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    Anthony Blinken’s Sales Pitch

    After his meeting with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, during his visit to Israel following last month’s ceasefire, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken explained his goals: “As I told the president, I’m here to underscore the commitment of the United States to rebuilding the relationship with the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people, a relationship built on mutual respect and also a shared conviction that Palestinians and Israelis alike deserve equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity and dignity.”

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    Blinken praised Egypt’s role in brokering the truce. According to Al Jazeera, Blinken believes Egypt can play a “vital” role in making it possible for Palestinians and Israelis to “live in safety and security to enjoy equal measures of freedom, opportunity and dignity.” One wonders about Egypt’s own commitment to freedom, opportunity and dignity, but Blinken apparently sees those three words as having some sort of magical effect, masking the blemishes of both of his trusted partners, Israel and Egypt.

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Freedom, opportunity and dignity:

    An example of the rhetorical ploy that aligns three incontestably noble ideals to create the belief that the only imaginable outcome of the policies or initiatives a politician is proposing will be resoundingly positive

    Contextual Note

    Adepts of the art of rhetoric have given the trope linking three ideas a technical name: tricolon. The association of three positive notions has the effect of persuading an audience of the gravitas of the speaker’s intentions. Tricolons also make for excellent motivational slogans. Julius Caesar left no doubt about his conquest of Gaul when he wrote “veni, vidi, vici.” The French revolutionaries made clear their noble intentions in the formulation “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” a historically enduring slogan, if ever there was one. 

    Thomas Jefferson, inspired by John Locke’s celebration of “life, liberty and property,” left an indelible trace in Americans’ historical memory when he summarized the basic rights of a people as “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Curiously, Blinken’s trio of meritorious wishes can be traced back to the title of a book published in 1942 by Samuel Crowther. The full title of the book is “Time to Inquire: How Can We Restore the Freedom, Opportunity, and Dignity of the Average Man?” The only commentary on Crowther’s book visible after a thorough web search appears in the catalog of the Library of Congress. It contains a single sentence: “Questions the general social, political, and economic values as they exist in the United States today, particularly the ‘internationalist complex,’ to which he attributes our being in the war.” 

    In other words, Crowther appears to be one of the last of the generation of isolationists who dominated US thinking about foreign policy between the two world wars. Did Blinken read his book? Does the secretary of state’s thinking in any way reflect the isolationist ideology that shamefully retreated into the background after the rise of the US empire in the wake of World War II? More likely, his adoption of the three words in Crowther’s title is a coincidence. But that’s what great marketing minds do. When they see an inspiring idea for a slogan, whatever the source, they seize it and turn it into a slogan.

    Does that mean we should think of Anthony Blinken as the secretary of international marketing rather than his official title of secretary of state? In some very real sense, a secretary of state can be defined as the head of international marketing for the US brand. And no one can doubt that the US has always been focused on selling its brand. 

    In one version of his sales pitch, Blinken adds a fourth word to introduce — and, in a certain sense, encompass — his trinity of virtues. To President Abbas, Blinken cited the importance of “equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity and dignity.” He cites “security” as the condition sine qua non that must be put in place to permit the flowering of “freedom, opportunity and dignity.” Modern states, such as the US and Israel, insist on putting security first. It is, after all, thanks to the existence of a security state — largely regulated, monitored and even enforced by the intelligence community — that the wonders associated with the prosperous American and Israeli way of life emerge. Both countries have produced an enviable military-industrial complex.

    Blinken’s trio of words defines the ideal toward which any modern society must aspire. Combining the three terms creates a compelling argument. Freedom, of course, points to the free market, the right of every individual to compete with everyone else in their quest to make it to the top. Opportunity means that there are no legal obstacles to the downtrodden in their quest to become equals of the wealthy and powerful. Everyone has a shot at winning the race. The only real obstacles are other peoples’ wealth and power. But that is precisely what makes the struggle so satisfying for the winners, knowing that they have overcome such formidable obstacles. 

    And what about dignity? The French tricolon puts liberty and equality first, both of which serve to establish an abstract legal principle denying an official social status to privilege. This leaves fraternity as a random choice of sentiment for a liberated people. Fraternity has no status in the law and may never truly exist in a competitive society. 

    Blinken’s first two terms — freedom and opportunity — describe the modern capitalist economy. It allows people to aspire to dignity while instituting a social and economic system that empowers the successful few to deny dignity to the many whose lives, thanks to their liberty, remains precarious. Without precarity, the noble ambition to achieve dignity would not exist. In other words, what the secretary of international marketing is selling is quite simply the American ideology.

    Historical Note

    Winston Churchill was a consummate rhetorician. In a wartime speech he famously intoned, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He added a fourth term to what was already a proverbial tricolon. The gravity of a world war justified adding this extra item. Subsequent generations reduced Churchill’s four-term litany to the more classical tricolon in the idiom, “blood, sweat and tears.” That trio of words became not just a part of standard modern English vocabulary but also the name of a legendary rock group. 

    It is worth pointing out that just as Blinken may have consciously or unconsciously borrowed his tricolon from Samuel Crowther, Churchill’s inspiration can be traced to the 17th-century poet, John Donne, who in his long poem, “Anatomy of the World,” wrote:

    “Thou know’st how dry a cinder this world is.

    And learn’st thus much by our anatomy,

    That ’tis in vain to dew, or mollify

    It with thy tears, or sweat, or blood: nothing

    Is worth our travail, grief, or perishing,

    But those rich joys, which did possess her heart.”

    Luke most literary men and women of his time, Donne understood the power of the tricolon. In two successive lines he offers a pair of tricolons. Donne’s contemporary, William Shakespeare, took it one step further when Ophelia, speaking admiringly of Hamlet, mentions “The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword.” Shakespeare aligns two tricolons in a single pentameter line.

    It is refreshing to note that a modern politician like Anthony Blinken has a feel for classical rhetoric, mobilizing the traditional literary devices to conduct his sophisticated political marketing. It reassuringly contrasts with Donald Trump’s jarring populist rhetoric that relies not on balanced phrases, clever verbal alignments and persuasive touches, but instead on provocative innuendos and insults, hyperboles (“great,” “huge,” “amazing,” “tremendous,” “terrific,” “phenomenal”) and on an insistence that the audience “believe me” or “trust me,” even when what he says is clearly unbelievable and he himself comes across as totally untrustworthy.

    Despite their stylistic differences, what Blinken and former President Donald Trump have in common is a commitment to “Make American Ideology Great Again” in the eyes of a world that has begun not only to doubt its legitimacy but to fear the consequences of the policies carried out in its name. Blinken’s (as well as President Joe Biden’s) tone is more soothing, or at least less upsetting, whereas Trump’s has more political impact. But the message they convey is similarly superficial and unrealistic. Both translate as a pretext for domination in a hypercompetitive world.

    *[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

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    America’s True Hyperreal Heroes

    At the very moment that US President Joe Biden is busy demonstrating how little power he wields, whether in reigning in the neocolonial and militaristic behavior of the Israeli government or in attempting to push key legislation through Congress, Elon Musk, who has never been elected to any public office, is flaunting his unchallenged personal power over what may be the most disruptive force in today’s global economy: cryptocurrency.

    Can the US Really Rally Other Nations?

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    Gregory Barber, writing for Wired, notes that through his tweeting, Musk has become a self-contained agent of volatility. He can send the value of different cryptocurrencies north or south, whenever he feels like it. As Barber frames it, “Musk is creating and destroying small fortunes, 280-characters at a time.” In his email promoting the article, Barber speculates: “Perhaps it’s strategic, or just whimsy, or maybe it’s a kind of performance art to inspire us all to wonder at the value of things. We might never know Musk’s true motives.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    True motives:

    In the current society built on the principle of hyperreality, intentions that though detectable, will never be exposed in public, even by the media who understand that reporting on reality could only confuse their consumers who have become addicted to the manipulated representation of reality rather reality itself.

    Contextual Note

    Elon Musk is a true hyperreal hero, whose only serious rival on the world stage has been Donald Trump. Both are committed to finding ways to obscure the public’s ability to understand some serious public issues. But, contrary to Barber’s assertion, their true motives have never been in doubt. They can be summarized in two words — money and power — and two pathologies — greed and narcissism.

    Because most people in the United States have been taught to revere money and power — money as the key to power, power as the means of obtaining wealth — for all their obvious faults, their admirers not only continue to admire them but also celebrate their consummate ability to epitomize hyperreality. In the Calvinist tradition, wealth and power in the community were signs of divine favor. With the fading of the Puritan ethic of sober achievement, in their excess, Musk and Trump have attained the status of secular gods.

    Embed from Getty Images

    American culture struggles helplessly with the idea of truth. Where the condition for basic survival is to be constantly selling something to other people (ideally by creating a marketplace), truth tends to disappear into a misty horizon, spawning a destabilizing doubt that it even exists. But rather than resigning themselves to the absence of truth, Americans now want to reduce it to the question of facts. Fact-checking is all the rage.

    But serious philosophers and psychologists have always understood that the idea of truth means much more than establishing facts. Paradoxically, facts themselves can represent a convenient way of burying the truth. Journalists and public figures know this. A typical New York Times article on a potentially controversial issue typically contains a breathless series of short paragraphs citing facts, events and expert statements.

    The authors avoid providing logical connections between the paragraphs in an effort to let the facts accumulate. After aligning litanies of factoids and well-chosen quotes, the authors can be certain that no reader will be capable of stitching together anything that leads them towards an underlying meaning. “True motives” will be lost in the onslaught. Here at The Daily Devil’s Dictionary, we have cited examples of these logicless developments, for instance here and here.

    Both of our hyperreal heroes have been publicly disciplined for tweeting irresponsibly. Perceived as less dangerous, Musk still has a Twitter account whereas Trump had his taken away just before leaving the White House. Musk once declared that “Twitter is a war zone,” whereas Trump was accused of using it to foment civil war. His “true motive” appears to have been an attempt to create enough havoc to justify remaining in the White House. It didn’t work for Trump, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have been inspired by Trump’s example after failing to form a new majority earlier this year.

    According to Barber, Musk’s tweets “drop from the sky without warning. He controls the narrative, and thus the market effect.” This is not just hyperreal posturing or playing an expected public role with melodramatic or comic effect, as both Trump and Musk are wont to do on practically any occasion. Musk’s tweets concerning cybercurrency give him a power to make money instantly, at the expense of millions of other people. It sounds dangerous and downright unethical, but as a lawyer quoted by Barber explains, “You can’t police based on what you think is somebody’s subjective heart-of-hearts intent.” Is “heart-of-hearts intent” a synonym of “true motive”? In US culture, people tend to think so.

    Barber notes that only “a small number of people” possess something comparable to Musk’s hyperreal power. He cites Warren Buffett and the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell. Neither of them is addicted to tweeting. But what is the true source of irresponsibility in this story? Is it Musk himself? Or is it Twitter as an institution that facilitates manipulation? Could it be cryptocurrency, which, as a pure product of purchasers’ greed, with no direct link to anything of substance, might justifiably be called hypercurrency? All three combine to define the hyperreal landscape that surrounds us, along with our media who amplify the drama the others generate.

    Historical Note

    Throughout history, political leaders have managed to control events by influencing the behavior of tens of thousands, and sometimes millions, of people. Think of Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler. Whatever extraordinary narrative their culture invented for them and whatever personal charisma on their part contributed to their success, what these figures from the past did was rooted in the reality of government, administration, coercive force and concrete economic relationships.

    Hyperreality today sits atop all those features of power but thrives in an independent world of its own. It may be that without the example of Hollywood we never would have reached this stage. Musk and Trump alike are more like entertainment figures — both writing the script and playing the role — than to leaders of social, political or cultural movements.

    Two centuries ago, P.T. Barnum provided the model for hyperreality that would fully blossom in the 20th century thanks to the disruptive technology of movies, television and finally the internet. Barnum invented an entire sector of entertainment based on the misrepresentation of facts when, after purchasing an aging slave, Joice Heth, put her on display, claiming she was 161 years old and had been young George Washington’s nurse. Barnum understood how facts and symbolism combine to draw the public to his spectacles.

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    George Washington was already known as “the father of the nation.” Barnum provided an exotic, black mothering figure for the father of the country. At the same time, the supposed relationship served to justify slavery and racism by promoting the idea that blacks in a situation of service could nurture whites, and whites would protect and nurture blacks.

    Barnum later became famous for organizing his three-ring circus, but before that he built his reputation around presenting facts or the appearance of facts. He created the American Museum in Manhattan. It featured both authentic historical artifacts and a freak show, prolonging the spirit of deception he developed around Joice Heth. With his partner James Bailey, he launched hyperreality’s ultimate theme with a circus they called “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Barnum himself never sought to be a hyperreal hero. He simply propagated the values of the culture of American hyperreality that would be refined by a later generation of architects of hyperreality.

    William Randolph Hearst modeled the modern idea of the news. Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, invented the art of public relations built around the science of advertising designed as a form of mind control. Trump and Musk have come to represent the ultimate hyperreal heroes, but they have built their identities around the culture created by geniuses like Barnum and Bernays combined with the culture of Hollywood’s larger-than-life screen heroes. They are not alone. There are plenty of hyperreal supporting actors and extras who give depth to the representation. But they are the ones talented enough and sufficiently narcissistic to occupy center stage and ultimately influence the audience’s behavior.

    *[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

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    Radical Republicans Are Not Conservatives

    The House Freedom Caucus is routinely described as conservative, by its members, by the mainstream media and by Wikipedia. The caucus, which draws together 45 Republican Party members of the House of Representatives, is the furthest to the right of any major political formation in the United States. The most extreme and flamboyant politicians in America, like scandal-plagued Matt Gaetz of Florida and gun-toting Lauren Boebert of Colorado, are proud to call the caucus their political home. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, after threatening to form an explicitly racist “America First” caucus, chose ultimately to continue promoting her nativist, QAnon-inspired beliefs from within the Freedom Caucus.

    By any reasonable measure, the Freedom Caucus and its members are not conservative. Because of their disruptive tactics and rhetoric, their contempt for bedrock conservative values like the rule of law and their embrace of the most radical populist in modern US history, they are more akin to European far-right politicians like those in the Alternative for Germany and Fidesz. Traditional Republicans recognize that the caucus and its members have nothing to do with the party they joined many years ago. Former House Speaker John Boehner, a more traditional Republican, gave an apt description of the caucus when he said in 2017, “They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”

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    The misidentification of the Freedom Caucus as “conservative” is not the only example of the misuse of this term. At various points over the last four years, Donald Trump was called a “conservative” president. Certain policies, like the dismantling of environmental regulations or the promotion of laissez-faire economics, have also been erroneously called “conservative.” Various media outlets and personalities, from One America News to Glenn Beck, have likewise been mislabeled “conservative.” When The Washington Post tries to rectify the problem by labeling far-right activist Ali Alexander an “ultraconservative,” it only makes matters worse. An ultraconservative should be even more determined to uphold the status quo rather than, like Alexander, trying to undermine it.

    The recent ouster of Liz Cheney from her position as the third highest-ranking Republican in the House has only further muddied the waters of this definitional quagmire. True, Cheney has upheld law and order in defending the integrity of the 2020 election against the revolutionary fervor of the “Trump Firsters” in her party. Prior to her recent stand, however, Cheney herself flouted many of the principles of conservativism by embracing the more radical policies of the Trump-inflected Republican Party, voting with the former president over 92% of the time on such issues as gutting the environment.

    The misuse of the term “conservative” is the result not only of a structural quirk of American politics, but also the evolution of political ideology in the United States.

    The Europeans

    In Europe, multi-party systems allow for greater nuance in political labeling. Thus, conservatives in the various Christian Democratic parties compete for votes against far-right populist parties that embrace anti-democratic, racist and even fascist positions. America’s two-party system, on the other hand, collapses such distinctions into a binary opposition between a single “liberal” and a single “conservative” party. If a faction emerges within the Republican Party, therefore, it is by definition “conservative” even if it so obviously isn’t. It’s as if politics in America is digital — either one or zero — while European politics reflect all the messy gradations of the analog realm.

    At the same time, ideologies have evolved considerably in the United States over the last half-century. “Conservative” once stood for preserving traditional arrangements in society such as family, faith, community and small business against the modernizing forces of the market. Conservatives have also adopted the British philosopher Edmund Burke’s distaste for the Enlightenment project of human rights and egalitarianism. Conservatives were also once conservationists (remember: it was Richard Nixon who, in 1970, created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act Extension).

    Embed from Getty Images

    The Reagan/Thatcher revolution changed all that. Conservatives suddenly became ultra-liberal in the economic sense. They wholeheartedly embraced the free market in their eagerness to deploy any powerful force against what they considered to be the primary evil in the world: big government. They supported laissez-faire economics — essentially, no government controls on the economy — even though unrestrained market forces tear apart communities, break apart families, undermine faith, destroy family farms and sweep away small businesses. But since such a market served as a counterforce to government authority, the neo-liberal conservatives prepared to throw out whatever babies were necessary in order to get rid of the bathwater.

    A further revolution in conservative thought came with the neoconservatives. These foreign policy hawks discovered a fondness for human rights and a taste for revolutionary change, as long as it was in countries the United States opposed. Overthrowing the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, which required a revolutionary destruction of the status quo, became a new addition to the conservative agenda.

    In some respects, Trump attempted to purge the conservative movement of these two newer tendencies through his rejection of both the cherished free trade of the neoliberals and the “forever wars” of the neoconservatives. In their place, the new president reverted to the older right-wing ideology of nationalism, populism and racism of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s and the America First movement of the 1940s. At the same time, however, Trump retained the allegiance of these newfangled conservatives by slashing government involvement in the economy and championing higher Pentagon spending.

    As a result, the current Republican Party features a dog’s breakfast of right-wing ideologies. You can still find ardent neoliberals like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio who espouse free-trade economics and a few neocons like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas who rail against neo-isolationism. A solid majority of the party, Cheney notwithstanding, backs Trump no matter how much he deviates from conservative values.

    The Media

    Given the inability of Republicans to define themselves with any degree of precision and their preference for hiding behind labels like “conservative,” it’s no wonder that the media has difficulty parsing right-wing terminology. If the Freedom Caucus calls itself “conservative,” and the American Conservative Union agrees, should it really be the job of The New York Times to correct the record?

    And yet, that’s precisely what the mainstream media does for other ludicrously inapt designations. No major newspaper believes that North Korea is democratic simply because its official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. No mainstream journalists would mistake the far-right Sweden Democrats for the US political party of the same name. As for Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, it is nothing of the sort, since it’s only the personal political vehicle of the raving extremist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and pity the poor reporter who takes the party at face value.

    It’s long past time for the mainstream media to apply these common-sense rules of nomenclature to American politics.

    There are several efforts ongoing to wean the Republican Party of its addiction to Donald Trump. Perhaps a more important first step would be to reclaim the term “conservative” so that it applies in the United States to the same system of values that inspires conservative parties in Europe. Only then will the Republican Party have a chance of becoming once again a defender of the status quo rather than its chief wrecking ball.

    *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

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

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    Can the US Really Rally Other Nations?

    On May 25, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an effusive demonstration of love and mutual admiration. The show the two men put on in the aftermath of a shaky ceasefire looked like a private celebration of a threefold victory for Israel thanks to its aggressive show of force. The rockets from Gaza have stopped; Israel is still in control; the US will stand by Netanyahu, thick or thin.

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    What has emerged from Blinken’s visit for Americans is a “mission accomplished” feeling. The US will now be able to write the entire event off as insignificant and return to their normal activities. These include arguing about how much not to spend on infrastructure, discovering the truth about UFOs or getting vaccinated so that people can start partying again as summer approaches. Hamas has been disarmed. The disaster in the Holy Land has been avoided.

    The problem for any serious observer is that their comforting discourse is in total dissonance with the historical context. The media across the globe have noticed that for the Biden administration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a low priority, an unwanted distraction from the real business of the hour: creating a positive image for the recently elected president, young in the office (a mere 125 days) but old in years and inevitably stale in his thinking.

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    What does all this tell us about President Joe Biden’s policy with regard to Israeli-Palestinian relations? Some have hinted that, under pressure from progressives and some centrist Democrats, the Biden administration might consider modifying its ever-forgiving relationship with Israel by, for the first time, imposing conditions on the generous military aid the US provides year after year. No trace of that pressure appeared in Blinken’s discourse. Instead, the policy he hints at sounds like an anemic version of the Trump-Kushner peace plan. Biden talks about achieving stability by encouraging trade and investment. This essentially means the US will release enough cash for the rebuilding required for the Palestinians to function minimally within the Israeli economy.

    In his meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Blinken evoked a gift of $360 million, not quite half of the appropriation of $735 million in supplementary military aid to Israel the Biden administration requested earlier this month and which some Democrats in Congress are currently contesting. Despite meetings with leaders in Egypt and Jordan, there is no indication that Washington may seek to address the historical causes of a never-ending series of conflicts. That will be left to others. Blinken summed up his intention in these words: “The United States will work to rally international support.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Rally:

    Incite a group of people and, in extreme cases, a mob to back or participate in a project that may or may not be in their interest but which reflects the goals and interests of the one who incites

    Contextual Note

    The style section of The New York Times features an article about a high school student named Adrian in California who, on May 17, produced a flyer to invite kids from his school to an open beach party for his 17th birthday. A friend spread the invitation to Snapchat and TikTok, whose “For You” algorithm turned it into a national event. Thousands of people responded and arranged to travel to Huntington Beach to be part of the event. The response ballooned uncontrollably, leading the two young friends to seek a willing commercial partner and turn it into an organized, paying event in Los Angeles, simply to avoid being accused of provoking a riot. It ended with a fracas on the beach, clashes with the police and hundreds of unhappy customers when no party materialized in Los Angeles. It did, however, instantly turn Adrian into an internet influencer.

    Adrian now understands what it means to rally his contemporaries and indeed how easy it is to do it with the right plan. The Biden-Blinken plan to rally international support not only seems more modest and vague than Adrian’s, but it is far less likely to succeed. Blinken’s promise contains the principal themes of the discredited Trump-Kushner plan, without the ambition. The countries he appears to be rallying are either part of last year’s Abraham Accords initiated by Donald Trump or sympathetic to its goals. They essentially consist of Israel’s neighbors to the south: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt.

    The Trump-Kushner plans rallied these nations around the idea of collaborating with Israel to create a prosperous business zone in the Middle East. It promised to turn the Occupied Palestinian Territories into a prosperous tourist attraction, allowing it to participate in the kind of glitzy commercial culture that has triumphed in Dubai and provided a model for Neom, Saudi Arabia’s futuristic city in the desert. Jared Kushner and friends imagined that Gaza could become one giant beach resort like Waikiki, Acapulco or Cancun.

    Historical Note

    This may be what was at the back of Antony Blinken’s mind when he proposed to “promote economic stability and progress in the West Bank and Gaza, more opportunity, to strengthen the private sector, expand trade and investment, all of which are essential to growing opportunity across the board.” The underlying logic is the same as the Trump-Kushner peace plan, once touted as the “deal of the century,” a game-changer destined to transform the economy of the Middle East, consolidate an objective alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia and isolate Iran. For historical and cultural reasons that should have been obvious to anyone familiar with the region, no one apart from the ruling class of those Middle Eastern countries took the plan seriously. Even they did so mainly out of diplomatic politeness toward Donald Trump and deference to the always redoubtable economic and military might of the US.

    The difference between the Trump-Kushner plan and Blinken’s vague proposal is that in the first case, the cash would be counted in billions. Most of it would have been provided by the Saudis, allowing them to gain cultural control over the Palestinians. The Palestinians would inevitably be beholden to the Israeli-Saudi alliance’s money and technology on the simple condition that they humbly accept their supporting role in an economy designed to further the interests of the ruling class in the US, Israel and the Arabian Peninsula. The Palestinians, with or without an identifiable state, would have their role in the neo-liberal economy assured, ensuring peace on earth forever after.

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    Blinken appears to have accepted the collaborative vision that Jared Kushner imagined, but in stating it, he unwittingly reveals its fundamental flaw. “Asking the international community, asking all of us to help rebuild Gaza only makes sense if there is confidence that what is rebuilt is not lost again because Hamas decides to launch more rocket attacks in the future,” Blinken said. The US has never reconciled the contradiction that comes from the fact that Hamas, which it classifies as a terrorist organization, came to power in a legitimate democratic election in 2006. Some might judge that the US, with a history of sending its mighty military into different regions of the world on false pretexts and prolonging its assaults on other populations for decades, could also be classified as a terrorist organization despite its democratically elected government.

    There is something chilling when Blinken evokes the idea “that what is rebuilt is not lost again because Hamas decides to launch more rocket attacks in the future.” He is telling the Palestinians that if they choose to react to any perceived injustice and repression with the limited weapons at their disposal, they should expect everything that is built or “rebuilt” to come toppling down on their heads once again. This is a threat, not a peace proposal. It is a cynical affirmation of might over right. It is also an explicit denial of democracy and respect for the outcome of democratic elections.

    The test of Biden’s ability to influence events in the Middle East will come very soon with the result of the Vienna talks concerning the United States’ eventual return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal with Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu is using the occasion to put pressure on the US to abandon the talks. Joe Biden promised during the 2020 election campaign to return to the JCPOA. If the US fails to do so, some will see it as a sign of Israel’s continued power to dictate US foreign policy.

    *[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

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    The Good Old Days: Nostalgia’s Political Appeal

    Donald Trump is gone, yet his specter continues to haunt American politics. The UK is no longer part of the European Union, yet Brexit continues to provoke emotions on both sides of the Channel. Both Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election and the outcome of the Brexit referendum of 2016 were driven by a range of widespread and profound emotions. One of the most prominent was nostalgia.

    Nostalgia has been around for ages. The first one to recognize its significance was a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer. In 1688, Hofer coined the word — a compound derived from the Greek nostro, meaning “home,” and algos, meaning “pain” — to describe what he considered to be a medical malaise he detected among Swiss mercenary soldiers, expressed as a profound yearning for their home (what in German is called Heimweh — homesickness).

    Hofer might have drawn inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey. Its hero, after spending seven years in the company of the sea nymph Calypso, felt compelled to return home. The longing to see his home was so overwhelming that he rejected Calypso’s offer to make him immortal if he stayed.

    The Meaning of Nostalgia

    Since Hofer’s times, the meaning of nostalgia has both substantially changed and significantly broadened. It is no longer associated with homesickness. Instead, in today’s parlance, nostalgia stands for “a sentimental longing for one’s past.” More specifically, nostalgia stands for a yearning for an idealized, lost past, a past more often than not seen through rose-tinted glasses. For a long time, nostalgia was seen as a pathology, reflecting the refusal to confront an unpleasant present and an even worse future.

    In this view, the yearning for “an irretrievable past becomes a narcissistic illusion,” a “deflection from current unpleasant circumstances.” More recently, however, nostalgia is predominantly seen as a positive emotion, an effective coping mechanism in times of turmoil and crisis. In this case, nostalgia serves as “an important resource that helps people find meaning in life and regulate meaning-related distress.” In the face of tectonic demographic, technological and geopolitical changes, seeking comfort in a past where life was arguably simpler and easier to navigate is human, all too human. As Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassu have put it, nostalgia “offers relief from socio-economic angst. Yesterday is associated with progress; tomorrow with stasis or regression.”  

    This type of nostalgia — because nostalgia comes in different guises — reflects “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.” In this context, as Matthias Stephan has recently suggested, nostalgia represents “both a look back to an idealized past (whether real or imagined) and a hope that the romanticized past will become our future.”

    The Politics of Recognition vs. Redistribution

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    Here, nostalgia “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” The author of these lines, Svetlana Boym, characterized this iteration as “restorative nostalgia.” Against this, Boym sets what she called “reflective nostalgia.” Reflective nostalgia accepts the fact that the past is past, that it cannot be retrieved. As Hal McDonald has put it, “This acknowledgment of the irretrievability of our autobiographical past provides an aesthetic distance that allows us to enjoy a memory in the same way that we enjoy a movie or a good book.”

    At the same time, it engenders a realistic, and perhaps even critical, view of the past. It is this constellation that makes nostalgia extremely political. In fact, because of its inherently binary nature, nostalgia is ideally suited to inform both progressive and reactionary politics.

    Today, nostalgia is primarily evoked on the nationalist right. More often than not, this is a type of nostalgia that depends on the “disparagement of the present,” which Christopher Lasch once considered the “hallmark of the nostalgic attitude.” Feeling discombobulated by and disenchanted with the present, as well as uneasy about the future, a growing number of people feel tempted to go down the memory lane and retreat to the past where, as the German expression goes, the world was presumably still in order.

    When the World Was in Order

    On the nationalist right, it is particularly radical right-wing populist parties and actors that have drawn the greatest political benefit from the appeal to nostalgia. Donald’s Trump is a prominent case in point. His campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that there was a time when the United States was still great, that today it no longer is, but that tomorrow it will be great again — as long as the people follow The Donald.

    The promoters of Brexit played a similar tune. Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), holding up his new non-EU passport and triumphantly exclaiming, “We got our passports back!,” evoked a time when Great Britain still maintained the pretense to be a great power rather than one among 28 EU member states where it was not even primus inter pares. Once freed from the shackles of the EU, a once again completely sovereign Great Britain would regain its lost glory. Or, as Britain’s Secretary of Defense Gavin Williamson claimed in late 2018, once Britain was out of the European Union, it would become a “true global player,” establishing new military bases all over the world. As an article in the Financial Times from early 2016 put it, “Brexiters are Nostalgics in Search of a Lost Empire.”

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    Public opinion polls conducted a few months prior to the referendum provided ample evidence of the extent to which the British public glorified the country’s past. In early 2016, a YouGov poll found more than 40% of British respondents expressing pride in Britain’s colonial history; about the same number thought the British Empire had been a good thing. Only a fifth of respondents had a negative view. In a similar survey, two years earlier, around 50% of respondents thought that Britain’s former colonies were better off today because they had been part of the British Empire, while a third thought that it would be a good thing if Britain still had an empire. At the same, there were strong sentiments that Britain was in decline. In fact, some 80% of “leavers” shared that view in 2016.

    Hardly surprising that, in the wake of the referendum, one of Britain’s leading tabloids, The Daily Star, called on its readers to “Make Britain Great Again!” Nostalgia, paired with mass delusion and a portion of righteous resentment, obviously paid handsome political dividends — at least for Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and their comrades in arms.

    Similarly in the United States, Trump’s main slogan “Make America Great Again” appealed to widespread nostalgia, particularly among the country’s white majority. In September 2016, for instance, half of the respondents in the annual American Values Survey agreed with the statement that their country’s best days were “behind us.” A few months earlier, a Pew survey found more than 45% of respondents agreeing with the statement that compared to 50 years earlier, life for people like them had gotten worse.

    Among Trump supporters, three out of four agreed with that statement. In a similar vein, one year earlier, around half of US respondents in a representative poll thought that “America’s best days” were in the past. At the same time, in 2016, more than 60% of Americans believed their children would be worse off than they were. This is also reflected in surveys that seek to gauge what Americans think about, for instance, the American dream — the notion that hard work will allow them to get ahead.

    Most notably, these sentiments were particularly pronounced among America’s white population, far more than among African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. Donald Trump, ever so tuned in to the grievances of white America, stoked the fire of white resentment, charging, at a town hall meeting in the fall of 2015, that “the American dream is in trouble,” only to add the promise that with him in the White House, “we will get it back.” To be sure, this was hardly original. Four years earlier, the Republican Platform already committed to “Restoring the American Dream.”

    The Good Old Days

    Conjuring up idealized images of the good old days is a crucial tool in the ideational repertoire of nativist and national-populist parties and actors. And for good reasons. For one, the evocation of nostalgic fantasies creates a sense of collective identity, community and a common purpose, all of them of central concern on the radical populist right. At the same time, in the hands of radical right-wing populists, nostalgia serves as an indirect indictment of the present, linked to an appeal to the notion that the best of the past could somehow replace the current situation.

    Here, nostalgia represents what S. D. Chrostowska has called a “malaise of dissatisfaction with the present and the direction that present” has taken. The more profound and widespread collective disenchantment with the present happens to be, the more pronounced is the appeal of the past. An exemplary case in point is a sociological study from 2016 in Poland, whose authors explored the extent to which nostalgia for the communist period was prevalent among current-day Poles. The results were striking. They showed that people who felt they had been better off during that period than at present were much more nostalgic and had a significantly better opinion about the communist government than other respondents.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Poland is hardly unique. The arguably best-known case of post-communist nostalgia is what in German is known as Ostalgie. Ostalgie entails a revaluation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) — former East Germany — on the part of a substantial part of its population following reunification. To a large extent, this was in response to “the perceived threat of a West German depreciation of their life experiences.” Substantial numbers of citizens in the east had the feeling that they and their past were treated with condescension, if not outright disdain. Even 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the sentiment that easterners are second-class citizens finds widespread resonance in what once was the GDR. Ostalgie is all about a demand for recognition, dignity and respect rather than crude material interests. As sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway has noted, we tend to forget “how much people care about public acknowledgement of their worth.”

    Yet they tend to “care about status quite as intensely as they do [about] money and power.” They want “to be someone.” Ostalgie is also informed by the sentiment that in the GDR, ordinary workers were valued — they were someone. Not for nothing, the GDR prided itself on being an Arbeiter und Bauernstaat — the state of workers and farmers.

    Nostalgia in post-communist societies might be somewhat puzzling to outside observers, yet politically it is of no consequences. There is no craving for a return of what in German was known as Realsozialismus — loosely translated as “actually existing socialism.” A regime that imprisoned its citizens behind walls, barbed wires and minefields in order to prevent them from fleeing the country has nothing in common with the radical humanist spirit of socialism, reflected, for instance, in Karl Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” and the writings of leading exponents of the Frankfurt School.

    Radical Reconstruction

    Matters are entirely different when populist leaders use nostalgia for the dismantling and radical (from the roots) reconstitution of a society’s collective identity. This is what has happened with two of the most important contemporary populist regimes: Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and Narendra Modi’s India. At first sight, the two cases could not be more different. Here, a representative of political Islam, there, of political Hinduism. Yet below the surface, the similarities are quite striking.

    These similarities are seen, in particular, in the place nostalgia — and the appeal to nostalgia — has in the rhetoric of both leaders. In the Turkish case, nostalgia is reflected in what Turkish observers have called neo-Ottomanism. Erdogan, as Hakan Yavuz has argued, has been seeking “to remold Turkey in the form of an imagined, ahistorical conceptualization of the former Ottoman Empire.” The ultimate objective is “to resurrect a powerful Muslim state in the ancestral mold of the former Ottoman Empire.”

    At the same time, Erdogan’s political project represents a frontal assault on and complete disavowal of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s foundation of the modern “Kemalist” Turkish state. This project was based on a progressive, secular vision of equality adopted from the French Revolution. Here, citizenship and identity derive from a common adherence to civic principles; in the case of Erdogan’s project, citizenship and identity derive from adherence to a common ethno-religious community, which bodes ill for Turkey’s minorities such as Kurds and Armenians.

    In the Indian case, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP), has never made a secret of the fact that it seeks to eradicate the legacy of Nehruvian secularism and replace it with Hindutva. Long before Modi became prime minister, the BJP mobilized against what it called Nehru’s “pseudo-secularism.” In reality, the BJP charged, secularism discriminated against Hindus while according concessions to India’s sizeable Muslim minority. In fact, in 2018, Sonia Gandhi admitted that the BJP had managed to convince a sizeable portion of the Indian public that the Indian National Congress was a pro-Muslim and, implicitly, anti-Hindu party.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Central to the BJP’s ideology is the myth of the Vedic golden age, exemplified, in particular, by the reign of the mythical Ram, largely seen as the epitome of India’s golden age. This golden age came to an abrupt end with the Muslim invasion and conquest, which ushered in what Modi has characterized as “1,200 years of slavery.” This is the central trope of Hindu nationalist historiography and victimology — the juxtaposition of “a glorious Hindu golden age followed by an era of Muslim oppression.”

    In order to bolster their case of that golden age, Hindu nationalists have gone to great lengths, in some cases transcending into the ridiculous. A case in point is the various claims that in ancient times, India already achieved stunning scientific and technological accomplishments, from advanced reproductive technologies to stem cell research, “spacecraft, the internet, and nuclear weapons — long before Western science come on the scene.” More often than not, these claims were advanced not by crackpots but by respected scientists fallen under the sway of Hindu nationalist nostalgia.

    In both cases, the combination of nostalgia and populism serves to mobilize the “true” people against a Westernized elite, from — but not of — the people. At the same time, it serves as a means to eradicate national humiliations: in the case of India, centuries of being subjugated to Islamic rulers; in the Turkish case, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, symbolized by the Treaty of Sèvres which, had it ever been implemented, would have left only a small area around Ankara under Turkish rule.  

    Erdogan’s recent decision to reclassify the Hagia Sophia — once the “ultimate icon of Christian civilization” — as a mosque, constitutes a reversal of Kemalist “secularist suppression.” Similarly, laying the foundations of a Ram temple on the site of an ancient mosque, known as Babri Masjid, in the city of Ayodhya in northern India, serves as highly visible expressions of the will to reverse — and perhaps even avenge — the past.

    Resurrecting Grievances

    The arguably most successful populist resort to this combination of grievance-based nostalgia and the exploitation of national humiliation is epitomized by Hungary’s Victor Orban. To be sure, Hungarians have good reasons for historically-grounded grief — the bloody suppression of the Hungarian people’s 1956 uprising against the communist regime and the Soviets is a prominent case in point. The most important episode, however, which continues to haunt Hungarian collective national consciousness until today, dates back to 1920, when the victorious powers imposed on Hungary the Trianon Treaty. The treaty deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its prewar territory and three-fifths of its prewar population, which turned Hungary into what Stanley Payne has called “the most nationally aggrieved state in all of Europe.”

    Victor Orban has been particularly adroit not only in manipulating diffuse sentiments of humiliation and resentment but also in evoking nostalgia for Hungary’s golden age. This was the period spanning from the formation of the dual monarchy following Vienna’s defeat in the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, which put the Hungarians on par with the Austrians until the end of the First World War — a period which saw all ethnic Hungarians united in the same state. Together, these two ideational elements constitute the core of Orban’s national-populist project, which over the past decade or so has progressively gained cultural hegemony in Hungary.

    Orban, Modi and Erdogan are prominent examples of how nationalist-populist actors have weaponized nostalgia for political gain the same way they have weaponized other emotions such as anxiety, anger and empathy. As Yale professor Paul Bloom has recently pointed out in his indictment of emotional empathy, “unscrupulous politicians use our empathy for victims of certain crimes to motivate anger and hatred toward other, marginalized, groups.” Emblematic of this strategy is Donald Trump’s exploitation of “our empathic feelings toward victims of rape and assault to build hatred toward undocumented immigrants.”

    Here, Trump instinctively exploited a central characteristic of this emotion, namely its intrinsic in-group bias. Neuropsychological studies suggest that more often than not, empathy extends significantly more to those we feel close to rather than out-groups, “potentially making them likely targets for prejudice and discrimination.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    The same is true for nostalgia. Experiments in social psychology have shown that collective nostalgia — the type of nostalgia routinely evoked by national populist actors — tends to confer “sociability benefits,” such as support and loyalty, to the in-group while tending to evoke exclusionary sentiments toward out-groups. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut have argued that “Collective nostalgia’s sociality is amenable to exploitation and can have controversial ramifications.” A recent empirical study on the effect of national nostalgia on out-group perceptions in the context of the 2016 US presidential election shows that national nostalgia “significantly predicted racial prejudice and this relationship was mediated by perceived outgroup threat.”

    This also holds true for Europe. A Bertelsmann study on nostalgia from 2018 found that more than three-quarters of European respondents classified as nostalgics (two-thirds of the sample) agreed with the statement that recent immigrants did not want to integrate into the host society; more than half thought they were taking jobs away from the natives. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that radical right-wing populist parties have found fertile ground for their nativist politics of exclusion.

    A case in point is the adoption of the concept of the folkhemmet by the Sweden Democrats, the country’s radical populist right. The folkhemmet (people’s home) stands for the heydays of Sweden’s Social Democratic welfare state, a golden age that spanned four decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s. This was a time of ethnocultural homogeneity, civic egalitarianism and social solidarity. The Sweden Democrats’ adoption of the sentimental notion of the folkhemmet appeals to nostalgic sentiments while, at the same time, serving as a justification for the exclusion of non-ethnic minorities such as refugees from social benefits.

    The Sweden Democrats’ manipulation of nostalgia in the service of their politics of welfare chauvinism is exemplary of the flexible and polyvalent possibilities of applying this emotion. It is for this reason that nostalgia lends itself ideally to national populist mobilization. One of the central ideational tropes informing populism is the notion of the united people, a unity derived from a shared past and a common destiny, confronting a common adversary, if not an enemy. The evocation of a glorious past is a great way to make people feel good about themselves at a time when there is little to be cheerful or optimistic about.

    These days, the glorious past is not far away, not more than two years, the time before social distancing, lockdowns and vaccination jitters. Under the circumstances, nostalgia is likely to persist, ready to be exploited by populist entrepreneurs for political gain. Those who still think that the pandemic will substantially weaken support for the radical populist right might take a look at Spain. There, Vox, whose rhetoric is replete with nostalgia, is the only party that has substantially increased its support base over the past several months.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

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

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    Biden Changes the Russia Equation

    The Biden administration is posing some stark choices for its European allies. It is not only challenging them to stand more firmly against the Kremlin, but is expanding America’s expectations of what democracy should be inside their own countries. President Joe Biden’s tough position on Russia, especially the sanctions announced on April 15, risks further exacerbating the split within NATO countries over how tough to be on the Kremlin. The administration also risks blowback from Central and East European (CEE) states over its strong support for liberal democratic standards that not all of them endorse.

    The Image of Russia

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    For all the contempt that many Europeans held for Donald Trump, his policies toward Russia were easier for some of them to live with. Hard-line NATO nations drew comfort from his continuation of sanctions against Moscow, sale of lethal arms to Ukraine and fierce opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Trump questioned Article 5 of the NATO charter, but Russian President Vladimir Putin never had the stomach to put Trump’s jumbled position on the issue to the test. Meanwhile, Europeans eager to accommodate Russia were encouraged by Trump’s attempts to forge a personal relationship with Putin and his enduring belief that the Kremlin could somehow become an ally.

    Trump was also a convenient president for those in CEE nations with conservative social values and an unsteady commitment to the rule of law. Trump’s attitude toward their countries was simply transactional; his interest was in what America could gain from their relationship. How they were governed held little interest for him.

    Bows and Wrist-Slaps

    Biden has changed the equation dramatically. Some might have expected him to set aside everything that Moscow did during the Trump presidency and focus on the future. Instead, Biden did the opposite. On April 15, he expelled Russian diplomats and imposed significant new sanctions for Russia’s actions during Trump’s time in office, leaving space for a whole new set of possible actions in case of further provocations from Moscow. Some observers found the measures Biden announced to be wrist-slaps.

    Embed from Getty Images

    But in many respects, the measures were significant and pointed clearly to future possibilities, ranging from new financial actions to the criminal prosecution of senior Russian regime figures. Officials also intimated that the US might already be retaliating on the cyber front.

    Biden has made the appropriate bows to potential cooperation with Moscow and offered Putin a summit in the coming months in a third country. But overall, the tone of his message to Russia has been hostile, including calling Putin a “killer.” Putin’s claim to legitimacy, at home and abroad, is built on the idea that he is a respected statesman and even something of an intellectual rather than the boss of a dictatorship backed by organized crime. (While most Russian reports on Biden’s comments translated “killer” as “ubiytsa,” the usual word for “murderer,” some media chose the imported word “killer,” which in Russian means a mob hitman.) 

    With Biden taking a more uncompromising attitude to the Kremlin, the question now is whether Western responses to Russian provocations will become much more unified and move well beyond diplomatic statements and scattered financial sanctions. Is a point approaching where US pressure — plus Russia’s threats to Ukraine, its torture of Alexei Navalny, its cyberattacks against the West and its murder of opponents abroad — might finally lead the allies to slash the scale of business deals with Moscow, choke off the flow of illicit Russian money and impose tighter restrictions on visas to the EU? Even if sanctions don’t work, they say something about the values that the country imposing them stands for.

    In CEE countries, substantial numbers of citizens still believe Russia poses little threat to their nations. But the drumbeat of provocations from Moscow, including espionage and even sabotage inside CEE countries, will have its effect. Even though Visegrad nations lack a united policy on Ukraine — mainly because of Hungary — they all backed Czechia’s expulsion of Russian diplomatic staff over the explosion of an arms depot in 2014. Will allied nations now respond to Czechia’s call for them to expel Russian diplomats from their countries, too, to show solidarity?

    Human Rights Challenge

    Meanwhile, the new US administration has thrown down a human rights challenge not only to authoritarian regimes, but to some of its CEE allies. Biden’s team has made clear that America once again cares very much about democratic rights in other countries. When directed at Russia, this message has the dual advantage of reflecting American values while also pressuring Putin, who, judging by his repression of even tiny protests, seems to genuinely believe a “color revolution” is around the corner.

    Yet the policy may well make some allies uncomfortable. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a speech on March 30, declared that in America’s view, there is no “hierarchy of rights” in a democracy. He not only vigorously and specifically defended abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, but essentially put them on the same level as freedom of speech and religion. In so doing, he lined up with forces in the EU that are pressing some CEE countries not only to strengthen basic democratic institutions, but to also adopt liberal social values. The US position creates a new opening for pro-Russian and populist politicians who have been claiming for years that the West is intent on undermining the “morals” of former members of the Soviet bloc.

    Virtuous as the US position may be, it is unclear how far the administration will go with it. Blinken, an experienced diplomat, knows that idealism often must bow to political realities. As his predecessor Mike Pompeo put it, “Our commitment to inalienable rights doesn’t mean we have the capacity to tackle all human rights violations everywhere and at all times.” Even if the administration recognizes no hierarchy of rights, it certainly has a hierarchy of interests. At the top of that hierarchy may well be the geopolitical imperative of keeping CEE nations out of Russia’s orbit.

    If the US runs into too-strong opposition over its human rights agenda, it could focus more on campaigning against corruption. That cause has wide public support. It is also effective against many anti-democratic forces, including pro-Russian actors who thrive on murky financial deals. This could de-escalate conflict over liberal social values while still encouraging activities that undermine Kremlin influence in the CEE region.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of GLOBSEC.]

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

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    What the State Department and the Media Get Wrong About the JCPOA

    Just as President Joe Biden’s administration waited till the very last minute to define its position of vaccine patent waivers, imperiling the effective impact on a pandemic of whatever agreement is finally reached, it has played for time with the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This may prove costly because of Iran’s tight electoral calendar. The failure to act quickly with the current negotiation-minded regime in Tehran, which insists on returning to the accord from which Donald Trump withdrew, risks reinforcing the Iranian hardliners in the country’s June 18 election.

    The quandary the Biden administration is dealing with may now have more to do with saving face than achieving an accord. In a New York Times article on the state of negotiations, reporters Steven Erlanger and David Sanger claim that American and Iranian leaders “share a common goal: They both want to re-enter the nuclear deal that President Donald J. Trump scrapped three years ago.” The easy path for a president who presumably represents everything Trump opposed would be simply to rescind the withdrawal. But Biden’s advisers appear to believe that returning to the old deal would make the president appear weak and unmanly after the virile performance by his predecessor who pleased his audience by taking a roundhouse punch at the hornet’s nest.

    Can the US and Iran Compromise in Vienna?

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    The Times reporters describe the situation in these terms. If Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken can’t come home with what he termed in January a “’longer and stronger accord’ — one that stops Iran from amassing nuclear material for generations, halts its missile tests and ends support of terrorist groups,” the US appears poised to accept Trump’s fait accompli. Republicans routinely accuse Democratic presidents of being weaklings. They believe that US presidents must perform with brio and show their muscles. Like George W. Bush in Iraq, to avoid appearing weak, Biden needs a pretext for a photo-op declaring the mission accomplished.

    According to Erlanger and Sanger, Biden “knows he cannot simply replicate what the Obama administration negotiated six years ago, after marathon sessions in Vienna and elsewhere, while offering vague promises that something far bigger and better might follow.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Bigger and better:

    The magic formula required to justify any proposed project in the consumer society

    Contextual Note

    The Times reporters insist that more than a month of “marathon sessions” must be justified by a cry of victory. In the US, time is money. Even if the public has paid little attention to the negotiations, the journalists clearly believe that the time invested must be accounted for. Erlanger and Sanger see a high political cost if the administration fails to show a return on investment. After all, Biden is already facing the shame — coming from both Republicans and Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) — of canceling 20 years of blood and treasure in Afghanistan with nothing to show for it.

    The journalists dismissively call the negotiations “five weeks of shadow boxing.” They deem the respective positions irreconcilable. The Iranians want to “be allowed to keep the advanced nuclear-fuel production equipment they installed after Mr. Trump abandoned the pact, and integration with the world financial system beyond what they achieved under the 2015 agreement.” The Biden administration, in contrast, insists on “an agreement on limiting missiles and support of terrorism.”

    Colm Quinn, the author of Foreign Policy’s newsletter, offers a clearer picture, pointing out that both sides are playing coy for the moment, as is usual in serious negotiations, especially in this case, when Americans and Iranians are communicating exclusively through European intermediaries. Quinn leaves a strong hint that the two sides may be close to a return to the original deal. This contradicts the impression given by The Times journalists. Is this their way of building suspense by treating it like a diplomatic Super Bowl?

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    If a deal is reached, The Times will be in a position to celebrate Biden’s “unexpected” accomplishment against such formidable odds. The Times, after all, has been going overboard to promote Biden as the new Roosevelt. To make their point, the authors cite American officials who “say it is not yet clear that Iran really wants to restore the old deal, which is derided by powerful hard-liners at home.” 

    With a single verb, Erlanger and Sanger unwittingly reveal their incapacity or unwillingness to take some perspective and distance themselves from the US State Department’s point of view. “With Iran’s presidential elections six weeks away,” they write, “the relatively moderate, lame-duck team of President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are spinning that an agreement is just around the corner.”

    The verb is “spinning.” For The Times journalists, it goes without saying that Iranians spin, while Americans tell it like it is. After citing the Iranians’ optimistic contention that negotiations are “underway for some details,” the journalists don’t just assume the State Department’s position but blurt out their own emotive reaction: “Not so fast, Mr. Blinken has responded, adding that ‘Iran has yet to make an equally detailed description of what nuclear limits would be restored.’”

    The rest of the article is remarkable for its uninformative incoherence, navigating around negotiating positions and areas of dispute that fail to differentiate between rhetoric and the description of the political reality on both sides. Lost in meaningless details, they make no attempt to clarify the underlying issues. They mix serious facts with anecdotal trivialities. To add to the confusion, they offer difficult-to-decipher statements in the passive voice, such as this one: “In two discussions in February, the Europeans urged American officials to start negotiating in earnest and lift some sanctions as a gesture of good faith toward Iran. Those suggestions were ignored.” Who ignored them and why?

    At one point, the journalists mention “Iran’s pressure tactics.” But even when citing Trump’s 1,500 sanctions against Iran, they never suggest that sanctions may be seen as pressure tactics. The authors apparently seek to leave the impression not only that the negotiations are going nowhere but that the journalists themselves — like for example, the Israeli government — may be hoping they fail. Compare this lengthy Times article with a brief video interview with Trita Parsi, executive vice president of The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where the viewer comes away with a solid idea both of what the stakes are on the two sides and a feeling for the historical logic underlying the current situation.

    Historical Note

    The rhetoric journalists use often reveals more about their unstated worldview than the content of what they write. Seizing on Blinken’s wish for something “longer and stronger,” the journalists echo it with their own “bigger and better.” This underlines the fact that Americans tend to see everything, even a supposedly delicate negotiation, in competitive terms. They multiply the comparatives, following the logic of marketers in the consumer society who always promise their product will provide “more and more.”

    The parties of any serious negotiation should have a principle on which they can agree, an overriding objective they both wish to achieve. In this case, it could be identified as a crucial historical goal: the denuclearization of the Middle East. It might even imply a broader goal, like the denuclearization of the world. Although they refused to make it explicit, the Obama administration’s JCPOA strategy did contain the idea of normalizing relations between the US and Iran in such a way as to remove the temptation of a Middle East nuclear arms race. By integrating Iran into the global economy, the competitive pressure to match Israel or dominate Saudi Arabia thanks to a nuclear arsenal would logically disappear.

    Instead of emphasizing that goal, Blinken publicly asserts, with The Times’ approval, that it’s all about getting an advantage and achieving more. There is a reason for that. Israel wants to maintain its own nuclear monopoly in the region, despite denying its existence. Because the US prioritizes Israel’s concerns, it effectively refrains not only from pursuing its own objectives but even articulating them in public. Reporting on the growing violence in Jerusalem and Gaza this week, The Times predictably notes that “neither side [is] prepared to make concessions the other would demand.” One more issue framed as a competition. Let the bigger and better man win.

    *[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

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    The Politics of Recognition vs. Redistribution

    At an earlier stage of my life, I had the great pleasure of spending two years teaching at York University in Toronto, Canada. Unlike the University of Toronto, whose campus looks like Harvard or Yale, York resembles British public universities such as Sussex: modern, functional, but without what in French is called “cachet.” York University also happened to be one of the last genuinely left-wing schools in the Western world, at least in the social sciences. I had colleagues who had actually read Karl Marx — and took him seriously. 

    By sheer coincidence, the day I interviewed for a position in the Department of Political Science, York had scheduled a public lecture by Nancy Fraser, a renowned feminist political theorist/philosopher from the New School for Social Research in New York City. The lecture was on the politics of recognition. Given her impeccable left-wing credentials, York was friendly terrain — or so it seemed. I still remember Fraser’s rather stunned expression when confronted with a barrage of attacks by York’s Marxists, who charged her with discounting if not dismissing the central importance of social class. 

    White Trash, White Privilege

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    That was some 20 years ago. Yet ironically, the tension between the politics of recognition and the class-based politics of redistribution is still as pertinent as it was when Fraser theorized it in the late 1990s. In recent years, it has become even more of an issue of vital importance for the future of progressive politics in liberal democracies, not least because of the challenge posed by contemporary radical, right-wing populism.

    Social Justice

    The questions of both redistribution and recognition are about social justice. Above all, social justice concerns leveling the playing field. This is a point Fraser has never tired of repeating. She has adamantly pointed out that struggles for redistribution are anything but “antithetical to struggles for recognition.” The problem is that, more often than not, one tended to be disassociated from the other. In reality, however, social justice involved both questions of redistribution and of “representation, identity, and difference.” 

    Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. In the 1980s, the left, by and large, started to abandon their commitment to what once was called the working class and its aspirations. In its wake, as Axel Honneth noted more than a decade ago, “‘equal distribution’ or ‘equality of good’ no longer form its central categories, but ‘dignity’ and ‘respect.’” To make matters worse, ordinary workers not only lost their privileged position in left-wing narratives. They were also increasingly denigrated, their needs and aspirations dismissed, and their values and views tagged as reactionary and retro, an expression of pervasive working-class authoritarianism. 

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    I remember a column written by the German satirist Wolfgang Ebert that said it all in a few lines. The article appeared in 1985 in the prestigious German weekly Die Zeit. The text was meant to be taken as what it was: satire on Germany’s post-68 new left, their delusions and disillusionment, which finally ended in the complete disavowal of the proletariat as a revolutionary class. On this reading, if the revolution never happened, it was because “the masses — not to speak of the working class as the so-called subject of the revolution — failed.” 

    In fact, Ebert continued, the masses “always fail.” Instead of following their “true interests” or at least listening to their “intellectual leaders,” they preferred to follow the siren calls of consumerism. Ebert’s conclusion: “Who would be stupid enough to risk their neck for these dumb masses?” The German Social Democrats (SPD) certainly didn’t. That’s why they are where they are today. Since the federal election of 1983, their share of the vote has plunged, from 38% to just over 20% in 2017. 

    Fast forward to 2011 in France, a few months before socialist Francois Hollande narrowly defeated the sitting president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the second round of the 2012 election. The election was overshadowed by the downfall of socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who for some time had been seen as a serious candidate for the presidency until his aspirations were sunk by sex scandals. 

    Terra Nova

    The reason Strauss-Kahn is mentioned here is because of his affiliation with Terra Nova, a progressive think tank modeled after the Center for American Progress and charged with “contributing to the intellectual renewal of the Left in France and in Europe.” In 2011, Terra Nova released a strategic paper that essentially advised that the left should forget about French workers. These workers, the authors charged, were no longer concerned with economic and social questions; instead, they had bought into the “cultural issues” promoted by the right. At the same time, they had progressively been seduced by the far-right National Front, both on cultural and socioeconomic questions.

    In short, as a highly critical commentary on the Terra Nova report in France’s premier left-wing daily, Liberation, ironically put it, workers were “dirty and nasty” — at least that was the impression one got from reading the paper. If the socialists were serious about winning the 2012 presidential election, Terra Nova insisted, they had to come up with a new progressive subject. Terra Nova suggested a “future-oriented” coalition (“tomorrow’s France”), “younger, more diverse, more feminized.” This was to be a coalition of the culturally progressive and the economically marginalized — except, of course, traditional workers. 

    The analysis was apparently heavily influenced by American strategists busily constructing the new or “emerging” Democratic majority — the title of an influential book from 2004. Today, as a recent dissertation on this question demonstrates, this (hitherto still quite elusive) majority consists of the “ascendant” and “rising” American electorate — constituencies that, unlike the traditional white working class, are growing as a share of the overall electorate: people of color, the young and well-educated, socially liberal whites and single women. As Christopher Cimaglio, the author of the essay, pointed out, in this framework, “the white working class often serves as a receding reactionary backdrop to emerging, forward-looking groups: ‘a more highly educated and diverse constituency,’ ‘a coalition of transformation, comfortable with demographic and cultural change.’” 

    Political Polarization

    The result of this strategy is what we have today: widespread polarization, mutual recriminations, intense loathing on both sides of the aisle, and a politics of grievances and resentment that makes a mockery of one of America’s most sacred notions: e pluribus unum. Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, roughly 80% of registered voters, both Democrats and Republicans, said “their differences with the other side were about core American values.” Around 90% in both camps “worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States.”

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    To be sure, the left’s embrace of identity politics and diversity, together with its somewhat callous dismissal of what in French is called the couches populaires (aka “ordinary people”) seeking to make a decent living, has not gone unchallenged. Just a few years ago in Spain, a polemic with the telling title “La Trampa de la Diversidad” (the diversity trap) became a national bestseller — and provoked a vicious backlash. Among other things, the author, the polemicist Daniel Bernabe, was charged with denigrating the feminist, LGBTQ and ecological causes, primarily for suggesting that the oppression of women was fundamentally rooted in economics — i.e., the capitalist system — rather than purely in sexism, which he considered as just another face of capitalism.

    For Bernabe, everything started with Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher managed to reframe economic inequality in terms of individual difference and diversity against a form of socialism that sought to impose “uniformity.” In the years that followed, socialists and social democrats, such as Tony Blair of the UK and Gerhard Schroder of Germany, bought into this narrative — with suboptimal success, to put it kindly.

    Recently in Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht, a leading politician of The Left party (Die Linke), provoked controversy with a new book highly critical of the left’s adoption of identity politics. Identity, according to Wagenknecht, has become the pet project of a self-indulgent, left-libertarian, individualistic, urban, cosmopolitan elite — a “lifestyle” politics reflecting the smug complacency of the morally superior, far removed from the mundane material concerns of ordinary workers. The charge implies that if today’s left embrace causes such as Fridays for Future or Black Lives Matter, it is less out of genuine conviction than out of the need to constantly reaffirm their distinctive identity and habitus, promoted as “the epitome of progressivism and responsibility.”

    Other critics of identity politics have been even less kind. “Blue Labour” theorist Jonathan Rutherford, for instance, in an article for New Statesman, argued that the decline of the British working class had turned Labour into a “party of the bourgeois left,” espousing what he called the cause of “cosmopolitan liberalism.” This, he charged, is the “culture of the elites,” one that is “deeply divisive,” grounded in identity politics. In turn, identity politics at least “in its libertarian pursuit of self-realisation and its judging and dividing into victim status hierarchies, is corrosive of society.”

    Under the influence of cosmopolitan liberalism, Rutherford argued, “progressive and left politics in the 1990s turned away from class politics and solidarity in favour of group identities and self-realisation.” In the process, the politics of recognition turned into a politics of victimization. At the same time, society has moved on. While the postindustrial, postmodern plebs fight over the question of who has been most victimized, the “new revolutionary subject,” the “‘universal educated person’ of urban, higher-educated and networked youth,” is busy conceptualizing a brave new world of material abundance, social harmony and ecological wellbeing — or so I understand what Rutherford is trying to say.

    Identity Politics

    Others have gone even further, charging that identity politics threatens to undermine liberal democracy. On this view, identity politics has led to a fragmentation of social cohesion, undermined a common sense of belonging, and been replaced by a new type of “tribalism” that has largely benefited the right and far right. As Francis Fukuyama pointed out, identity politics reflects “important grievances.” At the top of the list is the long history of denigration, discrimination and outright violence that various ethnic minorities have been subjected to by the white majority. 

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    In some cases, however, identity politics has taken on an “exclusive character where people’s ‘lived experiences’” determine who they are. This, Fukuyama said, has “created obstacles to empathy and communication.” One might add that it has done a disservice to the notion of a shared humanity. 

    In other cases, the combination of identity politics and political correctness has reached absurd dimensions. Take, for instance, the case of Felipe Rose, the iconic member of the Village People. Rose is the guy dressed in Native American garb, which has exposed him to charges of cultural appropriation and playing to stereotypes. As a critic put it, “Rose’s Halloween-style Indian is the only character [among the Village People] to play on the identity of a living culture.” Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the critic, added: “Why on earth, after American Indians have for decades been successfully waging war against the use of Indian stereotypes in popular culture, is Felipe Rose still parading around on stage in an Indian costume” like a cartoon character come to life? 

    The answer is simple. The singer defines himself as of Native American descent (Lakota Sioux) and has done more for America’s indigenous population than many a well-meaning left-wing culture warrior (pun intended). Skeptics might want to watch Rose’s “Trail of Tears” — a tribute to the “eviction” of the Cherokee and other nations from their ancestral lands resulting in thousands of deaths on the way.

    Does this mean the left should abandon recognition in favor of a return to an exclusive focus on redistribution? Quite the contrary: As Fukuyama has strongly insisted, the politics of recognition reflects a fundamental human desire for dignity, for being esteemed. Taking his cue from the eminent German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he noted that “history itself is driven by the struggle for recognition, by the desire of human beings to have their fundamental dignity recognised by other human beings and that modern democracy emerges when equal dignity, not the dignity of the master, but the mutual recognition of equal dignity, is achieved.” 

    Michael Sandel, a leading political philosopher and celebrated author of “The Tyranny of Merit,” argues along similar lines. As he wrote in The Atlantic, any “serious response to working-class frustrations must combat condescension and credentialist prejudice. It must also put the dignity of work at the center of the political agenda.” In the book, Sandel cited data chronicling the decline of America’s white working class, many of whom have simply fallen out of the labor market, as if “defeated by the indignities of a labor market indifferent to their skills.” The data comes from Isabel Sawhill’s work on what she calls “the forgotten Americans.”  They are the victims of the kind of “misrecognition” that Fraser has theorized. More often than not, they have given up, both with respect to the labor market and to life itself, succumbing to what Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called “deaths of despair.”

    “White Trash”

    These developments are not only highly unsettling. They also drastically demonstrate the central importance of recognition in the current period of hyperglobalization, accelerated innovation and automation, and run-away individualization. Under the circumstances, it is of paramount importance to bestow a modicum of visibility to the ignored and forgotten, to have their existence acknowledged.

    Yet this is seldom the case. America’s “white trash” underclass is a case in point. Poor and, more often than not, addicted to opioids, structurally irrelevant as both producers and consumers, white trash epitomizes what is wrong with today’s politics of recognition and identity, laying bare its internal contradictions — if not its inherent hypocrisies. White trash might appear to be an American phenomenon but it is not. As Imogen Tyler has shown, the denigration of the white, socially marginalized underclass is also prevalent in Britain, reflected in the notion of the “chav,” a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor. In fact, over the past two decades, “chavs” increasingly became a prevalent comedy television trope, exposing poor whites to ridicule and opprobrium by urban elites.

    This suggests that the struggle for recognition, as Fraser has affirmed, is an all-encompassing, comprehensive struggle based on an inclusive notion of hurt and grievances. On this reading, the struggle for recognition and dignity cannot be divorced from the struggle for redistribution or, for that matter, the struggle for equal participation. This, of course, is hardly a new idea. As early as 1918, Max Weber distinguished between three distinct but interrelated foundations of social inequality: resources, power and status. The latter refers to “inequality based on differences in honor, esteem, and respect.” As Stanford sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway has noted, we tend to forget “how much people care about public acknowledgement of their worth.” Yet they tend to “care about status quite as intensely as they do [about] money and power.” They want “to be someone.”

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    Historically, this was one of the main selling points of populist leaders, including Juan Peron in Argentina. Peron, who served two terms as president before his death in 1974, accorded workers and the poor and dispossessed “their own voice and a new sense of their relevance.” This was a particular concern of his wife, Evita, who “was instrumental in transforming the sense of identity of the workers and the poor, and in doing so she helped them gain a sense of their own ‘dignity’, as she frequently repeated.”

    As Carlos de la Torre, a leading specialist on Latin American populism, has put it, populism is “a politics of cultural and symbolic recognition of the despised underclasses. It transforms the humiliations that the rabble, the uncultured, the unseen, and those who have no voice have to endure in their daily life into sources of dignity and even redemption.” 

    Unfortunately, in today’s world, many people are denied the right to be someone. As Senator Bernie Sanders recently noted with respect to rural Americans, “there is not an appreciation of rural America or the values of rural America, the sense of community that exists in rural America.” He added: [S]omehow or another, the intellectual elite does have, in some cases, a contempt for the people who live in rural America. I think we’ve got to change that attitude and start focusing on the needs of people in rural America, treat them with respect, and understand there are areas there are going to be disagreements, but we can’t treat people with contempt.” 

    Unfortunately, this is has happened too often, not only in the United States but also in Europe. Social justice, however, can only be achieved if everyone is brought on board.

    Equal Rights

    There are myriad examples of how these dimensions of social justice are inextricably linked. Take, for instance, the struggle for women’s equal rights. In Germany, until 1958, women were not allowed — by law — to open their own bank account without the explicit permission of their husbands. In other words, it was the men who disposed of the money women brought into the marriage and the money they earned while married. In the United States, until the mid-1970s, banks could refuse to issue unmarried women a credit card. If they were married, their husbands were required to cosign.  

    Germany and the United States are not alone. In 1979, a British general practitioner refused to give former Labour MP Helen Goodman a prescription for contraception on the grounds that she was unmarried. In Switzerland, it took until 1971 for women to be granted the right to vote. Swiss men were largely opposed, as were many Swiss women. The reason why Switzerland agreed to accord women the right to vote was that the country wanted to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights. For this to happen, women’s suffrage was a sine qua non, much to the chagrin of Swiss men. In fact, it took until 1990 for the last Swiss canton (Appenzell Innerrhoden) to allow its female citizens to vote. Each of these cases confirmed Simone de Beauvoir’s conclusion that women constituted the “second sex.” No wonder the Vatican added her treatise to the index of prohibited books. 

    These examples illustrate the notion that the way in which humans are recognized — or not — has important consequences, material and otherwise. Take the case of gay rights. It took until 1987 for homosexuality to no longer be categorized as some kind of “mental disorder” in the United States. It took three more years for the World Health Organization (WHO) to follow suit. It took another few decades for the WHO to stop classifying gender incongruency as a behavioral and mental disorder. As Patchen Markell noted, “the denigration of non-normative sexualities … helps to sustain the maldistribution of resources ranging from health care to police protection.”

    In fact, take the more recent case of “welfare chauvinism,” which has led to attempts by Western European governments to limit access to social benefits for migrants and refugees while favoring the “native-born.” More often than not, the poor do not vote. Why should they? Nobody cares about them anyway.

    “Deplorables” in America

    Unfortunately but not unexpectedly — here, Fukuyama is right — the political right have, in recent years, hijacked identity politics in the service of division and polarization, driven by resentment and mutual recrimination. A paradigmatic example is the American tea party movement. One of its grievances was that welfare programs went “to ‘undeserving’ immigrants, minorities, and youth” instead of “hardworking” Americans.

    An even more outrageous example is a statement made by Idaho State Representative Priscilla Giddings, who recently justified cuts for Idaho’s universities. She claimed that state lawmakers “don’t want funds expended for courses, programs, services, or trainings that confer support for extremist ideologies, such as those tied to social justice.” Giddings, a member of the Republican Party, also opposed a bill in the Idaho legislature that would have released a federal grant designed to support the development of Idaho’s early childhood care and education system. She was particularly incensed that the program was aligned with a nonprofit organization that in its national catalog stated that “whiteness … confers privilege, as does being male” and that the organization “supports a ‘social justice curriculum.’” Giddings did not believe, she stated, “that you are privileged based on your gender or your race.” The bill failed, depriving Idaho’s children of much-needed funds.

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    Donald Trump, the former US president, built on this base during his first election campaign. To a large extent, he appealed to grievances not met by the dominant politics of recognition, which has tended to privilege minorities while dismissing the plight of the underprivileged, as long as they happen to be white. In 2016, he made restoring dignity to American workers a central trope of his speeches. When Hillary Clinton famously called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” he responded that, for him, they were “hard‐working American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people.” But above all else, Trump said, they were Americans, “entitled to leadership that honors you, cherishes you, and defends you.” He added: “Every American is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect in our country.” In the election, around two-thirds of white voters without a college degree voted for Trump.

    There can be no doubt that in recent decades, the question of recognition and dignity has become central in the politics of advanced liberal democracies. A prime example is the notion of multiculturalism, which presumes that all cultures are equal but different. In the process, the question of economic justice has taken somewhat of a back seat, to the detriment of those who have been struggling to keep afloat in an atmosphere of rapidly increasing economic uncertainty.

    One result has been an upsurge in support for political parties. Such parties have been astute in exploiting widespread popular resentment in the service of an exclusionary nativist notion of deservedness based on ethnicity or cultural compatibility. Unfortunately, too often the left have given up on their traditional electoral base, leaving the field wide open for the pied pipers of the radical, populist right. The radical right have promoted themselves as the advocates of ordinary people, claiming to give them a voice and a modicum of visibility and a sense of empowerment.

    Pandora’s Box

    The success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the regions that comprise the former East Germany is a case in point. As Jennifer Yoder, a professor at Colby College, recently suggested, support for the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia — strongholds for the party — is to a large extent the expression of a “revenge of the East.” As she pointed out, it reflects a profound sense among easterners of “not being taken seriously,” of never being asked what they think.  At the same time, it illustrates the perception “that one’s own status now and in the future is at risk.” It is this combination of the subjective experience of a lack of recognition and materially-related anxieties with regard to the future that has proved a powerful motivation for supporting a political party that purports to speak for both the mental state and the interests of the eastern German population.

    Germany is hardly a unique case. The claim to take ordinary people seriously, to give visibility to the forgotten and invisible has been a major selling point of radical, right-wing populists — from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump. In its election program for the 1985 election, the National Front in France declared that the “dignity of the French people” was one of its priorities. This was at a time of profound disillusionment among French workers over President Francois Mitterrand’s radical reversal of economic policy — aka tournant de la rigueur — of 1983.  Above all, rigueur meant austerity and subservience to Germany’s stringent monetary policy, which left French workers in the cold. Hardly surprising, in the years and decades that followed, many of them found a new home in Le Pen’s National Front.

    It might seem that the politics of recognition and diversity has opened Pandora’s box. To a certain extent, this is true. There is no good reason to recognize the suffering of ethnic, sexual and religious minorities at the hands of the majority, while dismissing the suffering of significant parts of the majority. White trash, as I have previously argued, might be white, but it is still dismissed and denigrated as “trash.” In this case, white privilege not only becomes meaningless, but it serves as an insult, adding to denigration and misrecognition, to use Fraser’s term.

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    Hardly surprising, the “deplorables,” to use Clinton’s term, overwhelmingly came out in support of Trump, who, as Clinton suggested, “lifted them up.” To be sure, Clinton meant that Trump reaffirmed their sexist, racist and homophobic views. Yet it could also mean that those who voted for Trump were — perhaps for the first time ever — given a sense that they existed, were “visible” and that they counted.  

    Le Pen, after being elected as the leader of the French radical, populist right, made the politics of recognition central to her project. In 2011, a few months before the presidential election, she promoted herself as the candidate of “la France des invisibles,” of all those citizens who never merit being mentioned, who are forgotten, who are — as she put it — “des triples riens.” The notion is an allusion to the triple-A ratings bestowed by international agencies on the creditworthiness of states — the main obsession, or so Le Pen maintained, of France’s political and economic elite.

    Le Pen failed to advance to the second round of the presidential election, which ended in a duel between Sarkozy and Hollande. In 2017, she made it to the second round but lost to Emmanuel Macron. Yet Le Pen’s politics of recognition had clearly hit a nerve, as did her adoption of a socioeconomic project that promised to expand the French welfare state; though this was under the proviso that the expansion would only be for the French.

    Same Boat

    The French case is neither unique nor limited to the radical, populist right. In Denmark, for instance, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, has advanced similar propositions, many of them adopted from the country’s far right. In today’s world, it appears that both recognition and redistribution only work if they are associated with a large dose of exclusion. Unfortunately, “identity politics” has turned into a zero-sum game. More often than not, the result has been more resentment and even less willingness to listen to the other side. The remarks by State Representative Giddings is paradigmatic of these trends. This kind of politics can only exacerbate social tension and increase polarization, in the process diminishing chances for moving forward.

    A progressive politics based on an honest assessment of the multiple crises we face today can only succeed if it includes all sectors of society, independent of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and material circumstances. It might sound a bit trite, but we are all sitting in the same boat. It would be a tragic mistake to throw some passengers overboard for the simple reason that they are deemed not to belong. 

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

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