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Javier E

In Los Angeles, a Nimby Battle Pits Millionaires vs. Billionaires - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lionaires-vs-billionaires.html

inequality rich conspicuous consumption

shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles
  • “Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say hello to the gigamansion.
  • Why are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have the same fun in one half the size?”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the market for these Versailles knockoffs is “flight capital.” “It’s oligarchs, oilgarchs, people from Asia, people who came up with the next app for the iPhone,” he said. While global wealth is pouring into other American cities as well, Los Angeles is still a relative bargain, Mr. Hyland said, adding: “Here you can buy the best house for $3,000 a square foot. In Manhattan, you’re looking at $11,000 a square foot and you get a skybox.”
  • In a city traditionally as hostile to architectural preservation as it is hospitable to architectural innovation, the gigamansion trend is accelerating the decimation of residential gems. A midcentury modern home in Bel Air designed by Burton Schutt (best known as the architect of the Hotel Bel-Air) and furnished by the decorator Billy Haines for Earle Jorgensen, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” and his wife, Marion, was recently razed
  • In the Sunset Strip area, a geometric hacienda built by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta for the actor Ricardo Montalbán was “remodeled” into a hulking glass spec house.
  • As the number of Los Angeles’s buildable lots dwindles and land values soar, houses that are out of scale with their surroundings are popping up everywhere. (
Alex Trudel

Fraud Claims Delay Elections in Two Ukrainian Cities - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gional-elections-mariupol.html

politics history crisis culture Obama ukrainian fraud elections

shared by Alex Trudel on 27 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • KIEV, Ukraine — Hopes that a local election could help shift tensions in an eastern Ukrainian city from simmering conflict to the relative safety of politics were thwarted Sunday when voters turned up to find no ballots.
  • But critics quickly pointed out that opinion polls had shown that a political party affiliated with Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government had been poised to win the most votes.
  • “Since the very beginning, I had insisted that elections should be held there, but when it became clear a large-scale falsification was prepared, we could not let this happen,” Mr. Poroshenko said.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Late Saturday, with just 12 hours before polls were to open, local election officials said they had discovered printing flaws on the ballots and destroyed them.
  • Many people in the area have relatives in Russia, for example, and over the weekend all airplane flights between the two countries were halted as they imposed mutual sanctions, complicating travel.
  • Both cities where the vote was canceled had fallen under rebel control last year but were recaptured by the Ukrainian military, and Sunday would have been the first opportunity for citizens to express their views in an election.
  • “Over 300,000 voters in the largest Ukrainian-controlled city of Donbass could not exercise their constitutional right because the authorities decided to hide their total loss by disrupting the election,” the Opposition Bloc said in a statement Sunday.
  • The dispute focused on the ballots, which had been printed by a typographical shop in Mariupol owned by an oligarch with ties to the Opposition Bloc, Rinat Akhmetov.
Javier E

The Rich Are Fighting the Superrich Over Britain's Manicured Lawns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-britains-manicured-lawns.html

rich billionaire wealth London conflict

shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Writ small, social researchers say, the tussle could foretell a future in which an ever-smaller upper crust will command financial heights far beyond the dreams of lesser mortals, even those who qualify, like many of the folks in Highgate, as pretty well off themselves.
  • These days, equality campaigners say, 80 immensely rich people have amassed the same wealth as the poorer half of the world’s entire population.
  • Among the most talked about is a 25-bedroom house called Witanhurst, said to be the second-biggest residential property in London, after Buckingham Palace, a vast pile with vistas over the 800-acre Hampstead Heath.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • According to news reports, the buyer paid some $75 million for it and resolved to spend the same again on enhancements, including basement excavations for features including a 70-foot swimming pool and a garage for 25 cars. Once the renovations are complete, the house will command a resale value of $450 million.
sarahbalick

Ex-Putin aide Mikhail Lesin died of 'blow to the head' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-35781333

aide died lesin

shared by sarahbalick on 11 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Ex-Putin aide Mikhail Lesin died of 'blow to the head'
  • A former aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was found dead in the US last year, died of a blow to the head, coroners say.
  • Mikhail Lesin also had blunt force injuries to the neck, torso, arms and legs, Washington DC's chief medical examiner said.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • After his death, his family members were quoted by Russian media as saying he had suffered a heart attack.
  • He worked as an aide to the presidency between 2004 and 2009, and was instrumental in the creation of Russia's state-funded international broadcaster, RT (formerly known as Russia Today).
  • Some of the properties reported to have been bought by companies connected to the family include, according to the LA Times, a house in the Pacific Palisades for almost $4m and a house in Beverley Hills bought in 2011 for almost $14m.
  • The chief medical examiner provided no further details from the post-mortem examination.
  • "clarification from Washington and relevant official data on the progress of the investigation".
  • In 2000, Lesin authorised the takeover of the NTV channel owned by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, who agreed to the move in order to secure his release from detention and to have criminal charges against him dropped.
  • Lesin's Gazprom-Media group is owned by Gazprombank which, in turn, has links to Bank Rossiya, described by the the EU and US authorities as "the personal bank" of top Russian officials.
Javier E

The GOP's Laboratories of Oligarchy | The New Republic - 0 views

newrepublic.com/...gops-laboratories-oligarchy

gop oligarchy partisan politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • In the classic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, the titular characters occasionally play a game known as “Calvinball.” The rules are simple: Hobbes makes them up as he goes. In one strip, the imaginary stuffed tiger declares mid-game that Calvin has entered an “invisible sector” and must cover his eyes “because everything is invisible to you.” The six-year-old boy obeys and asks Hobbes how he gets out. “Someone bonks you with the Calvinball!” Hobbes exclaims, chucking the volleyball at Calvin. And so it goes until Calvin, in the final panel, is dizzy and disoriented. “This game,” he notes, “lends itself to certain abuses.”
  • Now, one month later, GOP lawmakers in multiple states are using lame-duck sessions to hamstring incoming Democratic elected officials, either by reducing their official powers or transferring them to Republican-led legislatures.
  • Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers in North Carolina mastered the strategy of constitutional hardball to preserve their political muscle even as their electoral advantage shrank. The metastasis of this model today may be an even greater threat to the nation’s political health than Trump himself.
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  • Top Republicans in Wisconsin aren’t disguising the partisan aims of their legislation, which drew protesters to the state’s capitol building on Monday. “Most of these items are things that either we never really had to kind of address because, guess what? We trusted Scott Walker and the administration to be able to manage the back-and-forth with the legislature,” Scott Fitzgerald, the Wisconsin Senate’s majority leader, said in an interview with a conservative talk-radio host. “We don’t trust Tony Evers right now in a lot of these areas.”
  • This approach to governance was devastating enough in North Carolina. Its spread to other states is a grim sign for purple and red states. If Republicans are unwilling to be governed by another political party, one need not be a political scientist to understand how harmful that will be to democracy itself.
  • Gerrymandering is as old as the republic itself, and neither party’s hands are clean when it comes to drawing legislative districts for partisan advantage. What distinguished the post-2010 wave of Republican gerrymandering was its sheer aggressiveness. In Wisconsin, the GOP commands near-supermajorities in the state assembly and state senate despite drawing roughly even with Democrats in the statewide popular vote. North Carolina Democrats won nearly half of the statewide popular vote in congressional races but captured only three of the state’s House seats.
  • Democracy, both as a system of government and as a way of life, needs more than just legislation and constitutions to function. It also requires a shared understanding of the bounds of acceptable political action. Without that shared understanding, the laboratories of democracy, as Justice Louis Brandeis once put it, become breeding grounds for oligarchical rule
  • “The only permanent rule in Calvinball,” Calvin exclaims in one strip, “is that you can’t play it the same way twice!” That may work with an imaginary friend, but it’s a dangerous way to run a country
Javier E

The George Osborne story reveals Britain's ugly dinner party elite | Owen Jones | Opini... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...uled-never-ending-dinner-party

morality elite uk corruption entitlement

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • some politicians think they are simply too brilliant to be reduced to the mere level of giving a voice to those they exist to serve, exploiting the prominence that comes with constituents selecting them as their representative and then making a packet out of it.
  • Then there is the revolving door of British politics. Public office gives you lots of marketable advantages: prominence, connections, knowledge of the inside workings of government. These can then be exploited by major corporations, wealthy individuals and media oligarchs to gain even more power over our corrupted democracy.
  • Then there’s the parlous state of British journalism, increasingly an exclusive gilded club for those whose parents have healthy bank balances. Talented working-class aspiring journalists are discriminated against because they can’t live off the Bank of Mum and Dad. With few exceptions, only the well-to-do can afford to do the unpaid internships and expensive journalism masters’ degrees that increasingly must adorn the CVs of those with hopes of making it into journalism
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  • perhaps Osborne has done us all a service. In whose interests is this country run? They’re not even pretending any more. Britain is ruled by a never-ending dinner party, marked by limitless self-regard and contempt for those who don’t have a seat at the table
  • It is a grim spectacle. It is also a threat to our democracy, and it must be called out.
knudsenlu

The hysteria over Russian bots has reached new levels | Thomas Frank | Opinion | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-bots-us-election-coup-d-etat

russian bots hysteria politics global

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • he grand total for all political ad spending in the 2016 election cycle, according to Advertising Age, was $9.8bn. The ads allegedly produced by inmates of a Russian troll farm, which have made up this week’s ration of horror and panic in the halls of the American punditburo, cost about $100,000 to place on Facebook.
  • What the Russian trolls allegedly did was “an act of war ... a sneak attack using 21st-century methods”, wrote the columnist Karen Tumulty. “Our democracy is in serious danger,” declared America’s star thought-leader Thomas Friedman on Sunday, raging against the weakling Trump for not getting tough with these trolls and their sponsors. “Protecting our democracy obviously concerns Trump not at all,” agreed columnist Eugene Robinson on Tuesday.
  • Of what, specifically, did this sophistication consist? In what startling insights was this creativity made manifest? “Fallon said it was stunning to realize that the Russians understood how Trump was trying to woo disaffected [Bernie] Sanders supporters ...”
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  • If you’re one of those people who frets about our democracy being in serious danger, I contend that the above passages from the Post’s report should push your panic meter deep into the red. This is the reason why: we have here a former spokesman for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of the best-funded, most consummately professional efforts of all time, and he thinks it was an act of off-the-hook perceptiveness to figure out that Trump was aiming for disgruntled Sanders voters. Even after Trump himself openly said that’s what he was trying to do.
  • Its extremely modest price tag guarantees it, as does the liberals’ determination to exaggerate its giant-slaying powers. This is rightwing populism’s next wave, and in an oligarchic world, every American plutocrat will soon be fielding his or her own perfectly legal troll army. Those of us who believe in democracy need to stop panicking and start thinking bigger: of how rightwing populism can be undone forever.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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zareefkhan

Escort Says Audio Recordings Show Russian Meddling in U.S. Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nastya-rybka-trump-putin.html

russian politics US election

shared by zareefkhan on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • A Belarusian escort with close ties to a powerful Russian oligarch said from behind bars in Bangkok on Monday that she had more than 16 hours of audio recordings that could help shed light on Russian meddling in United States elections.
  • The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, said she would hand over the recordings if the United States granted her asylum. She faces criminal charges and deportation to Belarus after coming under suspicion of working in Thailand without a visa at a sex-training seminar in the city of Pattaya.
  • “If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know,” Ms. Vashukevich said on Monday. “I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr. Navalny charged in his video that Mr. Deripaska’s yacht trip was an attempt to bribe Mr. Prikhodko, and that Ms. Vashukevich was one of “several” prostitutes aboard the vessel. In the video, the tycoon and Mr. Prikhodko can be heard discussing Russian-American relations.
  • “They were discussing elections,” she said. “Deripaska had a plan about elections.”
  • Ms. Vashukevich described being held in a crowded cell with more than 100 women and only three toilets. She said a Thai official had asked her to sign a paper saying that she believed she would be safe in Russia, but that she had refused.
manhefnawi

Louis XII: Medieval King or Renaissance Monarch? | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...al-king-or-renaissance-monarch

Louis XII Monarch France Renaissance Medieval Political Kingship 1500

shared by manhefnawi on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • Early in the afternoon of April 7th, 1498, Charles VIII of France escorted his queen, Anne of Brittany, to an antiquated gallery at his chateau of Amboise, to watch a game of tennis
  • After the travails of Valois France during the Hundred Years War and the kingdom's subsequent recovery under Charles VII and Louis XI, few magnates any longer felt inclined to contest the title of a mature heir apparent.
  • Louis himself had been brought up in relatively impecunious circumstances, thanks partly to the antipathy of the late Louis XI towards him and his house. There were nobles who had felt that the ruler's treatment of them and their kind as well as his alleged general misgovernment warranted conspiracy and even revolt against him. Although Louis d'Orleans had been far too young to engage in that reign's most concerted expression of magnate resentment, the War of the Public Weal, he had rationalised in comparable terms his own behaviour under Charles VIII.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • And in all this he had invoked a version of medieval constitutionalism rooted in feudal law: that, regardless of the will of Louis XI, it was his right with his fellow princes to control the royal council and to exercise powers of regency during Charles VIII's minority
  • Such judgements spring partly from the impact of French incursions upon Italy itself, closely followed as they were by interventions from a Spain newly unified under its Catholic kings.
  • 'For France', according to Henri Lapeyre, 'a new destiny opened with the expedition of Charles VIII'. And according to Roger Doucet, although 'neither Charles VIII nor Louis Xll had any great gifts of government', during their reigns 'a great change took place, a change which may be regarded as a transformation of the monarchical system itself'
  • Whilst noblemen languished in rural penury or occupied themselves with court intrigues, the monarch held sway through the agency of his new men over a territory which, thanks not least to the acquisition of Brittany, was more unified under the Crown than ever before
  • So some jurists and humanists were ready to avow; and in propagating the ideology of monarchy, scholars were joined by artists who gave it visual expression through images pregnant with symbolism
  • On Louis XII's council nobles continued, as they had under his immediate predecessors, to rub shoulders with members of commoner extraction
  • Feudal independence might be long since gone; royal policy might no longer be susceptible to the dictates of magnate coalitions, as Louis d'Orleans had discovered to his cost. But royal resources and royal government remained very much the preserve of oligarchs amongst whom the nobility more than held their own
  • When economic recovery eventually got under way, hard on the heels of military revival under Charles VII, the conditions for reconstituting noble fortunes were not automatically restored
  • A notable instance is the house of La Tremoille, based mainly in western France, whose income from all sources fell by two-thirds between the end of the fourteenth century and the death of Louis XI, only to rise within two generations beyond its former level, owing not least to the efforts and system of estate-management developed by Louis II de La Tremoille, head of his house under Louis XII
  • Louis II de La Tremoille took care to cultivate royal favour. His distinguished service to Charles VIII in the wars of the 1480s which Louis d'Orleans helped to precipitate did not prevent his enjoying the patronage of the latter, once king
  • The phenomenon is obscured by the prominence in public affairs of some of Louis XII's best-known servants.
  • Personal secretary in due course to Louis XII, Robertet held numerous fiscal offices and married into the circle of Tours-based financiers upon whom successive monarchs relied to find them funds
  • and towards the 'absolutism' of the following centuries. Its formation, we are assured, was at least in some degree the achievement of Louis XII, for all that ruler's personal deficiencies and youthful waywardness
  • Confronted with economic difficulties, the nobles of Renaissance France rallied to the service of the Crown and were rewarded accordingly. What the kingdom experienced, in Bernard Chevalier's view, was 'not the rise of the bourgeoisie, but the triumph of the nobility'
  • Apanage after apanage had reverted to the Crown while, under Louis XII, the princes of the blood happened to be unusually young and the heads of other major dynasties to be preoccupied with affairs in their lands on the fringes of the kingdom
  • The most sensational domestic episode of Louis XII’s reign was the fall of one of his principal councillors and commanders, the notoriously grasping Marshal de Gie, accused in 1504 of crimes amounting to treason, owing in good measure to the machinations of the queen and her associates against him. Yet such incidents were exceptional
  • So much is evident from the legislative record of Louis XII's reign
  • Despite his advocacy of the role of the Estates-General under his predecessor, only once, in 1506, did Louis XII convene that assembly, and on that occasion as a device to extricate himself from a dilemma in his foreign affairs
  • Louis XII issued his most ambitious legislative act within his first regnal year: the ordinance of Blois on the 'justice and police' of the realm.
  • Shortly before his death Charles VIII had declared 'that there is no more clear and evident proof of custom than that which is made by the common agreement and consent of the Estates' of the relevant communities. Louis XII proceeded in a similar spirit, dispatching commissioners from his sovereign courts to consult with such Estates and so to record their customs in written form
  • The Renaissance monarchy as exemplified by Louis XII was aristocratic in its complexion, consultative in its methods and also, in a sense, popular. The reputation for benignity with which Du Moulin credited him echoed the appellation which the Estates-General of 1506 plucked from classical precedent to confer upon this monarch. Louis was the 'father of the people'; much later, the citizens of eighteenth-century Paris would remember him aw such when trying to rouse their king Louis XVI to a livelier sense of monarchical duty.
  • o far as the extant evidence will allow historians to judge, the average annual yield of direct taxation in his reign was significantly less than in Charles VIII's, and Iess than one half of Louis XI's demands in the early 1480s
  • How, then, are we to account for beliefs that Renaissance monarchy as exemplified in this reign paved the way for the authoritarianism and splendour associated with 'absolute' monarchy in the following centuries? The answer scarcely lies in the personal attributes of Louis XII
  • Despite – or because of – his excesses, he failed to beget a legitimate heir. His ultimate attempts to do so provoked ribaldry a good deal more overt than the rumours and suspicions that had accompanied his succession to the throne. Nine months after the death of Anne of Brittany in January 1514, Louis, in his fifty-third year, married Mary Tudor, teenage sister of Henry VIII of England
  • Exactly twelve weeks after his wedding, Louis XII died
  • But the impact of monarchy and interpretations of its nature did not depend upon the physical capabilities of its incumbent. The king had two bodies. Whatever the frailty of his body natural, his body mystical, epitome of the realm itself, existed before him and did not perish with his death
  • Under Louis XII, however, such propaganda reached fresh heights, with some infusion of new themes often of Italian inspiration, but above all through intensified and diversified use of traditional symbolism whereby artists and scholars cultivated portentous images of monarchy
  • Replete with time-honoured allusions, such images proliferated to an exceptional degree in the reign of Louis XII. They obliterated all impressions of the questionable character of Louis d'Orleans and his suspect biological antecedents. They elevated royal power to divine status. And they contributed significantly to clear the ground for the growth of the ideology of absolutism to full flower in the era of the Sun King
Javier E

The Disgust Election - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-disgust-election.html

election financing rich corruption supreme court oligarchy campaign politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • I would like for the most influential swing voter on the Supreme Court to step away from his legal aerie, and wade through some of the muck that he and four fellow justices have given us with the 2014 campaign.
  • How did we lose our democracy? Slowly at first, and then all at once. This fall, voters are more disgusted, more bored and more cynical about the midterm elections than at any time in at least two decades.
  • beyond disdain for this singular crop of do-nothings, the revulsion is generated by a sense that average people have lost control of one of the last things that citizens should be able to control — the election itself.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • You can trace the Great Breach to Justice Kennedy’s words in the 2010 Citizens United case, which gave wealthy, secret donors unlimited power to manipulate American elections. The decision legalized large-scale bribery — O.K., influence buying — and ensured that we would never know exactly who was purchasing certain politicians.
  • This year, the Koch brothers and their extensions — just to name one lonely voice in the public realm — have operations in at least 35 states, and will spend somewhere north of $120 million to ensure a Congress that will do their bidding. Spending by outside groups has gone to $1 billion in 2012 from $52 million in 2000.
  • just the opposite has happened. The big money headed for the shadows. As my colleague Nicholas Confessore documented earlier this month, more than half the ads aired by outside groups during this campaign have come from secret donors. Oligarchs hiding behind front groups — Citizens for Fluffy Pillows — are pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign, and overwhelmingly aiding Republicans.
  • you can’t argue with the corrosive and dispiriting effect, on the rest of us, of campaigns controlled by the rich, the secret, the few.
  • Kennedy famously predicted the opposite. He wrote that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That’s the money quote — one of the great wish-projections in court history. But Kennedy also envisioned a new day, whereby there would be real-time disclosure of the big financial forces he unleashed across the land.In his make-believe, post-Citizens United world, voters “can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”
  • At the same time that this court has handed over elections to people who already have enormous power, they’ve given approval to efforts to keep the powerless from voting. In Texas, Republicans have passed a selective voter ID bill that could keep upward of 600,000 citizens — students, Native Americans in federally recognized tribes, the elderly — from having a say in this election.
  • What’s the big deal? Well, you can vote in Texas with a concealed handgun ID, but not one from a four-year college. The new voter suppression measure, allowed to go ahead in an unsigned order by the court last Saturday, “is a purposefully discriminating law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, “one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hun
  • With the 2010 case, the court handed control of elections over to dark money interests who answer to nobody. And in the Texas case, the court has ensured that it will be more difficult for voters without money or influence to use the one tool they have.
Javier E

Our Constitution Wasn't Built for This - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...constitution-economy.html

constitution inequality Founding demagogue crisis economic politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.
  • Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.
  • From the ancient Greeks to the American founders, statesmen and political philosophers were obsessed with the problem of economic inequality. Unequal societies were subject to constant strife — even revolution. The rich would tyrannize the poor, and the poor would revolt against the rich.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The solution was to build economic class right into the structure of government.
  • Many in the founding generation believed America was exceptional because of the extraordinary degree of economic equality within the political community as they defined it
  • it wasn’t an oversight. The founding generation knew how to write class-warfare constitutions — they even debated such proposals during the summer of 1787.
  • Part of the reason was practical. James Madison’s notes from the secret debates at the Philadelphia Convention show that the delegates had a hard time agreeing on how they would design such a class-based system. But part of the reason was political: They knew the American people wouldn’t agree to that kind of government.
  • What is surprising about the design of our Constitution is that it isn’t a class warfare constitution. Our Constitution doesn’t mandate that only the wealthy can become senators, and we don’t have a tribune of the plebs. Our founding charter doesn’t have structural checks and balances between economic classes: not between rich and poor, and certainly not between corporate interests and ordinary workers. This was a radical change in the history of constitutional government
  • As long as the new nation could expand west, he thought, it would be possible to have a citizenry of independent yeoman farmers. In a community with economic equality, there was simply no need for constitutional structures to manage the clash between the wealthy and everyone else.
  • Unlike Europe, America wasn’t bogged down by the legacy of feudalism, nor did it have a hereditary aristocracy
  • In 1976 the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 8.5 percent of our national income. Today they take home more than 20 percent
  • While much of the debate has been on the moral or economic consequences of economic inequality, the more fundamental problem is that our constitutional system might not survive in an unequal economy
  • Campaign contributions, lobbying, the revolving door of industry insiders working in government, interest group influence over regulators and even think tanks — all of these features of our current political system skew policy making to favor the wealthy and entrenched economic interests. “The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest,” Gouverneur Morris observed in 1787. “They always did. They always will.” An oligarchy — not a republic — is the inevitable result.
  • As a republic descends into an oligarchy, the people revolt. Populist revolts are rarely anarchic; they require leadership. Morris predicted that the rich would take advantage of the people’s “passions” and “make these the instruments for oppressing them.”
  • Alexander Hamilton put it more clearly: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people: commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
  • Populists and progressives responded by pushing for reforms that would tame the great concentrations of wealth and power that were corrupting government.
  • On the economic side, they invented antitrust laws and public utilities regulation, established an income tax, and fought for minimum wages. On the political side, they passed campaign finance regulations and amended the Constitution so the people would get to elect senators directly. They did these things because they knew that our republican form of government could not survive in an economically unequal society. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.”
  • For all its resilience and longevity, our Constitution doesn’t have structural checks built into it to prevent oligarchy or populist demagogues. It was written on the assumption that America would remain relatively equal economically.
  • Madison worried that the number of Americans who had only the “bare necessities of life” would one day increase. When it did, he concluded, the institutions and laws of the country would need to be adapted, and that task would require “all the wisdom of the wisest patriots.”
anonymous

No, Mr. President, you can't do what you want - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-bb9d-8cd6118e1409_story.html

president politics US trump

shared by anonymous on 20 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • No, Mr. President, you can’t do what you want
  • Two issues are paramount in American politics. The first is whether President Trump will get away with his arrogant dismissal of the public’s right to a transparent government free of corrupting conflicts of interest. The second is whether those who would hold him to account remain focused, mobilized and determined.
  • Should we know why it is that, according to The Post’s Greg Miller, Trump “appears increasingly isolated within his own administration” in calling for warmer relations with Russia even as almost everyone else in his government issues “blistering critiques of Moscow”? Should he disclose details of his business ties to Russian interests and oligarchs? Should he stop resisting investigations into whether his campaign was complicit in Russia’s interference in the election that made him president? No, he says, I can do what I want.
Javier E

Ganesh Sitaraman's "The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution" - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...519909

oligarchy dictator inequality democracy Founding constitution crisis history culture politics economic

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Rebecca J. Rosen: Your new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, is premised on the idea that the American Constitution is what you call a middle-class constitution. What does that mean?
  • Ganesh Sitaraman: The idea of the middle-class constitution is that it’s a constitutional system that requires and is conditioned on the assumption that there is a large middle class, and no big differences between rich and poor in a society.
  • Prior to the American Constitution, most countries and most people who thought about designing governments were very concerned about the problem of inequality, and the fear was that, in a society that was deeply unequal, the rich would oppress the poor and the poor would revolt and confiscate the wealth of the rich.
  • ...52 more annotations...
  • extreme wealth, there’s extreme poverty, neither of which really exists in America. As a result they don’t need to design a House of Lords and a House of Commons, they don’t need a tribune of the plebs in order to make their constitution work.
  • What we have is a constitutional system that doesn’t build class in at all, and the reason why is that America was shockingly equal at the time in ways that seem really surprising to us today.
  • The idea is that the Constitution relies on a relatively equal society for it to work. In societies that are deeply unequal, the way you prevent strife between rich and poor is you build class right into the structure of government—the House of Lords, House of Commons idea. Everyone has a share in government, but they also have a check on each other.
  • In a country that doesn’t have a lot of inequality by wealth, you don’t need that kind of check. There’s no extreme wealth, there’s no extreme poverty, so you don’t expect there to be strife, to be instability based on wealth. And so there’s no need to put in some sort of check like that into the Constitution.
  • That’s how our Constitution works. The reason why it works this way is that when the founders looked around, they thought America was uniquely equal in the history of the world.
  • We have to distinguish between two separate things. The first is what I’m calling the tradition of the middle-class Constitution, and the idea here is that to have a republic, you have to have relative economic equality, and that’s within the political community.
  • And in an unequal society, the only possible government you could have would be some sort of aristocracy or monarchy.
  • there’s another question which is, who is in the political community? And that’s a question that’s been fiercely debated over our history, fiercely contested over our history.
  • There’s a second tradition that we call the tradition of inclusion, which over time has fought to expand the community to include minorities, to include women. The challenge for anyone who’s interested in continuing both of these traditions is, how do they work together?
  • I think the key thing is, when you expand the political community, you have to make sure that every member of the political community then has the opportunity to join the middle class, or else you can't maintain the structure of the republic and the preconditions for having a republic.
  • In the 17th century in England, James Harrington writes a book called The Commonwealth of Oceana, and it’s a pivotal book, extremely important in the history of political thought. What Harrington argues is that the balance of power in politics in any society will inevitably mirror the balance of property in society, and he talks a lot about property. We can think about that as wealth
  • What Harrington does is he explains this by saying that power has to follow property.
  • his views were well known in the time period. In fact, more so than being known, they were just believed by everyone. Everyone embraced them, in some cases without even necessarily knowing their source, although throughout the founders’ writings they list Harrington as one of the great political thinkers who can comment on what it means to create a republic.
  • their intellectual fountain, is Harrington, who suggests that, if you have an equal society, it is possible to have what he called a commonwealth, or a republic.
  • there’s actually a radical change in our Constitution that we don’t build economic class directly into these institutions. The purpose of the Senate, with its longer terms, is to allow representatives to deliberate in the longer-term interest of the republic, and that’s the goal of the Senate.
  • by the late 19th century, industrialization has reached full force.
  • These are all huge changes in the economy, and they put serious pressure on the economic foundations of the Constitution.
  • The response that starts really in full force in the populist era of the late 19th century and moves into the Progressive Era is to try to combat both economic power and to prevent economic power from turning into political power.
  • antitrust laws
  • People in this time period do a lot of extraordinary things.
  • an income tax
  • the first campaign-finance regulations
  • a constitutional amendment to require the direct election of U.S. senators
  • These factors, these actions, both economic and political, were designed to create what Teddy Roosevelt called an economic democracy that was necessary as a precondition for political democracy.
  • After World War II, something changes. In this period, post-World War II, the idea that economic equality is necessary for our constitutional system falls out of the consciousness of most people.
  • it happens for three reasons. The first is that we experience a huge economic boom. This is a period that economists call the Great Compression. GDP goes up, median wages go up, we build America’s middle class during this period.
  • a lot of things that contributed
  • we regulated the financial industry through the Securities and Exchange Commission, Glass-Steagall during the Great Depression.
  • We also invested a lot in the kinds of things that would build a strong middle class. We sent a generation to college through the GI bill. We invested in infrastructure, which created jobs. We invested in research and development
  • We also encouraged homeownership, and in addition to all of that, we also undertook policies that would help the people who were worst-off in society: Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start. Together, these things meant that we created a society that was more equal economically than we had seen in generations.
  • constitutional debates over the economy waned, because the New Dealers won the fight over the Constitution. Debates about economic policy now just moved into regulatory terms. There was no question that the Constitution empowered the federal government to be able to regulate and operate within the economy.
  • The third big factor is the Cold War.
  • After World War II, the contrast is now between capitalism and communism, not between republics and aristocracies. As a result, the egalitarian tradition in America wanes because of the fear of communism.
  • The fear in that period switches from a fear over aristocrats, oligarchs, and plutocrats to a fear of becoming too much like the Soviet Union and too much like the communists.
  • first had a period of about 30 years where things went really well. We had a growing middle class, an expanding middle class; in fact, it was in this period that we first made serious efforts to make our country more inclusive.
  • then, just at that moment, we started turning in a different direction and undermining many of the policies that had actually built the middle class. So over the last generation, we’ve significantly reduced taxes on the wealthy, we’ve abandoned a serious antitrust policy, we’ve started investing less in the things that create a broad middle class—education, infrastructure, research. And the result of all of this was the stagnating middle class
  • One of the important things about having a large middle class for society is that there’s a sense of everyone being part of the shared project. No one’s so different from each other when there’s a large middle class.
  • People don’t have different economic interests, and as a result, they often don't have very different social interests. People send their kids to the same public schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they shop in the same places, they play on the same sports teams.
  • When the middle class starts to crumble, people increasingly see themselves as different from others. They sort themselves by wealth, by education level, and the result is that there’s an increasing fracturing of society, a loss of the solidarity that comes with having a large middle class
  • throughout our history, you see big divergences between the tradition of inclusion and the tradition of the middle class. In some cases, they overlap.
  • there’s lots of places we could think about this in our Constitution today
  • I think the most interesting moments in our history, though, are when there were people who understood that these two things had to go together, and in fact tried to build movements around them. The Civil Rights Era is a good example
  • One of the most exciting things about writing this book is discovering how often throughout our history people talked about the Constitution in economic terms. Throughout our history there was a deep sense that to have a republic, to have our Constitution work, we had to have economic equality, and that the Constitution in fact relied on this and in some cases even required action from political leaders to fulfill this economic equality.
  • In Reconstruction, in the Jacksonian Era, the populists, the progressives, the New Dealers. Throughout our history, there is a strong tradition of people who believe this.
  • These two things don’t necessarily have to go together.
  • To take a simple example, a case like Citizens United uses the First Amendment in order to stop efforts, it seems, to make our political and economic system more equal by enabling corporations and wealthy people to have outsized power over the political process. We could think about a wide variety of constitutional provisions differently if we took this seriously—the Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, the 13th Amendment, which was seen by the Reconstruction Republicans as not just ending slavery but also empowering Congress to create economic opportunity for people who were struggling economically.
  • Even going back to the ancients there was a fear that economic power would turn into political power and undermine the republic. That’s an oligarchy.
  • First, the wealthy start believing that they’re better than everybody else, that they’re more virtuous, that they deserve to govern
  • The second thing that happens is that the wealthy now have different interests than everybody else. The things that are good for them aren’t actually in the common good, so when they do govern, they start pursuing policies that improve their well-being and wealth at the expense of everyone else.
  • the “doom loop of oligarchy”: once you start down this path, it’s very hard to get out of it.
  • The problem with the vicious cycle that leads to oligarchy is that people are smart, and they see it happening, and they know, and they feel that the system is rigged against them. And in that context, people revolt against the system. This doesn’t happen through some sort of mass uprising. What the people do is they look for a leader, they look for someone who will help them overthrow the oligarchy.
  • The threat for unequal republics is on the one hand oligarchy and then on the other hand tyranny. That is a pretty unfortunate fate in either direction.
Javier E

We're All Part of Trump's Show - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-putin-pomerantsev-show.html

trump reality entertainment attention narcissism corruption politics Crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • to understand the ways in which Donald Trump’s presidency is systematically corrupting the American mind
  • The book is Peter Pomerantsev’s “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.”
  • at its heart it’s the tale of the substitution of reality with “reality,” of factual truth with interpretive possibility.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • That’s also the central task of Donald Trump’s presidency.
  • In one of his book’s early scenes, he relates a professional homily from a man he identifies as prominent Russian TV presenter. “We all know there will be no real politics” in Putin’s Russia, the man says at a staff conference.“But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. So what should we play with? Shall we attack the oligarchs? Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like … like a movie!”
  • This is why there’s a Colosseum in Rome, and why public spectacle, theater, cinema, TV and now the internet have always been handmaids of dictators
  • “The new Kremlin,” Pomerantsev notes, “won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: It will never let TV become dull.” Authoritarian dominion requires effective methods of mass distraction.
  • Trump does control his Twitter feed, with its 43.6 million followers. And he exerts a deeper level of control simply through his ability to bait hostile media at will with his every seemingly nutty utterance.
  • The benefits, for Trump, are threefold:
  • a political opposition that is exhausting itself — and much of the public — with its perpetual state of moral apoplexy
  • a political base that thrills to his readiness to scandalize the bien pensant
  • and an effective means of distraction from his electoral, legislative and foreign policy failures.
  • the president is conducting a kind of meta-politics, the purpose of which is to erase ordinary standards of political judgment.
  • The question is not “How am I doin’?” as the late New York City mayor Ed Koch used to ask. It is, gladiator-like, “Are you not entertained?”
  • The truth about Trump is not that he’s crazy. He’s a narcissist and a neurotic with a feral talent for attracting the attention he craves
  • if one part of the system is all about wild performance,” writes Pomerantsev of Putin’s media calculations, “another is about slow, patient co-optation.” Like it or not, we all inhabit the Trump-verse and we all are subject to its consequences.
Javier E

No Wonder Millennials Hate Capitalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...llennials-hate-capitalism.html

millennials capitalism socialism politics tax

shared by Javier E on 05 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • 44 percent of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country, compared with 42 percent who want to live under capitalism.
  • given the increasingly oligarchic nature of our economy, it’s not surprising that for many young people, capitalism looks like the god that failed.
  • Younger people would foot the bill, either through higher taxes, diminished public services or both. They stand to inherit an even more stratified society than the one they were born into.
ethanshilling

US to Increase Military Presence in Germany - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-military-germany.html

europe military russia

shared by ethanshilling on 13 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The United States and NATO, anxious about a major Russian troop buildup on Ukraine’s border, signaled strong support for the Kyiv government on Tuesday.
  • And in what was considered another message to Moscow, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in Germany on Tuesday that the United States would increase its military presence there by about 500 personnel and that it was scuttling plans introduced under President Donald J. Trump for a large troop reduction in Europe.
  • “The U.S. stands firmly behind the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told Mr. Kuleba.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “This meeting is extremely timely given what is happening along the Ukrainian border with Russia,” Mr. Kuleba said, calling it the “border of the democratic world.”
  • “In recent weeks, Russia has moved thousands of combat-ready troops to Ukraine’s borders, the largest massing of Russian troops since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014,” Mr. Stoltenberg of NATO said
  • “These forces will strengthen deterrence and defense in Europe,” Mr. Austin said after meeting his German counterpart, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. “They will augment our existing abilities to prevent conflict and, if necessary, fight and win.”
  • The increase in U.S. troops in Germany is a strong indication of the Biden administration’s commitment to NATO and to collective European defense.
  • One of the two new units will involve field artillery, composite air and missile defense, intelligence, cyberspace, electronic warfare, aviation and a brigade support element.
  • On Tuesday, Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, said that “two armies and three airborne units were successfully deployed to the western borders of Russia”
  • Russia is widely seen as testing Mr. Biden and keeping the pressure on Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has moved against some of the Kremlin’s favorite oligarchs.
  • Ian Bond, a former British diplomat who is head of foreign policy for the Center for European Reform, said that a war was unlikely now but could come this summer.
  • In any event, Mr. Bond said, the United States and NATO should both reassure Ukraine and “deter Russia by shifting the cost-benefit calculation in favor of de-escalation’’ — in particular by being clear to Moscow about what the consequences of a new military intervention would be.
ethanshilling

U.S. Aid to Central America Hasn't Slowed Migration. Can Kamala Harris? - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-migration-kamala-harris.html

america biden

shared by ethanshilling on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • An American contractor went to a small town in the Guatemalan mountains with an ambitious goal: to ignite the local economy, and hopefully even persuade people not to migrate north to the United States.
  • Pedro Aguilar, a coffee farmer who hadn’t asked for the training and didn’t see how it would keep anyone from heading for the border, looked confused. Eyeing the U.S. government logo on the pamphlet, he began waving it around, asking if anyone had a phone number to call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”
  • As vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. led an enormous push to deter people from crossing into the United States by devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to Central America, hoping to make the region more tolerable for the poor — so that fewer would abandon it.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday.
  • But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.
  • Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.
  • The political risks are evident, including the obvious pitfalls of investing billions in a region where the president of Honduras has been linked to drug traffickers and accused of embezzling American aid money, the leader of El Salvador has been denounced for trampling democratic norms and the government of Guatemala has been criticized for persecuting officials fighting corruption.
  • “We’ve looked extensively at different programs that have been approached,” said Nancy McEldowney, a longtime diplomat who serves as Ms. Harris’s national security adviser.
  • Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration.
  • From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
  • “It’s an incredibly not-transparent situation,” said Eric Olson, an expert on foreign aid to Central America at the Seattle International Foundation. “It’s like this is a national secret.”
  • Even when aid money reached Guatemala in recent years, it often brought little change, according to interviews with dozens who worked with or received assistance from U.S.-financed projects in the country’s western highlands.
  • For decades, migration to the United States followed a pattern: Aside from some spikes in migration from Central America after civil wars or natural disasters, it was mostly single Mexicans who headed north in search of better jobs and pay.
  • Aid workers kept coming to deliver lots of seminars on topics in which the farmers were already well versed, they said, such as planting new varieties of coffee beans, and then left.
Javier E

Opinion | White Riot - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...itol-riot-white-grievance.html

racism status resentment working class white fragility history crisis politics trump Culture

shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • how important is the frustration among what pollsters call non-college white men at not being able to compete with those higher up on the socioeconomic ladder because of educational disadvantage?
  • How critical is declining value in marriage — or mating — markets?
  • How toxic is the combination of pessimism and anger that stems from a deterioration in standing and authority? What might engender existential despair, this sense of irretrievable loss?
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • How hard is it for any group, whether it is racial, political or ethnic, to come to terms with losing power and status? What encourages desperate behavior and a willingness to believe a pack of lies?
  • I posed these questions to a wide range of experts. This column explores their replies.
  • While most acute among those possessing high status and power, Anderson said,People in general are sensitive to status threats and to any potential losses of social standing, and they respond to those threats with stress, anxiety, anger, and sometimes even violence
  • White supremacy and frank racism are prime motivators, and they combined with other elements to fuel the insurrection: a groundswell of anger directed specifically at elites and an addictive lust for revenge against those they see as the agents of their disempowerment.
  • It is this admixture of factors that makes the insurgency that wrested control of the House and Senate so dangerous — and is likely to spark new forms of violence in the future.
  • The population of U.S. Citizens who’ve lost the most power in the past 40 years, who aren’t competing well to get into college or get high paying jobs, whose marital prospects have dimmed, and who are outraged, are those I believe were most likely to be in on the attack.
  • The terrorist attacks on 9/11, the Weatherman bombings in protest of the Vietnam War, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or the assassination of abortion providers, may be motivated by different ideological beliefs but nonetheless share a common theme: The people who did these things appear to be motivated by strong moral conviction. Although some argue that engaging in behaviors like these requires moral disengagement, we find instead that they require maximum moral engagement and justification.
  • “lower class individuals experience greater vigilance to threat, relative to high status individuals, leading them to perceive greater hostility in their environment.”
  • This increased vigilance, Brinke and Keltner continue, createsa bias such that relatively low socio-economic status individuals perceive the powerful as dominant and threatening — endorsing a coercive theory of power
  • there is evidence that individuals of lower social class are more cynical than those occupying higher classes, and that this cynicism is directed toward out-group members — that is, those that occupy higher classes.
  • Before Trump, many of those who became his supporters suffered from what Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, describes as pervasive “unhappiness, stress and lack of hope” without a narrative to legitimate their condition:
  • When the jobs went away, families fell apart. There was no narrative other than the classic American dream that everyone who works hard can get ahead, and the implicit correlate was that those who fall behind and are on welfare are losers, lazy, and often minorities.
  • What, however, could prompt a mob — including not only members of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois but also many seemingly ordinary Americans drawn to Trump — to break into the Capitol?
  • One possible answer: a mutated form of moral certitude based on the belief that one’s decline in social and economic status is the result of unfair, if not corrupt, decisions by others, especially by so-called elites.
  • There is evidence that many non-college white Americans who have been undergoing what psychiatrists call “involuntary subordination” or “involuntary defeat” both resent and mourn their loss of centrality and what they perceive as their growing invisibility.
  • violence is:considered to be the essence of evil. It is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do it because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.
  • “Most violence,” Fiske and Rai contend, “is morally motivated.”
  • A key factor working in concert to aggravate the anomie and disgruntlement in many members of Trump’s white working-class base is their inability to obtain a college education, a limitation that blocks access to higher paying jobs and lowers their supposed “value” in marriage markets.
  • In their paper “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003,” Christine R. Schwartz and Robert D. Mare, professors of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote that the “most striking” data in their research, “is the decline in odds that those with very low levels of education marry up.”
  • there isvery consistent and compelling evidence to suggest the some of what we have witnessed this past week is a reflection of the angst, anger, and refusal to accept an “America”’ in which White (Christian) Americans are losing dominance, be it political, material, and/or cultural. And, I use the term dominance here, because it is not simply a loss of status. It is a loss of power. A more racially, ethnically, religiously diverse US that is also a democracy requires White Americans to acquiesce to the interests and concerns of racial/ethnic and religious minorities.
  • In this new world, Federico argues, “promises of broad-based economic security” were replaced by a job market whereyou can have dignity, but it must be earned through market or entrepreneurial success (as the Reagan/Thatcher center-right would have it) or the meritocratic attainment of professional status (as the center-left would have it). But obviously, these are not avenues available to all, simply because society has only so many positions for captains of industry and educated professionals.
  • The result, Federico notes, is that “group consciousness is likely to emerge on the basis of education and training” and when “those with less education see themselves as being culturally very different from an educated stratum of the population that is more socially liberal and cosmopolitan, then the sense of group conflict is deepened.”
  • A major development since the end of the “Great Compression” of the 30 years or so after World War II, when there was less inequality and relatively greater job security, at least for white male workers, is that the differential rate of return on education and training is now much higher.
  • Trump, Richeson continued,leaned into the underlying White nationalist sentiments that had been on the fringe in his campaign for the presidency and made his campaign about re-centering Whiteness as what it actually means to be American and, by implication, delegitimizing claims for greater racial equity, be it in policing or any other important domain of American life.
  • Whites in the last 60 years have seen minoritized folks gain more political power, economic and educational opportunity. Even though these gains are grossly exaggerated, Whites experience them as a loss in group status.
  • all the rights revolutions — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — have been key to the emergence of the contemporary right wing:As the voices of women, people of color, and other traditionally marginalized communities grow louder the frame of reference from which we tell the story of American is expanding
  • The white male story is not irrelevant but it’s insufficient, and when you have a group of people that are accustomed to the spotlight see the camera lens pan away, it’s a threat to their sense of self. It’s not surprising that QAnon support started to soar in the weeks after B.L.M. QAnon offers a way for white evangelicals to place blame on (fictional) bad people instead of a broken system. It’s an organization that validates the source of Q-Anoners insecurity — irrelevance — and in its place offers a steady source of self-righteousness and acceptance.
  • “compared to other advanced countries caught up in the transition to knowledge society, the United States appears to be in a much more vulnerable position to a strong right-wing populist challenge.”
  • First, Kitschelt noted,The difference between economic winners and losers, captured by income inequality, poverty, and illiteracy rates within the dominant white ethnicity, is much greater than in most other Western countries, and there is no dense welfare state safety net to buffer the fall of people into unemployment and poverty.
  • Another key factor, Kitschelt pointed out, is thatThe decline of male status in the family is more sharply articulated than in Europe, hastened in the U.S. by economic inequality (men fall further under changing economic circumstances) and religiosity (leading to pockets of greater male resistance to the redefinition of gender roles).
  • More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”
  • On top of that, in the United States.Many lines of conflict mutually reinforce each other rather than crosscut: Less educated whites tend to be more Evangelical and more racist, and they live in geographical spaces with less economic momentum.
  • for the moment the nation faces, for all intents and purposes, the makings of a civil insurgency. What makes this insurgency unusual in American history is that it is based on Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the presidency, that the election was stolen by malefactors in both parties, and that majorities in both branches of Congress no longer represent the true will of the people.
  • We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.
  • President Obama, Grofman wrote,responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.
  • “white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”
  • nlike most European countries, Kitschelt wrote,The United States had a civil war over slavery in the 19th century and a continuous history of structural racism and white oligarchical rule until the 1960s, and in many aspects until the present. Europe lacks this legacy.
  • He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president.
  • What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.
  • In the end, Grofman said,Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.
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