The Atlantic: What Sarah Palin Saw Clearly

In 2008, John McCain wanted to change politics with his selection of a running mate; his idea was to pick Joe Lieberman, an independent senator who caucused with the Democrats. According to aides, McCain wanted to confront extreme partisanship and forge a kind of national-unity government built on comity and compromise, pledging to serve a single term. But after Senator Lindsey Graham floated the idea, the hard-core party faithful rejected the notion out of hand. Faced with the choice of picking a fight with the most loyal (and ideological) Republican voters, or picking a more doctrinaire candidate, McCain decided to appease the base. [...]

As the campaign went on, Palin bridled at the tone McCain set. When a McCain supporter said “I don’t trust Obama. I have read about him and he’s an Arab,” McCain responded, “No ma’am, no ma’am … He's [a] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” When one man said he was scared of Obama, McCain replied that “[Obama] is a decent person, and a person that you do not have to be scared [of] as president of the United States.” The crowd booed. McCain also said, “I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments. I will respect him and I want everyone to be respectful, and let’s make sure we are.”

Palin took the opposite tack: She stoked her supporters’ fears—and won their cheers. At her rallies, Palin said, “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America.” At one, a man shouted “Treason” and Palin said nothing. At another, Palin’s anti-Obama diatribe led a man to yell out, “Kill him!” Palin did not push back against her often-angry crowds. In the strongest echo of today’s Trump rallies, she instead used her speeches to go after the free press (or the “lamestream media”), reserving particular scorn for elite publications. Palin’s supporters then started verbally attacking her traveling press corps, including hurling a racial epithet at an African American journalist. Again, Palin not only refused to lower the temperature, she seemed to bask in that kind of heat. [...]

Another corrosive trend: Palin’s contempt for experts and elites. The then-governor didn’t study policy journals or even follow national news. She resisted when McCain aides tried to get her to focus on preparing for our interviews. But she thrilled her supporters with attacks on coastal liberals and support for “normal Joe Six Pack Americans.” Among some conservatives, a disdain for the liberal intelligentsia morphed into a disdain for the highly educated or for facts that contradicted their worldview. That has led to the current environment, where no matter what evidence the experts have brought to bear—against Brexit, against Trump’s trade and tax policies—it doesn’t matter to many voters. These elites, and the arguments they make, are dismissed out of hand.

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Social Europe: The Collapse Of European Social Democracy, Part 1

Instead, Social Democrats are being replaced by populists on the left and right. Identity politics based on gender, ethnicity, feminism and other single issues is taking precedence and minorities supported by SDs are pursuing their own agendas over broader communal interests. [...]

This power was irrevocably put to the the test when the financial system imploded and dramatic action had to be taken by governments of all colours. “We will do whatever it takes to save the Euro,” as Mario Draghi, ECB head, said in July 2012. Action was taken by states to save banks, huge private firms, economies and to regulate and reshape markets once more. [...]

Blair and Schröder favoured a more pro-market approach (‘Third Way’) and thus neglected to manage the rising dominance of finance. Their biggest mistake was in de-regulating finance at the precise time when they, as socialists, should have recognised that it was spinning out of control. The power of the state had been forgotten by European Social Democratic leaders. [...]

Another major issue raised by globalisation was fear of immigration. Whether real or imagined, these fears, usually exaggerated, were ignored by many SDs. They should be the protectors of the sovereign welfare state against its denigration by neo-liberals who wish to destroy it. It is the hard right which is shaping immigration policy as it gains power and many SDs parties (though not all) have tended to avoid the issue. Social Democrats, like many progressives, ironically appeared to take a free market approach to immigration, rejecting the kind of regulation they would normally seek in the labour market. This may have been because of a sense of decency to immigrants, but ignoring the issue has allowed exteme views to grow.

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Slate: The True Cost of the Louisiana Purchase

The interactive below, designed using a geodatabase built for an article in the March issue of the Journal of American History, maps the long history of the Louisiana Purchase for the first time. It tracks 222 Indian cessions within the Louisiana Territory. Made by treaties, agreements, and statutes between 1804 and 1970, these cessions covered 576 million acres, ranging from a Quapaw tract the size of North Carolina sold in 1818 to a parcel smaller than Central Park seized from the Santee Sioux to build a dam in 1958.

Historians have long known that Indians were paid something for their soil rights, but we’ve never been able to say how much. The closest we had was a guess—about 20 times the acquisition price, or $300 million—floated in the 1940s and erroneously cited as gospel ever since. Figuring out how much the United States has actually spent to extinguish Indian title to the Louisiana Territory, tracked here from 1804 through 2012, yielded a figure much higher than anyone previously imagined—and yet still far from what the land was actually worth. All told, it adds up to about $2.6 billion, or more than $8.5 billion adjusted for inflation. [...]

Federal authorities preferred acquiring Indian land by treaties because it was a more humane, and cheaper, method than outright war. But the treaties were backed by the looming threat of violence. The deals the government made specified compensation that came in a variety of forms, from one-time disbursements to annuities, goods, services, and more. In the allotment era, it became increasingly common to promise indirect compensation in the form of pledges to manage assets in tribal trust funds generated by the sale or lease of reservation land. Most arrangements for direct payments have long since ended. They were either broken, amended, exhausted, or, in the case of permanent annuities, commuted for lump sums. Just one lonely line item for Indian land ceded in the Missouri River Valley survives on the federal budget: $30,000 a year to the Pawnees of Oklahoma for 9,878,000 acres of what’s now Nebraska and South Dakota, ceded in 1857. [...]

In 1973, a federal commission found that this arrangement amounted to a valuation of a half a cent an acre for the ceded land. It also found the part of the Sac and Fox cession west of the Mississippi had a market value of 60 cents an acre in 1804. To make the Sac and Fox whole, the commission ordered an additional payment of 59.5 cents per acre, or $1,969,585, for the portion of the cession within the Louisiana Territory. Interest wasn’t part of the settlement, which enabled the government to pay a debt calculated in 1804 dollars with cash from 1973. [...]

Because these awards were arrived at after long delays, and typically excluded interest or any consideration of value not dictated by markets, they ultimately served more to quiet claims than deliver justice. This is why the Sioux rejected the most famous award, a 1980 Supreme Court judgment for $106 million for the taking of the Black Hills after nearly 60 years of litigation. While the court admitted that the 1876 agreement had been coerced with threats of starvation (and that it violated an earlier treaty from 1868), its decision left no room for what the Sioux actually wanted. As the Dakota novelist Elizabeth Cook-Lynn explained, the court added insult to injury by sanctioning a brazen theft, then adding, “we will now pay you X-millions of dollars, and the Sioux have said, ‘No, we want to talk about return of stolen lands.’ ” Nearly 30 years later, the judgment remains uncollected.

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Quartz: Romania’s referendum and the problem with asking people what they want

The Romanian referendum was forced by a civil society group with a clear agenda, the Coalition for the Family, which wanted a constitutional change that would stop future governments legalizing same-sex marriage. Voter turnout of just 20.4% fell below the required level of 30% for the decision to be binding. Civil rights groups had actively encouraged a boycott: In one example, a library chain offered a discount over the referendum weekend for people who wanted to stay in and read rather than vote. [...]

Psychologists call this kind of quandary a “false dichotomy.” In a false dichotomy, people start to believe that only two positions are possible, when the reality might be more multifaceted or nuanced. Parents use it—for the most part benignly—as a way to persuade toddlers who can’t yet reason: Do you want to eat the peas, or the carrots? (With no option of “the cake.”) [...]

But the problem with most referendums is that the decision of whether to put a question to the people—and what question to put—is in the hands of politicians.“It doesn’t have a lot to do with whether this should be decided by the people,” Alexandra Cirone, a fellow at the London School of Economics, told the New York Times. “It has to do with whether a politician can gain an advantage from putting a question to the people.”

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Politico: Countries resist Juncker’s clock change plan

Another said member countries feel the Commission should have kept a coordinating role rather than simply offering them the choice of sticking with winter or summer time. Under the Commission’s plan, countries need to notify Brussels by March 31, 2019 what they want to do, ahead of what could be the final bloc-wide clock change.

That means capitals need to move quickly in deciding their position. Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc said in September that Portugal, Cyprus and Poland are leaning toward summer time, while Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands prefer winter time, although no position has yet been fixed.[...]

The Commission argues its case for a speedy lawmaking progress is due to the overwhelming response to a public consultation on the issue. Some 84 percent of 4.6 million respondents to the survey came out in favor of scrapping the system, which has been an EU standard since 1996.

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