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Javier E

Why Words Matter - The Bulwark - 0 views

  • Some liberals and progressives replied that the word was irrelevant
  • The scatological vulgarity of this comment from a famous germaphobe was part of its racism.
  • He finds African countries disgusting, and finds people who come from them disgusting, and said so in a way that “poor and unhealthy countries” wouldn’t have captured.
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  • Swear words are swear words for a reason, and the urge to show that one is sophisticated and anti-puritanical sometimes leads to the false conclusion that they’re just words like any other, and don’t communicate anything special. They do, and it did.
  • Just ignore his words.
  • I have a hard time believing that anyone really thinks like this as a general proposition. Certainly conservatives who spent the postwar era reciting the mantra “ideas have consequences” didn’t think the words that carried political ideas were impotent
  • More recently, conservatives over the last ten years seemed to attribute totemic powers to words like “radical Islamic terrorism”—or, for that matter, “Merry Christmas.”
  • With his words threatening to subordinate the collective self-defense commitment of NATO
  • People put up with being ruled, and those who carry out the ruling on others’ behalf put up with taking orders in light of their beliefs about legitimacy and political reasonableness, beliefs that depend on prior speech and persuasion.
  • Norms rest on beliefs which rest on persuasion, and institutions rest on norms.
  • Hannah Arendt treated political speech as the core of her special sense of “action,” the chief way in which we shape and constitute our life together.
  • one particular kind of Trump’s speech, his especially outrageous and transparent lies, are words that have shaped the world: demonstrations of power, attempts to undermine the existence of shared belief in truth and facts.
  • Words are so central to international affairs that they get their own special professional and legal category: diplomacy. We hope that speech, if it does not draw countries closer together, will at least allow clear communication about interests, demands, and the possibility of war.
  • A large part of the population begins with a tribal sense of what team they’re on, which side they support, but relatively little information about the substantive policy views associated with that
  • Trump undermined the most longstanding pillar of American foreign policy.
  • America’s closest allies now have to believe that its treaty commitments are up for grabs in each election, and have to plan accordingly.
  • Coercion is expensive, and the in the postwar West the US has often been able to get its way without violence, as the widely-trusted anchor state in an order with a lot of perceived legitimacy
  • This is true in security, where the US is able to shape the world order to an outsized degree, cheaply, because of its network of alliances.
  • And it’s true in economics; the US benefits from the use of the dollar as a reserve currency, the international willingness to hold US debt, and the global system of trade that it created.
  • They leave because they hear and understand that they’re not wanted.
  • Trump called on Congress to allow Cabinet officials to “remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people,” i.e., to fire civil servants on grounds of political disagreement, ending the century-old rule of a professional and apolitical civil service that stays on as political appointees come and go
  • Trump saying it matters. House Speaker Paul Ryan echoing the call for a “purge” at the FBI matters. Fox News’ constant public delegitimation of the civil service matters
  • Immediate policy outcomes mainly have to do with coercion: who is taxed, regulated, expropriated, imprisoned, deported, conscripted, what wars are fought, who is kept out of the country by force of arms.
  • immigration enforcement is a domain in which there’s a lot of discretion on the ground
  • Trump’s demonization of immigrants and celebration of ICE change policy de facto. Trump’s words have sent the message of “anything goes” to ICE  and “you should be scared” to those who might be vulnerable to ICE. Both messages have been heard. ICE has become so aggressive in its tactics that a federal judge described it as “treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have long lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home, and work. And sent away.”
  • it also matters more broadly for the character of the American state and bureaucracy. By discouraging professionals and encouraging politicization, Trump is already changing the civil service by his speech.
  • the Republican and conservative rank and file now have an unusually direct, unusually constant source of information about the things that people like us are supposed to believe and support. I think that we can see the effect of this in the rapid and dramatic swings in reported Republican opinion on questions from free trade to Russia policy
  • Trump’s stump speeches and unhinged tweets, and Fox News’ amplification of them, are changing what Republican voters think it means to be a Republican. He doesn’t speak for them; how many of them had a view about “the deep state” two years ago? He speaks to them, and it matters.
  • The delegitimation of the basic enterprise of independent journalism is something else, and something new to the US
  • In their important new book How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point to the delegitimation of the independent press as one of the key warning signs of a genuine would-be autocrat.
  • We don’t know how far Trump will be able to go in his attempts to suppress the media, but we know that he’s persuaded millions of Republicans to let him try.
  • Trump has successfully communicated to his voters that being on their team means not being on the FBI’s team. He’s changed what being a Republican means.
  • And he’s trying to change what being an American means
  • It’s also the power to channel and direct the dangerous but real desire for collective national direction and aspiration. Humans are tribal animals, and our tribal psychology is a political resource that can be directed to a lot of different ends
  • all those presidents put forward a public rhetorical face that was better than their worst acts. This inevitably drives political opponents crazy: they despise the hypocrisy and the halo that good speeches put on undeserving heads. I’ve had that reaction to, well, every previous president in my living memory, at one time or another. But there’s something important and valuable in the fact that they felt the need to talk about loftier ideal than they actually governed by
  • In words, even if not in deeds, they championed a free and fair liberal democratic order, the protection of civil liberties, openness toward the world, rejection of racism at home, and defiance against tyranny abroad. And their words were part of the process of persuading each generation of Americans that those were constitutively American ideals.
  • When he tells us that there are “very fine people on both sides” as between the Klan and their critics, he turns the moral compass of American public discourse upside-down. He channels the desire for collective aspiration into an attempt to make us worse than we are.
  • a norm that was built up through speech, persuasion, and belief can be undermined the same way. Trump’s own racism, his embrace of white nationalist discourse, and his encouragement of the alt-right over the past two years have, through words, made a start on that transformation.
  • Much the same is true of his demonization of political opponents, from “lock her up!” chants on the campaign trail and telling Hillary Clinton that “you’d be in jail
  • In the long term, it tells a large portion of the country that it is patriotic and virtuous to reject political disagreement, to reject the basic legitimacy of the views of the majority of the electorate.
  • The business of prioritizing procedural norms, the rule of law, alternation in power, and electoral fairness is psychologically difficult
  • stating the norms out loud—in the U.S., affirming that they are central to the American system—helps to balance out the authoritarian and populist temptation
  • what populists and authoritarians do is to make a virtue out of the inclination to love our in-group and hate the out-group
  • As with his embrace of white nationalism, Trump’s equation of opposition with crime and treason isn’t just “norm erosion,” a phrase we have seen a lot of in the last year. It’s norm inversion, aligning the aspiration to do right with substantive political wrong
  • “Ignore the tweets, ignore the language, ignore the words” is advice that affects a kind of sophistication: don’t get distracted by the circus, keep your eye on what’s going on behind the curtain. This is faux pragmatism, ignoring what is being communicated to other countries, to actors within the state, and to tens of millions of fellow citizens
knudsenlu

France, Where Age of Consent Is Up for Debate - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • n April 24, 2017, a 28-year-old-man met an 11-year-old girl in a park in Montmagny, just north of Paris, after which, he took her home where he had oral and vaginal sex with her. When it was over, the girl called her mother and described what had happened, and her mother called the police. “She thought … that she didn’t have the right to protest, that it wouldn’t make any difference,” the mother told Mediapart, a French investigative site which first reported on the allegations of the case. The accusations were of an adult raping a child—a crime that, in France, can lead to a 20-year prison sentence for the perpetrator when the victim is 15 or younger.
  • But it initially wasn’t charged that way. When the case first went to court in September, the man faced only charges of “sexual infraction,” a crime punishable with a maximum of five years in jail and a €75,000 fine. Under French law, a charge of rape requires “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise,” even if the victims are as young as the girl in the Montmagny case. When the case, initially postponed, went back to court in February, the man’s attorneys did not deny the sexual encounter but argued that the girl had been capable of consenting. “She was 11 years and 10 months old, so nearly 12 years old,” defense lawyer Marc Goudarzian said. Sandrine Parise-Heideiger, his fellow defense lawyer, added: “We are not dealing with a sexual predator on a poor little faultless goose.”
  • “It is indefensible that a girl of 11 could be considered consenting with a 28-year-old man. This is shocking,” she added.
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  • nder French law, “rape” is defined as “any act of sexual penetration, of whatever nature, committed on the person of another by violence, coercion, threat or surprise.”
  • The medical rationale for age-of-consent laws is clear: Children are developmentally  unprepared to give informed consent, and it can be extremely difficult for them to say no to people in positions of authority, or those they trust. According to the World Health Organization (WHO)’s guidelines: “The sexual abuse of children is a unique phenomenon; the dynamics are often very different to that of adult sexual abuse and therefore abuse of this nature cannot be handled in the same way.” The WHO has found that adult perpetrators also rarely use physical force or violence on children, relying instead on their ability to “manipulate the child’s trust and hide the abuse.”
  • hy has the French legal system seemed reluctant to set a specific age of consent?One prominent explanation stems from the attitudes that followed May 1968, when student protests against capitalism, consumerism, and other values and institutions considered elitist and unjust, led to massive demonstrations, strikes, and civil unrest. The protests represented a cultural revolution that would leave a lasting imprint on France's very identity. Salmona said that after 1968, attitudes began to shift: Children were viewed as having the right to be considered sexual beings—in Salmona’s words: “pedophilia was considered a sexual orientation … It was all part of a vision of freedom.”
  • “People have a hard time admitting they were colonized by the discourse of pedocriminals,” Salmona told me. France in the 1970s and 1980s, she said, was an “atrocious” era for children, an active time for a very unapologetic “pedocriminal lobby.”
  • For her part, Durrieu-Diebolt has unreservedly endorsed an age of consent while defending the presumption of innocence—she does not see a conflict between the two. “We have to find an equilibrium between considering the victim and maintaining a presumption of innocence,” she said. “We have to respect both parts—we can’t go to either extreme.”“What it comes down to is this,” Schiappa said. “Do we think rape is serious or is it tolerable depending on circumstances?”
Javier E

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny -- NYMag - 1 views

  • my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic.
  • Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become.
  • Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”
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  • This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehendin
  • when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy
  • The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.
  • when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
  • He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt
  • If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee
  • Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities
  • He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.
  • Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.
  • Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished
  • The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones
  • Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded
  • further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.
  • “It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,”
  • Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud.
  • it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.
  • What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse
  • The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.
  • Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.
  • The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting
  • The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before
  • what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness
  • Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin
  • Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.
  • Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.
  • The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.
  • Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.
  • The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.
  • The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexisten
  • Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded
  • It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.
  • For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome
  • Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.
  • Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war?
  • In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.
  • But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.”
  • what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.
  • Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion
  • what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans
  • Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper­democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.
  • Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect.
  • Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.
  • The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.
  • “I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”
  • Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events.
  • I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.
  • His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton
  • the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic
  • All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crac
  • like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape
  • And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance
  • The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.
  • But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.
  • Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that.
  • Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands
  • Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate suppor
  • e. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.
  • Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.
Javier E

What Critics of Campus Protest Get Wrong About Free Speech - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Many critics have used the incident at Middlebury, as well as violent protests at the University of California Berkeley, to argue that free speech is under assault. To these critics, liberal activists who respond aggressively to ideas they dislike are hypocrites who care little about the liberal values of tolerance and free speech.
  • the truth is that violent demonstrations on campus are rare, and are not what the critics have primarily been railing against. Instead, they have been complaining about an atmosphere of intense pushback and protest that has made some speakers hesitant to express their views and has subjected others to a range of social pressure and backlash, from shaming and ostracism to boycotts and economic reprisal.
  • As Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in his celebrated 1927 opinion in Whitney v. California, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
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  • A simplistic answer would be that such pressure does not conflict with free speech because the First Amendment applies only to government censorship, not to restrictions imposed by individuals.
  • Many of the reasons why Americans object to official censorship also apply to the suppression of speech by private means. If we conceive of free speech as promoting the search for truth—as the metaphor of “the marketplace of ideas” suggests—we should be troubled whether that search is hindered by public officials or private citizens.
  • If the point of free speech is to facilitate the open debate that is essential for self-rule, any measure that impairs that debate should give us pause, regardless of its source.
  • But although social restraints on speech raise many of the same concerns as government censorship, they differ in important ways.
  • First, much of the social pressure that critics complain about is itself speech.
  • When activists denounce Yiannopoulos as a racist or Murray as a white nationalist, they are exercising their own right to free expression. Likewise when students hold protests or marches, launch social media campaigns, circulate petitions, boycott lectures, demand the resignation of professors and administrators, or object to the invitation of controversial speakers. Even heckling
  • one of the central tenets of modern First Amendment law is that the government cannot suppress speech if those harms can be thwarted by alternative means. And the alternative that judges and scholars invoke most frequently is the mechanism of counter-speech.
  • Put bluntly, the implicit goal of all argument is, ultimately, to quash the opposing view.
  • Counter-speech can take many forms. It can be an assertion of fact designed to rebut a speaker’s claim. It can be an expression of opinion that the speaker’s view is misguided, ignorant, offensive, or insulting. It can even be an accusation that the speaker is racist or sexist, or that the speaker’s expression constitutes an act of harassment, discrimination, or aggression.
  • In other words, much of the social pushback that critics complain about on campus and in public life—indeed, the entire phenomenon of political correctness—can plausibly be described as counter-speech.
  • It’s worth asking, though, why expression that shames or demonizes a speaker is not a legitimate form of counter-speech.
  • To argue that a speaker’s position is racist or sexist is to say something about the merits of her position, given that most people think racism and sexism are bad. Even arguing that the speaker herself is racist goes to the merits, since it gives the public context for judging her motives and the consequences of her position.  
  • Besides, what principle of free speech limits discussion to the merits? Political discourse often strays from the merits of issues to personal or tangential matters. But the courts have never suggested that such discourse is outside the realm of free speech.
  • Cohen v. California, “We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.”
  • Are these forms of social pressure inconsistent with the values of free speech?  That is a more complicated question than many observers seem willing to acknowledge.
  • The problem with this argument is that all counter-speech has a potential chilling effect. Any time people refute an assertion of fact by pointing to evidence that contradicts it, speakers may be hesitant to repeat that assertion.
  • Fine, the critics might say. But much of the social pressure on campus does not just demonize; it is designed to, and often does, chill unpopular speech.
  • This highlights a paradox of free speech, and of our relationship to it. On the one hand, Americans are encouraged to be tolerant of opposing ideas in the belief that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market
  • On the other hand, unlike the government, Americans are not expected to remain neutral observers of that market. Instead, we are participants in it; the market works only if we take that participation seriously, if we exercise our own right of expression to combat ideas we disagree with, to refute false claims, to discredit dangerous beliefs
  • This does not mean we are required to be vicious or uncivil. But viciousness and incivility are legitimate features of America’s free speech tradition
  • This, one suspects, is what bothers many critics of political correctness: the fact that so much of the social pressure and pushback takes on a nasty, vindictive tone that is painful to observe. But free speech often is painful.
  • Many critics, particularly on the left, seem to forget this. Although they claim to be promoting an expansive view of free speech, they are doing something quite different. They are promoting a vision of liberalism, of respect, courtesy, and broadmindedness
  • That is a worthy vision to promote, but it should not be confused with the dictates of free speech, which allows for a messier, more ill-mannered form of public discourse. Free speech is not the same as liberalism. Equating the two reflects a narrow, rather than expansive, view of the former.
  • Does this mean any form of social pressure targeted at speakers is acceptable? Not at all. One of the reasons government censorship is prohibited is that the coercive power of the state is nearly impossible to resist
  • Social pressure that crosses the line from persuasion to coercion is also inconsistent with the values of free speech.
  • This explains why violence and threats of violence are not legitimate mechanisms for countering ideas one disagrees with. Physical assault—in addition to not traditionally being regarded as a form of expression —too closely resembles the use of force by the government.
  • What about other forms of social pressure? If Americans are concerned about the risk of coercion, the question is whether the pressures are such that it is reasonable to expect speakers to endure them. Framed this way, we should accept the legitimacy of insults, shaming, demonizing, and even social ostracism, since it is not unreasonable for speakers to bear these consequences.
  • a system that relies on counter-speech as the primary alternative to government censorship should not unduly restrict the forms counter-speech can take.
  • Heckling raises trickier questions. Occasional boos or interruptions are acceptable since they don’t prevent speakers from communicating their ideas. But heckling that is so loud and continuous a speaker literally cannot be heard is little different from putting a hand over a speaker’s mouth and should be viewed as antithetical to the values free speech.  
  • Because social restraints on speech do not violate the Constitution, Americans cannot rely on courts to develop a comprehensive framework for deciding which types of pressure are too coercive. Instead, Americans must determine what degree of pressure we think is acceptable.
  • In that respect, the critics are well within their right to push for a more elevated, civil form of public discourse. They are perfectly justified in arguing that a college campus, of all places, should be a model of rational debate
  • But they are not justified in claiming the free speech high ground. For under our free speech tradition, the crudest and least reasonable forms of expression are just as legitimate as the most eloquent and thoughtful
Javier E

The threat from the illiberal left | The Economist - 0 views

  • SOMETHING HAS gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government.
  • Over the past 250 years classical liberalism has helped bring about unparalleled progress.
  • But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.
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  • By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.
  • The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left
  • a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.
  • Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.
  • However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about
  • For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up—and it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control.
  • The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.
  • Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers.
  • Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.
  • Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents.
  • Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group.
  • Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course.
  • It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.
  • Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary
  • That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice
  • The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.
  • Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”.
  • Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals
  • it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.
  • Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means
  • And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.
  • When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.
  • populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supporters—to the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribe’s excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen
  • Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents’ right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.
  • Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.
  • Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve society’s many problems without anyone resorting to coercion
  • Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release people’s creative energies.
Javier E

Francis Fukuyama's New History of Human Social Structures - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In a book to be published in April, “The Origins of Political Order,” Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University presents a sweeping new overview of human social structures throughout history, taking over from where Dr. Wilson’s ambitious synthesis left off.
  • he explicitly assumes that human social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare.
  • Because of this shared human nature, with its biological foundation, “human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures,” he writes. It is these worldwide patterns he seeks to describe in an analysis that stretches from prehistoric times to the French Revolution.
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  • It’s the kind of theory situated between the hyper-theory of Marx or Hegel and the thick description that certain anthropologists and historians aim at,” he said.
  • it provides “a new foundation for understanding political development.” It is neither Eurocentric nor monocausal, but provides a complex, multifactor explanation of political development, Dr. Sorensen said. “In terms of discussing political order this will be a new classic,
  • The book traces the development of political order from the earliest human societies, which were small groups of hunter-gatherers. The first major social development, in Dr. Fukuyama’s view, was the transition from hunter-gatherer bands to tribes, made possible by religious ideas that united large numbers of people in worship of a common ancestor. Since a tribe could quickly mobilize many men for warfare, neighboring bands had to tribalize too, or be defeated.
  • Warfare also forced the second major social transition, from tribe to state. States are better organized than tribes and more stable, since tribes tend to dissolve in fighting after the death of a leader. Only because states offered a better chance of survival did people give up the freedom of the tribe for the coercion of the state.
  • Much of Dr. Fukuyama’s analysis concerns how states develop from tribes. This transition, in his view, is affected by geography, history, and in particular by the order in which the different institutional components of the state are put in place. Depending on the order of events, several very different kinds of state emerged in China, India, the Islamic world and Europe, and even within Europe there have been several major variations on a common theme.
Javier E

Exorcising Hitler - By Frederick Taylor - Book Review - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The story of the denazification of Germany after 1945 comes in two versions. The one we know best allows us to congratulate ourselves on a job well done. We turned the most powerful and frightening dictatorship in Europe into a stable, peaceable and functioning democracy for the first time in its history. This is the story we grew up with during the cold war, one that justified the partition and occupation of the country over many decades.
  • there is also a much less self-­congratulatory version of denazification. It dwells on the darker side by exposing once taboo subjects like the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe and the apparently countless rapes carried out by the Red Army.
  • there were then — and remain to this day — two mysteries in the conduct of the German people at the war’s end, mysteries that go to the heart of Taylor’s book. One was the question of why they continued to fight so resolutely, for so long, against obviously overwhelming odds, even after it must have been clear that the war was lost. Taylor stresses two completely counterproductive messages sent by the Allies: the policy of unconditional surrender, and especially the draconian Morgenthau Plan advanced by the American Treasury secretary, which called for the destruction of Germany’s industrial base and the pastoralization of the country. He also highlights the Germans’ sheer terror at the approaching Red Army, a terror that had been fanned, as he notes, by Goebbels’s publicizing of an early Soviet atrocity in an East Prussian village. Finally, there was straightforward Nazi coercion as the regime rounded on its own people, killing more and more of them.
Javier E

The Enduring Power of Virtue - James Fallows - International - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • He posed the cultivation of virtue as a superior alternative to the manipulation or coercion of behavior through policy.
  • I'll highlight three virtues from Confucius's thought that I believe are the basic building blocks for all other virtues: One is rén (仁), benevolence or compassion. Another is self-control, which Confucius believed was enforced and nurtured by adhering to proper forms of behavior, or lǐ (礼). And, the third is wise judgment about how to turn benevolent intention into action of a kind that avoids the proverbial road to hell.
  • public discourse about virtue is muted. To abuse a recent parlour game, below is a graph of the rate of occurrence of the words "virtue" and "technology" in Google's Ngram Viewer, which plots frequency of words occurring in books over time. We see a rapid rise of technology in the last forty years against a two-century slide in virtue. (Is it a coincidence that the crossover happens around 1970, the same year I called out in yesterday's graph? Somewhat similar results are had with "virtue" against "institutions," "policies," and "systems.")
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  • I'd go even further. Virtues are paramount because they're the ultimate cause of good consequences, at least among those causes within human control.
  • While many virtue theorists insist that virtues are intrinsically and morally good, Driver defines virtue strictly in terms of outcomes. To her, a virtue is a "character trait that systematically produces good consequences." A trait is a virtue only if it tends to cause good consequences.
  • What the earthquake aftermath shows, however, is the remarkable power of virtue, even in the absence of any explicit legislation or enforcement. Virtue works without TIPS (technologies, institutions, policies, and systems), even though the converse isn't true.
  • Modern psychology research is confirming the power of virtue, as well, and the work on self-control is representative.
  • "Self-control, then, is one of the crucial mechanisms that had to improve in humans, to enable culture to succeed."
  • "Because their persons were cultivated, their families were in order. Because their families were in order, their states were well-governed. Because their states were well-governed, the whole kingdom prospered. From the sovereign down to the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides."
Javier E

Friedrich A. Hayek, Big-Government Skeptic - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A truly free society is not simply one that limits the power of the central government; many times in history, central governments have defended the liberty of non-elites against the coercions of well-­organized local power brokers. In American history, freedom for African-Americans did not evolve spontaneously. It required first a bloody civil war to end slavery and then intervention by the federal government a century later to bring about the end of legal segregation.
  • He is necessarily a moral relativist, since he does not believe that there is a higher perspective from which one person can dictate another’s ends. Morality for him is more like a useful coordinating device than a categorical imperative. But surely the Western tradition that Hayek celebrates is as concerned with virtue as with freedom, whether from the standpoint of Christianity or that of classical republicanism. One searches in vain through this or any of his other books for a serious treatment of religion or the moral concerns that animate religious ­believers.
  • Hayek made the slipperiest of slippery slope arguments: the smallest move toward the expansion of government would lead to a cascade of bad consequences that would result in full-blown authoritarian socialism. If anything, however, the history of the past 50 years shows us that the slippery slope has all sorts of ledges and handholds by which we can brake our descent into serfdom and indeed climb back up.
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  • In the end, there is a deep contradiction in Hayek’s thought. His great insight is that individual human beings muddle along, making progress by planning, experimenting, trying, failing and trying again. They never have as much clarity about the future as they think they do. But Hayek somehow knows with great certainty that when governments, as opposed to individuals, engage in a similar process of innovation and discovery, they will fail. He insists that the dividing line between state and society must be drawn according to a strict abstract principle rather than through empirical adaptation. In so doing, he proves himself to be far more of a hubristic Cartesian than a true Hayekian.
Javier E

'Fields of Blood,' by Karen Armstrong - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The page-by-page detail of the book is much of the reason to read it, but if you reduced its complexities and tangles to their essence, they would amount to these three points:
  • First, through most of human history, people have chosen to intertwine religion with all their other activities, including, notably, how they are governed. This was “not because ambitious churchmen had ‘mixed up’ two essentially distinct activities,” she says, “but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance.”
  • econd, this involvement with politics means that religions have often been tied up with violence: Crusaders, conquistadors, jihadists and many more. But — a point Armstrong cares about so much that she makes it dozens of times — the violence almost always originates with the state and spills over to religion, rather than vice versa
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  • any governing body, democratic or tyrannical, peace-loving or expansionist, “was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence,” and because “violence and coercion . . . lay at the heart of social existence.” The earliest states required force to maintain systems of agricultural production; mature ones found that the threat of violence — by police within their borders, by armies between them — was, sadly, the best way to keep the peace.
  • Third, citizens thus face the duty of confronting and trying to control violence carried out in their name by the state, without blaming religion for it or imagining that the solution lies in a cleaner separation of church and state.
  • This extends to understanding the roots of violence or terrorism directed against them: “As an inspiration for terrorism . . . nationalism has been far more productive than religion.”
  • In nearly all cases, she argues, violent impulses that originated elsewhere — with nationalism, struggles for territory, resentment at loss of power — may have presented themselves as “religious” disputes but really had little to do with faith.
  • Armstrong demonstrates again and again that the great spasms of cruelty and killing through history have had little or no religious overlay. In modern times Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all atheists, and the power behind the Holocaust, Armstrong says, was an ethnic rather than a religious hatred. An overemphasis on religion’s damage can blind people to the nonholy terrors that their states inflict.
katyshannon

Texas Court Tosses Criminal Case Against Former Gov. Perry - ABC News - 0 views

  • The felony prosecution of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry ended Wednesday when the state's highest criminal court dismissed an abuse-of-power indictment that the Republican says hampered his short-lived 2016 presidential bid.
  • The 6-2 decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is dominated by elected Republican judges, frees Perry from a long-running criminal case that blemished the exit of one of the most powerful Texas governors in history and hung over his second failed run for the White House.
  • A grand jury in liberal Austin had indicted Perry in 2014 for vetoing funding for a public corruption unit that Republicans have long accused of wielding a partisan ax. The unit worked under Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, an elected Democrat. Perry wanted her to resign after she was convicted of drunken driving.
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  • Perry was accused of using his veto power to threaten a public official and overstepping his authority, but the judges ruled that courts can't undermine the veto power of a governor.
  • "Come at the king, you best not miss," Republican Judge David Newell wrote in his concurring opinion, quoting a popular line from the HBO series "The Wire."
  • Perry has been campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz since becoming the first major GOP candidate to drop out of the race last year.
  • "I've always known the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, they were right," said Perry, who spoke at the headquarters of an influential Texas conservative think tank, which has previously christened its balcony overlooking downtown as the "Gov. Rick Perry Liberty Balcony."
  • The court said veto power can't be restricted by the courts and the prosecution of a veto "violates separations of powers." A lower appeals court had dismissed the other charge, coercion by a public servant, in July.
  • Perry had rebuked the charges as a partisan attack from the start, calling it a "political witch hunt," but the dismissal brought accusations of Republican judges doing a favor for a party stalwart.
  • Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning watchdog group that filed the original criminal complaint that led to the indictment, said Perry was handed a "gift" based on his stature.
  • Even a Republican judge who dissented in the ruling said the decision could leave the public with an uneasy perception that the system went out of its way to clear a famous politician with deep connections.
  • Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, made just one court appearance in the case and was defiant from the start — he went out for ice cream after turning himself in for booking at an Austin jail, and smiled wide for his mug shot.
  • Legal scholars across the political spectrum raised objections about the case. Still, the Republican judge overseeing it repeatedly refused to throw it out on constitutional grounds, prompting Perry's appeals.
  • Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who secured Perry's indictment, maintained that the matter was built on evidence — not politics — and deserved to go to trial. He can appeal, but that would be a lengthy process. Combined, the original charges carried a potential maximum of 109 years in prison.
  • Perry had formally announced he was running for president in June, hoping to convince GOP primary voters he deserved another chance after his 2012 bid was undone by a series of public gaffes. But his second campaign lasted barely three months, and he dropped out of the race in September.
  • The former governor spent more than $2 million on top defense lawyers. His latest White House campaign raised barely half that much in its first month, and Perry blamed the indictment for his sluggish fundraising. But polls showed he was badly trailing despite visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He was the first candidate to leave a GOP field jammed with 17 presidential hopefuls at the time.
Javier E

Disputing Korean Narrative on 'Comfort Women,' a Professor Draws Fierce Backlash - The ... - 0 views

  • In her book, she emphasized that it was profiteering Korean collaborators, as well as private Japanese recruiters, who forced or lured women into the “comfort stations,” where life included both rape and prostitution. There is no evidence, she wrote, that the Japanese government was officially involved in, and therefore legally responsible for, coercing Korean women.
  • Although often brutalized in a “slavelike condition” in their brothels, Ms. Park added, the women from the Japanese colonies of Korea and Taiwan were also treated as citizens of the empire and were expected to consider their service patriotic. They forged a “comradelike relationship” with the Japanese soldiers and sometimes fell in love with them, she wrote. She cited cases where Japanese soldiers took loving care of sick women and even returned those who did not want to become prostitutes.
  • Ms. Park’s book, published in Japan last year, won awards there. Last month, 54 intellectuals from Japan and the United States issued a statement criticizing South Korean prosecutors for “suppressing the freedom of scholarship and press.” Among them was a former chief cabinet secretary in Japan, Yohei Kono, who issued a landmark apology in 1993 admitting coercion in the recruitment of comfort women.
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  • Even then, however, Mr. Kono noted that the recruiting had been conducted mainly by private agents working at the request of the Japanese military, and by administrative and military personnel. For outraged South Koreans, the caveats rendered the apology useless.
  • others said the talk of academic freedom missed the main point of the backlash. This month, 380 scholars and activists from South Korea, Japan and elsewhere accused Ms. Park of “exposing a serious neglect of legal understanding” and avoiding the “essence” of the issue: Japan’s state responsibility.
  • “Korean comfort women were victims, but they were also collaborators as people from a colony,” Ms. Park wrote in one of the redacted sentences in her book.
  • Ms. Park said she had tried to broaden discussions by investigating the roles that patriarchal societies, statism and poverty played in the recruitment of comfort women. She said that unlike women rounded up as spoils of battle in conquered territories like China, those from the Korean colony had been taken to the comfort stations in much the same way poor women today enter prostitution.
  • She also compared the Korean comfort women to more recent Korean prostitutes who followed American soldiers into their winter field exercises in South Korea in the 1960s through ’80s. (The “blanket corps,” so called because the women often carried blankets under their arms, followed pimps searching for American troops through snowy hills or built field brothels with tents as the Americans lined up outside, according to former prostitutes for the United States military.)
  • Yang Hyun-ah, a professor at the Seoul National University School of Law, said that Ms. Park’s most egregious mistake was to “generalize selectively chosen details from the women’s lives.”
  • she added that even if the Japanese government did not directly order the women’s forced recruitment and some Korean women joined comfort stations voluntarily, the government should still be held responsible for the “sin” of creating the colonial structure that allowed it to happen.
  • “Whether the women volunteered or not, whether they did prostitution or not, our society needed them to remain pure, innocent girls,” she said in the interview. “If not, people think they cannot hold Japan responsible.”
Javier E

Donald Trump's Words Are Reshaping American Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Do the president’s words matter?In Donald Trump’s first year in office, there has been a surprisingly widespread effort to argue that they do not. Liberals and moderates occasionally insist that the media and the public should shift their attention from the president’s vulgar statements to the real policy work happening at federal agencies.
  • The upshot seems to be: Ignore the words, heed the substance.
  • But Trump’s words are his substance. “Politics is persuasion as well as coercion,” the political scientist Jacob Levy wrote last week, rightly arguing that Trump has “changed what being a Republican means.”
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  • through persuasive insistence. On issues as diverse as the alleged dangers of immigration and the nature of truth, Trump’s words have the power to cleave public opinion, turning nonpolitical issues into partisan maelstroms and turning partisan attitudes on their head.
  • Years ago (even months ago) it would have been absurd to imagine “law and order” Republicans souring on the FBI; or that the party of Reagan and Bush would turn on the NFL, America’s most orgiastically patriotic sport.
  • In 2014, about 60 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said the FBI was doing an "excellent" or "good" job. Last year, their views forked: Republican approval of the agency fell by about 10 points, while Democratic opinion improved by a similar margin.
  • And yet, because Democrats have become more pro-immigrant under Trump, a record-high share of Americans now say "immigrants strengthen the country.”
  • Trump evinces not a Midas touch, but a Moses touch—an extraordinary talent for planting a stake in the ground and dividing the landscape before him.
  • In mid-2016, 20 percent of both Republicans and Democrats considered Russia an “ally” or “friendly.” One year later, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to say the same.
  • Immigration had for years been a marginal political topic, especially when compared with issues like jobs and terrorism. But Trump effectively recast immigration as a question of American identity and national security.
  • The construction of a wall along the Mexican border, once a fringey scheme, became the centerpiece of the GOP presidential candidate’s agenda. Today, three-quarters of Trump supporters say that “building the wall” should be the highest priority of his presidency
  • Less than 20 percent of Republicans said they had unfavorable views of the NFL in the summer of 2017. But their disapproval had more than tripled by October, after Trump blasted players for kneeling to protest police violence during the national anthem
  • Trump’s “mere” words could starve his party of moderate legislators, while encouraging Democratic candidates to embrace more liberal positions to distinguish themselves as distinctly anti-Trump.
  • It's tempting to downplay the power of Trump's words by saying their influence is “merely” shifting public opinion. But that's not quite right. First, there’s nothing subtle about Republican voters clutching nativism, the far-right right clutching Nazism, or Democratic voters radicalizing in defiance of the president.
  • Second, Trump’s rhetorical posture has some real policy implications. Though he hasn’t yet signed any major legislation on immigration, his harsh stance on undocumented workers empowered the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to increase arrests by 40 percent in his first year, often to shocking effect
  • And his constant disparagement of experts who refuse to parrot his policies has sucked the talent out of several government agencies, notably the State Department.
  • Trump’s refusal to accept critical information as true—from his denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election to the “alternative facts” about his inauguration size—has demolished the right’s faith and trust in a free press. Three-quarters of the GOP now say that news organizations make up anti-Trump stories.
  • Even worse, a January study found that nearly half of Republicans believe that accurate stories that “cast a politician or political group in a negative light” are “always” fake news. Trump, along with Fox News, has given his supporters the license to self-deport from reality.
  • Trump’s obsession with building and broadcasting an alternative ledger of facts has made epistemology the fundamental crisis of his term
  • In its first month, the administration invented or mainstreamed a new vocabulary of mendacity—e.g., fake news, alternative facts—and within 10 months, Trump made more than 1,500 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post. That’s roughly six lies, exaggerations, or omissions per day
  • No legislation, no executive order, and no official speech has caused this shift. It is the president’s words, delivered often via Twitter and amplified on Fox News, that have exploded the very notion of a shared political truth.
  • The insistence that Trump’s words don’t matter isn’t incidental to the GOP’s broader strategy. It is the strategy—to quarantine Trump’s most noxious rhetoric and proceed apace with traditional Republican governance.
  • The idea that a president’s words don’t matter is a deeply ahistorical position. And that’s particularly true for the GOP
  • Perhaps Republicans don’t treat Trump as a typical Republican president because, in a very real sense, Trump is not really the president. Instead, he has become a kind of nationalist identity guru for the new American right.
  • an anonymous White House source all but acknowledged this strategy, telling Axios that the president would spend 2018 seeking “unexpected cultural flashpoints,” like the NFL’s kneeling controversy. The White House sees Trump’s principle talent as the ability to activate cultural resentment among his supporters, encouraging them to redefine their identity and values around a nativist anger.
  • Politics is downstream from persuasion, and law is downstream from language.
Javier E

What's Killing Liberalism? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.
  • Liberalism is not a doctrine founded on a sacred text, like Communism. It is something more like a set of predispositions—a faith in individuals and their capacity for growth, a tempered optimism that expects progress but recoils before utopian dreams, a belief in open debate and the possibility of persuasion, an insistence upon secularism in the public realm, an orientation towards civil rights and civil liberties.
  • liberalism has a core, and that is the right of the individual to stand apart
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  • because it has no canon, liberalism perpetually redefines and renews itself
  • mankind is fallible; our saving grace is that our errors are “corrigible.” We acknowledge our fallibility by listening to those with whom we disagree, and testing our ideas against the strongest possible counter-argument
  • In our own world, after all, free speech abounds while the intellectual habits that make free speech actually matter degenerate.
  • How can the quintessentially rationalist faith of liberalism flourish in an age that systematically demeans rationality?
  • all early liberals would have accepted Adam Smith’s proposition that prosperity will be best served if men are given free rein to pursue their self-interest
  • In 1909, Herbert Croly published The Promise of American Life, an immensely influential book that argued that Jeffersonian individualism no longer offered a real guarantee of freedom. “The democratic principle requires an equal start in the race,” Croly wrote, but so long as private property was sacred, equal rights could not guarantee equal opportunity to citizens not born to privilege.
  • The trunk of liberalism now separated into two boughs. One revived the free-market tradition, arguing that political freedom could not flourish absent full economic freedom.
  • The other liberalism was buoyed up by FDR’s New Deal and then sustained as the bulwark against totalitarianism by mid-century thinkers like Popper, Isaiah Berlin and George Orwell. This was the moderately interventionist, secular, empirical, pragmatic doctrine that became something like a civic religion in the United States after World War II
  • The “vital center,” as Arthur Schlesinger called it, occupied a spot midway between the strict individualism of 19th-century England and the collectivist social democracy of post-war Europe.
  • by the 1960s it was not white middle-class American who needed state intervention, but minorities, above all African Americans, who had been left behind as American became a broadly prosperous nation. This moral commitment carried obvious political dangers, for liberals were now asking Americans to make sacrifices for others.
  • By the end of the decade, liberalism had begun to lose its hold on the white working-class, once the prime beneficiary of government programs. Liberalism has never regained its appeal for those voters
  • “Neoliberals” or advocates of a “Third Way” like Bill Clinton (or Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder in Europe) endorsed the conservative emphasis on economic growth but applied liberal principles of social justice to public investment and the distribution of wealth; they aspired to forge a liberalism of the middle class.
  • The right-liberal and left-liberal parties traded power; each appeared to have almost exactly half the country on its side. Then, in 2016, the seesaw stopped: Both parties were rejected in favor of a candidate who simultaneously attacked Wall Street and the welfare state
  • Liberals have a problem of a different order; they need to reconstruct their faith as they did in 1912 and 1964 and 1992, when they learned or relearned how to speak to the broad middle of the country.
  • rather, liberals need to decide whether that is their goal. Can they, should they, seek to address the deep sense of grievance that the election exposed?
  • In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla argues that the growing obsession with identity politics has stripped liberals of the civic language they long used to address the American people collectively.
  • One way of thinking about the choice liberals face is this: At a moment of intense polarization, they must either return to the old “we” or deploy their own version of “us and them.”
  • liberalism simply cannot survive the violent division that now afflicts our culture. Intellectual polarization follows, and reinforces, social polarization. It is in the interest of liberals to take seriously the dictum of Lincoln that a house divided cannot stand.
  • What would it mean to address the sense of grievance that cost Hillary Clinton the election? Doing so requires liberals to find ways of buffering the effects of the globalization of jobs and products and people, without surrendering to Trump’s xenophobia and isolationism.
  • And it requires addressing the issue of inequality
  • But the inequality that makes Trump voters seethe is not the same one that enrages voters on the left; not the “1 percent,” but liberals themselves
  • The meritocracy of professionals and academics and upper-white-collar workers has ossified in recent years into something that looks to people on the outside more like an oligarchy. In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce dubs this phenomenon “hereditary meritocracy.
  • about a quarter of American children from the top 1 percent of the income scale attend an elite university, while only 0.5 percent of those from the bottom fifth do
  • Patrick Deneen, the author of Why Liberalism Died, has a word for this class: the “liberalocracy.” While the aristocratic family perpetuated itself through the landed estate, Deneen writes, the liberalocratic family rests upon the legacy of liberal individualism “loose generational ties, portable credentials, the inheritance of fungible wealth, and the promise of mobility.”
  • , standing apart from his fellow man, his past and his place. Liberty, in this formulation, means freedom from coercion, freedom to do as you wish—“negative liberty,” as Isaiah Berlin called it
  • Deneen reminds us of an older tradition, reaching back to Plato, which argues that citizens must gain self-mastery in order to be capable of exercising self-government. Liberty of this sort presupposes an “education in virtue”
  • Deneen is a Catholic conservative who offers an alternative reading of history that will be appealing to other Catholic conservatives, though perhaps only very reactionary ones.
  • In The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly writes that in a free society, men of talent will naturally rise to the top. But that privileged position begins to corrode social bonds when it threatens to become permanent, whether through inheritance or through the exploitation of privilege. “The essential wholeness of the community,” he writes, “depends absolutely on the ceaseless creation of a political, economic, and social aristocracy and their equally incessant replacement.”
  • Croly hoped to preserve the “essential wholeness of the community” in part through a steeply progressive estate tax. Teddy Roosevelt, his great patron, agreed
  • There is, in fact, no sharper difference between left-liberalism and right-liberalism than the estate tax, with its implicit principle that privilege ought not be transmitted generationally
  • No less important, the willingness of the left, unlike the right, to gore its own ox might demonstrate to hard-pressed Americans that the liberal elite understands, as it once understood, the meaning of sacrifice.
  • But do liberals understand sacrifice? Liberalism did grave damage to its reputation in the 1960s by demanding real sacrifices from ordinary people and very little from elites, whose children were not the ones being bused to inner-city schools, nor drafted and sent off to fight in Vietnam. Has anything changed today?
  • So many of the things liberals favor—globalization, a generous immigration policy, an increase in the minimum wage, affirmative action—do them real good and little harm, while impinging, or at least seeming to impinge, on Americans a few steps down the ladder.
  • What do liberals favor that’s good for America broadly but not good for them?
  • liberals fancy themselves idealists. They need to prove it by pulling themselves off their perch. What about mandatory national service?
  • National service and even the estate tax are essentially emblems; perhaps sacrifice itself is a kind of emblem. But it is a language that Americans understand, and appreciate. If liberals are to find a way to speak to Americans who have been trained to regard them as the spawn of Satan, it will not be enough, as Hillary Clinton amply demonstrated, to have the best policies.
manhefnawi

The Enslaved Native Americans Who Made The Gold Rush Possible - History in the Headlines - 1 views

  • the Anglo settlers who flocked to California declared war on the Native Californians who had come before them. But Forty-Niners weren’t the first white people to oppress or even enslave Native Americans in California. The very land on which Marshall spotted the gold was part of a vast empire built on the slave labor of native peoples
  • In order to acquire the land, he converted to Catholicism and became a Mexican citizen, and within a few years he had more than doubled his land holdings.
  • it was home to Native Americans who “found their homelands now the property of outsiders who viewed them as potential laborers
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  • Those native peoples presented both a threat and an opportunity to Sutter
  • local Nisenan people, and turned them into a militia, outfitting them with uniforms and weapons and training them to defend his land
  • With the help of his militia, he also enslaved them
  • did not hesitate to kill Native Americans who did not submit to hard labor
  • Native Americans weren’t just an economic powerhouse—they were currency. He traded native labor among local rancheros and to new settlers
  • Sutter’s Mill became ground zero for the Gold Rush of 1849. But even the discovery of gold was facilitated by Sutter’s enslavement and coercion of native peoples
  • the dirt there was dug by a group of Sutter-controlled Native Americans who knew about the gold, but did not value it
  • After the presence of gold became known, squatters and thieves overran Sutter’s ranch, destroyed his building, looted his wealth and stole his livestock
  • his claim to the lands granted to him in 1841 was declared invalid
  • But perhaps the biggest losers were the Native Americans of Gold Rush-era California
  • John Sutter had set the stage for their destruction—but his cruelty was just the beginning
Javier E

The core mission of the GOP is now to defend abusers - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • “Ignore the tweets, ignore the language, ignore the words” is advice that affects a kind of sophistication: don’t get distracted by the circus, keep your eye on what’s going on behind the curtain. This is faux pragmatism, ignoring what is being communicated to other countries, to actors within the state, and to tens of millions of fellow citizens. It ignores how all those actors will respond to the speech, and how norms, institutions, and the environment for policy and coercion will be changed by those responses. Policy is a lagging indicator; ideas and the speech that expresses them pave the way
manhefnawi

In the Blood - The Secret History of the Habsburgs | History Today - 0 views

  • 18th-century succession crisis unlocks a tale of dynastic obsession and myth-history in Austria's first family
  • Charles had devoted his whole adult life to maintaining the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne. From 1705 when he first arrived in Barcelona he saw himself as the only rightful king of Spain. He never accepted the accession of the Bourbon claimant, Philip V, under the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and thereafter anything that smacked of a French influence was guaranteed to rouse him to fury
  • his brother Joseph I
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  • his father Leopold I
  • With his death, that pre-eminence of the House was challenged
  • So, even if the last Habsburg's death had no sinister implications, it was potentially a catastrophe for the dynasty. Charles had no male heir, and his daughters could not succeed him to the Imperial throne. The laws of the Empire permitted only a male to sit on the throne of Charlemagne
  • Among the Habsburgs, gender was less important than blood
  • among the Habsburgs, as opposed, to say, the Valois or the Bourbons, the reality of female power and authority was accepted. Thus Charles' daughters could succeed to his titles and lands but they could not become Holy Roman Emperor
  • Since Frederick III had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1452, the Imperial title had become almost synonymous with the Habsburgs. They had been elected since 1438 in an unbroken succession to the most dignified and honourable office in Christian Europe. Sometimes there had been other challengers and, on occasion, it had seemed likely that the title would pass to another claimant. But the Habsburgs had always succeeded in persuading sufficient electors to favour their candidate
  • it obscured the real power that a Holy Roman Emperor could exercise
  • While the power and effectiveness of the Reich was undoubtedly waning, especially after the peace settlement at Westphalia in 1648, it was, paradoxically, becoming a more effective instrument of Habsburg power
  • its sanctions still carried weight
  • The Emperor Leopold I, in 1687 and 1705, had moved away from the notion of the equal claim towards establishing the precedence of the senior line, with males inheriting first and then females.
  • deprived the daughters of Joseph I, and established that the new primogeniture would begin with his own children. When Charles presented this edict he was initiating a constitutional revolution
  • It is worthwhile noting that Charles' concerns were for the future. In 1715, despite ten years of marriage, he had no heir
  • the lands ruled by the Habsburgs should never be divided, and he was mindful of the wrangles over the Spanish inheritance of his cousin Carlos II, which ultimately deprived him (he believed) of the throne of Spain
  • However, there was a strong body of legal opinion that suggested that so powerful were these claims ‘of blood' that no prior agreement could abrogate them, and certainly nothing could prevent their rights being transmitted to the future children of a female Habsburg
  • The Pragmatic Sanction assumed that males would come before females in order of inheritance, but if there were no male heirs, then a female could inherit all the powers and rights due to the head of the house of Habsburg
  • it was accepted that a female Habsburg could wear the Crown of St Stephen. Constitutional lawyers would insist that, technically speaking, Maria Theresa should become ‘King of Hungary’, although she was always referred to as Queen of Hungary
  • The sudden death of Charles produced a crisis for the Habsburgs, firstly in the political domain, but secondly, in the area of dynastic ideology
  • set apart from ordinary humanity, the chosen vessels of God's will
  • The Habsburgs had made so much of their long ancestry, of the male descent through the generations, since the time of the first Rudolf
  • To describe Charles VI as the ‘last of the Habsburgs’ plays to a widely-held legend of the enfeeblement of the Habsburg line
  • it marked their ancient heritage
  • his descendent Carlos II of Spain
  • This grotesque appearance lay behind the assumption that the Habsburgs had died out in the male line for genetic reasons, as a consequence of their deliberate policy of marrying within the family which they had followed since the middle of the sixteenth century
  • In fact the failure of the Habsburg line had much more to do with epidemic disease and poor standards of infant care in the Habsburg palaces than with any genetic taint
  • The lack of a male heir may have had a hereditary element, because there were many more female than male births in the House of Habsburg, but the disappearance of the male line was more an accident than a sign of waning procreative powers.
  • or this reason he never accepted that it was his elder daughter Maria Theresa who would succeed him, and had done nothing to introduce her to the complexities of government
  • The rules and taboos which constrained other ruling houses were transmuted by the Habsburgs' notion of their own unique collective identity
  • The Habsburgs, from the founder of the family's fortune, Emperor Rudolf I in the thirteenth century, had sedulously constructed a myth of their origins which set them apart from ordinary humanity
  • And most Habsburg rulers year by year, right up until the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916, played a solemn part in the annual Corpus Christi procession through the streets of Vienna
  • It was for this reason that the Darks of Habsburg identity, like the jutting jaw, were a mark of honour not a disfigurement
  • It had been the grimly practical Wallenstein and not the Virgin Mary who had rescued the Habsburg cause in the 1630s. In the 1740s Maria Theresa saved her inheritance with a steely will and an unswerving determination to succeed
  • Her response, conditioned both by her character and the exigencies of the circumstances, was very different from her fussy and pedantic father, obsessed with the lost throne of Spain
  • A young woman inherited the crowns and possessions of her father, but also an empty treasury and an army commanded by dotards. The process by which she stiffened the resolve of her generals, won the nobility and gentry of Hungary to her cause, and organised the resistance to the Prussian, Bavarian and French armies has itself achieved the quality of myth
  • Maria Theresa was as involved with the identity of the house of Habsburgs as he had been. She followed her father in his obsessive concern for the safe keeping of the bones of their ancestors
  • Maria Theresa's son Joseph II has been nicknamed ‘The Revolutionary Emperor' by one of his biographers
  • The transformation which she inspired and then enforced on her territories was less dramatic (and less publicised) than Joseph’s: it was also a lot more successful and longer lasting. The crisis of Maria Theresa's first years and the subsequent revival of Habsburg power is most often looked upon in external terms, both political and economic
  • She moved away from the reliance on the Imperial title as a principle source of Habsburg legitimacy
  • However, even then, she refused to be crowned as Empress, preferring the titles she held in her own right to the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia
  • Mother of the Country
  • who ruled briefly as Leopold II, knew better than either of them how to play the twin chords of coercion and free expression
  • But the Habsburgs, from Maria Theresa onwards, turned their backs on the tradition of grandeur and portrayed themselves as the first servants of the nation
  • he believed as ardently as any of his predecessors in the unique role and mission of his clan
  • Historians have come to regard Maria Theresa as one of the most significant and innovative of the long line of Habsburg rulers
  • The potential catastrophe of the 1740s was that the Habsburg lands, like Poland a generation later, might have been dismembered or at best much reduced in scale and power
Javier E

Hong Kong Shows the Flaws in China's Zero-Sum Worldview - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • China finds altering course especially difficult, mainly because of how its domestic political system functions. As an authoritarian regime—and one that is more and more centered on a personal cult surrounding Xi Jinping—admitting fault is perceived as a threat to credibility.
  • instead of compromising, Beijing trots out a couple of standard tactics to try to get its way. First, it throws money at the problem.
  • Then, Beijing mixes in coercion
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  • A significant share of Hong Kong’s population isn’t willing to exchange its civil rights for new railway lines, though, so Beijing has cracked down harder on dissent. Protests have become more violent, with some locals accusing the police of unwarranted brutality. In late July, a mob viciously assaulted peaceful protesters. We don’t know for sure whether Beijing coordinated the efforts, but such methods of terrorizing dissenters are standard Communist weapon
Javier E

What If the Left Was Right on Race? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • I doubt the last claim: that “instrumental racists” believe voters will perhaps only respond to racism. And I doubt that voters, in fact, only respond to racism. Something distinct and deeper is at work. This deeper force explains nearly all of Trump’s most odious and irresponsible comments, not just the racist ones. It helps explain why so many conservatives and Republicans were caught off guard by Trump’s rise and the resonance of his bigotry.
  • Karen Stenner, author of the 2005 book The Authoritarian Dynamic. The book built on research literature that distinguishes between “authoritarians,” who prize what Stenner calls “oneness and sameness” so much so that they are prone to support coercion to effect it, and “libertarians,” who not only defend but affirmatively prize diversity and difference. (Those labels are not to be conflated with the popular definitions of the terms.)
  • Using “racist” as a shorthand to describe Stenner’s intolerant subjects is inadequate.
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  • She thought that both the most extreme authoritarians and the most extreme libertarians have powerful, largely innate and highly durable psychological predispositions that affect how they react to all that is unfamiliar and different
  • If contacted by white interviewers, the “authoritarians” were almost indistinguishable from the “libertarians” in their willingness to schedule a conversation. They proved dramatically more reluctant to participate when contacted by black interviewers.
  • The authoritarians were more hostile, suspicious, and anxious with black interviewers, whereas “especially given a black interviewer, libertarians were vastly more likely than authoritarians to display great warmth toward their visitors.”
  • With white interviewers, authoritarians were less likely than libertarians to introduce talk about “social exclusion, isolation, and disconnection,” but with a black interviewer they were far more likely, even as libertarians were indifferent to the interviewer’s race. “The language of authoritarians was especially inclusive when it was just ‘us’ talking among ourselves,” Stenner explained, “but they were clearly thinking exclusion when confronting one of ‘them.’”
  • Regardless of the interviewers, authoritarians tended to say fewer overall words and fewer different words than libertarians. And the evident differences were greatly magnified in the presence of black interviewers. The sophistication of discussions “tended to diverge by just over one grade level when both interviewers were white,” with authoritarians “talking at almost a fifth-grade level” and libertarians talking “around the sixth-grade level,”
  • when forced to engage in conversations with a black primary interviewer, the two characters were as distinct as third and ninth graders in the complexity of their discussions.” Why? The critical distinction between libertarians and authoritarians, Stemmer argues, is that “the former are excited and engaged and the latter frightened and unhinged by difference.”
  • “fears regarding immorality and crime, claims about the critical need to reestablish some normative order, and elaboration of plans for accomplishing this” occupied the bulk of “their psychic space,” consuming a vastly disproportionate share of their time and energy.
  • the left needs to know that it will better grasp reality and increase its odds of defeating Trumpism if it understands that anti-authoritarianism rather than antiracism is the most apt, effective framework for opposing what ails the right.
  • their intolerance of difference was much broader than racism, encompassing racial and ethnic out-groups, political dissidents, and people they consider moral deviants. Authoritarians display distinct traits across very different domains of tolerance.
  • “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”
  • Stenner began her research with a questionnaire that probed the attitudes of her subjects toward child-rearing
  • many on the left and the right misunderstand racism in politics because neither quite understands the role of authoritarians.
  • the left makes several significant errors with regard to racism on the right
  • most important, leftists too often conceive of Trumpist politics as rooted primarily in racism, or even an ideological belief in white supremacy, rather than an authoritarian “different-ism” that manifests as racism at times but as distinct (if psychologically similar) intolerances at other times
  • “All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference… are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,”
  • “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.
  • “the authoritarian dynamic” provides a better account than mere racism of political conflict “across the seemingly diverse domains of race and immigration, civil liberties, crime and punishment, and of when and why those battles will be the most heated
  • Trump sometimes seems like the paradigmatic example of the authoritarian personality type. But he may simply be a charismatic leader who understands – whether by some advisor’s dark calculation, or his own instincts – the vulnerability and malleability of his audience
  • showy celebration of an absolute insistence upon individual autonomy and unconstrained diversity pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.”
  • I’d also advise the left to bear in mind that the right is a diverse coalition composed of authoritarians as well as many libertarians and people in between
  • when directed at non-authoritarian non-racists, false accusations could conceivably make them less inclined to probe, ponder, or perceive actual racism in others
  • The left should refine its best critiques on race and abandon its worst as lacking fairness and rigor.
  • And the non-authoritarian right needs to wake up to the authoritarians in their midst, taking responsibility for trying to deprive them of power rather than scapegoating or fixating on the least persuasive of the left’s critiques.
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