openDemocracy: The struggle for Yerevan: how city elections became a referendum on Armenia’s revolution

Yerevan city council elections have become an important touchstone for Nikol Pashinyan’s revolutionary team. The “struggle for Yerevan” started on 16 May, a week after Pashinyan’s appointment as Prime Minister. That day, photos showing that trees had been felled in a park outside City Hall as part of a beautification project went viral. As a result, civic activists first occupied the park and then the municipality building as they demanded that Taron Margaryan, the mayor of Yerevan and member of former ruling Republican Party, resign. [...]

The background for these events was the intensification of decentralised public protests across Armenia. On that same day (16 May), roughly 20 protests on very diverse issues were taking place in different parts of Armenia. The revolution, it seemed, was being disseminated and localised. At the same time, these decentralised protests questioned the capacity of Pashinyan’s government to control the situation. This concern was raised by Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the first president of Armenia and a former ally of Pashinyan’s against the Republican Party regime. “Pashinyan is the Prime Minister now, the head of the state whose most important duty is to secure the normal workflow of government bodies,” said Ter-Petrosyan. “Consequently, although these spontaneous protests, seizure of buildings and blocking of roads are done with good and sincere intentions, they actually work against Pashinyan.” [...]

Yerevan is too big a city for Armenia, with its population of three million. More than a third of them live in Yerevan. All governmental and administrative agencies, institutions are centralised here. While looking at the economics, more than 60% of Armenia’s GDP, 74% of retail, 61% of construction, and 80.6% of services are produced in Yerevan. In other words, Armenia looks like a man whose head is far bigger than his body — and to find its balance, this man has remain upside down, causing disproportionate distribution of everything among the country’s other regions. [...]

These attempts to transform the elections into a referendum narrowed the political space which had been opened, ironically, mostly by Pashinyan’s previous efforts. But while the presence of Pashinyan does not cancel out the fact of holding city council elections with 12 participating forces, it should be noted that his strategy requires only two political subjects — himself and the public. No other political subjects are envisaged under this logic. From the one side, this strategy clears the political arena, but from the other it devastates it. Any other subject finds itself in a love triangle — where the third person is superfluous. Moreover, to bring sense to his own active participation and therefore replacing the city council agenda with the revolutionary agenda, Pashinyan targeted people in his speeches who weren’t candidates for the city council or even represented via any of the forces. In this sense, the city council elections became impossible: voters could not elect the “light” and “dark” forces as described by Pashinyan per se, but could give their votes to the My Step bloc in approval of the April-May events. These kind of post-revolutionary elections are always approximate.

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Vox: The rise of YouTube’s reactionary right

Lewis’s report is trying to map the emergence of a new coalition on the right, one driven by a reactionary impulse and centered on YouTube. If you’re over 30 and don’t use YouTube much, it’s almost impossible to convey how central the platform is to young people. But spend much time talking to college students about where they get their political information and you’ll find YouTube is dominant; what’s happening on the platform is important to our political future, and badly undercovered.

Lewis is interested in how this ecosystem is being shaped by both social and algorithmic dynamics. The social side is familiar: Hosts appears on each other’s shows, do events together, and cross-pollinate their audiences. The algorithmic side is less familiar: YouTube’s powerful recommendation engine learns who’s connected to whom, adds in a preference for extreme and outlandish content, and thus pushes the entire ecosystem in a more radical direction. (Controversially, Lewis suggests YouTube should cut the most extreme of these shows off from monetization channels; this part of the report is the least detailed and, in my view, the least convincing, so I’m not going to spend time on it here.) [...]

If you spend much time listening to the reactionary right, you find that line cuts across social justice issues. You can hold a lot of different opinions on the economy, on Trump, on same-sex marriage, on atheism, and still be part of this community. It’s much more accepting of differing views on health care, the role of the state, and taxation than the modern Republican Party. But you can’t be in sympathy with the SJWs.

On the left, the reverse is increasingly true. The unbridgeable divides today, the ones that seem to define which side you’re really on, revolve around issues of race, gender, identity, and equality. While I see a lot of angry arguments about deficits within the Democratic coalition, I don’t know of any congressional Democrats who are against same-sex marriage, vocally skeptical of Black Lives Matter, and in favor of tight restrictions on immigration — even though those were common positions among elected Democrats in the aughts.

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Haaretz: Not Just Millennials: These Older U.S. Jews Are Disillusioned by Israel Too

Even World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder, a leader of mainstream Jewish organizations, a Republican (and longtime friend of U.S. President Donald Trump) took to the pages of The New York Times in August to voice his dismay in an Op-Ed entitled “Israel, This is Not Who We Are.” [...]

Lauder’s Op-Ed was the latest example of what political scientist Prof. Dov Waxman labels a fundamental change among U.S. Jews nowadays: Being pro-Israel no longer means pure unconditional support for the Israeli government. “I call it critical engagement,” he says, adding it is no longer the old model of what he calls “passive support.” [...]

He says that in the two years since his book was published, he has spent a lot of time on the road giving talks where, he estimates, some 90 percent of the audience is older American Jews. “And everywhere, I heard the same sentiments,” he says: “That people had long felt troubled by Israeli politics and actions regarding the Palestinians, but never felt able to speak out. They cowered around the sense they were alone, and felt like now a burden was being lifted because they were no longer alone and intimidated by speaking out,” says Waxman. [...]

Indeed, a recent American Jewish Committee poll seemed to suggest a major fissure between American and Israeli Jews when it comes to how they think Trump is handling U.S.-Israel relations. While 77 percent of Israeli Jews approve, only 34 percent of American Jews do.

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Politico: Salzburg Brexit failure stems from insular UK government

There’s a rather more convincing explanation for this massive failure: It’s a failure of the ecosystem of May’s government, rather than the individuals involved. British government machinery tends to be more comfortable executing a task than questioning fundamental assumptions. [...]

This is not the first time that geopolitical disasters have resulted from an overly narrow approach. In the run-up to the Iraq war, British diplomats and spies were tasked with making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They set about delivering with determination and energy. So successful was this work that, in early 2002, then-CIA Director George Tenet complained to his own spies that “all the good reporting I get is from [MI6].”

Unfortunately, nobody thought to ask the prior question: “Have they actually got these weapons?” The results are now all too well-known: Iraq was invaded on the false premise of a threat from WMD. The country collapsed into anarchy which still plagues it and the wider region, leading directly to the rise of ISIS and a new wave of global terrorism. [...]

Inside this pressure cooker, particularly the extreme pressure that the Brexit process is generating, there is an understandable tendency to focus on the narrow task at hand. This leaves British officials feverishly developing a plan that respects May’s self-defeating red lines rather than the bigger task of finding a plan that can actually be accepted by Europe.

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Al Jazeera: Modi's Hindu nationalism is stumbling

Moreover, the party's majority obscured the carefully worked out caste and regional alliances inside it. These strategic alliances with segments within lower and formerly "untouchable" castes or Dalits, as well as "tribal" populations, extended the social bases of the party beyond its core of urban upper castes in northern and western India, roughly a fifth of the Indian electorate. [...]

In 2014, Hindu nationalism essentially tied together disparate allies and agendas in a "Make India Great Again" moment. Muslims and Christians were vilified as non-Hindu "others," and attacked verbally and physically after the elections. But Hindu nationalists have always faced a fundamental obstacle: caste. [...]

Since 2014, Modi's overtures to historically subordinated castes has ended up angering the party's upper-caste votebank even as Dalits are shifting loyaltiesaway from the BJP after recent incidents of caste-based violence against them. [...]

But, after some initial successes, the reality of India as a federal union of states rather than a monolithic nation has become apparent. Indian states are divided linguistically and along borders of historical regions that long predate Hindu nationalism or the modern idea of India. [...]

With 93 percent earning less than the minimum taxable income and 98.5 percent not paying any income tax, the Modi government sought to raise revenues through indirect taxes. For the sake of the Hindu nation-in-the-making, buyers had to pay more for their consumption and sellers had to part with more of their earnings. The hasty introduction of the GST and the onerous new reporting standards hurt small business owners in the form of lower sales and earnings.

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FiveThirtyEight: We Looked At Hundreds Of Endorsements. Here’s Who Republicans Are Listening To.

The Republican Party is a coalition of overlapping factions — pro-business types, libertarians, evangelicals, populists, single-issue advocates and more — but to whom does it really belong? To many, the answer is clear: Donald J. Trump. And the success of Trump-endorsed candidates in the Republican primaries this year seems to bear that out — but, according to our research, that’s only part of the story. [...]

Let’s start with the kingpin of the Republican Party, the president himself. Trump endorsed 17 candidates in open Republican primaries this election cycle, and 15 of them won. That 88 percent win rate is the highest of any person or group we looked at. In early August, Trump tweeted, “As long as I campaign and/or support Senate and House candidates (within reason), they will win!” It was a bit of an exaggeration, but his success rate has certainly been high so far. [...]

Trump’s win rate may also be inflated by the type of candidate he endorses. For example, several of the candidates he endorsed didn’t face truly competitive primary opposition, including U.S. Senate candidates Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Mitt Romney, who is running in Utah. Other candidates he backed are less firebrands in Trump’s own image and more straitlaced establishment types with broad appeal. Trump has repeatedly cautioned Republican primary voters to “remember Alabama” — where a Republican Senate candidate lost to a Democrat in a deep-red state after the GOP nominee was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal involving minors — and vote for a candidate who can win a general election. [...]

Although the tea party appears to have largely gone out of style, we’d be remiss if we didn’t look at the endorsements of the individual power brokers most closely associated with the movement: the Koch brothers. Charles Koch (his brother David has retired) and groups affiliated with the Koch family, like Americans for Prosperity, continue to spend money and political capital on candidates who support their limited-government priorities. And it looks like they still have plenty left in the tank: This year, the Koch political network backed 21 candidates, 86 percent of whom won their races. That’s especially interesting given the Kochs’ opposition to Trump’s trade policies and Trump’s public feud with the brothers. In fact, Trump has bragged on Twitter that the Kochs’ “network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn.” But at least in the open primaries we looked at, the two have not supported opposing candidates this year. By contrast, they’ve actually supported the same candidates in eight open races.11

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Social Europe: Sovereignty: A False Friend In The Defence Of National Identity

However, in both contexts, the word has been the focus of disabling paradoxes. Nationally, the idea of the ‘separation of powers’ has meant that, in liberal democracies at least, there is no sovereign, in the sense of an ultimate holder of legal and political power. Internationally, diplomacy and war have meant that no island-state has ever been entire of itself, let alone equal to all others. States have never stopped interfering in each other’s internal affairs, politically and economically and through the use of armed force, and, on the other hand, they have never stopped inventing ever more complex rules and systems for making their restless co-existence possible and profitable. [...]

The consequence of all this is that traditional ideas of constitutionalism have had to be revised. National constitutional systems now flow seamlessly into the international constitutional system, and vice versa. The two constitutional systems are now inseparable. That is the origin of the European Union seen, on the one hand, as an international-national constitutional union, responding to the multiple disasters of the first half of the 20th century, and seen, other the other hand, as an effort to share the political and economic economies of scale latent in our local co-existence, in response to a world that Europe no longer dominates but which, on the contrary, poses a huge challenge to the survival and flourishing of the European countries, individually and collectively. [...]

European integration might serve to overcome the worst aspects of the 19th century invention of aggressive nationalism. Patriotism is a profound human experience that did not need to be invented. Love of a precious source of one’s identity cannot be overridden by law and government, however rational they might otherwise be. It has certainly been abused and manipulated in the service of nationalism. In the context of European integration, the word ‘sovereignty’ has been used to express resistance to what is seen as a threat to a cherished sense of collective identity other than citizenship of the EU, a citizenship which is still a perilously weak form of self-identifying. Europe contains many stronger forms of self-identifying, including the collective self-identifying of the citizens of each member state and the self-identifying of the multiple peoples present within each of the member states.

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The Atlantic: The Myth of Authoritarian Competence

In truth, worries about Turkey melting down the global economy are misplaced. Unlike during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when the collapse of the Thai currency unleashed regional upheaval, Turkey’s problems are less an indicator of systemic weakness across developing economies than the outgrowth of factors that are specific to Ankara. These include a politicized monetary policy, the highest current account deficit among the G20 developing economies, the most foreign-denominated private-sector debt of any emerging market, and a gratuitous fight with Washington that has escalated into sanctions. [...]

The rise of strongman regimes is, of course, organically linked to the well-documented erosion of democracy that has taken place globally over the past 15 years. But the impact of the strongman model is actually broader than this, not only breathing life into sham democracies like in Russia and Egypt—where elections are held but blatantly rigged—but also reshaping unabashedly authoritarian governments like in China and Saudi Arabia. Whereas a decade ago Beijing and Riyadh were both characterized by a kind of collective, institutionalized leadership, they have since moved away from this in favor of a paramount decision maker with decisive say over the country’s direction. [...]

The seductive draw of this logic, moreover, is not limited to nationalists and populists. Plenty of Western pundits and investors—including some of the same disciples of globalization who rage at the likes of Donald Trump or France’s Marine Le Pen—have a track record of going weak-kneed in the presence of modernizing autocrats, especially those who show up at Davos with PowerPoint decks promising painful structural reforms, crackdowns on corruption, and lucrative infrastructure projects. It turns out the case for enlightened despotism can be persuasive for self-styled liberals, too, especially when the despotism is in someone else’s country. [...]

It’s worth extending the analogy, however, to recall the fate that befell the Turkish and Russian empires. Indeed, personal autocracy in both the Romanov Court in Petersburg and the Sublime Porte in Constantinople was a source of debilitating weakness, not strength, especially as these regimes entered into direct competition with the West. An idiot sultan or czar—and there were quite a few of them—could paralyze systems for decades. But even the good ones never quite figured out how to reconcile the strong, modern state they sought to build with the autocratic prerogatives they were determined to preserve for themselves.

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Quartz: Delving Into the Nocturnal City of the Synanthrope

The researchers say this is the result of a counterbalance between a substantial rise in upward mobility for the historically-marginalised scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs), who have access to reserved seats in educational institutions and jobs, and a substantial decline for Muslims. The latter have become the least upwardly mobile group in India. [...]

In studying the educational attainment of sons compared to their fathers, they found that upward mobility remains high among forward castes, a category in the study that includes Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, as well as higher-caste Hindus. But it was a different story among Muslims, a religious minority that accounts for 14% of India’s 1.3 billion population. [...]

India’s Muslim community has for long faced discrimination and relatively lower living standards. Previous research has shown that the Muslim community has the lowest rate of enrollment in higher education in India, accounting for just 4.4% of students. It also faces high levels of poverty, with 25% of India’s 370,000 beggars being Muslim.

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