DMZ News (Die Mittlländische Zeitung) recently described the political experience of the last 10 years on the politics of xenophobia:
The mistake of wanting to beat right-wing populism with its own weapons will probably never be acknowledged. Why should they, because the textbooks are all written and they show how it works? The more you use these weapons, the more they change you and in the end you don't recognize your opponent anymore because you've become the same.
This spiral cannot be stopped in a society that is so receptive to this primitive construction. The part of the story repeats itself. Only the resulting catastrophes are likely to be different. In the short term, we will see what the new patriarch of the so-called Western world [Trump] will create. In which the heads of government of Europe had to coordinate beforehand how to throw honey at him in the correct dose, so that he would even listen before you tell him something that he does not intend to deal with on his own. (1)
There is ample evidence from the politics of various European countries, including Austria, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy, as well as in the US, that when left and center-left parties try to show they are just as hostile to foreigners as the far-right, it strengthens the far right. Because xenophobia is their most polarizing issue in recent years, and for the left and center parties to accept their framing rather than challenging it directly and calling out the inevitably lies used to justify it winds up enhancing the credibility of the far right.
Britain’s Keir Starmer is busily squandering his Labour Party majority in Parliament by playing that same fool’s game:
"We risk becoming an island of strangers," declared British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on May 12, as he presented his White Paper proposing measures to "take back control of our borders." …
Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, has clearly adopted the rhetoric of the anti-immigration right, which has historically always opposed immigration to the country – whether Russian Jews at the end of the 19th century, refugees fleeing Nazism in the 1930s, immigrants from the British colonies and the Commonwealth after World War II, Ugandans of Indian origin in the 1970s, citizens from European Union countries at the beginning of the 21st century or the people "illegally" crossing the Channel today. The list is endless. So is that of the anti-migrant parties. The most recent of these, Reform UK, stands out as the first to enter the British Parliament. [my emphasis] (2)
Here is a clip of journalists pressing Starmer on the issue back in May: (3)
Owen Jones reams Starmer over this demagoguery on this issue in this commentary from May and stresses how counter-productive and wrong that is for left and left-center parties: (4)
Xenophobia has been the single most effective issue during the last decade and more for far-right parties in Europe who oppose democracy and the rule of law. But to understand the process that leads to authoritarianism with xenophobia holding its hand, it’s important to keep in mind that the far right has not been able to achieve an absolute majority in in any European country with genuinely democratic elections. (Hungary under Viktor Orban’s system does not have genuinely free and competitive elections.)
As the examples of Britain, France, and Italy have all shown – to take three big examples - it has been the adoption of xenophobic and anti-immigration positions by center-right conservative parties that have boosted this trend and has tended to strengthen the far-right parties rather than the center-right parties gaining strength by co-opting nativist sentiments. And in some cases, notably in Germany, the center-left and now event he far left have started embracing this kind of destructive and self-immolating politics.
Here is a September 14 report on the results of the trend in the Netherlands: (1)
Notes:
(1) What’s behind the [Dutch] government's plan, what does it mean for migration? DW News YouTube channel 09/14/2024. <https://youtu.be/irvM7h1vXHs?si=rI_-5q1xylfBWCEZ> (Accessed: 2024-15-09).
There are some basic facts about immigration in the EU that parties of the left, center, and (the pro-democracy) right have to find ways to inject into the conversation. Following are some of the key ones.
The European Union is based on what are called the Four Freedoms: freedom of movement for goods, services, capital, and people. The kind of combined economy the EU has can’t really function with a healthy dose of all four. How the euro currency is constructed and the (in my view) demented “debt brake” that says EU countries can have no more debt than 60% of their GDP are perpetual problems – but those don’t have to do with the free movement of people. (The free movement for people across borders is actually regulated by what is known as the Schengen system that includes non-EU countries like Switzerland. The first Schengen country which a person enters is the one responsible for checking passports.)
The politicians, of course, have to devise their own talking points for dealing with xenophobic demagogy. But talking points have to be combined with practical, reality-based policies. A few bullet-points on this:
• Xenophobia lives on lies and anecdotes: politicians call out the lies and provide a real-world context refuting them.
• Ending the free movement of people among EU countries would basically wreck the EU common market.
• The current EU “Dublin system” by which asylum-seekers are supposed to be processed by the country of entry has long since broken down and has stuck Greece and Italy with large refugee camps than neither handle well. It needs to be replaced by a required systematic cooperation throughout the EU. Bitching about how our country needs to be able to “control its borders” won’t solve any actual problem.
• Anyone who talks about making immigration physically harder and more dangerous in order to stop immigrants from being exploited by smugglers is blowing smoke. The main effect is to make to attempts to enter the EU more expensive and more deadly. The EU borders are already the deadliest in the world. People who are calling for tougher police or military measures to reduce refugee entry are pretty much consciously calling for more deaths and abuse.
• The third-country solutions, like the now-abandoned British scheme to ship all asylum seekers to Rwanda, or the current EU agreement with Tunisia to hold refugees that and process their European asylum claims, are basically scams to let politicians pretend they are doing something to keep the foreigners out. (This is not to say that any and all such third-party outsourcing is bogus. The EU-Türkiye agreement of 2016 was an example of how that can work reasonably well; but even that eventually became more-or-l ess a scam because the EU failed to follow it up with a more permanent solution.)
• Human rights matter, and they are part of the rule of law. And every EU country is responsible for maintaining the rule of law.
• The EU has to have significant immigration. The birth rates in the EU are below the replacement rate. And for the foreseeable future, maintaining European economies will require more workers that current birth rates don’t provide.
• Strong economies are a magnet for immigration. Western members of the EU attract immigrants from eastern ones. Europe attracts immigrants from outside the EU, both highly-skilled and unskilled.
• Immigration is not easy. And absorbing refugees is also a challenge. And, yes, that requires some amount of public investment for the receiving countries.
• All immigrants and refugees are people and some of them will commit crimes. The better integration can function, the less likely it will be that immigrants turn to criminal activity. In the EU and the US, crime rates among immigrants are generally lower than among native citizens.
• And, yes, all that includes adequate support of government programs, including schools and health insurance. They should be managed well by the government. But there will always be somebody who find it satisfying to bitch and moan about “welfare loafers” no matter what.
• “Help on the spot” is a classic politician’s magi-thinking notion when it refers to cutting down external immigration and asylum-seeking by promoting economic development in the countries now producing lots of refugees. (Short-term assistance in particular crisis moment is a different thing.), At best, promoting develop in poorer countries is a decades-long solution, not an immediate one. And, in any case, the most significant form of development aid that stimulates local economies are cash transfers the immigrants in the EU send to their families in both Global South countries and eastern European EU countries.
• “Help on the spot” is a classic politician’s magi-thinking notion when it refers to cutting down external immigration and asylum-seeking by promoting economic development in the countries now producing lots of refugees. (Short-term assistance in particular crisis moment is a different thing.), At best, promoting develop in poorer countries is a decades-long solution, not an immediate one. And, in any case, the most significant form of development aid that stimulates local economies are cash transfers the immigrants in the EU send to their families in both Global South countries and eastern European EU countries.
• Finally, “open borders” is basically a bogeyman slogan, because no significant political trend actually advocates it. Within the EU, open borders within the Union is an essential part of the construction of the EU, as noted above.
The European Parliament elections take place June 6-9. These elections are EU-wide. Voters elect members for the Parliament, and these elections are separate from national elections for national parliaments.
A lot of the press focus has been on the prospects for the far-right parties, which have been performing strongly in the polls. Similar to national parliaments, various parties in the EU Parliament group together in partisan caucuses the way individual parties typically form coherent factions in national parliaments.
The conservative bloc is known as the European People’s Party (EPP), which includes the longtime center-right parties like the Christian Democrats in Germany and Austria. Politico reports on the current polling results, which indicate that the far right could get a bigger number of seats than the EPP. But the far-right groups don’t have a single umbrella EU-wide party grouping:
According to a POLITICO Poll of Polls projection of the incoming legislature, the EPP would win 170 seats if the election were held now.
The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID) — the two main right-wing groupings — are on course for a total of 144 seats.
There are also other parties in the mix, such as Alternative for Germany, which is projected to win 16 seats, and Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, which is in line for 10. France’s Reconquest is polling at five seats, Poland’s Konfederacja at six and Bulgaria’s pro-Kremlin Revival party at three.
That takes the projection of far-right MEPs to 184. (1)
So, this seems like a good time to look at liberal-democracy-vs.-authoritarianism in the EU.
The nativist/ethnonationalist position
Xenophobia has been a favorite issue for the radical right for decades. The so-called refugee “crisis” of 2015-6 sharpened their focus on this pitch even more. Since many of the refugees to the EU come from Muslim countries, the anti-refugee sentiment is closely connected with Islamophobia, a topic which French parties (and not just the far right) have promoted for a long time, going back particularly to the Algerian War and its aftermath.
From Deutsche Welle: (2)
I refer to the 2015-16 events as a “crisis” in quotation marks because that freak-out occurred when a year-long surge of refugees from various conflicts (Syria, Afghanistan, Libya) brought around 1.1 million of them to EU countries. In the year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, around five million Ukrainian refugees came to the UN. It required effort on the part of governments to accommodate it. There was some xenophobic grumbling over the Ukrainians, but nothing on the scale of 2015-16.
So, if the EU in 2022 could handle five times as many refugees without a freakout or a breakdown in government services or massive homeless encampments in major cities, then what made 2015-16 a “crisis” was not the number of refugees. Give the EU credit: Part of the reason the Ukrainian refugees weren’t so controversial is that the EU had set up different policy arrangements for them. At the time of the Russian invasion in 2022, the EU had a policy in place that Ukrainians could travel to the EU for up to three months without a visa. So, Ukrainians were not instantly “illegal immigrants” from the moment they crossed the border without a visa. The EU also quickly made rules allowing Ukrainians to stay for what is now a three-year period from the 2022 invasion (i.e., until 2025) without having to go through the standard asylum process.
In other words, the EU formally and practically recognized they were facing a surge of refugees and made some sensible and generally humane provisions for the real situations.
The UN’s Ukraine Refugee Situation website (3) provides regularly updated statistics for Ukrainian refugees. The count is based on border crossing to and from Ukraine, so the current number of refugees has to be estimated from the net of those two numbers. There are a large number of crossings between Ukraine and neighboring Poland in particular, so the 20 million border crossing to Poland do not mean there are 20 million Ukrainian refugees currently in Poland. Poland easily has the largest number of Ukrainian refugees of any EU country. So it’s very notable that in the national Polish parliamentary elections last October, the authoritarian-leaning Law and Justice Party (PiS) lost control to a much more centrist government that is committed to preserving democracy and the rule of law – despite the heavy Ukrainian refugee burden that Poland is carrying.
The (ugly) Tunisia-plan farce
Unfortunately for the parties that present themselves as committed to democracy and the rule of law across the EU, the centrist parties really have been so compromised by their commitment to the neoliberal notion of technocratic governance that doesn’t challenge the “free-market” concepts favoring a continuing concentration of wealth and power at the top of the wealth and income pyramid that – not unlike the Democrats in the United States – they are often way too hesitant to fight for (what should be!) their own side.
To a large extent, the center-right and center-left parties have tried to adopt a me-too position aping the right’s anti-immigration agitation. We’ve seen the Democrats in the US do something similar with the Obama Administration and (far more so) with the Biden Administration. Instead of confronting xenophobic demagoguery head-on, which is the only approach that really works to discredit the rightwing versions, the centrist parties all too often take the position, “look, we hate immigrants and refugees, too, we’re just not quite so crass about it.”
Again, the experience with Ukrainian refugees over the last two years shows how a practical approach with real leadership supporting it can produce a different and far more decent result than what happens when the center parties pander to the xenophobes. Sadly, even some political figures like Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany that are very much identified with the left also adopt anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric, which surely should make people question how much “left” is left in those factions.
The EU came up with a plan this year that involves an agreement with the government of Tunesia to hold refugees there to apply for asylum in the EU without actually entering the EU. This plan is such a bad joke (and an ugly one) that politicians in experts in immigration practically roll their eyes at it. Amnesty International reported in mid-May:
Over the past two weeks, the Tunisian government has launched an unprecedented repressive clampdown against migrants, refugees, and human rights defenders working to protect their rights, as well as journalists, said Amnesty International today. This comes less than two weeks after a high-level coordination meeting with the Italian Ministry of Interior about migration management. [my emphasis] (5)
The current Italian government is headed by Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who is head of the far-right Brothers of Italy (FdI) party. She has also been working on setting up a dump-the-refugees-on-Albania-project. (6)
Britain’s Tory-sponsored Uganda plan is an uglier and arguably even more crackpot version of the EU-Tunesia plan. Britain’s plan involves sending asylum-seeker who arrive in Britain to Uganda to apply for asylum there – asylum in Uganda, not in Britain. (6) And those refugees deported to Uganda would be legally banned from ever returning to Britain. Britain is no longer and EU member so they are directly bound by EU rules as such. But they do recognize the jurisdiction of the European Court, which they are also blatantly defying with this scheme that throws the international-law regime for refugees established after the Second World War out the window.
The message that far-right and far too many centrist politicians are trying to send with these plans is: refugees are not our problem; we want to keep them out; and we want to dump them on countries outside the EU; and, we know that this means their rights are being disrespected and than many of them are being badly abused so, look, voters: we’re injuring and killing refugees just like xenophobes want us to do!
Centrist parties supporting such approaches can succeed in harming and killing actual refugees – the Mediterranean Sea is currently considered the deadliest border in the world because of the number of refugees drowning at sea. Sometimes with the active support of EU countries like Italy and Greece. So far, this brand of centrism is mainly succeeding in encouraging and spreading such brutal policies. What it is not doing is promoting the rule of law in the “rules-based-international-order,” as American liberals like to call it.
Democracy is hard
No one should assume that massive immigration and the handling of refugees is easy. It’s not. But there are policies that work well and treat refugees decently and in line with international law and that work to the benefit of both the home countries and themselves. The EU handling of Ukrainian refugees since February 2022 is one example that is working decently so far without either enflaming xenophobia or brutalizing refugees. With centrist parties pandering to far-right xenophobes, though, that could change at any time.
The international cooperation on the mass Vietnamese refugee crisis (the “boat people”) after 1975, which became especially acute in 1978-79, stands as a constructive example of what can be done when countries are willing to use good sense and to recognize the requirements of international law. (7)
Xenophobia and Islamophobia and the ethnonationalism of which they are a part strengthens only the right in the end. The current twist on the far right’s hostility to the whole idea of the European Union is to promote a Europa of “homelands,” i.e., one in which ethnic and national identities are primary instead of democracy and the rule of law.
The left, the center-left and the center-right can’t out-bigot the radical right when it comes to ethnonationalism. They have to fight it by confronting it for what it is. That is, if they are serious about saving liberal democracy from “autocracy” or rightwing authoritarianism.
Markus Linden recently wrote:
From the disparagement of democratically elected politicians all the way to massive threats and physical attacks during the European election campaign: the republic [Germany] in these days is experiencing attacks on democracy on a scale that has never been seen on such a wide scale in its 75-year history. In any case, the recent demonstrations against right-wing extremism testified to immense concern among the population. The open manifestation of these real majorities is to be welcomed, because it is obvious that in Germany in particular there must be a consistent reaction to anti-democratic-völkisch thinking – especially when it takes more and more positions of power regionally, builds alliances with parts of [the larger] society and thus insidiously normalizes itself. (8)
It’s also worth remembering that in Germany’s most infamous descent into dictatorship, it wasn’t the Nazi Party that gained a majority and ceased power. It was an alliance with the conservatives, above all Reichspresident Paul von Hindenburg – who was the winning candidate for President in the election of 1932 against Hitler – that willingly brought Hitler into the Chancellorship of the Weimar Republic in early 1933.
(2) How campaigning EU parties keep migration on the agenda ahead of election. DW News 05/27/2024. <https://youtu.be/50GV9amfB9s?si=FUNoxGrGxR-K4z4A> (Accessed: 2024-30-2024). Note that “migration” is often used as a synonym for “refugees” or “asylum-seeking.” Xenophobes prefer to use the term to imply that people are just deciding for the heck of it to take dangerous and expensive trips to get into Europe, i.e., “migrating” not “fleeing.”
This story is about an incident of young people getting rowdy on New Year's Eve in a heavily-immigrant neighborhood in Vienna, shooting fireworks illegally, and committing some vandalism against property: (Großeinsatz in Wien: Mob beschoss Polizisten mit Pyro-GegenständenStandard 02.01.2020)
Standard reports on nine people that could be charged with something, i.e., they were "temporarily detained" (vorläufig festgenommen, provisionally detained). According to this report, only one of the nine persons was arrested, and that for a an act of attempted vandalism, i.e., allegedly trying but failing to break a window at a jewelry store. (See also: Pyrotechnik gegen Polizei in Favoriten ORF 01.01.2021)
Meanwhile, in Linz, the capital of Austria's third-most-populous state Upper Austria, on the following day, a crowd of around 1,000 gathered in the town square in a closely packed crowd to protest against anti-COVID-19 regulations. (Corona-Demo füllte am Freitag den HauptplatzOberösterreichische Nachrichten 02.01.2021.
One of these incidents provoked Austria's Interior Minister Karl Nehammer of the Christian-Democratic People's Party (ÖVP) to start the new year by posting this on New Year's Day on Facebook:
The sentence on the photo says, "For criminal acts like those in Favoriten, we have absolutely no tolerance."
The text of the post says, "Those who cannot identify with our social values and try to disrupt them must expect all legal consequences. The crimes committed on New Year's Eve at Reumannplatz are a sign of a deep anti-democratic and un-solidarish attitude that has does not belong in our country." (my emphasis)
Did I mention they made one arrest? For attempted vandalism?
The even more blatant rightwingers - Nehammer is a pretty unpleasant piece of work himself - quickly picked up the hint about not belonging in the country. Norbert Hofer, currently head of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) that was a national coalition partner for the ÖVP 2017-2019, immediately demanded that the firecracker criminals be expelled from the country. (FPÖ-Chef Hofer will Böller-Chaoten abschiebenHeute 01.01.2021)
Oh, and he wants their families expelled as well. He posted this on his Facebook page on New Year's Day, the caption on the photo reading, "The foreigners involved in the riots in Vienna-Favoriten must be deported along with their families."
Happy New Year, all you foreigners living in Austria!
Oh, did I mention they made one arrest? For attempted vandalism?
Standard is an excellent newspaper. But close reading is always a good idea. The story says what I summarized in the first two paragraphs here. But the headline is, "Big police action in Vienna: Mob shot at police with fireworks." And the first paragraph of the story reads:
In der sonst recht ruhigen Silvesternacht ging es in Wien-Favoriten wild zu: Nachdem es zu etlichen Sachbeschädigungen durch pyrotechnische Gegenstände in der Gegend um den Reumannplatz gekommen war, rückte die Polizei zu einem Großeinsatz aus. Der Mob beschoss Beamte mit Raketen bzw. Böllern, es kam zu zahlreichen vorübergehenden Festnahmen. Zahlreiche "Allahu Akbar"-Rufe sollen zu hören gewesen sein.
[In the otherwise rather quiet New Year's Eve, Vienna’s Favoriten neighborhood things were wild: After numerous instances of damage to property caused from pyrotechnic articles [aka, fireworks] in the area around Reumannplatz, the police moved out in a large-scale operation. The mob fired rockets or firecrackers at officials, and there were numerous temporary arrests. Numerous "Allahu Akbar" [“God is great” in Arabic] calls are said to have been heard.]
The following paragraph makes it sound even more dramatic:
Wie die APA erfuhr, wurden auch brennende Gegenstände in Richtung der Polizisten geschleudert. Die pyrotechnischen Gegenstände, die auch gegen die Beamten eingesetzt wurden, sollen die doppelte Sprengkraft einer scharfen Handgranate gehabt haben. Auch ein eintreffender Funkwagen wurde mit Pyrotechnik unter Beschuss genommen, ein Christbaum wurde mit brennbarer Flüssigkeit übergossen.
[As the APA learned, burning objects were also thrown in the direction of the policemen. The pyrotechnic articles, which were also used against the officers, are said to have had twice the explosive power of a sharp hand grenade. An incoming radio car was also bombarded with pyrotechnics, and a flammable liquid was poured on a Christmas tree.]
Standard attributes the worse-than-a-hand-grenade information to the Austrian Press Agency (APA), which is also a legitimate news wire service. But here "as the APA learned" seems to actually mean "somebody from the police told us this".
Because, seriously? An Islamic "mob" attacked cops with an explosives device twice as powerful as a hand grenade? And they made one arrest ... for attempted vandalism? To use one of Joe Biden's signature phrases, "Come on, man!" As in, "Who do you expect to believe that?" And if you read the APA claim closely, it appears to be some kind of estimate of the collective explosive power of the, uh, firecrackers that were shot off somewhere in the vicinity of the police.
I suppose here I should say the obvious, which is that tossing firecrackers at cop cars is not really a smart thing to do. Even in Vienna, where the cops are not known to be as trigger-happy as in a typical American city. But, good grief! Shooting off unauthorized fireworks on New Year's Eve isn't exactly something the Vienna police have never seen before, even if the risks of crowds gathering for such a thing even outdoors is somewhat higher than in other years.
But the Vienna-Favoriten incident resulted in one arrest? For attempted vandalism.
The COVID superspreader event in downtown Linz, however, did not promote any such immediate outcry. But we know from ten months of experience that such gatherings will spread the virus and that some people will get sick as a result, and some may well die. In Upper Austria, intensive care beds are already currently in short supply.
But the COVID spreaders in Linz were presumably mostly good, white Austrians without what is known as a "migratory background," which formally means people who themselves of their parents came from another country besides Austria. And there were apparently no arrests for attempted vandalism.
So the authoritarian politicians in Austria aren't calling for those people who are irresponsibly and knowingly spreading a deadly virus to be expelled along with their whole families.
The fact that the US is confronted with the kind of serious problems that Bacevich describes does not mean that the country will deal with them in a constructive way. His own description of the nature of Trump’s electoral coalition illustrates that.
The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”
This book is reminiscent in some ways of one that appeared at the beginning of Bacevich’s Emerald City period, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Culture of Contentment (1992). He identified some of the large challenges and dangers for American democracy that he saw then. Including the central role that the fear of international Communism had played in the maintenance of the US’ massive military establishment:
The fear of Communism was also responsible for three major developments in the military power as that existed in the political economy of contentment. The first, supplementing and extending what was an already large expenditure, was a further enormous increase in military and defense spending as the constituency of contentment gained full power in the 1980s; this was the Reagan arms buildup. The second was the emergence of a largely autonomous military establishment standing above and apart from democratic control. The third was a series of foreign ventures designed ostensibly to arrest the threatening spread of Communism but with the further purpose of justifying the expanding role of the military establishment by providing a presumed enemy. [my emphasis]
As Bacevich himself has long been explaining, the internal political imperatives connected to the military-industrial complex create strong incentives for an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. And if one enemy (the “Communist bloc”) goes away, there is not just vague psychological incentives but very material lobbies with ample funding that will be eager to create a new one. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has recently come under scrutiny for its years-long advocacy for war against Iran. (James Carden, “Will This Billionaire-Funded Think Tank Get Its War With Iran?The Nation 01/08/2020; Nick Wadhams, U.S. Official Central to Hawkish Iran Policies Departs NSCBloomberg Politics 01/04/2020; John Judis, The Little Think Tank That CouldSlate 08/10/2015)
Galbraith concluded his book on an explicit note of “sadness”:
Books of this genre are expected to have a happy ending. With awareness of what is wrong, the corrective forces of democracy are set in motion. And perhaps they would be now were they in a full democracy - one that embraced the interests and votes of all the citizens. Those now outside the contented majority would rally, or, more precisely, could be rallied, to their own interest and therewith to the larger and safer public interest. Alas, however, we speak here of a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong, the best insulation through short-run comfort from what could go wrong.
A key point of Galbraith’s notion of the contented majority is the low voter participation in the US. The 2018 midterm election produced a striking increase in voter participation which produced a distinct shift to the Democrats and away from Trumpism. As Galbraith emphasized, the wealthy and more affluent Americans have high voting participation rates, while the participation rate of the less affluent is distinctly lower. That means the portion of the electorate that votes is considerably financially better off, whiter, older, and more conservative than the American people, the potential electorate. The Republicans are acutely aware of this fact and want to preserve that condition. Thus, they have aggressively pursued segregationist voter-suppression measures against black and Latino voters, measures that also often affect poor whites, as well.
This is one of the fundamental challenges for actually fixing the serious problems that Bacevich describes. Another is the extreme effect of private money in political campaigns, already a serious problem in 1992, far more extreme now in the Citizens United era. Those are both serious limitations on American democracy.
And with the vast increase of Executive power that Bacevich identifies as one of the four basic markers of the Emerald City era, the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College system has become a bigger problem than ever now that, as he says, the Presidency is “overshadowing every other aspect of American politics.”
Moving away from neoliberal globalism is as necessary as it is difficult. This in itself requires not only confronting oligarchical power, but reducing it. And that inevitably involves not just limiting but reversing the current staggering concentrations of wealth and income. Rightwing populism will not fix those problems. But far-right populists like Steve Bannon do mobilize around those issues. The model “illiberal democracy” in the European Union right now is Viktor Orbáns Hungary that combines oligarchic rule with a certain level of social support for the less affluent with xenophobic nationalism and unaccountable oligarchic rule. In the United States, the progressive left offers a meaningful counter-appeal to that particular anti-neoliberal perspective. The corporate Democrats embrace corporate-deregulation neoliberalism. Any successful movement to build constructive political alternatives to neoliberal globalism will also have to be backed by a much-expanded labor union movement.
Moving away from militarized global dominance by the US will require a political movement that demands drastic changes in the current interventionist foreign policy, most obviously an end to the Forever War approach currently being pursued by Republican and Democratic administrations, including Trump’s. It will also require a major reduction in the US military budget and a major de-mystifying of the military in American political culture. As Bacevich points out in this book and elsewhere, the current idolatry of the military coincides with an unprecedented isolation of those actually bearing the burden of military service from the large majority of the American people. This situation needs to be countered either by military proscription (the draft) or by providing other concrete incentives to make military service more attractive to “middle class” families. But only a draft is likely to ensure that people like Trumps and Bushes would share even remotely equally in military service.
It’s less clear how the situation Bacevich problematizes as “freedom, empowerment, and choice became all but interchangeable terms” can be resolved in any short term. White racism is real, it’s damaging, and it’s wrong. It’s been an effective mobilizing tool for conservative and reactionary politics for the entire history of the Republic. Bacevich notes how not only did Obama’s election did not end racism against African-Americans, it was met by a militant racist counter-display. And gruesome elements of white racism like the often wanton murder of unarmed black men by white cops and the grossly disproportionate effect of law like prohibiting marijuana usage have had on African-American men.
Women’s rights have not yet been fully realized and the political assault on the core right to abortion – a right that is distinctly a woman’s right – is intense. Antiabortionists have gone a long way in many parts of the country to seriously restrict women’s access to abortion.
And as we’ve seen during the Trump Administration particularly, many Republicans are willing to literally howl in approval at Trump’s Nuremberg rallies for hostility to Latinos and immigrants, including the sadistic kidnapping of children from their parents and caging them in brutal and even life-threatening conditions.
And this is where a general appeal that “the proximate aim should not be to obscure differences but to sharpen them further and thereby give them meaning” misses a critical element of the current situation. In the “cultural wars”, the current polarization is asymmetrical. Black people aren’t demanding that unarmed, young white men be murdered by rogue cops proportional to how young black men are murdered. Democrats may be overly fond of partisan gerrymandering, but they aren’t aggressively purging white voters from voter rolls. Women’s rights advocates aren’t demanding that women who don’t won’t abortions have abortions forced on them. Latinos aren’t demanding that native-born white children be kidnapped from their parents, caged, and occasionally allowed to die on the concrete floors of their cages. And there are no Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden rallies where angry mobs howl for such things.
Bacevich notes, not entirely inaccurately that Hillary Clinton in 2016 “conveyed a distinct cluelessness, as illustrated by her infamous dismissal of Trump's supporters as ‘deplorables’.” But the truth is that people who enjoy the thought of immigrant children being kidnapped from their parents are deplorable. People who chant “blue lives matter” as approval of extralegal murders of unarmed black people are deplorable. Christian fundamentalists who want to not only ban abortion but also jail or execute abortion doctors and women who do get abortions – or even jail women who have miscarriages! – they are deplorable. And for a non-trivial number of those taking such positions, their prejudices and hatreds are generally more important to them than even the economic well-being of themselves or their children. White nationalist identity politics provides some real psychological rewards. And people who are strongly authoritarian are always going to be attracted to characters like Trump who they can image as a Stern Heroic Leader.
The point here is not that people firmly attached to such positions are incorrigible for life on such matters. Some of them are. Others are actually capable of having a real dialogue and altering their viewpoints and viewing their own experience in a more complex way. For the hardcores, as David Neiwert writes in his book Alt-America (2017), “There’s really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump. The only thing they understand, in the end, is brute political force: being thrashed at the ballot box, and in the public discourse.”
In other words, white racism, sexism, and xenophobia have to be challenged and defeated for democracy and social equality to flourish. And in the current situation of asymmetric polarization, no mutual live-and-let-live attitude between white racists and minorities, between fanatical antiabortionists and women, between rabid xenophobes and decent people. Which means that anti-discrimination laws and regulations as well as special protections for electoral rights will be absolute necessary for the foreseeable future. Asymmetric polarization is real, and it can’t be ignored or wished away.
In yesterday's "Heritage" post, I mentioned the James Whitman book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). which talks about the ways that the Hitler regime looked to American examples for ways to craft racist laws.
Omer Aziz reviews Whitman's book in America Through Nazi EyesDissent Winter 2019, which provides some useful perspective on that historical phenomenon.
Before getting more into Aziz' essay, I want to emphasize that this historical influence shouldn't be seen as some particularly perverse case of American Exceptionalism, in which other countries were just following the bad example set by the United States. Europe and Germany had their own histories of white racism and anti-Semitism long before Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, long before Jonestown and the Puritans landing in Massachusetts.
The Studies in Prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee in the 1940s is best known for the publication The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodore Adorno and others. Another volume in that series is Rehearsal For Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (1949). I did a series of five posts about Massing's book, starting with Political anti-Semitism in Germany, 1871-1914 (1 of 5): politics in the Kaiserreich 06/27/2011. As I noted in that series, organized anti-Semitism as it manifested itself in Imperial German politics in the second half of the 19th century up to 1895 revolve around two movements: the Berlin Movement led by Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909) and the pseudo-scientific racial agitation, led by characters like Hermann Ahlwardt (1846-1914), Otto Böckel (1859-1923), Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), Ernst Henrici (1854-1915), Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911). Eugen Dühring (1833-1921), who is mainly remembered today as the target of fierce polemics by Nietzsche and Engels, was also a significant promoter of racial anti-Semitism.
Despite the limits of specifically racial anti-Semitic politics during that period, the advocacy of racial anti-Semitism promoted a prejudice that later and more successful advocates of peusdoscientific racial anti-Semitism would effectively exploit. Nazi anti-Semitism in the 20th century was notably influenced by ideologues like the Brit Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Hitler himself was heavily influence by the toxic brand of anti-Semitism he sought out during his youthful years in Vienna, which included the political example of longtime mayor Karl Lueger (1844-1910), as well as fringy crackpots like former monk Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) and Guido von List (1848-1919).
George Masse extensively documented the evolution of Nazi ideology in books like Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1978).
The American examples of racist legislation and attitudes were processed by the Nazis through a particular European and German viewpoint heavily influenced by extreme German nationalism, pseudoscientific racism, and the rightwing cultural-political völkisch movement.
But there was plenty for them to find useful in the legal structures of white racism in the US. Aziz writes that in June 1934:
Nazi lawyers, jurists, and medical doctors gathered under the auspices of Justice Minister Franz Gürtner to discuss how to codify the Prussian Memorandum [of 1933 on Nazifying the German legal code]. The very first item discussed was U.S. law: “Almost all the American states have race legislation,” Gürtner averred, before detailing a myriad of examples, includingthe many states that criminalized mixed marriages. Roland Freisler, the murderous Nazi judge, stated at the meeting that U.S. jurisprudence would “suit us perfectly.” All the participants displayed either an eager interest in, or an avowed knowledge of, U.S. law. This went beyond specific legislation. The Nazis looked to an innovative legal culture that found ways to relegate Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and others to second- and third-class status; the many devious pathways around the constitutional guarantees of equal protection; the deliberate textual ambiguity on the definition of race itself; the draconian penalties for sexually consorting with a lesser race, or even meeting publicly. The United States in the 1930s was the apogee of a racist state. [my emphasis]
This is also a sobering reminder:
From a contemporary U.S. perspective, however, the most interesting area of influence that Whitman explores is in immigration law. From the outset, the United States had a racially restricted immigration regime. The Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the First Congress, limited immigration to “free white person[s].” In the 1800s, the United States passed more racially exclusionary immigration laws because of the perceived threat of Asians. As Whitman notes, the Nazis “almost never mentioned the American treatment of blacks without also mentioning the American treatment of other groups, in particular Asians and Native-Americans.” The Chinese were excluded from citizenship in the late 1800s, and the Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917 expressly banned immigration from a whole swath of Asia. Finally, the Immigration Act of 1924 set racial quotas for those who could enter the United States, and banned Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians outright, along with nearly all Arabs. Under the Cable Act of 1922, if a woman married an Asian man, her U.S. citizenship would be revoked. [my emphasis]
I'm cautious about casual optimism about American democracy. Because taking democracy too casually inevitably weakens democratic institutions. But I like the way Aziz frames the dynamic contradictory ideas and practices that have always been part of the American experience:
The United States is a nation with two radically different ideas at its heart: white supremacy and equality under the law. A nation that currently has more immigrants than any country in the world but is undergoing traumatic convulsions at the very mention of immigrants. A nation with a pessimistic mind and an optimistic soul, founded and codified by white men, whose geographic expansion was made possible by the violent clearing out of the original inhabitants, whose economic growth was purchased through slavery, but also a land where millions of immigrants have come in search of work and opportunity. The question of who counts in the “we” and who belongs to the “them” is being argued and fought every day, from the courtroom to the classroom to the streets. It is a conversation that has been taking place since the founding of the United States, and one that was taking place in Germany when the Nazi cabal seized the state. How this nation answers that question will determine which of the two American ideas lives on. [my emphasis]
And he also describes the broad sweep of American history in a way that is both realistic and informative when it comes to what has been called a "usuable past":
It is not white supremacy that differentiates America from Nazi Germany, but rather the constitutional architecture of this country - a democratic system tested, broken, remade, rewritten. Racism in the United States is counterbalanced by an emancipatory spirit. The Constitution enshrined slavery, but this same Constitution was transformed as a result of the bloodiest war in U.S. history, which ended the Southern slave empire. The Civil War was a second American founding, and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments advanced the American spirit of equality before the law. Even amid the racist terror that lasted long after the Civil War, African Americans made room in the United States to fight for their freedom, equality, and dignity. Nazi Germany, by contrast, was a totalitarian state, and its express objective was the erasure of the Jewish people. These differences cannot be minimized. [my emphasis]
Yes, Bipartisanship is what we need! Why hasn't anyone thought of that before?
In the Van Jones clip, Gabbard also goes Bipartisan by repeating one of the favorite lines of the radical xenophobic right: "Unless we have a secure border, we don't really have a country."
Newsweek International has a current cover story about Austria's baby-faced Chancellor Sebastian Kurz that's such a puff piece that it could have come from one of Kurz' PR flacks:
Elizabeth Schumacher, Sebastian Kurz is Remaking Europe's Future From its Darkest PastNewsweek International 10/17/2018.
No, it's not "fake news" or "Lügenpresse". It's just good, old-fashioned sloppy and/or lazy reporting. The fact that the headline doesn't make sense is the least of its problems.
Kurz is the Chancellor of a parliamentary coalition government that's been in office for a year. His party is the Christian Democratic classically conservative party ÖVP. The junior partner is the far-right populist party FPÖ, headed by Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache. If there has been any major differences between the two governing parties the last year, it hasn't been readily apparent.
This article gets one thing right: KurzStrache have emphasized their hostility to immigrants What you can't tell from the article is that their anti-immigration policy is mainly fear-mongering, fantasy solutions, publicity stunts, and gratutious measures to punish refugees for existing.
One example: KurzStrache and their fans like to complain that immigrants aren't learning German quickly enough. So they cut funding for German classes for immigrants. That's how they roll. And if they have made new provisions for handling a high influx of regugees like in 2015, they are keeping that well concealed, too.
The article doesn't even mention two of the most dramatic incidents of the last year. There is a current parlimentary investigation into what known as the BVT affair. The BVT is Austria's internal security agency charged with thwarting terrorist plots and the like. KurzStrache's far-right Interior Minister's department staged a highly irregular raid in which they used a Vienna city police unit controlled by Strache's FPÖ (!!!) and took a large number of documents relating to security investigations. The Washington Post has reported that several other European intelligence agencies have significantly reduced their cooperation with the BVT because they don't trust them to keep sources and methods secret. The likely though unadmitted reason for the raid was to find out which people close to the FPÖ were being investigated and who was provided the BVT the information.
The other was the amazing show KurzStrache staged for Vladimir Putin. Strache's FPÖ entered into a formal, publicly acknowledged cooperation agreement with Putin's United Russia party in 2016. The Foreign Minister invited Putin to her wedding, along with Kurz and Strache, of course. Austria press was not allowed there, but Putin's state channel RT was. RT filmed a dance of the Foreign Minister with Putin, after which she literally bowed down on her knee before him. Kurz is well-known for his obsession with Message Control. No way that Kurz and Strache didn't stage this exactly the way they and their friend Vlad wanted it. Putin dances, speaks German at Austrian FM’s weddingRT 08/18/2018:
This is a surprise to see: "For the first time in 100 years, since the end of the Habsburg Empire — when Austria ruled much of Europe for close to 500 years - the country finds itself in a position of power." Austria's power consists of direct diplomatic influence in the Balkans and traditional business and financial ties in both western and eastern Europe. The reporter seems to be basing that on Kurz' current role of President of the EU's European Council. But that's a rotating six-month role that is more a diplomatic ritual than any real authority. That role can be used to help set the EU's political agenda. But KurzStrache has mainly used it to promote their own anti-immigration PR show. They did produce some empty discussions about fantasy pseudo-solutions like asylum centers in North Africa (ain't gonna happen).
To the extent the KurzStrache economic policies are being felt, they are along Herbert Hooverish lines: lower wages, more job insecurity, weaker unions, cuts in public services to ordinary people, etc.
