Jimmy Carter has long been cast as one of America’s least-effective modern presidents—blamed for failing to tame inflation, solve the energy crisis, or free the American hostages in Tehran. His crushing reelection defeat in 1980 sealed the downbeat narrative. 

But that negative assessment is beginning to change. Recently, Washington Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah hosted a conversation between Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, two journalists who just published major biographies of America’s 39th president. Each approached Carter from a different angle, but both arrived at a similar conclusion: Jimmy Carter is seriously underrated. 

Alter and Bird both dispute that Carter was weak or lost in the weeds, as he has so often been portrayed. Carter brought more positive change to the Middle East than any president in the decades before or since; signed more legislation than any post–World War II president except LBJ; and warned of the dangers of climate change before the threat even had a name. Carter’s human rights policy played a huge and largely uncredited role in the collapse of the Soviet Union—more so, perhaps, than any policies enacted by his successor Ronald Reagan.

What follows is an edited transcript. We promise an absorbing and informative read about some recent history that you almost certainly don’t know as well as you think you do—assuming you remember it at all.

Timothy Noah: It’s my pleasure today to introduce two old friends, Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, to reassess the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Alter and Bird are the authors of two recent Carter biographies, His Very Best and The Outlier, in which each of them argues for a reconsideration of the former president’s administration. Carter is now 97 years old, which makes him the oldest ex-president in history. Rosalynn, his wife, is 94.

As it happens, the late 1970s is when I first met Jon and Kai. For the record, Jon and I met my freshman year in college, and Kai and I met when I was a summer intern at The Nation in 1979; Kai was my boss. I later succeeded Jon as an editor of the Washington Monthly, and Kai and I reconnected after he and his wife, Susan, moved to Washington, D.C. 

I’m going to turn this conversation over now to Jon and Kai, asking Jon to begin. 

Jonathan Alter: One of the most pleasurable parts of [this experience] for me was getting to know Kai. We met at the Carter Center Weekend in 2016. To my mind, [we] were engaged in basically the same larger project, which is to get the country to reassess Jimmy Carter, not just as a president but as a person. I think we’ve made some progress on that. 

I think the period of time that has elapsed since he left the presidency 40 years ago is about the same as it took to reassess Harry Truman’s legacy. Truman left office in 1953 as a really unpopular president. When David McCullough’s book came out about him [in 1992], it began a true revisionism. I don’t think it’s going to be quite the same level for Carter that it was for Truman, but the reappraisal is under way, and long overdue. 

The Carter administration prioritized human rights to an extent that no previous president had done, and this was an extraordinarily important thing. It helped lead to the end of the Cold War, as Larry Eagleburger acknowledged, as Colin Powell has acknowledged. When Václav Havel would give interviews, he would describe how important it was for the morale of dissidents to know that they had a friend as president of the United States. There are a lot of human rights organizations that arose, not just in the Soviet Union but in many other countries where when you talk to the people who started those organizations, they mention Carter.

There’s a story about a prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union who Carter gets released in a prisoner swap, and he comes to church with him in Plains, and when they’re in church, he’s sitting next to Rosalynn, and he pulls from the fake sole in his shoe a little picture that he kept in there of Jimmy Carter, the whole time he was
in prison. 

TN: Wow.

JA: So ideas have power. This is important to remember, even in the wake of the war in Afghanistan. You’re hearing some talk of human rights there, but having spent 20 years in Afghanistan, everybody’s now saying, “Well, we can’t, we can’t solve every human rights problem.” Carter would agree with that. It was a very pragmatic policy and situational policy. 

That means he did what he could, which was a lot, particularly in Latin America, which went from mostly authoritarian to mostly democratic in the 10 years after Carter was president. That’s not all attributable to him, but he should get some credit for it. There are still many more democratic countries in the world now than there were in 1980. And it’s because of a lot of hard work by people who, in a surprising number of cases, were inspired by Jimmy Carter.

Kai Bird: I would agree with that. Human rights was a major achievement by Carter. He put human rights, that principle, as a keystone of U.S. foreign policy, and none of his successors have been able to walk back from that or ignore it completely. They’ve talked about some of the hypocrisy and impracticality of the policy, but you can’t ignore it. I make this argument in my biography, that human rights, the talk about human rights, and the focus on dissidents in the Soviet Union, and in Czechoslovakia, and Poland—all of that did much more to weaken the Soviet empire in eastern Europe than anything Ronald Reagan did by increasing the defense budget or threatening Star Wars. The Soviet Union was a weak adversary, not a strong adversary. It was falling apart, and along comes Carter, talking about human rights, and as Jon has said, ideas are powerful, and this idea remains powerful, and it really contributed monumentally to the falling of the Berlin Wall and people seizing power in the streets, and wanting to have personal freedom. That, in part, can be attributed to Jimmy Carter.

TN: The Carters recently celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in their hometown of Plains, Georgia. You were both in attendance. What was it like, and what did you learn?

JA: They’re the longest-married presidential couple in American history. They’ve been married now longer than [were] Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, which everybody thought was some kind of world record. They actually met three days after Rosalynn was born, almost exactly 94 years ago, when Lillian Carter, Jimmy’s mother, brought her nearly three-year-old son around to see the baby that she had just delivered down the street. They didn’t really see each other very much for the next 20 years, though. They started going out when he was at the Naval Academy. 

What really struck me about the delightful wedding anniversary was how small-d democratic it was. It was a real contrast to, say, the Obama 60th birthday party. And not just because, you know, they weren’t cutting close aides from the list. Yes, Garth Brooks went, but it was not that kind of event. It was also a mending of old wounds, because Bill and Hillary Clinton, who hadn’t gotten along at all well with the Carters, came, as did Nancy Pelosi. I have this enduring image in my mind of [Pelosi] going up to Carter in his wheelchair and putting her hands on either side of his face and looking at him long and hard, and you knew that she was thinking, “This is the last time I’m ever going to see Jimmy Carter.” So there was a poignancy to it. 

They split us up into classrooms at the Plains High School, so that the party had an intimacy to it before we joined the larger group in the school auditorium. In my classroom you had everyone from Lucy Johnson and Sam Donaldson to Rosalynn’s hairdresser and a young Georgia researcher that they had befriended because they liked his nature research. It just really gave you a sense of the scope of their interests, and the fact that they—I wouldn’t describe Jimmy Carter as humble; I don’t think any politician is humble—but the modesty of his circumstances and their approach to life was on striking display.

KB: Jon, just to jump in on that theme, in my classroom I was in the presence of a billionaire who had befriended Carter 25 years earlier and helped to fund the Carter Center and fly him around Africa in his efforts to conquer guinea worm disease, but also in the room were his fly-fishing buddies. This family from Pennsylvania that he, during the presidency, he would go up to visit occasionally and go fly-fishing with. And the billionaire explained to me rather sheepishly that the Pennsylvania fly fisherman couple were Trumpists—they voted for Trump!

JA: The fly fishermen run kind of a legendary lodge in Pennsylvania. [Carter went there] right after the 1980 convention. It was also the location of a story that Paul Volcker told me. I interviewed him not long before he died, and he said that he was at the same fishing lodge when Carter was there a few years after the presidency, and Volcker said, “I’m sorry if I cost you the presidency,” because, you know, he jacked up interest rates, they went as high as 19 percent. How was Carter supposed to get reelected when interest rates were so high? When inflation was vanquished, Reagan was in office and got all the credit. Arguably, Volcker elected and reelected Ronald Reagan. But Carter turned to Volcker, and, with a smile, he said, “There were many factors, Paul.”

KB: Volcker was certainly right up there. Another factor was his treatment by the media. One of the reasons Carter is so misunderstood is, alas, the press that he got at the time, and specifically The Washington Post, [which] sort of mocked his southern heritage—his funny accent, his dress, his demeanor, his talking, his staff from Georgia. Sally Quinn, in particular, the queen of the Style section at the time, and married to [the editor] Ben Bradlee—just went after, relentlessly, Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and [Press Secretary] Jody Powell.

JA: Kai is absolutely right about this, and I was really surprised to see the tone of the coverage, which influenced me at the time. What I concluded [was] that Carter was both made and unmade by Watergate. He never would have been elected president without Watergate. He starts running just a few months after Nixon resigns, and he is the antidote to Nixon. He says, “I’ll never lie to you,” “We need a government as good as its people.” He [later] said he got a better press than he deserved in 1976 because he matched the moment so perfectly. But then when he gets to office, you have a Washington press corps that is determined to prove that he’s just another Nixon, and that anybody who has that job is by definition corrupt.

KB: Remember Peanutgate? That became a sort of mini scandal that was [much] ado about nothing. And yet the Washington press corps pursued it thinking that they [could] prove that Jimmy Carter used funds from this peanut warehouse illegally in his campaign. It was young reporters like us, always trying to be Woodward and Bernstein.

JA: I had been an intern in Jim Fallows’s office in the summer of 1978. He was not yet 30 years old, and he was Carter’s first chief speechwriter, and that was what got me into the whole Washington Monthly circle, and changed my life, getting to know Jim. I left the White House very influenced by the extremely critical article that Jim wrote for The Atlantic later that year, which I think you and I have different takes on, called “The Passionless Presidency,” and—

TN: I’d like to interject here Jim’s great joke—he probably regrets telling it: “Being Jimmy Carter’s chief speech writer was like being tap dance instructor to FDR.”

JA: Yeah, that was a great line. 

TN: Was that a fair comment?

JA: Let’s put it this way. The speechwriters were so downgraded, in terms of their importance in the Carter White House, that I was able to write a later piece, I think for the Monthly, entitled, “I Was a Teenage Presidential Speechwriter.” They would give me speeches to write for Carter, and Carter wouldn’t deliver them, or he would muff the line. I wrote a speech that he gave at a tobacco warehouse in North Carolina, and he ended up saying, “We’re going to make cigarette smoking even safer than it already is today.” He was just really bad at prepared speeches. He didn’t value prepared speeches; he didn’t value rhetoric. Both Kai and I use the diaries of this wonderful guy named Jerry Doolittle, who I got to know that summer, who was the gag writer and a speechwriter. Jerry is very acidic in his contemporaneous diaries about Carter’s speeches. This hurt Carter, especially in contrast to Reagan, who was such a great performer. His delivery was bad. He didn’t have an ear for language. He cut out anything that could possibly be seen as Sorensenian in its rhetoric. 

I remember that summer Jim said to me, “Here’s the line you need to use. ‘We must stop inflation, and we must do it now.’ ” That was Carter’s idea of a speech. 

I was so disenchanted with Carter that I supported Ted Kennedy in [the] 1980 [primaries]. And then later, [I] thought that was a really stupid thing to do, taking this perfectly fine, not-perfect president and subjecting him to this kind of challenge from within his own party. I was ashamed of having done that. 

I didn’t really think about him very much until I was in a book club in 2014 in New York, and we were reading Lawrence Wright’s terrific book, Thirteen Days in September, about Camp David. And somebody knew Carter in our group, knew his grandson Jason, and brought [Carter] to our book group, and this guy was 90 years old [and] delivered this brilliant analysis, not just of Middle East politics, but a tour of the horizon. And in reading that book I realized, this was a virtuoso performance at Camp David. This was one of the great diplomatic achievements in American history. So there has to be more to this guy than “mediocre president, great ex-president.” 

My editor at Simon and Schuster was the late Alice Mayhew, and she was Carter’s editor. So when I mentioned this to her, she said, “You have to do this. Nobody’s written his biography.” I didn’t know Kai, it was a little bit before Kai undertook this, and there was this huge hole in the line of scrimmage. 

[Editor’s note: A third major Carter book (President Carter: The White House Years) would be published in 2018. The author was Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic affairs adviser.]

I was in the Carter Library one day reading documents, in the summer of 2015, and MSNBC texted me, and they said, “Trump is announcing his candidacy. Go over to a studio [and] analyze this guy coming down the escalator.” So I did that. And I knew this was going to be a really hateful turn in our national life. I didn’t know he was going to be president. But I went back to the library, and I just remember having this overpowering feeling of relief, going back and studying Carter. He was a vacation for me for four years from Trump. Anytime the toxicity of Trump got to me, I would just retreat into Carter, and it really helped motivate me because Carter was the un-Trump in so many ways.

TN: I understand that, Kai, you take a harsher line on [Fallows’s influential Atlantic article, “The Passionless Presidency”] in your book than Jon does. Fallows argued that Carter lacked the big, visionary mind-set necessary to lead the country. 

KB: I devote a whole chapter to Jim Fallows. His Atlantic essay, the first essay in what became a long career at that magazine, was regarded by the Carter White House people as sort of a stab in the back. I thought that was an interesting turning point to write about. 

I also thought that the Fallows piece was, well, a little sophomoric. Trying to psychologize Carter. And of course the one thing that people remember from that essay was the tennis court. That the president, in Fallows’s reporting, was paying so much attention to detail that he was [even] micromanaging the schedule of the White House tennis court. When you dig into that, it emerges that there was a misunderstanding, it was a little more complicated, and Carter wasn’t spending time managing the tennis court schedule. But that’s one of the stories most Americans remember about Jimmy Carter.

TN: What about the broader critique that Carter was all trees and no forest? [Fallows] might have even talked about [Isaiah Berlin’s essay] “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” 

[Editor’s note: “The Passionless Presidency” doesn’t mention the Berlin essay, though others later likened Carter to Berlin’s fox, who knows many things, and his successor Ronald Reagan to Berlin’s hedgehog, who knows one big thing.]

JA: That was just wrong, Tim. I revere Jim, but that analysis did not hold up under scrutiny. Carter is very much, in Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, a hedgehog. He had big ideas, mostly about peace, that pulled together so much of his approach to the world. But he also is very focused on detail, so this was used as a slam against him. 

It’s true that sometimes, particularly when he was governor, he would get into a level of detail that wasn’t very productive, and micromanagement that didn’t help. [But] he really didn’t do that very much as president. What he did do is pay enormous attention to legislative and diplomatic detail. [Without that,] he never would have had the Camp David Accords, he never would have had the Panama Canal treaties, which prevented a major war in Central America, he probably wouldn’t have had normalization with China—instead of devoting a chapter to the Fallows episode, I devoted a chapter to normalization with China. Carter was right in there on the details of that negotiation. 

We never would have had the Alaska lands bill, which doubled the size of the National Park Service. Carter was down on his hands and knees with the maps on the floor of the Oval Office, and when Ted Stevens, the senator from Alaska, came in and tried to buffalo him and tell him, “I’ll vote for the bill if you exclude these areas,” Carter said, “No, those are the headwaters of this, and there’s habitat there.” In a limo on the way back to Capitol Hill, Stevens said to an aide, “That son of a bitch knows as much about my state as I do.” If he hadn’t done that, that bill would have been gutted and the developers would have gotten their way.

KB: Jon and I both agree that Carter’s attention to detail was a good thing, particularly in looking at the Trump presidency, where there was no attention to detail. This is what we want in a president. Someone who gets up at 5:30 in the morning, and is in the Oval Office by 6:30, and spends 12 hours reading 200, 300 pages of memos every day, and looking at details, trying to figure out what is the right thing to do.

JA: Where it hurt him, Kai, I think, is when he let that effort to try to get to the right answer crowd out the politics. He didn’t think of himself as a politician, and that really hurt him. I think of him as a political failure because he lost, but a substantive and farsighted success. 

But some of his political failings were a result of that assumption that if he could—and Jim did identify this in that famous Atlantic piece—this assumption that if you could get to the right answer, that everybody else would see that it was the right answer and go along with him. So, for instance, on tax reform, which he had promised during the campaign, he sat down, he studied the tax code, he got up at 5:30 in the morning, he knew everything about the tax code and what was wrong with it. And then he dropped a reform bill. He used to communicate through messages to Congress, and he had many of them because he was interested in many, many different issues, and got more legislation approved than any president since World War II—including in recent years—except Lyndon Johnson. He got more bills than Clinton and Obama did in eight years, and many more bills than any Republicans. So there were bill signings every other week, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation, which the press mostly ignored. 

But on some big ones he lost, and he lost on tax reform, because he just dropped it on them. [Democratic Senator] Russell Long later said, “He didn’t consult me when he was writing this bill, so why should I consult him when I’m gutting it?”

TN: Kai, do you agree that Carter was bad at the politics part of the job?

KB: Well, some of the time—the tax bill is a good example. Another example is dealing with Ted Kennedy on the health insurance bill. It was obvious to Carter, in his view, that Ted was simply looking for an issue to run, to challenge a sitting president for the nomination on, and health care was Kennedy’s big personal issue. Both politicians supported the notion of a national health insurance plan, and Carter was on record supporting Kennedy’s bill. But once he gets into the White House, he’s also a small-town fiscal conservative, and he’s worried about the federal budget deficit. Wrongly, I argued, because he didn’t appreciate Keynes enough. He had the mistaken assumption that the federal budget deficit was fueling inflation, when it was actually commodity prices, the oil increases, the Arab oil boycott, the Iranian revolution. That’s what was fueling inflation. 

As a result of this bias on budget deficits, [Carter] told Kennedy that he couldn’t support his bill until his second term in office, and in the meantime, “How about doing a compromise, and we’ll just agree to pass national universal catastrophic health insurance, so that no American family would spend more than $5,000 on a health incident?” Kennedy rejected that, and Carter refused to compromise. In retrospect, I think, Jon, you’re right—if he was being politically smart, he would have let Kennedy walk the plank, and supported his bill, and when it didn’t get the votes that Carter thought it lacked in the Senate, Kennedy’s bill would go down to defeat, and then he could have gotten the universal catastrophic health bill. 

But he didn’t think that way. He just thought, “This is a foolish bill, and I’m going to present the smart bill,” and the result was we got nothing. We got 40 years’ delay in national health insurance. We didn’t get it until Obama, and only partially.

JA: A couple of things that surprised me. Ted Kennedy’s bill was not single payer. There’s this assumption, with progressives now, “Oh, if only we could have had [the Kennedy bill].” [Kennedy’s] bill didn’t even have the votes—Carter was right about this—to get out of committee, much less win on the floor, and it wasn’t single payer. So there was opposition, and what Carter came back with initially was an incremental bill, and Kennedy was very contemptuous of that incrementalism. That’s what we ended up doing under Clinton, with the child health [care bill] first. 

Toward the end, Carter introduced his own bill that was really quite a good bill, a little bit beyond Obamacare, and he had the support of all of the key committee chairs in both the House and the Senate. It would have gone through, but Kennedy, who had such authority on that issue, was too proud, and he rejected it. 

KB: Kennedy doesn’t come off very well in our books, does he?

JA: Not really. Carter and Kennedy were like oil and water from the time they first met. In Kennedy’s memoirs, he’s very tough on Carter. Carter was trying in recent years to be a little bit more charitable toward Kennedy, and he admitted that he was wrong not to put Archibald Cox on the [appellate bench, which] Kennedy wanted. [It] was very petty of Carter not to do that.

KB: It was a cultural disconnect, the southerner versus the Massachusetts liberal. They just spoke two different languages and they both disdained each other. Kennedy didn’t really understand where Carter was coming from, didn’t believe in his liberal credentials. And Carter thought that Kennedy was a privileged millionaire’s son who thought he was destined to be president. 

JA: Carter has never been popular with other politicians. Even when he was in the National Governors Association, he would want the governors, when they were in some sunny clime for their meetings, he would want them to go out and do community service. And the governors were like, “We want to go to the pool, why is Governor Carter making us do this community service, or making us consider these resolutions that are just going to cause us political problems at home?” 

He was never a pol. He wasn’t as self-righteous and sanctimonious as some people think in retrospect—he was a huge believer in the separation of church and state, and extremely tolerant of bad behavior in his staff, so he didn’t have that stick up his ass that some people think. But he was all business. That photograph of him standing apart, right after Obama was elected, [with] Obama and the Bushes and Clinton yukking it up and Carter standing aside from them—Kai and I both agree that was really accurate. Carter himself admitted that, and two other presidents, I won’t say which ones, confirmed it. Carter was just stand-offish. When you look at the logs of his calls to members of Congress, he would dutifully make the calls to lobby, but the calls would last, like, a minute and 10 seconds. No time for small talk, he just wanted to cut right to the chase.

KB:Jon, that causes me to ask a question, to steer the conversation toward the art and craft of biography. What were the most valuable sources for your book? How valuable were your interviews with Carter himself?

JA: I don’t think they were hugely valuable, to be honest.

KB: Mine were very disappointing, I have to say. I’d get some color, but in my interviews with him he was so focused on his Carter Center work—projects in Africa or whatnot—he would keep looking at his watch. He was concerned about his historical record, but he was bored with familiar questions, and you showed him a document, it wouldn’t spark a memory. He wasn’t a storyteller.

JA: I agree with that. I did have more success when I went to his house in Plains. When I would interview him at his office in Atlanta, his secretary would come in exactly one hour after the interview started, and it was the old naval officer who’s extremely intolerant of tardiness. So I got a lot less out of those interviews. But when I went to his house we could talk longer.

I learned more from him when talking about his current work—his post-presidency. But I think we both agree that in some ways his post-presidency is overrated because he didn’t have anywhere near the power that he had when he was president to change lives.

KB: Right. I also thought that Doug Brinkley had done a whole book on his post-presidency.

JA: Just one other thing, on interviews. I interviewed 260 people, and I did find that pretty much all of them told me one interesting thing. You wouldn’t get much more than one, but there would be something interesting and unusual that I would always have to check, but that took me in a new direction.

And it was clear from my reporting that Jimmy Carter has led an epic American life. This is an extraordinary human story. When he was president, there was this assumption that there was something a little boring about him, in part because of the way he talked, and the technocratic language that he would use sometimes. The energy crisis was hardly as sexy as the civil rights movement, and he was hardly as compelling personally as Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. But when you look at the totality of his life, not just what he achieved but the complexity of him as a human being, the inability, I think, of either of us—I shouldn’t speak for you, Kai, but I don’t think it’s possible to write a definitive biography of him. His personality is so complex. 

We haven’t really talked about him as a person, but this assumption that he was this weak character couldn’t be further from the truth. He was a tough son-of-a-bitch. Not necessarily in a bad way—people didn’t hate working for him. He wasn’t an Andrew Cuomo. But when he bored those steely blue eyes into you, you knew you were in trouble. He was this fascinating combination of his disciplinarian father and his compassionate, although often detached, mother. She was gone so often that he called the desk where she would leave instructions “Mother.” Because she was out of the house, taking care of, often, Black patients, as a nurse.

I also got completely fascinated by the milieu of the South. I had to spend a lot of time stripping off the
sugarcoating that he put on it. He didn’t lie about his early years, but he sugarcoated it. He lived in one of the meanest sections of the whole county. The sheriff, Sheriff [Fred] Chappell, who Carter described as a friend, Martin Luther King described as “the meanest man in the world.” [King spent some time in prison in Chappell’s
jurisdiction.] 

I came to think of Carter as having lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924, but it might as well [have been] the 19th century because they had no running water or electricity, or mechanized farm equipment. He was president in the 20th century. Conflict resolution, democracy promotion, global health—these are the cutting-edge issues of the 21st century. Carter has been intimately involved in them for the first 20 years of the 21st century. So the scope of this life, I think, is under-appreciated.

I think [you] explain a little bit more to the reader than I do how useful Carter’s [published] diaries are, that he kept religiously when he was president. They’re really good.

KB: Absolutely. I relied on the diaries and other archival documents much more than interviews, but my main complaint and disappointment, and I’m sure yours, is we both asked for access to the full diary, and we didn’t get it. We got a little bit, but there are 5,000 pages, and he only published 20 percent of it in his 2010 book.

JA: On three or four occasions I requested things that were not in the diaries. For instance, I wanted his reaction in real time when the shah of Iran died, and they provided me those excerpts from the unpublished diaries. There were a couple of other [instances] where I asked for the full entry from that day, and they gave it to me, and actually, the [published] diaries are not whitewashed. I did not find that he took out embarrassing things from the diaries. I was disappointed that he wouldn’t give me his diaries from his post-presidency. 

TN: Let me introduce a couple of topics I’d love to see you both discuss. The first is economic deregulation. The other is the Iranian revolution. Does [Carter] have any retrospective regrets on either of those subjects?

KB: Well, the Iran revolution, yes, he has regrets. I write a lot about the Iran revolution. I argue that it was really an organic thing, it was going to happen, there was nothing much that Carter could do to save the Pahlavi regime. It was falling apart, and had become very unpopular by the mid-’70s. Just like we’ve witnessed with the Afghanistan situation, things moved very fast. There’s nothing he could have done to save the shah.

I think his one regret about Iran is that he gave political asylum to the shah. He resisted for months and months. David Rockefeller and John McCloy—the subject of my first biography—and [Henry] Kissinger formed this formal lobbying operation that they dubbed “Project Alpha.” They allocated a budget for it, they hired a publicist, they set up a calendar where each of them would contact at least one high-ranking Carter administration official, if not the president, each week, to lobby for the shah to be admitted. And Carter just resisted it, and you can see in his diary he worries that if he does this, perhaps, the passion in the streets of Tehran will be such that the embassy could be attacked and hostages would be taken. And of course he was right. 

He finally gives in late October of ’79, and a few days later the embassy is taken over and we have 444 days of hostages and it’s a body blow to his chances of reelection.

JA: Very quickly on deregulation. He did not engage in deregulating Wall Street in any significant way. This was deregulation of the airline industry, which he did with Ted Kennedy, [and] the trucking industry, which, I argue, set up the just-in-time delivery system that is one of the foundations of today’s economy. And railroad rates—a whole series of industries that his wonkiness led him to do, and he had some really smart people working on it for him, and they did a lot to set up the success of the economy in the ’80s, without really doing any damage. He didn’t do any deregulation on health and safety.

Kai and I both mention a lot of lesser examples. They deregulated the beer industry, allowing microbreweries. But I don’t think that, separate from a few Carter aides, anybody, when they hoist their microbrew, toasts Jimmy Carter. But they should.

TN: The deregulation of the trucking industry was enormously damaging to truckers. 

JA: The Teamsters didn’t like it, but—

KB: The same was true of deregulation of the airline industry. It weakened the labor unions that were servicing Pan Am and TWA and the big airlines, and they all went by the wayside, and the airlines that popped up hired non–labor union workers. It was a reform that allowed middle-class Americans to fly for the first time because there were cheaper fares and more choices, and more airline routes. So people like Ralph Nader thought it was a great boon for consumers. But the downside [was] it actually weakened part of the traditional Democratic constituency, trade unions. And this occurred, not only with the airline industry but, as you point out, with trucking and railroads. 

[Editor’s note: For more on the consequences of airline and railroad deregulation, see “Terminal Sickness,” by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan (in our March/April 2012 issue), and “Amtrak Joe Versus the Modern Robber Barons,” by Phillip Longman (in this issue).]

TN: It was part of the reorientation of liberalism from employees to consumers. Would you agree with that, Jon?

JA: By coincidence, I talked to Ralph [Nader] yesterday for the first time in quite a while. We talked some
about Carter. 

Ralph was pretty disappointed in the Carter presidency, although he agreed with Esther Peterson that Carter was the [most pro-consumer president] he experienced in his adult life. We talked about the failure [to create] a consumer protection agency, which was a big priority for Nader, and to my mind it was The Washington Post, when they editorialized against it, that drove a bunch of liberals away. [Nader] felt Carter could have argued harder
for that.

I don’t think it was deregulation itself, usually on behalf of consumers, that led to this shift [in emphasis from employees to consumers]. I think it was more that Carter never really focused on the problem of deindustrialization, of what would replace the Rust Belt as the engine of the American economy.

The same thing happened with Iran. When the shah started to teeter, Carter failed to apply his normal attention to detail to Iran. He had so much going on. He was planning for Deng Xiaoping’s historic visit. This is in the late fall and winter of 1978, and the beginning of 1979. [The] Camp David Accords fell apart. This is a little-
known fact. After they left Camp David, the whole deal came apart, and in early 1979 Carter had to go to the Middle East, and put the whole thing back together with chewing gum and baling wire and masking tape. 

So he has that, he has China. And then there’s this revolt over Bella Abzug, whom Carter had hired to run this women’s commission, and she had used her perch there to attack the Carter administration. So they decided to fire her. And the week that the shah left power, the minutes of the Cabinet meeting, they’re mostly talking about
Bella Abzug. 

They really didn’t understand. A lot of people thought “Shiite” was pronounced “shit,” and even Walter Mondale didn’t know what an ayatollah was. So there was this tremendous lack of knowledge about what was going on in that part of the world. And then, to pick up on something that Kai mentioned, there’s all this pressure on Carter to let the shah in. And at one point he says, “Fuck the shah.” He’s really resistant to McCloy and Kissinger and all these people pressuring him. I didn’t really believe that he said this, but when I interviewed [Carter Defense Secretary] Harold Brown, I said, “Did he really say ‘Fuck the shah,’ ” and he goes, “Yeah, I was quite surprised to hear those words out of his mouth.” 

But then in October of 1979, [Rockefeller has] a new argument, that the shah has cancer, and must be let in for humanitarian reasons. But this was a con job, and the details of the con job have [only] come out fairly recently. Basically, they pulled the wool over Carter’s eyes and made it seem as if the shah, who was in exile in Mexico, could not be treated for his cancer in Mexico, and could only be treated in the United States. So they let him in. And as Kai said, it was only a few days later that the student militants seized the embassy.

TN: I had always thought that the pressure to let the shah in didn’t happen until after he was a cancer patient. It actually preceded that?

KB: Yeah, from the time he went into exile, from the time that Ayatollah Khomeini came back to Tehran and the shah left, Kissinger and Rockefeller and McCloy were lobbying Carter to give [the shah] political asylum. 

TN: What was their argument?

KB: That we had to stand by this friend. If we were seen to be abandoning him, this would send a message to our allies that we were unreliable. It was the standard sort of Henry Kissinger argument about alliances. Carter saw through it as meaningless right away. He understood that this was not the right thing to do, and he only acceded because of—what Jon is referring to is this medical information, which was completely erroneous. [The shah] could have gotten the same or, in fact, he probably could have gotten better health care in Mexico City than in New York City, because the doctors that David Rockefeller set him up with were not experts in what he needed and made one mistake after another.

JA: The doctor was a tropical disease expert! 

KB: It was just outrageous. 

JA: It’s really a story about [how] celebrities get the worst medical care.

Kai is much harder on [National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski in his book than I am. When I interviewed both Kissinger and Brzezinski, I was really struck by the weakness of their argument: that Carter could have bolstered the shah and gotten him to use his army if he only urged him to shoot his own people. This was such a paternalistic bullshit argument. The shah knew enough about what was going on to tell one visitor, “Look, the difference between a monarch and a tyrant is a monarch doesn’t shoot his own people.” He’d already shot some of them during one rebellion. He said, if I start shooting them on one street one week, they’ll just pop up on the next street the next week.

TN: What is the difference between the two of you about Brzezinski? Because you’re not speaking very highly of [him]. Is it about Brzezinski himself or about Brzezinski’s influence on the White House?

JA:The latter.

KB:No, I’m much harsher on Brzezinski.

During the transition right after the ’76 election, Carter is trying to make his appointments, and Richard Holbrooke calls him. Holbrooke has been giving him advice on his foreign policy change during the campaign, and Carter says, “I’m thinking of appointing Brzezinski as national security adviser and Cy Vance as secretary of state.” And there’s a long pause, and Holbrooke says, “Well, Mr. President-elect, I think you could have one or the other but it would be a mistake to have both,” and he explains that they have two different worldviews. 

Brzezinski is at heart a Polish anticommunist who hates the Russians, and believes that the Soviet Union is an evil empire, and that we’re in a generational battle with the Soviet Union. He sees the whole world and U.S. foreign policy through that prism. Whether it’s Cuba or Africa or India, or the Middle East, he’s thinking, “Well, how can we make this bad for the Russians?” That’s his worldview. Cy Vance is much more subtle and sophisticated. He’s learned the lessons of Vietnam. Carter and Vance were on the same wavelength; Carter, though he was a Navy man, he was very averse to military force or interventions. And he found himself agreeing with Vance’s worldview. But he told Holbrooke in that famous conversation, “Oh, that’s all right, I think I can handle differences of opinion.” I think he had in mind [Franklin D.] Roosevelt’s cabinet, which was filled with people who would argue with each other. 

But Brzezinski, as I relate, played a very poisonous role in the White House. He was leaking all the time, he was undermining, undercutting Cy Vance, and he was giving Carter bad advice all the time, which Carter usually rejected. Until the last year, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Carter was shocked by that, personally, and at that point began giving way to Brzezinski, taking his advice over Vance’s. That’s why Vance left the administration and resigned.

I argue also that Carter was wrong to accept Brzezinski’s advice about the [Soviet invasion of] Afghanistan. Here we are today dealing with the defeat of a 20-year war. [But] it didn’t start in 2001. It actually started in 1978 and ’79, under the Carter administration, when Brzezinski persuaded Carter to allocate $500,000, and then a little more later. Not much money, but to do a covert operation in Afghanistan to fund the mujahideen, and this is six months before the Soviet invasion. 

Brzezinski saw the Soviet invasion as confirmation of an expanding empire, of a Soviet system that was on the move and was aggressive and strong. And this was all wrong. We now know from the Politburo minutes of that meeting, when they decided to invade, that it was a very contentious decision, and that the people in the Politburo who were opposed to invading were appalled to realize that Brezhnev was drunk and senile at the time. 

We now know in retrospect that the Soviet Union was falling apart. It was weak. And what were they invading? They were invading to take down a hard-line Communist and put in power a more moderate Communist Party member who would be less alienating to the Muslim culture that was prevailing. It was ridiculous! Brzezinski’s worldview poisoned everything.

JA: I also have a lot about this in my book, and I agree with most of what Kai just said, but a couple of things. 

I decided to look at this, not with my journalistic cap on, but to try to put on the hat of a historian, and to not look so much at what the big issues were when he was president, which is the way journalists would analyze it politically, in terms of staff squabbling and all that kind of thing, and look at it instead historically. In retrospect, whole forests died for the newsprint chronicling this bureaucratic rivalry between Brzezinski and Vance. And in the end, Carter rejected almost all of Brzezinski’s ideas, and agreed more with Vance, as he told both me and Kai. But he liked having [Brzezinski] around for the intellectual stimulation. Ultimately that turf fight and most of the other staff squabbling and staffing issues, to me, receded in importance, and I did less on them than trying to assess the long-term effects of [Carter’s] decisions. 

Not all those decisions were good. The grain embargo, for instance, which they applied after the Soviet invasion, was disastrous, and Democrats are still paying for that in the Farm Belt, as [Bill Clinton’s agricultural secretary] Dan Glickman told me 40 years later. Because the Soviets quickly started buying grain from other countries, and it was pointless. And obviously the Olympics boycott, which was very popular at first, and a resolution supporting it passed Congress overwhelmingly. That didn’t sit very well with the American people over time. But—

TN: Do you agree that Brzezinski started to break through and have more influence in the last year? 

JA: I guess it’s possible that Brzezinski tipped Carter over the edge into supporting [the failed Iranian hostage rescue mission]. But ultimately I don’t think it was Brzezinski’s advice that was decisive; it was the failure of this negotiating track to release the hostages that [White House Chief of Staff] Hamilton Jordan had been spearheading. After that failed in March of 1980, Carter was so frustrated by the fact that they were back to square one diplomatically that he opted for this idea of a rescue mission, which had been described to him since the week after the hostages were seized. They were already beginning to plan a possible rescue mission as a contingency, but it took many weeks of training and development, and then Carter and Brzezinski told them to add a helicopter, but they should have added two. I still think it wouldn’t have worked. The helicopters crashed in the desert, didn’t even get to Tehran. If they had gotten there, extracting the hostages would have been very difficult. A lot of people would have been killed, possibly including the hostages. 

KB: Jon and I agree about the craziness of the helicopter rescue mission. It could never have succeeded. It was always going to be a disaster. There were too many moving parts, it was too complicated. And if they had gotten into the streets of Tehran, there would have been a shooting battle, and people would have died. 

But I think Jon and I still have fundamentally different assessments about Brzezinski. I’m thinking of the spring of ’77, early in the administration, you can see Carter being pestered by Brzezinski with these memos, saying, “Mr. President, you need to do something tough to show the Russians that you are made of mettle. Something militaristic.” And Carter writes in the margins, “Like Mayaguez?” 

[Editor’s note: In 1975, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge seized a U.S. merchant vessel, named the Mayaguez, and captured its crew. In response, the U.S. launched a bloody and ultimately unnecessary battle to rescue the hostages.(The hostages were not on the island the American military attacked, and they were released when operations began.) Forty-one U.S. soldiers died in the fight.]

JA:Okay, so, Kai, what’s the enduring historical importance of Brzezinski’s advice if Carter told him to get lost? Why does it matter that much?

KB: It matters to readers because it’s really interesting, that there’s this difference of opinion. It’s color—I agree. But it also takes on a historical significance because Brzezinski was relentless. This was his message all the time, and it was debilitating, and it eventually warped Carter’s own response to events. In September ’79, remember the much-ballyhooed Soviet brigade in Cuba? Brzezinski went berserk on this, and tried to tip Carter into a real confrontation over Cuba. Finally [Carter] realizes after a briefing from Mac Bundy and John McCloy that that Soviet brigade—we always knew it was there, we’d agreed that it could be there in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis in ’62. It was all much ado about nothing. That was the one moment when Brzezinski, seriously, according to his own memoirs, threatened to resign.

JA: I agree with all of that, but to me the critical figure in that sorry episode was [Idaho Democratic] Senator Frank Church, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, facing a tough reelection fight that he would lose. He and a number of other formerly liberal members of Congress also went crazy on this ridiculous Cuban brigade story—

KB: True, true.

JA: —so I don’t think that Brzezinski was decisive. Where I do think he was important—and this is an area where we disagree—is that he wanted to be another Kissinger. He had this rivalry with Kissinger, so he went to China in advance of normalization and he negotiated at least some of the normalization. Leonard Woodcock and another negotiator/diplomat did most of it, but Brzezinski made an important trip. He was acing out Holbrooke—there’s great stuff in George Packer’s [Holbrooke biography] about that particular trip—but he says to the Chinese, “The first one to the top of the wall gets to fight the Russians.”

Why do you think that normalization was inevitable? I believe that’s what you write in your book, and you devote less than a paragraph to it. You say this was going to happen. My feeling is that [if] Gerald Ford, who was so afraid of the right wing that even after he had been defeated and his political career was over, he resisted entreaties from Senator Phil Hart’s widow to pardon draft dodgers—Carter did that in his first week as president—if Ford had been elected [to another term], there’s no way he would have defied Reagan and the right wing and thrown Taiwan under the bus the way Carter did, and normalized relations with China. That normalization is the foundation of the global economy. Carter thinks it’s the single most important, most enduring thing that he accomplished in office. I’m just curious as to why you think it would have happened anyway.

KB: I think you’re right. If Ford had been, he would have been under pressure from the right wing not to, quote, “abandon the Taiwanese.” But there were larger historical economic forces at work. Carter did win that ’76 election, and there was no disagreement among his team. Henry Kissinger was in favor of normalization. Cy Vance was, Brzezinski was in favor. There was no argument about it; there was no internal tussle. Everyone was in favor of it, and so was Carter, and I think it was going to happen.

This is coming back to what I said at the beginning, we come at these issues with different passions and interests, and when I saw that there was no internal argument inside the administration, it became a less interesting story for me to write about. I think I gave more than a paragraph to it. I think it is important, but it was inevitable. Politically, it was going to happen, and it did happen, and Vance was—coming back to the rivalry—he was offended by Brzezinski’s behavior, and [by] being jabbed in the stomach bureaucratically [when] Brzezinski finagled the trip out to China, undermining the secretary of state. Brzezinski was doing this all the time. So that was, I think, something to write about. I just found the story less interesting than you did. But there’s no surprise to that. We’re going to find different things. 

I devoted a whole chapter to the October Surprise. A little cautiously, with some trepidation, because it’s a conspiracy theory and it’s complicated, but I was fascinated by the story, and you decided to give two or three paragraphs to it. I don’t think we basically disagree about what may or may not have happened. But I thought it was worth a short chapter.

[Editor’s note: The October Surprise theory holds that Reagan campaign staffers conspired with Iran to delay the release of the American embassy hostages in order to damage Carter’s reelection chances.]

JA: To be honest about it, my book, with footnotes, was 782 pages, and it was originally 1,100 pages, and my publisher wouldn’t even let me submit it unless I cut 300 pages. So I had to make some hard choices on that.

But, Kai, I agree with you. Tim, I think this was after you left Newsweek, but in 1991 Newsweek did this, in retrospect, terrible cover story trying to debunk the October Surprise theory. Both Kai and I fastened on this now-deceased reporter named Robert Parry, who in 2013 came upon a 1991 White House memo mentioning [that] in the summer of 1980, [Reagan’s campaign manager] Bill Casey was in town for reasons the U.S. ambassador to Spain didn’t know. And the entire Newsweek cover story debunking the October Surprise theory was based on the idea that Casey never went to Madrid. But it turns out he was in Madrid. 

Gary Sick, who was Carter’s top adviser on Iran—he wrote a whole book on the October Surprise—told me the reason that he couldn’t really prove the case [was that] all the hotel records and the other records that would have validated a meeting between Casey and the Iranian regime were destroyed. Casey had been head of the CIA, [and Sick thinks] it was pretty short work for him to destroy all the incriminating evidence. Unfortunately, the Iranians who were at these meetings—their reliability is close to zero. So at the end of the day, as Kai said, we’re left in the same place, which is that it probably happened. But [we’re] never going to prove it.

There are, however, some things we know for sure. There was a guy named Joseph Verner Reed, who became head of protocol under Reagan, and then he was an ambassador under Bush. This Rockefeller-crowd guy, who I have—[Kai,] your venom for Brzezinski, I direct at this guy Joseph Verner Reed. He wrote to his family after the election, “I’m proud of my role in doing anything I could to delay the release of the hostages until after the election.” I mean, here these people are sitting in a dank basement. They’ve been in prison for 444 days, ultimately, and he’s proud of the fact—this pillar of the American banking establishment is proud of his role in keeping them imprisoned in Tehran. It’s disgusting. 

KB: That’s pretty disgusting. But the other guy who’s still around is C. Boyden Gray.

JA: He’s a bad actor in this also. 

KB: He was White House counsel under George H. W. Bush when Congress was investigating this October Surprise. There was a congressional task force led by Lee Hamilton, a very respected [Democratic] congressman from Indiana, and [the committee] had subpoena power, and they subpoenaed any records pertaining to Bill Casey’s travel in the summer of 1980. The subpoena forced the State Department in 1991 to make a search of its records.

Hamilton should have gotten some useful information from that search. The White House memo Parry discovered in 2013 relied on State Department information. It mentioned a cable from the Madrid embassy that reported that “Bill Casey was in town for purposes unknown.” The Madrid embassy cable, however, was never turned over to Lee Hamilton’s congressional task force. He wasn’t even aware of the cable until I told him about the 1991 White House memo in an interview. Hamilton then told me, “I was never given [the cable]. They never showed it to me. We subpoenaed it, and I never got it.” No one has been able to find the actual cable, just the memo noting its existence.

JA: In my conversation with Lee Hamilton—he’s very old, but he was kind of pissed. 

KB: Yeah, he was angry about this. 

JA: He [said], “They made a monkey of me.” He put in all this time in this investigation and they hid the key document from him. 

KB: I asked for an interview with Boyden Gray, who’s alive and well in Washington, D.C. He never responded. I sent him a letter telling him this was appearing in the book; he never commented. He thinks he can get away with this, and he has. 

This brings us to why did Carter lose the 1980 election? And I think one contributing factor was dirty works by Bill Casey. This meeting in Madrid where he allegedly met with a representative of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and assured him that the Iranians would get a better deal from his guy, Reagan. That was one reason [Carter lost]. The other reason was Kennedy’s challenge, which we’ve talked about, and how he weakened Carter going into the national campaign. Carter’s aides often told me that he lost in 1980 because of the three Ks: Khomeini, Kennedy, and [former New York City Mayor] Ed Koch. 

TN: Ed Koch?

KB: Why Ed Koch? We haven’t discussed this, but I write a great deal about this in my narrative. I thought it just fascinating that Carter had this difficult relationship with the Jews. The New York Times had an editorial entitled “The Jews and Jimmy Carter.”

He had a difficult time with the Jewish American establishment, and with people like Ed Koch, who thought that he was anti-Israel. This started even before Camp David, but it went on after Camp David—after he had taken Egypt off the battlefield for Israel, and made this triumphal piece of personal diplomacy that resulted in a real, long-lasting peace treaty—although a cold peace—between Israel and Egypt. 

The reason is that Carter continued to pressure the Israelis on the settlements. And why? Because he believed, ardently, that he had gotten [Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin to promise a five-year freeze on settlements in the West Bank. If that was true, then that makes it not just a separate peace between Egypt and Israel; it turns it into a comprehensive peace settlement that involves the Palestinians. It provides a road map to Palestinian autonomy, self-determination—they weren’t using the [phrase] “two-state solution” at that point, but that’s what everyone understood it to be. If you continue to build the settlements, Carter realized, that was going to close down the option [of] a two-state solution. 

So for the next 40 years, he was very outspoken about this, and he pissed off a lot of Jewish American leaders, who are still angry with him. In Zoom meetings promoting my book this summer, it was astonishing how, in the chat room, you can see questions—they never pose them directly to me, the moderators are too polite to do that—but you can see in the chat room that questioners are saying, “Well, isn’t Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite?” The reason it’s a hot-button issue is that the Jewish American establishment hasn’t spoken out to defend Carter. In fact, they make a point of criticizing him for his pressuring Israel on the settlements: “You shouldn’t do that, this is an Israeli decision that should be done on their own terms.” 

TN: Even retrospectively, looking back over the history of the last 40 years on settlements?

KB: J Street now exists, and J Street recently gave an award to Jimmy Carter, which was an extraordinary thing in the Jewish American community, and very controversial.

TN: I’m asking about your Zoom conversations, though. Did you hear anybody actually deny that the last 40 years of settlements have been catastrophic in the Middle East?

KB: No one argued with me on Zoom, but in the chat box you could see people saying that.

JA: The settlements [are] not what this is about. I deal with it at considerable length, and Kai, just in terms of Ed Koch—he had endorsed Carter and then sniped at him. Jane Byrne, the mayor of Chicago, endorsed Carter and then basically endorsed Kennedy after that. 

KB: Right.

JA: And Hamilton Jordan said if Jane Byrne and Ed Koch had a baby, it would have all the qualities of a dog except loyalty.

We could both write whole books on this subject. I also focus on this misunderstanding at Camp David, which I think was partly the product of intense fatigue.

TN: Do you both agree it was a misunderstanding as opposed to a betrayal by Begin?

JA: Yeah.

KB: No.

JA: You think it was a direct betrayal? You think that [Begin] flat-out promised?

KB: I believe Carter. Carter believes that Begin promised him, and that he deceived him. He either lied or he deceived him.

JA: The promise is not really in the documents. It came down to a distinction—

KB: It was a side letter, and they had agreed to a side letter that said five-year freeze on the settlements. 

JA: No.

KB: Begin had agreed to sign that. Then he substituted the letter.

JA: What the actual language had was a freeze on the settlements for the length of the negotiations before a treaty. The Camp David Accords were not a treaty. They set up a process, and the treaty wasn’t signed until the following March of 1979 after, as I mentioned, Carter had to go back to the region. There was a lot of work done. It had to pass the Knesset. 

Begin’s understanding—which he did, actually, renege on—was that he wouldn’t do anything with the settlements for the five months before a treaty. Carter thought that was until there was a final status agreement, five years later. If Carter believed that Begin was really not going to do anything for five years, he was being naive about that, in an otherwise brilliant performance. 

I think the real hostility from the Jewish community, which, as you said, has existed all along—Carter is the only modern Democratic president who didn’t receive more than 50 percent of the Jewish vote—

TN: Wow.

JA: That was in 1980. 

KB: Yup, only 45 percent. 

[Editor’s note: Reagan captured 39 percent, so Carter still won a plurality of Jewish votes.]

JA: —so all these bad feelings existed then, I think in part because a lot of them rejected Camp David. A lot of American Jews said, “You gave away the Sinai? [The Camp David Accords] hadn’t endured yet.” Now you can look back, and—what I say is that even though Jimmy Carter is the most critical of Israel of any American president, he has been the greatest president for the security of the state of Israel since Harry Truman. Because, as Kai mentioned, by taking the Egyptian army off the battlefield, he secured Israel. When I was growing up as a Jewish kid in Chicago, we would hear all the time, “Israel’s in danger of being driven into the sea.” There was only one army that could drive Israel into the sea: the Egyptian army. You never hear that anymore. It’s just gone from the vocabulary. That’s because of Jimmy Carter.

KB: But the settlements are important even today. This is why Carter’s presidency is still relevant on this foreign policy issue. He has been so prophetic in warning that if you build settlements, you change the whole nature of the conflict, and you change the nature of the Jewish state. It will no longer be a democratic Jewish state. It will become an apartheid state. He actually used the word in the title of his book in 2006 that pissed off
everybody. 

JA: That’s what pissed people off. That’s why you and I both got these questions, “Is Carter an anti-Semite?” Because of the title of that book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. 

I remember at the time, 2006, kind of going, “Wow, that’s pretty harsh.” But it turns out that not only Ehud Barak, a prime minister of Israel, but many members of the Knesset use that word, apartheid, on almost a weekly or monthly basis. 

KB: But Jewish American leaders wouldn’t.

[Editor’s note: After our conversation, Bird elaborated on this topic in a September 15 op-ed in Haaretz titled “Why Are U.S. Jews Still Calling Jimmy Carter an Anti-Semite?”]

JA: At Camp David, when he went to the region in ’79, even though he was much closer to [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat, he was nonetheless an honest broker. But after that, after he left the presidency, he sided almost entirely with the Arabs, and he wasn’t even welcome in Israel; nobody would meet with him when he would go there. And then, when he met with Hamas, that really sealed it. But I think perceptive Israelis understand where this comes from. 

My book is not as focused on the Carter presidency as Kai’s—I have a lot more about his early years. My basic argument is that he spent the second half of his life making up for what he didn’t do in the first half. He didn’t stand up for civil rights when he was running for governor in 1970. He issued dog whistles. He praised George Wallace. 

So as president, he launched his human rights policy. Years later, Karl Deutsch, the great Harvard professor of international relations, ran into Carter—Carter was depressed after he left office—and said, “President Carter, hundreds of years from now you will be remembered because your government was the first in human history that made the way other governments treat their own people an issue for your government.” Carter cried after he heard this. The policy was hypocritical, but it was enormously important. As Andy Young says—America’s embrace of international human rights was a globalization of the civil rights movement. The way Israelis analyze this, smart Israelis, is really accurate. They say that Carter’s attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict grows out of his regret over having lived on land in Georgia that was stolen from the Indians, and having not stood up enough for Black people in the South, and that he sides with the weaker party, the party that’s been persecuted, and in this case, that’s the Palestinians. That provides his motivation, and he is on fire about this. He’s been interviewed about the Middle East so much that I didn’t use much of my time in my interviews to bring up the Middle East, because it would consume the rest of the hour. His biggest regret about not getting reelected is that he couldn’t complete the work of Camp David and have a comprehensive Mideast peace. I think the greatest regret of his post-presidential life is also that he was not able to make any real progress in the Middle East [as an ex-president].

TN: Am I right in concluding that, ironically, where you both agree is that Carter, despite this rap he gets in the Jewish American community, wasn’t tough enough on Israel, because he didn’t secure that five-year hold on
settlements?

JA: There would have been no deal. They packed their bags three or four times, both sides, to leave. 

KB: That’s true, but I still maintain that in Carter’s view, he believes that he had the pledge from Begin to sign this side letter.

TN: Do you think that it’s possible, Kai, that it could have been in [the agreement]?

KB: In 1978 there were probably less than 20,000 settlers, maybe less than 15,000 settlers, in the West Bank. Today there are roughly 700,000. 

TN: Right.

KB: By the time Carter left office in ’81, there were 25,000. So, yeah, it would have been a tough issue, but Begin had agreed to remove the settlements in the Sinai. To put a freeze on settlements in return for the promise of a comprehensive deal with the Palestinians—in 1978, that could have been possible. Now, if Carter had been reelected, he would have, as Jon has just admitted, he would have made this a priority. He would have put enormous pressure on the Israeli establishment to come to terms with the Palestinians.

JA: Yes, I think he would have, but I don’t think he could have done it at Camp David. It would have almost certainly blown up the deal if it had been explicit. There’s a big difference between dismantling a few settlements in Sinai, which has no religious significance—

KB: If he couldn’t get it, he was deceived by Begin, who switched the letters. He agreed to sign one letter, Carter thought he had it, and then in Camp David he says, “Wait a minute, this is a different letter.” And he called the Israeli aide to Begin and said, “Go get the original language.” And then there was a delay, and they had by that time scheduled the press conference [on] the White House lawn, and they were getting on the plane to go back. Carter believed he had a deal that included [a] comprehensive [settlement]. Whether I’m right or not, he believed it. And he believed that he was deceived. Or lied to, outright. And this explains much about his attitude in the last 40 years.

JA: It does. But there were conferences later where other Israelis who Carter got along well with—unlike
Begin—said, “Come on, it’s one thing to relinquish some settlements in the desert in the Sinai, but this is—in the
Bible”—

KB: Judea and Samaria. 

JA: —so there was no way that Begin was committing to do that. And that Carter should have understood that. And that everybody was super tired on day 13. But I agree with you that, if he had been reelected, he would have not only pursued Middle East peace, he would have achieved it. Because, having been reelected, he would have paid any price to knock heads together, threatened to cut off aid to Israel, whatever was required, to get a comprehensive settlement.

KB: Particularly after Sadat was assassinated. He believed Sadat sacrificed his own life because of this. 

JA: But he also said, interestingly, that Israel gave up more at Camp David than Egypt did. And that these were tough concessions for Begin to make. It was a huge amount of acreage.

In the other “What if?” category is climate change. If Carter had been reelected, he would have pursued Middle East peace, and he also would have begun to pursue a climate change agenda. 

At the very end of his presidency, there was this thing called “Global 2000.” The [White House] Council on Environmental Quality, run by a guy named Gus Speth, released a report on what was sometimes called carbon pollution. Carter had started studying the issue in 1971. I found in his files from when he was governor underlinings in the journal Nature about carbon pollution and global warming. Other politicians played golf—Carter played tennis—but he was reading scientific journals. That’s how he got his jollies. So they issue this report. What’s amazing about it is that the reduction in CO2 that they recommend be the policy of the Carter administration is precisely what was in the Paris Climate Accords of 2015. Would we have fully embraced it? Would he have repudiated coal? No, because we needed coal at that time to achieve energy independence. But he would have surfaced global warming as a major issue. He was the first leader anywhere in the world who considered it a problem.

KB: It would have been a different world if he had had a second term, and we hadn’t had Ronald Reagan for two terms. That’s a great historical counterfactual.

TN: That’s a very good point on which to end the conversation unless—let me check in with both of you—do you feel as if you’ve exhausted the topic?

KB: We have not exhausted the topic!

[Laughter.] 

JA: Each of us spent five years on these books!

This piece was originally published in 2021 and appeared both online and in the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

The post The Surprising Greatness of Jimmy Carter appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In 2012, a young researcher at what was then the New America Foundation’s Open Markets program published an exposé in the Washington Monthly about the plight of chicken farmers and ranchers who were being crushed by Big Ag monopolies. It described a reality in which the people responsible for the food most Americans eat are trapped in a web of exploitation that has not only battered their livelihoods but also has jacked up the prices for consumers and undermined the welfare of animals.

The story went on to explain how the Obama administration and its agriculture secretary at the time, Tom Vilsack, took aim against this exploitation by trying to update the rules of the Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA), a law passed in 1921 to protect farmers, consumers, and other stakeholders in the livestock, meat, and poultry industries from “unfair, deceptive, unjustly discriminatory and monopolistic practices.” The effort, however, was derailed once the large agribusinesses deployed their lobbying forces to Capitol Hill and stopped anything meaningful from getting done. 

Now, it’s 2021, and the writer of that piece, Lina Khan, is no longer an unknown D.C. policy wonk, but chair of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the federal government’s two main antitrust enforcement agencies. And on July 9, President Joe Biden, who appointed Khan to her role, issued an executive order containing 72 separate initiatives to crack down on consolidation across the American economy. One of those guidelines instructs the Department of Agriculture, again headed by Vilsack, to update the rules of the PSA along almost precisely the same lines the Obama administration tried. 

If the past is prologue, the Biden administration will face a similar battle getting the rule changes enacted. The difference this time, however, is that the effort will have more firepower on its side. Anti-monopolism was a fringe movement in Washington in 2009. There was little to no momentum to mount a battle over changing the rules to an obscure law from the 1920s to protect farmers. All that’s changed. Biden has clearly made antitrust a featured part of his domestic agenda, and there is growing awareness in both parties in Congress about the dangers of today’s Gilded Age–level corporate concentration, with sweeping antitrust bills gathering bipartisan support in both houses. 

But as multiple sources deeply entrenched in the fight have told the Washington Monthly, it is far from a sure thing. Big Ag monopolists will not go gently into that good night—and they will pour the same money and resources and deploy the same playbook as last time to trip up the regulatory process in its tracks. 

In August 2009, eight months into Obama’s first term, the administration began holding a series of hearings across the country to investigate consolidation in the poultry, dairy, cattle, and seed industries. The impetus was a provision in the 2008 farm bill, passed when George W. Bush was president, that instructed the USDA to update the Packers and Stockyards rules. 

In state after state, government officials heard the same stories again and again from livestock producers—that the market was broken, and oppressive. The reason, they were told, was that the federal government had allowed the meatpacking industry to consolidate. The four biggest meatpacking companies controlled 82 percent of the beef market, up from 25 percent in 1976. And the top four poultry processing firms controlled 54 percent of the poultry market, up from 35 percent in 1986. At the hearings, chicken farmers complained that because there are so few buyers for their products, they had no choice but to sign sharecropper-like contracts with one of the few mammoth chicken processors. These contracts obliged them to purchase almost all the supplies they needed—like chicks or feed—from the processors themselves, and to accept whatever prices the processors offered for the grown birds. Whenever farmers would try to negotiate better terms, the companies would often retaliate by sending them back lousy feed or sickly chicks, thereby depressing their incomes even more. The system, in other words, meant the farmers had no choice but to accept the terms—even if those terms were driving them out of business—and to keep their mouths shut in the process. 

Based on such testimony, the USDA proposed a new set of rules in June 2010. They included banning company retaliation against farmers who tried to renegotiate a contract; requiring any company that forced farmers to make capital investments to offer contracts long enough for those farmers to recover at least 80 percent of that investment; and, perhaps most importantly, getting rid of a provision that said farmers had to prove that breaches of PSA rules caused industry-wide harm—a standard that made it virtually impossible for farmers to successfully file a claim over a violation. These changes to an old law may not sound like a big deal, but for American livestock farmers, they would be life-changing. 

A month later, however, Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee, joined by a few Democrats, assailed the administration for ignoring the concerns of meatpacking industry trade groups, such as the National Chicken Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. In response, the USDA, under Vilsack, extended the period for public comments on the proposed rules from 60 to 150 days. 

That might sound reasonable enough. But the delay proved fatal, for two reasons. First, it pushed the public comment period beyond the midterms, which the Democrats lost. Second, it gave industry trade groups time to commission dubious research to counter the rules. “Anyone can pay economists to come up with studies to support their point of view,” Dudley Butler, then the top USDA official overseeing the livestock industry, told me. “And extending the time for comments allowed them to come back with their studies for why these new rules were going to destroy the industry and hurt consumers and all that.” 

In November 2010, Informa Economics, a Memphis-based agricultural research firm that often works with the meatpacking industry, released a report purporting to show that the new rules would cost more than 22,000 jobs, $1.64 billion in meat industry revenue, and $360 million in tax revenue. The data Informa used to calculate these estimates, though, was supplied by the livestock industry trade groups that commissioned the report. Since the data was proprietary, and not available to regulators or outside reform groups, there was no way to check its validity—a classic deep lobbying trick. 

Emboldened by the report, House Republicans and their Democratic allies in June 2011 added a rider in a government funding bill to strip the USDA of the funds it needed to implement the strongest of its proposed rule changes. Advocacy groups and farmers fought hard against the rider—6,000 people called the White House—but the industry lobbyists won. While the Senate supported the PSA provisions, the House members waged an all-out offensive over it—holding funding for crucial safety net programs, such as food stamps, hostage. 

The maneuver worked. The Obama administration decided this was a war it could not win—and retreated from the fight. By November 2011, the rider passed the House, then made it through the Senate, and was later signed into law by Obama. The next month, the USDA published four watered-down versions of the rule changes, hardly making an impact. The defeat was intensely disappointing for Butler, who resigned from his post in January 2012. 

For the next four years, the Obama administration let the issue fall by the wayside. But in its final days, it proposed three rule changes that stemmed from the 2009–11 hearings. Of course, Donald Trump was set to take office in less than a month, so the move was more symbolic than anything else. The Trump administration buried the proposed rule changes. 

Today, however, it’s no longer Donald Trump’s Washington. Joe Biden is in the White House, Democrats control both the House and the Senate, and there’s a chance to finish what the Obama administration started. 

This summer, Biden ordered the secretary of agriculture to propose new rules that would update the standards by which regulations and enforcement would be applied, almost entirely along Obama’s 2016 order, including getting rid of the current standard that any kind of alleged anticompetitive conduct, or PSA violation, must demonstrate industry-wide harm. Instead, anticompetitive conduct would be a violation simply by virtue of its being anticompetitive. 

The new rules would also prohibit grower-ranking systems, which allow poultry companies and contractors to shortchange farmers, and enact anti-retaliation protections for farmers who file complaints. 

But the proposals have already faced vociferous opposition from major trade associations that represent Big Ag, such as the North American Meat Institute, which promptly, upon Biden’s order being announced, said the changes would “open the floodgates for litigation” that would hurt livestock producers. They also sent out a flier to reporters that included an economic analysis from the Steiner Consulting Group—a consultancy that, in its mission statement, claims to work to “significantly improve the bottom line of food companies”—that says consolidation isn’t what has led to rising prices of meat. Rather, the report counters, meat has gotten more expensive because of issues of supply and demand. 

Reports like this are part of the rhetorical weaponry that skilled Big Ag lobbyists—like Randy Russell of the Russell Group; Michael Torrey, a private attorney; and Kevin Bailey of the firm Finsbury Glover Herring (previously known as the Glover Park Group)—will likely use to try to kill or scale back the regulations.

Even if the USDA manages to issue strong regulations, the meatpacking behemoths will undoubtedly try to challenge them in federal court. In that effort, they will be able to deploy some of DC’s most powerful law firms. Kirkland and Ellis represents Tyson Foods; WilmerHale represents Monsanto; Mayer Brown represents Cargill. These firms will also have the advantage of arguing before a federal bench filled with GOP-appointed judges steeped in anti-regulatory, pro-monopoly thinking. 

That’s why, if the Biden administration really wants to protect the plight of farmers from a concentrated food market, it needs not only to update the rules of the Packers and Stockyards Act but also to strengthen the law itself. That’s the only way to guard against the likelihood that conservative judges will toss out the regulations. 

Luckily, there’s already a bill in Congress waiting for Biden to start pushing for aggressively: the Farm System Reform Act, sponsored by Senator Cory Booker. (Representative Ro Khanna has introduced a companion bill in the House.) The legislation would codify into law many of the reforms Biden is seeking in the executive order, such as eliminating tournament or ranking systems for contract growers. Thus far, the bill is only supported by Democrats, but congressional staffers who are working on it, as well as Joe Maxwell, the president of Family Farm Action and a former lieutenant governor of Missouri, see a reason to be optimistic that a few Republicans will jump on board. 

At a Senate hearing on consolidation in the cattle market, for instance, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley grilled Justin Tupper, the vice president of the United States Cattlemen’s Association, on the need for price discovery mechanisms to ensure that small, independent producers have the same opportunity to market their cattle as the big producers that dominate the industry. It was a clear indication of his antipathy to the current arrangement, in which a small group of massive companies get to run the show. Grassley has also introduced separate legislation to promote more transparency in the cattle market, which has been cosponsored by Democrats as well as Republicans, such as Joni Ernst of Iowa and Steve Daines of Montana. It’s conceivable that enough of these Republicans could get behind a bill to rein in a concentrated food industry to overcome a filibuster. 

The case for optimism is that when it comes to agriculture, and the economy generally, the winds have shifted in Washington, with growing bipartisan recognition of the deleterious effects of concentrated markets. The case for pessimism is that corporations generally, and Big Ag in particular, have a deep bench of veteran Washington experts who have proven they know how to block attempts to reform a broken system. Either way, if reformers are going to win this fight, they will have to know what and who they are up against.

The post Can Biden Coop Up the Monopolies? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Silicon Valley tycoons look up into space today, they see dollar signs: a booming space industry flush with venture capital funding, Wall Street investment, and a hot satellite technology market worth billions of dollars.

But Moriba Jah, a NASA scientist turned ardent space environmentalist, sees doom on the horizon.

On February 12, 2020, Jah testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on the political economy of space and national defense. Called to Washington as a witness from Texas, where he’s a professor of aerospace engineering at UT Austin, Jah stood out from the other witnesses. He wore a charcoal-gray suit, a nose ring, and a black kukui nut necklace partially obscured by his dreadlocks.

Jah, who grew up partly in Venezuela before joining the U.S. Air Force, warned the committee about the looming disaster of space debris, which threatens to derail the entire satellite industry as well as future space exploration. The two main culprits are Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. The tech giants are launching thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) with reckless abandon to provide high-speed broadband to underserved areas where terrestrial cable doesn’t reach or the connection runs too slowly.

“Every domain of human activity suffers from malicious behavior, and space is no different,” Jah told the committee. “Near Earth space is in…dire need of environmental protection.”

Approximately 30,000 space junk parts have accumulated in Earth’s orbit since Sputnik’s launch in 1957 and currently careen haphazardly through the atmosphere. Because these particles travel at thousands of miles per hour, even a minor impact between an active satellite and a tiny scrap of shrapnel as small as a paint chip is dangerous; eventually, the debris will fall back through the atmosphere and crash to the ground. As Jah’s research shows, we don’t even know how much junk is out there, because governments haven’t conducted proper inventory and only share limited information with other countries’ space programs.

“It’s a flawed system of governance all the way down the line,” Jah told me recently over Zoom.

While space junk has existed for decades, it’s evolving into a full-blown crisis because of the sudden overcrowding of commercial space by SpaceX’s Starlink program and Project Kuiper, a subsidiary of Amazon. By next year, the companies combined could operate more satellites in low Earth orbit than have ever launched into space, dating back to the 1950s.

The two companies are on track to hold a duopoly over the satellite communications market by rapidly deploying a new generation of satellite technology into low Earth orbit. These nanosatellites deliver fast internet connection by hovering far closer to Earth’s surface than the conventional geostationary satellites used by governments and satellite TV providers like Dish. Starlink already has close to 100,000 users who’ve signed up for its service, and it owns 1,500 active satellites, which is almost half of all satellites in low Earth orbit. The company is launching more every month at a breakneck pace. Amazon lags far behind, but it acquired licenses from the FCC in 2020 to begin launching a constellation of 3,000 satellites.

The upsides of satellite technology shouldn’t be discounted. LEO satellites can provide high-speed and low-latency broadband to all corners of the world by flying in huge constellation forms to cover any targeted service areas. In a world where satellite service is widely available, millions of households neglected by telecom giants like AT&T and Verizon could be able to access high-speed internet service for the first time. If the industry is regulated and well managed, LEO satellite communications could finally bridge the digital divide and even provide a competitive alternative to fiber optic cable internet service providers.

Jah recognizes the satellite industry’s potential, as he made clear in his testimony to the committee. He joined NASA because of his faith in the utopian potential of satellites to bring about new scientific discoveries and innovations. But Jah believes that government intervention is necessary to manage space debris and ensure that the financial gains of satellites don’t set us down a path of dystopian catastrophe.

So far, government agencies have failed to devise a proper regulatory strategy for organizing space as a public good rather than a playground for the egotistical ambitions of billionaires. By rapidly approving both companies’ satellite fleets and showering SpaceX with subsidies, regulators have all but given Musk and Bezos the keys to a kingdom in the sky. SpaceX’s near-total control over the rocket launch business, which is a barrier to entry, and band spectrum licenses have made the company a de facto arbiter of Earth’s orbit.

Monopolizing our satellite communications infrastructure would enrich Musk and Bezos while offloading major environmental, financial, and national security risks onto everyone else. As the companies expand their grip over the telecommunications sector, they’ll have unprecedented control over vast amounts of its users’ data, from web browser history to location tracking. These companies could also combine their access to customer data with satellite Earth-imaging capabilities, which would create a Truman Show-style system of surveillance beyond the imagination of dystopian sci-fi writers. It’s an immense amount of power and private information to put in the hands of two large tech companies.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States lost much of its military rationale for continuing the space race, and with the decline of public investment in general after the 1980s, NASA became a shadow of its old self. Yet other trends were also at work that favored private investment in space. The rise of Silicon Valley venture capital allowed for the funding of risky entrepreneurial projects that required high up-front costs. As with the internet itself, space also remained a largely unregulated frontier of commerce. As a result, a number of Silicon Valley bigwigs, most famously Bill Gates, began funding LEO satellite broadband companies to compete for communications dominance.

They all went belly-up in disastrous bankruptcies. Sufficient demand for satellites still wasn’t there, and the rocket launch costs were still too high. Yet plenty of venture capital firms and other financiers remained eager to fund space projects. In the early 2000s, both Musk and Bezos seized the opportunity and founded SpaceX and Blue Origin to begin building rockets for private space exploration.

The Falcon 9 reusable rocket was Musk’s killer app. For decades, commercial space development lagged because of unaffordable launch costs. The reusable rocket dramatically brought down the costs of operation, which allowed SpaceX to quickly ascend in the space market and win contracts with NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. Supported by government contracts, Blue Origin has mostly supplied rocket parts for the public and private sectors before recently developing its own orbital launch vehicle.

But now both companies are chasing a much broader customer base. In the developing world and even in much of rural America, lack of access to broadband is still the norm and increasingly threatens people’s ability to fully participate in modern life. Meanwhile, public frustration with telecom monopolies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast has reached an all-time high because of slower service and higher prices. This means there’s gold in satellites. Morgan Stanley estimates that the satellite communications sector alone will become a $400 billion business over the next two decades, and Musk and Bezos want as big a piece of that action as they can get.

Musk founded SpaceX’s satellite program Starlink in 2015 as a revenue driver for funding his long-term fantasies of establishing a colony on Mars. For Bezos, Project Kuiper fills a similar purpose for the Amazon empire. As the space investor Chad Anderson put it in an interview with CNBC, Bezos looks at satellites in cold financial terms: It’s “4 billion new customers,” Anderson noted, who don’t yet have access to broadband.

Both companies are using a new generation of LEO nanosatellite technology that can provide faster internet service by flying close to Earth’s surface. Their small size makes them more cost-effective to mass produce. By traveling in tightly knit mega constellations, the nanosatellites bounce radio transmissions between one another, creating a virtual grid across the band spectrum. This technology has allowed Starlink and Project Kuiper to hit the threshold for high-speed broadband, notching 50Mbps to 150Mbps with low latency (a measure of the lag time for wireless connection). The companies are betting that if they keep improving the speed and lowering their prices they’ll eventually be able to compete against fiber optic cable.

Yet while the upside potential of this technology should be obvious, monopolization and lack of sensible regulation threaten to bring us a dystopia of crashing space junk and rule by plutocrats.

There’s only a limited amount of LEO room for satellite companies to operate in. SpaceX and Amazon have built their business strategies around this constraint by moving rapidly to launch thousands of satellites and occupy the atmosphere before it fills up.

SpaceX is the furthest along. The company already owns almost half of all satellites currently in low Earth orbit. It’s launching almost 120 per month to build out its constellation of 12,000—more than the total number of satellites that have ever been in the sky. Musk is currently seeking the go-ahead for an additional 30,000 from U.S. and international regulators to reach his stated goal of operating a constellation of 42,000.

Amazon has played second fiddle to SpaceX but is gaining momentum. While the company doesn’t yet operate any satellites, it has received approval for 3,000, which is almost as many as the total number of satellites currently in low Earth orbit. Based on its beta tests, the company claims it can match, if not improve on, the internet speed of Starlink.

SpaceX has outpaced competitors in part because of the reusable rocket and the launch pads it controls, which help save costs on production. Yet much to Musk’s advantage, the company also prospers from favorable treatment by the government. Critically, the two most important American regulatory agencies for overseeing satellite commerce, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration, have played an active role in enabling SpaceX’s power play for satellite dominance. The FCC routinely approves Starlink’s fleets with little oversight, awards them millions of dollars in subsidies, and issues the company exclusive licensing permits to low-altitude levels in Earth’s orbit out of reach for competitors.

Since 2018, when SpaceX first got approval for their mega constellation, the FCC has signed off on Starlink’s 12,000 satellites; in 2020, it voted unanimously to approve Amazon’s request to build out a constellation of 3,236 satellites over the next four years.

Critics have attacked the FCC’s lax approach, describing it as operating simply on a first come, first served basis. Most of the satellites currently in low Earth orbit were approved under the chairmanship of the Trump appointee Ajit Pai.

The agency also does not properly account for environmental hazards or collisions, or even make sure that the companies seeking approval offer the best service. That’s especially relevant when it comes to SpaceX. The company reported malfunctions in around 5 percent of its satellites in 2019 due to technical flaws. Although there’s no standardized metric for satellite failures, experts worry that the massive scale of Starlink’s constellation will magnify the damaging effects of its satellite failures. Rivals have also pointed to customer dissatisfaction with Starlink’s service, claiming that it isn’t as fast as advertised. None of these complaints have apparently given the FCC pause in approving Starlink’s fleets.

The FCC’s auctioning process for band spectrum licenses has come under increasing scrutiny as well. The broadband spectrum where radio transmissions travel is the equivalent of atmospheric real estate: There’s only so much valuable land. To receive regulatory approval, companies first need to purchase licensing for both the atmospheric real estate and the allotted band spectrum “blocks” for radio transmissions, which has become a hot market. SpaceX has quickly bought up these licensing rights and crowded out other competitors by blocking them from trespassing in its spectrum.

In the early 2000s, the FCC made a rule change that allowed companies to trade and lease out these band spectrum licenses, creating a kind of shadow market for trading space property. As low Earth orbit has become overcrowded, the licensing permits have become a highly coveted commodity. SpaceX and Amazon have taken advantage of the auctioning process for the highest bidder, which tilts the playing field toward bigger companies with deep pockets.

In April, the FCC handed down a controversial ruling on SpaceX’s licenses that effectively gives the company near-total control over the lowest levels of Earth’s orbit. The agency expanded the licenses that SpaceX had already acquired to allow the company to move its existing satellite fleet closer to Earth’s surface, below 353 miles. Flying closer-to-ground stations will improve the company’s broadband speed and latency for customers.

The decision caused an uproar among space competitors, who argue that the decision gives SpaceX an unfair advantage and increases the likelihood of collisions. Opponents of the decision, led by Dish and Amazon, also claim that the shift in the elevation angle between Starlink’s ground stations and lower satellites will disrupt the radio transmission from other companies’ satellites in higher orbit. In effect, the FCC has given SpaceX a monopoly over the most premium real estate for satellite service and locked out competitors.

If that weren’t enough, the FCC also showers SpaceX with subsidies to provide broadband to rural areas. Without these government funds, Starlink’s business model—as with most of Musk’s enterprises—would rest on a house of cards. In December 2020, the FCC awarded the company almost a billion dollars as part of its “Rural Digital Opportunities Fund” program. An investigation from the watchdog organization Free Press, however, revealed that SpaceX applied for and won subsidies for non-rural areas that didn’t fall under the grant’s criteria, such as airports and empty parking lots in urban enclaves. Under the Biden administration, the FCC reviewed the subsidies and sent out letters requesting companies to self-report any misappropriated funding they received. This incident of overt fraud hasn’t stopped the agency from continuing to approve more Starlink satellite fleets to fly in the designated areas covered by the grant.

There’s no end in sight to regulators funneling taxpayer dollars to SpaceX. The broadband speed requirements in the bipartisan infrastructure bill will allow Starlink to qualify for a wider array of lucrative government grants. In aggregate, government subsidies and military contracts have kept Musk’s Starlink operation afloat and allowed the company to under-price its competitors.

To achieve an economy of scale and greater market share, Musk has also effectively engaged in predatory pricing to expand Starlink’s customer base. Customers who sign up for the Starlink program receive a kit that includes a user terminal to connect to the satellites, a mounting tripod, and a wireless router. According to its own disclosures, Starlink loses more than 50 percent on every kit it produces for customers to keep the price at $499 per package (and $99 per month for service).

This puts a huge strain on competitors but has worked in Starlink’s favor. The company has added new customers at a rapid rate, with 20,000 in the month of July alone. While Project Kuiper hasn’t set its rates yet, the company is expected to match Starlink’s prices once it gets its fleet up and running. Such tactics kill competition and in the long term could lead to monopoly pricing, which is why, when previous new communications networks came along, such as telegraphs and telephones, Americans quickly realized the need to regulate how much they charged users.

SpaceX’s march to dominance now also involves buying out the competition. The company recently made its first acquisition, which is expected to be the first of many to come. In August, it bought out Swarm Technologies, a promising satellite firm that specializes in Internet of Things (IoT) services for energy, shipping, and transportation. For SpaceX, which deals mainly with broadband for households, the deal expands its reach into IoT services. It also gives the company control of the spectrum licensing that Swarm received from the FCC.

For industry insiders, the deal signals that the satellite market is headed toward a wave of mergers and acquisitions. According to a Bloomberg analysis, $3.6 billion has been spent so far this year on takeovers and joint ventures in the space industry, already surpassing the numbers from 2020.

“There are too many small players right now, so we’re looking at a wave of consolidation,” says Aravind Ravichandran, an independent industry analyst and consultant who runs the influential TerraWatch Space podcast and blog, which covers the space industry.

SpaceX and Amazon are expected to win the spoils of the coming period. Billions of dollars in investment have propped up a wealth of satellite start-ups but saturated the market. Because of the high capital costs for entry and equipment maintenance, most companies won’t be able to stave off bankruptcy unless they draw a large customer base. That means many of the currently listed companies will either go out of business, which could be destabilizing to the market, or start looking for acquisition partners.

Two of SpaceX and Amazon’s biggest competitors, OneWeb and Intelsat SA, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy during the pandemic. OneWeb, which had long been seen as SpaceX’s main rival, survived after being bought out by the UK government. Only SpaceX and Amazon have the financial firepower to weather the storm of consolidation.

As the industry centralizes around SpaceX and Amazon, data gathering and surveillance are becoming major concerns. In 2017, President Trump signed a bill revoking a set of Obama-era privacy protections that restricted telecommunications companies from collecting web browser search history, location tracking, and other data from its customers. By rescinding those protections, the bill opened the floodgates for selling personal information to third parties. It also led to the centralization of data, which makes it easier for massive breaches by hackers such as the recent T-Mobile cyberattack. The same rules apply for satellite communications.

As the satellite communications sector attracts a broader customer base, Starlink and Project Kuiper will control even more users’ personal information. The companies could weaponize data collection to build more advanced business models that would help crush smaller satellite competitors. They can also sell that data for further profit at the cost of its users’ privacy, as Google and Facebook have done. Amazon already has a robust data collection business in its retail sector, which the company could pair with telecom data to become a truly terrifying micro-targeting data empire.

Data collection isn’t a side story in the satellite business. Both companies could combine the traditional forms of data harvesting with satellite surveillance imaging, which is one of the highest-valued sectors in the industry.

The Commerce Department has offered a helping hand to the satellite surveillance industry by eroding many of the limitations on Earth imaging. In 2020, the department lifted key restrictions on high-resolution images from satellites. Companies applauded the decision, but it set off alarm bells for privacy advocates, who warned that companies could now even track the movement of individuals.

Mapping Earth’s activity has certain productive uses if it is tightly regulated. Satellite imaging could help farmers check on the health of their crops and provide data analytics for renewable-energy companies to monitor offshore wind farms. But the technology also has far more nefarious applications. Many Earth-imaging companies say openly on their websites that they can offer data analytics about the operations of a client’s competitors—in other words, spying for hire. Privacy advocates also predict that without legal constraints, Earth-imaging satellites could track individuals at the behest of large corporations, like an all-seeing eye in the sky.

While Starlink doesn’t offer Earth imaging, there’s no technological barrier prohibiting it from doing so in the future. The company already exerts indirect control over the industry. In 2021, SpaceX signed a rideshare agreement with Planet Labs, the largest satellite imaging company, to give them access to the Falcon 9 for rocket launches. Once Starlink’s satellite fleets occupy most of Earth’s orbit, as it’s currently on track to accomplish, Earth-imaging companies will have to directly or indirectly deal with SpaceX. It also is an advantageous position for Musk to request images from these partners to spy on his competitors in the automobile or aerospace industries. It gives one company a huge amount of power over a troubling industry for privacy rights. These companies’ massive stores of data would also be especially vulnerable as high-priority targets for hackers.

SpaceX’s dominance threatens to exacerbate other hazards as well. By flying at such low levels in the Earth’s orbit, Starlink is creating light pollution that interferes with astronomers’ ability to study space. SpaceX has tried applying a black coating to minimize the rays of light refracted off its satellites, but astronomers don’t think it will have much effect. Light pollution from satellites also interferes with the simple pleasure of enjoying a clear night sky.

And, of course, SpaceX and Amazon’s massive satellite fleets will escalate the space junk crisis.

Donald Kessler, a former NASA astrophysicist, warns that continually putting more and more satellites into low Earth orbit means that even a minor piece of debris from a collision or malfunction would create an effect like a giant sheet of glass shattering in the sky and trap Earth under an impenetrable dome of space debris. We would have to wait years, maybe even decades, before enough debris burned up in the atmosphere that we could access space again.

These dystopian scenarios aren’t merely speculative fears. Just two satellite incidents—one collision involving an inactive Russian satellite in 2009 and another precipitated by a Chinese anti-satellite missile test in 2007—have produced a substantial amount of the debris currently in orbit and likely to remain there for decades. While the Department of Defense’s global surveillance network has tracked 30,000 pieces of junk in the atmosphere, debris specialists estimate that the number is far greater. This uncertainty makes it more difficult to accurately predict the risk of debris and avoid collisions.

Even outside of these worst-case scenarios, space debris could cause serious problems. It could knock out key parts of the communications infrastructure, as well as other intelligence satellites owned by the U.S. government.

“We need to secure the space orbit channels so that we avoid major disasters to our communications systems,” Mariel Borowitz, a professor at Georgia Tech who specializes in space policy and national security, told me.

Collisions between different countries’ satellites could also spark international conflicts. Because LEO satellites fly at such high speeds, their movement can be imprecise and may cross into other band spectrums or across national borders. Since international agreements have only set vague guidelines for collisions, commercial satellite accidents could become a pretext for disputes between superpowers. In one scenario, Musk has warned about China shooting down his satellites for flying over parts of the country where they don’t have licensing. The Chinese Communist Party has put a premium on maintaining a closed internet, known as the “Great Firewall,” and might blame the U.S. if Starlink crossed over into their network. For similar reasons, Russia has also threatened to fine any citizen who signs up with Starlink.

Musk has already strained our relationship with allies by clashing with European regulators over Starlink’s constellation. In 2019, the European Space Agency contacted Starlink about an urgent potential collision they detected with one of the company’s satellites. SpaceX never responded to the request, which forced the ESA to go into damage control and maneuver its satellites out of harm’s way. Since the incident, Europe has tried to counter Starlink’s influence in the region and invest heavily in their own satellite constellations.

Fortunately, it’s not too late to take advantage of the promise of new satellite communications technology while also avoiding or minimizing the myriad environmental and societal threats it poses. That, of course, means more diligent technical oversight from regulatory bodies to ensure that satellites are built and operated with the highest safety standards. But it also means using public policy to structure commercial competition in space so it is both fair and efficient.

In many ways, we have been here before. When new communications technologies emerged in the past, the U.S. government responded with legislation and regulatory frameworks for allocating key assets and managing competition. The evolution of law and regulation governing radio technology in particular has echoes of the current dilemma with satellite technology. In the 1920s, applications for new radio licenses came in at such a pace that the Commerce Department started approving licenses to almost anyone who applied. Since there was only a limited amount of radio spectrum, this created massive problems with radio interference. Congress responded with the Radio Act in 1927, which set more stringent criteria for reviewing licensing applications. Rather than give them out on a first come, first served basis, much less sell them to the highest bidder, station licenses went to applicants who could best demonstrate their ability to serve the public as stewards of a radio spectrum commonweal. Later legislation further managed competition by putting breaks on any tendency toward monopoly. Until many of these strictures were repealed in the 1980s and ’90s, this meant limiting the number of stations any one person or corporation could control, prohibiting station owners from vertically integrating into ownership of other forms of media, and even requiring that radio stations devote a share of their airwaves to balanced, public interest programming.

Today, we need a new satellite communications bill that is of similar scale and scope and that takes on new issues as well. One example would be to ban satellite telecom companies from selling their customers’ data. Congress should also block satellite companies that offer telecom services from engaging in Earth imaging, and vice versa. As with the original Ma Bell telephone system, we should ensure that satellite owners don’t abuse their control of essential information technology by going into other lines of business that use such infrastructure, such as media or advertising companies or online retail.

Because space is a global commons, solutions to our current satellite crisis will also require international collaboration and agreements. Moriba Jah, for example, is calling for governments to quantify how much space debris exists in orbit so they can track it and avoid collisions. His team at UT Austin’s Oden Institute has built an open-access database to pool information from national space programs across the world to provide an accurate estimate of space debris and its location. Jah also advocates setting up an international space traffic system with patrol officers to manage overcrowding.

New space technologies could immensely benefit humanity, but to realize the benefits we can’t hand over this valuable resource to the domineering control of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Instead, the government needs to establish rigorous oversight and enforce fair and efficient terms of competition so space junk and monopolization don’t ruin the final frontier forever.

The post Why Are We Letting Monopolists Corner Space? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As expected, when a chief executive nicknamed “Amtrak Joe” put together his signature infrastructure bill, it contained an unprecedented sum for expanding rail service across the country: $60 billion over 10 years. Perhaps more surprisingly, it attracted enough support from Republicans to pass the Senate in August. Though as of this writing Democrats in the House are divided over how and whether to tie the bill to other agendas, it seems likely that Biden will eventually realize his ambition to tilt far more transportation dollars toward rail.

It’s a worthy goal. The bill promises to furnish a more convenient and environmentally friendly mode of travel between destinations that are far enough apart to make driving tedious but close enough together to make flying impossible, or at best impractical. You might never use these new trains yourself, but those who do will benefit you by creating less traffic congestion, cleaner air, and a cooler planet. Removing more freight from pavement-pounding long-haul semitrucks onto super-fuel-efficient trains will make driving safer and more pleasant and would yield huge reductions in carbon emissions.

But for any of this to happen on any meaningful scale, the Biden administration will need to do more than just invest more public money in train travel. It will also need to reverse decades of deregulation, lax antitrust enforcement, and other policy blunders that have left modern-day robber barons in control of nearly all the nation’s highly monopolized railroad infrastructure, just as they were in the worst days of the Gilded Age. Only this time, the financiers aren’t presiding over an expanding rail system; they’re selling it off and permanently liquidating its assets for short-term economic gain.

Unless Biden takes on the financiers, even maintaining Amtrak service, let alone expanding it, will become ridiculously expensive. Here’s an example that shows why.

Amtrak for decades offered train service along the Gulf Coast corridor between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina badly damaged the tracks. The two giant corporate rail systems that own the line, Norfolk Southern and CSX, made the necessary repairs and within a year resumed running their own freight trains. But Amtrak service has never returned.

It is not that people in the region don’t want their Amtrak trains back. A broad coalition of civic and business leaders, including Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker, has been trying for years to persuade the railroads to let Amtrak resume operating. They point to a study by the Trent Lott National Center at the University of Southern Mississippi that says restoring Amtrak service will boost tourism significantly, greatly benefiting Mississippi’s beaches and casinos. They point to the report of a special Gulf Coast Working Group, created by Congress, that estimates the cost of resuming Gulf Coast passenger service at $5.4 million. They point to the fact that the Biden administration, Amtrak, and the state governments of Louisiana and Mississippi are all committed to furnishing the necessary operating funds.

But after five years of negotiations, you still can’t take the train to Gulfport, Biloxi, Pascagoula, or anywhere else along the Gulf Coast. CSX, which controls most of the track along the route, insists that restoring Amtrak service would interfere with the six to eight freight trains it runs daily along the coast. It’s an argument that rail corporations often deploy against passenger service.

The objection is absurd on its face. During World War II, when troop and military freight trains crowded this route along with civilian freight traffic long since lost to trucks, dispatchers still managed to move 11 scheduled passenger trains per day between Mobile and New Orleans. These included the storied “Pan American” of country music fame. And they did it using telegraphs and hand-operated semaphores, not the efficient GPS technology available today.

CSX’s recalcitrance is a negotiating strategy to get Amtrak to either go away or pony up for huge infrastructure investments that would mostly benefit CSX itself. The railroad says restoring two Amtrak trains requires a second main track, new sidings, siding extensions, yard bypasses, and modernization of drawbridges. At one point, CSX put the price tag at $2 billion—orders of magnitude more than estimates provided by the Federal Railway Administration and other independent experts.

Such maneuverings reflect the growing power of hedge funds and other “activist investors” over the railroad industry. In 2017, the financier Paul Hilal used his activist fund Mantle Ridge to buy a nearly $2 billion stake in CSX and win control of its board. Hilal used this power to depose CSX’s long-standing management and replace it with a team of downsizing specialists committed to boosting short-term profits by shrinking the railroad’s physical assets, labor force, and other expenses. The new focus on cost cutting and downsizing has seriously degraded CSX freight operations while also causing the company to take an impossibly hard line with Amtrak.

Exasperated by the railroads’ refusal to negotiate in good faith over the restoration of Gulf Coast service, Amtrak has recently appealed to an independent federal agency, the Surface Transportation Board. But deregulation has left the federal government with very limited control over railroad infrastructure. When Congress and the Nixon administration created Amtrak in 1970, they relieved railroad owners of their previous obligation to provide passenger service at their own expense. Half a century later, the federal government has no clear legal standard to decide when freight railroads must grant Amtrak access to their track, or what the terms of service will be. And since Amtrak owns track only between Boston and Washington and a few other places, dependence on freight railroads is a huge obstacle to improving or expanding passenger rail service.

For example, more than 10 years of studying and lobbying have been dedicated to the question of whether Amtrak will be permitted to run more than one round-trip train per day between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. Public policy makers must wrestle with many knotty problems; this shouldn’t be one of them. There’s plenty of track capacity. Amtrak ran two round-trip trains along the mostly three-track mainline as recently as 2004. But Norfolk Southern says today that bringing back that second train would create unworkable disruptions to its freight service. The railroad’s latest maneuver was to demand that the state of Pennsylvania pay for a study to calculate how much the public must pay Norfolk Southern for the necessary capital improvements, such as a possible fourth track.

Another example is the drawn-out battle Amtrak and the public had to wage to restore passenger service between Boston and Portland, Maine. By the time Amtrak came into being, passenger service on the route had already been discontinued. To get it started again, Amtrak, as well as state and local governments, had to agree to pay the railroad that owns the tracks tens of millions of dollars for capital improvements. It took another two years of litigation before the railroad, now known as Pan Am, would allow Amtrak to run its trains fast enough so people would want to ride them. A pending mergerbetween Pan Am and CSX now threatens the public’s considerable investment in that passenger route and any prospect of expanding Amtrak service elsewhere in New England.

Biden recently signed an executive order that commanded the Surface Transportation Board to put more pressure on railroads to stop their habitual practice of delaying Amtrak trains by making them wait for passing freight trains. That’s helpful. But the order failed to clarify what rights Amtrak possesses to expand service, and what price it and other public entities must pay railroad owners for capital improvements. Because there’s no clear statutory authority, some industry insiders predict that Amtrak’s legal fight to restore Gulf Coast passenger service will go all the way to the Supreme Court, which could take years. State and local governments seeking to establish commuter rail service have even less legal leverage than Amtrak in negotiating terms with private railroad owners.

It’s much the same story when you consider the prospects for expanding freight rail service in the U.S. Don’t expect much progress unless we claw back Wall Street control.

There’s an overwhelming societal need to divert more freight from trucks to trains. Freight trains are three to five timesmore fuel efficient than trucks and produce far less emissions. Indeed, when electrically powered by overhead wires, trains can be emissions free, and without the environmental and financial costs of battery disposal that plague electric trucks. According to one study, a modest investment in electrifying freight railroads could reduce carbon emissions by 39 percent and, by 2030, remove an estimated 83 percent of long-haul trucks from the road.

Moving more freight by rail would also reduce the number of Americans who are killed or injured by collisions with large trucks, a casualty rate that reached 156,000 in 2018. In addition, it would reduce dramatically the damage done to America’s roads and highways by large trucks—each of which causes the same wear and tear as 9,600 passenger cars.

Yet hedge funds, private equity firms, and other financiers are using their control of highly monopolized, underregulated railroads not to expand rail freight but to sell off rail assets and hand over all but the highest-margin business to trucks.

Some of this downsizing is justified by the decline of the railroads’ thermal coal business as electric utilities convert to natural gas. But most of the downsizing results simply from financiers forcing railroads to shed all but their most lucrative lines of business. Such practices threaten to shrink the nation’s rail network to the point of nonviability, but so long as rail expenses fall faster than rail revenues, the short-term return on assets increases. That’s all Wall Street cares about.

The scale of the downsizing is dramatic. One measure is the rapid disappearance of boxcars. During the 10 years leading up to 2019, even as GDP increased by nearly 50 percent, the railroad boxcar fleet shrank by one-third. Between 2000 and 2019, the trade journalist Bill Stephens reported, the equivalent of 16,132 merchandise freight trains, each with 75 cars, vanished from the tracks of CSX and Norfolk Southern. The main driver of this decline was an industry trend known as “demarketing,” in which railroads actively turn away profitable but low-margin business—for example, hauling grain or consumer appliances—if the move doesn’t involve huge volumes or requires boxcars to be hauled back empty. As a consequence, many farmers now have to use expensive trucks to get their crops to market while many kinds of manufacturing become far more difficult, if not impossible, in the rapidly expanding number of towns and cities where the railroads will no longer do business.

Railroads are also making it more expensive and cumbersome for shippers to realize any advantage from combining shipment by truck with shipment by rail. Especially for trips over about 500 miles, moving containers by both truck and train is much more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly than using trucks for the entire journey. During the 1980s and ’90s, railroads won substantial market share back from trucks in some lanes by offering such intermodal service. But that was before Wall Street started demanding that railroads limit themselves to the highest-margin business.

Bowing to such pressure, in 2018 Union Pacific and CSX discontinued their partnered service on 197 of 301 cross-country container train routes. As a consequence, even shippers who still use railroads to ship containers wind up making much greater use of trucks. For example, if a shipper wants to move a container from any number of western cities to Baltimore using Union Pacific and CSX, CSX will no longer move the container the full distance. Rather, CSX will only take it as far as Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and then make the shipper hire a trucker to haul it the remaining 100 miles to Baltimore.

Railroads have also been stripping out terminal capacity. Wonder why it took so long to get that new car you ordered? The shortage of rail terminal space is a major reason for the widespread logistical bottlenecks since the economy began recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In July, Union Pacific suspended container freight service from West Coast ports to Chicago for a week because it lacked the capacity to sort and redirect the boxes piling up there. The embargo immediately meant that still more boxes coming from Asia with everything from auto parts to transistors piled up on docks as West Coast ports waited for canceled trains. As the chain reaction continued, the steamship line HMM warned customers to expect more delays and announced restrictions on loading containers bound for Chicago. The rail expert Larry Gross calculated that it would take 50 double-stack trains, each carrying 800 20-foot containers, to haul away the pileup caused by just one week of suspended rail service.

Why did this bottleneck occur? In large part because, to appease Wall Street’s demands for higher margins, Union Pacific had previously closed a major handling facility in Chicago, known as Global III, that it now desperately needed to keep the supply chain moving.

Wall Street has also pressured railroads into cutting expenses by reducing the frequency of freight service. If you live near railroad tracks, or if you drive regularly over grade crossings, you may have noticed that railroads run freight trains much less frequently nowadays, and that the trains they do run can stretch as long as three miles. The industry refers to this as “PSR,” or precision scheduled railroading. In practice, PSR has nothing to do making trains run on precise schedules. The term was coined by the late E. Hunter Harrison, a railroad executive who, starting in the 1990s, boosted railroad stock prices through radical downsizing. This made him the darling of hedge funds like Pershing Square Capital Management and Mantle Ridge.

PSR mostly just involves running fewer trains to fewer places using fewer employees, while imposing all kinds of new fees on shippers. After Harrison implemented PSR at CSX, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific and other railroads imitated him, and freight rail operations deteriorated nationwide. In 2019, Congress held hearings in which shippers relayed example after example of paying more for worse service. Since then, CSX and other railroads have taken PSR still further by ripping out yards and laying off hard-to-replace employees such as locomotive mechanics and engineers. Between 2014 and 2019, before COVID had any impact, the four largest railroads laid off 30,000 mostly unionized workers.

The downsizing was so great that railroads can’t meet the post-pandemic surge of freight shipments. As a consequence, still more freight will crowd onto the nation’s highways. “We can’t let hedge fund managers write the rules of railroading,” complained Oregon Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, in May as he called for an investigation into the way PSR has degraded railroad freight service.

Deregulation and a retreat from antitrust enforcement also feeds the financiers’ control over railroads. Since 1980, the number of major, or Class I, railroads has shrunk from 33 to seven—a number that will drop to six if a proposed merger between Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern wins regulatory approval. The result is that more shippers are served by only a single railroad. There are always trucks, of course, but some commodities (grain and chemicals, for instance) are too heavy and bulky to move economically by truck for more than short distances.

Captive shippers once could depend on the Interstate Commerce Commission to protect them from predatory pricing, but in 1980 the Carter administration and Congress stripped the government of almost all its practical ability to do so. The combination of deregulation and lax antitrust enforcement leaves railroads free to hike prices or degrade service standards.

The shippers’ loss has been the railroad stockholders’ gain. Less than three years after Mantle Ridge brought in Harrison to run CSX, the railroad’s stock price doubled. Today, its new CEO says he’s committed to growing the business—but that isn’t necessarily the railroad business. On his watch, CSX bought a trucking company and used a $5 billion stock buyback program to raise the company’s stock price and fatten his own $15 million compensation package. The stock prices of other Class I railroads have also surged, thanks to cost cutting that now allows railroads to spend less than 60 cents for every dollarthey take in as revenue.

This is the industry on which Congress and Biden propose to bestow $66 billion. To protect that investment, we’ll need to do a lot more.

Government played an oversized role in building the nation’s railroads. Historically, railroads operated under charters granted by state and local governments that required them to serve the public good. CSX’s tracks along the Gulf Coast, for example, were originally laid by a corporation created by an act of Alabama’s state legislature in 1866. The legislature gave this corporation government-like powers, including eminent domain to acquire rights of way across the state. But in return, the legislature stipulated that the line must be built and managed in a manner “best adapted to and for the public accommodation.”

This basic relationship between railroads and the public was codified into federal law in the late 19th century and lasted until the end of the 1970s. America’s early railroads received vast grants of public land and other direct subsidies that turned them into local or regional monopolies. In return, American law treated them as quasi-public utilities, subject to strict price regulation and the principle known as “common carriage,” which prohibited them from turning away some customers or classes of business while favoring others.

As Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for the majority in the 1898 case of Smyth v. Ames,

A railroad is a public highway and nonetheless so because constructed and maintained through the agency of a corporation deriving its existence and powers from the state. Such a corporation was created for public purposes. It performs a function of the state. Its authority to exercise the right of eminent domain and to charge tolls was given primarily for the benefit of the public.

This led to railroads being heavily regulated, first by state railroad commissions and then, after 1887, by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first federal regulatory agency. The ICC came to wield enormous influence over industrial development by barring railroads from favoring one shipper, industry, city, or region over another. The agency also compelled railroads to provide certain low-margin or even money-losing lines of business, such as branch lines necessary to connect smaller cities and villages to the political and economic life of the nation. By controlling rates and terms of service, the ICC also prevented price wars and other ruinous competition among railroads and gave them a legal vehicle to coordinate operating plans so freight and passengers could travel efficiently across more than one railroad.

Because of the ICC and the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, railroads in that era were subject to far more regulation and antitrust enforcement than railroads face today. That’s one big reason why late-19th- and early-20th-century rail tycoons like James Hill or E. H. Harriman concentrated on building and improving railroads rather than on predatory pricing and demarketing like today’s financiers.

This regulatory regime worked reasonably well until the mid-20th century. As the political scientist Samuel Huntingtonwould write in 1952, “During its sixty-five years of existence the Commission developed an enviable reputation for honesty, impartiality and expertness.” But then it began falling apart. As advancing technology expanded transportation by automobile, truck, and air, policy makers should have adjusted transportation policy to take advantage of potential synergies. They could have encouraged, for example, combining trains and trucks to move long-haul freight, or trains and planes to reach out-of-the-way places. Instead, funding was lavished on highway and airport construction.

A telling symbol of this imbalance is Washington’s monumental Union Station, built by a consortium of railroads in the beginning of the 20th century. By the early 1960s, the railroads were paying property taxes on the station of $350,000 a year and an annual maintenance bill of more than $1 million, even as they lost money on passenger train service mandated by the ICC. Meanwhile, across the Potomac, airlines availed themselves of the federally owned and operated National Airport—built, expanded, and operated by a tangle of federal agencies that included the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Army Corps of Engineers, and even the National Park Service.

This imbalance led to massive railroad bankruptcies in the 1970s. Washington at that point might have nationalized the railroads, as nearly every other industrialized nation had done long before. Instead, it bailed out railroad stockholders by allowing railroads to shed public responsibilities such as operating passenger trains and branch lines, while allowing them to engage in a mad merger frenzy.

The strategy saved much of the industry from insolvency, but at a tremendous cost to the public good. Since 1980 the nation has lost more than 40 percent of its rail mileage, as many lines were ripped out that would be invaluable today as we struggle to decarbonize the economy and rationalize our transportation system. And once financiers twigged that Congress had turned railroads into unregulated monopolies answerable only to shareholders, they swooped in and pressured rail management to adopt policies like PSR to further downsize and squeeze out the last drops of monopoly profit.

One solution to this mess would be to nationalize the railroads. The U.S. actually did this, temporarily, during World War I, with many impressive results. Or we could nationalize only rail infrastructure, leaving private companies to operate trains. This “open access” approach has shown promising results in Europe, and it’s not all that different from how the Interstate Highway System works.

Alternatively, we could take a “back to the future” approach, once again treating railroads as utilities but paying better attention this time to coordinating regulation and subsidies among all transportation modes, including new ones like drones and self-driving cars.

The one thing we shouldn’t do, however, if we want to preserve planet Earth and build back a transportation network that suits our needs, is give the railroad industry more money without demanding that it serve the public interest. The looting has gone on long enough.

Research assistance for this article was provided by Rachel Cohen.

The post Amtrak Joe vs. the Modern Robber Barons appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Tried to find a new primary care physician lately? Insurers must provide you with a list of doctors, but you quickly discover that few are taking new patients. When you do find one, your first appointment is scheduled for two months out.

When the day finally arrives, the doctor seems nice, knowledgeable, but more than a bit frazzled. She spends most of the 13-minute visit entering data into a computer as you answer the same questions that were on the paper forms you filled out in the waiting room. You assure her you’ve been vaccinated for COVID-19 at a local pharmacy, but she has no record of it. You walk out without a referral for a long-overdue colonoscopy.

Dr. Sarah Mullins once ran a practice with similar flaws in Wilmington, Delaware. “Care was disjointed, unorganized, and there was a lack of communication,” she told me. But today, her practice, which employs four primary care physicians and five nurse practitioners for more than 10,000 patients, has been radically transformed.

Its doctors spend a half hour with every patient. The nurse practitioners leave part of their days unscheduled so the practice can offer same-day appointments to patients with pressing needs. They also act as care managers—reaching out to schedule wellness visits, vaccinations, and other preventive services. Patients’ electronic medical records incorporate data from hospitals, specialist referrals, urgent care clinics, and pharmacies, enabled by a comprehensive state health information network that didn’t exist a decade ago—and still doesn’t exist in many parts of the country.

“I spend less time searching for vital data,” Mullins said. “My staff is reaching out to schedule wellness visits while I have dedicated time to preventing illness and suffering. It’s a shift that’s changed our practice into one that helps people more and in a more organized fashion.”

It’s also far from the norm. In most of the U.S., primary care is in deep crisis. Family physicians are reporting high levels of stress and burnout, thanks to a reimbursement treadmill that requires many of them to see four patients every hour in order to make a living. Older physicians are retiring prematurely. Heavily indebted medical students are shying away from family medicine and pediatrics, which pay less than half the $500,000-plus salaries offered to surgeons, cardiologists, and other specialists. When surveyed, few newly minted doctors express interest in joining community-based practices, preferring the set salaries that come through employment with large institutions.

The deteriorating state of primary care is undermining every effort to rein in America’s bloated health care budget. Family physicians, who are both the most trusted and lowest-paid doctors in the United States, provide routine and preventive care to patients with common but complex chronic conditions, like high blood pressure, diabetes, substance abuse, and mental health disorders. As primary care has gotten worse, many patients with these illnesses have found themselves growing sicker and in need of expensive medical interventions. This has driven up health care spending while driving down outcomes. Between 2014 and 2019, the share of U.S. GDP spent on health care rose even as life expectancies fell. (Life expectancies have fallen further since 2019, but later data is skewed by COVID-19.)

But as the transformation of Mullins’s Delaware practice shows, it doesn’t have to be this way. New models for reinvigorating primary care are emerging from both the public and private sectors. They have the potential to dramatically lower costs while improving the overall health of the American people. Yet expanding these isolated experiments into system-wide change will take major reforms of the federal policies that govern how we pay for care, and who we put in charge of our health.

Since the early 1970s, U.S. spending on health care has increased faster than both inflation and wages. We now devote nearly 18 percent of the economy to health—40 percent more than any other country—yet our population trails peer nations on every measure of public health, from longevity to infant mortality to incidence of chronic disease. The expensiveness and poor outcomes are causally connected. Growing health care costs have depressed wages, as employers redirect would-be raises into insurance plans. They have forced individuals to fork over growing shares of what income remains to insurers and providers. This has left a greater share of the population suffering from inadequate  housing, food insecurity, and substance abuse, which in turn increases demand for the most costly health care services.

The only way to break this downward spiral is to invest more in primary care–led prevention and social services, which have declined from 7 percent to just 5 percent of total health care spending over the past several decades. But the obstacles to doing so are formidable. Right now, the physician reimbursement system is effectively determined by the American Medical Association, which is dominated by specialists and systematically undervalues the time spent listening to patients, evaluating their needs, and recommending preventative measures. The AMA instead places the highest values on surgical interventions, or delivering complex treatment and chemotherapy regimens. While critics have forced the organization to narrow the reimbursement gap in recent years, the wide gulf between the salaries paid to primary care physicians and specialists remains.

Insurers and employers have exacerbated the imbalance by increasing the number of workers and their families in high-deductible plans. Requiring people, especially those in the bottom half of the income distribution, to pay up front for care incentivizes them to skip primary care and preventive services. Paying rent and keeping food on the table come first. And when people wait to show up for care until their bodies are breaking down, they quickly wind up in the hands of specialists, who cost far more. The poorer Americans who do go in for regular checkups often fail to fill prescriptions for the drugs that manage chronic conditions, which can lead to expensive hospitalizations.

The broken insurance reimbursement system has left many independent primary care practices looking for a way out. Many become willing sellers to larger health care companies. Between 2010 and 2016, the share of the nation’s 200,000-plus primary care physicians working for hospital chains surged from 28 to 44 percent, while the share of physicians working in primary care fell by two percentage points to 30 percent of all doctors between 2010 and 2018. Many other doctors’ groups have been gobbled up by private equity–backed corporate entities and insurers. It’s part of the broader consolidation movement within the medical industrial complex. 

That consolidation has had grave consequences. When primary care doctors wind up working for a hospital instead of for themselves, they can come under pressure to put the hospital’s needs ahead of their patients’, including by not making referrals to competing hospitals that offer better-quality care. Similarly, when these physicians wind up working for health care plans, most of which still pay a fixed fee for each appointment, they can find themselves pressured not to recommend expensive treatments or spend much time with each patient.

The pandemic accelerated primary care consolidation. In June of last year, for example, with hospitalizations and deaths from COVID mounting and routine demand for health services in free fall, Fairfax Family Practice and its 38 primary care physicians sold itself to Inova Health, the five-hospital system that dominates the northern Virginia market. Dr. Robert Phillips, a Fairfax physician, is well positioned to understand the pitfalls that practices face when they get acquired. He directs the Center for Professionalism and Value in Health Care at the American Board of Family Medicine Foundation and served as cochair for a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on primary care. 

He told me that the practice’s decision to join forces with a hospital system beat its prior arrangement. Over the previous five years, the still-independent Fairfax and its 500 employees had been managed by Privia Health, which went public earlier this year after achieving profitability. Its major investors include Goldman Sachs and Anthem, one of the nation’s largest insurers. Privia, according to a spokesperson, takes 12 percent of practice revenue in exchange for providing electronic medical records, practice management, and billing software. But it did little to cushion Fairfax Family Practice when office visits declined during the 2020 COVID shutdown, causing revenue to collapse. 

I asked Phillips why he thought joining Inova might achieve better results. He cited the hospital system management, which brought in a new CEO in 2018 and has professed a commitment to “patient-centered care.” “They had been going in the direction of tertiary, quaternary care. That’s not what a community hospital should do,” Phillips said. “Part of our deciding to join was faith in the new leadership [and] their realization that the community was their main mission.” 

But there’s reason to suspect that Inova will still prioritize expensive specialty medicine. While well-heeled acquirers of physicians’ practices, like Inova, pay lip service to the value of primary care, acquired practices have structural conflicts of interest that inhibit family physicians from providing the consultation, care coordination, and social support services that could dramatically improve outcomes and lower overall costs. Hospital revenue depends on putting heads in beds, as industry jargon puts it, and controlling the physicians who make the referrals is a way to achieve that goal.

Insurers also have incentives that lead them to degrade primary care. To lower their immediate spending and increase short-term profits, many have started excluding higher-priced but higher-quality hospitals from their networks and exerting heavy-handed oversight of physician referral patterns. Controlling family physicians’ practices enables both tactics. 

The focus on short-term profits becomes even more acute once investors get involved. Most of the Wall Street–oriented financiers in primary care have a three- to five-year exit strategy for getting a hefty return on their investments, either by flipping the practices to another firm or through an initial public offering. That leads many to pursue cost-cutting and revenue-enhancing tactics, like eliminating support staff or stepping up offices’ appointment pace. This, again, increases short-term profitability at the expense of overall patient health.

“They will double down on whatever business strategy raises their margins the fastest,” said Phillips. “It has no heart. It has no population health mission.”

Writing in 2007, the late Dr. Arnold Relman, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, laid out his vision for the future of medical practice in the U.S. Relman, a single-payer advocate, recognized that controlling costs would also require transformation of the health care delivery system. He wanted to pay nonprofit, multi-specialty practices made up of salaried physicians a monthly, per capita fee for every person in their charge. This system is called “capitation.”

Capitation, Relman wrote, would put those practices on a budget and give their physician-leaders the freedom to allocate resources to hire support staff like nurse practitioners, dieticians, and social workers. It would likely increase the relative compensation of primary care doctors themselves. And by organizing preventive care and promoting better health habits, these reorganized practices would reduce the number of patients needing hospital and specialty services, the most expensive parts of the system. 

A few years after Relman published his proposal, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. The architects of the law also understood the need for delivery system reform, and the ACA included multiple pilot projects designed to incentivize less costly and more effective primary care. But none included full capitation, and they have had little success at controlling private health care costs. 

Given the ACA’s limited gains in promoting delivery system reform, some employers began looking for ways to bypass our foundering primary care structure by establishing on-site health clinics, a strategy now employed by a third of all organizations with more than 5,000 workers. Hospital systems and insurers countered by cutting deals with major pharmacy chains like CVS and Walgreens as well as large retailers like Walmart and Target to operate “minute clinics” inside their stores. There are now more than 3,000 across the U.S. But these initiatives have also been duds. A 2016 Rand study found that nearly 60 percent of visits to retail clinics added to total health care costs by failing to replace traditional office visits or trips to the emergency room.

Yet there are primary care practices springing up across the country that are replicating Relman’s ideal for some of the most challenging patients in America: people with disabilities and seniors on Medicare who have multiple chronic conditions. Ironically, a small corner of the private equity world helped launch the movement, and insurer-run Medicare Advantage plans are funding it.

These start-up firms operate with the recognition that in a typical group health plan, about 5 percent of patients will account for half of all health care spending. The start-ups take on full financial risk via capitated payments for these hard-to-treat patients. But instead of waiting for patients to come to them, they encourage people to come in for as many visits as necessary. This enables the primary care physician to identify not only medical conditions but also the patient’s mental health and substance abuse issues, housing and nutrition status, and family and social circumstances. The practices then pull together internal care teams that can include community outreach workers, care coordinators, social workers, nutritionists, pharmacists, and behavioral health specialists to deal with problems that, if left unaddressed, can drive patients into the ER—sometimes multiple times a year.

Just prior to the pandemic’s onset, I visited one such practice, run by Chicago-based Oak Street Health. Founded in 2012, Oak Street Health recently sold stock to the public and now serves nearly 110,000 patients at more than a hundred centers across 15 states. Its care teams focus on prevention and helping patients meet their housing, food, and transportation needs. They offer emotional support to people who are under the constant stress of living in isolation or poverty. Its clinics sometimes double as drop-in social spaces where clients can play bingo, attend cooking classes, or simply grab a cup of coffee. 

For the entities that pay for health care—be they independent insurers, the government, or companies—the business proposition can be compelling. In the short term, it makes financial sense for payers to skimp on preventive care, and many insurance companies do. But take only a slightly longer view, and the incentive becomes the opposite. The average ER visit costs $2,200. A single three-day hospitalization averages about $30,000. Preventing a single hospitalization ultimately more than pays for the primary care physician time and care team deployments. This is especially true in markets where there is little competition between insurers. In that case, if a plan spends money today to prevent a patient from developing a condition that would require hospitalization in the future, the insurer realizes a financial return because the patient will likely still be on the same plan. 

 “This is a really, really big economic opportunity because if you do this well, it will pay for itself,” Dr. Griffin Myers, the chief medical officer and cofounder of Oak Street Health, told me.

There are now about a dozen firms offering variations on the intensive primary care model to nearly a million people, almost all of them enrolled in Medicare Advantage and Medicaid managed care plans. The firms have grown so quickly and made so much money that they’ve even attracted investment from a few Wall Street financiers. JPMorgan Chase, for example, recently bought a stake in Vera Health, one of the start-ups pursuing a “primary care first” strategy. The bank hired Dan Mendelson, a former Clinton administration health care official and founder of the Avalere consulting group, to run its health care program. Mendelson has made sure that it’s more than just an external investment. He found Vera’s model so compelling that he plans to offer the company’s services to the bank’s quarter-million employees, beginning with one major market starting next year.

“That intensive work-up where you bring the patient in, you figure out if they have high cholesterol or diabetes, or if there are mental health issues in their family; that is the value we want to drive,” he said. “We’re paying the highest rates. Why aren’t we getting that kind of care for our employees?”

Turning these isolated experiments into system-wide change will require a full-court press on multiple policy fronts. It begins by changing the physician reimbursement system, which has undervalued and underpaid primary care doctors for decades. That means breaking the stranglehold the AMA has over evaluating how much insurers should pay for different treatments. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which determines rates for America’s two main public plans, needs to ignore the AMA when it sets fee-for-service physician pay schedules. It should dramatically increase compensation for primary care—ideally by switching entirely to capitation. The CMS is already launching pilot programs that incorporate the payment system. Its Primary Care Plus initiative, started in January 2021, applies a capitation model to primary care. It has attracted participation from 822 practices in 26 regions. 

The idea of moving toward capitation recently received endorsement from the prestigious National Academies’ report mentioned above, which suggested that primary care physician reimbursement should follow a hybrid model that would add a flat per capita monthly payment for every patient under a practice’s care. Simultaneously requiring every insured person to choose a primary care doctor would then guarantee that the practice receives payments. If sufficiently large, those payments could finance creation of primary practice care teams and give doctors and team members the time to fully understand a patient’s history, coordinate their care, and provide or help them obtain social services. 

Capitation isn’t without hazards. The system requires physicians’ practices to take on financial risk for patients in their care, and most primary care practices do not have the monetary or technical capacity to assume that kind of exposure. To help practices and the health care system generally move in that direction, the government needs to break down all the barriers standing in the way of greater care coordination. 

Chief among them is the failure of hospitals, insurance companies, and their electronic medical record vendors to share patient data across all care settings. Medical records should belong to patients, not to their providers or insurers. As things stand now, primary care physicians aren’t even notified when their patients are admitted or discharged from the hospital. Despite laws calling for full interoperability of medical records, the CMS has yet to issue regulations penalizing hospitals or insurers for failing to comply.

The government also needs to develop a pro-competition policy for the health care sector that preserves practice independence. When primary care doctors work for themselves, they are less likely to unnecessarily refer patients to specialists than when they work for companies with a financial interest in getting patients hospitalized. When referrals are necessary, independent physicians are also more likely to send their patients to quality facilities. The Federal Trade Commission has already announced that it will study doctors’ practice acquisitions by hospitals and insurers. Both claim that vertical integration promotes care coordination. But the claim will probably prove baseless. Studies show that when hospitals merge, the prices they charge almost always go up with little impact on quality or outcomes. 

While the FTC completes its study, the Biden administration should rapidly change policies that encourage physician acquisitions. It can begin by immediately eliminating a strange quirk under which Medicare pays more for a routine office visit when the practice is owned by a hospital than when it is independent. It should give special grants to struggling rural and urban primary care practices so they aren’t driven into the arms of local hospitals or insurers. It could also fund technical assistance for physicians’ practices and federally funded health care clinics that want to make the transition to alternative payment models, like capitation. 

The administration has enough discretionary spending to take these steps without new legislation. But if Biden can get Congress to act, he can take even more powerful measures. Phillips of Fairfax Family Practice suggested that the government pass a law requiring Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers to set a minimum primary care investment threshold at 11 to 12 percent of overall health care spending, more than double the current level. “It’s a blunt tool,” he said, “but it’s necessary, or otherwise we’ll see investment decline.” Democratic legislators interested in making health care affordable will be natural allies for such a bill. But plenty of Republicans could also sign on. Exploding medical costs are swelling the national debt, a fact that’s helped drive the GOP to support price regulations in health care before—including last year’s legislation outlawing surprise medical bills. 

Health care labor policy is also in need of an overhaul. Many states restrict the ability of nurse practitioners and physician assistants to provide routine medical services. Removing those restrictions, either through federal or state legislation, would free up primary care physicians to deal with the complex problems facing their most expensive patients. The FTC and Department of Justice also need to scrutinize the noncompete clauses in physician contracts, still allowed in many states, which prevent doctors from leaving hospital- or insurer-owned practices to start their own practices in the same community. 

“If we’re going to have a market-based system, then markets have to work,” says Dr. Farzad Mostashari, a former Obama administration official at the CMS. He is now the CEO of Aledade, which provides advice and services to physicians’ practices adapting to new payment models. Mullins’s practice in Delaware was one of Mostashari’s first clients, and she now serves as a medical director for Aledade. 

Health care reformers have long focused most of their attention on expanding access to the system through universal insurance coverage. They have waged spirited fights against the exorbitant prices charged by drug companies and hospitals, and they’ve lambasted the administrative waste and unnecessary restrictions imposed by insurers. This has all been necessary. But until delivery system reform is also on the table—beginning with expanding and empowering primary care—we’ll never achieve better outcomes for more people at a lower overall cost.

The post The Doctor Will Not See You Now appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On the last day of September, David Brooks of The New York Times published one of his “Wow, he sounds like a Democrat” columns that so delight liberals of a certain age. In it, he made an impassioned case for the massive spending bills the Biden administration and congressional Democrats were struggling to advance. 

The trillions of dollars in infrastructure and social welfare investments, he noted, would predominantly benefit ordinary, just-scraping-by Americans, many of them in red states and lacking college degrees. These are precisely the people screwed by the decades-long, upward redistribution of income and opportunity benefiting big corporations and educated elites. Because that wealth transfer unleashed a populist fury that has destabilized American democracy, the Democrats would be sending an important moral and cultural message:

These packages say to the struggling parents and the warehouse workers: I see you. Your work has dignity. You are paving your way. You are at the center of our national vision.

I’d like to think Brooks is right about this. Certainly, the spending would materially improve the lives of downscale Americans. But would the intended message be received? 

I’m not so sure. In March, Biden signed the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, with features like an expanded child tax credit that the Democrats aimed to make permanent in their reconciliation bill this autumn. Yet even though polls suggest that voters, including many Republicans, appreciated the tax credits and other spending, Biden’s approval numbers ultimately tanked, even among Democrats. The spending didn’t cause the tanking—things like the Delta variant surge and the ugly Afghanistan pullout did. But even with its easy-to-see stimulus checks and extended unemployment benefits, the American Rescue Plan didn’t reposition Biden and congressional Democrats as champions of the common people.

We probably shouldn’t have expected it to. Two trillion dollars might seem like a lot of money. But only about half of it will be spent by the end of 2021. That’s less than 5 percent of the nation’s projected 2021 GDP of $22.74 trillion. 

The truth is that even relatively large bumps in federal spending tend not to register with most voters compared to the dynamics of a much larger market economy that they experience daily. Brooks himself basically acknowledged as much:

These measures would not solve our problems, obviously. In many large Western nations, there are vast tectonic forces concentrating wealth in the affluent metro areas and leaving vast swaths of the countryside behind. We don’t yet know how to do the sort of regional development that reverses this trend. 

Ah, but David, we do know, as the Washington Monthly has explained for a decade. Spending is only one tool the federal government has to address problems like regional inequality. It can also shape how markets themselves behave, through regulations and antitrust enforcement. It did so in the Progressive Era, and again in the second half of the New Deal. The result was that heartland economies in the middle decades of the 20th century reversed their previous declines and median incomes there grew closer to those of the coasts. All that progress began to recede in the late 1970s and early 1980s as administrations of both parties deregulated industries and eased
antitrust enforcement. 

The good news is that the Biden administration gets this. In July, the president issued a sweeping executive order instructing federal agencies to crack down on consolidation across the American economy using existing statutory powers that have mostly lain dormant for years. He has also appointed smart, aggressive regulators like Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who has written pioneering articles on antitrust for the Monthly. And there is a burgeoning movement in Congress to strengthen antitrust laws governing everything from tech to agriculture—a movement that, unlike spending efforts, has broad bipartisan support. You can read about these current efforts, and what else needs to be added to the agenda, in the special “Unwinding Monopolies” report in this issue of the Washington Monthly.

The bad news is that most Americans have no idea that any of this is happening. All they see in the news is partisan bickering over massive spending bills. And the thought leader journalists who should be educating them on how enforcement and enhancement of antitrust laws can make their local economies more competitive and raise wages are either ignorant about or silent on the subject. Google “David Brooks monopoly” and see what you get.

All is not lost, however. In 2022, with the biggest battles over spending likely behind him, Biden will be free to focus his attention, and the nation’s, on actions his government is taking to challenge monopolies and restore competition. He can do so mostly without asking Mitch McConnell’s permission, and without spending additional taxpayer money. That’s a much stronger position for Biden and his party going into the midterm elections. And it just might save the country. 

The post Biden’s Next Agenda: Anti-monopoly appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One muggy June day in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Bill Marsh, a Republican from the picturesque lake town of Wolfeboro, rose to buck his party. The chamber, newly under Republican control thanks to an alliance between conservatives and libertarian activists, was considering an amendment that would ban mandatory vaccinations amid a global pandemic—all mandatory vaccinations, covering diseases from COVID-19 to mumps to hepatitis. Marsh, a retired ophthalmologist who has pushed fellow Republicans to take pandemic precautions more seriously, framed his objection as pro-business. He asked, “Why would we interfere with private businesses’ right to protect themselves, their employees, and their patrons?”

The amendment’s sponsor was Terry Roy, a veteran, devout Christian, and self-described constitutional conservative. He spoke next in defense of the measure, launching into a rambling diatribe that referenced child labor, slavery in the American South, “Chinese bats,” and the dangers of fluoridated tap water. “Does my body, my choice only apply to abortion?” he said, according to a House transcript. “What about new advances in science? What if we determine someone’s characteristics can be genetically altered in utero? Would we allow mandated gene therapy? After all, propensity for carrying certain diseases costs billions in health care. What about vaccines for the flu? Will employers mandate those next?”

Roy’s amendment narrowly failed, 193–182.

Retribution for the speech was swift and decisive—Marsh’s speech, that is. Within days, Marsh resigned from his committee, Health, Human Services and Elderly Affairs, after party leadership informed him that he would be removed as vice chairman. Later that summer, Roy was appointed vice chairman of the influential Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, replacing another wayward conservative who had disobeyed the party’s radical
new leadership.

A key factor in the extremism, and the extraordinary conservative successes, of this New Hampshire legislature is a group of libertarian activists known as the Free State Project. Founded in 2001 in hopes of establishing a government-free utopia, the Free State Project encourages liberty-minded people to move to New Hampshire to help push its politics even further toward low taxes and minimal state intervention. As of 2021, there are more than 5,000 Free Staters in New Hampshire. Despite their small numbers, they have built a well-funded and organized political apparatus that has elected roughly 45 Republicans to the New Hampshire House of Representatives. The libertarians vote as a bloc that, with a slim majority, the party can’t do without. 

With Free Staters at their back, Republicans this year have cut taxes in the already income-tax-less state, banned critical race theory and late-term abortions, and launched what’s likely the most sweeping education voucher program in the nation. Under House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, a Free State mover, anti-authority libertarians have joined with anti-elite populists to shoot down anything that smacks of expertise or specialized knowledge. Recently, a joint House-Senate committee tabled its acceptance of $6.3 million in federal funds for addiction counseling in the opioid-ravaged state, with members saying they needed to see proof that counseling even works. 

Over the past two decades, Free Staters have walked a long path from obscurity and ridicule to undeniable power. And as popular Republican Governor Chris Sununu eyes a 2022 U.S. Senate run, he may remember that a Free Stater, Aaron Day, is often credited with spoiling the 2016 Senate race for Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte. A year from now, the potentially vulnerable Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan may try to tie him to the libertarian extremism he has refused to reject, observers say. And if Sununu wins, he’ll enter the U.S. Capitol with a group of constituents he can’t afford to offend.

The founder of the Free State Project, Jason Sorens, is a mild-mannered college professor with a mop of brown hair, a boyish smile, and a knack for making even the most outlandish ideas sound like simple arithmetic. During the 2000 elections, Sorens, then a graduate student at Yale, watched with dismay as the Libertarian Party failed to earn more than 1 percent of the national presidential vote. If disaffection with the major parties wasn’t enough to swing elections, what was? Despair turned to anger over the course of the long New Haven winter, and then to determination. One day, Sorens sat down at his computer, queued up some heavy metal, and started a manifesto.

“Libertarian activists need to face a somber reality,” he wrote: “nothing’s working.” There are too few libertarians, spread too thinly across the United States, to make a difference through partisan politics, he argued. The only way to break free from oppressive government is to move together to one state, take over its political system, and use threats of secession to force the federal government to leave its residents alone. Uprooting one’s life would be inconvenient, yes. But, he wrote, “our forefathers bled and died—because of the Stamp Tax! The Free State Project requires nothing of that kind, and the stakes are so much higher. How much is liberty worth to you?”

In July 2001, Sorens sent the 2,000-word broadside, titled “Announcement: The Free State Project,” to an obscure libertarian publication—L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise—expecting little response. Then the emails started coming. And coming. People from all over the country wanted to sign up.

For its first few years, the Free State Project existed just as an idea, an internet forum where liberty-minded folk could fantasize about freedom from government overreach during the height of the war on terror. Far-flung libertarians signed a pledge to move together to one place and change its politics, often with the assumption that it would never actually happen. But in 2003, the movement took a significant step toward reality. In a nationwide vote, members chose their “Free State.” Would it be Texas, independent and suspicious of authority, but perhaps too populous for a small group of activists to influence? Wyoming, sparsely populated, but geographically expansive enough to make coordination difficult? In the end, it was New Hampshire. Population 1.2 million, with no income tax, the land of “Live Free or Die” was small enough, and libertarian enough, for a little band of determined freedom fighters to swing even further toward liberty.

The revolution had begun. It looked—well, a bit clownish. The pledge to move to New Hampshire did not technically take effect until 20,000 people, the number Sorens calculated would sway state politics, had signed. Until then, it was the most zealous, with the fewest connections to society, who chose to make the move. In 2004, as chronicled by the journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling in his book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears), New Hampshire got an early look at its colonizers-cum-liberators in the form of a grizzled, gun-toting posse of men who settled in the woods of Grafton, a town of some 1,100 with low taxes and no zoning regulations. Calling themselves the “Free Town Project,” the early movers took aim at local government, savaging the budget and constraining the town librarian’s bathroom breaks to a portable toilet. Bears, lured by the trash left outside the freedom fighters’ woodland shanties, made increasingly bold incursions into human settlements, which the Free Towners and another, separate commune of anarchists drove back with firecrackers, pistols, and nail-studded booby traps. (And, in one case, a llama named Hurricane.) Human society, meanwhile, nearly broke down. At annual town meetings, the Free Towners demanded that Grafton eliminate its police department and secede from the United Nations, which, they feared, might one day levy taxes or even invade. At one of these meetings, which regularly ran past eight hours, Free Towners reduced the moderator to tears.

Antics like these soon expanded beyond Grafton, dominating headlines about the Free State Project for its first decade. In Keene, New Hampshire, a group of “Robin-Hooders” declared war on the city’s parking officers starting in 2009, following them with video cameras and popping quarters into meters to foil local government’s ticket-hungry schemes. Every summer in the White Mountains, Free Staters gathered for the libertarian version of Burning Man: PorcFest, a cryptocurrency and substance-fueled celebration with few rules, many assault rifles, and a giant wooden porcupine that the Free Staters (known as prickly, independent “Porcs”) set ablaze at the festival’s end.

It wasn’t until 2016 that the Free State Project reached 20,000 signers, the magic number that “triggered the move” to New Hampshire. After a triumphant press conference in Manchester, the state’s largest city, Jason Sorens and other Free State VIPs retired to an after-party at a local speakeasy bar. (The password: “TRIGGERED.”) “It’s happening!” Sorens said giddily, imitating the popular meme of an arm-waving, celebrating Ron Paul. But Sorens, by this time the respectable face of the movement, with scholarly publications and an appointment at Dartmouth, had doubts, too. He no longer believed in secession, and he feared that the extremists in Grafton had cast a bearded, AK-47-wielding shadow on his brainchild. If all government should be eliminated, he mused, should we just let the roads fall apart? A sheepish grin stole across his face. “I don’t know—maybe that makes me a bad libertarian.”

Sorens wasn’t alone. For years, mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike viewed the Free Staters with suspicion. That included former Speaker Shawn Jasper, who, as recently as 2017, warned fellow Republicans that they must “distance themselves” from the Free State Project. Sununu, however, has understood the importance of courting the liberty faction since his first run for governor, in 2016. The Free Staters’ preferred candidate, Frank Edelblut, came within 1,000 votes of defeating him in the Republican primary. After winning the general election, Sununu offered Edelblut, a financier and homeschooler with no public school experience, control of the state department of education. It was a preview for a dance—neutralizing a rival, while recruiting from his base—that Sununu would do for years to come.

All the while, the Free State Project’s numbers and influence have been growing. Five years ago, the group claimed 2,000 movers and 17 legislators. Though only about 3,000 more people have arrived since then, far from the hoped-for 18,000, the movement’s legislative numbers have nearly tripled in that time—a function of outside investment and the peculiar structure of the New Hampshire legislature. 

The New Hampshire House of Representatives has 400 total members, an enormous number of citizen legislators who receive nominal salaries and often run with little to no opposition. In recent years, political organizations such as the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity appear to have recognized that these seats offer good value for their money. In the 2020 cycle alone, the group’s New Hampshire chapter spent nearly $847,000 on statehouse races and other statewide elections, often in support of Free State candidates, according to state filings. Meanwhile, as the Republican Party nationally has taken a populist, anti-elite turn, libertarians and conservatives are ever more united—in what they’re against.

Jason Osborne moved to New Hampshire from Defiance, Ohio, in October 2010. He had signed the Free State pledge years earlier, during graduate school, and mostly forgotten about it. But as he looked for a place to raise his four-year-old daughter, he was drawn by the prospect of a like-minded community in New Hampshire. A few months before his move, he took the stage at PorcFest 2010 to belt a karaoke rendition of “Minority,” by the left-leaning punk band Green Day. He sang, with equal doses of irony and prophecy,

I want to be the minority

I don’t need your authority

Down with the moral majority

’Cause I want to be the minority.

Once in New Hampshire, Osborne, who manages his family’s student debt collection firm, Credit Adjustments, Inc., gave generously to libertarian causes and built a profile in the community. He won his first election in 2014, and was elected majority leader this year. His financial profile—he donated $50,000 to a PAC financing
liberty-oriented statehouse candidates this cycle—and ability to deliver a growing libertarian base made him a strong choice for the leadership role. In an interview this fall, he said he hasn’t attended Free State Project events such as PorcFest since 2013, though he remains part of the legislature’s “liberty” faction, which includes sympathetic native New Hampshire-ites.

Osborne portrays himself as a “bottom-up” consensus builder, but under his leadership, the party has been strict in enforcing unity, and not just in the case of Bill Marsh. In summer 2021, nine-term state Representative Lynne Ober intentionally called a premature vote that threatened Republicans’ plans to kill Sununu’s paid family leave proposal and limit the governor’s emergency powers amid the pandemic. As punishment, leadership stripped Ober of her regular-session committee role. She and her husband, Representative Russell Ober, resigned from the legislature.

Punishments for speaking out haven’t been confined to Republicans. After the January 6 insurrection, Rosemarie Rung, a Democrat from Merrimack, was stripped of her committee assignments by the Republican speaker for tweeting a condemnation of a New Hampshire police chief who had attended the rally before the Capitol riot. 

If there is irony in libertarians embracing a party controlled by a distant plutocrat who tried, and failed, to institute authoritarian rule, the Free Staters do not accept it. Sorens and other libertarians said they didn’t believe Donald Trump had the same sway over the Republican Party in New Hampshire. But Sorens, now director of the Center for Ethics and Society at St. Anselm College, still has his doubts. He worries especially that libertarians will become more conservative as they’re embraced by Republicans. But, he noted, libertarians can still find things to appreciate about the party of Trump; for instance, the former president’s noninterventionist policy abroad.

And take the ban on critical race theory, an infringement on free speech from which liberty-minded people theoretically should recoil. Yet it was a Free Stater and friend of Sorens’s, Keith Ammon, who brought forward that bill in the House. Here, Sorens hesitated. He thought college students and professors should be able to debate whatever ideas they wished in the classroom. But, he added, “I also don’t think I want teachers shaming five-year-olds because of their whiteness.”

Whatever their methods and allegiances, the Republican majority has achieved results. This June, the legislature passed a $13.5 billion budget for the next two years, cutting nearly $300 million from Sununu’s original proposal. Onto the budget they tacked a ban on abortions beyond 24 weeks (unless to save the mother’s life); the aforementioned ban on “divisive” race education in schools; a program creating “education freedom accounts” (essentially vouchers) that redirect public school money to private schools and homeschooling; and a raft of tax cuts.

Though familiar in Congress, the tactic of loading the budget with measures unlikely to pass on their own is new to New Hampshire, says House Minority Leader Renny Cushing. Cushing, an eight-term Democrat from the liberal seacoast region, offered grudging respect for Osborne’s abilities—“He knows how to count votes”—but says he feared this would become standard practice in the New Hampshire legislature, giving minority constituencies such as libertarians and evangelicals a vehicle to push through policies the state as a whole doesn’t want. And despite libertarians’ assurances that they’re willing to ally with Democrats to protect civil liberties and other shared priorities, Cushing says he hasn’t found that cooperation to be forthcoming. “I think the allure of the appearance of power quickly trumps any principled origins they may have had that caused them to migrate to New Hampshire,” he told me.

If there was to be a breaking point between the legislature’s liberty faction and Sununu, the law they passed limiting the governor’s emergency powers seemed to have potential. Free Staters and their allies resented Sununu’s mask mandate and limits on public gatherings, and even sent rifle-wielding protesters to picket his house, forcing him to cancel his outdoor inauguration earlier this year. But he has since repealed the precautions—laxer than those of surrounding states to begin with—and has largely stayed silent as this legislature does its work.

Looming ahead is 2022. Heir to a political dynasty that has sent members to both the U.S. Senate and the governor’s mansion, Sununu has both the establishment pedigree and broad appeal—including to libertarians—that could make him a strong challenger to Hassan, especially during midterm elections in a purple state. Virtually everyone surveyed this fall agreed that he would have to keep the libertarian wing in mind, though opinions varied over the degree. Some libertarians, including Sorens, were skeptical of Sununu’s dependability, but Osborne had fewer doubts. In 2016, Hassan defeated incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte by a margin of 1,017 votes. Aaron Day, a Free Stater running as an independent, received 17,742.

“He cannot afford to lose us,” Osborne said.

Despite some recent successes, Sununu’s embrace of the libertarian faction has put him in a double-edged position that could turn against him in a matchup with Hassan, who can link him to the extremism of the Free State Project. Cushing, for his part, says he thought that the anti-abortion legislation passed this year, both in New Hampshire and places like Texas, would hurt Sununu in a race with Hassan. This September in the town of Bedford, Catherine Rombeau narrowly won a special election for state representative, giving Democrats two of seven seats in the conservative stronghold—for the first time ever. The backlash may already have begun.

By this fall, Bill Marsh, the physician chastised for his speech against an anti-vaccine bill, appeared to have learned his lesson. If he wanted to remain a Republican under New Hampshire’s new political order, it was best to be silent.

In a brief, cautious conversation in early September, Marsh referred a reporter to the House’s daily journal, which memorialized, as he put it, “the speech that ticked everyone off.” Otherwise, he said, “I don’t want to say anything that could jeopardize what I need to do going forward.”

About a week later, the state Republican Party hosted a large rally in opposition to President Biden’s nationwide vaccine mandate. For Marsh, this was the final straw. In December 2020, then Speaker Dick Hinch had died of COVID-19 after attending two unmasked, undistanced rallies of House Republicans. Marsh, who respected Hinch, publicly denounced Republicans’ role in the speaker’s death. For months afterward, he worked tirelessly to promote anti-COVID regulations that could survive libertarian backlash—work that was now being undone. On September 14, Marsh, a Republican since campaigning for Ronald Reagan in 1976, changed his affiliation to “Democrat.”

“I still do see myself as a conservative,” Marsh said in an interview afterward. “I just don’t think that Republicans are holding to the principles they once avowed. I can’t call this conservatism. It’s more like—libertarianism.”

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Does power corrupt, or does it attract the already corrupt? Are scoundrels and tyrants created by corrupt institutions, or are they just born that way? With enough power, would almost any of us skim riches or torture enemies? These compelling questions are the centerpiece of Brian Klaas’s Corruptible. To solve these and other puzzles about power, Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London, travels the globe introducing some of the “cult leaders, war criminals, despots, coup plotters, torturers, mercenaries, generals, propagandists, rebels, corrupt CEOs, and convicted criminals” he has interviewed. The result is a fascinating look at how power is dispensed by heads of state, police forces, school administrators, and pretty much anyone else who has authority over others. His tour of rulership styles yields the depressing fact that humans being humans, tyrants will probably always be among us. But in the tradition of Nudge, authored by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, or The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, Klaas suggests ways in which we can steer people in the right direction. The U.S. Constitution was written in the belief that without checks and balances, tyrants would rise. (And the past four years show they can, even with a multitude of constitutional safeguards.) Klaas wants us to think about how we can make any abuse of power—not just, as the title may imply, forms of corruption such as bribery—less likely.

We eagerly drink in the details of his bistro conversation with a daughter of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the former dictator of the Central African Republic, who was rumored to have served human flesh to his guests. We share his amused disdain for petty tyrants like a school facilities director in Schenectady, New York, who plotted violence against his rivals and whistleblowers. It’s not only stories, though. Klaas elucidates complex concepts, exposing readers, including this one, to scholarly research about human behavior that he draws on to address core questions about what leads to corruption. Such literature reviews can be excruciating in the hands of a dull author, but Klaas lays out the academic tableau clearly. He weaves together research about the Neolithic revolution with recent studies about gender bias when reviewing résumés. His historical examples are telling. King Leopold II’s progressive reforms in Belgium in the 19th century were impressive because Leopold “faced accountability and oversight.” His colonial and savage treatment of the Congolese, where “he was a tyranny of one and his atrocities were hidden,” demonstrates that accountability plays a crucial role in guiding individual behavior.

That said, Corruptible does not offer precise answers about why there are tyrants among us. Instead, Klaas invites us on an epistemological adventure with no destination. We are warned in the first chapter that “our world is too complex for one unifying theory that explains everything.” Armed with historical evidence, empirical data, and persuasive theories, readers are exposed to diminutive despots and everyday corruption. The book provides suggestions for designing recruitment efforts to avoid attracting sadists and psychopaths for important positions in private and public spheres. He recommends that we “recruit smarter; randomly select people to perform oversight; rotate people around more; and audit decision-making processes, not just results.” Corruptible is also filled with enough cautionary tales that we can more quickly recognize red flags or establish monitoring systems (such as surveillance of suspected corrupt police officers to see whether they will steal money from what they believe is a drug den). This allows institutions to detect and remove bad actors as soon as possible. Abusive behavior in one area—say, inappropriate language—is a warning sign for other abuses. Sexual harassers are usually abusive in other fora as well. Speaking of which, Klaas recommends giving power to more women. Why? “Substantial research has demonstrated that, on average, women are less prone to despotism than men and more eager to rule by democratic means.” However, he correctly cautions against “being a gender essentialist (suggesting that men and women are fundamentally and irreconcilably good at some things and bad at others).” 

Quite welcome are the instances in which he corrects widespread misunderstandings that may have warped our view of power. For example, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini did not make the trains in Italy run on time—a
common bit of conventional wisdom suggesting that his hold on power was due to ruthless efficiency rather than just ruthlessness. 

Klaas is particularly instructive when he explains why the widely understood belief about the results of the Stanford Prison Study of 1971 is wrong. A staple of Psych 101 classes for decades, the study supposedly demonstrates how ordinary people will behave when assigned the role of a guard or a prisoner, respectively. According to the study, those tapped to be guards became sadistic and the pseudo prisoners became compliant. But, as it happened, the 18 student participants were not quite a random sample. They responded to an ad regarding a “psychological study of prison life,” which may have unintentionally but decisively skewed the results. In 2007, researchers from Western Kentucky University conducted a new version of the study. In some college towns, they used the original wording in the ad, but they removed any mention of prison in others. When the volunteers arrived, researchers conducted personality evaluations and psychological screenings. Those who responded to the ad that included the word prison scored higher on tests measuring “aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance and significantly lower on dispositional empathy and altruism.” 

In other words, you get what you ask for, which should give pause to anyone writing a “Help Wanted” ad or trying to reform a government agency—the latter being a longtime concern of this magazine. Consider police departments. The federal government has given police departments more than $7 billion in military hardware since 1997, including “helicopters, military-grade ammunition, bayonets,” and more. These weapons of war have apparently attracted more aggressive applicants. “Even after controlling for confounding variables such as crime rate or population size,” Klaas explains, “researchers have found that police departments that bought the most surplus military gear killed more civilians to begin with and saw the numbers of civilians that they killed in a given year rise significantly after the military equipment arrived.” 

What can be done? Perhaps we can follow New Zealand’s example. (This would seem to apply to how that nation handled COVID-19 as well.) New Zealand police created recruiting videos designed to attract candidates more suited for community policing than military combat. One video showed an officer in hot pursuit of a purse thief, who turns out to be a dog. Thus, there was no need for a life-endangering high-speed chase or the drawing, let alone the discharging, of a weapon. The theme of the ad was “Do you care enough to be a cop?” (italics added) and not, say, “Are you tough enough to be a cop?” No weapons were shown. This and other recruitment efforts emphasized diversity, with plenty of female, ethnic-minority, Asian Pacific Islander, and Maori officers. Applications increased by 24 percent. Impressively, applications from women rose by 29 percent, and Maori applicants by 32 percent. A frequent adviser to nongovernmental organizations and governments, and a veteran of Democratic Party campaigns, Klaas is cheered by these progressive results.

According to Klaas, it’s not just the kind of person you recruit or elect that’s important, but also the culture in which they are immersed. In one interesting study, even the godly could be callous. A group of students studying at Princeton Theological Seminary were asked by researchers to speak on the importance of the Good Samaritan, the biblical parable in which passersby ignore a man in need. (A Samaritan, of course, stops to help.) The researchers told each student in the experiment to walk to a neighboring building to give their speech. One-third of the participants were told that they had plenty of time to get there, one-third that they had to be there on time and leave immediately, and the last third that they were already late and needed to rush. Each student independently encountered a man screaming in apparent pain. The only way to get by this stranger was to step over him. You can guess what happened. The students who believed they had spare time were much more likely to help; around 60 percent did. Only about half of those who had no time to spare stopped. Of the group of students who were running late, only 10 percent stopped to help the man in agony. If the mere imposition of a modest deadline left aspiring clergy uncharitable on their way to discuss the Good Samaritan, imagine what worse circumstances could produce. 

A minor criticism of Corruptible is that it does not define “corruption.” Is all self-serving behavior corrupt? Is any situation in which resources are unequally divided, or decisions are made without a majority vote, corrupt? Surely not. Executive authority means executive authority. Anyone who has participated in town meeting–style local government or worked in an organization overwhelmingly dependent on consensus, conference calls, and committees knows how insanely frustrating that can be. 

To be clear, the book does not argue for an end to hierarchies, which became more and more important as humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to agrarians in larger societies. Today, “when humans get together in larger groups, flat societies become impossible,” Klaas acknowledges. “Put enough people together, and hierarchy and dominance always emerge.” And “competition for status in more meritocratic societies can sometimes produce much better outcomes than if everyone just rested on their laurels as equals.” 

All of this raises interesting questions about American politics, law, and culture. Do we want judges to have lifetime tenure, or instead what Article III of the Constitution provides, that they “hold their offices in good behavior”? Insulating the judiciary from partisan politics makes sense, but so might, say, the idea of staggered 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices. Such a system would offer political insulation but also insulate us from senile justices. It would have the added benefit of guaranteeing that each president had an equal number of seats to fill per term, so we don’t end up with a situation in which one-termer Jimmy Carter gets no appointments to the high court, and Donald Trump appoints three justices during his four-year reign of terror. As the Washington Monthly has emphasized in its annual college guide, the old-school college rankings, based entirely on factors like test scores and low admission rates, do not measure outputs like public service and contributions to the country. They reward a selfish view of the university in American life. Klaas has given us a useful framework not for eliminating corruption or hierarchy but for recognizing that while difficult to change, human behavior can be steered in better directions.

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Ask older Americans to describe who Daniel Boone was, and they’ll likely conjure up an image of a resourceful frontiersman clad in buckskin and a coonskin cap, clutching a rifle as he explores Appalachian forests, defending fellow settlers from ferocious Indians, wolves, and grizzly bears, a role model for Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill. He was passed down to Baby Boomers as an archetype, the leader of the first westward advance of the newborn United States’s manifest destiny, mastering the wilderness and repelling savages so civilization could be built in the relative safety of his wake.

He’s therefore exactly the sort of icon due for a reckoning—a backcountry conqueror invading other nations’ homelands, slaughtering their people and destroying their civilizations to make way for the white Protestants’ imperialist expansion. In a 2021 historical reexamination, Boone is a prime candidate for cancellation. 

The prosecution’s case could well prevail, but it gets a lot less clear-cut the more you learn about the man and the world in which he operated. Matthew Pearl’s new book, The Taking of Jemima Boone, offers a fascinating corrective, bringing the real Kentucky frontier—Boone and all—alive, and providing both a devastating brief against the received Boone myth and a nuanced look at how his moral ledger stood up relative to those of many of his fellow settlers.

As a legend rather than a real person, Boone played a powerful symbolic role in the building of the American national myth. There were popular books being published about him while he was barely 40, and a fanciful biography published in 1833 became one of the best-selling books of the 19th century. James Fenimore Cooper fictionalized his story in The Last of the Mohicans, published just six years after Boone’s 1820 death and regarded by many literary scholars as the first “great American novel.” Lord Byron eulogized him as one of the happiest mortals anywhere on account of his having returned to nature, and in 1852, the art critic Henry Tuckerman was declaring Boone “the Columbus of the woods.” Victorians created epic paintings of his exploits, which likely inspired the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s image of the “lone scout” allegedly starting the process of forging a truly American identity from a set of disparate colonies in his famous (and discredited) “frontier thesis.” Baby Boomers, for their part, grew up with a Disneyfied Boone on film and television, while Gen X got Daniel Day-Lewis’s The Last of the Mohicans on the big screen.

Pearl’s book shows the real Daniel Boone to have indeed been a brave and exceptionally skillful frontiersman who played a pivotal role in the initial colonization of Kentucky and its defense during the American Revolution. But he was also highly sympathetic to the Shawnee and Cherokee he sometimes fought against, having been adopted into a Shawnee chief’s family, where he learned their language, forged genuine emotional ties, and felt a degree of conflicted loyalties. As a fierce fighter who was raised by Quakers and a colonizer with deep ties to those whom westward expansion subjugated, Boone is as full of contradictions as the state he is most associated with. Kentucky in the 1770s was more than just a battleground between “American” settlers and British-backed tribal peoples; it was a world where cultures sometimes blended, where adult captives adopted into Shawnee families willingly and passionately “went native,” and where, for a brief time during a terrible conflict, a vision of a shared world on Indigenous terms was imagined and entertained.

Pearl is a best-selling novelist (The Dante Club), and this is his first work of history. But he pulls it off well, leveraging diligent work in both archival and secondary sources and a novelist’s narrative skill to bring Boone’s world accurately and vividly alive. It reveals this first post-1776 U.S. frontier as the site not of a Manichean struggle between Native inhabitants and white intruders—though it was that, at times—but of a head-spinning set of chess matches played simultaneously on one board. To further complicate the situation, pieces sometimes switched loyalties between the various players: Britain; the Boones’ faction of settlers; a rival family’s settler faction; and several competing Shawnee and Cherokee power bases, including factions of captured settlers now loyal to their adoptive Shawnee families. Shawnee leaders profoundly disagreed on how best to deal with the Euro-American trespassers. Boone himself, fresh off an astounding military victory over the Shawnee, is nearly executed by rival settlers for having too friendly a stance toward them.

The Kentucky frontier of the 1770s, in other words, was not unlike the Maine frontier of the 1670s, when New England and New France sought control over the future eastern United States. French leaders intermarried with their Penobscot allies, lived in their settlements, and raised bilingual, bicultural children who themselves would become leaders of their North American colonial project. English settlers were sometimes captured and effectively adopted into Indigenous families. Towns on both sides were laid to waste, and noncombatants scalped and murdered, yet some Indigenous leaders regularly pushed for a reconciled sharing of the space, a vision that too few English colonists were willing to consider. Critically, it was definitely not some sort of Eden in which Euro-Americans could be born again as an innocent new people, “Americans,” as Turner’s frontier thesis would later assert. Life on the frontier—whether in New England, Spanish New Mexico, Kentucky, or Oregon—was messy, multifaceted, and decidedly human, in senses both good and bad.

As the title suggests, The Taking of Jemima Boone focuses on the 1776 kidnapping of Boone’s 13-year-old daughter and two of her friends, and the events that followed as an uneasy relationship between invading settlers and the Shawnee spiraled out of control. Pearl makes abundantly clear that history has given Jemima, like nearly every other American woman of the era, short shrift. The kidnapping plays a central role in Last of the Mohicans, but Cooper’s version of Jemima—Cora Munro—is a demure damsel in distress awaiting rescue by male relatives. In reality, Jemima and her friends fought back against their Shawnee kidnappers, whacking one in the face with an oar, and left a clever trail of clues for their rescuers to follow. Jemima even places tactical intel on her captors for her father, encoded in knotted bits of thread from her dress. Later, she’s melting ammo during a siege, delivering military supplies under fire, and helping save her father from advancing warriors. 

“Jemima was generally presented as a victim rather than the fighter, survivor, and leader she was,” Pearl writes. “The kidnapping and rescue became a story of courtship and romance . . . rather than one of the perseverance of strong young women amid volatile geopolitics.” Later in life, Jemima, though illiterate, tried to correct the record, dictating her story to be preserved in manuscript. Unfortunately—and conveniently for the narrative-obsessed men who constructed the conventional account of her story—the pages were lost in a riverboat sinking before they ever reached a printing press.

From the Shawnee and Cherokee perspective, the kidnapping was a legitimate response to the invasion of their ancient homeland by Boone’s Euro-American settlers. “Now, brothers, go home and stay there,” a Cherokee-born member of the Shawnee nation warned Boone on one of his early reconnaissance trips through the Cumberland Gap. “Don’t come here anymore, for this is the Indians’ hunting ground, and all the animals, skin and furs are ours; and if you are so foolish as to venture here again, you may be sure the wasps and yellow jackets will sting you severely.” Boone and his fellow settlers paid no heed to this and other warnings.

The carefully planned kidnapping of Jemima and her friends was intended to secure leverage over Boone and the other settlers of Boonesborough, a fortified settlement on the Kentucky River outside present-day Lexington that the Indians correctly realized would trigger the loss of their homelands if left to develop. But the girls helped Boone track their party and found ways to stall the warriors’ progress until rescued. In the firefight, however, the Shawnee war chief Blackfish’s son was killed, possibly by Boone himself. The Shawnee responded with a winter 1778 ambush in which Boone and 30 settlers were captured and brought back to the Shawnee town of Little Chillicothe and, later, the British at Fort Detroit.

Instead of killing Boone or selling him to the British commander, Henry Hamilton, Blackfish adopted him. In Shawnee culture, this was seen as a way to replace the person who had been lost—in this case, his son—and the adoptee was treated with love, care, and respect. Such adoptions happened with some frequency, blurring the lines between invader and invaded. Pearl describes the story of John Ward, kidnapped and adopted by the Shawnee as a child, who died on a battlefield in 1774 fighting his own biological father and brothers. Another settler, Simon Girty, was adopted as a young man by the Senecas and served as an interpreter and scout for various Indian tribes throughout the conflict, with no desire to return to the culture of his birth.

Boone, however, had no intention of “going native” and began plotting his escape. But in his months of captivity, he developed genuine feelings for his Shawnee “parents” and siblings, including toddlers. He learned their language, their spiritual practices, and their customs. He was the recipient, he later said, “of extraordinary love” and was treated “with profound respect, and entire friendship.” He began to worry that his escape attempt might force him to, in Pearl’s words, “use violence against people he’d grown to care about.” The feelings were mutual, with profound implications for the future of Kentucky.

Boone escaped and, in an epic wilderness trek lasting weeks, reached Boonesborough to warn them that Blackfish’s army was approaching, fixed on eliminating the settlement once and for all. When the Shawnee arrived, they outnumbered the town’s defenders by more than four to one and probably could have wiped them out. But both Blackfish and Boone sought to avoid slaughtering one another, meeting several times under a flag of truce to try to come to an agreement. 

This is a book full of drama—chase scenes, epic “man versus nature” challenges, harrowing battles and escapes—but perhaps the most arresting moment is when Blackfish lays out his vision for Boonesborough’s negotiated surrender. “Those settlers willing to pledge an allegiance to the British crown could live a comfortable existence at Detroit; others could join the Indians and become part of their families,” Pearl writes. “Rather than absorbing a settler here and there . . . an entire community of settlers could be welcome and integrated. Instead of a map divided up by disputed treaty boundaries that inevitably led to conflict, they could combine the tribal and settler communities with benefit for all.” The settlers would assimilate and Kentucky would remain in Shawnee and Cherokee hands, with the support of their British allies. 

Of course this vision did not—and in the middle term almost certainly could not—come to pass. Even had Kentucky nominally remained in British hands after the War of Independence, land-hungry settlers would have continued to push over the mountains, just as they would on other parts of the frontier. “What never would have happened was restoration of tribal rights to Kentucky,” Pearl writes. “No matter which side tribes aligned themselves with (or against) during the Revolutionary War, British or American, Indian interests were left behind.”

In the short term, however, Blackfish and Boone’s empathy for one another changed the history of this theater of the war, giving real credence to the idea of an integrationist Kentucky. Seeking peace, Blackfish hesitated, avoiding a massacre at Boonesborough. Though the details of the decisive final day of the siege remain unclear, Blackfish ultimately withdrew in the night rather than pressing his advantage with an assault on the damaged fort. Instead of liberating Kentucky and sealing the rebellious colonies off from the west, Britain would face expanding settlements that would soon be impossible for their Indian allies to dislodge. “The West” would be open to American expansion, and the British ambitions would retreat to the northern shores of the Great Lakes. American manifest destiny began in earnest.

After the siege, Boone faced a treason trial cooked up by his political rivals (he was suspected of colluding with Blackfish), but was acquitted. Disgusted, he left Kentucky and his namesake town and headed back east to reunite with his family in North Carolina. He later returned to Kentucky—but not to Boonesborough—where he owned eight slaves and showed himself to be a lousy land speculator. Frustrated and beset with financial and legal troubles, he emigrated to the Spanish empire in what is now Missouri, where he served as a district judge and military commandant. When the U.S. acquired the territory, Boone was forced to sell his land holdings to pay off creditors in Kentucky, which he vowed to never again visit. “The cutthroat race for land and money, the suspicions by narrow minded people of genuine bonds formed with Indians, the quick slide into violence by so many—including on occasion by him and those he led—had soured him,” Pearl notes. Boone later went so far as to say that he would prefer to be beheaded than to set foot in the territory ever again. 

Alongside books like Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions or Steve Inskeep’s Jacksonland, Pearl’s book helps provide a clearer view of the American frontier and its real role in the shaping of the character of the young, fractious United States. The most critical takeaway is that Turner’s frontier thesis, which shaped generations of history textbooks and the tropes of popular culture, was incorrect. Boone’s frontier was no Eden, and the conditions there did not promote civic values and virtues as Turner imagined they did. Settlers were not born again when immersed in the trans-Appalachian environment, but rather carried their cultural values with them. Westward expansion was not an innocent enterprise, and the clashes were between civilizations, not civilization against savagery. Nor does Boone’s story lend itself to easy summary trial and condemnation, the way those of more unrelentingly despicable figures like Christopher Columbus and Woodrow Wilson do. Boone is a more complex historical figure than either interpretation would allow. He grew to love his Shawnee counterparts, yet he fought and killed them in war. He questioned the very nature of the colonial project, but he owned slaves. And despite ushering it into existence, the archetypical frontiersman was appalled by the world the frontier experience wrought.

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Saint Augustine of Hippo, revered now as one of the most formative influences on Western Christianity, was once just a confused young playboy.

A childhood spent pilfering pears from his neighbor’s tree, shacking up with unmarried women, and fathering a child out of wedlock led him to an identity crisis at the ripe age of 31. Augustine realized the error of his ways when he heard the phantom voice of a small child calling to him. Over and over again, the voice chanted, “Pick it up. Read it. Pick it up. Read it.”

Augustine interpreted the command to be about the Bible and flipped to the first passage he could find. As his eyes absorbed the divine content, he was transformed.

“Instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty, and all the gloom of doubt vanished away,” Augustine wrote in his now-famous tome Confessions.

Not only did he become a Christian, molding the Western canon of philosophy and religion for centuries to come, but as Rebecca L. Davis asserts in Public Confessions, Augustine originated a tradition of conversions on the public stage. By melding what had historically been an external process of movement from one group to another with the interior journey of discovering one’s self anew, Augustine set the stage for Clare Boothe Luce, Sammy Davis Jr., and Muhammad Ali, celebrity converts who Davis follows in her project to understand the modern-day formation of identity.

Public Confessions may be a book about conversions. But Davis doesn’t set out to fully excavate her subjects’ internal motivations. Instead, the history professor is concerned with how these public conversions tracked for an often skeptical audience and what they have to reveal about the ability of individuals to shape politics. In Augustine’s case, after converting, his sermons were raptly attended by dedicated adherents, and he went on to earn Christianity’s highest exaltation: sainthood. In the process, he became one of the most important and powerful public figures of his time. 

Davis, however, is much more interested in Augustine’s 20th-century counterparts, some of whom enjoyed a less favorable reception. Upon converting to Judaism, Davis Jr. lost his standing among fellow Black entertainers and throngs of Black fans. And after joining the Nation of Islam, Ali dodged the Vietnam War draft on religious grounds, prompting him to be stripped of his boxing titles and banned from competing anywhere in the United States. It’s clear, Davis argues, that converts’ stories had immense ramifications for society. They raised questions about “the role of religion in shaping public life.” They upended conversations about the Cold War, shaped the fight against communism, and changed the civil rights movement. They helped mold a political climate in which spirituality skewed political.

But while Ali’s conversion story and political beliefs are as legendary as his boxing career, Davis Jr.’s conversion was never thought of with the same gravitas. As Davis’s chronicling shows, the ways in which conversions skew politics depend heavily on the convert—and the way they carry their transformation out. When converts make politics an explicit part of their religious journey, faith becomes a tool they can wield to reshape public opinion. This was certainly the case for Luce. It was even true for Ali, who inspired thousands of students to also protest the war and emboldened Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to oppose the conflict. But it wasn’t true for Davis Jr., who framed his conversion in personal terms, only to be ostracized. His story shows that when public converts try to leave politics out of their voyage, politics will nonetheless find them.

The modern Republican Party has certainly learned this lesson. Its leading politicians have latched onto faith in explaining their agenda, both attracting and fueling the religious right. George W. Bush, himself a convert to born-again Evangelicalism, frequently spoke of God in justifying his policies: rolling back access to abortion; fighting gay marriage and gender parity; and supporting Israel. Donald Trump is a Christian in name only and a clear sinner (in that religion’s definition of the term). But he is beloved by Christian conservatives nonetheless because he’s been an even more effective advocate for these causes than Bush was. He, too, frequently ties them to the Bible, using religion like a weapon. In 2019, he told a group of Christian leaders that “every child, born and unborn, is a sacred gift from God.”

Democrats are far more hesitant to use religion in this way, and not without cause. The party is a big tent, and separating church and state is key to its platform. But Joe Biden is one of the most prominent and powerful Catholics on the planet. He is well positioned to argue that his religion calls for exactly the kinds of policies his party is pursuing. The president might have more success at driving progressivism forward if he didn’t shy away.

Davis begins the project with the story of Clare Boothe Luce, a Republican author and congresswoman who converted to Catholicism in 1946, inspired by what the faith had to say about sacrifice and loss after her daughter tragically died in a car accident. Immediately, the transformation grabbed headlines and made her, according to Davis, “one of the most famous Catholics in the world.”

Luce quickly used the religious attention to shape politics. In a famous three-part story for the women’s magazine McCall’s in 1947, Luce argued that Catholicism was an age-old foil to communism and secular humanism, turning popular sentiment about the religion on its head. While many Americans at the time believed that supporters of the Catholic Church were antidemocratic, Luce wrote that it was the faith best suited to American democracy. Her piece, Davis writes, was a “watershed moment for American Catholics.” It helped normalize the faith and its role in public life, paving the way for John F. Kennedy.

The book grows even more intriguing when it arrives at the juxtapositional stories of Sammy Davis Jr. and Muhammad Ali—two Black Americans who chose different religions and strayed in divergent political directions as a result. Davis Jr. was drawn to Reform rabbis, identifying them as entertainers, just like him, but, as Davis describes, with an “aura of intellectual gravitas.” He was also drawn to Jewish men and their masculine style of “sartorial and intellectual sophistication.” During surgery after a serious car accident, he squeezed a Star of David emblem so tightly that it scarred his palm. Soon, the legendary Black entertainer charted his new religious path. 

Unlike Luce, Davis Jr. never made his conversion about politics. It was by all accounts something he did entirely for himself, not to motivate a greater cause. But politics and religion are almost always linked, and soon, the singer became a pariah among large swaths of the Black community. Sometimes, this was the product of viewpoints he adopted. Judaism inculcated a passionate adoption of Zionism, which ostracized him from other Black leaders who saw Israel’s military aggression against Palestinians as an extension of European colonialism. He embraced President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, believing his claims of support for bolstering civil rights, leading Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier to stop returning his calls.

At other times, the backlash was simply a reaction to the fact of his transition. In a 1960 issue of Ebony magazine, he outlined in largely politics-free terms why he converted. (“I feel religion is a very personal thing,” he wrote in the essay’s second paragraph.) In a response letter, a reader dismissed his logic. “I think what he is really trying to do is get away from being a Negro,” the reader claimed. 

Following a different political direction, Ali became a student of Malcolm X, which set the Louisville teenager on a radical drift. His conversion was born of politics and connected, Davis writes, to a harsh criticism of American imperialism. Ali saw a link between the civil rights bona fides of the Nation of Islam and the plight of Black people worldwide. His activism turned off millions of white Americans, and made him into their sporting and social enemy. But it also made him a leading political figure among many leftists and people of color, both in the U.S. and internationally.

In the years following his conversion, Ali traveled to Africa, expressed his desire to fight with Egypt against the Israeli military, became a fierce Vietnam War critic, and practiced a pan-African anti-colonial globalism. Ali’s ability to de-fix his identity, claim a new one, and champion such a coherent and authentic set of political positions inspired legions of draft resisters and identity seekers alike. He was also devoutly engaged with the doctrine and politics of the turbulent Nation of Islam. Unlike in the film One Night in Miami, Regina King’s whimsical reimagining of a meet-up between Ali, Malcolm X, the footballer Jim Brown, and the singer Sam Cooke, where the four men spend a night discussing civil rights, the role of celebrity, and Ali’s lurking uncertainty about conversion, Davis writes that on the actual night, Ali spent hours lecturing Brown on the Nation of Islam and its more obscure religious tenets.

“Cassius Clay was a true believer, conversant in the Nation’s theology and single-minded in his devotion to it,”
she says.

Unfortunately, Public Confessions ends prematurely, right where the public’s interest in religion and politics is likely to begin—with an attempt to understand our current vexing political moment. The recent fight over vaccine mandates in the workplace and objectors seeking religious exemptions is just one area where readers could use the author’s wisdom. Will religion ultimately shape the way Americans view COVID-19 vaccines in the same way that it filtered our understanding of race and the Cold War? How many faith-based exemptions will employers and courts tolerate? For a book focused intimately on the ways in which religion plays out on the public stage and influences politics, Davis could have provided readers with a more forward-looking answer, rather than one almost entirely focused on the 1900s.

Nonetheless, we can extrapolate Davis’s thesis into the 21st century. She gives us a head start, deftly connecting her history of public converts, who helped clarify voters’ views on race and democracy, among other issues, to the rise of the religious right. From William F. Buckley to Nixon to Newt Gingrich, conservatives embraced the narrative of martyrdom and the weaponization of religion for “neoliberal economics, heterosexuality, and the GOP’s pro-military funding priorities,” she writes. Democrats, meanwhile, deemphasized faith, a step many leaders thought necessary in order to vocally support LGBTQ-friendly policies and abortion rights.

Our two most recent presidents are particularly extreme examples of these approaches. Trump may be a serial philanderer who made hush money payments to a stripper and commits constant biblical gaffes, and Biden may be a lifelong devout Catholic who speaks often of how his faith has guided him through personal tragedy. But Trump is beloved by white evangelicals, and Biden is being vilified by the institutional voice of America’s Catholic clergy. 

It isn’t hard to see the parallels for both Trump and Biden in Davis’s history. Luce, like Trump, had a politically motivated performance of religion that relied on partisan ideology as opposed to doctrine, and it gave her great power. Davis Jr., like Biden, embraced a religion predicated on spirituality rather than state affairs. The Biden–Davis Jr. comparison is particularly potent. “It’s personal to him,” Biden’s press secretary told reporters after the American arm of the Roman Catholic Church voted to draft guidance that would deny him communion. “He doesn’t see it through a political prism, and we’re not going to comment otherwise on the inner workings of the Catholic Church.” 

Today is not 1960, and the president’s caution might well succeed. But were she to weigh in, Davis might suggest that Biden probably has something to learn from Luce, who framed her belief in Catholicism as the be-all and end-all force to combat society’s ills and won over many hearts and minds in the process. To court voters and advance his agenda, the president could do something similar. The pope, after all, agrees with Biden that governments should abolish the death penalty, expand safety net programs, and fight against climate change. In claiming that Catholicism demands progressive actions, the president would be on solid canonical ground. 

Still, performing religion is complicated for a Democratic president. With a rapidly secularizing and disaffiliating constituency, any Democratic politician’s challenge is to band together a coalition of both religious and secular voters without alienating anyone in the process. With their homogenous audience, GOP performers are more likely to receive rave reviews. But that doesn’t mean Biden shouldn’t employ faith at all in articulating his proposals. Like it or not, religion and politics find ways to mix. As issues of special religious significance—particularly abortion—heat up, it may be impossible for the president to escape the world that Davis outlines.  

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