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Racial Divisions Exist Among Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583267 American idea race diversity identity survey politics
shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Contra Barack Obama, there is a white America and a black America. There are also varying versions of Latino and Hispanic Americas across different regions of the country. There are robust, enduring differences in belief across races and communities about just what America’s identity should be and how politics are experienced, and they in turn create the political reality of the countr
  • these differences might be structural, informed by the basic fact of human geography, a geography itself built on the fact of American apartheid.
  • The PRRI/Atlantic poll, a random survey of slightly more than 1,000 people taken in December, reveals major differences among racial groups on some of the basic questions about what makes America America, and what makes Americans so
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  • Latino voters have increasingly made opposing the GOP agenda a top political priority in the age of President Donald Trump
  • The majority of black and Hispanic people do think that speaking English is at least a somewhat important component of Americanness, but almost a tenth of both groups think it’s not important at al
  • black and Hispanic respondents are much more likely than whites to say that belief in God is a very important component of a specific American identity.
  • Seventy-six percent of white people and 74 percent of Hispanics think that civil liberties such as freedom of speech are very important pieces of American identity, while only 61 percent of black respondents feel so
  • More than half of black respondents think that a belief in capitalism isn’t a very important part of that identity, while good majorities of both white and Hispanic people think that it’s either somewhat important or very important
  • Forty-five percent of Hispanic respondents said that racial, ethnic, and religious diversity make the country much stronger, compared with 32 percent of whites
  • white respondents are most likely to say that diversity makes the country weaker, or to be ambivalent about the idea of diversity altogether.
  • the small but influential sliver of black conservatives who identify as Republican appears to be diminishing, as the increasing influence of Trumpism and the alt-right of the modern GOP have made the Republican Party more and more openly hostile to black voters.
  • Other polls also show black voters increasingly concerned about racism. White voters might be moving in the other direction, and philosophically seem to be deprioritizing the importance of diversity in favor of an embrace of capitalism, nationalism, and individual liberty
  • 40 percent of Hispanic respondents think that a potential citizenship question would be used for checking individuals’ immigration status as opposed to counting the population. Black respondents, on the other hand, are the least likely to buy the stated rationale for the question, and only 17 percent believe that it will be used for the sole purpose of counting the population
  • The profiles of the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted accordingl
  • A strong majority of white respondents—59 percent—think that speaking English is a very important part of being American.
  • Republicans have had to shape their party around explicit appeals to white voters and their anxieties, and have had to build an electoral strategy that can promote low overall turnout and stoke white grievances
  • In short, Democrats have cultivated an image as the party of racial and cultural pluralism, while Republicans have rejected pluralism as a viable strategy.
  • Majorities of both white and Hispanic respondents also favor the minimum-wage increase, but not at the numbers or with the fervor of black people
  • black and Hispanic respondents are also much more likely to strongly favor stricter gun-control laws than whites
  • black respondents are the most likely racial group to support providing pathways to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States.
  • Six percent of black people and 7 percent of Hispanic people reported that they or someone else in their household did not have the proper voter identification the last time they went to vote, a small proportion but one much higher than the 1 percent of white respondents who said they’d had similar problems.
  • Nineteen percent of black people and 14 percent of Hispanic people said they’d had to wait in long lines, as opposed to 9 percent of whites
  • they come after a 2018 midterm election in which claims of voter suppression and major civil-rights lawsuits came to define elections in places such as Georgia, Kansas, and North Dakota.
  • In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats elected one of the most racially diverse incoming classes of legislators since Reconstruction, and a diverse field of potential presidential contenders revolves around a multifaceted policy debate that’s heavily influenced by progressive ideas
  • These numbers track with the Census Bureau’s recent approximation that more than 600,000 households would fail to complete the census because of the question
  • these results from PRRI and The Atlantic shed new light on fundamental questions
  • They illustrate that the so-called demographic destiny of America is one that would look radically different should the country become majority nonwhite sometime in the next 20 or 30 years. The data indicate that white, black, and Hispanic voters have markedly divergent ideas on what exactly makes the American identity, and they also indicate that these differences are enforced and entrenched via spatial and social segregation
  • the data also cast some doubt on the political prospects of that demographic destiny. They show that black and Hispanic voters are more likely to be carved out of the political process, and that those efforts are perhaps aided by the existing regime of segregation
  • they show that the competing visions of America, as separated by race and region, are indeed competing, and that they are the chessboard upon which all politics is played.
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Green New Deal: Why Democrats Will Struggle to Pass It - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 29 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • there is an unavoidable truth: Passing a Green New Deal is going to be really, really, really hard.The reason for this difficulty is so simple and straightforward, it feels almost silly to mention. Success will require Democrats to control the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate—and then find a policy that will pass all three.
  • In the next six years, immutable political facts will make passing anything out of the Senate especially difficult. Yet the next six years are the period that Green New Deal advocates must care most about. They have explicitly adopted the goal of limiting Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which would require global carbon emissions to be cut almost in half by 2030
  • Below, I’ve described one path that Democrats must walk to turn any ambitious climate policy into law. It will require the party to make an unlikely journey. It might require mainstream Democrats to endorse far more aggressive governance than they would have ever once considered
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  • Every additional Senate seat that Democrats take in 2020 could help them pass a Green New Deal. Sudden demographic change—such as a surge in enthusiasm among young voters—could push electoral math in Democrats’ direction. And if a Green New Deal fails, the party could also make a “second go” at climate policy before the 2022 election—trying for something like the carbon-fee-and-dividend scheme endorsed by many Democrats, some Republicans, and most oil companies.
  • A breakthrough on a technology like carbon capture—which is financially supported by many oil firms—could rapidly scramble the partisan politics of climate change, making the GOP more willing to negotiate on a round of federal spending.
  • none of these possibilities changes the basic fact that a Green New Deal will be really, really, really hard to pass in the coming years. And if we want to avert disastrous climate change, the coming years are the most important ones we have.
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Washington Governor Jay Inslee Is Running for President - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...579217 climate change governor politics
shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • OLYMPIA, Wash.—What if a meteor were hurtling toward the Earth, about to kill millions and reshape life on the planet as we know it?
  • And what if the president, instead of doing anything to help, made it worse in just about every way, and called it a hoax (and any solutions a scam) instead of the very real, very clear disaster taking shape?And what if all the Democrats running to beat him in the next election went on and on about how concerned they were and how it’s our most pressing problem—but none had ever done much more than talk about the problem, and for the most part only started doing that in just the past few years?
  • That’s where Jay Inslee thinks America is when it comes to climate change. And that’s why he’s going to run for president.
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  • When it comes to climate change, there now appears to be “an appetite for someone who has credibility and a long track record and, most importantly, a vision statement. It’s changed to show an opening in a Democratic primary, I believe.”
  • as the 2018 midterm campaigns came to an end, he read through searing international and federal climate-change assessments, took a trip to view the wildfire damage in California, and thought through the larger moment for the country—and he shifted.
  • Inslee is the only one who has actually run a government that has made climate-change policy central. He points to the towns in Washington that have become solar-cell farms, among other accomplishments.
  • He plans to focus on the threat that climate change poses to the environment and national security—the mega-storms and fires causing millions in damages, the weather changes that will cause mass migrations, the droughts that will devastate farmers in America and around the world.
  • Inslee would propose a mix of government investments and incentives to spur other investment, restrictions on power plants and emissions, and programs to promote R&D and job growth. An endless number of jobs can be created in the climate arena, Inslee says. It’s the way to make a real dent in income inequality and have the Democratic Party bring tangible solutions to communities in rural America that have been left behind.
  • He was elected governor in 2012 and has, without much national notice, pursued arguably the most progressive and greenest agenda in the country, with fields of solar panels, fleets of electric buses, and massive job growth to show for it. And years before anyone was tweeting about the “Green New Deal,” Inslee wrote a climate-change book while he was in Congress: Apollo’s Fire, a 2007 blueprint for how much economic and entrepreneurial opportunity there is in saving the planet.
  • Even more so, he wants to talk about the risk to American opportunity. “We have two existential threats right now: one is to our natural systems, and one is to our economic systems,
  • Among the qualities that 500 Iowa caucus-goers said they were looking for in a candidate, “someone who will reestablish America’s leadership in the fight against climate change” scored highest.
  • Inslee’s answer to that anticipated attack is “the other Washington”: the experiment in progressive governance that he’s led for the past six years that’s cut against the conventional wisdom of economics. On his watch, the state has boosted health care, increased access to early-childhood education and college, raised the minimum wage, expanded paid family leave, invested in infrastructure, and established in-state net neutrality, all while leading the country in job growth, overall personal-income growth, and GDP.
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Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583258 white supremacy history culture racism nazi eugenics genocide
shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.
  • History, though, tells a different story.
  • King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.
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  • “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.
  • What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.
  • Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.
  • Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him
  • Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide
  • The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
  • When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.
  • In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”
  • In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”
  • Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.
  • In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
  • it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers
  • The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.
  • In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:
  • The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.
  • Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that
  • Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”
  • President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.
  • Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.
  • On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.
  • A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
  • In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants
  • When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.
  • Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
  • In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
  • Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”
  • t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”
  • Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”
  • What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,
  • “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”
  • Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.
  • Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.
  • He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe
  • it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.
  • The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.
  • two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
  • Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.
  • the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.
  • The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it
  • historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name
  • Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.
  • The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.
  • That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.
  • The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
  • The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.
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The Missing Piece in Italian Politics: Women - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555260 italian politics history culture
shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • I lived in Rome for many years but moved away in 2013. Maybe I’ve changed since then, maybe it’s the #MeToo moment, but coming back to Italy this time, what struck me most wasn’t the political chaos, the populism, the dysfunction, or even the beauty, since a person can get used to all that. It was the fact that there were barely any women playing leading roles in the election coverage.
  • As the returns came in, the main talk shows had all-male panels of experts. Some of the reporters in the field were women, and some of the interviewers, too. But men dominated the debate.
  • Is it really possible that in a country of 60 million people, there were barely any women weighing in on the results on the front pages of the country’s most prominent newspapers, and barely any woman there with regular political columns?
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  • I recently interviewed Sofia Ventura, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna, about Silvio Berlusconi, and whether the image of women had improved in Italy since he had left power, after shaping a culture of trashy television. “The image of women hasn’t really improved in Italy. It’s still rare to find women who have authoritative roles in the media and political system. On the contrary, things have gone backwards,” she told me. “The evening talk shows are frightening,” she continued. “When they discuss politics and call on an authoritative voice, women are never called on.”
  • The #MeToo movement barely caught on in Italy, except coverage of developments in the States. Women were afraid to come forward in Italy for fear of being humiliated, excoriated, or sued for defamation. In the States, the #MeToo movement took off “because there was already a culture that allowed these people to be heard with respect,” the novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano told me. “Here, we’re so far behind that we still need to build that.”
  • In every country where populists have won, including the United States, it’s been followed by soul-searching about the role of the press in a democracy. Maybe it’s time for Italy to have the same debate.
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Bill Perry: America 'Blew the Opportunity' Stop Kim's Nukes - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • As South Korea’s national-security adviser told it on Thursday, Donald Trump will meet with Kim Jong Un this spring for one purpose only: to achieve the “permanent denuclearization” of North Korea. But according to one of the U.S. officials who came closest to striking that kind of deal, the president better lower his expectations. By a lot.
  • “I don’t think [the North Koreans are] going to want to negotiate giving up all their nuclear weapons,” he added. “But even if they did … I have no idea how we could verify it.”
  • The years since have brought a series of nuclear agreements that at times froze the North Korean nuclear program, but over the long term failed to prevent the North from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The achilles heel of many of these accords was the Kim government’s refusal to disclose all its nuclear activities and permit outside monitors to verify that those activities had ceased.
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  • Establishing safeguards against North Korea transferring nuclear components and technology to other states or non-state actors like terrorist groups would be difficult to verify but still worth pursuing in negotiations, Perry said. (North Korea has a history of proliferating missiles and other materials related to weapons of mass destruction.)
  • hile recognizing North Korea diplomatically and finally concluding the Korean War might seem like grand gestures, Perry argued that they are actually “easy and cheap” for the United States to implement—and, maybe most importantly, “reversible” in the event that North Korea reneges on its end of the bargain. The outcome Perry envisions is, as he put it, possible, desirable, and verifiable. It's also a far cry from the denuclearization of North Korea.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Conservative Obsession - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 09 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place. She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics. The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to. And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.
  • The idea that undeserving people of color are stealing money or recognition from the deserving  predates Trump, of course. It has been a feature of American politics since the country’s founding. The poetry of the young enslaved woman Phillis Wheatley was assumed to be fraudulent because her intelligence undermined the basic assumption of chattel slavery, that black people were not truly human. After Frederick Douglass wrote his first autobiography, a critic who knew one of Douglass’s owners insisted that the famed orator was “not capable of writing the Narrative” and that “there are no such barbarities committed on their plantations.”
  • More recently, the election of Barack Obama provoked a fierce backlash on the right, one that manifested in one conspiracy theory after another meant to prove Obama was a fraud. Conservatives became fixated on proving that the first black president did not write his autobiography, that he was functionally illiterate absent a teleprompter, and that his admission to elite universities was the unearned result of affirmative action, despite his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law.
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  • The entirety of the Republican Party’s response to this situation during its two years of unified control of the federal government was a failed effort to slash health-care coverage for millions and a successful effort to cut taxes on the wealthy. The GOP needs a different story to tell about what’s wrong with the country, and the one about people of color living lavishly at the expense of white people who work hard and play by the rules is an old classic.
  • What this narrative is meant to obscure is the reality that American policy making has not created some nightmare inversion of power between white people and ethnic minorities, but a landscape of harrowing inequality where people are forced to beg strangers for money on the internet to pay their medical bills. Upward mobility is stagnant; those who are born rich, die rich, and those who are born poor, die poor. Real wages have risen painfully slowly for decades; housing, particularly in urban centers, is unaffordable; and young people are saddled with skyrocketing student debt for educations that did not provide the opportunities they were supposed to.
  • Even after Obama was elected, conservative pundits argued that Obama wasn’t “really popular” because he maintained sky-high support among black voters—who, they implied, should count less. The underlying argument behind the claim, no matter how mundane or outlandish, was that being black confers unearned benefits rather than systemic obstacles to be overcome. Obama became the living, breathing symbol of the narrative that undeserving people of color were being elevated even as hardworking white people were being left behind
  • In America, when people of color succeed despite the limits placed on them, and use their newfound status to indict the system for holding others back, they are held up as proof that the limits do not exist, they are denounced as ingrates, or they are pilloried as frauds incapable of the successes attributed to them.
  • The exception is if they present their success as evidence that the structural barriers are not as great as they seem, and that in truth the only thing that holds back marginalized communities is their own lack of ability or motivation. If they affirm the righteousness of the class and caste system that they defied to succeed, they are hailed as heroes by the same people who would otherwise have denounced them as frauds.
  • When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system.
  • Trump is president in large part because of his ability to speak to this insecurity.
  • During the 2016 campaign, for every problem America faced, Trump found an enemy, an outsider to blame: Latino immigrants stealing jobs and lowering wages, Muslims engaging in terrorism, black men committing crimes. Then there were the white liberals, such as Elizabeth Warren, whose claim to American Indian heritage was touted as proof that the system is rigged to the advantage of undeserving people of color—so much so that even white liberals seek to get in on the scam
  • The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans.
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The Census Case Is About White Man's Government - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Roberts didn’t call the Voting Rights Act a “racial entitlement.” Rather, he insisted that while he agreed with the law’s intentions—“any discrimination in voting is too much,” he wrote—close federal oversight of local election laws to prevent discrimination was no longer warranted. “Things have changed dramatically,” Roberts concluded. Shortly thereafter, Republican-controlled states moved as quickly as possible to impose restrictions on voting targeted at minority communities, as if determined to make Roberts look a fool or a liar.
  • The disparate approaches taken by two of the Court’s conservatives to the Voting Rights Act reflect the right’s dueling impulses toward civil-rights laws.
  • Where Scalia rejected the very effort to guarantee black people the same right to cast a ballot as white people as a “racial entitlement,” Roberts insisted that he agreed with the law’s underlying premises, but that the statute now did more harm than good.
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  • Lingering beneath the surface was a defining question for the American right: Does it agree with Roberts that “any discrimination in voting is too much”? Or with Scalia, who saw ensuring equal participation in the polity as a black “racial entitlement”?
  • Empirical studies of the impact of adding the question have determined that it would result in a dramatic undercount of Latinos and immigrants—exactly contrary to one of the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationales, that it would provide a more accurate count.
  • Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.
  • The Trump administration, and by extension, the conservative masses, are already on board
  • In other words, long before Trump was even elected, Republican Party insiders were plotting to increase white political power at the expense of people of color. After Trump was elected, they implemented this plan by insisting that their actual goal was the protection of minority voting rights. As with the Voting Rights Act, there was the real reason and the stated reason, the truth and the pretext. The nationalism, and the delusion.
  • Trumpism merely traveled a few stops down the road from where the Republican Party leadership had been. The risk with Trump was not that the GOP would become a vehicle for the preservation of white political and cultural hegemony; it was that he would discredit that project by making its agenda explicit, by saying, as Scalia did, the quiet part loud.
  • The census case does not hinge on whether the citizenship question is discriminatory. Rather, as a matter of administrative law, the executive branch must follow certain procedures before making decisions. The Trump administration’s blatant dishonesty settles the question of whether it followed procedure definitively: It did not.
  • The census case is not ultimately about administrative procedure; it is, more fundamentally, about whether the Trump administration can use the federal government for the explicit purpose of increasing white political power.
  • recent revelations in the census case will force the Roberts Court to decide whether America is a nation for all of its citizens, or a white man’s republic.
  • Even before William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically,” the modern conservative movement has struggled to reconcile the ethno-nationalism that moves masses of its voters with the pluralism embodied in the notion that all persons are created equ
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Sexual-Assault Allegations Against Trump Hid in Plain Sight - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • How did Trump reach this point, less than four weeks before the election, despite these allegations?
  • there are a few reasons that immediately jump out
  • One is hyper-partisanship, and its subsidiary, negative partisanship: Because Republicans loathe Hillary Clinton so much, and because they find her so unacceptable, they have been willing to overlook Trump’s indiscretions (and clear dissonances with longstanding GOP dogma on social issues) in order to stop her.
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  • A second is that Trump’s coalition is largely, and increasingly, devoid of female supporters. The women who might have worked to derail Trump had already jumped ship long before.
  • A third is distrust of the media. Newspapers and other mainstream outlets have been focusing on Trump’s past for months, most notably with the Times’ May story. Yet many conservatives and conservative media outlets have spent decades arguing that the mainstream press is disreputable and untrustworthy. So when those outlets reported on Trump before, plenty of rank-and-file conservatives simply dismissed them out of hand.
  • But in the case of Trump and women, that tactic has shown its limitations. Ignoring stories about prior abuse didn’t make them go away, and now the GOP is saddled with a likely unelectable nominee who could drag the party down.
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Why Trump Won't Visit London - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Donald Trump began his presidency with a phone call to Australia that he used to complain about a deal made by his predecessor rather than trying to advance U.S. foreign policy. He won zero concessions while alienating a staunch ally.
  • he is openly showing the world that same petulant face.
  • Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for “peanuts,” only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!
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  • Whether his tweet was premeditated or another instance of erratic, spontaneous outburst, it is hard to imagine any of the men or women Trump ran against in the 2016 primaries or the general election handling this matter as poorly.
  • He’s projecting the image of a man canceling out of umbrage––a man who disagrees with a done deal and intends to make a show of it without trying to reverse it.
  • Donald Trump began his presidency with a phone call to Australia that he used to complain about a deal made by his predecessor rather than trying to advance U.S. foreign policy. He won zero concessions while alienating a staunch ally.Observers could only hope that over time his interactions on the world stage would be shaped by America’s interests more than his interest in being petulant. But almost a year later, he is openly showing the world that same petulant face.
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Who Was Recy Taylor? - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.
  • If we know that enslaved women were used for their productive and reproductive labor—if they were raped with impunity in the system of slavery—then what happened after Emancipation? Did those practices and the institutions that upheld those practices—the men and their sons and their cousins—end those practices just because of Emancipation?
  • So I started looking for cases, which were hard to find because marginalized people are hard to find in the archives. Their stories are not remembered, they’re not saved, and they’re not considered worthy of being archived so often. Those stories were hard to find, but the black press actually printed a lot of black women’s testimonies about sexual violence at the time.
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  • Newkirk: Having met and spent time with her, what’s your sense of how Recy Taylor fought all this, and how she processed what happened to her? Did she see herself as an activist?McGuire: No. She was not an activist. After she was assaulted, she immediately told what happened. She told her father, her husband, the sheriff, and then she went home. And then the family was terrorized, and her house was firebombed.
  • If someone threatens to kill you in Alabama in 1944, that’s real. There’s no consequences for that. The threat is very real. Her speaking out was just incredibly brave. And when I asked her in 2009 why she spoke out—why did she say anything, wasn’t she scared?—and she looked me right in the eye and said ‘I just didn’t think that I deserved what they did to me.’ I just thought that she had an incredible sense of self-worth and dignity.
  • I was raised to believe, like too many people are today, that Rosa Parks was a tired old lady who tiptoed into history. Because she had an ‘emotional response’ to her exhaustion and it changed the world. But, in 1998 I was working on my master’s thesis, and I listened to an NPR story about Montgomery Bus Boycott veterans. The editor of The Montgomery Advertiser, Joe Azbell, was talking about the boycott and he said that Gertrude Perkins had never been mentioned in history, but she was the most important in the boycott. It took my breath away, and I didn’t know who that was.So I went looking in microfilm for the newspaper, and I found her story. She was a black woman who was kidnapped by the police in Montgomery and raped.
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The Real-World Consequences of Trump's 'Fake News' Catchphrase - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...548888 fake news
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  • When Donald Trump’s press secretary was recently asked to comment on a rogues’ gallery of foreign leaders embracing her boss’s catchphrase of “fake news,” she essentially made the Las Vegas argument: What happens in the United States stays in the United States. “I’m not going to speak to specifics of another country when I don’t know the details,” said Sarah Sanders. “The White House is concerned about false and inaccurate information being pushed out ... to mislead the American people.”
  • Like many successful branding campaigns, Trump’s is grounded in some truth: The term “fake news” emerged, in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as a reference to the deliberately false stories that Russian government propagandists and assorted troublemakers around the world were spreading on Facebook and other social-media platforms to help or harm a particular candidate, sow chaos, or simply make a quick buck. The weaponization of information and large-scale manufacture of disinformation have become fixtures of contemporary politics.
  • But in specifically repurposing the term “fake news,” and conflating unfavorable journalism with disinformation, Trump is arguing that journalists maliciously fabricate the sources and substance of their reporting—at least when what they report doesn’t reflect well on him.
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  • The upshot is that “fake news”—the political logic, not the synthetic variety—has become more than a talking point for the American president and his imitators. It has had and will continue to have real-world consequences, both for American democracy and beyond America’s shores. As the British minister Matt Hancock recently testified to the House of Lords, “the basis of a free democracy is to have an agreed, objective basis of fact off which to have political disagreements.” Hancock felt compelled to make one more point: “Objective reality … exists.”
  • Arendt put it differently. “Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change,” she wrote in the essay “Truth and Politics.” But “metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”
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Calling the Trump Era by Its Proper Name - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • what is normal for other presidents was out of character for Trump. In the rest of his spoken or tweeted expressions, there’s been practically no evidence of what has preoccupied most other leaders: the centrality, and fragility, of the institutional underpinnings of American life.
  • Except for that odd passage in his inaugural address, there’s no evidence I can think of that he recognizes the claims, validity, or importance of a set of rules beyond his personal interests or aggrandizement.
  • I wonder increasingly about the proper name to give it
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  • Trumpocracy? This is the name of an excellent new book by The Atlantic’s David Frum
  • A “dying” of democracy? That is the implication of the new book How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
  • Perhaps this is “tribalism,”
  • Or it is time to call this era flat-out a return to fascism?
  • I thought frequently of two works by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates that appear in his new book We Were Eight Years in Power. One was “Case for Reparations”; the other, his article about Trump as “The First White President.” Each of them powerfully argued that calling things by their explicit, deliberately undiplomatic names was a crucial intellectual and political step.
  • He was not writing about America’s “racial problems.” He was forcing attention on state-sponsored white racial supremacy.
  • Riemen’s mission seems similar. He argues that we are again confronting fascism, and says that the bluntness of the term (as with “white racial supremacy”) focuses attention on the unpleasant realities and what can be done about them.
  • “We Europeans have a sense about fascism. We know the signs.”
  • I am on Riemen’s side of that argument, and I find that his case for considering today’s developments “fascist” is, in fact, useful in thinking about responses.
  • whether you prefer “Trumpocracy,” “dying democracy,” “tribalism,” or “fascism” to describe the disease, these books leave no doubt that treatment is needed, now
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Ta-Nehisi Coates: Kanye West in the Age of Donald Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
  • West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.
  • It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of
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  • West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.
  • It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community
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Apidima 1 Is the Oldest Human Fossil Outside Africa - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Finds like 300,000-year-old bones from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco suggest that our species arose from several diverse populations that lived across Africa. Meanwhile, bones from Misliya and Apidima tell us that early humans then expanded into other continents, and interacted with other hominins, far earlier than previously thought
  • The Apidima skulls also suggest that the accepted story of Europe, in which modern humans eventually replaced the long-dominant Neanderthals, is too simple. Instead, Harvati thinks that modern humans were already in Greece about 200,000 years ago; they were then replaced by Neanderthals, who were themselves replaced by humans about 40,000 years ago
  • A similar cycle of competition, where Neanderthals and humans repeatedly replaced each other, seems to have happened in the Levant, the Middle Eastern region that includes Israel and Syria. “We can’t refer to Homo sapiens as a ‘success’ in terms of being able to move into new areas and stay there,”
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Biden Is Just as Risky as Bernie - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608128 Democratic party strategy culture crisis politics
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  • The Democratic Party’s culturally and ideologically heterodox composition, and its proportionate-allocation system, means that any one faction will struggle to dominate the others.
  • The coalitional nature of the Democratic Party makes for less ideological discipline, but it also cultivates qualities necessary for multiracial democracy: tolerance, empathy, and the willingness to share power with those who are different from you. Without those qualities, political parties descend into authoritarianism.
  • Although simply restoring the status quo ante might be a persuasive political argument to a majority of Democrats and perhaps even a majority of Americans, governing from that assumption would leave the country vulnerable to another takeover by an authoritarian demagogue, just as it was in November 2016.
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The Coronavirus Revealed America's Failures - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...610261 American idea failure politics pandemic failed state culture history
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  • hen the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.
  • It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
  • The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.
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  • Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France.
  • Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
  • he administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
  • Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party
  • This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong.
  • Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified i
  • This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders
  • The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.
  • Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests.
  • it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
  • His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
  • Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests
  • If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end
  • This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.
  • The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long
  • An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.
  • Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers
  • An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.
  • It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation.
  • putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.
  • We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.
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The Vanishing American Adult: Ben Sasse on Virtue in Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...528015 virtue politics self-control culture meaning morality education
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  • a serious new book, The Vanishing American Adult. It advances a thesis that’s at once out of place at this political moment and almost too on-the-nose for the Trump years: He believes Americans have lost their sense of personal integrity and discipline
  • people must recover their sense of virtue. The republic depends on it.
  • At this point, the idea of a shared culture is almost unimaginable: America has been carved up into mutually exclusive spheres bounded by religion, race, income, and city-limit signs
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  • He’s trying to articulate a language of shared culture and values in a country that has been rocked by technological, cultural, and demographic change. It may be an imperfect attempt. But at least Sasse has identified the right project.
  • The Vanishing American Adult is written as a reflection on the purpose and nature of education, which, Sasses argues, should extend beyond schooling and classrooms.
  • Instead of relying on “institutionalized school-centric childhood[s],” Sasse says, families should develop practices that will prepare their kids to become “fully formed, vivacious, appealing, resilient, self-reliant, problem-solving souls who see themselves … called to love and serve their neighbors.”
  • In a chapter called “Embrace Work Pain,” Sasse encourages families to set their alarms early, maintain a rigorous chore system, and send their kids out to do hard labor; in his case, it was detasseling corn
  • Sasse holds up multi-generational relationships, world travel, and voracious reading as ways of building greater empathy and self-knowledge.
  • A large portion of the book is dedicated to forms of stoicism, discipline, and self-denial: “There is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption,” he writes. “Anyone who swims so completely in a sea of material surplus as to be unaware of the virtues of the simple life is flirting with great moral risk.
  • Citizens who take little interest in books threaten the idea of democracy, which “assume[s] the ability to read—and a desire to read.
  • Americans have long held the “ideal that work is a necessary component of becoming a fully formed adult, that a life well-lived entails a forward-leaning embrace of responsibility.” The country’s great challenge is “to create lifelong learners and lifelong producers,” he writes.
  • he believes culture—and the acculturation of the young—is more important than policy.
  • Americans “are a drifting and aimless people—awash in material goods and yet spiritually aching for meaning.
  • His proposals are about recovering this sense of meaning and establishing a shared language for talking about it, thickening the civic culture that serves as the foundation of political deliberat
  • This is an increasingly radical idea. America has largely responded to the challenges of diversity and pluralism by pushing moral language out of public life.
  • Platforms like Twitter, beloved by Sasse and Trump alike, thrive on outrage, reduction, and snark.
  • n. Like Rousseau, Sasse sees healthy society as a function of virtuous individuals. The senator is making “a plea for self-discipline and self-control” as “the one and only dignified alternative to discipline and control” by the government.
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Americans Say Jews Are the Coolest - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Maybe it's Seinfeld, or the ubiquitous appeal of bagels. It could be all the Jews in Hollywood, or the YouTube a capella sensations known as the Maccabeats, who flip their latkes with undeniable verve. Whatever the cause, at some point during the last 100 years, America developed a little crush on the chosen people: Jews are officially cool.
  •  Despite making up only two percent of the country's population, despite having only 100 representatives in this 3,000-person poll, Jews were at the top. For Jews like me, this feels like the statistically impossible triumph of Hanukkah, only better.
  • Still, despite the home-team advantage of the Christians in the survey, who made up more than two-thirds of the sample, Jews got the highest overall ratings.
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  • These feelings of warmth toward Jews aren't just fond personal memories of Mrs. Rosenberg from down the street, who makes an excellent kugel; they're a sign of a broad acceptance and appreciation of Jewish culture. Outside of New York City, Jews are generally rare in terms of numbers. Yet in spite of this, they've become seen as normal—and popular—by the population at large.
  • A century ago, when Jewish emigration from Central and Eastern Europe was at its peak, American anti-Semitism was common and fierce.
  • The world at large is full of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. Jews, it seems, are not universally accepted; their cool-kid status is unique to America. So why is it different here? Why, despite the anti-Semitism that still exists in the United States, are Americans mostly down with the Jews?
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Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist? - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.
  • For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.
  • “I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”
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  • She told me that she’d attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn’t again. “These folks can’t let things go. I mean, it’s not like they want people enslaved again, but they can’t get over the fact that history is history.”
  • I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their students that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Others are parents who don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on Gramling’s face, is a terrorist.
  • Gramling then turned his attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments—to the people who are “trying to take away our symbols.” In 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after last summer’s racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.
  • Gramling said that this was the work of “the American ISIS.” He looked delighted as the crowd murmured its affirmation. “They are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like.”
  • Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.
  • “I think everybody should learn the truth,” Jeff said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.“What is that truth?” I asked.
  • It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.
  • The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.
  • That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.
  • The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”
  • “Everybody always hears the same things: ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn’t,” he said. “It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself.”He pointed to a tombstone about 20 yards away, telling me it belonged to a “Black gentleman” named Richard Poplar. Jeff said Poplar was a Confederate officer who was captured by the Union and told he would be freed if he admitted that he’d been forced to fight for the South. But he refused.
  • But the reality is that Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.
  • Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?
  • I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—I kept coming back to Gramling’s words. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.
  • Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”
  • I asked him what he believed the cause of the Civil War had been. “How do I put this gently?” he said. “People are not as educated as they should be.” They’re taught that “these men were fighting to keep slavery legal, and if that’s what you grow up believing, you’re looking at people like me wearing this uniform: ‘Oh, he’s a racist.’ ” He said he’d done a lot of research and decided the war was much more complicated.
  • I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.
  • The typical Confederate soldier hadn’t been fighting for slavery, he argued. “The average age was 17 to 22 for a Civil War soldier. Many of them had never even seen a Black man. The rich were the ones who had slaves. They didn’t have to fight. They were draft-exempt. So these men are going to be out here and they’re going to be laying down their lives and fighting and going through the hell of camp life—the lice, the rats, and everything else—just so this rich dude in Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee, can have some slaves? That doesn’t make sense … No man would do that.”
  • But the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar has challenged that argument. He analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.
  • Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.
  • I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.
  • The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”
  • Once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in all of Louisiana, the Whitney is surrounded by a constellation of former plantations that host lavish events—bridal parties dancing the night away on land where people were tortured, taking selfies in front of the homes where enslavers lived. Visitors bask in nostalgia, enjoying the antiques and the scenery. But the Whitney is different. It is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on enslaved people. The old plantation house still stands—alluring in its decadence—but it’s not there to be admired. The house is a reminder of what slavery built, and the grounds are a reminder of what slavery really meant for the men, women, and children held in its grip.
  • Like Blandford, the Whitney also has a cemetery, of a kind. A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site’s director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them to a life of slavery.
  • Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000 visitors a year. I asked Yvonne if they were different from the people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names of the dead inscribed in stone. “No one is coming to the Whitney thinking they’re only coming to admire the architecture,” she said.
  • Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good slave owners?”
  • “I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”
  • But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”
  • So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.
  • Would Jeff’s story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for, survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney’s murdered rebels and lost children? Would he still be proud?
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