Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 670

Donald Trump’s real goal for 2016: Trying to beat Fox News

Donald Trump (Credit: AP/David Furst/Getty/Stan honda/Photo montage by Salon)

The conspiracy theory of the week is the idea that Donald Trump didn’t run to become president; he ran to become the head of the next conservative media empire. As the New Yorker reports, the Trump campaign has been joined in the last weeks by both Steve Bannon of Breitbart and Roger Ailes, the disgraced head of Fox News, fueling speculations that Trump’s real goal is to build a new conservative news media network.

The notion makes sense: How else to explain why Trump refuses to broaden his base of support and continues to stoke his core of racist, right-wing extremist fans? How else to explain why Trump has refused to reach out to the Republican establishment and build a larger political network? And how else to explain the dynamic duo of conservative media villains — Bannon and Ailes — playing a role in Trump’s campaign?

If the thought of a Trump presidency worries you, the thought of a Trump news network should scare the hell out of you.

As the speculation goes, Trump would launch a network that appeals to the right-wing fringe that currently watches Fox News. Building on the audience for Breibart, Trump would launch a media empire that was founded on the same principles we have seen in place during his campaign: hate mongering, extreme nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny and a total lack of connection to reality. If the campaign seemed to have fascist tendencies, imagine a news network founded on those same principles.

As The New Yorker reports, “We can be assured that a TBN (Trump Breitbart News) Network wouldn’t shy away from the conservative, or even the ‘alt-conservative,’ label. It would be nationalistic, xenophobic, and conspiratorial.”

Such a network would not only marshal the very worst in our society, it would serve to totally destabilize the role of Fox News. It would literally outfox Fox News, since it would likely pull some of its most devoted viewers and cause the network to have to completely rethink its strategy.

While it might be refreshing to think of Fox News shifting strategies, it would come as no solace if the shift happened in response to the rise of an even more conservative network.

It’s important to recall the significant role Fox News has played in shaping the narratives that dominate in our society. For instance, there is significant research to show that Fox News has single-handedly been responsible for destroying much of the fabric of our democracy. Running under the banner of “Fair and Balanced,” Fox News made a habit of reporting a pack of lies to their viewers. Whenever those lies were disputed, Fox News would cry about the “liberal bias” of the mainstream media and ignore it.

It was a brilliant move. It allowed the network to churn out hate, lies and stupidity while suggesting that any alternative viewpoint and any correcting information was nothing more than a “politically correct” attack. It allowed the network to make everything partisan spin. And it turned facts into ideological warfare and created conflict out of thin air. This is how you get the “war on Christmas” while ignoring the science of climate change.

Fox News also created the most loyal fan base of any news network by consistently suggesting that their viewers were victims of a system rigged to get them. Fox News viewers were the “silent majority” whose beliefs and values were being trampled on by the liberal power bloc. Because the draw was to appeal to viewers based on their beliefs and not their reason, the channel created a base of viewers that worshiped the network as if it were a religion more than a news station.

The consequence on our democracy can bee seen in the direct link between Fox News viewers and their lack of knowledge of current events. It can also be seen in their inability to process correcting information, even when that information comes to them from their own party.

The Fox News tactics didn’t just influence the mindset of their loyal viewers. They also radically transformed corporate news itself. As Fox News increasingly reported from an overt partisan position, it pushed outlets like MSNBC farther to the left. Some might remember that Ann Coulter once had a show on MSNBC. It’s hard to imagine her on the network now.)

But then something happened. Fox News became #1. It didn’t just dominate in its category — it won television. It became the most watched network of all.  And then its owner, Rupert Murdoch, also began to listen to his sons, James and Lachlan, who felt the station was too conservative and who didn’t like Ailes.

So just as Fox News was literally taking over the entire television news media landscape, there was talk of moving away from the extremist right-wing views that were its trademark and more towards the center. That was the context within which Trump launched his campaign.

The Trump campaign served to reveal the break in the network — the ongoing rule of conservative pundits like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly versus the new, more moderate vanguard of personalities like Megyn Kelly.  Kelly was considered by many to be the new face of the network — the one that would help it appeal to a younger demographic. And, even though Kelly has had her banner conservative moments — like when she ranted that Jesus and Santa Claus were white — her positions are far more moderate and her reporting far more incisive than the Fox News old guard.

The transition to a Fox News more dominated by Kelly-style reporting might have been seamless, but for Trump, whose campaign came in and revealed the deep friction between the Fox News founding values of hate, lies and spin and the newer vision for moderate, albeit still overtly conservative, reporting.

When Kelly and Trump feuded, leading to Trump’s decision to sit out the second debate, claiming he didn’t think Fox News could be fair to him — he effectively turned Fox News rhetoric back on itself. Then when Trump threatened to boycott the network, the network eventually caved. As Slate put it, Trump gave Fox News a taste of its own medicine.

Taking a page out of the Ailes playbook, Trump accused Fox News of being out to get him.  Any criticism of him was read as an example of bias, of Fox News serving the establishment, and silencing the truth.  Whatever we might think about Trump’s diminished capacities, it was a brilliant move.  Trump literally turned Ailes strategy back on his network.

Ailes, of course, is the mastermind who helped the Nixon-Agnew ticket use media to their advantage by spinning the story that all news was already liberal bias. His legacy in shaping the Nixon, Reagan and Bush campaigns is well-known. When Ailes turned his charm towards creating a network, he brought the same tactics he had used in GOP campaigns. As Politico reports, “Debuting in 1996, Fox by 2002 had overtaken CNN as the most-watched cable news network. Its key role in defining and promulgating right-wing issues and talking points over the last two presidential administrations — always in the vein of angry, resentful politics that Nixon made central to the modern Republican Party — is today well established.”

Today, though, Trump owns the politics of resentment and rhetoric of anger. As CNN reported during the Trump/Kelly feud: “Trump’s attacks on the network — like those he’s made on Mexicans, Muslims, Sen. John McCain, and others — are no random acts of emotion, conservative pundits and campaign strategists told CNN. Instead, they indicate calculated tactical moves designed to stoke support among a conservative base that no longer worships Fox News as it once did.”

Trump tapped into the ultraconservative base who had started to feel that Fox News was too supportive of the GOP establishment and not supportive enough of outsiders like Trump. Meanwhile many commentators on Fox News — from Karl Rove to George Will to Charles Krauthammer — claimed Trump was a problem for the party. The breakdown on the network, like the one in the party, opened the door for a splintered faction of extremists to argue that these “moderates” were no longer on their side.

Thus, Trump took the success of Fox News and its central role in the news media landscape and turned it against them. If Fox News used to be the source of rhetoric against the bias of the news media, now it was Trump making those same claims against them. As David Greenberg explains:

“He espoused a variety of the very same brand of politics that Ailes has successfully promoted, and the GOP has prospered with, since Nixon’s day: the substitution of bluster for reason, the angry scapegoating of others, the blind hatred and exaggerated fear of liberals in power, the appeal to traditional conservative values on polarizing social issues. Trump has merely upped the ante.”

Now that Ailes himself has left Fox News and we have evidence of his collaboration with Trump, this story is less about Trump competing with Ailes as it may be about him courting him.

And that is why Ailes teaming up with Trump and Bannon is so disturbing. If we take Trump’s blustering celebrity, Ailes cunning political strategy and Breitbart’s ultraconservative stance and combine them, we could have a news empire that will make the angry, fact-averse, polarizing reporting of Fox News look like the Disney Channel.

The bad news for us is that we might be able to vote against Trump in the November election, but there will be no national referendum on whether he gets to stay in the limelight.

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Not just a meat market: On Grindr, Nico Hines and rejecting shame

(Credit: Kostenko Maxim via Shutterstock)

The Daily Beast’s straight, married Nico Hines recently published “I Got Three Grindr Dates in an Hour in the Olympic Village” — an article that, by any standard, amounted to no more than reckless clickbait. The story was taken down less than a day after it was posted to the site in what can only be called a ridiculous failure of journalistic vision: The article provided identifying information that risked outing athletes Hines encountered on the app. The Daily Beast first — insult to Olympic injury — edited the piece, adding an editor’s note, and then deleted it entirely, including in its place a profuse apology that still reeks of anaphoric insincerity.

Coverage of Hines’ stunt and the fall-out often referred to Grindr as a “meat market” and “hook-up app,” in differing tones of flippant, presumptive, condescending, prudish and dismissive.

There’s no question Grindr connects queer men for fast sex through their phones. It does, and there is, of course, nothing wrong with that.

I want to talk about what happens when Grindr changes your life. Because it’s changed mine.

I take issue with the presumption in so many articles that Grindr is solely a hook-up app, because that suggests its influence does not reach beyond a fleeting sexual encounter. Hines’s scandal seemed all too keen to remind readers that Grindr is, exclusively, a shameful digital space for the seedy underbelly of a sexually-overcharged gay culture — which it’s not, or, at least, not in whole.

I recently started thinking about what my life at 18 would have looked like if the app existed then, just after I came out. All through my teen years I had been so fearful of other gay people, so certain they would take gross pleasure in judging and ridiculing me, the edge of “fun sass” sharpened in competition against me. We are often taught (and taught young) to despise ourselves and our queerness, to fear our queerness and to find what we can to despise in other gay people in order to feel superior, at least to them.

Which is why, sort of amazingly, Grindr and other gay apps have uniquely transformative power: in providing perspective and connection that I was sealed from at 18 and only accessed several years later.

One of the stunning things about the app — and no one really talks about this — is that Grindr puts into sharp relief what we might suspect, but so rarely see very clearly: Gay people are everywhere; they are around us always. To log on to the app is to be reminded of this. Whether you’re in a city, where the “grid” of faces and bodies maxes out around 900 feet, or in a small town in the Midwest (where this distance might be more like 65 miles), Grindr acts as a kind of magnetizing digital gay venue where we are confronted with the full home we are in, even if we are not at home with who we are.

What’s more, this display of faces and bodies is essentially a crowd showing up for their queerness and their desire. Think about it: Eighteen-year-olds suddenly confronted with the sexual actuality of those who, months prior, were authority figures — distant adults participating in lives so unknown to them. This is downright powerful. Even the blank profiles on the app contain the special charge of people who are, for whatever reason, not able to publicly show up for their gayness, yet sort of publicly showing up for their gayness right now — owning or at least leaning into it in some way. You can be out and not out on the app. And that provides fluidity that the term “out” itself actually eschews.

I think we don’t talk about this because it seems embarrassing, because a lot of people — gay and straight — conflate use of the app with an interest in gauche instant sexual gratification that, while not untrue, fails to see the app for what it really is. Grindr maybe never intended to become this, but it has: a deeply important connecting space — and emphatically not an ephemeral one — in which to self-identify as a gay body in this world and be seen doing so among peers, across boundaries.

Grindr has, intentionally or not, made a real space for gay people that affords them, at one click, the invaluable reminder that other gay bodies exist around them. That the app auto-repopulates the field of gay people around a user might at first seem unsettling, but it also re-proves the fact: Anywhere you go, that community is there. Grindr is not a safe gay space and likely never will be — no such space yet exists to my mind — but it is remarkable and enriching in ways we are too often simply refusing to acknowledge. This visibility can change lives.

I’ll admit my app-owed change here: Had I not downloaded Grindr, I would never have met the man who drove three suitcases and me to New York only months ago, or the first man I ever loved, or the model at whose party I befriended two lesbians who would basically adopt me and support me with the care of parents.

It is hard to imagine I am alone in having my life changed by people I would not have met if it were not for Grindr, and though this much transformation does seem to suggest an embarrassing overuse of the app, it is also testament to the sheer power of it. I think there are many amazing stories of gay connection made through Grindr that are buried for fear that the connections made would somehow be seen as less authentic if their origins are revealed.

I refuse to accept reductive reportages of Grindr itself. Let’s reconsider how we talk about the app, and live up instead to the connection we seek, in any capacity, and — in a world that seeks to demean and destroy us — recognize Grindr’s incredible potential to transform and enrich. Grindr has a truly uncanny power to act as a connecting (or disconnecting) agent: to bring one comfortably into their queerness or risk isolating them from a genuine, secure acceptance and love of it.

When we apply the low and easy language of trash to the app, we leech from these experiences a discussion with real integrity, one that allows Grindr a human element. Hines didn’t see the people: He saw their disembodied lust, the shadows projected.

Here’s as much of an anonymous back-and-forth as I want with Hines, the first and last message on his yellow screen from me: What made you think you know what Grindr even is?

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Trump in the bayou: The Tea Party, a sinkhole in Louisiana and the contradictions of American political life

Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri)

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

[This essay has been adapted from Arlie Hochschild’s new book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” (The New Press), which will be published on September 6th.]

Sometimes you have to go a long, long way to discover truths that are distinctly close to home. Over the last five years, I’ve done just that — left my home in iconically liberal Berkeley, Calif., and traveled to the bayous of Tea Party Louisiana to find another America that, as Donald Trump’s presidential bid has made all too clear, couldn’t be closer to home for us all. From those travels, let me offer a kind of real-life parable about a man I came to admire who sums up many of the contradictions of our distinctly Trumpian world.

So come along with me now, as I turn right on Gumbo Street, left on Jambalaya, pass Sauce Piquant Lane, and scattering a cluster of feral cats, park on Crawfish Street, opposite a yellow wooden home by the edge of waters issuing into Bayou Corne, La. The street is deserted, lawns are high and branches of Satsuma and grapefruit trees hang low with unpicked fruit. Walking toward me along his driveway is Mike Schaff, a tall, powerfully built, balding man in an orange-and-red striped T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. He’s wearing tan-rimmed glasses and giving a friendly wave.

“Sorry about the grass,” he says as we head inside. “I haven’t kept things up.” On the dining room table, he has set out coffee, cream, sugar and a jar of homegrown peaches for me to take when I leave. Around the edges of the living and dining rooms are half-filled cardboard packing boxes. The living room carpet is rolled into a corner, revealing a thin, jagged crack across the floor. Mike opens the door of the kitchen to go into his garage. “My gas monitor is here,” he explains. “The company drilled a hole in my garage to see if I had gas under it, and I do; 20 percent higher than normal. I get up nights to check it.” As we sit down to coffee at the small dining room table, Mike says, “It’ll be seven months this Monday and the last five have been the longest in my life.”

After the disaster struck in August 2012, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal issued an emergency evacuation order to all 350 residents of Bayou Corne — a community of homes facing a canal that flows into an exquisite bayou (a river through wetlands) with white egrets, ibis and spoonbills soaring across the water. When I visited in March 2013, Mike was still living in his ruined home.

“I was just starting life with my new wife, but with the methane gas emissions all around us now, it’s not safe. So my wife has moved back to Alexandria, a hundred and eighteen miles north, and commutes to her job from there. I see her on weekends. The grandkids don’t come either, because what if someone lit a match? The house could blow up. I’m still here to guard the place against a break-in and to keep the other stayers company,” he says, adding after a long pause, “Actually, I don’t want to leave.”

I had come to visit Mike Schaff because he seemed to embody an increasingly visible paradox that had brought me to this heartland of the American right. What would happen, I wondered, if a man who saw “big government” as the main enemy of local community, who felt a visceral dislike of government regulations and celebrated the free market, was suddenly faced with the ruin of his community at the hands of a private company? What if, beyond any doubt, that loss could have been prevented by government regulation?

Because in August 2012, exactly that catastrophe did indeed occur to Mike and his neighbors.

Like many of his conservative white Cajun Catholic neighbors, Mike was a strong Republican and an enthusiastic supporter of the Tea Party. He wanted to strip the federal government to the bone. In his ideal world, the Departments of Interior, Education, Health and Human Services, Social Security, and much of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be gone; as for federal money to the states, much of that, too. The federal government provides 44 percent of Louisiana’s state budget — $2,400 per person per year — partly for hurricane relief, which Mike welcomes, but partly for Medicaid and, as he explained, “Most recipients could work if they wanted to and honestly, they’d be better off.”

Louisiana is a classic red state. In 2016, it’s ranked the poorest in the nation and the worst as well in education, health and the overall welfare of its people. It also has the second highest male incidence of cancer and is one of the country’s most polluted states. But voters like Mike have twice elected Governor Bobby Jindal who, during his eight years in office, steadfastly refused Medicaid expansion, cut funding for higher education by 44 percent and laid off staff in environmental protection. Since 1976, Louisiana has voted Republican in seven out of ten presidential elections and, according to a May 2016 poll, its residents favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 52 percent to 36 percent, respectively.

Mike was an intelligent, college-educated man with a sense of stewardship over the land and the waters he loved. Given the ominous crack in his floor and the gas monitor in his garage, could he, I wondered, finally welcome government as a source of help? And had the disaster he faced altered his views of the presidential candidates?

“Alka Seltzer” in the rain puddles

The first sign that something was wrong had been a tiny cluster of bubbles on the surface of Bayou Corne’s waters, and then another. Had a gas pipe traversing the bottom of the bayou sprung a leak? A man from the local gas company came out to check and declared the pipes fine. At the time, Mike recalls, “We smelled oil, strong.”

Soon after, he and his neighbors were startled when the earth began to shake. “I was walking in the house when I felt like I was either having a stroke or drunk, ten seconds,” Mike recalls. “My balance went all to hell.”

It was then that he noticed that crack in his living room floor and heard a sound like a thunderclap. A single mother of two living in a mobile home a mile from Bayou Corne thought her washing machine was on, and then remembered it had been broken for months. Lawns started to sag and tilt. Not far from Mike’s home, the earth under the bayou started to tear open, and, as if someone had pulled the plug in a bathtub, the bayou began sucking down brush, water and pine.

Majestic century-old cypress trees crashed in slow motion and disappeared into the gaping mouth of the sinkhole then forming. Two clean-up workers had cast out booms not far from the sinkhole to contain an area of water shiny with oil. To steady their boat, they tied it to a nearby tree, which then slid into the sinkhole, as did their boat, though both men were rescued.

In the following weeks, pristine swamp forest was replaced by oily sludge as the earth began to leak natural gas. “During a rain, the puddles would shine and bubble, like you’d dropped Alka Seltzer tablets in them,” Mike said. Gradually, gassy sludge infiltrated the aquifer, threatening the local drinking water.

What had caused the sinkhole? The culprit was Texas Brine, a lightly regulated, Houston-based drilling company. It had drilled a hole 5,600 feet beneath the floor of Bayou Corne to mine intensely concentrated salt, which it sold to companies making chlorine. The drill accidentally punctured one wall of an underlying geological formation called the Napoleon Salt Dome, three miles wide and a mile deep, sheathed in a layer of oil and natural gas. (One hundred twenty-six such domes lie under Louisiana’s land and water and are often mined for brine, with toxic chemicals sometimes being stored in the resulting cavities.) When the drill accidentally pierced the side of a cavern inside the dome, the wall crumpled under the pressure of surrounding shale, sucking down everything above it.

The sinkhole grew. First, it was the size of one house lot, then five house lots, then the length of Crawfish Street. By 2016, it covered more than 37 acres. The pavement of the main road into and out of Bayou Corne began to sink, too. Levees along the bayou, originally built to contain rising waters in times of flood, also began to go down, threatening to extend the oily sludge over nearby grassland and forest. Meanwhile, shell-shocked evacuees doubled up with family members in spare rooms, campers and motels, turning to each other for news of the expanding sinkhole.

Environmental protection: Missing in action

Mike backs his boat into the canal. I climb in. It sputters to life and putts out into the wider bayou. “Around here you pull up bass, catfish, white perch, crawfish and sac-a-lait,” he says, “at least we used to.”

Mike was a water baby. He loved to fish and could describe the habits and shapes of a dozen kinds of local fish. He headed for the water as often as he could, although he got little time off. So “environment” wasn’t simply a word to him; it was his passion, his comfort, his way of life.

Mike has long disliked the idea of a strong federal government because “people come to depend on it instead of on each other.” He grew up in a close-knit community not far from Bayou Corne on the Armelise sugarcane plantation, the fifth of seven children of a plumber and a homemaker. As a boy, he tells me, “I went barefoot all summer and used to shoot crows with my rifle, use the guts for fish bait.” As an adult, he worked as an estimator, measuring and pricing materials used in constructing the gigantic platforms that house oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. As a child of the old South who grew to manhood in an era of big oil, he was for state’s rights and wanted even state government kept to a minimum.

This, however, was the last situation he’d ever imagined being in. “We’re a close community here. We leave our doors unlocked. We help each other rebuild levees during floods. You got the two-beer levee job, or the four-beer one.” He laughs. “We love it here.”

For a man who could lose himself for hours in his garage welding together parts of a two-seater Zenith 701 airplane from a kit and who described himself as “to myself,” he welcomed the easy sociability of Bayou Corne. It wasn’t the simple absence of government Mike wanted; it was the feeling of being inside a warm, cooperative group. That’s what he thought government replaced: community. And why pay heavy taxes to help the government rob you of what you most prize?

At a distance, we see a sign nailed to the gray trunk of a Tupelo tree: “DANGER, KEEP OUT, HIGHLY FLAMMABLE GAS.” Around it in the water are concentric circles of bubbles, scuttling outward like small bugs. “Methane,” says Mike, matter-of-factly.

By mid-2013, officials had declared Bayou Corne a “sacrifice zone” and most of the 350 residents had fled. A small group of “stayers” like Mike were now criticized by the “leavers” who feared their presence suggested to Texas Brine that “it wasn’t so bad” and so might lower the price the refugees could set for their suffering.

Everyone knew that the company’s drill had caused the sinkhole, but that didn’t settle the question of blame. To begin with, Texas Brine blamed Mother Nature, claiming (falsely) that earthquakes were natural in the area. Then it blamed its insurers and the company from which it rented space in the dome.

Both those who stayed and those who left were mostly angry at “the government.” For one thing, Governor Bobby Jindal had waited seven months before visiting the victims. And why was his first visit so delayed, he was asked, and why was it announced so abruptly on the morning of a mid-week day when most sinkhole refugees were at work?

Like so many of his neighbors, Mike Schaff had twice voted for Bobby Jindal and, as someone who had worked in oil all his life, approved the governor’s $1.6 billion tax incentive program to lure more of that industry to the state. For three years, it was impossible to tell whether the oil companies had paid a penny to Louisiana since, under Jindal, the job of auditing their payments had been handed over to the Office of Mineral Resources, which has close ties to the industry and between 2010 and 2013 performed no audits at all.

In Louisiana, on-the-books environmental regulations were laxly enforced by conservative state legislators, many of whom were oilmen or, like Governor Jindal, took donations from Big Energy. An eye-opening 2003 report from the Inspector General of the EPA ranked Louisiana last in its region when it came to implementing federal environmental mandates. Louisiana’s database on hazardous waste facilities was error-ridden. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality (a title missing the word “protection”) did not know if many of the companies it was supposed to monitor were “in compliance.” Its agents had failed to inspect many plants and even when it did find companies not in compliance with state regulations, it neglected to levy or collect penalties.

The Inspector General was “unable to fully assure the public that Louisiana was operating programs in a way that effectively protects human health and the environment.” According to the state’s own website, 89,787 permits to deposit waste or do other things that affected the environment were requested between January 1967 and July 2015. Of these, only 60 — or .07 percent — were denied.

The redder the state, the more the toxic waste

Louisiana was, it turned out, in good company. A 2012 study by sociologist Arthur O’Connor showed that residents of red states suffer higher rates of industrial pollution than those of blue states. Voters in the 22 states that went Republican in the five presidential elections between 1992 and 2008 live in more polluted environments. And what was true for Red States generally and Louisiana in particular was true for Mike himself. Looking into exposure to toxic waste, my research assistant Rebecca Elliot and I discovered that people who believe Americans “worry too much about the environment,” and that the United States already “does enough” to protect that environment were likely to be living in zip codes with high rates of pollution. As a Tea Party member enmeshed in the Bayou Corne sinkhole disaster, Mike was just an exaggerated version of a haunting national story.

Mike wanted to live in a nearly total free-market society. In a way Louisiana already was exactly that. Government was barely present at all. But how, I wondered, did Mike reconcile his deep love of, and desire to protect, Bayou Corne with his strong dislike of government regulation? As it happened, he did what most of us tend to do when we face a powerful conflict. He jerrybuilt a new world out of desperate beliefs, becoming what he termed a “Tea Party conservationist.”

Seated at his dining room table surrounded by cardboard boxes filled with his belongings, he composed letter after letter of complaint to members of the Louisiana legislature, demanding that they force companies like Texas Brine to pay victims in a timely way, that they not permit storage of hazardous waste in precarious waterways or again permit drilling in Lake Peigneur, which had suffered a devastating drilling accident in 1980. By August of 2015, he had written 50 of them to state and federal officials. “This is the closest I’ve come to being a tree-hugger,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of the environmentalists I meet are liberal. But I’ve had to do something. This bayou will never be the same.”

As we putted around the bayou, I asked, “What has the federal government done for you that you feel grateful for?”

He paused.

“Hurricane relief,” he finally responded.

He paused again. “The I-10…,” he added, referring to a federally funded freeway.

Another long pause. “Okay, unemployment insurance.” (He had once briefly been on it.)

I ask about the Food and Drug Administration inspectors who check the safety of our food.

“Yeah, that too.”

The military in which he’d enlisted?

“Yeah, okay.”

“Do you know anyone who receives federal government benefits?”

“Oh sure,” he answers. “And I don’t blame them. Most people I know use available government programs, since they paid for part of them. If the programs are there, why not use them?”

And then the conversation continued about how we don’t need government for this, for that or for the other thing.

Mike and his wife had recently moved from their ruined home near the sinkhole into a large fixer-upper on a canal flowing into Lake Verret, some 15 miles south of Bayou Corne. At nights, he can hear the two-toned calls of tree frogs and toads. He had jacked up the living room floor, redone the bedroom molding, put in a new deck and set up his airplane-building kit in the garage. A recent tornado had ripped the American flag from a pole on that garage, although it hadn’t harmed the Confederate flag hanging from the porch of his neighbor.

His new home is near the entrance to the spillway of the magnificent Atchafalaya Basin, an 800,000-acre National Wildlife Refuge — the largest bottomland hardwood swamp in the country — overseen, in part, by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. On my last visit, he took me in his flatboat to fish for perch, pointing out a bald eagle on the bare branch of a tall cypress. “I’ve gone from the frying pan to the fire,” he explained. “They are disposing of millions of gallons of fracking waste — the industry calls it ‘produced water’ — right here in the Basin. It can contain methanol, chloride, sulphates and radium. And they’re importing it from Pennsylvania and other fracking sites to go into an injection well near here. Salt can corrode the casing of those wells, and it’s not far from our aquifer.”

A sinkhole of pride

Mike loves the waters of Louisiana more than anything in the world. A vote for Hillary Clinton would protect the Clean Water Act, secure the EPA and ensure that government would continue to act as a counterbalance to the Texas Brines of the nation. But there was one thing more important to Mike than clean water: pride in his people.

He had struggled hard to climb out of the world of a poor plumber’s fifth son, to make it to a salary of $70,000 a year with a company that built oil rigs, to a third and at-last-right wife and to a home he loved that was now wrecked. At the entrance gate to the middle class, he felt he’d been slapped in the face. For progressive movements from the 1960s on — in support of blacks, women, sexual minorities, immigrants, refugees — the federal government was, he believed, a giant ticket-dispensing machine in an era in which the economy was visiting on middle-class and blue-collar white men the sorts of punishment once more commonly reserved for blacks. Democrats were, he was convinced, continuing to make the government into an instrument of his own marginalization — and media liberals were now ridiculing people like him as ignorant, backward rednecks. Culturally, demographically, economically and now environmentally, he felt ever more like a stranger in his own land.

It mattered little to him that Donald Trump would not reduce the big government he so fervently wanted cut, or that The Donald was soft on the pro-life, pro-marriage positions he valued, or that he hadn’t uttered a peep about the national debt. None of it mattered because Trump, he felt, would switch off that marginalization machine and restore the honor of his kind of people, of himself. Mike knew that liberals favored care for the environment far more than Republicans, Tea Partiers or Donald Trump. Yet, despite his lost home in a despoiled land, like others of his older white neighbors back at the Bayou and here in the Basin, Mike was foursquare for Trump; that’s how deeply his pride was injured and a measure of just how much that injury galled him.

What would Trump do to prevent another calamity like Bayou Corne with its methane-drenched mud, its lost forest, its dead fish? He has been vague on many of the policies he might pursue as president, but on one thing he was clear: he would abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Attack of the clones: Four new JonBenét Ramsey shows jump on the true-crime TV bandwagon

A still from "The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey" (Credit: CBS)

Imitation follows success on television, leading to a bounty of serviceable clones that don’t quite match the original’s greatness. That’s what happens in the best-case scenarios. In the worst cases, the industry responds to a wonderful discovery by flooding us with shoddy imitations. In the process, the extraordinary value of that first work can be suffocated as paler copies pile on, earning our revulsion — which is a positive human reaction, mind you, that can help us avoid harm and bad taste.

But for whatever reason, the idea of exhuming the unsolved murder of Colorado pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey continues to transmute revulsion into fascination. This is why, nearly two decades after the six-year-old was found strangled to death in her basement, four new TV projects are on the way, with three of them airing this month.

First is A&E’s “The Killing of JonBenét: The Truth Uncovered,” premiering 9 p.m. Monday. The following Monday, September 12, brings us Investigation Discovery’s “JonBenét: An American Murder Mystery.”

The centerpiece of this explosion is CBS’s “The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey,” a six-hour docuseries split into three segments airing over three nights of primetime. That kicks off Sunday, September 19, continuing on Monday, September 20 before concluding on Sunday, September 25.

CBS’s project features a team of experts who previously worked on the case, in addition to new ones, and among the geegaws it employs in its quest for the truth is a full-scale model of the Ramsey home.

We’ll get a few weeks to catch our collective breath before Lifetime delivers its teleflick “Who Killed JonBenét?” starring Michel Gill as JonBenét’s father John Ramsey, Julia Campbell as Patsy Ramsey and Eion Bailey as Boulder Police Department lead detective Steve Thomas, the man who was convinced that Patsy did the crime.

Adjacent to all this is Burke Ramsey’s widely teased three-part interview with Phil McGraw, with the first segment airing on the “Dr. Phil” September 12 season premiere. Burke was nine years old when his sister was murdered and also emerged as a possible suspect at the time. Apparently this is the first time he’s breaking his silence. John Ramsey appears in the A&E trailer as an interview subject, while Patsy Ramsey is featured in archival footage. She died of ovarian cancer in 2006, at the age of 49.

Full episodes were not available for review at the time of this story’s writing. (Nor is there any word on whether some other outlet plans to add to this ghoulish remembrance by re-airing CBS’s 2000 telepic “Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: JonBenét and the City of Boulder,” which starred Kris Kristofferson as detective Lou Smit and Marg Helgenberger as Patsy Ramsey.)

But the teasers are contradictory in terms of revealing each project’s tone and intent. “What the media has done, instead of covering this as a story that should be properly investigated . . . it’s become entertainment,” opines the first expert in the A&E trailer, before chyrons invite us to “Get the Whole Truth” with new interviews, new evidence and new revelations. This is all shown in the foreground of faded footage of JonBenét dancing and twirling in garish pageant gear.

The CBS preview is more than three minutes long, and includes an array of bold statements insinuating that, like “Making a Murderer” and “Serial,” the conclusions of this team of experts could change the trajectory of a case that gone unsolved for two decades, and not for lack of investigating.

While it’s impossible to fully evaluate these series without having seen them, the entire business has a whiff of Al Capone’s vault about it, all hype and demolition but revealing a roomful of nothing in the end.

This is what we get for devouring the “This American Life” spinoff podcast “Serial,” and HBO’s “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” for binging Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” and raving over FX’s scripted miniseries “The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story” and ESPN’s critically-acclaimed “30 for 30” docuseries “OJ Simpson: Made in America.”

Between our demonstrated addiction to the true crime doc format and this murder’s 20th anniversary hook, the tabloid obsession to end all tabloid obsessions is being served up buffet style.

The important distinction between this revisiting of a child’s murder and content such as “Serial,” “The Jinx” and the others is that the latter group has broader cultural value. It sure was fun analyzing Sarah Paulson’s wigs and John Travolta’s eyebrows-as-performance-art in “The People v. OJ Simpson,” but the series as a whole delivered a vital message: It and “The Jinx” show that with enough money and influence, the criminal justice system can be rigged.

In “The Jinx,” Durst, an obscenely wealthy New York real estate heir, purchased the finest legal defense possible to help him stave off a murder conviction, while Simpson’s lawyers capitalized on his fame and L.A.’s abysmal race relations to transform the courtroom proceedings into a soap opera. The strategy won his acquittal of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.

On the other end of the spectrum, our brick-by-brick examinations of “Serial” subject Adnan Syed and the men at the center of “Making a Murderer,” Brendan Dassey and Steven Avery, help to illustrate the ways in which a person’s socioeconomic status or heritage adversely affects his shot at receiving impartial treatment within our justice system.

All of these works yielded thoughtful conversations about class, race and the systematic structures that ensure unequal treatment in the eyes of the law. In fairness, a few of these elements play out in JonBenét’s case as well. If the Ramseys had not been white, wealthy and able to hire a PR firm to handle press, if their daughter had resembled the average six-year-old as opposed to a painted, prancing porcelain doll, maybe her murder investigation would merit a “Dateline” Friday night true crime installment or an Investigation Discovery special. But not a multi-episode 20-year reunion spectacle on broadcast and cable television.

The miserable fact that JonBenét’s lipsticked smile still beams at us from tabloid magazines all these years after her death speaks to the media’s preoccupation with the rich and their air of exclusivity and with the bizarre circumstances surrounding the girl’s murder.

The O.J. Simpson trial may have forced America to take a hard look at its relationship with fame, race and privilege, but JonBenét kept talk show hosts like Geraldo Rivera, Jenny Jones and Leeza Gibbons busily dissecting its more nauseating elements for quite some time. Her fully made-up face came to symbolize of the sexualized image of young girls and the higher value the news media places on the lives of Caucasian girls over children of darker hues. (Visit the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s search page, and notice how many faces on its posters are brown. Then ask yourself whether you’re familiar with any of their stories.)

Before JonBenét Ramsey’s murder, most of America had no idea that child pageants existed. Today, thanks to the circulated footage of the Ramseys’s home videos, we have “Toddler and Tiaras” and “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.” JonBenét Ramsey’s name is a punchline, her image a cartoon used for parody on “Family Guy” and “South Park.”

Reminder: she was six years old when she was murdered.

There’s a chance these series and specials will suitably earn their place in this genre. That would be wonderful. Regardless of how each is received, we’re only at the beginning of exploring this latest iteration of docu-crime format: NBC has greenlit “Law & Order: True Crime” from executive producer Dick Wolf; the eight-episode first season will focus on the 1996 trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez. Errol Morris is working on a six-part true crime series for Netflix, which has also picked up a second season of “Making a Murderer.”

Every trend in TV cloning eventually veers away from the impactful and toward high-profile ratings grabs anyway. Given the international notoriety of JonBenét’s case, a docuseries treatment was probably inevitable. And in contrast with other true crime tales, at least this time the victim is at the center of examination. She is its star, she is everything; unfortunately, it’s for all the wrong reasons.

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High times: How will budtenders and trimmigrants fare if pot is legalized?

(Credit: AP/Robert F. Bukaty)

Twenty years after legalizing the use of medical marijuana, California voters will decide whether to permit the use of recreational pot. This week, in a special series, Capital & Main looks at what will happen if Prop. 64 passes in November. “High Times: How Legalizing Marijuana Would Transform California” reports on how a legal cannabis industry will affect the environment, workers and the state’s economy.

In February of 2013, the employees of Wellness Connection, a medical marijuana provider based in Auburn, Maine, were worried about their product. They’d observed mold and fungus on their plants too often; bugs were infesting their work areas. Some of the chemicals they were being asked to use, such as the insecticide pyrethrin, had known health effects. Brittany Wallingford told the Portland Press Herald at the time that about a quarter of her colleagues were sick, and suspected the mold was at fault; others blamed the insecticide, which Maine law prohibits using on medical marijuana plants.The workers weren’t just concerned about their own health. They also feared for their clients, some of whom were already seriously ill. That February, several employees at the company’s Auburn cultivation site staged a one-day walkout. One month later when, despite management promises, nothing changed, several employees joined the United Food and Commercial Workers union, and made plans to organize their workplace. (Disclosure: The UFCW is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Medical marijuana dispensaries had been legal in Maine for four years by the time Wellness Connection’s staff members lodged their complaints. The industry had begun to supplant blueberries as the state’s top cash crop, bringing in an estimated $78 million. But because the federal government classified marijuana in 2013, as it does today, as a dangerous and illegal drug with no recognized medical uses, organizing could be risky. Both the UFCW and the Teamsters had already successfully organized cannabis operations elsewhere. But if an employer retaliated against a worker for organizing, that worker might have nowhere to complain. It wasn’t clear whether the National Labor Relations Board would step in to defend employees of what was, on a federal level at least, a criminal operation.

The Maine case was extreme. When state inspectors investigated the employee complaints, they found Wellness Connection of Maine guilty of 20 different violations, including use of pesticides and the manufacture of a highly concentrated form of marijuana called “kief” that was prohibited under the state’s medical marijuana law. Employees also alleged the company had used intimidation tactics to interfere with their organizing efforts, and asked the NLRB to intervene.

The federal agency’s advice memo on the Wellness Connection of Maine complaints is rich with detail about the specific tasks of cannabis workers, from the rough trimming of leaves and stems to the processing of bud through a machine called a “twister.” (“The twister uses a rotational vacuum and cutting process to remove the remaining stems and leaves from the buds, which have the most medicinal value.”) The document also succinctly summarizes the state of the market as it existed in late October 2013, when the memo came out: “The state-authorized medical marijuana industry is currently worth approximately $1.5 billion,” it reads, “and could grow to $6 billion in 2018.” It was already a market too big and too persistent to ignore. It was, therefore, “appropriate for the Board to assert jurisdiction … even though the Employer’s enterprise violates federal laws.”

“That was a turning point for us,” says Jeff Ferro, lead organizer with the UFCW’s Cannabis Workers Rising campaign, which was established in 2011. “Until then, the federal government hadn’t weighed in on workers’ rights in the cannabis industry.” It was a huge step toward legitimizing jobs within a nationally booming business.

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have now passed laws legalizing some form of medical marijuana; Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia have additionally lifted prohibitions on recreational use. Other states, including California, have measures on their November ballots to consider the end of cannabis prohibition. Both the Teamsters and the UFCW have organized dozens of marijuana-related businesses in several states, with contracts that guarantee everything from pension plans to tuition reimbursements for employees and their offspring.

All has not gone smoothly. In April of 2015, the UFCW in New Jersey withdrew an organizing petition in the face of legal complications; one year later, a cannabis dispensary worker in Colorado was allegedly fired for his organizing activity. Ferro believes that labor rights will firm up as cannabis continues to go mainstream, due to the industry’s need for strict standards and a skilled workforce. “A budtender needs to understand what a consumer needs and should expect. They have to know the strains — indica, sativa, all the hybrids out there — and be trained in them.” Standards have to be developed; tests have to be run. Legalization could lead to entirely new job categories.

“These are not dead-end jobs we’re securing,” Ferro says. “They’re career-builders.”

California’s Adult Use of Marijuana Act, which will appear on the November ballot as Proposition 64, emerged from strenuous negotiations in the legislature with a “labor peace” agreement attached, which prohibits cannabis business owners from interfering with organizing efforts. “It doesn’t mean we won’t disagree on what a good contract looks like,” Ferro says. But it does mean workers won’t need to call in the NLRB.

To hear Ferro tell it, the industry now has the potential to revive the middle-class in the states where it’s legal, and compel other states to follow suit. For the moment, at least, while other countries’ laws remain strict and exporting marijuana remains a felony, “Jobs in the cannabis industry are jobs that can’t be off-shored. They are jobs that are confined within the states where they’re permitted. Owners can make money and still afford to pay their workers enough for the employees to raise their families and send their kids to school.

“If we build it right, we can make these jobs into good, sustainable, well-paying, stable jobs. They’ll form the backbone of a new labor market in this country.”

If is a huge word, and the challenge to building the cannabis industry into Ferro’s ideal is a daunting one, starting first with the decades-long nature of a shadow economy about which little is commonly known. From the “budtenders” who mind the dispensary counters to the “trimmigrants” who clip the cured bud during the fall harvest season, the cannabis labor market has more variables than indica has strains.

This uncertainty comes into play especially at the harvesting and processing ends of the pot trade, which in California happen mostly within the Emerald Triangle (comprised of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties) from September through December. Itinerant laborers flock to “trim camps” during those months to potentially earn $200 a day grooming bud for the market, working long shifts and sleeping on site. First-person accounts of their experiences abound on the internet, most of them relatively idyllic, as agricultural-job stories go. “A lot of the workers enjoy meditation, yoga and playing light music in the evenings,” promises the “Trim Camp Counselor” on RealitySandwich.com, adding that your employer will generally provide vegetarian meals — “and if you are lucky, they will be organic.” Writer Sorcha O’Higgins on the Matador Network tells of equally good times — O’Higgins made $5,000 over five weeks and spent half the time “drinking and dancing.”

But O’Higgins, who like most trim-camp blog memoirists, writes from the privileged perspective of a dabbler, admits there’s a downside. “After a few weeks your hands are calloused, your lower back crippled, your wrists ache and all the days merge into a green haze, so much so that the spiky, conifered ridges of the Californian mountains look like lines of untrimmed buds just itching to be snipped,” she writes. “Trim camp consumes you.”

The stories of workplace abuse are “infinite and chilling,” she adds, and include “foreign trimmers getting their passports stolen, growers not paying them and throwing them off the farm, sex-starved rednecks paying more for girls to trim with their tops off.”

The plural of anecdote might be data, to paraphrase the late political scientist Raymond Wolfinger, but at the moment, no one has collected enough hard information to scientifically establish what life is like for marijuana workers. “We don’t know the past and current conditions of the labor force,” says Fred Krissman, an anthropology professor at Humboldt State University in Arcata. The studies — the thorough, comprehensive and peer-reviewed academic kind — have not been done, Krissman says.

No one even knows, for instance, how many undocumented foreign workers labor in the Emerald Triangle’s fields, forests and greenhouses. Mikal Jakubal, whose documentary film “One Good Year” chronicles the lives of Humboldt County pot growers, puts the figure at 10 percent; the California Growers’ Association, an alliance of industry professionals, says it’s more like 40 percent.

“If longtime growers with deep roots in the industry have such divergent points of view, who knows?” Krissman says.

He finds this strange, but not a mystery. Marijuana’s federal classification under the Controlled Substance Act makes universities and foundations reluctant to back studies of anything having to do with the drug. While some researchers do conduct federally funded research into marijuana’s medical benefits and psychoactive effects, they need to clear a series of subjectively placed hoops to qualify for government support.“When I studied immigration and legal crops, every grant I wrote received funding for 25 years,” Krissman says. “I couldn’t fend off all the money being thrown at me. The federal government, California, private foundations — no one knew how to say no.” Marijuana has been different. “I’ve applied to the National Science Foundation [NSF] and several private foundations and received no interest.”

With the caveat that “everything I can say for now is speculative,” Krissman says he nevertheless believes that, at this moment in time, most marijuana growers curry their employees’ loyalty more often than they abuse them. “Their ethic is, ‘We want to treat our workers well so they don’t rise up and screw us over,’” Krissman says. “If you can make big bucks and pay your employees well to safeguard your security, it’s worth it.” If, on the other hand, you pay sub-minimum wage and abuse your workers, “what’s to keep them from telling their friends where the grows are and organizing a ripoff?”

He also floats a “somewhat squishier” explanation for the decent labor conditions: Cannabis culture was founded on ideals of individual freedom and compassion that haven’t completely gone away. “In cannabis culture people tend to be more cooperative, and want a better planet for everybody. They’re not just getting everything they can for themselves.”

For those “very diverse reasons, currently the marijuana industry is an agricultural anomaly,” he says. Anecdotally speaking, “the conditions and wages of labor are far superior for marijuana workers than for any legal agricultural industry.”

Krissman doesn’t necessarily expect those conditions to prevail once marijuana becomes legal in California. Producers of a regulated commercial concern all face the same calculus — “reducing inputs,” is how Krissman puts it — and few can afford to put people over profits. Wages are one of the few expenses that can be cut. If you’re managing a corporate agricultural enterprise, “you can’t tell John Deere you want a lower price on a tractor. You can’t demand a lower price for land. You can’t negotiate with Dow Chemical or Monsanto for a price break on your chemicals.” You can, however, exploit your workers.

Which is why, Krissman says, traditional agribusiness prefers a workforce made up of undocumented immigrants. Over time, corporate marijuana will, too.

The UFCW doesn’t have statistics on the demographics of marijuana laborers, either. But in Washington State, where marijuana was made legal for recreational use in 2012, the union has begun to at least gather data on what cultivating weed does to one’s body, with the help and interest of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

“We brought NIOSH out to a cultivation place in Tacoma, and had them put sensors on people,” Jeff Ferro says. “[Cultivators] wore air monitors to determine what they were being exposed to. The trimmers wore gloves that monitored hand motion to see if there was a danger of repetitive stress.” As it turns out, there’s a high risk of carpal tunnel inherent in the task of snipping leaves away from tumescent colas, one that can be lessened by well-timed, workplace-mandated breaks.

Krissman, for his part, is working with the California Growers Association to codify the best practices of growers who are already committed to treating their workers fairly. “I would love it if the NSF or some other big foundation gave me $150,000 to do a group study of diverse types of marijuana grows across the Emerald Triangle,” he says. But for now, “I’m focusing on the growers who have organized themselves into groups to legitimize their industry, such as the California Growers’ Association. “At least I’ll be able to say, ‘This is the way we can do it right.’ Maybe from there, we can establish some standards.”

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Keeping the wolves at bay: Meet the woman who’s making Wall Street safe for women

Sallie Krawcheck (Credit: Ellevest/A.E. Fletcher Photography)

The 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street” received harsh criticism for its depiction of women as two-dimensional trophy wives, money-grubbing secretaries who sleep with their bosses, and prostitutes and strippers who served as a backdrop to a group of drug-fueled man-child stock brokers. But Martin Scorsese’s depiction of Reagan-era excess in America’s financial capital, as cartoonish and over-the-top as it was, drove home the point that Wall Street was a man’s world. And it still is.

Although the blatant and aggressive sexism of the past has been tempered along with the suggestion that working women would brush off sexual harassment as the cost of entry, the hallways and offices of Lower Manhattan are still occupied predominately by men. Men make up about two-thirds or more of executives at leading investment banks and an even higher share of first-year bankers. 

So you can see why Sallie Krawcheck, a former senior executive at Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Merrill Lynch, has made it her mission to end male-domination of finance. Lauded as “the last honest analyst,” Krawcheck has in recent years used her role as one of the most powerful women in finance to encourage her industry to hire more women — not just to improve gender equality in the industry but also to better serve female clients. She once famously observed that financial advisers’ practice of directing their attention to husbands led their wives to find other consultants after their husbands died, thereby costing firms valuable clients.

As American women begin to control a greater share of investable assets — $11.2 trillion by one estimate — firms that alienate them risk losing a sizable amount of business. Krawcheck also is critical about the way financial firms reward early-career associates. Women financial advisers, she says, tend to focus on the gradual accumulation of management fees collected as a percentage of assets over time rather than earning commission from executing stock trades​. This can work against them early on in their careers because promotions are based on how much revenue a junior employee collects in a short period of time. ​

Knowing that Wall Street’s testosterone problem wasn’t going to solve itself, Krawcheck decided in 2011 to leave Merrill Lynch and enter the business of ushering women into the business.

In 2013, she bought 85 Broads Unlimited (since rebranded as Ellevate Network), which offers a global networking service to help women connect and advance in their careers. And in May, she co-founded Ellevest, a robo-advising firm that crafts wealth-management portfolios that take into account women’s longer lifespans and unique lifetime earning patterns. The firm now has about 20 employees working out of an office in Manhattan’s Flatiron district.

Krawcheck discussed with Salon via an email exchange why Wall Street’s gender diversity problem is a problem for all women — and all of society for that matter.

You’ve built a reputation for calling out the male-dominated culture of Wall Street and shining a spotlight on the investment gender gap and the gender pay gap. Have there been any improvements in Wall Street attitudes about gender over the past 20 years?

I believe the overt sexism is mostly gone: the trips to the strip clubs, bringing strippers into the office, that type of thing. But as for the results — of more women in the industry, more women as clients, more women investing — we’re simply not there. The percentage of financial advisers who are men is about 85 percent; and it’s been stuck there for years. The proportion of women in senior roles is low, and by some measures has gone backwards over the past decade.

And don’t for a minute think that it’s been a pipeline issue; I got a call recently from a reporter telling me that the incoming class of new bankers to Wall Street was 30 percent women. He cited this as progress. But when I got into the industry in the late ’80s, my class was about 35 percent women. So this won’t be solved simply by hiring women and letting them work their way through the system.

Why do you think this is such a challenge on Wall Street?

How long do you have? Because the answer isn’t that simple. The industry will go through stages of hiring lots of women; but then those women “fail” because they tend to focus more on recurring revenue streams than trading income. The revenue requirements that firms impose on trainees tend to require a pretty fast ramp-up that’s more easily done from trading, so women often don’t meet early business hurdles and are fired.

The women also tend to be isolated in offices that are mostly men. And they don’t receive the promotions into management because those have historically required geographic relocation, and many women have found that harder to do than men.

The revenue requirements that firms impose on trainees tend to require a pretty fast ramp-up that’s more easily done from trading, so women often don’t meet early business hurdles and are fired. The women also tend to be isolated in offices that are mostly men. And they don’t receive the promotions into management because those have historically required geographic relocation, and many women have found that harder to do than men.

And on the other side, women have stayed away in droves. It is in part because they don’t know anyone in the field, given how few of their friends are in it, and so [they] don’t even know it’s an option. And if they think of it, their impression is colored by the financial crisis, which turns many of them off. Even before that, few women would look at the industry and say, “That really speaks to me.” The industry symbol is after all a bull — very male!

Cutting through all of this, however, is that the firms have not made gender diversity a priority, and they haven’t made it a meaningful part of their manager assessments for a meaningful period of time.

You’ve talked about the condescending practice of Wall Street firms creating these “pinking and shrinking” investment products they market to women. What should women should be wary of when shopping for wealth management advice?

To be clear, I don’t think there is an evil streak going on here. I really think it’s that we are all more comfortable engaging with people like ourselves, whether we admit that to ourselves or not. And so male financial advisers tend to engage more with men. It’s not something to be “wary” of; but it is a barrier that exists between so many women and investing. There is a gatekeeper there (the financial adviser) who hasn’t historically engaged much with her.

It seems like you’re saying that women have specific investment-advice needs, but they also should be treated equally. How do you balance the goals of offering women-specific investment advice but also treating them equally to men?

Well, I would say they’re not being treated equally now. As we just discussed, women don’t receive nearly the time and attention that men do in investing. The research is clear here.

As for the “women-specific investment advice” — do I detect that you are thinking it means “lesser” in some way? Perhaps more “dumbed down,” “less sophisticated”? Do you happen to be thinking “don’t buy shoes, invest in the stock market instead” messaging? Because that’s what “for women” has meant in the past, for so many “women’s investing initiatives.”

Instead, at my firm Ellevest, “for women” means that, when our algorithms calculate a financial and investing plan for her, we take into account that she lives longer than a man and that, sadly, her salary peaks sooner. These are really important if you don’t want to run out of money! And not only, does “for women” here not mean “dumbed down,” we have four patents pending on our process and methodology.

Can you point to any differences between men and women that manifest in their investment decisions? Is nature or nurture involved? Do women, on the whole, tend to be more risk averse or more interested in socially conscious investing, or is looking at it that way part of the problem?

So many of the “top investing mistakes” articles you read are actually “top investing mistakes men make.” They include things like over-trading, falling in love with stocks that go up and so on. Those are quite different from the investing mistakes women make, which are that they don’t invest or don’t invest as much as they should. They tend to hold back until they figure out all the jargon, which can take a long, long time.

Women do tend to be more “risk aware” as opposed to risk averse; that means they want to understand their downside more. They do tend to be more interested in values-based investing; but only a small percent say they have been shown a values-based investment by their financial adviser.

Nature or nurture? I’m not sure.

What is not that case is the statement: women are not as good at investing as men. That tends to be something that is taken as a fact, but the data tells a different story.

You founded Ellevest as a response to the way women are treated by Wall Street’s boys’ club. Ideally, there would come a time where there’d be no need for your firm, right? I take it you don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.

If there was no gender investing gap, there would be no need for Ellevest. But there is. Until Wall Street changes its stance that it simply needs to better market to women — and recognizes that it needs to better serve women — that gender investing gap won’t close.

By the way, what’s the bonus of having more women invest? It’s good for the women themselves and for their families, and it unleashes capital into the markets.

What’s the bonus if this also means more women working on Wall Street? Well, does anyone really believe that greater gender diversity on Wall Street would have made the financial crisis [in 2008] more severe? I didn’t think so.

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Brit right-winger Nigel Farage is right: Trump is a lot like Reagan — in all the worst possible ways

Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Doug Mills/Andrew Harnik/Photo montage by Salon)

Nigel Farage, the right-wing British politician and prominent advocate of last June’s successful Brexit referendum, was beside himself when he wrote for the British tabloid newspaper Daily Mail about his experience of speaking at a recent Donald Trump rally. Farage described the event as “more like a rock concert than a political meeting.” While the Eurosceptic Brit did not endorse Trump outright, he did, in a state of starstruck rapture, compare the Republican presidential candidate to the most renowned Republican president in modern history, Ronald Reagan.

“It is worth remembering,” wrote Farage, “that virtually everyone thought that Ronald Reagan was unfit to be the U.S. president before he made a huge success of his two terms.”

For Never Trump conservatives, whose worship of Reagan borders on stoking a cult of personality, anyone comparing the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to the Gipper is outrageous. To these establishment figures, Reagan is on a par with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and likening him to a narcissistic ignoramus like Trump is simply offensive.

But if someone worships a personality as conservatives do Reagan, he or she tends to shape that personality according to one’s thinking. Consider Christian fundamentalists’ molding the Enlightenment thinker and Thomas Jefferson into one of their own.

When one briefly surveys the Reagan presidency, there are a lot more similarities between the two politicians than the simple fact that Reagan, like Trump today, was considered by many to be unfit for the presidency. An amusing example of this is illustrated by a 1971 conversation with former President Richard Nixon when Henry Kissinger, then the national security adviser declared that Reagan’s brains were “negligible” and then stated that it was “inconceivable” that the governor of California at the time would ever become president.

The most evident similarity between Trump and Reagan is their staggering ignorance of the issues. Over the past year, Trump had proved to be one of the most uninformed presidential candidates in modern history: He didn’t know what the nuclear triad was, he claimed that he could eliminate the debt in eight years through trade negotiations (which is not only economically impossible but also stupid) and he has displayed an all-around ignorance about  the rest of the world. Commentators and pundits have expressed shock and dismay at his dearth of knowledge (as well as his apparent lack of interest in learning), but this cluelessness is hardly unprecedented. Historian William Leuchtenburg chronicled the ignorance of Reagan in his recent (and much recommended) book,  “The American President”:

No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. At presidential news conferences, especially in his first year, Ronald Reagan embarrassed himself. On one occasion, asked why he advocated putting missiles in vulnerable places, he responded, his face registering bewilderment, “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.”

In addition, he documented:

“You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.” In all fields of public affairs — from diplomacy to the economy — the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.”

Besides his ignorance and incuriosity, Trump shares another important trait with Reagan: a willingness to appeal to racism and bigotry. Reagan, of course, ran for president on what is today known as the “Southern strategy,” a Republican appeal to the resentments of white Southerners, who had abandoned the Democratic Party in light of its embrace of the civil rights movement.

During his 1980 run for president, the former actor lambasted “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” and gave a states’ rights speech at the Neshoba County Fair, just a few miles away from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where 16 years earlier three civil rights activists had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. When it comes to Trump, one hardly has to explain his appeal to racists and bigots, as some of his biggest supporters are white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

And there are Trump’s tax policies, which, like Reagan’s, are based on the unsound theories of supply-side economics. While his newly released tax plan is less extreme than the one he released last year, which would have added an estimated $10 trillion to the debt over a decade, it still provides enormous cuts to big corporations and the wealthy and would balloon the deficit.

Reagan found out how fiscally irresponsible big tax cuts for the rich could be when he signed what some have called the largest tax cut in history in his first year in office, which quickly led to a steep drop in government revenue and thus a swelling deficit. Just one year after his massive tax cut, Reagan signed a massive tax increase, to make up for the revenue shortages that the previous cut had created. Then in 1983 he signed an increase on the regressive payroll tax. Nevertheless, by the time Reagan left the White House in 1989, the national debt had nearly tripled.

It seems the major difference between Trump and Reagan — besides the fact that Reagan was a well-mannered man who attempted to hide his ignorance and Trump is a vulgar philistine who is actually proud of it — is that Reagan was something of a true believer, while Trump is a charlatan. Reagan was indeed convinced that the welfare state had ruined America and that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” Trump, in contrast, can change his positions on a whim, and says whatever he believes will gain him votes or rile up his base (no matter how odious or false).

Reagan, as wrong as he was (and he was very wrong indeed), had certain ideals and convictions, and one generally knew where he stood politically and ideologically. The same cannot be said for Trump, whose cynicism and demagoguery rival that of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Trump believes in Donald Trump, and he will do whatever he thinks is best for Donald Trump. In the end, that kind of unprincipled narcissism can be at least as dangerous as the dogmatism of Ronald Reagan.

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When doctors diagnose danger: Breaking patient-doctor confidentiality isn’t that simple

(Credit: xjbxjhxm via iStock)

This article was originally published by Scientific American.

Mental illness is a frequent talking point in the wake of mass shootings in our country. Politicians refer to the shortcomings of our mental health system and promise to deliver legislative reforms. Media coverage often suggests that if the shooters had been in treatment, these tragedies might never have occurred.

But our national conversation usually ends there. We rarely talk about the realities of identifying dangerous patients and the difficult decisions that mental health providers face in these scenarios.

As a resident physician in psychiatry, I’ve already seen a number of these cases in my training. Each one leaves its mark. It’s hard to sit across from a patient who is threatening to kill someone. These are some of the darkest moments in patient care.

Here’s an example of what might happen. A woman visits a psychiatrist because she’s been hearing voices. During the appointment, the psychiatrist asks about the voices and how the patient has been dealing with them.

The woman states that the voices remind her of colleagues from work. In fact, the patient says she has come to hate her coworkers for tormenting her and, if she were to find out which ones are responsible, she would kill them.

What should the doctor do?

It’s a decision with profound ethical and legal considerations. Under these circumstances, clinicians often follow the “Tarasoff rule.” In 1976, a California Supreme Court case — Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California — transformed the practice of medicine when justices ruled mental health providers have a duty to break patient-doctor confidentiality if the patient expresses threats against others.

In that case, a patient had disclosed thoughts of killing a female acquaintance named Tatiana Tarasoff to his psychotherapist; the therapist warned local authorities, who interviewed the patient and felt he was not a threat. However, no one warned the woman or her family. The patient soon after stabbed Tarasoff to death, and her parents later sued the therapist for malpractice for not warning them. The case ended up in the California Supreme Court, which ruled in the parents’ favor.

In the decades since, dozens of states have adopted this standard, mandating mental health providers take steps to protect those threatened by patients.

The Tarasoff rule makes this duty to warn seem straightforward. If a patient expresses a threat against someone, the health care provider should attempt to get in touch with that person and alert local authorities. In most states, doctors and other authorities can place patients they feel to be imminently dangerous on an involuntary psychiatric hold to complete a mental health evaluation in the hospital.

Yet these situations aren’t always so simple. What if the patient was joking? Sometimes, patients don’t name anyone specifically, as in the hypothetical scenario earlier in the column. The threat might be conditional, depending on something that may or may not happen in the future.

Writing for the majority opinion in the Tarasoff decision, Justice Mathew Tobriner famously concluded, “the protective privilege ends where the public peril begins.” But clinicians have to be careful when deciding to carry out this duty; breaking patient-doctor confidentiality can just as easily ruin the patient’s life.

Take the example of Jack Garner, a former police officer profiled in The New York Times Magazine. During the 1990s, he underwent therapy to sort out anger issues and work-related stress; however, after Garner casually vented thoughts of harming work colleagues who had frustrated him, his therapist alerted Garner’s coworkers at the police station.

Garner’s life subsequently fell apart. He was fired from his job and ostracized in his community. He lost his house and suffered marital problems. He eventually sued the therapist for malpractice in breaking patient-doctor confidentiality; a jury agreed with Garner, awarding him $280,000 in damages.

Did the therapist save the lives of Garner’s coworkers? It’s impossible to know. That’s why relying on mental health providers to predict violence is so tenuous. After all, the overwhelming majority of patients with mental health issues are non-violent. Research suggests less than five percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to major mental illness, and psychiatrists often can’t predict which patients may later become violent.

As mental health providers, we try to assess these risks as best we can, asking carefully about threatening statements, reviewing past behaviors and consulting colleagues for assistance. Still, at the end of the day, we can’t know what our patients are going to do when they walk out the door.

The duty to warn is a heavy burden in medicine, equally powerful as it is uncertain. When health care providers pick up the phone to carry out this role, we often do so with trembling hands, wondering if we’re doing the right thing.

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A revolution delayed: Young people trend left, but stay home on Election Day

Supporters cheer Hillary Clinton at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, May 16, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Aaron P. Bernstein)

According to the latest YouGov data, Donald Trump would narrowly win an election if only those 65 or older voted. But if just people under 30 voted, he would not only lose in a landslide, he would also come close to being eclipsed by the Libertarian third-party candidate, Gary Johnson.

During the Democratic primary, one of the most important divides was along age lines: Young people across race and gender lines were more supportive of Sen. Bernie Sanders than older folks. Is this just a fluke, driven by opposition to Trump and the outsider appeal of Sanders, or does it portend an important change in American politics?

Analyzing several data sets that included tens of thousands of respondents, I have found that young people are indeed more progressive, on a range of important issues. But few are voting, which means that the more progressive America they seem to support may take longer to arrive.

In a 2016 American National Election Studies survey, 48 percent of those 18 to 29 identified as Democratic, compared with 35 percent of those 70 and above.

The results from a 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies survey are similar: Forty-nine percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) identified as Republican, compared with 37 percent of those 70 or older. Nearly half of those older than 70 said they are Republican, compared with just more than a quarter of those 18 to 29.

On issues like the minimum wage, government-provided child care and expansion of government services, young people were more progressive than those of older generations, according to the American National Elections Studies data.

Trump scored more than 20 points lower among young people than among people in the oldest age group when the arithmetic mean of scores quantifying their general feelings is calculated. (Their feelings were assigned scores from 0 and 100, with 0 being the coldest sentiment and 100 the warmest.) Young people were also more supportive of the idea of Syrian refugees entering the United States, even when only the attitudes of young whites were examined.

“Without action on climate change, the millennial generation as a whole will lose nearly $8.8 trillion in lifetime income,” a new Demos and NextGen Climate report found. Perhaps unsurprisingly, young people are far more likely to support action on climate change (see chart). In another Cooperative Congressional Election Studies survey, from 2012, 48 percent of those over 70 support government action on climate change, compared with 65 percent of those 18 to 29.

On issues related to race and gender, the evidence is more mixed. Political scientist Ashley Jardina and I have shown that on many key questions about race, young people are more progressive. These younger individuals are less likely to endorse feelings of racial resentment and stereotyping (among whites only and among all respondents). But the shift on racial resentment appears to have happened recently.

In addition, as I previously wrote in Fusion, young people believe that society has already moved past sexism and this could prompt them to be less likely to support policies to bring about equity. For instance, according to the 2016 American National Election Studies survey, young people were not much more likely to support requiring employers to provide women equal pay for equal work. One reason could be that young people already believe society has attained gender equity, so further policy action is not necessary. After President Barack Obama was elected, young people were more likely to believe America was a post-racial society, though recent events have led many to reconsider their views.

While there are many reasons for optimism, some evidence suggests that young people today might not immediately usher in a progressive revolution.

Public policy tends to be determined more by those who vote and donate to campaigns than those who do not. But young people turn out to vote at a lower rate, though these turnout gaps aren’t distributed equally. Using 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies data, I have found that young nonvoters are more progressive than voters.  

Among young nonvoters aged 18 to 29, 51 percent were Democrats and 29 percent were Republican. Among the voters, 48 percent were Democrat and 43 percent Republicans.

While 44 percent of young nonvoters said they supported the Bowles-Simpson budget bill of 2013, 54 percent of young voters did. This 2013 legislation concerned a deficit reduction package that included tax increases and cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  

Young people were less likely to report having been contacted by an electoral campaign (32 percent did, compared with 75 percent of those 65 or older). They were also less likely to report being registered to vote, an essential step in their participation in the electoral process. Young people were more likely to report have registered to vote via an Election Day registration system.   

New work by John Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus has found preregistration (a policy that enables eligible young people to register when receiving a driver’s license) can dramatically increase turnout among young people.

Another solution could be automatic voter registration: to automatically register eligible voters when they interact with, say, a department of motor vehicles or public assistance agency and that would dramatically increase voter rolls (and turnout).

As I’ve written based on my research, extensive literature suggests that voting influences policy and higher turnout could lead to a more progressive county. A new study of Burgenland, Austria, has found that opening polls earlier boosted voter turnout, increasing the vote share for the Social Democratic Party and the populist right.

Given all the trends that I’ve mentioned above, boosting turnout among young people would likely bolster the vote share for Democrats.

Nonetheless, as I’ve noted previously, young campaign donors in 2014 tended to be on the liberal side: Sixty-one percent of young campaign donors were Democrats; only 48 percent of young non-donors were Democrats.  

These young donors were also more supportive of abortion rights: Seventy-one percent said women should always be able to obtain an abortion, compared with 59 percent of young non-donors. Young donors were also more supportive of easing the path to citizenship (65 percent were in favor, compared with 55 percent of non-donors).

In a recent exhaustive study of public opinion, political scientist Gary Jacobson showed two key trends: Young Americans were far less likely to identify as Republican, and those who did were less conservative than older people who were Republican (see charts below). The nation is becoming more diverse, and among whites, the youngest generation is more liberal on issues of race, gender and economics. 

Young people are more supportive of wealth redistribution and an active government, and this is true across gender, class, race and party identifications. One reason may be the financial crisis: A new generation that has grown up in an economy perpetually delivering below its potential will push young people to the left. By  fighting the economic stimulus, the GOP extended the length of the recovery, likely fostering more left-wing views among young people.

There are reasons to believe that these trends will have long-term effects on politics. Research suggests political attitudes tend to be quite sticky and they’re formed while people are young. A new working paper by Bastian Becker has found that expected income affects attitudes toward income redistribution; it’s unlikely that there will be a dramatic reversal on views about income redistribution as millennials age.

At the same time, change won’t happen quickly. Republicans are likely to hold the House after the 2016 election. They will be well-positioned for gains in 2018 and, depending on how they react to Trump’s likely defeat, 2020.

The low-turnout midterm and off-cycle elections reduce incentives for the GOP to moderate its views. Yet over the long term, today’s young people will become a force for progressivism. It’s unlikely that they will push for radical, sweeping change, but instead will opt for incremental steps towards social democracy.

But I’m left wondering, how can a movement gain a progressive majority if the majority doesn’t vote?

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Lengthy campaigns are the enemy: Labor Day should be the official start of campaign season

Hillary Clinton (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.

Once upon a time, in a faraway land called America, Labor Day marked the start of the traditional start of campaign season. Selected by their respective parties’ summer nominating conventions, the presidential candidates would then barnstorm the country for three months — a reasonable time for the electorate to evaluate their personalities and platforms. And then it would be over, until about four years later.

It seems hard to imagine today. Hillary Clinton has been a declared candidate since March 2015. Donald Trump has been a declared candidate since June 2015, which actually made him one of the later entrants into the Republican field. And, of course, many candidates start running long before they make their intentions official.

In almost all other advanced democracies, the official campaign season is short — a few weeks, at most two months. Not here. Here we spend endless news cycles obsessing over every last thing our candidates say. And good luck trying to escape the advertisements. American politics, it is often remarked, has become a permanent campaign.

This has five harmful consequences for American democracy.

1. Wretched excess

The first is the ginormous cost associated with running these endless elections. With each passing electoral cycle, it increases. The price tag for the 2012 election was more than $6 billion, making it yet again the most expensive election ever. There’s every reason to think 2016 will cost even more.

This high price makes both parties and candidates more reliant on wealthy donors to fund these elections, since they’re the ones with the money. This limits the types of policies the parties and candidates are willing to pursue, since they need to appeal to these donors to fund their campaigns. It also limits the types of candidates able to run for office in the first place to those whose networks put them in contact with lots of wealthy donors, and those whose policy positions don’t scare these wealthy donors away.

2. Polarization

The second problem is that the hyper-partisan marathon privileges campaigning over governing, which in turn privileges the “uncompromising mindset” over the “compromising mindset.” I borrow these terms from political scientists Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, who write about this problem in “The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It.” As Gutmann and Thompson explain it, the uncompromising mindset is the mindset of the modern campaign, which “favors candidates who stand firmly on their positions.” The uncompromising mindset of campaigning encourages what Gutmann and Thompson call “principled tenacity” (fighting hard for moral principles) and “mutual mistrust” (“the assumption that their opponents are motivated mainly by a desire to defeat them and their principles”). Such principles obviously stand in the way of governing. Similarly, political scientist Frances E. Lee’s new book, “Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign,” describes in painstaking detail how this endless focus on winning the next election has driven polarization in Congress. In short: a very long campaign makes for more divisive and unproductive governing.

3. Knee-jerk negativity

Third, while some scrutiny of candidates is obviously a public good, the entire election has became an exercise in negative campaigning. Candidates now mostly tear each other down. And to fill the endless time, the media attempts investigation after investigation, unable to distinguish the truly valuable scrutiny from the desperate desire to have something new to say. It’s no wonder we hate our candidates. A long election season just gives us time to tear every piece of them down.

4. Fear of loathing

Fourth, as a consequence of the first three points, it takes a certain type of person (i.e., a crazy person) to be willing to endure the endless slog of running for office. It’s not just the fundraising, not just the endless press scrutiny and negative attack ads and subjection of one’s family to it all, not just the endless campaigning that sacrifices all nuance and compromise to a need for crisp, consistent sound bites. It’s all three, plus the ability to go from event to event to event, from debate to debate to debate, from interview to interview to interview, all while smiling and staying on message. It’s a gauntlet that tells any sane person in bold letters, and all caps: DO NOT APPLY.

5. Ennui

Fifth, and finally, is the problem of voter fatigue. A short election season is exciting. If you know it’s limited, you know it’s time to pay attention now, this won’t last long. It becomes a ritual. The Olympics were buzzy because they lasted for a limited time, and then they were gone. If the Olympics had started last March and were still going on, most people would have grown bored and tired of them, and probably cynical. So it’s no surprise that’s how most people feel about politics. Not everyone is a political junkie.

To be fair, there are some plusses to a long election season. Being president of the United States is a pretty important job, and a long campaign season helps voters really get to know who the candidates are, and how they withstand various pressures. A long election season seems to have especially worn away support for Donald Trump.

The United States also has a longer election season because it is unique in its system of primary elections, which give voters a more direct say in picking their candidates. In almost every other advanced democracy, candidates are simply nominated at closed party conventions. While it has become fashionable this election season to long for the days in which American parties just selected their candidates in smoke-filled rooms of conventions, it’s also important to at least appreciate the uniquely democratic opportunities American citizens have in selecting candidates — though admittedly the role of money in even getting candidates to being able to run has undermined some of those opportunities.

However, neither of these concerns demand the election season be quite as long as it is. Three months would be plenty of time to accomplish both of these things.

Certainly, there are many forces pushing for long elections. There is an entire campaign consulting industrial complex that depends on the long election season, and has every incentive to keep fueling the arms race of earlier starts and costlier and costlier campaigns. And there is also an entire media industry that thrives on it, both because of the ratings and the advertising dollars.

How might we change it? Perhaps candidates could decide to start running later — but this seems unlikely. Perhaps the most direct solution would be to enact campaign finance reforms that make it harder for campaigns to effortlessly raise endless sums of money. With less money to fund them, campaigns simply couldn’t go on as long. They’d have to start later. And American democracy would almost certainly be better off as a result.

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