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even as immigration grows in this traditionally homogenous country, Japan appears to be avoiding the organized far-right backlash that has coursed through the West in recent years

In Europe and the United States, immigration and national identity seemingly consume all politics; in Japan, despite its reputation as closed-off, homogenous, and xenophobic, a large increase in immigration has mostly been met with a shrug. While anti-immigrant sentiments are widespread, they do not run very deep, or so suggests the lack of substantial opposition

In April 2019, Tokyo implemented historic immigration reform, expanding visa programs to allow more than 345,000 new workers to immigrate to Japan over the subsequent five years. Low-skilled workers will be able to reside in Japan for five years, while foreign workers with specialized skills will be allowed to stay indefinitely, along with their family members—suggesting that many of these workers might stay for good

it’s clear that few leaders have the power to impose an unwanted technology on its population without risking disgruntled voters or – at best – low uptake, which can render these tools irrelevant. That’s why what’s known as “data cultures” has become so important.

Japan’s acceptance of the new Apple-Google contact-tracing app marks a significant departure from a tradition of being fiercely protective of its citizens’ privacy – a national trait left over from a betrayal during the country’s experience of the second world war.In Brazil, a country where the data debate still feels new, a lawyer grapples with a fast-moving, data-hungry governor to force a slower, more conscientious approach while the wider public looks on, largely uninterested. And in South Africa, the idea of a data culture is only relevant to half the country’s population because of intense digital inequality, leaving governments with a cool attitude towards developers trying to promote their products.

just 53% of the South African population is connected – pointing to an issue of digital inequality. The lack of smartphones and digital literacy, both of which are related with poverty, are the main barriers to bringing people online. Smartphones remain unaffordable for many people. RIA found 36% of people claimed the cost of smart devices are the main reason they were not online, 15% said the Internet was too expensive, and 47% mentioned the cost of data as one of the reasons they limit their use. 

Imagine an empire with a massive security sector, one barely accountable to the democratic will. This coercive system, though appearing self-perpetuating, represents an elite echelon’s efforts to protect and consolidate power. It employs so many people that its maintenance and funding is necessary, not because of the dictates of national security, but simply to keep all its workers from becoming “superfluous.” With a repressive apparatus notorious for its abuses, this security sector fosters the very domestic opposition it is designed to combat.

this description actually comes from George Kennan’s foundational article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, under the byline X, in 1947. Kennan, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the rhetoric of the Cold War in a way that made it seem preordained, inevitable. He is most often remembered for calling out the supposedly innate qualities of Russian culture—spiritual deprivation, cynicism, and conformity—upon which communist ideology had been grafted. This combination, he argued, was destined to conflict with the innate qualities of Americanism—its freedom of worship, its emphasis on individuality, and its support of business. But the dominance of the security sector was another persistent motif in Kennan’s work; he dedicated five paragraphs of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to the “organs of suppression.” Secret police lurked everywhere, the narrative went, and prisons were the Soviet Union’s primary feature. By 1953, under Joseph Stalin, 2.6 million people were locked up in the gulag and over 3 million more were forcibly resettled— a total of around 3 percent of the population kept under state control. Kennan’s point, like those of other foundational Cold War tracts, was clear: unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was brutally repressive.

The pathway toward the permanent war economy of NSC 68’s vision was not direct. It was contested in Congress and in public opinion. Critics rightly feared the emergence of a “garrison state,” a term that has been largely lost today.

Policymakers who face unfamiliar challenges often turn to the past. The problem is they don’t see the messy questions that historians do but, instead, a warehouse of analogies providing easy answers. That seductive simplicity can lead them badly astray.

The actual events of the Chernobyl disaster that took place 35 years ago have been transmuted into a fable about how the revelation of a calamity can undermine an authoritarian regime. That story has led to a ceaseless search for how any disaster in an authoritarian system opposed to the United States presages the imminent defeat of U.S. adversaries from within. It’s an analogy that instructs U.S. policymakers of the fragility of other systems and the inherent superiority of their own. In doing so, it absolves them of any need to shore up the foundations of their own system or prepare for long-term coexistence with a resilient authoritarian rival.

If Soviet collapse was not inevitable or if we can attribute it to factors other than legitimacy or calamity, then the political importance of Chernobyl recedes. What becomes more important, then, is not the roots of instability in authoritarian countries per se but how political systems of any stripe grow brittle or susceptible to collapse—a lesson one would think Americans have learned from the past several years. Indeed, as nonprofit organization Freedom House notes, at the moment, it is contemporary democracies, not autocracies, that seem to be on the waning side as the world enters the 15th consecutive year of democratic recession.

America and Britain’s poor responses to Covid-19 can be traced partly to post-cold war self-congratulation — the belief that neither had much to learn from the rest of the world. In a few short months a microbe has exposed the underside to Anglo-American hubris. It could take far longer to undo the pandemic’s damage to their brands. 

In America the curve was never beaten, yet half the country has given up trying. Britain eventually flattened its curve in June having reached the second-highest mortality rate in the world (America is seventh and climbing). As is often its wont, Britain deployed Churchillian rhetoric to rally the public against Covid-19. In reality, the UK is now throwing caution to the winds on the beaches, on the streets and on the landing grounds. 

The national brands of America and Britain are the product of centuries. Self-belief gives them a greater appetite for risk than found in non-anglophone democracies such as Germany, Spain, France, Japan or Italy. But it is producing worse outcomes. Each of the latter has living memory of defeat, occupation, revolution and failure.