From Boop To Boom: ‘Shrinking’ Season 2 Is Explosive In The Best Way

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The 2024 version of Mark Andrews is "The Matrix Resurrections" of fantasy football follow-ups.

Late last week an inconvenient truth for Kamala Harris’ campaign, and the left as a whole, emerged: They have a man problem. Dudes just aren't into her. And the current Veep is losing ground with black male voters — as Trump is increasingly attracting demographics that traditionally leaned Democrat.

The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire is a particularly prolific poster. And lately, his takes have become almost unavoidable.Maguire manages Sequoia Capital’s stake in Elon Musk’s various companies, including the social network formerly known as Twitter, and he regularly amplifies and excuses Musk’s extreme political opinions. He’s also fond of sharing his own. Over the weekend, he posted a theory that “antifa” is committing mass voter fraud by having ballots sent by the hundreds to vacant houses; Musk signal-boosted Maguire’s concern with the message “Anyone else seeing this sort of thing?” Last week, Maguire advanced the perspective that “DEI was the most effective KGB opp of all time.” To his more than 150,000 followers, the VC has made it clear that he is “prepared to lose friends” over his choice to spit out the metaphorical Kool-Aid that caused him to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.On X, Maguire shows up in the feed alongside other prominent VCs who support Donald Trump—among them, David Sacks of Craft Ventures and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures. They all express similar opinions in similar ways, and they do so more or less constantly. (Maguire, who did not respond to a request for an interview, posted to X dozens of times this past Saturday alone.) This is an example of, as Paul Krugman recently noted, the “tech bro style in American politics.” It is largely defined by a flat, good-versus-evil worldview. The good? Free speech, which Democrats want to eradicate. The evil? Immigration, which is a plot by Democrats to allow violent criminals into the country and steal the election. San Francisco? A once-great American city purposefully ruined by Democrats. Kamala Harris? Sleepwalking into World War III. Trump? According to Musk, he is “far from being a threat to democracy”—actually, voting for him is “the only way to save it!”A “vibe shift” is under way in Silicon Valley, Michael Gibson, a VC and former vice president of grants at the Thiel Foundation, told me. Eight years ago, the notorious entrepreneur Peter Thiel was the odd man out when he announced his support for Trump. The rest of the Valley appeared to have been horrified by the candidate—particularly by his draconian and racist views on immigration, on which the tech industry relies. This year, J. D. Vance, a Thiel acolyte and former VC himself, is Trump’s running mate. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, came out in full support of Trump in a podcast episode released just before Joe Biden dropped out of the election. (Last Friday, Axios reported that Horowitz informed Andreessen Horowitz staff members that he and his wife, Felicia, will donate to support Harris “as a result of our friendship” with the candidate. “The Biden Administration,” his note continues, “has been exceptionally destructive on tech policy across the industry, but especially as it relates to Crypto/Blockchain and AI,” mirroring language from the podcast during which he and Andreessen endorsed Trump.)[Read: Silicon Valley got their guy]It’s doubtful that the thoughts of these prominent VCs reflect a broader change in the electorate—tech workers generally support Harris, and barring an unbelievable upset, California will go blue on November 5, as it has for decades. (Though as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has pointed out, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was 23 percent in 2020—small, but higher than the 20 percent he received in 2016.) And many well-known VCs back Harris, including Rabois’ colleague and Khosla Ventures’ namesake, Vinod Khosla, along with Mark Cuban and the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. This time around, Thiel has not thrown his weight behind Trump but has instead indicated that he would choose him over Harris if there were a gun to his head.But it is nonetheless significant that a number of influential—and very rich—men are eager to go against the grain. Silicon Valley has historically prided itself on technological supremacy and a belief in social progress: Now many of its loudest and most well-resourced personalities support a candidate who espouses retrograde views across practically every measure of societal progress imaginable. “We are talking about a few people, but I think this also reflects the political economy of the Valley right now,” Margaret O’Mara, an American-history professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, told me. “There’s a great deal of money and power and influence concentrated in the hands of a very few people, including these people who are extremely online and have become extremely vocal in support of Trump.” (Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)If Trump wins, there is a nonzero chance that he would give some of these people major roles in his second administration—Musk is already lobbying for one, with apparent success. If Trump loses, the Harris administration will have highly visible and vehement critics to whom a lot of people listen. Silicon Valley’s main characters are entering the culture war and bringing their enormous fan bases with them.To some extent, this is just business as usual. O’Mara noted that although the tech industry used to claim to be apolitical, it has always had its fair share of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., like every other industry. More than anything else, the industry’s interests have simply followed the money. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan supported defense spending and big contracts with the California tech companies. The result was that “Silicon Valley leaned Republican,” she said. “Silicon Valley started leaning Democratic in the Clinton years, when Clinton and Gore were big proponents of the internet and the growth of the internet industries.”Now many of these venture capitalists are holding on to huge bets on cryptocurrency. They fear—or enjoy suggesting—that Harris is plotting to destroy the industry entirely, a perception she’s trying to combat. Some of them have circulated an unsourced rumor that she would appoint to her Cabinet Gary Gensler, who has pursued strict regulations against the crypto industry as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Meanwhile, Trump has promised to save the crypto industry from “living in hell.”) Many in the tech industry worry about Harris’s plans to raise the top capital-gains tax rate. And her support for taxing centimillionaires’ unrealized investment gains has been particularly unpopular. Gibson argued that it would destroy the VC industry completely: “We would see the innovation economy come to a halt.” Even Harris’s supporters in the tech world have pressured the campaign not to pursue the tax; “There’s optimism that this can’t possibly be real,” Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told The New York Times in August. Also at issue is the labor movement. The tech industry came up during an era of lower regulation and declining union power, O’Mara pointed out. Nonunionized workforces have been essential to many of these companies’ business models, and collective action used to be more rare in their perk-filled offices. Yet during and after the pandemic, contractors and employees of major tech companies expressed dissatisfaction en masse: They wanted more diversity in the workforce, fairer treatment, and protection from the layoffs sweeping the industry. Some of them unionized. The companies faced, as O’Mara put it, “discontent among a group of people who had never been discontented.” The new labor movement has clearly rankled prominent tech figures, Musk among them. He is challenging the nearly century-old legislation behind the National Labor Relations Board, with the goal of having it declared unconstitutional. [Read: Palo Alto’s first tech giant was a horse farm]But business doesn’t explain everything. The American public’s attitude toward the tech industry has curdled since 2016, in large part because of critical reporting—about labor abuses, privacy problems, manipulative algorithms, and the bizarre and upsetting experiences one might have on social platforms at any given time. When I spoke with Gibson, he suggested that declining revenue in the digital-media business may have created some “rivalrous envy” on the part of journalists. (And it’s true that the media industry can and does cite the whims of tech platforms as a source of its financial problems.) “We are being lied to,” Andreessen wrote in his widely read and rueful Techno-Optimist Manifesto last year. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.” This, he suggested, was not just wrongheaded but harmful. Andreessen Horowitz, at one point, launched a media publication with the stated mission of publishing writing that was “unapologetically pro-tech.”Meanwhile, the federal government has pursued antitrust action and bipartisan efforts to regulate social media, while state governments have won huge settlements for workers. This has been a major shock: Silicon Valley was celebrated by previous Democratic administrations and was particularly welcome in both the Obama campaign and White House. Now some tech leaders are being treated like villains—which seems to have led some of them to embrace the label. “These are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, and they are presenting themselves, in a way, like Trump is,” O’Mara observed. They’re positioning themselves in public based on their grievances and their feeling that they’ve been unjustly targeted and maybe even embarrassingly spurned.Venture capitalists are public figures in a way they didn’t used to be. Many of them were famous founders first, and they have their own brands to maintain. “It’s part of the job to promote yourself,” Lee Edwards, a general partner at Root Ventures, told me. “I think you get in the habit of just tweeting your thoughts.”That might have hurt business not too long ago. In 2016, when Thiel endorsed Trump, Gibson had to worry about losing seats at dinners or speaking slots at events. That’s not the case now, he told me. He pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efforts to distance himself from Democrats. Although he has had a terrible relationship with Trump in the past—one that reached its nadir when the former president was temporarily banned from Facebook over the inflammatory comments he made during the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021—he has made tentative overtures to the candidate recently. The two have reportedly spoken one-on-one a couple of times this year, and Zuckerberg complimented Trump on his “bad ass” reaction (a fist pump) after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Zuckerberg hasn’t said how he’ll vote, but it’s a sign of change that he would talk about Trump in these terms at all. “The chill in the air has warmed up,” Gibson said.When I spoke with Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at UC Davis and the author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism, she said she’d be interested to hear whether this turned out to be a California story or “a very rich-person” story that happened to be taking place in California. Maybe it wasn’t so much about Silicon Valley or the tech industry as it was about billionaires. From another perspective, it could be a really rich-person story taking place on a social-media platform owned by one of those really rich people. And those people, despite their increasing public vociferousness, might actually be cloistered in their own world—isolated and deluded enough to believe that migrants are somehow a threat to their livelihood and that radical leftists are really going to steal the election. “What I’m seeing from VCs around the country is different from what I’m seeing amongst the Twitter VCs,” Candice Matthews Brackeen, of Lightship Capital, told me. “Some of us live … off of there.” Others I spoke with pointed to an effort called VCs for Kamala, a loose organization with hundreds of signatories on a letter supporting Harris’s candidacy. That group was organized by Leslie Feinzaig, a venture capitalist and registered independent who says she has never before made a political donation.The recent media coverage of Silicon Valley “was creating the impression that the entire industry, that all of venture capital, was going MAGA,” Feinzaig told me. “In my conversations, that was just not the case.” She wanted someone to step up and say that a lot of VCs were supporting Harris and that it wasn’t because they were on the far left. Many of them were registered Republicans, even. They simply had different priorities from the rich, angry guys posting on X. “I’m at the beginning of my career,” she said. “A lot of these guys are at the pinnacle of theirs.” She couldn’t say exactly what had happened to them. “There’s a cynicism at that point that I just don’t share.”

Seventy Miles in the Darién GapFor the September 2024 issue, Caitlin Dickerson reported on the impossible path to America.As a Colombian American, I was deeply moved by “Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap.” Thank you, Caitlin Dickerson, for your courage. I had the deep fortune of migrating to the United States legally with my parents in the 1990s, so I didn’t experience the Darién Gap personally. Recently, I’ve been helping a Colombian refugee who traveled through the Darién Gap. He began to tell me of his experiences there, and I was astounded by his story. He is understandably still processing what he witnessed, and I am letting him go at his own pace. Dickerson’s reporting offered a remarkable window onto a harrowing journey undertaken by the most desperate of people. Thank you for investing in such solid journalistic work. Now I’m going to go hug my dogs and wife.Carlos Enrique GomezUnion City, Calif.As a citizen of the United States and an avid consumer of its news, I’m saddened that most mainstream-media coverage of our immigration woes focuses on controlling our borders and not the underlying reasons people risk, and even lose, their lives in their attempts to immigrate here.For those who only listen to sound bites, the word immigrant conjures frightening notions—outsiders on a quest to thwart our border security and take some of what we consider to be ours. In Donald Trump’s view, they are murderers, criminals, and rapists.Caitlin Dickerson’s article reveals that these are mostly just normal people forced to flee their countries due to conditions beyond their control. I can’t imagine how dire circumstances would have to be for me to leave my home! It’s telling and sad to see that U.S. policy to discourage immigration has had the effect of increasing death rates among those who are already so helpless. Not to mention driving new profits for drug cartels.I hope we can have more coverage centered on the root causes of immigration. After all, U.S. policy created many of the problems that plague countries in Latin America.Peter BrownLyman, MaineI teach high-school English in Columbus, Ohio. Last year, one of my students wrote an essay about his experience traveling through the Darién Gap. It was the first time I had ever heard of it. This student was hardworking and kind, and I was amazed by his story. When he wrote it, he had been in the United States for just over a year. It’s 288 words, with minimal punctuation and no paragraph breaks.He left his home country in South America with his mom and sisters. After passing through the Darién Gap, they spent time in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, before eventually ending up in Ohio.He concluded his essay with this: “It affects me in what? I got a lot of depression and stress and I won’t do something like that again.” I feel lucky to have taught this student, and I appreciate that The Atlantic covered this topic.Chase MontanaColumbus, Ohio‘Lord, Help Us Make America Great Again’In the September 2024 issue, McKay Coppins considered the most revealing moment of a Donald Trump rally.McKay Coppins’s close reading of Trump-rally prayers was unsettling, even frightening. I was concerned less by the apocalyptic fear and strange theology that the prayers mobilized, and more by the unnerving similarity I saw to the rhetoric marshaled against Trump and Republicans by their adversaries.I confess to seeing in Trump’s opponents—and I count myself among them—the same tendency toward exaggeration (Trump is a modern Hitler, Trump is an existential threat to democracy). Conservatives have been quick to argue that many progressives behave with a quasi-religious zeal: Popular slogans echo liturgy; cancel culture exists as a penalty for heresy.I’d like to think that there are differences between Trump and his critics that I’m not discerning. Could The Atlantic do a similar sort of analysis of the weirder expressions by Democrats and progressives?Gary GaffieldFort Myers, Fla.My Mother the RevolutionaryFor the September 2024 issue, Xochitl Gonzalez considered what happens when fomenting socialist revolution conflicts with raising a family.As a mother of young children and a committed socialist organizer, I found that Xochitl Gonzalez’s recent article presented an unrealistic and at times bizarre portrait of the lives of people like me. The bulk of the article is a slippery mix of memory, feeling, and fact—understandable if its purpose was to explore the bitter process of reconciliation between an absent parent and her child, but unsatisfying if it aims to provide an accurate political analysis.What moved me to comment was the strange choice, 6,000 words into an almost-7,000-word essay, to pivot to a discussion of the presidential campaign of Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, who are running on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Although the author conducted an interview with the candidates, the only remnant of that interaction was a physical description of them (They are—“not that it matters—beautiful”) and a hasty reduction of their political platform (Burn it all down. Start from scratch). What a shame to silence these women and conflate their candidacy with the aberrant personal experiences of the author.Polls show that more and more young adults like me have positive attitudes toward socialism. We see the failures of capitalism all around us, and we are eagerly dedicating ourselves to building a socialist future. Although the article depicts socialist activism as a kind of personal obliteration, a subordination of our individual selves to the menacing whims of “the party,” the reality, in my experience, could not be further from the truth.I proudly support Claudia and Karina, not just because their politics offer the only viable path out of poverty, imperialist wars, and ecological crisis, but also because they are working mothers like me. When they speak about inflation at the grocery store, it is from experience. When they speak about the astronomical cost of child care, it is from experience. When they speak about fighting for a world that truly nurtures our children, it is proof that our identities as mothers are an asset, not a liability, in this struggle.Moira Casados CassidyDenver, Colo.Behind the CoverIn “Washington’s Nightmare,” Tom Nichols revisits the life of George Washington, whose bravery and self-command established an ideal that all future presidents would, with varying degrees of success, attempt to emulate. All, that is, save Donald Trump, a man who shares none of Washington’s qualities and exhibits the kind of base motives that the first president saw as a threat to the republic. For the cover, we turned to Gilbert Stuart’s The Athenaeum Portrait. The unfinished nature of the work suggests the ongoing American experiment, but also the existential danger that a second Trump term poses.— Elizabeth Hart, Art DirectorCorrection“You Think You’re So Heterodox” (October) misstated where Joe Rogan’s home is located. It is west of Austin, not east of Austin.This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

Vivian Zink/SyfyVice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has opened discussions with Joe Rogan that could see her sit down for an interview with the controversial podcast host who counts an army of impressionable young men among his listeners.Officials from the Democratic nominee’s campaign met with Rogan’s team this week, according to a report by Reuters.Harris’ outreach to Rogan suggests a significant shift in her campaign following a panic of sorts among Democrats who worried her previously light, cautious schedule was scuttling her chances in the election.Read more at The Daily Beast.

An early pastel of a Normandy beach by impressionist master Claude Monet was reunited with the descendants of its rightful owner after research by the Looted Art Commission in Europe.

The shooting deaths, if confirmed, would mark the second time in two weeks that Mexican military forces have killed civilians.

Rebecca Noble/Getty ImagsImpervious as ever to irony, Donald Trump is trying to weaponize his opponent’s medical records against her while staunchly refusing to release his own.In his latest unhinged tirade on Truth Social, the former president posted on Monday that he’s “far healthier than Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, but especially, Kamala,” adding that he is naturally “far too busy campaigning to take the time” to, you know, prove it.His comments come amid mounting pressure to provide evidence of his physical and mental health, not least after a letter was released on Sunday by Doctors for Harris, a group of pro-Democratic medical professionals, warning “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

“I wasn’t married to a monster — I was married to someone who got sick.”

Israel's military has uncovered a bunker it says Hezbollah's special forces unit was using to plan a cross-border attack on Israeli citizens.

Drew Crecente’s daughter was murdered nearly two decades ago. Earlier this month, he discovered that her name and image had been used to create an AI chatbot.

Is Lindor a Hall of Famer now? He is borderline — but also far from done.

The trial is underway of a Georgia woman, Leilani Simon, who's accused of killing her 20-month-old son and dumping his body in a trash bin two years ago.

The 22-year-old American started 2024 in the midfield for Columbus. Now he’s playing for Middlesborough and impressing new USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino.

A Washington Post investigation found that officials didn’t act on staff complaints about facility violence, which culminated in a patient brawl, rape and death.

It's clear Dave Roberts didn't view Game 2 of the NLCS as a must-win because it wasn't, but could the Dodgers' pitching strategy come back to bite them?

A narrow edge in voter contact by Kamala Harris’ campaign at the national level fades to parity in the battleground states.

Plus, an investigation into China’s panda factories.

There are two different ways to communicate persuasively, and we're seeing them play out on the campaign trail.

After defeating Panama in his U.S. coaching debut, the Argentine will lead the Americans against Mexico on Tuesday.

Cool Patch Pumpkins in Solano County has twice held the Guinness World Record for world's largest corn maze. Over the years, the maze has served as a towering 60-acre experiment in human psychology.

Trump's racism will have a material effect on the lives of minority voters. Kamala Harris needs to highlight examples of the ex-president's bigotry.

That Chevron near Olvera Street with infamously high gas prices? It's an outlier that doesn't reflect on the rest of California.

When a Medfly quarantine in L.A. ended this summer, you could be forgiven for asking, "A what quarantine?" This is the tale of California's long fight against an agricultural pest.

Shohei Ohtani has been outside his comfort zone in multiple games this postseason, and the Dodgers can't afford to have their best player struggling.

Angel Black always wanted a food garden, but she was never successful — until Farmscape helped convert the lawn in her family's Culver City backyard into a mini-farm.

Wedbush Securities is moving from a downtown L.A. tower to Pasadena, where it will occupy smaller offices suitable for employees with hybrid schedules.

Artists explore the intersection between environmental ruin and sexism

I knew running would only make it worse. I had no weapon. I thought, 'Wow, I guess this is how it ends, I'm only 31.'

Look who's leading the group Black Men for Trump, and you'll see the former president's real values. (He doesn't have any.)

There are valid alternatives to getting a four-year degree, but for the U.S. to thrive and for students to be all they can be, the emphasis on college should remain.

A nominee last year for the Grammys' songwriter of the year award, Amy Allen is poised for more nods with her work on Sabrina Carpenter's "Short n' Sweet."

How did Dejaune Anderson go from a loving mother to being accused of killing her infant son? After running off with Cairo, she got into mysticism and joined an apprenticeship program, according to her former friends.

The vice president spends a fair amount of time at her Brentwood home, generating increased traffic and other minor headaches. Could it get worse if she becomes president?

If the Oklahoma schools chief really wants a Bible that reflects on U.S. history, he need look no further than the 1819 Jefferson Bible.

After researching the 10 California propositions on the ballot, a reader asks: Don't we elect legislators to decide complex policy matters?

Pandemic conspiracy-mongers shared the stage with scientists and public health advocates at a Stanford University conference. Should they have even been let into the room?

Anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric has become common from the Trump-Vance ticket. But Trump is increasing calls for violence against Black and brown people — and anyone who stands with them.

For this artist and DJ, the beauty ritual is best played out in bed.

The author of 'The Message' insists on moral clarity about Israeli oppression, but the threat from Hamas and others is clearer than anything else in the conflict.

“Just go to sleep,” Martin Chalfie’s wife told him late one October night in 2008. Chalfie, a Columbia University chemist, had co-authored an influential paper describing a new method for studying cells with green fluorescent protein, and he was anxiously waiting to see whether it would be recognized. His wife, a fellow academic, tempered his expectations. “It’s a wonderful tool, and lots of people use it,” he recalls her saying. “But, to tell you the truth, it will never win the Nobel.”So when the call from Sweden came in, Chalfie was asleep. The beginning of his life as a Nobel laureate in chemistry had to wait until morning. He was still in his pajamas when the first journalist got him on the phone. He scolded her for asking whether he believed in God. Academics should not be asked to pontificate outside their fields of expertise! Chalfie was starting to understand that he had become the kind of rarefied figure whose musings on topics unrelated to chemistry were important to the press. He didn’t like it. And yet, he didn’t not like it either. The next thing he did was call his friend Bob—the 2002 Nobel laureate in medicine H. Robert Horwitz—to tell him he wanted to co-sign an open letter of Nobel laureates endorsing Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy.[Read: A Nobel Prize for artificial intelligence]This past week, the 2024 Nobel class was introduced to the world, creating a new crop of Olympian figures. Chalfie might tell you that the award hasn’t changed his day-to-day life all that much, that his grant applications still sometimes get denied. But the medal radiates from his chest even when he’s not wearing it. Chalfie learned that his graduate-school mentor bragged about having had three postdoc students who went on to win a Nobel. Chalfie’s dentist counted four laureates among his patients. “I became a collectible,” Chalfie says.The Nobel is the honor above all honors. The achievements it rewards—in science, literature, and peace—contribute “to the greatest benefit of mankind,” a tagline any other respectable award committee would be too shy to claim. How did a single award from the small nation of Sweden become the undisputed highest honor in the world? The marketing whizzes at Harvard Business School haven’t written a case study on the genius of the Nobel Foundation, but perhaps they should. The Nobel is one of the greatest branding exercises in history.Establishing a prize is easy. The hard part is getting anyone to care. Alfred Nobel, a businessman who made his fortune selling dynamite and explosives in the 19th century, was not an obvious candidate to become the namesake of the most prestigious distinction in the world. Nor were Swedish scientists, as opposed to French or British, clearly the ones who should award it. Some biographers link Nobel’s idea to establish a prize for sciences, culture, and peace to the moment he learned that a newspaper had prepared an obituary for him with the phrase “merchant of death” in the headline. That’s not how he wanted history to remember him.For the Nobel to become the Nobel, a few people had to get a few things really right. When rich individuals bequeath all their wealth to something other than their would-be heirs, their would-be heirs tend to resist. According to the historian Elisabeth Crawford, the author of The Beginnings of the Nobel Institution, this is one of the biggest obstacles rich men have had in using prizes to secure their legacy. The Italian businessman Jerôme Ponti, for example, had more or less the same vision as Nobel. But after his surviving relatives learned that he had donated his fortune to national academies headquartered in London, Paris, and Vienna in 1874, a group of them successfully litigated to void the will. In the 1890s, the executors of Nobel’s estate had to be a bit more clever. They preemptively reached an agreement with Nobel’s two living nephews, one of whom was particularly gracious and persuaded the rest of the family to honor the late Nobel’s wishes. A second reason the Nobel prevailed over prizes of similar ambition was that Sweden turned it into a nationalist project. Nobel himself did not mention anything about Swedish interests, but the government and the press interpreted his bequest as a call to action for the nation as a whole. “The Swedish scientific society could not have been invested with a more glorious task,” a newspaper editorial declared. The effort turned out to be well timed. In the early 1900s, a new prize in Sweden might have seemed unlikely to compete in prestige with one given by the French Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society in London. But when World War I struck, neutral little Sweden had a claim to objectivity that the great powers didn’t.[Read: The political slant of the Nobel Prize in economics]Finally, both Nobel and the executors of his will designed the rules wisely. Most prestigious prizes at the time were international only in theory; judges tended to favor their countrymen. Nobel requested that each award be given to the “worthiest person, whether or not they’re Scandinavian.” The Nobel Prize committee became the first to systematically solicit nominations from institutions abroad, turning the award into a sort of contest among nations. And one of the executors of the will had the idea of rewarding achievements no matter when they had been made, rather than just the work or discoveries of the previous year. This was a clever move, not just because some discoveries can take time to reveal their worth, but also because it turned winning the Nobel into a more sweeping victory.Fortified with its elegant design choices, the Nobel quickly established a first-mover advantage. Universities can come up with new medals in physics, but they will never be able to give the same one that Albert Einstein won. Prizes with more generous cash stipends exist—the Breakthrough Prize, created by Mark Zuckenberg and other tech billionaires, pays $3 million, compared with Nobel’s sum of about $1 million, which co-winners must share—but many people would still prefer to win an award that their parents have heard of. The Scottish economist Angus Deaton, who was knighted in Buckingham Palace and has received plenty of prizes throughout his life, told me that nothing comes close to the Nobel ceremony, which he attended in 2015. On the night after he found out he won, Deaton couldn’t keep the news to himself. He told his Uber driver on the way home from dinner in Princeton and watched him become ecstatically happy. The driver at first assumed that Deaton had won the peace prize; when he learned it was for economics, his enthusiasm dimmed, but only slightly. A Nobel is a Nobel.Architects and mathematicians might protest that the Nobel doesn’t recognize achievements in their professions, that more people should know about the Pritzker and the Fields. But nobody said prizes were fair. What prizes are meant to be is cheap: Societies can save money by having everyone work toward a grand goal and rewarding only the best. Prizes are prestige in material form. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the economics Nobel in 2001, explained to me that this is precisely their advantage. In many markets, say knowledge and cultural industries, people seek excellence for its own sake, and so money is not the best incentive. America would create more total welfare, Stiglitz argues, if instead of rewarding pharma companies with monopoly patents, we gave drug researchers a prestigious prize with a cash stipend. For that plan to work, of course, we would have to convince people that the prize is indeed covetable, like the Swedes did.Prizes aren’t all great. They distort fields by pushing hopefuls to do the type of work the prize jury will like. According to the economic historians Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg, the Nobel in economics—the only one that Alfred Nobel didn’t stipulate in his will—was used to build legitimacy for free-market reforms in Sweden, elevating the precepts of neoliberal economic theory to the same status as laws of physics. The main ideology the Nobel Foundation appears to be committed to, however, is the importance of preserving the prestige of the Nobel Prize—and in this it has succeeded. If there were a prize for prizes, the Nobel would win every year.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsAfter former President Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, his administration imposed several rounds of tariffs on China on everything from washing machines to steel. The move was described by the nonpartisan conservative organization the Tax Foundation as one of the “largest tax increases in decades.” And yet, protectionist economic thinking has since gained traction in both parties. In a rare instance of agreement, President Joe Biden retained most of his predecessor’s tariffs—and imposed even more earlier this year.Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described her own evolution on this topic succinctly: “People like me grew up with the view: If people send you cheap goods, you should send a thank-you note. That’s what standard economics basically says … I would never, ever again say, ‘Send a thank-you note.’” Essentially, Yellen used to think that if China wanted to flood the United States with cheap goods, why complain? Well, now she appears more concerned about the cost of all those cheap goods to the nation’s domestic manufacturing base.On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I’m joined by the Cato Institute’s vice president of general economics, Scott Lincicome, to examine this popular narrative—one that he doesn’t put much stock in, largely because the high cost of tariffs are disproportionately borne by poorer people, but also because of the political dysfunction they sow:“The economics of trade are counterintuitive,” Lincicome explains. “And so tariff policy is notoriously corrupt. And so there’s a lot of political dysfunction, along with just hiring all those lobbyists to get special tariffs or special exemptions. But also, it’s just a very politically perilous policy.”The following is a transcript of the episode:[Music]Jerusalem Demsas: There was an interesting policy exchange about tariffs between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris during their debate last month. Kamala Harris: My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20 percent tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result, for middle-class families, in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires. Demsas: Then Trump hit back, pointing out that the Biden-Harris team had been all too happy to keep the tariffs going. Donald Trump: First of all, I have no sales tax. That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that. We’re doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off, because it was so much money, they can’t. It would totally destroy everything that they’ve set out to do. They’ve taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They’ve left the tariffs on. Demsas: This exchange flew by many people. There was a lot going on in that debate, and this happened in the first few minutes. But Trump is pointing out something interesting here—that while Harris is calling his tariffs a sales tax, she and Biden kept the majority of his tariffs when they came into office.Looking back on 2019, Biden had similarly criticized Trump’s trade policy, arguing at the time that “any freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs.”While I think it’s important to highlight this similarity, it’s also important not to overstate it. Trump is now promising a 60 percent tariff on goods from China and a 20 percent tariff on everything else the U.S. imports. And in a speech last week, Trump said he’d “impose whatever tariffs are required—100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent.” This is far greater than anything Biden or Harris have publicly considered.[Music] Demsas: Welcome to Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer here at The Atlantic. And today we’re talking tariffs, trade, protectionism, and more.The standard economic narrative around tariffs is pretty negative. As my guest today has explained in a quip now famously memorialized on a novelty T-shirt: “Tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way.” It’s a busy shirt.Scott Lincicome is the vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute and has written broadly, including here at The Atlantic, about why the parties shouldn’t be so quick to embrace tariffs.[Music] Demsas: Scott, welcome to the show.Scott Lincicome: Well, thanks for having me.Demsas: We’re going to talk about tariffs today, so I’m going to start with the simplest question: What is a tariff?Lincicome: A tariff is a tax applied to an imported product, usually a good but, in theory, you could try to apply tariffs to services, as well.Demsas: What kinds of things that people commonly buy have tariffs on them in the United States?Lincicome: I think one of the most common examples we use is pickup trucks. In the 1960s, there was a dispute with the Europeans over chicken, of all things. That led to a tax on pickup trucks—Demsas: Wait. Wait. Wait. Slow that down. How do we get from chickens to pickup trucks?Lincicome: They were going after our chickens, so we put tariffs on their pickup trucks, and they stayed. Now we still have a 25 percent tax—tariff—on imported pickup trucks from everywhere except a few free-trade-agreement countries, like Mexico. So one of the reasons why we don’t have some of those cool little pickup trucks that you might see in Japan or whatever is because they’re subject to really ridiculous tariffs. And automakers abroad don’t want to have to deal with all the regulatory compliance and that kind of stuff and then pay another 25 percent tariff.It’s actually a great example of the things that tariffs do beyond just raising prices. They limit availability and consumer choice, and they stick around forever. We have tariffs on the books on shoes and clothing and other things that go back to the Smoot-Hawley days. They’re really hard to remove once you get them into place.Demsas: You just said something interesting. Who pays the tariff?Lincicome: It’s a little complicated. Legally, the importer in the United States, in almost all cases, is paying the tariffs. If you are a U.S. company and you are importing stuff, you’re going to be paying the tariff, by law. There’s a little exception to that, but we don’t need to worry about that. The more complicated thing comes in who actually pays, because, in theory, a foreign exporter can lower his price to essentially absorb the tariff costs.Let’s say you’re shipping widgets into the United States, and they’re $100. All of a sudden, a 25 percent tariff gets attached to it. You have, really, two basic choices: still sell at a hundred and have the importer pay $25 (25 percent of a hundred), or you lower your price to 80 and then have the importer pay $20 in tariffs. But to the importer, it’s all the same thing, right? It’s still $100. So the tariff hasn’t changed the calculus. In that sense, the foreign exporter is bearing the incidence of the tariff.Then we have the empirical question. So the empirical question is: What actually happens? Well, what actually happens is, in the vast majority of cases, importers and consumers pay the tariffs. You only have a situation where foreign exporters pay tariffs when the market that the foreign exporter wants to sell into is just massive—really important—and the exporter says, You know what? I just want to maintain market share, so I’m going to lower my prices.Typically, that’s not what happens. Typically, the consumer, the importer is going to pay the tariff. It might not be a hundred percent; the exporter might discount by a few bucks here and there. But, overall, as an empirical matter, typically consumers, importers pay. And that was certainly the case with the Trump-era tariffs on steel and aluminum and Chinese imports. Studies show that about 95 percent of the tariff incidence fell onto American companies and consumers.Demsas: And so as any listener listening to this can tell, you don’t really like tariffs. Economists, in general, don’t really like tariffs. Why is that? Can you walk us through the standard economic story for why tariffs are bad?Lincicome: I’ll start out with saying that economists are okay with tariffs in certain contexts—national security, for example. There’s a legitimate case that the United States—I’d say, a strong case the United States—shouldn’t be buying its tanks and planes and laser-guided missiles from China, that tariffs can serve a role there.But economists don’t like tariffs for a few reasons. First is that they’re costly. A tariff is a tax. It’s a tax typically borne by consumers and importers. Those consumers and importers typically are poorer, so it’s a regressive tax, meaning: More burden is paid by poorer people. They spend a larger share of their incomes on, say, tariffed bananas or whatever.But the second reason is that they are very inefficient taxes, meaning—so good tax policy is: You want a very broad base, and you want it to be very transparent, and you want to minimize gaming and other things that can poke holes and make the tax less distortionary.A tariff doesn’t qualify for anything I just said, right? It’s applied on a narrow set of products. It’s very opaque. Unlike a sales tax, you don’t get a receipt on that pickup truck that says, Oh, you just paid an extra 25 percent for this, right? It’s subject to all sorts of gaming because tariffs will vary, typically, based on the type of products. You get what’s called tariff engineering, where you’ll classify—I’ll go back to cars. There’s a famous example: Ford vans were imported without seats to get a lower tariff, and then, literally at the docks, they installed the seats and then drove them off to the warehouses. So it’s a really distortionary and inefficient way to raise revenue or do anything else you want to do with them.The other big thing, though, is that they’re pretty ineffective at boosting the companies that are getting protected and the workers that are getting protected. For example, I mentioned we have tariffs on shoes. Some of them are ridiculously high, more than 34—almost 40 percent. We have not saved any shoe jobs in the United States. We have almost no jobs in shoe manufacturing. You basically are just having consumers pay a tax for little to no good reason. And in case after case after case, what you see is: Most companies that are protected by tariffs either end up going away after the tariffs are lifted, or they’re seeking perpetual protection, right?The other big thing is that tariffs, by insulating companies from competition, discourage them from innovating. If you have a guaranteed market, you’re probably not going to be hyper-focused on staying lean and mean and really focused on delivering the best value to your customer. You will get fat, lazy, and happy. You’ll spend a lot of money on lobbying to maintain the tariffs, less money on being productive.For example, U.S. steel. So there’s probably no industry in the history of the United States that has received more protection than U.S. steel. It’s definitely on the Mount Rushmore of protectionist industries. And U.S. Steel is notoriously inefficient, in part because of that protection. It’s now trying to be bought out by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company. And the goal to—supporters of that deal, including U.S. Steel, by the way, say that Nippon Steel will help it innovate, provide it with better management practices, an influx of capital to upgrade its services.So put that all together, and economists say, You get high cost, you don’t achieve your objectives, and this is pretty bad. And then you throw in—the historians have looked back at tariff history, especially in the 19th century but even most recently. And tariffs are really historically associated with corruption and cronyism. And that goes back to them being kind of a hidden tax. Also, they target foreigners, and that makes it easier to sell. The economics of trade are counterintuitive. And so tariff policy is notoriously corrupt. And so there’s a lot of political dysfunction, along with just hiring all those lobbyists to get special tariffs or special exemptions. But also, it’s just a very politically perilous policy, as well.Demsas: You said a lot there. And I want to dig in on a few of these things, but I think as a broad overview, obviously, the idea is: You have to do a benefit-cost analysis of tariff policy. And you’ve obviously articulated a lot of reasons why there are high costs to tariffs, but, as you mentioned with national security, for instance, there are a lot of noneconomic things that policymakers are concerned with that they may want to use tariffs for. And so you think about the implications of what tariffs are trying to do, and often there’s this goal of, We want to spur some sort of industry in the United States. Often, it’s domestic manufacturing, right? You kind of asided to that with the shoe example.But there’s a history of this, right? Actually, last week, we just had on the show Oliver Kim, who was talking to us about the East Asian development miracle. And one thing that a lot of East Asian countries are credited with doing is having protected native industries and ensuring that those industries were able to succeed on the world market. And there was a lot of protectionism that was involved in doing that, including tariffs.And so what I guess I would ask you is, firstly, do you feel like that is a goal the U.S. government should have of trying to spur domestic manufacturing? Do you think that’s an important goal?Lincicome: No. At least not via tariffs. I think there is a million things that the United States government could be doing to boost the manufacturing sector. I should note, of course, the United States is the world’s second-largest manufacturing nation in terms of output, in terms of productivity. So the stuff we make per worker—we’re absolutely crushing it. No. 1 in the world, basically, for large, industrialized nations, so it’s not like the United States is this weak, nothing-burger nation when it comes to manufacturing.But that aside, there’s a couple caveats I think you need to include when you talk about Asian protectionism and industrial policy. First is: That came with a lot of free trade too. While, certainly, there was some protection for certain industries, there was also a lot of exposure to competition in export markets, in particular, but also in import markets. And, though, there was a lot of tariff liberalization for the things that manufacturers they were trying to support—that they needed. So it wasn’t this just blanket protectionist policy.The second big thing, though, is that there is a bit of a correlation-versus-causation thing in a lot of East Asian industrial-policy narratives because they were doing a lot of other stuff at the exact same time. And there’s a great book by Arvind Panagariya, who actually looks at South Korea and Taiwan and others and says, Actually, these economies performed better when they weren’t being protectionist—when they weren’t engaging this heavy-handed industrial policy—than when they were. So we need to be a little bit cautious there.But the third, and I think the most important one for the United States, is that the East Asian miracle applied to a radically different economy than the one in the United States in two big ways. One: Those were developing countries really trying to push infant industries, whereas most U.S. protection is—I mean, the U.S. is certainly not a developing economy. We’re a very developed economy. And most of our protection actually goes to lagging industries. It is not on the cutting edge, and one of the reasons—we have a lot of cutting-edge stuff. But typically, our protection goes to, again, shoes and steel and stuff like that—legacy industries.But the other thing is that the United States has far-more-developed capital markets than Asian economies did—very open, very fluid. And that means we have much-more-efficient investment where there might be the potential for that success and that innovation. And so it’s less likely that government planners in the United States are going to be able to pick the right industries, pick the right companies, pick the right whatever, as opposed to capital markets and VCs and private equity and all that great stuff. And in general, though, it’s just a radically different environment than what existed in, say, South Korea in the 1970s.Demsas: But then let’s take a look at the CHIPS and Science Act, for instance, right? That’s the 2022 law Joe Biden signed to bring semiconductor manufacturing to the United States. So during the pandemic, there’s a real concern about semiconductor chips, that we’re not going to be able to have as many. There’s obviously this big shortage. We’re really reliant on Taiwan, which is, of course, concerning because of its proximity to China and the threat that China poses to Taiwan’s freedom.It’s clear that there is a need to produce, at least in—if not domestically, we need to “friendshore.” We need to make sure can get those supplies from ally countries that we’re less worried about having some kind of future political risk with, but also just domestically because there might be supply-chain problems in the future that are unprecedented, like a global pandemic that we had not been expecting.And so the CHIPS Act is an industrial policy where there is a real push to get chips made here in the United States. We have factories opening up. I believe they are already producing chips. There’s an Arizona factory.Lincicome: Yeah. TSMC is not quite up yet.Demsas: Okay. Not up yet. But basically, we brought Taiwanese expertise to the United States, and they’re building here. We have American jobs that are being created here. And you may care about parts of that or not, but that seems like a policy where that’s on the cutting edge. It’s not confusing to make these chips, but it is a cutting-edge technology. It’s not a legacy industry. So how do you view the use of protection there?Lincicome: Yeah. Two things: One is that it’s really important to start by noting that this CHIPS Act is subsidies and not tariffs. Now, Biden just imposed some tariffs on semiconductors from China but, in general, the CHIPS Act is just about throwing money at companies.In general, if you’re going to ask an economist, What would you prefer: a domestic subsidy or a tariff? they’re going to say, A subsidy, nine times out of 10, right? That’s important because you’re at least—granted you’re subsidizing the production, but you’re at least—once the company gets up and running, going to be subjecting it to market forces and competition and its production and output and the rest. You’re not going to be artificially raising prices for downstream consumers and that kind of stuff. So a subsidy is definitely preferable to a tariff.And in fact, we actually applied tariffs to semiconductors in the 1980s. We had a big industrial policy push in the ’80s related to chips, Japanese memory chips. We applied a bunch of different tariffs, any dumping duties. There was a trade agreement restricting Japanese semiconductors. And what happened? Well, it raised the price of semiconductors and pushed computer manufacturers offshore from the U.S. computer manufacturers. So tariffs, again—historically not very good at achieving your objectives.But the other thing with the CHIPS Act is: It is starting to reveal some of the problems with industrial policy that we saw back then too. For example, back then, we actually picked—we, the government—picked the wrong type of semiconductor. The Department of Defense in the ’80s thought memory chips were going to be the big innovative thing of the future. So we targeted memory chips. Well, it turns out that the entire industry was actually moving towards logic chips, which are what we use today. And the government totally missed that, while imposing all of those costs.Right now, we might have a bit of a similar situation because you mentioned TSMC—and TSMC is a global leader. Okay. Cool. But also, the biggest subsidy recipient was Intel. Intel is our national champion. Intel is struggling like crazy.Intel is slated to receive as much as $45 billion in total subsidies because the CHIPS Act had grants, loans, and tax credits. So Intel is really in trouble.So did we, once again, pick a loser, along with TSMC? So that’s, I think, a concern we have to deal with. And that’s a traditional issue with industrial policy. Now, why did Intel get all that money? Well, Intel is an American company. Intel has an army of lobbyists in Washington, was instrumental in getting the CHIPS Act passed. Intel decided to locate its facilities in Ohio, a politically important place. And thus, there are questions about whether the government should, again, be giving $45 billion taxpayer dollars to a struggling company like Intel.Demsas: You’re pointing out a glut of good reasons why it’s not the most optimally efficient policy. But it seems obvious to me, at least, that it’s important for us to make semiconductors here or at least friendshore them. Is there an alternative way to do this?Lincicome: Yeah. Sure. Well, let me say one more thing about TSMC’s [fabrication facility], and then we’ll move onto your question. The other problem—and the thing I’m worried about—is that we’re actually not subsidizing bleeding-edge technology. TSMC’s fab that’ll be up and running next year is going to be very small, relative to its factories in Taiwan, and it’s not going to be producing the tippy-top-most innovative chip. It’s going to be producing four-nanometer chips instead of the industry two.It’s also insanely costly. Apparently, it’s costing about 50 percent more to build. And then, of course, a lot of other chip companies that aren’t TSMC are getting money, too, and not just Intel. And they’re getting money to produce what we call legacy chips. So these are clunky commodity chips that really have no security or even, really, innovative nexus. So I think we should be concerned. I don’t know the answer yet. You know, it’s still early in the ballgame, but there are some warning signs.Now, what could we do instead? A lot, because the big reason why companies weren’t producing a lot of chips here—although that’s a bit of a myth. About half of all chips consumed by American companies were still made in America before the CHIPS Act. But beyond that, we did lose some bleeding-edge capacity. Now, why did that happen? No. 1 reason is because of Intel. Intel was at the frontier and then totally botched it at 10 nanometers and has just become extremely behind the curve. So it’s just a corporate decision-making thing, nothing related to industrial policy.But the other big reason is because it costs a darn fortune to build a semiconductor facility in the United States. Now, some of that is just because we’re the United States. Things are more expensive than in a developing country. But a lot of it is permitting issues and materials issues and immigration issues. The semiconductor industry is one of the most immigrant-dependent industries in the United States.So tax issues, as well—we tax the construction of large structures at a much higher rate than we tax things like software and the rest. So you combine all these things, and there’s a free-market path to encouraging the onshoring of large manufacturing facilities, whether it’s semiconductors or anything else, and you could have tax reform and immigration reform and trade reform. Maybe we don’t put tariffs on construction materials and steel and everything else. So that’s a big part of it.And to the extent even that didn’t do the job, then you could see a role for the government to provide a targeted subsidy for national-security-related chips, so things our Defense Department needs or the tippy-tippy-bleeding-edge stuff that we need for, like, government supercomputers and the rest. But we didn’t get that. You know, that’s maybe a $5 billion bill. And, instead, we got this $60 billion—and then plus another $200 billion in potential tax credit—slush fund that just goes to anything and everything. So I think that’s a problem. And that’s a problem with industrial policy. What starts out as maybe a decent idea on paper just morphs into kind of a political albatross.Demsas: The only argument that I’ve seen that defends broad-based tariffs—because very few people will defend the, like, 60 percent tariff on goods from China, 20 percent on everything else the U.S. imports. I don’t think we even grow bananas. Even stuff we don’t actually make, no industries—coffee, stuff like that.But the one argument I have heard is that, while you don’t see increases in domestic manufacturing from these smaller tariffs, if you were to do this really broad-based tariff, it would just force industries to invest in the American economy, because American demand is just both lucrative but also, it would just reshape how capital markets thought about where to invest in companies. It would reshape the kinds of entrepreneurship that would happen, because now we do have to figure out how to satiate this American demand that they’ve been priced out of buying these cheaper goods from abroad.So setting aside the question about whether or not that would be good for the American consumer to have to now pay double or triple or whatever it is for these basic goods, why wouldn’t that work? Or what do you think would happen in a world where you actually saw these massive tariffs? You can go even higher. Like, you can say 60 percent tariffs on all goods outside the United States. What would actually happen here?Lincicome: Yeah. So basically North Korea, right? And I joke, but the reality is that tariffs also come with a deadweight loss, an economic loss in terms of economic growth and the rest. Yes. The United States is a big, diverse country with a very productive workforce and a lot of smart people and wonderful capital markets. But if you started imposing giant tariff walls, you’d have a few problems—the biggest being slower economic growth.By pushing workers into less productive industries, you would effectively be ensuring that the workforce, as a whole, is less productive. That means lower wages, less innovation outside of the sectors you’re targeting, right? You would push a lot of workers and resources into lower-value production. And let’s just leave aside the fact that you’d need giant greenhouses for bananas and stuff like that. We’ll leave that out.Demsas: Or we just don’t have bananas. No bananas. Yeah.Lincicome: Right. Heaven forbid. But I do think that’s the other thing that you would have to also consider. You would not just have lower economic growth and slower wages, but I think non-financially, it’d be a lower quality of life. And the grocery store is a wonderful example of that. I can remember back in the 1980s, the grocery store was not nearly as incredible as it is today. And a lot of that, today, is owed to open trade, globalization. And you would lose some of that. You would lose the variety and some of the things that make our lives richer. And I don’t just, by the way, mean bananas. And I don’t just mean food, although that’s a big one.We have this big globalization series going on. And we talk about fashion and film, and you can go down and on and on down the list. And there’s a lot of aspects of trade and open markets that make our lives fuller and richer in ways that aren’t just about where we’re working or how much we’re making, right? And so that would mean a little less, if not a lot less, of that too. I mentioned at the beginning those cool European and Asian pickup trucks we don’t get. Well, we wouldn’t get those either. We would just have fewer varieties of those things, even if, let’s assume prices are a little bit higher. Sure. But we just also wouldn’t have the variety.Demsas: I agree with you on this, but then it also gets to a point where sometimes I’m talking to people, and I realize there’s a difference in value. Some people don’t care about this, or they think it’s less important. They think that if we could get more manufacturing jobs in the United States, then it’s okay for us not to have bananas. It’s okay for us not to have a great variety of trucks. Is that stuff important? And I wonder, doesn’t this fall then down to political value judgment about what kind of world looks best?Lincicome: Yeah—yes and no, because I think if you started saying things like, Well, would you accept less medical innovation? Would you accept less scientific innovation outside of that? because resources are finite—so I think that if you gave people the fuller picture of the price of autarky, I think they would recoil. Particularly if you added things like, And also, your 401(k) is going to be smaller. Your houses are going to be smaller, there’s going to be less resiliency, not more.You might remember the baby-formula crisis, right? Well, we made all baby formula in the United States, except—because of protectionism. We had walls— tariff wall, non-tariff wall—around the country. Ninety-eight percent of baby formula consumed here was made here. We had a one factory closure, and the entire supply chain collapsed for a year. So you would have actually a more brittle economy than a more resilient one. We would not, at the end of the day, enjoy the much lower living standards, overall, just because we had a few more manufacturing jobs that people don’t even want.[Music]Demsas: We’re going to take a quick break. More with Scott when we get back.[Break]Demsas: Something you mentioned earlier on I always think is interesting is: The connection between tariff loving and immigration hating I always find very bizarre. We’re at low unemployment right now, so if you’re trying to spur more people to work in domestic manufacturing, it means you’re moving people out of other industries to work towards manufacturing. And if you have the kind of broad-based tariffs that are being proposed by the Trump-Vance ticket—I mean, they’re proposing, like, 60 percent on goods from China and up to 20 percent on everything else from the U.S. imports. These are massive, massive tariffs.That sort of thing means that you’re going to have the U.S. producing a ton more of the goods that Americans consume. And that would indicate that you would want more people coming here and working here. But at the same time, they’re opposed to immigration. So why do you think the anti-immigration and pro-tariff sentiments have gone hand in hand? They’re trying to deport millions of people too. I forgot about that.Lincicome: Nationalist sentiment, right? Look—I don’t think there’s a lot of logic or coherence in most economic nationalist arguments. And I think this is just a great example of it, for the reason you said, right? This isn’t 2014 anymore. Native-born employment has flatlined. We are an economy that needs more workers if it wants to grow at the rates we have grown accustomed to in the past. And that means we’re going to need just warm bodies. Just in terms of warm bodies, we’re going to need more of them. And obviously, immigration is a great source. I mean, babies are great, too, but they take at least 18 years to become workers, right? So we can’t do that tomorrow—at least, not that I’m aware of. I don’t know what the science is doing—Demsas: Latest technology? I think it’s still 18 years.Lincicome: Right. So we’re going to have a while on that. So immigrants are the obvious source for, you know—if we’re going to be making toasters in America again, like J.D. Vance wants, we’re going to need workers to do that. And robots are great, but robots can’t fill the gap entirely, particularly, again, in the near term. So there’s a huge disconnect there.And the other thing I’d note is that native-born Americans, in general, just don’t want to work in manufacturing. And this is something totally missed. We at Cato did a very expansive poll over the summer, asking people all sorts of questions. One of the questions we asked was a two-parter: One, Do you think the U.S. should have more manufacturing jobs? And it was, like, 80 percent yes. Yes. More people should work in manufacturing. Then we said, Do you want to work in manufacturing? And it was, like, 20 percent said yes. It’s almost the exact flip.There was a great article in Bloomberg a couple of years ago about furniture manufacturing here in North Carolina, talking about how they can’t find workers. And this was pre-pandemic, so it’s certainly gotten worse since then. You look at—the textile-manufacturing jobs in South Carolina pay $11 an hour to start. These are not the glamorous jobs that a lot of our politicians think they are. So to the extent we want these jobs in the United States, I am ambivalent. I want the market to determine that. Big surprise. They’re just going to have to come to the reality that we’re going to need more workers to do that. And, again, immigration’s the source.But there is another thing that I think the nationalists miss entirely, is that free trade actually can help reduce some of the immigration pressures in places like Central America, for example, because it’s going to boost the local economies and boost the stability of these places. Because a lot of immigration is that push-pull, right? People are living in terrible places. They’re like, I got to get the heck out of here. But also, the U.S. economy’s pulling them in. So to the extent that a trade agreement—and allowing companies to access the U.S. market to sell us shirts and stuff like that—can actually boost the local economies in places like, say, Guatemala, that’s going to actually reduce some of that push pressure on immigration, legal or otherwise.And there’s a fantastic study that actually showed everything I just said, most recently, and it said that you could reduce illegal border crossings by several hundred thousand if you had truly free trade with Central America for textiles, for the reasons I just described. So is that a panacea for the border issues? No. But would it help? Yes. And it is completely lost on our anti-immigration, anti-trade folks, the idea that trading more with places would actually reduce some pressures for more immigrants. They just want no trade and no immigrants, which just doesn’t make a lot of sense.Demsas: I want to get into some of the reasons for why tariffs haven’t been able to increase domestic manufacturing. There’s a really great study. Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce at the Fed—I hope, Aaron, I’m saying your last name correctly. I apologize if not. And they had this study where they looked at the Trump tariffs—the 2018, 2019 tariffs—and they find that the U.S. industries most exposed to tariff increases experienced reductions in employment.And they also find that counties more exposed to rising tariffs show increases in unemployment—more people are unemployed in counties that are more exposed to rising tariffs—and, of course, declines in labor-force participation. So people are just exiting the labor force entirely there. Why is that happening? Because why is even this narrow case of tariffs—they’re big tariffs, but they’re nothing like they’re being proposed now—why did that not improve domestic manufacturing?Lincicome: Right. For the moment, let’s just leave aside that the vast majority of us work in services. And if you work in services, you’re basically hurt by tariffs, regardless of anything.Demsas: Okay. This is one of my hobbyhorses, that whenever everyone talks about the working class, we pretend like everyone’s a manufacturer, but really everyone’s in the service industry, and it’s like, No one cares about those people. McDonald’s? Don’t care about them. It’s just bizarre.Lincicome: It’s crazy. Even for male-dominated professions—because we’re all worried about men not working and stuff—there are four times as many male-dominated, blue-collar jobs in services than there are in manufacturing. And we never talk about any of it, like you said. Whether it’s construction or security or repair, like automotive repair, you name it, there’s tons of jobs. Nobody talks about them. But anyway, we’re going to ignore all of those folks.Demsas: Just like our political leaders.Lincicome: Right. We’re going to ignore them. Sorry. Sorry, folks. We can get back to them later.Manufacturing—there’s three big reasons why tariffs actually harm American manufacturing. The first is that American manufacturing today is very much global. About half of everything we import into the United States is actually stuff used by American manufacturers to make other stuff—things like steel or machinery and semiconductors. The huge example of that is: The most advanced semiconductor-production technology comes from the Netherlands.We import that equipment to support semiconductor production in the United States, right?Demsas: These are intermediate goods.Lincicome: Yeah—intermediate. Oh, look at you! Nice. Yes. Exactly.Demsas: (Laughs.)Lincicome: When people use trade wonky terms, I’m always impressed. That’s great.So all these intermediate goods—you raise the price of those goods, which tariffs do, and you raise costs for manufacturers. That means those manufacturers spend less on employment and investment and the rest. You’re just raising their costs. It’s like a corporate tax but only for manufacturers that consume imports, which, again, is most of them.The second big channel is the export side, and that is through retaliation. Foreign governments typically don’t just sit there after a tariff is imposed on products they’re exporting and say, Oh, you got us. We’re toast. No. They retaliate. And they retaliate because they have their own domestic political considerations. They have strategic considerations about preventing even more tariffs. So that harms American manufacturers that export—American manufacturers that are already hurt because they’re facing higher import costs. So those companies are getting hit two ways: higher input costs and retaliation.The third channel is currency, and I won’t get into the weeds, but tariffs tend to increase the value of the domestic currency. So the dollar gets stronger. As the dollar gets stronger, there’s a good thing: That means that imports get a little cheaper. So it’ll offset some of that tariff pain. The bad thing is that it makes exports more expensive, and anybody who’s gone abroad and has a really strong dollar knows you can buy a ton abroad. That’s actually an import. You’re getting cheap imports. But if the dollar gets really weak and you go abroad, it’s the opposite. So just kind of think of it—it’s kind of those mechanisms, right?So those three channels, effectively, eliminate any benefit that manufacturers might get from tariff protection. And thus, like you said, the literature tends to show that countries with higher tariffs don’t have wonderful trade surpluses or burgeoning manufacturing industries. And in the United States, the empirical research from the Trump era shows much the same thing.Demsas: You’ve talked about the narrow cases in which tariffs make sense to you, which I think, largely, is around national security. But I think once you accept that logic, then it just becomes a political question about what things people value, right?There is this sense that people really care about protecting the manufacturing legacy of specific areas in the United States. And this is, I think, a legacy of 2016, when a lot of people were surprised by the victory of Donald Trump to the presidency. There was a lot of indexing on the fact that he won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and seeing that this narrative—that he really spoke to the white working class who had been disaffected by free trade.And this, of course, is right when the “China Shock” paper is becoming really central to the discourse. And so there’s a level here where I wonder if there’s a political-narrative thing that’s going on here, too, where, regardless of all the stuff that we’re talking about, if people want to win national elections, is this just necessary?Lincicome: No. I’m a firm believer that a lot of what’s going on with our protectionist moment right now is political. The conventional wisdom in Washington today is that, to win national elections, you need to win a handful of gettable votes—so Obama–Trump voters, basically, people who flipped—in a handful of important places, mainly in the industrial Midwest. And to win those votes, you need to offer lots of protectionism and industrial policy too—manufacturing-centric policy.And I think that is the reality—the conventional wisdom is. I think that is the case. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I’m not a political consultant, so I won’t dare to question it. And there was a good paper recently by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, another person—the “China Shock” authors—that said that Republicans did gain a little bit in places, thanks to the tariffs. Even though those places didn’t actually benefit economically, the tariffs were a political winner for Republicans, thanks to the idea that they were being protected. They weren’t actually being protected. The economy was actually a little worse. But they thought they were, and they were rewarding politicians for that.So I think that is the case. And it’s unfortunate because, first, I am not entirely convinced that tariffs and protectionism were what tipped the 2016 election.There’s a lot of other stuff bubbling under the surface. But the other big thing is: You actually look at the effect of import competition on these places pre-Trump, and it’s not nearly as devastating as the narrative makes it sound. Whether it’s the China Shock or NAFTA or anything else, these things undoubtedly had a small but significant negative effect on certain places, but it was small. There’s a lot of bigger things going on in terms of manufacturing job loss, in terms of communities surviving or dying.There’s a great study a few years ago from Brookings that found that, like, 80 percent of old industrial cities in the United States had transitioned to successful economies—places like Pittsburgh. So not every place ended up being like Youngstown, Ohio, right? Yet there’s this narrative that it was all trade, and every place got crushed. And that’s just not the reality, you know?And the other thing we ignore entirely is interstate competition. A lot of the jobs in the Rust Belt manufacturing—they’re still in the United States. They’re just not in the Rust Belt anymore. They’re in the Sun Belt. We don’t talk about that at all, either. It is all trade, trade, trade. And I think that’s really unfortunate.At the end of the day, what does that do? It means that the real solutions—and there are a lot of policies that could be pursued to help people adjust, to give them better training and education, to help them move if they need to move by lowering housing prices (you know all about that)—we don’t do any of those. Or, at least, we don’t focus on those. Instead, it’s like, Ah. We’ll just slap a tariff on a toaster, and suddenly Youngstown will be thriving again. And that’s just not reality, not just in the literature. It just doesn’t make any sense. But that’s politics for you, right?Demsas: Yeah. Yeah. I also think that one of the things that I wanted to get your—because you’ve thought about this for years as someone who’s working in trade. The political dynamics of tariffs, I think, are really important to understand. I think, broadly, my question for you is: Why are tariffs so popular if they’re so harmful? What is going on that, if you’re right, it’s creating all these problems, from baby-formula shortages, which is extremely politically costly, other kinds of shortages during the pandemic—very, very costly. If it’s leading to lower growth—all this stuff—what’s happening? Why doesn’t the political party just win 300 electoral votes by campaigning against tariffs?Lincicome: Right. Because they are extremely politically attractive to voters.There’s a guy named Bryan Caplan who wrote a wonderful book several years ago called The Myth of the Rational Voter. He’s a George Mason economist, libertarian guy. But this is more political-science oriented. He ticks through a bunch of biases we all have. And bias is kind of a bad connotation, but I don’t mean it that way. I just mean things that we innately feel.And tariffs check all of the boxes: an anti-foreign bias, a make-work bias. We like things that produce jobs, right? We have a status-quo bias. Like, we want to protect things that we see that are right in front of us. We are less inclined to want the unseen or the things we don’t know. We can, in fact, fear them. You can go down the list, and tariffs check all of those boxes. So that’s the first thing. Voters innately think, Oh, that’s great. You’re going to protect jobs with that tariff. Wonderful. But beyond that, the economics of tariffs are hard. It is counterintuitive that a tariff might actually reduce manufacturing output, right? It is counterintuitive, I think, that a trade deficit isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It sounds terrible, right? And it’s counterintuitive that if you cut imports, you actually cut exports too. So there’s all these little things in trade economics that make it a hard sell.And then, finally: It’s opaque. I mentioned before, when you go to the gas station, you see how prices change. So even some voters that are somewhat connected to the news can be like, Oh, wow. There’s this new conflict with Iran and Israel, and gas prices are going to go up. I get that connection. You don’t really get that with tariffs.Demsas: So you need a tariff ticker in grocery stores to show—Lincicome: Yes. I’ve actually long said we need—just the gas station ticker, you need that as well. I think that if you got a receipt from the grocery store and a lot of the line items was the tariff amount, I think that probably would change a few minds. And then, finally, the other thing is that tariffs are oftentimes a corporate tax, and corporate taxes can be hidden. They can either be absorbed by companies or passed on to consumers, again, in invisible ways. And that makes it hard too. So it’s a very, very tough sell.Now, I’ll note: We’ve known everything I just said for decades, if not centuries. And politicians came up with a fix. It’s called a trade agreement. Trade agreements are not, contrary to popular belief, primarily economic or even about foreign policy. They’re primarily political. There are ways for governments to tie their own hands when it comes to tariff policy. They’re like, I can’t be trusted with this. We went through Smoot-Hawley and all these other bad tariff episodes. We can’t be trusted with guiding tariff policy. So we’re going to delegate it all to the president, which, by the way, that was not the best idea, given Trump. But beyond that, we’re entering into agreements that essentially say that if we go back on our promises, well, what happens? Then the countries we’re trading with can retaliate, there can be litigation and the rest. And that can act as a check.The other big thing is: We’re going to offset import-competing industries. We’re going to offset their political power with exporters, and trade agreements are going to do that too. Because that’s the other political attractiveness, right? Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. The benefits of protectionism are very narrow, like the steel industry. Costs of protection are diffused. We all bear those little costs—again, an invisible cost.So how do you offset that? Well, a trade agreement does that, too, because you have exporters that are like, Oh, but I want access to that market. And I don’t just mean Boeing. I mean financial services and other companies. And so that was the political solution. Now, trade agreements have problems, but they were reasonably successful for 80 years in liberalizing trade, integrating economies, and checking the protectionist impulses of our political class. It was only in the last decade that Donald Trump hacked the whole machine. And we’re basically dealing with the aftermath.Demsas: Yeah. This diffuse-benefits, concentrated-cost thing—I think it’s just so key. Also, because even after the political constituency has died, it’s kind of hard—in general, once a law gets passed, it’s really durable. Repealing that law, on not just tariff policy but all policies—it kind of just lives on its own. It develops a constituency, whether it’s in the government or outside the government, that wants its continuation. And there’s also very few people who are going to make their political hobbyhorse to do good-governance reforms.But I write about housing policy a lot. And it’s funny—everyone is talking about housing policy now. Everyone’s talking about how to reduce the cost of housing, make it easier to do construction, all this sort of thing. I’ll have people who are in the Democratic Party or in the administration saying things like, Jerusalem, we need to lower costs. We need innovative ways for the federal government to do this. It’s really hard. It’s all at state and local level.And I’ll often just say, Hey. Did you guys know there are, like, massive tariffs on Canadian lumber, on Canadian softwood lumber? And they doubled those tariffs in August. And there’s none of this thinking about the diffuse costs to the American people. Like, Congress isn’t working on fixing that. It’s just a level at which I believe that they all care about lowering the cost of housing. I think that’s not a fake thing that they’re talking about here. But we don’t even think about tariff policy when we’re thinking about broad economic costs to the public. We only think about them narrowly in the question of, How does it hurt or benefit this specific industry? and not, What is the harm to the rest of the public?Lincicome: For sure. And every time you bring up potentially lifting the tariffs that are in place, what happens? Well, big lumber comes to your congressional office or big dairy when the—the dairy industry in the United States, highly protected. When the baby-formula thing was going down, they were vigorously opposing a long-term elimination of the tariffs on baby formula. Now, think about that for a second: baby formula. And these guys are out there, big dairy is out there fighting it. And it worked. Congress has not eliminated those tariffs, even though it’s the most sympathetic consumer possible, right?Demsas: And it was broadly unpopular. It’s very unpopular, what happened with the baby formula.Lincicome: Exactly. And every time you scratch a tariff, there’s a crony underneath, and they’re going to fight like heck to keep their windfall profits.And they’re paying attention. They’re editing Wikipedia pages to make the protectionism sound better. They are the ones laser focused on keeping the protection in place, while the rest of us are like, Well, five cents for some food that’s subject to a tariff, a few dollars here and there extra for a refrigerator or washing machine. Oh, well. But that stuff adds up, of course. Studies show that if you eliminated all of the protectionism that’s remaining in the U.S. economy—and we’re a pretty open economy—you would save consumers hundreds of dollars a year, if not more. And yet, because it is 10 cents here and 10 cents there, it just doesn’t resonate. And the other side is extremely motivated.Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Scott. I have one last question for you. And it’s: What’s an idea that you had that seemed good at the time but turned out to only be good on paper?Lincicome: Yeah. I struggled with this question.Demsas: Because you’ve always been right? Yeah. (Laughs.)Lincicome: Well, no, no, no. Because I wanted to find a good one. Self-checkout is my answer.Demsas: Oh, yeah?Lincicome: Yeah. I am a huge fan of self-checkout. And being me, I’m also a big fan of just efficiency, right? Waiting in line is terrible. I wrote a whole column about why you should never wait in line, because of the opportunity cost of doing so.So self-checkout—in theory, self-checkout is this amazing life hack. And I still love it, but I’m realizing that—let’s face it—and companies are realizing that self-checkout is not nearly the labor-saving, time-saving miracle that we think. And that’s because humans, alas, are still human. And for every guy like me who literally treats it like I’m trying to beat my best time ever at Costco when I’m going through the self-check—my daughter’s, like, handing me stuff. I mean, we’re literally gamifying it. It’s so great.Demsas: This is how I feel in the airport security line. I get so angry.Lincicome: For every person like me, who’s trying to get out of there as soon as possible and trying to break his own personal record, there are, like, 74 other people who are utterly confused by the technology, in no rush, wanting to maybe chat with the person behind the counter, wanting to pay by a check, confused by their coupons, or trying to steal. That’s the other big thing. And so, unfortunately, it has turned out that self-check is not the miracle technology that I was hoping. So it looked good on paper but less so in reality.Demsas: There’s a Safeway near my house. I moved recently, so I was checking out the nearby grocery stores. And the self-checkout is, like, I don’t know, an armed state. It’s so insane. You can’t exit the checkout without scanning your receipt. And I usually just throw my receipt away immediately, so I had to go get the receipt out of the trash. It wasn’t even functioning. Someone had to come and let me out and then look at all my stuff and make sure I wasn’t stealing. It was just this level of just—it genuinely would have taken me so much less time to wait in this line. But every time, I still go to the self-check. I don’t know why I’m doing it to myself.Lincicome: Of course. No. And I have a dream of opening up my own supermarket where we actually time people, and there’s, like, posted records of all this. But no. Alas, it still runs into problems.Demsas: Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show.Lincicome: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Great talk.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.Lincicome: I’ve really worked this out on Twitter a few times. You’d put a bar right at the checkout area, so people could watch, and stadium seating around it. It’d be great. Scott Mart!

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Secret papers list extraordinary powers a President might tap

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates during the Alight Align Arise: Advancing the Movement for Repair conference on June 7, 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Carol Lee Rose/Getty Images for Decolonizing Wealth Project I’ve always believed that the world is complicated and that our desire for simplicity is understandable but dangerous.  But when does the impulse to embrace ambiguity become its own pathology? Sure, the world is complex, but sometimes we have to pass judgment. We have to be willing to say that something is true and something is false, that something is right and something is wrong. So how do we know when things really are that clear? And how do we avoid the impulse to lie to ourselves when we know they’re not? Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author, essayist, and one of our most celebrated living writers. He’s just published a new book called The Message that has stirred up quite a bit of controversy because the longest essay in it is about his trip to Palestine. If you know almost nothing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the one thing you’d probably be comfortable saying is that it’s complicated. This is an assertion Coates challenges directly. For him, the moral arithmetic is simple and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian population is fundamentally wrong. So I invited Coates on The Gray Area to explore where he’s coming from and why he felt it was important to write this book. But the point wasn’t to have a debate or an argument. I invited Coates because I think he’s smart and sincere and doesn’t write anything without seriously thinking about it. This conversation is really about the role of the writer and the intellectual and what it means to describe the world with moral clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing What’s been the most surprising thing to you about the reaction to this book so far?  Ta-Nehisi Coates I’m surprised at the surprise. So, the CBS interview was the first live interview. I was not surprised by the aggression, tenacity, whatever you want to call it. Or, I should say, I knew that was going to happen eventually. I didn’t know it was going to happen there. So I was surprised in the sense that, “Oh, it’s right now.” And it took me a minute to catch up with it and realize that it’s actually happening right now, but this is what it is.  I’m surprised that people are like, “I can’t believe that happened.” I understand I am going to go into some arenas where you don’t usually say the state of Israel is practicing apartheid. That’s just not a thing that you usually hear people saying in places like that, and so I am going to say that. And what’s going to come out of that, I have no idea, but I hope people understand that this is what’s happening. Sean Illing You made a deliberate choice to write about Palestine, which, as you know, is an impossibly charged issue. Why wade into these waters? Why this conflict? Why now? Ta-Nehisi Coates I don’t think it’s impossibly charged. This is so clear. It was so clear. And when I saw that — and maybe this is naive, maybe you’re right, maybe it is impossibly charged — but I was just like, “Oh, this is easy.” Not easy like easy to do, easy to write, but the math is clear. You know what I mean?  The word I used at the time when I saw it was Jim Crow, because it was so obviously Jim Crow. You tell me you got one set of roads for one group of people, another set of roads for another group of people, and the roads you have for the other group of people are impossibly longer. They take more to get from point A to point B. Those roads have checkpoints, and the checkpoints sometimes materialize out of nowhere. This is all fact.  Whatever you think about it, maybe you think that’s the way it should be, but this is what it is. This is actually what it is. You’re telling me that one group of people has constant access to running water, and the other group of people don’t know when their water might be cut off?  You’re telling me that that other group of people, depending on where they live, if they’re in a particular area on the West Bank, it might be illegal for them even to collect rainwater? You’re telling me one group of people has access to a civil system of criminal justice, so that when they get arrested, they know their rights, they’re told why they’re arrested, lawyer, etc. You’re telling me the other group has no access to that? That they can be arrested, that no one needs to tell them why they’re being arrested? No one needs to tell their families that if they are killed, you don’t even have to return their bodies? What is that? Sean Illing So when you compare Palestine to the Jim Crow South, my reaction is that these are both moral obscenities, but they’re different. And I do think it’s complicated — Ta-Nehisi Coates Tell me why you think it’s complicated. Sean Illing I think it matters that many Palestinians still support the attacks on October 7. I think it matters that Black people in the Jim Crow South wanted to be treated as equal citizens in a fully democratic America.  I don’t think it’s generally true that Palestinians want equal rights in a fully democratic Israel. And if they had that they might vote to end its existence as a Jewish State. And you know what? If I was a Palestinian who was pulling my friends and my family out of the fucking rubble, I’d probably vote the same way. I understand that.  Personally, I hate the idea of a state based entirely on religious or ethnic identity. But I’m not Jewish and I don’t live in Israel and I understand why the people who do live there would have these concerns. And I also think it matters that Jews are indigenous to that land and have nowhere else to go. I just think that complicates the picture in other ways. Ta-Nehisi Coates I am of the mind that discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion is never acceptable. There is nothing in this world that will make separate and unequal okay, and there’s nothing — and I’ll use this word — that makes apartheid okay. That’s not complex for me. It’s like the death penalty is not really complex for me, because you cannot guarantee to me that the state will not execute an innocent person. You just can’t. So I’m against it, period. There aren’t any exceptions to that.  Sean Illing I haven’t been to Palestine but I know it’s bad and I know what you saw there is wrong. And I don’t believe there is any such thing as a moral occupation, because whatever the reasons for it, you cannot occupy a people without visiting cruelties upon them.  But for me, the main question isn’t necessarily the badness of the situation, which is incontestable. It’s how the hell do we end this? And all these complications that I was mentioning earlier, that’s the stuff that has to be accounted for if there’s any hope of a way forward.  Ta-Nehisi Coates We are sitting here asking ourselves why we don’t have a workable solution, while we exclude one of the two significant parties, and I guess my politics would say the most significant party, because that’s just where I come from in terms of the oppressed.  How can you decide what is going to be the solution when every night when I watch reports from the region, I can name only one person who is of Palestinian heritage, who I regularly see articulate a solution or an idea? How do we get to a solution when our journals, our newspapers, our literature that dominate the conversation is not just devoid of Palestinian perspectives, but it’s devoid of Palestinians themselves?  We are not having a conversation about solutions because we’ve basically prevented a whole group of people from entering into the frame. And so it’s like we’re putting the cart before the horse. We’re frustrated that we don’t have a solution, but we’re not actually talking to somebody.  Sean Illing I agree that our moral imagination needs to extend in both directions as far as possible. I understand writing this as a kind of corrective, feeling like there was a lack of empathy for the Palestinian experience because their story hasn’t been told enough, hasn’t been represented enough. I can understand that, I really can. And if I’m being honest, I think if I went there and saw the suffering firsthand, all of this would feel a whole lot less abstract to me and it would hit differently. And I don’t know how that would change how I think about it — Ta-Nehisi Coates So when are you going to go, Sean? Sean Illing It’s a fair question, and the only honest answer is I don’t know. Ta-Nehisi Coates You should go. I know it’s hard. And look, I’m putting you on the spot, but it was extremely hard. First of all, you are a journalist. That’s the first thing. That’s my first case for you going. The second case is this is being done in your name. And we’re going to pay for it. We’re going to pay for it one way or the other. We will pay for this. We will pay for this.  God, now I think it’s your responsibility to go. I’m sorry, but I really do believe that. I really do believe that because you are someone who is obviously curious, obviously wants to know things. And the reason why I’m pushing you is because that vague sense of injustice is exactly what I had. That is exactly how I felt, man. Sean Illing But I’ll push you a little on that because it runs in both directions. If I went to Israel and toured the villages that were plundered on October 7, I’d feel this same kind of indignation and rage. Ta-Nehisi Coates You should, though. You should see that, too. I don’t think those feelings are contrary. Sean Illing No, I don’t mean to say they’re contrary. I’m just saying I would still be left feeling the sense of hopelessness at the tragedy of it all. Ta-Nehisi Coates I think you would know more, though. I think you would know more. You sound like me. This is what I thought. Even on the eve of the trip, I was like, “Boy, this is going to be really complicated.” I thought the morality of it would be complicated. And there’s a reason why I began that chapter in [World Holocaust Remembrance Center] Yad Vashem, and it is because the fact of existential violence and industrial genocide brought to the Jewish people of this world is a very, very real thing.  And it’s like, how do you confront that and reconcile that with Israel? Because you want that group of people to be okay. You feel like maybe that group of people is entitled to certain things. And I mean that in the best kind of way. They’re entitled to a kind of safety, given what happened to them. You feel deep, deep sympathy. And so before I went, I was like, “Wow, this is going to be morally dicey.” I think you should go. I’m not even saying you’re going to agree with me. I’m not saying you’re going to end up where I ended up, but I think you should go. Sean Illing Do you think both sides of this conflict can tell a story about it that makes them right and the other side wrong? Because there are so many victims and perpetrators on both sides, because the cycle of violence and retaliation stretches back so far. Ta-Nehisi Coates I don’t think it stretches back that far. It’s 1948. It’s not even 100 years. I mean, I interviewed people that were very much alive in 1948, so I don’t even think it’s back that far. I think that when we say things like that, no disrespect, but I think we say things like that to make it harder than it actually is. It’s a lifetime that is not even over yet. And what I would say is my opposition to apartheid, to segregation, to oppression, does not emanate from a belief in the hypermorality of the oppressed or even the morality of the oppressed. The civil rights movement kind of fooled us with this because it was kind of a morality play and it was a very successful strategy. But whether Martin Luther King was nonviolent or not, segregation was wrong. Even when Malcolm X was yelling “by any means necessary,” segregation was still wrong. It was still wrong. So for me, it’s not even a matter of sides being right. The system that governs both sides is wrong. Sean Illing I remember once hearing you talk about the vulgarities of punditry. Pundits are not in the truth-seeking business. Pundits make pronouncements. That’s the whole stupid, mindless game. But you’re not like that. You have never been like that.  One reason I retreated into podcasting is that I don’t feel that pressure to pronounce in that way, and even doing it in a serious way for me felt futile. But I don’t have your stature and I don’t have your reach, so it’s different for you, I imagine. Do you think you can make a real difference here? Or is that not even part of the calculus?  Ta-Nehisi Coates I needed to write what I saw. This is uncomfortable to say, but I think this moment matters. I was talking to a good friend yesterday, a colleague, a very intelligent and sharp young writer. And we were actually sitting around a table. It was a Muslim woman and another writer there, and we were all in sympathy in terms of our politics. And she’s making the point that this thing that’s happening right now, it actually matters, it’s making a difference. And I was saying, I want out.  I’m doing this book tour and then I’m out of here, man. I’m going back to my French studies. I’m out. And I’m not out because I’m scared to say what I want to say. I’m not out because of the heat. I am out because it just feels unnatural. And part of it feels unnatural because I’m not Palestinian, but it also feels contrary to writing, which is always seeking, always trying to learn, always trying to figure it out, always asking questions. So when you’re making these pronouncements, as I admit I am now, you wonder, am I actually betraying the craft? Should I have just written a book, put it out, and be done with it? There’s always that voice in the back of your mind. But when I was over there, man, what they said to me over and over again was, “Tell them what you saw.” Sean Illing I come on this show every week and I praise the virtues of doubt and uncertainty and I believe in that. But refusing to describe things simply and clearly can become a kind of moral and intellectual crime. You’re right about that. And I still think sometimes things really are complicated and not so neat and maybe the challenge of being a writer and or just a human being is being honest and wise enough to know the difference. But it is hard sometimes, and I do think this situation is complicated, and it’s also true that sometimes withholding moral judgment can be its own kind of cowardice.  Ta-Nehisi Coates Yeah. And again, I just want to take it back. When that day comes, when the Palestinians are back in the frame, when they’re invited to tell their own stories, when they’re invited to take their place at the table, I have no doubt that what will come out of that will be quite complicated.  South Africa’s complicated. They defeated apartheid, but did they change the basic economic arrangements? My understanding is not as much as a lot of people would’ve wished. Better than apartheid, but it’s not done. It is indeed quite complicated. The victory is indeed quite complicated, but the morality of apartheid is not. What is hard for me is I’ve been on a couple of shows now where I’ve had some debate about this with people, and they never challenge the fact of what’s going on. So when I say half the population is enshrined at the highest level of citizenship and everyone else is something less, they don’t say, “Ta-Nehisi, that’s not true.” But perhaps this is just where I sit. It’s like when your parents grew up in Jim Crow, when they were born in the Jim Crow, that is an immediate no-go. I feel like I don’t know what comes after this, but that is wrong. That’s wrong. You know what I mean? What is after that might be quite complicated and quite hard, but that is not the answer at all.  I’m sitting in a cave in the South Hebron Hills [in the West Bank] with a group of people, and they’re telling me about their fears of being evicted out of a cave, man. When I look at — “Hey, that’s complicated” — when I know full well it’s not. What to do about it is probably complicated. But you begin from the basis that this is wrong and the very difficult work of figuring it out can proceed after that. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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