World Bank veteran Masood Ahmed explains why the 80-year-old lender should make a comeback, fueling the green transition.
The World Bank turns 80 next summer, which means eight decades of loans to fund infrastructure and other projects in poor countries. But it is entering its ninth decade with a bit of an identity crisis, and a widespread understanding that it needs to transform itself.
Ajay Banga, the former Mastercard CEO picked by President Joe Biden as the bank’s new leader, faces heavy pressure from climate groups to stop offering loans and other financing for carbon-emitting projects like natural gas plants. In turn, many governments in developing countries find this pressure brazenly hypocritical: the developed world got rich by burning coal and oil, and is now pulling the ladder up behind it lest poor countries use those same resources.
Masood Ahmed, who served for 21 years at the World Bank and now leads the Center for Global Development, a think tank working on development issues, thinks this debate is largely a distraction. The big question isn’t what the Bank shouldn’t do — it’s what the Bank should do.
How can the Bank fund solar and wind farms, electrical transmission, energy storage, nuclear production, and other zero-carbon ways of providing the developing world with the energy resources they deserve? If we don’t want Nigeria and Bangladesh to one day emit as much per person as the US or Germany in pursuit of giving their people a better life, we need to give those countries an alternative.
That requires global coordination, and Ahmed thinks the Bank is the right group to lead the charge. He imagines a world where vast projects, like solar farms across the Sahara Desert that feed into electrical grids from Europe to central Africa, are shepherded to completion by the World Bank, coordinating the potentially dozens of countries that would need to participate, help fund, and build out the ideas.
Ahmed and I spoke in early October about what the World Bank is doing now to fight global warming, and what it could be doing differently and better. A transcript edited for length and clarity follows.
Dylan Matthews
What’s the World Bank’s current approach to decarbonization?
Masood Ahmed
The World Bank is already the largest source of development finance for climate-related projects in developing countries. So what do we mean when we say the World Bank needs to take climate change as a central objective?
The World Bank and the regional development banks have traditionally had a mission of alleviating extreme poverty and helping their client countries make progress on development. They deal with climate change insofar as it features in those issues. We believe that the climate change needs to be explicitly added on as an objective that the World Bank would be tackling, in and of itself.
They also need to think about organizational changes to the way they operate, the way they work with other development banks, and the way they work with the private sector. And if you want to add the objective of dealing with global challenges like climate to the mission of these institutions, and you want them to do this not at the expense of what they do to help countries deal with poverty, then this has to be reflected in them being bigger and having the resources to do that.
A recent report done by an expert group that was commissioned by the G20, co-chaired by N.K. Singh and Larry Summers, said that these institutions need to be thinking about tripling their size by the end of this decade. There’s a discussion that’s underway about the ways in which they can build up their financing capacity, how they can stretch their existing balance sheets, and use their own capital more effectively to be able to get more out of the equity they’ve got.
Down the road, and not very far down the road, some of the banks will also need to have an injection of fresh capital to enable them to get to the tripling that is envisaged.
That’s the broad agenda for the reform of the MDBs [multilateral development banks; the World Bank and regional institutions like the Asian and African Development Banks] that at the moment is being pursued.
Dylan Matthews
A lot of the public pressure on the Bank has been sort of in the form of negatives: don’t fund this gas plant, don’t fund this hydrocarbons sector in India. How important is saying no to projects like that versus saying yes to many more decarbonizing projects?
Masood Ahmed
This negative agenda is not going to take us very far. The real question is not whether the bank funds natural gas projects in, let’s say, India, but what is going to be the transition of India’s energy sector from the heavy reliance on fossil fuels, coal being a big part of it, to one which is much more climate-friendly? How can the World Bank support that process?
We need to switch from saying “Don’t do this or that,” to saying, “This is how we would like you to help countries adopt a green growth approach.” That’s a much more positive, but also much more consequential agenda.
These [multilateral development banks] are lending around $150 billion a year. That’s tiny in relation to the investment needs and the financing of these countries. To be able to make a difference, you need to be helping to shape the broader investment strategies and policies in emerging markets.
Dylan Matthews
You’ve argued the World Bank and its peers need to be less risk-averse, to take bigger risks and take on bigger projects. Why is that important for decarbonization? And why is it hard?
Masood Ahmed
The culture of public sector institutions, including multilateral institutions like the World Bank, has traditionally been one of avoiding risk, staying away from it. In the public sector, the price for making a mistake is a lot higher than the benefits that come from getting things right. People jump on bureaucrats and pick on the mistakes they made, or things that didn’t work out. So, naturally, people tend to become risk-averse in that environment, because it’s easier to just stay with the tried and trusted than to innovate and take risks.
If we really want the MDBs to scale up, to get more out of their capital, to work more with the private sector, and help to mobilize at least as much money from the private sector as they themselves are lending, sometimes that will mean that taking more risk onto their own balance sheets. Sometimes it means that you use the instruments you have to help mitigate and allocate risk amongst different parties, including the private sector, the country itself in different ways.
These institutions have been very risk-averse in the way they’ve treated their own capital. The leverage ratio — the amount of money they lend against the equity they’ve got — at the World Bank has been about 5 to 1. [Author note: By contrast, the Inflation Reduction Act’s loan guarantees are estimated to spur about $10 in investment for every $1 they cost the US government.] Many people think it should be much higher than that. The reason the World Bank and the other MDBs have historically stuck with low ratios is because it just seemed like the least risky thing to do. But that just meant you weren’t getting the most out of the equity.
The World Bank has said they can lend an extra $50 billion over the next 10 years by making better use of their existing equity. The Asian Development Bank has done the same. So I think a lot of them are finding ways to be less risk-averse, while still being very proven financial managers. And I think that’s the direction in which they need to move even more.
Dylan Matthews
What’s an example of a big decarbonization project that you would like to see the World Bank tackle?
Masood Ahmed
The goal is not that the multilateral development banks just go scouting around for the next solar project that’s going to happen in Egypt anyway, or the next dam that’ll be built in Latin America anyway, and say, “We want a part of that.” That would simply displace somebody else who’s going to fund that. That would be a perverse outcome.
I would like to see them think harder about how to do big cross-border projects that are transformational in nature. Morocco has a solar project called the Noor Project. It’s about 500 megawatts. I’ve been to see it. It’s a big project, very impressive.
But the Sahara is a much, much bigger space. And there’s no reason why that project couldn’t be 20 times that scale, supplying electricity not only to Morocco, obviously, but to the north, to Europe, which would mean putting in more infrastructure, and to the south, going to countries where energy scarcity is the biggest problem.
That’s the kind of project that will cost tens of billions of dollars. That will be transformational, not just for the country in which the physical facilities are located, but the countries that receive the energy, north and south. Putting that together will require bringing together countries, bringing together agencies, putting in place governance structures, and deciding whose balance sheet it sits on. That kind of project doesn’t lend itself at all to the country-by-country approach that most of the multilateral development banks have.
That scale of transformative operation is very hard for them to achieve, but it’s very hard for anybody else to achieve. I think that they are best placed for it. It’s not as if they’ve never done that. One of the World Bank’s great successes is the River Blindness Project that the World Bank sponsored, started, managed, and helped put together under Bob McNamara going into the 1970s.
River blindness was blinding a whole slew of people in West Africa, and Bob McNamara took it upon himself to say that this was an unacceptable scourge on the people in that region, and the World Bank, working with other development agencies, the UN, private sector, the countries of the region, over 20 years led the eradication of the disease.
If you go to the lobby of the World Bank, there is a statue of a blind man being led by a young boy, which was a very common sight in those countries at the time, because many of the blind men, by the time they were adults, were blinded already. Eradicating that required the kind of vision, organization, multi-country approach, private-public approach, which is exactly what is needed.
My question is, what are the river blindness eradication projects for today, and how do we organize ourselves to be able to do them in the same way?
Dylan Matthews
Some of those projects are targeting emissions, like your giant Morocco solar farm idea, but it seems like climate is influencing how the banks make loans in less direct ways too.
Masood Ahmed
When people talk about climate change and what the MDBs can do, they quickly pivot to talking about what they can do to help mitigate the future trajectory of emissions in emerging markets. But the biggest problem is how climate change is impacting the day-to-day investment strategies of all developing countries. If you’re building bridges in Pakistan, the melt from the snow cap in the Himalayas is now coming down faster and larger. You’re going to have to build more resilient and bigger, tougher, higher bridges than you did before, which is going to cost you more.
If you were building schools in the Sahel, where you thought the temperature that they had to withstand was 104ºF summers, and now it’s 110, 115ºF, then suddenly you’re going to have to build that into the design of things. Adapting to climate change is a problem for all countries, including the poorest countries, who themselves don’t contribute very much to the emissions problem. No matter what they do, they’re going to have an inconsequential impact on global emissions in most cases. But what happens to global emissions is having a big impact on them now.
One of the roles of multilateral development banks is to build resilience into the infrastructure decisions that they’re making, which means that they need concessional financing [loans offered on more favorable rates than on the private market] for the poorest countries, without which they’re not going to be able to play this role.
The justices are seriously considering whether domestic abusers have a right to own a gun.
The next gun rights case before the Supreme Court, United States v. Rahimi, involves an individual that no sensible society would allow to have a gun.
Three years ago, according to the Justice Department, Zackey Rahimi and his girlfriend had an argument in a parking lot where Rahimi threatened to take away their mutual child. He then allegedly grabbed her wrist, knocked her to the ground, dragged her to the car, and hit her head on the dashboard. After he realized that a witness had seen this fight, Rahimi allegedly pulled a gun and fired at this bystander.
He later called his girlfriend and allegedly threatened to shoot her if she told anyone that he’d assaulted her.
This is one of a series of gun crimes allegedly committed by Rahimi. In 2020, he allegedly threatened another woman with a gun. According to the Justice Department, “Rahimi also participated in a series of five shootings in December 2020 and January 2021.” In one alleged incident, he “fired into the man’s house with an AR-15 rifle.” In another, he allegedly followed a truck and “fired multiple shots at another car that had been traveling behind the truck” after the truck’s driver flashed their headlights at Rahimi.
Although Rahimi’s lawyers claim that these allegations are “disputed,” they do not deny any of the DOJ’s specific claims. Nor do they offer an alternative version of these events.
Yet last February, a federal appeals court held that Rahimi and other domestic abusers have a constitutional right to own a gun. The Supreme Court will consider whether this decision was correct at a November 7 oral argument.
The federal law at issue in Rahimi allows someone to be disarmed before they are actually convicted of a violent crime. But the law also provides several due process safeguards.
Before anyone can be disarmed under this law, a court must have issued a restraining order against them, in a proceeding where the defendant was given an opportunity to appear and make their case. Federal law does not disarm anyone unless a court has either explicitly determined that they are a violent threat to their partner or to a child, or implicitly made such a determination by prohibiting them from engaging in violence against that partner or child.
Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit didn’t just strike down this law. It ruled that the law is unconstitutional on its face. That means that, if the Fifth Circuit’s decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, this federal ban on firearm possession by domestic abusers may never be applied to any individual, no matter how violent that individual may be and no matter how careful the court that issued a restraining order against such an individual was in ensuring that they received due process.
And that brings us to the single worst aspect of the Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Rahimi: It was correctly decided. Or, at least, it was correctly decided under the Supreme Court’s incompetently drafted decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which places an extraordinarily high burden on any government lawyer tasked with defending any gun law in court.
Bruen was supposed to be the crown jewel of originalism — the belief, now ascendant among Republican lawyers and judges, that the only legitimate way to read the Constitution is to determine how it was understood when it was ratified. The Bruen opinion was the six GOP-appointed justices’ attempt to build an originalist framework from the ground up, one that forced judges to rely almost entirely on historical sources when deciding Second Amendment cases.
A little more than a year after Bruen, it is clear that this approach is an unworkable failure that produces deeply immoral outcomes and that has fostered mass confusion within the federal judiciary.
The core question in Rahimi, in other words, is whether the Court will back away from its decision in Bruen, which has led to all kinds of disastrous results, including the Fifth Circuit’s decision holding that abusive husbands have a right to keep a weapon they could use to murder their wives.
How the Supreme Court gave us the Fifth Circuit’s terrible Rahimi decision
Bruen held that, in order to justify nearly any law regulating firearms, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” This means that lawyers defending even the most widely accepted gun laws, such as the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers, must show that “analogous regulations” also existed and were accepted when the Constitution was framed — particularly if the law addresses “a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.” If they cannot, the challenged gun law must be struck down.
This places an extraordinarily high burden on any lawyer defending a gun law. When the historical record is ambiguous or indeterminate, the government loses, and a gun law is effectively repealed by the courts. And lawyers defending gun laws face an especially heavy burden when they defend laws that seek to address a problem, like domestic abuse, that has existed for centuries.
Almost immediately, the Bruen decision sparked mass confusion in the federal courts. Judges have reached contradictory results in a multitude of post-Bruen challenges to gun laws. Courts applying Bruen have struck laws prohibiting guns in places of worship, requiring guns to have serial numbers that allow them to be tracked by law enforcement, and prohibiting underage ownership of guns — all claiming that these laws are inconsistent with “historical tradition.”
And if Bruen is legitimate, Zackey Rahimi must have a constitutional right to own a gun.
Until 1871, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that a husband and wife “may be indicted for assault and battery upon each other,” it was legal in every state for married partners to beat their spouses. There is historical evidence that abused women, in at least some parts of the country, were able to obtain court orders requiring their abusers to temporarily turn over money, which would be forfeited if the abuse continued. But there is no founding-era analog to the federal law disarming domestic abusers.
And so the question the Supreme Court must confront in Rahimi is whether a decision like Bruen, with its unworkable legal standard and catastrophic consequences, can be tolerated any longer.
It was obvious the day Bruen was decided that it is unworkable
On the day Bruen was decided, Justice Stephen Breyer warned in a dissenting opinion that, by requiring judges to dive into often-vague and indeterminate historical records, Bruen “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.” “Courts are, after all, staffed by lawyers, not historians,” Breyer continued. And “legal experts typically have little experience answering contested historical questions or applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems.”
Indeed, Bruen has proved so unworkable — and has led so many judges to such upsetting conclusions — that many of those judges complain openly about it in their opinions. By announcing “an inconsistent and amorphous standard,” complained Judge Holly Brady, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Indiana, “the Supreme Court has created mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.” Another judge slammed the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment cases as “filled with methodological flaws” that invite judges with an axe to grind to selectively find historical evidence that supports the outcome they want to reach anyway, and then use it to justify that result.
Judge Robert Miller, a Reagan appointee, was even more blunt in his assessment of Bruen. After holding that a federal law that prohibits individuals from receiving a firearm while they are under a felony indictment must be struck down under Bruen, Miller concludes his opinion by admitting it “was drafted with an earnest hope that its author has misunderstood New York State Rifle v. Bruen.” Bruen, Judge Miller continues, “insults” the framers by assuming “they were so short-sighted as to forbid the people, through their elected representatives, from regulating guns in new ways.”
Needless to say, sitting federal judges do not typically hurl these kinds of insults at the Supreme Court, as the high Court has more or less unlimited power to sabotage lower court judges’ work.
Bruen relied on a blinkered view of history
One fundamental problem with Bruen, as Judge Miller’s critique of the decision emphasizes, is that the six Republican-appointed justices who joined it appear to have no understanding of why changes in American society over the past 250 years make it difficult or impossible to draw meaningful analogies between modern gun laws and those that existed when the Constitution was written.
Recall that Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in Bruen announced that gun laws that address a “general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century” are presumptively unconstitutional unless there is a “distinctly similar historical regulation” from the 1700s. Applying this newly announced rule, Thomas argued that a citywide handgun ban is unconstitutional because “firearm violence in densely populated communities” was a problem that existed at the time of the founding, but 18th-century lawmakers did not address it with a handgun ban.
But the kind of urban communities that exist in modern-day America did not exist in the early American Republic. According to the 1790 census, New York City had only 33,131 residents around the time when the Second Amendment was ratified. The second-largest city, Philadelphia, had fewer than 29,000 residents.
Eighteenth-century lawmakers, in other words, simply did not confront the problem of “firearm violence in densely populated communities” because densely populated communities of the kind that struggle with gun violence in modern-day America did not exist in the 18th century. At the time of the founding, America’s largest city had more or less the same population as modern-day Meridian, Mississippi — the eighth-largest city in the poorest state in the Union.
And yet, because the Supreme Court declared in a majority opinion that urban policymaking in 1790 was closely analogous to governing modern-day New York City, every judge in the country is now bound to follow this absurd conclusion.
Meanwhile, there are countless other ways that America in the 21st century would be unrecognizable to the framers.
For one thing, early America did not have police forces — or, at least, the kind of organized police forces that could enforce modern-day gun laws. While early US communities sometimes relied on citizen “watchmen” to keep the peace and used patrols to track down escaped enslaved people, publicly funded and organized police forces did not emerge until the middle of the 19th century. Many sources claim that the first such police force in the United States was formed in Boston in 1838. New York City formed its police force just a few years later.
When the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1791, in other words, neither the United States nor any state or municipality had the capacity to enforce a law seeking to disarm domestic abusers. But that doesn’t mean that such laws should be declared unconstitutional, any more than modern-day laws regulating the internet are unconstitutional because the framers lacked the ability to send electronic communications.
We simply have no idea how people in 1791 would have regulated guns — or what sort of regulations they would have deemed permissible — if early Americans actually had the state infrastructure necessary to do modern-day law enforcement. Bruen’s inquiry into which kinds of laws existed in a pre-police society tells us nothing about which sort of laws the framers would have deemed constitutional.
Similarly, we have no idea how early American lawmakers would have regulated the kind of advanced weapons that are widely available today, but that did not exist at all — or that were at least very uncommon — when the Second Amendment was ratified.
Indeed, the sorts of firearms that were widely available in the 18th century are not the sort of weapons that were typically used to commit acts of violence against family members or romantic partners. As Ohio State University historian Randolph Roth explained in a 2019 book chapter, “fewer than 10 percent of household homicides” in colonial and revolutionary New England or Maryland were committed with a gun.
The most likely reason why 18th-century firearms were not often used in family violence is that the kind of muzzle-loading guns that were available at the time “could not be used impulsively unless they were already loaded for some other purpose.” These guns could not be kept loaded because the black powder used by these guns would corrode the weapon’s inner workings and would become moist, losing its ability to ignite. Loading such a gun took “at least a minute,” as the user had to “pour powder down the barrel, hold it in place with wadding, and drop or ram the shot or ball onto the charge.”
So one other likely reason why 18th-century Americans did not enact many of the sort of gun laws that exist today is that guns were fundamentally less dangerous in the early Republic. The fact that early Americans did not forbid impulsive men — the sort of men who might murder their wives — from owning a muzzle-loading musket tells us nothing about how the framers might have regulated a weapon that can be stored while loaded, that can be hidden in someone’s pocket or waistband, and that can rapidly discharge more than a dozen bullets.
In fairness, Bruen does acknowledge that cases involving “dramatic technological changes may require a more nuanced approach,” and it does include language indicating that, say, machine gun bans remain viable, even though machine guns were not invented until 1884. Bruen says that “the Second Amendment protects the possession and use of weapons that are ‘in common use at the time.’” So machine guns will remain illegal so long as they remain uncommon.
But the fact that the drafters and ratifiers of the Second Amendment were comfortable living in a world where muzzle-loaded muskets were commonplace tells us nothing about whether they would have also wanted the Constitution to protect weapons that can be carried while loaded and that can turn a mere argument into a murder in less than a second.
The specter of originalism is haunting the Supreme Court
At this point, you might be wondering how six Supreme Court justices — all of them legally trained and well-credentialed — could have embraced a legal framework with such obvious flaws that has been so harshly criticized by judges across the political spectrum. The short answer to this question is one word: “originalism.”
Originalism, in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s words, is the belief that “constitutional text means what it did at the time it was ratified and that this original public meaning is authoritative.” All reasonable judges believe that it is sometimes useful to inquire into how the Constitution was originally understood in order to decide cases, but originalism, at least in its strongest form, claims that this is the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution.
Many Republican lawyers, including Thomas, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Barrett, view originalism as an important part of their identity.
Barrett, at least, also acknowledges two serious problems with the originalist methodology: It sometimes leads to terrible or ridiculous results, and it sometimes produces no result at all. As Barrett wrote in a 2016 article co-authored with scholar John Copeland Nagle, “adherence to originalism arguably requires, for example, the dismantling of the administrative state, the invalidation of paper money, and the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education” — results that, Barrett admits, would “wreak havoc.”
Similarly, Barrett has also acknowledged that originalist methods don’t always produce a clear result, although her answer to how originalists should approach this problem is unsatisfying: “For an originalist, the meaning of the text is fixed so long as it is discoverable.”
Justice Thomas’s biggest innovation in his Bruen opinion is that he figured out a way for originalists to resolve Second Amendment cases even when it is not clear how that amendment would have been understood at the time it was ratified — simply apply a presumption that all gun laws are unconstitutional, and strike down the law unless the government produces sufficient historical evidence to rebut this presumption.
Thomas’s innovation makes a lot of sense if you are an originalist judge who wants to solve the problem of not knowing how to rule on a case if the historical record is indeterminate — provided, of course, that you don’t care one bit what happens to the people of the United States after countless gun laws are struck down. But Bruen does nothing to solve the other problem acknowledged by Barrett’s scholarship: What should an originalist do if their methodology leads to a truly awful and destabilizing result?
A responsible Court would confess that it erred in Bruen and come up with a new framework that can be applied in a sensible and predictable way by lower court judges. (As it happens, in the decade before Bruen, lower court judges came up with a two-step framework for deciding Second Amendment cases that was accepted by every federal appeals court that considered it. The Supreme Court could simply bring that framework back.)
And there is a precedent for the Court swiftly abandoning a disastrous legal framework after a majority of the justices realized it led to disaster.
In Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), the Supreme Court upheld a public school district’s decision to expel two students who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in class — the students were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they objected to saying the pledge on religious grounds. Almost immediately after it was handed down, the Gobitis decision triggered a wave of hate crimes against Witnesses, with one Southern sheriff dismissing the violence because “they’re traitors — the Supreme Court says so, ain’t you heard?”
Three years later, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), a humbled Court reversed course, holding that the First Amendment forbids the government from forcing anyone to say something they do not want to say.
Will today’s justices show the same humility their predecessors showed in Barnette? Unlikely. But there is a way out of the Bruen dilemma that will allow the six justices who joined that benighted decision to save face, while affirming that the government may enact reasonable gun regulations such as a ban on gun possession by domestic abusers.
Mr. Kavanaugh, tear down this precedent!
Although Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh both joined Thomas’s opinion in Bruen, they also joined a separate concurring opinion by Kavanaugh, which enumerated several categorical exceptions to the right to bear arms:
[N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. …
We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those in common use at the time. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
Kavanaugh added, moreover, that this list “does not purport to be exhaustive,” which implies that he would also endorse other categorical exceptions — perhaps one for domestic abusers, or for people that the legislature has determined are too dangerous to be armed.
This list of Second Amendment carve-outs, moreover, appeared in the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Court’s first decision holding that the Constitution protects an individual right to bear arms. And these carve-outs were not added to the Heller opinion because the Court determined that they fit into some kind of originalist framework.
Rather, as Justice John Paul Stevens revealed less than a year before his death in 2019, Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of Heller, added this language after relatively moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy asked for “some important changes” to the original draft of the Heller opinion.
Kennedy is no longer on the Court, but Kavanaugh, his successor, appears to have appointed himself as the keeper of this compromise that Kennedy struck with Scalia. Add on Roberts’s decision to join Kavanaugh’s Bruen opinion, plus the Court’s three liberals, and that’s five votes that are willing to create categorical carve-outs to the right to bear arms which exist outside of Thomas’s originalist framework.
Moreover, while Thomas’s framework supports the Fifth Circuit’s unconscionable decision in Rahimi, Kavanaugh’s framework offers the Court a way to rule that domestic abusers do not have a constitutional right to own a gun. As the Justice Department argues in its brief, the Court can add a new carve-out to Kavanaugh’s list, holding that the Second Amendment permits lawmakers to disarm people who are “not law-abiding, responsible citizens.”
That’s not a particularly satisfying answer to the legal questions presented by Rahimi because it places the Court in the role of an arbitrary policymaker, striking down some gun laws and upholding others because five or more justices think that a new carve-out should apply. But it’s a much more sensible outcome than affirming the Fifth Circuit and allowing abusers to have guns.
The most responsible course the Supreme Court could take, given Bruen’s many flaws, would be to overrule that decision in its entirety and announce a different, more workable framework that courts can apply in future Second Amendment cases — such as the two-step framework that was used by the courts of appeals before the Supreme Court made them abandon that framework in Bruen.
But, since this Supreme Court is unlikely to admit that it erred, Kavanaugh’s willingness to create categorical exceptions to the right to bear arms offers the Court a way to save face while also reversing the Fifth Circuit’s terrible Rahimi decision.
Javier Milei emerged from the fringe and is leading the polls ahead of Sunday’s election.
Editor’s note, October 23, 10:30 am: After the first round of voting in Argentina’s presidential election Sunday, Javier Milei will head to a runoff next month against left-wing candidate Sergio Massa. Vox’s original story on Milei, published October 21, is below.
Hernán Stuchi, a 29-year-old food delivery driver in greater Buenos Aires, grew up as a left-wing activist. During this weekend’s presidential election in Argentina, he will make a starkly different choice, and back Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian trumpeting socially conservative culture war issues and explosive proposals to reshape Argentine society.
“It was a kind of innocence,” he said of his previous support for left-wing leaders. “It’s not like us poor people ever stopped being poor.”
At the polls on Sunday, Stuchi will be far from alone.
Milei shocked the country when he defeated Argentina’s two main political forces in primary elections in August. Now, he looks poised to win the most votes over the weekend (though he may be forced into a runoff). A main fount of that support is, surprisingly, young people — and young men in particular.
Polls indicate almost 50 percent of voters 29 and younger back Milei, the wild-haired outsider and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who inveighs against traditional politicians, branding them as members of a “caste” that must be done away with. (His campaign slogan, “que se vayan todos,” or “get rid of them all,” carries echoes of the Trumpian “drain the swamp.”) A win by Milei’s ascendant campaign in Argentina would serve as yet another indicator of the far right’s rise across the Americas and around the world. But young voters’ support sets Milei apart from the far-right stars he is often compared with, including Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both of whom were shut out by young voters in their recent reelection bids.
With over 100 percent inflation crushing Argentine pocketbooks, Milei’s proposed solution is a radical plan to abolish the central bank and dollarize the economy by replacing the Argentine peso with the US dollar — a move untested by countries of Argentina’s scale. He has voiced support for other extreme positions, including liberalizing gun ownership and individuals’ freedom to sell their organs. He denies human-caused climate change and opposes abortion. At rallies, he can often be seen wielding a chainsaw, symbolizing his plan to slash public spending and unravel Argentina’s generous safety nets. In Milei’s view, the state should largely limit itself to homeland security: To that end, he has pledged to axe the ministries of education; environment; and women, gender, and diversity, among others.
That Milei’s platform has seduced the likes of former Fox News firebrand Tucker Carlson isn’t surprising. But Argentina’s youth, in contrast, have traditionally not been associated with right-wing forces. For much of this century, the bulk of their support has gone to the left-wing Peronist coalition, a dominant electoral force in Argentina. As recently as 2019, when the last presidential election took place, young voters were seen as an important group in favor of the left-wing candidate and eventual winner. In the 1970s and ’80s, students and young people played a storied role in the opposition to the ruling military junta. (Both Milei and his controversial pick for vice president, who has family ties to the military, have downplayed the dictatorship’s track record of human rights abuses.) In that historical context, young voters’ current pull toward Milei represents something of a paradigm shift.
Experts say there are many reasons for that shift, but chief among them is the pain of a prolonged and worsening economic crisis, which has put many in the mood for a sharp turn away from politics-as-usual. It’s also a reactionary impulse: There is a strong backlash against pandemic-era restrictions, which helped popularize Milei’s anti-establishment rhetoric, and a spate of recent progressive wins in Argentina, including a momentous bill that legalized abortion in 2020.
What started out as a youth movement powering Milei’s campaign has now widened to include groups of all ages, all across the country — Stuchi called it a process of “intergenerational contagion” with people like him working to sway over older relatives. That expanding appeal has put Milei on the precipice of power.
In pursuit of that power, he has been accused of fomenting violence and deepening the socioeconomic crisis he says he wants to solve. His rhetoric, according to Argentine officials from the current ruling party, encouraged looting across the south of the country in August.
A win for Milei would plunge Argentina into uncertainty at best, sheer dysfunction at worst.
The politics of 100 percent inflation, explained
No matter the economic indicator you consult, the takeaway is one and the same: Things in Argentina are dire. Annual inflation hit 138 percent in September, one of the world’s highest rates. Just over 40 percent of Argentines currently live in poverty, up from 25 percent in 2017. The central bank is almost out of reserves, raising the risk of a potential currency devaluation and yet another default. No one is unscathed by the economic malaise, but young people face higher unemployment.
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Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images
“You go [buy something] and you find a price. You go back a couple of days later and it’s changed to something else … It’s like, every day, things get more difficult,” said Carolina Ramos, 19, a college student in the heartland city of Córdoba who will vote for Milei. “Inflation is so out of control that you lose the notion of how much things actually cost.”
For many in Ramos’s generation, the only Argentina they’ve known is one in a state of crisis. Since 2012, the Argentine economy has been in recession more often than not, and the International Monetary Fund has forecasted yet another economic contraction for 2023.
“I only have memories of Argentina in decay,” said Adriel Segura, a 19-year-old based in Buenos Aires. “So, you look around and you associate all the political parties and all the movements that were in power during that time … to a decaying country. And you desperately search for other options.”
Valeria Brusco is a member of the Red de Politólogas, a group of women political scientists. She says the traditional center-left and center-right candidates in this election are so inexorably linked to the economic mismanagement at the origin of the ongoing crisis that it’s as though they were “invisible” to many young voters, leaving only Milei as a viable option.
“The more anger and rage a voter has, the more probable it is that they’ll vote for Milei,” said Pablo Vommaro, a University of Buenos Aires sociologist.
Milei’s signature proposal to curb inflation — dollarization — is viewed by experts as likely unworkable, in part because of how few greenbacks are left in the central bank’s coffers. Critics say it could wind up depreciating the peso even further and inducing more pain. In the 1990s, a dollar-peso peg proved popular in the short term, but it led to a crushing devaluation, skyrocketing poverty, and bloody riots. According to Vommaro, young Milei voters are nevertheless willing to “press the red button and let everything blow up.”
“Their thinking is that it’s better for everything to explode than to keep living through this agony with the same leaders as always.”
Some analysts say young voters are under the naïve impression Milei will be able to seamlessly turn around Argentina’s troubles. But the young people I spoke with have an almost nihilistic understanding that betting on the libertarian could end badly.
“I know that those who are in power now and who were in power before will screw me over, that they’ll continue to steal,” said 24-year-old Buenos Aires resident Alan Monte Bello, referencing high-profile corruption cases. “They won’t do a good job. With Javier, I at least have the possibility that he won’t be like that. And maybe it will end up being a failure and things will be worse than now. But at least the benefit of the doubt is there.”
A radicalizing pandemic
Milei drastically raised his public profile during the pandemic, when he joined anti-confinement protests organized by young people and made frequent TV appearances, arguing that the toll of the government’s containment measures would wind up exceeding the toll of Covid itself. There was a receptive audience for those views, in part because of the lockdowns imposed by Argentina in 2020 that lasted until November of that year. That’s nowhere near the intensity of China’s zero-Covid policy, which only opened up restrictions earlier this year. But young people’s livelihoods were disproportionately compromised. In Argentina, almost 45 percent of all workers in the informal economy are between ages 18 and 29. Working remotely isn’t an option, so staying home means forgoing a paycheck.
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“The people who wanted to [flout restrictions], they had Milei as their representative,” Brusco said. “He became their hero.”
In parallel, a right-wing social media ecosystem was gathering strength, with a cadre of Milei-supporting influencers growing significant audiences on TikTok and YouTube. Clips of Milei’s TV appearances found a second life on those platforms, and they helped give the firebrand a social reach unrivaled by his competition in this election. On TikTok, Milei’s official account, helmed by a 22-year-old staffer, has garnered nearly four times as many followers as those of the center-left and center-right candidates combined.
“[Milei’s] performance on social media is very strong … I’ve interviewed lots of young people who told me that, during the pandemic, they were at home, they didn’t know what to do, and they just started watching videos of Milei,” said Ezequiel Saferstein, a sociologist and researcher at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín.
Backlash against historic abortion laws and other progressive wins
In 2021, a landmark law legalizing abortion went into effect. It capped a series of legislative advances — around issues such as gender identity, gender equality, sexual education, and gay marriage — that put Argentina on the progressive vanguard of Latin America. Since then, the government has removed barriers to contraception and established a trans labor quota in the public sector. The current president has publicly used gender-neutral Spanish — a lightning rod of controversy across the Americas.
Some see Milei’s rise as aided by a backlash against those changes. That may explain the gender imbalance in his youth support, which is a majority male phenomenon. (“I’m not going to apologize for having a penis,” Milei once said in an interview.)
In addition to opposing abortion rights, Milei has denied the existence of the gender wage gap and dodged a question on a debate stage about gender violence. Those positions fueled large feminist demonstrations across the country late last month, with participants reporting fear that their rights would be in jeopardy under a Milei presidency.
Saferstein told me that right-wing affiliation has carried a degree of stigma for much of the last 40 years because of the long shadows cast by the military dictatorship. But the institutionalization of progressive policies has changed the way the right is perceived.
“Historically, it’s the left that has been associated with being revolutionary … [but] the left has in a way become the status quo,” he said. “The conservative reaction that we have seen has positioned itself as anti-system … Milei has made a cult out of that anti-system rebelliousness.”
Other young voters are less moved by the culture wars and might even disagree with many of Milei’s controversial beliefs. But amid the severe economic crisis, their top priority is Milei’s proposal to stabilize the country’s economy. Most of the young people I spoke with in Argentina, for instance, say they denounce Milei’s assertion that climate change is a “socialist lie.” Their votes, however, are not based on that.
“It’s not that the people who vote for Milei are saying, ‘Screw the climate.’ … It’s just that I need to get some money in my pocket first. Then I can worry about the climate,” Stuchi said. “I think the only people that can care about climate change are people who have full fridges. … And it’s like that with every controversial policy item Milei might have, from the sale of organs to abortion.”
Still, Brusco says electing a president who represents a brand of “angry masculinity” is a real worry. Milei might find it significantly more difficult once in office to implement his radical economic reforms than, for instance, to undermine the implementation of the abortion law.
“Honestly, if we weren’t living through it, this [election] would seem like something out of a movie,” Brusco said.
What’s next?
Despite its moribund economy, Argentina has enjoyed a relatively stable political system in recent years. A Milei win could change that, with analysts predicting a high risk of social upheaval. Among his first priorities would be to shrink the footprint of the Argentine state, drastically reining in spending and setting up an austerity regime to try to get the country’s books in order. Such moves would disproportionately affect the working class and be almost guaranteed to mobilize powerful unions and social movements, paralyzing cities nationwide.
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But it’s unclear whether Milei would even be able to enact reforms in the first place. Functionally a one-man party, the libertarian would have scant allies in the legislature and none in provincial governorships across the country — an unprecedented lack of support for an Argentine president. Coalition building might prove complicated given the Milei camp’s lack of governing experience. Resorting to decrees and referendums would be largely off-limits.
Those governability challenges could make it difficult for Milei to inspire confidence in the investor class — an ironic twist given his market absolutism. After Milei came out on top during preliminary elections in August, the country’s financial markets plummeted, accelerating the peso’s decline against the dollar.
“His government will face so many obstacles and I’m afraid there will be lootings, I’m afraid there will be revolutionaries in the streets,” said Natalia Fernandez, a lawyer in Córdoba. “That’s what I’m most worried about [if Milei wins]: the potential for unrest.”
If no candidate clears one of two bars Sunday (either receiving more than 45 percent of the vote, or notching 40 percent while also finishing more than 10 points ahead of the closest candidate), the top two contenders will advance to a runoff on November 19.
“Milei won’t have an easy time governing,” Vommaro said. “All those problems young people have, they will get worse … and that is going to generate more anger, without a doubt.”