Day: May 24, 2024

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— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) May 24, 2024

Protest movements that reject political parties have an unintended consequence, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame: They empower savvy politicians who channel them to shake up the status quo.

The findings provide a framework for understanding recent global political realignments and offer lessons for activists who want to make a meaningful impact. They are particularly relevant in an era when mass protests have become an increasingly common tool to voice dissent with powerful institutions and draw attention to overlooked issues ranging from climate and conflict to inequality and human rights.

Ann Mische, associate professor of sociology and peace studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame, and Tomás Gold, a Notre Dame doctoral candidate and doctoral fellow at the Keough School’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, co-authored the study, published in the American Journal of Sociology. The authors received funding from the Kellogg Institute and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, as well as Notre Dame’s Graduate School.

“Despite protesters’ strong rejection of parties, political parties have not ignored the protesters,” Mische said. “In fact, many partisan actors have found ways to use this hostility to their advantage, disrupting ‘politics as usual’ and contributing to political reconfigurations that surprised both actors and spectators.”

Mische and Gold analyzed data from the Varieties of Democracy Project, which provides several authoritative ways to measure democracy. The international project, widely cited by scholars, is affiliated with the Keough School’s Kellogg Institute.

Using the data, Mische and Gold analyzed 12 case studies across Europe, Asia, and North and South America between 2008 and 2016, amid the fallout of the global financial crisis and the ongoing rejection of parties that were seen as unable or unwilling to confront it.

They found that in response to massive anti-partisan protests, these countries generally experienced one of four outcomes: internal factional challenges within highly established parties (e.g., Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom); the emergence of new or renovated parties (Podemos, or “We Can,” an anti-austerity Spanish party); the formation of new anti-incumbent party coalitions (the Broad Front UNEN and Cambiemos coalitions in Argentina); and the rise of extreme populist leaders (such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil).

Mische and Gold said these varied outcomes could be explained by looking at the project’s data measuring parties’ institutional strength, the degree to which parties were cohesive or fragmented, and the overall numbers of viable political parties competing for power.

They used a comparative approach that bridged insights from sociology and political science, drawing on datasets to determine how the combination of these three variables generated different opportunities for political actors to navigate the challenges to the status quo. They complemented this analysis with a process-oriented account of how party-movement interactions contributed to these diverging pathways.

“We focused on how political elites can take advantage of the fact that they are rejected by protesters,” Gold said. “That paradox lies at the heart of this paper.”

Ultimately, Mische and Gold said, the study could serve as a cautionary tale to protesters who reject political parties rather than trying to negotiate with them. This rejection can paradoxically undermine activist goals by amplifying distrust in institutions and paving the way for populist demagogues.

“Sometimes you need social movements to challenge entrenched systems and respond to the needs and aspirations of the people,” Mische said, adding that further research could help explore the dynamics of insider-outsider coalitions for enacting reforms.

“But if you reject working with the state, then you cannot influence the development of policies that are important for the things that you care about. You may, instead, empower autocrats who don’t share your values but are adept at weaponizing institutional distrust. Understanding this dynamic is important to working for change and to strengthening global democracy at a time when institutions are increasingly under attack.”

Many of today’s quantum devices rely on collections of qubits, also called spins. These quantum bits have only two energy levels, the ‘0’ and the ‘1’. However, spins in real devices also interact with light and vibrations known as bosons, greatly complicating calculations. In a new publication in Physical Review Letters, researchers in Amsterdam demonstrate a way to describe spin-boson systems and use this to efficiently configure quantum devices in a desired state.

Quantum devices use the quirky behaviour of quantum particles to perform tasks that go beyond what ‘classical’ machines can do, including quantum computing, simulation, sensing, communication and metrology. These devices can take many forms, such as a collection of superconducting circuits, or a lattice of atoms or ions held in place by lasers or electric fields.

Regardless of their physical realisation, quantum devices are typically described in simplified terms as a collection of interacting two-level quantum bits or spins. However, these spins also interact with other things in their surroundings, such as light in superconducting circuits or oscillations in the lattice of atoms or ions. Particles of light (photons) and vibrational modes of a lattice (phonons) are examples of bosons.

Unlike spins, which have only two possible energy levels (‘0’ or ‘1’), the number of levels for each boson is infinite. Consequently, there are very few computational tools for describing spins coupled to bosons. In their new work, physicists Liam Bond, Arghavan Safavi-Naini and Jiří Minář of the University of Amsterdam, QuSoft and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica work around this limitation by describing systems composed of spins and bosons using so-called non-Gaussian states. Each non-Gaussian state is a combination (a superposition) of much simpler Gaussian states.

Each blue-red pattern in the image above represents a possible quantum state of the spin-boson system. “A Gaussian state would look like a plain red circle, without any interesting blue-red patterns,” explains PhD candidate Liam Bond. An example of a Gaussian state is laser light, in which all light-waves are perfectly in sync. “If we take many of these Gaussian states and start overlapping them (so that they’re in a superposition), these beautifully intricate patterns emerge. We were particularly excited because these non-Gaussian states allow us to retain a lot of the powerful mathematical machinery that exists for Gaussian states, whilst enabling us to describe a far more diverse set of quantum states.”

Bond continues: “There are so many possible patterns that classical computers often struggle to compute and process them. Instead, in this publication we use a method that identifies the most important of these patterns and ignores the others. This lets us study these quantum systems, and design new ways of preparing interesting quantum states.” 

The new approach can be exploited to efficiently prepare quantum states in a way that outperforms other traditionally used protocols. “Fast quantum state preparation might be useful for a wide range of applications, such as quantum simulation or even quantum error correction,” notes Bond. The researchers also demonstrate that they can use non-Gaussian states to prepare ‘critical’ quantum states which correspond to a system undergoing a phase transition. In addition to fundamental interest, such states can greatly enhance the sensitivity of quantum sensors.

While these results are very encouraging, they are only a first step towards more ambitious goals. So far, the method has been demonstrated for a single spin. A natural, but challenging extension is to include many spins and many bosonic modes at the same time. A parallel direction is to account for the effects of the environment disturbing the spin-boson systems. Both of these approaches are under active development.

The stress of heart failure is remembered by the body and appears to lead to recurrent failure, along with other related health issues, according to new research. Researchers have found that heart failure leaves a “stress memory” in the form of changes to the DNA modification of hematopoietic stem cells, which are involved in the production of blood and immune cells called macrophages.

These immune cells play an important role in protecting heart health. However, a key signaling pathway (a chain of molecules which relays signals inside a cell), called transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β), in the hematopoietic stem cells was suppressed during heart failure, negatively affecting macrophage production. Improving TGF-β levels could be a new avenue for treating recurrent heart failure, while detecting accumulating stress memory could provide an early warning system before it occurs.

Healthier lives and improved well-being are among the United Nations’ global Sustainable Development Goals. Positively, a recent study shows that life expectancy worldwide is projected to increase by about 4.5 years by 2050. Much of this is thanks to public health efforts to prevent disease and improved survival from illnesses, such as cardiovascular disorders. However, heart disease is still the leading cause of death worldwide, with 26 million people estimated to be affected by heart failure. 

Once heart failure has occurred, it has a tendency to reoccur along with other health issues, such as kidney and muscle problems. Researchers in Japan wanted to understand what causes this recurrence and the deterioration of other organs, and whether it can be prevented.

“Based on our earlier research, we hypothesized that recurrence may be caused by stress experienced during heart failure accumulating in the body, particularly in hematopoietic stem cells,” explained Project Professor Katsuhito Fujiu from the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Tokyo. Hematopoietic stem cells are found in bone marrow and are the source of blood cells and a type of immune cell called macrophages, which help to protect heart health.

By studying mice with heart failure, the researchers found evidence of stress imprinting on the epigenome, that is, chemical changes occurred to the mice’s DNA. An important signaling pathway, called the transforming growth factor beta, which is involved in regulating many cellular processes, was suppressed in the hematopoietic stem cells of mice with heart failure, leading to the production of dysfunctional immune cells. 

This change persisted over an extended period of time, so when the team transplanted bone marrow from mice with heart failure into healthy mice, they found that the stem cells continued to produce dysfunctional immune cells. The latter mice later developed heart failure and became prone to organ damage.

“We termed this phenomenon stress memory because the stress from heart failure is remembered for an extended period and continues to affect the entire body. Although various other types of stress might also imprint this stress memory, we believe that the stress induced by heart failure is particularly significant,” said Fujiu.

The good news is that by identifying and understanding these changes to the TGF-β signaling pathway, new avenues are now open for potential future treatments. “Completely new therapies could be considered to prevent the accumulation of this stress memory during hospitalization for heart failure,” said Fujiu. “In animals with heart failure, supplementing additional active TGF-β has been shown to be a potential treatment. Correcting the epigenome of hematopoietic stem cells could also be a way to deplete stress memory.” 

Now that it has been identified, the team hopes to develop a system that can detect and prevent the accumulation of stress memory in humans, with a long-term goal of being able to not only prevent the recurrence of heart failure, but also catch the condition before it can fully develop.

The Supreme Court decision announced in Alexander vs. State Conference of the South Carolina NAACP — written by Samuel Alito, and joined by the five other Republican appointees on the court — is so disturbing that you need to know what happened. 

It’s not just that the Supreme Court cleared the way for South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that a lower court had found to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 

The real news is that Alito and the five other Republican justices have made it much harder, if not impossible, to challenge racial gerrymandering. 

The Constitution’s equal protection clause bars racial gerrymandering but not partisan gerrymandering. In this case, the lower court had found that South Carolina’s redistricting map — which moved Black voters from one district to another to bolster the Republican majority — was racially gerrymandered. It caused the “bleaching of African American voters” from a district and “exiled” thousands of Black voters to carve out a district safer for a white Republican incumbent. 

But Alito and his right-wing cohort say this wasn’t racial gerrymandering. Why not? Because South Carolina says it wasn’t, and courts must defer to lawmakers’ assertions that their goal in redistricting is partisan rather than racial. “We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote. “We should not be quick to hurl such accusations [of racial discrimination] at the political branches.”

Hello? The whole point of the federal courts stopping state racial discrimination is notto assume state lawmakers acted in “good faith.” How could the Supreme Court have reversed school desegregation in Brown vs. Board of Education, or even upheld the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, without assuming that lawmakers were motivated by racial discrimination, regardless of what they said? 

Under Alito’s logic, the courts could rarely if ever strike down racially motivated state laws as long as state lawmakers say they weren’t racially motivated. 

Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, accuses the majority of making it all but impossible to challenge racial gerrymanders. The Supreme Court should “respect the plausible — no, the more than plausible — findings of the district court that the state engaged in race-based districting.”

She’s right, of course. But being right isn’t enough. The six Republican appointees have hijacked the Supreme Court for the Republican Party. 

So what do we do? 

If and when Democrats gain back control over the House and Senate, they must pass legislation setting term limits for Supreme Court justices. 

Article III of the Constitution gives judges lifetime appointments (conditional upon their “good Behavior”) but doesn’t specifically give Supreme Court justices lifetime appointments. So Congress can enact a law requiring Supreme Court justices to move to lower federal courts after a set number of years, thereby opening their seats to new justices. 

A second reform: I used to be against efforts to expand the size of the Supreme Court, but I changed my mind after the Republican Senate refused to consider President Obama’s nominee — alleging the nomination was made too close to the 2016 election — but then rushed through Trump’s third nominee on the eve of the 2020 election. If Democrats regain control of the Senate at a time when there’s a Democrat in the White House, they should expand the size of the court so it reflects the values of America. 

Third: Congress must enact an enforceable code of ethics for the Supreme Court. 

Until such reforms, the six right-wing Republican members of the court are unconstrained. The Roberts Supreme Court is the worst since the shameful days of Roger Taney’s Supreme Court. Alito, Thomas, Roberts, and the three Trump appointees are Republican partisan hacks.

• This article was published at Robert Reich’s Substack