Robert David Sullivan

Dear God, let me vote for someone younger than me before I die

My latest column at America magazine is about the oldsters in American politics who won't leave:

Particularly in the Democratic Party, the seniority system has helped to preserve racial and gender diversity by applying the same criterion to everyone: If you do your job, you keep your job for as long as you want it. This is why so many have been uncomfortable with the suggestions that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have retired before her death at age 87; that it might have been time for Speaker Pelosi to give up the gavel four years ago, at age 78; or that California Sen. Dianne Feinstein may not be up to the job at age 88. (After all, Strom Thurmond, a man, served until he was 100!)

Read the whole thing at America.

Reading the news is torture enough. Watching TV shouldn’t be.

My latest column at America magazine explains why, with 100 channels on Roku, I keep ending up watching old movies on HBO:

Reading the news is torture enough.

Watching TV shouldn’t be.

Nobody trusts anybody, and that's great news for authoritarians

My latest column for America magazine looks at the decline of confidence in our major political (and economic and social and religious) institutions, and why that fraying of trust is so dangerous:

What’s the worst-case scenario if trust in public institutions continues to drop? We could see the refusal to fund public schools and libraries; the snubbing of public health directives; a return to the cynical and corrupt patronage system to staff government agencies; and an ongoing characterization of the election process as tainted and therefore illegitimate—all moves to further weaken a sense of community and a concern for the common good. But it is not “bothsidesism” to fear that the left could also exploit widespread nihilism, either by coming up with a Trump-like demagogue of its own or by using the specter of resurgent Trumpism to justify its own restrictions on public speech and democracy.

Read the whole thing here.

And I've been remiss in posting them all here, but I have also had recent columns on the anti-abortion movement and anti-majority rule and on the shift in political power from the federal government to the states (and whether there is a backlash to giving state legislatures so much power).

Don't shoot in the subway, darling

I have a new column at America magazine on why packing heat is a bad idea in big cities like New York. But the Supreme Court may soon force us urbanites to live with concealed weapons wherever we go.

The full essay is here.

Gun violence has rattled subway riders in New York this year. But a pistol for every straphanger is not the solution. https://t.co/Jl9sUgoic4

— Robert David Sullivan (@RobertDSullivan) June 3, 2022

Replacement theory and NIMBYism have the same racist roots

I have a new column at America magazine (yes, it's been a while!) on the similarities between the "Great Replacement Theory" so popular on Fox News and the "not in my backyard" opposition to new housing that can be found in even the most liberal and Democratic areas. An excerpt:

Variants of the great replacement theory have been present on a smaller scale in towns and in neighborhoods all over the United States, including in deep-blue Democratic areas. You can find it wherever people say that new housing, inseparable from the new people it would attract, would ruin the “character” of their community. Or when environmentalists adopt the zero-sum logic of the great replacement theory to argue that any population growth in an area represents harm to the people already living there.

You can read the whole thing here.

Yes, population decline is bad

I just wrote a column for America magazine about population decline in the United States and how to prevent it. Hint: "Given the limitations of family-friendly government policies, there is no way to stave off population decline without turning to immigration, which accounted for more than half (55 percent) of U.S. population growth between 1965 and 2015."

And people may forget that for a good part of the 20th century, between the highly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 and its essentially being repealed in 1965, the number of immigrants in the United States steadily fell. (See my crude chart below.)

After I shared my column with a Facebook discussion group (a closed group, so I can't reveal comments), some people countered that it would be a great thing for the planet if there were fewer people living on it. This reminded me that decades ago, I wrote an article for the Boston Phoenix arguing that Boston’s severe population decline was a threat to its economy and quality of life, earning me angry letters from people complaining that the subway was still too crowded and movie lines were still too long. Unlike places like Detroit and St. Louis, Boston has since stopped emptying out and started to grow again. Its revival has come with increased economic inequality, but would it be better off with if its exodus had continued?

There could be environmental benefits to lower or negative population growth, but it will also come with lower economic activity (why invest in a declining market?), lower tax revenue for social services and Social Security, and a shortage of workers, including health care workers who care for the elderly. And the environmental benefits are not uniform: When there are fewer people on public transit, the unavoidable solution is to reduce or eliminate public transit. 

So there are trade-offs in any scenario. And people in Detroit and other major cities can tell you that population loss does not usually improve the quality of life.

If population decline is in fact necessary save the planet, we may have to accept a period of little innovation and declining living conditions (i.e., fewer consumer goods being produced by fewer workers). There is no scenario in which no one suffers.If population decline is necessary, we may have to accept a period of little innovation and declining living conditions (i.e., fewer consumer goods being produced by fewer workers). There is no scenario in which no one suffers.