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This week’s issue: vaccinating the world, the stakes of the filibuster, corporate reform, and more.
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Thanks, as always, for reading!
Caleb Watney argues that a way to help vaccinate the rest of the world faster would be for the US (either by itself or in conjunction with other wealthy nations) to buy out the IP for some vaccines:
The world needs more vaccines and we need them quickly. It seems unlikely that suspending the IP rights will do much to accelerate production in isolation and it could significantly diminish the incentives for investing in the future. On the other hand, a full technology buyout — which includes the IP rights and incentives to work with foreign manufacturers — could simultaneously activate any latent capacity that may exist while also giving the developing world an opportunity to bootstrap their own vaccine manufacturing capabilities with the help of American know-how.
He estimates a buyout could cost less than $36 billion.
(Related: In October 2020, Moderna made the following pledge: “while the pandemic continues, Moderna will not enforce our COVID-19 related patents against those making vaccines intended to combat the pandemic.”)
Aaron Sibarium argues that Brexit was a key reason why the UK has been able to vaccinate its public so much faster than the EU. And, he says, there are bigger implications here: “The results lend support to two related critiques of the EU: that it has too much bureaucracy and not enough sovereignty.”
The battle over the filibuster rages on (and the fate of the filibuster is deeply tied to the structure of political possibilities in the US).
In tandem, Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have recently stressed their total opposition to nuking or otherwise eliminating the filibuster. Dianne Feinstein has been a critic of the nuclear option for legislation and pledged in 2017 to oppose any effort to weaken or eliminate the filibuster for legislation, but one of her staffers recently said she “believes that the leadership of the Senate will come up with a path that allows this bill [the “For the People Act”] to go forward with 50 Democratic votes.”
Sinema and Manchin have warned that eliminating the filibuster could heighten partisan conflict and lead to increased political instability. In National Review, I discuss how the nuclear option threatens the institutional capital of the Senate and why preserving institutional capital is especially pressing in a time of disruption.
One key assumption of much American policy in recent decades has been that institutions do not matter — that enough righteous force, combined with market incentives, can ensure a democratic order. However, “move fast and break things” has led to frustrations abroad and at home. The Senate has long irritated more fervent ideologues, and yet the traits that purportedly make it “undemocratic” (such as the layers of rules and precedents that afford individual senators great protections — to engage in debate, propose action, and frustrate party leadership) are the very things that have helped it stabilize American democracy at certain key junctures. In a time of great unrest, perhaps we might remember the virtues of certain institutions before we irradiate them.
Bill Scher thinks about some of the “unintended consequences” of a “talking filibuster.”
In a recent concurrence, Clarence Thomas argued that there’s a case for treating major digital platforms like “common carriers.”
In many ways, digital platforms that hold themselves out to the public resemble traditional common carriers. Though digital instead of physical, they are at bottom communications networks, and they “carry” information from one user to another. A traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people. Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way. And unlike newspapers, digital platforms hold themselves out as organizations that focus on distributing the speech of the broader public….The analogy to common carriers is even clearer for digital platforms that have dominant market share.
Marshall Auerback uses this concurrence to call for a mode of corporate reform that combines antitrust efforts and an experimental approach to regulation.
Curt Mills thinks about the rising interest on the right in checking concentrated corporate power.
“Conservatism” has long been a contested term in American politics, Joshua Tait argues:
Today, as various factions clash over what it means to be a conservative—Are Trumpist populists conservative? Are the Never Trumpers? What about Republican standardbearers from ten or twenty or forty years ago?—it is worth revisiting the forgotten story of the first time Americans contended for the mantle of “conservatism.” It’s instructive to consider what happened to the losing side in that contest, and just why the episode came to be forgotten.
David D. Corey kicks off the “Law & Liberty” forum on Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at 50.
Frank DiStefano talks American political realignments with…“The Realignment.”
Sheri Berman says that democracy is still worth defending.
The Ciceronian Society has returned, with plans for a journal, podcast, and conference: “Our contemporary public life and discourse is animated by a predictable liturgy of fear, contempt, rage, rootlessness, and despair. The Ciceronian Society seeks to restore a liturgy of courage, affection, rootedness, peace, and hope.”
Coming attraction: On Friday, April 9 at noon EST, Baylor University hosts Cornel West, Teresa Bejan, and Andrew Sullivan on civility.
I’ll let Edith Hall gloss this week’s closing image: “Plato's Republic is set in a house of a friend of Socrates in the port of Piraeus on the occasion of the festival of the new Thracian avatar of Artemis called Bendis. This relief for Bendis, found in Piraeus, is exactly the right date (400-370 BCE). Makes me tingle.”