Why Are We Suddenly At War Again?

US-POLITICS-CLINTON

Maybe it’s worth tackling one more time. Dougherty, channeling my own thoughts, thinks it’s basically on an emotion-driven whim:

Barack Obama’s exit from Iraq was as popular as his re-entry. America is against war in Iraq and then for it with the same non-committal “Um, okay.” The nation was founded by a people who made vows, who would “pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Now its wars are are on and off like a proposed take-out order: “Chinese or pizza? I mean, whatever you want.”

The pundits who say that President Obama has failed to demonstrate leadership have never considered whether the public is capable of following him, or even their own train of thought. The American public is not even capable of not following him in any recognizable way. We might have been dropping bombs in Syria against Assad to the benefit of ISIS a year ago had it not been for the hearty “No” vote in the British Parliament that denied Obama the fig leaf of multilateralism. A democratic people should be bewildered that their president was urging them to join one side of a civil war a year ago, and now joins them to another. But the American people are as responsive to this stimulus as a cattle herd is to the conclusion of a Dostoyevsky novel.

My own view is that any circumspection about this – indeed any sign of a working collective memory at all – can be suddenly driven from the American mind by the obvious fact of seriously foul actors doing horrifying things to Westerners. 200,000 Syrians died in a brutal civil war and there was no groundswell for intervention. And yet a handful of beheadings of white dudes in the desert (even by another Westerner!) provokes an immediate, Jacksonian rush to war.

But I don’t want to be reductionist here, and I’ve absorbed many good points from your emails. Other factors are clearly at work. Americans do not want to be the policeman of the world, but they like and are reassured by America’s untrammeled military might. And in the last couple of years, as the US has retrenched (only slightly) from its post-9/11 posture of offensive defense, there was a sense that other powers were filling the vacuum – especially Russia. This has spooked Americans, and they are conflicted about it. The resumed disintegration of Iraq – begun in 2003 – provoked further anxiety. Was this not becoming a classic Jihadist enclave from which terrorists could launch attacks on the US?

On the right, there was also a desire to pummel the president for anything and everything. So when he is not being a lawless tyrant, he is a total wuss and loser in foreign policy. And so the re-emergence of the decade-old Sunni insurgency in Iraq was too-perfect a bludgeon for them to resist. They got to trash Obama for “weakness”, cast the Iraq war as some kind of “victory” that Obama managed to turn into “defeat”, and generally use bad news from Mesopotamia as another brick to throw at the man’s head. Total American amnesia about the horrors and futility of the Iraq war helped matters – even as Obama refused to force the GOP to confront head-on the question of ground troops yet again in Iraq.

Then there is the utterly understandable revulsion at the moral abyss that ISIS represents. Fighting against evil has always stirred American hearts – even if we have come to learn that fighting it with brute force can sometimes make it stronger. And the cumulative effect of so many depressing developments – from Crimea to Donetsk to Erbil and Mosul – led to an impression of American drift and disengagement. So a call to action against evil was the natural response to the summer of our discontent.

And one also senses that the administration began to believe this summer that ISIS could actually take down the Baghdad government. They haven’t said this much in public, because it would be damaging. But John Kerry recently gaffed to Christiane Amanpour that “Baghdad could well have fallen.” Others have bruited that the situation in Iraq had approached a potential tipping point in the summer, as the uselessness of the Iraqi army in Sunni neighborhoods became clearer. For Obama, watching Baghdad fall – or be convulsed by serious sectarian urban warfare – was intolerable. So he has done what he often does: fashioned a reasonable, needle-threading strategy to prevent the worst from happening, forestall as much mission creep as possible, and attempt to rally the regional actors into action.

He has not done something obviously stupid. And I may simply be under-estimating the pressures on a president facing mid-terms when such a huge public consensus emerges that Something Must Be Done.

He has tried to do it in coalition with the Sunni Arab dictatorships – and is, in his usual way, trying to thread the needle with the other actors in the region, especially Iran. There is a good chance it might do some good in the very short term, although there is a stronger chance that it will generate ever-more unintended consequences in the long term, something the president openly conceded would be left to his successor.

My concerns are based on the notion that ISIS cannot be defeated in this manner; that the root cause is the irreparable disintegration of Iraq and the Sunni-Shiite struggle; that interposing the US in the middle of a Muslim civil war is likely to increase Jihadist terrorism against the West, without being able to remedy the situation; and that the way in which the US has had to corral the Arab dictatorships into defending themselves does nothing but perpetuate the dysfunctional relationship between the US and the Middle East – in which we are held responsible for everything and despised as a result.

But I’ve said my piece. Maybe I should end by saying that, of course, I hope I’m wrong and that Obama manages to pull off an extraordinary military and diplomatic coup over the next two years. I hope his newfound moxie against evil-doers ends up in a different place than his predecessor’s. I hope this doesn’t upend the negotiations with Iran. I hope it helps his party retain control of the Senate in November. And I hope his precedent doesn’t further empower the war machine, the CIA shadow government and the imperial presidency that drives so much of this. All I can promise readers is that I will be open to all those hopeful possibilities, even as I fear a much darker time ahead.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

War Support With An Expiration Date

Cassidy makes an obvious but essential point:

At the start of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, fewer than one in four respondents to the Gallup survey believed it was a mistake to send in U.S. military forces. Thereafter, though, this number steadily increased. By the time the wars had been going on for two or three years, more than fifty per cent of respondents said that the decision to wage them had been an error. The one exception was Afghanistan, where, after three years of war, the percentage of people describing the decision to dispatch U.S. forces as a mistake was still pretty small. Since then, though, this figure has grown: by 2012, it was close to fifty per cent.

Larison wonders how Americans will support the war:

In most cases, the near-instant bipartisan consensus that congeals around an interventionist policy and the attendant media demands to “do something” tend to drown out countervailing arguments during the first few months of the campaign. This boosts public support for military action in the short term, but like any bait-and-switch trick it also causes people to sour on the intervention more quickly than they might have done otherwise. More Americans gradually become aware that the threat to the U.S. was overstated (or simply made up) all along, and they start to realize that the war they were originally told about at the beginning is not the one that the U.S. is actually fighting. Because presidents often set unrealistic goals for these interventions, there is usually even greater disillusionment because the war comes to be seen as “not working.” That is a trap that presidents set for themselves. They are the ones promising results that aren’t possible, and those results certainly aren’t possible at the very low cost that the public is willing to accept.

Can The Church Survive In America? Ctd

This embed is invalid



And so it continues:

Barbara Webb had been a chemistry teacher and volleyball coach at Marian High School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., for nearly a decade — until last month, when Webb says administrators at the all-girl’s Catholic school learned Webb and her wife were expecting their first child … Webb says that she learned of her pregnancy in June, informed her employers in July, and was fired by mid-August.

Webb had already been married for six years – and so she was fired not for marrying, but for that other terrible sin: having a baby.This time, however, the nuns in charge have had some qualms:

The congregation of Catholic nuns that operates Marian High School have signaled they will re-examine policies that led to the controversial firing of a gay teacher who said she was let go because of her nontraditional pregnancy.

“Pope Francis has brought a sense of hope to our lives and encourages us to look at our Church with new eyes,” Sister Mary Jane Herb, president of the Monroe-based Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, said in a letter to alums that was shared on a Facebook page created to support the fired teacher. “No, it is not likely that doctrine will change, however the Pope emphasizes that the values of mercy, inclusion and compassion need to be included in our response to complex situations.”

Part of the message is clearly not getting through:

Of the 40-some employees who have lost jobs at Catholic institutions since 2008 because of their sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancies or personal views on homosexuality, nearly half have lost their jobs this year.

This is only 17 firings across the entire country this year – which is a minuscule fraction of the number of gay and lesbian employees at Catholic institutions. But the accelerating pace and the intensive news coverage certainly means it is becoming more and more a live issue.

And it comes down to this: does it seem Christian to you to fire people for marrying someone or for having a baby? When the next generation of Catholics comes to see their church as doing this, how will they reconcile that with the notion of the church as dedicated to universal love, social justice and compassion? The “sins” that gay Catholics are committing, after all, are no worse in theological terms than masturbation, pre-marital sex or the use of contraception within a marriage. And yet only the gays are really subject to these new censures, because they can be more easily identified in the public space.

However way you slice it, that means that the Catholic church is engaged in a very targeted campaign of discrimination against gay people for the very sins most straight Catholics commit all the time. This has to strike most people as wrong – deeply wrong. Even the most stringent church teaching on homosexuality opposes what it calls “unjust discrimination” against gays. And isn’t selective enforcement of morals against one tiny minority precisely the definition of “unjust”?

Chart Of The Day

Income Distribution

Drum flags the above one – and it is truly staggering:

The precise numbers (from Piketty and Saez) can always be argued with, but the basic trend is hard to deny. After the end of each recession, the well-off have pocketed an ever greater share of the income growth from the subsequent expansion. Unsurprisingly, there’s an especially big bump after 1975, but this is basically a secular trend that’s been showing a steady rise toward nosebleed territory for more than half a century. Welcome to the 21st century.

Jordan Weissmann chimes in:

Through mid-century, when times were good economically, most of the benefits trickled down to the bottom 90 percent of households. Then came the Reagan era and actual trickle-down economics. Suddenly, the benefits started sticking with the rich. Since 2001, the top 10 percent have enjoyed virtually all of the gains.

This isn’t a totally new story. But it is a vivid and visceral illustration of what we’ve basically known to be true for a while (the graph is updated from this paper).

Ryan Cooper adds:

Most staggering of all, during our current economic expansion, the bottom 90 percent is suffering declining incomes. Not only is the rising tide not lifting everyone equally, it’s actually submerging nine out of ten people.

So it seems that the theory behind trickle-down economics has been empirically refuted: its impact has been overwhelmingly trickle-up. It is also quite clear by now that huge tax cuts do not remotely pay for themselves – and the recent experience in Kansas only adds a final coda to this. And yet the GOP shows absolutely no sign of absorbing these facts, or having anything to say about the dangerous political instability of huge social and economic inequality and crippling debt that are their consequence.

This is why I have such a hard time with contemporary American conservatism. It is still incapable of moving on from Reagan, even as the world has changed beyond recognition.

The Long, Twilight Struggle For Independent Journalism, Ctd

Go here and here to catch up on our coverage of the Simmons-Goodell row. Sports fans from the in-tray have the floor:

Your take on Bill Simmons as a fight over journalistic independence is largely misleading.  Does ESPN have a stake in the economic success of the NFL?  You bet.  Does that mean that ESPN is going to stop criticizing the NFL or muzzle its journalists?  Absolutely not.  Don Van Natta, Jr. and Kevin Van Valkenburg, two ESPN writers, wrote the single best piece of investigative journalism in the Ray Rice affair.  Their carefully researched and written article was sharply critical of the Ravens and Goodell.  Not only did ESPN publish the piece – making it the lead story on their website for most of a day – but ESPN defended it on air, while other ESPN journalists and broadcasters praised it on twitter. That doesn’t wash with your conspiracy theory.

The problem for Simmons is that he wants to be both a journalist and an entertainer.

It is fine for radio shock jocks to call Goodell a liar (and most people would probably agree), but it is not ok for a journalist to make that kind of bald and inflammatory statement. You can criticize ESPN for trying to draw a line between journalism and entertainment when the network has frequently has blurred that line in other contexts, but that issue is a lot different from journalistic independence.  In the long run, ESPN needs legitimacy even more than it needs the NFL.

But Simmons was saying this on an avowedly free-floating podcast where the style is “anything goes” (see below). That context is relevant, I think. It’s possible to be a chatty entertainer in one media form and a sober journalist in another. Another reader pushes back in the opposite direction:

You write that Simmons was suspended because “Simmons out-and-out named Goodell as a liar – without proof.” At this point, we have four sources that verify that Goodell was told about the contents of the video. In addition, we have a source that says that the NFL received a copy of the video and has a voice message confirming his story. Further, we have multiple sources saying that at the very least the NFL was offered a copy of the video. Finally, we know for a fact Goodell lied when he said New Jersey law forbid him from getting a copy of the tape. What more proof do you need that Goodell is a liar? Do you need a video of him watching the video?

Bill Simmons spoke the truth and now he is being punished, while the most incompetent, immoral commissioner in sports continues in his job. The longer this continues on, the less I start to care about the NFL. I do not think that I am alone.

Another:

I’m a long-time Simmons reader/listener, and I want to give you some context and also contend that this is a blow for independent journalism, not a harbinger of its death.

I don’t think this was a spontaneous rant, as you say. Bill had a bee in his bonnet and he needed to get it out. The rant came in the middle of a weekly podcast he does during football season with his Cousin Sal where they talk about betting lines and generally ridicule themselves and all degenerate sports gamblers. It’s pretty light and funny. He stopped Sal in the middle of that to make his statement. He knew what he was saying was going to get his bosses’ attention, and even dared them to call him on it. He may not have anticipated the three-week suspension, but he knew there would be consequences.

That he did it despite knowing the consequences tells you everything you need to know about the power relationship between Simmons and ESPN/Disney. He knew they would have to take disciplinary action to kowtow to the NFL, but that the likelihood of them firing him was very low, and even if they did, there would be a slew of large offers from other media outlets bidding for his services, much in the way Nate Silver was wooed. He has the upper hand, not ESPN.

Had anyone else at Grantland said what Simmons said, they would likely have been sacked. During podcasts, when someone else takes a pregnant pause while discussing a controversial subject, Bill interjects: “Don’t get fired.” But he knows that doesn’t apply to him.

Another reader:

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I rather suspect that Simmons‘ suspension by ESPN resulted from several factors you failed to note in your coverage, e. g., use of terms such as “fuck” and “fucking liar” in his rant filled harangue against Goodell and his acknowledgement that he had no evidence or proof that the commissioner was “lying.”

But another knocks that theory down:

Simmons‘ podcast begins with the disclaimer: “The B.S. Report is a free-flowing conversation that occasionally touches on mature subjects . . .” Ever since adding that disclaimer, and particularly since the advent of Grantland, foul language is common on the B.S. Report.  And the discussion frequently involves “mature” subjects.  Simmons referring to Goodell’s press conference as “fucking bullshit” is tame compared to the recurring discussions involving sex and drugs.  Not to mention, articles on Grantland routinely use swear words.

Another reader backs me up a bit:

I am a freelance sports reporter, journalism teacher, and avid Dishhead, so I feel I am uniquely positioned to riff about this Bill Simmons thing in context for a bit, so forgive me if I blabber.

First, I am also a Simmons/Grantland fan, and I listened to the podcast minutes after it was released. I thought his take was strong, but even I was a bit like, “Whoa, there. Careful.” The reason why is exactly what you stated: He called Goodell a liar without proof, and more importantly, without providing himself an out. Keith Olbermann, who has a show on ESPN TV nowadays, has also consistently championed Goodell’s resignation, but for all his blowhardiness, Olbermann cleverly leaves himself an out each time, saying for example (and I’m paraphrasing poorly here), that Goodell is either incompetent or lying, and therefore should resign. But never did he say Goodell is a liar, full stop. So that’s where Bill got into trouble with ESPN’s Journalistic Standards police: Lack of parsing.

But here’s the thing – I personally find even that laughable. Simmons isn’t a journalist per se; he’s an opinion-maker and a columnist, and also a pretty good, if homer-ish, NBA analyst. ESPN has no problem playing the journalism card on him in this case, but it’s totally cool with allowing fellow opinion-maker, columnist and NBA analyst Stephen A. Smith participate in Oberto beef jerky ads with Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks. That, apparently, is totally cool in Bristol.

It should also be noted that I personally believe the aggressive coverage of the Ray Rice case has partially been a reaction by all the networks to what they have long-viewed as heavy-handedness by the NFL in TV and advertising contract negotiations in the Goodell era. It’s no secret in the sports business world that the NFL has a very difficult reputation in negotiations. It’s as if the networks mutually decided when they found out that their reporters were lied to publicly that they would go open season on the league. And now that the story is waning a bit, and the league is regaining some ground (largely thanks to the consumption of its regular product every weekend), ESPN is pulling the reins in a tad.

I think there’s a bit more inside baseball going on here, since it’s in the networks’ interest to try to devalue the NFL as a commodity for the next round of negotiations by, well, doing their jobs and reporting facts. The NFL appears on ALL of the major networks – FOX, CBS, NBC and ESPN (which is owned by ABC/Disney), so whatever they can do to rein the NFL’s negotiating power in is  gravy to them, I’m sure, since it also owns the ratings for the dying major networks across the board.

I hope that helps at least a bit. Thanks again for all you and your team do!

The Gender Gap On The Big Screen

Female Characters

Alyssa Rosenberg flags new research on female characters in film:

[W]hen a new study from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, produced by the scholars at the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California Annenberg, rounded up the representation of women in movies from the world’s top-ten markets outside of the United States, I was curious. Are audiences in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United Kingdom accustomed to see women on screen in numbers and in ways that might force the heavily-male American movie industry to cater to their preferences?

She explains the “mixed” results:

The study’s authors looked at the movies that played in those countries’ theaters between the beginning of 2010 and May 1, 2013. During that time, 29.3 percent of characters in American movies were female. Seven countries had a higher percentage of female characters in movies–Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom. But the numbers were not dramatically higher. The United Kingdom had the highest overall percentage of female characters at 37.9 percent, a figure that hardly suggests a yawning gap between what the U.S. provides and what international audiences are accustomed to at home.

Molly Mirhashem takes a closer look at the study’s findings:

Less than a fourth of all characters with jobs were female, while in reality women represent 40 percent of the global workforce. Beyond that, very few female characters held powerful roles in any field; leadership and “prestigious” positions, like judges, doctors, executives, and professors, skewed overwhelmingly male. Only 10 percent of workers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields were women, as compared to about 25% in actuality. …

The team further surveyed the levels of revealing clothing, nudity, thinness, and implications of attractiveness for female characters across age groups. For example, in the German films, 40 percent of all female characters wore revealing clothing (defined as “tight and alluring”). In American films, for comparison, 29 percent of the female characters were scantily clad. And in perhaps the most disturbing finding, teenage girls as young as 13 were as likely to be sexualized as women in their thirties.

Pessimism Inc.

Bourree Lam tracks Westerners’ dim hopes for corporations:

In developed economies of North America and Western Europe only 44 percent of the public see corporations as a source of hope, compared with 57 percent of executives. 55 percent of the public polled in developed markets feel that corporations have not been humbled by the recession, and haven’t been acting more responsibly either. In the U.S. last year, the SEC announced a record $3.4 billion in fines, and 2011 was the year with the most actions filed in the agency’s history.

Compared with China, where 84 percent of people consider corporations a source of hope, the U.S. is not very optimistic about corporations making the economy stronger—only 36 percent feel hopeful toward them. Interestingly, the U.S. general public is more than 10 times as likely as the Chinese general public to say that corporations have more power than the government. 95 percent of those surveyed in China say the government has more power than corporations in their country, compared to just 51 percent in America. Nearly half of Americans surveyed feel that corporations have too much influence on the future of the U.S. economy.

Neil Irwin interprets the survey’s findings:

When it comes to business exerting power over the economy, Americans have mixed views but are generally comfortable. But when it comes to business exerting power over government, they are much more exercised.

Americans aren’t antibusiness, in other words. They’re just against business having what they see as too much power in Washington.

Compare that with China, where citizens seem to view businesses as less powerful in terms of lobbying (only 19 percent seeing a lot of influence by corporate lobbyists, a full 40 percentage points lower than in the United States) but are more likely to believe it is good for companies to be strong and influential. One might imagine that Chinese citizens see less a phenomenon in which business overly influences government and one more in which government overly influences businesses.

Black-ish Is Beautiful

Alyssa Rosenberg declares the ABC sitcom “the best new comedy pilot of the fall television season”:

The series focuses on an upwardly-mobile black Los Angeles family, headed by Andre (Anthony Anderson), an advertising executive, his doctor wife Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), Andre’s father (Laurence Fishburne) and their four children. Andre appreciates the opportunities that are open to him, including a nice home and a possible promotion at his firm, but when “Black-ish” begins, he is also gravely concerned that his kids are drifting from his own sense of what it means to be black, in part because they have grown up in such relative comfort. …

But the tension Andre is feeling does not simply play out in his own family, where he and Rainbow–who is mixed-race–have radically different perspectives on everything from their own children’s choice of sports and attraction to Judaism to an ongoing disagreement about whether O.J. Simpson is actually guilty. Instead, the great insight of “Black-ish” is that everyone has a relationship to black culture now, as well as to issues of class and gender, and that there is great comedy and great insight to be mined in looking at the fine-grained differences in the perspectives everyone brings to blackness (and whiteness), family life and money.

While watching the first episode – available in full here – Judnick Mayard felt a pang of recognition:

The pilot, which airs this week on ABC, follows “Dre” on the day he is promoted to senior vice president at the ad agency where there are no folks of color on the management team. To his surprise, he is named SVP of the Urban Division, essentially boiling his job down to black man in charge of black stuff. His boss insults him further by requesting that he also keep it real on his first pitch, which incenses Dre into a mad spiral of reaffirming his blackness to himself and his family. Dre’s anger and antics throughout the rest of the episode come from feeling like his blackness (and his family’s blackness) is being attacked. It’s a feeling that many of us can understand.

Linda Holmes contends that “while the racial politics of Black-ish are interesting and feel pretty fresh … what’s even more unusual is Dre’s mention of money”:

What makes the show interesting and the comedy more pointed, for me, is that there’s a candor about the way that having money affects Dre and Rainbow’s sense of who they are and how they’re raising their kids that’s very uncommon in a world where the obviously rolling-in-dough families on Modern Family, for instance, almost never discuss it. That’s not to even mention, of course, the many much-maligned examples of people living in palatial New York apartments they would never be able to afford in their proffered professions, from everyone on Friends to Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, who was somehow supporting herself in high style and hot shoes by writing one column for one outlet, rather than living in a closet with four roommates and a cockroach infestation. Black-ish concerns itself largely with the way Dre’s sense of racial identity intersects with the introduction of wealth.

Willa Paskin adds, “What ultimately gives Black-ish so much warmth – a warmth reminiscent of, yes, The Cosby Show – is its optimism that audiences, of all colors, will not be turned off by its specificity”:

Black-ish is about the affluent black experience, no apologies, no soft-pedaling. And that experience, of course, encompasses the anxiety of raising your children, the sustaining of a great marriage, and the ongoing project of being the person you most want to be. Like the many, many sitcoms about the affluent white experience, this is a show that is meant to be seen and enjoyed by everyone.

But Kellie Carter Jackson longs for more all-black casts:

How is it that in the “Age of Obama,” there is even less black programming on TV, save the ratchet reality TV shows of Love and Hip Hop, Basketball Wives, and the Real Housewives of Atlanta? Not only are these reality shows a false and horrible representation of black culture, but they are essentially made for pennies on the dollar when compared to a network drama or comedy.

Of course, if reality TV such as Love and Hip Hop was about authentic, complex characters, I’d watch it. I’d watch a show about drug dealers, if it were authentic and thoughtful. Who didn’t love The Wire? Who doesn’t love a good anti-hero? Black TV isn’t always about the politics of respectability. What American television should be about is presenting America with a world as diverse and complex as it really is. TV’s visual binary should not consistently be limited to that of black success or black struggle: Most of us live somewhere in between.

Perhaps in the age of Obama, the decline of all-black casts is simply because African-American actors are more woven into the fabric of TV overall. If anyone knows of any demographic data pointing either way, email us at dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Tech’s New Political Charge

In an analysis of the “long, awkward relationship between Silicon Valley and American politics,” Ben Smith sees tech industry on the brink of a new era:

The relationship between tech and politics is “radically changing,” said Ace Smith, a San Francisco political consultant whose clients have included the biggest names in both Democratic politics and technology. The startups jangling transportation, housing, and an array of other consumer areas have “opened the tech world’s eyes to needing a broader perspective, and it’s opened every one else’s eyes – it’s really brought them much more into the world of politics and government and communications.” Indeed, 2014 feels like the end of one era and the beginning of another.

A generation ago in Silicon Valley, “you didn’t even think about government until you were a public company – and even then it was a culture of avoidance,” said Matt Mahan, who has worked for a decade at the intersection of politics and tech and now runs Brigade, a startup aimed at reforming U.S. politics. … Now Uber, in particular, is winning more fights than it’s losing in an endless series of tussles with local regulators. The same is true for Airbnb, whose spokesman, Nick Pappas, had previously been selling Obamacare from the West Wing press office. (Two other former top Democratic staffers also work there.) These companies carry the confidence (at times, arrogance) and sense of destiny that has driven Silicon Valley’s burst of innovation; they also are being shaped by urgent battles with regulators of the sort that Microsoft, for instance, didn’t quite see coming (on a far larger scale) until the Department of Justice came calling. They are showing a new willingness to compromise the purism that sometimes made tech companies leery of dirtying themselves up in Washington.

Relatedly, Daniel Ben-Ami praises urbanist Joel Kotkin’s recent book The New Class Conflict, which tracks the ascent of tech power elite, as “an innovative attempt to rethink the main contours of US society”:

[Kotkin] sees the American elite as split between two mutually antagonistic oligarchies. On one side is a new elite based largely on information technology, although with substantial support from Wall Street. On the other is the old plutocracy centered on sectors such as agribusiness, construction, energy and manufacturing. The new oligarchy differs from the old in important ways. Its technology wing is concentrated in and around San Francisco, with a secondary cluster in Seattle, and it employs far fewer people than traditional industries. Kotkin estimates that in 2013 the leading social media companies together directly employed fewer than 60,000 people in the US. By contrast, GM employed 200,000, Ford 164,000 and Exxon more than 100,000. The different nature of technology firms, with far less dependence on cheap energy, helps explain why they are predisposed to green thinking. They also tend to be both geographically and emotionally distant from middle America.