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Javier E

The Boomers Are to Blame for Aging America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...592336

boomers aging generation politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history
  • what’s to blame for this institutional aging?
  • One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018.
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  • it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic
  • most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial g
  • Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s
  • These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.
  • There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.
  • Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.
  • hey also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.
  • even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water
  • the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.
  • these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of lif
  • graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend
  • most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates
  • It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s
  • Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time
  • Below, I show a reasonable projection of the share of national income that will have to be spent paying for these obligations in the future if there is no substantial restructuring of liabilitie
  • Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.
  • Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence
  • there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending
Javier E

How the Internet Threatens Democracy - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ernet-threatens-democracy.html

internet democracy media social media dysfunction crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • it’s clear that the internet and social media have succeeded in doing what many feared and some hoped they would. They have disrupted and destroyed institutional constraints on what can be said, when and where it can be said and who can say it.
  • They are contributing — perhaps irreversibly — to the decay of traditional moral and ethical constraints in American politics.
  • “if you took the label off, someone looking at the United States would have to be worried about democratic failure or transitioning toward a hybrid regime.”
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  • Such a regime, in his view, would keep the trappings of democracy, including seemingly free elections, while leaders would control the election process, the media and the scope of permissible debate. “What you get is a country that is de facto less free.”
  • The use of digital technology in the 2016 election “represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of legacy institutions that had set bounds for American politics in the postwar era,
  • the Trump campaign was “totally unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics.” He argues thatthis type of campaign is only successful in a context in which certain established institutions — particularly, the mainstream media and political party organizations — have lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world.
  • The influence of the internet is only the most recent manifestation of the weakening of the two major American political parties over the past century, with the Civil Service undermining patronage, the rise of mass media altering communication, campaign finance law empowering donors independent of the parties, and the ascendance of direct primaries gutting the power of party bosses to pick nominees.
  • how the erosion of political parties played out in 2016:Neither party appeared to have a mechanism of internal correction. Neither could muster the wise elders to steer a more conventional course. Neither could use its congressional leadership to regain control of the party through its powers of governance. Neither could lay claim to financial resources that would compel a measure of candidate loyalty. Neither could even exert influence though party endorsements.
  • The parties proved hollow vehicles that offered little organizational resistance to capture by outsiders. And what was captured appeared little more than a brand, certainly not the vibrant organizations that are heralded as the indispensable glue of democratic politics.
  • “We are witnessing a period of deep challenge to the core claims of democracy to be the superior form of political organization of civilized peoples,” he told his audience:
  • The current moment of democratic uncertainty draws from four central institutional challenges, each one a compromise of how democracy was consolidated over the past few centuries. First, the accelerated decline of political parties and other institutional forms of engagement; second, the weakness of the legislative branches; third, the loss of a sense of social cohesion; and fourth, the decline in democratic state competence.
  • “Technology has overtaken one of the basic functions you needed political parties for in the past, communication with voters,” he said. “Social media has changed all of that, candidates now have direct access through email, blogs and Twitter,” along with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other platforms.
  • Two developments in the 2016 campaign provided strong evidence of the vulnerability of democracies in the age of the internet: the alleged effort of the Russian government to secretly intervene on behalf of Trump, and the discovery by internet profiteers of how to monetize the distribution of fake news stories, especially stories damaging to Hillary Clinton.
  • Clay Shirky is a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U. In a 2009 TED talk — the full political significance of which has only become clear over the past eight years — he described some of the implications of the digital revolution:
  • The internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. Whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, radio, magazines, books, gave us the one-to-many pattern, the internet gives us the many-to-many pattern.
  • The second big change is that, as all media gets digitized, the internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media, meaning that phone calls migrate to the internet, magazines migrate to the internet, movies migrate to the internet
  • Put another way, media is increasingly less just a source of information, and it is increasingly more a site of coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well.
  • the third big change, according to Shirky, is that members of the former audiencecan now also be producers and not consumers. Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment — phones, computers — let you consume and produce
  • Of course, this problem goes much deeper than the internet
  • Our politics are vulnerable to nefarious influences — whether of the Kremlin variety or the Breitbart variety — not because our information landscape is open and fluid, but because voters’ perceptions have become untethered from reality. For reasons that are both complex and debatable, very many voters have stopped seeing government as a tool for the production of the common good, and have instead turned to politicians (and others) who at least make them feel good. Thus, the news we consume has become as much about emotion and identity as about facts. That’s where the vulnerability comes in, and its roots are in our politics — not in the internet.
knudsenlu

Can Germany Fix Facebook? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...543258

germany facebook lies

shared by knudsenlu on 02 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • goal was to satirize Facebook’s cryptic regulations, which have made the company a target of vehement public criticism in a society historically suspicious of censorship in all forms.
  • To say Facebook has an image problem in Germany, where it has 28 million users, is a staggering understatement. Germans tend to view it as a phenomenon that drives people apart instead of bringing them “closer together,” as Facebook’s mission statement suggests, by facilitating the spread of hate speech, misinformation, and fake news in the process.
  • Facebook played a role in delivering the far-right Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) to the best performance of a far-right nationalist party since the Third Reich.
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  • “Facebook Law,” allows the government to fine social-media platforms with more than 2 million registered users in Germany—a club that includes giants like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit—up to 50 million euros for leaving “manifestly unlawful” posts up for more than 24 hours. Unlawful content is defined as anything that violates Germany’s Criminal Code, which bans incitement to hatred, incitement to crime, the spread of symbols belonging to unconstitutional groups, and more.
  • Unlike in the United States, freedom of speech is “not the most important civil right” in Germany
  • The invocation of human dignity carries immense moral force, and parallels the language of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights.
  • Instead, Article One of Germany’s postwar constitution instructs, “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” This notion “means you are not allowed to claim false things about me, because it hurts my dignity,” Beckedahl said. “You are not allowed to tell anyone in public lies about me, or I can take you to court.”
  • Malicious misinformation “is even more dangerous than hatred or incitement,”
  • Like Künast, Jun has been assiduously collecting and reporting instances of pro-Nazi language and other forms of hate speech on Facebook since 2015, logging them methodically in a Dropbox folder and Excel spreadsheet that he’s eager to share with inquiring journalists. Images from the internet of beheadings, murders, Nazi salutes, and racist slurs abound. His aim in collecting this wealth of abhorrent material is simple: to underscore the chasm separating Germany’s constitution, which bans the dissemination of material documenting “cruel or otherwise inhuman acts of violence” and incitement to hatred, and the permissive culture of the internet. The result, Jun said, is that Germans—and most Facebook users around the world—are living a kind of double life, subject to two very different legal and moral codes.
  • In response to what he saw as Facebook’s negligence on this score, Jun took a different approach, targeting individual managers at the company for perpetuating, or even encouraging, hateful behavior. “If a manager of a company has positive knowledge about a concrete crime, and he doesn’t do anything about it, then he will have personal liability for that crime,” he explained. In other words: If he could prove that Facebook employees were aware of hate speech on the network and did not take the posts down, they could be found guilty of a crime in a German court. (The law is usually applied to copyright infringements, and whether it will work in a criminal case against a social-media platform remains an open question.)
Javier E

The Year of Voting Recklessly - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...year-of-voting-recklessly.html

history crisis politics US UK lessons democracy

shared by Javier E on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Why? The word that usually serves to explain it is “normalization.” As Raskolnikov puts it in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” “Man gets used to everything, the scoundrel!
  • there’s no need to normalize what you already like. All you need to do is raise it to the surface. Neither Corbyn nor Trump would have come as far as they did if they hadn’t seized control of their parties by stroking some inner ideological id.
  • Nor would they have succeeded if the party faithful hadn’t forgotten, or never learned, why the warmed-over Marxism or dumbed-down nationalism each championed was so thoroughly discredited.
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  • “As the memory of World War II, the Holocaust and the Gulag fades, so too does the antipathy to the illiberal ideologies that spawned Europe’s past horrors,” writes James Kirchick in his superb if dismaying book “The End of Europe”: “This is evidenced in the rising electoral success of populist authoritarian parties of the extreme left and right, none of which have anything new to say, yet claim the mantle of ideological innovation and moral virtue.”
  • It took three generations to lose the lessons of prewar isolationism. It took two to ignore the benefits of postwar European integration. If Corbyn’s rise is something to go by, it has taken just a single generation to forget the sins of the far left: anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism; anti-Americanism masquerading as pacifism; fellow-traveling with dictators and terrorists masquerading as sympathy for the wretched of the earth.
  • democracy is a system in which people are only accountable to themselves. The recklessness of their leaders is a result of personal choices at the ballot box, not impersonal social or economic forces.
malonema1

Why Trump's Exit From the Paris Agreement Could Spark a Trade War - 0 views

www.worldpoliticsreview.com/...eement-could-spark-a-trade-war

paris agreement trump environment trade politics

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Why Trump’s Exit From the Paris Agreement Could Spark a Trade War
  • “America First” trade policy
  • generate renewed anxiety over the stability of the international trading system
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • imposing a 45 percent tariff on all imports from China. However, in addition to exiting the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trump’s provocative rhetoric continues to keep U.S. trading partners on edge.
  • Trump used his participation in the NATO and G-7 summits in part to criticize German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the U.S.-Germany trade relationship
  • To create future disincentives for free-riding, parties to the agreement may seek ways to punish the U.S. for its behavior.
  • rump has proposed significant budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency that, if adopted, would cut spending by 31 percent and eliminate 25 percent of the agency’s 15,000 jobs
  • Second, Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement politically isolates the U.S. from many of its key trading partners
  • Given its policy decisions on climate change and the environment, the Trump administration may have difficulty achieving this objective in future settings, such as NAFTA renegotiations
  • The administration also risks appearing hypocritical if it brings disputes over environmental commitments or dumping in green technologies such as solar panels up for resolution at the WTO
  • Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement is a terrible misjudgment that will have lasting ramifications for the Earth’s climate and U.S. global leadership of the postwar liberal international order. The decision could also undermine America’s trading competitiveness, an issue Trump claims to champion, while causing the kind of economic harm that he says he wants to avoid by leaving the climate accord. U.S. policymakers must remain vigilant to avoid a trade war that could further damage the economic interests of American companies, workers and citizens.
Javier E

I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ght-trump-proved-me-wrong.html

conservatism right alt-right nativism fascism populism US history

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Stephen H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life
  • In fact, the “far right” was never that far from the American mainstream. The historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, writing in the journal Social History, points out that “scholars of American history are by and large in agreement that, in spite of a welter of fringe radical groups on the right in the United States between the wars, fascism never ‘took’ here.”
  • Nevertheless, Steigmann-Gall continues, “fascism had a very real presence in the U.S.A., comparable to that on continental Europe.” He cites no less mainstream an organization than the American Legion, whose “National Commander” Alvin Owsley proclaimed in 1922, “the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”
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  • Anti-Semitism in America declined after World War II. But as Leo Ribuffo points out, the underlying narrative — of a diabolical transnational cabal of aliens plotting to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization — survived in the anti-Communist diatribes of Joseph McCarthy. The alien narrative continues today in the work of National Review writers like Andrew McCarthy (“How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda”) and Lisa Schiffren
  • When Trump vowed on the campaign trail to Make America Great Again, he was generally unclear about when exactly it stopped being great. The Vanderbilt University historian Jefferson Cowie tells a story that points to a possible answer.
  • In his book “The Great Exception,” he suggests that what historians considered the main event in 20th century American political development — the rise and consolidation of the “New Deal order” — was in fact an anomaly, made politically possible by a convergence of political factors. One of those was immigration. At the beginning of the 20th century, millions of impoverished immigrants, mostly Catholic and Jewish, entered an overwhelmingly Protestant country. It was only when that demographic transformation was suspended by the 1924 Immigration Act that majorities of Americans proved willing to vote for many liberal policies.
  • Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.
  • In their 1987 book, “Right Turn,” the political scientists Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson presented public-opinion data demonstrating that Reagan’s crusade against activist government, which was widely understood to be the source of his popularity, was not, in fact, particularly popular. For example, when Reagan was re-elected in 1984, only 35 percent of voters favored significant cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit
  • Much excellent scholarship, well worth revisiting in the age of Trump, suggests an explanation for Reagan’s subsequent success at cutting back social programs in the face of hostile public opinion: It was business leaders, not the general public, who moved to the right, and they became increasingly aggressive and skilled in manipulating the political process behind the scenes.
  • another answer hides in plain sight. The often-cynical negotiation between populist electioneering and plutocratic governance on the right has long been not so much a matter of policy as it has been a matter of show business.
  • It is a short leap from advertising and reality TV to darker forms of manipulation. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. Direct-mail pioneers like Richard Viguerie created hair-on-fire campaign-fund-raising letters about civilization on the verge of collapse.
  • In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the United States — and it is no accident that this date coincides with the increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.
  • Why Is There So Much Scholarship on ‘Conservatism,’ and Why Has It Left the Historical Profession So Obtuse About Trumpism?” One reason, as Ribuffo argues, is the conceptual error of identifying a discrete “modern conservative movement” in the first place. Another reason, though, is that historians of conservatism, like historians in general, tend to be liberal, and are prone to liberalism’s traditions of politesse. It’s no surprise that we are attracted to polite subjects like “colorblind conservatism” or William F. Buckley.
  • Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to “white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”
  • Until the 1990s, the most influential writer on the subject of the American right was Richard Hofstadter, a colleague of Trilling’s at Columbia University in the postwar years. Hofstadter was the leader of the “consensus” school of historians; the “consensus” being Americans’ supposed agreement upon moderate liberalism as the nation’s natural governing philosophy.
  • He didn’t take the self-identified conservatives of his own time at all seriously. He called them “pseudoconservatives” and described, for instance, followers of the red-baiting Republican senator Joseph McCarthy as cranks who salved their “status anxiety” with conspiracy theories and bizarre panaceas. He named this attitude “the paranoid style in American politics”
  • in 1994, the scholar Alan Brinkley published an essay called “The Problem of American Conservatism” in The American Historical Review. American conservatism, Brinkley argued, “had been something of an orphan in historical scholarship,” and that was “coming to seem an ever-more-curious omission.” The article inaugurated the boom in scholarship that brought us the story, now widely accepted, of conservatism’s triumphant rise
  • American historians’ relationship to conservatism itself has a troubled history. Even after Ronald Reagan’s electoral-college landslide in 1980, we paid little attention to the right: The central narrative of America’s political development was still believed to be the rise of the liberal state.
  • If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?
  • The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump
  • But if Hofstadter was overly dismissive of how conservatives understood themselves, the new breed of historians at times proved too credulous. McGirr diligently played down the sheer bloodcurdling hysteria of conservatives during the period she was studyin
  • Lisa McGirr, now of Harvard University, whose 2001 book, “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” became a cornerstone of the new literature. Instead of pronouncing upon conservatism from on high, as Hofstadter had, McGirr, a social historian, studied it from the ground up, attending respectfully to what activists understood themselves to be doing. What she found was “a highly educated and thoroughly modern group of men and women,” normal participants in the “bureaucratized world of post-World War II America.” They built a “vibrant and remarkable political mobilization,
  • I sometimes made the same mistake. Writing about the movement that led to Goldwater’s 1964 Republican nomination, for instance, it never occurred to me to pay much attention to McCarthyism, even though McCarthy helped Goldwater win his Senate seat in 1952, and Goldwater supported McCarthy to the end. (As did William F. Buckley.) I was writing about the modern conservative movement, the one that led to Reagan, not about the brutish relics of a more gothic, ill-formed and supposedly incoherent reactionary era that preceded it.
  • A few historians have provocatively followed a different intellectual path, avoiding both the bloodlessness of the new social historians and the psychologizing condescension of the old Hofstadter school. Foremost among them is Leo Ribuffo, a professor at George Washington University.
Javier E

Young and to the left? Not in Germany, where the Merkel generation prefers an old hand.... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b2a7-bc70b6f98089_story.html

germany merkel youth history politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Fifty-seven percent of first-time voters, for instance, favor the chancellor, compared with 21 percent who prefer her Social Democratic rival, Martin Schulz, according to polling conducted by the Forsa Institute.
  • It also marks a change within Germany, where young voters typically have chosen the Social Democrats, and increasingly the Greens, in the postwar era. The first time Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union captured the largest share of the youth vote without the help of its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union, was in 2013. 
  • This generation came to political consciousness in the anxious aftermath of the 9/11 attacks but then watched their own country weather the financial crisis later that decade with relative ease. The European Union is suddenly no longer a given, and the United States, which steered Germany to political normalization, is looking inward under a president who promises “America first.”
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  • Students in Magdeburg took comfort in Germany’s stability but voiced pessimism about the safety of the world — somewhat the inverse of the perspective with which earlier generations came of age. 
  • “I’m afraid about the future,” said Philipp Thiel, 27, who is training to become a teacher at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. “I don’t expect a third world war but maybe something like that, with North Korea, Turkey, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, Trump,” he said.
  • Merkel, he said, is a contrast to bellicose world leaders. “She’s someone who will say, ‘Okay guys, calm down.’ ”
  • much of her audience sees Merkel only for her role on the world stage — her ability to keep Russia in line, her willingness to counter President Trump and, most recently, her appeal for talks with North Korea.
  • “A feeling that I sometimes sense among our viewers is, ‘Could somebody please stop the world for a moment, just so I could try to understand one crisis at a time?’ ” said Schulz, who is 27 and described 9/11 as the moment “politics started” for her. Her parents, she said, did not worry about terrorism, and they believed they had moved past the brand of politics it breeds — nationalism.
  • in traveling across the country to prepare for the show, Schulz said, she heard one view repeatedly: “We are doing fine as a generation.” Germany boasts the lowest youth unemployment rate, 6.5 percent, of any E.U. country. Quibbles, Schulz said, are dismissed as “Luxusprobleme,” best translated as “First World problems.”
  • But this idea — almost a sense of gratitude — may be dissuading young people from getting more involved in politics, Schulz warned. Just six lawmakers in the Bundestag, the 630-member lower house of Parliament, were born after 1985. 
  • Wolfgang Gründinger, author of the book “Old Geezers’ Politics,” said Germany’s older generations “are robbing the youth of their future,” pointing to the lack of attention to education and child poverty in this month’s electoral debate.
  • Although Gründinger is an active member of the Social Democrats, he does not spare the party blame. “Fewer than 3 percent of SPD members are younger than 25, which means that the lives of younger people play virtually no role in the everyday debate,” said Gründinger, referring to the party.
Javier E

Opinion | What Happened When Germany's Far-Right Party Railed Against Lockdowns - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...germany-afd-covid.html

germany pandemic Politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In November, as Covid-19 cases began to rise, thousands of people gathered in Berlin to protest against restrictions. In among the conspiracy theorists and extremists were several lawmakers from the country’s main opposition party, the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany.
  • the AfD’s support has slipped. Already struggling to reach new voters, its embrace of anti-lockdown sentiment seems to have further limited its appeal — and sped up its transformation into an extremist organization.
  • the AfD’s initial response was cautious. Prominent party legislators warned about the virus, encouraged the government to act swiftly and voted for a package of economic relief. “Closing ranks is our first duty as citizens now,” Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the party, said.
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  • But this attempt to cater to the average voter came at a cost. The party soon found itself deprived of many of its usual supporters, who took a different course, downplaying the danger and castigating the government. On Facebook and social media, the party stuttered.
  • As the first lockdown was tentatively lifted, through April and May, many leading AfD figures performed a 180-degree turn. No longer consensual, they fiercely railed against restrictions of any kind, which they claimed were unconstitutional as well as economically ruinous.
  • The historic showing of 2017 — when the AfD became the first far-right party to enter Germany’s postwar parliament — is unlikely to be repeated, let alone surpassed.
  • The move made sense. By the time the pandemic arrived, the party “had started to struggle,” Kai Arzheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Mainz, told me. Migration had vanished from the top of voters’ concerns, depriving the party of its momentum. It was unclear how it might make further inroads.
  • What’s more, the party was increasingly seen as extreme and radical. The media uncovered many ties to extremist groups
  • In November, to demonstrate its defiance, the party held an in-person convention with hundreds of participants packed into a hall. That same month, an AfD legislator appeared in the parliament, where masks are mandatory, wearing one riddled with holes. And prominent party members not only attended some of the anti-lockdown protests that spread across the country last year but also adopted the protesters’ talking points, for example by calling Germany a “Corona dictatorship.” The AfD became something like the anti-lockdown party.
  • That doesn’t make the party less of a danger, though. In ways reminiscent of former President Donald Trump, the AfD is seeking to scuttle public trust in the political system.
  • Ahead of an election where many may vote remotely — Germany’s vaccination program probably won’t be complete by fall — this amounts to a calculated strategy of subversion. Though the party’s influence is limited, the fact that 8 percent to 10 percent of the electorate seems unshakable in its support is deeply concerning.
Javier E

Opinion | Was Nazi Germany Defeated or Liberated? Germans Can't Decide. - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-liberation-nazi-history.html

germany nazi liberation wwII history Culture Politics debate

shared by Javier E on 08 May 21 - No Cached
  • the discussion of May 8 as a day of liberation, however well intentioned, does not just challenge the far-right narrative. It also muddies historical reality and could contribute exactly to what many of those who embrace it wish to avoid: a shunning of historical responsibility.
  • At a time when living memories are disappearing, some Germans — now and in future generations — will take the talk of liberation literally, glossing over the complicity of the masses in Nazi crimes.
  • It was in an effort to oppose this mentality that on V-E Day in 1985, the president of West Germany, Richard von Weizsäcker, gave a speech that is now considered one of the most important in the country’s postwar history. Germans at the end of the war, he said, felt “exhaustion, despair and new anxiety.” Yet, he went on, “with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: The 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National Socialist regime.”
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  • While the impulse today to interpret May 8 as a day of liberation — if only through a retrospective lens — is understandable, few seem to have taken into account the danger that many Germans will take the term at face value, as historical reality. But as generations pass, and as the last victims and perpetrators perish, keeping the facts straight becomes even more important.
  • In a poll commissioned by the German weekly Die Zeit before the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, 53 percent of respondents agreed with the false statement that “it was just a few criminals who instigated the war and killed the Jews.” In another poll commissioned by a German public broadcaster, 23 percent didn’t even have a grasp of what the Holocaust was.
  • To be clear, German leaders today employ the notion of liberation to embrace their historical responsibility, not to deny it. This was clear when President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke on the 75th anniversary of V-E Day. It had taken three generations “for us to wholeheartedly admit” that May 8 is “a day of liberation,” he said.
  • Though the liberation was “imposed from outside,” he said, Germans subsequently played a part in “our internal liberation.” This was a “long and painful process which involved facing up to the past,” he said, and “fighting to stop silence and denial from prevailing.” The process of internal liberation, in other words, meant rejection of a Schlussstrich.
  • The point is not to saddle current and future generations with guilt, but to ensure that the unvarnished truth remains clear. No good lesson can be drawn from history without a full understanding that the guilty were all around, and that they fought to the end.
Javier E

Debate Erupts at N.J. Law School After White Student Quotes Racial Slur - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Rutgers-law-school-n-word.html

law school censorship slur racial free speech

shared by Javier E on 03 May 21 - No Cached
  • Rutgers officials willing to talk openly about their opposition to the students’ demands have said that the school, as a public institution, has a greater obligation to safeguard students’ and teachers’ First Amendment right to free speech.
  • The head of the journalism department at Central Michigan University was fired last year after using the same slur when quoting from a lawsuit. An Emory University law school professor was placed on administrative leave for more than a year after using the word in discussions with students about race.
  • Any public use of a racial epithet can carry a risk of steep professional consequences.
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  • “Although we all deplore the use of racist epithets,” said Gary L. Francione, a law professor who also signed the statement, “the idea that a faculty member or law student cannot quote a published court decision that itself quotes a racial or other otherwise objectionable word as part of the record of the case is problematic and implicates matters of academic freedom and free speech.”
  • Among the professors who have signed a statement in support of Professor Bergelson and the student are some of the school’s most prominent faculty members, including John Farmer Jr., a former New Jersey attorney general, and Ronald K. Chen, the state’s onetime public advocate. Both are former deans of Rutgers Law School.
  • rofessor Bergelson, 59, has said that she did not hear the word spoken during the videoconference session, which three students attended after a criminal law class, and would have corrected the student if she had.
  • Professor Bergelson said she was never told about her students’ objections, learning of them only after the petition surfaced April 6, five months later. Within days, she said, she convened a meeting with the criminal law class and other first-year students to discuss the incident and to offer an apology. The student, who has not been publicly identified, also apologized during the meeting.
  • “I don’t think the Law School should have rules that are stricter than the Constitution of the United States,” said Dennis M. Patterson, a professor.
  • Professor Lopez and his co-dean, Kimberly Mutcherson, said in a statement that the discussion underway had nothing to do with “stifling academic freedom, ignoring the First Amendment, or banning words.”
  • Rather, they said, it was about “how best to create classroom environments in which all of our students feel seen, heard, valued and respected.”
  • “He said, um — and I’ll use a racial word, but it’s a quote,” the student said, according to a summary of the incident written by professors. “He says, ‘I’m going to go to Trenton and come back with my [expletive]s.”
  • The controversy began on Oct. 28, after a criminal law class all first-year students are required to take. In discussing the circumstances under which a criminal defendant could be held liable for crimes committed by his co-conspirators, the student repeated a quote from a defendant that appeared in an opinion written by a former State Supreme Court judge, Alan B. Handler.
  • Samantha Harris, the lawyer representing the woman, said the school would be abdicating its responsibility to train lawyers if it encouraged professors to avoid epithets in all contexts.
  • “When you’re an attorney, you hear all kinds of horrible things,” said Ms. Harris, a former fellow at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
  • dam Scales, a Black professor at Rutgers Law who has signed the statement of support for Professor Bergelson, said he opposed even voluntary limits on speech. But he said the number of his colleagues who believe racial epithets should never be spoken, regardless of the context, is “not insignificant.”
  • “You represent people who have said horrible things, who have done horrible things,” she said. “You can’t guarantee a world free of offensive language.”
  • The faculty discussions, held by videoconference, have been fraught, he said.
  • “I can’t imagine a less hospitable setting than a 100-person Zoom call to discuss racism,” he said. “It’s a demoralizing time for everyone involved.”
  • “I certainly grew up in the shadow of this tragedy,” she said. “I am very sensitive to how a word can trigger painful episodes. I would never use the words in class.”Still, she said, other professors and students should be free to make their own choices.
  • Professor Bergelson, who emigrated from Moscow as an adult, said her belief that slurs rooted in racism, bigotry or misogyny should be avoided in class stems from her personal history. Her grandmother, she said, was a journalist who was executed in 1950 by the Stalin regime for associating with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Another relative was executed in 1952.
cartergramiak

Opinion | My Grandparents' Immigration Lies Shaped My Father's View of Justice - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ted-immigration-holocaust.html

politics US Culture history economics

shared by cartergramiak on 27 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • “The Blumstein family, consisting of Mr. B, age 43, his wife, same age, and their two children, ages 6½ and 2½ arrived in the United States on 12/21/50,” begins the social worker’s minutely detailed account of my grandparents’, and my father’s, first weeks as refugees in the United States.
  • My father was born stateless in Uzbekistan in 1945, as World War II was winding down. His Polish-born Jewish parents had spent years in flight — first to Russia in 1939, when Hitler invaded their home country, only to be deported via cattle cars into forced labor in Siberia. My father’s older brother perished of diphtheria during the war. Postwar, my grandparents boarded trains west, but at the Polish border heard the news that nearby villagers had murdered Jews who returned and gave up on their plan to reclaim their home.
  • “Misrepresentation in visa and citizenship applications is a matter of U.S. immigration law, and few if any of the normal due process rights accorded to defendants in criminal trials apply,” my father wrote in his memoir, “Lies That Matter,” which will be published next month. “And so deportations to the U.S.S.R. followed by a firing squad were seen as not really ‘punitive,’ as if lives were not at stake.” To my father this was not justice: The immigration system did not take into consideration whether the punishment fit the crime. He left O.S.I. after 18 months.
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  • My father had come to recognize that in contrast to what so many of today’s most vulnerable immigrants face, the system his family encountered ultimately supported them. He also knew intimately that lives are at stake.
Javier E

How America Went Haywire - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534231

reality truth irrationality crisis culture trump history politics post-factual post-truth

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
  • Why are we like this?The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned.
  • The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites.
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  • Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.
  • Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.
  • Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking
  • The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.
  • The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them
  • Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.
  • we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.
  • We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.
  • For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.
  • It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.
  • These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.”
  • The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.
  • And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.
  • Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami.
  • During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent.
  • The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.
  • over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself
  • Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger.
  • then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.
  • To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”
  • In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.
  • Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”
  • Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certaint
  • Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more.
  • Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies.
  • Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.
  • t more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.
  • Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.
  • Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.
  • Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.
  • Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.
  • For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.
  • Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say
  • as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”
  • After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.
  • America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.
  • In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment
  • Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.
  • I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did.
  • Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day.
  • Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.
  • Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.
  • there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown
  • After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.
  • Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers
  • Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say
  • Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.
  • On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.
  • Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of result
  • If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?
  • an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.
  • Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”
  • Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies.
  • Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.
  • People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.
  • Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?
  • One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian
  • , as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but ratherthey are interconnected. Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.
  • Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades.
  • The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.
  • starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.
  • Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism
  • Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish
  • For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans
  • Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.
  • But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,”
  • “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”
  • What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.
  • The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did
  • A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.
  • Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians.
  • What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed
  • When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier.
  • Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.
  • Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.
  • Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.
  • Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.
  • Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites.
  • The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.
  • He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.”
  • indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”
  • Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.
  • he idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies
  • I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine
  • I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.
  • I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations
  • We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal
  • do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.
  • How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities?
  • reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.
  • Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.”
  • A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.
Javier E

H-Debate on Versailles Tr. - Google Drive - 0 views

drive.google.com/...Y6IivTRpbhUV2GVDIqKfGnPvMsN5Rh

Versailles Treaty history

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • She points out that the territorial settlement, which deprived Germany of 13% of its territory, 10% of its population, and 13.5% of its economic potential, in fact involved the transfer of much German land that “was French, Walloon, Danish, or Polish in population and culture” (652).
  • hose forced territorial cessions were much less that the huge swath of
  • Her main insight about reparations—which has been highlighted by Mark Trachtenberg6 and others-- is that the Allied leaders in Paris were caught in a terrible dilemma: they recognized that post-war Germany would be incapable of bearing the enormous financial burden of rebuilding the territories ravished by its armies during the war. But they also knew that their publics had been led to expect Germany to pay for the entire cost of reconstruction and would cashier any head of government who settled for anything less than full payment.
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  • territory that Germany wrested from Bolshevik Russia in the March 1918 Treaty of Brest- Litovsk and planned to force France and Belgium to cede if Germany had won in the west.
  • But Marks notes that no amount of reparation payment would have been acceptable to the leaders of the Weimar Republic because such payments were erroneously connected in the mind of the German public with the widespread myth of the “war guilt clause.” As she has reminded us in her earlier work, the word “guilt” does not appear in the notorious Article 231, and virtually identical language was included in the treaties signed with Germany’s allies. Yet the myth of the “war guilt clause” unilaterally imposed on Germany, which was propagated in the early 1920s by Weimar officials and opinion makers, has stood the test of time and continues to find its way into histories of the peace settlement.
  • They therefore resorted to a masterly sleight-of-hand: Under Article 231 of the peace treaty, Germany would be required to acknowledge full responsibility for the damage done. Article 232 would concede that Germany could not be expected to pay beyond its capacity. Thus, the Allied publics would have the satisfaction of knowing that Germany would be required to accept responsibility for the damage caused by its military forces in northeastern France, Belgium, and elsewhere. The Weimar Republic should have been relieved to learn that it would it not be required to pay a war indemnity or the actual costs of the war, as France had after 1871 at the end of a war in which no German territory had been damaged. Germany should also have been pleased to note that the reparation bill would be based not on the total amount of damage caused but rather on Germany’s economic wherewithal to pay.
  • On the question of Germany’s capacity to pay, Marks is merciless in dissecting and disproving the various claims of penury. “There are those, not all German, who claim that reparations were unpayable,” she observes. “After 1871, France, with a much smaller economy than Germany’s fifty years later, paid nearly as much in two years (by French estimate) to liberate its territory as the Weimar Republic paid from 1919 to 1932”
  • She points out that “Germany’s tax rates [in the 1920s] were abnormally low and remained so....Raising taxes would have provided ample funds, as the Dawes Committee discovered. Weimar could have borrowed from the citizenry, as France did after 1871.”Moreover the postwar German economy “was intact, having been spared devastation and denudation [which the major reparation recipients France and Belgium had experienced.] There were lavish social subsidies, unmatched by the victors.
  • In the end, as Stephen A. Schuker has shown, the Weimar Republic actually paid no net reparations at all, discharging its reparation bill with the proceeds from American bank loans and then defaulting on both reparations and foreign debts in the Great Depression.
  • So much for the claim that the ‘burdensome’ reparations requirement of the peace treaty led to the collapse of the German economy and the advent of Hitler.
Javier E

The age of perpetual crisis: how the 2010s disrupted everything but resolved nothing | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...verything-but-resolved-nothing

2010s decade review history politics culture crisis uk

shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • How will we remember the last 10 years? Above all, as a time of crises. During the 2010s, there have been crises of democracy and the economy; of the climate and poverty; of international relations and national identity; of privacy and technology
  • The world of the 2000s, she concluded, “has been swept away”. In place of centrist politicians and steady economic growth, the 2010s have brought shocks, revolts and extremists. Hung parliaments; rightwing populists in power; physical attacks on politicians; Russian influence on western elections; elderly leftists galvanising young Britons and Americans; rich, rightwing leaders in both countries captivating working-class voters – scenarios close to unimaginable a decade ago have become familiar, almost expected.
  • In the 2010s, it has often felt as if everything is up for grabs – from the future of capitalism to the future of the planet – and yet nothing has been decided. Between the decade’s sense of stasis and sense of possibility, an enormous tension has built up
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  • Perhaps the most frightening of this year’s many apocalyptic books is The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Its chapter titles read: Heat Death. Hunger. Drowning. Dying Oceans. Unbreathable Air. Wildfire. Plagues. Economic Collapse. Climate Conflict. It’s intended to be a forecast of the planet’s near future that will shock readers out of their complacency. But during the 2010s almost all the disasters that the book names have already started to happen.
  • As one of the New Optimists’ favourite sources, the website Our World in Data, had to admit this year: “In some aspects the data suggests the world is getting worse.”
  • the awareness that much of modern life – air travel, car travel, eating meat, shopping, using plastics – has malign consequences has grown from a minority preoccupation in the 1970s into an everyday topic.
  • Sometimes in the 2010s, it has felt as if the whole world we have made, from the tiniest exhaust particle to the most sprawling conurbation, is toxic.
  • Nowadays, the fear is almost universal. The creation of social media networks over the last decade and a half, starting with Twitter in 2006, and the conversion of traditional media into non-stop news services, have made awful events seem relentless and impossible to ignore. We have become perpetually anxious.
  • In a working world that requires quick switches between inactivity and activity, that values powers of endurance, caffeine is a vital drug. In many British town and city centres during the 2010s, otherwise emptied out by online commerce, cafes proliferated, replacing shops and pubs as the busiest indoor spaces.
  • When people say “It is what it is”, they are rarely challenged. Instead, they are usually heard in respectful silence. In a difficult world, fatalism and stoicism are useful qualities.
  • Another coping mechanism is escape. Possibly the most revealing leisure activity of the 2010s is shutting yourself away with a TV series: typically a drama set in another country or another era, with an addictive, slowly resolved plot, many characters, elaborate settings, and enough episodes to allow for watching in binges. In an age of squeezed incomes, TV dramas are worlds you can explore on the cheap.
  • During the decade, it became cooler than usual in Britain to eat comforting things: bread, cakes, pies, even grilled cheese sandwiches. The Great British Bake Off, first broadcast in 2010, made cooking with lots of carbs and sugar respectable again
  • Clothes have become more cocooning: enormous puffer jackets, scarves the size of small blankets, fleeces and woolly hats. In the 2000s, clothes and silhouettes were leaner and more formal – tight suits, skinny trousers – as if people expected to seize exciting new opportunities, or at least to work in offices. In the 2010s, social mobility has stalled, and many of the jobs being created – and often taken by middle-class graduates – involve zero-hours contracts and outdoor work
  • “It is what it is.” Usually, it means: “I’m learning to live with something negative” – a personal setback, a wider injustice, difficult circumstances. It’s a mantra for an age of diminishing expectations, when many people no longer assume – unlike their postwar predecessors – that they will become richer than their parents, and live in an ever more sophisticated or just society, on an ever more hospitable planet
  • Another way to cope with the 2010s has been to work obsessively on yourself. From the 1950s to the 1990s, being young in the west was often associated with lounging around, or rebelling, or living for the moment. But in the 2010s being young often means relentlessly working and studying, polishing your public persona, and keeping fit
  • Yoga, marathons, triathlons – it’s not hard to see their renewed popularity over the last decade as an effort by people, conscious or otherwise, to hone themselves for a tougher world.
  • this self-optimisation can be measured, and compared with the efforts of others, as never before. This process has created a new hierarchy, particularly within the American middle class, but increasingly in its European counterpart, too, which privileges the leanest people, the most punishing exercise classes, the most body-conscious brands of workout clothes.
  • finally, the harsher world of the 2010s has also prompted many people to undergo a more private, less visible toughenin
  • They have got used to walking past the decade’s casualties in the street, and not giving them much thought. In the 2010s, as in Victorian times, if you want an untroubled mind, it doesn’t pay to look at the world around you too hard.
  • the difficulties since 2010 of so many previously dominant value systems – capitalism, centrism, traditional conservatism, white male supremacy – have opened up space for new political movements, at a rate not seen since the 1960s.
  • the 2010s have reacquainted voters with the idea that politics can be about big promises and fundamental choices.
  • the 2010s have also brought a renewed realisation that culture is political – after decades when most creative people and cultural critics avoided that conclusion. Literary and art prizes now regularly go to people whose work is overtly political, such as Margaret Atwood
  • Although prizes are inherently elitist, they are now also increasingly expected to promote greater equality in society as a whole. It is a contradiction characteristic of the decade’s politics, where a greater awareness of the injustices suffered by many social groups, and sometimes a greater willingness to redress them, co-exists with an intensifying individualism – with a growing preference for letting people self-identify and respecting each person’s particular life experience
  • In 2012, Mark Fisher said that Britain was suffering from “depression economics and boomtime politics”: the disengagement prompted by the relatively comfortable 1990s and 2000s was lingering on, despite the reopening of so many economic issues by the financial crisis. Seven years later, apathy remains a habit for many Britons
  • digital technology, far from enabling more creativity, had actually made it both harder and less essential for artists. Instead of coming up with new ideas, they could now roam the internet’s infinite archives, and build careers out of clever hybrids and pastiches of previous forms.
  • Pop culture from the 1990s, in particular, such as the cosy TV series Friends, has become hugely popular again. In our often backward-looking society, “Time itself seem[s] to become sluggish,” wrote Reynolds, “like a river that starts to meander”
anniina03

Harry Harris: Mustache of US ambassador sparks uproar - CNN - 0 views

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

politics US culture history

shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Harry Harris, Washington's envoy to South Korea, has been subjected to heated vitriol on social media and by anonymous netizens for his mustache. That small piece of facial hair has, as Harris put it, "for some reason become a point of some fascination here in the media."
  • But Harris' 'stache has sparked discussions on topics much bigger than the ambassador himself: the still-raw emotions among many Koreans about the legacy of Japanese occupation; the prevalence of racism in such a homogenous society; and cracks appearing in the future of the decades-old alliance between Seoul and Washington as the two sides attempt to reach a deal on how to cover the cost of US troops stationed in South Korea, amid reports that President Donald Trump demanded a 400% pay increase.
  • The gist of the criticism is that with the mustache, Harris resembles the reviled Japanese leaders who ruled the Korean Peninsula with an iron fist during the Japanese occupation. Some of Japan's most prominent wartime leaders -- like Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister who was later executed by a postwar tribunal, and Emperor Hirohito -- had mustaches.
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  • Under Japanese rule, many Koreans were brutalized, murdered and enslaved. It's still living memory for elderly Koreans and remains a highly emotive subject in both North and South Korea.
  • But Harris isn't Japanese, he's a US citizen. And calling him out for his Japanese ancestry would almost assuredly be considered racist in the United States.
  • South Korea is a homogenous society without racial diversity like the United States. The CIA World Factbook doesn't even list other ethnic groups living in South Korea on the country's page, instead just referring to the country as "homogenous." Mixed-race families are rare and xenophobia remains surprisingly common.
  • "I didn't grow a mustache because of my Japanese heritage, because of the independence movement of Korea or even because of my dad. I grew it because I could and I thought I would and I did," he said.
brookegoodman

The United Kingdom is too precious to be lost to narrow nationalism | Gordon Brown | Op... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-be-lost-to-narrow-nationalism

Crisis economics

shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • If the United Kingdom is to survive, it will have to change fundamentally, so that Scotland does not secede and our regions can once again feel part of it.
  • Recent events are better understood as resulting from the power of competing nationalisms: Brexit nationalism, seeking national independence from Europe; Scottish nationalism; Welsh nationalism; and Irish and Ulster nationalisms. The risk is that “getting Brexit done” is leaving Britain undone and, by destabilising the careful balance between the Irish and British identities in Northern Ireland, threatening the very existence of the United Kingdom.
  • In this respect, last month’s election result seems less like an enthusiastic endorsement of any party than a plea for radical change. The old postwar social contract, based on times when manufacturing, making a product in which you had pride, and mining which kept the nation’s lights on, gave people dignity and respect, is seen as at breaking point, with each of its four pillars approaching collapse.
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  • This widespread and rising dissatisfaction is the context for today’s populist nationalisms. The 19th- and 20th-century nationalism that underpinned anticolonial movements and the breakup of the imperial dynasties was driven by anger at cultural discrimination, political exclusion and the economic exploitation of one ethnic group by another.
  • Nationalism can exploit these injustices but it cannot end them. While the Conservatives are the current beneficiaries of the revolt of the regions, their promise of a northern renaissance will have to mean more than love-bombing the regions with a few infrastructure projects and an airline rescue.
  • Instead, we must deliver a radical alternative to nationalism. It must start with a plan to address economic insecurity. But it must also recognise that, in a multinational state that is asymmetric (83% of its voters lie in one nation) and where financial, political and administrative power is concentrated in just one city far to the south, the outlying nations and regions require new powers of initiative as decision-making centres – which, given our history as a unitary state, would be something akin to a British constitutional revolution.
  • The Treasury should also devolve decisions about the allocation of regional resources to new councils of the north and Midlands, comprising mayors, councillors and MPs. With proper financial backing, whether in research, science, technology, new industries or culture, cities and towns in every region – not just London – could become leaders for the UK, capitals in their own right.
  • In 2020, that means rediscovering the value of empathy and solidarity between nations and regions and the benefits that can flow from cooperation and sharing in pursuit of great causes: from jointly tackling climate change to offering the same floor of rights to universal health, social care and welfare services in every part of the UK.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
Javier E

The End of Wilson's Liberal Order | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...end-wilsonian-era

wilson liberal order international relations internationalism foreign policy biden

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • He was not a particularly original thinker. More than a century before Wilson proposed the League of Nations, Tsar Alexander I of Russia had alarmed his fellow rulers at the Congress of Vienna by articulating a similar vision: an international system that would rest on a moral consensus upheld by a concert of powers that would operate from a shared set of ideas about legitimate sovereignty.
  • Wilson’s contribution was to synthesize those ideas into a concrete program for a rules-based order grounded in a set of international institutions. 
  • In the decades that followed, however, his ideas became an inspiration and a guide to national leaders, diplomats, activists, and intellectuals around the world.
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  • Self-determination, the rule of law between and within countries, liberal economics, and the protection of human rights: the “new world order” that both the George H. W. Bush and the Clinton administrations worked to create was very much in the Wilsonian mold. 
  • When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, it seemed that the opportunity for a Wilsonian world order had finally come. The former Soviet empire could be reconstructed along Wilsonian lines, and the West could embrace Wilsonian principles more consistently now that the Soviet threat had disappeared.
  • American leaders during and after World War II laid the foundations of what they hoped would be a Wilsonian world order, in which international relations would be guided by the principles put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and conducted according to rules established by institutions such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization.
  • the order of things
  • The next stage in world history will not unfold along Wilsonian lines. The nations of the earth will continue to seek some kind of political order, because they must. And human rights activists and others will continue to work toward their goals. But the dream of a universal order, grounded in law, that secures peace between countries and democracy inside them will figure less and less in the work of world leaders. 
  • Although Wilsonian ideals will not disappear and there will be a continuing influence of Wilsonian thought on U.S. foreign policies, the halcyon days of the post–Cold War era, when American presidents organized their foreign policies around the principles of liberal internationalism, are unlikely to return anytime soon. 
  • Today, however, the most important fact in world politics is that this noble effort has failed.
  • Wilsonianism is only one version of a rules-based world order among many.
  • the pre-Wilsonian European order had moved significantly in the direction of elevating human rights to the level of diplomacy. 
  • The preservation of the balance of power was invoked as a goal to guide states; war, although regrettable, was seen as a legitimate element of the system. From Wilson’s standpoint, these were fatal flaws that made future conflagrations inevitable. To redress them, he sought to build an order in which states would accept enforceable legal restrictions on their behavior at home and their international conduct. 
  • Although Wilson was an American, his view of world order was first and foremost developed as a method for managing international politics in Europe, and it is in Europe where Wilson’s ideas have had their greatest success and where their prospects continue to look strongest.
  • His ideas were treated with bitter and cynical contempt by most European statesmen when he first proposed them, but they later became the fundamental basis of the European order, enshrined in the laws and practices of the EU.
  • the arc of history
  • The real problem of Wilsonianism is not a naive faith in good intentions but a simplistic view of the historical process, especially when it comes to the impact of technological progress on human social order.
  • Wilson was the devout son of a minister, deeply steeped in Calvinist teachings about predestination and the utter sovereignty of God, and he believed that the arc of progress was fated
  • he shared the optimism of what the scholar Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig historians,” the Victorian-era British thinkers who saw human history as a narrative of inexorable progress and betterment. Wilson believed that the so-called ordered liberty that characterized the Anglo-American countries had opened a path to permanent prosperity and peace.
  • Today’s Wilsonians have given this determinism a secular twist: in their eyes, liberalism will rule the future and bring humanity to “the end of history” as a result of human nature rather than divine purpose
  • In the early 1990s, leading U.S. foreign policymakers and commentators saw the fall of the Soviet Union through the same deterministic prism: as a signal that the time had come for a truly global and truly liberal world order. On all three occasions, Wilsonian order builders seemed to be in sight of their goal. But each time, like Ulysses, they were blown off course by contrary winds. 
  • Technical difficulties Today, those winds are gaining strength. Anyone hoping to reinvigorate the flagging Wilsonian project must contend with a number of obstacles
  • The most obvious is the return of ideology-fueled geopolitics. China, Russia, and a number of smaller powers aligned with them—Iran, for example—correctly see Wilsonian ideals as a deadly threat to their domestic arrangements.
  • Seeing Wilsonianism as a cover for American and, to some degree, EU ambitions, Beijing and Moscow have grown increasingly bold about contesting Wilsonian ideas and initiatives inside international institutions such as the UN and on the ground in places from Syria to the South China Sea.
  • These powers’ opposition to the Wilsonian order is corrosive in several ways.
  • It raises the risks and costs for Wilsonian powers to intervene in conflicts beyond their own borders.
  • The presence of great powers in the anti-Wilsonian coalition also provides shelter and assistance to smaller powers that otherwise might not choose to resist the status quo
  • Finally, the membership of countries such as China and Russia in international institutions makes it more difficult for those institutions to operate in support of Wilsonian norms: take, for example, Chinese and Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council, the election of anti-Wilsonian representatives to various UN bodies, and the opposition by countries such as Hungary and Poland to EU measures intended to promote the rule of law. 
  • Biological and technological research, by contrast, are critical for any country or company that hopes to remain competitive in the twenty-first century. An uncontrollable, multipolar arms race across a range of cutting-edge technologies is on the horizon, and it will undercut hopes for a revived Wilsonian order. 
  • The irony is that Wilsonians often believe that technological progress will make the world more governable and politics more rational—even if it also adds to the danger of war by making it so much more destructive. Wilson himself believed just that, as did the postwar order builders and the liberals who sought to extend the U.S.-led order after the Cold War. Each time, however, this faith in technological change was misplaced
  • As seen most recently with the rise of the Internet, although new technologies often contribute to the spread of liberal ideas and practices, they can also undermine democratic systems and aid authoritarian regimes.
  • Meanwhile, the torrent of technological innovation and change known as “the information revolution” creates obstacles for Wilsonian goals
  • It also makes it harder for national leaders to pursue the compromises that international cooperation inevitably requires and increases the chances that incoming governments will refuse to be bound by the acts of their predecessors. 
  • Wilsonians prioritize arms control not just because nuclear warfare could destroy the human race but also because, even if unused, nuclear weapons or their equivalent put the Wilsonian dream of a completely rules-based, law-bound international order out of reach. Weapons of mass destruction guarantee exactly the kind of state sovereignty that Wilsonians think is incompatible with humanity’s long-term security. One cannot easily stage a humanitarian intervention against a nuclear power. 
  • What is more, the technological progress that underlies the information revolution significantly exacerbates the problem of arms control. The development of cyberweapons and the potential of biological agents to inflict strategic damage on adversaries—graphically demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic—serve as warnings that new tools of warfare will be significantly more difficult to monitor or control than nuclear technology.
  • Today, as new technologies disrupt entire industries, and as social media upends the news media and election campaigning, politics is becoming more turbulent and polarized in many countries.
  • it’s not for everybody One of the central assumptions behind the quest for a Wilsonian order is the belief that as countries develop, they become more similar to already developed countries and will eventually converge on the liberal capitalist model that shapes North America and western Europe
  • The Wilsonian project requires a high degree of convergence to succeed; the member states of a Wilsonian order must be democratic, and they must be willing and able to conduct their international relations within liberal multilateral institutions. 
  • Today, China, India, Russia, and Turkey all seem less likely to converge on liberal democracy than they did in 1990. These countries and many others have developed economically and technologically not in order to become more like the West but rather to achieve a deeper independence from the West and to pursue civilizational and political goals of their own. 
  • In truth, Wilsonianism is a particularly European solution to a particularly European set of problems
  • With the specter of great-power war constantly hanging over them, European states developed a more intricate system of diplomacy and international politics than did countries in other parts of the world.
  • Although it would take another devastating world war to ensure that Germany, as well as its Western neighbors, would adhere to the rules of a new system, Europe was already prepared for the establishment of a Wilsonian order.
  • The idea of a single legitimate state with no true international peers is as deeply embedded in the political culture of China as the idea of a multistate system grounded in mutual recognition is embedded in that of Europe. There have been clashes among Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but until the late nineteenth century, interstate conflict was rare. 
  • In human history as a whole, enduring civilizational states seem more typical than the European pattern of rivalry among peer states.
  • For states and peoples in much of the world, the problem of modern history that needed to be solved was not the recurrence of great-power conflict. The problem, instead, was figuring out how to drive European powers awa
  • International institutions face an even greater crisis of confidence. Voters skeptical of the value of technocratic rule by fellow citizens are even more skeptical of foreign technocrats with suspiciously cosmopolitan views
  • After colonialism formally ended and nascent countries began to assert control over their new territories, the classic problems of governance in the postcolonial world remained weak states and compromised sovereignty. 
  • expert texpert
  • The recent rise of populist movements across the West has revealed another danger to the Wilsonian project. If the United States could elect Donald Trump as president in 2016, what might it do in the future? What might the electorates in other important countries do? And if the Wilsonian order has become so controversial in the West, what are its prospects in the rest of the world?
  • Postcolonial and non-Western states often joined international institutions as a way to recover and enhance their sovereignty, not to surrender it, and their chief interest in international law was to protect weak states from strong ones, not to limit the power of national leaders to consolidate their authority
  • Yet from the standpoint of Wilson and his fellow progressives, the solution to these problems could not be simply to vest power in the voters. At the time, most Americans still had an eighth-grade education or less
  • The progressives’ answer to this problem was to support the creation of an apolitical expert class of managers and administrators. The progressives sought to build an administrative state that would curb the excessive power of the rich and redress the moral and political deficiencies of the poor.
  • The Internet and social media have undermined respect for all forms of expertise. Ordinary citizens today are significantly better educated and feel less need to rely on expert guidance. And events including the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2008 financial crisis, and the inept government responses during the 2020 pandemic have seriously reduced confidence in experts and technocrats, whom many people have come to see as forming a nefarious “deep state.”
  • Wilson lived in an era when democratic governance faced problems that many feared were insurmountable. The Industrial Revolution had divided American society, creating unprecedented levels of inequality.
  • when it comes to international challenges such as climate change and mass migration, there is little evidence that the cumbersome institutions of global governance and the quarrelsome countries that run them will produce the kind of cheap, elegant solutions that could inspire public trust. 
  • what it means for biden
  • For all these reasons, the movement away from the Wilsonian order is likely to continue, and world politics will increasingly be carried out along non-Wilsonian and in some cases even anti-Wilsonian lines
  • the international order will increasingly be shaped by states that are on diverging paths. This does not mean an inevitable future of civilizational clashes, but it does mean that global institutions will have to accommodate a much wider range of views and values than they have in the past.
  • Non-Wilsonian orders have existed both in Europe and in other parts of the world in the past, and the nations of the world will likely need to draw on these examples as they seek to cobble together some kind of framework for stability and, if possible, peace under contemporary conditions. 
  • For U.S. policymakers, the developing crisis of the Wilsonian order worldwide presents vexing problems that are likely to preoccupy presidential administrations for decades to come. One problem is that many career officials and powerful voices in Congress, civil society organizations, and the press deeply believe not only that a Wilsonian foreign policy is a good and useful thing for the United States but also that it is the only path to peace and security and even to the survival of civilization and humanity.
  • Those factions will be hemmed in by the fact that any internationalist coalition in American foreign policy must rely to a significant degree on Wilsonian voters. But a generation of overreach and poor political judgment has significantly reduced the credibility of Wilsonian ideas among the American electorate.
  • But American foreign policy is always a coalition affair. As I wrote in my book Special Providence, Wilsonians are one of four schools that have contended to shape American foreign policy since the eighteenth century.
  • Hamiltonians and Wilsonians largely dominated American foreign-policy making after the Cold War, but Obama began to reintroduce some Jeffersonian ideas about restraint, and after the Libyan misadventure, his preference for that approach clearly strengthened.
  • Trump, who hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, sought to build a nationalist coalition of Jacksonians and Jeffersonians against the globalist coalition of Hamiltonians and Wilsonians that had been ascendant since World War II. 
  • Even as the Biden administration steers American foreign policy away from the nationalism of the Trump period, it will need to re-adjust the balance between the Wilsonian approach and the ideas of the other schools in light of changed political conditions at home and abroad.
  • Saving the planet from a climate catastrophe and building a coalition to counter China are causes that many Wilsonians will agree both require and justify a certain lack of scrupulosity when it comes to the choice of both allies and tactics. 
  • The Biden administration can also make use of other techniques that past presidents have used to gain the support of Wilsonians
  • Even as the ultimate goals of Wilsonian policy become less achievable, there are particular issues on which intelligent and focused American policy can produce results that Wilsonians will like
  • International cooperation to make money laundering more difficult and to eliminate tax havens is one area where progress is possible.
  • Concern for international public health will likely stay strong for some years after the COVID-19 pandemic has ended.
  • Promoting education for underserved groups in foreign countries—women, ethnic and religious minorities, the poor—is one of the best ways to build a better world,
  • however problematic Wilson’s personal views and domestic policies were, as a statesman and ideologist, he must be counted among the most influential makers of the modern world
Javier E

Land of Plenty (of Government) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...land-of-plenty-of-government

inequality economics government Europe US activism history consumption consumer libertarian conservatism

shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Why do European countries have lower levels of poverty and inequality than the United States? We used to think this was a result of American anti-government sentiment, which produced a government too small to redistribute income or to attend to the needs of the poor.
  • over the past three decades scholars have discovered that our government wasn’t as small as we thought. Historians, sociologists and political scientists have all uncovered evidence that points to a surprisingly large governmental presence in the United States throughout the 20th century and even earlier, in some cases surpassing what we find in Western Europe.
  • But if Europe has been so favorable to business, how did it end up with lower poverty and inequality rates? To understand this, we have to let go of the idea that governments are the opposite of markets, or that welfare spending kills capitalist production. European countries do have larger public welfare states, and this brings down their poverty and inequality rates. But in return, European corporations received a gift: a political economy biased against consumption and geared toward production.
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  • observers at the time thought that the problem was that wealth was concentrated in so few hands that consumers did not have purchasing power to buy the goods that lay rotting in the fields. Increasing consumer purchasing power became the paradigm that drove economic policy during the New Deal and for decades after. A central element of this was increasing homeownership by encouraging citizens to take on large debts for the purchase of home
  • This history also explains the current resistance in Europe, especially Germany, toward Keynesian stimulus.
  • Understanding this fundamental divergence between the United States and Europe sheds new light on several episodes of recent history
  • It suggests that in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan tried to deregulate industry, he was actually pushing the United States in the direction of Europe.
  • Where Europeans focused on restraining consumption, Americans saw consumption as the machine that drives growth — and we still do.
  • a consumption bias has distributional consequences that we are only beginning to understand. Some studies suggest that it undermines support for the welfare state, because as consumers come to depend on private assets — especially their homes — for their well-being, they appear to become less interested in providing for the welfare of others.
  • A consumption bias also focuses the efforts of the left on increasing private consumption.
  • But credit access does nothing for the truly poor, those who are not deemed creditworthy
  • Pointing out all the ways in which the American government has actually been more interventionist than European governments seems to alarm partisans on both the left and the right. Activists on the right can
  • o longer pretend that American history is about small government. Those on the left are equally alarmed, because pointing out the ways in which the government has been hostile to business can undermine their calls to be even more hostile to business.
  • poverty reduction is not about hostility to business. It’s about strategies like promoting saving over borrowing. We don’t need regulations as loose as postwar Europe’s, but if reducing poverty and inequality is the goal, we do need to rethink our love affair with consumption.
delgadool

Opinion | Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Hurt American Alliances - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-foreign-policy-us-allies.html

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shared by delgadool on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • European nations have watched with alarm as President Trump has set about undermining American democracy while attacking the very foundations — the European Union and NATO — that allowed war-torn Europe to become whole, democratic and free.
  • Hence the talk in European capitals of the need to “contain” the United States, a verb once reserved for the Soviet Union. America, under Trump, has lost the credibility and legitimacy that were cornerstones of its influence.
  • The values of liberty, democracy, freedom of expression and the rule of law for which the United States has stood, albeit with conspicuous failings, over the postwar decades have been abandoned. Despite the horrors of Vietnam and Abu Ghraib, and Cold War support for dictatorial regimes, America led not just because it had a huge army and nuclear arsenal, but also because it shared beliefs with its allies and worked with them. The United States has become a values-free international actor under a president who has led a values-free life.
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  • The Trump administration has unrelentingly undermined proven international relationships.
  • Trump is far more comfortable with autocrats like Putin and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia than with a democratic leader like Merkel. (She has, for the president, the added drawback of being a woman.)
  • Trump has trampled on the idea of America as a land of immigrants.
  • The democratic framework of the United States rests on certain principles: checks and balances, a vigorous free press, an independent judiciary, protection of the individual against forms of racial, religious or sexual prejudice. All these principles, inspirations to democracies across the world, have been attacked by Trump. He has turned the Department of Justice into his personal fief. The president has even refused to commit to leaving office if he loses the election.
Javier E

Can There Ever Be a Working-Class Republican Party? | The New Republic - 0 views

newrepublic.com/...king-class-agenda-hawley-rubio

gop immigration labor working class policy Politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • a party of upper–middle-class traditions and inclinations finds itself left alone with the working-class parts of Trump’s base, in a society where the deck is more stacked against the working class than it has been since the nineteenth century.
  • The party’s survival depends on protecting the interests of these voters, and yet few Republicans have given much systematic thought to how they might do it. The task has fallen largely to three senators: Hawley, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
  • In the twenty-first century thus far, something strange has been happening. Reaganite Republicans have continued cutting taxes to “unleash” “entrepreneurship,” but the rich people thus favored keep turning into Democrats.
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  • in general Democrats now enter the political arena as the party of wealth.
  • Traditionally, “the right,” for better and for worse, is the party of large property holdings, of bosses and managers and cultural guardians, of dominant belief systems (religious and secular), and of elite education institutions that set the boundaries of what knowledge and lore are proper to pass on to tomorrow’s generations. If America has such a party today, it is not the Republicans.
  • Biden’s most loyal followers by occupation included professors (94 percent), librarians (93 percent), therapists (92 percent), and lawyers (88 percent)
  • Trump got homemakers (96 percent), welders (84 percent), HVAC professionals (82 percent), farmers (75 percent), and custodians (59 percent)
  • They are also the party of education and prestige. On the eve of November’s election, Bloomberg News analyzed which employees gave the most to Donald Trump and which the most to Joe Biden. Biden swept the commanding heights of the economy. He got 97 percent of the contributions at Google and Facebook, 96 percent at Harvard, 91 percent at the consultants Deloitte, and (back here on planet Earth) 90 percent at the New York City Department of Education
  • Krein doubts whether anything that could be described as Trumpism happened at all. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 was renegotiated to American workers’ advantage, but that did not lead to the renaissance of manufacturing that candidate Trump had tirelessly promised in 2016. The wages of the lowest-paid workers went up, but that may be due to minimum-wage hikes enacted in dozens of states and cities.
  • “It feels to me like the party’s getting pushed into it,” said Julius Krein, an investor who publishes the quarterly review American Affairs, in an interview this winter. “Donors, especially, don’t want it to be a working-class party. And certainly the old guard not only doesn’t think of itself as such, but is quite hostile to that, and to any policy that could possibly lead in that direction. But it’s getting pushed there because all the elite are going to the Democrats.”
  • Trump’s administration worked out well for American workers, at least up until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. Unemployment was under 4 percent for most of 2018 and 2019. The good times reached even those to whom prosperity had historically been slowest to arrive. Unemployment among Black men, a whisker under 20 percent in March 2010, had fallen to around 5 percent in November 2019. According to The Economist, gains were concentrated in professions where workers had heretofore faced competition from immigrant labor, such as housekeepers and maintenance workers
  • the economic hand that Trump had to play in last fall’s elections was stronger than almost anyone outside of the working class understood, and the results—at least in terms of the swing-state popular vote—correspondingly closer.
  • There is a philosophical disagreement about how one gives the working class more power. To boil it down to the basics, Democrats believe in more unions and Republicans believe in less immigration.
  • Krein is generally skeptical of the Republican Party’s traditional economic policies. “Contrary to the pervasive mythology of entrepreneurialism and creativity,” he writes, “it is glaringly obvious to today’s professional elite that the neoliberal economy is allocating capital, and especially talent, very poorly.
  • the extraordinary 2017 tax cuts, the only significant piece of domestic legislation passed in Trump’s four years. A supply-side piñata without precedent, it encouraged the corporate “buybacks” that can spur stock prices (padding executive bonuses) but can destabilize corporate finances (increasing the likelihood of layoffs in a downturn)—quite the opposite of what Trump had seemed to promise on the campaign trail.
  • Now Rubio has a simpler message: These are my people. I will fight for them. It beats the perennial Republican approach of theorizing about incentives and the capital gains tax.
  • Among Senate Republicans, it is Rubio who has laid the biggest bet on working people. He has a lot of ideas. He has urged fighting stock buybacks, reauthorizing Small Business Administration loan programs, and limiting Covid aid to universities with endowments of more than $10 billion
  • The core of his agenda, said Rubio, “is the availability of good-paying jobs that allow people to raise families, to retire with dignity, to live in safe and stable communities—that’s where life is lived.”
  • Hawley does often sound like a throwback. He criticizes the sexual revolution, the “woke mob,” and those who propose to rechristen military bases named after Confederate generals. In this sense, his appeal to the working class is less direct than Rubio’s. He is using, in classic Reagan fashion, the correlation between working-class status and conservative cultural attitudes to win over voters without making class appeals at all.
  • In 2008, two young thinkers, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, wrote a book called Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. The authors warn that “Sam’s Club Republicans”—cheekily named after a Walmart-owned chain of cut-price warehouse stores where few urban Democrats had ever set foot—were losing ground. And these voters were beginning to notice that their party wasn’t doing anything for them. The old Republican entrepreneurial rhetoric of unleashing this and untrammeling that was ceasing to resonate. Worse, it now served the other party’s base.If Grand New Party was the first call to arms in the remaking of the party, it went largely unheeded
  • Until recently, few congressional Democrats have been inclined to do battle with the tech companies, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren being among the conspicuous exceptions.
  • Tom Cotton, a Harvard-educated Republican lawyer from tiny Yell County, Arkansas, is trying to use China the way Hawley uses Big Tech
  • When the public compares the two parties on the question of protecting the working class, it is still Democrats who come out on top—but not by a lot.
  • In early December, Hawley and Bernie Sanders staggered their speeches, swapping floor time back and forth, in hopes of rallying the chamber to deliver Covid aid in $1,200 direct payments to parents. It was eyebrow-raising, Senate staffers said, because such moments require close staff coordination, and each senator pledged solidarity to the other. “I’m proud to yield the floor to him,” said Sanders of Hawley. “I’m delighted to join with Senator Sanders,” Hawley responded, adding: “Working families should be first on our to-do list, not last.”
  • The most closely attended-to conservative voice on this issue is Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney adviser who heads American Compass, a conservative think tank that calls for “widely shared economic development.
  • Nearly all the Republicans loosely aligning themselves with working-class interests listen to Cass, and it’s partly because he has a theory about the economic history of this century and how it led to our present predicament.
  • As Cass sees it, the weakness of structures has been explained by the work of M.I.T. economist David Autor, who has given us a new understanding of how labor markets work under globalization.
  • A “China shock” wiped out a good deal of manufacturing employment after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, Autor has shown. “Skill-biased technical change” drove college-educated workers’ compensation up and that of the noncollege-educated down
  • The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton gathered similar evidence of the collapse of labor markets and the rise of regional inequality in their 2020 book on opioids, suicide, and life expectancy, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.
  • J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a book that is often read as an X-ray of how eastern Ohio and other parts of Appalachia were struggling as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were vying for the presidency in 2016
  • the embrace of this coming-of-age saga as an all-purpose explanation of Trump’s new pitch to the working class was misguided, for Vance was already in his thirties when it was published. “The story that he is telling,” Cass insisted, “is of what was going on in the late ’90s, during what we think of as the go-go years, the boom years, the very best years.”
  • Indeed, an interesting general question arises to challenge Republicans about the 1980s and 1990s—were the policies arrived at outright wrong?
  • “If you talked to Republicans and gave them truth serum,” one congressional political adviser admitted, “a majority would say we had it wrong for decades on immigration and trade. We were too quick to look just at the lower price of goods and how that ultimately helped people, and didn’t spend enough time looking at people who were directly hurt by factories being closed and lower wages.”
  • Cass’s central insight is: Tight labor markets are good. That is how unions work to drive up wages, and if conservatives want higher wages, they will need to overcome their “foolish orthodoxy” on the matter.
  • At the same time, you can’t believe unions are good and say any amount of immigration is fine. Limiting immigration raises wages—which is a key reason that the postwar labor movement supported immigration restrictions
  • From a supply-and-demand perspective, mass immigration does the same thing as offshoring and de-unionizing: It exposes workers with American labor protections and lifestyle expectations to competition from workers without them
  • Republicans’ rapport with the working class may turn out to be more natural than it now appears. They won’t have to “come up with” policies for helping the workers, still less to “reinvent” themselves as a working-class party
  • they will follow the logic of the situation to embrace the sort of policies Democrats followed when they were the party of the workers and the Republicans the party of the bosses.
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