Michael Gerson can be an annoying self-righteous conservative. But his op-ed I’m a conservative who believes systemic racism is real (Washington Post 06/21/2021) is actually decent. No bold new insights. But decent in a way that at least a few Republican conservatives may find accessible.
I mean, it's Michael Gerson, so he takes a dumb shot at Tom Paine (?!) in the piece.
But it is (mostly) a decent piece:
I don’t think it’s possible to be a conservative without believing that racism is, in part, structural.
Most on the American right have dug into a very different position. They tend to view racism as an individual act of immorality. And they regard the progressive imputation of racism to be an attack on their character. In a free society, they reason, the responsibility for success and failure is largely personal. They’re proud of the productive life choices they’ve made and refuse to feel guilty for self-destructive life choices made by others.
It’s an argument that sounds convincing — until it’s tested against the experience of our own lives. [my emphasis]
This is a core posture of conservatives, and is also part of the neoliberal worldview that gained dominance in the US in the 1980s. Here's Maggie Thatcher's classic description of the neoliberal outlook (Margaret Thatcher: a life in quotesGuardian 04/08/2013):
They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. (1987) [my emphasis]
Ivan Natividad gives some more background and additional references (How American racism is rooted in residential segregationBerkeley News 06/21/2021): He quotes Stephen Menendian, director of a UC-Berkeley institute that focuses on such issues:
While 20th century segregation was also residential — Black urban areas versus white suburban areas — in the 21st century we’re seeing segregation as more regional today. We’re also seeing white suburbs and Black suburbs.
A city like Ferguson, Missouri, in 1970 was 90% white. But by 2010, it’s 66% Black. Segregation now is more mobile and more regional than it was in the 20th century. It’s much more multiracial. It’s not binary. And it’s about the community you live in, not the neighborhood within the city you live in.
What hasn’t changed is that these segregated communities of color are still poorly resourced. White communities have these high pockets of private wealth and resources, while non-white areas have very anemic low levels of wealth where residents are extremely underpaid, under-resourced, and have disinvested public goods and infrastructure. ...
When you think about disproportional use of police brutality, or COVID-19 health outcomes and unemployment in communities of color, society often labels these disparities as racism in these individual institutions. But all these outcomes are really connected to residential segregation. This is what makes it systemic and not institutional racism. [my emphasis]
We don't know yet whether in 5, 10, years from now classes on Contemporary History with have units on "2020" as an iconic year like "1968". (Hopefully not like "1914"!)
But three historians are giving us a preliminary look in current articles. One is Millsaps College historian Bob McElvaine, who in The Political Price of Military Assaults on AmericansMedium 06/17/2020 looks at Herbert Hoover's human and political fiasco with the brutal military suppression of the Bonus Army protest in 1932. He also discussed that and the Great Depression as well in a recent English-language interview with
Thomas Seifert from the Austrian Wiener Zeitung, Interview with Prof. Robert McElvaine, Author of "The Great Depression" 06/12/2020:
The German translation of the interview has the title, "'The deepest recession of all time'": "Die tiefste Rezession aller Zeiten" 14.06.2020.
In the Medium piece, he writes about the attack on the Bonus Army protesters, commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who is a heroic figure in the rightwing pantheon:
Though MacArthur had acted in direct disobedience of his orders, Hoover chose to take responsibility for what the military leader had done. The President was making a calculated move to the right, to stand in the fall election for law and order. The immediate reaction of major newspapers was generally in favor of the assault. The New York Times referred to the Bonus Army “insurrection.” “We are confident,” the paper’s editors affirmed, “that the decision of the President will be sustained by the great majority of our citizens.”
That confidence was misplaced, as the Democratic nominee understood. “Everyone could see what was there,” Franklin Roosevelt said of the man in the White House, “and they wouldn’t like it.” Hoover, Roosevelt remarked, had “set Doug MacArthur on those harmless vets.” Instead of sending troops and gas, FDR said, Hoover should have sent coffee and donuts. “There was nothing inside the man but jelly,” the challenger said of the incumbent. “Maybe there never had been anything.” [my emphasis]
Sean Wilentz also looks at the Bonus March and its possible relevant for the 2020 Presidential campaign, The Disgrace of Donald TrumpRolling Stone 06/15/2020. He also looks at more recent times, and gives the following description that is a key part of the story of asymmetric partisan polarization in the US. Picking up with the Bush 1 Administration, he writes:
When no conservative in Reagan’s mold successfully claimed his mantle, leadership of the GOP fell to those elements of the traditional party that had accommodated themselves to the Reagan revolution, personified by George H.W. Bush, the Connecticut Yankee reborn as a Texas conservative. Bush well understood that to win the presidency, he would need to claim and then agitate the Reagan base; and as his campaign manager Lee Atwater, steeped in the wiles of South Carolina politics, understood just as well, this meant stirring racist fears, an evil art at which Atwater excelled. When, as president, Bush ran afoul of supply-side dogma, old faces like the reactionary Pat Buchanan and new faces like the firebrand Georgian Newt Gingrich challenged his leadership of the party.
From that point forward, a radicalizing dynamic overtook Republican national politics. Constituencies that the traditional GOP had tried to absorb to build its post-1960s majority - conservative white Southerners, including, more broadly, white evangelical Christians - became the party’s heart and soul. Establishment Republican leaders vying for the presidency — Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney - had to appease an ever-hardening right-wing base, centered in what has become the solidly Republican white South. When those leaders lost - as they did twice to Bill Clinton and twice to Barack Obama - the base despaired of anything resembling conventional conservative politics. The one GOP victor, George W. Bush, did win over the party base, thanks in part to his Svengali, Karl Rove, and in part to the patriotic surge that followed the attacks of 9/11. But Bush disastrously invaded Iraq, and he ended his presidency with the start of the Great Recession and the birth of the radical Tea Party, which went on to hound President Obama at every turn. [my emphasis]
And that "radicalizing dynamic" is still running wild in the Republican Party, the sideshow of the NeverTrump Republicans notwithstanding.
And Rick Perlstein reflects on the current consequences of four decades of Reagan-Thatcher economic and cultural dogma, aka, neoliberalism, although he doesn't use the term here: Market Logic Is Literally Killing UsIn These Times 06/17/2020. He writes:
Covid-19 has sucked the world into a vortex of interlocking crises that demand collective sacrifice to resolve. The world’s most powerful nation has revealed itself as tragically unequal to the challenge - unwilling to transcend private interest. From the deranged Republicans running the White House and the Senate to the penny-pinching Democrats running the House of Representatives, from ordinary folks who can’t be bothered to wear a mask to corporate titans scouring the horizon for profit-taking opportunities - it all marks the distillation of a national ideology: selfishness, über alles.
He also reminds us how bipartisan this push was:
President Carter ... declared, in his 1978 State of the Union, "Government cannot solve our problems, it can't set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy." Two years later, Carter ran for reelection against Reagan by holding himself up as Reagan's deregulationist equal: The party of FDR now believed, "We ought to get the government's nose out of the private enterprise of this country. We've deregulated rail, deregulated trucking, deregulated airlines, deregulated financial institutions, working on communications, to make sure that we have a free enterprise system that's competitive." [Carter]
That larger project, of writing public obligation out of business's social contract with the people, was bipartisan. "Business is entitled to its decade, and I will try to help them get it," the Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, told a business association in 1981. By 2020, the surrender to market logic had advanced so far along that when the moral equivalent of war came, America's arsenal to fight it proved quite nearly bare[.] (my emphasis)
That represents the other side of the asymmetric partisan polarization. The Republican Party has spent four decades in the throes of Wilentz' "radicalizing dynamic." He suggests in the article is better dated to 1992, but his description of Old Man Bush's more moderate course running up against the Reaganized Congressional party is accurate.
The Democrats, on the other hand, have mostly been dominated for the last four decades by a tendency of what I'll call radical centrism, because that sound politer than the alternatives that come to mind. There has been durable opposition to the course of those decades, represented in Presidential politics by the campaigns of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, Jerry Brown in 1992, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Ted Kennedy mounted a substantial primary challenge to Carter in 1980, attempting to keep the party more on the New Deal/Great Society track. Including, yes, national health insurance.
I don't want to get too caught up into the Presidential-level references. But Obama's 2008 campaign was generally perceived as a progressive work, particularly compared to his establishment Dem rival Hillary Clinton. But in his policy priorities, he quickly proved to be on board with the chronic centrism. And is still there in 2020, when he helped in the emergency operation to consolidate the donors quickly around Joe Biden. Biden's record, if it can be fairly called centrist at all, is a centrism titled toward the conservative side.
Donor influence and the steady increase of massive amounts of money in politics, particularly since Citizens United decision in 2010, has been the most important influence in this asymmetric polarization process. But some of it is also due to the duck-and-cover style the Democrats have developed, in which they embrace Republican framing of issues and a general duck-and-cover impulse they can't shake:
A final thought on Carter's deregulation policy in 1976-80. On the whole, it was clearly a bad general direction. But the Democrats' position on deregulation at that time was not simply surrender to business lobbies. It was also one of the response to the inflation that seemed to be intractable, the idea being that establishing more price competition could restrain inflationary pressures. Even figures clearly identified at the time as being on the pro-labor left of the party, including Ted Kennedy and Fred Harris, also adopted some form of this approach.
Jimmy Carter is also a special case, because after his Presidency, he has become a figure possibly more respected for his stances, which at times look radical in comparison to those of timid duck-and-cover Democrats. For instance, his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005) was a more searing indictment of the Cheney-Bush Administration that established Democrats in Congress could muster. He has said publicly that he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016, although in 2020 he expressed concern that both Biden and Sanders were too old to start a Presidency.
Gerhard Altmann did a review in 2003 (Twentieth Century British History 14:1) on a book about British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who first made free-market fundamentalist neoliberalism the dominant governing ideology in British politics, a book by Dominik Geppert, Thatchers konservative Revolution. Der Richtungswandel der britischen Tories 1975-1979 (2002). In summarizing the events covered in Geppert's book, Altmann describes the chain of events that established Thatcherism as the ascendant ideology:
Thathcher's ideology was perceived as a significant policy departure even by many in own Conservative Party. Altmann writes that by the 1990s, "New Labour" led by Tony Blair had "unashamedly embrace[d] its
economic tenets and foreign policy approach."
This must doubtless astonish those who take the perspective of the mid-1970s when Thatcher set out to put paid to the much-vaunted post-war consensus. For the odds seemed so glaringly against her that few members of her own party expected her to make it to the next general election as leader of the opposition (and some even hoped for her untimely political demise). [my emphasis]
Thatcher exploited the changes in the world economic system marked by the oil crisis and the end of the Bretton Woods system to sell her own version of a conservative revolution as the solutions to the problems that had become more dramatically evident to more people:
The verities of the political generation that had boldly established the welfare state and gracefully bowed out of the empire appeared to have outlived their usefulness. Nor did the incumbent Labour government show much adroitness at tackling these problems. The country reached its nadir when the Chancellor had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund, which conjured up associations with the plight of the Third World. It was in this specific context that Thatcherism as a 'radical strategy of crisis management' (p. 13 [Geppert]) could become the clarion call to action. [my emphasis]
And Thatcher made her pitch in a kind of elitist-populist manner:
Thatcher skilfully appealed to the instincts of ordinary party members and society at large, mostly over the heads of the Tory grandees and by deftly challenging taboos. For instance, she held up the 1930s, of all decades, as a period of self-help and solidarity, and, by the same token, vilified the sixties as the age of inertia and moral decay. Moreover, Keynesianism - the economic creed of all post-war governments - was condemned for stultifying the individual's initiative and saddling the state with tasks that drained off private wealth without adding to public prosperity.
Left and liberal critics, along with the occasional antiwar libertarian, point out the ideological prejudice against government programs as being inefficient, ineffective, and altogether inferior to private business is almost never mentioned by conservatives - or by most liberals - in reference to denfese spending. That's in large part a function of the fact that the military budget provides huge profits to private business through military purcahses. And over the last two decades, a significant portion of military functions previously performed by the official military have been privatized. Including the reckless use of mercenaries. Privatization of military functions flourished during the Cheney-Bush Admininstration. See, for instance, Mahlon Apgar IV and John Keane, New Business with the New MilitaryHarvard Business Review Sept 2004:
The “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower first recognized is taking new form. Then, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the four military services (the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force) were closely tied to a few major weapons contractors that managed large programs within a labyrinth of detailed regulations and specifications. Now, the military is turning to nontraditional business partners to meet a wide range of needs, from health care to housing to information technology. In essence, the long-standing government monopoly on every aspect of national security is being replaced by a more businesslike model in which DoD’s warfighting capabilities are supported through outsourcing and business alliances for numerous noncombat functions.
But the dominant narrative from the neoliberals shifted criticism of government services toward more emphasis on efficiency and away from the dogmatic, pseudo-ethical idea that some things like unemployment insurance were just illigitimate. Not that the latter has died out, it certainly hasn't. But for New Labour in Britain and corporate Democrats in the US, the neoliberal rhetoric allowed them to sound innovation, forward-looking, and respectably edgy while supporting conservative positions on government services.
Thatcher also saw the advantage of asymmetric partisan polarization, as Altmann recalled, "Thatcher poured scorn on the tedious search for compromise. Responding to a truculent mood which emerged from the very centre of the ideological spectrum, she honed her image as a conviction politician and applied the divisive rhetoric of the cold war to the British arena."
And, similar to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the US, more established British Labour politicians were already surrendering their previous pro-worker and left-leaning positions. Laobur Prime Minister, "Denis Healey had already begun - and not without success - to dismantle Keynesianism and to inject a dose of monetarism into the ailing British economy when Prime Minister Callaghan's decision not to call an autumn election in 1978 eventually spelt disaster for Labour."
Ezra Klein's article The president’s job is to manage risk. But Trump is the risk.Vox 05/18/2020 describes a situation that is in no small created by the ideological notion that "gubment" is inefficient and ineffective - except for our glorious military, of course. Developing a substantial consituency that holds civilian government generally in dismissive contempt doesn't work well in preparing a serious problems and setbacks like the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent recession. As Klein notes:
The federal government’s primary job is risk management. If that sounds strange to you, just follow the money. More than 50 percent of the federal budget is devoted directly to social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid — programs that insure Americans against the risks of illness, old age, and financial disaster. Another 16 percent goes to defense spending, which, in theory, protects us from the risks posed by other countries and terrorist networks. Together, safety net programs and military spending account for almost three-quarters of federal spending. [my emphasis]
The North Atlantic brand of neoliberalism symbolized by Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was a significant shift in the dominant ideology of how government as an insurance function needs to work.
These days we typically date the beginning of neoliberal dominance in the US and Britain to the Reagan-Thatcher era. In the US, that has resulted in an asymmetric polarization of the two main political parties. The Republicans have embraced the market-fundamentalism of neoliberal economics with a political Christian fundamentalist view on social and legal issues and a steadily building authoritarian orientation. At the present moment – specifically the weekend after the Senate voted not to call witnesses in Trump’s (first?) impeachment trial – the Republican Party has established a form of the “illiberal democracy” with which Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. At the moment, the 2020 elections still offer a promising opportunity to reverse that trend. But the Republican Party is now an authoritarian, white nationalist party.
The Democrats have also embraced the basics of neoliberal market-fundamentalism, although they try to put a more human face on it. The two parties do lean toward different segments of the American oligarchy: the Democrats tend to favor the finance and digital segments while the Republicans have a famous affection for the extractive industries, for instance. But the Democrats are on board with the basic neoliberal economic menu: lower wages, weaker unions, reduced social services, privatization of government service (even including prisons!), lower pensions, weaker safety regulations, an so on.
As Andrew Bacevich helpfully describes in The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (2020), the Democrats combined their embrace of market fundamentalism with a surprisingly strong embrace of formal legal rights and representation for women, African-Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ people, and other groups long discriminated against. Surprising, because even in 2008, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton considered same-sex marriage too controversial to endorse. And, in general, the Democrats have shown more concern for preserving democratic and Constitutional procedures and limits.
But that formal reverence for diversity also coexisted with harsh law-and-order measures with which the Clintons and Joe Biden are particularly identified, notably due to Clinton’s Crime Bill and the “war on drugs” generally. There was a bipartisan consensus on a legal regime that put large numbers of black men in prison for relatively small drug offenses, i.e., marijuana possession. Such convictions have been used by many states to support the Republicans’ Orbanist/segregationist project of suppressing minority votes by banned formerly convicted felons from voting.
The Democrats’ commitment to formal legal and symbolic equality also didn’t prevent the Obama Administration from pursuing a draconian policy against national-security leaks or giving officials of the Cheney-Bush Administration a pass on criminal conduct, mostly strikingly on the torture crimes.
Bacevich takes the post-1989 world as his age of illusions, which was famously characterized as The End of History. While both parties made their adaptation to the neoliberal era, for the Democrats it meant abandoning their New Deal/Great Society orientation and moving far toward conservative Republicans positions. For the Republicans, it meant that they could more enthusiastically pursue the conservative, pro-corporate, anti-labor politics with which they were already very comfortable.
Burke clearly has contempt for Sanders and his political program:
But by running again and proposing many of the “boldest” but least viable plans in the Democratic field, such as arbitrarily cancelling all student loan debt, or implementing national rent control—both of which have tepid support even among Democratic members of Congress–he has shifted the debate of serious issues in an unserious direction.
Much like Donald Trump in 2016, Sanders is standing out in a crowded field by making promises he can’t keep. He’s not giving voters an honest assessment of how he will improve their lives. Like an airbrushed magazine model who makes real people look bad by setting an impossible standard of beauty, Sanders is harmfully distorting our view of other candidates by refusing to stick to reality.
But later he writes, "Needless to say, it is not fair or accurate to compare Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump." Huh. Cute.
There’s nothing original about this. It’s the same kind of condescending sneering that has been standard rhetoric of conservative Democrats against those to their left. Including ones that didn’t specifically call themselves democratic socialists. It’s not worth wasting energy to be irritated or get huffy over it.
Because not only is it unoriginal. He gives away the meaning here:
Sanders is not offering aspirational goals and saying he will try his best; he is making promises. He has directly told voters: “We will pass Medicare for All. We will eliminate co-pays, premiums and deductibles.” His website doesn’t say he will work to reduce medical debt. It says flatly: “We will eliminate all past due medical debt in this country.” He also promises to “Avert Climate Catastrophe and Create 20 Million Jobs,” provide guaranteed, universal, affordable child care, and more.
In other words, Democrats should have no grand visions. No serious commitments to reform. No willingness to address serious existing and developing problem head-on. And, most importantly, they should be acting like they intend to fight for their own positions.
This is the asymmetric polarization on full display. The Republicans are willing to pursue radical positions, even ones that are unpopular, and fight to push them through. They haven’t been shy about pursuing a Reagan Revolution or a Gingrich Revolution.
While the Democrats, on the other hand, have spent a large part of the last four decades in a defensive crouch, adopting Republican framing of issues and afraid to aggressively push for their own expressed goals, campaigning as though they were embarrassed by their own supporters. We saw a particularly notable example in 2019, when Nancy Pelosi was swept into the House Speakership by a stunning Democratic turnout in the 2018 midterms, and then spent her first half year as Speaker strongly arguing against impeaching Trump. She even gave the Republicans a perfect talking point, that impeaching Trump would hurt the Democrats politically. She didn’t abandon that defensive crouch position until Democrats newly elected in swing districts insisted that their reelection prospects would be politically damaged if the House didn’t move on impeachment.
One of her arguments was that the House Democrats should pursue impeachment only if they had assurance beforehand that they would get a 2/3 majority for removal in the Republican-dominated Senate. “Don’t fight unless we already know we can win” is anything but an inspiring battle cry. Burke makes the same kind of argument against basically everything about Bernie Sanders:
Sanders is often praised for his honesty and authenticity. But in this respect he is actively misleading voters. Most of his promises depend on Congress to keep them. There is virtually no evidence that, even if he becomes President, he will have the votes necessary to enact any, let alone all, of these ideas. Critically, that isn’t just because Republicans are standing in the way—it’s because there is not enough support among Democrats either.
For almost any important political issues to which there is any kind of opposition, “Don’t fight unless we already know we can win” is the same as “Don’t fight at all. Don’t even try.”
For the Make American Boring Again Democrats, the sentiment of the Pete Seeger song that became a major anthem for the civil rights movement in the 1960s is incomprehensible:
The only thing we did was wrong
Staying in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
The only thing we did was right
Was the day we started to fight
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola on The Young Turks of 01/23/2020 reference this piece from last year by Adolph Reed, Jr.: The Myth of Class ReductionismNew Republic 09/15/2019.
It deals with the political argument between the corporate-liberal and progressive wings of the Democratic Party, one that has taken on a quasi-theological form, over how to articulate the proper relationships among race relations, women's rights, and economics. It's not a new discussion, nor is it unique to the Democratic Party in the 21st century.
I've tried to avoid the specific incarnations in the current Presidential primary race. In theory, there's not much difference between liberals and progressives over the first two, although policies and priorities are what really count.
On economic issues, the differences are understood similarly on both sides. Progressives want Medicare for All and tax policies aimed at closing the wealth and income gap between the One Percent and everyone else. Liberals don't, although they want policies that move at least somewhat in that direction. Progressives aren't afraid of the Republicans calling them socialist, liberal are. Despite the fact that Republicans have been doing just that for generations.
What I think of as the quasi-theological aspect of the current argument comes from the argument that corporate Democrats use against the progressives, and currently against Bernie Sanders in particular, that they are sexist and racist, though it's usually not put quite that crassly. There's also a Bernie-Sanders-makes-my-skin-crawl argument, but that's not really the same thing. (It's also borderline anti-Semitic.)
The anti-Sanders argument is that Sanders doesn't take white racism and sexism seriously enough, and that his talk about class and redistribution issues are a way to minimize the seriousness of racism and sexism in the US.
Reed refers to the two sides of this controversy as left-identitarian and class-reductionist. The first is probably more obvious than the latter, which refers tot he notion that "that inequalities apparently attributable to race, gender, or other categories of group identification are either secondary in importance or reducible to generic economic inequality." He argues that the class-reductionist position is more a polemical construct. "I know of no one who embraces that position," he writes.
Reed does make an important observation here
As American politics shifted steadily rightward between the Nixon and Clinton presidencies, so, too, did the discourse surrounding race and the country’s political economy. Conservatives attributed black socioeconomic inequalities to bad values; liberals attributed them to bad values and racism. Once it was effectively decoupled from political-economic dynamics, “racism” became increasingly amorphous as a charge or diagnosis - a blur of attitudes, utterances, individual actions, and patterned disparities, an autonomous force that acts outside of historically specific social relations. Today it serves as a single, all-purpose explanation for mass incarceration, the wealth gap, the wage gap, police brutality, racially disproportionate rates of poverty and unemployment, slavery, the Southern Jim Crow regime, health disparities, the drug war, random outbursts of individual bigotry, voter suppression, and more. ...
As Cedric Johnson and Dean Robinson have argued, post-civil rights black politics has tended to emphasize an “ethnic group” notion of racial solidarity that masks the face that this race politics is itself a class politics. Black Democratic and other neoliberal elites have shown again and again in their sustained denunciations of the Sanders program since 2016 that they ultimately rely on race-specific arguments to oppose broadly redistributive initiatives that would improve the circumstances of African American working people along with all others. Ironically, this means that the constituencies most affected by economic inequality and disadvantage have the least voice in contemporary policy debates. [my emphasis]
Of course, in a high-stakes political campaign like the Presidential race, campaigns are going to use dubious attacks. Some of which will be closer to true. Some of which will be less fair than others. Politics is politics.
The liberal, pro-corporate verisons of neoliberalism combines free-market fundmentalism (with a bit more humane face than the conservatives version) with a classic liberal defense of equal rights. In theory, a society with severe class divisions and a severe maldistribution of wealth and income could have complete equality between for minorities and women. There are mountains of rigorous research that show why in practice that cannot and will happen in the real world.
But the soundbite version are always going to be imprecise.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that blocked Iran from developing nuclear weapons was signed in 2015. The parties included the United States and Iran, along with Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia.
In return, Iran got sanctions dropped that the US had imposed on them and had frozen Iranian funds held by the US released. As BBC News reports (Iran nuclear deal: Key details 06/11/2019):
Under the deal, Iran gained access to more than $100bn in assets frozen overseas, and was able to resume selling oil on international markets and using the global financial system for trade.
However, in May 2018, US President Donald Trump abandoned the landmark deal and in November that year, he reinstated sanctions targeting both Iran and states that trade with it.
Just before the Trump Administration announced it was unilaterally leaving the agreement, France's Emmanuel Macron, Germany's Angela Merkel, and Britain's then-Prime Minister Theresa May tried to persuade Trump to reconsider. Stephen Walt related at the time what happened (Europe Has No Clue How to Handle an American BullyForeign Policy 05/02/2018):
But instead of getting tough with Trump and warning him that Europe would both stick to the deal and defy any subsequent U.S. effort to impose secondary sanctions on them, all three leaders chose to mollify and flatter Trump instead. Macron tried to persuade Trump to let him “mediate” some sort of a new deal between the various parties, only to say at the end of his visit that he believed Trump would nix the deal for “domestic reasons.” Next up was Merkel, who held a three-hour meeting with Trump and then told reporters that the current nuclear agreement was “not sufficient.” May reportedly then conferred with Macron and Merkel after their trips to Washington, and the three leaders sought to present a united front that was crafted to support the deal without alienating Trump.
The practical result of all this sucking up was disastrous. The top European powers had effectively caved in to the Trump administration’s view that the Iran deal is inadequate and has to be either replaced or supplemented by additional agreements. [my emphasis]
Walt counted the potential threat of tariffs on European steel and aluminum as one reason for the European failure in that instance. Another reason:
... the European response to Trump shows how successfully the United States has tamed and subordinated the former great powers that once dominated world politics. After 70-plus years of letting Uncle Sam run the show, European leaders can barely think in strategic terms, let alone act in a tough-minded fashion when they are dealing with the United States. It doesn’t help that Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, is in a state of self-inflicted disarmament and incapable of influencing events beyond the eurozone itself.
In other words, European division, the lack of a common EU foreign policy, was showing itself once again. "When Europe’s leaders cannot summon the will to stand up to a tin-pot autocrat like Viktor Orban, expecting them to show some spine when dealing with Trump is a bridge too far."
Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence this month points out how the German-led EU focus on exports has become another vulnerability that the Trump Administration is exploiting, also through the threat of tariffs. In How the US blackmails the EU 01/16/2020, he relates:
Donald Trump’s ambassador in Berlin denied the story furiously, but we have reason to believe that it is correct. The Trump administration issued a direct but private threat that it would slap a 25% tariff on EU cars unless the EU took action against Iran under the provisions of the 2015 nuclear agreement. This is exactly what happened this week.
We pay not [sic] credence to claims that the Germany, France and the UK wanted to trigger the dispute mechanism anyway, and that the threat by the Trump administration, if anything, complicated the decision. The whole notion of the EU triggering the mechanism in order to save the deal is a face-saving exercise. The EU acted the way it did because it had no choice.
He claims a similar US threat that was successful in the matter of suppliers to NordSstream 2 project. And he links this to the vulnerability in the eurozone that was so dramatically on display during the euro crisis:
It is the consequence of the EU’s incomplete model of integration. This was also the story of the eurozone crisis, when EU leaders persistently failed to act together in the interest of the eurozone. Back then the EU was lucky because the ECB was willing to take a supranational perspective and able to act on it. There is nothing like it in foreign and security policy. The European Commission has limited powers, for example in trade and competition policy, but the EU will need to employ different tools to defend itself from Trump or Xi.
He expands on the theme in The world has discovered how to blackmail Germany 01/17/2020: "This is what happens when trade surpluses are not merely occurring but they are an essential part of your overall economic strategy."
Ecuador introduced a series of measures to discourage capital flight and prevent speculative flows of capital back in 2007 by taxing outflows that did not meet the criteria of productive foreign direct investment (FDI). The measures have been successful in strengthening macroeconomic stability and raising revenues for the government. ...
The new bill passed by the Ecuadorian assembly [at the IMF's insistence] removes the provision on tax havens, shortens the wait period for some investments to be exempt from the tax, and withdraws it altogether for equity and security markets as well as financial investments.
The changes to the law effectively open the door to financial speculation. [my emphasis]
The results are vitually certain to be bad. At least for Ecuador and its people:
It is also stated in the IMF's Articles of Agreement that Fund resources cannot be used to “meet a sustained outflow of capital.” However, this is exactly what happened in Argentina, where $36.6 billion left the country as the IMF disbursed $44.5 billion. Sustained capital flight was undeniably a main contributor to the colossal failure of the IMF’s latest Argentina program.
It seems natural to ask under these circumstances, and given the context, why the IMF is pushing for measures that weaken Ecuador’s current capital controls. Since the tax on outflows already did not apply to productive, long-term investments, attracting more (real) FDI cannot justify these measures. On top of all this, the unpopular measures that the IMF demanded and that fueled massive protests earlier this fall have only been postponed. [my emphasis]
Peter Pilz was a longtime leader of the Green Party in Austria. In 2017-19, he served in the Austrian Nationalrat (Parliament) as part of a splinter group from the Greens first called the Liste Pilz and more recently Jetzt.
Back in 2003, he authored a book called Mit Gott gegen alle: Amerikas Kampf um die Weltherrschaft, in which he analyzed the post-2001 situation and America's role in the world. Given the focus on neoliberalism, aka, the Washington Consensus, that has recently come more into focus in European and American news due to the protests in Chile and the disastrous economic policies of the outgoing government of Mauricio Macri in Argentina. And this quote from Pilz' book has held up well (my translation from German:
East Asia and Latin America at the same time received good [“good” meant ironically] advice from the USA and the IMF. They should follow the Washington Consensus point by point. Brazil, Argentina and Mexico implemented the program. The success was striking: poverty and unemployment, capital flight, recession. At the end of the neoliberal cure a small group was rich like never before. The states themselves were ruined economically. Once wealthy countries like Brazil and Argentina strikingly approached the economic level of Albania. People are starving again.
Dani Rodrik writes about the general rigidity introduced into the world economy by the neoliberal, corporate-deregulation brand of "globalization" (Globalization's Wrong TurnForeign Affairs 4:2019):
... there was nothing inevitable about the path the world followed beginning in the 1990s. International institutions played their part, but hyperglobalization was more a state of mind than a genuine, immutable constraint on domestic policy. Before it came along, countries had experimented with two very different models of globalization: the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system. The new hyperglobalization was closer in spirit to the historically more distant and more intrusive gold standard. That is the source of many of today's problems. It is to the more flexible principles of Bretton Woods that today's policymakers should look if they are to craft a fairer and more sustainable global economy. [my emphasis]
He also has this comment on the outsized influence of "exporter and investor lobbies":
The clearest illustration of that power came when international trade agreements incorporated domestic protections for intellectual property rights, the result of aggressive lobbying by pharmaceutical firms eager to capture profits by extending their monopoly power to foreign markets. To this day, Big Pharma is the single largest lobby behind trade deals. [my emphasis]
Rodrik makes the important point that the trade rules that block or reduced national capital controls are a huge problem of the current neoliberal international arrangements. It makes individual countries subject to speculative movement of money in and out of a country that makes financial crises far more likely. The fact that the eurozone countries allow free movement of capital within the currency zone but without the safeguards against negative regional effects from such speculative flows was a huge reason that the effects of the 2008 crash were so devastating to countries like Greece and Spain.
Frances Coppola took a look recently at the reality of family care for dependent elderly relatives in A lack of compassion Coppola Comment 02/23/2019, with special reference to Thatcherite conservative dogma in Britain:
Nor does relying on families to care for relatives reinforce social and community bonds, as Fraser imagines. Both the cared-for and the carer often feel socially isolated. Depression is common among unpaid family carers. Young carers, of whom there are many, can also find it difficult to continue in education, with devastating consequences for their future. Wrecking state and professional care services by slamming the door shut on immigration can only make matters worse for families with caring responsibilities.
This is a good example of how sentimental-sounding political rhetoric about the "traditional family" can serve as promotion for negligent, even cruel, public policies.
In that election, "The Dec. 2 vote saw the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) lose 14 seats in the regional parliament and the leftist alliance, Adelante Andalucía, drop three." The big winner in terms of improved vote percentages was the far-right Vox party.
Comparing trends in Spain to those in Grmany, he emphasizes that the center-right is losing support. But he is more concerned about the weakening of the center-left, largely due to their embrace of neoliberal austerity policies after the so-called End Of History:
What’s similar [between Spain and Germany] is the anger at the conventional center-right and center-left parties that have enforced a decade of misery on their populations. Center-left parties like the Democratic Party in Italy and the Social Democratic Party in Germany bought into the failed strategy of neo-liberalism that called for austerity, regressive taxes, privatization of public resources, and painful cutbacks in social services as a strategy for getting out of debt. [my emphasis]
And he describes this important move by the PSOE that was unpopular with the PSOE's base:
After ousting [Previous Party General Secretary Pedro] Sanchez, [the more conservative PSOE leader Susana] Diaz allowed the conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy [of the Partido Popular {PP}] to form a government and pass an austerity budget. Making common cause with the PP was apparently too much for the SPOE’s rank and file, and they returned Sanchez to his old post seven months later. The Socialist rank and file also seems to have sat on their hands in the Andalucian election. Only 58.6 percent of the electorate turned out, and there were a considerable number of abstentions and blank ballots in traditionally Socialist strongholds. [my emphasis]
The neoliberal austerity dream of the 1990s turned out to be more of a dystopia for large parts of the public, in Europe and the United States and pretty much everywhere else it was applied. But the wealthies got a lot richer, so there's that.
"Venezuela is Latin America's biggest exporter of crude oil and has the world's largest petroleum reserves." - Brian Ellsworth and Andrew Cawthorne, Venezuela death toll rises to 13 as protests flareReuters 02/24/2014
The Trump Corrolary to the Monroe Doctrine: Why can't we just take the oil?
Pilar Marrero flags this relevant item on Tiwtter:
In Venezuela, Russia pockets key energy assets in exchange for cash bailouts (Putin owns Venezuela´s oil AND Trump, there goes your theory about the US wanting the oil) https://t.co/egLW2c5wy5
I don't interpret this as evidence that the US doesn't "want the oil." There's good reason to believe that Trump turned Venezuela policy over to Mike Pence and the neocons and Trump's not driving it. She may be suggesting that Putin is pressuring Trump to be tough on Venezuela so Russia can get more control of the oil. As weird as it feels to write out the sentence, that's unfortunately not outside the realm of plausibility.
This looks like a good occasion to quote one of my favorite observations from John Kenneth Galbraith (The Age of Uncertainty, 1977), discussing the origins of the First World War:
There was a final consideration, one that it is always thought a trifle pretentious to stress. Rulers in Germany and Eastern Europe, generals in all countries, held their jobs by right of family and tradition. If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement. Nor is its absence likely to be a disqualification. On the contrary, intelligence is a threat to those who do not possess it, and there is a strong case, therefore, for excluding those who do possess it. This was the tendency in 1914. In consequence, both the rulers and the generals in World War I were singularly brainless men.
None was capable of thought on what war would mean for his class - for the social order that was so greatly in his favor. There bad always been wars. Rulers had been obliterated. The ruling classes had always survived. To the extent that there was thought on the social consequences of war, this was what was believed.
That two-paragraph section in the book is titled, "The Stupidity Factor." The role played by factors like arrogant impulsiveness, lack of knowledge, and believing that the way one wants things to be is the way things really are can be decisive factors, even with leaders that actually are intelligent. More recent examples from America include the decision-making on the Vietnam War and the invastion of Iraq in 2003.
It seems pretty obvious that neocon wishful thinking around their grand political schemes and the current President's lack of knowledge and understand of anything beyond self-promotion are playing a major role in the current iteration of Venezuela policy.
But that doesn't exclude either Russian scheming and nor the importance of oil. But "oil" means more in this context than the greed of energy corporations, although that most certainly does exist. Venezuela's oil wealth can give it an important role in influencing international alignments. Venezuela's financial support for Cuba has played an important role in Latin American international politics. So "oil" also means political potentcy for Venezuela which is not always comfortable for Washington.
More broadly, US policy really still does operate under the Monroe Doctrine. Even though it operates in very difference conditions than those in 1817-1825, the actual time of James Monroe's Presidency. That's a larger geopolitical scheme than simply access and control of natural resources in Latin America. In the current Venezuela coup attempt, oil is definitely the driving consideration in US policy. But "oil" has to be understand in its broader Latin American, Monroe Doctrine context.
The US also has a neoliberal ideological agenda more broadly, known variously as the Washington Consensus, IMF/World Bank standard policy, or "free-market" liberalism. There are very material interests supporting it. But ideology itself does become a factor in policymakers' understanding of the world. The Obama Administration's distinctly conservative Monroe Doctrine policy toward Latin America was heavily defined by that consideration.
