The U.S. Needs to Stop Gutting the Institutions That Make It Work
PLUS: Caitlin Clark's March Madness mission
Over the past three years, COVID-19 has taken the lives of approximately 1.1 million Americans. It’s estimated the vaccine prevented 18 million hospitalizations in the United States and saved the lives of another 3.2 million Americans. During the pandemic, public health officials worked tirelessly to protect Americans from the disease and keep the national health care system functional. What lesson have we taken from that experience? Lauren Weber and Joe Achenbach published an answer last week in the Washington Post:
At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority, according to a Washington Post analysis of laws collected by Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press as well as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University.
Health officials and governors in more than half the country are now restricted from issuing mask mandates, ordering school closures and imposing other protective measures or must seek permission from their state legislatures before renewing emergency orders, the analysis showed….
The result, public health experts warn, is a battered patchwork system that makes it harder for leaders to protect the country from infectious diseases that cross red and blue state borders.
For example, public health officials in Ohio can no longer close businesses or schools at the center of an outbreak nor order someone exposed to a deadly contagious disease to quarantine. In North Dakota, state health officials are prohibited from issuing mask mandates. Florida legislators barred schools from requiring students to get coronavirus vaccines, while Iowa legislators have forbid school officials from requiring students to wear masks. Montana empowered local elected officials to overrule the directives of local health boards during a public health emergency.
There’s a very reasonable argument to be made here that elected representatives should be the ones ultimately responsible for either making or approving decisions of this magnitude. Yet it’s also not unusual for legislative bodies to delegate authority to boards of experts tasked with managing emergencies or situations that require a high degree of specialized knowledge. That’s not an easy dilemma to resolve, and one that’s part of an eternal debate about whether it’s better to have a democracy by the people or for the people.
But what’s truly shocking about this development is that many Americans walking away from a seriously disruptive pandemic have concluded it is better to weaken public health institutions in this country than strengthen them. That’s completely the wrong lesson to take from a pandemic that has killed roughly as many people as the population of Montana. Said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, “One day we’re going to have a really bad global crisis and a pandemic far worse than COVID, and we’ll look to the government to protect us, but it’ll have its hands behind its back and a blindfold on.”
Some will argue these public health organizations ultimately hurt themselves by offering the public bad advice. For the most part, however, organizations like the CDC offered the public their best possible advice based on the best evidence they had at any given moment in the midst of an ongoing crisis. When they did offer guidance that didn’t reflect the science, it was typically a “noble lie” intended to shape public behavior. For example, early in the pandemic, public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci downplayed the need to mask. There is some evidence Fauci privately believed that, but other signs suggest he downplayed masking to prevent the public from hording masks at a time when frontline health care workers didn’t have enough PPE.
It’s fair to criticize Fauci for making this strategic recommendation. One can argue a public official should never under any circumstance mislead the public for even well-intentioned strategic reasons, as that can undermine public confidence in official recommendations. But Fauci also had good reason in the spring of 2020 to fear COVID could lead to the collapse of the nation’s healthcare system. At a time when we still knew little about the virulence of the disease but could see the strain it was placing on hospitals in Europe and New York City, and as Americans were hording toilet paper, Clorox, and hand sanitizer, Fauci may have concluded a noble lie was genuinely in the public’s best interest.
What is odd, however, about those who dragged the CDC for initially getting the mask recommendation wrong is that they couldn’t offer a better scientific recommendation themselves. They also used the CDC’s error as an excuse to ignore the CDC’s updated recommendation on masking, which matched the eventual scientific consensus. Rather than seek out better knowledge, public health critics instead threw their hands into the air and touted the pointlessness of obtaining knowledge. When they did cite scientific knowledge, it often came from sources far more dubious than the ones they blamed for dispensing bad advice. If you’ve lost trust in Dr. Fauci as a medical expert, a good alternative is not Joe Rogan.
Public health officials also caught all kinds of hell for encouraging schools to close. That will remain the most debated action undertaken during the pandemic. Yet what that criticism ignores is that many (but not all) who advocated re-opening schools were also those who took the dangers of the pandemic least seriously. It was hard to believe people determined to re-open bars, restaurants, and other gathering places in the summer of 2020 really cared about the safety of children or would take the necessary steps should rising case counts suddenly imperil those kids’ well-being. And it’s not as though that concern wasn’t ultimately borne out: By the time school resumed in fall 2020, the daily per capita death rates in counties that favored Trump in that year’s election—in other words, the counties most likely led by elected officials inclined to disregard public health recommendations—had permanently passed the daily per capita death rates in counties that favored Biden. Even if you do believe it was right to fully re-open schools in the fall of 2020, I’d say you’d also have to admit that, in most cases, the officials who supported that move were the equivalent of broken grandfather clocks, which don’t keep time accurately but are still right at least twice a day.
I guess what I’m saying is, during the pandemic, public health institutions—which had planned for events like this and had the knowledge base to deal with it—mostly got it right. The pandemic’s toll on society would have been much greater without their work. And they definitely offered better advice overall and demonstrated a much greater concern for the public good than the elected officials and public figures who not only rolled their eyes at public health recommendations but often aimed their followers’ ire at the public health officials making those difficult recommendations.
Yet more people now despise their national, state, and local public health institutions than at the onset of the pandemic. Maybe some of that is expected; it’s hard to lead a nation through a time of great distress and come out of it without having engendered some level of public antipathy. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s absolutely astonishing people would conclude they need to kneecap the institutions that handle public health emergencies in the wake of a public health emergency.
The precarious position of public health institutions in the United States is but one example of how American institutions have fallen into a state of disrepute and neglect. Some of this is the result of willful attempts by right-wing politicians to gut agencies in order to score political points with their base or remove a check on their political power. For instance, a major story in The Atlantic this week by Barton Gellman looks at the continued threat posed by election-denying elections officials, often now the only Republicans able to win their party’s nomination for that position. Their and their supporters’ belligerence have run skilled and qualified elections officials from both parties out of office. In another example, Republicans have exploited Americans’ hatred of taxes to significantly underfund the IRS, which has hindered the agency’s ability to process tax returns and enabled wealthy tax cheats, costing the U.S. government trillions of dollars in revenue. (The Inflation Reduction Act has pumped billions of dollars into the IRS to address this problem.) It’s not always conservatives, though, who assail political institutions. Liberal calls to “Abolish ICE” or “Defund the Police” imply the problem with these necessary agencies are their very existence rather than the way their agents are carrying out their duties.
But the United States’ institutional crisis runs deeper than politics. Many of the organizations that have traditionally tied communities together have faltered. Church attendance has been in decline for decades, but the pandemic has hastened the closure of churches. Local news sources have either vanished or shriveled up, depriving communities of the sort of watchdog journalism that keeps public officials in check. And as we can buy nearly anything we want online, many brick-and-mortar business endeavors—i.e., book stores, movie theaters, department stores, malls—have struggled or closed, leaving huge holes in our local retail landscapes.
Don’t mistake my concern about institutions here for a blind reverence for institutions. There are institutions that make grievous mistakes and deserve to lose their reputations. Sometimes institutions fail because they don’t adapt to the times. It’s also important to acknowledge there are drawbacks to placing too much faith in institutions. Institutions can attain and consolidate excessive social power; place the interests and preferences of the institution ahead of the society they purport to serve; and encourage (and even enforce) groupthink, mediocrity, and complacency. There are numerous institutions at work today that I think ought to be reformed or overhauled.
But of course, institutions provide many benefits to society as well. To begin with, there is their organizational capacity, which allows them to plan and coordinate complex undertakings. Because of their size, they tend to have numerous resources and personnel at their disposal that others can tap into to fulfill their own objectives. Institutional culture typically encourages the development of expertise and quality control (although, again, that isn’t guaranteed.) Institutions also foster a sense of belongingness and even meaning, either among their members or among those they serve. Institutions are often resources in and of themselves, organizations that build community, assist in solving social problems, and knit together the fabric of society.
Institutions help societies accomplish big things. The United States likes to fashion itself a nation of rugged individuals, but individuals alone usually cannot accomplish the tasks institutions typically undertake. It is very difficult to manage a nation as big and complex as the U.S., but it would be nearly impossible to organize and coordinate any sort of activity at the national—let alone local—level without institutional knowledge and resources.
I fear these lessons are lost on most Americans today, who not only have the means and willingness to sever themselves from institutions but often see institutions as either too constraining or even the source of society’s problems. Again, in some cases, that may very well be true, but we shouldn’t overlook the benefits we derive from healthy institutions. We will find it extraordinarily difficult to cope with many of the problems we are bound to confront in the coming decades if we allow our nation’s institutional muscle to atrophy. My concern is we already have.
How did we arrive at this point? This decline in institutional trust has actually been going on for about fifty years, as the chart below shows.
Historically speaking, Americans’ loss of confidence in institutions began in the 1970s, as the War in Vietnam, Watergate, and a series of economic shocks led many to question the faith they placed in the government and other previously trusted organizations. That era also unleashed a new spirit of individualism in American society. The American left came to regard traditional American institutions as personally constraining and coercive. The American right came to power by extolling the virtues of unfettered free market capitalism, which emphasized the pursuit of individual economic self-interest and regarded government as a “problem” that, institutionally, should be small enough to drown in a bathtub. While the progressive left has for the most part regained its trust in government, many on the right still despise it and are almost conditioned to condemn government action as an infringement on personal freedom. Trust in institutions recovered somewhat in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but trust plunged to new lows as the War in Iraq turned into a quagmire, the nation struggled to recover from the Great Recession, and Tea Party activists renewed the conservative broadside against government.
It isn’t only politics, however, that has led to a weakening of institutions in America over the past fifty years. Part of it was a cultural shift that came to emphasize individual expression. People sought meaning beyond the sources that had traditionally supplied it. For example, in terms of religion, millions of Americans abandoned established Christian churches and joined start-up non-denominational evangelical churches, explored New Age practices, turned to self-help advice, or renounced their faith all together. In this time, Americans also quit joining civic organizations, as participation in collective civic affairs no longer felt like a priority.
Finally, technology—particularly the Internet—has played a major role in weakening institutions. One way this happened was by replacing real institutional membership with virtual membership that caters to specific individual preferences. More significantly, however, the Internet upended the economic models that kept pre-Internet institutions profitable. Amazon is a one-stop shopping destination that has squeezed out many brick-and-mortar retailers. Gig work has turned many workers into temporary hired hands. Digital music services, while empowering many more musicians to record and distribute music, have turned the recording industry into a shell of itself. Streaming threatens to do the same to the film and theater industry. Free, abundant, and niche online news sources have hollowed out print media news rooms, but because online media have struggled to monetize their product, the quality of coverage has suffered, particularly at the local level. Additionally, Craigslist, Ebay, and Cars.com have rendered classified ad sections—once a major source of revenue for newspapers—obsolete and driven many local papers into bankruptcy. Those websites are certainly handy, but no one ever wondered when they went online if it was worth trading away local news institutions for them.
The institution that epitomizes the problem with institutional decline in the United States is the political party. In the late 1960s, liberal activists frustrated with conservative, establishment, and pro-war voices in the Democratic Party compelled the party to change its presidential nomination procedure to give rank-and-file members greater influence over that process. Republicans would adopt a similar procedure by the end of the 1970s. The new, more democratic nomination process weakened the influence party insiders exercised over candidate selection. Now, presidential candidates had to win over primary voters first in Iowa and New Hampshire and then the rest of the states rather than sway party bigwigs in smoke-filled backrooms. Additionally, the ability of parties to support candidates financially was hindered by a ban on soft money that went into effect about twenty years ago. At around the same time, candidates found they could raise large sums of money online by courting small-dollar donors.
All these developments went a long way toward democratizing political campaigns, but in this new age, parties beyond the halls of government are shockingly weak, basically little more than a brand. They struggle to coordinate the activity of members. Central party organizations dominated by party elites have little control over the nomination process. Without a reservoir of financial resources, they also find themselves marginalized during campaigns and unable to exert significant influence over officeholders. Entrepreneurial candidates—who easily raise money on their own and appeal directly to impassioned activists through social media—not only act independently of the party but even defy it. It is as though the roles have reversed: Rather than candidates serving the party, the party serves the candidate.
Few Americans would want to return to the time of the smoke-filled room, but our parties and politics have suffered as a result of weakened party institutions. While the Democratic Party has certainly felt the effects of this (the second place finisher in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries has only registered as a Democrat when seeking that party’s presidential nomination) the consequences for the Republican Party have been pronounced for both the party and the country. Consider:
The GOP’s inability to prevent its rank-and-file members from putting bad candidates like Roy Moore, Herschel Walker, and Mehmet Oz on the ballot has caused the party considerable embarrassment and cost it winnable elections.
Unable to use the threat of withholding campaign funds as a way to compel officeholders to toe the party line or agree to intraparty compromises, Republican legislative leaders often find themselves at the mercy of GOP officeholders who only feel obligated to the rump of voters who support them in primary elections. It should come as no surprise, then, that the House Republican caucus is so easily held hostage by the likes of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Green and is guiding the country to a potentially ruinous and pointless showdown over the debt ceiling.
The GOP is currently captured by Donald Trump, an insurgent candidate whom nearly every party leader will privately admit is unsuited to hold high office but whom party officials cannot check. Republicans who stand up to him are usually drummed out of office.
Additionally, the RNC cannot produce a party platform articulating its beliefs, and has outsourced its messaging operation to Trump and FOX News. It is often in rebellion against itself and struggles to govern. In the next few years, it is likely either to collapse or become a despotic ruling party.
Most Americans dislike our two-party system, and it is not unusual to hear partisans bemoan the state of their own party. Many would love nothing more than to stick it to both parties and weaken their standing in the American political system even further. The irony, however, is that if we really wanted to improve the performance of our parties so that they are more productive and better caretakers of the public good, we would take steps to strengthen rather than weaken them as political institutions.
I had hoped coming out of the pandemic Americans would have gained a greater appreciation for the institutions that organize our social, political, and economic relations. I’d also thought Americans would have wanted to bolster the institutions that serve them and their fellow citizens after four years of Trump-style neglect and vandalism. Instead, Trump’s supporters continue to behave as vandals, and a descent into an “every man for himself” society remains a contingency in the back of many people’s minds. Consequently, few seem interested in reinforcing this nation’s institutions.
There is always the danger that strengthening the United States’ various institutions could stifle individual freedom or entrench power among those who would wield it ineffectively or irresponsibly. There is a balance that needs to be struck here, and consideration must be given to institutional design. Yet I worry in this country we’ve moved too far in the direction of undermining our nation’s institutions. That’s something we may come to regret when the next crisis hits.
Further reading: “The Ugly Elitism of the American Right” by Tom Nichols (The Atlantic)
Signals and Noise
“We have no choice. If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever. People are tired of RINOs [Republican in name only] and globalists. They want to see America First. This is the final battle. They know it, I know it, You know it, everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win, or we win and if they win, we no longer have a country….In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today I add: I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”—Don Trump at CPAC
We were treated to more private messages from FOX News personalities this week thanks to Dominion’s lawsuit against the cable network:
Tucker Carlson, on January 4, 2021: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.”
Tucker Carlson, that same day: “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy hating on FOX News journalists:
Hannity: “‘News’ [as in FOX’s news division] destroyed us.”
Doocy: “Every day.”
Hannity: “You don’t piss off the base.”
Doocy: “[Those in the news division] don’t care. They are JOURNALISTS.”
Hannity added he “warned” people at FOX about the news division “for years” but there is “NOTHING we can do to fix it.”Laura Ingraham, complaining about the news division after it called Arizona for Biden: “We are all officially working for an organization that hates us.”
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham grousing to one another:
Carlson: “We devote our lives to building an audience and they let [anchor] Chris Wallace and [reporter] Leland f*cking Vittert wreck it. Too much.”
Hannity: “Too much is correct. I am disgusted at this point.”
Ingraham [later in the exchange]: “I think the three of us have enormous power. We have more power than we know or exercise…Together.”Tucker Carlson: “All of [Trump’s business ventures] fail. What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong. It’s so obvious.”
As predicted when Kevin McCarthy gave him exclusive access to Capitol Hill security tapes, Tucker Carlson is actively trying to rewrite the history of 1/6, airing footage from the event that portrays the insurrectionists as nothing more than sightseers. Conveniently excluded from his coverage: Hours of violent combat between the rioters and police officers. It’s like claiming footage of a murderer walking calmly away from his crime effectively exonerates him. Not that right-wingers will care. (Well, some right-wingers care, notably those who had to run from those sightseers.)
David A. Graham of The Atlantic breaks down how absurd Carlson’s narrative is and how characteristic it is of Trump’s “don’t believe your own eyes and ears” politics. (“Look at the hallways they didn’t smear feces on and statues they didn’t deface! is not an especially good argument.”)
Also from the The Atlantic: Tom Nichols reminds readers the QAnon Viking, whom Carlson thinks deserves a new trial after showing him roaming the halls with Capitol police officers, was never put on trial for his crimes that day because he pleaded guilty and is currently serving a 41-month jail sentence.
Just worth noting: McCarthy has handed Carlson a lot of material to lie about. Doing so was apparently part of the deal he swung with Matt Gaetz to become Speaker.
The “whistleblowers” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is hauling before his “Weaponization of Government” Committee have flopped, with witnesses not only exposed as harboring violent inclinations themselves but not even witnessing the wrong-doing they allege. Not that right-wingers will care.
States run by Republicans, including Florida, are quitting ERIC, a data-sharing consortium of states that shares voter registration information to keep voter rolls updated and free of fraud. The states that have withdrawn from ERIC have falsely accused ERIC of making voter fraud easier. Not that right-wingers will care.
“If I had a hammer, I’d a-hammer in the morning/ I’d a-hammer in the evening/ All over this land…”
Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky thinks it was a “mistake” Trump didn’t bomb meth and fentanyl labs in Mexico.
From Carl Hulse and Catie Edmondson of the New York Times: “Hard-right House Republicans are readying a plan to gut the nation’s foreign aid budget and make deep cuts to health care, food assistance and housing programs for poor Americans in their drive to balance the federal budget, as the party toils to coalesce around a plan that will deliver on their promise to slash spending.” That’s an odd move coming from a party that thinks it’s the new voice of lower-income and working class Americans. Meanwhile, the House Freedom Caucus has issued a plan that calls for steeper spending cuts than the rest of the House Republican caucus appears ready to go forward with in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
Josh Boak of AP has an idea of what it will take to get Congress to raise the debt ceiling: A market crash.
You can take a peak at what’s in Biden’s recently released budget here. He looks to trim the debt, protect entitlement programs, and boost defense spending.
On the heels of Eli Lilly’s plan to cap the cost of insulin at $35, Biden’s budget would cap the price private insurers can charge for insulin at $35 as well.
The Republican-led government of Arkansas has passed a law repealing the requirement that employers verify the age of children younger than 16 when hiring them for a job. That same article noted a bill moving through the Iowa legislature would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to take certain jobs in meatpacking plants and limit the liability of businesses if a child is sickened, injured, or killed on the job. Kids are so annoying. From last week: “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.” by Hannah Dreier of the New York Times
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems very interested in undermining free press protections by making it easier to sue when media outlets publish false information. DeSantis’s targets are media organizations like the New York Times but FOX News would certainly collapse under the new standard.
From the Washington Post: “Florida legislators have proposed a spate of new laws that would reshape K-12 and higher education in the state, from requiring teachers to use pronouns matching children’s sex as assigned at birth to establishing a universal school choice voucher program. The half-dozen bills, filed by a cast of GOP state representatives and senators, come shortly before the launch of Florida’s legislative session Tuesday. Other proposals in the mix include eliminating college majors in gender studies, nixing diversity efforts at universities and job protections for tenured faculty, strengthening parents’ ability to veto K-12 class materials and extending a ban on teaching about gender and sexuality — from third grade up to eighth grade.”
But check out this poll from USA Today/Ipsos: By a 56%-39% margin, Americans say “woke” means being aware of social injustice rather than being overly politically correct. That margin holds among independents at 51%-45%. As Susan Page of USA Today writes, “The findings raise questions about whether Republican campaign promises to ban policies at schools and workplaces they denounce as ‘woke’ could boost a contender in the party's primaries but put them at odds with broader public opinion in the general election.”
Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic looks at how Biden avoids engaging Republicans on culture war issues beyond abortion. It appears to be part of a strategy outlined in this brief on how Democrats can compete for votes in factory towns by American Family Voices.
The Republican-led chambers of Florida’s state legislature have filed bills that would ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he will sign such a bill. The bill will make an exception if the life of the mother is at risk or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, although (I saw this coming) sexual assault victims would need to prove they were victimized, a massive loophole I’m sure anti-abortion activists will exploit to keep pregnant sexual assault victims from getting abortions.
BREAKING: From the Washington Post: “The Texas judge who could undo government approval of a key abortion drug has scheduled the first hearing in the case for Wednesday but took unusual steps to keep it from being publicized, according to people familiar with the plans.”
A man has sued three women in Texas for allegedly helping his ex-wife obtain medication that terminated her pregnancy. It is the first case of its kind to emerge in Texas following the end of Roe v. Wade.
Five married women who were denied abortions despite risks to themselves and their fetuses have sued Texas over the state’s restrictive abortion laws. Said one of the women, who was denied an abortion because she wasn’t sick enough before becoming septic twice, “You don’t think you’re somebody who’s going to need an abortion, let alone an abortion to save my life. If anybody reads my story, I don’t care where they are on the political spectrum, very few people would agree there is anything pro-life about this.”
Joe Biden is shifting to the middle with the 2024 election looming.
The Biden administration appears poised to open up a 23 million acre tract of land in the far north of Alaska—the largest pristine piece of land in the United States—to oil drilling. Biden had promised not to expand drilling on federal land. The strain on the oil market caused by the War in Ukraine is said to be driving Biden’s decision. Environmental activists strongly oppose the move, which carried enormous political risk for Biden among his political base.
Bipartisan support is emerging in the Senate for a carbon tariff, which would slap a fee on imports that add to CO2 emissions. The EU is moving in this direction as well, which is partly responsible for spurring this retaliatory action in Congress.
The Biden administration is considering once again detaining families who cross the border illegally, a policy he had ended as part of a promise to create a more humane immigration system.
Meanwhile, there aren’t enough workers to fill the positions that will be created by Biden’s green energy legislation. As Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) said, “There’s no question that addressing our broken immigration system in America would address many workforce shortages. There’s employment needed right now. Jobs are available.”
The Biden administration is contemplating the mass vaccination of poultry to stem the deaths of chickens from bird flu. Meanwhile, Foghorn Leghorn is having none of it and ingesting horse dewormer.
An Emerson College poll has Don Trump leading Ronald DeSantis in New Hampshire 58%-17%. Yeah, it’s early, but that poll has Trump cracking 50%. Furthermore, even if the poll had a margin of error of 17% (meaning Trump’s support could be anywhere between 75% and 41% and DeSantis’s support could be anywhere between 34% and 0%) Trump would still be in the lead.
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is riddled with “deputy gangs” (the Executioners, the Banditos, the Regulators, the Spartans, the Gladiators, the Cowboys, and the Reapers) who require prospective new members to initiate violent encounters with the public before officially joining.
Adam Serwer looks at the constitutionality of boycott bans in The Atlantic.
Undergraduate college enrollment in the United States dropped 8% between 2019 and 2022.
Americans with federal college loans will soon need to start repaying them again once the pandemic-era hiatus expires. This is occurring as many Americans under thirty face increased economic strain.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are resuming diplomatic ties following a deal brokered by China. The two nations are regional rivals in the Middle East and fighting a proxy war against each other in Yemen. China’s involvement is seen as further evidence the United States’ influence in the region (and particularly with Saudi Arabia) is waning. I wonder if that’s necessarily a bad thing, though.
From The Economist: “A demographic tragedy is unfolding in Russia. Over the past three years the country has lost around 2m more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women outnumber men by at least 10m.”
With Ukrainians taking heavy casualties to defend a city of little strategic value, the Ukrainian defense of Bakmut looks like it’s more of a political than a practical operation.
Intelligence reports suggest a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline carrying natural gas from Russia to Europe through the Baltic Sea last year.
Max Abrahms argues in The Atlantic the United States’ policy toward Ukraine and Russia disregards the findings of International Relations scholars.
Missy Ryan of the Washington Post finds the United States struggling to surge the weapons production it needs to not only arm Ukraine but keep its own military stocked.
Garbage Time: A March Madness Preview starring Caitlin Clark
(Garbage Time theme song here)
March Madness is upon us again. I’ve barely watched any men’s college basketball this year. That won’t keep me from filling out a bracket, though. I’m not picking any upsets. I’ve heard the Big 12 is good, so I might advance the highest-seed Big 12 team from each region to the Final Four, and then pick either Baylor to win it all or Kansas to repeat. Now watch the Big 12 get smoked during the first weekend.
But enough of that. The story of the year in college hoops is the University of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark.
If you haven’t heard of Clark by now, it’s beyond time to start paying attention. The rangy West Des Moines native is Iowa City’s version of Steph Curry. That’s no exaggeration: Their styles of play—from the long-range threes to the way they finish around defenders at the rim—are eerily similar to one another. Like Curry, she’s always in range. (Pardon the NBA Jam graphic enhancements in the clip below, but Clark does actually play basketball like she’s in a video game.)
Those highlights are ridiculous. Defenders have to pick up Clark (27 PPG[!], 7.5 RPG, 8.3 APG) at half-court not because she’s actually going to shoot the ball from there…well, she might, but, no, the reason defenders have to pick her up there is just to make sure the level of difficulty of whatever shot she does step into actually increases a bit. Make it so she isn’t just sizing up the rim as she’s dribbling around out there. But then you get sequences like the one that begins at 1:13 above—where she evades a defender on a break by dribbling the ball behind her back and then, without losing a step, dials in a 27-footer from the Mediacom logo—and you realize she’s a magician whose greatest trick is being able to steal her opponents’ will to compete with a simple flick of the wrist.
Clark’s good at playing hero ball, too, and she knows it. Her she is a couple weeks ago with Iowa down 2 and 1.5 seconds on the clock against #2 ranked Indiana:
And then in the Big Ten tournament championship game, she only put up a 30 point, 10 rebound, 17 assist triple-double as Iowa dismantled #14 Ohio State 105-72. Clark scored or assisted on 68 of Iowa’s points; Ohio State only reached 68 points with 3:03 left in the game, by which point Clark and the rest of Iowa’s starters had already been subbed out. Iowa’s 37 point lead at halftime (61-24) was the largest halftime lead by any team over any ranked opponent this season.
All the characteristic step-back 3s you’d expect to see from Clark are on full display (Ohio State’s defensive strategy at times appeared to be “let’s hope she has an off-day”) but I dig those two sky hook assists that start the fourth quarter highlights, particularly that oh-so-casual first one to Monika Czinano. I’m not sure why the assist in the second highlight below wasn’t included in the above package, but I couldn’t leave it out; it’s a testament to how if Clark isn’t directly guiding the ball into the basket herself, she’s using her teammates to channel the ball to that final destination:
That pass is a rope. So yeah, Clark finished that game with a triple-double. That gives the junior 10 triple-doubles over the course of her collegiate career, which is the third-most all-time in both men’s and women’s college basketball. (Ahead of her on that list: Kyle Collinsworth of BYU [2010-2016] with 12 and Sabrina Ionescu of Oregon [2016-2020] with 26[!].) But that’s not all: A college player has only logged a minimum 25 point, 10 rebound, 15 assist triple-double once before, and that player was none other than Caitlin Clark, who did so this past January against a then undefeated Ohio State Buckeye squad. Of course she’s the Big Ten Player of the Year. Sports journalists will say she’s in the running for National Player of the Year, but that’s just trying to build some suspense for the sake of argument where there isn’t any.
Iowa isn’t invincible. They’ve lost six games this season, three early to opponents outside their conference (at Kansas State, on a neutral court against Connecticut, and at home versus North Carolina State) and three in the Big Ten (all on the road against Illinois, Big 10 regular-season champion Indiana, and Maryland, who pummeled them 96-68, although Iowa avenged that loss during the Big 10 tournament.) Iowa has good players but their roster isn’t as talented as other teams. They do, however, have Clark, who could decide to put this team on her back and make a run deep into March.
One team that does appear invincible, however, is Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks, who have yet to lose a game this year. Led by National Player of the Year candidate Aliyah Boston (13.3 PPG, 9.7 RPG), South Carolina (32-0) has rarely not dominated their opposition this season; they’ve only won four games by less than ten points, with three of those victories occurring on the road, and two occurring in overtime, including a 5-point OT win early in the season against an at-the-time #2 ranked Stanford squad. A highly-touted February match-up against then-#3 LSU turned into a rout.
As the most complete team, it would be foolish to pick against South Carolina in the tournament. And coaches will undoubtedly scour tape of that Iowa-Maryland game to figure out how the Terps held the NCAA’s best player to under 20 points in College Park. But there’s one thing fans of college basketball demand to see over the next three weeks, and that’s Caitlin Clark vs. South Carolina—David vs. Goliath, if you will—with the national championship on the line. College basketball journalists have signaled that’s what they want by elevating Iowa to #2 in their poll. ESPN’s bracketology still has Iowa sitting at a 2-seed, however. Hopefully, the selection committee can do what they can to grease these wheels. No matter what, both South Carolina and Iowa would have to beat good teams before getting the chance to face-off against each other, but let’s cross our fingers and hope we’re rewarded with exactly that—a showdown between college basketball’s best team and college basketball’s best player—a few weekends from now.