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Javier E

Trump meets his real enemy - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html

trump crisis corruption

shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Trump will continue to bask in the faithful’s chants of “Lock her up,” as he did at a West Virginia rally Tuesday night, but Hillary Clinton is no longer his adversary. His enemies now are the facts and the truth. They cannot be jailed and have no personal shortcomings to exploit. Trump and his defenders are reduced to arguing that truth doesn’t exist.
  • Trump’s speech was a catalogue of antipathies and a gauge of his fight-back plan: He will make his survival synonymous with the aspirations of voters who despise liberals, fear cultural change and see Trump as their last-ditch defender in a hostile world.
  • “The Democrat Party is held hostage by the so-called resistance: left-wing haters and angry mobs,” he declared. “They’re trying to tear down our institutions, disrespect our flag, demean our law enforcement, denigrate our history and disparage our great country — and we’re not going to let it happen.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Through the sheer force of his malevolence, Trump hopes to bait his foes into engaging on matters far more favorable to him
  • Trump’s effort took a major hit with the success of Mueller’s team in convicting Manafort. But Cohen’s plea inflicted damage of a higher order because it tied Trump to a crime. This was not a bank shot. It was a direct hit.
  • Democratic candidates are coming to see an attack on corruption as the theme that will unite their party, appeal to less partisan voters — including at least some in Trump’s 2016 “drain the swamp” constituency — and highlight the broad range of misdeeds by the president, his advisers and his administration.
Javier E

The Confederacy's 'Living Monuments' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ederacys-living-monuments.html

confederacy white supremacy history US culture racism

shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • by World War I they were an army of 100,000 women, engaged in the fight to preserve and perpetuate the myths that the Confederate cause was a just and honorable one and that states’ rights, not slavery, was its call to arms. (Of course, a state’s right to maintain the institution of slavery was generally not part of that narrative.)
  • The Daughters’ ambitious agenda was not solely focused on monuments. They sought to collect and preserve the artifacts of war, as well as archival material, which they believed would help tell a “truthful” history of the Confederacy. Indeed, what they collected often formed the basis of the first state archives and museums of history in the South.
  • The Daughters’ primary objective, however, was to instill in Southern white youth a reverence for Confederate principles. Indeed, they regarded their efforts to educate children as their most important work as they sought, in their words, to build “living monuments” who would grow up to defend states’ rights and white supremacy.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Members of the U.D.C. developed a multipronged approach to educating white children about the “truth” of the “War Between the States.” They developed lesson plans for teachers, a number of whom were members of the organization. They placed pro-Confederate books in school and public libraries, which they insisted students use when they competed in U.D.C.-sponsored essay contests. They led students in the celebration of Robert E. Lee’s life on his birthday and placed portraits of Confederate heroes, festooned with the battle flag, in classrooms across the South and even in some schools outside of the region. They also formed Children of the Confederacy chapters for boys and girls ages 6 to 16, intended to serve as a pipeline for membership
  • The children’s organization is also where the Daughters taught the Confederate catechism, generally written by one of their members. Cornelia Branch Stone, of Galveston, Tex., wrote one of the earliest in 1905. The catechism, a call and response to a series of questions, was drilled into children at their meetings. “What causes led to the War Between the States, between 1861 and 1865?” was a typical question. “The disregard, on the part of the states of the North, for the rights of the Southern or slaveholding states” was the answer. “What were these rights?” The answer, according to Stone’s catechism, was “the right to regulate their own affairs and to hold slaves as property.” There were also questions and answers that led children to believe that slavery was a benevolent institution in which cruel masters were rare.
  • Those “citizens of tomorrow,” who drank from the cup of history brewed by the U.D.C. for generations, became the “living monuments” that Southern white women sought to build. In the 1950s and ’60s, they were segregationists who hoisted the Confederate battle flag with talk of defending states’ rights and who denounced federal intervention into their affairs. They were members of the White Citizens’ Councils who spoke of “states’ rights and racial integrity.”
Javier E

The sorry state of Murdoch media - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...e-sorry-state-of-murdoch-media

murdoch media wsj partisan Culture publishing conservatism

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The Wall Street Journal editorial page is a different matter, however. The move from grudging defense of a Trump presidency to full-blown, Fox-like rationalization has been ongoing since Trump won the nomination.
  • The Journal editorial page was long thought to be the crown jewel of fiscal conservatism — a staunch defender of open markets, legal immigration and economic freedom. Internationally, it was anti-communist and supportive of U.S. leadership in the world.
  • Jay Rosen of New York University tells me via email, “From my perspective the Oct. 25 editorial was an important event because it combines so effectively with this development, in which the Journal reporters were told to stand out by their greater willingness to give Trump the benefit of the doubt — greater, that is, than the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Politico, Bloomberg and others in their peer group.” He continues, “The implicit appeal is not to impersonal and timeless standards of veracity but to an ideological position that, according to the newsroom editors, the others guys have taken while the Journal does not.” He argues, “This is an attempt to give intellectual respectability within the news tribe to ‘the enemy of the people’ attacks. The editors were saying to their reporters: Okay, maybe not enemies of the people, but they’re acting like enemies of Trump! We don’t do that.”
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  • “The news staff and the editorial pages do operate more independently than people assume, but it’s the combined effect we should look at,” Rosen says. “The news side gives him the benefit of doubt, the editorial pages endorse an extreme position in which Mueller cannot fairly investigate. The signal to what used to be called establishment Republicans is: There are no institutionalists among us any longer; it’s tribalism all the way down.”
  • The perceived shift in the Journal’s editorial board, not unlike the further decline into journalistic insanity at Fox, is symptomatic of the intellectual rot that has eaten away at the right, and at the Republican Party specifically. On the right, years of bashing liberal media turned from criticism to paranoia and a sense of victimhood. The Clinton bogeyman became so exaggerated that anything Trump did became “not as bad as Hillary.” The rise of a worldwide populist movement suffused with nativism left conventional Republican outlets and politicians racing to catch up to the mob, running to defend Trump and his movement, whatever the cost and whatever intellectual gymnastics were necessary.
  • Bill Kristol observes, “As political movements go, American conservatism has been relatively principled and idea-driven. That’s served America well. But the survival of such a conservatism — one that would resist authoritarianism, nativism and demagoguery — is now very much in question.”
Javier E

Opinion | Morality and Michael Cohen - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...michael-cohen-testimony.html

morality cynicism trump

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Imagine what your own life would be like if you had no love in it, if you were just using people and being used. Trump, personifying the worst elements in our culture, is like a providentially sent gong meant to wake us up and direct us toward a better path.
  • his kind of life has an allure for other lonely people who also live under the illusion that you can win love and respect with bling and buzz. Michael Cohen was one of these people. He testified that in serving Donald Trump he felt he was serving a cause larger than self. Those causes were celebrity and wealth.
  • Getting arrested seems to have been a good education for Cohen. He now realizes that Trump will not provide him with the sustenance he needs
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  • I believe that Cohen basically told the truth in his testimony on Wednesday, but I don’t believe that he is a changed man.
  • He’s just switched teams and concluded that the Democrats can now give him what he wants, so he says what appeals to them. That may be progress, but it is not moral renewal.
  • Normal people have moral sentiments. Normal people are repulsed when the president of their own nation lies, cheats, practices bigotry, allegedly pays off porn star mistresses.
  • Were Republican House members enthusiastic or morose as they decided to turn off their own moral circuits, when they decided to be monumentally unconcerned by the fact that their leader may be a moral cretin?
  • Do they think that having anesthetized their moral sense in this case they will simply turn it on again down the road? Having turned off their soul at work, do they think they will be able to turn it on again when they go home to the spouse and kids?
  • This is how moral corrosion happens. Supporting Trump requires daily acts of moral distancing, a process that means that after a few months you are tolerant of any corruption. You are morally numb to everything
  • I’ve heard the rationalizations. This is gang warfare. We have to do everything we can to defend our team. The other team leaves us no choice. Those are the sorts of things people say to give themselves permission to yield to their venal ambitions.
  • Those are the sorts of things rookies and amateurs say.
  • Professionals know that effectiveness in any realm, especially politics, depends on having some guiding and consistent integrity that people can trust
  • In “East of Eden,” John Steinbeck writes: “Humans are caught — in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too — in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last. …
  • A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard clean questions: was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill.”
  • That is the passage that confronts us as we decide to defend or condemn Trump. The moral drama is the central drama. Did you, at your crucial moment, side with generosity or greed?
Javier E

Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583258

white supremacy history culture racism nazi eugenics genocide

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.
  • History, though, tells a different story.
  • King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.
  • What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.
  • Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.
  • Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him
  • Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide
  • The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
  • When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.
  • In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”
  • In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”
  • Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.
  • In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
  • it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers
  • The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.
  • In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:
  • The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.
  • Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that
  • Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”
  • President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.
  • Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.
  • On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.
  • A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
  • In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants
  • When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.
  • Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
  • In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
  • Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”
  • t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”
  • Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”
  • What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,
  • “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”
  • Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.
  • Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.
  • He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe
  • it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.
  • The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.
  • two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
  • Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.
  • the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.
  • The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it
  • historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name
  • Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.
  • The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.
  • That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.
  • The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
  • The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.
Javier E

Opinion | Dissecting the Dreams of Brexit Britain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...exit-leave-remain-britain.html

UK brexit Thatcher empire

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • he referendum didn’t create division. It exposed something that was already there, latent. This was hard to see if you attended to people’s conventional political views about taxation or public spending; even the issue of immigration, by itself, wasn’t “it.” Nor was it to be found in something as vague as “feelings” or “emotions.” It lay elsewhere, in the realm of the individual political psyche, that blending of personal, family and nonacademic history, casually informed reasoning, clan prejudice, tribal loyalty and ancestor worship that forms the imaginative framework in which, as we represent it to ourselves, our lives relate to events in the wider world.
  • What may seem, rationally, to be dead, gone and replaced (or to have never existed) is actually still there, immanent, or hidden, or stolen. An empire. An all-white Britain. A socialist Britain. A country that stood alone against the Nazi menace. One’s young self. A word for this is “dreaming.”
  • the hard-core Brexiteer minority as most in tune with the Leaver dreaming: that state of mind where it’s natural to talk about the Britons who endured the Nazi siege of the early 1940s as “we,” as if the present and the past, the dead and the living, were one and the same, bound to re-enact the slaying of a European dragon every few generations.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • I spoke mainly to Leavers, since they were the disrupters. I heard many true stories and many strong opinions, but as the years went by I began to attend more and more to the hints of dreaming between the lines, in what was not said as well as what was said. I noticed three things.
  • One was a strong sense of oppression, of being censored, and an attendant resentment. There were several occasions when Leavers I spoke to left pregnant gaps that could only have been filled with anti-immigrant sentiments that they weren’t “allowed” to say.
  • for many, casual racism is regarded as a lost patrimony; that as much as Leavers might oppose immigration, they are no less resentful of the “elites” rendering it awkward to categorize people along racial lines
  • I used to be skeptical of the idea that Britain hadn’t come to terms with the loss of its empire.
  • for the freedom to roam the North Sea without engaging with other littoral countries
  • Australian universities instead.
  • The third thing was the preoccupation with the state as defender of its people.
  • that it was the British government’s job to defend native Britons against immigrants; foreign competition; greedy capitalists; and, through the National Health Service, illness.
  • Another thing I noticed was the internationalism of Leavers — internationalism with a particular flavor: the nostalgia for Ian Smith’s Rhodesi
  • not a single one of the many Leavers I’ve had hours of conversations with over the years has explicitly expressed wanting it back. How could you? It would be ridiculous.
  • I believe now that a subliminal empire does persist in the dreaming of a large number of Britons, hinted at in a longing for the return of guilt-free racial categorization, in the idea that my country can be both globally open and privileged in an international trading system where it can somehow turn the rules to its advantage, in the idea of a safe white core protected from the dark hordes beyond by a mighty armed force
  • the matchless political skills of Margaret Thatcher. She achieved the extraordinary feat of turning into political orthodoxy a plainly contradictory credo, that nationalism and borderless capitalism could easily coexist.
  • The reality of the new Britain has been a shrunken welfare state, a country ruthlessly exposed to global free-market competition. The blindness of Thatcherism’s supporters has been to accept it as the patriotic solution to the globalism it enabled.
  • The bizarre and already disproved notion that the global free market might work as an avatar of Britain’s imperial power lies at the heart of the die-hard Brexit psyche. Propagating it was Mrs. Thatcher’s personal success, and that success, as we can now see, was her great failure.
Javier E

McCabe, Amazon and Defending the Republic from Donald Trump - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...the-republic-from-donald-trump

law rule of law democracy republic trump danger politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • the bigger point is that it’s not really about McCabe or Amazon. Having a sitting President launching scathing personal attacks on a federal law enforcement officer and demanding his firing or imprisonment for personal and political motives is wildly outside the norms that govern the American system. Similarly, a President who routinely threatens prosecutorial or regulatory vengeance against private companies because they are not sufficiently politically subservient to him personally is entirely outside of our system of governance.
  • At present, Donald Trump is an autocrat without an autocracy. The system mostly resists his demands because it’s not designed to operate that way and we have centuries worth of norms that are remarkably resilient. But systems change. And it’s clear that ours is already starting to change under his malign influence.
  • Preserving a rule of law political system from sliding into one that is corrupt and autocratic is much more important than the specifics of whether any one company is monopolistic or nefarious or the individual rights and wrongs of what some high level executive at the FBI may or may not have done
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The rule of law is the path to the solution to every other ill in our society. Not a sufficient one but a necessary one in every case.
  • So jumping into the breach to visibly back up the targets of his arbitrary actions isn’t some blinkered liberalism that loses the forest for the trees in its rage and opposition to Donald Trump. It’s really the only way to oppose him. Because his attack on the rule of law and democracy itself is the heart of the danger he poses for all of us.
Javier E

Europe 'coming apart before our eyes', say 30 top intellectuals | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-eyes-say-30-top-intellectuals

europe populism freedom

shared by Javier E on 25 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • “Abandoned from across the Channel and from across the Atlantic by the two great allies who in the previous century saved it twice from suicide; vulnerable to the increasingly overt manipulations of the master of the Kremlin, Europe as an idea, as will and representation, is coming apart before our eyes,” the text reads.
  • Rushdie told the Guardian: “Europe is in greater danger now than at any time in the last 70 years, and if one believes in that idea it’s time to stand up and be counted.
  • “The historical success of Europe made it easier to defend these ideas and values which are crucial to humanity all over the world,” he said. “There is no Europe besides these values except the Europe of tourism and business. Europe is not a geography first but these ideas. This idea of Europe is under attack.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Pamuk said the idea of Europe was also important to non-western countries. “Without the idea of Europe, freedom, women’s rights, democracy, egalitarianism is hard to defend in my part of the world.
  • The net result is likely to be a far more complex parliamentary make-up, delicate coalition-building, and a European parliament increasingly unable to pass legislation to deal with major challenges, such as immigration and eurozone reform.
  • the manifesto’s signatories said they “refuse to resign themselves to this looming catastrophe”. They counted themselves among the “too quiet” European patriots who understand that “three-quarters of a century after the defeat of fascism and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, a new battle for civilisation is under way”.
  • Despite its “mistakes, lapses, and occasional acts of cowardice”, Europe remains “the second home of every free man and woman on the planet”, they say, noting with regret the widely held but mistaken belief of their generation that “the continent would come together on its own, without our labour”.
  • Pro-Europeans “no longer have a choice”, they say. “We must sound the alarm against the arsonists of soul and spirit that, from Paris to Rome, with stops in Barcelona, Budapest, Dresden, Vienna, or Warsaw, are playing with the fire of our freedoms.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Hard Road to Conservative Reform - The New York Times - 0 views

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

conservative conservatism gop reform economy history trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • And while Trump was winning, a certain amount of evidence emerged to confirm his darker view of the American situation — the surging opioid epidemic
  • “deaths of despair” among lower-income white Americans, growing evidence that the opening to China had worked out far better for Beijing’
  • All of this has left conservative policy wonks, the erstwhile reformocons and others, with a dilemma. Should they defend the post-Reagan economic order against Trump’s blustering, blundering assault — defend the benefits of “neoliberalism” and free trade and global openness, warn against the sclerosis that protectionism and industrial policy often bring, champion the innovative culture of Silicon Valley against its populist despisers? Or should they take Trump’s success as evidence that even reform conservatism was ultimately too sanguine and too moderate, and that there are deeper problems in the economic order that require a more-than-moderate conservative response?
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  • the vigorous intra-conservative debate over a new book, “The Once and Future Worker,” written by the former Mitt Romney domestic policy director Oren Cass. In certain ways the book is an extension of the reform-conservative project, an argument for policies that support “a foundation of productive work” as the basis for healthy communities and flourishing families and robust civic life. But Cass is more dramatic in his criticism of Western policymaking since the 1970s, more skeptical of globalization’s benefits to Western workers, and more dire in his diagnosis of the real socioeconomic condition of the working class.
  • Cass’s bracing tone reads like (among other things) an attempt to fix reform conservatism’s political problem, as it manifested itself in 2016 — a problem of lukewarmness
  • The critics’ concerns vary, but a common thread is that Cass’s diagnosis overstates the struggles of American workers and exaggerates the downsides of globalization, and in so doing risks giving aid and comfort to populist policies — or, for that matter, socialist policies, from the Ocasio-Cortezan left — that would ultimately choke off growth.
  • In a sense the debate reproduces the larger argument about whether a post-Trump conservative politics should seek to learn something from his ascent or simply aim to repudiate him — with Cass offering a reform conservatism that effectively bids against Trump for populist support, and his critics warning that he’s conceding way too much to Trumpist demagogy.
  • Cass’s book also raises a larger question that both right and left are wrestling with in our age of populist discontent: Namely, is the West’s post-1980 economic performance a hard-won achievement and pretty much the best we could have done, or is there another economic path available, populist or social democratic or something else entirely, that doesn’t just lead back to stagnation?
  • If you emphasize the disappointment, then experimenting with a different policy orientation — be it Cass’s work-and-family conservatism or an Ocasio-Cortezan democratic socialism or something else — seems like a risk worth taking; after all things aren’t that great under neoliberalism as it is.
  • if you focus on the possible fragility of the growth we have achieved, the ease with which left-wing and right-wing populisms can lead to Venezuela, then you’ll share the anxieties of Cass’s conservative critic
  • the best reason to bet on Cass’s specific vision is that the social crisis he wants to address it itself a major long-term drag on growth — because a society whose working class doesn’t work or marry or bear children will age, even faster than the West is presently aging, into stagnation and decline.
  • it might well be, as some of his critics think, that the working class’s social crisis is mostly or all cultural, a form of late-modern anomie detached from material privation. In which case political-economy schemes to “fix” the problem won’t have social benefits to match their potential economic costs.
Javier E

My husband was attacked for critiquing Franklin Graham's Pete Buttigieg tweets - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-grahams-pete-buttigieg-tweets

christian hypocrisy trump gop

shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • This reveals more than a partisan double standard. It also reveals the unintended consequences of the church’s crass political expediency of 2016
  • First, the AFA ploy showed that our “deeply held religious beliefs” were not that deeply held. By defending Graham from critique, the AFA “family” organization finds itself defending the reputation of a serially married, self-described sexual assaulter who paid an adult-film star hush money (and lied about it).
  • Second, it caused us to overlook other sins. Although Christians claimed that voting for Trump did not entail endorsing his panoply of bad character traits, that’s exactly what happened. Turns out, people don’t want to support the “lesser of two evils.” Instead, they want to support a winner. Consequently, evangelicals began to rationalize behavior that they would have vociferously condemned in a Democratic president.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Third, it has relieved evangelical leaders of their responsibility to call out their leaders. Instead, they became dazzled by Trump’s power
  • Lastly, it has caused us to call evil good and good evil. Very quietly, the “lesser of two evils” edict morphed from “opposing Hillary Clinton at all costs” into even attacking good people who question the president.
Javier E

Will We Stop Trump Before It's Too Late? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ascism-madeleine-albright.html

trump fascism crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Fascism, it appeared, was dead.To guard against a recurrence, the survivors of war and the Holocaust joined forces to create the United Nations, forge global financial institutions and — through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — strengthen the rule of law.
  • fascism — and the tendencies that lead toward fascism — pose a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II.
  • He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • If freedom is to prevail over the many challenges to it, American leadership is urgently required. This was among the indelible lessons of the 20th century. But by what he has said, done and failed to do, Mr. Trump has steadily diminished America’s positive clout in global councils.
  • Instead of mobilizing international coalitions to take on world problems, he touts the doctrine of “every nation for itself” and has led America into isolated positions on trade, climate change and Middle East peace.
  • Instead of engaging in creative diplomacy, he has insulted United States neighbors and allies, walked away from key international agreements, mocked multilateral organizations and stripped the State Department of its resources and role.
  • Instead of standing up for the values of a free society, Mr. Trump, with his oft-vented scorn for democracy’s building blocks, has strengthened the hands of dictators.
  • At one time or another, Mr. Trump has attacked the judiciary, ridiculed the media, defended torture, condoned police brutality, urged supporters to rough up hecklers and — jokingly or not — equated mere policy disagreements with treason.
  • Warning signs include the relentless grab for more authority by governing parties in Hungary, the Philippines, Poland and Turkey — all United States allies.
  • He routinely vilifies federal law enforcement institutions.
  • He libels immigrants and the countries from which they come.
  • His words are so often at odds with the truth that they can appear ignorant, yet are in fact calculated to exacerbate religious, social and racial divisions.
  • If one were to draft a script chronicling fascism’s resurrection, the abdication of America’s moral leadership would make a credible first scene.
  • Equally alarming is the chance that Mr. Trump will set in motion events that neither he nor anyone else can control.
  • What is to be done? First, defend the truth. A free press, for example, is not the enemy of the American people; it is the protector of the American people.
  • Second, we must reinforce the principle that no one, not even the president, is above the law.
  • Third, we should each do our part to energize the democratic process by registering new voters, listening respectfully to those with whom we disagree, knocking on doors for favored candidates
Javier E

The GOP's Problems Are Bigger Than Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...558305

gop problems trump resentment anti-intellectualism

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • if Trump starts to seem like he’s hurting the GOP’s popularity more than he is helping it, he has no reserve of personal goodwill or substantive support for his ideas on which to fall back
  • Trump’s unpopularity was illustrated most colorfully by an unnamed GOP representative quoted by conservative commentator Erick Erickson. “I say a lot of shit on TV defending him,” the legislator said. “But honestly, I wish the motherfucker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, shits all over Twitter, shits all over us, shits all over his staff, then hits golf balls. Fuck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.” The unnamed congressman even declared of the president he has defended on television, “If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherfucker.”
  • The populist right of 1994 to 2014 might have seemed rudderless, insofar as it appeared to drift from the Contract with America to late 1990s anti-interventionism to panicked anti-jihadism to Iraq War boosterism to the Tea Party to Donald Trump-style white nationalism.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • But all the while, its captains were going full-throttle toward a consistent sort of destination that the populist right cared about more than any policy agenda: culture-war clashes with liberal elites.
  • Those clashes were like whales: Populist entertainers like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Andrew Breitbart could be relied upon to spot the biggest one, take aim, and attempt a ramming maneuver.
  • That isn’t to say that various iterations of right-wing populism were without earnest adherents of substance
  • But anti-leftist ressentiment was always the lodestar of right-wing populism, so much so that successive iterations could be substantively different or even contradictory, yet still be led by the same entertainers and backed by similar coalitions.
  • Who could champion George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump as if there were no contradiction in doing so? Rush Limbaugh, for one. And much of his audience.
  • “Paradoxically, the right’s ideological diversity is often what breeds intellectual conformity,” Douthat wrote in 2010. “It’s precisely because American conservatism represents a motley assortment of political tendencies united primarily by their opposition to liberalism that conservatives are often too quick to put their (legitimate, important and worth-debating) differences aside in the quest to slay the liberal dragon. After all, slaying liberalism is why they got together in the first place!”
  • that brings us to the bad news for the Republican Party: Dumping Trump won’t actually get rid of the pathologies that made his rise to president possible. Republicans will remain vulnerable to takeover by charismatic hucksters without a substantively constructive policy agenda, an ability to successfully govern, or a vision for a coalition that transcends ressentiment
  • And the populist entertainers will keep getting filthy rich in the process.It is they who’ve come closer to taking over the GOP.
knudsenlu

Kanye West on Trump: 'The mob can't make me not love him' - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

kanye trump politics US culture

shared by knudsenlu on 30 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Kanye West remained defiant Wednesday amid mounting backlash from fans over the rapper's positive words about President Donald Trump, tweeting a picture of himself wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat and criticizing former President Barack Obama.
  • Obama was in office for eight years and nothing in Chicago changed
  • he series of tweets comes after fans lamented a report this week from Hot 97 radio host Ebro Darden that West recently told him, "I love Donald Trump," and defended a previous tweet in which the rapper complimented conservative commentator Candace Owens.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • He defended the meeting in a series of now-deleted tweets and wrote,"I wanted to meet with Trump today to discuss multicultural issues ... I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication with our future President if we truly want change.
sarahbalick

Mike Pence edges Tim Kaine in VP debate instant poll - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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

vp debate

shared by sarahbalick on 05 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Mike Pence scored a narrow win over Tim Kaine in the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, according to a CNN/ORC instant poll, with 48% of voters who watched the debate saying Pence did the better job while 42% think Kaine had the best night
  • just 14% said he did worse than they thought he would
  • with 43% saying he did worse than they expected and 38% saying he outperformed their expectations.
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  • And 48% said Kaine had a better understanding of the issues, edging out Pence at 41%. Clinton topped Trump by a better than 2-to-1 margin on that score after their first debate
  • Most debate watchers said Kaine did the better job defending Hillary Clinton, 58%, while just 35% thought Pence better defended Donald Trump.
  • Still, 29% of debate watchers said what they saw Tuesday made them more apt to vote for Trump, compared with 18% who said it made them more likely to back Clinton. Most debate watchers, 53%, said their vote was not swayed by Tuesday's face off. After the first Clinton-Trump debate last week, 34% said it made them more apt to vote Clinton, 18% Trump.
  • Pence was largely seen as the more likeable candidate on the stage, 53% to 37%,
  • Both men are broadly judged qualified to take over the office of president if needed, 77% say Pence is qualified, 70% that Kaine is. Most voters who watched Tuesday night said Kaine's positions on the issues are about right ideologically (57%) while 36% see him as too liberal and 5% too conservative. Assessing Pence's positions, about half, 49%, think he's about right, 46% too conservative and just 3% too liberal.
Javier E

Trump Puts the Purpose of His Presidency Into Words - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550454

trump racism policies tribal white supremacy politics history culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • These remarks reflect scorn not only for those who wish to come here, but those who already have. It is a president of the United States expressing his contempt for the tens of millions of descendants of Africans, most of whose forefathers had no choice in crossing the Atlantic, American citizens whom any president is bound to serve.
  • And it is a public admission of sorts that he is incapable of being a president for all Americans, the logic of his argument elevating not just white immigrants over brown ones, but white citizens over the people of color they share this country with.
  • The racist pseudoscience underpinning Walker’s belief that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were incapable of responsible self-government is out of vogue today, but the both the sentiment and logic are now applied by the descendants of those very same “beaten races” who now work for Trump in the White House, who craft arguments defending his prejudice, and who cast ballots bearing his name.
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  • they are all now a part of Trump’s only sincere ideological project, the preservation of white political and cultural dominance.
  • Trump has adopted policies that would be responsible for the displacement of nearly a million people of color in less than 12 months in office.  
  • The benefit of this history is that we know how the story ended then; with the adoption of racist immigration laws, and the immigrants from the “shithole countries” of the turn of the century defending the country in two world wars. But their children and grandchildren, having assimilated into the very whiteness Walker and his ilk saw as endangered, now repeat the same slander laid upon their ancestors against a new generation of immigrants looking for a better life in America. The old lies are now again embraced by the descendants of those who once suffered because of them.
  • The president was not making an assessment of the relative quality of life in Haiti or Norway, he was condemning entire populations of people of as undesirable because of where they were born. Trump’s remarks do not merely express contempt for foreigners; but also for every American who shares their origins.
  • The president’s focus on the nationality, rather than on the personal merits, of immigrants suggests what he means by “merit-based” immigration: Not accepting those immigrants who have mastered science or engineering or some other crucial skill, but instead a standard that finds white Scandinavians acceptable, while ruling out Haitians, Salvadorans, and Africans. The only “merits” here are accidents of birth and geography, owing to no individual accomplishment at all.
  • Trump’s is not a logic that employs facts, it is one that employs tribe. It is the logic of “us” being better than “them,” with white Scandinavians reflecting a self-definition of “us,” that excludes blacks and latinos regardless of their relationship to this country.
  • To describe the issue here, as many media outlets have, as one of coarse or vulgar language, is itself an obscenity. The president’s remarks reflect a moral principle that has guided policy while in office, a principle that is obvious to all but that some simply refuse to articulate.
Javier E

The core mission of the GOP is now to defend abusers - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...e-gop-is-now-defending-abusers

ideas values words speech consequences policy

shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • “Ignore the tweets, ignore the language, ignore the words” is advice that affects a kind of sophistication: don’t get distracted by the circus, keep your eye on what’s going on behind the curtain. This is faux pragmatism, ignoring what is being communicated to other countries, to actors within the state, and to tens of millions of fellow citizens. It ignores how all those actors will respond to the speech, and how norms, institutions, and the environment for policy and coercion will be changed by those responses. Policy is a lagging indicator; ideas and the speech that expresses them pave the way
manhefnawi

King Philip of England | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...king-philip-england

King Philip II of Spain and England Queen Mary Elizabeth

shared by manhefnawi on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • Philip, the only legitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1530-56), and known to history as Philip II of Spain (r.1556-98), was King of England for rather more than four years. He achieved that dignity when he married Queen Mary (‘Bloody Mary’, r.1553-58) in July 1554, and surrendered it when she died in November 1558
  • Philip of Spain, he was the bitter enemy of Elizabethan England, against whom a twenty-year war was fought
  • potentially his reign was one of huge significance. Had Mary borne him children, particularly a healthy son, the entire subsequent history of England could have been different
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  • Neither he nor his courtiers knew much about England
  • Charles V’s ambition and Mary’s suggestibility
  • Both the Ottoman threat and the schism would go (he thought) with Germany to his brother Ferdinand, but the French rivalry would remain to Spain
  • A marriage to the Queen of England provided the perfect solution – a powerbase in the north from which the Netherlands could be secured
  • Mary secured the English succession in July 1553
  • Throughout Edward’s reign (1547-53) she had attempted to defend her father’s religious settlement, and when her brother died young in July 1553 she was the heir by law, and a notorious religious conservative
  • She also owed, and willingly acknowledged, a debt of gratitude to Charles, who had defended her by diplomatic means over many years
  • There were only three candidates: Dom Luis of Portugal, the brother of King Juan; Edward Courtenay, son of the Marquis of Exeter (executed in 1539) and related through his mother to Edward IV; and Prince Philip
  • Elizabeth would never have come to the throne, the country would have remained Roman Catholic, and England would have been linked for an indefinite period with the Netherlands in a dynastic union
  • Although his support remained, there is no evidence that the Queen ever had any intention of marrying him
  • There were protests in Parliament which Mary brushed aside, and a briefly serious rebellion in Kent in January 1554, which was with some difficulty suppressed
  • As a result, the prince found himself with little more than the title of King of England
  • had no authority in England independent of the Queen, and must surrender his title if she should die childless
  • Their numerous titles had been officially proclaimed, and ‘King and Queen of England, France and Ireland …’ duly took precedence.
  • Whether by calculation or oversight, he found that he had two households, one Spanish, one English, and in spite of fair-minded attempts to divide his service between them, he was besieged with complaints on all sides
  • Mary’s much heralded pregnancy turned out to be an illusion
  • If Henry’s settlement was reversed, the whole process of dissolution could be declared invalid, and the land reclaimed by the Church, at the cost of immense disruption. Such a situation would be unacceptable to the English Parliament
  • Philip therefore used Habsburg clout in Rome to persuade Pope Julius III to do a deal. If he waived the Church’s claim to these lands, the King and Queen would reconcile England to his ecclesiastical authority
  • By the middle of January 1555, Philip had performed his first major service to the realm of England
  • The Queen consorts of Henry VIII had all been given generous settlements, but Philip got nothing
  • The Queen was sick, bewitched, even dead; there was a substitution plot in which Philip was implicated
  • On August 3rd the royal couple removed to Oatlands, and on the 5th, as soon as he could decently leave her, Philip departed for the Netherlands
  • Within a few weeks he had taken over his father’s authority in the Low Countries, and the real test of Charles’s intentions had arrived
  • Charles V abdicated in Brussels in September 1555, and handed over the Crowns of Spain to Philip in January 1556
  • There was talk of the council being divided into King’s men and Queen’s men, and the Duke of Alba urged him to get a grip on the appointments to English offices
  • The war with France, temporarily suspended by truce in February 1556, flared up again in the autumn, and Mary’s increasingly desperate pleas for Philip’s return were met with professions of affection, and bland excuses
  • Both his honour and his shortage of resources necessitated that England join him in his war against France. Mary was only too anxious to do something to gratify him that would not compromise her authority in England, so she was keen to oblige
  • Philip had left in July, and when in January 1558 the Queen announced that she was again pregnant, no one believed her. This was not only immensely sad, it was also a warning that there was something seriously wrong with her health, and Philip got the message. Ever since he had abandoned his campaign for a coronation in 1556, the King had had his eye upon Elizabeth
  • At first the King sought to neutralise Elizabeth by marriage to one of his loyal dependents, the Duke of Savoy
  • The princess was the heir by English law – the same law which had brought Mary to the throne – but the heir in the eyes of the Catholic church should have been Mary Stuart, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret. Mary was in France and betrothed to the Dauphin, so that neither Philip nor Mary wanted her on the English throne
  • As her health deteriorated in the early autumn of 1558, to Mary’s intense distress, her husband concentrated on ensuring that Elizabeth’s succession would be as smooth as possible
  • Mary’s death was a relief to Philip. The affection in their relationship had been all on her side, and he urgently needed a fertile wife who would bear him more children. In the event he had failed to transcend the limitations of his marriage treaty, and his power in England had remained extremely limited. In the course of time, the country became a liability
  • he also brought it into the war which cost Calais; but he protected Elizabeth during the latter part of the reign, and made sure that she came safely to the throne. Paradoxically, that was his most lasting achievement as King of England
manhefnawi

Nicholas I: Russia's Last Absolute Monarch | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...2%80%99s-last-absolute-monarch

Russia Nicholas I

shared by manhefnawi on 22 May 18 - No Cached
  • Nicholas’ power as an Autocrat was indeed so absolute that any command, even as extreme as the one to march on France, was fully within his power should he choose to exercise it
  • Throughout his reign, Nicholas jealously guarded the recognized prerogatives of the ruler in all aspects of government and he exercised a more personal control in state affairs than any other ruler since Peter the Great
  • Only a strong Emperor could bear the crushing burden of such a system of personal government and, as events after 1848 made clear, even Russia’s iron-willed Emperor himself could not bear such a burden in the face of serious crises.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Indeed, the second quarter of the nineteenth century saw the greatest flowering of Russian literature in the Imperial period
  • As the third son of the Emperor Paul I, Nicholas Pavlovich was given the traditional education of a Russian Grand Duke. He was taught not the art of statecraft, but that of military command; more precisely, in view of his father’s love of the parade ground, he was trained for command on the drill field. Because of his junior position in the Imperial family he was never regarded as a possible candidate for the throne during his childhood or adolescent years; but, during the last decade of his elder brother Alexander I’s reign (1815-1825), the order of succession changed dramatically.
  • Nicholas, as the third son of Paul I, became the heir apparent. As such, the matter of succession seemed clear enough
  • The ill-advised secrecy about the succession soon bore chaotic fruit in late 1825 when Alexander died under mysterious circumstances while on a visit to southern Russia
  • In the absence of his two older brothers, he often had acted as the senior member of the royal family, but even so, Constantine Pavlovich remained heir-apparent in the eyes of the senior state counsellors, the officers of the army, and the nobility. Because he felt that he could not assume the Imperial title until Constantine had publicly renounced the crown, Nicholas therefore proclaimed his brother Emperor when news of Alexander’s death reached St Petersburg in late November 1825
  • Constantine chose to regard his younger brother’s title to the throne as an accomplished fact and, for reasons best known only to himself, he steadfastly refused to come to St Petersburg from Warsaw publicly to renounce his rights to the throne
  • As the victor in the revolt of December 14th, he must defend the full power of autocracy by all possible means, and all threats to such power must be eliminated; translated into terms of foreign policy, this meant that he must stand as the defender of the status quo, of the Holy Alliance of his brother Alexander, in Europe
  • Nicholas I must be considered Russia’s last absolute monarch, therefore, not because his power was unlimited, but because never again after his reign would the power of the Autocrat be completely undivided
  • Nicholas thoroughly distrusted the intelligentsia, he also was apprehensive about the nobility and had no confidence in the regular bureaucracy to plan and execute changes in the existing order. The nobility, he felt, could never be trusted to set aside the social and economic interests of their class in order to work for the welfare of the state as a whole. Further, Nicholas saw in the actions of the Decembrists a potential threat to his power from the nobility
  • From the beginning of his reign, then, Nicholas was aware that changes must come, and he had concluded that these matters could best be accomplished by concentrating the work of reform in institutions over which he could exercise direct personal control. One should, at this point, examine how his efforts worked in practice
  • Agents of the Third Section were everywhere and any unusual event, even such a seemingly insignificant occurrence as the arrival of a stranger in a provincial town, made its way into the Section’s files in St Petersburg
  • the peasantry in Russia did require attention for the conditions under which they lived were extremely harsh. Yet a solution to the serf problem, whether in terms of abolishing serfdom or simply ameliorating peasant living conditions, was beyond the capacities of the system that Nicholas had created. Reforms of state finances, the codification of the law, and the creation of an efficient and paternalistic gendarmerie were possible in Russia of the 1830s and 1840s because their success depended neither on the full co-operation of all levels of the bureaucracy nor on that of the nobility.
  • The Emperor’s reaction to the revolutions of 1848 caused the Nicholas System to degenerate rapidly from a type of paternal state conservatism to a system of stark, sterile reaction. After 1848 it became impossible to discuss progressive ideas in print, and even the works of Karamzin, the court historian during the reign of Alexander I, were censored
  • That the Nicholas System was severely shaken by the revolutions of 1848 is clear enough; nevertheless, it managed to survive the shock. The following year, in response to the pleas of the Habsburg Emperor, Russia’s armies crushed the revolt of Kossuth’s rebels in Elungary, and a year later Russia preserved the uneasy balance of power between the Habsburg Monarchy and Prussia in Germany by dictating the Convention of Olmutz
  • Crushing defeats in the Crimean War dealt the death blow to the Nicholas System. From the very first losses in the South, it was evident that the Empire of 1854 was only a failing shadow of the Empire of 1812 whose armies had driven the Grande Armee from Russia and had pursued Napoleon into Germany. The defeat in the Crimea meant that broad and fundamental reforms must come to Russia, and the Nicholas System had paved the way for them by its failure
  • When Alexander II mounted the throne in 1855, the nobility was indeed weaker, for the policy that Nicholas had pursued toward them during the first twenty years of his reign had taken its toll. Further, the lack of a legal basis for the nobility’s power over their serfs was now clear as a result of the compilation of the laws that Nicholas’ government had achieved
  • Nicholas himself did not live to see the Great Reforms nor did he live to see the final failure of his system; he died in 1855 while war still raged in the Crimea. His system had preserved the absolute power of the Autocrat intact at a time when absolute monarchy had vanished from the scene in Western Europe. The price for preserving an anachronistic system was paid in the Crimea, but it was also paid by Russian society as well
Javier E

Every Culture Appropriates - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...559802

culture appropriation western civilization

shared by Javier E on 08 May 18 - No Cached
  • the idea persists that there is something wrong and oppressive about people of one background adopting and adapting the artifacts of another.
  • A Canadian university cancelled its yoga classes as culturally appropriating—notwithstanding that most of the strenuous moves taught in a modern class actually originate in Danish gymnastics and British army calisthenics, which were in turn appropriated by Indian entrepreneurs seeking to update yoga from a meditative to an active practice for the body-conscious modern age.
  • The cultural appropriation police answer the yoga and banh mi objections with a familiar counter-argument: it’s about power. It’s fine for colonized Indians to incorporate European fitness regimes into their yoga; wrong for Canadians of European origin to incorporate yoga into their fitness regimes.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • the trouble with that argument is that—like culture—power also ebbs and flows. Customs we may think of as immemorially inherent in one culture very often originated in that culture’s own history of empire and domination
  • All cultures have histories. Young people born in North America may imagine that their grandmother’s recipes or wardrobe emerged autochthonously in a timeless ancestral homeland. But that only reflects how thoroughly they have Americanized themselves, reducing other countries’ complexities to folklores to be fetishized rather than understood and evaluated on their own terms.
  • The Chinese dress young Kezia Daum wanted to wear to prom originated in a brutal act of imperialism, but not by any western people
  • For whatever reason it happened, the idea that clothing styles should change regularly and often for no very compelling reason is one of Europe’s most distinctive contributions to world culture. Before their encounter with European culture, nobody else saw the point of it.
  • With the cheongsam, fashion in the European sense came to China. In the decades from 1915 to 1950, the cheongsam changed more than women’s costume did in the previous 250 years.
  • Like the idea that audiences should refrain from talking while music is performed, the idea that women should be able to move about as freely and easily as men is a cultural product—popularized by the North Atlantic world in the period after the First World War.
  • If it’s wrong for one culture to borrow from another, then it was wrong to invent the cheongsam in the first place—because not only did the garment’s shape originate outside China, but so, too, did the garment’s purposes. It was precisely because they appreciated that they were importing Western ideas about women that the inventors of the cheongsam adapted a Western shape.
  • They took something foreign and made it something domestic, in a pattern that has repeated itself in endless variations since the Neolithic period.
  • The policemen of cultural appropriation do not think that way. They have a morality tale to tell, one of Western victimization of non-Western peoples—a victimization so extreme that it is triggered by a Western girl’s purchase of a Chinese dress designed precisely so that Chinese girls could live more like Western girls.
  • In order to tell that story, the policemen of cultural appropriation must crush and deform much of the truth of cultural history—and in the process demean and infantilize the people they supposedly champion.
  • The would-be culture police build their whole philosophy on a single assumption of extreme chauvinism: that Western culture is universal—indeed the only universal culture.
  • Western technology, the Western emphasis on individual autonomy and equal human dignity, and even such oddly specific Western practices as death-metal music—the cultural police take all this for granted as thoroughly as a fish takes for granted the water in its fishbowl.
  • It’s a free society, do what you like! But please remember, as you do so, that this “freedom” you use is itself a cultural product, with its own origins in precisely the culture you traduce.
  • The Western culture of personal autonomy and equal dignity is a precious thing precisely because it is not universal. Those who participate in that culture and enjoy its benefits may hope—do hope—that it may someday become universal
  • If anything, that culture is at present in retreat, challenged and assailed both at home and abroad. It needs defending, and to be defended effectively it is vital to understand precisely how non-universal it is.
  • To the extent that the cultural-appropriation police are urging their targets to respect others who are different, they are saying something that everyone needs to hear
  • beyond that, they can plunge into doomed tangles.
  • How to draw the line between that and America’s ugly tradition of minstrelsy, in which subordinated peoples are both mimicked and mocked—as Al Jolson mimicked and mocked black music in his notorious blackface career? There is no clear rule, but there is an open way: the values of respect and tolerance that draw precisely on the rationalist Enlightenment traditions both rejected and relied upon by the cultural-appropriation police
  • Those traditions are the spiritual core of American culture at its highest. And those values we should all hope to see appropriated by all this planet’s peoples and cultures.
  • When the Manchu dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911, Chinese people found themselves free for the first time in 250 years to dress as they pleased. In the decade afterward, creative personalities in the great commercial metropolis of Shanghai devised a new kind of garment for women. They called it the cheongsam.
  • The new garment was a fusion of old and new, east and west. Manchurian-style fabrics were tailored to a European-style pattern
  • The cheongsam was equally available to women from a wide range of statuses—and enabled Chinese women to move as their western counterparts did.
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