Democratic Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Why Trump Represents a ‘Trifecta of Danger’

      by

      Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captures the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”Klaas argues that the presidential contest now pitsA 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to poweragainst “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”“One of those two candidates,” Klaas notes, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: it’s somehow *not* the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”Klaas asks:What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?The media, Klaas argues, has adopted a policy in covering Trump of: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he calls the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”This approach, according to Klaas,has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “Don’t Amplify Him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.Looking over the eight-and-a-half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there were no warning signs.Three months after Trump took office, in April 2017, a conference called “A Duty to Warn” was held at the Yale School of Medicine.The conference resulted in a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” A sampling of the chapter titles gives the flavor:“Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” by Robert Jay Lifton.“Unbridled and Extreme Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again That He Is Unfit for Duty,” by Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword.“Pathological Narcissism and Politics: a Lethal Combination,” by Craig Malkin.In a review of that book, “Twilight of American Sanity: a Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” and “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History,” Carlos Lozada, now a Times Opinion columnist, wrote in The Washington Post that the political elite in Washington was increasingly concerned about Trump’s mindset:“I think he’s crazy,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) confided to his colleague Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a July exchange inadvertently caught on a microphone. “I’m worried,” she replied …. Even some Republicans have grown more blunt, with Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) recently suggesting that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” to succeed as president.The warnings that Donald Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.I asked some of those who first warned about the dangers Trump poses what their views are now.Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emailed me:He acts like he’s impervious, “a very stable genius,” but we know he is rageful, grandiose, vengeful, impulsive, devoid of empathy, boastful, inciting of violence, and thin-skinned. At times it seems as if he cannot control himself or his hateful speech. We need to wonder if these are the precursors of a major deterioration in his character defenses.Glass continued:If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood of our country”), we have to wonder if he has crossed into “new terrain.” That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is “the only one” and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.In March, he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration shoplifters will be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont N.H. on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible, they’ll do anything whether legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”Nothing captures Trump’s megalomania and narcissism more vividly than his openly declared agenda, should he win back the White House next year.On Nov. 6, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett reported in The Washington Post that Trump “wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.”Trump, the Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’ ” and then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”A week later, my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, quoted Trump in “How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025”: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” adding, “I will totally obliterate the deep state.”In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency, but that never went into effect.Schedule F, the reporters wrote,would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.I asked Joshua D. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, whether he thought Trump’s “vermin” comment represented a tipping point, an escalation in his willingness to attack opponents. Miller replied by email: “My bet is we’re seeing the same basic traits, but their manifestation has been ratcheted up by the stress of his legal problems and also by some sense of invulnerability in that he has yet to face any dire consequences for his previous behavior.”Miller wrote that he haslong thought that Trump’s narcissism was actually distracting us from his psychopathic traits. I view the two as largely the same but with psychopathy bringing problems with disinhibition (impulsivity; failure to delay gratification, irresponsibility, etc.) to the table and Trump seems rather high on those traits along with those related to narcissism (e.g., entitlement, exploitativeness), pathological lying, grandiosity, etc.).I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration,” adding “this behavior is also consistent with psychopathy which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.”Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal, and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama, or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.Fisher noted that he anticipated the movement toward increased isolation in his 2017 contribution to the book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which I mentioned earlier:Reflecting the interplay of personal and social, narcissistic concerns for self and a preoccupation with power may initially shape and limit those invited to the narcissistic leader’s social network, with sensitivity to slights and angry reactions to them further eroding that network.This process of exclusion, Fisher wrote, becomes self-reinforcing:A disturbing feature of this kind of dynamic is that it tends to feed on itself. The more the individual selects for those who flatter him and avoid confrontation, and the more those who have affronted and been castigated fall away, the narrower and more homogenous his network becomes, further flattering the individual but eventually becoming a thin precipice. President Nixon, drunk and reportedly conversing with the pictures on the White House walls, and praying with Henry Kissinger during his last nights in office, comes to mind.Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.In 2019, leaked memos written by Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, warned British leaders that the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace,” adding: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”In 2020, Pew Research reported that “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe.” Pew found:Trump receives largely negative reviews from publics around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 64 percent say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29 percent express confidence in the American leader. Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three-in-four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands.A recent editorial in The Economist, carried the headline: “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concludes:would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.Klaas, who opened this column, concludes that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that dominates over all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Ignore Trump? Democrats Now Want Him Plastered All Over the News.

      by

      The former president has been relatively quiet, out of the headlines and off mainstream social media. Democrats are hoping that more attention on him can help turn around President Biden’s fortunes.When Donald J. Trump left the White House, Democrats didn’t want to hear another word from him. President Biden dismissed him as “the former guy.” A party-wide consensus held that he was best left ignored.Three years later, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign and Democratic officials across the party’s spectrum have landed on a new solution to his political slump:More Trump.Criticizing the news media for giving Mr. Trump a platform is out. Quietly pining for major networks to again broadcast live coverage of Trump campaign rallies is in.Behind the improbable longing for the former president to gobble up political oxygen again is Democrats’ yearslong dependence on the Trump outrage machine. Since his ascent, Mr. Trump has been a one-man Democratic turnout operation, uniting an otherwise fractured opposition and fueling victories in three straight election cycles.Now, Democrats worry that the fever of Trump fatigue has passed, and that some voters are softening toward a man they once loathed. Many others may simply be paying little attention, as Mr. Trump’s share of the daily national conversation has diminished, despite the occasional interruption of campaign-trail pronouncements like his recent vow to “root out” political opponents like “vermin.”Mr. Trump, who has never been called a shrinking violet, has nevertheless skipped the three Republican presidential debates and stayed away from the major social media platforms. He is expected to spend large parts of next year in criminal trials that, except for one in Georgia, will not be televised.Cynthia Wallace, a co-founder of the New Rural Project, a progressive group in North Carolina, said she didn’t hear much about Mr. Trump these days from the rural Black and Hispanic voters her organization focuses on.“I think it’s like a relationship,” she said. “There were a lot of bad things that happened, but the longer distance you get away from the bad things, you’re like, maybe the bad things weren’t that bad.”Cynthia Wallace, a co-founder of the New Rural Project, a progressive group in North Carolina that focuses on rural Black and Hispanic voters, said that these days, she didn’t hear as much from them about Mr. Trump. Travis Dove for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s campaign, which has been slow to ramp up its operations, is betting that once voters view the election as a choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, who remains highly polarizing, they will set aside their reservations about the president and fall in line behind him.But while Mr. Trump is likely to rise in the public consciousness as November 2024 approaches, it is far from certain that he will sabotage himself politically. And it remains unclear whether his criminal trials will make him more toxic among moderate and swing voters, or whether weeks of courtroom appearances will keep his presence more muted than normal.Other Biden efforts are meeting limited success. His campaign has little to show for a $40 million advertising push promoting his economic record. And approval of the president, according to polls released this month by The New York Times and Siena College, has fallen sharply among Black and Hispanic voters — demographics that strategists say are more likely to disregard Mr. Trump when he is not front and center in the news.“Not having the day-to-day chaos of Donald Trump in people’s faces certainly has an impact on how people are measuring the urgency of the danger of another Trump administration,” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, an African American political organizing group. “It is important to remind people of what a total and absolute disaster Trump was.”Mr. Biden and Democrats, of course, cannot control decisions that news organizations make or the topics that absorb voters in person and on social media. But the Biden campaign, which is aiming to make the 2024 election a referendum on whether Mr. Trump should return to the White House, can try to push the national discussion in his direction with its messaging.One big challenge, however, is that many Americans who tuned out the former president when he left office show little interest in hearing more about him.Several voters who backed Mr. Biden in 2020 and are now leaning toward Mr. Trump said they had not followed the ins and outs of the former president’s post-White House activities and tended to discount and brush aside his past scandals.“I know a lot of people get mad about what he said years ago about ‘grab them by whatever,’” said Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. “That was kind of aggravating. But, you know, that was years ago. And that’s how guys talk in a locker room. I don’t think he really would do that. I think he was just saying that.”Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesArthur Taylor, a business owner from Mesa, Ariz., described himself as a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden and now says he will back Mr. Trump in 2024. He said that the business climate was better when Mr. Trump was president and that the 91 criminal charges against him might not be so bad.“There’s so many things that President Trump does that’s just not ethical,” Mr. Taylor said. But he added that with the former president, “there’s a level of honesty and almost transparency, even in a way that we might cringe at it.”Those sorts of sentiments have left the Biden campaign this past week to engage in its own media criticism, publicly urging news shows on network television to follow New York Times articles about Mr. Trump’s plans for immigration and deportation policies if he wins the election.“The more the American people are confronted with who Donald Trump is — a dangerous, extreme and erratic man who only cares about using the power of the government to help himself and his friends — the more they reject him,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “We will continue to highlight for voters what’s at stake if Trump and his cronies are allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.”Mr. Biden and most of his Democratic allies have adopted a collective vow of silence on what portends to be the biggest Trump-related story line over the next year — the four criminal trials he faces in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C.In August, 38 House Democrats wrote to the federal courts administrator asking that Mr. Trump’s federal trials be broadcast live on television. Mr. Trump himself last week asked that cameras be allowed in the courtroom for his trial in Washington — a request that federal prosecutors swiftly opposed.“You see one of the court-artist sketches, and you look at that and you’re like, I’m not really sure which trial he’s on,” Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said in an interview. “Is anyone paying attention to them?”Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic strategist, said Mr. Biden’s decision to stay quiet had allowed Mr. Trump to frame the cases against him as “a one-sided conversation.”“We have not engaged on perhaps Donald Trump’s No. 1 Achilles’ heel, which is the 91 indictments,” she said. “We’ll see what happens when we do.”Aside from the trials, Democrats are longing for the days when cable networks carried Mr. Trump’s rallies live. To watch a Trump rally live now, viewers need to find an online stream or a fringy far-right cable station like Newsmax.On this, Mr. Trump and Democrats tend to be in agreement.“The more people see and hear from Donald Trump and what he has planned for the country if he regains power, the better off Democrats will be up and down the ballot,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “Trump’s voracious need for attention works to Democrats’ advantage.”Google search interest in Mr. Trump remains well below the level it was at when he was in office and running for re-election four years ago. The television ratings for Mr. Trump’s CNN town-hall event in May were strong, but well below what similar events in 2016 and 2020 drew.Jessica Floyd, the executive director of the Hub Project, a progressive group, urged mainstream cable TV networks to “remind people exactly how bad these rallies are and how corrosive they are for our democracy.”She added, “They should also show President Biden selling an absolutely historic level of investment in our economy.”Jon Soltz, a co-founder and chairman of VoteVets, a liberal veterans group, cautioned Democrats to be patient.“There’s a huge amount of the population right now that doesn’t realize that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president,” he said. “When that happens, you will see a different response.”Camille Baker More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Biden and the Democratic Party’s Future: 12 Voters Discuss

      by

      Pick an animal that best describes the Democratic Party. Pick an animal that bestdescribes the Democratic Party. “A moose.” Christopher, 31, white, Calif. “A bison.” Mary-Beth, 72, white, Mo. “A kangaroo.” Emil, 71, Black, N.Y. The party of the people. The Democracy. The New Dealers. The Democrats have gone by many names over the years, […] More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      The Senate Is Getting Less Democratic by the Minute

      by

      Democrats and the independents who caucus with them will be playing defense in 23 of the 34 Senate seats on the ballot in the 2024 congressional elections. Four of the 23 are in swing states that President Biden won narrowly in 2020. Three are in states that Donald Trump won in both 2016 and 2020.If Democrats were to lose all seven, a catastrophic defeat, they would start the next session in Congress with a weak minority of senators — its smallest number since the days of President Herbert Hoover — who would nonetheless represent nearly half the population of the United States.Depending on where you stand in relation to partisan politics in this country, you may not find this disparity all that compelling. But consider the numbers when you take political affiliation out of the picture: roughly half of all Americans, some 169 million people, live in the nine most populous states. Together, those states get 18 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate.To pass anything under simple majority rules, assuming support from the sitting vice president, those 18 senators would have to attract another 32 votes: the equivalent, in electoral terms, of a supermajority. On the flip side, it is possible to pass an item out of the Senate with a coalition of members who represent a small fraction of the total population — around 18 percent — but hold an absolute majority of the seats. And this is before we get to the filibuster, which imposes a more explicit supermajority requirement on top of this implicit one.Last week, The Washington Post published a detailed look at the vast disparities of power that mark the Senate, which was structured on the principle of equal state representation: Regardless of population, every state gets two members. A carry-over from the Articles of Confederation, the principle of equal state representation was so controversial that it nearly derailed the Philadelphia Convention, where James Madison and others were trying to build a national government with near total independence from the states.It is not for nothing that in the Federalist Papers, neither Madison nor John Jay nor Alexander Hamilton attempts to defend the structure of the Senate from first principles. Instead, Madison wrote in Federalist No. 62, you should consider it a concession to the political realities of the moment:A government founded on principles more consonant to the wishes of the larger States, is not likely to be obtained from the smaller States. The only option, then, for the former, lies between the proposed government and a government still more objectionable. Under this alternative, the advice of prudence must be to embrace the lesser evil; and, instead of indulging a fruitless anticipation of the possible mischiefs which may ensue, to contemplate rather the advantageous consequences which may qualify the sacrifice.Today, the Senate is a distinctly undemocratic institution that has worked, over the past decade, to block policies favored by a large majority of Americans and even a solid majority of senators. And while there’s no immediate hope of changing it, a cleareyed analysis of the chamber’s structural faults can help answer one of the key questions of American democracy: Who, or what, is this system supposed to represent?As the Post piece notes, equal state representation has never been equitable: “In 1790, Virginia, the most populous state, had roughly 13 times the population of Delaware, the least populous, with a difference of about 700,000 people.” But as the country has grown larger and more diverse, the disparities have grown greater and more perverse. The population difference between the states is so large now that a resident of the least populous state, Wyoming, as many observers have pointed out, has 68 times the representation in the Senate than does a resident of California, the largest state by population. In fact, a state gets less actual representation in the chamber the more it attracts new residents.There is not just a disparity of representation; there is a disparity in who is represented as well. The most populous states — including not only California, but New York, Illinois, Florida and Texas — tend to be the most diverse states, with a large proportion of nonwhite residents. The smallest states by population — like Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire — tend to be the least diverse. And the structure of the Senate tends to amplify the power of residents in smaller states and weaken the power of those in larger states. When coupled with the potential for — and what is in truth the reality of — minority rule in the chamber, you have a system that gives an almost absolute veto on most federal legislation to a pretty narrow slice of white Americans.One response to these disparities of power and influence is to say that they represent the intent of the framers. There are at least two problems with this view. The first is that the modern Senate reproduces some of the key problems — among them the possibility of a minority veto that grinds governance to a halt — that the framers were trying to overcome when they scrapped the Articles of Confederation. The second and more important problem is that the modern Senate isn’t the one the framers designed in 1787.In 1913, the United States adopted the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the direct election of senators at the ballot box rather than their selection by state legislatures. This change disrupted the logic of the Senate. Before, each senator was a kind of ambassador from his state government. After the amendment went into effect, each senator was a direct representative of the people of that state.If each member was a kind of ambassador, then you could justify unequal voting power by pointing to the equal sovereignty of each state under the Constitution. But if each member is a direct representative, then it becomes all the more difficult to say that some Americans deserve more representation than others on account of arbitrary state borders.This brings us back to our question: Who, or what, is the American system supposed to represent? If it is supposed to represent the states — if the states are the primary unit of American democracy — then there’s nothing about the structure of the Senate to object to.It’s plain as day that the states are not the primary unit of American democracy. As James Wilson of Pennsylvania observed during the Philadelphia Convention, the new national government was being formed for the sake of individuals rather than “the imaginary beings called states.” And as we’ve expanded the scope of democratic participation, we have affirmed — again and again — that it is the people who deserve representation on an equal basis, not the states.There is no realistic way, at this moment, to make the Senate more democratic. But if we can identify the Senate as one of the key sources of an unacceptable democratic deficit, then we can look for other ways to enhance democracy in the American system.I know that, given the scale and scope of the problem, that does not sound very inspiring. But we have to start somewhere.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      With Joe Biden Turning 81, the White House Is Focused Elsewhere

      by

      President Biden has no plans for a lavish public celebration when he turns 81 on Monday, even as Democrats search for a strategy to assuage voters’ concerns about his age by next year’s election.For many of a certain age, there comes a point when marking yet another birthday, taking note of yet another passage of the calendar, is not greeted with the same enthusiasm it once was. And that’s for people who are not even running for president.For President Biden, who turns 81 on Monday, another birthday may bring more liability than revelry, offering one more reminder of his age to an already skeptical electorate. Unlike other presidents who have celebrated birthdays with lavish political events, Mr. Biden plans to observe his milestone privately with family in Nantucket later this week.The best birthday gift the oldest president in American history could hope for would be a strategy for assuaging voters’ concerns, but that has been hard to come by. Mr. Biden and his team have taken the approach that his record of domestic legislation and international leadership should belie any worries about his capacity, even though polls have shown consistently that that line of argument has not been persuasive, at least not yet.Some Democrats argue that Mr. Biden needs to do more to draw the contrast with his likeliest Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, who at 77 has himself exhibited confusion in public lately. Mr. Trump has warned that the country is on the verge of World War II, mixed up the leaders of Hungary and Turkey, and boasted of beating former President Barack Obama in the polls when of course Mr. Obama is not running. If Mr. Trump wins next year and serves out four years, he would take over the status as the country’s oldest president.Others, including some current and former administration officials, said Mr. Biden’s staff members should stop treating him like an old man they do not trust and let him interact with the public and reporters more. Some said the president needed to start getting out on the campaign trail more to show his vigor, deploy more humor to defuse the matter and even boast about his age rather than ignore it.Others, however, said he needed to be protected even more, allowed more time to rest and not sent on so many draining international trips — what some cheekily call the “Bubble Wrap” strategy, as in encasing him in Bubble Wrap for the next 12 months to make sure he does not trip and fall.If some of this is contradictory, it may be because there is no easy answer, much as Democrats have been obsessing about Mr. Biden’s age. One thing the White House cannot do is make him younger. In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states, 71 percent said Mr. Biden was “too old” to be president, including 54 percent of his own supporters. By contrast, 39 percent said that about Mr. Trump.“He doesn’t look and speak the part,” said John B. Judis, the longtime political analyst and author with Ruy Teixeira of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” published earlier this month. “He’s not a commanding or charming presence on a presidential or presidential election stage.”Mr. Judis said he thought Mr. Biden had demonstrated “astonishing success” in passing major legislation building infrastructure, lowering the cost of medicine and combating climate change, and added that he planned to vote for the president himself. But he noted that presidents were expected to be both the head of government and the head of state — a prime minister and a king, if you will — and that the public performance part had eluded Mr. Biden.“I think a lot of voters, and young people in particular, who are not at all put off by his political positions or accomplishments, are put off by his utter failure as a regal persona,” Mr. Judis said. “And I don’t know how that can be fixed. Not by bicycling. Biden’s best hope in that regard is the voters’ perception of Trump as a bad or even evil father who wants to wreck the family.”Nothing irritates White House officials more than discussion of Mr. Biden’s age, which they view as an obsession of the news media that does not correspond with the energetic and mentally sharp president they describe inside the Oval Office. While Mr. Biden shuffles when he walks, talks in a low tone that can be hard to hear and sometimes confuses names and details in public, they note that he maintains a crushing schedule that would tire a younger president.In the past few weeks alone, he has devoted countless hours to managing the Israel war with Hamas while also hosting separate summit meetings with leaders from Asia, Europe and the Western Hemisphere. He made a one-day trip to Israel, flying across the world and back without stopping in a hotel room, and they said he has worked the phone endlessly to deal with high-stakes foreign crises.Asked about his forthcoming birthday, the White House did not directly address the age issue on Sunday but chose to focus on the president’s accomplishments, making the point that his long experience in Washington has paid off.“Because of President Biden’s decades of experience in public service and deep relationships with leaders in Congress, he passed legislation that has helped to create more than 14 million jobs, lower prescription drug costs, invest in America’s infrastructure and technology and led to the strongest economic recovery in the developed world,” Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, said in a statement.“He has revitalized alliances on the world stage — cultivated over many years — to promote America’s interests and respond forcefully when global crises arise,” Mr. LaBolt added.Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic strategist, said the White House should lean even more into the benefits of Mr. Biden’s age rather than be defensive.“He’s been successful because of his age, not in spite of it,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “We’re all going to have to make that case because it’s true. We can’t run away from the age issue. It’s going to be a major part of the conversation, but we would be making a political mistake if we don’t contest it more aggressively.”Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, said there were naturally limits to what the White House could do. “Nothing anyone, even a president, can do to avoid having a birthday,” she said. “President Biden should continue to do what he’s been doing: connecting personally with people, making jokes about the coverage and highlighting his administration’s accomplishments.”Some party strategists argued that age had dominated the discussion about Mr. Biden lately in part because the president had not yet fully engaged in the contest against Mr. Trump. At the end of the day, they said, Democrats and independents who may be leery of a president who would be 86 at the end of a second term will conclude that it is better to support an octogenarian they agree with than another soon-to-be octogenarian they consider a threat to democracy, abortion rights and other issues that matter to them.“This issue, like many others, will fade once the campaign moves into the general election phase,” said Brian Fallon, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “Once the race gets reframed as a choice, it will be impossible for Republicans to try to weaponize the issue of age when their own nominee would also be over 80 in his next term.”If that were to work, it would be the best birthday gift Mr. Biden could hope for when he turns 82 next year. It is, of course, a big if. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      The War in Gaza Is Splintering the Democratic Party

      by

      Representative Jamaal Bowman, whose district encompasses several affluent Westchester County suburbs as well as a small part of the Bronx, last week planned a “healing breakfast” with Jewish constituents pained by his pro-Palestinian politics. A member of the informal alliance of a half-dozen or so young Black and brown left-wing representatives known as the Squad, Bowman won a primary against the district’s staunchly pro-Israel incumbent in 2020, fueled largely by the energy of that summer’s racial justice protests. But now, with the conflict in the Middle East inflaming American politics, he seemed likely to face his own primary challenge in June, one that will test the coalition between liberal Jews and people of color that is key to the progressive movement both in his district and in the country more broadly.Bowman didn’t get into politics to work on Israel and Palestine. A brash, impassioned and sometimes impetuous former middle school principal, he was motivated by education and criminal justice reform. But like other members of the Squad, Bowman has developed a sympathy with the Palestinian cause that makes him an outlier in a Congress where deference to Israel is the norm.He was one of nine Democrats to vote last month against a resolution expressing support for Israel and condemning Hamas, because, he said, it didn’t call for a two-state solution or for military de-escalation. Speaking at a rally held by Rabbis for Ceasefire this week, he said, rather presumptuously, “By me calling for a cease-fire with my colleagues and centering humanity, I am uplifting deeply what it actually means to be Jewish.”Plenty of Jews in his district, including some who loathe Israel’s right-wing government, disagree, and have grown alienated from their congressman and the strain of progressive politics he represents. “People like me are not being given much to work with when we go to some of our beleaguered, anxious and frightened Jewish friends, and they are saying that the left is so infested with antisemitism that they can no longer be part of it,” said Lisa Genn, a local progressive activist who is part of a group called Jews for Jamaal.With tensions in the district high, Bowman organized the breakfast so the community could talk things out in person. “Nobody’s going,” the head of the Westchester Board of Rabbis told New York Jewish Week, adding, “The relationship with the congressman has hit rock bottom, and he knows it, we know it.” Nevertheless, so many people R.S.V.P.ed that the meeting was moved from Bowman’s office in White Plains to the nearby Calvary Baptist Church.When I arrived at the church that morning, a small group of protesters stood outside clutching signs. “Jews are not idiots. We know this is a P.R. stunt!” said one, held by a woman in a blue “Zioness” sweatshirt. “Bowman does not protect our Jewish students,” said another, held by Nancy Weinberger, a Democrat who has two children studying in Israel, and who was particularly incensed by Bowman’s recent vote against a House resolution condemning “the support of Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations” on college campuses. “Can’t he give us one win?” she asked. “Can’t he vote in our interest at all?”Soon the pastor of the church showed up, saw the demonstrators, and appeared to grow worried that Calvary Baptist would be seen as anti-Zionist. He abruptly canceled the event and called the police to clear everyone out. As Bowman’s staff tried to find a new location, Guy Baron, a protester wrapped in an Israeli flag, confronted the congressman in the church parking lot. “Your actions as our representative in Washington, D.C., are so painful to our community,” he said. “You have no idea. You are so out of touch with the Jewish members of your community.”Baron inveighed against a slogan defended by Rashida Tlaib, another member of the Squad and the only Palestinian in Congress: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The slogan was a major reason Tlaib was censured by the House last week, with 22 Democrats joining almost all but a few members of the Republican caucus.“That is a call to genocide,” said Baron, “and you’re on their team.”Bowman listened, his hands folded, then thanked Baron for sharing his feelings. “We are horrified by the rise of antisemitism that is happening all over the world, right here in our country, and right here in our community,” he said. “That is why we’re having this meeting and conversation today. Because we know and we acknowledge the trauma and the pain and the fear.”Eventually, the meeting was moved back to Bowman’s office. About 40 people, including several of the protesters, gathered in a crowded semicircle in a low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit room. Trays of bagels, scrambled eggs and pastrami sandwiches were brought in, but they went mostly untouched. Emotions were intense — there were repeated invocations of the Holocaust — but by absorbing his constituents’ outrage and grief, Bowman was able to keep the conversation civil.“I am deeply concerned that the people that I’ve spent my life marching with are not marching with me,” Bill Giddins, a retiree from Bronxville, said to applause. “I am deeply concerned that when a Black person is damaged in America, I want to protect that person. I don’t feel the same from you and your office.” A few days before, a man had been arrested near the site of a local rally for the victims of Oct. 7 on charges of illegally carrying a semiautomatic weapon; his car was flying a Palestinian flag and had a swastika intertwined with a Jewish star scrawled on the side.Bowman’s Jewish constituents tried to convey how an ancestral terror of annihilation had been newly awakened. “This is Westchester!” said one mother of young children. “How can we be feeling unsafe as Jews?”“I myself can’t keep you safe,” said Bowman. “We, in this room, in this community, and me and my colleagues in elected office can do so. Not just with words, or political pandering, or virtue signaling,” but “sleeves up, in the room, figuring it out.”Whether Bowman can figure out how to heal the rifts in his district will have implications beyond his slice of New York. Ahead of the existentially important 2024 election — which could bring Donald Trump, increasingly unabashed in his embrace of vengeful authoritarianism, back to power — some polls show Joe Biden’s support among young people and Arab Americans collapsing, likely because of the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza. “People tell me they’re not voting Democrat, without me asking,” Bowman told me.A series of ugly primary campaigns fought over Israel will only widen the progressive political divide. But with horror at conditions in Gaza and Jewish fear both ratcheting up, an intraparty clash over the future of the Squad now looks inevitable.From left, the Squad members Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a gathering calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe crowd at an event called the Westchester Stands With Israel Rally, held last month at Temple Israel Center in White Plains.Mark Vergari/The Journal News-USA Today NetworkAs the left-leaning journalist Ryan Grim points out in his forthcoming book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” the politics of Israel and Palestine have bedeviled the group ever since its first members burst onto the political scene in 2018.The most famous figure in the Squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rarely spoke about the Middle East in 2018, during her first congressional campaign, which was centered on the same economic issues that powered the Bernie Sanders movement. But that May, she’d tweeted about the Israeli military’s shooting of protesters in Gaza, calling it a “massacre.” After her primary victory, she was questioned about that tweet, and her stance on Israel, on the TV show “Firing Line.” She grew visibly flustered, and afterward decided to stop doing national interviews for a while.“At the time, she betrayed a visceral sense of just how treacherous the issue could be for her, but she could never have guessed how significantly she had underestimated it,” wrote Grim.It was even more treacherous for Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women in Congress, who’ve both voiced support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. Both spoke for many left-wing voters, especially young ones, who see in the Palestinian struggle a reflection of their own battles against various forms of oppression. Both also, occasionally, invoked what many Jews see as antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and dual loyalty. Less than a week into her first term, for example, Tlaib tweeted that Senate supporters of an anti-B.D.S. bill “forgot what country they represent.” Not long after, Omar tweeted that fealty to Israel by U.S. political leaders was “all about the Benjamins.” Some of the early weeks of the new congressional session were consumed by an attempt, eventually watered down, to officially rebuke her.Soon after the original members of the Squad were sworn in in 2019, Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who once did work for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, started a group called the Democratic Majority for Israel aimed in part at stopping their influence from growing. “Most Democrats are strongly pro-Israel and we want to keep it that way,” Mellman told The Times. “There are a few discordant voices, but we want to make sure that what’s a very small problem doesn’t metastasize into a bigger problem.”To that end, the Democratic Majority for Israel tried hard to thwart Bowman when he ran against Eliot Engel in 2020. The group spent almost $2 million in the race, much of it on ads slamming Bowman for unpaid taxes. As Grim noted, hitting “a working-class Black man for financial troubles before he’d risen to become a successful principal in the area would have been considered tone-deaf in a New York Democratic primary in any recent cycle,” but especially amid the summer’s protests over the killing of George Floyd. The attack failed; Bowman ended up winning a blowout 15-point victory.The district, whose contours have changed with redistricting and could change again before the primary, is about 50 percent Black and Latino, and voters of color were Bowman’s base. But they were joined by some Jews, who are thought to make up about 10 percent of the district’s population. “It was the time,” said Giddins, the Bronxville retiree, who backed Bowman in the past. “We have to coalesce and give Black people power. They’re entitled to it.”But despite Bowman’s popularity, growing disaffection among Jews — who, according to The New York Times, probably make up 20 percent to 30 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in his district — could make him vulnerable. He’s one of several Squad members facing potentially formidable primary challenges over their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Omar is going to have a rematch against a former Minneapolis City Council member, Don Samuels, who lost to her by about two points in the 2022 primary. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat who emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement, is facing a primary challenge from a former political ally, the St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. Summer Lee, a Pittsburgh Democrat whose district includes the Tree of Life synagogue, site of an antisemitic mass murder in 2018, is being challenged by Bhavini Patel.Bowman doesn’t have an opponent yet, but last month 26 rabbis in his district wrote a letter to Westchester’s popular county executive, George Latimer, imploring him to get into the race. Last week, a local TV station reported that Latimer had indeed decided to jump in, though he told me he still hadn’t made a formal decision and wouldn’t until he returned from a solidarity trip to Israel.Should a few members of the Squad lose their primaries, the blow to Democratic unity could be severe. “Many of the young people or people of color, Muslim and Arab Democrats who support the Squad will feel like the party is not a place for them,” said Waleed Shahid, former communications director of the Justice Democrats, the group that recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run for office, and a senior adviser on Bowman’s 2020 campaign. “And they’ll either stay at home or they’ll go to a third party.”Already, there are signs that the party is fracturing over Israel. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about three-quarters of Democrats want a cease-fire, but few in the Democratic establishment share their views. Last week, in a rare gesture of defiance, more than 100 congressional staffers walked out to demand that their bosses back a cease-fire. More than 500 alumni of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and Democratic Party staff members have signed a letter imploring Biden to call for a cease-fire, saying, “If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”If the conflict in Israel cools down in a few months, it might recede from the center of American politics. But the wounds it’s torn open will be hard to mend, because so many people are feeling betrayed. Many liberal Jews, mourning the mass murder in Israel and shaken by the upsurge of antisemitism at home, believed they’ve been abandoned by their allies. Advocates for the freedom and safety of Palestinians, horror-struck by more than 10,000 civilian deaths in Gaza, believe that the Democratic Party is giving its approval to atrocities. Bowman’s attempt to transcend this split in his own district, knowing how much ire would be directed at him, struck me as decent and brave. But when people discover that they see the world so radically differently, better communication alone might not be enough to bring them back together.From the time he was elected, Bowman has had to traverse a minefield on the Middle East, facing pressure from both his pro-Israel Jewish constituents and from some of the left-wing groups that backed him. He’s mostly refused to tiptoe. Coming into office, Bowman was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he angered the organization when he voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. After he traveled to Israel and the West Bank with the left-leaning pro-Israel group J Street in 2021, some in the Democratic Socialists, which has a policy of boycotting Israel, moved to expel him. He ended up dropping his membership.For all the blowback from the left, however, the trip solidified his abhorrence of the occupation of Palestine. “I got to see the giant wall built around the West Bank,” Bowman told me. He described being turned away from a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron, where Palestinian movement is curtailed to accommodate a few hundred fanatical settlers, because he wasn’t Jewish. “And I thought that was ironic, because I’m literally a sitting member of Congress voting to support funding for the state of Israel,” he said.He saw firsthand the way settlement expansion is making a contiguous Palestinian state nearly impossible. “I left feeling pretty overwhelmed and pretty dejected,” Bowman said, adding, “The rhetoric at home didn’t match the reality on the ground there, and specifically, the rhetoric around a two-state solution.” Bowman still believes in two states, but said, “The policies of the Israeli government haven’t gotten us there, and the U.S. hasn’t held Israel accountable towards helping us to get there.”“At Jamaal’s core, he’s someone who believes in racial and social justice,” said Shahid, his former adviser. “And I think that a lot of the ways he thinks about the world were confirmed” by his trip to Israel. Shahid compared Bowman’s experience to that of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, speaking on the left-wing broadcast “Democracy Now,” described his own shocking encounter with the brutal segregation in Hebron. “I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited,” said Coates. “Where your voting rights are inhibited. Where your right to the water is inhibited. Where your right to housing is inhibited, and it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.”It was familiar to Bowman, too. Given the congressman’s “experience as a racially conscious Black person,” said Shahid, “it’s hard not to see the parallels.”Before going to Israel and Palestine, Bowman had co-sponsored legislation encouraging Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel. When he returned, he withdrew his sponsorship and announced he’d vote against the bill because, among other things, it didn’t take Palestinian interests into account. The move appalled rabbis in his district. Later, Bowman angered many Jewish constituents by co-sponsoring Tlaib’s resolution commemorating what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, referring to their expulsion from Israel during the country’s founding. He angered them further by boycotting the speech by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to Congress in July.Oct. 7 brought an already simmering discontent to a raging boil. A few days after the attacks, Bowman wanted to attend an Israeli solidarity rally held by the Westchester Jewish Council, but organizers advised him to stay away because he’d be received poorly. He has spoken out repeatedly against antisemitism, denouncing, for example, an Oct. 8 demonstration in Manhattan, promoted by the New York Democratic Socialists of America, where Hamas’s attacks were celebrated. But he hasn’t backed away from his fundamental view of the conflict, leaving the mainstream Jewish community feeling as if he’s run roughshod over their interests and sensitivities. “Actions against Israel affect the safety of the Jewish people everywhere,” said Weinberger, the woman with two children in Israel, adding, “We feel so helpless in Congress because of him. He’s taken our voice away.”In 2022, despite mounting unhappiness with Bowman among some local Jewish leaders, national pro-Israel groups sat out his primary, determining, as Jewish Insider reported, that he “was likely unbeatable.” (He ended up winning about 57 percent of the vote in a four-way race.) But pro-Israel groups — one of which received funds from the disgraced crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried — poured an unprecedented amount of money into other primaries that year, a foretaste of the resources we could soon see mobilized against Bowman.As Politico reported, the Democratic Majority for Israel spent $2 million to defeat the Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat Nina Turner in a 2022 Ohio primary. In Michigan, the United Democracy Project, a super PAC tied to AIPAC, spent a staggering $4.3 million to help beat Representative Andy Levin, a Jewish Democrat who had been outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s occupation. Some funding for the United Democracy Project came from Republican megadonors, including the Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, a Trump supporter. These are not, needless to say, people who are averse to creating lasting ill will among Democrats.“I’ve been in politics for 30 years, local, state and federal,” said Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat and former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “But last cycle was the first time I saw a really disturbing new phenomenon, which was two groups — cryptocurrency folks and AIPAC — getting involved in Democratic primaries with huge amounts of money,” often more than the candidates were spending themselves. We can expect to see even more outside money from groups supporting Israel deployed against the Squad in 2024. “The level of concern and engagement on the part of the pro-Israel community is at an extraordinarily high level,” Mellman, of Democratic Majority for Israel, told me.These big-footed donors, who are overwhelmingly targeting representatives of color, are going to exacerbate the fissures in the Democratic Party. But they did not create them. Talking to some of the disenchanted voters at Bowman’s event, I was struck most not by their anger but by their heartbreak.Diana Lovett, a Democratic Party district leader who held a fund-raiser for Bowman last year, said polarization over the congressman was tearing apart local Democrats. Leaving the event, she told me, with great sadness, that she didn’t feel she could back him anymore. “I love him personally,” she said. She’d spoken to him in October about their disagreement over Israel. “He was lovely, and he’s amazing, and he was the same warm and openhearted person that he was today,” she said.But Lovett, who’d recently been hanging posters of kidnapped Israelis around town only to see them being torn down, had come to believe that their views on the Middle East are irreconcilable. “I think he sees what he believes to be an injustice, a grave injustice,” and that his votes are coming from a deep “moral consciousness,” she said. “And I think the pain and suffering he is causing to his constituents is some kind of collateral damage to that higher principle.”If Bowman were a more transactional politician, he might have compromised on an issue so fraught in his community. But he is, for better or worse, very sincere. Lovett was dreading “an insanely divisive primary,” but didn’t see any way around it. “He’s not going to convince us, and we’re not going to convince him,” she said.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Overturning Roe Changed Everything. Overturning Affirmative Action Did Not.

      by

      What do the strikingly different public responses to two recent Supreme Court rulings, one on abortion, the other on affirmative action, suggest about the future prospects for the liberal agenda?Last year’s Dobbs decision — overturning the longstanding precedent set by Roe v. Wade in 1973 — angered both moderate and liberal voters, providing crucial momentum for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, as well as in elections earlier this month. The hostile reaction to Dobbs appears certain to be a key factor in 2024.Since Dobbs, there have been seven abortion referendums, including in red states like Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Abortion rights won every time.In contrast, the Supreme Court decision in June that ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions provoked a more modest outcry, and it played little, if any, role on Election Day 2023. As public interest fades, so too do the headlines and media attention generally.There have been no referendums on affirmative action since the June decision, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. Six states held referendums on affirmative action before that ruling was issued, and five voted to prohibit it, including Michigan, Washington and California (twice). Colorado, the lone exception, voted in favor of affirmative action in 2008.Do the dissimilar responses to the court decisions ending two key components of the liberal agenda, as it was originally conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, suggest that one of them — the granting of preferences to minorities in order to level differences in admissions outcomes — has run its course?On the surface, the answer to that question is straightforward: Majorities of American voters support racial equality as a goal, but they oppose targets or quotas that grant preferential treatment to any specific group.In an email, Neil Malhotra, a political economist at Stanford — one of the scholars who, on an ongoing basis, oversees polling on Supreme Court decisions for The New York Times — pointed out that “race-based affirmative action is extremely unpopular. Sixty-nine percent of the public agreed with the court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, including 58 percent of Democrats.”On the other hand, Malhotra noted, “the majority of Americans did not want Roe overturned.”The July 1-5 Economist/YouGov poll posed questions that go directly to the question of affirmative action in higher education.“Do you think colleges should or should not be allowed to consider an applicant’s race, among other factors, when making decisions on admissions?”The answer: 25 percent said they should allow racial preferences; 64 percent said they should not.“Do you approve or disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, which ruled that colleges are not allowed to consider an applicant’s race when making decisions on admissions?”Fifty-nine percent approved of the decision, including 46 percent who strongly approved. Twenty-seven percent disapproved, including 18 percent who strongly disapproved.I asked William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, about the significance of the differing reactions to the abortion and affirmative action decisions, and he referred me to his July 2023 essay, “A Surprisingly Muted Reaction to the Supreme Court’s Decision on Affirmative Action”:In a marked contrast to last year’s Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the response to its recent decision prohibiting the use of race as a factor in college admissions has been remarkably muted. The overall reason is clear: while voters wanted to preserve access to abortion by a margin of roughly 20 percentage points, they were willing by the same margin to accept the end of affirmative action.“To the surprise of many observers,” Galston writes, citing poll data, Black Americans “supported the court by 44 percent to 36 percent.”Key groups of swing voters also backed the court’s decision by wide margins, Galston goes on to say: “Moderates by 56 percent to 23 percent, independents by 57 percent to 24 percent, and suburban voters, a key battleground in contemporary elections, by 59 percent to 30 percent.”Sanford V. Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin, wrote me by email thatThere has always been a certain ambivalence on the part of many liberals regarding the actual implementation of affirmative action. I thought that it would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories such as “white” or “Black,” and the impossibility of clearly defining who counts as “Hispanic” or “Asian.”In contrast, Levinson continued,Abortion has become more truly polarized as an issue, especially as the “pro-life” contingent has revealed its strong desire to ban all abortions. Moreover, it’s become immediately and obviously clear that the consequences of Dobbs are absolutely horrendous for many women in Texas, say, and that the “pro-life” contingent simply doesn’t seem to care about these consequences for actual people.I asked Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., about the divergent responses to the two decisions, and he emailed his reply:There are two reasons the public and political reaction differs so dramatically between the two decisions. The first is that in public opinion polling, affirmative action has always had significantly less than majority support.Pildes pointed out thatin perhaps the most liberal state in the country, California, 57 percent of voters in 2020 voted to keep in place the state’s ban on affirmative action, even as Biden won the state overwhelmingly. Popular opinion on abortion runs the other way: a majority of the country supports the basic right of access to abortion, and we see strong majorities even in red states voting to support that right, as in recent votes in Ohio and Kansas.Pildes’s second reason involves the advance preparation of the public for the decisions. In the case of affirmative action in college admissions,It was widely expected the Supreme Court was going to ban it. That outcome did not come as a surprise; it had long been discounted into the assumptions of those who follow these issues closely.In the case of the Dobbs, according to Pildes, “there was far more uncertainty in advance, even though the expectation was that the court would uphold Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks.”While the court majority might have decided the case “on narrow grounds, without overruling Roe,” Pildes wrote, it took “the far more extreme path of overruling Roe altogether. That came as a stunning shock to many people and it was the first time the court had taken away a personal constitutional right.”Nicholas Wu reported last month in Politico (in “Why Dems Aren’t Campaigning on Affirmative Action”) that some of the strongest proponents of affirmative action in the House do not see campaigning against the court decision as an effective strategy.Representative Mark Takano, a California Democrat who believes affirmative action helped get him into Harvard, told Wu, “I don’t see it as a rallying point for Democrats.”Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and Workforce, told Wu, “This is going to cause some heartburn, but we need to campaign on the fact that we are opening opportunities to everybody, and we’ll do everything we can to maintain opportunities.”“It’s difficult,” Scott added, “to bring back a strategy that the Supreme Court has directly ruled as unconstitutional.”Nicholas Dias, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, responded by email to my inquiry by noting that his “read of the existing data is that Americans care more about equality of opportunity than equality of outcome.”Dias conducted a study asking Americans how they prioritize three social goals in setting policies concerning wealth: “ensuring wealth is determined by effort (i.e., deservingness); providing for basic needs (sufficiency); and ensuring wealth equality.”He found that Republicans overwhelmingly give top priority to ensuring that wealth is determined by effort, at 70.5 percent, while Democrats give top priority, at 51.2 percent, to ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met.Dias noted that very few Democrats, Republicans or independents gave wealth equality top priority.Dias sent me a 2021 paper, “Desert and Redistribution: Justice as a Remedy for, and Cause of, Economic Inequality,” in which Jacob S. Bower-Bir, a political scientist affiliated with Indiana University, makes the case that:People tolerate grave inequalities if they think those inequalities are deserved. Indeed, if outcomes appear deserved, altering them constitutes an unjust act. Moreover, people who assign a significant role to personal responsibility in their definitions of economic desert oppose large-scale redistribution policies because government intervention makes it harder for people to (by their definition) deserve their economic station.In short, Bower-Bir argues, “people must perceive inequality as undeserved to motivate a policy response, and the means of combating inequality must not undermine desert.”In that context, Dias wrote in his email, it would be inaccurate to say thatpolicies designed to benefit minority constituencies have run their course. There’s plenty of evidence that members of these constituencies lack economic opportunities or cannot meet their needs. However, I think many Americans need to be convinced of that.In a further elaboration of the affirmative action debate, three sociologists, Leslie McCall, Derek Burk and Marie Laperrière, and Jennifer Richeson, a psychologist at Yale, discuss public perceptions of inequality in their 2017 paper “Exposure to Rising Inequality Shapes Americans’ Opportunity Beliefs and Policy Support”:Research across the social sciences repeatedly concludes that Americans are largely unconcerned about it. Considerable research has documented, for instance, the important role of psychological processes, such as system justification and American dream ideology, in engendering Americans’ relative insensitivity to economic inequality.Challenging that research, the four scholars contend that when “American adults were exposed to information about rising economic inequality in the United States,” they demonstrated increased “skepticism regarding the opportunity structure in society. Exposure to rising economic inequality reliably increased beliefs about the importance of structural factors in getting ahead.” Receiving information on inequality “also increased support for government redistribution, as well as for business actors (i.e., major companies) to enhance economic opportunities in the labor market.”The intricacies don’t end there.In their April 2017 paper, “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” three professors of psychology, Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom, write thatThere is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies.How can these two seemingly contradictory findings be resolved?The authors’ answer:These two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness.Human beings, Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom write, “naturally favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”My interest in the subdued political response to the court’s affirmative action decision was prompted by a 2021 book, “The Dynamics of Public Opinion,” by four political scientists, Mary Layton Atkinson, James A. Stimson and Frank R. Baumgartner, all of the University of North Carolina, and K. Elizabeth Coggins of Colorado College.The four scholars argue that there are three types of issues. The first two types are partisan issues (safety net spending, taxation, gun rights etc.) and nonpartisan issues, like the space program. Public opinion does not change much over time on these two types of issues, they write: “Aggregate opinion moves up and down (or, left and right) but fifty years later remains roughly where it started.”Such stability is not the case with the third category:These are social transformations affecting society in powerful ways, literally shifting the norms of cultural acceptability of a given issue position. These can be so powerful that they overwhelm the influence of any short-term partisan differences, driving substantial shifts in public opinion over time, all in the same direction.Two factors drive these transformations:Large swaths of the American public progressively adopting new, pro-equality positions on the issue, and the generational replacement of individuals with once-widespread but no-longer-majority anti-equality opinions — with younger individuals coming-of-age during a different time, and reflecting more progressive positions on these cultural shift issues.Opinion on these mega issues, Atkinson and her co-authors argue, has been moving steadily leftward. “The overall trend is unmistakable,” they write: “The public becomes more liberal on these rights issues over time,” in what Atkinson and her co-authors describe as the shifting “equality mood.”While trends like these would seem to lead to support for affirmative action, that is not the case. “We cannot treat belief in equality as a normative value as interchangeable with a pro-equality policy preference,” Atkinson and her co-authors write:This is particularly true because many pro-equality policies emphasize equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. And while equality of opportunity is the touchstone of a liberal society (i.e., all Americans are entitled to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness), the right to equality of outcomes has not been equally embraced by Americans. Once equality of opportunity is significantly advanced, or de jure equality is established, public support for further government action focused on equalizing outcomes may not exist, or at least wanes significantly.In other words, there has been a steady leftward movement on issues of equality when they are described as abstract principles, but much less so when the equality agenda is translated into specific policies, like busing or affirmative action.Atkinson and her co-authors point specifically to growing support for women’s equality in both theory and in practice, reporting on an analysis of four questions posed by the General Social Survey from the mid-1970s to 2004:When asked whether women should let men run the country and whether wives should put their husbands’ careers first, the policy responses look nearly identical to women’s ‘equality mood.’ The series trend in the liberal direction over time and reach a level of approximately 80 percent liberal responses by 2004.But when asked whether it is better for women to tend the home and for men to work, and whether preschool children suffer if their mothers work, the responses are far less liberal and the slopes of the lines are less steep. While responses to these questions trend in the liberal direction during the 1970s and 1980s, by the mid-1990s the series flattens out with liberalism holding between 50 and 60 percent.I asked Stimson to elaborate on this, and he emailed in reply:We have long known that the mass public does not connect problem and solution in the way that policy analysts do. Thus, for example, most people would sincerely like to see a higher level of racial integration in schools, but the idea of putting their kids on a bus to achieve that objective is flatly rejected. I used to see that as hypocrisy. But I no longer do. I think the real issue is that they just do not make the connection between problem and solution. That is why affirmative action has such a troubled history. People are quite capable of supporting policy goals (e.g., racial balance in higher education) and rejecting the means.Where does that leave the nation? Galston, in his Brooking essay, provided an answer:In sum, the country’s half-century experiment with affirmative action failed to persuade a majority of Americans — or even a majority of those whom the policy was intended to benefit — that it was effective and appropriate. University employers — indeed the entire country — must now decide what to do next to advance the cause of equal opportunity for all, one of the nation’s most honored but never achieved principles.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Plan to Spend Millions to Weaken Republican Supermajorities

      by

      The party is targeting states with Democratic governors but overwhelming Republican legislative control, effectively battling to win back veto power.Democrats are planning to spend millions of dollars next year on just a few state legislative elections in Kansas, North Carolina, Kentucky and Wisconsin — states where they have little to no chance of winning control of a chamber.Yet what might appear to be an aimless move is decidedly strategic: Democrats are pushing to break up Republican supermajorities in states with Democratic governors, effectively battling to win back the veto pen district by district. Such supermajorities result when a single political party has enough votes in both chambers of a legislature to override a governor’s veto, often, though not always, by controlling two-thirds of the chamber.The extraordinary political dissonance of having a governor of one party and a supermajority of an opposing party in the legislature is one of the starkest effects of gerrymandering, revealing how parties cling to evaporating power.As gerrymanders built by both parties for decades have tipped the scales to favor the party of the map-drawers, legislative chambers have proved resistant to shifting political winds at the state level. At times, those gerrymanders have locked in minority rule in legislatures while statewide offices, like the governor’s, adhere to the desires of a simple majority of voters.Though both parties employed aggressive gerrymanders during the last round of redistricting in 2021, Republicans entered the cycle with a distinct advantage: In 2010, G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures across the country drew aggressive gerrymanders in state governments. Democrats were caught off guard.“The bottom fell out,” said Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “And we’ve been building back since then.”As a result, Republicans now control resilient supermajorities in Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky, even as Democrats hold the executive branch. And in Wisconsin, Republicans control a supermajority of the State Senate, which can act unilaterally on issues like impeachment, and are just two seats shy of a supermajority in the State Assembly, though last year Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, won re-election.The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee has committed “more than seven figures” of its initial $60 million budget for 2024 to breaking up these four supermajorities, with the caveat that redistricting efforts in North Carolina and Wisconsin could shift resources. “Republicans in these legislatures are not moderate,” Ms. Williams said. “They are governing very extremely, and we need a stopgap, and it is critical that governors have veto power where their legislature and their legislative maps are so gerrymandered.”The only example where the parties are flipped is in Vermont, where a Democratic supermajority in the legislature overrode multiple vetoes by Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, this year. And in Nevada, Democrats control a supermajority of the State Assembly and are just one vote shy of a supermajority in the State Senate, while Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, was elected in 2022.A spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee did not respond to questions about similar strategies for Republicans.Though Democrats have occasionally ventured into conservative-leaning legislative districts, such an extensive foray into fairly hostile territory will be a new challenge, particularly in deeply red states like Kansas where Democratic voters are often ignored during better-funded national campaigns for president. Recruiting candidates to serve in the minority, rather than to play a role in flipping a chamber — a more energizing prospect — can also pose a challenge.But while state legislative elections are often defined by issues as hyperlocal as a traffic intersection or funding for an after-school program, Democrats are also hoping that one critical national issue will help them: abortion.Despite President Biden’s persistent unpopularity, Democrats last week took back the Virginia General Assembly and won the governor’s race in deep-red Kentucky, as well as a majority of this year’s special elections, largely because abortion access was a motivating issue.On the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year, Kansas voters rejected an amendment that would have effectively eliminated abortion in the state. But in the Legislature, dominated by Republicans, “we had 21 different bills come up in committee trying to restrict abortion access,” said Jeanna Repass, the chair of the Kansas Democratic Party. “So what that has taught us is that if we can get the messaging out to people, we can get them interested in the fact that they’re not being represented by their legislators.”“When I’m out, I hit them hard with abortion, our public schools and Medicaid, and in that order,” Ms. Repass added.As Democrats invest in trying to climb out of superminority positions, they will face some deep-pocketed state Republicans. Robert Reives, the Democratic minority leader in the North Carolina General Assembly, pointed to two races in 2022 that featured Republican candidates spending roughly $800,000 each to defeat Democratic incumbents.“They had the benefit of having two billionaires that kind of financed a lot of the top line of the campaign and then just kind of went from there,” Mr. Reives said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have billionaires on our side to do that.”Mr. Reives was confident that even with newly drawn maps favoring Republicans, the Democrats would have a chance of breaking the supermajority in the state in 2024, focusing on urban areas like Wake County, home to Raleigh. And he said that while abortion would inevitably be a factor in coming elections, the hyperlocal issue of authorizing casinos in the state is likely to help Democrats claw back a few seats.“They were literally going against every constituency,” Mr. Reives said, referring to broad opposition to casino expansion. Even some Republicans objected to it.One path for Democrats to win back their veto pens can be found in eastern Wisconsin.In 2022, Democrats stared down gerrymandered maps that raised the possibility of a Republican supermajority even as Mr. Evers, the Democratic governor, cruised to a re-election victory.As returns trickled into the party headquarters in Madison, party officials breathed a sigh of relief when Steve Doyle, a 10-year incumbent from La Crosse, defeated his Republican challenger by 756 votes. His race was won not on the airwaves or even necessarily just on the issues, but on the pavement, as Mr. Doyle undertook an extensive door-knocking campaign to meet all of his voters, according to Greta Neubauer, the Democratic minority leader in the Wisconsin Assembly.“This is a Trump-won district that Democrats at the top of the ticket struggle to win,” Ms. Neubauer said. “But he spends a lot of time on his acquisition of voters, and constantly fending off attempts to take him out.” More