The Atlantic: The Myth of a Kinder, Gentler Xi Jinping

Why have so many of us been wrong about Xi and the direction China is heading? The most straightforward answer is the difficulty of accurate prediction (the reason why, for example, I didn’t buy Amazon stock in 2008 and earn a return 22 times over). In arguably the most-analyzed presidential election in history, Donald Trump shocked millions of people, including himself, by winning. If we couldn’t predict any of that, how could we possibly cobble together the scant public facts about Xi’s life, past, and worldview, and expect those to predict his future?

Simplistic thinking also deserves some share of the blame. Kristof claimed reform is in Xi’s “genes,” because Xi Zhongxun, his father, “was a pioneer of economic restructuring and publicly denounced” the Tiananmen massacre, and because his mother “chooses to live” in the capitalistic southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. “You can make the case that Xi has reformist impulses,” the CNN host Fareed Zakaria wrote in 2011. “His father, once a comrade of Mao Zedong’s, was purged three times.” Zakaria’s father Rafiq was an Islamic theologian and politician who supported the ban of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. How silly would it be to expect the younger Zakaria to advocate for the same ban? There is no gene for political views.

Similarly, despite dozens of prominent examples, including Kim Jong Un, who studied in Switzerland, people wrongly assume that an exposure or openness to places considered liberal places correlates with liberal views. Xi sent his only daughter to Harvard; therefore, he must have admired the Western-style education, with its emphasis on free thought, Zakaria, Kristof, and others implied. But there are more convincing explanations for why he may have sent his daughter to a school considered the pinnacle of Western education—the possibility, for example, that she actually just wanted to study there, or that Xi thought it would be valuable for her to understand how that world worked. The son of the late Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi earned a PhD at the London School of Economics, while the increasingly authoritarian Cambodian leader Hun Sen sent his son to West Point. There is no indication that any of that ideological openness reformed the parents or their children.   

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Social Europe: What Happened To Europe’s Left?

Last year was an ‘annus horribilis’ for the European left. In Austria, France, and the Czech Republic, the left lost its governing position, and the same might occur in Italy in a few weeks. Today, only Portugal, Greece, Sweden, Slovakia, and Malta are governed by the left. The 2017 collapse was precipitous. The Dutch Workers’ party went from roughly 25% to 6%; the French Socialist Party went from roughly 30% to 7%. The Czech Social Democrats went from 20% to 7%. And the Czech Communist party saw its worst result in its almost 100-year history. [...]

Seymour Martin Lipset suggested that the greatest achievement of the left had been the lifting of the working class away from authoritarianism and towards cosmopolitanism espoused by left-wing intellectuals. Indeed, the general success of the left in capturing and ‘educating’ the lower social strata profoundly shaped European party systems. In western Europe, the political left has been uniformly and continuously associated with progressive policies not only in the economic domain, but also in non-economic matters such as the environment, women’s rights, and (slowly and shyly) the rights of minorities – both ethnic and sexual. [...]

In the context of the changing working class and the developing political supply, the traditional left parties became parties of the new middle class – primarily of the increasing numbers of white-collar state employees. In doing so, the traditional left responded to the Green challenge by adopting more environmental and generally socially liberal profiles, but also it slowly but surely abandoned the new ‘precariat’ – the new service working classes and those in poor or irregular employment. Politically pulled by social-liberalism (of the ‘new’ left), and by economic moderation to the centre (preferred by a new group of urban white-collar workers and ‘yuppies’), the traditional left opened a political breach – a gaping political vacuum around those seeking economic protection, and certain cultural traditionalism. The salience of this left and traditionalist political space, vacated by the mainstream left parties, would be boosted by another important structural development – the growth of transnational exchange.

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Quartz: How New York’s wealthy parents try to raise ‘unentitled’ kids

Yet these parents have a problem: How to give their kids these advantages while also setting limits. Almost all of the 50 affluent parents in and around New York City that I interviewed for my book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (2017), expressed fears that children would be ‘entitled’—a dirty word that meant, variously, lazy, materialistic, greedy, rude, selfish, and self-satisfied. Instead, they strove to keep their children ‘grounded’ and ‘normal’. Of course, no parent wishes to raise spoiled children; but for those who face relatively few material limits, this possibility is distinctly heightened. [...]

But in the past few decades this homogenous ‘leisure class’ has declined, and the category of the ‘working wealthy’, especially in finance, has exploded. The ranks of high-earners have also partially diversified, opening up to people besides WASP men. This shift has led to a more competitive environment, especially in the realm of college admissions.

At the same time, a more egalitarian discourse has taken hold in the public sphere. As the sociologist Shamus Khan at Columbia University in New York argues in his book Privilege, it is no longer legitimate for rich people to assume that they deserve their social position based simply on who they are. Instead, they must frame themselves as deserving on the basis of merit, particularly through hard work. At the same time, popular-culture images proliferate of wealthy people as greedy, lazy, shallow, materialistic, or otherwise morally compromised. [...]

The best way to help kids understand constraints, of course, is to impose them. But, despite feeling conflicted, these parents did not limit what their kids consumed in any significant way. Even parents who resisted private school tended to end up there. The limits they placed on consumption were marginal, constituting what the sociologist Allison Pugh in Longing and Belonging called ‘symbolic deprivation’. Facing competitive college admissions, none of the high-school-age kids of parents in my sample worked for pay; parents were more likely to describe their homework as their ‘job’.

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The Atlantic: Why Is Silvio Berlusconi Back (Again)?

How is it possible that Berlusconi is still on the political stage? Especially when Italy is facing dramatic economic problems—some of which stem from his years in government—and after all the embarrassing “Bunga Bunga” years? I’ll try to keep this simple. He’s still around because Italy doesn’t have a normal center-right; because its center-left, although polling higher than Forza Italia, has imploded into a fratricidal mess and been unable to capitalize on five years of decent government; and because he’s a known quantity in an election dominated by anti-establishment arrivistes like the Five-Star Movement and right-wing anti-immigrant politicians. During the campaign, Berlusconi has referred to himself as “usato sicuro,” or “used but in good condition,” the same term you see in ads for used cars. There’s a sucker born every minute. Although maybe not in Italy, which has one of the lowest birth rates in the West. [...]

Berlusconi as politician was born in 1994 from a political void—the collapse in a massive bribery scandal of the Christian Democrats and Socialists who had at that point governed throughout the post-war era—and today he fills another void. “If Berlusconi suddenly decided to retire from politics, the real true center-right, with the exception of Salvini, would not find a political expression. There would be a vacuum,” Sofia Ventura, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna, told me. Berlusconi is still on the scene because of the large number of centrists in Italy who could vote right or left, and who in this election don’t feel at home in the Democratic Party but are not as far right as League voters. Where else can they turn? [...]

There’s also the possibility that if he gets the numbers for Forza Italia, they could drop their right-wing partners, the League, and form a grand coalition with the center-left Democratic Party, which is running on an opposing ticket with other left-wing parties. Berlusconi criticizes the Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi on the campaign trail—the left ruined the country and let in too many immigrants; Renzi governs by clicks and tweets are constant refrains—but he seems to have more fellow-feeling with Renzi than with Salvini, the leader of his party’s ostensible coalition partner, the League. A gossip magazine owned by a Berlusconi family company once ran a photo of the 44-year-old Salvini’s girlfriend kissing another man. In Italy’s political culture, the term for a sotto voce agreement, in which two rival politicians have a tacit agreement to drop their partners and team up after elections, is an “inciucio” (pronounced In-CHEW-CHO), which comes from Neapolitan dialect and implies a secret affair. “Berlusconi and Renzi are like two lovers looking to hide in the dark,” Ezio Mauro, a columnist for and former editor of La Repubblica, Italy’s leading center-left daily, which was an opposition paper when Berlusconi was in power, told me.

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Vox: We aren’t having an evidence-based debate about guns

“There’s some evidence that certain types of gun laws, like universal background checks, may be useful,” David Hemenway, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively about injury prevention and guns, told me. “There’s no evidence at all about raising the age to 21. There’s certainly no evidence about arming teachers. There’s evidence [that] arming more people is typically good for the gun industry and bad for society.”

What we do know is that fewer guns likely lead to fewer deaths, as Vox’s German Lopez has explained at length. So improved background checks and higher age limits could reasonably be expected to help. But these are largely inferences from other countries with stronger gun laws rather than rigorously researched theories that have been tested in America. (We do have a few non-government studies, from Connecticut and Missouri, that suggest background checks help reduce gun deaths.)  [...]

We don’t know much beyond that. Congress has made it effectively impossible for federally funded researchers to study gun violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are the gold standards for public health research in the United States. But they are effectively barred from studying a problem that kills more than 35,000 people in a year.

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The Conversation: When it comes to election meddling, America is as guilty as Russia

There is some irony to this. The United States has been covertly interfering in other nations’ politics—including elections—for at least three-quarters of a century. It still does today. Latin America, the focus of my own research, has been a frequent target.

Rather than using Facebook and Twitter to create make-believe organizations, the CIA organized front groups. Rather than creating bots to spread fake news, the CIA bribed foreign journalists, financed foreign newspapers and set up false flag radio stations. The disruptive goals of information warfare have not changed over the decades, only the technology has. [...]

The US feared that Western European Communist parties would ascend to power by winning elections. One of the very first covert actions by the CIA’s new operational wing, directed by Frank Wisner, was a concerted effort to prevent the Italian Communist Party from winning the 1948 election. Washington funneled several million dollars to the conservative, pro-American Christian Democrats. [...]

A decade later, the CIA enlisted La Prensa, Nicaragua’s main newspaper, to play a similar role in a covert war to overthrow the Sandinista leftist government. As in Chile, the CIA funneled funds to a wide variety of opposition political parties, private sector groups and voluntary organizations—not to mention creating a counterrevolutionary paramilitary army, the “contras,” in neighboring Honduras. The Reagan administration’s funding of the contras in defiance of a congressional ban led to the Iran-contra scandal.

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Political Critique: The origins of abstentionism in the Italian Republic

The latest opinion polls for the upcoming elections see abstentionism hovering at around 34%. According to Demos & pi, at the end of 2016 lack of faith in the political parties stood at a cataclysmic 94%. What on earth has happened? And how can we combat it? The discourse would be a long one and here I can only sketch it out. Furthermore, I am not a constitutionalist but (only) a historian. Yet perhaps a little history could help here. [...]

There were various reasons for this, of which self-interest was only one. The need to combat centrifugal tendencies – long a preoccupation of the ruling Italian elites – was another. The superficial turbulence and ideological division of the new ruling class misled many a foreign journalist’s uneducated eye, but in reality guaranteed great lines of continuity. Over 90% of the citizens regularly went to vote, at both a local and national level. [...]

It was upon these bases that the Italian partitocrazia was constructed. The ruling political parties, unhampered by the magistrates of the time (many of whom were ex-Fascists), or by other institutional restraints, systematically occupied the state and divided amongst themselves all the positions of power and influence therein. Corruption was systemic, not occasional, as were contacts and exchanges of favour between politicians and criminal organisations. [...]

Nowhere in the Italian party system is there minimally the recognition that the constant activity of participation guarantees, stimulates and controls the quality of representation.’ Rather it is true that the more corrupt and decrepit representative democracy becomes, and the more toothless its participation, the more likely it is that citizens will withdraw their votes in ever more massive numbers.

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Independent: Take it from someone who has been morbidly obese: this is what overweight people actually need to hear

The traditional finger-wagging approach from parents, friends or doctors did nothing to alter my eating habits, which got worse when I escaped home and moved to university. Like many students, I found a diet of takeaways and processed food preferable to properly planned meals. And sport? Well, that was something to be watched on television, not to participate in. [...]

This wasn’t about cutting foods, opting for fad diets or shaming my body. I decided that I would take a positive approach to changing my behaviour and it began with accepting what had gone wrong up until that point. I wouldn’t set myself any specific target – I simply wanted to be happy.  [...]

It wasn’t my newfound ability to enter a room of strangers without appearing flustered, or a changed relationship with food, that was important; it was the fact that I had finally become happy in my own skin. The previous years of warnings had little impact on me – I knew fine well that eating pizza several times during the week wasn’t the best of ideas, who doesn’t? It was always about changing my mental outlook.  

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The Guardian: Why do we still shame adults who live with their parents?

In fact, this sleeping arrangement is so degrading, the media has even coined a patronizing name for the losers who do it: boomerangs. They’re the millennials who’ve failed to live up to the idea of success our Protestant work ethic-obsessed society has shoved down their throats. They’re the ones finally doubting our long-held convictions that material gain, self-reliance, and that all important guiding principle – freeeeeeedoooooom – are what determine our sense of worth and give us purpose.

Unlike most of the world, where family is number one and cooperation is valued over competition, Americans tend to think we don’t need family. Or anyone actually. I’m not saying family isn’t important to us. Of course it is. But it’s not quite as important as self-determination and the right to pursue individual happiness (like moving out at 18 and maybe even owning a gun), and we like to shame any millennial who dares to question our collective allegiance to this destructive bootstraps mentality that unbridled capitalism hinges on. [...]

Nobody seems to shame boomerangs as much as we do in America. Not even in Europe, where I currently live and work. Here, it’s totally normal to stay at home until even 30. Almost half of Europeans do, actually. What’s not normal to them is having thousands of dollars of debt right out of the gate.

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