The County Where Cops Call the Shots

 The County Where Cops Call the Shots

Fiscal conservatives and liberal activists both want to curb the power of police unions in Suffolk County. Can they do it?

By Farah Stockman New York Times

Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board.

SMITHTOWN, N.Y. — Rob Trotta, a cranky Republican county legislator on Long Island who worked as a cop for 25 years, might be the unlikeliest voice for police reform in America. He’s full of praise for the rank and file. The phrase “defund the police” makes his skin crawl. When he talks about race, he sounds like he’s stuck in the 1980s.

Yet Mr. Trotta has railed for years about the political influence of police unions in Suffolk County, Long Island, a place where the cops are known to wield exceptional clout. He’s a potent messenger, since he can’t be smeared as anti-cop. He wore a badge and walked a beat. Mr. Trotta’s small, quixotic battle is part of a much larger struggle in the United States to wrestle power away from police unions that for too long have resisted meaningful reform.

Since the killing of George Floyd, the push to rein in the police has gained public support across the country, as liberal activists demand sweeping changes to policing and greater accountability for officers who commit crimes. But the headwinds are stiff. Few other occupations demand the deference and trust that police officers say they require to do their jobs. They even have their own version of the American flag — it’s black with a blue line running down the center, representing the idea that the “thin blue line” they embody is all that separates civilization from anarchy.

There’s some truth to that. The news is full of stories of the sacrifices police officers make, most recently the officer who lost his life responding to a mass shooting in Colorado. That’s one reason the growing criticism of the police has been met with a passionate counter-movement, called Blue Lives Matter. But there are also far too many cases of police officers who abuse their positions and are protected by powerful police unions.

What began as national calls for reform last summer are now in the hands of local communities to bring about. There are more than 18,000 policing organizations in the United States. In the state of New York, police departments have been scrambling to adopt a reform plan by April 1, the deadline set by Gov. Andrew Cuomo for communities that want to remain eligible to receive state funding.

In many cases, reform plans are rolled out by the same politicians who once cozied up to police unions to get elected. But momentum for change is building, as both fiscal conservatives and liberal activists take aim at the outsize political power of police unions.

Nowhere is that dynamic more clear than in Suffolk County, N.Y. It’s a place where the residents are well off, crime is relatively low and the Police Department has made national news for a huge corruption scandal. Yet the police union still holds great sway. It’s sometimes said that the county doesn’t run the police; the police run the county. Now people in the county are watching the reform process play out, to see whether that’s still true. 

Suffolk County is home to some 1.5 million people, many of them current or former New York City police officers. Last year, the county hosted what was billed as the largest “Back the Blue” rally in the country. Donald Trump gave a speech there in 2017, encouraging officers to rough up suspects and drawing cheers. But what really stands out about Suffolk County is the compensation that police officers receive and the money their unions spend on local elections.

In 2019, more than 1,200 officers — nearly half the force — took home over $200,000 a year. Even an officer who was criminally charged for falsifying time sheets walked away with a payout of $291,868. Eye-popping a sum as that might seem, it’s par for the course in Suffolk County. Another superior officer left with $624,082, including unpaid vacation days and sick time.

With so much money at stake, the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association doesn’t leave elections to chance. It has not only a PAC, but also a super PAC that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on local elections. That super PAC is generally funded by contributions from law enforcement. Last September, it also collected tens of thousands of dollars from Long Island businesses, including two $10,000 checks from construction and maintenance companies, which super PACs are allowed to do. State law forbids the police from soliciting political donations from the public. Thus far, police benevolent associations have operated outside those restrictions.

With those generous salaries, the citizens of Suffolk County have paid for what should be world-class law enforcement. Instead, it got a police chief, James Burke, who went to prison in 2016 for running the department like a mafia boss. That scandal, which led to the conviction of the powerful district attorney, Thomas Spota, who was scheduled to be sentenced this month, and the head of his anti-corruption unit underscored how easy it can be for cops and politicians to get in bed together and turn law enforcement into a system of political favors and personal vengeance. Police officers testified that they feared for their families’ safety or that they’d be framed for crimes if they blew the whistle on their boss. It’s hard to imagine a starker illustration of the need to reinvent policing.

Steve Bellone, the Suffolk County executive who appointed Mr. Burke, says he was fooled by Mr. Burke and Mr. Spota and turned against them when he discovered their “criminal enterprise.” He vows that a new day has dawned. He touts a new district attorney who set up a conviction integrity bureau to investigate wrongful convictions. On March 11, the county unveiled its long-awaited plan for police reform.

Mr. Trotta watched the rollout on Zoom at his office desk in Smithtown. He pointed out his fellow county legislators on the screen and rattled off how much the police union had spent to help each one get elected. He said some elected officials visibly stiffened when police union representatives walked into county meetings. A member of the union sat on the reform task force.

“I can’t stress to you enough how afraid of the union these people are,” he said of his fellow legislators.

“This is a good thing,” he said, gesturing at the meeting on his screen. “But it’s not getting at this,” he declared, holding up printouts about the union’s political donations. “The root of the evil is the money.”

Even those who disdain Mr. Trotta acknowledge that he has a point when it comes to the money. But I dug around and found articles about the power of the Suffolk County police unions from the 1970s, long before it was legal for police officers to donate to political campaigns in New York.

During the first half of the 20th century, police unions were “rare, weak and lacked legal status,” Aaron Bekemeyer, a Ph.D. student at Harvard who is writing his dissertation on the history of police unions, told me. In the 1950s and 1960s, police unionists managed to convince a large part of the American public that their own safety depended on a strong police union. Without unions, they argued, the police would never get the funding and legal protections needed to keep crime in check.

In the 1960s, a series of debilitating public sector strikes across New York persuaded lawmakers to pass the Taylor Law, which outlawed strikes but granted access to a labor-friendly board that resolved disputes. In 1974, police officers and firefighters in New York got an additional boost from a new provision in the Civil Service Law that gave them compulsory binding arbitration if they reached an impasse in a contract dispute. Other unions didn’t get that. Since then, the average salaries of the police and firefighters have risen far faster than other government employees’, and well above the rate of inflation, according to E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Politicians bellyache that compulsory binding arbitration is bankrupting their communities by handing power over police salaries to an unelected, police-friendly arbitrator. But legislators have not had the guts to get rid of the provision.

The justification for this sweetheart deal for the police and firefighters is that they are so essential to safety that communities can’t risk a strike. But that same logic beat back an attempt to unionize the American military. In 1976, an A.F.L.-C.I.O.-affiliated union voted to admit military personnel, prompting a freakout at the Pentagon, according to Jennifer Mittelstadt, a history professor at Rutgers who wrote “The Rise of the Military Welfare State.” Congress swiftly outlawed union membership for soldiers. Giving a paramilitary force the right to collective bargaining would undermine the military chain of command, they argued. It was true. But that’s also true of the police.

Across the country, police commissioners who have attempted to hold police officers accountable for killings have seen their authority undermined by police union leaders who get fired officers reinstated. That’s one reason police reform so often gets announced at news conferences but so rarely seems to occur in the real world. Police commissioners come and go. Union leaders always outlast them.

In 1983, police unions in New York successfully lobbied to amend a law that barred them from donating to politicians. A longstanding prohibition on police officers’ soliciting political donations from the public remains on the books, but appears to be rarely enforced. While private sector unions have withered, police unions have flourished, supported by Democrats, who champion labor rights, and Republicans, who champion law and order.

In Suffolk County, the police unions wield outsize influence. In 2008, when the county executive tried to cut costs by having the sheriff’s department patrol the Long Island Expressway instead of the police, who earned more, about 2,000 police officers and their relatives joined a local political party to try to oust the sheriff. The union also began collecting $2 a day from every officer to put toward an “education fund” — to educate politicians about the importance of police patrols on the Long Island Expressway.

In 2011, the Suffolk Police Benevolent Association backed Steve Bellone. After he won, they got their expressway back, along with a new contract. But the union kept collecting special assessments of $1 a day from officers, which eventually funded the super PAC they established, the Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation.

Mr. Trotta talks about politics as broken because police unions’ donations have been able to purchase deference from politicians, leading to unsustainable salary increases. A sheet of paper in his office hangs above his desk with the number 62 on it, showing that Suffolk County ranks 62 out of 62 New York counties in fiscal stability. The bathroom in his office is decorated with rows of articles from the Long Island newspaper Newsday about corruption in the county. Other politicians, particularly those allied with Mr. Bellone, call Mr. Trotta a “toxic character,” a “bomb-thrower,” a hypocrite or a loon. Railing about the influence of the police union in Suffolk County is like railing against the moon in the sky.

Mr. Trotta’s crusade against police unions grew out of his personal hatred for James Burke, his former boss. Mr. Trotta had loved being a cop. As a detective, he uncovered drug dealers in places others didn’t think to look. If a guy was known to live beyond his means, Mr. Trotta asked around about where the money came from. In 2001, he busted a cocaine trafficker, in a case that recovered a million dollars in cash from a safe hidden under a bathroom rug. He was named detective of the year.

Eventually, he got on an F.B.I. task force. In 2012, he flew to Costa Rica to testify in court in a money-laundering case. As soon as he returned, he got reassigned. His new job? Catching thieves who stole copper pipes out of abandoned homes. “I went from the pinnacle of law enforcement to the basement,” he told me.

The new police chief, Mr. Burke, had reassigned all three Suffolk County detectives who had been working with the F.B.I., including two who were working on a major gang case. A new seven-part true-crime podcast called “Unraveled” alleges that Mr. Burke hampered the F.B.I. because he didn’t want them prying into his own misconduct.

A lot of cops knew what kind of guy Mr. Burke was. Before he was appointed chief, members of the police force wrote an anonymous letter to Mr. Bellone warning him that Mr. Burke was “known to frequent prostitutes,” interfered with an officer-assault investigation and used information obtained from a wiretap as leverage against a politician. Mr. Bellone appointed him anyway, after Mr. Spota vouched for Mr. Burke.

“It took time to understand the corrupt operation that existed in this county,” Mr. Bellone told the hosts of the podcast.

Yet that corrupt operation was intimately connected to the police unions that he and so many other politicians have been forced to make peace with by election time. Mr. Spota was once a police union lawyer. At his trial, witnesses described a union official coaching officers to lie to cover up Mr. Burke’s crimes. No union official has ever been charged.

“Historically, in Suffolk County, you can’t win a major office without the police unions’ endorsement,” said Gus Garcia-Roberts, a journalist with The Washington Post who is writing a book about Mr. Burke. “Suffolk is an extreme version of the same problems that are elsewhere.”

The revelation that officers lied shocked many on Long Island. But it didn’t shock the loved ones of Kenny Lazo, a Black man who got pulled over by Suffolk County officers in 2008 and wound up beaten to death in a case the medical examiner ruled a homicide. No police officers were held accountable for the death. Police statements about Mr. Lazo’s death contained obvious falsehoods and omissions, according to Fred Brewington, a lawyer who has been fighting for years to bring a civil suit on behalf of Mr. Lazo’s estate to court. “They lied like rugs,” he told me.

Nor did it surprise activists who demanded justice for Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean migrant who was stabbed to death by high school students. That case revealed a stunning indifference on the part of police officers. At least one officer was charged with systematically robbing undocumented drivers he pulled over. In 2013, the department agreed to oversight from the Justice Department over its treatment of Latinos, which mandated the department to collect data on racial disparities in traffic stops, forcing the department to admit it had a problem.

Mr. Burke was still a powerful police chief that year when Mr. Trotta decided to run for office.

“I thought, this is a great way to get back at them: I’ll become their boss,” Mr. Trotta told me. “I was reading the county charter about what a legislator does. And it said in it, ‘Investigate any department you wish.’ My eyes lit up. This is great. I can investigate the Police Department.”

A fiscal conservative in a deep-red district, Mr. Trotta won handily, even though the union hated him. But he could not get rid of the dirty police chief.

The very first bill Mr. Trotta presented required all officers above the rank of captain to have a bachelor’s degree and be free of complaints about civilian abuse or moral turpitude — requirements that Chief Burke, who did not have a college degree, did not meet. The police union spoke out against the bill. It never made it out of committee.

Transcripts of the public safety meetings in that era are full of county legislators praising the “chief.” Backed by the union, the district attorney and the county executive, Mr. Burke seemed untouchable. Some legislators joked about Mr. Trotta’s obsession with taking him down. “In every conversation, he found a way to bring it back to Jimmy Burke,” one told me. 

James Burke escorted by F.B.I. personnel in 2015.Credit...Steve Pfost/Newsday, via Getty Images

Mr. Trotta opposed the police contract, calling it unsustainable at a time of fiscal crisis. Everybody else voted for it. He couldn’t get assigned to the public safety committee, even as a former police officer. Eventually, he said, it dawned on him: “The county doesn’t run the police. The police run the county.”

Less than a year after he was appointed police chief, Mr. Burke beat up a heroin addict who had stolen a duffle bag full of sex toys out of his SUV. For years, the feds couldn’t prove it. The officers who saw the beating were too afraid to talk. Mr. Trotta kept in touch with the feds, feeding them things he’d learned and trying to keep the case alive. Eventually, one guy told the truth. Then another. Then another. In 2019, when a local paper asked Mr. Trotta what he had accomplished as a legislator, he replied: “The chief of police went to jail and the district attorney has been indicted. The system works, but very slowly.”

But Mr. Trotta is reviled by the political establishment. Allies of Mr. Bellone say he is rude, hypocritical and prone to exaggeration. Most of all, they take umbrage at the notion that police union donations influenced their political decisions. Half a dozen current and former elected officials in Suffolk County told me they vote their conscience, regardless of what the union gives. None were willing to publicly refuse to accept police union donations.

As hated as Mr. Trotta is among the political establishment, many of his former colleagues respect him. Gerard McCarthy, who recently retired as chief of operations for the Suffolk County Police Department, lauded Mr. Trotta for being the sole person willing to raise the issue of the police union’s political donations.

“I believe that it is illegal and it’s unethical,” Mr. McCarthy said of the $1-a-day political assessment that was taken out of his paycheck and sent to the Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation. He contends the payments were not voluntary, as required.

Mr. McCarthy told me that most police officers don’t pay attention to the union and that some resent the insular group that runs it. “Some say the union’s corrupt,” he told me. “Others say, ‘As long as I’m making $250,000 a year, I don’t care.’” 

Something changed last summer, after George Floyd’s death. Protesters began demanding that politicians stop taking money from the police. In New York, many elected officials did just that. Lawmakers in Albany worked up the courage to repeal 50-a, a state statute that prohibited the release of police officers’ personnel records. In November, the Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation spent nearly $500,000 attacking two state senators who had voted for the repeal. The ads backfired. One got voted out, but the other, James Gaughran, survived.

“To be honest with you,” Mr. Gaughran told me, “it was very effective in generating volunteers.”

Police reform had become a thing, even in Suffolk County. A task force set up to produce the reform plan held community listening sessions through video chats. It was on one of those calls that Mr. Trotta encountered other people railing about the power of police unions — liberal activists. He was impressed.

The activists mostly ignored him. He was a Republican who had predicted in a radio interview that police reform wouldn’t amount to much. But his reasoning — the police union’s political donations — caught the ear of an activist named Emily Kaufman.

Ms. Kaufman was a clinical social worker who joined a Black-led community coalition called LI United to Transform Policing and Community Safety, which was helping to put together an alternative police reform called The People’s Plan.

Ms. Kaufman and another organizer, Alexandra Saint-Laurent, were working on the part of The People’s Plan that proposed the creation of an unarmed alternative to the police that would respond to 911 calls about homeless people, or drug overdoses or the mentally ill. Studies showed that social workers and counselors could produce far better outcomes than the police in such situations — at a much lower cost.

Ms. Kaufman thought Mr. Trotta might support the plan. He was one of just two county legislators, both Republicans, who took no police money. Ms. Kaufman called him.

“I wonder if we can talk about creating an effort for a non-police response that could be as safe or safer, and maybe even cheaper,” she told him in a conversation she later recounted to me.

Mr. Trotta was skeptical: “What if a mentally ill person turns violent on a dime?”

Mr. Trotta and the activists did not see eye-to-eye on much. The activists saw racism as the reason people in Black and Latino communities got stopped at higher rates. Mr. Trotta thought it was because they lived in communities with more crime. But they agreed that the police budget was bloated.

“I’m not against people getting a cost-of-living increase, but they were getting three times the cost of living,” Mr. Trotta told them of the raise that Mr. Bellone’s contract gave the police. (Mr. Bellone argued that an arbitrator would have given them more.) It amounted to more than $200 million over the life of the contract, when the county was already in debt. Without that extra spending, Mr. Trotta said, “We could have done the roads. We could have done the parks.”

There might have been enough money, too, for the social workers the activists wanted.

A few weeks later, three members of the Suffolk County Democratic Socialists of America visited Mr. Trotta’s office. He advised them to drop the word “socialist” from their name and avoid the phrase “defund the police.”

“You should say what I say: We would love to pay them $500,000 a year, but we just can’t afford it,” he told them.

The activists found his suggestions absurd. But they talked to him for three hours anyway. Establishment Democrats avoided Mr. Trotta, but the socialists were intrigued. He reminded them of Jimmy McNulty, the quirky detective from the TV show “The Wire.”

“He made me realize it was even worse than I’d thought,” one of the Democratic Socialists, a 25-year-old from Setauket named Hannah Erhart, told me.

The night the police commissioner, Geraldine Hart, rolled out Suffolk County’s reform plan on Zoom, much of it sounded like more of the same old thin gruel: more community policing, more money for training, more body cameras — which police officers will be paid extra to wear.

But there were moments that felt inspiring and new. Fred Brewington, the lawyer who has been fighting for 12 years for justice since the beating death of Kenny Lazo, the Black motorist, took notice when Commissioner Hart acknowledged racial disparities in police stops.

“That’s a major point,” he told me afterward. “That means they are not adverse to having a very important conversation about policing.”

Ms. Kaufman felt hopeful about the mention of a “three-tiered” mental health crisis response and a 911 Call Diversion, although the plan contained few specifics. The activists behind The People’s Plan put out a statement that lauded parts of the county’s plan, but criticized the lack of a civilian review board or outside investigators for complaints against the police. They cited political donations from the police union as the reason.

“It is not a donation, it’s an investment,” the statement read. “It seems the P.B.A. just got their return.”

After a quarter of a century as a cop, Mr. Trotta found it hard to believe that any plan would significantly change how the police operate. But he stayed on the video call long enough to hear his new friend Tim Karcich, a 32-year-old Democratic Socialist from Centereach, rattle off a bunch of demands, from reducing the public’s contact with police officers to establishing a reparations fund for police victims.

Then he added one that made Mr. Trotta smile: Investigate the Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation.

 

Why Oumuamua, the Interstellar Visitor, Looks Eerily Familiar

By Dennis Overbye The New York Times

A piece of an extra solar Pluto may have passed through our cosmic neighborhood, a new study suggests.

Although an artist’s concept of Oumuamua looking like a cigar-shaped rock gained widespread circulation, some astronomers have suggested that it could be shaped like a pancake.Credit...William Hartman

One of the great shaggy-dog mysteries of the sky continues to mesmerize astronomers. That would be the nature of a strange interloper, Oumuamua, that came zooming through the solar system in 2017. Interstellar comet? Cosmic iceberg? Alien space wreck?

This week two astronomers from Arizona State University, Alan Jackson and Steven Desch, offered the most solid explanation yet: Oumuamua was a chip off a faraway planet belonging to another star. Long ago, a collision with an asteroid broke it off and sent it careering through space.

“This research is exciting in that we’ve probably resolved the mystery of what Oumuamua is, and we can reasonably identify it as a chunk of an ‘exo-Pluto,’ a Pluto-like planet in another solar system,” Dr. Desch said in a statement released by the American Geophysical Union. “Until now, we’ve had no way to know if other solar systems have Pluto-like planets, but now we have seen a chunk of one pass by Earth.”

They announced their results at a meeting of the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference on March 17 and in a pair of papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

The operative words are “probably resolved.” Although astronomers agree that the new model could answer some questions about the mystery flyby, many more remain in motion.

“What makes Oumuamua both interesting and frustrating is that none of the theories are a slam-dunk,” said Gregory Laughlin, an astronomer at Yale who has studied Oumuamua.

Astronomers in Hawaii, patrolling for killer asteroids and other flashes in the night with the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on Maui, first spotted this mystery object speeding away from the sun at 50 miles per second on Oct. 19, 2017. They called it Oumuamua — Hawaiian for “scout” or “messenger.” But what was the message?

The trajectory of the object indicated that it had come from outside the solar system and that after a brief buzz past the inner worlds of our system it was bound for deep space. By the time it was noticed, it had already passed Earth. Astronomers concluded from the variations in its brightness that it was a tumbling object, longer than it was wide.

Astronomers had long thought than an orphan comet might be the first interstellar visitor to our region because comets, residing in distant clouds, are easily detached from their home stars. Oumuamua did not have a tail, however, or the gaseous cloud that forms around a comet nucleus, so it was tentatively identified as a wandering asteroid.

 

An artist’s conception of a reddish, cigar-shaped rock gained widespread circulation. Some astronomers have suggested that it could be shaped like a pancake.

But when Oumuamua was on the way out of the solar system, it sped up. Comets often act this way, as they are given a kick from jets of evaporating gas on their surfaces. So perhaps it was a comet after all — but a weird one. An illustration accompanying Dr. Jackson and Dr. Desch’s result shows it looking like a cracker or even a flying cow chip.

The mystery deepened in 2018 with the discovery of 2I/Borisov, another interstellar interloper that behaved more like an ordinary comet.

Theories and models abounded in the literature. Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard, rode onto the best-seller list earlier this year with a book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” arguing that Oumuamua was an alien space vessel of some kind, and scolding the astronomical community for not thinking more outside the box about extraterrestrial life. The object’s imputed shape, he said, could be perfectly consistent with that of a light sail of the type that Dr. Loeb and his colleagues, in an ambitious project called Breakthrough Starshot, hope to send to Alpha Centauri sometime this century.

But an international team of comet experts writing in Nature Astronomy in 2019 under the name of The Oumuamua ISSI Team concluded that all the data were consistent with “a purely natural origin” for Oumuamua.

Last year Dr. Laughlin of Yale and his student Darryl Seligman, now at the University of Chicago, suggested that Oumuamua was a primordial iceberg of hydrogen that had formed in the dark, cold center of a molecular cloud, one of the vast assemblages of primordial gas that give rise to stars.

The problem was that it was hard to explain how the hydrogen, which freezes at a temperature around 3 degrees Kelvin, barely above absolute zero, would stay frozen on the long trip from its birth to here.

Inspired by the hydrogen ice idea, Dr. Jackson and Dr. Desch investigated other kinds of icebergs that might fill the bill. They finally hit on nitrogen.

“We’ve never seen any examples of hydrogen ice in nature,” Dr. Desch said in an email. But when the New Horizons spacecraft went past the previously unexplored Pluto in 2015, it found a world awash in nitrogen glaciers.

“Oumuamua was small, about half as long as a city block and only as thick as a three-story building, but it was very shiny,” they wrote in one of their papers. “The shininess is about the same as the surfaces of Pluto and Triton, which are also covered in nitrogen ice.” Triton is a moon of Neptune.

In the scenario favored by Dr. Desch and Dr. Jackson, the nascent Oumuamua was knocked from a Pluto-like object that was circling a distant star some half-billion years ago. It would have originally been roundish, but as it traveled through space it was carved away by cosmic rays.

By the time it entered our solar system in 1995 or so, it had lost half its original mass, according to their model. During its passage around the sun it likely melted to a sliver, like a bar of soap in the shower, the researchers say. Only 10 percent would have remained by the time it left the solar system, boosted by the rocketlike effect of evaporating nitrogen.

Nitrogen sublimates at about 25 degrees Kelvin, Dr. Desch said: “We calculate that Oumuamua reached temperatures in the 45 to 50 K range while it rounded the sun, so it was sublimating nitrogen gas like crazy, hence the strong mass loss.”

He and Dr. Jackson concluded in their paper: “A key advantage of the proposal we advance here of a nitrogen ice fragment is that it can simultaneously explain all of the important observational characteristics of Oumuamua, and that material of this composition is found in the solar system. We therefore conclude that Oumuamua is an example of an uncommon but certainly not exotic object: a fragment of a differentiated Pluto-like planet from another stellar system.”

Of course, that’s not the end of the story.

In an email Dr. Loeb complained, among other things, that if Oumuamua was made of nitrogen it should also contain carbon (which was not detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope), because both nitrogen and carbon are produced together by a thermonuclear carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle in stars.

Dr. Desch responded in an email: “Spoken like a cosmologist!” He went on to note that planets have ways of sifting and separating the elements they were born with. Otherwise, Earth’s atmosphere, which is 79 percent nitrogen, should be several percent carbon instead of one-tenth of 1 percent carbon. Or, as another astronomer pointed out, the Great Lakes would all be full of sparkling water.

Dr. Desch noted, moreover, that the reddish color of Oumuamua is an exact match to the redness of the ice on Pluto, which is 0.1 percent carbon, in the form of methane.

Another issue is statistics. How is it that these cosmic icebergs are so common — more than 50 trillion per cubic light-year of space, according to a calculation by Dr. Laughlin — that the Pan-STARRS project would have discovered one after just five years of searching?

“That puts a lot of pressure on the galaxy to manufacture exo-Plutos,” Dr. Laughlin said.

If so, Oumuamua was just the tip of an unsuspected iceberg, so to speak, which is exactly what Dr. Desch and Dr. Jackson contend.

A lot of things get ejected from planetary systems, Dr. Desch pointed out; older papers assumed that these would be as big as comets, and so predicted them in much lower numbers. But if they are smaller, Dr. Desch added, there would be many more fragments flying out, so something like Oumuamua would not necessarily be an anomaly.

“So far we’ve seen one N2 ice fragment and one comet among the interstellar objects,” he wrote in an email. “Small-number statistics doesn’t get much smaller than that.” Those numbers were about what is expected, according to their calculations, he said: “Maybe we got a little lucky to see one so quickly, but it’s not a fluke or anything. This is a common object to be entering our solar system.”

If more are out there to be seen, they should soon be detectable by the Vera Rubin Observatory, a giant telescope in Chile that will start stalking the sky later this decade.

Other astronomers have suggested a different creation mechanics, in which a distant planet passing close to its star is torn apart by tidal forces. This would result in fragments even more oblong, closer in resemblance to a cigar than a cookie, casting doubt on the nitrogen ice theory, Dr. Laughlin said. That is a controversy that could be resolved by better images, if and when the next interstellar interloper comes by.

But as Dr. Laughlin said, nature might have the last laugh. “Given the rule of thumb that 99 percent of one’s own cool ideas tend not to work out,” he said, “I think the smart money is on another object with Oumuamua’s characteristic weirdness’s never again being observed.”

 Weaklings, racists, and drooling loners

These are the people Republicans want to have guns 

Lucian K. Truscott IV

You’re going to hear a lot in the coming months about how background checks wouldn’t have stopped the Atlanta killer of eight this week, even the kinds of enhanced background checks called for in the two bills passed by the House this week.  The accused murderer, Robert Alan Long, 21 years old, didn’t have a criminal record.  He had never been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility.  He bought the gun he used on Tuesday earlier that day from a gun shop and shooting range called Big Woods Goods in Canton, Georgia.  He had the proper identification required to purchase a gun in that state.  He passed the background check required by law.  When he was arrested hours later, he was still carrying the 9 millimeter handgun he used to shoot and kill eight people.

A few Republicans in the House joined Democrats in passing the new background check laws, but a far larger number of them voted against them.  We all know why that is.  They take money from gun manufacturers, from gun lobby groups like the NRA, and they want the votes of gun culture Republicans who are against any kind of so-called “gun control” laws.  But those laws aren’t the point.

The point is this:  Republicans want people like Robert Alan Long to have the right to go out and buy guns.  They actually want people like him to own guns.  You have to look at it from the point of view of the lowest common denominator.  If you are going to have a system of laws in this country which makes it permissible in almost every state in the Union to walk into a store and put down your driver’s license and a few hundred dollars and walk out with a deadly weapon and all the ammunition you can carry, then you’re going to have weak-chinned, vacant-eyed, racist loners like Robert Alan Long walking around with guns.  Because the laws that allow the easy purchase and ownership of all sorts of guns, from .22 caliber pistols to AR-15 military style semiautomatics to .50 caliber sniper rifles, apply to everyone among us.  They apply to people walking around who hate Black people and women and Asian people and people of Latin descent.  They apply to people who hate Jews.  They apply to people who think that leaders of the Democratic Party are pedophiles who secretly rape children and then eat them.  They apply to people who believe that the United States government is secretly run by lizard people from outer space.  The laws don’t discriminate based on your beliefs, or your desires, or what kind of moral character you have.  They apply to all of us.  Everyone has the “right” under the Constitution established by the Heller decision to buy and “bear” arms.

That’s the problem right there.  Because guns aren’t like anything else you can buy.  They aren’t like a hammer, which you can certainly use to kill someone, but which is designed and intended to drive and remove nails.  Guns aren’t like a 14 ounce can of soup, which you could throw at someone’s head and kill them, but which is intended to be opened up with a can opener and eaten.

Guns have one purpose:  to kill.  You can use them to shoot at paper targets or cans or bottles, but the purpose of a gun is to project the power to kill away from yourself.  You can buy a gun and walk into a room and stand 15 feet away and point it at someone and with the simple, easy pull of a trigger, you can kill them.  You don’t have to walk up close to them.  You don’t have to touch them.  You don’t have to get their blood on you.  You can legally buy a gun in this country called the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle that is accurate at distances of up to a mile, which means that you can set up that Barrett rifle and aim it and kill a person who is 5,280 feet away from you.  Don’t let anyone tell you the Barrett .50 caliber is intended for “hunting.”  It’s for killing people.  That exact rifle, and sniper rifles just like it, are used by armies all around the world for that exact purpose.

That’s why weaklings like this 21 year old “man” named Robert Alan Long like guns.  Because for a few hundred dollars, he can buy himself way more power than he should have --  in the case of his 9 millimeter pistol, the awesome power to kill.  Republicans and others who oppose measures to make it more difficult to buy guns want to make it easy for people like Robert Alan Long to buy a gun, just like it was easy for him on Tuesday.  It probably took him less time to buy the gun he used to kill eight people than it takes me to buy a week’s worth of groceries at my local Stop ‘n Shop.  That’s the way the Republicans in the House who voted against the bills passed this week want it.  They want drooling racist lunatics who shouldn’t even be allowed to drive to have the right to buy and own a gun and all the ammunition they can afford, and they want to make it easier for them to do it than it already is.

I remember the first time the state of California allowed the publication of the addresses of sex offenders.  You could go on a website run by the state and put in your address and an image similar to Google Maps came up showing all of the sex offenders who lived in your neighborhood.  We lived in the Hollywood Hills at the time, so I typed in our address and zoomed out the map so it showed the streets around our house to the distance of about a half mile.  It was stunning.  There were more than 150 red X’s showing the sex offenders living on the streets all around our house, people who had been convicted of sex crimes like rape and assault and sexual harassment, all of the categories that required them to register with the state.  I had no idea there were so many terrible people within walking distance of the house where we had two small children.

Republicans don’t want those sex offenders in my old neighborhood to have the right to buy a gun – at least I think most of them don’t.  But they want every other adult person over the age of 18 living in every other dwelling in that neighborhood, and in every other neighborhood around the country, to have the right to go out and buy a gun.  If there were 150 people who had been stupid enough to commit sex offenses and get caught and convicted, I’ll bet you there were at least twice as many in that same neighborhood who hadn’t gotten caught, who hadn’t been convicted, who were out there walking around looking for more women or children to rape or abuse.  Every single one of them had the right to buy a gun that they could use to commit such a crime.  If there were people in my old Hollywood neighborhood who hated Asian people and wanted to kill them, they had the right to go out and buy a gun they could use for that purpose as well.

That’s the way the Supreme Court decided the insane Heller decision, that somehow a Constitution written more than 240 years ago when there were a limited number of flintlock rifles and pistols in this country, confers on every adult citizen a “right” to own a Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifle, or a 9 millimeter pistol like the one bought by Robert Alan Long on Tuesday.

That’s what we’re stuck with.  That Constitution, that Supreme Court decision, and a Republican Party that’s happy to make sure the level of insane bloodshed carried out in Atlanta on Tuesday can be carried out again and again and again. 

There were more than 600 mass killings in 2020 in this country, 600 times that someone killed more than four people in one incident.  There is no way of telling how many there will be in 2021, but Robert Alan Long and his Republican enablers have gotten us off to a good start.

The Science Behind Your Need for One More Potato Chip

 

The Science Behind Your Need for One More Potato Chip

Michael Moss describes how flavor sensations derived from a combination of sugar and fat, as well as other smells and tastes, hit your brain, interact with memories and release a flood of neurotransmitters that stimulate and perpetuate fundamental cravings.Credit...James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images

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By Daniel E. Lieberman

HOOKED

Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions By Michael Moss NY TIMES

As an entree to Michael Moss’s excellent new book, “Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions,” try this experiment. Imagine or — even better — place two bowls in front of you: one with potato chips; the other with whole walnuts. Make sure they are both good quality brands and fresh from a never-opened bag. Sample a walnut first. Enjoy how its initial slightly bitter crunch transforms into something soft, buttery, faintly woodsy. Next munch a potato chip. Its flavor is less complex than the walnut’s, but every chip instantly delivers an intense combination of salt, sugar and fat. They are so crispy you can hear them snap between your teeth, and then they miraculously dissolve into nothingness on your tongue, making you want another. And another. And another.

Now ask yourself which is more likely to make you fat. From a purely nutritional perspective the answer is easy: the walnuts. According to the nutrition labels helpfully provided on both packages, an ounce of walnuts contains 186 calories, 25 percent more than the 150 calories delivered by an ounce of potato chips. To be sure, walnuts pack more protein and fiber and less salt, but if weight gain is your worry, you should eat the potato chips.

Obviously, it is preposterous to consider potato chips less fattening than walnuts — because potato chips are among the most addictive foods on the planet, along with French fries, pizza, cheeseburgers and Oreos. Too many of us can’t help eating too much of this stuff. And that’s the chief motivation for “Hooked,” which is in many ways a sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s 2013 tour de force, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.” That book exposed how multinational food companies churn out processed foods that are both cheap and alluring. “Hooked” asks how food manufacturers manipulate these foods to addict us, helping along a national crisis in which 40 percent of Americans are obese.

No one questions that the nutritional quality of foods has health consequences, but “Hooked” redirects our attention to the arguably more important question of quantity. To do so, Moss first focuses necessarily on the brain, the true fountainhead of addiction, which he defines (using the words of a Philip Morris C.E.O.) as “a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.”

If you are not a neuroscientist, you’ll be relieved by Moss’s jargon-free approach to this complex biology. Without going into much detail, he describes how foods can be engineered to trigger the brain’s “on switch” (mostly the neurotransmitter, dopamine) and inhibit its “off switch” (a region called the prefrontal cortex). These switches and the instincts that turn them on and off have deep evolutionary origins that likely helped our ancestors survive and thrive when food was scarce.

And, wow, are the hard-wired instincts to eat these foods powerful — more so than those that push us toward addictive drugs like heroin and nicotine. Even seeing the pictures of certain foods can cause us to salivate. In unforgettable language, Moss describes how less than a second after you bite into a luscious chocolate or a glazed doughnut, flavor sensations derived from a combination of sugar and fat, as well as other smells and tastes, hit your brain, interact with memories and release a flood of neurotransmitters that stimulate and perpetuate fundamental cravings.

We find out how Big Food innovates to manipulate and intensify these addiction-inducing sensations. We also learn how multinational food companies, in gastro-Orwellian fashion, hook us by expertly tapping into our memories, introducing endless new varieties, and combining sensations and ingredients rarely seen together in nature like sugar and fat, brittle and soft, sweet and salty. None of us are immune.

According to Moss, Big Food is relentlessly and cynically striving to maximize their “share of stomach,” industry parlance for how much of the food we eat they can supply. Beyond hunting for genes that predispose us to particular cravings or quantifying exactly how much sugar our brains prefer, these corporate peddlers perniciously play with serving sizes on nutrition labels to deceive us into thinking we are making healthy choices.

To trick us to eat more they also lure us in with low prices, dazzling packaging, convenience and trumped-up variety. One example among many: Differently colored M&M’s taste the same but dupe our brains to consume more than if they were all just brown. Perhaps most cunningly, Big Food has also acquired many major brands of processed diet foods like Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine. One has to admit it’s clever to make money helping us get fat and then profit from our efforts (usually futile) to lose weight.

All in all, “Hooked” blends investigative reporting, science and foodie writing to argue that the processed food industry is no different from tobacco companies like Philip Morris that for decades lied about the harmful and addictive nature of cigarettes. In Philip Morris’s case they were the same company (until recently, Philip Morris owned Kraft and General Foods).

Which leads to a question: Who is at fault? No one is forced to eat at McDonald’s or drink Dr Pepper, and few Americans are unaware that a salad for lunch is healthier than a cheeseburger with fries. But Moss’s argument is that free will is an illusion, at least for certain foods.

He’s right. It is sometimes said that for some of us sugar is as addictive as cocaine, but from an evolutionary biological perspective, cocaine is actually as addictive as sugar, because it takes advantage of ancient mechanisms we inherited from our distant ancestors that helped them acquire rare but needed calories. To stay healthy in our current, modern food system, consumers have to overcome instincts and make choices over which we have little control.

Moss’s attention to food addiction should open eyes and convert some free market advocates. On legal grounds, Big Food may be safe in court for now, but their actions raise ethical questions. Should we judge companies solely by their profits or by how they affect the world? Regardless of debates about the law and free will, is it acceptable to market to children breakfast cereals like Cotton Candy Cap’n Crunch, which is nearly half sugar? These and many other harmful habit-forming foods have fattened corporate bank accounts at the cost of fattening hundreds of millions of Americans, contributing to countless premature deaths and debilitating illnesses as well as costing trillions of dollars. Even if you don’t consume these foods, you are paying big time for their consequences.

“Hooked” can also help us pay more attention to the relationship between food quantity and quality. Over the last few decades modern, westernized attitudes toward food have increasingly focused on nutrition labels that inform us how many grams of saturated fat, fiber and other stuff are in the foods we buy. These labels can make many highly processed foods seem deceptively harmless compared with more calorie-dense natural foods like avocados, salmon and walnuts. Yet how many people overeat unprocessed wholesome foods?

Nutritionist perspectives on food combined with the challenges of losing weight also generate confusion over the relative merits of alternative diets, sometimes promoting new kinds of disordered eating as we Google the glycemic index of muffins or bananas, and worry about whether chocolate, eggs or peanuts are “good” or “bad.”

I’ve done my share of Googling and fretting, but I’m done with this. One doesn’t need a degree in nutrition science to recognize that just about every traditional, nonprocessed diet from every culture on the planet that isn’t loaded with junk food is probably generally healthy. What’s more, like those walnuts, those diets are tastier too.

Daniel E. Lieberman is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and the author of “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding.”

HOOKED
Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions
By Michael Moss
304 pp. Random House. $28.

                                                                                                                                      

The Politics of the Anthropocene

 
The Politics of the Anthropocene in a World After Neoliberalism

Can today’s crises inspire action at the scales required to think about planetary sustainability? 

DUNCAN KELLY This essay is featured in Boston Review

Historian Adam Tooze has argued that COVID-19 is the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene, a term encapsulating the idea that human impact on the environment and climate is so extreme that it has moved us out of the Holocene into a new geological epoch. While this argument remains the subject of deep disagreement among experts, those advocating for the Anthropocene emphasize that humans have so drastically altered the environment that we have become agents of transformations we cannot reliably control. Indeed, we are daily reminded of these effects by extreme weather events, species extinctions, and new global health emergencies.

Why has it proven so difficult politically to act in the face of ample evidence of an increasingly uninhabitable Earth?

The most pressing and most obvious of these forces is the novel coronavirus, which has exposed the frailties of political systems in so-called advanced democracies in collectively terrifying but individually unsurprising ways. As with other pandemics, the least powerful and most insecure members of society are those who suffer the most. If one of the challenges posed by the Anthropocene is to rethink the evaluative and ecological foundations of our politics in dramatic new ways, it might help to make better sense of the challenges we face—and to build a better and fairer world after neoliberalism—to explore the convoluted route by which we have arrived at this point. The pandemic struck at a moment of deep-seated disaffection with democratic politics after forty years of neoliberalism and the rise of new forms of authoritarian and populist politics.

Facing his own era-defining political crisis, German chancellor Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) took the title of a 1920 silent film starring Bela Lugosi, Dance on the Volcano, and turned it into a serious metaphor by which to describe the economic threats faced amid the rise and decline of the Weimar Republic—from military defeat and a quietly successful democratic revolution to economic catastrophe, militaristic nationalism, and rising anti-Semitism. While the early 2020s are certainly not the late 1930s, the metaphor remains convincing.

Can today’s crises inspire action at the scales required to think about planetary sustainability? Why has it proven so difficult politically to act in the face of ample evidence of an increasingly uninhabitable Earth, to which now can be added the threat of COVID-19?

During the pandemic, Tooze has disinterred German sociologist Ulrich Beck as an unlikely Virgil to guide us through this uncertain modern purgatory. Beck’s thinking about what he termed “risk society” seems even more pertinent during an Anthropocene pandemic than it did thirty-five years ago.

Reflecting on environmental fallout, Chernobyl, and ecological politics in 1980s Germany, Beck asked what it meant to live amidst the new risks of modern society—from disease and radioactive fallout to still broader forms of ecological calamity. How, he wondered in Risk Society (1986), can we “live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fears” that erupt from within? This combination of scientific knowledge of threats, alongside a fear of the invisible agency of both viral and radioactive hazards, offers a perverse combination of hypermodernism amid a sort of quasi-religious fear and primitivism around the unseen. Such an unstable compound formed part of Beck’s search for a more “reflexive” form of modernization. As he put it in Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk (1995), society in the age of climate crisis—when we are “confronted by the challenges of the self-created possibility, hidden at first, then increasingly apparent, of the self-destruction of all life on this earth”—passes through two stages.

Merely “following the science” will not get us anywhere close to a more progressive future.

The first offers technocratic solutionism, grounded in models of economic growth and progress, which allows modern experts something like “wardship” of Earth. And while democracy might “twitch” at moments of mismanagement by technocrats, it can do so only after its practical “demise” as a political force in the first place. During this stage, all trends point toward ever greater power in the hands of unelected experts, while democracy continues to function as an ideological illusion—a spell cast over the world by a word only loosely connected to how power is exercised in day-to-day politics.

The second stage of risk society, what Beck termed “hazard civilization,” takes place at the level of knowledge production. As we become increasingly aware of the fragility of our situation and the proximity of existential risks and hazards, we obviously become more and more beholden to experts for understanding and surviving the threats they have done so much to inform us about. Yet at the same time that they offer complex and rarefied knowledge about problems that threaten our collective existence, scientists and experts show—in full view of the public—the powerful disagreements, divergences, and dissonance among themselves in the production and distribution of expert claims. Just think of the politicking behind the massive documents and appendices of the 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which focused on the need to keep future warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius. In turn it quickly became a rallying cry, taken up particularly by those on the frontline of climate change in the Caribbean, suggesting that this was really about “1.5 to stay alive.”

As figures such as Bruno Latour have emphasized, increased awareness of science as an argumentative social practice and continuous process of negotiation and interpretation serves two conflicting functions. On the one hand, it provides intellectual emancipation from ignorance: recognizing complexity and uncertainty is a form of liberation. But on the other hand, it also breeds skepticism about scientific knowledge. This can, in turn, make possible reactionary forms of critique, quickly taken up by institutions and ideologies seeking to benefit from the status quo. Such a state of affairs leaves us even further adrift, for the insidious threats of risk society and hazard civilization are also social and massively unequally distributed. As Beck wrote, in the face of massive hazards and existential threat, what use is a society that protects individuals in their acquisition of extreme wealth and that legitimates massive levels of income and wealth inequality through property rights at the same time that it “legalizes large-scale hazards on the strength of its own authority, foisting them on everyone, including even those multitudes who resist them”?

In his account of ecological politics in this hazard civilization, Beck paraded the tragedy and irony of atomic modernity as a social structure of “non-liability.” Its distinctive features lay in “turning that which controls the production of hazards—law, science, administration, policy—into its accomplices.” This “theatre of the absurd” in turn “renders all resistance idle,” for while it is impossible for society to avoid risk, the “institutionalized safety pledge” social institutions and experts offer interprets the actual presence of hazards as forms of system failure rather than as failures of social relations that have already given themselves over to technocratic management. Social institutions have become “prisoners of their own safety technology,” a perverse summation to the solidaristic social-insurance schemes underpinning the original emergence of the modern welfare state.

Beck’s alternative vision was to provide space to ground multiple forms of what he called “sub-politics”: a return to something like a politics of democratic accountability expressed locally as a form of collective irresponsibility, when set against the paradoxical realities of the new technocracy governing ecological risk. For Beck this was the “antidote” to the pathologies of hazard civilization. But he was deliberately non-stipulative about what direction these forms of politics might take, which makes it sound rather abstract at first. Sub-politics is about fostering spaces for individual and collective political judgment within which local groups and communities can learn to deliberate, think, and act in a world of perpetual risk and hazard—but free from the rigid hierarchies of technical solutionism and an uncritical acceptance of whatever expert knowledge provides as the only justification for political choice-making.

How such processes and places work in practice will have to be determined on the ground, in a bottom-up process of democratic organizing. The politics of organizing has always been crucial to the successes and failures of ecological politics, and for Beck it seems like an activist model of democratic self-government in sub-political perspective is a better antidote to hazard life than the precautionary anti-majoritarianism of some political and constitutional theorizing. Such spaces might also help to avoid the temptation simply to habituate ourselves to a “new normal” with all its abnormalities—as something beyond our control or ken—or to seek solace in the return to earlier times of apparent simplicity and order, with strong leaders and grateful subjects. In the face of current challenges, the search for technological fixes, constitutional amendments, or even forms of constitutional dictatorship may seem emancipatory, but in fact they only bind us to the status quo. They may provide models for salvaging democratic politics tomorrow, but they do so by pre-committing ourselves to contemporary values. What, though, if today is precisely when we need to do things differently?

The search for technological fixes, constitutional amendments, or even forms of constitutional dictatorship may seem emancipatory, but in fact they only bind us to the status quo. 

Others look to a new ethics of interspecies care between kith and kin as a way of “staying with the trouble,” in Donna Haraway’s terminology. Small wonder, perhaps, that the promise of environmental care and mobilization for the sake of planet Earth and future human generations seem more likely to find a coalition of the willing through nonstate affiliations such as religious groupings, which see themselves as acting above the grubby secular needs of nationalist politics. Amitav Ghosh has laid this out clearly as one way that future historians might look back on this period of failure—one that he calls “the great derangement”—with perhaps a little more sympathy once we recognize the exclusionary nature of a political and economic modernity open only to a relative minority in global terms.

More recently still, proposals for a Green New Deal have offered seemingly novel model political economies, mobilizing groups at both national and what we might think of as various sub-political levels, as well as across generational divides. Yet in so doing, they indicate some of the structural problems connecting the sub-political to the demands of an uninhabitable Earth or a politics of the Anthropocene, which might require a still-more radical rethinking of the very concepts, values, and priorities that underpin modern democratic politics.

For even as such challenges to the mainstream play out and support forms of localism and radical democracy, they often continue to work within the conceptual horizons of a pre-Anthropocene world. Perceiving the urgent need to move beyond forty years of neoliberalism, they hark back—often rhetorically, sometimes substantively—to the allure of the original New Deal. Bypassing the last four decades, we plunge back to forms of Keynesian demand management where government spending, taxation, and plans for full employment in new sustainable jobs are required to finance this transition—meaning a sort of last hurrah for Old World growth and stimulus is the necessary prerequisite for moving into a new world running along a “slower groove,” as Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos put it in A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (2019).

Such attempts to revive older models of growth, employment, interest, and money in new forms might not be enough to meet the demands of Beck’s challenge. Indeed, it often remains unclear what it might mean to go beyond neoliberalism: there are such diverse understandings of what the term means in theory and practice, and what its history might have to teach us about a future beyond it.

Consider two of the most powerfully articulated positions in contemporary scholarship on the topic.

First is the critique of neoliberalism exemplified by Wendy Brown, who sees it as an “undoing” of the demos by self-conscious political choice. Unevenly distributed across the globe, neoliberalism on this account is a “field of oscillations” broadly set upon rendering human interactions and subjectivities into little more than market calculations of individual and comparative advantage. It stealthily weakens any commitment either of individuals or of government to solidaristic ties of affection and mutual aid as beyond the scope of policy-making and detrimental to the acquisition of wealth. Neoliberalism, in this account, is an essentially antidemocratic project: it professes to depoliticize and thereby to naturalize the realm of the economy and of economic competition as the essential measure of human success.

For some writers, whatever a world beyond COVID-19 looks like, it must surely mean the end of neoliberalism and the affirmation of public goods, not just individual ones.

Brown argues, against this regime, that democracy has only ever advanced through the revolt and reforms demanded by the excluded, and it is thus premised on a view of politics grounded in the hope for a better, though perhaps never fully realizable, future. Once a market calculus is applied to democratic politics or to society more broadly, a new kind of political rationality takes hold. Contemporary neoliberalism has conquered a progressive commitment to welfare, offering in its place the simplistic mantra that the state and the economy are separate entities; that the market is smart and rewards according to talent; and that the state is dumb, slow, and corrupted by sinister interests.

For writers such as Neal Ascherson, this suggests that whatever a world beyond COVID-19 looks like, it must surely mean the end of neoliberalism and the affirmation of public goods, not just individual ones. What sort of model of society might that be? As Will Davies recently suggested, democracies in the age of COVID-19 remain stuck between two basic options. One is an imagined community—whether the nationalism of contemporary right-wing populists and the so-called “left behind” or the solidaristic left version—harking back to a better time when communities were close, patriotism was natural, and people looked out for one another’s children. The other option is to view society as an amalgam of individuals and groups into vast networks, part of an increasingly interconnected world through forms of technology they might nonetheless remain physically distant from. Its roots lie in the sociological and telecommunications revolutions of the nineteenth century, adapted for a broadband era. Whether mythical, nostalgic, or nodal, such choices still fall victim to the criticisms laid out by Beck.

In contrast to Brown’s political theory of neoliberalism, a second approach is historical. The work of Angus Burgin, Philip Mirowski, and Dieter Plewhe has tracked the roots of modern neoliberalism back to the 1938 conference Colloque Walter Lippmann in Paris and the Mont Pèlerin Society, founded in Switzerland in 1947 by figures including Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. This historical argument emphasizes the organizational effectiveness of an intellectual effort to construct a new liberalism in the wake of war and depression. Intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian extended this argument in his 2018 study Globalists, which recasts the origins of neoliberalism as an attempt to shift political power away from nation-states toward supranational federal architectures—from the League of Nations to the World Trade Organization. This vision began life as a sort of updated Habsburg Empire model, wherein cultural diversity could thrive under political structures too complex to be captured by bureaucratic or national interests. (Hayek and his teacher Ludwig von Mises saw World War I as a calamitous triumph of nationalism and socialism within the modern nation-state.)

Such complex, supranational structures were once thought to be among the best ways to save capitalism not only from itself, but from the distortions of statist politics. Neoliberal versions of this history were a capitalist mirror to wider, anticolonial critiques of the nation-state that developed at the same time. But what trajectories link the historical dynamics of the modern statist politics that won out against these competing visions into the uninhabitable Earth of the Anthropocene?

In Climate Leviathan (2018), Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright give a typology of various political structures that might emerge in response to climate change. One option is “Climate Leviathan,” a system of global capitalism premised upon the already wealthy and powerful being motivated to save the planet for their own interests. Another vision is “Climate Mao,” which responds to the climate crisis not by global capitalism but by seemingly anti-capitalist and autarchic blocs. Still another option is “Climate Behemoth,” a reform of reactionary populism at the level of the nation-state. But beyond these options, Mann and Wainwright contend, we might also imagine some sort of Climate X, a radical democratic rethink of the forms of sub-national as well as international politics that might reconnect economics and politics in new forms of value and accounting.

Perhaps not even the pandemic has condemned neoliberalism to the dustbin of history. 

Amid the pandemic, we have seen the domestic power of nation-states and the international power of central bankers working in tandem to stabilize the structures of financial capitalism—all in an effort to maintain the status quo ante. But we have also seen a dramatic display of the state’s capacity to demobilize its economy in the name of protecting health. This offers a novel perspective from which to think about politics after neoliberalism and in the face of the Anthropocene. But the temptation to return to the old regime is immense. Who can say, then, that the project of neoliberalism has definitively run its course? Perhaps not even the pandemic has condemned it to the dustbin of history. But it is surely the challenge of the Anthropocene that provides the real trigger for thinking about a radically new way of conceiving of politics, rather than one that gives in to the temptations of the old.

Among those major challenges are questions of value: what we owe nature, and what we owe to future generations. Such issues might embolden us to think anew about questions of reparations at the bar of ecological indebtedness, within which other forms of structural-historical injustice (such as racial slavery and patriarchal oppression) arose and continue to inform our present. The Anthropocene also questions conventional thinking about population, economic limits to growth, unevenly distributed forms of inequality, and the relationship between humans and other animals.

Much as with Beck’s earlier treatment of ecological politics in an age of risk, these are problems that it is tempting to view through the prism of either a technocratic-legalist paradigm or a mitigation-adaptation perspective. The real challenge laid out by Beck, and through Anthropocene narratives and epistemologies today, is the thought that we might be better advised to drastically revise the established conventions and expectations around the terms we use to interrogate politics and economics, transfiguring both their histories and their values.

Among those major challenges are questions of value: what we owe nature, and what we owe to future generations. 

Rethinking the history and the ideas that shaped our politics into the present, we might be able to conceive of new and alternative forms of community. We might also, at the very least, go back to a more historically sensitive tradition of thinking about political economy, prevalent in the period before and during World War I, for hints about how to proceed to a politics beyond neoliberalism—particularly if that history can help us to see the longue durée of neoliberalism and its critics, rather than only its most recent forms. Consider antitrust progressives in the United States, historical political economists in Europe, and British political economists who worked out the relations between wealth, welfare, and the principles of taxation for negative externalities such as pollution: all offered ways of seeing the interconnections between politics, economics, history, and the environment that are more capacious and synthetic than anything modern neoliberalism and mainstream economics have to offer. All, as well, value complexity over predictive simplification.

Only by reconnecting questions of value to the properly embedded interrelationship between politics and economics can these visions become thinkable anew. The pandemic at least shows that it really is a very old question about the value of political economies or market societies that will have to bear the foundational weight of any future-oriented, progressive politics of the Anthropocene. Whether such rethinking might issue in the achievement of radical demands for forms of politics grounded in love, justice, and radical hope—or just follow the line of least resistance back to business as usual—remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: merely “following the science” will not get us anywhere close to a more progressive future, with or without the particular threats posed by this pandemic.