Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,090]

still relevant 11 years later

The Daily Mail Song

 

[Vesper 30,090]

Democrats Have 1 Option Left

Today’s 6–3 Supreme Court decision is a hinge point for American democracy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/supreme-court-voting-rights-filibuster/619341/

Today’s Supreme Court decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act affirmed that the only way Democrats can reverse the wave of restrictive voting laws in GOP-controlled states is to pass new federal voting rights by curtailing the Senate filibuster.

Congressional action has long seemed the only realistic lever for Democrats to resist red states’ surge of voter-suppression laws, which are passing, as I’ve written, on an almost entirely party-line basis. In the state legislatures, Democrats lack the votes to stop these laws. And while the John Roberts–led Supreme Court—which opened the door to these restrictions by eviscerating another section of the Voting Rights Act in his 2013 Shelby County decision—always seemed unlikely to restrain the Republican-controlled states, today’s ruling from the six GOP-appointed justices eliminated any doubt.

Republicans will understandably view Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion upholding two disputed Arizona statutes as a green light to pass voting restrictions that could disproportionately limit the ability of minority groups to vote: “Even if the plaintiffs were able to demonstrate a disparate [racial] burden caused by [the Arizona laws], the State’s ‘compelling interest in preserving the integrity of its election procedures’ would suffice to avoid [VRA] liability,” Alito wrote. Republican legislators will likely interpret Alito’s repeated emphasis in his decision on the importance of stopping “fraud” and his somewhat gratuitous swipes at voting by mail, both of which echo themes from former President Donald Trump, as much more than a wink and a nod of approval for the laws that are proliferating across red states. (“Fraud is a real risk that accompanies mail-in voting even if Arizona had the good fortune to avoid it,” Alito insisted at one point.) If anything, Alito’s decision, which all the other GOP-appointed justices joined, underscores how thoroughly the determination to restrict voting access in the name of combatting illusory “fraud” has permeated every corner of the GOP. (Even the rare GOP critics of Trump’s discredited fraud claims, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have also defended the restrictive new state laws.)

Read: Watch what’s happening in red states

While the ruling signals long odds for the Justice Department’s effort to challenge those laws (starting with Georgia’s) in court, civil- and voting-rights advocates might welcome the clarity the decision provides. It makes plain that if Congress doesn’t establish new federal standards, the nation is headed toward a two-tier voting system, with red states imposing ever-tightening restrictions that especially burden Democratic-leaning constituencies—young, minority, and lower-income voters.

It’s no coincidence that red states are imposing these restrictions precisely as Millennials and Gen Zers, who represent the most racially diverse generations in American history, are rapidly increasing their share of the total vote, as I wrote earlier today. The rise of those younger generations especially threatens the GOP hold on Sun Belt states such as Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, which Republicans now control through their dominance of older and non-urban white voters; in that way, the voting restrictions Republicans are enacting amount to stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change.

After a Republican filibuster blocked their sweeping voting-rights bill, Senate Democrats are working to unify behind a more limited plan—and to persuade holdout Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (and perhaps others) to change the filibuster rules to pass it. Following today’s decision, the demands from civil-rights groups on Senate Democrats and Biden to change the rules will grow even more intense.

Read: Manchin and Sinema now face the weight of history

“Our elected leaders need to wake up and start acting like the house is on fire—because it is, and this ruling pours more gasoline on the flames,” Nsé Ufot, the CEO of the New Georgia Project, said today in a statement that was echoed widely by other groups. “Black and Brown communities gave Democrats federal power to protect the vote and passing bills like the For the People Act is what we both expect and deserve.”

With more measured (though no less passionate) language, the fierce dissent from Justice Elena Kagan and the other Democratic-appointed justices seemed to be sending the same message. They obviously never endorsed any legislation, but their tone reminded me of the pleas to the Senate majority (particularly Manchin and Sinema) from Democratic legislators in the states passing these restrictive laws. We’ve done all we can here, the justices seemed to be saying: Now it’s up to Congress whether to protect democracy at what Kagan called “a perilous moment for the Nation’s commitment to equal citizenship.”

[Vesper 30,090]

Meet the Anti-MAGA Trolls

Inside the Reddit communities that can’t leave the right-wing internet alone

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/07/meet-anti-maga-trolls/619332/

Late in the evening on Christmas Day, the lawyer and Donald Trump loyalist Lin Wood tweeted an elaborate infographic stating his views about the upcoming U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia. The final tally would be corrupted by Dominion voting machines, it said, and the only way to expose the fraud would be to boycott the election. That would “break the algorithm” by producing a result in which the GOP candidates would receive fewer than zero votes—and then the Supreme Court would have “no choice” but to overturn the presidential election, while someone would have no choice but to arrest Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, as well as Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and the other GOP candidate, David Perdue. “I just want an HONEST election,” Wood wrote above the image. “Don’t you?”

The next day, on Reddit, the members of a vaguely leftist community called r/ParlerTrick started celebrating. One of them had created the infographic out of whole cloth, with the hopes that it would be picked up in right-wing internet spaces and persuade Trump supporters not to vote in the runoff. That Wood had come across it and shared it himself was a far wilder result than they could have hoped for. Still, most of them avoided breaking character in their posts. “We must have fair elections. We must know the Truth!!!” one wrote. “Let every nasty democRAT vote while true patriots stay home and trust the plan!” wrote another. The fact that Wood was calling for the arrests of various Georgia political figures was soon covered by Yahoo News, Business Insider, and other bloggy mainstream outlets, with no mention of the way the thought had been incepted into his tweets.

That wasn’t an ordinary day in r/ParlerTrick, but it is representative of the group’s culture. Members of the forum—which was created shortly after the 2020 election and is named after the social-media app Parler—pretend to be prototypical social-media “patriots” in order to sow confusion in right-wing online spaces. They boosted the hashtag #DeleteParler as part of an effort to convince other Parler users that the app is a “wholly-owned project of the FBI” and that everything posted there is subject to surveillance by the “Deep State.” In the days following the Capitol riot, they spread a rumor that anyone who attended would be pardoned by Trump if they turned themselves in before the end of his term. Recently, r/ParlerTrick subscribers signed up for free tickets to an event hosted at the Iowa Corn Palace by the MyPillow CEO and Trump loyalist Mike Lindell in order to limit actual attendance, and then congratulated themselves on their choices of fake names: Harry Sach, Yura Dumas, Ann T. Fa.

At first glance, the forum’s whole deal can be difficult to discern. When I first reached out to its moderator team, r/ParlerTrick’s creator replied, “Can you please stop being racist about reddit and swearing about it thank you.” Several weeks later, after he agreed to an interview, I asked him what that message even meant. “We kind of wanted to keep it a little cryptic,” he told me, also sort of cryptically. Then he asked to go by his middle name, Michael, because he and the other moderators are often harassed and sometimes receive death threats.

Michael and his compatriots are targets on account of their participation in one of the most visible and active forums in a new online ecosystem dedicated to surveilling and poking the MAGA universe. (In other subreddits, members boast of messing with those on the conspiracy-theory-hotbed platform MeWe and the QAnon-favored chat app Telegram.) These forums signify an important cultural shift: For the past five years or so, internet trolls have been among the most hated and feared actors in American politics, blamed for the rise of Trump and the sad triumph of ironic bigotry. Then an upswell of leftist trolling started attracting attention last summer, when the hacking collective Anonymous returned after years of dormancy and coordinated, internet-based pranks were adopted as part of the political tool kits of K-pop fans, TikTok kids, and random coalitions of Twitter users.

The question is whether all of these anti-MAGA trolls represent a corrective counterforce or a misguided reaction. “Even the most ethically oriented troll is always going to be controversial because it uses deception,” says Gabriella Coleman, a cultural anthropologist known for her research on Anonymous. Trolling is also chaotic as a rule. “These campaigns spiral,” she told me.

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The Parler trolls on Reddit first got together in a forum called r/ParlerWatch. It was imagined as a small space for like-minded Redditors to share the most out-there things they’d seen on Parler, and to come up with ways to mess with the people who were sincerely posting on the app. But it grew quickly, gaining about 16,000 members in its first week, and its creator, Sloane—who asked to go by his middle name for the same reasons as Michael—decided to steer the forum in a more serious direction. Now, instead of hatching practical jokes, its 150,000 members focus on surveilling the Trump-loyalist internet and organizing moments of “armchair activism,” such as combing through Parler data scraped from the site after the Capitol riot and sending tips to the FBI. “Monitoring right-wing spaces online has always been kind of a hobby of mine,” Sloane told me.

Members who still wanted to do anti-MAGA trolling, led by Michael, went on to form a spin-off group with Sloane’s blessing: r/ParlerTrick. The members of the smaller forum discussed their forays into far-right spaces, where they posed as caricatures of liberals and riled people up to no real end. Later, they experimented with using the language and framing of a MAGA diehard to push their own politics, including support for unions, but this ended up confusing everyone. Their messages on Parler would sometimes get reposted as screenshots in r/ParlerWatch and discussed as if they were authentic right-wing activity. Eventually, the whole subreddit became a role-playing game, Michael told me. “We started having people coming in not knowing if it was real or not, which is perfect,” he said. The members now call themselves “patriots” and disavow liberals with every sentence. As role-playing games go, it’s low-effort: At the time of the Georgia runoff election, they made a meme of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue that said simply, “They know what they did to Donald Trump.” It was shared by Trump fans on Parler hundreds of times, though no one actually had any idea what Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue might have done to Donald Trump.

Read: The first troll

Trolling used to be the pastime of a subculture that considered itself apolitical, and that claimed to be interested in provoking everyone. But for Michael and Sloane, the jokes are part of how they practice their politics—the only fun part, they say. Similarly, many politically minded young people have come of age with an innate understanding of how antisocial behavior online can be used to win attention for and participation in a chosen cause. “Trolling has a long and noble history, and shitposting can be useful,” says Talia Lavin, the author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. She took part in an attempt to troll Trump’s “Voter Fraud Hotline,” she told me, by submitting a long video in which she described being intimidated by the sexual attractiveness of an antifa operative at her polling place.

But trolling can have especially unpredictable results when it engages with hateful rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking. It might even help spread and amplify misinformation or extremist beliefs. Some r/ParlerTrick members, for example, created memes that, per Michael, had “some racist stuff” in them, or might have stoked “unnecessary hate.” The forum has struggled with this issue, he said. “It’s a thin line. You have to really pay attention to what you’re doing.”

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The problem that needs fixing, say the people who spend hours monitoring the MAGA world, is that the MAGA world has gotten so hard to see.

The more radical of Trump’s supporters were largely pushed off mainstream social-media platforms last summer and fall, as the result of an industry-wide crackdown on election misinformation and QAnon activity. They joined sites such as Parler, Telegram, MeWe, and TheDonald.win because that’s where other, further-right actors had gone when they were banned from Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. With that, an ideological divide became a literal separation across platforms. “The Balkanization of the internet is what led to r/ParlerWatch,” Sloane said. “That’s exactly why these watchdog groups started around the 2020 election cycle.”

While the sequestering of the MAGA internet has made surveillance of far-right ideas seem more important, it has also made trolling MAGA diehards easier (and, for some, more fun). An excursion onto a platform like Parler can be exactly that for pranksters—a quick trip behind enemy lines, where you know you’ll find a target-rich environment, and where your mischief might be less likely to cause collateral damage. (Parler, for its part, seems to welcome the additional activity. An updated set of community guidelines added in February specifically allows “trolling content.”) But constant engagement with the ideas that gain the most traction on Parler and similar platforms might still have risks for the people who are trolling. When I asked Michael whether he thought r/ParlerTrick members could ever role-play themselves into having actual hateful beliefs, he expressed concern but in an unconcerned tone of voice. “You have to be aware of that,” he said. “You have to really be thinking and conscious in the moment and know what you’re looking at.”

Read: The return of Anonymous

Some of the anti-MAGA trolls’ motivations are obscure. In a smaller subreddit called r/MeWeTrolling, created in February, one highly active user who calls himself a “trolling expert” regularly shares dramatic confrontations he’s had in character with right-wing users of MeWe. This poster is the star of the show, and he receives accolades from commenters who suggest that he upgrade his title to “trolling legend” or “trolling god emperor.” Recently, a new member pointed out the high degree of absurdity in this troll’s exploits, and cautiously suggested that he might be playing both characters in his “interactions.”

This ambiguity could be the biggest problem with trolling as a political tactic. It’s obviously a game, but what are the prizes? Lavin said that when trolling is publicly coordinated, it tends to work better; Coleman added that campaigns like that are more transparent—they’re built less on sustained deception than on participatory spectacle. A public call to spam a militia-recruiting site or to humiliate a politician who’s blaming “woke ideology” for ruining the military invites a different sort of game, with clearer boundaries than an online space for posing as nationalism-addled “patriots.” When I asked Michael if he ever feels overwhelmed by the subterfuge and irony, he said yes. Sometimes when the r/ParlerTrick people go out to troll, they come back confused. “We’re probably in communication with other trolls, who are trolling back to us,” he said. “It’s like seven layers of troll, and there’s actually no real discourse happening at all.”

 

Edited July 2, 2021 by Vesper

[Supermonkey 38]

https://unherd.com/2021/07/the-fightback-against-critical-race-theory/

 

The fightback against Critical Race Theory

Its creators thought America was on their side — they were wrong

 

 

Douglas Murray is an author and journalist.

July 2, 2021

 

 

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One of the most irritating terms of our time must be “gaslighting”. It sounds so serious, but is just another of those pseudo-criminal charges that people fling around online, as though it has a well-known application in the real world. Loose in definition, assumed by the user to be understood by all, it is merely a form of elite jargon, known and understood only by a few.

But when a word gets used so relentlessly, it begins to take on a certain legitimacy — and even begins to crop up in the minds of people who loathe it. Indeed, it even happened to me recently after I read a number of pieces in the American press claiming that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) was a bogeyman of the Right. Now here, I thought, is something that is definitely gaslighting. Surely these people must be trying to drive readers mad by making assertions that are so clearly untrue; presenting one vision of the world and then denying that it even exists. If this is not “gaslighting”, then what is?

In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg claimed that the current wave of concern across America about CRT had simply been whipped up by a clever propagandist — and that, as a consequence, CRT had become a maddening debate. In particular, she said, “the phrase itself had become unmoored from any fixed meaning”. Elsewhere she criticised people of being guilty of a “moral panic” and said that she was “highly sceptical” of the idea that CRT is being taught in schools, before going on to explain that “antiracist education” isn’t “radically leftist” but just “elementary”.

This slew of claims demonstrates the problem at hand. For in CRT we are not talking about some hidden theory; we are talking about a school of thought which was openly heralded within American academia and has now been forced upon the wider world. Yet just at the point that it has infiltrated the public sphere, Goldberg and others claim that our understanding of CRT has become confused — as if an ideology that is wilfully obscurantist ought, in fact, to be straightforward and agreed upon.

In the Washington Post and elsewhere, this debate has come to define American politics in recent weeks. Most prominently, Joy Reid of MSNBC has taken to claiming that CRT is not being taught in schools, is not what its critics say that it is and is both too complex for people to understand and also an exceptionally obvious demand for social justice.

What prompted such a desperate defence? Well, American parents have finally woken up to what is being taught to their children. At one prestigious Manhattan school, the headmaster even resigned after a group of parents complained about a number of school initiatives, ranging from “racist cop” re-enactments in science lessons to classes about “decentering whiteness” and “white supremacy”.

But now, just at the moment that the American public are starting to push back, supporters of CRT are stepping away from their creation, pretending that concerned citizens have misunderstood it, or are railing at a mirage.

The aforementioned Reid, for instance, recently interviewed a leading CRT scholar — indeed the person who reportedly coined the term — Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has described the backlash against CRT as an effort “to reverse the racial reckoning unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime”.

There is, to put it simply, a lot going on here; clearly, today’s discussions about CRT are unclear and disingenuous. But if there is a reason for this, it is that CRT’s decades-long advocates are no longer being honest. In their 2001 work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic described CRT as a “movement” consisting of:

“A collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power… Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

So this is not a hidden campaign. Its thought leaders did not try to hide the revolutionary, activist nature of their “discipline”. They boasted about it; the activism was the point. The purpose of CRT was never simply to throw around ideas — it was to change America, and by extension the wider world, by applying these new racial rules in the widest possible way.

So why the sudden reversal? Why the sudden retreat into contradictory forms of self-defence? The reason, I suspect, is clear: the ugly little game that has been playing out in American academia is — like many a theory before it — not surviving its first encounters with the public.

In that sense, at least, it faces a similar problem to that experienced by Marxists. On paper, Marxist academics were able to make grand claims about how to make an equitable society. But try it out on the public and they soon learned that what worked on paper did not work in practice

A similar, if so far less bloody, discovery is being made with CRT. Yes, its advocates may believe that they have come up with a system to create universal justice. But applied in American schools, for instance, all they come up with is a system which causes untold pain and ugliness.

Earlier this year when Grace Church School in Manhattan was in the headlines, people could see this for themselves. In private the headmaster conceded that there was a problem with the racial games he was forcing on all of his students. “Problematising whiteness” may seem fine in theory, but in practice it creates discord. As its headmaster reluctantly conceded, there are a lot of white children at his school; and if you “problematise” whiteness then you problematise them. Crenshaw, Reid and their fellow CRT supporters failed to account for that — and now this failing of theirs has plunged America into chaos.

In the meantime, their response has been to run for cover, camouflaging themselves with every technique possible. They say we don’t understand them. They say that CRT doesn’t really exist — or that it is all too complex to explain to ordinary people. But the simple fact is that CRT does exist, as a very large number of Americans have discovered. As for CRT’s bad reception, there is only one group to blame: its creators. It is their fault, not ours, that their ideology’s first mass encounter with the general public is proving such a failure.

[Supermonkey 38]

Metadehumanization erodes democratic norms during the 2020 presidential election

https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/asap.12253

 

Abstract

The present research directly replicates past work suggesting that metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, erodes Americans’ support for democratic norms. In the days surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more than was actually the case. Partisans’ exaggerated metadehumanization inspired reciprocal dehumanization of the other side, which in turn predicted their support for subverting democratic norms to hurt the opposing party. Along with replicating past work demonstrating metadehumanization's corrosive effect on democratic integrity, we also contribute novel insights into this process. We found the most politically engaged partisans held the most exaggerated, and therefore most inaccurate, levels of metadehumanization. Moreover, despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans. This suggests that political ideology can at times be as much an expression of social identity as a reflection of deliberative policy considerations, and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.

[Vesper 30,090]

On 02/07/2021 at 22:51, Supermonkey said:

Metadehumanization erodes democratic norms during the 2020 presidential election

https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/asap.12253

 

Abstract

The present research directly replicates past work suggesting that metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, erodes Americans’ support for democratic norms. In the days surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more than was actually the case. Partisans’ exaggerated metadehumanization inspired reciprocal dehumanization of the other side, which in turn predicted their support for subverting democratic norms to hurt the opposing party. Along with replicating past work demonstrating metadehumanization's corrosive effect on democratic integrity, we also contribute novel insights into this process. We found the most politically engaged partisans held the most exaggerated, and therefore most inaccurate, levels of metadehumanization. Moreover, despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans. This suggests that political ideology can at times be as much an expression of social identity as a reflection of deliberative policy considerations, and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.

If you take the time to actually read the study (I did), it not only is quite silly, simplistic, and arbitrary, BUT also uses a (self-admitted) skewed sample (many RWers refused to participate) of self-selectors for the study groupings.

Of course you are going to have people on the so-called left (or simply Democrats, plenty of US Dems are hardly lefties at all, many would be right wing in many EU nations, but in the US it is so artificially skewed to the right you have people like Manchin being laughably called 'commies', ffs) identify the extreme RW in a negative manner, when that extreme RW, with its overt white nationalism/racism, violent rhetoric (open calling on their media outlets for mass executions of tens of thousands of Democrats, for but one example) violent actions (January 6th attempted violent coup d'état culminating in the storming of the US Capitol, etc etc etc), and batshit insane meta conspiracy theories  (Q ANON, the thousands of false claims about election fraud, etc etc, and its christofacist attempts to implement draconian anti-human rights hate laws (like the Missouri state legislature now trying to ban all birth control for single, divorced, and gay women, etc etc) is running riot and taking over (literally) the US Republican party.

[Vesper 30,090]

Trump's new rallies prove that a con man doesn't have to be smart if his victims are stupid enough.

blast from the past to drive this point home:

 

[Vesper 30,090]

The soft underbelly of British politics

A by-election in northern England highlights the corrosive atrophying of the UK body politic, Paul Mason writes.

https://socialeurope.eu/the-soft-underbelly-of-british-politics

 

Last week’s by-election in Batley & Spen, an old Yorkshire manufacturing town with a Labour tradition and a large postwar south-Asian Muslim population, has opened up a new chapter in post-Brexit politics.

With Labour trailing badly behind a Conservative government, seemingly untouchable despite its lies and corruption, the script seemed clear. The party would lose in a straight fight with the Tories, Keir Starmer would face a challenge to his leadership of Labour and the disintegration of British social democracy would accelerate.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. Labour won—just—by 323 votes. Starmer emerged rejuvenated and all talk of a leadership challenge evaporated. And the government remains mired in personal and financial scandals.

But the intervention of a populist candidate, George Galloway—once a Scottish Labour MP and now the main British voice on the Russian government propaganda channel RT—appealing primarily to the Muslim vote, disrupted the whole process. Indeed it cast a shadow over the future of British democracy, further complicating the post-Brexit upheaval.

‘Anti-woke’ campaigner

Galloway arrived in Batley & Spen fresh from a prior intervention in the elections to the devolved Scottish parliament in May. He had stood as an opponent of independence for Scotland, waving the Union flag and attacking the ruling Scottish National Party—which supports independence and an associated reapplication to the European Union—advising his supporters elsewhere in Scotland to cast tactical votes for the Conservatives. The SNP won and he received a derisory 5,521 in the South Scotland constituency—targeted for the strength of its support for UK unionism—or just 1.5 per cent of the vote.

Galloway had been sacked by the right-leaning, London-based radio station TalkRadio in 2019 after making anti-Semitic remarks about Tottenham Hotspur football club, a team strongly associated with north London’s Jewish community. Galloway pledged that there would be ‘No #Israël flags’ on the Champions League cup (the diaeresis over the ‘e’ apparently signalling his refusal to acknowledge the country’s English title).

In the past Galloway had painted himself as a left-wing ‘anti-imperialist’, famously leading the Respect Party—which he had joined after his expulsion from the Labour Party—to victory over Labour in a largely Asian seat in Bradford in 2012. In his latest apparition, however, Galloway has become an ‘anti-woke’ campaigner, railing against transgender rights, lesbian and gay education in schools, and ‘the endless obsession with race’. So when Labour was forced to call a by-election in Batley, because the sitting MP had become the region’s mayor, Galloway’s anti-woke machine descended eagerly on the town—where he had a residual network from the days of Respect.

Tensions already high

Thus began one of the dirtiest campaigns in modern British politics. Tensions were already high after a teacher at Batley Grammar School was forced into hiding, having mistakenly shown images of the prophet Mohammed to pupils. The area’s previous MP, Jo Cox, was murdered in 2016 by a far-right terrorist, and the far right had an established local presence.

Galloway’s modus operandi is to ‘canvass’—knock on doors—with a large group of followers, which has been perceived by his opponents as intimidating. He made inflammatory speeches, telling an outdoor meeting: ‘I don’t want my children taught about sex; I don’t want them taught how to masturbate; I don’t want them taught about anal sex … this liberal identity politics is anathema to me.’

But as with other right-wing populist challengers, from Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil to Narendra Modi in India, it was through WhatsApp that his supporters are alleged to have stoked the most tension. Labour activists reported stories circulating among Galloway’s followers claiming (correctly) that Labour’s candidate—Kim Leadbeater, sister of Cox—was a lesbian and lived with another woman. They also claimed Starmer was a ‘Zionist’, being (this part also correct) married to a Jewish woman and his children being raised in the faith.

Soon Labour-supporting Muslim women, in an anonymous letter circulated to the press, were claiming they faced ‘harassment and intimidation, both online and in the streets’. Galloway’s supporters were alleged to have torn down rival posters and verbally harassed Labour councillors who tried to re-erect their own.

When the Jewish Chronicle conducted interviews with pro-Galloway Muslim voters, it recorded a disturbing mixture of prejudice and conspiracy theory—such as that Leadbeater wanted gay sex taught in schools and had ‘spoken against Palestine’, whereas Jo had been covertly killed by the British state because of her support for the cause.

Video reverberated

Days before the vote, tensions escalated. Leadbeater was harassed on the street by a Muslim anti-gay activist. Video showed that, as she retreated, her (male) opponents shouted: ‘You are the colour of blood.’ Though Galloway was present at a distance, claimed not to know the activist who led the harassment, and condemned it, the video reverberated through the community.

Then one of Galloway’s organisers, Shammy Cheema, was outed as a Holocaust denier by the Daily Mail, triggering widespread concern among local mosque leaders who had made genuine efforts at intercultural dialogue (Cheema was immediately axed from Galloway’s team). And in the final weekend of campaigning, there were at least three incidents where young men purporting to support Galloway harassed and threw eggs at Labour campaigners and shouted homophobic abuse. In one incident, a Labour supporter was allegedly kicked in the head.

Labour organisers told me that, after this, Galloway’s support tangibly deflated. Yet when the votes were counted he had scored 21.9 per cent—8,264 votes—the majority assumed to be from former Labour supporters in the Asian community.

Though the public, and to an extent the media, regarded the Galloway campaign as a circus, his success has shocked the political establishment. Since the collapse of the United Kingdom Independence Party once led by Nigel Farage and the self-immolation of his Brexit Party, there has been no serious right-wing populist leader in the UK. Instead, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have soaked up the votes of the populist right.

But here is a man, out of nowhere, capable of garnering 21 per cent with a socially conservative message aimed at Muslim voters while, because of his strong support for Brexit, attracting some white working-class voters previously attached to UKIP. 

Galloway has not only used anti-Semitic language in the past and attracted a Holocaust denier into his campaign. He dismisses the 2013 chemical attack on eastern Ghouta by the Syrian regime as a hoax and likewise presents the repression of Muslims in Xinjiang by the Chinese dictatorship as an imperialist fiction.

Labour’s leadership

Much of the responsibility for handing Galloway this political opportunity has to be assumed by the Labour leadership. It permitted an unnecessary election. And though its formal position was critical of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, no Labour frontbencher attended the two massive, pro-Palestinian demonstrations stemming from it in London. Attendance was left to the former leader, Jeremy Corbyn—suspended from membership of the parliamentary group—and his backbench allies.

After a report on Islamophobia inside the party was delivered to Labour’s headquarters last December, campaigners claim little action was taken. And HQ has suspended numerous branches and officials which challenged Corbyn’s suspension. It was thus easy for Galloway to portray Labour as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians and to mobilise Muslim voters on that issue.

According to those charged with leading the Labour fightback, however, the pervasive trope within the online campaigns backing Galloway was social conservatism—opposition to sex education, LGBT+ rights and ‘transmania’. Responding to the flurry of violent intimidation, the Muslim women’s group wrote ‘to the Muslim men involved’, saying ‘you do not represent the Islam we practice, you may be the loudest voices but you are not the majority’.

By mobilising women, and by getting out the vote using the formidable machine built during the five years of Corbynism, Labour managed to win, despite the desertion of at least a quarter of its traditional vote to Galloway. An unnamed Labour official told the Times that in six weeks the party had basically built a new electoral coalition: ‘Lost the conservative Muslim vote over gay rights and Palestine, and won back a lot of 2019 Tory voters.’

Scant comfort

If correct, this assessment can be of scant comfort to anyone concerned about the state of British democracy. Out of nowhere, Galloway was able to descend on an area with a history of division and far-right violence, stoke polarisation and garner 21 per cent of the vote. He used UK electoral law, which requires the BBC and others to give candidates equal prominence, to appear on UK-wide television. He has pledged to stand in every upcoming by-election where there are significant Muslim votes—and his current vehicle, the Workers Party GB, may decide to stand more widely in the 2024 general election.

Not only did Labour find itself ill-equipped to deal with this new, amorphous, right-wing but ‘anti-imperialist’ populism; it found its local support networks very weak in the face of it. Meanwhile both the London-based media and the local police struggled to formulate a response, as a flurry of incidents were captured mainly by alternative media, with law enforcement struggling to catch up.

Galloway makes no secret—and is indeed proud—of the support he gets from RT (formerly Russia Today) on which he appears. Yet the Conservative government has refused to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, before and after which there were multiple meetings between officials of one of the Leave campaigns and high-ranking Russian officials. Johnson suppressed an official intelligence report on Russia’s involvement and there remains no demonstrable surveillance of its interference in UK democracy.

In this context, Galloway has just provided proof of concept for one of the most effective campaigns to degrade and destabilise UK democracy in living memory. Neither his anti-Semitic language in the past nor the open support of the Russian state broadcaster—nor the clear evidence that his tension-inducing strategy had tainted his supporters—deterred 8,000 people from backing him.

If replicated elsewhere in Britain, bringing racial and religious tension to communities situated on its cultural faultlines, Galloway’s intervention could have a negative impact on the quality of democracy across the whole UK.

This article is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal

 

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The formula for a social Europe

https://www.wsi.de/de/faust-detail.htm?sync_id=HBS-008050

Free Download

https://www.wsi.de/fpdf/HBS-008050/p_wsi_pb_57_2021.pdf

The strengthening of the social dimension of the EU is back on the agenda of European politics. The European Pillar of Social Rights, the revision of the Posted Workers Directive and the initiative for a European minimum wage are interpreted by some as a turning point. However, the road to a more social Europe is still very long. Against that background, this paper formulates social Europe thus: social minimum standards plus a reconfiguration of the internal market and economic and monetary union in a manner compatible with the pillars of the European social model.

 

[Vesper 30,090]

What if American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?

Ezra Klein and four environmental thinkers discuss the limits of politics in facing down the threat to the planet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/magazine/ezra-klein-climate-crisis.html

Of late, I’ve been obsessing over a single question: What if political systems, in the United States and internationally, fail to curb climate change?

It can seem an impolite question, even as it’s the path we’re on. President Biden’s climate agenda is both ambitious and, on its own, insufficient. Its political prospects are mixed at best. The international picture is little better. Only a few countries are on track to meet the goals laid out in the Paris agreement, and none of the major emitters are among them.

That is not to say there is no reason for optimism or hope. Clean-energy and battery technologies are outpacing even the brightest projections from a few years ago. Activist movements worldwide are gathering strength and flexing newly won power. A rising generation understands the urgency of the moment, even if their elders do not. The trends are, broadly, going in the right direction. But they need to move faster.

And so we convened this panel of climate experts with different backgrounds — technological, literary, political, academic — to try to reconcile the reality of our political progress with the scale of the emergency. Ezra Klein

 

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The Participants

Saul Griffith
Chief scientist and founder of both Otherlab and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that advocates rapid electrification to meet our climate goals.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Climate-policy director at the Roosevelt Institute and an author of the Green New Deal.

Sheila Jasanoff
Professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Novelist and author, most recently, of “The Ministry for the Future.”

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Are our political systems even capable?

Ezra Klein: The American Jobs Act, President Biden’s infrastructure bill, includes an ambitious clean-energy standard and huge investments in renewable-energy and electric-car technologies. It is effectively this administration’s big climate bill. Its passage right now certainly isn’t clear. But even if it did pass in its proposed form, how far would it get us on the climate fight?

Rhiana Gunn-Wright: It would certainly be a good start, but it really leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, the scale is simply too small; $900 billion on climate is not enough to catalyze the pace of decarbonization we will need in order to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030, while providing millions of good jobs. That’s more like $10 trillion over 10 years. It isn’t entirely the Biden administration’s fault. The reconciliation process in Congress, just because of the way that it is structured, really forces you to rely really heavily on existing programs. For example, the plan routes some of its investments in the built environment through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program, which has a history of being exploited by developers. It also relies heavily on existing tax credits to fund the building and deployment of clean-energy infrastructure. If the programs that we had were enough to decarbonize, they would have done that already. It is certainly better than what we have now, but there’s still a lot of room to improve.

Saul Griffith: It’s not even remotely close to sufficient. But something extraordinary did happen when the Biden administration came out and said it was aiming for a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It may not be binding, but that is enormously more ambitious than John F. Kennedy standing up and saying we’ll go to the moon by the end of the decade. We knew how to build rockets, and we knew where the moon was. We don’t know all the answers of where we’re going.

Now you see, basically daily, the news stories of automobile companies bringing forward the date of the last time they’re going to produce the internal-combustion-engine car. It’s gone from 2050 for most companies last year to 2030, and some are talking 2025. We might just be at the very beginning of the reinforcing cycle of ambition begetting more commitment, which begets more ambition. We are absolutely not even remotely on track yet. But this, I think, is what it feels like as you start to ramp up.

Gunn-Wright: I mean, there’s definitely momentum, but there’s still a lot of desire to do this work in ways that look and feel familiar and keep power relationships the same as they have been for a very long time. There is a reason that we are talking about moving climate policy through budget reconciliation — not straight-out legislation. It’s because certain people don’t want to get rid of the filibuster. With the American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration was comfortable using deficit spending because it was an acute crisis. That is not the case for the infrastructure package. They don’t actually consider climate to be that type of crisis. And there is still a real desire to have this transformation happen in a way that is painless, and painless for particular people, and to have the same type of people bear the pain that often bear the pain of the system — largely Black, Latino, poor communities.

Klein: Sheila, from your perspective, as someone who thinks about how societies reason and how ideas get legitimacy, do you think we have a process for generating sustainable climate policy nationally or internationally, really at all? Are we looking at a political challenge? Or are we dealing with some deeper absence than that?

Sheila Jasanoff: That’s a huge question. When one hears what Rhiana just had to say about making do with the tools that are already around, one can’t avoid thinking about moving deck chairs on the Titanic. The challenge for politics, I think, is what we in the social sciences call reframing. That is: Are we looking at the problem in the right way at all? And if you were to begin with climate change that way, you’d have to start with the fact that the per capita contribution of greenhouse-gas emissions is not the same across the globe; it’s orders of magnitude different in some parts of the world than others. So if there are people today who contribute next to nothing, shouldn’t we aim to reproduce their lifestyles at scale? Or should we say that those are the lifestyles of the impoverished and that they have to live like people in more developed countries do, and then turn to technology to fix the consequences? There’s something a little absurd in that idea — that after some portion of us poisoned the planet through a set of consumption practices, now we must worry that another six billion people will want to make that same transition by adopting the lifestyle changes that produced the problem in the first place.

Griffith: The historical contributors to the carbon in the atmosphere — the United States and Western Europe — are not going to produce a majority of future emissions. One of the biggest determinants of our climate outcomes is how elegantly India, China and Africa do this transition. That’s four billion people. The U.S. is 300 million people. America has a big role in helping those countries leapfrog some of the mistakes we have made in developing, particularly India and Africa. China is doing a pretty good job by itself.

In the United States, everyone is optimistic because the Ford F-Series trucks, one of the most produced vehicles ever in human history — nearly 40 million of them so far — are now going electric. That’s great news for those people who wish to continue the F-150 lifestyle. But in the background, more is happening. Some 25 million of the 74 million two-wheeled scooters that sold last year were electric. That is far more relevant to Africa, to Asia, because that is the reality of the transportation systems there.

Klein: Optimists say that because of advances in technology, maybe even if the politics fails here, there’s a technological path where we avert the worst consequences of climate change just because innovation is beginning to accelerate so rapidly. Do you think there’s some possibility of that?

Griffith: I think it’s very unlikely that you get there with technology alone. Our politics co-evolved with a century of fossil fuels, and so a huge portion of our regulations still favor the incumbent, which is fossil fuels. I have a lot of optimism that by around 2024 the cost of solar, electric vehicles, batteries, wind and heat pumps convincingly give us the opportunity to save money on everything, basically everywhere. In Australia, where I’m calling in from, one kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar costs about a third of what a kilowatt-hour of grid-delivered electricity does in the U.S. We can make everyone’s energy future cheaper, but politics has to work with technology, which has to work with finance.

‘There is still a real desire to have this transformation happen in a way that is painless, and painless for particular people.’

Klein: Stan, imagining outside the current context is your specialty as a science-fiction novelist, so I’m wondering what you think the weaknesses of our current systems are.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, we are stuck in an international system of nation-states, and we don’t have time to invent and institute any kind of alternative world governance, so we have to use what we’ve got. But we also have the Paris agreement, and climate equity was written into it so that developed rich nations were tasked with paying more and doing more and helping the historically disadvantaged and even colonized nations. Executing all that is, of course, a different story.

Jasanoff: We recently had a president of the United States who simply decided overnight to bow out of the Paris agreement.

Robinson: It is a fragile system. It could become like the League of Nations. In the future, to the extent that there will be historians, they may look back and say it was a good idea that failed. People may look back to our time and say, Here was a crux, and then they blew it. This is the power of the basic science-fictional exercise of looking at our own time as if from the future, thus judging ourselves as actors in creating history. From that imaginary perspective, it can sometimes become blazingly obvious what we should do now. Parochial concerns over quarterly returns or the selfish privileges of currently existing wealthy people fade to insignificance when you take the long view and see us teetering on the edge of causing a mass-extinction event that would hammer all future living creatures.

What happens when the system is under stress?

Klein: Covid functioned, in some ways, as a test run for how our political systems would handle the disruptions of climate change. It was a crisis that experts had warned about for years and years. And we didn’t really prepare at all. And then it hit. And so you’d imagine that the last year has led to a tremendous sharpening of our catastrophic imagination, that the idea that the perils we are told will come are not abstract, that they really do come and they really transform our lives. On the other hand, you can read it the opposite way: It’s a potentially scary lesson in how much external destruction the rich countries, if they can protect themselves, will get used to. How has the pandemic changed your model of how societies will envision and then respond to true catastrophe?

Jasanoff: I have spent 16 months thinking about almost nothing other than what you’re talking about. There was an interesting moment in France when the health minister was being questioned about why the initial modeling of the spread of the disease in France failed. And she said in public testimony that one point their modelers hadn’t reckoned on was that there were direct flights from Wuhan to Paris. This was not in their model. Just pause for a second to consider that: In modeling the spread of the disease, the advisers to the health minister of France didn’t know that there were direct flights from Wuhan to Paris. So, these are moments that make one reflect on the hubris of so-called knowledge. What is it that people are seeing, and what is it that they’re not seeing when contemplating the next catastrophe? And why? Those are, I think, the questions that we should be confronting as well.

Gunn-Wright: I think it’s important to note that in the United States, that resistance to masks and social distancing was not equally racially distributed or equally distributed by class or income. And I do think it’s important when we have takeaways like that to actually note and wonder what that means and what drove that, because it wasn’t happening across the board.

Griffith: I worry that America might learn the wrong lesson from Covid. There’s a lot of optimism there now, because magically the vaccines arrived. I think that’s a fairly natural response. But a similar level of success with climate change — let’s say, staying under two degrees of warming — won’t be easy. The existing machines in the world that burn fossil fuels — the coal plants, natural-gas plants, cars, furnaces and boilers in people’s basements — if they’re allowed to live out their natural life spans, they will emit enough carbon dioxide to take us very close to two degrees. We need very close to perfect execution: When we retire anything that emits carbon dioxide, we must replace it with the thing that won’t emit carbon dioxide.

And that will only get us under two degrees if we have a World War II “arsenal of democracy”-style intervention in the economy. Back then, American manufacturing was ramped up to make the materials to win the war: bullets, tanks, airplanes, Liberty ships. The bullets to win this war are batteries, electric vehicles, offshore wind platforms, wind turbines, solar, rooftop solar and heat pumps. All those industries are about 10 times below the production rates we need to hit this target. No better time to do that than coming out of the pandemic, when unemployment is high and we need to put people back to work.

‘Living in fossil fuels was to live in a smaller world, cocooned in crap. Decarbonization can actually make us more alive.’

 

Jasanoff: The research team I’ve been leading has looked into this, and it turns out that military victor countries tend to use war metaphors for confronting climate change and not military nonparticipants. So the war metaphor was reportedly not used in Sweden at all. That’s quite interesting. It was occasionally used by Angela Merkel, but only to get citizens to remember what a period of shared suffering had been like. So we’ve been talking about imagination. And there’s a serious question: Who is doing this imagining of our collective future?

In the United States, for instance, we favor individual and technological solutions for social problems. In Cambridge, Mass., where I live, we have reconfigured practically every major road in town to make it very difficult for cars and very easy for bikes. But why cars and bikes if the problem is mobility for all? I’m a senior. I’m not going to go riding around Cambridge, doing my shopping at Whole Foods, then bringing it back on a bicycle. So I’m supposed to use Uber — I mean, is that the solution?

Griffith: I am all in favor of public transit, but it is not the only answer. The per-passenger-mile energy consumption of these two-wheeled scooters and mo-peds and electric bicycles, this is far lower than the per-passenger-mile energy cost of public-transit systems. We’re seeing experiments run all over the world in what new mobility options can look like.

I think the great Zoom experiment is going to be more significant than public transport. A huge number of people have realized that an enormous amount of the traveling we do is tedious, expensive and time-consuming and can be eliminated. So there’s a piece of our imagination that was released by the experience of the pandemic. Honestly, I think Stan is on the vanguard. In your novel “The Ministry for the Future,” I particularly loved how you imagined people in the future using dirigibles and slow air transport as the solution to noisy, fast jets.

Robinson: We’re already seeing companies developing airships for short hops between cities, which would greatly reduce the carbon burn for this form of travel without adding too much to the trip time. And speed itself is not of the essence when you can both work and enjoy yourself during these transits.

Because we absolutely have to decarbonize civilization as fast as we can, if that involves slowing down supply chains — meaning profits — and slowing down the economy generally, and slowing down our own personal travel around this planet, so that the planet grows bigger for those of us who do travel, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s good to understand that living in fossil fuels was to live in a smaller world, cocooned in crap. Decarbonization can actually make us more alive.

 

And what if politics does fail?

Klein: Stan, in “The Ministry for the Future,” you imagine the aftermath of a heat wave in India that leads to 20 million deaths. The country begins blasting particulates into the air for a period of time in a desperate effort to bring the temperature down. Violent movements arise that put pressure on political systems by causing property damage and assassinating people who are seen as responsible for climate change. Now, your book is a work of fiction, but of course some people believe that you need more extrapolitical action to prevent the worst from happening. The Swedish scholar Andreas Malm just published a book called “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” arguing for direct property damage as a way to impose pressure on the system and to make the costs of the status quo more visible. Stan, what do you think will happen if politics fails?

Robinson: You can never say politics has failed. It never goes away. I read Zachary Carter’s book about Keynes, “The Price of Peace.” After World War II, everyone realized that a new world had to be set up. They got Bretton Woods. And in the Depression, there was the New Deal. At the time, everybody supported the idea that the rich should pay more in taxes. In 1944, the top marginal rate — above $200,000, which is about $3 million now — was 94 percent. And this rate remained above 90 percent through Eisenhower and a Republican Congress, because after World War II people felt that excessive wealth was morally wrong. I think that should come back if we want a sustainable future.

I feel we’ve got momentum in 2021 that is simply stupendous compared with 2019. It’s like 1978 compared with 1982. It’s one of these rapid cultural transitions that happens from time to time, and I don’t see why there would be any turning back if the momentum gathers even a little bit more.

Klein: The idea about India putting sulfates in the air to cool off the planet isn’t pure science fiction. It is actually pretty frequently invoked as an example of the sort of geoengineering that we may need to do to ameliorate the worst effects of climate change. Stan, you imagine a number of these in your book, including pumping out water from beneath glaciers — can you talk more about that?

Robinson: I mean, sea-level rise is going to happen. We’ve already baked in a certain amount of sea-level rise, and it will be devastating to the coastlines. I was intrigued by this suggestion of a glaciologist — that if we just suck the water out from underneath the big glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, we might go back to an ordinary level of sea-level rise, or at least a much lesser one. And this pumping out of meltwater from underneath glaciers is a known technology that in fact uses similar methods to the oil industry, and might even be something the oil industry could be set to doing, given that it is going to be an ex-industry because of the need to keep oil in the ground.

Klein: As somebody thinks about the science-fiction scenarios for the future, do you think there’s a chance that we don’t act fast enough but do discover and implement subsequent interventions that spare us the worst of the consequences?

Robinson: Throwing dust up into the atmosphere would be, I think, an emergency gesture on a temporary basis, in effect imitating a volcanic eruption and hoping that five years of slightly lower temperatures would save us from brutal heat waves. And if one nation suffers a catastrophic heat-death event and then decides to go this route, no other nation will have any legal or moral standing to object to it. Nor is it clear that it would be bad for civilization or the biosphere. Arguments about moral hazard become irrelevant in such an emergency, and worries about secondary effects are speculative and not supported by what has actually happened after real volcanic explosions.

Klein: Rhiana, geoengineering hasn’t traditionally been part of the Green New Deal. Should it be?

Gunn-Wright: Not in my opinion. And I say this based on the opinions of frontline activists. I don’t live near places where geoengineering would happen. But people who do are very afraid of the ecological consequences. Given our general orientation toward a desire for a silver bullet that doesn’t require much change in how power is distributed, I fear that a lot of money will go there and not toward other things that we know would help but are more difficult to do. So, no, I don’t think it’s right for the Green New Deal.

Jasanoff: I wanted to raise the question of responsibility, which hasn’t come up. I think people around the world see very clearly that we are not equally responsible for emissions. The word “Anthropocene” imagines that there’s a single anthropos and that the ages of humanity are measured according to its collective actions. And I think people’s lived experience is not of a singular humanity but of one that’s very much stratified and unequal. So, will people mobilize on a sufficient scale to make the hard choices? For some people, it’s not a hard choice. They’re already living at a subsistence level. So what are you going to tell them to do?

In a way, these geoengineering ideas are the solutions of the supersaturated mind. Having conceptualized the planet as one, having conceptualized humanity as a unitary anthropos, having conceptualized climate change as a global phenomenon, now all it can think of is a global technological solution.

Klein: But for a lot of people, it is a hard choice, including people who were looking forward to choices that they may now not have. And so let me end on this question: Does the future really have to be one of less? Or can climate change be solved within a context of abundance?

Griffith: I am optimistic that materially all of our lives can improve. It doesn’t mean we have a higher volume of things in our life. We will have more things that last longer and far, far fewer disposable things. But that doesn’t mean you have an empty house and a boring life. It probably means you have beautiful objects that you have a lot better relationship with. We have concepts like the Polynesian mana, in which the value of the object comes from its age and its history, not because of its shininess and newness. I am optimistic that we can bring billions of people up the quality-of-life ladder, but we don’t get there with our existing notions of property, ownership, debt and land use.

Gunn-Wright: I have never figured out a way, particularly as a Black woman, to tell people who have been oppressed and who have seen, you know, different things held up as luxuries or standards that will come to them eventually, that that is not the version of life that they should or can seek. That they have borne all sorts of ills to not get the thing that they thought might be their reward. I think that is incredibly difficult. And I don’t know how one delivers that message or even, as a person, takes that in.

Jasanoff: And no matter what happens, there will be a class of people, all over the planet, who will have the money, the political connections, the insurance to move their houses inland or up the hill or whatever. And who knows, maybe the kind of thinking that we had in the United States back in the 1970s, about the population explosion and the need to control the global population, could make a return. You know, who cares if there is a winnowing out of global humanity if Noah’s ark can be made available for the rich?

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This discussion has been edited and condensed for clarity, with material added from follow-up interviews.

Illustrations by Francesco Muzzi.

 

 

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THE ETHICIST

Should I Hang Out With Someone Whose Political Views I Hate?

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether it’s hypocritical for a liberal to socialize with an increasingly extreme conservative.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/magazine/conservative-friends.html

 

I am a liberal in a blue city in a red state. One of my friends is married to a man who has become increasingly conservative over the past year (an “anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-abortion, Democrats are all idiots and socialists are taking over the country” mind-set), and his posts on social media are becoming more and more extreme. We occasionally socialize as couples. When we are together, I am friendly with him, and we avoid overt political talk, but as his social media becomes more and more extreme, I feel conflicted about continuing to accept invitations to socialize with them. Is it hypocritical of me to socialize with them when I find his personal political views so abhorrent? Name Withheld.

When I was 15 and in Britain for school, I came to know a neighbor of my English grandmother’s. Then in his 60s, he was a right-wing member of Parliament whose views on the major issues of the day were utterly remote from mine. All the same, we enjoyed spending time together — when he took me trout fishing, it always involved more talk than trout — and though politics was far from the only thing we discussed, it wasn’t a topic we avoided. Once, when he drove me to visit the college he had attended (and that I would too, just as he hoped), I spent two full hours trying to persuade him to support an upcoming resolution to maintain the abolition of capital punishment for murder. We must have made an odd pair — a reactionary M.P. with the strapping build of the heavyweight boxing champion he was as an undergraduate; a willowy brown teenager who kept up with what was then known as The Peking Review. Still, as we whizzed past the hedgerows and incurious sheep of the Cotswolds, we carried on a vigorous debate over an issue we both cared a great deal about.

I do understand why people prefer to limit their socializing to people who share their view of the world and to steer clear of the maddeningly misguided. In recent years, certainly, America has reshaped itself in ways that accommodate the tendency. With the rise of “assortative mating,” bankers — to paint in broad strokes — no longer marry secretaries; they marry other bankers. Doctors no longer marry nurses; they marry other doctors. And so on, up and down the lines of income and class. (Although social scientists have argued that this trend has deepened economic inequality, it also reflects substantial and welcome gains in gender equality in the workplace.) More to the point, the United States has become politically sorted: Increasingly, your neighborhood will be predominantly red or blue, not mixed. If racial segregation has diminished somewhat over the past generation, partisan segregation has risen.

And so have partisan identities. Your friend’s husband, that is, has the political views of his tribe. These views, as with any tribal shibboleths, will often matter to him because they are signs of his membership. Maybe a few of his views were arrived at by careful reflection, but he probably couldn’t argue effectively for most of his opinions before an open-minded audience. The trouble is that the same is almost certainly true of you. You have the liberal tribal beliefs and commitments. And — as a substantial body of social-science research suggests — you probably did not acquire them by deep and thoughtful analysis, because you are like most of us. Identity precedes ideology: Who you are determines what you believe.

I’m happy to stipulate that your views are enlightened and his benighted. Still, it’s possible that you and this fellow are in one respect allied — that you are both committed, as citizens, to participating together in the governance of this battered republic of ours. Despite the forces that would keep us socially and even geographically isolated from one another, you each have a reason to try to understand the other tribe; to figure out what its members believe and (to the extent that there are arguments involved) why they believe it. Democracy falters not when we disagree about things but when we lose interest in trying to make sense of the other person’s point of view and in trying to persuade that person of the merits of our own.

Identity precedes ideology: Who you are determines what you believe.

If you took no pleasure in hanging out with this person, you wouldn’t be asking me whether you can go on doing so. And yet you write as if there are only two options here — tolerating his views in silence or cutting him off. Here’s a third option: Stick with this fellow but speak up for your politics. Encourage him to do the same. When we stop talking even to people we know and like because of political disagreements, we’ve abandoned the deliberative-democratic project of governing the republic together.

Not that we should delude ourselves about our prospects for shifting the other person’s shibboleths. At the end of that car trip, my burly interlocutor got out of the car, stretched his legs and told me, almost ruefully: “You may have won all the arguments today. I’m still voting against the resolution.” It passed anyway. And there were many other topics to discuss, from village gossip to high politics, the next time we went fishing.

[NikkiCFC 8,286]

13 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Should I Hang Out With Someone Whose Political Views I Hate?

Absolutely not. That would be hell!

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20 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

Absolutely not. That would be hell!

I have people I interact with across a huge spectrum politically, BUT I draw the line at open neo-nazis, (although I have been in social settings with some, especially Nordfront members here in Sweden, and the conversations we had were, shall we say, interesting, lol, and thank fuck did not escalate to violence), and also numpty, brainwashed fools who are incapable of any original thought and just spew out talking points. I detest braindead parrots, no matter what their politics are.

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Cop beats and tasers a disabled man. Absolutely sickening.

 

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Boris Johnson yet again avoids paying the price for his cavalier attitude

Analysis: despite his exoneration, Mustique freebie is just the latest example of a lifelong disdain for rules

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/08/boris-johnson-yet-again-avoids-paying-price-cavalier-attitude-mustique-freebie-exoneration

 

Boris Johnson has been formally exonerated for his freebie holiday on the island of Mustique at the expense of a Tory donor. But the convoluted case is just the latest evidence of the prime minister’s apparently cavalier attitude to money and where – or whom – it comes from.

He appears to give little thought to how his lifestyle will be funded – “friends” have told journalists of his financial struggles – after a costly divorce from his second wife, Marina Wheeler, and without the £250,000 a year he once earned from writing Daily Telegraph columns.

The prime minister thought the matter of accepting £15,000-worth of accommodation from the Carphone Warehouse co-founder David Ross almost too trivial to mention, insisting he had only declared it voluntarily.

It fits a pattern of behaviour that saw a Conservative peer, Lord Brownlow, initially meeting the costs of the lavish refurbishment of the Downing Street flat by the designer Lulu Lytle, before questions were raised about the arrangement and Johnson declared that he was meeting the costs himself.

Johnson’s new independent adviser on ministers’ interests, Christopher Geidt, called the prime minister’s approach to that project “unwise”. The prime minister’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings claimed the initial plan for paying for the refurbishment had been “possibly illegal”.

Even in the last parliament, the committee for standards said Johnson had “an over-casual attitude to obeying the rules” – uncannily echoing the sentiment of his Eton housemaster, who wrote to the prime minister’s father in 1982: “I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.”

Almost 40 years later Johnson still appears, at best, unconcerned about following the rules – or, now that he is a public figure, about the importance of appearing to act with propriety.

His former close friend Jennifer Arcuri – who claims to have had a romantic relationship with him – received taxpayer-backed support for her tech business and accompanied the then mayor of London on a trade mission. Johnson has insisted there was “no interest to declare”.

He awarded a peerage to the Conservative donor Peter Cruddas despite the House of Lords watchdog having suggested Cruddas – who had previously been implicated in a cash-for-access scandal, something he has consistently denied – should not be eligible. Cruddas gave the Tory party £500,000 several days after receiving the peerage.

Johnson declined to sack Matt Hancock last month despite the health secretary having apparently failed to declare a personal relationship with a non-executive director at his own department – not to mention being snapped busting lockdown rules.

It followed the prime minister’s defence of Priti Patel in the face of a finding from his previous ethics adviser, Sir Alex Allan, that her conduct “amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying”. Allan subsequently resigned.

Johnson also defended Robert Jenrick after he was accused of skewing a planning decision in favour of a Tory donor; and Gavin Williamson, who was sacked by Theresa May for leaking security secrets – something he staunchly denies – but restored to a place in the cabinet after helping Johnson to whip MPs into line during his 2019 leadership race.

Johnson’s supporters insist there has been no wrongdoing, pointing to the various official reports, including on the Mustique break, that have formally cleared him of rule-breaking. They put the financial chaos down to mere scattiness, and the defence of his cabinet colleagues to loyalty.

Received wisdom at Westminster says Johnson’s ambiguous relationship with the rules the little people follow is priced-in politically. Certainly, his colourful private life was no secret when he swept to a landslide majority in 2019.

But opposition parties are beginning to see a glimmer of hope that the sheer accretion of stories such as these will eventually help them to topple the caricature of the prime minister as a harmlessly lovable rogue.

Edited July 8, 2021 by Vesper