#Partisan politics in contemporary America | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mariacallous · 5 months

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Moments before the kickoff of the 118th United States Congress in January, incoming GOP leaders ripped down Nancy Pelosi’s post-insurrection magnetometers, which had stopped at least one Republican, Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, from entering the House floor with a handgun. The first meeting of the House Natural Resources Committee, held on February 1, devolved into partisan vitriol as Republicans reversed an explicit ban on members bringing firearms into their hearings. Soon, AR-15 pins started popping up on rank-and-file lapels. Then, two weeks later, a bill was introduced to make the mass-shooter-approved AR-15 the “national gun of the United States.”

This may be Joe Biden’s Washington, but the US Capitol appears to be, once again, under the firm grip of the gun lobby. With repeated threats of federal government defaults and shutdowns consuming Washington throughout 2023, little attention has been paid to specific agency-by-agency spending proposals, including a House Republican proposal to zero out funding for gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That effort, part of a House appropriations bill, was postponed after Congress passed a short-term extension to fund the federal government into early next year. But that doesn't mean it won't return then, with powerful Republican lawmakers painting the CDC's research as overtly partisan.

“I think it may have a political component, and that's my concern,” Representative Robert Aderholt, an Alabama Republican, tells WIRED. He’s known as a cardinal on Capitol Hill because he chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, which is tasked with producing the nation’s largest domestic funding measure, including control of the CDC’s budget, each year.

The powerful appropriator isn’t thoroughly versed in the gun violence research his subcommittee is trying to defund, but Aderholt is skeptical anyway. “If it were just honest, innocent research, then I wouldn’t have a problem,” Aderholt says. “But I have some concerns with the way that it’s being handled under this administration.”

Thing is, no one really knows what story the CDC research will tell. It’s only been around for three years after nearly a quarter-century of congressional prohibition under the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which essentially barred the CDC from examining the roots of the uniquely American scourge of gun violence.

“This is about public health,” Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the labor committee, tells WIRED. “We haven’t had it for 20 years. Think about all the research that was done about seatbelts and prevention. So I think about what’s happening with the uptick in gun violence, which is unbelievable … we need to do the research to help us be able to prevent that.”

In 2018, lawmakers upended the Dickey Amendment, explicitly clarifying that the will of Congress is for the CDC to research the contemporary weaponization of America. But federal dollars—which, contrary to GOP concerns, are still strictly forbidden from being used to promote gun control—didn’t start flowing to researchers until 2021. Democrats have pushed for $50 million annually to research America’s second-leading cause of death for people 18 years old or younger. (The first is motor vehicle accidents, which Congress devoted $109.7 million to research in the 2022 fiscal year.) But for the past three years, they’ve only been able to squeeze $25 million a year—split between the CDC and National Institutes of Health—out of Republican senators.

With more than 39,000 gun-related deaths so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, America’s on pace to endure another record-setting amount of carnage by year’s end, which you wouldn’t know from the giddily gun-friendly mood on the House side of the Capitol. “I think the Republicans are just nuts on this, you know, the extremes,” Mike Thompson, a Democratic representative from California, tells WIRED. Nuts or not, Republicans control the House.

Even through the tears stemming from America’s recent uptick in gun violence—including homicides, suicides, and mass shootings—the past three years have been an exciting time for researchers in this space, because when the federal government leads, university research follows. The two-plus decades drought has rippled through academia.

“People weren't going into this field because you couldn't make a career in it,” Andrew Morral, who runs RAND Corporation’s Gun Policy in America Initiative, tells WIRED. “It’s the kind of thing where it takes a fair amount of research before you start getting believable findings. I mean, you can have a study or two that show something, but in social science, it's very hard for one or two studies to persuade anyone.”

Morral is also director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, which is philanthropically endowed with $21 million earmarked for firearm violence prevention research. A few years back, he led a conference with “30 to 100 people.” At the start of the month, when they held their annual meeting in Chicago, there were 750 attendees, including some 300 presenters whose studies ranged from how “guns provide access to sources of life meaning” for some Floridians to whether there’s any correlation between heat waves and shootings.

“A lot of new questions are being asked and new ways of looking at things—this just wasn't possible five years ago,” Morral says. “There [are] people coming into the field now, and that's what the money is doing. It's making it possible to get this field launched. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit here, but it's going to take a lot of research to start getting persuasive findings and it's starting to happen.”

In the wake of horrific mass shootings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, last year, before the GOP recaptured the House, Congress passed the sweeping Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), aimed at improving the nation’s background check system, stymieing gun traffickers, protecting domestic violence survivors, and enhancing mental health services in local communities and schools from coast to coast.

The measure includes billions for mental health, $250 million for community violence intervention programs, and $300 million for violence prevention in the nation’s schools. It also recognizes the federal deficiency in school safety research by creating a Federal School Safety Clearinghouse, envisioned as a repository for the best “evidence-based” research for keeping violence off American school grounds.

That best-practices clearinghouse for schools was a GOP-sponsored provision that made it into the BSCA, but, as WIRED reported last summer, studying gun violence wasn’t a part of negotiations on the measure aimed at curbing gun violence. This latest effort by House Republicans to effectively bar the CDC from researching gun violence has social scientists worried about the real-life consequences of turning off the federal funding tap again. The two Senate Republicans who negotiated the BSCA aren’t worried.

“People misuse research every day,” Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, tells WIRED. The other Republican who had a seat at the head table for last summer’s gun negotiations is one of minority leader Mitch McConnell’s top lieutenants, John Cornyn of Texas—a leading contender for replacing the ailing GOP leader in the Senate—who shrugs off CDC gun violence research. “I don't think there's any shortage of research in that area,” Cornyn tells WIRED. But he bifurcates gun violence research from gun violence prevention. “We haven't been able to figure out how to solve all the crimes. Basically, we've tried to deter them, we've tried to investigate and prosecute them, but we haven't been able to figure out how to prevent them. So that's the basic problem, I think.”

Democrats agree. They also say the reason for that “basic problem” is clear: The CDC—through the chilling effect the federal prohibition had on academia over 24 years—has failed to foster a robust research environment to accompany America’s robust gun culture. But Democrats aren’t looking to pass reforms this Congress. Sure, they want to. But the House is barely performing at its normal rate of functional-dysfunctionality these days (just ask newly-former House speaker Kevin McCarthy). Senate Democrats are willing to have a gun violence prevention debate, but as of now, many say there’s no reason to try and debate House Republicans.

“They're not writing bills that are designed to pass the Senate in order to get signed by the president. They're literally throwing red meat to the fringe on every conceivable issue. That's just not serious,” Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who was at the center of last summer’s gun reform negotiations, tells WIRED. “At some point, they're going to have to figure out how to pass a bill with us, but they haven't reached that space yet.”

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theculturedmarxist · 9 months

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The Rise of the Young, Liberal, Nonwhite Republican?

The Republican coalition isn’t quite what it used to be. For decades, white college graduates gradually exited red America while non-college-educated whites drifted in. Donald Trump’s nomination then accelerated this long-run trend, increasing the GOP’s advantage with working-class whites in the secular north. In 2020, meanwhile, Trump made inroads with Hispanic voters, thinning the Democratic Party’s margin with that heterogeneous demographic by 8 percentage points.

In a new analysis of survey data, the New York Times maps the contours of the contemporary Republican electorate. Some of its findings give conservatives cause for concern. The new GOP coalition has considerable internal ideological tensions. The party now derives 12 percent of its support from a group that the paper dubs “blue-collar populists”: a mostly northern, socially moderate, economically populist contingent whose attachment to Republican politics derives primarily from their rightwing views on race and immigration, and personal affection for Donald Trump. In the Electoral College, this constituency punches above its weight, as it is disproportionately concentrated in the Rust Belt’s battlegrounds.

A majority of this group supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage. This aversion to bible-thumping moralism helped tie a segment of these voters to the Democratic Party before Trump’s emergence. To the extent that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade increases the salience of reproductive rights, and Trump’s eventual exit from GOP politics weakens blue-collar populists’ emotional identification with the party, Republicans could lose ground with them. Indeed, in last year’s midterm elections, Democrats performed better in heavily blue-collar Midwest states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than they did nationally.

But the New York Times-Siena College poll also gives Democrats some cause for anxiety. The survey suggests that nonwhite, working-class Americans are starting to vote more like their light-skinned peers. In 2020, nonwhite, non-college-educated voters backed Joe Biden over Trump by a 48-point margin. Today, this group backs by Biden by merely 16 points, according to the survey. This erosion in the Democrats’ support among nonwhite voters leaves Biden and Trump tied at 43 percent nationally.

The realignment of some nonwhite voters appears to be partially driven by self-identified conservatives cutting ties with the party of their parents in favor of the one best aligned with their social views. In the Times survey, three quarters of nonwhite, non-college-educated voters identified as moderate and conservative. Historically, the Democratic Party has relied on the support of Hispanic and (especially) Black voters who lean right on most policy questions but whose racial identities and familial attachments have tethered them to blue America. In 2020, Democrats bled many such voters, as Trump won over right-leaning Latinos. The Times survey suggests a continuation of this trend.

More surprisingly, the poll suggests that Republicans are winning a non-negligible percentage of young, nonwhite voters with left-of-center views on public policy. According to the Times’s Nate Cohn, eight percent of Republican voters are “newcomers,” a subset characterized by moderate-to-liberal views on economics, immigration, race, and social issues. Only about 60 percent of this group is white, and a quarter are younger than 30.,

In their policy views, these voters resemble Democrats. Only a minority identify as conservative, and most support immigration reform and transgender rights. And yet they are strong Republican partisans and supporters of Donald Trump. The source of this allegiance is unclear. But of the six types of Republicans that Cohn identified, they were among the most emphatically anti- “woke.”,,

Now, we’re looking at one small subset of voters from a single poll. The margin of error here is so high that the existence of this voter group could be illusory. But it does seem possible that, among America’s youngest voters, the most overbearing forms of progressive discourse have acquired more political salience than concrete questions of public policy.,

Regardless, there has long been reason to worry that the Democratic Party would struggle to perpetually maintain its landslide margins among nonwhite voters in general, and Black ones in particular. Keeping 90-plus percent of any subgroup united in one partisan camp takes work. The reason Democrats have managed to perennially win that high of a share of African-American voters — despite considerable ideological and attitudinal diversity within that demographic — is not that each individual African-American Democrat concluded that the GOP was hostile to people like them through their own personal ruminations on current affairs. Rather, as political scientists Ismail K. White and Cheryl N. Laird argue in their book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, the Black bloc vote is a product of “racialized social constraint” — which is to say, the process by which African-American communities internally police norms of political behavior through social rewards and penalties. In their account, the exceptional efficacy of such norm enforcement within the Black community reflects the extraordinary degree of Black social cohesion that slavery and segregation fostered.,

If this thesis is correct, then it would follow that the erosion of African-Americans’ social isolation, and the declining cultural influence of community institutions such as the Black church, would weaken racialized social constraint, and thus narrow the Democratic Party’s margin with Black voters. And it is plausible that a similar phenomenon might occur within Hispanic communities with longtime ties to the Democrats.,

In such a scenario, one thing we’d expect to see is more political diversity among younger non-white voters, who came of age at a time of greater social atomization and racial integration, and are less likely to regularly attend church or have an ethnically homogenous social world. This relaxation of ethnic social constraints could make it easier for ideologically conservative nonwhites to support the Republican Party. But it could also introduce more random variation into the voting behavior of younger, nonwhite Americans. Uncompelled by ancestral partisan attachments, some voters may be more likely to heed idiosyncratic (or irrational) political impulses, such as those that would compel a self-identified liberal to support Donald Trump.,

As noted above, there are plenty of political trends that look favorable for Democrats, above all the exceptional liberalism of the Zoomer and Millennial generations writ large. But if Trump does manage to win reelection next year, there’s a good chance that nonwhite voters’ loosening attachments to their inherited partisan identities will be a big part of the story.

#democrats #voting #2024 presidential election

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ausetkmt · 2 months

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Should America Pay Reparations Now?

The subject of reparations for Black Americans is a complex and deeply debated issue in the United States, rooted in the country's history of slavery and systemic discrimination. Here's a breakdown of the key points and arguments, without taking a definitive stance:

Arguments in Favor of Reparations

Moral Imperative: Advocates argue that reparations are a way to acknowledge the centuries of unpaid labor, suffering, and systemic discrimination endured by enslaved Africans and their descendants. They emphasize that the legacy of slavery continues to manifest as a racial wealth gap and other socioeconomic disparities.

Economic Justice: Proponents contend that reparations would help address the persistent economic inequality between Black and white Americans. The wealth gap resulting from historical injustices directly impacts opportunities for housing, education, and well-being.

Historical Precedent: There are instances where governments have offered reparations to groups who have suffered historical injustices, such as the compensation for Japanese Americans interned during World War II.

Arguments Against Reparations

Practical Challenges: Opponents raise concerns about the difficulties in determining who qualifies for reparations and how they should be distributed.

Divisiveness: Some believe reparations could fuel racial tensions rather than bring healing and reconciliation.

Accountability: The argument is made that since those who directly committed the injustices of slavery are long dead, present-day Americans should not bear responsibility.

Forms of Reparations

Proposed forms of reparations go beyond direct financial payments and include:

Investments in Black communities: Funding for education, housing, business development, and healthcare in underserved Black communities.

Apologies and Acknowledgement: Formal apologies from the government for slavery and its ongoing legacy.

Educational Initiatives: Comprehensive education on the history of slavery and its influence on contemporary American society.

How Much and When?

No Consensus: There is no clear agreement on the amount or timing of reparations. Estimates vary widely, with some advocates calling for trillions of dollars, while others suggest more targeted programs.

Ongoing debate: This remains a highly contentious topic. Organizations and politicians are engaged in ongoing discussions on whether reparations are due, the best way to implement them, and the appropriate amount.

Important Considerations

The reparations debate is multifaceted. It's crucial to approach it with an understanding of the historical context, the ongoing impact of systemic racism, and the diverse range of perspectives on this complex issue.

The potential social and political implications of paying reparations to Black Americans are significant and far-reaching. Here's a breakdown of some of the key areas that would likely be affected:

Social Implications

Racial Reconciliation: Reparations could be a step towards acknowledging and addressing the deep-seated pain and trauma of slavery and its enduring legacy. It could potentially help move the nation towards greater racial healing.

Empowerment of Black Communities: Investment in historically disadvantaged communities could lead to significant improvements in education, housing, business ownership, and healthcare. This could help level the playing field and reduce the persistent racial wealth gap.

Shift in Narratives: Reparations could trigger a shift in the national narrative around race and the history of slavery. This could lead to more comprehensive and honest education about these issues.

Potential Backlash: There's a risk of backlash from those who oppose reparations, potentially leading to increased racial tensions and resentment.

Political Implications

Partisan Divide: Reparations are a highly divisive issue, mainly along partisan lines. Democrats generally tend to be more supportive of reparations, while Republicans are generally opposed. This could become a further wedge issue between the two major political parties.

Shift in Political Power: Successful implementation of reparations could lead to increased political power and influence for Black communities. This may impact voting patterns and political representation.

Mobilization: The debate over reparations could galvanize political activism both for and against the issue. This could significantly impact elections, policymaking, and political discourse.

International Attention: Reparations could draw international attention and potentially spur similar discussions in other countries with histories of slavery and racial injustice.

Challenges and Considerations

Determining Eligibility: Implementing a reparations program would involve complex debates about who is eligible, based on factors like ancestry and the extent of harm suffered.

Form of Reparations: Decisions would need to be made about the appropriate forms of reparations, whether direct payments, investments in communities, or a combination of approaches.

Political Will: Building the necessary political will for a reparations program would be a significant challenge, given the current polarization of American politics.

In Conclusion

The social and political implications of paying reparations to Black Americans would be profound and complex. While the concept has the potential to initiate healing and address historical injustice, it also carries the risk of division and backlash. The debate about reparations is likely to continue as a significant social and political issue in the years to come.

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Google wrote this short essay, so when you are looking for clarity on issues, use google to find the talking points first; and then expand on them with historical context and signifiers.

FREE THE LAND / REPARATIONS NOW!

#REPARATIONS NOW #Free The Land #Reparations Are Due #Black Americans Demand Reparations #Reparations

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denimbex1986 · 10 months

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'The new film Oppenheimer is the buzz of Hollywood and a clear frontrunner for Best Picture. Closely hewing to the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography American Prometheus (to which this essay is indebted and quotes from to fill in gaps), the film tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership of the team that created the first atomic bomb and the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) hearings in which he was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and stripped of his security clearance. The chief antagonist of the film is Lewis Strauss. Played by Robert Downey Jr. in a turn that deserves a Best Supporting Actor nod, Strauss is a politico who scurrilously plots and successfully portrays Oppenheimer’s past sympathies toward Communism as a contemporary security risk, thereby creating skeletons in his own closet.

The film raises more moral and political questions than can be addressed here. Can “great” men be “good”? Why do great men so often fail as husbands and fathers? (Unfortunately—and uncharacteristically for a Christopher Nolan film—Oppenheimer’s extramarital affairs are portrayed with gratuitous sexuality.) How much is a man defined by past indiscretions? Was the impulse to smoke out Communist subversives from the American security apparatus fundamentally sound but misapplied in cases like Oppenheimer’s? Indeed, several Communist spies were discovered and convicted for nuclear espionage, including agents who had infiltrated the Manhattan Project and passed on secrets to the Soviets. Or was the impulse fundamentally flawed because it was incompatible with free speech and inevitably oriented toward illegal weaponization of law enforcement against political enemies, partisan witch hunts, and a culture of hysteria? Indeed, Oppenheimer’s kangaroo-court spectacle embodied the worst excesses of McCarthyism.

And, of course, the film explores the most pressing question at the center of Oppenheimer’s legacy, which has been debated for seventy-eight years: Should America have dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In this two-part essay, I argue that Oppenheimer’s story, like the story of the bomb, is a case study in the perils of science and reason when they are decoupled from and untutored by faith and true religion.

Oppenheimer, played in an Oscar-worthy performance by Cillian Murphy, was a larger than life figure whose success story was characteristically American. Born in New York City in 1904 to a first-generation Jewish immigrant father and self-made businessman and a Jewish artist mother, he was educated in the Ethical Culture Society, a secular Jewish community dedicated to progressive values and social justice. His precocity was evident from a young age, and he acquired a liberal education, mastering ancient and modern languages and was broadly read in European literature and poetry. But his true gift was in theoretical physics. By twenty-five, he had graduated from Harvard, acquired a Ph.D. at Gottingen, distinguished himself in the field, and was on his way to creating one of the finest academic programs in physics in the world at UC-Berkeley.

Oppenheimer does a good job of portraying the high drama of theoretical physics in the 1920s and 30s. It was a heady time for the field, which had undergone a scientific revolution in recent years. Physicists like Niels Bohr had shown that classical mechanics did not explain phenomena observed at the quantum level. But the film only hints at Oppenheimer’s religious-like faith in the new science.

When a friend pressed a young Oppenheimer about his own religious beliefs, specifically, about whether he believed in God, he replied: “I believe in the second law of thermodynamics, in Hamilton’s Principle, in Bertrand Russell . . . ” And later Oppenheimer was known to say that Bohr was “his God.” At Berkeley, it was believed by his students that Bohr’s Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature was the Bible, Bohr was God, and Oppenheimer was his prophet.

After German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman published their experiments on atomic fission in 1938, Oppenheimer immediately realized an atomic bomb could be created. He was eventually recruited by the gruff and severe General Leslie Groves (played excellently by Matt Damon) to lead the top-secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico—part town, part military base in the middle of the desert constructed in 1942 to house hundreds of scientists and their families to work full time on creating an atomic bomb. Throughout these years, Oppenheimer and his team’s motivation had the moral clarity of survival: the very existence of the West was at stake if the Nazis acquired a bomb before they did.

But when the Nazis surrendered in May 1945, the bomb was still months away from being ready for testing. This threw Oppenheimer and many of his fellow politically liberal scientists into moral perplexity. Was the bomb really necessary to defeat Japan? After all, no one believed they had a secret bomb program. If not, then perhaps bombing Japan could serve as a form of nuclear diplomacy toward the Russians (i.e., to keep the Soviets out of Japan and deter them from aggression in Europe)?

The latter argument apparently did not carry much moral weight with Oppenheimer. For, while Oppenheimer was slowly awakening to the true nature of Stalin’s Russia, like many American New Deal liberals, he had been sympathetic to Soviet Russia’s experiment in combining socialism with power. Moreover, the Soviets were still ostensibly our allies in the summer of 1945. Indeed, Oppenheimer favored the idea of sharing information about the atomic bomb with Russia and brokering a Soviet-American agreement on international control of nuclear power.

Oppenheimer had limited information about Japan, and we cannot know how he would have reasoned had he been apprised of the possibility or probability that Japan’s surrender could have been negotiated without an invasion. Meanwhile, he was aware of and moved by Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s argument that, assuming an invasion would otherwise be necessary to subdue Japan, the bomb would save the lives of hundreds of thousands of American troops. (In retrospect, Stimson’s argument that the bomb was effectively the “lesser evil” could be enhanced by updating the calculus to include all the Japanese lives potentially saved not only from a continued land war, but also those who were saved from being captured by the Russian Army, enslaved, and sent to Soviet labor camps.)

What we do know is that the calculus of lives to be saved, while important, was not in and of itself sufficient for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. He settled on a new rationale, which he convinced his fellow liberal-minded scientists to adopt: Their scientific achievement needed to be revealed to the world, and such a revelation of this new destructive force would trigger and coincide with a revolution in political sovereignty, in which nation-states would cede sovereignty to the United Nations, which would in turn control nuclear weapons and therefore the capacity to punish nuclear transgressors and even prevent war. In short, Oppenheimer believed that dropping the bomb would lead to the end of war itself.

Is it possible that Oppenheimer’s argument was calculated cajolery to flatter the sensibilities of his liberal listeners and goad them to finish the job? One of his colleagues points out in the film that Oppenheimer could persuade anyone of anything—even himself. At any rate, he seems to have convinced himself of this moral justification at the time.

The flaws in his reasoning are apparent. First, it seems entirely possible that that goal could be pursued by a non-lethal demonstration of the bomb, a course of action that a group of scientists working on the Manhattan Project recommended in the Franck Report and which was favored by the Leo Szilard faction. The idea that the deaths of innocent Japanese civilians by atomic fire can rightly be willed as a means to the end of world government is, simply put, morally reprehensible.

Second, Oppenheimer’s prognostication was politically naïve in the extreme. He was correct that the atomic revolution had forever changed man’s relationship to nature. His mistake was to believe that the atomic revolution would fundamentally change human nature. Human plasticity and perfectibility are hypotheses of modern philosophical anthropology that can be traced from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Progressive movement in America (of which the Ethical Culture Society was a vanguard and seedbed). They certainly are not theorems that can be soundly derived from theoretical physics. Moreover, radical human plasticity and perfectibility are false. Love of one’s own and the willingness to fight (justly or otherwise) to protect one’s own is an unalterable feature of human nature that grounds particularity, patriotism and the desire for power. The potential for war, corruption, and tyranny thus cannot be eradicated on this side of heaven from the heart of man, including the hearts of nuclear-armed world government bureaucrats.

To suggest otherwise amounts to a wild-eyed utopianism and is a telltale symptom of rejection of a central tenet of Christian faith, that human nature can only be perfected by God’s grace. As it was, so ever shall it be.'

#Oppenheimer #Oscars #Cillian Murphy #American Prometheus #Lewis Strauss #Robert Downey Jr.#Christopher Nolan #Niels Bohr #Leslie Groves #Matt Damon

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capitol-scholar · 1 year

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Greetings, Scholars!

After our initial introduction, it's time to dive into the heart of our journey - the essential readings. These foundational texts provide a comprehensive exploration of American politics, covering everything from the grassroots to the echelons of power. We'll be going through these readings systematically, discussing their main arguments, implications, and relevance to contemporary political discourse.

Below, I have provided our initial list of essential readings. This list is, by no means, exhaustive. It's a starting point for our exploration, but we're not confined to it. If you have any requests, recommendations, or come across a gem that you believe should be shared, please feel free to suggest. After all, academic pursuit thrives on collaboration and openness to new perspectives.

The list is as follows:

Aldrich, John Why Parties?

Alvarez & Brehm Hard Choices, Easy Answers

Arnold, Douglas The Logic of Congressional Action

Bartels, Larry Unequal Democracy

Baumgartner & Jones The Politics of Attention

Baumgartner & Jones Agendas and Instability in American Politics (latest ed.)

Baumgartner, et al. Lobbying and Policy Change

Bensel, Richard The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900

Berry, Jeffrey The New Liberalism

Browning, Rufus, et al. Protest Is Not Enough

Burns, Schlozman & Verba The Private Roots of Public Action

Cameron, Charles Veto Bargaining

Campbell, Louise How Policies Make Citizens

Cohen, et al. The Party Decides

Converse, Philip "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in Apter (Ed.),

Ideology and Discontent

Cox & McCubbins Setting the Agenda

Delli Carpini & Keeter What Americans Know About Politics and Why it Matters

Erikson, MacKuen, & Stimson The Macro Polity

Fiorina, Morris Retrospective Voting in American National Elections

Fiorina, Abrams & Pope Culture War? (3rd ed)

Gilens Affluence and Influence

Green & Shapiro Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory

Green, Palquuist, & Schickler Partisan Hearts and Minds

Hacker, Jacob The Divided Welfare State

Hajnal, Zolton America’s Uneven Democracy

Hansen, John Mark Gaining Access

Harvey, Anna Votes Without Leverage

Hibbing, Smith & Alford Predisposed

Hero, Rodney Latinos and the US Political System.

Iyengar, Shanto Is Anyone Responsible?

Jacobson, Gary The Politics of Congressional Elections

Kernell, Samuel Going Public (latest ed.)

King & Smith Still a House Divided

Kingdon, John Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (latest ed.)

Krehbiel, Keith Pivotal Politics

Mann & Ornstein It's Even Worse Than it Looks

Mayhew, David Electoral Realignments

Mettler, Suzanne Soldiers to Citizens

Milkis & Nelson The American Presidency (latest ed.)

Mutz, Sniderman, Brody Political Persuasion

Neustadt, Richard Presidential Power

Olson, Mancur The Logic of Collective Action

Ostrom, Elinor Governing the Commons

Page & Shapiro The Rational Public

Patashnik, Eric Reforms at Risk

Pierson, Paul Politics in Time

Putnam, Robert Bowling Alone

Rosenstone & Hansen Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America

Schlozman, Verba & Brady The Unheavenly Chorus

Skocpol, Theda Protecting Soldiers and Mothers

Skorownek, Stephen The Politics Presidents Make

Smith, Steven S. Party Influence in Congress

Stone, Clarence Regime Politics

Stone, Deborah Policy Paradox and Political Reason

Stonecash & Brewer Split: Class and Cultural Divisions in American Politics

Strolovitch, Dara Affirmative Advocacy

Verba, Schlozman & Brady Voice and Equality

Weimer & Vining Policy Analysis (latest ed.)

Wilson, J.Q. Bureaucracy

Zaller, John The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion

Each reading will have its dedicated blog post, where I'll summarize the key arguments, provide a critical analysis, and relate the text to our broader understanding of American politics. More importantly, I encourage you to share your thoughts, critiques, and insights as well.

The sequence of our reading will not necessarily follow the order in which the books are listed. Depending on our discussions, current political events, or requests, we might jump around the list. Flexibility will keep our exploration fresh and relevant.

So, let's embark on this intellectual adventure! It's time to dig into these fascinating texts and unravel the complex, dynamic world of American politics. Here's to a journey full of discovery, debate, and deep insights!

Happy Reading,

The Capitol Scholar

#american politics #american president #political communication #political science #academia #public policy #public opinion #phd scholar #grad school #Comprehensive Exams

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sfnewsvine · 2 years

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Biden Unloads And Speaks The Truth About The Illegitimate SCOTUS Majority

President Biden spoke his thoughts when he known as the conservative Supreme Court docket majority extra an advocacy group than an even-handed courtroom. Biden mentioned throughout a digital fundraiser, “I view this off-year election as one of the vital essential elections that I’ve been engaged in as a result of loads can change as a result of the establishments have modified. The Supreme Court docket is extra an advocacy group lately than it’s an even-handed courtroom.” The midterm election for management of the Senate is vital as a result of the subsequent oldest justices on the present courtroom are within the conservative majority, so if there’s a emptiness earlier than the 2024 election, it’s more likely to come from the conservative facet. The reminiscence of then-Senate Majority Chief Mitch McConnell blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court docket must be contemporary within the minds of all. The President was appropriate. The one strategy to counter the Supreme Court docket majority is with Democrats in command of Congress. A Democratic Home and Senate can codify Roe and make reproductive rights accessible to all once more. A Democratic Congress with a filibuster-busting majority can defend voting rights and get darkish cash out of US elections. The nation is dealing with an out-of-control conservative Supreme Court docket majority that’s legislating its partisan agenda from the bench. The excellent news is that your vote can neutralize them and set the stage for his or her replacements who’re extra in keeping with America. Mr. Easley is the managing editor. He’s additionally a White Home Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Diploma in Political Science. His graduate work targeted on public coverage, with a specialization in social reform actions. Awards and Skilled Memberships Member of the Society of Skilled Journalists and The American Political Science Affiliation Supply hyperlink Originally published at SF Newsvine

#SF Newsvine

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“…The ideas that animate Harlequin romance novels, Game of Thrones, and Disney movies alike can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Look at the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and others influenced by them—works like John William Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” (1888) and Frederic William Burton’s “The Meeting on the Turret Stairs” (1864)—and you’ll see some very familiar figures.

These canvases reflect popular Victorian understandings of medieval ladies: passive, slender, aristocratic, the objects of knightly devotion. These women have never laboured in the fields with sunburned necks or callused hands. Their clothing and flowing hairstyles are eclectic, designed more to make nineteenth-century audiences think about a distant, misty, heroic past than to accurately reproduce any given moment in the Middle Ages. And, they are, invariably, white.

Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. These paintings were produced when European imperialism was at its zenith; when Darwinian theories of evolution were twisted to justify colonialism and social hierarchies based on race; and when a supposed early-medieval “Teutonic”—or Germanic—ancestry for the white Protestant populations of Britain and North America was claimed to be the reason for the explosive economic growth of those regions.

They were also painted at the same time that white people in Europe and the Americas were enjoying steadily increasing standards of living—in large part thanks to the backbreaking, and often coerced, labour of those in colonised places. Black and brown women helped to shape history, but Victorian society excluded them from the category of “lady” because of the colour of their skin.

Nineteenth-century thinkers drew on the medieval past in order to justify racial and class inequities, or burgeoning notions of nationalism. These thinkers racialised the medieval lady. They idealised her as white, passive, and unsuited to manual labour. In doing so, they made her into a rationale as to why her elite, white, female descendants could sip tea in parlours while brown and black women toiled in the fields—or in their houses—to bring them that tea. The status quo was given such a venerable heritage that it was made to seem natural, even inevitable. Such ideas were then, and are now, pervasive and insidious. They were absorbed by white women, by Disney animators, by the makers of Halloween costumes, and even by those who write histories.

But what happens if we take the medieval lady off her pedestal? What kind of woman do we see inhabiting the Middle Ages if we try to peel off the Victorian veneer of chivalry and politesse? Does looking at what medieval people actually did in the past tell us something about our own assumptions concerning race and gender? In part, this is a process where we have to reconsider the language we use. What do we mean by “lady”? What did medieval people mean by the term? Or, rather, since most texts produced in western Europe in the Middle Ages were written in Latin, what were the connotations which they associated with the word domina?

The first key difference is that the modern English word “lady” simply doesn’t have the aura of power which the Latin word domina did in the Middle Ages. A domina was a woman with authority and moral rectitude in her own right, not simply the consort or complement to a dominus (lord). A domina (and holders of other Latin titles applied to women in medieval records, like comitissa, vicedomina or legedocta) administered estates and adjudicated legal disputes. It did not matter whether she held her title by inheritance or through marriage. Those who held titles in their own right, or those who were widowed, could exercise significant power over fiefs and vassals.

For example, when Matilda, countess of Tuscany (1046-1115), was referred to as domina, it was because she controlled a large swathe of northern Italy. She was the mediator during the famous meeting between Pope Gregory VII and the German emperor Henry IV at her great fortress of Canossa. In doing so, she influenced the outcome of a major medieval power struggle. On his accession to the throne in 1199, King John of England installed his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1122-1204), as domina of the French territory of Poitou and gave her authority in all of his lands—a tacit acknowledgement of her political skill.

Eleanor even managed to expand queenly authority in some ways. She seems to be the first queen of England after the Norman Conquest to have regularly collected the “queen’s gold”, a one-tenth share of some of the legal fines paid to the king. This gave her a valuable (and somewhat independent) source of revenue—and with money comes power. As a more modest example, one contemporary of Matilda of Tuscany’s was a woman named Mahild of Alluyes, domina of a far smaller territory in northern France. She wasn’t a player in papal or imperial politics. Yet as wife and widow, she oversaw the affairs of her vassals and witnessed charters which they drew up in the chapter house of the nearby abbey of Marmoutier, which gave her considerable influence over their lives. And there are many, many more dominae in the sources.

Medieval aristocratic women were sometimes seen as passive by their male contemporaries; those with power who broke this mould were sometimes described in plainly misogynistic terms. But equally, their deeds could be lauded. For example, one of the great chroniclers of the early twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis, wrote that the French noblewoman Isabel of Conches was “lovable and estimable to those around her.” He complimentarily said that she “rode armed as a knight among the knights”, and compared her favourably with Amazon queens.

Matilda of Boulogne (ca. 1105-1152), queen of King Stephen of England, was one of her husband’s most capable partisans during the Anarchy—the period of civil war that tore twelfth-century England apart. Not only did she head the government during her husband’s captivity, but proved herself a capable military commander. She directed troops into battle at the so-called Rout of Winchester and arranged for her husband’s release when he was captured.

A generation or so later, the English countess Petronella of Leicester (ca. 1145-1212) participated alongside her husband in the Revolt of 1173-74; she gave her husband military advice, rode armed onto the battlefield, and was even wearing armour when captured. These actions may not have been normal behaviour for a domina—administration and adjudication were more usual. But they were still within the bounds of possible behaviour for a medieval woman without endangering her status as a “lady.”

The Matildas, Mahild, Eleanor, Isabel, and Petronella: it is hard to imagine any of these dominae as the subject of a Waterhouse painting or the centrepiece of a Disney movie. They weren’t always victorious or virtuous; they could be ambitious and high-handed and hold ideas which most people today would find distasteful. And yet, whether medieval chroniclers approved or disapproved of these women individually, they didn’t think the very fact that they were active, decisive, and opinionated was out of the ordinary. Neither should you.

Nor would the colour of their skin have been thought a defining aspect of their status as a lady. There was certainly prejudice about skin colour in the Middle Ages. The relatively small number of non-white people in northern Europe means that we can’t definitively point to a woman of colour exercising political power there. But things were slightly different in southern Europe, in areas like Iberia—modern Spain and Portugal—which was long home to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations of multi-ethnic heritage.

While there were religious prohibitions against Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, there are some scattered examples of intermarriages between dynasties in the early Middle Ages: Muslim women of north African or Arab descent marrying into northern, Christian royal families. For instance, Uriyah, a daughter of the prominent Banū Qasī dynasty, married a son of the king of the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre; Fruela II, king of Asturias, married another Banū Qasī woman called Urraca. Their ancestry doesn’t seem to have posed a barrier.

Western Europeans may have only rarely had direct contact with non-white female rulers further afield—like the powerful Arwa bint Asma, queen of Yemen (r. 1067-1138)—but when they did, it could be in dramatic fashion. Shajar al-Durr, sultana of Egypt (d. 1257), famously captured Louis IX of France during the Seventh Crusade and ransomed him for an eye-wateringly large sum.

While historical examples of women of colour exercising prominent roles in Europe during the Middle Ages are few in number, skin colour didn’t limit the imaginations of white medieval Europeans. Medieval people often had clear anxieties about skin colour and blackness, but despite this racism they could still envision a brown- or black-skinned woman as a member of the upper classes, just as they did the white-skinned Mahild or Isabel.

For example, the early thirteenth-century German epic poem Parzival centres on the eponymous hero and his quest for the Holy Grail. Parzival has a half-brother, the knight Feirefiz, who is mixed-race. His mother, Belacane, is the black queen of the fictional African kingdoms of Zazamanc and Azagouc; the narrative praises her beauty and her regal bearing. As another example, a Middle Dutch poem written about the same time, Morien, recounts the story of the handsome, noble knight Morien, “black of face and of limb,” whose father Sir Aglovale fell in love with his “lady mother,” a Moorish princess.

However, the most vivid example is provided by medieval depictions of the biblical Queen of Sheba. Scholars think the historical Sheba likely lay somewhere in southwestern Arabia; other traditions place the kingdom in east Africa. Regardless of the queen’s historicity, various traditions grew up around her in the Middle Ages. Some of the most popular of these claimed that she had a son by the biblical king Solomon. She frequently appears alongside him in art, in elegantly draped garb as on the late twelfth-century Verdun Altar, or accompanied by courtiers as in an early fourteenth-century German illustrated bible: a beautiful black woman and a regal queen. When you think of a medieval “lady”—you could do worse than to think of her.

All of this should prompt us to look again, to reconsider how racialized Victorian ideals of womanhood still impact us—both in contemporary popular culture and also in our understandings of the medieval past. When we think about the Middle Ages, we should consider the impact of race, and especially whiteness, on how we think about it. That is not necessarily because our medieval forebears did so, but because our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ones did so very much.

The idea of the “lady” was one of the useful fictions which they and others employed, glorifying white, upper-class womanhood as an apex of western achievement. This helped to make existing racial and imperial hierarchies seem like they had such a long history that they must be innate, biological: a simple fact of life. But it was a fiction, and a harmful one. If we are to better understand the medieval past, it is one we must set aside.”

- Yvonne Seale, “My Fair Lady? How We Think About Medieval Women.”

#medieval #race #gender #history #yvonne seale

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whitehotharlots · 3 years

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Nothing is going to get better, and that is everyone’s fault

I don’t see how anyone could survey our political discourse right now and conclude that we have any hope, however remote, of a more decent future. We’ve mandated the uniform adoptions of worldviews that are unsustainable and objectively untrue. We’ve forced everyone accept ludicrous understandings of severe social problems that guarantee we will never be able to reform those problems.

Of course, revoltingly, this as happened because the routine brutalities of American life have become undeniable. A person cannot simply say that police murders don’t happen anymore. Every few days, there’s a new video. But in the absence of plausible deniability we have jerryrigged a new understanding, demanding that people regard these horrors not as fabulations but as unchangeable, apolitical constants that even the most powerful people on earth are helpless to address.

Today, we’re being told that knife fights are no big deal. Getting stabbed is just a rite of passage, a part of everyone’s childhood, something that no one--especially not a person authorized to use lethal force--should ever interfere with.

This is insane. In every sense of the word, this is insane. And it’s absolutely par for the course with contemporary understandings of social issues.

The Jussie Smollett incident was really a canary in the coal mine for this stuff. Anyone who spent 30 seconds reading about the incident with an open mind would realize that it was a complete fabrication cynically deployed to help the career of a struggling public figure.

But you simply weren’t allowed to think critically about it. Instead, we instituted a perverse system of incentives where people actually received social rewards for pretending to believe it without reservation. That fact that it was so implausible, at parts even physically impossible, created all the more incentive to go along with it. Anyone can express disgust at a child getting shot by a cop. It takes a real ally to believe something that is objectively untrue.

And then, when all the details came out and the case was debunked--even after Jussie admitted to hiring two Nigerian immigrants to rough him up and immediately tried to sell them out when cops began questioning his story--even then, you couldn’t admit to its falsity in liberal spaces. Dave Chappelle did a very funny bit about it in one of his Netflix specials, and this was held up as proof that Chappelle is now a dangerous fascist who should not be platformed.

No one who went along with it recanted or apologized. Because they had no reason to. The point of the exercise wasn’t to unveil and analyze truths so as to attempt to enact reforms. It was merely to signal one’s placement in the good group, vs. the bad group. The fact that it was eventually repudiated beyond all doubt only made the cause all the more righteous. Doing something about it was never considered, because we can’t do anything about it, nothing can ever change, all you can ever do is signal your goodness and denounce those who signal badness.

Again, this was all because the people who are in charge of this country--left and right--have absolutely zero desire to reform any aspect of this country. The unshakable, bipartisan consensus is that the only role of government should be to ensure that the maximum amount of resources and power be held by as few people as possible. We are uniform in our dedication to austerity and infrastructural dismantlement. No one is any position of influence has any regard for human life. We all believe, regardless of our partisan differences, that American citizens should accept brutalization as the baseline of existence.

This world was not inevitable. It was built. It was built by Republicans and Democrats. It was built by racists and evangelicals. It was built by the professorate, NGO’s, and successful members of the black leadership class. Everyone is implicated. And no one want to change.

This vision of an ideal America is uniform among our ruling class. Biden spent his career helping build it. Trump was created by it, and he strengthened many of its most malignant aspects. Obama, Bush, Clinton, and Reagan all worked toward the same general goals.

A society in which hopelessness is ambient and decency is nonexistent is going to give rise to violent crime and widespread discontentment. This necessitates the existence of police forces that are large, aggressive, militarized, and unaccountable. You can repeat all the slogans you want. You can demand that other people repeat those slogans. You can ban naughty words and diversify corporate boards, whatever. None of these things change this basic fact. And because we won’t change it--because we won’t countenance the possibility of change--we’ve had to adopt a worldview that is very literally insane.

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antoine-roquentin · 4 years

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This is a study of the disinformation campaign that led to widespread acceptance of this apparently false belief and to its partisan distribution pattern. Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role.

Our results are based on analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements. They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018, published in Network Propaganda, in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists.

most conspiracy theories in america are elite-driven

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echoesoftheeast · 3 years

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Why I No Longer Support the Russian Annexation of Crimea

A few years ago, when I first began learning the Russian language and the histories of Eastern Europe, I was unabashedly pro-Russian in my geopolitical convictions. I still remember watching a documentary about the Maiden Revolution in Kyiv and how it was presented as being orchestrated by the West, how it resulted in the safety of Russian speakers in Ukraine being compromised, and how it ushered in the rise of a fascist government with Nazi sympathies that espoused a type of ultra-Ukrainian nationalism that left no place for anything Russian in Ukraine anymore. Due to this analysis of the Maidan and post-Maidan currents in Ukraine, I came to the conclusion that the annexation of the Crimea was a truly democratic action and that the war in Donetsk and Luhansk represented almost a motherly care from Moscow for the Russian speakers of Eastern Ukraine. For years this served as the basis of my understanding of the post-Maidan conflicts, particularly the annexation of the Crimea. I continued to read a multitude of pro-Russian articles that justified the annexation. According to the standard positions given, the initial transfer of the Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR by Khrushchev was nothing more than a whimsical decision from the former party head of the Ukrainian SSR. Since the Crimea had been thoroughly under Russian administration prior, this means that the actual transfer was an historical injustice in the first place; Crimea is thoroughly Russian land and is deeply connected with Russian history. Secondly, the annexation can be justified since NATO had allegedly promised the newly formed Russian Federation following the collapse of the USSR that they would not expand into either former Eastern Block or Soviet territory. Since a multitude of former Eastern Bloc and Soviet countries have in fact been integrated into NATO, the West broke their promise so then what sort of moral high ground do they have to declare the annexation of the Crimea as illegal? Thirdly, considering that the majority of the population considered themselves ethnically Russian, since there was a referendum that resulted in an overwhelming majority of voters supporting being received into the Russian Federation, how should this act of democracy be considered any differently than say the will of the Albanian Kosovars to cede from Serbia. If an autonomous province of one country can have the legal right to cede, why can’t another? Finally (not to say that there are only four justifications for the annexation of Crimea, rather these were the biggest reasons for my previous support behind it), there was the strategic considerations of the naval base at Sevastopol. Considering that following the collapse of the Soviet Union that more and more former Soviet republics and Eastern Bloc countries have been joining the European Union and NATO (or lining up to do so), this presents a threat to Russia. Considering that the geopolitical relations between Russia and the West are at an all time low since the Cold War, it would be a strategic blunder for Russia if Ukraine was allowed to achieve its goals of EU and NATO integration. Considering the close proximity of Sevastopol to Russian territory, if Ukraine would become a part of NATO and allow for NATO to establish itself in Sevastopol, this would poise a huge military threat to Russia. Therefore, in a sort of pre-emptive move, the annexation of the Crimea was necessary to prevent any further potential NATO bases being so close to Russian territory. However, over the years as I have opened myself to more and more information from across the geopolitical spectrums, the justifications for the annexation began to slowly dismantle themselves until I came to the conclusion that the annexation of the Crimea was not only an illegal action taken by Russia but a geopolitical blunder of the highest level. I will leave why I think this was the biggest mistake they could make until the end and I will address why I no longer consider the justifications that I mentioned as valid. Before we proceed, I would like to just mention an event that was fundamental in helping me reconsider my convictions and to abandon what I can only call the Russian-Chauvinistic mentality that I previously held. A few years ago when I was on one of my trips to Chisinau, my wife and I decided to visit the Museum of Soviet Occupation (also known as the Museum of Victims of Communism). Now, I was definitely not pro-Soviet (being an Orthodox Christian, I know enough history about the persecutions against the religious in the Soviet Union and the overall atheistic ideology to keep me at arms length from having any real sense of Soviet sympathy) so I was very eager to check this museum out. Having read various books and articles that talk about some of the horrors that happened (especially during the Stalinist era), I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the tragedies that befell different people within the Soviet Union. However, it was a completely different experience to walk through the museum and see real letters from prisoners, confiscated passports, and photos of the real people who experienced the repressions; simply because they were land owners, priests, or suspected of being pro-Romanians. What struck me most was the collection of propaganda posters in one of the exhibits. Whether they were attacking religion or bolstering the benefits of the Soviet system, the propaganda seemed to address everything. It was this moment of looking at the seemingly endless collection of Soviet propaganda posters where something struck me, “If there was this much propaganda going on back then, who’s to say that there’s not just as much now but through contemporary mediums?” So, what got me to reconsider my positions wasn’t an article, or a book, or a conversation; it was the feeling of being overwhelmed by an endless supply of propaganda. After this moment, I began to be more critical of what I would read and try to expand my reading to include sources that present both sides of a situation, as well as material from non-partisan sources. One of the most important examples was with the annexation of Crimea. I began to look a little deeper at the arguments put forward to justify the annexation. Over time, as I read more sources or would occasionally stumble upon some information, each point began to have less weight to me that they used to have, until the point where I came to the conclusion that I no longer can buy into the arguments: Crimea is Ukraine.

The first point that is often brought up is that Khrushchev simply gave Crimea to Ukraine either because he had a soft spot for the country, or that it was a gift to celebrate the 1654 Pereyaslav Treaty, or because he wanted to reward Ukraine for their loyalty to the whole Soviet system (among other reasons that are given). Now, it is definitely true that the Crimea was previously an autonomous oblast within the Russian SFSR and that Nikita Khrushchev played a major role it the transfer of the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR. However, no matter what the reason (or most likely, reasons) behind the transfer, ultimately it was transferred and became an administrative unit of the Ukrainian SSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of the new entities of Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the Crimea was legally recognized as part of Ukraine. Most importantly, in 1994 both the Presidents of Russia and Ukraine (along with the President of the USA and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) signed the Budapest Memorandums on Security Assurances. Along with this document came the accession of Ukraine to the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In return for Ukraine agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons from their territory within a specified period of time, they were given certain national security assurances. Some of the assurances are worth quoting in full, “1. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine;

2. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nation.” The first two points that were noted on the memorandum, signed by the Russian President, concerned respecting the territorial integrity of the existing borders of Ukraine at the time, which included Crimea, and the affirmation that they would not use force against Ukraine and threaten their sovereignty. I came across this memorandum while reading an excellent book written by the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Serhy Yekelchyk, “The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know”. This information completing undermines any king of argument that posits the initial transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR as being some sort of geopolitical injustice, and thereby justifying the annexation of it to the Russian Federation. Russia signed a memorandum to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine, to abstain from using force against Ukraine, and to refrain from threatening the current borders of Ukraine. This leads nicely into the next point that the Western powers allegedly promised Russia that they had no intentions of expanding NATO into former Eastern Bloc and Soviet territories. As time went by, history has shown us that a number of former Eastern Bloc and Soviet republics have in fact been accepted in NATO. From the standard Russian narrative, since the West went back on their promise, then how can they oppose the annexation of Crimea? The logic seems to go that since the West reneged on their side of the deal, Russia is therefore free to disregard whatever security guarantees they provided to ensure the territorial integrity of Ukraine. However, we need to ask the question: did the Western powers ever promise this? This answer was given by Mikhail Gorbachev himself: no. The agreement that did happen was in regards to non-German NATO forces being employed in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic). When Gorbachev was interviewed and asked about the supposed promises made to Russia that NATO wouldn’t expand eastwards, he had this to say,

“The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”

It becomes evidently clear that no such promise regarding the refraining of NATO from expanding eastwards was every actually given, so Russia has no ground to try to justify their breaking of an international memorandum on the alleged failure of the West from refraining to expand NATO. Another point is that Crimea is historically Russian land with great historical significance for Russia. While its true that some very significant historical events in Russian history have taken place in the Crimea (including the baptism of St. Volodymyr in Kherson, the Crimean War, and the siege of Sevastopol) and that from 1783-1917 it was part of the Russian Empire and then from 1921-1954 it was part of the Russian SFSR, if we want to talk about the earlier inhabitants of the Crimea, it’s impossible to overlook the Crimean Tatars. Turkic peoples had been inhabiting the Crimean Peninsula since the 6th century and the Crimean Khanate was established in the 15th century. The Tatars were there prior to the movement of Slavs into the peninsula and were the majority until a number of historical factors began to decrease the Tatar population in the Crimea (such as Tatars fleeing or being deported to the Ottoman Empire after the initial conquest by the Russian Empire, more Tatars fleeing or being deported after the Russian loss of the Crimean War, and when practically the entire Crimean Tatar population was deported to Central Asia following World War 2 by Joseph Stalin). Only since 1989 has the Tatar population been growing again when the Supreme Soviet condemned the removal of the Tatars from their lands as unlawful, and thereby allowing larger numbers of them to return. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Crimean Tatars have largely been in favor of the Ukrainian government and have a more complicated relationship with Russian rule. When the annexation was in process, the Tatar population in Crimea boycotted the referendum and have been vocal in their desire to remain within Ukraine. While the history of Crimea is a part of Slavic history (not simply Russian), the Crimea has more historical rights with the Crimean Tatars, and the voice of the Crimean Tatars has spoken and sides with Ukraine. Now, to address the so-called democratic process of the referendum held in the Crimea that led to the request to be accepted into the Russian Federation. This was probably the strongest argument in favor of the annexation since it appeared the represent the concept of democracy and self-determination. It seemed to me that when the Soviet Union was collapsing and the various republics were declaring their own independence, then why should Ukraine’s desire to cede from the Soviet Union be respected while the Crimea’s desire should be treated as separatism? Is not Kyiv becoming to Crimea what Moscow was to Ukraine? On top of that, why is it that the referendum in the Crimea is treated as illegal while the referendum in Kosovo was accepted by the West? Let’s first look at the legitimacy of the referendum first. The whole tension between the political concepts of territorial integrity and self-determination is difficult to say the least. However, in the situation following the Maidan Revolution, it’s abundantly clear that the situation in Crimea was escalated following the arrival of the little green men. Even in my most pro-Russian days I had no doubts that these were “unofficial” Russian soldiers coming to the Crimea. What this presents itself as is nothing other than a military invasion and occupation. Since the referendum took place within a context of military occupation, it fundamentally cannot be accepted as valid on an international level. While it may be true that a large percentage of the population living in Crimea may in fact have supported a move towards Russia (I have friends and acquaintances with family members in Crimea and I have been told from them that the general opinion was indeed to become a part of Russia), the context and procedures were far from happening within what is accepted on a legal basis and can be legitimized on an international level. In regard to the comparison with Kosovo, we have to recognize that their situations are completely different. While both Kosovo and the Crimea were autonomous regions within their respective countries, the Russian population in the Crimea never underwent the same atrocities that the Kosovar Albanians underwent during the Kosovo War. The context for the independence of Kosovo was largely based on the genocidal afflictions they experienced during the war from Serbia, thus giving a moral precedence to pursue a path of independence. The only population within Crimea that can claim to have any kind of similar experience are the Crimean Tatars, who have been the victims of repression and deportation numerous times throughout history. So, we can see that neither the fact that a referendum was held or the comparison with Kosovo can have any legitimacy in regards to the annexation of Crimea. Now I’d like to look at the claim that it was necessary to annex the Crimea as a pre-emptive strike to protect Russian borders from the expansion of NATO. Since there’s a significant naval port in Sevastopol, it would be a geopolitical disaster for Russia if the ports of Sevastopol became NATO bases. This argument is completely dismantled once one considers the point that Sevastopol isn’t the only port in Ukraine. This point was driven home to me during a discussion with a Ukrainian acquaintance of mine about the whole situation in Crimea. We were discussing the various justifications given by Russia and I brought up this point about self-defence against NATO. My acquaintance simply replied, “So what if Sevastopol doesn’t become a NATO base? If Ukraine would be accepted into NATO, there are ports in Odessa which could easily be used as well. Is the distance from Sevastopol to Odessa really going to be that big of a difference?” The weakness of this argument became immediately apparent to me. If we even put aside the question of naval bases, there’s still the reality of regular military bases that could be set up in Ukraine. NATO could simply set up bases in cities like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, or even Kyiv and these would all be very close to the Russian border. To pursue this line of argument would necessitate that Russia simply annex all of Ukraine to prevent NATO from establishing any closer bases to their borders. As each argument began to collapse for me, I came to the ultimate conclusion that the annexation of Crimea was nothing more than an illegal military occupation, taking advantage of the unfavorable situation that arose for Russia in the aftermath of the Maidan Revolution. In an attempt to keep Ukraine divided to at least prevent her from moving closer to the West, the annexation and the war in Donbass is nothing more than a destabilizing effort by Moscow to try and force Ukraine to stay within their sphere of influence and to prevent the West from getting to close to Ukraine. However, the actions taken by Moscow were the biggest geopolitical blunder that they could have made. If Moscow genuinely wants to keep Ukraine within their sphere of influence, the worst thing that they could have done was to annex territory and become involved in a separatist war. By trying to force Ukraine to stay, they have only pushed her farther away. While it’s unlikely that Russia will ever accept that the annexation of the Crimea was unlawful and actually return it to the control of the Ukrainian government, it’s also just as unlikely the Ukraine will return to a place where closer ties with Russia is a popular opinion. While there are small measures of truth in the propaganda employed by Moscow in regards to the situation in Ukraine (there are definitely ultra-Ukrainian nationalists as well as those who have sympathies for the Galician division of the SS who fought against the Soviets with the Germans in World War 2), it is grossly inaccurate to portray the situation as if every Ukrainian is a fascist, ultra-nationalist, who’s looking to persecute Russian speakers. While the Russian language may have less acceptance in certain parts of Ukraine, it’s still spoken across the country. At the end of the day, I realized that my thoughts in the museum in Chisinau were right: Moscow is simply continuing the propaganda tradition through new mediums. To sum everything up simply, we can say this much: not all Ukrainians are fascists, not all Ukrainian are Nazi sympathizers, not all Ukrainians are out for Russian blood. Russia signed a memorandum to respective the territorial integrity of Ukraine and to abstain from threatening it with force. There was never any promise from NATO that they wouldn’t expand eastwards. While Crimea plays a role in Slavic history, the Crimean Tatars have a greater claim through history than the Russians do. The referendum took place in an atmosphere of military occupation and therefore has no chance of legitimacy. The situations of Kosovo and Crimea are completely different and therefore are not a viable comparison. And finally, if Ukraine was to join NATO, bases could still be set up close to the Russian border even without the naval bases in Sevastopol. Crimea is Ukraine.

#crimea #russia ukraine geopolitics

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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There is another question behind the question of how – that is the question of why. Why heal our divides? After all, human beings have survived despite division for as long as recorded history. Indeed, rulers and politicians are skilled at driving wedges between people around them in order to increase their own power. As Julius Caesar famously remarked divide et impera, “divide and conquer.”

In our current environment, fear and anger do motivate communal action, and political expediency often seems the primary goal. One need only be familiar with The Prince to know that modern politics follows the lead of Niccolo Machiavelli far more than the social vision of any ethical or religious master – Moses, the Buddha, and Jesus included.

And so, we find ourselves in a world echoing Gordon Gecko’s famous 1980s dictum, “greed is good,” where the contemporary American political creed seems to be “division is gain.”

Division is one of the most persistent political strategies in the western world. You might say it is our practice, the most deeply ingrained of our political habits. It certainly isn’t new. Why heal our divides? The question might be answered: You can’t. History teaches us that Machiavelli will always be with us – and will most often win.

Why even try to heal our divides?

Because it matters. For our communities, our neighbors. Of course. But it also matters for our own lives.

In 1892, William James wrote, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” A large body of research since then has confirmed how our lives are composed of routinized practices, the habits we develop over years. One recent study found that 40 percent of the participants’ daily actions did not come from intentional choice, but were things they did from habit.

America is a culture that aspires to unity – e pluribus unum – but has habituated division. Blame it on Caesar, Machiavelli, Gordon Gecko or whomever. Truth is, we’ve a national habit of finger pointing, blaming others, assigning people to categories, and pressing advantage for our own side. We’ve a divided national soul, and that line of division runs right through each of our own hearts. Even when we say we want to get beyond division and invective, many (including me) secretly think, “But I don’t want to be with those people. They are beyond the pale. You can’t make peace with them.”

When I finally admit that division isn’t just external but a way of thinking and acting that I’ve learned — a way that I have practiced — it hurts. I may preach a good sermon on nonviolence or taking down the walls of hostility between people, but deep inside, I’m uneasily grateful that something still separates me from others. The boundary between my moral rightness and another’s ethical failing seems necessary to protect. Those boundaries become hidden prejudices, the prejudices turn into partisanship, and all-too-often, partisanship crystallizes as bigotry. For good people, this internal process can be subtle, deniable, and shameful. But it is part of our habituation into being American – a people who proclaim unity while building walls that divide.

Why heal our divides? Because if we do, we heal ourselves.

New Testament scholar Stephen Patterson has recently argued that the first Christian creed was not a proclamation of separation from others (believers from nonbelievers); rather it was a declaration of human solidarity. That creed was part of the very first baptismal liturgies of those who followed Jesus:

For you are all children of God in the Spirit. There is no Jew or Greek; There is no slave or free; There is no male and female. For you are all one in the Spirit.

He insists that Christianity was successful because it imparted a social vision of unity in a deeply divided world and called people to a new shared identity: “We human beings are naturally clannish and partisan: we are defined by who we are not. We are not them. This creed claims that there is no us, no them. We are all one. We are all children of God.” (Patterson, The Forgotten Creed, p.5)

Not only did the first Christians proclaim these words, they practiced them in their communities. They developed habits of including others, of breaking down barriers, of eating with and befriending those whom they once found objectionable. They literally showed Roman society that it was possible — and desirable — to love every neighbor without regard to religion, class, or gender. During the earliest years of Christianity’s existence, the faith was marked by its insistence of the common kinship of humankind – that we could, indeed, be one. And there is evidence that they practiced what they preached.

Of course, that is an example from my faith tradition. America isn’t made up of only Christians, nor is it a “Christian nation.” But we do have a national creed, and like that early church creed, it proclaims a vision of unity, of oneness.

Is the American creed possible? That e pluribus unum we recite? Or are we forever consigned to political habits that confirm the we and demonize them? History reminds us that such creeds must be embodied in communities of practice, where we are called into a vision of human solidarity, where we create habits of oneness together, where we establish peace across the most durable barriers, and where we get in trouble for standing as one against the political expediency of division.

When I commit myself to that creed, when I find myself in such a community, the divide in my own heart lessens. Something within heals. Creed and community remind me that changing habits is hard, and practicing solidarity involves wrestling with my own failures. But, with the help of others, each one of us can mend the fault lines in our own lives and lend our hands to repair the world.

* * *

INSPIRATION

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond. ― Gwendolyn Brooks

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here. ― Eleanor Roosevelt

If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. — Galatians 5:15

How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity! — Psalm 133:1

Why does colour or race matter? Why not join together, instead of being scrambled and scattered? Why can't we just not plainly see, The unity in diversity? People will be people all the same, And under the setting sun, Nothing may ever change, But I am here to take a stand, To show the world how to finally be, Unified in Diversity. — Peter Vector

* * *

THE COTTAGE

DIANA BUTLER BASS

#Diana Bass #Diana Butler Bass #quotes #articles #healing #racial justice #division #political #religion

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202006290caic2122 · 3 years

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Learning Contract

Contemporary America in Context is a module designed to encourage me to branch out in the news outlets I engage with. I hope to achieve a more creative approach to history, politics, and sociological events, rather than academic styles of writing and investigation. Using facts, research, and personal opinions, I will debate stories and provide a different outlook on journalistic practices. I want to use my role as a student to engage in healthy discussions to widen my understanding of current and historical events.

I realise how different a blog is concerning academic assessment. By the end of the semester and the end of the academic year, I want to see a clear improvement in my writing, engaging with other blogs and a personal change in my open-mindedness. My aim and methods of achieving these goals are relatively straightforward: I would like to engage with news sources and stories I previously would not have. Finally, I will engage in debate and conversation with my course-mates blogs to understand how people similar to my own age understand these stories differently.

Debating is healthy, as is having different ideas. Society did not develop as a consequence of a single person with a single idea. In an age where politics and societal issues are becoming more partisan, I hope this module will force me to realise that a range of ideas can be a good thing. It will also highlight that not everybody in society can be as tolerant as I hope.

#caic2122

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nicklloydnow · 3 years

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"But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the nineteen-thirties. It is not certain that if Whitman himself were alive at the moment he would write anything in the least degree resembling Leaves of Grass. For what he is saying, after all, is ‘I accept’, and there is a radical difference between acceptance now and acceptance then. Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled prosperity, but more than that, he was writing in a country where freedom was something more than a word. The democracy, equality, and comradeship that he is always talking about are not remote ideals, but something that existed in front of his eyes. In mid-nineteenth-century America men felt themselves free and equal, were free and equal, so far as that is possible outside a society of pure communism. There was poverty and there were even class-distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class. Everyone had inside him, like a kind of core, the, knowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it without bootlicking. When you read about Mark Twain’s Mississippi raftsmen and pilots, or Bret Harte’s Western gold-miners, they seem more remote than the cannibals of the Stone Age. The reason is simply that they are free human beings. But it is the same even with the peaceful domesticated America of the Eastern states, the America of Little Women, Helen’s Babies, and Riding Down from Bangor. Life has a buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your belly. It is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very badly, because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of making you feel it. Luckily for his beliefs, perhaps, he died too early to see the deterioration in American life that came with the rise of large-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap immigrant labour.

Miller’s outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and neaarly everyone who has read him has remarked on this. Tropic of Cancer ends with an especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the imbecilities, he simply sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical acceptance of the thing-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first place, not America, but the ancient boneheap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and regimentation. To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but, those things among others. And on the whole this is Henry Miller’s attitude. Not quite always, because at moments he shows signs of a fairly ordinary kind of literary nostalgia. There is a long passage in the earlier part of Black Spring, in praise of the Middle Ages, which as prose must be one of the most remarkable pieces of writing in recent years, but which displays an attitude not very different from that of Chesterton. In Max and the White Phagocytes there is an attack on modern American civilization (breakfast cereals, cellophane, etc.) from the usual angle of the literary man who hates industrialism. But in general the attitude is ‘Let’s swallow it whole’. And hence the seeming preocupation with indecency and with the dirty-handkerchief side of life. It is only seeming, for the truth is that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit. Whitman himself ‘accepted’ a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the ‘grey sick faces of onanists’, etc, etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude — even ‘decadent’, if that word means anything.

But precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience, Miller is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. During the past ten years literature has involved itself more and more deeply in politics, with the result that there is now less room in it for the ordinary man than at any time during the past two centuries. One can see the change in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books written about the Spanish Civil War with those written about the war of 1914-18. The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think, whereas the books about the Great War were written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books like All Quiet on the Western Front, Le Feu, A FArewell to Arms, Death of a Hero, Good-bye to All That, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and A Subaltern on the Somme were written not by propagandists but by victims. They are saying in effect, ‘What the hell is all this about? God knows. All we can do is to endure.’ And though he is not writing about war, nor, on the whole, about unhappiness, this is nearer to Miller’s attitude than the omniscience which is now fashionable. The Booster, a short-lived periodical of which he was part-editor, used to describe itself in its advertisements as ‘non-political, non-educational, non-progressive, non-cooperative, non-ethical, non-literary, non-consistent, non-contemporary’, and Miller’s own work could be described in nearly the same terms. It is a voice from the crowd, from the underling, from the third-class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political, non-moral, passive man."

#orwell #george orwell

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thevividgreenmoss · 4 years

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Now, Fukuyama takes himself to be neither postmodern nor postcolonial. Unlike so many postmoderns and postcolonials, from Derrida to Spivak, he claims for himself no radical, leftwing credentials in the politics of today. Unlike Lyotard, Kristeva, Glucksman and many other 'New Conservatives' of French postmodernity, Fukuyama has no past as a Trotskyist, Maoist or whatever. He has no qualms about the fact that he is, and has always been, a man of the Right and an advocate of neo-liberalist capitalism; much of his life has been spent, after all, between the U.S. State Department and the Rand Corporation.

...He is right, for instance, though hardly original, in asserting that capitalism is more universally dominant and more securely entrenched today than at any other point in this century; but he is wrong to equate this capitalist triumph with the outbreak of Equality and Universal Recognition. What has been universalized is neither a universal state of the common good, nor an equalized access to goods and services, but integrated markets for the circulation of capital and the expropriation of labour, and, in the cultural domain, universalisation of the ideology of commodity fetishism.

Indeed, if you subtract commodity fetishism, hardly anything remains in the culture of actually existing capitalism that is fundamentally universalistic. Indeed, the history of this capitalism shows that the dissolution of traditional communities and the mobility of populations under capitalist pressures produce not a universal culture of broadly shared human values and radical equalities, but highly malleable processes of decomposition that constantly recompose identities of nation, race, ethnicity, and religious group, not to speak of freshly fashioned claims of tradition and primordiality. One might even speculate that the great intensification of identity politics and of multi-culturalist ideology and policy demonstrates, in some crucial respects, the living reality of how much contemporary capitalism is in the process of giving up on the idea of Universal Equality even in its advanced zones. The modem state even in these zones may well get reorganized as so many islands of ethnic identity supervised by the benign but ever vigilant gaze of the one ethnicity that is so dominant that it need not define itself as ethnicity. Thus, Fukuyama is wrong even on this count: communitarian ideology as a complement of industrial capitalism is by no means an attribute of East Asia alone; it is ascendant within North America itself; meanwhile, the more strident versions of communitarianism are blowing apart legacies of secular civil government in countries as diverse as Algeria, Egypt and India; and yet, the idea of self-governing religious communities as an alternative to secular citizenship in the modern nationstate is gaining ground in that branch of postcolonial theory which calls itself Subaltern Studies, as is clear from the recent writings of its principal figures."

This is a reversal, in fact, of historic proportions. The idea of universal equality was until quite recently the most potent ideological force in the struggles against European imperialism and against the Eurocentric racisms which have been the necessary supplements of that imperialism. Now, Fukuyama of course advises us that it is precisely the aspiration for universal equality that is producing a culture of universal mediocrity, while Lyotard and his postcolonialist followers such as Gyan Prakash, a late entrant in the Subalternist paradigm, have taken to assuring us that the idea of universality is itself Eurocentric and simply one of those metanarratives of Emancipation that have been rendered obsolete by the entry of the world into postmodernity, and that the only refuge from Eurocentricity and racism is to be sought in philosophical and cultural relativism. For all his Hegelian starting-points, Fukuyama's idea that recognition from one's exclusivist community is the only recognition worth having belongs squarely in the postmodernist world of relentless relativism, absolutisation of difference, and refusal to acknowledge that anything other than goods and services could define a horizon of universality or normative value.

...The fact of so substantial a convergence between postmodernity, which purports to be a discourse of the Left, and Fukuyama, who confidently announces himself as a partisan of neo-liberal conservatism, should give us, I believe, some pause. Lyotard's posthistorical euphoria and Fukuyama's posthistorical melancholy are rooted in the shared conviction that the great projects for emancipatory historical change that have punctuated this century have ended in failure. When they speak of this failure, both have in mind, I think, the same three markers - anti-imperialist nationalism; leftwing social democracy; and communism - which Lyotard dismisses contemptuously as mere metanarratives of Reason and Progress, and Fukuyama regards as threats to Occidental civilization itself; what they do share is a sense of immense relief at the defeat.

Aijaz Ahmad, Post Colonial Theory and the 'Post-' Condition

#*#aijaz ahmad #essays

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theculturedmarxist · 3 years

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Chances are that by the time you get to the end of this article, there will be news of another information operation targeting Donald Trump. There’s one a day now—each trumpeting a new mortal threat to the republic or some dastardly revelation based on sources that are usually anonymous. Whatever it is, it will serve the same purpose as the hundreds of similar sallies launched over the last four years—namely, to preserve and protect the position and privileges of America’s ruling elite.

Trump stories are rarely about Trump. The same stories, or versions of them, would have targeted anyone who threatened to sever the American political, corporate, and cultural elite’s economic lifeline to the Chinese Communist Party. It is largely because Trump sought to decouple the United States from the CCP that America’s China Class, which owns the platforms on which Americans communicate, has waged a relentless campaign of information warfare against him through its social media and prestige media brands.

Consider the last two anti-Trump info ops: He gratuitously denigrated the historical suffering of African Americans, and he expressed contempt for America’s war dead. These are the sort of false allegations that political operatives are tasked to manufacture and disseminate during election season. Their purpose is to reinforce a negative impression of the opposing party among whatever cohort is being addressed, and make the target spend resources—time and money and sometimes blood—on defense. That’s politics 101, since the time of the Romans.

What’s new is that this is now journalism too. Since the internet defunded the press at the end of the 20th century and social media became the dominant player in America’s information space, journalism has abandoned the traditional standards and practices that once defined reporting. For instance, the smear holding that Trump is contemptuous of the military was supposedly based on four anonymous sources recalling exchanges from three years ago, which have been contradicted by dozens of named sources, some of whom were physically present when the comments were supposedly made—and some of whom have been public Trump opponents. In traditional journalistic terms, that’s not a news story—that’s a failed attack line.

The press that existed in America from the end of the 19th century until the turn of this one was designed to inform, influence, and sometimes inspire or inflame fellow citizens. But for people under 30, the only kind of “journalism” they’ve ever known is more like Pravda in the old Soviet Union or the kinds of party media found throughout the Third World. Journalism is an insider’s game, in which the stories are often outlandish, but rarely true; their actual news value is the hints they may offer about shadowy maneuverings that affect people’s lives but take place out of public view, like the rise or fall of a particular colonel who is pictured standing closer to or farther away from El Caudillo or Al Rais. Stories aren’t about the realities they purport to depict; the real stories are always the stories about the story.

American journalists, who now draw their paychecks directly and indirectly from the country’s largest economic interest—technopolies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook—are now turning the public sphere into a phantasmagoria of conspiracy theories and hysteria to cement the politburo’s position and privilege.

Accordingly, the debate in Washington, D.C., over which great power is feeding more disinformation into the 2020 election cycle isn’t real—it’s not Russia, as collusion impresario and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff claims, nor, as Attorney General William Barr says, is it China, though he’s closer to the truth. The source of the purposeful disinformation pouring into the American public sphere like untreated sewage is the American elite, led by its tech oligarchs, who own the platforms on which information campaigns are staged and laundered to protect their core interests—foremost among them being cheap Chinese labor and access to Chinese markets.

Let’s return to the two smears from above: Trump scoffs at Black suffering and Trump says military service is for suckers and losers. The former comes from the Washington Post’s famous Watergate reporter Bob Woodward’s new anti-Trump book, and the latter was posted on the website of the Atlantic. Strip away the decorative paraphernalia that dresses them up to look like news articles, and both of these pieces of “journalism” are actually just tweets. The stories they’re attached to are hollow vessels festooned with brand names to ensure their reach and reception as they circulate through the information ecosystem of social media and cable news platforms.

Of course, when Jeff Bezos bought the Post and Woodward brands in 2013, he had no more idea than Vladimir Putin did that the host of “Celebrity Apprentice” would one day sit in the Oval Office. Bezos acquired them for the same reason the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs picked up the Atlantic—to defend the industry, tech, and political arrangements with China’s manufacturing base that drive their profits from “political interference.”

A little historical background may help explain how America’s information supply has become so badly poisoned. The Atlantic magazine was founded in the mid-19th century in Boston, where it published some of the founding figures of the American nationalist movement in literature like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 2005, its owner moved the Atlantic to Washington, D.C., where it accomplished the rare feat of turning a profit in the contemporary publishing industry—not by selling magazines or ad space, which had been turned into cheap commodities by the rise of the internet, but by billing Beltway lobbyists and tech and defense executives for the opportunity to influence well-known thought leaders at conferences, luncheons, and parties hosted under the Atlantic label in Washington, Aspen, and elsewhere. Laurene Powell Jobs bought a majority share in 2017.

The big message her property sent with its anti-Trump blog post was that Trump is contemptuous of a significant part of his base. What many Trump supporters saw was something else, though: Another proof of the elite’s determination to replay the 2016 election cycle.

Four years ago, few normal Americans imagined that their political class was capable of manufacturing a conspiracy theory out of whole cloth and laundering it through the nation’s spy agencies and the press in the hope of overturning the result of a democratic election. But after four years of Russiagate, and subsequent operations (the Mueller investigation, Ukrainegate, the razing and looting of American cities disguised as “peaceful protests,” etc.), no one is unaware that such coordinated campaigns are possible. In fact, they have become normal.

This time around, the role played by spies in the 2016 election is being filled by former senior Pentagon officials, including James Mattis, Trump’s one-time defense secretary. In June, Mattis wrote an article—in the Atlantic—likening Trump to the Nazis for wanting to dispatch the military to protect the lives, homes, and businesses of American voters.

Gen. Mattis is no stranger to Silicon Valley or its scandals. As head of U.S. Central Command, the four-star Marine general pushed for the products of one Silicon Valley startup to be used on wounded Americans in uniform, and after retiring he won a lucrative seat on the board of the same company, Theranos, which turned out to be the biggest fraud in the history of biotech.

Then there’s Stanley McChrystal, a retired four-star Army general who is reportedly advising a Democratic PAC called “Defeat Disinfo” on how to use Pentagon software to wage information warfare operations against the Trump campaign. McChrystal resigned his post in 2010 after a magazine reporter documented how he and his aides savagely mocked then-Vice President Biden, the man his information warfare campaign is now supposed to install in the White House.

McChrystal’s beef with Trump is something more than just greed or ego. He has been openly critical of Trump for wanting to get American forces out of the Middle East. He ripped the president when Mattis left his Pentagon post because the Marine wanted to keep more troops in Syria. McChrystal was head of operations in Afghanistan and thinks Trump should stay there, too. The problem is, he’s not sure why. As he told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he thinks the best option is to stay in Afghanistan and “muddle along.” And now he’s getting paid by Silicon Valley, too.

Trump is right that top military brass has it out for him and probably for the reasons he states—because pointless engagements like Afghanistan advance them personally and land them lucrative seats on the boards of defense and technology companies. But the personal ambitions of Pentagon officials are finally no more relevant here than those of the FBI, DOJ, CIA, and State Department bureaucrats who played a role in the first installment of the Russiagate franchise. They’re walk-on parts, as are the various media operatives and outlets like Bob Woodward and the Atlantic, in a much larger corruption of our politics.

The central pillar of the corrupt new order is the American elite’s relationship with China. To be clear, the issue is not that former media organizations like the Post and the Atlantic are pro-China. Both publish articles about the Chinese military, intelligence services, propaganda campaigns, human rights abuses, etc.—at the same time as the Post runs a regular insert produced by the Chinese Communist Party called China Daily. The point is that terms like pro- or anti-Red China are from a different era, when publications like Henry Luce’s Time Magazine were partisan and had points of view.

What matters now are platforms. And for the purposes of information warfare, what’s important is not the content but rather the availability and reach of the platforms, whose job is to protect the American ruling elite’s wealth and preferences by spreading whatever propaganda the elite sees as beneficial. By threatening to split the United States from China, Trump earned the enmity of America’s China Class, which is working hard to remove him from office, and replace him with someone more pliant.

Trump was not the first presidential candidate who noticed there was a tremendous political opportunity in picking up the support of a middle class undone by the ruling class’s foreign trade practices. Democratic Congressman Richard Gephardt made the same case during the 1988 election cycle. Gephardt lost. He lost again in 1992.

By the time the Clinton White House granted China most favored nation trade status in 2000, all of Washington knew that America was running a vast trade deficit that was destined to increase with accession to the World Trade Organization. The price for lifting tens of millions of rural Chinese peasants out of poverty through favorable trade arrangements would be tens of millions of American lives ruined, even as large American companies like Apple and Nike and bankers like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs got richer. The elite reasoned that they had no choice: The rise of China was inevitable. Why fight it?

American political and corporate elites didn’t choose decline. They chose to get rich. By shipping America’s manufacturing base off to China, they seized a business opportunity the likes of which had never been seen before—an enormous captive labor force controlled by an authoritarian regime that guaranteed the steady production of goods at a fraction of what it would cost at home. American cultural elites (Hollywood, sports, art, etc.) who exploited the increasingly large Chinese market for their products provided cover for the China Class cohort with messaging that dovetailed with CCP propaganda.

Who were Americans to judge a great and ancient civilization like China’s for jailing dissidents and enslaving the Uighur minority? Doesn’t America have its own history of slavery and political prisoners? It’s racist to protect American jobs. Those jobs aren’t coming back and there is nothing to be done about it, as Barack Obama famously said—unless you have a magic wand …

Calling out the American elite for betraying American interests in the service of their own personal and corporate bottom lines helped Donald Trump win the presidency. But it’s not clear that he truly understood how deeply entwined Beijing’s interests were with America’s China Class—and that trying to decouple the two would lead to an attempt at a permanent coup by the new techno-elite, targeting not just him and his supporters but the foundations of the republic, from our military to the media, and from our justice system to the institution of the presidency itself.

The American elite’s financial relationship with China is the key to understanding what’s been happening in America the past four years. Any president, Democrat or Republican, who took on China would have been targeted by the China Class. Because it was Trump flying the Republican banner who sided with America’s working men and women, the Democrats resorted to alliances with powers that now threaten the stability and security of the country.

#china #trump #media #journalism #conspiracy stuff #conspiracy #bourgeoisie #class warfare #class war #information warfare #psychological warfare

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