Trump claimed that Biden's son Hunter Biden got a $3.5 million payment from the wife of the former mayor of Moscow. "Why is it, just out of curiosity, the mayor of Moscow's wife gave your son $3.5 million?" Trump said.
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Fact checking Biden and Trump at the first presidential debate - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Hunter Biden was a co-founder and CEO of the investment firm Rosemont Seneca Advisors. But Mesires said Hunter Biden did not co-found Rosemont Seneca Thornton. It's not clear what connection exists between Rosemont Seneca Advisors and Rosemont Seneca Thornton.Neither the Senate report nor Trump have provided any evidence that the payment was corrupt or that Hunter Biden committed any wrongdoing.
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: This is false. Biden said in an August interview with ABC that he would shut down the country if scientists told him it was necessary -
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Addressing his opponent, Trump said, "I closed it, and you said, 'He's xenophobic. He's a racist and he's xenophobic,' because you didn't think I should have closed our country."
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It's not clear Biden even knew about Trump's China travel restrictions when he called Trump xenophobic on the day the restrictions were unveiled
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Trump claimed 308,000 "military people" died because Biden "couldn't provide them proper health care."
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Trump seems to be referencing findings from a 2015 inspector general report that examined a backlog of healthcare applications at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The report found more than 307,000 records that remained pending in a VA enrollment system were for people who had already died, according to social security records.
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shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 16
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Ben Sasse's words of wisdom - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...ben-sasses-words-of-wisdom
American idea democracy dignity constitution race class nativism crisis culture history civic education
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“We aren’t a nation rooted in blood. We aren’t a nation based in ethnicity . . . America was an idea that was about something much bigger than what tribe you come from.”
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That message was entirely absent — and remains absent — in the xenophobic, nativist ramblings of Trump and his followers. Trump’s supporters rallied to his cry of white resentment and anti-immigrant blame-mongering. His authoritarianism and contempt for the First Amendment were of no concern.
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the right, for all its Constitutional veneration, has become proudly ignorant about our founding principles and instead has adopted the worst aspects of the left: race obsession and class resentment. In the hands of misogynistic and xenophobic opportunists, the right now seems to be all about getting even, getting what some Americans imagine was taken from them.
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That, too, seems to be a proposition — sensible internationalism — that center-right and left can agree upon.
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a sense of shared responsibility for the fate of our neighbors, especially those facing economic or other hardship, should be the basis of our public policy discussion
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It is here, perhaps, that the conscientious center-right and center-left can join forces. Both should reject the steady diet of xenophobia on the right and identity politics on the left. Both should insist on a revival of civic education.
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“We can talk about a specific factory moving from Ohio or Indiana to Mexico and the jobs that might be saved or lost in a move like that, but the long-term factor is that each of those factories have so many fewer workers. We are talking about 7 percent of the U.S. workforce now working in industrial jobs.”
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Neither party, he said, is focusing on the real challenges — creating lifetime learners who can navigate through economic shifts we cannot now anticipate.
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Sasse is unusual because, sadly, so few pols talk to voters like adults, addressing rather than denying complexity and appealing to American ideals rather than base fears and tribal prejudices
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It Was Never Populism. It's Nationalism - 0 views
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'populism' has always been the wrong name for what Trumpism represents. The unifying message of Trumpism is nationalism, and particularly an aggressive, zero-sum nationalism. It is also summed up simply in "Make America Great Again."
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The style may be 'populist' in some generic sense. But the message and agenda is nationalism. That is the focus around which all the actions of these rancorous 13 days come together into a unified whole - aggressive attacks on friends and foes alike, threats of tariffs against non-compliant foreign states, clampdowns on immigration, etc.
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President Trump often talks about "workers" but it is almost always in the vein of protecting American workers from abuse by foreigners. Especially since the Trump virtually never speaks about wages. And he never spoke about wealth inequality, financial security provided by programs like Medicare and Social Security, let alone worker protections or labor unions. One might add job security, affordable education for children and retirement security generally to the list of the undiscussed.
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The real theme is one Trump articulated clearly yesterday in his National Prayer Breakfast speech: "We have to be tough. It's time we're going to be a little tough, folks. We're taking advantage of by every nation in the world virtually. It's not going to happen anymore. It's not going to happen anymore."
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The Trump message was about nationalism, power and aggression against the nations of the world who are 'taking advantage of" us and laughing at us. That kind of aggression against outsiders, with their domestic counterparts, the 'elites', can overlap with economic concerns. They're quite distinct.
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But a proper understanding of Trumpism is also a political opportunity for Democrats. Trump is cozying up to the Wall Street barons he campaigned against. He's about to throw 25 million Americans off their health care
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“We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank, because frankly I have so many people, friends of mine, that have nice businesses and they can’t borrow money,” he said again today, while he also talks about vast tax cuts for his wealthy friends and tax increases for many ordinary working and middle class families. This is a perfect evocation of government by the richest, for the richest, by the rich - and from the President's own lips. The complete indifference to the supposed interests of the people who voted for him has so many examples it's almost comical. Democrats need to be building this storyline now.
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Nationalism is not a bad word or a bad thing, in itself. I don't believe so at least. If you do, it is important to recognize that a strain of non-retributive nationalism is the default assumption of the great majority of Americans. Any politics which doesn't recognize that is doomed to fail.
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an aggressive, defensive nationalism is in some sense natural and generally harmless for small, weak countries. They often are taken advantage of and ill-used by the nations of the world. It can be a realistic basis of national policy.
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But when strong countries, even the strongest country in the history of the world, start indulging fantasies of weakness and grievance things can get dangerous quickly. Weak and small countries by definition can't do that much harm. Their grievance and sense of victimization is inextricable from their very weakness. But when grievance and rage at outsiders takes hold among the strong, they are capable of committing great evil, precisely because of their power. Victimology is a powerful drug.
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How to Write About the Right: An Exchange | by James McAuley | The New York Review of B... - 0 views
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it is foolish to deny or minimize social realities that xenophobes exaggerate and exploit, in the vain hope of cutting off their oxygen. Equally foolish is an unwillingness to take up fundamental political questions that the xenophobes give bad answers to, and to try giving better ones—questions like Ernst Renan’s “What is a nation?”
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If there is anything we’ve learned in recent decades, it is that closing our eyes or establishing taboos on what can and can’t be discussed, or how, always backfire. The left needs to present people with a fuller reality than the right presents, not an equally restricted one.
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unless one believes in open borders, citizens are perfectly right to expect that whatever level of legal immigration has been democratically decided will be enforced. If not, the democratic system itself will look illegitimate. Uncontrolled immigration, along with economic globalization, are the major factors behind the growing distrust plaguing liberal democracies. It is not just bigotry.
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Though the Muslim population has grown to only 10 percent so far, over a quarter of all children born in France have at least one parent born outside Europe, most from Muslim countries. So the Muslim population will continue to grow
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For those concerned about the antiliberal forces gaining strength in world politics, the most important thing is to maintain one’s sangfroid. Before we judge we must be sure of what exactly we are judging. We need to take ideas seriously, make distinctions, and never presume that the present is just the past in disguise
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Whatever we are facing, it is not twentieth-century fascism. Hell keeps on disgorging new demons to beset us. And as seasoned exorcists know, each must be called by its proper name before it can be cast out.
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shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 20
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US awol from world stage as China tries on global leadership for size | World news | Th... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...-on-global-leadership-for-size
china leadership rivalry global us decline prestige xenophobe trump crisis politics
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When the UN security council and the G7 group sought to agree a global response to the coronavirus pandemic, the efforts stumbled on the US insistence on describing the threat as distinctively Chinese.
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There are other reasons for the lack of collaboration in the face of a global crisis, but the focus on labelling the virus Chinese and blaming China pursued by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, helped ensure there would be no meaningful collective response from the world’s most powerful nations.
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For some US allies, the fixation on words at a time when the international order was arguably facing its greatest challenge since the second world war encapsulated the glaring absence of US leadership.
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And that absence was illustrated just as vividly by news coverage of planes full of medical supplies from China arriving in Italy, at a time when the US was quietly flying in half a million Italian-made diagnostic swabs for use in its own under-equipped health system
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“To me what is so striking is the complete absence of the US from public debates. The US is basically off the map, and China very much is on the map,”
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what is happening now is going to linger on, simply because what we’re going through now is such a traumatic experience … It is going to remain very much in our individual and collective memories.”
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this week’s $2tn stimulus bill contained scarcely more than $1bn (about 0.06%) for spending outside the US.
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additional aid has done little to soften the image of an administration that has employed xenophobic rhetoric and breaking with its closest partners in its efforts to intensify economic pressure on its enemies, Iran and Venezuela, whose populations are at high risk from the coronavirus.
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Despite its responsibility for allowing the virus to run rampant in the first place, China has had notable success in reshaping its image as a leader by its later efforts to contain the disease and its outreach to Italy and other vulnerable countries.
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“US global leadership won’t just end because they bungled their response to the coronavirus, but I think we will come to find that this was a pivotal point,”
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the coronavirus crisis will inflict more lasting damage on the US’s standing than the 2003 Iraq invasion.
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“China wasn’t in the wings in 2003,” she said. “It wasn’t ready to take over that global role. Well, it’s now in a position where it can take over global leadership, and it’s just waiting for the US to misstep or to lose support among its allies
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From the debacle over testing to Trump’s months-long denial about the scale of the threat and his constant political point-scoring, the US has showed itself to be anything but a model for the rest of the world to emulate.
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worldwide faith in US competence has been one of the pillars of its global standing, and is currently crumbling.
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“Far from making ‘America great again,’ this epic policy failure will further tarnish the United States’ reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively,” Walt wrote in Foreign Policy, in a commentary titled “the death of American competence”.
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Khanna pointed out that China’s neighbours in Asia are well aware that Beijing’s censorship during the initial outbreak in Wuhan resulted in a missed opportunity to contain the virus
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“China is filling a public goods vacuum, not a leadership vacuum,” Khanna said. “People here are not idiots. They know exactly where this came from, so you don’t need to worry about China winning any global narrative campaign in the world.”
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the extent to which China succeeds in exploiting the crisis to pursue global primacy would be dependent on whether Beijing can be successfully challenged, for example from a change to a more outward leadership in Washington, or a Europe that can transcend its divisions.
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Lindsey Graham should beware of Trump's 'magic' (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views
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"There's something about Trump," Graham, told "Axios on HBO." "There's a dark side -- and there's some magic there."
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Appearing on CNN in 2015, he told Alisyn Camerota that Trump was "a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot," that didn't represent his party .
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What Graham seems to find magical is that despite his many failures, which include not just Trump's defeat at the polls but his failed effort to help the GOP hold onto a Senate majority and his abysmal handling of the pandemic, Trump has a firm grip on millions of GOP voters.
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After the attack, Pence went silent for a while, but returned to public view by publishing an article that echoed Trump's false claims about "election integrity." Having escaped the mob, he now seems to be courting it.
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To that end he wants to "harness the magic" of Trump. "He can make it [the GOP] bigger. He can make it stronger. He can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it."
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Bay Area Attacks On Asian American Seniors Evoke Anger And Fear : NPR - 0 views
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Business and civil rights groups in California are demanding action after a recent surge of xenophobic violence against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area left one person dead and others badly injured. The brazen, mostly daylight assaults have rattled nerves in communities ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.
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a 64-year-old grandmother was assaulted and robbed of cash she'd just withdrawn from an ATM for Lunar New Year gifts.
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a 91-year-old man in Oakland's Chinatown, who was hospitalized with serious injuries after being shoved to the ground by a man who walked up behind him.
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In January, a 52-year-old Asian American woman was shot in the head with a flare gun, also in Chinatown.
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84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was going for a morning walk in his San Francisco neighborhood. Surveillance cameras captured a man running at him full speed and smashing his frail body to the pavement.
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The Oakland Anti Police-Terror Project has asked people "to wear yellow to show you're in support of Chinatown seniors and businesses."
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The more than two dozen recent assaults and robberies in the Bay Area mirror a national rise in hate crimes against older Asian Americans during the pandemic. From last March through the end of 2020, Kulkarni's group has documented nearly 3,000 incidents of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and the District of Columbia.
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Despite arrests in some of the high-profile attacks, the violence has prompted many Chinatown businesses to reduce hours during a normally bustling shopping period ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.
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Separately, more than 200 people across the area have volunteered to serve as "community strollers" in Chinatown starting next week.
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"These attacks taking place in the Bay Area are part of a larger trend of anti-Asian American/Pacific Islander hate brought on in many ways by COVID-19, as well as some of the xenophobic policies and racist rhetoric that were pushed forward by the prior administration,"
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"Racist rhetoric from the pandemic has targeted us as being the reason for the coronavirus," Wu says, singling out phrases used by former President Trump to describe the outbreak's origins.
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Civil rights advocate Kulkarni also shared criticism of politically charged speech. "Oftentimes, perpetrators have used the exact language of the prior president, words like 'human virus, kung flu, China virus, China plague,' "Kulkarni says. "And sometimes they have even weaponized the former president himself saying 'Trump is going to get you, go back to your country.'
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Across the bay in Oakland, Calif., police say they've added foot and car patrols and set up a mobile command post in Chinatown, measures the community welcomes.
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"It's not unique to Chinatown or to the Asian community the increase in crime we've seen across the city and across the county, but we have seen in the last several weeks and month a very specific increase in crimes committed against Asians," O'Malley told a press conference in Chinatown.
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"I believe there are some individuals in our community that have targeted people of different races," he says noting that some offenders may see Asian Americans as less likely report crimes to law enforcement.
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The pandemic, chief Armstrong tells NPR, had certainly made it easier for criminals, with time on their hands, to mask up and often slip away unidentified. "That's why it's so important that businesses and others that have video that they share with us. The mask wearing, although it's required and I think very important for health reasons, it also is definitely a deterrence in identifying those that are responsible," he says.
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President Biden, meantime, recently signed a memorandum pledging to combat anti-Asian and Pacific Islander discrimination. It was part of a series of racial equity-focused executive orders.
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"What the incidents in the Bay Area remind us of is that action is needed now," Kulkarni says, "not a few months from now, not a few years from now."
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Opinion | The Triumph of the Ukrainian Idea - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea — an idea that inspires Ukrainians to fight so doggedly, an idea that inspires people across the West to stand behind Ukraine and back it to the hilt.
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That idea is actually two ideas jammed together. The first is liberalism, which promotes democracy, individual dignity, a rule-based international order.
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There are many people who assume that liberalism and nationalism are opposites. Liberalism, in their mind, is modern and progressive. It’s about freedom of choice, diversity and individual autonomy. Nationalism, meanwhile, is primordial, xenophobic, tribal, aggressive and exclusionary.
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it has become clear that there are two kinds of nationalism: the illiberal nationalism of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and the liberal nationalism of Zelensky. The former nationalism is backward-looking, xenophobic and authoritarian.
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The latter nationalism is forward-looking, inclusive and builds a society around the rule of law, not the personal power of the maximum leader. It’s become clear that if it is to survive, liberalism needs to rest on a bed of this kind of nationalism.
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Nationalism provides people with a fervent sense of belonging. Countries don’t hold together because citizens make a cold assessment that it’s in their self-interest to do so. Countries are held together by shared loves for a particular way of life, a particular culture, a particular land
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Nationalism provides people with a sense of meaning. Nationalists tell stories that stretch from a glorious if broken past forward to a golden future
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Democracies need nationalism if they are to defend themselves against their foes. Democracies also need this kind of nationalism if they are to hold together.
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Yascha Mounk celebrates the growing diversity enjoyed by many Western nations. But he argues they also need the centripetal force of “cultural patriotism,” to balance the centrifugal forces that this diversity ignites.
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Finally, democracies need this kind of nationalism to regenerate the nation. Liberal nationalists are not stuck with a single archaic national narrative. They are perpetually going back, reinterpreting the past, modernizing the story and reinventing the community.
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Over the past decades this kind of ardent nationalism has often been regarded as passé within the circles of the educated elites
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The first problem with this posture is that it opened up a cultural divide between the educated class and the millions of Americans for whom patriotism is a central part of their identity
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Liberal nationalism believes in what liberals believe, but it also believes that nations are moral communities and the borders that define them need to be secure
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It believes that it’s sometimes OK to put Americans first — to adopt policies that give American workers an edge over workers elsewhere. It believes it’s important to celebrate diversity, but a country that doesn’t construct a shared moral culture will probably rip itself to shreds.
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It shows what a renewed American liberal nationalism could do, if only the center and left could get over their squeamishness about patriotic ardor and would embrace and reinvent our national tradition.
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“Self-centered individualism must therefore be replaced with a more collectivist spirit that nationalism knows how to kindle.”
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shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23
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Opinion | The Unsettling Truth About Trump's First Great Victory - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...cial-resentment-2016-2020.html
trump appeal support demographics racism resentment GOP trumpism
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The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level
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We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups
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respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views
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the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.
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The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population,
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Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.
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The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.
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Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.
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the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:
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election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete
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understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.
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The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?”
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Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racist voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”
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Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.
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“It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”
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Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors
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The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.
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Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means
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It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale.
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Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.
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It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group
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the important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.
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The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believe
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that Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate
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Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win
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and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).
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it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation
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One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.
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the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining
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racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time
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Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower
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While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment
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Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment
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In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior.
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that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment
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there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.
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my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.
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Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.
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In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge
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Even If He Loses, Donald Trump's Supporters Aren't Going Away - The Atlantic - 0 views
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This is what Trump has done over the last year: He’s whipped up the darkest, angriest demons in the electorate. He has not simply given people permission to indulge any racist, sexist, xenophobic, or religiously intolerant tendencies they may harbor. He has insisted—loudly—that such bigotry is only common sense and mocked anyone who refuses to see the danger presented by “the other” as a blind idiot. Those not sharing Trump’s grim vision are, by definition, suckers being taken for a ride.
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If anything, Trumpism has, in part, made the rest of the nation all the more eager to ignore the millions of white voters living on the edges of the economy. Many may now be written off without guilt, because they have shown themselves to be not just unfortunates but undesirables—irredeemable hate-mongers itching to reassert their cultural dominance.
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No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, this is a tragic outcome. It leaves Americans that much more segregated and alienated from one another. It’s exactly this kind of cross-cultural suspicion and mistrust that has enabled Trump to come within spitting distance of the presidency.
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shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 16
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The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Don't assume western democracy will last for ever... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...racy-liberal-order-ussr-russia
democracy globalization human rights crisis politics culture west
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Since Trump’s victory in November 2016, it has become possible to believe a similar collapse will happen in the west, to globalisation and liberal values.
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The parallels are obvious. We too have lived for 30 years under an economic system that proclaimed its own permanence. Globalisation was an unstoppable natural process; free-market economics simply the natural state of things.
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But when the country that designed globalisation, imposed it and benefited from it most votes against it, you have to consider the possibility that it is going to end, and suddenly
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you also have to consider a possibility that – if you are a liberal, humanist democrat – may be even more shocking: that oligarchic nationalism is the default form of failing economies.
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In economics, political science and the study of international relations there has been, for about three decades, a general assumption that the current framework is permanent. Just as in Soviet academia, if globalisation turns out to have been just a temporary and reversible thing, textbooks once revered will have to lie abandoned.
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there’s one big difference. The dissidents of the late Soviet era fought for democracy and human rights under the general concept of “the west”. For us, if xenophobic populism triumphs, there will be no “west” to aspire to: if liberal, democratic societies begin to go the way of Orbán’s Hungary, there will be no external power to help us.
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Our last great hope will be ourselves. And there are enough of us to stop this second great collapse towards oligarchy and nationalism.
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Germany's AfD Party and Its Anti-Islam Platform - The Atlantic - 0 views
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After racking up historic gains in regional elections in March, the party this month adopted a new manifesto insisting that “Islam is not part of Germany.”
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A meeting between the AfD and Muslim leaders broke down this week after the president of the Central Council of Muslims refused to retract previous comments comparing the AfD to Nazis.
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It called for empowering national governments to ditch the euro, limiting state bailouts, and mandating national referenda for certain EU policies, alongside scintillating stipulations about European Central Bank maneuvers and alternative funding for renewable-energy subsidies.
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Last month’s manifesto not only declared Islam incompatible with German legal and cultural values, but also endorsed a ban on burqas and the call to prayer.
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First, despite having a woman at the helm in the figure of Frauke Petry (as well as trigger-happy aristocrat Beatrix von Storch, who has advocated using deadly force against illegal migrants at the border, as deputy party chief), AfD supporters are predominantly male.
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As the German daily Die Zeit pointed out, that means AfD support follows roughly the same pattern as support for the intensely anti-Islamic pan-European movement PEGIDA (“Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West”).
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Theories abound as to why and to what extent men are more likely to vote for far-right or xenophobic platforms than women—a pattern that holds with Trump supporters in the United States, as well as voters for Austria’s far-right presidential candidate Norbert Hofer, who just barely lost that country’s election this week.
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A second trend in AfD demographics involves class. Originally, professors, journalists, and business leaders dominated the party, with over half the founding members in 2013 sporting a “Dr.” in front of their names.
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Third comes age. “[AfD supporters] are youngish to middle-aged,” said Arzheimer. “Interestingly, voters over 60 seem to shy from voting for the AfD because they're still tied to the Christian Democrats,” Merkel’s center-right party.
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When Bernd Lucke founded the AfD, he intended to win voters both from the Christian Democrats and Germany’s liberal party, the Free Democratic Party (FDP).
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Crucially, Arzheimer pointed out, the AfD manages to attract NPD voters while also remaining “acceptable for a much larger group of the German population.”
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Part of AfD’s strength so far has been its ability to capitalize on intense concerns about the economy and immigration with increasingly inflammatory rhetoric while maintaining a sheen of respectability—crucial in German politics, where incitement to ethnic or racial hatred is a criminal offense.
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The AfD’s fragility may be what sets it apart both from right-wing parties further east and the newly nativist turn in the United States.
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Art made a similar point, but turned westward. “There’s been a major containment of this far-right nativism in Germany … but it’s the United States in which it’s become in fact a part of the political system.”
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There’s a term in German, he mused: ausgegrenzt, translating roughly to “excluded” or “marginalized,” but with a literal translation closer to “beyond limits” or “out of bounds.” Those who wanted the NPD banned wanted it “ausgegrenzt.”
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'Trump Emergency': World leaders wary of dumping on the Donald - 0 views
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WASHINGTON — Foreign leaders who harshly criticized Donald Trump's world views earlier this year have clammed up now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — and someone they may have to deal with if he winds up in the White House
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They realize they need to protect their relationship with the world’s most powerful nation by no longer airing their grievances as publicly as before.
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President Obama underscored their concerns — expressed privately — when he said Thursday that the leaders at the Group of Seven summit in Japan are “rattled” by the prospect of a Trump presidency.
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Many leaders, who criticized Trump from December through March, are concerned about Trump’s disdain for free trade agreements negotiated by Obama and past administrations, and his pledge to renegotiate defense agreements to make allies in East Asia and Europe “pay their fair share.”
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Asked how he would deal with a President Trump, who rejects the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, Trudeau said trade is key to the shared goals of growth and prosperity. "The level of integration between the Canadian and American economies is unlike anything else ... in the world,"
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Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, a former ambassador to Washington, reflected much of the world’s puzzlement with Trump’s success so far on May 5 during a dinner for the Washington Institute on Near East Policy. But unlike other Saudi leaders earlier in the campaign, he only offered friendly support to his American friends.
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Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said on May 22 he stands by his criticism in December that Trump's proposed Muslim ban was "divisive, stupid and wrong”, and went a step further, saying Trump's ideas are also “dangerous."
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Mexican Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu said on May 13 that Mexico would fight Trump’s “xenophobic, or racist, or uninformed positions with information, not adjectives,”
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Ian Brzezinski, a NATO analyst at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, D.C., said European leaders and diplomats have told him of their worries about Trump’s isolationism, aversion to free trade, disregard for human rights, and “his fire-and-forget approach to military force.”
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Brzezinski agreed, saying leaders are hearing from their embassies in the U.S. that Trump could be the next president. “So why blast away at somebody that could be your next partner, someone who could be the next leader of the free world,” he said.
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Crackpot Party Crackup - The New York Times - 0 views
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Long ago and far away, in the days when white men in power ties and women in funny hats gathered in air-conditioned caverns to hammer out the Republican Party platform, it was a predictable affair. The G.O.P. was for less taxes and less government, free trade and free people, a scolding of victims and grievance-mongers, and a vision of social norms circa 1952.
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As time went on, they let the cranks and the racists in, the fact-deniers and the extreme gun nuts, the xenophobes and the nature-haters, because the big tent could take in all that extra gas without overheating. They would tolerate those people, who you picture looking like that dude who sucker-punched a protester at a Trump rally, because they needed them.
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imagine the Republican Party gathering for its convention in Cleveland and hammering out a vanity platform in Donald Trump’s image. It’s all walls and no bridges. Free trade is gone. Taxes? Who knows. There will be a call for more government, through a bloated military, and untouched benefits for seniors who must be pandered to. Most significantly, it’s a party of grudges and grievances, of anger and fear by that formerly detested class — victims.
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It’ll be a personality cult, without a hint of optimism, and certainly no overarching governing philosophy
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In temperament and judgment, this is now Trump’s party. And take him at his word: His supporters will riot, as he predicted this week, if he doesn’t get his way.
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There is no getting around how much Trump’s followers now echo his darkest sentiments. In Tuesday’s exit polls, huge majorities of Trump supporters backed his call to ban Muslims from entering the country, and for rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants.
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This month, members of the Republican national security community issued a strongly worded missive against Trump. They said his trade policies would be a “recipe for economic disaster,” that his embrace of torture was “inexcusable,” that his anti-Muslim campaign would badly damage American interests abroad, and on and on and on.
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Where were these people six months ago? Laughing at the orange-haired clown with the rest us. But if this who’s who of Republican foreign policy cardinals is serious about their words, they have no choice but to leave the party this summer. Either that or accept the man who said he got foreign policy advice “speaking with myself.” For him, a glance in the mirror is enough. “I have a very good brain,” Trump said.
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I Was a Muslim in the Trump White House-and I Lasted Eight Days - The Atlantic - 0 views
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In 2011, I was hired, straight out of college, to work at the White House and eventually the National Security Council. My job there was to promote and protect the best of what my country stands for. I am a hijab-wearing Muslim woman––I was the only hijabi in the West Wing––and the Obama administration always made me feel welcome and included.
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Throughout 2015 and 2016, I watched with disbelief, apprehension, and anxiety, as Trump’s style of campaigning instigated fear and emboldened xenophobes, anti-Semites, and Islamophobes. While cognizant of the possibility of Trump winning, I hoped a majority of the electorate would never condone such a hateful and divisive worldview.
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American history is not without stumbles, which have proven that the nation is only made more prosperous and resilient through struggle, compassion and inclusiveness. It’s why my parents came here. It’s why I told my former 5th grade students, who wondered if they still belonged here, that this country would not be great without them.
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U.S. detains and nearly deports French Holocaust historian - The Washington Post - 2 views
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PARIS — Henry Rousso is one of France’s most preeminent scholars and public intellectuals. Last week, as the historian attempted to enter the United States to attend an academic symposium, he was detained for more than 10 hours — for no clear reason.
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On Wednesday, Rousso arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport after an 11-hour flight from Paris, en route to Texas A&M University in College Station. There, he was to speak Friday afternoon at the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study.
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But things did not go according to plan: Rousso — an Egyptian-born French citizen — was “mistakenly detained” by U.S. immigration authorities, according to Richard Golsan, director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M.
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“When he called me with this news two nights ago, he was waiting for customs officials to send him back to Paris as an illegal alien on the first flight out,” Golsan said Friday at the symposium, according to the Eagle, a newspaper that covers the College Station area.
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The university then sprang into action, the Eagle reported, with President Michael Young reaching out to law professor Fatma Marouf,
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He confirmed his experience Saturday on Twitter: “I have been detained 10 hours at Houston Itl Airport about to be deported. The officer who arrested me was ‘inexperienced.’”
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Egypt — from which Rousso and his family were exiled in 1956, after a slew of anti-Semitic measures imposed by the administration of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz — was not among the seven nations in the travel ban, which had been suspended by the time he arrived in the United States.
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France is a beneficiary of the U.S. visa waiver program, which permits French citizens to enter the United States without a visa. All that is required is an online ESTA application before departure.
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“It seems like there’s much more rigidity and rigor in enforcing these immigration requirements and technicalities of every visa,” she told the Eagle.
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“Thank you so much for your reactions,” Rousso posted Saturday evening on Twitter in response. “My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn't be defended as I was.”
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“It is now necessary to deal with the utmost arbitrariness and incompetence on the other side of the Atlantic,” Rousso wrote Sunday in the French edition of the Huffington Post. “What I know, in loving this country forever, is that the United States is no longer quite the United States.”
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5 reasons the West should care about the protests in Ukraine - Salon.com - 0 views
www.salon.com/...he_protests_in_ukraine_partner
ukraine history politics policy crisis government issues economic culture west protests reasons
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Seeing how Western governments placed Ukraine’s simmering crisis on the back burner for months, it’s hard not to recall British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 quote about events in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia: “A quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
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1. Civil warUkraine is a country the size of France. Its population is double that of Syria, and more than 10 times the size of Bosnia’s.
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The impact on Ukraine’s 45 million people would be tragic. Historic cities like Kyiv, Lviv or Odessa could be left facing the destruction inflicted on Aleppo or Sarajevo. The European Union would have to cope with an unprecedented refugee crisis that would risk undermining traditional democratic parties as far-right groups exploit discontent over such an influx from the east.
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As casualties mount among civilians and pro-Western forces, pressure would grow for international intervention, perhaps along the lines of NATO’s airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo
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Crimea — a largely Russian-speaking Black Sea region, where the Russian navy maintains a major base — could be a flashpoint.Russian officials have said Moscow would be prepared to fight to regain it if Ukraine shifts westward. Moscow has history here. It has supported breakaway movements to undermine other westward-leading former Soviet nations like Georgia and Moldova.
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If President Viktor Yanukovych’s ongoing crackdown succeeds in crushing the demonstrators, Ukrainians can expect their country to be sucked back into the Russian orbit. The hoped-for “association agreement” with the European Union setting the country’s limping economy on a Western path would be buried.
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The EU’s “eastern partnership” plan to build an arc of Western-style democracies along its borders would be left in tatters. In its place would be a new, Cold War-style division of the continent.
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3. PartitionA glance at results from the 2010 presidential election that brought Yanukovych to power will show the extent of Ukraine’s divisions. The north and west voted solidly for pro-Western candidate Yulia Tymoshenko, who is now in jail, the south and east supported Yanukovych.
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4. RadicalizationUkraine’s protesters are not all brave democrats fighting for freedom. Among them are hardline nationalists with xenophobic and anti-semitic leanings.
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5. Ukraine resurgentThis week’s violence has seriously damaged hopes that Ukraine can emerge peacefully from the crisis as a democracy that maintains good relations with both Russia and the West.
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Yet there remains some hope of a solution — if Putin, Yanukovych and the opposition see that the dangers of confrontation outweigh those of compromise; if Russia and the West agree to jointly help rebuild Ukraine’s weakened economy; and if they allow the country to choose its own path which could enable continued economic ties with both.Should that happen, a stable and prosperous Ukraine could still become an important partner for Europe and the United States and a bridge between east and west.
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Germany's Age of Anxiety - By Roger Boyes | Foreign Policy - 0 views
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The first- and second-generation Turks may have been content to save enough money for a house in eastern Anatolia where they could spend their old age. But the third generation of Turks, who came of age in 1980s and 1990s and only knew Germany as a home, began demanding more from the state. When all they seemed to receive in return were welfare payments, discontent rose both among immigrants and among German citizens. Germans resented what they saw as a permanent dependent class; Turks pointed to systemic discrimination and cultural exclusion.
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A 2005 law accepted that immigrants were not always short-term residents, but put most of the onus of integration on the incoming foreigner rather than on German institutions. Deportation rules were tightened, and the children of foreign parents who had been working legally in Germany were encouraged for the first time to apply for German citizenship.
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maverick former central banker named Thilo Sarrazin. His new book, Germany Is Abolishing Itself, argues that the strong Turkish and Arab birth rates will lead to the dumbing down of Germany. His message has struck a chord among a middle class fearful of declining educational standards and among unskilled workers who are nervous about lower-paid immigrant competition. The political class had mostly shied away from addressing these concerns; the subject has been a taboo in Germany's largely conformist media. Since the World War II, xenophobic rhetoric has been barred, both by law and custom. Yet on the German street, resentment about foreigners smoldered,
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his public readings are crammed with fans. I attended one the other day and was shocked to see how a teenage schoolgirl was shouted down and hustled out of the room by security guards for mildly questioning the Sarrazin thesis.
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a party that would be critical of Islamic expansion in Europe and that seeks to control immigration -- could win 15 percent of the vote, thus seriously shaking up the German political system
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"The crimes of the Nazi era," he told the cheering crowd, "are not an excuse for you to refuse to fight for your own identity. Your only responsibility is to avoid the mistakes of the past." The cardinal error of the interwar years, according to Wilders, was the failure to identify gathering threats against democracy. In his analogy, it was the Muslims who were the Nazis. The audience rose to its feet to applaud him. It was the first time in decades of reporting from Germany that I witnessed a passionate response to a passionately delivered political speech.
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Merkel does not want to grasp the nettle of anti-immigrant populism -- one senses it stings her as much as it does the Muslims she finds herself unloading against. But if she doesn't, if she simply bides her time, she will see her Christian Democratic party crumble. Germans are restless, and they increasingly believe their political class is tone-deaf. Popular resentment is running high, and there is a powerful head of steam behind the emerging anti-Islam movement
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"Conservatism Is True." - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views
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the core argument for conservatism was indeed that it was truer to humankind's crooked timber; that it was more closely tethered to earth rather than heaven; that it accepted the nature of fallen man and did not try to permanently correct it, but to mitigate our worst instincts and encourage the best, with as light a touch as possible. Religion was for bishops, not presidents. Utopias were for liberals; progress was not inevitable; history did not lead in one obvious direction; we are all limited by epistemological failure and cultural bias.
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So on taxes today, a conservative would ask: what have we learned about the impact of lower rates over the last two decades - now the lowest as a percentage of GDP since the 1950s? In healthcare, what have we learned about the largely private system the GOP wants to preserve? A conservative would look at home and abroad for empirical answers, acknowledging no ultimate solution but the need for constant reform because society is always changing. On gay rights, a classic social change, he'd ask what a society should do in integrating the emergence of so many openly gay people, couples and families. On foreign policy, he'd move on a case by case basis, not by way of a "doctrine."
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On these terms, today's GOP could not be less conservative. I'd insist it's less conservative than Obama. It does not present reality-based reform for emergent problems. It simply reiterates dogma and ruthlessly polices dissent or debate.
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Now it's Levin-land: either total freedom or complete slavery and a rhetorical war based entirely on that binary ideological spectrum. In other words, ideological performance art: brain-dead, unaware of history, uninterested in policy detail, bored by empiricism, motivated primarily by sophistry, Manicheanism, and factional hatred.
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Back in the 1980s, conservatism was a thrilling empirical, reality-based challenge to overweening government power and omniscient liberal utopianism. Today, alas, it has become a victim of its own success, reliving past glories rather than tackling current problems. It is part secular dogma - no taxes, no debt, more war - and part religious dogma - no Muslims need apply; amend the federal constitution to keep gays in their place; no abortions even for rape and incest; more settlements on the West Bank to prepare for the End-Times.
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today's unconservative "conservatism" is a movement held together by cultural resentment and xenophobic panic.