Politics & Stuff

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The Undecided Voter

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An Electoral College Tie Would Be a Win for Trump

Looking at some "what-if" scenarios with 45 days to go.

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/an-electoral-college-tie-would-be

Over the next 45 days, a tiny fraction of undecided voters across seven swing states (and one swing district) will decide the presidential election. It remains plausible that either candidate could win any mix of the seven. Within these combinations are several potential 269-269 Electoral College ties—an outcome not seen in two centuries.

What might a tied electoral map look like? Would Trump or Harris have the advantage if the election were sent to the House? 

Let’s take a look at three plausible (if still unlikely) tied scenarios.

Scenario One

The “Blue Wall” holds for Harris, but Trump sweeps the four Sunbelt States and ekes out a win in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district.

 

Scenario Two

Trump flips Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Harris holds Wisconsin by the narrowest of margins—it’s where she’s polling the best today—and wins Nevada, Arizona, and North Carolina. 

 

Scenario Three

A near inverse of the first scenario, Trump outperforms polling in the Midwest and sweeps the “Blue Wall” à la 2016, but Harris keeps Arizona, Georgia, and flips North Carolina.

 

Ultimate Scenario: The House Determines the Winner

If one of these scenarios proves correct, the contest would head to the House of Representatives where each state’s delegation (in the next Congress not the current one) receives one vote. In this “contingent election” scenario, Donald Trump would be an overwhelming favorite. 

 

Why? Republicans safely hold 24 delegations and another pair, Iowa and Montana, lean their direction. So if Republicans hold steady, they should comfortably hit 26 votes—enough to send Donald Trump to the White House. In other words, Democrats need a clean sweep of House tossups and a few upsets just to get within striking distance. Let’s examine some of those closely divided states. 

Alaska: Democrat Mary Peltola faces a fierce challenge from Republican Nick Begich. With one at-large congressional district, whoever wins will control the state’s vote. 

Arizona: Republicans currently hold a 6-3 majority, but two of their seats are tossups—Juan Ciscomani’s AZ-6 and Dave Schweikert’s AZ-1. If Democrats can flip both, they would win a majority. 

Colorado: Democrats have a 5-3 advantage, but freshman Rep. Yadira Caraveo represents a Biden +5 district north of Denver that Republicans hope to flip this year. A 4-4 split is the best the GOP can hope for as Colorado continues to move left. 

Maine: Democrats have a 2-0 advantage heading into November. Republicans, however, hope to defeat Blue Dog Jared Golden and force a split. 

Michigan: Democrats took a 7-6 lead after a neutral redistricting amendment took effect in 2022. But Dan Kildee in MI-8 and the open seat (vacated by Elissa Slotkin) in MI-7 are both at risk of flipping red. Democrats do have an offensive opportunity in the 10th District.

Minnesota: The current 4-4 split looks likely to hold barring a Republican upset of Angie Craig in the Minneapolis suburbs. 

Pennsylvania: A 9-8 Democratic advantage is erased if either Susan Wild or Matt Cartwright is defeated in November. Both races are pure tossups at this point. 

It is incredibly difficult to imagine Democrats winning a majority of state delegations. Just about everything would have to go their way—in which case Kamala Harris has likely won anyway.

So, as the election comes down to the wire, remember that in all likelihood Donald Trump’s magic number is 269—not 270.

 

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The myth of civic vs ethnic nationhood

 

The forging of countries

Two distinct and conflicting forms of nationalism – civic and ethnic – helped create the nation-states of Europe

https://aeon.co/essays/the-myth-of-civic-vs-ethnic-nationhood-in-europe-east-and-west

At around three o’clock, on a warm and beautiful summer day, the headwaiter approached Hans Kohn’s table. It was 1914, and Kohn was tucked away with a friend in the cool and quiet Café Radetzky in the Malá Strana area of Prague, preparing for his upcoming bar examination. Sunday strollers crowded the city’s streets and parks while people chatted over beer and coffee in the open air. All presumably an unwelcome distraction for the two young law students.

The waiter’s hand trembled as he handed them a special edition of a local newspaper. It announced that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, had been assassinated in Sarajevo. The mood in the country would quickly move from bewilderment to belligerence, driving Austria-Hungary into a disastrous world war. Four years later, the country was gone from the map of Europe.

On that warm June day in 1914, few anticipated a war that would reshape the political map of Europe. When Kohn was mobilised into military service, he had expected to be home by Christmas. Instead, he ended up among the unlucky hundreds of thousands captured by Russian troops and cursed to spend the war deep in the Russian imperial interior.

Hans Kohn in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914. Courtesy the Leo Baeck Institute New York

By 1920, when Kohn had made it back to Europe, Prague was the capital of Czechoslovakia, one of several new nation-states that had sprouted up during his absence, based on the principle of national self-determination. These new nation-states replaced the vast multinational – or anational – empires that had previously blanketed central and eastern Europe: the others being the German, Russian, and Ottoman Empires.

Conflicts between various nationalist movements had plagued Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary in the decades before its collapse. Once the war was obviously lost, the path was open for them to take over from the delegitimised and eventually deposed Habsburg dynasty. An even more radical nationalism would flourish in the successor states of the various empires. Germany under the Nazi regime – the largest of all – elevated racialist nationalism into the organising principle of its eastward conquests, finding no shortage of local collaborators keen to settle scores with their supposed national enemies.

Countless millions would perish in the orgy of violence unleashed by their messianic nationalist dreams, including the majority of Prague’s Jewish community to which Kohn had once belonged. In the wake of the Second World War, 12 million Germans were sent westwards out of fear or retribution. All the Allied powers agreed that the surest guarantee of future stability for central and eastern European nation-states was to have as few ethnic minorities as possible. Kohn’s youth in fin de siècle Austria-Hungary had been spent in one of the most ethnically diverse countries in Europe. By the mid-20th century, its former territories hosted some of its most homogeneous.

For Kohn, the real culprit for the downfall of his multinational homeland was not the war itself, but the force of nationalism that in its waning years exerted such a powerful sway over its people. He was hardly alone in this assessment. For at least three-quarters of a century, central and eastern Europe has served as the prime example of the pitfalls of nationalism. In particular, of the kind of ethnic nationalism that, we are often told, is characteristic of this non-Western world.

It was this particularly central and eastern European ethnic nationalism, this perspective goes, that was responsible for the collapse of the diverse and cosmopolitan Habsburg Monarchy. For the failure of the new democracies that took over from empires in 1918 – Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and others. And for the rise of authoritarian and fascist regimes in their place, the largest of which would go on to perpetrate the most horrific genocide in human history in the Holocaust.

According to this orthodox view, the essentially ethnic nature of central and eastern European nationalism contrasts starkly with that of the Western democracies of France, the United Kingdom and the United States. They are characterised as thoroughly civic nations, based not on supposedly primordial tribal identity, but on common citizenship and a democratic understanding of politics. In all three, the US, UK and France, their civic nationalism is a centuries-old tradition, dating back to their foundation as modern nations.

Kohn was the first historian to systematically seek out the roots of this divergence between the nature of nationhood in the Western democracies, and the central and eastern European countries in his weighty book The Idea of Nationalism (1944). Kohn’s book grew into a foundational work of ‘nationalism studies’ in the Anglophone world and has influenced generations of scholars and readers alike. He did not just see Western and non-Western nationalisms as different, but came to believe they were, in effect, totally different phenomena.

The assimilation of minorities into the dominant ethnicity in Western nation-states was celebrated as progress

Kohn argued that Western nationalisms were ‘based upon liberal middle-class concepts … pointing to a consummation in a democratic world society’, while central and eastern European nationalisms derived from ‘irrational and pre-enlightened concepts … tending towards exclusiveness’. The enlightened Western ones, he claimed, developed in France, the UK and the US, the primordial superstitious ones in Germany, before spreading across the rest of central and eastern Europe and, eventually, the world. The backwardness of all non-Western countries apparently made it all but predetermined that the latter would win out over the former.

While the distinction between these two kinds of nationhood was known to 19th-century thinkers, the notion that ethnic and civic aspects of nationhood were necessarily in conflict, or that one or the other was purely characteristic of a certain part of Europe, was not. Western ‘civic’ nation-states have always been built on the dominance of certain ethnic groups with their own language, traditions and myths of origin and distinctiveness. Indeed, the assimilation of minorities into the dominant ethnicity in Western nation-states was celebrated as progress.

Central and eastern European nationalists did not ‘reject’ the civic values of their Western counterparts but tried to follow them closely. They acknowledged civic rights for all that lived in a given nation-state but sought – like their Western counterparts – to eventually see all ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities assimilated into the general civic nation that was ultimately shaped by the dominant ‘state-forming’ ethnic group.

They were in awe of the assimilatory power of the English language and its culture in Britain or North America, and of the French equivalents ultimately defined in and around Paris. That German or Hungarian nationalists wanted to see Slavs or Jews shed their culture and become true Germans and Hungarians did not reflect some ‘irrational and pre-enlightened’ exclusivism. It simply reflected the reality of the Western nation-state.

Nevertheless, in nationalism studies, this geographic distinction between Western civic and non-Western (or ‘Eastern’) ethnic nationalism remains one of the most deeply engrained orthodoxies. The problem is it simply isn’t true. To understand how this misleading but influential view took shape, it is necessary to understand how the descent into ethnic extremism in early 20th-century central Europe shaped the enduring works of early theorists of nationalism. Many of whom – like Kohn himself – were ultimately shaped by its consequences, their work marked by a deep desire to discover where the histories of their homelands had ‘gone wrong’.

Kohn was born in 1891 in Austria-Hungary, perhaps the most bewildering state in modern European history. In fact, it wasn’t one state at all, but two. The half colloquially referred to as Austria consisted of three kingdoms, six duchies, two archduchies, a grand duchy, two margraviates, two princely counties and a free city, all with their own unique histories, identities, flags, forms of patriotism, celebrations of belonging and more. The other, Hungarian half itself had a kingdom within a kingdom in Croatia-Slavonia.

Profile portrait of Hans Kohn. Courtesy the Leo Baeck Institute, New York

What united all these political entities was the emperor-king Franz Joseph, who sat atop the Habsburg dynasty that had ruled most of these polities for centuries. With two brief interruptions, the Hapsburg family, from the 15th century to 1866, had acted as hereditary heads of the entirety of today’s Germany, first as Holy Roman Emperors and then as ‘heads of the presiding power’ of the German Confederation, itself consisting of 39 different German states.

This bewildering political tapestry did not make for simple nation-building on the Western model. France and Britain were centralised, but central Europe was decentralised. The former had dominant national languages, but the latter was extremely multilingual. The former had strong centres of political authority, the latter diffuse and overlapping ones. Kohn’s hometown of Prague was the historical capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia sandwiched between the Austrian duchies to the south and the rest of Germany to the north. It was a prime example of the kind of national complexities arising from this complicated Habsburg inheritance.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Bohemian natives nurtured wildly different visions of their homeland’s place in a possible national state. Most German-speaking Bohemians envisioned it as a part of Germany or a German-dominated Austrian state. Nationally conscious Bohemian Slavs variously imagined it as part of a wider Slavic-Austrian state, a more narrowly ‘Czechoslovak’ one, a purely Czech one, or even a bilingual Czech-German nation-state.

Only after 1871 did the idea that civic borders should conform to ‘objective’ national ones based on ethnic criteria come to prominence

The problem faced by all nationalisms emerging out of central Europe before 1918 was that no ethnic nation was congruent with the state. Insofar as German or Czech-speaking nationalists in Bohemia, for example, saw their nation as the one truly representative of the kingdom, they would have to assimilate their rivals against their will. Or, as Kohn maintained, ‘redraw the political boundaries in conformity with ethnographic demands’, supposedly one of the tenets of ‘non-Western’ nationalisms.

Somewhat bizarrely considering nationalism captivated Europe only in the 19th century, Kohn concluded The Idea of Nationalism with the 18th, content that he had discovered the roots of the two nationalisms by then. Yet the historical record contains very few demands from 18th- or even 19th-century eastern and central Europeans for the redrawing of borders. The first example of ‘objective’ ethnographic measures being used as the basis for border changes in Europe was in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and there its goal is only the exchange of a few villages on the initiative of an entrepreneurial statistician.

Only in the decades after 1871 did this idea that civic borders should conform to ‘objective’ national ones based on ethnic criteria come to prominence. Importantly, it arose with the maturity of nationalist movements, not at their birth. For most of the 19th century, we find political or civic nations in central Europe seeking to assert their rights to manage their own affairs while opening up the boundaries of the nation to people of wildly diverse religious or linguistic backgrounds. In return, however, they asked for assimilation, that outsiders identify with the political community of the state and its leading ethnic group. Sometimes – as in Bohemia – competing claims arose about the question of which ethnic group had the right to be identified with the political nation.

Scholars usually date the emergence of modern nationalism to the 18th century. But it’s also true that the word ‘nation’ has been used in Europe for centuries. What changed is the modern claim that nations consist of the ‘masses’ and the modern nationalist assertion of the rights of those masses to statehood. That’s what we call ‘nationalism’.

But for a long time before modern nationalism, the word ‘nation’ frequently referred to political nations in premodern Europe. That is, the nation as a corporate group consisting of those whose rights and privileges marked them out as a distinct group in and above society. Whose privileges made them the group that ruled society, complete with their own language, customs, traditions and identity. This is why one of the great innovations of the French Revolution was the extension of nationhood through political emancipation to the broad masses of French society.

Kohn saw the romantic veneration of the common folk as the root of reactionary non-Western nationalism

The nobilities of the Habsburg-ruled kingdoms – of diverse ethnic and linguistic origins – had strong and well-developed conceptions of belonging to a common nation. So strong, in fact, that they resisted incorporation into the kind of centralised absolutist states characteristic of 18th-century Europe. The Habsburg Monarchy was nearly torn apart by the pressures of such policies pursued by Joseph II, who rescinded most of them on his deathbed in 1790.

In the kingdoms of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia, nationalism was pioneered in the 19th century by patriotic nobles keen to assert their ‘state right’. That is, their political sovereignty as a corporate nation with the right to manage their own affairs. They were aided by small groups of middle-class publicists and scholars who, under the strong influence of German romanticism, sought to reform and cultivate vernacular languages native to the kingdoms, build narratives of historical continuity for the nations, and educate the broader masses in order to make them productive members of the nation at large. Kohn saw exactly this romantic veneration of the common folk as the root of reactionary non-Western nationalism.

He even claimed in The Idea of Nationalism that, after 1806, local central European elites proclaimed ‘the uniqueness of the folk … as an aggressive factor in the struggle against Western society and civilisation.’ An exaggeration of the role played by some nationalist publicists during the Napoleonic Wars, whose vitriolic anti-French views were more important to Wilhelmine or First World War-era German nationalists than 19th-century ones.

German liberal nationalists of the first half of the 19th century contrasted their envisioned nation-state not with Western society and civilisation, but with the reactionary princely confederation in which they lived. When national revolts broke out in Greece or Poland, German nationalists cheered their fellow Europeans fighting for freedom against despotic regimes. They largely recognised the liberal struggle as a cosmopolitan European one, not as a narrowly German one nor as one that existed in opposition to ‘the West’.

England and France as bastions of progress and civilisation presented models for admiration, emulation, and – occasionally – envy. In the 1830s and ’40s, Hungary’s generation of reform nobles who transformed the country’s social and political life were enamoured by England, as were many German intellectuals. England seemed to represent everything that their countries lacked in terms of national and political life, where the prosperity created by liberal social and political ideas allowed for the full flourishing of national life.

The most difficult question faced by liberal nationalists in ‘non-Western’ countries was not how to redraw borders to make nation and state congruous. It was rather how to reconcile the model provided by France, England or the US with their own circumstances. In other words, how to transform the civic nation from a narrow noble elite to a broader public of educated middle-class men from a confusing collection of linguistically and politically diverse states tied together by the House of Habsburg.

In 1848, a series of revolutions broke out across Europe. Terrified at the sight of disgruntled masses in the streets, European monarchs made once-unthinkable concessions. They called democratically elected assemblies, drafted constitutions and ratified liberal laws. Though by 1850 the revolutions would be defeated – the assemblies closed, constitutions revoked and laws overturned – they had given the middle-class liberal nationalist public its first taste of politics.

The opening of the Frankfurt Parliament in Paulskirche in 1848. Note the portrait of Germania. Courtesy Wikipedia

In 1848, a German National Assembly formed in Frankfurt where revolutionaries produced the first draft constitution for a German nation-state. Hungary, meanwhile, adopted a raft of liberal legislation in spring 1848 that transformed it into a modern parliamentary state. The realisation of the right of ‘historic’ nations like Hungary and Germany (as well as Italy and Poland) to statehood would have meant a de facto partition of central Europe among these four nation-states. Revolutionaries across Europe celebrated the prospect, dismissing the objections of Czechs, Slovaks or Slovenes who would be subsumed in the German or Hungarian nation-states as the cries of ‘unhistoric’ nations or mere ‘fragments of peoples’.

None of these nationalist movements sought to withhold civic rights to members of ethnic minorities. Rather, they expected them to assimilate, as did those minorities who lived in prosperous, progressive Western states. As one deputy asked in the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848: ‘What would the French say if the Breton, Basque and old Ligurian fragments of peoples declared they no longer wanted to be French?’

Deference to the Western nation-state – where the supposedly most advanced ethnic group in the state had become the core of a democratic civic nation – was a common point made in prerevolutionary Hungary as well. The politician Ferenc Pulszky, who himself had travelled extensively in Britain, asked in the 1840s: ‘What do we Hungarians demand of the Slavs[?] … we demand nothing more than what the English ask of the Celtic inhabitants of Wales and high Scotland, nothing more than the French ask of Brittany and Alsace.’ Pulszky could not see why the civic model of nationhood could work for France but not Hungary.

Perhaps 40 per cent of the country spoke Hungarian – not enough to claim that only Hungarian be used in public life

The Western nation-state was a model for some, but a warning for others. From the enslavement of people of African descent and the displacement of native Americans in the US to the suppression of minority languages and dialects in France to the disenfranchisement of Catholics in the UK and the gradual elimination of Celtic languages, Western nationalisms were predicated on the homogenising force of a dominant national group that gave no quarter to national minorities in public life. Unsurprisingly, representatives of national minorities in German states and in Hungary near-universally refused to accept subordinate status in someone else’s nation-state. Or to recognise that the nation-state belonged to groups that were themselves minorities.

Though Bohemia’s elites overwhelmingly spoke German, the majority of Bohemians were Czech speakers. Hungary, meanwhile, was perhaps the most linguistically diverse country in Europe. German dominated its cities, Hungarian the nobility, and Latin served as the official language until 1844. Yet the masses spoke an array of Slavic, Romance, Germanic and Hungarian vernaculars. Only perhaps 40 per cent of the country spoke Hungarian (even by the 1880 census, it was only 46.5 per cent), a plurality but not enough to claim that only Hungarian could be used in public life.

Given the examples set by Western countries, it makes sense that Hungarian nationalists presumed that the predominant national vernacular would be the linguistic rallying point for national development. France, the US and the UK were all home to enormous ethnic, linguistic and racial minorities. But these minorities were either assimilated to the dominant nationality or excluded from national life altogether.

Conversely, there was little reason to expect that nationally conscious Czechs should have accepted that their state was fundamentally German. Or that Hungary’s numerous nationally conscious minorities – Croats with their own subordinate kingdom, Slovaks concentrated heavily in the north, or Romanians who formed majorities in large swathes of Transylvania – should have accepted the conflation of a Magyar ethnic nation with a Hungarian state. In either case, this had little to do with any kind of distinct idea of nationalism but was caused by inherent contradictions in the model of the idealised Western nation-state in a central European context.

Despite such conflicts and contradictions, central European nationalists did not reject the civic nation. The final draft of the revolutionary constitution produced by the Frankfurt Parliament declared in the most straightforward civic terms: ‘The German people consists of the citizens of the states that form the German Empire.’ In 1868, a year after the creation of Austria-Hungary out of a unitary Austrian Empire, the new Hungarian government wrote into the constitution that there would be only a single Hungarian nation. Multiple ‘nationalities’ were also recognised, but there was only a single civic nation. Anyone could be a member, but they had to speak, dress and effectively become a Magyar.

It was an outrage to minority nationalists, but surely no less of an outrage than the national development of Western nation-states. The French Ministry of Public Instruction found in 1863 that at least a quarter of the country spoke no French at all. For the millions of Occitans in the south – whose Romance tongue was at least related to standard French – to Celtic Bretons in the northwest, rebellious Corsicans and totally unique Basques in the southwest, ‘becoming French’ entailed assimilation into a language and culture that was not quite theirs. The congruence of the French ethnic and civic nations was not a result of pure ideas, but of decades – centuries even – of nation-building.

In the latter half of the 19th century, international statisticians were faced with a seemingly intractable question: how could a nation be measured objectively? From the 1850s, a series of conferences had brought together statisticians from across Europe and North America in an attempt to harmonise how countries collected statistics around the world. In 1872, they endorsed the notion that ‘mother tongue’ could determine the boundaries of nationalities. But this was not a universally recognised measure. The following year, the newly founded International Commission on Statistics tasked three Austro-Hungarians with tackling the problem head-on.

The Austro-Hungarians couldn’t agree. One put forward the civic idea of conscious self-identification, another the ethnic idea that it was ‘racial’, and the third simply argued it was a complicated mix that was difficult to measure universally. The tensions between civic and ethnic nationalisms were on full display, but they had little to do with geography. Their range of opinions came at a time in the late 19th century in which ethnic nationalism was increasingly influential across the continent, inspired by the rise of racialist thinking, eugenics and social Darwinism.

By the turn of the 20th century, young radicals across Europe put forth ethnic conceptions of nationhood in which Jews especially were singled out as being a foreign element supposedly unable to be a member of the political community of the nation. But the appearance of antisemitism did not signal a quick triumph among nationalisms with long traditions of Jewish assimilation. In the years up to 1918, the majority of German Jews insisted that they were simply ‘German citizens of the Jewish faith’. Jews in Hungary were no less assimilated. In Austria and Bohemia, most Jews were German-speakers who similarly identified themselves as German.

Kohn was one such German-speaking Jewish Bohemian. He embraced Zionism prior to the First World War, at a time when it was a tiny movement among the elite, and assimilated, Jewish communities of central Europe. After stints in Paris and London, he ended up in Palestine in the mid-1920s hoping to live his Zionist beliefs. After a wave of violent riots broke out there in 1929, Kohn grew disillusioned. The same ‘spirit of extreme nationalism among [Austria-Hungary’s] peoples’ that had made the ‘building of a peaceful multiethnic state’ he saw manifesting itself in Palestine too. He opted to abandon Palestine for the US, where he settled in 1933.

Citizenship cannot force people to feel part of a civic nation

Unlike in the empire of his youth, or the Jewish state of his dreams, in the US Kohn thought he had found a country in which nationalism as a progressive and tolerant force had produced a truly just and liberal society. The contrast between this US reality and the exclusivist ambitions of German, Zionist or Czech nationalists deeply moved the former lawyer-cum-historian. Nationalism, he concluded, was not the problem, but only a certain ‘type’ of non-Western nationalism.

But nationalisms – both Western and non-Western – contain a complicated mixture of civic and ethnic factors, excluding some while offering others the chance for inclusion through assimilation. The state acts as the most powerful force for both. That’s why historians of nationalism like to say states make nations, not the other way around. Nationalism is, by definition, exclusivist insofar as it excludes those who do not think of themselves as a part of the nation. Citizenship cannot force people to feel part of a civic nation, just as citizenship does not stop some from trying to exclude others from their ethnic nation.

Today, it feels vaguely accurate to say that countries like the US, the UK or France base their national identity on the ‘civic’ nationhood of common citizenship. Poland, Hungary, Czechia or even Russia, on the other hand, appear wedded to a more ethnic idea of nationhood rooted in a common language, traditions and myths of origin. It would be an error to read the world of 2024 into the past, as much as it would be an error to read the world of 1944 into the past. An error to assume that today’s ethnic homogeneity in central and eastern European countries, as well as the inclusive nationhoods of Western democracies, are nothing but the consummation of eternal and essential truths rather than the result of contingent historical events. Unfortunately, this was precisely Kohn’s error.

In many ways, Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism is really a book about a prototype of the Sonderweg (‘special path’) thesis, seeking to explain where German history had ‘gone wrong’ to such an extent that it led to Nazism. Why it did not follow the supposedly inclusive path of other Western countries like France, UK and the US but instead went down a fascist path that culminated in the catastrophe of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Yet the US of the 1930s that Kohn was so enamoured with was a country whose extremely restrictive immigration policies sought to retain ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ethnic dominance, to which end much of the country mandated racial segregation until the 1960s. With few exceptions, over the past three centuries, the building of all modern nation-states required one ethnic group dominating and assimilating others.

Looking for the ‘roots’ of central and eastern Europe’s lagging behind the West in modernisation, and also at the horror of Nazism, led Kohn to make anachronistic claims about the long-term ethnic continuity and nature of their nations. Civic and ethnic nationalisms were never two distinct courses of historical development taken by different nations, but in fact two different aspects of the development of almost all modern nation-states. The tension between them unfolded across the 19th and 20th centuries as nationalism spread across Europe and the world.

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,300]

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

The four kinds of lies in politics:

1) The happy-go-lucky people (for example "generalized Navier-Stokes equation ? bliah-h-h, that's dead easy")
2) Fools who believe Trump/Mitsotakis propaganda.
3) People who believe the Trump/Mitsotakis propaganda but are not fools.
4) Out of deliberately malicious intent.

A smallish percentage 3-4% will attempt to tell you the truth but you won't believe.

 

Edited September 20, 2024 by cosmicway

[Vesper 30,090]

In Late Push To Help Trump, Nebraska GOP Might Take An Electoral Vote Away From Kamala Harris

Trump's allies want the state to move to a winner-take-all system for its Electoral College votes to make it harder for Harris to win.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nebraska-electoral-votes-kamala-harris_n_66eda868e4b016b76ff7a149

With eight weeks to go until Election Day, Nebraska Republicans are considering passing a law to change how the state distributes its electoral votes in a bid to deny Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris any vote from the state. Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, that does not allocate all of its electoral votes to the overall winner of the state. Instead, it provides two electoral votes for the statewide winner and then one vote for each of its three congressional districts.

The state’s 2nd Congressional District, centered on Omaha and its suburbs, has swung toward Democrats since former President Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Trump only narrowly won the district after GOP nominee Mitt Romney won it comfortably in 2012. In 2020, President Joe Biden won the district and its one electoral vote by 6.5%. The most recent polling of the district shows Harris with a similar lead to Biden’s 2020 margin.

The push to change Nebraska’s electoral vote allocation is being led by GOP Gov. Jim Pillen and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Graham flew to the state to lobby state lawmakers at the governor’s mansion on Wednesday. Nebraska’s entire congressional delegation also endorsed the push in a letter on Wednesday to Pillen and John Arch, the Republican speaker of the state’s unicameral legislature.

U.S. Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) and Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) said they believed the push for a winner-take-all result remained three or four votes shy in the Nebraska legislature as of Friday morning. Smith claimed a unified slate of electors would give Nebraska “more of a say” in the presidential election. “Right now, we have a diminished say with the way that the legislature has it in place,” Smith told HuffPost.

A winner-take-all result would give Nebraska Democrats less say in the presidential outcome. Bacon said splitting electors is a better way of representing the popular will, but only if all states do it. “I wish every state did it our way. I think it’s fair. To have only two states doing it causes problems,” Bacon told HuffPost, pointing to the fact that the Harris campaign has spent millions in the state while the Trump campaign has spent nothing.

If Nebraska changes how it allocates its electoral votes, it could have a significant impact on the outcome of the election. If Harris wins the three northern Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, then she wouldn’t need to win any other swing state to win the election. If, however, that one electoral vote from Nebraska instead goes to Trump, as it would in a winner-take-all allocation, Harris would need to win either Arizona, Georgia, Nevada or North Carolina to avoid a tied election.

The only other option to avoid a tied Electoral College vote in this scenario would be for lawmakers in Maine to change how they allocate electoral votes as well. Trump won one Electoral College vote from Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in 2016 and 2020. Polls show he is likely to win it again.

But it is likely that Maine would not be able to pass such legislation, even if its Democratic state legislative majority wanted to. In Maine, new legislation does not go into effect until 90 days after it is enacted. The election will take place in 45 days. State legislators can pass emergency legislation to go into effect immediately, but that requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature. State Republicans would likely block any such effort.

Edited September 20, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,090]

Did Middle East device attack violate international law? Advocates want an investigation

https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-geneva-conventions-1d0044e23cdb902036884e66e8fea086

GENEVA (AP) — Human rights advocates are calling for an independent investigation into the deadly explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon and Syria, suggesting the blasts may have violated international law if the devices were fashioned as booby traps.

The explosions that have been widely blamed on Israel killed at least 37 people and wounded more than 3,000, including many members of the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah. Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement.

The United Nations human rights office and some advocacy groups have cried foul, arguing that the strikes were “indiscriminate” because it’s nearly impossible to know who was holding the devices, or where they were, when they went off. But some academics insist the explosions were precisely focused because the devices had been distributed to Hezbollah members.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which aims to help protect civilians and other noncombatants in conflict and aims to stay neutral, said: “This was a unique operation, and it will take time to have all the facts to establish a legal opinion.”

The committee declined to comment publicly about whether the operation violated international humanitarian law, which is difficult to enforce and sometimes flouted by countries.

International law has never addressed the targeting of communication devices that people carry on their bodies. The Geneva Conventions, which provide a rule book for the protection of civilians during conflict, were adopted 75 years ago, long before pagers, mobile phones and walkie-talkies were in widespread public use. The legal situation is further complicated by the fact that Hezbollah is an armed nonstate group acting inside Lebanon, a sovereign member of the U.N.

“There must be an independent, thorough and transparent investigation as to the circumstances of these mass explosions, and those who ordered and carried out such an attack must be held to account,” the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk, said in a statement.

Did devices amount to booby traps?

The question of how to apply international rules to the attack seems to center mostly on whether a secret explosive embedded in a personal electronic device might be considered a booby trap. Israel has been blamed for targeted strikes and assassinations in the past, but a large strike using mobile communication devices is virtually unheard of.

A booby trap is defined as “any device designed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object,” according to Article 7 of a 1996 adaptation of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which Israel has adopted.

The protocol prohibits booby traps “or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.”

Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said the rules were designed to protect civilians and avoid “the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today.” She too called for an impartial investigation.

The convention also sets rules for the use of land mines, remnants of cluster bombs and other explosives. It bars use of other “manually emplaced munitions,” such as improvised explosive devices that “are designed to kill or injure, and which are actuated manually, by remote control or automatically after a lapse of time.”

The pagers were used by members of Hezbollah, but there was no guarantee that the members would be holding the devices when they went off. Many of the casualties were among members of Hezbollah’s extensive civilian operations mainly serving Lebanon’s Shiite community.

Laurie Blank, a professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta who specializes in international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict, said the law of war doesn’t prohibit use of booby traps outright, but places limits on them. She said she believed the attack was “most likely lawful under international law.”

She said booby traps can be used to target enemy forces in or near a military objective, including the communication systems used by Hezbollah fighters.

“That said, it’s not clear that this is a booby-trap scenario. For example, if the attack is attacking the pagers themselves, then it’s not an issue of booby-trapping,” Blank wrote in an email.

Did ‘indiscriminate’ nature of attack make it illegal?

Experts said the pager explosions suggested a long-planned and carefully crafted operation, possibly carried out by infiltrating the supply chain and rigging the devices with explosives before they were delivered to Lebanon.

“There is no world in which the explosion of hundreds, if not thousands, of pagers is not an indiscriminate attack prohibited by international law,” Mai El-Sadany, who heads the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, a Washington-based think tank, wrote on X.

“The pager holders were scattered across civilian areas, from shopping malls to crowded streets and apartment buildings to hospitals, surrounded by women, children and men,” she told The Associated Press. “An attack like this cannot anticipate what innocent passerby is in the impact area or what carefree child picks up the pager when it beeps.”

British lawyer Geoffrey Nice, who prosecuted former Yugoslav and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, said in an interview: “It’s pretty obvious here it’s a war crime. And we should call it out for what it is.”

But he noted criminal conduct on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict, alluding to rocket strikes by Hamas militants on Israel and casualties caused by Israel’s military operation in Gaza, where the Health Ministry says at least 41,000 people have been killed since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel that triggered the latest war.

Rules require countries to ‘minimize’ harm

Amos Guiora, a professor at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, said the strikes were “justified in the context of self-defense,” but he acknowledged the risks of collateral damage against civilians.

“International law does not articulate a number as to what is legitimate or illegitimate collateral damage, it’s just to ‘minimize.’ The tragic reality of collateral damage is that innocent people will be harmed and killed,” he said. “I do have a sense on this one that there was a conscious effort to minimize it — with the understanding it will be never perfect.”

“This particular attack strikes me — whoever did it — is as pinpointed as pinpointed can be,” said Guiora, who spent 20 years in the Israeli military and advised its commanders in Gaza in the 1990s.

Israel has already faced heavy international criticism over its military response in Gaza and, more recently, in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.

Back in May, the top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Hamas leaders behind the attacks, over their actions in the war.

Israel ignored an order from the U.N.’s top court to halt its military offensive in southern Gaza after South Africa accused Israel of genocide. Russia, too, has ignored the court’s call for it to end its invasion of Ukraine.

Hamas has also been investigated. Human Rights Watch released a report in July that concluded Hamas-led armed groups committed numerous war crimes during the attacks in Israel.

Hezbollah has been linked to numerous indiscriminate attacks on civilians over the years, including in Argentina, Bulgaria and, of course, Israel.

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Trump and Vance Are Using One of America’s Oldest Racist Playbooks

By falsely linking Haitians in Springfield to the spread of infectious diseases, the GOP candidates are joining a long, terrible history.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jd-vance-springfield-infectious-diseases/

One of the strangest moments in American presidential campaign history has to be Donald Trump’s insistence in his recent debate with Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in the Ohio town of Springfield. Of course, this racist garbage wasn’t true, but the former President and his vice-presidential pick could not help but repeat these false rumors day after day.

But as an infectious disease epidemiologist and an HIV+ scientist, what has really caught my attention is Ohio Senator JD Vance’s claim that immigrants were bringing communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS, to Springfield, a town nestled between Dayton and Columbus in southwestern Ohio.

It’s easy to debunk these lies; there’s publicly available data at AIDSVu.org and the Clark County Combined Health District’s own webpage proving that Vance’s claims are nonsense. But why make such incendiary charges in the first place, if they are not true, particularly about your own constituents? I would assume there are plenty of other attacks to be made on their political opponents that at least are grounded in reality.

History holds a clue to what might be going on here. For generations, demagogic American politicians have linked marginalized communities—whether immigrants, people of color, or women–with infectious diseases. From the attacks on the Chinese community in San Francisco in 1900 when bubonic plague emerged in the city, and the roundup only a few years later of thousands of American women across the country under the Chamberlain-Kahn Act for ostensibly spreading venereal disease, these kinds of campaigns have happened throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, with HIV, Ebola, and Covid. Some of the most gruesome stories are largely unknown—such as the use of kerosene and a chemical called Zyklon B, made famous by the Nazis, to delouse Mexican migrant workers in El Paso from 1917 until well into the 1970s. 

In some cases, these incidents stemmed from the panic and paranoia of real outbreaks, in which infectious-disease control could act as a smokescreen for crackdowns on immigrant communities. But even the threat of disease could be weaponized to enforce political goals. Under the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, women could be arrested for any reason whatsoever; over 30,000 women were swept into detention during World War I, in a campaign that continued into the 1950s and was less about controlling sexually transmitted diseases than controlling women’s behavior and bodies.

What all these sorry tales have in common is that they are about determining who belongs here in the US, who is a “real American,” and who is an interloper. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has said, this is a “blood-and-soil nationalism that holds some Americans as more American than others. It is to say that there are some people who, on account of their origins or those of their parents and grandparents, cannot be full and equal members of the national community.” Trump and Vance’s claims go further than that: They are positioning immigrants as an imminent danger to the true Volk, the true people. In this construction, immigrants are a pathogen that must be purged, cleansed from the body of the nation.

All this should send shivers down your spine. Already, the impact of Trump and Vance’s false claims have been felt in Springfield, with hospitals, schools, city buildings, and a local university receiving bomb threats or canceling events out of an abundance of caution after other menacing e-mails.

Back in the early days of HIV, Senator Jesse Helms spewed a special kind of hatred against people living with HIV and members of the LGBTQ community. In the early 1990s, a spin-off of the activist group ACT UP decided they had had enough. They put a giant condom on the senator’s house with the words “Helms is deadlier than a virus.”

The impact of Trump and Vance’s attacks are creating a crisis in Springfield where there was none, terrorizing citizens of that small town and surely affecting their mental health, disrupting medical care, education, city services with bomb threats. HIV isn’t the problem in Springfield; it’s these two men who have decided to use a community for their own political ends and a press corps that can only wonder if it’s good politics.

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The Futile Search for Political Motives in the Second Trump Assassination Attempt

Both Democrats and Republicans claim Ryan Wesley Routh belongs to the other side. But his beliefs are incoherent—and all too American.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-second-assassination-attempt/

If a team of laboratory scientists were working round the clock to develop a life-form that encapsulated the political incoherence of would-be assassins, it’s hard to see how they could improve on Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspect apprehended after an abortive attempt on former president Donald Trump’s life at Trump’s Florida golf course. As the basic elements of Routh’s recent life story come into view, it’s hard to ascribe any clear political through line to it. He voted for Trump in the 2016 election, was enamored of Tulsi Gabbard in 2020, and spent most of the pandemic as a Covid truther. Most recently, he entertained fond reveries of a Nikki Haley–Vivek Ramaswamy ticket, which represents an unlikely fusion not only of two former presidential hopefuls who despise each other, but also an impossible coalition. The two candidates respectively represented a flailing GOP establishment’s perennial effort to distance itself from Trump and a bid to repurpose Trumpism into a permanent revolution administered by the American tech-investment elite. Even in today’s Republican Party, it’s unlikely that Routh, a lifelong construction worker who was apparently living in Hawaii after several decades in North Carolina, would have found himself in demand as a political consultant. (Routh also cast a Democratic ballot in North Carolina’s most recent open primary, and made a number of small donations to Act Blue after 2019, totaling $140.)

In some ways, Routh’s wild-swinging political sympathies proved weirdly prophetic: Gabbard, after all, is now an eager Trump supporter. But even that shift doesn’t square with Routh’s most ardent political obsession: support for Ukraine in its battle against the 2022 Russian invasion. In a 2023 interview with The New York Times for an article about Americans volunteering for the Ukrainian war effort, Routh said he had traveled to the country to try to enlist Afghan soldiers to fight in the war, and that he was prepared to “fight and die” for the cause of Ukrainian independence. Suffice it to say, that is not the position of Gabbard, whom Hillary Clinton famously denounced as a Russian asset during the 2020 presidential campaign, and who is firmly aligned with Trump’s own Putin-first worldview, particularly on the Ukraine war. In a self-published book called Ukraine’s Unwinnable War, Routh wrote that Iran would be justified in assassinating Trump, in part for his repudiation of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with the country. He also called for the assassinations of Putin and Belarusian Aleksandr President Lukashenko, and urged the United States to precipitate a nuclear confrontation with Russia. In the same tract, he wrote, “I get so tired of people asking if I am a Democrat or a Republican, as I refuse to be put in a category.”

It’s unlikely that Routh’s wish will be honored anytime soon. Right-wing news outlets are already claiming that Routh’s Mad Libs pronouncements about the nation’s politics “echoed” Democratic anti-Trump rhetoric—and Trump himself took up the same refrain as he launched a new bout of fundraising on the thwarted attempt on his life. Never mind that this is a theory of discursive influence right up there with the notion that dire prophecies are contained in backward-playing Beatles records; the claim feeds directly into the elevation of Trump into the status of movement martyr in the 2024 campaign, and will likely only gather greater force as Election Day draws nigh. Meanwhile, liberal commentators, not surprisingly, have downplayed Routh’s Trump-baiting outbursts and stressed the violent strains of MAGA rhetoric, while properly insisting that highlighting Trump’s real and present threat to American democracy is not an incitement to political violence.

Yet it’s hard not to think that this scrum for partisan advantage in interpreting Routh’s unhinged actions and thought processes misses a good deal of the larger point. Trump’s earlier aspiring assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, came from a right-leaning political background, but so far very little is known about his possible motivations, particularly since he was killed at the scene of the assassination attempt. But Crooks, like Routh, seemed to harbor an outsize image of the role he was destined to play in world affairs—an all too familiar strain of thinking among political gunmen, from John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald to Arthur Bremer. For most of these figures—with the notable exception of Booth—ideology tends to be something of an afterthought, and certainly not the primary focus. The fantasies of assassins, successful or otherwise, mostly hinge on the craving to lurch with a single blow from fringe obscurity to the center stage of world-shaping historical agency.

In Routh’s case, this reverie was apparently filtered through a far more common and respectable form of violent fantasy—that of the wised-up solitary warrior defending America’s true interests in a dark and hazardous global order. There’s no evidence that he actually took up arms on Ukraine’s behalf while he cosplayed as a member of the conflict’s international brigade, but he clearly felt that the stakes of the conflict—which he repeatedly referenced as a fundamental confrontation of “good and evil”—licensed any and all forms of violent response, up to and including nuclear war. That extremity is thankfully not part of the diplomatic framework in the Ukraine war—though with US missile shipments to Ukraine poised to target installations deeper in Russia, that’s not as steadfast a guarantee as it should be. In the wake of Routh’s arrest, as in the case of Crooks’s June assassination attempt, we’ve seen a chorus of political leaders and policy intellectuals rush to assure us that our country settles political differences by ballots, not bullets. Yet in the theaters of conflict that Routh himself was drawn into, that is decidedly not so.

Just as his actions in Florida were presaged by a prior history of lethal weapons offenses, so were Routh’s geopolitical delusions fed by generations of American regime-change follies carried out at gunpoint. Instead of looking to Republican or Democratic messaging complexes for the last word on Routh’s demented golf-course assault, we might better heed the wisdom of Mick Jagger, seeking to finger the culprits of the most notorious assassinations of the 1960s: After all, it was you and me.

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Trump Shared Fake Image Claiming Kamala Harris Attended Diddy's "Freak Off"

Trump continues to launch sexual themed attacks against Kamala Harris

 

https://meidasnews.com/news/trump-shared-fake-image-claiming-kamala-harris-attended-diddys-freak-off

 

 

Trump shared a fake image which altered an photo of Kamala Harris with Montel Williams and his daughter Ashley Williams at the Eighth Annual Race to Erase Multiple Sclerosis in May 2001. Trump's meme replaces Montel Williams with an image of Diddy and seems to imply that Diddy, who was recently indicted for sex crimes, has two dates at his side, Montel Williams' daughter Ashley and Kamala Harris.

 

Diddy has been accused by the US Attorney's Office of hosting massive baby oil and drug fueled "freak offs" in which he would fly in sex workers from multiple states to engage in prolonged sexual activities with multiple people. Trump's meme implies Harris has been being sexually involved with Diddy and participated in his "freak offs":

 

Trump's reposted meme: "Kamala doing the Diddy? Madam Vice President, have you been involved with or engaged in one of Puff Daddy's freak offs?"

This week, Montel Williams called out a now deleted post of an unaltered photo claiming that he was Diddy. Williams stated, "Here they go again with 'all black people look alike.'"

MAGA Republican accounts previously used the unaltered photo of Kamala Harris, Montel Williams, and his daughter Ashley Williams to attack Kamala Harris in vulgar ways. 

In August, Williams responded to MAGA account using the photo of Kamala Harris dating him as an attack. 

MAGA accounts are now pushing the fake, altered image showing Diddy with Montel Williams' daughter and Kamala Harris to push their false attacks. And now Trump himself has amplified the fake image to his millions of followers.

This isn't the first time Trump has launched sexual themed attacks against Kamala Harris. In August, Trump shared an Alanis Morrisette parody song implying Kamala Harris traded oral sex for boosts to her career. 

Later that month, Trump also reposted a meme suggesting Kamala Harris exchanged oral sex for political power. 

 

One of the most common forms of misogyny women experience is accusations that they didn't earn the position they got, but that they "slept their way to the top." Trump latest attack on Harris by sharing this fake picture not only builds upon that, but could be an attempt project the spotlight away from Trump's association with Jeffrey Epstein to a false narrative linking Harris to the Diddy sex crime indictments. 

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MyPillow goes full Nazi with new sale.

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Finland’s far-right government runs down the welfare state

https://feps-europe.eu/finlands-far-right-government-runs-down-the-welfare-state/

20/09/2024

Finland has its most right-wing government since the 1930s, and this can also be seen in its economic policy. Massive cuts to social security and public service spending undermine the welfare state, and the government’s labour market reforms weaken employees’ negotiation power.

Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s right-wing government has been in power in Finland since the spring 2023 elections. Orpo’s National Coalition Party (NCP) won the race with 20.8 per cent of the vote and agreed to form a government with the populist right Finns Party that was just 0.7 percentage points behind. They formed a majority coalition government with the support of two smaller right-wing parties.

The government can be called extreme right-wing, as a similar coalition has not been seen since the 1930s, when fascism also gained influence in Finland. This can also be seen in the government’s economic policy, which has been clear from the beginning: public spending on social security and public services is cut dramatically. This starts to harm especially those with low income and in need of social services. However, the fiscal consolidation has affected everyone except the richest, who have even received tailored tax reductions.

These budget cuts are not about small amounts. The government says it will consolidate public finances with 9 billion euros annually. This corresponds to about 10 per cent of the central government budget or 3 per cent of Finland’s gross domestic product (GDP). For many low-earning families, this means hundreds of euros less for living each month, and the queues for public health services have begun increasing.

However, in reality, the fiscal consolidation is significantly smaller – but still enormous – at approximately half of the 9 billion. The government exaggerates the figure with selective calculation methods. It has, among other things, re-classified about 1 billion euros of ordinary annual budget spending as ‘an investment programme’ and ignored it in the calculations. This blurring is because the government’s narrative relies essentially on the fact that it claims to bring Finland’s debt under control in the face of necessity.

The election campaigns of both main governing parties relied on debt scaremongering and the claim that they would turn the public debt into decline. Their central message was that the centre-left government of the Social Democratic Prime Minister Sanna Marin had made irresponsible economic policy. This is even though the debt growth during Marin’s government was mainly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, from which Finland came out among the best in the world in economic and health indicators. At the end of 2023, Finland’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 75.8 per cent. The ratio has risen clearly, especially after the financial crisis, but it is still below the average in both the EU and the euro area. Finland’s interest rate has also remained relatively low.

Despite these facts, debt scaremongering paid off and impacted the voters’ decision. According to many estimates, it was a key reason for the election result. Both the NCP and the Finns Party promised significant spending cuts before the elections, but there were also differences in their economic programmes. Respecting their populist roots, the Finns Party did not present the means to implement the massive spending cuts it promised. Instead, the NCP proposed cuts to both social security and service spending.

As a result, the government’s economic programme pretty much matches the goals of the NCP, whereas the Finns Party broke many key promises it made before the elections. For example, before the elections, party chair Riikka Purra, who later became finance minister, pledged her party would not accept any budget cuts that would affect those with low income. Nor did the Finns Party election programmes include proposals to cut spending on social and health services or education.

The government is undermining the foundations of the Finnish welfare state also in another way. Until the 2023 elections, the Finns Party appealed to the working class. Now, however, it has made a massive U-turn after the elections when drafting the government’s labour market policy. The government is implementing more than 20 reforms that will weaken the negotiating power of employees and trade unions. This will, in many ways, break down the Finnish labour market policy model built since World War II, where governments have negotiated all major reforms in cooperation with representatives of employees and employers. The labour unions have called the turn a scam as the current reforms were not of the Finns Party’s election programmes, nor, even, of the NCP’s. Instead, they were copied directly from the programmes of the employer associations.

It can be considered another broken promise that the government is not able to eliminate budget deficits despite the pledges both largest government parties made before the elections. According to the latest forecasts, the central government debt will rise as much as it did during the previous Marin government, but now even without a pandemic.

This is primarily because the government does not want to increase taxes on the rich, even though the highest-earning one per cent pay proportionally less taxes than lower-earning income groups. The capital accumulated by the rich is taxed at lower rates than high salaries. The taxes of the richest were even lowered a bit this year. This spring, the government decided to increase some taxes. However, they were primarily concerned with regressive taxes, affecting low-income earners proportionally more. From the beginning of this September, Finland’s general value-added tax rate rose to 25.5, the second highest in the EU.

The total support of the governing parties, especially the Finns Party, has fallen somewhat since the elections. Still, it is not certain that it could not recover before the 2027 parliamentary elections. Party chair Purra has already stated that the harsh spending cuts must be continued after this government’s term. The coming years will show whether the Finnish welfare state is about to be scrapped once and for all. The development of the rule of law in Finland has also stalled during the time of Orpo’s government. 

The left-wing opposition has plenty of work to do if it wishes to turn the tide. The hope should not be lost as the margins are low. The current government has never come close to the popularity of Marin’s government. It is also worth remembering that the election last year was tight. The Social Democrats fell short of victory by less than one percentage point, and the previous government’s parties got nearly half of the votes. Now, the party is leading the polls with the new chair, Antti Lindtman, who is trying to keep the lead until the elections in 2027.

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Orbán’s centaur state

https://feps-europe.eu/orbans-centaur-state/

20/09/2024

Viktor Orbán is well-known for his opposition to liberal democracy. He is also against the idea of the welfare state. For Hungary, this meant rising inequalities and decaying public services.

It is not uncommon for European politicians to implement welfare state retrenchment. It is rare for a prime minister, however, to openly declare their opposition to the idea of the welfare state as such. Viktor Orbán announced, in 2012, that “our program is to establish, instead of a Western-type of welfare state, which is not competitive, a work-based society”. What ensued was not the elimination of the welfare state, but its restructuring – the broad direction of which is aptly illustrated by French sociologist Loïc Wacquant’s characterisation of the kind of state neoliberalism brings about: a centaur state, “liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom, which presents radically different faces at the two ends of the social hierarchy: a comely and caring visage toward the middle and upper classes, and a fearsome and frowning mug toward the lower class”.

Whereas the Orbán-regime has been etatist in some policy areas, regarding price controls and state ownership of utility companies, its fundamental distributive logic can be succinctly summarised: the more you have, the more you get. The decrease in employment protection and the curtailment of the right to strike have favoured capital over labour. The corporate tax rate is the lowest in Hungary in the whole EU. In comparison to many other European countries, income inequality is still not very high. However, Hungary has seen the steepest increase in inequality among all member states, as indicated by the Gini coefficient, between 2010 and 2023.

The introduction of a flat personal income tax, alongside the elimination of low-income tax credits, has led to a remarkable surge in disposable income among the top 10 per cent, while the tax burden on those earning near the minimum wage has doubled on average. Consequently, the tax rate for the lowest earners is among the highest in Europe, while that of the highest earners is among the lowest. Considering both personal income tax and the highest value-added tax in Europe (at 27 per cent), households in the bottom 10 per cent of the income distribution pay a higher proportion of their incomes in taxes than the top 10 per cent.

Family and housing policies follow a similar distributive logic. Although there are generous tax breaks, grants and subsidised credits for home purchases and renovation available to families with children, they systematically provide more benefits to those with more secure employment, higher wages, more savings and more wealth than to those who are more in need. The maximum duration of unemployment insurance has been reduced to just three months, the shortest in Europe. Minimum income protection – the extent to which the government protects its citizens from destitution – is the lowest in Hungary. By conventional measures, the prevalence of poverty is not particularly high, but poverty can be exceptionally deep here: in terms of purchasing power parity, the actual income of those below 40 per cent of the median income is the lowest within the EU.

Historically, the Hungarian educational system has been one of the most inequitable in Europe, failing to ensure equality of opportunity by mitigating the effects of students’ socio-economic backgrounds. The subsequent Orbán governments bear responsibility for their inaction over the past 14 years of de facto political omnipotence and their explicit approval of the ongoing segregation of Roma students. The same applies to public health care, whose problems also predate the emergence of the Orbán regime but have continued to worsen largely unaddressed. Access to healthcare of acceptable quality has increasingly become contingent on purchasing power. The stark contrast between the intolerable conditions in many public hospitals and the obscene enrichment of pro-government oligarchs or the extravagant investments in stadiums has underscored that the issue is not that the country is poor, but that essential public services are underfinanced.

The main goals behind this are easily discernible, just as the absence of some of the traditional goals of the post-1945 European welfare states. The economic priorities of the Orbán-regime have been to reach and sustain high levels of employment, and to ensure ‘competitiveness’ through a capital-friendly labour law and tax environment. Welfare policy has followed two main goals. The first has been to ensure that the state incentivises labour market participation, a goal that has guided both welfare state retrenchments and some positive policy reforms, such as increases in the minimum wage and the expansion of preschool education coverage. The second has been a selective pro-natalist goal: to counteract the long-term trend of population decline by boosting fertility rates – not universally, but specifically among middle- and upper-class households. Reducing inequalities – whether of opportunity or outcome – has simply never been a goal of the regime. This is not quite in line with the preferences of the Hungarian electorate. Comparative data consistently show that the expectation that the government should reduce differences in income levels is particularly strong among Hungarians. 

Why have this discrepancy and the ever-more-obvious decay of public services not had a more significant impact on the popularity and electoral results of the governing party? I can only cover two parts of the explanation here. First, the government – through extensive, unscrupulous government propaganda – has been effective in centring politics on other issues, such as the supposed threat that George Soros, ‘Brussels’, ‘the migrants’ and the ‘LGBT-propaganda’ pose. Or, most recently, by convincing much of the electorate that the opposition (and again, ‘Brussels’) poses a threat to peace, and therefore the only way to avoid war is to vote for them.

Second, the available alternative was not convincing because of the unfavourable track record of the hitherto dominant opposition parties and because the liberal opposition has never consistently campaigned around material and distributive issues, but mostly focused on corruption and abstract notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘democracy’ instead. It remains to be seen what might transpire if an opposition were to emerge that is both willing to articulate and capable of credibly representing the widespread discontent with the dismal quality of public services, rising inequalities, and the material insecurity affecting broad segments of the population.

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Donald “America’s Hitler” (J.D. Vance Called Trump 'America's Hitler' Before He Became Trump's VP Pick) Trump Gives Supporters the Green Light to Blame Jews If He Loses in November

He did this at an event on antisemitism.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-gives-supporters-the-green-light-to-blame-jews-if-he-loses-in-november

 

 

Once upon a time, before he became Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance told his law school roommate he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole…or that he’s America’s Hitler.” Obviously, the Ohio senator has since disavowed every negative thing he previously said about Trump. But he clearly shouldn’t have, particularly when it comes to the Hitler vibes, given all the wildly antisemitic remarks Trump has made on the campaign trail—including the comment he made last night re: whose fault it will be if he loses in November. Spoiler alert: It’s the Jews!

That’s right: At a campaign event on Thursday that was—wait for it—about denouncing antisemitism, the GOP nominee for president told the audience: “If I don’t win this election…the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.” The ex-president baselessly claimed that Kamala Harris, who is married to a Jewish man, “hates Israel,” while he is “the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.” He suggested that American Jews should be more grateful to him, saying, “With all I have done for Israel, I received only 24% of the Jewish vote…I really haven’t been treated very well, but that’s the story of my life.”

At another event the same day hosted by the Israeli American Council, Trump doubled down on blaming things on Jewish people, saying that if he loses the election to Harris, Israel will be destroyed and it’ll be the fault of Jews for “voting for the enemy.”

 

Blaming Jews for stuff was, of course, Adolf Hitler’s MO. The Nazi leader blamed German Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I, claiming the tiny minority had “stabbed Germany in the back”—language that sounds not dissimilar to what Trump had to say yesterday, and not dissimilar to the things he’s said and done re: Jews for years now. As a reminder, those words and actions include but are not limited to:

• Saying, “I think that any Jewish person who votes for a Democrat…should have their head examined.” (This is one of his go-to claims.)
• Declaring that a group of neo-Nazis had some “very fine people” among it
• Having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with a Holocaust denier
• Saying a man known for going on antisemitic tirades had “a good heart”
• Hosting a White House Hanukkah party that featured an evangelical pastor who once said Jews were going to hell
• Allegedly claiming that Hitler “did some good things,” and having to be told by his then chief of staff, “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy”
• Attacking “liberal Jews” on Rosh Hashanah, one of the holiest days of the year
• Telling a room full of Jewish people that Jews who work in real estate are “brutal killers” and “not nice people at all”
• Suggesting Jews control the media
• Reportedly saying that Jews are “only in it for themselves,” following phone calls with Jewish lawmakers
• Saying Jews who vote for Democrats “hate Israel” and Judaism
• Reportedly wanting his military leaders to operate like “the German generals in World War II”
• Tweeting an image of Hillary Clinton’s face against a backdrop of $100 bills and a Star of David, along with the words “most corrupt candidate ever”
• Using Hitler-esque rhetoric, like calling his enemies “vermin” and claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”
• Suggesting that Jews only care about money
• Keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed

Meanwhile, during his blame-the-Jews tour on Thursday, Trump had nothing to say about Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for governor in North Carolina whom the ex-president endorsed and who CNN reported yesterday once referred to himself as a “black NAZI” in comments online, among other things. (Robinson has denied he wrote the comments.)

[Vesper 30,090]

Israeli forces shove at least four men off West Bank roof, videos show

The Israel Defense Forces are investigating the episode, which it said went against “IDF values.” The United States has called for an investigation. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/20/israel-soldiers-west-bank-roof-bodies-video/

At least three Israel Defense Forces soldiers dropped, pushed and shoved four men over the side of a two-story building Thursday in the town of Qabatiya near Jenin in the occupied West Bank, a Post analysis of nearly a dozen videos and photos showed.

It was not clear if the men were still alive at the time, though their bodies were motionless. At least two were bound, and one was kicked off the roof of the building. The incident came after an Israeli raid targeting militants in the area that included at least one exchange of fire near the building, which sits just behind two school buildings.

The IDF, asked to comment on the footage, said in a statement: “This is a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.”

The IDF declined to comment further when asked about the military’s protocol regarding the movement of someone injured or killed by Israeli fire, why the soldiers shoved the people off the building or whether they checked for vital signs before shoving the people from the roof.

The IDF had said in a statement Thursday that its troops fatally shot four “terrorists” in Qabatiya that day as part of a “large-scale operation.” It did not respond to a request for comment on whether the four people killed were the men who were shoved off the roof.

Sometime before 12:19 p.m. local time Thursday, a man dressed in black and carrying a weapon moved quickly across the building’s roof, video published to X shows.

The person filming from a nearby window urges him, “Run away! Run away, run away!” Bursts of gunfire are audible, and the man falls to the ground. “They hit him with a rocket,” the narrator says.

By that time, at least one other man lies motionless on the rooftop, his arms awkwardly tucked under his torso.

Two additional bodies lie in a pool of blood on the rooftop. Soldiers roll one man over, revealing his hand and stomach covered in blood. Another fires his rifle into the other body. The group then rolls the bodies, kicking and pulling them, until they are closer to the roof’s edge.

It is not clear how much time elapses before a group of Israeli soldiers throws three bodies off the same rooftop. The clothing and general description of the bodies match those previously moved by the soldiers.

Over the course of a minute-and-a-half video, the soldiers lift a man wearing a white T-shirt upside down and hold him over the building’s edge. The man’s feet and hands appear to be tied, as he falls straight down without moving and a cord follows him. Then, the soldiers pick up a second person by their arms, swinging them backward and forward before dropping the flailing body over the edge. Together they roll a third body toward the edge, and one soldier kicks the body off the roof.

Video filmed later in the evening shows Israeli security forces lifting a fourth man with a ropelike object tethered to his ankle over the edge of the same building. The soldiers watch the body fall.

“The conduct shown in the videos is manifestly unlawful,” Adil Haque, an expert on international law at Rutgers University said. “Killing any person incapacitated by wounds, or mistreating their dead body, violates international humanitarian law and constitutes a war crime in the context of a military occupation,” he added.

Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at Crisis Group who previously served at the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department, agreed, noting that “outrages against personal dignity — including against the deceased — can amount to a war crime,” in an occupied territory.

According to the IDF’s mission statement, Israeli soldiers must “maintain their humanity during combat and routine times. The soldier will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.”

“Of course it’s against the ethical code of the IDF,” said Nadav Weiman, a former Israeli army sniper who leads Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation veterans’ group that gathers testimony from soldiers assigned to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. “But that was thrown out the window years ago.”

Weiman noted that in Gaza, the IDF has been accused of mistreating Palestinian bodies in a number of incidents. The discovery of mass graves in the Gaza Strip in April sparked global outrage, including condemnation from the United Nations.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday that officials had seen the video of Thursday’s episode. “We found it deeply disturbing,” he said.

Kirby added that should the video be “proven to be authentic, it clearly would depict abhorrent and egregious behavior by professional soldiers.” He said the United States pressed Israeli officials for more details and were promised a thorough investigation into the matter.

The conduct of Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank has previously been criticized by the international community, including by the United States. Secretary of State Antony Blinken this month called for the IDF to change its rules of engagement in the West Bank after an American woman was fatally shot by an IDF soldier. The IDF said it was “very likely” she was hit “unintentionally.” President Joe Biden called the killing “totally unacceptable.”