TUESDAY, MAY 17 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23
W
hatever you think of her, at
least Elizabeth Warren is try-
ing to do something about
inflation, right? The Demo-
cratic senator from Massachusetts wants
legislation to give the Federal Trade Com-
mission and state governments more
authority to crack down on corporations
that significantly raise prices. This stands
in stark contrast to the Biden administra-
tion, whose policy response consists
mainly of blaming the pandemic and
Russian President Vladimir Putin, railing
against Republican tax proposals and
otherwise denying responsibility for the
fastest price increases in decades.
That being said, let me add this: Presi-
dent Biden’s plan is much better than
Warren’s — precisely because it does
effectively nothing. It’s not something
politicians can go around telling voters,
but sometimes “nothing” is the best pol-
icy option you have.
After 9/11, the Bush administration
wanted to do something. Actually, it
wanted to do a lot of somethings: prove
that no attack on the United States would
go unpunished, stabilize the volatile re-
gions that had become breeding grounds
for terrorism, and promote democracy
and liberalism around the world. Unfor-
tunately, there weren’t any easy ways to
accomplish those things. So, instead, we
blundered into Iraq.
This is the most dramatic recent ver-
sion of a quite common problem. Govern-
ment does many useful things, from
providing police and building roads, to
insuring our bank accounts and making
sure disabled people get food and shelter.
Nonetheless, in big things and small,
our government often does things that
are worse than not acting at all. Partly
this is because government is run by
humans, who have imperfect knowledge
and therefore sometimes make mistakes.
But there is also our all-too-human bias
toward doing something, to which hu-
man voters and human politicians fre-
quently fall prey.
Possibly this was a sensible adaptation
for our hunter-gatherer forebears; if
there’s a saber-toothed tiger standing in
front of you, almost anything you might
try is potentially more useful than pa-
tiently waiting to become lunch. But this
instinct ill serves us in a modern nation
where not all problems have good solu-
tions, and few politicians are willing to
explain that to voters.
It’s not that we have no idea how to
reduce inflation; in fact, we have a very
good idea. Inflation is always and every-
where a matter of too much money chas-
ing too few goods. So all you need to do to
reduce the consumer price index is to
take some of that money out of private
hands. Typically, we leave this problem to
the Federal Reserve to manage through
monetary policy, and after a slow start it
is beginning to act more aggressively. But
if Biden really wanted to, the federal
g overnment could also theoretically at-
tack inflation through fiscal policy, with
some combination of tax hikes or spend-
ing cuts.
In fact, the idea of using taxes to
control inflation has recently been in
vogue on the left, in the form of some-
thing called modern monetary theory.
Proponents of this theory argue that a
government such as ours, which borrows
in its own currency, can deficit-finance
almost any amount of new spending,
using fiscal policy to tamp down any
resulting inflation. That theory remained
popular right up to the point where the
inflation actually materialized. Now, we
can all acknowledge what should have
been blindingly obvious from the start:
At a time when consumers are already
suffering from price hikes, politicians are
not going to add insult to injury by raising
taxes or cutting government benefits.
Since the thing that actually works is
politically foolish, Democrats such as
Warren are resorting to conspiracy
t heories and quack cures. The conspiracy
theory is “greedflation,” which blames
rising prices on corporate greed. (They’re
right, of course, that corporations are
greedy, but they didn’t all of a sudden get
massively more greedy in January 2021.)
The quack cure is simply forbidding firms
to raise prices under threat of legal
s anction.
This is a stealth variation on the wage-
and-price controls imposed by President
Richard M. Nixon in 1971, early in the
country’s last great bout of inflation. Even
Nixon appears to have understood that
they wouldn’t work, since they didn’t
actually address the underlying problem.
But he was facing reelection and wanted
voters to see him doing something about
one of their most pressing problems.
Nixon won in 1972, but his series of
“temporary” freezes caused shortages
and other economic distortions, without
fixing the problem. In 1974, with inflation
at a two-decade high, the failed controls
were allowed to expire.
Nixon resigned in disgrace not long
afterward. Now, I don’t suggest that the
cynical economic manipulation led di-
rectly to Watergate. (Though one won-
ders if the economy had been in better
shape, would the Nixon campaign have
been tempted to burglary?) But it does go
to show that there are worse things than
being a one-term president. So please,
Mr. President, keep right on embracing
the healing power of inaction. Be the
do-nothing president America needs.
MEGAN MCARDLE
B e grateful
for Biden’s
inaction
on inflation
The memorial dedicated by the
White townspeople of Colfax, La.,
in 1921 was at least direct. Many
Southern monuments to
C onfederate heroes erected in this era are
made up only of an image and a name.
But on the white marble obelisk in Colfax
was engraved: “Erected to the memory of
the heroes, Stephen Decatur Parish,
James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who
fell in the Colfax riot fighting for white
supremacy.”
The Colfax conflict was less a riot and
more a frenzied murder spree against
Black citizens who were resisting white
supremacy. Most of the “rioters” took
refuge in the local courthouse. The build-
ing was set aflame. Whites shot anyone
who tried to put out the fire. Many Black
people who tried to escape were slaugh-
tered at close range. Later in the evening,
drunk, younger White men executed the
remaining prisoners by marching them
two by two out of a makeshift jail and
shooting them from behind. By the end of
the massacre, as many as 80 Black people
were dead.
All these heinous crimes were commit-
ted with impunity. Local law enforce-
ment had no intention of arresting and
convicting the guilty. The Black people of
Colfax, according to historian Nicholas
Lemann, “had no choice but to live
meekly under the rule of the men who
had killed their husbands and sons and
brothers.”
I recount this story not only because it
is tragic but also because it demonstrates
some enduring characteristics of white
supremacy. The White people in this case
were not merely acting out of racial
animus (though their cups runneth over
with hatred). The prejudice and violence
of many White Southerners were incited
and sustained by a certain historical
narrative. They generally believed that
violent actions by Whites — eventually
organized by the Ku Klux Klan and the
White League — were fundamentally
defensive in nature.
After the Civil War, in this view, a cabal
of carpetbaggers and vindictive Black
officials was attempting to destroy the
Southern way of life. Whites were resist-
ing a culture war being conducted
against them.
This vision of victimization was set out
in films such as “The Birth of a Nation,”
screened by President Woodrow Wilson
at the White House in 1915. Such cultural
products lent credibility to White fears
and knit these fears into a compelling
conspiracy theory — one reinforced by
newspapers, educational institutions,
politicians and movie night at the White
House. It was hard to separate such
theories from efforts across the South to
intimidate Black people through lynch-
ing and mass violence.
These thoughts came to mind with the
Buffalo grocery store massacre. The ac-
cused killer wrote a manifesto endorsing
the “great replacement theory,” popular
among today’s right-wing activists and
media personalities. In this belief, the
progressive left is encouraging the unfil-
tered immigration of fecund non-Whites
to replace White citizens, dilute White
political influence and destroy White
culture. In some instances, the story
alleges that the whole plot is being
orchestrated by Jews.
Replacement theory checks many of
the boxes of useful racist ideology. Most
of all, it presents White people as the
victims of a plot. Their anger and resent-
ment, in this theory, are natural reactions
to the cultural aggression of the other
side. Their failures and suffering are no
longer their fault. There are always en-
emies to blame. The future of White,
Christian America is at stake. Those
willing to fight for it, in this self-
j ustifying myth, are heroes.
Do the purveyors of replacement theo-
ry bear some responsibility when their
revisionism motivates murderers? Of
course they do. This dispute has become
tiresome and pointless. There is no moral
world in which those who libel outsiders,
justify rage, incite bigotry and allege that
enemies have broken down the outer
gate are innocent of the likely influence
of their words.
And the method of mass killing is not
some insane, unimaginable, unknown
act of evil — something committed by the
demon possessed. Lynchings and large-
scale terrorist murder were relatively
common features of the post-Civil War
political order, designed to intimidate
Black people and undo that war’s out-
come. If the Buffalo supermarket killer’s
motivation was to undo the anti-racism
of modernity, he is part of a long, ignoble
history of racist killers.
The perpetrator of this mass murder
will not be given impunity. But the racist
ideas closely associated with such killing
are being granted impunity daily within
the Republican Party. The problem is not
just that a few loudmouths are saying
racist things. It is the general refusal of
Republican “leaders” to excommunicate
officials who embrace replacement theo-
ry. The refusal of Fox News to fire the
smiling, public faces of a dangerous,
racist ideology.
This much needs to be communicated
— by all politicians and commentators —
with clarity: No belief that likens our
fellow citizens to invaders and encourag-
es racist dehumanization is an American
belief.MICHAEL GERSON‘Replacementtheory’ shouldhave no placein the GOPHave you seen the faces of the
women of Kabul? Have you
seen them, these women who
are my Afghan sisters, carry-
ing signs through the streets, their voic-
es raised for justice, their bodies vulner-
able and unafraid?
See them. Look now. Look before the
blue tide rises and they disappear
b elow.
The Taliban decreed May 7 that
A fghan women must cover themselves
from head to toe in public. The blue
burqa is the Taliban’s garment of
choice; ideal, however, would be for
women to never leave the house unless
absolutely necessary.
In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, wom-
en’s bodies, opportunities and futures
are to be utterly controlled by men, and
in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, this con-
trol must begin at home. It’s the last
part of that sentence I hope you’ll pay
attention to.
During its first regime in the 1990s,
the Taliban beat women in the street if
their clothing was insufficiently “mod-
est.” This won’t happen during its sec-
ond regime — not because it has
changed its goals but because it has
become more subtle about achieving
them.
Now, it says, women aren’t the ones
who’ll be disciplined; it will be their
“guardians.” An Afghan woman’s
guardians, in the Taliban’s Afghanistan,
are the men of her house: fathers, broth-ers, husbands, even sons. If these male
relatives permit a woman under their
supervision to appear in public uncov-
ered, they’ll receive a visit at home from
the Taliban, and a warning. Those who
fail to heed the warning, and who per-
mit their wives and mothers and daugh-
ters to defy the Taliban’s edict, will face
jail time and the loss of their jobs.
The Taliban is using its power to
institutionalize control of women at the
family level. The message it is sending
Afghan men is a simple one: Control
your women, or we will punish you.
This is the Taliban’s strategy to create
its new Afghanistan. It’s a generational
strategy. And what I’m afraid of is that it
could work.
What happens to a society when its
boys are brought up to understand that
it is normal to control the women in
their lives? What happens to a society
when those boys become men? What
happens to the progress that this soci-
ety’s women have made? And what
happens to those women, forced to
shelter under head-to-toe fabric like so
many featureless ghosts?
As the head of a nongovernmental
organization, I will not cross certain
boundaries of language, but I will ask
this: How is it permissible, in 2022, for
an unelected ruling body to codify con-
trol of women’s autonomy and then
place that control into the hands of
men?
The global community responded tothe Taliban’s edict with the usual words
of concern. I suppose that’s something.
I understand there is only so much it
can do to alter the policy trajectory of a
regime that seems to be doing every-
thing in its power to prevent itself from
attaining international legitimacy.
I understand this, too: To be female
in Afghanistan today is to feel suffocat-
ed. If I succeed at conveying anything
with my words, I hope it’s this. The
sense of suffocation. The sense of peril
in the face of the incoming tide.
And yet: I’ve mentioned, in the past,
that my Afghan girls’ school is in the
midst of admitting new students at our
Rwanda campus. We simply have no
way of bringing girls to us from within
Afghanistan, but very recently, I heard
from an Afghan father.
He wanted to know whether there
was any chance at all that we would
admit his daughters, because if such a
chance existed, he was prepared to find
his way to a neighboring country so that
his girls would be freely able to travel —
and enroll.
This man, this Afghan father, is ready
to become a refugee from his homeland
so that his girls can have a chance at
another life.
He will not wield control, and he will
not be controlled. And there is hope in
that.Shabana Basij-Rasikh is a Post Global
Opinions contributing columnist.SHABANA BASIJ-RASIKHIn the Taliban’s Afghanistan,control of women begins at homeANJA NIEDRINGHAUS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
An Afghan woman waits to try on a new burqa at a shop in Kabul in April 2013.bag” rather than join such a decision and
likened the writing to “the mystical
aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”
And certainly courts past have had
their share of intense internal disagree-
ments, even hatreds. Justice Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes famously described the in-
stitution as “nine scorpions in a bottle.”
But letting those tensions surface so
openly is another matter. One breaking
point, according to court insiders, came
when Roberts switched his initial vote to
strike down the Affordable Care Act,
depriving conservatives of a majority to
do away with the law. Conservatives, on
the court and off, still seethe at what they
see as a betrayal in which Roberts put his
own reputation as an institutionalist
above intellectual purity.
Now, any pretense of family harmony
that remained is collapsing. During oral
argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s
Health Organization , Roberts appeared
ready to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week
abortion ban. But, according to report-
ing around the leak of the draft opinion,
he is balking at taking the final step of
overruling Roe v. Wade outright.
Even before the unprecedented leak of
the draft opinion in the Mississippi case,
the court’s internal tensions spilled onto
the editorial page of the Wall Street
Journal, which expressed anxiety that
Roberts “may be trying to turn another
justice” — Kavanaugh being the most
likely defector — to undo the majority.
Did someone aligned with the court’s
conservatives not only whisper to the
Journal’s editorial writers but also leak
the draft opinion, in an effort to head
that off? Or was the culprit a liberal
infuriated by the court’s apparent will-
ingness to abandon precedent?
Either way, as Thomas’s remarks
made clear, the episode seems to have
opened wounds on the court that will be
slow to heal.
“When you lose... trust, especially in
the institution that I’m in, it changes the
institution fundamentally,” he said. “You
begin to look over your shoulder. It’s like
kind of an infidelity: You can explain it,
but you can’t undo it.”What is worse than a dysfunc-
tional family? An institution
so dysfunctional, perhaps,
that you can’t even call it a
family with a straight face?
That was the message of the angry
swipe that Supreme Court Justice Clar-
ence Thomas took at the court under the
leadership of John G. Roberts Jr., at a
conservative conference Friday. The
chief justice’s name wasn’t mentioned —
but it didn’t have to be for Thomas’s
meaning to be plain.
“The court that was together 11 years
was a fabulous court. It was one you
looked forward to being a part of,”
Thomas said, setting the end of that era
as 2005, when Chief Justice William
H. Rehnquist died and Roberts replaced
him.
“We actually trusted — we might have
been a dysfunctional family, but we were
a family,” Thomas said, adding, “You
trusted each other, laughed together. You
went to lunch together every day.... This
is not the court of that era.”
Ouch. This is not the way Supreme
Court justices talk about their institu-
tion. Not in public, anyway.
Remember, after the tumultuous con-
firmation hearings for Justice Brett
M. Kavanaugh, Justice Sonia Sotomayor,
much to the displeasure of progressives
outside the court, noted, “The nine of us
are now a family.... This is our work
family, and it’s just as important as our
personal family.” After reports that Soto-
mayor stayed away from oral argument
because Justice Neil M. Gorsuch de-
clined to wear a face mask, the two
issued a joint statement: “While we may
sometimes disagree about the law, we
are warm colleagues and friends.”
Yes, justices take sometimes intem-
perate jabs at colleagues’ reasoning in
their opinions. Justice Antonin Scalia
could be notoriously scathing about his
fellow justices. In a 1989 abortion case,
he said an argument by Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor “cannot be taken serious-
ly.” He ridiculed Justice Anthony M.
Kennedy’s 2015 same-sex marriage rul-
ing, saying “I would hide my head in aIf Thomas was open, even indiscreet,
about his unhappiness with the current
court, he was similarly revealing, if not
as intentionally, about how he sees his
own role.
At various points in the comfortable
setting of a conservative conference,
Thomas let slip the mask of being an
impartial justice and instead seemed to
identify himself as a dedicated partisan
— and an aggrieved one at that. “That is
the way it has been for 40-plus years: us
against the elite.”
Asked by an audience member about
how Republicans responded to per-
ceived Democratic mistreatment of con-
servative nominees, including Thomas
himself, Thomas said, “We’ve never done
it. You would never visit Supreme Court
justices’ houses when things didn’t go
our way. We didn’t throw temper tan-
trums. It is incumbent on us to always
act appropriately and not to repay tit for
tat.... We are to conduct ourselves
better than they conduct themselves.”
Us? We?
He defended then-Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision not
to hold a hearing for Merrick Garland
when he was nominated by President
Barack Obama. “The most they can point
to is that Garland did not get a hearing.
But he was not trashed,” Thomas said. “It
was a rule that Joe Biden introduced, by
the way, which is that you cannot get
a hearing in the last year of an
a dministration.”
Really? How is it Thomas’s role to
opine on Garland’s treatment or to
defend McConnell? (And, by the way,
there was no actual “rule,” and if there
were one, where was Thomas’s concern
about Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s con-
firmation with just over a week to go
before the 2020 presidential election?)
At his 1991 confirmation hearings,
Thomas proclaimed that judges must
“shed the baggage of ideology.” We all
know how that worked out. Friday’s
remarks illustrate how tribal Thomas’s
ideological outlook remains — and how
his strongest loyalties might remain with
a different family altogether.RUTH MARCUSFor Justice Thomas, the Roberts courtis more feud than family