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Is democracy getting in the way of saving the planet? | Kate Aronoff | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-the-way-of-saving-the-planet democracy climate change politics response technocracy authoritarian
shared by Javier E on 25 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • he Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report confirmed this month is that the stable climate many of us grew up with is gone and has been replaced by a fundamentally unstable one.
  • Amid a drumbeat of depressing news and decades of inaction, there’s a sort of folk wisdom emerging that liberal democracy might just be too slow to tackle a problem as urgent and massive as the climate crisis
  • With a punishingly tiny budget of just 400 gigatonnes of CO2 left to make a decent shot of staying below 1.5C of warming, is it time to give something less democratic a try?
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  • If a less democratic world is needed to deal with the climate, who are the people who’d like to bring a less democratic world into being?
  • The aim is not to reach net zero faster – neither party has laid out workable plans to do so – but to endear climate-conscious voters to an ethno-nationalist cause.
  • It’s not just the right, however, that has considered a turn away from democracy for the planet’s sake.
  • As much as US and UK liberals have talked up the promise of spreading democracy throughout the world this century, though, many centrists – as the Progressive International’s David Adler wrote in 2018 – are pretty down on democracy itself. Analysing the World Values and the European Values surveys, Adler found that centrists in wealthy countries were less supportive of democracy than their counterparts on either the left or the far right. Less than half of centrists in the US thought elections were essential; only 25% saw civil rights as a critical feature of democracy.
  • Actually existing centrist politicians, meanwhile, such as Emmanuel Macron in France, haven’t shown any willingness to address the climate crisis at the speed or scale it demands.
  • Openly authoritarian governments hardly fare better. China has rolled out an impressive array of green technologies over the last decade with massive industrial policy. Yet still it continues to prioritise fossil-fuelled growth, with its 14th five-year plan pledging to reduce “emissions intensity” by just 18% through 2025, and the planned opening of 43 new coal-fuelled power stations
  • But India, like China, has missed the deadline to update its emissions reduction plan in advance of UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.
  • There is simply no class of enlightened technocrats in powerful governments waiting in the wings to save the day.
  • A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum,” the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor has argued, “but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.”
  • In the less upbeat SSP3, “resurgent nationalism” and “concerns about competitiveness and security” start to emerge as countries go their own way in trying to adapt to and (more rarely) mitigate rising temperatures.
  • A best-case scenario detailed in their report by IPCC scientists, Shared Socioeconomic Economic Pathway 1, involves “more inclusive development” and unprecedented collaboration among the world’s governments to manage the global commons
  • The best hope in the short term is for a popular front to browbeat the middling centrists who claim to “believe science” into actually acting on it, and beating back the illiberal right accordingly.
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Francis Fukuyama: Still the End of History - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671761 crisis culture history end liberal democracy authoritarian
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  • Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.
  • The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences
  • Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.
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  • Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or endpoint of historical progress.
  • The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy.
  • setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.
  • Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted. Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights
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3 Turkish Ministers Resign Amid Corruption Scandal - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sh-cabinet-members-resign.html turkish corruption scandal nytimes US history politics crisis policy culture economic
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  • Three Turkish cabinet ministers resigned on Wednesday in an intensifying corruption scandal that has challenged the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and polarized the country.
  • Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Interior Minister Muammer Guler, both of whose sons have been arrested in the anticorruption investigation, stepped down.
  • Hours later, Erdogan Bayraktar, the environment and urban planning minister, announced his resignation in an interview with the private NTV television network. Mr. Bayraktar’s son was detained as part of the corruption probe but later released.
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  • Mr. Erdogan’s government has denounced the inquiry as a politically motivated plot by a “criminal gang” within the state.
  • The prime minister’s allies have also characterized it as a foreign plot to undermine Turkey’s rise and damage the government ahead of elections in March. Responding to the investigation, the government has dismissed more than a dozen high-ranking police officials as part of a purge of those it believes are behind the probe.
  • The investigation has been linked to the followers of Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive Muslim preacher who lives in Pennsylvania and leads an influential Islamic movement.
  • But in recent years, it appears a rift has grown between the men, as Mr. Gulen has challenged Mr. Erdogan in key areas, including foreign policy.
  • The Turkish news media reported that $4.5 million in cash was found packed in shoe boxes in the home of the chief executive of a state-run bank, while a money-counting machine and piles of bank notes were reported to have been discovered in the bedroom of a government minister’s son.
  • The inquiry could prove to be one of the most potent challenges yet to Mr. Erdogan’s government, which was buffeted this summer by large demonstrations in a cherished Istanbul park by mostly liberal and secular-minded protesters who were angry at what they perceived as Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies.
  • Mr. Erdogan’s intervention in the inquiry has drawn criticism from within his Justice and Development Party and threatens to undermine the unity of the party, known for its discipline, before a series of elections scheduled for the next 18 months.
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The Big Debate - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-big-debate.html authoritarian democracy regime social system
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  • The events of the past several years have exposed democracy’s structural flaws. Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning. Voters tend to want more government services than they are willing to pay for. The system of checks and balances can slide into paralysis, as more interest groups acquire veto power over legislation.
  • Across the Western world, people are disgusted with their governments. There is a widening gap between the pace of social and economic change, and the pace of government change. In Britain, for example, productivity in the private service sector increased by 14 percent between 1999 and 2013, while productivity in the government sector fell by 1 percent between 1999 and 2010.
  • In places like Singapore and China, the best students are ruthlessly culled for government service. The technocratic elites play a bigger role in designing economic life. The safety net is smaller and less forgiving. In Singapore, 90 percent of what you get out of the key pension is what you
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  • Is democracy in long-run decline?
  • These Guardian States have some disadvantages compared with Western democracies. They are more corrupt. Because the systems are top-down, local government tends to be worse. But they have advantages. They are better at long-range thinking and can move fast because they limit democratic feedback and don’t face NIMBY-style impediments.
  • Most important, they are more innovative than Western democracies right now.
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How America's culture wars have evolved into a class war - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-have-evolved-into-a-class-war culture class war crisis working class legitimacy inequality
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  • today’s culture wars offer a new set of cultural battles linked with shifting economic circumstances, including globalization, immigration and the changing boundaries of legitimate pluralism.
  • those in the lower end of the middle class have grown increasingly estranged from their counterparts in the professional class as they have watched their opportunities and hopes for a better life grow more distant and, in some cases, disappear.
  • What is more, these members of the lower middle class see many of the values and beliefs they live by — once perceived as honorable in their own communities — ridiculed as bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic and backwar
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  • about 8 of 10 Americans with less than a college degree believe that “political correctness is a serious problem in our country, making it hard for people to say what they really think” compared with 5 of 10 of the well-educated
  • 7 of 10 of the less educated believe that “the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good” compared to just over 4 of 10 of college or postgraduate educated Americans
  • Another feature of our new culture wars is our crisis of legitimation
  • A growing majority of Americans believe that their government cannot be trusted, that its leaders (and the leadership class more broadly) are incompetent and self-interested, and that as citizens, they personally have little power to influence the powerful institutions or circumstances that shape their lives. Survey research shows that this distrust has grown and even hardened.
  • this crisis, too, follows a class pattern
  • The poorly educated are one and a half times more likely than the college educated to hold the highest levels of distrust of the government; nearly three times more likely to be highly cynical of politicians; and over twice as likely to express the highest levels of alienation from the political process.
  • As a result, the credibility of the political establishment, conservative and liberal — its governing philosophies and ideals, its institutional authority, and its leadership — has been depleted.
  • Most significantly, the idea that one can find truth in the words of politicians or that there are even agreed-upon truths to which politicians could be held to account has largely vanished.
  • The party establishments and their governing philosophies, moreover, are no longer tethered to the aspirations and interests of their constituencies; a reality reflected not only in the continuation of a long-term growth of self-identified independents, who now outnumber Republicans or Democrats at 39 percent of the electorate
  • t significant minorities of Republicans and Democrats don’t believe their party represents their views of how the government should operate.
  • Whatever else the culture war of the last several decades accomplished, it unquestionably contributed to the intensification of this legitimation crisis. On any issue, from abortion to same-sex marriage, what was considered reasonable and justifiable governance and policy for one side came to be viewed as irrational and indefensible by the other. The resulting political discourse has been less about persuasion and compromise than about demonizing the opposition through overstatement and hyperbole.
  • We want to believe that the tragic insults to liberal democracy today — whether in the White House or the streets of Charlottesville — are atypical, and that soon, reason and good sense will again prevail. Yet the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump are not an aberration, but a reflection of the political estrangement of our times.
  • So is the authoritarian impulse we see bubbling up from the fringes. Genuine democratic freedom has become an opportunity for carefully staged political theater, the end of which is the denial of democratic freedom. The culture wars we fought before have given way to a new and worrying confrontation, the stakes of which feel darker and higher.
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The End of Wilson's Liberal Order | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...end-wilsonian-era wilson liberal order international relations internationalism foreign policy biden
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  • He was not a particularly original thinker. More than a century before Wilson proposed the League of Nations, Tsar Alexander I of Russia had alarmed his fellow rulers at the Congress of Vienna by articulating a similar vision: an international system that would rest on a moral consensus upheld by a concert of powers that would operate from a shared set of ideas about legitimate sovereignty.
  • Wilson’s contribution was to synthesize those ideas into a concrete program for a rules-based order grounded in a set of international institutions. 
  • In the decades that followed, however, his ideas became an inspiration and a guide to national leaders, diplomats, activists, and intellectuals around the world.
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  • Self-determination, the rule of law between and within countries, liberal economics, and the protection of human rights: the “new world order” that both the George H. W. Bush and the Clinton administrations worked to create was very much in the Wilsonian mold. 
  • When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, it seemed that the opportunity for a Wilsonian world order had finally come. The former Soviet empire could be reconstructed along Wilsonian lines, and the West could embrace Wilsonian principles more consistently now that the Soviet threat had disappeared.
  • American leaders during and after World War II laid the foundations of what they hoped would be a Wilsonian world order, in which international relations would be guided by the principles put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and conducted according to rules established by institutions such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization.
  • the order of things
  • The next stage in world history will not unfold along Wilsonian lines. The nations of the earth will continue to seek some kind of political order, because they must. And human rights activists and others will continue to work toward their goals. But the dream of a universal order, grounded in law, that secures peace between countries and democracy inside them will figure less and less in the work of world leaders. 
  • Although Wilsonian ideals will not disappear and there will be a continuing influence of Wilsonian thought on U.S. foreign policies, the halcyon days of the post–Cold War era, when American presidents organized their foreign policies around the principles of liberal internationalism, are unlikely to return anytime soon. 
  • Today, however, the most important fact in world politics is that this noble effort has failed.
  • Wilsonianism is only one version of a rules-based world order among many.
  • the pre-Wilsonian European order had moved significantly in the direction of elevating human rights to the level of diplomacy. 
  • The preservation of the balance of power was invoked as a goal to guide states; war, although regrettable, was seen as a legitimate element of the system. From Wilson’s standpoint, these were fatal flaws that made future conflagrations inevitable. To redress them, he sought to build an order in which states would accept enforceable legal restrictions on their behavior at home and their international conduct. 
  • Although Wilson was an American, his view of world order was first and foremost developed as a method for managing international politics in Europe, and it is in Europe where Wilson’s ideas have had their greatest success and where their prospects continue to look strongest.
  • His ideas were treated with bitter and cynical contempt by most European statesmen when he first proposed them, but they later became the fundamental basis of the European order, enshrined in the laws and practices of the EU.
  • the arc of history
  • The real problem of Wilsonianism is not a naive faith in good intentions but a simplistic view of the historical process, especially when it comes to the impact of technological progress on human social order.
  • Wilson was the devout son of a minister, deeply steeped in Calvinist teachings about predestination and the utter sovereignty of God, and he believed that the arc of progress was fated
  • he shared the optimism of what the scholar Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig historians,” the Victorian-era British thinkers who saw human history as a narrative of inexorable progress and betterment. Wilson believed that the so-called ordered liberty that characterized the Anglo-American countries had opened a path to permanent prosperity and peace.
  • Today’s Wilsonians have given this determinism a secular twist: in their eyes, liberalism will rule the future and bring humanity to “the end of history” as a result of human nature rather than divine purpose
  • In the early 1990s, leading U.S. foreign policymakers and commentators saw the fall of the Soviet Union through the same deterministic prism: as a signal that the time had come for a truly global and truly liberal world order. On all three occasions, Wilsonian order builders seemed to be in sight of their goal. But each time, like Ulysses, they were blown off course by contrary winds. 
  • Technical difficulties Today, those winds are gaining strength. Anyone hoping to reinvigorate the flagging Wilsonian project must contend with a number of obstacles
  • The most obvious is the return of ideology-fueled geopolitics. China, Russia, and a number of smaller powers aligned with them—Iran, for example—correctly see Wilsonian ideals as a deadly threat to their domestic arrangements.
  • Seeing Wilsonianism as a cover for American and, to some degree, EU ambitions, Beijing and Moscow have grown increasingly bold about contesting Wilsonian ideas and initiatives inside international institutions such as the UN and on the ground in places from Syria to the South China Sea.
  • These powers’ opposition to the Wilsonian order is corrosive in several ways.
  • It raises the risks and costs for Wilsonian powers to intervene in conflicts beyond their own borders.
  • The presence of great powers in the anti-Wilsonian coalition also provides shelter and assistance to smaller powers that otherwise might not choose to resist the status quo
  • Finally, the membership of countries such as China and Russia in international institutions makes it more difficult for those institutions to operate in support of Wilsonian norms: take, for example, Chinese and Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council, the election of anti-Wilsonian representatives to various UN bodies, and the opposition by countries such as Hungary and Poland to EU measures intended to promote the rule of law. 
  • Biological and technological research, by contrast, are critical for any country or company that hopes to remain competitive in the twenty-first century. An uncontrollable, multipolar arms race across a range of cutting-edge technologies is on the horizon, and it will undercut hopes for a revived Wilsonian order. 
  • The irony is that Wilsonians often believe that technological progress will make the world more governable and politics more rational—even if it also adds to the danger of war by making it so much more destructive. Wilson himself believed just that, as did the postwar order builders and the liberals who sought to extend the U.S.-led order after the Cold War. Each time, however, this faith in technological change was misplaced
  • As seen most recently with the rise of the Internet, although new technologies often contribute to the spread of liberal ideas and practices, they can also undermine democratic systems and aid authoritarian regimes.
  • Meanwhile, the torrent of technological innovation and change known as “the information revolution” creates obstacles for Wilsonian goals
  • It also makes it harder for national leaders to pursue the compromises that international cooperation inevitably requires and increases the chances that incoming governments will refuse to be bound by the acts of their predecessors. 
  • Wilsonians prioritize arms control not just because nuclear warfare could destroy the human race but also because, even if unused, nuclear weapons or their equivalent put the Wilsonian dream of a completely rules-based, law-bound international order out of reach. Weapons of mass destruction guarantee exactly the kind of state sovereignty that Wilsonians think is incompatible with humanity’s long-term security. One cannot easily stage a humanitarian intervention against a nuclear power. 
  • What is more, the technological progress that underlies the information revolution significantly exacerbates the problem of arms control. The development of cyberweapons and the potential of biological agents to inflict strategic damage on adversaries—graphically demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic—serve as warnings that new tools of warfare will be significantly more difficult to monitor or control than nuclear technology.
  • Today, as new technologies disrupt entire industries, and as social media upends the news media and election campaigning, politics is becoming more turbulent and polarized in many countries.
  • it’s not for everybody One of the central assumptions behind the quest for a Wilsonian order is the belief that as countries develop, they become more similar to already developed countries and will eventually converge on the liberal capitalist model that shapes North America and western Europe
  • The Wilsonian project requires a high degree of convergence to succeed; the member states of a Wilsonian order must be democratic, and they must be willing and able to conduct their international relations within liberal multilateral institutions. 
  • Today, China, India, Russia, and Turkey all seem less likely to converge on liberal democracy than they did in 1990. These countries and many others have developed economically and technologically not in order to become more like the West but rather to achieve a deeper independence from the West and to pursue civilizational and political goals of their own. 
  • In truth, Wilsonianism is a particularly European solution to a particularly European set of problems
  • With the specter of great-power war constantly hanging over them, European states developed a more intricate system of diplomacy and international politics than did countries in other parts of the world.
  • Although it would take another devastating world war to ensure that Germany, as well as its Western neighbors, would adhere to the rules of a new system, Europe was already prepared for the establishment of a Wilsonian order.
  • The idea of a single legitimate state with no true international peers is as deeply embedded in the political culture of China as the idea of a multistate system grounded in mutual recognition is embedded in that of Europe. There have been clashes among Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but until the late nineteenth century, interstate conflict was rare. 
  • In human history as a whole, enduring civilizational states seem more typical than the European pattern of rivalry among peer states.
  • For states and peoples in much of the world, the problem of modern history that needed to be solved was not the recurrence of great-power conflict. The problem, instead, was figuring out how to drive European powers awa
  • International institutions face an even greater crisis of confidence. Voters skeptical of the value of technocratic rule by fellow citizens are even more skeptical of foreign technocrats with suspiciously cosmopolitan views
  • After colonialism formally ended and nascent countries began to assert control over their new territories, the classic problems of governance in the postcolonial world remained weak states and compromised sovereignty. 
  • expert texpert
  • The recent rise of populist movements across the West has revealed another danger to the Wilsonian project. If the United States could elect Donald Trump as president in 2016, what might it do in the future? What might the electorates in other important countries do? And if the Wilsonian order has become so controversial in the West, what are its prospects in the rest of the world?
  • Postcolonial and non-Western states often joined international institutions as a way to recover and enhance their sovereignty, not to surrender it, and their chief interest in international law was to protect weak states from strong ones, not to limit the power of national leaders to consolidate their authority
  • Yet from the standpoint of Wilson and his fellow progressives, the solution to these problems could not be simply to vest power in the voters. At the time, most Americans still had an eighth-grade education or less
  • The progressives’ answer to this problem was to support the creation of an apolitical expert class of managers and administrators. The progressives sought to build an administrative state that would curb the excessive power of the rich and redress the moral and political deficiencies of the poor.
  • The Internet and social media have undermined respect for all forms of expertise. Ordinary citizens today are significantly better educated and feel less need to rely on expert guidance. And events including the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2008 financial crisis, and the inept government responses during the 2020 pandemic have seriously reduced confidence in experts and technocrats, whom many people have come to see as forming a nefarious “deep state.”
  • Wilson lived in an era when democratic governance faced problems that many feared were insurmountable. The Industrial Revolution had divided American society, creating unprecedented levels of inequality.
  • when it comes to international challenges such as climate change and mass migration, there is little evidence that the cumbersome institutions of global governance and the quarrelsome countries that run them will produce the kind of cheap, elegant solutions that could inspire public trust. 
  • what it means for biden
  • For all these reasons, the movement away from the Wilsonian order is likely to continue, and world politics will increasingly be carried out along non-Wilsonian and in some cases even anti-Wilsonian lines
  • the international order will increasingly be shaped by states that are on diverging paths. This does not mean an inevitable future of civilizational clashes, but it does mean that global institutions will have to accommodate a much wider range of views and values than they have in the past.
  • Non-Wilsonian orders have existed both in Europe and in other parts of the world in the past, and the nations of the world will likely need to draw on these examples as they seek to cobble together some kind of framework for stability and, if possible, peace under contemporary conditions. 
  • For U.S. policymakers, the developing crisis of the Wilsonian order worldwide presents vexing problems that are likely to preoccupy presidential administrations for decades to come. One problem is that many career officials and powerful voices in Congress, civil society organizations, and the press deeply believe not only that a Wilsonian foreign policy is a good and useful thing for the United States but also that it is the only path to peace and security and even to the survival of civilization and humanity.
  • Those factions will be hemmed in by the fact that any internationalist coalition in American foreign policy must rely to a significant degree on Wilsonian voters. But a generation of overreach and poor political judgment has significantly reduced the credibility of Wilsonian ideas among the American electorate.
  • But American foreign policy is always a coalition affair. As I wrote in my book Special Providence, Wilsonians are one of four schools that have contended to shape American foreign policy since the eighteenth century.
  • Hamiltonians and Wilsonians largely dominated American foreign-policy making after the Cold War, but Obama began to reintroduce some Jeffersonian ideas about restraint, and after the Libyan misadventure, his preference for that approach clearly strengthened.
  • Trump, who hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, sought to build a nationalist coalition of Jacksonians and Jeffersonians against the globalist coalition of Hamiltonians and Wilsonians that had been ascendant since World War II. 
  • Even as the Biden administration steers American foreign policy away from the nationalism of the Trump period, it will need to re-adjust the balance between the Wilsonian approach and the ideas of the other schools in light of changed political conditions at home and abroad.
  • Saving the planet from a climate catastrophe and building a coalition to counter China are causes that many Wilsonians will agree both require and justify a certain lack of scrupulosity when it comes to the choice of both allies and tactics. 
  • The Biden administration can also make use of other techniques that past presidents have used to gain the support of Wilsonians
  • Even as the ultimate goals of Wilsonian policy become less achievable, there are particular issues on which intelligent and focused American policy can produce results that Wilsonians will like
  • International cooperation to make money laundering more difficult and to eliminate tax havens is one area where progress is possible.
  • Concern for international public health will likely stay strong for some years after the COVID-19 pandemic has ended.
  • Promoting education for underserved groups in foreign countries—women, ethnic and religious minorities, the poor—is one of the best ways to build a better world,
  • however problematic Wilson’s personal views and domestic policies were, as a statesman and ideologist, he must be counted among the most influential makers of the modern world
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The Center Cannot Hold | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...center-cannot-hold China US rivalry competition cooperation climate change pandemic europe
shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • the debate over whether great-power competition or transnational threats pose the greater danger to the United States is a false one. Look back at strategic assessments from ten years ago on China and Russia, on the one hand, and those on pandemics and climate change, on the other, and it is clear that Washington is experiencing near-worst-case scenarios on both. Great-power rivalry has not yet sparked a hot war but appears to be on the brink of sparking a cold one. Meanwhile, the worst pandemic in a century is not yet over, and the climate crisis is only accelerating. 
  • What COVID-19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition—one in which the two phenomena exacerbate each other.
  • By the same token, ramping up competition with China without a plan to rally the world to deal with transnational threats (which can themselves fuel rivalry between great powers) would only guarantee future disasters. 
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  • Attempting to ease tensions with China to make cooperation on global public health possible won’t work, partly because Beijing cannot credibly commit to being more transparent and cooperative in the future.
  • Xi did not want to facilitate an international response to COVID-19 that could have attributed blame to China or isolated it through travel restrictions, either of which might have damaged the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Instead, Xi leveraged the pandemic to his advantage: China’s suppression of the virus became a matter of national pride, held up by Beijing in sharp contrast to the experience of the United States.
  • But in case cooperation fails, it must have a backup plan to rally allies and partners to provide a much greater share of global public goods, even if that means shouldering more of the costs.
  • as a number of U.S. embassy officials told the foreign policy analyst Colin Kahl and me for our book Aftershocks, this team’s cooperation with the Chinese government became more challenging as U.S.-Chinese rivalry intensified, largely because of China’s actions.
  • When COVID-19 hit, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained near-absolute secrecy. All channels of communication between Beijing and Washington went silent, as they did between Beijing and other governments. Chinese leaders sought to conceal vital information about the emerging epidemic in China from the rest of the world, even attempting to prevent Chinese scientists from sharing the genetic sequence of the virus with scientists in other countries.
  • It is impossible to say for certain why the Chinese government behaved the way it did, but secrecy and control make sense in light of what the vast majority of China experts believe to be Xi’s top priority: regime survival.
  • For China’s leaders, the pandemic revealed the inexorable decline of the West, confirmed Beijing’s power and capabilities, and created more latitude for the CCP to do as it wished.
  • according to the UN, the pandemic could force a total of 490 million people into poverty—defined as the loss of access to clean water, adequate food, or shelter—pushing the global poverty rate to around seven percent by 2030, compared with the pre-pandemic target of three percent. 
  • Contrary to popular belief, some senior Trump administration officials grasped the national security threat posed by the virus faster than their European counterparts did. Top officials in the National Security Council began focusing on the pandemic in early January, just days after news of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, became public.
  • ven though Pottinger and other NSC officials were wise to the danger, they ultimately failed to persuade Trump to make the necessary preparations to deal with the pandemic when it inevitably reached the United States. 
  • As the administration began to formulate its response, those who favored a more comprehensive public health approach both at home and abroad were excluded or marginalized at crucial moments. The result was that the Trump administration focused more on holding China responsible for the outbreak and reducing U.S. reliance on Beijing than on the minutiae of global public health policy or the hard work of rallying the world to tackle the pandemic.
  • the pandemic and China’s response to it helped unify the administration behind a more comprehensive strategy to push back against Beijing. Between March 2020 and the end of the year, the senior official said, the United States put in place more containment measures than it had in the previous three years, including restrictions on Chinese technology firms, sanctions on Chinese officials, looser regulations on diplomatic contacts with Taiwan, and recognition of the repression in Xinjiang as a genocide. In this sense, the pandemic was a pivotal moment in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry. 
  • Competition between the two countries overwhelmed everything else, including U.S. cooperation with allies on the pandemic, leaving a global leadership vacuum that no one could fill.
  • The EU tried to step up by increasing funding for the WHO and for COVAX, the global initiative to share vaccines, but it never came close to organizing a global response. China’s assertive foreign policy, and its attempts to use pandemic assistance to advance its interests, aggravated European leaders and convinced them to harden their positions toward China throughout the course of 2020. 
  • During this period, there was hardly any international cooperation on vaccine development or distribution, no coordination on travel restrictions or the distribution of medical supplies, and limited cooperation on achieving a cessation of hostilities in conflict zones
  • The economic disruption caused by COVID-19 devastated low-income countries, which received little in the way of international assistance. Especially hard hit were countries, such as Bangladesh, that had made significant development gains in the last two decades and were propelling themselves into the lower tier of middle-income economies.
  • The United States needs a strategy to address transnational threats under the conditions of great-power competition. It must aim to cooperate with rivals, especially China, to prepare for future pandemics and to tackle climate change
  • Pandemics are not the only transnational threat that promises to intensify great-power rivalry and diminish the prospects for much-needed cooperation. Climate change could do the same.
  • Rather than unite the world around a common purpose, climate change is likely to deepen competition between major powers, especially as the transition away from fossil fuels creates economic winners and losers.
  • Countries that aggressively decarbonize could place sanctions and other trade restrictions on countries that do not, leading to counterresponses and new trade wars.
  • the impediments to cooperation between Europe and China on climate change “are becoming higher” and warn that “decision-makers must not underestimate the highly competitive aspects of how China is changing its energy production and consumption.” 
  • The United States and Europe will both compete with China for access to raw materials and in developing the technology needed to make their economies carbon neutral: magnets, batteries, high-performance ceramics, and light-emitting diodes, among other things
  • even if the U.S. government remains broadly aligned with Europe on climate policy, the Europeans could still become disaffected if Congress blocks meaningful climate action, such as commitments to cut carbon emissions or invest in clean technology. This, in turn, could diminish Europe’s willingness to help uphold the U.S.-led international order.
  • If, on the one hand, they mean softening U.S. rhetoric without conceding much of substance to China, they would do well to look to Europe, where governments were much more inclined than the Trump administration to cooperate with China, but China did not take them up on the offer.
  • If, on the other hand, they mean unilaterally making major geopolitical concessions to China—on its territorial acquisitions in the South China Sea, for instance, or the status of Taiwan—the United States would not only pay an extremely high price but also likely embolden Beijing further without actually securing cooperation on pandemics or climate change beyond what Beijing has already offered.
  • There is no getting around strategic competition with Beijing: it is deeply embedded in the international order, mainly because China seeks to expand its sphere of influence in Asia at the expense of the United States and its allies, which are in turn committed to thwarting Beijing’s plans.
  • The United States and China are also engaged in what Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, recently called “a competition of models.” China is seeking to make the world safe for the CCP and to demonstrate the effectiveness of its system. This entails pushing back against what it sees as pressure from liberal democratic countries that could thwart its objectives. For its part, the United States worries about the negative externalities of Chinese authoritarianism, such as censorship of international criticism of Beijing or the export of its tools of repression to other countries.
  • The United States also worries about what would happen to the military balance of power if China secured an enduring advantage in key technologies.
  • Even in diplomacy, friction will be endemic to the U.S.-Chinese relationship and will affect the broader international order for the foreseeable future. Outright confrontation can be avoided—but competition cannot. 
  • This competition places real limits on cooperation. Take the arena of global public health: many studies on how to improve pandemic preparedness call on world leaders to dramatically strengthen the WHO, including by giving it the same power to enforce international health regulations as the International Atomic Energy Agency enjoys with nuclear nonproliferation rules
  • The problem is getting every government to agree to a universally applicable mechanism for sanctions or some other enforcement mechanism. China will not agree to any reform that would involve intrusive inspections of its scientific research facilities.
  • The need for cooperation on transnational threats must change how the United States competes with China—not whether it competes.
  • U.S. officials should not give up on China entirely; instead, they should make a good-faith effort to work with Beijing, both bilaterally and in multilateral settings. Recognizing that there are strict limits on U.S.-Chinese cooperation is not the same as saying that no cooperation is possible.
  • the real challenge is determining what to do when cooperation with China and other rivals falls short of what is required. The United States needs a backup plan to tackle shared challenges through coalitions of the willing.
  • When it comes to pandemic preparedness, this means fully supporting the WHO (including by pressing for needed reforms) but also forging a coalition of like-minded states: a global alliance for pandemic preparedness that would regularly convene at the head-of-state level and work alongside nongovernmental organizations and the private sector.
  • Crucially, whenever the WHO declared an international public health emergency, alliance members would coordinate on travel and trade restrictions, as well as on public messaging and financial penalties and sanctions. Those penalties and sanctions would be aimed at those states that failed to provide sufficient access to or fully cooperate with the WHO. The alliance would support, not supplant, the WHO.
  • Sustained, managed competition with China could potentially help the United States build bipartisan support for investments in clean technology that would prevent Beijing from gaining an enduring advantage in this area.
  • ut the United States and the European Union will also need to build coalitions of the willing to deal with the international security consequences of accelerated climate change, such as extreme weather events that threaten large numbers of people, and to address the foreign policy dimensions of climate action, including managing the risk that a shift away from fossil fuels could destabilize countries and regions that are dependent on oil exports.
  • Cooperation across this divide should always be the first choice in times of shared crisis, but as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, the U.S.-led constellation must always have a backup plan. It did not have one in 2020. It needs one for the next crisis
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The GOP is at its peak, but conservatism has hit rock bottom - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html conservatism gop fascism authoritarian trump crisis
shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • It is one of fate’s cruel jokes that conservatism should be at its modern nadir just as the Republican Party is at its zenith — if conservatism is defined as embracing limited government, displaying a rational, skeptical and moderate temperament and believing in the priority of the moral order.
  • All these principles are related, and under attack
  • Conservatives believe that human beings are fallible and prone to ambition, passion and selfishness
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  • It is the particular genius of the American system to balance ambition with ambition through a divided government (executive, legislative and judicial)
  • Conservatives believe that finite and fallen creatures are often wrong. We know that many of our attitudes and beliefs are the brain’s justification for pre-rational tendencies and desires
  • All of us have things to learn, even from our political opponents. The truth is out there, but it is generally broken into pieces and scattered across the human experience. We only reassemble it through listening and civil communication.
  • And conservatives believe that a just society depends on the moral striving of finite and fallen creatures who treat each other with a respect and decency that laws can encourage but not enforce.
  • no serious constitutional recourse seems to remain. While open to other options, I see none. It will now fall to citizens and institutions to (1) defend the legislature and judiciary from any encroachment, (2) defend every group of people from organized oppression, including Muslims and refugees, (3) expand and defend the institutions — from think tanks to civil liberty organizations — that make the case for a politics that honors human dignity. And pray for the grass to grow.
  • this type of conservatism — a conservatism of intellectual humility and moral aspiration — also has the advantage of being organic. It grows with tenacity in hidden places, eventually breaking down the cement and asphalt of our modern life.
  • This is not the political force that has recently taken over the Republican Party
  • That has been the result of extreme polarization, not a turn toward enduring values. The movement is authoritarian in theory, apocalyptic in mood, prone to conspiracy theories and personal abuse, and dismissive of ethical standards. The president-elect seems to offer equal chances of constitutional crisis and utter, debilitating incompetence.
  • The plausible case that Russian espionage materially contributed to the election of an American president has been an additional invitation to anger. Now, not only the quality but also the legitimacy of our democracy is at stake.
  • But what is the proper conservative response? It is to live within the boundaries of law and reality
  • In the midst of all our justified skepticism, we can never be skeptical of this: that the reason for politics is to honor the equal value of every life, beginning with the weakest and most vulnerable. No bad goal — say, racial purity or communist ideology — outweighs this commitment. And no good goal — the efficiency of markets or the pursuit of greater equality — does either.
  • The GOP is at its peak, but conservatism has hit rock bottom
  • Michael Gerson Opinion
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Turkey's ailing sultan - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition - 0 views

mondediplo.com/06turkey economics US policy history culture politics crisis monde turkey sultan syria erdogan
shared by julia rhodes on 15 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • “Increasingly, democratisation and authoritarianism are going hand in hand, and not just in Turkey.”
  • Erdogan’s ambition to institute an enhanced presidency with himself as a new “sultan” now looks unlikely to succeed after his imperious response to the protests over the development of Gezi Park
  • For the first time, Erdogan, who had confidently steered Turkey through choppy waters, seemed at a loss
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  • His other recent attempts at social control (restrictions on the sale of alcohol or moves to end abortion, which he has described as murder) infuriated secular Turks, but were aimed at winning votes from Muslim conservatives in this still divided society.
  • Secular intellectuals regard Gezi as a turning point: in the first major political protests since the 1970s, an apolitical younger generation has become politicised — not by big ideas like democracy or nationalism, but for their rights. They were joined by activists for Kurdish, Alevi and gay rights — a coming together of separate causes that is new to Turkey.
  • As it built its own coalitions at home, it set out internationally to demonstrate that Islam was compatible with democracy. The policy worked. The AKP was re-elected on 22 July 2007, and won a triumphant third term in the 12 June 2011 elections
  • The AKP, though not democratic, became a democratising force, giving a new sense of belonging and empowerment to a majority of Turks, previously excluded by the old secular elites
  • His worsening authoritarianism escaped the world’s attention, although in Turkey, there were worries about unaccountability and crony capitalism, the penetration of Fethullah Gulen’s Islamist movement into the police and judiciary, the silencing of the media, and the arrest of many journalists and other critics of the government
  • It is clear the justice system is not free of politics and has failed to investigate evidence of wider involvement in criminal activity and human rights abuses, particularly in the southeast. Yet with the verdicts, Turkey’s demilitarisation has been underlined.
  • Much of the AKP success story was based on the economy, which it opened up, building on structural adjustment reforms by the former economy minister Kemal Derviş (2001-02).
  • . On Cyprus, there is a sense that the AKP government has done what it can, backing the UN peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan for a federal solution.
  • he AKP government’s biggest achievement so far — and greatest remaining challenge — is its attempt at a solution to the Kurdish question.
  • “We used to see self-determination as the only solution... Now our Kurds want to look west. Both for economic benefits and because of the regional conjunction, Kurds here see their future in a democratising Turkey that recognises their rights.” Those rights mean an end to ethnic discrimination, full recognition of Kurdish identity with the right to teach Kurdish at school and a decentralisation that will lead to a form of autonomy. For this, constitutional reform is needed.
  • Further diplomatic incidents led to Turkey’s suspension of military, though not economic, ties with Israel that October. This made Erdogan the darling of the Arab world and played well with the Turkish public. Washington under Obama was not dissatisfied. Then came the Mavi Mamari affair, when a Turkish flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza was attacked in international waters on 31 May 2010 and nine Turkish activists killed. This year, after a very public row, the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu apologised.
  • There were miscalculations on Syria. After Turkey’s close alliance with President Bashar al-Assad was swiftly reversed at the start of the uprising, Turkey facilitated the rebels, set up refugee camps along the shared border and allowed the opposition Syrian National Council to set up its headquarters in Istanbul. Ordinary Turks welcomed Syria’s refugees but there was no enthusiasm for military involvement, with the risks of unrest among the country’s own Alevi minority (3) and concern at the porous borders that allow infiltration of Al-Qaida-linked jihadists into Turkey.
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4 Types of Korean Historiography - 0 views

realsearcher.tripod.com/history01.html korea historiography
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  • four distinct models: Confucian (yukyo), Colonial(singmin), nationalist(minjok), and minjung, or "populist," historiography
  • Confucian historiography, is concerned on the idea that a nation's "culture" constitutes the overriding determinant of its history
  • By the Koryo period, then, Chinese Confucian culture had supplanted Buddhism as the leading influence on Korean society, and it is this influence that is the source of Korea's historical legac
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  • modern nationalist historians who criticize the Confucian school as taking an overly Sino-centric view of Korean history, reflecting the Chinese bia
  • colonial historiography, or singmin sahak, is of a fundamentally geopolitical nature and is the direct consequence of Korea's colonial experience under Japanese rule(1910-1945
  • This school points to geographic determinism as the leading factor in Korean history and argues that given Korea's geographic position, international interaction with surrounding powers, especially China, Japan, Russia, and more recently, the United States, is inevitable
  • the influence (or interference) of foreign "actors" has resulted in the inability of Koreans to chart an independent course in making policy, leading to a subservient national character and the predominance of acute factionalism in Korean politic
  • retarded or stunted nature of Korean historical development, as reflected in the continued existence of slavery up to the end of the Choson dynasty and the lack of a feudalist stage in Korea's historical development
  • not only that historical development in Korea is distinguished by its lack of indigenous progress, but also that what progress that has occurred has been the direct result of foreign influence and/or pressure
  • the nationalist school, emerged as a reaction against Japanese colonialism
  • for minjung theorists, Korean history is one of suffering -- of the masses subjugated socially, politically, and economically, whether it be in the form of Chinese cultural hegemony, the domination of the yangban class, Japanese colonialization, the "neo-colonial" influence of post-liberation superpowers (Japan and the United States in the South; China and Russia in the North), authoritarian government rule, or, most recently, international pressure on trade issues
  • Korea was on the verge of a cultural, political and social renaissance, led by a number of enlightened intellectuals (e.g. the Kapsin and Kabo reform movements and the Independence Club) who saw the decay of the Choson dynasty and recognized the need to bring Korea out of its self-imposed isolation.
  • Korea was the proverbial "shrimp caught between fighting whales," and the ensuing 35-year-long Japanese colonial period, coupled with Korea's subsequent national division and a devastating civil war, essentially wiped out any possibility of an indigenous movement building a modern, civil society independent of outside interference.
  • Korean development as a modern civil society was thwarted just as it was emerging from the long, slow decline of the Choson dynasty
  • By the end of the 1970s, Korea's economic success seemed to confirm the nationalist model: Korean development, far from being dependent on outside factors (e.g. Chinese suzerainty, Japanese colonialism, etc.), had in fact undergone its own, unique evolution
  • Success in the economic field was matched by discoveries in Korean archaeology, which added a timeless dimension to the debate. The discovery of paleolithic artifacts and the widespread existence of bronze culture in ancient Korea were combined with the existence of private landholding during the Three Kingdoms period and the slow emergence of an upwardly-mobile class system during the Choson dynasty to argue that, far from being stagnant, traditional Korean society, while not exactly dynamic, was at the very least much more fluid
  • Korean history is one of slow but steady indigenous progress toward modern, civil society.
  • minjung, (populist, grassroots, "the masses," etc.) school of historical interpretation. This school emerged out of Korea's rapid economic development, with its uneven distribution of wealth and the rising class-consciousness of Korean workers, combined with popular resentment against continued authoritarian rule and the widely perceived illegitimacy of the Chun Doo-hwan government in the aftermath of the Kwangju Pro-Democracy Uprising in 1980
  • there is no single, encompassing minjung theory, and minjung theorists themselves have had mixed success in gaining widespread respect for their views, possibly in part by a reluctance by more conservative academics to give credibility to a movement admittedly inspired by Marxist ideology
  • the nationalist school was divided over how to interpret the historical legacy of the "practical learning"(silhak) movement of the late Choson period
  • with the election of former pro-democracy opposition leader Kim Young-sam as president in 1992 following his party's merger with Korea's two leading conservative parties, the rise of a dominant Korean middle class and its concomitant influence on policy making, the emergence of a new generation of Koreans unfamiliar with past hardships, and the rise of globalization (and the decline of nationalism) as a defining influence, mainstream Korean society has all but rejected minjung theory.
  • where is a minjung historian to go when his erstwhile victims have gone mainstream and have adopted many of the perspectives of their newfound (middle) class?
  • no single theory is all-encompassing: each explains a part of a much greater whole.
  • colonial historiography explains Korea's relations in an unfriendly international setting, but it does not explain why Korea was unable to better adapt to an admittedly hostile environment.
  • nationalist historiography is also unable to adequately explain why Korea was unable to register impressive economic and political development until after its liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, and even then only in the context of U.S. liberation and protection during the Korean and Cold Wars, and without addressing the roles played by Japanese capital and a receptive U.S. market for Korea's export-led growth
  • it might benefit the would-be scholar to take a multifaceted approach to Korean historiography. At the very least, a comprehensive understanding of these historical schools is in order for any significant understanding of modern Korean history.
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Russia and China are taking different but equally dangerous approaches to coronavirus -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html Authoritarian government china russia coronavirus
shared by johnsonel7 on 27 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • TWO OPPOSING but equally malignant approaches to the coronavirus epidemic are emerging. One would flood the information space with lies, while the other would shut that space down to all voices but one. Their sponsors, not surprisingly, are Russia and China.
  • Evidence suggests Moscow is spreading propaganda designed to stoke anxiety about the virus and distrust in authorities’ efforts to fight it. Meanwhile, citizens in China are suffering not from a deluge of misleading material but from a dearth of open discussion.
  • U.S. officials say thousands of Russian-linked accounts on social media have been posting “almost near identical” messages about the coronavirus in English, Spanish, Italian, German and French — all echoing narratives on state-run media. These stories mostly target the West, alleging, for example, that the virus was forged in a U.S. lab to be unleashed on the Chinese people. Bill Gates and George Soros, in some tellings, were in on the plot.
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  • The Chinese have a different problem. Officials are using their ability to monitor WeChat accounts even outside the country to censor expatriates who share articles critical of President Xi Jinping’s response.
  • China and Russia are modeling the go-to responses authoritarian regimes have adopted in the digital age for robbing the Web of its democratizing power. A government can try to persuade its citizens to believe only what it wants them to, or it can try to persuade them to believe nothing at all. Either tactic, with stakes as high as they are today, could get people killed.
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White House Slaps Sanctions On Belarus Following Brazen Arrest Of Opposition Figure : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...razen-arrest-of-opposition-fig US Politics Belarus Sanctions
shared by yehbru on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The White House on Friday night announced a series of sanctions against Belarus for its forced landing of a Ryanair commercial flight and the subsequent removal and arrest of opposition journalist Roman Protasevich.
  • The Sunday flight diversion, made under the false pretense of a bomb being onboard the aircraft, comes as the government of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko faces growing outcry from the West for the nation's recent crackdowns on free speech and public dissent.
  • In response to Protasevich's arrest, Psaki said the United States had issued a travel advisory urging U.S. citizens not to travel to Belarus, would reimpose sanctions on nine Belarusian state-owned enterprises, and would develop increased sanctions against the Eastern European nation's government, among other actions.
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  • "We call on Lukashenka to allow a credible international investigation into the events of May 23, immediately release all political prisoners, and enter into a comprehensive and genuine political dialogue with the leaders of the democratic opposition and civil society groups that leads to the conduct of free and fair Presidential elections under [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] auspices and monitoring."
  • Lukashenko, a six-term authoritarian whose most recent election win was marred by accusations of ballot rigging, has fashioned himself as an international strongman and is often referred to as Europe's last dictator.
  • While a number of developed nations have sharply criticized Lukashenko's harsh rejection of fundamental democratic principles like free speech, Lukashenko has found allyship in a fellow authoritarian leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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My Never Trump Elegy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616917 elegy 2020 resistance history crisis authoritarian trump gop anti
shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • When my friends—including the few I have left among the conservatives—ask what the Never Trumpers will do now, I say with all honesty that I am not sure.
  • What I do know is that, regardless of what any one of us does individually, two aspects of the Never Trump movement will outlast Trump. First, we will always be able to say that when Trump and his thugs took over the Republican Party and then the elected branches of the United States government, we did not cut and run. We stood and fought.
  • Second, these four years have confirmed to us that Trump’s moral corruption of the Republican Party is total, from top to bottom.
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  • I believe that if all of us had caved, Trump would now be much closer to victory, not just at the polls, but over the Constitution itself. Many of us instead held firm and made the case for democracy and the rule of law from the right flank against our own tribe.
  • We all paid for our dissent, in various ways.
  • While some lost money, all lost friends. A few needed law enforcement to step in because of threats to their lives and to their families.
  • I spent decades studying repressive regimes, but I always did so with the swagger of a man who holds an American passport. Other people had to fight for their rights, not me. Now I was accused of legal wrongdoing for expressing my political views as a private citizen. For the first time in my life, I felt like a dissident.
  • The people I care most about in the world all told me the same thing: Fight.
  • That summer, I sat down with my wife and members of my family. Continuing to write about Trump could mean serious financial hardship. I had a lifetime contract with the Navy, but no contract is unbreakable. We were facing real risk, and I wanted to know their feelings.
  • As they did with all of us in the Never Trump camp, the president’s most fanatical supporters accused me of outright treason. They demanded my arrest. Some sent messages telling me that they looked forward to my official execution or other versions of my untimely death
  • If we’d been in it for our own enrichment, we’d have made the smart play and signed on with Trump, because that’s where the money was right from the start.
  • The experience of fighting taught the Never Trumpers how much the president had poisoned the Republican Party and long ago exposed the character of many of our former comrades. Some turned out to be as racist and authoritarian as Trump himself, while others merely confirmed that they were little more than vacuous opportunists who were capable of betraying the Constitution at will.
  • Whether it is Nikki Haley or Tom Cotton running for president or Fox’s prime-time lineup bolstering Trump’s underlings, for as long as I have a public platform, I will contend that these are people who betrayed the principles of our system of government for their own gain and that my fellow citizens should refuse to give them votes or ratings.
  • As Smiley said over his brandy, “if my past were still around today, you could say I’d failed.” But as the election approaches, I prefer to think about my time as a Never Trumper by recalling the old spy’s final words to those young students:“Never mind. What matters is that a long war is over. What matters is the hope.”
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(1) The Resilience Of Republican Christianism - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...of-republican-christianism-1a5 Christianist worldview GOP trump culture politics US history crisis fundamentalism
shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • I tried to sketch out the essence of an actual conservative sensibility and politics: one of skepticism, limited government and an acceptance of human imperfection.
  • My point was that this conservative tradition had been lost in America, in so far as it had ever been found, because it had been hijacked by religious and political fundamentalism
  • I saw the fundamentalist psyche — rigid, abstract, authoritarian — as integral to the GOP in the Bush years and beyond, a phenomenon that, if sustained, would render liberal democracy practically moribund. It was less about the policy details, which change over time, than an entire worldview.
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  • the intellectual right effectively dismissed the book
  • Here is David Brooks, echoing the conservative consensus in 2006:
  • As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.
  • The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.
  • The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preacher
  • Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.
  • Christianism starts, as critical theory does, by attacking the core of the Founding: in particular, its Enlightenment defense of universal reason, and its revolutionary removal of religion from the state.
  • Mike Johnson’s guru, pseudo-historian David Barton, claims that the Founders were just like evangelicals today, and intended the government at all levels to enforce “Christian values” — primarily, it seems, with respect to the private lives of others. As Pete Wehner notes, “If you listen to Johnson speak on the ‘so-called separation of Church and state’ and claim that ‘the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,’ you will hear echoes of Barton.”
  • Christianism is a way to think about politics without actually thinking. Johnson expressed this beautifully last week: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.
  • this tells us nothing, of course. The Bible demands interpretation in almost every sentence and almost every word; it contains universes of moral thought and thesauri of ambiguous words in a different ancient language; it has no clear blueprint for contemporary American politics, period
  • Yet Johnson uses it as an absolute authority to back up any policy he might support
  • The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism
  • Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.
  • And of course you do what you can to make sure that God’s will be done — by attempting to overturn the election results if necessary.
  • Christianism is a just-so story, with no deep moral conflicts. Material wealth does not pose a moral challenge, for example, as it has done for Christians for millennia. For Christianists, it’s merely proof that God has blessed you and you deserve it.
  • “I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear: that God is the one that raises up those in authority. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.” That means that Trump was blessed by God, and not just by the Electoral College in 2016. And because he was blessed by God, it was impossible that Biden beat him fairly in 2020.
  • More than three-quarters of those representing the most evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three-quarters of the deniers in the caucus hail from evangelical districts.
  • since the Tea Party, the turnover in primary challenges in these evangelical districts has been historic — a RINO-shredding machine. No wonder there were crosses being carried on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. The insurrectionists were merely following God’s will. And Trump’s legal team was filled with the faithful.
  • Tom Edsall shows the skew that has turned American politics into something of a religious war: “When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats and the second quintile by 68 Republicans and 19 Democrats.”
  • the overwhelming majority of the Republican House Caucus (70%) represents the Most Evangelical districts (top two quintiles). Thus, we can see that a group that represents less than 15% of the US population commands 70% of the districts comprising the majority party in the House of Representatives.
  • And almost all those districts are safe as houses. When you add Christianism to gerrymandering, you get a caucus that has no incentive to do anything but perform for the cable shows.
  • This is not a caucus interested in actually doing anything.
  • I don’t know how we best break the grip of the fundamentalist psyche on the right. It’s a deep human tendency — to give over control to a patriarch or a holy book rather than engage in the difficult process of democratic interaction with others, compromise, and common ground.
  • he phenomenon has been given new life by a charismatic con-man in Donald Trump, preternaturally able to corral the cultural fears and anxieties of those with brittle, politicized faith.
  • What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict
  • It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants. Johnson is a reminder of that.
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Opinion | Freedom is a Bad Defense For Ugly Behavior - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...crimination-racism-sexism.html freedom right-wing interpretation culture politics history
shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Each of these actions used the language of freedom to justify anti-democratic politics. These, then, are what I call “ugly freedoms”: used to block the teaching of certain ideas, diminish employees’ ability to have power in the workplace and undermine public health.
  • They manifest, instead, a particular interpretation of freedom that is not expansive, but exclusionary and coercive.
  • there is a long history of ugly freedoms in this country.
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  • From the start of the American experiment the language of freedom applied only to a privileged few.
  • At the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, only 2 percent of the city’s population were qualified to vote.
  • overtake freedom’s meaning entirely, harnessing freedom solely to projects of exclusion, privilege and harm.
  • In the 20th century, racial segregation was justified as the freedom of white people to control public space and make their own business choices.
  • It is true the language of freedom was central to emancipation, suffrage and democratic movements of all kinds, but it has also justified violence and discrimination.
  • more and more laws, caucuses, rallies and hard-right movements use the language of freedom as a cudgel to erode democratic governance and civil rights; these laws expand the creep of authoritarianism.
  • Slave codes allowed white property owners to possess Black humans — creating what the historian Tyler Stovall called “white freedom,” the “belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.” This freedom for the white master extended to torture, rape and lifelong control over the humans he (or she) owned.
  • The ugly freedoms in American politics today increasingly justify minority rule, prejudice and anti-democratic governance. If we don’t push back against their growing popularity, we will have ceded what freedom means to those who support monopolistic rule and furthered the country’s downward slide toward authoritarianism.
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Opinion | MAGA Turns Against the Constitution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...maga-constitution-trump.html constitution power liberty nationalism authoritarian right-wing tyranny class culture politics US history crisis GOP
shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • the problem of public ignorance and fake crises transcends politics. Profound pessimism about the state of the nation is empowering the radical, revolutionary politics that fuels extremists on the right and left.
  • now, for parts of MAGA, the Constitution itself is part of the crisis. If it doesn’t permit Trump to take control, then it must be swept aside.
  • Elements of this argument are now bubbling up across the reactionary, populist right
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  • Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.
  • Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.
  • Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.
  • The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways
  • if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.
  • Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing
  • its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.
  • Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.
  • The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.
  • Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.
  • As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.
  • The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.
  • But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.
  • decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.
  • And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.
  • So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty
  • One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.
  • Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.
  • The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous
  • Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.
  • Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.
  • Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.
  • At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.
  • An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.
  • Now they don’t have that same control
  • Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.
  • when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.
  • “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.
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How Democracies Perish - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...how-democracies-perish.html liberalism community values tradition norms religion alienation crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Everybody agrees society is in a bad way, but what exactly is the main cause of the badness?
  • People like me emphasize cultural issues. If you have 60 years of radical individualism and ruthless meritocracy, you’re going to end up with a society that is atomized, distrustful and divided.
  • But some emphasize the intellectual. The people who designed our liberal democratic system made fundamental errors, which are now coming home to roost. Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen falls into this camp.
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  • His new book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” is a challenge to those of us who want to revive the liberal democratic order.
  • Deneen argues that liberal democracy has betrayed its promises. It was supposed to foster equality, but it has led to great inequality and a new aristocracy. It was supposed to give average people control over government, but average people feel alienated from government. It was supposed to foster liberty, but it creates a degraded popular culture in which consumers become slave to their appetites.
  • The problem, Deneen argues, started at the beginning. Greek and medieval philosophies valued liberty, but they understood that before a person could help govern society, he had to be able to govern himself.
  • People had to be habituated in virtue by institutions they didn’t choose — family, religion, community, social norms.
  • But under the influence of Machiavelli and Locke, the men who founded our system made two fateful errors. First, they came to reject the classical and religious idea that people are political and relational creatures. Instead, they placed the autonomous, choosing individual at the center of their view of human nature.
  • Furthermore, they decided you couldn’t base a system of government on something as unreliable as virtue. But you could base it on something low and steady like selfishness.
  • You could pit interest against interest and create a stable machine. You didn’t have to worry about creating noble citizens; you could get by with rationally self-interested ones.
  • When communism and fascism failed in the 20th century, this version of liberalism seemed triumphant. But it was a Pyrrhic victory
  • Liberalism claims to be neutral but it’s really anti-culture. It detaches people from nature, community, tradition and place. It detaches people from time.
  • Once family and local community erode and social norms dissolve, individuals are left naked and unprotected.
  • They seek solace in the state. They toggle between impersonal systems: globalized capitalism and the distant state. As the social order decays, people grasp for the security of authoritarianism.
  • He urges people to dedicate themselves instead to local community — a sort of Wendell Berry agrarianism.
  • Deneen’s book is valuable because it focuses on today’s central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order
  • Nonetheless, he is wrong. Liberal democracy has had a pretty good run for 300 years. If the problem were really in the roots, wouldn’t it have shown up before now?
  • The difficulties stem not from anything inherent in liberalism but from the fact that we have neglected the moral order and the vision of human dignity embedded within liberalism itself.
  • , liberal democracy contains a rich and soul-filling version of human flourishing and solidarity, which Deneen airbrushes from history.
  • the liberal democratic moral order stands for the idea that souls are formed in freedom and not in servility, in expansiveness, not in stagnation.
  • It stands for the idea that our covenantal institutions — like family, faith, tradition and community — orient us toward higher loves and common dreams that we then pursue in the great gymnasium of liberty.
  • Yes, liberalism sometimes sits in tension with faith, tradition, family and community, which Deneen rightly cherishes. But liberalism is not their murderer.
  • there are community healers in towns and cities concretely living out the liberal democratic vision of the good life — deeply embedded in their communities, surrendered to their ideals, reaching out to other communities, growing in their freedom.
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Opinion: Why Biden must stop Erdogan's abuse of counterterrorism rhetoric - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by mattrenz16 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • After 13 Turkish hostages were found dead in Northern Iraq on Feb. 14, Turkey arrested hundreds of people, including prominent members of the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). The government even opened investigations into HDP members of parliament and human rights activists Hüda Kaya and Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, who had actively fought alongside the victims' families to bring the hostages home safely.
  • According to the Turkish Association of Journalists' Annual Media Monitoring Report, one in six journalists are currently on trial in Turkey. Since 2016, at least 160 media outlets have been closed. The Turkey representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Erol Önderoğlu, responsible for monitoring and advocating for press freedom in the country, is currently on trial and facing up to 14 years in prison on charges of "propagandizing for a terrorist organization," "openly inciting to commit crimes" and "praising the crime and the criminal."
  • His organization says Önderoğlu and his co-defendants face these "spurious charges" solely for guest editing a newspaper that was forced to close after the attempted coup. Can Dündar, another prominent veteran journalist and editor of a paper that has seen nearly half of its staff imprisoned, was sentenced in December to more than 27 years in prison on terrorism charges. In November, an appeals court upheld a life sentence against Hidayet Karaca, a journalist and president of a now-closed TV broadcasting group. On Feb. 15, three former staffers of a shuttered newspaper, along with co-chief editor and human rights lawyer Eren Keskin, were sentenced to a combined 20 years and 10 months in prison on terrorism charges.
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  • The remaining platforms for discussion in Turkey are rapidly shrinking. The government is cracking down on social media, and thousands could be arrested and charged with insulting the President or spreading terrorist propaganda. Human Rights Watch notes that hundreds are being investigated or detained by police for social media posts deemed to "create fear and panic" about Covid-19, some of which included criticism of the government's response to the pandemic.
  • Turkey is now expanding its powers to crush civil society under the guise of "combatting terrorism" with a new bill authorizing the government to block the donations and assets of non-government organizations like human rights groups and close them if members are charged with terrorism. The law was introduced after Turkey already shut down and seized the assets of at least 1,500 NGOs between 2016 and 2019.
  • The US cannot cooperate on security matters with a country that has justified human rights abuses under the banner of counterterrorism and lost all credibility on real terror threats -- thereby undermining the broader NATO alliance. Biden should also press for the release of political prisoners at the forefront of the struggle for freedom in Turkey.
  • As a bipartisan majority of the Senate put it in a recent letter to the President, Biden should urge the Turkish government to "end their crackdown on dissent... release political prisoners... and reverse their authoritarian course." Otherwise, Turkey will continue to exploit tragedies like the deaths of hostages to further entrench Erdogan's rule through the guise of "counterterrorism" to the detriment of its citizens.
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'Patriots' Only: Beijing Plans Overhaul of Hong Kong's Elections - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-hong-kong-elections.html china hong kong elections
shared by ethanshilling on 23 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • China’s Communist Party already wields outsized influence over Hong Kong’s political landscape. Its allies have long controlled a committee that handpicks the territory’s leader.
  • Now, China plans to impose restrictions on Hong Kong’s electoral system to root out candidates the Communist Party deems disloyal, a move that could block democracy advocates in the city from running for any elected office.
  • The latest planned overhaul seeks to prevent such electoral upsets and, more important, would also give Beijing a much tighter grip on the 1,200-member committee that will decide early next year who will be the city’s chief executive for the next five years.
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  • The central government wants Hong Kong to be run by “patriots,” Mr. Xia said, and will not let the Hong Kong government rewrite the territory’s laws, as previously expected, but will do so itself.
  • When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the territory was promised a high degree of autonomy, in addition to the preservation of its capitalist economic system and the rule of law.
  • But in the decades since, many among the city’s 7.5 million residents have grown wary of Beijing’s encroachment on their freedoms and unfulfilled promises of universal suffrage.
  • Collectively, those efforts are transforming Hong Kong’s freewheeling, often messy partial democracy into a political system more closely resembling mainland China’s authoritarian system, which demands almost total obedience.
  • Mr. Lau, a former senior Hong Kong official, said the Chinese legislature, the National People’s Congress, would probably move to create a high-level group of government officials with the legal authority to investigate every candidate for public office and determine whether each candidate is genuinely loyal to Beijing
  • China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, raised the issue in late January with Mrs. Lam, telling her that having patriots govern Hong Kong was the only way to ensure the city’s long-term stability.
  • “You cannot say, ‘I’m patriotic but I don’t respect the fact that it is the Chinese Communist Party which leads the country,’” Erick Tsang, Hong Kong’s secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs, said at a news conference.
  • “I can only say people worry about that — for example, whether criticism of Communist Party or the political system in China would be regarded as not patriotic, then they have this kind of self-censorship,” said Ivan Choy, a senior lecturer in government and public administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
  • “It’s just in connection with these two major and important matters,” Mr. Chow said. “I still believe that, going forward, we still have a role to play.”
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Opinion | The Israel-Hamas War Was Not Inevitable - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-hamas-war.html israel gaza choices history policy politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players
  • Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.
  • If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade
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  • This is triggering a U.S.-China cold war, mass migrations from south to north and an America that has become more unreliable than indispensable.
  • that’s not the half of it. Because now that advanced military technologies like drones are readily available, smaller players can wield much more power and project it more widely than ever before, enabling even their bad choices to shake the world
  • This is why I referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as our first true world war, and why I feel that Hamas’s war with Israel is in some ways our second true world war.
  • They are being fought on both physical battlefields and digital ones, with huge global reach and implications.
  • Indeed, in today’s tightly wired world, it is possible that the war over the Gaza Strip — which is roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. — could decide the next president in Washington, D.C., as some young Democrats abandon President Biden because of his support for Israel.
  • before we become too pessimistic, let us remember that these choices are just that: choices. There was nothing inevitable or foreordained about them
  • Gorbachev, Deng, Anwar el-Sadat, Menachem Begin, George H.W. Bush and Volodymyr Zelensky, to name but a few, faced excruciating choices, but they chose forks in the road that led to a safer and more prosperous world, at least for a time
  • What is the essential ingredient that Dubai has and Gaza lacks? Because both began, in one sense, as the convergence of sand and seawater at crucial intersections of the world.
  • The short answer is visionary leadership.Dubai has benefited from two generations of monarchs in the United Arab Emirates who had a powerful vision of how the U.A.E. in general and the emirate of Dubai in particular could choose to be Arab, modern, pluralistic, globalized and embracing of a moderate interpretation of Islam
  • Their formula incorporates a radical openness to the world, an emphasis on free markets and education, a ban on extremist political Islam, relatively little corruption, a strong rule of law promulgated from the top down and a relentless commitment to economic diversification, talent recruitment and development.
  • Any of Dubai’s neighbors — Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Iran and Saudi Arabia — could have done the same with their similar coastlines, but it was the U.A.E. that pulled it off by making the choices it made.
  • Compare that with Gaza, where the role models today are Hamas martyrs in its endless war with Israel.
  • Among the most ignorant and vile things that have been said about this Gaza war is that Hamas had no choice — that its wars with Israel, culminating on Oct. 7 with a murderous rampage, the kidnappings of Israelis as young as 10 months and as old as 86 and the rape of Israeli women, could somehow be excused as a justifiable jailbreak by pent-up males.
  • Let’s go to the videotape: In September 2005, Ariel Sharon completed a unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza, which Israel occupied in the 1967 war. In short order, Hamas began attacking the crossing points between Gaza and Israel to show that even if Israel was gone, the resistance movement wasn’t over; these crossing points were a lifeline for commerce and jobs, and Israel eventually reduced the number of crossings from six to two.
  • In January 2006, the Palestinians held elections hoping to give the Palestinian Authority legitimacy to run Gaza and the West Bank. There was a debate among Israeli, Palestinian and Bush administration officials over whether Hamas should be allowed to run in the elections — because it had rejected the Oslo peace accords with Israel.
  • Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli architects of Oslo, told me that he and others argued that Hamas should not be allowed to run, as did many members of Fatah, Arafat’s group, who had embraced Oslo and recognized Israel. But the Bush team insisted that Hamas be permitted to run without embracing Oslo, hoping that it would lose and this would be its ultimate refutation.
  • Fatah ran unrealistically high numbers of candidates in many districts, dividing the vote, while the more disciplined Hamas ran carefully targeted slates and managed to win the parliamentary majority.
  • Hamas then faced a critical choice: Now that it controlled the Palestinian parliament, it could work within the Oslo Accords and the Paris protocol that governed economic ties between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — or not.
  • Hamas chose not to — making a clash between Hamas and Fatah, which supported Oslo, inevitable
  • That led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza — and what would be 22 years of on-and-off Hamas rocket attacks, Israeli checkpoint openings and closings, wars and cease-fires, all culminating on Oct. 7.
  • These were fateful choices. Once Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza, Palestinians were left, for the first time ever, with total control over a piece of land. Yes, it was an impoverished slice of sand and coastal seawater, with some agricultural areas. And it was not the ancestral home of most of its residents. But it was theirs to build anything they wanted.
  • Hamas had a choice: to replicate Dubai in 2023 or replicate Hanoi in 1968. It chose to replicate Hanoi, whose Củ Chi tunnel network served as the launchpad for the ’68 Tet offensive.
  • Hamas is not simply engaged in some pure-as-the-driven-snow anticolonial struggle against Israel. Only Hamas’s useful idiots on U.S. college campuses would believe that.
  • Hamas is engaged in a raw power struggle with Fatah over who will control Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s engaged in a power struggle in the region — alongside other pro-Muslim Brotherhood parties and regimes (like Turkey and Qatar) — against pro-Western monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the U.A.E. and military-led regimes like Egypt’s.
  • In that struggle, Hamas wanted Gaza isolated and in conflict with Israel because that allowed Hamas to maintain its iron-fisted political and Islamist grip over the strip, foregoing elections and controlling all the smuggling routes in and out, which funded its tunnels and war machine and the lifestyle of its leaders and loyalists
  • The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — or a whole new P.L.O.-appointed government of Palestinian technocrats — in partnership with moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But when I raise that with many Israelis right now, they tell me, “Tom, it’s not the time. No one wants to hear it.”
  • please, spare me the Harvard Yard nonsense that this war is all about the innocent, colonized oppressed and the evil, colonizing oppressors; that Israel alone was responsible for the isolation of Gaza; and that the only choice Hamas had for years was to create an underground “skyline” of tunnels up to 230 feet deep (contra Dubai) and that its only choice on Oct. 7 was martyrdom.
  • But our story about agency and choices does not stop there. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister — 16 years — also made choices. And even before this war, he made terrible ones — for Israel and for Jews all over the world.
  • Before this war, Netanyahu actively worked to keep the Palestinians divided and weak by strengthening Hamas in Gaza with billions of dollars from Qatar, while simultaneously working to discredit and delegitimize the more moderate Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, committed to Oslo and nonviolence in the West Bank.
  • Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all. In that, Bibi and Hamas have always needed each other: Bibi to tell the United States and Israelis that he had no choice, and Hamas to tell Gazans and its new and naïve supporters around the world that the Palestinians’ only choice was armed struggle led by Hamas.
  • This is now a common strategy for consolidating and holding power forever by a single political faction and disguising it with an ideology of resistance. It’s no wonder they all support one another.
  • Don’t they get it? Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement has been to persuade Israelis and the world that it’s never the right time to talk about the morally corrosive occupation and how to help build a credible Palestinian partner to take it off Israel’s hands.
  • He and the settlers wore everyone down. When I covered the State Department in the early 1990s, West Bank settlements were routinely described by U.S. officials as “obstacles to peace.” But that phrase was gradually dropped. The Trump administration even decided to stop calling the West Bank “occupied” territory.
  • Israel is being surrounded by what I call Iran’s landcraft carriers (as opposed to our aircraft carriers): Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran is squeezing Israel into a multifront war with its proxies. I truly worry for Israel.
  • But Israel will have neither the sympathy of the world that it needs nor the multiple allies it needs to confront this Iranian octopus, nor the Palestinian partners it needs to govern any post-Hamas Gaza, nor the lasting support of its best friend in the world, Joe Biden, unless it is ready to choose a long-term pathway for separating from the Palestinians with an improved, legitimate Palestinian partner.
  • For all these reasons, if Netanyahu keeps refusing because, once again, politically, the time is not right for him, Biden will have to choose, too — between America’s interests and Netanyahu’s.
  • In sum, this war is so ugly, deadly and painful, it is no wonder that so many Palestinians and Israelis want to just focus on survival and not on any of the choices that got them here
  • The Haaretz writer Dahlia Scheindlin put it beautifully in a recent essay:The situation today is so terrible that people run from reality as they run from rockets — and hide in the shelter of their blind spots. It’s pointless to wag fingers. The only thing left to do is try and change that reality.
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