We begin today with Pew Research Center’s survey that shows two-thirds of Americans are simply “exhausted” by politics.
A little more than a year before the presidential election, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55% feel angry. By contrast, just 10% say they always or often feel hopeful about politics, and even fewer (4%) are excited.
The survey also provides people several opportunities to describe in their own words their feelings about the political system and elected officials. When asked to sum up their feelings about politics in a word or phrase, very few (2%) use positive terms; 79% use negative or critical words, with “divisive” and “corrupt” coming up most frequently.
We also asked people to identify the strengths of the political system, as well as its weaknesses. Among the positive responses, roughly one-in-ten point to the structures of U.S. government, including its system of checks and balances (12%), freedoms and democratic values (9%) and the opportunity to vote in elections (8%).
Yet it is telling that a majority of Americans are unable or unwilling to identify strong points of the nation’s political system. While about a third gave no answer, another 22% write “nothing” – meaning that in their view, the political system does not have any strengths.
That final excerpted paragraph is a breeding ground for authoritarianism.
Charles Blow of The New York Times takes a deep dive into the Pew numbers for young people, specifically.
On metric after metric, the report ticked through markers of our persistent pessimism. In 1994, it says, “just 6 percent” of Americans viewed both political parties negatively. That number has now more than quadrupled to 28 percent. The percentage who believe our political system is working “extremely or very well”: just 4 percent.
And on many measures, younger people are the most frustrated, and supportive of disruptive change as a remedy.
Younger voters recognize that our political system is broken, and they have little nostalgia about a less broken time. They have almost no memory of an era when government was less partisan and less gridlocked. Their instincts are to fix the system they’ve inherited, not to wind back the clock to a yesteryear.
Speaking of exhausting, that House Judiciary Committee meeting yesterday ...
Aidan Quigley and David Lerman of Roll Call report that House Republicans seem to be inching closer to an agreement on a stopgap funding measure to fund the government past Sept. 30.
At least a handful of conservative holdouts still maintained their opposition as of Wednesday night, which would be enough to sink a revised bill unless GOP leaders are able to change some minds in the next few days. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is expected to keep the chamber in session on Saturday if necessary.
Even if GOP leaders’ new effort is successful, however, it was starting to look more like a bid to reopen the government after a brief shutdown, given the deadline is 10 days away and the Senate is likely to ping-pong a much different bill back to the House.
The arrangement slowly emerging from a closed-door House GOP Conference meeting would revise the initial leadership-backed, 31-day stopgap funding bill to reduce the overall annualized funding rate by $119 billion to the $1.471 trillion figure conservatives want.
The measure would preserve the restrictive border policies in line with much of a separate House-passed bill earlier this year, while adding a new fiscal commission to tackle long-term debt challenges. The latter was a key ask of Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., who’s been highly critical of McCarthy, and was expected to swing her in favor.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker says that Republicans posing as friends of union workers is laughable.
Politics is politics, but the sight of senior Republicans posing as the true friends of the union workers is so outlandish as to be almost comical. From Trump on down, the G.O.P. has spent decades siding with employers and seeking to frustrate union efforts to organize workplaces and raise wages. Even as it has sought to rebrand itself as a workers’ party, the G.O.P.’s actions have made a mockery of this claim.
Start with Trump. After taking power in 2017, he restored the Republican majority on the five-person National Labor Relations Board, the agency that was established during the New Deal to support workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively. Trump appointed a former House Republican staffer, Marvin Kaplan, as chair of the N.L.R.B. Under G.O.P. leadership, the agency quickly moved to reverse several pro-labor rulings that it had issued during the Obama Administration, including one that made it easier for workers at fast-food franchises to organize. This pro-employer slant continued throughout Trump’s term. In December, 2019, the agency issued two rulings that introduced new restrictions on unionization votes and made it easier for firms to classify workers as independent contractors, thus depriving them of union wage scales and benefits.
Contrast this record with the actions of the N.L.R.B. under Biden, who appointed two former union lawyers to its board and another former union lawyer, Jennifer Abruzzo, as its general counsel. In the past couple of years, the agency has abrogated many of its Trump-era rulings, including the ones related to voting procedures and independent contractors. Last month, the N.L.R.B. ruled that if a company engages in intimidatory behavior during a unionization election, such as firing union organizers, the agency will order the company to recognize the union and bargain collectively. In another ruling, the N.L.R.B. set out new rules for unionization votes, which require votes to be held promptly and restrict efforts by employers to delay them, which are very common occurrences.
Don’t laugh.
Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian reports on a survey by climate change and disinformation organizations showing that Elon Musk’s social media platform is a cesspool of climate misinformation and lack of content moderation.
The Climate of Misinformation report by Climate Action Against Disinformation looked at Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter for their content moderation policies and efforts to mitigate inaccurate information such as climate denialism. The group, which is made up of dozens of international climate and anti-disinformation organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, released the report to draw attention towards climate misinformation on major platforms and makes the claim that big tech has become a “complicit actor” in accelerating the spread of climate denial.
Twitter’s low rank in the survey was because it failed to meet almost any of the organization’s criteria for climate misinformation policies, which ranged from having clear and publicly available information on climate science to having clearly articulated policies on what actions the company will take against the spread of misinformation. The report noted that billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk’s purchase of the company last year added to the confusion over how policies are enforced and how the company makes content decisions.
“Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company has created uncertainty about which policies are still standing and which are not,” the report stated.
Twitter received its only point in the report for fulfilling one of the researchers’ requirements that platforms have an easily accessible and readable privacy policy. Twitter was also the only platform to lack a clear reporting process for flagging harmful or misleading content for higher review.
Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron report for WIRED that letters have been sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the deaths of 12 macaques because of primate research done by the Musk-owned biotech company Neuralink.
Musk first acknowledged the deaths of the macaques on September 10 in a reply to a user on his social networking app X (formerly Twitter). He denied that any of the deaths were “a result of a Neuralink implant” and said the researchers had taken care to select subjects who were already “close to death.” Relatedly, in a presentation last fall Musk claimed that Neuralink’s animal testing was never “exploratory,” but was instead conducted to confirm fully formed scientific hypotheses. “We are extremely careful,” he said.
Public records reviewed by WIRED, and interviews conducted with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the University of California, Davis primate center, paint a wholly different picture of Neuralink’s animal research. The documents include veterinary records, first made public last year, that contain gruesome portrayals of suffering reportedly endured by as many as a dozen of Neuralink’s primate subjects, all of whom needed to be euthanized. These records could serve as the basis for any potential SEC probe into Musk’s comments about Neuralink, which has faced multiple federal investigations as the company moves toward its goal of releasing the first commercially available brain-computer interface for humans.
Antoinette Radford of BBC News reports on the widening rift between Ukraine and Poland over grain imports that has now resulted in Poland no longer supplying weapons to Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Poland summoned Ukraine's ambassador over comments made by President Volodymyr Zelensky at the UN.
He said some nations had feigned solidarity with Ukraine, which Warsaw denounced as "unjustified concerning Poland, which has supported Ukraine since the first days of the war".
Poland's prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, announced the decision to no longer supply Ukraine with weapons in a televised address on Wednesday after a day of rapidly escalating tensions between the two countries over grain imports.
"We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons," Mr Morawiecki said.
[...]
Mr Morawiecki said they would increase the number of banned products from Kyiv if Ukraine escalates the grain dispute. Poland's foreign ministry added that "putting pressure on Poland in multilateral forums or sending complaints to international courts are not appropriate methods to resolve differences between our countries".
Jon Henley of The Guardian reminds us that the United States is not the only place where far-right anti-establishment political parties are on the rise.
Analysis by more than 100 political scientists across 31 countries found that in national elections last year a record 32% of European voters cast their ballots for anti-establishment parties, compared with 20% in the early 2000s and 12% in the early 1990s.
The research, led by Matthijs Rooduijn, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam, and shared exclusively with the Guardian, also found that about half of anti-establishment voters support far-right parties – and this is the vote share that is increasing most rapidly.
“There’s fluctuation, but the underlying trend is the numbers keep rising,” Rooduijn said. “Mainstream parties are losing votes; anti-establishment parties are gaining. It matters, because many studies now show that when populists secure power, or influence over power, the quality of liberal democracy declines.”
In a sign of how far the rise of the nativist, authoritarian far right has shifted Europe’s politics rightwards, the researchers considered classifying several of the continent’s better-known centre-right parties as borderline far-right.
Finally today, Andrea Rizzi of El País in English. thinks that we are entering an “era of revenge” in the international order.
The world is rapidly entering the era of revenge. Two great vectors are converging. From the east, China, India and Russia are each seeking a new position of strength in the world order. While in the south, the heterogeneous group of developing and emerging countries in the Southern Hemisphere are demanding — with greater volume and unity — better solutions to their needs. Each country may have a different approach and level of influence, but they are brought together by their common desire to move away from the past, in which they received unfavorable and sometimes humiliating treatment. To do this, they are demanding changes and compensations. They are turning to historical revisionism and calling on the West, a longstanding hegemonic force, to address their grievances. This is taking place amid a backdrop tinged with reproaches and even resentment.
It’s not a new movement, but it is becoming faster and more intense. China and India are stronger now than they have been in recent centuries. The Non-Aligned Movement generally carries more weigh today than half a century ago. This week’s United Nations General Assembly will shed light on the future of this era. This understanding will come from both what is said at the event, and from who has chosen not to attend: Xi, Putin, Modi, Macron, Sunak. The absence of the leaders of China, Russia, India, France and the U.K. suggests that the push is not being made via the U.N. and its multilateralism. Let’s look at the background dynamics.
Everyone have the best possible day!
