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Javier E

What the Fall of the Roman Republic Can Teach Us About America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-j-watts-mortal-republic.html

trump crisis culture politics US rome decline republic

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • At its inception, “the republic provided a legal and political structure that channeled the individual energies of Romans in ways that benefited the entire Roman commonwealth.”
  • But over the following centuries, that foundation slowly weakened, and then rapidly collapsed.
  • Since the founding fathers explicitly modeled the United States on the Roman Republic, a study that investigates the circumstances of its demise promises to hold considerable relevance for our own times
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  • As Watts puts the point, the principal purpose of his book is to allow “readers to better appreciate the serious problems that result both from politicians who breach a republic’s political norms and from citizens who choose not to punish them for doing so.
  • In Watts’s telling of the Roman Republic’s agonizing death, slow-moving structural transformations gradually sowed the seeds of demise.
  • As the population exploded and the economy became ever more sophisticated, the growing share of poor citizens started to demand redress. But since the institutions of the republic were dominated by patricians who had much to lose from measures like land reform, they never fully addressed the grievances of ordinary Romans.
  • With popular rage against increasingly dysfunctional institutions swelling, ambitious patricians, determined to outflank their competitors, began to build a fervent base of support by making outsize promises. It was these populares — populists like Tiberius Gracchus and his younger brother Gaius — who, in their bid for power, first broke some of the republic’s most longstanding norms.
  • The transformation of Rome’s army compounded the challenge of growing inequality. In the early days of the republic, soldiers thought of their participation in military service as a civic duty. Commanders hoped to win great honors and perhaps to attain higher office
  • But by the late second century B.C., the army had essentially been privatized. Commanders knew that the plunder of new lands could garner them vast riches. Their soldiers signed up for the ride in the hope of gaining a generous allotment of land on which to start a farm.
  • It took a long time for these tensions to build. But once they reached a critical point, Rome’s descent into chaos and dysfunction was astonishingly swift.
  • During the century and a half between the days of Pyrrhus and the rise of Tiberius Gracchus, there had not been a single outbreak of large-scale political violence. Then Tiberius pushed through land reforms in defiance of the Senate’s veto. In the ensuing fracas, he and hundreds of his followers were murdered. The taboo on naked power politics had been broken, never to recover
  • “Within a generation of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had begun to arm their supporters and use the threat of violence to influence the votes of assemblies and the election of magistrates. Within two generations, Rome fell into civil war.”
  • If we are to avoid the fate that ultimately befell Rome, Watts cautions, it is “vital for all of us to understand how Rome’s republic worked, what it achieved and why, after nearly five centuries, its citizens ultimately turned away from it and toward the autocracy of Augustus.”
  • the sheer repetitiveness of the calamities that befell Rome only serves to underline the book’s most urgent message.
  • Like the original populist, Trump was propelled to power by the all-too-real failures of a political system that is unable to curb growing inequality or to mobilize its most eminent citizens around a shared conception of the common good.
  • And like Gracchus, Trump believes that, because he is acting in the name of the dispossessed, he is perfectly justified in shredding the Republic’s traditions.
  • Far from single-handedly destroying our political system, he is the transitional figure whose election demonstrates the extent to which the failings of our democracy are finally starting to take their toll
  • The bad news is that the coming decades are unlikely to afford us many moments of calm and tranquillity.
  • If the central analogy that animates “Mortal Republic” is correct, the current challenge to America’s political system is likely to persist long after its present occupant has left the White House.
Javier E

Politics is religion, and the right is getting ready for the end times - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-9663-00ac73f49662_story.html

politics religion right demonization partisan

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • the appropriation — really, the profanation — of religious ideas to serve ideological purposes. During the 20th century, this was often the preserve of the left. Marxism provided a soteriology — a theory of salvation — that caused people to die and kill in service to a redemptive ideal. It is what made communism so appealing — and so dangerous. It gave oppression the veneer of idealism.
  • Conservatism sought to lower the sights of the political enterprise to serve humbler conceptions of individual liberty and the common good. The proper work of politics was seen as reform rather than redemption — working with the existing fabric of society rather than ripping it up and starting over.
  • the populist right has taken on a distinctively religious tone. Rather than offering a vision of salvation, it has embraced a certain eschatology — a theory of the end times. The threat of liberalism, in this view, has become so dire that the wrong outcome of a presidential race could mean the end of U.S. civilization
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  • The threat was defined as liberal activism to promote “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.”
  • In this secularized eschatology, alarmism is combined with nativism
  • Before the Civil War, many evangelical Christians held a postmillennial eschatology. They believed that society, through acts of mercy and grace, would become better and better, eventually ushering in the benevolent rule of Christ
  • Toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, however, more Christians adopted a premillennial eschatology — a belief that the world would get worse and worse until Christ intervened to save it.
  • But the appeal of Trump and his supporters is distinctive. It is used as a mental preparation for extreme measures
  • If the political world is really headed toward disaster, then the normal political tools — things such as civility, persuasion and governing skill — are outmoded.
  • maybe the situation requires an abrasive outsider willing to fight fire with napalm. Desperation increases the appetite for political risk.
  • There are serious dangers to the cultivation of desperation. It transforms opponents into enemies. It turns compromise into heresy. And it paves the way for authoritarian thinking and measures.
  • It is also not an accurate description of a flawed but wonderful country
  • There are disturbing trends in modern liberalism — a secularism that sometimes slips into intolerance of religious people and institutions; a form of multiculturalism that despairs of unifying American ideals; the elevation of human autonomy above other humane values.
  • the country’s problems are not rooted in the ethnic makeup of its people
  • Our challenges — from government debt to educational failure — require reform, not revolution
Javier E

Washington Monthly | Rage Against the Machines - 0 views

washingtonmonthly.com/...rage-against-the-machines

parties politics history ideology

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • hat hyper-partisanship is wrecking American democracy is a truism of our times. But there is a lack of consensus about what to do about it. One challenge is that many pundits and would-be reformers lack historical understanding of the problem
  • reformers should read Sam Rosenfeld’s new book, The Polarizers, a timely and valuable guide explaining how our current political divisions came to be
  • Rosenfeld, a Colgate University political scientist trained as a historian, goes through the historical record to recreate two parallel stories—the intellectual debate over whether to have two distinct political parties, and the on-the-ground intraparty battles in which activists triumphed over insiders in restructuring party organizations and coalitions. Told together, these stories add important context to our present dilemma, reminding us that party politics are so different today from the 1950s
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  • At midcentury, the common critique was not of too little bipartisanship, but of too much
  • Two currents, one intellectual and one cultural, helped to undermine this model and presage the marriage of party and ideology we have today.
  • The intellectual current was the rise of the “responsible party” theory of government, advocated by political scientists who argued that the lack of clarity between parties “stifled progress while blurring accountability to the voters,”
  • The cultural trend was that as voters became better educated and more economically stable, they wanted something more out of politics than the patronage provided by the old political machines
  • This led a new generation of solidly middle-class and young activists in both parties to turn away from the pragmatic politics of backroom bargaining and technocratic tinkering of their elders and toward a new front of ideological battle, beginning with civil rights.
  • The Goldwaterites, for example, rightly believed that they could appeal to southern conservative Democrats over their shared distaste for civil rights legislation and defeat the far less organized urban-oriented liberal moderates, who Rosenfeld importantly notes were too top heavy with elected officials and intellectuals and “devoid of grassroots strength.”
  • Among Democrats, the energy for aligning party with principle came from “young, educated New Deal liberals, motivated largely by national issues, [who] forged alliances with organized labor and racial minorities to square off against sclerotic, generally non-ideological Democratic organizations.” Civil rights was their cri de coeur
  • With the arrival of the “Watergate Babies” after the 1974 election, congressional Democrats enacted new rules to give both the caucus and the speaker more power to overcome the conservatives. These rules were pushed by liberal outside groups, most prominently Common Cause. Later, Newt Gingrich would further centralize power when he became speaker, bringing American politics a step even closer to the responsible-party vision.
  • Richard Nixon opined in 1959, “It would be a great tragedy if we had our two major political parties divided on what we would call a conservative-liberal line. . . . [O]ne of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in administrations from one extreme to the other.”
  • As a mode of governing, non-ideological politics worked well with the technocratic solutionism of President John F. Kennedy, who proudly told Yale graduates in 1962, “The central domestic issues of our time relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals.”
  • Consensus politics could work when the substance of party politics was thick with issues of consensus, in which debates over means dominated debates over ends. Once ends came to be more important than means, politics changed. Pragmatic incrementalism was no match for moral urgency.
  • Since the 1980s, the ideological activists have remained dominant in both parties, steadily weeding out dissenting holdovers from an earlier era while enforcing more and more programmatic unity, an iterative and ultimately generational project. Even the “New Democrats” of the 1990s “pitched moderate programmatic initiatives in explicitly partisan terms.”
  • Rosenfeld’s history lesson gives us two key takeaways.
  • modern advocates of “bipartisanship” remember that bipartisanship was not all lollipops and roses. It fostered a political system in which voters lacked meaningful choices, and it stymied civil rights.
  • it’s not clear how we could simply reverse six decades of organizational and coalitional transformation. The party organizations of the 1950s reflected a very different world, in which most politics was local and there were few highly educated, activist voters
  • an optimistic takeaway from the book is that change is possible through deliberate action. Just as activists half a century ago set in motion a new vision for a party system, so too might today’s activists set in motion their own vision for a new party politics.
Javier E

Reagan's 'Party of Ideas' Is Down to Just One: Tax Cuts - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-reagan-republicans.html

gop conservatism principles ideas tax deficit reagan trump crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • What has become of the Republican Party, which I once served on Capitol Hill and which I now consider a dangerous extremist movement on a par with the ruling Fidesz party in neo-fascist Hungary?
  • Where did its principles go? What became of Ronald Reagan’s “party of ideas”?
  • One by one, those ideas were tossed aside for expediency and power — except the tax cut.
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  • A time traveler from the Reagan era would no longer recognize the Republican Party, but most Republican politicians feel no embarrassment supporting policies they once condemned.
  • Since World War II, Republicans have styled themselves the party of national defense. Yet under President Trump, they have unsettled our alliances and professed a strange new respect for Vladimir Putin.
  • The Republicans were once the party of global free trade, a system with major flaws but one that requires reform, not ham-handed overthrow. Yet the president believes he can bully longtime allies and force them to accept bilateral trade deals on his terms.
  • An enduring caricature of the old-time Republican is the penny-pinching deficit hawk.
  • But the president’s high-decibel smear campaign against the professionals of the F.B.I. destroys the party’s pretense of being a friend of law enforcement
  • the deficit, thanks partly to the tax cut, is projected after years of decline to explode to a trillion dollars annually.
  • Tax cuts, regardless of the deficit, are an obsession with Republicans and a source of shameless hypocrisy.
  • Under Mr. Trump, who has extolled leveraging other people’s money while declaring that debt is good, the party is no longer even half pregnant. His tax act, passed exclusively with Republican votes in both the House and the Senate, increases the national debt by over a trillion dollars and awards 62 percent of its monetary benefits to the richest 1 percent of Americans.
  • Now the E.P.A. is being systematically gutted. Its administrator, Scott Pruitt, has named as chairman of its science advisory board a person who criticizes the E.P.A.’s standards for exposure to mercury (a neurotoxin causing severe brain damage) and believes ozone pollution rules are unnecessary because Americans spend most of their time indoors.
  • Republicans always counted themselves as strong supporters of law and order.
  • Republicans were once the party of conservation and the environment: from Abraham Lincoln, who set aside Yosemite for what later became a national park, to Theodore Roosevelt, preserving 230 million acres of public land, to Richard Nixon, who signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • So what do Republicans have left? The tax cut, the sole important legislation from the Republican Congress, shows that catering to its rich contributors is the party’s only policy. The rest of its agenda is simply tactics and trickery.
  • As the party has become unmoored from positive belief, it has grown manipulative, demagogic and contemptuous of truth.
  • It has culminated in the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway’s appealing to “alternative facts,” meaning lies, on behalf of her boss, who has made an average of 5.6 false or misleading claims a day since his inauguration.
  • Today’s Republican Party is incapable of honest and coherent governance, with “right” or “wrong” reduced to a question of whether it helps the party.
  • A few Republicans protest the president’s disgraceful behavior, but never in a way that matters. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona has become famous for sanctimonious speeches denouncing the latest outrage, but he votes with machine-like consistency in favor of the president’s destructive agenda and unqualified nominees.
  • Ultimately, the party’s spiritual sickness isn’t about Mr. Trump. Eight years ago, did Republican officeholders shut down the nonsense that Mr. Obama was a secret Muslim? For that matter, a quarter-century ago, did they quash the idiotic charge that the Clintons murdered Vince Foster?
malonema1

Congress Fights the Military Over a New 'Space Corps' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...536124

US history

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In a bipartisan vote last month, the House of Representatives approved legislation that would direct the Defense Department to build a new “space corps” within the Air Force. Its backers blame the Pentagon for failing to prioritize space security in recent years, a lapse that has allowed rivals like Russia and China the opportunity to catch up to U.S. superiority. The proposal’s fate now rests in the Senate, but its most powerful foe is the military itself, which says Congress should simply send more resources rather than force it to undertake a bureaucratic overhaul during a time of war.
  • The idea for a new service devoted to space is not new, and support for it does not break down along partisan lines. It first gained currency in 2000 as a recommendation from a military-reform commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld, who was then a retired ex-defense secretary and White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford. A year later, Rumsfeld would be recruited back to government as George W. Bush’s defense secretary and set about to overhaul the bureaucracy of the Pentagon—a reform that might have included the space corps. But the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the launching of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sidetracked that effort.
  • In phone interviews, Rogers and Cooper cited the emerging threat from Russia and China as the reason for the newfound political momentum. Rogers said lawmakers had received alarming classified briefings about the two countries’ capabilities and said the Air Force was consistently six to eight years behind in deploying its own new capabilities. Both countries, he said, had recently gained “peer status” with the United States in space. The worry is that either country could neutralize key U.S. satellites. “They recognize they cannot take us on and it be a fair fight,” Rogers told me. “But if they take our eyes and ears out, they actually have a chance to have a fair fight with the United States. We don’t ever want to get into a war where we have a fair fight.”
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  • “People in the Air Force who are in space sometimes view themselves as failed fighter pilots, because the real ethic there has been to be a fighter pilot, and that’s the way to get promoted to general,” he told me. Cooper said the Air Force was even unenthusiastic about drones initially, “because they didn’t like aircraft that were not piloted.”
Javier E

'Climate of panic': bombings in Brazil reveal growing power of gangs | Jo Griffin | Glo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-reveal-growing-power-of-gangs

brazil gangs education

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • The current crisis is now a perfect storm as gang leaders in overstuffed jails prey on young people with “no exit door from gangs”, says Roseno, while Ceará’s governor, Camilo Santana, from the leftwing Workers’ Party (PT), is “worried about not looking weak”. So far the response of Santana has echoed the tough rhetoric of Bolsonaro, calling for military reinforcements and promising stern action in his Facebook posts.
  • Da Silva, a social worker with young people at risk of joining gangs, says many areas are now too dangerous for him and co-workers to enter. “The authorities cannot step back for fear of looking weak, but this is going to lead to more serious problems,” Da Silva says. “Where is the intelligent response to these problems in Brazil? We have a super-ministry of security but where’s the super-ministry of education?”
  • Roseno says: “The question is: how can we reduce the power of the gangs? How can we not just get rid of the weapons and cut off financial resources but offer young people a different life? These gangs operate by offering a sense of brotherhood, self-esteem, money. They are filling the space where there are no public policies.”
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  • Luiz Fábio Paiva, a sociologist at the federal university of Ceará and researcher with the Laboratory for the Study of Violence (LEV), says the assertions from the state government, which is “preoccupied excessively with manifesting and demonstrating a hyper-masculine show of fighting violence with violence”, are reckless.
  • This has contributed to a sharp rise in Brazil’s prison population to 700,489 – the world’s third largest. Of all inmates nationwide, 34.2% are on remand and Ceará holds the record for most prisoners who have not been convicted of a crime.
  • As well as providing more staff and resources for prisons, judicial practice must change in order to reduce mass incarceration, he says. Despite a law in 2006 decriminalising possession of a small amount of drugs for personal consumption, “they began prosecuting anyone found with drugs, [even] a small quantity at home, as if they were serious traffickers”.
  • Without investment and reform of the prison system, the cycle of violence and crime continues. “It is right for the state to re-engage with command of the prisons but [Albuquerque] made a mistake by saying he would not respect gangs without [having] a plan.”
  • “We haven’t changed the prison policy for 30 years, and we just repeat the same mistakes,” says Roseno, who heads a campaign to stop murders of adolescents. “The government needs a policy of penal reform but it doesn’t have one. A prison should aim to [reintegrate] the criminal into society, but only 5% of inmates are studying and only 7% are working – they need skills and education.”
Javier E

Why Conservatives Must Abandon Trumpocracy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550685

conservatism gop trump politics boomers party

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy. Indeed, such defeats may well perversely strengthen President Trump. Congressional defeats will weaken alternative power centers within the Republican Party. If they lose the House or the Senate or many governorships—or some combination of those defeats—then Republicans may feel all the more compelled to defend their president. The party faithful may interpret any internal criticism of Trump as a treasonable surrender to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
  • The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.
  • If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
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  • That means slowing the pace of immigration so that the existing population of the country does not feel it is being displaced and replaced. Economists will argue that a country with a slow-growing population needs more immigrants to sustain the growth of its labor force. But a population is a citizenry as well as a labor force, and when it grows slowly, it can less easily assimilate newcomers. Immigration is to natural population increase as wine is to food: a good complement, a bad substitute.
  • In the most immediate sense, that means accepting that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, and to work to reform it so that it costs less and protects middle-class families more
  • The stability of American society depends on conservatives’ ability to find a way forward from the Trump dead end, toward a conservatism that cannot only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and U.S. leadership internationally.
  • As when they had resisted the draft in the 1960s, so now when they refused changes to Medicare, the politics of the baby boom generation were the politics of generational self-defense.
  • Here’s what those right-leaning boomers did mean by “conservatism.” If read a list of scally liberal statements like, “It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” boomers became increasingly likely to deliver a stern no over the 20 years between the 1990s and the 2010s. In fact, by 2010, they had become the age cohort most likely to answer no, more so than either their elders or juniors.
  • They were the cohort most likely to attribute individual economic troubles to those individuals’ own personal failings, rather than to ill fortune, racism, or any other systemic cause.
  • The boomers had faced more competition for everything, from jobs to housing, and now faced an ominous retirement environment. If they acted like shipwreck survivors in an already overcrowded lifeboat … well, the boat really was jammed awfully tight.
  • Americans
  • “Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts,” reported Teresa Ghilarducci of The New York Times. They would need their federal retirement benefits much more than they had anticipated back when they were younger and more liberal.
  • Then struck the financial crisis, followed by the presidency of Barack Obama. The proportion of baby boomers who called themselves “angry with government” surged from 15 percent before 2008 to 26 percent the next year. By 2011, 42 percent of baby boomers were labeling themselves “conservative,” the same percentage as the next generation up.
  • “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” Tea Partiers differentiated between those who worked (or who had worked) and those who sought something for nothing—in other words, between people as they imagined themselves and the people they imagined competing against them.
  • In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution.
  • Of the U.S. residents who lacked health insurance prior to the 2008 financial crisis, 27 percent were foreign born. As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.”
  • The social scientist Robert Putnam observed with dismay in 2007 that “new evidence from the U.S. suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Projects of social and economic reform crash into the reality that human beings most willingly cooperate when they feel common identity. In a society undergoing rapid demographic change, loyalties narrow.
  • Republican politicians since the 1980s had spoken a language of “hope” and “opportunity.”
  • “Believe in America!” “A new American century!” What are they talking about? wondered voters battered and bruised by the previous American century.
  • the political language of the 1980s had lost its power. The most common age for white Americans in 2015 was 55. These older white voters were more eager to protect what they had than to hustle for more. They wanted less change, not more. They cared about security, not opportunity. Protection of the status quo was what candidate Trump offered.
  • One poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified. The Left’s hopes for a social democratic politics founded on class without regard to race look only slightly less moribund than the think-tank conservatism of low taxes and open borders.
  • Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonalit
  • Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.
  • Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.
oliviaodon

Donald Trump Doesn't Understand What's Happening in Iran - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549440

trump iran

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The protests that have rattled Iran this weekend are in many ways an echo of the near past. In the summer of 2009, millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose rhetoric and policies had isolated their country for four years.
  • Now, Iran is experiencing the first large-scale unrests since the Green Movement faded.
  • Now that frustrations have spilled into the streets, the scene is reminiscent of what took place in Iran nine years ago. Some of the slogans chanted by protesters are identical. “Bullets, tanks, and Basijis are no longer effective,” “referendum, referendum, this is the people’s slogan,” and “death to the dictator” are among those recycled chants. Young protesters are again covering their faces to bring down and burn effigies of Khamenei. And just like in 2009, both protesters and security forces are attempting to leverage social media for their benefit. The apps Telegram and Instagram have been temporarily restricted by the Iranian government amid this week’s protests, the BBC reported.
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  • Iranians aren’t “finally” waking up and “getting wise,” as Trump suggests. Instead, Iran has a dynamic and active civil society, which has created and embraced opportunities for reformation and progress for decades. From active participation in elections to various reform and protest movements, Iranians have tried to make their voices heard.
  • But far from empowering the Iranian people, the Trump administration’s response to the protests serves to undermine their efforts. In 2009, upon request from the U.S. government, Twitter delayed a temporary shutdown to allow Iranians to use the platform for organization and communication. Today, the Trump administration should similarly work with social media platforms and media outlets to facilitate the flow of communication into and out of the country.
  • And if Washington is viewed as actively interfering in Iranian affairs, it’ll at best deter Iranians from joining the movement and making their voices heard, and will at worst help the hardliners, undermine the protesters, and facilitate the crackdown against them.  
runlai_jiang

Sri Lanka's president rejects move to allow women to buy alcohol - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-42682526

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A move to grant women in Sri Lanka the same rights as men to buy alcohol legally has been overruled by President Maithripala Sirisena.He told a rally he had ordered the government to withdraw the reform, which would also have allowed women to work in bars without a permit.
  • What would the reform have meant?While the previous law was not always strictly enforced, many Sri Lankan women had welcomed the change.It would have allowed women over the age of 18 to buy alcohol legally for the first time in more than 60 years.
  • Leading monks in the Buddhist-majority country had criticised the decision to lift the ban, arguing it would destroy Sri Lankan family culture by getting more women addicted to alcohol. Saying he had listened to criticism of the government's step, President Sirisena told the rally he had ordered the government to withdraw its notification announcing the lifting of the ban.
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  • Why is the president being accused of hypocrisy? Mr Sirisena has encouraged women in the country to play a more active part in politics, boasting last year that his government had acted to ensure more women were returned at future elections.
  • Just how much do women drink in Sri Lanka anyway?According to World Heath Organization data from 2014, 80.5% of women never drink, compared to 56.9% of men.Less than 0.1% of women above the age of 15 are prone to heavy drinking, compared with 0.8% of men in the same age bracket.
manhefnawi

Charles X - King - Biography - 0 views

www.biography.com/...charles-x-21358667

Last Bourbon King of France 1830

shared by manhefnawi on 02 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Charles X was the last Bourbon monarch of France, best known for igniting the July Revolution with his unpopular political positions
  • A devout Catholic and royalist, he resisted the constitutional reforms instituted by Louis XVIII during the Bourbon Restoration.
  • Louis Antoine—the first member of the next generation of Bourbons
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  • Charles's political awakening began in 1786, when an indebted France struggled to implement fiscal reform
  • In January 1814, Charles traveled to southern France to join the pro-monarchy coalition force.
  • with Charles as his regent
  • Charles remained staunchly conservative
  • Louis XVIII died in September 1824, and his brother succeeded him to the throne as King Charles X of France. In the first few months of his reign, Charles's government passed a series of laws that bolstered the power of the nobility and clergy. Charles's government attempted to re-establish male primogeniture and successfully extended France's imperial power by conquering Algeria
  • Charles was already unpopular when he dissolved much of the government in 1830.
  • Charles and his ministers suspended the constitution.
  • In August, Charles X abdicated in favor of his young grandson Henry, Duke of Bordeaux
  • Fearing bodily harm, Charles X and his family fled France and settled in England
  • The Bourbons moved to Prague in the winter of 1832, residing at the Hradschin Palace at the invitation of Emperor Francis I of Austria
manhefnawi

Catherine II - Emperor - Biography - 0 views

www.biography.com/...catherine-ii-9241622

Russia's Absolute Rulers

shared by manhefnawi on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Catherine II served as empress of Russia for more than three decades in the late 18th century after overthrowing her husband, Peter III
  • was born in Prussia in 1729 and married into the Russian royal family in 1745
  • Catherine orchestrated a coup to become empress of Russia in 1762
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  • After more than three decades as Russia's absolute ruler, she died in 1796
  • Catherine II, often called Catherine the Great, became empress consort of Russia when her husband, Peter III, ascended to the throne following the death of his aunt, Elizabeth of Russia, on December 25, 1761
  • During his brief time in power, Catherine II conspired with her lover, Gregory Orlov, a Russian lieutenant, and other powerful figures to leverage the discontent with Peter and build up support for his removal
  • Catherine II finally produced a heir with son Paul, born on September 20, 1754. The paternity of the child has been a subject of great debate among scholars, with some claiming that Paul's father was actually Sergei Saltykov, a Russian noble and member of the court
  • Concerned about being toppled by opposing forces early in her reign, Catherine II sought to appease the military and the church
  • she also returned the church's land and property that had been taken by Peter, though she later changed course on that front, making the church part of the state
  • While Catherine believed in absolute rule, she did make some efforts toward social and political reforms
  • During Catherine's reign, Russia expanded its borders. She made substantial gains in Poland, where she had earlier installed her former lover, Polish count Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the country's throne
  • Catherine gave parts of Poland to Prussia and Austria, while taking the eastern region herself.
  • Russia's actions in Poland triggered a military conflict with Turkey. Enjoying numerous victories in 1769 and 1770, Catherine showed the world that Russia was a mighty power. She reached a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire in 1774, bringing new lands into the empire and giving Russia a foothold in the Black Sea
  • Catherine II started out as a minor German princess. Her birth name was Sophie Friederike Auguste, and she grew up in Stettin in a small principality called Anhalt-Zebst. Her father, Christian August, a prince of this tiny dominion, gained fame for his military career by serving as a general for Frederick William I of Prussia
  • Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, Catherine II's mother
  • By the mid-1790s, Catherine had enjoyed several decades as Russia's absolute ruler. She had a strained relationship with her son and heir, Paul, over her grip on power, but she enjoyed her grandchildren, especially the oldest one, Alexander
  • Historians have also criticized her for not improving the lives of serfs, who represented the majority of the Russian population. Still, Catherine made some significant contributions to Russia, bringing forth educational reforms and championing the arts. As leader, Catherine also extended the country's borders through military might and diplomatic prowess
manhefnawi

Gustav II Adolf | king of Sweden | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Gustav-II-Adolf

Sweden Europe Habsburgs German Princes

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  • made it a major European power
  • Gustav was the eldest son of Charles IX and his second wife, Christina of Holstein.
  • Charles IX had usurped the throne, having ejected his nephew Sigismund III Vasa (who was also king of Poland) in 1599, and the resulting dynastic quarrel involved Sweden and Poland in a war that continued intermittently for 60 years.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Not only had Charles placed Sweden in a calamitous situation internationally but he had left behind him a legacy of domestic troubles. His usurpation of the throne had meant not only the expulsion of a Roman Catholic sovereign whose rule seemed to threaten Sweden’s Lutheranism but also the defeat of the aristocratic constitutionalism of the Council of State, and it had been followed by the execution of five leading members of the high aristocracy.
  • Charles IX had intervened in Russia to prevent the Poles from placing their own candidate on the Russian throne;
  • The king observed the spirit of the charter. The aristocracy found in Gustav a king favourable to their interests. He enlisted the nobility in the service of the state and thus provided them with numerous economic benefits.
  • The first decade of the reign, therefore, saw the creation of the Supreme Court (1614) and the establishment of the Treasury and the Chancery as permanent administrative boards (1618), and by the end of the reign an Admiralty and a War Office had been created—each presided over by one of the great officers of state.
  • And in the 1620s a thorough reform professionalized local government and placed it securely under the control of the crown. The Council of State became, for the first time, a permanent organ of government able to assume charge of affairs while the king was fighting overseas.
  • Thus, the fate of Europe was bound up with what happened in Livonia or Prussia. Protestant Europe was slow to appreciate the connection, but as the Protestant cause plunged to disaster in Germany, its leaders increasingly turned their eyes to Gustav as a possible saviour.
  • The disastrous defeat (1626) of Christian IV of Denmark, who had intervened in Germany without such an assurance, justified his caution, but it also made Swedish intervention inevitable.
  • Gustav landed in Germany without allies. Whatever the feelings of the Protestant populations, the Protestant princes resented Swedish interference, and the refusal of George William of Brandenburg to cooperate with the Swedes thwarted Gustav’s attempts to save Magdeburg from capture and sack at the hands of Tilly’s armies. In September John George of Saxony, provoked by violations of his neutrality, formally allied himself with Sweden.
  • the old security had become the new indemnity. Many Germans feared, and some Swedish diplomats now believed, that a final settlement must probably entail the deposition of the German emperor Ferdinand II and the election of Gustav as emperor in his place. It was a solution he must certainly have contemplated, but there is no firm evidence of his attitude; probably he considered it only as a last resort. Certainly it would have alienated those German allies who had no wish to exchange a Habsburg domination for a Swedish one.
  • His death came at a moment when it had already begun to appear that the victory he believed to be essential to the stability of Germany and the security of Sweden might be more difficult to achieve than he had imagined. But he had lived long enough to deflect the course of German history. His intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, at a moment when the armies of the Habsburg emperor and the German princes of the Catholic League controlled almost the whole of Germany, ensured the survival of German Protestantism against the onslaughts of the Counter-Reformation.
  • By supporting the German princes against the emperor, Gustav Adolf defeated the attempts of the Habsburgs to make their imperial authority a reality and thus played a part in delaying the emergence of a united Germany until the 19th century.
manhefnawi

Sigismund I | king of Poland | Britannica.com - 1 views

www.britannica.com/...Sigismund-I-king-of-Poland

Sigismund I Poland II Augustus Habsburgs

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  • In a short time his judicial and administrative reforms transformed those territories into model states. He succeeded his brother Alexander I as grand prince of Lithuania and king of Poland in 1506. Although he established fiscal and monetary reforms, he often clashed with the Polish Diet over extensions of royal power. At the Diet’s demand he married Barbara, daughter of Prince Stephen Zápolya of Hungary, in 1512, to secure a defense treaty and produce an heir. She died, however, three years later, leaving only daughters. In 1518 Sigismund married the niece of the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian, Bona Sforza of Milan, by whom he had one son, Sigismund II Augustus, and four daughters.
manhefnawi

France - The age of the Reformation | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...The-age-of-the-Reformation

Francis I II Charles IX Henry III Edict of January Catherine de Médicis

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  • in 1521 Francis I, who was on the point of war with Emperor Charles V and King Henry VIII of England and who wanted to demonstrate his orthodoxy, forbade their publication.
  • Henry II (1547–59) pursued his father’s harsh policies, setting up a special court (the chambre ardente) to deal with heresy and issuing further repressive edicts, such as that of Écouen in 1559. His sudden death from a jousting accident in 1559 and the demise the following year of his eldest son, Francis II, left royal policy uncertain.
  • Calvinism provided both a rallying point for a wide cross section of opposition and the organization necessary to make that opposition effective.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This organization was ultimately headed by Louis I de Bourbon, prince de Condé, who assumed the title of protector general of the churches of France, thus putting all the prestige of the house of Bourbon behind the Huguenot cause. By doing so, he added a new dimension to the age-old opposition of the mighty feudal subject to the crown: that opposition was now backed by a tightly knit military organization based on the Huguenot communities, by the financial contributions of wealthy bankers and businessmen, and by the dedicated religious zeal of the faithful, inspired by the example of Geneva.
  • The struggle between the families of Guise, Bourbon, and Montmorency for political power at the centre of government after Henry II’s death; the vacillating policy of Catherine de Médicis, widow of Henry II, who strongly influenced the three sons who successively became king; and, most important, the ineptitude of those rulers—Francis II (1559–60), Charles IX (1560–74), and Henry III (1574–89)—meant that local government officials were never confident of their authority in seeking to curb the growing threat of Huguenotism. After the death of Francis II, Catherine de Médicis, who was ruling in the name of her second son, Charles IX, abandoned the repressive religious policy of Francis I and Henry II and attempted to achieve religious reconciliation.
  • in the following year she issued the Edict of January, which allowed the Calvinists a degree of toleration. These signs of favour to the Protestants brought a violent reaction from devout Catholics, who found leadership in the noble house of Guise, the champions of Roman Catholicism in France.
Javier E

Opinion | Is the Religious Right Privileged? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...religion-race-liberalism.html

religious right post-liberalism American idea culture

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Serwer is stating with particular force something that most liberals seem to believe: That populism in all its forms, but maybe religious conservatism especially, is best understood as the illiberal rage of the formerly privileged, the longtime white-male-Christian winners of our history, at discovering that under conditions of equality they don’t get to be the rulers anymore.
  • I want to complicate the first argument, and challenge the second one
  • The complication has to do with the history of black emancipation and black politics
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • the challenge has to do with the actual composition of the religious right and the history of liberalism’s relationship to Christianity.
  • On the first point, it’s true that black America has never formed an illiberal bloc in American politics, and true as well that the dominant, so far victorious strain in African-American activism and political thought is represented by the fulfill-the-founding patriotism that binds Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
  • slavery was abolished only because of the interaction between Southern paranoia, ambition and vainglory and Northern abolitionists who regarded the constitutional order as a “compact with hell” — an interaction that led first to political violence, then a breakdown of the constitutional order and then a civil war
  • a stark reminder that our system has advanced morally through effective re-foundings as well as liberal reforms, and that some moral-religious-cultural chasms can be closed only by extra-constitutional events.
  • As an undercurrent, at least, the black political tradition in America has included many “post-liberal” forays and flirtations, sharpest in periods of apparent political breakdown, that encompass everything from the Communist affiliations of many black intellectuals in the 1930s to the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and other black nationalist movements in the civil rights era.
  • If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people’s flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities. And defenders of the system should accept that openness
  • the idea that the religious-conservative coalition just represents the former big winners of American history, resentful of their lost privilege and yet even now so secure within it that they can’t imagine being on the receiving end of state oppression, is … not really an accurate description.
  • the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.
  • because I would prefer that political liberalism turn away from the trajectory that is inspiring both integralism and Trumpism, I want liberals — liberals like Serwer, perhaps liberals like you, reader — to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before
  • Its allies in pro-life, pro-family politics include Orthodox Jews, whose history is not exactly one of power; Mormons, who were harried westward by a brutal persecution and then forced to rewrite their doctrines by state power; and conservative Roman Catholics
  • all of these groups are embedded in global religious communities in which persecution is as common as privilege — which if anything probably leads them to worry too much about what a hostile government might do to them, not to fail to imagine such oppression.
  • secular liberalism, in its meritocratic-elite form, may present itself as a vehicle for long-suffering minorities to finally grasp power, in many ways it is also a peculiar post-Protestant extension of the old WASP ascendancy
  • to impose the current doctrines of Episcopalians on the Baptists and the Papists.
  • after 50 years of small-d democratic activism by pro-lifers, the pro-choice side seems to be hardening into a view that such activism is as un-American as racism. Legally, elite liberalism is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today, and perhaps colleges and grammar schools tomorrow
  • they threaten the return of longstanding tendency in modern secular polities — an institutionalized anti-Catholicism that effectively oppresses the church even if it stops short of persecuting it, a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing
  • Today’s evangelicalism is a complicated mix, but it is heavily descended from Bible Belt, prairie and Sun Belt folkways that were often poor and marginalized and rarely close to the corridors of power.
  • two arguments, two lines of thinking, that it eloquently distills.
  • The first argument is a broad historical defense of the American experiment
  • America was born imperfect and remains so, in this story, but it is a place where the most oppressed and disfavored people need never despair of their future, need never abandon the promise of the founding, because the arc of our national story can always, with enough activist zeal and procedural perseverance, be bent toward justice.
  • Then the second argumen
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: The Limits of My Conservatism - 0 views

nymag.com/...limits-of-my-conservatism.html

conservatism reactionary gender leftist indoctrination immigration

shared by Javier E on 17 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • I had a very pleasant dinner with Michael Anton, the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while
  • Anton is something of an intellectual pariah — a Washington Post columnist wrote last year that “there is little reason to ever listen” to him — but he’s a pariah in part because he’s a reactionary with a first-class mind
  • He reminds me why I’m a conservative, why the distinction between a reactionary and a conservative is an important one in this particular moment, and how the left unwittingly is becoming reactionism’s most potent enabler
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • one core divide on the right: between those who see the social, cultural, and demographic changes of the last few decades as requiring an assault and reversal, and those who seek to reform its excesses, manage its unintended consequences, but otherwise live with it. Anton is a reactionary; I’m a conservative
  • there is a place where conservatives and reactionaries find common cause — and that is when the change occurring is drastic, ideological, imposed by an elite, and without any limiting principle.
  • On immigration, for example, has the demographic transformation of the U.S. been too swift, too revolutionary, and too indifferent to human nature and history?
  • Or is it simply a new, if challenging, turn in a long, American story of waves of immigrants creating a country that’s an ever-changing kaleidoscope?
  • If you answer “yes” to the first, you’re a reactionary. If “yes” to the second, you’re a liberal. If you say yes to both, you’re a conservative.
  • If you say it’s outrageous and racist even to consider these questions, you’re a card-carrying member of the left.
  • In a new essay, Anton explains his view of the world: “What happens when transformative efforts bump up against permanent and natural limits? Nature tends to bump back
  • But what are “permanent and natural limits” to transformation? Here are a couple: humanity’s deep-seated tribalism and the natural differences between men and women
  • — but you will never eradicate these deeper realities.
  • That kind of left-radicalism will generate an equal and opposite kind of right-reactionism. And that’s especially true if you define the resisters as bigots and deplorables, and refuse to ever see that they might have a smidgen of a point.
  • I’d say that by any reasonable standards in history or the contemporary world, America is a miracle of multiracial and multicultural harmony. There’s more to do and accomplish, but the standard should be what’s doable within the framework of human nature, not perfection
  • More to the point, the attempt to eradicate rather than ameliorate these things requires extraordinary intervention in people’s lives, empowers government way beyond its optimal boundaries, and generates intense backlash.
  • if you decide to change the ethnic composition of an entire country in just a few decades, you will get a backlash from the previous majority ethnicity; and if you insist that there are no differences between men and women, you are going to generate male and female resistance.
  • The left is correct that Americans are racist and sexist; but so are all humans
  • This is not to say that some of the resisters are not bigots, just that no human society has been without bigotry, and that many others who are resistant to drastic change are just uncomfortable, or nostalgic, or afraid, or lost
  • I’m a multicultural conservative. But when assaulted by the slur of “white supremacist” because I don’t buy Marcuse, my reactionism perks up. The smugness, self-righteousness, and dogmatism of the current left is a Miracle-Gro of reactionism.
  • Subject young white boys to critical race and gender theory, tell them that women can have penises, that genetics are irrelevant in understanding human behavior, that borders are racist, or that men are inherently toxic, and you will get a bunch of Jordan Peterson fans by their 20s. Actually, scratch that future tense — they’re here and growing in number.
  • Many leftists somehow believe that sustained indoctrination will work in abolishing human nature, and when it doesn’t, because it can’t, they demonize those who have failed the various tests of PC purity as inherently wicked.
  • n the end, the alienated and despised see no reason not to gravitate to ever-more extreme positions. They support people and ideas simply because they piss off their indoctrinators. And, in the end, they reelect Trump.
  • None of this is necessary. You can be in favor of women’s equality without buying into the toxicity of men; you can support legal immigration if the government gets serious about stopping illegal immigration; you can be inclusive of trans people without abolishing the bimodality of human sex and gender; you can support criminal-justice reform without believing — as the New York Times now apparently does — that America is an inherently racist invention,
  • Leftists have to decide at some point: Do they want to push more conservatives into Michael Anton’s reactionary camp or more reactionaries into the conservative one? And begin to ponder their own role in bringing this extreme reactionism into the mainstream.
Javier E

Kathryn Murdoch Steps Out of the Family Shadow to Fight Climate Change - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...och-climate-change-voting.html

murdoch family climate change politics redistricting

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Ms. Murdoch said that she actually got the inspiration to take on climate change from that Al Gore talk at the Fox retreat in 2006. The former vice president presented a version of the slide show that had just been turned into the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
  • the urgency of the climate crisis jolted her. “I decided to switch everything I was doing,” she said. “I wanted to be able to look my children in the eye and say ‘I did everything I could.’”
  • Now, working with the nonpartisan group Unite America, she is connecting like-minded organizations that are trying to overhaul the democratic process of voting to make it less likely to reward partisanship. She is also raising funds to ensure that the network will be effective.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “I’m not saying I have all the answers — I don’t,” she said, “But what I know and what I feel very strongly is that sitting around not doing anything is the wrong answer.”
  • “Murdoch media are notorious amongst climate scientists for their constant stream of misinformation on climate change,” said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “I can see how a thinking person who marries into that family might feel an urge to counter at least a little bit of the damage they do.”
  • She decided, however, that spreading scientific knowledge might not be enough. People already understand that the planet is warming and that humans are the cause. The deeper problem, she said, is that the government of the United States isn’t doing anything about it.
  • ichard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University Law School and an expert on constitutional law and democracy, said that democracy reform efforts were laudable but a long shot. They “might have effects at the margins,” he said, but “these reforms are not likely to fundamentally transform our politics from this hyper-polarized era we’ve been in for nearly 40 years.”
  • “Everyone is so panicked about the situation and wants to help, but doesn’t know what to do.”
  • She said she still had “a lot of hope” that we are capable of solving the climate crisis. “But we don’t yet have the political will.”
Javier E

Opinion | We've Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders's Socialism - Th... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bernie-sanders-socialism.html

socialism us idealism politics history culture progressive

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Sanders fits into a strain of American socialism that has largely eschewed ideology, made few references to Karl Marx, and been more likely to talk about fairness and values than about economic theory.
  • He does not sound like the doctrinaire immigrant socialists of the 19th century, for example. He is somewhat closer to Norman Thomas and the socialists of the 1930s or Eugene Debs and the socialism of the early 20th century. But both men headed a socialist party, which Mr. Sanders does not
  • The socialists Mr. Sanders most resembles were Gilded Age intellectuals, reformers, union members and ordinary citizens who self-labeled as socialist.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • the leading voices were, like Mr. Sanders, native-born and middle-class advocates of reform within the Democratic and Republican parties, whose bosses they often criticized.
  • Mr. Sanders sounds like these Gilded Age socialists in part because the issues of their time were similar to ours — immigration, environmental deterioration, declining well-being and growing inequality in a period of rapid technological and economic change
  • The Gilded Age socialists admitted what their opponents often did not: Americans did not all share common values.
  • Mr. Sanders’s actual similarity to 19th-century socialists makes him seem unthreatening, even avuncular. He is infinitely closer to William Dean Howells, the 19th-to 20th-century novelist who for a while proclaimed himself a socialist, than to Joseph Stalin.
  • Howells’s political evolution makes socialism’s American roots clear. Howells wrote campaign biographies for Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes, and remained close friends with John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Even when Howells called himself a socialist in the late 1880s, he continued to vote Republican, although he thought the party was corrupted.
  • Howells regarded socialism as “not a positive but a comparative thing … Every citizen of a civilized State is a socialist.”
  • If anyone believed “that the postal department, the public schools, the mental hospitals, the almshouse are good things; and that when a railroad management has muddled away in hopeless ruin the money of all who trusted it, a Railroad Receiver is a good thing,” then that person embraced socialism.
  • Like Howells, Bernie Sanders embraces a series of modest changes. Mr. Sanders often rightly seems bewildered that free public college education — once the norm in California — and the universal health care of Canada and Europe can seem to be radical solutions to American problems.
  • Radicals — anarchists, Communists and other Marxists — have at critical moments influenced America’s development, often for the better, and most of them have despised American socialists as insufficiently revolutionary, ideologically incoherent, hopelessly sentimental and utterly enmeshed in existing society.
  • They were right — which was why American socialists have been far more influential than their radical critics. Socialists appealed to sensibility, values and justice, not ideologies. They put their hope in the benevolence and fairness of the mass of Americans —­ what Howells called the sufficiency of the common — rather than in elites.
Javier E

How the Coronavirus Will Change Young People's Lives - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609862

social effects pandemic crisis culture politics financial youths Generation C

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
  • With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and Costco.
  • “Epidemics are really bad for economies,”
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • “We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.”
  • People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to their parents or other family members for significant help
  • To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in their teens and 20s when it hit.
  • Not only did jobs dry up, but federal relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and insurance companies instead of to workers themselves.
  • investors picked off dirt-cheap foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American wage growth.
  • Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less money in savings than previous generations did at the same age. Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.
  • Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare for the country’s labor force.
  • Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a slow-rolling global disaster.
  • American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering temperatures of their commercial ovens,
  • The private-equity behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse the economy generally is for workers and consumers.
  • Less competition means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to improve wages, worker safety, or job security.
  • as with virtually all problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus might do to your future.
  • there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable life.
  • those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not significantly improving professional outcomes.
  • Private universities may suddenly be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict.
  • there is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.
  • What will become of Generation C?
  • Many types of classes don’t work particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out into the natural world.
  • “People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,”
  • Disasters, he told me, tend to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of everyday life.
  • Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods, scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to catastrophe than others
  • Children in those communities already have a harder time accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer and die during a pandemic.
  • in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s possible shifts.
  • For that to translate to real change, though, it’s crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of political agitation that were already happening before the virus. “Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,
  • This is where young people might finally be poised to take some control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many Millennials leftward
  • When housing prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections, wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for young people who experience American life as a rigged game
  • the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.
  • “There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary revolutionary change,”
  • The seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive candidates both locally and nationally.
  • Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,”
  • a subset of young voters believes that some American conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word lost much of its power to scare.
  • the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for working people.
  • But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.
  • Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too. Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to those in need.
  • As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though, people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,” Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe in the world, so I don’t know
andrespardo

Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump | Robert Reich | Opinion | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...hment-trial-state-of-the-union

trump

shared by andrespardo on 07 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • ut why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?
  • But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.
  • hey talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging”.
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  • “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly.
  • peaking at a factory in Pennsylvania in June 2016, he decried politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families”.
  • Racism did play a part. But to understand why racism had such a strong impact in 2016, especially on the voting of whites without college degrees, it’s important to see what drove it. After all, racism in America dates back long before the founding of the Republic, and even modern American politicians have had few compunctions about using racism to boost their standing.
  • Clinton and Obama chose not to wrest power back from the oligarchy. Why? In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. Clinton pushed for Nafta and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the “confidence” of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.
  • Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 supreme court opinion opening wider the floodgates to big money in politics.
  • There is no longer a left or right.
  • A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. As Eduardo Porter of the New York Times notes, since 2000 Republican presidential candidates have steadily gained strength in America’s poorer counties while Democrats have lost ground. In 2016, Trump won 58% of the vote in the counties with the poorest 10% of the population. His share was 31% in the richest.
  • Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement. Trump has harnessed the frustrations of at least 40% of America. Although he’s been a Trojan horse for big corporations and the rich, giving them all they’ve wanted in tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, the working class continues to believe he’s on their side.
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