What to make of the global far-right

More immigration = more anti-immigration politics

My recommended reading this week is Yasmin Tayag’s piece about the steadily growing bird flu epidemic in the United States.

Tayag walks an incredibly fine (and difficult) line, pointing out that the situation is genuinely very bad, even while acknowledging that it almost certainly isn’t going to turn into the kind of spectacular catastrophe that draws massive attention. We’re looking at a future in which lots of farm animals die, which will impose lots of economic costs, and a steady drip of humans get sick. Probably not especially sick, all the symptoms so far have been pretty mild. But being sick sucks. And given more time to circulate, the virus may get better at spreading human-to-human (right now, everyone getting sick works with animals), which could result in a global wave of H5N1 infections. Even if those infections are mild, they are still cumulative with all the existing cold and flu virus (and now Covid-19) that already float around and make people sick and occasionally kill those with weakened immune systems.

Which is just to say the news is pretty bad, even if you don’t anticipate anything spectacularly bad happening. It’s just not good to have new respiratory ailments emerging.

And yet, the basic conditions for both lab leaks and zoonosis remain in place, and the world continues to massively underinvest in the kind of countermeasures — primarily vaccines that could work against whole families of viruses — that might keep us safe.

Some other recommendations:

• Darrell Owens on a zoning battle in Berkeley

• Alice Evans on what’s real and what’s fake in Saudi Arabia’s turn toward women’s empowerment

• Jonathan Last’s Joe Biden appreciation

• This RAND report on improving security for AI model weights

I also agree with Tom Ricks that the Schoodic Peninsula is the best.

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This week’s good news is that 50 housing supply bills have passed state legislatures so far in 2024, there’s a bipartisan deal on permitting reform, we’ve got some lab-grown pet food meat, and we’re seeing progress on using gene editing to treat rare conditions.

Comment of the week from Binya: It seems to me to be a core falsehood of the progressive movement that centrist Democrats are the bottleneck on advancing left-wing policy. Obama and Pelosi pushed the ACA against the advice of their political advisers, and duly got a shellacking in the midterms after enacting it. They were willing to pay the political price to deliver a huge progressive win. Biden spent ~2 years wrangling the biggest climate bill in history through Congress and likewise invested huge efforts delivering student loan forgiveness, even as it undermined his credibility on combating inflation.

All of this was possible because centrist democrats won in red states, and you'd get more progressive policy if you made it more of a priority to help the John Tester types to do that.

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Our question comes from Lost Future: What exactly is wrong with center right, globally? We've seen a fragmentation in political parties over the last few decades, and a rise in more extreme ones, but also that's been kind of asymmetric. The center left is diminished but is still in OK shape in the US/UK/Germany/Canada/the Nordics etc., and the far left is in power basically nowhere. Meanwhile, the far right has definitely eclipsed your father's center right party all over the developed world, taken a ton of vote share, forced coalition governments in some cases, the whole Trump situation, etc. As a boring center left voter I see a healthy center right party that can counter us at times as a key part of a healthy society. What's their problem? How can they beat back the far right for vote share?

I was in Germany for the 2017 federal election campaign, when the far-right AfD party first made its breakthrough. To this day I am struck by a conversation I had with a couple of older (late fifties or early sixties, maybe) AfD voters I met while waiting for a rally to start in Munich.