A Feared Law to Protect the Monarchy Returns Amid Thailand’s Protests
The country’s lèse-majesté law, which makes insulting the king punishable by years in prison, is being used against the protesters’ leadership for the first time.
BANGKOK — The number 112 strikes fear in Thailand. It refers to Section 112 of the country’s criminal code, which makes insulting or defaming the king and his close kin an offense punishable by three to 15 years in prison.
On Tuesday night, a leader of the protest movement that is calling for changes to Thailand’s monarchy and political system received a summons to face multiple charges of lèse-majesté, as the crime is known. It was the first time that Section 112 had been applied during the protests, which have brought thousands of people onto the streets since July.
The protest leader, Parit Chiwarak, commonly known as Penguin, must report to a police station by Dec. 1 to face the charges, which stem from speeches he gave in September and this month. In those speeches, Mr. Parit and others called for the monarchy to come under the Thai Constitution and for the public to be allowed to scrutinize its considerable wealth.
Eleven other protest leaders have also received summonses for lèse-majesté charges, according to the International Federation for Human Rights, which works with human rights lawyers in Thailand. Section 112 has not been used to prosecute individuals for the past two years, according to legal scholars.
The revival of 112 came hours before a rally in Bangkok on Wednesday during which protesters urged King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun to return his fortune to the people. Tax revenues, they said, were being used to fund his lavish lifestyle and fill the coffers of one of the world’s richest monarchies.
The protest took place at the headquarters of the Siam Commercial Bank, in which the king is the biggest shareholder. It was the first rally to focus almost exclusively on overhauling the monarchy’s powers, as opposed to bundling the issue together with calls for Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the leader of a 2014 coup, to resign.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/worl ... 778d3e6de3
FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
My Son Was Killed Because I’m a Federal Judge
Protecting judges is essential to our families, and our democracy.
“Let’s keep talking; I love talking to you, Mom.” Those were the last words spoken to me by my only child, Daniel, as we cleaned up the basement from his birthday festivities. He was still glowing from a glorious weekend at home with his parents and friends.
Then the doorbell rang. Daniel raced up the stairs. Seconds later, as I stood alone in our basement, my beloved son was shot to death. Mark Anderl, my husband of 25 years, was shot three times and critically injured.
This tragedy, every mother’s worst nightmare, happened for a reason wholly unrelated to either my husband or my son, but because of my job: I am a United States District Court judge. A lawyer who had appeared before me was angered by the pace of a lawsuit he had filed in my court. He came to my home seeking revenge.
My attacker sought to hurt me but his ire, and his focus, were not unique. Federal judges are at risk from other would-be attackers.
For judges and their families, better security is a matter of life and death. But its importance goes beyond our well-being alone. For our nation’s sake, judicial security is essential. Federal judges must be free to make their decisions, no matter how unpopular, without fear of harm. The federal government has a responsibility to protect all federal judges because our safety is foundational to our great democracy.
Since Daniel’s death, I have vowed to do everything I can to make similar tragedies less likely. Last month New Jersey passed what is known as “Daniel’s Law,” which prohibits the distribution of personal information, including home addresses and phone numbers, for judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel.
After Daniel’s death, I learned from F.B.I. agents that it’s easy to find personal information about judges on the internet. Judges’ addresses can be purchased online for just a few dollars, including photos of our homes and the license plates on our vehicles. In my case, this deranged gunman was able to create a complete dossier of my life: he stalked my neighborhood, mapped my routes to work and even learned the names of my best friend and the church I attend. All of which was completely legal. This access to such personal information enabled this man to take our only child from my husband, Mark, and me.
Now the United States Senate needs to pass the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, which would provide further protections for federal judges. Identical legislation has been introduced in the House.
The bipartisan bill would protect judges’ personally identifiable information from resale by data brokers. It would also allow federal judges to redact personal information displayed on federal government internet sites and prevent publication of personal information by other businesses and individuals where there is no legitimate news media interest or matter of public concern.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/opin ... ogin-email
Protecting judges is essential to our families, and our democracy.
“Let’s keep talking; I love talking to you, Mom.” Those were the last words spoken to me by my only child, Daniel, as we cleaned up the basement from his birthday festivities. He was still glowing from a glorious weekend at home with his parents and friends.
Then the doorbell rang. Daniel raced up the stairs. Seconds later, as I stood alone in our basement, my beloved son was shot to death. Mark Anderl, my husband of 25 years, was shot three times and critically injured.
This tragedy, every mother’s worst nightmare, happened for a reason wholly unrelated to either my husband or my son, but because of my job: I am a United States District Court judge. A lawyer who had appeared before me was angered by the pace of a lawsuit he had filed in my court. He came to my home seeking revenge.
My attacker sought to hurt me but his ire, and his focus, were not unique. Federal judges are at risk from other would-be attackers.
For judges and their families, better security is a matter of life and death. But its importance goes beyond our well-being alone. For our nation’s sake, judicial security is essential. Federal judges must be free to make their decisions, no matter how unpopular, without fear of harm. The federal government has a responsibility to protect all federal judges because our safety is foundational to our great democracy.
Since Daniel’s death, I have vowed to do everything I can to make similar tragedies less likely. Last month New Jersey passed what is known as “Daniel’s Law,” which prohibits the distribution of personal information, including home addresses and phone numbers, for judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel.
After Daniel’s death, I learned from F.B.I. agents that it’s easy to find personal information about judges on the internet. Judges’ addresses can be purchased online for just a few dollars, including photos of our homes and the license plates on our vehicles. In my case, this deranged gunman was able to create a complete dossier of my life: he stalked my neighborhood, mapped my routes to work and even learned the names of my best friend and the church I attend. All of which was completely legal. This access to such personal information enabled this man to take our only child from my husband, Mark, and me.
Now the United States Senate needs to pass the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, which would provide further protections for federal judges. Identical legislation has been introduced in the House.
The bipartisan bill would protect judges’ personally identifiable information from resale by data brokers. It would also allow federal judges to redact personal information displayed on federal government internet sites and prevent publication of personal information by other businesses and individuals where there is no legitimate news media interest or matter of public concern.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/opin ... ogin-email
What Really Saved the Republic From Trump?
It wasn’t our constitutional system of checks and balances.
Americans are taught that the main function of the U.S. Constitution is the control of executive power: curtailing presidents who might seek to become tyrants. Other republics have lapsed into dictatorships (the Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, the Republic of China and so on), but our elaborate constitutional system of checks and balances, engineered largely by James Madison, protects us from despotism.
Or so we think. The presidency of Donald Trump, aggressive in its autocratic impulses but mostly thwarted from realizing them, should prompt a re-examination of that idea. For our system of checks and balances, in which the three branches of government are empowered to control or influence the actions of the others, played a disappointingly small role in stopping Mr. Trump from assuming the unlimited powers he seemed to want.
What really saved the Republic from Mr. Trump was a different set of limits on the executive: an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials. You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.” Whatever you call them, they were the decisive factor.
It’s true that the courts at times provided a check on Mr. Trump’s tyrannical tendencies, as with their dismissal of his frivolous attacks on the election and their striking down of his effort to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program without appropriate process. But in other cases, such as his anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive. More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.
........
The last four years suggest something different: Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials. We have grown too jaded about things like professionalism and institutions, and the idea of men and women who take their duties seriously. But as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.
It may sound naïve in our untrusting age to hope that people will care about ethics and professional duties. But Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
It wasn’t our constitutional system of checks and balances.
Americans are taught that the main function of the U.S. Constitution is the control of executive power: curtailing presidents who might seek to become tyrants. Other republics have lapsed into dictatorships (the Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, the Republic of China and so on), but our elaborate constitutional system of checks and balances, engineered largely by James Madison, protects us from despotism.
Or so we think. The presidency of Donald Trump, aggressive in its autocratic impulses but mostly thwarted from realizing them, should prompt a re-examination of that idea. For our system of checks and balances, in which the three branches of government are empowered to control or influence the actions of the others, played a disappointingly small role in stopping Mr. Trump from assuming the unlimited powers he seemed to want.
What really saved the Republic from Mr. Trump was a different set of limits on the executive: an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials. You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.” Whatever you call them, they were the decisive factor.
It’s true that the courts at times provided a check on Mr. Trump’s tyrannical tendencies, as with their dismissal of his frivolous attacks on the election and their striking down of his effort to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program without appropriate process. But in other cases, such as his anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive. More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.
........
The last four years suggest something different: Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials. We have grown too jaded about things like professionalism and institutions, and the idea of men and women who take their duties seriously. But as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.
It may sound naïve in our untrusting age to hope that people will care about ethics and professional duties. But Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Trump Didn’t Break Our Democracy. But Did He Fatally Weaken It?
The election provides a clear example of resilience to authoritarian pressure. But it doesn’t mean our democracy is unbreakable.
After the Electoral College vote on Monday affirming his election, Joe Biden declared that “nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power, can extinguish” the “flame of democracy.” Mr. Biden’s speech and the vote capped a series of victories for democratic institutions, including the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results — just the latest turn in the extended refusal of President Trump and his Republican enablers to accept the outcome.
Political scientists like us are trying to assess the damage from Mr. Trump’s baseless, inept and ultimately doomed attacks on democracy. Do the sharp rebukes from our courts and other institutions mean that democracy “survived,” and we can simply move on? Or does all the talk about what “saved” American democracy really show that it’s in deep trouble?
After all, that Texas lawsuit had the public support of more than half of the Republican House members. And it looks like even Vladimir Putin beat Mitch McConnell to congratulate Mr. Biden.
The problem is we’ve been treating Mr. Trump’s attacks on democracy as if they are a pass-fail test. We should instead think of democracy as both damaged and resilient, like a forest after a powerful windstorm.
In our research, we argue that though all democracies are imperfect, one of their central virtues is that they are built to be resilient — to bend without breaking, even when elected leaders pull institutions in an authoritarian direction. But just because they’re more flexible doesn’t mean democracies can’t break. Resilience — the ability to adapt and keep functioning under strain — is a resource that needs replenishing, not a guarantee of safe passage.
It’s normal for institutions to face challenges from events or from politicians who try to use them for their own purposes. When institutions survive a stress test, they may come out stronger or weaker. Ambiguous laws can be clarified to withstand abuse; regulations can be updated; and public officials gain experience in how to prevent or defend against future tests. But it can take time for the strengthening to occur.
The 2020 election provides a clear example of democratic resilience to authoritarian pressure. Election officials and judges fielding legal challenges had to adapt not only to the enormous logistical challenges of the pandemic but also to Mr. Trump’s rhetoric. His attacks — and those from elected officials in his party and from the conservative media — put additional pressure on election officials and poll workers, who faced threats, intimidation efforts and overt pressure to ignore the will of the voters.
Yet in most of the more than 10,000 electoral jurisdictions across the country, voters cast ballots without incident and Election Day was peaceful. International election observers praised the election as orderly and organized.
Both democracy optimists and pessimists can draw the conclusions they want to see from this example. Optimists can say that our election system faced the 2020 test admirably, and those who run it will be better prepared for future efforts to undermine their work. Pessimists can say that Mr. Trump’s attacks will leave lasting scars. Next time, election officials might give in to political pressure. Or the damage might be invisible, like a tree’s weakened root system, deterring people from running for office or working at the polls.
Right now, there’s no way to know if the damage will be permanent. But we do know that democracies are better able to recover from such assaults because they allow for routine, peaceful replacement of leaders or parties. Dictators are more likely to be replaced through rebellion, military coup or civil war than through constitutional processes like elections and impeachment.
This is what democracy optimists get right. Mr. Trump’s abuse of foreign policy got him impeached. His spectacular failure to govern during a pandemic got him voted out of office.
But eventually, if stretched too far, democratic institutions will reach a limit. There may not be a dramatic break, like a coup, but democracy will be twisted and warped and cannot return to its original shape.
Take the example of Nicaragua. President Daniel Ortega, after losing several elections, conspired to change the voting rules such that he was able to win the presidency in 2006 with just 38 percent of the vote. He has since moved Nicaragua further toward authoritarianism.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/opin ... ogin-email
The election provides a clear example of resilience to authoritarian pressure. But it doesn’t mean our democracy is unbreakable.
After the Electoral College vote on Monday affirming his election, Joe Biden declared that “nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power, can extinguish” the “flame of democracy.” Mr. Biden’s speech and the vote capped a series of victories for democratic institutions, including the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results — just the latest turn in the extended refusal of President Trump and his Republican enablers to accept the outcome.
Political scientists like us are trying to assess the damage from Mr. Trump’s baseless, inept and ultimately doomed attacks on democracy. Do the sharp rebukes from our courts and other institutions mean that democracy “survived,” and we can simply move on? Or does all the talk about what “saved” American democracy really show that it’s in deep trouble?
After all, that Texas lawsuit had the public support of more than half of the Republican House members. And it looks like even Vladimir Putin beat Mitch McConnell to congratulate Mr. Biden.
The problem is we’ve been treating Mr. Trump’s attacks on democracy as if they are a pass-fail test. We should instead think of democracy as both damaged and resilient, like a forest after a powerful windstorm.
In our research, we argue that though all democracies are imperfect, one of their central virtues is that they are built to be resilient — to bend without breaking, even when elected leaders pull institutions in an authoritarian direction. But just because they’re more flexible doesn’t mean democracies can’t break. Resilience — the ability to adapt and keep functioning under strain — is a resource that needs replenishing, not a guarantee of safe passage.
It’s normal for institutions to face challenges from events or from politicians who try to use them for their own purposes. When institutions survive a stress test, they may come out stronger or weaker. Ambiguous laws can be clarified to withstand abuse; regulations can be updated; and public officials gain experience in how to prevent or defend against future tests. But it can take time for the strengthening to occur.
The 2020 election provides a clear example of democratic resilience to authoritarian pressure. Election officials and judges fielding legal challenges had to adapt not only to the enormous logistical challenges of the pandemic but also to Mr. Trump’s rhetoric. His attacks — and those from elected officials in his party and from the conservative media — put additional pressure on election officials and poll workers, who faced threats, intimidation efforts and overt pressure to ignore the will of the voters.
Yet in most of the more than 10,000 electoral jurisdictions across the country, voters cast ballots without incident and Election Day was peaceful. International election observers praised the election as orderly and organized.
Both democracy optimists and pessimists can draw the conclusions they want to see from this example. Optimists can say that our election system faced the 2020 test admirably, and those who run it will be better prepared for future efforts to undermine their work. Pessimists can say that Mr. Trump’s attacks will leave lasting scars. Next time, election officials might give in to political pressure. Or the damage might be invisible, like a tree’s weakened root system, deterring people from running for office or working at the polls.
Right now, there’s no way to know if the damage will be permanent. But we do know that democracies are better able to recover from such assaults because they allow for routine, peaceful replacement of leaders or parties. Dictators are more likely to be replaced through rebellion, military coup or civil war than through constitutional processes like elections and impeachment.
This is what democracy optimists get right. Mr. Trump’s abuse of foreign policy got him impeached. His spectacular failure to govern during a pandemic got him voted out of office.
But eventually, if stretched too far, democratic institutions will reach a limit. There may not be a dramatic break, like a coup, but democracy will be twisted and warped and cannot return to its original shape.
Take the example of Nicaragua. President Daniel Ortega, after losing several elections, conspired to change the voting rules such that he was able to win the presidency in 2006 with just 38 percent of the vote. He has since moved Nicaragua further toward authoritarianism.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/opin ... ogin-email
Cyberspace Plus Trump Almost Killed Our Democracy. Can Europe Save Us?
If we don’t find a solution fast, China will pass us economically.
Donald Trump has been impeached for trying to kill the results of our last election, but we should have no illusions that whatever happens at his trial, the weapon he used is still freely available for others to deploy. It’s a realm called “cyberspace” — where we’re all connected but no one is in charge.
Trump, like no leader before, took advantage of that realm to spread a Big Lie, undermine trust in our electoral system and inspire an attack on our Capitol. We need a democratic fix for cyberspace fast.
China has figured out how to project its autocratic system and Communist values into cyberspace, to enhance its growth and stability, better than we’ve figured out how to project our democratic values into cyberspace to enhance our growth and stability. And we invented the damn thing!
If we don’t figure this out fast, we’re going to fall behind China economically, because the pandemic has dramatically accelerated the digitization of everything, making cyberspace bigger and more important than ever.
How did this happen?
When cyberspace, which is made up of the sum total of all the apps running on the internet, first blossomed in the 1990s, it seemed so benign. The worst thing going on there was that a guy named Bezos was selling books on a site named after a river in Brazil — and it didn’t always collect state sales taxes. But a new breed of bloggers and websites quickly emerged, utterly free to speak their minds, and there was also gambling and porn and entertainment — and just about anything else you’d find in the digital version of a Wild West saloon.
Fast forward to today. Cyberspace is starting to resemble a sovereign nation-state, but without borders or governance. It has its own encrypted communications systems, like Telegram, outside the earshot of terrestrial governments. It has its own global news gathering and sharing platforms, like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It even has its own currencies — Bitcoin and others — that no sovereign state has minted.
In recent years, all these platforms have mushroomed. They can elevate important voices that were never heard before. But they can also enable a believer in Jewish-run space lasers that start forest fires to connect with enough voters to become a congresswoman. They can generate mass movements for racial equity and women’s rights, and also generate crowds to block Covid-19 vaccinations or to interrupt a nation’s sacred peaceful transfer of power.
The biggest political science question in the world today is how to get the best from this cyber realm and to cushion its worst. China, America and Europe all have different strategies. I’m rooting for Europe’s.
Why? As cyberspace began to emerge as a place where we were all connected but no government was in charge, China’s Communist Party recognized it as a threat to its monopoly on power and to order and stability in a country of 1.4 billion people.
So, in 2014, China created a special ministry — the Cyberspace Administration of China — to coordinate all government regulation of its cyber realm and guarantee that Beijing was in charge there as much as in Tiananmen Square.
Now, just as you cannot publish an anonymous critique of President Xi Jinping in The People’s Daily, you cannot do it on Sina Weibo, China’s combined version of Facebook and Twitter, where all users must be registered under their real identity. Facebook, Google, Telegram, Twitter and The New York Times are all blocked in China by the Great Firewall (although there are illegal ways around it).
I believe China will pay a price for having choked off even the smallest outlets, like the new audio drop-in app Clubhouse, for its people to let off steam and discuss important issues, like a spreading pandemic, but the regime believes otherwise.
“Each country gets to pick how its old physical governance system and values get projected into the new cyberworld, and China said its would be cybersocialism with Chinese characteristics,” explained Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft. “We just didn’t pick.”
Indeed, as big American cyber companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google emerged, they argued that the best governance of cyberspace would be if no government was in charge. That way their business models would be in charge — and they would grow bigger, faster.
They were also able to grow quickly thanks to a U.S. law that was actually enacted when Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old — long before he helped start Facebook in 2004 — Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
It stipulated that internet/cyberspace companies, which at the time were mostly crude search engines and aggregator sites to help people ferret out recipes and movie reviews, could not be held liable for defamatory or false posts by people using their platforms, the way The New York Times or CBS could be. These companies were treated like printing presses, not news organizations. This did help the internet grow fast, but it was later used by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to escape from having to heavily edit the content they published.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
If we don’t find a solution fast, China will pass us economically.
Donald Trump has been impeached for trying to kill the results of our last election, but we should have no illusions that whatever happens at his trial, the weapon he used is still freely available for others to deploy. It’s a realm called “cyberspace” — where we’re all connected but no one is in charge.
Trump, like no leader before, took advantage of that realm to spread a Big Lie, undermine trust in our electoral system and inspire an attack on our Capitol. We need a democratic fix for cyberspace fast.
China has figured out how to project its autocratic system and Communist values into cyberspace, to enhance its growth and stability, better than we’ve figured out how to project our democratic values into cyberspace to enhance our growth and stability. And we invented the damn thing!
If we don’t figure this out fast, we’re going to fall behind China economically, because the pandemic has dramatically accelerated the digitization of everything, making cyberspace bigger and more important than ever.
How did this happen?
When cyberspace, which is made up of the sum total of all the apps running on the internet, first blossomed in the 1990s, it seemed so benign. The worst thing going on there was that a guy named Bezos was selling books on a site named after a river in Brazil — and it didn’t always collect state sales taxes. But a new breed of bloggers and websites quickly emerged, utterly free to speak their minds, and there was also gambling and porn and entertainment — and just about anything else you’d find in the digital version of a Wild West saloon.
Fast forward to today. Cyberspace is starting to resemble a sovereign nation-state, but without borders or governance. It has its own encrypted communications systems, like Telegram, outside the earshot of terrestrial governments. It has its own global news gathering and sharing platforms, like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It even has its own currencies — Bitcoin and others — that no sovereign state has minted.
In recent years, all these platforms have mushroomed. They can elevate important voices that were never heard before. But they can also enable a believer in Jewish-run space lasers that start forest fires to connect with enough voters to become a congresswoman. They can generate mass movements for racial equity and women’s rights, and also generate crowds to block Covid-19 vaccinations or to interrupt a nation’s sacred peaceful transfer of power.
The biggest political science question in the world today is how to get the best from this cyber realm and to cushion its worst. China, America and Europe all have different strategies. I’m rooting for Europe’s.
Why? As cyberspace began to emerge as a place where we were all connected but no government was in charge, China’s Communist Party recognized it as a threat to its monopoly on power and to order and stability in a country of 1.4 billion people.
So, in 2014, China created a special ministry — the Cyberspace Administration of China — to coordinate all government regulation of its cyber realm and guarantee that Beijing was in charge there as much as in Tiananmen Square.
Now, just as you cannot publish an anonymous critique of President Xi Jinping in The People’s Daily, you cannot do it on Sina Weibo, China’s combined version of Facebook and Twitter, where all users must be registered under their real identity. Facebook, Google, Telegram, Twitter and The New York Times are all blocked in China by the Great Firewall (although there are illegal ways around it).
I believe China will pay a price for having choked off even the smallest outlets, like the new audio drop-in app Clubhouse, for its people to let off steam and discuss important issues, like a spreading pandemic, but the regime believes otherwise.
“Each country gets to pick how its old physical governance system and values get projected into the new cyberworld, and China said its would be cybersocialism with Chinese characteristics,” explained Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft. “We just didn’t pick.”
Indeed, as big American cyber companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google emerged, they argued that the best governance of cyberspace would be if no government was in charge. That way their business models would be in charge — and they would grow bigger, faster.
They were also able to grow quickly thanks to a U.S. law that was actually enacted when Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old — long before he helped start Facebook in 2004 — Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
It stipulated that internet/cyberspace companies, which at the time were mostly crude search engines and aggregator sites to help people ferret out recipes and movie reviews, could not be held liable for defamatory or false posts by people using their platforms, the way The New York Times or CBS could be. These companies were treated like printing presses, not news organizations. This did help the internet grow fast, but it was later used by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to escape from having to heavily edit the content they published.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us
Is technopessimism our new future?
A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online behemoths like Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge — confounding what is true and what is untrue — eroding the foundations of democracy.
These worries have intensified in response to the violence of Jan. 6, and the widespread acceptance among Republican voters of the conspicuously false claim that Democrats stole the election.
Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, summarized the dilemma in his 2019 report, “The internet’s Challenge to Democracy: Framing the Problem and Assessing Reforms,” pointing out that in a matter of just a few years
the widely shared utopian vision of the internet’s impact on governance has turned decidedly pessimistic. The original promise of digital technologies was unapologetically democratic: empowering the voiceless, breaking down borders to build cross-national communities, and eliminating elite referees who restricted political discourse.
Since then, Persily continued:
That promise has been replaced by concern that the most democratic features of the internet are, in fact, endangering democracy itself. Democracies pay a price for internet freedom, under this view, in the form of disinformation, hate speech, incitement, and foreign interference in elections.
Writing separately in an email, Persily argued that
Twitter and Facebook allowed Trump both to get around legacy intermediaries and to manipulate them by setting their agenda. They also provided environments (such as Facebook groups) that have proven conducive to radicalization and mobilization.
Margaret Roberts, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, puts it differently. “The difficult part about social media is that the freedom of information online can be weaponized to undermine democracy.”
Social media, Roberts wrote by email,
isn’t inherently pro or anti-democratic, but it gives voice and the power to organize to those who are typically excluded by more mainstream media. In some cases, these voices can be liberalizing, in others illiberal.
The debate over the political impact of the internet and social media raises the question: Do the putatively neutral instruments of social media function for both good and evil or are they inherently divisive?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Is technopessimism our new future?
A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online behemoths like Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge — confounding what is true and what is untrue — eroding the foundations of democracy.
These worries have intensified in response to the violence of Jan. 6, and the widespread acceptance among Republican voters of the conspicuously false claim that Democrats stole the election.
Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, summarized the dilemma in his 2019 report, “The internet’s Challenge to Democracy: Framing the Problem and Assessing Reforms,” pointing out that in a matter of just a few years
the widely shared utopian vision of the internet’s impact on governance has turned decidedly pessimistic. The original promise of digital technologies was unapologetically democratic: empowering the voiceless, breaking down borders to build cross-national communities, and eliminating elite referees who restricted political discourse.
Since then, Persily continued:
That promise has been replaced by concern that the most democratic features of the internet are, in fact, endangering democracy itself. Democracies pay a price for internet freedom, under this view, in the form of disinformation, hate speech, incitement, and foreign interference in elections.
Writing separately in an email, Persily argued that
Twitter and Facebook allowed Trump both to get around legacy intermediaries and to manipulate them by setting their agenda. They also provided environments (such as Facebook groups) that have proven conducive to radicalization and mobilization.
Margaret Roberts, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, puts it differently. “The difficult part about social media is that the freedom of information online can be weaponized to undermine democracy.”
Social media, Roberts wrote by email,
isn’t inherently pro or anti-democratic, but it gives voice and the power to organize to those who are typically excluded by more mainstream media. In some cases, these voices can be liberalizing, in others illiberal.
The debate over the political impact of the internet and social media raises the question: Do the putatively neutral instruments of social media function for both good and evil or are they inherently divisive?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A Radical Proposal for True Democracy
What if the solution to our dysfunctional politics is to get rid of the politicians?
One thing I want to do on my podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show,” is give space to truly radical ideas, to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imaginations. And Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, has one of those ideas. She calls it “open democracy,” and the premise is simple: What we call democracy is not very democratic.
The role of the people is confined to elections, to choosing the elites who will represent us. Landemore argues that our political thinking is stuck in “18th-century epistemologies and technologies.” It is not enough.
We’ve learned much in the last few hundred years about random sampling, about the benefits of cognitively diverse groups, about the ways elections are captured by those with the most social and financial capital. Landemore wants to take what we’ve learned and build a new vision of democracy atop it — one in which we let groups of randomly selected citizens actually deliberate and govern. One in which we trust deliberation and diversity, not elections and political parties, to shape our ideas and to restrain our worst impulses.
This is a challenging idea. I don’t know that it would work. But it’s a provocation worth wrestling with, particularly at this moment, when our ideas about democracy have so far outpaced the thin, corrupted ways in which we practice it.
You’ve heard people say, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” Landemore’s challenge is this: What if we were a democracy? We honor those who came before us for radically reimagining who could govern, and how politics could work. But did they really discover the terminal state of democracy? Or are there bold steps left for us to take?
To listen to the full conversation, subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show” wherever you get your podcasts, or click the player below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
(A full transcript of the episode can be found here https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/podc ... emore.html.)
What if the solution to our dysfunctional politics is to get rid of the politicians?
One thing I want to do on my podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show,” is give space to truly radical ideas, to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imaginations. And Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, has one of those ideas. She calls it “open democracy,” and the premise is simple: What we call democracy is not very democratic.
The role of the people is confined to elections, to choosing the elites who will represent us. Landemore argues that our political thinking is stuck in “18th-century epistemologies and technologies.” It is not enough.
We’ve learned much in the last few hundred years about random sampling, about the benefits of cognitively diverse groups, about the ways elections are captured by those with the most social and financial capital. Landemore wants to take what we’ve learned and build a new vision of democracy atop it — one in which we let groups of randomly selected citizens actually deliberate and govern. One in which we trust deliberation and diversity, not elections and political parties, to shape our ideas and to restrain our worst impulses.
This is a challenging idea. I don’t know that it would work. But it’s a provocation worth wrestling with, particularly at this moment, when our ideas about democracy have so far outpaced the thin, corrupted ways in which we practice it.
You’ve heard people say, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” Landemore’s challenge is this: What if we were a democracy? We honor those who came before us for radically reimagining who could govern, and how politics could work. But did they really discover the terminal state of democracy? Or are there bold steps left for us to take?
To listen to the full conversation, subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show” wherever you get your podcasts, or click the player below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
(A full transcript of the episode can be found here https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/podc ... emore.html.)
Texas Is a Rich State in a Rich Country, and Look What Happened
We don’t realize how fragile the basic infrastructure of our civilization is.
A few months back, because I really know how to live, I spent a night reading “The Green Swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change.” The report, released in January 2020 by the Bank for International Settlements, argued that central banks, concerned as they are with the stability of prices and financial systems, were negligent if they ignored climate change. The economies we know are inseparable from the long climatic peace in which they were built. But that peace is ending. There are no stable prices in a burning world.
This is one of those papers where the measured language preferred by technocrats strains against the horrors they are trying to describe. What emerges is almost an apocalyptic form of poetry. One line, in particular, has rung in my head for months. “Climate-related risks will remain largely unhedgeable as long as systemwide action is not undertaken.” If you know anything about financial regulators, you know the word “unhedgeable” is an alarm bell shrieking into the night. Financial systems are built to hedge risk. When a global risk is unhedgeable, the danger it poses is existential.
The point of the report is simply this: The world’s economic systems teeter atop “backward-looking risk assessment models that merely extrapolate historical trends.” But the future will not be like the past. Our models are degrading by the day, and we don’t understand — we don’t want to understand — how much in society could topple when they fail, and how much suffering that could bring. One place to start is by recognizing how fragile the basic infrastructure of civilization is even now, in this climate, in rich countries.
Which brings me to Texas. Two facts from that crisis have gotten less attention than they deserve. First, the cold in Texas was not a generational climatic disaster. The problem, as Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in his newsletter, is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ worst-case scenario planning used a 2011 cold snap that was a one-in-10-year weather event. It wasn’t even the worst cold Texas experienced in living memory: in 1989 temperatures and electricity generation (as a percentage of peak demand) dropped even further than they did in 2011. Texas hadn’t just failed to prepare for the far future. It failed to prepare for the recent past.
Second, it could have been so much worse. Bill Magness, the president and chief executive of ERCOT, said Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse — the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted. “If we had allowed a catastrophic blackout to happen, we wouldn’t be talking today about hopefully getting most customers their power back,” Mr. Magness said. “We’d be talking about how many months it might be before you get your power back.”
This was not the worst weather imaginable and this was not the worst outcome imaginable. Climate change promises far more violent events to come. But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.
Texas will not prove unique, or even all that bad, in terms of how fragile the assumptions beneath its critical infrastructure really were. Most of its mistakes are familiar to anyone who has ever covered the politics of infrastructure and disaster preparation. Shalini Vajjhala, who worked on climate resilience in the Obama administration and is now the chief executive of re:focus partners, a firm that helps cities prepare for climate change, put it sharply to me. “When I am successful, that means something hasn’t happened. That’s good policy, but it’s lousy politics. The first year, you’re applauded. The second year, your budget is cut. The third year, your staff goes away.”
It is not just our energy infrastructure that is unprepared for climate change. It is our political infrastructure. It is our social infrastructure. It is our psyches. There’s long been a hope that repeated climate crises will force Republicans to enlist in the fight to stop, or slow, climate change. How can you ignore the crisis when it is your constituents who are frozen, your home that is underwater? But what we saw in Texas is the darker timeline — a doom loop of climate polarization, where climate crises lead, paradoxically, to a politics that’s more desperate for fossil fuels, more dismissive of international or even interstate cooperation.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opin ... 778d3e6de3
We don’t realize how fragile the basic infrastructure of our civilization is.
A few months back, because I really know how to live, I spent a night reading “The Green Swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change.” The report, released in January 2020 by the Bank for International Settlements, argued that central banks, concerned as they are with the stability of prices and financial systems, were negligent if they ignored climate change. The economies we know are inseparable from the long climatic peace in which they were built. But that peace is ending. There are no stable prices in a burning world.
This is one of those papers where the measured language preferred by technocrats strains against the horrors they are trying to describe. What emerges is almost an apocalyptic form of poetry. One line, in particular, has rung in my head for months. “Climate-related risks will remain largely unhedgeable as long as systemwide action is not undertaken.” If you know anything about financial regulators, you know the word “unhedgeable” is an alarm bell shrieking into the night. Financial systems are built to hedge risk. When a global risk is unhedgeable, the danger it poses is existential.
The point of the report is simply this: The world’s economic systems teeter atop “backward-looking risk assessment models that merely extrapolate historical trends.” But the future will not be like the past. Our models are degrading by the day, and we don’t understand — we don’t want to understand — how much in society could topple when they fail, and how much suffering that could bring. One place to start is by recognizing how fragile the basic infrastructure of civilization is even now, in this climate, in rich countries.
Which brings me to Texas. Two facts from that crisis have gotten less attention than they deserve. First, the cold in Texas was not a generational climatic disaster. The problem, as Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in his newsletter, is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ worst-case scenario planning used a 2011 cold snap that was a one-in-10-year weather event. It wasn’t even the worst cold Texas experienced in living memory: in 1989 temperatures and electricity generation (as a percentage of peak demand) dropped even further than they did in 2011. Texas hadn’t just failed to prepare for the far future. It failed to prepare for the recent past.
Second, it could have been so much worse. Bill Magness, the president and chief executive of ERCOT, said Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse — the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted. “If we had allowed a catastrophic blackout to happen, we wouldn’t be talking today about hopefully getting most customers their power back,” Mr. Magness said. “We’d be talking about how many months it might be before you get your power back.”
This was not the worst weather imaginable and this was not the worst outcome imaginable. Climate change promises far more violent events to come. But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.
Texas will not prove unique, or even all that bad, in terms of how fragile the assumptions beneath its critical infrastructure really were. Most of its mistakes are familiar to anyone who has ever covered the politics of infrastructure and disaster preparation. Shalini Vajjhala, who worked on climate resilience in the Obama administration and is now the chief executive of re:focus partners, a firm that helps cities prepare for climate change, put it sharply to me. “When I am successful, that means something hasn’t happened. That’s good policy, but it’s lousy politics. The first year, you’re applauded. The second year, your budget is cut. The third year, your staff goes away.”
It is not just our energy infrastructure that is unprepared for climate change. It is our political infrastructure. It is our social infrastructure. It is our psyches. There’s long been a hope that repeated climate crises will force Republicans to enlist in the fight to stop, or slow, climate change. How can you ignore the crisis when it is your constituents who are frozen, your home that is underwater? But what we saw in Texas is the darker timeline — a doom loop of climate polarization, where climate crises lead, paradoxically, to a politics that’s more desperate for fossil fuels, more dismissive of international or even interstate cooperation.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opin ... 778d3e6de3
‘I Just Didn’t Want to Be Alive Anymore’: Meghan Says Life as Royal Made Her Suicidal
In a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Duchess of Sussex said she had asked officials at Buckingham Palace for medical help but was told it would damage the institution.
A year after Meghan Markle married Prince Harry in a fairy-tale wedding, she said in an extraordinary interview broadcast on Sunday night, her life as a member of the British royal family had become so emotionally desolate that she contemplated suicide.
At another point, members of the family told Harry and Meghan, a biracial former actress from the United States, that they did not want the couple’s unborn child, Archie, to be a prince or princess, and expressed concerns about how dark the color of the baby’s skin would be.
An emotional but self-possessed Meghan said of her suicidal thoughts: “I was ashamed to have to admit it to Harry. I knew that if I didn’t say it, I would do it. I just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
Meghan, 39, made the disclosures in an eagerly anticipated, at times incendiary, interview on CBS with Oprah Winfrey that aired in the United States in prime time. In describing a royal life that began as a fairy tale but quickly turned suffocating and cruel, Meghan’s blunt answers raised the combustible issues of race and privilege in the most rarefied echelon of British society.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
In a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Duchess of Sussex said she had asked officials at Buckingham Palace for medical help but was told it would damage the institution.
A year after Meghan Markle married Prince Harry in a fairy-tale wedding, she said in an extraordinary interview broadcast on Sunday night, her life as a member of the British royal family had become so emotionally desolate that she contemplated suicide.
At another point, members of the family told Harry and Meghan, a biracial former actress from the United States, that they did not want the couple’s unborn child, Archie, to be a prince or princess, and expressed concerns about how dark the color of the baby’s skin would be.
An emotional but self-possessed Meghan said of her suicidal thoughts: “I was ashamed to have to admit it to Harry. I knew that if I didn’t say it, I would do it. I just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
Meghan, 39, made the disclosures in an eagerly anticipated, at times incendiary, interview on CBS with Oprah Winfrey that aired in the United States in prime time. In describing a royal life that began as a fairy tale but quickly turned suffocating and cruel, Meghan’s blunt answers raised the combustible issues of race and privilege in the most rarefied echelon of British society.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Why Are We So Obsessed With Royalty?
Monarchies are surprisingly resilient, in real life and popular culture. Are we hard-wired to respect the throne?
My 4-year-old daughter is into princesses. Really into princesses. I have given the Princess Industrial Complex more money than I’d like to admit to keep those episodes of “Elena of Avalor” coming.
It isn’t as bad as I feared it would be. These are not the helpless princesses of my youth, yearning for their prince to come. These princesses are feminists. They fight, do magic and ride flying creatures, all while wearing sparkly ball gowns. They are also a racially diverse bunch. Elena is Disney’s first Latina princess. Her friends include a Black princess, a Jewish princess and kings who hail from places that seem awfully similar to India and Japan.
But there is one thing about them that still feels, well, not particularly progressive. They are royalty. The whole premise still rests on the notion that certain people were born to rule.
It’s odd that this idea is so widely accepted in 2021 even in the United States, a country borne out of a rebellion against a king. Our popular culture is awash with royalty — from “Coming 2 America” to the Netflix series “The Crown.”
This week, 17 million people in the United States tuned in to Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, which ignited an outcry about the injustice of denying a hereditary title to the couple’s child, possibly because of race. The allegations seemed to lay bare the empty promises of racial equality in Britain.
But isn’t there something inherently unjust and unequal about hereditary titles themselves? Why do so many people who routinely attack patriarchy and white supremacy give monarchy a pass?
Some have pointed out the absurdity. “Having a queen as head of state is like having a pirate or a mermaid or Ewok,” wrote Patrick Freyne in The Irish Times. To the assertion that the monarchy “looks archaic and racist” after that interview, he offered these wise words: “Well duh.”
And yet, the concept of royalty manages to be both enduringly compelling and entirely natural, so much so that it can occupy a 4-year-old’s entire imaginary world. If princesses suddenly ceased to exist, I’m quite sure that my daughter would reinvent them.
In real life, monarchies have been surprisingly resilient and popular around the world, according to Mauro Guillén, a Wharton international management professor who has analyzed 120 years’ worth of data from 137 countries.
Although Americans associate royalty with Europe, it’s a system that’s been used virtually everywhere, from the pharaohs of Egypt to the emperors of Japan and ancient Rome, to the Mayan kingdom that stretched across modern-day Mexico and the royal courts of West Africa. The Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran all reference kings and queens.
The idea that rulers derive their legitimacy from God and might pass it down to their children has been around for at least 7,000 years. For most of that time, kingship has been the dominant form of government. Today, 29 countries still have monarchies (43 if you include those in the British Commonwealth).
Another reason for their enduring popularity might be their success. Dr. Guillén’s study concluded that monarchies tend to produce higher standards of living than republics, apparently because they do a better job protecting private property rights and provide a necessary check on pesky politicians. Constitutional monarchies, where royals throw lavish weddings but leave the actual governing to elected leaders, have some of the highest standards of living on the planet — the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Japan.
“The fascination, the magic, the continuity, the stability that comes from a monarchy with a dynasty that has been playing this role for centuries, a lot of people find comfort in that,” Dr. Guillén told me. “In the U.K., that’s the reason the monarchy has 55 percent support.”
John Jost, a New York University professor, told me that people tend to cling to traditions and longstanding social systems that justify our understandable desire for order, safety and predictability. That’s what his 2020 book, “A Theory of System Justification,” is all about.
“I also suspect that some people are simply drawn to the glamour of royalty and the fantasy that some very, very special people are living opulent, extravagant lives, and this could be a way of transcending our mundane realities,” he told me. “Perhaps we hope that they will protect and take care of us as a reward for our adulation? That’s how it works out in fairy tales, at least.”
Is it possible that people crave pomp and pine for leaders who embody grandeur? Leaders who live in fancy towers, full of gaudy gold stuff, perhaps? Leaders who are said to have been chosen by God? Donald Trump obviously thought so.
“I play to people’s fantasies,” he wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”
There are certainly many who’d rather be represented by the richest man in the biggest palace, instead of an ordinary guy in a cardigan sweater.
Amid the uncertainty and bad faith that has overtaken so much of American democracy, it feels good to escape into Avalor, a world where kings and queens rule benevolently over contented villagers, and nobody ever has to worry about voter suppression or the Electoral College. As terrible as the wicked witch is on the show, she’s not nearly as terrifying as the thought of millions of American voters who believe in QAnon or Pizzagate.
On Jan. 6, the day Trump supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol, it calmed my nerves to watch “Elena of Avalor” with my daughter. It felt good to retreat into a world where villains aren’t real, and the princesses always prevail in the end.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Monarchies are surprisingly resilient, in real life and popular culture. Are we hard-wired to respect the throne?
My 4-year-old daughter is into princesses. Really into princesses. I have given the Princess Industrial Complex more money than I’d like to admit to keep those episodes of “Elena of Avalor” coming.
It isn’t as bad as I feared it would be. These are not the helpless princesses of my youth, yearning for their prince to come. These princesses are feminists. They fight, do magic and ride flying creatures, all while wearing sparkly ball gowns. They are also a racially diverse bunch. Elena is Disney’s first Latina princess. Her friends include a Black princess, a Jewish princess and kings who hail from places that seem awfully similar to India and Japan.
But there is one thing about them that still feels, well, not particularly progressive. They are royalty. The whole premise still rests on the notion that certain people were born to rule.
It’s odd that this idea is so widely accepted in 2021 even in the United States, a country borne out of a rebellion against a king. Our popular culture is awash with royalty — from “Coming 2 America” to the Netflix series “The Crown.”
This week, 17 million people in the United States tuned in to Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, which ignited an outcry about the injustice of denying a hereditary title to the couple’s child, possibly because of race. The allegations seemed to lay bare the empty promises of racial equality in Britain.
But isn’t there something inherently unjust and unequal about hereditary titles themselves? Why do so many people who routinely attack patriarchy and white supremacy give monarchy a pass?
Some have pointed out the absurdity. “Having a queen as head of state is like having a pirate or a mermaid or Ewok,” wrote Patrick Freyne in The Irish Times. To the assertion that the monarchy “looks archaic and racist” after that interview, he offered these wise words: “Well duh.”
And yet, the concept of royalty manages to be both enduringly compelling and entirely natural, so much so that it can occupy a 4-year-old’s entire imaginary world. If princesses suddenly ceased to exist, I’m quite sure that my daughter would reinvent them.
In real life, monarchies have been surprisingly resilient and popular around the world, according to Mauro Guillén, a Wharton international management professor who has analyzed 120 years’ worth of data from 137 countries.
Although Americans associate royalty with Europe, it’s a system that’s been used virtually everywhere, from the pharaohs of Egypt to the emperors of Japan and ancient Rome, to the Mayan kingdom that stretched across modern-day Mexico and the royal courts of West Africa. The Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran all reference kings and queens.
The idea that rulers derive their legitimacy from God and might pass it down to their children has been around for at least 7,000 years. For most of that time, kingship has been the dominant form of government. Today, 29 countries still have monarchies (43 if you include those in the British Commonwealth).
Another reason for their enduring popularity might be their success. Dr. Guillén’s study concluded that monarchies tend to produce higher standards of living than republics, apparently because they do a better job protecting private property rights and provide a necessary check on pesky politicians. Constitutional monarchies, where royals throw lavish weddings but leave the actual governing to elected leaders, have some of the highest standards of living on the planet — the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Japan.
“The fascination, the magic, the continuity, the stability that comes from a monarchy with a dynasty that has been playing this role for centuries, a lot of people find comfort in that,” Dr. Guillén told me. “In the U.K., that’s the reason the monarchy has 55 percent support.”
John Jost, a New York University professor, told me that people tend to cling to traditions and longstanding social systems that justify our understandable desire for order, safety and predictability. That’s what his 2020 book, “A Theory of System Justification,” is all about.
“I also suspect that some people are simply drawn to the glamour of royalty and the fantasy that some very, very special people are living opulent, extravagant lives, and this could be a way of transcending our mundane realities,” he told me. “Perhaps we hope that they will protect and take care of us as a reward for our adulation? That’s how it works out in fairy tales, at least.”
Is it possible that people crave pomp and pine for leaders who embody grandeur? Leaders who live in fancy towers, full of gaudy gold stuff, perhaps? Leaders who are said to have been chosen by God? Donald Trump obviously thought so.
“I play to people’s fantasies,” he wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”
There are certainly many who’d rather be represented by the richest man in the biggest palace, instead of an ordinary guy in a cardigan sweater.
Amid the uncertainty and bad faith that has overtaken so much of American democracy, it feels good to escape into Avalor, a world where kings and queens rule benevolently over contented villagers, and nobody ever has to worry about voter suppression or the Electoral College. As terrible as the wicked witch is on the show, she’s not nearly as terrifying as the thought of millions of American voters who believe in QAnon or Pizzagate.
On Jan. 6, the day Trump supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol, it calmed my nerves to watch “Elena of Avalor” with my daughter. It felt good to retreat into a world where villains aren’t real, and the princesses always prevail in the end.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
How do governments make money? | CNBC Explains
The pandemic is making governments cash poor as they deal with the biggest economic shock since the 1930s. CNBC's Silvia Amaro looks at where governments get their money from and why you could soon be paying more taxes.
Video:
https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2021/how-do- ... ee9d77dc9f
The pandemic is making governments cash poor as they deal with the biggest economic shock since the 1930s. CNBC's Silvia Amaro looks at where governments get their money from and why you could soon be paying more taxes.
Video:
https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2021/how-do- ... ee9d77dc9f
China Doesn’t Respect Us Anymore — for Good Reason
We’ve stopped following our formula for success.
Sometimes a comedian cuts through foreign policy issues better than any diplomat. Bill Maher did that the other week with an epic rant on U.S.-China relations, nailing the most troubling contrast between the two countries: China can still get big things done. America, not so much.
For many of our political leaders, governing has become sports, entertainment or just mindless tribal warfare. No wonder China’s leaders see us as a nation in imperial decline, living off the leftover fumes of American “exceptionalism.” I wish I could say they were all wrong.
“New Rule: You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a ‘silly people.’ And Americans are a silly people,” said Maher. “That’s the classic phrase from ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ — when Lawrence tells his Bedouin allies that as long as they stay a bunch of squabbling tribes, they will remain ‘a silly people.’ …
“We all know China does bad stuff. They break promises about Hong Kong autonomy; they put Uyghurs in camps and punish dissent. And we don’t want to be that. But it’s got to be something between authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.”
Maher added: “On a national level, we’ve been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009, but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending ‘woke’ competition. … The other half believes we have to stop the lizard people, because they’re eating babies. … China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it.”
Yes, China has huge problems. Its leaders are not 10 feet tall, but they are focused on real metrics of success. “China’s leaders are fierce but fragile,” argues James McGregor, the chairman of the consultancy APCO Worldwide, Greater China. “Precisely because they were not elected, they wake up every day scared of their own people, and that makes them very focused on performance” — particularly around jobs, housing and clean air.
By contrast, many U.S. politicians these days are elected from safe, gerrymandered districts and seek to stay in power by just “performing” for their base with populist theatrics.
Whenever I point this out, critics on the far right or far left ridiculously respond, “Oh, so you love China.” Actually, I am not interested in China. I care about America. My goal is to frighten us out of our complacency by getting more Americans to understand that China can be really evil AND really focused on educating its people and building its infrastructure and adopting best practices in business and science and promoting government bureaucrats on merit — all at the same time. Condemning China for the former will have zero impact if we’re not its equal in all of the latter.
At last week’s Alaska meeting between America’s and China’s top diplomats, Chinese officials made it quite clear that they no longer fear our criticism, because they don’t respect us as they once did, and they don’t think the rest of the world does, either. Or as Yang Jiechi, China’s top foreign affairs policymaker, baldly told his U.S. counterparts: “The United States does not have the qualification … to speak to China from a position of strength.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
We’ve stopped following our formula for success.
Sometimes a comedian cuts through foreign policy issues better than any diplomat. Bill Maher did that the other week with an epic rant on U.S.-China relations, nailing the most troubling contrast between the two countries: China can still get big things done. America, not so much.
For many of our political leaders, governing has become sports, entertainment or just mindless tribal warfare. No wonder China’s leaders see us as a nation in imperial decline, living off the leftover fumes of American “exceptionalism.” I wish I could say they were all wrong.
“New Rule: You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a ‘silly people.’ And Americans are a silly people,” said Maher. “That’s the classic phrase from ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ — when Lawrence tells his Bedouin allies that as long as they stay a bunch of squabbling tribes, they will remain ‘a silly people.’ …
“We all know China does bad stuff. They break promises about Hong Kong autonomy; they put Uyghurs in camps and punish dissent. And we don’t want to be that. But it’s got to be something between authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.”
Maher added: “On a national level, we’ve been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009, but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending ‘woke’ competition. … The other half believes we have to stop the lizard people, because they’re eating babies. … China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it.”
Yes, China has huge problems. Its leaders are not 10 feet tall, but they are focused on real metrics of success. “China’s leaders are fierce but fragile,” argues James McGregor, the chairman of the consultancy APCO Worldwide, Greater China. “Precisely because they were not elected, they wake up every day scared of their own people, and that makes them very focused on performance” — particularly around jobs, housing and clean air.
By contrast, many U.S. politicians these days are elected from safe, gerrymandered districts and seek to stay in power by just “performing” for their base with populist theatrics.
Whenever I point this out, critics on the far right or far left ridiculously respond, “Oh, so you love China.” Actually, I am not interested in China. I care about America. My goal is to frighten us out of our complacency by getting more Americans to understand that China can be really evil AND really focused on educating its people and building its infrastructure and adopting best practices in business and science and promoting government bureaucrats on merit — all at the same time. Condemning China for the former will have zero impact if we’re not its equal in all of the latter.
At last week’s Alaska meeting between America’s and China’s top diplomats, Chinese officials made it quite clear that they no longer fear our criticism, because they don’t respect us as they once did, and they don’t think the rest of the world does, either. Or as Yang Jiechi, China’s top foreign affairs policymaker, baldly told his U.S. counterparts: “The United States does not have the qualification … to speak to China from a position of strength.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Excerpt: His Highness the Aga Khan on Democracy (1)
by NANOWISDOMS ARCHIVE OF IMAMAT SPEECHES, INTERVIEWS AND WRITINGS
"My first concern is that we must define the paths to democracy more flexibly. We like to say that democracy involves a pluralistic approach to life but too seldom do we take a pluralistic approach to democracy. Too often, we insist that democracies must all follow a similar script, evolving at a similar pace, without recognising that different circumstances may call for different constructs...."
"How is power best divided and balanced? How should secular and spiritual allegiances interact? How can traditional authority, even monarchical authority, relate to democratic frameworks? How is the integrity of minority cultures and faith systems best reconciled with majority rule?'
"It is simplistic to wish that our democratic destinations should be similar - that they cannot be reached by many paths. The democratic spirit of freedom and flexibility must begin with our definitions of democracy itself. Even as we think more flexibly about democracy, we should also consider a second goal: diversifying the institutions of democratic life....
"Democracies need to distinguish responsibly between the prerogatives of the people and the obligations of their leaders. And leaders must meet their obligations. When democracies fail, it is usually because publics have grown impatient with ineffectual leaders and governments.
"When parliaments lack the structure or expertise to grapple with complex problems, or when a system of checks and balances stymies action rather than refining it, then disenchanted publics will often turn to autocrats. The UN Development Program recently reported, for example, that 55 percent of those surveyed in 18 Latin American countries would support authoritarian rule if it
brought economic progress. There, in too many cases progress and democracy have not gone hand in hand....
"Expanding the number of people who share social power is only half the battle. The critical question is how such power is used. How can we inspire people to reach beyond rampant materialism, self-indulgent individualism, and unprincipled relativism? One answer is to augment our focus on personal prerogatives and individual rights, with an expanded concern for personal responsibilities and communal goals....
"A deeply rooted sense of public integrity means more than integrity in government, important as that must be. Ethical lapses in medicine and education, malfeasance in business and banking, dishonesty among journalists, scientists, engineers, or scholars - all of these weaknesses can undermine the most promising democracies."
http://www.nanowisdoms.org/nwblog/wp-co ... %20(1).pdf
by NANOWISDOMS ARCHIVE OF IMAMAT SPEECHES, INTERVIEWS AND WRITINGS
"My first concern is that we must define the paths to democracy more flexibly. We like to say that democracy involves a pluralistic approach to life but too seldom do we take a pluralistic approach to democracy. Too often, we insist that democracies must all follow a similar script, evolving at a similar pace, without recognising that different circumstances may call for different constructs...."
"How is power best divided and balanced? How should secular and spiritual allegiances interact? How can traditional authority, even monarchical authority, relate to democratic frameworks? How is the integrity of minority cultures and faith systems best reconciled with majority rule?'
"It is simplistic to wish that our democratic destinations should be similar - that they cannot be reached by many paths. The democratic spirit of freedom and flexibility must begin with our definitions of democracy itself. Even as we think more flexibly about democracy, we should also consider a second goal: diversifying the institutions of democratic life....
"Democracies need to distinguish responsibly between the prerogatives of the people and the obligations of their leaders. And leaders must meet their obligations. When democracies fail, it is usually because publics have grown impatient with ineffectual leaders and governments.
"When parliaments lack the structure or expertise to grapple with complex problems, or when a system of checks and balances stymies action rather than refining it, then disenchanted publics will often turn to autocrats. The UN Development Program recently reported, for example, that 55 percent of those surveyed in 18 Latin American countries would support authoritarian rule if it
brought economic progress. There, in too many cases progress and democracy have not gone hand in hand....
"Expanding the number of people who share social power is only half the battle. The critical question is how such power is used. How can we inspire people to reach beyond rampant materialism, self-indulgent individualism, and unprincipled relativism? One answer is to augment our focus on personal prerogatives and individual rights, with an expanded concern for personal responsibilities and communal goals....
"A deeply rooted sense of public integrity means more than integrity in government, important as that must be. Ethical lapses in medicine and education, malfeasance in business and banking, dishonesty among journalists, scientists, engineers, or scholars - all of these weaknesses can undermine the most promising democracies."
http://www.nanowisdoms.org/nwblog/wp-co ... %20(1).pdf
How will Canada pay back its pandemic debt?
As Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland prepares to table the first federal budget in two years, Canadians should keep in mind that the debt accumulated during the pandemic – and the debt Ottawa is poised to take on in its immediate aftermath – will need to be repaid some day.
The extraordinary amount of income support provided by the federal government during the pandemic led to a 75 per cent increase in federal spending in the 2020-21 fiscal year that ended on March 31. The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has pegged federal expenditures at $652-billion in 2020-21, compared to $373-billion in 2019-20. A year-over-year increase of this magnitude has never been seen outside of wartime.
The C.D. Howe Institute estimates that, for every dollar Ottawa spent on programs last year, it borrowed 50 cents. Overall, the federal debt hit nearly $1.1-trillion in the year to March 31, up from $712-billion a year earlier, and is on its way to $1.3-trillion by 2024.
What’s more, in her Fall Economic Statement, Ms. Freeland signalled her government’s intention to spend an additional $70-billion to $100-billion over three years to finance a stimulus program that the PBO this week said could be “mis-calibrated” given signs that economic and job growth appear set to exceed forecasts made in Ottawa’s fall update.
That is not likely to stop Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals from tabling what is expected to be a pre-election budget that promises not only a massive one-time stimulus program, but additional permanent spending measures related to new program launches. While some programs, such as national daycare or pharmacare, might be worthy in themselves, they may not be financially sustainable without new taxes on the middle class or cuts to other programs.
Unfortunately, no one in Ottawa appears willing to admit that, at least not before the next election.
More...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
As Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland prepares to table the first federal budget in two years, Canadians should keep in mind that the debt accumulated during the pandemic – and the debt Ottawa is poised to take on in its immediate aftermath – will need to be repaid some day.
The extraordinary amount of income support provided by the federal government during the pandemic led to a 75 per cent increase in federal spending in the 2020-21 fiscal year that ended on March 31. The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has pegged federal expenditures at $652-billion in 2020-21, compared to $373-billion in 2019-20. A year-over-year increase of this magnitude has never been seen outside of wartime.
The C.D. Howe Institute estimates that, for every dollar Ottawa spent on programs last year, it borrowed 50 cents. Overall, the federal debt hit nearly $1.1-trillion in the year to March 31, up from $712-billion a year earlier, and is on its way to $1.3-trillion by 2024.
What’s more, in her Fall Economic Statement, Ms. Freeland signalled her government’s intention to spend an additional $70-billion to $100-billion over three years to finance a stimulus program that the PBO this week said could be “mis-calibrated” given signs that economic and job growth appear set to exceed forecasts made in Ottawa’s fall update.
That is not likely to stop Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals from tabling what is expected to be a pre-election budget that promises not only a massive one-time stimulus program, but additional permanent spending measures related to new program launches. While some programs, such as national daycare or pharmacare, might be worthy in themselves, they may not be financially sustainable without new taxes on the middle class or cuts to other programs.
Unfortunately, no one in Ottawa appears willing to admit that, at least not before the next election.
More...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Israelis and Americans Both Are Asking, Whose Country Is This Anyway?
Israel and the U.S. are trying to define anew what it means to be a pluralistic democracy.
As Israel struggles to put together a ruling coalition, I was struck by a television report there that a senior ultra-Orthodox rabbi and spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party said he’d prefer a government propped up by Israel’s Islamist Raam party than one with leftist Jewish parties, because Israeli Arab lawmakers were less likely to turn everyone secular.
That pretty well sums up how polarized Israeli politics is today — and why Israel just held its fourth inconclusive election in under two years and could soon be heading for a fifth, which must be some kind of Guinness world record for democratic electoral haplessness.
I follow Israeli politics closely, not only for itself, but because I’ve noticed over the years that Israeli political trends are to Western politics what off-Broadway is to Broadway. Stuff often happens in miniature there first.
What is playing out in Israel is the same political fragmentation/polarization that is hobbling America: the loss of a shared national narrative to inspire and bind the country as it journeys into the 21st century.
While Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, on Tuesday gave Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges, the first shot at forging a new government out of all the parties that won seats in the last election, Rivlin said “no candidate has a realistic chance of forming” a ruling coalition. Earlier Rivlin had said Israel needed a leader who could “heal the divides between us” as well as “pass a budget and extricate the state institutions from political paralysis.”
Sound familiar?
Israel and America are both nations “that gave birth to themselves in the name of self-proclaimed ideas and ideals,” noted Dov Seidman, author of the book “How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything.” “When your country is a grand, aspirational human project like that, it requires sharing some very deep things — foundational principles like liberty and justice for all and an animating ethos like America’s e pluribus unum. Right now, in both countries, those deep things not only have been fractured, they are actively being fractured by a polarization industry that assaults the truth and trust necessary for these projects to flourish.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Israel and the U.S. are trying to define anew what it means to be a pluralistic democracy.
As Israel struggles to put together a ruling coalition, I was struck by a television report there that a senior ultra-Orthodox rabbi and spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party said he’d prefer a government propped up by Israel’s Islamist Raam party than one with leftist Jewish parties, because Israeli Arab lawmakers were less likely to turn everyone secular.
That pretty well sums up how polarized Israeli politics is today — and why Israel just held its fourth inconclusive election in under two years and could soon be heading for a fifth, which must be some kind of Guinness world record for democratic electoral haplessness.
I follow Israeli politics closely, not only for itself, but because I’ve noticed over the years that Israeli political trends are to Western politics what off-Broadway is to Broadway. Stuff often happens in miniature there first.
What is playing out in Israel is the same political fragmentation/polarization that is hobbling America: the loss of a shared national narrative to inspire and bind the country as it journeys into the 21st century.
While Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, on Tuesday gave Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges, the first shot at forging a new government out of all the parties that won seats in the last election, Rivlin said “no candidate has a realistic chance of forming” a ruling coalition. Earlier Rivlin had said Israel needed a leader who could “heal the divides between us” as well as “pass a budget and extricate the state institutions from political paralysis.”
Sound familiar?
Israel and America are both nations “that gave birth to themselves in the name of self-proclaimed ideas and ideals,” noted Dov Seidman, author of the book “How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything.” “When your country is a grand, aspirational human project like that, it requires sharing some very deep things — foundational principles like liberty and justice for all and an animating ethos like America’s e pluribus unum. Right now, in both countries, those deep things not only have been fractured, they are actively being fractured by a polarization industry that assaults the truth and trust necessary for these projects to flourish.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Why Political Sectarianism Is a Growing Threat to American Democracy
The country is increasingly split into camps that don’t just disagree on policy and politics — they see the other as alien, immoral, a threat. Such political sectarianism is now on the march.
American democracy faces many challenges: New limits on voting rights. The corrosive effect of misinformation. The rise of domestic terrorism. Foreign interference in elections. Efforts to subvert the peaceful transition of power. And making matters worse on all of these issues is a fundamental truth: The two political parties see the other as an enemy.
It’s an outlook that makes compromise impossible and encourages elected officials to violate norms in pursuit of an agenda or an electoral victory. It turns debates over changing voting laws into existential showdowns. And it undermines the willingness of the loser to accept defeat — an essential requirement of a democracy.
This threat to democracy has a name: sectarianism. It’s not a term usually used in discussions about American politics. It’s better known in the context of religious sectarianism — like the hostility between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. Yet a growing number of eminent political scientists contend that political sectarianism is on the rise in America.
That contention helps make sense of a lot of what’s been going on in American politics in recent years, including Donald J. Trump’s successful presidential bid, President Biden’s tortured effort to reconcile his inaugural call for “unity” with his partisan legislative agenda, and the plan by far-right House members to create a congressional group that would push some views associated with white supremacy. Most of all, it re-centers the threat to American democracy on the dangers of a hostile and divided citizenry.
In recent years, many analysts and commentators have told a now-familiar story of how democracies die at the hands of authoritarianism: A demagogic populist exploits dissatisfaction with the prevailing liberal order, wins power through legitimate means, and usurps constitutional power to cement his or her own rule. It’s the story of Putin’s Russia, Chavez’s Venezuela and even Hitler’s Germany.
Sectarianism, in turn, instantly evokes an additional set of very different cautionary tales: Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia, regions where religious sectarianism led to dysfunctional government, violence, insurgency, civil war and even disunion or partition.
These aren’t always stories of authoritarian takeover, though sectarianism can yield that outcome as well. As often, it’s the story of a minority that can’t accept being ruled by its enemy.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/us/d ... iversified
The country is increasingly split into camps that don’t just disagree on policy and politics — they see the other as alien, immoral, a threat. Such political sectarianism is now on the march.
American democracy faces many challenges: New limits on voting rights. The corrosive effect of misinformation. The rise of domestic terrorism. Foreign interference in elections. Efforts to subvert the peaceful transition of power. And making matters worse on all of these issues is a fundamental truth: The two political parties see the other as an enemy.
It’s an outlook that makes compromise impossible and encourages elected officials to violate norms in pursuit of an agenda or an electoral victory. It turns debates over changing voting laws into existential showdowns. And it undermines the willingness of the loser to accept defeat — an essential requirement of a democracy.
This threat to democracy has a name: sectarianism. It’s not a term usually used in discussions about American politics. It’s better known in the context of religious sectarianism — like the hostility between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. Yet a growing number of eminent political scientists contend that political sectarianism is on the rise in America.
That contention helps make sense of a lot of what’s been going on in American politics in recent years, including Donald J. Trump’s successful presidential bid, President Biden’s tortured effort to reconcile his inaugural call for “unity” with his partisan legislative agenda, and the plan by far-right House members to create a congressional group that would push some views associated with white supremacy. Most of all, it re-centers the threat to American democracy on the dangers of a hostile and divided citizenry.
In recent years, many analysts and commentators have told a now-familiar story of how democracies die at the hands of authoritarianism: A demagogic populist exploits dissatisfaction with the prevailing liberal order, wins power through legitimate means, and usurps constitutional power to cement his or her own rule. It’s the story of Putin’s Russia, Chavez’s Venezuela and even Hitler’s Germany.
Sectarianism, in turn, instantly evokes an additional set of very different cautionary tales: Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia, regions where religious sectarianism led to dysfunctional government, violence, insurgency, civil war and even disunion or partition.
These aren’t always stories of authoritarian takeover, though sectarianism can yield that outcome as well. As often, it’s the story of a minority that can’t accept being ruled by its enemy.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/us/d ... iversified
Bias Is a Big Problem. But So Is ‘Noise.’
The word “bias” commonly appears in conversations about mistaken judgments and unfortunate decisions. We use it when there is discrimination, for instance against women or in favor of Ivy League graduates. But the meaning of the word is broader: A bias is any predictable error that inclines your judgment in a particular direction. For instance, we speak of bias when forecasts of sales are consistently optimistic or investment decisions overly cautious.
Society has devoted a lot of attention to the problem of bias — and rightly so. But when it comes to mistaken judgments and unfortunate decisions, there is another type of error that attracts far less attention: noise.
To see the difference between bias and noise, consider your bathroom scale. If on average the readings it gives are too high (or too low), the scale is biased. If it shows different readings when you step on it several times in quick succession, the scale is noisy. (Cheap scales are likely to be both biased and noisy.) While bias is the average of errors, noise is their variability.
Although it is often ignored, noise is a large source of malfunction in society. In a 1981 study, for example, 208 federal judges were asked to determine the appropriate sentences for the same 16 cases. The cases were described by the characteristics of the offense (robbery or fraud, violent or not) and of the defendant (young or old, repeat or first-time offender, accomplice or principal). You might have expected judges to agree closely about such vignettes, which were stripped of distracting details and contained only relevant information.
But the judges did not agree. The average difference between the sentences that two randomly chosen judges gave for the same crime was more than 3.5 years. Considering that the mean sentence was seven years, that was a disconcerting amount of noise.
Noise in real courtrooms is surely only worse, as actual cases are more complex and difficult to judge than stylized vignettes. It is hard to escape the conclusion that sentencing is in part a lottery, because the punishment can vary by many years depending on which judge is assigned to the case and on the judge’s state of mind on that day. The judicial system is unacceptably noisy.
Consider another noisy system, this time in the private sector. In 2015, we conducted a study of underwriters in a large insurance company. Forty-eight underwriters were shown realistic summaries of risks to which they assigned premiums, just as they did in their jobs.
How much of a difference would you expect to find between the premium values that two competent underwriters assigned to the same risk? Executives in the insurance company said they expected about a 10 percent difference. But the typical difference we found between two underwriters was an astonishing 55 percent of their average premium — more than five times as large as the executives had expected.
Many other studies demonstrate noise in professional judgments. Radiologists disagree on their readings of images and cardiologists on their surgery decisions. Forecasts of economic outcomes are notoriously noisy. Sometimes fingerprint experts disagree about whether there is a “match.” Wherever there is judgment, there is noise — and more of it than you think.
Noise causes error, as does bias, but the two kinds of error are separate and independent. A company’s hiring decisions could be unbiased overall if some of its recruiters favor men and others favor women. However, its hiring decisions would be noisy, and the company would make many bad choices. Likewise, if one insurance policy is overpriced and another is underpriced by the same amount, the company is making two mistakes, even though there is no overall bias.
Where does noise come from? There is much evidence that irrelevant circumstances can affect judgments. In the case of criminal sentencing, for instance, a judge’s mood, fatigue and even the weather can all have modest but detectable effects on judicial decisions.
Another source of noise is that people can have different general tendencies. Judges often vary in the severity of the sentences they mete out: There are “hanging” judges and lenient ones.
A third source of noise is less intuitive, although it is usually the largest: People can have not only different general tendencies (say, whether they are harsh or lenient) but also different patterns of assessment (say, which types of cases they believe merit being harsh or lenient about). Underwriters differ in their views of what is risky, and doctors in their views of which ailments require treatment. We celebrate the uniqueness of individuals, but we tend to forget that, when we expect consistency, uniqueness becomes a liability.
Once you become aware of noise, you can look for ways to reduce it. For instance, independent judgments from a number of people can be averaged (a frequent practice in forecasting). Guidelines, such as those often used in medicine, can help professionals reach better and more uniform decisions. As studies of hiring practices have consistently shown, imposing structure and discipline in interviews and other forms of assessment tends to improve judgments of job candidates.
No noise-reduction techniques will be deployed, however, if we do not first recognize the existence of noise. Noise is too often neglected. But it is a serious issue that results in frequent error and rampant injustice. Organizations and institutions, public and private, will make better decisions if they take noise seriously.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The word “bias” commonly appears in conversations about mistaken judgments and unfortunate decisions. We use it when there is discrimination, for instance against women or in favor of Ivy League graduates. But the meaning of the word is broader: A bias is any predictable error that inclines your judgment in a particular direction. For instance, we speak of bias when forecasts of sales are consistently optimistic or investment decisions overly cautious.
Society has devoted a lot of attention to the problem of bias — and rightly so. But when it comes to mistaken judgments and unfortunate decisions, there is another type of error that attracts far less attention: noise.
To see the difference between bias and noise, consider your bathroom scale. If on average the readings it gives are too high (or too low), the scale is biased. If it shows different readings when you step on it several times in quick succession, the scale is noisy. (Cheap scales are likely to be both biased and noisy.) While bias is the average of errors, noise is their variability.
Although it is often ignored, noise is a large source of malfunction in society. In a 1981 study, for example, 208 federal judges were asked to determine the appropriate sentences for the same 16 cases. The cases were described by the characteristics of the offense (robbery or fraud, violent or not) and of the defendant (young or old, repeat or first-time offender, accomplice or principal). You might have expected judges to agree closely about such vignettes, which were stripped of distracting details and contained only relevant information.
But the judges did not agree. The average difference between the sentences that two randomly chosen judges gave for the same crime was more than 3.5 years. Considering that the mean sentence was seven years, that was a disconcerting amount of noise.
Noise in real courtrooms is surely only worse, as actual cases are more complex and difficult to judge than stylized vignettes. It is hard to escape the conclusion that sentencing is in part a lottery, because the punishment can vary by many years depending on which judge is assigned to the case and on the judge’s state of mind on that day. The judicial system is unacceptably noisy.
Consider another noisy system, this time in the private sector. In 2015, we conducted a study of underwriters in a large insurance company. Forty-eight underwriters were shown realistic summaries of risks to which they assigned premiums, just as they did in their jobs.
How much of a difference would you expect to find between the premium values that two competent underwriters assigned to the same risk? Executives in the insurance company said they expected about a 10 percent difference. But the typical difference we found between two underwriters was an astonishing 55 percent of their average premium — more than five times as large as the executives had expected.
Many other studies demonstrate noise in professional judgments. Radiologists disagree on their readings of images and cardiologists on their surgery decisions. Forecasts of economic outcomes are notoriously noisy. Sometimes fingerprint experts disagree about whether there is a “match.” Wherever there is judgment, there is noise — and more of it than you think.
Noise causes error, as does bias, but the two kinds of error are separate and independent. A company’s hiring decisions could be unbiased overall if some of its recruiters favor men and others favor women. However, its hiring decisions would be noisy, and the company would make many bad choices. Likewise, if one insurance policy is overpriced and another is underpriced by the same amount, the company is making two mistakes, even though there is no overall bias.
Where does noise come from? There is much evidence that irrelevant circumstances can affect judgments. In the case of criminal sentencing, for instance, a judge’s mood, fatigue and even the weather can all have modest but detectable effects on judicial decisions.
Another source of noise is that people can have different general tendencies. Judges often vary in the severity of the sentences they mete out: There are “hanging” judges and lenient ones.
A third source of noise is less intuitive, although it is usually the largest: People can have not only different general tendencies (say, whether they are harsh or lenient) but also different patterns of assessment (say, which types of cases they believe merit being harsh or lenient about). Underwriters differ in their views of what is risky, and doctors in their views of which ailments require treatment. We celebrate the uniqueness of individuals, but we tend to forget that, when we expect consistency, uniqueness becomes a liability.
Once you become aware of noise, you can look for ways to reduce it. For instance, independent judgments from a number of people can be averaged (a frequent practice in forecasting). Guidelines, such as those often used in medicine, can help professionals reach better and more uniform decisions. As studies of hiring practices have consistently shown, imposing structure and discipline in interviews and other forms of assessment tends to improve judgments of job candidates.
No noise-reduction techniques will be deployed, however, if we do not first recognize the existence of noise. Noise is too often neglected. But it is a serious issue that results in frequent error and rampant injustice. Organizations and institutions, public and private, will make better decisions if they take noise seriously.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Israel Is Falling Apart, Because the Conflict Controls Us
Our politics are stalled. Our democracy is in tatters. Blame the occupation.
TEL AVIV — For a few days in early May, Israel appeared close to establishing a new government. After four elections in two years that failed to produce a decisive result, the country was poised for a surprising partnership of ideologically diverse parties including, for the first time, an independent Arab party — Raam. Such a government would have been fraught, even shaky, but it would have ended the two years of political chaos and replaced Israel’s right-wing prime minister, a man currently standing trial for corruption.
What happened instead followed a grim pattern: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict flared yet again. Within days of the start of the military escalation between Hamas and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu that was sparked in Jerusalem and compounded by Jewish and Palestinian violence in Israeli cities, the crisis had put political change on hold.
Although many Israelis scoff at the left-wing tendency to blame the occupation for the country’s problems, and Mr. Netanyahu has insisted for years that the conflict doesn’t control our lives, reality says otherwise. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominates Israeli politics, muscling out sound policymaking in other critical areas of life. The conflict is suffocating liberal values, eroding Israel’s democratic institutions. Israeli leadership at large is collapsing under its weight.
It is time to accept that it’s not just that Israel controls Palestinians in the conflict. Palestine also controls Israel. The occupation and the festering political conflict since 1948 have permeated every part of our society, political and social institutions, and well-being. If Israel and its supporters can view the situation in this light, they might reach different conclusions about what’s best for the country.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Our politics are stalled. Our democracy is in tatters. Blame the occupation.
TEL AVIV — For a few days in early May, Israel appeared close to establishing a new government. After four elections in two years that failed to produce a decisive result, the country was poised for a surprising partnership of ideologically diverse parties including, for the first time, an independent Arab party — Raam. Such a government would have been fraught, even shaky, but it would have ended the two years of political chaos and replaced Israel’s right-wing prime minister, a man currently standing trial for corruption.
What happened instead followed a grim pattern: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict flared yet again. Within days of the start of the military escalation between Hamas and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu that was sparked in Jerusalem and compounded by Jewish and Palestinian violence in Israeli cities, the crisis had put political change on hold.
Although many Israelis scoff at the left-wing tendency to blame the occupation for the country’s problems, and Mr. Netanyahu has insisted for years that the conflict doesn’t control our lives, reality says otherwise. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominates Israeli politics, muscling out sound policymaking in other critical areas of life. The conflict is suffocating liberal values, eroding Israel’s democratic institutions. Israeli leadership at large is collapsing under its weight.
It is time to accept that it’s not just that Israel controls Palestinians in the conflict. Palestine also controls Israel. The occupation and the festering political conflict since 1948 have permeated every part of our society, political and social institutions, and well-being. If Israel and its supporters can view the situation in this light, they might reach different conclusions about what’s best for the country.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3
We’ve had too many underqualified presidents and prime ministers
In a podcast interview last summer, Barack Obama lamented his lack of experience while serving as president. He didn’t do badly, but if he served a third term, he told Marc Maron, he would be better because he’d “screwed up enough times” and now “I know what I’m doing and I’m fearless … I’ve been through this.”
Mr. Obama is one of a batch of recent presidents and prime ministers who came to office inexperienced and underqualified. They’ve required too much on-the-job training. Their populations have paid a price.
Joe Biden, the oldest and most experienced president in the history of his country, marks a sharp break with recent history. He is in a position to re-establish the importance of pedigree, the idea that if you’re set on occupying the most important position in the land, maybe you should have suitable credentials.
Mr. Obama, who served in the Illinois legislature, hadn’t even completed one Senate term in Washington before running for president.
Donald Trump was the first president who had no political experience or public service whatsoever.
George W. Bush, who served a few years as governor of Texas after being a baseball-club owner, had nowhere near the experience of his father, who was president from 1989 to 1993. Among other missteps stemming in part from his callow, cocksure ways was his blundering into the Iraq war.
Finding three other presidents serving in succession with such modest qualifications is no small task.
In Canada, Justin Trudeau had served a few years on the opposition benches and as Liberal leader, but had no governing experience before becoming Prime Minister. He brought in a cohort of younger-generation types like himself who offered some fresh perspectives and fresh policies. But his team often excluded older pros who could have prevented embarrassing sophomoric lapses, which did not afflict Pierre Trudeau’s more veteran crew.
Likewise, Stephen Harper only had experience as an opposition member of Parliament before becoming PM. Calling himself an economist, as the brainy ideologue did, was a stretch. He was parochial, having rarely set foot outside the country before becoming leader of a G7 country.
His reign importantly addressed Western Canadian discontent. But his grounding was too narrow for him to take on statesman-like qualities. He governed with a chip on his shoulder, instead of doing so with goodwill.
The closest thing to a Joe Biden that Canada has had in terms of experience is Jean Chrétien, who served in 11 cabinet portfolios before becoming prime minister. After barely surviving a Quebec referendum vote in 1995, the Shawinigan fox, as Bob Plamondon called him in his book of that name, governed effectively. He knew the country; he had it in his bones.
Another elder statesman, Louis St. Laurent, who became PM at age 66, didn’t fare too badly either. Nor did his contemporary in the Oval Office, Dwight Eisenhower, who became president at 62 with the experience of having led the Allied forces in the Second World War. The Republican presidency deemed the most successful in modern times is that of Ronald Reagan, who didn’t take office until age 69.
Experience isn’t everything, of course. Through history, several presidents and prime ministers (such as Brian Mulroney) fared well without much of it. But the old hands have the advantage of knowing where the fault lines are.
Post-Reagan and Bush the elder, the Republicans became the anti-government party. Experienced leaders were cast as establishment insiders. It reached such mindlessness that candidates for Republican office who were educated at prestigious schools tried to camouflage such qualifications. They didn’t want to be seen as erudite.
It all culminated in the election of Mr. Trump and the gong show that ensued. Outsiders and disrupters are sometimes necessary to rattle the system and generate new thinking. His pushes for ending the endless wars, for taking on China on trade and for focusing on the working class were not without merit, but they weren’t enough to save him on election day last year.
In Canada, politics haven’t quite descended to so lowbrow a level. But there has been a dearth of experienced and learned types who have shown an interest in public office. A test will be how former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney is received as he contemplates an entry into the Liberal fold. He doesn’t have hands-on political experience as such, but his kind of intellectual capital is sorely needed. With his global expertise and standing he could serve to elevate the standards.
With his half-century of experience, Joe Biden is attempting to do just that in Washington. It’s a tall task. But so far, so good.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... ministers/
In a podcast interview last summer, Barack Obama lamented his lack of experience while serving as president. He didn’t do badly, but if he served a third term, he told Marc Maron, he would be better because he’d “screwed up enough times” and now “I know what I’m doing and I’m fearless … I’ve been through this.”
Mr. Obama is one of a batch of recent presidents and prime ministers who came to office inexperienced and underqualified. They’ve required too much on-the-job training. Their populations have paid a price.
Joe Biden, the oldest and most experienced president in the history of his country, marks a sharp break with recent history. He is in a position to re-establish the importance of pedigree, the idea that if you’re set on occupying the most important position in the land, maybe you should have suitable credentials.
Mr. Obama, who served in the Illinois legislature, hadn’t even completed one Senate term in Washington before running for president.
Donald Trump was the first president who had no political experience or public service whatsoever.
George W. Bush, who served a few years as governor of Texas after being a baseball-club owner, had nowhere near the experience of his father, who was president from 1989 to 1993. Among other missteps stemming in part from his callow, cocksure ways was his blundering into the Iraq war.
Finding three other presidents serving in succession with such modest qualifications is no small task.
In Canada, Justin Trudeau had served a few years on the opposition benches and as Liberal leader, but had no governing experience before becoming Prime Minister. He brought in a cohort of younger-generation types like himself who offered some fresh perspectives and fresh policies. But his team often excluded older pros who could have prevented embarrassing sophomoric lapses, which did not afflict Pierre Trudeau’s more veteran crew.
Likewise, Stephen Harper only had experience as an opposition member of Parliament before becoming PM. Calling himself an economist, as the brainy ideologue did, was a stretch. He was parochial, having rarely set foot outside the country before becoming leader of a G7 country.
His reign importantly addressed Western Canadian discontent. But his grounding was too narrow for him to take on statesman-like qualities. He governed with a chip on his shoulder, instead of doing so with goodwill.
The closest thing to a Joe Biden that Canada has had in terms of experience is Jean Chrétien, who served in 11 cabinet portfolios before becoming prime minister. After barely surviving a Quebec referendum vote in 1995, the Shawinigan fox, as Bob Plamondon called him in his book of that name, governed effectively. He knew the country; he had it in his bones.
Another elder statesman, Louis St. Laurent, who became PM at age 66, didn’t fare too badly either. Nor did his contemporary in the Oval Office, Dwight Eisenhower, who became president at 62 with the experience of having led the Allied forces in the Second World War. The Republican presidency deemed the most successful in modern times is that of Ronald Reagan, who didn’t take office until age 69.
Experience isn’t everything, of course. Through history, several presidents and prime ministers (such as Brian Mulroney) fared well without much of it. But the old hands have the advantage of knowing where the fault lines are.
Post-Reagan and Bush the elder, the Republicans became the anti-government party. Experienced leaders were cast as establishment insiders. It reached such mindlessness that candidates for Republican office who were educated at prestigious schools tried to camouflage such qualifications. They didn’t want to be seen as erudite.
It all culminated in the election of Mr. Trump and the gong show that ensued. Outsiders and disrupters are sometimes necessary to rattle the system and generate new thinking. His pushes for ending the endless wars, for taking on China on trade and for focusing on the working class were not without merit, but they weren’t enough to save him on election day last year.
In Canada, politics haven’t quite descended to so lowbrow a level. But there has been a dearth of experienced and learned types who have shown an interest in public office. A test will be how former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney is received as he contemplates an entry into the Liberal fold. He doesn’t have hands-on political experience as such, but his kind of intellectual capital is sorely needed. With his global expertise and standing he could serve to elevate the standards.
With his half-century of experience, Joe Biden is attempting to do just that in Washington. It’s a tall task. But so far, so good.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... ministers/
The Strange, Sad Death of America’s Political Imagination
The U.S. used to be a country of invention and change. Today, our politics are sclerotic, our civic culture is in crisis, and our dreams are small. What happened?
The world didn’t expect much from Edward Bellamy, a reclusive, tubercular writer who lived with his parents. Yet if he lived small, he dreamed big, and in 1888 he published a phenomenally successful utopian novel, “Looking Backward, 2000-1887.” It told of a man who fell asleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000 to electrified cities, music broadcasts and “credit cards.”
Even more exciting than Bellamy’s technological forecasts were his political ones. Unforgiving capitalism would be replaced by a welfare state, he predicted, with universal education, guaranteed incomes and supported retirement. His readers started Bellamy Clubs and set off a craze for utopian novels. In the 19th-century United States, only “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sold more copies in its first years than “Looking Backward.”
Bellamy, and his fans across the country, felt confident a “radically different” future was imminent. And why not? The United States was a dynamic, almost volatile, country then. During the 1800s, the United States grew more than four times in size, its western edge moving from the Mississippi River to the South China Sea. In the first half of that century, it had transformed from a patrician society run by the propertied into a rough-and-tumble one in which nearly all white men could vote. The second half, when Bellamy lived, saw the end of slavery, the military defeat of great Native American powers and the explosive growth of industrial capitalism — events that, for good or ill, profoundly altered the country.
Bellamy saw his era as “portentous of great changes,” and he was right. Not only did his technological predictions come true; his political ideas caught fire. In 1892, the Populist Party presidential candidate won five states running on a Bellamy-inspired platform that called for a shortened workday, a graduated income tax and the direct election of senators. The New Deal — with its income supports, economic controls and federal jobs — seemed straight out of Bellamy.
During Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, “Looking Backward” occupied a conspicuous spot in the White House library. Roosevelt’s own book, published on his inauguration in 1933, was titled “Looking Forward.”
Our own era is, like Bellamy’s, “portentous of great changes.” A Bellamy-style character falling asleep just five years ago and waking up now would require patient orientation (“So, after the assault on the Capitol, the right seized on calls to defund the police and Mr. Potato Head’s gender as wedge issues, which …”). Alongside eventful episodes like Donald Trump’s presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic are deeper transformations: the internet’s upending of daily life and work, the faltering of the gender binary, the rise of China, the warming of the planet.
And yet it’s hard to imagine politics changing as a result, as Bellamy’s readers once did. Washington seems inhospitable to utopians; it’s deadlocked between those determined simply to hang onto power and those seeking modest tweaks.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The U.S. used to be a country of invention and change. Today, our politics are sclerotic, our civic culture is in crisis, and our dreams are small. What happened?
The world didn’t expect much from Edward Bellamy, a reclusive, tubercular writer who lived with his parents. Yet if he lived small, he dreamed big, and in 1888 he published a phenomenally successful utopian novel, “Looking Backward, 2000-1887.” It told of a man who fell asleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000 to electrified cities, music broadcasts and “credit cards.”
Even more exciting than Bellamy’s technological forecasts were his political ones. Unforgiving capitalism would be replaced by a welfare state, he predicted, with universal education, guaranteed incomes and supported retirement. His readers started Bellamy Clubs and set off a craze for utopian novels. In the 19th-century United States, only “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sold more copies in its first years than “Looking Backward.”
Bellamy, and his fans across the country, felt confident a “radically different” future was imminent. And why not? The United States was a dynamic, almost volatile, country then. During the 1800s, the United States grew more than four times in size, its western edge moving from the Mississippi River to the South China Sea. In the first half of that century, it had transformed from a patrician society run by the propertied into a rough-and-tumble one in which nearly all white men could vote. The second half, when Bellamy lived, saw the end of slavery, the military defeat of great Native American powers and the explosive growth of industrial capitalism — events that, for good or ill, profoundly altered the country.
Bellamy saw his era as “portentous of great changes,” and he was right. Not only did his technological predictions come true; his political ideas caught fire. In 1892, the Populist Party presidential candidate won five states running on a Bellamy-inspired platform that called for a shortened workday, a graduated income tax and the direct election of senators. The New Deal — with its income supports, economic controls and federal jobs — seemed straight out of Bellamy.
During Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, “Looking Backward” occupied a conspicuous spot in the White House library. Roosevelt’s own book, published on his inauguration in 1933, was titled “Looking Forward.”
Our own era is, like Bellamy’s, “portentous of great changes.” A Bellamy-style character falling asleep just five years ago and waking up now would require patient orientation (“So, after the assault on the Capitol, the right seized on calls to defund the police and Mr. Potato Head’s gender as wedge issues, which …”). Alongside eventful episodes like Donald Trump’s presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic are deeper transformations: the internet’s upending of daily life and work, the faltering of the gender binary, the rise of China, the warming of the planet.
And yet it’s hard to imagine politics changing as a result, as Bellamy’s readers once did. Washington seems inhospitable to utopians; it’s deadlocked between those determined simply to hang onto power and those seeking modest tweaks.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The job of Canada’s governor-general is merely symbolic – except when it’s not
At the height of the Idle No More movement in 2013, Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence asked for an audience with then governor-general David Johnston to discuss treaty obligations. She was subsequently mocked by political commentators. The governor-general, after all, was powerless to affect any real change, they said. Yet this week, some of those same voices applauded the appointment of Mary Simon, who will become Canada’s first Indigenous governor-general as a reflection of reconciliation.
It so often seems that progress in the Crown-Indigenous relationship is measured strictly in symbolism. This is not to say there isn’t some power in the appointment of an Indigenous, and specifically an Inuk, woman to the role of governor-general; there is. But it’s complicated.
The Crown might be the most confusing concept in Canadian politics. The institution of the Crown is supposed to represent Canadians – think Crown lands, Crown attorneys or Crown wards – and when the Crown acts, it is supposed to be on behalf of Canadians and their interests. It does so, theoretically, through the executive branch of the federal government (i.e. cabinet). Some conflate the Crown with “the state,” but that’s not quite right. Rather, the state and the institutions of the state serve the Crown.
After all, Queen Elizabeth II is, as the personal embodiment of the Crown, Canada’s nominal head of state, making the Canadian Crown an individual as well as an ambiguous political concept. The position of the governor-general was created to ensure the early colony was behaving, with all policy and law flowing upward to English colonial masters to approve. This dynamic is reflected in Canada’s initial constitutional sources, with a tremendous amount of influence afforded to the governor-general, at least on paper: validating laws and dissolving Parliament, appointing judges and allocating taxes – the stuff of a steady colonial hand.
After rebellions in the 1830s in pursuit of responsible government, Canadians largely refused to revolt over the intervening years. The role of the governor-general eventually evolved into a ceremonial one, and the office now mostly defers to the prime minister of the day on the matters of substance mentioned above.
Mary Simon’s historic appointment as Canada’s next governor-general is worth celebrating
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... eneral-is/
New life, new sunrise with new Governor-General
But there’s an unanswered question in this complex formulation of the Crown: where Indigenous people fit.
While the colonial overtones don’t need to be repeated, consider that treaties were (and still are) negotiated between First Nations or Inuit and the Crown; the Supreme Court views aboriginal rights as a burden on Crown sovereignty, and there is a federal department devoted to Crown-Indigenous relations. In addition to the lands, wards and attorneys mentioned above, these images are all confrontational, the Crown existing in opposition to Indigenous people.
In fact, the Crown has shapeshifted to more effectively oppose Indigenous rights over the years. While English colonial officials initially negotiated and signed treaties, that role was passed down at Confederation to the federal cabinet, without discussion with Indigenous peoples. Many years later, the 2014 Supreme Court’s decision on Grassy Narrows First Nation v. Ontario allowed provincial Crowns to override treaties in the name of the public interest; Indigenous people were not included in the “the public.” In the 2017 Clyde River case, the court ruled that an arm’s-length regulatory body such as the National Energy Board can be “the vehicle through which the Crown acts,” and could thus do the work of treaty and aboriginal rights implementation – or not.
Readers, then, might understand why Indigenous leaders are often confused about who and what the Crown is. It is everything and everyone. It is Mary Simon.
The incoming Queen’s representative actually helped shape discussions during Canada’s Constitutional patriation, with campaigns for Inuit and Indigenous women’s rights, and has a long record of effective diplomacy. Ms. Simon will be someone who Inuit – and Indigenous people generally – will be proud of. But simultaneously and in addition to representing the Queen, governors-general also unavoidably represent colonialism.
So could there be somewhere within this contradiction a path to resist underwriting the oppressive and oppositional nature of the Crown/Indigenous relationship?
Ms. Simon has already defied one convention – the requirement that the governor-general be bilingual in English and French, having instead led her remarks on Tuesday with Inuktut. Perhaps there will be more to come. What if she refused to sign federal bills that would harm Indigenous people, or rewrote the Speech from the Throne to commit tax dollars to return Indigenous lands to Indigenous communities? What if Ms. Simon forced legislators to pass Indigenous rights bills stalled in the Senate before agreeing to dissolve Parliament for an election, or answered the phone when the next Theresa Spence calls?
It is likely that she’d be fired. But until then – or instead – perhaps Ms. Simon will find a way to avoid the strictly symbolic, and shift by degrees who the Crown is actually accountable to.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
At the height of the Idle No More movement in 2013, Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence asked for an audience with then governor-general David Johnston to discuss treaty obligations. She was subsequently mocked by political commentators. The governor-general, after all, was powerless to affect any real change, they said. Yet this week, some of those same voices applauded the appointment of Mary Simon, who will become Canada’s first Indigenous governor-general as a reflection of reconciliation.
It so often seems that progress in the Crown-Indigenous relationship is measured strictly in symbolism. This is not to say there isn’t some power in the appointment of an Indigenous, and specifically an Inuk, woman to the role of governor-general; there is. But it’s complicated.
The Crown might be the most confusing concept in Canadian politics. The institution of the Crown is supposed to represent Canadians – think Crown lands, Crown attorneys or Crown wards – and when the Crown acts, it is supposed to be on behalf of Canadians and their interests. It does so, theoretically, through the executive branch of the federal government (i.e. cabinet). Some conflate the Crown with “the state,” but that’s not quite right. Rather, the state and the institutions of the state serve the Crown.
After all, Queen Elizabeth II is, as the personal embodiment of the Crown, Canada’s nominal head of state, making the Canadian Crown an individual as well as an ambiguous political concept. The position of the governor-general was created to ensure the early colony was behaving, with all policy and law flowing upward to English colonial masters to approve. This dynamic is reflected in Canada’s initial constitutional sources, with a tremendous amount of influence afforded to the governor-general, at least on paper: validating laws and dissolving Parliament, appointing judges and allocating taxes – the stuff of a steady colonial hand.
After rebellions in the 1830s in pursuit of responsible government, Canadians largely refused to revolt over the intervening years. The role of the governor-general eventually evolved into a ceremonial one, and the office now mostly defers to the prime minister of the day on the matters of substance mentioned above.
Mary Simon’s historic appointment as Canada’s next governor-general is worth celebrating
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... eneral-is/
New life, new sunrise with new Governor-General
But there’s an unanswered question in this complex formulation of the Crown: where Indigenous people fit.
While the colonial overtones don’t need to be repeated, consider that treaties were (and still are) negotiated between First Nations or Inuit and the Crown; the Supreme Court views aboriginal rights as a burden on Crown sovereignty, and there is a federal department devoted to Crown-Indigenous relations. In addition to the lands, wards and attorneys mentioned above, these images are all confrontational, the Crown existing in opposition to Indigenous people.
In fact, the Crown has shapeshifted to more effectively oppose Indigenous rights over the years. While English colonial officials initially negotiated and signed treaties, that role was passed down at Confederation to the federal cabinet, without discussion with Indigenous peoples. Many years later, the 2014 Supreme Court’s decision on Grassy Narrows First Nation v. Ontario allowed provincial Crowns to override treaties in the name of the public interest; Indigenous people were not included in the “the public.” In the 2017 Clyde River case, the court ruled that an arm’s-length regulatory body such as the National Energy Board can be “the vehicle through which the Crown acts,” and could thus do the work of treaty and aboriginal rights implementation – or not.
Readers, then, might understand why Indigenous leaders are often confused about who and what the Crown is. It is everything and everyone. It is Mary Simon.
The incoming Queen’s representative actually helped shape discussions during Canada’s Constitutional patriation, with campaigns for Inuit and Indigenous women’s rights, and has a long record of effective diplomacy. Ms. Simon will be someone who Inuit – and Indigenous people generally – will be proud of. But simultaneously and in addition to representing the Queen, governors-general also unavoidably represent colonialism.
So could there be somewhere within this contradiction a path to resist underwriting the oppressive and oppositional nature of the Crown/Indigenous relationship?
Ms. Simon has already defied one convention – the requirement that the governor-general be bilingual in English and French, having instead led her remarks on Tuesday with Inuktut. Perhaps there will be more to come. What if she refused to sign federal bills that would harm Indigenous people, or rewrote the Speech from the Throne to commit tax dollars to return Indigenous lands to Indigenous communities? What if Ms. Simon forced legislators to pass Indigenous rights bills stalled in the Senate before agreeing to dissolve Parliament for an election, or answered the phone when the next Theresa Spence calls?
It is likely that she’d be fired. But until then – or instead – perhaps Ms. Simon will find a way to avoid the strictly symbolic, and shift by degrees who the Crown is actually accountable to.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
The American Identity Crisis
For most of the past century, human dignity had a friend — the United States of America. We are a deeply flawed and error-prone nation, like any other, but America helped defeat fascism and communism and helped set the context for European peace, Asian prosperity and the spread of democracy.
Then came Iraq and Afghanistan, and America lost faith in itself and its global role — like a pitcher who has been shelled and no longer has confidence in his own stuff. On the left, many now reject the idea that America can be or is a global champion of democracy, and they find phrases like “the indispensable nation” or the “last best hope of the earth” ridiculous. On the right the wall-building caucus has given up on the idea that the rest of the world is even worth engaging.
Many people around the world have always resisted America’s self-appointed role as democracy’s champion. But they have also been rightly appalled when America sits back and allows genocide to engulf places like Rwanda or allows dangerous regimes to threaten the world order.
The Afghans are the latest witnesses to this reality. The American bungles in Afghanistan have been well documented. We’ve spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of our people. But the two-decade strategy of taking the fight to the terrorists, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, has meant that global terrorism is no longer seen as a major concern in daily American life. Over the past few years, a small force of American troops has helped prevent some of the worst people on earth from taking over a nation of more than 38 million — with relatively few American casualties. In 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school. Within four years, 6 percent were enrolled, and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40 percent.
But America, disillusioned with itself, is now withdrawing. And there’s a strong possibility that this withdrawal will produce a strategic setback and a humanitarian disaster. The Taliban are rapidly seizing territory. It may not be too long before Afghan girls get shot in the head for trying to go to school. Intelligence agencies see the arming of ethnic militias and worry about an even more violent civil war. The agencies worry about a flood of refugees, and terrorist groups free to operate unmolested once again.
History didn’t stop just because America lost confidence in itself. As President Biden correctly notes, the world finds itself enmeshed in a vast contest between democracy and different forms of autocracy. This is not just a struggle between political systems. It’s an economic, cultural, intellectual and political contest all at once — a struggle between the forces of progressive modernity and reaction.
Over the past decades America and its allies have betrayed our values and compromised with tyrants innumerable times. But at their core the liberal powers radiate a set of vital ideals — not just democracy and capitalism, but also feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice. These things are all intertwined in a progressive package that puts individual dignity at the center.
If the 21st century has taught us anything, it is that a lot of people, foreign and domestic, don’t like that package and feel existentially threatened by it. China’s leaders are not just autocrats, they think they are leading a civilization state and are willing to slaughter ethnic minorities. Vladimir Putin is not just a thug, he’s a cultural reactionary. The Taliban champion a fantasy version of the Middle Ages.
These people are not leading 20th-century liberation movements against colonialism and “American hegemony.” They are leading a 21st-century Kulturkampf against women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, individual dignity — the whole progressive package.
You know this is a culture war and not a traditional great power rivalry because the threat to each nation is more internal than external. The greatest threat to America is that domestic autocrats, inspired by a global authoritarian movement, will again take over the U.S. government. The greatest threat to China is that internal liberals, inspired by global liberal ideals, will threaten the regime.
Each civilization is thus trying to attract believers to its own vision. It matters tremendously how we show up in the world.
We’re never going back to the Bush doctrine. But we’re probably not going to do well in battle for hearts and minds if we see ourselves abandoning our allies in places like Afghanistan. We’re probably not going to do well if our own behavior begins to resemble the realpolitik of autocrats. We probably won’t do well if we can’t look ourselves in the mirror without a twinge of shame.
I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.
But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.
If we’re going to fight Trumpian authoritarianism at home, we have to fight the more venomous brands of authoritarianism that thrive around the world. That means staying on the field.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
For most of the past century, human dignity had a friend — the United States of America. We are a deeply flawed and error-prone nation, like any other, but America helped defeat fascism and communism and helped set the context for European peace, Asian prosperity and the spread of democracy.
Then came Iraq and Afghanistan, and America lost faith in itself and its global role — like a pitcher who has been shelled and no longer has confidence in his own stuff. On the left, many now reject the idea that America can be or is a global champion of democracy, and they find phrases like “the indispensable nation” or the “last best hope of the earth” ridiculous. On the right the wall-building caucus has given up on the idea that the rest of the world is even worth engaging.
Many people around the world have always resisted America’s self-appointed role as democracy’s champion. But they have also been rightly appalled when America sits back and allows genocide to engulf places like Rwanda or allows dangerous regimes to threaten the world order.
The Afghans are the latest witnesses to this reality. The American bungles in Afghanistan have been well documented. We’ve spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of our people. But the two-decade strategy of taking the fight to the terrorists, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, has meant that global terrorism is no longer seen as a major concern in daily American life. Over the past few years, a small force of American troops has helped prevent some of the worst people on earth from taking over a nation of more than 38 million — with relatively few American casualties. In 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school. Within four years, 6 percent were enrolled, and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40 percent.
But America, disillusioned with itself, is now withdrawing. And there’s a strong possibility that this withdrawal will produce a strategic setback and a humanitarian disaster. The Taliban are rapidly seizing territory. It may not be too long before Afghan girls get shot in the head for trying to go to school. Intelligence agencies see the arming of ethnic militias and worry about an even more violent civil war. The agencies worry about a flood of refugees, and terrorist groups free to operate unmolested once again.
History didn’t stop just because America lost confidence in itself. As President Biden correctly notes, the world finds itself enmeshed in a vast contest between democracy and different forms of autocracy. This is not just a struggle between political systems. It’s an economic, cultural, intellectual and political contest all at once — a struggle between the forces of progressive modernity and reaction.
Over the past decades America and its allies have betrayed our values and compromised with tyrants innumerable times. But at their core the liberal powers radiate a set of vital ideals — not just democracy and capitalism, but also feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice. These things are all intertwined in a progressive package that puts individual dignity at the center.
If the 21st century has taught us anything, it is that a lot of people, foreign and domestic, don’t like that package and feel existentially threatened by it. China’s leaders are not just autocrats, they think they are leading a civilization state and are willing to slaughter ethnic minorities. Vladimir Putin is not just a thug, he’s a cultural reactionary. The Taliban champion a fantasy version of the Middle Ages.
These people are not leading 20th-century liberation movements against colonialism and “American hegemony.” They are leading a 21st-century Kulturkampf against women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, individual dignity — the whole progressive package.
You know this is a culture war and not a traditional great power rivalry because the threat to each nation is more internal than external. The greatest threat to America is that domestic autocrats, inspired by a global authoritarian movement, will again take over the U.S. government. The greatest threat to China is that internal liberals, inspired by global liberal ideals, will threaten the regime.
Each civilization is thus trying to attract believers to its own vision. It matters tremendously how we show up in the world.
We’re never going back to the Bush doctrine. But we’re probably not going to do well in battle for hearts and minds if we see ourselves abandoning our allies in places like Afghanistan. We’re probably not going to do well if our own behavior begins to resemble the realpolitik of autocrats. We probably won’t do well if we can’t look ourselves in the mirror without a twinge of shame.
I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.
But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.
If we’re going to fight Trumpian authoritarianism at home, we have to fight the more venomous brands of authoritarianism that thrive around the world. That means staying on the field.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
This Is Why America Needs Catholicism
A social historian looking for a defense of the Black Power movement in popular magazines and newspapers of the 1960s would have to do a great deal of digging. Such an inquirer would have an easier time quarrying the pages of Triumph, a little-remembered Catholic periodical started by L. Brent Bozell, a brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review.
In January 1967, the editors of Triumph suggested that Black Power could help to restore “liberty and human dignity to America.” Liberals congratulating themselves over the passage of major civil rights legislation, the magazine argued, were unaware of how they were still “barbarizing” Black people, who rightly understood that human dignity transcended mere legal recognition of their constitutional rights.
The editors would go even further than this. To these decidedly reactionary Roman Catholic laymen — Mr. Bozell had only recently returned with his family from Francisco Franco’s Spain — rioting was an understandable response to the “terror that always haunts men confronted by meaninglessness,” the actions of a people “yearning to make contact with the divine.” For Triumph, Black Power was a rebellion against the “soulless tyranny of secular liberalism,” and its adherents were worthy of praise because “almost alone among our brethren they seem willing to burst violently through the flesh into the realm of the spirit.”
When I began reading through the archives of Triumph several years ago, I found these arguments striking. This was not because they seemed to offer a wholly accurate assessment of the state of American race relations in the late ’60s. (Among other things, many at the magazine ignored the reality that millions of African Americans were quite pleased with the decidedly sublunary consolations of equal protection under the law and held correspondingly unromantic views about rioting.)
What struck me, rather, was that the editors, who also called for unilateral nuclear disarmament and were among the founders of the nascent pro-life movement, were doing something that even now, in a nation of some 65 million Catholics, seems impossibly radical: setting aside the standard ideological divisions of coalition politics in an attempt to apply the full range of the church’s social teaching to the problems of modern life.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A social historian looking for a defense of the Black Power movement in popular magazines and newspapers of the 1960s would have to do a great deal of digging. Such an inquirer would have an easier time quarrying the pages of Triumph, a little-remembered Catholic periodical started by L. Brent Bozell, a brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review.
In January 1967, the editors of Triumph suggested that Black Power could help to restore “liberty and human dignity to America.” Liberals congratulating themselves over the passage of major civil rights legislation, the magazine argued, were unaware of how they were still “barbarizing” Black people, who rightly understood that human dignity transcended mere legal recognition of their constitutional rights.
The editors would go even further than this. To these decidedly reactionary Roman Catholic laymen — Mr. Bozell had only recently returned with his family from Francisco Franco’s Spain — rioting was an understandable response to the “terror that always haunts men confronted by meaninglessness,” the actions of a people “yearning to make contact with the divine.” For Triumph, Black Power was a rebellion against the “soulless tyranny of secular liberalism,” and its adherents were worthy of praise because “almost alone among our brethren they seem willing to burst violently through the flesh into the realm of the spirit.”
When I began reading through the archives of Triumph several years ago, I found these arguments striking. This was not because they seemed to offer a wholly accurate assessment of the state of American race relations in the late ’60s. (Among other things, many at the magazine ignored the reality that millions of African Americans were quite pleased with the decidedly sublunary consolations of equal protection under the law and held correspondingly unromantic views about rioting.)
What struck me, rather, was that the editors, who also called for unilateral nuclear disarmament and were among the founders of the nascent pro-life movement, were doing something that even now, in a nation of some 65 million Catholics, seems impossibly radical: setting aside the standard ideological divisions of coalition politics in an attempt to apply the full range of the church’s social teaching to the problems of modern life.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Our ‘Broken Windows’ World
For years, “broken windows” policing — the idea that the best way to prevent serious crime was to enforce laws against petty crime — was derided by critics as unnecessary, unjust, even racist. So cities across America pulled back from prosecuting the supposedly small stuff, like shoplifting.
Now we’ve seen a jump in violent crime.
Criminologists can debate the causes of the new crime wave. But many people intuitively understand that places in which decay and disorder become the norm are places where crime tends to thrive. That’s because crime is largely a function of environmental cues — of the palpable sense that nobody cares, nobody is in charge, and anything goes.
We now live in a broken-windows world. I would argue that it began a decade ago, when Barack Obama called on Americans to turn a chapter on a decade of war and “focus on nation-building here at home,” which became a theme of his re-election campaign.
It looked like a good bet at the time. Osama bin Laden had just been killed. The surge in Iraq had stabilized the country and decimated Al Qaeda there. The Taliban were on the defensive. Relations with Russia had been “reset.” China was still under the technocratic leadership of Hu Jintao. The Arab Spring, eagerly embraced by Obama as “a chance to pursue the world as it should be,” seemed to many to portend a more hopeful future for the Middle East (though some of us were less sanguine).
We vacated Iraq in 2011. But instead of getting peace, we got the horror of ISIS, forcing us to send back troops and fight a war that has lasted for years, cost thousands of civilian lives and led to the displacement of more than three million people.
We declared in 2012 that Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons would cross a red line and lead to a decisive U.S. response. At least as of 2018, he was still gassing his own people. We’ve mostly ceased to notice.
Unrestrained violence in Syria forced millions into exile, bringing unbearable strain on countries like Lebanon while flooding Europe with refugees in 2015. One result was a populist backlash that included Brexit, big electoral gains for neo-fascist parties in France and Germany and a major assist to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
China last year unilaterally revoked the “one country, two systems” policy for Hong Kong. Does anyone outside that city even remember?
Vladimir Putin seized Crimea in 2014, six months after the Syrian chemical-weapons crisis, and was met by a muted response. Putin fomented a pro-Russian insurrection in eastern Ukraine and was met by a muted response. Putin sent armed forces to support al-Assad in Syria and was met by a muted response. Putin interfered in our elections and was met by a muted response.
More recently, President Biden has offered tough talk on Putin. But when it came to blocking Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany, his administration offered a muted response.
It’s in this global context that the catastrophe in Afghanistan is playing out. Beyond the humanitarian calamity it represents for the Afghan people, the political debacle it represents for Biden (though he scarcely appears aware of it), and the national disgrace it represents for Americans who don’t think we should go begging to the Taliban to extend our exit deadline, the Afghan surrender is the most visible evidence that the era of Pax Americana is over.
We have turned the corner into a world of unlit streets, more hospitable to predators than it is to prey.
In this world, the temptation can only grow stronger for Putin to break the back of NATO by picking off a vulnerable member like Latvia (where a quarter of the population is ethnically Russian and the opportunities for subversion are great). Ditto for China seizing Taiwan. For that matter, what keeps the Taliban (or some nominal offshoot that provides the Taliban with plausible deniability) from taking hundreds of stranded Westerners hostage and humiliating Biden just as Iranian revolutionaries once humiliated Jimmy Carter?
Some pundits lightly dismiss the notion of credibility in statecraft. But foreign policy is also conducted by taking the measure of your opponents, as John F. Kennedy learned after Nikita Khrushchev thrashed him at their summit in Vienna and built the Berlin Wall two months later.
If you’re wondering why remote and God-forsaken Afghanistan matters in places of allegedly greater strategic relevance to the United States, ask yourself what signals this bungled withdrawal — the overconfident predictions, the lousy military intelligence, the incompetent diplomatic coordination, the unwillingness to stand by allies — sends about our capacity to deal with a more serious adversary, especially one that can hold the American heartland at risk.
Critics of the past 75 years of American foreign policy have consistently attacked the idea, and counted the costs, of the United States as the world’s policeman. They are soon to learn just how high the costs can go when the policeman walks off the job.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
For years, “broken windows” policing — the idea that the best way to prevent serious crime was to enforce laws against petty crime — was derided by critics as unnecessary, unjust, even racist. So cities across America pulled back from prosecuting the supposedly small stuff, like shoplifting.
Now we’ve seen a jump in violent crime.
Criminologists can debate the causes of the new crime wave. But many people intuitively understand that places in which decay and disorder become the norm are places where crime tends to thrive. That’s because crime is largely a function of environmental cues — of the palpable sense that nobody cares, nobody is in charge, and anything goes.
We now live in a broken-windows world. I would argue that it began a decade ago, when Barack Obama called on Americans to turn a chapter on a decade of war and “focus on nation-building here at home,” which became a theme of his re-election campaign.
It looked like a good bet at the time. Osama bin Laden had just been killed. The surge in Iraq had stabilized the country and decimated Al Qaeda there. The Taliban were on the defensive. Relations with Russia had been “reset.” China was still under the technocratic leadership of Hu Jintao. The Arab Spring, eagerly embraced by Obama as “a chance to pursue the world as it should be,” seemed to many to portend a more hopeful future for the Middle East (though some of us were less sanguine).
We vacated Iraq in 2011. But instead of getting peace, we got the horror of ISIS, forcing us to send back troops and fight a war that has lasted for years, cost thousands of civilian lives and led to the displacement of more than three million people.
We declared in 2012 that Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons would cross a red line and lead to a decisive U.S. response. At least as of 2018, he was still gassing his own people. We’ve mostly ceased to notice.
Unrestrained violence in Syria forced millions into exile, bringing unbearable strain on countries like Lebanon while flooding Europe with refugees in 2015. One result was a populist backlash that included Brexit, big electoral gains for neo-fascist parties in France and Germany and a major assist to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
China last year unilaterally revoked the “one country, two systems” policy for Hong Kong. Does anyone outside that city even remember?
Vladimir Putin seized Crimea in 2014, six months after the Syrian chemical-weapons crisis, and was met by a muted response. Putin fomented a pro-Russian insurrection in eastern Ukraine and was met by a muted response. Putin sent armed forces to support al-Assad in Syria and was met by a muted response. Putin interfered in our elections and was met by a muted response.
More recently, President Biden has offered tough talk on Putin. But when it came to blocking Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany, his administration offered a muted response.
It’s in this global context that the catastrophe in Afghanistan is playing out. Beyond the humanitarian calamity it represents for the Afghan people, the political debacle it represents for Biden (though he scarcely appears aware of it), and the national disgrace it represents for Americans who don’t think we should go begging to the Taliban to extend our exit deadline, the Afghan surrender is the most visible evidence that the era of Pax Americana is over.
We have turned the corner into a world of unlit streets, more hospitable to predators than it is to prey.
In this world, the temptation can only grow stronger for Putin to break the back of NATO by picking off a vulnerable member like Latvia (where a quarter of the population is ethnically Russian and the opportunities for subversion are great). Ditto for China seizing Taiwan. For that matter, what keeps the Taliban (or some nominal offshoot that provides the Taliban with plausible deniability) from taking hundreds of stranded Westerners hostage and humiliating Biden just as Iranian revolutionaries once humiliated Jimmy Carter?
Some pundits lightly dismiss the notion of credibility in statecraft. But foreign policy is also conducted by taking the measure of your opponents, as John F. Kennedy learned after Nikita Khrushchev thrashed him at their summit in Vienna and built the Berlin Wall two months later.
If you’re wondering why remote and God-forsaken Afghanistan matters in places of allegedly greater strategic relevance to the United States, ask yourself what signals this bungled withdrawal — the overconfident predictions, the lousy military intelligence, the incompetent diplomatic coordination, the unwillingness to stand by allies — sends about our capacity to deal with a more serious adversary, especially one that can hold the American heartland at risk.
Critics of the past 75 years of American foreign policy have consistently attacked the idea, and counted the costs, of the United States as the world’s policeman. They are soon to learn just how high the costs can go when the policeman walks off the job.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
It’s Time to Protect America From America’s President
Illustration by The New York Times; source photograph via U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and Associated Press
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
America has periodically faced great national tests. The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street.
I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarianism in other countries, and I’ve seen all this before. The chummy scene in the White House this week with Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was telling. “Trump and Bukele Bond Over Human Rights Abuses in Oval Office Meeting,” read Rolling Stone’s headline, which seemed about right.
With chilling indifference, they discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father of three who is married to an American citizen and who in 2019 was ordered protected from deportation by an immigration judge. The Trump administration nonetheless deported Abrego Garcia as a result of what it eventually acknowledged was an “administrative error,” and he now languishes in a brutal Salvadoran prison — even though, in contrast to Trump, he has no criminal record.
This is a challenge to our constitutional system, for the principal lawbreaking here appears to have been committed not by Abrego Garcia but by the Trump administration.
Appellate judges in the case warned that the administration’s position represented a “path of perfect lawlessness” and would mean “the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process.”
Then the Supreme Court ruled that Trump must obey the district judge’s instruction to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Trump and Bukele effectively mocked our federal courts by making it clear that they had no intention of bringing Abrego Garcia home.
Trump prides himself on his ability to free hostages held in foreign prisons, yet he presents himself as helpless when it comes to bringing back Abrego Garcia — even though we are paying El Salvador to imprison deportees.
A remarkable Times investigation found that of the 238 migrants dispatched to the Salvadoran prison, most did not have criminal records and few were found to have ties to gangs. Officials appear to have selected their targets in part based on tattoos and a misunderstanding of their significance.
This is the same administration that marked for deletion a photo of the World War II bomber Enola Gay, seemingly because it thought it had something to do with gay people. But this ineptitude is intertwined with brutality. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that those sent to the Salvadoran prison “should stay there for the rest of their lives.”
Trump’s border “czar,” Tom Homan, suggested that governors of sanctuary states should be prosecuted and perhaps imprisoned. “It’s coming,” he said.
Much of this echoes what I’ve seen abroad. In China, the government has cracked down on elite universities, crushed freethinking journalism, suppressed lawyers and forced intellectuals to parrot the party line. One university lecturer recalled how an ancient historian, Sima Qian, had spoken up for a disgraced general and been punished with castration: “Most Chinese intellectuals still feel castrated, in that we don’t dare stand up for what is right,” the lecturer told me — and I suspect some American university presidents feel that way today.
In Communist Poland, in Venezuela, in Russia, in Bangladesh and in China, I’ve seen rulers cultivate personality cults and claim to follow laws that they concocted out of thin air. “We are a nation of laws,” a Chinese state security official once told me as he detained me for, um, committing journalism. In North Korea, officials hailed Kim Jong-il’s book, “The Great Teacher of Journalists,” less in hopes of improving my writing than as a demonstration of utter fealty to the boss. Trump’s cabinet members can sometimes sound the same.
Trump’s defiance of the courts comes in the wider context of his attacks on law firms, universities and news organizations. The White House this week appeared to ignore a separate court by blocking Associated Press journalists from a White House event.
In the face of this onslaught, many powerful institutions have caved. Nine law firms have surrendered and agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for the administration’s preferred causes. Columbia University rolled over.
We needed a dollop of hope, and this week it came from Harvard University. Facing absurd demands from the administration, it delivered a resolute no, standing fast even as Trump then halted $2.2 billion in federal funding and threatened the university’s tax-exempt status. (A conflict alert: I’m a former member of Harvard’s board of overseers, and my wife is a current member.)
Yes, critics of elite universities make some legitimate points. For many years I’ve argued that we liberals sometimes ignore a crucial kind of diversity on campuses: We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us, but only if they think like us. Too many university departments are ideological monocultures, with evangelical Christians and social conservatives often left to feel unwelcome.
It’s also true that there is a strain of antisemitism on the left, although Trump exaggerates it to encompass legitimate criticisms of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. (And note that there is parallel antisemitism in the Trump orbit, with Trump himself trafficking in troubling tropes about Jews.) Top universities amplify their own elitism when they admit more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 50 percent, as some do. Admission preferences based on legacy, sports and faculty parents perpetuate an unfair educational aristocracy.
Yet Trump is not encouraging debate on these issues. Rather, like autocrats in China, Hungary and Russia, he’s trying to crush independent universities that might challenge his misrule. One difference is that China, while repressing universities, at least has been smart enough to protect and boost academic scientific research because it recognizes that this work benefits the entire nation.
I hope voters understand that Trump’s retaliatory funding freeze primarily strikes not Harvard’s main campus but researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The university has 162 Nobel Prize winners, and scientists there are working on cancer immunotherapy, brain tumors, organ transplants, diabetes and more. It was a Harvard researcher who discovered the molecule that is the basis for the GLP-1 weight-loss medications that have revolutionized obesity care.
Programs now facing funding cuts address pediatric cancer and treatment for veterans. The federal government already issued a “stop-work order” on Harvard research on Lou Gehrig’s disease. The upshot is that Trump’s lust for power and vengeance may one day be measured by more Americans dying of cancer, heart disease and other ailments.
All this illuminates an administration that is not only authoritarian but also reckless; this is vandalism of the American project. That is why this moment is a test of our ability to step up and protect our national greatness from our national leader.
More from Nicholas Kristof on President Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opin ... e9677ea768
Illustration by The New York Times; source photograph via U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and Associated Press
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
America has periodically faced great national tests. The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street.
I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarianism in other countries, and I’ve seen all this before. The chummy scene in the White House this week with Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was telling. “Trump and Bukele Bond Over Human Rights Abuses in Oval Office Meeting,” read Rolling Stone’s headline, which seemed about right.
With chilling indifference, they discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father of three who is married to an American citizen and who in 2019 was ordered protected from deportation by an immigration judge. The Trump administration nonetheless deported Abrego Garcia as a result of what it eventually acknowledged was an “administrative error,” and he now languishes in a brutal Salvadoran prison — even though, in contrast to Trump, he has no criminal record.
This is a challenge to our constitutional system, for the principal lawbreaking here appears to have been committed not by Abrego Garcia but by the Trump administration.
Appellate judges in the case warned that the administration’s position represented a “path of perfect lawlessness” and would mean “the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process.”
Then the Supreme Court ruled that Trump must obey the district judge’s instruction to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Trump and Bukele effectively mocked our federal courts by making it clear that they had no intention of bringing Abrego Garcia home.
Trump prides himself on his ability to free hostages held in foreign prisons, yet he presents himself as helpless when it comes to bringing back Abrego Garcia — even though we are paying El Salvador to imprison deportees.
A remarkable Times investigation found that of the 238 migrants dispatched to the Salvadoran prison, most did not have criminal records and few were found to have ties to gangs. Officials appear to have selected their targets in part based on tattoos and a misunderstanding of their significance.
This is the same administration that marked for deletion a photo of the World War II bomber Enola Gay, seemingly because it thought it had something to do with gay people. But this ineptitude is intertwined with brutality. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that those sent to the Salvadoran prison “should stay there for the rest of their lives.”
Trump’s border “czar,” Tom Homan, suggested that governors of sanctuary states should be prosecuted and perhaps imprisoned. “It’s coming,” he said.
Much of this echoes what I’ve seen abroad. In China, the government has cracked down on elite universities, crushed freethinking journalism, suppressed lawyers and forced intellectuals to parrot the party line. One university lecturer recalled how an ancient historian, Sima Qian, had spoken up for a disgraced general and been punished with castration: “Most Chinese intellectuals still feel castrated, in that we don’t dare stand up for what is right,” the lecturer told me — and I suspect some American university presidents feel that way today.
In Communist Poland, in Venezuela, in Russia, in Bangladesh and in China, I’ve seen rulers cultivate personality cults and claim to follow laws that they concocted out of thin air. “We are a nation of laws,” a Chinese state security official once told me as he detained me for, um, committing journalism. In North Korea, officials hailed Kim Jong-il’s book, “The Great Teacher of Journalists,” less in hopes of improving my writing than as a demonstration of utter fealty to the boss. Trump’s cabinet members can sometimes sound the same.
Trump’s defiance of the courts comes in the wider context of his attacks on law firms, universities and news organizations. The White House this week appeared to ignore a separate court by blocking Associated Press journalists from a White House event.
In the face of this onslaught, many powerful institutions have caved. Nine law firms have surrendered and agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for the administration’s preferred causes. Columbia University rolled over.
We needed a dollop of hope, and this week it came from Harvard University. Facing absurd demands from the administration, it delivered a resolute no, standing fast even as Trump then halted $2.2 billion in federal funding and threatened the university’s tax-exempt status. (A conflict alert: I’m a former member of Harvard’s board of overseers, and my wife is a current member.)
Yes, critics of elite universities make some legitimate points. For many years I’ve argued that we liberals sometimes ignore a crucial kind of diversity on campuses: We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us, but only if they think like us. Too many university departments are ideological monocultures, with evangelical Christians and social conservatives often left to feel unwelcome.
It’s also true that there is a strain of antisemitism on the left, although Trump exaggerates it to encompass legitimate criticisms of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. (And note that there is parallel antisemitism in the Trump orbit, with Trump himself trafficking in troubling tropes about Jews.) Top universities amplify their own elitism when they admit more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 50 percent, as some do. Admission preferences based on legacy, sports and faculty parents perpetuate an unfair educational aristocracy.
Yet Trump is not encouraging debate on these issues. Rather, like autocrats in China, Hungary and Russia, he’s trying to crush independent universities that might challenge his misrule. One difference is that China, while repressing universities, at least has been smart enough to protect and boost academic scientific research because it recognizes that this work benefits the entire nation.
I hope voters understand that Trump’s retaliatory funding freeze primarily strikes not Harvard’s main campus but researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The university has 162 Nobel Prize winners, and scientists there are working on cancer immunotherapy, brain tumors, organ transplants, diabetes and more. It was a Harvard researcher who discovered the molecule that is the basis for the GLP-1 weight-loss medications that have revolutionized obesity care.
Programs now facing funding cuts address pediatric cancer and treatment for veterans. The federal government already issued a “stop-work order” on Harvard research on Lou Gehrig’s disease. The upshot is that Trump’s lust for power and vengeance may one day be measured by more Americans dying of cancer, heart disease and other ailments.
All this illuminates an administration that is not only authoritarian but also reckless; this is vandalism of the American project. That is why this moment is a test of our ability to step up and protect our national greatness from our national leader.
More from Nicholas Kristof on President Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opin ... e9677ea768
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist
In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.
But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.
Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.
So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade.
But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.
So far, each sector Trump has assaulted has responded independently — the law firms seek to protect themselves, the universities, separately, try to do the same. Yes, a group of firms banded together in support of the firm Perkins Coie, but in other cases it’s individual law firms trying to secure their separate peace with Trump. Yes, Harvard eventually drew a line in the sand, but Columbia cut a deal. This is a disastrous strategy that ensures that Trump will trample on one victim after another. He divides and conquers.
Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities.
So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.
What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault. In their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan looked at hundreds of nonviolent uprisings. These movements used many different tools at their disposal — lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.
These movements began small and built up. They developed clear messages that appealed to a variety of groups. They shifted the narrative so the authoritarians were no longer on permanent offense. Sometimes they used nonviolent means to provoke the regime into taking violent action, which shocks the nation, undercuts the regime’s authority and further strengthens the movement. (Think of the civil rights movement at Selma.) Right now, Trumpism is dividing civil society; if done right, the civic uprising can begin to divide the forces of Trumpism.
Chenoweth and Stephan emphasize that this takes coordination. There doesn’t always have to be one charismatic leader, but there does have to be one backbone organization, one coordinating body that does the work of coalition building.
In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.
This struck me as essential advice for Americans today. We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. They have to show that they are democratically seeking to reform their institutions. This is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.
Let’s take the universities. I’ve been privileged to teach at American universities off and on for nearly 30 years and I get to visit a dozen or two others every year. These are the crown jewels of American life. They are hubs of scientific and entrepreneurial innovation. In a million ways, the scholars at universities help us understand ourselves and our world.
I have seen it over and over: A kid comes on campus as a freshman, inquisitive but unformed. By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, a critical thinker. The universities have performed their magic once again.
People flock from all over the world to admire our universities.
But like all institutions, they have their flaws. Many have allowed themselves to become shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: Your voices don’t matter. Through admissions policies that favor rich kids, the elite universities have contributed to a diploma divide. If the same affluent families come out on top generation after generation, then no one should be surprised if the losers flip over the table.
In other words, a civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator.
I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opin ... firms.html
By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist
In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.
But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.
Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.
So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade.
But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.
So far, each sector Trump has assaulted has responded independently — the law firms seek to protect themselves, the universities, separately, try to do the same. Yes, a group of firms banded together in support of the firm Perkins Coie, but in other cases it’s individual law firms trying to secure their separate peace with Trump. Yes, Harvard eventually drew a line in the sand, but Columbia cut a deal. This is a disastrous strategy that ensures that Trump will trample on one victim after another. He divides and conquers.
Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities.
So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.
What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault. In their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan looked at hundreds of nonviolent uprisings. These movements used many different tools at their disposal — lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.
These movements began small and built up. They developed clear messages that appealed to a variety of groups. They shifted the narrative so the authoritarians were no longer on permanent offense. Sometimes they used nonviolent means to provoke the regime into taking violent action, which shocks the nation, undercuts the regime’s authority and further strengthens the movement. (Think of the civil rights movement at Selma.) Right now, Trumpism is dividing civil society; if done right, the civic uprising can begin to divide the forces of Trumpism.
Chenoweth and Stephan emphasize that this takes coordination. There doesn’t always have to be one charismatic leader, but there does have to be one backbone organization, one coordinating body that does the work of coalition building.
In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.
This struck me as essential advice for Americans today. We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. They have to show that they are democratically seeking to reform their institutions. This is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.
Let’s take the universities. I’ve been privileged to teach at American universities off and on for nearly 30 years and I get to visit a dozen or two others every year. These are the crown jewels of American life. They are hubs of scientific and entrepreneurial innovation. In a million ways, the scholars at universities help us understand ourselves and our world.
I have seen it over and over: A kid comes on campus as a freshman, inquisitive but unformed. By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, a critical thinker. The universities have performed their magic once again.
People flock from all over the world to admire our universities.
But like all institutions, they have their flaws. Many have allowed themselves to become shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: Your voices don’t matter. Through admissions policies that favor rich kids, the elite universities have contributed to a diploma divide. If the same affluent families come out on top generation after generation, then no one should be surprised if the losers flip over the table.
In other words, a civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator.
I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opin ... firms.html
Re: FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
When Culture Breaks, Democracy Won’t Be Far Behind
By Jonathan Sumption
Mr. Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Britain, is the author of “The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law.”
As an observer of democracies and a constitutional lawyer in Britain, I have watched with rising alarm as many Western nations threaten to become failed democracies.
They may not yet be like Venezuela, Peru, Hungary, Turkey or Russia. But these countries show what can happen when a democracy dies with a whimper, not with a bang. There may not be tanks on the lawns or mobs in the streets, but slowly, they are drained of everything that once made them democratic, often with substantial public support.
These countries have elections, legislatures, courts and so on. The institutional framework is still there. But they are no longer democracies because the political culture on which democracy depends has failed.
Now the United States is in danger of being added to this list. There are tensions among its institutions, though they are still largely functioning. But the deterioration of its political culture is striking — and alarming. The country resembles other Western democracies in buckling under the weight of increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state from its electorate.
Democracy is a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government and a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable. That is the institutional framework.
A democratic culture depends on something more than institutions. It depends on the instincts of politicians and citizens. It calls for a willingness to choose solutions that the greatest number of people can live with. It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow citizens with whom they disagree — and not as enemies to be smashed.
Hence the significance of President Trump, who exhibits the three classic symptoms of totalitarianism: a charismatic leader surrounded by a personal cult, the identification of the state with himself and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of opposition or dissent. The result is a regime of discretionary government in place of the government of laws that the founders saw as the chief defense against tyranny.
Mr. Trump has used public powers to pursue private grudges: for example, against law firms that represented his political opponents; public figures for whom he has removed security protection; or cultural institutions, from Harvard to the Kennedy Center, that do not share his personal agenda.
Article 2 of the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Yet this, too, has become dependent on the president’s personal discretion. Mr. Trump has directed the Justice Department not to enforce laws passed by Congress such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has reduced or wound up programs for which Congress has appropriated funds and has threatened governors and other authorities with cutting off federal funds unless they submit to his wishes.
Foreign observers like myself have the luxury of watching these developments from a distance, but we need to look at the vulnerability of our own democracies. What is happening in the United States is essentially a crisis of expectations that is common to other advanced democracies as well. A respected polling organization in Britain in 2019 found that a majority of people (54 percent) agreed with the statement that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules.”
Continental Europe has seen high levels of electoral support for openly authoritarian figures, such as Marine Le Pen in France, Jörg Haider in Austria, Viktor Orban in Hungary and the leading lights of Alternative for Germany.
The reasons are complex, but the main one is the increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state and the electorates’ growing aversion to risk. Some of what voters expect is beyond the capacity of the state to deliver. Some of it can be delivered only at the expense of other equally important values. This is especially true of voters’ most powerful expectation, that the state will protect them against adverse economic winds.
We crave state protection from many risks that are inherent in life: job insecurity, economic misfortune, drought, fire and flood, sickness and accidental injury. This is in some ways a natural response to the remarkable increase in the technical competence of humanity since the middle of the 19th century. For all perils, we demand a governmental solution. If there is none, we put that down to governmental incompetence.
When these expectations are disappointed, as they so often are, people blame the system or the “deep state.” They turn against the whole political class, which has proved unable to satisfy their demands for a progressive improvement of their lives. In the absence of a democratic culture, they spontaneously turn to strongmen and kid themselves that strongmen get things done.
The United States is a particularly interesting example. It has enjoyed a century and a half of almost unbroken good fortune. This may now be coming to an end in the face of competition from countries like India and China. Old skills have become redundant in high-wage economies as national prosperity has shifted to high-tech industries, hitting incomes traditionally derived from manufacturing, agriculture and the extraction industry. Even in the high-tech sectors where the United States is strongest, its lead has shortened and in some cases vanished.
These are not exclusively American problems. Europe suffers from them even more, and European expectations of the state are higher. The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any democracy. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the crisis of Europe that began in 1914 and ended in 1945.
The tragedy is that historical experience warns us that strongmen do not get things done. At best they may indulge the fantasies of some of the population. But at what cost? Strongmen tend to be fixated on a few simple ideas that they offer as solutions to complex problems. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enable them to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, a strongman promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. All of this usually makes for chaos, political breakdown, economic impoverishment and social divisions.
If enough Americans persistently vote authoritarian figures into government and their cheerleaders into Congress, then democracy will not survive. But that is not yet an inevitability.
The founding fathers of the United States were profoundly conscious of the cultural underpinnings of democracy and well aware of its fragility. The second U.S. president, John Adams, summed up their fears in a letter written in old age. Democracy, he wrote, was just as vulnerable to vanity, pride, avarice and ambition as any other form of government, and a good deal less stable. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote.
The founders’ answer to the self-destructive tendencies of democracy was to design “a government of laws and not of men.” A government of laws was based on rational principles, consistently applied. A government of men was something different: an invitation to rule by discretion, subject to the whims of a handful of men at the heart of the state, guided by the very vices of vanity, pride, avarice and ambition which Adams knew would sooner or later destroy any democracy.
There have been demagogues before in American history. Until now, they have failed. Political parties had enough respect for the workings of the democratic state to freeze them out.
The many friends of the United States must hope that the experience of autocratic government will persuade voters to restore the country’s democratic tradition and truly make America great again.
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By Jonathan Sumption
Mr. Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Britain, is the author of “The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law.”
As an observer of democracies and a constitutional lawyer in Britain, I have watched with rising alarm as many Western nations threaten to become failed democracies.
They may not yet be like Venezuela, Peru, Hungary, Turkey or Russia. But these countries show what can happen when a democracy dies with a whimper, not with a bang. There may not be tanks on the lawns or mobs in the streets, but slowly, they are drained of everything that once made them democratic, often with substantial public support.
These countries have elections, legislatures, courts and so on. The institutional framework is still there. But they are no longer democracies because the political culture on which democracy depends has failed.
Now the United States is in danger of being added to this list. There are tensions among its institutions, though they are still largely functioning. But the deterioration of its political culture is striking — and alarming. The country resembles other Western democracies in buckling under the weight of increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state from its electorate.
Democracy is a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government and a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable. That is the institutional framework.
A democratic culture depends on something more than institutions. It depends on the instincts of politicians and citizens. It calls for a willingness to choose solutions that the greatest number of people can live with. It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow citizens with whom they disagree — and not as enemies to be smashed.
Hence the significance of President Trump, who exhibits the three classic symptoms of totalitarianism: a charismatic leader surrounded by a personal cult, the identification of the state with himself and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of opposition or dissent. The result is a regime of discretionary government in place of the government of laws that the founders saw as the chief defense against tyranny.
Mr. Trump has used public powers to pursue private grudges: for example, against law firms that represented his political opponents; public figures for whom he has removed security protection; or cultural institutions, from Harvard to the Kennedy Center, that do not share his personal agenda.
Article 2 of the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Yet this, too, has become dependent on the president’s personal discretion. Mr. Trump has directed the Justice Department not to enforce laws passed by Congress such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has reduced or wound up programs for which Congress has appropriated funds and has threatened governors and other authorities with cutting off federal funds unless they submit to his wishes.
Foreign observers like myself have the luxury of watching these developments from a distance, but we need to look at the vulnerability of our own democracies. What is happening in the United States is essentially a crisis of expectations that is common to other advanced democracies as well. A respected polling organization in Britain in 2019 found that a majority of people (54 percent) agreed with the statement that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules.”
Continental Europe has seen high levels of electoral support for openly authoritarian figures, such as Marine Le Pen in France, Jörg Haider in Austria, Viktor Orban in Hungary and the leading lights of Alternative for Germany.
The reasons are complex, but the main one is the increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state and the electorates’ growing aversion to risk. Some of what voters expect is beyond the capacity of the state to deliver. Some of it can be delivered only at the expense of other equally important values. This is especially true of voters’ most powerful expectation, that the state will protect them against adverse economic winds.
We crave state protection from many risks that are inherent in life: job insecurity, economic misfortune, drought, fire and flood, sickness and accidental injury. This is in some ways a natural response to the remarkable increase in the technical competence of humanity since the middle of the 19th century. For all perils, we demand a governmental solution. If there is none, we put that down to governmental incompetence.
When these expectations are disappointed, as they so often are, people blame the system or the “deep state.” They turn against the whole political class, which has proved unable to satisfy their demands for a progressive improvement of their lives. In the absence of a democratic culture, they spontaneously turn to strongmen and kid themselves that strongmen get things done.
The United States is a particularly interesting example. It has enjoyed a century and a half of almost unbroken good fortune. This may now be coming to an end in the face of competition from countries like India and China. Old skills have become redundant in high-wage economies as national prosperity has shifted to high-tech industries, hitting incomes traditionally derived from manufacturing, agriculture and the extraction industry. Even in the high-tech sectors where the United States is strongest, its lead has shortened and in some cases vanished.
These are not exclusively American problems. Europe suffers from them even more, and European expectations of the state are higher. The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any democracy. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the crisis of Europe that began in 1914 and ended in 1945.
The tragedy is that historical experience warns us that strongmen do not get things done. At best they may indulge the fantasies of some of the population. But at what cost? Strongmen tend to be fixated on a few simple ideas that they offer as solutions to complex problems. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enable them to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, a strongman promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. All of this usually makes for chaos, political breakdown, economic impoverishment and social divisions.
If enough Americans persistently vote authoritarian figures into government and their cheerleaders into Congress, then democracy will not survive. But that is not yet an inevitability.
The founding fathers of the United States were profoundly conscious of the cultural underpinnings of democracy and well aware of its fragility. The second U.S. president, John Adams, summed up their fears in a letter written in old age. Democracy, he wrote, was just as vulnerable to vanity, pride, avarice and ambition as any other form of government, and a good deal less stable. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote.
The founders’ answer to the self-destructive tendencies of democracy was to design “a government of laws and not of men.” A government of laws was based on rational principles, consistently applied. A government of men was something different: an invitation to rule by discretion, subject to the whims of a handful of men at the heart of the state, guided by the very vices of vanity, pride, avarice and ambition which Adams knew would sooner or later destroy any democracy.
There have been demagogues before in American history. Until now, they have failed. Political parties had enough respect for the workings of the democratic state to freeze them out.
The many friends of the United States must hope that the experience of autocratic government will persuade voters to restore the country’s democratic tradition and truly make America great again.
More from Opinion
Opinion | Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt
How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/opin ... cracy.html
May 8, 2025
Opinion | David Leonhardt and Jillian Weinberger
How to Turn the Middle Against Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/opin ... uture.html
May 28, 2025
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Three Well-Tested Ways to Undermine an Autocrat https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/opin ... otest.html
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Jonathan Sumption is a former justice o
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/opin ... e9677ea768