Ross Douthat

Williamson is interesting because she helps reveal the spiritual shape of political ideas. Yang is interesting because he’s eager to think well outside the existing policy consensus and propose ideas that don’t fit naturally into either party’s current box.

But just as I don’t actually share Williamson’s specific theological perspective, I have a core disagreement with Yang: His biggest policy proposal, a guaranteed basic income for every American, is a response to a disruption that I’m not persuaded is actually happening.

Yang argues that we need this guarantee because robots and automation are already destroying, and will increasingly destroy, the employment prospects of millions of Americans. His argument assumes that we’re living through an age of accelerating technological transformation — which seems intuitively correct to many people — and that we need a government that’s ready to compensate the losers even as the winners keep on generating breakthroughs.

But intuition might be deceiving. The best reason to doubt Yang’s story is contained in productivity statistics, which measure the output of the gainfully employed and which traditionally rise rapidly during periods of technological change — because even if workers are losing their jobs to the spinning jenny or the automobile, other workers should be increasing their productivity with the new technology’s assistance.

Lately this hasn’t been happening. Instead productivity growth in the developed world has decelerated over the last decade. To quote a recent summary, in mature economies “labor productivity growth rates halved from an average annual rate of 2.3 percent in the period 2000-2007 to 1.2 percent from 2010-2017.” Combine that with the slow, consistent trend back toward full employment in the American economy — again, not what you’d expect if the labor market were being upended by technology — and the story of our times looks more like stasis than automated revolution, more like the stagnation discerned by a number of heterodox thinkers than the acceleration of conventional wisdom.

Yang and I wrangled about just this question when he graciously came on our Op-Ed podcast, The Argument. He suggested that what we’re seeing in the statistics is that automation for now is just holding down wages and shunting people out of industrial occupations and into low-paying service sector work … and that come a few more breakthroughs and the next recession, when companies will inevitably seek roboticized efficiency, you’ll start to get far more significant disruption.

He could be right; he’s certainly right that automation has had some impact on middle-class jobs, influencing the populism roiling Western politics. But it seems equally plausible that the real state of things is captured by my colleague Neal Boudette’s update on the status of the self-driving car, long portrayed as a technological breakthrough poised to throw lots of people — from long-distance truckers to cabdrivers — out of work.

The boosters predicted that thousands of autonomous vehicles would be on the road this year. Not so — and here’s Boudette quoting an expert arguing that the revolution might be “way in the future” instead: Salesky said Argo and many competitors had developed about 80% of the technology needed to put self-driving cars into routine use — the radar, cameras and other sensors that can identify objects far down roads and highways. But the remaining 20%, including developing software that can reliably anticipate what other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists are going to do, will be much more difficult, he said.

This kind of 80/20 problem feels like a characteristic story of our low-productivity-growth era. It’s not that we’ve ceased to make scientific progress. It’s that our research keeps failing to translate into the kind of dramatic real-world change that we learned to expect from earlier expansions of human knowledge. Across a range of fields we’re constantly being teased by the promise of the big change — the alternative-energy economy, the cure of Alzheimer’s or cancer — and getting, instead, a lot of impressive specialized innovation. Which is not a small thing if your disease is cured by that specialized innovation — but on the societal scale, it’s not the acceleration and turbulence that Yang’s prescription assumes we will experience.

On Sunday I wrote about the failure of America, and humanity, to match the greatness of the Apollo project across the 50 years since, or to fulfill the revolutionary, to-the-stars promise of the space program. After writing that column I read a Twitter thread from the technology writer Timothy Lee that imagined “a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution.”

In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt. It would be clear that the invention of the steam engine triggered a 200-year, S-shaped growth spurt. From the perspective of 2019, people would view the moon landing 50 years earlier as marking the point where the S curve leveled off.

Instead, we did invent the transistor, and thus added the internet-fueled boom of the 1990s to the super-expansion that trailed off in the 1970s. So what was just a coincidence of timing — in Lee’s thought experiment, at least — created an expectation that we could just get another innovation boom after that, and still another one, restoring exponential growth, keeping the Singularity in reach.

But if long expansions are actually as hard to generate as they appeared before the 18th century, then we shouldn’t expect a return to pre-1970s conditions, in which all our 80/20 problems suddenly get solved with Edisonian rapidity. (Though Lee himself thinks self-driving cars may be closer than the new pessimistic mood believes.)

Instead we should anticipate an age of slower growth, in which, as Lee wrote, “the living standards of mature postindustrial civilizations … converge on a sustainable level” instead of leapfrogging one another, and many new inventions are like the robot who shows up in an early episode of the near-future HBO show “Years and Years,” in a scene that promises Isaac Asimovian scenarios until it turns out that the robot’s owner just uses him the way so many people use the internet.

Yang was disappointingly muted in the first round of Democratic debates, but he’ll be back for the second round, and it would be nice if his presence and signature proposal inspired a question for all the candidates: Do you think our era is defined by acceleration or stagnation?

A lot turns on the answer. Both the wisdom of particular policy choices and the correct approach to social discontents depend on whether we should fear the coming robot age — or regret, instead, that our robot overlords’ arrival may be permanently delayed.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/opinion/robots-andrew-yang-democratic-debate.html" id="705182d1-5375-347f-a525-465faa960ff4">The New York Times</a>.

Like many non-Democrats with an interest in both public policy and supernatural religion, I have two favorite 2020 Democratic candidates: Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang.

The Robot Apocalypse Has Been Postponed

First, the policy. Our president’s past views on monetary policy range all over the map; he has been both an inflation hawk and an inflation dove, and he obviously has no definite and deeply held views on monetary issues, as he has no definite and deeply held views on many other topics.

But as on other issues, that lack of ideological mooring has enabled him to break loose from the stale formulas, the always-1979 assumptions, that defined a lot of conservative thinking in the past 10 years.

Shaped by the battles of the inflationary 1970s, much of the right reacted to the financial crisis and its aftermath by critiquing Ben Bernanke’s Fed for its interventionism and warning about imminent inflation. A few conservative journalists and economists dissented, arguing that the situation was very different, the ’70s weren’t returning, and if anything the Fed’s policy had been too hawkish. But you had to listen hard to hear them; for the most part institutional conservatism and Republican politicians kept up a steady “inflation is coming” beat.

Actual economic trends, however, vindicated the dissidents. And now Trump himself, for instinctive and opportunistic reasons, has taken up a crude version of their argument, jawboning Jerome Powell to discourage rate increases (a self-interested position, but also the correct one) and trying to elevate Moore in part because he currently shares the White House’s dovish line.

But a lot hangs on that “currently.” Historically Moore has not been an inflation dove; indeed when it counted he was a predictable inflation hawk, calling for monetary tightening in the teeth of the Great Recession. So it’s hard to escape the impression that his newfound dovishness is simply a hack’s adaptation to whatever Trump demands. Especially because — let’s be completely blunt here — Moore’s entire record of writings and arguments are hackish, his prominence a testament to cable-television’s appetite for partisans with think-tank titles, and those titles a testament to conservatism’s decadence.

So while Trump’s embrace of dovishness is moving the Republican Party in a sensible direction on the issue, his personnel moves aren’t rewarding the dissidents who were correct ahead of time. Instead, after making some respectable but uncreative picks, he’s trying to bring in yes-men and conservative-entertainment personalities (like his other, since-withdrawn choice for the Fed, Herman Cain) and relying on their loyalty rather than their ideas to make the policy he favors.

The desire to reward loyalists rather than intellectuals is common to politicians, and many dissident-conservative intellectuals were cool to Trump during the 2016 campaign. But most presidents make some effort to instantiate their governing ideology by elevating figures who actually believe it, rather than relying exclusively on toadies and ring-kissers and guys who look the part when you turn on Fox or CNN.

Not so Trump: All instinct and solipsism, he simply doesn’t care enough about Trumpism to find people who might carry his impulses forward once he’s gone. And so he’s bidding to do for monetary policy what he’s done in domestic policy and foreign policy already: Pursue a somewhat heterodox and populist agenda, but leave its implementation — and therefore to some extent its future — in the hands of men like Moore or John Bolton or Mick Mulvaney who represent the consensus that he once campaigned against.

And it’s telling, in envisioning the possible future of Trumpism, that until the latest round of embarrassment Senate Republicans seemed inclined to go along with the Moore nomination. They drew the line at Cain, but Moore’s hackishness and acknowledged ignorance of monetary policy are forgiven because he’s an old familiar movement-conservative face, and in many Republican breasts there beats the desire to return, after Trump, to the old familiar conservatism, the forever-1979 consensus.

That desire suggests a very plausible post-Trump scenario — especially if a liberal Democrat occupies the White House next — in which the Republican Party simply abandons his heterodoxies and returns to all its Obama-era positioning, all its reflexive policy clichés. Which in turn would set the stage for yet another Trump-like populist rebellion against this orthodoxy five or 10 years down the line.

In fairness, some Republican lawmakers appear to want to avoid this kind of pointless cycle. A younger cohort in the Senate, including Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Mike Lee and lately Josh Hawley of Missouri, appears interested in sustaining a conservative populism after Trump has exited the stage. And as Ramesh Ponnuru noted in a recent Bloomberg column, judging by how they questioned Powell in February, some Republican lawmakers seem to be “shopping” for a different monetary policy, one that actually learns something coherent from the past 10 years.

If those shoppers are serious, they should reject Moore on the basis of his empty intellectual portfolio, not just his dumber experiments in punditry, and they should encourage Trump to make a different kind of outside-the-box pick. I have suggested Ponnuru as a possibility before; as a journalist he has a long paper trail of rigorous, mostly vindicated takes on monetary policy, and as a representative of the right’s intelligentsia he’s everything that Moore is not.

Another clever choice would be Karl Smith, another Bloomberg columnist, a former economics professor and a prolific economics blogger, who has also defended Trump’s much-criticized tax reform (in case that matters to anyone in the White House!). Alternatively, if Trump prefers someone with a current academic title, then he should tap Scott Sumner or David Beckworth from George Mason University, both of whom were elaborating the more dovish case back when Moore was still pitching the gold standard.

Of course because they’re serious people, that “dovish” case is far more sophisticated than the White House’s palpable desire for rate cuts as re-election stimulus. Also, Sumner recently called for Trump’s impeachment ... so, yeah, he’s probably off the table.

But so long as Moore’s nomination is in trouble, there is an opportunity here for some entrepreneurial senator to push the White House in a new direction — toward the actual institutionalization of the president’s better instincts, rather than just the appointment of hacks who flatter him. For it will have profited conservatism nothing to have surrendered to Trump’s rebellion, if all it gains in the end is another decade submitting to the imaginary “expertise” of hacks like Stephen Moore.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/opinion/trump-stephen-moore.html" id="d7a1da4f-bff1-3f1b-a770-ec201179a855">The New York Times</a>.

The drama of Stephen Moore, Donald Trump’s controversial not-yet-nominee for a seat on the Federal Reserve, is a nice microcosm of the larger drama of conservatism in a Trumpian age. In the monetary policy debate that lurks behind the Fed battle, you can see some of the reasons for Trump’s political success. In the Moore appointment itself you can see the limits of Trumpism as an ideological program. And in the reaction to the appointment from Republican politicians you can see why the party ...

Solving Trump's Federal Reserve Problem

For a clinical rather than impressionistic assessment of this trend, you can turn to the new report from Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s Joint Economic Committee, which tracks “brain drain” trends across U.S. states and finds a pattern, both long-standing and accelerating, in which the highly educated cluster in “dynamic states” and “major metropolitan areas,” leaving less-educated Americans in “rural and postindustrial states” behind. The report describes this “geographic sorting” as one factor behind economic stagnation and social breakdown; it’s also clearly a factor driving the class-based polarization that’s given us President Donald Trump, and in European politics the Brexiteers and gilets jaunes and more.

This background is part of what makes Pete Buttigieg, the bright young man of the Democratic field, such an interesting figure. In many ways Buttigieg is a kind of uber-meritocrat, a child of academic parents who made a swift climb up the meritocracy’s cursus honorum: a Harvard degree and then a Rhodes scholarship, a brief stint in D.C. followed by three years at McKinsey. And beyond the résumé, an obvious part of his appeal depends on his performative intelligence, his college-interview style of “humble” showing off.

But another part of Buttigieg’s appeal rests on the fact that during and after the McKinsey stint, he did two very un-meritocratty things: First, he joined the Navy Reserve and was briefly deployed to Afghanistan, and then he moved back to the small, de-industrialized Midwestern city of his youth, not to join his parents in its academic enclave, but to run for mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and attempt to save a piece of the heartland from stagnation and decline.

These unusual steps away from elite self-segregation inform the way he sometimes seems to want to run for president: As a bridge-builder between the heartland and the coasts, as the Ivy League guy who takes Trump voters seriously as something more than just “deplorables,” as the first gay president who, like President Richard Nixon going to China, might be able to call a truce in the post-Obergefell culture wars and convince cultural liberals that they don’t need to bring every evangelical florist or Catholic adoption agency to heel.

But this bridge-building possibility coexists with another theory of Buttigieg, in which his unusual trajectory back homeward, far from a rejection of the meritocratic mentality, is actually just a clever meritocrat’s “hack” of the system of ascent — an advertisement for his own seriousness that, having served its purpose, can now be abandoned while he tries to vault insanely high, to return not only to Washington but to the Oval Office (or at least the Naval Observatory or a Cabinet office).

This is the reading offered by Buttigieg’s pungent left-wing critics: I especially recommend a long takedown of the young mayor’s memoir by Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs, and a shorter critique by a scion of the Studebaker family (Studebakers being the cars whose manufacture once built South Bend’s blue-collar prosperity).

These anti-Buttigiegians look at his mayoral record and see a politician who never really escaped the mentality of Harvard and McKinsey, whose big idea for the city involved bulldozing poor people’s houses and encouraging internet companies to move in — a “creative class” theory of urban renewal that didn’t supply the jobs that working-class South Benders need.

From the right, one could offer a similarly skeptical reading of his cultural bridge-building, which has not cashed out in any actual culture-war moderation. He has the same maximalist pro-abortion rights views as every other Democrat, and while he quips about finding common ground over the tastiness of Chick-fil-A, his official positions on the “gay rights versus religious liberty” questions cede zero ground to religious conservatives. No sooner had my colleague David Brooks praised him for the way he “deftly detaches progressive policy positions from the culture war” than he invented an unreciprocated theological feud with Mike Pence, as if to advertise to liberal donors that he would be fully committed to traditionalism’s rout.

As it happens, we have a striking example of an uber-meritocratic politician who ran as an outsider but turned out to just represent the elite from whence he came. His name is Emmanuel Macron, and his presidency in France has been something less than a success. What we badly need is something different: a meritocrat who can commit real treasons against his class, and discover economic and cultural alternatives that the elite ignores and the populists lack the capacity to implement.

I doubt Buttigieg is the man for this task. But I think he at least senses that the task exists. That’s a start; I hope he follows that sense further along, rather than just offering himself, appealingly but ultimately pointlessly, as the American Macron.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opinion/which-way-pete-buttigieg.html" id="b30aad4d-2761-399e-ad3e-2dee87037e51">The New York Times</a>.

One of the central problems in Western politics is the impasse between a governing class that lacks legitimacy, and populist alternatives that are poorly led and unready to govern. This impasse reflects a deep trend of the past few decades — the working-out of meritocracy’s iron logic, in which the most talented young people (or at least the most talented résumé-builders) self-segregate in a small group of metropoles while the hinterland declines.

Which Way, Pete Buttigieg?

My original subject was the latest controversy in Catholicism’s now-years-long Lent, in which conflicts over theology and sex abuse have merged into one festering, suppurating mess. The instigator of controversy, this time, was the former pope, the 92-year-old Benedict XVI, who late last week surprised the Catholic intelligentsia with a 6,000-word reflection on the sex abuse crisis.

Portions of the document were edifying, but there was little edifying in its reception. It was passed first to conservative Catholic outlets, whose palpable Benedict nostalgia was soon matched by fierce criticism from Francis partisans, plus sneers from the secular press at the retired pope’s insistence that the sex abuse epidemic was linked to the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the 1970s.

The column I was writing before the fire was mostly a lament for what the document’s reception betokened: A general inability, Catholic and secular, to recognize that both the “conservative” and “liberal” accounts of the sex abuse crisis are partially correct, that the spirits of liberation and clericalism each contributed their part, that the abuse problem dramatically worsened during the sexual revolution (a boring empirical fact if you spend any time with the data or the history) even as it also had roots in more traditional patterns of clerical chauvinism, hierarchical arrogance, institutional self-protection.

So the column was a defense of Benedict’s argument, in part, against secular sneers and liberal-Catholic sniping. But then it also agreed with certain criticisms of his letter, and worried about the ways that such an intervention contributes to the sense of a church in pieces, a church almost with two popes, each offering partial diagnoses to their respective factions.

That’s where I was, what I had at least half-written, before the fire began in Paris. But now let me try to say something larger, something commensurate to the symbolism of one of Catholicism’s greatest monuments burning on Holy Week, a day before Benedict’s own birthday, on the day after Catholics listened to a gospel in which the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom.

That larger thing is this: The problem of Catholic narratives that can’t find synthesis, of “liberal” and “conservative” takes that feed angrily off one another, of popes and former popes as symbols grasped by partisans, is not the problem of the sex abuse crisis. It is simply the problem of Roman Catholicism in this age — an age in which the church mirrors the polarization of Western culture, rather than offering an integrated alternative.

The church has always depended on synthesis and integration. That has been part of its genius, a reason for all its unexpected resurrections and regenerations. Faith and reason, Athens and Jerusalem, the aesthetic and the ascetic, the mystical and the philosophical — even the crucifix itself, two infinite lines converging and combining.

Notre-Dame de Paris is a monument to a particularly triumphant moment of Catholic synthesis — the culture of the high Middle Ages, a renaissance before the Renaissance, at once Roman and Germanic but both transformed by Christianity, a new hybrid civilization embodied in the cathedral’s brooding, complicated, gorgeous sprawl.

The Catholicism of today builds nothing so gorgeous as Notre-Dame in part because it has no 21st-century version of that grand synthesis to offer. The reforms of the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council and everything after, have left the church partially and unsuccessfully transformed, torn between competing visions of how to be Catholic in modernity, competing promises of renewal and reform, competing factions convinced that they are the firefighters inside Notre-Dame, and their rivals are the fire.

I belong to one of these factions (or to a faction within a faction; who can keep track?); I am a conservative of some sort, who fears that liberal Christianities usually end up resembling a post-inferno cathedral, with the still-grand exterior concealing emptiness within.

But I am also doubtful that anything so simple as a conservative “victory” will return the church to cathedral-raising vigor and make it feel, to outsiders, like something more than a museum whose docents all seem to hate one another. Especially given how often conservative Catholicism is in thrall to orthodoxies that are political rather than theological, how often — especially as it reacts to the destabilizing style of Pope Francis — its climate feels more like an airless bunker than a Gothic nave.

And it is impossible, as a Catholic, to be writing about this subject while the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is literally burning on Holy Week and not feel that everyone engaged in Catholicism’s civil wars is being judged, and found wanting, and given a harrowing lesson in what is actually asked of us.

The cathedral will be rebuilt; the cross and altar and much of the interior survived. But all preservation is provisional. The real challenge for Catholics, in this age of general post-Christian cultural exhaustion, is to look at what our ancestors did and imagine what it would mean to do that again, to build anew, to leave something behind that could stand a thousand years and still have men and women singing “Salve Regina” outside its cruciform walls, as Parisians did Monday night while Notre-Dame burned.

What is the synthesis that could make that possible? What lies beyond the stalemates and scandal and anger of our strange two-pope era?

Go ask the Catholics of 3019 A.D. It’s for them to know, and us, if God wills it, to find out.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/opinion/notre-dame-fire-catholic-church.html" id="4aefc0b7-5403-359a-ade9-5b73840681c0">The New York Times</a>.

A first draft of this column was written before flames engulfed the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, before its spire fell in one of the most dreadful live images since Sept. 11, 2001, before a blazing fire went further than any of France’s anticlerical revolutionaries ever dared.

From the Ashes of Notre-Dame

In our age of digital connection and constantly online life, you might say that two political regimes are evolving, one Chinese and one Western, which offer two kinds of relationships between the privacy of ordinary citizens and the newfound power of central authorities to track, to supervise, to expose and to surveil.

The first regime is one in which your every transaction can be fed into a system of ratings and rankings, in which what seem like merely personal mistakes can cost you your livelihood and reputation, even your ability to hail a car or book a reservation. It’s one in which notionally private companies cooperate with the government to track dissidents and radicals and censor speech; one in which your fellow citizens act as enforcers of the ideological consensus, making an example of you for comments you intended only for your friends; one in which even the wealth and power of your overlords can't buy privacy.

The second regime is the one they’re building in the People’s Republic of China.

This is a dark joke; it isn’t meant to minimize the horrors of China’s march into information-age totalitarianism. Beginning with its successful taming of the internet, Beijing has treated the darkest episodes of “Black Mirror” as a how-to guide for social control and subjugation — with “social credit” scores and official public shamings for people whose daily conduct disappoints, official Communist Party apps that you’d better use if you know what’s good for you, surveillance technologies and facial recognition software as boots on the back of nonapproved religions, and compulsory internet as part of the brutal, tech-enabled replay of the Cultural Revolution imposed in China’s Muslim west.

What’s happening in the West with privacy and authority is happily different. Unlike China’s system, our emerging post-privacy order is not (for now) totalitarian; its impositions are more decentralized and haphazard, more circumscribed and civilized, less designed and more evolved, more random in the punishments inflicted and the rules enforced.

This means that, for instance, there is no central party apparatus encouraging our corporations to create individual “trust scores” for every consumer (even if they’re still doing it), no official commissars organizing digital mobs (even if shaming for random wrongthink is now a commonplace), no political persecution involved in most cases where public figures have their secrets and selfies exposed on the internet. (Perhaps Jeff Bezos' claims of Saudi involvement will pan out, but so far he mostly seems to have been the victim of his own stupidity and his mistress's brother's greed.) And it means that the radicals surveilled by corporate-government cooperation are mostly white nationalists and jihadis, not human rights advocates and Christian pastors, as in China.

But this list of real differences is still also a list of partial similarities, of ways in which the architecture of our system replicates certain features of the emergent Chinese panopticon, even if the life lived within our system is still blessedly freer than in theirs.

Indeed our system cannot help re-creating features of the Chinese order, because the way that we live on the internet leaves us naked before power in a radical new way. In the West that power is still decentralized, diffuse, divided and polarized, and therefore likely to be limited and checked. But to adapt Deng Xiaoping’s famous call for “socialism with Chinese characteristics," the Western order in the internet age might be usefully described as a “liberalism with some police-state characteristics.” Those characteristics are shaped and limited by our political heritage of rights and individualism. But there is still plainly an authoritarian edge, a gentle “pink police state” aspect, to the new world that online life creates.

And what’s striking is how easily we have come to tolerate it. Yes, there are moments when particular organs of surveillance get pushback — the NSA during the brief “libertarian moment” starring Rand Paul and Edward Snowden, the social media companies from liberals when it turned out that the Trump digital team no less than the Obama whiz kids could exploit their user data.

But apart from the high-minded and the paranoid, privacy per se is not a major issue in our politics. Most people want the convenience of the internet far more than they want the private spaces that older forms of communication protected. They shrug off the stalker-ish ways that corporations hurl their ads at you throughout your day. They put surveillance devices in their homes and pockets without a qualm. They accept hackings and online shamings the way a Californian shrugs off earthquakes. They assume that the extremists being surveilled and censored and sometimes arrested probably deserve it. And they welcome the possible advantages of panoptical living, hoping for less crime and less police misconduct, better public health, more exposure of corruption — plus, of course, the chance to see their favorite celebrities in the nude.

So for those who object inherently to our new nakedness, regard the earthquakes as too high a price for Amazon’s low prices, or fear what an Augustus or a Robespierre might someday do with all this architecture, the best hope for a partial restoration of privacy has to involve more than just an anxiety about privacy alone. It requires a more general turn against the virtual, in which fears of digital nakedness are just one motivator among many — the political piece of a cause that’s also psychological, intellectual, aesthetic and religious.

This is the hard truth suggested by our online experience so far: That a movement to restore privacy must be, at some level, a movement against the internet. Not a pure Luddism, but a movement for limits, for internet-free spaces, for zones of enforced previrtual reality (childhood and education above all), for social conventions that discourage career-destroying tweets and crotch shots by encouraging us to put away our iPhones.

Absent such a movement we may not join China in dystopia. But the dystopian elements in our own order will be here to stay.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/opinion/china-internet-privacy.html" id="f7fd4f6b-2a86-3b98-a3a3-53d90ffe478b">The New York Times</a>.

(What Can I Do?)

The Only Answer Is Less Internet

This sense of betrayal was fertile ground for Trump, who used bigotry and bluster to sell himself to immigration hawks as a Republican who wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, sell them out. You could trust him more than the Bushes and Rubios because he was willing to be disreputable, willing to give the finger to elite opinion, willing to play not only the tough guy but the bad guy. And you had to trust him, some hawks argued, because the Democrats had been radicalized on the issue, and the hour was late; it was either Trump or a Californian future, in which waves of immigration transformed the entire United States into a one-party, Democratic-governed state.

But the irony was that the populist resistance had already itself been reasonably effective in achieving some of the goals that Trump promised to pursue. Over the years when bipartisan elites were seeking the grail of “comprehensive” reform, they tried to appease skeptics with various forms of border-security spending, and this spending really did gradually harden the United States-Mexico border and make it much more difficult to simply slip across. Combine this with economic and demographic change in Latin America, and by the time Trump took office, border crossings had fallen by two-thirds since the presidency of George W. Bush.

In this sense Trump was a lagging, not a leading, indicator. He represented the political triumph of an attitude that had already changed policy, albeit in piecemeal and only half-intentionally, and partially sealed the porous borders of 15 years before. And his chief proposal, the famous wall, would have been a (literal) extension of the existing border-security project rather than a radical addition.

This reality created an interesting opening, especially in Trump’s first year, for a different kind of comprehensive deal, between restrictionists feeling a little more secure in their position and immigration advocates feeling chastened by populist backlash. And there was even some evidence that the White House might be groping in this direction — toward reforms that would seek stability more than radical change, tilting the entire system away from low-skilled immigration and toward recruitment, and compromising between restrictionists and enthusiasts by trying to keep the overall immigration rate about the same.

But that possibility has evaporated because of the second irony of immigration in the Trump era. Having inherited a border situation that was somewhat better than his rhetoric of crisis suggested, Trump has now been handed an actual crisis — a wave of Central American families claiming asylum, which has returned monthly crossings to their highest levels in a decade and overwhelmed the system for handling new arrivals.

There is a sense in which this crisis vindicates immigration hawks, who warned from the late-Obama era onward that the immigration decline wasn’t necessarily permanent, that there could easily be another wave, that U.S. policy — particularly the Obama precedent of a tacit amnesty for child migrants — created specific incentives for families and children to come north.

But those same hawks ended up electing a president whose signature immigration policy, more walls to deter border-crossers, has proved largely ineffective in dealing with an immigration crisis created by people surrendering to Border Patrol officers and asking for asylum.

Nor does that president have the capacity to devise a more effective response, it seems, since any policy solution would require two negotiations. First, negotiation with Congress, to change asylum law to override the court decisions currently tying up the Trump White House’s attempts at deterrence — like the attempt to make Central American asylum petitioners wait out the process in Mexico. Second, negotiation with the Mexican government, to get more help discouraging migration on its side of the border. For a different president these tasks would be challenging; for Trump, they seem impossible.

Hence the flailing on display this week, with the president purging his entire Homeland Security apparatus, in the hopes of finding somebody with the requisite toughness to succeed where the present staff has failed. Since “toughness” apparently means one of two things — returning to the cruelty of child separation or ordering Border Patrol agents to simply ignore asylum law themselves — it’s doubtful that this purge will produce anything except more unpopularity for Trump's policies, and more unsuccessful collisions with the courts.

The flailing also absolves the Democratic Party, currently torn between radicalism and evasion on immigration, from actually having to propose a coherent alternative to the White House’s approach. If this sort of crisis were happening on President Hillary Clinton’s watch, it would create all kinds of political problems for the Democrats; as it stands, they can point at the man who once boasted of Washington that “I alone can fix it” and say, well, why don’t you?

There is still some political peril here for liberals, who may be inclined to confuse the public’s distaste for Trump with a consensus for an open door (though that Vermont socialist is still willing to swat down calls for open borders). But the greater peril by far is for conservative immigration skeptics, for whom the Trump presidency is at risk of turning into a policy disaster.

The attempts to increase deportation have been real enough, but they will be evanescent should Trump lose in 2020. The attempt to legislate sustained legal-immigration cuts has conspicuously failed. Someone in the administration is making deals behind the scenes to increase visas for low-skilled guest workers — one of the policies that hawks resisted for years in “comprehensive” bills. And the longer the current border crisis goes on, the more this White House’s most important legacy may be offering evidence that even Donald Trump, even Donald Trump, can’t really stop illegal immigration when enough people get the idea to bring their kids and come.

For every conservative faction, supporting Trump was a gamble — do you reach for short-term victory, even though his incompetence and unfitness might cost you in the long run?

The danger for immigration hawks is that the long run has already arrived.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/opinion/trump-kirstjen-nielsen-border-security-.html" id="d33b5937-1dc3-36ee-a7ce-6b13b4f1df63">The New York Times</a>.

Across the decade that preceded Donald Trump’s election, American politicians of both parties consistently tried to pass big, sweeping immigration bills that would legalize most of the country’s illegal population and increase immigration overall. These bills failed because of populist opposition, at first bipartisan (the resistance of a certain socialist senator from Vermont helped doom the 2007 effort) but increasingly simply conservative, and over time the conservative opposition developed...

Trump's Immigration Crisis

And yet over that same period, a good many members of the opposition to Donald Trump — a mix of serious journalists, cable television hosts, pop culture personalities, erstwhile government officials, professional activists and politicians — have been invested in what appears to be exactly the kind of conspiracy-laced alternative reality that they believed themselves to be resisting.

With the apparent “no collusion” conclusion to the Robert Mueller investigation, there will now be a retreat from this alternative reality to more defensible terrain — the terrain where Trump is a sordid figure who admires despots and surrounded himself with hacks and two-bit crooks while his campaign was buoyed by a foreign power’s hack of his opponent.

All of this is still true, in the same way that once the WMD and al-Qaida connections turned out to be illusory, Saddam Hussein was still a wicked dictator whose reign deserved to end. But as with the Iraq War, what has been sold, and often fervently believed, about l’affaire Russe has been something far more sweeping — a story about active collaboration and tacit treason and the subjection of U.S. policymaking to Vladimir Putin’s purposes, a story where the trail of kompromat and collusion supposedly went back decades, a story that was supposed to end with indictments in Trump’s inner circle, if not the jailing of the man himself.

I’m borrowing the parallel to the Iraq debate from Matt Taibbi, the left-wing muckraker and flamethrower, whose splenetic denunciation this weekend of the media’s Russia coverage declared that as “a purely journalistic failure ... WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate.”

Like many of Taibbi’s claims over the years, this one seems overdrawn. Yes, the most extreme forms of the collusion narrative were always exceedingly unlikely, but the combination of a real Russian crime and a lot of lying and guilty-seeming behavior by Trump and his hangers-on made a certain amount of speculation inevitable and reasonable. Yes, the mainstream press gave too much credence to the Steele dossier and rushed to publish too quickly on seemingly incriminating stories. But as long as you got news from somewhere other than Rachel Maddow the case for skepticism was amply available as well. And — as Taibbi concedes — the various Russiagate conspiracy theories didn’t actually lead us into a shooting war with Russia, whereas the Iraq debate gave us a true foreign policy disaster, not just a strange cultural obsession with a special prosecutor’s work.

But the parallel is still useful, because both the march to war with Iraq and the Russia panic show us the ways in which a politics of paranoia can manifest itself not just on the far-left and far-right fringes but in the very heart of the American establishment.

In both cases, the exaggerated fear of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal and terrorism ties and the exaggerated fear of Russian capacities and influence, the truest believers belonged to the center-right and center-left — neoconservatives and hawkish liberals in the Iraq case, and an alliance of center-left pundits, overeager reporters, national security figures and NeverTrump Republicans in the case of Russiagate.

And in both cases the strongest skepticism came not just from partisans (Trump-defending Republicans with Russia, Bush-hating Democrats with Iraq) but also from the ideological fringes, both further left and further right. The Iraq War was fiercely opposed by paleoconservatives and anti-war libertarians as well as by the anti-war left, and the strongest skeptics of the Russiagate narrative have been left-wing journalists — Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey and others.

This pattern points to the essential difference between paranoias of the fringes and what Reason’s Jesse Walker once called “the paranoid center.” Because the center believes in the basic goodness of American and Western institutions, the basic wisdom and patriotism of their personnel, its threat matrix is always attuned to Great Enemies outside and radicals within, and its greatest fears tend to involve the two groups working together — whether that means Middle Eastern dictators and Islamist sleeper cells after Sept. 11 or the grand alliance of Putinists and homegrown white nationalists that’s blamed for Donald Trump.

Meanwhile the extremes, in different but sometimes overlapping ways, are much more skeptical about American institutions, much more “unpatriotic” in the way that David Frum once dismissed right-wing critics of the Iraq War, and thus much more likely to be skeptical of any narrative that asks you to simply trust the wisdom and good intentions of, say, figures like James Comey and John Brennan.

This gives both the far left and the far right an advantage when it comes to seeing through the paranoias of the center — even as both are tempted toward paranoias that locate all the evils of the world within the establishment, in the interlocking directorates of Washington and Wall Street or the military-industrial complex or the Brussels-Berlin axis.

Neither form of paranoia is necessarily worse or better than the other — and neither, it should be stressed, is always wrong. The paranoid center tends to take real threats and then inflate them, rather than inventing them ex nihilo; the paranoid fringes tend to identify real establishment failures and corruptions but then over-imagine conspiracies and puppet masters.

But the paranoid center generally has a power that the fringes lack — both the formal power of institutions and the cultural power to set narratives and declare the boundaries of legitimate debate. And this can make centrist paranoia more dangerous and more easily disguised.

At the same time, the center still believes in authority figures in a way that the fringes don’t. So one might hope, in this specific case, that having an establishment figure like Robert Mueller rendering a skeptical verdict will suffice to put the more baroque Trump-Russia conspiracies to rest ... or at least to banish them from cable and newsprint, and back to the extremely long Twitter threads where they first flourished, and ultimately belong.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/opinion/mueller-report-trump-russia.html" id="e508000c-5afe-3e1d-a53f-5e975e032893">The New York Times</a>.

Over the last three years, since Brexit and the Trumpening and the general rise of disreputable forces in Western politics, there has been a steadily boiling elite panic about the power of the paranoid fringe, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, the pull of fake news and the danger of alternative realities.

The Paranoid Center

And so the story of the Jews in post-World War II America is the story, not just of anti-Semitism’s marginalization, but of philo-Semitism’s triumph. Jewish Americans weren’t just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.

For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn’t just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case. The outsize success of Jewish intellectuals and scientists and artists and businessmen and activists was an especially good thing, a unique proof of American exceptionalism — because ours was the one country where a people so long persecuted could not only survive but triumph. And attacks on Jewish success and influence, like attacks on the state of Israel, were treated as particularly dangerous, particularly un-American, because they threatened to undo this great achievement, and return the Jews to their historic state of constant threat and peril.

This history supplies one way to understand the stakes in the controversy over Ilhan Omar, the Muslim congresswoman who keeps using anti-Semitic clichés in her criticisms of the American-Israeli relationship. The part of the American left that’s defending her, or at least mitigating her offense and accusing her conservative critics of bad faith, doesn’t see itself as defending Jew-hatred, and since many of those defenders are Jewish — including the arguable front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders — it’s reasonable to take them at their word.

But the defend-Omar project is a project that seeks to push us away from the age of philo-Semitism, the age in which both American Jews and the American-Israel relationship were considered special cases among the range of minority groups and foreign policy partnerships.

This is what the left seems to want in the Omar controversy, and what I suspect it will eventually get: a left-of-center politics that remembers the Holocaust as one great historical tragedy among many, that judges Israel primarily on its conservative and nationalist political orientation, rather than on its status as a Jewish sanctuary, and that regards the success of American Jews as a reason for them to join white Gentiles in check-your-privilege self-criticism, ceding moral authority to minority groups who are more immediately oppressed. (This last shift was helpfully distilled by James Clyburn, the Democratic House whip, who defended Omar last week by basically saying that the Holocaust was a long time ago and her personal experience as a refugee and Muslim immigrant was more immediate and relevant.)

The shifts here would not just be, as is sometimes suggested, a reaction to Israeli politics, to the right-wing Netanyahu government or the cruelties of occupation. If the occupation ended tomorrow, Israel would still have a nationalist and religious identity at odds with the left’s broadly post-nationalist and post-religious vision. Secularization would still be separating the left from any specifically Christian sense of guilt over the Holocaust — which was an important spur to postwar philo-Semitism. Many American Jews would still enjoy advantages that expose them to the left’s intersectional critiques, and the Orthodox Jewish population (growing apace relative to more secular and liberal forms of Judaism) would still have religious beliefs and practices that are the very opposite of woke.

Finally, a great deal of the new anti-Semitism — from the recent wave of hate crimes in New York City to the anti-Jewish violence befouling Europe — would still be coming from minority and immigrant communities that are seen as essential to left-of-center and especially radical-left politics going forward, making them more difficult than right-wing anti-Semitism for the left to full-throatedly condemn.

Of course right-wing anti-Semites haven’t gone away either — which is part of why anti-anti-Omar Democrats can tell themselves that by downgrading Jewish exceptionalism, trading a specific philo-Semitism for a general politics of all-bigotry-is-bad, they are asking liberal Jews to make a sacrifice that’s essential for the greater good of defeating the greater enemy, which is still the reactionary right.

Whether this argument works depends in part on what the post-Trump right ultimately becomes — whether there’s a way to marry nationalism and philo-Semitism, perhaps wooing Jewish voters rightward, or whether any form of right-wing populism inevitably brings anti-Semitism roaring back.

But it also depends on whether the assumptions of Omar’s left-wing defenders are justified — whether anti-Semitism can be contained if it’s treated as one form of bigotry among many, or whether the perverse resilience of Jew-hatred is such that cultures choose between philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism, with only a swift downward slope lying in between.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/is-anti-semitism-exceptional.html" id="320f731d-0cba-36db-a0eb-5d71100e21ac">The New York Times</a>.

Like most places, America has always had potent strains of anti-Semitism — crude and polished, KKK and country club. But unlike many places, we have always had important strains of philo-Semitism as well; there is a long American tradition, with both Protestant and Enlightenment roots, of really liking Judaism and the Jews.

Is Anti-Semitism Exceptional?

The Steele dossier made four big claims — or, since all those claims took the form of rumors and raw intelligence, let’s say that it raised four big possibilities. One of them, soon well corroborated, was that Russian intelligence was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the release of stolen emails through WikiLeaks.

The next possibility was that a Russian project to cultivate Trump, supported and directed by Vladimir Putin, had been going on for many years, and included both offers of “sweetener real estate business deals” (which Trump supposedly declined) and “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” (which he supposedly accepted).

The third possibility was that this relationship dramatically influenced the 2016 campaign. According to Steele’s sources, there was possibly “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence, managed by Paul Manafort with Michael Cohen playing go-between in Prague, which encompassed the DNC hacking — a crime carried out “with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.”

The final possibility, of course, was that Russia had so-called “kompromat” on Trump — above all, the pee tape.

Since its BuzzFeed publication in early 2017, the dossier’s prominence has varied. It’s probably cited more often in the defensive, pro-Trump press, where it’s depicted as discredited gossip that tainted the Russia investigation’s credibility from the start. But Russiagate enthusiasts and would-be honest brokers have also returned to it frequently — and for good reason, since it establishes a bar for Mueller’s investigation that, if cleared, would absolutely deserve to end Trump’s presidency.

If the DNC hack took place with Trump’s cooperation as part of a long-standing exchange of favors, then he would be guiltier than Nixon, having participated in a Watergate with a foreign power as the burglar. If Mueller could prove that something like that happened, impeachment would be inevitable, and resignation or removal reasonably likely.

But will Mueller prove it? While retaining an official agnosticism, my sense after Cohen’s testimony is that the odds are as low as they’ve been since this whole affair started, and the increasing likelihood is that the Steele dossier was, in fact, as Trump’s defenders have long described it — a narrative primarily grounded in Russian disinformation.

That’s because Cohen’s testimony dovetailed with the always-more-plausible narrative in which Trump and his circle weren’t collaborators but fools and wannabes, who might have been willing to play games with spies and hackers, but who mostly just bumbled around haplessly on the sidelines.

This is what you can see happening in the Trump Tower Moscow project, so far as I can tell — instead of Putin offering Trump a sweetheart deal, it seems to have involved his fixers trying to get the Russian government’s attention, to no practical end. And it’s also the sense left by Cohen’s testimony that he witnessed Trump taking a call from Roger Stone in the summer of 2016, in which Stone claimed to have just heard from Julian Assange about “a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

This happened at a time when WikiLeaks had already been hinting at an email dump, so Stone was not exactly delivering privileged information. Trump, according to Cohen, responded “to the effect of stating ‘wouldn’t that be great.'” This doesn’t seem like how a yearslong collaboration with Russian intelligence would unfold.

Meanwhile on every other Russia-related front, Cohen — with every reason to knife his former boss — offered dossier-discrediting denials. He never went to Prague to meet with Russian intelligence, as the dossier alleged, never heard anything about kompromat, and never had any direct evidence of Trumpian collusion with the Russians.

Is it possible that a real conspiracy was run without the knowledge of the president’s trusted and then-proudly shady fixer? In theory, yes; it could have all happened through figures like Paul Manafort, who we know shared campaign polling data, at least, with a Russian-intelligence-linked figure. But if the dossier’s claim of a years-long Trump-Kremlin entanglement and its claim of Cohen’s direct involvement are both looking implausible or false, then its claims about a sustained Manafort-managed collaboration should be treated extremely skeptically as well.

In which case the most likely l’affaire Russe endgame may be a special prosecutor’s report that doesn’t make Trump look good or decent or moral, but which implicitly exonerates him of conspiring with the Russians, and makes a lot of Mueller watchers extremely unhappy in the process.

On the eve of Muellerdamerung, that’s what this agnostic very cautiously expects.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/opinion/the-state-of-russiagate.html" id="0b4b7483-7180-3dc8-afd8-6f473ae8556b">The New York Times</a>.

In the window of calm between Michael Cohen’s testimony and the allegedly almost-at-hand delivery of Robert Mueller’s report, it’s worth returning for a moment to the document that established the darkest interpretation of all the Russian weirdness swirling around President Donald Trump: the intelligence dossier created by Christopher Steele, late of MI6, on behalf of Trump’s political opponents, which brought together the reports and rumors that Steele deemed credible about the then-candidat...

The State of Russiagate

Thus in a 19th-century context, where healthy sexuality meant a large patriarchal family with the wife as the angel in the home, anti-Catholic polemicists were obsessed with Catholicism’s nuns — these women who mysteriously refused husbands and childbearing, and who were therefore presumed to be prisoners in gothic convents, victims of predatory priests.

Then a little later, when the apostles of sexual health were Victorian “muscular Christians” worried about moral deviance, the problem with Catholicism was that it was too hospitable to homosexuality — too effete, too decadent, too Oscar Wildean even before Wilde’s deathbed conversion.

Then later still, when sexual health meant the white-American, two-kid nuclear family, the problem with Catholicism was that it was too obsessed with heterosexual procreation, too inclined to overpopulate the world with kids.

And now, in our own age of sexual individualism, Catholicism is mostly just accused of a repressive cruelty, of denying people — and especially its celibacy-burdened priests — the sexual fulfillment that every human being needs.

The mix of change and consistency in anti-Catholic arguments came to mind while I was reading “In the Closet of the Vatican,” a purported exposé of homosexuality among high churchmen released to coincide with the church’s summit on clergy sexual abuse. The book — written by a gay, nonbelieving French journalist, Frédéric Martel — makes a simple argument in an florid, repetitious style: The prevalence of gay liaisons in the Vatican means that clerical celibacy is a failure and a fraud, as unnatural and damaging as an earlier moral consensus believed homosexuality to be.

The style of Martel’s account is fascinating because it so resembles the old Protestant critique of Catholic decadence. Instead of a tough-guy Calvinist proclaiming that Catholicism’s gilt and incense makes men gay, it’s a gay atheist claiming that the gays use Catholicism’s gilt and incense to decorate the world’s most lavish closet. Instead of celibacy making men deviant, celibacy is the deviance, and open homosexuality the cure. Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.

The book is quite bad; too many of its attempted outings rely on the supposed infallibility of Martel’s gaydar. And yet anyone who knows anything about the Vatican knows that some of the book’s gossip is simply true — just as the other critiques of Catholicism have some correspondence to reality.

The church’s teaching that gay sex is sinful has clearly coexisted with and encouraged powerful gay subcultures in the priesthood. Priests really have seduced and abused nuns, and still do today. Celibate men are not more likely to be predators (as one would hope the #MeToo era has decisively established), but particular kinds of predation have flourished in the priesthood, and the worst of that predation looks like an anti-Catholic polemic brought to life.

So if Catholics look at these changing-yet-recurring critiques of the church and see only bigotry, they would be making a grave mistake. A critic of the church can be quicker to see problems than a believer, and when critiques are dismissed just because they partake of anti-Catholic stereotypes — well, you get the disgraceful way the church treated allegations of clerical sex abuse for many years.

But at the same time, the way the “healthy sexuality” supposedly available outside the church seems to change with every generation offers a reason to be skeptical that all Catholic ills would vanish if Rome only ceased making “unnatural” demands like celibacy and chastity.

The sexual ethic on offer in our own era should make Catholics particularly skeptical. That ethic regards celibacy as unrealistic while offering porn and sex robots to ease frustrations created by its failure to pair men and women off. It pities Catholic priests as repressed and miserable (some are; in general they are not) even as its own cultural order seeds a vast social experiment in growing old alone. It disdains large families while it fails to reproduce itself. It treats any acknowledgment of male-female differences as reactionary while constructing an architecture of sexual identities whose complexities would daunt a medieval schoolman.

In the name of this not-obviously-enlightened alternative, Catholicism is constantly asked to “reform” away practices that are there because they connect directly to the New Testament — in the case of celibacy, to Jesus’ own example and his hard words for anyone making an idol of family life.

This seems like a bad bargain, no matter how much hypocrisy there may be in Rome.

That clerical celibacy doesn’t guarantee asceticism is obvious, any more than attending Mass guarantees prayerfulness (trust me on that one). But it preserves the call even when the system is corrupted. And to lose that call, in this era of scandal and unfinished purgation, could easily leave only the corruption, undiluted and unchecked.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/opinion/why-celibacy-matters.html" id="d1f416fd-9d4e-32da-a843-552c46f902cc">The New York Times</a>.

The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call healthy sexuality. This rhetorical trope has persisted despite radical redefinitions of what healthy sexuality means; one sexual culture overthrows another, but Catholicism remains eternally condemned.

Why Celibacy Matters

But there are occasional exceptions: Polarizing issues where you could essentially call a truce without anyone winning or losing, without it affecting the balance of power in America’s political debates and culture wars, without anything disappearing except a lot of nonsense, hysteria and panic.

My candidate for the exception is the debate over voter ID laws. For as long as I’ve been politically conscious, conservatives have touted tougher identification requirements at the polls as a means to fight the scourge of voter fraud, and over the last decade Republicans have successfully implemented voter ID laws in a number of reddish states. Over the same period those laws have been cited by liberals as evidence that Republicans are bent on winning elections by disenfranchising Democrats — locking out poor and minority voters in a rerun of the Jim Crow-poll tax era, and electing conservative politicians at the expense of democracy itself.

You could imagine a world in which the voter ID debate reflected a real and sweeping clash of interests. If conservatives were right that the laws reduced rampant voter fraud by preventing illegal immigrants from voting for Democrats in large numbers, and meanwhile liberals were also right that the laws dramatically reduced turnout among African-Americans and other liberal-leaning constituencies, effectively limiting the right to vote, then the whole debate would be extremely consequential and difficult to resolve.

In this world, however, the stakes seem to be considerably lower. That’s the conclusion of a new study, one of the largest to date, from the economists Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons, which assessed the impact of voter ID laws between 2008 and 2016 using a nationwide voter file. The study finds that requiring voter identification has no effect on turnout — not overall, and not on “any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”

If that shocks you, it shouldn’t. The evidence that voter ID laws meaningfully suppress minority votes has always been shaky; a literature review in 2017 that filtered out studies with obvious design flaws reported “modest, if any, turnout effects of voter identification laws” in the best research on the subject. So a voter ID requirement might possibly affect the closest of close races, based on what we’ve learned up till now — but if the Cantoni and Pons results hold up, the real effect is basically nil.

But before conservatives claim vindication, the new paper also casts doubt on the argument for voter ID laws, finding no effect on fraud itself, nor even any effect on public confidence in the integrity of the ballot. Which should be even less surprising than the absence of evidence for voter suppression, because since the George W. Bush administration a large group of people with strong incentives to uncover voter fraud — Republican lawmakers, law-enforcement personnel and conservative election researchers — have failed to produce any evidence that the problem exists on a scale that requires a legislative response. And the rare prosecuted cases generally seem disproportionate to the offense involved — with confused individuals in the dock rather than old-fashioned Chicago-style machines.

There is more to the voting-rights debate than just voter ID laws; nothing in the new study settles arguments about early voting, absentee balloting and more. Still, because the ID debate is a particular flash point, its findings are a real public service. No matter where you stand on the voter fraud-voter suppression controversies, these findings strengthen the case for dialing down outrage, reducing anxiety and generally recognizing that if we stopped pushing for these laws and stopped freaking out about how they supposedly doom democracy, voting in America would rattle along basically unchanged.

But since it’s conservatives and Republicans who are the prime mover here, because they’re generally the ones pushing legal changes, they also have the primary obligation to step back and stand down.

Despite what many liberals believe, much of the right’s anxiety about voter fraud is sincere, not just a cynical cover for racist vote suppression. I have had enough arguments with fellow conservatives on this issue to attest that the specter of those old Chicago operations haunts the right, along with more contemporary fears generated by a left that really does want to extend some of the benefits of citizenship to illegal immigrants.

At the same time there’s also no question that a lot of Republican operatives pushing voter ID laws are cynics who expect their party to benefit from lower minority turnout, and a number of professional right-wing partisans — including our president — see an upside in frightening their voters or viewers with the racialized threat of “urban” ballot-stuffing.

Which, again, is what makes the evidence from this study so helpful: It offers reasons for both the conservative sincerely worried about voter fraud and the operative cynically hoping for lower Democratic turnout to let this issue slide.

And in letting it slide, Republicans might even have more to gain than Democrats. After all, the cynical side of the voter ID push is pretty transparent, meaning that even if the laws don’t have real vote-suppressing consequences, they do serve as a continuing gesture of disrespect to minority voters, a continuing expression of GOP indifference to the African-American memory of what vote restrictions used to mean. So their removal from the Republican agenda could be an act of minority outreach unto itself.

Maybe that’s too optimistic. But even without that upside, the case for standing down is strong. The voter ID debate essentially involves Republicans whipping themselves into a panic over a problem that doesn’t meaningfully affect their chances of winning elections, and then passing laws that whip Democrats into a panic over a problem that also doesn’t meaningfully affect their chances of winning elections. So if the debate simply disappeared tomorrow, a source of distrust would vanish without either side losing ground. There are few cases where that’s possible. Let’s seize this one.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/voter-id-study-republicans-democrats.html" id="ccdab0ca-78c2-3ba7-a089-5ccf35f16a64">The New York Times</a>.

Usually when some sententious centrist talks about ending partisan polarization and just coming up with “solutions” based on “data” or “studies” or “expert consensus,” the appropriate response is to roll your eyes — the way people have been eye-rolling lately at Howard Schultz of Starbucks and his apparently substance-free vision for an independent presidential campaign. Usually where you find polarization, you also find some issue of great moment, some important conflict of interests or valu...

The Myths of Voter ID

Almost 50 years ago, in 1970, New York passed the nation’s most liberal abortion law, a template for the Roe v. Wade decision two years later. And the state has a justifiable reputation as (to quote a 2005 New York magazine story) “the abortion capital of America” — with a strong pro-abortion-rights consensus and high abortion rates.

But there is a forgotten chapter to this story. In 1972, New York’s Assembly and Senate both voted narrowly to repeal the 2-year-old abortion law. The only thing preventing repeal was the veto of the Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller — and, of course, the intervention of the Supreme Court the following January.

This almost-successful repeal was not an isolated case. As Russell Hittinger pointed out in a 2010 essay for First Things, prior to Roe v. Wade the anti-abortion side was regularly winning political victories in places that we think of as liberal bastions today. The division on abortion that runs between red and blue states today ran through both political parties and every U.S. state two generations ago — the “abortion capital” very much included.

This changed because of polarization and political tribalism, because currents in elite opinion reshaped liberal politics and backlash reshaped the GOP. But if you delve into this paper’s coverage of those long-gone abortion debates, you’ll be reminded that it also changed because the Catholic Church — in New York, especially — used to be an effective pro-life political force straddling partisan divides, instead of an institution devastated by attrition, internal division and the sex abuse disaster.

That declining influence is neatly distilled in the story of Mario and Andrew Cuomo. The father felt constrained by his Catholicism to at least agonize publicly over abortion, to insist that he could be pro-choice and “personally opposed.” His son, a Catholic politician with a “First Girlfriend” who lit the Freedom Tower pink to celebrate late-term abortion, plainly fears neither God nor Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

In the case of Dolan, Cuomo’s right to be blasé. New York State still has millions of baptized Catholics, but the faithful are divided and adrift and accustomed to tuning out messages from their bishops that don’t fit their partisan preconceptions. (This goes for messages that criticize Donald Trump as well.) Dolan has tried to answer secularization with gregarious good cheer, but a bingo-hall winsomeness would be no match for cold indifference even without the church’s scandals.

And yet it remains the case that deep inside the ransacked, decaying basilica that is American Catholicism, you can find the only vision that might transform the abortion debate, so that we don’t end up with a permanent red-blue divide, in which the Supreme Court allows conservative states to pass restrictions but liberal states are radicalized toward eugenics and infanticide.

That vision isn’t the “seamless garment of life” beloved of certain liberal Catholics, which effectively makes every issue a “life” issue, downgrading abortion to salve uneasy consciences. Rather, it’s a more tailored seamless garment, one that would put the goal of outlawing abortion at the center of a web of pro-family policies — adoption support, child allowances, wage subsidies for breadwinners. The goal would be to make the end of abortion seem less utopian by making the burdens of motherhood less daunting, and to link the pro-life cause to a larger revolt against sterility.

Maybe someday this vision will be embraced by one of our political parties — after the GOP nominates Tucker Carlson for president in 2024, perhaps. But for the time being, the leaders of the Catholic Church should act as if this vision, their vision, is more than a wouldn’t-it-be-nice synthesis in bureaucratic documents, a generic humanitarianism that informs the smorgasbord of charitable programs mentioned in annual appeals.

Suppose that tomorrow Dolan made two conjoined announcements. First, that Andrew Cuomo is excommunicated. Second, that a specific collection would henceforth be taken up at every Catholic Mass, every day, all year, to fund an annual family allowance administered by the Sisters of Life, available to any parent in the state who asked the church for help bearing and raising their child.

I have no idea how much money this would raise, no confidence in how effective it would be. But the church needs leaders who act as if they have confidence, not only in the church’s teachings, but in its capacity to vindicate those teachings on its own, rather than through supplication to indifferent or hostile politicians.

Confidence alone cannot arrest decline. But it is a precondition for rebirth. And the church’s vision will not matter in American politics until Catholicism becomes a power unto itself again — one that does not need the favor of an Andrew Cuomo to promote the common good.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/opinion/the-church-and-the-abortion-capital.html" id="979411e3-dc42-367a-a9e4-4f4f367af0bd">The New York Times</a>.

In a sense it’s not surprising that a renewed debate about abortion would begin in New York state, which passed a law last week — since imitated, to more controversy, by Virginia Democrats — ratifying the right to kill human beings in utero in the third trimester.

The Church and the Abortion Capital

Yet at the same time, amid all the domestic chaos and incompetence and political malpractice, this administration continues to act in foreign policy — not tweet obnoxiously, not rage behind the scenes, but act — as if it’s following a serious grand strategy, one sufficiently coherent and plausible and forward-looking that future presidents might reasonably imitate it.

This Trump doctrine, in practice, isn’t the isolationism that he sometimes promised on the campaign trail; nor is it the flailing bellicosity that many of his critics feared. It’s a doctrine of disentanglement, retrenchment and realignment, in which the United States tries to abandon its most idealistic hopes and unrealistic military commitments, narrow its list of potential enemies and consolidate its attempts at influence. The overarching goal isn’t to cede U.S. primacy or abandon alliances, as Trump’s opponents often charge; rather, it’s to maintain U.S. primacy on a more manageable footing, while focusing more energy and effort on containing the power and influence of China.

Consider the two administration efforts in the news this week. The first is the White House’s decision to support the opposition leader in Venezuela and build a coalition to undermine the dictatorial Maduro government. The second is the advancing effort to negotiate a deal with the Taliban that would end America’s 17-years-and-counting military commitment in Afghanistan.

If a deal is struck and our forces actually withdraw, Trump’s personal skepticism of the Afghanistan intervention will have helped produce an outcome that large parts of our foreign policy establishment long resisted — an endgame that accepts the possibility of true defeat, a full Taliban takeover, as the price of reducing American commitments and bringing troops home.

Two years into his presidency Donald Trump has no clear legislative strategy, no policy agenda, no plan for remedying his persistent unpopularity and a path to re-election sufficiently bleak that he’s trying to bait a political naïf, Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz, into running as a third-party spoiler. Also, he might be impeached.

Ross Douthat

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