FiveThirtyEight: Why Buttigieg Dropped Out

Pete Buttigieg pulled off a surprisingly successful presidential run. The 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, the fourth-largest city in Indiana, was unable to win the race for chair of the Democratic National Committee three years ago. In the 2020 Democratic primary, however, he not only outlasted prominent Democrats like Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, but Buttigieg also effectively tied for first in Iowa and finished a close second in New Hampshire. He won more support than Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another party heavyweight, in all four early caucuses and primaries. And his sharp attacks on Warren (and her proposal for Medicare for All) in October and November were arguably one of the most important moments of the primary, helping blunt Warren’s rise when it seemed like she could become the race’s front-runner. [...]

Just as important as the losing itself was the way Buttigieg was losing. More than 30 percent of Democratic voters are black or Latino. And the Democratic Party thinks of itself as the party that represents people of color. But Buttigieg never gained much popularity with black or Latino voters, punctuated by him getting an estimated 3 percent of the black vote in South Carolina. [...]

Why would Buttigieg do that? The former mayor might genuinely think that Sanders would be a terrible nominee for the Democratic Party. But there is a potential upside for Buttigieg in making this decision too. At his age, Buttigieg has four decades to try to become president. In leaving the race now, he builds goodwill with Democratic Party officials broadly and Biden in particular. If Biden is elected president, it’s easy to imagine him putting Buttigieg in a top administration post that helps Buttigieg fill out his resume — think U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. And goodwill among party officials will help Buttigieg if, as I expect, he eventually runs for president again.

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TLDR New: Could Bloomberg Become the Nominee: Mike's Rise Explained

Michael Bloomberg has experienced an impressive rise in the polls in recent months, with him closing in on Biden. It's looking more and more like he could be the serious moderate competition for Sanders. So in this video, we explain Bloomberg's history, his late entry into the race, why he's popular and why he isn't.

Social Europe: The party of discontent

Pundits frequently point out that, while elected officials may be uneasy, the average Republican voter adores Trump: over 90 per cent of declared Republicans claim to have a favourable view of the president. Yet this analysis glosses over important fault-lines in the Grand Old Party, which is in fact divided. [...]

Republican elites in the US are equally appalled by Trump. Historically, they are ‘libertarian’—the American term for classical liberalism. Republican elites prefer small government, low taxes and deregulation. They abhor policies that might redistribute wealth. GOP politicians complain about deficits if they can make a plausible case that these are caused by social programmes but tolerate them if the cause is tax cuts and military spending. These policies offer little benefit to their impecunious southern supporters, so they have used social conservativism—highlighting the rise of secularism, threats to traditional gender relations and (indirectly) changes in the racial hierarchy—to attract votes. [...]

The main political problem of the Republican elite is that, while they are still libertarian, their voters are now fascist. Previously they had been able to obtain their economic preferences and control their base by playing to the latter’s conservative social values. Trump has changed all that. The game is up.

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The Guardian: Four lessons the Spanish flu can teach us about coronavirus

Spanish flu is estimated to have killed between 50 million and 100 million people when it swept the globe in 1918-19 – more than double the number killed in the first world war. Two-thirds of its victims died in a three-month period and most were aged 18-49. So what lessons has the world’s deadliest pandemic taught us? [...]

The Spanish flu hit during the first world war, so authorities were unusually keen to avoid further social disruption or blows to national morale. Much of the pandemic was characterised by increasingly untenable reassurances that the Spanish flu was not something to be overly concerned about. In June 1918, just before the UK felt the full force of the outbreak, the Daily Mail advised readers that flu was no worse than a cold and that people should not have “any great dread” but “maintain a cheery outlook on life”. The Times initially adopted a casual, jokey tone before growing critical of official complacency. [...]

Flu viruses are fundamentally different from coronaviruses in that they are constantly shuffling their genomes, which means they rapidly morph from one strain into another – that’s why flu vaccines are needed annually. Coronaviruses tend to be genetically fairly stable and so scientists don’t expect a sudden shift in the mortality rate of Covid-19. But the question of whether coronavirus will disappear, reappear in waves or simmer in the background as an endemic illness still remains to be answered.

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The American Interest: Challenges and Pitfalls of the Technocratic Art

But as John Dryden wrote, “Geniuses and madmen are near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” The ban isn’t madness at all, just a manifestation of the Confucian-inflected penchant for orderliness, and its tacit assumption that the social psychology of orderliness is seamless. It’s not just a Confucian conclusion either: The ban makes sense as Singapore’s version of James Q. Wilson’s famous “broken windows” insight. [...]

I’m uncomfortable with caning’s implied paternalism, but not with its results. But it’s really none of my business (or yours, fellow American) since I’m not a Singaporean national. As a general rule, Americans should think twice (or as many times as necessary) before tendering judgments about matters in which they are not vested and probably can’t fully understand for lack of metis. A former Singaporean ambassador to the United States complained to me, recently and in the main justifiably, that Americans often just don’t listen to others, especially others from small countries. She was too polite to add that this rarely stops us from speaking out about the supposed moral deficiencies of said others, whether we know what we’re talking about or not. It’s not one of our more endearing traits. [...]

Out of concern to avoid stigmatizing and humiliating the vulnerable, the government publishes no data on the proportions of the country’s ethnic hearth communities that end up in jail and rehab. It’s a sensitive matter, as are all matters intercommunal, and the reason is that the Malay community, which occupies the statistical bottom of the mean income and education scales, also occupies the top of the incarceration, broken families, delinquent youth, and drug-dependency scales. [...]

The resulting food security anxiety has led, for example, to a megadeal with China wherein a chunk of Chinese land is being developed with Singaporean capital for the main purpose of providing foodstuffs to Singapore. The Jilin Project involves 1,450 square miles of land; all of Singapore is only 751.5 square miles. Perhaps sensing belatedly that putting so much leverage in Chinese hands might be unwise, the government subsequently announced the 30/30 challenge, by which Singapore will produce 30 percent of its own food by 2030, largely through advanced vertical hydroponic methods.

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