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maddieireland334

Mitt Romney isn't exactly ruling out his presidential nomination - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ut-his-presidential-nomination

Romney election US nomination

shared by maddieireland334 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • the 2012 GOP nominee is nevertheless leaving the door open — just a crack — to the possibility of being drafted by his party at a contested convention in July.
  • don't think anyone in our party should say, 'Oh no, even if the people in the party wanted me to be the president, I would say no to it,'" Romney said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
  • If through the primary process Republican front-runner Donald Trump fails to collect the majority of delegates needed to secure the nomination, the result would be a contested convention.
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  • I can guarantee you this: One of the people running for president — one of the four — is going to be the Republican Party nominee," he added. "Three of the four are people I would endorse. But I'm not running, and I'm not going to be running."
Javier E

Polarization in Poland: A Warning From Europe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...568324

poland polarization authoritarian liberal democracy conspiracy theory propaganda

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half. The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide, one that runs through not only what used to be the Polish right but also the old Hungarian right, the Italian right, and, with some differences, the British right and the American right, too.
  • Some of my New Year’s Eve guests continued, as my husband and I did, to support the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market center-right—remaining in political parties that aligned, more or less, with European Christian Democrats, with the liberal parties of Germany and the Netherlands, and with the Republican Party of John McCain. Some now consider themselves center-left. But others wound up in a different place, supporting a nativist party called Law and Justice—a party that has moved dramatically away from the positions it held when it first briefly ran the government, from 2005 to 2007, and when it occupied the presidency (not the same thing in Poland), from 2005 to 2010.
  • My husband was the Polish defense minister for a year and a half, in a coalition government led by Law and Justice during its first, brief experience of power; later, he broke with that party and was for seven years the foreign minister in another coalition government, this one led by the center-right party Civic Platform; in 2015 he didn’t run for office. As a journalist and his American-born wife, I have always attracted some press interest. But after Law and Justice won that year, I was featured on the covers of two pro-regime magazines, wSieci and Do Rzeczy—former friends of ours work at both—as the clandestine Jewish coordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland. Similar stories have appeared on Telewizja Polska’s evening news.
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  • In a famous journal he kept from 1935 to 1944, the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian chronicled an even more extreme shift in his own country. Like me, Sebastian was Jewish; like me, most of his friends were on the political right. In his journal, he described how, one by one, they were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame. He recounted the arrogance and confidence they acquired as they moved away from identifying themselves as Europeans—admirers of Proust, travelers to Paris—and instead began to call themselves blood-and-soil Romanians. He listened as they veered into conspiratorial thinking or became casually cruel. People he had known for years insulted him to his face and then acted as if nothing had happened. “Is friendship possible,” he wondered in 1937, “with people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?”
  • This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired
  • the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause célèbre. Just one court case—one disputed trial—plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another. But this shows that vastly different understandings of what is meant by “France” were already there, waiting to be discovered
  • More important, though the people I am writing about here, the nativist ideologues, are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be (about which more in a minute), they are not poor and rural, they are not in any sense victims of the political transition, and they are not an impoverished underclass. On the contrary, they are educated, they speak foreign languages, and they travel abroad—just like Sebastian’s friends in the 1930s.
  • What has caused this transformation
  • My answer is a complicated one, because I think the explanation is universal. Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.
  • And it is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe suffered in the 1930s. Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession. What’s more, the refugee wave that has hit other European countries has not been felt here at all. There are no migrant camps, and there is no Islamist terrorism, or terrorism of any kind.
  • in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.
  • All of these debates, whether in 1890s France or 1990s Poland, have at their core a series of important questions: Who gets to define a nation? And who, therefore, gets to rule a nation? For a long time, we have imagined that these questions were settled—but why should they ever be?
  • the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization.
  • Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.
  • In monarchies such as prerevolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets
  • Two decades ago, different understandings of “Poland” must already have been present too, just waiting to be exacerbated by chance, circumstance, and personal ambition
  • Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal.
  • As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
  • Lenin’s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of a neutral state, of apolitical civil servants and an objective media. He wrote that freedom of the press “is a deception.” He mocked freedom of assembly as a “hollow phrase.” As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than “a machine for the suppression of the working class.”
  • These parties tolerate the existence of political opponents. But they use every means possible, legal and illegal, to reduce their opponents’ ability to function and to curtail competition in politics and economics. They dislike foreign investment and criticize privatization, unless it is designed to benefit their supporters. They undermine meritocracy. Like Donald Trump, they mock the notions of neutrality and professionalism, whether in journalists or civil servants. They discourage businesses from advertising in “opposition”—by which they mean illegitimate—media.
  • nepotism, state capture. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: It represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy and competition, principles that, by definition, never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, then what’s wrong with it?
  • If you are someone who believes that you deserve to rule, then your motivation to attack the elite, pack the courts, and warp the press to achieve your ambitions is strong. Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the “system” is unfair—these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right.
  • Whatever mistakes the party might make, whatever laws it might break, at least the “truth” about Smolensk would finally be told.
  • the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand much less of their adherents. They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police. They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don’t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality.
  • yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium-Size Lies. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it’s been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.
  • In Hungary, the lie is unoriginal: It is the belief, shared by the Russian government and the American alt-right, in the superhuman powers of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to bring down the nation through the deliberate importation of migrants, even though no such migrants exist in Hungary.
  • In Poland, at least the lie is sui generis. It is the Smolensk conspiracy theory: the belief that a nefarious plot brought down the president’s plane in April 2010.
  • The truth, as it began to emerge, was not comforting to the Law and Justice Party or to its leader, the dead president’s twin brother. The plane had taken off late; the president was likely in a hurry to land, because he wanted to use the trip to launch his reelection campaign. There was thick fog in Smolensk, which did not have a real airport, just a landing strip in the forest; the pilots considered diverting the plane, which would have meant a drive of several hours to the ceremony. After the president had a brief phone call with his brother, his advisers apparently pressed the pilots to land. Some of them, against protocol, walked in and out of the cockpit during the flight. Also against protocol, the chief of the air force came and sat beside the pilots. “Zmieścisz się śmiało”—“You’ll make it, be bold,” he said. Seconds later, the plane collided with the tops of some birch trees, rolled over, and hit the ground.
  • When, some weeks after the election, European institutions and human-rights groups began responding to the actions of the Law and Justice government, they focused on the undermining of the courts and public media. They didn’t focus on the institutionalization of the Smolensk conspiracy theory, which was, frankly, just too weird for outsiders to understand. And yet the decision to put a fantasy at the heart of government policy really was the source of the authoritarian actions that followed.
  • Although the Macierewicz commission has never produced a credible alternate explanation for the crash, the Smolensk lie laid the moral groundwork for other lies. Those who could accept this elaborate theory, with no evidence whatsoever, could accept anything.
  • picking apart personal and political motives is extremely difficult. That’s what I learned from the story of Jacek Kurski, the director of Polish state television and the chief ideologist of the Polish illiberal state. He started out in the same place, at the same time, as his brother, Jarosław Kurski, who edits the largest and most influential liberal Polish newspaper. They are two sides of the same coin.
  • The Smolensk conspiracy theory, like the Hungarian migration conspiracy theory, served another purpose: For a younger generation that no longer remembered Communism, and a society where former Communists had largely disappeared from politics, it offered a new reason to distrust the politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals who had emerged from the struggles of the 1990s and now led the country.
  • More to the point, it offered a means of defining a new and better elite. There was no need for competition, or for exams, or for a résumé bristling with achievements. Anyone who professes belief in the Smolensk lie is by definition a true patriot—and, incidentally, might well qualify for a government job.
  • Hungary’s belated reckoning with its Communist past—putting up museums, holding memorial services, naming perpetrators—did not, as I thought it would, help cement respect for the rule of law, for restraints on the state, for pluralism
  • 16 years after the Terror Háza’s opening, Hungary’s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising. It has created a new business elite that is loyal to Orbán.
  • Schmidt embodies what the Bulgarian writer Ivan Krastev recently described as the desire of many eastern and central Europeans to “shake off the colonial dependency implicit in the very project of Westernization,” to rid themselves of the humiliation of having been imitators, followers of the West rather than founders.
  • Listening to her, I became convinced that there was never a moment when Schmidt’s views “changed.” She never turned against liberal democracy, because she never believed in it, or at least she never thought it was all that important. For her, the antidote to Communism is not democracy but an anti-Dreyfusard vision of national sovereignty
  • It’s clear that the Medium-Size Lie is working for Orbán—just as it has for Donald Trump—if only because it focuses the world’s attention on his rhetoric rather than his actions.
  • I described my 1999 New Year’s Eve party to a Greek political scientist. Quietly, he laughed at me. Or rather, he laughed with me; he didn’t mean to be rude. But this thing I was calling polarization was nothing new. “The post-1989 liberal moment—this was the exception,” Stathis Kalyvas told me. Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.
  • Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome.
  • In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.
  • In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, particularly in an era when people have rejected aristocracy, and no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth or that the ruling class is endorsed by God
  • Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself.
  • More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community.
  • The authoritarian state, or even the semi-authoritarian state—the one-party state, the illiberal state—offers that promise: that the nation will be ruled by the best people, the deserving people, the members of the party, the believers in the Medium-Size Lie.
Javier E

The Tory leadership contest: your handy idiots guide | Marina Hyde | Opinion | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...test-brexit-conservative-party

tory leadership guide brexit

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • As I type this, Dominic is now voting for the deal he resigned to oppose, having negotiated that deal in the first place. He spent most of the week reckoning we should go back to the EU over the backstop, I mean … Dominic? DOMINIC? It’s now not so much that that ship has sailed, more that it has sailed, hit an iceberg, sunk, and formed the basis for a myriad books and dramas, culminating in the biggest-grossing movie of all time. WHICH BIT OF THIS JOURNEY DID YOU MISS? You were Brexit secretary. You were literally on deck with Michel Barnier while the band was playing.
Javier E

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...suffocation-of-democracy

democracy authoritarian fascism illiberal history

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
katyshannon

António Guterres to be next UN secretary general | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rres-next-un-secretary-general

antónio guterres world news the guardian UN Secretary General politics Policy

shared by katyshannon on 06 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • António Guterres, the former Portuguese prime minister, will be the next UN secretary general, after the security council agreed he should replace Ban Ki-moon at the beginning of next year.
  • In a rare show of unity, all 15 ambassadors from the security council emerged from the sixth in a series of straw polls to announce that they had agreed on Guterres, who was UN high commissioner for refugees for a decade, and that they would confirm the choice in a formal vote on Thursday.
  • The abrupt end to the UN leadership race came as a surprise. Many observers had expected the selection process to go on late into October as the major powers struggled to promote their favourite candidates.
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  • some thought that Russia, currently holding the presidency of the security council, would block Guterres, as Moscow had said it wanted an eastern European in the top UN job.
  • Guterres’s margin of victory was decisive. He won 13 votes in his support and two abstentions, with no one voting against him. The second-place candidate, the Slovak Miroslav Lajčák, had seven votes in support and six against him – two of them vetoes from permanent council members.
  • The security council on Thursday will decide whether to have a formal vote or, if the two abstentions change their mind, to simply pass a resolution nominating Guterres by acclamation. That nomination would go to the UN general assembly which would either vote or, more likely, confirm the candidacy by acclamation.
  • As the UN’s refugee chief, Guterres persistently appealed to the conscience of the international community over the worst refugee crisis since the second world war, and he vowed to carry on being a spokesman for the downtrodden if he became UN secretary general.
  • The fact that he was promising to be an activist on humanitarian causes also makes Guterres victory surprising, as both Russia and China in particular have been resistant to outspoken activists in top UN posts
  • Also there was widespread sentiment this year that it was time for a woman to run the organisation for the first time in its 71-year history and there were several strong female candidates in the contest.
  • In the final ballot, the highest-placed woman candidate, the head of Unesco, Irina Bokova, finished fourth. Another female candidate for the job, Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres described the result as “bittersweet”.
  • The contest to replace Ban as secretary general began in April with public hearings in the UN general assembly, the first time candidates for the job had had to make their pitch in public. The new transparency was a result of a groundswell of pressure from civil society activists, in the 1 For 7 Billion movement.
Javier E

Review: 'Transaction Man' and 'The Economists' Hour' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...594718

economics science policy inequality history

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • little more than a generation ago, a stealthy revolution swept America. It was a dual changing of the guard: Two tribes, two attitudes, two approaches to a good society were simultaneously displaced by upstart rivals
  • In the world of business, the manufacturing bosses gave way to Wall Street dealmakers, bent on breaking up their empires. “Organization Man,” as the journalist William H. Whyte had christened the corporate archetype in his 1956 book, was ousted by “Transaction Man,” to cite Nicholas Lemann’s latest work of social history.
  • In the world of public policy, lawyers who counted on large institutions to deliver prosperity and social harmony lost influence. In their place rose quantitative thinkers who put their faith in markets.
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  • It was The Economists’ Hour, as the title of the New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum’s debut book has it.
  • Lemann and Appelbaum contribute to the second wave of post-2008 commentary. The first postmortems focused narrowly on the global financial crisis, dissecting the distorted incentives, regulatory frailty, and groupthink that caused bankers to blow up the world economy
  • The new round of analysis broadens the lens, searching out larger political and intellectual wrong turns, an expansion that reflects the morphing of the 2008 crash into a general populist surge.
  • Berle went further. He laid out in detail how shareholders, being so dispersed and numerous, could not hope to restrain bosses—indeed, how nobody could do so. Enormous powers to shape society belonged to company chieftains who answered to no one. Hence Berle’s prescription: The government should regulate them.
  • “the Treaty of Detroit,” GM’s bosses granted workers regular cost-of-living pay increases, a measure of job security, health insurance, and a pension—benefits that were almost unheard-of. General Motors had “set itself up as a comprehensive welfare state for its workers,” in Lemann’s succinct formulation.
  • Berle celebrated the Treaty of Detroit by propounding a pro-corporate liberalism. The corporation had become the “conscience-carrier of twentieth-century American society,” he marveled
  • Anticipating the “end of history” triumphalism of a later era, the sociologist Daniel Bell feted the corporatist order in a book titled The End of Ideology.
  • the chief threat to Berle’s vision came not from America’s suspicion of concentrated power. It came from economics
  • Starting in the 1970s, however, economists began to wield extraordinary influence. They persuaded Richard Nixon to abolish the military draft. They brought economics into the courtroom. They took over many of the top posts at regulatory agencies
  • The rise of economics, Appelbaum writes, “transformed the business of government, the conduct of business, and, as a result, the patterns of everyday life.
  • Jensen agreed with Berle’s starting point: Corporate managers were unaccountable because shareholders could not restrain them. But rather than seeing a remedy in checks exerted by regulators and organized labor, Jensen proposed to overhaul the firm so that ownership and control were reunited
  • In sum, Jensen’s prescriptions inverted Berle’s. The market could be made to solve the problem of the firm. Government could pull back from regulation
  • After decades in which economists’ influence expanded rapidly, the striking thing about the Trump administration and its foreign analogues is that they have largely dispensed with economic advisers
  • Shortly after the publication of his research, the invention of junk bonds made hostile takeovers the rage. During the ’80s, more than a quarter of the companies on the Fortune 500 list were targeted. Jensen became the scholar who explained why this unprecedented boardroom bloodbath was good news for America.
  • to a considerable extent, the news was good. Shielded from market discipline, the old corporate heads had deployed capital carelessly
  • From 1977 to 1988, Jensen calculated, American corporations had increased in value by $500 billion as a result of the new market for corporate control. Reengineered and reinvigorated, American business staved off what might have been an existential threat from Japanese competition.
  • Yet a large cost eluded Jensen’s calculations. The social contract of the Berle era was gone: the unstated assumption of lifetime employment, the promise of retirement benefits, the sense of community and stability and shared purpose that gave millions of lives their meaning. Berle had viewed the corporation as a social and political institution as much as an economic one, and the dismembering of corporations on purely economic grounds was bound to generate fallout that had not been accounted for
  • Even before the 2008 crash, Jensen disavowed the transactional culture he had helped to legitimize. Holy shit, Jensen remembers saying to himself. Anything can be corrupted.
  • Contrary to common presumption, the economics establishment in the 1990s and 2000s did not believe that markets were perfectly efficient. Rather, influential economists took the pragmatic view that markets would discipline financiers more effectively than regulators could
  • He is happy to state at the outset that market-oriented reforms have lifted billions out of poverty, and to recognize that the deregulation that helped undo Berle-ism was not some kind of right-wing plot. In the late ’70s, it was initiated by Democrats such as President Jimmy Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy.
  • Inequality has grown to unacceptable extremes in highly developed economies. From 1980 to 2010, life expectancy for poor Americans scandalously declined, even as the rich lived longer.
  • Meanwhile, the primacy of economics has not generated faster economic growth. From 1990 until the eve of the financial crisis, U.S. real GDP per person grew by a little under 2 percent a year, less than the 2.5 percent a year in the oil-shocked 1970s.
  • economists have repeatedly made excessive claims for their discipline
  • In the ’60s, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s advisers thought they had the business cycle tamed. They believed they could prevent recessions by “fine-tuning” tax and spending policies
  • When this expectation was exposed as hubris, Milton Friedman urged central banks to focus exclusively on the supply of money circulating in the economy. This too was soon discredited. From the ’90s onward, economists oversold the benefits of targeting inflation, forgetting that other perils—the human cost of unemployment, the destabilization wrought by financial bubbles—might well be worse than rising prices
  • Greenspan and Summers ducked the political challenge of buffering new kinds of financial trading with regulatory safeguards
  • Michael C. Jensen, an entertainingly impassioned financial economist who reframed attitudes toward the corporation in the mid-’70s.
  • today’s fierce international competition and disruptive innovation oblige businesses to cut costs or go under. The dilemma is that, even as they compel efficiency, globalization and technological change exacerbate inequality and uncertainty and therefore the need for a compassionate social contract
  • LinkedIn is not a solution to worker insecurity writ large, still less to inequality. On the contrary, a world in which people compete to gather connections may be even less equal than our current one. A few high-octane networkers will attract large followings, while a long tail of pedestrians will have only a handful of buddies
  • Rather than buy in to a single grand vision, societies should prefer a robust contest among interest groups—what Lemann calls pluralism. Borrowing from the forgotten early-20th-century political scientist Arthur Bentley, Lemann defines groups broadly. States and cities are “locality groups,” income categories are “wealth groups,” supporters of a particular politician constitute “personality groups.” People inevitably affiliate themselves with such groups; groups naturally compete to influence the government; and the resulting push and pull, not squabbles among intellectuals about organizing concepts, constitutes the proper stuff of politics
  • Lemann is aware of the risks in this conclusion. He cites the obvious objection: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” In a contest of competing interest groups, the ones with the most money are likely to win
  • For those who regard inequality as a challenge, an interest-group free-for-all is a perilous prescription.
  • Appelbaum presents a series of persuasive recommendations, confirming that Lemann is wrong to despair of reasoned, technocratic argument. If policy makers want ordinary Americans to appreciate the benefits of open trade, they must ensure that displaced workers have access to training and health care. Because some interest groups are weaker than others, government should correct the double standard by which the power of labor unions is regarded with antipathy but the power of business monopolies is tolerated
  • Progressives should look for ways to be pro-competition but anti-inequality
  • —it isn’t so clear that the economists have departed
  • throughout Appelbaum’s narrative, many of the knights who slay the dragons of bad economic ideology are economists themselves. The story of the past generation is more about debates among economists than about economists pitted against laypeople. Perhaps, with a bit of humility and retooling, the economists will have their day again. If they do not come up with the next set of good ideas, it is not obvious who will
Javier E

Coronavirus has not suspended politics - it has revealed the nature of power ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...virus-politics-lockdown-hobbes

politics political theory hobbes coercion arbitrary power pandemic china korea

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • e keep hearing that this is a war. Is it really? What helps to give the current crisis its wartime feel is the apparent absence of normal political argument.
  • this is not the suspension of politics. It is the stripping away of one layer of political life to reveal something more raw underneath
  • In a democracy we tend to think of politics as a contest between different parties for our support. We focus on the who and the what of political life: who is after our votes, what they are offering us, who stands to benefit. We see elections as the way to settle these arguments
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • But the bigger questions in any democracy are always about the how: how will governments exercise the extraordinary powers we give them? And how will we respond when they do?
  • These are the questions that have always preoccupied political theorists. But now they are not so theoretical.
  • As the current crisis shows, the primary fact that underpins political existence is that some people get to tell others what to do.
  • At the heart of all modern politics is a trade-off between personal liberty and collective choice. This is the Faustian bargain identified by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, when the country was being torn apart by a real civil war.
  • As Hobbes knew, to exercise political rule is to have the power of life and death over citizens. The only reason we would possibly give anyone that power is because we believe it is the price we pay for our collective safety. But it also means that we are entrusting life-and-death decisions to people we cannot ultimately control.
  • The primary risk is that those on the receiving end refuse to do what they are told. At that point, there are only two choices. Either people are forced to obey, using the coercive powers the state has at its disposal. Or politics breaks down altogether, which Hobbes argued was the outcome we should fear most of all.
  • Autocratic regimes such as China also find it hard to face up to crises until they have to – and, unlike democracies, they can suppress the bad news for longer if it suits them. But when action becomes unavoidable, they can go further. The Chinese lockdown succeeded in containing the disease through ruthless pre-emption.
  • The rawness of these choices is usually obscured by the democratic imperative to seek consensus. That has not gone away. The government is doing all it can to dress up its decisions in the language of commonsense advice.
  • But as the experience of other European countries shows, as the crisis deepens the stark realities become clearer
  • This crisis has revealed some other hard truths. National governments really matter, and it really matters which one you happen to find yourself under.
  • In a democracy, we have the luxury of waiting for the next election to punish political leaders for their mistakes. But that is scant consolation when matters of basic survival are at stake. Anyway, it’s not much of a punishment, relatively speaking. They might lose their jobs, though few politicians wind up destitute. We might lose our lives.
  • for now, we are at the mercy of our national leaders. That is something else Hobbes warned about: there is no avoiding the element of arbitrariness at the heart of all politics. It is the arbitrariness of individual political judgment.
  • Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be, but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to make the really tough choices.
  • We wait until we have no choice and then we adapt. That means democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one, though some are better at playing catch-up than others.
  • Though the pandemic is a global phenomenon, and is being experienced similarly in many different places, the impact of the disease is greatly shaped by decisions taken by individual governments.
  • Some democracies have managed to adapt faster: in South Korea the disease is being tamed by extensive tracing and widespread surveillance of possible carriers. But in that case, the regime had recent experience to draw on in its handling of the Mers outbreak of 2015, which also shaped the collective memory of its citizens
  • It is easier to adapt when you have adapted already. It is much harder when you are making it up as you go along
  • In recent years, it has sometimes appeared that global politics is simply a choice between rival forms of technocracy
  • In China, it is a government of engineers backed up by a one-party state. In the west, it is the rule of economists and central bankers, operating within the constraints of a democratic system
  • This creates the impression that the real choices are technical judgments about how to run vast, complex economic and social systems.
  • But in the last few weeks another reality has pushed through. The ultimate judgments are about how to use coercive power.
  • These aren’t simply technical questions. Some arbitrariness is unavoidable. And the contest in the exercise of that power between democratic adaptability and autocratic ruthlessness will shape all of our futures.
  • our political world is still one Hobbes would recognise
malonema1

Is Trump closer to obstruction of justice? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-40208812

politics trump comey

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Is Trump closer to obstruction of justice?
  • James Comey may not have added much new detail in testimony on Thursday about his one-to-one meetings with Donald Trump but he did add something: he set the scene, and law professors say that could be a missing piece in an obstruction of justice case against the president.
  • We knew that already - Mr Comey made details of the meeting public several weeks ago - and Committee Republicans sought on Thursday to paint it as an innocent exchange: "I hope" was not an instruction, they said.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • So what's changed? Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law professor and former federal prosecutor, said the oral testimony gave new and legally significant insight into how Mr Comey interpreted the president's words in the moment.
  • Mr Comey's testified on Thursday that he clearly understood Mr Trump to be pushing him to drop the inquiry. We also heard for the first time that the president cleared the room before making the remarks, removing even Mr Comey's boss, the attorney general.
  • "Whether it's a case that should be prosecuted, or whether it merits impeachment, those are separate questions, but the elements are now there for obstruction. There was a corrupt intent to impede justice. I think you could charge this case."
  • "In his oral testimony, he made it clearer that he believed Trump was trying to obstruct justice. He said that when Trump used the word hope, he understood that to be a command of some sort, and that strengthens the case for obstruction.
  • "Everybody is parsing the words of course, but I don't know that Comey's testimony strengthens or weakens an obstruction case," he said. The meetings described by Mr Comey were however "clearly inappropriate", he said. "This is simply not how Americans want a president to conduct himself."
  • "Comey put his credibility on the line today and he did it in a very public way," he said. "Now it's a credibility contest between him and the president, and I think it's safe to say Comey is winning that contest."
  • Both those scenarios remain unlikely however, at least for the meantime. It is effectively impossible to bring criminal charges against a sitting president - the case would have to be brought by the executive branch, of which Mr Trump is the boss.
  • So Mr Comey's testimony will not trigger legal proceedings any time soon, but it does have the potential to damage the president's political standing and resonate with moderate voters, Mr Posner said."Obstruction of justice is clearly on the minds of a lot of people and I think it damages the president politically," he said. "He continues to have supporters of course. But for many people in the middle, their opinion of the president will decline and their reservations will strengthen."
ecfruchtman

North Korea is closer towards nuclear capability - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 03 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 03 Jun 17
     
    China's President Xi Jinping calls for a "peaceful" resolution to tensions on the Korean Peninsula during a phone call with President Donald Trump as the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group churned toward the contested region.
  • ecfruchtman on 05 Jun 17
     
    China's President Xi Jinping calls for a "peaceful" resolution to tensions on the Korean Peninsula during a phone call with President Donald Trump as the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group churned toward the contested region.
aleija

Opinion | The election has actually been the most normal thing about 2020 - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-most-normal-thing-about-2020

election US history Trump opinion

shared by aleija on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The only normal event has been the presidential election.
  • . As strange as all the events informing the race have been, on a fundamental level, this election has been pretty much exactly like those before it. Sure, day-to-day events such as campaign rallies and the debates were different, and if President Trump contests the results, we will quickly step into uncharted territory. But in these strange times, four time-tested political patterns have held.
  • Neither Trump’s failures nor his supposed accomplishments have unsettled the stasis that increasingly defines our politics. Republicans like Trump, and Democrats (plus a few swing voters) don’t. Joe Biden could still win in a landslide — but even if he does, Trump will maintain the loyalty of a huge number of Americans.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Third, though the world has changed since 2016, the underlying contours of the American electoral map haven’t shifted much. Four years ago, Trump triumphed over Hillary Clinton by winning swing states such as Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. This year, those same states again may be decisive: Trump’s path to a majority is narrow without Michigan and Wisconsin, and it will be extremely difficult for him to win without Florida or Pennsylvania.
  • Finally, remember: Like many recent races, this contest is still relatively close. We live in an era of tight elections: No candidate since Bill Clinton has won the popular vote by more than eight percentage points.
mariedhorne

Uganda Votes for President Amid Internet Shutdown - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...sidential-election-11610613391

Uganda politics

shared by mariedhorne on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Ugandans voted on Thursday amid heightened security and an internet shutdown after a hotly contested and violent race in which a youthful rapper-turned-lawmaker is attempting to unseat one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders.
  • Some 18 million voters cast ballots at around 35,000 polling stations across the coffee- and oil-producing country to decide a presidential election that has sparked the worst political clashes in decades. Dozens of military trucks mounted with machine guns patrolled the uncharacteristically quiet streets of the capital, Kampala. State television warned voters not to wear clothing in colors that denoted partisanship, to “avoid trouble.”
  • Incumbent President Yoweri Museveni has easily won previous contests since assuming power in 1986, but his winning streak appears to be in jeopardy in the face of a challenge from Bobi Wine, a 38-year-old musician.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The winner requires more than 50% of the vote.
  • Election observers from the U.S. and European Union aren’t monitoring the election for the first time in decades, after the government declined to accredit monitors
  • Some recent polls suggest that Mr. Museveni will win with a slim margin of just 53%, a far cry from his 61% victory in 2016. Yet many analysts expect the 76-year old to claim a much larger margin, due to the control he wields over state institutions.
  • Crucially, Uganda hosts East Africa’s largest unexploited oil reserves and is on the cusp of an oil boom, as oil companies prepare to invest as much as $20 billion to develop vast crude fields along the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, where production is expected to commence in 2024.
katherineharron

Pete Buttigieg picks up the pace in Iowa as impeachment keeps others away - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Buttigieg embarked on one of his most frenetic days yet in the Hawkeye State, speeding across the state's snow-covered northern border with Minnesota to pitch his candidacy to both diehard Democrats who are leaning toward caucusing for him and what the mayor calls "future former Republicans," those voters who backed President Donald Trump in 2016 but want to vote against him four year later.
  • "If he does not place in the top two in either Iowa or New Hampshire, or I would argue if he places behind Biden in both of those contests, that will be it," said one source familiar with the Buttigieg campaign's thinking in Iowa, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the campaign. That view reflects the idea that without strong finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, Buttigieg will lack the momentum his campaign is counting on to carry him into future contests.
  • All of this comes as Warren, Sanders and Klobuchar -- all of whom have also spent considerable time focused on Iowa -- will be required to be in Washington to fulfill their role as jurors in Trump's impeachment trial, taking them off the campaign trail with only weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "I think I am going to sign a caucus card for Pete today," she said. Asked what she would do if Buttigieg didn't win the nomination, Hrdlicka was direct: "I am going to vote for Trump."
  • Buttigieg's campaign is enthused by these supporters, but knows it will take more than just a surge in former Republicans to win the Iowa caucuses. So Buttigieg has begun to put the hard ask on voters here in Iowa, urging them to embrace the next few weeks as decision time.
  • "We've advanced to this stage in the race with a message that obviously wasn't based on me having been a household name for or having an office in Washington, DC," Buttigieg said in Newton on Wednesday. "It's about making sure we connect with the lived experience on the ground of the voters who have so much to gain or lose by the decisions that are going to be made in the White House in the years ahead."
aidenborst

Media should call GOP election fight an attempted coup, historian says - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US trump history Culture gop election-overview election fraud coup

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Republican effort to contest the presidential election results on the Senate floor this week is raising questions about how media outlets should cover the moment, and whether the Trump-supported action should be called an attempted "coup."
  • A dozen GOP senators have announced that they will object to counting votes in Biden's clear Electoral College win during what has traditionally been a ceremonial exercise on Capitol Hill. The effort comes despite no credible evidence suggesting widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
  • A dozen GOP senators have announced that they will object to counting votes in Biden's clear Electoral College win during what has traditionally been a ceremonial exercise on Capitol Hill.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "Should TV networks show the proceedings live when the GOP objectors are boldly lying?" asked CNN Chief Media Correspondent Brian Stelter. Should they call it a "coup?""I've been using that word for months now," historian and author Timothy Snyder told Stelter on "Reliable Sources" Sunday.
  • The Republican effort to contest the presidential election results on the Senate floor this week is raising questions about how media outlets should cover the moment, and whether the Trump-supported action should be called an attempted "coup."
  • "Is it accurate to call this a coup attempt? ... Is President Trump betraying his oath of office? Are the lawmakers supporting him seditious? These words matter a lot right now," Stelter said at the start of his show.
  • A whopping 83% of Fox News viewers say Biden was not elected legitimately, according to a new Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll, but Snyder said that "unlike previous elections, we actually did have an election in 2020 that people around the world could admire."
  • Before Election Day, right-wing media outlets said "Trump would win and he would only lose if it was rigged," Stelter said. In the "MAGA bubble," the only people you hear from are "Trump supporters and experts who sound very smart," he added.
aidenborst

Trump, Biden and the Tough Guy, Nice Guy Politics of 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-biden-masculinity-2020.html

campaign US trump politics gop election Biden polls gender

shared by aidenborst on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Kindness. Humility. Responsibility. These traits were once “the definition of manliness,” Barack Obama told a crowd on Saturday, campaigning in Flint, Mich., for his former running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • “It used to be being a man meant taking care of other people, not going around bragging,” Mr. Obama said.
  • n two days, Americans will take their shot, making a choice between two presidential candidates who resemble vastly different case studies in what a man, even in 2020, should do or be.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • On the one extreme is President Trump, who leaves little subtlety in his approach: Bragging about his sexual prowess, along with the size of his nuclear button, proclaiming “domination” over coronavirus and mocking his opponent for the size of his mask (“the biggest mask I’ve ever seen”), as if mask-wearing is somehow weak.
  • He has said he believes men who change diapers are “acting like the wife.” “Macho Man” is the song that plays at his rallies, even after the Village People objected. “He seeks to distinguish himself as the manliest — and thus, in his mind, the most-qualified — person to be president,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, or perhaps somewhere in the middle, is Mr. Biden, a “Dad-like” figure, as the philosopher Kate Manne put it, who has vowed to be America’s protector through a dark period, with some combination of strength, empathy and compassion.
  • “He’s offering a more paternalistic type of masculinity, in that you can be a strong leader, but still be compassionate and empathetic,” said Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford University who studies gender and work.
  • “Ultimately, masculinity still matters, we’ve learned. It’s how candidates still try to prove they are the best candidate,” said Ms. Cooper. “And so, even in 2020, Democrats decided the safest bet to beat a white man in his 70s is another white man in his 70s.”
  • From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and right on through Mr. Trump, largely white, Christian, heterosexual presidential candidates have “performed” manhood in all sorts of ways: Donning hard hats and posing inside military tanks; battling over who would be the better guy to have a beer with; and implying their opponents were soft, weak, or “sleepy.”
  • “Michael Dukakis had a 17-point lead over Bush in the summer of 1988,” said Mr. Katz, whose book on presidential masculinity has been adapted into a documentary called “The Man Card.” “So what did they do? They relentlessly attacked his manhood. They suggested he was a failed protector, that he was ‘soft,’ that he wasn’t a ‘real man.’”
  • “I think the performance of masculinity means a lot,” he noted, “because it has the potential to eclipse all else.”
  • Girls receive a message that they “become” women — typically through a biological event like menstruation — while men are told throughout their lives to “be” men or to “man up,” as if masculinity is something that can be easily lost.“You don’t really say ‘be a woman’ the way you say ‘be a man’ or ‘man up,’” she said.Image
  • “Trump is the personification of this masculinity contest culture,” Ms. Cooper said. “It’s bad for organizations, it’s terrible for a country.”
  • Maybe women were always the intended audience for the contests. Whether that’s true, they seem to be ready to render a clear judgment. Mr. Biden is leading among women by as much as 20 points.
katherineharron

Activists move from 'protests to the polls' in a push to shape a slew of local races on... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

election

shared by katherineharron on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Progressive activists are working to turn this year's nationwide protests over police brutality and racial injustice into results at the polls on Election Day,
  • Georgia Democrats need to flip 16 seats out of 180 to take control of the chamber.
  • In addition, the Color of Change PAC, the political arm of a longstanding civil rights organization, has endorsed a slate of what it defines as progressive prosecutors. And liberal organizations recently created The Frontline initiative to turn out young people of color.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The Working Families Party, aligned with high-profile progressives, such as New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is battling on behalf of liberal candidates in contests that will decide who holds positions as sheriffs and prosecutors.
  • "We're going from protests to the polls," Angela Angel, a former Maryland state legislator who is a senior adviser to the new Black Lives Matter PAC, told CNN. "We understand in this moment that the real power is in exercising our right to vote."
  • the group has targeted young voters in more than a dozen key states with a particular focus on reaching people who had requested absentee ballots but had not yet returned them.
  • In Georgia, a traditionally red state now in play in this year's presidential and US Senate elections, the Black Lives Matter PAC is backing Joyce Barlow, a Democrat running for the Georgia House of Representatives to represent a swath of rural southwest Georgia.
  • A study released earlier this year by the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina's Law School at Chapel Hill examined more than 2,300 prosecutors' races around the country and found contested elections in fewer than 700 -- or less than a third -- in either the primary or general election.
  • The groups engaged in electoral politics include Black Lives Matter, the sprawling social justice organization closely associated with this year's protests.
  • Tuesday's election "isn't just about the presidency. Your money, your minimum wage is on the ballot."
  • "We saw that very different outcomes were realized by Black people killed by police violence, based on the prosecutors elected in their jurisdictions," said Arisha Hatch, who oversees the Color of Change PAC.
  • Taylor's mother has sought the appointment of an independent prosecutor to handle the case. In September, Cameron announced that a grand jury indicted one former Louisville Metro Police Department Detective Brett Hankison, with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment in connection with his actions on the night of the raid.
  • But the Color of Change PAC and other liberal groups are putting their political muscle into local prosecutors' races around the country
  • In Florida, meanwhile, the PAC is urging a "yes" vote on Amendment 2, which would phase in a $15-an-hour minimum wage in the Sunshine State by 2026.
  • Rural counties might lack enough lawyers to mount a challenge to an incumbent. Prosecutor elections don't generate much attention. And voters don't always understand the power local county and district attorneys wield.
  • The Working Families Party mailers in the race tout Rucker's opposition to cash bail for non-violent offenses. "People shouldn't be sitting in jail because they can't afford to not be there," Rucker said in an interview with CNN.
  • The Working Families Party's "people's charter" calls to "shift resources away from policing, jails and detention centers" and into schools, housing and jobs programs.
aniyahbarnett

Opinion | You're Waiting for Election Results. It's Agony. Here's What to Do. - The New... - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...election-day-stress-2020.html

politics

shared by aniyahbarnett on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Right now you probably feel like a spring that’s been tightly compressed under enormous weight. From the outside, it appears still. Inside it is coursing with intense potential (anxious!) energy just dying for release.
  • But the 2020 contest has raised the stakes, adding looming threats of disinformation and interference, contested results and a president who has repeatedly antagonized a deeply polarized electorate. It is an extremely stressful moment.
  • “For many people, they’ve voted and thus have taken what is perhaps the last action they can take to have an influence in the outcome,”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Often, Mr. Markman noted, we are deploying something called “defensive pessimism,” which is a strategy our brains use in stressful situations where we can control the outcome, like, say, a big exam. “It’s a great coping strategy when you have agency because being defensively pessimistic forces you to study more,” Mr. Markman said. But in circumstances out of our control, it is an example of the mind working against its best interests and creating more anxiety.
  • “Defensive pessimism is creating a fictitious state. You’re feeling pessimistic but you don’t really believe it. Deep down you think your candidate will win, but you’re telling yourself they won’t, so when the actual outcome happens it’ll hurt less. But that’s not how it works. So really you’ll be paying the price twice. Once for anticipatory period and again if the results don’t go how you want,” he said.
  • An election. A pandemic. An economic crisis. A climate crisis. Mass protests for racial justice. It is a painful and tense moment in America right now. We’re all living through it together.
  • “Bracing for the worst makes sense when you lack agency,” she said. “We see it in even the most optimistic people because it protects us and also elevates the experience of good news.”
  • If you’re scared, allow yourself to feel that way for a moment. “Denying the pain and fear and anger leads to bad things down the road — the feelings always come out somewhere,”
  • Focusing on something desirable is a great strategy.” He suggests that planning and cooking your favorite meal or making plans to see friends in a socially distant way can help. “It’s not fiddling while Rome burns,” he told me. “There’ll be time to refocus thoughts to the election as returns come in, but planning and executing something you enjoy will reduce uncertainty between now and then.”
  • “Lots of people tell me they’re canceling everything during election week and I’m like, ‘No please don’t cancel. Schedule. If you have nothing to do you’ll only revert to worrying and obsessively consuming news,”
  • All elections elicit this feeling t
  • iting so difficult and what, if anything we can do to make this uncertain moment a little more tolerable?
rerobinson03

Joe Biden's 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...020-presidential-campaign.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Joseph R. Biden Jr. began his 2020 presidential campaign by losing, and then losing some more
  • Mr. Biden is now facing President Trump in a contest dominated by a global pandemic and a summer of unrest over police killings of Black Americans.
  • Mr. Biden’s year got off to a rocky start. In February, Iowans dealt him his first setback with a fourth-place finish in the state’s caucuses, and New Hampshire’s primary a week later went even worse. He finished in fifth place — and fled the state before the results came in.
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  • Then came South Carolina. It was the first early contest where a large number of Black voters would register their preferences, and Mr. Biden enjoyed good will with those voters, stemming from his loyal service at the side of President Barack Obama.
  • When the results came in, he had won — and he had done so decisively, with more than twice as many votes as his closest rival, Mr. Sanders.
  • On Super Tuesday, Mr. Biden won 10 of 14 states, including some that he never campaigned in. His former rivals continued to coalesce around him over the next week. Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey endorsed Mr. Biden before Michigan’s primary a week later.
  • Mr. Biden re-emerged on Memorial Day, placing a wreath at a veterans memorial in Wilmington, Del., and wearing a mask, in contrast to how Mr. Trump had been appearing.
  • The next week, he met with community leaders at a Black church in Wilmington following the death of George Floyd in police custody
  • His campaign organized occasional in-person events in Delaware and neighboring Pennsylvania that were designed with safety in mind, with large white circles on the ground ensuring social distancing among reporters who attended.
  • After months of suspense, he selected Ms. Harris, a former rival, to join the Democratic ticket.
  • Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris accepted their nominations in front of socially distanced reporters at an event center in Wilmington — a far cry from the packed arena that was supposed to have cheered them on. On the convention’s final night, supporters gathered in their cars as if at a drive-in theater, and the new Democratic ticket joined them for a fireworks display.
  • Once again, his campaign held carefully arranged events with social distancing and mask wearing, a stark contrast to Mr. Trump’s crowded rallies.
  • Mr. Biden was returning from a campaign trip to Minnesota when the news broke: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. Mr. Trump and Senate Republicans moved quickly to appoint Judge Amy Coney Barrett in her place.
  • Mr. Biden tried to frame the court fight as a battle over the future of health care in America, warning about Mr. Trump’s desire for the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act.
  • The first debate was the subject of great anticipation, presenting Mr. Trump with a chance to change a race that was unfolding in Mr. Biden’s favor. It also put a spotlight on Mr. Biden after Mr. Trump had spent months portraying him as a senile old man.
  • The meeting, however, was remembered not for Mr. Biden’s performance but for Mr. Trump’s constant interruptions.
  • Later that week came another seismic development: Mr. Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. Within two weeks, he had recovered and returned to the campaign trail with large rallies that flouted public health guidance.
  • Mr. Biden stuck to his approach. He made more visits to battleground states but refrained from holding crowded events.
  • In the final weeks, Mr. Biden pioneered a pandemic-appropriate substitute for traditional events: drive-in campaign rallies.His speeches quickly took on a new soundtrack, with applause lines punctuated by the beeping of car horns.
  • On the last weekend before Election Day, Mr. Biden campaigned with former President Barack Obama in Michigan, a state their ticket won twice. With coronavirus cases surging in many places, they condemned Mr. Trump over his handling of the pandemic.
  • Mr. Biden finished the campaign much the way he had started, presenting himself as a unifying figure who would work to repair the damage inflicted by Mr. Trump’s presidency.
lmunch

As America Awaits a Winner, Trump Falsely Claims He Prevailed - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lection-trump-biden-recap.html

Trump US Biden politics polling

shared by lmunch on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The president made his unfounded claim even though no news organizations declared a winner between him and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and a number of closely contested states still had millions of mail-in ballots to count.
  • “Frankly, we did win this election.”
  • Mr. Trump said, without offering any explanation, that “we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” and added: “We want all voting to stop.”
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  • Mr. Biden projected optimism but asked voters for patience. He pointed to Pennsylvania and Michigan, among other battlegrounds, as slow-counting states that he expected to win.
  • “As I’ve said all along, it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people. But I’m optimistic about this outcome.”
  • Vote-counting was moving relatively slowly in some battleground states on Tuesday night because of the scale of the turnout, a backlog of absentee ballots received by mail and scattered problems with processing the vote. And each state handled the counting and releasing of its ballots differently.
  • For all the angst about a potential breakdown in voting procedures in advance of Election Day, there were no prominent reports of technological failures or chaos at the polls, nor was there any evidence of significant civil unrest midway through the evening.
  • Mr. Biden, the former vice president, was outperforming Hillary Clinton in a number of the country’s large metropolitan areas, but Mr. Trump was reprising or enlarging his margins in many rural areas.
  • While it was too early to say which party would control the chamber in January, Democrats faced disappointment in three solidly red states where they were making a bid to stretch the campaign map. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, easily defeated Jaime Harrison; Representative Roger Marshall of Kansas defended an open seat that Democrats had contested aggressively; and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa turned back a challenge from Theresa Greenfield.
  • Mr. Biden, 77, appeared to be underperforming with Latino voters, especially in the critical battleground of Florida, where he led Mr. Trump by only single digits in the group, according to exit polls. Mrs. Clinton won Latinos in the state by a wider margin four years ago; Mr. Trump’s improvement appeared to reflect the success of his insistent anti-socialist message in South Florida, where Cuban-Americans and other immigrant communities are wary of far-left policies.
  • Mr. Biden’s candidacy also had the potential to create a history-making moment for his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent; she was seeking to become the first woman on a winning presidential ticket. And Mr. Biden would be only the second Catholic president, along with John F. Kennedy.
  • Mr. Biden’s coalition was more impressive for its breadth than its depth, and despite its size and diversity, most voters supporting him appeared more excited to reject Mr. Trump than to install Mr. Biden in his place.
  • No American presidential race in half a century or more has featured the same scale of civil unrest and uncertainty about the legitimacy of the political process, and no modern campaign has been so defined by an incumbent president who seemed to relish both factors the way Mr. Trump has.
Javier E

The Declaration Under Siege - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/the-declaration-under-siege

rights human declaration American idea relativism natural law natural rights

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Margaret Thatcher explained the stark difference between American and European political traditions with elegant economy. The Iron Lady said that European nations were made by history but the United States was made by philosophy.
  • Last month, the State Department issued a thoughtful and carefully reasoned report on that quintessentially American philosophy, and the unique nation that came into existence to conserve and champion it
  • The report explores the cause of natural law and natural rights, as articulated by the Declaration of Independence (as well as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights). In this theory, rights inhere in human individuals at birth, which is why we call them natural. “The sacred rights of mankind,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, “are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature.”
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  • Thus government does not create rights, nor does it dispense them. It merely recognizes and respects them. As George Will likes to say, the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is secure: “[T]o secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”
  • The assumption of natural rights and government’s limited role to secure those rights, the bedrock premise of American political thought, finds itself widely embattled today. It is under pressure on university campuses and in the prestige media, and even challenged by self-professed advocates of human rights
  • The United States was from its beginning a republic “dedicated” to certain self-evident truths, foremost among them that “all men are created equal.
  • These founding principles of equal rights and human freedom—America’s public philosophy—contain what Will (in his bracing tome The Conservative Sensibility) calls “an epistemological assertion” that important political truths are not merely knowable but known.
  • In the world of 1776, the truths held to be self-evident by America’s founders were ferociously contested by kings and monarchs who claimed a divine right
  • Today, although despots still contest America’s great epistemological assertion, the problem in the West is closer to the opposite: everyone claims the truth is known, but with the crucial stipulation that no one’s truth is better or worse than anyone else’s.
  • Tom Nichols has written deftly about this phenomenon. “It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”
  • Thus does the American Founders’ assertion of truth, and its implication that not all claims to truth are equally valid, comes off as “judgmental” to modern ears
  • A central aim of progressivism has been to blur the distinction between what have been called “negative rights” (those that, like the Bill of Rights, protect life and liberty) and “positive rights” (those that obligate the government to provide certain services in pursuit of equality). This project brings concentrated focus on economic and social rights rather than fundamental political freedoms, and this ever-widening circle of rights has brought the older, limited system of rights under scrutiny.
  • If their expansive vision of rights is accepted as legitimate, it would bring the older vision—with its ironclad protections for free speech, and its ideals of a colorblind society, rational discourse, and the scientific method—into disrepute. These classical liberal ideals self-evidently clash with newly asserted rights, since they have already begun to be curtailed to make way for them.
  • The commission assails the left’s elastic conception of rights on the logic that Frederick the Great would recognize: “to defend everything is to defend nothing.” It argues that this proliferation of elective rights for certain groups (some of which are good in and of themselves) endangers the essential liberties of all.
  • Modern politics, built on progressive foundations, assumes that natural rights constitute an incomplete and therefore inadequate body of rights.
Javier E

Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fuelling... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crisis-consumption-environment

population panic climate change crisis

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse – will dissolve itself, because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that they had “underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial”.
  • It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people claim.
  • The formula for calculating people’s environmental footprint is simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology (I = PAT).
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  • The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the responsibility for increased consumption
  • But population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.
  • Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown.
  • Panic about population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.
  • At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the global average: “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”
  • If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.
  • he proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don’t want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.
  • Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor.
  • Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”, and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.
  • Malthusianism slides easily into racism.
  • Most of the world’s population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”
  • These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.
  • The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and the UK
  • how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.
  • So a good way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty.
  • Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind
  • Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?
  • Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers.
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