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      Ahead of Biden’s Democracy Summit, China Says: We’re Also a Democracy

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      Beijing argues that its system represents a distinctive form of democracy, one that has dealt better than the West with challenges like the pandemic.BEIJING — As President Biden prepares to host a “summit for democracy” this week, China has counterattacked with an improbable claim: It’s a democracy, too.No matter that the Communist Party of China rules the country’s 1.4 billion people with no tolerance for opposition parties; that its leader, Xi Jinping, rose to power through an opaque political process without popular elections; that publicly calling for democracy in China is punished harshly, often with long prison sentences.“There is no fixed model of democracy; it manifests itself in many forms,” the State Council, China’s top governing body, argued in a position paper it released over the weekend titled “China: Democracy That Works.”It is unlikely that any democratic country will be persuaded by China’s model. By any measure except its own, China is one of the least democratic countries in the world, sitting near the bottom of lists ranking political and personal freedoms.Even so, the government is banking on its message finding an audience in some countries disillusioned by liberal democracy or by American-led criticism — whether in Latin America, Africa or Asia, including in China itself.Officials attending a news conference at the State Council Information Office in Beijing on Saturday.Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press“They want to put on a back foot, put on the defensive, what they refer to as Western democracy,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political scientist at Hong Kong Baptist University.China’s paper on democracy was the latest salvo in a weekslong campaign seeking to undercut Mr. Biden’s virtual gathering, which begins on Thursday.In speeches, articles and videos on state television, officials have extolled what they call Chinese-style democracy. At the same time, Beijing has criticized democracy in the United States in particular as deeply flawed, seeking to undermine the Biden administration’s moral authority as it works to rally the West to counter China.Get Ready for the 2022 Beijing Winter OlympicsJust a few months after Tokyo, the Olympics will start again in Beijing on Feb. 4. Here is what you need to know:A Guide to the Sports: From speedskating to monobob, here’s a look at every sport that will be contested at the 2022 Winter Games.Diplomatic Boycott: The U.S. will not send government officials to Beijing in a boycott to pressure China for human rights abuses.Covid Preparations: With a “closed-loop” bubble, a detailed health plan and vaccination requirements, the Games will be heavily restricted.The Fashion Race: Canada partnered with Lululemon for its Olympic kit, and a Black-owned athleisure brand will outfit Team Nigeria.“Democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve,” Mr. Xi said at a gathering of top Communist Party leaders in October, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. (In the same address, he ridiculed the “song and dance” that voters are given during elections, contending that voters have little influence until the next campaign.)On Sunday, the foreign ministry released another report that criticized American politics for what it described as the corrupting influence of money, the deepening social polarization and the inherent unfairness of the Electoral College. In the same way, officials later sought to play down the White House announcement that no American officials would attend the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February by saying none had been invited anyway.A journalist takes a copy of a Chinese government-produced report titled “Democracy that Works” before a news conference at the State Council Information Office in Beijing on Saturday.Mark Schiefelbein/Associated PressChina’s propaganda offensive has produced some eyebrow-raising claims about the fundamental nature of Communist Party rule and the superiority of its political and social model. It also suggests that Beijing may be insecure about how it is perceived by the world.“The fact that the regime feels the need to consistently justify its political system in terms of democracy is a powerful acknowledgment of the symbolism and legitimacy that the term holds,” said Sarah Cook, an analyst who covers China for Freedom House, an advocacy group in Washington.When officials introduced the government’s policy paper on Saturday, they seemed to compete over who could mention “democracy” more often, while muddying the definition of the word.China’s system “has achieved process democracy and outcome democracy, procedural democracy and substantive democracy, direct democracy and indirect democracy, and the unity of people’s democracy and the will of the country,” said Xu Lin, deputy director of the Communist Party Central Committee’s propaganda department. The campaign carries echoes of the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, which sparred for decades over the merits of their political systems, said Charles Parton, a China specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, a British research group.Senior Communist Party officials at a meeting in November in Beijing. Yan Yan/Xinhua, via Associated Press“They are more keen, in a way, on an ideological competition, and that takes you back to the Cold War,” Mr. Parton said, referring to China.Mr. Biden’s democracy summit, which administration officials have said is not explicitly focused on China, has also faced criticism, in the West as well as from China, in part for whom it invited and whom it left out.Angola, Iraq and Congo, countries that Freedom House classifies as undemocratic, will participate, while two NATO allies, Turkey and Hungary, will not. In a move likely to anger Beijing, the White House also invited two officials from Taiwan, the island democracy China claims as its own; and Nathan Law, a former legislator in the semiautonomous territory of Hong Kong who sought asylum in Britain after China’s crackdown.At the heart of Beijing’s defense of its political system are several core arguments, some more plausible than others.Officials cite the elections that are held in townships or neighborhoods to select representatives to the lowest of five levels of legislatures. Those votes, however, are highly choreographed, and any potential candidates who disagree with the Communist Party face harassment or worse.People in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, protesting new security laws in May 2020.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesThe legislatures then each choose delegates for the next level, up to the National People’s Congress, a parliamentary body with nearly 3,000 members that meets each spring to rubber-stamp decisions made behind closed doors by the party leadership.When Mr. Xi pushed through a constitutional amendment removing term limits on the presidency — effectively allowing him to rule indefinitely — the vote, by secret ballot, was 2,958 to 2.China has also accused the United States of imposing Western values on other cultures, an argument that might resonate in regions where the two powers are competing for influence.China’s ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, recently joined his Russian counterpart, Anatoly Antonov, to denounce Mr. Biden’s summit as hypocritical and hegemonic. Writing in The National Interest, the conservative magazine, they alluded to support for democratic movements in authoritarian countries that became known as “color revolutions.”“No country has the right to judge the world’s vast and varied political landscape by a single yardstick,” they wrote.Pointing to the ways that American and other Western societies have been torn by political, social and racial divisions and hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic, China is also arguing that its form of governance has been more effective in creating prosperity and stability.Health workers during a Covid alert in Wuhan, China in January.Gilles Sabrie for The New York TimesAs officials often note, China has achieved more than four decades of rapid economic growth. More recently, it has contained the coronavirus outbreak that began in Wuhan, with fewer deaths throughout the pandemic than some countries have had in a single day.Skeptics reject the argument that such successes make China a democracy.They cite surveys like the one done by the University of Würzburg in Germany, which ranks countries based on variables like independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press and integrity of elections. The most recent put China near the bottom among 176 countries. Only Saudi Arabia, Yemen, North Korea and Eritrea rank lower. Denmark is first; the United States 36th.In China, the Communist Party controls the courts and heavily censors the media. It has suppressed Tibetan culture and language, restricted religious freedom and carried out a vast detention campaign in Xinjiang.What’s more, China’s vigorous defense of its system in recent months has done nothing to moderate its prosecution of dissent.Two of China’s most prominent human rights lawyers, Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, are expected to face trial at the end of this year on charges that they called for more civil liberties, according to Jerome Cohen, a law professor specializing in China at New York University. A Chinese employee of Bloomberg News in Beijing has remained in detention for a year, as of Tuesday, with almost no word about the accusations against her.Under Mr. Xi’s rule, intellectuals are now warier of speaking their minds in China than at practically any time since Mao Zedong died in 1976.“This is an extraordinary time in the Chinese experience,” Mr. Cohen said. “I really think that the totalitarianism definition applies.”A police officer in 2020 walking past placards of detained rights activists taped on the fence of the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong protesting Beijing’s detention of Xu Zhiyong, the prominent anti-corruption activist.Isaac Lawrence/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKeith Bradsher More

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      The Problem of Political Despair

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      On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes, started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state’s elections, then paused to let my tachycardiac heartbeat subside. Marinating in the news is part of my job, but doing so lately is a source of full-body horror. If this were simply my problem, I’d write about it in a journal instead of in The New York Times. But political despair is an issue for the entire Democratic Party.It’s predictable that, with Donald Trump out of the White House, Democrats would pull back from constant, frenetic political engagement. But there’s a withdrawal happening right now — from news consumption, activism and, in some places, voting — that seems less a product of relief than of avoidance. Part of this is simply burnout and lingering trauma from Covid. But I suspect that part of it is about growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve.One redeeming feature of Trump’s presidency, in retrospect, was that it was possible to look forward to the date when Americans could finish it. Covid, too, once seemed like something we’d be able to largely put behind us when we got vaccinated. Sure, Trumpism, like the virus, would linger, but it was easy to imagine a much better world after the election, the inauguration and the wide availability of shots.Now we’re past all that, and American life is still comprehensively awful. Dystopia no longer has an expiration date.My friend Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, uses the phrase “the bad feeling” to describe certain kinds of stories about America’s democratic unraveling. “The bad feeling is that pit of the stomach feeling that we’re not OK, and it’s not clear we’re going to be OK,” he told me.Bill Armstrong, courtesy of ClampArt, New YorkThe problem isn’t just that polls show that, at least right now, voters want to hand over Congress to a party that largely treats the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes. That’s upsetting, but it’s also fairly normal given the tendency of American voters to react against the party in power, and in a democratic system Republicans should prevail when they have public sentiment behind them.What’s terrifying is that even if Democrats win back public confidence, they can win more votes than Republicans and still lose. Gerrymandering alone is enough to tip the balance in the House. North Carolina, a state Joe Biden lost by 1.3 percentage points, just passed a redistricting map that would create 10 Republican seats, three Democratic ones and one competitive one. “Democrats would have to win North Carolina by 11.4 points just to win half its congressional seats,” FiveThirtyEight reported.There are already lawsuits against the map, but the Supreme Court — which is controlled by conservatives even though Democrats won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections — gutted constitutional limitations on gerrymandering in 2019.Things are, if anything, even worse in the Senate, where growing geographic polarization threatens to give Republicans a near lock on the chamber. As my colleague Ezra Klein wrote last month, the Democratic data guru David Shor predicts that if Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote in 2024, they will lose seven seats compared to where we are now.Meanwhile, Republicans are purging local officials who protected the integrity of the 2020 election, replacing them with apparatchiks. It will be hard for Republicans to steal the 2024 election outright, since they don’t control the current administration, but they can throw it into the sort of chaos that will cause widespread civil unrest. And if they win, it’s hard to imagine them ever consenting to the peaceful transfer of power again. As Hayes said, there’s an inexorability about what’s coming that is “very hard to watch.”Already, the Republican Party winks at the violent intimidation of its political enemies. During the presidential campaign, a right-wing caravan tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road, and Senator Marco Rubio cheered them on. School board members and public health offices have sought help from the Justice Department to deal with a barrage of threats and harassment. Three congressional Republicans have said they want to give an internship to the teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse. One of those Republicans, Representative Paul Gosar, earlier tweeted an animated video of himself killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the overwhelming majority of his caucus stood by him.I look at the future and I see rule without recourse by people who either approve of terrorizing liberals or welcome those who do. Such an outcome isn’t inevitable; unforeseen events can reshape political coalitions. Something could happen to forestall the catastrophe bearing down on us. How much comfort you take from this depends on your disposition.Given the bleak trajectory of American politics, I worry about progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity, a retreat that will only hasten democracy’s decay. In order to get people to throw themselves into the fight to save this broken country, we need leaders who can convince them that they haven’t already lost.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Democratic Socialists Have a Long Road to Electoral Victory

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      In my political circles, the socialist and activist left, the recent defeat of India Walton, a democratic socialist candidate for mayor of Buffalo, seemed all too familiar, even if she lost in an unusual way to the incumbent Democratic mayor, Byron Brown. Ms. Walton prevailed against Mr. Brown in the Democratic primary, but for the general election, he ran a write-in campaign to retain his position.That outcome saddens and disappoints me. Like many admirers of Ms. Walton, I believe she was terribly mistreated by the New York Democratic Party, which largely fell in line behind Mr. Brown, even though he was not running as a Democrat. It’s not fair that Ms. Walton had to run against him twice, with the weight of a lot of centrist Democrats and Republicans behind him in the general election, and that he enjoyed the support of several prominent labor unions and much of the city’s and state’s larger party infrastructure. (Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand did endorse Ms. Walton.)Nevertheless, I am willing to say something far too few leftists seem willing to: Not only did Mr. Brown win, but he won resoundingly (the race is not officially over but stands at roughly 59 percent for Mr. Brown to 41 percent for Ms. Walton); it’s time for young socialists and progressive Democrats to recognize that our beliefs just might not be popular enough to win elections consistently. It does us no favors to pretend otherwise.What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.They frequently claim that Americans want socialist policies and socialist politicians but are prevented from voting for them by the system. Or they argue that most American voters have no deeply held economic beliefs at all and are ready to be rallied to the socialist cause by a charismatic candidate.This attitude toward Ms. Walton’s defeat specifically and toward the political landscape more broadly is part and parcel of a problem that has deepened in the past five years: So many on the radical left whom I know have convinced themselves that their politics and policies are in fact quite popular on a national level, despite the mounting evidence otherwise.As New York magazine’s Sarah Jones put it over the summer, “Should Democrats mount a cohesive critique of capitalism, they’ll meet many Americans where they are.” We are held back, the thinking frequently goes, not by the popularity of our ideas but by the forces of reaction marshaled against us.But the only way for the left to overcome our institutional disadvantages is to compel more voters to vote for us. Bernie Sanders’s two noble failures in Democratic presidential primaries galvanized young progressives and helped create political structures that have pulled the party left. They also helped convince many of a socialist bent that only dirty tricks can defeat us. In the 2016 primary, the superdelegate system demonstrated how undemocratic the Democratic Party can be. Mr. Sanders won every county in West Virginia, for example, but the system at the time ensured that Mr. Sanders did not receive superdelegates in proportion to his vote totals (many superdelegates defied the wishes of the voters and supported Mrs. Clinton). In 2020, it was widely reported that after Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada, former President Barack Obama had an indirect role as the minor candidates in the primary rallied behind Joe Biden to defeat the socialist threat. There is little doubt that the establishment worked overtime to prevent a Sanders nomination.But the inconvenient fact is that Mr. Sanders received far fewer primary votes than Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020. He failed to make major inroads among the moderate Black voters whom many see as the heart of the Democratic Party. What’s more, he failed to turn out the youth vote in the way that his supporters insisted he would.Whatever else we may want to say about the system, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the voters of the liberal party in American politics twice had the opportunity to nominate Mr. Sanders as their candidate for president and twice declined to do so. If we don’t allow this to inform our understanding of the popularity of our politics, we’ll never move forward and start winning elections to gain more power in our system.This may be seen as a betrayal of the socialist principles I stand for, which are at heart an insistence on the absolute moral equality of every person and a fierce commitment to fighting for the worst-off with whatever social and governmental means are necessary. But I am writing this precisely because I believe so deeply in those principles. I want socialism to win, and to do that, socialists must be ruthless with ourselves.The idea that most Americans quietly agree with our positions is dangerous, because it leads to the kind of complacency that has dogged Democrats since the “emerging Democratic majority” myth became mainstream. Socialists can take some heart in public polling that shows Americans warming to the abstract idea of socialism. But “socialism” is an abstraction that means little without a winning candidate. And too much of this energy seems to stem from the echo-chamber quality of social media, as young socialists look at the world through Twitter and TikTok and see only the smiling faces of their own beliefs reflected back at them.Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.Fredrik deBoer is the author of “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice” and publishes a daily newsletter.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republicans Are Going to Use Dog Whistles. Democrats Can’t Just Ignore Them.

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      The Virginia election results should shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics. No candidate would think of entering an election without a winning message on the economy or health care. Yet by failing to counter his opponent’s racial dog whistles, Terry McAuliffe did the equivalent, finding himself defenseless against a strategy Republicans have used to win elections for decades.Crucially, the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, was able to use racially coded attacks to motivate sky-high white turnout without paying a penalty among minority voters. This appears to solve the problem bedeviling Republicans in the Trump era: how to generate high turnout for a candidate who keeps Donald Trump at arm’s length, as Mr. Youngkin did.Before Tuesday night, conventional wisdom held that racially coded attacks could well spur higher white turnout but that those gains would be offset by losses among minority voters. Mr. Youngkin proved this assumption false. He significantly outperformed other Republicans among white voters, especially women: In 2020, Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump among white women in Virginia by 50 percent to 49 percent, but according to exit polls, Mr. Youngkin beat Mr. McAuliffe among them by 57 percent to 43 percent. At the same time, Mr. Youngkin suffered no major drop-off among minority voters — if anything, he appeared to slightly outperform expectations.This should terrify Democrats. With our democracy on the line, we have to forge an effective counterattack on race while rethinking the false choice between mobilizing base voters or persuading swing voters.It will not work to ignore race and talk about popular issues instead. Mr. McAuliffe’s closing message was a generic appeal on infrastructure and other issues that poll well. He was following the strategy known as popularism, which has gained in influence since the 2020 election, when Democrats’ disappointing down-ballot performance was attributed to rhetoric like “defund the police.”In the heat of a campaign, popularism fails because Republicans will not let Democrats ignore race. Mr. Youngkin dragged race into the election, making his vow to “ban critical race theory” a centerpiece of his stump speech and repeating it over the closing weekend — even though in Virginia the prominence of C.R.T., which teaches that racism is woven into the structures of American society, was vastly exaggerated.Some Democrats may resist accepting the centrality of race, pointing to the bearish national political environment and cyclical patterns. This would be a mistake for two reasons. First, C.R.T. helped create the rough national environment, with Fox News hammering it relentlessly; and cyclical explanations, like thermostatic public opinion (a longstanding tendency for voters to drift toward the views of the party out of power on some issues), do not explain Democrats’ loss of support in the suburbs or the strong turnout. Voters in New Jersey, where a stronger-than-expected Republican performance caught Democrats off guard, have been inundated with C.R.T. hype by Fox News, too.Second, the past half-century of American political history shows that racially coded attacks are how Republicans have been winning elections for decades, from Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad. Many of these campaigns were masterminded by the strategist Lee Atwater, who in 1981 offered a blunt explanation: Being overtly racist backfires, he noted, “so you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” C.R.T. is straight out of the Atwater playbook.In recent years, it has become commonplace in Democratic circles to think that our diversifying population has relegated such attacks to the past. The theory goes that Democrats can counteract racist appeals by encouraging high turnout among people of color. This interpretation took a ding in 2016 and a bigger hit in 2020, when Mr. Trump shocked many people by making major inroads with Latinos. Latinos recently became the largest population of color, and Democrats cannot win on the national level without winning them by large margins. Yet from 2016 to 2020, Democrats saw a seven-point drop in support among Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.How did the most racist president of our lifetime outperform a more generic Republican like Mitt Romney with Latinos? Research by Equis Labs suggests that Latinos found Mr. Trump’s populist message on the economy appealing.And as Mr. Trump showed — and Mr. Youngkin confirmed — racially coded attacks do not necessarily repel Latino voters. They may even attract them. One of us, Ms. Gavito, was among the first to flag this disturbing trend. In focus groups in battleground states during the lead-up to the 2020 election, pollsters with Lake Research tested a message that denounced “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Both whites and Latinos found this message persuasive, but Latinos found it appealing at significantly higher rates than whites.This, then, is the Democrats’ problem: The fact that Republicans can drag race into the conversation with ease kicks the legs out from under the idea that Democrats can succeed by simply talking about more popular things. And the fact that racially coded attacks spur turnout among white voters without necessarily prompting a backlash among minority voters undermines the idea that mobilizing a diverse electorate can win elections for Democrats.That’s the bad news. The good news is, we know what a path forward looks like.First, Democrats must separate our (accurate and necessary) analysis of structural racism from our political strategy in a country where the electorate remains nearly 70 percent white — and as much as or more than 80 percent white in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Instead of ignoring race while Republicans beat us silly with it, Democrats must confront it and explain that powerful elites and special interests use race as a tool of division to distract hard-working people of all races while they get robbed blind. Then pivot back to shared interests. The pivot is critical: Without it, Democrats are simply talking past voters, while Republicans play on their racial fears.This strategy is known as the “race-class narrative,” pioneered by Prof. Ian Haney López of Berkeley, the author Heather McGhee and the messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio (whom we have worked with). To be clear, Democrats should not seek to impose a racial-justice frame; to the contrary, research found a focus on racial justice to be less persuasive than the race-class narrative. The strategy we suggest here is a middle way: It is more powerful than a racial-justice-only frame but also more powerful than a strategy that ignores race altogether. Race is the elephant in the room, and Democrats must stop fooling themselves into thinking that they can prevent it from becoming an issue.Second, Democrats must put aside the false choice between the tactics of persuasion and mobilization and embrace them both. By confronting race as a tool of division, and then pivoting to shared interests, Democrats can offer an optimistic, inspiring and even patriotic vision. This is the approach that rocketed Barack Obama to the White House. As an African-American, Mr. Obama was never allowed to ignore race. Forced to confront it, Mr. Obama offered Americans a vision that mobilized a broad, diverse coalition — while also persuading white voters. In 2008, Mr. Obama won the highest share of the white vote since Bill Clinton in 1996.Race has infused American history and politics since our founding. It threads through most aspects of daily life, and stirs up complicated feelings that Americans of all backgrounds find difficult to discuss. But Virginia showed that race is impossible to ignore.The simple fact is that Republicans have long used race to achieve victory, and Democrats are fooling themselves if they think they can avoid it. Democrats have to get real about race, and forge a way to win.Tory Gavito (@torygavito) is president of Way to Win, a donor network focused on expanding Democrats’ power in the Sun Belt, and lead of the Latinx Justice Fund. Adam Jentleson is the executive director of Battle Born Collective, a progressive strategy organization, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and the author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Una despedida esperanzada para los lectores

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      Mi vida se transformó cuando tenía 25 años y entré nervioso a una entrevista de trabajo en la imponente oficina de Abe Rosenthal, el editor legendario y volátil de The New York Times. En un momento, no estuve de acuerdo con él, así que esperé a que se enojara y llamara a seguridad. En cambio, me tendió la mano y me ofreció un trabajo.La euforia me desbordó: ¡era muy joven y había encontrado a mi empleador para el resto de la vida! Estaba seguro de que la única manera en que dejaría el Times sería muerto.Sin embargo, esta es mi última columna para el diario. Estoy dejando un trabajo que amo para postularme como gobernador de Oregón.Es sensato cuestionar mi decisión. Cuando le preguntaron a mi colega William Safire si dejaría su columna en el Times para ser secretario de Estado, contestó: “¿Y por qué bajar un escalón en mi carrera?”.Así que, ¿por qué estoy haciéndolo?Voy a llegar a eso, pero primero quiero compartir unas cuantas lecciones de mis 37 años como reportero, editor y columnista del Times.En especial, quiero dejar claro que, aunque pasé mi carrera en la primera línea del sufrimiento y la depravación humana, cubriendo genocidio, guerra, pobreza e injusticia, salí de ahí con la firme creencia de que podemos lograr un progreso real si logramos convocar la suficiente voluntad política. Somos una especie magnífica, y podemos hacer las cosas mejor.Lección 1: A un lado de lo peor de la humanidad, encontrarás también lo mejor.El genocidio en Darfur me marcó y horrorizó. Para cubrir la matanza, crucé fronteras sin ser visto, escapé de puestos de control, y me congracié con asesinos en masa.Fue difícil no llorar mientras entrevistaba a niños traumatizados que habían recibido balazos, habían sido violados o quedado huérfanos. Era imposible reportear en Darfur y no oler la maldad en el aire. Pero, junto con los monstruos, invariablemente encontré a héroes.Había adolescentes que se ofrecieron para usar sus arcos y flechas para proteger a sus aldeas de los milicianos que llevaban armas automáticas. Había trabajadores humanitarios, en su mayoría locales, que arriesgaron sus vidas para dar asistencia. Y sudaneses de a pie, como Suad Ahmed, una mujer de 25 años de Darfur que conocí en un campo de refugiados.Suad y su hermana Halima, de 10 años, estaban recogiendo leña cuando vieron que los yanyauid, una milicia genocida, se dirigían hacia ellas a caballo.“¡Corre!”, le dijo Suad a su hermana. “Debes correr y escapar”.Suad creó una distracción para que el yanyauid la persiguiera a ella en lugar de a Halima. Atraparon a Suad, la golpearon brutalmente y la violaron en grupo; la dejaron demasiado herida para caminar.Suad restó importancia a su heroísmo, y me dijo que si hubiera corrido, la habrían capturado de todos modos. Dijo que el hecho de que su hermana escapara hizo que el sacrificio valiera la pena.Incluso en un panorama de maldad, las personas más memorables no son los Himmler ni los Eichmann sino las Anne Franks y Raoul Wallenberg, y las Suad Ahmeds, quienes son capaces de una bondad inspiradora frente al repugnante mal. Ellas son la razón por la que no dejé el frente de batalla deprimido sino inspirado.Lección 2: En general, sabemos cómo mejorar el bienestar en el país y fuera de él. Lo que falta es voluntad política.Hay cosas buenas que suceden a nuestro alrededor sin que nos demos cuenta de ellas, y son el resultado de una comprensión más profunda de lo que funciona para hacer la diferencia. Eso puede parecer sorprendente viniendo de un columnista apesadumbrado, que ha cubierto el hambre, las atrocidades y la devastación climática. Pero el hecho de que los periodistas solo cubran las noticias de los aviones que se estrellan, y no los que aterrizan con éxito, no significa que todos los vuelos terminen en tragedia.Considera esto: históricamente, casi la mitad de los humanos murieron en la infancia; ahora solo muere el 4 por ciento. En los últimos años, hasta la pandemia de la COVID-19, 170.000 personas en todo el mundo salían de la pobreza extrema todos los días. Otras 325.000 personas obtienen electricidad cada día. Unas 200.000 personas lograron tener acceso a agua potable. La pandemia ha sido un gran revés para el mundo en desarrollo, pero la tendencia más general de logros históricos permanecerá; esto es, si aplicamos las lecciones aprendidas y redoblamos los esfuerzos al encarar las políticas climáticas..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Aquí, en Estados Unidos, hemos logrado aumentar las tasas de graduación de la secundaria, reducir a la mitad el número de personas sin hogar entre los veteranos y disminuir el embarazo adolescente en más del 60 por ciento desde su momento más alto en 1991. Estos éxitos deberían inspirarnos a hacer más: si sabemos qué hacer para reducir la carencia de vivienda de los veteranos, podemos aplicar las mismas lecciones para reducirla en los niños.Lección 3: El talento es universal, aunque las oportunidades no lo sean.El mayor recurso del mundo sin explotar es el enorme potencial de las personas que no han sido completamente impulsadas o educadas. Se trata de un recordatorio de lo mucho que podemos ganar si tan solo hacemos mejores inversiones en el capital humano.La médica más excepcional que he conocido no estudió en la Escuela de Medicina de Harvard. De hecho, ella nunca ha ido a una escuela de medicina o a escuela alguna. Mamitu Gashe, una mujer etíope que no sabía leer, padeció una fístula obstétrica y fue sometida a tratamientos prolongados en un hospital. Mientras estaba allí, comenzó a ayudar.Los médicos estaban desbordados y se dieron cuenta de que era muy inteligente y capaz, y empezaron a darle más responsabilidades. Con el tiempo, ella misma comenzó a realizar cirugías de fístulas y, después, se convirtió en una de las cirujanas de fístulas más distinguidas del mundo. Cuando profesores de obstetricia de Estados Unidos iban a su hospital para aprender a corregir fístulas, su maestra a menudo era Mamitu.Pero, por supuesto, hay muchos otros casos, personas igual de extraordinarias y hábiles que Mamitu, que nunca tienen una oportunidad.Hace unos años, me enteré de un niño sin hogar que nació en Nigeria, asistía al tercer grado y acababa de ganar el campeonato de ajedrez del estado de Nueva York para su grupo de edad. Visité al niño, Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi, y a su familia en un refugio para personas sin hogar y escribí sobre ellos. Eso derivó en donaciones de más de 250.000 de dólares para los Adewumi, un coche, becas completas para asistir a escuelas privadas, ofertas de trabajo para los padres, ayuda legal pro bono y vivienda gratuita.Lo que vino después fue quizás aún más conmovedor. Los Adewumi aceptaron el hospedaje pero pusieron el dinero en una fundación para ayudar a otros inmigrantes sin hogar. Mantuvieron a Tani en su escuela pública como forma de agradecimiento a los trabajadores que les condonaron las cuotas del club de ajedrez cuando era el niño recién comenzaba.Tani ha seguido creciendo en el mundo del ajedrez. Ahora, a sus 11 años, ganó el campeonato de ajedrez de Norteamérica para su grupo de edad y es un maestro con una calificación de la Federación de Ajedrez de Estados Unidos de 2262.Pero ganar campeonatos estatales de ajedrez no es un método escalable para resolver la falta de vivienda.La generosidad deslumbrante en respuesta al éxito de Tani es conmovedora, pero debe ir acompañada de políticas públicas generosas. Los niños deberían tener vivienda incluso si no son prodigios del ajedrez.No construimos el Sistema de Autopistas Interestatales con voluntarios ni vendiendo pasteles. Para dar soluciones sistémicas al fracaso educativo y la pobreza se necesita, como pasó con la construcción de autopistas, de una inversión pública rigurosa, sustentada tanto en datos como en la empatía.En Estados Unidos, a menudo somos cínicos ante la política, a veces nos parece ridícula la idea de que los líderes elegidos democráticamente marcan una gran diferencia. Pero durante décadas he escrito sobre manifestantes a favor de la democracia en Polonia, Ucrania, China, Corea del Sur, Mongolia y otros lugares, y ellos me han contagiado parte de su idealismo.Un amigo chino, un contador llamado Ren Wanding, pasó años en prisión por su activismo, e incluso escribió un tratado de dos volúmenes sobre la democracia y los derechos humanos con los únicos materiales que tenía a su disposición: papel higiénico y la punta de un bolígrafo desechado.En 1989, en la plaza de Tiananmén, vi a soldados del gobierno chino abrir fuego contra los manifestantes que pedían democracia. Y luego, en una demostración extraordinaria de valentía, conductores de rickshaws pedalearon con sus carritos hacía ellos para recoger los cuerpos de los jóvenes que habían muerto o habían resultado heridos. Un conductor corpulento, con lágrimas en los ojos, se desvió y pasó a mi lado pedaleando lento para que yo pudiera ser testigo de lo sucedido, y me pidió que le contara al mundo lo que veía.Esos conductores de rickshaws no eran cínicos ante la democracia: estaban arriesgando sus vidas por ella. Después de ver esa valentía en el mundo me entristece aún más advertir que hay personas en este país que están socavando nuestras instituciones democráticas. Pero los manifestantes como Ren me inspiraron a preguntarme si debería participar de manera más plena en la vida democrática de Estados Unidos.Es por esta razón que estoy dejando el trabajo que amo.He escrito con regularidad sobre las tribulaciones de mi amada ciudad natal, Yamhill, Oregón, que ha lidiado con la pérdida de buenos trabajos para la clase trabajadora y la llegada de la metanfetamina. Todos los días llegaba a la escuela primaria de Yamhill, y luego a la secundaria Yamhill-Carlton, a bordo del autobús número 6. Pero hoy, más de una cuarta parte de mis amigos del antiguo autobús han muerto por las drogas, el alcohol o el suicidio. Son muertes por desesperación.El sistema político les falló. El sistema educativo les falló. El sistema de salud les falló. Y yo les fallé. Era el niño en el autobús que ganó becas, recibió una gran educación y luego me fui a cubrir genocidios al otro lado del mundo.Aunque estoy orgulloso de la atención que le di a las atrocidades en el mundo, me puso mal regresar de las crisis humanitarias en el extranjero y encontrar una en casa. Cada dos semanas, perdemos a más estadounidenses por las drogas, el alcohol y el suicidio que en 20 años de guerra en Irak y Afganistán. Y esa es una pandemia que ni los medios de comunicación han cubierto de la mejor manera ni nuestros líderes han abordado adecuadamente.Mientras procesaba esto, la pandemia de covid empeoró la situación. Una amiga que había dejado de consumir drogas recayó al inicio de la pandemia, se quedó sin hogar y durante el año siguiente tuvo 17 sobredosis. Temo por ella y por su hijo.Amo el periodismo, pero también amo a mi estado natal. Sigo pensando en el dicho de Theodore Roosevelt: “El que cuenta no es el crítico, ni el hombre que señala el modo en el que el fuerte tropieza”, dijo. “El mérito pertenece al hombre que está ahí, en el ruedo”.Estoy resistiendo el impulso periodístico de mantenerme al margen porque me lastima ver lo que han soportado mis compañeros de escuela y siento que es el momento adecuado para pasar de cubrir los problemas a tratar de solucionarlos.Espero convencer a algunos de ustedes de que el servicio público en el gobierno puede ser un camino para ejercer responsabilidad por las comunidades que queremos, por un país que puede hacer las cosas mejor. Incluso si eso significa renunciar a un trabajo que amo.¡Adiós, lectores!Nicholas Kristof fue columnista del Times durante 20 años. Ha sido galardonado con dos premios Pulitzer por su cobertura de China y del genocidio de Darfur. Puedes seguirlo en Instagram. Su libro más reciente es Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope. @NickKristof | Facebook More

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      A Farewell to Readers, With Hope

      by

      My life was transformed when I was 25 years old and nervously walked into a job interview in the grand office of Abe Rosenthal, the legendary and tempestuous editor of The New York Times. At one point, I disagreed with him, so I waited for him to explode and call security. Instead, he stuck out his hand and offered me a job.Exhilaration washed over me: I was a kid and had found my employer for the rest of my life! I was sure that I would leave The Times only feet first.Yet this is my last column for The Times. I am giving up a job I love to run for governor of Oregon.It’s fair to question my judgment. When my colleague William Safire was asked if he would give up his Times column to be secretary of state, he replied, “Why take a step down?”So why am I doing this?I’m getting to that, but first a few lessons from my 37 years as a Times reporter, editor and columnist.In particular, I want to make clear that while I’ve spent my career on the front lines of human suffering and depravity, covering genocide, war, poverty and injustice, I’ve emerged firmly believing that we can make real progress by summoning the political will. We are an amazing species, and we can do better.Lesson No. 1: Side by side with the worst of humanity, you find the best.The genocide in Darfur seared me and terrified me. To cover the slaughter there, I sneaked across borders, slipped through checkpoints, ingratiated myself with mass murderers.In Darfur, it was hard to keep from weeping as I interviewed shellshocked children who had been shot, raped or orphaned. No one could report in Darfur and not smell the evil in the air. Yet alongside the monsters, I invariably found heroes.There were teenagers who volunteered to use their bows and arrows to protect their villages from militiamen with automatic weapons. There were aid workers, mostly local, who risked their lives to deliver assistance. And there were ordinary Sudanese like Suad Ahmed, a then-25-year-old Darfuri woman I met in one dusty refugee camp.Suad had been out collecting firewood with her 10-year-old sister, Halima, when they saw the janjaweed, a genocidal militia, approaching on horseback.“Run!” Suad told her sister. “You must run and escape.”Then Suad created a diversion so the janjaweed chased her rather than Halima. They caught Suad, brutally beat her and gang-raped her, leaving her too injured to walk.Suad played down her heroism, telling me that even if she had fled, she might have been caught anyway. She said that her sister’s escape made the sacrifice worth it.Even in a landscape of evil, the most memorable people aren’t the Himmlers and Eichmanns but the Anne Franks and Raoul Wallenbergs — and Suad Ahmeds — capable of exhilarating goodness in the face of nauseating evil. They are why I left the front lines not depressed but inspired.Lesson No. 2: We largely know how to improve well-being at home and abroad. What we lack is the political will.Good things are happening that we often don’t acknowledge, and they’re a result of a deeper understanding of what works to make a difference. That may seem surprising coming from the Gloom Columnist, who has covered starvation, atrocities and climate devastation. But just because journalists cover planes that crash, not those that land, doesn’t mean that all flights are crashing.Consider this: Historically, almost half of humans died in childhood; now only 4 percent do. Every day in recent years, until the Covid-19 pandemic, another 170,000 people worldwide emerged from extreme poverty. Another 325,000 obtained electricity each day. Some 200,000 gained access to clean drinking water. The pandemic has been a major setback for the developing world, but the larger pattern of historic gains remains — if we apply lessons learned and redouble efforts while tackling climate policy.Here in the United States, we have managed to raise high school graduation rates, slash veteran homelessness by half and cut teen pregnancy by more than 60 percent since the modern peak in 1991. These successes should inspire us to do more: If we know how to reduce veteran homelessness, then surely we can apply the same lessons to reduce child homelessness.Lesson No. 3: Talent is universal, even if opportunity is not.The world’s greatest untapped resource is the vast potential of people who are not fully nurtured or educated — a reminder of how much we stand to gain if we only make better investments in human capital.The most remarkable doctor I ever met was not a Harvard Medical School graduate. Indeed, she had never been to medical school or any school. But Mamitu Gashe, an illiterate Ethiopian woman, suffered an obstetric fistula and underwent long treatments at a hospital. While there, she began to help out.Overworked doctors realized she was immensely smart and capable, and they began to give her more responsibilities. Eventually she began to perform fistula repairs herself, and over time she became one of the world’s most distinguished fistula surgeons. When American professors of obstetrics went to the hospital to learn how to repair fistulas, their teacher was often Mamitu.But, of course, there are so many other Mamitus, equally extraordinary and capable, who never get the chance.A few years ago, I learned that a homeless third grader from Nigeria had just won the New York State chess championship for his age group. I visited the boy, Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi, and his family in their homeless shelter and wrote about them — and the result was more than $250,000 in donations for the Adewumis, along with a vehicle, full scholarships to private schools, job offers for the parents, pro bono legal help and free housing.What came next was perhaps still more moving. The Adewumis accepted the housing but put the money in a foundation to help other homeless immigrants. They kept Tani in his public school out of gratitude to officials who waived chess club fees when he was a novice.Tani has continued to rise in the chess world. Now 11, he won the North American chess championship for his age group and is a master with a U.S. Chess Federation rating of 2262.But winning a state chess championship is not a scalable way to solve homelessness.The dazzling generosity in response to Tani’s success is heartwarming, but it needs to be matched by a generous public policy. Kids should get housing even if they’re not chess prodigies.We didn’t build the Interstate System of highways with bake sales and volunteers. Rigorous public investment — based on data as well as empathy — is needed to provide systemic solutions to educational failure and poverty, just as it was to create freeways.In this country we’re often cynical about politics, sometimes rolling our eyes at the idea that democratic leaders make much of a difference. Yet for decades I’ve covered pro-democracy demonstrators in Poland, Ukraine, China, South Korea, Mongolia and elsewhere, and some of their idealism has rubbed off on me.One Chinese friend, an accountant named Ren Wanding, spent years in prison for his activism, even writing a two-volume treatise on democracy and human rights with the only materials he had: toilet paper and the nib of a discarded pen.At Tiananmen Square in 1989, I watched Chinese government troops open fire with automatic weapons on pro-democracy demonstrators. And then in an extraordinary display of courage, rickshaw drivers pedaled their wagons out toward the gunfire to pick up the bodies of the young people who had been killed or injured. One burly rickshaw driver, tears streaming down his cheeks, swerved to drive by me slowly so I could bear witness — and he begged me to tell the world.Those rickshaw drivers weren’t cynical about democracy: They were risking their lives for it. Such courage abroad makes me all the sadder to see people in this country undermining our democratic institutions. But protesters like Ren inspired me to ask if I should engage more fully in America’s democratic life.That’s why I am leaving a job I love.I’ve written regularly about the travails of my beloved hometown, Yamhill, Ore., which has struggled with the loss of good working-class jobs and the arrival of meth. Every day I rode to Yamhill Grade School and then Yamhill-Carlton High School on the No. 6 bus. Yet today more than one-quarter of my pals on my old bus are dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide — deaths of despair.The political system failed them. The educational system failed them. The health system failed them. And I failed them. I was the kid on the bus who won scholarships, got the great education — and then went off to cover genocides half a world away.While I’m proud of the attention I gave to global atrocities, it sickened me to return from humanitarian crises abroad and find one at home. Every two weeks, we lose more Americans from drugs, alcohol and suicide than in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan — and that’s a pandemic that the media hasn’t adequately covered and our leaders haven’t adequately addressed.As I was chewing on all this, the Covid pandemic made suffering worse. One friend who had been off drugs relapsed early in the pandemic, became homeless and overdosed 17 times over the next year. I’m terrified for her and for her child.I love journalism, but I also love my home state. I keep thinking of Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum: “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,” he said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”I’m bucking the journalistic impulse to stay on the sidelines because my heart aches at what classmates have endured and it feels like the right moment to move from covering problems to trying to fix them.I hope to convince some of you that public service in government can be a path to show responsibility for communities we love, for a country that can do better. Even if that means leaving a job I love.Farewell, readers!The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      U.S. Regains Seat at U.N. Human Rights Council, 3 Years After Quitting

      by

      The Trump administration called the 47-nation council hypocritical and said it was vilifying Israel. The Biden administration says the U.S. can be more effective as a member.The United States on Thursday regained a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council, which the Trump administration abandoned in 2018 because of what it called the body’s hypocrisy and anti-Israel prejudice.In seeking to rejoin the 47-member council, the Biden administration, which has taken a far more supportive stance toward the United Nations than its predecessor, argued that American interests would be better served if the United States were a member seeking change from within.The United States won a three-year term for one of 18 open seats on the council, starting in January, in a vote by the 193-member General Assembly.Based in Geneva, the council is regarded as the world’s most important human rights body. While it has no criminal enforcement or sanctioning powers, the council can undertake investigations that help shape the global image of countries. It can also exert influence on their behavior if they are deemed to have poor rights records.But the council has a wide array of critics who argue that many of its elected members are human-rights abusers themselves, pointing to examples like China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela. The presence of such countries on the council, critics say, undercuts the legitimacy of its work.Many also object to a permanent item on the council’s agenda concerning rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, which has become the basis for its numerous resolutions condemning Israel.The Biden administration’s success at rejoining the council may now bring about a test of its stated goal of strengthening America’s human-rights advocacy around the world. Many conservative Republicans opposed rejoining, and there is no guarantee that the United States will not withdraw from the council again, should a Republican win the White House back in 2024.“The Council provides a forum where we can have open discussions about ways we and our partners can improve,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who announced the intent to rejoin the council in February, said Thursday after the election results.“At the same time, it also suffers from serious flaws, including disproportionate attention on Israel and the membership of several states with egregious human rights records,” he said. “Together, we must push back against attempts to subvert the ideals upon which the Human Rights Council was founded.”Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke by video message to the United Nations Human Rights Council last year.United Nations, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs if to underscore the challenges cited by Mr. Blinken, several countries with poor or questionable human-rights records also won seats on the council on Thursday, among them Cameroon, Eritrea, the United Arab Emirates and Honduras.With its return to the Human Rights Council, the Biden administration further reversed its predecessor’s moves toward American isolationism.President Biden has revived U.S. membership in the World Health Organization, re-entered the Paris climate accord and restored funding to U.N. agencies that had been cut. Those agencies include the United Nations Population Fund, a leading supplier of maternal health and family planning services, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists Palestinians classified as refugees.Despite the revived U.S. engagement, diplomats and rights groups in Geneva did not foresee an easy return to the kind of influence wielded by the United States at the Human Rights Council during President Barack Obama’s tenure.The United States faces a more assertive China that is pushing back aggressively at criticism of its repression in the Xinjiang region and is pressuring economically vulnerable countries into supporting initiatives that shift attention away from civil and political rights.The United States, by contrast, is short of diplomatic staff in Geneva to promote its human rights agenda. President Biden’s chosen ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva is still awaiting congressional confirmation, and he has yet to nominate an ambassador to the Human Rights Council.Under the voting system for open seats in the Human Rights Council, slates of candidates are divided into five geographic regions, and any member of the General Assembly is eligible to run except those completing two consecutive terms on the council. Voting is by secret ballot. A simple majority of 97 votes is needed to win. In cases where the number of candidates exceeds the number of open seats, the biggest vote-getter wins.This year, however, the number of candidates from each region equaled the number of that region’s open seats, meaning none of the seats were contested. Rights groups outside the United Nations called that part of the problem.“The absence of competition in this year’s Human Rights Council vote makes a mockery of the word ‘election,’” Louis Charbonneau, the U.N. director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement ahead of the vote. “Electing serious rights abusers like Cameroon, Eritrea and the U.A.E. sends a terrible signal that U.N. member states aren’t serious about the council’s fundamental mission to protect human rights.”The other newly elected or re-elected members included Gambia, Benin and Somalia from the African group; Qatar, Kazakhstan, India and Malaysia from the Asian group; Argentina and Paraguay from the Latin America and Caribbean group; Luxembourg and Finland from the Western group; and Lithuania and Montenegro from the Eastern Europe group.Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting from Geneva, and Lara Jakes from Washington. More