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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The utility of voter ballot initiatives [1]

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Date: 2023-08-13  

We begin today’s mostly lighter fare with Paul Waldman of The Washington Post explaining how and why Democrats have learned to use voter referenda to attain policy victories.

Not long ago, Republicans made their opponents live in fear of ballot initiatives, mobilizing public anger to achieve political victories for the right. In 2004, President George W. Bush’s reelection was aided by the passage of initiatives banning same-sex marriage in 11 states. California’s anti-tax Proposition 13 in 1978 was exported to many states, where it kept government small and taxes low. But now, the ballot initiative is one of the most vital tools liberals have to force change. The emphatic defeat of a Republican effort in Ohio to require supermajorities to pass ballot initiatives (an attempt to head off an abortion rights initiative in November) is only the latest example of this sea change. It’s also a harbinger of more to come from both sides: Democrats will try to put policy issues on the ballot, and Republicans will work to make that harder. [...] Conservatives and their allies do still mount initiative campaigns; next year , California will hold measures sponsored by the fast-food industry, the oil industry and the real estate industry. But lately, liberals have had more and more success — even in conservative states — making policy gains at the ballot box that they can’t achieve in state legislatures. even in conservative states

Giancarlo Pasquini, Alison Spencer, Alec Tyson, and Cary Funk of Pew Research Center says that more Americans may want to hear from more scientists about climate change.

The interviews revealed that language describing climate change as a crisis and an urgent threat was met with suspicion by many participants. The disconnect between crisis rhetoric and the participants’ own beliefs and experiences drove doubt about the motivations of the people making these claims, sowing suspicion and deeper mistrust. Interviewees widely rejected the national news media as a credible source for climate information. They see these outlets as presenting information that suits their own agendas. Interviewees generally expressed greater openness toward hearing from scientists on climate change because of their subject matter expertise. Still, participants stressed the importance of hearing factual statements from scientists rather than beliefs that may be shaped by their own political leanings or their research funders. On policy, interviewees were open to government efforts to improve environmental quality, including air and water quality – especially when these efforts were at the local level. The conversations underscore areas of common ground around environmental protection, regardless of Americans’ level of concern about climate change.

Nate Cohn of The New York Times says that the Republican Party is no longer the Party of Reagan ideologically.

For more than 30 years, the Republican Party was defined by Ronald Reagan’s famous three-legged stool: a coalition of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and national security hawks. It’s not Mr. Reagan’s party anymore. Today, a majority of Republicans oppose many of the positions that defined the party as recently as a decade ago, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week. Only around one-third of Republican voters takes the traditionally conservative side on each of same-sex marriage, entitlements and America’s role in the world — three issues that defined George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and correspond with each leg of Mr. Reagan’s stool.

But Ed Kilgore of New York magazine responds that the GOP never was Reagan’s party to begin with.

Yes, Reagan mostly favored free trade. He launched a “round” of multilateral trade-expansion negotiations and began the talks with Canada and Mexico that culminated in NAFTA. But it’s Reagan who represented a new GOP tradition on trade. Economic nationalism and protectionism all but defined the Republican Party (and its predecessor party, the Whigs) throughout the 19th century; the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 signed by Herbert Hoover arguably represented the high-water mark of American protectionism, likely deepening the Great Depression. Recurrences of GOP protectionism broke out more recently, notably under Richard Nixon (whose southern supporters led by Strom Thurmond regularly secured textile import quotas). There was always an economic nationalist rump faction in the GOP even in Reagan and Bush’s days; as with so many paleo-conservative causes given new relevance by Trump, Pat Buchanan kept the flag waving for protectionism. Reagan also championed the libertarian–Wall Street cause of expanded immigration and immigration “amnesty.” By the time George W. Bush embraced the same cause, it had spurred a large and angry conservative backlash, which killed W.’s push for “comprehensive immigration reform” and paved the way for MAGA neo-nativism. This, too, was a very old Republican tradition, expressed most thoroughly by the blatantly racist Immigration Act of 1924, signed by Calvin Coolidge. This law, which stayed in force until 1965, imposed strict immigration quotas by national origin, with a big thumb on the scales in favor of Northern Europeans. Nothing Trump has proposed breaks particularly new ground.

Isaac Bailey of The Miami Herald says he laughed at the Montgomery Brawl because Ahmaud Arbery could not.

On that Alabama dock, a Black riverboat co-captain, Damien Pickett, asked a group of white men to move their pontoon boat so the passenger ferry could dock in its regular spot. They spent 45 minutes refusing to move their boat only a few feet. As the black co-captain argued with one of the white men, another appeared and assaulted him. “I’m going to kill you, (expletive),” Pickett heard one of the men scream. Within seconds, the Black man was on his back with six white men and one white woman either pummeling and repeatedly punching or hovering over him. Mary Todd, 21, Richard Roberts, 48, Allen Todd, 23, and Zachery Shipman, 25 would later be arrested and charged with third-degree assault. Freeze that frame in your mind and you’d see more than just the shadow of some of this country’s worst periods. It was more than an echo. But bystanders refused to allow it to become a repeat. On Feb. 23, 2020 in Brunswick, Georgia, no one came to Arbery’s rescue as Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael chased him down and shot him to death while William Bryan recorded that 21st century lynching. There would be no lynching on that Alabama dock because the calvary showed up. A Black bystander surveying the scene intervened. A young black man jumped from the ferry and swam to the dock to help. Others did as well, including one man wielding a white folding chair and unwittingly launching a million memes.

Walter Mayr of Der Spiegel looks at the two faces of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučic.

Whether over a poolside breakfast at the president’s residence, flying in a helicopter over southern Serbia or in the presidential palace, Vučić consistently chooses his words to sound as though he humbly accepts that hardly anyone is particularly grateful for his services to country and region. The president sees himself as a guarantor of peace in the western Balkans. Those who understand a bit of Serbian and are able to read between the lines, however, those who follow the bluster on pro-regime private broadcasters: They might arrive at a rather different conclusion. Namely, that Vučić has all the characteristics of an instigator. [...] The president’s foreign policy strategy is nothing short of a balancing act. Even as he emphasizes the importance of Serbia’s relations with Brussels and Washington, he cultivates ties to both Moscow and Beijing. Belgrade continues to refrain from participation in the sanctions that the West has levied against Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine – while harassment of Russian opposition activists who have fled to Serbia is on the rise.

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