The Atlantic: The Left and the Right Have Abandoned American Exceptionalism

One difference lies in the way they talk about America. Obama consistently acknowledged America’s racist history. He would never have declared, as George W. Bush did in his second inaugural that, “From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this Earth has rights and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and Earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave.” I suspect Obama would have gagged on the words. [...]

Ocasio-Cortez does not. She depicts American history less as an arc of progress than as a circle, in which America repeats—rather than rises above—its past. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE’s) treatment of people of color, she told The Intercept, continues an American tradition: “The very first immigration policy law passed in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s, and so the very bedrock of U.S. immigration policy, the very beginning of it was a policy based on racial exclusion.” She told New York magazine that, “child separation is a barbaric new iteration of what is going on, but for a very long time.” [...]

What explains the change? One obvious answer is Donald Trump. When Obama spoke about American history as a narrative of unfolding progress, his own election served as Exhibit A. And while he acknowledged the conservative backlash it sparked, he described that backlash as temporary, a “fever” that would eventually “break.” But Trump shows that, far from breaking, the fever has intensified. Which raises the possibility that the real historical aberration was not the racist reaction to Obama’s presidency, but his presidency itself. [...]

In different ways, Obama and Bush both spoke about America as embodying a set of ideas. Now neither Republicans nor Democrats are as likely to do so. Donald Trump doesn’t care about human rights. For him, America isn’t an idea; it’s a nation. And when it pursues universal ideals—by admitting refugees, eschewing torture, agreeing to environmental norms or aiding other nations—it gets ripped off. For Ocasio-Cortez, human rights matter intensely, but the United States has no special claim to embodying them. It’s hard to imagine her saying, as Obama often did, that “in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

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Social Europe: Could The US Become A Democratic Dictatorship?

Yet Hungary is still a democracy in the sense of having reasonably genuine elections. As the opposition is fragmented there is little need to resort to the kind of tactics used in other democracies, such as Turkey. When occasionally the opposition does win a local election, Orbán unleashes the full might of his nationalist, enemies at the door, enemies within narrative at them. With almost total control of the media and civil institutions, he can make life very difficult for the opposition. He won his last election with ease. It is an effective model that could survive for many years. [...]

He may not control the courts to the extent that Orbán does, but he is not miles away. Soon he, or at least his party, will get a majority on the supreme court. He has pardoned whoever he likes at his whim. The Republican party have retained a majority in the House in part because of gerrymandering, and the supreme court allows this to continue. Orbán fights a long but successful battle to close down a university in Budapest, while Trump’s climate change denying appointees try to close down scientific research in the US (on the latter, see this excellent essay from Carl Zimmer HT Tim Harford).  [...]

Trump certainly acts like a dictator would act. The barriers to Trump becoming an Orbán type figure are that his supporters do not control most of the media, and he faces a single and organised opposition party. These are the two threads by which this pluralist democracy hangs. You might think it an exaggeration to call these two only threads, and I hope we will see that it is in the midterms, but there are worrying signs in the US and elsewhere that popular support for democracy is falling, as documented by Yascha Mounk in a book reviewed here. The fact that Trump could be elected and then supported in the first place by one of the two main political parties in the US is a clear sign that all is not well with US democracy. Those, like Paul Krugman, who have for a long time appeared ‘shrill’ about what was happening to the Republican party have been fully justified in their fears.  

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Vox: A Princeton sociologist spent 8 years asking rural Americans why they’re so pissed off

The percentage that is African-American is relatively small, but it depends on what part of America we’re talking about. There are many rural communities in the South that are almost entirely African-American, and the same is true of small towns in places like Minnesota. But I’d say something like 90 percent of rural America is white. Although the demographics are quickly changing as Hispanics and other immigrants settle in rural parts of the country. [...]

I’m not sure that Washington is doing anything to harm these communities. To be honest, a lot of it is just scapegoating. And that’s why you see more xenophobia and racism in these communities. There’s a sense that things are going badly, and the impulse is to blame “others.”  [...]

Yes, this is one of the most difficult aspects of the discussion we’re now having about morality in America. What counts as moral varies so much from place to place. In the South, for example, you have clergy who are vehement about abortion or homosexuality, and they preach this in the pulpits every Sunday. But then they turn a blind eye to policies that hurt the poor or discriminate against minorities.  [...]

Point two is that rural America does have real problems — population decline, a brain drain, opioid addiction, etc. We can make of that what we want. But that’s not the whole picture. Not every small town is full of people who are suffering and bitter and angry at Washington.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Salvini Plan

It’s not just immigrants that Salvini has in his crosshairs. His Lega, today in government with the Five Star Movement, has discussed closing down many of Italy’s mosques, and his ministry has announced plans for a census of Roma camp sites throughout the country. He has also set his sights on immigration lawyers, liberal journalists, and NGO volunteers, claiming that they peddle fake news and engage in humanitarian activity for profit. The attack on perceived “foreigners” also targets NGO missions as representative of foreign capital: “foreign ships with foreign money.” [...]

By 2013, the route proved so deadly that large numbers of Syrians refused to take it, preferring to wait in North Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey for other routes to open. Under Matteo Renzi’s center-left government, the Italian state’s own Mare Nostrum rescue operation was axed. As the state left people to drown, humanitarian maritime missions run by NGOs tried to save them. Even so, as deaths at sea mounted during 2014 and 2015, this did not deter hundreds of thousands from daring the route: indeed, more than 150,000 made the crossing each year between 2014 and 2016. [...]

In spring 2017, Italy’s center-left government, led by Paolo Gentiloni and then-interior minister Marco Minniti, fleshed out a deal with the Serraj government in Libya to effectively arm and fund Libyan militia to seize departing migrant boats. The plan was finally implemented at the end of the summer. By the time of the march 2018 elections, there had already been a 75 percent drop in the number of migrant landings, and a campaign of racist rhetoric and violence outran the efforts of the progressive left-wing and Catholic forces, which had previously sustained rescue operations. [...]

The Salvini Plan might also be designed to break the Five Star Movement’s own coalition of support and consolidate the Lega’s power, both through ongoing local votes and any snap general election that might be called. Recent local elections have indeed seen the center-right win mayoral seats across Italy, often with 60 percent of the vote. The Five Star Movement, which came in first across the South in March’s general election, no longer seems to be polling well after allying with the Lega, whose anti-migrant rhetoric used to be matched by hatred for Southerners (it only recently dropped the name “Northern League” from its propaganda at the national level). A fresh election, likely resulting in gains for the Lega, would allow Salvini’s party greater control of state finances and satisfy the conservative capitalist interests that stand behind it, without having to give in to some of the Five Star’s (limited) demands for welfare reform. [...]

Yet the power of the extreme-right hate speech does not only draw from its radicalism or the leverage of the capitalist powers financing it. Matteo Salvini is not only a result of the Left’s failure, but ironically, the success of past revolt. The fear he stirs up is based on very real acts of resistance against the border regime. Without the mass breakthrough of 2015, in which migrants scaled and dissolved Europe’s eastern and southern borders, the new European right would not have had the basic material from which to construct its hatred and lies.

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Politico: Time for Europe to embrace democracy

EU citizens have voted representatives into the European Parliament since 1979, but even today they do so on different dates, according to different electoral laws, for candidates selected by national — rather than European — political parties and on the basis of domestic agendas.

Pan-European parties (so called Euro-parties) have been given institutional recognition and financial resources over time, but they remain weak, extra-parliamentary federations made up of national parties from several EU countries, united by thin political affinity and driven by financial rewards. [...]

The nature and scale of many of the challenges facing Europe, such as migration, require pan-European solutions. But citizens are led to believe that most of the problems afflicting their local communities can and should be solved locally. Instead of holding a single search for a solution across the bloc, national debates promote local “solutions” that are inefficient and often at odds with one another, as in the case, again, with migration. [...]

One thing is clear. There are many more visions of Europe than those presented by traditional federalists on one side of the spectrum and nationalists on the other. Europe as a political space is still evolving, but these transnational movements — however well they perform — will nudge all political parties to compete for ideas, votes and seats on a European stage.

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The New Yorker: The Colors of American Patriotism in the Age of Trump

These are just a few of the makeshift gestures of American patriotism that the New York-based photographer Chris Maggio collects and dissects in his sly series “Bored on the 4th of July,” which he shot last summer, often in the suburbs, and mostly on trips around the Northeast. He has said that he was interested in creating imagery that channelled “the confusion and polarisation of a country where everyone has a differing opinion of what it means to be an upstanding American.”  

Maggio, a Long Island native, often makes works that play with the signs and symbols of Americana—Christmas trees, the Statue of Liberty, quirky sculptural iterations of the American flag. In “Bored on the 4th of July,” he uses a flat, snapshot style that makes his subjects look equal parts lurid and lonely. An ad trailing behind an airplane tempts beachgoers with Domino’s pizza, but only one sunburned man is in the frame to see it. An air conditioner plopped onto an overturned plastic bin is pumping cold air through the mesh window of a camping tent, but it’s not clear whether anyone is inside.

Here and in many images, with sneaky visual wit, Maggio hunts for unlikely combinations of the colors red, white, and blue, as if they were a code that might unlock some passage into the American psyche. He finds them on a dumpster labelled “diapers only,” on a TV showing a Fox News report on the “myth” of climate change, and on the bright vinyl exteriors of a chair lift bearing a solitary white-haired man in one of its chairs. He has said that he is drawn to “imagery that often appears cheerful, but has a kind of doomed, sinister patina.”  

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The Guardian: Homophobia is alive and kicking. The LGBT ‘cure’ ban is pure pink-washing

Absolutely right. But banning conversion therapy is confusing cause and effect: it is simply the most extreme and obvious effect of homophobia. It’s also an easy win, like banning the use of kittens as footballs. The abhorrent practice that has to go is homophobia. But “Minister recognises insidious nature of prejudice and attempts to unpick centuries of ingrained hate” makes a less snappy headline.

Buried within this long-overdue survey is a more startling, and depressing, figure: more than two-thirds of respondents said they had avoided holding hands in public with a same-sex partner. Startling, because it’s only two-thirds; depressing, because it just is. [...]

Right now, police forces across the country are preparing for a rise in domestic violence linked to England’s World Cup performance. A study by Lancaster University, published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, found instances of domestic violence rose 38% when England lost, and 26% when they won or drew. Some women are cheering for their lives. There’s no research yet into homophobic violence at World Cup time, but you can feel it on the streets. LGBT hate incidents were experienced by 40% of respondents to the government survey, with over 90% of the most serious offences going unreported. [...]

A real action plan would tackle homophobia at the root, in health and education. It would make PrEP HIV drugs available to everyone today – one pill a day, proved to save lives and money by dramatically reducing HIV infection. The Scottish government has rolled it out nationwide; Theresa May refuses to.

Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of schools in England, said some faith schools run by religious conservatives were “deliberately resisting” British values and equalities law. If May’s faith truly is the personal matter she insists it is, she’ll have no problem immediately secularising all state schools. Every pupil should be safe in a system that prioritises the rational over the supernatural, and love over hate.

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Deutsche Welle: Germany's Angela Merkel strikes conciliatory note on migrants in Bundestag speech

The centrality of this issue to the success or failure of Merkel's fourth term as chancellor was evident in the fact that she barely spoke of her budget at all. Instead she concentrated on migrants in general and in particular on secondary migration, non-EU migrants moving from one country to another within the European Union for economic reasons or to improve their chances at being granted asylum. [...]

"It cannot be that refugees themselves determine where their applications are processed," Merkel said, citing a deal with Greece that would allow Germany to send migrants back to that Mediterranean country. "There has to be more order to all forms of migration." [...]

At the same time, Merkel cited world-wide declines in military expenditures and the global eradication of diseases as examples both of a general improvement in the human condition and of what can be achieved though international cooperation. She also didn't neglect to mention positive German economic developments such as full state coffers and low unemployment. [...]

With SPD approval for the conservative compromise still pending, there was considerable interest in what the Social Democrats would put forward. SPD chairwoman Andrea Nahles said that after a good start, the government had "begun to sputter in the past few weeks." She added that she hoped work on issues other than migrants would resume.

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Quartz: A landmark Hong Kong ruling means gay expat couples can get spouse visas

The ruling found that a British woman, known only as QT, faced “irrational” discrimination by immigration authorities in not being awarded a dependent visa to accompany her female partner, with whom she was in a legally recognized civil union, to Hong Kong. It upheld an earlier appeal court decision in her favor. The Court of Final Appeal said that it was “hard to see how the Policy’s exclusion, on grounds of sexual orientation, of persons who were bona fide dependant civil partners of sponsors granted employment visas promoted the legitimate aim of strict immigration control.”[...]

A lower court ruled against QT in 2016, which she appealed. Along the way, global financial firms expressed their support for QT to the court, on the grounds that a more inclusive policy would help Hong Kong-based firms continue to attract top talent. The Court of Appeals ruled in QT’s favor late last year, finding that current immigration policy was effectively discriminating against gay expat couples. The Hong Kong government appealed the decision to the Court of Final Appeal, resulting in today’s ruling. [...]

The judgment from a five-member bench was careful to make clear that it wasn’t trying to open the door for same-sex marriage in Hong Kong, which conservative groups strongly oppose. Still, opinion about same-sex marriage is becoming more favorable, and this ruling could help lead to further acceptance.

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