainable position. It doesn’t necessarily make you a favorite to win the nomination, especially when there’s another candidate who’s polling at about the same number. But through this point in a presidential primary, few candidates who have sustained numbers in the mid-to-high-20s have completely flopped. Those numbers tend to be good enough that you’ll win your share of states (past Iowa caucus winners have often gotten around 25 to 30 percent of the vote) or at least your share of delegates. They mean that you’ll probably be one of the trains leaving the station as the field starts to winnow. They reflect a measure of success unto themselves.
All right, this is getting a little grandiose, so let’s save the rest of the analysis for after the debate. Besides, the Democratic primary just isn’t all that complicated right now. Roughly speaking, the nomination process is going reasonably well for both Warren and Biden. And while there are other candidates who are exceeding expectations,18 it isn’t going all that well for anyone else.
Lowering the flag at Fox News headquarters in New York.CreditCreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times
I try to limit my intake of 24-hour cable TV news, because as a medium, on balance, I think it’s bad for America. Though Facebook has suffered more scrutiny and reputational damage for its role in 2016, it was cable, not social networks, that went gaga pumping up Trump during the campaign. Today, it’s the toxic feedback swirl of Twitter and cable — and a president and a press corps that spend all hours feeding on one another’s digital droppings in a dystopian circle of life — that has rendered our political culture so vulnerable to reflexive, narrow-minded conspiracies, tribalism and groupthink.
Lately, however, I’ve found myself gorging like a bear in salmon season on the worst, most brain-corroding corner of cable, the network I’ve called a “forked-tongue colossus” for its two-decades-long project of dismantling our collective hold on the truth. I refer, of course, to Fox News.
[Farhad Manjoo will answer your questions about this column on Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Twitter: @fmanjoo]
In the past week, it’s been riveting, and I can’t get enough. Forget “Succession” — as we descend into the hell pit of impeachment and a presidential election, there is no more engaging and consequential family drama on television right now than the one happening every day on Fox News.
Sign Up for Debatable
Agree to disagree, or disagree better? We'll help you understand the sharpest arguments on the most pressing issues of the week, from new and familiar voices.
I won’t lie to you: Watching Fox isn’t easy. Much of it is still a fetid sewer of venom that bears little resemblance to the real world, and I would hope that you have more enjoyable ways to spend your time, like elective dental surgery.
But when news breaks on television — as it will in an unending cascade of hearings, stump speeches, debates and grandstanding news conferences from now until at least January 2021 — Fox should be your go-to place to watch, especially if you are on the left.
There is a simple reason: While other organizations report the news, Fox News is the news. There is now a growing rift on Fox: Its news side is asking increasingly tough questions of Trump, while its opinion side pushes his raving conspiracies. The drama speaks to real tension on the right, and Fox will inform political reality. It is no exaggeration to say that what happens on Fox now — the way it decides to play impeachment and the twists and turns of the 2020 race — could well determine the fate of the republic.
Fox’s anchors, reporters, its far-flung network of guests and its many shaggy narratives — what Deadspin’s David Roth has called the “Fox News Cinematic Universe” — are now deeply embedded in the operations of the United States government.
Even before the Trump era, Fox exerted striking influence on the Republican Party. But with Trump, Fox has reached the zenith of its powers. Its anchors regularly advise the president about politics and policy. Its story lines inform his hourly moods and his strategic decisions, including his staffing. And its commitment to indulging the president’s conspiracy-fueled ravings has helped pull political culture ever farther from reality.
In other words, Fox is now not just a reflection of what happens in the world; instead, how a piece of news plays on Fox determines what happens in the world.
The connection between Trump and Fox runs so deep that you might wonder where one ends and the other begins. Is Trump rotting Fox’s brain, or is Fox rotting Trump’s?
But when it comes to politics, it doesn’t matter; whichever way the rot runs, watching Fox now is like getting a peek into Trump’s war room and, in a larger sense, into the future of the right in America, however ugly that picture may be.
Now there is an extra layer of intrigue. Suddenly Fox News feels like a nation up for grabs, and there is growing, palpable drama on its sets.
The network’s daytime anchors — people like Shep Smith and Chris Wallace, who fall on the news reporting side of Fox’s opinion-reporting divide — have always grumbled about the network’s nighttime pundits, talkers like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Now the two sides are at open war, sniping at each other daily over the seriousness of impeachment and the very legitimacy of any inquiry of the president.
On impeachment, Fox News’s news side has been excellent. There were many moments in the last week where I felt shocked and gratified by the seriousness with which Fox was taking impeachment.
in STYLN_email_trump-0_control_STYLN_email_trump
On Friday, Wallace called the White House’s “spinning” on the Ukraine call “astonishing and deeply misleading.” On Sunday’s “Fox & Friends,” the reporter Ed Henry set about asking the conservative radio host Mark Levin a series of substantive questions about the propriety of the Ukraine call. Levin roared his response, earning Twitter praise from the president, but Henry’s sharp questioning stood out to me: There he was upsetting Trump’s narrative on Trump’s favorite show. That’s progress, right?
And later on Sunday, in one of the most devastating performances by a Trump official this week, the Trump aide Stephen Miller fell apart like a used tissue under Chris Wallace’s withering questions.
In those moments of truth on Fox, I couldn’t help feeling a rush of optimism for America. I’ve often wondered whether after the Trump era it will ever be possible to pull back from the conspiracy right. In the ravings of Trump’s Ukrainian call, we saw undeniable proof that Infowars has invaded the president’s brain.
Are we seeing some sign that the conspiracies have a limit — that as nutty as things have gotten, Rupert Murdoch isn’t willing to turn his air over to an even darker cast of characters and story lines, what NBC News’s Ben Collins calls the “4Chan Cinematic Universe”?
But then I watch Fox’s opinion side and my optimism vanishes. For much of the past week, on Fox’s prime-time lineup, the president’s narrative has held total sway. On Carlson, on Hannity, on Ingraham, on “The Five,” the big story has been much the same: The president did nothing wrong, impeachment is a witch hunt and a coup, they’re coming to take your guns, to corrupt your children and to ruin all that’s great about the country.
There were times, watching Carlson and Hannity, that I felt truly terrified for the nation. Fox’s most popular hosts are still framing Trump’s political battles in apocalyptic terms; if they keep that up, what hope is there for any of us?
But this, too, is important news about America: The president, quoting a Fox News guest, says that his impeachment could bring about civil war in America. Watching Fox’s prime-time lineup, I totally believe it.
Office Hours With Farhad Manjoo
Farhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.
The BBC has cleared its schedule for news after a momentous ruling from the highest court in Britain on Tuesday. The UK’s Supreme Court reached the unanimous conclusion that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament for five weeks, known as proroguing Parliament, was unlawful. Johnson shut down Parliament on 9 September, with a […]
A huge fire at a cattle breeding facility in Australia has caused thousands of dollars in damage after at least 100 cylinders containing bull semen were destroyed.
Emergency services were called to the blaze in the early hours at Yarram Herd Services in Gippsland, Victoria.
According to ABC, it took 10 fire crews more than two hours to fully extinguish the fire after it broke out around 3 a.m. local time.
A spokesman from the Country Fire Authority told Daily Mail Australia that the fire had "completely shredded the building."
Country Fire Authority Gippsland commander Chris Loeschenkohl said the crew had to be wary of "projectiles" coming at them while they tackled the blaze.
"The liquid inside the cylinders was rapidly expanding and essentially the lids of the cryogenic cylinders were just popping off the top and projectiles were being thrown from the building," he told ABC.
"So firefighters went into a defensive mode initially to protect themselves, because there were also LPG cylinders at the neighboring property, and they did a magnificent job."
Loeschenkohl added that he has never had "anything to do with the artificial insemination (AI) side of things before" during his career.
Yarram Herd Services Committee vice chairman Aaron Thomas said the loss of 100 cryogenic cylinders of cattle semen will be a "huge blow" for the farmers.
"The actual cylinders are worth between $500 (U.S. $342) and $1,000 per unit but the semen inside them varies in price," he said.
"We're coming into the AI season so there would have been substantial amounts of semen inside the tanks that we've lost, which was owned by our local farmers, and it can range in value from $5 per straw to $95 per straw."
Thomas said the farmers have also lost a lot of equipment as a result of the fire.
"So this is significant damage and it is going to have a flow-on effect on Yarram, especially after the drought that Yarram district has experienced over the last 12 months."
(File photo) Herd of Charolais bulls on a cattle property in the wildnerness of the Australian Outback, Queensland. Around 100 cylinders of bull semen have been destroyed in a fire ravaged at a cattle breeding facility in Victoria, Australia.
Tim Graham/Corbis/Getty
Earlier this year, ABC reported that farmers in Gippsland were losing as much as 70 percent of their regular income due to a lack of rainfall and weeds causing what is known as a green drought.
"A green drought is a drought through the wintertime where we have a green cover but there's no actual growth coming from any desirable pasture species," explained Rodwells Sale agronomist Casey Willis.
"A lot of what's being grown in paddocks at the moment is weeds and they have little to no nutritional value for stock."
Yarram Herd Services had been providing artificial insemination as well as other services such as calf dehorning and freeze-branding services for farmers in Gippsland for the past 20 years.
An investigation to determine the cause of the fire is underway.
Mr. Emanuel is a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Fuchs is an emeritusprofessor of economics at Stanford.
342
Image
CreditCreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
Health care, so far perhaps the biggest issue in the Democratic primary, is also the most complicated issue facing government and the public. Unfortunately the debate is filled with persistent misconceptions, from the role insurance company profits play in health care costs to who is actually paying for workers’ health coverage.
Clarifying four fundamental health care fallacies could make it easier for voters to square some of the Democratic proposals — and their critiques — with reality:
Fallacy No. 1: Employers pay for employees’ health insurance.
Employers write checks that cover most health insurance premiums for employees and their dependents. But as the Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt once explained, employer-sponsored insurance is like a pickpocket taking money out of your wallet at a bar and buying you a drink. You appreciate the cocktail until you realize you paid for it yourself.
With health coverage, employers write the check to the insurer, but employees bear the cost of the premium — the entire premium, not just the portion listed as their contribution on their pay stub. The premium money that goes to the insurance company is cash that employers would otherwise deposit in employees’ accounts like the rest of their salary.
The fallacy is in thinking an employer’s contribution comes out of profits. In fact, higher health insurance premiums mean lower wages for workers. Since 1999, health insurance premiums have increased 147 percent and employer profits have increased 148 percent. But in that time, average wages have hardly moved, increasing just 7 percent. Clearly workers’ wages, not corporate profits, have been paying for higher health insurance premiums.
Sign Up for Debatable
Agree to disagree, or disagree better? We'll help you understand the sharpest arguments on the most pressing issues of the week, from new and familiar voices.
Health care costs are one — though not the only — reason wages have stagnated over the last few decades. With health insurance costs rising faster than growth in the economy, more labor costs go to benefits like health insurance and less to take-home pay.
Yet the belief that employees don’t pay for their own health insurance is widespread. One reason is that individuals cannot be sure what causes their wages to change or remain stagnant for decades. Another reason is that employers want Americans to believe that they pay for their workers’ health insurance. Still another reason is that there are those who profit from the employment-based system: drug companies, device manufacturers, specialty physicians and high-income individuals. They all want you to believe companies are being magnanimous in giving you insurance.
Who else benefits from the belief in this fallacy? Opponents of national health insurance.
The key to evaluating the cost of Medicare for All is to distinguish between increasing spending on health care and shifting expenditures from private insurance to the federal government.
True, Medicare for All would increase federal health care spending. But that is not the same as increasing total health care spending, which was over $3.5 trillion last year. Instead, Medicare for All would move money from one column (private health insurance spending) to another (federal health spending); it does not automatically increase total costs.
A recent study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University — a free-market center generally hostile to government programs — estimates that for the 10 years between 2022 and 2031 the total national health costs for Senator Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan would actually be $50.1 trillion. That would be $2 trillion less than if we let the system operate as it currently does. However, Mercatus researchers doubt that the Sanders’s plan would ultimately save trillions because they believe Congress would have to increase Medicare rates paid to hospitals and physicians to get the legislation enacted. They may be right — or wrong. But that is a different argument — a prediction about the politics of enacting laws — than that Medicare for All would inherently increase total health care spending.
We have our doubts about Medicare for All. But unaffordability is not a reason to oppose it. Whether it’s our current arrangement or a future Medicare for All, the per capita cost of our health care system already far exceeds that of any other industrialized country — including those with single-payer systems. When you hear a health care price tag in the trillions, know that the existing system has already brought us there.
Fallacy No. 3: Insurance companies’ profits drive health care costs.
In the second Democratic presidential debate, Senator Bernie Sanders declared that the health care industry makes $100 billion in profits. He once railed against the insurance company Anthem for denying a claim while noting that it reported “fourth-quarter profits for 2017 had increased by 234 percent to $1.2 billion.”
Many Americans believe that profits have no place in health care. They see for-profit health insurance, like buying and selling kidneys and livers for transplantation, as what the Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth termed a “repugnant industry” — something that should not be exchanged in the market.
That is an important moral stand, but it makes no difference to the claim that eliminating for-profit insurers will reduce high health care costs. The fact is, we could eliminate those profits and it would hardly matter to the cost of health care. You would not notice it in your premiums.
For the eight largest for-profit health insurance companies, in 2016, their cumulative revenue amounted to nearly $452.2 billion and profits were $22.1 billion, for a profit margin of about 5 percent. By contrast, technology companies, banks and major drug companies generally make more than 20 percent profit.
True, $22.1 billion is a lot of money — but it is 0.6 percent of health spending. And last year alone health care costs increased over $130 billion — six times insurance company profits. Health care spending would not be significantly cheaper if all insurance companies’ profits were zero.
There are far more savings to be had in other efforts — by cutting unnecessary patient services, for example, or by making physicians and hospitals more efficient — to deliver the same care at a lower cost.
Fallacy No. 4: Price transparency can bring down health care costs.
“Hospitals will be required to publish prices that reflect what people pay for services,” said President Trump when he signed his executive order on health care price transparency. “Prices will come down by numbers that you wouldn’t believe. The cost of health care will go way, way down.”
There is no doubt that prices for medical procedures can range widely even within the same city or state. For instance, M.R.I.s of the spine can vary threefold in Massachusetts and mammograms fivefold in San Francisco.
Conservatives argue that informing patients of prices for tests and treatments will induce them to shop for lower-cost services, saving them, insurers and the country money. In theory, the beauty of price transparency is that neither the government nor insurers impose cost controls; the invisible hand of the market does it all.
Yet demonstrations of price transparency have been tried many times in many places, and in reality, it has not reduced the cost of care.
One recent study by Harvard Medical School researchers involved hundreds of thousands of employees and used a website telling them what they would pay out-of-pocket if they chose particular physicians and hospitals. The result: no savings. A follow-up study using another set of employers and another price transparency tool found the same result: no savings.
Since 2007, New Hampshire has had a state website, N.H. Health Cost, that allows patients to select a medical procedure, insurer and ZIP code and then get a list of prices for the procedure from various providers. The most promising study of N.H. Health Cost suggests a few million dollars in savings per year. That works out to be about $5 per New Hampshire resident.
The fact is, price transparency will not make health care costs “go way, way down.” Health insurance insulates the patient from price. Over 80 percent of the cost of medical care is paid by private and public insurance. Patients have little incentive to seek out the cheapest provider. When pricing websites exist, few patients use them. Even in the most favorable studies, when offered a price transparency tool, only 12 percent of patients took advantage of it; usually it’s less than 4 percent of patients.
Furthermore, price considerations are useful for choosing only about 40 percent of procedures — routine services like colonoscopies, M.R.I. scans and laboratory tests. Most of the expensive services — think heart catheterizations, cancer chemotherapy and organ transplants — are not the kind of thing you decide based on price.
Finally, in health care, Americans usually put relationships ahead of money. Once patients find a physician they trust and a hospital they like, they tend to stick with them even if there is a lower-cost alternative nearby.
***
American health care is complex and any simplistic solution is likely to be based on a fallacy. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do. There are solutions — they just don’t make for bumper sticker phrases like Medicare for All or Eliminate For-Profit Insurers or Price Transparency.
The Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, DC. | Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
In the early 20th century, legislators carved out a tax break to help megaphilanthropists. It still shapes our tax law today.
In the United States, if you donate money to charity, you can “deduct” it on your taxes — that is, you don’t have to pay taxes on the share of your income that you donated.
Unless you’re poor.
The way the charitable tax deduction is set up, lower-income Americans can’t really take advantage of it. Unless you earn a lot of money, it makes no financial sense to do your taxes in a way that lets you claim the charitable deduction. The 2017 Republican tax bill made even fewer Americans eligible for the charitable deduction by hiking the standard deduction. Critics responded that they’d made the tax deduction a deduction just for the rich.
The paper, “Founders’ Fortunes and Philanthropy: A History of the U.S. Charitable-Contribution Deduction” by Nicolas Duquette of the University of Southern California takes a comprehensive look at the policy history of the charitable deduction since it was introduced in 1917.
Its conclusion? “The contribution deduction was created to protect voluntary giving to public goods by rich industrialists who had made their fortunes in business,” the paper argues. Thinkers of the time believed it was better for services— like libraries, universities, and aid to widows and orphans — to be provided by the rich out of generosity than by the state out of necessity, so they set up the tax code to enable that.
It might seem like there’s not much to learn from tax code history that’s a century old. But how we enact the charitable deduction matters, and so does how we think about it. The world of nonprofits and philanthropy has changed dramatically since the early 20th century, when charities really were funded near-exclusively by the ultrarich.
Our attitudes about charity have changed, too. Very few people today think it’s morally better for hospitals and libraries to be provided through largesse from billionaires than through public funding. It’s important to think about whether our laws are still shaped by attitudes about philanthropy that, on the whole, we have grown to reject.
A short history of the charitable deduction
When philanthropy got started in America, there was no federal income tax. Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller both founded their famous philanthropic organizations before the 16th Amendment — which made it legal for the federal government to assess an income tax — came into law. (The Rockefeller Foundation funds Future Perfect, this section of Vox.)When it did, lawmakers “saw philanthropists as a source of social capital that should be protected from the new tax on high incomes,” the report writes, “lest the government find itself having to pay for programs philanthropy had previously funded voluntarily, out of the donors’ own pockets.”
Thus, the deduction for charitable donations, designed specifically to make sure rich people would keep donating to their foundations even after the enactment of the income tax.
The income tax itself started out as a very small tax. In the first year, fewer than 1 percent of households were subject to it. But then America entered World War I and the income tax was expanded dramatically — and the top tax rate was quickly raised all the way to 67 percent. Lawmakers were worried that would kill private foundations, forcing the government to take over for them when it could ill afford to. So the 1917 War Revenue Act was amendedto protect donations to “corporations or associations organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, or educational purposes, or to societies for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.”
Up through World War II, that’s how people thought about the charitable deduction. The deduction, they reasoned, saved the government money: If philanthropists stopped funding research, museums, libraries, and programs for children, then the government would have to do it. Collecting a little less in tax revenue, the paper argues, was perceived as a small price to pay for keeping those obligations off the government’s balance sheet.
Around the time of World War II and in the high-marginal-tax-rate years that followed it, changes to the tax code meant that the tax incentives got a lot bigger. For a number of years, a wealthy person was actually financially better off donating stock from their company than they were if they kept it.
At the same time, the percentage of income that people were allowed to deduct went up. In 1917, it had been 15 percent. In 1952 it was increased to 20 percent, and in 1954 it was increased to 30 percent for some charities.
Now, normal people do not donate 30 percent of their income to charity. (Disclosure: I donate 30 percent of my income to charity). In general, people donating that much money are independently wealthy and have a wealth that far exceeds their annual income. So the primary group affected by these changes was wealthy people.
At the same time, a different set of changes to the tax code effectively took the income tax deduction away from ordinary Americans. In 1943, the year before these changes to the tax code were introduced, 75 percent of households were eligible to take the charitable-contribution deduction (the other 25 percent did not file tax returns at all). In 1944, almost all of those households were better off taking the newly introduced standard deduction, and only 14 percent itemized (and were thus eligible for the tax rebate for their donations).
So the tax deduction for charitable giving got better for rich people while becoming increasingly inapplicable to everyone else. The paper argues that these developments(plus the extremely high tax rates on the rich at the time) drove a huge surge in individual and corporate foundations. (The big incentives went away by the time of Reagan’s tax reforms, but the foundations remain to this day.)
These big shifts to the tax code have been reinforced recently with the 2017 Republican tax bill. It is estimated that just over 10 percent of taxpayers will itemize their taxes under the new changes, meaning that only 10 percent of taxpayers have their giving subsidized. At the same time, you can now claim a deduction for donating up to 60 percent of your income.
Do we mean to be a society that subsidizes giving by the rich while taxing giving by everybody else? The report convincingly argues that when the deduction was introduced, yes, that’s exactly what we meant to do. It’s less clear that most Americans or even most policymakers endorse those side effects of our tax code today.
And it would be possible to do better. The US could revise our laws to do away with the charitable deduction and give a uniform credit for charitable contribution so the rich and the poor get the same amount of money back from the government when they donate. (Canada does something similar to this.) This was actually considered during the debate over the 2017 tax bill but didn’t make it into the final version. (Charitable donations do seem to respond to tax incentives, so depending how this was done it could either increase or decrease charitable giving.)
If we want to incentivize philanthropy, incentivizing philanthropy only from rich people is an absurd way to go about it, a leftover vestige of an attitude about billionaire giving that no one — even its proponents — really endorses anymore. We owe it to taxpayers and nonprofits alike to do better.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
I don't think this especially insightful, but it does nicely summarize my reasons for thinking We're Fucked.
Caring about tomorrow
Why haven’t we stopped climate change? We’re not wired to empathize with our descendants.
Jackson Joyce for The Washington Post
By Jamil Zaki
August 22, 2019
Add to list
On my list
About 70 percent of Americans believe that the climate is changing, most acknowledge that this change reflects human activity, and more than two-thirds think it will harm future generations. Unless we dramatically alter our way of life, swaths of the planet will become hostile or uninhabitable later this century — spinning out ecological, epidemiological and social disasters like eddies from a current. And yet most Americans would support energy-conserving policies only if they cost households less than $200 per year — woefully short of the investment required to keep warming under catastrophic rates. This inaction is breathtakingly immoral.
It’s also puzzling. Why would we mortgage our future — and that of our children, and their children — rather than temper our addiction to fossil fuels? Knowing what we know, why is it so hard to change our ways?
One answer lies in the nature of empathy: our ability to share, understand and care about others’ experiences. Deeply empathic people tend to be environmentally responsible, but our caring instincts are shortsighted and dissolve across space and time, making it harder for us to deal with things that haven’t happened yet.
Human activity is now a dominant force in shaping the Earth’s environment, but humanity’s moral senses have not kept pace with this power. Our actions reverberate across the world and across time, but not enough of us feel the weight of their consequences. Empathy could be an emotional bulwark against a warming world, if our collective care produced collective action. But it evolved to respond to suffering right here, right now. Our empathic imagination is not naturally configured to stretch around the planet or toward future generations. That puts their very existence at risk. Ironically, our better angels — and the way they operate — might be hampering our ability to do what’s best for the world.
People take part in a traditional fishing practice in Tuvalu this month. Many islanders rely on fishing to feed their families, but climate change and rising ocean temperatures are reducing fish populations. (Mick Tsikas/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Empathy evolved as the north star to our moral compass. When someone else’s pain feels like our own, we have reason not to harm them. Empathy is also ancient, tuned to a time when we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. Much as we did back then, we still find it easier to care for people who look or think like us, who are familiar, and who are right in front of us.
It’s difficult to scale our emotions to the global task that climate change represents. For instance, people feel strong empathy after hearing about one victim of a disaster — whose face we can see and whose cries we can hear — but hearing about hundreds or thousands of victims leaves us unmoved. Such “compassion collapse” stymies climate action. Environmental damage has already produced enormous suffering, particularly in the global south. But in the global north, where most carbon emissions are produced, these victims are distant statistics who garner little empathy.
Like distance, time diminishes empathy. People find the future psychologically fuzzy; we even tend to view our future selves as strangers. This leads individuals to make shortsighted choices such as accruing debt instead of saving for retirement. Across generations, this tunnel vision worsens. Not only are the consequences of our actions far off, but they will be experienced by strangers who have yet to be born. Add to that an uncertainty about their lives — a century from now, humanity might have solved climate change using tools we cannot imagine, or been ravaged by a war that makes today’s sacrifices irrelevant — and you have a perfect recipe for indifference. Indeed, researchers find that people are less willing to sacrifice when the benefits of their actions feel far away or unsure.
Children watch a play about climate change in an open-air theater in the village of El-Boghdadi, Egypt, last month. Global warming is a huge issue for Egypt, where agriculture provides an estimated 28 percent of all jobs. (Sima diab/Bloomberg)
Yet empathy is a skill we can build through the right choices and habits, which is the subject of my book “The War for Kindness.” Crucially, even if empathy is naturally tuned to the short term, the right tools can expand it into the future and build climate consciousness along the way. One strategy is to turn the abstract concrete. When people make personal (or even virtual) contact with individuals who differ from them, they see them more clearly and empathize with them more deeply. Reading about the lives of people affected by climate change — such as sisters Kulsum and Komola Begum, who survive by scavenging for debris among the ruins of towns in Bangladesh destroyed by unprecedented storm surges — can help those of us who are more comfortable become less comfortable with the consequences of our actions. So, too, can vividly imagining the floods, water shortages and other calamities that await us if we do nothing, rather than letting them remain fuzzy.
This might explain why children and teenagers, such as Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, have emerged as leaders in the movement for climate action: Children are living, tangible and beloved representatives of the future, not to blame for climate change but at risk of paying for it dearly. In one recent study, scientists assigned North Carolina middle school students to a “climate curriculum,” in which they learned about the risks posed to their coast by rising sea levels. The children also interviewed their parents about these issues, for instance asking if they’d noticed changes in weather patterns over their lifetimes. Both before and after the course, researchers polled students and parents about their environmental attitudes. Compared with their peers, enrolled students expressed growing concern about climate change. More powerfully, their parents did as well.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, at the marina in Plymouth, England, on Aug. 13. She is sailing to a climate conference in New York on a boat designed to leave no carbon footprint. (Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images)
Children can be viewed as less politically entrenched than adults, and thus more persuasive. But their effectiveness in the climate conversation might also reflect the moral urgency of coming face to face with the people who must live in the world we leave behind. As one child activist recently declared: “You’re all going to be dead in 2050. We’re not. You’re sealing our future now.”
This raises another challenge in caring for the future: We won’t be there. Considering great spans of time means facing our mortality — an unnerving encounter that can turn people inward and increase tribalism. But other experiences can make us feel entwined with the world after us. One is the feeling of awe: a sense of something so vast that it interrupts our selfish preoccupations. Psychologists induce awe by showing people images of enormous things, like the Milky Way or a vista of Himalayan peaks from the show “Planet Earth.” In one such study, after watching awe-inspiring clips vs. amusing ones, people reported feeling small but also more connected to others; they also acted more generously.
The vastness of time is just as staggering. Imagine standing next to the California pine tree Methuselah — at almost 5,000 years old, probably the most ancient living organism on the planet. You could imagine a person touching its trunk a hundred generations ago, and a hundred generations from now. Seeing yourself as part of a long chain of humanity, you might be more inclined to tend to its future.
Consistent with this idea, psychologists have found that people with a long view of the past are more concerned with environmental sustainability. For instance, older countries score more favorably on an environmental performance index, which records variables such as national air pollution and water cleanliness. And in one clever study, researchers showed Americans timelines depicting the nation’s history. Some participants saw a timeline spanning back to the Roman Empire, which made the United States seem like a brand-new arrival on the world stage. Others saw a timeline that began with Christopher Columbus’s departure from Spain, making America’s history feel longer. People made to see the United States as an old country vs. a young one reported feeling closer to future generations and were more willing to donate to environmental organizations.
The site where a monument was unveiled this month in memory of Okjokull, Iceland's first glacier lost to climate change. (Jeremie Richard/AFP/Getty Images)
Touching the past can connect us to the future, especially when we look back fondly. In one set of studies, psychologists induced people to think about the sacrifices past generations had made for them. These individuals became more willing to sacrifice short-term gains to help future generations, paying forward their forbears’ kindness. Organizations like Longpath are applying these insights to foster sustainable thinking. They reason that gratitude toward the past might empower us to help those who come after — a kind of golden rule across time.
Empathizing with the future, alone, will not save the planet. The majority of carbon emissions come from a tiny number of massive companies, which are abetted by government deregulation. Empathy can be a psychological force for good, but climate change is a structural problem.
That doesn’t mean individuals don’t matter. Our behaviors create norms, social movements and political pressure. Newfound awareness of how voiceless, powerless people suffer has sparked enormous change in the past. It can again.
Empathy is built on self-preservation. We watch out for our children because they carry our genes, for our tribe because it offers sex, safety and sustenance. Spreading our care across space and time runs counter to those ancient instincts. It’s difficult emotional work, and also necessary. We must try to evolve our emotional lives: away from the past and toward a future that needs us desperately. Doing so might help us to finally become the ancestors our descendants deserve.
Trees stand dead in a forest near Oderbrueck, Germany, the result of damage from bark beetles. The destructive insects are flourishing as winters get warmer. (Julian Stratenschulte/AP)
Sally was on my freshman trip at Dartmouth, and I knew her peripherally until we graduated. We weren't really friends at all, and we unsurprisingly lost touch completely after graduation, but I remember she was a very nice person. I'm not at all surprised that she did something this awesome in the 14 years since I last spoke with her, and sad to hear that she's died. I think I'll donate a little to Charleston Legal Access in her memory.
Sally Newman, who founded a sliding-scale nonprofit law firm after her experience seeing people fall through the cracks of the court system, died on Fri. Aug. 16 of cancer at the age of 36.
Newman grew up in rural Montana and founded Charleston Legal Access after graduating from Dartmouth and NYU Law School and working as a federal law clerk, including for Judge Richard M. Gergel in Charleston. It was through that work and firsthand experience as a child where Newman witnessed people in legal disputes wind up in even more trouble because they were unable to afford an attorney to represent them.
"In addition to growing up poor and seeing the impact that lack of access to the legal system has on people, not just people who are below the poverty line, but for anyone who has a modest income, running into legal trouble can be really disastrous," Newman told City Paper reporter Dustin Waters in 2016.
Over the course of 2018, Newman began receiving treatment for osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer, documenting her journey on Medium. On March 31, 2018, Newman married Romain Philippe Guimard, a French professional acrobat, at Mepkin Abbey. They first met in 2013 while he was in town performing with Compagnie XY for Spoleto Festival USA, according to the couple's announcement in The New York Times.
In her final post on July 29, Newman wrote that her options for further therapy seemed limited, both because of increasing pain and obstacles in the health care system. Through it all, Newman remained thankful for the life she had, writing:
"I don't have a bucket list. I'm lucky to have lived my life exactly how I've wanted to. I've traveled, and visited wonderful places. I've worked my ass off as a lawyer advocating for those without the resources to do it on their own. I've worn lovely clothes and attended lavish parties and renovated an old house and planted fruit trees in my front yard. I've marched in the streets and protested wars and then worked to resettle refugees from those wars. I've performed in and produced circus shows, dangling from rigs and trees and spinning freely, joyously, through the air. I've hiked mountains and visited parks and camped and had the most wonderful, enjoyable, frustrating, interesting mishaps and relationships and adventures. What I want now is mostly just to rest and be in retirement. I don't care about the Mueller report or the eighty democratic candidates. I'm tired."
In a statement on Thursday, Patrick Wooten, the board chairman of Charleston Legal Access, said, "Most of us spend our lives thinking of how we can advance our own interests. Not Sally. She devoted her life to fighting for others — for those who needed an advocate but could not afford one."
"To say that Sally was selfless, brilliant, and passionate is an understatement," Wooten said.
Writing that Charleston Legal Access will continue to build on the foundation laid by Newman, the firm's executive director Lana Kleiman said, "Sally was a true visionary and because of her, each year, hundreds of our fellow neighbors will have access to justice that otherwise would not have been available to them. Her passing leaves a hole in the lives of so many, felt keenly by the legal community, her colleagues and friends."
Adair Ford Boroughs, who officiated Newman's wedding and previously worked as CLA's executive director before announcing a run for Congress in South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District, said Newman's work will continue to have an impact.
"Very few people leave a legacy as far reaching as Sally's, not only in her selfless work fighting for everyday people at CLA, but in so many individuals who have been forever changed by her presence in our lives," Boroughs said in a statement on Thursday. "She will not only be remembered, but will continue to impact our world for the better through the many people she touched."
Anybody who wants some free contraception for the next three months, click through the article with the image of the painting. I'm not going to be able to un-see that anytime soon.
Given the hurricane-force storm of media attention swirling around the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the news that he owned a particularly strange work of art perhaps doesn’t seem like the biggest of deals. After all, the aggressively unsettling decor of Epstein’s homes, which includes displays of prosthetic eyeballs, a female mannequin hanging from a chandelier, and a chessboard whose pieces featured the likenesses of his staff clad only in underwear, was already well established.
This particular work of art, however, features an image of former president Bill Clinton clad in a blue dress and high heels, gesturing to the viewer. Given that Bill Clinton’s name has been prominentlyconnected to Epstein, word of the painting sent the internet conspiracy machine wild.
The original source of the gossip is the not-exactly-reliable Daily Mail, which quotes an unnamed source who snapped a photo of the unsettling Clinton painting through a doorway at Epstein’s $56 million home in 2012. (The Mail claimed it had seen metadata verifying the location and date of the photo.) The New York Post, picking up the story, quoted another anonymous source saying of the painting, “It was hanging up there prominently—as soon as you walked in—in a room to the right. Everybody who saw it laughed and smirked.”
The front of Jeffrey Epstein’s residence at 9 East 71st Street in the borough of Manhattan, New York on July 18, 2019 in New York City. Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images.
The painting has been identified as Parsing Bill by New York-based Australian artist Petrina Ryan-Kleid. (A print version is available on Saatchi Art starting at $40.) The more feverish corners of the internet immediately began to decode the imagery for clues—but the truth is that it was part of a body of student work produced quite independently of Epstein.
The Clinton painting comes from a pair of works by Ryan-Kleid that lightly satirized political figures. Its companion, a painting of George W. Bush called War Games, features the former president sitting on the floor of the White House playing with paper airplanes and two fallen Jenga towers, referencing his manipulation of the attacks of 9/11 to justify war in Iraq, the defining scandal of Bush’s White House tenure. As for Parsing Bill, the blue dress seems a likely reference to the blue dress that served as evidence in the former president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the scandal that marked Clinton’s time in office.
Petrina Ryan-Kleid, War Games (2012). Image via the New York Academy of Art.
Parsing Bill and War Games were shown at the 2012 Tribeca Ball, a fundraiser for Ryan-Kleid’s alma mater, the New York Academy of Art. Photos from A Guest of a Guest, a party blog, show the artist posing in front of the two works at the star-studded event.
Earlier today, Ryan-Klein said in a statement to artnet News that she had no idea where the painting had ended up until she saw it light up the news yestereday:
In 2012, as a grad student at the New York Academy of Art, I painted pictures of Presidents Bill Clinton and Bush as part of my Master’s thesis. When the school put on a fundraiser at the Tribeca Ball that year, they sold my painting to one of the attendees. I had no idea who the buyer was at the time. As with most of my paintings, I had completely lost track of this piece when it was sold seven years ago. So it was a complete surprise to me to learn yesterday that it wound up in Epstein’s home.
After graduating from the New York Academy of Art, Ryan-Klein worked as a studio assistant for Jeff Koons in 2015 and 2016 and now does social media marketing for artists in New York.
Aside from general titillation, it is unclear how, exactly, the Clinton painting might fit into the many conspiracy theories swirling around the apparent suicide by the 66-year-old convicted pedophile, which have included president Donald Trump retweeting a theory that the Clintons had Epstein killed. Bill Clinton is documented to have flown on Epstein’s plane in 2002 and 2003, and says that he visited Epstein’s home in 2002, but issued a statement noting that he was accompanied by staff and his security detail at all times.
(Donald Trump, for his part, is also known to have spent time with Epstein, and infamously remarked to New York magazine that the financier was “terrific” and “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”)
It is certainly possible to read the painting as a reminder by Epstein to himself and to guests that he had dirt on powerful people. But then again, the common denominator of all of Epstein’s known decor, so far, is simply that he had a taste for the cartoonishly sadistic.
Shared for the 2nd one. My 3yo is *deep* into the "why?" phase, and it's only making me realize that I actually don't have good answers for most things.
The plastic straw thing is a good example of Trump's tactical shrewdness. It's the kind of thing that very effectively paints his political opponents as petty, in everyday experiential ways that anybody can relate to.
And, not gonna lie, I like the environment and marine life, and I fucking hate paper straws. Especially when it's the only thing available for my 16-month-old in a restaurant, because toddlers definitely do not know how to use straws with the extreme gentleness that paper ones require in order not to immediately turn into a useless mile of soggy wood pulp mush.
**Note to self: buy reusable plastic or metal straws for my diaper bag.
Note #2 to self: when I fail to ever get around to that, curse the Libs every time Calvin screams full-throatedly because he can't suck the water out of his glass with his useless paper straw.
‘Everything that we hold dear’: From race to plastic straws, Trump dials up culture wars in divisive play for 2020 votes
Add to list
On my list
President Trump, seen here in a file photo, has sought to force his potential presidential rivals to defend the most far-reaching cultural ideas circulating within their party. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
George W. Bush had “freedom fries,” Sarah Palin had the “Big Gulp” and Dan Quayle had the Hollywood portrayal of an unwed single mother named Murphy Brown.
For President Trump, it’s paper straws — the latest addition to an ever-growing list of cultural flash points his campaign is seeking to highlight as part of a base-focused reelection effort.
As cities and coffee chains across the country have adopted policies aimed at limiting environmental damage, the president’s campaign has targeted what it calls “liberal paper straws.” It’s selling a Trump-branded plastic version as a fundraising tool.
Pointing to the “runaway success” of the straws — which have earned the campaign more than $670,000 in a month — communications director Tim Murtaugh said they represent Trump’s ability to make a political point using a cultural issue everyday voters can relate to.
“With the Trump straws, the campaign tapped into widespread disdain for paper straws that simply don’t work,” he said. “People don’t like being told they can’t do simple things, and so the Trump straws were born.”
From straws to wind turbines to socially conservative issues, Trump is deliberately amplifying public tensions by seizing on divisive topics to energize his base, according to campaign aides and White House advisers. The president is following much the same strategy that he pursued in 2016 — inserting himself into the issues his supporters are already discussing, and using blunt us-against-them language without regard to nuance or political correctness.
Subtitle Settings
Font
Default
Mono Sans
Mono Serif
Sans
Serif
Comic
Fancy
Small Caps
Font Size
Default
Small
Medium
Large
X-Large
XX-Large
Font Edge
Default
Outline Dark
Outline Light
Outline Dark Bold
Outline Light Bold
Shadow Dark
Shadow Light
Shadow Dark Bold
Shadow Light Bold
Font Color
Default
Black
Silver
Gray
White
Maroon
Red
Purple
Fuchsia
Green
Lime
Olive
Yellow
Navy
Blue
Teal
Aqua
Orange
Default
100%
75%
50%
25%
0%
Background
Default
Black
Silver
Gray
White
Maroon
Red
Purple
Fuchsia
Green
Lime
Olive
Yellow
Navy
Blue
Teal
Aqua
Orange
Default
100%
75%
50%
25%
0%
How Trump is doubling-down on his race-baiting base strategy
Skip
The Fix’s Eugene Scott analyzes how President Trump’s recent attacks on Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) play into his 2020 reelection strategy. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
As Democrats debate policy, Trump has sought to force his potential rivals to defend the most far-reaching cultural ideas circulating within their party.
“It’s part and parcel of his long-running effort to energize his base at the expense of those who were not for him before and who are not for him today,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “Part of his appeal to his base is that he is famously and proudly not politically correct.”
While Trump’s campaign aides have proactively pushed his politically incorrect message with creative and at times tongue-in-cheek marketing, the president has caught some of his advisers off guard by crudely inflaming culture wars on heavier topics such as race, abortion and immigration.
He has attacked his opponents (including four minority congresswomen) as un-American, described entire U.S. cities (many with large minority populations) as deplorable, and pitted his mostly white base against an increasingly diverse Democratic Party.
The president — angry at Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) for his oversight of the Trump administration — recently targeted Baltimore, tweeting that “no human being would want to live there,” and derisively comparing the majority-black city’s homicide rate to Afghanistan.
Trump: ‘I do think we have bigger problems than plastic straws’
President Trump on July 19 pointed to other utensils made from plastic when asked about banning plastic straws. (The Washington Post)
“The Democrat Party is now being led by four left-wing extremists who reject everything that we hold dear,” Trump said at an Aug. 1 campaign rally in Cincinnati, a reference to the four congresswomen he targeted last month with a racist go-back-to-your-country taunt.
Like much of what Trump does, the strategy of inflaming the culture wars carries significant risks. Democrats say the president is writing off much of the country and giving some of the voters who stayed home in 2016 a reason to vote against him. Some 2020 Democratic candidates have specifically sought to portray Trump’s constant agitation of political, cultural and racial divisions as too exhausting for the country.
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) contrasted her presidential campaign with Trump’s by saying that voters want a political message “about lifting people up and not beating them down.”
“People are just tired of what we’ve been seeing,” she told reporters earlier this month in Detroit. “It is tiring.” And after two mass shootings earlier this month — including one authorities think may have been inspired by anti-immigrant racism — Democrats say Trump’s unwillingness to play the traditional presidential role of national healer and bipartisan problem-solver has been laid bare.
“We have a president who has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation,” former vice president Joe Biden said Aug. 7. “And that makes winning the battle for the soul of this nation that much harder.”
Trump disparaged Biden on a day the president had set aside for visiting victims of the shootings that killed 31 people in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio.
“Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making a speech,” Trump tweeted from Air Force One as he traveled between the grieving communities. “Sooo Boring!”
In recent weeks, Trump has attacked Nike for pulling shoes with the Betsy Ross flag, blamed wind turbines for various community ills and suggested labeling anti-fascist demonstrators — known as antifa — as a domestic terrorist group.
Democrats have also arguably provided Trump with some of the fodder he is using in his cultural crusade, as the party continues a leftward shift on both economic and social issues. He has accused Democrats of favoring undocumented immigrants over Americans, comparing downtrodden U.S. cities to parts of Central America.
While Trump’s turn toward more overt racially offensive rhetoric surprised some campaign officials, they were much more prepared to follow suit when the president began taking on liberal cities. Campaign manager Brad Parscale had already been testing one aspect of the message through the paper straw sales.
Parscale sent out a tweet last month lamenting what he characterized as excessive liberalism, complete with a picture of a disintegrating paper straw, smashed tight in the lid of his cup.
“I’m so over paper straws. #LiberalProgress,” he wrote. “This is exactly what they would do to the economy as well. Squeeze it until it doesn’t work.”
Within hours, the campaign website was promoting a new product — plastic red straws, with “Trump” written down the side.
As of last week, the campaign had sold more than 44,700 packs of 10 at $15 per pack, Murtaugh said.
Ralph Reed, chairman of the socially conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, compared Trump’s ability to capture the cultural zeitgeist to another political figure who transcended politics and entered the mainstream of popular culture.
He recalled how former Alaska governor Sarah Palin protested a proposed ban on large soft drinks in New York City at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference. During her speech, she reached below her podium and pulled out a Big Gulp, taking a sip to the roar of the crowd.
“It was for Palin, and similarly is for Trump today, a way to combine a cultural message with policy substance, in a way that energizes conservatives and marginalizes the left,” he said.
Republican allies of President George W. Bush sought to rebrand french fries as “freedom fries” in 2003 as part of an effort to galvanize the public and protest the French government’s opposition to the Iraq War. In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle leaped into the culture wars by publicly castigating the television show “Murphy Brown” after the sitcom depicted the lead character choosing to have a baby as an unwed career woman. Quayle, who said in a campaign speech that the show was “mocking the importance of fathers,” later backtracked amid a backlash from critics.
Karine Jean-Pierre, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser at MoveOn.org, said Democrats should ignore Trump’s attempts to goad them into debates over tangential social issues on his terms.
“Don’t play into the labels and the silliness of where they want to take us,” she said, adding that Democrats should take Trump on directly when he engages in racist behavior.
Jean-Pierre said Trump, who won a narrow electoral college victory in 2016 amid low Democratic voter turnout in key states, is only energizing liberal voters with his divisive rhetoric. Attacking Democrats over social and cultural issues comes naturally to Trump, who entered politics via reality television, said David Urban, a 2016 campaign aide who advises the president.
“What he’s doing, this culture war, is going to just excite our base even more — in particular, people of color,” she said. “They’re looking at this and they’re thinking, ‘This is crazy. This is not safe. This is not okay.’ Democrats have to tap into that energy.”
“The culture wars are a byproduct of the political wars,” he said. “It’s the coasts versus Mid-America. It’s people who drive Teslas versus people who drive John Deere tractors. And it’s being fanned by dueling cable networks.”
Trump and his campaign have also seized on policy issues that have emerged in the Democratic presidential race, including Medicare-for-all, decriminalization of unauthorized border crossings and health benefits for undocumented immigrants.
At the recent Democratic presidential debates, some candidates appeared to agree that the party should be wary of handing Trump another term by embracing a left-wing agenda.
“We’ve got to talk about the working-class issues, the people that take a shower after work,” Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) said at a debate last month, after cautioning Democrats against focusing too much on helping undocumented immigrants. A clip of his comments was shared on Twitter by the Trump campaign.
Ayres, the pollster, said a base-first strategy could work for Trump if Democrats nominate a candidate who tries to placate Democratic activists at the expense of more-moderate voters.
“If the Democrats nominate someone who can consolidate the non-Trump majority of the country, then they’ll have a very good chance to win,” he said. “On the other hand, if they nominate a far-left-winger who splits the non-Trump majority, Donald Trump can be reelected with just his base.”
Trump was able to win over some traditionally Democratic voters in 2016 by presenting himself as a tough political outsider who would disrupt Washington.
His straight-talking approach and with-us-or-against-us calls to patriotism are part of his appeal, even as they occasionally land him in hot water politically, said Karl Rove, who worked as a political strategist for Bush.
“Others may dress it up, but he just goes straight there, and he’s an everyman, so the way he phrases it is as an everyman,” Rove said. “Now, it gets him into trouble sometimes, so the ‘go back to where you came from’ was not very artful.”
Trump tweeted last month that four Democratic congresswomen of color — three of them born in the United States, the fourth a naturalized citizen — should “go back” to other countries. The campaign spent more than a week trying to make the case that the tweets were not about race. Polls showed that voters found the attacks to be out of bounds and a growing number of Americans view the president as a racist.
But Jim DeMint, the chairman of the Conservative Partnership Institute and a former Republican senator from South Carolina, said Trump is reaching beyond the traditional Republican voter for new audiences by breaking from political tradition.
“I don’t know that it’s strategy, but it turns out to be so much more effective because I just don’t think he thinks politically, which is kind of refreshing in a lot ways but it gets him in trouble a lot of times,” he said.
While Rove and other political strategists have long used wedge issues to press a political advantage, Trump has shifted the Republican playbook by expanding beyond socially conservative issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, said former Trump White House official Andy Surabian.
“It’s not like plastic straws is an issue for social conservatives; plastic straws are an issue that touches atheists, Jews, Catholics, evangelicals,” Surabian said. “It’s an issue that touches pop culture.”
David Weigel and Dan Balz contributed to this report.
“Increased spacing has been shown to help facilitate processing in a number of other reading studies,” Johnson explained to me by email, using two spaces after each period. “Removing the spaces between words altogether drastically hurts our ability to read fluently, and increasing the amount of space between words helps us process the text.”
In the Skidmore study, among people who write with two spaces after periods—“two-spacers”—there was an increase in reading speed of 3 percent when reading text with two spaces following periods, as compared to one. This is, Johnson points out, an average of nine additional words per minute above their performance “under the one-space conditions.”
This is a small difference, though if a change like this saved even a tiny amount of time, or prevented a tiny amount of miscommunication, the net benefit across billions of people could be enormous. Entire economies could be made or broken, wars won or lost.
Or so it would seem. The conclusions she drew from that data pushed people into their corners on social media, where they dealt with it in variously intense ways.
Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at University of Michigan, tweeted in reference to the study: “Science can blow your mind sometimes, and this time it has come down on the side of two spaces after a period.”
Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Yale University, wrote: “Hurray! Science vindicates my longstanding practice, learned at age 12, of using TWO SPACES after periods in text. NOT ONE SPACE. Text is easier to read that way. Of course, on Twitter, I use one space, given 280 characters.”
There’s a lot going on in that tweet, but you get the idea.
Others were less ecstatic. Robert VerBruggen, the deputy managing editor at National Review, shared the study with the comment: “New facts forced me to change my mind about drug legalization but I just don’t think I can do this.”
My colleague Ian Bogost tweeted simply, “This is terrorism.”
Full disclosure: I also shared a screenshot of the study’s conclusion that “the eye-movement record suggested that initial processing of the text was facilitated when periods were followed by two spaces.” I said about this only, “Oh no.”
I find two spaces after a period unsettling, like seeing a person who never blinks or still has their phone’s keyboard sound effects on. I plan to teach my kids never to reply to messages from people who put two spaces after a period. I want this study’s conclusion to be untrue—to uncover some error in the methodology, or some scandal that discredits the researchers or the university or the entire field of psychophysics.
So let’s look for that. Because this really does matter: In a time of greater and greater screen time, and more and more consumption of media, how do we optimize the information-delivery process?
I teach my college students to lie. Honestly. Whoppers. It’s good for them.
Add to list
In my list
Here’s what accounts for the beguiling vitality of the bald-faced liar.
A man browses through the Twitter account of Alt News, a fact-checking website. (Altaf Qadri/AP)
By David Lawrence Morse
David Lawrence Morse is a writer and lecturer at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
July 30
When President Trump’s “false or misleading statements” surpassed 10,000 recently, as documented by the Washington Post Fact Checker, political commentators worried that Trump’s lying might encourage Americans to lie more frequently. “Without truth and a common factual basis for our national life,” Peter Wehner wrote in the Atlantic, “a free society cannot operate.”
Such claims are valid — we have good reason to fear that Trump’s lying threatens our democracy. But pious eulogizing of the truth can oversimplify the problem. We need to “model truthfulness, temperance, decency and integrity in our daily lives,” Wehner wrote. “If you want to improve yourself and the people around you,” new atheist author Sam Harris has instructed, “you need only stop lying.”
Equating decency with honesty, and wickedness with lies, however, ignores the moral complexity of mendacity and our conflicted relationship with the truth. And so while college courses on spotting fake news are proliferating, in my class at the University of Michigan, I teach students how to lie. Not tiny lies, or white lies, but big lies, real whoppers, told for political ends. My purpose is not to validate Trump’s lies but to help students understand what commentators like Wehner and Harris overlook: Lying is not only essential for human social interaction — to protect our privacy, or the feelings of others, or the oppressed — it is inherently liberating, and that’s what makes it dangerous and seductive.
Each student in my class starts by proposing a lie with a political agenda that could be loosed to great effect. They explain why someone would propagate the lie, and the lie’s intended audience. By this point, we’ve studied several real-world examples, including the Soviets’ lie that the CIA invented HIV/AIDS to target African Americans, and the Republicans’ lie that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels.” There’s something brilliantly wicked about these lies: how they exploit anxieties within the target populations; how they feel true even though they’re false. In each, you glimpse the creator’s ingenuity at work. You sense the purpose, trajectory and outcome: a weapon artfully created to do maximum damage.
Some students struggled. They lacked the creativity to dream up an original lie or the moral license to do something that was self-evidently unethical.
Others claimed to struggle to appease their conscience (I’m not the kind of person who could do this), while in fact they cooked up some corkers. One student, I’ll call her Tara, evinced a small-town sensibility — respectful, quiet, unassuming. She didn’t like any of the lies she had come up with. They weren’t original, she said, and anyway, it didn’t feel right to assert something that was obviously wrong.
I reminded her of the assignment’s rationale, and eventually she relented: What if, she proposed, as part of their opposition to Trump’s immigration policy, Democrats put out the lie that ICE was forcibly sterilizing immigrant women at the border.
My God, I said, that’s perfect.
Right away you could see it: How such a lie would appeal to liberals’ tendency to believe the worst of Trump. How it would call attention to Republicans’ sanctity-of-life hypocrisy. All successful lies manipulate the truth. Tara’s lie would take advantage of the fact that ICE was already separating mothers from children at the border; it wouldn’t take much to convince outraged liberals that ICE had gone further.
Afterward, I asked students to react: What was it like, inventing a big lie? Some reiterated Tara’s squeamishness, while others claimed they had found something exhilarating in the process. Tara herself admitted as much, while another student surprised us all by describing how he had not only invented a lie but formatted it to resemble a New York Times article and sent it to friends and family. I held up my hands in innocence: I wasn’t responsible for the spread of fake news. But I had to know — what were the results of his experiment?
Of his 25 targets, 24 accepted the article as true. Only one questioned its authenticity.
That was interesting, but, given what researchers have learned about fake news’ ability to spread, not surprising. More surprising was the enthusiasm with which this student embraced the task. A military kid, strait-laced, crew cut, who wore his uniform to class. Like Tara, respectful, quiet, unassuming. Yet also like Tara, he found in the assignment an invitation to break the rules, experienced the thrill of crossing illicit thresholds, enjoyed the license to play with reality. The exercise was liberating.
This is classic Nietzsche. The argument that truths are illusions, that conventional morality, stitched together from ancient taboos and superstitions, is a herd mentality that limits our creativity, our individual pursuit of excellence, our experience of life.
Some might argue that my class is corrupting honest youth. That I’m teaching students how to deceive, how to pursue their own agenda without constraint. Don’t we have enough scammers without professors training more? Moreover, I worry that, as a fiction writer who enjoys playing with reality, I am transporting my values to a discipline — public policy — where they don’t belong.
But as Hannah Arendt wrote, the liar “says what is not so because he wants things to be different from what they are — that is, he wants to change the world.” And he does so, Arendt added, using “this mysterious faculty of ours that enables us to say, ‘The sun is shining,’ when it is raining cats and dogs.”
To create something new, you first have to deny the validity of the status quo. Lying is a kind of creation. There is vitality in the act, while defending the truth is inherently static. Liars can say anything. They can make up a story perfectly suited to political exigencies, whereas the truth is stubborn and unpliable.
Creating a Big Lie helped students acquire a more sophisticated sense of political lying than they could gain through reading moralizing essays. They came to understand that many Americans are attracted to Trump not in spite of but because of his lies; they admit he’s lying but believe that his lies are evidence of his courage to thumb his nose not only at the establishment but also reality. They thrill in what they perceive to be Trump’s vigor.
My students brought a similar vigor to the second part of their assignment, a simulation in which they chose one lie from among the many that they had proposed, then in groups attempted to advance the lie or defend the truth. Their chosen lie was another artfully devious conceit: When 517 prisoners went missing from Orleans Parish Prison after Hurricane Katrina (which is true), as the lie would have it, they were kidnapped by NASA for experimentation.
To begin, each student adopted the persona of a real-world politician, journalist or so-called expert, then used a Twitter-style platform to advance their arguments, criticize their opponents and introduce new “evidence.” With gusto, the Liars took advantage of the tools in the deceivers’ playbook, larding their lies with facts (e.g., government experiments on vulnerable populations), asking leading questions, posing worst-case scenarios. Meanwhile, the Truthers, beholden to the facts, could not provide an accurate answer to the liars’ demands as to the location of the missing prisoners. Instead they feebly attempted to shift the debate to the jobs that NASA creates, or criminal justice reform.
I teach another class at Michigan on what I call “applied utopianism.” We read utopian philosophers, then study real-world outcomes of their proposals. This demonstrates the dangers of extreme idealism, but also shows that, to solve intractable problems, it might be necessary to envision the impossible. Sometimes wild creativity is needed, unconstrained by reality. We study how utopians’ fanciful proposals occasionally proved useful — and yet, when students must come up with their own original ideas, they struggle, producing hackneyed recombinations of previous proposals. In fact, it’s been in my lying class — not utopia — where students have demonstrated the most creativity.
Maybe it’s a flaw in the course or assignment design that has inhibited students’ imagination in utopia. Or maybe, if we want to inspire future leaders to be creative, we must figure out how to harness the liar’s ingenuity and bravado — the fearlessness in the face of reality and willingness to assert that what has been accepted as true might not be the truth after all. To do this without lying — to go beyond reality while maintaining a grasp on the distinction between fact and fantasy — that is the visionary’s calling.
“It’s cool people are buying this, that’s great and all,” he said. “But I’ve got to be honest, I am so tickled in the most petty way possible that the president of the United States, who I despise, stood up and gave a talk in front of this graphic. Whoever put that up is my absolute hero.”
Charles Leazott hadn’t thought about the seal in months.
The 46-year-old graphic designer threw it together after the 2016 presidential election — it was one part joke, one part catharsis. He used to be a proud Republican. He voted for George W. Bush. Twice.
But Donald J. Trump’s GOP was no longer his party. So he created a mock presidential seal to prove his point.
He substituted the arrows in the eagle’s claw for a set of golf clubs — a nod to the new president’s favorite pastime. In the other set of talons, he swapped the olive branch for a wad of cash and replaced the United States’ Latin motto with a Spanish insult. Then, his coup de grace: a two-headed imperial bird lifted straight from the Russian coat of arms, an homage to the president’s checkered history with the adversarial country.
“This is the most petty piece of art I have ever created,” the Richmond resident said in an interview with The Washington Post.
The seal wasn’t meant for a wide audience. But then, years later, it wound up stretched across a jumbo-tron screen behind an unwitting President Trump as he spoke to a conference packed with hundreds of his young supporters.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, The Post was the first to report that the seal was fake — and that neither the White House, nor Turning Point USA, the organizers of the star-studded Teen Student Action Summit, knew how it got there or where it came from. Leazott woke up Thursday and saw the news in a Reddit post as he drank his morning coffee. Then, a torrent of messages.
“It’s been chaos,” he said. “This is not what I expected when I woke up today.”
No one expected it. A Turning Point spokesman said Wednesday the conservative group wasn’t even aware of the phony seal until The Post called him. He spent that night trying track down the culprit and determine whether it was an intentional act by a rogue staffer, or just an honest mistake.
The faux seal was on-screen for at least 80 seconds, in plain sight but largely ignored as hundreds in the room at the Washington Marriott Marquis trained their attention on Trump.
But the modified symbol was loaded with jabs at the president — subtle and overt. The Russian eagle, an allusion to accusations that he embraced the Kremlin, and the Spanish script, a reference to Trump’s controversial border policies and his denigration of Latin American immigrants. Instead of E pluribus unum — “out of many, one” — Leazott wrote “45 es un títere,” or “45 is a puppet,” a callback to a viral exchange between Trump and Hillary Clinton in a 2016 debate.
“I’m a graphic designer, it’s just something I tossed together,” he said. “This was just a goofy thing for some people I knew. I had no idea it would blow up like this."
Left: Russia's coat of arms. (iStock) Right: The doctored seal of the president at Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, Tuesday, July 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) (iStock/AP Photo/Andrew Harnik//iStock/AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
By Thursday morning, the Turning Point spokesman said the group had identified the staffer responsible for turning Leazott’s design into a trending topic. He called the incident a last-minute oversight, the result of a quick online search to find a second high-resolution photo of the presidential seal to place behind Trump. He said the mistake was “unacceptable.”
“We did let the individual go,” the spokesman said. “I don’t think it was malicious intent, but nevertheless.”
Leazott doesn’t buy it. He thinks whoever was responsible had to know exactly what they were looking for. He believes the person dug up the image he created and used it intentionally.
“That’s a load of crap,” he said in response to Turning Point’s explanation. “You have to look for this. There’s no way this was an accident is all I’m saying.”
After The Post story published, Internet sleuths went looking, too. They found the image’s origin, tracing it back to an online marketplace Leazott set up to sell shirts and stickers sporting the seal, along with other jokey “resistance” apparel. And the citizens of the Web wanted to buy his stuff.
In one fell news cycle, Leazott began making money and fielding calls from papers and TV stations from across the country. People wanted to support him. But the trolls came, too.
“The worst has been Facebook,” he said, which he hadn’t checked “in like a year.”
“Holy crap at the amount of vile, hateful Facebook messages," he said. "It’s apparently a personal affront to some people.”
But, Leazott said, it’s him who gets the last laugh. A photo of Trump in front of his seal is now his computer background, and the person who used it at the event is “either wildly incompetent or the best troll ever — either way, I love them.”
As of Thursday afternoon, Leazott’s shirts were sold out. He said he had to start working with a fulfillment center just to meet the demand. He also revived the primary website for his brand, OneTermDonnie, which includes a paean to the American Civil Liberties Union, where the site says 10 percent of all sales will be directed.
“It’s cool people are buying this, that’s great and all,” he said. “But I’ve got to be honest, I am so tickled in the most petty way possible that the president of the United States, who I despise, stood up and gave a talk in front of this graphic. Whoever put that up is my absolute hero.”
Democratic candidates on the stage before their first debate on Wednesday.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
Image
Democratic candidates on the stage before their first debate on Wednesday.CreditCreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump. So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?
According to a recent Gallup poll, 35 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, 35 percent call themselves moderate and 26 percent call themselves liberal. The candidates at the debates this week fall mostly within the 26 percent. The party seems to think it can win without any of the 35 percent of us in the moderate camp, the ones who actually delivered the 2018 midterm win.
The progressive narrative is dominating in part because progressives these days have a direct and forceful story to tell and no interest in compromising it. It’s dominating because no moderate wants to bear the brunt of progressive fury by opposing it.
It’s also dominating because the driving dynamic in this campaign right now is not who can knock off Joe Biden, the more moderate front-runner. It’s who can survive the intense struggle between Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and others to be the surviving left-wing alternative. All the energy and competition is on the progressive side. Biden tries to bob and weave above it all while the whole debate pulls sharply leftward.
Sign Up for Jamelle Bouie's Newsletter
Join Jamelle Bouie as he shines a light on overlooked writing, culture and ideas from around the internet.
The party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable. And it’s doing it without too much dissent.
First, there is health care. When Warren and Harris raised their hands and said that they would eliminate employer-based health insurance, they made the most important gesture of the campaign so far. Over 70 percent of Americans with insurance through their employers are satisfied with their health plan. Warren, Harris and Sanders would take that away.
According to a Hill-HarrisX survey, only 13 percent of Americans say they would prefer a health insurance system with no private plans. Warren and Sanders pin themselves, and perhaps the Democratic Party, to a 13 percent policy idea. Trump is smiling.
Second, there is the economy. All of the Democrats seem to have decided to run a Trump-style American carnage campaign. The economy is completely broken. It only benefits a tiny sliver. Yet in a CNN poll, 71 percent of Americans say that the economy is very or somewhat good. We’re in the longest recovery in American history and the benefits are finally beginning to flow to those who need them most. Overall wages are rising by 3.5 percent, and wages for those in the lowest pay quartile are rising by well over 4 percent, the highest of all groups.
Democrats have caught the catastrophizing virus that inflicts the Trumpian right. They take a good point — that capitalism needs to be reformed to reduce inequality — and they radicalize it so one gets the impression they want to undermine capitalism altogether.
Third, Democrats are wandering into dangerous territory on immigration. They properly trumpet the glories immigrants bring to this country. But the candidates can’t let anybody get to the left of them on this issue. So now you’ve got a lot of candidates who sound operationally open borders. Progressive parties all over the world are getting decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.
Fourth, Democrats are trying to start a populist v. populist campaign against Trump, which is a fight they cannot win. Democratic populists talk as if the only elite in America is big business, big pharma — the top 1 percent. This allows them to sound populist without actually going after their donor bases — the highly educated affluent people along the coasts.
But the big divide in America is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99. It’s between the top 20 percent and the rest. These are the highly educated Americans who are pulling away from everybody else and who have built zoning restrictions and meritocratic barriers to make sure outsiders can’t catch up.
If Democrats run a populist campaign against the business elite, Trump will run a broader populist campaign against the entire educated elite. His populism is more compelling to people who respond to such things. After all, he is actually despised by the American elite, unlike the Democrats.
Finally, Democrats aren’t making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They are good at pointing to Trump’s cruelties, especially toward immigrants. They are good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.
A decent society rests on a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions. Trump is a disrupter. He rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity, and so renders society a savage world of dog eat dog. Democrats spend very little time making this case because defending tradition, manners and civility sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.
The debates illustrate the dilemma for moderate Democrats. If they take on progressives they get squashed by the passionate intensity of the left. If they don’t, the party moves so far left that it can’t win in the fall.
Right now we’ve got two parties trying to make moderates homeless.
Photo illustration by Slate. Images by Science magazine.
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Ugly facts kill beautiful theories, to paraphrase the 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley. But, as we learned recently, policies at the top scientific journals don’t make this easy.
Our story starts in 2008, when a group of researchers published an article (here it is without a paywall) that found political conservatives have stronger physiological reactions to threatening images than liberals do. The article was published in Science, which is one of the most prestigious general science journals around. It’s the kind of journal that can make a career in academia.
It was a path-breaking and provocative study. For decades, political scientists and psychologists have tried to understand the psychological roots of ideological differences. The piece published in Science offered some clues as to why liberals and conservatives differ in their worldviews. Perhaps it has to do with how the brain is wired, the researchers suggested—specifically, perhaps it’s because conservatives’ brains are more attuned to threats than liberals’. It was an exciting finding, it helped usher in a new wave of psychophysiological work in the study of politics, and it generated extensive coverage in popular media. In 2018, 10 years after the publication of the study, the findings were featured on an episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast.
Fast forward to 2014. All four of us were studying the physiological basis of political attitudes, two of us in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Bakker and Schumacher at the University of Amsterdam), and two of us in Philadelphia (Arceneaux and Gothreau at Temple University). We had raised funds to create labs with expensive equipment for measuring physiological reactions, because we were excited by the possibilities that the 2008 research opened for us.
The researchers behind the Sciencearticle had shown a series of images to 46 participants in Nebraska and used equipment to record how much the participants’ palms sweated in response. The images included scary stuff, like a spider on a person’s face. We conducted two “conceptual” replications (one in the Netherlands and one in the U.S.) that used different images to get at the same idea of a “threat”—for example, a gun pointing at the screen. Our intention in these first studies was to try the same thing in order to calibrate our new equipment. But both teams independently failed to find that people’s physiological reactions to these images correlated with their political attitudes.
We believe that it is bad policy for journals like Science to publish big, bold ideas and then leave it to subfield journals to publish replications showing that those ideas aren’t so accurate after all.
Our first thought was that we were doing something wrong. So, we asked the original researchers for their images, which they generously provided to us, and we added a few more. We took the step of “pre-registering” a more direct replication of the Science study, meaning that we detailed exactly what we were going to do before we did it and made that public. The direct replication took place in Philadelphia, where we recruited 202 participants (more than four times than the original sample size of 46 used in the Science study). Again, we found no correlation between physiological reactions to threatening images (the original ones or the ones we added) and political conservatism—no matter how we looked at the data.
By this point, we had become more skeptical of the rationale animating the original study. Neuroscientists can often find a loose match between physiological responses and self-reported attitudes. The question is whether this relationship is really as meaningful as we sometimes think it is. The brain is a complex organ with parallel conscious and unconscious systems that don’t always affect the other one-to-one. We still believe that there is value in exploring how physiological reactions and conscious experience shape political attitudes and behavior, but after further consideration, we have concluded that any such relationships are more complicated than we (and the researchers on the Sciencepaper) presumed.
We drafted a paper that reported the failed replication studies along with a more nuanced discussion about the ways in which physiology might matter for politics and sent it to Science. We did not expect Science to immediately publish the paper, but because our findings cast doubt on an influential study published in its pages, we thought the editorial team would at least send it out for peer review.
It did not. About a week later, we received a summary rejection with the explanation that the Scienceadvisory board of academics and editorial team felt that since the publication of this article the field has moved on and that, while they concluded that we had offered a conclusive replication of the original study, it would be better suited for a less visible subfield journal.
We wrote back asking them to consider at least sending our work out for review. (They could still reject it if the reviewers found fatal flaws in our replications.) We argued that the original article continues to be highly influential and is often featured in popular science pieces in the lay media (for instance, here, here, here, and here), where the research is translated into a claim that physiology allows one to predict liberals and conservatives with a high degree of accuracy. We believe that Science has a responsibility to set the record straight in the same way that a newspaper does when it publishes something that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We were rebuffed without a reason and with a vague suggestion that the journal’s policy on handling replications might change at some point in the future.
We believe that it is bad policy for journals like Science to publish big, bold ideas and then leave it to subfield journals to publish replications showing that those ideas aren’t so accurate after all. Subfield journals are less visible, meaning the message often fails to reach the broader public. They are also less authoritative, meaning the failed replication will have less of an impact on the field if it is not published by Science.
Open and transparent science can only happen when journals are willing to publish results that contradict previous findings. We must resist the human tendency to see a failed replication as an indication that the original research team did something wrong or bad. We should continue to have frank discussions about what we’ve learned over the course of the replication crisis and what we could be doing about it (a conversation that is currently happening on Twitter).
Science requires us to have the courage to let our beautiful theories die public deaths at the hands of ugly facts. Indeed, our replication also failed to replicate part of a study published by one of us—Arceneaux and colleagues—which found that physiological reactions to disgusting images correlated with immigration attitudes. Our takeaway is not that the original study’s researchers did anything wrong. To the contrary, members of the original author team—Kevin Smith, John Hibbing, John Alford and Matthew Hibbing—were very supportive of the entire process, a reflection of the understanding that science requires us to go where the facts lead us. If only journals like Science were willing to lead the way.
Correction, June 25, 2019: The image for this piece originally contained a book covered mislabeled as a cover of Science magazine. The illustration has since been updated.
Trump supporters demonstrated before the first Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
Image
Trump supporters demonstrated before the first Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday.CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
What did you think of the bunch of socialists you just saw debating on stage?
Wait, you may protest, you didn’t see any socialists up there. And you’d be right. The Democratic Party has clearly moved left in recent years, but none of the presidential candidates are anything close to being actual socialists — no, not even Bernie Sanders, whose embrace of the label is really more about branding (“I’m anti-establishment!”) than substance.
Nobody in these debates wants government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean. Most of the candidates are, instead, what Europeans would call “social democrats”: advocates of a private-sector-driven economy, but with a stronger social safety net, enhanced bargaining power for workers and tighter regulation of corporate malfeasance. They want America to be more like Denmark, not more like Venezuela.
Leading Republicans, however, routinely describe Democrats, even those on the right of their party, as socialists. Indeed, all indications are that denunciations of Democrats’ “socialist” agenda will be front and center in the general election campaign. And everyone in the news media accepts this as the normal state of affairs.
Which goes to show the extent to which Republican extremism has been accepted simply as a fact of life, barely worth mentioning.
Sign Up for Jamelle Bouie's Newsletter
Join Jamelle Bouie as he shines a light on overlooked writing, culture and ideas from around the internet.
To see what I mean, imagine the media firestorm, the screams about lost civility, we’d experience if any prominent Democrat described Republicans as a party of fascists, let alone if Democrats made that claim the centerpiece of their national campaign. And such an accusation would indeed be somewhat over the top — but it would be a lot closer to the truth than calling Democrats socialists.
The other day The Times published an Op-Ed that used analysis of party platforms to place U.S. political parties on a left-right spectrum along with their counterparts abroad. The study found that the G.O.P. is far to the right of mainstream European conservative parties. It’s even to the right of anti-immigrant parties like Britain’s UKIP and France’s National Rally. Basically, if we saw something like America’s Republicans in another country, we’d classify them as white nationalist extremists.
True, this is just one study. But it matches up with lots of other evidence. Political scientists who use congressional votes to track ideology find that Republicans have moved drastically to the right over the past four decades, to the point where they are now more conservative than they were at the height of the Gilded Age.
Or just compare the G.O.P., point by point, with parties almost everyone would classify as right-wing authoritarians — parties like Hungary’s Fidesz, which has preserved some of the forms of democracy but has effectively created a permanent one-party state.
Fidesz has cemented its power by politicizing the judiciary, creating rigged election rules, suppressing opposition media and using the power of the state to reward the party’s cronies while punishing businesses that don’t toe the line. Does any of this sound like something that can’t happen here? In fact, does any of it sound like something that isn’t already happening here, and which Republicans will do much more of if they get the chance?
One might even argue that the G.O.P. stands out among the West’s white nationalist parties for its exceptional willingness to crash right through the guardrails of democracy. Extreme gerrymandering, naked voter suppression and stripping power from offices the other party manages to win all the same — these practices seem if anything more prevalent here than in the failing democracies of Eastern Europe.
Oh, and isn’t it remarkable how blasé we’ve become about threats of legal persecution and/or physical violence against anyone who criticizes a Republican president?
So it’s really something to see Republicans trying to tar Democrats as un-American socialists. If they want to see a party that really has broken with fundamental American values, they should look in the mirror.
But that won’t happen, of course. Whoever the Democrats nominate — even if it’s Joe Biden — Republicans will paint him or her as the second coming of Hugo Chávez. The only question is whether it will work.
It might not, or at least not as well as in the past. By spending decades calling everything that might improve Americans’ lives “socialist,” Republicans have squandered much of the accusation’s force. And Donald Trump, who was installed in office with Russian help and clearly prefers foreign dictators to democratic allies, is probably less able to play the “Democrats are unpatriotic” card than previous Republican presidents.
Still, a lot will depend on how the news media handle dishonest attacks. Will we keep seeing headlines that repeat false claims (“Trump Says Democrats Will Ban Hamburgers”), with the information that the claim is false buried deep inside the article? Will we get coverage of actual policy proposals, as opposed to horse-race analysis that only asks how those proposals seem to be playing?
![Description: Cthulhu, an ancient creature, emerges from the ocean.
Cthulhu: \](http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/cthulhuRises.png "Description: Cthulhu, an ancient creature, emerges from the ocean.
Cthulhu: \")
![Wittgenstein, pointing to a blue square: \](http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/WittgensteinTeachesElementary.png "Wittgenstein, pointing to a blue square: \")
The Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, DC. | Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Jamil Zaki is an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory. He is author of “The War for Kindness.” Follow @zakijam 
People take part in a traditional fishing practice in Tuvalu this month. Many islanders rely on fishing to feed their families, but climate change and rising ocean temperatures are reducing fish populations. (Mick Tsikas/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock) 
Children watch a play about climate change in an open-air theater in the village of El-Boghdadi, Egypt, last month. Global warming is a huge issue for Egypt, where agriculture provides an estimated 28 percent of all jobs. (Sima diab/Bloomberg) 
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, at the marina in Plymouth, England, on Aug. 13. She is sailing to a climate conference in New York on a boat designed to leave no carbon footprint. (Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images) 
The site where a monument was unveiled this month in memory of Okjokull, Iceland's first glacier lost to climate change. (Jeremie Richard/AFP/Getty Images)
Trees stand dead in a forest near Oderbrueck, Germany, the result of damage from bark beetles. The destructive insects are flourishing as winters get warmer. (Julian Stratenschulte/AP)
![heading: \](//static.existentialcomics.com/comics/secretHistoryOfPhilosophy1.png "heading: \")
![heading: \](//static.existentialcomics.com/comics/secretHistoryOfPhilosophy2.png "heading: \")
![heading: \](http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/secretHistoryOfPhilosophy1.png "heading: \")
![heading: \](http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/secretHistoryOfPhilosophy2.png "heading: \")
![Description: Camus is standing in front of the hill as Sisyphus rolls up his boulder.
Camus: \](http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/SisyphusMeetsCamus.png "Description: Camus is standing in front of the hill as Sisyphus rolls up his boulder.
Camus: \")
July 30
![Robespierre: \](http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/FrenchRadicalEye1.png "Robespierre: \")
![Diderot
Robespierre
Burke
Robespierre: \](http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/FrenchRadicalEye2.png "Diderot
Robespierre
Burke
Robespierre: \")
