Ross Douthat

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, has an interesting piece today asking the question:  “Will the Ukraine War end the age of populism?”  His main theme is:

“Putin’s war has struck two blows against populism, one direct and one indirect. First, there is the embarrassment involved for every populist leader, European or American, who has either offered kind words for Putin or at least held him up as an adversary whose statecraft runs circles around our own incompetent elites. Such flirtations have now largely ended in backpedaling and reversal, forcing populists to choose between self-marginalization or a shameless pivot..

“..The [second] more damaging blow, though, is the indirect one, the way the Ukraine invasion has revealed how uncertain and at sea the populist instinct becomes when it’s confronted with an adversary that doesn’t fit easily into its focus on internal Western corruption, its narratives of elite perfidy and folly.

This uncertainty isn’t confined to right-populists alone; rather, you see it among anti-establishment voices of all stripes at the moment — the left-wing gadflies who didn’t expect the Ukraine invasion because they did not expect Western intelligence to ever get something right, the critics of U.S. power who didn’t expect Ukrainian resilience because they assumed that any regime backed by our foreign policy elites would be too hapless to survive, the media personalities casting about for narratives that fit populist preconceptions because the bigger picture of Putinist aggression and Western unity does not.”

Douthat makes several other important observations in his column (reprinted below).  His conclusion which you have to read carefully is:

“Last week, for instance, the Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that Putin’s invasion disproves “all the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China.” With the West rallying to a resilient Ukraine, “all of that turned out to be bunk.”

What was bunk was the idea that Putin’s Russia represents some kind of efficient postliberal or traditionalist alternative to the problems of the West, and one whose military could simply steamroller Eastern Europe. But all those Western problems remain: American power is in relative decline, China’s power has dramatically increased, and none of what I, as a self-appointed expert on the subject, would classify as the key problems of American decadence — demographic decline, economic disappointment and stagnation, a social fabric increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide — have somehow gone away just because Moscow’s military is failing outside Kyiv.

Since those problems are crucial to understanding where populism came from in the first place, it’s reckless for liberals to declare victory based on shifts in the international order while simply waving domestic discontents away. Populism’s poor fit for this particular moment has given an opportunity to its enemies and critics. But they will squander the opportunity if they convince themselves that the external challenge has somehow made the internal crisis go away.”

Tony

—————————————————————————–

The New York Times

Will the Ukraine War End the Age of Populism?

March 16, 2022  

By Ross Douthat

If the past 10 years of Western history have featured an extended wrestling match between populism and liberalism, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has inspired many liberals to hopefully declare the contest over, their opponent pinned.

And with some reason. Putin’s war has struck two blows against populism, one direct and one indirect. First, there is the embarrassment involved for every populist leader, European or American, who has either offered kind words for Putin or at least held him up as an adversary whose statecraft runs circles around our own incompetent elites. Such flirtations have now largely ended in backpedaling and reversal, forcing populists to choose between self-marginalization or a shameless pivot. Which is to say: Don’t be surprised if Donald Trump somehow evolves into the biggest Russia hawk you’ve ever seen come 2024.

The more damaging blow, though, is the indirect one, the way the Ukraine invasion has revealed how uncertain and at sea the populist instinct becomes when it’s confronted with an adversary that doesn’t fit easily into its focus on internal Western corruption, its narratives of elite perfidy and folly.

This uncertainty isn’t confined to right-populists alone; rather, you see it among anti-establishment voices of all stripes at the moment — the left-wing gadflies who didn’t expect the Ukraine invasion because they did not expect Western intelligence to ever get something right, the critics of U.S. power who didn’t expect Ukrainian resilience because they assumed that any regime backed by our foreign policy elites would be too hapless to survive, the media personalities casting about for narratives that fit populist preconceptions because the bigger picture of Putinist aggression and Western unity does not.

Amid all this flailing, the Republican Party, the main vehicle for populism, seems to be returning to its pre-Trump instincts. Throughout Trump’s presidency there was a basic uncertainty about what populism stands for in foreign policy. Retrenchment and isolationism or a new Cold War with China? Leaving NATO entirely versus strengthening the alliance by forcing its members to pay up? Fighting fewer wars or taking the gloves off? Pat Buchanan or John Bolton?

Now, though, if you look at polls of Republican voters or listen to G.O.P. politicians, what you see is mostly a reversion to straightforward hawkishness, to a view that the Biden White House probably isn’t being confrontational enough — which is to say, to where the party stood before the Trump rebellion happened.

But in that reversion you can also see one of the difficulties with assuming that if populism is floundering, liberalism must be the beneficiary. After all, Bolton is hardly a champion of liberal internationalism, and the return of Republican hawkishness is mostly a revival of old-fashioned American nationalism — working against populism, this time, rather than the two forces pulling the same way.

And what’s true within the G.O.P. is true more generally. The Ukrainian fighters everyone so admires are clearly fighting more for nationalism than for liberalism, and some aren’t fighting for liberal ideals at all. The European country arguably doing the most to assist them is Poland, until yesterday the bête noire of Western liberalism for its nationalist and socially conservative government. The sudden sense of Western unity seems very, well, Western; it’s not a global coalition confronting Putin so much as a Euro-American one, infused with more than a little of the civilizational chauvinism that liberalism aspires to stand above.

In the American media, too, it’s centrist jingoism rather than liberal cosmopolitanism that seems ascendant at the moment — the wave of Russophobic cancellations; the sudden “America: Love or leave it” enthusiasms of daytime TV personalities; the zeal for military escalation, nuclear peril be damned, among supposedly responsible figures who once led the opposition to Trumpism.

None of this should be surprising: It’s always been the case that a liberal society depends for unity and vigor on not entirely liberal forces — religious piety, nationalist pride, a sense of providential mission, a certain degree of ethnic solidarity and, of course, the fear of some external adversary. Liberalism at its best works to guide and channel these forces; liberalism at its worst veers between ignoring them and being overwhelmed by them.

Among the optimistic liberals of the current moment, you can see how that veering happens. “A Russian defeat will make possible a ‘new birth of freedom,’” Francis Fukuyama wrote last week, “and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on.” Following up in an interview with The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Fukuyama framed the current moment as an opportunity for Westerners and Americans to choose liberalism anew, out of a recognition that the nationalist alternative is “pretty awful.”

But one of the key lessons of recent years is that the spirit of 1989 was itself as much a spirit of revived Eastern European nationalism as of liberalism alone. Which is one reason countries like Poland and Hungary have sorely disappointed liberals in their subsequent development … up until now, of course, when Polish nationalism is suddenly a crucial bulwark for the liberal democratic West.

So liberals watching the floundering of populism need a balanced understanding of their own position, their dependence on nationalism and particularism and even chauvinism, their obligation to sift those forces so that the good (admiration for the patriotism of Ukrainians and the heroic masculinity of Volodymyr Zelensky) outweighs the bad (boycotts of a Russian piano prodigy, a rush toward nuclear war).

And they also need to avoid the delusion that Putin’s wicked and incompetent invasion means that all complaints about the West’s internal problems can safely be dismissed as empty, false, self-hating.

Last week, for instance, the Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that Putin’s invasion disproves “all the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China.” With the West rallying to a resilient Ukraine, “all of that turned out to be bunk.”

What was bunk was the idea that Putin’s Russia represents some kind of efficient postliberal or traditionalist alternative to the problems of the West, and one whose military could simply steamroller Eastern Europe. But all those Western problems remain: American power is in relative decline, China’s power has dramatically increased, and none of what I, as a self-appointed expert on the subject, would classify as the key problems of American decadence — demographic decline, economic disappointment and stagnation, a social fabric increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide — have somehow gone away just because Moscow’s military is failing outside Kyiv.

Since those problems are crucial to understanding where populism came from in the first place, it’s reckless for liberals to declare victory based on shifts in the international order while simply waving domestic discontents away. Populism’s poor fit for this particular moment has given an opportunity to its enemies and critics. But they will squander the opportunity if they convince themselves that the external challenge has somehow made the internal crisis go away.

Nina Khrushcheva

Dear Commons Community,

“Russia is done,”  Nina Khrushcheva said in an interview with Yahoo News, whose grandfather was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, an ethnic Russian whose rise through the communist ranks mostly took place in Ukraine.  Khrushcheva is a Professor of International Affairs in the graduate program at The New School in New York City and  director of the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute.

It was Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, who returned Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 as a Soviet administrative region, putting in motion the geopolitical shifts that would, much later, result in war. 

Six decades later — in 2014 — Putin first invaded Ukraine to recover Crimea, as well as two eastern territories home to many ethnic Russians. When he launched a full-scale invasion last month, he blamed his Soviet predecessors for making mistakes he said it was now his duty to correct. 

Few outside the Kremlin see it that way. “Russia is hated by the rest of the world,” Khrushcheva said, predicting a period of deepening international isolation. “Russia is the global enemy. That doesn’t end quickly,” she said, pessimistically envisioning “another 100 years of us being villains of the universe.” On Friday, President Biden announced that the United States, the European Union, Canada and Asia were all revoking Russia’s status as a favored trading partner, a move that comes on top of several rounds of sanctions and an exodus by Western corporations like McDonald’s.

Though it is not clear how long the sanctions will last, “it’s pretty clear that Russia will become poorer and more technologically backward. The choices for its citizens will be radically diminished and for many, many years to come,” Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations told The Hill.

Moscow will certainly look to Beijing in response, and while China has avoided joining the chorus of condemnation directed at Russia, its own vast ambitions could leave Putin indebted to a dangerous degree.

What is already clear, however, is that three decades of hoping that Russia would emerge from the Cold War, like Germany, as a full-fledged modern democracy have been decisively dashed. The departure of McDonald’s, which opened on Red Square in 1990 to surging fascination, was a poignant symbol of disappointment in how little has changed since communism’s collapse.

The initial sanctions were not a surprise to the Kremlin, which almost welcomed them with a show of defiance. Nor, so far, have they served as a deterrent. In Putin’s own speeches and writings — including a remarkably frank English-language essay two years ago in the National Interest, an American publication — he discusses history in geopolitical terms, and he may be willing to countenance collective suffering to achieve his vision of a restored Russian empire that encompasses Ukraine and perhaps other ex-Soviet states. But achieving that vision has already caused widespread suffering for Russians and Ukrainians alike, leading to the kind of near-universal condemnation that is rare in a world of complex and competing national interests.

“Vladimir Putin is isolated and morally dead,” the lead editorial in a recent issue of the Economist thundered, with the magazine comparing him to Joseph Stalin, the brutal Soviet dictator whose image Putin has assiduously worked to rehabilitate.

Khrushcheva thinks such comparisons are unfair — to Stalin. “Even Stalin had an idea,” she said, adding that she has no sympathy for the ruthless Soviet despot who sent millions of his citizens to death and prison. The point of the comparison, rather, is to underscore Putin’s failure to articulate a reason for invading Ukraine, a nation that does share many cultural and historical ties with Russia but has been sovereign since 1991.

She deemed Putin’s vision of a “pan-Slavic state” encompassing Russia, Ukraine and Belarus as “beyond backward-looking,” not to mention out of touch with a Russian populace whose appetite for war he may have misjudged.

Still, war is being waged in the Russian name. And the longer it continues, the more dangerous Putin arguably becomes. Projecting strength is a key feature of his foreign policy — and has been for decades. “You must hit first, and hit so hard that your opponent will not rise to his feet,” he told Russian interviewers in 2000 about the second war he launched against Chechnya. The conflict reduced the breakaway republic to rubble, leaving little but grief and destruction in the wake of the Russian army.

Similar fears are mounting with Russian troops approaching Kyiv, though Putin may not be willing to outright destroy the historically significant city. Failing to seize the Ukrainian capital, however, would be tantamount to defeat. “I don’t think Russia has a ‘best outcome,'” Khrushcheva believes. “Russia doesn’t have a good solution — at all.”

An outcome short of clear victory could prove personally devastating for Putin, who has wielded his power virtually unchallenged for two decades. So far, attempts at a negotiated peace have failed while confusion over the path ahead — on both diplomatic and military fronts — appears to be deepening.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes that a Ukrainian resistance bolstered by the West will ultimately prevail against a Russian military that has the advantage of size but suffers from poor leadership and low morale. The war will end in an “outright defeat” for Russia, Fukuyama argued in a recent blog post, and the subsequent collapse of Putin’s regime: “He gets support because he is perceived to be a strongman; what does he have to offer once he demonstrates incompetence and is stripped of his coercive power?”

Khrushcheva thinks that even if Putin is replaced as president, the kleptocratic power structure he created will remain, simply allowing a successor to take over without making reforms, the way Dmitry Medvedev did when he became president in 2008. (Putin could not serve a third term at that time because of term limits; he has since changed that law, assuring his own rule into near perpetuity.)

“The system is not going anywhere,” Khrushcheva told Yahoo News. And she finds discussion of a post-Putin Russia far too premature. “His popularity is rising,” she said. Though polling can be inaccurate in Russia, his approval rating last month was above 70 percent. “People will rally around the flag,” Khrushcheva predicted. And she did not have in mind the banners of Ukrainian yellow and blue that have become commonplace in many Western cities.

When he invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin almost certainly expected a quick, decisive conquest that would restore the Kremlin’s influence in Eastern Europe and burnish his own status as a Russian leader on par with Peter and Catherine the Great.

Weeks later, Russia is a hobbled pariah, while the dogged Ukrainian resistance — led by charismatic President Volodymyr Zelensky — has attained admiration in much of the world.

There is little doubt that the Russian army has the firepower to level its smaller neighbor if it chooses to. But the costs to Russian society could be enormous for years, even generations, to come.

Khrushcheva might have it right!

Tony

Video Courtesy of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty

Dear Commons Community,

An anti-war protester interrupted a live news bulletin on Russia’s state TV Channel One yesterday, holding up a sign behind the studio presenter and shouting slogans denouncing the war in Ukraine.

The sign, in English and Russian, read: “NO WAR. Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They are lying to you here.” Another phrase, which looked like “Russians against war”, was partly obscured.

The extraordinary act of dissent took place on day 19 of the war which began when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what he called a special military operation.  As reported by Reuters.

“Stop the war. No to war,” the woman protester could be heard shouting, as the news anchor continued to read from her teleprompter.

The protester could be seen and heard for several seconds before the channel switched to a different report to remove her from the screen.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked the protester in his nightly video address:

“I am grateful to those Russians who do not stop trying to convey the truth. To those who fight disinformation and tell the truth, real facts to their friends and loved ones,” Zelenskiy said. “And personally to the woman who entered the studio of Channel One with a poster against the war.”

Kira Yarmysh, spokeswoman for jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, wrote on Twitter: “Wow, that girl is cool.”

She posted a video of the incident, which quickly racked up more than 2.6 million views.

State TV is the main source of news for many millions of Russians, and closely follows the Kremlin line that Russia was forced to act in Ukraine to demilitarise and “denazify” the country, and to defend Russian-speakers there against “genocide”. Ukraine and most of the world have condemned that as a false pretext for an invasion of a democratic country.

The woman was named by OVD-Info, an independent protest-monitoring group, and by the head of the Agora human rights group, as Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of the channel.

Pavel Chikov, head of Agora, said Ovsyannikova had been arrested and taken to a Moscow police station. Tass news agency said she may face charges under a law against discrediting the armed forces, citing a law enforcement source.

The law, passed on March 4, makes public actions aimed at discrediting Russia’s army illegal and bans the spread of fake news or the “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation”. The offence carries a jail term of up to 15 years.

In a video recorded before the incident and posted online, a woman who appeared to be Ovsyannikova described herself as a Channel One employee and said she was ashamed to have worked for years spreading Kremlin propaganda. She said her father was Ukrainian, and her mother Russian.

“What is happening now in Ukraine is a crime, and Russia is the aggressor country. The responsibility for that aggression lies on the conscience of only one man, and that man is Vladimir Putin,” she said.

“Now the whole world has turned away from us and the next 10 generations of our descendants will not wash away the shame of this fratricidal war,” she said.

She urged Russians to go out and demonstrate.

Authorities have broken up anti-war protests. According to OVD-Info, which monitors protests and provides legal assistance to those detained, a total of 14,911 people have been arrested.

What a courageous act!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ten days before the University of California at Berkeley was scheduled to notify applicants whether they’d been accepted in-person, online, or for the spring semester only, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation yesterday to allow it to avoid those distinctions — a response to court-ordered enrollment cuts — for the coming fall.

Both the State Senate and the California State Assembly had voted unanimously earlier in the day in favor of SB 118/AB 168, which essentially overrides the decision of the state Supreme Court. That court had upheld two lower court rulings freezing enrollment at 2020-21 levels.

Late Monday, Newsom, a Democrat, signed the bill into law. “I’m grateful to the legislature for moving quickly on this critical issue,” the governor said in a prepared statement. “It sends a clear signal that California won’t let lawsuits get in the way of the education and dreams of thousands of students, our future leaders and innovators.”  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education,

The measure gives Berkeley 18 months to complete an environmental review of its expansion efforts before a court-ordered freeze on enrollment can take place. The law also changes the California Environmental Quality Act so that enrollment shifts don’t constitute, by themselves, a “project” subject to environmental restrictions.

The university is scheduled to send out acceptances for its fall 2022 class by March 24, and it had planned to tell 1,000 students they could enroll online-only for the fall semester and 635 more that they’d have to defer to the spring semester. Now, that won’t be necessary.

As a result of the new law, the university will return to its original admissions and enrollment targets, a campus spokesman, Dan Mogulof said. In late March, it will offer admission to more than 15,000 incoming freshmen and then in mid-April, to more than 4,500 transfer students. As it does each year, Berkeley will enroll a small number of students in the spring, but nowhere near the number the now-scrapped mitigation plan had called for. All admissions offers will be for on-campus learning. The approximately 400 graduate-school seats the university had planned to cut will be reinstated.

Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol T. Christ, thanked lawmakers “on behalf of thousands of students who will benefit” from the new law. “At Berkeley we are, and will remain, committed to continuing our efforts to address a student-housing crisis through new construction of below-market housing,” she said in a written statement. “We look forward to working in close, constructive collaboration with our partners in Sacramento in order to advance our shared interest in providing California students with an exceptional experience and education.”

Michael V. Drake, president of the University of California system, said the legislation affirms the university’s obligations under state environmental laws “while also safeguarding the bright futures of thousands of hardworking prospective UC-Berkeley students.”

The neighborhood group that sued the university over its recent expansion blasted the legislation as “poorly drafted and confusing.”

“UC-Berkeley does not have the capacity to handle more students, and more than 10 percent of current Berkeley students suffer homelessness during their education. In addition, more than 15 percent suffer from food insecurity,” Phil Bokovoy, president of Save Berkeley Neighborhoods, said in a statement. “We don’t want new students to have to live in cars, campers, and hotel rooms like they are in Santa Barbara.”

Bokovoy predicted the measure would worsen the area’s housing crisis and result in additional litigation.

Good move on the part of the California Legislature and Governor Newsom!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the U.S. Department of Education has warned Florida officials, in a letter sent on Thursday, that forcing the state’s public colleges to seek new accreditation, as required under a bill passed earlier this week, could mean losing access to federal student loans, Pell Grants, and other forms of financial aid.

“Proposals to amend state law must be drafted and implemented carefully to ensure that they do not put institutions and the students they enroll at risk of loss of eligibility for federal financial-aid programs,” says the letter, which was sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who is expected to sign the bill into law.

Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for the governor, said DeSantis continued to support the legislation. “We love the bill — higher-education institutions should be held accountable,” Griffin wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

The State Board of Education, which oversees Florida’s 28 public colleges, also received a copy of the department’s letter. The board did not respond to a request for comment. As reported by The Chronicle.

The Education Department raises three issues in its letter, notably that any college applying to a new accreditor must get approval from the secretary of education and demonstrate a “reasonable cause” for that change. The process is intended to “prevent institutions from changing accreditors in search of lower standards, which may be implicated here,” says the letter, which was signed by James R. Kvaal, the under secretary of education. Since the bill may be the first of its kind, it’s not clear whether a requirement under state law would be considered a reasonable cause.

In addition, the letter says, federal regulations prohibit any college from changing accreditors if it is under any kind of sanction from its current accreditor. That includes actions that don’t necessarily result in the removal of accreditation, such as show cause or probation, though no public college in the state is now under sanction from its accreditor.

Colleges must also be voluntary members of an accrediting organization, the letter explains, but “it is not clear to the department that Florida institutions seeking a new agency, and the agencies accrediting them, would meet the voluntary requirement.”

If an accreditor accepted a college that was not applying voluntarily, it could lose federal recognition and could no longer serve as a gatekeeper for federal student aid — a key role performed by accreditors. That could be a big disincentive for other accrediting organizations to accept Florida colleges as members.

The letter also raises questions about a provision in the legislation allowing any college in the state, public or private, to sue an accreditor if the institution is “negatively impacted by retaliatory action,” according to the bill’s language. “Any dispute involving a final denial, withdrawal, or termination of accreditation” must first go through arbitration before any other legal action could be taken, the department wrote. The possibility of such a legal challenge could be another disincentive for other accreditors to accept Florida colleges as members.

If a college did sue, the lawsuit would probably be moved to a federal court, where judges generally defer to the decisions of accrediting organizations, said Jan Friis, senior vice president for government affairs at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

The department also repeated concerns from accreditation experts that the bill would be costly and an administrative burden for many institutions.

Florida’s Legislature gave final approval on Wednesday to the bill, which also would allow the Board of Governors to call for post-tenure review every five years. Republican lawmakers, who overwhelmingly supported the measure, argued in support of it that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, the accreditor that currently oversees all the state’s public colleges, has not done enough to raise student performance.

Democrats, who largely opposed the bill, and national higher-education experts warned that it was ill conceived and could lead to unintended consequences, such as the possible loss of access to federal student aid.

Critics of the measure see it as retribution for the accreditor’s inquiries about academic freedom at the University of Florida and political interference in the presidential search at Florida State University.

 Tony

Ezra Klein

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Ezra Klein, has a piece this morning calling out a broad set of governmental checks on development that have done a lot of good over the years but are doing a lot of harm now. When they were first designed,  they were needed, now they are powerful allies of an intolerable status quo, rendering government plodding ineffectual and making it almost impossible to build and expand infrastructure at the speed we need.  He uses the current controversy with the University of Berkeley’s plan to expand as an example of government legislation that impedes development that might be desirable.

The entire column entitled, Government Is Flailing, in Part Because Liberals Hobbled It, is below.

Tony

——————————————————————–

The New York Times

Government Is Flailing, in Part Because Liberals Hobbled It

March 13, 2022Top of Form

Bottom of Form

By Ezra Klein

There’s a strange story unfolding in Berkeley, Calif., right now. That may present as a tautology, but bear with me. This one provides a window into a problem that endangers us all.

An organization called Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, led by a former investment banker, sued the University of California, Berkeley for adding too many students, too quickly, without careful enough consideration of how bad students are for the environment.

If the number of students at U.C. Berkeley seems of questionable environmental relevance, well, I’d say you’re right. If this sounds to you like a bunch of homeowners who don’t want more college kids partying nearby, I’d probably agree. But the courts sided with Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods and froze the university’s enrollment at last year’s levels, forcing it to potentially cut back in-person admission for thousands of students and ordering it to conduct a deeper assessment of the harm students could inflict (more trash, more noise, more homelessness and more traffic were all mentioned in the court case, if you’re curious about the specifics).

This kind of NIMBYISM is noxious. The way to ease homelessness in Berkeley is to build more homes for everyone, not keep out a bunch of kids looking to better their lives. And if there’s too much trash, maybe nearby homeowners, who’ve seen their property values rise to astonishing levels in large part because of U.C. Berkeley’s gleam, should pay higher property taxes for more frequent pickup. But on its own, it’s hard to get too exercised about this suit. The world has bigger problems than the size of Cal’s incoming class.

Zoom out from the specifics, though, and look at what it reveals about how government, even in the bluest of blue communities, actually works. Why was it so easy for a few local homeowners to block U.C. Berkeley’s plans, over the opposition of not just the powerful U.C. system but also the mayor of Berkeley and the governor of California? The answer, in this case, was the California Environmental Quality Act — a bill proposed by environmentalists and signed into law in 1970 by Gov. Ronald Reagan that demands rigorous environmental impact reviews for public projects, and that has become an all-purpose weapon for anyone who wants to stymie a new public project or one that requires public approval.

There are laws like this in many states, and there’s a federal version, too — the National Environmental Policy Act. They’re part of a broader set of checks on development that have done a lot of good over the years but are doing a lot of harm now. When they were first designed, these bills were radical reforms to an intolerable status quo. Now they are, too often, powerful allies of an intolerable status quo, rendering government plodding and ineffectual and making it almost impossible to build green infrastructure at the speed we need.

A bit of history is useful here. The environmentalism movement as we know it today was built around the risks posed by humans acting too fast, without sufficient consideration of consequences. Government was, in this era, part of the problem. A big part. This is a story Paul Sabin, a historian at Yale, tells in “Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism.” In it, Sabin questions the received wisdom that it was a revolt on the right that got Americans to see government as an incompetent foe rather than a powerful friend. The most potent attacks, as he sees it, came from inside the Democrats’ house.

These attacks were mounted for good reason. America’s major cities were choked with smog. Developers paid little heed to the presence of precious ecosystems or rare habitats. An explosion of industrial innovation led to an explosion of industrial runoff and novel chemicals and byproducts were dumped into waterways, poisoning people and wildlife alike. America was growing, and the government was trying to sustain and support that growth. The environment was an afterthought, if that.

As Sabin writes, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the foundational text of modern environmentalism, was an attack on “government-led efforts to deploy science and engineering” and “the legitimacy and trustworthiness of agency decision-making.” Ralph Nader, and the manifold organizations he birthed, was similarly focused on the failures of government agencies.

What emerged was an entire branch of liberalism — and a whole universe of activist organizations, and even laws — dedicated to critiquing and then suing and restraining government. As Sabin writes:

Litigation by leading public interest environmental law firms in the early 1970s almost exclusively targeted the government for legal action. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund boasted of seventy-seven legal accomplishments between 1971 and 1973. Approximately seventy sought to block government actions, or to intervene in public proceedings to influence government regulatory and permitting practices. The Environmental Defense Fund similarly began its 1972 case summary with a list of acronyms for the ten federal agencies named in its legal interventions. In more than sixty of its sixty-five listed legal actions, the Environmental Defense Fund either intervened in public proceedings, such as government permitting processes for private projects or directly assailed a government-led initiative. Fewer than five of EDF’s legal actions directly targeted companies or private parties. Similarly, only three out of twenty-nine of NRDC’s legal action initiatives from its first seven months directly named a corporate defendant.

I want to say this as clearly as I can: Carson and Nader and those who followed them were, in important respects, right. The bills they helped pass — from the Clean Air Act to the National Environmental Policy Act — were passed for good reason and have succeeded brilliantly in many of their goals. That it’s easy to breathe the air in Los Angeles today is their legacy, and they should be honored for it.

But as so often happens, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Processes meant to promote citizen involvement have themselves been captured by corporate interests and rich NIMBYs. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again,” Sabin writes.

Larry Hogan, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger

Dear Commons Community,

While the presidential primaries are still two years away, the reality is that campaigning will start in earnest after the midterm elections later this year.  However, several prominent anti-Trump Republicans are already indicating potential runs for the presidential nomination.  As reported by the Associated Press. 

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is planning trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., is considering a rough timeline for a potential presidential announcement. And allies of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., are openly talking up her White House prospects.

More than two years before the next presidential election, a shadow primary is already beginning to take shape among at least three fierce Republican critics of former President Donald Trump to determine who is best positioned to occupy the anti-Trump lane in 2024.

Their apparent willingness to run — even if Trump does, as is widely expected — represents a shift from previous years when “Never Trump” operatives failed to recruit any GOP officeholders to challenge the incumbent president. But with the 2024 contest almost in view, the question is no longer whether one of Trump’s prominent Republican critics will run, but how many will mount a campaign and how soon they will announce.

Those close to Cheney, Hogan and Kinzinger expect one of them, if not more, to launch a presidential bid after the 2022 midterms. While all three are nationally known to some degree, their goal would not necessarily be to win the presidency. Above all, they want to hinder Trump’s return to the White House, at least compared with 2020, when his allies cleared the field of any Republican opponents and persuaded some states to cancel primary contests altogether.

“It’s there as an option, but it’s not necessarily because this is all some big plan so I can be in the White House,” Kinzinger told The Associated Press when asked about his timeline for deciding on a presidential run. “It’s looking and saying, ‘Is there going to be a voice out there that can represent from that megaphone the importance of defending this country and democracy and what America is about?’ There certainly, I’m sure within the next year or so, will be a point at which you have to make a decision.

“If it’s not me doing anything, certainly we’ll be all in for whoever can represent us,” Kinzinger said.

Republican primary voters are expected to have other options.

Several former Trump loyalists who have emerged as on-again, off-again Trump critics are also eyeing the GOP’s next presidential nomination. Among them: former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. But most in this group have offered Trump far more praise than criticism, leaving the likes of Cheney, Hogan and Kinzinger as the only consistent Trump antagonists in the 2024 conversation.

The range of prospects suggests an openness within the GOP to move past Trump and his divisive politics, even as many Republican voters suggest they would like to see him run a third time.

About 7 in 10 Republicans said the former president should run for president again in 2024, according to a CBS poll last month. Among the most common reasons they cited: He’s the best Republican candidate and has the best chance of winning.

Lest anyone question his intentions, Trump told thousands of supporters Saturday night in South Carolina, “We may have to run again.” He remains the most popular figure among Republican voters and plans to use the upcoming midterms to keep bending the party in his direction. He was in South Carolina, for instance, to support GOP rivals to two incumbent members of Congress who have crossed him.

But those close to Cheney, Hogan and Kinzinger insist a significant number of less vocal Republican voters are eager to move past Trump, especially after he inspired the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. After all, 10 Republican representatives voted to impeach Trump and seven Republican senators subsequently voted to convict him.

“There is a large and growing lane of Republicans and Americans across the political spectrum who are fed up with toxic politics and want to move in a new direction,” Hogan told the AP. “While I’m focused on finishing my term as governor strong, I’m going to continue to stand up and be a voice for getting our party and our country back on the right track.”

For now, Cheney, Hogan and Kinzinger remain friendly and in semi-regular contact.

The 65-year-old, term-limited Hogan will leave office at the end of the year. He already decided against a 2022 Senate campaign, rebuffing an aggressive lobbying effort from Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. He said he saw himself as an executive more than a legislator.

Kinzinger, among 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump, chose not to seek reelection after his district was redrawn in the Democrats’ favor. Only Cheney, who also voted to impeach, is running to retain her seat in this fall’s midterms, although she is no lock to win her primary election in August.

Trump is pushing hard for Cheney’s defeat. And while her allies indicate she is focused on her reelection, it’s an open secret that she is seriously considering a presidential run once the 2022 race is decided.

By some measures, the 55-year-old daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney has the strongest national profile. Cheney is building a national fundraising network, as demonstrated by a $7.1 million fundraising haul in 2021, among the most in the nation for any House member.

Wyoming state Rep. Landon Brown, a Cheney ally, said this network will allow her to compete on a national scale. Of a Cheney presidential run, he said, “I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t” happen.

“She’s opened up the door across the country by standing up on a national platform that bridges that middle gap of the people that were frustrated on both the left and the right,” Brown said. “I don’t think it would be easy, but she would be a formidable candidate, for sure.”

Cheney has encouraged 2024 speculation by delivering prominent speeches about the future of the Republican Party in recent months, including a November address in New Hampshire, which typically hosts the first presidential primary election.

Meanwhile, both Hogan and Kinzinger are building political organizations that could serve as vehicles to promote their presidential ambitions after they leave office early next year.

Hogan’s advocacy group, America United, has millions in the bank, according to an adviser. To strengthen his network, Hogan is planning to travel to Iowa and New Hampshire — the first and second states on the traditional presidential primary calendar — to stump for local candidates in coming months.

Hogan is working to help Trump’s loudest Republican critics in other states as well.

Hogan had lunch last week with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who has refused to embrace Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Hogan also plans to host events for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif. He voted to impeach Trump for inspiring the Jan. 6 insurrection while Murkowski voted for Trump’s conviction.

Kinzinger’s outside group, Country First, now claims chapters in 38 states and a growing fundraising base.

The 44-year-old Illinois congressman, a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, plans to spend much of the year working to defeat Republicans in the midterms who promote Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Last month, he announced a plan to encourage Democrats and independents to cast ballots in Republican primaries when possible to oust pro-Trump candidates.

Kinzinger said he would even consider a 2024 run as an independent if that’s the best way to stop Trump, although he prefers to stay a Republican.

“This country is built really for two parties, like it or love it or hate it,” he told the AP. “Never rule anything out. But my hope would be to be able to find the salvation of the GOP.”

The Republican Party needs a presidential candidate who is not Trump!

Tony

New York Times Credit…Ben Hickey

Dear Commons Community,

This was the weekend that we changed out clocks to daylight savings time and as usual we hear debates about why we do we have to make this change.  The New York Times has an article that asks experts about the benefits of changing or not changing our clocks twice a year.  Below is an excerpt.

On Sunday, most people in the United States will “spring” their clocks forward by one hour, heralding the end of standard time (with its brighter mornings and darker evenings) and the beginning of daylight saving time.

But according to polls, most Americans don’t like changing the clocks twice a year, and the days after the switch are often a turbulent time for public health.

As a result, a growing cadre of scientists, politicians and business leaders have been urging the country to stop changing the clocks altogether, and to pick one permanent time system.

The only problem: Nobody can agree on which one to use.

The claim that darker mornings and brighter evenings would be a boon for public health has not been well studied, in part because it’s near impossible to conduct national experiments on the topic. And in fact, many related studies are limited and sometimes contradictory.

Nevertheless, a loud group of business leaders, academics and bipartisan senators have suggested that a permanent switch to daylight saving time would be beneficial for most people in the United States.

Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, introduced legislation in 2018 arguing that Americans shouldn’t have to suffer the sleep loss or hassle that comes with changing the clocks twice a year. Brighter afternoons, he (and other senators) have said, will make people more productive, well rested and happier.

Some limited yet related research seems to support that claim. In one 2017 study from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect.

There are economic interests as well. Some lobbyists in the retail and leisure industries have argued that more light in the evenings would give consumers more time to spend money — through shopping or golfing, for instance.

Some advocates also say that permanent daylight saving time might translate to fewer robberies. And they suggest savings in energy as well, since people won’t have to turn their lights on until later in the evening (though most research disputes that claim, or finds only a minor effect).

Proponents also argue that lighter evenings would lead to safer roads for pedestrians. And permanent daylight saving time in general would mean fewer fatal car crashes.

“Darkness kills; sunshine saves,” said Steve Calandrillo, a law professor at the University of Washington who has conducted economic research into daylight saving time. He said that the evening rush hour is already dangerous: The roads are crowded, drivers are tired after work and they are more likely to have alcohol in their systems.

But dark roads are only one factor in car safety.

Several coalitions of scientists, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, on the other hand, argue that standard time (with its brighter mornings) is more naturally aligned with the progression of the sun, and therefore with the body’s natural clock. However the studies in favor of this argument similarly do not prove cause and effect.

Scientists say that a permanent switch to daylight saving time might throw people’s circadian rhythms out of whack, leading to unintended health consequences.

Bright mornings help people wake up and stay alert; dark nights allow for the production of melatonin, the hormone that triggers sleep. When it’s too light at night, it can be hard to fall asleep. When it’s too dark in the morning, it can be hard to wake up. Together, both circumstances could lead to sleep deprivation.

One 2019 study, which looked at how light affects people at opposite ends of a single time zone, found that an extra hour of natural light in the evening led to an average of 19 fewer minutes of sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation has been linked to a range of health conditions, like obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

This “mismatch” between your internal clock and environmental cues, said Dr. Anita Shelgikar, an associate professor of neurology and director of the sleep medicine fellowship program at the University of Michigan, can disrupt your circadian rhythm.

Light cues from the sun also regulate metabolism, insulin production, blood pressure and hormones. And your circadian clock helps to control your immune system, so being out of whack during daylight saving time can wear down your body’s natural defenses.

“The idea is that you’re off-kilter,” said Dr. Beth Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics and the director of the sleep division at Vanderbilt Medical Center.

While no study has proved that standard time is best for human health, most experts agree that circadian misalignment can carry higher risks of some serious health conditions, including obesity, metabolic disorders, cardiovascular issues, depression and even cancer. A loud chorus of sleep researchers even suggest that resetting the clocks by just one hour during daylight saving time could trigger those same outcomes.

The movement to enact permanent daylight saving time is gaining momentum. More than a dozen states have passed legislation that would adopt permanent daylight saving time, and are now waiting for a federal greenlight. (Hawaii, most of Arizona and U.S. territories like Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are already in permanent standard time.)

I would not hold my breadth for any changes soon!

Tony

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed Britain’s Parliament by video call on Tuesday.Credit…Jessica Taylor/U.K. Parliament

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her column this morning comments on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky using lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to demonstrate his resolve to fight and defeat the Russians who have invaded his land.   

“The question for us now is to be or not to be,” Zelensky told the British Parliament in a video call on Tuesday, speaking in Ukrainian. “This is the Shakespearean question. For 13 days, this question could have been asked. But now I can give you a definitive answer. It’s definitely yes, to be.”  Here is an excerpt from Dowd’s column.

“As Simon Godwin, the director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C.,  noted of the TV sitcom actor turned Ukrainian wartime president, “He has become, in a way, the world’s greatest actor engaged with the world’s deepest truth, using a piece of poetry to express this truth in a forceful context.”

What made the Ukrainian president’s delivery so powerful was that the world is caught up in the existential questions raised by the moody prince of Denmark.

Will Zelensky live or die when Russian forces bear down? Will Ukraine exist as a sovereign nation? What does this crisis mean for the identity of America and the West — who will we be when this is over? Will the planet even survive?

Zelensky and the Ukrainians chose to stand for something, and to be. They are united as a democracy in a way America has not been for a long time, as we have become more and more riven over politics, with burning questions of reality and artifice; with the destructive partisanship of masks and Covid; and with the corrosive effect of our culture of greed, selfishness and billionaires.

Ukraine is showing a collective will, an inspiring community of people working together. Their heroic efforts against a gobbling tyrant set on empire recall America’s own beginning. They have also shown military experts that in a conventional war, the U.S. would smoke Russia. Its military has been shockingly slow and stumbling, even as it has inflamed people around the world by killing children and fleeing civilians.

President Biden and his generals are facing their own existential moment as they try to figure out the incredibly knotty problem of where the line is. Are Javelins OK and MiGs too far? How do we do everything we can to help Ukraine without spurring a sadistic and unhinged Vladimir Putin to start World War III and a nuclear conflagration?

Despite the threat, we must stand by Ukraine in what its ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, calls “the 1939 moment” of good versus evil.

As Illia Ponomarenko, a reporter for The Kyiv Independent, tweeted Friday (vulgarity excised): “I wonder how many Ukrainian cities Russia needs to carpet-bomb until the West realizes that every time it refuses to give Ukraine a weapon for ‘fear of provoking Putin’ is an invitation for further escalation in war.”

I talked to George Pataki, the former governor of New York, who is in Ukraine, near Hungary, helping refugees.

“When we ask Ukrainians what they most want, the answer we always get is, ‘Close the sky,’ because families, homes and towns are being devastated from above by the Russian military,” he said. “And it’s very disappointing not to be able to answer that question. I understand we’re not going to create a no-fly zone, but we should give the Ukrainians the material support to enable them to create their own no-fly zone.”

Echoing our military leaders, Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia, told Stephen Colbert on Thursday night that a “no-fly zone is a euphemism for a declaration of war. That means an American pilot shoots down a Russian pilot, and that’s a declaration of war.” Give Ukraine everything short of that in terms of military weapons and sanctions, he said.

The attenuated debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan have left many Americans weary of conflict. But this is no time for us to withdraw into ourselves.

It is a horrible position Biden is in, dealing with an irrational, soulless fiend with over 4,000 nukes who thinks he can glue the Soviet empire back together with the blood of innocents.

As Hamlet said, the oppressor’s wrong.”

May God be with Zelensky and the Ukrainian people!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former Vice President Mike Pence has spent the past couple of weeks outmaneuvering Donald Trump, his old boss and potential 2024 primary opponent.  He has used a series of speaking engagements, media appearances and private meetings — most recently with the influential GOP mega-donor Miriam Adelson — to carve-out a unique lane for himself in a potentially crowded and contentious Republican primary field.  As reported by The Hill.

“There’s pretty clearly an opportunity for him to come out and say ‘look, we want the Trump policies but let’s have it without the chaos,’” one Republican strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns said.

“Pence is perfectly placed to do that, because he has the credentials of supporting Trump and being loyal through the administration. But he can also kind of meld it with more traditional conservative talking points.”

At times, Pence’s strategy has meant distancing himself from — and even outright criticizing — Trump, who remains the standard-bearer for the modern GOP and is eyeing a possible comeback bid for the White House in 2024.

In a rebuke of his former boss last week, Pence declared that “there is no room” in the GOP for “apologists” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, an apparent reference to Trump’s description of the Russian leader as a “genius” for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Pence also offered a forceful rejection last month of Trump’s claim that Pence had the authority to change the results of the 2020 presidential election, asserting plainly that the former president was “wrong.”

To be sure, the former vice president is still embracing aspects of Trump’s agenda — the decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, for example, or opening up public lands for oil and gas exploration — signaling that he’s still hoping to appeal to at least parts of Trump’s voter base.

But he has also sought to present a more forward-looking vision. Speaking to GOP donors on Friday, Pence warned that Republicans “cannot win by fighting yesterday’s battles or by relitigating the past.”

“Elections are about the future,” he said. “My fellow Republicans, we can only win if we are united around an optimistic vision for the future based on our highest values.”

Pence’s more aggressive posture is, in essence, a political gamble that the GOP and its voters are increasingly interested in moving past Trump, while also positioning himself as the obvious successor to the former president’s political movement and legacy.

But some Republicans say that time may be running out for the former vice president.

“Pence is in a great position. He’s got a national profile. He was the guy’s vice president. He can say you can get what you wanted with Trump without all the issues,” said Keith Naughton, a veteran Republican strategist. “I think the problem is he’s losing relevance fast. It’s draining away.”

Naughton said that part of Pence’s challenge is the fact that he’s spent much of the past year being “risk-averse” when it comes to confronting Trump and pitching himself as the GOP’s future standard-bearer. While he spoke out against those in the GOP who have praised Putin, for instance, he stopped short of calling out his former boss by name.

And even in pushing back against Trump’s narrative that the former vice president had the power to block the congressional certification process, Pence did not explicitly say that Trump lost the 2020 election, nor did he rebut his former boss’s claim that the election was stolen.

In the meantime, Naughton added, many Republican voters have begun to eye other would-be candidates, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has more readily cast himself in a similar mold to Trump.

“[Pence] has been afraid to mark out that territory,” Naughton said. “And DeSantis is filling the vacuum.”

Still, Pence hasn’t joined other prospective Republican presidential contenders in pledging not to run if Trump mounts another campaign for the White House in 2024. In an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo this week, Pence insisted that he was focused on helping the GOP in this year’s midterm elections but left open the possibility of a 2024 run.

“In 2023, I’m confident the Republican Party will nominate a candidate who will be the next president of the United States of America,” Pence said. “And at the right time, my family and I will reflect and consider how we might participate in that process.”

As it stands right now, however, Pence could face an uphill battle for the 2024 Republican nomination.

The Conservative Political Action Conference’s 2024 presidential straw poll late last month found Pence notching just 1 percent support for the GOP nod — with or without Trump on the ballot. Pence was notably absent from that gathering.

Likewise, a Yahoo! News/YouGov survey conducted at the end of February found the former vice president placing third in a hypothetical GOP primary field behind Trump and DeSantis. Pence notched just 8 percent support in that poll.

Even if Trump doesn’t run in 2024, he could emerge as a major roadblock for Pence. The former president has already attacked Pence, calling him “an automatic conveyor belt” to “get Biden elected president as quickly as possible.” And in the event that he forgoes another presidential bid, it’s unlikely that Trump will let the primary play out without his input.

“The foremost problem for Pence: Trump still blames him, at least partially, for not doing more to keep him in the White House,” one former Trump campaign aide said. “So I think of all the Republicans out there, Trump would least want Pence to be on the ticket.”

“If Trump doesn’t run, he’s going to go all-out to knock out Pence.”

Run Pence run and don’t be afraid of the bully Trump!

Tony