In his most recent Washington Post column George Will laments that the midterm campaign season has given us a master class in things we probably don’t want to know about ourselves. Here’s what was to me the most salient part:

If on Tuesday Hispanic voters continue their drift away from Democrats, the reasons might include these: Self-identified “strong progressives” are only about 10 percent of voters, but they have a disproportionate effect in setting perceptions of the Democratic Party. Sixty-six percent of them say this is not the world’s greatest country, and 94 percent say racism is built into the nation’s policies and institutions. Hispanics disagree with those propositions by 70 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

Also, many Hispanics fled socialism, or have family memories of it, and are repelled by progressives who admire it from a safe distance.

I don’t think it’s just Hispanics.

I thought you might be amused (or infuriated, depending) on the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s reaction to President Biden’s pre-midterm plea to save democracy. It takes the form of “missing pages” from the president’s address:

“My fellow Americans, I’ve mentioned the MAGA threat. But to preserve democracy, it will take the efforts and honesty of both political parties. And we Democrats need to acknowledge that most Republicans feel as strongly and sincerely about fair elections as we do. After the 2020 election, hundreds of Republicans were the most important obstacle to Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.

“Mike Pence in particular played a heroic role in refusing as Vice President to stop the Electoral College count. He was under enormous pressure from Donald Trump to do so, and he knew that refusing would jeopardize his chances of ever becoming President. But he stood on principle and followed the Constitution. I should thank him more often than I have, and I want to salute him tonight.

“There were also the many lawyers in the White House and Justice Department who refused to go along with the former President’s claims when they saw no evidence for them. Thank you, Bill Barr.

“There were Governors and state election officials who refused to follow Trump’s demand to find votes that didn’t exist. Thank you, Doug Ducey and Mark Brnovich.

“There were the many judges appointed by Donald Trump who examined the evidence and ruled against the fraud claims. Thank you, Mitch McConnell and Federalist Society for supporting those judges.

“Truth be told, some in my own Democratic Party have also contributed to the climate of political mistrust and animus. The ranks of election deniers include Georgia’s Democratic candidate for Governor Stacey Abrams, who refused to accept her defeat in 2018. My own press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, tweeted in 2020 that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp ‘stole the gubernatorial election from Georgians and Stacey Abrams.’

“That was wrong, and I’ve asked Karine to apologize at her next press conference. I know she regrets that tweet.

“Worst of all, Hillary Clinton and many others claimed Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was illegitimate and the result of Russian influence. Some in the FBI even lied to a secret surveillance court to spy on a Trump campaign official. That was wrong, and those lies have made it easier for Trump to exploit fears about a politicized ‘deep state,’ as MAGA Republicans call it. I hope that Secretary Clinton will also acknowledge the damage from those versions of the Big Lie.

“Democracy is too important to have a double standard for election denial. And from now on, including next week, I promise to call out members of my own party if they refuse to recognize they have lost an election after all the votes have been counted and confirmed.

“I also can’t absolve myself for sowing doubts about democracy. In my first year as President I referred to election changes being considered in Georgia as ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ and I said the midterm election would be ‘illegitimate’ if laws like that passed.

“Well, the Georgia law did pass, and it looks on the evidence so far that voter turnout in Georgia will set midterm records. I was wrong to use such divisive language, and especially to invoke the shameful era of government racial segregation, to make a partisan point.”

and they conclude:

We’d like to think Mr. Biden meant to include these missing pages in his speech. If they weren’t dropped accidentally, then perhaps he could include them next time. Otherwise his speeches about democracy will be dismissed as cynical and calculating partisanship.

My own take is somewhat different. I think that Democrats and Republicans differ in their definitions of “democracy”. I don’t think that either of them mean the same thing as I do.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it but I certainly have. Judging by the various reactions, the assault on Paul Pelosi is practically a Rorschach test.

Some saw it as an example of right-wing extremism. Some saw it as an example of left-wing extremism. Some saw it as being hoist by one’s own petard. Or a security state cover-up. Now there’s apparently an illegal immigration side of it.

As I tried to indicate in my quick take post, I thought that people should be cautious before leaping to too many conclusions.

Stand aside, baseball. Jumping to conclusions is apparently now the national pastime.

Among the many offices and other matters on which Illinoisans will be voting next Tuesday is something called “Amendment 1”. Here’s how the referendum appears on the ballot:

PROPOSED AMENDMENT TO THE 1970 ILLINOIS CONSTITUTION
EXPLANATION OF AMENDMENT

The proposed amendment would add a new section to the Bill of Rights Article of the Illinois Constitution that would guarantee workers the fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively and to negotiate wages, hours, and working conditions, and to promote their economic welfare and safety at work. The new amendment would also prohibit from being passed any new law that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively over their wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and workplace safety. At the general election to be held on November 8, 2022, you will be called upon to decide whether the proposed amendment should become part of the Illinois Constitution. For the proposed addition of Section 25 to Article I of the Illinois Constitution.[

Amendment 1 would add the following language to Article I of the Illinois Constitution:

(a) Employees shall have the fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing for the purpose of negotiating wages, hours, and working conditions, and to protect their economic welfare and safety at work. No law shall be passed that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively over their wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and work place safety, including any law or ordinance that prohibits the execution or application of agreements between employers and labor organizations that represent employees requiring membership in an organization as a condition of employment.

(b) The provisions of this Section are controlling over those of Section 6 of Article VII.

Several lawsuits have been brought concerning this amendment. In one of them the appellate court found that the amendment would only pertain to public sector workers, the supremacy clause ensuring that the provisions of the NLRB would continue to hold for private sector workers.

If I had to pick the ten most important issues facing Illinoisans today, this would not be among them. I have been unable to find any newspaper, print or online that has come out in support of the amendment. the Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, The Daily Herald, and the Wall Street Journal have all published editorials against it. As I see it among the things this amendment would do would be to render all “no strike clauses” in public employee contracts null and avoid which seems to me to be the opposite of what needs to be done. Is it really true that public employees in Illinois do not have enough power?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal certainly don’t seem to think so:

Illinois debt teetered close to junk bond status until nearly $200 billion in Covid bailouts provided enough cash for a reprieve to its fiscal mess. A peek at the startling state payroll reveals why the mess will return.

According to Open The Books, which focuses on government transparency, the state has 132,188 public employees with salaries and benefits over $100,000. That’s a total cost of $17 billion. The list includes 10 police department leaders and 18 school superintendents with salaries above $300,000 and some 16,592 retirees with six-figure pensions. Five of the top 10 public school employee payouts are for pensions above $330,000 a year.

That’s in a state school system that fails its most vulnerable children. See the National Assessment of Educational Progress, if you dare. In 2020 the average Chicago teacher’s compensation was $108,730 including salary and benefits. Chicago teachers are among the highest paid in the nation, which might be fine if they were also among the highest performing measured by student achievement. But pay for performance is unknown in Springfield.

Giant pensions in some cases outstrip salaries, as politicians know they can increase pension benefits that will be paid long after they leave office. Open The Books says there are “more state police officers retired on six-figure pensions (1,555) than officers currently paid on six-figure salaries (1,540).”

Many states offer high salaries to public employees, but Illinois state workers are the second highest-paid government workers in the country when adjusted for cost of living, according to Wirepoints. The Land of Lincoln beats California, New Jersey and New York on the metric. This is one reason Illinois voters pay the second highest property tax rates. New Jersey is number one.

In my view there are presently several major problems with the relationship between the state and public employees. First, public employee unions’ contributing to political campaigns is inherently corrupt. That’s the very nature of being able to recycle tax dollars into political contributions. Second, many of those who benefited from the high pensions offered to public employees aren’t paying for them. They’ve left the state, leaving the state with a larger tax burden than might otherwise be the case. That is unjust. And we aren’t receiving value for what we’re paying. Also, not only are Chicagoans paying the pensions of retired Chicago schoolteachers, they’re paying the pensions of all Illinois schoolteachers. I believe that Chicago is the only jurisdiction so burdened. Jurisdictions should pay their own pensions rather than depending on other jurisdictions to do it for them.

I will vote “No” on Amendment 1 and I encourage all Illinoisans to do the same.

Ballotpedia has considerably more detail on Amendment 1.

As I had anticipated Kyle Kondik has an update on the midterm elections at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Here’s the bottom line:

This week’s rating changes leave us with 219 seats at least leaning Republican. 196 at least leaning Democratic, and 20 Toss-ups. Splitting those would lead to a 229-206 Republican House, or a net gain of 16 for Republicans. However, as we wrote above, that represents the low end of what we’re expecting, and we think our final handicap will be better for Republicans.

The Senate remains a toss-up. Here in Illinois the status of the 6th Congressional District, presently represented by Democrat Sean Casten, has shifted from “likely Democratic” to “leans Democratic”. Given that the boundaries of the gerrymandered 6th had been drawn specifically to save Casten’s seat while packing Republicans into an adjoining district, it would be a shock if he lost his re-election bid.

In front of our house is a large silver maple. I presume it was planted in the 1960s after the elm that had been there succumbed to Dutch elm disease which would make it in the vicinity of 60 years old. The silver maple and both Japanese garden maples (neither typical) we have planted in our front yard still have most of their leaves.

They say that over the weekend a big wind will come along and all of the leaves will fall off. That’s pretty typical for Chicago. We tend not to have beautiful, colorful falls like Wisconsin or New England. Basically, the leaves change color and a week or so later a big wind comes along and blows them all off.

Sounds like my work may be cut out for me this weekend.

I found this piece on the earliest settlers of South America from Florida Atlantic University at Phys.org fascinating:

Using DNA from two ancient human individuals unearthed in two different archaeological sites in northeast Brazil—Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça—and powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, Florida Atlantic University researchers in collaboration with Emory University have unraveled the deep demographic history of South America at the regional level with some unexpected and surprising results.

Not only do researchers provide new genetic evidence supporting existing archaeological data of the north-to-south migration toward South America, they also have discovered migrations in the opposite direction along the Atlantic coast—for the first time. The work provides the most complete genetic evidence to date for complex ancient Central and South American migration routes.

Among the key findings, researchers also have discovered evidence of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of ancient individuals from South America. Neanderthals are an extinct population of archaic humans that ranged across Eurasia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic.

Results of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B : Biological Sciences, suggest that human movements closer to the Atlantic coast eventually linked ancient Uruguay and Panama in a south-to-north migration route—5,277 kilometers (3,270 miles) apart. This novel migration pattern is estimated to have occurred approximately 1,000 years ago based on the ages of the ancient individuals.

Findings show a distinct relationship among ancient genomes from northeast Brazil, Lagoa Santa (southeast Brazil), Uruguay and Panama. This new model reveals that the settlement of the Atlantic coast occurred only after the peopling of most of the Pacific coast and Andes.

“Our study provides key genomic evidence for ancient migration events at the regional scale along South America’s Atlantic coast,” said Michael DeGiorgio, Ph.D., co-corresponding author who specializes in human, evolutionary, and computational genomics and is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science within FAU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. “These regional events likely derived from migratory waves involving the initial Indigenous peoples of South America near the Pacific coast.”

Researchers also found strong Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) genetic signals in an ancient genome from Panama.

The DNA of the sweet potato has suggested to some that South America was settled from the Pacific hundreds of years ago. The human DNA seems to suggest that it took place millennia ago.

It’s always gratifying when someone with a much larger audience than I have manages to lurch onto a point I made years ago. In this case in his latest New York Times column Ross Douthat points out that conservatives and progressives have, in a real sense, swapped places:

One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.

These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.

By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.

In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.

His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.

And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,” “Trust no one,” is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.

which I pointed out quite some time ago. Sadly, Mr. Douthat does not go so far as to explain how something happened only that it happened.

I think I know how it happened. They got power. Once they had power they became loth to relinquish it, particularly when their personal business models became corrupt influence peddling. You need only consider the Clintons to see how that is true. They got hundreds of millions of dollars as long as Mrs. Clinton was the heir apparent to the presidency. When that fell through, the donations dried up. The practice is now so widespread and accepted not to mention lucrative among the nomenklatura, not just politicians but generals and civil servants, they don’t even think of it as corrupt any longer.

That’s how you can tell the system is corrupted. When something that’s obviously corrupt is no longer thought of as corrupt, the system itself has been corrupted.

In a thought-provoking column in the New York Times Thomas Edsall explains why the drift of working class voters away from the Democrats is not at all surprising:

In a September 2022 paper, “Tasks, Automation and The Rise In U.S. Wage Inequality,” Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an economist at Boston University, found that automation “accounts for 50 percent of the changes in the wage structure” from 1980 and 2016, reducing “the real wage of high-school dropout men by 8.8 percent and high-school dropout women by 2.3 percent.”

Task displacement — the replacement of workers with machines — has wide-ranging adverse impacts, they write: “A 10 percentage point higher task displacement is associated with a 4.4 percentage point decline in employment between 1980 and 2016, and a similar 3.5 percentage point increase in nonparticipation (in the work force).”

Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, emailed me to say that “it is extremely unlikely that we will create an employment miracle in manufacturing.” Even if the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Biden signed in August, is “successful in reshoring some manufacturing,” he argued,

I am afraid that will do very little to create good jobs for U.S. workers without college or advanced degrees. Semiconductors and advanced manufacturing are among the most capital- and skill-intensive sectors in the economy and ramping up investment in them — as worthwhile as it may be on geopolitical grounds — is one of the least effective ways of increasing demand for labor where it is most needed.

In addition, Rodrik wrote:

Many of America’s competitors have successfully increased the share of manufacturing in G.D.P., including Taiwan and South Korea. But in none of these cases has the employment share of manufacturing bounced back up. In fact, to my knowledge, there has never been a case of sustained reversal in the downward trend of the manufacturing employment among advanced economies.

There is, Rodrik observed,

broad and compelling evidence, from Europe as well the United States, that globalization-fueled shocks in labor markets have played an important role in driving up support for right-wing populist movements. This literature shows that these economic shocks often work through culture and identity. That is, voters who experience economic insecurity are prone to feel greater aversion to outsider groups, deepening cultural and identity divisions in society and enabling right-wing candidates to inflame (and appeal to) nativist sentiment.

In an April 2021 paper, “Why Does Globalization Fuel Populism? Economics, Culture, and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism,” Rodrik wrote that he studied

the characteristics of “switchers” in the 2016 presidential election — voters who switched to Trump in 2016 after having voted for Obama in 2012. While Republican voters were in general better off and associated themselves with higher social status, the switchers were different: they were worried about their economic circumstances and did not identify themselves with the upper social classes. Switchers viewed their economic and social status very differently from, and as much more precarious than, run-of-the-mill Republican voters for Trump. In addition to expressing concern about economic insecurity, switchers were also hostile to all aspects of globalization — trade, immigration, finance.

The irony of this abounds. The low-hanging fruit for manufacturing and lot of other jobs for individuals without college or professional degrees was already picked long ago. Why, then, do we continue to import such workers in the millions? Furthermore the task displacement that is primed to bear the greatest fruit is among professionals. I’ll just cite one example. Judges can be replaced by expert systems. Not only would such systems be as good as human judges they would be better. They could keep track of every precedent, know the entire background to the extent it could be known. They would not be swayed by emotion, political considerations, or personal benefit.

What prevents that? It isn’t the technology. The technology was available decades ago. The professionals themselves prevent it.