From 1963 to 1966 Gallup asked Americans what they thought of Martin Luther King Jr. on a scale of -5 to +5. I’ve renormed this to a more common 0-10 scale:

By 1966, King’s average rating had fallen to 3.5. Even if you exclude the large number of stone racists who gave him a zero, he only scored a 5.4. He was not an especially popular figure.

In 2011, Gallup polled King again using their old scale. By then he was beloved, scoring 8.7 no matter how you count. Even the stone racists had given up. Practically no one rated him less than a 7.

It’s always easier to love someone when he’s no longer around to make trouble, isn’t it?

Elementary and high school teachers are striking in several states over low pay and attacks on their benefits. Here’s an excerpt from an EPI report showing the pay of public school teachers over the past four decades. Bottom line: Pay has stagnated since the mid-90s and has declined by 5 percent since 2010.

From the Washington Post:

President Trump has instructed military leaders to prepare to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, but has not set a date for them to do so….The president said that the U.S. mission would not extend beyond the destruction of the Islamic State, and that he expects other countries, particularly wealthy Arab states in the region, to pick up the task of paying for reconstruction of stabilized areas, including sending their own troops, if necessary.

I haven’t been following the details of the fighting in Syria for the past few months, but my tentative reaction is that this is a good thing if Trump follows up. Next up: does Trump have the balls to withdraw from Afghanistan too?

Come what may, it’s past time for American troops to get out of the Middle East. We’re creating more problems than we’re solving.

Fifty years after the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Matthew Desmond wants to know why our cities are so calm these days:

Fifty years later, our cities, in both the North and the South, remain sharp-line segregated. Not only that, but the decades following the Holy Week Uprising have witnessed a surge in mass incarceration that has disproportionately caged poor black men; a loss of manufacturing jobs that has left many black men unemployed; soaring housing costs and an epidemic of evictions, felt most acutely in low-income communities of color; and the gutting of welfare, which has led to a spike in extreme poverty.

By these measures, things have grown worse. Yet the streets, for the most part, have remained clear and quiet. Only two significant riots have broken out since the early 1970s: in Miami in 1980 and in Los Angeles in 1992, both of them in response to the acquittals of police officers who had beaten unarmed black men. Recent years have witnessed spates of unrest protesting police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and beyond, but these have been short-lived affairs resulting in few serious injuries and restrained arson. The 2015 unrest in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died in police custody resulted in an estimated $9 million in property damage and no deaths. The 1992 L.A. riots, by comparison, caused more than $1 billion in property damage and 63 deaths.

Why don’t American cities burn like they used to?

Desmond wouldn’t like my answer much, I’m afraid. I don’t even have to say it, do I?

I’m reading Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon right now, and one of the characters has just decided to create a new app that lets people tag their experiences on the street:

“So, like Foursquare,” my interviewer said, with the doubt of a young person looking at an old man in front of a computer.

“Exactly like that,” I said, “except that our users will record incidences of hate. We’ll be working initially to produce a live map—like a traffic congestion map—of more and less racist areas, safe routes home, institutionally racist police forces and local authorities, local populations. We’ll have a star rating system and so on.”

I immediately wondered if anyone is actually doing this. So far, all I’ve found is a recently launched app from South Africa called ZiRRA, which allows you to report incidents of racism but nothing more.

I’m surprised. The book was published three months ago, which seems like plenty of time for some hotshot Silicon Valley team to womp together a Foursquare clone in their off hours. What’s the holdup? Or does it already exist and I just don’t know how to find it?

Family week continues today with a selection from my London-loving sister. This is a view on a hazy day from the top of the Eye, London’s famously huge ferris wheel. It’s highly recommended if you visit. Some of you might be put off by the fact that it’s such a touristy thing to do—and it is—but you’re a tourist. Embrace it. And it really is fun and it really does provide a great view. On the downside, it’s a bit pricey and, in summer, can get crowded at peak times. Plan accordingly.

BONUS PHOTO! One of our caterpillars just hatched. Here’s our brand new baby Monarch butterfly, contemplating its first flight into the big world.

What’s the main result of Donald Trump’s continuing attempts to sabotage Obamacare? In the latest Kaiser tracking poll, Obamacare users say that the prospect of premiums going up is one of their major fears, though most report that their premiums stayed about the same compared to 2017. What’s more, most of them qualify for government subsidies, which puts a hard cap on how high their premiums can go.

But there’s an even bigger and more real problem:

This number is worse than it looks like at first glance. At a guess, at least a third of Obamacare enrollees live in urban areas that aren’t in any danger of losing insurance carriers. Those folks probably all reported that they had no worries about getting coverage. This means that nearly everyone outside of big cities—most of whom voted for Trump—is worried about the possibility of every insurance carrier pulling out of their region in the near future. This fear has become considerably more potent over the past six months, as Trump’s rampage has made more and more insurance carriers reluctant to waste more time on a program that seems destined for destruction.

Nice job, Mr. President.

I guess it’s time to fire Rod Rosenstein:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was authorized by a top Justice Department official to investigate whether Paul Manafort, the onetime chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, illegally coordinated with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, new court filings show….A partly redacted memo included in court filings late Monday night revealed that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein authorized Mueller to pursue allegations that Manafort colluded with Russia in 2016.

The new filings show that Rosenstein specifically approved lines of investigation for the special counsel in an August 2017 memo. A version of the memo filed in court showed that Rosenstein signed off on an investigation of whether Manafort “committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials” and of Manafort’s work as an international political consultant in Ukraine before joining Trump’s campaign. Additional sections of the 2½-page memo were blacked out by prosecutors, indicating that Rosenstein authorized other lines of investigation that remain a secret.

My guess is that special prosecutors almost always have their requests approved, so Rosenstein’s blessing may not mean much. Still, it sure looks like Mueller has a lot of irons on the fire.

In the LA Times today, Jonah Goldberg pushes back against defenses of Donald Trump which rely on the claim that “populism” has always been a part of the Republican message:

Not all populisms are the same, because though they all claim to be the voice of the people, they invariably speak with a specific voice for a specific subset of the people….Populism is a bottom-up phenomenon, but it is shaped and defined by rhetoric from the top. And just as there are differences between left and right populism, there are different kinds of conservative populism.

I appreciate the small band of conservative NeverTrumpers. Really, I do. But I sure wish they could be a little more forthright about exactly what makes Trump’s brand of populism so poisonous: namely that the “specific subset of the people” Trump speaks for is explicitly white people. He routinely appeals to white resentment and racial bigotry with barely even a fig leaf to camouflage what he’s doing. This appeal has been a part of the Republican Party for decades, but in recent years its public face has dwindled, mostly taking the form of wink-wink-nudge-nudge innuendo. Trump doesn’t bother. His core base is white people who are mad at blacks and Hispanics and Muslims, and he’s happy to publicly stoke their anger.

Aside from his chaotic incompetence, this is what makes Trump different and toxic. It’s not his conservative heresies on trade or entitlements or Putin or NATO. It’s his racism. It shouldn’t be so hard to put that front and center.

I mentioned in passing yesterday that Donald Trump’s approval rating is actually quite low considering that the economy is doing pretty well. In fact, it’s historically low. Here’s an annotated chart from earlier in the year put together by Nate Cohn:

Trump’s approval rating is well below the lowest ever recorded with unemployment below 5 percent. So what happens if the economy turns down? Even a small hiccup could push his approval rating down by a net 10 points. Trump better hope the Fed does its usual best to keep Republicans in office and that Wall Street keeps its cool in the face of trade wars and general economic incompetence.