The Atlantic: Bernie Sanders Offers a Foreign Policy for the Common Man

Luce’s and Wallace’s visions differed in two critical ways. First, Wallace denied that America had any special or inherent claim on democratic ideals. “We ourselves in the United States,” he declared, “are no more a master race than the Nazis.” When citing models he hoped other nations would follow, Wallace mentioned not only the American Revolution but also “the French Revolution of 1792, the Latin American revolutions of the Bolivarian era, the German Revolution of 1848,” and, more dubiously, “the Russian Revolution of 1917.” The implication was that global progress would flow from a partnership of nations, each of which boasted traditions of liberty, rather than domination by an America that would mold the world “for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”[...]

Wallace, by contrast, saw unchecked private wealth as a threat to liberty. The “common man,” he argued, must “have the opportunity to form unions and bargain through them collectively.” If Luce saw Nazism as a species of socialism, Wallace saw it as the result of a toxic alliance between demagogues and big business. Citing “Herr Thyssen, the wealthy German steel man” who “gave Hitler enough money to enable him to play on the minds of the German people,” Wallace warned of “wealthy men who sincerely believe that their wealth is likely to be safer if they can hire” tyrants who “lure the people back into slavery.” [...]

Sanders’ speech evokes both of the key themes of Wallace’s 1942 address. First: its anti-exceptionalism. Sanders, like Wallace, describes a global struggle between democratic and authoritarian forces. But he doesn’t see that struggle as pitting democratic America against its authoritarian foes. He sees it as pitting democrats across the world, including Americans, against their increasingly antidemocratic governments, which include Trump’s. [...]

The second way in which Sanders evokes Wallace is by linking authoritarianism to concentrated wealth. Wallace warned of “wealthy men who sincerely believe that their wealth is likely to be safer” if they support “demagogues.” Sanders notes that many of today’s authoritarian leaders are “connected to a network of multibillionaire oligarchs.” He cites Sheldon Adelson as an example. Like Wallace, who said that “men and women cannot be really free until they have plenty to eat,” the “global democratic movement” that Sanders envisions is also a movement against “global inequality.” The widening gap between rich and poor, Sanders argues, fuels authoritarianism in two different ways: It gives oligarchs the resources to fund despots and it drives the alienation that leads some in the working class to support them.

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The Atlantic: Male Gorillas Love Hanging Around With Infants

Though Isabukuru’s fondness for infants was especially striking, such behaviors are fairly common among the mountain gorillas of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, the same group that Dian Fossey studied. The males, whether silverbacks or subordinates, will cuddle infants, play with them, welcome them into their nests, and just plain hang out with them. “I often describe it as babysitting,” says Rosenbaum. [...]

Many mountain gorilla groups include several adult males; some have as many as nine. The silverback might sire the majority of infants, but subordinates reproduce too. So when Rosenbaum first noticed males babysitting infants, she naturally figured that they must be looking after their own babies. She was wrong. “They really don’t seem to have any preference for their own offspring,” she says. [...]

It’s possible that the males who have already sired the most offspring are also more likely to pay attention to infants—but Rosenbaum thinks that this explanation can’t be the whole story. After all, some of the males in the study were very young, and had barely started fathering their own babies. And yet, their attentiveness to other infants predicted their future reproductive success.

The more likely explanation is that females are preferentially mating with the males who engage most with the group’s infants. They might be attracted to personality traits that, coincidentally, make males more likely to babysit. Or—and this is perhaps the most interesting possibility—it could be that the babysitting is attractive in itself. By mating with males who are most attentive to infants, female gorillas give their own offspring a better chance in life.

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Jacobin Magazine: Hard Questions in Israel-Palestine

The fact that, after fifty years of Palestinian support efforts, the Israeli occupation is more entrenched than ever should inspire some intellectual humility among those hawking solutions to the conflict, notes Jamie Stern-Weiner in the introduction to his edited collection Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions. It is humbling as well to read through the volume, with more than seventy essays and rejoinders by more than fifty different authors, from almost every one of which something new can be learned. [...]

The reason it cannot be implemented, argues Levy, is the settlers: “The settlers have won. One needs to recognize this, however painful it may be. More than 600,000 settlers will not now or in the future be removed from their homes. Yet without such mass removal, there is no viable Palestinian state, and more important, there is no justice.”

Why no justice? To “leave a single settlement intact … would amount to rewarding those who have undermined international law and violated it so crudely.” After all, “[i]f the settlements are a violation of international law, as they are, then they should be undone, to the last one. Crimes are crimes. There is no retroactive legitimation—not for murder, not for rape, and not for land grab.” [...]

The second problem with Arieli’s proposal is that he says he designed it by taking account of the positions of both sides and then seeking a compromise between them. But he judges the Palestinian position by what Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has accepted as if this reflects actual Palestinian sentiment. However, as Diana Buttu notes, “the president rules by decree; the prime minister has never received confirmation; the parliament has not met in a decade and has not passed a single piece of legislation in eleven years; and the terms of the president, parliament, and municipal councilors expired years ago.”

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FiveThirtyEight: Why The House And Senate Are Moving In Opposite Directions

But a House-Senate split is exactly what we’re seeing in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Democratic prospects in the Senate are increasingly dire, having fallen to about 1 in 5. Indeed, it’s been hard to find any good news for Democrats in Senate polling lately. In the House, by contrast, their opportunity is holding up relatively well. In fact, Democrats’ chance of taking the House has ticked back upward to about 4 in 5, having improved slightly from around 3 in 4 immediately after Kavanaugh was confirmed. And while district-by-district House polling has been all over the place lately, Democrats’ position has improved slightly on the generic congressional ballot. [...]

The Democrats’ map in the House is fairly robust, because they aren’t overly reliant on any one type of district. (This stands in contrast to the Senate, where most of the battlegrounds fit into a certain typology: red and rural). While House battlegrounds are somewhat whiter, more suburban and more educated than the country overall, there are quite a few exceptions — enough so that Democrats could underperform in certain types of districts but still have reasonably good chances to win the House. This differs from Hillary Clinton’s position in the Electoral College in 2016, in which underperformance among just one group of voters in one region — white working-class voters in the Midwest — was enough to cost her the election. [...]

It’s true that House battlegrounds are Republican-leaning — but for the most part, they’re Republican-leaning and not much more than that. Only 18 percent of competitive House races have a partisan lean of R+10 or better for the GOP, for instance. By contrast, weighted by their importance to determining the outcome of the Senate, 63 percent of competitive districts are at least R+10. Romney-Clinton and Obama-Trump districts — that is, districts that split their vote between the past two presidential elections — are quite important in the House but not really a factor in the Senate.

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The Atlantic: Saudi Arabia Does a Big Favor For Iran

It is for reasons such as this that the United States and its allies have sanctioned Iran heavily over the years. Relations improved somewhat in the Obama years because of the nuclear agreement but have worsened dramatically since Trump withdrew the United States from the accord in May. Last week, Mike Pompeo, the U.S. secretary of state, said the object of U.S. pressure was to convince “Iranian leaders to behave like a normal nation.” Yet Iran has watched mostly in silence as Saudi Arabia is being excoriated in the West precisely for not behaving like a normal nation.

Al-Monitor, a website that focuses on Middle Eastern news, noted that much of the Iranian media’s coverage of the Khashoggi story focused on relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. “A rift between Saudi Arabia and Turkey could be welcome news to the Iranian government,” Al-Monitor wrote. “While Iran and Turkey disagree on a number of regional developments, particularly on the Syrian civil war in which they are backing opposing sides, the two countries have deep economic ties. Any conflict between Saudi Arabia and Turkey could allow Ankara-Tehran ties to deepen further while simultaneously isolating Saudi Arabia, Iran’s rival.” [...]

Prior to Trump’s interview, the Trump administration’s own public response to the Khashoggi case had been muted. Part of the challenge the U.S. faces is formulating a response to the alleged Saudi action without alienating perhaps its most important ally in the Muslim world. U.S. and Saudi interests converge on a host of issues: stable oil supplies, Islamic extremism, and, Iran’s influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. But the U.S. Congress’s move to trigger the Global Magnitsky Act, which gives the president 120 days to decide whether to impose sanctions on anyone involved with Khashoggi’s disappearance, could complicate matters: At best for Saudi Arabia, the issue remains the news for that period compounding the kingdom’s PR nightmare; at worst, the kingdom is sanctioned by its closest ally. Meanwhile, Iran, a country that is routinely called a bad actor and sanctioned, can point to Saudi Arabia and say: You’re no better than us.

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Vox: From “Mad Dog” to “Democrat”: How Defense Secretary Mattis lost Trump

For instance, Mattis reportedly stopped Trump from ordering the assassination of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in April 2017, a move that would have escalated Syria’s brutal civil war and brought the US much deeper into the conflict. He also pushed Trump to stick to a diplomacy-first approach to North Korea rather than defaulting immediately to military options. And according to Trump himself, Mattis convinced him that torture is a bad idea. [...]

Mattis, along with Tillerson, opposed pulling the US out of the Iran deal — something Trump had promised to do on the campaign trail. They argued that Iran, despite its support for terrorism in the region, had not violated the terms of the deal by working toward a nuclear weapon. And for a while, they were successful, forcing Trump to recertify the deal every three months. [...]

Mattis also opposed moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, creating a Space Force, and starting a trade war with America’s European allies. But he failed to persuade Trump to see things his way on each of those issues, despite his once-good rapport with the president. [...]

Ultimately, Trump wants to disrupt world affairs while Mattis wants to maintain the status quo. So even though they began their time together speaking several times a day on the phone, their fundamental disagreements seem to have pushed them further and further apart as time went on — and now they rarely talk.

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Bloomberg: German Voters Are Tired of Immigration Politics

Although German states have fewer powers than those in the U.S., state elections are extremely important. They’re where the parties try out electoral platforms, tactics, and alliances, and where national political stars are born. Voters are active: The turnout in Bavaria on Sunday was 72.4 percent, only slightly lower than the 76.2 percent that voted at last year’s national election. [...]

The election proved that Seehofer’s tactics had been a big mistake. With just 10.2 percent of the vote, the AfD did worse than in last year’s national election, when it won 12.4 percent in Bavaria and 12.6 percent nationwide. The CSU lost some 180,000 votes to the nationalist party – but it lost as many to the Greens and almost as many to the Free Voters of Bavaria, another local party with centrist politics and a focus on community affairs. [...]

A moderate stance on immigration and more attention to local affairs and the environment probably would’ve given the CSU a stronger result without undermining the nationwide coalition. As it is, Seehofer in particular comes out of the election weakened, and Merkel must be quietly pleased despite a loss for her allies. Even if Seehofer manages to hold onto the party leader’s job, the idea of fighting the AfD by being more like the AfD is discredited now. The Greens’ compassionate stance on immigration aligned much better with the CSU voters’ values – and with the stance of the Bavarian Catholic Church, for that matter – than Seehofer’s attempts to shove asylum seekers back from Germany’s borders. [...]

One complication for Merkel is that the Social Democratic Party, part of the federal ruling coalition, did terribly in Bavaria. With 9.7 percent of the vote, the once-formidable workers’ party is sinking into irrelevance. Its nationwide polling numbers are dismal: It consistently lags behind the Afd now and is beginning to fall behind the Greens. The latter, with a political program that appeals to millennials and liberal voters in general, have a chance to turn themselves from an environmentally focused party into the biggest center-left force – the slot in the political spectrum that the SPD thought it would own forever. Now the Social Democrats’ string of defeats means they may rethink their participation in the governing coalition; if they do, a new election is likely. Merkel wouldn’t be the conservatives’ uncontested choice to lead the CSU into it.

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The Guardian: Bavaria election: Merkel's conservative allies humiliated

Among the main victors was the environmental, pro-immigration Green party, which as predicted almost doubled its voter share to 17.5% at the expense of the Social Democratic party (SPD), which lost its position as the second-biggest party, with support halving to 9.7%. [...]

The Free Voters, a regional protest party, is also likely to enter parliament, having secured a historic 11.6%. Its leader, Hubert Aiwanger, said shortly after the result that he had called the CSU leadership to start coalition negotiations. [...]

Merkel did not react to the results, but the CDU’s general secretary, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, called them “bitter … but not surprising”, citing the governmental infighting of recent months. She said the party would urgently consult before a state election in Hesse in two weeks’ time. “We need to address the issues which are burning under people’s fingernails,” she added. [...]

But in the weeks running up to the election, successive polls showed the CSU’s hardline stance and its near-success in causing the government’s collapse had prompted a haemorrhaging of voters to other parties.

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