Many Think Modernity Is About The Rise Of Science, The Spread Of Democracy And Capitalism, Or The Decline Of Religion Or Superstition. But Those Stories Ignore The Bigger Picture About Colonialism And Race.
14 November 2018
The Atlantic: America’s Struggle for Moral Coherence
Five years earlier, he had been more candid. Speaking in Chicago in the summer of 1858, Lincoln noted that when the republic was founded, “we had slavery among us,” and that “we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted” slavery to persist in those parts of the nation where it was already entrenched. “We could not secure the good we did secure,” he said, “if we grasped for more.” The United States, in other words, could not have been created if the eradication of human bondage had been a condition of its creation. Had Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the nation was conceived not in liberty but in compromise, the phrase would have been less memorable but more accurate. [...]
The constitutional principle was clear, but it proved to be unenforceable. Over the first half of the 19th century, as enslaved men and women ran from slavery to freedom, the federal government remained too weak to do much to stop them. By the second quarter of the century, some of the fugitives—the most famous was Frederick Douglass—were telling their stories with the help of white abolitionist editors in speeches and memoirs that ripped open the screen behind which America tried to conceal the reality that a nation putatively based on the principle of human equality was actually a prison house in which millions of Americans had virtually no rights at all. By awakening Northerners to this fact, and by enraging Southerners who demanded the return of their “absconded” property, they pushed the nation toward confronting the truth that America was really two nations, not one. [...]
In 1846, with the outbreak of the Mexican War, the final reckoning was set in motion. With strong but not universal support in the South, and against strong but not universal resistance in the North, both halves of the United States joined to wage a war of conquest. By the time the fighting ended two years later, the United States had seized a huge swath of land stretching from Texas to California, nearly equal in size to one-third of our present-day nation. This immense expansion of territory under control of the federal government brought back the old question of compromise between slavery and freedom in a new form and with more urgency than ever. Would slavery be confined to states where it already existed, or would it be allowed to spread into the new territories, which would eventually become states? A growing number of white Northerners insisted on the former. White Southerners almost universally demanded the latter. The fragile political truce that had held the United States together was coming apart. [...]
The Fugitive Slave Law turned the nation upside down. Southerners who had once insisted on states’ rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights. Northerners who had once derided the South for its theory of “nullification”—John C. Calhoun’s idea that acts of Congress require consent from each individual state before they can take effect within its borders—now became nullifiers themselves. The Fugitive Slave Law clarified just how incompatible North and South had become. It broke the national Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions. It fractured the Whig Party into “Cotton Whigs” and “Conscience Whigs.” It made the possibility of disunion, once an extremist idea, seem suddenly plausible. One eminent New Englander replied to the Southern secessionist threat with a shrug of disgust: “If the union be in any way dependent on an act so revolting in every regard, then it ought not to exist.”
UnHerd: Britain’s homelessness shame
The statistics are bleak: rough sleeper numbers in England rose in 2017 for the seventh consecutive year. The ‘official’ tally – the number of people likely to be out on the streets on any one night – was put at 4,751. But the real figure is likely to be far higher once the ‘hidden homeless’ – people whose homeless situation is concealed by the fact they are squatting or sofa surfing or living in extremely over-crowded accommodation – are factored in.1 On average, a homeless man dies at the age of 47 (for women it’s 43). And they are nine times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population. [...]
Personal issues can also play a part. Many rough sleepers have alcohol or drug dependencies or mental illness. They may have fled violence at home. But once on the streets, it’s almost impossible to get off. And the large increase in the number of homeless over time is testament to the power wider societal factors have in pushing people to the margins. It’s no coincidence that there are growing numbers of people bedding down outside at a time of austerity, precarious work and cuts to local authority budgets. [...]
Moreover, three quarters (74%) believe that rough sleepers could get themselves off the streets if they wanted to. In other words, we still view extreme poverty through a lens tinted by the Victorian age, when Henry Mayhew, pioneer of 19th-century social research on the poor, subtitled the fourth volume of his book London Labour and the London poor, “Those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work”. [...]
But it can’t be denied that part of the problem lies in the public’s attitude. A widespread indifference has allowed the crisis to reach this point. If the homeless are lucky, we step over them. If they aren’t, they are belittled, assaulted and urinated upon. Until they are seen as less fortunate versions of ourselves, people who unintentionally ended up at the margins of society, then Gary and the thousands of people like him will remain a faceless statistic, the unwanted detritus of an atomised society.
openDemocracy: Brexit (and Boris) torpedoed
Today, it is the Generalissimo of Brexitannia, Boris Johnson, who has been torpedoed. After two long years of preparation the battle of Brexit has finally been joined by a well-aimed, perfectly executed strike which has holed the Leave campaign that he led below the water line. The torpedo was the stunning resignation statement of his younger brother Jo Johnson MP. Johnson junior was Theresa May’s loyal Minister of Transport. Now, he has pulled out of the government denouncing its negotiations with the EU as a catastrophe of statecraft while clinically skewering his brother’s braggadocio. He has pledged to vote against the prime minister’s deal with the EU should it reach the House of Commons, where its defeat is now likely. He has called for a People’s Vote instead, to endorse remaining in the European Union.
Johnson junior was a Remainer, like all ‘sensible’ ruling class conservatives including the prime minister, and he backed her attempt to deliver a Brexit that ‘works’. But the prime minister could not escape its contradictions. As I have shown the EU is above all a union of regulation. This is its central achievement: a customs union and single market, accomplished with the British, who played a central role in its creation over the course of 40 years. Regulation is not the same as sharing traditional sovereignty and for EU members like the UK who are outside of the Eurozone the classic pillars of sovereignty remain overwhelmingly national. Such is its strength, whatever happens to the common currency, Europe’s regulatory union will continue. Its advantages explain the commitment to continued membership of countries strongly opposed to many of the EU policies. It offers over 500 million people a growing cosmos of opportunity across all their nations with shared human rights and high environmental, safety and employment standards as well as an exceptional open market for capital and business – both manufacturing and services.
The vote for Brexit led by Boris Johnson claimed that Britain could have all the economic advantages of participating in the European space without applying its rules. Behind this absurd claim was and still is an alternative worldview. The proponents of hard-Brexit desire an Anglo-America dominated globe of deregulated capitalism. For all of his apparent indifference to leaving the EU, for which he is rightly criticised, Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has been consistent – and consistently right – in pointing this out. Describing his desired version of Brexit to Der Spiegel last week he said, “we wouldn't be trying to face towards the deregulated economy of the United States, which the one wing of the Tory Party is trying to do all the time”.
CityLab: How One City Kickstarted the Ozone’s Recovery
Then-mayor Larry Agran, who championed the move, estimated that it would affect about 500 of the city’s 5,000 businesses, and that the reduction of CFC emissions in the city would fall between 20 and 50 percent. But even if Irvine were to eliminate all of its CFC emissions, it would only account for 1.5 million pounds a year—less than 1 percent of the world’s production of CFCs.[...]
The latest assessment, released Monday by the UN and organizations like NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization, reveal that through the collective effort, the ozone layer in different parts of the stratosphere are on a path to full recovery, healing at a rate of 1 to 3 percent per decade. By 2030, researchers expect the layer in the Northern Hemisphere to fully recover, followed by the Southern Hemisphere in the 2050s, and the polar regions by 2060. [...]
With that, Irvine took a more drastic step in hopes that other cities would follow suit. The city was home to several high-tech industries, from computer hardware and software to biotechnology and medical devices. Not surprisingly, business owners opposed the ordinance, warning the city council that complying with the law would either make services and goods costlier for consumers or drive business out of Irvine. Agran and his team disagreed. [...]
Data from individual companies were limited, but in a 1992 report in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association, Brown and then-city manager Allison Hart said the ordinance was effective in spurring action even before it was fully implemented. In anticipation of the vote, they wrote, managers began looking into alternatives and companies were trying out new, cleaner technology in their production process. For those who couldn’t immediately eliminate the use of CFCs, they were committed to at least reducing it. “It was really all about getting compliance without getting out the hammer,” Hart told CityLab.
Foreign Policy: Armenia’s Democratic Dreams
First, Armenia’s Velvet Revolution represented the climax of a decade of peaceful protest centered on human rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, and labor and employment issues—all explicitly non- or minimally political causes. Such activism created a model for advocating and securing tangible compromises from government figures. Small-scale protests also established nonviolence as a credible strategy. By the time Sargsyan announced his intention to become prime minister, there was already a well-known template in place for responding. [...]
These cases stand in stark contrast to the post-Soviet color revolutions, which were often sudden and driven by reformist elites, who were themselves usually backed by outside players, most notably the European Union and the United States. Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, for example, included mass protests but really resulted from the loss of faith at the top rather than a push from below. The revolution’s top-down nature allowed one of its leaders, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was quickly elected as president after the protests died down, to strengthen the executive branch of the government with little pushback from largely compliant parliamentary forces. Interelite competitions in the aftermath of the other color revolutions in Serbia and Ukraine produced paralysis within their governments, paving the way for illiberal forces to retake power later on.
The Velvet Revolution’s emphasis on consensus building also had more in common with Latin American revolutions than the color ones. Pashinyan spent his time bargaining both within parliament and the executive branch and among the mass mobilizers in the street. For example, he negotiated with various factions in parliament to hold a vote for the prime ministership as a way to reconcile the preferences of the protesters with parliamentary processes. He has likewise worked with both civil society movements and unaligned parliamentary groups to gain support for holding snap elections.
Social Europe: Searching For Germany’s Volkspartei
Of course, the political landscape in Hesse and Bavaria is not homogenous, forcing separate analysis to explain the results. This is necessary despite their similarities. The most remarkable being, for the first time, the AfD will enter Bavaria’s parliament, Maximilianeum, and Hesse’s Hessischer. A far-right party with a taste for the politically distasteful making such strides in Germany is alarming. The Greens are closing in from another direction, up to 24 percent in one recent poll, with the SPD down to 13 percent. [...]
One must consider the contexts that produce results that is shaking up Germany’s politics to the extent that Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to announce she’d step down in 2021, much earlier than she would have wanted to. Of course, no sage who follows German politics would wager Ms. Merkel had plans to seek another term. She delivered a strong economy prior to 2017. Her exit is a chance for the country’s political centre to strengthen.[...]
The Greens’ success in Bavaria is not a SPD death knell. It’s a sign of a weakening political middle. It took the AfD a single run in Bavaria to achieve (10.7 percent) what the Greens took 36 years to achieve with their 17.5 percent win. Until now, the Greens had been in single digits ever since they burst onto Bavaria’s political scene. The last time the SPD got their lowest score, 18.6 percent, was in 2008. Bavarians do not have an enduring love for the Greens. Proclamations such as “Green is the new Red,” based on an infatuation, are unwise. The Hessians have had a relatively mature affair with the Greens, giving them a mandate in the early 80s and allowing their slow and steady progress to date. These contrasting histories do not provide a full explanation for the SPD’s loss in either case.
Politico: Italy’s beggar’s nationalism
It also portrays a man who, as he enters office, puts tremendous energy into trying a — perhaps quixotic — attempt to straighten out Italian bureaucracy. In particular, Mussolini tries to balance the budget, not so much because he is enamored with a 19th century, liberal approach to public finance, but because he wants to establish his country as self-sufficient. He’s determined to make Italy great again, and he knows that beggars can’t be choosers.
Scurati’s novel can be read as a timely warning in a country where the conventions of parliamentary democracy are assaulted, day after day, by the two populist parties in government — the far-right League and the anti-establishment 5Star Movement. Talk of an incoming, new “fascism” is a certainly a blatant exaggeration. But there’s no denying that Italian politics is assuming a nationalist posture — something it has rarely done since it became a republic in 1946. [...]
Unlike in the past Rome has made no attempt to justify its higher spending as an extraordinary measure, to be offset by fiscal restraint in a future budget. Lax public finance is considered the new normal, not because of investments but because of new government giveaways. It’s this embrace of a reckless path toward insolvency that triggered the tensions with the Commission. [...]
This reasoning is echoed in Italy’s views on migration. Here, the complaint is that the country was left alone in managing its migration crisis, regardless of the fact it was supposed to be taking care of an external, European border. This may be an understandable grievance, but it’s worth noting that a large part of Italy’s problems with migrants is the result of its lax policies. After Italy put in place a tougher approach to migration, a sharp decline in the landings of migrants soon followed.
Politico: Merkel joins Macron in calling for EU army to complement NATO
“Jean-Claude Juncker already said that a common European army would show the world that there would never again be war in Europe,” Merkel said, referring to the European Commission president, who was in the Parliament chamber.
“This is not an army against NATO, it can be a good complement to NATO,” Merkel said. At the same time, Merkel noted that Europe faces numerous logistical obstacles to greater military and defense integration, including too many different weapons system — more than 150 by her count, compared to 50 or 60 in the U.S.[...]
“We have to create a European intervention unit with which Europe can act on the ground where necessary,” Merkel continued. “We have taken major steps in the field of military cooperation, this is good and largely supported in this house. But I also have to say, seeing the developments of the recent years, that we have to work on a vision to establish a real European army one day.”
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