A selection of powerful news photographs taken around the world this week.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Earlier this month, a Black man named Keenan Darnell Anderson died at a Southern California hospital hours after he was repeatedly Tasered by LAPD officers as they attempted to arrest him following a traffic accident. In video footage where he alternately seems to be asking for help and confusedly resisting arrest, “the officers tell Anderson that if he does not stop resisting, they will Taser him,” MSNBC reported. “The video shows one officer, who appears to be Black, placing his elbow on Anderson's neck to pin him to the ground. At one point, Anderson yells, ‘They’re trying to George Floyd me.’” The story continues, “Police Chief Michel Moore said Anderson had committed a felony hit-and-run and tried to ‘get into another person's car without their permission.’”

I have no idea how to apportion blame in this particular death, but in an opinion article, also at MSNBC, Ja’han Jones contrasted “the widespread public outrage over Floyd’s death” and the dearth of attention paid to the death in Los Angeles. “What are we to make of this difference?” he wrote. “Has the public gotten busier since then? Crueler? More fickle? More tolerant of violence? More futile in our response to it? Where are the black Instagram squares, the corporate news releases claiming to stand for racial justice, the social media posts about white folks listening and learning about their privilege?” But Jones neglects to acknowledge that none of those responses did anything to lessen the number of police killings.

A subsequent Slate article titled “What Happened to the National Outrage Over Police Killings?” offered variations on the same theme. Its author, Shirin Ali, began by asserting that “an ongoing analysis by The Washington Post found Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans—and in 2022, police killed the highest number of people on record.” That’s misleading, as the criminologist Peter Moskos pointed out: There were more police killings in 2022 than any year in the Washington Post database of fatal police shootings, but the newspaper has only been keeping track since 2015.

There is evidence to suggest police killings are much lower today than in the past. Moskos has found historical data on 18 major cities showing a 69 percent drop in police shootings since the early- to mid-1970s. Police in New York City and Los Angeles both shoot fewer people than they did then, even though the cities’ populations are now much bigger.

Nevertheless, police in America still kill far more people than in other liberal democracies. The Yale professor Phillip Goff, the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, told Slate that although periodic reforms to American policing have improved it over the decades, police reform has also been stymied. The culprit, in his telling, is “people who think the best way to manage vulnerable Black communities is to lock them up or commit acts of violence whenever they are in a place where they shouldn’t be, where they violate a law that was made to give them opportunities to lock the folks up.”

Reading both articles, I was struck not so much by what was said as by what was neglected: hugely significant factors that are obviously influencing how Americans respond to police shootings compared with how they responded in 2013, when protesters marked the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; or during ensuing years, as #BlackLivesMatter began growing from a hashtag into an international movement; or in 2020, when Floyd was killed and the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in America and abroad.

What happened to the national outrage over police killings? It has been muted, in part, by a spike in gun homicides that dwarfs police killings in the number of Black lives that it has destroyed. The outrage has also been muted, in part, by trepidation after the weeks in 2020 when several anti-racist protests were marred by incidents of arson, vandalism, and looting, resulting in as much as $2 billion in damage and as many as  19 people killed. If history is any guide, affected neighborhoods will suffer for decades, disproportionately harming Black and brown communities and businesses.

And although it has always been hard to disentangle the exact relationship between the hearteningly widespread, decentralized activist movement Black Lives Matter and the coalition of groups called the Movement for Black Lives, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the Black Lives Matter PAC, and more, outrage is more muted now in part because of infighting among some prominent activists within these groups. Several individuals have come under scathing criticism from some of the very families they purported to champion, or are doing who-knows-what-exactly (some bought luxury real estate) with an unprecedented windfall of grassroots contributions.

Those of us who still want to improve policing need to face reality: Probing why Americans are reacting differently to the most recent death of a Black man after an encounter with police, without at least grappling with all that went wrong in recent years, is doomed to fail.  

Long before Black Lives Matter’s ascent, I was among those inveighing against policing injustices and America’s catastrophic War on Drugs, and trying and failing to significantly reduce police misconduct. Black Lives Matter arose in part because most of us who came before it largely failed. When it did, I hoped it would succeed spectacularly in reducing police killings and agreed with at least its premise that the issue warranted attention.

But it is now clear that the Black Lives Matter approach has largely failed too.

Despite an awareness-raising campaign as successful as any in my lifetime, untold millions of dollars in donations, and a position of influence within the progressive criminal-justice-reform coalition, there are just as many police killings as before Black Lives Matter began. Politically, a powerful faction inside the movement sought to elect more radical progressives; Donald Trump and Joe Biden won the next presidential elections. That same faction sought to “defund the police”; police budgets are now rising, and “defund” is unpopular with majorities of every racial group.

Whether or not you think those reforms should have prevailed, they did not. If impact matters more than intent, the criminal-justice-reform movement needs an alternative to Black Lives Matter that has better prospects for actually improving real lives. Today, almost every American is aware of police killings as an issue. Awareness has been raised, and returns are diminished.

I wish I knew the best way forward. I lament the breakup of the constructive alliance of libertarians, progressives, and religious conservatives who cooperated during the Obama Administration to achieve some worthy criminal-justice reforms, and I continue to be impressed with the ethos Jill Leovy sketched out in the book Ghettoside, offering one strategy that would (in my estimation) dramatically increase equity in American policing. (I also urge everyone to revisit this newsletter’s previous installments on the death penalty, which highlight the powerful abolitionist arguments of my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig, and the war on drugs, which keeps imposing staggering costs while failing to prevent pandemic opioid deaths.)

This week’s question is “What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve the criminal-justice system?” I hope to air perspectives as diverse as the country, and perhaps plant seeds that grow into constructive new approaches.

Civilian Oversight and Its Discontents

At the Marshall Project, Jamiles Lartey describes the political battle in many municipalities over police-oversight boards, and argues that police unions frequently try to undermine their mission:

Resistance to oversight boards comes primarily from pro-law enforcement groups, especially police unions, who often make concerted efforts to dilute the power of the boards. Law enforcement voices frequently argue that civilians, by definition, don’t have the right knowledge to evaluate police actions. “It would be akin to putting a plumber in charge of the investigation of airplane crashes,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, told the Washington Post in 2021. When they can’t stop these oversight agencies, or weaken their powers, police unions sometimes seek to have allies placed in vacant board positions. In Chicago, where proponents recently won passage of a new oversight structure, WBEZ reported this week that the largest local police union is spending money “in an attempt to extend the union’s power into a domain created specifically to oversee the officers who make up the union’s membership.”

It’s common for negotiations about oversight bodies to include debate on whether people with close ties to the police (like former officers or family members of officers) are eligible to serve.

On the other side of the spectrum, some police abolitionists push back against these boards, arguing that they work “against deeper change.” It’s also not uncommon for community activists who initially back oversight boards to turn against them over time, frustrated by a lack of results. That’s how things are playing out in Dallas, where activists and board members are both expressing frustration with a board that had its powers expanded after the 2018 killing of Botham Jean by then-officer Amber Guyger. One board member told Bolts Magazine that their efforts were being “stonewalled,” “marginalized” and “put in a corner” by the department’s non-cooperation. The political wrangling about oversight boards is only one way that police departments and unions push back on accountability. In Boston, which rolled out its own independent watchdog body in 2021 (to mixed reviews), Mayor Michelle Wu is currently locked in a battle over the police union contract, and her desire to strengthen the disciplinary process for officer misconduct.

Continuing the DEI Conversation

In our last installment, I promised to run additional reader responses to the Question of the Week about diversity training and associated initiatives within organizations. Today’s collection explores how readers feel about the intersection of corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals and hiring practices.

Andy feels frustrated by a lack of specificity about what is expected of him––and a climate where open conversation and debate seems too risky to engage in:

In my company, we have a VP of Diversity, who has made a couple of presentations about how we “need” to be more diverse. But what does that look like? I’m in software. I’m a manager who has 10 people reporting to me. Five are white men (one an Orthodox Jew––how does he fit in?). One is an Asian man, one is an Asian woman, two are Indian women, and one is an Indian man. One of the Indian women is my highest-paid employee, deservedly. So, how much work do I have to do in order to make my team diverse?

So instead, we focus on “underrepresented,” which means women, Black, and Hispanic. Maybe gay or trans. How many "groups" do we put on the underrepresented list? Which ones? By the way, the other development manager working with me is a Black man, and our testing and product managers are Hispanic men. I’ve hired maybe 20 employees over my career. The majority are Indian, then Asian, men. My last few openings, I’ve had women recruiters, which, research says, is supposed to tilt the candidates toward women. Not working, I guess. Or maybe it’s actually reflective of the pool? Of course, there isn’t much room for discourse. I’m debating whether I should post this article in our “random” slack channel. Will I just get in trouble?

Jack hypothesizes that diversity work is less appealing when resources are scarce:

I took the all-day diversity class as a middle manager. The company was going through downsizing, which creates a zero-sum mentality that is not a good companion to confessions of moral turpitude, the holy grail of the day. Then the multimillion-dollar fee charged by the consultant came up, igniting two-way hostility.  A total fiasco. I concluded that movies would do a better job helping people internalize the diversity concepts.

D. believes that, for some positions, job candidates from historically underrepresented groups should get hired over white candidates for the sake of diversity, as opposed to a policy of strict nondiscrimination. But he is frustrated by his perception that his employer won’t admit that preference:

I am a card-carrying liberal teaching at a Canadian university. All members of hiring committees are mandated to do periodic equity training in order to sit on the committee, so I’ve done this at least twice. My experience is that the training is as good or as bad as the trainers: my second time was competent, boring, professional; it explained Canadian law and provincial law and university policies, and gave a few decent tips on how to balance the three when they are in conflict, which is pretty often.

But the first time was so insulting to our intelligence. What I most remember is the trainer’s complete ignorance of, or refusal to be honest about, affirmative action (which I support, by the way). The message was you must hire the best candidate, but make sure the best candidate is from an equity-deserving group. Our question: “Can we advertise that for diversity reasons we are only looking for, say, an Indigenous person to teach Indigenous studies?” The answer: “No, you can’t do that.” Our question: “So we have to accept applications from people who in reality have no chance of making the short list?” Their answer: “Hire the best person,” but with the implication that it would be a bad outcome to have a non-Indigenous instructor of Indigenous studies. I actually support the idea of diversity-oriented searches to address historical exclusion and present underrepresentation. Again, I’m a liberal.  But I don’t support lying in job ads.  

It’s the exact equivalent, in reverse, of the NFL mandate to give no-chance-in-hell interviews to minority head-coach candidates. So is the problem the training, or is it Canadian law, which refuses to call diversity preference or compensatory preference by its name, and just calls it “equity”? I’m not sure, but the English language weeps either way. To be clear, though, my awful experience was years back, and the second time, the trainers were pretty honest with us about the contradictions between laws at various levels.

Paul argues that the current approach to DEI generates a backlash from people who feel discriminated against:

I am a Ph.D. candidate at a flagship state university in the Midwest, and recently, a call was put out for scholarships and research funding. At the beginning of the application was the caveat that “priority will be given to underrepresented groups.” Although I am a military veteran, a “nontraditional” student (i.e. middle aged), and come from a rural and “underprivileged” background (whatever that means), I am quite persuaded that none of these “underrepresented” categories is what they meant. And that’s the problem.  

In modern academic circles, DEI initiatives engage in a good deal of coy linguistic posturing that is intended to signal “justice” but that actually sows confusion and resentment. It is well understood on campus that racial and sexual identities trump all other aspects of background and character, and that the commanding heights of student and faculty ambitions are occupied by a class of technocrats engaged in setting historical injustices straight. They do so, paradoxically, by engaging in precisely the kind of arbitrary and capricious discrimination that caused the historical injustices in the first place. And one daren’t lift so much as an eyebrow of critical inquiry (“Can we have a list of the groups to be favored and why?”) without risking professional sanction and social animus.

And even if these DEI programs were models of carefully and individually tailored merit-apportioning, it would hardly matter, since the general perception is quite the opposite. Like the Irish who “need not apply,” talented and ambitious men and women (if they are the wrong identity) quietly skulk to the sidelines to wait for the madness to end.

They don’t even look one another in the face.

Mike has concluded that it’s a waste of time for him to apply for jobs at an employer that is emphasizing certain kinds of DEI initiatives:

I was part of a layoff last week with nearly a universal demographic makeup: straight, white-looking men. The company was already 60 percent female. I have an MBA and a bunch of technical certifications. I look at data and can do analysis. Before I even respond to an inbound request from a prospective employer, I look at the DEI targets. If those targets require significant headcount growth or layoffs to meet goals based on historical trends … I will not apply or interview. I will point my POC and female friends their way.

It’s purely a numbers game.

The leaders are telling me they don’t want people like me … so they don’t get people like me. The shift from meritocracy to equity is going to cause businesses not focused on DEI to gain an advantage in the long term. I’m not less talented than I used to be; I am just the wrong race—and DEI is clear that being white makes me lower quality. There was one company I did accept an inbound with. They put their DEI targets against proportional talent metrics, and they wanted to promote proportionally. It was more work and didn’t look as good as the aggressive virtue signal, but I know if I land there, I just have to execute to win. TLDR: As a white male, when I see DEI, I know it normally means “We don’t want you, we don’t like you, and we will promote or hire literally anyone else if we can.”

James feels discarded by organizations with what he sees as an insufficient commitment to diversity and inclusion:

In my experience, as a visibly queer, Indigenous person in various leadership roles over the past decade, all that is being fulfilled by many diversity efforts––classes, webinars, newsletters, certification programs, and the like––is the documentation of completion rather than the work that should and must be done in order to actually effect change.

The people we should be listening to are Asian women, Black women, Indigenous women, queer women, and femmes of color—they are often at the bottom of the wage pool, subjected to microaggressions and outright discrimination. I’ve had a nonprofit leader ask me why we needed “another DEI class” when she had a certificate from just two or three years ago; I’ve had an instructor who touts a certification of excellence granted by some national institution or other using slurs and derogatory language about Indigenous people like it’s industry jargon. Because it is: Microaggressions; belittling remarks based on race, gender, identity, presentation, hair, makeup, clothes, body type; and the expectation of willingness to step into a stereotype are what we see. The closest thing many of us come to “inclusion” is that we’re all discarded in equal measure.

In an essay that takes aim at TikTok, Cory Doctorow puts forth a general theory of tech giants:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die … This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries? Do you have personal experiences with them? I’d love to hear from boosters and critics alike, especially if your commentary is grounded in something you’ve observed at work, school, or elsewhere in your life.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

“What if diversity trainings are doing more harm than good?”

That’s the headline of a recent New York Times op-ed by Jesse Singal, the writer, podcaster, and author of a 2018 Atlantic cover story, who delves into the multibillion-dollar diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry. While its advocates claim that “diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on,” Singal writes, in practice there is “little evidence that many of these initiatives work.” And the type of diversity training “that is currently in vogue—mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems—may well have a net-negative effect.”

I have a theory about why programs of that sort might fail. After Donald Trump was elected, I studied the political-psychology research on authoritarian personality types. I was especially impressed by the work of Karen Stenner, who found in her scholarship that “a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone blacks, let alone African Americans and their purported shortcomings” (though anti-Black, ideological racists do of course exist and African Americans are harmed regardless of what drives intolerance). “Ultimately,” Stenner contended, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”

As I explained in a 2019 article:

The distinction isn’t merely about word choice. It has critical implications for fighting and easing both racism and other forms of intolerance. For example, in an entirely separate experiment meant to manipulate the way authoritarians viewed “us” and “them,” subjects were told that NASA had verified the existence of alien life––beings “very different from us in ways we are not yet even able to imagine.” After being told that, the measured racial intolerance of authoritarian subjects decreased by half, a result that suggests a general intolerance of difference that varies with perceptions of otherness, not fixed antagonism against a racial group. Their boundaries (and thus their behavior!) can be swiftly altered, Stenner emphasized, just by this simple cognitive device of creating a “superordinate group”: making “black people look more like ‘us’ than ‘them’ when there are green people afoot.” Under these conditions, the authoritarians didn’t only become kinder to black people, Stenner noted; they also became more merciful to criminals—that is, less inclined to want a crackdown on perceived moral deviance.

As I went on to explain:

Stenner’s book reaches a conclusion that cuts against one of the main progressive strategies for fighting racism in American society: the belief that if we have the will, everyone can be socialized to respect and value difference. “All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,” she wrote.

The appearance of sameness matters, and “apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity,” so “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.

Put more simply, perhaps 15 percent of humans are psychologically ill-suited to dealing with difference—and when DEI-industry programming deliberately raises the salience of race in a given organization with the intention of urging anti-racism, the effect is to exacerbate differentism.

In an article that dovetails nicely with Stenner’s insights, Matthew Yglesias once explained why he believes that raising the salience of race in public-policy debates is frequently bad for anti-racism.

He wrote:

A deep body of scholarship across history, political science, and economics all broadly point toward the conclusion that increasing the salience of race can have harmful results.

One particularly frustrating example I came across years ago at Vox is that Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found in experimental settings that telling people about racial disparities in the criminal justice system made people less supportive of reform.

And you could react to that by thinking “wow, that sucks, people shouldn’t be so terrible,” but I think most people believe there are tradeoffs between harshness in the criminal justice system and public safety. And while more progressive-minded people would say that’s overstated, there are clearly some margins on which it’s true. So if you tell people a penalty will be applied in a racist way, for many of them, that’s appealing—the system can crack down on dealers and addicts while they personally can rest assured that if their kid happens to be caught doing drugs, he’ll be okay. By the same token, a friend who’s running for office told me that many of the people she speaks to who are most agitated about crime also hate traffic cameras. My guess is that’s precisely because traffic cameras don’t engage in racial discrimination, and nice middle-class white people don’t like the idea of an enforcement system that doesn’t exempt them.

In the specific case of the cameras, I think we should have more of them and that the aim of our criminal justice system more broadly should be to catch a larger share of offenders in a non-discriminatory way and then punish them less harshly. Ideally, everyone who speeds would get caught and fined and the fines wouldn’t necessarily be very high, but people would stop doing speeding because the odds of detection are overwhelming.

And in the general case, I think it’s clear that the goal should be to reduce the salience of race in public debate and focus on the direct objects of reducing poverty, making policing more accountable, improving schools, reducing air pollution, expanding health insurance coverage, and otherwise solving the big problems of American society. All of this would, mechanically, close racial gaps. But highlighting that is genuinely counterproductive.

I mention these writers at such length because many diversity-loving people find it surprising that DEI training could be counterproductive, and Stenner and Yglesias’s work offers plausible explanations for why. But the intersection of politics, psychology, and race is exactly the sort of wildly complicated subject area where epistemic modesty and airing diverse viewpoints is vital for truth-seeking, so I hope that fans of DEI training and members of the industry will stand up for their work.

But to defend the industry in aggregate will require a lot of explaining. As Singal wrote, “Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is ‘disappointing,’ wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, ‘considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.’”

The Harvard Business Review has been publishing articles that cast doubt on the efficacy of mainstream DEI approaches for years. “One reason why I found Jesse’s piece so compelling is that he’s echoing arguments I made more than a year ago,” David French wrote in The Dispatch. “I quoted from a 2018 summary of studies by Harvard University professor Frank Dobbin and and Tel Aviv University professor Alexandra Kalev that said, ‘Hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.’”

In French’s telling, that scholarship has implications for the culture wars:

We fight a tremendous amount over diversity training—even to the point of violating civil rights laws and the First Amendment—to either mandate or prohibit certain forms of DEI instruction when DEI instruction doesn’t impact hearts and minds much at all. It’s Diet Coke. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that just doesn’t deliver what its advocates hope for, nor does it foster identity politics in the way that many of its opponents fear.

… People just aren’t that malleable. For good and ill, we’re built of sterner, less flexible stuff, and periodic Corporate PowerPoints or group learning sessions can’t really shape peoples’ lives.

For more, see a podcast debate that Jane Coaston hosted on diversity initiatives and my 2021 profile of the entrepreneur and public intellectual Chloé Valdary, who offers an alternative approach to DEI training that she calls the Theory of Enchantment. Finally, for a deep dive into the history of the diversity-training industry, see Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s 2002 book Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.

“There’s No Planet B”

In Aeon, Arwen E. Nicholson and Raphaëlle D. Haywood reject the possibility of humanity moving off of Earth:

Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind?

No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere.

Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.

Gas Stoves and Asthma

Emily Oster attempts to evaluate the data.

Berlin’s Failing Army

Spiegel International argues that even with war raging in Ukraine, and the attendant need for German contributions to European security, the German military is in dire shape. It reports the following:

In June, the Bundestag passed a 100-billion-euro special fund for the German military, and in December the Budget Committee released the first 13 billion from that fund for eight defense projects, including the new F-35 combat aircraft. “It is clear that we must invest much more in the security of our country in order to protect our freedom and our democracy,” the chancellor said in his February address to the nation. Scholz also formulated his political expectations: “The goal is a powerful, cutting-edge, progressive Bundeswehr that can be relied upon to protect us.” The question is: How much progress has been made on fulfilling that pledge. Since then, after all, the Defense Ministry has been producing little in the way of announcements about restructuring and reform, instead landing on the front pages due to gaffes and catastrophic shortcomings.

One example: The commander of the 10th Tank Division reported to his superiors that during an exercise with 18 Puma infantry fighting vehicles, all 18 of them broke down. It was a worrisome incident given that the ultra-modern weapons systems are a key component of the NATO rapid-reaction force. There is a lack of munitions and equipment—and arms deliveries to Ukraine have only worsened the situation. “The cupboards are almost bare,” said Alfons Mais, inspector general of the German army, at the beginning of the war. André Wüstner, head of the German Bundeswehr Association, seconds him: “We continue to be in free fall.” The situation is so bad that the German military has become a favorite punchline of late-night comedy shows … The German military, to be sure, is no stranger to mockery and ridicule, but it hasn’t been this bad in a long time.  

Is This Morning in America?

David Brooks argues in The Atlantic that the future is brighter for the country than many now imagine:

If a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted. The economist Tyler Cowen suggests a thought experiment to illustrate this point. Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.” Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when they lose energy.

And creative energy is one thing America has in abundance.

Provocation of the Week

At Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Davis, California, some workers are trying to unionize. Faith Bennett reports on their grievances in Jacobin:

Like many other baristas and service workers, Peet’s employees are challenged by schedules that are delivered on short notice, unreliable hours, lean staffing, and difficulty securing coverage. As a result, café positions have high rates of turnover. But members of PWU are invested in making the job more sustainable for themselves and more tenable for those who come next.

In Davis, Peet’s workers report that they are often scheduled for shifts that are deliberately shortened so that they are not afforded breaks. Meanwhile mobile orders exacerbate understaffing issues: the company does not place restrictions on mobile orders, which often leads to a torrent of tickets, not all of which are picked up, and delays of drinks ordered by customers who arrive in person. The current practice around mobile orders exhausts baristas and contributes to frustration of customers, who sometimes direct that frustration toward staff.

Although it is possible to turn off the mobile order system, this can only be accomplished if staff from a given store put in a request to the district manager, who oversees operations at approximately seventeen locations. Having this request granted for even an hour is a rare occurrence … mobile orders, a lack of breaks, and understaffing curtail the ability to chat with regulars who look to baristas for social interaction.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Last week, Spiegel International reported on a country where carnivores can already legally dine on meat that is produced from the stem cells of animals. As the article put it:

Just imagine for a moment that you could save the world with chicken nuggets. All you would have to do is just eat them. Your teeth would sink into real meat, yet no animal would have lost its life for your meal. It will have been grown in the laboratory from a single chicken cell. Imagine that there would suddenly be enough meat from the laboratory to feed everybody in the world. Hunger would be a thing of the past. The land now used to grow corn for animal feed could be repurposed, perhaps even for a forest that could draw CO2 out of our atmosphere. Industrial livestock farming would no longer be needed.

To be sure, solutions that sound so simple should be approached with caution. But there is a place where the utopia described above isn’t as far away as it might sound. Where such laboratory chicken can be tasted and where the nuggets are being served up on real plates.

That place is Singapore.

There’s lots more at the link, including a review of lab-grown “chicken.” And still more fodder on synthetic meat from Virginia Postrel. What do you think about meat grown in a lab? Would you eat it? Will your grandchildren? Will we ever stop eating non-laboratory-grown animals?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of NoteDenying Treatment to the Imprisoned

Convicted criminals are among the most hated figures in most societies––and uncoincidentally, they suffer some of the most egregious injustices perpetrated by the state in America. Solitary confinement is often inhumane. Prisoners are sexually assaulted at inexcusable rates. And a Stat News investigation documents another practice that I find indefensible: the systematic withholding of lifesaving medical care from prisoners with hepatitis C.

Nicholas Florko’s report begins with John Ritchie, who was serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery in Missouri when he sought a 12-week course of treatment that would cure his condition:

Ritchie begged repeatedly for the medicine ... The prison system knew he was getting sicker and sicker—it documented his deteriorating condition in his health records. The prison’s doctors wrote frequently he would benefit from hepatitis C treatment. But officials still denied him, in the same way a STAT investigation documented prisons around the country are still denying thousands of others the cure. So the virus infecting Ritchie’s blood continued to replicate, scarring his liver until it was so damaged that it could hardly function. Eventually he was diagnosed with liver cancer, a common complication of untreated hepatitis C. Now, the prison argued, he was too sick for the drugs to work. They refused him again. He died in June 2021 at the age of 64, nearly five years after his first request for medication.

STAT’s investigation found that 1,013 people died of hepatitis C-related complications in states’ custody in the six years after the first cure, a Gilead antiviral drug called Sovaldi, hit the market in late 2013. This tally, based on an analysis of 27,674 highly restricted death records, has never before been reported. Many of those 1,013 people were not serving life sentences; they would likely have had the chance to return home, reapply for jobs, and reconnect with parents, spouses, and children—or, in Ritchie’s case, his one grandchild, Gabe. Many should not have died. In fact, the treatment for hepatitis C is a modern medical marvel. The scientists who paved the way for its discovery won a Nobel Prize. Public health experts say it’s possible to cut hepatitis C deaths to virtually zero, and effectively eliminate the virus as we’ve done with smallpox or polio.

This article reminds me of a proposal I’ve been meaning to air despite the fact that it is almost certain to anger many and seems unlikely to be politically viable: much as Washington, D.C., and various territories have nonvoting members in the House, I think there should be a nonvoting House member who represents the interests of incarcerated people in the United States.  

When Educators and Parents Disagree

This week I published an Atlantic article about what ought to happen when parents and educators disagree about how to handle the gender identity or expression of very young children. It begins with a case study taken from the premier journal of early-childhood educators:

Meet Michael, a 4-year-old who “usually comes to school in jeans and a T-shirt but always goes to the dress-up area as soon as he arrives and puts on a dress or skirt.” The preschooler is the subject of a 2019 case study in the education journal Young Children’s “Focus on Ethics” column, a recurring feature about how educators ought to respond in fraught situations––in this real case, a parent objecting to their child’s gender expression.

Take off that skirt, Michael’s mother tells her child one day while volunteering in the classroom. She orders him instead to put on firefighter gear, a cowboy hat, or “something that boys do,” the authors Stephanie Feeney, Nancy K. Freeman, and Katie Schaffer recount. Later, the parent tells the teacher, Ana, that Michael “plays female roles at home and shows little interest in toys and activities typically associated with boys.” She asks Ana to prohibit Michael from playing with “girl stuff” at school. “Ana also has observed that Michael strongly prefers playing with girls,” the authors add, “and chooses activities that are stereotypically feminine, like having tea parties and wearing dress-up clothes that have lots of ribbons and sequins. He also frequently tells the other children that he is really a girl and that he wants to be called ‘Michelle.’”

What should Ana do?

The National Association for the Education of Young Children, which publishes Young Children, has a Code of Ethical Conduct that directs teachers to “recognize and respect the unique qualities, abilities, and potential of each child”; to “develop relationships of mutual trust and create partnerships with the families we serve”; and to “acknowledge families’ childrearing values and their right to make decisions for their children.” In essence, this case study explores what ought to happen when those obligations are in conflict.

In the case study’s telling, Ana has an ethical obligation to side with the child. For my own viewpoint, click through and read the rest, because I want to focus here on some reader responses.

D.M. writes, “I just wanted to echo my agreement with what I’d call your position of ‘principled ethical humility.’ We *know* what our principles are in general, and we should stick to them, but we shouldn’t pretend to have all the answers. This is a brand-new area of ethics, it’s really fraught among *all* cultures, and it’s OK to pause and appreciate that instead of making absolutist pronouncements.”

An anonymous reader who teaches high school in New England reports struggling with the issue of kids wanting to keep their gender identity from their parents.

He emailed:

There are wonderful things about the school: the kids are very intelligent, they explore their passion and care about their classes, and the community is accepting of everyone. However, there is a strange paradox where students are simultaneously seen as helpless children who deserve month-long extensions on assignments, a minimum grade of 50% on missing work, and hours and hours of social/emotional learning while also given radical self-determinism in how they present themselves, which teachers must hide from their families. There have been a number of policy decisions related to gender identity that have made me uncomfortable.

I want to provide a window into my school's policy:

1. I’d estimate 25% of all students identify as trans or gender non-conforming. Perhaps the number is higher, but it is certainly not lower. Many of these kids have never gotten a medical diagnosis; some even make no effort to present as the opposite gender yet insist on using different names and pronouns. The majority of these students are white females.

2. I have students who have changed their name/gender identity multiple times throughout a semester. It became pretty exhausting to keep up with.

3. Many students insist on being called a different gender than they present as with the plea “do not tell my parents.” School policy is to use their legal first name and assigned gender at birth in conversations with their parents while simultaneously using the student’s preferred pronouns in all internal school communication.

This seems to be a ticking time bomb.

There are absolutely students who suffer from gender dysphoria and have made the appropriate medical/social arrangements with their families. However, these students are few and far between, and the vast majority of students that identify as gender non-confirming have done so with no medical/psychological intervention.

Without medical or psychological intervention, students live one way at school and another way at home. I cannot imagine how traumatizing and confusing that must be. There is little dialogue or communication about how to handle these situations. Instead, we accept a radical tolerance, often at the expense of struggling teenagers’ mental health. To me, hiding such important and consequential decisions from parents seems entirely unethical. But there has been virtually zero pushback from staff, most of whom I think agree with these policies.

The gender identity issue is a sensitive topic. Treating it as something as inconsequential as a nickname will lead to disastrous results for a generation already struggling with mental health to the degree that is crippling. As you said, this rigidness is not the way forward, especially if medical professionals are not involved. I am uncomfortable and worried about the liability of working in this environment. Unfortunately, I will leave this school—and possibly education—after this school year.

Michael articulates one view of the relationship between educators and parents:

Is defying the parents ever an ethical choice? It could be, in rare cases when a judge decides to remove the children from their parents’ custody. This course is reserved for extreme cases of abusive parenting. Otherwise the only ethical choice is to cooperate with the parents. Remember that the educators are not co-parents, they are essentially agents hired by parents (directly or through taxation) to attend to their children while the parents focus on the day job. If an educator notices some problem with the child, it is their duty to inform the parents, and—optionally—to offer their professional opinion on how to fix it.

Now if the parents insist on the educator doing something that the teacher finds unacceptable, e.g. forcing the child to drink milk or calling the child by a name that causes a distress to the child or disruption to the others, the educator should have an option of denying the family access to child care. That way the parents could seek to fix the problem themselves, find a therapy or specialized care facility or do homeschooling. Using your words, usurping parental rights is not an ethical choice, nor is it legal due to fiduciary duty of the educator.

I suspect some readers agree and others would describe the relationship very differently.

Jaleelah would defer less to parents as a general matter:

I can’t tell what your actual stance on parental rights is, but I strongly disagree with the premise that parents morally have any kind of final say (apart from input about severe health conditions) over what goes on in their children’s public classrooms. Consider the following “ethical dilemma.” A 4-year-old girl comes to school wearing a religious veil and takes it off upon entering the classroom. Her mother notices one day and instructs the teacher to make her put it back on. When the teacher approaches the girl, she starts crying about how she doesn’t believe in God.

What should the teacher do?

What is the difference between this situation and the trans one? In both cases, a child has understandable preferences about their identity and their preferred clothing. In both cases, a parent wants a teacher to overrule these preferences on the basis of religious belief. Much of the language you use in your article to describe the potential outcomes of the trans kid applies to the atheist kid too. “A teacher has no way to know for sure whether any preschooler or kindergartener will grow up to be atheist or otherwise non-religious.” How does this uncertainty justify forcing the kid–—or at least humouring the request to force the kid—to try out the parent’s preferred religion?

Personally, I think children deserve the same rights to belief and expression as adults. This view is shared (at least in theory) by nearly every country in the world: the US was one of the only UN members to refuse to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children who grow up in an environment that teaches them their parents’ and communities’ political and religious beliefs have authority over their own grow up to be adults who believe it is justified to pass laws restricting expression in schools and universities.

I confess that I don’t have fully formed views about the rights of children at various ages, but I don’t think it is tenable to proceed as if American or Canadian children “deserve the same rights to belief and expression as adults.” An adult can decide, say, that all doctors are quacks, that eating vegetables is for suckers, and that they’re going to stand on a street corner and denounce women to all passersby. A parent would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t compel their 6-year-old to visit the pediatrician, eat all the required nutrients, and cut out the name-calling. I do believe that children possess some rights, including some expressive rights, but deciding exactly when kids are owed deference strikes me as complicated.

Great Expectations

A longtime teacher of teenagers joins the conversation about sports by lamenting the unrealistic fantasies they can stoke:

I lost count of the number of kids who had the attitude, “why do I need an education? I’m going to be the next Kobe Bryant/Derek Jeeter/Patrick Mahomes/Lionel Messi!” A majority of male students labored under the idea that their future was as a famous, rich, pro athlete. When you tried to point out the statistical improbability of this happening, they always assumed they were the exception that proved the rule.

Then there were the parents. I had one student, a really great kid, friendly, helpful, eager, who struggled academically. When teachers or counselors would try to address his struggles with his parents, his father would deflect with, “he’s going to QB for UCLA, who cares about his grades!” Never mind that his grades would be a problem for any college, much less UCLA––this kid was 5’5”, was not in the running to QB the high-school team, and would get killed by the guys on a college team. He loved welding. He’d come to class with art pieces he’d created. I hope he got to pursue that passion.

One more kid: actual star of the high school team. In 11th grade, he was in line to be the lead QB. Instead, he spent most of that season on crutches after a twisted knee in practice required multiple surgeries. This kid had lots of options, given his relative strength academically, but so much of his focus that year was on trying to get healthy again. We as a society need to get better at managing kids’ expectations about their purpose.

A Low Point for the Catholic Church

In The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig writes on Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church’s child-molestation scandal:

This was and is the sort of darkness not seen for centuries, a historic catastrophe. It affected its direct victims, their families and loved ones, the parishes and dioceses that became responsible for settling with them, the parishioners who now had to salvage their faith. The world—and the Church—post-crisis can feel like a place too violent, too exploitative for the vulnerability of enchantment. Perhaps the pope emeritus saw the magnitude of the damage himself, and perhaps his retreat came nearest to acknowledging it.

How heavy the toll is—how it colors the Church’s recent history with a streak of predatory menace, how it demands an accounting for itself even in moments of celebration and loss for the Church, how it irrevocably complicates simple lay faith. The summary Catholic novel of the post-crisis era may well be Mary Doria Russell’s prescient The Sparrow, whose protagonist cries out before a council of his brother priests: “I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God. And I was raped.” To speak of the Church now is always to speak after the crisis; to write about the faith now is always to grapple with this ghastly inheritance. But where there remains something whatsoever to be said, there remains some hope, and some capacity for redemption. That belief may at last be the very one upon which the entire faith survives.

Provocation of the Week

In Nature, Emily Sohn defends the colonoscopy against a recent study that questioned its effectiveness at preventing deaths:

Colonoscopy is much less common in Europe, in part owing to questions about whether the test is too invasive and expensive to be worth recommending, says Michael Bretthauer, a gastroenterologist at the University of Oslo. To address these questions, he and his colleagues planned a randomized trial of colonoscopies. Starting in 2009, they recruited more than 84,000 people aged 55 to 64 from Norway, Poland and Sweden. Some were invited to get screened. Others received their usual health care but no such invitation. With about ten years of follow-up data, Bretthauer and colleagues released their attention-grabbing results in October 2022, seemingly suggesting that colonoscopies had a smaller benefit than expected.

There was just an 18% reduction in the risk of developing cancer among those who had been invited to get colonoscopies, and no significant reduction in the risk of death. But the study itself offered layers of interpretation that cast colonoscopies in a more favourable light. Overall, only 42% of people in the group that had been invited to get colonoscopies actually got one. If the compliance rate had been 100%, the researchers’ analysis showed, the test would have reduced cancer risk by 31%—from 1.22% to 0.84%—and it would have reduced the risk of death from colorectal cancer by 50%—from 0.3% to 0.15%.

Those benefits are significant, says Chyke Doubeni, a family doctor and colonoscopy researcher at the Ohio State University in Columbus, and there are reasons to think that they could be larger in other circumstances, especially in populations that experience disproportionately high rates of the disease. And despite the huge scale of the European study, ten years of follow-up is a relatively short period of time for colorectal-cancer development, says Amy Knudsen, who studies disease simulation models to inform cancer-care policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston. “I think we’re only going to see the impact of colonoscopy increase the longer we follow up,” she says. The European study is continuing to track participants.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

A selection of powerful images from all over the globe, taken in the past seven days.

Who is a handful for defenders? Who has enormous mental strength? It's Garth Crooks' Team of the Week.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Earlier this week, the NFL player Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped on the field after a violent collision with another player; a mountain climber died after an avalanche on Britain’s highest mountain; and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles launched a new program to treat kids with sports injuries. Although the three events are technically unrelated, they each serve as a timely reminder of the potential hazards of athletic pursuits.

What do you think about the health and safety risks that are inherent (to different degrees) in sports and the ethical questions they raise? Feel free to discuss professional athletes, college athletes, “extreme” athletes in especially risky sports, youth sports, or sports that you’ve played and how you thought about risks and the rewards.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

The strongest opinion I have about sports and related risks concerns college athletics. Consider a quotation from a website designed for young athletes who are being recruited. It begins with the question, “Can an athletic scholarship be taken away?” Here is part of the answer:

If you are injured, depending on the school you attend and whether it happened outside of games or practice, your scholarship can be pulled.

In my estimation, if an athlete on a college athletic scholarship is injured in a way that renders them physically unable to play their sport, the institution should still cover their tuition.

Back in 2013, Meghan Walsh wrote about this subject in The Atlantic:

Upon joining a Division I team, every participant must have insurance and undergo a medical examination before playing. But when it comes to protecting players, who generate billions of dollars every year, from having to pay unanticipated medical bills or ensuring they receive superior, impartial health care, there are no official NCAA provisions in place. Thus, when a player is injured, nothing prevents the athletic director from refusing to pay related medical bills—which sometimes keep coming for years. Even for those with private insurance, some policies don't cover varsity sports injuries, have high deductibles, or refuse to pay the entire amount due. In such situations, the remaining costs fall to the athlete (many schools, though, do pay those bills).

The NCAA has a catastrophic-injury fund that kicks in when personal deductibles exceed $90,000 … According to Ramogi Huma, the president of the National College Players Association, schools are more likely to help cover costs if the player is high-profile and the injury is severe or public, such as the one Louisville’s Kevin Ware suffered when he broke his leg during a 2013 March Madness game. Or when the running back Marcus Lattimore twisted his knee almost 180 degrees during a televised game last year.

There is also no provision in the Division I Manual to prohibit a coach from revoking a scholarship the year after a recruit gets hurt. For those from poor families and without coverage through a parent, this means that a young man or young woman can be enlisted on the promise of an education, get injured on the field, and lose his or her only source of medical insurance precisely when he or she needs it most. “There is no doubt there are horror stories out there about schools terminating scholarships,” says Warren Zola, the assistant dean for graduate programs in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and a sports-business expert. “It comes down to the ethos of particular schools.”

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On Martian Life

In the course of opining against putting a human on Mars––because robots explore the planet much better than humans can––Maciej Cegłowski argues on his blog, Idle Words, that the most important new information we’ve recently gotten about the possibility of life on Mars was obtained on Earth:

Microbiologists had long suspected that the 12,000 or so known species of microbes were just a fraction of the total, with perhaps another hundred thousand “unculturable” species left to discover. But when new sequencing technology became available at the turn of the century, it showed the number of species might be as high as one trillion. In the genomic gold rush that followed, researchers discovered not just dozens of unsuspected microbial phyla, but two entire new branches of life.

These new techniques confirmed that earth’s crust is inhabited to a depth of kilometers by a ‘deep biosphere’ of slow-living microbes nourished by geochemical processes and radioactive decay. One group of microbes was discovered still living their best lives 100 million years after being sealed in sedimentary rock. Another was found enjoying a rewarding, long-term relationship with fungal partners deep beneath the seafloor. This underground ecology, which we have barely started to explore, might account for a third of the biomass on earth.

At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere. Bacteria not only stay viable for years on the space station hull, but sometimes do better out there than inside the spacecraft. Environments long thought to be sterile, like anoxic brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea, are in fact as rich in microbial life as a gas station hot dog. Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals or Antarctic ice have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing without so much as a cup of coffee.

The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars. The existence of a deep biosphere in particular narrows the habitability gap between our planets to the point where it probably doesn’t exist—there is likely at least one corner of Mars that an Earth organism could call home. It also adds support to the theory that life may have started as an interplanetary infection, a literal Venereal disease that spread across the early solar system by meteorite. If that is the case, and if our distant relatives are still alive in some deep Martian cave, then just about the worst way to go looking for them would be to land in a septic spacecraft.

The New Normal

In a column about changes that have endured even as most people stopped paying attention to COVID-19, The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle argues that pre-pandemic urban life probably isn’t ever coming back:

Weekday foot traffic in downtowns remains about one-third below 2019 levels, and public transit ridership averages about two-thirds of what it was. This suggests a permanent shift in the way cities are organized, with daily economic activity moving toward the peripheries, including exurbs at distances that would be intolerably far from downtown for a daily commute but manageable for going to the office once or twice a week. Cities will need to redesign large swathes of their urban centers around residential and leisure activities rather than 9-to-5 workdays, and adjust their tax codes and spending accordingly.

The Near Future of the Republican Party

The journalist Josh Barro believes that abortion was an issue that hurt Republicans in the recent midterm elections, and that it is likely to hurt their prospects again when the 2024 election cycle comes around.

In his Very Serious newsletter, he writes:

Polls tend to show clear majorities of voters who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Abortion bans with no exceptions are extremely unpopular, but that doesn’t mean creating exceptions that apply only to a small number of the most alarming situations is sufficient to stem the political damage. One Republican who ran very well in 2022 was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and one political advantage he had is that Florida has (so far) charted a moderate path on abortion compared to many other Republican-controlled states. Abortion in Florida remains legal through 15 weeks of pregnancy … But Florida’s 15-week ban predated the Dobbs decision. The state’s legislature wasn’t in session when Dobbs was handed down, and the Republicans who hold majorities in both houses are under significant pressure to further restrict abortion when they get back to work this month. DeSantis’s political strategy so far has been to fudge the issue — asked last month about a proposal to prohibit abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, he dodged, saying “I’m willing to sign great life legislation. That’s what I’ve always said I would do.”

… Fudging isn’t likely to work forever. Laws that broadly permit first-trimester abortions are politically sustainable because they satisfy public opinion by making abortions generally permitted in the circumstances when most women seek them. But pro-life activists actually want abortion broadly prohibited. We have not yet seen what a Republican presidential primary looks like post-Dobbs. I expect the candidates will be asked over and over what they’ll do on abortion, in much the same way that Democratic presidential candidates are constantly pressed to outbid each other on health care policy. If all DeSantis has to offer is a ban at 15 weeks (or 12 weeks), he’ll be outbid …

The Near Future of the Democratic Party

At its company newsletter, the political-consulting firm ClearPath Strategies looks back on the 2022 midterms and argues that the success Democrats experienced was not sustainable, because it relied too heavily on having an unusually strong field of candidates.

The analysis:

The Democratic Party also holds a negative favorability rating (44%-53%). More than half (51%) of voters think the party is too extreme. And by a 2:1 margin, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats on handling arguably the biggest issue of the election (inflation). So it would appear the Democrats defied history despite the party and President, not because of them.

But how?

Extraordinarily. Strong. Candidates.

Raphael Warnock, Mark Kelly, John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, Catherine Cortez Masto. As we’ve said, Democrats require great candidates to win elections. Democrats outperformed expectations because their candidates built brands independent of the deeply unpopular Party and President. They did not echo the President’s final plea to voters to defend democracy. Instead, they were laser focused on the issues that mattered in their races, inflation and abortion rights.

Democratic party strategists are patting themselves on the back for defending democracy, but they lost the House and arguably left a few Senate seats on the table. Instead of asking how they prevented a Red Wave, they should ask why they failed to achieve a historic Blue Wave. Dems had extremely high quality candidates. Trump’s insertion into the election provided the gift of hand-picked, cringe-worthy candidates in key races. And in a moment when people still crave stability, Trump’s brand of aggressive chaos served as a reminder of the risks of the modern GOP, over which he still maintains a strong grip.

“Really strong candidates” is not a good strategy. We must ask ourselves: how much stronger of a night would Dems have had if they could leverage a strong party brand or strong party leadership?

They go on to articulate their view of why some successful Democratic Party candidates are ill-suited to be party leaders:

Mark Kelly cannot be both the independent, Arizona-focused advocate and also a leader of the Democratic Party. Raphael Warnock cannot be the Georgia Reverend, fighting for people regardless of party, and also a leader of the Democratic Party. If Democrats continue to require strong, independent candidates to win elections, those same would-be leaders cannot lead the party. To lead is to lose. They must remain independent. Investing in long-term party building is as much about building a strong bench as it is building a strong brand by advancing a strategy to serve people.

Critiques of Independent Sinema

In my most recent Atlantic article, I argued that whatever one thinks of Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s character or positions, there is one reason to celebrate her recent change in party affiliation from Democrat to independent: It makes Congress more representative.

After all, “independent” is––per years of Gallup data––typically the country’s most popular party affiliation, with more Americans identifying that way than as Democrats or Republicans. Recent polls suggest that, if the Senate reflected the American electorate’s party affiliations, the chamber would include 35 to 50 independent members. Yet until Sinema’s announcement, the Senate had just two independents: Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, both of whom caucus with the Democrats. The 117th House of Representatives had no independents, and neither will the 118th when it takes office tomorrow.

… The dearth of independents is contributing to a loss of faith in Congress as a representative democratic institution. An alarming 70 to 80 percent of Americans disapprove of the job the national legislature is doing, Gallup polls in recent months suggest. The branch’s approval rating among Democrats and Republicans has long fluctuated based on which party is in charge, but independents are consistently cool to Congress. This is hardly surprising; one would expect the one-third to one-half of Americans who decline to affiliate with Democrats or Republicans to dislike a system dominated by them.

Numerous readers emailed responses to the article.

Bob is an independent who is frustrated with the status quo:

Thank you for your excellent article about independent voters. Too often, pundits seem to assume we are either uninterested in politics or are partisans in disguise, i.e., “lean Democrat” or “lean Republican.” No doubt that is true for some, perhaps many, people; however, you are “not alone in disliking how Democrats have used their control of the White House and Congress but also wishing I had somewhere to turn other than the Republican Party.” I have been an active independent voter for nearly six decades and have typically leaned away from one party or the other. Right now, I am leaning away from the Republicans.

Stephen suggested an alternative to independents:

I agree with your overall premise (our two party system is bad and broken and leads to people feeling underrepresented) but disagree with your solution (more Independents). Instead, I’d like to see more parties which necessitate the building of coalitions to accomplish things, which I believe will lead to both more nuanced positions and to a greater ability to compromise … Party structures are useful precisely because they “get help with funding, campaign infrastructure, voter outreach, or ballot access,” which is why I’m suggesting that we should have more of them. However, our electoral system is prohibitive of third parties.

John Oliver has a good video on third parties, as does CGP Grey. GGP Grey’s series on different voting systems in particular has influenced my thoughts here). Both of them argue that third parties mostly play Spoiler and, as a result, have a difficult time getting rolling.

Dave argued that Sinema is different from the Senate’s other two independents in an important respect:

Senators Angus King and Bernie Sanders ran as independents; they didn’t switch parties. And while a large swath of the country waited from 2016-2020 for honorable men to appear and become independents while the ex-president wrecked the office of the presidency and America’s good standing, somehow there were no such honorable men. Senator Sinema may be beholden to her constituency first, but she appears to be more beholden to corporate interests and becoming rich via her office. Opportunists should not be put in the same category as senators Sanders and King.

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In contrast, John doesn’t care whether Sinema changed her affiliation opportunistically or not:

I am registered as a Republican, but I was registered as a Democrat last year and an independent before that. I was a Republican until the rise of the Tea Party. That turned me into an independent. Donald Trump turned me into a Democrat. I switched back to Republican because I wanted to vote in the Republican Primary in the closed primary system in Florida. I see myself as an independent, but I intend to switch back and forth between being registered as a Democrat or Republican based on the primary I want to vote it.

I have a lot of policy conversations with my friends—some Republican and some Democrat. When we get beyond the popular narratives, we have a lot of common ground. The roughly third, third, third make up of the country could be about right depending on how you frame the question. If you got deep into detailed policy, it would be quarter, half, quarter. The country is nowhere near as divided as people think. It is the extremists who push that narrative. It is their interest to frame the division as nearly evenly split since that puts them in a more powerful position. The reality is that the extremists are a vocal minority.

I don’t know whether we give Sinema credit for being principled or driven by the politics of a purple state. But we need more people who are willing to buck the party line. Moderate Democrat, moderate Republican, independent, whatever you call it, we need reasonable people who can find middle ground we can all tolerate. We are a diverse country. Nobody is going to get everything they want. The only sustainable solutions are in the middle.

“’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky”

In The Atlantic, Bianca Bosker describes and ponders “supertalls,” skyscrapers that are “often defined as buildings more than 300 meters in height, but better known as the cloud-puncturing sci-fi towers that look like digital renderings, even when you’re staring at them from the sidewalk.”

She writes:

First supertalls were impossible, then a rarity. Now they’re all over the place. In 2019 alone, developers added more supertalls than had existed prior to the year 2000; there are now a couple hundred worldwide … Some supertalls have an even more futuristic designation: superslim. These buildings are alternately described as “needle towers” or “toothpick skyscrapers” … Building engineers, like judgy modeling agents, have varying definitions of superslim, but they usually agree that such buildings must have a height-to-width ratio of at least 10 to 1. To put that in perspective, the Empire State Building (one of the world’s first supertalls, completed in 1931) is about three times taller than it is wide—“pudgy,” as one engineer described it to me. Steinway Tower is 24 times taller than it is wide—nearly as slim as a No. 2 pencil, and the skinniest supertall in the world. These superslim buildings—and supertalls generally—have relied on engineering breakthroughs to combat the perilous physics that go with height…

Like many cutting-edge innovations, supertalls can behave unpredictably. In strong winds, occupants have reported water sloshing in toilet bowls, chandeliers swaying, and panes of glass fluttering. The architect Adrian Smith, who has designed numerous supertalls, contends that you’re in supertall territory not just when you hit 300 meters, but when you build so high that you get into “potentially unknown issues.” And, he acknowledges, there are “still mistakes being made.”

Supertalls aren’t necessarily good neighbors. Their shadows can reach half a mile, and they can magnify the winds at street level, churning the air into high-speed gusts as far as three blocks away. Many New Yorkers consider the city’s proliferating supertalls at best an eyesore—“Awful Waffle” is one nickname for 432 Park Avenue, a luxury condominium that looks like a strip of graph paper stuck on the Manhattan skyline. At worst, they’re considered nonsensical constructions that exacerbate the city’s affordable-housing crisis, contribute to climate change, and stand as totems to inequality … Today many of New York’s supertalls are designed to serve as homes for the superrich—“the modern-day castle, if you will,” says Stephen DeSimone, a structural engineer who’s worked on supertalls in the city. “You’re living amongst the sky, like the rest of the world isn’t good enough.” Supertalls have made even fans of tall buildings wonder whether we’ve built too high, for too few—and finally gone too far. Staring up at them from the dark, blustery sidewalk, it’s hard not to wonder: Is there anything to love?

Provocation of the Week

In the newsletter Hold That Thought, Sarah Haider reads up on the success women are having relative to men in earning bachelor’s degrees, and investigates scholarships to determine if there are disparities in who qualifies. Her thought-provoking conclusions:

As far as I can tell, “Male” is the only noticeably underrepresented demographic in college that is also highly underrepresented in the scholarship world. In fact, it is the only demographic where the majority receives many more exclusive scholarship opportunities than the minority. According to a study by the SAVE Title IX Equity Project analyzing scholarships exclusive to one sex in 115 universities, “among 1,161 sex-specific scholarships, 91.6% were reserved for female students, with only 8.4% designated for male students.”

Not surprising, exactly. Perhaps a bit more surprising: Despite a lot of crowing about how few men go into female dominated fields, as far as I could find, there is little money offered to encourage them. Women who wish to “break barriers” in STEM can look forward to diving into a mountain of money, but men who wish to do the same in a profession like Speech-Language Pathology (90%+ female) can look forward to nothing of the sort.

That’s all for this week—see you on Monday.

Who is capable of doing special things? Who could make a future manager? It's Garth Crooks' Team of the Week.