I don’t agree with everything in Edward Luce’s characterization of the present moment in America in Financial Times but I agree with a lot of it. There is a very apocalyptic tone in a lot of the political discourse and nearly all of it is overblown or “fake news” as we’re saying these days. And a lot of it is a completely logical outcome of a loss of confidence:

It is easy to forget that a country founded on the creed of self-belief — not the customary blood, soil and messy evolution of the rest — can turn dark when its self-confidence goes. Doom is the flip side to the hope of US exceptionalism. Just as the American upside is overdone — and highly selective in its self-image — so the darkness can become a self-soothing cult.

I have characterized it as a drawn out national nervous breakdown, beginning with the attacks on September 11, 2001, further fueled by the financial crisis, and then stoked by COVID-19. It does not help that some have seen fit to attack the very foundations of that confidence with nothing substantial with which to replace it.

I think he sugar-coats the situation in which the Biden Administration finds itself a bit. Its conundrum is not the “wildly unrealistic expectations” of Biden’s supporters but the wildly unrealistic expectations that President Biden has set up for himself. He was narrowly elected through a longing for normalcy not through revolutionary fervor. Attempting to revolutionize our entire system system with only the narrowest of Congressional majorities in essence is providing his supporters with precisely the opposite of what they wanted. It would be enough were he to simply do his job without striving to be the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson but as weak as his political performance has been his performance on the day-to-day activities of government is even worse.

I think this passage is worthy of some consideration:

Liberal America’s chief worry, which is not a figment of its imagination, is over the future of US democracy. The fact that Biden is unable to pass his election reform bills, and that the system has so far been unable to hold the plotters of last year’s January 6 failed putsch to account, is the deepest source of angst. Yet there is an underrated distinction between the next presidential election and last year’s one — the people occupying the White House.

Whatever happens, between now and January 2025 no other American will come close to wielding Biden’s power as commander-in-chief. An electoral coup requires federal connivance, which it will not get in 2024. The doomscrollers might pause briefly on that fact. It was Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s vice-president, who refused to go along with last year’s plot to reject the result of the electoral college. No such courage will be required of Kamala Harris in 2024.

I would have said that the notion that U. S. democracy was dangling by a thread was a paranoid fantasy. Our institutions held. We should take the steps necessary to ensure they continue to hold rather than responding as though they’d already failed. Maybe it looks different from Old Blighty. I don’t think so because I think his conclusion is about right:

The maths of America’s media habits are oddly reassuring. Most Americans have switched off. The most demagogic Fox News anchor gets about 3.5m viewers a night. Betting on an apathetic majority may sound odd. But they still greatly outnumber the fanatics.

It isn’t just or even mostly Fox News that has seen a decline in viewership:

Americans are tuning out the news generally. The media have lost the confidence of their viewership and the louder they shriek the worse that loss of confidence becomes.

I strongly recommend Ruy Teixeira’s analysis of the fix in which the House progressives have placed the Democratic Party which he characterizes as “How Not to Build a Coalition”. Key points include

1. Increasing turnout hasn’t worked.
2. Clumping blacks, Hispanics, and Asians together as “people of color” hasn’t worked.
3. The majority of Americans reject “cultural leftism”.
4. Promoting the notion that there’s a “crisis of democracy” hasn’t worked.
5. Promoting the notion that the there’s a dire need for radical transformation in the United States hasn’t worked.

Here are a few important snippets:

In the 2020 election, running against Donald Trump (Donald Trump!) and in the wake of a social upheaval after George Floyd’s murder that associated the Democratic party closely with a left stance on the centrality of “systemic racism” to pretty much every policy issue…the Democrats actually lost ground among nonwhite voters. They lost 7 margin points from their 2016 margin among black voters and a stunning 16 points from their 2016 margin among Hispanics (Catalist two party vote) The black share of voters in 2020 was actually slightly smaller than the black share in 2016 because, while black turnout did go up, it did not go up as much as other groups. Overall, nonwhite voters contributed less to Biden’s margin over Trump in 2020 than they did to Clinton’s margin over Trump in 2016.

and

The left in the Democratic party insists that cultural leftism is central to consolidating the “rising American electorate” that will power the Democratic party to dominance in an increasingly multicultural, multiracial America. It is a feature they say, not a bug, of current Democratic practice.

But in the process, the left has managed to associate the Democratic party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, schooling, free speech and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median voter. That’s a success for the left but the hard reality is that it’s an electoral liability for the Democratic party.

What should be done? The party should focus on popularism—ideas that are popular with most Americans, without poison pills, “gotchas”, or extras. There are plenty of them like DACA, and voter ID. It’s been said that the Republicans are looking for converts while the Democrats are busy searching for heretics. Stop looking for heretics. Abandon vanguardism. That’s the path to becoming a boutique party.

The reason that Democrats have control of the cities is that historically they’ve “brought home the bacon”, i.e. people in those cities benefited. Increasingly, they’re voting Democrat through force of habit. That won’t persist forever. Without reinforcement habits are extinguished.

And for goodness sake don’t just write off getting Republican votes in Congress. Strategies that have been used successfully for 200 years haven’t been tried and found wanting. They’ve been found to violate the Marcusist principles of the Congressional progressives and not tried.

At Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman cite five “warning signs” for the Biden Administration as President Biden’s first year in office concludes:

1. Biden’s overall job approval has stagnated
2. Biden is having trouble with key subgroups
3. Republicans are gaining strength
4. Inflation has led to political turbulence in the past…
5. … and the public sees an administration not focused on its top concerns

to which I would add a sixth: the Congressional progressives, who clearly have the president’s ear, want him to double down on “Build Back Better” and do what he can to get it enacted as-is. Devoting his energies to that effort would almost certainly aggravate the other five. He would be better off if they were advising him to devoting 100% of his attention to COVID-19. Or just maintain a low profile.

There is a good and revealing passage in Carles L. Glenn’s well-written and insighful post at Glenn Loury’s site:

Have I abandoned my youthful convictions and become complacent about racial and other injustices? Not at all; I believe I am as passionate as ever about these continuing problems, but that I have learned from experience and from my own mistakes to advocate for more effective remedies.

We were right about one big thing in our pursuit of justice in the ‘70s and wrong about another. The irony is that both what I held to then (and hold to still) and what I changed my mind about put me in basic conflict with the current “social justice” orthodoxy.

The one big thing we were right about is that racial and social class integration can be a very good thing, both for how and what children learn and for the quality of the education provided to poor children. But there is nothing magic about integration and, done poorly, it makes things worse. We found that two qualities were essential to the success of integration: ample opportunities for students to work together on projects and a climate of mutual respect.

The purpose of creating contexts in which white students worked together with black and other “minority” students (as we then called Hispanic and Asian American students) was to encourage them to focus on the common task or discovery rather than on racial and ethnic differences. Through these shared efforts they came to respect, to trust, and often even to like one another.

That is of course the direct opposite of what McWhorter calls “Third Wave Antiracism,” the new orthodoxy in progressive circles, which “teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ ‘complicity’ in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.”

The working-out of this divisive ideology in schools, as has been reported from across the country, involves heightening racial self-consciousness in ways large and small, persuading some children that they are inevitably victims and others that they are inevitably oppressors. The focus is no longer on shared projects but on divisive grievances.

Read the whole thing.

The editors of the Washington Post have their own advice for President Biden:

Mr. Biden, who ran as a longtime Senate veteran able to get the executive branch and Congress working again, has committed several unforced errors.

Top on the list was his chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which resulted in the deaths of 13 American service members and consigned to Taliban rule a country into which the United States had invested vast resources.

As Afghanistan unwound, Mr. Biden allowed progressive expectations to outrun the reality of what Democrats could accomplish with their slim congressional majorities. Progressives talked of passing a Build Back Better bill running to several trillion dollars or more, using the Senate’s reconciliation procedure that allows taxing and spending legislation to duck the filibuster’s 60-vote requirement. In fact, conservative Senate Democrats Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) would not support a bill that surpassed $2 trillion. Once that reality sank in, Mr. Biden should have persuaded Democrats to prioritize a few programs to fund sustainably. Instead, House Democrats refused to sacrifice programs to save others, approving a bill containing a large number of underfunded initiatives. When Mr. Manchin balked publicly, the White House released a blistering statement that poisoned negotiations.

On voting rights, Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats pushed for sweeping legislation that would end partisan gerrymandering and mandate voting-access measures, warning that failure to do so could leave U.S. democracy in severe danger. This time, Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema supported the bill but did not favor changing Senate rules to pass it over a Republican filibuster.

Even on the omicron variant, the Biden administration could have been better prepared. It was foreseeable that the coronavirus would continue to mutate, perhaps in a way that made it more infectious and enabled it to evade vaccines. The White House should have built rapid PCR testing infrastructure throughout the country in case this occurred, which it did this winter. Instead, wait times are almost uselessly long for reliable results.

In his second year, Mr. Biden must tack toward the practical. Mr. Manchin had offered to support a $1.8 trillion Build Back Better proposal last month, which would have included hefty climate change provisions, before his talks with the White House collapsed. The president should have taken up Mr. Manchin then. Mr. Biden should say yes to Mr. Manchin now, salvaging as much of that proposal as he can in direct talks with the West Virginia senator. Progress could happen soon: Mr. Biden signaled Wednesday that he would substantially pare down the Build Back Better bill to match Mr. Manchin’s preferences, with the climate and energy provisions remaining at its core.

Meanwhile, the gravest threat to U.S. democracy is not vote denial but that administrators or elected officials will attempt to tamper with legitimate vote counts based on lies about fraud. Mr. Trump’s continuing effort to discredit the 2020 vote, which experts say was the most secure presidential election ever, has spurred a wave of GOP candidates to campaign on his bogus conspiracy theories. A bipartisan group of senators is discussing a bill that would harden vote-counting procedures against partisan subversion. Mr. Biden should foster these discussions.

The president should also encourage lawmakers to keep working on reforming the Senate. Though Mr. Manchin refused to upend the filibuster to pass a voting rights bill, he has signaled openness to altering the rules in more modest ways. These could include making it more difficult for the minority party to sustain filibusters, which have become routine only recently. Doing so might require more talks with Republicans; the president should get those started.

I only have one piece of advice: don’t get us into a war with either Russia or China.

As I read a piece at the New York Times by Patrick Healy and Adrian J. Rivera, interviewing selected independents on President Joe Biden’s first year in office, a couple of things leapt out at me. The first was the level of anxiety they expressed, exemplified by this remark:

Janet: It changes. It gets worse. I have a grandson. He’s on the autism spectrum, and I’m worried about what’s happening at school. Do you wear a mask? Don’t you wear a mask? I don’t know what the future holds. It’s scary. And I’m 66, so I have seen this country in lots of ups and downs, and I feel this is the lowest point in my lifetime.

but they weren’t particularly worried about January 6, 2021.

The second thing was their misconceptions as illustrated by this observation:

Tenae: I said “new normal.” So let me explain that. We have never, as a nation, experienced anything like this, as far as the virus, the variants of it. So it causes a lot of chaos. There’s misinformation out there. I think it causes a lot of people to be angry. There’s more domestic violence. There’s more road rage. There’s more killings. There’s a lot that’s happening because people don’t know how to actually deal with this or they’re in disbelief.

which is simply untrue. What we’re experiencing now with respect to COVID-19 is the normal state of life, not just here but everywhere. What are different are the velocity and granularity of data with which we are being bombarded. Every virus has always had variants. We just weren’t aware of them because we couldn’t deduct them. Something else that is different is the policy response.

I certainly think that anxiety I mentioned before is a factor in the violence about which Tenae expressed concern.

Almost all of those in the group think the level of crime is up relative to last year.

You might find this interesting. Here’s how the members of the group characterize the Democrats:

Scott: Cohesiveness. The anti-hate. Calmness, I would think.

Don: Revolution. Revolutionary.

Dickie: Fair.

Jim: Sometimes too liberal, but together.

Alice: They’re more, like, people-oriented.

Travis: Sneaky.

Janet: He stole mine.

Tenae: Crazy.

Azariah: Sweet talkers.

Kristine: Chaotic.

Mark: Radical.

Julia: Going toward socialism.

Nick: Smooth talkers.

Jules: Currently intolerant.

and here’s how they characterize the Republicans:

Jules: Very loud.

Nick: They don’t represent everybody.

Julia: Have to regroup.

Kristine: Wrong direction. I can’t think of one word.

Mark: Weak.

Azariah: Ruthless.

Tenae: Inconsistent.

Janet: Uncivil.

Jim: Dishonest and cowardly.

Alice: More business-oriented.

Travis: Arrogant.

Dickie: Capitalistic.

Don: Unnecessarily divisive.

Scott: Chaotic.

If the members of this group are at all typical, Democrats should be concerned about the mid-terms:

Frank Luntz: Would you prefer a Republican Congress or a Democratic Congress, knowing that you voted for Trump and for Obama, knowing that you are ticket splitters. How many of you say the Democrats?

[Scott, Don, Jim, Dickie and Azariah raise their hands.]

Frank Luntz: Republicans?

[Janet, Kristine, Jules, Julia, Tenae, Mark, Alice and Travis raise their hands.]

I think that some may find this piece at UnHerd by Vinay Prasad helpful. Here’s its opening passage:

Last week, a group of scientists, doctors, and academics published an open letter calling on Spotify “to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform”. Specifically, they were objecting to two recent episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which he interviewed the prominent vaccine sceptics Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone. “By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions,” the letter claimed, “Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research.”

I am an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, as well as a practising physician, and I firmly believe that it would be a mistake to censor Rogan under the guise of combating “misinformation”.

Rogan is not a scientist, and, like everyone else, he has his biases. But he is open-minded, sceptical, and his podcast is an important forum for debate and dialogue. It is not enough, moreover, to simply dismiss Malone and McCullough as conspiracy theorists. They are controversial and polarising figures, but they do have real credentials. Malone is a physician who has worked in molecular biology and drug development for decades, while McCullough was, until recently, an academic cardiologist and researcher.

It strikes me as a pretty fair-minded treatment.

I presume you’ve heard about the snafu surrounding what was supposed to have been the rollout of 5G today. Here’s Reuters’s description:

WASHINGTON, Jan 16 (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Sunday it had cleared an estimated 45% of the U.S. commercial airplane fleet to perform low-visibility landings at many airports where 5G C-band will be deployed starting Wednesday.

The FAA has warned that potential interference could affect sensitive airplane instruments such as altimeters and make an impact on low-visibility operations.

U.S. passenger and cargo airlines have been sounding the alarm to senior government officials that the issue is far from resolved and could severely impact flights and the supply chain.

“Even with the approvals granted by the FAA today, U.S. airlines will not be able to operate the vast majority of passenger and cargo flights due to the FAA’s 5G-related flight restrictions unless action is taken prior to the planned Jan. 19 rollout,” said Airlines for America, a trade group representing American Airlines (AAL.O), Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), Fedex (FDX.N) and other carriers.

I am seeing a lot of fingerpointing—at the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, the carriers, and the airlines—and I have no idea how to arbitrate the various claims. The only thing that’s clear is that it’s a disorganized mess. Law, sausages, and now apparently 5G networks.

Can anyone explain to me who did or didn’t do what?

Update

Good observations from Gus Hurwitz at RealClearPolicy:

On the surface, the fight between the FAA and FCC is a technocratic disagreement about the use of spectrum in the 3.7GHz band for 5G wireless services. The FAA, backed by Boeing and Airbus, is concerned that allowing cellular carriers to use this spectrum will interfere with avionics systems on some aircraft. The FCC, which spent years studying the issue, has developed usage rules that it believes address interference concerns. The FCC’s rules are similar to those that have been used by wireless carriers in Europe without incident and seek to accommodate the aviation industry’s concerns.

But the real fight is not really about technical rules for wireless spectrum; it’s about agency attitudes toward risk and responsibility. The FAA is a risk-averse agency (one of many). This is the same FAA that spent years arguing that passenger use of cell phones posed a threat to planes, even while they were on the ground. After years of pushback, use of cell phones on planes has been allowed for the past several years without incident.

Risk aversion does have its place. But in seeking to minimize risks to the aviation industry, the FAA does not consider the costs its policies impose on those outside the industry, or even on consumers within the industry. The problem is that the FAA has no incentive to care about those costs. The agency and its leaders get no credit for factoring those costs into their decision-making, but they would face intense scrutiny for any kind of safety incident that in hindsight could have been avoided.

Read the whole thing. There is very little that any administration can do about the sort of institutional culture he highlights. We need major government reorganization and civil service reform.

The editors of the Washington Post pose two questions about the hostage incident in a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas:

According to The Post’s Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, William Booth and Jennifer Hassan, Mr. Akram has been known to security officials in Britain. The BBC reported that he had been investigated in 2020 by Britain’s counterintelligence and security agency and placed on a watch list as a “subject of interest” before it was concluded that he no longer posed a threat. According to his brother, Mr. Akram had a well-known history of mental health problems and a criminal record. “How was he allowed to get a visa and acquire a gun?” asked the brother.

Good questions. After 9/11, strict security protocols were put in place to screen out people coming to the United States with the aim of doing harm. What were the circumstances of Mr. Akram’s entry through New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Dec. 29; was there a human mistake or a failure in the system that needs to addressed? It will be important for authorities to determine whether Mr. Akram acted alone. That it was seemingly so easy for him to acquire a gun — reportedly buying it off the street — underscores once again the complete folly of American gun laws.

Yes, those are good questions. I’d like to know the answers.

And I feel the need to add, although I don’t oppose additional gun control laws and, in particular, would like to see our present laws enforced more strenuously, I think the editors are putting the cart before the horse in their last comments. At this point we don’t know whether the perpetrator had a gun legally or not. Gun control laws by definition only control legal gun ownership. Is there anything that any law can do to prevent illegal gun ownership?

I believe we deserve answers to those questions and many others in particular was the perpetrator’s history already known to the FBI? From what I’m hearing the FBI’s performance in this incident was not nearly as good as they’ve been claiming.