Why We Will Need Walt Whitman in 2020
With our democracy in crisis, the poet and prophet of the American ideal should be our guide.
Excerpt:
Whitman understood that democracy wasn’t “very boring” but rather a political system that could deliver on the promises that authoritarianism only pretended it would. For the poet, democracy wasn’t just a way of passing laws or a manner of organizing a government; democracy was a method of transcendence in its own right.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. A politics that is unable to translate its positions into some sort of transcendent language, pointing to something greater than the individual, is a politics that will ultimately fail. Whitman understood this. Though political theorists of democracy routinely speak of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence or Hamilton and Madison’s Federalist Papers, Whitman’s poetry of a half-century later explicates the metaphysical underpinnings of transcendent democracy. Where Nietzsche would offer the illusions of the Übermensch, Whitman would sing a song of the “divine average.”
Such was Whitman’s description of Lincoln in a March 1863 letter to two New York friends. The president, wrote Whitman, had a face “like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.” The essence of the “divine average” is that Lincoln was great not necessarily in spite of his supposed ugliness but in part because of it — that all of us have a divine greatness because we share in the common foibles of our humanity. A king, a dictator, an Übermensch will pretend that his lot is above the least of his subjects, but as Whitman would counter in “Song of Myself,” his most celebrated poem, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” whether from the slave or slave master, the refugee migrant or the president.
In Whitman’s understanding of democracy, we’re bound to one another in the experience of being finite creatures with bodies that will one day die. The scholar Kevin J. Hayes explains that in Whitman’s estimation, people must “feel the humanity within the self. Deep personal understanding can broaden individual perspective, creating a sense of humanity large enough to include everyone.” A demagogue may whip his admirers into a hateful frenzy and impart the illusion of unity, but the loving work of democracy actually provides that unity with others who may be very different from ourselves. Hayes describes Whitman in “Song of Myself” “going from the personal to the national” and finally “to the universal.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/opin ... 0920191230
FORMS OF GOVERNANCE
How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything?
Our institutions lost the capacity to mold character and have become platforms for performance instead.
Americans are living through a social crisis. We can see that in everything from vicious partisan polarization to rampant culture-war resentments to the isolation, alienation and despair that have sent suicide rates climbing and driven an epidemic of opioid abuse. These dysfunctions appear to have common roots, but one symptom of the crisis is that we can’t quite seem to get a handle on just where those roots lie.
When we think about our problems, we tend to imagine our society as a vast open space filled with individuals who are having trouble linking hands. And so we talk about breaking down walls, building bridges, leveling playing fields or casting unifying narratives.
But what we are missing is not simply greater connectedness but a structure of social life: a way to give shape, purpose, concrete meaning and identity to the things we do together. If American life is a big open space, it is not a space filled with individuals. It is a space filled with these structures of social life — with institutions. And if we are too often failing to foster belonging, legitimacy and trust, what we are confronting is a failure of institutions.
This social crisis has followed upon a collapse of our confidence in institutions — public, private, civic and political. But we have not given enough thought to just what that loss of confidence entails and why it’s happening.
Each core institution performs an important task — educating children, enforcing the law, serving the poor, providing some service, meeting some need. And it does that by establishing a structure and process, a form, for combining people’s efforts toward accomplishing that task.
But as it does so, each institution also forms the people within it to carry out that task responsibly and reliably. It shapes behavior and character, fostering an ethic built around some idea of integrity. That’s why we trust the institution and the people who compose it.
We trust political institutions when they undertake a solemn obligation to the public interest and shape the people who populate them to do the same. We trust a business because it promises quality and reliability and rewards its workers when they deliver those. We trust a profession because it imposes standards and rules on its members intended to make them worthy of confidence. We trust the military because it values courage, honor and duty in carrying out the defense of the nation and forms human beings who do, too.
We lose faith in an institution when we no longer believe that it plays this ethical or formative role of teaching the people within it to be trustworthy. This can happen through simple corruption, when an institution’s attempts to be formative fail to overcome the vices of the people within it, and it instead masks their treachery — as when a bank cheats its customers, or a member of the clergy abuses a child.
That kind of gross abuse of power obviously undermines public trust in institutions. It is common in our time as in every time. But for that very reason, it doesn’t really explain the exceptional collapse of trust in American institutions in recent decades.
What stands out about our era in particular is a distinct kind of institutional dereliction — a failure even to attempt to form trustworthy people, and a tendency to think of institutions not as molds of character and behavior but as platforms for performance and prominence.
In one arena after another, we find people who should be insiders formed by institutions acting like outsiders performing on institutions. Many members of Congress now use their positions not to advance legislation but to express and act out the frustrations of their core constituencies. Rather than work through the institution, they use it as a stage to elevate themselves, raise their profiles and perform for the cameras in the reality show of our unceasing culture war.
President Trump clearly does the same thing. Rather than embodying the presidency and acting from within it, he sees it as the latest, highest stage for his lifelong one-man show. And he frequently uses it as he used some of the stages he commanded before he was elected: to complain about the government, as if he were not its chief executive.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/opin ... 3053090119
Our institutions lost the capacity to mold character and have become platforms for performance instead.
Americans are living through a social crisis. We can see that in everything from vicious partisan polarization to rampant culture-war resentments to the isolation, alienation and despair that have sent suicide rates climbing and driven an epidemic of opioid abuse. These dysfunctions appear to have common roots, but one symptom of the crisis is that we can’t quite seem to get a handle on just where those roots lie.
When we think about our problems, we tend to imagine our society as a vast open space filled with individuals who are having trouble linking hands. And so we talk about breaking down walls, building bridges, leveling playing fields or casting unifying narratives.
But what we are missing is not simply greater connectedness but a structure of social life: a way to give shape, purpose, concrete meaning and identity to the things we do together. If American life is a big open space, it is not a space filled with individuals. It is a space filled with these structures of social life — with institutions. And if we are too often failing to foster belonging, legitimacy and trust, what we are confronting is a failure of institutions.
This social crisis has followed upon a collapse of our confidence in institutions — public, private, civic and political. But we have not given enough thought to just what that loss of confidence entails and why it’s happening.
Each core institution performs an important task — educating children, enforcing the law, serving the poor, providing some service, meeting some need. And it does that by establishing a structure and process, a form, for combining people’s efforts toward accomplishing that task.
But as it does so, each institution also forms the people within it to carry out that task responsibly and reliably. It shapes behavior and character, fostering an ethic built around some idea of integrity. That’s why we trust the institution and the people who compose it.
We trust political institutions when they undertake a solemn obligation to the public interest and shape the people who populate them to do the same. We trust a business because it promises quality and reliability and rewards its workers when they deliver those. We trust a profession because it imposes standards and rules on its members intended to make them worthy of confidence. We trust the military because it values courage, honor and duty in carrying out the defense of the nation and forms human beings who do, too.
We lose faith in an institution when we no longer believe that it plays this ethical or formative role of teaching the people within it to be trustworthy. This can happen through simple corruption, when an institution’s attempts to be formative fail to overcome the vices of the people within it, and it instead masks their treachery — as when a bank cheats its customers, or a member of the clergy abuses a child.
That kind of gross abuse of power obviously undermines public trust in institutions. It is common in our time as in every time. But for that very reason, it doesn’t really explain the exceptional collapse of trust in American institutions in recent decades.
What stands out about our era in particular is a distinct kind of institutional dereliction — a failure even to attempt to form trustworthy people, and a tendency to think of institutions not as molds of character and behavior but as platforms for performance and prominence.
In one arena after another, we find people who should be insiders formed by institutions acting like outsiders performing on institutions. Many members of Congress now use their positions not to advance legislation but to express and act out the frustrations of their core constituencies. Rather than work through the institution, they use it as a stage to elevate themselves, raise their profiles and perform for the cameras in the reality show of our unceasing culture war.
President Trump clearly does the same thing. Rather than embodying the presidency and acting from within it, he sees it as the latest, highest stage for his lifelong one-man show. And he frequently uses it as he used some of the stages he commanded before he was elected: to complain about the government, as if he were not its chief executive.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/opin ... 3053090119
This Is How Scandinavia Got Great
The power of educating the whole person.
Almost everybody admires the Nordic model. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have high economic productivity, high social equality, high social trust and high levels of personal happiness.
Progressives say it’s because they have generous welfare states. Some libertarians point out that these countries score high on nearly every measure of free market openness. Immigration restrictionists note that until recently they were ethnically homogeneous societies.
But Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy.
The 19th-century Nordic elites did something we haven’t been able to do in this country recently. They realized that if their countries were to prosper they had to create truly successful “folk schools” for the least educated among them. They realized that they were going to have to make lifelong learning a part of the natural fabric of society.
They look at education differently than we do. The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. It was based on the idea that if people were going to be able to handle and contribute to an emerging industrial society, they would need more complex inner lives.
Today, Americans often think of schooling as the transmission of specialized skill sets — can the student read, do math, recite the facts of biology. Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town.
As Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Bjorkman put it in their book “The Nordic Secret,” “Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms.”
The Nordic educators worked hard to cultivate each student’s sense of connection to the nation. Before the 19th century, most Europeans identified themselves in local and not national terms. But the Nordic curriculum instilled in students a pride in, say, their Danish history, folklore and heritage.
“That which a person did not burn for in his young days, he will not easily work for as a man,” Christopher Arndt Bruun wrote. The idea was to create in the mind of the student a sense of wider circles of belonging — from family to town to nation — and an eagerness to assume shared responsibility for the whole.
The Nordic educators also worked hard to develop the student’s internal awareness. That is to say, they helped students see the forces always roiling inside the self — the emotions, cravings, wounds and desires. If you could see those forces and their interplay, as if from the outside, you could be their master and not their slave.
Their intuition was that as people grow, they have the ability to go through developmental phases, to see themselves and the world through ever more complex lenses. A young child may blindly obey authority — Mom, Dad, teacher. Then she internalizes and conforms to the norms of the group. Then she learns to create her own norms based on her own values. Then she learns to see herself as a node in a network of selves and thus learns mutuality and holistic thinking.
The purpose of bildung is to help people move through the uncomfortable transitions between each way of seeing.
That educational push seems to have had a lasting influence on the culture. Whether in Stockholm or Minneapolis, Scandinavians have a tendency to joke about the way their sense of responsibility is always nagging at them. They have the lowest rates of corruption in the world. They have a distinctive sense of the relationship between personal freedom and communal responsibility.
High social trust doesn’t just happen. It results when people are spontaneously responsible for one another in the daily interactions of life, when the institutions of society function well.
In the U.S., social trust has been on the decline for decades. If the children of privilege get to go to the best schools, there’s not going to be much social mutuality. If those schools do not instill a love of nation, there’s not going to be much shared responsibility.
If you have a thin educational system that does not help students see the webs of significance between people, does not even help students see how they see, you’re going to wind up with a society in which people can’t see through each other’s lenses.
When you look at the Nordic bildung model, you realize our problem is not only that we don’t train people with the right job skills. It’s that we don’t have the right lifelong development model to instill the mode of consciousness people need to thrive in a complex pluralistic society.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opin ... 0920200214
The power of educating the whole person.
Almost everybody admires the Nordic model. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have high economic productivity, high social equality, high social trust and high levels of personal happiness.
Progressives say it’s because they have generous welfare states. Some libertarians point out that these countries score high on nearly every measure of free market openness. Immigration restrictionists note that until recently they were ethnically homogeneous societies.
But Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy.
The 19th-century Nordic elites did something we haven’t been able to do in this country recently. They realized that if their countries were to prosper they had to create truly successful “folk schools” for the least educated among them. They realized that they were going to have to make lifelong learning a part of the natural fabric of society.
They look at education differently than we do. The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. It was based on the idea that if people were going to be able to handle and contribute to an emerging industrial society, they would need more complex inner lives.
Today, Americans often think of schooling as the transmission of specialized skill sets — can the student read, do math, recite the facts of biology. Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town.
As Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Bjorkman put it in their book “The Nordic Secret,” “Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms.”
The Nordic educators worked hard to cultivate each student’s sense of connection to the nation. Before the 19th century, most Europeans identified themselves in local and not national terms. But the Nordic curriculum instilled in students a pride in, say, their Danish history, folklore and heritage.
“That which a person did not burn for in his young days, he will not easily work for as a man,” Christopher Arndt Bruun wrote. The idea was to create in the mind of the student a sense of wider circles of belonging — from family to town to nation — and an eagerness to assume shared responsibility for the whole.
The Nordic educators also worked hard to develop the student’s internal awareness. That is to say, they helped students see the forces always roiling inside the self — the emotions, cravings, wounds and desires. If you could see those forces and their interplay, as if from the outside, you could be their master and not their slave.
Their intuition was that as people grow, they have the ability to go through developmental phases, to see themselves and the world through ever more complex lenses. A young child may blindly obey authority — Mom, Dad, teacher. Then she internalizes and conforms to the norms of the group. Then she learns to create her own norms based on her own values. Then she learns to see herself as a node in a network of selves and thus learns mutuality and holistic thinking.
The purpose of bildung is to help people move through the uncomfortable transitions between each way of seeing.
That educational push seems to have had a lasting influence on the culture. Whether in Stockholm or Minneapolis, Scandinavians have a tendency to joke about the way their sense of responsibility is always nagging at them. They have the lowest rates of corruption in the world. They have a distinctive sense of the relationship between personal freedom and communal responsibility.
High social trust doesn’t just happen. It results when people are spontaneously responsible for one another in the daily interactions of life, when the institutions of society function well.
In the U.S., social trust has been on the decline for decades. If the children of privilege get to go to the best schools, there’s not going to be much social mutuality. If those schools do not instill a love of nation, there’s not going to be much shared responsibility.
If you have a thin educational system that does not help students see the webs of significance between people, does not even help students see how they see, you’re going to wind up with a society in which people can’t see through each other’s lenses.
When you look at the Nordic bildung model, you realize our problem is not only that we don’t train people with the right job skills. It’s that we don’t have the right lifelong development model to instill the mode of consciousness people need to thrive in a complex pluralistic society.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opin ... 0920200214
The Coronavirus Is Us
We live in an interconnected world, where borders are porous, more like living membranes than physical walls.
The new coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, now threatening to snowball into a full-fledged pandemic, has already begun to wreak a sort of global havoc, causing alarm and even panic in several countries, spasms in financial markets and, most painfully, loss of life. There has been very little time so far for reflection, and few of us have stopped to wonder what this crisis might tell us about ourselves — about our bodies, our communities, our political systems and the nature of our growing interconnectedness across borders. But I believe it has something crucial to tell.
Well before the current outbreak, a global tendency to build walls and seal off national borders — between the United States and Mexico, Israel and Palestine, Hungary and Serbia and Croatia and elsewhere — had taken hold. The resurgent nationalism instigating this tendency nourishes itself on the fear of migrants and social contagion, while cherishing the impossible ideal of purity within the walled polity.
The border closures, obstacles to travel and quarantines now being imposed in response the viruses are on the surface medical measures, but they are also symbolic, resonating with the same basic logic as the construction of physical walls for political reasons. Both acts are meant to reassure citizens and give them a false sense of security. At the same time, they ignore the main problem — the poor state of transnational governance and decision-making that are vitally important for tackling climate and migrant crises, pandemics and economic crimes like tax evasion.
Survivalism has always followed a trajectory parallel to that of virulent nationalism. At its core is the fiction of a self-reliant, totally independent and autonomous, Crusoesque individual, the one who is smart and strong enough to be able to save himself (the gendered pronoun is not accidental here) and, perhaps, his family. Following the trail of the theological doctrine of salvation reserved for the select few, this attitude abstracts human beings from the environmental, communal, economic and other contexts of their lives.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/opin ... 0920200303
We live in an interconnected world, where borders are porous, more like living membranes than physical walls.
The new coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, now threatening to snowball into a full-fledged pandemic, has already begun to wreak a sort of global havoc, causing alarm and even panic in several countries, spasms in financial markets and, most painfully, loss of life. There has been very little time so far for reflection, and few of us have stopped to wonder what this crisis might tell us about ourselves — about our bodies, our communities, our political systems and the nature of our growing interconnectedness across borders. But I believe it has something crucial to tell.
Well before the current outbreak, a global tendency to build walls and seal off national borders — between the United States and Mexico, Israel and Palestine, Hungary and Serbia and Croatia and elsewhere — had taken hold. The resurgent nationalism instigating this tendency nourishes itself on the fear of migrants and social contagion, while cherishing the impossible ideal of purity within the walled polity.
The border closures, obstacles to travel and quarantines now being imposed in response the viruses are on the surface medical measures, but they are also symbolic, resonating with the same basic logic as the construction of physical walls for political reasons. Both acts are meant to reassure citizens and give them a false sense of security. At the same time, they ignore the main problem — the poor state of transnational governance and decision-making that are vitally important for tackling climate and migrant crises, pandemics and economic crimes like tax evasion.
Survivalism has always followed a trajectory parallel to that of virulent nationalism. At its core is the fiction of a self-reliant, totally independent and autonomous, Crusoesque individual, the one who is smart and strong enough to be able to save himself (the gendered pronoun is not accidental here) and, perhaps, his family. Following the trail of the theological doctrine of salvation reserved for the select few, this attitude abstracts human beings from the environmental, communal, economic and other contexts of their lives.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/opin ... 0920200303
Of Course They Gave Up on Democracy
Today’s political crisis is of the West’s own making.
“It is a paradox of democracy,” the historian Jill Lepore recently wrote, “that the best way to defend democracy is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent.” If she is right, then the post-Cold War decades, when democracy’s triumph seemed indisputable, left it alarmingly defenseless.
In 1989, when Vice President Dan Quayle nonsensically remarked that “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change,” we all dutifully relished the gaffe. But he turns out to have been right. What once seemed foreordained has mysteriously slipped our grasp. And not only have democracy and capitalism fallen into disarray worldwide, the uncritical idealization of democracy and capitalism after 1989 is at least partly responsible for our current woes.
At the end of the Cold War, democratic capitalism suddenly became synonymous with modernity. To be modern meant to adopt Western values, attitudes and institutions. Imitating the West was almost universally judged to be the fastest route to freedom and prosperity. The major divide in the world was no longer between the “Free World” and Soviet Communism but between exemplary Western democracies and their struggling emulators in the East and South. The tacit assumption, at the time, was that the East would undergo a radical “transition” while the West would be cryogenically frozen in its victory laurels. At this time, American constitutional lawyers had little time to reflect critically on their own democracy, so busy were they ghostwriting constitutions for the new democracies in the East.
In the 1990s, the geopolitical stage seemed set for a performance not unlike George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” an optimistic and didactic play in which a professor of phonetics (“the West”), over a short period of time, succeeds in teaching a poor flower girl (“the Rest”) to speak like the Queen and feel at home in polite company (“to become a liberal democracy”).
But the radical makeover did not play out as expected. It was as if instead of watching a performance of “Pygmalion,” the world ended up with a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a horror story about a man who decided to play God by assembling human body parts into a humanoid creature and fell victim to his own misguided experiment in self-duplication. Turn-of-the-century confidence in the global spread of liberalism has been shattered, two decades later, by a global backlash against it.
But how did the East’s zealous wish to imitate the West, which was matched by the West’s keenness to export its beloved political and economic models, contribute to the current crisis?
We argue that seeing democratization after the Cold War as a troubled and troubling process of political imitation helps us understand three critical ways in which an unjustifiable over-idealization of capitalism and democracy in the early years after the end of the Cold War helped bring about the wave of authoritarian and xenophobic anti-liberalism currently engulfing our world.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/opin ... 0920200310
Today’s political crisis is of the West’s own making.
“It is a paradox of democracy,” the historian Jill Lepore recently wrote, “that the best way to defend democracy is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent.” If she is right, then the post-Cold War decades, when democracy’s triumph seemed indisputable, left it alarmingly defenseless.
In 1989, when Vice President Dan Quayle nonsensically remarked that “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change,” we all dutifully relished the gaffe. But he turns out to have been right. What once seemed foreordained has mysteriously slipped our grasp. And not only have democracy and capitalism fallen into disarray worldwide, the uncritical idealization of democracy and capitalism after 1989 is at least partly responsible for our current woes.
At the end of the Cold War, democratic capitalism suddenly became synonymous with modernity. To be modern meant to adopt Western values, attitudes and institutions. Imitating the West was almost universally judged to be the fastest route to freedom and prosperity. The major divide in the world was no longer between the “Free World” and Soviet Communism but between exemplary Western democracies and their struggling emulators in the East and South. The tacit assumption, at the time, was that the East would undergo a radical “transition” while the West would be cryogenically frozen in its victory laurels. At this time, American constitutional lawyers had little time to reflect critically on their own democracy, so busy were they ghostwriting constitutions for the new democracies in the East.
In the 1990s, the geopolitical stage seemed set for a performance not unlike George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” an optimistic and didactic play in which a professor of phonetics (“the West”), over a short period of time, succeeds in teaching a poor flower girl (“the Rest”) to speak like the Queen and feel at home in polite company (“to become a liberal democracy”).
But the radical makeover did not play out as expected. It was as if instead of watching a performance of “Pygmalion,” the world ended up with a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a horror story about a man who decided to play God by assembling human body parts into a humanoid creature and fell victim to his own misguided experiment in self-duplication. Turn-of-the-century confidence in the global spread of liberalism has been shattered, two decades later, by a global backlash against it.
But how did the East’s zealous wish to imitate the West, which was matched by the West’s keenness to export its beloved political and economic models, contribute to the current crisis?
We argue that seeing democratization after the Cold War as a troubled and troubling process of political imitation helps us understand three critical ways in which an unjustifiable over-idealization of capitalism and democracy in the early years after the end of the Cold War helped bring about the wave of authoritarian and xenophobic anti-liberalism currently engulfing our world.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/opin ... 0920200310
We Need Great Leadership Now, and Here’s What It Looks Like
These times are testing leaders from the schoolhouse to the White House, from city halls to corporate suites.
In a time of crisis, like we are in now, with people feeling frightened and uncertain, leadership doesn’t just matter more. It matters exponentially more.
Because even small errors in navigation can have exponential consequences when you’re spending $1 trillion in a week — while fighting a pandemic that spreads so fast that hesitating for just a week can totally sap your ability to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.
In moments like these, when the choices we make are so impactful, people desperately want to believe that their leaders know what they’re doing. But they quickly learn that in times like these, leaders either grow or swell — they either grow out of their weaknesses and rise to the level of the challenge or all of their worst weaknesses swell to new levels.
And pandemics leave nothing hidden. They flow into every tiny corner and pore and expose every weakness or strength in your society: how much trust you have in your government; how much social trust exists in your community to enable collaboration; the strength of your companies’ balance sheets; how prepared your government is to tackle the unexpected; how many of its people are living paycheck to paycheck; and what kind of public health care safety nets you’ve built.
We have never had a simultaneous global leadership stress test like this — one that is testing leaders from the schoolhouse to the White House and from city halls to corporate suites. Everyone will be graded.
Because this is such a critical leadership test at all levels, and because it is so not over, I called my teacher and friend Dov Seidman — who is the founder and chairman of both the ethics and compliance company LRN and the How Institute for Society, which promotes values-based leadership — to explore this issue. This is an edited version of our conversation:
Interview and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
These times are testing leaders from the schoolhouse to the White House, from city halls to corporate suites.
In a time of crisis, like we are in now, with people feeling frightened and uncertain, leadership doesn’t just matter more. It matters exponentially more.
Because even small errors in navigation can have exponential consequences when you’re spending $1 trillion in a week — while fighting a pandemic that spreads so fast that hesitating for just a week can totally sap your ability to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.
In moments like these, when the choices we make are so impactful, people desperately want to believe that their leaders know what they’re doing. But they quickly learn that in times like these, leaders either grow or swell — they either grow out of their weaknesses and rise to the level of the challenge or all of their worst weaknesses swell to new levels.
And pandemics leave nothing hidden. They flow into every tiny corner and pore and expose every weakness or strength in your society: how much trust you have in your government; how much social trust exists in your community to enable collaboration; the strength of your companies’ balance sheets; how prepared your government is to tackle the unexpected; how many of its people are living paycheck to paycheck; and what kind of public health care safety nets you’ve built.
We have never had a simultaneous global leadership stress test like this — one that is testing leaders from the schoolhouse to the White House and from city halls to corporate suites. Everyone will be graded.
Because this is such a critical leadership test at all levels, and because it is so not over, I called my teacher and friend Dov Seidman — who is the founder and chairman of both the ethics and compliance company LRN and the How Institute for Society, which promotes values-based leadership — to explore this issue. This is an edited version of our conversation:
Interview and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
It’s Not Enough to ‘Get Back to Normal’
We can rebuild better. Here’s how.
A hallmark of America’s strength and resilience has been our ability to seize opportunity amid our greatest crises.
After the Civil War, we adopted constitutional amendments to end slavery and enshrine the concept of equal protection under the law. In the Great Depression, we established the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. After World War II, we had the G.I. Bill and founded NATO and the United Nations. During the Vietnam War and civil rights era, Congress abolished segregation, secured the right to vote for all Americans, and reinforced our social safety net through the Great Society.
As we struggle through the Covid-19 crisis — the greatest challenge to global health, national security and our economy since World War II — we must ask again how we can emerge a more just, equitable and cohesive nation.
Unfortunately, we are today condemned to be led by a president who has no conception of the national interest apart from his personal interest. Donald Trump is obsessed with his image and poll numbers and the Dow Jones average, but sadly none of the ambitious questions that inspired his predecessors — chiefly, how can we exit this crucible of death and hardship as a more decent America?
Yet, as destructive and lethal as Mr. Trump’s failings are, we cannot afford to miss this moment of reckoning. The coronavirus has laid bare our domestic divisions, unequal economy, and glaring racial and socio-economic disparities as well as the fragility of our democracy. To recover from this crisis, it will not suffice to contain the carnage, reopen our economy and “get back to normal.” “Normal” is too costly and deadly for all Americans.
Now is the time to rebuild better — our economy, our health care and education systems, our democratic institutions — so that we cure the root causes of our collective disease. While one can hope we soon will be blessed with new leadership committed to national unity, human dignity, and respect for democracy, we cannot afford to wish and wait.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
We can rebuild better. Here’s how.
A hallmark of America’s strength and resilience has been our ability to seize opportunity amid our greatest crises.
After the Civil War, we adopted constitutional amendments to end slavery and enshrine the concept of equal protection under the law. In the Great Depression, we established the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. After World War II, we had the G.I. Bill and founded NATO and the United Nations. During the Vietnam War and civil rights era, Congress abolished segregation, secured the right to vote for all Americans, and reinforced our social safety net through the Great Society.
As we struggle through the Covid-19 crisis — the greatest challenge to global health, national security and our economy since World War II — we must ask again how we can emerge a more just, equitable and cohesive nation.
Unfortunately, we are today condemned to be led by a president who has no conception of the national interest apart from his personal interest. Donald Trump is obsessed with his image and poll numbers and the Dow Jones average, but sadly none of the ambitious questions that inspired his predecessors — chiefly, how can we exit this crucible of death and hardship as a more decent America?
Yet, as destructive and lethal as Mr. Trump’s failings are, we cannot afford to miss this moment of reckoning. The coronavirus has laid bare our domestic divisions, unequal economy, and glaring racial and socio-economic disparities as well as the fragility of our democracy. To recover from this crisis, it will not suffice to contain the carnage, reopen our economy and “get back to normal.” “Normal” is too costly and deadly for all Americans.
Now is the time to rebuild better — our economy, our health care and education systems, our democratic institutions — so that we cure the root causes of our collective disease. While one can hope we soon will be blessed with new leadership committed to national unity, human dignity, and respect for democracy, we cannot afford to wish and wait.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Why the Trump Ploy Stopped Working
As the nation unifies, divisiveness falls flat.
Even in a pandemic there are weavers and rippers. The weavers try to spiritually hold each other so we can get through this together. The rippers, from Donald Trump on down, see everything through the prism of politics and still emphasize division. For the rippers on left and right, politics is a war that gives life meaning.
Fortunately, the rippers are not winning. America is pretty united right now. In an ABC News/Ipsos poll last week, 98 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans supported social-distancing rules. According to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey, nearly 90 percent of Americans think a second wave of the virus would be at least somewhat likely if we ended the lockdowns today.
A Pew survey found 89 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Democrats support the bipartisan federal aid packages. Seventy-seven percent of American adults think more aid will be necessary.
According to a USA Today/Ipsos poll, most of the policies on offer enjoyed tremendous bipartisan support: increasing testing (nearly 90 percent), temporarily halting immigration (79 percent) and continuing the lockdown until the end of April (69 percent). A KFF poll shows that people who have lost their jobs are just as supportive of the lockdowns as people who haven’t.
The polarization industry is loath to admit this, but, once you set aside the Trump circus, we are now more united than at any time since 9/11. The pandemic has reminded us of our interdependence and the need for a strong and effective government.
It’s also taken us to a deeper level. The polarization over the past decades has not been about us disagreeing more; it’s been about us hating each other more. This has required constant volleys of dehumanization.
This dehumanization has always been a bit of a mirage. A new study from the group Beyond Conflict shows that Republicans and Democrats substantially exaggerate how much the other side dislikes and disagrees with them.
The pandemic has been a massive humanizing force — allowing us to see each other on a level much deeper than politics — see the fragility, the fear and the courage.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
As the nation unifies, divisiveness falls flat.
Even in a pandemic there are weavers and rippers. The weavers try to spiritually hold each other so we can get through this together. The rippers, from Donald Trump on down, see everything through the prism of politics and still emphasize division. For the rippers on left and right, politics is a war that gives life meaning.
Fortunately, the rippers are not winning. America is pretty united right now. In an ABC News/Ipsos poll last week, 98 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans supported social-distancing rules. According to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey, nearly 90 percent of Americans think a second wave of the virus would be at least somewhat likely if we ended the lockdowns today.
A Pew survey found 89 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Democrats support the bipartisan federal aid packages. Seventy-seven percent of American adults think more aid will be necessary.
According to a USA Today/Ipsos poll, most of the policies on offer enjoyed tremendous bipartisan support: increasing testing (nearly 90 percent), temporarily halting immigration (79 percent) and continuing the lockdown until the end of April (69 percent). A KFF poll shows that people who have lost their jobs are just as supportive of the lockdowns as people who haven’t.
The polarization industry is loath to admit this, but, once you set aside the Trump circus, we are now more united than at any time since 9/11. The pandemic has reminded us of our interdependence and the need for a strong and effective government.
It’s also taken us to a deeper level. The polarization over the past decades has not been about us disagreeing more; it’s been about us hating each other more. This has required constant volleys of dehumanization.
This dehumanization has always been a bit of a mirage. A new study from the group Beyond Conflict shows that Republicans and Democrats substantially exaggerate how much the other side dislikes and disagrees with them.
The pandemic has been a massive humanizing force — allowing us to see each other on a level much deeper than politics — see the fragility, the fear and the courage.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Pity Us
Danes haven’t built a “socialist” country. Just one that works.
President Trump thunders that Democrats are trying to drag America toward “socialism,” Vice President Mike Pence warns that Democrats aim to “impose socialism on the American people,” and even some Democrats warn against becoming, as one put it, “[expletive] Denmark.”
So, before the coronavirus pandemic, I crept behind [expletive] Danish lines to explore: How scary is Denmark? How horrifying would it be if the United States took a step or two in the direction of Denmark? Would America lose its edge, productivity and innovation, or would it gain well-being, fairness and happiness?
So, here, grab a Danish, and we’ll chat about how a [expletive] progressive country performs under stress. The pandemic interrupted my reporting, but I’d be safer if I still were in Denmark: It has had almost twice as much testing per capita as the United States and fewer than half as many deaths per capita.
Put it this way: More than 35,000 Americans have already died in part because the United States could not manage the pandemic as deftly as Denmark.
Denmark lowered new infections so successfully that last month it reopened elementary schools and day care centers as well as barber shops and physical therapy centers. In the coming days, it will announce further steps to reopen the economy.
Moreover, Danes kept their jobs. The trauma of massive numbers of people losing jobs and health insurance, of long lines at food banks — that is the American experience, but it’s not what’s happening in Denmark. America’s unemployment rate last month was 14.7 percent, but Denmark’s is hovering in the range of 4 percent to 5 percent.
“Our aim was that businesses wouldn’t fire workers,” Labor Minister Peter Hummelgaard told me. Denmark’s approach is simple: Along with some other European countries, it paid companies to keep employees on the payroll, reimbursing up to 90 percent of wages of workers who otherwise would have been laid off.
Denmark also helped hard-hit companies pay fixed costs like rent — on the condition that they suspend dividends, don’t buy back stock and don’t use foreign havens to evade taxes.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opin ... ogin-email
Danes haven’t built a “socialist” country. Just one that works.
President Trump thunders that Democrats are trying to drag America toward “socialism,” Vice President Mike Pence warns that Democrats aim to “impose socialism on the American people,” and even some Democrats warn against becoming, as one put it, “[expletive] Denmark.”
So, before the coronavirus pandemic, I crept behind [expletive] Danish lines to explore: How scary is Denmark? How horrifying would it be if the United States took a step or two in the direction of Denmark? Would America lose its edge, productivity and innovation, or would it gain well-being, fairness and happiness?
So, here, grab a Danish, and we’ll chat about how a [expletive] progressive country performs under stress. The pandemic interrupted my reporting, but I’d be safer if I still were in Denmark: It has had almost twice as much testing per capita as the United States and fewer than half as many deaths per capita.
Put it this way: More than 35,000 Americans have already died in part because the United States could not manage the pandemic as deftly as Denmark.
Denmark lowered new infections so successfully that last month it reopened elementary schools and day care centers as well as barber shops and physical therapy centers. In the coming days, it will announce further steps to reopen the economy.
Moreover, Danes kept their jobs. The trauma of massive numbers of people losing jobs and health insurance, of long lines at food banks — that is the American experience, but it’s not what’s happening in Denmark. America’s unemployment rate last month was 14.7 percent, but Denmark’s is hovering in the range of 4 percent to 5 percent.
“Our aim was that businesses wouldn’t fire workers,” Labor Minister Peter Hummelgaard told me. Denmark’s approach is simple: Along with some other European countries, it paid companies to keep employees on the payroll, reimbursing up to 90 percent of wages of workers who otherwise would have been laid off.
Denmark also helped hard-hit companies pay fixed costs like rent — on the condition that they suspend dividends, don’t buy back stock and don’t use foreign havens to evade taxes.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opin ... ogin-email
How We Broke the World
Greed and globalization set us up for disaster.
If recent weeks have shown us anything, it’s that the world is not just flat. It’s fragile.
And we’re the ones who made it that way with our own hands. Just look around. Over the past 20 years, we’ve been steadily removing man-made and natural buffers, redundancies, regulations and norms that provide resilience and protection when big systems — be they ecological, geopolitical or financial — get stressed. We’ve been recklessly removing these buffers out of an obsession with short-term efficiency and growth, or without thinking at all.
At the same time, we’ve been behaving in extreme ways — pushing against, and breaching, common-sense political, financial and planetary boundaries.
And, all the while, we’ve taken the world technologically from connected to interconnected to interdependent — by removing more friction and installing more grease in global markets, telecommunications systems, the internet and travel. In doing so, we’ve made globalization faster, deeper, cheaper and tighter than ever before. Who knew that there were regular direct flights from Wuhan, China, to America?
Put all three of these trends together and what you have is a world more easily prone to shocks and extreme behaviors — but with fewer buffers to cushion those shocks — and many more networked companies and people to convey them globally.
This, of course, was revealed clearly in the latest world-spanning crisis — the coronavirus pandemic. But this trend of more frequent destabilizing crises has been building over the past 20 years: 9/11, the Great Recession of 2008, Covid-19 and climate change. Pandemics are no longer just biological — they are now geopolitical, financial and atmospheric, too. And we will suffer increasing consequences unless we start behaving differently and treating Mother Earth differently.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Greed and globalization set us up for disaster.
If recent weeks have shown us anything, it’s that the world is not just flat. It’s fragile.
And we’re the ones who made it that way with our own hands. Just look around. Over the past 20 years, we’ve been steadily removing man-made and natural buffers, redundancies, regulations and norms that provide resilience and protection when big systems — be they ecological, geopolitical or financial — get stressed. We’ve been recklessly removing these buffers out of an obsession with short-term efficiency and growth, or without thinking at all.
At the same time, we’ve been behaving in extreme ways — pushing against, and breaching, common-sense political, financial and planetary boundaries.
And, all the while, we’ve taken the world technologically from connected to interconnected to interdependent — by removing more friction and installing more grease in global markets, telecommunications systems, the internet and travel. In doing so, we’ve made globalization faster, deeper, cheaper and tighter than ever before. Who knew that there were regular direct flights from Wuhan, China, to America?
Put all three of these trends together and what you have is a world more easily prone to shocks and extreme behaviors — but with fewer buffers to cushion those shocks — and many more networked companies and people to convey them globally.
This, of course, was revealed clearly in the latest world-spanning crisis — the coronavirus pandemic. But this trend of more frequent destabilizing crises has been building over the past 20 years: 9/11, the Great Recession of 2008, Covid-19 and climate change. Pandemics are no longer just biological — they are now geopolitical, financial and atmospheric, too. And we will suffer increasing consequences unless we start behaving differently and treating Mother Earth differently.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The article below highlights the issues of global governance and the role of the United Nations.
Why Canada’s bid for a seat at the UN’s Security Council matters
John McNee was permanent representative of Canada to the United Nations from 2006 to 2011. He was also the Secretary General for the Aga khan's Global Center for Pluralism
On June 17, years of advocacy and international cajoling will be resolved one way or the other, as Canada, Ireland and Norway stand for election to the UN Security Council for a two-year term beginning in 2021. The council, composed of five permanent members – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – also has 10 countries elected for such terms, from different regions.
Western countries often go to great lengths to win one of the two seats, and this race has been no different. The three countries have deployed prime ministers and foreign ministers for their campaign, dispatched special envoys around the world, mobilized diplomatic networks, and otherwise reasoned, lobbied and persuaded in their efforts to secure the votes of the 193 countries of the General Assembly.
The value of a Security Council seat, however, is viewed by many with skepticism. The past decade has been disappointing as great-power rivalry has frustrated action, with China and the U.S. colliding. The council’s shameful inability to address the Syrian tragedy is thanks to cynical Russian opportunism. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has proven unpredictable. In recent months, the Security Council was unable even to pass a resolution on COVID-19.
But this does not mean we should simply sit on the sidelines and criticize. Instead, Canada should try to effect change and bring new, 21st-century concerns around international security to the council, on issues ranging from cyberthreats to pandemics. It’s in Canadians’ interest – and that of the international community, too – for Canada to be elected.
First, the stakes are higher now. The world is becoming a more dangerous place. The economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has weakened fragile countries, deepening the agony of failed states such as Venezuela and undermining international security. Suspicion of foreigners is rising. A great worry is that more states will turn increasingly inward.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a clear failure of international co-operation, signalling that the great global challenges will require more collaboration among nations, not less. Yet, the institutions that allow for such co-operation are increasingly under attack from the great powers’ aggressive pursuit of their own interests; other countries, emboldened by that example, have been less willing to accept the need for collaboration over common goals and adherence to agreed-upon rules.
This rules-based international order, which has undergirded the world since the Second World War, is imperfect, but it remains the best hope to prevent a world where might makes right.
Canada, which has long been a beneficiary of this order, is well-placed to strengthen and defend it. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has called for a group of “constructive powers,” including Canada, France, Japan, Germany and possibly Singapore to fight for multilateralism and international institutions, starting with the UN. These institutions offer the best hope of confronting the great global challenges of this century. Canada’s voice would be stronger in defending this vital cause as a Security Council member.
Second, Canada could contribute to the council’s agenda around threats to peace in places such as Yemen, Mali, Colombia, Afghanistan and others. With its deep ties to anglophone and francophone countries in Africa and Asia, membership in the Group of Seven (G7), Group of Twenty (G20), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and Organization of American States (OAS) and allies in Europe, Canada has a unique network of global relationships that can make it a distinctive contributor.
Canada also has the ability to work in partnership with others on new-generation security issues. International terrorism, pandemics, increasing food insecurity, unprecedented outflows of refugees from countries in conflict, cyberthreats, and climate change all deeply affect Canada’s and global security.
Canada’s Mission to the UN has championed innovative approaches to financing for development, drawing on the private sector, to get at some of the deep causes of conflict. Innovative thinking is sorely needed on the council.
We have the heft to make a difference, and the DNA for collaboration. Canada could rally other council members, such as Vietnam, Tunisia and Niger, to address these important challenges. Canada’s track record at the UN is of building successful cross-regional coalitions, whether for protecting civilians in conflict, gender issues or prevention of genocide. What’s more, Canadians’ respect for diversity would be an enormous asset, given the number of conflicts that involve ethnicity, race or religion.
Just as it was in 2010 – the last time we ran – Canada is clearly hoping to shape the international security agenda, and now, it’s a time when global tensions are on the rise. So let us hope, to paraphrase former U.S. president Barack Obama, that the world decides it “needs more Canada” – starting with Wednesday’s election.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Why Canada’s bid for a seat at the UN’s Security Council matters
John McNee was permanent representative of Canada to the United Nations from 2006 to 2011. He was also the Secretary General for the Aga khan's Global Center for Pluralism
On June 17, years of advocacy and international cajoling will be resolved one way or the other, as Canada, Ireland and Norway stand for election to the UN Security Council for a two-year term beginning in 2021. The council, composed of five permanent members – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – also has 10 countries elected for such terms, from different regions.
Western countries often go to great lengths to win one of the two seats, and this race has been no different. The three countries have deployed prime ministers and foreign ministers for their campaign, dispatched special envoys around the world, mobilized diplomatic networks, and otherwise reasoned, lobbied and persuaded in their efforts to secure the votes of the 193 countries of the General Assembly.
The value of a Security Council seat, however, is viewed by many with skepticism. The past decade has been disappointing as great-power rivalry has frustrated action, with China and the U.S. colliding. The council’s shameful inability to address the Syrian tragedy is thanks to cynical Russian opportunism. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has proven unpredictable. In recent months, the Security Council was unable even to pass a resolution on COVID-19.
But this does not mean we should simply sit on the sidelines and criticize. Instead, Canada should try to effect change and bring new, 21st-century concerns around international security to the council, on issues ranging from cyberthreats to pandemics. It’s in Canadians’ interest – and that of the international community, too – for Canada to be elected.
First, the stakes are higher now. The world is becoming a more dangerous place. The economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has weakened fragile countries, deepening the agony of failed states such as Venezuela and undermining international security. Suspicion of foreigners is rising. A great worry is that more states will turn increasingly inward.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a clear failure of international co-operation, signalling that the great global challenges will require more collaboration among nations, not less. Yet, the institutions that allow for such co-operation are increasingly under attack from the great powers’ aggressive pursuit of their own interests; other countries, emboldened by that example, have been less willing to accept the need for collaboration over common goals and adherence to agreed-upon rules.
This rules-based international order, which has undergirded the world since the Second World War, is imperfect, but it remains the best hope to prevent a world where might makes right.
Canada, which has long been a beneficiary of this order, is well-placed to strengthen and defend it. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has called for a group of “constructive powers,” including Canada, France, Japan, Germany and possibly Singapore to fight for multilateralism and international institutions, starting with the UN. These institutions offer the best hope of confronting the great global challenges of this century. Canada’s voice would be stronger in defending this vital cause as a Security Council member.
Second, Canada could contribute to the council’s agenda around threats to peace in places such as Yemen, Mali, Colombia, Afghanistan and others. With its deep ties to anglophone and francophone countries in Africa and Asia, membership in the Group of Seven (G7), Group of Twenty (G20), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and Organization of American States (OAS) and allies in Europe, Canada has a unique network of global relationships that can make it a distinctive contributor.
Canada also has the ability to work in partnership with others on new-generation security issues. International terrorism, pandemics, increasing food insecurity, unprecedented outflows of refugees from countries in conflict, cyberthreats, and climate change all deeply affect Canada’s and global security.
Canada’s Mission to the UN has championed innovative approaches to financing for development, drawing on the private sector, to get at some of the deep causes of conflict. Innovative thinking is sorely needed on the council.
We have the heft to make a difference, and the DNA for collaboration. Canada could rally other council members, such as Vietnam, Tunisia and Niger, to address these important challenges. Canada’s track record at the UN is of building successful cross-regional coalitions, whether for protecting civilians in conflict, gender issues or prevention of genocide. What’s more, Canadians’ respect for diversity would be an enormous asset, given the number of conflicts that involve ethnicity, race or religion.
Just as it was in 2010 – the last time we ran – Canada is clearly hoping to shape the international security agenda, and now, it’s a time when global tensions are on the rise. So let us hope, to paraphrase former U.S. president Barack Obama, that the world decides it “needs more Canada” – starting with Wednesday’s election.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Video Quote: MHI on Training Future Leaders
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD5fOVUn-Yk
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Evora University Symposium, Evora, Portugal, 12 February 2006.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD5fOVUn-Yk
Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Evora University Symposium, Evora, Portugal, 12 February 2006.
China Is Harvesting the DNA of Its People. Is This the Future of Policing?
The Chinese police are systematically collecting genomic data from tens of millions of men and boys.
For several years now, the police and other authorities in China have been collecting across the country DNA samples from millions of men and boys who aren’t suspected of having committed any crime.
In a report published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last month, we exposed the extent of the Chinese government’s program of genetic surveillance: It no longer is limited to Xinjiang, Tibet and other areas mostly populated by ethnic minorities the government represses; DNA collection — serving no apparent immediate need — has spread across the entire country. We estimate that the authorities’ goal is to gather the DNA samples of 35 million to 70 million Chinese males.
Matched against official family records, surveillance footage or witness statements in police reports, these samples will become a powerful tool for the Chinese authorities to track down a man or boy — or, failing that, a relative of his — for whatever reason they deem fit.
The Chinese government denies the existence of any such program, but since our study’s publication, we have continued to uncover online scattered evidence revealing the program’s enormous scale, including government reports and official procurement orders for DNA kits and testing services.
DNA is being harvested across the country: in the southwestern provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou; in central-southern Hunan; in Shandong and Jiangsu, in the east; and up north, in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia.
We have continued to find photographic evidence that the police are collecting blood from children, pinpricking their fingers at school — a clear violation of China’s responsibilities under the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
And we have found fresh proof, including official documents, showing that DNA samples are also being gathered in major urban centers. (For a time, the focus seemed to be largely on rural communities.)
An official report dated June 16, available on a website of the government of Sichuan Province, details the creation of a DNA database by the Public Security Bureau of the city of Chengdu, the province’s capital, and seeks expert opinion on the creation of a “male ancestry investigation system.”
It documents how 17 public security offices have collected DNA samples from nearly 600,000 male residents across the city — that’s about 7 percent of Chengdu’s male population (assuming that roughly half of the city’s total population of about 16.6 million is male).
The Chengdu procurement report states that building a massive genetic database about local residents will help the police “maintain public order and stability as well as meet the needs of daily case work.” This is of no comfort.
In China, securing the public order essentially means maintaining the uncontested rule of the Communist Party. Dissent is a crime, and police operations are a key part of the state’s apparatus of repression.
The Chinese police are not doing this work alone. Evidence continues to accumulate that private companies, both Chinese and foreign, are complicit in this extraordinarily vast, and ominous, assault on the privacy of Chinese citizens.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The Chinese police are systematically collecting genomic data from tens of millions of men and boys.
For several years now, the police and other authorities in China have been collecting across the country DNA samples from millions of men and boys who aren’t suspected of having committed any crime.
In a report published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last month, we exposed the extent of the Chinese government’s program of genetic surveillance: It no longer is limited to Xinjiang, Tibet and other areas mostly populated by ethnic minorities the government represses; DNA collection — serving no apparent immediate need — has spread across the entire country. We estimate that the authorities’ goal is to gather the DNA samples of 35 million to 70 million Chinese males.
Matched against official family records, surveillance footage or witness statements in police reports, these samples will become a powerful tool for the Chinese authorities to track down a man or boy — or, failing that, a relative of his — for whatever reason they deem fit.
The Chinese government denies the existence of any such program, but since our study’s publication, we have continued to uncover online scattered evidence revealing the program’s enormous scale, including government reports and official procurement orders for DNA kits and testing services.
DNA is being harvested across the country: in the southwestern provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou; in central-southern Hunan; in Shandong and Jiangsu, in the east; and up north, in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia.
We have continued to find photographic evidence that the police are collecting blood from children, pinpricking their fingers at school — a clear violation of China’s responsibilities under the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
And we have found fresh proof, including official documents, showing that DNA samples are also being gathered in major urban centers. (For a time, the focus seemed to be largely on rural communities.)
An official report dated June 16, available on a website of the government of Sichuan Province, details the creation of a DNA database by the Public Security Bureau of the city of Chengdu, the province’s capital, and seeks expert opinion on the creation of a “male ancestry investigation system.”
It documents how 17 public security offices have collected DNA samples from nearly 600,000 male residents across the city — that’s about 7 percent of Chengdu’s male population (assuming that roughly half of the city’s total population of about 16.6 million is male).
The Chengdu procurement report states that building a massive genetic database about local residents will help the police “maintain public order and stability as well as meet the needs of daily case work.” This is of no comfort.
In China, securing the public order essentially means maintaining the uncontested rule of the Communist Party. Dissent is a crime, and police operations are a key part of the state’s apparatus of repression.
The Chinese police are not doing this work alone. Evidence continues to accumulate that private companies, both Chinese and foreign, are complicit in this extraordinarily vast, and ominous, assault on the privacy of Chinese citizens.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Colonialism Made the Modern World. Let’s Remake It.
This is what real “decolonization” should look like.
“Decolonize this place!” “Decolonize the university!” “Decolonize the museum!”
In the past few years, decolonization has gained new political currency — inside the borders of the old colonial powers. Indigenous movements have reclaimed the mantle of “decolonization” in protests like those at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access pipeline. Students from South Africa to Britain have marched under its banner to challenge Eurocentric curriculums. Museums such as the Natural History Museum in New York and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels have been compelled to confront their representation of colonized African and Indigenous peoples.
But what is “decolonization?” What the word means and what it requires have been contested for a century.
After World War I, European colonial administrators viewed decolonization as the process in which they would allow their imperial charges to graduate to independence by modeling themselves on European states. But in the mid-20th century, anticolonial activists and intellectuals demanded immediate independence and refused to model their societies on the terms set by imperialists. Between 1945 and 1975, as struggles for independence were won in Africa and Asia, United Nations membership grew from 51 to 144 countries. In that period, decolonization was primarily political and economic.
As more colonies gained independence, however, cultural decolonization became more significant. European political and economic domination coincided with a Eurocentrism that valorized European civilization as the apex of human achievement. Indigenous cultural traditions and systems of knowledge were denigrated as backward and uncivilized. The colonized were treated as people without history. The struggle against this has been especially central in settler colonies in which the displacement of Indigenous institutions was most violent.
South Africa, where a reckoning with the persistence of the settler regime has gripped national politics, reignited the latest calls for decolonization in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall movement. Students at the University of Cape Town targeted the statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, but saw its removal as only the opening act in a wider struggle to bring white supremacy to an end. Under the banners of “more than a statue” and “decolonize the university,” students called for social and economic transformation to undo the racial hierarchies that persist in post-apartheid South Africa, free university tuition and an Africa-centered curriculum.
Now, partly riding the global surge of Black Lives Matter mobilizations, calls for decolonization have swept Europe’s former imperial metropoles. In Bristol, England, last month, protesters tore down the statue of Edward Colston, the director of the Royal African Company, which dominated the African slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Across Belgium, protesters have focused on statues of King Leopold II, who ruled the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) as his personal property from 1885 to 1908. King Phillipe II of Belgium recently expressed “regret” for his ancestor’s brutal regime, which caused the death of 10 million people.
Colonialism, the protesters insist, did not just shape the global south. It made Europe and the modern world. Profits from the slave trade fueled the rise of port cities like Bristol, Liverpool and London while the Atlantic economy that slavery created helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution. King Leopold amassed a fortune of well over $1.1 billion in today’s dollars from Congo. His vision of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, which opened in 1910 soon after his death, reproduced a narrative of African backwardness while obscuring the violent exploitation of the Congolese.
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This is what real “decolonization” should look like.
“Decolonize this place!” “Decolonize the university!” “Decolonize the museum!”
In the past few years, decolonization has gained new political currency — inside the borders of the old colonial powers. Indigenous movements have reclaimed the mantle of “decolonization” in protests like those at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access pipeline. Students from South Africa to Britain have marched under its banner to challenge Eurocentric curriculums. Museums such as the Natural History Museum in New York and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels have been compelled to confront their representation of colonized African and Indigenous peoples.
But what is “decolonization?” What the word means and what it requires have been contested for a century.
After World War I, European colonial administrators viewed decolonization as the process in which they would allow their imperial charges to graduate to independence by modeling themselves on European states. But in the mid-20th century, anticolonial activists and intellectuals demanded immediate independence and refused to model their societies on the terms set by imperialists. Between 1945 and 1975, as struggles for independence were won in Africa and Asia, United Nations membership grew from 51 to 144 countries. In that period, decolonization was primarily political and economic.
As more colonies gained independence, however, cultural decolonization became more significant. European political and economic domination coincided with a Eurocentrism that valorized European civilization as the apex of human achievement. Indigenous cultural traditions and systems of knowledge were denigrated as backward and uncivilized. The colonized were treated as people without history. The struggle against this has been especially central in settler colonies in which the displacement of Indigenous institutions was most violent.
South Africa, where a reckoning with the persistence of the settler regime has gripped national politics, reignited the latest calls for decolonization in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall movement. Students at the University of Cape Town targeted the statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, but saw its removal as only the opening act in a wider struggle to bring white supremacy to an end. Under the banners of “more than a statue” and “decolonize the university,” students called for social and economic transformation to undo the racial hierarchies that persist in post-apartheid South Africa, free university tuition and an Africa-centered curriculum.
Now, partly riding the global surge of Black Lives Matter mobilizations, calls for decolonization have swept Europe’s former imperial metropoles. In Bristol, England, last month, protesters tore down the statue of Edward Colston, the director of the Royal African Company, which dominated the African slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Across Belgium, protesters have focused on statues of King Leopold II, who ruled the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) as his personal property from 1885 to 1908. King Phillipe II of Belgium recently expressed “regret” for his ancestor’s brutal regime, which caused the death of 10 million people.
Colonialism, the protesters insist, did not just shape the global south. It made Europe and the modern world. Profits from the slave trade fueled the rise of port cities like Bristol, Liverpool and London while the Atlantic economy that slavery created helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution. King Leopold amassed a fortune of well over $1.1 billion in today’s dollars from Congo. His vision of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, which opened in 1910 soon after his death, reproduced a narrative of African backwardness while obscuring the violent exploitation of the Congolese.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opin ... ogin-email
‘Clean Up This Mess’: The Chinese Thinkers Behind Xi’s Hard Line
Chinese academics have been honing the Communist Party’s authoritarian response in Hong Kong, rejecting the liberal ideas of their youth.
HONG KONG — When Tian Feilong first arrived in Hong Kong as demands for free elections were on the rise, he said he felt sympathetic toward a society that seemed to reflect the liberal political ideas he had studied as a graduate student in Beijing.
Then, as the calls escalated into protests across Hong Kong in 2014, he increasingly embraced Chinese warnings that freedom could go too far, threatening national unity. He became an ardent critic of the demonstrations, and six years later he is a staunch defender of the sweeping national security law that China has imposed on the former British colony.
Mr. Tian has joined a tide of Chinese scholars who have turned against Western-inspired ideas that once flowed in China’s universities, instead promoting the proudly authoritarian worldview ascendant under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party leader. This cadre of Chinese intellectuals serve as champions, even official advisers, defending and honing the party’s hardening policies, including the rollout of the security law in Hong Kong.
“Back when I was weak, I had to totally play by your rules. Now I’m strong and have confidence, so why can’t I lay down my own rules and values and ideas?” Mr. Tian, 37, said in an interview, explaining the prevailing outlook in China. Witnessing the tumult as a visiting scholar in Hong Kong in 2014, Mr. Tian said, he “rethought the relationship between individual freedom and state authority.”
“Hong Kong is, after all, China’s Hong Kong,” he said. “It’s up to the Communist Party to clean up this mess.”
While China’s Communist Party has long nurtured legions of academics to defend its agenda, these authoritarian thinkers stand out for their unabashed, often flashily erudite advocacy of one-party rule and assertive sovereignty, and their turn against the liberal ideas that many of them once embraced.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/worl ... ogin-email
Chinese academics have been honing the Communist Party’s authoritarian response in Hong Kong, rejecting the liberal ideas of their youth.
HONG KONG — When Tian Feilong first arrived in Hong Kong as demands for free elections were on the rise, he said he felt sympathetic toward a society that seemed to reflect the liberal political ideas he had studied as a graduate student in Beijing.
Then, as the calls escalated into protests across Hong Kong in 2014, he increasingly embraced Chinese warnings that freedom could go too far, threatening national unity. He became an ardent critic of the demonstrations, and six years later he is a staunch defender of the sweeping national security law that China has imposed on the former British colony.
Mr. Tian has joined a tide of Chinese scholars who have turned against Western-inspired ideas that once flowed in China’s universities, instead promoting the proudly authoritarian worldview ascendant under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party leader. This cadre of Chinese intellectuals serve as champions, even official advisers, defending and honing the party’s hardening policies, including the rollout of the security law in Hong Kong.
“Back when I was weak, I had to totally play by your rules. Now I’m strong and have confidence, so why can’t I lay down my own rules and values and ideas?” Mr. Tian, 37, said in an interview, explaining the prevailing outlook in China. Witnessing the tumult as a visiting scholar in Hong Kong in 2014, Mr. Tian said, he “rethought the relationship between individual freedom and state authority.”
“Hong Kong is, after all, China’s Hong Kong,” he said. “It’s up to the Communist Party to clean up this mess.”
While China’s Communist Party has long nurtured legions of academics to defend its agenda, these authoritarian thinkers stand out for their unabashed, often flashily erudite advocacy of one-party rule and assertive sovereignty, and their turn against the liberal ideas that many of them once embraced.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/worl ... ogin-email
Why Edmund Burke Still Matters
He reminds us it’s hard to respect democratic political institutions while disdaining the founders of those institutions.
Had it not been for the revolution in France, Edmund Burke would likely have been remembered, a bit vaguely, as an 18th-century philosopher-statesman of extravagant rhetorical gifts but frustratingly ambivalent views. The Irish-born member of the British Parliament was sympathetic to the grievances of the American colonies but not (like his onetime friend Thomas Paine) an enthusiastic champion of their independence; an acerbic critic of George III but a firm defender of monarchy; a staunch opponent of English rapacity in India but a supporter of British Empire; an advocate for the gradual emancipation of at least some slaves, but no believer in equality.
He was also an unabashed snob. “The occupation of a hairdresser,” he wrote, “cannot be a matter of honor to any person.”
Burke’s name endures because of his uncompromising opposition to the French Revolution — a view he laid out as some of Britain’s more liberal thinkers thought it represented humanity’s best hopes. “Reflections on the Revolution in France” was published in November 1790, more than a year after the fall of the Bastille but before the Reign of Terror, when it still seemed possible that Louis XVI would survive as a constitutional monarch and the country wouldn’t descend into a blood bath.
Burke foresaw, more accurately than most of his great contemporaries, what the revolution would bring: the executions of Louis and Marie Antoinette; the ineffectuality of moderate revolutionary leaders (“a sort of people who affect to proceed as if they thought that men may deceive without fraud, rob without injustice, and overturn every thing without violence”); the rise of a military dictator in the mold of Napoleon; and a long European war in which the “Republic of Regicide” would seek to subjugate the world in the name of liberating it.
How did Burke get it right about the ultimate course of events in France — and, by extension, so many subsequent revolutions that aimed to establish morally enlightened societies and wound up producing despotism and terror? The question is worth pondering in light of two main ideological currents of today: the tear-it-all-down populism that has swept so much of the right in the past five years and the tear-it-all-down progressivism that threatens to sweep the left.
At the core of Burke’s view of the revolution is a profound understanding of how easily things can be shattered in the name of moral betterment, national purification and radical political transformation. States, societies and personal consciences are not Lego-block constructions to be disassembled and reassembled with ease. They are more like tapestries, passed from one generation to the next, to be carefully mended at one edge, gracefully enlarged on the other and otherwise handled with caution lest a single pulled thread unravel the entire pattern. “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity,” Burke wrote. “And therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs.”
Burke’s objection to the French revolutionaries is that they paid so little attention to this complexity: They were men of theory, not experience. Men of experience tend to be cautious about gambling what they have painstakingly gained. Men of theory tend to be reckless with what they’ve inherited but never earned. “They have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have ‘the rights of men.’ Against these there can be no prescriptions.”
Not that Burke was against rights per se. The usual caricature of Burke is that he is the conservative’s conservative, a man for whom any type of change was dangerous in practice and anathema on principle. That view of him would have astonished his contemporaries, who knew him as a champion of Catholic emancipation — the civil rights movement of his day — and other reformist (and usually unpopular) causes.
A fairer reading of Burke would describe him as either a near-liberal or a near-conservative — a man who defied easy categorization in his time and defies it again in ours. He believed in limited government, gradual reform, parliamentary sovereignty and, with caveats and qualifications, individual rights. But he also believed that to secure rights, it wasn’t enough simply to declare them on paper, codify them in law and claim them as entitlements from a divine being or the general will. The conditions of liberty had to be nurtured through prudent statesmanship, moral education, national and local loyalties, attention to circumstance and a healthy respect for the “latent wisdom” of long-established customs and beliefs. If Burke lacked Thomas Jefferson’s clarity and idealism, he never suffered from his hypocrisy.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
He reminds us it’s hard to respect democratic political institutions while disdaining the founders of those institutions.
Had it not been for the revolution in France, Edmund Burke would likely have been remembered, a bit vaguely, as an 18th-century philosopher-statesman of extravagant rhetorical gifts but frustratingly ambivalent views. The Irish-born member of the British Parliament was sympathetic to the grievances of the American colonies but not (like his onetime friend Thomas Paine) an enthusiastic champion of their independence; an acerbic critic of George III but a firm defender of monarchy; a staunch opponent of English rapacity in India but a supporter of British Empire; an advocate for the gradual emancipation of at least some slaves, but no believer in equality.
He was also an unabashed snob. “The occupation of a hairdresser,” he wrote, “cannot be a matter of honor to any person.”
Burke’s name endures because of his uncompromising opposition to the French Revolution — a view he laid out as some of Britain’s more liberal thinkers thought it represented humanity’s best hopes. “Reflections on the Revolution in France” was published in November 1790, more than a year after the fall of the Bastille but before the Reign of Terror, when it still seemed possible that Louis XVI would survive as a constitutional monarch and the country wouldn’t descend into a blood bath.
Burke foresaw, more accurately than most of his great contemporaries, what the revolution would bring: the executions of Louis and Marie Antoinette; the ineffectuality of moderate revolutionary leaders (“a sort of people who affect to proceed as if they thought that men may deceive without fraud, rob without injustice, and overturn every thing without violence”); the rise of a military dictator in the mold of Napoleon; and a long European war in which the “Republic of Regicide” would seek to subjugate the world in the name of liberating it.
How did Burke get it right about the ultimate course of events in France — and, by extension, so many subsequent revolutions that aimed to establish morally enlightened societies and wound up producing despotism and terror? The question is worth pondering in light of two main ideological currents of today: the tear-it-all-down populism that has swept so much of the right in the past five years and the tear-it-all-down progressivism that threatens to sweep the left.
At the core of Burke’s view of the revolution is a profound understanding of how easily things can be shattered in the name of moral betterment, national purification and radical political transformation. States, societies and personal consciences are not Lego-block constructions to be disassembled and reassembled with ease. They are more like tapestries, passed from one generation to the next, to be carefully mended at one edge, gracefully enlarged on the other and otherwise handled with caution lest a single pulled thread unravel the entire pattern. “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity,” Burke wrote. “And therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs.”
Burke’s objection to the French revolutionaries is that they paid so little attention to this complexity: They were men of theory, not experience. Men of experience tend to be cautious about gambling what they have painstakingly gained. Men of theory tend to be reckless with what they’ve inherited but never earned. “They have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have ‘the rights of men.’ Against these there can be no prescriptions.”
Not that Burke was against rights per se. The usual caricature of Burke is that he is the conservative’s conservative, a man for whom any type of change was dangerous in practice and anathema on principle. That view of him would have astonished his contemporaries, who knew him as a champion of Catholic emancipation — the civil rights movement of his day — and other reformist (and usually unpopular) causes.
A fairer reading of Burke would describe him as either a near-liberal or a near-conservative — a man who defied easy categorization in his time and defies it again in ours. He believed in limited government, gradual reform, parliamentary sovereignty and, with caveats and qualifications, individual rights. But he also believed that to secure rights, it wasn’t enough simply to declare them on paper, codify them in law and claim them as entitlements from a divine being or the general will. The conditions of liberty had to be nurtured through prudent statesmanship, moral education, national and local loyalties, attention to circumstance and a healthy respect for the “latent wisdom” of long-established customs and beliefs. If Burke lacked Thomas Jefferson’s clarity and idealism, he never suffered from his hypocrisy.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Beirut’s Blast Is a Warning for America
In this country, as in Lebanon, everything is now politics.
When I first heard the news of the terrible explosion in Beirut, and then the rampant speculation about who might have set it off, my mind drifted back some 40 years to a dinner party I attended at the residence of Malcolm Kerr, then president of the American University of Beirut.
During the course of the dinner, someone mentioned the unusual hailstorms that had pelted Beirut the previous two nights. Everyone offered their explanations for this extreme weather event, before Malcolm, tongue in cheek, asked his guests, “Do you think the Syrians did it?”
Malcolm — a charming man and brilliant scholar, who was tragically murdered a few months later by unidentified assassins — was being both humorous and profound. He was poking fun at the Lebanese tendency to explain everything as a conspiracy, and, in particular, a conspiracy perpetrated by Syria, which is why we all laughed.
But he was also saying something profound about Lebanese society — that, alas, also applies to today’s America — the fact that in Lebanon then, and even more so today, everything, even the weather, had become political.
Because of the sectarian nature of Lebanese society, where all the powers of governing, and the spoils of the state, had been constitutionally or informally divided in a very careful balance between different Christian and Muslim sects, everything was indeed political. Every job appointment, every investigation into malfeasance, every government decision to fund this and not that was seen as advantaging one group and disadvantaging another.
It was a system that bought stability in a highly diverse society (between spasms of civil war) — but at the price of constant lack of accountability, corruption, misgovernance and mistrust.
That is why the first question so many Lebanese asked after the recent explosion was not what happened, but who did it and for what advantage?
The United States is becoming like Lebanon and other Middle East countries in two respects. First, our political differences are becoming so deep that our two parties now resemble religious sects in a zero-sum contest for power. They call theirs “Shiites and Sunnis and Maronites” or “Israelis and Palestinians.” We call ours “Democrats and Republicans,” but ours now behave just like rival tribes who believe they must rule or die.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
In this country, as in Lebanon, everything is now politics.
When I first heard the news of the terrible explosion in Beirut, and then the rampant speculation about who might have set it off, my mind drifted back some 40 years to a dinner party I attended at the residence of Malcolm Kerr, then president of the American University of Beirut.
During the course of the dinner, someone mentioned the unusual hailstorms that had pelted Beirut the previous two nights. Everyone offered their explanations for this extreme weather event, before Malcolm, tongue in cheek, asked his guests, “Do you think the Syrians did it?”
Malcolm — a charming man and brilliant scholar, who was tragically murdered a few months later by unidentified assassins — was being both humorous and profound. He was poking fun at the Lebanese tendency to explain everything as a conspiracy, and, in particular, a conspiracy perpetrated by Syria, which is why we all laughed.
But he was also saying something profound about Lebanese society — that, alas, also applies to today’s America — the fact that in Lebanon then, and even more so today, everything, even the weather, had become political.
Because of the sectarian nature of Lebanese society, where all the powers of governing, and the spoils of the state, had been constitutionally or informally divided in a very careful balance between different Christian and Muslim sects, everything was indeed political. Every job appointment, every investigation into malfeasance, every government decision to fund this and not that was seen as advantaging one group and disadvantaging another.
It was a system that bought stability in a highly diverse society (between spasms of civil war) — but at the price of constant lack of accountability, corruption, misgovernance and mistrust.
That is why the first question so many Lebanese asked after the recent explosion was not what happened, but who did it and for what advantage?
The United States is becoming like Lebanon and other Middle East countries in two respects. First, our political differences are becoming so deep that our two parties now resemble religious sects in a zero-sum contest for power. They call theirs “Shiites and Sunnis and Maronites” or “Israelis and Palestinians.” We call ours “Democrats and Republicans,” but ours now behave just like rival tribes who believe they must rule or die.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The King Had No Clothes. Spain Looked the Other Way.
An outdated culture allowed King Juan Carlos I to become a lobbyist for Arab dictatorships and to hide his fortune for decades.
MADRID — One of my first assignments as a reporter, in 1996, was to interview an alleged lover of the king of Spain, Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón. My editors at El Mundo asked me to look into whether Bárbara Rey, a Spanish film and television actress, demanded money from the state in exchange for keeping her relationship with the married king secret. In the end, I didn’t get the interview. Under pressure, Ms. Rey chose to remain silent. Thus our king’s two great weaknesses — women and money — remained the country’s worst-kept secret for another two decades.
It’s time we Spaniards acknowledge that we always knew the king had no clothes, but we chose to look the other way.
An outdated culture of allegiance, the opacity surrounding the Spanish monarchy and a Constitution that exempts our kings from any criminal responsibility sent the monarch the message that he was above the law. His immunity from prosecution, designed to give stability to the institution of the crown, was used to amass a fortune primarily through millions of dollars in presumed kickbacks from Arab dictators. He acquired such wealth that in 2012, in the middle of the Great Recession that left 25 percent of Spaniards unemployed, he transferred 65 million euros to his lover Corinna Larsen, a German businesswoman.
The revelation of this royal “gift,” which Ms. Larsen attributed to “gratitude and love” — and investigators consider an attempt to hide illicit deals and large sums of money — is just the tip of the iceberg of a scandal that has forced the monarch into exile.
Juan Carlos I left the country on Aug. 4 and his whereabouts is unknown to us Spaniards. This strategy of keeping him out of the spotlight, after a secret negotiation between the Royal Household and the government, shows that we have learned nothing.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/es/2020/08/13/o ... 778d3e6de3
An outdated culture allowed King Juan Carlos I to become a lobbyist for Arab dictatorships and to hide his fortune for decades.
MADRID — One of my first assignments as a reporter, in 1996, was to interview an alleged lover of the king of Spain, Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón. My editors at El Mundo asked me to look into whether Bárbara Rey, a Spanish film and television actress, demanded money from the state in exchange for keeping her relationship with the married king secret. In the end, I didn’t get the interview. Under pressure, Ms. Rey chose to remain silent. Thus our king’s two great weaknesses — women and money — remained the country’s worst-kept secret for another two decades.
It’s time we Spaniards acknowledge that we always knew the king had no clothes, but we chose to look the other way.
An outdated culture of allegiance, the opacity surrounding the Spanish monarchy and a Constitution that exempts our kings from any criminal responsibility sent the monarch the message that he was above the law. His immunity from prosecution, designed to give stability to the institution of the crown, was used to amass a fortune primarily through millions of dollars in presumed kickbacks from Arab dictators. He acquired such wealth that in 2012, in the middle of the Great Recession that left 25 percent of Spaniards unemployed, he transferred 65 million euros to his lover Corinna Larsen, a German businesswoman.
The revelation of this royal “gift,” which Ms. Larsen attributed to “gratitude and love” — and investigators consider an attempt to hide illicit deals and large sums of money — is just the tip of the iceberg of a scandal that has forced the monarch into exile.
Juan Carlos I left the country on Aug. 4 and his whereabouts is unknown to us Spaniards. This strategy of keeping him out of the spotlight, after a secret negotiation between the Royal Household and the government, shows that we have learned nothing.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/es/2020/08/13/o ... 778d3e6de3
This Is Where I Stand
The power of conservative radicalism in an age of upheaval.
Radicals are not my cup of tea, but I’m grateful for them. The radicals who brought us Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign gave the problem of income inequality a prominence it wouldn’t have had without them.
The founders of the Black Lives Matter organization put racial injustice at the top of the national conversation. The radical populists who ultimately produced Donald Trump showed us how much alienation there is in Middle America.
Radicals are good at opening our eyes to social problems and expanding the realm of what’s sayable.
But if you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals. At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions.
In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln. In the Progressive era, the radicals and anarchists who started the labor movement in the 1880s gave way to Theodore Roosevelt.
Radicals are not good at producing change because while they are good at shaking up the culture, they don’t have practical strategies to pass legislation when you have to get the support of 50 percent plus one.
They also tend to divide the world into good people and bad people. They think they can bring change if they can destroy enough bad people, and so they devolve into a purist, destructive force that offends potential allies.
The people who come in their wake and actually make change are conservative radicals. They believe in many of the radicals’ goals, but know how to work within the democratic framework to achieve them.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The power of conservative radicalism in an age of upheaval.
Radicals are not my cup of tea, but I’m grateful for them. The radicals who brought us Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign gave the problem of income inequality a prominence it wouldn’t have had without them.
The founders of the Black Lives Matter organization put racial injustice at the top of the national conversation. The radical populists who ultimately produced Donald Trump showed us how much alienation there is in Middle America.
Radicals are good at opening our eyes to social problems and expanding the realm of what’s sayable.
But if you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals. At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions.
In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln. In the Progressive era, the radicals and anarchists who started the labor movement in the 1880s gave way to Theodore Roosevelt.
Radicals are not good at producing change because while they are good at shaking up the culture, they don’t have practical strategies to pass legislation when you have to get the support of 50 percent plus one.
They also tend to divide the world into good people and bad people. They think they can bring change if they can destroy enough bad people, and so they devolve into a purist, destructive force that offends potential allies.
The people who come in their wake and actually make change are conservative radicals. They believe in many of the radicals’ goals, but know how to work within the democratic framework to achieve them.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Aim For What’s Reasonable: Leadership Lessons From Director Jean Renoir
Directing a film involves getting an enormous group of people to work together on turning the image inside your head into a reality. In this 1970 interview, director Jean Renoir dispenses time-tested wisdom for leaders everywhere on humility, accountability, goal-setting, and more.
***
Many of us end up in leadership roles at some point in our career. Most of us, however, never get any training or instruction on how to actually be a good leader. But whether we end up offering formal or informal leadership, at some point we need to inspire or motivate people towards accomplishing a shared vision.
Directors are the leaders of movie productions. They assemble their team, they communicate their vision, and they manage the ups and downs of the filming process. Thus the experience of a successful director offers great insight into the qualities of a good leader. In 1970, film director Jean Renoir gave an interview with George Stevens Jr. of the American Film Institute where he discussed the leadership aspects of directing. His insights illustrate some important lessons. Renoir started out making silent films, and he continued filmmaking through to the 1960s. His two greatest cinematic achievements were the films The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939). He received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry.
In the interview, Renoir speaks to humility in leadership when he says, “I’m a director who has spent his life suggesting stories that nobody wanted. It’s still going on. But I’m used to it and I’m not complaining, because the ideas which were forced on me were often better than my own ideas.”
Leadership is not necessarily coming up with all the answers; it’s also important to put aside your own ego to cultivate and support the contributions from your team. Sometimes leaders have the best ideas. But often people on their team have excellent ones as well.
Renoir suggests that the role of a director is to have a clear enough vision that you can work through the imperfections involved in executing it. “A picture, often when it is good, is the result of some inner belief which is so strong that you have to show what you want, in spite of a stupid story or difficulties about the commercial side of the film.”
Good leaders don’t require perfection to achieve results. They work with what they have, often using creativity and ingenuity to fill in when reality doesn’t conform to the ideal image in their head. Having a vision is not about achieving exactly that vision. It’s about doing the best you can once you come into contact with reality.
When Renoir says, “We directors are simply midwives,” he implies that effective leadership is about giving shape to the talents and capabilities that already exist. Excellent leaders find a way to challenge and develop those on their team. In explaining how he works with actors, he says, “You must not ask an actor to do what he cannot do.” Rather, you need to work with what you have, using clear feedback and communication to find a way to bring out the best in people. Sometimes getting out of people’s way and letting their natural abilities come out is the most important thing to do.
Although Renoir says, “When I can, I shoot my scenes only once. I like to be committed, to be a slave to my decision,” he further explains, “I don’t like to make the important decisions alone.” Good leaders know when to consult others. They know to take in information from those who know more than they do and to respect different forms of expertise. But they still take accountability for their decisions because they made the final choice.
Good leaders are also mindful of the world outside the group or organization they are leading. They don’t lead in a vacuum but are sensitive to all those involved in achieving the results they are trying to deliver. For a director, it makes no sense to conceive of a film without considering the audience. Renoir explains, “I believe that the work of art where the spectator does not collaborate is not a work of art.” Similarly, we all have groups that we interact with outside of our organization, like clients or customers. We too need to run our teams with an understanding of that outside world.
No one can be good at everything, and thus effective leadership involves knowing when to ask for help. Renoir admits, “That’s where I like to have my friends help me, because I am very bad at casting.” Knowing your weaknesses is vital, because then you can find people who have strengths in those areas to assist you.
Additionally, most organizations are too complex for any one person to be an expert at all of the roles. Leaders show hubris when they assume they can do the jobs of everyone else well. Renoir explains this notion of knowing your role as a leader: “Too many directors work like this. They tell the actor, ‘Sit down, my dear friends, and look at me. I am going to act a scene, and you are going to repeat what I just did.’ He acts a scene and he acts it badly, because if he is a director instead of an actor, it’s probably because he’s a bad actor.”
***
Although leadership can be all encompassing, we shouldn’t be intimidated by the ideal list of qualities and behaviors a good leader displays. Focus on how you can improve. Set goals. Reflect on your failures, and recognize your success.
“You know, there is an old slogan, very popular in our occidental civilization: you must look to an end higher than normal, and that way you will achieve something. Your aim must be very, very high. Myself, I am absolutely convinced that it is mere stupidity. The aim must be easy to reach, and by reaching it, you achieve more.”
https://fs.blog/2020/08/aim-for-whats-r ... an-renoir/
Directing a film involves getting an enormous group of people to work together on turning the image inside your head into a reality. In this 1970 interview, director Jean Renoir dispenses time-tested wisdom for leaders everywhere on humility, accountability, goal-setting, and more.
***
Many of us end up in leadership roles at some point in our career. Most of us, however, never get any training or instruction on how to actually be a good leader. But whether we end up offering formal or informal leadership, at some point we need to inspire or motivate people towards accomplishing a shared vision.
Directors are the leaders of movie productions. They assemble their team, they communicate their vision, and they manage the ups and downs of the filming process. Thus the experience of a successful director offers great insight into the qualities of a good leader. In 1970, film director Jean Renoir gave an interview with George Stevens Jr. of the American Film Institute where he discussed the leadership aspects of directing. His insights illustrate some important lessons. Renoir started out making silent films, and he continued filmmaking through to the 1960s. His two greatest cinematic achievements were the films The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939). He received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975 for his contribution to the motion picture industry.
In the interview, Renoir speaks to humility in leadership when he says, “I’m a director who has spent his life suggesting stories that nobody wanted. It’s still going on. But I’m used to it and I’m not complaining, because the ideas which were forced on me were often better than my own ideas.”
Leadership is not necessarily coming up with all the answers; it’s also important to put aside your own ego to cultivate and support the contributions from your team. Sometimes leaders have the best ideas. But often people on their team have excellent ones as well.
Renoir suggests that the role of a director is to have a clear enough vision that you can work through the imperfections involved in executing it. “A picture, often when it is good, is the result of some inner belief which is so strong that you have to show what you want, in spite of a stupid story or difficulties about the commercial side of the film.”
Good leaders don’t require perfection to achieve results. They work with what they have, often using creativity and ingenuity to fill in when reality doesn’t conform to the ideal image in their head. Having a vision is not about achieving exactly that vision. It’s about doing the best you can once you come into contact with reality.
When Renoir says, “We directors are simply midwives,” he implies that effective leadership is about giving shape to the talents and capabilities that already exist. Excellent leaders find a way to challenge and develop those on their team. In explaining how he works with actors, he says, “You must not ask an actor to do what he cannot do.” Rather, you need to work with what you have, using clear feedback and communication to find a way to bring out the best in people. Sometimes getting out of people’s way and letting their natural abilities come out is the most important thing to do.
Although Renoir says, “When I can, I shoot my scenes only once. I like to be committed, to be a slave to my decision,” he further explains, “I don’t like to make the important decisions alone.” Good leaders know when to consult others. They know to take in information from those who know more than they do and to respect different forms of expertise. But they still take accountability for their decisions because they made the final choice.
Good leaders are also mindful of the world outside the group or organization they are leading. They don’t lead in a vacuum but are sensitive to all those involved in achieving the results they are trying to deliver. For a director, it makes no sense to conceive of a film without considering the audience. Renoir explains, “I believe that the work of art where the spectator does not collaborate is not a work of art.” Similarly, we all have groups that we interact with outside of our organization, like clients or customers. We too need to run our teams with an understanding of that outside world.
No one can be good at everything, and thus effective leadership involves knowing when to ask for help. Renoir admits, “That’s where I like to have my friends help me, because I am very bad at casting.” Knowing your weaknesses is vital, because then you can find people who have strengths in those areas to assist you.
Additionally, most organizations are too complex for any one person to be an expert at all of the roles. Leaders show hubris when they assume they can do the jobs of everyone else well. Renoir explains this notion of knowing your role as a leader: “Too many directors work like this. They tell the actor, ‘Sit down, my dear friends, and look at me. I am going to act a scene, and you are going to repeat what I just did.’ He acts a scene and he acts it badly, because if he is a director instead of an actor, it’s probably because he’s a bad actor.”
***
Although leadership can be all encompassing, we shouldn’t be intimidated by the ideal list of qualities and behaviors a good leader displays. Focus on how you can improve. Set goals. Reflect on your failures, and recognize your success.
“You know, there is an old slogan, very popular in our occidental civilization: you must look to an end higher than normal, and that way you will achieve something. Your aim must be very, very high. Myself, I am absolutely convinced that it is mere stupidity. The aim must be easy to reach, and by reaching it, you achieve more.”
https://fs.blog/2020/08/aim-for-whats-r ... an-renoir/
With Freedom at Stake, Courts Are Collapsing
In Hungary, Turkey and India, the courts have turned into silent bystanders and complicit actors.
NEW DELHI — The rise of right-wing populist leaders in several countries has brought immense attention to the use of executive power, in popular debate and among constitutional scholars across presidential and parliamentary systems. Along with the rise of executive power, there has been a corresponding but less studied phenomenon: the decline in judicial power.
The courts were once seen as shields against the tyranny of majority and autocratic drifts within the state, and as the defenders of liberty and enforcers of accountability. Sadly, courts today have become silent bystanders and complicit actors.
In Hungary, the autocratic government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has systematically disarmed the judiciary by lowering retirement ages, creating vacancies and appointing favorable people. Mr. Orban initially planned a parallel system of administrative courts that would be controlled by the government. That plan was dropped but a new law was introduced in December, which enables the government to move politically sensitive cases from the more independent wings of the judiciary to the Constitutional Court, whose autonomy was severely compromised by court-packing. Earlier, after Mr. Orban’s re-election in 2018, several Hungarian judges resigned for “personal reasons,” though the timing and collective action raised concerns of government pressure.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan similarly took command of the judiciary by filling its benches with supporters. Thousands of judges were removed in 2016 after the failed military coup against the Turkish government. A 2017 referendum cemented Mr. Erdogan’s power by giving him nearly complete authority over the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which manages appointments to the judiciary. The new judicial system has approved the indefinite detention of dissident intellectuals and civil society activists.
Neither in Turkey nor in Hungary were the courts closed. The strategy, instead, was to expand their jurisdiction and give them even more authority to decide cases, thereby overwhelming them with so much work that they could not perform. The courts still had a place in society, but because judicial appointments had been manipulated, the outcomes were all but predetermined.
Similarly, in Poland, the populist Law and Justice party, which came to power in 2015 and was re-elected in 2019, sought to neutralize any forces that checked its powers. An early victim was the constitutional court, called the Constitutional Tribunal, which the Law and Justice party first packed and subsequently swamped with cases, thereby preventing it from scrutinizing the government.
Yet nowhere has the collapse of judicial power been more extreme than in India. Over the past six years, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has taken India away from the liberal, democratic and secular principles that it has long endorsed. Mr. Modi’s government has passed a law that makes religion the basis for deciding Indian citizenship; it has expanded a pervasive biometric project with few privacy safeguards; it has unilaterally annulled the constitutional status of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, followed by widespread arrests and lockdowns; and it has created an electoral finance scheme that protects donor and recipient anonymity.
India’s once powerful judiciary has been largely silent or approving. On questions such as the biometric project or the building of a Hindu temple on disputed land where a mosque once stood, it has offered its stamp of approval. On a great many matters, it has been missing in action. Hundreds of habeas corpus petitions relating to detentions in Kashmir remain unheard. And the opacity of the new election-funding arrangement has yet to evoke judicial interest, with challenges in court languishing for more than two years.
As Gautam Bhatia, an Indian lawyer and scholar, has documented, India’s higher judiciary has simply avoided dealing with difficult legal matters. The most serious questions, like the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood without consultation with the state legislature as required by the Constitution of India, remain to be heard. And recently, the Supreme Court of India pronounced that a highly respected public interest lawyer who commented on its functioning was guilty of contempt.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a scholar of constitutional law at Princeton, has drawn an important contrast between traditional autocrats and contemporary ones. If the autocrat’s moves in the 19th century were mass human rights violations and streets afloat with tanks, “the new autocrats come to power not with bullets but with laws.”
We see this in the co-opting of courts by populist regimes. In Turkey, Hagia Sophia’s conversion from a museum to a mosque was made possible by a judicial ruling. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal approved changes to the National Council of the Judiciary that appoints judges and regulates their behavior, giving politicians far greater power over courts.
The Indian judicial approach of not only approving the government’s actions — like the courts in Hungary, Poland and Turkey — but also being absent, remaining silent while the state acts, raises a genuine puzzle. India’s judiciary possesses a rare institutional safeguard: Since the early 1990s, it has exercised formal control over the processes for the appointment of judges. The Indian Supreme Court’s rare confrontational decision in recent years was in 2015, when it struck down a federal commission for judicial appointments proposed by the government.
For decades, India’s higher judiciary has held extraordinary power and been noticeably interventionist, recognizing social welfare rights, passing wide-ranging interim orders that assess the work of executive ministries at regular intervals, and even reviewing and striking down constitutional amendments.
Yet the self-abrogation by the judiciary in India; court packing in Hungary, Poland and Turkey; and the strategy of submerging the courts with so much work that they are not able to scrutinize the government illustrate the demise of judicial power and the courts losing their institutional role in a variety of ways.
The lesson has been a sobering one for constitutional scholars. A generation ago, law students, whether in the United States or elsewhere, had interpreted the Warren Supreme Court era, which saw the expansion of civil rights, as the rule rather than the exception. It was hard to think of democratic constitutionalism in the absence of a powerful judiciary. Now it seems just as likely that when freedom is truly at stake, courts are quick to collapse, either from within or without.
The legitimacy of courts was never built on popular authorization from the people. It was built on the promise of keeping representation in check and protecting the people from the extremes of politics. The real question for the future is not how courts will act. It is whether their actions will carry legitimacy if and when they do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
In Hungary, Turkey and India, the courts have turned into silent bystanders and complicit actors.
NEW DELHI — The rise of right-wing populist leaders in several countries has brought immense attention to the use of executive power, in popular debate and among constitutional scholars across presidential and parliamentary systems. Along with the rise of executive power, there has been a corresponding but less studied phenomenon: the decline in judicial power.
The courts were once seen as shields against the tyranny of majority and autocratic drifts within the state, and as the defenders of liberty and enforcers of accountability. Sadly, courts today have become silent bystanders and complicit actors.
In Hungary, the autocratic government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has systematically disarmed the judiciary by lowering retirement ages, creating vacancies and appointing favorable people. Mr. Orban initially planned a parallel system of administrative courts that would be controlled by the government. That plan was dropped but a new law was introduced in December, which enables the government to move politically sensitive cases from the more independent wings of the judiciary to the Constitutional Court, whose autonomy was severely compromised by court-packing. Earlier, after Mr. Orban’s re-election in 2018, several Hungarian judges resigned for “personal reasons,” though the timing and collective action raised concerns of government pressure.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan similarly took command of the judiciary by filling its benches with supporters. Thousands of judges were removed in 2016 after the failed military coup against the Turkish government. A 2017 referendum cemented Mr. Erdogan’s power by giving him nearly complete authority over the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which manages appointments to the judiciary. The new judicial system has approved the indefinite detention of dissident intellectuals and civil society activists.
Neither in Turkey nor in Hungary were the courts closed. The strategy, instead, was to expand their jurisdiction and give them even more authority to decide cases, thereby overwhelming them with so much work that they could not perform. The courts still had a place in society, but because judicial appointments had been manipulated, the outcomes were all but predetermined.
Similarly, in Poland, the populist Law and Justice party, which came to power in 2015 and was re-elected in 2019, sought to neutralize any forces that checked its powers. An early victim was the constitutional court, called the Constitutional Tribunal, which the Law and Justice party first packed and subsequently swamped with cases, thereby preventing it from scrutinizing the government.
Yet nowhere has the collapse of judicial power been more extreme than in India. Over the past six years, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has taken India away from the liberal, democratic and secular principles that it has long endorsed. Mr. Modi’s government has passed a law that makes religion the basis for deciding Indian citizenship; it has expanded a pervasive biometric project with few privacy safeguards; it has unilaterally annulled the constitutional status of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, followed by widespread arrests and lockdowns; and it has created an electoral finance scheme that protects donor and recipient anonymity.
India’s once powerful judiciary has been largely silent or approving. On questions such as the biometric project or the building of a Hindu temple on disputed land where a mosque once stood, it has offered its stamp of approval. On a great many matters, it has been missing in action. Hundreds of habeas corpus petitions relating to detentions in Kashmir remain unheard. And the opacity of the new election-funding arrangement has yet to evoke judicial interest, with challenges in court languishing for more than two years.
As Gautam Bhatia, an Indian lawyer and scholar, has documented, India’s higher judiciary has simply avoided dealing with difficult legal matters. The most serious questions, like the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood without consultation with the state legislature as required by the Constitution of India, remain to be heard. And recently, the Supreme Court of India pronounced that a highly respected public interest lawyer who commented on its functioning was guilty of contempt.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a scholar of constitutional law at Princeton, has drawn an important contrast between traditional autocrats and contemporary ones. If the autocrat’s moves in the 19th century were mass human rights violations and streets afloat with tanks, “the new autocrats come to power not with bullets but with laws.”
We see this in the co-opting of courts by populist regimes. In Turkey, Hagia Sophia’s conversion from a museum to a mosque was made possible by a judicial ruling. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal approved changes to the National Council of the Judiciary that appoints judges and regulates their behavior, giving politicians far greater power over courts.
The Indian judicial approach of not only approving the government’s actions — like the courts in Hungary, Poland and Turkey — but also being absent, remaining silent while the state acts, raises a genuine puzzle. India’s judiciary possesses a rare institutional safeguard: Since the early 1990s, it has exercised formal control over the processes for the appointment of judges. The Indian Supreme Court’s rare confrontational decision in recent years was in 2015, when it struck down a federal commission for judicial appointments proposed by the government.
For decades, India’s higher judiciary has held extraordinary power and been noticeably interventionist, recognizing social welfare rights, passing wide-ranging interim orders that assess the work of executive ministries at regular intervals, and even reviewing and striking down constitutional amendments.
Yet the self-abrogation by the judiciary in India; court packing in Hungary, Poland and Turkey; and the strategy of submerging the courts with so much work that they are not able to scrutinize the government illustrate the demise of judicial power and the courts losing their institutional role in a variety of ways.
The lesson has been a sobering one for constitutional scholars. A generation ago, law students, whether in the United States or elsewhere, had interpreted the Warren Supreme Court era, which saw the expansion of civil rights, as the rule rather than the exception. It was hard to think of democratic constitutionalism in the absence of a powerful judiciary. Now it seems just as likely that when freedom is truly at stake, courts are quick to collapse, either from within or without.
The legitimacy of courts was never built on popular authorization from the people. It was built on the promise of keeping representation in check and protecting the people from the extremes of politics. The real question for the future is not how courts will act. It is whether their actions will carry legitimacy if and when they do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The Very Structure of Modern Government Is Under Legal Assault
Here’s how to defend it.
More than at any time since the 1930s, the administrative state is under constitutional assault. Some judges, lawyers and legal academics are calling into question the very structure of modern government.
Four members of the U.S. Supreme Court, and possibly five, have indicated that they would like to revive the “nondelegation doctrine,” which would forbid Congress from granting excessively broad or uncabined discretion to administrative agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor and the Department of Transportation. Under their approach, important parts of the Clean Air Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act might be invalidated.
So too, in eliminating the independence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in June, a majority of the Supreme Court cast a dark constitutional cloud over the long-established idea that Congress has the power to allow agencies to operate independently of the president. The court’s approach raises serious doubts about the legal status of the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other such entities.
These developments are just two of a large number of emerging efforts within the federal courts to limit the power of administrative agencies or perhaps even to abolish them, at least in their current form. We are witnessing the flowering of a longstanding attempt to see the administrative state as fundamentally illegitimate. (The legal assault on the administrative state has political resonance, too; think of the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s call for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”)
Viewed most sympathetically, those efforts reflect a commitment to the values of legality, accountability and liberty — understanding all these values in particular, highly controversial ways. But the best way to promote such values is not by deconstructing anything, but by adapting and making new an old idea: the rule of law.
About 60 years ago, the legal philosopher Lon Fuller specified the conditions that he believed were necessary, at least in some minimal form, for the very existence of law. They were: the making of rules, so that issues aren’t decided on a case-by-case basis; transparency, so that affected parties are aware of the relevant rules; not applying rules retroactively, so that people can rely on current rules; comprehensibility, so that people understand the rules; not issuing rules that contradict one another; not issuing rules that require people to do things they lack the power to do; relative stability of rules, so that people can orient their action in accordance with them; and no mismatch between rules as announced and rules as administered.
Writing against the background set by fascism and communism, Professor Fuller claimed that if a government entirely failed to meet any of these conditions, it would fail to have “a legal system at all.” But he also saw the principles underlying these procedural virtues as moral ideals within law — aspirational principles that, judiciously applied, would help to make governance not only respectful of legality but also more efficacious.
In Professor Fuller’s view, law has a kind of internal morality. His account of the morality of law is an excellent way of channeling modern administration into its best forms — and of responding to the strongest arguments of those who want to limit the authority of administrators.
In our view, courts should be taking the morality of law quite seriously. Fortunately, they often do. Indeed, many of the principles of legal morality that Professor Fuller listed have been invoked by the Roberts court in a number of domains.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/opin ... ogin-email
Here’s how to defend it.
More than at any time since the 1930s, the administrative state is under constitutional assault. Some judges, lawyers and legal academics are calling into question the very structure of modern government.
Four members of the U.S. Supreme Court, and possibly five, have indicated that they would like to revive the “nondelegation doctrine,” which would forbid Congress from granting excessively broad or uncabined discretion to administrative agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor and the Department of Transportation. Under their approach, important parts of the Clean Air Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act might be invalidated.
So too, in eliminating the independence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in June, a majority of the Supreme Court cast a dark constitutional cloud over the long-established idea that Congress has the power to allow agencies to operate independently of the president. The court’s approach raises serious doubts about the legal status of the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other such entities.
These developments are just two of a large number of emerging efforts within the federal courts to limit the power of administrative agencies or perhaps even to abolish them, at least in their current form. We are witnessing the flowering of a longstanding attempt to see the administrative state as fundamentally illegitimate. (The legal assault on the administrative state has political resonance, too; think of the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s call for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”)
Viewed most sympathetically, those efforts reflect a commitment to the values of legality, accountability and liberty — understanding all these values in particular, highly controversial ways. But the best way to promote such values is not by deconstructing anything, but by adapting and making new an old idea: the rule of law.
About 60 years ago, the legal philosopher Lon Fuller specified the conditions that he believed were necessary, at least in some minimal form, for the very existence of law. They were: the making of rules, so that issues aren’t decided on a case-by-case basis; transparency, so that affected parties are aware of the relevant rules; not applying rules retroactively, so that people can rely on current rules; comprehensibility, so that people understand the rules; not issuing rules that contradict one another; not issuing rules that require people to do things they lack the power to do; relative stability of rules, so that people can orient their action in accordance with them; and no mismatch between rules as announced and rules as administered.
Writing against the background set by fascism and communism, Professor Fuller claimed that if a government entirely failed to meet any of these conditions, it would fail to have “a legal system at all.” But he also saw the principles underlying these procedural virtues as moral ideals within law — aspirational principles that, judiciously applied, would help to make governance not only respectful of legality but also more efficacious.
In Professor Fuller’s view, law has a kind of internal morality. His account of the morality of law is an excellent way of channeling modern administration into its best forms — and of responding to the strongest arguments of those who want to limit the authority of administrators.
In our view, courts should be taking the morality of law quite seriously. Fortunately, they often do. Indeed, many of the principles of legal morality that Professor Fuller listed have been invoked by the Roberts court in a number of domains.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/opin ... ogin-email
Faith and Governance
A 17th-century example of zoomorphic calligraphy. Because of his courage and valour, Hazrat Ali was known as “The Lion of God.” The Arabic text is known as Nad-e ‘Ali, and is typically used by Shia Muslims to seek Hazrat Ali’s support in times of sorrow.
AGA KHAN MUSEUM
One of the most profound documents attributed to Imam Ali (a.s.) is his letter to Malik al-Ashtar, upon the Imam appointing him governor of Egypt. This document is often considered a model for good governance and continues to play a major role in international diplomacy. Citing this letter in 2002, Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, called Imam Ali one of “the fairest governor[s] who appeared in human history”. Yet, in his letter, Imam Ali tells us not to be impressed by such external validation. Imam Ali says, “one who is unaware of the value of his own capabilities will be even more ignorant of the value of others” (pg. 227).
His letter is not just a guide for good governance, but an ethical document that applies to us as individuals. For example, in the above quote, he exhorts us to understand and appreciate for ourselves the treasures we have, such as the guidance of the Imams. When we understand we have value as human beings, because we are created by God as ashraf al-makhluqat, the noblest of creation, we comprehend the value of every part of creation, including recognizing the humanity and value of other people. By extension, we can also understand that Imam Ali is telling us that if we cannot recognize the majesty of the Divine in our own selves, as Divine creation, then we may struggle to recognize God in our everyday lives.
The letter continues, specifically giving guidance to Malik al-Ashtar as a governor, but also providing lessons for believers (mu’mins) to structure the world around them. Imam Ali quotes Prophet Muhammad (s.a.s.) as saying, “A nation in which the rights of the weak are not wrested in an uninhibited manner from the strong will never be blessed” (pg. 229). For Imam Ali, society exists to serve all of its members, not just the strong and the powerful. He reminds us that God is always on the side of those who are suffering: “For God hears the cry of the oppressed and keeps a vigilant watch over the oppressors” (pg. 221).
Many verses of the Qur’an deal with questions of equity and care of the marginalized. For example, verse 2:177 says in part, “piety is [personified by] those who have faith in Allah and the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets, and who give their wealth, for the love of Him, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveller and the beggar, and for [the freeing of] the slaves.” Imam Ali echoes these verses by urging the governor to pay attention to the orphans, the elderly, the needy, the disabled, and those with special needs (pg. 228-229). Imam Ali tells us to recognize our own value as God’s creation in order to recognize the value in others as God’s creation. Here, Imam Ali tells us who we are responsible for in this world. Be responsible for God’s creation, because everyone has worth, and realize that you have worth as God’s creation as well. The Imam is explicit. The Imam reminds us there are two types of people in this world for whom we are responsible: those who are your family in faith and those who are God’s creation (pg. 220).
In his letter, Imam Ali advises Malik Al-Ashtar to ensure that he pays special attention to people who do not have access to the governor because if the regular people are upset, it weakens society, but if the elite are upset, no one is affected but the elite. He goes further to say, “In times of prosperity no subjects are more of a burden… than the elite, and none who are less helpful … in times of trial” (pg. 221). From this section, we understand that the members of society are interdependent, and the voices and needs of the vast majority of people must be tended to in order for society to function well. While Imam Ali is giving guidance to his governor, there are also lessons for believers on how to structure and contribute to the societies in which they live. It is not about charity, but about creating a society that inherently takes care of all of its members.
Imam Ali reminds us that our responsibility is to each other and to create social structures that show the care we have for each other, because we have a responsibility to God. He reminds us to care for the marginalized members of society so that God may forgive us for our shortcomings “for they are more in need of justice from you than any others” (pg. 229).
In his guidance, Imam Ali directs us to an understanding that our relationship with ourselves, and with each other, is intimately tied to our relationship with the Divine. To understand the value that each of us has as Divine creation, to protect and care for all of creation, is a celebration of God’s Mercy and an act of devotion.
----
All quoted passages are taken from the Letter to Malik Al-Ashtar found in Appendix II of Justice and Remembrance by Reza Shah-Kazemi.
https://the.ismaili/usa/our-community/f ... governance
A 17th-century example of zoomorphic calligraphy. Because of his courage and valour, Hazrat Ali was known as “The Lion of God.” The Arabic text is known as Nad-e ‘Ali, and is typically used by Shia Muslims to seek Hazrat Ali’s support in times of sorrow.
AGA KHAN MUSEUM
One of the most profound documents attributed to Imam Ali (a.s.) is his letter to Malik al-Ashtar, upon the Imam appointing him governor of Egypt. This document is often considered a model for good governance and continues to play a major role in international diplomacy. Citing this letter in 2002, Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, called Imam Ali one of “the fairest governor[s] who appeared in human history”. Yet, in his letter, Imam Ali tells us not to be impressed by such external validation. Imam Ali says, “one who is unaware of the value of his own capabilities will be even more ignorant of the value of others” (pg. 227).
His letter is not just a guide for good governance, but an ethical document that applies to us as individuals. For example, in the above quote, he exhorts us to understand and appreciate for ourselves the treasures we have, such as the guidance of the Imams. When we understand we have value as human beings, because we are created by God as ashraf al-makhluqat, the noblest of creation, we comprehend the value of every part of creation, including recognizing the humanity and value of other people. By extension, we can also understand that Imam Ali is telling us that if we cannot recognize the majesty of the Divine in our own selves, as Divine creation, then we may struggle to recognize God in our everyday lives.
The letter continues, specifically giving guidance to Malik al-Ashtar as a governor, but also providing lessons for believers (mu’mins) to structure the world around them. Imam Ali quotes Prophet Muhammad (s.a.s.) as saying, “A nation in which the rights of the weak are not wrested in an uninhibited manner from the strong will never be blessed” (pg. 229). For Imam Ali, society exists to serve all of its members, not just the strong and the powerful. He reminds us that God is always on the side of those who are suffering: “For God hears the cry of the oppressed and keeps a vigilant watch over the oppressors” (pg. 221).
Many verses of the Qur’an deal with questions of equity and care of the marginalized. For example, verse 2:177 says in part, “piety is [personified by] those who have faith in Allah and the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets, and who give their wealth, for the love of Him, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveller and the beggar, and for [the freeing of] the slaves.” Imam Ali echoes these verses by urging the governor to pay attention to the orphans, the elderly, the needy, the disabled, and those with special needs (pg. 228-229). Imam Ali tells us to recognize our own value as God’s creation in order to recognize the value in others as God’s creation. Here, Imam Ali tells us who we are responsible for in this world. Be responsible for God’s creation, because everyone has worth, and realize that you have worth as God’s creation as well. The Imam is explicit. The Imam reminds us there are two types of people in this world for whom we are responsible: those who are your family in faith and those who are God’s creation (pg. 220).
In his letter, Imam Ali advises Malik Al-Ashtar to ensure that he pays special attention to people who do not have access to the governor because if the regular people are upset, it weakens society, but if the elite are upset, no one is affected but the elite. He goes further to say, “In times of prosperity no subjects are more of a burden… than the elite, and none who are less helpful … in times of trial” (pg. 221). From this section, we understand that the members of society are interdependent, and the voices and needs of the vast majority of people must be tended to in order for society to function well. While Imam Ali is giving guidance to his governor, there are also lessons for believers on how to structure and contribute to the societies in which they live. It is not about charity, but about creating a society that inherently takes care of all of its members.
Imam Ali reminds us that our responsibility is to each other and to create social structures that show the care we have for each other, because we have a responsibility to God. He reminds us to care for the marginalized members of society so that God may forgive us for our shortcomings “for they are more in need of justice from you than any others” (pg. 229).
In his guidance, Imam Ali directs us to an understanding that our relationship with ourselves, and with each other, is intimately tied to our relationship with the Divine. To understand the value that each of us has as Divine creation, to protect and care for all of creation, is a celebration of God’s Mercy and an act of devotion.
----
All quoted passages are taken from the Letter to Malik Al-Ashtar found in Appendix II of Justice and Remembrance by Reza Shah-Kazemi.
https://the.ismaili/usa/our-community/f ... governance
With Elections Ahead, Some African Presidents Try Engineering Results
Presidential elections are scheduled soon in at least 10 African countries. Many incumbents are changing constitutions and bending rules to ensure they stay in power.
DAKAR, Senegal — The president of the West African nation of Guinea is running for a third term on Oct. 18, even though Guinea requires its presidents to step down after two. But because of a constitutional change he initiated, his first two terms don’t count.
The president in neighboring Ivory Coast has made his first two terms disappear with a constitutional amendment, too. So he is also running for a third-but-actually-first term, on Oct. 31.
And after 34 years in power, Uganda’s 76-year-old president plans to run for re-election in February. The age limit for presidents in Uganda was 75, but then he changed the constitution, and sought to prove his fitness to stay in office with a demonstration of his red-carpet workout routine in the State House — to the howls of many Ugandans.
While much of the world may be focused on the contest for the top job in the United States, presidential elections are also set to take place in at least 10 of Africa’s 54 countries over the next five months. All of the incumbents but one want to stay in office.
While most African presidents since 1990 have stepped down after their terms were up, many are now bending the rules to ensure they stay in power. Some have manipulated supreme courts and electoral commissions; others have changed constitutions, prosecuted opposition candidates or prevented them from running by imposing onerous qualifying criteria.
But countries like the United States that once claimed to stand against those undermining democracy are now turning inward and so, some political thinkers say, incumbents are increasingly getting away with it.
“Too many of our countries have not stood by the protocols and the resolutions that we have made in our regional institutions. Regarding democracy. Regarding term limits. Regarding the transfer of power in a regular and peaceful way,” said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia. “And those shifts are coming also because of the changes in the geopolitical landscape.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Presidential elections are scheduled soon in at least 10 African countries. Many incumbents are changing constitutions and bending rules to ensure they stay in power.
DAKAR, Senegal — The president of the West African nation of Guinea is running for a third term on Oct. 18, even though Guinea requires its presidents to step down after two. But because of a constitutional change he initiated, his first two terms don’t count.
The president in neighboring Ivory Coast has made his first two terms disappear with a constitutional amendment, too. So he is also running for a third-but-actually-first term, on Oct. 31.
And after 34 years in power, Uganda’s 76-year-old president plans to run for re-election in February. The age limit for presidents in Uganda was 75, but then he changed the constitution, and sought to prove his fitness to stay in office with a demonstration of his red-carpet workout routine in the State House — to the howls of many Ugandans.
While much of the world may be focused on the contest for the top job in the United States, presidential elections are also set to take place in at least 10 of Africa’s 54 countries over the next five months. All of the incumbents but one want to stay in office.
While most African presidents since 1990 have stepped down after their terms were up, many are now bending the rules to ensure they stay in power. Some have manipulated supreme courts and electoral commissions; others have changed constitutions, prosecuted opposition candidates or prevented them from running by imposing onerous qualifying criteria.
But countries like the United States that once claimed to stand against those undermining democracy are now turning inward and so, some political thinkers say, incumbents are increasingly getting away with it.
“Too many of our countries have not stood by the protocols and the resolutions that we have made in our regional institutions. Regarding democracy. Regarding term limits. Regarding the transfer of power in a regular and peaceful way,” said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia. “And those shifts are coming also because of the changes in the geopolitical landscape.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Our Standing in the World
Tuesday’s election will be seen globally as a referendum on the durability of democracy. If American democracy, long a beacon, cannot self-correct, then all democracies are at risk. European nations have watched with alarm as President Trump has set about undermining American democracy while attacking the very foundations — the European Union and NATO — that allowed war-torn Europe to become whole, democratic and free.
The Oval Office was once the focal point of the respect the United States commanded around the world; no longer. It has become impossible for democracies today to believe it is in their national interest to take Trump’s America seriously. With this president, there are simply too many petulant reversals of course. The presidency and dishonesty have become synonymous. Alliances are founded on trust. When that goes, they begin to dissolve.
Hence the talk in European capitals of the need to “contain” the United States, a verb once reserved for the Soviet Union. America, under Trump, has lost the credibility and legitimacy that were cornerstones of its influence.
Allies believe a second Trump term could lead to the United States’ leaving NATO, following the decision to leave the World Health Organization. Departure from the World Trade Organization is also possible. Trump has yet to encounter a multilateral organization he does not want dead.
The values of liberty, democracy, freedom of expression and the rule of law for which the United States has stood, albeit with conspicuous failings, over the postwar decades have been abandoned. Despite the horrors of Vietnam and Abu Ghraib, and Cold War support for dictatorial regimes, America led not just because it had a huge army and nuclear arsenal, but also because it shared beliefs with its allies and worked with them. The United States has become a values-free international actor under a president who has led a values-free life.
This American abdication has allowed President Vladimir Putin of Russia to proclaim liberalism “obsolete.” It has led Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to say Europeans must “take our fate into our own hands.” It has empowered President Xi Jinping of China to offer his country’s one-party system as an alternative model for developing countries. It has turned the phrase “leader of the free world,” as applied to the United States, into a laughable notion.
The Trump administration has unrelentingly undermined proven international relationships. America-first nationalism (even on vaccine development) has replaced the stabilizing commitment of the United States to multilateral institutions, a rules-based order and painstakingly negotiated international accords, like the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal.
Over the past four years, America has come close to exiting the global community of democracies. Trump is far more comfortable with autocrats like Putin and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia than with a democratic leader like Merkel. (She has, for the president, the added drawback of being a woman.)
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Tuesday’s election will be seen globally as a referendum on the durability of democracy. If American democracy, long a beacon, cannot self-correct, then all democracies are at risk. European nations have watched with alarm as President Trump has set about undermining American democracy while attacking the very foundations — the European Union and NATO — that allowed war-torn Europe to become whole, democratic and free.
The Oval Office was once the focal point of the respect the United States commanded around the world; no longer. It has become impossible for democracies today to believe it is in their national interest to take Trump’s America seriously. With this president, there are simply too many petulant reversals of course. The presidency and dishonesty have become synonymous. Alliances are founded on trust. When that goes, they begin to dissolve.
Hence the talk in European capitals of the need to “contain” the United States, a verb once reserved for the Soviet Union. America, under Trump, has lost the credibility and legitimacy that were cornerstones of its influence.
Allies believe a second Trump term could lead to the United States’ leaving NATO, following the decision to leave the World Health Organization. Departure from the World Trade Organization is also possible. Trump has yet to encounter a multilateral organization he does not want dead.
The values of liberty, democracy, freedom of expression and the rule of law for which the United States has stood, albeit with conspicuous failings, over the postwar decades have been abandoned. Despite the horrors of Vietnam and Abu Ghraib, and Cold War support for dictatorial regimes, America led not just because it had a huge army and nuclear arsenal, but also because it shared beliefs with its allies and worked with them. The United States has become a values-free international actor under a president who has led a values-free life.
This American abdication has allowed President Vladimir Putin of Russia to proclaim liberalism “obsolete.” It has led Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to say Europeans must “take our fate into our own hands.” It has empowered President Xi Jinping of China to offer his country’s one-party system as an alternative model for developing countries. It has turned the phrase “leader of the free world,” as applied to the United States, into a laughable notion.
The Trump administration has unrelentingly undermined proven international relationships. America-first nationalism (even on vaccine development) has replaced the stabilizing commitment of the United States to multilateral institutions, a rules-based order and painstakingly negotiated international accords, like the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal.
Over the past four years, America has come close to exiting the global community of democracies. Trump is far more comfortable with autocrats like Putin and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia than with a democratic leader like Merkel. (She has, for the president, the added drawback of being a woman.)
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Trump Has Made the Whole World Darker
There is no escaping it: America is on the ballot on Tuesday — the stability and quality of our governing institutions, our alliances, how we treat one another, our basic commitment to scientific principles and the minimum decency that we expect from our leaders. The whole ball of wax is on the ballot.
The good news is that we’ve survived four years of Donald Trump’s abusive presidency with most of our core values still intact. To be sure, the damage has been profound, but, I’d argue, the cancer has not yet metastasized into the bones and lymph nodes of our nation. The harm is still reversible.
The bad news is that if we have to endure four more years of Donald Trump, with him unrestrained by the need to be re-elected, our country will not be the America we grew up with, whose values, norms and institutions we had come to take for granted.
Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America.
And then, who will we be? We can explain away, and the world can explain away, taking a one-time flier on a fast-talking, huckster-populist like Trump. It’s happened to many countries in history. But if we re-elect him, knowing what a norm-destroying, divisive, corrupt liar he is, then the world will not treat the last four years as an aberration. It will treat them as an affirmation that we’ve changed.
The world will not just look at America differently, but at Americans differently. And with good reason.
Re-electing Trump would mean that a significant number of Americans don’t cherish the norms that give our Constitution meaning, don’t appreciate the need for an independent, professional Civil Service, don’t respect scientists, don’t hunger for national unity, don’t care if a president tells 20,000 lies — in short, don’t care about what has actually made America great and different from any other great power in history.
If that happens, what America has lost these past four years will become permanent.
And the effects will be felt all over the world. Foreigners love to make fun of America, of our naïveté, or our silly notion that every problem has a solution and that the future can bury the past — that the past doesn’t always have to bury the future. But deep down, they often envy Americans’ optimism.
If America goes dark, if the message broadcast by the Statue of Liberty shifts from “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to “get the hell off my lawn”; if America becomes just as cynically transactional in all its foreign dealings as Russia and China; if foreigners stop believing that there is somewhere over the rainbow where truth is still held sacred in news reporting and where justice is the norm in most of the courts, then the whole world will get darker. Those who have looked to us for inspiration will have no widely respected reference point against which to critique their own governments.
Authoritarian leaders all over the world — in Turkey, China, Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and elsewhere — already smell this. They have been emboldened by the Trump years. They know they’re freer to assassinate, poison, jail, torture and censor whomever they want, without reproach from America, as long as they flatter Trump or buy our arms.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
There is no escaping it: America is on the ballot on Tuesday — the stability and quality of our governing institutions, our alliances, how we treat one another, our basic commitment to scientific principles and the minimum decency that we expect from our leaders. The whole ball of wax is on the ballot.
The good news is that we’ve survived four years of Donald Trump’s abusive presidency with most of our core values still intact. To be sure, the damage has been profound, but, I’d argue, the cancer has not yet metastasized into the bones and lymph nodes of our nation. The harm is still reversible.
The bad news is that if we have to endure four more years of Donald Trump, with him unrestrained by the need to be re-elected, our country will not be the America we grew up with, whose values, norms and institutions we had come to take for granted.
Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America.
And then, who will we be? We can explain away, and the world can explain away, taking a one-time flier on a fast-talking, huckster-populist like Trump. It’s happened to many countries in history. But if we re-elect him, knowing what a norm-destroying, divisive, corrupt liar he is, then the world will not treat the last four years as an aberration. It will treat them as an affirmation that we’ve changed.
The world will not just look at America differently, but at Americans differently. And with good reason.
Re-electing Trump would mean that a significant number of Americans don’t cherish the norms that give our Constitution meaning, don’t appreciate the need for an independent, professional Civil Service, don’t respect scientists, don’t hunger for national unity, don’t care if a president tells 20,000 lies — in short, don’t care about what has actually made America great and different from any other great power in history.
If that happens, what America has lost these past four years will become permanent.
And the effects will be felt all over the world. Foreigners love to make fun of America, of our naïveté, or our silly notion that every problem has a solution and that the future can bury the past — that the past doesn’t always have to bury the future. But deep down, they often envy Americans’ optimism.
If America goes dark, if the message broadcast by the Statue of Liberty shifts from “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to “get the hell off my lawn”; if America becomes just as cynically transactional in all its foreign dealings as Russia and China; if foreigners stop believing that there is somewhere over the rainbow where truth is still held sacred in news reporting and where justice is the norm in most of the courts, then the whole world will get darker. Those who have looked to us for inspiration will have no widely respected reference point against which to critique their own governments.
Authoritarian leaders all over the world — in Turkey, China, Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and elsewhere — already smell this. They have been emboldened by the Trump years. They know they’re freer to assassinate, poison, jail, torture and censor whomever they want, without reproach from America, as long as they flatter Trump or buy our arms.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump
The Constitution is supposed to protect us from demagogues. Can we make it work again?
Voting Donald Trump out of office was crucial, but it will not be enough to save the American experiment.
Many critics have used the words “authoritarian” or “fascist” to describe the president’s mode of politics, as if he were an invader from outside our democratic way of life. In fact, Mr. Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against: He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil. We have almost forgotten how common such creatures are in democracies because we have relied on a technology designed to restrain them: the Constitution. It has worked by setting up rules for us to follow, but also on a deeper level by shaping our sense of what we are proud of and what we are ashamed of in our common life. Today this constitutional culture has all but collapsed, and with it, our protection against demagogues.
For most of the history of Western political thought, writers focused on demagoguery only in the context of arguing that democracy was a poor form of government. Aristocratic critics such as Thucydides and Plato blamed popular leaders for dismissing experts, exploiting the poor and soaking the rich, sparking factional violence, and starting foreign wars to distract the populace from their tyrannical tendencies. Since these writers thought it obvious that democracies were natural breeding grounds for demagogues, their strategy for eliminating demagoguery was to support alternatives to democratic government: If you don’t like wolves, don’t create a wolf habitat.
The framers of our Constitution were not satisfied with that anti-democratic view, but they were persuaded that a democracy would not work well unless it found ways to defang demagogues. They thought of their constitution-making as an experiment to see whether they could “refine and enlarge” the democratic will, in Madison’s words, civilizing the inevitable conflict between popular leaders and elites and channeling it into a sustainable form of politics. Right now, the experiment is not succeeding.
The language Mr. Trump uses, his willingness to insult, his refusal to follow the standard conventions of polite society or decency — his crudeness — is not a superficial sideshow. It is his defining trait, both a rebuke of Madison’s experiment and a giveaway that he is a demagogue.
Look for the common thread in his otherwise unconnected actions: Associating ordinary immigrants with rapists and murderers was not necessary to demonstrate a commitment to lowering crime or saving American jobs; it was a way of showing he would say what others would not. Tearing a mask off on the White House balcony did not help the economy; it was a declaration of independence from the rule of experts. Trolling the media on whether to accept the results of the election; refusing to offer, on a journalist’s command, the requisite statement opposing white nationalists; and declining to apologize as if backing down would compromise his principles — these are positions whose substance should not be ignored, and I find them morally appalling — but we understand the fundamental political dynamic better when we focus less on their content and more on their motivation: He is determined to show that he will not be shamed.
To allow oneself to be shamed is to admit that you are subject to and ruled by society’s arbiters of what is acceptable. Demagogues, as a rule, insist that they will not be so ruled; that is part of their democratic appeal. Shame is a constraint, and so is an affront to freedom. Shame condemns from a moral high ground, and so is an affront to equality. The demagogue follows these impoverished understandings of freedom and equality and concludes that conventions and laws are for suckers. Part of his pernicious influence is to persuade even his opponents that moral and constitutional scruples are forms of weakness.
The demagogue’s own weakness lies in the fact that most people, even most of his supporters, tend to live by the conventions that he disdains. He needs their support and craves their adoration, making him dependent on people he holds in contempt — in this case, on evangelicals and suburban women. In both his shamelessness and the political dilemma it creates for him we can see how well this president fits into the classic demagogic type.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The Constitution is supposed to protect us from demagogues. Can we make it work again?
Voting Donald Trump out of office was crucial, but it will not be enough to save the American experiment.
Many critics have used the words “authoritarian” or “fascist” to describe the president’s mode of politics, as if he were an invader from outside our democratic way of life. In fact, Mr. Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against: He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil. We have almost forgotten how common such creatures are in democracies because we have relied on a technology designed to restrain them: the Constitution. It has worked by setting up rules for us to follow, but also on a deeper level by shaping our sense of what we are proud of and what we are ashamed of in our common life. Today this constitutional culture has all but collapsed, and with it, our protection against demagogues.
For most of the history of Western political thought, writers focused on demagoguery only in the context of arguing that democracy was a poor form of government. Aristocratic critics such as Thucydides and Plato blamed popular leaders for dismissing experts, exploiting the poor and soaking the rich, sparking factional violence, and starting foreign wars to distract the populace from their tyrannical tendencies. Since these writers thought it obvious that democracies were natural breeding grounds for demagogues, their strategy for eliminating demagoguery was to support alternatives to democratic government: If you don’t like wolves, don’t create a wolf habitat.
The framers of our Constitution were not satisfied with that anti-democratic view, but they were persuaded that a democracy would not work well unless it found ways to defang demagogues. They thought of their constitution-making as an experiment to see whether they could “refine and enlarge” the democratic will, in Madison’s words, civilizing the inevitable conflict between popular leaders and elites and channeling it into a sustainable form of politics. Right now, the experiment is not succeeding.
The language Mr. Trump uses, his willingness to insult, his refusal to follow the standard conventions of polite society or decency — his crudeness — is not a superficial sideshow. It is his defining trait, both a rebuke of Madison’s experiment and a giveaway that he is a demagogue.
Look for the common thread in his otherwise unconnected actions: Associating ordinary immigrants with rapists and murderers was not necessary to demonstrate a commitment to lowering crime or saving American jobs; it was a way of showing he would say what others would not. Tearing a mask off on the White House balcony did not help the economy; it was a declaration of independence from the rule of experts. Trolling the media on whether to accept the results of the election; refusing to offer, on a journalist’s command, the requisite statement opposing white nationalists; and declining to apologize as if backing down would compromise his principles — these are positions whose substance should not be ignored, and I find them morally appalling — but we understand the fundamental political dynamic better when we focus less on their content and more on their motivation: He is determined to show that he will not be shamed.
To allow oneself to be shamed is to admit that you are subject to and ruled by society’s arbiters of what is acceptable. Demagogues, as a rule, insist that they will not be so ruled; that is part of their democratic appeal. Shame is a constraint, and so is an affront to freedom. Shame condemns from a moral high ground, and so is an affront to equality. The demagogue follows these impoverished understandings of freedom and equality and concludes that conventions and laws are for suckers. Part of his pernicious influence is to persuade even his opponents that moral and constitutional scruples are forms of weakness.
The demagogue’s own weakness lies in the fact that most people, even most of his supporters, tend to live by the conventions that he disdains. He needs their support and craves their adoration, making him dependent on people he holds in contempt — in this case, on evangelicals and suburban women. In both his shamelessness and the political dilemma it creates for him we can see how well this president fits into the classic demagogic type.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Only Truth Can Save Our Democracy
The Trump presidency has dangerously normalized lying.
On Saturday morning I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Ann, who was stirring her Cream of Wheat, when out of nowhere she surprised me with a question: “Is not lying one of the Ten Commandments?”
I had to stop and think for a second myself, before answering: “Yes, thou shalt not bear false witness.”
The fact that the two of us even momentarily struggled over that question is, for me, the worst legacy of the Trump presidency.
You remember the old joke? Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and tells the children of Israel: “Children, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I bargained him down to 10. The bad news is that adultery is still in.”
Well, I’ve got bad news and worse news: We’re now down to nine.
Yes, this was a historic four years — even one of the Ten Commandments got erased. Lying has been normalized at a scale we’ve never seen before. Hence Ann’s question.
I am not sure how we reverse it, but we’d better — and fast.
People who do not share truths can’t defeat a pandemic, can’t defend the Constitution and can’t turn the page after a bad leader. The war for truth is now the war to preserve our democracy.
It is impossible to maintain a free society when leaders and news purveyors feel at liberty to spread lies without sanction. Without truth there is no agreed-upon path forward, and without trust there is no way to go down that path together.
But our hole now is so deep, because the only commandment President Trump did believe in was the Eleventh: “Thou shalt not get caught.”
Lately, though, Trump and many around him stopped believing even in that — they don’t seem to care about being caught.
They know, as the saying goes, that their lies are already halfway around the world before the truth has laced up its shoes. That’s all they care about. Just pollute the world with falsehoods and then no one will know what is true. Then you’re home free.
The truth binds you, and Trump never wanted to be bound — not in what he could ask of the president of Ukraine or say about the coronavirus or about the integrity of our election.
And it nearly worked. Trump proved over five years that you could lie multiple times a day — multiple times a minute — and not just win election but almost win re-election.
We have to ensure that the likes of him never again appear in American politics.
Because Trump not only liberated himself from truth, he liberated others to tell their lies or spread his — and reap the benefits. His party’s elders did not care, as long as he kept the base energized and voting red. Fox News didn’t care, as long as he kept its viewers glued to the channel and its ratings high. Major social networks only barely cared, as long he kept their users online and their numbers growing. Many of his voters — even evangelicals — did not care, as long as he appointed anti-abortion judges. They are “pro-life,” but not always pro-truth.
For all those reasons, lying is now such a growth industry it deserves its own G.D.P. line: “Auto sales and durables were each down 10 percent last quarter, but lying grew 30 percent and economists predict that the lying industry could double in 2021.”
Israeli Bedouin expert Clinton Bailey tells the story about a Bedouin chief who discovered one day that his favorite turkey had been stolen. He called his sons together and told them: “Boys, we are in great danger now. My turkey’s been stolen. Find my turkey.” His boys just laughed and said, “Father, what do you need that turkey for?” and they ignored him.
Then a few weeks later his camel was stolen. And the chief told his sons, “Find my turkey.” A few weeks later the chief’s horse was stolen. His sons shrugged, and the chief repeated, “Find my turkey.”
Finally, a few weeks later his daughter was abducted, at which point he gathered his sons and declared: “It’s all because of the turkey! When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”
And do you know what our turkey was? Birtherism.
When Trump was allowed to spread the “birther” lie for years — that Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was actually born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president — he realized he could get away with anything.
Sure, Trump eventually gave that one up, but once he saw how easily he could steal our turkey — the truth — he just kept doing it, until he stole the soul of the Republican Party.
And, had he been re-elected, he would have stolen the soul of this nation.
He and his collaborators are now making one last bid to use the Big Lie to destroy our democracy by delegitimizing one of its greatest moments ever — when a record number of citizens came out to vote, and their votes were legitimately counted, amid a deadly and growing pandemic.
It is so corrupt what Trump and his allies are doing, so dangerous to our constitutional system, but you weep even more for how many of their followers have bought into it.
“Lies don’t work unless they’re believed, and nearly half the American public has proved remarkably gullible,” my former Times colleague David K. Shipler, who served in our Moscow bureau during the Cold War, said to me. “I think of each of us as having our own alarm — and it’s as if half of their batteries have died. Lots of Trump’s lies, and his retweets of conspiracy fabrications, are obviously absurd. Why have so many people believed them? I’m not sure it’s fully understood.”
That is why it’s vital that every reputable news organization — especially television, Facebook and Twitter — adopt what I call the Trump Rule. If any official utters an obvious falsehood or fact-free allegation, the interview should be immediately terminated, just as many networks did with Trump’s lie-infested, postelection, news conference last week. If critics scream “censorship,” just shout back “truth.”
This must become the new normal. Politicians need to be terrified every time they go on TV that the plug will be pulled on them if they lie.
At the same time, we need to require every K-12 school in America to include digital civics — how to determine and crosscheck if something you read on the internet is true — in their curriculum. You should not be able to graduate without it.
We need to restore the stigma to lying and liars before it is too late. We need to hunt for truth, fight for truth and mercilessly discredit the forces of disinformation. It is the freedom battle of our generation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/opin ... ogin-email
The Trump presidency has dangerously normalized lying.
On Saturday morning I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Ann, who was stirring her Cream of Wheat, when out of nowhere she surprised me with a question: “Is not lying one of the Ten Commandments?”
I had to stop and think for a second myself, before answering: “Yes, thou shalt not bear false witness.”
The fact that the two of us even momentarily struggled over that question is, for me, the worst legacy of the Trump presidency.
You remember the old joke? Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and tells the children of Israel: “Children, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I bargained him down to 10. The bad news is that adultery is still in.”
Well, I’ve got bad news and worse news: We’re now down to nine.
Yes, this was a historic four years — even one of the Ten Commandments got erased. Lying has been normalized at a scale we’ve never seen before. Hence Ann’s question.
I am not sure how we reverse it, but we’d better — and fast.
People who do not share truths can’t defeat a pandemic, can’t defend the Constitution and can’t turn the page after a bad leader. The war for truth is now the war to preserve our democracy.
It is impossible to maintain a free society when leaders and news purveyors feel at liberty to spread lies without sanction. Without truth there is no agreed-upon path forward, and without trust there is no way to go down that path together.
But our hole now is so deep, because the only commandment President Trump did believe in was the Eleventh: “Thou shalt not get caught.”
Lately, though, Trump and many around him stopped believing even in that — they don’t seem to care about being caught.
They know, as the saying goes, that their lies are already halfway around the world before the truth has laced up its shoes. That’s all they care about. Just pollute the world with falsehoods and then no one will know what is true. Then you’re home free.
The truth binds you, and Trump never wanted to be bound — not in what he could ask of the president of Ukraine or say about the coronavirus or about the integrity of our election.
And it nearly worked. Trump proved over five years that you could lie multiple times a day — multiple times a minute — and not just win election but almost win re-election.
We have to ensure that the likes of him never again appear in American politics.
Because Trump not only liberated himself from truth, he liberated others to tell their lies or spread his — and reap the benefits. His party’s elders did not care, as long as he kept the base energized and voting red. Fox News didn’t care, as long as he kept its viewers glued to the channel and its ratings high. Major social networks only barely cared, as long he kept their users online and their numbers growing. Many of his voters — even evangelicals — did not care, as long as he appointed anti-abortion judges. They are “pro-life,” but not always pro-truth.
For all those reasons, lying is now such a growth industry it deserves its own G.D.P. line: “Auto sales and durables were each down 10 percent last quarter, but lying grew 30 percent and economists predict that the lying industry could double in 2021.”
Israeli Bedouin expert Clinton Bailey tells the story about a Bedouin chief who discovered one day that his favorite turkey had been stolen. He called his sons together and told them: “Boys, we are in great danger now. My turkey’s been stolen. Find my turkey.” His boys just laughed and said, “Father, what do you need that turkey for?” and they ignored him.
Then a few weeks later his camel was stolen. And the chief told his sons, “Find my turkey.” A few weeks later the chief’s horse was stolen. His sons shrugged, and the chief repeated, “Find my turkey.”
Finally, a few weeks later his daughter was abducted, at which point he gathered his sons and declared: “It’s all because of the turkey! When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”
And do you know what our turkey was? Birtherism.
When Trump was allowed to spread the “birther” lie for years — that Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was actually born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president — he realized he could get away with anything.
Sure, Trump eventually gave that one up, but once he saw how easily he could steal our turkey — the truth — he just kept doing it, until he stole the soul of the Republican Party.
And, had he been re-elected, he would have stolen the soul of this nation.
He and his collaborators are now making one last bid to use the Big Lie to destroy our democracy by delegitimizing one of its greatest moments ever — when a record number of citizens came out to vote, and their votes were legitimately counted, amid a deadly and growing pandemic.
It is so corrupt what Trump and his allies are doing, so dangerous to our constitutional system, but you weep even more for how many of their followers have bought into it.
“Lies don’t work unless they’re believed, and nearly half the American public has proved remarkably gullible,” my former Times colleague David K. Shipler, who served in our Moscow bureau during the Cold War, said to me. “I think of each of us as having our own alarm — and it’s as if half of their batteries have died. Lots of Trump’s lies, and his retweets of conspiracy fabrications, are obviously absurd. Why have so many people believed them? I’m not sure it’s fully understood.”
That is why it’s vital that every reputable news organization — especially television, Facebook and Twitter — adopt what I call the Trump Rule. If any official utters an obvious falsehood or fact-free allegation, the interview should be immediately terminated, just as many networks did with Trump’s lie-infested, postelection, news conference last week. If critics scream “censorship,” just shout back “truth.”
This must become the new normal. Politicians need to be terrified every time they go on TV that the plug will be pulled on them if they lie.
At the same time, we need to require every K-12 school in America to include digital civics — how to determine and crosscheck if something you read on the internet is true — in their curriculum. You should not be able to graduate without it.
We need to restore the stigma to lying and liars before it is too late. We need to hunt for truth, fight for truth and mercilessly discredit the forces of disinformation. It is the freedom battle of our generation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/opin ... ogin-email
In light of failure of democracies around the world, the interview below of His Highness the Aga Khan conducted by CBC is worthy of reflection.
http://ismaili.net/timeline/2005/20050609cbcint.html
CBC: Your words are that the most preoccupying global threat is the failure of democracy. What do you mean?
AK: I think there has been, for a number of years now, a lot of pressure particularly on the developing world that I know to bring in democracy. And while the notion is one I fully support, democracies don't run themselves - people run them. And my sense is that in many, many countries the sorts of human capabilities that are necessary to make democracies function, in their multiple forms, are not there. There is a tendency to use democracy as a generic term, but it isn't. There are so many different forms of democracy.
CBC: So what does that suggest then about how you look at, for example, the efforts by the United States to bring democracy to Iraq and to Afghanistan?
AK: If you look at Afghanistan or you look at Kenya or you look at other countries in the developing world and you think of the number of countries that are redesigning their constitutions today, they have to make serious considered decisions as to the profile of the constitution they want, that suits their country, their demography. Then they have to decide whether democracy, such as what is common in the West, can work. I am not sure that democracies in countries which have have sixty or seventy political parties are going to be stable democracies. So I think the issue really is how to sustain and help these countries develop leadership which is able to function within the new constitutions that are coming forwards. One of the serious questions I have is, for example, in education. It is traditional in North America and much of Western Europe to educate on government. That doesn't happen in a large number of countries in the developing world.
CBC: Is this part of what you call the "clash of ignorance"?
AK: No. The "clash of ignorance" I apply really to the relations between the Muslim world and the rest.
CBC: So what does the West have to do then because we now see the prospect of the Group of Eight leaders getting together and essentially talking about relieving the debt of the poorest countries in Africa? What kind of a commitment do they need to make in your view?
AK: I think they need to make a commitment to understand what are the inputs that would be required to assist these countries to develop functioning democracies. And that needs to be, in my understanding, or in my view, would be tailored to the requirements of each country or tailored to the region.
CBC: One of the things you have done in Canada is establish this Global Centre for Pluralism.
AK: Right, right.
CBC Tell me what you mean by "pluralism" and how that fits into your notion of civil society?
AK: In the past decades I have had a feeling that in Europe, but also in Asia and Africa, many, many of the conflicts have been driven by peoples or faiths or tribes who do not accept the existence of others, who want power or who want to normatise religious attitudes or things of this sort. And I don't believe these societies are born into the acceptance of pluralism. I think societies get educated about pluralism. I think young children can be educated without even it being a process - to recognise and accept people of different backgrounds, of different faiths, etc. And I would hope that there could be a process in place drawn from Canadian experience - and I mean drawn from Canadian experience - where it becomes the psyche of these countries to base their development programs on the acceptance of pluralism, seen as an asset.
CBC: Why Canada?
AK: Because you of all the developed countries that I know, have committed yourselves infinitely more than anybody else to this exercise. And Canadians are humble about it. They talk about it as a work in progress. They are right. It is always going to be a work in progress. And I think that you have accumulated experience over decades which we really can learn from.
CBC: Well obviously that's closely connected to your drive for democracy in all its forms as you put it. It's also connected and I will go back to it, it is also connected to the "clash of ignorance" that you talk about too. Isn't it?
AK: Absolutely. Absolutely you can't really build pluralism unless it is based on education. It's got to be based upon a minimum of understanding and knowledge.
CBC: You know so much of education is about having a wider view of the world. And you have that, you travel, you have the Ismaili communities all over the globe, so often in countries where that wider view does not exist as you point out, they are rural communities, they are people who do not have an opportunity to go beyond their village in a sense. How do you inculcate that wider view without affording people, in a sense, the opportunity to get beyond the village?
AK: Right, right. I think our experience with rural development in mixed communities - and we have done a lot of that work in a large number of countries - in Africa, in Asia, Central Asia, with CIDA help amongst others, what we have learnt from that is that in those contexts pluralism is equitable access to opportunity rather than monolithic carrying of despair. And if there is equitable access to opportunity, communities come together because they are looking to the future. And they are looking to that future with hope. And they are entitled to believe in that. And they are entitled actually to manage that.
CBC: It has been a real pleasure to talk with you. Thank you very much.
AK: Thank you.
http://ismaili.net/timeline/2005/20050609cbcint.html
CBC: Your words are that the most preoccupying global threat is the failure of democracy. What do you mean?
AK: I think there has been, for a number of years now, a lot of pressure particularly on the developing world that I know to bring in democracy. And while the notion is one I fully support, democracies don't run themselves - people run them. And my sense is that in many, many countries the sorts of human capabilities that are necessary to make democracies function, in their multiple forms, are not there. There is a tendency to use democracy as a generic term, but it isn't. There are so many different forms of democracy.
CBC: So what does that suggest then about how you look at, for example, the efforts by the United States to bring democracy to Iraq and to Afghanistan?
AK: If you look at Afghanistan or you look at Kenya or you look at other countries in the developing world and you think of the number of countries that are redesigning their constitutions today, they have to make serious considered decisions as to the profile of the constitution they want, that suits their country, their demography. Then they have to decide whether democracy, such as what is common in the West, can work. I am not sure that democracies in countries which have have sixty or seventy political parties are going to be stable democracies. So I think the issue really is how to sustain and help these countries develop leadership which is able to function within the new constitutions that are coming forwards. One of the serious questions I have is, for example, in education. It is traditional in North America and much of Western Europe to educate on government. That doesn't happen in a large number of countries in the developing world.
CBC: Is this part of what you call the "clash of ignorance"?
AK: No. The "clash of ignorance" I apply really to the relations between the Muslim world and the rest.
CBC: So what does the West have to do then because we now see the prospect of the Group of Eight leaders getting together and essentially talking about relieving the debt of the poorest countries in Africa? What kind of a commitment do they need to make in your view?
AK: I think they need to make a commitment to understand what are the inputs that would be required to assist these countries to develop functioning democracies. And that needs to be, in my understanding, or in my view, would be tailored to the requirements of each country or tailored to the region.
CBC: One of the things you have done in Canada is establish this Global Centre for Pluralism.
AK: Right, right.
CBC Tell me what you mean by "pluralism" and how that fits into your notion of civil society?
AK: In the past decades I have had a feeling that in Europe, but also in Asia and Africa, many, many of the conflicts have been driven by peoples or faiths or tribes who do not accept the existence of others, who want power or who want to normatise religious attitudes or things of this sort. And I don't believe these societies are born into the acceptance of pluralism. I think societies get educated about pluralism. I think young children can be educated without even it being a process - to recognise and accept people of different backgrounds, of different faiths, etc. And I would hope that there could be a process in place drawn from Canadian experience - and I mean drawn from Canadian experience - where it becomes the psyche of these countries to base their development programs on the acceptance of pluralism, seen as an asset.
CBC: Why Canada?
AK: Because you of all the developed countries that I know, have committed yourselves infinitely more than anybody else to this exercise. And Canadians are humble about it. They talk about it as a work in progress. They are right. It is always going to be a work in progress. And I think that you have accumulated experience over decades which we really can learn from.
CBC: Well obviously that's closely connected to your drive for democracy in all its forms as you put it. It's also connected and I will go back to it, it is also connected to the "clash of ignorance" that you talk about too. Isn't it?
AK: Absolutely. Absolutely you can't really build pluralism unless it is based on education. It's got to be based upon a minimum of understanding and knowledge.
CBC: You know so much of education is about having a wider view of the world. And you have that, you travel, you have the Ismaili communities all over the globe, so often in countries where that wider view does not exist as you point out, they are rural communities, they are people who do not have an opportunity to go beyond their village in a sense. How do you inculcate that wider view without affording people, in a sense, the opportunity to get beyond the village?
AK: Right, right. I think our experience with rural development in mixed communities - and we have done a lot of that work in a large number of countries - in Africa, in Asia, Central Asia, with CIDA help amongst others, what we have learnt from that is that in those contexts pluralism is equitable access to opportunity rather than monolithic carrying of despair. And if there is equitable access to opportunity, communities come together because they are looking to the future. And they are looking to that future with hope. And they are entitled to believe in that. And they are entitled actually to manage that.
CBC: It has been a real pleasure to talk with you. Thank you very much.
AK: Thank you.
Cooperative Competition Is Possible Between China and the U.S.
A former vice foreign minister of China proposes a way forward for the world’s two leading powers.
BEIJING — The domestic politics of major countries are never kept within their borders — and the future policy orientation of the United States has become a hot topic for many people in China.
There is no denying the fact that China-U.S. relations have suffered serious damage over the past four years. Each country has expressed much complaint and concern about the other.
The United States believes that China craves world hegemony. China sees the United States as trying to block China’s way forward and as hindering its people’s pursuit of a better life.
It seems that both sides are convinced it is always the other party that is in the wrong; any initiative one of them undertakes is invariably seen by the other as an attempt to undermine it.
For example, China has proposed the Belt and Road Initiative as a global public good to promote more growth and greater connectivity, but America interprets the project as a strategy for geopolitical dominance.
As relations grew more tense in recent years, Washington started bullying Chinese high-tech companies and making things difficult for Chinese students. I have met many young Chinese entrepreneurs who studied in America and who today are puzzled to be treated like a security threat to the United States, after many years of a productive partnership between our two countries. The politicization of even people-to-people exchanges has left many wondering if what had long been mutually beneficial ties can be reinvigorated.
To refresh the relationship, each side must accurately assess the other’s intentions. China does not want to replace U.S. dominance in the world. Nor does China need to worry about the United States changing China’s system.
And it would be a tragedy of history if two countries of such power moved toward confrontation based on misperceptions. That would only work against their own fundamental interests, and many businesses and people would pay the price.
Both governments have heavy domestic agendas to attend to, and so even if competition between China and the United States is unavoidable, it needs to be managed well, cooperatively. It is possible for the two countries to develop a relationship of “coopetition” (cooperation + competition) by addressing each other’s concerns.
In the fields of economics and technology, rules and laws must prevail. It is important that Beijing listen to and address the legitimate concerns of American companies in China, such as their calls for better intellectual property protection, cybersecurity and privacy. China is making strong efforts in all these areas by improving its laws and their enforcement. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress recently adopted amendments to China’s copyright law, raising the cost of violations, among other things.
Washington, for its part, should ensure a level playing field for Chinese enterprises to operate in the United States. America’s fear of Huawei’s cutting-edge advantages should not be expressed through government bullying: This not only hurts the company, it also limits many people’s access to technological progress. The U.S. government should instead be encouraging its companies to work and compete with Huawei.
Its attempt to block the popular social media platform TikTok on national security grounds also seems unfair since the United States has not publicly proved its allegations of security violations and the company has vowed to abide by all U.S. laws and regulations.
Washington’s so-called national security argument against Chinese companies seems hypocritical to the Chinese, considering that China, over the course of four decades or more of reform and opening up, welcomed all kinds of Western technologies and American companies into China — all the while maintaining its own national security.
And yet if the two sides engage in equal and candid negotiations, they should be able to build a solid basis for long-term relations that are beneficial to both.
On the political front, it is high time that the United States drop its habit of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs. One hopes that Washington will learn from its unsuccessful interventions the world over, for example in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. America’s concerns that foreign forces might interfere with its presidential elections should serve as a good reminder of why other countries are so sensitive about U.S. intervention in their own domestic affairs.
China finds it offensive when the United States points a finger at the Chinese system or takes action against Beijing for its policies on domestic matters. But China also needs to be more proactive in providing the rest of the world firsthand information about what the country stands for and why it is doing what it is doing.
A calmer atmosphere can be cultivated when China and the United States respect each other and acknowledge that the other has a different political system that is working in its own way.
In the security field, both countries shoulder responsibilities for ensuring that the peace and tranquillity that the Asia-Pacific region has enjoyed over the years continues to last. The United States should be respectful of China’s sense of national unity and avoid challenging China on the issue of Taiwan or by meddling in the territorial disputes of the South China Sea.
Admittedly, China’s growing navy has put some pressure on the United States in the western Pacific. The U.S. Navy, which has long claimed to be the dominant force in the region, finds the presence of a strong local military power today to be unsettling; its activities close to territories over which China claims sovereignty are met with growing objections from the Chinese military.
The United States’ insensitivity toward China’s concerns over Taiwan and territorial disputes in the South China Sea can only make Beijing suspect Washington’s motivations: Does America want to help Taiwan go independent? Is it siding with the other claimants in the region in order to humiliate China as the imperialists did in the past?
To avoid any misunderstandings and unexpected conflicts, the two militaries should talk at the strategic level in order to build mechanisms to effectively manage potential crises and find other ways to coexist peacefully.
This is not impossible. In the late 1990s, China and the United States established a consultation regime about maritime security. Later, they set up both guidelines for handling unplanned encounters at sea and in the air and a hotline to defuse any possible crises. In recent years, they established formal mechanisms to notify each other of major military activities.
Now they need to have candid talks to better understand each other’s intentions and cultivate trust.
Finally, a host of global issues call for close cooperation between China and the United States — the most urgent being the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Scientists from both countries have a solid track record of professional cooperation in responding to past health crises, and they should be encouraged to maximize again the potential for exchange and joint research. Both China and America are resourceful in vaccine development. If they cooperate to make vaccines more affordable and accessible, the whole world will benefit.
Climate change is another area that needs urgent attention. The world expects China and the United States to play a leading role, and the two countries have a lot to work on together. Other global topics — such as economic stability, digital security and artificial intelligence governance, to mention but a few — all cry out for united efforts as well.
To tackle these challenges, China and the United States should join hands and cooperate with all other concerned parties. Only then can multilateralism continue to bring hope for the betterment of humankind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A former vice foreign minister of China proposes a way forward for the world’s two leading powers.
BEIJING — The domestic politics of major countries are never kept within their borders — and the future policy orientation of the United States has become a hot topic for many people in China.
There is no denying the fact that China-U.S. relations have suffered serious damage over the past four years. Each country has expressed much complaint and concern about the other.
The United States believes that China craves world hegemony. China sees the United States as trying to block China’s way forward and as hindering its people’s pursuit of a better life.
It seems that both sides are convinced it is always the other party that is in the wrong; any initiative one of them undertakes is invariably seen by the other as an attempt to undermine it.
For example, China has proposed the Belt and Road Initiative as a global public good to promote more growth and greater connectivity, but America interprets the project as a strategy for geopolitical dominance.
As relations grew more tense in recent years, Washington started bullying Chinese high-tech companies and making things difficult for Chinese students. I have met many young Chinese entrepreneurs who studied in America and who today are puzzled to be treated like a security threat to the United States, after many years of a productive partnership between our two countries. The politicization of even people-to-people exchanges has left many wondering if what had long been mutually beneficial ties can be reinvigorated.
To refresh the relationship, each side must accurately assess the other’s intentions. China does not want to replace U.S. dominance in the world. Nor does China need to worry about the United States changing China’s system.
And it would be a tragedy of history if two countries of such power moved toward confrontation based on misperceptions. That would only work against their own fundamental interests, and many businesses and people would pay the price.
Both governments have heavy domestic agendas to attend to, and so even if competition between China and the United States is unavoidable, it needs to be managed well, cooperatively. It is possible for the two countries to develop a relationship of “coopetition” (cooperation + competition) by addressing each other’s concerns.
In the fields of economics and technology, rules and laws must prevail. It is important that Beijing listen to and address the legitimate concerns of American companies in China, such as their calls for better intellectual property protection, cybersecurity and privacy. China is making strong efforts in all these areas by improving its laws and their enforcement. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress recently adopted amendments to China’s copyright law, raising the cost of violations, among other things.
Washington, for its part, should ensure a level playing field for Chinese enterprises to operate in the United States. America’s fear of Huawei’s cutting-edge advantages should not be expressed through government bullying: This not only hurts the company, it also limits many people’s access to technological progress. The U.S. government should instead be encouraging its companies to work and compete with Huawei.
Its attempt to block the popular social media platform TikTok on national security grounds also seems unfair since the United States has not publicly proved its allegations of security violations and the company has vowed to abide by all U.S. laws and regulations.
Washington’s so-called national security argument against Chinese companies seems hypocritical to the Chinese, considering that China, over the course of four decades or more of reform and opening up, welcomed all kinds of Western technologies and American companies into China — all the while maintaining its own national security.
And yet if the two sides engage in equal and candid negotiations, they should be able to build a solid basis for long-term relations that are beneficial to both.
On the political front, it is high time that the United States drop its habit of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs. One hopes that Washington will learn from its unsuccessful interventions the world over, for example in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. America’s concerns that foreign forces might interfere with its presidential elections should serve as a good reminder of why other countries are so sensitive about U.S. intervention in their own domestic affairs.
China finds it offensive when the United States points a finger at the Chinese system or takes action against Beijing for its policies on domestic matters. But China also needs to be more proactive in providing the rest of the world firsthand information about what the country stands for and why it is doing what it is doing.
A calmer atmosphere can be cultivated when China and the United States respect each other and acknowledge that the other has a different political system that is working in its own way.
In the security field, both countries shoulder responsibilities for ensuring that the peace and tranquillity that the Asia-Pacific region has enjoyed over the years continues to last. The United States should be respectful of China’s sense of national unity and avoid challenging China on the issue of Taiwan or by meddling in the territorial disputes of the South China Sea.
Admittedly, China’s growing navy has put some pressure on the United States in the western Pacific. The U.S. Navy, which has long claimed to be the dominant force in the region, finds the presence of a strong local military power today to be unsettling; its activities close to territories over which China claims sovereignty are met with growing objections from the Chinese military.
The United States’ insensitivity toward China’s concerns over Taiwan and territorial disputes in the South China Sea can only make Beijing suspect Washington’s motivations: Does America want to help Taiwan go independent? Is it siding with the other claimants in the region in order to humiliate China as the imperialists did in the past?
To avoid any misunderstandings and unexpected conflicts, the two militaries should talk at the strategic level in order to build mechanisms to effectively manage potential crises and find other ways to coexist peacefully.
This is not impossible. In the late 1990s, China and the United States established a consultation regime about maritime security. Later, they set up both guidelines for handling unplanned encounters at sea and in the air and a hotline to defuse any possible crises. In recent years, they established formal mechanisms to notify each other of major military activities.
Now they need to have candid talks to better understand each other’s intentions and cultivate trust.
Finally, a host of global issues call for close cooperation between China and the United States — the most urgent being the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Scientists from both countries have a solid track record of professional cooperation in responding to past health crises, and they should be encouraged to maximize again the potential for exchange and joint research. Both China and America are resourceful in vaccine development. If they cooperate to make vaccines more affordable and accessible, the whole world will benefit.
Climate change is another area that needs urgent attention. The world expects China and the United States to play a leading role, and the two countries have a lot to work on together. Other global topics — such as economic stability, digital security and artificial intelligence governance, to mention but a few — all cry out for united efforts as well.
To tackle these challenges, China and the United States should join hands and cooperate with all other concerned parties. Only then can multilateralism continue to bring hope for the betterment of humankind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3