What Madeleine Albright Wrote about Nicolas Maduro

Madeleine Albright is most known for her tenure as Secretary of State during the Clinton administration. She served in this capacity from January 1997 to January 2001.

Her influence on global diplomacy and presidential policy continued long after she left office. She advised President Obama, President Biden, and a long list of diplomats in the State Department.

She was active in shaping foreign policy until shortly before her death in 2022. Worth noting is the development of her view of Nicolas Maduro between 2018 and 2021.

In 2018, Albright had a dim view of Maduro, but still considered him someone to be treated by means of diplomacy. She wrote:

Chavez intended to be president for life, and he was, but disease cut the dream short. The Venezuela he left behind is poorer than in 1999, when he took office. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, is rigidly ideological former bus driver and union boss who possesses every flaw but none of the virtues of the leader he replaced.

Albright recorded the disastrous economic policies of Maduro. While short-sighted and uninformed, and probably corrupt, his incompetence did not yet merit going beyond diplomacy.

The new president took the helm of an economy in rough waters and steered it toward Armageddon. To repay debts, he tapped the country’s financial reserves. Without reserves, Venezuela is hard-pressed to afford imports. Without imports, basic commodities are unavailable. The value of the national currency — the Bolivar fuerte — has declined to near zero, while the inflation rate is the world’s highest. The result is misery. Paychecks and pensions can no longer cover the cost of necessities; the price of a single tube of toothpaste is equal to half the average weekly income. Malnutrition is widespread. No matter how many pharmacies they visit, families are unable to obtain essential medicines. The minimum wage has been raised repeatedly but has failed to keep pace, stalling at about one-eighth the level in neighboring Colombia. Domestic production of coffee, rice, and corn has declined 60 percent. The country’s cattle herd is smaller by a third, and a decade and a half of squeezing the private sector has left the business community unable to supply basic needs.

If Maduro was to be arrested and taken into custody, then in 2018 it was to be done by the Venezuelan people. Aware of the diplomatic proprieties, Albright apparently thought that Maduro had not yet crossed the line which would precipitate his apprehension by U.S. authorities. It was still a domestic matter, to be dealt with by the Venezuelan system.

For months in early 2017, angry citizens took their grievances to the streets, shouting anti-Maduro slogans while trying to protect their bodies with bike helmets, cardboard shin guards, and homemade shields painted with the country’s colors of yellow, blue, and red.

There was no doubt that Maduro was liable for criminal charges and should face those charges in a Venezuelan court.

The president could have eased the crisis by admitting past mistakes and adopting policies to bring the country together. That would have caused foreign investors to take a fresh look at the situation and sparked regional and global initiatives to help. Instead, he doubled down on repression. To Maduro, one either tries to fulfill the Chavista revolution or betrays it — and he is a stubborn and unrepentant revolutionary. In July 2017, he engineered a referendum to replace the elected parliament with an all-powerful assembly of partisan puppets. Their job is to write a constitution to supplant the one Chavez wrote, which he predicted would last for centuries. At Maduro’s direction, major opposition parties have been banned, while political rivals and even some former allies have been locked up or forced into exile. When responding to street protests, security forces killed more than 120 civilians and roughed up and jailed thousands more. To ensure loyalty, the military and ex-military have taken over many government and private sector functions including the production of oil and the distribution of food.

In 2018, Albright expressed clearly that Maduro had lost all credibility. She dismisses his statements:

Maduro has refused to accept a shred of responsibility for the setbacks his country has endured. He blames every woe on domestic reactionaries and on “coup-mongering, power-grabbing … tendencies directed and governed by the United States.” This last charge was easy to dismiss.

According to Madeleine Albright, Maduro “has tried to nudge followers away from the consensus of support for democratic norms that required decades of struggle and sacrifice to build.”

Albright writes that Nicolas Maduro sees “access to high office not as a temporary privilege but as a means of imposing” his “own desires for as long as” he can. “In public statements,” Maduro displays “no interest in cooperation outside the specific groups” he purports “to speak for and represent.” He claims for himself “the mantle of ‘strong leader,’” and says that he speaks “for ‘the people.’”

By 2020, Albright had gone a step further. She is willing to question not only Maduro’s credibility, but even his legitimacy. In this, she joined the wider global diplomatic community. The EU and several dozen individual countries around the world declared Maduro’s government to be illegitimate.

According to Albright, Maduro is one “of a more contemporary breed of autocratic leaders.”

Maduro was elected in April 2014 and reelected in July 2024. International observers agreed that the elections were rigged. Madeleine Albright writes:

Those in charge of the process manipulated it to the favor of the incumbent. These were not fair elections.”

Two factors seem to have nudged Albright into a more prosecutorial stance against Maduro: First, when the EU and individual nations declared his rule to be illegitimate, he lost the claim to diplomatic immunity. Second, mounting evidence made it clear that he was engaged in criminal activity, i.e., being part of a drug cartel and promoting that cartel’s activities.

Maduro was no longer “probably” corrupt. Evidence confirmed that he was a leader in an international cartel, guilty of smuggling, racketeering, and a long list of other crimes. Given that the community of nations had declared his government to be illegitimate, he was no longer the object of diplomacy, but rather the object of law enforcement.

As early as 2015, when Albright was advising Obama, the U.S. government was gathering such evidence, as the Associated Press reports:

Nephews of Maduro’s wife were heard during recorded meetings with confidential U.S. government sources in 2015 agreeing to send “multi-hundred-kilogram cocaine shipments” from Maduro’s “presidential hanger” at a Venezuelan airport. The nephews during the recorded meetings explained “that they were at ‘war’ with the United States.”

As the case against Maduro became stronger, the Biden administration offered increasing rewards — up to $25 million — for information leading to the arrest of Maduro. It was the aim of the Biden administration to apprehend Maduro and take him into custody.

Given that Madeleine Albright’s work for the Biden administration was informal, confidential, and off-the-record, it is difficult to ascertain the exact degree of her involvement in the decision to seek Maduro’s capture. From her writings, it’s clear that her stance against Maduro was becoming more resolute. She was also in a position, given both her experience and her contacts in the global diplomatic community, to discern that other nations were confirmed in their view that Maduro’s government was illegitimate and that he was not entitled to diplomatic immunity.

In March 2021, Albright participated in a forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute. There was no live audience because of the pandemic, but the participants — government leaders and diplomats from several nations, of whom Albright was one — did meet live and in-person. There is no currently available record of the back-channel conversations which Albright might have had with these leaders, and whether Maduro was a topic in those conversations. Given the increasing amount of cocaine being smuggled into EU countries from Venezuela at that time, it is certainly possible that Maduro was a topic.

Amazingly, Albright was alert, lucid, and engaged in foreign policy conversations until shortly before her death in March 2022. At her funeral, in April of that year, President Biden said:

Presidents and leaders around the world continued to solicit her advice, including me. When I asked her last year to chair the Defense Policy Board, she built businesses. She pumped out New York Times bestsellers that were both highly prescient and deeply salient — and constantly bestsellers. I think I’ve read them all.

Albright, in unofficial capacity, would have been able to “send out feelers” to other nations to judge what kind of response the Biden administration would get when it put a bounty on Maduro’s head. Official State Department diplomats would not have been able to be as frank and direct as Albright could be, and they would not have the personal relationships, acquaintances, and friendships that Albright had. She was ideal for doing the kind of off-the-record communicating that the Biden administration would need to lay the groundwork for eventually offering a reward for Maduro’s capture.

KTVZ reported further comments that the president made at Albright’s funeral:

The President said Albright remained a “nexus of the foreign policy community” in the decades after she left office.

Albright, Biden said, was “always, and I mean always, on top of the latest developments. Always speaking out for democracy, and always the first to sound the alarm about fascism.”

The Biden administration offered large cash rewards for Maduro’s apprehension. If there is conclusive evidence that Albright was part of the decision-making leading to this offer, it has not been declassified or published yet. Given her status as the go-to foreign policy expert in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations, and given her close and frequent communication with Biden, with State Department officials, and with the global diplomatic community, it is difficult to imagine that the administration did not ask her opinion on the idea of posting a reward for Maduro’s capture. Perhaps she was promoting the idea before her opinion of it could be asked.

An article in Sky News in August 2025 stated:

Under US President Donald Trump's predecessor Joe Biden, the offer went up to $25M — the same amount the US offered for the capture of Osama bin Laden following the 11 September 2001 attacks. Now it's doubled to $50M.

In January 2025, an A News article explained:

The US increased the reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to $25 million on Friday as he was sworn in for a third term in office.

The Biden administration is also increasing the reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan Interior and Justice Minister Diosdado Cabello to $25 million under the State Department's Narcotics Rewards Program, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby announced. A new $15 million reward is being offered for Defense Minister Vladimir Pedrino.

The Biden administration, during its entire four years, had Maduro in its sights, and gradually increased the dollar amount of the bounty on Maduro’s head. Biden’s clear objective was to arrest and incarcerate Maduro.

In her role as an advisor during both the Obama administration and the Biden administration, Madeleine Albright was not only aware of the effort to capture Maduro, but approved of it, and even espoused it.

The Word ‘Community’ in Contemporary Political Rhetoric

The vocabulary used by candidates, elected leaders, and the media changes over the decades, and is a good barometer of what people are thinking and how the power structure is attempting to influence the people’s thinking. In the process, the meaning of a word morphs and gets redesigned. This change in a word’s meaning may start as an intentional propaganda technique, but can and often does become subject to the normal linguistic processes which change a word’s meaning in an organic way: in a way which is no longer under the control of those who began the process.

Hovering in the background, as observers note the introduction of new vocabulary and note the changes in vocabulary’s style and popularity, is the linguistic distinction between prescriptive and descriptive definitions. The old and endless debate about the interplay between these two types of definitions comes to the fore as words are used, misused, and abused.

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, one example is the word ‘community.’ For much of the twentieth century, this word, both prescriptively and descriptively, was in most cases understood to refer to a group of people who knew and interacted with each other on a frequent and regular basis: a small town or a neighborhood being the prime examples.

A change occurred when the word began to be applied to groups which were organized for the purpose of creating political or social pressure. These are social action groups or lobbying groups.

The next step was to apply this word to the people, usually cast as victims, whom the pressure groups allegedly represented. The news media reported on activists speaking about the “Black community” or the “African-American community.” In this way, the word came to refer to people who’d never met, and who were not even aware of each other’s existence. A 75-year-old multi-millionaire in Massachusetts and a 25-year-old receptionist at a dental practice in Los Angeles were thus part of the same “community.”

The semantic field of the word was stretched and distorted.

Marketing analysts began using phrases like “the wristwatch community” and “the mechanical pencil community.”

The word had come to be applied to large numbers of people who shared only one variable, and who had no knowledge of, or acquaintance with, each other: people who might be different from each other in many significant ways.

What is the effect arising from this change in a word’s usage? Why did this change come about? To speak of the “fountain pen community” — a subset of the “analog writing community” — is to attribute to the group a quality beyond the mere fact that all members share one common variable. The connotation or feel of the word is that these people share an identity and sense of belonging. The people who use these phrases don’t say that explicitly, and probably don’t even believe it; yet they use the phrase to create an impression in the mind of the reader or hearer: an impression that these people somehow are united.

The reader will consider the subtle difference between ‘Black people are … ’ and ‘the Black community is … ’ at the beginning of a sentence.

But, as in the earlier example, these people have only one variable in common, and that is a weak argument for alleging a sense of community among them. They have never met or communicated with each other, vote differently, worship differently, hold different moral standards, speak different languages, live and shop and play in different contexts, and have different educations and family structures. This is a “community” only if the definition of ‘community’ has been significantly changed.

It might be more accurate to speak of the “Black population” or the “Black demographic segment” in most situations. But it might lack the emotion and might fail to create the mental image in people’s minds — the emotion and image which lobbyists or activists find useful in promoting their causes.

Yet the organic growth of natural languages is inexorable, and won’t be contained, like Frankenstein’s monster, even by those who created such usages. Once the runaway use of the word ‘community’ started, it could not be stopped.

Which leads us to a November 2025 article in the Michigan Daily about a manicurist who posted photos of her work on social media: the article’s title included the phrase: “The Online Nail Community.”

Nixon in 1968: Assessing the Candidate

Some of the issues in the presidential election of 1968 are still relevant sixty years later: economics and equal opportunity. Other issues now belong primarily to the study of history: the Vietnam War and the Soviet Union are no more.

During the spring and summer, primary elections were held as the political parties considered their options for nominees. By the time the Republican National Convention began in Miami, the delegate counts were such that there was still no clear nominee. The leading candidates were Nixon, Reagan, and Nelson Rockefeller.

The media watched closely as the time for the first balloting neared. William F. Buckley offered analysis and commentary on the ABC network for primetime television. Although Reagan and Rockefeller worked energetically, the momentum among the delegates seemed to favor Nixon. But no candidate had the required number of delegates until shortly before the balloting.

Which ideas did the candidates represent? Rockefeller appealed to the wing of the Republican Party which can be labeled as “moderate” or “left-wing,” depending on who’s doing the labeling. Reagan and Nixon were ideologically similar to each other, to the extent that Reagan supported Nixon’s foreign policies in the early 1970s, and Nixon supported Reagan candidacy in 1980. The two conferred with each other when one of them was president.

Explaining Nixon on live TV, Buckley said:

This country has had the most phenomenal success of any country in the world in graduating people from poverty into affluence, and that graduation has been the result of economic and private activity, not government activity.

Buckley added: “Under the circumstances,” Nixon “wants to maintain those wellsprings of action.” According to Buckley, Nixon sees that giving people the freedom to act is the best way to create social mobility — a chance to move up — and therefore the best way to address issues like poverty and race relations.

The standard response to this view, then and now, is to point to inequality. In the twenty-first century, it has become common to focus on equity instead of equality, but few ordinary Americans, and even fewer in the media and in academia, can accurately express the distinction between the two concepts. In 1968, the word ‘equality’ was the operative word for such discussions.

Buckley presents the view that a government which usually refrains from intervention and regulation and a government which hesitates to create, fund, and sustain programs in response to social problems is the type of government which offers the best solutions to the problem of poverty. It offers chances and opportunities; it offers social mobility. But the standard response again points out that the result of Buckley’s proposal will not be equality. Under Buckley’s system, some people will have more and some will have less.

Buckley suggests that the goal is not equal status, but rather equal opportunity: This is the meaning of the twenty-first century’s distinction between ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ in political rhetoric.

Given equal opportunities, one person might decide to study engineering and another person might decide to study poetry. The engineer will probably earn more money than the person who analyzes poetry. Inequality is the result of unrestrained choices. In Buckley’s words:

Unless you have the freedom to be unequal there is no such thing as freedom. Every single person who owns a Ford car today is considered, by terms of international statistics, as being especially privileged. My point is that he worked to achieve it and that we ought to encourage a system which permits people like you and people like Mr. Smith and people like the technicians in this room to make progress. The fact that they make more progress than other people is not their fault nor is it the fault of other people. It’s the fault of freedom, but this I judge to be a price that we ought to be willing to pay in order to indulge the great animating force of progress in the world.

Having given the standard account of how a free society with a limited government creates opportunity for upward social mobility for those in the lower classes, Buckley turned to the general mood of the time. The year 1968 has been well documented for its chaos: student protests on university campuses, riots in cities, passionate and conflicting opinions about the Vietnam War and about race relations, increasing drug use, crime in the large cities, and other matters.

When asked what the presumptive nominee should say about the unstable ambience of the year, Buckley said:

I think the strongest line he could take is to face the people of the United States and say, “The reason, the principal reason, for the discontent of our time is because you have become encouraged by a demagogy of the left to believe that the federal government is going to take care of your life for you.” The answer is the federal government (a) can’t (b) shouldn’t (c) won’t. Under the circumstances look primarily to your own resources — spiritual, economic, and philosophical — and don’t look to the government to do it because the government is going to fail you.

Implicitly or explicitly, the notion was promulgated that the government is there to help people and there to solve problems. Having integrated this notion into their thinking and conception of life, people are radically disappointed when they discover that the government can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t fill the roles and complete the tasks which this notion assigns to it. This notion has been insinuated so pervasively that people assume in perhaps an almost subconscious way. Despite clear evidence that government is incapable of managing society, some people continue to insist that it do so.

So far, Buckley had described Nixon, who was not yet the party’s official nominee. The question poses itself: Is Buckley’s description accurate? Buckley’s description of Nixon seems quite similar to Buckley’s description of Buckley. Was this all wishful thinking? Was Buckley perceiving Nixon accurately? What would Nixon do and say if nominated? What would Nixon do and say if elected?

Buckley was offering analysis and commentary during the Republican National Convention in August 1968. His description of Nixon at that time contained a degree of ideological purity and consistency which one might expect in an abstraction, but not in a living flesh-and-blood candidate, who had to include in his calculations both the sometimes self-contradictory desires of the voters and the complexity of national and international circumstances.

In point of fact, the convention selected Nixon to be the nominee, and the voters chose Nixon. Buckley backed Nixon, mainly because Nixon was preferable to Hubert Humphrey, the nominee of the Democratic Party.

After the Republican National Convention, the Democrats had nominated Humphrey at their convention in Chicago in August 1968. He was committed to keeping the United States in the Vietnam War. The war was becoming increasingly unpopular, and the Democrats chose to take a pro-war stance. There was significant anti-war sentiment, even within the Democratic Party.

With Nixon, the Republicans had an anti-war candidate. One of his standard slogans during the campaign was: “I pledge to you that we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.”

Humphrey would work to continue the war; Nixon would work to end it. In fact, he did end the Vietnam War, and ended the military draft.

In other ways, however, Nixon did not perform as Buckley hoped.

Buckley considered Nixon too much of a pragmatist or opportunist rather than a pure free-market ideologist. Nixon’s “wage and price controls” in 1971 was a clear violation of free market principles. Buckley opposed the controls fiercely.

Nixon created the EPA, and embraced the “Philadelphia Plan” which was an early version of affirmative action. Buckley saw this as an abandonment of the principle of limited government, and felt that Nixon lacked convictions.

Despite these and other disappointments with Nixon, Buckley endorsed him in 1968, and again in 1972, as a tactical move against other candidates.

Reasons to Be Cheerful — Part 7

There are things in this world for which one can be thankful. To be sure, there is also misery and suffering in this world. The presence of the latter does not negate the reality or efficacy of the former.

Nicholas Kristof, in a January 2025 piece in the New York Times, writes that even in a “messed-up world, many trends are still going right.” He notes that people want “reassurance” and this can be had by “putting grim news in perspective,” i.e., by noting the significant good which is found in the world alongside the real evil.

Kristof begins by pointing to the lives of small children, who now routinely live past childhood and into adulthood. He reports that

2024 appears to have been the year in which the smallest percentage of children died since the dawn of humanity.

For most of history, about half of newborns died as children. As recently as 1950, more than one-quarter did. In 2024, the best guess of United Nations statisticians is that an all-time low of 3.6 percent of children died before the age of 5, a bit lower than in 2023 (which set the previous record).

That is still far too many. But the risk of that worst thing happening has dropped by half over the last quarter-century. Just since 2000, more than 80 million children’s lives have been saved.

What will be the quality of life for these many children whose lives have been preserved? Many of them will experience a higher quality of life than their parents and grandparents, as Kristof goes on to explains:

Consider extreme poverty, defined as having less than $2.15 per day, adjusted for inflation. Historically, most human beings lived in extreme poverty, but the share has been plummeting — and in 2024 reached a new low of about 8.5 percent of the world’s people.

Another way of looking at it: Every day over the past couple of years, roughly 30,000 people moved out of extreme poverty worldwide. And here’s something to look forward to: This year will probably register even more progress against child deaths and poverty alike.

Not only will the majority of these children escape extreme poverty, but rather they will also receive an education, a benefit which enriches life in many ways.

Of the many skills that a person can acquire, the ability to read and write is one of the strongest predictors for economic success, protection from exploitation, and personal development. Kristof reflects on the advancement of education during his own lifetime:

Education and literacy are the greatest forces empowering human beings, yet when I was a child, a majority of human beings had always been illiterate. Now we’re approaching 90 percent literacy worldwide, and the number of literate people is rising by more than 12 million each year. Every three seconds, another person becomes literate.

As these children reach adulthood, they will receive more healthcare than previous generations. Paradoxically, that means gaining weight in the third world while losing weight in the first world.

As nutrition improves in what is often called the ‘developing world,’ brain development, internal organs, and general health improve with it. Appropriate weight gain during the first few years of life is a predictor of good health for many years afterward.

In the industrialized world, a focus on nutrition and exercise is combating chronic excess body weight.

Both trends are salutary.

Other improvements in healthcare are in the offing. Kristof notes that

Scientists have newly developed the first antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia in decades, and a vaccine against a form of breast cancer may enter Phase 2 trials this year.

One must grieve the loss of life. In Ukraine, in various parts of the Middle East, and in the concentration camps in northwest China. These deaths are shocking and saddening.

Yet in comparison to the twentieth century, the world is becoming a safer place. Between 1900 and 2000, approximately 200 million people died in combat, working out to 50 million people per quarter century. So far, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, combat deaths have accumulated at a much slower rate.

One need only compare the years of 1900 to 1925 with the years of 2000 to 2025 to quickly and clearly see the improvement.

It is true that this is a broken world, containing significant suffering.

But it is also true, in the words of Ian Drury and the Blockheads, that there are “reasons to be cheerful.”

Obama 2008, Obama 2012 — Same Candidate, Different Campaigns

In November 2008, Barack Obama won the election to become president. His campaign transmitted the idea that Obama was an outsider, not part of the national political establishment, and represented a new and fresh approach to governing. Obama presented himself as an “everyman,” with roots both in Hawaii and in Chicago, and so not representing a merely regional outlook.

Further, Obama’s heritage included, in his own words, his mother, whose skin was “as white as milk,” and his father, whose skin was “as black as pitch.” Obama hoped to be an embodiment of racial reconciliation and the harbinger of a “post-racial” society.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama used the traditional political phrases of “casting a wide net” and using a “big tent” approach. He was rewarded by obtaining votes from various demographic segments: voters in various income levels, various regions, various ethnic groups, and various racial groups elected him.

By contrast, the 2012 reelection campaign used a different approach.

Instead of a “wide” approach, the 2012 Obama campaign focused on obtaining not merely a majority, but a vast majority, from certain specific and narrowly-defined demographic segments. This approach highlights a peculiarity of electoral politics. A candidate can win by achieving a mere majority of all the voters, or by achieving a vast majority from a subset of the voters.

Both tactics lead to victory, but they do so with different societal dynamics.

A candidate can either find common interests and desires which appeal to all voters, or target specific policies which activate a strong reaction within a particular subset of voters. The latter strategy is sometimes called “identity politics” and dissects the electorate into groups by race, income level, religion, ethnicity, regionality, etc. An sad side effect of this strategy is that these groups will inevitably begin to see themselves in competition.

The campaign of 2008 and the campaign of 2012 were different from each other, projecting two different images of the candidate, and promulgating different political messages.

Some — perhaps many — candidates adjust their messages during campaigns to appeal to a maximum number of voters. Obama is no exception. Neither campaign fully reflected Obama’s beliefs or intentions.

In 1996, Obama stated clearly: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” During the 2008 campaign, Obama said, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.” Finally, in 2012, he said, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

All three quotes are well documented.

It is certainly possible for a political leader to change his views on any given topic. It is, however, more reasonable to hypothesize that Obama merely disguised his views rather than changing them.

Reviewing the 2008 campaign, Sean Hannity wrote, “Democrats often managed to downplay the extent of their radicalism, pretending — at least when it suited their political purposes — to be a party of moderates,” and “Obama tried to conceal his radical ideology.”

Having stated opposition to same-sex marriage during the 2008 campaign, Obama appointed two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009 and 2010: Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. These two, in turn, became part of the Supreme Court majority which set a significant precedent with Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 — a precedent which was the precise opposite of Obama’s 2008 statement during the campaign.

Voters who’d voted for Obama based on his words — his clear statement during the 2008 campaign — found that his actions were diametrically opposed to his announcement.

By contrast, Obama’s 2012 campaign featured what is called “identity politics.” Instead of leveraging a broad social and cultural consensus among diverse segments of the American electorate, Obama narrowly focused on specific segments, and spoke directly and only to them, delivering messages and promises designed exclusively for them.

Ben Shapiro notes the differences:

In 2012, President Barack Obama won reelection. He did so despite winning 3.5 million fewer votes than he did in 2008, and 33 fewer electoral votes; he did so despite winning the same percentage of the white vote losing Democrat John Kerry did in 2004; dropping support from 2008 among Americans across all age groups and education groups; and losing voters who made above $50,000 per year.

Obama won in 2008 and he won in 2012. But he won in two different ways. In 2008 he won a broad majority across various demographic segments. In 2012 he won a majority within select demographic segments, as Ben Shapiro writes:

The story of Obama’s 2012 victory is the story of the transformation of American politics. In 2008, Obama had been a different sort of candidate running a quite familiar campaign: a campaign of unification.

The 2008 campaign pointed to unity. Obama said that he would bring together various groups in American society:

Obama ran on the terms “hope” and “change,” pledging to move beyond America as a collection of “red states and blue states” and instead to unite Americans more broadly. In fact, Obama’s personal story was part and parcel of this appeal: he could justifiably claim to unite the most contentious strains of America in his own background, being the child of a white mother and a black father, raised in Hawaii but ensconced in the hard-knock world of Chicago, born to a single mother and raised by grandparents but educated at Columbia and Harvard Law School. Obama was, as he himself stated, a “blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

By contrast, the 2012 campaign emphasized group identity over a common American identity:

In 2012 he charted a different course than in 2008. Instead of running a campaign directed at a broad base of support, Obama sliced and diced the electorate, focusing in on his new, intersectional coalition, a demographically growing agglomeration of supposedly victimized groups in American life.

The reframing of Obama’s campaign from 2008 to 2012 is more than the story of one candidate’s adjustments. It documents how one group of American candidates moved toward “identity politics” and began to treat demographic segments of the electorate in isolation from each other. This way of doing politics assumes or hopes that individuals view themselves primarily as members of a racial or ethnic group, and not as rational knowing agents.

For candidates who use the tactic of identity politics, the analytically thinking individual who examines questions of policy, diplomacy, and economics is anathema. Such candidates prefer voters who embrace a group identity, and prefer that identity to independent thinking.

The practice of identity politics seeks such voters, assuming and hoping they are plentiful. But it also nudges voters toward that viewpoint, and away from seeing themselves as deliberative rational intellects.

Lessons from the Pandemic: Architecture

During much of 2020 and early 2021, researchers devoted much attention to the transmission of the virus which had disrupted daily life around the world and caused people to quarantine. Investigators gathered and analyzed data in massive quantities and at record speeds.

Biologists, virologists, and epidemiologists produced so many reports in such a short time that it may take decades to thoroughly examine the discoveries and understand their true importance.

One area for exploration is the link between building structures and viral transmission.

Data consistently point to reduced infection rates among people who live in free-standing structures, i.e., in houses.

These are structures which are variously categorized: single family dwellings, detached condominiums, and other real estate classifications are used to label them.

Viral transmission is enhanced and amplified by structures like duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, row houses, and high rise buildings.

While it is intuitive that buildings with shared hallways — large condominiums and high rise apartment buildings — lead to more disease transmission, it is significant but less obvious that structures like duplexes do so as well.

While duplexes may feature separate entrances, and thus avoid the communal spaces like hallways, they often share attics, crawl spaces, and some HVAC amenities. Even something as small and simple as an electrical outlet on a shared wall can allow for some air exchange between two otherwise separate living spaces — and with this air exchange, infection.

The data of infection rates in medium and large cities confirm this hypothesis.

In a pandemic caused by an airborne contagion, a free-standing house is an important line of defense against infection.

City planners and urban planners would do well to bear this in mind.

Real Estate Red-Lining: Government Facilitates Racism

“Redlining” is the practice of limiting homeownership in a town or in a neighborhood on the basis of race, or what is perceived as race. It was a real estate practice, found in some locations in the United States in the twentieth century, but now almost extinct. Simply put, real estate agents and homeowners were told to sell houses only to people of certain genetic groups.

“Sundown towns” and “sundown neighborhoods” are a closely related concept. They were areas in which people considered to be “Black” were not to be after dark: i.e., those people weren’t to spend the night, and certainly not to own real estate in those areas. They might be tolerated if they were briefly there during daylight hours for business reasons.

Redlining, and the creation of sundown towns, came into being at the end of the Reconstruction Era in American History. Until the late 1870s, the Republican Party had legislated the presence of military and civilian officials in the former Confederate States in order to protect and preserve the civil rights of the former slaves. It worked: Black people voted in ever-increasing numbers, and African-Americans were elected to Congress and other high offices.

But at the end of the Reconstruction Era, this good trend ceased. The Democratic Party took over city, county, and state governments, and began enacting Jim Crow Laws, and enacting policies which were segregationist and racist.

The principle at work in these events is this: racism is a vile and evil sentiment; it remains merely a sentiment, and therefore toothless, until governments become sufficiently powerful to change sentiment into action.

An undergraduate researcher at the University of Michigan, Audrey Melillo, explains that in a typical “sundown town,” the leaders “encourage people to sign a pledge that they wouldn’t sell their home to anyone who wasn’t white.”

Such pledges were called ‘covenants’ in the real estate business. Such documents were immoral and wrong. But they were also meaningless, until the government agreed to enforce them.

A homeowner might sign such a pledge, but then later decide to sell the house to a Black family anyway. The pledge was simply a piece of paper, and the homeowner could ignore it — until the government stepped in. From local zoning boards to the United States Supreme Court, the government supported, or at least failed to overturn, verdicts based on such pledges.

Only because of a powerful government could racism move from being a nasty sentiment to a truly dangerous reality. What if the United States had more fully embraced the concept of a ‘weak’ or ‘limited’ government? What if the government refused, or lacked the ability, to facilitate racism?

Anna Megdell, also at the U of M, explains how took these pledges, which were initially powerless expressions of sentiment, and turned them into concrete and damaging realities: “Over the years, these policies were enforced formally through ordinances and legal covenants.”

Professor Stephen Berrey, likewise at the U of M, has researched sundown towns and the practice of redlining. He notes that “these rules were embedded in” local “zoning ordinances.”

The foul and indecent practices of redlining and sundown towns continued, in some parts of the country, into the mid-twentieth century; in some places, past mid-century.

The principle at work is this: Racism is a shameful and immoral idea. It remains merely an idea until the government obtains enough power to tempt the racist to leverage that power in favor of racism. Where governments are weak and limited, they cannot enforce concepts like segregation.

It may seem counterintuitive to plead for a “weak” government, but it is precisely a weak or “limited” government which prevents practices like redlining from taking effect. The term “limited” is more palatable, and therefore more common, in such discussions.

When a government is limited, it cannot intervene in free market decisions. The majority of homeowners and the majority of real estate agents — perhaps even all of them — are interested primarily in money. When they are selling houses, they want to sell to the highest bidder. Instantly, race is no longer a consideration.

Imagine a person who has a house to sell. Two offers are made to this owner. One offer is for $500,000 and the other offer is for $600,000. Which offer will the seller accept? The higher one, naturally. The seller will not stop to ask about the race (or gender, or religion, or ethnicity, etc.) of the potential buyer. In a “free market” economy, practices like redlining and sunset towns disappear quickly.

It is only when the government has enough power to force the seller to ignore the obvious economic reality that racist policies can take effect.

Economic transactions in an unregulated free market are the most effective instruments for anti-racism. Societies which allow people to freely buy and sell have no interest in a customer’s skin color; they are only interested in a customer’s money.

When local real estate markets are freed from government intervention — when governments no longer enforce rules and pledges about a customer’s race — then redlining and sunset towns quickly disappear.