What Happened Today: April 20, 2023
Mr. McCarthy's proposal; California's energy equity experiment; The body is the brain and the brain is the body
The Big Story
Democrats are struggling to maintain a united front as the GOP’s top lawmakers rallied behind Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s proposal to raise the debt limit by $1.5 trillion ahead of a possible national default. Chiding President Joe Biden for not negotiating budget reforms with McCarthy in exchange for raising the debt limit, Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia who’s clashed with the White House over past economic packages, said “this signals a deficiency of leadership, and it must change.”
McCarthy’s package would provide enough cushion for the federal government to stay on top of its financial liabilities through March 2024, but it would require Democrats to abandon Biden’s plan for student debt relief and to chip away at several major facets of the party’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, including green energy infrastructure. Lambasting the proposal, Biden told a union hall of steel workers on Wednesday that “these wacko notions” are not about “fiscal discipline [but rather] cutting benefits for folks ... they don’t seem to care much about.”
Because it wouldn’t make it past the Senate, the proposal is simply a negotiating tactic. And for now, at least, the game of chicken hasn’t spooked the markets, which are acting on the assumption that the Speaker and the president will sit down to work out a deal before a default over the summer. The White House’s hard-line opposition to even discussing the terms of McCarthy’s proposal might ultimately force McCarthy to blink first, however, as it remains unclear if he would have enough support from the party’s far-right wing to reach the required 218 votes to pass the proposal with a majority.
Read More: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/20/house-dems-biden-mccarthy-debt-00093093
In The Back Pages: American Crisis
The Rest
→ Paris stock-market operator Euronext saw its offices briefly overtaken by hundreds of protestors on Thursday as the demonstrations against the government’s pension reforms continue into a third month. One protestor told reporters that the money to keep France’s retirement age doesn’t have to come from “the pockets of workers—there is some in the pockets of billionaires.” Macron and his allies have tried to shift the attention of the public onto other issues, like education, but according to the latest polls, the vast majority of voters remain against the pension reforms. “There is a bit of everything,” Macron said on a visit this week to a school in southern France, just as protestors nearby demanded his resignation. “There are people who are happy and people who are not happy.”
→ Satisfying new requirements from state lawmakers as California continues a push to electrify everything it can, including cars and appliances, three of the state’s biggest utility companies are one step closer to creating new pricing rubrics based on customers’ income. The new plan would split utility bills into two charges, one of which would help subsidize the ongoing electrification process but would include a flat fee pegged to users’ income. That could mean low-income residents ultimately get a bill that’s reduced 20% from what they’re paying now while top earners could pay around $92 more each month. But not everyone thinks the new subsidized electrification is worth the effort. Loretta Lynch, former head of the California Public Utilities Commission, said “it’s really just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of the excessive costs imposed on Californians.”
→ Oakland A’s fans watched their team spin a $56 million payroll, the 30th lowest in Major League Baseball, into a 3-16 record, a dismal start to the season that just got a little more depressing as team officials announced this week that they’ve signed a binding agreement to buy new land for a future ballpark in Las Vegas. Oakland A’s fans who watched Reggie Jackson dominate the league in the ’70s or the endless homer bombs from the Bash Brothers in the ’80s will no doubt lament the idea of the club saying goodbye to California for good, though there’s hope, perhaps, when the only direction to go in is up. “In 37 years of covering baseball, I don’t know that I’ve seen a clubhouse as depressed as the one I walked into before the game,” sportswriter Evan Drellich noted on Wednesday.
→ At least one person has died and several others were injured after a five-story parking garage collapsed on Tuesday in lower Manhattan. After the collapse of the second story, which led to the breakdown of the entire building, the NYPD used a robotic dog to enter the garage to assess how first responders could enter the structure safely. Built in the early 20th century, the structure had long-standing hazardous-condition complaints from inspectors that were potentially unaddressed at the time of the collapse—though the issue here might be bigger than just old buildings. A recent report in The Telegraph found several experts sounding the alarms that old infrastructure in England and abroad will struggle to support the heft of electric vehicles, which are significantly heavier than traditional vehicles because of their batteries. “I don’t want to be too alarmist, but there definitely is the potential for some of the early car parks in poor condition to collapse,” said structural engineer Chris Whapples.
→ Top-ranked ultramarathon runner Joasia Zakrzewski had her third-place finish in a recent English race disqualified after tracking data revealed she had “taken vehicle transport during part of the route.” The data showed that Zakrzewski ran one mile in 1 minute and 40 seconds, a split easy enough for a car but essentially impossible for the 47-year-old, who said she had quit the race and taken a ride in a car to the nearest check-in to alert tournament officials she was out, only to be encouraged at the checkpoint to complete the race. Accepting the third-place trophy was a “miscommunication,” she said, noting a bad case of jet lag and brain fog as she apologized to the racer who would have taken the podium spot. The actual third-place finisher, Mel Sykes, wrote on Twitter, “Great news for me but really bad news for sportsmanship.”
→ That old mind-body problem that so rankled René Descartes might be solved, or at least better understood, now that Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis researchers have published a new study in the journal Nature that reveals a previously unidentified system within the motor cortex of the brain that both connects to parts of the brain that run internal organs and develops plans and actions. Researchers are calling this system SCAN (the somato-cognitive action network). “SCAN seems to integrate abstract plans-thoughts-motivations with actual movements and physiology, [and] it provides additional neuroanatomical explanation for why ‘the body’ and ‘the mind’ aren’t separate or separable,” said study senior author Nico Dosenbach.
→ A weekly German magazine is in hot water after it ran a cover interview with Formula One champion Michael Schumacher, who has largely lived a private life since a 2013 skiing accident in the French Alps left him with a serious brain injury. Schumacher didn’t participate in the interview with Die Aktuelle; his “answers” were generated by AI, and though the article itself clarifies the use of AI, the deceptive cover was enough to anger the Schumacher estate, which is now preparing to sue the magazine. The role of AI in creative content will only become more contentious and likely require intervention from a high court or legislators. Last week, a song with cloned voices of Drake and The Weeknd became a viral hit, streamed 8.5 million times on TikTok.
→ Rebellious short-story writer and winner of the 2013 International Man Booker prize Lydia Davis said her newest story collection will not be available on Amazon because she does not “believe corporations should have as much control over our lives as they do.” The book will only be available through brick-and-mortar stores and some independent online retailers, a boycott “that puts my book on the shelves of booksellers who are so much more likely to care about it,” Davis said.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Do Not Destroy by Philip J. Bentley
On Earth Day, looking back on the history of Jewish thought about our responsibility to care for the environment
Three Poems by Kinton Ford
‘I face time with my mom each afternoon / The darkness here means darkness there, too soon’
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
American Crisis
How we lost our faith in the future and how to get it back
Readers whose memories go back before the Age of Trump may remember the Via Meadia series of essays and news notes at The American Interest. What drove Via Meadia was my conviction that history was far from over, that American society was heading into a period of turmoil, and that internationally the “holiday from history” that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War was rapidly coming to an end.
Via Meadia traced the meltdown of post-historical society in both world and American politics. Overseas, revisionist great powers like China, Russia, and Iran were moving steadily and effectively to undermine the foundations of the American-led world order. At home, the framework of social order inside the United States was beginning to come unglued. Institutions and ideologies that used to work reasonably well most of the time were losing their effectiveness, and the politics of both the left and right wandered off in strange and sometimes troubling new directions.
Since then, I’ve continued to write about the increasingly dramatic international scene in my Global View columns at The Wall Street Journal. But I’ve also been paying attention to the domestic scene, and increasingly I feel the need to get back to writing regularly about what’s happening inside the United States.
Not since the 1970s have Americans felt this pessimistic about where the country is headed. Some believe that our best days are behind us, others that we never really had any good days. America, they say, was never anything more than an oppressive society built on the theft of Native land and the exploitation of African slaves. American liberal ideology was never more than a disguise for white supremacy; American capitalism was always only a system of exploitation.
Meanwhile, public confidence in institutions ranging from the federal government to the media to religious institutions has rapidly—and justifiably—declined. The price of essential services like education and health care has escalated beyond all reason. Voter discontent with the status quo, and disdain rising to hatred against what many perceived as an entitled and incompetent establishment boiled over among Democrats and leftists as social movements ranging from Occupy Wall Street to the Bernie Sanders candidacy sought to redefine the Democratic Party. On the right, such sentiments powered Donald Trump’s rise to the White House in 2016 and they continued to curdle during the COVID pandemic and the Biden years.
I’ve written about a generational failure in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Something similar is happening at home. Our federal government, and many of our city and state governments as well, pile up huge debts without meeting the basic needs of the American people. Too much of our leadership class in universities, the media, and the corporate and intellectual establishments has lost sight of essential truths—and lost the ability to communicate with the rest of the country. And in the absence of genuine leadership, more Americans are turning to angry, misguided voices, both on the left and the right, peddling quack solutions to the real problems we face.
The domestic coverage at Via Meadia 1.0 struck a chord among readers all over the country, from many different political perspectives and of all ages and professions. Many people reached out to say that they found hope and inspiration in some of the ideas we presented there. (The internet being what it is, many wrote in with less positive assessments.) That kind of coverage seems even more needed today, and so with the support of my friends and colleagues at Hudson Institute and the good people at Tablet, I’ve decided to get back into commentary on the domestic scene.
Via Meadia 2.0 is launching as a series of Tablet essays, podcasts, and reports. Although the content will occasionally nod in the direction of world affairs, and my podcast partner Jeremy Stern may sometimes pull me into commenting on my Global View columns, Via Meadia 2.0 is going to center on domestic life. The goal is to illuminate the causes of America’s current political distemper, analyze the most important American issues of our time, and develop ideas and proposals for a new kind of American politics in the rapidly changing environment of a tumultuous period in American history.
This is anything but a parochial focus. America’s success at home has always been the foundation of American security and success abroad. At a time of growing international danger, when the framework of world peace has come under the gravest threats in decades, America needs to succeed at home if we are to fulfil our potential as a stabilizing power worldwide.
Writing intelligently about the United States is harder than it looks. If there is one thing I’ve learned in decades of travel, study, and work in the United States and abroad it is that everybody thinks they understand America but that in fact very few people do. The United States of America is a complex society with a rich history, great cultural and geographic diversity, a social system that is often not very transparent, and a set of founding institutions and ideas that exist in tension with each other and with newer ideas and institutions that have developed over time. Our religious culture has been shaped by salvationist Christianity, but our civic culture and national ideology are grounded in an essentially secular liberal outlook.
We are also an American society. That is, we share characteristics with other countries in the Americas like Mexico and Brazil that set the countries of our hemisphere apart from countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Like many other American countries, the United States has more ethnic, cultural, social, and religious diversity than most European countries. The turbulent history of the hemisphere has left its mark on many American societies, where levels of crime, inequality, and violence are extraordinarily high by world standards. At the same time, our cultural roots are more Anglo and Protestant than most of our fellow American states, giving us much in common with countries like Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and of course Canada. As is the case throughout the Western Hemisphere, our intellectual classes and social elites have historically looked to Europe for aesthetic and intellectual values, while much of our population has had little knowledge of or interest in European history and culture. Serial waves of immigration, the latest and largest of which is taking place now, have reshaped American politics and culture, while leaving many of the essential elements of the national character largely unchanged.
Most of the time, however, our national conversation fails to do justice to the rich complexity of our national life. There are some outstanding exceptions both on the left and the right of American political discourse, but the quality of too much of our national conversation, mediated as it often is by cable news and social media, is too superficial, too one-sided, and too polarized to address the real issues in American life. That would be dangerous enough in ordinary times, but we live in demanding times. The disruptive economic and social consequences of the information revolution combine with the decadence and decay of the midcentury American model of regulated industrial democracy to plunge American society into a maelstrom of interconnected economic, social, racial, political, cultural, and ideological crises.
Between the domestic upheavals in American society, the international turmoil at a time of renewed great power competition, and global threats ranging from nuclear war to climate change, many Americans feel angry, frustrated, and afraid. To make matters worse, America’s leadership class has lost its way, and too many of the politicians, intellectuals, artists, educators, and religious leaders who ought to be pointing the way forward are locked into stale ideologies and failed institutional models, lacking the vision required to move up to the next stage of American life.
Our country is rocked by a set of related but distinct waves of destabilizing change. The first centers around the decadence and decay of what I’ve called “blue model society,” the set of institutions, ideas, and practices built on the foundations of the American economy of the mid 20th century. Once widely admired and emulated as the highest form of social organization, and still the object of widespread political nostalgia, blue model society suffers today both from the ways the emerging information economy disrupts the economic assumptions on which it depends and, crucially, from the increasing consequences of the flaws and shortcomings analyzed over the years by observers like Daniel Bell, Jane Jacobs, and Christopher Lasch. The toxic long-term social and environmental consequences of a mass-production and mass-consumption society based on the technologies of the Industrial Revolution are unfolding around us today in ways that pollute both the natural and social environment.
The hyperindividualism and hedonism that characterize declining blue model society intersect with the massive consequences of the sexual revolution in ways that challenge some of the most deeply rooted institutions and values in American (and indeed in human) life. The 20th century brought three extraordinary changes. The development of antibiotics brought most STDs under control, turning syphilis from a major scourge into a nuisance. Oral contraception and the somewhat later development of a “morning-after pill” reduced the likelihood of unwanted pregnancy, and the easy availability of abortion made pregnancy optional. And a combination of increased educational opportunity for women with the decline in the importance of physical strength for most jobs led to a revolution in gender roles and the mass entry of American women into all levels of the labor force. These changes would have been profoundly disruptive under any circumstances and at any time. That they came as blue model hedonic individualism was creating a new kind of impulse-friendly social climate (“If it feels good, do it” was a slogan popular among boomers in their youth) magnified their impact on social life. The social and political impact of these unprecedented changes will continue to unfold for some time.
Even as these changes roiled American society, the information revolution was getting underway. Like the Industrial Revolution before it (and the Neolithic revolution thousands of years before), the information revolution involves massive changes in every dimension of human life. It will drive every human institution from the family to the state into a series of far-reaching and, from where we now stand, bewildering and unsettling transformations. We’ve witnessed declines in manufacturing and clerical jobs as rapid as the declines in agricultural jobs during the Industrial Revolution, even as giant corporations rise and fall with breathtaking speed. Just as the Industrial Revolution produced new and powerful business corporations, and a new class of “Titans of Industry” with previously unimaginable wealth and power, so the information revolution is generating new kinds of corporate and individual power—even as thorny problems of governing the new economy test the wisdom and competence of government. The recent acceleration in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence reminds us, if we needed the reminder, that the information revolution is still in its early stages, and the coming decades are likely to see more change, and faster change, than anything we’ve experienced to date.
America also faces what must be called a spiritual crisis. Here again we can speak of a confluence of forces contributing to a crisis that, unless coolly and carefully analyzed, can seem overwhelming. Part of the crisis stems from the nature of the times that we live in. Human life has never been this rich, and the potential to solve problems ranging from hunger to cancer has never been greater, but human civilization has also never been under this kind of severe, ongoing threat. Polls reveal that a large majority of younger Americans fear that climate change will materially harm them during their lives. The return of great power competition and Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war revived Cold War-era fears of nuclear annihilation. The COVID pandemic served as a vivid reminder of the dangers of global outbreaks of disease. These fears reinforce concerns based in the social and economic stresses flowing from the information revolution as whole job categories and industries disappear in the face of technological change to create a public mood of anxiety and unease that naturally and inevitably spills over into politics.
Unfortunately, the religious institutions and belief systems that traditionally helped people manage their fears have been hollowed out in many American communities and faith traditions. In the absence of formal religious affiliation, or the weakness of a particular set of religious institutions, the human needs that religion meets do not disappear. Politics sometimes becomes a new religion for people losing touch with the old kind. For those concerned, for example, that irreversible climate change is only decades away from destroying human civilization, political events like elections become plot points in an unfolding apocalypse. If the other side wins the next election, humanity may die! The collapse of politics into wars of religion and ideology exacerbates polarization and creates fanatics on all sides.
We must also speak of a crisis of the American public square, as the inherited cultural and religious traditions that once enriched American homes and communities yield to the power of a corporatized synthetic national culture that is often less tolerant, and less rich, than the older traditions it seeks to displace. As the old ethnic and regional subcultures fade away, we are left with an ersatz national “tradition” informed by superficial pop culture, pop psychology, and the logic of consumerism.
Finally, there is the crisis of the chattering classes. Academics and journalists, two groups of people whose business it is to make sense of events and help the rest of the country understand what is going on, have been particularly hard hit by the economic and social changes of recent decades. The overproduction of Ph.D.s mixed with the declining growth in student enrollments means that fewer and fewer young academics can hope to attain the status and security of reasonably paid, tenured jobs in their fields. And even for those who get tenure, college professors (it pains me to acknowledge) are often not as well-respected or as relatively well-off as they used to be.
Journalism, too, is not what it was. Print journalism is a shadow of its former self, and by and large internet publications do not pay the kinds of salaries and freelance fees that magazines like GQ, Newsweek, and Life used to offer. Compared to professions like law, banking, and medicine, many journalists—including, tragically, pundits—are less well paid and less professionally secure than they used to be. To make matters worse, given both the proliferation of internet publications and the decline in public confidence in the media, journalism is a less prestigious occupation than it once was. Anchors and prominent columnists can no longer count on the kind of authority their exclusive and prestigious platforms formerly gave them.
It is small wonder that under the circumstances, many academics and journalists take a dim view of the American reality, see more perils than opportunity in the new economy, and communicate their gloom and disenchantment to their readers and students. It is never good policy to starve the poets; the gloomy tone of so much of today’s academic and journalistic commentary reflects the diminished circumstances in which so many of the chattering classes now live.
Given all this upheaval we should not be surprised that American politics and public discourse reflect the emotions of fear, suspicion, and rage that are natural human responses to the stress so many of us are living with. The problems facing American society are real, they are serious, and they appear to be getting steadily more severe. I’ll do my best in these essays to analyze and explore them.
But if our problems are troubling, our opportunities are astounding. Never in human history has a society had the resources we have today in the United States. Never have new scientific discoveries offered so many ways to improve human lives. Never have there been so many ways for so many people to enjoy levels of affluence and ease that their parents and grandparents never knew. Never has it been possible for human beings to live as well as we can today while reducing the impact of human civilization on the natural order and preserving the environment on which we all depend.
The most important event of our time is not the decadence and decay of the old social order. It is the opening of an extraordinary and unprecedented opportunity to build a new and better way of life.
America was once the country of the future. Too many of us lately have lost our sense of the possible. But America’s time does not have to be over. We can renew our youth like the eagle. We can run and not be weary. The most extraordinary chapters in the American story have yet to be written.
That at least is the conviction that has grown on me through many years of observation and study. It’s my fondest hope and my fervent prayer that the readers who choose to follow me in this series of essays will come to share that conviction and rise up from their tablets to build an America better, wiser, richer, greener, happier, and more just than any society anybody in this long-suffering world has ever seen.
In keeping with yesterday’s inexplicable omission of the Kennedy Presidential candidacy announcement, today you inexplicably include as especially newsworthy that science has discovered that mind and body are intimately and indivisibly connected!! Eureka!! Or DUH, as the case may be. 🤦🏻♀️