Quartz: The typical political party only lasts 43 years

En Marche is the 15th political party since 1900 to be among the top two in seats won in France. Of the 14 previous political parties to accomplish this, only three remain relevant today (as defined by having finished in the top five in the previous two elections). On average, parties remained relevant for 34 years.

In order to quantify the transience of political parties, Quartz analyzed data from the ParlGov database, an elections results database maintained by Holger Dorin and Philip Manow at the University of Bremen. The database contains election results for all EU countries and most OECD countries. For comparability, our analysis only looks at results from parliamentary elections. The US does not appear in the dataset because it is not a parliamentary system. [...]

How long do parties usually last? To calculate this number, we used a statistical technique called survival analysis (pdf). It is a method for estimating a person or organization’s typical lifespan when some of the people or organizations that are part of an analysis are still in existence. We found that the median major political party lasts around 43 years, and one third of parties don’t even last 20 years. (These estimates are based on a statistical model, so not perfectly accurate, but they are likely correct to within 10 years.)

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The New Yorker: The Danger of President Pence

If the job is a gamble for Pence, he himself is something of a gamble for the country. During the tumultuous 2016 Presidential campaign, relatively little attention was paid to how Pence was chosen, or to his political record. And, with all the infighting in the new Administration, few have focussed on Pence’s power within the White House. Newt Gingrich told me recently that the three people with the most policy influence in the Administration are Trump, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Pence. Gingrich went on, “Others have some influence, such as Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. But look at the schedule. Pence has lunches with the President. He’s in the national-security briefings.” Moreover, and crucially, Pence is the only official in the White House who can’t be fired. [...]

On Election Night, the dissonance between Trump’s populist supporters and Pence’s billionaire sponsors was quietly evident. When Trump gave his acceptance speech, in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, he vowed to serve “the forgotten men and women of our country,” and promised to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, and hospitals.” Upstairs, in a room reserved for Party élites, several of the richest and most conservative donors, all of whom support drastic reductions in government spending, were celebrating. Doug Deason, a Texas businessman and a political donor, recalled to me, “It was amazing. In the V.I.P. reception area, there was an even more V.I.P. room, and I counted at least eight or nine billionaires.” [...]

Cecil Bohanon, one of two adjunct scholars at Pence’s think tank, had a history of financial ties to tobacco-company front groups, and in 2000 Pence echoed industry talking points in an essay that argued, “Smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers doesn’t die from a smoking-related illness.” A greater “scourge” than cigarettes, he argued, was “big government disguised as do-gooder, healthcare rhetoric.” Bohanon, who still writes for the think tank’s publication, also has ties to the Kochs. Last year, John Hardin, the head of university relations for the Charles Koch Foundation, told an Indiana newspaper that the Kochs had been funding Bohanon’s work as a professor of free-market economics at Ball State University “for years.” [...]

Pence, who had called global warming “a myth” created by environmentalists in their “latest Chicken Little attempt to raise taxes,” took up the Kochs’ cause. He not only signed their pledge but urged others to do so as well. He gave speeches denouncing the cap-and-trade bill—which passed the House but got held up in the Senate—as a “declaration of war on the Midwest.” His language echoed that of the Koch groups. Americans for Prosperity called the bill “the largest excise tax in history,” and Pence called it “the largest tax increase in American history.” (Neither statement was true.) He used a map created by the Heritage Foundation, which the Kochs supported, to make his case, and he urged House Republicans to hold “energy summits” opposing the legislation in their districts, sending them home over the summer recess with kits to bolster their presentations. [...]

But conservatives blocked the idea, and Pence threatened to veto any such legislation. “With Pence, you need to look at the framework, which is abstinence,” Clere said. “It’s the same as with giving teen-agers condoms. Conservatives think it promotes the behavior, even though it’s a scientifically proven harm-reduction strategy.” In March, 2015, Clere staged a huge public hearing, in which dozens of experts and sufferers testified about the crisis. Caught flat-footed, Pence scheduled his own event, where he announced that he would pray about the syringe-exchange issue. The next day, he said that he supported allowing an exchange program as an emergency measure, but only on a temporary basis and only in Scott County, with no state funding. Clere told me that he spent “every last dime of my political capital” to get the bill through. After Scott County implemented the syringe exchange, the number of new H.I.V. cases fell. But Republican leaders later stripped Clere of his committee chairmanship, a highly unusual event. “I commend Representative Clere for the efforts to help the state deal with this,” Kevin Burke, the health officer in neighboring Clark County, told me. “But he paid a price for it.”

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The Atlantic: The Movement of #MeToo

For a long time, most women defined their own sexual harassment and assault in this way: as something unspoken, something private, something to be ashamed of acknowledging. Silence, although understandable, has its cost. A decade ago, I couldn’t have conceived of the fact that so many women had experienced sexual coercion or intimidation; now, I’d be surprised if I could find a single one who hadn’t. On Sunday afternoon, the actress Alyssa Milano used her Twitter account to encourage women who’d been sexually harassed or assaulted to tweet the words #MeToo. In the last 24 hours, a spokesperson from Twitter confirmed, the hashtag had been tweeted nearly half a million times. [...]

or all the frequent grumbles about the passivity of most forms of Twitter activism, this was a moment in which the form fit perfectly with the message: The goal of #MeToo, as Milano’s friend told her, was simply to give people a sense of “the magnitude of the problem.” Waking up to a feed dominated by women discussing their experiences of harassment and assault, it turns out, will do that. For more than a week, social media has been filled with stories told by women about their interactions with the producer Harvey Weinstein, accusations that range from verbal coercion to rape. But as horrifying as the allegations against Weinstein have been, more appalling still is the sense that his behavior isn’t uncommon. That in industries across the world, from media to music to modeling to academia, women have encountered their own Weinsteins and have deduced, for whatever reason, that nothing could be done about it and nobody cared.

The power of #MeToo, though, is that it takes something that women had long kept quiet about and transforms it into a movement. Unlike many kinds of social-media activism, it isn’t a call to action or the beginning of a campaign, culminating in a series of protests and speeches and events. It’s simply an attempt to get people to understand the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in society. To get women, and men, to raise their hands. Recent revelations about the alleged abuses of Weinstein and Bill Cosby and Jimmy Savile and R. Kelly have proven that truth has power. There’s a monumental amount of work to be done in confronting a climate of serial sexual predation—one in which women are belittled and undermined and abused and sometimes pushed out of their industries altogether. But uncovering the colossal scale of the problem is revolutionary in its own right.

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The Atlantic: Gender-Fluid Scouts of America

The naming of the “Boy Scouts of America” came in 1910, when women could not vote, on the heels of Robert Baden-Powell’s 1908 book Scouting for Boys. Baden-Powell, a British army officer, sought to impart a lifestyle that would “combat brooding and selfishness.” Though in his text he also praised “women scouts of the nation” like Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale. And Baden-Powell is quoted by the Boy Scouts as having said, “It’s the spirit within, not the veneer without, that makes a man.” [...]

Assuming that’s a genuine question, I may have an answer. A constant tension among human-rights advocacy is whether to focus on protection or freedom. Nowhere is the debate more heated than on questions of gender and sexuality. There are times when it is necessary to highlight differences among groups of people, and there are times when it’s beneficial to downplay differences. When calling out discrimination and injustice predicated on such a difference, it needs to be discussed frankly. When the difference is being named to excuse injustice, it’s better to emphasize what everyone has in common. [...]

During past years’ debates over banning openly gay and trans Boy Scouts and leaders, detractors cited the potential for sexual activity among males in the woods. Some of the same detractors now expressed concern about boys being with girls. The fundamental element there is really not the preservation of heterosexuality, but the preservation of status. The objection is to anything that threatens the exclusive nature of what it means to be a man as it refers to a code of identity that commands power.

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Politico: Brexiteers fear ‘Swiss Trap’ trade deal

For some in the British government, the Swiss model — and the high level of access to the European single market it offers — looks attractive, were it not for a catch which troubles even the mildest of Euroskeptics: If the Swiss break a single clause in any of the numerous bilateral agreements that make up their trade deal with Brussels, their whole economic relationship comes tumbling down.

This all-or-nothing “guillotine clause” forces the Swiss into accepting a large and evolving share of EU law, including free movement of people, with little practical power to break away without risking enormous economic damage. [...]

It is the closest model to the one laid out by U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May in her Florence speech last month, where she rejected Norwegian-style EEA membership as too restrictive, while also insisting a Canada-plus free-trade model did not offer enough access for Britain’s economy. [...]

These agreements are overseen by “more than 15 joint committees,” rather than the European Court of Justice — but if they break any deal, the whole arrangement collapses. The severity of this penalty — and its impact on the Swiss economy — means that in practice the country must go along with whatever is decided in Brussels, if it is related to any of the sectors of its economy where is has a deal with the EU.

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