The Intercept: Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues

Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that “whether it’s good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trump’s appeal.” For example, he says, “in 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.” [...]

For Sanders, Warren and others on the left, the economy is what matters most and class is everything. Yet the empirical evidence just isn’t there to support them. Yes Trump won a (big) majority of non-college-educated whites, but he also won a majority of college-educated whites, too. He won more young white voters than Clinton did and also a majority of white women; he managed to win white votes regardless of age, gender, income or education. Class wasn’t everything in 2016. In a recent essay in The Nation, analysts Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel point out that “income predicted support for McCain and Romney, but not Trump.” Their conclusion? “Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics.” [...]

If Democrats are going to have any chance of winning back the White House in 2020, they have to understand why they lost in 2016, and that understanding has to be based on facts and figures, however inconvenient or awkward. The Sanders/Warren/Moore wing of the party is right to focus on fair trade and income equality; the calls for higher wages and better regulation are morally and economically correct. What they are not, however, is some sort of silver bullet to solve the issue of racism. As the University of California’s Michael Tesler, author of “Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era,” has pointed out, the “evidence suggests that racial resentment is driving economic anxiety, not the other way around.”

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The Guardian: Brexitland: The truth from well-to-do Fareham: this was no working-class uprising

A confession: I also framed it that way. And it’s true that much of the referendum result can be attributed to working-class disaffection with an unjust status quo. I’ve been to Doncaster, one of the birthplaces of the Labour party, where traditional industries have given way to insecure and low-paid work; and to Barking and Dagenham, where a housing crisis has left many working-class residents struggling to get a comfortable, affordable roof over their heads. It is also true that only among middle-class professionals was there a majority for remaining in the European Union. But as a complete story of why this country is leaving the EU, it is too simplistic. That matters, not least because a singular, flawed narrative will increasingly be used to silence dissent in Britain. [...]

As elsewhere, the result defied any predefined class dynamic and confounded the stereotypes. While Fareham is cast as part of an anti-establishment vanguard, Tower Hamlets – which has prevalent child poverty and two-thirds of whose residents voted for remain – is subsumed into the caricature of a pampered liberal elite. Most working-class Britons under 35 opted for remain, while most middle-class people over 65 voted for leave. Most working-class people who are white went for leave, most working-class people from ethnic minorities went for remain. Consider that the next time the Brexit press imposes its simplistic narrative on a complicated reality. Applying their logic, black supermarket workers and young apprentices form part of the privileged remoaner elite. [...]

For the left, class politics is about who has wealth and power, and who doesn’t, and eliminating the great inequalities that define society. The populist right, on the other hand, denounces “identity politics”, while indulging in exactly that: transforming class into a cultural and political identity, weaponised in their struggle against progressive Britain. The left must be able to counter that approach with arguments that resonate in Doncaster and Thanet, and no less in towns like Fareham.

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Jacobin Magazine: Humanitarianism Became Imperialism

The way we remember the Afghan War today is as a kind of prologue. We care that the United States (along with, far more importantly, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) helped fund jihadists because those insurgents would later turn against the United States, serving as the ultimate indictment of Reaganite Cold War politics. We care that the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan because that failure foreshadowed the Afghan quagmire of today. We care about the Afghan War because it spawned Osama bin Laden. [...]

But this conflict over the future of “Pashtunistan” and the Afghan presence along the line became an ideological conflict as well. As they had done for decades, Afghan leaders appealed to socialist values and internationalist goals to pressure the Soviet Union into maintaining its support for Kabul, while Saudi financing (coming in part from the windfall generated by the 1970s oil crisis) turned the southern insurgency into a worldwide Islamist project. [...]

The legacy of opposition to the Vietnam War combined with the lack of revolutionary progress in the West produced a new kind of ethos among European leftists. Solidarity with suffering people targeted by state repression, whether in right-wing Nigeria during the Biafran War or in newly communist Vietnam during the “Boat People” crisis, came to take precedence over grudging support for either Soviet or Chinese-aligned governments. This was the moment that gave birth to Doctors Without Borders in France and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan in Sweden.

Both groups opposed Soviet intervention as imperialist and, eventually, supported the Islamist insurgency as a genuine expression of the popular will. Their powerful lobbying in their home countries and the United Nations meshed neatly with US foreign policy priorities, expressed most concisely in Carter national security adviser Zbygnew Brzezinski’s words, “we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.” But the NGOs also helped the mujahidin directly, providing them with industrial equipment and embedding with them to spread their message to sympathetic Western audiences.

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The Guardian: Congested, polluted and with car jobs at risk, Stuttgart reaches a crossroads

But elsewhere the mood in Stuttgart, the car capital of Europe where the automobile was born in 1886 and where Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch and many major auto suppliers have their HQs, is far from confident. All the social, technological and political trends point to a rapid demise of the polluting internal combustion engine, the coming of electric cars and the end to German car dominance.

In the wake of “Dieselgate”, when VW was found to have cheated emission figures, and the arrival on the car scene of digital companies such as Uber, Tesla and Google, all jockeying to introduce driverless and electric cars, the sedate German industry is waking up to the fact that it may be left behind by the US and China and that if it does nothing its cars could soon seem like antisocial relics.[...]

With one in three of all industrial workers in Stuttgart in the car industry, the unions see the coming decarbonised world as dangerous. An internal combustion engine has about 1,200 parts, an electric motor only 200, suggesting far fewer workers will be needed, says Frederic Speidel, head of strategy at IG Metall, Germany’s biggest union with more than 500,000 car workers. [...]

“Electrification is coming fast. I think one in three of all cars will be hybrids, plugins or full electric by 2030,” says Claus Huisgen, director of global marketing at Getrag, part of the Magna group and the world’s largest supplier of transmission systems. “We are definitely in a transition to the electric car. It is being driven by global trends like urbanisation, by CO2 emissions and by China. Electric is the only way to meet CO2 targets.

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Haaretz: 'I’m Not Sure It’s Possible to Have Democracy in a Jewish State' read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/holylandings/.premium-1.781780

China is influencing democratization in the world, but thedemocracies themselves are focusing increasingly on security. Theyare showing a priority for security over human rights. Globalterrorism has made democracy more challenging. [...]

I didn’t speak to many people here, but it seems that people herefeel that democracy in the country is in decline. Maybe becausetoday there is less pressure from international players to behavedemocratically. If politicians once took that pressure into account,today the global norms have changed. There’s less push fordemocracy all over the world. That’s how I’d explain what’shappening in Israel. It’s a global trend. [...]

On the positive side. You have a parliament, there are Arab partiesand Arab citizens who can vote, and you have a constitutional court.On the other hand, there are more problematic issues relating tohuman rights that stem mainly from the balance between religionand state. The connection between Israel and a Jewish state makesit problematic. I’m not sure it’s possible to be a democracy whenthere’s a Jewish state: Religion creates a separationist system, andthat’s dangerous. Do you know the French term laicite?

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Political Critique: Sex Worker’s March in Ukraine: “We have the right to work”

March 3 has been recognized as International Sex Worker’s Day. The day became widely known after 2001, when more than 25,000 sex workers in India assembled to participate in a festival organized by Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, which took place despite the efforts of prohibitionist groups to make authorities revoke their permission to hold the event.

This year, Ukrainians celebrated the day for the first time in history. The All-Ukrainian Legalife League, in participation with the Public Health Alliance, organized a demonstration in Kyiv to march along a route that passes three main governmental buildings in Kyiv: the Parliament, the Cabinet of Ministers, and the President’s Administration. The main demand of protest participants was to decriminalize sex work in Ukraine, or more specifically, to revoke the administrative punishment for prostitution provided in the Article 181-1 of the Administrative Code of Ukraine. [...]

Although the demand of this year’s march was to decriminalize sex work, the organizers and the participants, when asked about legalization, answer, “We will see.” It does seem, however, that legalization is the ultimate goal for them, with decriminalization only being the first step towards achieving it.

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Vox: Is 100% renewable energy realistic? Here’s what we know.

We know that deep decarbonization is going to involve an enormous amount of electrification. As we push carbon out of the electricity sector, we pull other energy services like transportation and heating into it. (My slogan for this: electrify everything.) This means lots more demand for electricity, even as electricity decarbonizes.

The sources of carbon-free electricity with the most potential, sun and wind, are variable. They come and go on their own schedule. They are not “dispatchable,” i.e., grid operators can’t turn them on and off as needed. To balance out variations in sun and wind (both short-term and long-term), grid operators need dispatchable carbon-free resources.

Deep decarbonization of the electricity sector, then, is a dual challenge: rapidly ramping up the amount of variable renewable energy (VRE) on the system, while also ramping up carbon-free dispatchable resources that can balance out that VRE and ensure reliability. [...]

Today’s models, at least, appear to agree that “a diversified mix of low-CO2 generation resources” add up to a more cost-effective path to deep decarbonization than 100 percent renewables. This is particularly true above 60 or 80 percent decarbonization, when the costs of the renewables-only option rise sharply.

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Jakub Marian: Fertility rate by region in Europe

The total fertility rate is defined as the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime if she were to survive from birth through the end of her reproductive life and experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates through her lifetime. This is a rather technical definition, so to put it bluntly: The total fertility rate tells us how many children per woman will be born, on average, if everyone keeps trying to have children at the same rate as they do now, according to their age.

The most important figure to keep in mind when discussing fertility rates is the so-called replacement rate (or “replacement-level fertility”). It is the fertility rate at which the size of the entire population will remain stable, when mortality is taken into account and migration ignored. The replacement rate is approximately 2.1 in most developed countries (that is, 9 out of 10 women should have two children and 1 out of 10 women should have three), but it is somewhat higher in developing countries due to higher mortality rates.

As you can see on the map below, the situation in Europe does not look very bright. Most of Europe is dying out—some regions, such as Galicia in Spain and Sardinia in Italy at extraordinarily low fertility rates close to 1 child per woman:

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Land of Maps: Mapping the Empires of History

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