UnHerd: Is Trump killing or curing American conservatism?

The reality is not so bleak. Fading American conservatism has an excellent chance to renew itself and become again a dominant political force. But to do that, it needs to be a little less distinctively American and bit more like the conservatism found in other Anglosphere countries. [...]

Vice President Mike Pence excellently encompasses them, however. His acceptance speech for the Republican Party’s nomination in 2016 started: “I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” This expression of faith is non-controversial within conservative circles. But fewer than one-third of Americans would be able say the same about themselves. [...]

If Pence’s sincere but ostentatious religiosity is off-putting for tens of millions of Americans, his devotion to conservative economic nostrums dismays millions more. American conservative thought remains opposed to virtually any expansion of social welfare programmes; it has opposed efforts to expand government-subsidised healthcare coverage, regardless of whether such efforts were pushed by Republican or Democratic presidents. Pence enthusiastically opposed both Obamacare and President Bush’s expansion of the popular health insurance programme for senior citizens, Medicare.[...]

Trump’s tenure in office does, however, show how certain longstanding conservative priorities can be part of the new emerging conservatism. Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation of business are longtime conservative priorities. His focus on religious liberty, without the ostentatious preaching of religious belief so common among other Republicans, is proving popular. Trump is even curbing some of the less central elements of the social welfare state. The number of people receiving disability insurance benefits had been rising dramatically for over 15 years, but the number has been shrinking since Trump’s inauguration. Conservatives may not be getting what they want, but they are getting what they need.

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The Intercept‎: El Salvador Is Trying to Stop Gang Violence. But the Trump Administration Keeps Pushing Failed “Iron Fist” Policing.

But while Trump and many in his administration act as though Salvadoran gangs exist due to a lack of toughness, parts of the U.S. federal government in Central America — which for years enabled the implementation of exactly the kind of policy Trump calls for now — have recognized that mano dura has failed. “It’s a policy that did not have positive results,” said Enrique Roig, former coordinator of the Central America Regional Security Initiative for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a major vehicle for U.S. funds to the region. “The whole intention to focus more on the prevention side, on respectful law enforcement,” was to correct the mistakes of the past, like “the use of incarceration as the main method of dealing with the problem.” It is also meant to build “relationships of trust between communities and police, so people in communities actually report crime, and police know what’s happening by responding in a way that’s respectful of human rights.” [...]

El Salvador, like most countries, has long had disaffected kids in poor communities who create gangs – Salvadoran anthropologist Juan José Martínez D’Aubuisson dates the earliest gangs to the 1950s, when state modernization prompted a disorganized mass internal migration to urban centers. What appeared were neighborhood or schoolyard crews defending their honor and territory with fistfights and knives. Throughout the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the homegrown crews meshed with the violent legacy of a recently ended civil war — and with U.S. street gang culture, which arrived among the tens of thousands of Salvadorans deported from the United States during that time. According to the FBI, many of those deportees were members of two gangs formed in the U.S. and composed mostly of embattled Salvadoran war refugees: the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, and Barrio 18. [...]

That policy was backed by law in October 2012, when the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated MS-13 a “transnational criminal organization,” adding the gang to a list alongside terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Many experts dispute the extent and reach of the gangs’ transnational activities, including cross-border drug trafficking, arguing that most cliques are made up of kids from the country’s poorest neighborhoods who barely manage to feed themselves. Still, the designation set into motion a chain of possibilities for the U.S. government. For one thing, it enabled INL to open a field office in the country, which would be impossible without the presence of an officially designated transnational criminal group. In 2016, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement built an entire cross-border strategy around the designation, “deploying special agents to El Salvador” who would work with the Salvadoran National Civil Police to chase the gang’s assets and act on a “free flow of actionable intelligence between ICE and our host country law enforcement partners.” [...]

That analysis remained sidelined until 2015, when thousands of Central American children fleeing violence showed up at the southern U.S. border. Faced with the children, the Obama administration investigated the causes of emigration. In all three countries, it found systemic corruption. In Guatemala, there were conflicts over natural resources that were sometimes drug-fueled and often disproportionately affected native people; in Honduras and El Salvador, what stuck out was violence from narcos and gangs. The administration’s investigation led to a new openness toward tertiary prevention — a shocking move on the ground in El Salvador. Jones from Catholic Relief Services remembered thinking at the time that State Department visitors “are very open right now. … They are seriously exploring what can we fund that will work.”

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Scientific American: Rising Ethnic Diversity Increases Whites’ Fears

Evidence from social science seems to both refute and support the idea that greater ethnic diversity leads to increased feelings of threat amongst Whites. Proponents of “contact theory” claim that increasing levels of diversity within a community actually reduces prejudice. When Whites are able to build personal relationships with people belonging to a particular ethnic group, and get to know them as close friends or neighbors, contact theory predicts that they will develop a more positive view of members of that ethnic group. However, other studies, such as a famous paper by Harvard’s Robert Putnam, seem to support “threat theory”: as Whites have increasing contact with members of other ethnic groups, they tend to withdraw from their communities and become less trusting of people belonging to other ethnicities.

Until now, these two theories have competed with each other, leaving a lack of clarity about the degree to which ethnic diversity truly leads Whites to feel more threatened. A recently published paper by political scientists Eric Kaufmann and Matthew Goodwin attempts to reconcile these two theories and determine conclusively which one is actually correct. They found that the relationship between ethnic diversity and feelings of threats amongst native-born Whites is mixed: for small communities, contact seems to reduce threat, while in larger communities, more diversity seems to increase it. This suggests that increasing diversity by itself does not necessarily lead to greater wariness amongst Whites; diversity interacts with the size of a community in producing threatened feelings. [...]

Perhaps contact theory is only true in smaller sized neighborhoods because that is where people are most likely to develop close, personal relationships with people who have different backgrounds than themselves. In larger cities, people may be more likely to segregate themselves into their own racial groups. Or perhaps the largeness of a community inherently reduces people’s ability to trust strangers who appear different than themselves. However, this is all speculation, as the study cannot offer a definitive explanation as to what is causing the findings. To answer that question, the researchers plan to undertake additional research that looks more deeply at the conditions under which diversity either does or does not produce a sense of threat amongst Whites.

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Foreign Policy: Syria’s Three Wars

It is not surprising, then, that one of the first firefights in Syria’s ongoing civil war took place near the city of Jisr al-Shughur in western Idlib, where insurgents assaulted a military outpost, killing more than 120 people. After four years of fighting, the Syrian regime lost control of Idlib in 2015. In 2017, as the United States pushed jihadi forces out of Raqqa in Syria’s east, survivors fled to Idlib. Their numbers were swelled more recently by men of all political stripes seeking to evade conscription into the Syrian army, which has been hoovering up all males between 18 and 51. In the interim, Turkey inserted about 1,300 troops and a dozen observation posts into the province. These were meant to contain any threat to Turkey emanating from Idlib, as well as provide the country with a forward base for further operations, as Ankara somewhat unrealistically described its mission. Instead, Ankara was primarily focused on corralling extremists who might otherwise make their way to Turkey, keeping refugees from crossing the border, and attempting to filter hard-core jihadis out of the larger rebel population, even as it sustained more moderate rebels as weapons to be used against the Assad regime. Once the civil war is over, Turkey will likely aim to convert a long-term occupation of Idlib into a permanent arrangement as part of a larger postwar settlement. [...]

Damascus has indicated its readiness to move against the rebels in Idlib soon, but a drumbeat of warnings from the United States, United Nations, Turkey, and others against a reckless offensive seems to have deterred the expected assault for now. From the regime’s perspective, the delay represents pragmatic restraint. A campaign in Idlib would be labor-intensive, and the regime lacks manpower. It would also be difficult—the foreign fighters, especially Central Asians, who have lived and battled in Syria for years have nowhere to go and would fight to the death. Intensive combat would push a wave of desperate refugees toward the Turkish border, which might inject unwelcome vigor into Turkish operations in the province. In addition, neither of Syria’s backers, Russia and Iran, want to be tarred as facilitators of the humanitarian disaster that most observers expect to result from an offensive. It is no wonder, then, that things have been put on hold.[...]

It is hard to know the exact reasons for Iran’s caution. It could reflect a view among regime officials that the targets of Israel’s strikes have been insignificant. Alternatively, Tehran might just not have plans to open a second front. It could also want to avoid doing anything that could diminish European support for the Iranian nuclear deal, or it might believe that it is overmatched. It is also possible that the skeptics are wrong and that the Assad regime has effectively banned counterattacks. Whatever the reason, Tehran could at some point decide that it has had enough and respond either from Syria or Lebanon.

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Quartz: Young people are more likely to feel lonely than any other age group

Adults between the ages of 16 and 24 were most likely of any group to say they felt lonely, with 40% responding that they felt lonely “often” or “very often.” By contrast, only 27% of those over age 75 had the same response. The research was conducted with a BBC survey of 55,000 people which was then analyzed by psychologists at the University of Manchester.

Why are young people so lonely? An analysis accompanying the release of the findings notes that our late teens and early 20s are often a tumultuous period. People experience lots of changes, including moving away from home, starting college, and experiencing our first jobs and relationships. But young people may not yet be well-equipped to deal with the stress and emotional upheavals. [...]

One of the limitations of the survey was that, because it was self-selecting, it may have overstated the degree to which loneliness is felt amongst the population as a whole. It’s also possible younger people are more likely to fill in an online survey. The large number of responses means the study is still worth examining, however. The survey was publicly available through a UK site, but not restricted to participants from only that country.

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Social Europe: Why The Left Must Resist Wanting A Piece Of The Xenophobic Action

While the left wants to swing public anger against class targets, some are asking whether it cannot gain some vital added traction by tapping into some of these highly effective themes: immigrants bring wages down; the EU is a capitalist club; trade with China is destroying manufacturing jobs. The top leadership of the British Labour Party swung into unequivocal support of Brexit. In Germany a new movement, Aufstehen, is being launched to rally anti-EU, anti-immigrant sentiment on the left. Similar rumblings come from Denmark, Italy and elsewhere. [...]

But the historical achievement of labour and social democratic parties was precisely to weld these very particularistic solidarities into wider ones – not destroying them but subordinating them within a wider class-based morality of universalism. For most of the 20th century ‘universal’ meant ‘national’. The reason for this was an amalgam of pragmatic reasoning (the nation state was the level at which democracy could be most effectively established) and appeals to solidarities based on blood and soil. The universalist, egalitarian morality of the left stressed the former; exclusionary tendencies of the right, the latter. The precise mix did not matter much while the two could proceed in tandem, but as the nation state has lost its capacity autonomously to govern economic space, the case for insisting on the priority of the nation has leaned more heavily on appeals to blood and soil. Therefore, the right has become the main beneficiary of discomfort with a globalizing world. To share in that, the left has to abandon a universal, egalitarian morality in favour of an exclusionary one, a betrayal of the nobility of its past.

Second, this also means that, far from stealing a piece of the right’s action, all the left achieves by following it on these issues is to legitimise the far right’s message, conspiring with it to tear down the boundaries that the genuine morality of universalism has over the years held the right in check. It is not chance that waves of hate crimes and violence against minorities followed the vote for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the entry of La Lega into the Italian government. The debates around these events made legitimate the denigration of immigrants and other foreign persons and institutions that had been made shameful by decades of the great recoil from everything Adolf Hitler had stood for. Hate is by far the most powerful human emotion, and politically it is the property of the extreme right. It has to be kept down, outside acceptable discourse.

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