GIN AND TACOS

The explosion of conspiratorial thinking, including among liberals and the far left, is one of the most troubling developments of the last few years. There are many reasons people are attracted to conspiracy theories, not the least of which is the way they make the world vastly more interesting than it really is. "9/11 happened because the U.S. made the terrible decision to throw money and weapons at every radical jihadist willing to fight the USSR in Afghanistan, plus nobody realized the incredibly obvious fact that cockpit doors should be locked" is, if simplified, a 100% correct explanation. But it has a number of drawbacks.

For one, it requires a half-decent knowledge of history. By "history" I mean anything that happened more than a week ago, and I think we can agree without undue cynicism that most Americans' (most people, really) grasp of history is tenuous at best. The percentage of people who could give a half-accurate summary of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the US role in it, is in the low single digits. And most of those few people got their understanding from one half-awake viewing of the highly fictionalized version in Charlie Wilson's War with Tom Hanks.

More importantly, though, it's just boring. It's a boring story when it's told this way. "Some well-educated potential terrorists realized that cockpit doors are unlocked and that, as long as you aren't interested in taking off or landing, flying a modern commercial airliner can be done adequately without too much training" is not satisfying. When things happen, especially traumatic things, we want there to be some Big Plot to explain it. There isn't. There rarely is.

Add in ideology and motivated reasoning – our inherent want for certain things to be sinister because we dislike them – and the widespread seeding of ideas on the internet and we are living in the golden age of crackpot theories. QAnon might end up being the most representative aspect of this era when people study it in the future.

There is a certain subset of center-left or center-liberal people who have hatched a million strange conspiracy theories about Bernie Sanders, almost all of which have to do with Russian Propaganda, the Kremlin, Russia, Russians, and some sort of orchestrated (Russian) effort (by Russia) to create the impression that (Russian Operative) Mr. Sanders (a Russian) has a fan base when in reality he has none. In fairness to these folks, Sanders is not being treated differently – everything, in their new worldview, is a Russian plot. If something happens that is not fundamentally in line with their understanding of the world, Russia is behind it.

This manner of thinking struck me when I saw this dull Tweet from Mr. Sen. Sanders a few days ago:

If you are interested in understanding why Bernie Sanders has the dedicated following he does, that is your explanation. Unlike any other Democratic could-be with a national profile, he regularly makes reference to organized labor. No one else with a similar level of visibility does. In fact, most other possible candidates or nationally recognized leaders in the party – even Warren, who is pretty far left – run away from labor (which current orthodoxy holds is a dinosaur from earlier days) or just pays lip service to it. They mention "unions" in the abstract when they want union donations, and that's about it.

It strikes me as funny, but not incredible, that some people choose to ignore the very simple, obvious explanation – He talks about a thing some people like, and other people don't talk about it! – in favor of something convoluted and sinister. Maybe it's just more exciting that way. Maybe it helps them make sense of the world in some way I don't understand.

These things simply do not need complicated explanations unless you go looking for one. Why do people like Beto? Well, he's good looking, he's good speaking to crowds, he's pleasantly neutral (which allows people to project their own beliefs onto him), and he raised a lot of money. Why do people like Bernie? Despite his complete lack of personal charisma, he talks about things other candidates don't, and there is a subset of voters who don't care about candidate personality at all. Pretty simple.

My point is not – since I can already see people reading four sentences and rushing to the comments – that Bernie is awesome and you should love him. I simply do not think it should be – can be – any kind of mystery to understand why he has a following. He does some simple things that other candidates and national political figures don't. If other people did those things and were sincere about it, his fans would likely gravitate to those candidates as well. This isn't complicated.

Nothing is more profoundly depressing to journalists, or anyone who writes for a living, than looking at the kind of shit The Market rewards and comparing it to one's own attempts to put something decent and useful out into the world. I imagine every fiction writer slaving away on what they believe is the very best novel they can produce feels a cold, bitter spite welling up inside of themselves every time they realize EL James and her "The vampire fucked the other vampire very erotically, with his erect vampire member" fanfic are worth a billion dollars.

There are a lot of bad opinion columnists in the world, but none as bad as Bari Weiss. The reason Bari Weiss infuriates writers so much is not simple jealousy – she writes for the New York Times and she's terrible! – because a lot of shitty writers have good, high-paying jobs for major media outlets. Half of her NYT colleagues could be described the same way. It is the fact that aside from having terrible opinions, her writing literally is indistinguishable from a college newspaper opinion writer. You could go to any campus in the United States, pluck out the eagerest sophomore from the Opinion page, and stick that person in the NYT and not miss a beat. Her writing is so thick with the tropes one thought were clever and edgy at age 20 that, unless you were an undergrad journalism major at some point, I'm not sure I can explain it to you.

This week her column for the Newspaper of Record, the hallowed Gray Lady, is literally "How I spent my summer vacation." Woman goes on vacation, comes back from vacation, writes a piece about how the place she went on vacation "has a lot to teach us."

I don't know about you, but the last time I wrote "What I did on my vacation" I was 10.

To be certain, all that differentiates Weiss from other bad writers like David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Megan McArdle, and the like is her total lack of polish and erudite "New York Timesy" writing skill. The others share her dumb, juvenile opinions but their employers pay them for their ability to write up dumb, juvenile opinions in an Ivy Leagueish, Upper Crust, Country Club sort of way. It's the George Will trick – they are paid to say things a certain audience wants to hear in a language and manner that allows them to consider it an intelligent, worldly point of view. They want someone to make the opinions sound respectable. Thoughtful, even.

That is the whole point of someone like David Brooks or Ross Douthat, or older, less relevant past stars of the printed word like Mr. Will or Peggy Noonan. They are to modern politics what courtiers were to the courts of European monarchs; they exist to flatter. To tell people of a certain worldview that said worldview is proper, correct, respectable, intelligent and – importantly – widely shared. Yes m'lord, you are most wise! The people certainly agree with you!

And I don't understand how Weiss fits into that world. She writes literally like a child. What is the audience for this? Tech Bros want to read Megan McArdle, not Tomi Lahren. Bankers want Ross Douthat, not Charlie Kirk. People of a certain level of wealth and cultural awareness / class want to feel smart, so I understand the lucrative market for writers who can tell them that the things they believe are good and correct and widely shared in a way that makes them feel smart. What they don't want is someone who failed to progress out of writerly adolescence making them feel like they're in high school listening to a moron soft-sell upper class authoritarianism.

I get the grift. But even in the context of the grift Bari Weiss makes no sense.

Even as we try to cheer ourselves up and enjoy the holiday season, one of the realities that has been lurking just beneath the surface throughout Trump's presidency is becoming clearer: As miserable as the first two years were by any conceivable measure, this has been the *good* part. We haven't even started the bad part yet.

Though the president's actions in no way contributed to it, the national economy maintained its pedestrian growth rate since the end of the Obama era. Employment has remained pretty high, with the important caveat that much of the job market consists of low wage, no benefit service industry type jobs and Gig Economy things like Uber driving taking people out of job-seeking. The stock market, for the rarefied slice of Americans who get to benefit from such things, has performed well. It's not an economic track record anyone should crow about (not that anything could stop Trump from credit-claiming) but it certainly hasn't been an unmitigated disaster. Remember the last year of W Bush and the first year of Obama? THAT was bad. This has been just kinda mediocre.

But as you no doubt have noticed, the inevitable "correction" of the stock market is well underway (and overdue). While the stock market is not the economy or vice-versa, bear markets like this historically are a reliable indicator of economic trouble ahead.

Some critics have pointed out (correctly) that the mystery of why Trump's approval rating is so high (that is, in the low 40s instead of like 15% where it logically should be) is better understood as: Why is his approval rating so *low* given the overall positive to decent economic indicators? And that's what I mean when I say the bad part is still to come. Trump has coasted on a lot of "Well, the economy's going up so who cares!" cynicism and callousness so far. As we have seen clearly, those white suburban middle class types will put up with just about anything is the 401(k) performs. When that support softens, what do you think Trump is going to do? If this is how he behaves now, how will he behave when his approval is in the 20s like fin de siècle GWB?

Authoritarians don't have any strategy for digging themselves out of a hole except to do everything they're doing, but harder. Changing course is not a thing they're emotionally capable of doing. Authoritarianism is an endless string of doubling-downs until they're removed from power.

Additionally, while I don't recommend hanging on the every turn of Mueller's investigation it appears (as anyone with half a brain predicted from the beginning) that the news will continue to get worse on that front. The mass exodus of cabinet and White House officials appears to be accelerating, which is a reliable sign that people who know something we don't know are starting to give Trump a wide berth.

The traditional authoritarian move when the walls close in is to start a war and double down on persecuting minority populations internally. The latter is bound to keep ratcheting up until Trump is gone; at this point my hope is simply that we can get to the endpoint without the former.

As the brief marketing campaign to make Tulsi Gabbard 2020 a thing flares up (but before it dies out in approximately a week) it's as good a time as any to talk about the most glaring weakness shared by all of the factions to the left of the Republican Party: foreign policy. Depending on where you're focusing the spotlight, the foreign policy across the left spectrum today is either nonexistent, totally incoherent, or coherent but terrible. Take your pick.

Broadly speaking, there are three very bad categories.

One, more popular among leftist-progressive types, is essentially a repackaged version of Gilded Age and Interwar isolationism. War is bad (which is true, but not a foreign policy). Any outcome that does not involve the United States engaging in military action is good (usually true, but not universally). Picking sides is bad, because without any real thought about what American goals are – Humanitarian? Strategic? Public relations? – everything gets reduced to Philosophy 101 guy-who-didn't-do-the-readings logic: Who's to say who's right here? There's also an alarming tendency for people of this mindset to be manipulated by obviously bad actors – Jill Stein and Glenn Greenwald and their "What's so bad about Russia Today? It's just like the BBC!" shtick, or Gabbard and her "I went and talked to Assad and he agrees with me" stunt. When no goal or policy beyond "Let's stay out of it" can be articulated, you make yourself pretty easy to manipulate.

The second, represented by center types like Biden or Hillary Clinton (and Bill for that matter), is basically neoconservatism. This strain is a remnant of Democrats old enough to remember the Carter-Mondale-Dukakis era in which Republicans seemed to score endless political points by accusing Democrats of being Weak. Weak on defense, Weak on crime, Weak on everything. So the reaction, spearheaded by Bill Clinton, was to go full hawk to preempt the right. Out-hawk the hawks; brilliant! This kind of "Who will be tougher on the Soviets," put-Dukakis-in-the-tank mindset is out of date by about 30 years and gives live ammunition to the cynical "There's no difference between the parties" worldview.

Finally, there is this younger (Beto, Booker, etc) set that seems not to want to talk about foreign policy at all. They believe, right or wrong, that voters want to hear about the $15 minimum wage or Medicare for All and since nobody cares about foreign policy anyway it is best dealt with as little effort or commitment as possible. Address it in platitudes, say some stuff nobody can really disagree with, praise The Troops, and be done with it. This of course leads to a status quo bias because candidates who don't care about foreign policy have a huge incentive simply to placate the power players and walk away. Kiss AIPAC's ass, promise the defense contractors that you won't mess with the Pentagon budget except around the edges, and say some generic "Let's be strong, also let's end the wars" kind of stuff that you have no intention of thinking about again after getting elected.

Those are three bad options. The first is basically Trumpism, with its underlying belief that authoritarians around the world really aren't so bad. The second is George W. Bush foreign policy, the whole "I voted for the Iraq War but I was also critical in some vague way that affected nothing." The third is effectively punting and admitting that the Pentagon and military-industrial complex can kind of do whatever they want as long as it happens in the background.

I have no answers. If I did I certainly wouldn't give them away for free. The situation seems to boil down to whether the center, liberals, and the far left collectively or individually decide this is important enough to devote time and energy to. Quite a few far-left Bernard Brother types have been writing about this actively since 2016, but it doesn't gain much traction. The mainstream Democratic Party seems content to pull an Obama and basically promise to do what neocons propose but, uh, you know, do it better or nicer or smarter or something. And the young progressive-adjacent mainstream types do not appear to care at all, which I can't imagine working out well in the long run. Because when they achieve some kind of position of power and there's no coherent policy, they will default to "Find some Generals who seem like they know what they're doing and delegate everything."

A good place to start might be to think about what underlying values and principles – big picture stuff – should be at the heart of America's interactions with the rest of the world. What is it we want? What are we trying to do? Those are questions that the left largely has ignored since the end of the Cold War. While the Beto generation is right to point out that the average voter does not care much (and is appallingly uninformed about) foreign policy, that doesn't mean political leaders can share the same attitude.

Collectively the left can advance some pretty compelling domestic policy ideas that appeal strongly to most Americans. But it's time to admit – as the 2020 potential candidates demonstrate all too well – that foreign policy has withered on the vine and become a black hole.

It is widely recognized in academia that teaching evaluations are dumb. Let me qualify that: it is widely recognized by anyone who has bothered to look in even the most casual way at the research on teaching evaluations. If you are too lazy to Google the overwhelming evidence, I am not going to bore myself providing links to each individual piece of evidence pointing to the same conclusion.

Briefly, there is a strong bias built in based on student expectations (what they expect from you based on their other courses, the "Well my other professors do _____" problem), biases (women and people of color get evaluated differently and generally in much more critical ways), grading (magically we become better professors when we're giving higher grades!), and really basic transfer-of-affect type stuff (students are more favorable if you give them cookies or some other kind of treat like extra credit or, as one former colleague famously did, announcing that the final exam was canceled immediately before handing out evaluation forms).

No matter how the questions are worded, what evals end up measuring is some nebulous combination of Likeability factors rather than learning. We might like the students to state objectively whether they had a good learning experience but ultimately they end up telling us whether they Liked the professor and Liked the class.

Anyone who fails to recognize the above at this point is ignorant – possibly by design – of the evidence, dumb, or a university administrator.

OK, so starting from the agreement that evaluations are, if not total garbage at least unacceptably noisy, the question that nobody seems prepared to answer is: What do we use to replace them? "It's the best of a bunch of bad options" is not a good defense of anything, yet that's exactly where we are. There are broadly three alternatives:

1. Not having any sort of metric or evaluation for teaching in higher education. This would not only do a disservice to students – simply starting from the assumption that everyone is teaching well simply by being hired to teach – but it would screw faculty by eliminating any mechanism for rewarding good teaching in tenure and promotion. If there is no metric to show I'm a bad teacher, there's also no metric to demonstrate that I'm a good one. And so research and "service" become the sole determinants of T&P. Hard pass.

2. "Outcomes-based" evaluation, or the kind of stuff they do in K-12. Administrators could determine our teaching effectiveness by looking at how well students do grade-wise. This is transparently ridiculous since we control the assignment of grades in our own courses. If I am told "Lower grades mean you're bad a teaching" then obviously everyone's getting an A. If some examination from outside the course is going to be used, then I'm spending all my time "Teaching to the Test" which is exactly what's happening in K-12. We know this doesn't work.

3. Some kind of peer evaluation. Terrifyingly, I've actually heard some people suggest this. So your senior, tenured colleagues watch you teach and determine whether you're a good teacher or not. Yeah great what could go wrong? This either puts junior faculty fully at the mercy of one or more senior colleagues who could range from "Brilliant academic" to "Bitter, hate-filled deadwood Associate" or it creates some kind of self-certification system wherein faculty take turns declaring one another Outstanding Teachers.

It's not that I see any merits worth defending in student evaluations of teaching. The bigger issue, instead, is that no viable alternative exists. I'm all for doing away with student evals. Really. Cancel them tomorrow. The worrisome thing is that the things they will be replaced with have the potential to do all the things that are bad about student evals, but worse.

Sure, let's try some subjective, "holistic" approach to evaluating classroom performance. It won't take long to reveal how vulnerable that system will be to interpersonal grudges and biases. Oh, the Dean doesn't like you? Your senior colleague was opposed to hiring you because he wanted a different candidate? Awesome. Those people now get to decide whether you're a good teacher. I'm sure they'll be fair and objective.

My least favorite genre of journalism is the retrospective "How did we miss this?" piece that comes after years of the profession sticking its head in the sand and refusing to see something inconvenient. The New York Times actually had the balls to print a headline like "The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It."

Who missed it? That's a serious question. Who makes up the demographic "Did not see a disturbing rise in explicitly racist and xenophobic politics" and where were these people during the eight years Obama was president? It seems unlikely that an even mildly observant person could have failed to notice that about 20% of the people in this country came psychologically unmoored over the idea of having a black president.

This is one of the fundamental flaws of centrism, with its obsession with Decorum and playing nice – people get chastised for trying to call problems what they are when they first appear. "It's rude and unproductive to call people you disagree with politically racists or Nazis, tut-tut!" Yes, well, these people are really racist and some of them are taking that to the logical extreme of becoming actual Nazis. Like, with swastikas and stuff.

No no, they're merely expressing economic anxiety. They're resorting to shocking imagery because they feel like their voices aren't being heard. They're just raising some valid questions about the "character" of the American population. One excuse, one downplaying, one euphemism after another.

We saw these Retrospectives in waves in 2005 and 2006 as the George Wills of the world wondered aloud How We Got Iraq So Wrong. Then, as now, the answer is very simple: You got it wrong because you willfully ignored all of the disconfirming evidence in order to reach your predetermined conclusion.

Add to that the seriously misplaced priorities of the establishment media, which values blaming nobody and everybody equally (Both sides are wrong!) over identifying problems and assigning responsibility even when it's patently obvious. The only way to miss right-wing extremism's rise is to operate your media outlet while more afraid of being chided by right-wingers than of totally missing a crucial story.

"We" is an ego-saving rhetorical device to lessen the embarrassment of having whiffed on something a blind man could have – and should have – seen coming. If they convince themselves that nobody could have foreseen it, it exculpates everyone. The rise of white nationalism becomes like the weather, a phenomenon nobody can do anything about and which can only be fully explained in hindsight.

We didn't miss it. You did.

What is going on right now in Wisconsin (and Michigan, and in North Carolina after the 2016 Election) is the logical progression of the erosion of democratic norms that Newt Gingrich kicked off in 1994 and Mitch McConnell elevated to an art form. If you can't win, change the rules. The Democrats are not without blame, indirectly, since the strategy relies on the knowledge that the dopey-ass decorum addicts will always change the rules back (hamstringing themselves) when in power. It is a perfect example of the Republicans as Air Bud and the Democrats standing there futilely pointing at the rule book shouting "A DOG CAN'T PLAY BASKETBALL!" while Air Bud dunks on them over and over again.

But there's another, deeper component to the justifications the Wisconsin GOP is trying to lay out for its naked power grab. The briefest, yet totally accurate, summary is that rural Wisconsin voters are the ones who actually matter so they should get what they want. That's it. That's all it boils down to. Sure the Democrats won the statewide elections, but only because – seriously, this is the argument – people in Milwaukee and Madison voted for them.

The city people (wink!) don't count. They're not real. They exist and sure maybe even they have the right to vote, but they're fundamentally lesser. Their preferences are subordinate to the Real Wisconsinites. Like in the deep south after Reconstruction, Wisconsin's GOP sees its politics as a state with x population but only a small fraction of x that should rightly be making decisions and exercising rights for the whole.

This is the language of European far-right ethno-nationalist parties. We know we are not the majority, but we are the only people who matter.

That's where we are. I reiterate that there is no world in which this era of American politics has a happy ending.