Tag: Trump

Neither the Democrats nor MAGA won yesterday

Yesterday was bad for Democrats. They won, or, at least, they didn’t lose as badly as expected (results still too close to call), probably maintaining control of the Senate and losing the House by far fewer seats than expected. This is a victory, to be sure, but it’s a pyrrhic victory, setting the stage for a 2024 decimation of the Democratic Party at both the executive and legislative levels.

By all accounts, the Democrats should have seen a resounding defeat yesterday. Off-year election cycles routinely deliver bad results to the governing party, and the most important indicators – crime, the economy, etc. – favored an opposition party over a governing party. Combine that with a president who’s quite obviously non compos mentis, and the expected result is, as George W. Bush once described it, “a thumpin’.” But that didn’t happen, so the obvious question is: Why?

Why were the Democrats able to defy the odds and pull off what amounts to a victory? Only two real options are available: the Democrats did just about everything right, or the Republicans did just about everything wrong. If Democrats are being honest with themselves, it should be obvious to them that the electorate voted against the Republicans, not for the Democrats. If there was widespread content with the Democrats, the polls don’t show it. They don’t show it in the presidential approval rating or in confidence in Democrats’ ability to handle key issues like crime and inflation; the Democrats don’t even fully dominate the area they’ve tried to make their key issue: protecting democracy (though, to be sure, this is an area where they beat the Republicans).

Throughout the race, the Democrats broadcast their lack of faith in their standing with the voters. While Biden was making speeches arguing MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy, other members of his party were openly funding the most extreme of these threats, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. A cynical move, ostensibly fighting for democracy while funding democracy’s supposed gravediggers, but it worked. With a few exceptions, almost all of the Trump-favored extremists, including those the Democrats helped to beat out over their moderate, regular Republican, challengers, lost. But therein lies the problem for the future.

Victory leads to complacency, while defeat leads to soul searching, as was the case in 2020, when Democrats like Abigail Spannberger forcefully questioned the “defund the police” slogan with which the Democratic Party had become too comfortable. Recall that 2020 was a defeat for Democrats in the same way that 2022 is a victory: while this time they didn’t lose by as much as they would have been expected to, two years ago they didn’t win by nearly as much as they should have. Indeed, the only reason they won a “majority” (really, 50-50 plus the vice president’s tie-breaking vote) of the Senate was because Trump went to Georgia and convinced Republicans their votes didn’t matter, because the election was “rigged” and “stolen.”

Now, the election results have made the Democrats complacent, while the Republicans search their souls, along with their strategic playbook. While many have been arguing that Trump is an albatross around the Republicans’ collective neck, yesterday made it clear that he’s not an albatross, but a noose. The candidates Trump picked lost yesterday, but in places where the former president didn’t interfere, Republicans fared much better. Georgia’s Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is locked in a dead heat with Republican Herschel Walker, an unhinged figure who was endorsed by Trump. Walker could win, but Democrats only need to look elsewhere in Georgia to see something that should terrify them: Brian Kemp, a conservative Republican who Trump declared an enemy, destroyed Democratic superstar Stacey Abrams in the race for governor, 54-46, despite few problems and high turnout.

One could look also at New York’s 17th Congressional district. There, Sean Patrick Maloney was defeated by Republican state legislator Mike Lawler. Lawler, despite having been a Trump delegate to the RNC in previous times, sought to distance himself from Trump and focused his campaign on crime and inflation. Lawler’s website, especially its foreign policy section, shows a candidate at pains to paint himself as a strongly conservative – not an America Firster. And Maloney should have won easily: there was some redistricting, but Biden won the general area of the district by 10 points – and Maloney is chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the organization that’s responsible for raising and doling out money to the party’s Congressional candidates. No DCCC member has lost in four decades.

Other examples abound, but the most important is in Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis handily beat Democrat Charlie Crist. Trump has been strongly, and publicly, signaling that he hates DeSantis, holding a rally at the same time as the Florida governor and warning DeSantis not to run for president because, “I know more about him than anybody — other than, perhaps, his wife.” Were DeSantis to run, Trump said, the Florida governor “could hurt himself very badly.”

So far, DeSantis hasn’t hurt himself at all. He’s been able to build a huge base of support in Florida, straddling the lines between competent administrator (If he runs for president, he’s sure to point to his handling of the pandemic, as compared to the disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, responsible for the state’s nursing home scandal), conservative, and Trump-style troll (as evinced in his apery of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s transport of undocumented immigrants to blue states).

Coming days will reveal more information about how Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters cast their ballots, but they are clearly shifting Republican – and DeSantis has made huge headway with, at least, Hispanic voters in his state, beating Biden’s share of that demographic’s vote in 2020. While commentators then pointed to Cubans and Venezuelans fearing the stated socialism of AOC, Sanders, and their bloc, the same explanation doesn’t hold now. DeSantis won 50 percent of all Hispanic voters in Florida, and a whopping 55 percent of Puerto Rican voters in the state.

The Florida governor is clearly the rising star in the Republican Party, and, if that dynamic isn’t halted, it likely means an eclipse for the Democrats. DeSantis might actually be able to purge the GOP of Trump’s influence, or at least to wrest control from him. That, combined with the quite obvious rebuke of Trumpism by the voters, can expunge MAGA and rob the Democrats of their key talking point in 2022. In 2024, they’ll have to focus on their record and the state of the country, and economists are still predicting a recession.

And if DeSantis becomes the Republican nominee, Biden would not stand a chance. Biden won in 2020 by promising not to be Trump. While Biden and the Democrats didn’t seem to get the message, it was pretty clear: voters wanted simply a return to normalcy, to pre-Trump politics. They didn’t want a lurch to the left or to the right; they wanted to make America normal again. Biden hasn’t done that; everyone who’s honest admits that there’s something terribly amiss in the Biden administration’s handling of almost everything, and the president isn’t even able to hold his own against friendly interviewers. How will he perform against DeSantis who will, after winning the primary and hew moderate? DeSantis is a fairly skilled orator, full of facts and figures, easily able to defeat Biden in a debate.

Each party has work to do. For Republicans, the steps forward are clear: expunge Trump’s influence. For Democrats, the work is clear, but both the problem and the necessary steps forward are obscured by the fog of victory. Recent Democratic statements seem to indicate that Biden and his inner circle, as well as many legislative Democrats, believe that there has been a vindication of their policies, encouraging them to simply keep doing what they’ve done for the past two years. That, though, is a path to electoral disaster. As for the actual steps the Democrats should take moving forward, George Will has some decent suggestions.

If Trump is gone, a winning strategy will no longer consist of not being Trump.

Sanders, Corbyn, Anti-Semitism, and the Left’s Lack of Introspection

The spectacular collapse of the UK’s Labour Party in the December 12 elections – the party hasn’t fared so poorly since 1935 – was caused by a complex web of interconnecting factors, including feelings about Brexit, how far left is “too far”, disenchantment in working class areas such as northeastern England, and the party’s anti-Semitism crisis. It’s hard to know how much of a factor anti-Semitism played in Corbyn’s electoral disintegration, given the country’s very small Jewish population and entrenched anti-Semitism on the right. Still, it is likely to have played some role, and American progressives, if they want to retake the White House next year, should try to take that important lesson. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is more entrenched on the left than many would like to admit.

A mini-fury broke out on Twitter over the past few days after conservative commentator Noah Rothman published a piece in Commentary magazine suggesting that it is worth looking into whether the Sanders campaign has an anti-Semitism problem. The response to Rothman’s piece was far from measured. People on Twitter asked “Who’s cutting the checks?”, accused the author of donating to Klansman David Duke’s campaign (Duke, by the way, has previously accused Rothman of spreading “Talmudic” lies), and even made random accusations of child abuse.

For the most part, what happens on Twitter doesn’t matter. But the response to Rothman’s article is important, because it illustrates that the same tendencies at play in the anti-Semitism crisis in the Labour Party are at play in the U.S.

Ad hominem

The ad hominem condemnations of Rothman are analogous to Corbyn supporters’ attempts to pin the whole anti-Semitism row, to use the British term, on right-wing propaganda. They’ve accused even The Guardian, a British liberal newspaper, of conspiring against Corbyn. Rothman is, of course, a conservative, but he’s hardly a liar or a propagandist for Trump: he’s argued that the president should be impeached, condemned hypocrisy in the GOP, and critiqued the GOP’s entanglement with white nationalists on the eve of the 2016 election. What’s more, these kinds of responses simply dodge the questions raised, which everyone should be asking.

“Anti-Zionism isn’t Anti-Semitism”

When defending Labour or many of Sanders’ supporters, the most common refrains are, “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism” and  “you can’t equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.” The most obvious point to make is that, in most cases, anti-Zionists are anti-Semites, and much of the time Israel has nothing to do with the discussion. Remember that Labour supporters used the same argument to defend everything that’s happened in their party, while a report to the European Human Rights Commission detailing Labour’s anti-Semitism featured quotes from anti-Zionists saying things like “The only reason we have prostitutes in the [area] is because of the Jews” or Jews should “be grateful we don’t make them eat bacon for breakfast everyday” or “Shut the fuck up, Jew” or “Hitler was right”. 

The second reply, related to the first, is that many who’ve condemned “progressive” anti-Semites in the U.S. and the UK say very little about anti-Zionism or, in fact, criticism of the State of Israel or its policies. Much of the anti-Semitism isn’t actually hidden behind anti-Zionism, or, when it is related, is only tangentially so.

The third reply is that, while normal criticism of Israel is fine, common, and even encouraged, singling Israel out as a uniquely bad actor on the world scene is both anti-Semitic and wrong. States in the very same region are committing horrific war crimes, as in Syria and Yemen. Nothing any Israel has ever done could come close to what is happening there. The fact that Israel has been condemned by the UN’s human rights body more than any other country in the world – combined – is also obviously anti-Semitic, as it is a prime example of singling out the Jewish state as the world’s worst actor – worse the than genocide-loving and democracy-smashing Chinese regime or North Korea.

And anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Aside from a tiny number of anarchists who argue for the abolition of all states and the miniscule grouping of Charedi dynasties (notably Neturei Karta and the Satmars) who oppose Israel’s statehood on religious grounds, anti-Zionists have embraced anti-Semitism. To argue that all other states in the world have a right to exist, but that Israel does not is anti-Semitic. To go further, to say that many other states are perfectly fine having laws extending citizenship to those born abroad based on ancestral membership of the nation (Ireland, Poland, etc., all have similar laws), while it is discrimination when Israel does it, is anti-Semitism.

“Sanders is Jewish and had family who died in the Holocaust”

Many have argued that Rothman and others who have criticized the Sanders campaign on this point are wrong, because Sanders can’t be an anti-Semite, since he is Jewish and had family who died in the Holocaust. This is a strange argument, because virtually no one, certainly not Rothman in his piece, has accused Sanders of anti-Semitism, and it is hard to  imagine that anyone thinks Sanders harbors such hatreds. The problem is that, for whatever reason, Sanders has brought on as surrogates and staff people who have made blatantly anti-Semitic comments at best, and who are extreme anti-Semites at worst.

The campaign’s anti-Semites

One of these anti-Semites is the wealthy (in 2017, she was paid about $70,000 by the Women’s March and about $26,000 by another organization alone) Park Slope activist Linda Sarsour, whom Sanders has made a national campaign surrogate. It is not necessary to say much about her, as she has a fairly long and well-known record of anti-Semitic comments, the reason for which she had to leave the Women’s March leadership. Speaking of progressive Zionists at a conference on Nov. 29, Sarsour said,  “Ask them this, to explain to you how can you be against white supremacy in America and the idea of being in a state based on race and class, but then you support a state like Israel that is based on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.” After being condemned for her comments, she claimed she was speaking of the recent nation state law, though the video of her speech shows this was clearly not the case.

The idea that Jews see themselves as a superior race is a long-standing anti-Semitic trope, closely related to the ideas that Jews are puppeteers pulling the world’s strings. Beyond that, Sarsour’s implication is that a person cannot be a Zionist and a progressive. Given that Zionism means only supporting the right of the Jewish state to exist, and that polling shows 90 or 95 percent of American Jews support Israel, Sarsour’s was effectively saying you can’t be a Jew and a progressive, because you support a form of racial supremacy. In other words, “You don’t belong here, Jew.”

On Dec. 4, the Sanders campaign had to rid itself of new hire Darius Johnson, who’d been tapped for the position of Deputy Director of Constituency Organizing, because in prior years he’d tweeted anti-Semitic (and homophobic) content, including a message relating to “Jew money.” The campaign’s deputy press secretary, Belén Sisa, said that Jews seem to have a “dual allegiance to the State of Israel.” 

Another Sanders ally, Rep. Ilhan Omar has also made blatantly anti-Semitic statements recently. She and her allies have sought to cast any criticism for her statements as “Islamophobia, simply because she is a Muslim woman from Somalia. But this is a smokescreen; she also deserves to be condemned when she speaks hatefully against Jews or any other persecuted group.

Why are anti-Semites so visible in the campaign?

Bernie Sanders is not an anti-Semite. He advocates a different U.S policy towards Israel, but does not seek its destruction or abolition; he supports a two-state solution, as does most of the American Jewish community. On top of that, Sanders has shown over the years that he legitimately believes in a more humane society, and has demonstrated over and over again that he sees the oppression of any group as anathema to the “democratic socialism” that he advocates. It is not necessary to support or embrace his beliefs to see that he is a true believer in them. But his campaign has given a national platform to anti-Semites. Why?

Having worked in campaigns off and on for a couple decades, I know that one person is pivotal: the campaign manager. The best candidates hire a good campaign manager, and then listen to that manager’s orders. Politico Faiz Shakir, who has previously worked for Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid, is Sanders’s campaign director. Shakir had already been criticized for anti-Israel bias when he was brought on board. He was the editor of Think Progress when that online outlet, a product of the Center for American Progress, came under fire for bias against Israel. The anti-Israel animosity was so pronounced that the Obama White House announced that it was “troubled” by the tone of the blog. Shakir seems to have a penchant for stumbling into anti-Semitism controversies. Whether or not Shakir is himself an anti-Semite, he is not much on guard against anti-Semitism. And, as the American left is currently configured, not purposely locking the doors on anti-Semites means that they will enter your organization. 

My own best guess as to “Why?” is that the Sanders’ campaign is as much a product of the overall modern American left as it is of Sanders himself. Having spent time in this milieu myself, I know that anti-Semitism is much more prevalent than most people would assume; one often only needs to scratch the surface. The Women’s March meltdown, in which Sarsour played a leading role, is a salient example of anti-Semitism in progressive spaces, as was the banning of the Star of David at the DC Dyke March.

Anti-Semitism is a unique form of hatred that fits on the left and right equally well: the idea of the Jew as the rich globalist comports easily enough with the loathed capitalist. The multinational banks that pushed Latin America into a global debt crisis fits snugly into the Jewish banker trope.

Beyond easy parallels, the notion that “Zionism is racism,” an idea manufactured in the Soviet Union to fit foreign policy aims and adopted for several decades by the United Nations, became commonly accepted by progressives, as it is to this day, long after the Soviet Union disintegrated and the UN reversed itself on Zionism. If you don’t want to take my word on Soviet anti-Zionism’s relationship to anti-Semitism,  simply check out this article from an early 1980s issue of Australian Left Review, the official journal of the Communist Party of Australia. Even Pravda acknowledged in 1990 that the Party had erred, and that the anti-Zionist campaign had given new life to anti-Semitism: “Hiding under Marxist phraseology,” Pravda stated, the leaders of the campaign “came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism, and on Jews in general.” Unfortunately, no one in the West appears to have read the editorial; perhaps more leftists need to read later issues of Pravda. Keep in mind that the Soviets spent millions of dollars spreading their anti-Zionist campaign throughout the world.

Now we are left with a left that believes Zionism is racism. To believe that, one must logically believe that Israel, the product of Zionism, is a racist creation. Trace this horrific logic a step further, and supporters of Israel – including about 90 percent of American Jews – become racists (as Sarsour alluded).  

For the first time in decades, a major political campaign is openly left-wing. This is a step forward for progressives, but it brings with it all the baggage that had been easily hidden from view by an unwatchful public before. Sanders himself seems to have an early Socialist Party mentality, in that he sees the class struggle as paramount, above all else. According to this logic, fighting racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other social maladies are laudable, but come second to winning the class struggle, i.e. putting the working class into political power. Doing that, these early socialists argued, would automatically lay the conditions that would naturally cause these social ailments to disappear. Of course, none of that is true, as the experience of all socialist societies, from Sweden to the Soviet Union, shows. Still, Sanders seems to have long embraced this principle and is only now slowly moving away from it; the class reductionist approach is the reason Sanders has found himself in trouble with, among others, the African American community.

The need to get rid of anti-Semitism

Some defenders of Sanders’ campaign argue that there is far more anti-Semitism on the Trump side of the political aisle. Whether or not that is true, it doesn’t excuse anti-Semitism anywhere, just as racism and sexism are inexcusable on the left, even if they are more extreme on the right. This is a moral issue of justice; it is incumbent upon Sanders to purge his campaign of anti-Semites. Rothman, the conservative columnist, is right: everyone should bring up the anti-Semitism issue with Sanders. Hopefully, this will move him to get rid of Sarsour and other anti-Semites on his team.

For anyone aiming to oust Trump in the coming election, it should be obvious that anti-Semitism cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. Jews have been a vital component of the Democratic Party, and are one of the most solid Democratic-voting demographics. Hundreds of thousands of Jews happen to be clustered in Florida, a swing state. All of Florida’s 29 electoral votes were awarded to Trump in 2016, who won the state by only about 113,000 votes. The most heavily Democratic section of the state is Broward County, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties. This is also an area with a huge concentration of Jewish voters. It’s unlikely that Jews would in majority switch to Trump, but it is not out of the question that a perceived Corbynization of the Democratic Party, or at least the Democratic presidential campaign, could depress enough people into staying home.

Ensuring the maxim turnout against Trump is important, especially given his growing popularity.

Do the right thing

Sanders has a shot at winning the nomination, as he has been polling well. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is not currently likely a deal-breaker for the Democratic primaries, but it can do real harm in the national election. Besides that, it is a major moral stain on any campaign that allows it, and, if not immediately, a dangerous threat to American Jews and to America itself in the long term. It’s up to Sanders to get rid of the the stain on his campaign, and it’s up to all people of good will to push him to do so.

Image: Anti-Zionist display at a 1972 Soviet parade. Photo by Vladimir Sychev, assumed to be public domain.

Thoughts on the North Korea situation

Watching the current situation unfold on the Korean peninsula, it’s hard not to think, “We’ve been here before,” or “Been there, done that..” While it’s always a dangerous idea on anyone’s behalf to ratchet up tensions in that corner of Asia, this seems particularly the case now, with Donald Trump in the White House. However qualified Mattis is, Trump has the final say on what happens, and he is dangerously inexperienced.

With that said, here are a few thoughts on the Korean situation.

1. As evil as the regime is, its collapse might be worse than its existence, at least currently. Reports of gulags that make Stalin’s look like Disney World, concentration camps, mind control practiced by the state, the mass rape of women and children; all of these things are of course horrifying, and should make any person of goodwill tremble with indignation. The regime, which has the Orwellian “Democratic People’s Republic” as its name, deserves to be destroyed, morally speaking. But thinking pragmatically, we have to ask what could replace it. Were the Pyongyang government to collapse, the meager system of public distribution still in place would disintegrate, probably causing even wider starvation than is currently being experienced. Collapse would mean that the few nuclear devices Pyongyang controls would likely vanish in the chaos, probably to be sold by whoever obtains them to the terror group offering the most hard cash.

Collapse would throw the region into chaos. A refugee crisis, potentially bigger than any other, would erupt. No one can predict what millions of fleeing North Koreans would be met with at China’s border, and South Korea would have no way to handle the flow.

2.The North Koreans will not start a war, at least not on purpose. The regime thrives off of confrontation and anti-Americanism, mixed with anti-Japanese rhetoric and outright racism against non-Koreans. The Kim family has long held itself up as the defenders of the Korean people against an evil outside world dominated by “American imperialists.” With the collapse in the 1990s of most public services, the diversion of nearly all wealth to the military under the state’s Songun policy, and the continued immiseration of the North Korean people, this claim is all the regime has to legitimize itself in its people’s eyes. Therefore, they will constantly issue threats and make dangerous provocations, but they will not do anything that they believe will cause a war, which they know they will lose handily.

Everything in North Korea is done for regime survival: the personality cult, the mass terror, the theatrics of the Mass Games, and more are all based on protecting the standing and privileges of Kim and his inner circle. Starting a war is simply not in their interest. However, there is the potential that the dangerously insulated regime could miscalculate and do something that provokes a war.

North Korea won’t, we can be sure, lob missiles at South Korea or Japan or the U.S. We should continue any covert operations to disrupt their missile testing, but it is a waste of time to install missile defense systems against them. It is up to the leaders in Washington, Beijing, Seoul, and to some extent, Tokyo and Moscow, to make sure war doesn’t break out.

3.War would make everything worse. In some instances and places, war is necessary, our Civil War and World War II being the most obvious examples, with George H.W. Bush’s first Gulf War being perhaps another. Intervention in Rwanda by someone could have helped prevent a genocide, or at least end it sooner. A no-fly zone in Syria, while not a war, would be a military action that could be a relief for hundreds of thousands of suffering civilians. The Korea situation, though, is not one of those instances.

If war breaks out there, it could lead to some sort of limited nuclear conflict. But the nukes are the least of the potential worries; a bigger threat is Pyongyang’s conventional army, which could destroy much of South Korea more quickly than we could neutralize them.

4. Peace will destroy the North Korean regime; the U.S. should give North Korea what they (say they) want, i.e. to hold bilateral talks, though not at the dangerously legitimizing head of state level, and figure out some way to sign a peace treaty with the rogue state. This is hard, because the U.S. was never technically at war with NK; it was a UN action. The armistice agreement was between several countries, and the UN maintains the UNMIK there. North Korea purposely tries to make it impossible for a peace treaty to end the war, because, as mentioned above, their only legitimacy comes from animosity towards the U.S. They demand that the U.S. sign a treaty, and refuse to sign with the UN or other disputants. Still, the U.S. should find a way to sign some sort of treaty with Pyongyang. This will remove any legitimacy the regime has, and make it impossible for them to continue their evil existence much longer.

5. Manage the transition. Once North Korea no longer has the U.S. as it’s bete noire, the regime’s control will begin to slip further and further, until transition becomes inevitable. That is good, but, like I was mentioning above, collapse would cause untold suffering.

Once the North Korean leadership “wins,” it will know it has lost, and the U.S. and, especially, China, can begin to make changes in North Korea behind the scenes. How this happens would have to be worked out, but it would require some mutual trust and understanding of benefits between the U.S. and China. There is a lot of common interest for stability in the region.

China cares less about human rights than South Korea, Japan, or the U.S. (which, under the Trump administration, is also not that much). Still, during the transition, this is one of the things that these countries (pushed by NGOs like Human Rights watch, as well as the UN system) can begin to ensure. China has an interest in keeping the North Korean people fed, because they don’t want a refugee crisis at their border.

As I stated above, these are just a few disparate thoughts on the situation in North Korea. They are more about the general US/NK relationship than the specifics of what Trump and Tillerson are talking about, but I think they are germane. Any comments or criticism are welcome, of course.

Image: Kids searching for food in North Korea, via Wikimedia Commons.

Islam and Terror?

The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency has raised, once again, the question of the relationship between Islam and terror. Unfortunately, the conversation in the United States, at least at the popular level, has tended to be highly clichéd.

Anyone who is able to look at the world and form cogent thoughts should be able to see that the planet’s billion or so Muslims are not inherently violent, at least not more so than other humans. The vast majority live in peace, very often with Christian or Jewish neighbors. Still, while “Islam is a religion of peace” is a nice thing to say, and is usually said by the well meaning, the statement falls short. First, there are clearly Muslims, even if a tiny minority, who don’t believe it. Who are non-believers like me to disagree with them? I don’t have any moral standing to say to these people, “You are not truly good Muslims.” My doing so would be akin to a rabbi showing up at a conservative Southern Baptist Church and telling the congregants that they’re bad Christians because they don’t follow the faith as laid down by the world’s billion Catholics.

All of the world’s large religions (and perhaps all of the world’s small cults) have blood on their hands: Indian Hindus, including the current prime minister of India, have had a hand in massacring Muslims, as have Burmese Buddhists; Japan’s Shinto faith helped to justify that nation’s atrocities in China and Korea; and Catholics packed shrapnel into pipe bombs to kill as many civilians as possible in London shopping malls, not to mention its thousands of years of pogroms against Jews. The list goes on, though each of these faiths also has its share of peacemakers and justice lovers as well. While all of them have a majority of faithful adherents who are good people, none has earned the moniker “religion of peace.”

Islam, just like other religions, has faithful members who, because of their religious beliefs, kill innocents. The reverse is true as well: like those of other faiths, Muslims have have given their lives to help others, Muslim or not. Still, the question arises: why does it seem that the majority of religious inspired violence involves a radical version of Islamism (political Islam, a relatively recent invention)? I would argue that there are two reasons, each of which only applies in certain parts of the world, and neither of which can be found in the Koran or the Hadiths.

The first reason involves sections of the Muslim world, most especially the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as well as parts of South Asia. There is true butchery carried out in these regions most of it committed by those professing to be Muslim. Famous examples are ISIL and al-Qaeda, but there are other groups as well: al Shabaab in and around Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, etc. Looking at this section of the world – which represents a huge swath of humanity, as well as a sizable portion of the world’s Muslims – it becomes easy to see how it is that many observers would take from a superficial glance that Islam is the cause of the trouble. But these observers are mistaken; Islam isn’t a cause, but a confounding variable. A more rational answer comes when we step back from viewing Islam as the area’s common feature, and instead focus elsewhere. The more important unifying feature is the region’s lack of strong institutions, the most important of which is the state.

No area wrought by Islamist violence has a strong state. According to Max Weber’s widely accepted definition, a modern state is bureaucratic (meaning that its servants are selected based on qualifications, not familial relationships), and it maintains a monopoly of legitimate violence. All violence should flow from the state for reasons accepted as legitimate, e.g. stopping criminals or defending from foreign invaders; any other should be met with strong sanction. But as Samuel Huntington illustrated in his Political Order in Changing Societies, arguing against those who believe that economic development causes a society and its state to become more orderly and modern, the process of economic development before strong institutions have been introduced causes societies to become more and more disordered, i.e. it starts a process of political decay. Without a state that is able to really impose order and act as the sole arbiter of force, violence stays common and decentralized.

States did not simply spring into being; they arose out of war, as sociologist Charles Tilly noted first in his “War and State Making as Organized Crime”: before states existed, groups plundered and took territory; after they took the territory, they had to govern it; they “taxed” those they’d plundered in exchange for protection from others: the plunderers/governors plundered more land, and so on, until they eventually formed a standing army, and a modern state with bureaucratic institutions was born. (Note: this is an extremely vulgarized explanation of Tilly’s argument; I highly encourage you to read the full article, linked above.) The violence and plunder, then, is a sort of “default” in human history, or at least human history post-hunter-gatherer society, and much of the violence we are seeing in MENA and other areas without strong institutions is of the same variety that produced, quite by accident, the states that later democratized and became the modern Western democracies we now know. This is the process by which states rose in Europe. These “pristine” states were letter recreated through settler colonies in the Americas (especially North America). The rest of the world, however, was colonized before modern states could be built (or, was colonized after modern states had been built and had then collapsed, as in China). The “states” left after decolonization looked like pristine states – with capitals, parliaments, armies, and such – but they never gained the legitimacy (that is, the acceptance by the people they supposedly ruled over) that the European states had been able to build due to their centuries of development. Of course, there are exceptions. Due to historical factors too detailed to go into here, modern states with strong institutions have arisen in other places – South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, to name a few – but suffice it to say that these were exceptions that can be easily explained based on historical facts. And, of course, the former Communist states are in various levels of development.

ISIL is a perfect illustration of the problem: this group even call itself the Islamic State, and they’ve succeeded at building a proto-state in the regions that they have conquered. They use the progressively more extreme and perverted version of the faith to encourage their followers to ever more cruel, yet effective, ends. Social psychology’s group polarization theory offers some explanation for how ISIS has been able to become so extreme in its violence, far more explanation than can be found reading the Koran. Also adding to the mix is the fact that a portion of ISIS’s leadership is composed of ex-Baathists, ousted from Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, which, due to de-Baathification, destroyed what little institutional stability there was in Iraq to begin with).

Thus, Islam isn’t the reason for the violence, but the mask placed over it as justification. Islam can, and certainly has been, quite comfortable with modernity. In his Being Arab, Samir Kassir, the former Lebanese Communist leader murdered by Syria’s Baathist dictatorship, made much of the fact that the Arab world, for centuries mostly Islamic, was a stronghold of modernity by the 1930s. Cairo was a hotbed of the women’s rights movement at that time, and was only behind Hollywood and Bollywood in film production. This changed in part with the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, long the most backward and fundamentalist of the Arab states. Using oil money, the Saudi kingdom exported their version of Islam, as Kassir noted, around the Arab world. The destruction of colonial institutions (often by the colonizers themselves); constant interference by the world’s two hegemons during the Cold War; the chaos of the Iraq War; and, eventually, even the Arab Spring led to the disintegration of what little institutions there were. (It is worth adding that, with the fall of the Soviet Union; the co-optation of “secularism” by highly repressive regimes in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere; and brutal repression from monarchical governments, the secular left movements were crushed or delegitimized as well, and could no longer provide a vehicle to channel violence and build institutions). Thus, when the inevitable violence began, it was draped in, and bolstered by, Islam, prevalent faith in the region.

Again: Islam has been able to deal well with modernity. Look to the majority Muslim sections of eastern Europe and you find relatively peaceful people. For 70 years, Muslims, Christians, and atheists lived at peace in Yugoslavia, and conflicts arose only when, as could be imagined, the federal state itself collapsed. Further, none of these conflicts were primarily religious; instead they were ethnic and national: Bosnian vs. Croatian vs. Serbian, for example. In Albania, probably a Muslim majority nation (though poll results are widely disparate), there has been no widespread terror or disturbances. The difference between Albania and MENA obviously isn’t religious; instead, the difference is the state. After the Communist regime was overthrown in 1989, the state was transformed, but not destroyed; the bureaucracy continued to function.

All of the explanation above answers the question of violence in Muslim sections of the developing world. But what of the terrorist attacks that have been happening in the West, so-called “homegrown terrorists”? Obviously, America has a strong bureaucracy, as do the European states that have experienced violence. While some incidents have been committed by refugees from areas experiencing violence, a phenomenon far more pronounced in Europe, many of the acts have been committed by those born in the U.S. or in EU states. The explanation for these terrorists is much simpler: they are misfits, social outcasts, who have become violent.

The western world has a long history of violent social outcasts, which we periodically forget. In the 1960s, young westerners joined groups like the Baader-Meinhoff clique (Red Brigade) or the Japanese Red Army or the Weathermen or the Communist Party USA/Provisional, which blew up a townhouse in Greenwich Village. These groups all committed terror, as did the Symbionese Liberation Army and a host of others. At that time, the menace that the West feared was communism, but the official Communist Parties (CPUSA, Japanese Communist Party, DKP, etc.) didn’t advocate a violent revolution, so the more outcast, prone to violence members of society joined or created groups that called themselves communist, but which practiced terror.

As the “communist” terror groups receded, we began to see lone wolf acts of violence. School shootings started in the 1980s, and the trend has continued, with the Newtown massacre of elementary school-aged children being one of the most horrific of the incidents. These instances, perpetuated generally by young males who were isolated from society and (since it came into being) on the internet are the milieu out of which American homegrown Islamist radicals emerge. The brothers who bombed the Boston marathon are not different than the friends who killed high school kids in Columbine. The latter were nihilists, and so were the former. They slapped the label of “Islamic radical,” now one of America’s worst fears, on themselves to seem even more outré, or to emphasize how much they hate the society they were isolated from. This is the case too with the Orlando massacre perpetrator and other “lone wolves.”

The West, and America especially, has a problem with isolated people who become violent, often after immersing themselves in negative, anti-social material. Years ago, it was an extreme variant of the communist movement; now it is an extreme variant of Islam, in short, anything that terrifies Americans. Now, thanks to ISIL, al-Qaeda, and other groupings, there is a whole world of nihilistic death-cult ideology for these people to immerse themselves in.

It is good for Muslims to stand up and speak out against violent acts committed in their name (everyone should speak out against violent acts committed in their name), and by and large they are doing this. When Muslims argue that Islam is a religion of peace, they are arguing for their, peaceful, interpretation of Islam over that of the fanatical sects, including the ideology of death perpetuated by ISIL and others of that ilk. The same is the case with Catholics and other Christians who argue that, for example, the Westborough Baptist Church members are not real Christians.

The real solution to these problems, however, are not uniform: in the West, in addition to punishing violent nihilists, we have to erode the isolation and conditions that lead some people to commit acts of terror, disrupt these people’s networks, online and off. Further, we have to somehow reverse the atomization of our society (as described in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone). Reversing atomization, though, will be harder and requires creativity. In other parts of the world, fighting and killing violent extremists is part of the solution, but only part. The other, harder, part is to build the institutions that can provide political order and monopolize violence.

These are gargantuan tasks, and they won’t be won in the battle of ideas. And they certainly won’t be ridiculous “Muslim bans.”

Image by Edward Muslak under a Creative Commons copyright.

Yesterday’s Terror: Are We Already Starting to Forget?

As I write this, the block where I used to work in Chelsea, New York City, is still an active crime scene, as investigators try to determine who is responsible for yesterday’s terrorist attack on Manhattan. What is most remarkable, however, is how unremarkable much of the public seems to find what happened.

For the record, I am calling yesterday’s attempt at carnage by a thankfully incompetent plotter a terrorist attack, even though Mayor DeBlasio and Hillary Clinton have not done so yet. While they are trying to be prudent, I have to agree with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who noted that when someone detonates a bomb in New York City, there really is not much else one can label the action. What’s the reason for caution in calling what happened the proper and most descriptive name? If the perpetrators turn out not to be connected to ISIS or some other overseas Islamist entity, the bomber(s) is still a terrorist. It seems that some liberal Democrats have internalized the notion that terror is an Islamic thing, and, in their zeal not to appear Islamophobic, have shown internalized anti-Islam. They should work on that. Indeed, if the perpetrators were anarchists, it was terror. If they were black nationalists, it was terror. If they were 70s-style Maoists, it was terror. If they were supporters of Trump, it was terror. Maybe it was left-wing terror; maybe it was right-wing terror; maybe it was anti-gay terror. Maybe it was Islamist terror.

And the terrorists’ intent wasn’t confined only to 23rd Street, as we now know. A similar device that thankfully failed to detonate was found on 27th Street. The investigators have announced that the devices in Chelsea, as well as the bomb that exploded on the Jersey Shore yesterday, were made using old-fashioned flip phones, suggesting that all the bombs were made by the same group or person.

But let’s look at the whole of yesterday in context. The evening before, six people were shot in Philadelphia by a mad gunman, one of whom, a 25-year-old woman, died of her wounds. Then the bomb went off in New Jersey near a parade, then the Manhattan bombing happened. At just about the same time at a mall in Saint Cloud, Minn., a man dressed as a guard rambling about Allah went on a stabbing rampage, injuring at least eight people. (ISIS has claimed responsibility for that.)

An armed rampage, two bombings, and a stabbing spree. Philadelphia, Minnesota, and New York.

These horrific happenings mix the sorts of things that Americans used to actually notice together: lone gunmen, terrorists, deranged individuals. But already everything is returning to normal; Facebook feeds are back to talk of football games and whether Hillary’s brief coughing fit means she has tuberculosis.

More and more, it seems that there is a new normal, and it sprang upon us so quickly that no one noticed. Even five years ago, people would have been horrified for days by a bomb in NYC (anyone remember when some chemicals caused an explosion in Manhattan about ten years ago, creating ’round the clock coverage in the media for days? Or when the lights going off in much of the country due to poor planning by the utility providers stoked fear that al-Qaeda-induced Armageddon was upon America?) I have always been quick to point out that Americans are sometimes too fearful, and in many ways, we still are. But the new normal, in which people take little note of terror and violent rampages, does not at all bode well. It’s as if we are in a society that’s become numb. Is it worse for Americans to live in fear of the ongoing horrors that started with, perhaps, Columbine? Or is it worse that these things have become so common that people scarcely even take note?

Perhaps people’s seeming apathy is a defense mechanism. After all, the vast majority of the country wanted some slight gun control measures, which wouldn’t have even approached anything close to the level of restrictions in many states, enacted nationally. The president, the most powerful man in the world, pushed hard for these measures after Newtown’s violence. Perhaps when America mourned scores of dead schoolchildren and said, along with their president, “Never again!” only to find out that Congress’s reply was a tacit signal that “again” was far more acceptable than a few meager gun control measures, people decided to turn off their feelings. Or, perhaps, it was the fact that such an evil action, that surely has a complex tapestry of causes – access to guns; poor mental health care nationally; the failure of anyone to notice in advance that the madman was, in fact, mad; such poor security in the school itself despite multiple instances of school shootings; a general spiritual malaise in the national psyche, especially pronounced in the youth – was reduced to bickering about gun control and sloganeering.

Maybe, after Orlando, as it has become apparent that the vast security state the U.S. had built up is not enough to keep a club of young people dancing and enjoying life safe from a local terrorist, people decided it was best to check their feelings.

Add to this new normal the routinization of the type of hateful rhetoric spewed by the Trump campaign and his followers on the right, along with the growing anti-Americanism on the left, and the picture of America that emerges is of a nation on the verge of disintegration, or something far worse.

It might feel good to keep ourselves emotionally unconnected to what’s going on around us. It felt good through much of our history, until we found out – in 2001 – that America is not some isolated land safe from the horrors of the rest of the world. Perhaps it feels good now to believe that the violence we see on TV is so rare that we won’t be affected.

Trouble is brewing across the country. We should meet it face to face before it engulfs everything.

Alienation and despair: The dark side of progress

Clearly something is wrong in the Western world.

These problems are most evident in the UK and the U.S. In Britain, a campaign propelled by fear of immigrants and multiculturalism was able to capture more than half the vote, making it highly likely that Britain will leave the European Union, causing the fall of a prime minister, and potentially leading to the breakup of the United Kingdom itself. In the United States, the situation is even more dire. The presidential campaign of Donald Trump – who has been called a fascist, not just by the left, but by fellow Republicans – has brought to the surface tensions that must have been simmering for years. His rallies, and now the Republican National Convention, are showcases of the politics of hate and fear, and they have very often led to violence. Instead of calling for an end to the violence, Trump has urged his thugs on. In Dorchester, Boston, after two white men beat a homeless Hispanic man savagely, and then saying they were inspired by Trump’s campaign, he called his supporters “passionate.” Only a few years ago, these kinds of antics would have destroyed a presidential campaign; now they bolster it. The Republican Party, unsure of what to do, is in a shambles. Mass shootings have become commonplace: in less than a month, we have seen a “self-radicalized” ISIS supporter open fire in a crowded gay Orlando nightclub, killing dozens. While the nation was still trying to recover from that event (which happened as America was still trying to recover from the previous mass shooting), two police shootings took place, provoking outrage across the country. Who was outraged, and by what, highlighted the racial divisions in this country that many Americans had thought, as recently as 2008, were becoming a thing of the past. Since then, a lone gunman shot nearly a dozen police officers in Dallas, and then another lone gunman shot some in Baton Rouge.

America and the UK, lost in turmoil. But turmoil is spreading elsewhere as well. In the midst of America’s madness, another “self-radicalized” person ran a truck into a crowd of hundreds of people in Nice, France, as they were celebrating Bastille Day. France, of course, has been no stranger to terrorism caused by “self-radicalized” Islamists (one might argue, nihilists, since they seem to worship killing more than Allah). The violence in Nice was the third such event in less than two years, with the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January 2015 and the rampage in Paris only months after. These were not specifically French affairs; as it turned out, there were connections to a network in Brussels – the capital of Europe.

It would be a mistake not to notice, sympathize with, and send solidarity to those who suffer violence around the world: the hundreds killed in Baghdad, the young girls still missing in Nigeria, the victims of ongoing civil wars across the African continent, the victims of inter-communal violence in India, Muslims persecuted in Burma, Jews killed by terrorists in Israel, the victims of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and so on. But there seems to be something new, something different, going on in the West than had previously been the case. While we can generally get a sense of the troubles in much of the rest of the world, the malaise in the West seems different because it is newer. (Again, this is a sweeping generalization, and there are many exceptions.)

But what is going on in, most especially, America? Why does it feel like we are in the midst of a societal breakdown?

Marxists have long argued that the economic relations of a society, its base, determine everything else (the “superstructure”). This has generally proven to be somewhat true, and it follows that when the economic base of society changes, the whole society will change. And right now, we are seeing one of the most fundamental economic changes, rooted in technological innovation, that the world has ever seen.

To be sure, the Industrial Revolution revolutionized societies, and quickly. “All that is solid melts into the air,” Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, describing the changes that the revolution brought about. As everyone who has researched it knows, it was a horrible time for humanity, as progressive as it was: children worked long days in the factories, there was little to nothing in the way of social security or social welfare. Luckily, we have (mostly) moved past all that. But there was something different about that period, when the capitalist system was rising, than now, during our current changes. To keep with the Marxist quotes, here is how Marx’s friend Frederick Engels described some of the changes, writing in 1847: “this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength.” Early capitalism in general and the Industrial Revolution in particular centralized; they brought people together.

Historians have described at great lengths the process of working people being brought together in factories. Prior to this centralization, people lived in feudal family units. These units were destabilized by the rise of the factory system, and they were transformed. But they were replaced: the feudal family became the nuclear family, and a new division of labor developed. It was a painful change, but centralization continued and people were again able to achieve some stability, especially in times and places like post-war America.

The new revolution, the information revolution, however, is different. It pulls in exactly the opposite direction from previous historical progress. As labor-saving technology has been implemented, factories have downsized, and as the costs of communication, transport, and relocation have plummeted, factories have moved away. Starting perhaps in the 1980s, when a huge belt of industrial areas began rusting, Americans could no longer count on going to work in the factories. Entire communities were decimated. Detroit was the most notable, but cities and towns across the country changed. People not only experienced economic insecurity – together – they began to experience social insecurity. Especially in the upper strata of the working class and the middle class, people have begun to search regionally, or nationally for work. Friends and loved ones now live further away than ever before, and social networks have become national in scope, even for the most average person.

All of this leads to weaker and weaker social bonds, more social isolation. Those who are economically insecure are now also socially insecure. The nuclear family broke down long ago, but nothing has come to replace it. Leftists a of generations ago dreamed of “smashing the family” and replacing it with a new society where everyone felt like family. The first part happened (thought the left had no hand in it), but society has become more and more atomized, and less and less conducive to close bonds between people.

While society’s economic base is evolving away from community life, humans have not. We evolved together, as social animals, over a course of more than 100,000 years (at least). While there are a few people here and there who are hermits, generally speaking, humans need community; without it, they feel a spiritual void. Without community, people become depressed, and they search for and join it wherever they can. Perhaps it is found in a Pentecostal church, or a street gang, or, as we are seeing among movements on the left and right, in identity politics. Or perhaps they find it somewhere else.

The idea that Americans, and, by extension, much of the industrialized world, are increasingly “bowling alone” is not new. Political scientist Robert Putnam noted this in a 1995 essay, and then in his famous book in 2000. What Putnam’s work could not have foreseen, though, was how pervasive the Internet has become. The period between when America was offline and when it was completely wired was extremely brief. Generation X first signed onto an online Bulletin Board Service, now arcane, as they finished up high school or entered college – and were astounded by the technology. Not even two decades later, the same people, now barely middle age, can scarcely comprehend the world they left behind when they sent their first email.

The online world has revolutionized cultural and community life. It is not necessary to share common interests with people nearby; you can find anything that interests you, and find friends, whom you have never met and likely never will meet, in far-flung corners of the nation or world. While for most of us, the vestiges of the old world, where friends and family we love are nearby, still remain, for the most socially isolated, all life is lived in the new world. Community is online.

And therein lies the danger: as anyone who reads the comments on a Youtube video knows, the most extreme ideas and beliefs are amplified by the anonymity of the Internet, and communities grow around them. The most socially isolated will find community where they find it: perhaps in a motor cars forum, or perhaps in an ISIS chat group. While in years past, someone with extremist ideas would most likely spend their days being kept in line by their local community, they now have a wide platform to spout their views, and they can easily find those who agree with them. Sociology shows us that people quickly adopt the norms of the group they interact with most. This is harmless if the online community is a UFC fight group, perhaps a bit pernicious if they become too involved in some other group, and downright scary if they become involved in extremist political or racial groups. Extremist beliefs are, as studies have shown, a much more accurate indicator of a tendency towards violence than mental illness ever has been.

None of America’s or the industrialized world’s old problems have gone away, either: inequality is still with us, environmental issues still plague us, racism and ethnic discrimination are still with us, sexism is still with us, and so on. Now all of these problems exist alongside, exacerbate, and are exacerbated by an ever-increasing and ever-new sense of insecurity and isolation. This is the brew out of which the seemingly senseless horrors that have started plaguing society have arisen, and there is no indication that any of that is about to change for the better.

What can be done about it? The answer is far from clear. While the old ideas of the left, that people should unite to fight for a better future, still sound nice, the whole economic and technological basis of society is pulling us in a much different direction. If these ideas were not successful during the days when industry and factories dominated the scene, it is hard to imagine how they can become successful now.

Unfortunately, it is also hard to imagine any other solution.

Photo by KD, used under a Creative Commons license.