What Happens in the West Wing

The cast of the West Wing recently reunited after 14 years for a one-off special called, rather awkwardly, A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote. (“When We All Vote” is an organization.) The special, filmed at the historic Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, combines a reenactment of the Season 3 episode “Hartsfield’s Landing” with a series of PSAs from cast members and celebrity guests (Bill Clinton, Michelle Obama, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Samuel L. Jackson) on the importance of voting and the means by which one can register.

The West Wing is one of the most highly acclaimed television series of all time. Set in a fictitious presidential administration, it influenced a generation of Democratic politicos. Over seven seasons, the series provided a kind of liberal “alternate universe” presidency during the Bush years. It’s sometimes called a “fantasy” about an “idealized” Washington, because its White House is populated by educated, witty, well-intentioned technocrats who are both progressive and patriotic. Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet is a Nobel Prize-winning economist with an uncommonly good memory, a firm grasp of policy, and a noble soul. He is patriotic and religious while firmly loyal to the Democratic Party. He is also a good dad.

Left critics of the show have noted the shortcomings of the show’s political ideal, which celebrates “governance by the good and intelligent.” Sorkin himself called the show “a Valentine to public service and to American institutions” about people who “all seemed to wake up in the morning and come to work wanting to do good.” Luke Savage, in an excellent analysis of the show printed in this magazine several years ago, said that in the West Wing, “the mundane business of technocratic governance is made to look exciting, intellectually stimulating, and, above all, honorable,” and that by “recreating the look and feel of political processes to the tee, while garnishing them with a romantic veneer, the show gifts the Beltway’s most spiritually-devoted adherents with a vision of how many would probably like to see themselves.”

This is certainly on display in the episode picked for the new reenactment. It’s actually one that Savage quoted, due to a scene in which the White House communications director tells President Bartlet that he should stop pretending to be “folks,” and should wear his intelligence on his sleeve. “Make this election about smart and not, qualified and not,” the communications director tells the president. As he says this, Bartlet is in the middle of winning chess matches against multiple White House staffers at once, and resolving a seemingly impossible military stand-off with China, because he is a genius who can “see the whole board” while others cannot. (...)

I went back through some of the West Wing recently because, like Savage, I see it as a very useful guide for understanding the aspirations and ideology of a certain kind of “technocratic liberalism.” Two conclusions stuck out: first, it is a very good show in lots of technical aspects, and this is important for understanding how horrible values can come to seem compelling and why talent and virtue are not synonymous. Second, it is not a depiction of an “unrealizable fantasy,” but an extremely realistic depiction of liberal governance that just needs to be interpreted correctly rather than in accordance with the intentions of its creators and the self-perceptions of its characters.

There is a tendency to believe that art with bad values is bad art, or that the people who produce it are stupid. I see this in some of the criticism of J.K. Rowling: people assume that because she is transphobic and has bad politics, the Harry Potter books are bad and trite and stupid. That may be true (I think the books are very good, as pieces of children’s literature) but people with horrible values can also be extremely talented and even “smart.” The West Wing is a compelling piece of television. The characters are memorable and seem like real people. (Pious know-it-alls like Bartlet are not rare, but quite common.) The dialogue is snappy, the political issues are well-researched, the jokes can be good, the plots are tight but intricate. I do not think the problem with Aaron Sorkin is that he is a bad writer. In fact, I think the problem with him is that he is a good writer who has appalling and ignorant values.

The West Wing, far from being unrealistic, was prophetic. It did not depict an administration that “could not exist.” In fact, the very thing it aspired to came about shortly after. Two years after the West Wing went off the air, the country elected Barack Obama, the brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning academic liberal president, who made “hard choices” and surrounded himself with the best and brightest. (He was also a good dad.) And what we found out is that just stuffing the West Wing with the “wisest,” most “pragmatic,” most “well-intentioned” people does not produce needed political change. Being a natural compromiser is not actually “pragmatic”—it just helps the other side win. It sells out our core moral values and gets nothing in return. It is neither good nor effective.

What’s interesting is that all of this was depicted in the West Wing, but the people making and watching the West Wing did not appear to notice. Because Aaron Sorkin is a good writer and artist who observes how people talk and act and does his research, he presented a fairly accurate picture of how a certain type of high-minded technocrat really behaves. I am reminded here of The Toast’s feature “Women Having A Terrible Time At Parties In Western Art History.” Male artists throughout the ages depicted the facial expressions of women with scrupulous accuracy. They just didn’t necessarily realize that the women they were painting were bored out of their minds, because they didn’t know how to interpret what they were representing. Sometimes it is true that Sorkin simply writes female characters badly, but other times he writes true-to-life characters and simply does not seem to grasp or care what is really going on between them.

President Bartlet is actually a dreadful president, and the show portrays this. As Savage points out, “after two terms in the White House, Bartlet’s gang of hyper-educated, hyper-competent politicos do not seem to have any transformational policy achievements whatsoever.” Bartlet’s speechwriting team, like Obama’s, is stuffed with Ivy League white guys who are great at talking and bad at listening. These men are sexist and smug. They rationalize bureaucratic inertia as pragmatism. They think reeling off statistics about agricultural subsidies is “doing politics.” They strut down hallways looking purposeful, without having any idea of where they’re going.

The West Wing, then, can be understood as a rather brilliant show that does offer a crucial political science lesson. It goes through issue after issue and shows how liberals fail on each. To see the reality, all we have to do is watch the show with a critical eye. When we do that, we gain a profound insight into why Sorkin’s (and Obama’s) politics are compelling to people, because we see what they appear like from the inside looking out. We see how important issues come to seem secondary, how defeats can be spun as victories, how government officials can be distracted by the trivial and neglect what actually matters. Sometimes the West Wing is contrasted with Veep, because the former supposedly portrays competent and moral government officials while the latter presents bumbling and venal ones. But this is false. Both shows depict bumbling and venal government officials, and do it beautifully, but the West Wing offers a more profound (if accidental) study of why people who do horrible things don’t notice that those things are horrible.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: West Wing

Collings Guitars: There Are No Shortcuts

Hornet's Nest

Heavily protected crews vacuum ‘murder hornets’ out of Washington nest (AP/Star Advertiser).

Image: uncredited. More pics here.

Jerry Jeff Walker (March, 1942 - October, 2020)

Jerry Jeff Walker has never been one to do what he was supposed to do. A military dropout who scored a Top 10 hit in writing “Mr. Bojangles,” he left New York City for Austin, Texas, long before it was known as the “Live Music Capitol of the World.” And in the summer of 1973, Walker cut an LP, ¡Viva Terlingua!, that helped lay the foundation for the outlaw country sub-genre of country music.

“We had an independent record and we used it to the nth degree. It wasn’t this independent deal where you find a producer, go up to Nashville and record in a studio. We actually applied it to being here, made in Texas for Texas,” says Walker, now 76. “It’s still the quintessential Texas album as far as explaining how it all was before Austin City Limits.”

¡Viva Terlingua! would be a literal soundtrack to Austin’s golden age, with one of its best-known cuts, “London Homesick Blues,” serving as Austin City Limits‘ theme song for nearly 30 years. But the nine-track album, released 45 years ago in November, had a greater influence as the high-water mark for the Texas strain of cosmic cowboy music, as well as the template for the modern-day ecosystem of Red Dirt and Texas Country.

“It set a fine example for singer-songwriters and everything that followed. It was more Texas than, say, Willie [Nelson], who was a Nashville product. He had the whole Nashville record company sheen behind him,” says Gary P. Nunn, the author of “London Homesick Blues” and then a member of Walker’s Lost Gonzo Band, which played with him on the album. “It made a statement and created an image of what Texas [music] was and could be.” (...)

“The people in Texas, if they heard a new song, they were so excited and eager to play on it. They just wanted to try things,” says Walker, whose voice has worn into a hoarse and painful-sounding rasp. His seat-of-the-pants approach never fit well with his first label, Atlantic Records. “The studios in New York, they don’t want to sit through that. They’re on a time schedule. You got to have all that shit worked out in advance.”

In the Lost Gonzo Band — a name cribbed from his friend Hunter S. Thompson and a perfect encapsulation of the group’s countercultural ethos — Walker found his vehicle for an eclectic mix of country, folk, rock, Tex-Mex and Tejano, all of which were native to Texas but rarely used together in Music City or the Big Apple. “Somebody told me ‘gonzo’ meant taking an unknown thing to an unknown place for a known purpose. I always thought, ‘Yeah, we don’t know where the fuck we’re going, but when we get out there and do it, we’ll know it,'” he says.

by Jeff Gage, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Paul Natkin/ArchivePhotos/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Morning Song to Sally. And, Running Wild with Jerry Jeff (Texas Monthly).]

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The Waterboys

Charles of the Ritz “Veilesscence” Ad (1965)
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Imagining the End of Capitalism

An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of more than twenty books, including New York 2140, Red Moon, and the Mars trilogy. He talked to Jacobin about his latest work, his vision of socialism, and why we must fight to imagine the end of capitalism rather than the end of the world.

***

The Ministry for the Future is Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest attempt to fill in a major gap in the utopian fiction tradition. Rarely dealing with the transitional phase toward a better and different society, speculative fiction of this type instead explores the final stages of a utopian experiment. The Ministry is an exception to this tendency.

A speculative history of the next few decades, the novel revolves around an international ministry assembled to help implement the Paris climate agreement. The novel’s action spans the globe, featuring popular uprisings, ecoterrorism, asymmetrical warfare, student debt strikes, and geoengineering. Green New Deal–style programs in a number of the world’s biggest economies feature prominently — with a post-BJP India leading the way — and the commandeering of many of the world’s key central banks to finance the work toward a just transition off fossil fuels is explored.

This is the meat and potatoes of the long transition — that which has dismissively been called “a cookshop of the future.” But while it may not service as a political blueprint, it is undeniably fertile ground for a novel. And genre disregard for the subject matter has been to Robinson’s gain.

Looking backward from the mid-twenty-first century, The Ministry helps open our minds to a world in transition away from capitalism. Imagining is a necessary precondition for solving the ecological crisis of our times. It provides the pivot for leveraging the horizon of the possible. By envisioning possible routes forward, Robinson has done us an invaluable service.

Jacobin’s Derrick O’Keefe, a Vancouver-based organizer and writer, caught up with KSR to talk about politics, economics, climate change, sci-fi, and the journey from now to the future.

This past month, Vancouver, where I’m based, has had a few days with the worst air quality in the world, thanks to the smoke from the California and West Coast wildfires. This was an appropriate backdrop for reading The Ministry of the Future, which opens with a catastrophic weather event. That event, which takes place in India, helps trigger a wave of political change and climate action worldwide. Do you think it’s going to take something really extreme to trigger the changes we need?

KSR: I think we’re already there, with the pandemic and with the fires and hurricanes — the level of extremity has brought a sense of general awareness that something is going to have to be done, and the sooner the better. That said, I think we’re on the brink of even worse events happening, as the book makes clear. It’s been a memorable year, a traumatic year — so this may be a stimulus to the start of some changes. 

I wanted to ask you about the now-famous quote attributed to Jameson, which is actually a bit of a paraphrase: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” It strikes me this book is coming out in a year when it’s become pretty easy to imagine the end of things, and that the real challenge is to imagine the beginnings of some kind of socialist system. As much as The Ministry is about the future, it suggests that those beginnings we need are already here with us now and that it’s really a matter of scaling up some of those alternatives.

KSR: I’m a novelist, I’m a literature major. I’m not thinking up these ideas, I’m listening to the world and grasping — sometimes at straws, sometimes just grasping at new ideas and seeing what everybody is seeing.

If we could institute some of these good ideas, we could quickly shift from a capitalism to a post-capitalism that is more sustainable and more socialist, because so many of the obvious solutions are contained in the socialist program. And if we treated the biosphere as part of our extended body that needs to be attended to and taken care of, then things could get better fast, and there are already precursors that demonstrate this possibility.

I don’t think it’s possible to postulate a breakdown, or a revolution, to an entirely different system that would work without mass disruption and perhaps blowback failures, so it’s better to try to imagine a stepwise progression from what we’ve got now to a better system. And by the time we’re done — I mean, “done” is the wrong word — but by the end of the century, we might have a radically different system than the one we’ve got now. And this is kind of necessary if we’re going to survive without disaster. So, since it’s necessary, it might happen. And I’m always looking for the plausible models that already exist and imagining that they get ramped up. (...)

Amidst and between all the action of The Ministry, there are some polemics carried out, is that fair to say? One recurrent polemic is against mainstream economics, a theme running throughout the book that there’s a need for new metrics and new indices both to quantify the biosphere and to express what we truly value rather than just GDP and the stock market.

KSR: There is a polemic for sure. First, I would want to make a distinction between economics and political economy, because by and large, economics as it’s practiced now is the study of capitalism. It takes the axioms of capitalism as givens and then tries to work from those to various ameliorations and tweaks to the system that would make for a better capitalism, but they don’t question the fundamental axioms: everybody’s in it for themselves, everybody pursues their own self-interest, which will produce the best possible outcomes for everybody. These axioms are highly questionable, and they come out of the eighteenth century or are even older, and they don’t match with modern social science or history itself in terms of how we behave, and they don’t value the natural biosphere properly, and they tend to encourage short-term extractive gain and short-term interests. These are philosophical positions that are expressed as though they are fixed or are nature itself, when in reality they are made by culture.

Political economy is a kind of nineteenth-century thing, a more open-ended idea where we could have different systems. And that accounts for a lot of the struggles of the twentieth century. But capitalism likes to pretend that it’s nature itself, and that’s what economics is today, largely.

Take the term “efficiency.” In capitalist economics, that’s just regarded as almost a synonym for “good,” but it completely depends on what the efficiency is being aimed at. You know, machine guns are efficient, gas chambers are efficient. So, “efficiency” as such does not mean “good.” It is a measure of the least amount of effort put in for the most amount gotten out.

One of the things you’re seeing during the pandemic is that the global system of creating masks is efficient, but it is also fragile, brittle, and unreliable because redundancy, robustness, and resilience are all relatively inefficient, if the only rubric of efficiency is profit.

Capitalist economics misunderstands and misjudges the world badly, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in — caught between biosphere degradation and radical social inequality. These are both natural results of capitalism as such, a result of the economic calculations we make under capitalist axioms.

by Derrick O'Keefe, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Paid Patriotism

The broadcast booth, like the press box, is always located in an elevated area of an arena or stadium.

And on Sunday, it allowed FOX’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman the perfect vantage point to see just how ridiculous the NFL’s continued faux patriotism is, just weeks from Election Day.

There was a pregame military flyover before the Tampa Bay-Green Bay game, as if fighter pilots and football go together like baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie.

Aikman: That’s a lot of jet fuel just to do a little flyover.

Buck: That’s your hard-earned money and your tax dollars at work!

Aikman: That stuff ain’t happening with [a] Kamala-Biden ticket. I’ll tell you that right now, partner.

The comments were caught on a hot mic, and the off-the-cuff remarks point to a lie that the NFL has been trying to push down the throats of Americans for years. Because if the NFL was so patriotic, then they wouldn’t have accepted cash from the Defense Department to disperse to teams for the purpose of waving the stars and stripes around.

Besides 9/11 and the Super Bowl, teams weren’t even mandated to be on the field for the national anthem until 2009. But then, there was an initiative that included at least 14 NFL teams getting paid to put on “elaborate patriotic salutes” between 2011 and 2014.

Check this out from a 2017 article from ThinkProgress.com.

“Overall, the Defense Department spent at least $10.4 million on ‘marketing and advertising contracts with professional sports teams’ across the board between 2012 and 2015, although, the report noted, the department ‘[could not] accurately account’ for the full number of contracts and payouts it had awarded. ‘It only reported 62 percent (76 of 122) of its contracts and 70 percent ($7.3 million) of its spending in its response to our inquiry,” wrote Arizona Senators Jeff Flake(R) and John McCain (R).

And they add this.

“Even with that disclosure, it is hard to understand how a team accepting taxpayer funds to sponsor a military appreciation game, or to recognize wounded warriors or returning troops, can be construed as anything other than paid patriotism.”

And according to CNN, the Department of Defense spent $6.8 million on “paid patriotism” between 2012 and 2015 amongst 50 teams from the NBA, NFL, MLB, MLS, and NASCAR.

In 2016 – the year of Colin Kaepernick and Trump – it was reported that the NFL would pay back taxpayers more than $720,000 for the “paid patriotism” that the teams took from the military. At the time, Roger Goodell admitted that an audit discovered that $723,734 “may have been mistakenly applied to appreciation activities rather than recruitment efforts” in a four-season span.

by Carron J. Phillips, Deadspin | Read more:
Image: Getty

Mute, Sweet Mute

This is the worst place to attach a ballot drop-off location sign [Updated]

Image: John Park

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[ed. It's worth stopping for a moment and thinking - isn't it amazing that the upcoming Presidential debate has a mute function because the current occupant of the office might wingnut off at any time and try to dominate the airwaves with more lies and bombast? Dysfunction has become so normalized these days that this seems like a reasonable solution. We'll see.]

Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett Confronts a Future Without the Piano (NYT).

A Shift in How Some Conservatives Talk and Think About Abortion

Trump has sparked a shift in how some conservatives talk and think about abortion (Yahoo News):

“One of the things that I think has been different and has surprised me are the number of Christians, particularly Christian women, who are talking about abortion in a different way,” said Amy Sullivan, a journalist who has covered the intersection of politics and faith for the past 20 years.

Sullivan said she has noticed an “awakening” among Christian women who feel they have been “manipulated” by male leaders in their community.

Too often, Sullivan said, the abortion issue has been “a trap that makes them feel like they have to vote Republican.”

Some anti-abortion conservatives are deciding they don’t want to be trapped. They cite data that suggests the abortion rate has declined under Democratic presidents just as much as it has under Republicans, and is now lower than it was before the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, that made abortion legal.

And they argue that the broader set of Democratic policies — greater access to health care, and to birth control, comprehensive sex education, funding for foster care systems and a strong social safety net — reduces unwanted pregnancies more effectively than the GOP’s efforts do.

Image: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images

[ed. Predictable. Suddenly some people have a much more nuanced perspective on a lot of issues now that Trump appears to be losing. Where were they when this atrocity happened: Parents of 545 Children Separated at the Border Cannot Be Found (NYT).]

Denver: Support Team Assistance Response Program

A concerned passerby dialed 911 to report a sobbing woman sitting alone on a curb in downtown Denver.

Instead of a police officer, dispatchers sent Carleigh Sailon, a seasoned mental health professional with a penchant for wearing Phish T-shirts, to see what was going on.

The woman, who was unhoused, was overwhelmed and scared. She’d ended up in an unfamiliar part of town. It was blazing hot and she didn’t know where to go. Sailon gave the woman a snack and some water and asked how she could help. Could she drive her somewhere? The woman was pleasantly surprised.

“She was like, ‘Who are you guys? And what is this?'” Sailon said, recounting the call.

This, Sailon explained, is Denver’s new Support Team Assistance Response program, which sends a mental health professional and a paramedic to some 911 calls instead of police.

Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, Sailon said.

“We’re really trying to create true alternatives to us using police and jails,” said Vinnie Cervantes with Denver Alliance for Street Health Response, one of the organizations that helped start the program.

Though it had been years in the making, the program launched just four days after protests erupted in Denver calling for transformational changes to policing in response to the death of George Floyd. (...)

The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.

“It’s amazing how much stuff comes across 911 as the general, ‘I don’t know what to do, I guess I’ll call 911,’” Richardson said. “Someone sets up a tent? 911. I can’t find someone? 911.”

The city has touted the program, still in its pilot, as an example of progress as it is barraged with criticism during and after the protests.

“It’s the future of law enforcement, taking a public health view on public safety,” Denver police Chief Paul Pazen said. “We want to meet people where they are and address those needs and address those needs outside of the criminal justice system.”

by Elise Schmelzer, Denver Post |  Read more:

Image: Rachel Ellis, The Denver Post

[ed. See also: Unbundling the police: Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety? (Marginal Revolution). To which I'd add, why are police officers directing traffic around road construction projects. Additionally, see: Seattle's LEAD program: here and here.]

Stephen Stills

In April of 1968, after leaving Buffalo Springfield, but before joining CSN, Stephen Stills found himself in a New York recording session with then girlfriend Judy Collins. Stills wandered down the hall with an engineer and an acoustic guitar, and laying down a couple hundred-dollar bills, told the engineer Just roll tape. What he recorded in the ensuing hours was the first ever versions of what would become classics for Stephen Stills, CSN, CSNY, and Manassas. Almost 40 years later the tapes, rescued decades ago from a garbage bin, are finally remastered and released to the public.

Empire of Emperors

What Is China, and Why You Should Worry About It: An excerpt from David Goldman’s new book: ‘You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World’

Lyndon Johnson apocryphally told Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that it was hard to be president of three hundred million Americans. She replied, “It’s harder to be prime minister of three million prime ministers.” Xi Jinping might add that it is even harder to be the emperor of 1.4 billion emperors. We tend to think of the West as individualistic and China as collectivist. In some ways that’s true, but the notion can also be misleading. As individuals, the Chinese are the most ambitious people in the world. Ambition is the sinew that holds together the sprawling, multi-ethnic, polylingual empire that China has been since its founding. For 5,000 years, China’s ambition has been constrained by the limits of nature. The great flood plains of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers supported a larger population at higher living standards than any other part of the pre-modern world. But China’s riparian civilization was also fragile, subject to periodic drought, famine, and flood, leading to civil unrest, barbarian invasion, and prolonged periods of chaos.

All this compelled China to turn inward. Its forays into the broader world were brief and abortive. No more; China can feed itself and control natural disasters. It has turned outward to the world and is seeking its place in the sun. This is a grand turning point in world history. For most of the past five thousand years, China has been the world’s most populous and wealthiest civilization in the world, but largely indifferent to events outside its borders. Now its ambitions are turned outward. Its 2,500-year-old system of elite formation now embraces the ten million students who take the annual college entrance exam. It has absorbed tens of thousands of the best Western scientists and engineers into its project for technological dominance, above all through Huawei, its bridgehead in the world market. And it proposes to extend its imperial principle of assimilation through infrastructure to the whole of the Eurasian continent, through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Western observers often attempt to draw a bright line between the good Chinese people and the nasty Chinese government. That is an unsubtle form of condescension, and wholly misguided. The character of China’s state is shaped by the ambitions of the Chinese people. Sadly, the distinction between “good people” and “bad state” is a misjudgment on which America’s China hawks and China doves agree. Since the late Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms in 1979, the liberal foreign policy establishment has argued that economic liberalization inevitably would lead to political liberalization. That didn’t happen. The China hawks argue that the Chinese people will rise up and overthrow their Communist overlords if the United States applies sufficient pressure, by placing tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States. That won’t happen, either.

The Liberal Illusion That Prosperity Promotes Political Reform

China doves promised that China’s economic success inevitably would lead to political reforms. Prominent among them is former Goldman Sachs President John L. Thornton, now a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing and chairman of the board of trustees at the Brookings Institution, Washington’s oldest and best-funded think tank. In 2009, Thornton told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that China was making progress towards democracy:

Premier Wen Jiabao consistently advocates for the universal values of democracy. He has defined democracy in largely the same way as many in the West would. “When we talk about democracy,” Premier Wen said, “We usually refer to the three most important components: elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on checks and balances.”

Premier Wen’s emphasis on universal values of democracy reflects new thinking in the liberal wing of the Chinese political establishment. He likely represents a minority view in the Chinese leadership, but like many other ideas in China during the past three decades, what begins as a minority view may gradually and eventually be accepted by the majority.

Now let me move to the second issue: New and far-reaching economic and socio-political forces in present-day China. Let me briefly mention three such forces, the first is the new and ever-growing middle class, the second is the commercialization and increasing diversity of the media, and the third is the rise of civil society groups and lawyers. These new players are better equipped to seek political participation than the Chinese citizens of 30 years ago …

Political participation through institutional means remains very limited. Yet, the ongoing political and intellectual discourse about democracy in the country, the existence of a middle class, commercialization of the media, the rise of civil society groups, the development of the legal profession, and checks and balances within the leadership are all important, contributing factors for democratic change in any society. In all these aspects, China is making significant progress.

China remains quite as authoritarian as ever it was, and technology has vastly increased the ability of its government to monitor and control the details of everyday life. The government of China knows where every smartphone is at all times, and can verify that it is carried by its registered owner through a vast network of facial recognition cameras. Soon it will require Chinese citizens to log on to the internet through facial recognition to police the online activity of the whole of society.

American hawks have argued that the Chinese political system is fragile and that the Communist Party can be toppled by outside pressure. Prominent among them is Gordon Chang, whose book The Coming Collapse of China appeared in its first edition in 2001. “The People’s Republic is a paper dragon,” Chang argued. “Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao’s death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society.” That was 18 years ago. In the meantime China’s per capita GDP has quintupled. Chang continues to provide newspaper and television commentary predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese system.

Hawks and doves are both wrong because they share the same false premise: For a society to succeed, they both believe, it must look and act like the United States of America. The doves thought that China would evolve into something like a Western democracy and succeed, while the hawks thought China would remain authoritarian and collapse. In fact, China remained authoritarian and deepened its economic success. Hawks and doves suffer from a sort of narcissism. They cannot conceive that a society so radically different from ours can flourish.

China Is in a Golden Age

But China has flourished. As Francesco Sisci observes, China is in a Golden Age, the first time in history that no one need fear going hungry. Since 1986, household consumption in China has risen seventeen-fold—that is, 1,700%. That isn’t a fabrication of Communist Party statisticians. Chinese now in their thirties, spent their early childhood in homes with dirt floors and outhouses. They now live in newly built apartments with central heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing. In 1986, just 3% of Chinese had access to universities or professional schools. That proportion grew to 50% by 2017. One-third of new labor force entrants have university degrees, and one-third of those are engineers. The Chinese buy 400 million smartphones a year and 25 million automobiles. Chinese commute to work in Shanghai on high-speed trains that reduce the distance from Wilmington to New York City to a 45-minute interval. We will take a closer look at China’s economy in another chapter.

We have to stop viewing China through a half-silvered mirror that reflects our own image back at us, and understand China on its own terms. It isn’t a pleasant picture, but we need to take a hard look at it.

by David P. Goldman, Tablet |  Read more:

Image: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty

An Easy Way To Remember the High Point of Any Trip? Set It To Music

I was watching zebras drink from a watering hole in the Rwandan wilderness when I turned to my safari guide and asked him to play me his favorite song.

Wherever I go, I collect “song souvenirs.” On one level, it’s an easy way to find common ground with people from other places, but the practice also never fails to firmly embed a place in my mind. Science backs me up, too: A 2015 study published in the neurology journal Brain found that musical memories are so strong, they can even be preserved in patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

On this day, though, I also wanted to lighten the mood. Between sightings in Akagera National Park, my guide, Johnston Mbanzamihigo, had been telling me about his time fighting in the Rwandan Patriotic Front against the perpetrators of the country’s 1994 genocide.

He opened his phone and cued up Ntawamusimbura, a sentimental track sung in Kinyarwanda by the local singer Meddy. It has a lightly autotuned but vulnerable Ed Sheeran-like vibe; the title means “No one can replace her,” Mbanzamihigo translated. As he closed his eyes and swayed with his arms outstretched, I joined him, knowing that every time I heard this song later, it would transport me straight back to this moment on the savanna.

by Jennifer Flowers, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Marc Majewski

Research Finds Few Links Between School and COVID Cases

Despite widespread concerns, two new international studies show no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of coronavirus. And a third study from the United States shows no elevated risk to childcare workers who stayed on the job.

Combined with anecdotal reports from a number of U.S. states where schools are open, as well as a crowdsourced dashboard of around 2000 U.S. schools, some medical experts are saying it's time to shift the discussion from the risks of opening K-12 schools to the risks of keeping them closed.

"As a pediatrician, I am really seeing the negative impacts of these school closures on children," Dr. Danielle Dooley, a medical director at Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told NPR. She ticked off mental health problems, hunger, obesity due to inactivity, missing routine medical care and the risk of child abuse — on top of the loss of education. "Going to school is really vital for children. They get their meals in school, their physical activity, their health care, their education, of course."

While agreeing that emerging data is encouraging, other experts said the United States as a whole has made little progress toward practices that would allow schools to make reopening safer — from rapid and regular testing, to contact tracing to identify the source of outbreaks, to reporting school-associated cases publicly, regularly and consistently.

"We are driving with the headlights off, and we've got kids in the car," said Melinda Buntin, chair of the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, who has argued for reopening schools with precautions.

Emerging evidence

Enric Álvarez at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya looked at different regions within Spain for his recent co-authored working paper. Spain's second wave of coronavirus cases started before the school year began in September. Still, cases in one region dropped three weeks after schools reopened, while others continued rising at the same rate as before, and one stayed flat.

Nowhere, the research found, was there a spike that coincided with reopening: "What we found is that the school [being opened] makes absolutely no difference," Álvarez told NPR.

Spain does extensive contact tracing, so Álvarez was also able to analyze how much schools are contributing to the spread of COVID-19. Álvarez said his research suggests the answer is: Not much. He found that, for all the students and staff who tested positive, 87% of them did not infect anyone else at the school. They were single cases.

"We are not sure that the environments of the schools may not have a small and systematic effect," said Álvarez, "But it's pretty clear that they don't have very major epidemic-changing effects, at least in Spain, with the measures that are being taken in Spain."

These safety measures include mask-wearing for all children over 6, ventilation, keeping students in small groups or "bubbles," and social distancing of 1.5 meters — slightly less than the recommended 6 feet in the United States. When a case is detected, the entire "bubble" is sent home for quarantine. (...)

What about the U.S.?

On Oct. 14, the Infectious Diseases Society of America gave a briefing on safe school reopenings. Bottom line? "The data so far are not indicating that schools are a superspreader site," said Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Michigan's medical school.

One place in the U.S. where systematic data gathering is happening — Utah — seems to echo the conclusions drawn by the new international studies. Utah's state COVID database clearly reports school-associated cases by district. And while coronavirus spread is relatively high in the state, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson believes that schools are not, for the most part, driving spread.

"Where you see cases on the rise in a neighborhood, in a county, we see that tend to be reflected in a school," Dickson said. "[But] we're not seeing spread by virtue of being in school together."

by Anya Kamenetz, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Alvaro Barrientos/AP

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Richard Estes, Automat, c.1971.

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We Need a New Science of Progress

In 1861, the American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new kind of research institution. Recognizing the “daily increasing proofs of the happy influence of scientific culture on the industry and the civilization of the nations,” and the growing importance of what he called “Industrial Arts,” he proposed a new organization dedicated to practical knowledge. He named it the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rogers was one of a number of late-19th-century reformers who saw that the United States’ ability to generate progress could be substantially improved. These reformers looked to the successes of the German university models overseas and realized that a combination of focused professorial research and teaching could be a powerful engine for advance in research. Over the course of several decades, the group—Rogers, Charles Eliot, Henry Tappan, George Hale, John D. Rockefeller, and others—founded and restructured many of what are now America’s best universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and more. By acting on their understanding, they engaged in a kind of conscious “progress engineering.”

Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”

Before digging into what Progress Studies would entail, it’s worth noting that we still need a lot of progress. We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is still extremely long.

Those are major challenges. A lot of progress can also come from smaller advances: Thousands of lesser improvements that together build upon one another can together represent an enormous advance for society. For example, if our discoveries and inventions improve standards of living by 1 percent a year, children will by adulthood be 35 percent better off than their parents. If they improve livelihoods at 3 percent a year, those same children will grow up to be about 2.5 times better off.

Whether viewed in terms of large or small improvements, progress matters a lot.

Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East. Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In each case, the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort. Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerland’s Basel region in life sciences.

These kinds of examples show that there can be ecosystems that are better at generating progress than others, perhaps by orders of magnitude. But what do they have in common? Just how productive can a cultural ecosystem be? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? Can we deliberately engineer the conditions most hospitable to this kind of advancement or effectively tweak the systems that surround us today?

This is exactly what Progress Studies would investigate. It would consider the problem as broadly as possible. It would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.

Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.

Plenty of existing scholarship touches on these topics, but it takes place in a highly fragmented fashion and fails to directly confront some of the most important practical questions.

by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Harry Todd/Hulton Archive/Getty

[ed. See also: America’s Toxic Love Affair With Technology (The Atlantic).]