The Atlantic: Democrats Are Newly Emboldened on Gun Control

In July 2001, at a meeting in Indianapolis, national Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe told party brethren that gun control was an issue they were wise to avoid. Nobody in the ballroom challenged him. The consensus at the time was that Democrats had lost the House seven years earlier, when Newt Gingrich’s GOP picked up 54 seats, because President Bill Clinton had signed a ban on the sale of assault weapons. And in 2001, many Democrats believed that Al Gore had lost the recent presidential race because southern white males had tagged him as a gun controller.[...]

Largely overlooked during the government stasis in Washington is the news that House Democrats celebrated their return to power by touting legislation to expand background checks that would cover most firearm purchases—even those made at gun shows and online. The chief sponsor, Representative Mike Thompson of California, was once a recipient of NRA money and a B+ rating from the NRA. But now he’s hailing the gun-reform bill as “a decisive step to help save lives,” with strong support “from public polling to the ballot box.” [...]

The political winds have decisively shifted. According to the exit polls released last November, 59 percent of the voters in the congressional elections favored “stricter gun-control measures,” with only 37 percent in opposition. Of those who supported more gun control, 76 percent voted for House Democratic candidates. The NRA nevertheless insisted in a postelection statement that “gun control was not a decisive factor on election day,” but it appears that the ever-mounting national casualties—from Sandy Hook to Parkland to the Pittsburgh synagogue, with 116,000 shooting victims annually, 35,000 deaths annually, and historically high gun violence in schools—have undercut the NRA’s power and its purist defense of the Second Amendment. [...]

Granted, new House Democratic calls for an assault-weapons ban, stronger background checks, and a lifting of the 23-year ban on federal firearms research will likely die in the Republican Senate. But Democrats—buoyed by their historic gains in suburban House districts, particularly among independents and Republican-leaning women—believe that gun-reform policy is good politics, with the goal of rebuilding the party’s brand for 2020.

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Aeon: The lottocracy

In the modern world, we often find ourselves in the following situation. I know that whether I do X rather than Y won’t make a difference by itself. I also know that everyone else knows this about me and about themselves. I also know that if all of us do X, rather than Y, it will make a difference. And everyone else knows this, too. So it’s striking and surprising that a celebrity such as Brand would come out and say, to millions, ‘Don’t vote,’ rather than ‘Vote for X.’ That was the revolutionary part of the interview. A thousand lefty celebrities have gone on TV and advocated for causes. Very few have gone on TV and said ‘Don’t vote.’ Very few have gone on TV and said, essentially, X and Y can both go fuck themselves. [...]

There are hard questions about how exactly to structure a political system with lottery-selection at its heart. Here’s one approach, which I am in the process of developing, that I call lottocracy. The basic components are straightforward. First, rather than having a single, generalist legislature such as the United States Congress, the legislative function would be fulfilled by many different single-issue legislatures (each one focusing on, for example, just agriculture or health care). There might be 20 or 25 of these single-issue legislatures, perhaps borrowing existing divisions in legislative committees or administrative agencies: agriculture, commerce and consumer protection, education, energy, health and human services, housing and urban development, immigration, labour, transportation, etc. [...]

No pure lottocratic system has ever existed, and so it’s important to note that much could go wrong. Randomly chosen representatives could prove to be incompetent or easily bewildered. Maybe a few people would dominate the discussions. Maybe the experts brought in to inform the policymaking would all be bought off and would convince us to buy the same corporate-sponsored policy we’re currently getting. There are hard design questions about how such a legislative system would interact with other branches of government, and questions about the coherence of policymaking, budgeting, taxation, and enforcement of policy. That said, it’s worth remembering the level of dysfunction that exists in the current system. We should be thinking about comparative improvement, not perfection, and a lottocratic system would have a number of advantages over the current model.

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Jacobin Magazine: Ukraine on the Brink

Neither the NGOs nor the parties could articulate any progressive, egalitarian agenda. It was pretty clear from the outset that even progressive liberals were in the minority, never mind socialists. They were only loosely organized, and had no substantial influence, either on the development of the protests or on their ideological framing. They were probably more important in terms of framing the protests for parts of the Western audience which, in a kind of wishful thinking, focused on the most progressive elements of the movement but not the much stronger reactionary ones. From the outset it was clear that if the Maidan protests succeeded, they would bring right-wing opposition parties to power.[...]

What we’ve seen in the five years since then is that Ukraine has become poorer. The IMF recently updated their global statistics on GDP per capita, and Ukraine’s is now the lowest in Europe. The only countries even lower down the scale are located in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Ukraine is the northernmost of the Global South — and not just in terms of economic statistics. Its economic structure is also more typical of the Third World: it is export-oriented and primarily focused on raw materials. And unlike Southeast Asia, Ukraine is not industrializing but deindustrializing — particularly because the most advanced parts of Ukrainian industry, which were inherited from the Soviet Union and primarily served the markets of the former Soviet republics, have been harmed by the introduction of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the European Union; they are not usually competitive on global markets. A significant part of those industries is located in Donbass, where the war is going on. [...]

Many argue that this lack of parliamentary representation means that all the talk about Ukrainian fascists and the far right is simply Russian propaganda. But this is wrong — at the extra-parliamentary level, the radical nationalists have become much stronger. No party or coalition of liberal NGOs can mobilize so many people on the streets as the Ukrainian nationalists do every year on their key dates. These include the day of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which is now a national holiday in Ukraine (it wasn’t before Maidan), and the birthday of Stepan Bandera (the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II, and of a movement which conducted ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in western Ukraine, as well as collaborating with the Nazis in the Holocaust). The nationalists gather tens of thousands of people for these rallies, and it’s incomparable to anything that the liberals can mobilize.[...]

First, it’s important to understand that radical nationalists don’t actually have so much popular support. It may seem surprising, but they have more legitimacy within civil society than among Ukrainian society at large — many so-called “Ukrainian liberals” are basically just moderate nationalists. The far-right parties’ electoral support, even if they were to unite, would at best be 5–10 percent. That’s support for the parties — support for some nationalist ideas would be higher. The reason for this low support is that the politics is dominated by much better-resourced oligarchic parties that control the media and have money they can put into electoral campaigns. [...]

Another problem with Tymoshenko is that she is unpredictable, not only at the level of her views on the EU and NATO. The same concerns her social populist rhetoric. This is an easy way to criticize Poroshenko: nobody wants to pay more for utilities and so on, and obviously most people don’t want austerity — they are poor and do not see many prospects in this country. But that doesn’t mean a Tymoshenko administration will really be more redistributive — definitely not consistently.

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The Guardian Today in Focus: The Catholic church faces its past

Last year investigations around the world showed that historical sexual abuse within the Catholic church had been covered up for decades. India Rakusen talks to two survivors and hears from the Guardian’s religion correspondent Harriet Sherwood on how the church plans to move forward. Plus: the Guardian’s Tom Phillips on Juan Guaidó’s attempted take over in Venezuela

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Social Europe: Politics in Poland: eternal duopoly or refreshing breeze?

Most analyst are of the opinion that the parliamentary elections will be a battle for the centre. This is particularly evident in the strategy of the PiS government, which after two turbulent years exchanged the revolutionary cabinet of Beata Szydło with a more moderate team around Mateusz Morawiecki, a technocrat acquainted with the western and domestic establishment. It’s already become routine in approaching elections for the PiS to hide away its most radical and controversial figures to attract more centrist voters, who do not necessarily believe the 2010 Smolensk air crash to have been a plot by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, or don’t feel the need to enthrone Jesus as the king of Poland. [...]

What’s more, the nationalist faction of the coalition quickly emancipated itself, also sometimes teaming up with the governing PiS, as in the case of the centennial Independence March in November 2018 in Warsaw, when the president’s celebrations practically merged with the biggest far-right demonstration in Europe. Also, the recent nomination of a nationalist activist and MP, Adam Andruszkiewicz, as secretary of state at the Ministry of Digitalisation is a clear sign of the PiS flirting with the nationalist right. Perhaps it is learning from the Hungarian experience: it wants to disable the nationalist movement before it becomes a serious political opponent, as Jobbik became to Fidesz. For sure, the nationalist circles will call in the big guns in May as well as in October 2019. [...]

In 2019 the stakes are high in Poland. For the PiS it is a matter of maintaining its monopoly and keeping the more radical right under control. For the liberals, it is about revenge and regaining power, lost after eight years in 2015. The new, emerging actors have nothing to lose—they can only win by mobilising voters tired of the PO-PiS duopoly. The biggest challenge, however, is that facing the left: the European and especially the parliamentary elections will be a fight for its survival on the Polish political scene.

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The Guardian: Britons don’t grasp the EU’s essential motivation – a quest for the quiet life

Advertisement Europe’s quest for the quiet life goes much further. The EU and most of its states were born or reborn from the rubble of war and the traumas of totalitarianism. Britons forget how deeply that affects their instincts. History is dense, present, complicated and inescapable on the mainland in a way that it is not in Britain. The pavements of German cities are studded with brass plaques bearing the names and dates of those deported to the death camps, planted outside the addresses where they once lived. Memories of flight, destruction and oppression – the 3am rap at the door, the rumble of military trucks on cobbles, the squelch of carts laden with possessions on muddy tracks – live on in continental families in a way that they do in comparatively few British ones.[...]

The EU’s unofficial mission is to protect this comfortable, once-traumatised European garden from outside threats. When Helmut Kohl confronted sceptics in his Christian Democrat Union with the case for the euro, notes Alexander Clarkson of King’s College London, he did so primarily not with talk of peace but talk of preserving the European way of life. Today the EU is most effective when it shields its citizens from over-mighty technology firms, negotiates trade deals in a world where its population is proportionately smaller every year, and ventures tentative steps towards common defence forces independent from those of Donald Trump’s America. It lures its neighbours not with soaring rhetoric but with the promise of the quiet life for their citizens. Macedonia’s recent decision to change its name, ending a dispute with Greece and launching itself on the track to EU membership, was ultimately motivated by the desire to join the sheltered European garden.[...]

A tour of European capitals illustrates this truth. The Dutch may sympathise with the Brits but their prime minister also uses Britain as a cautionary tale of a country whose citizens have lost their appetite for “a good life for themselves and those around them”. Poles may want to bend the rules of the Irish backstop to preserve the quiet life for their immigrant compatriots in Britain but only so far, for Warsaw knows the pain of European fragmentation better than most. Athens and Brussels dislike each other but remain committed to Greek membership of the EU because both fear a destabilising rupture. Macron may rail against Brexit but his real target is Marine Le Pen. Germans may be torn between seeking to stop Brexit by backing a second referendum and managing a messy British exit to get it over with but, like their fellow Europeans, their utmost concern is stability.

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openDemocracy: The battle over the memory of Egypt’s revolution

In fact, when activists managed to reach out to citizens on the ground, they succeeded to undermine the counter-revolutionary narrative and the regime’s collective memory field. A prominent example is the activists’ 2012 campaign: Askar Kazeebon (Lying Military) whose modus operandi was to broadcast videos and documentaries to pedestrians that falsify the military’s accounts of various events and expose the soldiers’ crimes and human rights violations that official and regime-friendly media ignored. [...]

Under the disguise of renovation, the walls of revolutionary graffiti were repainted, CCTV cameras were installed in central spaces, and governmental offices were relocated away from the heart of Cairo. Some, like Schindehutte, view al-Sisi government’s new administrative capital as a project with which government buildings ‘will be spatially removed from the memory of resistance.’ [...]

One of the prominent monuments in revolutionary Cairo was the building of the former ruling party: The National Democratic Party (NDP). A historical building on the Nile Corniche adjacent to Tahrir Square and the Egyptian Museum. On January 28, 2011, during the protests, the building was set ablaze. The arsonists remain unknown, yet, the burned building became a symbol of the revolution’s triumph over the regime. To destroy this monument’s ability to stimulate people to remember this victory, the regime demolished it. And so did the regime with the first memorial to the January 25 martyrs that was constructed by the protesters, in Tahrir Square, immediately after Mubarak stepped down .

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Vox: Why the NRA is struggling

A particularly low point came during the 2018 midterm elections, when the NRA was outspent by gun control groups for the first time in recent history, even while allegedly coordinating with GOP candidates in two states.

The NRA has also been enveloped in a Department of Justice investigation into Russian efforts to influence US politics that featured Russian nationals using the organization as a conduit to the Republican Party. It’s been decried for paying millions of dollars to contractors and close associates of the organization while laying off dozens of employees. And that doesn’t even mention that between January 2017 and November 2018, two of the NRA’s biggest legislative initiatives resulted in failure — derailed by high-profile mass shootings.[...]

For the NRA, the Obama administration provided what any organization needs: a motivating threat. But now that threat, however existent or nonexistent it may have been, is gone, replaced by an unreliable ally in Trump. Furthermore, the organization has been so successful in changing not only America’s gun laws but the gun conversation more broadly (and what potential restrictions on guns are even floated as possibilities) that the NRA isn’t thinking big anymore — because it doesn’t have to. [...]

This is perhaps unsurprising from a president who grew up in New York City and once advocated heavily for gun control before he aligned himself with the Republican Party. In Trump’s 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump decried members of the GOP who “walk the NRA line” and resisted restrictions on guns. [...]

And the NRA is certainly on Trump’s side, which might be part of the problem. While real threats to gun rights and the Second Amendment still exist, as we saw in the Philando Castile case — one the NRA decided to opt out of — the NRA’s turn toward Trumpian right-wing culture warring has possibly turned off those who might be supportive of the groups’s actual messaging on guns. Coupled with the group’s stance on bump stocks — which has turned off many gun owners — one source told me that the NRA’s turn toward culture-warring has given rise to more direct criticism of the NRA even from within the gun rights community.

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Quartz: Three things we’ve learned about Trump from Nancy Pelosi’s first month as speaker

But on Friday, Pelosi managed to pull off what some are calling the first undeniable legislative blow to the Trump presidency. She secured an end to the government shutdown without giving Trump the one thing he wanted in exchange—funding for the wall at the US-Mexico border—and did so just days after informing Trump that he would not be permitted to deliver the State of the Union address in the House chamber until the government was open again. [...]

Pelosi has proved what many didn’t believe about Trump: that he is subject to the normal laws of political gravity, and that for all his bluster, he is no more capable of sustaining an unsustainable position than any other politician.

While this isn’t an entirely new insight, Pelosi’s coup of ending the shutdown has shown that the loyalty of Trump’s base has its limits. While pundits have hypothesized the president may hope to use the wall as a cudgel and rallying cry in the 2020 election, the president’s ardent supporters are signaling that they want a wall, and they want it this term.

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