The "Rigorous" Case Against Teaching More Students More Math

California is in the process of updating its statewide framework for Mathematics education, and unsurprisingly there is controversy -- controversy that will strike many observers as having striking similarities to the recent flare-ups about "ethnic studies" in the state. Monica Osborne in Newsweek has a concise summary of the position of opponents (largely summarizing the objections made in this open letter). There are the de rigueur drive-bys against the curriculum becoming too "political" and non-"neutral", to the point at which it is allegedly not even "mathematics" anymore -- I actually addressed some of those objections in a prior post. But the main objection is claiming that the new math framework abolishes (or at least sharply discourages) "accelerated" or "advanced" math classes, doing disservice to students who genuinely are "gifted" in a misguided nod towards "equity".

One thing I will say is that the open letter (perhaps learning from the Ethnic Studies debacle, where a refusal to do basic citation led to outright fabrications being bandied about by curriculum opponents) does everyone the helpful service of citing its sources so one can see where, exactly, the Mathematics Framework allegedly does say the things its critics contend it is saying. It isn't perfect -- for example, the letter claims that the Framework "[e]ncourages keeping all students together in the same math program until the 11th grade and argues that offering differentiated programs causes student 'fragility' and racial animosity (Ch. 1, p. 15)"; but I wasn't able to find either the "keeping all students together" claim or the "racial animosity" claim on that page (as for the "fragility" point, which was mentioned, it is interesting to note that -- perhaps contrary to one's intuition reading that word out of context -- the claimed "fragility" is that of the gifted students who come to "fear times of struggle in case they lose the label"). Nonetheless, it is tremendously helpful in assessing these claims that they are consciously linked to particular portions of the draft framework. Kudos for that!

Having said that, what do we make of how the new framework addresses issues like "tracking" and "giftedness" and other like practices? To some extent, there seems to be the usual "talking past one another" that one finds in controversies such as this; the State Board explicitly denies that the new framework removes programming to serve "gifted" students, or eliminates "accelerated" classes. But clearly they are attempting to make some alterations that are designed -- I think it is fair to say -- to de-emphasize the degree to which math education is sharply divided between the naturally-gifted "haves" and the hapless "have-nots". Are those modifications salutary? Do they underserve brilliant minds? Or are they increasing access to rigorous mathematical education for all students?

I want to digress for a moment to talk about my own journey through mathematics education. I am not, to be clear, a math teacher (though I am a teacher, and so to that extent have practitioner-level experience with pedagogy in general). I also never considered myself, and to this day do not consider myself, "good at math" (a label which to some extent makes this debate more interesting to me). This is so even though under any objective metric I was actually very good at math -- I got a 720 on my math SAT and a 4 on my AP Calculus exam. That's quite good, especially for someone who always considered himself "bad at math"!

My recollection of how math education occurred at my (high-performing, suburban public) school is that between sixth and seventh grade students made a single, fateful choice. They could enroll in advanced math -- that would put them on track to take advanced calculus (multi-variable calculus) by twelfth grade. They could enroll in honors math -- that would put them on track to take regular calculus in twelfth grade. Or they could enroll in some form of "basic" or "remedial" math, in which case they would not be on track to take calculus at all.

Notice that this single choice at age 12 basically laid out the entirety of one's mathematical education for the next six years. There was essentially no moving up the ladder once one made the choice (there was theoretically the possibility of falling down the ladder, although that was a terrifying prospect that kept many a "gifted" student awake cramming at night). For my part, I chose the middle ("honors") route -- I didn't think of myself as "good at math", so the top path wasn't for me, but I was a conscientious student, so I wasn't going to go the bottom route either. And from that point forward, my path was set; and to a large extent so was my self-identity vis-a-vis math. Despite the fact that I objectively was perfectly capable of doing well at math (again, check those SAT and AP scores), I always viewed myself as not a math guy -- the people who were taking the advanced classes; they were the ones good at math. As someone who tends to think very verbally, I never connected with math, never fully saw its usefulness to someone like me and with my interests.

This persisted even after I graduated high school. Carleton had a math/science distribution requirement, which I skirted as best I could with classes like "Science and Society" or "Conservation Biology" (which basically was a semester of taking pleasant hikes through nature). The political science department did require one to take a statistical methods sequence, which I satisfied by taking (1) the lowest level stats class the school offered and then (2) a "methods" class where I resolutely avoided doing any of the hard statistical analysis by deliberately choosing a research question where I found no correlation between my variables (so no need for robustness checks). When I got to graduate school, there was no way in hell I was going to touch the methods classes (which were not required for political theorists) -- that was way to advanced for little ol' anti-math me. I can't quite say I "regret" not taking them -- even now, the thought of it fills me with dread -- but I can say that lacking the ability to conduct independent empirical research is probably the biggest gap in my scholarly toolset dividing the sorts of scholarship I'm interested in doing from that which I'm capable of doing, and I do regret that.

Thinking back on it, it is simply insane that this entire mathematical-education arc was more or less set in stone via a single decision made when I was twelve. That's nuts! All the more nuts since it ended up becoming quite obvious that I was perfectly capable of learning advanced math; the choice made then did not map onto any "natural" capacity I did or did not have. I can fully accept that some other students at twelve might have had more fire in the belly for math than I did at the time, and that in turn could suggest different styles of teaching math to them than would have been appropriate for me. But to lock either of us into a particular rigid track at that age, telling us "you will go exactly this high, and no further" (and "you can go lower, but only if you cop to being a disgraceful failure") seems absolutely absurd.

It was remembering that personal trajectory that informed my read on what California is proposing. The core of their argument is, more or less, "all or nearly all students are capable of learning high-level math, and so making decisions in middle school that lock students in or out of taking high-level math classes at the end of high school is both unnecessary and foolish". Instead, we should restructure math education so that there are many different pathways that offer the opportunity for more students to end up enrolled in high-level math courses -- the choice you make at twelve shouldn't be your destiny. And likewise, we should recognize that "calculus" is not the only example of "high-level" math -- it is one, but not the only one. The current system is defined by the "race to calculus", where success is defined solely by whether and how fast one gets to the calculus class of the math sequence. This was certainly my experience -- the advanced students got there in 11th grade (then took an extra class of advanced calculus senior year), the middle group I was in get there in 12th grade, and the bottom group doesn't get there at all and is thus looked down upon. We actually had an AP Statistics class offered as well, but I honestly do not recall who even took it -- it was definitely seen as the "lesser" math class, even though in retrospect a strong knowledge of statistics would have been far more useful to me than the calculus class I did take. But it did not lie on the rigid trajectory of the math sequence, which meant it was implicitly downgraded as the off-ramp for the failures.

Math education, even more so than other disciplines, is addicted to the "cult of the genius", where we can identify relatively early on certain students as naturally gifted and others as hapless drones, and sort them into appropriate tracks based on those assessments. The California Framework suggests that this cult, like many cults, is not backed by empirical evidence -- one needn't be a gifted genius to learn high-level math, and working on the assumption that one does need to be such a genius means providing decidedly suboptimal math education to the median California student. We could be successfully teaching more students more math, but we don't because we somehow decided that we can sort the geniuses from the worker bees at the tweenage years and after that we just let nature take its course. It is unsurprising that these gut-check instincts about who is a "genius" track the usual lines of social hierarchy and stereotyping, but that is just the tip of the problematic iceberg.

The reformulation proposed by the California framework is not to prohibit strong, enthusiastic math students from being able to pursue their interests. For those students, it suggests that optimal math education is not defined by racing them to calculus as soon as possible, but may entail giving them more opportunities to explore more elements of math in greater depth or rigor. Moreover, by broadening the pathway that leads to high-level math, we reduce the sometimes overwhelming pressure that falls upon these student where if they struggle anywhere they are a failure and have sacrificed their future. It stands to reason that there will be plenty of "gifted" students for whom algebra clicks easily and for whom geometry is a nightmare. The status quo assumes that anyone who happens to be good at that type of math that is prevalent in grade seven will likewise sail through all the other math concepts at a similar pace. It would be better if we recognized that all students likely will have some parts of math they find easy or which naturally connects (or which they just enjoy more), and other areas they find difficult and need more time on (or just find profoundly uninteresting), and that acknowledging the latter does not come at the cost of giving up one's chance to take upper level courses. The rigidity of the current framework doesn't serve "advanced" students even on its own terms. It locks them into a rat race with only one destination and exceptionally high stakes for failure. It is not a good thing that strong math students at my high school essentially could not take AP Statistics even if that interested them more than AP Calculus.

But the bigger reform being pitched is that, for the average California student, the math sequence being offered isn't rigorous enough. It knocks too many students off the path of taking advanced math classes at far too early a point. Pluralizing the sequence of math classes and making it so that many students -- not just those identified as "stars" as tweens -- are in position to take advanced coursework in the field is a step towards stronger math education. It is step towards teaching more students more math at a higher level -- an unambiguously good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

In this, Osborne's reference to the opportunities wealthier families have to place their children in bespoke math "enrichment" programs actually proves the opposite of her point. It is unlikely, after all, that all or even most of the students who enroll in such programs are "geniuses". But that's the point -- they don't have to be: give them access to advanced programming, and they're perfectly capable of learning the material, because this education is not the province of geniuses but of ordinary students. The lesson California draws from those programs is that most of their students, "genius"-labeled or no, can and should have access to strong, rigorous mathematical education. So they should reorient their math education away from rigid, imprecise sorting at young ages, and instead think in terms of providing a plurality of pathways to get as many students as possible to advanced classes. Rich parents get this already; they can provide their kids with advanced instruction regardless of how they're labeled as tweens. This is powerful evidence that the rest of the public school system should follow suit.

What may be true is that California is trying to at least diminish the obvious hierarchy within math, where we can say the students who took multi-variable calculus their senior year are better than the those who only took AB calculus are better than those who didn't take calculus at all (recall my high school, where taking AP Statistics was a sure mark of being a lesser student). Reorienting the math curriculum so that many different end points (calculus, statistics, formal modeling, and so on) are all rigorous and robust means consciously trying to blur hierarchical lines that say one of these ends is "higher" than the others. If the most important part of math education is providing for status-differentiation -- being crystal clear about who are the elite students and who are the normies -- then this is a loss. It is, we should be clear, a very different loss from depriving "gifted" students of the opportunity to learn advanced math -- they're still learning it, they if anything have more choices on exactly what arena of advanced math they want to concentrate on, but they are not simply by virtue of staying on the top rung of the ladder they climbed at age twelve automatically viewed as superior math students to their peers. There is good ground to believe that it is that loss --the status loss, not the educational loss -- which is what's motivating much of the anger at the reform (how can I guarantee I'll get into Stanford unless everyone knows I'm better than my classmates who weren't imprecisely identified as math geniuses as a tween?). 

But California is making a conscious decision to trade having clear ordinal hierarchical ranking for giving more students more rigorous math instruction than they have now. That, to me, sounds like a good trade. And to the extent it isn't -- the problem isn't that the new curriculum lacks rigor or ambition, or tries to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. It is because it is sincerely committed to doing more for more students that the framework is generating this animosity.

Omari Hardy is the Future of BDS in the Democratic Party

In the sprawling field vying to replace deceased Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings, there were no less than five current elected officials running in the Democratic primary that occurred this week. One of these five was State Rep. Omari Hardy.

Initially, all of these candidates avowed positions on Israel that fell roughly in the mainstream of contemporary Democratic politics. About a month before election day, however, Hardy abruptly changed his position on Israel -- announcing his support for the BDS movement (he had only several weeks earlier claimed to be opposed) as well as opposition to the U.S. funding Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. Upon announcing this change, I suddenly started seeing him a lot more on my Twitter feed, loudly proclaiming about how he wouldn't be intimidated into changing his position and basking in the adoration of a certain wing of commentators who lauded his rare courage and bold commitment to principle, and who presented him as a harbinger of change in Democratic politics. This was not something Hardy did quietly -- his switch to becoming overtly anti-Israel and pro-BDS was a critical part of his closing argument to try and win the race and become the next Democratic Representative from Florida.

On election day, in a sprawling field that contained five current elected officials, Omari Hardy ended up placing sixth. He received less than 6% of the vote -- behind all of his fellow politicos, as well as a wealthy self-funding businesswoman named Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (the ultimate winner has not yet been called; Cherfilus-McCormick and Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness are currently separated by a whopping twelve votes).

Sixth place finishing, 6% winning Omari Hardy is the future of BDS in the Democratic Party.

If that sounds a bit snarky, I don't -- well, okay, I do mean it to be a little snarky. But believe it or not, the snark is not actually my main thesis.

Omari Hardy was competing in a sprawling, wide open field for an open congressional seat. If you're going to stand out from the pack, you need to do something that clearly marks you as different from the pack. Adopting a generic pro-Israel position in the same vein as all the other candidates wouldn't give anyone a reason to vote for him. Or against him, to be sure. But in politics, the saying "second place is first loser" is especially apt. Announcing support for BDS and pivoting towards intense pronounced hostility to Israel was a calculated risk; it at least offered him a chance to win, even if the more likely result was that he'd just lose by a wider margin (before he announced his pro-BDS turn, Hardy was polling at 10%, so if anything he slipped in performance).

It is a myth that the only route to political power is to take broadly popular positions, even within your own party. That's probably necessary if you want to become the national leader -- as Bernie Sanders found out, if you want to become the Democratic nominee for President, you have to be supported by most Democrats. But becoming the leader is not what everyone wants. You can amass a great deal of power by becoming the standard-bearer for a smaller but intensely passionate faction of the party. And the nice thing about these smaller factions is that they are smaller, and so it's easier to become their "the guy" than it is to become the national "the guy". In particular, in a sprawling primary that's wide open and conducted under first past the post rules, consolidating the small but intense faction is an at least plausible path to victory. It's no accident that Sanders performed best against a divided Democratic field -- a high floor, low ceiling candidate is well-positioned in wide-open, sharply fractured races.

Omari Hardy represents the future of BDS not (just) because he shows that BDS remains whatever the opposite of a selling point is for most Democrats. That is certainly an important lesson to learn. But just as importantly, he's the future because he perceived -- and I think not incorrectly -- that endorsing BDS is a way of standing out from other Democrats and potentially consolidating the backing of a small but intense wing of the progressive movement, some of whom border on being single-issue (anti-)Israel voters (the seething hatred many on the left have for Ritchie Torres, who is on the left edge of the party on virtually every issue but Israel, is one manifestation of this. The comical attempt by some lefty activists to expel Jamaal Bowman from the Democratic Socialist of America because he didn't vote against Iron Dome is another). 

A sprawling primary where a small cadre of passionate supporters can plausibly carry a candidate to victory is a good place to try and leverage becoming the consensus choice of a small wing of Democrats who feel very intensely about one issue. An even better place to run this play may be after one has already won the primary to hold a safe seat and one can feel confident in one's ability to hold onto it indefinitely (Ilhan Omar, too, flipped on BDS only after she had secured a victory in a Democratic primary), when a politician's eye can drift away from local challengers and towards the national spotlight. To be clear, this path is not the route to become President, it's not even the route to become leader of the Democratic congressional caucus (neither one of these is in Ilhan Omar's future). But it is a route to securing a not-insubstantial amount of power. And that's going to be very tempting to a certain type of ambitious politico.

I'm not accusing Hardy of being purely opportunistic in his sudden embrace of BDS. I don't think he's lying; I believe he believes BDS is a reasonable and non-pernicious campaign. But I also don't think it's wrong to look a little archly at his rapid about-face, just a month before election day -- one that was loudly trumpeted and promoted by his campaign, one that he quickly tried to make a centerpiece of his campaign and his boundless courage -- and think that political calculations were playing a rather sizeable role here. Most likely, I suspect that Hardy didn't really care that much about BDS or Israel at the start of this race, and doesn't care too much about it now. He took the anti-BDS position at the start of the race not because he had strong feelings against it but because it was the easiest, default option and didn't seem patently offensive, and he swapped positions at the end of the race not because he developed strong feelings for it but because it was a plausible Hail Mary play that also didn't patently offend him. And if this sounds very cynical, I suspect this is how most politicians deal with most issues that are not especially central to their identity -- it's not that they don't believe what they're saying, but for the 90% of issues that aren't "their" issues, there's plenty of room for beliefs to accommodate a more bloodless calculation of political interest. Hardy is no different from any other politico save for the particular lane his bloodless calculation of political interest ended up placing him in.

And so, despite the fact that the result for Hardy was finishing in sixth place with less than 6% of the vote, plays like Hardy's are something I think we'll be seeing a lot more of. Most Democrats will continue to oppose BDS, and oppose extreme anti-Israel policies (while -- hopefully -- become more open to practical and sorely needed policy shifts designed to actually promote Palestinian rights, such as backing the Two State Solution Act). But more and more frequently, we'll see cases like Omari Hardy: candidates who are laboring at the back of a crowded field and are looking to stand out and get a burst of cash and volunteers, or safe seat backbenchers yearning to garner a national profile and internet likes, will view BDS as a promising avenue for rising for obscurity. It won't win them national or competitive races; it often won't even succeed in fragmented contests amongst Democrats. But if you're going to lose the race anyway, it's a cost-free gamble. And if you don't care that much about the issue to begin with, plenty of people will be happy to roll those dice.

Blindness or Short-Sighted Caution: Memmi on the Jew-of-the-Right

 "How can a man be a Rightist when he is a Jew?," Albert Memmi asked in A Portrait of the Jew.

The alliance of Jewry with Right wing movements can never be anything but temporary . . . To preserve the existing order, the Right has to stiffen and emphasize differences while at the same time having no respect for what is different. To preserve itself as a privileged group, it must repulse, restrict and repress other groups. Now it may be that a Jew may desire the survival of a given social order in which, by chance, he is not too unhappy. But in addition, he wants the differences between himself and the non-Jews in that class to be forgotten or at least minimized. The Right, either openly or covertly, drives the Jew back to his Jewishness and can only condemn and burden his Jewishness. Not to speak of times of crisis when the Rightist doctrine, whipped to a frenzy, is driven to violent solutions, to the use of sentiments and methods that debase the lives of Jews (218-19).

In his next book, The Liberation of the Jew, Memmi reiterated the point more bluntly: "[A] Jew is conservative only out of blindness of some short-sighted caution" (228). If you are a Jew and you find right-wing movements appealing, it's because you're not paying attention, or because you aren't looking more than six inches in front of your own feet. The end of the story is all too predictable, only an idiot could not see it coming. And this is an observation Memmi makes in the midst of a searing critique of the left and its treatment of the Jews. That critique notwithstanding, Memmi still wants to be crystal clear that the Jew-of-the-right is a fool.

Much has been made over the way in which the anti-CRT frenzy, first confined to local offices like school boards, may have accounted for major conservative victories in the elections yesterday. Juxtapose that account with this story, also from this week, about how that rhetoric is playing out in one such school board meeting in Arizona:

During the public comment portion of the meeting of the Chandler Unified School District board, a woman who identified herself as Melanie Rettler spoke for over a minute about critical race theory and vaccines — topics not listed on the meeting agenda but at the center of heated public debate nationwide.

Her comment crescendoed with an antisemitic claim drenched in the language of right-wing conspiracy theories.

“Every one of these things, the deep state, the cabal, the swamp, the elite — you can’t mention it, but I will — there is one race that owns all the pharmaceutical companies and these vaccines aren’t safe, they aren’t effective and they aren’t free,” Rettler said. “You know that you’re paying for it through the increase in gas prices, the increase in food prices — you’re paying for this and it’s being taken from your money and being given to these pharmaceutical companies and if you want to bring race into this: It’s the Jews.”

If you think for a second that this anti-CRT hysteria is even going to slow down, let alone reverse course, insofar as it predictably breeds rank hatred like this (not to mention both-sidesing the Holocaust, and banning books on the Holocaust, and blocking an antisemitism envoy for the crime of opposing antisemitism ...) you are out to lunch. Whatever faint concern some conservatives might have for Jews and Jewish safety won't even be a speed bump in their race to power by way of right-wing authoritarianism. To cozy up to this darkness out of blindness or short-sighted fear -- well, fortunately most Jews know better. But every group has its idiots and its fools, and I suppose we are no different.

A Question for Journalists: What If White Racism Causes GOP Wins?

Shortly after the 2016 election, I posted something on Facebook observing that Trump's victory proved that White racism was alive and well in America and remained a winning electoral force. My most all-in MAGA classmate from law school replied with a half-enraged, half-taunting rant to the effect of "calling White Americans racist is why Trump won, and that you're still doing it now is why we're going to keep on winning."

Spit-flecks aside, I recognized an interesting puzzle. It is entirely plausible for both of the following to be true: (1) That White racism is an important causal factor in contemporary Republican success, and (2) That saying that aloud makes Republican success even more likely. In other words, there's a potential disjuncture between how the social scientist and the political strategist should characterize "why Republicans are winning." It could be that, in terms of public discourse, accurately describing the political lay of the land is antipathic to changing it.

With GOP victories across the country yesterday, most prominently in Virginia, it is a plausible hypothesis that White racism is a significant part of the explanation for GOP success. Some of you think "plausible hypothesis" is far too gentle, others think the very idea is outrageous. I frame it as a "plausible hypothesis" to bracket that debate, for while I think the hypothesis is very strongly supported by the evidence, to the persons who are more skeptical I merely want them to concede that it surely is not outlandish, beyond the realm of what one could reasonably investigate, to think racism played a sizeable role in GOP successes yesterday or indeed over the past decade. Glenn Youngkin, the incoming GOP Governor of Virginia, ran an explicitly race-baiting campaign centered on ginned-up fears of "Critical Race Theory". I hardly need repeat the well-worn notion that "Critical Race Theory", in this context, has no analytical content other than "discussions about race or racism that I don't like"; this of course emphasizes that the anti-CRT push really is nothing more than White resentment politics at fever pitch. By the end of the campaign, Youngkin supporters were a half-step away from calling Terry McAuliffe's call to diversify the ranks of K-12 teachers a form of White genocide. There are reasons to think that the "CRT" narrative didn't really have much purchase beyond the already partisan, and other factors explained the GOP's victory. But again, it is plausible to think otherwise -- clearly plausible, in fact, such that fair-minded and independent journalists should at least think about what the implications are for Democrats, if it is true.

Yet I'm not sure I've ever seen a mainstream journalist grapple with that question. Which is strange, since journalists love nothing more than taking a few off-cycle election results and saying "this is what this means for Democrats" or "here's what Democrats have to do to win." They'll give various answers to that question tailored to the various explanations they have on tap for why Republicans succeeded -- do this if the reason Republicans won is "economic anxiety", do that if it is that Democrats are "out of touch with the heartland", do this other thing if GOP victories stem from "progressives going too far" (boy they love that one). So in that line of thought, we could also ask: what should Democrats do if the reason Republicans won in 2021 is "because White racism is a powerful electoral force"?

Journalists don't have an answer to that -- or at least, not one they are willing to express. In part, they don't ask the question because they refuse to even accept the premise -- calling GOP voters "racist" is rude, it is mean, it is Not Done (none of this has any relation to whether it is true). There may be nobody more fragile on the planet than the White GOP-leaning voter asked to reckon with racism as a partial feature of their life. Certainly, the anti-CRT campaign provides ample evidence of this: parents who saw Connor was a bit sad upon learning about U.S. history and concluded that totalitarianism had been reborn (or just read David Bernstein's origin story for how he became an anti-CRT zealot -- somehow, he thinks that he isn't the obvious villain of this tale). If you're going to give Connor that medicine, by golly he better get ten scoops of sugar to help it go down -- and hey, wouldn't he be even happier if we just skipped the medicine altogether and only ate the sugar?

But to some extent, I think part of why they refuse to ask the question is that they are just constitutionally incapable of coming up with an acceptable answer. For one, at the most basic level, if it is true that the GOP wins insofar as White racism is powerful, the "correct" response is that there is something diseased in America that needs to be cured. Yet framing the problem in this way -- as Republicans doing something wrong they need to fix -- is a clear violation of Murc's Law (that Democrats are the only agential actors in American politics). 

If there is any defense of refusing to go with the obvious answer, it is that an explanation for what Democrats should do can't really rely on problematizing what voters want, let alone asking Republicans to leave off a winning strategy ("because it's hideously immoral? Hah -- good one!"). Politics is partially about persuasion, but for the most part one takes the electorate you have, not the one you wished you had. "I would have won if I had better voters" is a pretty pathetic excuse. So the other obvious, if bloodless, response to any explanation of the form "voters want X" is "Democrats should provide, or at least accommodate, X." Of course, that's far easier to say aloud when X is "more restrictive trade policies" or "focusing on bread-and-butter issues" than when X is "racism". Put simply, under the prevailing way political journalists talk about politics, once you admit that racism is what the electorate wants, the only way to complete that story is to advise Democrats to "be more accommodating to racism".

This is why journalists are insistent, to the point of franticness, to recharacterize "racism" as something legitimate that it is fair to ask Democrats to be responsive to. It's not "racism", it's "economic anxiety" or "extreme theories being taught at Berkeley" or "cancel culture gone haywire". At one level, these are just more PC ways of saying "Democrats need to be more accommodating of White racism". But the reason we bother with the altered frame is that, on face at least, it is reasonable to ask Democrats to be responsive to those concerns, in a way one can't just baldly state "Democrats should come to terms with racism". They are more convenient explanations; they allow the standard political story -- voters want X, Democrats should be responsive to X -- to be completed. But convenience aside, whether or not "economic anxiety" versus racism is actually the explanation for GOP electoral successes is an empirical question; "racism" does not fail as an explanation simply because it'd be an awkward one for journalists to explore.

Yet the dismissal of "racism" as an explanation on grounds of convenience is the reality of contemporary political journalism. And it's a problem, for a host of reasons, not the least of which being the puzzle I identified at the outset. If White racism remains an exceedingly powerful political force, what should Democrats do, as a matter of political strategy, in order to win elections? This is a genuinely hard question, and I don't have a clear answer -- I wish I had a silver bullet to make racism less appealing, but I don't and I don't pretend to. Which is all the more reason why it'd be nice if thoughtful political journalists started asking this question. Yet they don't, and they won't, no matter how much evidence piles up suggesting that racism is a viable explanation for our current state of political affairs.

White Jews: An Intersectional Approach -- Presenting to the Germans

Tomorrow (well, I suppose later today -- Nov. 2, at any rate) at 11:30 AM (Pacific), I'll be presenting "White Jews: An Intersectional Approach" before the Alliance Against Antisemitism -- Cologne. I believe I'm just one of two English-language speakers on their event list this season, so this is quite an honor.

A link to the livestream is here. It'll be in English, of course, so feel free to tune in!

Are All Exemptions "Individualized"?

One of the many fun events of the past few years has been the Supreme Court deciding it is going to blow apart and reconstruct First Amendment free exercise doctrine in the middle of a pandemic, often on the shadow docket, with little warning and less argument, invariably in the direction of hamstringing the public authorities' efforts to impose basic common-sense limitations to stop the spread of a highly-infectious, contagious disease. We should all take a moment to pour one out for the courageous American people, who have largely been steadfast and resilient in the face of the federal judiciary's determined efforts to kill us all.

The latest salvo on this front was the 6-3 vote by the Supreme Court to deny emergency relief to health care workers who wanted a religious exemption from Maine's vaccine requirement. Maine allows vaccine exemptions solely for medical reasons; it does not permit religious (or, I believe, any other) bases for exemption. This vote does not necessarily mean that the case will come out the same way if it ever reaches the Court via normal avenues; Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Kavanaugh, concurred but suggested that part of their issue was that the case was inappropriate for resolution on the shadow docket. Glad they finally got the memo!

Justice Gorsuch wrote for three dissenters to stake out what would have been until, well, last week, a truly staggering position: that Maine's choice to exempt from a vaccine mandate only those for whom a vaccine is physically dangerous fails rational basis review, which is such an extreme departure from existing constitutional law doctrine I'm almost in awe of its lèse-majesté. Others can pick at other aspects of the opinion, but one element I wanted to flag was Justice Gorsuch's claim that Maine has a system of "individualized exemptions" in place for its vaccine mandate which it is unreasonably failing to extend to religious objectors.

The "individualized exemption" rhetoric picks up from the Court's halting attempt to harmonize its new free exercise jurisprudence with what had been the prevailing standard in Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith, which held that neutral and generally applicable laws needn't offer religious exemptions even if they happen to impinge upon the religious precepts of certain individuals. Smith distinguished some older cases, notably Sherbert v. Verner, on the grounds that in the latter there was a system allowing for individualized review and assessment of each applicant's claim. In Sherbert, which involved claims for unemployment benefits, the state individually checked to see whether each applicant had demonstrated "good cause" for declining any work offered to them; the case there involved a circumstance where the administrative agency declined to accept that refusing to work on the Saturday Sabbath constituted "good cause". As Smith observed, most laws do not offer that sort of case-by-case, highly-tailored individualized review, and so the Sherbert rule is difficult to reasonably extend to other cases.

Fast forward thirty years, and we have a Court that seems far more inclined to grant religious exemptions as a matter of constitutional entitlement, but has not (as yet) been willing to overturn Smith. So it relies on the "individualized exemption" angle to say that it's not actually making a change. This gives us Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, ruling against a Philadelphia policy which declined to give a religious accommodation to a Catholic organization that wanted to discriminate against gay couples notwithstanding that its anti-discrimination policy allowed for exemptions at the sole discretion of the relevant administrator for any reason whatsoever. Though Philadelphia had never actually granted an exemption, the Court interpreted this provision as essentially having Philadelphia look at each application for an exemption and decide, based on individualized assessment of the particular case, whether to grant one or not. This was akin to Sherbert rather than Smith -- a system of individualized review -- and if one is going to offer that sort of review than religious exemptions have to be permitted as well. Perhaps for that reason, Fulton was a unanimous decision -- it really could fit within the pre-existing doctrine, albeit only because Philadelphia had a crafted a broad and purely discretionary exemption system allowing for individualized assessment of every applicant.

Which brings us back to the vaccine mandate case. Justice Gorsuch, in his dissent, says that the Maine rule is like the Philadelphia rule -- it allows for "individualized exemption." What he specifically says is that "The State’s vaccine mandate is not absolute; individualized exemptions are available but only if they invoke certain preferred (nonreligious) justifications" -- namely, the health-based justification.

Yet Justice Gorsuch seems to be making a conflation here with huge ramifications -- between "exemptions" and "individualized exemptions". Yes, Maine's law has an exemption from its vaccine mandate for persons for whom the vaccine would not be healthful; this is eminently sensible if Maine's ambition is to promote public health. But these exemptions are not individualized in the way that was present in Sherbert or Fulton -- Maine does not make a free-standing commitment to assess every applicant "as an individual" and determine, based on the totality of the circumstances, whether an exemption is appropriate or not. It has a specific exemption for a particular class of persons -- those for whom the vaccine would be physically dangerous. Admittedly, Maine presumably has to do some individualized review to determine whether a person applying for an exemption under this demarcated policy qualifies for the exemption. But that is still not "individualized" review in the Sherbert/Fulton sense, unless every "exemption" in a law necessarily is an "individualized exemption".

Which actually does seem to be Justice Gorsuch's position: all exemptions are "individualized exemptions" -- the word "individualized" is superfluous. His proof that the vaccine mandate has "individualized exemptions" is that it is "not absolute", suggesting that any exception ipso facto qualifies as an individualized exemption which must therefore allow for a religious exemption as well.

This is staggering. One would struggle, I imagine, to think of a law that doesn't have some "exemptions" in it -- pretty much any law of substance has some "provided that such-and-such does not qualify" proviso in it somewhere. Our laws prohibiting stabbings exempt surgeons; our laws prohibiting possession of drugs exempt police officers seizing drugs; our laws prohibiting homicide exempt executioners of the death penalty. Are these all now "individualized exemptions", compelling religious adherents to get a similar exemption as well? In our soon-to-be-post-Roe world, most states which ban abortion probably still will have some "life of the mother" exception; does offering this exemption mean that any person for whom abortion is religiously mandatory in other scenarios must be permitted to have one?* I can't wait for the first Jewish plaintiff to sue on that theory; I can wait for her to inevitably lose because there is no question that the rule being expressed here is not a check liberal religious observers will be entitled to cash as against conservative rules.

At some level, this is all an academic exercise -- the reason we're focusing on the existence or not of "individualized exemptions" is not because Justice Gorsuch has any particular attachment to that as the standard, it's because this is the rhetoric one can find in Smith and so this is the best way to achieve the outcomes Justice Gorsuch wants in a world where there are not yet enough votes to overturn Smith. Nonetheless, the implications of Justice Gorsuch's position really is that any law which has any exemption for any reason must have a religious exemption too -- a position which seems perilously close to covering "all laws". That's a recipe for religious anarchy. I won't say "and that's the point", because again, we all knew who is going to be allowed to ride that train and who won't be. The likely upshot is far more likely to be the typical authoritarian-conservative structure: a favored class for whom the laws protect but do not bind, and a disfavored class for whom the laws bind but do not protect.

* It is amusing to me just how well Justice Gorsuch's logic for why a health exemption to a vaccine  mandate necessarily compels a religious exemption maps onto why a health/life exemption to an abortion ban necessarily compels a religious exemption there too. Justice Gorsuch's position is that we are per se forbidden from ever declaring a "religious" need as lesser than any secular need, including health and safety (this has been referred to as promoting a wrongful hierarchy privileging "life-sustaining" over "spirit-sustaining" needs). The only basis we have for declining a religious exemption is if the religious action uniquely threatens the state's interest in promulgating the general law in a way that the secular exemption doesn't. 

In the vaccine case, Gorsuch's argument goes, unvaccinated persons may be dangerous in a health care setting, but they're equally dangerous regardless of the reason they're unvaccinated -- it's not as if a virus is less transmittable if it's carried by someone who's unvaccinated because of health reasons compared to religious reasons. But so too in the abortion case -- the state's interest in protecting fetal life is equally implicated regardless of whether the reason the fetus is killed is because its necessary to protect the mother's life or because it's necessary to protect the mother's soul. Either way, the fetus is equally dead, and so once the state allows the, ahem, "individualized exemption" permitting abortion in cases where it is necessary to save a mother's life, it must allow them in any cases where a patient sincerely believes them to be religiously mandatory. 

The Original Understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment is Not Just the Original Understanding of White People

Earlier today, I was having an internet discussion about a tweet from Ibram X. Kendi where he said that one element of racism "is to see books by White authors on White people as pertaining to *people* not race." This was in response to efforts in Texas to investigate and potentially ban a huge list of books that are on the subject of race (and/or sexuality).

Kendi's point, clearly, was not to say that books about White people are actually about aliens (I thought this was obvious, but some apparently need persuasion). Rather, his point was that books about White people are about White people, not "people" simpliciter. They are exactly as "raced" as books by Black authors about Black people. But the latter are pigeon-holed into being "Black" literature, while the former are thought just to be books about "people". And this is a very bad thing, that yields predictable distortions. 

Think of all the times that articles about "working class Americans" only talk to White working class Americans. The conflation gives a sharply skewed account of "working class Americans" -- for example, it makes them out to be far more conservative than they are. To be clear, a poll that sampled only Black Americans' political attitudes also would give us skewed picture of "Americans'" political attitudes (it would tell us, for example, that 90% of "Americans" vote Democrat, which is ... not correct). But it is not an accident that nobody makes that mistake -- there are plenty of good reasons to poll Black Americans as to their views, but nobody thinks that a poll which sampled only Black respondents is giving a comprehensive picture of American political attitudes.

By coincidence, I was having this discussion at approximately the same time I came across a new article by James W. Fox on how Black Americans originally understood the 13th Amendment. This is an important contribution because very often "originalist" investigations of the Constitution -- those which look to see how people of the framing era understood the meaning of giving constitutional clause -- look almost-exclusively at the understandings of White Americans at that time. That isn't self-conscious or intentional -- to the contrary, it is almost entirely unthinking. But nonetheless, investigations that sample near-exclusively White Americans are used to generate inferences about the original understandings held by Americans, as a whole. And this feels very natural, just the way of doing "neutral" originalist thinking, such that we don't even notice until it's pointed out just how skewed our sample is.

In reality, it is not remotely surprising that Black Americans and White Americans in the 1860s may have had different understandings of what the 13th Amendment was supposed to do. There are absolutely important historical reasons to look specifically at what White people thought; there are certainly are good historical reasons to look specifically at what Black people thought. From an originalist perspective, there may be a good reason to try and synthesize these thoughts into a cohesive whole that does capture a unified "American" understanding of the document, if that is indeed possible. But you have to be self-conscious about it -- if you're only looking at what White people thought, you're not looking at what "Americans", as an undifferentiated whole, thought. The racism that Kendi is articulating is the racism that assumes that proper taxonomy is one where an investigation of Black perspectives on the 13th Amendment is categorized as specifically "Black", while an investigation of White perspectives on the 13th Amendment is categorized as just "people's" perspectives or "American's" perspectives.

A Buffalo Socialist in the Heart of America, Part II

The Washington Monthly has a good, short profile up on India Walton, the self-described socialist who is the Democratic nominee for Mayor of Buffalo. Walton earned that spot by upsetting the incumbent, Byron Brown, in the Democratic primary. While initially this made it look as if Walton would be a shoo-in for the general, Brown has waged a furious fight to keep his seat via a write-in campaign, and at least one poll has him with a sizeable lead.

While I have no particular dog in this hunt, I actually think it would be unfortunate if Brown prevails. This might surprise some of you, as I'm not especially oriented towards self-described socialist candidates. Partially, I'm of the view that, absent really strong reasons to the contrary, as a Democratic voter I'm going to support the Democratic nominee. But the larger reason is that, as I wrote back when Walton first won the primary, Buffalo actually seems like a really good candidate for experimenting with some of the socialist policies that Walton is putting forward, and seeing whether these ideas can be put into practice in an actual American city under "live fire" conditions. Buffalo is small enough so Walton won't constantly be under the national media microscope unless she deliberately seeks out the spotlight, yet large enough such that one actually has to manage various diverse stakeholders and entrenched interests -- which is something one has to do, if one seeks to govern and alter the society we have. Maybe Walton will prove up to the task, maybe not; maybe her ideas will have legs, maybe they'll be all smoke. But I'm curious to find out.

Brown has gone on a fundraising tear from developers and Republicans, and so is very well-financed; already Walton's backers are prepping a narrative where the Powers-That-Be conspired to keep her out of the seat in defiance of the popular will. I find such stories to be more than a little tendentious, even though it's true that Walton has admittedly been slow to consolidate formal Democratic Party support. Even still, and pat "establishment vs. insurgent" narratives aside, Walton was endorsed by both of New York's senators (Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand), and from my vantage there are more big-wig Democratic figures who are trying to stay neutral than who are actively backing Brown. More to the point: if you can't beat your opponent when his name isn't even on the ballot, then maybe your "popular" support isn't as broad as you think it is (and according to the above-linked poll, Brown actually sports surprisingly robust approval ratings -- 60%! -- for a guy who lost in a primary). 

That said, just as a political observer (and admittedly, someone who doesn't live in Buffalo), I'd be very curious to see how a Walton stint in the Mayor's office would go. So for now, I guess I'm still rooting for her.

The Hardball Case for Democrats Abolishing Congressional Districts

How can Democrats respond to Republican attempts at consolidating power and locking out even future Democratic majorities? For example, aggressive Republican gerrymandering may subject America to perpetual minority rule even in the branch of government (the House of Representatives) meant to be most majoritarian in character. But what can Democrats do to stop it?

People often talk about "hardball" options, as if the only reason Democrats aren't acting to defend themselves is a failure of steely-eyed will. Admittedly, that is a vice some Democrats have. But it's not the only issue. A particular problem with many hardball tactics is they invite tit-for-tat retaliation. If Democrats engage in court-packing, for instance, Republicans can just re-pack the courts again the next time they take control of the presidency and Senate. By contrast, one advantage of DC statehood is that it is relatively immune from direct retaliation -- there are no obvious GOP-leaning states that can be admitted in response.

So the ideal hardball tactic is one that Democrats can use (a) in states they control, without Republican (or, perhaps as importantly, Sinema/Manchin) permission, and (b) where Republicans cannot easily respond in kind. And so here's my pitch, more as a thought experiment than anything else: in solid blue states, Democrats should abolish congressional districts entirely, elect all House representatives at-large without any form of proportional representation.

Right now, for example, California has 53 House seats (soon to be 52). Some of these districts are Republican, some are competitive, most are Democratic. Currently, California's delegation comprises 42 Democrats and 11 Republicans. But since California is reliably Democratic at the statewide level, if all representatives were elected at-large (without any nod to proportional representation) we can assume all 53 would be Democrats -- a net gain for Democrats of 22 seats.

Of course, by stipulation I say that Republicans are allowed to retaliate, and so if California passes this law, so does Texas. Texas currently has 23 Republicans and 13 Democrats;* but if all are elected statewide and Texas retains its red hue then all 36 seats would go GOP -- a net gain of 26 for team red (If this makes you think California more gerrymandered than Texas is, recall that Trump won Texas in 2020 by approximately 5.5%, while Biden won California by 29%).  And then there are the states where this doesn't matter, because they're already all-blue (Massachusetts) or all-red (Oklahoma). Switching to at-large would yield the same outcome as the status quo, just without defined districts.

So doesn't it wash out? Not if you play it out, no.

Let's make two simplifying assumptions to start: first, that all House seats in a state-wide at-large race will go to one party (there will be no ticket-splitting), and second, that each state will vote for the party it voted for in the 2020 presidential election. The first of these should under conditions of strong polarization remain true enough (and idiosyncratic exceptions should cancel out). The second is obviously dicier (what if we're in the universe of 2016 instead of 2020?), and I'll address it in more detail in a moment. The result would be basically be the same as the electoral college outcome if we remove DC and the distorting impact of the Senate (recall that every state gets two extra electoral votes from their Senate seats, regardless of population).

Right now, the House of Representatives is Democratic-controlled by a 220-212 margin (with three vacancies). But if all states voted at-large under the above assumptions, the House breakdown after the 2020 election would 253-182 -- a huge Democratic swing.

Now, of course, it is hardly guaranteed that the 2020 election results will replicate themselves in future House elections. Georgia, for instance, went Democratic at the presidential level but had voted for a GOP governor just a few years prior. It would be foolish for Democrats to pin their House majority hopes on Georgia reliably being a blue state and thereby giving all of its seats to Democrats. There is a live possibility, after all, that it goes red, then under my above assumptions all of its seats would go Republican instead. Ditto states like Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. In 2016, for example, the House under the above model would have had a 246R-189D split.

So let's complicate the model slightly. In swing states (which we'll define as states where the margin of victory in 2020 was less than 5%), we will assume that the state will not adopt the at-large system but instead will prefer the (typically gerrymandered) status quo as the risk-averse option. For example, right now Florida has a 16-10 Republican advantage in the House notwithstanding that Trump won Florida by just 3.3%. The GOP-controlled Florida legislature might be willing to roll the dice on the at-large system in the hopes of getting all 26 seats; but of course doing so runs a non-negligible risk that they might lose all 26 seats. Better to preserve the status quo where they can, by redistricting, guarantee themselves most seats rather than go for broke. The case is even clearer in Georgia, where Republicans hold an 8-6 advantage in the House delegation in a state Biden won (albeit by a sliver). They're already getting more than they should via gerrymandering, why take a risk and potentially lose everything? In Nevada, Democrats face the same prospect in the opposite direction: they already have a 3-1 lead in the House delegation -- why risk letting the GOP run the table in a good year just to get one more seat?

If only the non swing states use the at-large system (while the swing states preserve the status quo and vote the same as they did now), the 2020 House margin would be 235-200 in the Democrats favor. The forty-two non swing states would break down 186-142 for team blue. The remaining eight swing states are Arizona (4R/5D), Florida (16R/11D), Georgia (8R/6D), Michigan (7R/7D), Nevada (1R/3D), North Carolina (8R/5D), Pennsylvania (9R/9D), and Wisconsin (5R/3D) -- this totals 58 Republican seats and 49 Democratic seats.

Pictured: The 2020 presidential map, with "very close" states greyed out. Note that each state's number of electoral college votes is two more than its number of House seats (House seats plus Senate seats). The 2016 map is below.

What about 2016?

There were even more very close states in 2016 than 2020 -- 11 were decided by five points or less. Of course, states can't necessarily predict in advance that they'll be close (who saw Minnesota coming?). But again, if we assume that only the non-close states would use the at-large (functionally) winner-take-all system, that would start us off with 167 Democrats and 156 Republicans. The eleven swing states were Arizona (4D/5R), Colorado (3D/4R), Florida (11D/16R), Maine (1D/1R), Michigan (5D/9R), Minnesota (5D/3R), Nevada (3D/1R), New Hampshire (2D/0R), North Carolina (3D/10R), Pennsylvania (5D/13R), and Wisconsin (3D/5R). That yields a final result of 223R-212D (thanks to a whopping 67-45 advantage in the swing states). Still a GOP win, but much narrower than its actual 2016 margin of 241-196 (and, in fairness, the GOP -- barely -- won the House popular vote in 2016). Also note that two of those states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, were forced to revise their lines shortly after the election -- it is likely that the GOP lost enough seats just from those rulings such that, under the reformed lines, Democrats would have been able to win a narrow majority even in 2016.

So this is not a "Democrats always win" solution, by any means. But it does offer Democrats some advantages. For one, it allows Democrats to fully leverage their advantage in larger states where they are leaving more "meat on the bone", so to speak. Many solid red states already have all or nearly all GOP delegations -- switching to the at-large system wouldn't change much in, say, Oklahoma or Utah, which currently have no Democrats in Congress at all and where Democrats in their best year maybe could squeak out one winner. Big solid blue states like California, New York, and Illinois would be rich prizes. Outside Texas, there aren't that many comparable opportunities for the GOP. Ohio would be a solid possibility, but Ohio is already gerrymandered so ludicrously aggressively (11R/3D) that the at-large switch wouldn't actually do that much -- just a six seat swing. Compare that to New York, where going all blue from the current 19D/8R status quo would net Democrats 16 seats.

But the other reason it works is because it neutralizes the specific GOP advantage in gerrymandering swing states. A major reason the House is so close right now is that the GOP has a nine seat advantage in the eight 2020 states that were decided by five points are fewer, even though Biden won six of them. In 2016, the Pennsylvania GOP's "gerrymander of the decade" gave them a 13-5 House advantage in a state that Trump won by less than one percent. That is largely the product of extremely favorable (to say the least) districting lines. Abandoning those lines for an effectively all-or-nothing at-large system would be incredibly dangerous for the GOP. But without going for it in these states, Republicans would be hard-pressed to overcome Democratic advantages in populous, deep blue states like California.

Again, as much as this might seem like stacking the deck, we should note that all that this system really does is make it more likely that the party which gets the most votes controls the chamber that is intended to be most responsive to majority preferences. The above analysis is fancy footwork that boils down to "under this system, the party with the most votes is most likely to win". In 2016, under the modified model where the swing states are risk-averse, Republicans would have narrowly won a House majority after narrowly winning the (House) popular vote. In 2020 under that model, Democrats would have secured a wider House majority after earning a wider (House) popular vote win. This is a good thing.

That said, putting aside its tactical utility as a hardball play that forces recalcitrant players towards more robust democratic solutions, do I think abolishing congressional districts is a good (as in virtuous) idea? That is, would I support it on its own terms, regardless of its usefulness in counteracting GOP gerrymandering? Honestly -- not really. There are good reasons to have politicians represent smaller geographic districts to whom they feel particularly accountable towards -- someone looking out for Fresno or Tacoma or Springfield specifically. An at-large process could still account for that somewhat -- the Democratic "slate" in California could self-consciously include figures from around the state who would hold themselves out as responsive to the needs of a particular community and would take point in responding to local constituent concerns. But there's no doubt there'd be a genuine loss there.

My preference, then (to the extent we're moving this beyond "thought experiment") is for this proposal to be expressly set to sunset at the moment there are uniform federal rules governing redistricting (and forbidding partisan redistricting). Basically, it tells Kevin McCarthy "agree to national rules on voting rights or you can kiss your precious California House seat goodbye". If he agrees to cooperate, lovely. If he doesn't, well, then you make good on the threat.

[Note: It took me about an hour to write this post and then another two to check and recheck my math. I'm not a math guy, so I can't guarantee the math is perfect now -- but I think it should be close. If I made any gaping mistakes, please let me know.]

UPDATE: Turns out that federal law (2 U.S.C. 2c) appears to forbid this, insofar as it requires states establish an equal number of districts to the number of representatives they're entitled to (with each district only electing one representative). I suppose one could try to skirt this by establishing multiple "districts" which overlap the same geographic territory (or better -- detach districts from geography altogether and randomly assign voters to districts). But alas, seems like this thought experiment must stay firmly in the realm of the thought.

Anti-Vaxxers Aren't Funny Anymore

As recently as, oh, two years ago, if you asked the media to imagine its archetype of an anti-vaxxer, they would have given you some crunchy-granola type who mistrusts vaccines because something-something-natural living-something-something-big pharma. You know, like this:

 

And so long as this was our anti-vaxx image -- a hippy Hollywood Jenny McCarthy sort -- the media was quite happy to laugh and laugh at how stupid anti-vaxxers were. Which, to be clear, was richly deserved.

But now, of course, we see that the image of the anti-vaxxer has shifted. It's no longer some out-of-touch flower child. It's the Republican base. And suddenly, the media has decided that this isn't funny anymore. Now it's a policy dispute, see? Now it is a matter of principles, a dilemma between admittedly important scientific and health care necessities and deeply-rooted American values of freedom. Anti-vaxxers are not silly cranks and are not to be treated that way. We can make fun of left-wing hippies, but heaven forfend we show anything but the utmost seriousness and respect towards exurban churchgoing conservatives.

It's worth noting that there were, well in advance of the COVID pandemic, plenty of signs that the stereotype that anti-vaxx sentiment was a province of the hippy-dippy left were at best outdated. For one, even before anyone was thinking about COVID we were already seeing Republican politicians start to dip their toes into anti-vaxx conspiracy theories. For two, we should not have been so quick to assume that crunchy-healthful-living and conservatism are oil and water. Marjorie Taylor Greene owns a cross fit gym! The anti-vaxx private school academy in Miami, owned by rabid Trump backers, provides meal options that would normally read like the far-right's parody of a soy-boy ("Our menu is consistently 100% organic, 100% non-GMO, gluten-free, light on dairy, no added sugar, never processed, always fresh and locally-sourced when possible. We incorporate Superfoods such as ginger, hemp, quinoa, spices such as cinnamon, turmeric, curcumin, and herbs such as rosemary and basil.").

But it took the pandemic to make it clear that anti-vaxx sentiment in America is primarily a conservative phenomenon. And once we did realize that, and realized alongside it that anti-vaxx paranoia wasn't just a matter of hippie punching, well, the media suddenly decided that it just wasn't that much fun to joke about it anymore.

On Losing in History, from Bundism to Liberal Zionism

What does it mean, to be part of a political movement that ... loses?

Most political organizing, as I understand it, is not primarily about predicting the future. It's about fighting for the future that one wants to see, at a time where there are multiple plausible futures that could come to pass. Given that, it will inevitably be the case that many people will join political movements that are fighting for a plausible, defensible future and who -- fast-forward twenty years -- will have lost.

Consider the Bundists of the early 20th century. They fought for a world in which Jewish equality and self-determination would flower and be protected in the places where Jews already were -- "hereness". Certainly, this is a defensible vision of the world, one that one would be perfectly justified in fighting for in the early 20th century. And yet, as we know, the future the Bundists fought for did not come to pass. They lost their battle, and lost it in the most horrifying manner possible to the Nazis. And so in the future that did come to pass, the Bundists, like all Jews, suffered horribly.

Does this discredit the Bundists? Does the end of the story necessarily mean that they made the wrong choice in what they sought to fight for at the start of the story? Many say yes. I'm unconvinced. It seems unfair -- cruel, even -- to judge an ideology by the consequences of a future that they unsuccessfully sought to resist. The Bundists had a plausible vision of the future that they reasonably thought was worth fighting for. And they did, and they ... lost. Are all political campaigns that are lost thereby proven to have been wrong to fight for in the first place?

It is easy to say they should have known better, with the benefit of hindsight. Knowing how the story  played out, of course the Bundists look like fools. But nobody should be so confident in their ability to win political struggles. One can have the best moral judgment in the world, and a will of iron, and a keen strategic mind, and one can in politics still lose. Too much depends on what other people do. You can make all the right moves, or at least defensible moves, and still lose. It is, in many ways, a sign of our own egocentrism that we blame ourselves for "picking the wrong side", as if history's arc would have been materially different if we, personally, had chosen to be liberals or socialists or Marxists or nationalists or pragmatists in the moment of fighting. Any one of us changing sides would almost certainly not change matters one whit. Sure, maybe if everyone had switched sides that would've made a difference. But not even the most powerful and influential among us has that amount of sway. The choices other people make will always be largely uncertain to us. And so while utter naivete about the choices others will likely make is not always excusable, we should not act as if only a fool would not have known how events would play out. The Bundists could not have known that Nazism would end up carrying the day in Germany, and that all their work would be for less than naught.

Liberal Zionism in 2021 perhaps looks much like Bundism in 1931. Make no mistake: we are losing. Perhaps we have already lost, though the revitalization of neo-Bundism today makes me think that no ideology of this sort truly can be said to have lost forever. Maybe in some future world there will be a new set of conditions making Liberal Zionism a winning team again (for example, if we live out the "Czechoslovakia gambit", where a one state solution eventually leads to a two state solution on equitable terms, I can very much imagine a New Liberal Zionism flowering). 

But whether one retains faint hope or not about the present or not, there is no question that the liberal Zionist vision is losing. I did not begrudge anyone for cheering Netanyahu's demise, but it is certainly emblematic of how weak the liberals are that Naftali Bennett counts as a savior. Or, for that matter, Benny Gantz, who himself has spoken of the need to preserve Israeli sovereignty over far-flung settlements "forever" and just designated an array of respected Palestinian human rights NGOs as terrorist entities. How excited can we be, when men such as these excite us?

And these are the high notes! On the other side, the far-right is ascendant and makes no bones about its desire to raze liberal rule of law values to the ground. Traditional pillars of liberalism and rule of law in Israel -- the judiciary, cultural institutions, academia -- are under assault from all sides and are slowly wilting. The liberal parties in Israel are moribund, to the point where it's now no longer a given that Labor can cross the electoral threshold unaided. The right surged to victory in the last WZC election and rapidly began consolidating power. With the exception of the Abraham Accords, it is hard to think of any aspect of Israeli life where the liberal ideal has not decayed significantly over the past twenty years (and even the Abraham Accords, as much as I celebrate them, still ultimately represent compacts with largely authoritarian nations -- not exactly a liberal seed). 

And things look slated only to get worse. The younger generation in Israel is far, far more conservative than the older one; in Israel it is not bigotry and prejudice that might eventually die out with age, but tolerance and democratic values. Among young Jewish Israelis, levels of hatred towards Arab citizens are staggeringly high; half of young religious Zionist Jews in Israel think Arabs shouldn't be allowed to vote. The larger mainstream Jewish organizations are still stuck in patterns of passivity and obeisance, and will not stick their necks out to actually organize for liberal values in Israel -- in their best moments the most they can offer is to stay out of the way. Seeing groups squabble over something as seemingly mundane and unoffensive as the Two State Solution Act is as disheartening as it is unsurprising. The idea that they will ever have the boldness to pick a stick to go along with their carrots is ludicrous. 

And those who are still fighting for liberal values in Israel from a place of genuine attachment to Israel are increasingly alone, and are on the defensive. All their energy is devoted to slightly slowing down the liberal decay; they cannot even imagine what going on the offensive would look like, and they wouldn't have the resources or time to do it even if they could. Elsewhere on the left, there are no reinforcements, but rather cheers for our demise. At best, we have no role in their strategizing. We're non-factors. Just as often, the liberals are seen as nothing more than an annoying set of gadflies standing between the decolonizers and the fascists; the left cannot wait to see us wiped out, and if they see an opportunity to accelerate the process -- squeeze out those beleaguered universities and cultural institutions and academics -- they'll jump all over it. 

Even the SunriseDC fiasco -- objectively, a crushing defeat for anti-Israel fundamentalists -- is a sign that we're losing, for SunriseDC would not have tried this gambit if it hadn't at least thought it might succeed. Five years ago, it would have been inconceivable to imagine a call to expel the NCJW from progressive spaces succeeding. Even in the wake of its failure, one could see the Overton Window shift, and people for whom perhaps this particular play was a step too far start to rationalize how other, similar moves, that also would result in kneecapping Jewish liberal organizations or imposing special litmus tests us to "earn" or "claim" our seat at the progressive table, could be justified, and how a policy of slow strangulation of liberal Jewish political activity could begin anew. The cavalry is not coming. We are losing.

I don't want to say it's hopeless. But we are losing, and losing badly enough that we have to start imagining actual defeat. If we do lose, outright and utterly, we can only hope first that the consequences of our defeat are not as staggeringly catastrophic as they were for the Bundists. Probably they won't be -- actual industrial genocide remains a rare thing. But an unrepentant authoritarian apartheid Israel would be bad enough.  Or the eradication of Jewish self-determination in Israel, a return to being a minority at others' sufferance, that would be bad enough. And we will ask ourselves, "could it have all been averted, if we had switched sides? If we had not fought a losing battle?" Knowing the end of the story, does the indict our choices at the beginning?

As with the Bundists, perhaps it will be unfair, to blame us for a future that we fought against, just because we did so unsuccessfully. A small consolation indeed.

It's a Small World After All

My SunriseDC posts have gotten me a bunch of new followers, and I've promised to start disappointing them as soon as possible.

Well, no time like the present, so here we go.

You probably heard the news that Israel designated six Palestinian human rights organizations as terrorist groups, alleging they are tied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The US has already signaled its discontent with the move, and for my part I've suggested that a good "throw an elbow" move would be to take some extremist but nonetheless politically connected Israeli organizations (think Lehava) and place them on a terror watchlist (something we should be doing anyway, but now certainly would make an especially poetic time to do it).

But saying the Israeli government's decision to label these groups as terrorist organizations was wrong is not all that hot a take. None of you will be disappointed in me for making it, I fear. So try this one instead: the decision to label these groups as terrorist organizations was wrong even if one can find links between the organizations and the PFLP (and indeed, there are reports suggesting that there are at least some connections).

Maybe that'll get your attention.

The reason, to be clear, is not because the PFLP is not properly deemed a terrorist group. It absolutely is. And while less well known these days than, say, Hamas or Islamic Jihad, the PFLP has been responsible for some of the most gruesome violent terrorist assaults in Israeli history, including a massacre at Lod Airport that killed twenty eight people. I have no fond feelings towards the PFLP.

What came to mind, rather, was someone on my twitter feed suggesting that the PFLP was being treated as a "contaminant" -- any connection to it, at any level or through any personnel, was enough to generate this sort of absolute and uncompromising crackdown by association. "Contaminant" caught my eye because it was the same word Abe Silberstein had used to characterize what SunriseDC was doing to Jewish organizations re: Zionism -- the slightest touch or whiff was enough to warrant expulsion.

(Yes, I can already hear the howls of protest at even drawing the comparison. How dare you compare the entire ideology of Zionism with a literal terrorist group? Or, how dare you compare a criminal enactment by a national government with a decision by a piddling activist group in DC? You needn't bother to message me about it.).

One can already see, if one looks, a familiar set of excuses and modes of justification. Sure, Israel seemed to target Palestinian human rights groups -- but it didn't ban all groups. It is articulating a neutral standard, and in any event are you saying it's wrong to oppose the PFLP, a known terrorist actor? Why, it is downright insulting -- I daresay the real racism -- to suggest that a Palestinian NGO couldn't not be associated with the PFLP! You're conflating "Palestinian", an identity, with the particular ideology and tactics of certain organizations (namely, violent militant leftist resistance to the Israeli state)!

All of this is a way of eliding a simpler reality. What Israel is doing is suffocating Palestinian civil society and human rights advocacy. That it doesn't do so absolutely comprehensively is not a defense. That it has superficially defensible reasons that have nothing to do with "suffocating Palestinian civil society" is also not a defense. That you can pour through the archives and see that this assistant director was on a panel with that social activist who attended on a grant issued by a man who has also seeded money to the PFLP's government affairs wing is, too, not a defense.

The internet may be big, but the world of the Palestinian community, much like the Jewish community, is pretty small, in the scheme of things. For any remotely prominent or active player, there aren't going to be too many degrees of separation between the participants -- still less, if they're concentrating on the broadly defined shared goal of bringing attention to wrongs and mistreatments done to the Palestinian people by Israel, or, for that matter, the PA (if, as Anshel Pfeffer speculates, what Israel was actually doing is targeting internal Palestinian critics of the PA at Abbas' request, that only strengthens the point). I know for my part it would not take a lot of effort or steps to connect me to some people and groups I very much do not like and do not support (to say nothing of those with whom I disagree with on most issues but may provisionally align with for a narrow or discrete project where interests align), because the Jewish world is small, and the Jewish political world is smaller. We've all seen the breathless "investigations" which show that David Schraub is a member of this organization which is sponsored in part by this other foundation which has also funded this other group and would you look who is on their Board of Directors?

We're all familiar with the genre. I've seen, more times than I care to count, the amateur and professional shops eager to offer reams of evidence "showing" how all of Israeli or Palestinian society is a seamless web of conspiracy, such that any pin in the corkboard can and must be ostracized not because they are Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or Muslim (perish the thought!), but solely because of neutral standards demonstrating their own bad acts and associations. And the peddlers of these screenshots and PDFs and databanks pat themselves on the back for their deep investigative reporting and congratulate themselves for proving that everyone is acting on basis of principle, and the cries of prejudice and bigotry are just the usual suspects caterwauling.

Such logic is suffocating. It is suffocating notwithstanding the smarmy replies asking whether it is "really so hard not to associate oneself" with so-and-so or such-and-such wrongdoer, and it is suffocating notwithstanding the probable fact that someone, somewhere, maybe genuinely is sufficiently disconnected to pass muster (or more likely, has their particular set of connections excused and overlooked on an ad hoc basis -- everyone has their good ones). I'm not a libertarian, but anyone with even a smidgeon of libertarian instinct can understand how the weight of enough regulations, any or all of which can sound sensible or salutary on their own, can crush the life out of even good, public-spirited businesses. The same holds true for public participation. Cast the net wide enough and fine enough, and Israel will never need to come out and say "Palestinian human rights organizations are banned". It can get rid of them all -- or all but a token few -- through regulations and policies that are not just neutral on face, but sound to the credulous audience perfectly sensible and defensible on face.

It strikes me as quite likely that there are, if one looks deep enough and stretches broad enough, some connections between the groups Israel targeted today and the PFLP. That's mostly because I suspect one could find such connections (to PFLP or to some other genuine bad guy) for essentially any political Palestinian actor; just as one could do it without too much trouble for essentially any political Jewish or Israeli actor. What strikes me as exceptionally unlikely is that these groups are outright fronts for the PFLP, pretending to do some human rights makework in the front office while busily building bombs and rockets in the back.

So no doubt you will see some bloggers or news outlets come out in the next few days with breaking reports of just how this human rights NGO is tied to the PFLP. And no doubt they will hold themselves out as proving that the very idea that Israel's actions were anti-Palestinian, that they were targeting human rights groups as opposed to engaged in the laudatory fight against terrorism, is a lie and a libel. They may even believe these things.

They'll be wrong. And their logic suffocates.

The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow

After furious pushback from pretty much every quarter, Sunrise DC claims to be reflecting and pondering upon the reaction it got from its announcement demanding the expulsion of three Jewish groups (but not other groups with similar views) from progressive coalitional spaces for being "Zionist".

The probability that they will issue an actual, unequivocal apology strikes me as essentially nil. I welcome being disproven on this point, but it is a prediction I'm quite confident in. For starters, genuine moral epiphanies do not come so fast. Their initial sin was not a harsh word taken in a moment of weakness or impatience, but something pondered and considered. If they are to come to the conclusion that what they did was simply wrong, flat period, it will take more than a few days of bad PR.

But beyond that, as much heat as they're taking from bigger fish in the progressive ecosystem (including the Sunrise Movement as a whole), the local and interpersonal connectors which promoted and lauded this decision in the first place remain operative and will be no doubt furious if Sunrise DC shows contrition. When one gets far enough out into the fringes of political activism, where purity of purpose and practice is the only currency, one's situation is not dissimilar to what Churchill said of dictators -- they ride to and fro on tigers they dare not dismount, for the tigers are hungry. If the back down, they'll be eaten alive by their erstwhile allies and they will not be forgiven by those they have wronged. That's the other thing: there is no chance that any apology, right now, would suffice to heal the wound that Sunrise DC caused -- at least not right away. And to be clear, that's not anyone's moral failing for being insufficiently forgiving -- in a case like this, the wronged party is not obliged to simply accept an apology and immediately wipe the slate clean. All I'm saying is that, even if one does recognize that one has done wrong, it takes a very strong person to apologize knowing that the only tangible result is that they'll be pilloried by their "friends" and unforgiven by those they hurt. Sunrise DC has not shown much evidence of possessing that sort of strength.

Far more likely, then, is that Sunrise DC will look for some alternative pathway to get to a similar place to where they had initially wanted to go, but that avoids the nominal arguments for their particular statement aroused such ire. It has been noted that the argument I made in my post -- that Sunrise DC targeted exclusively Jewish groups for positions that are common among the great bulk of left-of-center organizations, Jewish or not -- seems to be one that has gotten considerable traction as "the" reason for why what Sunrise DC did was wrong. For some, this set off a hunt for some hypothetical set of criteria and distinctions that just happened to include only these three Jewish groups. They would then triumphantly ask whether the American Federation of Teachers' website mentions Israel-related programming on its front page, as if that was the actual demarcation between acceptable and unacceptable (Answer: "No, of course [these other groups] were not in this new reference class which you have just now constructed in such a way as to contain only [the initial three].").

More likely is the promulgation of a new criteria which does expressly include some other, non-Jewish groups they won't work with (the AFT is an obvious candidate). But again, the goal is tractability -- the new standard has to be one that can be enforced, and that means limiting its scope. "Just the Jews" was one such limit that allows for tractability, and I noted in my prior post that if SunriseDC actually meant to preclude cooperation with all groups that hold views on Israel similar to that of the RAC -- which just this summer reiterated its long opposition to "the military occupation of the West Bank, which humiliates Palestinians and causes much daily suffering... the expansion of settlements and annexation in the West Bank and the eviction/displacement of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, elsewhere in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank" -- would mean it basically could not work with any liberal person or organization of any significant size (Jewish or not) of any that had ever ventured a thought on Israel, since such a position is absolutely the normal one among liberal political sorts. 

To be fair, it was pointed out to me -- and I had come to this thought on my own -- that SunriseDC might not especially mind this outcome, as its theory of change is not particularly tied to having close collaborative relations with mainstream liberal organizations or politicians. While I still think that SunriseDC would think carefully about how many bridges it wants to burn, it still is the case that such a move would be less costly for them than for many comparable organizations. Nonetheless, my guess is that SunriseDC does not want to commit to more tangible exclusions than it must. Indeed, right now I think SunriseDC has a potential trust issue looming over any potential partnership it might want to make. Forget what it did to the Jewish groups, what it did to the DFAD coalition, or to Sunrise National -- it was a blindside hit. Anyone who might be interesting in collaborating with SunriseDC has to wonder whether two weeks from now they'll be publicly castigated for having an investment banker on their board or having the wrong vowels in their name or defending "capitalist" solutions to social problems or some other heresy that will come out of nowhere. The hidden utility of only targeting the Jews was that it implicitly signaled to all the non-Jews "don't worry -- you're going to be fine. This isn't about you." If it starts lashing out willy-nilly, everyone has to wonder if they're next; and the best way to dissipate the worry is to just partner with someone else.

So SunriseDC still has the same basic incentive coupled with the same basic moral orientation: it wants to keep excluding the Jewish groups, and a few others for "neutrality's" sake, while keeping the total number of exclusions tractable and enforceable. To this, I see two options. First, come up with a new set of criteria that is very precise and gerrymandered to mostly encompass the Jews they were already targeting (and now a few others). This might be something like "no groups that do work in Israel that isn't expressly about ending the occupation" or "no groups that have hosted Israeli politicians". Again, anyone who thinks these rules actually demarcate the difference between morally acceptable and unacceptable organizations is deceiving themselves as much as if the rule was "no organizations which mention Israel on the front page of their website." These criteria are there for tractability -- it is another way of signaling to everyone else "don't worry, we're not coming after you, we're only going after this slice" (a slice that "just happens to be" overwhelmingly Jewish). Which wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the criteria tracked a moral division -- but it doesn't. The goal, again, is to limit scope. Make an example out of a few, and the rest fall into line (or make an example out of a few, and feel happy that you destroyed a few evildoers. Even SunriseDC can appreciate some marginal gains).

Option two is to retain what they have now -- an intentionally broad and underspecified criteria of "no Zionists", and then just declare that a few more non-Jewish organizations are now qualifying miscreants. The breadth and vagueness allows people to fill in the content however they want (how many people did we see argue -- somehow with a straight face -- that all SunriseDC was doing was announcing opposition to the occupation!), and few will research to see whether the criteria is in fact being consistently applied (particularly when it now facially includes both Jews and non-Jews -- notwithstanding this is a bit like Trump's travel ban expanding to include North Korea and Venezuela).

What will remain true is that this alteration is, at root, nothing more than a gotcha play: "you said the problem was that Jewish groups are singled out? Well now our standard includes non-Jews too -- so there! We corrected the problem!" Of course, my post anticipated this move in noting that Randi Weingarten is sufficiently prominent as a Jewish leader that her, and through her the AFT, could easily be attacked as well without much adjustment. 

But more to the point: it is neither unreasonable nor goalpost moving to hold that when an actor has just a moment earlier engaged in naked discriminatory conduct, it is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt when it reorganizes to do almost exactly the same thing as its initial discrimination, but this time with a fig leaf in front of it (Muslim Ban 1.0 should have altered our assessment Muslim Ban 2.0). Being antisemitic should extract a cost like that; one should be limited in what policies one can endorse or what steps one can take in ways others are not. When you engage in rank antisemitism, you lose -- at least for a little while, certainly for more than a week -- the right to play in sandboxes that are filled with precious Jewish objects.

Can I Be Proud of You?

"I'm so proud of you!"

As a professor, I have happily had many occasions to speak and think these words. Whenever one of my students, or former students, does something momentous, or accomplishes an ambition, or makes their mark, I feel it, and I get to say it. This is one of the many wonderful features of being in a role of mentorship, guidance, and support as part of one's career.

I've often wondered, though, is this feeling of pride one that necessarily only attaches (at least without condescension) to persons who had at some point been under your supervision? Your students, or your subordinates, or your children?

On many occasions, I have thought "I'm so proud of you" regarding persons who had never been in that role -- had always been a peer. Classmates, friends, or colleagues. It is a happy thought, and so I want to share it. But I do worry about whether it implies condescension. So I ask "can I say I'm proud of you?" or "would it be weird for me to be proud of you?" And they usually reply yes and no, respectively, and so I say it. But I still wonder -- am I mistaken in the feeling? Or am I wrong to think being proud of someone implies at least a prior superior/subordinate relationship?

The Internet is Full of Bad People

The problem with the internet is that it's full of bad people.

Let me explain.

The internet is also full of good people. And average people, and weird people. The internet has a lot of people on it. And so, ipso facto, it will also have a lot of bad people.

Last year I wrote a post hypothesizing that the social media revolution doesn't mesh with our lizard brains regarding how to assess how "common" a given opinion is. Our primordial brain imagines that easily-found opinions are common opinions, and hard-to-find opinions are rare opinions. But on Twitter, every opinion is easy to find. For any major social calamity, no matter how obvious it may seem that one side or another is just clearly behaving wrongly or abusively, you can find dozens upon dozens of twitter accounts -- and not just bots -- falling over themselves to talk about how wonderful it is. Tankies, fascists, smarmy centrists -- all your "favorite" players seem to be everywhere and omnipresent. In our off-line time, we'd have trouble finding them (I'm an academic in Portland by way of Berkeley, and I doubt I know a true tankie in person). No wonder time on the internet makes us all despair. Our brains cannot help but interpret our time on the internet as confirming that monsters are everywhere, nowhere is safe, and the world is going to hell.

And maybe the world is going to hell. But the internet, at the very least, is misleading evidence for the case. When I spend too much time on Twitter, I have to remind myself that the perception that bad people are everywhere is a trick -- a matter of the lizard brain not being able to account for the sheer vastness of the "community".