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      Did Emmanuel Macron Have It Coming?

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      After watching the video of a street battle raging directly below the Paris apartment I once occupied at a time when François Mitterand was president, I turned to The New York Times’ editorial board’s response to President Emmanuel Macron’s accusation that The Times and other English-speaking media have been unfair in their coverage of Macron’s campaign against Islamist separatism.

      In an excellent article examining recent developments in France, Glenn Greenwald is far too generous when he suggests that the proudly authoritarian Macron is acting either “out of political calculation, conviction or some combination of both.” For the past three years, most people in France have been wondering whether in fact their president has any convictions beyond electoral calculations. Just ask the gilets jaunes, whose legacy is far from over. The yellow vests have been seen reemerging to accompany the current protests against Macron’s new law on global security.

      To defend his policies, Macron has frequently quoted Jean Baubérot, a historian of laïcité, the French ideology of secularism. In an interview with the journal L’Obs, Baubérot excoriates the president, notably calling into question Macron’s pompous invocation of the “values” of “la République.” But as Baubérot notes, Macron’s idea of values “could disguise less than honorable intentions.” At the same time, the historian reminds the president that values are communicated by “convincing rather than constraining.”

      Macron’s Problem With the News in English

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      Baudérot goes even further when he compares Macron to the revolutionaries of France’s Reign of Terror who worshipped the goddess of reason. He accuses Macron of attempting to turn laïcité itself into “a goddess of which France would be her chosen people.” No one has forgotten Macron’s ambition of becoming a Jupiterian leader. The supreme god must have his goddesses. 

      Macron’s pagan religion is clearly incompatible with Islam, but, as Olivier Roy and Régis Debray have pointed out, it is also incompatible with democratic rights and especially the freedom of expression. Roy points out that Macron’s latest initiatives brutally stifle the freedom of expression of schoolchildren as well as of an entire community bullied into conformity.

      The Times editorial board thinks that the issues Macron is concerned about “should be open to debate, both within France and among mature democracies.” In an effort to sound conciliatory, The Times agrees that “the debate cannot cross into any notion that any victim of Islamist terror ‘had it coming.’ Mr. Macron is right to reject any such suggestion.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Had it coming:

      An expression used by individuals and even political leaders — such as George W. Bush with regard to Saddam Hussein or Hillary Clinton with regard to Muammar Gaddafi — to justify not only acts of war but also their own gruesome terrorist methods.

      Contextual Note

      The Times editorial board politely makes its own significant point about President Macron’s simplistic approach to complex problems when it notes that “he goes too far in seeing malicious insult throughout the ‘Anglo-American media.’” Macron may not like this critique, but most lucid observers agree he “had it coming.” And it may be getting worse with the approach of the 2022 election.

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      As he always does, Emmanuel Macron insists on keeping his word — not to others, but to himself. This is his idea of remaining consistent with his convictions. He does so, especially when those who are directly concerned by his authoritarian measures express their disagreement. He then has no choice but to wait for the explosion and watch everything go up in flames.

      That is what happened when he chose to repeal France’s wealth tax and compensate by raising the tax on gas. It led to the yellow vest revolt. He claimed that it was all about ecology when it was essentially a means of shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor. It happened again with the stubborn promotion of retirement reform. The imminent explosion was only averted by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March that halted the legislative process.

      Even when Macron proclaimed that Islam was in crisis to justify putting France on a war footing against 10% of its own citizens, he admitted that the nation had failed its Muslim population by permitting their effective ghettoization, marginalizing most young Muslims. And concerning the depredations of the police, he admitted, in an interview with Brut, a media popular among the young, that “today, when the color of someone’s skin isn’t white, they will be much more subject to police controls.” 

      In the Brut interview, Macron characterized his proposed law to counter Islamic separatism as an attempt to “rearm the Republic against the supporters of radical Islam.” Who could not hear in this remark an echo of “The Marseillaise,” “Aux armes, citoyens”? Like Hillary Clinton with regard to Muammar Gaddafi, Macron seems to be anticipating the day when he will be able to chortle and say, “We came, we saw, [they] died.” While he admits that “French style integration failed,” he appears only to imagine a military-style response to that failure.

      Le Monde shows itself less indulgent than Greenwald on the possibility that Macron may be acting on principle. The newspaper comments that “during this free-flowing interview [with Brut], Mr Macron took the position of defending his record, with his eyes riveted on the 2022 election.” A French James Carville might be tempted to sum it up this way: “It’s the election, stupid.”

      Macron even allowed himself to enter into a spat with the writer, cineaste and ecological activist Cyril Dion, who had the temerity to remind the president that, in the wake of the yellow vest consultations, Macron had promised but failed to take on board the propositions of a committee of 150 citizens representing the full diversity of France. The president has now summarily dismissed the issue with a remark intended to sound insulting to anyone not belonging to the church of the goddess Laïcité: “Because 150 citizens wrote something, that doesn’t mean it’s the Bible or the Koran.”

      Historical Note

      The New York Times, as the voice of modern liberalism, has become hypersensitive to the question of diversity and racial justice. This may simply be a consequence of its alignment with the Democratic Party, which sees identity politics as the unique theme legitimizing its brand of “progressivism.” This focus on a single theme allows it to dispense with the need to show undue concern with distracting issues such as the militarism of the US empire, the trampling of civil liberties by the intelligence community or the need for economic justice in an increasingly indifferent capitalist plutocracy. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Consistent with this logic, in its response to Macron, The Times offers the truism that “racism and Islamophobia are major problems in France, as they are in the United States, Britain and elsewhere in the Western world.” Though obvious to everyone, it subtly suggests that Macron’s claim to universalism sounds more like French exceptionalism than a commitment to universal human rights.

      And The Times is absolutely right. The universalist “republican” values Macron embraces contain the idea that its institutions are color blind. On the instructions of the Ministry of the Interior, the police may or may not be color blind, but they are not blind. They have two eyes to see with, whenever they decide to stop someone in the street. Likewise, employers can discriminate when they see the name of a candidate on a resumé or at least discover the truth during the interview. In other words, France and the US both have a problem of white privilege, but they manage it — poorly, in both cases — in contrasting ways.

      The Times concludes by celebrating its vocation as a truth-teller ready to take on the challenge of racial justice: “That’s what the news media does, at home and abroad. It is its function and duty to ask questions about the roots of racism, ethnic anger and the spread of Islamism among Western Muslims, and to critique the effectiveness and impact of government policies.” The Times’ performance at this task has, over time, produced variable results. It still hasn’t admitted its complicity in the ongoing humanitarian disaster provoked by Bush’s wars in the Middle East. But with regard to Emmanuel Macron, we can congratulate it for showing the courage to stick to its principles.

      *[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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      Why Do Latinos Vote for Trump?

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      Debates about the role of the Latino vote have become somewhat of a tradition in the United States. As campaigns begin to trace their strategies for the upcoming elections, the topic is brought up by political strategists, scholars and pundits who attempt to project the electoral behavior of these communities. Their concern is not unfounded. …
      Continue Reading “Why Do Latinos Vote for Trump?”
      The post Why Do Latinos Vote for Trump? appeared first on Fair Observer. More

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      International Monitors Found No Fraud in US Election

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      This month’s election was no doubt the most dramatic in recent US history. Given the highly bipartisan political atmosphere, at 67%, voter turnout was the highest since 1900. Given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there were 20% fewer polling stations open across the country. An unprecedented 65 million voters opted for mail-in ballots, raising fears that the US Postal Service may not be able to handle the amount of traffic in a timely manner. President Donald Trump had already laid the groundwork in the preceding months to claim that the election will be stolen from him and, true to his brand, his team promptly filed 36 legal challenges to contest the results; to date, 29 of these have been unsuccessful.

      Donald Trump’s Treason Against the American People

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      More than three weeks after the election, Trump has not officially conceded. The president and his supporters are vociferously and aggressively claiming voter fraud. President-elect Joe Biden and his camp, alongside US election and security officials, are unequivocal that there is no evidence of foul play. At this time of bitter impasse, it would be invaluable to refer to a truly objective, unbiased third party. Fortunately, there is one.

      Election Monitoring

      The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was founded in 1975. It consists of 57 member countries, and the United States is one of them. A key raison d’être of the OSCE is election monitoring. It assesses whether elections are “characterized by equality, universality, political pluralism, confidence, transparency and accountability.” The OSCE has observed over 300 elections globally, both in established democracies like Canada and the UK as well as in countries like Croatia and Ukraine, where the democratic tradition is still tenuous. A multinational team of experts is on hand before, during and after the vote. The methodology is thorough and transparent.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The organization has been observing every general and midterm election in the US since the 2000 disputed contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Its presence is particularly relevant at this moment in US history. The OSCE planned to deploy some 500 observers in the 2020 election, but the number was reduced due to the pandemic. By early October, the International Election Observation Mission (IEOM) to the US had some 130 international election monitors from 39 member nations on the ground. While some states did not allow international observers full access, most did. And even in states where the observers were not allowed in the polling stations, they at least examined the mail-in process. On the night of November 3, the OSCE delivered a detailed, 23-page report, the entirety of which is openly available on the internet. 

      The report covers a lot of ground: the political context and the legal framework of the electoral system; election administration and observation; voter rights, registration and identification; candidate registration (no room for birther controversy here); campaign environment and finance; the role of the media; legal complaints and appeals; as well as new voting technologies and the conduct of the election itself. It also explains IEOM’s process, observations, analysis, conclusions and recommendations.

      Anyone with any doubt about possible voter fraud and whether the election was legal will be assuaged by the report’s conclusion that “The 3 November general elections were competitive and well managed” and that, “In general, IEOM interlocutors expressed a high level of confidence in the work of the election administration at all levels.”

      The report also offers two chilling warnings. First, it states that “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.” Second, it surmises that “Numerous ODIHR interlocutors noted that the judiciary has become highly politicized and indicated that this would have an impact on the rules governing the holding of these elections and possibly the outcome.” This report is preliminary. The IEOM remains on the task and will release a final report in early January.

      Virtually Ignored

      Interestingly, the presence of international election monitors in this United States has been virtually ignored by the media, the public and the politicians themselves. On the one hand, it’s understandable. Given the US-centric focus of many Americans, they may not even be aware of the role international observers play in US elections. Those who claim that the election was stolen from Donald Trump are certainly not going to point out that there is an objective assessment of the validity of the voting process. In fact, President Trump fired the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, for stating that this election was “the most secure in American history.”

      But why are the Democrats, the left-wing media and indeed anyone interested in proving beyond doubt that the election was fair ignoring the OSCE findings? Perhaps they don’t want to rely on any outside institutions to determine the validity of their election. Or maybe they feel that international monitors are only for banana republics, not for established democracies — and certainly not for the world’s oldest democracy. Pride goes before the fall.

      Susan Hyde, a professor of political science at the University of Berkeley, California, and an experienced international election monitor, says that “In countries that are very divided, it can be hard for citizens to know which sources of information are objective because it seems like every domestic audience has a dog in the fight.” She explains that international observers can “act as an external but credible resource for voters and for political parties.” International monitoring missions do not stand for Democrats or for Republicans — they stand for democracy.

      On the one hand, it may be ironic that the United States should be in need of the services of international election monitors. But it would be even more tragic if the US did not use their essential, objective and readily available expertise and their vital findings at this critical juncture in its democracy.

      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 Low Expectations of Biden’s High-Mindedness

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      As Donald Trump’s war of attrition has wound down to the point at which only an organized revolt could provide the final glimmer of hope the president is hoping for to extend his lease on the White House past January 20, the American people and US media are left wondering how the president-elect will fill the role of an absent reality TV host. It may, in the end, require the talents of a Samuel Coleridge to tell the full story of President-elect Joe Biden, the ancient mariner of the Washington marshes, who, having cast the albatross of Trump from the country’s neck, will seek to govern a nation reeling from the tsunami of COVID-19 and the economic woes that have come in its wake.

      To help us understand at least one dimension of the transformation awaiting us, Ben Smith — President Emmanuel Macron’s newest phone buddy at The New York Times — has authored a fascinating article examining what is likely to stand as the most visible change in the coming transition. It has little to do with policy. Instead, it concerns the two presidents’ relations with the media.

      Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

      READ MORE

      The sudden switch next January from the tweet-wielding, unmasked Republican slayer of Mexican and Muslim dragons, a man equipped his desk with a live hotline to Fox News host Sean Hannity and who manages an extended family ready to spread his improvised policies across the globe, to the 78-year-old Democratic DC seadog who, after 36 years in the Senate, spent half of this year sequestered in his basement, the change is likely to be monumental.

      The world has grown accustomed to Trump’s slogans, insults, claims of greatness and outrageous lies that are automatically echoed by his minions in the media, including those who oppose him. That has become an attribute of the White House itself. Trump is always on stage and always looking to land a zinger. As Smith points out, the contrast provided by the president-elect couldn’t be greater. Where Trump was constantly inventing counterfactual boasts to market his brand, “Mr. Biden liked nothing more than a wide-ranging, high-minded conversation about world affairs after he had returned from a trip to China or India.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      High-minded conversation:

      A dialogue between two people who have mastered the art of sounding not only serious but responsible, regardless of whether the substance of what they have to say is either serious or responsible.

      Contextual Note

      Ben Smith recounts that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, showed himself “particularly attentive to the wise men of Washington, especially the foreign policy columnists David Ignatius of The Washington Post and Thomas L. Friedman of The Times.” The journalist was almost certainly using the term “wise men” ironically, since the wisdom of both of those writers has too often been questioned by truly wise analysts for Smith’s readers to suppose that Ignatius and Friedman seriously live up to that label.

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      According to the laws of the liberal marketplace — laws with which The New York Times generally complies — opinion writers treating serious subjects in a serious style, and who are read and quoted routinely by educated people, define a journalistic commodity that can be labeled “wise men.” These voices are a form of the merchandise The Times puts on sale every day of the week.

      Ever since Hillary Clinton’s famous characterization of Donald Trump’s voters as “a basket of deplorables,” it has been clear that “high-mindedness” is a feature of the Democratic brand. Democrats like to talk about serious, complex problems, although, even when in a position of power, they appear to be far less adamant about solving them. Above all, they aim to convince a reasonably educated public that they are serious people, in contrast with Republicans who like to reduce complex issues to slogans that turn around a binary choice. That is the kind of thing deplorables voters reflexively respond to.

      Michelle Obama is admired for the dictum she taught her children, which ultimately became a slogan: “When they go low, we go high.” The problem with this as a mobilizing sentiment is that it tends to communicate an attitude of superiority and condescension. When it comes from people who have achieved a high position, it implicitly expresses their indifference to the concerns of those who, for whatever reason, feel impelled to go low. Appearing to be the product of complex thought, it expresses a simple idea: that “we” (the wise ones) refuse to listen to those who fail to admire our accomplishments and respect our rules.

      Smith points out how patently unskilled Biden has been throughout his career at leveraging the power of the media, a force now available to any prominent figure in today’s celebrity culture to impose their brand. Whatever light a public personality has to shed outward can be refracted through the commercial media into thousands of colors and amplified by social media to create an impact that will generate enthusiasm among the populace. That is what Donald Trump consummately knows how to do, and Joe Biden clearly doesn’t. Smith sees Biden as clinging to “an older set of values.” In a word, Biden is an old school politician called to reign over a world that is more likely to resonate with Jack Black’s “School of Rock.”

      As Smith observes, “it misreads Mr. Biden to see him as either a true insider or a media operator with anything like President Trump’s grasp of individual reporters’ needs, his instinct for when to call journalists or their bosses and his shrewd shaping of his own image.” A good segment of the US population and a clear majority of people overseas will be reassured. But can this old school approach make an impact in the US today, where celebrity and influencer culture drives every social and even political trend?

      Historical Note

      In his latest book, “Capital and Ideology,” Thomas Piketty pours out and analyzes in considerable demographic and economic detail the history of voting patterns in the elections of three democracies: the US, France and the UK. The statistics reveal an inversion of the scale of education between the parties labeled left and right in all three countries. 

      Whereas the conservative parties in these countries have traditionally drawn a clear majority of the educated class, today, it is the parties on the left that have won over the college-educated crowd, producing what he calls the establishment’s “Brahmin left.” It may or may not overlap with the progressive left, who tend not only to be educated but, unlike their establishment peers, intellectual. Increasingly the parties on the right continue to appeal to the wealthiest segment of the population — their traditional constituency — but, paradoxically, they have managed to attract the less educated classes into voting for what Piketty calls their culture of the “merchant right.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      In a fascinating frank and personal discussion between former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and author Anand Giridharadas, the writer explains his view of how the Democratic Party has evolved. After provocatively observing that “Democrats don’t know how to talk,” he tells Yang that “the Democratic Party as a constellation is a victim of its own high-mindedness, its own sense of moral purpose, its own very high level of educational attainment.” He quite rightly emphasizes that high-mindedness may be a bit overrated in the world of contemporary politics.

      Joe Biden of course managed to squeeze past Donald Trump in five battleground states by having what Hillary Clinton lacked, a tenuous connection with the working class and an education that was definitely not Ivy League. He wasn’t exclusively high-minded. But Biden never acquired or even sought to understand the populist swagger that now seems to be obligatory. When Giridharadas says that Democrats don’t know how to talk, what he means is that they don’t know how to present and sell their vision or their ideas. That, of course, supposes they have a vision and really do want to sell it, a proposition that has become somewhat debatable.

      If Giridharadas seems skeptical about any Democrat’s ability to promote necessary ideas, Ben Smith ends on a complementary melancholy note, wondering almost fatalistically “whether the electorate and we in the media can break our addiction to the Trump news cycle.”

      *[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 Rapid Growth of Emmanuel Macron’s Authoritarianism

      by

      In early October, French President Emmanuel Macron, as a preparation for the 2022 election, made the decision to mount a campaign blaming France’s Muslims for their failure to embrace the country’s increasingly dogmatic “Republican culture.” To counter Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration extreme right, Macron calculated that his shambolic center-right party needed to find a way of steering votes away from the passably racist National Rally led by Le Pen.

      In Macron’s eyes, French Muslims have failed to prove the sincerity of their expected conversion to France’s national religion of laicité, or secularism, that has now definitively supplanted the traditional role of the Catholic Church. To outdo Le Pen, he deviated the blame to the world’s entire Muslim population, claiming that Islam was in the thralls of a global crisis that offended French republican sensibilities. Its credo of “equality, liberty, fraternity” now excluded tolerance for any group of people who did not unanimously adopt all its trappings. Fraternity has its limits.

      Even before the gruesome assaults on a schoolteacher and three citizens in a church in Nice that horrified the French nation, through his rhetoric about a global Islamic threat, Macron managed to convince a number of governments in Muslim countries that France was at war with their religion. Several nations responded by recommending a boycott of French products.

      Emmanuel Macron Defends His Crusade

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      Some went further. Since Macron felt himself in a position to signal their crisis, some Muslim authorities were tempted to focus on his own. Noticing that the French president was proposing increasingly authoritarian laws that had the effect of targeting Muslim children in schools, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari penned a tweet comparing Macron’s proposed laws, which included attributing ID numbers to school children, to the Nazi policy of requiring Jews to wear yellow stars.

      Mazari initially made the accusation on the basis of an article that was later amended to state that the IDs would be required for all children, not just Muslims. The reform aimed at obliging every child in France to receive civic instruction teaching them the “values of the Republic.” Those values include celebrating the publication of insulting cartoons that may even express bigotry and limiting the freedom to don clothing or symbols that may signify affiliation with a religion other than republicanism. Because France’s values are universal, they trump anyone else’s particular values. Conformity is a core republican value.

      France’s Foreign Ministry wasted no time reacting to Mazari’s comparison of the new measures with Nazi practices. NBC News’s headline on the story read: “France ‘deeply shocked’ as Pakistan minister compares Macron to Nazis.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Deeply shocked:

      1. Morally offended
      2. Embarrassingly surprised that one has been found out

      Contextual Note

      In the film “Casablanca,” Captain Renault, the French chief of the local police under German occupation gives the order to shut down Rick’s Café, a nightclub where he spends most of his evenings. When Rick, the American owner of the café played by Humphrey Bogart, asks why, Renault replies “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here” just as the croupier arrives to give him his winnings.

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      The French Foreign Ministry didn’t quite frame the message in the same terms as Captain Renault. NBC reports that “the minister spoke in ‘deeply shocking and insulting terms’ of Macron and the whole of France.” The ministry added, “These hateful words are blatant lies, imbued with an ideology of hatred and violence.” Clearly, Mazari had fallen into the trap of Godwin’s law (citing Nazis invalidates any argument) and the ministry jumped on it.

      France’s proposed law clearly applies the French anti-discriminatory republican rule that procedures must apply equally and uniformly to everyone. Unlike the policies of the Nazi regime, it doesn’t seek to exclude or eliminate groups of people considered different. Marine Le Pen’s party might be tempted to envisage measures of exclusion, but not France’s traditional parties. Not even Macron’s non-traditional Republic on the Move, which was cobbled together in 2017 by attracting a variety of traditional personalities from the political establishment to provide the president with a majority in parliament.

      The republican credo elevates universal civic values to the level of an alternative moral system, replacing all the traditional bases of morality, including the Christian principles of compassion, non-violence and concern for the oppressed. Universality implies uniformity. Individuals must show themselves not so much worthy of their neighbors and their community, but of the republic itself. In that sense, the spirit of the new policies put forward by Macron do vaguely resemble Hitler’s belief in a singular Aryan ideal.

      Historical Note

      Macron’s vision of la république takes Charles de Gaulle’s meme of aspiring to “a certain idea of France” beyond mere aspiration. Macron seeks to codify and monitor the behavior of individuals, who must now prove their conformity with the civic ideal.

      Recently, China’s President Xi Jinping inveighed against a trend that when translated into English is rendered as “splitism.” China is an immense country with a dominant ethnic group, the Han, and the ambition to control territory that includes other ethnicities and cultures. China enjoys the security that comes from governing a population that not only believes in its overwhelming ethnic unity but also, largely as a reaction to its humiliation by Western powers in the 19th century, embraces a fervent form of nationalism. This has permitted Xi in the 21st century to consolidate and reinforce the authoritarianism that Mao Zedong had pushed to a chaotic extreme half a century ago.

      Macron’s links his idea of Muslim separatism in France to the entire Muslim world. This curiously echoes Xi’s complaint about “splitism.” The two ideas are fundamentally different, of course, since Xi worries that the cultures and traditions of autonomous regions, such as Tibet or Xinjiang, might lead to movements of political independence. No risk exists in France of a Muslim nation splitting off, whereas in the past, there have been very real threats of Breton, Alsatian or Basque separatism.

      Historically, France achieved a sense of national unity by imposing the French language on its linguistically diversified regions. Forcing children whose native language was Breton, Alsatian, Basque or Occitan to think in French and imagine themselves as descendants of the Gauls (who obviously didn’t speak French) led to the virtual disappearance of the regional languages. Macron probably sees this historical reality as a policy that paid off in the end. Why not apply it to another important component of contemporary French demography: Muslims?

      Macron is now discovering that there are a number of problems with this approach. Unlike Basques or Bretons, French Muslims are geographically dispersed across the nation. The history of their relations with the French formerly colonialist nation is extremely complex. And the fact that it is their religion rather than their ethnicity or their geographical origin that defines them means that treating them as a coherent group is not just perilous, but impossible, especially if the reasoning is restricted to France itself. An important part of their identity derives from a global community that is also extremely diverse.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This may help to explain why Macron believes that Islam is in a crisis. Someone who has a “certain idea” of France itself expects other nations and groups of people to have a certain idea of themselves. For the universalist republican Macron, anything that isn’t uniform and unified must be in a state of crisis.

      By taking on the entire Muslim world, Macron may end up disastrously achieving the goal of unifying Muslims by posing as their common enemy. His policies that now insist on shaping all young Muslims in France into the universalist republican mold is creating rather than resolving tension. For one thing, it inevitably provokes more irrational attacks by unhinged fanatics — and every community has its unhinged fanatics.

      Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut writing in The New York Times call the system Macron is putting in place “France’s Dragnet,” a policing campaign that now focuses on Muslim children as young as 10. Teachers have been instructed to denounce children who show signs of thinking differently about the values of the republic. It has already left numerous children “traumatized” and fearful to speak freely in class for fear of being suspected of terrorist intentions. That is how, in the wake of drama surrounding the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, France promotes its republican version of “freedom of expression.” 

      *[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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      in World Politics

      Donald Trump’s Treason Against the American People

      by

      Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. He not only lost, he lost bigly, at least in terms of the popular vote, despite record numbers of voters turning out for him, wishing for four more years. Trump’s response has been entirely predictable. Like the proverbial spoilt child in the sandbox, he has been ranting and raving, shaking his fist at the injustice of it all, plotting his revenge on detractors and former allies alike and, particularly, on the ungrateful American people who so bitterly snubbed him, forgetting all the wonderful things he has done for them during his presidential stint.

      America Is No Longer One Nation

      READ MORE

      This brings me to another self-declared genius and self-appointed savior of his nation, Adolf Hitler. In an earlier article, I have maintained that associating Trumpism with fascism is pure nonsense. Equating Trump with Hitler is indeed utter nonsense, except for one not-so-minor detail.

      Treason

      Some 40 years ago, the German-British journalist and historian Sebastian Haffner wrote a remarkable book on Hitler with a rather unpretentious title, “Anmerkungen zu Hitler” (“Notes on Hitler”). In less than 200 pages, Haffner discusses the most significant aspects of the Hitler phenomenon, his “achievements” and “successes,” his errors, mistakes and crimes. None of these aspects is relevant for the point of this piece, even if they would make an excellent blueprint for any future notes on Trump. What is relevant here is Haffner’s final note: “treason.” Once Hitler realized, Haffner argues, that all was lost, he turned on his own people. Since he had failed to destroy the enemies of the Third Reich, and here above all the Soviets, he could at least destroy his own people.

      As Golo Mann, one of Germany’s most eminent postwar historians, noted in his review of Hassner’s book in Der Spiegel, in Hitler’s eyes, the potential demise of the German people was, “in and itself no loss” — as long as it guaranteed that the trains continued to roll toward Auschwitz and the gas chambers and crematoria to run smoothly.

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      Hitler’s betrayal of the German people was the quasi-logical consequence of his personality and self-projection. On a mission from the almighty (proof: Hitler survived the July 1944 attempt on his life largely unharmed), he promoted himself as the “chosen one” selected to do “the work of the Lord.” And Hitler was hardly alone in considering himself chosen. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich, a Catholic paper stated that Austria’s “return to the Reich” was a clear sign that “the Almighty God has blessed the work of the Führer.”

      After the attack on Poland in 1939, the official organ of the Protestant Church of the Free City of Danzig wrote that God had sent Hitler to liberate Germany from the shackles of Versailles and redeemed the German people from the danger of Polish violence. Successes such as these affirmed Hitler’s belief that he was special, infallible, even almighty — a belief daily reaffirmed by his entourage of mediocre sycophants and yes-men scared to death of his choleric tantrums, perfectly portrayed by Bruno Ganz in “Downfall.”

      At this point, in films, you usually get a disclaimer that “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” I don’t know whether this also applies to opinion pieces. In any case, the disclaimer does not apply here. Any associations evoked in the reader’s mind are fully intended. This does not mean to suggest that Trump and Hitler are in the same league. Quite the contrary.

      Petty Impersonator

      Hitler was evil personified, a mass murderer who drew great satisfaction from human suffering. Compared to Hitler, Trump is a petty impersonator, a “man without qualities” and substance, full of himself. And yet. As Aninda Dey has recently put it in The Times of India, Trump’s behavior following his defeat in the presidential election is reminiscent of Hitler’s last days in his bunker in Berlin. “Ensconced in the White House ‘bubble bunker,’” Trump “uncorked a similar deluge of rants, delusions, a fake narrative, alternate reality and invincibility as witnessed by Hitler’s Generals and staff in his end days.”

      Add to that the clownish public appearances of the likes of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has finally managed to live up to his own Borat-type caricature, and the picture is complete. Like Hitler in 1945, Trump in November 2020 lives in an alternate reality. This is a reality where he has won bigly, where the American people cannot wait to see all the wonderful things he has in store for them, like a big, beautiful wall, really beautiful new industrial parks and coal-fired power plants — where he will finally have the opportunity to make America great again.

      Delusion, even self-delusion, however, goes only that far. Reality hits when even Trump’s faithful toadies like Tucker Carlson, over at Fox News, take their distance — if cautiously, like treading on eggshells — and strong-arm methods no longer prove effective. It is in this situation that delusion turns into bitterness, and bitterness into a strong urge for revenge. This might be the point where we are now, the point where Trump turns on his own people, dishing out punishment for having failed him. Unfortunately enough, this is a real possibility, given he is going to be in office for another two months. And as the pandemic has taught us, two months are quite a long time.

      The signs are there, for all to see, starting with COVID-19. Over the past several weeks, the situation has reached catastrophic proportions, particularly in the predominantly rural states such as the Dakotas. The statistics are public knowledge, daily displayed on the front page of The New York Times. By now, even some of the most reluctant Republican governors, such as North Dakota’s Doug Burgum, have caved in and mandated wearing masks in their state after being overwhelmed by the pandemic. In the meantime, Trump completely checked out, despite a skyrocketing rate of new infections. In line with his earlier shrug of shoulders, “It is what it is,” the administration has largely gone AWOL.

      As Time magazine recently noted, in a situation where the United States and its people are confronted with a health crisis of terrifying proportions, Trump has “pulled a ‘disappearing act.’” But then, why should he care. He cared little before, when he was still the president. Now, he soon won’t be. It is what it is. Let them fend for themselves. Serves them right if they die from the “China virus.”

      Reversing Democracy

      In the meantime, Trump has done what he has done best — corrode America’s political institutions and weaken, sabotage and subvert the democratic system. The United States used to be a liberal democracy, all its serious faults and shortcomings notwithstanding. To be sure, the Founding Fathers of the republic were not entirely sure whether democracy was such a great idea. James Madison in particular had serious reservations, and it was he who drafted the US Constitution.

      This explains the Electoral College, an archaic and arcane institution, which Trump has been trying to manipulate to his advantage. This explains why it took until 1913 that senators were elected by the people rather than being appointed by state legislatures. Madison had little trust in the wisdom of ordinary citizens. In view of the current situation, he might have been right. Be it as it may, the United States developed into a liberal democracy. Donald Trump has done whatever he could to reverse this development.

      Embed from Getty Images

      His persistent insistence that the result of the election has somehow been rigged, his ludicrous tweets charging that he was cheated of what is rightfully his, together with his so-called legal team headed by Baghdad Bob impersonator, Rudy Giuliani, and the chorus of his sycophants in Congress and the right-wing media who have been toeing the line have done indelible damage to the democratic system. A few days ago, a representative survey found that more than half of Republicans believe that Trump “rightfully won” the election; more than two-thirds believe that the election was rigged. Before the election, more than 50% of Republicans expressed confidence about the electoral process; after the election, a bit more than 20%. In fact, a substantial majority of Republicans said they were “not at all confident” that the election had been fair and that the results were accurate.

      What is at heart here goes far beyond the belief in various conspiracies involving ballot tampering and other forms of fraud, but a fundamental belief that the whole system is rigged. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have recently put it in Foreign Policy, elections, “Trump’s most fervid supporters feel, are rigged by open borders and low hurdles to the naturalization of people who have entered the country illegally and by making it easier for African-Americans to register and vote, policies introduced by Democrats who are thereby seeking to lock in their future preeminence by reshaping the electorate to their advantage.” As a result, they fear that for them, “there may never be another election.”

      The whole thing would make for a jolly good Monty Pythonesque farce if it were not so pathetic and, unfortunately, bloody serious. As Tho Bishop from the Mises Institute has recently noted, “regardless of the legal outcome, America is about to find itself with a president that will be viewed as illegitimate by a large portion of the population — and perhaps even the majority of some states. There is no institution left that has the credibility to push back against the gut feeling of millions of people who have spent the last few months organizing car parades and Trumptillas that their democracy has been hijacked by a political party that despises them.” They should know, given that they voted for a president and a political party that for four years showed nothing but contempt for large swaths of the American public.

      Betrayal of the American People

      The American president is supposed to be the president of all Americans. With Trump, this has never been the case. He has foremost been, in descending order, the president of himself, the president of the rich, of the Fox News MAGA crowd, and the white portion of the US population of European descent. His presidency has been largely consumed by the mission to safeguard and protect the privileged position of these groups. Take, for instance, the census whose data form the basis for the reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. In July, Trump made it known that he intended “to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.”

      What all this amounts to is a large-scale, multi-pronged operation designed to add fuel to existing resentments, exacerbate the already high disaffection with politics, further undermine trust in political institutions and the democratic processes and, ultimately, pit Americans against Americans. In ancient times, they called this strategy divide et impera — divide and conquer. It is a core point in the playbook of every serious authoritarian and wannabe dictator, from Putin to Erdogan, from Orban to Maduro. In the United States, it is nothing short of a fundamental betrayal of the ideals that once upon a time, far, far away in history, informed the American republic, its founding documents and constitution. It has further eroded America’s standing as the defender and promoter of democracy across the globe, leaving its image further sullied.

      What this operation amounts to, in turn, is a fundamental betrayal of the American people. The architects of American democracy, above all James Madison, firmly believed that elected political leaders, “who held their office as a public trust, were not merely to act as a mouthpiece of the citizenry but to see farther than ordinary citizens: ‘to refine and enlarge the public views,’ to have the wisdom to ‘discern the true interest of their country,’ and to do so against ‘temporary or partial considerations.’” It fell onto the country’s political institutions and civic associations — political parties, the media, churches and schools — to cultivate the citizens’ minds and shape “a democratic people.”

      Over the past few years, the opposite has happened. As Larry Bartels, one of America’s most respected political scientists, has recently put it, under Trump, the Republican Party’s commitment to democracy has been eroded by “ethnic antagonism.” He cites the results of a recent survey that found that, among Republican identifiers and independents leaning toward the GOP, more than half agreed with the statement, “The traditional way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Four out of 10 agreed that “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Under the circumstances, recent alarm over the specter of a coup staged by Trump in connivance with Republican officials in Congress and the states might not be all that crazy. In fact, they reflect to what degree four years of Trump have debased the spirit of American democracy, and to what extent the United States under Trump have progressed on the way to becoming a banana republic.

      It is fitting that by now, there are serious concerns that Trump’s attempts to create as much havoc as possible might even extend to the economy. As Claudia Sahm recently asked in the pages of The New York Times, “Is Trump Trying to Take the Economy Down With Him?” Trump already caused significant damage to the US economy with his protectionist policies aimed at China and the European Union — damage acknowledged even by Trump’s economic advisers. In the twilight of his presidency, nothing is more tempting than leaving his successor with an economic train wreck, particularly if it causes maximum damage to cities, such as Detroit and Atlanta, and states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, that killed his chances of reelection.

      US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s recent decision to defund several Federal Reserve COVID-19 lending programs, sharply criticized by both the Federal Reserve and the Biden transition team, is a preview of things to come. As Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, put it, Mnuchin’s move was a clear sign “that the Trump administration and their congressional toadies are actively trying to tank the U.S economy.”

      It is to be hoped, for the sake of the American people, first, and for the whole international community, second, that the worst is not going to come to pass. Trump’s continued non-response to the catastrophic trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, his protracted insistence that the outcome of the election was not only unfair but illegitimate, and his administration’s recent decisions directly impacting America’s economy suggest that a worst-case scenario is not out of the realm of the possible. On the contrary, it is quite likely.

      If it should come to that, it would represent an act of treason against the American people, which should be treated as such — and prosecuted, at least in the court of public opinion. Adolf Hitler betrayed the German people, starting in 1944. He was never held accountable for his betrayal, taking the easy way out by committing suicide. The German people, however, learned a lesson that for a long time immunized them to the siren songs of a politics based on the appeal to the baser sides of human nature. It is to be hoped that coming to terms with the extent to which four years of Trump have inflicted damage on American democracy will immunize the American people against a repeat of 2016. I, for myself, would not count on it.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      Can Joe Biden Rewrite the Rules of the Road?

      by

      During his presidency, Donald Trump found a new way to keep the American public and its media alert. It was a kind of educational game called “Spot the Lie.” If the media had understood how the game worked, the nation and the world would have benefited. Instead, it tended to degenerate into a shouting match in which each side would shriek with increasing volume to express its indignation.

      What was special about his prevarication? It was systematic and provocative, attention-getting. Traditionally, US presidents lied quietly, covering their reprehensible acts in expressions of virtuous intentions. Even the most obvious lie of the 21st century — George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding a massive store of weapons of mass destruction — was presented as a concern for ensuring peace by preventing an imminent act of war by a mad Iraqi dictator. It turned out that both the madness and the capacity for war were on the American side. But nobody noticed because, well, the American military is by definition “a force for good.”

      The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions

      READ MORE

      With the incoming Biden administration, there will be fewer obvious lies. Given President-elect Joe Biden’s limited rhetorical skills, there may even be moments when Americans have access to the true intentions of a government that ordinarily seeks to hide them.

      After the signature by 15 Asian nations of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) last week, Biden explained what would be behind US strategy after he becomes president on January 20, 2021. “We make up 25% of the world’s trading capacity, of the economy of the world,” he said. “We need to be aligned with the other democracies, another 25% or more, so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Rules of the road:

      The prescription of behavior for a group of supposed equals that clearly favors the interests of one member of the group whose dominant status allows it to impose its values and preferred behaviors on other members of a group without having to consult an external authority or waste too much time negotiating among equals

      Contextual Note

      Leaders of hegemons rarely explicitly lay out their hegemonic agenda. No one could doubt the bold claim Biden has made about the “rules of the road.” The United States always seeks to set the rules rather than play by them. But his statement deviates from the truth when he compares the US attitude with China’s. When it’s about the US defining the rules, Biden uses the verb “set.” But when it’s China, he uses the verb “dictate.” After all, China is a communist dictatorship, so logically anything it does can be called dictating.

      That’s how clever diplomatic language works, at least in the hands of Democrats. They prefer to select the effective verb to instill the idea of good versus evil. Republicans prefer to use the language of moral judgment or downright insult. President Trump likes to call them purveyors of evil, “illegitimate” or even “shitholes.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      But the major difference between the rhetoric of the two parties is that the Republicans shy away from admitting the hard reality that results from the muscular use of power relationships. They prefer to present it as the logic of history, divine will or predestination that have put the US in the role of unique decision-maker for the rest of the world. The shining city on the hill spreads its light across the globe by virtue of being the shining city, not through its complex interplay with other nations. It has an existential quality that can no one can ever doubt.

      That is what Trump means by “America First.” He presented the slogan as if it turned around the idea that the US should decide to tend only to its own needs and not worry about what happens elsewhere in the world. But it also contained the idea that because America was “first” by virtue of its might, it produced the light that illuminated the rest of the world. It didn’t actually have to be good and fair to stand as a model for everything that was good and fair.

      The primary difference between these two interpretations of American exceptionalism lies in the respective rhetorical strategies rather than policy. That is why Biden’s foreign policy may not be very different from Trump’s in its overall effect on the rest of the world. It will be a variation on hegemonic rhetoric, but the military and financial base will be nearly identical. 

      Democrats believe that American exceptionalism, the success story of the nation, endows it with the authority to write the rules of the road for the rest of humanity. The Republicans see it as the result of writing the rules for themselves which they expect the rest of the world will naturally follow.

      Historical Note

      When, alluding to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the RCEP, Joe Biden compared the attitude of the US quite naturally seeking to “set the rules of the road” and the Chinese who “dictate outcomes.” The case can be made that he inverted the truth concerning the history of these two trade arrangements.

      When the TPP was still awaiting signature at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, the BBC noted that the deal designed to put the US in the position to set the rules of the road was contested inside the US. The BBC reports: “US opponents have characterised the TPP as a secretive deal that favoured big business and other countries at the expense of American jobs and national sovereignty.” That highlights the problem Biden will be facing in many of his future decisions: how to define the US and its interests. In other words, who defines the rules? Is it big business or the American people?

      Commenting on the historical background of the “secretive deal,” Vox reported: “Negotiations over the TPP’s terms were conducted in secret, with well-connected interest groups having access to more information — and more opportunities to influence the process — than members of the general public.” Even Congress was refused full access to the terms of the draft.

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      In other words, when Biden refers to setting the rules of the road, it is anything but an openly negotiated procedure. In contrast, the RCEP was drafted conjointly and largely democratically by all the interested parties, which include some of the strongest allies of the US: Australia, Japan and South Korea. It is a lie of Trumpian proportions to suggest that the RCEP was dictated by the Chinese.

      Statements of that kind by the president-elect do not bode well for the future foreign policy we can expect from the Biden administration. Biden’s future secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, sounds refreshing when he more realistically characterizes the state of the world at a forum at the Hudson Institute in July: “Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions. Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.” 

      Blinken’s approach to foreign policy is likely to be similar to Obama’s, which does indeed appear refreshing in comparison to Donald Trump’s. But it is likely to be a return to a certain form of wishing to write the rules alone, if not handling the problems alone. In an interview in July, Blinken regretted that, under Trump, the US had lost the ability to dictate the rules. “If we’re not doing a lot of that organizing in terms of shaping the rules and the norms and the institutions through which countries relate to one another,” he said, “then one of two things, either someone else is doing it and probably not in a way that advances our own interests and values or maybe just as bad, no one is and then you tend to have chaos and a vacuum that may be filled by bad things.”

      The problem Biden will face is that the world has changed. Unlike a few decades ago, few now believe the US has a divine right to “shape the rules” or the ability to stave off chaos.

      *[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

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in World Politics

      The Post-Election Art of Drawing Hasty Conclusions

      by

      In a Fair Observer column this week analyzing the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election, Steve Westly echoes the tendentious conclusions of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Not only do they seek to place the blame for the ambiguous outcome of the election on the rhetoric of the left, they clearly want that wing of the party simply to shut up.

      Westly finds himself in the company not just of subtle political thinkers like Representative and former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, but also of apostate Republicans such as John Kasich and Meg Whitman. These are people who have discovered — thanks to the four-year run of Donald Trump’s White House reality-TV show — that the Democratic Party feels a lot like the Republican Party of old.

      Alex Acosta and the Guidelines of the Elite

      READ MORE

      Westly makes the following bold claim: “Democrats need to understand that America is still a center-right country with a large, highly motivated evangelical base.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Center-right country:

      A nation that in its majority seeks to believe in and fulfill the ideals of democracy and equality but whose power brokers have the clout to convince the media that it prefers the stability of oligarchic control

      Contextual Note

      The Democrats seized on the idea of Russian meddling in 2016 to explain their defeat in the presidential election. This time, the scapegoat is the group of Democrats who pledge allegiance to “democratic socialism” and shout “defund the police.” Those words and ideas must now be stricken from the vocabulary of the party. All language must be formulated to soothe the fears of “moderates.” 

      This exercise in pre-digested, reductionist analysis leading to the simplification of discourse and debate seeks to brand an entire swath of the population as un-American. The US is increasingly divided and visibly fragmented. The Democrats apparently want to use President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral success to dictate to the American people who they are as a group and how they should think of themselves.

      Embed from Getty Images

      There may be a statistical sense that justifies calling the country “center-right.” But this has no meaning when a wide range of cultural values are at play. When people are pushed toward the edges, no statistical mean accurately identifies a center. Westly is right to mention the existence of a highly motivated evangelical base. But even that fact requires further analysis. The Republicans have to a large extent created the fiction that it exists as a coherent voting bloc.

      There are two reasons not to think of the US as a center-right country. The first is that it has never been more diversified and divided. That two extremes may exist does not mean that the mid-point between them defines the nature of a people.

      Furthermore, polls taken during the election campaign have consistently shown that issues identified with the left and branded by Republicans and Democrats alike with the deliberately toxic term “socialism” are in fact endorsed by a large majority of the population. The most obvious is Medicare for All, consistently denigrated by centrists and the right as “socialist medicine” and rejected by Biden, but massively approved by Americans (70%) and even by a near majority of Republicans.

      Even Andrew Yang’s theme of the universal basic income (UBI) — a “socialist” measure of redistribution if ever there was one — also has majority support. If we consider single-payer health care and UBI centrist policies because a majority approves them, then we need to redefine who is a centrist on the political spectrum. Certainly not Joe Biden.

      The second reason concerns the nature of the two extremes. They are radically different. In the US, the extreme right is indeed a powerful force, as the tea party movement demonstrated. It expresses its extremism by eschewing all forms of rationality, insisting that personal beliefs, opinions and prejudices trump any form of reasoning. Evangelical faith is one example of this, but not the only one. Blind nationalism is another, but to a large extent that is also a feature even of the Democratic center, which embraces the slogan of American exceptionalism. The idea of exceptionalism itself is anti-rational, an implicit rejection of the democratic principle of equality, if not of the rule of law itself.

      The extreme left contrasts radically with the extreme right. First, just in terms of comparative size, the extreme left is marginal. This imbalance may contribute to the mistaken impression that the nation can be defined as center-right. More significantly, the left as a whole, with its many variants, clings to the value of rationality. It is fundamentally an intellectual movement promoting reasoned rather than emotional approaches to addressing social problems. 

      In Shakespearean terms, the left is Hamlet, the thinker, as opposed to Polonius, the busybody focusing on executing the will of King Claudius, the wielder of power. Hamlet rebelled intellectually, but Claudius ruled Denmark until he was replaced in the final act by the Norwegian Fortinbras (literally “strong-in-arm”).

      Like most establishment Democrats, Westly singles out “democratic socialism,” treating it as a kind of virus that has infected the Democratic Party. It encourages the idea that the incoming Biden administration’s essential task will be the production of a vaccine to eliminate it or at least contain any further contamination.

      That theme of ostracizing the left seems to be the flavor of the month. Just now, Al Jazeera informs us that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declared that the US will label the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign — a movement focused on contesting the politics of the Israeli government — as “anti-Semitic.” It is a theme the Labour Party in the UK has just used effectively to purge the left. The left everywhere is accused of toppling statues. The center, both right and left, topples people.

      That kind of purge may not be what Westly has in mind, but it’s becoming more and more likely that that’s what the Democrats will be seeking to do.

      Historical Note

      The history of 21st-century elections tells a tale that contradicts the characterization of the US as a center-right country. The center-right epithet implies the public’s preference for stability and adherence to the status quo. But recent elections have revealed a profound and growing unease with the status quo.

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      The presidential election of 2000 should have resulted in the election of a center-left candidate, Al Gore. Instead, the Supreme Court crowned George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote and even failed to win the Electoral College. Bush managed to get that close to winning by defining himself as a “compassionate conservative.” That was his way of claiming to be dead center: conservative to please the Republicans, compassionate to please the Democrats.

      President Bush very quickly abandoned the compassionate side and sought to impose an aggressive neocon, neoliberal agenda that Americans had not voted for. It began with the notorious Bush tax cuts at a time when polls showed Americans were ready to accept tax hikes if the goal was to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Bush doggedly pursued his agenda rather than the people’s.

      Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 promising hope and change. His first challenge was to resolve the financial crisis Bush left in his lap. This may have sobered his impulse to effectuate change. President Obama spent the next eight years consolidating the status quo. Then, in 2016, the status quo candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to an irresponsible clown promising an irrational, undefined program of radical change.

      These recent elections show that voters regularly come out to vote against the status quo. It defines a nation that consistently expresses its impatience with the center-right but is repeatedly given little choice. The centrist Republicans invented the idea of “anyone but Trump.” The voters have shown an attitude closer to “anything but the center.” The Democrats fared poorly in 2020 because “anyone but Trump” trumped “anything but the center.”

      The massive go-out-and-vote campaign in the wake of the George Floyd killing helped the uninspired and uninspiring candidate, Joe Biden, to attain nearly 80 million votes as opposed to Clinton’s 65.85 million. Without the mobilization of those protesting the status quo, Biden’s numbers would have been closer to Clinton’s. He most likely would have lost massively in the Electoral College to Donald Trump’s 74 million.

      As a new Democratic administration prepares to take office in January 2021, it would be wise to take the time to assess the deeper meaning of the vote.

      *[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