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Analysis
With the baseball playoffs in full swing and the US presidential election looming, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the most polarizing figures in America: a serial liar, an unrepentant womanizer, a convicted criminal, and a charismatic hero to millions.
I don’t know who comes to mind for you, but I am thinking of Pete Rose.
For those unfamiliar with Rose, who died this week at age 83, he was one of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field. A hard-nosed, scrappy, winning-is-everything athlete nicknamed “Charlie Hustle,” Rose led his hometown Cincinnati Reds to two world titles in the 1970s and amassed more base hits than anyone else in history. Even today, decades later, he holds the hits record by such a large margin that it will probably never be broken.
But a Major League Baseball investigation in the late 1980s found that Rose had broken the rules by betting on baseball games that he played in and managed. He lied about it and, as a result, was banned from MLB for life. The Baseball Hall of Fame voted to exclude him permanently from candidacy.
Despite calls from many players, fans, and sportswriters to reinstate him – and a clumsy late-life rapprochement campaign by Rose himself – MLB and the Hall of Fame have never budged.
Which is to say that, unlike the other person my introduction might have brought to mind (and a great many other powerful people in America), Rose ran into something that's too rare in public life today: real consequences for doing really bad things.
It didn’t matter that Rose was one of the greats. Or that he was immensely popular, had a a quick bat, a flinty charisma, or an inspiring life story. He still paid the price for his actions.
Imagine if our politics always worked like that. What if undermining the legitimacy of, say, an election – the World Series of any democracy, really – or endlessly telling obvious lies to huge numbers of people carried a real cost? In other words, imagine if messing with the integrity of the game got you thrown out of it.
Instead, we live in a world where we often excuse the offenses of players on our own political teams because the other side is so much worse. It’s always the bottom of the ninth with the future of civilization on the line.
The contrast between the world of Pete and the world of Politics couldn’t be clearer. As Sports Illustrated baseball editor Ted Keith, who supports the ban on Rose, puts it in a superb new documentary about the player, “integrity has to be the basis of professional sports, even if it’s not the basis of public life.”
And yet there is, as with so many things in modern baseball, an asterisk to this story.
*If we want a society where people respect rules and laws, then those laws have to be enforced in a fair and reasonably consistent way.
And that's where the Rose story is an example of what not to do if you want to bolster the credibility of the rules and the systems that enforce them. Why, many ask, was Rose banned from baseball for gambling on games when a team that won the World Series after a season of cheating faced no serious sanctions?
Why did the Barry Bondses and the Mark McGwires, who broke all-time records while pumped to the eyeballs with illegal steroids in the 1990s, never get banned?
When baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani was implicated in a gambling scandal earlier this year, why did everyone simply accept the explanation that his Japanese interpreter was the one placing the bets? “Boy I wish I’d had an interpreter,” Rose said of the matter.
And all of this is Cracker Jack stuff compared to what goes on outside of baseball.
People see the way that some countries get support when they kill civilians while others get sanctioned. Or the way that some leaders get booked for sexual misconduct, while others get book deals, or how some rioters get sentenced while others get sympathy. They understand that world is one in which some people get bailouts while others go broke, and some countries kill journalists or dissidents with impunity while others get stern lectures from "the free world." They know that some speech is deemed “violent” while other similar speech is declared “free.” They see all of this and think: The fix is in.
In baseball, and even more importantly in the world outside baseball, either we have a reasonably consistent “rules-based order” or we don’t.
And if not, is it any wonder that our hustlers become heroes?
Are likable liars the secret weapon of campaign 2024?
After the Tuesday night vice presidential debate ended, there was widespread praise about the demeanor of the candidates, Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance. “Voters overwhelmingly characterized the debate as positive in tone,” wrote CBS News, which hosted the debate and then conducted a poll right immediately afterward. The BBC headline used the word “politeness” to characterize the debate. GZERO used “civility.” It’s true. A much-needed Midwestern decency prevailed throughout the VP debate, the expected personal attacks giving way to a wider policy discussion.
After watching the screed-filled mayhem about immigrants eating pets that characterized the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate, the VP face-off was like sipping a cold beer in the middle of a heat wave.
But something about this new political “decency” beer doesn’t taste right, and it’s causing a massive hangover. The common decency displayed by Vance and Walz cleverly masks constant deceptions, and yet that doesn’t seem to have any impact on the campaign. In fact, there’s more controversy about the candidates being fact-checked by journalists — that is their job! — than about candidates lying.
Vance won the debate because he had one job: Don’t look like the “weird” guy Democrats say you are, don’t insult women, don’t alienate voters by being the extreme Trump attack dog. He exceeded all expectations. He was prepared, likable, and polished, sawing off Trump’s rough edges with the candor and geniality that appeal to independent voters in swing states. On the surface, it was a master class and might well help secure Vance’s role as the Republican standard-bearer of the future. Below the surface, though, there was an indelible flaw: Vance kept lying.
For example, Vance claimed that Trump didn’t try to destroy the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare — but that he actually saved it! That was such a revisionist spin that it took me a while to even process it.
“WhenObamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and healthcare costs,” Vance declared smoothly, “Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
It sounds so reasonable that you might forget that it has no connection to reality. Trump repeatedly claimed his goal was to “let Obamacare fail” and, in 2017, he brought in the “repeal and replace” vote to finally kill it. That vote failed when Trump’s nemesis, the late Sen. John McCain, famously gave it the 1 a.m. on-the-floor thumbs-down. Claiming Trump saved Obamacare is the equivalent of “We had to destroy the village to save the village,” the logical contradiction that became a parody of perfidy during the Vietnam War.
Vance’s likable lies extended to the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s overt attempt to illegally stop the peaceful transition of power. “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January 20,” Vance said, as if the mob, the deaths, and the arrests of Jan. 6 never happened. The guy Vance replaced, former VP Mike Pence, has starkly contradicted this nonsensical claim, telling Fox News back in 2021 that he refused to comply with Trump and “his gaggle of crackpot lawyers” who “didn’t just ask me to pause. They asked me to reject votes, return votes, essentially to overturn the election.”
Just a reminder: Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives in 2021 because of his actions supporting the insurrection, and he was the first president in 150 years to be a no-show at the inauguration of his predecessor. Of course, Trump still claims the results of the election were fake, and this week he is facing new allegations about his potentially criminal actions leading up to the events of Jan. 6 as revealed in the recently unsealed legal brief from special counsel Jack Smith.
Later in the debate, it got worse, as Vance would not admit that the last election results were fair, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Rebranding Jan. 6 as a peaceful transition of power where a bunch of curious patriots took a friendly tour of the Capitol building is swampland in Florida that no sucker needs to buy.
Finally, Vance claimed that he “never supported a national ban” on abortion. “I did, during [sic] when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard.” Again, this sounds reasonable, and maybe Vance’s position has changed, but in 2022 he said on stage, “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
Walz also had his likable liar moments. He had two jobs in the debate: Don’t look like the radical the Republicans claim you are and do no harm. Walz simply had to keep up his straight-talk, friendly neighbor, America’s coach persona. Apart from being nervous off the top and ragged and jumpy in his points, Walz for the most part did no harm, even if he was roundly seen as losing the debate by a slight margin. But he also could not explain his past lies.
Back in 2014, Walz declared to a congressional hearing that “as the events were unfolding [in Tiananmen Square, China], several of us went in. I still remember the train station in Hong Kong." Except he didn’t. Walz was in Nebraska at the time. When asked about it in the debate, Walz was flummoxed and fumbled badly, first saying he gets “caught up in the rhetoric,” then admitting that he is “a knucklehead at times” and then, finally, “All I said on this was, I got there that summer and misspoke on this. That is what I have said.” He never admitted that he had lied but made the weird case that being a good guy makes this excusable.
Walz later claimed that Trump hasn’t paid taxes in over a decade and half, which is also not true. According to a report by the Committee on Ways and Means, Trump has paid taxes in some years, even if the rates were shockingly low. For example, he listed $641,931 in federal income tax in 2015 but only $750 in the next two years. Trump didn’t pay any taxes in 2020. Walz didn’t need to lie about Trump’s taxes as the evidence is already damning, but he did it anyway.
Revealing that politicians lie is about as shocking as saying the pope is Catholic. And to the credit of many organizations like CBS, CNN, and others, there were a lot of articles fact-checking the debate. Still, no matter how frequently it happens, you wonder why it doesn't cause an anaphylactic voter reaction? After all, someone who lies to voters in a campaign will, logically, lie to them in power, and who wants that? Would voters rather have likable over believable?
Four years ago, Newsweek published a survey with Redfield and Wilton Strategies that showed 54% of Americans agree that “lying has become more acceptable in American politics.” Voters don’t care about a lying candidate because the end justifies the means. A new study called “When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics” examined “explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding.” The study found that when lies help push the overall political aims of a candidate to victory, their supporters have no issue with it.
“A lot of people’s support for politicians who say things that aren’t true isn’t because they believe those statements per se, but they view that misinformation as supporting political goals that they believe in,” one of the authors of the study, assistant professor Ethan Poskanzer, told the University of Colorado.
The other factor at work here is sowing doubt in everything. The Steve Bannon “flood the zone with shit” strategy has tainted the political process, so partisan voters are urged to disbelieve anything that harms their candidate while believing everything their own leader says.
Lying can sometimes come off as crude, aggressive deception: “Immigrants are eating your pets!” And there are different kinds of lies: Some statements are blatant lies, others are exaggerations, and some are misleading, out-of-context statements used to make a point. So there are degrees, but let’s focus on the blatant lies because they are so obvious.
One other key factor to consider is frequency. Some candidates lie much more than others and so get called out for it more. In the presidential debate, Trump lied over 30 times while Harris told one lie and made a few misleading statements. Trump’s rate of lies might seem like a vulnerability, but he has cleverly turned it into an attack line, claiming that fact-checking proves that the fake news machine is biased against him. Repeat a lie, get called out for it, and claim you are the victim of a media conspiracy. It works. But it works even better when the candidate can do that and still be likable, and grab headlines for their decency, not their deception. That is what Vance and, to a lesser degree, Walz did.
In 2024, the likable liars may end up being the difference in a close election.
Canada’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly told the United Nations General Assembly on Monday that Ottawa supports the creation of a Palestinian state and will officially recognize such an entity “at the time most conducive to building a lasting peace and not necessarily as the last step of a negotiated process.”
For more than 70 years, Canada and the United States have been in lockstep on policy in the Middle East. But Canada has been indicating for some time that it is preparing to join countries like Spain, Norway, and Ireland in unilaterally recognizing Palestinian statehood.
Despite pressures from within the Democratic caucus, that is not the position of the Biden administration. President Joe Biden has said he believes a Palestinian state should be realized through direct negotiations between the parties, not through unilateral recognition.
An early 20th-century Canadian cabinet minister, Sir Clifford Sifton, once said the main business of Canadian foreign policy is to remain friendly with the Americans while preserving the country’s self-respect.
That friendship has been tested in recent times.
Last December, Canada voted in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza that did not condemn, or even mention, Hamas. The US voted against the resolution.
For two decades, Canada has voted against UN resolutions that it felt unfairly sought to isolate Israel. Yet in May, it abstained on one that proposed to upgrade Palestine’s rights at the UN to a level short of full membership. Again, the US was one of only nine countries that voted against it.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has criticized his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to a future two-state solution – a frustration shared by the Biden administration. But Canada has gone a step further by saying that the peace process cannot indefinitely delay the creation of a Palestinian state.
Tensions were heightened in August when Joly announced new restrictions on the sale of defense equipment to Israel, suspending 30 export permits and blocking a deal to sell Quebec-made munitions to the US that were intended for Israel.
The move drew the ire of Netanyahu, who said it was unfortunate Joly took the steps she did as anti-Israel riots were taking place in Canadian cities.
It also attracted the attention of Sen. James Risch, the ranking member of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “It is disappointing to see our allies make domestic political decisions intended to hamstring our shared ally, Israel,” he wrote on X.
Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, and a former policy analyst at Canada’s Global Affairs department, said Risch’s comments reflect a “habitual disappointment” about Canadian foreign policy in Washington.
“By now, expectations are so low that it is hard to be disappointed by anything. People have come to the conclusion that Canadian foreign policy is about grandstanding and domestic politics, rather than national interests,” he said.
Risch was one of 23 bipartisan senators who wrote to Trudeau before the prime minister traveled to Washington for NATO’s summit in July saying they were “concerned and profoundly disappointed that Canada’s most recent (military spending) projection indicated it will not reach the 2 percent commitment this decade.”
At the summit, Canada’s ambassador in Washington, Kristen Hillman, said there remains “a strong recognition that Canada is a steadfast ally in all aspects.” But that rosy view was not reflected in the comments made by US policymakers. House Speaker Mike Johnson described Canada’s promise to get to 1.76% of GDP on defense spending by 2030 as “shameful.” “Talk about riding on American coattails,” he said.
Even Biden’s extremely discreet ambassador in Ottawa, David Cohen, referred to Canada as “the outlier” in the alliance.
Eurasia Group’s Thompson agreed with Risch’s assessment that domestic politics are at the root of a shift in foreign policy that moves away from traditional support for Israel and does not view security spending as a priority.
He said the debate in the ruling Liberal Party is similar to the one playing out in the Democratic Party in the US – but is at a more advanced stage because it has the blessing of the leader, Trudeau.
He noted the base of support for the Liberals has moved from ridings with large Jewish populations in Toronto and Montreal to ridings with large Muslim populations in the suburbs of both big cities. Trudeau has tried to walk a fine line between both communities, often failing to please either of them.
His Liberals are trailing the Conservatives by around 20 points in most polls, and the opposition party leader, Pierre Poilievre, is pushing for a general election.
The Liberals are relying on the support of the left-leaning New Democratic Party and separatist Bloc Québecois to keep them in power. Both of those parties are highly critical of Israel and strongly supportive of a Palestinian state.
A debate in the Canadian House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on the recognition of a Palestinian state last week reflected the realignment of foreign policy. The committee voted in favor of a short study, after which a recommendation to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state will likely be made to the government. The Liberals on the committee voted alongside the NDP and the Bloc, arguing that for a two-state solution, you need two states.
The Conservative foreign affairs critic, Michael Chong, said that unilateral recognition would break with the long-standing position of the successive Canadian governments and would isolate Canada from its allies, including the US.
“To veer from that path rewards violence and authoritarianism,” he said.
The committee vote has not yet drawn a response from Washington.
That does not surprise Derek Burney, a veteran Canadian diplomat who served as Ottawa’s ambassador in Washington from 1989 to 1993.
He said Canada’s view has become inconsequential to its allies. “I’ve never seen a time when we were more irrelevant than we are now. We are nowhere on the global scene. We are nowhere in Washington because we have nothing to contribute or to support what the Americans are trying to do,” he said.
“Nobody knows what we stand for, or stand against. We don’t count. It’s a sad fact of life.”
Iran portrayed as an origami tiger, being coaxed by Netanyahu.
Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last Friday didn’t just deal a crushing blow to the once-fearsome Lebanese militia. It also exposed Iran’s vulnerabilities and marked a pivotal shift in the region’s balance of power.
The death of Nasrallah caps several weeks of successful Israeli strikes against Hezbollah’s military capabilities and chain of command that have left the group weaker than it has been in almost two decades.
Israel is now pressing its advantage with a limited ground incursion into southern Lebanon – the natural conclusion of the sabotage, bombing, and assassination campaign of the 10 days prior. The end goal of the operation remains the same: to clear the area south of the Litani River of Hezbollah fighters, weapons depots, and infrastructure in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to safely return the 60,000 displaced Israelis to their homes in the north. The IDF has indicated the targeted offensive is expected to stay close to the border and end within weeks, as opposed to a more protracted occupation of extensive Lebanese territory (best-laid plans, though …).
Hezbollah would normally be expected to respond to such an escalation with heavy missile and rocket strikes on Israeli military installations, civilian infrastructure, and densely populated urban areas. That hasn’t happened. At the very least, Hezbollah could be counted on to defend its strongholds. Yet Israel’s ground offensive has met virtually no resistance thus far. While Hezbollah retains a significant fighting force, an entrenched arsenal of precision-guided weapons (though it’s unclear how much of it survives), and an ability to rebuild over the long term, the group is in such disarray that it’s hard to imagine it mustering the capacity or command to mount a response that passes the cost-benefit test at this time.
It’s become even harder to imagine Iran, its patron, reacting sharply to Israel’s escalations and risking a regional war that could draw the United States into the fight.
For starters, the Islamic Republic lacks good options to effectively retaliate against the Jewish state without inviting devastation to its homeland. That is especially true now that Hezbollah, previously the leading edge of Iran’s efforts to deter Israel, is reeling from Nasrallah’s death. Apart from its impressive array of ballistic missiles, most of Iran’s military is built upon Cold War-era hardware. It is no match for Israel’s overwhelmingly superior technological, intelligence, and military capabilities, let alone its nuclear weapons. A direct conventional conflict with Israel would not go Tehran’s way – and that’s before you bring the US military into the equation.
Moreover, President Masoud Pezeshkian and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have expended political capital on pursuing a policy of détente with the West in the hopes of obtaining sanctions relief. They have calculated that improving the economy while delivering limited reforms is their best hope for stabilizing the regime’s crumbling internal position amid a legitimacy crisis born of domestic dissatisfaction with stifling repression and growing economic woes. Getting directly involved in a war with Israel and, potentially, the US would make resuming diplomacy impossible and jeopardize the regime’s survival strategy. There’s nothing Iran’s leadership values more than self-preservation.
At the same time, Khamenei is under intense domestic pressure from hardliners and conservative elites to reestablish some deterrence and bolster Iran’s credibility within the Axis of Resistance at the risk of inducing unwanted trouble.
This tension explains why Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles against Israel yesterday – a largely performative attack it framed as its one-and-done, catch-all response to Israel’s assaults on its interests (including the killings of Nasrallah, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and several other Axis of Resistance and Iranian officials). The strike was heavily telegraphed and calibrated to limit damage, causing only two injuries and one fatality – a Palestinian man in the occupied West Bank. Much like its April response to Israel’s Damascus bombing and its 2020 reaction to the US assassination of Iran’s military chief Qassem Soleimani, Tehran sought to strike a balance between retaliating to save face and avoiding further escalation.
The problem for Iran is that its approach has lost all credibility and become counterproductive in the face of Israel’s capability asymmetry.
With Hezbollah no longer a viable insurance policy against direct Israeli attack, Israel has achieved escalation dominance – and both sides know it. Faced with the choice between risking a direct war with Israel and the US he can’t win or backing down in the interest of self-preservation, Khamenei has always chosen the latter. Knowing that gives a more risk-tolerant and increasingly emboldened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a green light to keep crossing Iran’s red lines without expecting serious consequences. Which means Khamenei’s retaliations (such as yesterday’s) not only fail to deter Israel but induce it to escalate further.
That’s a very dangerous place for the Islamic Republic to be in. Unless and until something changes, Israel’s government will continue to take more aggressive actions to degrade Tehran and its proxies until its security and political objectives have been achieved. For instance, Israel is very likely to leverage yesterday’s attack to strike back more forcefully than it did following the April episode, possibly by targeting IRGC and missile production-linked facilities in Iran. While direct shots at the country’s energy infrastructure, nuclear program, or senior leadership may be deemed too escalatory for the current cycle, they will no doubt be on Netanyahu’s mind next time an opportunity arises.
Longer term, the only way for Iran to restore some semblance of deterrence against Israeli attack is to turn to its nuclear program. That doesn’t mean imminent weaponization. In fact, a sudden dash toward a bomb is unlikely to happen under Khamenei, as this would go against his long-standing fatwa banning Iran from producing weapons of mass destruction, derail Pezeshkian’s hopes for diplomacy with the West, and risk war with the United States. That moment is, however, more likely to come once the 85-year-old supreme leader is dead or deposed – especially as it becomes clear that the next US president will have limited willingness (in the case of Donald Trump) or political space (in the case of Kamala Harris) to pursue talks. Israel may well attempt to strike Iran’s underground nuclear sites, but far from killing the nuclear program, that would only set it back and encourage Tehran to redouble its efforts to weaponize.
And when it finally does … the regional balance of power will be upset yet again, encouraging other powers to nuclearize in response and making a combustible Middle East even more dangerous.
Republican Sen. JD Vance and Democrat Gov. Tim Walz greet each other before they square off during the CBS News vice presidential debate in New York City on Oct. 1, 2024.
The debate kicked off with the escalating situation in the Middle East, as the moderator asked the candidates whether they would support Israel if it launched a preemptive military strike against Iran. Both candidates said Israel has a right to defend itself, but while Walz dodged answering the preemptive question directly, Vance said it was “up to Israel what it needs to do to keep their country safe. We should support our allies.” He also praised Trump’s deterrence strategy, saying that the world was more stable under his administration – an argument that is becoming more potent as the situation in the Middle East escalates.
Climate change came second, as North Carolina reels from Hurricane Helene, and as Americans across the country are facing more frequent, and expensive, natural disasters. Walz focused on the Biden-Harris administration’s investment in clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act, pointing out that it created jobs and gave funding for adapting infrastructure to withstand climate change.
Meanwhile, Vance did not explicitly deny that carbon emissions are warming the Earth, straying away from Trump, who has repeatedly called it a hoax. But he emphasized the need for more investments in nuclear and natural gas, and for restoring US energy production and manufacturing, which he claimed was cleaner than producing it overseas.
The discussion about abortion offered Walz one of his strongest moments. He rearticulated that the Harris-Walz campaign stands for restoring Roe v. Wade and for reproductive rights, one of Democrats’ strongest issues heading into November.
Surprisingly, Vance criticized the uneven availability of abortion services and referenced instances where state regulations resulted in medical complications for women. While this concern runs contrary to the times he has said he supports a national abortion ban, viewers unfamiliar with Vance’s previous statements would have heard a candidate who was sympathetic to the need to ensure reproductive care. He even acknowledged that the GOP needed to do a better job in “earning the American people’s trust back” on abortion issues.
On the economy, Vance argued it was better under Trump and highlighted the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, expressing unease about the relocation of production to nations like China. Walz didn’t disagree with him on manufacturing and China, but he also highlighted Harris’ plans to create an “opportunity economy” and plans to increase housing.
They both attacked their running mates’ economic records. “Tim, I think you got a tough job here because you gotta play Whac-A-Mole,” Vance said, accusing Walz of having to “pretend” that Biden’s economy didn’t have higher inflation than Trump’s. Walz rebutted that Harris from Day One had been plagued by “Donald Trump’s failure on COVID that led to the collapse of our economy.”
When asked about immigration, Vance called for a strict crackdown at the Southern border, saying the Trump administration would focus its mass deportation efforts on undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. Walz focused his answer on the bipartisan border deal that Republicans tanked in the Senate at Trump’s request earlier this year. He also highlighted the Biden-Harris administration's success in curbing the opioid crisis and took Vance to task on lies he told about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating people’s pets. The altercation, one of the spiciest of the night, led to both men’s mics being muted.
So, who won? With 35 days left before the election, few voters are likely to be swayed by the outcome of this debate. Vance appeared prepared and reasonable and landed significant punches against Walz and Harris that the Minnesota governor struggled to refute. He was also effective in laundering many of the Trump-Vance tickets’ most extreme statements on immigration, abortion, and healthcare to make them sound more appealing to moderates.
Walz struggled out of the gate. It was apparent that he had done fewer press interviews and was less comfortable on the debate stage than his Yale-educated, frequent-cable-news-guest opponent. The governor spent much of the debate with his head down, taking notes. But he ended strong, vigorously pressing Vance on giving a “damning non-answer” to the question about whether he would acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election.
Vance was, in large part, performing for an audience of one: Trump. After a series of recent flubs spurred rumors that the former president might regret his VP choice, Vance knew he needed to win over the boss. While Vance strayed away from Trump’s rhetoric, the former president seemed pleased with the performance, posting on Truth Social in all caps, “GREAT JOB JD.”
Polls reflect an American electorate split over who should become the 47th president. So GZERO decided to dig deeper and partnered with Echelon Insights for some exclusive polling to find out what Americans think should be the first geopolitical priority for the next US president, regardless of who ends up in the Oval Office in January.
Our survey of 1,005 voters found that across the political spectrum, a majority of Americans believe the Israel-Gaza war is the most pressing issue for the White House, followed by the Ukraine-Russia war, US-China relations, and then climate change.
Interestingly, climate change was the second most pressing issue for Democrats, with 26% of respondents saying it should be the top priority. Meanwhile, among Republicans, only 5% of respondents answered it was the biggest issue. The Ukraine-Russia war, which Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to end within 24 hours of taking office, came in second among Republicans’ top priorities, at 24%, compared to third for Democrats, at 18%.
This could be a reflection that Republicans share Trump’s belief that immediate action needs to be taken to end the Ukraine war (even if that comes at the expense of Ukraine), whereas Democrats are more satisfied with the continuation of the current administration’s support for Kyiv.
We also polled Americans on who they trusted more to be alone in a room with Vladimir Putin and found that the responses were almost as equally divided as the polls on who should be the next president, as you can see below:
Marietje Schaake has watched Silicon Valley for years, and she has noticed something troubling: The US technology industry and its largest companies have gradually displaced democratic governments as the most powerful forces in people’s lives. In her newly released book, “The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley,” Schaake makes her case for how we got into this mess and how we can get ourselves out.
We spoke to Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament who serves as international policy director at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She is also a host of the GZERO AI video series. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
GZERO: How do private companies govern our lives in ways that governments used to — and still should?
Schaake: Tech companies decide on civil liberties and government decision-making in health care and border controls. There are a growing number of key decisions made by private companies that used to be made by public institutions with a democratic mandate and independent oversight. For-profit incentives do not align with those.
When tech companies curate our information environments for maximum engagement or ad sales, different principles take priority compared to when trust and verification of claims made about health or elections take precedence. Similarly, cybersecurity companies have enormous discretion in sharing which attacks they observe and prevent on their networks. Transparency in the public interest may mean communicating about incidents sooner and less favorably to the companies involved.
In both cases, governance decisions are made outside of the mandate and accountability of democratic institutions, while the impact on the public interest is significant.
Why do you present this not merely as a new group of powerful companies that have become increasingly important in our lives, but, as you write, as an “erosion of democracy”?
The more power in corporate hands that is not subject to the needed countervailing powers, the fewer insights and agency governments have to govern the digital layer of our lives in the public interest.
Why do you think technology companies have largely gone unregulated for decades?
Democrats and Republicans have consistently chosen a hands-off approach to regulating tech companies, as they believed that would lead to the best outcomes. We now see how naively idealistic and narrowly economically driven that approach was.
Silicon Valley is constantly lobbying against regulation, often saying that rules and bureaucracy would hold industry back and prevent crucial innovation. Is there any truth to that, or is it all talk?
Regulation is a process that can have endless different outcomes, so without context, it is an empty but very powerful phrase. We know plenty of examples where regulation has sparked innovation — think of electric cars as a result of sustainability goals. On the other hand, innovation is simply not the only consideration for lawmakers. There are other values in society that are equally important, such as the protection of fundamental rights or of national security. That means innovation may have to suffer a little bit in the interest of the common good.
What’s Europe’s relationship like with Silicon Valley at this moment after a series of first-mover tech regulations?
Many tech companies are reluctantly complying, after exhausting their lobbying efforts against the latest regulations with unprecedented budgets.
In both the run-up to the General Data Protection Regulation and the AI Act, tech companies lobbied against the laws but ultimately complied or will do so in the future.
What’s different about this moment in AI where, despite Europe’s quick movement to pass the AI Act, there are still few rules around the globe for artificial intelligence companies? Does it feel different than conversations around other powerful technologies you discuss in the book, such as social media and cryptocurrency?
I have never seen governments step up as quickly and around the world, as I have in relation to AI, and in particular the risks. Part of that may be a backlash of the late regulation of social media companies, but it is significant and incomparable to any waves of other technological breakthroughs. The challenge will be for the democratic countries to work together rather than to magnify the differences between them.
You were at the UN General Assembly in New York last week, where there was a new Pact for the Future and HLAB-AI report addressing artificial intelligence governance at the international level. Does the international community seem to understand the urgency of getting AI regulation and governance right?
The sense of urgency is great, but the sense of direction is not clear. Moreover, the EU and the US really do not want to see any global governance of AI even if that is where the UN adds most value. The EU and US prefer maximum discretion and presumably worry they would have to compromise when cooperating with partners around the world. The US has continued its typical hands-off approach to tech governance in relation to AI as well.
There is also a great need to ensure the specific needs of communities in the Global South are met. So a global effort to work together to govern AI is certainly needed.
Back to the book! What can readers expect when they pick up a copy of ”The Tech Coup?”
Readers will look at the role of tech companies through the lens of power and understand the harms to democracy if governance is not innovated and improved. They will hopefully feel the sense of urgency to address the power grab by tech companies and feel hopeful that there are solutions to rebalance the relationship between public and private interests.
Can we actually save democracy from Silicon Valley — or is it too late?
The irony is that because so little has been done to regulate tech companies, there are a series of common-sense steps that can be taken right away to ensure governments are as accountable when they use technology for governance tasks, and that outsourcing cannot be an undermining of accountability. They can also use a combination of regulatory, procurement, and investment steps to ensure tech companies are more transparent, act in the public interest, and are ultimately accountable. This applies to anything from digital infrastructure to its security, from election technologies to AI tools.
We need to treat tech the way we treat medicine: as something that can be of great value as long as it is used deliberately.