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    Trump's British cheerleaders are rushing to denounce him. It's too little, too late | Owen Jones

    As smoke billowed out of the Capitol, some of Donald Trump’s US apologists – the appeasers, the opportunistic cheerleaders, even some true believers – suddenly discovered consciences. In Britain, rightwing commentators had even less reason to embrace the man who remains US president: domestic support for him here has always been negligible. Cheerleading for Trump in Britain has always been a conscious choice, and it is all the more striking because it comes without the excuse of external pressure or cynical self-interest: indeed, it carries the price of damaging the cheerleaders’ credibility even among many Conservative voters.Those who made that choice in Britain are now attempting to walk away whistling from the crime scene, but apologism for the figurehead of the international far right – including the self-confessed Nazis who stormed the US legislature – should come with accountability. Fraser Nelson is editor of the Spectator, which presents itself as a respectable centre-right publication – its summer party is attended by senior Tory and Labour figures and BBC journalists alike – even as it publishes columns bemoaning there is “not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory party”.Last week, Nelson joined the ranks of British conservatives abandoning their fallen hero, writing a column entitled “Trump’s final act was a betrayal of the people who voted for him” – itself a questionable claim, given one YouGov poll showed more Republican voters backed the storming of the Capitol than opposed it. It stands in stark contrast to another of his columns from three years ago, headlined “A new, more reasonable Donald Trump presidency might just be on the way”, endorsing suggestions the president would “gravitate to the middle”.The Spectator is chaired by former flagship BBC interviewer Andrew Neil, who can now be found beating his chest and declaring: “There is one name responsible for what is happening on Capitol Hill tonight and that name is TRUMP.” And yet no British publication gave such generous space to Trump and Trumpism as the Spectator, publishing articles with headlines such as “The intelligent case for voting Trump” and “Trump will be much, much better for Britain”, or crowing “Donald Trump’s victory marks the death of liberalism”. There is a broad consensus that what paved the way for Wednesday’s insurrection in Washington DC was the deliberate (and baseless) delegitimising of the presidential election, and in November, the Spectator was publishing articles such as “Trump is right not to concede” and “Can you really blame Trump for refusing to accept the election result?”The U-turns are suddenly coming thick and fast. Former Tory MEP Daniel Hannan often positions himself as a genteel rightwing Brexiteer: polite, well-read, thoughtful, eschewing demagoguery. This weekend, he did not hold back, penning a fiery polemic entitled: “Donald Trump is guilty of treason: political violence in a democracy is never justifiable”. Let’s reflect, then, on another of his pieces, written less than four months ago, headlined: “Trump’s flaws are many, but he’d be better for Britain than Biden”. Hannan also repeated the phoney narrative that it was a uniquely violent left who were the real threat. “God knows I’m no fan of Trump,” he tweeted the day before the election, “but is it really disgruntled Republicans that people are boarding up their shops against?”Hannan has been joined by Douglas Murray, one of the most successful rightwing authors of our age, who once demanded that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”, denounced Muslims as a “demographic timebomb” and suggested London had become a foreign country because in 23 out of its 33 boroughs, “‘white Britons’ are now in a minority”. Murray, too, pointed to the boarding up of Washington DC as Americans voted. “Doubtless Democrats will blame Republicans and lazy media will blame all sides,” he solemnly predicted, “but this town is not bracing for disgruntled Trump-ists to smash it up.” In a Telegraph column in August headlined “It’s in the UK’s national interest for Trump to triumph”, Murray accepted the president had flaws – among which he included boastfulness and “devotion to exaggeration”, but, oddly, not Islamophobia, racism or describing neo-Nazis as “very fine people”. Casually discarding the man he lauded, Murray now gravely intones: “Only Trump is to blame for the Capitol chaos”.For so long, Trump’s opponents have been accused of hysteria, of exaggeration, even of “Trump derangement syndrome”. But when we organised mass protests against him, we did so because we recognised Trump represented a serious incipient fascist threat. For British rightwingers who denied or downplayed that threat, it was always clear that while they might regard him as vulgar – or felt polite society compelled them to say so – they had rather a lot of sympathy for his political platform. With Trump finally going, Trumpism will not suddenly vanish, across the Atlantic: but as these receipts show, nor will it do so here. More

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    In China’s Net City, Opportunity Comes at Uncertain Costs

    The one thing the city of Shenzhen — whose nearly 13 million people comprise the industrial engine of China’s Guangdong province — seems unwilling to reimagine is its name. The name Shenzhen, which loosely translates to “irrigation ditch” or “drainage dump,” is the only piece of the city’s incredible story that remains stuck in the past.

    Beginning in 2020, Shenzhen, in partnership with Chinese tech behemoth Tencent and NBBJ Architects, embarked on the design of a coastal, sustainable, state-of-the-art neighborhood called Net City to serve as the exclamation point capping Shenzhen’s status as China’s Silicon Valley. And yet, upon its completion in 2027, Net City, like Shenzhen itself, will represent far more than just another technology company’s tricked-out corporate campus. In fact, Net City might just set the global standard for urban development in the 21st century. That is if it can navigate the perilous waters that have sunk so many similarly intentioned projects in the past.

    Policies, Principles, People

    Green, tech-infused infrastructure is no longer groundbreaking in and of itself, but neither is the desire of major global firms to directly fund urban investment as a business strategy. Examples of this often quixotic foray range from Google’s disappointing but understandable discontinuation of investments in a Toronto smart city project to Fordlandia, Ford Motor Company’s failed Amazonian utopia chronicled brilliantly in Greg Grandin’s 2009 award-winning book. For both the Googles of today and those of generations past, it appears that products remain significantly easier to manufacture than physical places.

    Any local economic development professional, or for that matter anyone who has tried to renovate a kitchen, will tell you that construction projects, no matter their scale, are marked by an eternal struggle between the perfect and the possible. What, then, can set Tencent’s Net City apart from these previous failures? To borrow the time-honored language of geopolitical analysis, the potential answers come in three “buckets”: policies, principles and people.

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    On the policy front, the analysis must begin with the fact that there exists no better example of the opening of markets, however gradually and cautiously, as an accelerant for innovation, growth and prosperity than Shenzhen. It is stunning how much economic dynamism has been unleashed in this former fishing village over the past few decades, and the same innovation-spurring economic policy framework that enabled the city’s rise will similarly nurture the growth and ongoing vitality of the Net City project as it matures.

    That said, Shenzhen is not the only part of China that has grown. And, in immediate relevance to Net City, it would not be the only place where China has invested untold billions only to end up with what are commonly referred to now as ghost cities. A Net City skeptic might point to both the ambiguous nature of the true costs of this ambitious urban development and those still unoccupied, debt-funded townscapes littering China’s interior still awaiting their first residents as the fodder for their wariness.

    Product and Place

    Skeptics are also right to cite the lingering uncertainty of COVID-19 and fissures with nearby Hong Kong as risks to the sizable foreign direct investment Shenzhen has enjoyed throughout its rise. While the Chinese government and Tencent have every incentive to ensure the successful development of Net City, even these giants are not immune to the conditions of the world economy and thus should double down on the (relatively) open policy frameworks and diversified, reliable financing strategies that have thus far enabled Shenzhen’s rise.

    Next, as it relates to the principles upon which Net City has unapologetically been founded, its focused, intentional blending of work and leisure with the natural world place sustainability at its core in a manner and at a scale no previous corporate community can claim. Limitations on cars in favor of pedestrian-friendly walkable spaces coupled with reliance on renewable energy sources will provide a rising China with beautiful, tangible evidence that it, too, is taking steps to combat climate change and to shape the next century of life on this planet in ways the rest of the world might cheer.

    These commitments to sustainability, while encouraging, cannot only be for show. Net City provides China with an opportunity to demonstrate not only its desire to lead the world as a center of innovation, but as an upholder of the shared values and responsibilities that come with the terra firma for any global power.

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    Lastly, as it relates to the people who will someday call this new neighborhood home, it is possible that no single neighborhood in the world has ever rooted itself so enthusiastically in the philosophy of user-centered design as Net City. The blurring of lines between work and play to come upon its completion will pale in comparison to the implications of Net City’s more meta-level, but no less intentional, blurring of product and place. But just as fatefully as the designers of Fordlandia discovered that places are not products, so too must Net City’s master planners remember that people are not products either.

    Net City’s development has begun at a moment when the familiar dueling concepts of work and life have also merged into one amorphous, quarantine soup of time and space. While billions around the world cannot wait to return to certain elements of pre-COVID work-life balance, a more realistic forecaster will admit that work and life have become intertwined in ways that have transformed experiences on both fronts and will not soon be undone.

    This march may appear inevitable, but it remains an open question how much further people will willingly participate in the elimination of boundaries between home and work, of private and public spaces and of restrictions instead of rights. Whether discussing a new piece of technology or a new smart city, the tired bargain between new features and old freedoms is a false one. Smart cities need not — and should not — dangle the possibility of positive environmental outcomes behind the acceptance of stricter, tech-fueled surveillance states.

    The ongoing development of this initiative will fascinate global analysts for the majority of the next decade that stands to reveal the level of commitment its designers have to the lofty promises they have made at its outset. But beneath all that potential and possibility Net City might also reveal the answer to a deeper question: Is the internet a place we want to live?

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.]

    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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    Death of an Insurrection Salesman

    Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, formerly a rising star in his party, gambled dangerously with what he believed was the considerable political capital he had accumulated thanks to his image of a populist — a conservative fighting for the cause of the people. In recent weeks, Hawley even teamed up with Bernie Sanders …
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    A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

    It is a well-established fact that America, as it approaches its 245th birthday, is a divided nation. Red versus blue, conservative versus liberal, right versus left, black versus white, rich versus (a growing number of) poor, urban versus rural. Further divisions may be drawn along education, religion, class, gender identity, ethnicity, language of origin and …
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    Is There a Path to Redemption for Mitch McConnell?

    Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is famously a man of institutions. Even a brief stint of four years as a resident of Kentucky was enough for me to learn how well he knows the levers of power. Outsiders wondering why Kentucky reelects him by double-digit margins need to study the way he maneuvers bills …
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    Visible Cracks in the New American Order

    Joe Biden has now officially been designated the 46th president of the United States. He dislodged the quintessential political misfit, Donald Trump, who, before belatedly agreeing to “an orderly transition,” had engaged in a truly Satanic battle to overpower the institutions he was elected to defend as he attempted to install a regime of permanent …
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    It’s Time to Put Guardrails in Place in Washington

    Americans have historically been fond of pounding their chests when proclaiming US “exceptionalism,” believing that what happens elsewhere in the world doesn’t happen here. That was until Donald Trump came steamrolling in. His supporters’ storming of the US Capitol on Wednesday was a perfect capstone to his tumultuous and torturous presidency. At his direction, the …
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    For the US, Right-Wing Extremism Is Here to Stay

    Over the last three decades, globalization, ethnic diversity and social inclusion have become forefront issues in American political discourse. However, this spotlight has not come without consequence. Finding historical precedents in the Civil War and civil rights eras, today’s new progressive wave has been met with backlash from conservative and reactionary sociopolitical milieus that see …
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