How can Democrats build a multiracial coalition that adds up to an electoral majority? A discussion about whether it’s necessary or possible to win back voters we’ve lost.
6 August 2018
The New Yorker: Is Poland Retreating from Democracy?
Pietrzak founded his patriotic association during the term of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was a member of the liberal party Civic Platform. Tusk, who was elected in 2007, presided over what was perhaps the most dramatic period of growth in Polish history. Since the nineties, both the economy and salaries have doubled. Peasants, historically Poland’s largest social class, all but disappeared. Among the hulking Stalinist blocks of Warsaw’s city center, skyscrapers—Axa, Deloitte, MetLife—shot up. Sushi shops and espresso bars proliferated. “In how many towns in this country did you have latte before 2005?” Dariusz Stola, who runs the polin Jewish-history museum, quipped. But growth has been uneven. While Warsaw saw the introduction of Uber Eats and Mercedes taxis, rural areas in the east lagged behind. “Every rich person in the country is rich in the first generation,” Stola said. “And that makes a lot of relative deprivation. ‘Why did he become rich? I remember his father being as poor as mine.’ ” After Poland joined the European Union, in 2004, around two million Poles, in a country of thirty-eight million, migrated to other European countries. [...]
In the summer of 2017, the sociologist Maciej Gdula interviewed Law and Justice supporters from a provincial town not far from Warsaw, many of whom had benefitted greatly from the economic boom. Still, they felt despised by Polish élites. Kaczyński, they thought, offered a vision in which “you no longer have to go to university, get a mortgage and buy a flat, and declare that you have ‘European values,’ in order to be a fully-fledged member of the Polish nation,” as one reviewer of Gdula’s book, “The New Authoritarianism,” put it. [...]
Yet, according to surveys, the percentage of people who think that Poles suffered as much as Jews during the war rose from thirty-nine in 1992 to sixty-two in 2012. When high-school students were asked recently in a nationwide poll what happened at Jedwabne, forty-six per cent said that the Germans murdered Poles who were hiding Jews. “After the fall of Communism, there was a tendency to conform to the Western interpretation,” Omer Bartov, a professor of modern European and Jewish history at Brown, told me. Now that Poland is coming into its own, there is a sense that “we don’t need these norms forced on us by the West.”
openDemocracy: Everything that is wrong is the fault of '68: regaining cultural hegemony by trashing the left
All this changed once Christoph Blocher (SVP Zürich), one of Switzerland's richest entrepreneurs, established himself as Switzerland's leading – and most controversial – politician. Under his leadership, the SVP morphed into a right-wing populist party, promoting itself as a the defender of Swiss sovereignty (against the EU) and national pride (against foreign and domestic detractors questioning Switzerland's less than stellar role during the Second World War). But above all, the party made its mark as a staunch critic of Switzerland's migration policy. Charging that the country had lost control over immigration, the SVP called for "measured immigration" by severely curtailing the influx of migrants of all provenance, but particularly Muslim countries. Claiming that Islam was incompatible with Switzerland's constitution and Rechtsstaat, the party made it its avowed goal to strictly limit Islam's impact on Swiss society and culture. It was in this spirit that the party – initially rather reluctantly -– supported the anti-minaret initiative, which Swiss voters passed by a slim majority in 2009. [...]
The Swiss case suggests that the right-wing populist insurgency that has occurred throughout western liberal democracies over the past several decades has little to do with promoting "more democracy" – a legitimate demand given the pervasiveness of technocracy and TINA; rather, it has a lot to do with reversing, once and for all, what the right considers the nefarious influence of 1968, which in their view has undermined traditions and poisoned the moral fabric of western democracies. The objective is once and for all to defeat the post-68 left and regain the strategic heights with respect to the production of meaning – what the Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (persecuted and imprisoned under Mussolini) once referred to as "cultural hegemony" and what in German is known as Deutungshoheit (power of interpretation).
In recent years, it has become blatantly obvious that meaning is subject to profound struggles and conflicts. The spectacular career of the notion of "fake news" as a major new field of contestation is perhaps the clearest reflection of the central importance of interpretation in contemporary politics. Recent studies on the latest wave of the right-wing populist upsurge suggest that culture rather than economics is at the center of contemporary right-wing populist mobilizations. Right-wing populist voters are less concerned about unemployment, cheap imports from emerging economies such as China or having to compete with low-wage workers than about the dissolution of familiar life-worlds and a shared identity. What gets them riled up are not so much T-shirts made in Vietnam and hawked in neighborhood shopping malls as mosques and minarets disturbing the idyllic skyline of small-town Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere. [...]
None of these developments has anything to do with the ‘68 generation. They are rather the result of local governments and administrations eager to attract companies and international organizations in order to increase their revenue base by offering them all kinds of tax incentives. SVP politicians have been as complicit in promoting excessive development with all of its negative consequences as have been the politicians of other parties. The frustration, anger, indignation and resentment provoked by the results, however, have primarily benefited the SVP, which in turn has used its electoral capital not to address the country's real problems, largely linked to excessive development, but to promoting anti-‘68 nostalgia for a world that seems irretrievably lost.
Aeon: Ageing out of drugs
Despite the common trope that trying any illicit drug – even once – will definitively lead to a life of ruin, the vast majority of people quit without such dreadful consequences. According to the United States National Institute on Drug Abuse, drug use peaks for most of us in our late teens and 20s. While more than a fifth of 18- to 25-year-olds have used an illegal substance in the past month, only 15.1 per cent of 26- to 34-year-olds and 6.7 per cent of those 35 and up report current use of illicit drugs. [...]
In his 1999 study of natural recovery from alcohol abuse among Navajo Indians, the anthropologist Gilbert Quintero and colleagues at the University of Rochester in New York found that: ‘One of the most persistent and formative influences organising narratives of “ageing out” were the responsibilities and role demands connected to raising children.’ The more that individuals came to embrace their Navajo heritage, the more they expressed a sense that drinking simply didn’t fit anymore. Abstaining from alcohol use became a means of identifying with their culture. Similarly, while binge-drinking is a notorious and often troubling rite of passage for many young Americans, the behaviour – outside of specific contexts – has an expiration date. As we age and seek to fit into cultural moulds, we often change what we do. [...]
My research showed that homelessness was a particular threat for relapse. As much as Clyde, discussed above, felt like it was probably time to quit, life kept pulling him back in. His recurring homelessness left him and his girlfriend Bonnie (also not her real name) at the mercy of others. When it came to providing physical protection and hustling income, the two had each others’ backs – hence the nicknames I’ve given them here. But whenever Bonnie and Clyde came up short of the funds needed to rent a room for the night, they typically landed on the couch of someone who used meth.
Haaretz: Hamas Stands to Emerge Dominant From Possible Gaza Deal – at Abbas' Expense
Two main proposals are under discussion – one presented by Egypt and the other by United Nations special Mideast envoy Nickolay Mladenov. The Egyptian proposal gives high priority to internal Palestinian reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah; to exchanges of prisoners and of bodies of soldiers, with Israel; and to an agreement for a long-term cease-fire, to last from five to seven years, with the first step being a cease-fire within days of signing the accord. [...]
Mladenov’s proposal stresses economic factors and prioritizes the prisoner exchanges. According to this scheme, Israel will allow goods to enter the Strip on a large scale; inject about half-a-billion dollars into its development; establish desalination plants; boost the Strip’s electrical supply; and issue numerous work visas to residents there. [...]
Egypt wants the Palestinian Authority to accept this proposal and move ahead quickly on reconciliation. However, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has presented 14 objections that could derail the whole process. Moreover, Abbas recently appointed Nabil Abu Rudeineh deputy prime minister, which Hamas sees as a step showing the president's opposition to a new, unified government. Without such a government, there can be no reconciliation, and without reconciliation, Cairo will have to decide whether it will disregard the PA and become an even more active partner in an accord. [...]
If this is indeed the outcome of the current talks, it will be a turning point in ties between Israel and Hamas. Israel will have to allow Hamas to conduct extensive business ties with manufacturers in Israel and the West Bank; give more work permits to Gazans, who will also receive permits from Hamas; and redefine the closure on the Strip, which will gradually disintegrate. But more than this: Israel will have to accept the possibility that the new Palestinian government that will be established (if it is established), and will consist of Hamas and the PA, will be granted international legitimacy.
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