#Partisan politics in contemporary America
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How do you imprison an ex-president with lifetime Secret Service protection?
If Trump is convicted, his Secret Service protection may be an obstacle to his imprisonment.
All former US presidents, including Donald Trump, are provided Secret Service protection for life — technically this entitlement and protocol applies, even if Trump were to be convicted and sentenced to prison or home confinement.
By Spencer S. Hsu, Carol D. Leonnig and Tom Jackman
The Washington Post - August 4, 2023
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/04/trump-criminal-cases-prison-secret-service/
This article originally appeared in The Washington Post August 4, 2023. It was republished in Australia by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - August 5, 2023:
YouTube video >> Please Explain Podcast - Inside Politics: Is Donald Trump going to jail? [Podcast (televised) 4 August 2023 / 18mins.+35secs.]:
From the newsrooms of The Age and SMH, Please Explain Podcast provides daily insight to the stories that drive the world.
youtube
On Tuesday 1 August 2023 in the Federal District Court in Washington DC, special counsel Jack Smith filed an indictment against former US president Donald Trump, for his role in the violent aftermath of the 2020 US election.
Trump faces four criminal charges related to alleged conspiracies to overturn the results of the 2020 election and obstruct the process of certification of those results on January 6 2021, the day of the violent Capitol riot.
If convicted, Trump could potentially go to jail for decades.
Please Explain Podcast host Jacqueline Maley talks with North America correspondent Farrah Tomazin and international editor Peter Hatcher on the latest charges against Donald Trump.
Try looking at the Trump legal saga without congratulating yourself.
How the Modern Meritocracy made Trump inevitable.
By David Brooks
This article originally appeared in The New York Times August 2, 2023. It was republished in Australia by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - August 7, 2023:
#Youtube#World politics#US politics#Donald Trump#Donald Trump faces Federal conspiracy charges#US Secret Service protection of ex-president Donald Trump#US special counsel Jack Smith#‘Please Explain Podcast’ host Jacqueline Maley#North America correspondent Farrah Tomazin#International news editor Peter Hatcher#Cartoon by Matt Golding#Democracy#Democracy vs. authoritarianism#Partisan politics in contemporary America#Class warfare & political polarisation in contemporary America#Culture wars in contemporary America
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The Contemporary Intellectual Challenges Within Republican Politics
The age of idiots: "Are Republican politicians dumb? Let's break down the details for better understanding."
The Republican Party in the United States is facing significant intellectual challenges, particularly from within its ranks. The rise of the so-called "MAGA" (Make America Great Again) movement, spearheaded by former President Donald Trump and his ardent supporters, has brought to the forefront a concerning trend of anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, and a disregard for empirical evidence.
The MAGA Movement: A Departure from Reason
The MAGA movement, which has gained a strong foothold within the Republican Party, represents a departure from traditional conservative principles rooted in reason, logic, and intellectual discourse. Instead, it has embraced a brand of populism that often rejects expertise, dismisses inconvenient facts, and promotes a cult-like devotion to its figurehead, Donald Trump.
Prominent MAGA supporters such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump Jr., J.D. Vance, Ron Johnson, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Scott Perry, Kari Lake, Greg Abbott, and Ted Cruz have been at the forefront of propagating conspiracy theories, spreading disinformation, and undermining faith in democratic institutions.
The Denial of Reality
One of the most concerning aspects of the MAGA movement is its blatant denial of reality and its dismissal of empirical evidence. The refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, despite overwhelming evidence of its legitimacy, is a prime example of this dangerous trend.
Members of the MAGA movement have perpetuated the baseless claim of widespread voter fraud, even in the face of numerous court rulings, audits, and investigations that have found no evidence to support their allegations. This willful disregard for facts and the rule of law undermines the very foundations of American democracy.
The Erosion of Intellectual Discourse
The MAGA movement has also contributed to the erosion of intellectual discourse within the Republican Party. Instead of engaging in substantive debates and reasoned arguments, its adherents often resort to ad hominem attacks, whataboutism, and the demonization of those who dare to challenge their beliefs.
This hostility towards intellectual rigor and critical thinking has alienated many conservative thinkers and academicians, further exacerbating the party's intellectual challenges. The result is a political environment where emotionally charged rhetoric and conspiracy theories take precedence over evidence-based policymaking and rational debate
Threats to Social Cohesion and National Stability
The intellectual challenges within the Republican Party, fueled by the MAGA movement, pose significant threats to social cohesion and national stability. The promotion of divisive rhetoric, the demonization of perceived "enemies," and the rejection of established facts and institutions can lead to a further polarization of society and a breakdown of shared values and trust in democratic processes.
Moreover, the embrace of conspiracy theories and the normalization of disinformation can erode the foundations of an informed citizenry, which is essential for the proper functioning of a democratic society. When truth and reality are subjugated to partisan interests and personal agendas, the ability to engage in constructive dialogue and find common ground becomes increasingly difficult.
The Way Forward: Embracing Intellectual Integrity
To address these intellectual challenges, the Republican Party must recommit itself to the principles of reason, evidence-based policymaking, and respect for democratic institutions. This requires a willingness to reject conspiracy theories, disinformation, and the demonization of political opponents.
Additionally, the party must foster an environment that values intellectual discourse, welcomes diverse perspectives, and encourages critical thinking. This means embracing dissenting voices, engaging in substantive debates, and rejecting the notion that loyalty to a particular individual or ideology supersedes the pursuit of truth and the common good.
Ultimately, the path forward for the Republican Party lies in reclaiming its intellectual integrity and recommitting itself to the principles of reason, evidence, and democratic values. Only by doing so can it address the contemporary intellectual challenges it faces and restore its credibility as a party of serious thinkers and policymakers.
#politics#donald trump#joe biden#potus#scotus#heritage foundation#trump#democracy#democrats#usa#usa news#usa politics#united states#maga morons#maga cult#maga#republican#republicans
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Moments before the kickoff of the 118th United States Congress in January, incoming GOP leaders ripped down Nancy Pelosi’s post-insurrection magnetometers, which had stopped at least one Republican, Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, from entering the House floor with a handgun. The first meeting of the House Natural Resources Committee, held on February 1, devolved into partisan vitriol as Republicans reversed an explicit ban on members bringing firearms into their hearings. Soon, AR-15 pins started popping up on rank-and-file lapels. Then, two weeks later, a bill was introduced to make the mass-shooter-approved AR-15 the “national gun of the United States.”
This may be Joe Biden’s Washington, but the US Capitol appears to be, once again, under the firm grip of the gun lobby. With repeated threats of federal government defaults and shutdowns consuming Washington throughout 2023, little attention has been paid to specific agency-by-agency spending proposals, including a House Republican proposal to zero out funding for gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That effort, part of a House appropriations bill, was postponed after Congress passed a short-term extension to fund the federal government into early next year. But that doesn't mean it won't return then, with powerful Republican lawmakers painting the CDC's research as overtly partisan.
“I think it may have a political component, and that's my concern,” Representative Robert Aderholt, an Alabama Republican, tells WIRED. He’s known as a cardinal on Capitol Hill because he chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, which is tasked with producing the nation’s largest domestic funding measure, including control of the CDC’s budget, each year.
The powerful appropriator isn’t thoroughly versed in the gun violence research his subcommittee is trying to defund, but Aderholt is skeptical anyway. “If it were just honest, innocent research, then I wouldn’t have a problem,” Aderholt says. “But I have some concerns with the way that it’s being handled under this administration.”
Thing is, no one really knows what story the CDC research will tell. It’s only been around for three years after nearly a quarter-century of congressional prohibition under the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which essentially barred the CDC from examining the roots of the uniquely American scourge of gun violence.
“This is about public health,” Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the labor committee, tells WIRED. “We haven’t had it for 20 years. Think about all the research that was done about seatbelts and prevention. So I think about what’s happening with the uptick in gun violence, which is unbelievable … we need to do the research to help us be able to prevent that.”
In 2018, lawmakers upended the Dickey Amendment, explicitly clarifying that the will of Congress is for the CDC to research the contemporary weaponization of America. But federal dollars—which, contrary to GOP concerns, are still strictly forbidden from being used to promote gun control—didn’t start flowing to researchers until 2021. Democrats have pushed for $50 million annually to research America’s second-leading cause of death for people 18 years old or younger. (The first is motor vehicle accidents, which Congress devoted $109.7 million to research in the 2022 fiscal year.) But for the past three years, they’ve only been able to squeeze $25 million a year—split between the CDC and National Institutes of Health—out of Republican senators.
With more than 39,000 gun-related deaths so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, America’s on pace to endure another record-setting amount of carnage by year’s end, which you wouldn’t know from the giddily gun-friendly mood on the House side of the Capitol. “I think the Republicans are just nuts on this, you know, the extremes,” Mike Thompson, a Democratic representative from California, tells WIRED. Nuts or not, Republicans control the House.
Even through the tears stemming from America’s recent uptick in gun violence—including homicides, suicides, and mass shootings—the past three years have been an exciting time for researchers in this space, because when the federal government leads, university research follows. The two-plus decades drought has rippled through academia.
“People weren't going into this field because you couldn't make a career in it,” Andrew Morral, who runs RAND Corporation’s Gun Policy in America Initiative, tells WIRED. “It’s the kind of thing where it takes a fair amount of research before you start getting believable findings. I mean, you can have a study or two that show something, but in social science, it's very hard for one or two studies to persuade anyone.”
Morral is also director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, which is philanthropically endowed with $21 million earmarked for firearm violence prevention research. A few years back, he led a conference with “30 to 100 people.” At the start of the month, when they held their annual meeting in Chicago, there were 750 attendees, including some 300 presenters whose studies ranged from how “guns provide access to sources of life meaning” for some Floridians to whether there’s any correlation between heat waves and shootings.
“A lot of new questions are being asked and new ways of looking at things—this just wasn't possible five years ago,” Morral says. “There [are] people coming into the field now, and that's what the money is doing. It's making it possible to get this field launched. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit here, but it's going to take a lot of research to start getting persuasive findings and it's starting to happen.”
In the wake of horrific mass shootings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, last year, before the GOP recaptured the House, Congress passed the sweeping Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), aimed at improving the nation’s background check system, stymieing gun traffickers, protecting domestic violence survivors, and enhancing mental health services in local communities and schools from coast to coast.
The measure includes billions for mental health, $250 million for community violence intervention programs, and $300 million for violence prevention in the nation’s schools. It also recognizes the federal deficiency in school safety research by creating a Federal School Safety Clearinghouse, envisioned as a repository for the best “evidence-based” research for keeping violence off American school grounds.
That best-practices clearinghouse for schools was a GOP-sponsored provision that made it into the BSCA, but, as WIRED reported last summer, studying gun violence wasn’t a part of negotiations on the measure aimed at curbing gun violence. This latest effort by House Republicans to effectively bar the CDC from researching gun violence has social scientists worried about the real-life consequences of turning off the federal funding tap again. The two Senate Republicans who negotiated the BSCA aren’t worried.
“People misuse research every day,” Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, tells WIRED. The other Republican who had a seat at the head table for last summer’s gun negotiations is one of minority leader Mitch McConnell’s top lieutenants, John Cornyn of Texas—a leading contender for replacing the ailing GOP leader in the Senate—who shrugs off CDC gun violence research. “I don't think there's any shortage of research in that area,” Cornyn tells WIRED. But he bifurcates gun violence research from gun violence prevention. “We haven't been able to figure out how to solve all the crimes. Basically, we've tried to deter them, we've tried to investigate and prosecute them, but we haven't been able to figure out how to prevent them. So that's the basic problem, I think.”
Democrats agree. They also say the reason for that “basic problem” is clear: The CDC—through the chilling effect the federal prohibition had on academia over 24 years—has failed to foster a robust research environment to accompany America’s robust gun culture. But Democrats aren’t looking to pass reforms this Congress. Sure, they want to. But the House is barely performing at its normal rate of functional-dysfunctionality these days (just ask newly-former House speaker Kevin McCarthy). Senate Democrats are willing to have a gun violence prevention debate, but as of now, many say there’s no reason to try and debate House Republicans.
“They're not writing bills that are designed to pass the Senate in order to get signed by the president. They're literally throwing red meat to the fringe on every conceivable issue. That's just not serious,” Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who was at the center of last summer’s gun reform negotiations, tells WIRED. “At some point, they're going to have to figure out how to pass a bill with us, but they haven't reached that space yet.”
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The Rise of the Young, Liberal, Nonwhite Republican?
The Republican coalition isn’t quite what it used to be. For decades, white college graduates gradually exited red America while non-college-educated whites drifted in. Donald Trump’s nomination then accelerated this long-run trend, increasing the GOP’s advantage with working-class whites in the secular north. In 2020, meanwhile, Trump made inroads with Hispanic voters, thinning the Democratic Party’s margin with that heterogeneous demographic by 8 percentage points.
In a new analysis of survey data, the New York Times maps the contours of the contemporary Republican electorate. Some of its findings give conservatives cause for concern. The new GOP coalition has considerable internal ideological tensions. The party now derives 12 percent of its support from a group that the paper dubs “blue-collar populists”: a mostly northern, socially moderate, economically populist contingent whose attachment to Republican politics derives primarily from their rightwing views on race and immigration, and personal affection for Donald Trump. In the Electoral College, this constituency punches above its weight, as it is disproportionately concentrated in the Rust Belt’s battlegrounds.
A majority of this group supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage. This aversion to bible-thumping moralism helped tie a segment of these voters to the Democratic Party before Trump’s emergence. To the extent that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade increases the salience of reproductive rights, and Trump’s eventual exit from GOP politics weakens blue-collar populists’ emotional identification with the party, Republicans could lose ground with them. Indeed, in last year’s midterm elections, Democrats performed better in heavily blue-collar Midwest states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than they did nationally.
But the New York Times-Siena College poll also gives Democrats some cause for anxiety. The survey suggests that nonwhite, working-class Americans are starting to vote more like their light-skinned peers. In 2020, nonwhite, non-college-educated voters backed Joe Biden over Trump by a 48-point margin. Today, this group backs by Biden by merely 16 points, according to the survey. This erosion in the Democrats’ support among nonwhite voters leaves Biden and Trump tied at 43 percent nationally.
The realignment of some nonwhite voters appears to be partially driven by self-identified conservatives cutting ties with the party of their parents in favor of the one best aligned with their social views. In the Times survey, three quarters of nonwhite, non-college-educated voters identified as moderate and conservative. Historically, the Democratic Party has relied on the support of Hispanic and (especially) Black voters who lean right on most policy questions but whose racial identities and familial attachments have tethered them to blue America. In 2020, Democrats bled many such voters, as Trump won over right-leaning Latinos. The Times survey suggests a continuation of this trend.
More surprisingly, the poll suggests that Republicans are winning a non-negligible percentage of young, nonwhite voters with left-of-center views on public policy. According to the Times’s Nate Cohn, eight percent of Republican voters are “newcomers,” a subset characterized by moderate-to-liberal views on economics, immigration, race, and social issues. Only about 60 percent of this group is white, and a quarter are younger than 30.,
In their policy views, these voters resemble Democrats. Only a minority identify as conservative, and most support immigration reform and transgender rights. And yet they are strong Republican partisans and supporters of Donald Trump. The source of this allegiance is unclear. But of the six types of Republicans that Cohn identified, they were among the most emphatically anti- “woke.”,,
Now, we’re looking at one small subset of voters from a single poll. The margin of error here is so high that the existence of this voter group could be illusory. But it does seem possible that, among America’s youngest voters, the most overbearing forms of progressive discourse have acquired more political salience than concrete questions of public policy.,
Regardless, there has long been reason to worry that the Democratic Party would struggle to perpetually maintain its landslide margins among nonwhite voters in general, and Black ones in particular. Keeping 90-plus percent of any subgroup united in one partisan camp takes work. The reason Democrats have managed to perennially win that high of a share of African-American voters — despite considerable ideological and attitudinal diversity within that demographic — is not that each individual African-American Democrat concluded that the GOP was hostile to people like them through their own personal ruminations on current affairs. Rather, as political scientists Ismail K. White and Cheryl N. Laird argue in their book, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, the Black bloc vote is a product of “racialized social constraint” — which is to say, the process by which African-American communities internally police norms of political behavior through social rewards and penalties. In their account, the exceptional efficacy of such norm enforcement within the Black community reflects the extraordinary degree of Black social cohesion that slavery and segregation fostered.,
If this thesis is correct, then it would follow that the erosion of African-Americans’ social isolation, and the declining cultural influence of community institutions such as the Black church, would weaken racialized social constraint, and thus narrow the Democratic Party’s margin with Black voters. And it is plausible that a similar phenomenon might occur within Hispanic communities with longtime ties to the Democrats.,
In such a scenario, one thing we’d expect to see is more political diversity among younger non-white voters, who came of age at a time of greater social atomization and racial integration, and are less likely to regularly attend church or have an ethnically homogenous social world. This relaxation of ethnic social constraints could make it easier for ideologically conservative nonwhites to support the Republican Party. But it could also introduce more random variation into the voting behavior of younger, nonwhite Americans. Uncompelled by ancestral partisan attachments, some voters may be more likely to heed idiosyncratic (or irrational) political impulses, such as those that would compel a self-identified liberal to support Donald Trump.,
As noted above, there are plenty of political trends that look favorable for Democrats, above all the exceptional liberalism of the Zoomer and Millennial generations writ large. But if Trump does manage to win reelection next year, there’s a good chance that nonwhite voters’ loosening attachments to their inherited partisan identities will be a big part of the story.
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JD Vance Rallies Trump Base with Fiery Conservative Rhetoric in Pennsylvania
In a recent political gathering in Leesport, Pennsylvania, JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio and potential vice presidential candidate, delivered a speech that underscored the growing divide in American politics. Vance's rally, held at a livestock fair, drew approximately 350 supporters and highlighted the increasingly polarized nature of the upcoming November election. The event, set against the backdrop of rural Pennsylvania, saw Vance adopting a highly conservative stance. His speech primarily focused on criticizing Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, mentioning her name an astounding 53 times in just 45 minutes. This repetitive strategy seemed designed to galvanize the Republican base and paint a stark contrast between the two parties' visions for America.
Matthew Hatcher / Getty Images Vance's rhetoric centered around three main points of contention: immigration, inflation, and Harris's alleged avoidance of media scrutiny. By emphasizing these issues, he aimed to portray the Democratic ticket as out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans, particularly those in swing states like Pennsylvania. The senator's approach reflects a broader trend in Republican campaigning, where loyalty to former President Donald Trump remains a central theme. Vance praised Trump's leadership, particularly highlighting his response to what was described as an assassination attempt in July. This narrative, whether factual or embellished, serves to reinforce Trump's image as a resilient and fearless leader among his supporters.
Supporters of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Ohio Senator JD Vance await hs arrival at the Berks County Fairgrounds on September 21, 2024 in Leesport, Pennsylvania for a rally. (Photo by Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images) Interestingly, the rally also shed light on how Trump's base perceives the various legal challenges and controversies surrounding the former president. Attendees dismissed or downplayed allegations ranging from the January 6 Capitol riot to Trump's civil conviction for financial misrepresentation. This steadfast support demonstrates the deep-rooted loyalty Trump commands among his followers, who often view these issues through a partisan lens. The event in Leesport also highlighted the geographical and ideological divide in American politics. While Vance rallied supporters in rural Pennsylvania, the Democratic campaign was likely focusing on urban centers and suburbs. This spatial separation underscores the two parallel realities that seem to exist in contemporary American political discourse. Vance's speech and the crowd's reactions also touched upon other contentious issues such as abortion rights. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was framed as a positive development, with supporters arguing that it rightfully returned power to individual states. This stance on reproductive rights aligns with the broader conservative agenda and appeals to the Republican base. As the November election approaches, rallies like Vance's in Pennsylvania serve as a barometer for the political climate in crucial swing states. The intense focus on criticizing the opposition, coupled with unwavering support for Trump, suggests that the Republican strategy revolves around energizing their base rather than appealing to undecided voters. In conclusion, JD Vance's rally in Pennsylvania offers a glimpse into the Republican campaign strategy for the upcoming election. By adopting a strongly conservative stance and aligning closely with Trump, Vance and other Republican figures are betting on the power of their base to secure victory in key battleground states. As both parties continue to campaign, the stark differences in their approaches and messages are likely to further polarize an already divided electorate. Read the full article
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The Democrat Party Hates America is a provocative and incendiary title that immediately commands attention. Written by Mark R. Levin, a well-known conservative commentator and author, this book dives headfirst into a full-scale critique of the Democratic Party, alleging that its policies and actions are fundamentally at odds with American values and interests. Levin’s compelling narrative is designed not just to captivate readers but to challenge deeply entrenched beliefs, offering a stark examination of the ideological rifts that define contemporary American politics. In an era rife with political polarization, The Democrat Party Hates America seeks to provide clarity and perspective for conservatives who feel marginalized and vilified. Leveraging a blend of historical analysis, current events, and partisan critique, Levin positions this book as a vital resource for those looking to understand and counter the influence of progressive politics. By dissecting the Democratic Party's strategies and rhetoric, he aims to reveal what he views as the party’s detrimental impact on the nation, thus equipping readers with the intellectual ammunition needed to engage in informed political discourse. This book attempts to solve the problem of ideological disorientation by framing the Democratic Party's policies as antithetical to the principles upon which America was founded. ## Plot The plot of *The Democrat Party Hates America* meticulously analyzes various historical and contemporary events to argue that the Democratic Party has consistently acted against the best interests of the United States. It delves into pivotal moments such as the party's policies during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, and the modern socio-political climate. Through a linear progression of events, the book frames the Democratic Party's actions as attempts to degrade American values and destabilize the nation's foundational principles. Specific case studies, such as the controversy over voter ID laws and healthcare reform, exemplify the author's contention that the party's actions have led to societal division and economic instability. ## Characters In *The Democrat Party Hates America*, political figures from various historical periods are given close scrutiny. Figures such as Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson are analyzed for their policies and their impacts on the nation's trajectory. The book also brings to the forefront modern-day politicians like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden, scrutinizing their legislative records and public statements. Through detailed examination of these characters, the book attempts to draw a continuous line of ideological consistency that allegedly undermines America's core values. Each political figure is portrayed not only as an individual but also as a representative of broader party strategies and philosophies. ## Writing Style The writing style of *The Democrat Party Hates America* is both assertive and polemical, designed to persuade readers through a combination of rhetorical questions, emotive language, and selective presentation of facts. The prose is direct and uncompromising, making extensive use of exclamatory sentences and bold assertions to drive home points. A significant portion of the book employs historical documentation interwoven with the author's interpretations, creating a sense of authority and credibility. The writing effectively combines historical narrative with journalistic critique to present a cohesive argument, while also utilizing footnotes and references to support claims and offer further reading. ## Setting The setting of *The Democrat Party Hates America* spans various eras in American history, offering context for the Democratic Party's actions across different time periods. Each chapter situates readers in a specific historical milieu, whether it be the antebellum South, the New Deal era, or the Obama administration, providing a backdrop against which the party's policies are critiqued.
Locations such as Washington D.C., state legislatures, and pivotal states during election cycles are recurrently explored, emphasizing the geopolitical influence the party has wielded over time. This temporal and locational grounding serves to illustrate the long-term implications of the policies in question. ## Unique Aspects One of the unique aspects of *The Democrat Party Hates America* is its unabashedly conservative viewpoint, which diverges from more neutral or liberal-leaning political analyses. The book's approach to historical and contemporary events often contrasts sharply with mainstream interpretations, challenging widely held assumptions about the role and impact of the Democratic Party. It also uniquely combines a broad historical sweep with detailed individual case studies, providing both macro and micro perspectives on the issues discussed. Another distinctive feature is the book's appeal to a specific audience, aimed at galvanizing conservative readers by tapping into existing sentiments and reinforcing particular ideological viewpoints. Similar to The Democrat Party Hates America Book Review Pros of The Democrat Party Hates America Book Review Cons of The Democrat Party Hates America Book Review Thorough Research: The book is backed by extensive research, providing readers with well-documented information on the topic. Engaging Writing Style: The author's engaging writing style keeps the readers interested and invested throughout the book. Controversial Insights: The book presents controversial insights, sparking discussions and debates among readers. Accessible Language: The language used is accessible to a wide audience, making complex political ideas understandable. Comprehensive Coverage: The book covers a wide range of topics related to the Democrat Party, offering a comprehensive analysis. Bias: The book may exhibit a noticeable bias, influencing the reader's perception of objectivity and neutrality. Polarizing Tone: The polarizing tone can alienate certain readers, particularly those who hold opposing views. Repetition: Some points are repeated multiple times, which could be seen as redundant and lessen the impact. Overgeneralizations: The book may contain overgeneralizations that oversimplify complex political situations and figures. Lack of Counterpoints: There might be a lack of counterpoints or balanced viewpoints, leading to a one-sided perspective. Author Reputation When considering "The Democrat Party Hates America" book, it is crucial to evaluate the author's reputation. Assess their background, professional credentials, and previous works. Look for other books or articles written by the author, and read reviews to understand their expertise and viewpoint. The credibility of the author will significantly affect the reliability and quality of the information provided in the book. Publisher Reputation Next, consider the reputation of the publisher. Established and respected publishers are more likely to produce well-researched and factual content. Check to see if the publisher specializes in the genre or subject matter. Reputable publishers also typically have a rigorous editorial process, which helps ensure high-quality content. Book Reviews and Ratings Reading reviews and checking ratings can provide a wealth of information. Look for reviews on multiple platforms such as Amazon, Goodreads, and academic review sites. Pay attention to both positive and negative reviews to get a balanced perspective. Reviews can give you insights into the book's merits, readability, and reliability. Look for patterns in the feedback, as consistent comments can indicate recurring strengths or weaknesses. Credibility of Sources Analyze the credibility of the sources cited in the book. A well-researched book will reference credible, reliable, and relevant sources. Check if the book includes a bibliography or references section. Evaluate the quality of these sources to determine if they are impartial and well-regarded in the field.
Source credibility plays a crucial role in assessing the overall reliability of the book. Content Depth and Accuracy Consider the depth and accuracy of the content. Scan the table of contents and sample chapters, if available, to get an idea of the topics covered and the level of detail provided. A good book will present comprehensive coverage of the subject and provide accurate, factual information. Look for books that balance depth with accessibility, avoiding superficial treatment of complex topics. Publication Date The publication date is another important factor. Ensure that the book is current and includes up-to-date information. Older books may not reflect recent developments or prevailing viewpoints. However, also remember that some timeless works may still hold relevance despite their age. Compare the publication date with other similar works to choose the most current and comprehensive option. Price and Format Consider the price and available formats of the book. Compare prices across different sellers and formats such as hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook to find the best deal. Factor in the cost with the value you anticipate gaining from the book. Sometimes paying a bit more for a comprehensive version can be worthwhile. Commentaries and Critical Analyses Look for academic commentaries and critical analyses of the book. Such resources can provide additional perspectives and deeper understanding. Commentaries often point out the strengths and weaknesses of the book, offering more informed judgments than casual reviews. They can also highlight the book's significance within its field of study. Personal Bias and Perspective Finally, be mindful of personal biases and perspective. Understand that a book's content may be influenced by the author's viewpoint. Reflect on your own biases and be open to diverse viewpoints. A well-rounded reading list includes books from varying perspectives to provide a holistic understanding of the subject. ```html FAQ What is the main thesis of "The Democrat Party Hates America"? The main thesis of the book is that the Democrat Party's policies and actions are fundamentally detrimental to American values and interests. The author argues that the party prioritizes its political agenda over the well-being of the country. Who is the author of "The Democrat Party Hates America"? The book is written by Mark Levin, a conservative commentator, lawyer, and author known for his critical views on the Democrat Party and progressive policies. Is "The Democrat Party Hates America" a biased book? Many readers and critics would consider the book biased, as it presents a highly critical perspective of the Democrat Party. The author’s conservative viewpoints and political background may influence his analysis and conclusions. What type of evidence does the author use to support his arguments? Mark Levin uses a combination of historical references, policy analysis, and contemporary examples to support his arguments. He often cites specific actions, statements, and legislative initiatives of Democrat leaders to make his case. Is this book suitable for readers with opposing political views? This book may be challenging for readers with opposing political views due to its strong conservative stance. However, those interested in understanding conservative critiques of the Democrat Party may find it insightful. How has "The Democrat Party Hates America" been received by critics? The reception of the book varies widely. Conservative critics and readers often praise it for its thorough analysis and bold arguments. On the other hand, progressive and liberal critics typically dismiss it as one-sided and overly critical. Does the book offer any solutions or recommendations? Yes, the book does offer solutions and recommendations to counteract what the author sees as the negative influence of the Democrat Party. These solutions are generally rooted in conservative political philosophy and policies. What is the writing style of "The Democrat Party Hates America"?
The writing style of the book is direct, assertive, and polemical. Mark Levin's background as a radio host and commentator is evident in his emphatic tone and rhetorical approach. Where can I purchase "The Democrat Party Hates America"? The book is available for purchase at major bookstores, both online and in physical stores. It can also be found on various e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. ``` In conclusion, "The Democrat Party Hates America" stands as a compelling and provocative read for anyone interested in understanding the current political climate from a critical perspective. This book offers an in-depth analysis and thought-provoking insights that challenge conventional narratives about one of America's major political parties. The author’s meticulous research and unabashed commentary make it a valuable choice for both political enthusiasts and casual readers who seek to gain a deeper understanding of the ideologies at play. By exploring the historical context, ideological shifts, and policy impacts, the book not only informs but also encourages readers to engage in meaningful discourse. Whether you agree with its premises or not, "The Democrat Party Hates America" provides substantial food for thought and is a noteworthy addition to any political literature collection. Other The Democrat Party Hates America Book Review buying options
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Texas Migrant Law Is Latest Test of America vs. Its States
The face-off between Texas and the federal authorities over whether or not the state can implement its personal immigration coverage displays a broader and recurring characteristic of American politics: a lot of hot-button points have turn into proxy battles over who will get to resolve. Through the Trump administration, Democratic-run states like California and blue cities like New York waged authorized fights over their proper to move sanctuary legal guidelines to guard migrants. Now, the battle over whether or not Texas can arrest and deport migrants is only one half of a bigger marketing campaign that purple states have directed on the Biden administration. A coalition of Republican state attorneys normal has additionally gone to courtroom to thwart the administration’s efforts to control methane emissions from oil and gasoline drilling, to dam a program that enables humanitarian entry to migrants from particular nations, and to halt an effort to crack down on gun equipment, amongst others. The steadiness of energy between the nationwide authorities and states has been a supply of tensions in america since its founding, resulting in the Civil Conflict. However within the twenty first century, as partisan polarization has intensified, it has morphed into a brand new dynamic, with states managed by the social gathering against the president commonly testing the boundaries. The political points run the gamut — and embody matters like abortion, gun management, same-sex marriage and even marijuana legalization — however the bigger sample is obvious: Every time one social gathering wins management of the central authorities, the opposite social gathering makes use of its management of varied states to attempt to withstand nationwide insurance policies. “We’re seeing stuff we’ve by no means seen within the fashionable period,” stated Heather Okay. Gerken, the dean of Yale Legislation Faculty who has written about contemporary federalism. “It’s actually beautiful what sort of proxy battle is going down. It’s all as a result of the vicious partisanship that has lengthy been a characteristic of Washington has now filtered all the way down to the states.” A clause within the Structure says that federal statutes are supreme, and the normal understanding is that the place federal and state regulation battle, federal regulation prevails. On the identical time, the Structure solely grants sure powers to the federal authorities and reserves the remaining to states. In apply, the powers of each ranges typically overlap. In consequence, the traces aren't at all times clear, stated Jessica Bulman-Pozen, a Columbia regulation professor who has written about what she calls “partisan federalism.” That ambiguity, she stated, mixed with the growing nationalization of politics, has induced the events to make use of management of states to withstand presidents of the opposite social gathering. “We now have quite a lot of political preventing that will get channeled via this federalist construction, the place when you've got a Democratic president, Republican-led states attempt to choose fights with the presidency and the identical with Democratic states throughout Republican administrations,” Ms. Bulman-Pozen stated. “And sure folks’s views about state energy and federalism are wont to alter with completely different administrations and completely different workouts of energy.” Political scientists say the rising partisan gridlock gumming up Washington over the previous 20 years has created the circumstances for states which can be handily managed by one social gathering or the opposite, like Texas and California, to set off on their very own. Liberal states like California and Democratic-run cities have handed gun restrictions, auto-emissions requirements which can be stricter than nationwide requirements and sanctuary insurance policies to restrict how native law-enforcement officers can work with federal immigration brokers. In the meantime, Republican states handed stringent abortion bans and declared themselves Second Modification sanctuaries. “The states have been rising increasingly more highly effective,” stated Lara M. Brown, a political scientist and writer. “Most of us exist below state legal guidelines greater than federal legal guidelines. Texans are pleased they will stroll round with their weapons. And Californians are pleased folks aren’t.” Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale Legislation Faculty professor, stated the arguments over federalism pit two beliefs in opposition to one another. One is that everybody might be happier if completely different components of the nation can govern themselves, as long as folks can transfer to the locations they agree with. The opposite is that to be a viable nation with an built-in economic system, there have to make certain fundamental guidelines and uniform nationwide rights. Historical past reveals there are limits to how in a different way states can govern, partially as a result of what occurs in a single state can have an effect on one other. A choose on the federal appeals panel weighing Texas’s immigration regulation scrutinized that query on Wednesday, asking whether or not the state may arrest an undocumented migrant who crossed into the state not from Mexico, however from Arizona. “Possibly?” responded Aaron L. Nielson, the Texas solicitor normal. Simply as within the nineteenth century it proved untenable for the nation to endure whereas some states permitted slavery and others outlawed it — with fights over points like what occurred when an enslaved particular person was taken to or fled to a free state — the political actuality is that folks attempt to use nationwide management to impose a uniform imaginative and prescient. For almost 50 years, the Supreme Courtroom’s landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade meant that states couldn't outlaw abortion. Then, after a conservative majority overturned that call in 2022, many Republican-controlled states imposed sharp restrictions on the process, whereas Democratic-controlled ones didn't. However the challenge stays risky. Disputes have emerged over whether or not antiabortion states can criminalize touring elsewhere to terminate pregnancies and whether or not states supporting abortion rights can mail abortion capsules to ladies residing in states the place the process is outlawed. And each supporters and opponents of abortion have floated passing nationwide laws to impose their respective beliefs throughout the nation. The battles over uniformity and variety don't at all times play out in courtroom. Regardless of federal legal guidelines outlawing marijuana, Washington has largely allowed greater than 30 states to legalize and regulate medical or leisure hashish, for instance. However fairly often these fights find yourself in litigation, placing final decision within the palms of the Supreme Courtroom. For the reason that courtroom has more and more tilted to the suitable due to President Donald J. Trump’s three appointments, Republicans have an edge. In 2015, for instance, the courtroom voted 5 to 4 to strike down legal guidelines in conservative-leaning states that restricted marriage to heterosexual {couples}, permitting same-sex {couples} to marry in all 50 states. In 2022, the courtroom’s widened conservative majority — along with overturning Roe v. Wade — voted in a 6-to-3 choice to strike down legal guidelines in New York and different liberal-leaning states that positioned strict limits on carrying weapons in public. Nonetheless, the deeper roots of the conflicts are discovered within the construction of america authorities that has put the powers of the nationwide authorities in pressure with states from the start. “You see it again and again,” stated David I. Levine, a professor with the College of California School of the Legislation, San Francisco, who has tracked California’s conflicts with the federal authorities through the Trump administration. “The civil battle. Civil rights, integration of faculties. It’s constructed into the system.” Read the full article
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Should America Pay Reparations Now?
The subject of reparations for Black Americans is a complex and deeply debated issue in the United States, rooted in the country's history of slavery and systemic discrimination. Here's a breakdown of the key points and arguments, without taking a definitive stance:
Arguments in Favor of Reparations
Moral Imperative: Advocates argue that reparations are a way to acknowledge the centuries of unpaid labor, suffering, and systemic discrimination endured by enslaved Africans and their descendants. They emphasize that the legacy of slavery continues to manifest as a racial wealth gap and other socioeconomic disparities.
Economic Justice: Proponents contend that reparations would help address the persistent economic inequality between Black and white Americans. The wealth gap resulting from historical injustices directly impacts opportunities for housing, education, and well-being.
Historical Precedent: There are instances where governments have offered reparations to groups who have suffered historical injustices, such as the compensation for Japanese Americans interned during World War II.
Arguments Against Reparations
Practical Challenges: Opponents raise concerns about the difficulties in determining who qualifies for reparations and how they should be distributed.
Divisiveness: Some believe reparations could fuel racial tensions rather than bring healing and reconciliation.
Accountability: The argument is made that since those who directly committed the injustices of slavery are long dead, present-day Americans should not bear responsibility.
Forms of Reparations
Proposed forms of reparations go beyond direct financial payments and include:
Investments in Black communities: Funding for education, housing, business development, and healthcare in underserved Black communities.
Apologies and Acknowledgement: Formal apologies from the government for slavery and its ongoing legacy.
Educational Initiatives: Comprehensive education on the history of slavery and its influence on contemporary American society.
How Much and When?
No Consensus: There is no clear agreement on the amount or timing of reparations. Estimates vary widely, with some advocates calling for trillions of dollars, while others suggest more targeted programs.
Ongoing debate: This remains a highly contentious topic. Organizations and politicians are engaged in ongoing discussions on whether reparations are due, the best way to implement them, and the appropriate amount.
Important Considerations
The reparations debate is multifaceted. It's crucial to approach it with an understanding of the historical context, the ongoing impact of systemic racism, and the diverse range of perspectives on this complex issue.
The potential social and political implications of paying reparations to Black Americans are significant and far-reaching. Here's a breakdown of some of the key areas that would likely be affected:
Social Implications
Racial Reconciliation: Reparations could be a step towards acknowledging and addressing the deep-seated pain and trauma of slavery and its enduring legacy. It could potentially help move the nation towards greater racial healing.
Empowerment of Black Communities: Investment in historically disadvantaged communities could lead to significant improvements in education, housing, business ownership, and healthcare. This could help level the playing field and reduce the persistent racial wealth gap.
Shift in Narratives: Reparations could trigger a shift in the national narrative around race and the history of slavery. This could lead to more comprehensive and honest education about these issues.
Potential Backlash: There's a risk of backlash from those who oppose reparations, potentially leading to increased racial tensions and resentment.
Political Implications
Partisan Divide: Reparations are a highly divisive issue, mainly along partisan lines. Democrats generally tend to be more supportive of reparations, while Republicans are generally opposed. This could become a further wedge issue between the two major political parties.
Shift in Political Power: Successful implementation of reparations could lead to increased political power and influence for Black communities. This may impact voting patterns and political representation.
Mobilization: The debate over reparations could galvanize political activism both for and against the issue. This could significantly impact elections, policymaking, and political discourse.
International Attention: Reparations could draw international attention and potentially spur similar discussions in other countries with histories of slavery and racial injustice.
Challenges and Considerations
Determining Eligibility: Implementing a reparations program would involve complex debates about who is eligible, based on factors like ancestry and the extent of harm suffered.
Form of Reparations: Decisions would need to be made about the appropriate forms of reparations, whether direct payments, investments in communities, or a combination of approaches.
Political Will: Building the necessary political will for a reparations program would be a significant challenge, given the current polarization of American politics.
In Conclusion
The social and political implications of paying reparations to Black Americans would be profound and complex. While the concept has the potential to initiate healing and address historical injustice, it also carries the risk of division and backlash. The debate about reparations is likely to continue as a significant social and political issue in the years to come.
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Google wrote this short essay, so when you are looking for clarity on issues, use google to find the talking points first; and then expand on them with historical context and signifiers.
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'The new film Oppenheimer is the buzz of Hollywood and a clear frontrunner for Best Picture. Closely hewing to the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography American Prometheus (to which this essay is indebted and quotes from to fill in gaps), the film tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership of the team that created the first atomic bomb and the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) hearings in which he was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and stripped of his security clearance. The chief antagonist of the film is Lewis Strauss. Played by Robert Downey Jr. in a turn that deserves a Best Supporting Actor nod, Strauss is a politico who scurrilously plots and successfully portrays Oppenheimer’s past sympathies toward Communism as a contemporary security risk, thereby creating skeletons in his own closet.
The film raises more moral and political questions than can be addressed here. Can “great” men be “good”? Why do great men so often fail as husbands and fathers? (Unfortunately—and uncharacteristically for a Christopher Nolan film—Oppenheimer’s extramarital affairs are portrayed with gratuitous sexuality.) How much is a man defined by past indiscretions? Was the impulse to smoke out Communist subversives from the American security apparatus fundamentally sound but misapplied in cases like Oppenheimer’s? Indeed, several Communist spies were discovered and convicted for nuclear espionage, including agents who had infiltrated the Manhattan Project and passed on secrets to the Soviets. Or was the impulse fundamentally flawed because it was incompatible with free speech and inevitably oriented toward illegal weaponization of law enforcement against political enemies, partisan witch hunts, and a culture of hysteria? Indeed, Oppenheimer’s kangaroo-court spectacle embodied the worst excesses of McCarthyism.
And, of course, the film explores the most pressing question at the center of Oppenheimer’s legacy, which has been debated for seventy-eight years: Should America have dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In this two-part essay, I argue that Oppenheimer’s story, like the story of the bomb, is a case study in the perils of science and reason when they are decoupled from and untutored by faith and true religion.
Oppenheimer, played in an Oscar-worthy performance by Cillian Murphy, was a larger than life figure whose success story was characteristically American. Born in New York City in 1904 to a first-generation Jewish immigrant father and self-made businessman and a Jewish artist mother, he was educated in the Ethical Culture Society, a secular Jewish community dedicated to progressive values and social justice. His precocity was evident from a young age, and he acquired a liberal education, mastering ancient and modern languages and was broadly read in European literature and poetry. But his true gift was in theoretical physics. By twenty-five, he had graduated from Harvard, acquired a Ph.D. at Gottingen, distinguished himself in the field, and was on his way to creating one of the finest academic programs in physics in the world at UC-Berkeley.
Oppenheimer does a good job of portraying the high drama of theoretical physics in the 1920s and 30s. It was a heady time for the field, which had undergone a scientific revolution in recent years. Physicists like Niels Bohr had shown that classical mechanics did not explain phenomena observed at the quantum level. But the film only hints at Oppenheimer’s religious-like faith in the new science.
When a friend pressed a young Oppenheimer about his own religious beliefs, specifically, about whether he believed in God, he replied: “I believe in the second law of thermodynamics, in Hamilton’s Principle, in Bertrand Russell . . . ” And later Oppenheimer was known to say that Bohr was “his God.” At Berkeley, it was believed by his students that Bohr’s Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature was the Bible, Bohr was God, and Oppenheimer was his prophet.
After German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman published their experiments on atomic fission in 1938, Oppenheimer immediately realized an atomic bomb could be created. He was eventually recruited by the gruff and severe General Leslie Groves (played excellently by Matt Damon) to lead the top-secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico—part town, part military base in the middle of the desert constructed in 1942 to house hundreds of scientists and their families to work full time on creating an atomic bomb. Throughout these years, Oppenheimer and his team’s motivation had the moral clarity of survival: the very existence of the West was at stake if the Nazis acquired a bomb before they did.
But when the Nazis surrendered in May 1945, the bomb was still months away from being ready for testing. This threw Oppenheimer and many of his fellow politically liberal scientists into moral perplexity. Was the bomb really necessary to defeat Japan? After all, no one believed they had a secret bomb program. If not, then perhaps bombing Japan could serve as a form of nuclear diplomacy toward the Russians (i.e., to keep the Soviets out of Japan and deter them from aggression in Europe)?
The latter argument apparently did not carry much moral weight with Oppenheimer. For, while Oppenheimer was slowly awakening to the true nature of Stalin’s Russia, like many American New Deal liberals, he had been sympathetic to Soviet Russia’s experiment in combining socialism with power. Moreover, the Soviets were still ostensibly our allies in the summer of 1945. Indeed, Oppenheimer favored the idea of sharing information about the atomic bomb with Russia and brokering a Soviet-American agreement on international control of nuclear power.
Oppenheimer had limited information about Japan, and we cannot know how he would have reasoned had he been apprised of the possibility or probability that Japan’s surrender could have been negotiated without an invasion. Meanwhile, he was aware of and moved by Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s argument that, assuming an invasion would otherwise be necessary to subdue Japan, the bomb would save the lives of hundreds of thousands of American troops. (In retrospect, Stimson’s argument that the bomb was effectively the “lesser evil” could be enhanced by updating the calculus to include all the Japanese lives potentially saved not only from a continued land war, but also those who were saved from being captured by the Russian Army, enslaved, and sent to Soviet labor camps.)
What we do know is that the calculus of lives to be saved, while important, was not in and of itself sufficient for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. He settled on a new rationale, which he convinced his fellow liberal-minded scientists to adopt: Their scientific achievement needed to be revealed to the world, and such a revelation of this new destructive force would trigger and coincide with a revolution in political sovereignty, in which nation-states would cede sovereignty to the United Nations, which would in turn control nuclear weapons and therefore the capacity to punish nuclear transgressors and even prevent war. In short, Oppenheimer believed that dropping the bomb would lead to the end of war itself.
Is it possible that Oppenheimer’s argument was calculated cajolery to flatter the sensibilities of his liberal listeners and goad them to finish the job? One of his colleagues points out in the film that Oppenheimer could persuade anyone of anything—even himself. At any rate, he seems to have convinced himself of this moral justification at the time.
The flaws in his reasoning are apparent. First, it seems entirely possible that that goal could be pursued by a non-lethal demonstration of the bomb, a course of action that a group of scientists working on the Manhattan Project recommended in the Franck Report and which was favored by the Leo Szilard faction. The idea that the deaths of innocent Japanese civilians by atomic fire can rightly be willed as a means to the end of world government is, simply put, morally reprehensible.
Second, Oppenheimer’s prognostication was politically naïve in the extreme. He was correct that the atomic revolution had forever changed man’s relationship to nature. His mistake was to believe that the atomic revolution would fundamentally change human nature. Human plasticity and perfectibility are hypotheses of modern philosophical anthropology that can be traced from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Progressive movement in America (of which the Ethical Culture Society was a vanguard and seedbed). They certainly are not theorems that can be soundly derived from theoretical physics. Moreover, radical human plasticity and perfectibility are false. Love of one’s own and the willingness to fight (justly or otherwise) to protect one’s own is an unalterable feature of human nature that grounds particularity, patriotism and the desire for power. The potential for war, corruption, and tyranny thus cannot be eradicated on this side of heaven from the heart of man, including the hearts of nuclear-armed world government bureaucrats.
To suggest otherwise amounts to a wild-eyed utopianism and is a telltale symptom of rejection of a central tenet of Christian faith, that human nature can only be perfected by God’s grace. As it was, so ever shall it be.'
#Oppenheimer#Oscars#Cillian Murphy#American Prometheus#Lewis Strauss#Robert Downey Jr.#Christopher Nolan#Niels Bohr#Leslie Groves#Matt Damon
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Greetings, Scholars!
After our initial introduction, it's time to dive into the heart of our journey - the essential readings. These foundational texts provide a comprehensive exploration of American politics, covering everything from the grassroots to the echelons of power. We'll be going through these readings systematically, discussing their main arguments, implications, and relevance to contemporary political discourse.
Below, I have provided our initial list of essential readings. This list is, by no means, exhaustive. It's a starting point for our exploration, but we're not confined to it. If you have any requests, recommendations, or come across a gem that you believe should be shared, please feel free to suggest. After all, academic pursuit thrives on collaboration and openness to new perspectives.
The list is as follows:
Aldrich, John Why Parties?
Alvarez & Brehm Hard Choices, Easy Answers
Arnold, Douglas The Logic of Congressional Action
Bartels, Larry Unequal Democracy
Baumgartner & Jones The Politics of Attention
Baumgartner & Jones Agendas and Instability in American Politics (latest ed.)
Baumgartner, et al. Lobbying and Policy Change
Bensel, Richard The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900
Berry, Jeffrey The New Liberalism
Browning, Rufus, et al. Protest Is Not Enough
Burns, Schlozman & Verba The Private Roots of Public Action
Cameron, Charles Veto Bargaining
Campbell, Louise How Policies Make Citizens
Cohen, et al. The Party Decides
Converse, Philip "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in Apter (Ed.),
Ideology and Discontent
Cox & McCubbins Setting the Agenda
Delli Carpini & Keeter What Americans Know About Politics and Why it Matters
Erikson, MacKuen, & Stimson The Macro Polity
Fiorina, Morris Retrospective Voting in American National Elections
Fiorina, Abrams & Pope Culture War? (3rd ed)
Gilens Affluence and Influence
Green & Shapiro Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory
Green, Palquuist, & Schickler Partisan Hearts and Minds
Hacker, Jacob The Divided Welfare State
Hajnal, Zolton America’s Uneven Democracy
Hansen, John Mark Gaining Access
Harvey, Anna Votes Without Leverage
Hibbing, Smith & Alford Predisposed
Hero, Rodney Latinos and the US Political System.
Iyengar, Shanto Is Anyone Responsible?
Jacobson, Gary The Politics of Congressional Elections
Kernell, Samuel Going Public (latest ed.)
King & Smith Still a House Divided
Kingdon, John Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (latest ed.)
Krehbiel, Keith Pivotal Politics
Mann & Ornstein It's Even Worse Than it Looks
Mayhew, David Electoral Realignments
Mettler, Suzanne Soldiers to Citizens
Milkis & Nelson The American Presidency (latest ed.)
Mutz, Sniderman, Brody Political Persuasion
Neustadt, Richard Presidential Power
Olson, Mancur The Logic of Collective Action
Ostrom, Elinor Governing the Commons
Page & Shapiro The Rational Public
Patashnik, Eric Reforms at Risk
Pierson, Paul Politics in Time
Putnam, Robert Bowling Alone
Rosenstone & Hansen Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America
Schlozman, Verba & Brady The Unheavenly Chorus
Skocpol, Theda Protecting Soldiers and Mothers
Skorownek, Stephen The Politics Presidents Make
Smith, Steven S. Party Influence in Congress
Stone, Clarence Regime Politics
Stone, Deborah Policy Paradox and Political Reason
Stonecash & Brewer Split: Class and Cultural Divisions in American Politics
Strolovitch, Dara Affirmative Advocacy
Verba, Schlozman & Brady Voice and Equality
Weimer & Vining Policy Analysis (latest ed.)
Wilson, J.Q. Bureaucracy
Zaller, John The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
Each reading will have its dedicated blog post, where I'll summarize the key arguments, provide a critical analysis, and relate the text to our broader understanding of American politics. More importantly, I encourage you to share your thoughts, critiques, and insights as well.
The sequence of our reading will not necessarily follow the order in which the books are listed. Depending on our discussions, current political events, or requests, we might jump around the list. Flexibility will keep our exploration fresh and relevant.
So, let's embark on this intellectual adventure! It's time to dig into these fascinating texts and unravel the complex, dynamic world of American politics. Here's to a journey full of discovery, debate, and deep insights!
Happy Reading,
The Capitol Scholar
#american politics#american president#political communication#political science#academia#public policy#public opinion#phd scholar#grad school#Comprehensive Exams
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“…The ideas that animate Harlequin romance novels, Game of Thrones, and Disney movies alike can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Look at the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and others influenced by them—works like John William Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” (1888) and Frederic William Burton’s “The Meeting on the Turret Stairs” (1864)—and you’ll see some very familiar figures.
These canvases reflect popular Victorian understandings of medieval ladies: passive, slender, aristocratic, the objects of knightly devotion. These women have never laboured in the fields with sunburned necks or callused hands. Their clothing and flowing hairstyles are eclectic, designed more to make nineteenth-century audiences think about a distant, misty, heroic past than to accurately reproduce any given moment in the Middle Ages. And, they are, invariably, white.
Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. These paintings were produced when European imperialism was at its zenith; when Darwinian theories of evolution were twisted to justify colonialism and social hierarchies based on race; and when a supposed early-medieval “Teutonic”—or Germanic—ancestry for the white Protestant populations of Britain and North America was claimed to be the reason for the explosive economic growth of those regions.
They were also painted at the same time that white people in Europe and the Americas were enjoying steadily increasing standards of living—in large part thanks to the backbreaking, and often coerced, labour of those in colonised places. Black and brown women helped to shape history, but Victorian society excluded them from the category of “lady” because of the colour of their skin.
Nineteenth-century thinkers drew on the medieval past in order to justify racial and class inequities, or burgeoning notions of nationalism. These thinkers racialised the medieval lady. They idealised her as white, passive, and unsuited to manual labour. In doing so, they made her into a rationale as to why her elite, white, female descendants could sip tea in parlours while brown and black women toiled in the fields—or in their houses—to bring them that tea. The status quo was given such a venerable heritage that it was made to seem natural, even inevitable. Such ideas were then, and are now, pervasive and insidious. They were absorbed by white women, by Disney animators, by the makers of Halloween costumes, and even by those who write histories.
But what happens if we take the medieval lady off her pedestal? What kind of woman do we see inhabiting the Middle Ages if we try to peel off the Victorian veneer of chivalry and politesse? Does looking at what medieval people actually did in the past tell us something about our own assumptions concerning race and gender? In part, this is a process where we have to reconsider the language we use. What do we mean by “lady”? What did medieval people mean by the term? Or, rather, since most texts produced in western Europe in the Middle Ages were written in Latin, what were the connotations which they associated with the word domina?
The first key difference is that the modern English word “lady” simply doesn’t have the aura of power which the Latin word domina did in the Middle Ages. A domina was a woman with authority and moral rectitude in her own right, not simply the consort or complement to a dominus (lord). A domina (and holders of other Latin titles applied to women in medieval records, like comitissa, vicedomina or legedocta) administered estates and adjudicated legal disputes. It did not matter whether she held her title by inheritance or through marriage. Those who held titles in their own right, or those who were widowed, could exercise significant power over fiefs and vassals.
For example, when Matilda, countess of Tuscany (1046-1115), was referred to as domina, it was because she controlled a large swathe of northern Italy. She was the mediator during the famous meeting between Pope Gregory VII and the German emperor Henry IV at her great fortress of Canossa. In doing so, she influenced the outcome of a major medieval power struggle. On his accession to the throne in 1199, King John of England installed his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1122-1204), as domina of the French territory of Poitou and gave her authority in all of his lands—a tacit acknowledgement of her political skill.
Eleanor even managed to expand queenly authority in some ways. She seems to be the first queen of England after the Norman Conquest to have regularly collected the “queen’s gold”, a one-tenth share of some of the legal fines paid to the king. This gave her a valuable (and somewhat independent) source of revenue—and with money comes power. As a more modest example, one contemporary of Matilda of Tuscany’s was a woman named Mahild of Alluyes, domina of a far smaller territory in northern France. She wasn’t a player in papal or imperial politics. Yet as wife and widow, she oversaw the affairs of her vassals and witnessed charters which they drew up in the chapter house of the nearby abbey of Marmoutier, which gave her considerable influence over their lives. And there are many, many more dominae in the sources.
Medieval aristocratic women were sometimes seen as passive by their male contemporaries; those with power who broke this mould were sometimes described in plainly misogynistic terms. But equally, their deeds could be lauded. For example, one of the great chroniclers of the early twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis, wrote that the French noblewoman Isabel of Conches was “lovable and estimable to those around her.” He complimentarily said that she “rode armed as a knight among the knights”, and compared her favourably with Amazon queens.
Matilda of Boulogne (ca. 1105-1152), queen of King Stephen of England, was one of her husband’s most capable partisans during the Anarchy—the period of civil war that tore twelfth-century England apart. Not only did she head the government during her husband’s captivity, but proved herself a capable military commander. She directed troops into battle at the so-called Rout of Winchester and arranged for her husband’s release when he was captured.
A generation or so later, the English countess Petronella of Leicester (ca. 1145-1212) participated alongside her husband in the Revolt of 1173-74; she gave her husband military advice, rode armed onto the battlefield, and was even wearing armour when captured. These actions may not have been normal behaviour for a domina—administration and adjudication were more usual. But they were still within the bounds of possible behaviour for a medieval woman without endangering her status as a “lady.”
The Matildas, Mahild, Eleanor, Isabel, and Petronella: it is hard to imagine any of these dominae as the subject of a Waterhouse painting or the centrepiece of a Disney movie. They weren’t always victorious or virtuous; they could be ambitious and high-handed and hold ideas which most people today would find distasteful. And yet, whether medieval chroniclers approved or disapproved of these women individually, they didn’t think the very fact that they were active, decisive, and opinionated was out of the ordinary. Neither should you.
Nor would the colour of their skin have been thought a defining aspect of their status as a lady. There was certainly prejudice about skin colour in the Middle Ages. The relatively small number of non-white people in northern Europe means that we can’t definitively point to a woman of colour exercising political power there. But things were slightly different in southern Europe, in areas like Iberia—modern Spain and Portugal—which was long home to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations of multi-ethnic heritage.
While there were religious prohibitions against Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, there are some scattered examples of intermarriages between dynasties in the early Middle Ages: Muslim women of north African or Arab descent marrying into northern, Christian royal families. For instance, Uriyah, a daughter of the prominent Banū Qasī dynasty, married a son of the king of the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre; Fruela II, king of Asturias, married another Banū Qasī woman called Urraca. Their ancestry doesn’t seem to have posed a barrier.
Western Europeans may have only rarely had direct contact with non-white female rulers further afield—like the powerful Arwa bint Asma, queen of Yemen (r. 1067-1138)—but when they did, it could be in dramatic fashion. Shajar al-Durr, sultana of Egypt (d. 1257), famously captured Louis IX of France during the Seventh Crusade and ransomed him for an eye-wateringly large sum.
While historical examples of women of colour exercising prominent roles in Europe during the Middle Ages are few in number, skin colour didn’t limit the imaginations of white medieval Europeans. Medieval people often had clear anxieties about skin colour and blackness, but despite this racism they could still envision a brown- or black-skinned woman as a member of the upper classes, just as they did the white-skinned Mahild or Isabel.
For example, the early thirteenth-century German epic poem Parzival centres on the eponymous hero and his quest for the Holy Grail. Parzival has a half-brother, the knight Feirefiz, who is mixed-race. His mother, Belacane, is the black queen of the fictional African kingdoms of Zazamanc and Azagouc; the narrative praises her beauty and her regal bearing. As another example, a Middle Dutch poem written about the same time, Morien, recounts the story of the handsome, noble knight Morien, “black of face and of limb,” whose father Sir Aglovale fell in love with his “lady mother,” a Moorish princess.
However, the most vivid example is provided by medieval depictions of the biblical Queen of Sheba. Scholars think the historical Sheba likely lay somewhere in southwestern Arabia; other traditions place the kingdom in east Africa. Regardless of the queen’s historicity, various traditions grew up around her in the Middle Ages. Some of the most popular of these claimed that she had a son by the biblical king Solomon. She frequently appears alongside him in art, in elegantly draped garb as on the late twelfth-century Verdun Altar, or accompanied by courtiers as in an early fourteenth-century German illustrated bible: a beautiful black woman and a regal queen. When you think of a medieval “lady”—you could do worse than to think of her.
All of this should prompt us to look again, to reconsider how racialized Victorian ideals of womanhood still impact us—both in contemporary popular culture and also in our understandings of the medieval past. When we think about the Middle Ages, we should consider the impact of race, and especially whiteness, on how we think about it. That is not necessarily because our medieval forebears did so, but because our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ones did so very much.
The idea of the “lady” was one of the useful fictions which they and others employed, glorifying white, upper-class womanhood as an apex of western achievement. This helped to make existing racial and imperial hierarchies seem like they had such a long history that they must be innate, biological: a simple fact of life. But it was a fiction, and a harmful one. If we are to better understand the medieval past, it is one we must set aside.”
- Yvonne Seale, “My Fair Lady? How We Think About Medieval Women.”
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Nothing is going to get better, and that is everyone’s fault
I don’t see how anyone could survey our political discourse right now and conclude that we have any hope, however remote, of a more decent future. We’ve mandated the uniform adoptions of worldviews that are unsustainable and objectively untrue. We’ve forced everyone accept ludicrous understandings of severe social problems that guarantee we will never be able to reform those problems.
Of course, revoltingly, this as happened because the routine brutalities of American life have become undeniable. A person cannot simply say that police murders don’t happen anymore. Every few days, there’s a new video. But in the absence of plausible deniability we have jerryrigged a new understanding, demanding that people regard these horrors not as fabulations but as unchangeable, apolitical constants that even the most powerful people on earth are helpless to address.
Today, we’re being told that knife fights are no big deal. Getting stabbed is just a rite of passage, a part of everyone’s childhood, something that no one--especially not a person authorized to use lethal force--should ever interfere with.
This is insane. In every sense of the word, this is insane. And it’s absolutely par for the course with contemporary understandings of social issues.
The Jussie Smollett incident was really a canary in the coal mine for this stuff. Anyone who spent 30 seconds reading about the incident with an open mind would realize that it was a complete fabrication cynically deployed to help the career of a struggling public figure.
But you simply weren’t allowed to think critically about it. Instead, we instituted a perverse system of incentives where people actually received social rewards for pretending to believe it without reservation. That fact that it was so implausible, at parts even physically impossible, created all the more incentive to go along with it. Anyone can express disgust at a child getting shot by a cop. It takes a real ally to believe something that is objectively untrue.
And then, when all the details came out and the case was debunked--even after Jussie admitted to hiring two Nigerian immigrants to rough him up and immediately tried to sell them out when cops began questioning his story--even then, you couldn’t admit to its falsity in liberal spaces. Dave Chappelle did a very funny bit about it in one of his Netflix specials, and this was held up as proof that Chappelle is now a dangerous fascist who should not be platformed.
No one who went along with it recanted or apologized. Because they had no reason to. The point of the exercise wasn’t to unveil and analyze truths so as to attempt to enact reforms. It was merely to signal one’s placement in the good group, vs. the bad group. The fact that it was eventually repudiated beyond all doubt only made the cause all the more righteous. Doing something about it was never considered, because we can’t do anything about it, nothing can ever change, all you can ever do is signal your goodness and denounce those who signal badness.
Again, this was all because the people who are in charge of this country--left and right--have absolutely zero desire to reform any aspect of this country. The unshakable, bipartisan consensus is that the only role of government should be to ensure that the maximum amount of resources and power be held by as few people as possible. We are uniform in our dedication to austerity and infrastructural dismantlement. No one is any position of influence has any regard for human life. We all believe, regardless of our partisan differences, that American citizens should accept brutalization as the baseline of existence.
This world was not inevitable. It was built. It was built by Republicans and Democrats. It was built by racists and evangelicals. It was built by the professorate, NGO’s, and successful members of the black leadership class. Everyone is implicated. And no one want to change.
This vision of an ideal America is uniform among our ruling class. Biden spent his career helping build it. Trump was created by it, and he strengthened many of its most malignant aspects. Obama, Bush, Clinton, and Reagan all worked toward the same general goals.
A society in which hopelessness is ambient and decency is nonexistent is going to give rise to violent crime and widespread discontentment. This necessitates the existence of police forces that are large, aggressive, militarized, and unaccountable. You can repeat all the slogans you want. You can demand that other people repeat those slogans. You can ban naughty words and diversify corporate boards, whatever. None of these things change this basic fact. And because we won’t change it--because we won’t countenance the possibility of change--we’ve had to adopt a worldview that is very literally insane.
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This is a study of the disinformation campaign that led to widespread acceptance of this apparently false belief and to its partisan distribution pattern. Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role.
Our results are based on analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements. They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018, published in Network Propaganda, in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists.
most conspiracy theories in america are elite-driven
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Why I No Longer Support the Russian Annexation of Crimea
A few years ago, when I first began learning the Russian language and the histories of Eastern Europe, I was unabashedly pro-Russian in my geopolitical convictions. I still remember watching a documentary about the Maiden Revolution in Kyiv and how it was presented as being orchestrated by the West, how it resulted in the safety of Russian speakers in Ukraine being compromised, and how it ushered in the rise of a fascist government with Nazi sympathies that espoused a type of ultra-Ukrainian nationalism that left no place for anything Russian in Ukraine anymore. Due to this analysis of the Maidan and post-Maidan currents in Ukraine, I came to the conclusion that the annexation of the Crimea was a truly democratic action and that the war in Donetsk and Luhansk represented almost a motherly care from Moscow for the Russian speakers of Eastern Ukraine. For years this served as the basis of my understanding of the post-Maidan conflicts, particularly the annexation of the Crimea. I continued to read a multitude of pro-Russian articles that justified the annexation. According to the standard positions given, the initial transfer of the Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR by Khrushchev was nothing more than a whimsical decision from the former party head of the Ukrainian SSR. Since the Crimea had been thoroughly under Russian administration prior, this means that the actual transfer was an historical injustice in the first place; Crimea is thoroughly Russian land and is deeply connected with Russian history. Secondly, the annexation can be justified since NATO had allegedly promised the newly formed Russian Federation following the collapse of the USSR that they would not expand into either former Eastern Block or Soviet territory. Since a multitude of former Eastern Bloc and Soviet countries have in fact been integrated into NATO, the West broke their promise so then what sort of moral high ground do they have to declare the annexation of the Crimea as illegal? Thirdly, considering that the majority of the population considered themselves ethnically Russian, since there was a referendum that resulted in an overwhelming majority of voters supporting being received into the Russian Federation, how should this act of democracy be considered any differently than say the will of the Albanian Kosovars to cede from Serbia. If an autonomous province of one country can have the legal right to cede, why can’t another? Finally (not to say that there are only four justifications for the annexation of Crimea, rather these were the biggest reasons for my previous support behind it), there was the strategic considerations of the naval base at Sevastopol. Considering that following the collapse of the Soviet Union that more and more former Soviet republics and Eastern Bloc countries have been joining the European Union and NATO (or lining up to do so), this presents a threat to Russia. Considering that the geopolitical relations between Russia and the West are at an all time low since the Cold War, it would be a strategic blunder for Russia if Ukraine was allowed to achieve its goals of EU and NATO integration. Considering the close proximity of Sevastopol to Russian territory, if Ukraine would become a part of NATO and allow for NATO to establish itself in Sevastopol, this would poise a huge military threat to Russia. Therefore, in a sort of pre-emptive move, the annexation of the Crimea was necessary to prevent any further potential NATO bases being so close to Russian territory. However, over the years as I have opened myself to more and more information from across the geopolitical spectrums, the justifications for the annexation began to slowly dismantle themselves until I came to the conclusion that the annexation of the Crimea was not only an illegal action taken by Russia but a geopolitical blunder of the highest level. I will leave why I think this was the biggest mistake they could make until the end and I will address why I no longer consider the justifications that I mentioned as valid. Before we proceed, I would like to just mention an event that was fundamental in helping me reconsider my convictions and to abandon what I can only call the Russian-Chauvinistic mentality that I previously held. A few years ago when I was on one of my trips to Chisinau, my wife and I decided to visit the Museum of Soviet Occupation (also known as the Museum of Victims of Communism). Now, I was definitely not pro-Soviet (being an Orthodox Christian, I know enough history about the persecutions against the religious in the Soviet Union and the overall atheistic ideology to keep me at arms length from having any real sense of Soviet sympathy) so I was very eager to check this museum out. Having read various books and articles that talk about some of the horrors that happened (especially during the Stalinist era), I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the tragedies that befell different people within the Soviet Union. However, it was a completely different experience to walk through the museum and see real letters from prisoners, confiscated passports, and photos of the real people who experienced the repressions; simply because they were land owners, priests, or suspected of being pro-Romanians. What struck me most was the collection of propaganda posters in one of the exhibits. Whether they were attacking religion or bolstering the benefits of the Soviet system, the propaganda seemed to address everything. It was this moment of looking at the seemingly endless collection of Soviet propaganda posters where something struck me, “If there was this much propaganda going on back then, who’s to say that there’s not just as much now but through contemporary mediums?” So, what got me to reconsider my positions wasn’t an article, or a book, or a conversation; it was the feeling of being overwhelmed by an endless supply of propaganda. After this moment, I began to be more critical of what I would read and try to expand my reading to include sources that present both sides of a situation, as well as material from non-partisan sources. One of the most important examples was with the annexation of Crimea. I began to look a little deeper at the arguments put forward to justify the annexation. Over time, as I read more sources or would occasionally stumble upon some information, each point began to have less weight to me that they used to have, until the point where I came to the conclusion that I no longer can buy into the arguments: Crimea is Ukraine.
The first point that is often brought up is that Khrushchev simply gave Crimea to Ukraine either because he had a soft spot for the country, or that it was a gift to celebrate the 1654 Pereyaslav Treaty, or because he wanted to reward Ukraine for their loyalty to the whole Soviet system (among other reasons that are given). Now, it is definitely true that the Crimea was previously an autonomous oblast within the Russian SFSR and that Nikita Khrushchev played a major role it the transfer of the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR. However, no matter what the reason (or most likely, reasons) behind the transfer, ultimately it was transferred and became an administrative unit of the Ukrainian SSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of the new entities of Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the Crimea was legally recognized as part of Ukraine. Most importantly, in 1994 both the Presidents of Russia and Ukraine (along with the President of the USA and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) signed the Budapest Memorandums on Security Assurances. Along with this document came the accession of Ukraine to the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In return for Ukraine agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons from their territory within a specified period of time, they were given certain national security assurances. Some of the assurances are worth quoting in full, “1. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine;
2. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nation.” The first two points that were noted on the memorandum, signed by the Russian President, concerned respecting the territorial integrity of the existing borders of Ukraine at the time, which included Crimea, and the affirmation that they would not use force against Ukraine and threaten their sovereignty. I came across this memorandum while reading an excellent book written by the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Serhy Yekelchyk, “The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know”. This information completing undermines any king of argument that posits the initial transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR as being some sort of geopolitical injustice, and thereby justifying the annexation of it to the Russian Federation. Russia signed a memorandum to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine, to abstain from using force against Ukraine, and to refrain from threatening the current borders of Ukraine. This leads nicely into the next point that the Western powers allegedly promised Russia that they had no intentions of expanding NATO into former Eastern Bloc and Soviet territories. As time went by, history has shown us that a number of former Eastern Bloc and Soviet republics have in fact been accepted in NATO. From the standard Russian narrative, since the West went back on their promise, then how can they oppose the annexation of Crimea? The logic seems to go that since the West reneged on their side of the deal, Russia is therefore free to disregard whatever security guarantees they provided to ensure the territorial integrity of Ukraine. However, we need to ask the question: did the Western powers ever promise this? This answer was given by Mikhail Gorbachev himself: no. The agreement that did happen was in regards to non-German NATO forces being employed in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic). When Gorbachev was interviewed and asked about the supposed promises made to Russia that NATO wouldn’t expand eastwards, he had this to say,
“The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”
It becomes evidently clear that no such promise regarding the refraining of NATO from expanding eastwards was every actually given, so Russia has no ground to try to justify their breaking of an international memorandum on the alleged failure of the West from refraining to expand NATO. Another point is that Crimea is historically Russian land with great historical significance for Russia. While its true that some very significant historical events in Russian history have taken place in the Crimea (including the baptism of St. Volodymyr in Kherson, the Crimean War, and the siege of Sevastopol) and that from 1783-1917 it was part of the Russian Empire and then from 1921-1954 it was part of the Russian SFSR, if we want to talk about the earlier inhabitants of the Crimea, it’s impossible to overlook the Crimean Tatars. Turkic peoples had been inhabiting the Crimean Peninsula since the 6th century and the Crimean Khanate was established in the 15th century. The Tatars were there prior to the movement of Slavs into the peninsula and were the majority until a number of historical factors began to decrease the Tatar population in the Crimea (such as Tatars fleeing or being deported to the Ottoman Empire after the initial conquest by the Russian Empire, more Tatars fleeing or being deported after the Russian loss of the Crimean War, and when practically the entire Crimean Tatar population was deported to Central Asia following World War 2 by Joseph Stalin). Only since 1989 has the Tatar population been growing again when the Supreme Soviet condemned the removal of the Tatars from their lands as unlawful, and thereby allowing larger numbers of them to return. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Crimean Tatars have largely been in favor of the Ukrainian government and have a more complicated relationship with Russian rule. When the annexation was in process, the Tatar population in Crimea boycotted the referendum and have been vocal in their desire to remain within Ukraine. While the history of Crimea is a part of Slavic history (not simply Russian), the Crimea has more historical rights with the Crimean Tatars, and the voice of the Crimean Tatars has spoken and sides with Ukraine. Now, to address the so-called democratic process of the referendum held in the Crimea that led to the request to be accepted into the Russian Federation. This was probably the strongest argument in favor of the annexation since it appeared the represent the concept of democracy and self-determination. It seemed to me that when the Soviet Union was collapsing and the various republics were declaring their own independence, then why should Ukraine’s desire to cede from the Soviet Union be respected while the Crimea’s desire should be treated as separatism? Is not Kyiv becoming to Crimea what Moscow was to Ukraine? On top of that, why is it that the referendum in the Crimea is treated as illegal while the referendum in Kosovo was accepted by the West? Let’s first look at the legitimacy of the referendum first. The whole tension between the political concepts of territorial integrity and self-determination is difficult to say the least. However, in the situation following the Maidan Revolution, it’s abundantly clear that the situation in Crimea was escalated following the arrival of the little green men. Even in my most pro-Russian days I had no doubts that these were “unofficial” Russian soldiers coming to the Crimea. What this presents itself as is nothing other than a military invasion and occupation. Since the referendum took place within a context of military occupation, it fundamentally cannot be accepted as valid on an international level. While it may be true that a large percentage of the population living in Crimea may in fact have supported a move towards Russia (I have friends and acquaintances with family members in Crimea and I have been told from them that the general opinion was indeed to become a part of Russia), the context and procedures were far from happening within what is accepted on a legal basis and can be legitimized on an international level. In regard to the comparison with Kosovo, we have to recognize that their situations are completely different. While both Kosovo and the Crimea were autonomous regions within their respective countries, the Russian population in the Crimea never underwent the same atrocities that the Kosovar Albanians underwent during the Kosovo War. The context for the independence of Kosovo was largely based on the genocidal afflictions they experienced during the war from Serbia, thus giving a moral precedence to pursue a path of independence. The only population within Crimea that can claim to have any kind of similar experience are the Crimean Tatars, who have been the victims of repression and deportation numerous times throughout history. So, we can see that neither the fact that a referendum was held or the comparison with Kosovo can have any legitimacy in regards to the annexation of Crimea. Now I’d like to look at the claim that it was necessary to annex the Crimea as a pre-emptive strike to protect Russian borders from the expansion of NATO. Since there’s a significant naval port in Sevastopol, it would be a geopolitical disaster for Russia if the ports of Sevastopol became NATO bases. This argument is completely dismantled once one considers the point that Sevastopol isn’t the only port in Ukraine. This point was driven home to me during a discussion with a Ukrainian acquaintance of mine about the whole situation in Crimea. We were discussing the various justifications given by Russia and I brought up this point about self-defence against NATO. My acquaintance simply replied, “So what if Sevastopol doesn’t become a NATO base? If Ukraine would be accepted into NATO, there are ports in Odessa which could easily be used as well. Is the distance from Sevastopol to Odessa really going to be that big of a difference?” The weakness of this argument became immediately apparent to me. If we even put aside the question of naval bases, there’s still the reality of regular military bases that could be set up in Ukraine. NATO could simply set up bases in cities like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, or even Kyiv and these would all be very close to the Russian border. To pursue this line of argument would necessitate that Russia simply annex all of Ukraine to prevent NATO from establishing any closer bases to their borders. As each argument began to collapse for me, I came to the ultimate conclusion that the annexation of Crimea was nothing more than an illegal military occupation, taking advantage of the unfavorable situation that arose for Russia in the aftermath of the Maidan Revolution. In an attempt to keep Ukraine divided to at least prevent her from moving closer to the West, the annexation and the war in Donbass is nothing more than a destabilizing effort by Moscow to try and force Ukraine to stay within their sphere of influence and to prevent the West from getting to close to Ukraine. However, the actions taken by Moscow were the biggest geopolitical blunder that they could have made. If Moscow genuinely wants to keep Ukraine within their sphere of influence, the worst thing that they could have done was to annex territory and become involved in a separatist war. By trying to force Ukraine to stay, they have only pushed her farther away. While it’s unlikely that Russia will ever accept that the annexation of the Crimea was unlawful and actually return it to the control of the Ukrainian government, it’s also just as unlikely the Ukraine will return to a place where closer ties with Russia is a popular opinion. While there are small measures of truth in the propaganda employed by Moscow in regards to the situation in Ukraine (there are definitely ultra-Ukrainian nationalists as well as those who have sympathies for the Galician division of the SS who fought against the Soviets with the Germans in World War 2), it is grossly inaccurate to portray the situation as if every Ukrainian is a fascist, ultra-nationalist, who’s looking to persecute Russian speakers. While the Russian language may have less acceptance in certain parts of Ukraine, it’s still spoken across the country. At the end of the day, I realized that my thoughts in the museum in Chisinau were right: Moscow is simply continuing the propaganda tradition through new mediums. To sum everything up simply, we can say this much: not all Ukrainians are fascists, not all Ukrainian are Nazi sympathizers, not all Ukrainians are out for Russian blood. Russia signed a memorandum to respective the territorial integrity of Ukraine and to abstain from threatening it with force. There was never any promise from NATO that they wouldn’t expand eastwards. While Crimea plays a role in Slavic history, the Crimean Tatars have a greater claim through history than the Russians do. The referendum took place in an atmosphere of military occupation and therefore has no chance of legitimacy. The situations of Kosovo and Crimea are completely different and therefore are not a viable comparison. And finally, if Ukraine was to join NATO, bases could still be set up close to the Russian border even without the naval bases in Sevastopol. Crimea is Ukraine.
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There is another question behind the question of how – that is the question of why. Why heal our divides? After all, human beings have survived despite division for as long as recorded history. Indeed, rulers and politicians are skilled at driving wedges between people around them in order to increase their own power. As Julius Caesar famously remarked divide et impera, “divide and conquer.”
In our current environment, fear and anger do motivate communal action, and political expediency often seems the primary goal. One need only be familiar with The Prince to know that modern politics follows the lead of Niccolo Machiavelli far more than the social vision of any ethical or religious master – Moses, the Buddha, and Jesus included.
And so, we find ourselves in a world echoing Gordon Gecko’s famous 1980s dictum, “greed is good,” where the contemporary American political creed seems to be “division is gain.”
Division is one of the most persistent political strategies in the western world. You might say it is our practice, the most deeply ingrained of our political habits. It certainly isn’t new. Why heal our divides? The question might be answered: You can’t. History teaches us that Machiavelli will always be with us – and will most often win.
Why even try to heal our divides?
Because it matters. For our communities, our neighbors. Of course. But it also matters for our own lives.
In 1892, William James wrote, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” A large body of research since then has confirmed how our lives are composed of routinized practices, the habits we develop over years. One recent study found that 40 percent of the participants’ daily actions did not come from intentional choice, but were things they did from habit.
America is a culture that aspires to unity – e pluribus unum – but has habituated division. Blame it on Caesar, Machiavelli, Gordon Gecko or whomever. Truth is, we’ve a national habit of finger pointing, blaming others, assigning people to categories, and pressing advantage for our own side. We’ve a divided national soul, and that line of division runs right through each of our own hearts. Even when we say we want to get beyond division and invective, many (including me) secretly think, “But I don’t want to be with those people. They are beyond the pale. You can’t make peace with them.”
When I finally admit that division isn’t just external but a way of thinking and acting that I’ve learned — a way that I have practiced — it hurts. I may preach a good sermon on nonviolence or taking down the walls of hostility between people, but deep inside, I’m uneasily grateful that something still separates me from others. The boundary between my moral rightness and another’s ethical failing seems necessary to protect. Those boundaries become hidden prejudices, the prejudices turn into partisanship, and all-too-often, partisanship crystallizes as bigotry. For good people, this internal process can be subtle, deniable, and shameful. But it is part of our habituation into being American – a people who proclaim unity while building walls that divide.
Why heal our divides? Because if we do, we heal ourselves.
New Testament scholar Stephen Patterson has recently argued that the first Christian creed was not a proclamation of separation from others (believers from nonbelievers); rather it was a declaration of human solidarity. That creed was part of the very first baptismal liturgies of those who followed Jesus:
For you are all children of God in the Spirit. There is no Jew or Greek; There is no slave or free; There is no male and female. For you are all one in the Spirit.
He insists that Christianity was successful because it imparted a social vision of unity in a deeply divided world and called people to a new shared identity: “We human beings are naturally clannish and partisan: we are defined by who we are not. We are not them. This creed claims that there is no us, no them. We are all one. We are all children of God.” (Patterson, The Forgotten Creed, p.5)
Not only did the first Christians proclaim these words, they practiced them in their communities. They developed habits of including others, of breaking down barriers, of eating with and befriending those whom they once found objectionable. They literally showed Roman society that it was possible — and desirable — to love every neighbor without regard to religion, class, or gender. During the earliest years of Christianity’s existence, the faith was marked by its insistence of the common kinship of humankind – that we could, indeed, be one. And there is evidence that they practiced what they preached.
Of course, that is an example from my faith tradition. America isn’t made up of only Christians, nor is it a “Christian nation.” But we do have a national creed, and like that early church creed, it proclaims a vision of unity, of oneness.
Is the American creed possible? That e pluribus unum we recite? Or are we forever consigned to political habits that confirm the we and demonize them? History reminds us that such creeds must be embodied in communities of practice, where we are called into a vision of human solidarity, where we create habits of oneness together, where we establish peace across the most durable barriers, and where we get in trouble for standing as one against the political expediency of division.
When I commit myself to that creed, when I find myself in such a community, the divide in my own heart lessens. Something within heals. Creed and community remind me that changing habits is hard, and practicing solidarity involves wrestling with my own failures. But, with the help of others, each one of us can mend the fault lines in our own lives and lend our hands to repair the world.
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INSPIRATION
We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond. ― Gwendolyn Brooks
Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here. ― Eleanor Roosevelt
If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. — Galatians 5:15
How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity! — Psalm 133:1
Why does colour or race matter? Why not join together, instead of being scrambled and scattered? Why can't we just not plainly see, The unity in diversity? People will be people all the same, And under the setting sun, Nothing may ever change, But I am here to take a stand, To show the world how to finally be, Unified in Diversity. — Peter Vector
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THE COTTAGE
DIANA BUTLER BASS
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Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., is calling on five major U.S. banks to provide updates on the racial equity pledges they announced after the surge in Black Lives Matter activism in 2020.
In letters sent Wednesday to the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo, Pressley asked for a “comprehensive financial audit report,” including data, plans and policy changes related to their commitments, by Oct. 23.
“Whether you’re talking about redlining or denying credit for Black homebuyers and entrepreneurs, or closing brick-and-mortar banks in Black communities, Black folks have historically been denied opportunities to grow wealth, to achieve financial prosperity,” Pressley told NBC News.
“The harm was very precise. The work of restorative justice, of racial justice, of justice for Black Americans, has to be just as precise,” she said.
Representatives for the five banks didn’t immediately comment.
Of the pledges Pressley cited, JPMorgan’s was by far the largest. Its $30 billion commitment over five years, announced in October 2020, included expanded housing programs and small-business lending, along with increasing workforce diversity efforts. In a February 2022 update, the bank said it had already committed or deployed $13 billion of that sum, financed 60,000 affordable housing and rental units and approved $1 billion in lending to build or redevelop affordable homes, among other steps.
Citi and Bank of America each pledged $1 billion, with the latter expanding its effort to $1.25 billion in March 2021. Last September, Wells Fargo announced a racial equity audit of programs, including a $420 million fund for diverse small-business owners, and USBancorp-owned U.S. Bank committed $116 million in June 2020 to address racial and economic disparities.
Nodding to the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington on Monday, Pressley told the bank chiefs, “It is critical that your financial power is used to rectify the wrongdoing and heal the very communities harmed by the historical and contemporary role that institutions such as yours have played and continue to play in perpetuating racial inequities.”
Pressley, a Democrat who sits on the Financial Services Committee, acknowledged that her push for greater transparency has limited teeth in a Republican-led House.
“I’m not going into this with contingency plans. You have to first just lay it out there,” she said, adding that she believes the banks “will be responsive. They want to be on the right side of history.”
Divided government in Washington is set to last at least until after the November 2024 election, and there are already sharp partisan disagreements over the private sector’s role in effecting social change. Some of the GOP presidential candidates gathering for a primary debate Wednesday night have honed their political profiles by opposing corporate efforts they deride as “woke” meddling in cultural issues.
Pressley’s effort comes in a tumultuous year for the U.S. financial sector. Ongoing shakiness among small and midsize banks has generally played to Wall Street titans’ favor, and some minority-focused lenders are straining to serve their communities. Rising interest rates and other market headwinds have dented Black-led banks’ historic growth of recent years, NBC News has reported, and many are digging deep to preserve their momentum.
While Pressley called on like-minded lawmakers to join her effort, she said: “I’m currently governing under the context of a Congress that has an ‘Anti-Woke’ Caucus. I’m not in denial about that. That is why it is critical that we be just as vigilant, just as unrelenting.”
“No days off, because they’re not taking any,” she said.
#House Democrat presses big banks on the status of over $32 billion in racial equity pledges#Ayanna Pressley#Racial Equity#Racial Equity Pledges#systemic racism
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