Campaign messaging to become faster, more misleading as US enters 'uncharted territory' of advanced technology: Expert.

It was a black Monday for media titans: Tucker Carlson split from Fox amid allegations from a former producer, Abby Grossberg, that the set of Tucker Carlson Tonight was a hostile workplace for women; Don Lemon was fired by CNN just weeks after declaring that the Republican primary candidate Nikki Haley was out of her “prime” at age 51; and Jeff Shell, the CEO of NBC Universal, was ousted because of what he characterized as an “inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company” and what Hadley Gamble, the woman in question, described as sexual harassment in a complaint filed with NBC prior to Shell’s dismissal. The housecleaning may not have been entirely prompted by matters related to women and sex, but the overall effect was nevertheless redolent of the high #MeToo era, when consequences for offenders first began to materialize.  

Nevertheless, a cynical observer might ask why, years after the advent of the #MeToo movement and the collapse of so many illustrious careers on ignoble grounds—even in this same industry—incidents like these keep revealing darkly retro workplace cultures. Is it bona fide #MeToo backlash, as commentators have worried in recent months, or a failure, as one friend worriedly confided in me on Monday, of the movement to radically transform that much at all? Neither, I would say: #MeToo is, and always has been, a power struggle; in many places throughout this industry and many others, it isn’t yet won. But episodes like these—daunting as their revelations are—nevertheless suggest that progress is still being made.

[Catharine A. MacKinnon: Where #MeToo came from, and where it’s going]

It’s worth conceiving of #MeToo as a struggle for power because this frame places appropriate emphasis on who is actually in control of workplace cultures and environments, versus a more limited view that imagines #MeToo as a collection of many different conflicts between many different individuals. Each of these instances matter—the personalities and experiences matter—but the systems of corporate hierarchy that allow high-ranking company players to victimize other employees are much more crucial to ongoing workplace toxicity than any one individual, or even all of the individuals combined. The pioneers of the #MeToo movement found their greatest success in looking beyond their immediate resources for justice—in going outside the systems that had disempowered them—to vindicate their rights.

For Harvey Weinstein’s victims, that meant taking their stories out of Hollywood and into the court of public opinion—and then the courts proper, as Weinstein was criminally prosecuted and convicted. For one of Roger Ailes’s many targets at Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, it meant escaping the forced-arbitration scheme that had kept Ailes’s egregious sexual harassment a networkwide secret by filing a lawsuit in open court, which Fox later settled. In each of these cases, the right to a better workplace was fought for and won through an exercise of greater power—typically in the courts, and often in full public view.

And those victories did come with lasting endowments. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that most Americans feel that #MeToo has made accountability for workplace sex discrimination likelier; when so much of a victim’s outcry is calculated on the likelihood of a favorable outcome, that kind of terrain-changing win is precious. And then there were the people all over the country who, inspired by the movement, organized under its auspices to take power: According to researchers at Georgetown University and the University of Oregon, “between 2017 and 2021, states introduced 2,324 #MeToo-related bills and passed 286.” There was less activity on the federal level, with the exception of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harrassment Act and the Speak Out Act, both championed by Gretchen Carlson and signed by President Joe Biden (the former bill guarantees that a victim of sexual harassment or abuse can seek relief in court rather than through a secret arbitration process; the latter limits the use of nondisclosure agreements and nondisparagement clauses to silence victims).

[Read: When the White House is a safe space]

I was at the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on November 16, 2021, the day that several women testified about their experiences with sexual harassment and forced arbitration in support of the then-pending Ending Forced Arbitration Act. I had the sense that something momentous was happening for American workers. An employer’s ability to trap an employee in a private court of their choosing with a mere contractual clause is—and was even more so, before the bill became law—a ready aid to exploitation. The women who testified that day all said as much, under oath and on the record. The result of the bill is that employees who are sexually harassed now have access to that much more power.

But the #MeToo tale has continued long after the initial success: No law and no regulation yet has been ambitious enough to solve the problem of rich and unaccountable men. Instead the struggle to work and to live like dignified people in a civilized society has been won by smaller shifts in power in lesser victories that are still being decided, even now.

The so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act, which House Republicans passed late on Wednesday, will never become law, because its combination of a small increase in the debt limit and a freeze on much government spending has no chance of making it through the Senate. The bill is nevertheless a statement about conservative priorities—among the most important of which, the debate over the bill suggests, is putting in place work requirements for people who get government benefits. In fact, the way Republican lawmakers speak about the issue, you’d be forgiven for thinking that work requirements were essential to revving up the U.S. economy.

As it happens, able-bodied people ages 18 to 49 and without dependents already have to meet certain work requirements in order to be eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments. The new bill would, for no obviously discernible reason, raise the age threshold for those requirements to 56. More substantively, the bill would subject similarly defined Medicaid recipients to new work requirements, including rules that recipients spend 80 hours a month either working, doing community service, or participating in a designated work program (or some combination of the latter two activities).

The argument for these requirements is straightforward: Threatening people with the loss of benefits will encourage them to get off their butt and get a job, which will be good for their well-being and better for the economy. That’s why the section of the Limit, Save, Grow Act that deals with work requirements is headlined “Grow the Economy.” Advocates of these requirements frequently point to what happened after 1996, when work requirements were attached to what had been Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits: Welfare rolls shrank dramatically, supposedly because recipients poured into the workforce and found gainful employment.

[Read: 20 years since welfare ‘reform’]

The logic here seems neat and clean. And work requirements also seem morally just to numerous voters. “I don’t think many people think it’s right to be paying billions of dollars to allow people to sit at home,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said recently, “and not work when everybody’s looking for workers.” The only problem: No good evidence exists that work requirements of the kind that are in this bill will have a noticeable impact on employment; plenty of evidence exists that what they’ll do instead is cause many thousands of people to lose their benefits despite being perfectly eligible for them.

To start with, most people on government benefits who realistically can work already do so. They may not work 80 hours every month, because they work in seasonal employment or can’t get enough hours, or for health reasons. But a study by researchers at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project found that only 29 percent of SNAP and Medicaid recipients did not work over a two-year period. This should not be surprising: Few people who can work are going to choose a to subsistence existence on food stamps and Medicaid. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office’s evaluation of the new bill’s impact is that “the employment status of and hours worked by Medicaid recipients would be unchanged.” And it’s why, when Arkansas put work requirements in place for Medicaid recipients ages 30 to 49 in 2018, the program did not increase employment in the group, according to a 2020 study.

What Arkansas’s work requirements did do, though, was result in a lot of people losing their health insurance. In fact, 18,000 people fell off Medicaid in the months immediately after the requirements went into effect (and before they were halted by a federal judge), and the uninsured rate among Arkansans in that same age group rose by four percentage points. Many of those who lost their benefits were either working or were eligible for exemptions and should never have been kicked off the rolls.

That is similar to the situation today with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the welfare program that succeeded AFDC. Millions fewer people are on assistance rolls today than was the case in the mid-1990s—but most of that reduction has been because of a sharp decline in the percentage of eligible people receiving benefits, rather than a big drop in the actual number of people who need help.

So why do work requirements result in eligible people losing their benefits? One explanation, according to a 2019 paper from the nonprofit organization Ideas42, is that they create a lot of new paperwork for benefit recipients: If you have a job, you have to document it. If you don’t, you have to document your hours of community service or time in a work program, or, in some cases, your history of looking for a job. Then you have to submit all of the documentation in a form that the government considers acceptable. In Arkansas, Medicaid recipients initially had to navigate a complicated and confusing website to enter all of this information, which meant you needed both internet access and solid web skills. You also needed to complete your submission by the fifth day of each month, or you lost your health insurance. Oh, and the website shut down every night from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m.

[Read: Why states want certain Americans to work for Medicaid]

Work-requirement advocates are fond of quoting 2 Thessalonians: “He who will not work shall not eat.” In practice, that amounts to “He who is bad at documenting his work history or his community service will not eat.”

No doubt, some number of able-bodied slackers are unfairly mooching off the system. But public policy is a matter of benefits and costs: Although the main benefit of work requirements is that they make gaming the system harder, the heavy cost is that they result in lots of people who genuinely need government assistance, and are legitimately eligible for it, losing their benefits. By any reasonable evaluation, that cost far outweighs the modest benefits.

For conservative Republicans skeptical of welfare to begin with and eager to find ways to cut government spending, the fact that work requirements reduce caseloads may be a desired outcome, even if it means tossing eligible people off the rolls. If, however, the goal is to reduce the number of people on welfare, work requirements are an inefficient, needlessly complex, and ultimately unjust way to do it.

The superficial appeal of work requirements is easy enough to understand. But policy makers need to acknowledge this simple reality: Work requirements just don’t work.

Republicans have had 10 months to hammer out a coherent post-Roe message on abortion. You would think they’d have nailed it by now.

Yet on Tuesday, Nikki Haley set out to declare her position on the issue—and proceeded to be about as clear as concrete.

She began with plausible precision. “I want to save as many lives and help as many moms as possible,” the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations told reporters gathered at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America headquarters, in Northern Virginia—a press event billed as a “major policy speech.” But her statements quickly got squishier. It’s good that some states have passed anti-abortion laws in the past year, she said. And as for the states that have reacted by enshrining abortion-rights protections? Well, she wishes “that weren’t the case.”

And then she seemed to channel Veep’s Selina Meyer. “Different people in different places are taking different paths,” Haley said, with a self-assurance that belied the indeterminacy of her words.

[Read: Abortion pills will be the next battle in the 2024 election]

Questioning whether any national anti-abortion legislation would ever pass, Haley did gesture at a need for some action. “To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus,” she said. As for what that might look like, she had no words. And she took no questions.

Some people seemed to like Haley’s speech, in a tepid way. She sounded human when she described how her husband had been adopted, and how she’d struggled with infertility. “Ms. Haley deserves credit for confronting the subject head on, with a speech that wasn’t sanctimonious or censorious,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, before concluding, “The party could do worse than Ms. Haley’s pitch.” But it could do better—or at least do with something more specific.  

Leaders of the self-described pro-life movement were predictably annoyed at Haley’s conciliatory-sounding vagueness. “Disappointing speech by @NikkiHaley today. Leads with compromise & defeatism, not vision & courage,” Lila Rose, who heads the group Live Action, tweeted. “We agree that consensus is important, but to achieve consensus we will need to stake out a principled position,” wrote Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.

Even Haley’s hosts seemed on the wrong page. “We are clear on Ambassador Haley’s commitment to acting on the American consensus against late-term abortion by protecting unborn children by at least 15 weeks,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement sent to me. But a few hours later, Team Haley emailed me to correct the record: “She committed to working to find a consensus on banning late-term abortion. No specific weeks,” Nachama Soloveichik, Haley’s communications director, wrote. Not only did Haley alienate both sides—she confused them!

[Mary Ziegler: Abortion restrictions targeted at minors never stop there]

Haley is in a tough spot, as are all of the Republican presidential wannabes. They each have their own personal convictions on abortion; former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, has been outspoken in his support for a national ban. But they’re up against an issue that seems to have cost their party a string of recent elections. Most Americans believe that abortion should be accessible, with some limits.

The “consensus” position, then, is somewhere in the foggy zone between no abortion ever and abortion whenever. But primary elections tend to push candidates toward one extreme or another. “The gap between what the base demands and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten really wide,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the Never Trump site The Bulwark, told me. “Nowhere is this more true than on abortion.”

What all politicians need to do “is settle on a position they believe they can defend, and they need to repeat it consistently and clearly,” Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, told me. “Any politician whose position on abortion is vague will be wrapped around the axle eventually with questions and doubts about where they actually stand.”

Some GOP candidates have followed Ayres’s advice. But much axle-wrapping has occurred already in the early days of the 2024 primary season.

Asked on the campaign trail whether he’d support a 15-week federal ban on abortion, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told CBS, “I do believe that we should have a robust conversation about what’s happening on a very important topic,” before pivoting so hard to an anecdote about Janet Yellen that I thought he’d need a neck brace. In a follow-up interview, Scott backtracked, clarifying that as president, he would “literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation” Congress sent to his desk.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to mount a presidential bid, did approve a very conservative state law recently—a six-week abortion ban. But he signed that legislation in the dead of night earlier this month, while most people in Tallahassee were probably in bed. (By contrast, last year, he celebrated the signing of a 15-week ban with a big party at a church.) The following day, DeSantis gave a speech at a Christian university full of students who are opposed to abortion, yet said nothing about his major legislative achievement. He’s mostly stayed quiet about it since—even at glad-handing events in early primary states.

So far, the only confirmed presidential candidate who seems clear on his position and keenly aware of the political optics is Donald Trump. Despite being hailed by anti-abortion activists as the “most pro-life president” in history, Trump has never been rigid on abortion (probably because he supported abortion rights for most of his life as a public figure), and he doesn’t talk much about the issue now. But a spokesperson told The Washington Post recently that Trump “believes that the Supreme Court, led by the three Justices which he supported, got it right when they ruled this is an issue that should be decided at the State level.” Shorter Trump: I’ve done my bit—it’s up to the states now. God bless.

If any national consensus on abortion exists, the GOP strategist Ayres said, Trump’s position “is pretty close” to it. Trump has always seemed to have “a lizard-brain sense of where the voters are,” Longwell said. “He has a relationship to the base, and he doesn’t have to pitch what he believes.” And, unlike DeSantis, Trump has never signed a law banning abortion at any stage, so it’ll be harder to pin him down. Sure, there’s an activist class that would like to see abortion banned in all cases. To them, Trump could reply, You got your justices. You’re welcome.

[Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion]

Right now Trump and his lizard brain have a commanding lead in the GOP primary. His victory would set up an interesting general-election situation—a fitting one for our complicated post-Roe country: a former president who once personally supported abortion rights and is now politically opposed to them running against a sitting president whose own position on abortion is the exact opposite.

Until a Republican presidential nominee emerges, we’ll hear many more Haley-esque platitudes that sound thoughtful and weighty but ultimately aren’t.

“Whether we can save more lives nationally depends entirely on doing what no one has done to date,” Haley told reporters on Tuesday, before wrapping up her speech with—you could almost hear a drumroll—“finding consensus.” The waffling will continue, in other words, until the primary concludes.