Political Cynic takes the measure of Mises/Hayek/Friedman’s successor?
I’ve been a reader of The Economist from the early 1990’s and on and off since then. The stogey old white men, represented by those once stalwarts Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, Oxbridgers both, and their best sellers like The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America compendiums of their various essay subjected to studious re-writes. When the comments section was closed, that was marked my canceling of my subscription, though I later returned. Beddoes was not a member of that club, so that high-flown rhetoric must patiently wait for paragraphs like these? In this essay Amazon is the arbiter of Popular Taste, with Mr Seabright’s off and on appearances, aided by some ‘Big Names’. This is propaganda!
God gets mixed reviews on Amazon. This is perhaps surprising. His marketing campaign (now in its third millennium) has been strong. His slogans (“God is Great!”) are positive. And indeed many shoppers effuse. “Wonderful!” reads one five-star review beneath His best-known work, the Bible. “Beautiful,” says another. “Amen,” adds another satisfied customer.
Other reviewers are critical. One, after giving the Bible just a single star, observes bluntly, if rather blasphemously, that it is a “boring read”. Another review complains: “the plot is not cohesive”. A third disgruntled reader argues that there are “Too many characters” and that the main protagonist is a bit full of himself.
The patient reader need just wait as Mr Seabright describes himself:
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My research lies in the areas of microeonomic theory, industrial and competition policy, intellectual property and the digital society, development economics, economics and human evolution, the economics of gender, the economics of religion. A common theme to these apparently chaotically diverse topics is the foundations of human cooperation and social trust: I examine the way in which our prehistorically evolved psychology interacts with modern institutions to make social cooperation possible.
The Reader might just wonder, indeed ponder the reach of ‘Economic Science’, in the thought of Mr Seabright! He seems to bypass the Neo-Liberal Chatter of that Toxic Trio of Mises/Hayek/Friedman!
The Reader might wonder at what Economist might offer the The Believer, The Atheist , and or the completely disinterested?
If it feels surprising that God is reviewed on Amazon, it should not. God may have made heaven and earth, but he also makes an awful lot of money, as Paul Seabright, a British economist and professor at the University of Toulouse in France, points out in a new book.
The utter boredom of God Talk: The Economist.
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Secularists may smirk at religion as silly, but it deserves proper analysis. “The Divine Economy” looks at how religions attract followers, money and power and argues that they are businesses—and should be analysed as such. Professor Seabright calls religions “platforms”, businesses that “facilitate relationships”. (Other economists refer to religions as “clubs” or “glue”.) He then takes a quick canter through the history, sociology and economics of religions to illustrate this. The best parts of this book deal with economics, which the general reader will find enlightening.
Economists were slow to study religion. Some 250 years ago Adam Smith observed in “The Wealth of Nations” that the wealth of churches was considerable.He used secular language to describe how such wealth arose, observing that churches’ “revenue” (donations) flowed in and benefited priests, who he argued were sometimes animated less by love of God than by “the powerful motive of self-interest”. He also argued that if there were a better functioning market in religious providers, this would lead to increased religious harmony. According to Laurence Iannaccone, a professor of economics at Chapman University in California, Smith’s analysis was “brilliant”—and for a long time largely ignored.
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The Religious Hucksters, what ever their guise, trade in Sacred Texts like the Bible, the Koran, The Talmud. Mr. Sebright uses Economics as the ‘Key’ . It’s like the etiolated Neo-Liberal Trinity of Hayek/Mises/Friedman in a new key! Economics is the central driver in human existence: The Wisdom of the Market is the singular imperative of human striving?
Some selective quotation: The Economist: Two descriptors apply: ‘Potted History’ or ‘History Made To Measure’!
Divinity departments are staffed by theologians rather than economists; the idea of mixing the dismal science with the divine strikes many people at the very least “as odd and at worst strikes them as blasphemous”, says Mr Iannaccone. People associate God with angels, not with Excel.
Yet religions lend themselves to economic analysis nicely. They offer a product (such as salvation); have networks of providers (priests, imams and so on) and benefit from good distribution networks. It is not just trade that travels on trade routes: ideas, diseases and religions do, too. Roman roads allowed the plague of Justinian to spread across Europe with a rapidity never seen before. They also allowed Christianity to.
Starting in the 1970s, some economists have been approaching religion with more academic devotion, analysing, for example, the economics of extremism and obtaining a place in the afterlife. This mode of thinking can help to clarify complicated religious history. When historians talk about the Reformation they tend to do so using thorny theological terms such as “transubstantiation”. Economists would describe it more simply as the moment when a monopoly provider (the Catholic church) was broken up, leading to an increase in consumer choice (Protestantism) and the price of services declining (indulgences were out).
A greater variety of suppliers started to offer road-maps to heaven. Henry VIII swapped his old service provider, Catholicism, for the new one—which was not only cheaper, but also allowed him to divorce a troublesome wife. There were, admittedly, some bumps: the pope was not pleased, and the habit of burning picky customers at the stake dented consumer confidence. But overall, the Reformation enabled people and their rulers to “get a better bargain”, says Davide Cantoni, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Seabright returns briefly, then some Brand Names, Nations, then it becomes a muddle of Economist chatter!
(Christianity and Islam), Walmart, Lidl and Tesco, the Catholic church, like McDonald’s, Vatican or Venezuela, Baal , the Bible, Tom Lehrer, Catholics, The Vatican Rag, “The Divine Economy”, ‘ a rational Bayesian framework, God, as Friedrich Nietzsche stated, Jordan Peterson, a Canadian academic.
The final salvo: The Economist
God might wish he were dead when He hears such things. He is not.
( Call this the profession of Faith of ‘The Economist’?)
Hear is a revelatory report from Le Monde on the 2022 election in France, and a comparison with 2017!
Headline: French election results if abstentions, blank and invalid votes were included
Sub-headline: Counting the 2.2 million blank or invalid ballots as well as the 13.6 million abstentionists in the second round of the French election creates a very different result for Sunday’s French presidential runoff.
Published on April 25, 2022, at 4:05 pm (Paris), updated on May 24, 2022, at 12:48 pm Lire en français
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A record 13,600,000 voters, or 28% of the electorate, abstained in the second round of the French presidential election on Sunday, April 24. Blank and invalidated votes, meanwhile, declined in proportion compared to the 2017 presidential race, which featured the same two finalists, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.
Under current rules, the blank vote is indeed counted separately (from invalid ballots) but is not considered as part of the votes cast. Recognition of the blank vote would amount to counting it in the total votes cast, as if the blank vote were a candidate in its own right, de facto lowering the percentage of votes cast for the two other candidates.
If the blank vote was recognized, Emmanuel Macron would not have been elected with 58.5 % of the votes cast but with 54.7% of the recognized votes, 41.5% for Marine Le Pen (compared to 38.8% taking into account the white votes) and 6.5% for the blank vote. There are many possible ways to determine how to deal with the percentage of blank votes, and it is not possible to detail them here.
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If we add the invalid ballots and abstention, Mr. Macron was re-elected president with only 38.5 % of the votes among the registered voters.
These pie charts show the proportion of votes obtained by the finalists according to whether you calculate it from only the ballots cast or by taking into account the blank and invalid votes as well as abstentions (source : Ministry of the Interior
On the vexing question of Macron’s ‘Pension Reform’:
Editorial
Headline: French pension reform: The damage of a never-ending conflict
Sub-headline : To get out of the pension dispute, Emmanuel Macron cannot simply invoke the legality of the Constitutional Council’s decision, which on Friday approved the key elements of his controversial reform.
Published on April 15, 2023, at 11:23 am (Paris), updated on April 15, 2023, at 1:23 pm 2 min read Lire en français
As France has been going through a never-ending conflict since January, the decision of the Constitutional Council to approve the core of President Macron’s pension reform did not, as expected, contribute to lowering the social temperature by even one degree. The French president decided to sign the bill postponing the retirement age from 62 to 64 as soon as it was validated, and without listening to calls to not rush into anything. This quick promulgationwill not calm the unions’ anger, who immediately declined Emmanuel Macron’s invitation for a meeting on April 18. The unions have instead promised to make Labor Day, on May 1st, the high point of a popular mobilization that left-wing parties also intend to support.
The legal argument the executive branch can now lean on is not a minor onein the face of the opposition’s accusations that it abused the weapons of rationalized parliamentarianism to restrict the debate and get its unpopular reform adopted no matter the cost. In the end, only six provisions – including the “senior index” which was intended to improve the employment rate of senior citizens – were censured as they “had no place” in this financial law. The government used a specific type of financial bill for its reform, one that is used to amend the social security budget. This procedure was one of the main arguments put forward by the opposition before the Constitutional Council.
Simultaneously, the proposal carried by the left-wing oppositions to organize a referendum to counter the reform was rejected. It will however be followed by another bid. Apart from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who blamed the Constitutional Council for “being more attentive to the needs of the presidential monarchy than to those of the sovereign people,” no one questioned its decision, which is fortunate for the functioning of our institutions.
Undermined morale:
It is not, however, the end of the social and political crisis for Macron, who is constantly fueling it dangerously. Even if the country wasn’t brought to a standstill and the rate of strikers was not as high as during previous conflicts, the protests consistently held in Paris and other smaller cities across France for three months still testify to the level of incomprehension and anger that retirement at 64 arouses, particularly in the middle and working-class electorate. The President of the Republic cannot fail to see that the reform he wanted to impose provides powerful fuel for Marine Le Pen, who, according to all polls, appears to be the only one to benefit politically from the conflict. Nor can Macron ignore the intensity of the democratic quarrel that his determination to impose his reform has created in a context of relative majority in the Assemblée Nationale and of the fragility of representative democracy. While a great majority of the French remains hostile to his project, he must listen instead of fanning the fire, as he did once again on Friday by declaring, “Never give up, that’s my motto.”
…
The opening paragraphs of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s essay/apologetic is mock-epic of a kind, in it’s modest way…
Better late than never. Emmanuel Macron has moved full spectrum from Putin appeaser to arch-warrior, belatedly seizing the stage as the impassioned leader of the Continental war alliance.
He has not backed down from talk of deploying French troops on Ukrainian soil. His speech this week in Prague was a Churchillian tour de force, evoking the failure of the liberal democracies to stand behind Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, out of spinelessness and complacency. “We are at a moment in Europe where we cannot afford to be cowards,” he said.
Some saw it loaded with thinly-veiled attacks on Chancellor Olaf Scholz, others as a cri de coeur against the mood of fatalistic defeatism taking hold as Europe contemplates life without the American security umbrella.
Evans-Pritchard then invokes a moment, of what might be named fatalism?
If only Mr Macron’s epiphany had come earlier when his standing at home and abroad was still high, and his political capital was large. The tragedy for him, and for Europe, and for Ukraine, is that this capital is greatly depleted. Fellow leaders are weary of his oratory, apt to roll their eyes at every new demarche. At home, everything is going wrong at once.
Le Point against Macron :
Even the Macroniste weekly Le Point has turned against him. Its cover splash this week, “The Circus of the Sun King”, is a cruel portrait of an isolated leader lurching from one random position to another, surrounded by sycophants who dare not tell the truth. “Only the shoe shiners remain,” it said.
Le Figaro against Macron:
Le Figaro is scarcely kinder about a “hyperpresident” who wants to be in charge of everything and consults nobody, exasperating everybody with erratic grandstanding.
Editor: some selective quotation:
His Renaissance party is in incipient mutiny. Disloyal would-be successors are looking beyond him, not that they will inherit much.
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It was never going to be easy for Mr Macron after he lost his parliamentary majority in 2022. His strategic mistake was to think that he could plough ahead as if nothing had changed, relying on the decree powers of article 49:3 to ram through laws.
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This week he warned that more austerity would be needed, admitting that France had become “addicted to public spending” and that the budget deficit for 2023 will be much higher than the expected 4.9pc of GDP.
Editor: Why would the gilets jaunes continue demonstrating, if they were bribed, is the question! Perhaps as retaliation against violent French Police?
When the gilets jaunes revolt erupted over fuel duties, Mr Macron threw money at them. When the farmers rebelled this winter, he threw money at them, too, adding Gosplan “price floors” for different products to the horror of his own farm minister.
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Mr Macron lavished subsidies on rich and poor alike during the energy crisis, radically suppressing the price signal for electricity and gas.
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Editor: ‘Gallic Thatcherism’ …
Little remains of his once-bold plans for market reform and Gallic Thatcherism.
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Editor: Evans-Pritchard hits paydirt, by mistake!
Mr Macron is an incomprehensible figure. He seeks to be the heir of Charles de Gaulle. His copy of Mémoires de Guerre sits open on his desk in the official Élysée portrait. He sports the Croix de Lorraine, the heraldic double cross carried by the Free French forces on Juno Beach in 1944.
Editor: Evans-Pritchard as New Cold Warrior:
The mystery is what took him so long to grasp that a Russian victory in Ukraine would set in motion the disintegration of his beloved EU project, starting with a fabricated “persecution” of ethnic Russians in the Estonian pocket of Narva, no doubt swallowed hook, line, and sinker by Putin’s useful idiots in the West.
A cynic might note that he has failed to match his rhetoric with commensurate action at every stage over the last two years. If only he had actually put the French economy on a “war footing” instead of just talking about it.
Editor: Evans-Pritchard as munitions expert:.
Even at this juncture, France can barely make enough 155mm artillery shells in one year to supply Ukraine for four days. If only he had not kept vetoing EU purchases of spare shells from South Africa. Yes, French SCALP missiles and Caesar howitzers have been vital for Ukraine, but France is far down the list of military donors.
Editor: Evans-Pritchard as Political Farceur!
Mr Macron’s falling star is no cause for celebration. From a British point of view, he has metamorphosed from first-term foe to second-term friend. The Brexit hatchet is largely buried. Events have thrown Britain and France back into each other’s arms in a fresh Cordiale Entente, akin to the anti-Tsarist pact with Napoleon III.
We badly need Mr Macron at his best – idealistic, courageous, and willful – to help prevent a colossal disaster unfolding in Europe. He can now see with 20/20 clarity that we are facing the cascading collapse of the liberal democratic West if Putin prevails in Ukraine. It is shocking that so many other politicians of our age cannot.
Newspaper Reader confronts the reality of ‘Journalism’, as the servant of the various members of the overarching National Security States of ‘The Post War Liberal Order’.
Mr. Rachman opens his essay as if he and his newspaper are not complicit in the Gaza Genocide & forced Famine:
Et tu, Joe? For many months, Benjamin Netanyahu has shrugged off international criticism of Israel, secure in the knowledge that the president of America had offered ironclad support. If you have the White House behind you, who cares about South Africa or the students of Columbia University?
But even the Biden administration has its limits. The Netanyahu government’s determination to press ahead with a full-scale attack on the Gazan town of Rafah has finally prompted the US to halt some of its military aid to Israel.
Followed by this ‘report’ on Netanyahu response
Netanyahu has responded to the US decision with bravado and defiance. Israel looks likely to move forward with its attack on Rafah, using its already formidable arsenal. The Israeli prime minister says that no outside power can prevent his nation from defending itself, as it sees fit. Israel, Netanyahu insists, “will stand alone” if necessary.
Political melodrama infuses this whole essay, Rachman quotes ‘David Horovitz, the founding editor of the Times of Israel’ a propaganda arm of the Israeli State:
But the reality is that many Israelis are shocked and dismayed by Biden’s decision. David Horovitz, the founding editor of the Times of Israel, called it a “devastating announcement”. His description of Israel’s situation is stark: “Already abandoned by most of the international community, Israel . . . has now lost the unstinting public support and full protection of its most essential ally.”
I’ll quote the last paragraphs of this essay, that is still awash in the now shop-worn Israeli Victimhood Narrative, while its Genocide/Famine continues. While Joe Biden faces the fact, that this crime will seal his political fate!
Note also, that I place in bold font: ‘That change became even less likely after the trauma of the savage Hamas attacks of October 7.’ Rachman willfully ignoring the 75 years of murder and oppression against Palestinians!
The Israeli government seems to take an entirely military view of the Palestinian issue. It argues that Israel must eliminate Hamas and “restore deterrence” — and that force is the only true path to Israel’s safety. The Biden administration, by contrast, has always believed that Israel’s future can only ultimately be achieved by a peace settlement that involves the creation of a Palestinian state.
The US knows from its own bitter experience in Afghanistan that you cannot defeat an organisation like Hamas, or the Taliban, simply by killing its leadership and foot soldiers. Without a sustainable political solution, there will always be new recruits. Indeed, mass killing of civilians is likely to be the most effective recruitment tool for the next generation of Hamas fighters.
But facing up to that reality would require profound shifts in the thinking of Netanyahu and much of the Israeli public. That change became even less likely after the trauma of the savage Hamas attacks of October 7. So it may require another external shock — such as the White House decision on weapons — to force the Israelis away from the brutal and self-defeating strategy they have embraced in Gaza. If Biden’s decision helps to kick-start that process, he may yet salvage something from the current horror.
Do the headline and sub-headline tell the full story?
Headline: Who’s gaslighting who? Sunak and Starmer are stuck in the blame game
Sub-headline: As the economy sputters into life, voters can’t believe it. The Tories can take a victory lap, but Labour disputes that no one feels any richer
Should this twitter post from @rcolvile surprise The Reader?
Yet until The Reader herself confronts the Colvile Chatter, but I’m getting ahead of myself! Quotations from this essay are revelatory:
One of the great myths of British politics is that power invites scrutiny. In fact, as Tony Blair found in 1997 and Sir Keir Starmer is finding now, it’s really rather pleasant being the anointed successor to an unpopular government. Suddenly everything you do takes on a rosy glow. Newspapers and magazines fill with admiring profiles of your staff, strategy and philosophy. Voters who thought you awkward and nasal suddenly decide that if everyone else seems to like you, you can’t be that bad. From struggling to get attention, you suddenly find the press hanging on your every word.
Last week Starmer visited Dover, the seat occupied by his new star defector, Natalie Elphicke — a description, given Elphicke’s politics, that feels almost as incongruous as “vegan activist Nigel Farage”. There he unveiled a package of measures to secure the border: there would be an elite new force, the Border Security Command, tasked with working across government to smash the smugglers. There would be more money. There would be greater co-operation with the French.
How different from the discredited Tory approach! That merely involved extra funding for a new Small Boats Operational Command, which co-operates with the French while joining up efforts across government. Admittedly, Starmer said he’d get MI5 involved, while the Tories highlighted the role of the Royal Navy. In both cases, one suspects, because it made the announcement sound cooler.
If the Conservatives had tried such blatant copy-and-pasting, they’d have been ridiculed. Indeed, speaking of copy-and-pasting, Rachel Reeves was also out and about last week. The shadow chancellor — who barely missed an electoral step when it was revealed that chunks of her book had been lifted from more than 20 other sources — accused the Tories of “gaslighting” the public over the economy, and warned voters not to be taken in.
What did she mean? The speech was an attempt to pre-emptively discredit the Tories’ last, best hope of an electoral turnaround: to argue that things are getting better, the plan is working, the economy is improving, don’t let Labour ruin it. Sure enough, on Friday it was confirmed that the economy was out of recession. And not just out of recession, but growing far more perkily than anyone predicted.
The Reader might turn to @JohnJCrace column of Wednesday May 8, 2024 as the political precursor to @rcolvile ? Mr Crace offers what Colvile cannot, political candor , wedded to wit, salt and style!
Headline: Natalie Elphicke’s queasy welcome shows Labour will turn no one away
Sub-headline: A quick win is a quick win for Keir Starmer. Never mind the politics, just feel that Tory majority weakening
Some things you just don’t see coming. Defections from the Tory party may be very on trend: just last month it was Dan Poulter. Or Dan Who? to his friends. But when Natalie Elphicke took her place right behind Keir Starmer on the Labour benches for prime minister’s questions there were open mouths on both sides of the Commons. Penny Mordaunt had to do a quick double-take. Could it be? Surely not. It was. She dashed to the speaker’s chair to warn the prime minister.
Elphicke is no ordinary defector. Not some Tory wet like Dripping Dan, who was so centre-right, one nation that he may as well have been Labour anyway. Natalie is about as far to the right as you can get. Not only that, but with an unpleasant backstory too.
A woman who defended her former husband, Charlie, the previous MP for Dover, until she inherited the constituency after he had been convicted of three charges of sexual assault. Not the best of looks. Natalie was even suspended from the Commons after she was found to have tried to influence the judge presiding over his trial.
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In the final paragraphs:
PMQs now represents a Theatre of Cruelty, its every second a reminder of Sunak’s own inadequacy. It starts with the cheers that greet his arrival in the Commons. They’ve gone from the ironic to the openly mocking. No one thinks he is doing a good job. No one holds him in any affection. He only gets to keep his job because it would look even worse to sack him so soon before a general election. An election they all know they are going to lose. Gallows humour is all that is left. Dignity long gone.
Everyone knows the score. None more so than the Labour leader. Time was when Starmer was more wary around Rish!. Took him seriously as a political opponent. Now he is almost demob happy. The game of PMQs is just too easy for him. Sunak is just a plaything. A rag doll to be kicked around and punched. Before being discarded.
Starmer began by crowing about the local election results. Rish! looked as if he might start crying before starting to read out the names of all the successful Tory councillors. There are so few, it didn’t take long. Sunak retreated into his safe place: the investigation into Angela Rayner. Keir just smirked. People in glass houses, etc. Had the prime minister forgotten that he had two convictions himself?
After that it was all just fun, fun, fun. All the places where Sunak has fifth homes – the ones we know about – were now under Labour control. So at least he would be safe. Could Rish! think of any of his policies that were actually working? At the current rate of progress it would take 300 years to deport every refugee to Rwanda. Sunak’s comebacks just died a death. Not even his own backbenchers could keep up the pretence that they were enjoying this.
We ended with Sunak unexpectedly blurting out an inconvenient truth. “There is no long-term policy,” he said. Of course there isn’t. Everything is concentrated on short-term survival. The prime minister had been spat out and ground into the dust. You wouldn’t treat an animal like this.
David Brooks ‘strategy’ in this essay is an attempt to change the subject from the Gaza Genocide, and enforced Famine of the Zionist Faschist State: to the clear and present danger of Trump, that Mr. Brooks’ as a once Neo-Liberal/Neo-Con nurtured until it became politically inconvenient, to his careerism. He now uses Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the Disinherited” as the means to present Biden as the politician who will ‘save the soul of America’ – the toxin of America’s Puritan Tradition is the ready-to-hand for a wide spectrum of The American Political Grifter Class!
The first paragraphs of Brooks are awash in the cliches of That Old Time Religion, or better yet its political pastiche:
In 2020 Joe Biden ran on the theme of saving the soul of America. Once he was president, he used the power of his office to help direct hundreds of billions of dollars through the infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act to the people and places that had been left behind. At the time, I hoped that these programs would not only create jobs and give people a sense of financial security but also be seen as a sign of respect, a sign to the unseen and the alienated that America had their back.
These policies were successful in economic terms, sparking a torrent of additional investment and lifting real wages, but economic progress has not produced social or spiritual progress — less alienation, higher social trust. American society, at every economic level, is still plagued by enmity, distrust, isolation, willful misunderstanding, ungraciousness and just plain meanness. The pain in America resides in places deeper than economic policies can reach. So how can we create a society in which it is easier to be decent to one another?
The next paragraphs mention an obscure book by Howard Thurman “Jesus and the Disinherited”. The books obscurity plays well in the hands of Neo-Conservative, speaking to a readership that treats Mr. Brooks as an political expert of wide reading and high integrity!
To answer that question, I returned to Howard Thurman’s magnificent 1949 book, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” Thurman, a Black theologian, was a contemporary of Martin Luther King Sr., at Morehouse and had a strong influence on the activism of his son Martin Luther King Jr.
In the book Thurman asks a series of profound questions: How is it possible for the disinherited and the oppressed to live pushed against the wall without losing their humanity? More broadly, how is it possible to strengthen the spiritual and social foundation of society so that people will recognize one another’s full dignity amid the normal tussles of life? These are germane questions today, when so many — on the left and right — feel that society has pushed them against the wall.
To answer that question, I returned to Howard Thurman’s magnificent 1949 book, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” Thurman, a Black theologian, was a contemporary of Martin Luther King Sr., at Morehouse and had a strong influence on the activism of his son Martin Luther King Jr.
In the book Thurman asks a series of profound questions: How is it possible for the disinherited and the oppressed to live pushed against the wall without losing their humanity? More broadly, how is it possible to strengthen the spiritual and social foundation of society so that people will recognize one another’s full dignity amid the normal tussles of life? These are germane questions today, when so many — on the left and right — feel that society has pushed them against the wall.
Thurman emphasizes that Jesus was a poor Jew living under the tyranny of Roman power. But even in these vicious circumstances, Jesus focused his attention on the “inward center” of each person. He showed that you can’t look only at a person’s economic or political circumstances. The crucial level for any person is the spiritual level, the place where souls are either sanctified or degraded.
Thurman reminds us that when the networks of relationships in a society are broken and unjust, national transformation must flow from a tide of personal transformations. Thurman emphasizes that Jesus was a poor Jew living under the tyranny of Roman power. But even in these vicious circumstances, Jesus focused his attention on the “inward center” of each person. He showed that you can’t look only at a person’s economic or political circumstances. The crucial level for any person is the spiritual level, the place where souls are either sanctified or degraded.
Thurman reminds us that when the networks of relationships in a society are broken and unjust, national transformation must flow from a tide of personal transformations.
What might The Reader make of this long quotations and paraphrases of Mr. Therman’s book? To what political/moral purpose does Brooks yoke these paragraphs to, but Joe Biden and ‘the theme of saving the soul of America’. Some empirical evidence about Biden might be useful to The Reader:
Joe Biden in 1993 speech warned of ‘predators on our streets’
Joe Biden in a 1993 speech warned of “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale” and said they must be cordoned off from the rest of society because the justice system did not know how to rehabilitate them.
Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the comments on the Senate floor a day before a vote was scheduled on the Senate’s version of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
His central role in shaping and shepherding the tough-on-crime bill will likely face scrutiny in a Democratic primary should he run for president in 2020. His 1993 comments, which were in line with the broad political consensus to tackling crime at the time, are at odds with a new bipartisan coalition of activists and lawmakers who are trying to undo what they say is a legacy of mass incarceration fostered by that era.
Biden’s word choice could also pose a problem with a new generation of Democrats who view the rhetoric at the time as perpetuating harmful myths about the black community.
CNN’s KFile came across the 1993 speech during a review of the former vice president’s record.
President Bill Clinton in 1994 signed the crime bill into law with broad bipartisan support as violent crime rates peaked in the US in the early 1990s. Included in the law was the federal “three strikes” provision, mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.
“We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created,” said Biden, then a fourth-term senator from Delaware so committed to the bill that he has referred to it over the years as “the Biden bill.”
“They are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale,” Biden continued. “And it’s a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society.”
In the speech, Biden described a “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.” He said, “we should focus on them now” because “if we don’t, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now.”
Biden added that he didn’t care “why someone is a malefactor in society” and that criminals needed to be “away from my mother, your husband, our families.”
Bill Russo, a spokesman for Biden, said high violent crime rates at the time was key context to understanding the bill and that, “Senator-Biden’s strong rhetoric” was in response to Republican critiques that past efforts had been too soft on crime.
“Then-Senator Biden was referring specifically to violent crimes in the selected quotes. He was not talking about a kid stealing a candy bar, but someone who committed sexual assault, manslaughter, or murder,” Russo told CNN in an email. “In contrast, he says in the same speech that we need a different approach for nonviolent crimes. Specifically, he says we ‘need to keep people who are first time offenders, non-violent offenders, or potential first-time offenders who in fact are people getting themselves into the crime stream from the first time – that they should be diverted from the system.’”
Biden’s spokesman added the 1994 crime bill included funding “to keep individuals who committed first-time offenses and non-violent crimes out of prison and instead in treatment and supervision,” and that Biden advocated for prevention funding. Russo also pointed to two provisions of the bill that led to Biden’s strong support of its passage: bans on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons and the Violence Against Women Act.
Biden’s 1993 “predator” remarks are similar to comments made by then-first lady Hillary Clinton in 1996, where she warned of “superpredators” who had “no conscience, no empathy” and who need to be brought “to heel.” During the 2016 Democratic primary, Clinton was confronted by Black Lives Matter activists over her use of the term. Clinton later told the Washington Post: “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.
Biden defended the 1994 crime law as a whole in a 2016 interview with CNBC, saying, “By and large, what it really did, it restored American cities.”
But more recently, at an event talking about criminal justice in January, Biden said, “I haven’t always been right. I know we haven’t always gotten things right, but I’ve always tried.”
He highlighted his later work with President Barack Obama to address the sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, saying, “It was a big mistake when it was made,” he said at the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast in Washington. “We thought, we were told by the experts, that crack you never go back, it was somehow fundamentally different. It’s not different. But it’s trapped an entire generation.”
In the decades since it passed, portions of the act have been singled out by critics as contributing to the expansion of mass incarceration, particularly of African Americans. Speaking about mass incarceration in 2015, Bill Clinton said he “signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it.”
In 1993, Biden spoke to the broad political consensus that had formed around tackling violent crime.
“The consensus is A), we must take back the streets,” Biden said, “It doesn’t matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn’t matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society. The end result is they’re about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons.”
Biden added in his speech that rehabilitation could not be a condition for release or sentencing, because the United States criminal justice system didn’t know how to rehabilitate offenders.
“I’m the guy that said rehabilitation, when it occurs, we don’t understand it and notice it and even when we notice it and we know it occurs, we don’t know why,” he said. “So you cannot make rehabilitation a condition for release.”
The consensus, Biden again said, was the need to make streets safer. With an impassioned plea, Biden said he did not care what led someone to commit crimes.
“I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don’t care why someone is antisocial. I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath,” Biden said. “We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society, try to help them, try to change the behavior. That’s what we do in this bill. We have drug treatment and we have other treatments to try to deal with it, but they are in jail.”
Mr. Brooks encomiums to The Biden of the Present, is about the self-willed forgetting that the Trump phenomenon has produced, in the cadre of New York Times and the other proliferating Newspaper Pundits!
Ed Kilgore offers this from 2019 on Biden’s ‘Crime Bill’
Headline: On Crime Policy, Biden Worked Closely With His Segregationist Friends
There are two story lines about Joe Biden’s long Senate record that are potentially dangerous for him, in that they could threaten his currently strong support among African-Americans. One involves his friendships with segregationists in the Senate — notably James Eastland, Strom Thurmond, and Herman Talmadge — which he can’t seem to stop talking about. And the other is his responsibility for policies that have led to mass incarceration, including the landmark 1994 crime bill.
What could be happening now is that the two stories are converging, as reflected in a New York Times report on how Biden worked closely with his racist colleagues to push crime policy toward mandatory minimum sentences and other “get tough” positions, long before the 1994 bill.
The Diligent Reader has still to face 923 words. She can , if she chooses, continue to read Brooks essay, yet the very center of this muted polemic is in its last paragraphs:
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There are obviously times when this nonviolent strategy is inappropriate — in a state of anarchy or war, when the very existence of your people is under threat. But these techniques did work in Birmingham, Selma, Chicago and beyond. Most important, they altered people’s souls, fortifying the state of consciousness of the disinherited, undermining the state of consciousness of the dominators and elevating the consciousness of those who looked on in awe and admiration.
These thoughtful techniques are a long way from the tit-for-tat crudities that now often pass for public discourse, the tantrums of the merchants of rage, the 57 percent of Republicans and the 41 percent of Democrats who regard people in the other party as their enemies.
As many have noted, we’re not going to solve our problems at the same level of consciousness on which we created them. If the national consciousness, the state of our national soul, is to repair, it will be because people begin to think as deeply as Thurman did and begin to be intolerant of the immoralities of their own side.
I was impressed this week by Georgia’s former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan. A conservative Republican, he announced his decision to support Biden, and he rebuked those other conservatives who are appalled by Trump but still vow to vote for him. Duncan’s reasoning was straightforward: Character is more important than policy. Or to put it more grandly, the soul of our democracy is more important than whatever the future top tax rate might be.
Old Socialist asks ‘A New York Times Question’: Is Bret Stephens ‘Woke’ ?
Mr. Stephens disingenuous thank you note to campus protestors, who can’t quite match Stephens education : Middlesex School , *University of Chicago & the London School of Economics, demonstrates his status as part of a highly credentialed elite, that entitles him to rebuke these campus protestors. Although these protestors are part on another elite, of another generation. In its way, this rebuke is Stephens way of exhibiting his educational, political and religious superiority, to a category of strangers under the guise of campus protestors.
Mr. Stephens begins his essay :
Dear anti-Israel campus protesters:
Though it may take a few years before you realize it, supporters of Israel like me have reasons to give thanks to militant anti-Zionists like you.
Recently, a friend asked what I would have made of your protests if they had been less fervently one-sided. If, for instance, pro-Palestinian student groups at Harvard and Columbia hadn’t castigated Israel immediately following the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Or if Jewish students and professors hadn’t faced violence, harassment and antisemitic imagery from you or your allies from Harvard to Columbia to Berkeley to Stanford. Or if you had made a point of acknowledging the reality of the Oct. 7 rapes or the suffering of Israel’s hostages and their families while demanding their safe return. Or if you consistently condemned and distanced yourselves from Hamas. Or if all of you had simply followed rules that gave you every right to free expression without trampling on the rights of others to a safe and open campus.
In short, what if your protests had focused on Israel’s policies, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, rather than demanding the complete elimination of Israel as a Jewish state? What if you had avoided demonizing anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist — which includes a vast majority of Jews — as modern-day Nazis?
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Here are Nora Barrows-Friedman, Asa Winstanley, Ali Abunimah and Jon Elmer of The Electronic Intifada were joined by Donya Abu Sitta, contributor and journalist in the Gaza Strip, on the day 208 livestream.
Debunking “Screams Before Silence,” Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 October “mass rapes” film, with Ali Abunimah
Mr. Stephens, ignores the inconvenient fact of the Gaza Genocide and forced Famine of the Palestinians, but Mr. Stephen continues his scolding of those campus protestors. The challenge to Stephens, that the propagandist does not meet, is the amorphous character of his chosen class of persons.
In that case, I told my friend, I would have disagreed with your views but I wouldn’t have despised them. Nor would a broad plurality of Americans, including many to my left. The result could have been a movement that would have had stronger arguments and greater impact. You would have been able to win over undecideds to your cause. And I would have had to fight harder to make my case that Israel must get rid of Hamas.
The Reader might ask herself who/what is the ‘left’ that Stephens refers too: the great looming presence of disloyalty, a hold over from Nixon/McCarthy Era, and its various political iterations, over time. That reliable political ghost surely cannot refer to his fellow Zionists Tom Friedman or David Brooks! Stephen’s was editor of the Jerusalem Post a propaganda arm of the Israeli government, yet in this instance that experience has failed him.
In Stephens collection of would-be gambits Marx makes an appearance, along with the free-floating ‘your Maoist-style sloganeering’ assisted by your arrogant disdain for the genuine fears of some of your Jewish peers.
I realize this isn’t how some of you see it. The most hard-line among you want to “sharpen the contradictions,” as the Marxists say. Your real goal was not to shape U.S. government policy, at least in the near term. What you really want to do is normalize anti-Zionism, particularly on elite college campuses, while hoping that the bigger payoff will come in 20 or 30 years, when those you’ve converted to your cause become senators and governors and university presidents.
But the problem with sharpening the contradictions is that the contradictions being sharpened are your own. For every student who became ardently pro-Palestinian during the protests, another one, perhaps a Jewish student with previously indifferent feelings about Israel, finally saw the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. For every professor who’s shown up to your encampment to lend support, you’ve lost a fair-minded liberal with your Maoist-style sloganeering and your arrogant disdain for the genuine fears of some of your Jewish peers.
What follows is more avuncular scolding : note The Players in this section. I’ll put them in italics. The Reader might also note, that the third paragraph lapses into political hysterics, that recapitulates the Jewish Victimhood Narrative, from the point of view of bourgeois political intellectual, of a very specific kind: A bellicose Straussian! And like most, if not all Straussians, no military nor battle experience!
In short, if sharpening the contradictions is the game you’re playing, it’s paying bigger dividends for my side than it is for yours. It’s also nothing new. Those 1968 protests you’re trying to emulate? What they mainly helped achieve was the election of Richard Nixon followed by nearly 40 straight years of right-of-center governance in the United States.
Nor is this the only help you’re giving my side.
I am a Zionist not only because I support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state — an abstract point about another country. I am also a Zionist for the most personal of reasons: because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries. For anyone with a historical memory of France until Dreyfus, Germany until Hitler or Iran until Khomeini, that kind of insurance is one Jews can’t afford to lose.
In the final paragraphs again Stephens again will-fully ‘forgets’ the Gaza Genocide and the enforced Famine. As I write this Rafah awaits! In sum, Stephens never left his employment as editor of The Jerusalem Post- The New York Times has assumed that role in American Life!
But Stephens can’t let go if his closely held belief in his own victim-hood!
What happened on Oct. 7 shook my faith in the quality of that insurance: What else does the Israeli state exist for, after all, if not to protect its people from the kind of butchery they endured that day? But what happened on Oct. 8 — the moment your protests began — renewed that faith, because it gave me a glimpse into what America might yet become for Jews, at least if people like you were to gain real power.
I get that many if not most of you see yourselves as dedicated idealists who want to end suffering for Palestinians, champion equality and oppose all forms of bigotry. There are ways you could do that without making common cause with people who hate Jews, want to kill us and often do. Supporting a two-state solution would be one such way. Insisting that Palestinians deserve better leaders than Hamas is another. Building bridges with Israelis is a third.
Instead, without knowing it, you are my daily reminder of what my Zionism is for, about and against. For that, if nothing else, thank you.
Old Socialist asks a New York Times ? Has Stephens become ‘Woke’ ?
While the Genocide and enforced Famine continues in Gaza, and the attack on Rafah awaits, Bret Stephens and Sheryl Sandberg sound the alarm on ‘Anti-Semitism’.
There is a scene in “Screams Before Silence,” the harrowing documentary about the rape and mutilation of Israeli women on Oct. 7, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s an interview that the former Facebook chief operating officer There is a scene in “Screams Before Silence,” the harrowing documentary about the rape and mutilation of Israeli women on Oct. 7, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s an interview that the former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the documentary’s presenter, conducted with Ayelet Levy Sachar, the documentary’s presenter, conducted with Ayelet Levy Sachar,…
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Why? “People are so polarized that they want every fact to fit into a narrative, and if their narrative is resistance, then sexual violence doesn’t fit into that narrative,” Sandberg told me when I met her in New York last Thursday, hours before the documentary’s premiere at The Times Center. “You can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel has no choice; you can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel wants to kill babies. You can hold either one of those thoughts. And you should also be able to hold the thought that sexual violence is unacceptable, no matter what.”
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“I’ve spent my life, obviously, building businesses,” Sandberg told me toward the end of our interview. “And separately I’ve spent a lot of my life fighting for women. And I never thought I was going to work on antisemitism. I didn’t think it was a problem, and I was absolutely wrong. And I never thought that politics could make any group or feminist leader turn a blind eye to just such clear documentation of sexual violence.”
Political Observer recalls Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan, as ‘The Transformational President’, while FDR remained in the shadow of that Hollywood has-been!
The reader needs, must consider what planet Janan Ganesh resides! This ‘essay’ on Joe is History Made To Measure ‘we can write it in exponent form as x2’
The first paragraphs are indicative of the ‘Ganesh Historical Methodology’
There are three things that Joe Biden cannot shake off: his Secret Service guards, his own shadow and the phrase “ . . . since Lyndon Johnson”. He is described as the most consequential Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson. He is said to have brought about the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson. The historical comparison is meant well. In fact, it undersells him.
In turning ideas into statute, LBJ had lavish advantages. Democrats outnumbered Republicans around two-to-one in both houses of Congress for much of the 1960s. Having replaced the slain John F Kennedy, he began with the nation’s goodwill, and could present his reforms as his predecessor’s unfinished work. Biden had neither the numbers nor the moral head-start. Still, last week, the Ukraine aid package joined the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and a vast infrastructure splurge in Biden’s canon of important (or at least expensive) laws.
What are we to learn from this prolific doer of things? What, as we near its end, is the lesson of this startlingly fertile presidential term?
For those of us who who were adults at the time, Mr. Ganesh’s political portrait of LBJ, represents not just a failed attempt to make Joe Biden and LBJ, as somehow sharing the same political imperatives! Mr. Ganesh is not familiar with Billie Sol Estes nor Abe Fortas!
Joe Biden is a Neo-Liberal: not the etiolated remains of the New Deal: Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act (1965) were the belated, unfinished business of that hallowed New Frontier of Kennedy. While not forgetting LBJ’s ‘Guns And Butter’! nor the careers of the war mongers McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, or Robert S. McNamara. Kai Bird’s book is the kind of political education that Janan Ganesh has no interest in exploring:
Ganesh is a apologist/ propagandist for senile Old Joe, as the political savior against the Political Monster Donald Trump. Though he makes no appearance in this defence of Biden. Yet Biden in Ganesh’s telling is not an exemplar of what might be considered political virtues:
One thing above all: eloquence is overrated. So is charisma, vision-setting and all the other “performance” aspects of politics. Biden was an average-to-poor communicator even before his age-related deterioration. He has no signature speech or even epigram to show for half a century in frontline politics. What he does have is more inside experience of Washington — its details, its unwritten codes — than any president ever. The result is a one-term legacy that exceeds what such silver-tongues as Bill Clinton managed in two.
Here is Joe’s signature speech, that has eluded the grasp of Ganesh:
Joe Biden in 1993 Speech talks of “Predators” on our streets
The above paragraph doesn’t quite qualify as faint praise. The Reader might wonder what it is! Perhaps the strangled voice of a would-be novelist? Or a writer traying to meet his deadline!
The fact is that Ganesh trades upon ‘leadership’ invested in the very thing that he inveigh against!
Samples:
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Biden understood, as his more outwardly gifted predecessors didn’t always, the importance of face. Something else, too: he can count.
A leader can’t be so presentationally inept as to be unelectable. But once that low standard is met, there are diminishing returns to star power.
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Their nation-changing qualities — stamina, focus, certitude — were in the private side of politics, which is most of politics.
Liberals need to hear this more than most. American ones in particular can be crashing snobs about education and speech. In The West Wing, they got to create their ideal president. The result? A hyper-articulate Yankee Brahmin.
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But the ultimate beneficiary of this liberal obsession with rhetoric was Barack Obama. It wasn’t even profound rhetoric. “In no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
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Biden is to Obama what Johnson was to Kennedy.
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But the perception of what constitutes a leader never caught up. Because people overvalue what they themselves are good at, the educated politico-media class overvalues eloquence.
I say all this as no particular admirer of Biden’s domestic bills. If he loses re-election, the culprit will be inflation, to which his spending has probably contributed. His protectionism almost guarantees immense waste and fragments the world trade order that allowed the postwar US to bind countries to it.
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Still, there are other moments to discuss how Biden uses his political skill. Just recognise that skill, and how little it relies on words. If a “great” leader is one who changes things, for better or not, this is an administration of mumbling, tongue-tied greatness.
Political Observer on Friedman’s 2,019 word intervention.
‘writing from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’ is attached to this ‘essay’ as the in order to of impressing the Times readership? Mr. Friedman, and his newspaper, self-present as not just the ‘last word’ on International Affaires but the sine qua non of such reportage! This rambling essay begins with these four paragraphs:
U.S. diplomacy to end the Gaza war and forge a new relationship with Saudi Arabia has been converging in recent weeks into a single giant choice for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: What do you want more — Rafah or Riyadh?
Do you want to mount a full-scale invasion of Rafah to try to finish off Hamas — if that is even possible — without offering any Israeli exit strategy from Gaza or any political horizon for a two-state solution with non-Hamas-led Palestinians? If you go this route, it will only compound Israel’s global isolation and force a real breach with the Biden administration.
Or do you want normalization with Saudi Arabia, an Arab peacekeeping force for Gaza and a U.S.-led security alliance against Iran? This would come with a different price: a commitment from your government to work toward a Palestinian state with a reformed Palestinian Authority — but with the benefit of embedding Israel in the widest U.S.-Arab-Israeli defense coalition the Jewish state has ever enjoyed and the biggest bridge to the rest of the Muslim world Israel has ever been offered, while creating at least some hope that the conflict with the Palestinians will not be a “forever war.’’
This is one of the most fateful choices Israel has ever had to make. And what I find both disturbing and depressing is that there is no major Israeli leader today in the ruling coalition, the opposition or the military who is consistently helping Israelis understand that choice — a global pariah or a Middle East partner — or explaining why it should choose the second.
Its a kind of low grade political melodrama, that sends his bourgeois readership into fits of near adoration? His location, Riyadh, and his proximity to power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who appears later in the essay, lends credibility ?
The next paragraph offers a Friedmann an ‘understanding mood’:
I appreciate how traumatized Israelis are by the vicious Hamas murders, rapes and kidnappings of Oct. 7. It is not surprising to me that many people there just want revenge, and their hearts have hardened to a degree that they can’t see or care about all of the civilians, including thousands of children, who have been killed in Gaza as Israel has plowed through to try to eliminate Hamas. All of this has been further hardened by Hamas’s refusal so far to release the remaining hostages.
Followed by this paragraph steeped in admonition:
But revenge is not a strategy. It is pure insanity that Israel is now more than six months into this war and the Israeli military leadership — and virtually the entire political class — has allowed Netanyahu to continue to pursue a “total victory” there, including probably soon plunging deep into Rafah, without any exit plan or Arab partner lined up to step in once the war ends. If Israel ends up with an indefinite occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank, it would be a toxic military, economic and moral overstretch that would delight Israel’s most dangerous foe, Iran, and repel all its allies in the West and the Arab world.
The Reader searches in vain for any mention of the Zionist Genocide and Famine in Gaza! Friedman is playacting the part of the ‘Peace Maker’ , the unofficial American Ambassador, with strong ties to Biden, and perhaps acting as his proxy? Enough of the Friedman self-congratulatory chatter, the last paragraphs of Freidman’s essay:
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The Biden team wants to complete the U.S.-Saudi part of the deal so that it can act like the opposition party that Israel does not have right now and be able to say to Netanyahu: You can be remembered as the leader who presided over Israel’s worst military catastrophe on Oct. 7 or the leader who led Israel out of Gaza and opened the road to normalization between Israel and the most important Muslim state. Your choice. And it wants to offer this choice publicly so that every Israeli can see it.
So let me end where I began: Israel’s long-term interests are in Riyadh, not Rafah. Of course, neither is a sure thing and both come with risks. And I know that it’s not so easy for Israelis to weigh them when so many global protesters these days are hammering Israel for its bad behavior in Gaza and giving Hamas a free pass. But that’s what leaders are for: to make the case that the road to Riyadh has a much bigger payoff at the end than the road to Rafah, which will be a dead end in every sense of the term.
I totally respect that Israelis are the ones who will have to live with the choice. I just want to make sure they know they have one.
Mr. Friedman is a maladroit paternalist, as the sentence I’ve placed in bold font, demonstrates!
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I’ll offer this video of Netanyahu’s latest pronouncement on American political/civic life:
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