American News

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      The Science of Rebuilding Trust

      by

      During his inauguration, President Joe Biden appealed to us, American citizens, repeatedly and emphatically, to defend unity and truth against corrosion from power and profit. Fortunately, the bedrock tensions between unity, truth, power and profit have newly-discovered mathematical definitions, so their formerly mysterious interactions can now be quantified, predicted and addressed. So in strictly (deeply) scientific terms, Biden described our core problem exactly right.

      Can We Build Social Trust in an Online World?

      READ MORE

      I applaud and validate President Biden’s distillation of the problem of finding and keeping the truth, and of trusting it together. Human trust is based on high-speed neuromechanical interaction between living creatures. Other kinds of trust not based on that are fake to some degree. Lies created for money and power damage trust most of all.

      A Moment of Silence

      As Biden showed in his first act in office, the first step toward rebuilding is a moment of silence. Avoiding words, slowing down, taking time, breathing, acknowledging common grievances and recognizing a common purpose are not just human needs, but necessary algorithmic steps as well. Those are essential to setting up our common strategy and gathering the starting data that we need to make things right.

      The next step, as Biden also said, is to recognize corrupting forces such as money and power — and I would also add recognition. The third step, as I propose below, is to counter those three forces explicitly in our quest for public truth, to do the exact opposite of what money, power and careerism do, and to counter and reverse every information-processing step at which money, power and recognition might get a hold.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Instead of using one panel of famous, well-funded experts deliberating a few hours in public, employ a dozen groups of anonymous lone geniuses, each group working separately in secret for months on the same common question. Have them release their reports simultaneously in multiple media. That way, the unplanned overlap shows most of what matters and a path to resolving the rest — an idea so crazy it just might work.

      Since I’m describing how to restore democracy algorithmically, I might as well provide an example of legislation in the algorithmic language too. To convey data-processing ideas clearly, and thereby to avoid wasting time and money building a system that won’t work, technologists display our proposals using oversimplified examples that software architects like myself call “reference implementations” and which narrative architects like my partner call “tutor texts.”

      These examples are not meant to actually work, but to unambiguously show off crucial principles. In the spirit of reference implementations, I present the following legislative proposal, written to get to the truth about one particular subject but easily rewritten to find the truth about other subjects such as global warming or fake news: The Defend the Growing Human Nervous System With Information Sciences Act.

      The Defend Act

      Over centuries, humankind has defended its children against physical extremes, dangerous chemicals and infectious organisms by resolute, rational application of the laws of nature via technology and medical science. Now is the time to use those same tools to defend our children’s growing nervous systems against the informational damage that presently undermines their trust in themselves, their families and their communities. Therefore, we here apply information science in order to understand how man-made communication helps and hurts the humans whom God made.

      The human race has discovered elemental universal laws governing processes from combustion to gravitation and from them created great and terrible technologies from fire and weapons to electricity grids and thermonuclear reactions. But no laws are more elemental than the laws of data and mathematics, and no technologies more universal and fast-growing than the mathematically-grounded technologies of information capture, processing and dissemination. Information science is changing the world we live in and, therefore, changing us as living, breathing human beings. How?

      The human race has dealt with challenges from its own technologies before. Slash-and-burn tactics eroded farmland; lead pipes poisoned water; city wells spread cholera; radioactivity caused cancer; refrigerants depleted ozone. And we have dealt with epidemics that propagated in weird and novel ways — both communicable diseases spread by touch, by body fluids, by insects, by behaviors, by drinking water, by food, and debilitating diseases of chemical imbalance, genetic dysregulation, immune collapse and misfolded proteins. Our science has both created and solved monumental problems.

      But just as no technology is more powerful than the information sciences, when deployed against an immature, growing, still-learning human nervous system, no toxin is more insidious than extractive or exploitive artificial information.

      The Defend the Growing Human Nervous System With Information Sciences Act aims to understand first and foremost the depth and texture of the threat to growing human nervous systems in order to communicate the problem to the public at large (not to solve the problem yet). This act’s approach is based on five premises about the newly-discovered sciences of information.

      .custom-post-from {float:left; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      First of all, there is an urgent global mental-health crisis tightly correlated over decades with consuming unnatural sensory inputs (such as from TV screens) and interacting in unnatural ways (such as using wireless devices). These technologies seem to undermine trust in one’s own senses and in one’s connections to others, with the youngest brains bearing the greatest hurt.

      Second, computer science understands information flowing in the real world. Numerical simulations faithfully replicate the laws of physics — of combustion, explosions, weather and gravitation — inside computers, thereby confirming we understand how nature works. Autonomous vehicles such as ocean gliders, autonomous drones, self-driving cars and walking robots, select and process signals from the outside to make trustworthy models, in order to move through the world. This neutral, technological understanding might illuminate the information flows that mature humans also use to do those same things and which growing humans use to learn how to do them.

      Third, the science of epidemiology understands the information flows of medical research. Research has discovered and countered countless dangerous chemical and biological influences through concepts like clinical trials, randomization, viral spread, dose-response curves and false positive/negative risks. These potent yet neutral medical lenses might identify the most damaging aspects of artificial sensory interactions, in preparation for countering them in the same way they have already done for lead, tar, nicotine, sugar, endocrine disruptors and so on. The specific approach will extend the existing understanding of micro-toxins and micro-injuries to include the new micro-deceptions and micro-behavioral manipulations that undermine trust.

      Fourth, the mathematics of management and communication understands the information flows of businesses. The economic spreadsheets and prediction models that presently micromanage business and market decisions worldwide can, when provided with these new metrics of human health and damage, calculate two new things. First, the most cost-effective ways to prevent and reduce damage. Second, such spreadsheets can quantify the degree to which well-accepted and legal practices of monetized influence — advertising, branding, lobbying, incentivizing, media campaigns and even threats — potentially make the information they touch untrustworthy and thereby undermine human trust.

      America has risen to great challenges before. At its inception, even before Alexis De Tocqueville praised the American communitarian can-do spirit, this country gathered its most brilliant thinkers in a Constitutional Convention. In war, it gathered them to invent and create a monster weapon. In peace, it gathered them to land on the Moon. Over time, Americans have understood and made inroads against lead poisoning, ozone destruction, polluted water, smog, acid rain, nicotine and trans-fats. Now, we need to assemble our clearest thinkers to combat the deepest damage of all: the damage to how we talk and think.

      Finally, we humans are spiritual and soulful beings. Our experiences and affections could never be captured in data or equations, whether of calorie consumption, body temperature, chemical balance or information flow. But just as we use such equations to defend our bodies against hunger, hypothermia or vitamin deficiency, we might also use them to defend against confusion, mistrust and loneliness, without in the process finding our own real lives replaced or eclipsed. In fact, if the human nervous system and soul are indeed damaged when mathematically-synthesized inputs replace real ones, then they will be freed from that unreality and that damage only when we understand which inputs help and hurt us most.

      Informational Threat

      The Defend Act tasks its teams to treat the human nervous system as an information-processing system with the same quantitative, scientific neutrality as medicine already treats us as heat-generating, oxygen-consuming, blood-pumping, self-cleaning systems. Specifically, teams are to examine human informational processing in the same computational terms used for self-driving vehicles that are also self-training and to examine our informational environments, whether man-made or God-made, in the same terms used for the “training data” consumed by such artificial foraging machines.

      An informational threat such as the present one must be met in new ways. In particular, the current threat differs from historic ones by undermining communication itself, making unbiased discussion of the problem nearly impossible in public or in subsidized scientific discourse. Thus, the first concern of the Defend Act is to insulate the process of scientific discovery from the institutional, traditional and commercial pressures that might otherwise contaminate its answers. Thus, the act aims to maximize scientific reliability and minimize commercial, traditional and political interference as follows.

      The investigation will proceed not by a single dream team of famous, respected and politically-vetted experts but by 10 separate teams of anonymous polymaths, living and working together in undisclosed locations, assembled from international scientists under international auspices; for example, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will collaborate with the World Health Organization.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Each team will be tasked with producing its best version of the long-term scientific truth, that is of the same truth each other team ought to also obtain based on accepted universal principles. Teams pursuing actual scientific coherence thus ought to converge in their answers. Any team tempted to replace the law of nature with incentivized convenience would then find its results laughably out of step with the common, coherent consensus reported by the other teams.

      Choosing individual team members for intellectual flexibility and independence, rather than for fame or institutional influence, will ensure they can grasp the scope of the problem, articulate it fearlessly and transmit in their results no latent bias toward their home colleagues, institution, technology or discipline.

      Each team will contain at least two experts from each of the three information-science fields, each able to approximately understand the technical language of the others and thus collectively to understand all aspects of human informational functionality and dysfunctionality. To ensure the conclusions apply to humans everywhere, at least one-third of each team will consider themselves culturally non-American.

      Each team will operate according to the best practices of deliberative decision-making, such as those used by “deliberative democracy”: live nearby, meet in person a few hours a day over months in a quiet place and enjoy access to whatever experts and sources of information they choose to use. Their budget (about $4 million per team) will be sufficient for each to produce its report in one year, through a variety of public-facing communications media: written reports, slide decks, video recordings, private meetings and public speeches. Between the multiple team members, multiple teams and multiple media, it will be difficult for entrenched powers to downplay inconvenient truths.

      Released simultaneously, all public reports will cover four topics with a broad brush:

      1. Summarizing the informational distractions and damage one would expect in advance, based only on the mathematical principles of autonomous navigation mentioned above, including not only sensory distractions but also the cognitive load of attending to interruptions and following rules, including rules intended to improve the situation.

      2. Summarizing, as meta-studies, the general (and generally true) conclusions of scientifically reputable experimental studies and separately the general (and generally misleading) conclusions of incentivized studies.

      3. Providing guideline formulae of damage and therapy, based on straightforward technical metrics of each specific information source such as timing delay, timing uncertainty, statistical pattern, information format, etc., with which to predict the nature, timescale, duration and severity of informational damage or recuperation from it.

      4. Providing guidelines for dissemination, discussion and regulatory approaches most likely not to be undermined by pressures toward the status quo.

      Within two years of passing this act, for under $100 million dollars, the world will understand far better the human stakes of artificial input, and the best means for making our children safe from it again.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 63 Shares189 Views

      in World Politics

      Is US Democracy Still Exportable?

      by

      On Inauguration Day 2021, the nation’s capital looked like it has just experienced a coup, not successfully survived one. Streets were blocked off, barricades were up, and armed police and National Guard were everywhere. The inauguration itself took place in front of a deliberately minimal crowd as if the authorities are somehow pulling off an inside job. These precautions were eminently sensible, given the threat of right-wing violence. And the last thing the new administration wants on its first day in office is to hold a very visible super-spreader event in the nation’s capital.

      A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

      READ MORE

      But it’s not a good look for American democracy when the peaceful handover of power has the appearance of a banana republic installing a tinpot dictator — or resembles the America of 1861, for that matter, when a huge security presence at Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration presaged the outbreak of civil war. The brain turns the images it receives from the eyes upside down so that we can ultimately perceive the world right side up. Our brains must now perform the task when looking at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

      Cracked Vessel

      Washington, DC, might look like a city besieged, but this day is in fact the culmination of a vigorous and successful defense of democracy. Voters have removed an autocrat from office by way of an election. The courts and state officials have prevented his attempt to perpetrate electoral fraud. Those who broke into the Capitol on January 6 are belatedly being subjected to the rule of law. And the dictator wannabe is slinking out of town with the smallest and least triumphant farewell parties imaginable. Not only did a coup not happen on January 6 to keep Trump in power, but a coup wasn’t necessary to remove Trump from power. Two cheers for democracy!

      The Biden administration has promised to repair the political damage that Trump has caused. The proposals on the domestic side, such as undoing some of the Republican Party’s voter suppression efforts, are no-brainers from a progressive standpoint. But the foreign policy recommendations around democracy promotion are not so contention-free. A promise to bring together a global Summit of Democracies, for instance, has met with considerable skepticism.

      .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      There is no question that American democracy has been tarnished, not only by the events of January 6 but by the entire four years of the Trump administration. As I wrote right after the 2020 election, “The democracy that Donald Trump dropped on the floor suffered a great deal from the experience. It’s going to take more than an election to put it right.”

      The events of January 6 have prompted many observers, in the United States and abroad, to declare an end to US pretensions to democracy promotion. As Emma Ashford writes in Foreign Policy: “How can anyone expect — as Joe Biden’s campaign promised — to ‘restore responsible American leadership on the world stage’ if Americans cannot even govern themselves at home? How can the United States spread democracy or act as an example for others if it barely has a functioning democracy at home? Washington’s foreign-policy elites remain committed to the preservation of a three-decade foreign policy aimed at reshaping the world in America’s image. They are far too blasé about what that image has become in 2020.”

      Of course, US democracy has always been a cracked vessel, from the limitations on the franchise that accompanied the country’s birth and the near-constant eruptions of mob violence to the deformations of executive power by practically every president. So, when Roger Cohen writes in The New York Times that the “images of the overrun Capitol will be there, for those who want to use them, to make the point that America would be best advised to avoid giving lessons in the exercise of freedom,” the natural retort would be: There have always been such images.

      From its inception, the United States has continually needed to put its own house in order. When it comes to democracy, America has always been a work in progress. Actually, over the last four years, it was a work in regress, but the point still holds. Democracy in America is not perfect. But does that mean that America’s recent slide away from democracy has disqualified it from engaging in democracy promotion?

      Exports and Brands

      Countries are always promoting something. The French want you to buy their wines. Russia hawks its oil and natural gas. South Korea lobbies on behalf of its boy bands, Saudi Arabia its Wahhabist version of Islam, India its Bollywood movies, Israel its security forces, and so on.

      Democracy might seem like just another export. And, indeed, some American promoters treat their work as if it were an extension of the US brand. They are promoting not democracy in general but American-style democracy. Consultants in Europe, for instance, have evangelized about increasing the role of private fundraising in elections, an American innovation that hitherto has not been so prominent on the continent. In other cases, the promotion of democracy has been just a cover for the projection of US power and influence, as in Iraq after the 2003 invasion or Ukraine after the Maidan revolution of 2014.

      In other words, “democracy promotion” either boils down to the promotion of the US version of democracy or the promotion of US interests, actual democracy be damned. Either way, the phrase and the program have acquired a poor reputation, particularly in their linkage to the political agenda of neoconservatives throughout the Reagan years and again under George W. Bush in the 2000s.

      As with the support of other exports like soybeans and soda pop, there’s a lot of money in democracy promotion. USAID, for instance, has a budget of a couple of billion dollars for “democracy, human rights, and governance,” which includes Elections and Political Processes, the Human Rights Grants Program, the Global Labor Program, the Disability Rights and Inclusive Development Program, and so on. Various foundations and civil society organizations also put a lot of money into the global promotion of democracy and human rights. All of this has been put at acute risk by what Trump and his followers have unleashed upon the United States, much as a sour batch of wine can send an entire wine industry down the drain.

      “Repairing the substantial damage to U.S. image in the world and regaining credibility on democracy issues will be tough and take a long time, even under the best scenario,” Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based study group, told the Los Angeles Times. “The problem is not so much Trump himself, but rather his enablers and those who have remained silent and been complicit in his patently antidemocratic rhetoric and behavior.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Progressives have long pressed the United States to support labor rights overseas. If another country is throwing labor leaders into jail merely for organizing strikes, the United States should protest. If corporations are employing slave labor or child workers, the United States should sanction them. If a country is abusing its migrant laborers, Washington should say something.

      And the United States should do that even though its own record on labor rights is inconsistent at best. Sometimes US failings are connected to a lack of enforcement of rules on the books. Sometimes the rules on the books are lousy. And sometimes, as was the case in particular during the Trump years, administrations have gone out of their way to depress wages, ignore or actively worsen miserable working conditions and otherwise engage in a veritable war on labor.

      But none of that means that progressives should urge the incoming Biden administration to keep quiet about labor rights abuses overseas until it compiles a perfect record at home. Foreign and domestic policy ideally should go hand in hand. In this way, the United States can demonstrate how to repair an imperfect labor record even as it urges other countries to do the same. The same applies to other elements of the progressive agenda: access to reproductive health care, LGBTQ rights, environmental regulations. The United States has an imperfect record on every issue on the progressive agenda.

      Promoting Progressive Values Overseas

      The way out of the apparent contradiction between what the United States says for export and what it does domestically is relatively simple. Don’t do as we say; do as the world says. Focus, in other words, on international standards. All countries, including the United States, should adhere to these standards on labor, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, environmental regulations and the like.

      So, does democracy fall into the same category as these other planks in the progressive platform? To the extent that democracy consists of protections for human rights and political rights such as freedom of speech and a free media, progressives can comfortably insist that all countries, including the United States, adhere to international standards. Let’s call this embrace of the component parts of democracy the “let a thousand trees bloom” approach, with each tree a different human right.

      The challenge comes with the “let’s plant a forest” approach. Democracy as a category can be tricky because of widely varying definitions of what the forest is exactly. Viktor Orbán insists that Hungary is a democracy, albeit an illiberal one, and so far the European Union reluctantly agrees. Brussels might grumble about certain Hungarian actions, but it hasn’t expelled the country from the EU. Plenty of Hungarian activists, however, argue that Orbán has undermined the country’s democratic institutions by compromising the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the media, to name just two violations. So, does Hungary qualify to participate in Biden’s planned Summit of Democracies?

      Although there might be an international consensus around certain aspects of democracy as enshrined in various UN human rights conventions, there is no such agreement over democracy as a whole. Plenty of non-democratic countries have signed UN human rights agreements, for instance, but they would never presume to be invited to a Summit of Democracies. It’s not so much that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Many progressives have reservations about the forest and prefer to focus on the trees.

      One of those reservations concerns regime change. Neoconservatives, in particular, used “democracy promotion” as a cover for pursuing the collapse of governments they didn’t like. In the case of North Korea, for instance, they viewed US pressure on Pyongyang as necessary to eliminate not simply the country’s nuclear weapons but its entire political system. Ditto Iraq, Iran, Libya, Venezuela and Cuba. Such a version of democracy promotion should be off the table. It is up to the people of a country to determine their own political future. And they should be protected in their efforts to do so by international pressure to ensure that the country abides by global human rights standards.

      Over the next four years, let’s by all means work to protect all of those fragile trees at home and abroad. But let’s also take some time to define what we mean by the forest, and let’s make sure to include Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, the Occupy struggles and all the other powerful examples of grassroots democracy. The trees, after all, are part of a larger ecosystem, and they can’t prosper if the overall environment deteriorates.

      Once we have defined what we mean by democracy, American progressives should absolutely support its promotion, even as we work to improve our own political ecosystem. After all, at some point in the future, we may need to call upon the international community to help us save our democracy as well.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 63 Shares179 Views

      in World Politics

      Joe Biden’s Inaugural History Lessons

      by

      In his inaugural address, President Joe Biden endlessly insisted on the idea of “unity.” He repeated the word nine times. In the various media’s account of the event, commentators endlessly repeated a different word, one that Biden himself cited when he said: “This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Historic:

      1. An adjective that calls attention to the special status or original character of an event witnessed by the media, signifying that the event may remain in the public’s memory at some later point in history, thanks principally to the media’s insistence that the unfolding event is far more important than it may appear to any serious historian.

      2. Predictably hyperreal.
      Contextual Note

      US presidential inaugurations are predictable events. They happen every four years. Except in the case of a sitting president’s reelection to a second term, they mark a transition between two different personalities and two contrasting administrations. That fact alone will always have some minor historical significance. But the event itself is choreographed to follow essentially the same formal scenario from one administration to the next. Apart from this year’s social distancing, a reduced crowd and the wearing of masks, nothing in the event itself justifies calling Biden’s inauguration ceremony historic.

      Biden’s inauguration program contained some of the unique features required by the glitz and glamor of today’s hyperreality. Lady Gaga sang the national anthem and Jennifer Lopez offered some complimentary patriotic entertainment. There was a rap-influenced poem recited by a young female black poet, Amanda Gorman, the first-ever national youth poet laureate. But nothing about its staging or content was original or unpredictable enough to merit the epithet historic. So why did all media commentators lose themselves in using that word to describe it?

      Embed from Getty Images

      They did have one good reason, though most reporters opted to spend more time on the first-ever enthronement of a female vice president, Kamala Harris. Though an unexciting politician as her performance in the Democratic primaries revealed, Harris offers two rare attributes besides being a woman. Their combined effect adds to the sense of this being a unique moment in history. She is the daughter of two foreigners, one black (her Jamaican father) and the other Asian (her Indian mother, and Tamil, to boot). 

      Oddly, no commentators seem aware of a true historical curiosity: that of the two individuals of African heritage to have risen to the presidential or vice presidential position — Barack Obama and Harris — neither are descendants of the American slaves who constitute the core of African American ethnicity. That means, from a historical point of view, there is still a gap to be filled.

      The real reason Biden’s inauguration could be called historic was the absence of his predecessor, Donald Trump. But even that was not only predicted — by Trump himself — but also predictable, given his narcissism. The 45th president’s absence had no effect on the protocol of the event. It did, however, affect, at least unconsciously, everyone’s perception of the moment. For the first time in five and a half years, Americans had to face the odd fact that Donald Trump was no longer at the core of the news cycle.

      For 22 minutes, Biden proceeded to produce a thoroughly unhistoric speech, rife with timeless clichés rather than the timely observations one might expect from a historic moment. Biden has always preferred pompous banalités and self-plagiarism to original thought. He predictably recycled his litany of crowd-pleasing but meaningless rhetorical formulas, already devoid of sense but even more so when repeated for the thousandth time. 

      As expected, there was the eternal (and historically false): “We have never, ever, ever failed in America when we have acted together.” At least he made it slightly more compact than on all the previous occasions. He drew applause with his stale chiasmus, “We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” without realizing that a witty rhetorical figure loses its quality of wit when parroted over and over again. Inauguration audiences are trained to be solemnly polite. So, predictably, applause replaced the groans that Biden’s oft-repeated trope deserved.

      The absence of a sense of true historical significance failed to deter the commentators. “A historic moment, but also a surreal one,” wrote Peter Baker in The New York Times, noting that unlike other inaugurations it “served to illustrate America’s troubles.” He seems to have forgotten a notable and recent precedent: the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, who famously evoked “American carnage” at the core of his inaugural address. 

      Trump’s speech four years ago was authentically surreal, as was so much that Trump thought, did or tweeted in the following four years. Trump himself, beyond his surreal acts, was the epitome of hyperreality, in the sense that he existed as a parody of the “normal” hyperreality of US politics. He permanently drew his audience’s attention to a political system built like a movie set façade and acted out following the rules of a scripted pro wrestling melodrama. Trump’s premature departure from Washington, DC, was exceptional, if not historic. But is there any justifiable reason to believe that Biden’s plodding return to normal hyperreality can be called “historic”?

      Historical Note

      Inaugurations are, by definition, theatrical exercises. As transitional moments, they mark a date in history, but that doesn’t make them historical. The one inauguration that still makes that claim —because it has remained in the collective memory — was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s performance in 1961. That was poised to be historic because Kennedy was the youngest president ever elected and the first to break what should be called the WASP barrier. As a Roman Catholic of Irish descent, Kennedy was the first who didn’t fit the obligatory presidential mold of being white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

      But what people associate with that January 1961 event is the memorable line from Kennedy’s address: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” In contrast with Biden, Kennedy had never used that line before. It took people by surprise. First there was the syntax. It possessed Miltonic solemnity by eschewing the now obligatory “do” that structures negative commands in English. People normally say, “don’t ask” rather than “ask not.” 

      .custom-post-from {float:left; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      Kennedy made the injunction sound like a divine commandment. In reality, it was as empty of meaning as any of Biden’s formulas. Americans don’t need a president to tell them whom to ask and not to ask. There is no shame in asking your country to do something, even if it never gets done. Get the wealthy to pay their share of taxes, for example. They might even ask the country not to do something, such as launch a nuclear showdown over the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba or wage a war in Vietnam. And many people do spontaneously ask what they can do for their country, though their request is usually accompanied by the demand for some form of payment. Both Kennedy and Biden responded to the public’s expectations in an inaugural address of rhetoric that “elevates the spirit” and encourages feelings of generosity and solidarity. Because it is such a standard feature of inaugural addresses, the presence of such sentiments can hardly be considered historic. On the other hand, Trump’s “American carnage” was historic, simply because nobody expected it.

      CNN desperately sought an original thought in Biden’s speech, something to relate to the “historic” nature of the event. Chris Cillizza wrote: “About halfway through his inauguration speech, President Joe Biden said something very important about the work of Washington — and how he envisions his presidency.” What did he find? Unlike Kennedy’s positive incitement to action, he selected Biden’s negative admonition: “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.”

      That’s where the US finds itself today. It lives with the hope that disagreement will not produce war. And yet, a culture war has been raging for decades, inflamed by the media. For the first time in a century and a half, there is a sense that a messy civil war may break out. That truly is historic.

      *[Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Amanda Gorman as national poet laureate.]

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in World Politics

      Donald Trump Proves That It’s the System, Stupid

      by

      “It’s the economy, stupid,” a catchphrase coined in the 1990s by American political strategist James Carville, made George H. W. Bush — who won the First Gulf War for Americans — a one-term president, catapulting Bill Clinton into the White House. As Donald Trump’s one-term presidency winds down with an attempted insurrection, widespread social media …
      Continue Reading “Donald Trump Proves That It’s the System, Stupid”
      The post Donald Trump Proves That It’s the System, Stupid appeared first on Fair Observer. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in World Politics

      What If America Doesn’t Recover From Trump?

      by

      With two-thirds of Republicans still believing that President Joe Biden’s election was fraudulent, the Republican Party faces what could prove to be an existential fork in the road. Does it double down on Trump and Trumpism at this juncture or does it reject his divisive legacy root and branch much the same way that McCarthyism …
      Continue Reading “What If America Doesn’t Recover From Trump?”
      The post What If America Doesn’t Recover From Trump? appeared first on Fair Observer. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in World Politics

      Why Is Joe Biden’s Presidency Anathema to So Many US Catholics?

      by

      When I was growing up in Germany in the 1960s, during the holiday seasons, both Christmas and Easter, one of the highlights on television was the reruns of “Don Camillo and Peppone.” These are movies that involve the adventures of a Catholic priest and a communist mayor, taking place in a small village in the Po valley in northern Italy. The protagonists are constantly at loggerheads, yet in the end they always find a compromise, based on mutual understanding and appreciation. The time is the immediate postwar period, when both the Italian Catholic Church and Italy’s Communist Party were at the height of their influence and power. For the Catholic Church, this meant substantial interference in Italian politics.

      Sex Abuse Is the Moral Downfall of the Catholic Church

      READ MORE

      One of the most drastic attempts to wield such influence was the Vatican’s decision in mid-1949 to excommunicate all members of the Communist Party. Given the fact that communism was “materialist and anti-Christian,” anyone who came out in support of the ideology automatically expressed their hostility “to God, religion and the Church” and, therefore, had no place among the community of believers. In a country where faith in the Catholic Church and its teachings were deeply ingrained, this was a formidable weapon. It is to the credit of the creator of Don Camillo and Peppone, Giovannino Guareschi, that he showed in many of his stories that this had little to do with reality on the ground — that somebody could be a communist and a good Catholic.

      Bygone Era

      In contemporary Italy, these are stories of a bygone era, one where the Christian Democrats still were the predominant party and where Italians still flocked to the churches. By now, the Christian Democrats are politically dead, and Italian churches have become museums rather than places of worship. In my own country, Germany, the Catholic Church has long abandoned its anti-socialist rhetoric aimed at the Social Democrats, perhaps, but not only, because the SPD has largely abandoned any pretense to be a socialist party.

      .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      Even in Ireland and in Poland, the Catholic Church is increasingly in a defensive position. Take, for instance, recent shocking official revelations about decades of neglect and abuse in Ireland’s mother and baby homes. Most of them run by religious orders affiliated with the Catholic Church, they reflected a “brutally misogynistic culture” promoted by the church. This culture resulted not only in unmarried women and girls being held “virtual prisoners” in these “homes” but also in the death of thousands of babies, oftentimes buried anonymously in mass graves. Under the circumstances, the Catholic Church’s adamant pro-life stance rings somewhat hollow.

      The church’s taking the moral high ground has also started to undermine the position of the Polish Catholics. It was recent scandals about the sexual abuse of children involving, most infamously, an icon of Polish Catholicism, Henryk Jankowski, a legend of the Solidarność movement that was instrumental in putting an end to Poland’s communist regime. His statue was toppled by protesters in 2019 in the city of Gdansk, before being officially dismantled and removed. The fact that until today, the Polish Catholic Church has refused to accept responsibility has led to a dramatic loss of trust in its authority. The church, in turn, has sought to divert attention from the crimes committed in its name by targeting the country’s LGTBQ community as the new “plague that seeks to dominate our souls, hearts and our mind.”

      I doubt that the American Catholic Church is tuned in to developments in contemporary Poland or that it has any awareness of the far-reaching influence of the Italian Catholic Church in the immediate postwar period. Yet the parallels are striking, particularly in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. This time, President Donald Trump garnered roughly 50% of the Catholic vote and about 57% among white Catholics. To be sure, Catholics voted for Trump for a range of different reasons. “Pro-life” considerations probably rank very high, if not highest, particularly among white Catholics. So do anti-immigrant sentiments. Among Hispanics, economic considerations appear to have had a significant influence on electoral choice, plus the open hostility a number of Catholic spiritual leaders have expressed toward Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in general.

      Take, for instance, Jesse Romero, a former cop turned into a well-known Catholic evangelist, who appears to have personally “witnessed diabolical satanic activity,” recounted in his 2019 book, “The Devil in the City of Angels: My Encounters With the Diabolical.” A cop staring down the devil — what other qualifications does one need to be a major authority on spiritual guidance? In early 2020, Romero published a book that proclaimed that a vote for Trump was the only choice for Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike. Those interested in the rationale behind Romero’s plea should consult his response to a Never Trump Catholic, which provides a long list of Trump’s “accomplishments” starting with his “pro-life” measures. What about him being a liar and philanderer? Who cares?

      To be sure, Romero is nothing more than another one of these evangelical snake oil salesmen that clutter America’s airwaves. Usually, they are of the Protestant persuasion; but then, the US is an equal opportunity country, and Romero is certainly not the worst of the lot, at least on the Catholic side.

      Party of Death

      A recent post on the Jesuit America magazine website provides a sobering account of the extent to which Catholic officials have gone to incite hatred toward Joe Biden and the Democrats. The author quotes one priest who posted a clip to YouTube that charged that the Democratic platform was “against everything the Catholic Church teaches.” Therefore, American Catholics who voted for the Democrats should “just quit pretending” to be Catholics. Those contemplating voting for Biden should repent of “their support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell.” Christianity in action.

      And who cares that Biden is, in fact, a practicing Catholic, while Donald Trump, as his Presbyterian Protestant congregation puts it, is not an “active member.” As Rick Stika, the bishop of Knoxville, Tennessee, put it in a tweet in August, Biden should not claim to be a good Catholic “as he denies so much of Church teaching especially on the absolute child abuse and human rights violations of the most innocent, the not yet born.” As a member of an institution infamous for widespread abuse of the most innocent, Stika should have known better than to use this kind of language. And yet, as an article in the National Catholic Reporter has documented, he was hardly the only top Catholic dignitary to question Biden’s Catholic faith and credentials.

      When God Hates America

      READ MORE

      Lower ranks followed suit. One priest posted a clip that called the Democrats the “party of death.” This is a trope that has been around for years, first introduced by the former St. Louise Archbishop Raymond Burke. Burke was appointed to the Vatican’s highest court in 2008 from where he attacked both Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who, he charged, “while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.”

      Given the relatively long tradition of labeling the Democratic Party as the party of death by the gotha of American Catholicism, it is hardly surprising that the recent video clip received enthusiastic support from Joseph Strickland, a bishop from Tyler, Texas. Strickland not only endorsed the message but exhorted his flock to listen to this “wise and faithful priest.” It might also come as no surprise that according to one witness in Pennsylvania, some priests were “openly suggesting that politicians who support abortion rights should be denied Communion.”

      This is akin to what the Italian Catholic Church told its flock in the postwar period. This is what the Polish Church has been telling its flock since the collapse of the communist regime. The result: In 2019, a mere 20% of the Polish population expressed trust in the country’s Catholic Church.

      Blood on Their Hands

      Things are likely to move in the same direction in the United States. The headline of a recent article in National Catholic Reporter minced no words: Catholics, the article charged, “need to confess their complicity in the failed coup.” The author claims that, given the five casualties caused by the assault on the Capitol, “Catholic apologists for Trump have blood on their hands.” The tacit or open support of parts of the American Catholic Church’s clergy and affiliated lay organizations, such as Catholics for Trump, CatholicVote.org and LifeSiteNews, for a president who represents the very antithesis of Gospel teaching is bound to have a significant fallout, given the assault on the nation’s cradle of democracy.  

      This comes at a time when the Catholic Church is under tremendous pressure given the growing number of revelations of widespread sexual abuse, more often than not hushed up by the Church hierarchy. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Catholic Church spent more than $5 million on lobbying to prevent victims of sexual abuse from getting meaningful compensation.

      Ever since the creation of the United States, Catholics have been under a cloud of suspicion. It took more than a century to alleviate these suspicions and allow Catholics to be accepted as equal members of the nation. By openly supporting a president who represents the very antithesis of Christ’s teaching, parts of the American Catholic Church have managed to erase much of the progress the American Catholic Church has managed to accomplish over the past several decades. Consumed by one issue, the question of abortion, they condoned Trump’s behavior by looking the other way on questions of racism, white supremacy, refugees and Black Lives Matter.  

      Embed from Getty Images

      On the contrary, radical right-wing influencers, such as Michelle Malkin (who once said that what was at the heart of her “outspokenness” was her Catholic faith), characterized Black Lives Matter protesters as “vigilante terrorists.” A few weeks before the assault on the Capitol, Malkin ridiculed the idea that Trump supporters might be “the real threat to civil order” or that the “populist movement to ‘stop the steal’ of election 2020 is rooted in hate.”   

      In the wake of the assault on the Capitol, it has become clear that the American Catholic Church’s narrow focus on the question of abortion is a dead end with serious consequences. It is time to shift the focus to pressing issues like social justice, affordable health care for all, human dignity independent of skin color, gender and sexual orientation, and, last but not least, a fundamental break with the Trump administration’s approach to the global climate crisis. In other words, following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ rather than kowtowing to the likes of Donald Trump and many within the Republican Party who care only about themselves. 

      A recent article in the Chicago Tribune suggests that this is going to be an uphill battle. When a Catholic priest in Chicago raised uncomfortable questions about the church’s complicity with the Trump administration and the assault on Congress, a significant number of his congregation walked out, clearly unprepared to confront reality. This suggests that the rift in American society extends deep into the country’s Catholic community. This is hardly surprising, giving the polarizing figure of Pope Francis.  What many of his detractors in the Catholic Church have objected to is that his “theology stems from reality: from the reality of injustice, poverty and the destruction of nature.”

      As it happens, the American Catholic Church is a hotspot of opposition to Pope Francis. This might, in part at least, explain the support of many American Catholics for Donald Trump and the vitriol parts of the Catholic community have directed at Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Hence the irony that the country’s second Catholic taking over the Oval Office since John F. Kennedy is anathema to so many American Catholics.  

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 50 Shares169 Views

      in World Politics

      Forecasting the US-China Relationship

      by

      With a new US administration about to be inaugurated, it is prudent to look at the dynamics and variables shaping the future of one of the world’s most important relationships, that between Washington and Beijing. President Donald Trump came into office looking to take a more aggressive approach toward China. Trump’s reliance on figures like Peter Navarro and Mike Pompeo put American foreign policy on a forceful path. While Navarro, as Trump’s trade adviser, was focused on conducting trade wars, Secretary of State Pompeo was centered on military balancing. In the final year of the Trump presidency, relations with China were rapidly disintegrating, with little room left for cooperation.

      Joe Biden Will Face a Much-Changed and Skeptical World

      READ MORE

      If President Trump presided over a rapid deterioration of the US-China relationship, under President Joe Biden, the relationship is likely experience a stable deterioration. A stable deterioration is typified by two features: the continuance of deviating trajectories and the transactional nature of future cooperation. These two features interact to create a new status quo in the US-China relationship.

      Deviating Trajectories

      The era of engagement between Beijing and Washington was sustained through a shared interest in China’s economic and political integration in the international community. Today, China under President Xi Jinping has sought to both blunt international political institutions and create international financial bodies, thereby challenging US spuremacy and allowing for more Chinese dexterity. Xi’s international revisionism struggles against American national interests, creating a split between the two global giants.

      As President-elect Joe Biden is in the final stages of forming his national security team, he sends a strong, clear signal: This will not be a third Barack Obama term. Biden has declared that he plans on nominating Antony Blinken as secretary of state and Jake Sullivan as national security adviser. While both are veterans of the Obama administration, their tone and language signal a break from the Obama years. Both Blinken and Sullivan have acknowledged the need to develop a new strategy for China that goes beyond traditional engagement into managing competition.

      Embed from Getty Images

      At a Hudson Institute event last summer, Blinken stated, “We are in a competition with China — and there’s nothing wrong with competition, if it’s fair.” Continuing the theme of managing competition with China, a piece for Foreign Affairs co-authored by Sullivan with Kurt Campbell, the CEO of the Asia Group, suggests that “the signs that China is gearing up to contest America’s global leadership are unmistakable, and they are ubiquitous.”

      These statements follow a larger trend within the Democratic Party of getting tougher on China. For example, in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform, China is only mentioned seven times. In the 2020 document, mentions were up to 22 and included language like “push back against” and “stand up to.” A Biden administration is going to bring strategic clarity to US-China competition. Key advisers like Sullivan and Blinken are not pollyannish about the relationship and recognize the dramatic change that has been occurring for nearly a decade. As Biden leaves America’s engagement strategy behind, he will advance a more confident and more energetic foreign policy in defense of US interests and values.

      Meanwhile, on the Chinese side of the relationship, President Xi Jinping has pursued an aggressive posture that has shaken the regional order. His ambitious “national rejuvenation” strategy has created consternation. Xi has abandoned institutional integration and instead established his own multilateral financial institutions to blunt the influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The People’s Liberation Army has also been more assertive in promoting Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. The complete political absorption of Hong Kong has alarmed neighboring Taiwan. Lastly, Xi’s extraordinary Belt and Road Initiative has expanded China’s political influence across the region.

      President Xi’s national rejuvenation campaign is in direct conflict with the interests of the United States and its allies. The US stands atop of an international order that promotes political and economic liberty. Through this alliance system, the United States promotes and secures a free and open Indo-Pacific. Under Xi’s helmsmanship, China wants to displace, if not replace, the US and develop a new, Sinocentric order. These trajectories will only continue to deviate until a new status quo can develop.

      Areas of Cooperation

      While the chasm in the US-China relationship widens and deepens, there are several areas where American and Chinese interests align. The United States and China must develop procedures for collaboration in these areas. If the relationship is only limited to competition, problems will arise that could otherwise be solved. Additionally, neither country gains from complete destruction of bilateral relations.

      The stabilization of the Korean Peninsula will require significant coordination between Washington and Beijing. Neither the Chinese nor the Americans want to see conventional or nuclear conflict on the peninsula. The two countries do not need to feign friendship to achieve stabilization, but it does require communication.

      Climate change is an issue that is not only an opportunity for cooperation but a problem that demands collaboration. As the world’s two largest economies, the US and China have a lot of influence in affecting the trajectory of global warming and climate change. Both countries stand only to gain from working together on this issue. Collaboration on the environment does not require a new proclamation of camaraderie between the two nations. Each government can recognize that cooperation on climate change is important without declaring a new era of relations. The business-like, transactional nature of US-China cooperation creates an environment where the two countries can work together without upsetting the aggressive factions within their respective countries.

      When accounting for these dynamics, the most likely scenario to play out under the Biden administration is stable deterioration. Stable deterioration recognizes the continued decline in bilateral relations brought about by the deviating trajectories of the two countries but understands that there is a limit to that decline. Both countries accept collaboration when interests align, but the nature of cooperation is transactional. Through managing competition and transactional cooperation, a new status quo in the US-China relationship will develop.

      This scenario assumes that neither President Biden nor President Xi perceives any value in the destruction of bilateral relations, but both recognize that competition is unavoidable. Both countries will continue to pursue their interests in the region, and neither will apologize for it. But both the United States and China will work together to develop a new relationship that allows them to compete without the total abandonment of the relationship.   

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in World Politics

      Corporations Step Up to Punish Republicans

      by

      Perhaps the most surprising outcome of the Capitol riots has been the reaction of corporate donors to the funding of political campaigns. These locomotives of democracy are suddenly unhappy. The shame that now stains the doubly impeached Donald Trump has shaken and apparently cracked what had become the main pillar of electoral politics in the US: corporate money.

      Who Owns Susan Collins’ Brain?

      READ MORE

      One commentator states it in these terms: “Big corporations are deciding they don’t want their campaign contributions being linked to violent insurrections.” This has turned out to be particularly problematic for Republican lawmakers after the scandalous raid on Capitol Hill on January 6. The Washington Post reports that “Several major companies on Monday said they planned to cut off political donations to the 147 members of Congress who last week voted against certifying the results of the presidential election.” Yahoo Finance notes what may become a long-term trend as “companies are just beginning to recognize that ‘political spending today poses a really broad risk and a deep risk that they need to manage.’”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Broad risk:

      Risk related to the level of awareness of an entire population, as opposed to deep risk that concerns the legal and commercial status of a monopoly or privileged economic position.

      Contextual Note

      The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, a provider of health insurance to over 100 million people, has now pledged to stop its contributions “to those lawmakers who voted to undermine our democracy.” Critics might point out that health insurance providers have been undermining democracy for decades. They literally control Congress thanks not only to their lobbying efforts but also to the direct campaign contributions needed to obtain the legislation their lobbyists push through Congress.

      Will pulling back weaken their chances of getting privileged treatment in the future? The risk is real. But health insurance providers are experts in evaluating risk. They realize that the public’s growing preference for a national single-payer system means they desperately need to improve their moral profile. What better way than to express their indignation at the immorality of politicians?

      .custom-post-from {float:left; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
      .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
      .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
      .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
      -webkit-user-select: none;
      -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
      user-select: none;
      order: 1;
      color: #ffffff;
      font-weight: normal;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
      right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
      .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
      .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

      Yahoo Finance interviewed Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability. Freed asks the fundamental question about what Donald Trump, in his original presidential campaign, referred to as the DC “swamp” that needed draining. “Does this really lead to a fundamental change in the way companies approach their political spending?” Freed calls the recent announcements a “reaction of the moment.” He nevertheless thinks this could be the beginning of a trend. It all depends on how long the public’s indignation lasts as well as how consistently the media give it play.

      Wall Street banks have taken the most radical position. Rather than punishing Republicans for their lack of civism, some “have announced steps to back away from giving money to all lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — at least for now.” This is undoubtedly an act of pure PR calculation. They must at all costs avoid singling out Republicans for punishment, who have always been the first to do their bidding. Yahoo judges that this “appears to be temporary and could expire before fundraising for the 2022 midterm elections begins in earnest.” In other words, this clearly is PR. It sounds more like a vacation than a strike. Basically, these companies will save some money in the short term, take the time to observe the drift of opinion and think out their strategy just in time for the next midterms.

      This entire episode demonstrates how radical Trump’s impact on US institutions has been. The Republican Party has become the principal victim. When Republican elected officials in their majority made the choice of remaining loyal to Trump, they painted themselves into a corner. They accepted Trump’s strategy of polarizing the electorate beyond possible reconciliation. For the past four years, public debate has consistently turned around the extreme positions Trump tweeted on a daily basis. The media lost all interest in rational debate about real political issues. It doesn’t attract eyeballs.

      It wasn’t always like this. In the lead-up to the 2016 Republican National Convention, the GOP establishment massively opposed Trump. At the time, commentators speculated about a possible revolt within the party against Trump’s nomination. Party stalwarts even seemed to count on his defeat in the November election to rid the party of its troublemaker. In vain.

      When, to Trump’s own surprise, he won against Hillary Clinton, the designated dynastic heiress to the imperial throne as defined by the Democrats, establishment Republicans employed a strategy that consisted of accommodating Trump’s idiosyncrasies while pursuing their traditional goals: tax cuts, militarism and transforming the judiciary. The strategy worked well, indeed too well for the taste of many Republicans. They realized that Trump had become the key to the party’s winning of elections, and they knew for a fact that politics today is about nothing other than winning elections.

      Historical Note

      This story highlights not just the importance of corporate financing in political campaigns but also the emergence of a culture focused exclusively on electoral success. If the US is still a democracy, it has become literally a democracy of beggars. The needs of the citizens and the methods of good government have taken a back seat to the perennial quest for campaign funding. Members of Congress now spend 67% of their time on fundraising. Not only does that mean that they have limited time to do their job as legislators — it also means that their fundraising needs redefine and inevitably pervert their official role in government: representing their constituents.

      At best, in their interactions with lobbyists, lawmakers can resist specific demands of their donors on the grounds that what they are requesting would be unacceptable to their voters. What happens then is that, instead of refusing, they will more likely work on the window-dressing that makes policies inimical to their constituents’ interests seem logical, acceptable or simply inevitable. 

      This type of beggars’ democracy becomes palatable to many because society itself has become a civilization of beggars fighting for survival in an economy of beggars. Lobbyists themselves are professional beggars, but with clout. The rest of the population has increasingly adapted to the gig economy, which sums up what democratic politics has become. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Traditional economies owed their stability to a somewhat sclerotic continuity of gainful economic activity. Successive generations in the same family exercised identical vocations. With the advent of the industrial revolution, capitalism worked on the basis of creating a pool of largely uprooted workers begging for a job that had nothing to do with inherited skills. This brought the advantage of flexibility and the capacity of manufacturing to produce more efficiently what generations of artisans could only create on a limited scale. The enclosure system in England forced peasants to towns where manufacturing, exploiting the resources made available through colonial conquest, offered the possibility of employment. The poor of the countryside became the beggars of the town.

      The Industrial Revolution created a society that depended on the notion of mass anonymity. It required pools of potential workers who could be available for employment to meet the growing needs of industry. The anonymous masses then had the choice of selecting to invest personally in skill sets that promised possible employment. This relationship has defined the economic system that has prevailed for the past two centuries in the West and now in most of the global economy.

      Because anonymity and fluctuations in every marketplace lead to instability, the latest permutation of this model has been the evolution toward the gig economy. Paradoxically, it represents a return to the logic of early capitalism and the policy of subsistence wages. Employers needed simply to ensure that the pool of workers could be physically maintained to continue to meet the needs of production. The policy of subsistence gradually evolved to include cultural factors that contributed to a notion of prosperous and stable subsistence. This permitted the creation of the modern welfare state. But the aggravation of competition and the financialization of the economy ultimately led to the gig society where people sell their time on a piecemeal basis.

      Millions of people make their living online. Increasingly, they do it as beggars, offering their services in the hope someone will need them enough to pay. A beggar’s democracy requires a beggar’s economy.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More