Politics

Gorsuch Would “Walk Out the Door” If Asked to Overturn Roe

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President Donald Trump introduces Gorsuch, accompanied by his wife, as his nominee for the Supreme Court at the White House on January 31, 2017. (Public Domain)

The following was an exchange between Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and Republican Senator Lindsay Graham during yesterday’s marathon confirmation hearings:

Graham: I don’t think there’s any reason to suggest you’re his [Trump’s] favorite. Had you ever met Mr. Trump personally?

Gorsuch: Not until my interview.

Graham: In that interview, did he ever ask you to overrule Roe v. Wade?

Gorsuch: No, Senator.

Graham: What would you have done if he had asked?

Gorsuch: Senator, I would have walked out the door.

This exchange is getting all kinds of coverage, and most of the analysis concludes or strongly implies that Gorsuch’s statement is a commitment not to overturn Roe v. Wade. As one example, here is Sophie Tatum’s take for CNN, where she puts Gorsuch’s statement at the hearing in the context of Trump’s promise to nominate a pro-life judge and then segues into “Gorsuch also defended the value of precedent…” This kind of analysis is making some of my pro-life friends furious and some of my pro-choice friends breathe a sigh of relief, but it’s a misunderstanding of what Gorsuch actually meant.

First, Gorsuch was not rejecting the possibility of overruling Roe v. Wade in particular or of overturning court cases generally. This is pretty clear from ths rest of his statement. After saying, “I would have walked out the door,” Gorsuch paused for a long moment before continuing: “That’s not what judges do.” So what, exactly, did Gorsuch mean here? What is it that “judges [don’t] do” and that would have prompted him to walk out on an interview with the President?

The answer is that Gorsuch is committed to rule of law, and that means that as a judge he is bound to only rule on the merits of the cases actually brought before him in light of the law and the relevant facts. To commit to the President–or to anyone–how he would rule on a hypothetical case that hasn’t even been brought yet is a flagrant violation of the judicial process that would have substituted politics for law. Gorsuch reacted so strongly not because he was defending Roe v. Wade, but because he was defending judicial process. In other words, it doesn’t matter which Supreme Court case Trump had asked about, the answer in any case would have been to “[walk] out the door.” You do not nominate anyone to the Supreme Court as a way of setting policy. You do it as a way of sustaining the Constitution. Therefore, Gorsuch’s reply here tells us absolutely nothing about how he would actually rule in a case involving Roe v. Wade other than that it would depend on the specifics of the case as it was actually argued before the Court.

Second, we still have every indication that Gorsuch is most likely an extremely pro-life nominee. The evidence for this comes from his book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. I haven’t read the book, but here are two quotes that I think reveal quite a lot about Gorsuch’s thinking in ways that are directly relevant to abortion. The first comes from a Vox article, I read Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s book. It’s very revealing, and it sums up Gorsuch’s argument in the book:

Gorsuch’s core argument in the book is that the US should “retain existing law [banning assisted suicide and euthanasia] on the basis that human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

Right off the bat, this is characteristically pro-life rhetoric. For all that they are derided as merely “anti-abortion,” the pro-life movement is united in opposition to abortion and euthanasia by a commitment to the idea that “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable.” You simply never hear the pro-choice side use this kind of language.

In terms of logic, the key here is that “human life” is a broad category, and if it is broadened to include unborn human beings, then Gorsuch’s argument against legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia also applies to abortion. This is made clear in the second quote, this one from a New York Times article:

What gives individuals such an inviolable right, he has reasoned, is a status that legal scholars call “constitutional personhood,” defined by the 14th Amendment. Under that amendment, a state is prohibited from denying any constitutional person “life, liberty or property, without due process of law,” and cannot “deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The Roe decision expressly excluded human fetuses from that definition. As the court put it in 1973, “the word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn.” But if the Supreme Court were ever to recognize fetuses as constitutional persons, however unlikely that might seem now, then under Judge Gorsuch’s framework, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause would require that they be entitled to the same legal protection as constitutional persons. Laws that prohibit murder thus would have to be extended to them.

Judge Gorsuch has said as much himself. In his book, he wrote, “Abortion would be ruled out by the inviolability-of-life principle I intend to set forth if, but only if, a fetus is considered a human life.” He noted that had the court “found the fetus to be a ‘person’ for purposes of the 14th Amendment, it could not have created a right to abortion because no constitutional basis exists for preferring the mother’s liberty interests over the child’s life.”

The real give-away for me here, again, is Gorsuch’s very broad language. When he talks about “fetus” and “person” we can infer basically nothing, but when he says “if…a fetus is considered a human life“[ref]emphasis changed from original[/ref], then we’re talking about language that is interesting in two regards. First, it is deliberately secular/scientific as opposed to philosophical/theological. This is characteristic of Gorsuch’s thinking which, according to a quote from another article at The Atlantic, relies on “secular moral theory” rather than the stereotypically religious grounds common to much of the pro-life movement. What’s more: once we’ve entered that secular/scientific realm, the question of whether or not a fetus counts as “a human life” has an unambiguous, objective, and absolutely conclusive answer: of course it is.

So let’s recap:

  1. Gorsuch’s comment about walking out the door if Trump had asked him to overrule Roe v. Wade was not a defense of Roe v. Wade. It was a defense of judicial process, and it tells us nothing one way or the other about Gorsuch’s views on abortion in general or Roe v. Wade in particular.
  2. Gorsuch’s book opposes legalziation of assisted suicide and euthanasia under an argument that he explicitly states would apply in abortion as well “if… the fetus is considered a human life,” in ways that suggest (as science dictates) that this is in fact the case.

Taken together, I’d say that Gorsuch comes across as about the most unambiguously pro-life candidate that you could possibly hope for in someone who has not ruled on abortion cases or made explicit statements about the subject. It’s certainly not open-and-shut. He’s a smart person, and smart person and capable of all kinds of weird, circuitous, unexpected twists and turns in their thinking and philosophy. He  may indeed be pro-choice, but that’s not where I’d lay my money.

Final thought: I listened to parts of the confirmation hearing yesterday, and there was one exchange I have not been able to find (it was either from around 5:20 or around 8:40) when Gorsuch talked about the motivation for his euthanasia book. It came down to concern for the most vulnerable in society: the poor, the disabled, and minorities. Left unspoken was “the unborn,” but it fit so perfectly in that list–and with Gorsuch’s philosophy as I understand it thus far–that it almost didn’t need to be spoken.

 

A World Without Borders

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Open borders, according to economist Nathan Smith writing in Foreign Affairs, is the

complete freedom of migration worldwide, with rare exceptions for preventing terrorism or the spread of contagious disease. Borders would still exist in such a world, but as jurisdictional boundaries rather than as barriers to human movement. Ending migration controls in this way would increase liberty, reduce global poverty, and accelerate economic growth. But more fundamentally, it would challenge the right of governments to regulate migration on the arbitrary grounds of sovereignty.

Smith points out that

Gallup has estimated that 640 million people worldwide want to emigrate from their current country of residence. Yet the true number could be much greater—economists such as John Kennan predict that in the absence of border controls, global labor markets would tend toward equilibrium, which in practice would mean the migration of several billion people to the West. (In the short to medium run, the true number of immigrants would be closer to Gallup’s estimates, but over the long run that figure might reach into the billions, as stocks of immigrants and their descendants accumulate in destination countries.) The more efficient allocation of labor would result in global increases in productivity, leading the world economy to nearly double in size. This increased economic activity would, moreover, disproportionately benefit the world’s poorest people. 

Smith acknowledges,

At current levels of benefits, a vast influx of immigrants would bankrupt the welfare state, as newcomers would not be able to pay enough in taxes to finance the benefits to which they would be entitled. (A possible solution might involve curtailing welfare programs, or at least their generosity to the foreign-born.) It follows that open borders would probably lead to a large increase in visible extreme poverty in the West. Yet impoverishment by Western standards looks like affluence to much of the world. And far from creating such poverty, open borders would actually be alleviating it. The new huddled masses, although worse off than the average Western natives, would be better off in their new countries than they were at home. The only difference would be that without borders, Westerners would see the poverty that today is kept comfortably out of sight.

He concludes,

Opening borders would expand the scope of freedom, strengthen respect for rights, and widen the realm of actions that governments, including democratic ones, are not allowed to take. This endeavor is an extension of the liberal project that has animated the West since the Enlightenment. And those who sympathize with abolishing migration restrictions, but fear how popular backlash against immigration has recently affected Western democracy, should ask themselves whether freedom can really be secure if its growth is curtailed; whether respect for rights can be compatible with the exclusion of the foreign-born; and whether, in the United States, immigrants are really a greater threat to freedom and the rule of law than are native-born devotees of the president, Donald Trump.

Read the whole thing.

The Regulatory State

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“Between 1970 and 2008,” reports The Economist,

the number of prescriptive words like “shall” or “must” in the code of federal regulations grew from 403,000 to nearly 963,000, or about 15,000 edicts a year, according to data compiled by the Mercatus Centre, a libertarian-leaning think-tank. Between 2008 and 2016, under Mr Obama, about the same number of new rules emerged annually.

The unyielding growth of rules, then, has persisted through Republican and Democratic administrations…Several factors explain it. First, Congress has neither the staff nor the expertise to write complex, technical laws. So lawmakers happily let experts in government agencies fill in the blanks. What Congress does write itself, it writes sloppily. In 2015 the Supreme Court found “more than a few examples of inartful drafting” in the Affordable Care Act. One such error nearly saw the court strike down crucial parts of law; only semantic gymnastics saved it. The “Chevron deference”, a doctrine from a 1984 court ruling, gives agencies wide latitude to interpret laws when they are vaguely written.

Second, America’s division of powers makes it easy for interest groups to defend any one regulation, tax break or policy. That forces administrations to solve problems by taping yet more rules onto whatever exists already, rather than writing something simple from scratch. Over time, this gums up the system, resulting in what Steve Teles of Johns Hopkins University has dubbed a “kludgeocracy”. This explains, for instance, why over half of Americans have to pay a professional to fill out their tax return for them (in Britain, for comparison, most people need not even complete one).

The biggest culprit though? What the article calls “the habits of Washington’s bureaucracy”:

When a government agency writes a significant regulation—mostly defined as one costing more than $100m—it must usually prove that the rule’s benefits justify its costs. Its analysis goes through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a nerdy outpost of the White House. The process is meticulous. The OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, finds that America’s analysis of regulations is among the most rigorous anywhere.

But once a rule has cleared the hurdle, there is little incentive for agencies ever to take a second look at it. So it is scrutinised only in advance, when regulators know the least about its effects, complains Michael Greenstone, of the University of Chicago. The OECD ranks America only 16th for “systematic” review of old red tape. (The leading country, Australia, has an independent body tasked with dredging up old rules for review.)

…The endless pile-up of regulation enrages businessmen. One in five small firms say it is their biggest problem, according to the National Federation of Independent Business, a lobby group. (Many businessmen grumble in private about the Obama administration’s zealous regulatory enforcement). Based on its own survey of businessmen, the World Economic Forum ranks America 29th for the ease of complying with its regulations, sandwiched between Saudi Arabia and Taiwan.

Read the whole piece.[ref]I’ve highlighted a few Mercatus Center studies on regulation here and here.[/ref]

 

Against Democracy: Interview with Jason Brennan

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for against democracyWhen I shared Jason Brennan’s newest book Against Democracy on my Facebook wall, I got a little push back in both the thread and even in a personal email. How could anyone be against democracy? Isn’t this just elitist snobbery at best and totalitarianism in the making at worst? In short, no. Following the election, I finished off Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance and Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, both of which showed convincingly that our country consists of a politically ignorant and misinformed electorate. Brennan surveys this literature to demonstrate that voters often choose policies that would make us all worse off. He then dives into the political psychology literature and finds that political participation tends to make us mean and dumb (I told him that chs. 2-3 alone were worth the price of the book). Brennan divides the electorate into three categories:

  • Hobbits: the typical nonvoter; mostly ignorant and apathetic to politics and social science.
  • Hooligans: pretty much everyone else; consumes political information in a highly-biased way and ignores evidence contrary to their position.
  • Vulcans: rare; rational and scientific; can articulate opposing views well; interested in, but dispassionate about politics.

When judged from an instrumentalist point of view (i.e., judging institutions and systems based on their performance, not some supposed intrinsic value), the case for democracy seems far weaker than is often assumed. The evidence he presents helps him build his case for epistocracy: the rule of the knowledgeable. Yet, this isn’t some technocratic bureaucracy, but a way to mitigate the negative outcomes of poor voter knowledge.

The book is packed with tons of information and rigorous arguments. I hardly do it justice with the description above. Even if you’re not convinced to be an epistocrat, the solid social science alone makes the book worth reading. One of the most interesting books I’ve read in some time.

You can see an interview with Jason Brennan discussing the book below.

Who Speaks for Islam?: Interview with Dalia Mogahed

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for who speaks for islamSome of the most interesting and infuriating things to witness on Facebook are the threads on Daniel Peterson’s wall. Peterson teaches Arabic and Islamic studies at BYU (he’s even authored a biography of Muhammad) and has been a big name in Mormon apologetics for some time. Because of the latter, he tends to be favored among conservative Mormons, both religiously and politically. However, his educated, sympathetic, and often favorable views of Islam tend to bring Islamophobic Church members out of the woodwork. I’ve seen ignorant Internet warriors attempt to lecture him on the “threats” of Sharia law, provide decontextualized readings of the Quran,[ref]They should pick up the fairly new The Study Quran.[/ref] explain how Islam is an inherently violent religion, and justify Trump’s Muslim ban. In the midst of one of these exchanges, Peterson suggested John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed’s Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think based on the Gallup Poll of the Islamic world.

The book was eye-opening. For example, the authors summarize some of their findings as follows:

  • Who speaks for the West?: Muslims around the world do not see the West as monolithic. They criticize or celebrate countries based on their politics, not based on their culture or religion.
  • Dream jobs: When asked to describe their dreams for the future, Muslims don’t mention fighting in a jihad, but rather getting a better job.
  • Radical rejection: Muslims and Americans are equally likely to reject attacks on civilians as morally unjustified.
  • Religious moderates: Those who condone acts of terrorism are a minority and are no more likely to be religious than the rest of the population.
  • Admiration of the West: What Muslims around the world say they most admire about the West is its technology and its democracy — the same two top responses given by Americans when asked the same question.
  • Critique of the West: What Muslims around the world say they least admire about the West is its perceived moral decay and breakdown of traditional values — the same responses given by Americans when posed the same question.
  • Gender justice: Muslim women want equal rights and religion in their societies.
  • R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: Muslims around the world say that the one thing the West can do to improve relations with their societies is to moderate their views toward Muslims and respect Islam.
  • Clerics and constitutions: The majority of those surveyed want religious leaders to have no direct role in crafting a constitution, yet favor religious law as a source of legislation (pg. xii-xiii).

This is just a taste. The hard numbers paint a very different picture than what we typically see in the media. You can see an interview with Mogahed about her research below.

Do Immigrants Increase Crime?

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Once again, the supposed link between immigrants and crime was peddled by President Trump with the announcement of VOICE: Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement office. “We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests,” Trump said in his joint address to Congress this past Tuesday.

But the scare over immigrant criminality is, frankly, nothing more than fear-mongering. “Research has shown virtually no support for the enduring assumption that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime,” write sociologist Robert Adelman and criminologist Lesley Reid.

Immigration-crime research over the past 20 years has widely corroborated the conclusions of a number of early 20th-century presidential commissions that found no backing for the immigration-crime connection. Although there are always individual exceptions, the literature demonstrates that immigrants commit fewer crimes, on average, than native-born Americans.

Also, large cities with substantial immigrant populations have lower crime rates, on average, than those with minimal immigrant populations.

Drawing on their recent study that “analyzed census data spanning four decades from 1970 to 2010 for 200 randomly selected metropolitan areas,” Adelman and Reid explain that an increase in immigration led to a decrease in murder, robbery, burglary, and larceny (on average). They conclude, “These associations are strong and stable evidence that immigration does not cause crime to increase in U.S. metropolitan areas, and may even help reduce it.”

Researchers Charis Kubrin and Graham Ousey also find that “[c]ities and neighborhoods with greater concentrations of immigrants have lower rates of crime and violence, all else being equal…In one study, for example, we found that cities with historically high immigration levels are especially likely to enjoy reduced crime rates as a result of their immigrant populations.” One of the more exciting bits of research is their forthcoming article in The Annual Review of Criminology:[ref]Be on the look out for the title “Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Contentious Issue” probably early next year. William & Mary have a nice write-up here.[/ref]

We conducted a meta-analysis, meaning we systematically evaluated available research on the immigration-crime relationship in neighborhoods, cities and metropolitan areas across the U.S. We examined findings from more than 50 studies published between 1994 and 2014[.]

Our analysis of the literature reveals that immigration has a weak crime-suppressing effect. In other words, more immigration equals less crime.

There were some individual studies that found that with an increase in immigration, there was an increase in crime. However, there were 2.5 times as many findings that showed immigration was actually correlated with less crime. And, the most common finding was that immigration had no impact on crime.

The upshot? We find no evidence to indicate that immigration leads to more crime and it may, in fact, suppress it.

Despite these facts, President Trump will likely continue and expand the Obama administration’s deportation tactics. Here’s hoping it turns out differently.

Is the “China Shock” Even a Thing?

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Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell conducted a study toward the end of last year that found “those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.” Now, Rothwell is back with another study suggesting that the supposed “China Shock” is actually overblown. Rothwell writes,

…[O]ne important achievement of [Autor, Dorn, Hanson, 2013] is its innovative methodology and framework, which has allowed scholars to better understand how import competition affects local areas. Nonetheless, my analysis and extension — which greatly benefited from Autor et al.’s coding and data — conclude that their findings about the harm from import competition at the community level are not robust, beyond the manufacturing sector, and, even then, only in the later period. At the individual level, and consistent with results from Autor et al. (2014), I find that workers in import-intensive industries have a strong attachment to the labor force and are as likely to be employed as workers in other industries.

…Though [Autor et al.’s] paper makes an enormous methodological contribution and provides further and robust evidence that Chinese imports—rather than only technological change—reduced U.S. manufacturing employment, the evidence presented here suggests the paper’s most important findings do not withstand further scrutiny.

…If China had remained a communist country and closed to trade, it is quite likely that manufacturing workers around the world would have enjoyed higher wage growth. While manufacturing job loss probably would not have been as significant, the increased competition from China did not create labor market conditions that appear dramatically different than what workers face in other industries such as retail, restaurants and engineering firms. In fact, the evidence is clear that manufacturing work remains a source of relatively high pay, long tenure, and low layoff risk, despite the intensity of import competition (pg. 20).

What is likely surprising to many, Rothwell found that

for the 1990-to-2000 period, there is no evidence that import competition resulted even in manufacturing job loss. Indeed, many of the manufacturing-specific models show that import competition resulted in a large increase in the average wages of manufacturing workers. The positive wage effect is evident outside of the manufacturing sector, particularly for noncollege educated workers and males. Taken literally, these models show that import competition during the 1990s caused a substantial increase in wages for the average worker. These models also show that import competition increased employment growth for college-educated, nonmanufacturing-sector workers and population growth for people aged 35 to 64.

Of the 45 models with significant effects in the stacked regression, only five retain significance in the expected direction during 1990 to 2000, and each of these pertain to transfer payments. These results could be explained by the population growth of pre-retirement-age workers, as health problems and risk of retirement are increasingly sharply with age. Overall, it appears that import competition in the 1990s was, if anything, largely beneficial to the average worker in the local areas most exposed to competition (pg. 18).

A new job market paper deals another blow to the “China Shock” theory. Using microdata from the US Census Bureau, the author

showed that the employment of US manufacturing firms rose in response to increasing Chinese imports in US output markets. More exposed firms expanded employment (i) in manufacturing, as they hired production workers whom they paid higher wages, and (ii) in non-manufacturing, by adding jobs in R&D, design, engineering, and headquarters services. In other words, China caused a relative expansion of US employment in firms operating in industries that experienced the largest growth in Chinese imports. I argued theoretically, and provided reduced-form evidence, that this was possible through firms’ reorganization toward less exposed output industries, in which the US had a comparative advantage relative to China. In these output industries, firms expanded skilled employment by taking advantage of falling production costs due to increased offshoring to China.

The evidence provided in this paper indicate that the employment losses at the establishment level, measured by the previous papers (Acemoglu et al., 2016; Autor et al., 2013), were compensated by the employment gains that resulted from two sources. First, within-firm reorganization allowed US manufacutring firms to escape the negative impact of the China shock; US manufacturing firms reorganized their activities in many dimensions in response to the China shock. On the one hand, they reorganized their US activity from exposed to non-exposed US output markets. On the other hand, they reorganized their input sourcing as they replaced domestic suppliers with foreign suppliers and increased foreign direct investment. Second, employment at US manufacturing firms expanded in response to the combined effect of increased Chinese imports in US output and input markets. This is because increased imports in the input markets put downward pressure on US manufacturing firms’ cost of sourcing material inputs. Thus, the China shock to the firm’s input markets acted as a favorable cost shock that compensated for some or all of the negative impacts of the increased output market competition.

All of these suggest that the China shock impacted US manufacturing employment in a more nuanced way than simply increasing output market competition at the establishment level, which captures only the losses that resulted from the shock. Reorganization at the firm level and the combined effects of input and ouput market shocks can lead to net job creation. However, this may not involve the same workers in the same industries, in the same regions of the US or the same establishments of the firm (pg. 51).

When one considers the other benefits of trade, it becomes increasingly clear that globalization is not the demon it has been made out to be.

Reducing Poverty & Improving Economic Mobility

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A 2015 Brookings report written for the campaign season is still relevant today. Researcher Isabel Sawhill lays out a few major ideas candidates could use to reduce poverty and improve economic mobility. Three hurdles necessary for climbing out of poverty are:

  1. Graduating high school
  2. Working full-time
  3. Delaying parenthood until they in a stable, two-parent family

Sawhill proposes a number of policies aimed at helping people achieve these objectives:

Sawhill 1118002

  • To support work, make the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) refundable and cap it at $100,000 in household income. Because the credit is currently non-refundable, low-income families receive little or no benefit, while those with incomes above $100,000 receive generous tax deductions. This proposal would make the program more equitable and facilitate low-income parents’ labor force participation, at no additional cost.
  • To strengthen families, make the most effective forms of birth control (IUDs and implants) more widely available at no cost to women, along with good counselling and a choice of all FDA-approved methods. Programs that have done this in selected cities and states have reduced unplanned pregnancies, saved money, and given women better ability to delay parenthood until they and their partners are ready to be parents. Delayed childbearing reduces poverty rates and leads to better prospects for the children in these families.

Check out the full paper.

Do Violent Protests Produce Social Change?

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Image result for Drop Your Weapons When and Why Civil Resistance Works

Not usually. As Reason summarizes,

When it comes to enacting social change, are broken windows and displaced limousine drivers merely the cost of doing business? No. In fact, violent and destructive protesting is less efficient than nonviolent protesting, according to the research.

“Why Civil Resistance Works,” a study written by Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth,[ref]The authors have an excellent article in Foreign Affairs about their research as well.[/ref] found that nonviolent tactics were much more effective than violent tactics. Researchers surveyed anti-governmental resistance movements in the 20th century in a variety of countries: nonviolent means achieved their aims 53 percent of the time, while the violent means worked only 26 percent of the time.

“Whereas governments easily justify violent counterattacks against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent movements is more likely to backfire against the regime,” wrote the authors. “Potentially sympathetic publics perceive violent militants as having maximalist or extremist goals beyond accommodation, but they perceive nonviolent resistance groups as less extreme, thereby enhancing their appeal and facilitating the extraction of concessions through bargaining.”

Another study, by Princeton University Assistant Professor of Politics Omar Wasow, found that violent extremist movements in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s inspired a conservative backlash that helped elect Richard Nixon to the presidency. Nonviolent protests, on the other hand, did not provoke a backlash.

“In the 1960s, black-led protests that escalate to violence cause increased conservatism in white voters who live nearby,” Wasow wrote in an email to Reason. “Conversely, I find that proximity to black-led nonviolent protests, particularly those in which the state engages in brutal repression, are associated with increased liberalism among white voters.”

The science isn’t exactly settled: Wasow said other scholars have found that violent protests occasionally prompt the government to implement favorable social policies as a means of de-escalating the violence.

“If the recent modest amount of protest-related property damage remains an outlying event, I’d expect very little effect,” wrote Wasow.

Still, violent tactics—such as those displayed against Spencer—run a risk of provoking a conservative counter-reaction. Historically, authority figures have known this. When President Nixon was informed by an aide that campus violence was expected to increase in the coming year, his response was, “Good!” Nixon understood what too many leftists do not: Violent resistance is often the health of the state.

The article concludes,

The Women’s March sent a message that Trump is unpopular. The black bloc rioting likely accomplished the exact opposite: undermined public sympathy for Trump resistors.

It certainly seems like the organizers of the Women’s March chose the more tactically effective route. Wasow said the march might have the same kind of lasting effect as the Tea Party movement, which accomplished many of its political goals…I won’t say violence never works as a means of advancing social progress, but the Women’s March is powerful evidence that orderly resistance is the better tactic for the struggles that lie ahead. And recall that during the primaries, when protesters shut down Trump’s speeches, this made Republican voters more favorably disposed toward Trump.

With that, enjoy this rap battle between two advocates of nonviolent resistance.

Still Crying Wolf

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Hitler and the Nazi’s have long held a quasi-mythological status in the American psyche. I do not know when this began, but it has simply been a fact for my entire conscious life.[ref]This is why Godwin’s Law is a thing.[/ref] I can only imagine that, in centuries gone by, Satan and his devils filled the niche in the collective social consciousness that Hitler and his Nazis serve today.

Deep down, the people of all Western democracies wonder if their nation could–given the right historical circumstances–follow in the path of Nazi Germany. And all the citizens of these nations have wondered–at least at some point in their lives–if they would have had the courage and the foresight to have opposed Hitler’s rise. Because everyone wants to believe in their own heroism, and because the only evidence that they would have opposed the last Hitler is to oppose the next Hitler, there’s latent desire for someone to fill that role, just so that they could prove to themselves[ref]Better still: themselves and their friends.[/ref] that they would pass the test.

This is related to what Scott Adams had in mind when he wrote his blog post: Be Careful What You Wish For (especially if it is Hitler).[ref]Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert. He’s achieved no small modicum of fame for calling Trump’s success early on, and also for being an all-around contrarian.[/ref]:

But lately I get the feeling that Trump’s critics have evolved from expecting Trump to be Hitler to preferring it. Obviously they don’t prefer it in a conscious way. But the alternative to Trump becoming Hitler is that they have to live out the rest of their lives as confirmed morons. No one wants to be a confirmed moron. And certainly not after announcing their Trump opinions in public and demonstrating in the streets. It would be a total embarrassment for the anti-Trumpers to learn that Trump is just trying to do a good job for America. It’s a threat to their egos. A big one.

And this gets me to my point. When millions of Americans want the same thing, and they want it badly, the odds of it happening go way up. [emphasis original]

Adams hastened to clarify that he wasn’t “talking about any new-age magic.” Instead:

I’m talking about ordinary people doing ordinary things to turn Trump into an actual Hitler. For example, if protesters start getting violent, you could expect forceful reactions eventually. And that makes Trump look more like Hitler. I can think of dozens of ways the protesters could cause the thing they are trying to prevent. In other words, they can wish it into reality even though it is the very thing they are protesting.

I don’t agree with Adams on a lot of thing, even here. I don’t, for example, find the idea that “Trump is just trying to do a good job for America” to be credible. It seems clear to me that Trump is just trying to do a good job for Trump. However, I do think he’s right that the anti-Trump movement has become so invested in their own narrative of manning the barricades in a last-ditch defense against tyranny that they kind of need Trump to come through for them. Everybody wants to be a hero and so, deep down, everybody wants their enemies to be villains.

This is all a little bit abstract, however. Adams tries to make things concrete with his example of protesters going overboard, but there’s a much better example of how this can play out. It comes from Damon Linker’s piece: America’s spies anonymously took down Michael Flynn. That is deeply worrying. Linker makes a couple of vitally, vitally important philosophical points, like this one: “In a liberal democracy, how things happen is often as important as what happens. Procedures matter.”[ref]Emphasis original.[/ref] Along those lines, he points out that–even though the resignation of Michael Flynn is a good thing–the fact that he was essentially removed by intelligence professionals as part of a “soft coup (or political assassination)” is a serious concern. In particular:

The chaotic, dysfunctional Trump White House is placing the entire system under enormous strain. That’s bad. But the answer isn’t to counter it with equally irregular acts of sabotage — or with a disinformation campaign waged by nameless civil servants toiling away in the surveillance state.

As Eli Lake of Bloomberg News put it in an important article following Flynn’s resignation,

Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do. [Bloomberg]

Those cheering the deep state torpedoing of Flynn are saying, in effect, that a police state is perfectly fine so long as it helps to bring down Trump.

I haven’t had an awful lot to say–on my blog or even to friends and family in person–about Trump since the election. This is why. I haven’t figured out a good method of opposing Trump that doesn’t feed into the larger pendulum-swinging crisis in American politics. A lot of the opposition to Trump–both before and especially since the election–has been not only hysterical and unprincipled, but deeply, seriously dangerous. The reality is that at this point opposing Trump–in most places and for most people–is not an act of courage or bravery because it doesn’t carry any substantial risk. Take Attorney General Sally Yates. She was lauded as a hero because she ordered the Department of Justice attorneys not to defend Trump’s immigration executive order and was subsequently fired. Her opposition to the executive order is laudable, but there’s not even a glimmer of heroism in how she went about it. She was a political appointee on her way out anyway. Her grandstanding cost her literally nothing and earned her endless applause and praise. Heroism has certainly never come cheaper than that.Whether it’s violent protests at Berkeley, punching Richard Spencer, or applauding the growth of an unaccountable police state (see above), the anti-Trump movement is increasingly dominated by a radical fringe hellbent on racing Trump down the downward spiral of dishonesty, hysteria, and extremism.

I believe in defending our nation from Trump’s cavalier disregard for law and principle. But I also believe in defending our nation from the escalating cycle of co-dependent extremism. Journalists, who fall over themselves to run 16 fake anti-Trump news stories in the first month of his presidency, are making King Pyrrhus proud; even if they win they will find they have shredded the last vestiges of their credibility in the process. It’s time to reiterate that one Nietzsche quote everyone knows[ref]I mean, other than “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”[/ref]:

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

 

Maybe Trump is the next Hitler, but I doubt it. He’s probably not the next Stalin or Mao or Mussolini either. He doesn’t have the commitment, the talent, the opportunity, or the ideology to pull it off. But if we keep pushing the pendulum further on every swing with escalating hyper-partisanship and if we sabotage our own institutions–from the civil services to the mainstream media to expectations of basic decency–we will find that on the day when an American Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Mussolini steps up onto the stage, we will have ripped all of our institutional safeguards to shreds already.

Trump got elected because the American right keeps crying wolf when it comes to illegal immigrants and terrorists and because the American left keeps crying wolf when it comes to fascism and bigotry. Neither side has learned their lesson. And so the crying wolf continues. The reality is, we haven’t seen the wolf.[ref]Can anyone keep a straight face while accusing Donald Trump of being a wolf?[/ref]

Yet.