BBC4 Analysis: Identity Wars: lessons from the Dreyfus Affair and Brexit Britain

The episode "tore society apart, divided families, and split the country into two enemy camps, which then attacked each other …”

A description by some future historian looking back at Britain after Brexit? No - it is how the late French President Jacques Chirac described the so-called “Dreyfus Affair”, which shook France from top to bottom a century ago.

Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish army officer who was convicted on false charges of passing military secrets to the Germans. He spent several years in prison on Devil's Island, and was only released and exonerated after a long campaign led by eminent figures such Emile Zola.

Although the circumstances of the Dreyfus affair are very different to those surrounding Brexit, there are certain parallels – for example, the way that people came to identify themselves as either Dreyfusards or anti-Dreyfusards.

The Dreyfus affair and its aftermath convulsed France for decades, with French society split down the middle about whether Dreyfus was guilty or innocent.

How important are societal divides like these? Should they be allowed to run their natural course - or should steps be taken to encourage “healing”, as Boris Johnson recently urged?

In this edition of Analysis, Professor Anand Menon, Director of the UK in a Changing Europe, looks back at the Dreyfus affair, and asks what lessons we can learn - and whether they can help us better understand what is happening in Britain as the country faces up to the reality of Brexit, and the coronavirus crisis.

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History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: Fukuyama on History

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History became associated with the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the twentieth century. But was Fukuyama really a triumphalist? David explores what Fukuyama had to say about the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy and asks whether his analysis still holds true today. What have we learned about the modern state from its history? And can it, and we, really change now?

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The Atlantic: America Has No President

It is not that Trump has been silent. Far from it: His Twitter feed has been a supercharged version of its normal self. Trump has attacked Joe Biden, slurred reporters, insulted leaders on the front lines of protests, and claimed federal authority he doesn’t have. This is the sort of behavior we’d call unhinged from any other president, but the word has lost any power through its endless, justified invocation throughout his tenure. In any case, the tweeting suggests a president flailing around for a message that sticks and for a sense of control.

What has been missing is any sort of behavior traditionally associated with the presidency. Trump initially condemned George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer, but since then there have been no statements intended to quell anger, bridge divisions, or heal wounds. There have been no public appearances, either; Trump traveled all the way to Florida to watch a SpaceX rocket launch on Saturday, but hasn’t managed to travel in front of cameras for a formal statement. [...]

“He should just stop talking. This is like Charlottesville all over again,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on CNN last night, referring to Trump’s disastrous comments after a violent white-nationalist march in Virginia in 2017. “He speaks and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet, and I wish that he would just be quiet.” [...]

Nothing in Trump’s statement to the Times touches the demonstrations or shows even a rudimentary understanding of what has inspired them. The paper reports that “aides repeatedly have tried to explain to him that the protests were not only about him, but about broader, systemic issues related to race.” Unsurprisingly, Trump, who has a long history of racist behavior and comments, has not warmed to that explanation. Instead, he has gravitated toward conspiracy theories. Yesterday, he tweeted that he would designate antifa—a familiar rhetorical target—as a terrorist organization, even though he has no federal authority to do so. He also blamed outside agitators for unrest, a claim debunked by his own allies at National Review. It seems true that there are some violent protesters trying to stir up trouble, but they are plainly neither the starting point nor the majority of the marchers.

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City Beautiful: Should cities keep open streets after the pandemic?

Salon: Coronavirus is a blood vessel disease, study says — and its mysteries finally make sense

The study, which was published in The Lancet in April, demonstrates that endothelial cells — that is, cells which form the barrier between blood vessels and organ tissues and control the transmission of fluids between the two — are involved in various health problems associated with the coronavirus. They observed this in multiple patients with COVID-19. One patient, a 71-year-old man who had had a kidney transplant, died of multisystem organ failure after being diagnosed with COVID-19, and a subsequent analysis of his transplanted kidney found that viral inclusion structures were in his endothelial cells. They also found inflammatory cells associated with endothelial cells in his heart, small bowel and lungs. [...]

As the researchers write, "the development "of this disease seems to be that it utilizes the ACE2 receptors as an entry way to a range of cells causing destruction.. . . This explains why the disease has such a variety of presentations and makes it potentially more dangerous," they continue. ACE2 receptors refers to a specific protein that allows coronavirus to infect human cells. [...]

Prior to this study, scientists were baffled as to why blood clots were a common symptom of the coronavirus. The clots alone were not what confused them, but also the fact that blood thinners did not seem to prevent them and people would die of strokes caused by brain blockages. As of last month, one report found that up to 30 percent of patients who are seriously ill with the coronavirus develop blood clots that become dangerous.

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Social Europe: Lessons from the pandemic for the conservative welfare state

From the logic of the ‘conservative’ welfare state—as Gøsta Esping-Andersen defined the mainland-European social-insurance model in his classic welfare-regimes typology—this is nothing to worry about. Yet, from a social-justice perspective such lobbying is intolerable. The crisis is revealing who are the real victims of the downturn. The lockdown has struck the entire services sector, which comprises more than three-quarters of western European economies. Within this huge sector freelancers and small entrepreneurs were those affected most directly by the economic losses because they lacked the established safety net that comes into effect for standard employees, as Esping-Andersen already emphasised in 1990. [...]

The crisis points to another weak spot of the current order. The coronavirus has generated a vocabulary which cuts across the conservative welfare state’s normative assumptions and legal categories—the notion of systemic importance. Thus, the already fragile concept of standard employment on which the conservative welfare state rests becomes a new faultline. Interestingly, these groups are among those in the labour market who lack a strong collective voice. It is estimated that only around 5 per cent of German caregivers are members of trade unions. What is more, given their below-average income it is unlikely that workers in the critical infrastructure would benefit from a buyers’ premium on cars. [...]

So, even though Covid-19 does not stop at the rich, as has been suggested by some observers, the crisis has hit the most vulnerable hardest—not only on a global scale but also within the protected space of national welfare states. Viewed through the lens of the conservative welfare state, the powerful foray by the German car industry was no surprise at all—an attempt at self-help by the established insiders. Yet the coronavirus crisis also provides a chance to reconsider the social rights of labour-market outsiders and the social value of (often female) essential workers.

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