“The most important issues here, to me, are the related topics of China and climate change. I used to think the engagement with China strategy made sense, and I thought the people who objected to it were mostly driven by economic ignorance about the benefits of free trade. I still think the economic arguments for free trade are sound, but the actual geopolitical situation has evolved to the point where it’s clear that commercial ties between the United States and China were not fostering world peace or the liberalization of Chinese society.
Unfortunately, a lot of what’s happened since the conventional wisdom shifted on China is just unprincipled protectionism.
I think that’s wrong. Reducing dependence on imported Chinese manufactured goods is like trying to make sure we have the capacity to produce more ammunition — it’s not an economic policy at all, it’s a national security policy that involves incurring economic costs. We should be freeing up trade with the rest of the world, especially with our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. Which is just to say that the China situation has made me more supportive of ideas I would have rejected in the past, like increasing the defense budget, while continuing to feel that the new post-neoliberal ideas, on both the left and the right, are basically wrong.
But this really comes crashing into the mainstream progressive view of climate policy. Since the mid-Bush years, American carbon dioxide emissions have fallen nearly 20 percent, while global emissions have risen by over 20 percent.
Just to clarify that I am not a knuckle-dragging moron, the following standard environmentalist points are all true:
On a per capita basis, American emissions are still exceptionally high.
On a historical basis, America is still the major contributor to climate pollution.
The countries poised to suffer most from climate change are not the ones that have benefitted most from industrialization.
Those three considerations do add up, in my opinion, to a compelling moral case for American climate leadership. That said, the cold hard fact that I’ve come around to is that while it would be worth it for the United States of America to bear significant economic costs to avert climate change, it is literally not possible for us to do that. Given that the United States needs tax revenue, we can and should price the externality associated with our domestic carbon dioxide consumption. And we should fund clean energy innovation, continue to drive down the cost of batteries and solar panels, and make complementary regulatory changes to try to speed the deployment of long-range transmission lines, along with geothermal, small modular reactors, and fusion power. But China is doing a lot of that innovation and deployment right now and also building tons of coal plants, and we have no way of stopping them.
Instead of wrestling with these realities, American environmentalists are too often shopping ideas like denying poor countries financing for their own industrialization or trying to stop the United States from supplying the world with natural gas. These ideas almost certainly won’t work as environmental policy, because countries that want natural gas will just get the gas and the financing from other less friendly countries. And if they did work, the outcomes wouldn’t be desirable — trying to reduce emissions by choking off economic development in poor countries inverts the moral logic of the whole argument.”
“What is really different — and dangerous — about today’s justices is not partisanship, but rather a cognitive trap that Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called the “most damaging” of all human biases: overconfidence. Put simply, today’s justices possess a frightening degree of certainty that they can alone answer society’s most pressing problems with just the right lawyerly argument.
The roots of this certitude developed, perhaps surprisingly, from a noble place. When confronted with legal challenges to a slew of racially discriminatory laws in the mid-20th century, the justices needed the ability to proclaim those laws inconsistent with our Constitution’s one, true meaning. For good and important reasons, that is exactly what the court did.
But the power to declare the law’s meaning — and to override democratically enacted policies — is seductive. High constitutional theories such as living constitutionalism and originalism were advanced to justify judicial intervention in disputes ranging from guns to abortion and religion to the death penalty. And our overconfident Supreme Court was born.
The evidence of this overconfidence is everywhere around us, and it affects both sides of the political spectrum. One rough measure is the frequency with which the court overrules the judgment of our nation’s elected lawmakers. Whereas the court struck down less than one act of Congress per year between 1788 and 1994, the court has invalidated an average of more than three federal laws per year since then.”
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“Perhaps most significantly, the court’s overconfidence problem is apparent in its opinions. In overturning the right to abortion, for example, Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion declared that the legal reasoning embraced by respected jurists such as Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and Thurgood Marshall was “far outside the bounds of any reasonable interpretation.” Never mind that the “most important historical fact” on which Alito rested his own conclusion — the number of states that banned abortion in 1868 — was riddled with historical inaccuracies.
Opinions reaching liberal results often reflect overconfidence bias, too. In Kennedy v. Louisiana, for example, the court struck down the death penalty for cases of aggravated child rape. Although the Constitution was far from clear on the matter and elected officials had reached differing views, a bare five-justice majority wrote that “in the end,” it is “our judgment” that must decide “the question of the acceptability of the death penalty.””
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“Overconfidence bias has led to the court’s legitimacy crisis by unleashing the justices’ underlying partisan instincts. Humble justices can overcome those instincts by admitting uncertainty and deferring to others.”
“If you are angry at the Supreme Court, you are right to be angry. Many of this Court’s decisions are completely lawless — such as the Court’s recent decision in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), which ignored a federal law that unambiguously authorized Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. They demand anger. And that anger isn’t just righteous, it is useful.
But I also want to counsel against despair — that is, I want to counsel against the absence of hope.
The Court’s GOP-appointed majority is starting to draw some fences around the conservative legal project. The Court appears unwilling to attack entrenched parts of the American welfare state. It smacked down a Trump judge who attempted to ban the abortion drug mifepristone. It has rejected legal arguments that would devastate the US economy or threaten its national security.
And, most importantly, the Court is now signaling that it may preserve America’s ability to hold free and fair elections (or, at least, to hold elections that are as free and fair as possible in a nation with an Electoral College and a malapportioned Senate).”
“the fact that they’re unwilling to give conservatives a win in every case may say as much about what advocates are asking for as it does about the court’s ideological bent. The two big surprises this term — the ruling involving the Constitution’s elections clause and the decision involving the Voting Rights Act — were both cases that previous courts probably wouldn’t have agreed to hear at all. The aggressive arguments in both cases are just two examples of the way the court’s docket is changing, with right-wing legal groups and politicians asking for much further-reaching outcomes than they would have even five or six years ago.”
“House Republicans narrowly passed their version of an annual defense bill 219–210, after stacking it with controversial amendments on social issues that are dead on arrival in the Senate.
The debate on the National Defense Authorization Act, or the NDAA for short, now heads to the Democrat-controlled upper chamber, which is set to consider its own take on the bill later this month. Eventually, the two chambers will work to reconcile their differences between the two in the hope of finding a compromise.
The NDAA, one of Congress’s must-pass bills, effectively lays out what the military’s budget could look like for the next year and which programs will be funded. This year’s House bill authorizes $886 billion in funding, including a 5.2 percent pay raise for service members and the appointment of an inspector general to oversee Ukraine funding.
Much like the debt ceiling legislation and annual spending bills, the NDAA is a prime opportunity for lawmakers to add unrelated amendments making policy changes to pet issues, since it has to pass every year. This week, Republicans capitalized on this opportunity to put forth controversial amendments favored by their right flank, including restrictions on abortion and LGBTQ rights. It’s a move that’s meant to send a message about their position on social issues, and it’s also one that makes what was a bipartisan bill much more contentious.”
“opinion leaders create narratives about how the world works—and then voters essentially buy into one that suits their biases. They pick a team. Social media reinforces each side’s thinking habits. As the election arrives, most voters aren’t doing a cost-benefit analysis—but embracing the candidate who touts the story their team tells (whether it’s true or not).
“Narratives … provide a rich source of information about how people make sense of their lives, about how they construct disparate facts and weave them together cognitively to make sense of reality,” explains a 1998 UC Irvine study. They can be helpful for understanding the world, but they can also send people down a rabbit hole.”
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“fewer people can be persuaded by evidence. If you subscribe to the narrative that your opponents want to destroy everything that you find holy and dear, then you’ll put up with anything from a candidate from your tribe. During the 2016 election, Republicans embraced the “Flight 93″ theory—it’s time to rush the cockpit because a Hillary Clinton presidency would crash democracy.
Democrats believe something similar about a Donald Trump re-election, although they’re on more solid ground given that he did indeed try to steal an election and his election-denying acolytes filled the GOP ticket this year. Polls show most GOP voters have bought into that denialism narrative—and no evidence likely will sway them from their vote-stealing fantasies.”
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“Jumping on the narrative bandwagon can take you to some morally dubious places. I don’t expect voters to adopt my balls-and-strikes voting strategy. But unless there’s a movement back in that direction, the story of our democracy might not have a happy ending.”
“With Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s narrow victory over president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil—the two-time former president defeated the incumbent by a 1.8 percent margin (50.9 to 49.1)—the Latin American left has completed its strategic dominance over the region’s seven largest countries.
In the 2000s, much was made of Latin America’s so-called “Pink Tide,” which began with Hugo Chávez’s first electoral victory in Venezuela (1998) and da Silva’s first term in Brazil (2002–2006). There followed an unprecedented rise of left-wing governments across the region. However, there were still important holdouts at the time; Mexico and Colombia didn’t veer left at all; Chile maintained its post-Pinochet social democracy; Peru’s original “Pink Tider,” Ollanta Humala, initially scared the markets in 2011 but proved to be mostly moderate in power.
By late 2022, however, hard leftists—often in cahoots with local communist parties—had handily won the last elections in each of these countries and in Argentina, which returned to Peronist Kirchnerism in 2019. Bolsonaro was the last right-winger standing”