Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
A woman seeking employment attends the 25th annual Central Florida Employment Council Job Fair at the Central Florida Fairgrounds, May 12, 2021.
Politico Playbook began the week by noting that “the NYT and WSJ both published stories Sunday focused on Missouri that explored whether cutting federal unemployment benefits is helping employers fill vacancies. And … they reached opposite conclusions.”
Here’s what the Politico smarty-pants didn’t tell you: Yes, Patricia Cohen’s story in the Times and Eric Morath and Joe Barrett’s story in the Journal both reported on the results at the same jobs fair at the Element Hotel in St. Louis and reached differing conclusions about whether cutting off unemployment benefits spurred people to look for jobs. In making the case that “Americans are leaving unemployment rolls more quickly in states cutting off benefits” and thereby “ending the aid could push more people to take jobs,” however, the Journal story relied on some decidedly sketchy evidence. First, it noted a drop in the number of those applying for jobless benefits, which it tied to Missouri’s cutoff, but the article’s authors relied on a statistic that actually predated that cutoff. (They tied it simply to its announcement.) Second, in noting a significant rise in the number of applicants at the Element jobs fair over its previous one, the article failed to mention that the hotel had instituted two separate wage hikes in the previous months (including one that occurred just two days earlier), thereby making the jobs it was offering far more attractive. For her part, Cohen actually traipsed down there to interview the people who attended the fair and found that most of them were not collecting unemployment benefits. Even so, the Journal piece will likely be deployed by Republican legislators looking to “inspire” people to seek shitty jobs by cutting off their benefits.
Morning Consult has released an extremely useful eight-country survey headlined “U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing Authoritarianism Compared to Western Peers: Global Morning Consult data reveals a distinctive authoritarian bent in the American right.” Highlights include the facts that “26% of the U.S. population qualified as highly right-wing authoritarian … twice the share of the No. 2 countries, Canada and Australia,” along with the fact that “the beliefs that voter fraud decided the 2020 election, that Capitol rioters were doing more to protect than undermine the government and that masks and vaccines are not pivotal to stopping COVID-19 were similarly prevalent among right-leaning Americans and those that scored high for right-wing authoritarianism.”
You can see what they mean in this nutty article in Tablet, which argues that “the Biden administration has made a point of treating the nonviolent Jan. 6 offenders more harshly than other Americans who have come to the Capitol to exercise their First Amendment rights.” That’s right: They are “America’s new political prisoners,” as Tablet laments. You can see some of that nonviolence in this incredible Times video. (Also, unrelated, but bonus points to the same Trump-friendly Jewish website for its stories explaining that, sadly, “Trump’s defeat is likely to embolden those grifters who prospered most in this corrupt intellectual environment.” We are also informed that “progressives could legalize polyamorous marriage by October even if Congress opposed it.” I suppose we should be grateful that this story does not sound the alarm for “man on dog” marriages as well.
Anyway, back to authoritarianism: The Morning Consult survey should inspire an update on the argument over Seymour Martin Lipset’s 1968 argument about “working-class authoritarianism,” For more background on the concept, here is a nice short comment on the predictive power of the Frankfurt School’s writings on the topic—particularly Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s edited volume The Authoritarian Personality, discussed by Alex Ross in a New Yorker comment at the dawn of Trump’s presidency. And here’s a lengthy academic study that will require library or some other access. In any case, any careful analysis of contemporary trends needs to take note of just how much improved over Hillary Clinton’s numbers were Biden’s 2020 totals among white non–college educated voters, something Eric Levitz points out that George Packer’s new book totally misses, to the considerable detriment of his thesis.
In related research, this study, which you will need to access through some sort of research consortium or university, indicates something we “knew” but which now has been demonstrated with peer-reviewed evidence. Its authors put it thus: “[A]t least in a US context, we do see evidence of a decrease in information effects on key, political issues—immigration, same-sex adoption and gun laws, in particular—in the period 2004–2016. This offers some novel, empirical evidence for the ‘post-truth’ narrative.” What that means is that right-wing disinformation is succeeding in convincing people of the lies its purveyors are peddling. (I believe I was the person who coined the term “post-truth presidency” in my 2004 book When Presidents Lie, nicely reviewed by John Dean here.
Related, alas, to all of the above is the fact that a court has ruled that what goes on inside Fox News is just as toxic as the pollution it spews forth into the news ecosphere. Despite Fox News’s claims to have repaired the company’s poisonous workplace culture since the firing of founder and chairman Roger Ailes in July 2016, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has effectively admitted to ongoing misconduct that includes sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation against victimized employees, and has agreed to pay a million-dollar fine for what New York City’s Commission on Human Rights called “a pattern of violating of the NYC Human Rights Law.” (Alleged “sex criminal” Ed Henry has more to say about the network’s behind-the-scenes funhouse here.)
The settlement agreement, reached last week with the human rights commission, contains the largest-ever financial penalty assessed in the agency’s six-decade history, and also requires Fox News to remove mandatory confidential arbitration clauses from the contracts of on-air talent along with other employees and contributors for a period of four years when they file legal claims under the city’s human rights law outside of the company’s internal process. (It does not get into the problem of Tucker Carlson receiving messages from aliens speaking through his wisdom teeth; at least I think that’s what this story says.)
It’s time yet again for an update on Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom’s potentially best season ever in the modern era, the estimable Bob Gibson not withstanding. To wit:
- On June 26 against the Phillies, deGrom retired the side in order in the first inning, making it 37 straight batters that he’s retired in the first inning across his last seven starts.
- DeGrom’s 13 consecutive starts with two earned runs or fewer allowed to start the season is tied for the sixth-longest such streak since earned runs became official in 1913.
- DeGrom’s 0.50 ERA through his first 12 starts was the lowest by any pitcher since at least 1913. It is now 0.69, or about half of what Gibson achieved in his best season.
- DeGrom allowed three hits or fewer in 11 straight starts, the longest streak ever by a non-opener starting pitcher.
- Going back to last season, deGrom has not allowed more than five hits in 18 consecutive starts, the second-longest streak of all time.
- He’s allowed five base runners or fewer in all 13 of his starts. Excluding openers, no other starting pitcher has had more than nine starts in a row allowing five base runners or fewer.
- Oh, and he’s hitting .414.
I got those stats here. You know who has barely touched this incredible story? This newspaper, the one that thinks the imperialistic, overcharging, underperforming, Steinbrenner-owned Yankees are the only baseball team in the city.
Odds and Ends
Speaking of deGrom’s casting of a pall-like silence on the streets of Philadelphia, I don’t want to gush over Springsteen’s reopening Broadway, what with a top ticket price of over a thousand bucks. I’d prefer to note that 16 years ago this week, in yet another (this time real-life) installment of “Legends of Springsteen,” Bruce played six songs to airport staff in the middle of the night during a layover in Iceland. It remains the only time Bruce has ever “performed” in that cold country. You may have heard that the Foo Fighters reopened Madison Square Garden and played this horribly cheesy version of the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing.” Compare its lameness with the seriously wonderful version of “Stayin’ Alive” Bruce and the band did in February 2014 in Brisbane. Also, I’ll bet you never heard Bruce’s song “Freedom Cadence” before. I hadn’t. It’s from the 2017 movie Thank You for Your Service.
The late great Pete Hamill got a street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, named after him this week. Here he is with (the also great) Jonathan Schwartz speaking about the even-greater-than-both-of-them-put-together Frank Sinatra (saluted by guess which fellow New Jersey native) on the occasion of the publication of Pete’s book Why Sinatra Matters. It’s a good little book, but in this opinion, the best thing about it was that its commercial success led its publisher to say to his staff: “Who else can we get to write about someone else that ‘matters.’” The answer from my editor, “How about Eric Alterman on Bruce Springsteen?” has led to a constant stream of tiny checks, now 22 years later.
Finally, here’s the video of the talk I did with professors Tom Patterson and Robert Shapiro on June 24 sponsored by the Network for Responsible Public Policy that was inspired by this Altercation column.
