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      in World Politics

      The Death of Meaningful Live Coverage in US Media

      by

      In an important article in Foreign Affairs cited yesterday in this column, Charles King mentions a particular initiative of media manipulation that an increasingly panicked President Lyndon Johnson undertook to defuse criticism of the war he had engaged in Vietnam. King describes a game of political chess that took place between William Fulbright, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1974, intent on exposing the bad faith of the government, and Johnson, who was desperately seeking to manufacture consent for his war.

      Fulbright, Vietnam and the Problem of Purity in US Politics

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      The chessboard was the media and specifically, television. “If there was a moment when the White House began to lose middle America,” King writes, “the Fulbright hearings marked it. From the outset, Johnson was so worried about their impact that he pressed one television network to air I Love Lucy reruns instead of live coverage.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Live coverage:

      The last increasingly feeble attempt by the media to acknowledge the abiding importance of reality in a culture that expresses a clear preference for hyperreality

      Contextual Note 

      Live coverage has always been a risky endeavor for the media, except in sports, where people understand the rules of engagement. Live coverage of a popular sporting event happens to be the most profitable form of entertainment. “Broadcasters pay heavily for sport because it is the best live, unscripted drama they can get,” according to one media commentator.

      War in some ways resembles sports because it pits two very serious adversaries against each other. US television networks in the 1960s sensed that live coverage of an emerging war could be profitable. But, in contrast with a sporting event, it entailed four serious problems beyond the physical risk to journalists themselves.

      Embed from Getty Images

      First, broadcasting unadulterated violence might violate the reigning standards of “decency.” But that could be solved with good editing.

      A second drawback lay in the fact that programming and planning became far more complex to manage since there was no official pre-announced schedule.

      The third was even thornier. It concerned the question of truthful reporting. Being too honest about what is happening on the ground risked alienating indispensable sources inside a government that desperately wants people to applaud “our side” and perceive the noble and even glorious side of combat.

      That consideration of honesty defines the fourth problem related to live coverage: Viewers keep expecting more reality at the very moment when the people promoting war decide they should see less of it. That leaves two options for news services: either scale back their reporting or begin misrepresenting or airbrushing the truth. But in the consumer society, the problem with scaling back (for example, offering sitcom reruns instead of Senate hearings) is that consumers always want more. In the end, misrepresentation — fake news — becomes the only viable solution. The key to manufacturing consent, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman made clear in their book with that title, is giving consumers not only what they want to hear, but what you (the media and the government) want them to want to hear.

      The Vietnam War brought home to both the government and the media the difficulty of managing live reality. The Nixon administration that followed both intensified the war and worked on molding the public’s mindset rather than either debating critics or seeking to hide from public scrutiny. Richard Nixon introduced the notion of “the silent majority” to neutralize the voices of protest and shame the refractory media by accusing them of failing to respond to the will of the people, “real Americans.” Nixon’s war on the media eventually backfired with the Watergate scandal, leading to his resignation in 1974. But it effectively drew attention away from his policies and onto his person, something Johnson was never able to do.

      From that point on, and thanks in part to the Watergate scandal itself, the media acquired the habit of focusing on the personality of presidents and neglecting critical discussion of their policies. Suddenly, there was plenty of live coverage of the Watergate affair itself and less and less of Vietnam, Indonesia and Chile, where the kind of foreign policy Fulbright denounced was being carried out with greater and greater impunity.

      Perhaps CBS and other audio-visual media had learned that live broadcasting of the reality produced by a president’s policies was too problematic to manage safely. In contrast, live broadcasting the dramas of the president himself excited their audiences. The public lapped up the scandals the media featured about Richard Nixon, the crook, Bill Clinton, the seducer, and George W. Bush, the bumbler and gaffer who, while launching disastrous wars, so charmingly failed even to put a coherent sentence together. Ronald Reagan, the incarnation of the wisdom attributed to Nixon’s silent majority, stood as an icon of Hollywood hyperreality, where scripted fiction distracted attention from the spontaneous and often duplicitous truth hiding behind it. Barack Obama, as the first black president, was protected by his own iconic status while, at the same time, silently polarizing the fears of the silent white majority. For them, his very presence in the White House was a scandal.

      As a living and breathing fountain of permanent scandal, Donald Trump was the godsend enabling all news outlets — for and against him — to thrive during a golden age of media. For four years, the kind of rational, critical discourse aiming at achieving some perspective on reality that Fulbright was known to promote disappeared from the airwave. The very idea of letting it be heard became anathema to media producers. This was as true of Fox (Republican, conservative) as of MSNBC (Democrat, liberal). The media relished every speech and tweet that emerged from Donald Trump’s creative impulses.

      Historical Note

      One problem with the American war in Vietnam was that, despite its superficial resemblance to a contest between “our team” and “their team,” it fundamentally failed to conform to the binary model. Americans never quite understood why the South Vietnamese government should be called our team. Lyndon Johnson’s massive deployment of troops was designed partly to convince Americans that it was a war not between two Vietnamese rival organizations with a claim to governing, but between American democracy and an illegitimate enemy that had no clear defining characteristics other than an apparent belief in Marxist theory. Those who delved into the people’s history understood that the North Vietnamese were nationalists whose goal was to finally break free of French colonial rule.

      The next serious problem with the conflict was the fact that once an American war starts, unless it is quickly won, it will go on forever. No excuse ever exists for stopping it. When, in his Senate hearings, William Fulbright called to the witness stand George Kennan — a highly respected presidential foreign policy adviser, considered by many to have written the ground rules of the Cold War — Johnson reacted. Knowing that Kennan judged the intervention in Vietnam to be a mistake, Johnson put pressure on CBS to replace its programmed live coverage of the hearings by stale reruns of popular sitcoms. This immediately provoked the resignation of Fred Friendly, the head of CBS’ news division. 

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      Friendly’s reaction tells us something about how the standards for truth that once existed even in corporate news media have evolved over time. Those who take the job now are only too aware of what’s expected of them. Like an Amazon or Uber driver, they obligingly deliver. They would never consider resigning simply because of orders from the White House. In any case, presidents no longer bother to put pressure on news editors to kill a story or live coverage. They prefer to send their message straight to the corporate executives who hire the news editors.

      Fulbright lived in a world that hadn’t yet fully realized that news could be entertainment and that politics and corporate interest could be seamlessly merged into a politico-media complex. In the 1960s, the idea persisted that political decisions could and should derive from rational analysis of historical context. But as President Dwight Eisenhower warned at the beginning of the decade, the military-industrial complex now occupied the government’s existential core. Its decision-making was based on cynical, irrational, profit-driven and power-hungry reasoning. William Fulbright, Walter Cronkite and Fred Friendly confronted that emerging world. They themselves belonged to a universe that no longer exists today.

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

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

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in World Politics

      How Biden Helped Hardliner Raisi Win in Iran

      by

      It was common knowledge that a US failure to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) before the Iranian presidential election would help conservative hard-liners to win. Indeed, on June 18, the conservative Ebrahim Raisi was elected as the new president of Iran.

      Raisi has a record of brutally cracking down on government opponents, and his election is a severe blow to Iranians struggling for a more liberal, open society. He also has a history of anti-Western sentiment and says he would refuse to meet with US President Joe Biden. While incumbent President Hassan Rouhani, considered a moderate, held out the possibility of broader talks after the US returned to the JCPOA, Raisi will almost certainly reject broader negotiations with Washington.

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      Could Raisi’s victory have been averted if Biden had rejoined the Iran nuclear deal right after coming into the White House and enabled Rouhani and the moderates in Iran to take credit for the removal of US sanctions before the election? Now we will never know. 

      The US withdrawal from the agreement under Donald Trump in 2018 drew near-universal condemnation from Democrats and arguably violated international law. But Biden’s failure to quickly rejoin the deal has left Trump’s policy in place, including the cruel “maximum pressure” sanctions that are destroying Iran’s middle class, throwing millions of people into poverty, and preventing imports of medicine and other essentials, even during a pandemic. 

      US sanctions have provoked retaliatory measures from Iran, including suspending limits on its uranium enrichment and reducing cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Trump’s, and now Biden’s, policy has simply reconstructed the problems that preceded the JCPOA in 2015, displaying the widely recognized madness of repeating something that didn’t work and expecting a different result.

      If actions speak louder than words, the US seizure of 27 Iranian and Yemeni international news websites on June 22, based on the illegal, unilateral US sanctions that are among the most contentious topics of the Vienna negotiations, suggests that the same madness still holds sway over US policy.

      Biden Takes His Time

      Since Biden took office on January 20, the critical underlying question is whether he and his administration are really committed to the JCPOA or not. As a presidential primary candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders promised to simply rejoin the nuclear deal on his first day as president. Iran has always said it was ready to comply with the agreement as soon as the United States rejoined it. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Biden has been in office for five months, but the negotiations in Vienna, Austria, did not begin until April 6. His failure to rejoin the agreement on taking office reflected a desire to appease hawkish advisers and politicians who claimed he could use Trump’s withdrawal and the threat of continued sanctions as “leverage” to extract more concessions from Iran over its ballistic missiles, regional activities and other questions. 

      Far from extracting more concessions, Biden’s foot-dragging only provoked further retaliatory action by Iran, especially after the assassination of an Iranian scientist and sabotage at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, both probably committed by Israel. 

      Without a great deal of help, and some pressure, from America’s European allies, it is unclear how long it would have taken Biden to get around to opening negotiations with Iran. The shuttle diplomacy taking place in Vienna is the result of painstaking negotiations with both sides by former European Parliament President Josep Borrell, who is now the European Union’s foreign policy chief.

      The sixth round of shuttle diplomacy has now concluded in Vienna without an agreement. President-elect Raisi says he supports the negotiations, but would not allow the US to drag them out for a long time. 

      An unnamed US official raised hopes for an agreement before Raisi takes office on August 3, noting that it would be more difficult to reach an agreement after that. But a State Department spokesman said talks would continue when the new government takes office, implying that an agreement was unlikely before then. 

      Will They or Won’t They?

      Even if Biden had rejoined the nuclear deal, Iran’s moderates might still have lost this tightly managed election. But a restored JCPOA and the end of US sanctions would have left the moderates in a stronger position. It would have also set Iran’s relations with the United States and its allies on a path of normalization that would have helped to weather more difficult relations with Raisi and his government in the coming years.

      If Biden fails to rejoin the JCPOA, and if the US or Israel ends up at war with Iran, this lost opportunity to quickly rejoin the deal during his first months in office will loom large over future events and his legacy as president.

      If the United States does not rejoin the JCPOA before Raisi takes office, Iran’s hard-liners will point to Rouhani’s diplomacy with the West as a failed pipe-dream, and their own policies as pragmatic and realistic by contrast. In the US and Israel, the hawks who have lured Biden into this slow-motion train-wreck will be popping champagne corks to celebrate Raisi’s inauguration, as they move in to kill the JCPOA for good, smearing it as a deal with a mass murderer.

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      If Biden rejoins the JCPOA after Raisi’s inauguration, Iran’s hard-liners will claim that they succeeded where Rouhani and the moderates failed and take credit for the economic recovery that will follow the removal of US sanctions. 

      On the other hand, if Biden follows hawkish advice and tries to play it tough, and Raisi then pulls the plug on the negotiations, both leaders will score points with their own hard-liners at the expense of majorities of their people who want peace. In doing so, the United States will be back on a path of confrontation with Iran. While that would be the worst outcome of all, it would allow Biden to have it both ways domestically, appeasing the hawks and telling liberals that he was committed to the nuclear deal until Iran rejected it. Such a cynical path of least resistance would very likely be a path to war.

      Move Faster

      On all these counts, it is vital that Biden and the Democrats conclude an agreement with the Rouhani government and rejoin the JCPOA. Rejoining it after Raisi takes office would be better than letting the negotiations fail altogether, but this entire slow-motion train-wreck has been characterized by diminishing returns with every delay, from the day Biden took office. 

      Neither the people of Iran nor the people of the United States have been well served by Biden’s willingness to accept Trump’s Iran policy as an acceptable alternative to Barack Obama’s, even as a temporary political expedient. To allow Trump’s abandonment of Obama’s agreement to stand as a long-term US policy would be an even greater betrayal of the goodwill and good faith of people on all sides — Americans, allies and enemies alike.

      Biden and his advisers must now confront the consequences of the position their wishful thinking and dithering has landed them in. They must make a genuine and serious political decision to rejoin the JCPOA within days or weeks.

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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Fulbright, Vietnam and the Problem of Purity in US Politics

      by

      Though few millennials recognize his name other than as the title of a scholarship fund, Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995) stands as one of the most important and influential US politicians of his time. For the generation of young Americans appalled by the knee-jerk militarism coupled with an incomprehensible domino theory that culminated in the nation’s catastrophic engagement in Vietnam in the 1960s, the senator from Arkansas emerged as their champion of tolerance, rectitude and moral probity. Fulbright had demonstrated it initially in his courageous opposition to the paranoid anti-communism of Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. But the message really came home with his sedulous opposition to the aggressive foreign policy of a fellow Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson, in the 1960s in Southeast Asia.

      Foreign Affairs has published an enlightening article by Charles King, a Georgetown professor of international affairs and government, bearing the title, “The Fulbright Paradox, Race and the Road to American Internationalism.” The article serves as a reminder of how different congressional politics is today in the age of Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer from what it was 60 years ago. It also reminds us how the two major issues that still preoccupy Americans — the role of the US as a global policeman and racial inequality — remain in the headlines as the source of serious division, despite a deep historical shift in political culture.

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      The paradox King points to seems obvious today but was hardly shocking at the time. Fulbright “was a figure who committed his life to global understanding yet found it impossible to apply the same ideals to his homeland,” King writes. In short, the anti-militarist was a racist. For a generation ready to demonstrate in the streets and occasionally to join radical groups or even terrorist cells, Fulbright became the one politician within the halls of power to champion moral opposition to Johnson’s war. He valiantly organized Senate hearings on the origins and the conduct of a war Johnson was continually escalating. This was nearly two years before two senators, Eugene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy, emerged as challengers to the incumbent president in the coming 1968 presidential election.

      Most people today remember the 1960s as the era of Martin Luther King’s powerful civil rights movement. But the two parallel dramas provoking massive protest against a neocolonial war abroad and endemic racial injustice at home shared the stage. King’s article highlights the fact that the enlightened, forward-looking liberal, William Fulbright, could at the same time think and act as a traditional Southern racist. He both opposed Johnson’s war and voted against the Texan president’s history-shifting civil rights act that abolished Jim Crow.

      It strains belief today to imagine that anyone at that time could have been both morally opposed to the Vietnam War and convinced that, as Fulbright’s biographer Randall Woods claims, “the blacks he knew were not equal to whites nor could they be made so by legislative decree.” 

      By the end of the 1960s, Fulbright began to adapt to the changing culture, embracing the lessons of the civil rights movement. “Later in life,” King writes, “he would claim his stance was tactical. Electoral viability in his home state of Arkansas depended on defending states’ rights and a gradualist approach to equality for Black Americans, he said.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Electoral viability:

      The strategic principle according to which all principles may be abandoned or silenced in the interest of achieving the ultimate goal: the obtention of political power that will permit the achievement of other goals not necessarily mentioned during the election campaign

      Contextual Note

      Fulbright’s influence on US culture in the 1960s was monumental. He defined a moral position that continues to inspire opponents of American overreach in its often doubtful claim to enforce the “rule of law” by aggressive measures against foreign populations, whether in the form of invasion and military occupation, debilitating sanctions or simply by propping up sanguinary dictators. His analysis of the folly of the Vietnam War holds today: “The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Fulbright spent nearly 30 years in the Senate. To be reelected so many times required reassuring his electorate that he represented their interests and deepest beliefs. Arkansans clung to the old order. The majority opposed integration. In 1956, following the Supreme Court’s decision to end segregation in schools (Brown v. Board of Education), Fulbright helped to author and signed the “Southern Manifesto” that contested the constitutionality of the court’s decision. He clearly shared the majority’s basic racist view of the order of society. His political opposition to integration and not his anti-militarism made him electable.

      His position on race was more a result of lazy conformity than deep-seated racism. It evolved quickly during Richard Nixon’s presidency, to the point that The New York Times, covering the Arkansas primary contest between Fulbright and Dale Bumpers in 1974, wrote that “both are considered friendly to blacks.” In other words, like many politicians, Fulbright could follow the ineluctable trends. His intelligence permitted him to understand that Jim Crow was dead.

      Fulbright’s case illustrates a problem that has reemerged in contemporary US political culture. It takes the form of McCarthyist obsession with purity or political correctness. Politicians are judged on the basis of their absolute adhesion to a set of predefined positions by those who see themselves as guardians of the order. No deviation is tolerated. An individual who fails on any count will be rejected, shamed, exiled or excommunicated. Had this been true in the 1960s, the protesters who felt empowered by Fulbright’s resistance would have scorned him as a hypocrite.

      One example is the drama currently taking place in the Catholic hierarchy in the US. The Conference of Catholic Bishops has voted by a large majority to allow denying communion to anyone who publicly endorses a pro-choice position on abortion. Their specific target is President Joe Biden. The bishops appear more interested in taking a stance in the “more general culture war against ‘liberals,’ against Democrats, or even against Pope Francis” than they are with theological coherence. This ridiculous skirmish indicates one obvious truth: that partisan politics has overtaken religion as the dominant system of belief in the US.

      Another example is the left-wing comedian, Jimmy Dore, who in his popular podcast routinely vilifies politicians on the left who show compromise on any negotiation with the establishment. He has notably disparaged and insulted two public heroes of the progressives — Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — for refusing to revolt against the party’s mainstream leadership. Dore’s disappointment with their apparent pusillanimity is real. His own tactical position has its merits. But his refusal to acknowledge what may be called “electoral viability” could prevent the emergence of a politician capable of having the impact of a William Fulbright.

      Historical Note

      Charles King accurately describes William Fulbright as “the most broadly influential American internationalist of the twentieth century.” He credits him with the capacity to “stage-manage some of the most deeply civic moments of the era,” moments that helped define a moral stance regarding war and imperial reach that have left deep traces in US culture. Fulbright’s contribution was immense.

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      King reminds readers of a quote by the young John Kerry, at home just after serving in Vietnam: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Some 40 years later, Kerry became President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. His role was to defend military operations that were initiated under George W. Bush and continued and even amplified under Obama. Soldiers are still dying for that particular foreign policy mistake. Once fully ensconced in the establishment, Kerry managed to forget Fulbright’s lessons.

      Fulbright once said: “We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every 10 minutes.” That includes everything that is being done today, especially by Republicans, to restrict voting rights, clearly seeking a return to Jim Crow. Were Fulbright alive today, his principles would probably guide him to oppose such initiatives with the same vehemence he demonstrated against Joe McCarthy.

      *[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

      To Embrace Biden’s Democracy Agenda, Start With Turkey

      by

      European Union leaders are getting ready to discuss Turkey once again. The timing of the European Council meeting on June 24-25 is crucial, taking place just after the G7, NATO and EU-US summits. Following four years of discontent between Brussels and Washington, this has been an exercise in reassurance, looking to reinvent multilateralism for the 21st century.

      At the summits, the allies discussed rules for various policy areas, including economy, trade, climate, security and defense, while seeking a common stance against autocracies, particularly Russia and China. If US President Joe Biden and his European allies are serious about standing up to undemocratic regimes, the place to start is Turkey, which the European Council should shift its focus to right away.

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      Turkey’s relations with its Western allies have been deteriorating for years. European decision-makers blame this on Ankara’s democratic backsliding and its unilateral foreign policy, which increasingly runs counter to European interests. Developments in Syria, Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean and Nagorno-Karabakh, however, have shifted almost the entire focus to foreign policy.

      The EU’s desire to reduce tensions in its neighborhood has eclipsed questions of democracy and rule of law. That is what is behind its proposal for a “positive agenda” with Turkey that is “progressive, proportional and reversible.” It is thus conditional on Turkey’s external actions — good regional relations in line with international law — but not clearly linked to the state of democracy. While the European Parliament flagged this in its recent report, a firm stance by the European Council is missing.

      Commitment to Democracy, Everywhere

      In March, concerns mounted in the EU when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan withdrew Turkey from the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women. This was clearly the continuation of a long-term trend limiting basic rights and freedoms. The new presidential system in Turkey has eliminated most of the checks and balances. Civil society is under immense pressure. Democratically elected representatives have been removed and prosecuted. Last but not least, the state prosecutor has applied to the constitutional court to ban the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). According to Freedom House, Turkey is “not free,” just like Russia and China.

      This situation threatens the credibility of the transatlantic allies’ commitment to democracy, rule of law, and basic rights and freedoms. According to the summit’s communiqué, the G7 is committed to upholding a rules-based international system and defending values. That is also the promise of NATO and the transatlantic allies.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Selective application would undermine that commitment: The rules apply to a rising China challenging Western economies, but not if you can get a bargain with Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean. Those who prioritize geopolitics over principles might argue that Turkey receives less criticism as a NATO ally and strategically important accession candidate on the EU’s doorstep. Yet even if the European Union dropped the entire democratic conditionality framework, it would still risk being affected negatively by democratic backsliding and erosion of rule of law. Recent examples include Turkey’s unlawful detention of EU and US citizens and arbitrary decisions to move refugees to its borders with Greece in 2020. Not to speak of the future risks to European investments.

      European leaders may think that criticizing domestic repression in Turkey would put positive foreign policy developments at risk. There are no guarantees, however, that advances in the Eastern Mediterranean or relations with Greece, Cyprus or other member states will not be suddenly reversed, for example, to rally nationalists behind the current government.

      EU leaders must know that there can be no guarantees for the union as long as instability prevails in Turkey. The situation in the country has been exacerbated by deficits in democracy and rule of law. If European leaders choose to settle for a fragile status quo rather than promoting core values, they may still end up at odds with Turkey, while undermining the values they keep vowing to defend.

      Serious About Democracy? Time to Speak Up

      European leaders will try to buy time again, as they did at the European Council meetings in October and December 2020 and March 2021. But there is a window of opportunity. Ankara is on a charm offensive with its Western allies, needing an economic boost and trying to avoid European and American sanctions. While the government is determined to stay in charge, power struggles are emerging within the state apparatus. This is definitely the right time to set the tone, one that focuses on democracy.

      Action on Turkey is also needed to show the broader world that the G7, European Union and NATO mean what they said at the recent summits. Democracy will be an important component of external action. If the European Union cannot apply this principle to such a close neighbor, ally and EU accession candidate, what does that say about the democracy agenda?

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security 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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      France’s Electoral Abyss

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      Across the globe, democracy appears to be in a curious state. One of the main indicators of the health or pathology of democracy is the turnout in elections. Some might claim that the high turnout for the Biden-Trump face-off last year was a sign of health for US democracy.

      But the aftermath — marked by the “stop the steal” movement, a riotous occupation of the Capitol building and a continued spirit of revolt by a significant proportion of the citizenry as well as some prominent politicians — reveals that the spectacular numbers achieved by both candidates in the presidential election were a sign of high fever in the body politic rather than healthy democratic engagement. Many commentators noticed that voting against a particular candidate — Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump in 2020 — rather than voting for a preferred candidate may have been the determining factor in those two elections.

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      Iran’s presidential election on June 18 was notable for its low turnout. But that is what everyone expected. Iran’s centrally controlled electoral system, emanating from a strictly hierarchical governmental structure in which the power of the president is extremely restricted, produces elections that are more accurately referred to as “selections.”

      Though the two-party system in the US, sometimes referred to as a “duopoly,” leaves itself open to a similar critique, Western democracies still hold onto the idea that elections are expressions of vox populi, reflecting the will of the people. The general trend noted in recent years and in many democratic nations toward levels of abstention that often dip below 50% indicates that belief in democracy as a viable representative form of government may be far less solid than politicians and educators like to affirm.

      France set a record on June 20 for its combined departmental and regional elections, two distinct opportunities to vote on the same day in the same place. With nearly 33.3% showing up to vote, two-thirds of the electorate simply didn’t bother. The only worse showing was in a referendum in 2000, where only 30% of the electorate bothered to vote on shortening the length of a presidential term. On Sunday, the abstention figure was dramatic enough, in any case, for President Emmanuel Macron’s press secretary to term it “abyssale” (abysmal).

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Abyssale:

      A French adjective, usually translated in English as “abysmal,” but with a more literal meaning that serves to compare what is being described to a literal abyss, something most French people also consider to be an appropriate characterization of the level of competence and efficacy of the current French government and more generally of the political class

      Contextual Note

      Macron’s government has every reason to deem the result of this first round abysmal. Occurring less than a year before the 2022 presidential election in which Macron hopes to break the recent trend of one-term presidents (Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande), the media and the pollsters regarded these local elections primarily as an indicator of what to expect in next May’s contest. The majority party — itself a “bricolage,” an assemblage cobbled together after Macron’s freak parting of the Red Sea in 2017 — performed particularly badly, not even attaining the 10% required to remain in the running for the second round in five of the 13 regions. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      For most of his term, Macron has had low approval ratings. He has never earned the admiration of the masses that presidents of the Fifth Republic once managed to achieve, though there have been moments when the French were willing to respect his apparent competence. This was especially true after his initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are other moments, far more frequent, in which his popularity has not only faded, but Macron himself has become an object of public scorn. The yellow vest movement that raged in 2018 and 2019 is the closest thing in modern times to the kind of popular revolt immortalized during the French Revolution that more than two centuries ago, at least provisionally, abolished the monarchy.

      The commentators were even more surprised by the unexpectedly low score of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing populist party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front. The media have been building up the idea that the second round of next year’s presidential election will inevitably be a remake of 2017, with a rising Le Pen challenging a fading Macron, a recipe for anguished suspense among those less tempted by fascism. Over the next week, and immediately following the second-round results, the pundits will begin drawing conclusions about what this tells us about who will actually be present in the second round next year and how they may fare. 

      The same pundits may even decide that it means nothing at all, given the rate of abstention. Prognostication has suddenly become a more difficult exercise. The manifest indifference of the electorate to everything that politicians believe is important does, however, tell us something about the state of democracy in France in what may be the waning years of the Fifth Republic. L’Obs, a left-center weekly, cites what it calls “fatigue démocratique,” a weariness with the very rituals of democracy.

      Historical Note

      The one dramatic indicator early commentators have highlighted is the apparent victory of the traditional right that had formerly been humiliated, finding itself in a no-man’s-land between Emmanuel Macron’s increasingly right-wing neoliberal center and Marine Le Pen’s xenophobic right-wing nationalism. Some see it as a sign of rejuvenation for the Gaullist tradition. The leader of Les Républicains, Xavier Bertrand, has been trying to resist Macron’s sedulous attempt to laminate the traditional right by adopting not only its policy themes, but also the demagogic Islamophobia of Le Pen’s party.

      President Macron, the self-declared centrist, was counting on using his status as incumbent to position himself in a way that would make him attractive to a full range of voters on the right, while assuming that in his contest with Le Pen in the second round, he would also pick up most of the voters on the left who would be afraid to abstain. This could be compared on some points with Joe Biden’s successful strategy in the 2020 US presidential election.

      Les Républicains appear as the real winners for the moment, if only because they have thrown a wrench into Macron’s 2022 strategy. There now may be a stronger likelihood that Bertrand will reach the second round opposite Macron, or possibly even opposite Le Pen. This is a cause of deep embarrassment, if not consternation. The combination of Le Pen’s low score and the Républicains’ success means that the traditional right — whose continuity dates back to Jacques Chirac and, ultimately, Charles De Gaulle, the founder of the Fifth Republic — may have recovered its mojo that so suddenly faded in 2017 following the scandals of its leading candidate, Francois Fillon, and its most recent president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The latter was recently convicted for electoral fraud and has been sentenced to six months in prison.

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      The media hasn’t begun asking the real historical question that underlies this curious drama. The parties are one thing, but what about the French people? What do they think, and what do they want at this historical “inflection point,” to quote Biden? The yellow vest spirit is still floating in the air, maybe even permeating the atmosphere.

      The only candidate to have dared to talk about the eventuality of a Sixth Republic is Jean-Luc Melenchon, the left-wing populist candidate who fared honorably in the first round of the 2017 election at a moment when the once conquering Socialist Party imploded. The French media refuse to take Melenchon seriously, except as a foil to the legitimate pretenders. He has been cast in the role of the French Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, with a stronger intelligence, a more marked strain of rebelliousness against the establishment, but less charisma. Though he could never win a presidential election, he is still the strongest political personality on the left.

      With other crises brewing — a pandemic still dragging on, hints of a possible new global financial crisis, a deepening climate crisis, exacerbated European instability, complemented by shaky leadership in the US — the French may simply be wondering how voting for anyone promises to accomplish anything worthwhile.

      *[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

    • 238 Shares179 Views

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      A leaked S&M video won’t keep Zack Weiner out of politics – and nor should it | Arwa Mahdawi

      by

      You have to be something of a masochist to want to get into politics – and Zack Weiner is an unapologetic masochist. Last week, the 26-year-old, who is running for a place on the city council in New York, was something of a nonentity: he had zero name recognition and his campaign had raised just over $10,000 (£7,200), most of which he had donated himself.Perhaps the most notable thing about Weiner was the fact his dad is the co-creator of the kids’ TV show Dora the Explorer. But that changed when a video of a man engaged in consensual sadomasochism was posted on Twitter by an anonymous account that claimed the man was Weiner. On Saturday, the New York Post ran a story about the video, complete with salacious screengrab. Pretty soon it made international headlines.Why would anyone care about the sex life of an unknown twentysomething running for local office? Well, because a lot of people are pervs, for one thing. But the main reason the story has become so popular is because of how Weiner responded. Instead of going on the defensive, he owned it. His own campaign manager was the one who tipped off the New York Post about the video and Weiner told the paper that he is a “proud BDSMer”, who has nothing to be ashamed of.“Whoops. I didn’t want anyone to see that, but here we are,” Weiner later wrote on Twitter. “Like many young people, I have grown into a world where some of our most private moments have been documented online. While a few loud voices on Twitter might chastise me for the video, most people see the video for what it is: a distraction.”Weiner’s response to the video is almost identical to a plotline from the TV show BillionsThe frank and dignified way in which Weiner handled this episode has, quite rightly, earned him a lot of praise. It is, in many ways, a masterclass in how to respond to revenge porn.There was some speculation that the video was a publicity stunt. Releasing a sex tape of yourself in order to kickstart a political career might once have been unthinkable, but in today’s attention economy it is all too plausible. Donald Trump taught the world that any idiot can get into politics as long as you find a way to keep your name in the headlines.Then there’s the fact that Weiner’s response to the video is almost identical to a plotline from the TV show Billions. “I’m a masochist,” the character Chuck Rhoades announces in a press conference after a political rival threatens to leak pictures of him enjoying sadomasochistic sex in an attempt to derail his campaign for state attorney general for New York. Rhoades’s speech is a huge success: he goes on to win the election.So is it possible that Weiner’s campaign, inspired by Billions, might have leaked the video itself? Absolutely not, Joseph Gallagher, Weiner’s campaign manager, told me. He added, for good measure, that neither he nor Weiner, who is also an actor and screenwriter, had ever watched the TV show. The reason he flagged the video to the Post, he clarified, was in order to control the narrative and get ahead of the story. Which makes sense.Ultimately, what’s important is the fact that, as Weiner pointed out, a generation of young people who have documented every part of their lives are starting to enter politics. Revenge porn, which has already helped derail the political career of the former congresswoman Katie Hill, is going to become a common political weapon. And I suspect female politicians will have a far harder time surviving the weaponisation of their personal lives than men. More