Oh My God The Obergefell Opinion Is Bad

Last summer, the Supreme Court decided the hideously-named Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that the Constitution protects what we on the left these days call marriage equality, i.e. that state laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman are unconstitutional. And... what with one thing and another I just never really got around to reading the case. Not the majority opinion, not the dissents. I heard some things about it. I heard that Kennedy did a lot of pronouncing about how wonderful marriage is, including a final paragraph the reading of which has apparently become a fixture at weddings. I heard that, as usual in these sorts of cases, his doctrinal analysis was a mess, and (as in Lawrence v. Texas) he was kind of unclear about whether this was an equal protection case or a "substantive due process" a.k.a. fundamental rights case. I heard that Chief Justice Roberts's opinion was far more fire-breathing culture warrior than I had been expecting after his curious dissent in U.S. v. Windsor. But I didn't read it for myself. Between those few snippets and my knowledge of Kennedy's previous gay rights jurisprudence I figured I had a decent kind of idea what the opinion said, and while it left a lot to be desired (aside from, y'know, deciding the case correctly), it had some interesting, maybe even promising stuff going on.

Well I just actually read the damn thing, and oh my god it sucks. It's waaaaaaaaaay worse than I had been imagining. First of all, about half the opinion isn't legal analysis at all, it's Anthony Kennedy Tells The Story of Marriage And How Wonderful It Is. Which first of all is just weird and kinda gross to read in the U.S. Reports. It's like Scalia's dissent in U.S. v. Virginia, the VMI case, where he includes the full text of the Virginia Military Institute's Code of a Gentleman at the end. This is just not something that belongs in a judicial opinion, not like this anyway. (As I'll note later, there could be a place for a little bit of this sort of thing in a better-crafted opinion, but Kennedy massively overdoses us on it.) Second, while there's some nice stuff in what he says, particularly the bits about how the changes that have been made to the institution of marriage over the centuries as women have achieved greater and greater social progress have strengthened and improved marriage, a lot of it is kind of gross on its own terms. He goes on and on about how wonderful marriage is, how it's a bond unlike any other, so ennobling, it's at the heart of human civilization, blah blah blah, and then he's like, hey isn't it great how these gay people love marriage as much as I do! They want in to our patriarchal (if slightly less than it used to be) institution, hooray!!! He literally goes so far as to say that "Were their intent to demean the revered idea and reality of marriage, the petitioners' claims would be of a different order." WTF, bro.

On Trump's Gains

The polls have tightened! Maybe you've heard, people are making kind of a big deal about it. In fact they're probably overstating the extent of the tightening, but it's pretty undeniable that some tightening has occurred. And one interesting thing about it is that it's almost entirely Trump gaining ground, rather than Clinton losing ground. On October 19th, the 538 national polling average stood at Clinton 45.4%, Trump 38.8%, a lead of 6.6% for Hillary. Today Trump's all the way up to 41.0%, a gain of 2.2%! And Clinton has fallen all the way to... 45.4%. A.k.a. the exact same place. Admittedly in the interim she went up to 46.0% and came back down again, but even since Hillary's number peaked on October 26th she's only down 0.6%, while Trump is up 1.4%. The share of voters remaining undecided or going for one of the third-party options has been falling for a while now. So let's think a bit about what this means, that Trump is gaining ground while Hillary is holding her ground.

Trump at Gettysburg

Donald Trump gave a speech today at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Apparently after descending into a depressed funk where he seemingly knew he was going to lose and didn't have much fight left in him yesterday, he's back to being Donald Trump today: reiterates that he'll lock up Hillary, attacks the media, says he'll sue the women accusing him of sexual assault for libel after the election (which, in this vision of the future, he has I believe won--imagine that, the President suing people for defamations that failed to derail his campaign!). Y'know, standard "Donald Trump is a disgusting creature" stuff.

But since he gave the speech at Gettysburg, it provides an occasion for a game I like to play. It's called "Imagine if it were Trump." The way it works is you take any memorable moment from the Presidency of any of the forty-three men who've actually been President so far and you picture that moment playing out if Trump had been President instead. It's literally always just laughably absurd; sometimes, as with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it ends with the destruction of the world. (There's a companion game, "Imagine if it weren't Trump," where you picture any major political figure not named Donald J. Trump doing any of the shit he's done. Equally hilarious; almost always ends with the destruction of that person's political career.)

But anyway, so let's play this game with the Gettysburg Address. The setting: some four months earlier, the Union Army had won a great victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a turning-point in the war but one that came at extraordinary cost (the Battle of Gettysburg had the most casualties of any in the Civil War). Now there's to be a dedication for the Soldier's National Cemetery in Gettysburg, and the President has been asked to speak. Imagine what Donald Trump would say. And then read what Lincoln actually said:

The Mets are Dead, Long Live the Mets!

The 2016 New York Mets have been eliminated from the post-season after losing last night's National League Wild Card Game. Noah Syndergaard was brilliant, getting into the sixth inning before giving up a hit and finishing with a pitching line of 7.0 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 3 BB, 10 K, good for a Game Score of 80. That would've been tied for the second-best start of the 2015 playoffs. It's the second-best start ever in a game which eliminated the pitcher's team, behind a Mike Mussina gem from 1997. (It is therefore the best such start by a National League team.) Unfortunately Madison Bumgarner turned in an even better start, a complete game shutout with four hits and two walks against six strikeouts (Game Score 83), and Jeurys Familia gave up the game-winning three-run home run to Conor Gillaspie of all people in the ninth inning, bringing the Mets' season to a close.

Which means it's time to look to next year. Here's what I figure the incumbent 2017 Opening Day 25-man roster looks like:

How To Use This Mets Roster

The Mets just recalled Michael Conforto from AAA Las Vegas, with fellow left-handed outfielder Brandon Nimmo being sent down in his place. (The latter move follows as a matter of course; Nimmo, a top prospect, needs to get consistent playing time, which he's definitely not going to get with the Mets with Conforto back.) Conforto was shockingly great last year after being called up directly from AA, was Ted Williams levels of great in April this year, and then was pitcher-with-a-bit-of-pop levels of awful from May 1st onward. May 1st was the day when he was kept in the lineup against Madison Bumgarner, one of the best left-handed starters in the world. I dunno if that's what caused the slump, but it makes for an awfully convenient marker. Anyway, he went down and was raging hot at AAA (his first exposure to the level! actually!), so now he's back. Makes sense.

Except it creates a bit of a sticky situation regarding the outfield configuration. Conforto is strictly a corner outfielder; until his stint in Vegas he had only ever played left field as a professional. Curtis Granderson is, at this point, also a corner outfielder, and like Conforto he's left-handed. Yoenis Cespedes, meanwhile, is the Mets' best position player. To start the year, he was playing a lot of center field, flanked by Conforto in left and Granderson in right, with the team thinking it could live with Cespedes's below-average defense in center in return for getting those three bats into the lineup simultaneously. But Cespedes keeps being banged up with minor injuries, and he suspects that the toll center field takes on his legs may be contributing to that. So they'd really like to keep him in left field as often as possible, where, as it happens, he's a Gold Glove defender. That, of course, leaves them with no center fielders, but not to worry, because we've got Juan Lagares, who ought to be a legitimate contender for the Platinum Glove award (given to the Gold Glover in each league who's the best overall defensive player) any time he plays a full season, and who's also been hitting well to start the second half of the season (as well as on the entire year to date). Great! We've got four legitimately major league quality starting outfielders! Hooray!

...except, of course, you only typically play three outfielders. I mean, you could play four of them, but then you'd only have three infielders, which is probably a bad idea. So we have four deserving candidates for three spots. Whaddaya do?

Here's what: you play everyone. Some of the time.

Concerning those Polls

So, um. There's no real way to sugarcoat it: the polls right now look bad. We're mostly into the general election now; Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton is the basically-also-presumptive Democratic nominee. This match-up has been polled extensively since last summer, when it (to be more precise, the Trump side of it) first became plausible. And Clinton has led in the polls, constantly. At the worst of her email scandal last August, this got down to maybe a 1-point lead, but then it got bigger and for most of 2016 it's been pretty substantial. In late March Hillary was up by more than 10 point, on average. As recently as mid-April it was still around 9%.

Now it's 2%. This is, um, scary. The only thing that's made Trump's victory in the Republican primary anything other than utterly terrifying has been the thought that, of course, he's not going to win. Right now, if you look at the polls... yikes. It doesn't look especially slam-dunk that he's not going to win. And the question is what to make of this.

Obviously, given my nature, I'm going to say that we shouldn't worry too much, not commensurate with how bad it would be if we were entering this election with only a +2% advantage anyway. And I do think that's right. Equally obvious, though, is the fact that we should be somewhat worried, and that something about this current wave of bad polls is telling us that there is maybe more of a chance that things go the wrong way than we thought.

But the key to understanding what the polls are saying right now, I think, is that they're saying a different thing from a month ago. And from two months ago, and three, and four. That means we need to ask, what's changed? And there's a clear answer: Trump has wrapped up his nomination fight, while Clinton hasn't. And the Democratic side is getting nasty. We can see this in the polls, too. Bernie's hypothetical lead over Trump grew wider at about the same time Hillary's did, earlier in 2016, suggesting that that shift was caused by something about Trump (i.e., he got less popular). But right now, Bernie's lead hasn't budged. That tells me that the current shift is nothing to do with Trump, it's to do with Hillary. Note also that since mid-April, when it was Clinton 49%, Trump 40%, Trump's gone up just over 1%, while Clinton has dropped by nearly 6%. Again, this looks like a Clinton phenomenon, not a Trump phenomenon.

But I don't recall the last month as being a particularly bad one for Clinton. No new scandals, no major missteps. The latest rumor about the email thing is that she's been fully vindicated, though a formal announcement has yet to be made. Nothing's really been going on that would suggest Hillary's become that much more toxic a candidate... in the eyes of a disinterested observer, maybe. Not in the eyes of a Bernie supporter. And there's the rub: it seems basically certain that what's going on right now is that an awful lot of Bernie supporters aren't saying they'll vote for Hillary in the general election. (Nate Silver makes the same point in a series of tweets.)

So we basically know why the polls look like they do. The thing Hillary's people keep saying about how she's fighting two campaigns right now is correct. Trump has wrapped up the Republican side, and has gotten a bit of a boost from consolidating his party. More importantly, Hillary hasn't wrapped up her side yet, and the Democrats are if anything splintering a bit as our race draws to a close. So that's the big question of the election right now: once Hillary actually wins, and Bernie drops out, do his supporters go back to saying they'll all vote for her? Can he get them to do that? If so, then we're back to a baseline of Clinton +6% or +8% or maybe even +10%, and the election looks fairly comfortable, especially since I expect the campaign to wear well for her and ill for Trump. If not, then there's potentially a lot more danger.

I would really like to think that this is just a temporary phenomenon. Something similar happened to Obama back in 2008, when McCain had wrapped up the nomination but Hillary was still hanging on, and that too passed. And, hey--Trump got a boost when he wrapped up his nomination! And Republicans have way more reason to not support him than Democrats do to not support Hillary. Waaaaay more. You see prominent conservative pundits talking about how bad Trump is and thinking of running a third-party candidate or whatever. Bernie Sanders keeps repeating how much better than the Republicans Hillary is. It would just be bizarre if this election ends up with a Republican Party unified around Trump but a Democratic Party that can't unify around Hillary Clinton, one of its leading figures for damn near three decades now. So I remain skeptical that that's what's going to happen. Probably another month from now, the polls will start looking more like they should, and the best course of action until then is not to panic.

But I can't deny that the way the whole Sanders campaign is going right now has me pretty legitimately worried. I think he's done some real damage, and I think he's going to need to work real hard to repair it when the time comes. He'd bloody well better.

Hillary Clinton and the Foreign Policy Triangle

There's an interesting piece on Vox today trying to reconcile several different views of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (I can say that now, after her wins in New York and most of the other northeastern states that voted last night) in terms of her foreign policy attitudes. One view comes from a profile by Mark Landler in the New York Times Magazine titled, "How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk," whose thesis (which, as the Vox article notes, embodies the conventional wisdom) is that Hillary is a "super-hawk," "the last true hawk left in the race," with far more "appetite for military engagement abroad" than even any of the Republicans. Than even Ted "Let's See if Sand Can Glow in the Dark" Cruz. Yikes! The other view comes from the nuclear nonproliferation group Global Zero, on whose scorecard Clinton ranks far more dovish across the board than the Republicans, and is not so different from Bernie Sanders. This is a question of some considerable importance, and one that received perhaps less attention during the Democratic primary than it deserved, because if Hillary is, indeed, a super-hawk, that would be by far her greatest potential weakness with the Democratic electorate. (Bernie failed to make much hay with this, because he seemed remarkably out of his depth in foreign policy arguments, but it's still worth thinking about.)

The Vox piece ends up concluding that things are considerably more complicated than perhaps either of the opposing views would suggest:

[H]er past record, current policies, and ... larger worldview . . . reveal Clinton as someone who is exceptionally enthusiastic about the merits and potential of American engagement in the world. She is indeed, more than any other candidate in the race, a true believer in American power.

But Clinton's policies and past record suggest that her vision of power includes military force as well as diplomacy, so that while she is more likely to act in foreign affairs, she is also more likely to do so peacefully.

This is an area where, I think, viewing foreign policy through a simple one-dimensional spectrum is a real mistake. American attitudes toward foreign policy are best thought of as a triangle, with three distinct poles: isolationism, imperialism, and internationalism. Isolationism is simple: it's the view that we shouldn't really be involved in foreign affairs at all. This was the prevailing attitude in, say, the 1920s, and into much of the 1930s. Imperialism is the view that we should aggressively use our national might, and especially our military power, to advance our own interests across the globe. Our literal imperialism around the turn of the 20th century was the clearest embodiment of this view, and I therefore use the word "imperialism" as a neat shorthand, but in our own era I think the neoconservatives exemplify this overall attitude. Finally, internationalism is the view that we should take an active, perhaps even a leading, role in foreign affairs, but that we should do so in cooperation with other countries where possible, should emphasize diplomacy, and should in general act for the general good of the world rather than for selfishly pro-American reasons. Woodrow Wilson (and his League of Nations) and Harry Truman (who brought America into the U.N.) are exemplars of internationalism.

And it really is a three-way system. You can't construct any one of these worldviews out of some mixture of the other two; they're qualitatively different orientations toward the world. And they map onto the ordinary political spectrum in some interesting ways. Internationalism is a distinctively liberal attitude, and imperialism a conservative one, but while you can have isolationism of either a liberal or a conservative stripe, it's not especially a "centrist" approach. Indeed, during much of the 20th century it was the very most conservative Republicans who were isolationists. Broadly speaking I think that conservative foreign policy thought runs along the edge of the triangle from imperialism to isolationism (see this excellent Jonathan Chait piece identifying Ted Cruz with the modern isolationists, who see air power as a way to dominate the world without engaging in it, and Marco Rubio with the neo-imperialist neocons)*, while liberal foreign policy runs along the edge from internationalism to isolationism. Bernie Sanders, for example, is somewhere in the middle of that line: he's emphatically not an imperialist, and is in conventional terms incredibly "dovish," but is somewhat skeptical about American involvement abroad, whether diplomatic or militaristic.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is I think on that other edge, the line running from imperialism to internationalism. And I think she's pretty clearly most of the way toward internationalism, maybe almost all the way there. But she's definitely not an isolationist. She sees America as having tremendous capacity to do good in the world, by various means, and as President she will doubtless try to do a lot of good in the world using those various means. Maybe that will get her into trouble sometimes; I certainly think that Obama's skepticism of America's ability to change things for the better has been a healthy one. But it's a fundamentally different impulse from the truly "hawkish" ones of the imperialists. She is interested in using military power, but not for conquest. Maybe from a left-isolationist standpoint that doesn't matter. Maybe for an internationalist skeptical about American power, in more of the Obama tradition, it's a well-meaning but ultimately mistaken and potentially even disastrous approach. This piece isn't entirely a defense of Hillary Clinton.

Rather, it is simply an argument that you cannot understand Hillary Clinton if you try to see foreign policy through a one-dimensional, bipolar lens, with "hawks" on one side and "doves" on the other. There are three different foreign policy camps, and unless you understand that, you can't understand how the different candidates relate to one another.




*And what, you may ask, about Donald Trump? I... don't know, exactly. I think he's a sort of imperialist? But a very different one than the neocons. Basically, as many people have noted, it seems like his "ambition is to sit at the head of a vast American tribute empire," not surprising, perhaps, given that his own business is basically a tribute empire built around the name Trump. I guess that's imperialist? Or some sort of weirdo hybrid between imperialism and isolationism? Maybe it's more isolationist? We shouldn't get involved unless they pay us? Transactional isolationism? I don't know. Certainly it's not within the four corners of any standard-issue map of foreign policy approaches.

Yes, the Democratic Party Has a Real Ideology: Equality

It's become common, among intelligent, political-science-literate types, to say that the Democratic and Republican Parties are organized in qualitatively different ways. The Republican Party is highly ideological, the thinking goes: it's defined by a monolithic commitment to conservative principles. The Democrats, on the other hand, are commonly described as a coalition, maybe even a loose one, of different interest groups. Paul Krugman's latest blog post is largely in this same tradition, with one major variation; it repeats the "coalition of interest groups" description of the Democrats verbatim, but Krugman describes the Republicans as "an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of higher incomes for the donor class"--and, as he notes, "the base never cared about the ideology." It's not very hard to diagnose this particular fault-line in the party right now, since Trump basically represents a rebellion on behalf of the white-resentment-y voters against the donor class-favoring party elites.

But I've always thought that this description of the two parties is wrong. Certainly I think it's wrong as to the Democrats, and it might even be totally backwards. Certainly the common wisdom accurately captures the way the parties seem to behave in practice. But if you look deeper, I'm not sure it's so true. The Democrats do have an ideology. You could call it liberalism if you wanted, but egalitarianism is probably a better name. Liberal egalitarianism is better still, if not so pithy. I like that formulation, though, because I'm using the word "liberal" in its technical or political-theory sense, meaning generally a commitment to expansive individual freedom. I also demote liberalism, in this sense, to the position of modifier, with egalitarianism remaining the noun.

And I like that, because I do think that egalitarianism is the central organizing concept of the Democratic Party.

Who Says Resurrection Is All That?

Last night I happened to see an article posted on Facebook titled, "The Challenge of Easter." It's a very thoughtful and well-articulated statement of the importance of Easter, and the event it celebrates--the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion and death--for the Christian world-view. There's one passage in particular that I thought was interesting:

If you don’t believe in the Resurrection, you can go on living your life while perhaps admiring Jesus the man, appreciating his example and even putting into practice some of his teachings. At the same time, you can set aside those teachings that you disagree with or that make you uncomfortable—say, forgiving your enemies, praying for your persecutors, living simply or helping the poor. You can set them aside because he’s just another teacher. A great one, to be sure, but just one of many.

If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, however, everything changes. In that case, you cannot set aside any of his teachings. Because a person who rises from the grave, who demonstrates his power over death and who has definitively proven his divine authority needs to be listened to. What that person says demands a response.

In short, the Resurrection makes a claim on you.

Uhhh... why? I don't entirely get the logic here, the one that says "resurrection → authority." And I'm not even talking here about my own personal quibble with the "god → authority" logic, although I do also have a problem with that. No, I'm talking about the "resurrection → god" step in the reasoning. Because there's plenty of non-god creatures that can rise from the dead. Vampires, for instance, and zombies. Or wights, though they're less popular these days. Oh, and Time Lords, of course. (Jesus was clearly a Time Lord.) The simple fact of his resurrection doesn't really narrow down which of these he was. Now, you may say, ah, yes, but vampires, zombies, and Time Lords aren't real. Okay, but... neither is god. It's a level playing field!

Or, at least, we haven't yet established that god exists: the author uses his resurrection as evidence for his authority. Obviously if you already believe he's god, then he's god, but if you don't already believe that he's god, I don't see how his supposed resurrection really gets you any further toward that destination. I might be very impressed by someone who can rise from the dead (presuming, of course, that he's not in the zombie/vampire/etc. scary-undead category of people who rise from the dead), but why on earth should I conclude that he's my sovereign?

You Don't Have the Votes

"This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative," declares David Brooks in the opening of his column today. That sounds strange, given the general despair gripping the Republican Party, and in particular the "it would be nice if our party weren't so goddamn crazy" faction of the Republican Party, but his closing paragraph explains what he means:

We’re going to have two parties in this country. One will be a Democratic Party that is moving left. The other will be a Republican Party. Nobody knows what it will be, but it’s exciting to be present at the re-creation.

On the one hand, that sounds about right. I've long thought something along these lines: that the Republican Party as we know it has a clear expiration-date, that eventually it would have to reshape itself, but that I couldn't for the life of me imagine what it would come out the other side looking like. Brooks suggests that Trump represents the destruction of the old party, the "model crisis" in which the old Republican ideas, having grown unworkable over the past few decades, come crashing to the ground. This sets up an opening for a new Republican paradigm, a new model for the party.

But here's the thing: that new Republican Party doesn't have the votes. Not yet, and probably not for a long time. The big problem in American politics right now is that there's a section of the country, no longer large enough to win a general election, as it was back in the 1980s, but still big enough to dominate one party's primaries, which is bitterly committed to a mixture of what we might charitably call white nationalism and conservative Christian traditionalism. Those voters want nothing to do with the new Republican Party Brooks wants. They're angry about America's increasing pluralism, and about the fact that white Christians no longer get to just run everything without serious opposition. Hell, it's worse than that, for them, as this piece about Trump-as-Jefferson-Davis observes: like the South after the Election of 1860, these voters are looking at a bleak future of being consistently outvoted by those who would tear down the social institutions and traditions they hold most dear.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to be "compassionate," but these voters have, it appears, no compassion for anyone outside their own little group, and precious little of it even within the group.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to have an "expansive open" nationalism, but these voters are practically defined by the "closed, ethnic nationalism" Brooks decries.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to be "honest," but these voters feel so threatened by reality that they demand unwavering loyalty from their politicians to ideas they'd have to be either fools or knaves to espouse.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to focus less on economic theory and more on "sociology," but... well, okay, let's be honest. These voters don't give a damn about homo economicus and the conservative economic theories which have used him as their justification. As for sociology, though, I fear these voters only have interest in "binding a fragmenting society, reweaving family and social connections" in one way, and not one that involves "relating across the diversity of a globalized world."

The basic point is that the people voting for Trump like Trump. They like what Trump stands for, and it's everything Brooks is against. What's more, even those Republicans who aren't voting for Trump are mostly voting for Ted Cruz. Let's run Cruz through the Brooks checklist. Compassionate? Hah. He's one of the least compassionate politicians you'll ever see. Expansive and open in his nationalism? Try "let's see if sand can glow in the dark" and "let's secure Muslim neighborhoods." (Actually, file those under the compassion thing as well.) Honest? Well, I guess Cruz is slightly more honest than Trump, but he's hardly honest. And as for sociology, Cruz is as fanatic about Reagan-style conservative economic theory as anyone on the Republican debate stages. Probably more. So between Trump and Cruz, we're looking at close to 80% of the Republican Party's voters who really don't want the kind of party Brooks wants.

So while I'd sure like to think the Republican Party might rise from its Trump-induced ashes in a form similar to what Brooks describes. But I just don't see where it's going to get the votes. Because the thing is, the people who have been deciding to vote for the Republican Party these last few decades are a lot more like Donald Trump than David Brooks. Perhaps that's because what David Brooks is describing is a lot more like Barack Obama's Democratic Party than it is like the Republicans.

In fact, thinking about it a bit, it sort of seems to me like American politics, particularly in the coming years, is divided in something like three parts. The first divide is between people who think that, e.g., global warming and health care and poverty and race discrimination are the problems with the world (broadly liberal priorities) and those who think that, e.g., godlessness and sexual perversion and invading hordes of Muslim terrorists and racial entitlements are the problems with the world (broadly conservative priorities). The latter form the Trump/Cruz part of the electorate. It's the vast majority of Republicans, but probably not much more than a third of the electorate. Then within the first group there's a division between those with broadly conservative (in a traditional, 1950s sense of the word) ideas about how to solve these problems and those with more aggressively liberal, verging on socialist ideas about how to solve them. That last is the people supporting Bernie, plus those who would support him except for fear that he'd lose the general. So then in the middle, the people who have broadly liberal sensibilities about what the problems are but broadly conservative sensibilities about how to fix them, are people like David Brooks. And Barack Obama, at least as he's manifested as President. (It's tough to know how much more radical he might have been in his approach with fewer political constraints.) Of course, it's really more of a spectrum between Brooks at one end and Bernie on the other, with Obama and Clinton somewhere in the middle.

In a lot of ways, this three-way divide looks a lot like the Socialist/Liberal/Conservative party systems we see in many countries. And it would be really, really nice if we could end up kicking the Trump/Cruz-style conservative faction out altogether, and having something like a socialist party and a liberal party. But those reactionary conservatives aren't going away, not all at once anyway. It'll be many decades yet before we can have a party that includes the Trump/Cruz voters but isn't dominated by them. And in the meanwhile, given that people like Brooks are starting to wake up to the fact that the reactionaries really aren't the kind of people they want to be making common cause with, it's awfully tough to see how we're gonna get two parties out of this electorate in the near future.

David Brooks may think it's a great time to be a conservative, but he's looking at a generation of alliance with either the party of Trump or the party of Obama, Clinton, and *gasp* Sanders.

Shut Up, Bernie

So, last week Bernie Sanders said some things. Things like this:

But the bottom line is that when only half of the American people have participated in the political process, when some of the larger states in this country, people in those states have not yet been able to voice their opinion on who should be the Democratic nominee, I think it's absurd for anybody to suggest that those people not have a right to cast a vote. 

And like this:

We think if we come into the convention in July in Philadelphia, having won a whole lot of delegates, having a whole lot of momentum behind us, and most importantly perhaps being the candidate who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump, we think that some of these super delegates who have now supported Hillary Clinton can come over to us. Rachel, in almost every poll, not every poll, but almost every national matchup poll between Sanders and Trump, Clinton and Trump, we do better than Hillary Clinton and sometimes by large numbers. We get a lot more of the independent vote than she gets. And, frankly and very honestly, I think I am a stronger candidate to defeat Trump than Secretary Clinton is and I think many secretary -- many of the super delegates understand that.

 Okay, so, a few thoughts.

Thoughts on Merrick Garland

First of all, I must confess error: I really, really thought it was going to be Sri Srinivasan. It wasn't. Whoops. (I did however predict that Obama would announce his choice today, right after Trump has seized control of the Republican primary, thus helping with the "make Republicans look like damned fools" strategy.)

As far as the nomination itself, I think Garland is probably the unique solution to the question of "who would this President and this Senate pick as a nominee?" Now, of course, we know that this Senate has no interest in solving that question, and I actually think that's why it's important that Obama chose Garland. Senate Republicans oppose this nomination on spurious grounds of principle, and I think Obama has a solemn responsibility to contest that principle with all his might, lest it become settled precedent. That doesn't just mean nominating someone. It means nominating the very person he would choose if his goal was to reach a reasonable compromise with this Senate. After all, if this President has the right to participate in this process, surely so does this Senate. Nominating some liberal firebrand would feel more like Obama's responding in kind to the Republicans, saying, hey, pretty soon you guys won't be in office either, I'd rather wait until then.

Of course, that depends on Garland's status as someone acceptable to both liberals and conservatives. I've gone back and forth a bit on whether I think he should be acceptable from our side of things; basically what gives me pause is the possibility that he would be more conservative than Scalia on certain criminal justice issues. That's the area where Garland is said to be at his most conservative, and many of Scalia's idiosyncratically liberal stances were in that area. It would rub me a little the wrong way for the Court to get worse on any major set of issues by dint of replacing Antonin Scalia. But right now I'm feeling pro-Garland. Partly that's just because Obama nominated him, and I trust Obama's judgment. Partly it's because, while Scalia did have a few liberal views about criminal procedure, mostly he was awful on criminal justice stuff.

But partly it's just because Obama has successfully appealed to the small-d democrat in me. It's not fun when the other side wins, but sometimes they do, and when they do, it's their right to participate in governance. Garland, as the most reasonable compromise between President and Senate, is the correct answer to the question "who should replace Scalia?" in terms of how our constitutional system is supposed to function. And while I applaud Obama for his willingness to reject lopsided compromises that would shift public policy in a conservative direction when it comes to ordinary matters of legislation, I do think it's kind of different here. There's a real argument that it would be a dereliction of duty to just leave the seat unfilled for a year because Obama hoped that his side would be in a more commanding position after the election. And, of course, Garland would shift the Court massively to the left compared with Scalia, even if he might not do so on every single issue. We also might get another opportunity to shift the Court leftward if Justice Kennedy retires sometime soon; I've heard rumors to the effect that he's maybe not doing so well. Garland would probably be a really good Supreme Court Justice, even if I might not agree with him about everything, and frankly, I'm not entitled to a nominee I agree with about everything right now. So, count me in.

That being said, by far the most important thing about this whole situation is that he's not going to end up on the Court, not as a result of this nomination in any event. (Watching him tear up at his press conference earlier I couldn't help but feel kind of sorry about that, even though I'll probably like the Justice who ends up in the seat in his stead better.) I bet the Republicans are really regretting that they decided to take this pseudoprincipled stand right now, because as a matter of pure strategy, the obvious play is to fold like a cheap suit and confirm Merrick Garland. Their party is going to nominate one Donald J. Trump. He's more than likely going to lose to one Hillary Rodham Clinton. It's not even clear that they'll be rooting against that result. And when he loses to Hillary, she'll likely wind up with a Democratic Senate. At the very least it'll be a less Republican Senate than we've got now. If this vacancy is still open then, they'll be longing for the days of Merrick Garland. But having staked out this supposed constitutional principle, they can't follow the strategic logic without making it painfully obvious that they were lying earlier.

And their idiocy isn't just a matter of strategy. They're saying that they want "the American people" to have a say in the process, but in cutting the people who elected Barack Obama out of the process, they're also cutting the people who elected them out of the process. Honestly I feel like they're betraying their constituents more than anyone else.

I also think it's very likely that if, as I think is likely, we get President Hillary and a Democratic Senate next year, the Senate Democrats will both be entirely within their rights to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees (thus ensuring that no Republicans have an ounce of influence over Hillary's nomination), and will be kind of likely to do so. Those same Senate Republicans will have spent a year instituting a blockade on spurious constitutional grounds purporting to defend the right of the people; they'll have forfeited any right to block the President and Senate that the people chose from making their preferred choice.

Oh, and one final point: people are talking about what will happen during the lame duck session. Suppose, for instance, that the Democrats win big, taking the Senate and holding the Presidency. Well at that point, Republicans should leap to confirm Garland, right? Yes, but Obama shouldn't let them. He's perfectly within his rights to withdraw the nomination, and if the vacancy is still open on November 9th I think it would be entirely proper of him to do so. Indeed, even if he left the Republicans with a little sliver of time to vote Garland through before withdrawing the nomination, he would be perfectly within his rights to decline to sign the commission, thus defeating the appointment. His rationale would be as follows: "look, I wanted to work with you to fill this seat, but you insisted on waiting until after the election, and you lost. You've forfeited your right to be a part of this process; I'm done with you." Particularly if Hillary's position in the polls looks commanding, he might even want to announce that a little in advance of the election. One way or another, it would be unacceptable to allow this Garland nomination to serve as a "heads we win, tails we don't lose very much" device for the Republicans.

I wish I could say that the next little while will be very interesting, but unfortunately it looks like the plan is for just nothing to happen for many months, and then eventually we'll see if it had an effect on the election. Ah well.

A Reality Check on the Democratic Primary

It's Tuesday. Specifically, it's Tuesday, March 15th, the Ides of March, and a key turning point in both presidential primaries. But who cares about the Republicans; this post is about the Democrats. One week ago, on Tuesday, March 8th (a.k.a. International Women's Day), the soon-to-be first female President suffered a really shocking defeat in Michigan, where polls had her up by over 20 points. Bernie ended up winning, just barely, by about 1.5%. It was shocking, and made us reconsider everything we thought we knew about how the race is going. Today (well, tomorrow, really, since it's only just barely Tuesday as I'm writing this), five big states will vote, the first and last time that will happen. It's Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida. And we'll see whether Michigan was a harbinger of things to come, in terms of polling error, or whether things will be basically back to normal. If the latter, we're looking at big Clinton wins in Florida and North Carolina, the last Southern states to vote, a more modest Clinton win in Ohio, a close race in Missouri, and... god knows what's going on in Illinois.

But it's worth taking stock of how things are going, because... they're going really well for Hillary. You can see how well using the FiveThirtyEight delegate targets. In almost every state, Hillary's meeting or beating her targets. And while Bernie does have a few states where he's beat his targets, they're tiny little victories. He netted one delegate versus his target in Oklahoma and Maine, two apiece in Vermont (by shutting Hillary out) and Colorado, and by five in Kansas. That's his biggest win. In Michigan, his great victory only amounted to holding Hillary to her targets. Meanwhile, Hillary has seven wins bigger than Bernie's biggest, in South Carolina (+7), Georgia (+9), Alabama (+9), Mississippi (+9), Virginia (+10), Tennessee (+11), and Texas (+22). Indeed, Tennessee all by itself is enough to cancel out all five of Bernie's wins. Put it all together and she's 88 delegates ahead of her targets, which means he's 88 delegates behind his targets. He doesn't just need to win going forward. He needs to win big. He needs to win big states by big margins. He needs to beat his targets by big margins in big states. And those targets include winning New York. Hillary's from New York.

And all this, having not delivered a single win of the sort he needs.

Here's another fact about tomorrow: it marks the half-way point of the campaign. 2006 delegates will have been awarded after tomorrow, with only 1946 to come (plus a handful here or there from non-state primaries). So after tomorrow, Bernie will need to win by the same margin he's lost by to date. Let's assume he manages to hold Hillary even in delegates. And let's also say he manages to hold her even in delegates between California and New York. All of that is generous to Bernie, I think. The 538 targets would have Hillary winning 723 of the 1413 delegates at stake in those seven states, and that has Bernie narrowly winning New York. So that would leave Bernie 223 delegates behind (as he is right now), with 1224 delegates left to be awarded. He'd need to win 724 of those delegates, or nearly 60%. Take Pennsylvania and New Jersey out of the mix, the two biggest states, where a combined delegate split also looks pretty generous for Bernie, and you're talking about only 909 delegates left. He'd need to win 557 of those. Here are the states where Bernie's won more than 60% of the delegates: Kansas and Vermont. That's his home state, and one other state. (EDIT: whoops, I forgot Maine. There's also Maine.)

If he can't win big tomorrow, bigger than it looks like he should, and if he can't win big in the four biggest states that will remain after tomorrow, his task is to win everywhere else as thoroughly as he won Kansas. (And Maine!)

That really doesn't seem very plausible. And that means that, 24 hours from now, it might start looking pretty much impossible for him to win. Unless we get another Michigan.

So, the Republicans are Running the 1836 Whig Play, huh?

It looks like, in the wake of Super Tuesday, the anti-Trump forces within the Republican Party, decreasingly a.k.a. the Republican Party, have recognized that Trump will "win" the primaries, in the sense of getting the most votes, winning the most states, and having the most delegates pledged to him at the convention. Their goal is to keep his delegate count below the 50% threshold so they can get to a second ballot and then ignore him and nominate someone less, y'know, Trump. And this means jettisoning the old anti-Trump strategy of consolidating around a single champion. Now they want Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich to all stay in for the long haul, each performing well in different areas of the country and collectively denying Trump a majority even though no one opponent will have anything like his overall support.

If that strategy sounds familiar, well, it shouldn't, unless you're familiar with the 1836 election. There, Martin Van Buren was running to succeed Andrew Jackson, and the anti-Jacksonian Whigs ran this exact same play. William Henry Harrison was their real candidate, but he wasn't on the ballot in every state. Instead, they ran Daniel Webster in Massachusetts, Willie Person Mangum in South Carolina, and Hugh L. White throughout much of the South, with Harrison as their northern and midwestern candidate. The plan was to deny Van Buren a majority in the electoral college and thereby throw the election to the House of Representatives, which the Whigs controlled. It was a fascinating moment in American politics: had the Whigs succeeded, they might have made this multiple regional candidates strategy the norm in American politics for the party that controlled the House.

They, uh, didn't succeed. Van Buren won 15 states and 170 electoral votes, compared to 7 and 73 for Harrison, 2 and 26 for White, one (Massachusetts) and 14 for Webster, and one (South Carolina) and 11 for Mangum. That's 170 for Van Buren, 124 for the various Whigs: a majority for Van Buren, and a third term for the Jacksonians. Four thousand votes in Pennsylvania could've swung that state for Harrison, taking its 30 EVs out of Van Buren's column and making the Whigs' gambit work. But they didn't, and it didn't, and the strategy has never been tried again.

Until now.

We'll see how it goes. I mean, it won't go well, that's for sure: if it "fails" it means they nominate Trump, and if it "works" it means they deny the guy who won their primaries the nomination and he probably storms out and runs as an independent and throw the election to Hillary and the party humiliates itself. But as between those two, we'll see how it goes. Good luck!

What Religious Liberty Really Looks Like

I just read Linda Greenhouse's piece about how the Court is shaping up in the wake of Justice Scalia's death, and something in it caught my eye. She mentions a case, Ben-Levi v. Brown, in which Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissent from the denial of certiorari, a highly unusual move and one that Greenhouse couldn't recall ever seeing Justice Alito make. That case concerned a prisoner's religious liberty claim: he wanted to meet up with fellow Jewish inmates for religious study and/or worship (there was some dispute about which one, and it might matter), but the state wouldn't let him, because there were only two other Jewish inmates. You might think that shouldn't matter--and you would be right!--but it mattered because the state had apparently been informed by a rabbi that collective Jewish worship requires the presence of ten Jews in order to form a minyan. Hence, the state's rules allowed Jewish inmates to meet up for worship so long as there were at least ten of them. Alito, in his dissent from the denial of cert, thought this was ridiculous: what mattered isn't what some rabbi says, but what Mr. Ben-Levi himself believed.

And... he's right about that. I think Ben-Levi should have won that case, and easily so. I don't even necessarily even need to get the Free Exercise Clause involved here: this policy seems to me to violate the Establishment Clause pretty clearly. One prong of the traditional test under that Clause is that government policy must not create "entanglement" with religion. Basically the idea is that we really, really don't want the government dictating religious doctrines. This is the aspect of the Establishment Clause that's meant to protect religion from government as much as the reverse. And so I would say, the government has absolutely no business enforcing the minyan rules. Maybe they could simply not allow for group study/worship by Jewish prisoners, or maybe in appropriate cases they could limit the right to participate in those groups for individual prisoners whose poor behavior merits it. But if they're gonna allow the study at all, they absolutely cannot base their rules about when it is or is not permissible based on some view of what constitutes the correct interpretation of the religion in question; that's flatly impermissible.

And it's totally different from the other "religious liberty" case this term, and all the high-profile one of the past few years. Greenhouse speculates that Alito may have been "practicing" for the upcoming blockbuster case Zubik v. Burwell, where a bunch of religious groups and/or companies (because apparently that's a thing now) are complaining about the government's new rule saying that they don't have to provide insurance that covers contraception to their employees if they don't want to, they just have to let the government know that they object and then the government will provide that coverage separately. This, you see, still makes them culpable for whatever sins they think the contraception will perpetrate, according to their own religious convictions.

Spot the difference? It's simple: whereas Ben-Levi (and presumably his fellow Jewish inmates) just wants to practice his own religion his own way, these companies are fairly explicitly claiming a religious right to obstruct others' behavior that violates their own beliefs. I deny wholeheartedly that the latter has anything to do with "religious liberty." But to anyone who thinks this means I don't believe in religious liberty, that's wrong: I do support real religious liberty claims, like Ben-Levi's.

Congratulations to Bernie Sanders on his First Good State Result!

Woohoo! He finally beat the 538 benchmarks in a state! And it'll almost certainly be two of them by night's end. His shocking 10-point victory in Oklahoma was six points ahead of his +4% benchmark, and he looks on pace to win Colorado by about six surplus points as well, with a 17-point win.

That is officially the end of the good news for Bernie Sanders tonight. Well, okay, a 73-point win in Vermont ain't bad, even if it falls short of the +83% benchmark. But his ~15-point win in Minnesota will fall short of a +21% benchmark. Meanwhile he's failing to win two states he should've won: Massachusetts, which he should've won by about 11% and will instead lose by 2% (which I think is brutal for his campaign), and Tennessee. Oh, Tennessee. 538 thinks it should've been a very competitive state. It had other ideas, joining its Southern neighbors in giving Hillary a landslide win at +37%. Taken all by itself that would imply a 39-point national lead for Hillary. Obviously that's ridiculous, but these benchmarks are just approximations and the real results would vary a little. Which is to say, the massive surplus in Tennessee for Clinton makes up for Bernie's good results in Colorado and Oklahoma.

And then we get to the rest of the South, where he was projected to lose big but actually lost bigger. In the current approximations of the final results, he's 16 points behind his benchmark in Georgia, 20 points behind in Texas, 24 points behind in Arkansas, and 28 points behind in Alabama.

Add it all together and Hillary's running about 15 points ahead of the benchmarks in the states that voted tonight. Add in the four early states and it's... still 15%. We're getting a fairly consistent view of the race, not so much state to state but when you add it all up. Sanders has run a great campaign, and his five state wins so far really are amazing given where he came from. But he's not there yet, and at this point, with the battle-lines hardening ever more, it really doesn't look like he can get there.

And even if he does, he'll need to make up for the big wins Hillary's already banked. Which looks basically impossible given the proportional delegate allocation.

Within a few weeks it's gonna start looking like Bernie shouldn't really be in the race anymore.

Ronald Reagan and the Meaning of Trump

So, it sure looks like Donald Trump is going to seize firm control of the Republican primary tonight. His eventual victory and nomination will be, pretty literally, unprecedented: there's been nothing remotely like it since the 1970s primary reforms, and pretty much by definition there couldn't be prior to then, because party elites literally picked the nominee themselves. This means we can't really avoid talking about, y'know, what exactly the whole Trump phenomenon means. Is it the break-down of the Republican Party? Is it a rise of bigoted, authoritarian sentiment? What's going on?

Here's my take, and it's a relatively optimistic one. The key thing about Trump's campaign is that the guy running it is Donald J. Trump. Or, to give him his full title, "businessman Donald J. Trump." That's right, his title doesn't even get capitalized! Unlike "Senator" or "Governor" or "Secretary" or whatever. He's a not-politician, or rather he's a dilettante politician. And this matters because we really have seen a fairly similar campaign before. It's basically Ronald Reagan's campaign. Reagan was a celebrity who had been a liberal Democrat for decades, switched to more conservative views in the 1960s (alienated by the Civil Rights Movement, perhaps?), had a brash demeanor on the campaign trail, did not have the world's most sophisticated understanding of public policy, and openly appealed to racial resentment and white identity politics. Remember "welfare queens" and their Cadillacs?


In a lot of ways, Trump is running the Reagan campaign. Why does it feel so different, then? Why is it so different? Because I do think it is different. And I think it's different because Reagan was a real politician, Governor of California before even his first unsuccessful run for the White House. Back in 1968, and 1976, and especially in 1980, this was a campaign you could run and win with. Nixon ran something similar, and won with it, in '68 and '72. Republicans ran a somewhat more polished version of the same play in the elections directly succeeding Reagan. But then something changed: the demographics. White identity politics is not going to be a strong enough force in American politics for very much longer to actually deliver the Presidency. There just won't be enough white people.

And all the real politicians can see this coming. They saw it coming a mile away in 2013, when they tried to get away from the white nationalist image with immigration reform. Didn't work. Its champion is falling relatively flat in the primary. And that's because, while white nationalism is in decline, there's still enough of it to dominate a Republican primary--and it's been seriously inflamed by a Mr. President Barack Hussein Obama. Actual politicians know they need to try to get away from this, but of course they still need it to win the nomination. And so we get Rubio, awkwardly trying at once to broaden his party's base and to pander to the existing base. He's in a bind.

Donald J. Trump is in no such bind, because he's not a politican. He has no commitment to the Republican Party; he doesn't give a damn about the future. Running a forthright version of Reagan's old campaign is plenty to win the nomination, and so he's blundered in and done it. And it's working, so far at least; I still believe, and/or hope, that there aren't enough of these guys left to win a general election, and that Trump won't be able to reinvent himself with Hillary running the "I don't know anything about white supremacy" clips on a loop 24/7. It's certainly got him closer to the White House than he deserves.

And so this, I think, is the real meaning of Trump. It's not about the rise of bigotry, but its decline. The Republican Party has always (in its current incarnation at least) basically been a "wars and tax cuts" agenda supported by, in large part, racist sentiments in the electorate. Romney and Rubio have tried to keep on playing that same old game, but it doesn't work anymore, because now all the real politicians know that they have to jettison many of the things that made their party attractive to the racists. They lose too many votes among non-whites, and there are too many non-white voters, to afford it. But the racist voters ain't happy about it. They were happy to go along with wars and tax cuts so long as the people they voted for defended America's white Christian identity. What they're not okay with is compromising on that national identity. The Republican Party knows it needs to make that compromise, eventually, in order to survive; that identity is dying. And that's opened up a space for any idiot willing to reject the compromise.

Enter Trump.

This is, of course, a hopeful story. It suggests that the current alignment of American politics really is shifting, that the alliance between the white nationalists and the Republican agenda is coming undone. There's any number of ways that could go. Perhaps we'll see a genuine split within the current Republican coalition that will persist for several elections, until something puts one side or the other out of their misery. Perhaps we'll see, in effect, a few cycles of "grand coalitions" behind Democratic Presidents while the rump Republican Party works through the dying throes of its dedication to racial resentment politics, unable to reach the median voter in a new, more diverse nation. Or perhaps the racial conservative faction will at some point concede defeat and splinter apart as a political force. They're not really united by commitment to conservative principles; some of them might find their way back into the Democratic Party, willing to support its pro-working class policies even though they're not thrilled with its stance in the culture wars. I can't say which of those is going to happen; I can say that we've known for a long time that the Republican Party as we know it had an expiration date, and it looks like Trump has come along to upset the apple-cart a little earlier than any of us had really dreamed.

Are We Due for a Realignment?

So, this has been a pretty crazy election. Right? No real argument there. So crazy, in fact, that Nate Silver just tweeted an interesting little observation. There have been six major "realignment" events in American political history, during which the dynamics of partisan politics have been reforged and new coalitions have emerged to define electoral conflicts for a generation or two: 1792, 1828, 1854, 1896, 1932, and 1968. The average interval between realignments has been about 35 years; indeed, three of the five intervals have been precisely 36 years. The last one was 48 years ago. That is indeed the longest reign that a single "party system" has ever had. Sure makes it seem like we're due for one, and sure enough, politics has gone crazy. Maybe we're in the midst of a realignment!

On Liberals, Politics, and even Democracy Itself

This is partly inspired by the Democratic primary, and an attempt to understand what's behind the Sanders phenomenon, but it's also inspired more generally by just a loose complex of phenomena over the past few years. Here's my basic idea: over the past few generations, America has been engaged in a rather massive culture war. Beginning in about the 1960s, a bunch of people came along who radically disagreed with mainstream, relatively conservative social norms and political beliefs. And these cultural liberals have been winning, spectacularly so. We've reached the point where many, if not all, of the new liberal views are pretty damn mainstream, such that people who violate them are broadly perceived as deviant (e.g. a Mr. Trump). But, quite rightly, we're not resting on our laurels. Nor are we accepting the current, relatively liberal mainstream views on those issues as sacred gospel. Rather, they're works in progress, and of late, particularly in the internet age, a ton of energy has gone into the development of the new progressive norms. The broad principles are increasingly being translated into a fairly comprehensive code of conduct, which aspires to a kind of perfection. For just about any question of "how should I behave toward other people," there's a right answer out there, which you should follow. The older, more conservative norms also prescribed such a code of conduct, although there is one major difference: the new liberal paradigm, more or less tautologically, gives far greater space for individual autonomy. There are a lot of rules that say, basically, "do whatever you want so long as you're respecting what others want." That last part requires a lot of elaboration, though, and it's been getting a lot of elaboration. All of this is great, and it proceeds within a more-or-less agreed-upon analytical framework. Then it's just a matter of proselytizing for the basic worldview that says you should follow these rules, of spreading the message that it's not okay to violate them. It's a work in progress, obviously, but we're working on it.

Like I said, that's all great. And the way that this enterprise aspires, basically, to Perfection, in a certain way, is great. For the first time we have a chance to implement widespread social norms based on genuinely liberal values, and so we have this opportunity to really think about how to get them Right in a way that's kind of new. But the thing is, then you get to politics. And the trouble with politics is that not everyone agrees with you. And I feel like on some level, the focus on developing liberal norms of righteous conduct, and on condemning those who don't follow them, has a bit of a tendency to distract from the fact that the people who disagree with us are within their rights to do so. Specifically they're within their political rights to do so. Their beliefs are wrongful ones, and as a matter of morality they ought to change them, but they do not lose their rights as democratic citizens because of those wrongful beliefs. The point here is not just that we, as liberals, have to be cognizant of the fact that democratic politics is hard and we won't get everything we want. It's that on some level, we shouldn't. Not so long as the things we want are unpopular with the American people. Because the American people really do have the right to make these decisions for themselves, even if they will make their decisions badly.

Now, to be clear, that last point doesn't apply to everything. I'm a big believer in democracy, but more specifically I'm a big believer in liberal democracy, and in constitutionally limited government. And we happen to have a Constitution that, I think, really does protect a lot of liberal values when properly read. That is to say, it really does restrain the political choice of the people in ways that are pleasing to modern social liberals. At the very least it's perfectly legitimate to argue, as to much of the agenda of modern social liberalism, that the issue has been constitutionalized and is not the subject of ongoing political choice anymore. Gay rights are a great example of that: it's absolutely right for us to say that we should win on that issue even if most Americans are against us. "Equal" really does mean equal. But constitutionalism only gets you so far. It's just not plausible that every single item on your agenda will be constitutionalized, and moreover, it would be bad if that were so, because democratic political choice is important and no constitution should lock in a country's entire political program.

I think the specific impetus for this post was actually when I saw some article about how Hillary Clinton's effort to present herself as the candidate of the modern Democratic Party's identity-politics coalition of oppressed groups is unconvincing because, in order for those various movements to be truly "intersectional," I believe was how they put it, they also need to be radically anti-corporate and what-have-you. My reaction to which was, okay, so what are you going to do if you find yourself in a country where "we shouldn't discriminate against women, or racial minorities, or LGBTQ&c. people" commands widespread support but "we should adopt radically anti-corporate economic policies" doesn't? Because the thing is, not only won't you be able to enact your whole "intersectional" program in such a world, there's a very real sense in which you shouldn't be able to, either. Now, again, it may well be wrongful of the public not to support your position on this. But their wrongness doesn't give you a right to govern them against their will.

This ties into something Barney Frank recently said in a column critiquing Bernie's campaign: "What troubles me and many of my former colleagues—among the most liberal members—is the belief that nothing short of this [Sanders's agenda] is worth fighting for." You have to figure out what's worth fighting for that you can plausibly get a democratic mandate for. But it goes further. In a democracy there's a need to accept that sometimes you lose, and that it's legitimate for the other side to enact its policies when that's the will of the people. Again, this is not always the case, and the modern conservative movement is quite generous in its willingness to have its bad-on-the-merits policies also be unconstitutional. But there's always got to be a large area where it's legitimate for the other side to win, and you have to be sort of graceful about that, because otherwise you start attacking democracy itself. This really isn't something we have to deal with in the project of creating liberal social norms; indeed, it's important that those norms be as uncompromised and as near to perfect as possible. But it's important not to lose sight of it in the political realm, not just as a matter of pragmatism but as a matter of principle.

There's Not a Single State Where Polling (or Voting) Suggests Sanders is Leading

FiveThirtyEight just rolled out a new version of the projections I discussed in this piece. It incorporates several new demographic factors, including an urban/rural split. One interesting thing about it is that, if the race is tied, Hillary will be winning about fifteen states, out of fifty: this implies that her support is more strongly concentrated into a few big states where she has major advantages, where Sanders has more modest advantages across a larger number of smaller states. Or to put it another way, in order to win, Sanders really needs to feel like he's winning.

And... boy does this ever not look like a race where Sanders is winning. The first three states now look way better for Hillary: instead of implying national leads of 6, 7, and 2 points respectively, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada now imply leads of 19, 10, and 5. Meanwhile, they also put the current 538 polling averages into their latest chart, and... whaddaya know, Sanders is currently beating his benchmarks in a whopping zero states. You've got some states, like South Carolina, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Texas, and North Carolina, that don't look all that different from a tied race; Hillary's beating those benchmarks by single digits. But then you've got, jeez. Sanders ought to be winning Tennessee, narrowly; he's losing it by 25 points. Similarly in Michigan, where he's 20 points behind his benchmark. And then looking a little further down the calendar, you've got more states Sanders ought to be winning, or maybe even winning big, like Utah and Wisconsin. You've got big states he's got to win, like Pennsylvania and California. Hillary's leading them all: by eight, two, twenty-two, and thirteen, respectively. There just isn't a single real bright spot for Sanders in the state polling we have right now. Overall, taking a rough average of all these future states, it looks like a Clinton +13 race right now. That's very similar to the numbers implied by the first three states that have voted, which were maybe consistent with a +11 race overall.

And this, by the way, makes me skeptical of the polls we're seeing showing more like a +5 Clinton race nationally, or the one that had Sanders leading for what is I believe the first time ever. If that's so, there has to be somewhere in this nation where he's doing better than you might expect given a tied race. But those national polls that are more optimistic for Sanders, that's basically where the single most optimistic individual state data-points for him are at. And that makes it tough to view them as anything other than outliers, or perhaps pollsters whose weighting algorithms are off.

But, we shall see.

Where We're At in the Democratic Primary

A few days ago, FiveThirtyEight published a very useful piece that essentially laid out the landscape for the 2016 Democratic primary. They used some polling data, fundraising, demographics, and Facebook popularity to figure out how we can expect each state to vote if Hillary is leading by twelve points, and alternately how we would expect them to vote if she's fallen into a tie with Bernie--i.e., the first projection shifted over by twelve points, plus or minus rounding errors. And what this lets us do is convert individual state results into an estimate of how the race stands nationally, both with actual results and with polls.

So, for example, they show Nevada as a pro-Hillary state, one that should go to her by about 3 points even if the race is tied. If in fact Nevada ends up as basically a tie tomorrow (and we have very little idea what will happen there; there have only been three polls, all low-quality ones, in recent weeks), that's a fantastic result for Bernie. Even if it comes out as Hillary +6%, the most pro-Hillary of the three recent polls, that's a very good result for him. Conversely, Hillary's got something like a 25-point lead in the South Carolina polling average, which would be even better than the +23% win they project for her with a national 12-point lead. It's to be expected that different states will give different signals, because these projections are by no means perfect. (It's like extrapolating election night results on the assumption of uniform swing: it's a good approximation but never quite holds.) Indeed it kind of looks like a decent guess for Nevada is the national-tie scenario, while a decent guess for South Carolina is the Clinton lead scenario.

One interesting thing, though, is that the two states that have voted so far both say the same thing about the race. Iowa was a tie, falling almost precisely between the two projections (+7% for Hillary if she's up big, +6% for Bernie if it's a tie). Meanwhile, though Sanders won big in New Hampshire, by 22%, he didn't win as big as he should have if the race is a tie, which would've been 29%. Both states, therefore, imply a Clinton lead of roughly 6 or 7 points nationwide. Which confirms my feeling that those results were decent for Clinton, even though they looked pretty lousy. To be sure it's remarkably that Sanders is within 6 or 7 points nationally, but that's still a pace that has Hillary winning. If that pace holds, we should see Hillary winning by nearly 10 points in Nevada and by 16 or 17 in South Carolina; more likely we'll see a similar average result between those two states but highly disparate individual signals.

In any case, it's just something to keep an eye on, as a guide to interpreting each state's results.

The Deeper Problem With the Sanders Campaign "Voodoo"

There's been a big controversy of late over an economic analysis, originally performed by an independent economist but repeatedly endorsed by members of the Sanders campaign itself, purporting to show that Bernie Sanders's economic plan would great an essentially unprecedented economic paradise, featuring among other things 5% annual growth over the next decade. It's basically just the latest in a sequence of fights between the Sanders campaign and the liberal wonk community, in which the wonks keep saying that Bernie isn't being totally honest about the costs of some of his proposals and in return Sanders sympathizers, basically, accuse said wonks of being corporate shills or whatever. There's plenty to say about this, and why it would be a bad thing if the Democrats adopted the Republicans' willingness to say empirically absurd things and then just have all their supporters pretend that they're true.*

But there's one thing about this that I haven't seen said, possibly because most of the commenters have been coming at the issue from the perspective of the policy wonks. My idea is more of a political theory one: it's not a good thing when you feel the need to lie to the public about your agenda. It means that on some level you know that your agenda, on a full and honest accounting, is unpopular. That's why the Republicans do so much of it! They're committed to advancing a policy agenda that would not really be very popular, so they have to lie about it, and while they're at it they have to suppress lots of voters and such. To be sure, the Sanders campaign is only taking its very first steps down a path the Republicans sprinted all the way down long ago. But it's not a good path to tread even a little bit.

Because it also betrays a kind of contempt for democracy. You could, of course, say, well, yes, we're lying about this plan because it's unpopular, but it should be popular, it's wrong of the people not to support it. Maybe it'll even be better for them than the policies they support. And so, really, what we're doing will make the world the best place it can be. And, sure. That might be a good argument, from a certain perspective. Just, not from the perspective of democratic self-governance. The whole concept of democracy is that the people get to decide these things for themselves. And it is surely a noble quest to educate the people, to make popular what should be popular. Nor am I saying that politicians have a moral responsibility to follow the weathervane of public opinion in all things; I'm actually a pretty big believer in the "trustee" model of representation, as opposed to the "delegate" one.

But you do have to be honest. Honest about what you'll do and about what you've done. If you're right that your policies are better, then once you implement them they'll presumably prove, at least in the fullness of time, to be popular. (See, e.g., ObamaCare.) But if you sell the people on policies by concealing their costs or exaggerating their rewards in some absurd fashion, then when the results are worse than you promised you'll spark a backlash. And beyond that, you just can't have a meaningful democracy on any other basis. If the choice ultimately belongs to the people, rather than to some benign counsel of Those Who Know Better, then the people need to be told, honestly, what their choice is.

We're the Democratic Party. We should believe in democracy, not just pragmatically but philosophically. We should believe in the people's right to decide their own fate, and that means their right to choose wrongly. (There are of course exceptions, as provided by the Constitution, but that's not really about the kind of economic policy choices Sanders is talking about.) We shouldn't seek to force our legislative program on the American people through force or trickery. I don't think the Sanders campaign really disputes this, so they should try to live up to these ideals a little more fully.





*Here's a relatively sympathetic take on what the Sanders people are doing here. There was a process that began sometime, I dunno, in the 1960s or thereabouts, wherein the American left started incorporating the advice of mainstream economic theory, and thereby moderating, from a certain perspective, its policy proposals. It's why you see things like liberal support for carbon taxes or whatever: there's a pretty broad consensus, or there has been, around finding the most effective and efficient economic tools for the promotion of liberal values. It's hardly been absolute, and in some cases it's gone in the opposite direction: liberals kept supporting the minimum wage for decades when standard economics said it was a bad idea, and then, lo and behold, more recent economic research suggests that maybe the liberals aren't wrong. Whaddaya know. But there's been a pretty strong commitment of late to using policies which have empirical support for their effectiveness.

The worry, though, and it's an eminently reasonable one, is that liberals have actually absorbed not just the practical and strategic suggestions of mainstream economics but also some of the underlying values and goals, which are in many cases really not all that liberal. And it's admirable for the Sanders campaign to want to roll back that tendency, the tendency to get assimilated into the Yay Capitalism mindset. The problem is, though, that they sort of seem to be conflating the two trends--again, understandably, since I think they probably were conflated in their origins. They're not the same thing, though, and we ought properly roll back one of them and not the other.

Bernie and Thomas and Alex

Thomas Jefferson, that is, and Alexander Hamilton. (With whom I'm currently a bit obsessed, having seen Hamilton on Broadway this past weekend.)

Because, you see, I'm pretty sure Bernie Sanders would be on Team Jefferson. And... Team Jefferson is wrong. Thomas Jefferson was wrong, about, like, most things. Not everything: I like much of what he has to say about religion, and he was on the right side of the "is it okay to be an opposition party?" thing. Essentially everything he thought about the Constitution was wrong, though, as was his notion that America should be all rural and agrarian and stuff. Oh, and the whole "holding slaves" thing. True, he had relatively anti-slavery principles, but he also had lots and lots of slaves. His whole humble, man-of-the-people thing was basically a lie; he was an artistocrat. Hamilton was, as the first song from Hamilton so powerfully illustrates, the "bastard, orphan" who "gr[e]w up to be a hero and a scholar." Oh, and who opposed slavery. But no, he's the monarchist and the elitist, apparently.

Now the point isn't that Sanders likes all of these things about Jefferson. He certainly disagrees with at least the slavery thing, and he's probably not a strict constructionist. But I'm sure he loves Jefferson's whole egalitarian shtick, despite its being basically a lie, and he probably has at least some sympathy for the rural/agrarian thing.

Oh, and then there's the Bank. The First Bank of the United States, championed by Hamilton and opposed by Jefferson. I'd be shocked if Sanders isn't on Jefferson's side there (on policy if not on the constitutional issue). Which... is bad. It also puts him in the company of Andrew Jackson, whom liberals have recently had the decency to recognize as a slave-owning, native-slaughtering, paranoid villain, not a populist hero.

And this actually ties into the thing that maybe bothers me the most about the prospect of Bernie Sanders becoming President: he's against the Wall Street bailout of 2008. Indeed, he doesn't even seem to know that the American taxpayer made money out of the bailout, because we got paid back more than we paid out in the first place. (Bernie keeps using the line that "America bailed out Wall St., now it's time for Wall St. to bail out America" in describing his proposed speculation tax.) And again, this is wrong. Really, really wrong. If Sanders had been President, and had vetoed the law (which he voted against in the Senate), we actually would've had another depression. It would've done enormous damage to the world economy. But, you know, it was a bailout, to the banks. The big banks at that. And banks are bad, especially the big ones--as Jefferson and Jackson knew.

I find this legitimately troubling. Either he's being disingenuous here or he really doesn't understand some things about how the economy works. And I really would worry that, if some similar sort of financial crisis came up, he might not be willing to do what had to be done to prevent collapse, even if it didn't really sit comfortably with his general ideology.

Now, perhaps the most favorable part of the Jefferson comparison is that when push came to shove, and Jefferson had an opportunity to radically change America's destiny forever, but he had to violate his constitutional principles in order to do so, he did it. That's the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which a Jeffersonian strict constructionist would've thought unconstitutional. So maybe if push came to shove, Sanders would listen to the advice of mainstream economics and do what was necessary. But... maybe? He might actually not do that; at the very least I'd like for someone to interrogate him a bit more about this.

Until they do, his resemblance to Jefferson is a little bit troubling.

The Sanders Campaign Is Becoming A Problem

When Bernie Sanders announced his campaign for President, I thought, okay, this could do some good. Put some more aggressively left-wing issues on the agenda, help move the party, and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, in a more liberal direction, expand the Overton window, etc. But there's always been a lurking danger that it would become something else, that it would start stoking liberal dissatisfaction with the Democrats and with Hillary, in a way that would imperil our chances of holding the White House.

Well, I'm increasingly feeling like his campaign is turning into that more dangerous version. And this "HillarySoProgressive" thing is perhaps the most extreme example of it. This all started when Bernie and Hillary got into a Twitter war yesterday that started with Sanders (or his campaign staff, not actually sure which) saying that "You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive," and then proceeded to rattle off various un-progressive things Hillary's done: raising money from Wall St., taking a long time before coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone pipeline, and supporting the Iraq war. Hillary (or her staff, probably) shot back, with various progressive things Hillary has done, and with repeatedly pointing out Sanders' less-than-pure history on gun control. Now various Sanders supporters have started this HillarySoProgressive hashtag basically mocking the idea that she's any sort of liberal. (Seriously, does no one say "liberal" anymore?) The tweets this Vox discussion of the tag references bring up, in total, the fact that Clinton takes donations from Wall St., the fact that she has, from time to time, been seen in the company of Wall St. executives, that she does not support reinstating Glass-Steagall, and her 2004 opposition to gay marriage. Oh, and also a fake Clinton/Gore '92 bumper sticker design featuring the Confederate flag.

The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe all of this is "disgusting." And not just because of the Tea Party-esque obsession with absolute purity (while, of course, excusing their own candidate's extreme lack of purity on the gun control issue), the strict and exclusive concept of the "progressive" movement, the suggestion that anyone who doesn't agree with them on every single issue is the enemy. It's all of that, too, of course; some of this stuff almost feels like it has an "are you now, or have you ever been, a capitalist?" feel to it.

But also, like... these are remarkably petty things to excommunicate someone from your movement over, aren't they? Bernie's remarks about how she took her time coming out against TPP and Keystone feel particularly silly, to me. I actually know several very left-wing people who thought both of those issues were in fact somewhat complicated, and that the case against each was overstated. And even beside that, like, since when is taking your time to think something over a grievous sin? Is it that one must not only have the right positions but also take all of them quickly enough, or you're out of the movement? That's insane, isn't it?

As of course is this persistent accusation of massive corruption on Hillary's part, which of course is never explicitly stated as such, because that would be "going negative" and "dirty politics," but that's what it is.

Add it all up and I feel like this campaign is becoming so toxic that it's running a real risk of doing serious damage to the Democratic Party and to the liberal cause going forward. It's essentially becoming a larger-scale version of Nader 2000, which, like, do the people supporting Bernie remember how that went? Do they remember George Bush? Have they inspected Marco Rubio's platform? As Matt Yglesias said the other day, it's basically the platform for those who think the problem with the Bush Administration is that we should've tried bigger tax cuts and more wars. In the face of this, do you really want to set up a Spanish Inquisition to root out every last little trace of heresy within the progressive movement?

I'm still hopeful that this can end well, but I'm increasingly unsure that it will. Sanders himself seems to have been bitten by the ambition bug, maybe for the first time in his life, and he's got a lot of work ahead of him repairing the damage he's been causing. When he loses, and he will lose, he better take a page out of Hillary's playbook and give her one hell of a ringing endorsement.

Creatively Structuring Contracts: Yoenis Cespedes Edition

One rumor about the Mets' pursuit of Yoenis Cespedes is that he doesn't just want an opt-out after the first season of a potential three-year deal, but after the second season as well. That's pretty extreme: the ability to opt out is a very useful one, essentially shifting an awful lot of risk onto the other side. If the player performs, he can seek a new, even bigger deal on the open market; if he doesn't, the team is stuck with what now probably looks like a not-so-fantastic contract. In no case does the team get to enjoy the normal fantastic bargain that comes when you sign a player and then they're even better than you anticipated. This year has seen an awful lot of opt-outs in star players' contracts, but mostly only one of them. (I think there's one deal that gives someone, perhaps Heyward, two opt-outs after consecutive seasons in the middle of a long-term deal.) The idea of giving the player an opt-out after every season is not super appealing for a team. It's a lot like turning every season into a player option, and player options are great. For players.

But I have an idea about how something like this design could be made to work in a way that might benefit both parties. Typically, contract years have one of four statues: guaranteed, team option, player option, or mutual option. Typically the salary of a team option year will be very high, and of a player option year very low; in both cases the side with more control is giving back some money in return. In that last category, the contract is extended only if both the team and the player want it to be; the size of the buy-out typically depends on which side declined the option. But what about combining team and player options in a different way? What if you had, basically, sequential options? So, at Step One, the team gets to exercise an option to just plain keep the player under contract, no questions asked--but, with a very high salary. Maybe even higher than a regular team option would be. If they decline that option, then the player has an option to extend his current contract at a significantly lower salary, or to become a free agent.

For the player, they get most of the benefits of an opt-out/player option, except that some of those benefits are realized not in the form of control over their own destiny but in the form of cash. For the team, it's better than an opt-out, because they have a lot more control if they decide the cash is worth it. And they get the benefit of giving the player something to play for every single year. That could be particularly relevant with someone like Cespedes, where it's rumored that teams don't want to just give him a large guaranteed contract for fear he'll get all Manny/Hanley-esque. This is a way to do that on a truly perpetual basis without giving up the insane amount of control that an opt-out after each year would give up. In principle I could see a contract structured like this over a basically indefinite period, if the dollars were balanced the right way on each side. (This would probably mean that the player option's value would decline substantially after a few years.) It's designed to make each side okay with whatever the other side does at any time. That way, a player and a team who aren't quite comfortable just signing on with each other for a term of six or eight or ten years might nonetheless be willing to sign on to a framework of perpetual tolerable uncertainty covering just such a term.

I feel like this is the logical next step after this off-season's opt-out craze.

The Mets Should Give Cespedes Five Years

Apparently the Nationals are offering Yoenis Cespedes a five-year deal, while the Mets have no interest (reportedly) in going beyond three years. This seems to me an obvious mistake. At 5 years, $100 million (around where the Nationals' offer is believed to be), you're paying Cespedes to be worth under 3 wins above replacement per year. He's been in the Majors for four years. Yearly WAR totals, averaging Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs: 3.4, 1.9, 3.7, 6.5. It's tough to project this guy not to be at least something like a 3.5 win player, if not 4, and if he's that then 5/$100 is an entirely fair contract. Perhaps a bargain. And the funny thing about the reluctance to go longer-term is that the one big concern about Cespedes and the Mets disappears after 2017, because that's when Curtis Granderson's contract expires. At that point, you could quite naturally move Cespedes to right field rather than having to play him primarily in center, and he's a really good defensive corner outfielder.

And I don't actually buy that long-term payroll constraints, and the need to pay their young pitchers, will be that much of a problem. In 2020, the Mets will have the following players under contract at sub-free agency prices: Kevin Plawecki, Domonic Smith, Dilson Herrera, Amed Rosario (as well as several other shortstop types), Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, and (I think) Zack Wheeler. Now, none of these guys with the possible exception of someone like Smith or Rosario would still be making the league minimum; they'd all be in arbitration, many of them in their last round of arbitration. You'll also have David Wright on the books at $12 million that year, because his contract was middle-loaded. Put it all together and I just don't see how having Cespedes under contract at a pretty reasonable rate is going to be a problem for that team. Not if the payroll has actually risen back to a more ordinary level, after what looks like it should be a pretty prolonged period of the team's being really good.

So yeah, if the Nationals sign Cespedes to 5/$105 or something like that, that's just not gonna be okay, and the Mets' reluctance to go that far really does seem to signal that something remains deeply rotten with the team's long-term financial situation.

Bernie Sanders, Continued

Just a brief follow-up to my last post about Bernie Sanders. I suggested there that you need to take on forces like white supremacy and the patriarchy before you can have the kinds of economic reforms Sanders wants to have. That's not quite right; it's not really a strict chronological thing. Which is good, because the fight against white supremacy, the fight against patriarchy: these aren't really fights you win. They're fights you fight, forever if need be. If we can't have progress until those fights are won, well, we'll all be dead before we have any progress. And of course we had things like the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank without vanquishing racism or whatever.

But I do think it's important to understand the fight, and to understand that these seemingly economic fights are also the fight against these various more cultural forms of oppression. And it just occurs to me--indeed, this is the impetus for this post--that not understanding this is what leads an awful lot of Democrats, apparently Sanders among them, to be just dumbfounded as to why poor white people vote Republican. Don't they know it's against their own interests?!? Well, no, maybe because they have a different conception of those interests. This is the Southern Strategy, and it's hardly the fraud Democrats often like to make it out as when we recognize that white Southerns really, really care (many of them, at least) about white supremacy, at least in its relatively more genteel modern forms. Our instinct is to just keep repeating how much better off they'll be economically under our policies, and I think that's probably a big mistake.

I don't know exactly how you fight this fight when you understand it better. Maybe you just recognize that the opposing side is in a long-term demographic decline and content yourself with beating them. I have a feeling this country won't really become the America that it's supposed to be until we actually manage to do something about the whole "white people are awful" thing, though, even if there stop being enough terrible white people to form a viable political party. In any event the demographic decline doesn't really address the sex equality stuff. What I do know, or at least what I believe, is that you can't fight it at all if you don't understand it, and you'll find yourself losing other fights you really just can't fathom why you didn't win.