The Left Loses Another Messaging War

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 30, 2021

 

From the outset of this administration, Democrats misjudged the scale of the challenges they had set for themselves. The predictable result has been a series of unmet expectations.

 

Without outright control of the Senate, a razor-thin majority in the House, and a president whose national popular vote margin belied the modesty of his majorities in swing states, Democrats somehow convinced themselves that they could pass the party’s entire domestic legislative agenda in one fell swoop. If that wasn’t daunting enough, the first step involved ushering in a paradigmatic revolution.

 

Infrastructure, we were told, was not what you thought of when you think of the word “infrastructure.” We weren’t just talking about roads, bridges, and airports. Infrastructure was also “social and civic.” It was “human” and “caregiving.” As ABC News observed, the White House set out not just to pass a bill but to “redefine the meaning of the word.”

 

Any semblance of humility before the awesome might of the English language should have dissuaded Democrats from this course, and pursuing it was a costly error. Republicans managed to position themselves as supporters of “hard” or “physical” infrastructure, and Democrats eventually conceded to their terms by breaking their objectives up into two parts: one genuine infrastructure bill and another smorgasbord of progressive aspirations that we no longer even pretend to call infrastructure.

 

The left lost that messaging fight, and they learned few lessons from the defeat. Democrats promptly pivoted to another messaging war. But they sought to prosecute it from indefensible ground, and they once again find themselves in retreat.

 

For months, both supporters and opponents of the supplemental reconciliation bill the progressive left hoped to couple with the “hard” infrastructure bill have emphasized its price tag. In May, Joe Biden proposed a $6 trillion budget plan. Biden’s plan would do a lot, but to discern from the president’s public statements, its most desirable feature was the scale of the “investments” it would represent.

 

Intraparty negotiations eventually forced Joe Biden to pare down his budget and its sundry infrastructure-adjacent features down $4.5 trillion, frustrating progressives who were still invested in a $6 trillion moonshot. Even this failed to satisfy Democratic moderates, which contributed to splitting the bill into its constituent parts. That left us with an infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion progressive dream board. But even that was too much for some of the party’s moderates, leaving aggravated progressives to wonder precisely how much spending these Democrats would back. House Rep. Ro Khanna is indicative of this mindset. Venting his frustrations over Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to this package, Khanna savaged the senator because he “refuses to even give a number” to the spending level he would support.

 

The proposal’s bottom-line costs have been the most prominent feature of the discussion around it. By contrast, talk about what the reconciliation bill would actually achieve if it became law has been far more muted. Indeed, even today, the reconciliation bill is still referred to as the “$3.5 trillion reconciliation bill”—a feature its opponents are happy to accentuate.

 

Having spent months searing the number $3.5 trillion into American minds, however, Democrats have suddenly made a 180-degree turn to the idea that this gargantuan spending bill will actually cost nothing at all.

 

This week, Joe Biden contended that his agenda actually “costs zero dollars.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi picked up the baton: “It’s not about a dollar amount,” she said, “the dollar amount, as the president said, is zero. This bill will be paid for.” This new tactic is both economically illiterate and strategically unsound.

 

The White House’s new contention is that there is no “cost” to this mammoth proposal because it would add nothing to the national debt. That is nonsense, of course. No independent analysis supports the Democratic Party’s largely conjectural claim. It is only feasible insofar as it relies on the idea that economic growth will offset its costs, and a future Congress may turn off the spending spigot this bill would unleash. If Democrats were so secure in its projections, its members would not have conspicuously avoided submitting their plan to the Congressional Budget Office to determine its impact on the debt and deficit before they hope to vote on it.

 

The grating innumeracy aside, this tactic also undermines the months of dedicated labor Democrats have devoted to popularizing the figure $3.5 trillion. Not unlike the abandonment of their efforts to reconceptualize infrastructure as a state of mind, Democrats are now sacrificing the work they’ve done to convince the public that all this spending is not just vital but a climb down from the exorbitant public-sector consumption the country really needs. For months, the spending was the point. Suddenly, fiscal profligacy is undesirable, and frugality is the Democratic Party’s new passion.

 

This isn’t some carefully considered strategy. It’s bargaining—a last-ditch effort to see what, if anything, will stick. Like the lost messaging fight over what constitutes infrastructure, it is predicated on the idea that Democrats can bamboozle you with their rhetorical cleverness. And like that lost messaging campaign, it, too, is doomed.

Biden’s Generals Throw Him to the Wolves

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

 

In August 2020, President Donald Trump told reporters that the United States would draw down its forces in Afghanistan precipitously ahead of Election Day. At the time, around 8,500 were deployed to the region—roughly the same troop levels Trump inherited from his predecessor. The former administration made good on its promise. In November 2020, U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan had been reduced to about 5,000. By January, on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration, the U.S. had drawn its presence to just 2,500.

 

Donald Trump wanted out of Afghanistan, and his administration was committed to executing his vision with imprudent alacrity. The Biden administration has repeatedly reminded the public of this truth in its contradictory efforts to shift blame for the president’s long-sought accomplishment—getting out of Afghanistan altogether—away from the president. Yet, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley testified before Congress on Tuesday, the situation in Afghanistan could have gone south earlier than it did. In November of last year, Milley acknowledged receiving a signed order from Trump directing the military to withdraw fully from Afghanistan before Biden’s inauguration day. Mercifully, the president was talked out of it. “After further discussions,” he said, “the order was rescinded.”

 

Thus, a misleading narrative by the Biden administration met a deservedly ignominious end. Joe Biden and his allies have repeatedly insisted that America’s drawdown in Afghanistan was not of his making. His predecessor had made a “commitment,” Biden contended. To reverse course would jeopardize American lives. But Joe Biden had every opportunity to avoid the catastrophe his preferred policies have unleashed, just as his predecessor had.

 

It is a matter of public record that the president was repeatedly advised to back off his self-set terms for America’s full withdrawal from Afghanistan. In August, the New York Times reported that Gen. Milley recommended that Biden not only preserve the existing number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan but augment American forces by as much as 2,000 soldiers. In February, a congressionally appointed panel publicly recommended that Biden ditch the Trump administration’s May 1 deadline (which the administration subsequently did) and increase troop levels to 4,500.

 

In March, both Gen. Milley and Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin, formerly the commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq, implored the president to rethink his withdrawal schedule, citing the increasingly “dire outcomes” America’s military brass were forecasting. “But the president was unmoved,” the Times reported. As late as June, according to Wall Street Journal reporting recently confirmed by Politico, the Pentagon briefly halted the inexplicable decision to abandon the pivotal Bagram Airbase to allow the president and his advisers to reassess their disastrous strategy. But Biden did no reassessing.

 

In a July interview with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, Biden was repeatedly pressed to explain the pace of the drawdown and account for the public reporting suggesting his own appointees advised against it. “They didn’t tell you that they wanted troops to stay?” Stephanopoulos asked. “No,” Biden replied. “Not in terms of whether we were going to get out in a timeframe all troops. They didn’t argue against that.” Incredulously, the anchor asked the same question again; specifically, that no one advised Biden to maintain at least 2,500 troops in theater. “No,” Biden said. “No one said that to me that I can recall.”

 

That was not true. Biden’s definitive denials suggest that he absolutely could recall the conversations he had with his military and civilian advisers prior to the debacle this administration engineered in Afghanistan. Whether the Pentagon initiated the plan, as Biden’s civilian advisers contend, or his political and diplomatic strategists were its biggest boosters remains the subject of an ongoing congressional inquiry. But we don’t need an investigation to know that Joe Biden was its executor.

 

The Biden administration has sought refuge from the political whirlwind they unleashed with their haphazard Afghanistan strategy in the idea that the plan was unalterable and imposed on them by the last administration. That is false. This tragedy was perfectly evitable, and opportunities to reverse course and prevent the worst outcomes regularly presented themselves. Joe Biden ignored them, pursued his own objectives, and unleashed an ongoing crisis in which American citizens, permanent residents, and visa holders were betrayed and left stranded in Central Asia behind Taliban lines. That much we now know for sure.

The People and Their Rulers Increasingly Loathe Each Other

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, October 04, 2021

 

If you’re just waking up from a coma that felled you in 1995, Americans in 2021 hate each other. Polls released last week by the University of Virginia showed that “roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union.” In addition, “a strong majority of Trump voters see no real difference between Democrats and socialists, and a majority of Biden voters at least somewhat agree that there is no real difference between Republicans and fascists.”

 

Some of this should be taken with a grain of salt. Respondents to polls increasingly understand their response as a free kick. Answering a pollster is a political action in itself, with no responsibility to the truth or your own reputation. No one is going to hold you accountable for your answer, so you can give the most partisan one imaginable. If you had asked me in an anonymous telephone poll whether Governor Andrew Cuomo was an organ-destroying bacterium dressed up in a human costume, I’d have said yes, immediately. If you had asked me the same question on live television, I’d have at least paused for a few seconds.

 

At the same time, there must be something to this loathing. There have been moments in the last five years when the political atmosphere tasted metallic, where you could feel rage building up. Conspiracy theorizing and the language of extremism are more common — in part because the algorithms of social media select for strong stimulation. Whatever idiot thing some progressive said, I’ll be sure to hear about it in a few seconds.

 

But this isn’t just a problem of social media and overstimulation. It is now an inescapable conflict between — for lack of better terms — populists and those aligned with elite institutions. Wesley Yang, in an interview with The Tablet, described the way a “horizontally integrated ruling class” responded to the provocation of Trump’s election. He’s worth quoting at length:

 

The Trump presidency radicalized America’s governing and chattering classes, who saw in his election the fulfillment of one of the dark possibilities of democracy — that the people would elect a demagogue intent on bending the arc of history backward — and felt themselves summoned to act as guardians of the Republic righting the course of that arc. We were in a state of exception that it was both their warrant and their duty to decide.

 

The standards and practices that marked our professional classes as elites deserving of our trust in ordinary times (impartiality, procedural correctness) were no longer applicable. In a time of “literal white nationalists in the White House” putting “babies in cages,” these protocols would in practice end up colluding with an existential danger. Departures from those practices become not just excusable but a moral imperative. Thus was undertaken a principled abandonment of scrupulousness in reporting, proportionality in judging, and the neutral application of rules once held to be constitutive of professional authority, all in favor of a politics of emergency.

 

This was something I warned about the week of Trump’s inauguration: Something about the Trump phenomenon caused his opponents, as much as his supporters, to “abandon their moral, ethical, and professional standards.”

 

Yang sees the members of this ruling class as shifting their mind. At first they treated Trump as an aberration to an America that was “already great.” Then they argued that Trump was a manifestation of the deep, inveterate problem in an America that was “never that great” at all.

 

For myself, the politics of emergency that stoked the deep antipathy of the governing and chattering classes toward the people was expanded in the COVID emergency, to the point where it swallowed public health as well. Going to the beach in a red state like Florida was deemed the action of a death cult. Going to a Black Lives Matter/Antifa riot in Kenosha was deemed a salvific form of public health.

 

This has now become morbid as Anthony Fauci goes on television to explain that you can’t make Christmas plans yet, even as much of the country is returning to as much of normal life as the law allows.

 

A democracy cannot long put up with such a glaring mismatch between the people — broadly conceived — and their ruling institutions. One writer tried, in his own age, to descry “the cause of the present discontents.” He is something of a model for me in these times. “I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong,” he wrote. “They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people.” That was the inveterate populist Edmund Burke.

 

The next decade is going to see a fantastic contest. One the one side are nearly uniformly liberal governing institutions. They will claim to defend liberalism — our inalienable rights, as mediated to us by the media, Silicon Valley, and NGOs — from the predations of populist demagogues. And they will often be caught merely defending their present privileges. They will demand respect for institutions in which their opponents have no voice or share. On the other side will be the ragged populists, democratic in spirit, but prone to wild misstatement and intemperate promises of violence and cataclysm.

 

It’s going to get nastier.

A Small Blow to the Defamation Peddlers

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, October 03, 2021

 

A Texas court has ruled that conspiracy entrepreneur Alex Jones is liable for damages in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which Jones has alleged was a staged, “false flag” propaganda operation carried out by “crisis actors.”

 

This is bad news for kindred figures such as Julie Kelly, one of the habitually dishonest contributors to the habitually dishonest American Greatness, who has similarly claimed that D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, one of the officers assaulted during the Capitol riot, is a “crisis actor.” It is, indeed, very bad news for the whole bullsh** industry, from cable news to the rage-retailers of Twitter, because defamation is central to that industry’s business model.

 

Jones should, of course, be bled white. In this matter, he is unquestionably on the wrong side of the law, to say nothing of the law’s very distant relation, morality. His culpability is beyond doubt, though it has been very entertaining to observe the evolution of his excuses in this and related matters, first claiming to be in the grip of some “psychosis,” then insisting that he could not effectively defame anybody because nobody would be so monumentally stupid as to take him at his word.

 

It is worth noting the utter cowardice at work there, which is one of the most powerful political and cultural influences of our time.

 

It’s no coincidence Jones has in effect offered for himself the same justification that many of Donald Trump’s admirers put forward in his defense, which is, to borrow from Salena Zito, that he should be taken seriously but not literally. He isn’t a habitual liar — he’s just “owning the libs,” sticking a thumb in the eye of elite sensibilities, whatever. Trumpism, like Alex Jones-ism and its left-wing equivalents, is built on defamation, and its foundation is the confidence that such defamation imposes no real cost on those who traffic in it.

 

That confidence is not entirely misplaced. Sometimes, defamation is legally actionable, and sometimes it isn’t. But actionable defamation often goes unchallenged because of the cost and inconvenience involved in litigation. In that respect, the Sandy Hook families did a public service by suing Alex Jones. We owe them our gratitude, and more of us should follow their example.

 

I have some experience with the law of libel, which is what you call defamation in print. I spent the first part of my career as a newspaper editor, meaning that I was threatened with a libel lawsuit about once a week, though few of those threats ever amounted to much and none ever saw the inside of a courtroom. In my present post as a political commentator in the Golden Age of Bullsh**, I attract a fair amount of slander and libel, too — manufactured quotations from the likes of Matt Bruenig, completely fictitious inventions from the likes of NARAL, etc.

 

This kind of thing happens all the time, and it isn’t just the usual assortment of nobodies on Twitter: Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times, for example, slandered venture capitalist Marc Andreessen earlier this year, in another case of a manufactured quotation. Other than a well-deserved vivisection by Glenn Greenwald, nothing came of it. But the examples set by people associated with institutions such as the New York Times and the Atlantic — and the White House — matter a great deal, because elite institutions enjoy prestige and credibility that make their transgressions powerful weapons.

 

As noted, these sorts of episodes rarely produce legal action, in part because initiating such action is a pain in the butt that often costs more than it is worth, and in part because public figures have — wrongly, I think — come to accept defamation as an inevitable part of modern life, something that must simply be endured.

 

American libel law is, for the most part, very good. It requires only that a complainant show that a claim is both false and defamatory, and, when public figures are involved, that the claim was made with the actual malice of reckless disregard for the truth. The complainant does not have to document further economic loss to claim damages — the defamation itself is the damage.

 

The substance of the law is reasonable, but the world is full of unpredictable judges and juries, and good lawyers are expensive. Worse, this kind of defamation is often trafficked in by entrepreneurs looking for free publicity — people who, in at least some cases, want their targets to sue them, because a lawsuit will give them what they most crave: attention.

 

On top of that, social media and other technological and social changes have complicated the situation a little bit. Without the New York Times connection, nobody would care who Taylor Lorenz is, but she did not libel Marc Andreessen in the pages of the New York Times. If you are a lawyer looking to buy yourself a vacation home in Aspen, then you don’t want to sue Taylor Lorenz — you want to sue the New York Times. I don’t know what Taylor Lorenz’s savings account looks like, but I am willing to bet that it is not very close to the New York Times Company’s market capitalization of $8.3 billion.

 

Social media has, to some extent, given institutions the opportunity to outsource their defamation to Twitter, where individual writers can drive traffic and revenue to your publication while giving the institution itself a layer of legal insulation. Firms get to enjoy the benefits of irresponsible social-media-rage-monkey antics without being exposed to much risk. That is emblematic of our time, which is characterized by intellectual and moral cowardice.

 

In one sense, we could think of this phenomenon as a moral failing on the part certain media entrepreneurs. But in the larger sense, we should think of it as a moral failing on the part of their audience. If the market treated an Alex Jones or a Dan Bongino with the contempt they deserve, then there would be no incentive to behave as dishonestly and irresponsibly as such figures do. But markets are like democracies: They are a blessing in that they ultimately end up giving people what they want, and they are a horror in that they ultimately end up giving people what they want. And that isn’t really a problem that can be fixed with legislation. Corruptissima republica plurimae leges.

 

Alex Jones has been a wonderful boon to the Left — he is exactly the kind of foil you would want if you were a left-wing culture warrior. If he didn’t exist, they would have had to invent him — they are, in fact, busy trying to invent a replacement for him as we speak. And the Trumpist Right will, of course, oblige, coughing up as many Proud Boys or Newsmax grifters or Claremont Institute poseurs as the market will bear.

 

There are limits to how far a business model based on defamation can go. Alex Jones probably is not a big enough fish that making an example of him will have much salutary effect, but putting a real price on lying for a living is still a baby step in the right direction.

How Jen Psaki Plays the Press

By David Harsanyi

Thrusday, September 30, 2021

 

In her first appearance as White House press secretary, a prim Jen Psaki pledged to tell the American people the truth “even when it’s hard to hear.” Her job, she explained, wasn’t merely to relay the positions of the president and his administration but also to “rebuild trust” with “the American people.” Restoring normalcy to White House press briefings, she suggested, was the first step toward restoring decency in a beleaguered nation.

 

Psaki’s promise was difficult to square with reality. Joe Biden, her boss, had just run the least transparent campaign in modern American presidential history. Biden, whose propensity for fabulism and gaffe-laden streams of consciousness were now hampered by a struggle to string together coherent sentences, would need to be further insulated from the press as president. While Trump, no Cicero himself, would engage in wild and unruly press conferences with the media, Biden rarely takes unsanctioned questions — often, and, oddly, admitting that he has been told with whom he may speak. Because of this, Psaki would take on an even larger role.

 

The New York Times remarked that Psaki had “tamped down the vitriol that colored news briefings” during the Trump administration. White House press conferences have always been aggressively uninformative, but in recent years they had become virtually useless. The antagonism in the briefing rooms during the Trump era — deployed to various levels of effectiveness by Sean Spicer, Sarah Sanders, Stephanie Grisham (who never held a briefing in her nine months in the job), and Kayleigh McEnany — reflected the presi­dent’s own feelings about media. Yet it is also true that the press’s obsession with partisan-generated pseudo-scandals, such as Russian “collusion,” took up most of their focus and manifested itself in more grandstanding than useful journalism. It was a corrosive, if symbiotic, relationship.

 

The central problem with the Trump-age political media wasn’t the hyper-critical view of the administration or even the detestation of the man in charge. Journalists should never be comfortable with those in power. It’s the fact that the media rarely employ a healthy skepticism or antagonism when Democrats are in power. Watching the treatment of press secretaries is one of the best ways to understand the asymmetry.

 

Media hosannas fell on Psaki as she took to the lectern. A Vogue profile — accompanied by Annie Leibovitz’s pictures — noted that Psaki exhibited “a mixture of warmth, humor, intelligence, and edge.” “I really should not be impressed with a calm, professional, and factual press briefing,” marveled New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb, “but I am where I am.” A Washingtonian profile noted that not only was half the country “smitten” by Psaki, but “a swath of the White House press corps sounds quite taken with how polite she is.”

 

Psaki’s ability to dunk on reporters — though on most days, the only reporter willing to challenge Psaki is Fox News’s Peter Doocy — has also garnered the press secretary widespread accolades from left-wing social-media circles, where the hashtag #Psakibomb is often trending on Twitter. Admittedly, Psaki brushes off questions with an icy, surgical precision. It’s no wonder that Axelrod calls her the best press secretary he’s ever seen. “She’s unflappable,” Obama’s former senior adviser said. “It’s very easy under the glare of those lights and the intense questioning to buckle or to become ornery. She never does. As Biden would say, she has a steel rod for a spine.”

 

Psaki cut her teeth in the Obama White House, where she served in various roles, from traveling press secretary during the 2008 campaign to chief spokeswoman for Secretary of State John Kerry, before becoming White House communications director. She had memorably spearheaded the puerile hashtag diplomacy of “#unitedforukraine” and functioned as the kind of drab D.C. propagandist who excels in the loyalty-driven partisan environment of Wash­ington. “I would argue that Obama doesn’t give himself enough credit for what he’s done around the world” is the kind of thing she would say.

 

More notably, Psaki had been one of the bureaucrats deputized to enact Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber,” in which the Obama administration manipulated young, pliable, and incurious journalists into spreading misinformation about a nuclear deal with Iran, one of the administration’s highest priorities.

 

The Iran Deal media operation was many things, but none of them were “transparent.” In one 2013 incident, for instance, Fox News investigative journalist James Rosen — a reporter whom the Obama Justice Department had spied on in 2010, collecting telephone records, perusing personal emails, and tracking movements — attempted to refer back to a video of an exchange he had with Psaki regarding secret negotiations between the Obama administration and the Islamist regime in Iran. He couldn’t find it. In the conversation, Psaki had accidentally blown the administration’s claim that it had not been negotiating with Iran, saying “there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that.” (The conversation was somewhat reminiscent of Nixon’s hapless press secretary Ron Ziegler, who, after being asked if American troops were preparing to invade Laos, famously answered, “The president is aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia. That is not to say anything is going on in Southeast Asia.”)

 

An investigation soon found that eight minutes of tape had been deleted to protect the administration. Psaki risibly denied knowing anything about how her conversation — cut from a video in the department she was running — had miraculously disappeared.

 

“It’s one thing not to release sensitive information,” veteran reporter Wolf Blitzer said, confronting Psaki. “It’s another thing to lie to the media and the public. Is it ever justified for a U.S. government spokesperson to lie to the American people?”

 

“A fundamental value I’ve always followed is not to,” Psaki claimed.

 

In the real world, Psaki has a nearly sociopathic ability to mislead people. She lies all the time. She will lie about small things, like claiming that Biden’s dog, Major, was not biting Secret Service officers. She will lie to placate Twitter mobs, as she did when she falsely contended recently that Border Patrol agents were “whipping” Haitian migrants at the border. And she definitely lies about the big things.

 

During the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, in which perhaps a thousand American residents were left behind to deal with the Taliban, ISIS, and remnants of al-Qaeda, Psaki would indignantly claim that no Americans had been “stranded.” She made this claim even as Pentagon spokesman John Kirby informed others in the media that Americans were, in fact, “stranded” in the nation, after the State Department warned green-card holders to “keep a low profile,” after generals lamented the fact that not every American could get out, and even after reports of Americans being hunted by the Taliban hit the Internet.

 

Certainly Psaki isn’t responsible for the professionalizing of the White House fib. Yet it’s difficult to think of a press secretary who’s done it with the same ruthless proficiency. The vast majority of the political press corps allows it to happen. The sometimes cloying and obsequious coverage of her is merely a symptom of underlying problems with political journalism.

 

Psaki, for instance, had, when a political commentator at CNN, referred to the never-married senator Lindsey Graham on Twitter as “#LadyG.” This kind of homophobic jab would probably destroy the prospects of any Republican press secretary, but it barely made a dent in the news. CNN’s Brian Stelter, who made his name warning about Trumpian attacks on democracy, kicked off an interview with Psaki by asking her what the press was getting “wrong” about the administration. The Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple noted that people were “blindsided by the return of competence and civility to the White House briefing room.”

 

Journalists prefer mendacity to be curated, managed, liberal, and, above all things, civil. In that regard, Psaki is perfect for this town. 

Journalists Face Disaster as COVID-19 Deaths Drop

By Joel Zinberg

Friday, October 01, 2021

 

The COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. is ebbing, but you would never know it from the headlines. Bad news, accurate or not, sells. And in the case of COVID-19, it also supports the journalists’ prejudices.

 

The seven-day moving average of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations peaked and started to decline in early September. Nationwide, COVID-19 hospitalization rates have decreased 17 percent over the past two weeks. Only 19 states had any increase, and many were small. The remaining 31 states and the District of Columbia saw hospitalization rates decline. But that hasn’t stopped journalists from publicizing localized exceptions to the good news.

 

A recent article, for example, starts with the statement, “Coronavirus patients are flooding and straining hospitals across the U.S.” and goes on to describe how some states are promulgating “crises standards of care” to guide health-care providers on how to allocate limited resources. The article cites as evidence high ICU utilization, ranging from 77 percent to 90 percent of capacity, in seven states: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, and Texas.

 

Yet the most recent government data shows other indicators of pandemic severity and health-care capacity look pretty good in those seven states. New COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100 beds were lower compared with the previous week in five of the states, with only small increases in Idaho and Montana. New COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population were lower in Georgia and Texas and essentially unchanged in Idaho. Test positivity rates (a rough indicator of how widespread disease is and how quickly it is spreading) were lower in all the states other than Montana. New COVID-19 deaths — a lagging indicator — were up in four states, down in another and unchanged in Georgia and Texas, which both showed declines in the three other indicators.

 

The ICU capacity figures cited in the article also lack context. What is the normal utilization level for the ICUs in those states? Most trauma-center and tertiary-care-center ICUs routinely functioned at 80–90 percent of capacity even before the pandemic. And ICU beds are not a static resource.

 

In a study of 13 academic medical centers across the country during the first wave of the pandemic (March–June 2020), only five reported an ICU census on at least one day that exceeded their overall pre-pandemic ICU capacity. Only two exceeded pre-pandemic capacity for more than 17 days. COVID-19 patients were a quarter of the median daily ICU census during this period. All of the 13 centers were able to increase their ICU capacity to accommodate COVID-19 patients by limiting elective, non-emergent procedures and by shifting providers and beds into medical ICU usage. Staff and beds from other types of ICUs and recovery rooms were repurposed for critically ill COVID-19 patients.

 

The situation was similar during the recent Delta variant wave. Currently, three-quarters of hospital inpatient beds are filled. COVID-19 patients account for only 11 percent of the available beds. Seventy-eight percent of ICU beds are filled. COVID-19 patients represent 26 percent of the capacity.

 

The suggestion in many articles is that people who refuse vaccination are forcing widespread life-and-death choices. Journalists appear to be channeling President Biden who, in remarks late last week, chastised “the unvaccinated [who] overcrowd our hospitals, overrunning emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack or a cancer operation needed to get the lifesaving care because the places where they would get that care are crowded; they are not available.”

 

Yet, while the unvaccinated may be foolish or misinformed, there is little evidence they have crowded out others. Some people delayed necessary care during the pandemic, but that was usually the result of fear, exacerbated by stay-at-home orders and other lockdown measures. Few if any people were unable to obtain emergency care if they sought it out.

 

Anyone who has worked in a hospital knows that ICU beds are a scarce resource and that ICU physicians often need to choose which sick patients get available beds and which do not. Perhaps the pandemic has made these choices more acute in limited locations for limited amounts of time. But triaging ICU patients is not a new phenomenon.

 

Distorting the news to censure the unvaccinated is unhelpful and unwarranted. The unvaccinated are primarily harming themselves. Unfortunately, many media outlets are misleading us all.

Germany after Merkel

By Andrew Stuttaford

Thursday, September 30, 2021

 

The coalition-building that follows a German election can take quite some time, but regardless of who becomes the country’s next chancellor (almost certainly the Social Democratic Party’s Olaf Scholz), one thing is undeniable: The descent of the center-right CDU/CSU to its lowest-ever share of the vote puts two defining characteristics of outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel — tactical brilliance and strategic blindness — into uncomfortable perspective.

 

Great leaders take on the consensus; Merkel’s talent lies only in identifying it. Since first becoming chancellor in 2005, she steadily outmaneuvered the SPD by sliding leftward into territory that the Social Democrats had once called their own. It was a move that owed little or nothing to ideology and everything to a determination to hang on to her job. Tactically, it was a triumph, but with Merkel (whose personal approval rating now stands at around 80 percent) having decided not to run again, it left the center-Right with a problem. With not too much to distinguish themselves (most notably in the case of the CDU) politically from the SPD — at least on the surface — they needed a candidate persuasive enough to retain the support of those who had been brought into the fold by “Mutti” Merkel’s mysterious charisma rather than by anything in their platform. Armin Laschet was not that candidate.

 

More broadly, Merkel’s approach had moved Germany’s Overton Fenster in a direction that no one on the right should appreciate. Scholz himself appears to be firmly in the SPD’s center-left tradition, but that is not so with some of those behind him. And the adverse consequences of Merkelism stretch far beyond politics. Germany’s persistently high tax rates are one legacy of Merkel’s instinct that the middle ground was the right place to be.

 

On the economic front, Merkel has been fortunate. Her SPD predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, had put in place labor-market reforms designed to im­prove German productivity. Those, reinforced by lucrative export opportunities in a rapidly expanding China, as well as by the boost to Germany’s competitive advantage from the disguised devaluation that arose from exchanging the deutsche mark, an intrinsically strong currency, for the weaker euro, provided the country with the foundations for years of healthy growth. It also presented Germany with the temptation to coast — a temptation to which, under Merkel, it succumbed. The results were then exacer­bated by chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, which has made a substantial contribution to the country’s notorious failure to keep pace with the digital revolution.

 

Fiscal discipline is a rare virtue, but Germany has taken it too far. What looked like prudence was in fact reckless, given China’s growing industrial sophistication (which has not only increased its self-sufficiency but also elevated it as a competitor) and the rising challenge to Ger­man industry posed by both digitization and climate policies both at home and abroad. Traditional German engineering expertise could well count for little in the electric-vehicle era. This could hurt, particularly for smaller suppliers to the auto sector, which, directly or indirectly, accounts for around 10 percent of Ger­many’s GDP.

 

Making matters worse, Merkel’s Energiewende — a bid to simultaneously wean the country off fossil fuels and nuclear energy — has burdened Germany, and thus its industry, with the highest electricity costs in the world. Merkel’s responsibility for Germany’s grotesquely expensive and, in terms of greenhouse-gas reduction, distinctly unimpressive dash to renewables might perhaps be put down to the inability of any one leader to hold back the hysteria in Western Europe, let alone deep-green Germany, over climate change. However, Merkel’s decision to accelerate the phaseout (one she had earlier slowed down) of Germany’s nuclear-power stations — which had supplied roughly 30 percent of the country’s energy in 2000 — in the wake of panic over the Fukushima disaster is a showcase for the way she has regularly placed short-term political expediency over the longer-term national interest. As a physicist by training, Merkel was well positioned to make the argument for nuclear power — tellingly, she chose not to.

 

Over time, the Energiewende has led to a dangerous reliance on Russia, which now supplies around 40 percent of Germany’s natural gas. This has created a dependence that helps explain why Merkel was prepared to traduce Ukraine by agreeing to the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That stance was difficult to reconcile with her supposed role as “leader of the free world” — a title that, to be fair, she disavowed — but then so was her attempt to lead the European Union into a closer trade relationship with China. Xi’s concentration camps might have been expected to make a German leader pause, but her attitude toward a deal with Huawei only confirmed that genocide is not a deal-breaker. Something similar can be said of Merkel’s willingness to largely go along with Germany’s neglect of NATO and with the introduction of a social-media law so harsh that it was emulated in Russia, albeit with infinitely more malign intent.

 

Merkel’s adventures in Germany’s “near abroad” (to borrow a not entirely inappropriate Russian phrase), the EU, have also been marked by the lack of any strategic vision. She is not to blame for the euro or its innate structural flaws. However, all too typically, she dodged making the difficult decision she should have taken when the inevitable crisis struck. The best methods of reconciling her twin objectives of saving the euro while preventing the euro zone’s transformation into a “transfer union” (in which its more frugal north subsidized the euro zone’s laggards) would have been either to cut the euro zone’s weakest members loose or to have split the euro into “northern” and “southern” units. These options would have been risky and in all probability expensive, but they would have been preferable to the course she eventually set for the euro zone: bailouts and the accompanying austerity that preserved a procrustean currency but ruined the lives of millions. And even this victory — if that’s the word — will, in the end, prove to be Pyrrhic. The Brussels ratchet is what it is.

 

Merkel’s commitment to a more closely integrated EU is one limited by her insistence that it should be run on German lines, especially when it comes to the question of living within its means. Nevertheless, in 2009 she was sufficiently communautaire to force through the Lisbon Treaty as a device to enact the proposed EU constitution that had previously been felled by two key referenda. That Merkel would set out to bypass voters in this way was evidence of an authoritarian strain (the social-media law was another) that has revealed itself rather too often.

 

Opinions differ over whether Britain’s quitting was a good thing for the EU, but there can be no doubt that the Lisbon Treaty played an important part in setting the U.K. on the path to Brexit — a path made even easier by the euro zone’s prolonged agony and then by Merkel’s unilateral decision to suspend the EU’s Dublin procedure on asylum seekers and open Germany’s doors during the migrant crisis, less than a year before the Brexit vote. Even after all that, Brexit was approved only by a narrow margin: If Merkel had indulged British prime minister David Cameron with a spot of even mildly convincing pre-referendum kabuki, Brexit would, quite possibly, have been voted down. Indeed, if any one EU politician was responsible for Brexit, it was Merkel. In 2015, The Economist described her as the “indispensable European,” in no small part because of her behavior during the migrant crisis. That may or may not have been true (spoiler: it was not), but she was certainly the indispensable, if accidental, Brexiteer.

 

The conclusion (so far) of the migrant crisis was that 890,000 refugees and other migrants arrived in Germany in 2015, followed by a much smaller number the next year (after an about-turn by Berlin), furnishing final confirmation of what had long been obvious. Whatever its people may have wanted, and however much its governments had, against all the evidence, denied it, Germany had become a Migrationsland. And for what? In the mean­time, this influx completed the transformation of AfD from a Euro­skeptic Professorenpartei into post-war Germany’s most successful party of the nationalist-populist Right, a Merkel legacy that must disappoint her bien-pensant fans.

 

In addition, Merkel’s agreeing to the admission of so many incomers, which was probably prompted by a combination of her Lutheranism (she is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor), moral narcissism, and, once again, panic, opened fault lines within the EU that have yet to close. Her actions were seen, not without reason, as having attracted even more migrants to Europe, and her attempts to insist on resettlement quotas for refugees throughout the union only added to the resentment she had stirred up. That later efforts to deal with the influx have relied heavily on Turkey’s cooperation have meant that Recep Tayyip Erdogan is, along with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, one of three authoritarian leaders on whom all or part of the EU has become all too dependent, something hard to square with its noisy pronouncements on the importance of “European values.”

 

Put all this together, and the praise for Merkel that has accompanied her upcoming departure looks absurd. But in the continent of the blind . . .