BeyondGeography
BeyondGeography's JournalJosh Marshall: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose - Scenes from The Annals of Authoritarianism
Its another version of debt ceiling hostage taking. Youre going to fold because deep down you know were willing to wreck the country to get what we want. We both know that. And we both not youre not wiling to do that. So weve already won. All were talking about is when you realize it.
This is obviously a fools game. Agreeing to play by those rules means youve already lost. I dont particularly care about McCarthy or Scalise who thrived under this system before it consumed them. Who cares about them? But as we discussed a couple days ago, this is just is just a microcosm of the authoritarian pathogen looming over and threatening the whole American Republic. Its the use of force over systems of rules. So in that sense it matters quite a lot.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/heads-i-win-tails-you-lose-scenes-in-the-annals-of-authoritarianism
Longer Commutes, Shorter Lives: The Costs of Not Investing in America
(NYT gift link; long but well worth the read)
Alternative headline: Chronicle of our Republican-led decline.
In their frustration, many embraced a diagnosis that a group of conservative intellectuals had been offering for decades, mostly without winning converts. It held that the post-New Deal United States had put too much faith in government regulation and not enough in the power of the market to allocate resources efficiently. These intellectuals included Milton Friedman and Robert Bork, while the politician who successfully sold their vision was Reagan. The new consensus has become known as neoliberalism, a word that in recent years has turned into a catchall epithet to describe the views of moderate Democrats and conservatives. But the word is nonetheless meaningful. The neoliberal revolution in economic policy changed the countrys trajectory. After 1980, regulators allowed companies to grow much larger, often through mergers. The government became hostile to labor unions. Tax rates on the affluent plummeted. And Washington pulled back from the major investments it had been making.
Federal spending on research and development, which had already come down from its post-Eisenhower high, declined in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, it has accounted for less than half as large a share of G.D.P. as it did 60 years ago. The countrys roads, bridges, rail networks and air-traffic system have all atrophied hence the lengthening of travel times. The share of national income devoted to government spending on education stopped rising in the 1970s and has remained stagnant since. Less selective colleges, which tend to educate working-class students, tend to be especially lacking in resources.
Other countries, meanwhile, have passed by the United States. Every American generation born between the late 1800s and mid-1900s was the most educated in the world. Americans under age 50 no longer hold this distinction. The lack of progress among American men has been especially stark. Mens wages, not coincidentally, have risen extremely slowly in recent decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/magazine/us-public-investment.html?unlocked_article_code=b5q5gdbIBQJ44blmtt0kK9ZNSfbw3maBrAL898CSWtoZSWV7wQ_mwH8blyNCxqgkZHQZNsRaepLVA6djdcwM6isVNnuu_N_e8kRTod9MJK5Oi4HRbPesiOZHDchsC2SApOMsOSVI08BvZm0QSCwlcDadO3r6yrAU8EKNzAMMoAZ7Jl2a8xtso6uWFmIkVwTXClkDNp6XPlqIzi4IRgLEeMqZQ4EX8JGThWgySgQnI7wPZn_s8W9Vma1hweA-cuY1by4DAzZuqwydo154tdme1fEgGLlCdYUnRjWEPA1hFO4jAgUexMT1XmxX8Dv6W1f7sshfwU4PgkVUfG-KFmfH&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Stevie Wonder - Higher Ground
?si=4QWCQ_WYznvkT1i2Earth to Trumpers and all their enablers: This is what happens when you tear a country apart
Israelis Can No Longer Afford Vicious Infighting (gift link)In the past five years, as Israel dissolved government after government and held divided election after divided election, and even more so in the past year since Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister, the nation has been busy tearing itself apart from within. The Jewish state seems to have forgotten its second role in the world, as a place that embodies the idea of Jewish solidarity. Israelis instead found themselves engaged in an all-out war not against terrorists but against themselves.
Over the past nearly 40 weeks, as the battle over the judiciary overhaul surfaced, violently, old questions of identity and religious affiliation, as well as ethnicity, class and privilege, shook the populace. Is Israel more Jewish or more democratic? Many in Israel experienced real anxiety: The judiciary change, presented by the most right-wing government in the countrys history, seemed to threaten the liberal nature of their beloved country. They felt that they were fighting for the soul of the nation and that in this fight, all bets were off and nothing was sacred including the once-untouchable idea of shirking reserve duty in the army. Despite the turmoil in the streets, the ruling coalition refused to accept the fact that with a slim majority, it could not enforce such big changes without consensus, plowing ahead with ever more anxiety-inducing policies day by day.
As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy. And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/opinion/international-world/israel-hamas-attack.html?unlocked_article_code=4v6zGcgQLMdm-_rvwo6RxNdESvFfn0Y_JMcWp6AhEJ7LN3B5wzxlRu2LUxusUpGK0hHvKr2Bkyb_RiA_FWCWVmh4jt3YDs7o06u2XOXgtgmtdTERexwkBczuzI3apVGD5O5yaF3dUthwcYjd18koWfatgDiohN8-Ohs5AsRk0Vy4OpnH8lMyvzCViuW0vxiIkCtPPEGbSLkia6Ub9Ae5Eq-M5a1nA2rk5-1tHoSGLFwuqoAEsbr-dUrkWtcm6FJwoU5-xp5Nt80Yjl1gWiLiXNj552P3tcE2Gc_8gSCxdBRpfIINVrgz6XCmH2sobLzeB-uWjGkr2frUv6WK92KrDdj4lV_Cjpziqwci6sOkTanc&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The multi-polar world is here, see if you like it better
The Global Context of the Hamas-Israel War (gift link)Perhaps the biggest damage to American prestige has come from Donald Trump, who has rejected the very idea that the U.S. should lead the world. Trump withdrew from international agreements and disdained successful alliances like NATO. He has signaled that, if he reclaims the presidency in 2025, he may abandon Ukraine. In the case of Israel, Trump encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israels prime minister, to show little concern for Palestinian interests and instead seek a maximal Israeli victory. Netanyahu, of course, did not start this new war. Hamas did, potentially with support from Iran, the groups longtime backer, and Hamas committed shocking human rights violations this past weekend, captured on video. But Netanyahus extremism has contributed to the turmoil between Israel and Palestinian groups like Hamas
I understand that some readers may question whether the long era of American power thats now fading was worth celebrating. Without question, it included some terrible injustices, be they in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala or elsewhere. But it also made possible the most peaceful era in recorded history, with a sharp decline in deaths from violence, as Steven Pinker noted in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. And the number of people living in a democracy surged. Smith concluded his Substack newsletter on the new Middle Eastern war this way:
Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of American exceptionalism, to ridicule Americas self-arrogated function of world police and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/briefing/hamas-israel-war.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Ravel - Oiseaux Tristes (Sad Birds)
?si=7lEN9g0C1h_ZZEzeJeff Stein/WaPo: White House signals support for House bill, optimistic on Ukraine aid
https://wapo.st/3ZE1jId
Where the New Identity Politics Went Wrong
Dont let right-wing culture warriors obscure the fact that some ideas behind this progressive ideology have genuine problems.By Yascha Mounk
As the identity synthesis has gained in influence, its flaws have become harder to ignore. A striking number of progressive advocacy groups, for example, have been consumed by internal meltdowns in recent years. We used to want to make the world a better place, a leader of one progressive organization complained recently. Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at. As institutions such as the Sierra Club and the ACLU have implemented the norms inspired by the identity synthesis, they have had more difficulty serving their primary missions.
The identity synthesis is also starting to remake public policy in ways that are more likely to create a society of warring tribes. In the early months of the pandemic, for example, a key advisory committee to the CDC recommended that states prioritize essential workers in the rollout of scarce vaccines rather than the elderly, in part because racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented among seniors. Not only did this policy, according to the CDCs own models, have the probable outcome of increasing the overall number of Americans who would perish in the pandemic; it also placed different ethnic groups in competition with one another for lifesaving medications.
When decision makers appear out of touch with the values and priorities of most citizens, demagogues thrive. The well-founded fears roused by the election of Trump accelerated the ascendancy of the identity synthesis in many elite institutions. Conversely, the newfound hold that these ideas now have over such institutions makes it more likely that he might win back the White House in 2024. The identity synthesis and far-right populism may at first glance appear to be polar opposites; in political practice, one is the yin to the others yang.
More at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/woke-ideology-history-origins-flaws/675454/
Ex-Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson claims Rudy Giuliani groped her on January 6
Source: The Guardian
Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump aide turned crucial January 6 witness, says in a new book that she was groped by Rudy Giuliani, who was like a wolf closing in on its prey, on the day of the attack on the Capitol.
Describing meeting with Giuliani backstage at Donald Trumps speech near the White House before his supporters marched on Congress in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Hutchinson says the former New York mayor turned Trump lawyer put his hand under my blazer, then my skirt.
I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh, she writes. He tilts his chin up. The whites of his eyes look jaundiced. My eyes dart to [Trump adviser] John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin. I fight against the tension in my muscles and recoil from Rudys grip
filled with rage, I storm through the tent, on yet another quest for Mark.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/20/rudy-giuliani-grope-cassidy-hutchinson-claim-january-6-trump-aide?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
A Trip to Ukraine Clarified the Stakes. And They're Huge.
By Thomas Friedman
Because if Ukraine can escape this war even if it has to temporarily cede some territory to Putin and can complete the anti-corruption and other regulatory reforms that are required for it to join the European Union, the brainpower, agricultural power and military power that Ukraine represents would serve as an important model and magnet for Russians wanting a different future, not to mention other shaky Balkan states.
Which is why, as much as I value NATO as a security alliance, I have never lost sight of how the European Union which Americans tend to know little about has managed to quietly build itself into its own kind of United States of Europe, another great center of free markets, free people democracy and the rule of law. To be sure, the E.U. has plenty of its own problems managing day to day. But considering Europes long history of fratricide, the E.U. is a quiet, boring miracle. Adding Ukraine to it would make it only stronger.
Indeed, as Ive thought about what could be the most meaningful and painful punishment for Putin and his war crimes, I decided it would be for him to be sentenced to sit in the Kremlin for the rest of his life, hiding from coup plotters and having to look out at a Ukraine that is a secure and flourishing member of the single largest democratic, free market/free travel zone in the world the E.U while Putins citizens would be left with the freedom to vacation and invest in North Korea and Iran.
That would be Vladimir Putins nightmare. Our job is to help make it come true.
(Gift link) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/ukraine-war-putin.html?unlocked_article_code=_shXNurOe-J5qx42jNmZw_c27LLzewm3ayHlLWSjNoVqsPQsBKICwIf-7N3SPpYazeF78nsy9Ir0Y4vZZAyRAgSG2GE8o-OL-0O0G0YquQ9W71DVSYnaUWktLyg84e7lPabKIMPdN_Efdzn7hE7RU40kGLiRRXRvbmYrO1dzmL1k4gvIfLmpJ2uDWSM_nMUHvGdJ3ZMlVsnwb_Nx8Q25A9V2didrXkevIs58w_VMqcvpTSN5KyMgF2d1kLAYhLxN5tHpABRcE3UVaodxyVdyG9MGXhwtgqCNvwGbBmCeAJNt0iRDrP3R2iws4JYDv3zbTL1tvKgRJfI3D_s&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
This is as good as it will ever get from Friedman. Highly recommend.
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