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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