David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column is an interesting exercise. He opens by taking the back of his hand to the Republicans:

When it comes to elections, the Republican Party operates within a carapace of lies. So we rely on the Democrats to preserve our system of government.

but after that it’s almost completely devoted to how offbase Democrats are in “defending democracy”. He provides a series of “myths”, debunks them, and then points out what the Democrats are doing. I’ll take them one at a time.

Myth #1: the whole electoral system in crisis

Elections have three phases: registering and casting votes, counting votes and certifying results. When it comes to the first two phases, the American system has its flaws but is not in crisis. As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout. The votes were counted with essentially zero fraud.

The emergency is in the third phase — Republican efforts to overturn votes that have been counted. But Democratic voting bills — the For the People Act and its update, the Freedom to Vote Act — were not overhauled to address the threats that have been blindingly obvious since Jan. 6 last year. They are sprawling measures covering everything from mail-in ballots to campaign finance. They basically include every idea that’s been on activist agendas for years.

Myth #2: voter suppression efforts are a major threat to democracy

Given the racial history of this country, efforts to limit voting, as some states have been implementing, are heinous. I get why Democrats want to repel them. But this, too, is not the major crisis facing us. That’s because tighter voting laws often don’t actually restrict voting all that much. Academics have studied this extensively. A recent well-researched study suggested that voter ID laws do not reduce turnout.

Myth #3: higher turnout helps Democrats

Political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik, authors of “The Turnout Myth,” looked at 70 years of election data and found “no evidence that turnout is correlated with partisan vote choice.”

Myth #4: the best way to address the crisis is top down

Democrats have focused their energies in Washington, trying to pass these big bills. The bills would override state laws and dictate a lot of election procedures from the national level.

Given how local Republicans are behaving, I understand why Democrats want to centralize things. But it’s a little weird to be arguing that in order to save democracy we have to take power away from local elected officials.

He concludes:

The crisis of democracy is right in front of us. We have a massive populist mob that thinks the country is now controlled by a coastal progressive oligarchy that looks down on them. We’re caught in cycles of polarization that threaten to turn America into Northern Ireland during the Troubles. We have Republican hacks taking power away from the brave state officials who stood up to Trumpian bullying after the 2020 election.

Democrats have spent too much time on measures that they mistakenly think would give them an advantage. The right response would be: Do the unsexy work at the local level, where things are in flux. Pass the parts of the Freedom to Vote Act that are germane, like the protections for elections officials against partisan removal, and measures to limit purging voter rolls. Reform the Electoral Count Act to prevent Congress from derailing election certifications.

So, let’s recap. Vote fraud exists but at such a low level it’s not a dire problem. Voter suppression exists but it doesn’t influence turnout or election outcomes. Higher turnout doesn’t provide an advantage of one party over the other. Republicans are worried about “a coastal progressive oligarchy” and the Democratic strategy for improving democracy is to place more control in their hands. Nothing to worry about there, obviously. So, where’s the beef?

It seems to me that the crisis is one of trust. Not only does neither party trust the other they view the other party’s members as enemies rather than as competitors. I think the solution to that is not just one of messaging.

In an op-ed in the New York Times Lilia Shevtsova comments on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans:

So what is Mr. Putin’s endgame? The immediate aim, to be sure, is to return Ukraine to Russia’s orbit. But that’s only a brush stroke on a much bigger canvas. Mr. Putin’s design is grand: to refashion the post-Cold War settlement, in the process guaranteeing the survival of Russia’s personalized power system. And judging from the West’s awkward, anguished response so far, he might be close to getting what he wants.

In recent years, Mr. Putin has successfully revived Russia’s tradition of one-man rule by amending the Constitution, rewriting history and clamping down on the opposition. Now he seeks to provide the system with a sturdy Great Power spine, returning to Russia its global glamour. In the past decade, Mr. Putin’s Russia not only demonstrated its readiness to resume control over the former Soviet space, testing its ambitions in Georgia and Ukraine, but also left its footprints all over the world, including through meddling in Western democracies. Yet today’s standoff over Ukraine takes things to a new level.

No longer content with upsetting the West, Mr. Putin is now trying to force it to agree to a new global dispensation, with Russia restored to eminence. It doesn’t stop there, though. Crucially, the geopolitical advance would serve to safeguard Mr. Putin’s rule. So the West, by accepting Russia’s geopolitical position, would effectively underwrite its domestic agenda, too. The United States would become, at home and abroad, Russia’s security provider. It’s quite the gambit.

I don’t know whether this is accurate or not but that’s not my point in this post. The NYT blandly describes Dr. Shevtsova as a “Russia expert”. She’s a Ukrainian Russia expert. I would expect her to have a point of view that might, indeed, be different from that of a Russian. Or an American for that matter.

This is a near-perfect instance of something I’ve been remarking on recently. An enormous proportion of the “Russia experts” cited in American media are either Ukrainians or Poles. It’s as though all of the experts on American politics being cited were Mexican scholars. Or Guatemalans. Their insights might well be true but they would represent a specific point of view which might cause them to skew those insights.

Note that I’m not challenging Dr. Shevtsova’s expertise, merely pointing out potential biases. I wish the NYT were doing that for us.

At MIT Technology Review Antonion Regalado presents his picks for the “worst technology of 2021”. It includes:

• Aduhelm—an anti-Altzheimer’s drug that’s hugely expensive, not particularly effective, and dangerous
• Zillow’s house-buying algorithm that overpaid for houses
• Ransomware
• Billionnaires in space
• Beauty filters

I only disagree with one of them—the spurt of space tourism. I think that anything that encourages interest in space travel is to the good.

Adam Ellwanger has provided the next exhibit in my ongoing search for definitions of democracy in a piece at Human Events. Here’s the kernel of his observations:

What, then, are the essential characteristics of a true democracy? I argue there are four. The first is that the methods for the selection of candidates for office must be fair and cannot allow any particular class of citizens to have significant advantages in earning an appointment to a government position. Secondly, people in leadership positions must recognize an obligation to respond to public concerns in ways that mirror the preferences of their constituents, and they must prioritize their efforts at governance in accord with the most urgent concerns of the public. Third, a very large majority of citizens must have faith that the methods for selecting who will hold public office are fair and uncorrupted. Finally, the core non-governmental institutions that wield enormous power in the public sphere must not use that power to deliberately manipulate public opinion or decisions about politics and the direction of society. I’ll discuss each of these in turn.

A considerable amount of energy has ben expended today expressing concerns about the third “essential characteristic”, the confidence of the citizenry in institutions, but I think that we fail on all four. With respect to #3, I would submit that the decline of voter turnout in midterm elections from 75% immediately following World War II to its present roughly 55% as evidence of a decline in confidence.

I genuinely wish I knew what to make of this study (PDF):

We estimated the number of excess myocarditis events per million persons in the 1-28 days following each exposure for the main analysis and by age and sex (Supplemental Table 5 and
Figure 1). Following the first dose of the ChAdOx1 and BNT162b2 vaccines an additional 1 (95%CI 0, 2) and 2 (95%CI 1, 2) myocarditis events per million persons exposed would be anticipated, respectively. Following the second dose of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 an additional 2 (95%CI 2, 3) and 36 (95%CI 34, 37) myocarditis events would be anticipated, respectively. Following a third dose of BNT162b2 an additional 2 (95%CI 1, 2) myocarditis events per million persons would be anticipated. These estimates compare to an additional 30 (95%CI 29, 31) myocarditis events per million in the 1-28 days following a SARS-CoV-2 positive test.

If the findings prove out it would suggest to me that the model of getting a booster against COVID-19 every few months may not be workable.

Nothing is risk-free and the assessment of risk varies by individual based both on personal circumstances as well as individual tolerance for risk. I haven’t done the math but it would seem to me that there would be a “sweet spot” somewhere at which the risk of myocarditis was so much lower than the risks from contracting COVID-19 it was barely worth considering. It does make one wonder about the 20th or 50th booster shot.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Jeffrey Scott Shapiro covers some of the same ground that I have:

The events of Jan. 6, 2021, are misunderstood, and the failure to correct the record could be damaging to both America’s future and its justice system. Words have to have meaning, and the continuous mislabeling of the U.S. Capitol breach as an “insurrection” is an example of how a false narrative can gain currency and cause dangerous injustice.

Many crimes undoubtedly took place at the Capitol that day. Demonstrators rioted, destroyed government property and in some instances engaged in acts of violence. Many are charged with violating 18 U.S.C. 371, which makes it a crime “to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States,” and with underlying charges of civil disorder, disorderly conduct, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, destruction of government property, and obstruction of an official proceeding.

These are important criminal charges that shouldn’t go unaddressed. But of the hundreds of “Capitol Breach Cases” listed at the Justice Department’s prosecution page, not one defendant is charged with insurrection under 18 U.S.C. 2383. That’s because insurrection is a legal term with specific elements. No prosecutor would dare mislabel negligent homicide or manslaughter a murder, because they are totally distinct crimes. The media has no legal or moral basis to do otherwise.

The events of Jan. 6 also fail to meet the dictionary definition of insurrection, which Merriam-Webster defines as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” A usage note adds that the term implies “an armed uprising that quickly fails or succeeds.” A closely related term, “insurgency,” is “a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as a belligerency.”

Other near synonyms include “rebellion,” “revolution,” “uprising,” “revolt” and “mutiny.” All require two elements, neither of which was present in the Jan. 6 breach—the organized use of violent force and the aim of replacing one government or political system with another.

A real insurrection would have required the armed forces to quell an armed resistance. Actual insurrections—apart from the Civil War—include Shay’s Rebellion in 1787, in which thousands of insurrectionists tried to seize weapons from a Massachusetts armory after months of planning to overthrow the new revolutionary government, and the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, in which 500 armed men attacked the home of a U.S. tax inspector in Western Pennsylvania. Both events required President Washington to quell the insurrections with thousands of armed troops, who killed several resistors.

The demonstrators who unlawfully entered the Capitol during the Electoral College count were unarmed and had no intention of overthrowing the U.S. constitutional system or engaging in a conspiracy “against the United States, or to defraud the United States.” On the contrary, many of them believed—however erroneously—that the U.S. constitutional system was in jeopardy from voter fraud, and they desperately lashed out in a dangerous, reckless hysteria to protect that system.

The media’s mischaracterization of these events created a moral panic that unfairly stigmatized Trump supporters across the nation as white supremacists conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government, resulting in the unnecessary mobilization of armed U.S. troops in Washington.

Those who violated the law inside the U.S. Capitol should be prosecuted and, if convicted, sentenced accordingly. But dramatizing a riot as an organized, racist, armed insurrection is false reporting and dangerous political gaslighting.

Note that there is no attempt to diminish the events, exonerate the guilty parties, or otherwise justify them. It’s just a flat assertion that words have meanings.

Question: who is undermining democracy? Those who breached the Capitol, those who justify those actions on specious grounds, or those who insist on misapplying language or, in Mr. Shapiro’s words, “political gaslighting”? My answer: all of the above. Rabid partisanship is undermining democracy.

My ears always prick up when the editors of the Wall Street Journal turn their attention to Illinois or Chicago and one of today’s editorials there is about the showdown between the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Here are their opening remarks:

The political scandal of the year so far is unfolding in plain sight in Chicago, where the teachers union has effectively shut down the public schools. Will this finally cause President Biden to speak up for children? Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is showing the way.

Chicago schools were supposed to be open Wednesday, but they shut down after the Chicago Teachers Union voted against in-person learning. The CTU says it won’t relent until the surge in Covid-19 cases has subsided, or the school district signs an agreement “establishing conditions for return” approved by the CTU.

Even Mayor Lori Lightfoot is unhappy, correctly noting that Chicago’s classrooms are safe and accusing the union of an “illegal work stoppage.” She added that teachers who didn’t show up Wednesday would be put on no-pay status. We’ll see how long that lasts given how powerful the CTU is in Democratic politics.

The CTU action comes as we are learning about the full—and unnecessary—costs inflicted on children in the name of Covid prevention. These include mental-health issues, losing ground academically, and the lack of normal socialization. This damage has all been done even though children remain among the least at risk for a severe case of Covid.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation” this weekend, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona also emphasized that schools can be opened safely. “We know what works, and I believe even with Omicron, our default should be in-person learning for all students across the country.”

They then turn their gaze to Arizona in which I’m not particularly interested. Let’s consider a little additional perspective. In the Chicago Tribune Tracy Swartz and Gregory Pratt report:

Chicago Public Schools and the teachers union have filed unfair labor charges against one another, with each side asking state officials to end the current dispute over in-person learning in their favor.

The latest escalation in the conflict over adequate COVID-19 safety measures in schools comes as CPS saw a new record number of coronavirus cases Tuesday — the last day of classes before the lack of agreement with the Chicago Teachers Union shut down schools districtwide for two days.

Lawyers for CPS are asking the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board to issue a cease-and-desire order against CTU and hear the case on an expedited basis.

“On Tuesday, January 4, 2022, the CTU illegally directed its members … not to report to work as directed but to work remotely instead from January 5 until the earlier of January 18 or when CPS meets certain health metrics,” CPS lawyers said in the filing.

CTU lawyers separately filed charges alleging CPS violated the law by not negotiating an agreement with CPS about school reopenings after the one they signed in February 2021 expired. They’re asking the state to to order CPS “to honor the statutory right of employees to refrain from working in dangerous conditions and to allow employees to work remotely.”

while the editors of the Sun-Times lament:

Chicago Public Schools is reliving a bad version of “Groundhog Day,” and 290,000 students are worse off because of it.

Those 290,000 students sat out of school altogether on Wednesday, just two days after returning from break, and will do so again on Thursday because of yet another acrimonious stalemate between CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union over remote learning and COVID-19 safety.

Parents and the public have seen this movie before, most recently with the two-week strike in 2019 and then the impasse over COVID safety and re-opening schools last school year.

Eventually, we fear, the acrimony will substantially erode public confidence in Chicago schools. When labor strife becomes routine and adults can’t figure out how to keep schools open, what else can we expect?

The Centers for Disease Control’s present guidelines are:

• Students benefit from in-person learning, and safely returning to in-person instruction in the fall 2021 is a priority.
• Vaccination is the leading public health prevention strategy to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Promoting vaccination can help schools safely return to in-person learning as well as extracurricular activities and sports.
• Due to the circulating and highly contagious Delta variant, CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.
• In addition to universal indoor masking, CDC recommends schools maintain at least 3 feet of physical distance between students within classrooms to reduce transmission risk. When it is not possible to maintain a physical distance of at least 3 feet, such as when schools cannot fully re-open while maintaining these distances, it is especially important to layer multiple other prevention strategies, such as screening testing.
• Screening testing, ventilation, handwashing and respiratory etiquette, staying home when sick and getting tested, contact tracing in combination with quarantine and isolation, and cleaning and disinfection are also important layers of prevention to keep schools safe.
• Students, teachers, and staff should stay home when they have signs of any infectious illness and be referred to their healthcare provider for testing and care.

As I’ve been saying since the very beginning of the pandemic, the public schools serve multiple constituencies including the students, their parents, as well as teachers and school staffs. Importantly, the interests of those groups are not always aligned. To my eye it would appear that the Chicago Public Schools and Mayor Lightfoot’s actions are consistent with federal Department of Education and the CDC’s guidance.

However, to be fair to the teachers there’s a good argument to be made that protestations to the contrary notwithstanding at least some Chicago schools are simply not safe environments. To my eye that claim would have more weight if they’d been complaining about it all along. What aggravates me about the CTU’s position is its passive-aggressive tone. In response to the CPS’s requirement to return to in-person learning I wish they had responded with a plan for accomplishing that rather than simply refusing.

And I haven’t even gotten into the attendant scandal regarding COVID-19 testing. Short version: tens of thousands of tests have simply left to deteriorate. Administering a COVID-19 test is one thing but doing something with the test actually requires somebody to do something.

Returning to the beginning of this post I’m not sure where the priorities in this matter are but I’m pretty sure of where they aren’t: on the students.

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner has a representative sampling of commentary on the events of January 6, 2021. Op-eds from Karl Rove (WSJ), Jimmy Carter (NYT), Francis Fukuyama (NYT), Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux (FiveThirtyEight), and Politico’s “Playbook” feature are quoted at length. The best characterization I have encountered today is from Mark Tapscott at Instapundit:

…a year ago today, a large crowd of thoughtless fools waving signs and shouting slogans a few of whom may actually have believed, overcame a clearly unprepared, untrained U.S. Capitol Police force, penetrated the U.S. Capitol, forced a temporary suspension of Congress certifying the 2020 presidential election results, and did an estimated $1.5 million worth of damage in an historic building full of priceless paintings, statutes, architecture and memories.

By the evening, order was restored, Congress resumed its business and democracy survived.

As I’ve said before my view is:

1. January 6, 2021 was significant and the actions of those who breached the Capitol were wrong.
2. All of those involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
3. I think it’s important to distinguish between a reasonable revulsion at the events and partisan posturing or battlespace preparation.
4. There’s a lot of the latter going on.

Just as with 9/11 practically nothing has been learned since the breaching of the Capitol. It’s a terrible commentary on us.

Update

The view expressed by the editors of the Wall Street Journal comport pretty closely with mine:

The Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, was a national disgrace, but almost more dispiriting is the way America’s two warring political tribes have responded. Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem intent on exploiting that day to retain power, while the Donald Trump wing of the GOP insists it was merely a protest march that got a little carried away.

We say this as a statement of political reality, not as a counsel of despair. Our job is to face the world as it is and try to move it in a better direction.

with this important observation:

The true man at the margin was Mike Pence. Presiding in the Senate as Vice President, he recognized his constitutional duty as largely ceremonial in certifying the vote count. He stood up to Mr. Trump’s threats for the good of the country and perhaps at the cost of his political future.

In other words, America’s democratic institutions held up under pressure. They also held in the states in which GOP officials and legislators certified electoral votes despite Mr. Trump’s complaints. And they held in the courts as judges rejected claims of election theft that lacked enough evidence. Democrats grudgingly admit these facts but say it was a close run thing. It wasn’t. It was a near-unanimous decision against Mr. Trump’s electoral claims.

None of this absolves Mr. Trump for his behavior. He isn’t the first candidate to question an election result; Hillary Clinton still thinks Vladimir Putin defeated her in 2016. But he was wrong to give his supporters false hope that Congress and Mr. Pence could overturn the electoral vote. He did not directly incite violence, but he did incite them to march on the Capitol.

Worse, he failed to act to stop the riot even as he watched on TV from the White House. He failed to act despite the pleading of family and allies. This was a monumental failure of character and duty. Republicans have gone mute on this dereliction as they try to stay united for the midterms. But they will face a reckoning on this with voters if Mr. Trump runs in 2024.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal have what appears to me to be a practical suggestion for reducing the likelihood of a recurrence of the riots on January 6:

The anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is Washington’s theme of the week, and waves of righteous anger will roll across the Mall. We agree the riot was disgraceful, but then why not rewrite the law that encouraged Donald Trump’s supporters to think Congress could overturn the 2020 election?

We’re referring to the Electoral Count Act, the ambiguous 19th-century statute that purports to allow for a majority of Congress to disqualify a state’s electors after the Electoral College has voted. Congress’s certification of presidential election results should be a technicality, but Mr. Trump misled supporters into believing Vice President Mike Pence and Congress could overturn Joe Biden’s victory, leading to the Jan. 6 march on the Capitol.

The solution, of course, is repeal. Sounds sensible to me.

Before I leave this subject I want to remind my few readers that I immediately and unambiguously condemned the events on January 6, 2021. Additionally, I believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, submitting as evidence that NONE of the court challenges that have been filed prevailed. That leads me to a question.

So far none of the 700 some-odd individuals who have been charged with crimes in connection with the January 6, 2021 breaching of the Capitol has been charged with insurrection. Does the same standard apply to the election and the breaching of the Capitol? If not, why not.

If so, there was no insurrection and claiming there was is mischievous.