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      Tunisia: The Pending Goals of the Revolution

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      A decade after the Arab Spring, Tunisians have made significant progress in the field of democratization with respect to the constitution and the guarantee of public and private freedoms. However, economic performance remains modest, and many of the demands of the Tunisian Revolution are still pending.

      Tunisia commemorated the 10th anniversary of the revolution with violent youth protests alongside peaceful demonstrations in major cities like Tunis, Sousse and Nabeul, and inland cities of Siliana, Kasserine and Kairouan. The protesters demanded employment and comprehensive development. They expressed their discontent with high prices, monopolies and the deterioration of the purchasing power of citizens. There was also consternation about the increasing number of COVID-19 victims and the mishandling of the pandemic.

      What Is the Key to Tunisia Successfully Beating COVID-19?

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      The reality is that the demands for employment are stagnating, ending the isolation of marginalized areas is still a distant dream, and achieving transitional justice is at a stalemate. While the population of Tunisia suffers, many members of the former regime who opposed the revolutionary struggle are still there at the forefront of the media, clinging to impunity.

      The Youth Unemployment Problem

      Tunisia has not yet succeeded in developing effective solutions to the unemployment problem that first sparked protests in December 2010. According to the National Institute of Statistics, the unemployment rate in the country during the third quarter of 2020 was 16.2% of the total active population, translating to approximately 6,766,000 people. This figure includes no fewer than 225,000 university graduates, with the rate rising to between 30% and 40% in several inland governorates.

      The youth population in Tunisia is the most vulnerable to joblessness. The latest field survey on employment by the National Institute of Statistics showed that around 70% of all those unemployed are below 30 years of age. Unemployment is effectively marginalizing youth in Tunisia and is among the main reasons behind both the 2010 revolution and the current protests. The continuing absence of employment opportunities for young people, the spread of favoritism among government and business elites, the rampant administrative and financial corruption and nepotism resulted in a perception of injustice that fueled discontent among many of those who have been unemployed for a long time.

      Embed from Getty Images

      While some impacted by the unemployment crisis attend sit-ins or demonstrate, others risk death on the high seas in search of work that guarantees dignity. In 2020, nearly 10,000 Tunisians arrived in Europe illegally. According to Romdhane Ben Amor, spokesman for the Tunisian Economic and Social Rights Forum, between 150 and 200 families have left Tunisia to Europe clandestinely over the last year, evading the Tunisian coast guard.

      A report by the forum found that “most of the illegal immigrants, aged between 18 and 30, share a fundamental characteristic as they lived the ‘school failure experience’ through early drop-out. They refer such drop-out to several reasons ranging from economic difficulties, and reluctance to continue to study, because the school, in their view, is no longer useful in light of the high unemployment of high-ranking people.” In addition, many who give up hope either take the path of organized crime or get involved with international terrorist networks.

      There is an urgent need to develop inclusive strategies aimed at empowering youth in the labor market. This is possible through the development of educational programs, vocational services and training courses to enhance the social investment role of the state by creating new productive projects directed at the domestic or foreign consumer market that would create jobs for the young.

      Marginalized Regions Remain Isolated

      A decade after the revolution, the inland and remote governorates have not yet gotten their share of comprehensive development. Rather, they are still suffering from marginalization, the ravages of high rates of illiteracy, poverty, unemployment and school dropouts. They lack basic facilities such as infrastructure, health services and educational institutions even though the new constitution stipulates the necessity of implementing a policy of positive discrimination concerning these underprivileged areas. It is not known where the financial allocations and in-kind assistance that the successive governments, the European Union and the Gulf states have allocated to those governorates have gone.

      It is worth noting that, according to the European Commission, “Since 2011, EU assistance to Tunisia has amounted to almost €3 billion (over €2 billion in grants and €800 million in macro-financial assistance).” With an average of €300 million ($360 million) per year between 2017 and 2020, these funds go toward the “Promoting good governance and the rule of law,” “stimulating a sustainable economic growth generating employment” and “Reinforcing social cohesion between generations and regions.” It is likely that these marginalized areas suffer locally from financial corruption and administrative misbehavior and are dominated by bureaucratic lobbies. Such underprivileged areas are often exploited politically by party and trade union elements to serve as a reservoir of popular protest against government policies.

      Likewise, ruling parties only pay attention to these marginalized regions during election campaigns. This has made the residents suffer the brunt of inequality and injustice. It leaves them with a difficult choice: to continue staying in neglected regions despite dire conditions or to leave their lands for major cities or to board migration boats to Europe. There is a definite need to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants of these regions, to provide them with resources for a decent living, to encourage greater investment in these regions and to revive the spirit of citizenship that will help regain confidence in the state.

      No Truth or Dignity

      In another context, the demand for justice for the victims of tyranny that the revolutionaries called for back in 2010 has not yet been fulfilled in an atmosphere where the transitional justice process is still stumbling. This includes the many obstacles that the Truth and Dignity Commission, which carries the mandate of investigating human rights abuses by the state, has faced — a lack of cooperation from state agencies and executive institutions being one of them. Observers have noticed that the perpetrators of violations did not attend the hearings and did not respond to lawsuits by judicial departments.

      This failure reinforces the culture of impunity and intensifies the suffering of the victims of the dictatorial regimes of President Habib Bourguiba (1956-1987) and his successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011). The state must make use of its authority to bring to justice the perpetrators, apologize to the victims and authorize reparations for their material and mental suffering so that they can resume their lives as part of the Second Republic.

      It is true that the revolution has, to some extent, removed the fear of the government and led to a decline in repression and the power of the president, the censors and the police. Critics were also released, the culture of protest spread, politics became a public affair and governance an ordinary exercise in which competing parties maintained an atmosphere of peace and democracy, with no single party having a monopoly.

      However, it is evident that some of the revolution’s goals have not been implemented. What is required is to make those goals not just promises and slogans, but a reality. The need of the hour for Tunisia is to further reform the judicial and government systems, ensure decentralization and comprehensive development to win citizens’ trust in the state, the revolution and the project of democratization.

      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

      The Imperial Presidency Comes Home to Roost

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      US President Joe Biden’s got a problem — and so do I. And so, in fact, do we. At 76 years old, you’d think I’d experienced it all when it comes to this country and its presidencies. Or most of it, anyway. I’ve been around since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. Born on July 20, 1944, I’m a little “young” to remember him, though I was a war baby in an era when Congress still sometimes declared war before America made it.

      As a boy, in my liberal Democratic household in New York, I can certainly remember singing (to the tune of “Whistle While You Work”) our version of the election-year ditty of 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced off against Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. The pro-Republican kicker to it went this way: “Eisenhower has the power, Stevenson’s a jerk.” We, however, sang, “Eisenhower has no power, Stevenson will work!” As it happened, we never found out if that was faintly true, since the former Illinois governor got clobbered in that election (just as he had in 1952).

      Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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      I certainly watched at least some of the 1960 televised debates between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy — I was 16 then — that helped make JFK, at 43, the youngest president ever to enter the Oval Office. I can also remember his ringing inaugural address. We youngsters had never heard anything like it:

      “[T]he torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world … Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

      While a college freshman at Yale, I saw Kennedy give a graduation speech in New Haven, Connecticut. From where I was standing, he was as small as one of the tiny toy soldiers I played with on the floor of my room in childhood. It was, nonetheless, a thrill. Yes, he was deeply involved in ramping up the war in Vietnam and America’s global imperial presence in a fiercely contested “Cold War.”

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      Most of us teens, however, were paying little attention to that, at least until October 1962, in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he addressed us on the radio, telling us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” As a generation that grew up ducking and covering under our school desks in nuclear-attack drills, young Americans everywhere, my 18-year-old self included, imagined that the moment might finally have arrived for the nuclear confrontation that could have left our country in ruins and us possibly obliterated. (I can also remember sitting in a tiny New Haven hamburger joint eating a 10-cent — no kidding! — burger just over a year later when someone suddenly stuck his head through the door and said, “The president’s been assassinated!”)

      And I can recall, in the summer of 1964, hitchhiking with a friend across parts of Europe and trying, rather defensively, to explain to puzzled and quizzical French, Italian and German drivers the candidacy of right-wing Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who was running against Kennedy’s vice-president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was the Donald Trump of his moment and, had I been in the US, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day.

      Still, as an American in Europe, I felt strangely responsible for the weirder political aspects of my country and so found myself doing my damnedest to explain them away — perhaps to myself as much as to anyone else. In fact, maybe that was the secret starting point for TomDispatch, the website I would launch (or perhaps that would launch me) just after the 9/11 attacks so many years later.

      The Coming of a “Presidential Dictatorship”

      Although I never saw Johnson in person, I did march through clouds of tear gas in Washington, DC, to protest the bloody and disastrous conflict — the original “quagmire war” — that he continued to fight in Vietnam to the last Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian. By then, as I was growing up, presidencies already seemed to be growing down and starting to look ever grimmer to me. And of course, as we all now know, there was far worse to come. After all, Johnson at least had reasonably forward-looking domestic policies in an age in which economic inequality was so much less rampant and the president and Congress could still accomplish things that mattered domestically — and not just for the staggeringly richest of Americans.

      On the other hand, Nixon, like Goldwater, a “Southern strategy” guy who actually won the presidency on his second try, only ramped the Vietnam War up further. He also plunged his presidency into a corrupt and criminal netherworld so infamously linked to Watergate. And I once saw him, too, in person, campaigning in San Francisco when I was a young journalist. I sat just rows away from the stage on which he spoke and found myself eerily awed by the almost unimaginable awkwardness of his gestures, including his bizarrely unnatural version of a triumphant V-for-what-would-indeed-prove-to-be-victory against antiwar Democratic candidate George McGovern.

      For Nixon, the V-for-defeat would come a little later and I would spend endless hours watching it — that is, the Watergate hearings — on an old black-and-white TV, or rather watching his imperial presidency come down around his ears. Those were the years when the Pentagon Papers, that secret trove of internal government documents on Vietnam War-making by successive White Houses, were released to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg. (His psychiatrist’s office would later be burgled by Nixon’s “plumbers” and he would play a key role in the fall of the house of Nixon.)

      It was in those same years that former Kennedy aide and “court historian” Arthur Schlesinger wrote the book he classically titled “The Imperial Presidency.” And it was then, too, that Senator William Fulbright described the same phenomenon in his book “The Crippled Giant,” this way:

      “Out of a well-intended but misconceived notion of what patriotism and responsibility require in a time of world crisis, Congress has permitted the president to take over the two vital foreign policy powers which the Constitution vested in Congress: the power to initiate war and the Senate’s power to consent or withhold consent from significant foreign commitments. So completely have these two powers been taken over by the president that it is no exaggeration to say that, as far as foreign policy is concerned, the United States has joined the global mainstream; we have become, for purposes of foreign policy — and especially for purposes of making war — a presidential dictatorship.”

      Amen. And so it largely remains.

      The Executive Order

      Keep in mind that those were still the good old days before George W. Bush launched his own imperial war on significant parts of the planet with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, based only on an open-ended, post-9/11 congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). That first AUMF and a second one passed a year later would then be cited by the presidents to follow, whether to “surge” in Afghanistan or drone assassinate an Iranian leader at Baghdad International Airport. Congress declare war? You mean Congress have anything (other than endlessly funding the Pentagon) to do with the mess that an American world of warfare has created?

      Embed from Getty Images

      So, before Trump ever left “The Apprentice,” the presidency had already become an imperial one on the world stage. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could still work together domestically, but just in Republican (or in the case of Bill Clinton, Republican-style) administrations largely to further the yawning gap between the 1% of wealthy Americans and everyone else.

      Otherwise, especially in the Obama years (when Mitch McConnell took control of the Senate in all his oppositional splendor), the imperial presidency began to gain a new domestic face thanks to executive orders. What little Barack Obama could do once the Republicans controlled Congress would largely be done through those executive orders, a habit that would be inherited big time by Trump. On entering office, he and his crew would promptly begin trying to wipe out Obama’s legacy (such as it was) by executive orders and similar actions.

      Trump’s presidency would certainly be the most bizarrely “imperial” of our time, as he and his team worked, executive act by executive act, to essentially burn the planet down, destroy the environment, lock Americans in and everyone else out, and dismantle the country’s global economic role. And in the end, in the most imperially incoherent way imaginable, with Republican congressional help, Trump would come at least reasonably close to rather literally destroying the American democratic system (“fake election”) in the name of his own reelection.

      It couldn’t have been more bizarre. Today, in a country experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic like no other and with a Congress so evenly split that you can almost guarantee it will get next to nothing done, any president who wanted to accomplish anything would have little choice but to be imperial. So, who could be surprised that Biden launched his presidency with a flurry of executive actions (30 of them in his first three days), mainly in the Trumpian style — that is, taken to reverse the previous executive actions of The Donald).

      Grandpa Joe

      I doubt it’s happenstantial that the vibrantly imperial, yet still domestically democratic, country that elected the young John F. Kennedy would, 60 years later, elect a 78-year-old to replace a 74-year-old in the White House. Biden will, in turn, join forces with the 80-year-old Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, while butting heads with the 78-year-old minority leader of the Senate to “run” a country that hasn’t been able to win a war since 1945, a pandemic nation of such staggering inequality as to be nothing short of historic.

      As a senator who arrived in Washington just as Watergate was unfolding, Biden presented himself as the opposite of the corrupt Nixon and so an opponent of an imperial presidency. And as he recently claimed in a phone conversation with PBS NewsHour’s David Brooks, he’s still evidently not a fan of it. And yet in a Congress unlikely to do much of anything, including convicting the previous president of incitement to insurrection, what choice does he have? The way has been paved and he’s already on that ever-wider imperial road to… well, history suggests that it’s probably hell.

      Biden may not believe in the imperial presidency, but it could be all he has. Congress is in disarray; the courts, stacked with McConnell conservatives, will be against much of whatever he does; and those wars launched by Bush and now spread disastrously across significant parts of the greater Middle East and Africa are anything but over.

      Yes, Trump was a nightmare. Still, as I wrote years ago, he was always the mosquito, not the virus. I think it tells you something, thinking back to the vibrant 43-year-old JFK in 1960, that Americans, with the worst outbreak of COVID-19 on the planet, would choose to elect a former vice-president who was an exceedingly familiar old man. In our moment of crisis, we have grandpa in the White House.

      Embed from Getty Images

      And yet what could be more striking than a country, not so long ago considered the planet’s “lone superpower,” its “indispensable nation,” that simply can’t stop fighting distant and disastrous wars, while supporting its military financially in a way that it supports nothing else? As it happens, of course, the “costs” of those wars have indeed come home and not just in terms of a “Green Zone” in Washington or veterans assaulting the Capitol. It’s come home imperially, believe it or not, in the very form of Grandpa Joe.

      Joe Biden is a decent man, acting in the early days of his presidency in decent ways. He’s anything but Donald Trump. Yet that may matter less than we imagine. The odds are, hesitant as I am to say it, that what we face may not prove to be an imperial presidency but an imperial-disaster presidency, something that could leave Johnson, Nixon and crew in the shade.

      At 76 — almost as old, that is, as our new president — I fear that Trump was just our (particularly bizarre) introduction to imperial disaster. We now live on a distinctly misused planet in a country that looks like it could be going to the dogs.

      As I said when I began this piece, Biden has a problem (what a problem!) and so do I. So do we all. We could be heading into American territory where no one of any age has been before.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      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

      How the Left and the Right Radicalize Each Other

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      The year 2020 has seen a spate of activity that has fueled the growth of far-right activity globally. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spike in conspiracy theory communities that are intimately linked with the radical right, including the QAnon movement and anti-lockdown groups. Another such moment was the global protest movement against racial injustice under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Sparked in the United States by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, these protests quickly spread internationally. In response to these protests, far-right activity saw an increase both online and offline, not only in the US but globally.

      These mobilizations should not be taken lightly. They have resulted in deaths on both sides, including the shooting dead of two activists in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by an individual affiliated with a far-right militia, and the shooting of an activist involved in a pro-Trump caravan in Portland, Oregon.

      Conspiracy Pushers: QAnon’s Radical Unreality

      READ MORE

      Such activity is, of course, not new. Violent clashes between the left and right have been observed globally for many decades and also in recent years, including clashes between far-right and far-left protesters at various rallies organized by radical-right groups in Australia in the second half of the 2010s. However, this activity does raise the need for careful research into the risks posed by groups on both the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. The risk of violence posed by the radical-right is becoming more recognized.

      However, the potential use of violent tactics within contemporary radical left movements is less well understood, despite frequent claims during public debates — and especially from conservative voices — that lump in radical-left activism with violent behaviors or even going so far as likening it to terrorism, like former US President Donald Trump did in his infamous tweet in early June, designating “ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”   

      Potential Threats

      To better understand the potential threats posed by both far-left and far-right activists, as well as the interplay between these opposing political movements, a team of researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Victoria University, Melbourne, are undertaking a research project mapping far-right and far-left activity online in Australia. Through this work, we hope that we will start to establish an evidence base around the potential risks posed by these groups, as well as the role reciprocal activity plays in online activism by such groups.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This work is focused on examining the activity of known far-left and far-right actors across Facebook and Twitter as well as far-right actors on Gab and Telegram. Using a mixed methodology drawing on natural language processing techniques and qualitative analysis, we are interrogating the output of these groups, identifying key topics of conversation as well as their attitude toward their political opponents.

      In November 2020, our teams published our first briefing paper, analyzing the activity of the far right and far left on Facebook. We analyzed the activity of 50 public pages and groups associated with the Australian far right and 33 public pages and groups associated with the Australian far left. Across both cohorts, we mapped activity throughout the first seven months of 2020, finding notable increases in the volume of conversation in the month of June, coinciding with worldwide Black Lives Matter protests.

      Amongst far-right entities, this conversation focused on both domestic issues, such as climate change activism during Australia’s bushfire crisis and state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as international discussions, including on China’s role in the coronavirus outbreak and Black Lives Matter protests in the US and beyond. A qualitative analysis of this activity reveals in particular that the global protests against racial injustice were a central discursive element in attacking the left more broadly among the Australian far right. Public debate around violence within the Black Lives Matter movement in America and Trump’s repeated attacks on left-wing activists were used as opportunities to characterize domestic racial justice movements as being “anti-white” and “violent.”

      Reciprocal Radicalization

      This corresponds with trends documented through ongoing ISD analysis in Canada and New Zealand that demonstrate the importance of US politics and activity in shaping the agenda of far-right groups internationally, and a continued trend among domestic far-right movements toward internationalization. This points toward the need for global awareness when monitoring domestic activity, but also highlights how far-right activity is increasingly framed in the context of global struggles — either for the preservation of white identity and culture or against the progressive left that activists see as a destructive and insurrectional force against traditional values and forms of culture.

      It is within this context of a perceived transnational battle between progressive, pro-minority left-wing groups and their right-wing counterparts that we can begin to analyze and understand the risks of so-called cumulative extremism or reciprocal radicalization — potential escalation, both online-rhetorical and physically violent in the offline world, between far-left and far-right movements. So far, most academic and non-academic studies have focused on dynamics between the far right and Islamist extremists.

      In our data-set we examined the scale and nature of conversation mentioning far-left ideologies, groups or actions in far-right communities, and vice versa, to better understand how central political opponents are to the online mobilization and messaging on the political fringes in Australia. In total, mentions of the far right accounted for 17% of the output of far-left pages and groups, whilst mentions of the far left accounted for 7% of the output of far-right entities. This suggests that far-right ideologies and actions have a more central role in shaping far-left political agendas and inspiring reciprocal activity from the far-left than vice versa.

      However, qualitative analysis revealed that when discussing the left, the far right are more violent, including explicit calls for the execution and murder of left-wing activists. The far left, on the other hand, appear to frame their discussion more through the need to counter the far right with non-violent means, such as the mobilization of a broad — anti-fascist and anti-capitalist — grassroots movement.

      This analysis should not be used to comprehensively define the risk posed by far-left movements — some activists associated with these groups have traditionally and recently been involved in violent activity and many have expressed in-principle support for the option of defensive violence as part of a direct action toolkit in opposing the threats of fascism. However, it does suggest that policies focusing on tackling the far right should be a priority given their increased proclivity to violent rhetoric.

      Our analysis also indicates that such activity may have a knock-on effect of limiting the risks of far-left violence, often in response to a fascist or other far-right threats. By recognizing that these groups are interconnected by their reciprocal opposition, and analyzing the nature of this oppositional activity, we can start to evidence the collective risks posed by such activity and its spill-over into offline activity.

      *[This article draws on a larger research project currently conducted by ISD and Victoria University within the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS), a think tank consortium of eight Australian and international academic, community and industry partners.]

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

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

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      in US Politics

      US 'deeply disturbed' by reports of systematic rape in China's Xinjiang camps

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      The United States government is “deeply disturbed” by reports of systematic rape and sexual torture of women detained in China’s Xinjiang camps for ethnic Uighur and other Muslims, and demanded serious consequences.The US state department was responding to a BBC report, published on Wednesday, detailing horrific allegations rape, sexual abuse and torture, based on interviews with several former detainees and a guard. The interviewees told the BBC “they experienced or saw evidence of an organised system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture”.“We are deeply disturbed by reports, including first-hand testimony, of systematic rape and sexual abuse against women in internment camps for ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang,” a state department spokesperson said, reiterating US accusations that China has committed “crimes against humanity and genocide” in Xinjiang.“These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences.”The spokesperson demanded China allow “immediate and independent investigations by international observers” into the rape allegations “in addition to the other atrocities being committed in Xinjiang.”The BBC report said it was unable to independently verify the women’s stories, which included horrific accounts of sexual assault and torture, and the forcing of some women to strip and handcuff others before they were left alone with Han men. However, key details and travel documents matched timelines and available satellite imagery, and corresponded with numerous other accounts from former detainees.Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, echoed the US’s calls for international observers, including the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, “to be given immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang at the earliest opportunity,” she said.“Australia has been consistent in raising our significant concerns with the human rights abuses in Xinjiang. These latest reports of systematic torture and abuse of women are deeply disturbing and raise serious questions regarding the treatment of Uighurs and other religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.”China has consistently denied allegations of human rights abuses and genocide in Xinjiang, despite mounting evidence of mass internment, suspected forced labour programmes, indoctrination, forced sterilisation of women, extensive digital and in person surveillance, and suppression of religious and cultural activities. China says the camps are vocational training centres designed to counter extremism.On Wednesday, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the BBC of making a “false report” which was “wholly without factual basis”.He claimed the women interviewed were “actors disseminating false information”, and said China had released multiple reports showing “people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang live in peace and contentment, unity and harmony, and that all their legal rights are effectively guaranteed”.Among the reports referred to the Wang is a white paper on Xinjiang which last year admitted for the first time that more than 1.2 million people had been sent through its “vocational training” programmes.The BBC revelations horrified the global Uighur community, many of whom have missing family members detained or suspected to be detained in the camps. Recent data leaks have shown that contact with overseas relatives has been used by Chinese authorities to justify detaining a Uighur person in Xinjiang.“I have a mother, a wife, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers. The rape of any woman breaks my heart and makes my blood boil,” said Salih Hudayar, the US-based founder of a self-declared government-in-exile for East Turkistan.“The systematic rape of Uighur and other Turkic women are part of China’s ongoing genocide against East Turkistan’s people. We urge the international community to support our case against China at the International Criminal Court.”In December the ICC rejected an application to investigate claims of genocide in Xinjiang, saying it was unable to act because the alleged crimes occurred in China, which is not a party to the court and so is outside its jurisdiction.The Biden administration has endorsed a declaration by the outgoing Trump administration in its final days of office that China has committed genocide in Xinjiang. More

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      in US Politics

      House to vote on removing rightwing extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees – live

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      Key events

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      4.49pm EST16:49
      McCarthy defends refusal to remove extremist Greene from committees

      4.30pm EST16:30
      House Republicans meet to discuss Greene and Cheney

      3.59pm EST15:59
      Pelosi mocks McCarthy as a member of the ‘Q’ party

      3.22pm EST15:22
      House rules committee holds hearing on punishing extremist Greene

      2.20pm EST14:20
      White House walks back CDC director’s comments about vaccinating teachers

      1.48pm EST13:48
      White House warns against ‘cost of inaction’ on coronavirus relief

      1.29pm EST13:29
      DoJ drops discrimination case against Yale

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      4.49pm EST16:49

      McCarthy defends refusal to remove extremist Greene from committees

      House minority leader Kevin McCarthy has released a statement defending his refusal to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments over her racist, anti-Semitic and violent rhetoric.

      Kevin McCarthy
      (@GOPLeader)
      My full statement on Rep. Taylor Greene: https://t.co/BBjlftVdUn

      February 3, 2021

      “Past comments from and endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene on school shootings, political violence, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference,” McCarthy said.
      “I condemn those comments unequivocally. I condemned them in the past. I continue to condemn them today. This House condemned QAnon last Congress and continues to do so today.”
      McCarthy went on to accuse House Democratic leadership of “choosing to raise the temperature by taking the unprecedented step to further their partisan power grab regarding the committee assignments of the other party”.
      “I understand that Marjorie’s comments have caused deep wounds to many and as a result, I offered Majority Leader Hoyer a path to lower the temperature and address these concerns,” McCarthy said.
      Steny Hoyer released a statement earlier today saying that McCarthy made it clear there was “no alternative” to moving forward with a full House vote to remove Greene from her committee assignments. The vote will take place tomorrow.

      4.42pm EST16:42

      House minority leader Kevin McCarthy has been telling allies that he plans to defend Liz Cheney during this afternoon’s meeting, according to Politico.

      Melanie Zanona
      (@MZanona)
      House @GOPLeader Kevin McCarthy has been telling ppl he plans to DEFEND Liz Cheney during closed-door meeting and make the case for her to stay in leadership, per sources.

      February 3, 2021

      Some Republicans have called on Cheney to step down as House Republican conference chairwoman over her vote to impeach Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection.

      4.30pm EST16:30

      House Republicans meet to discuss Greene and Cheney

      House Republicans are now holding a caucus meeting to discuss two of their members, Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
      Both congresswomen have faced criticism from fellow Republicans in recent days, but they are each in the hot seat for very, very different reasons.

      Craig Caplan
      (@CraigCaplan)
      Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) heads to House GOP Conference meeting. pic.twitter.com/nU9al3GhAe

      February 3, 2021

      Greene has been denounced by members of both parties for supporting the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon and for spouting many racist and extremist beliefs. The House is expected to hold a vote tomorrow on removing Greene from her committee assignments.
      Cheney, on the other hand, has been criticized by Trump loyalists for voting to impeach the former president over inciting the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol. Some Republicans have said Cheney should step down as the House Republican conference chairwoman.
      The action that House Republicans pursue in connection to the two congresswomen could provide clues as to how the caucus will conduct itself now that Trump has left office.
      Stay tuned for updates from the meeting.

      Updated
      at 4.38pm EST

      4.23pm EST16:23

      Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman who has been one of Donald Trump’s fiercest advocates in the House, suggested he would give up his seat to defend the former president in the impeachment trial.
      Gaetz made the comment in an interview today with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.
      “I love my district,” Gaetz told Bannon. “I love representing them. But I view this cancellation of the Trump presidency and the Trump movement as one of the major risks to my people, both in my district and all throughout this great country.”
      Gaetz added, “Absolutely, if the president called me and wanted me to go defend him on the floor of the Senate, that would be the top priority in my life. I would leave my House seat, I would leave my home, I would do anything I had to do to ensure that the greatest president in my lifetime … got a full-throated defense.”
      The House approved an article of impeachment against Trump last month, charging the then-president of incitement of insurrection in connection to the 6 January attack on the Capitol.
      Ten House Republicans supported the article of impeachment, making it the most bipartisan presidential impeachment in US history.

      Updated
      at 4.34pm EST

      4.08pm EST16:08

      More Senate Republicans are coming out to denounce the racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric of congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
      Thom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina, said in a new tweet, “It’s beyond reprehensible for any elected official, especially a member of Congress, to parrot violent QAnon rhetoric and promote deranged conspiracies like the Pentagon wasn’t really hit by a plane on 9/11. It’s not conservative, it’s insane.”

      Senator Thom Tillis
      (@SenThomTillis)
      It’s beyond reprehensible for any elected official, especially a member of Congress, to parrot violent QAnon rhetoric and promote deranged conspiracies like the Pentagon wasn’t really hit by a plane on 9/11. It’s not conservative, it’s insane.

      February 3, 2021

      Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota also said this afternoon that it would be “very hard” for him to support Greene staying on the House education committee, given that she has suggested school shootings were hoaxes. (Those suggestions, of course, have absolutely no basis in reality.)

      Julie Tsirkin
      (@JulieNBCNews)
      CRAMER on House vote to strip @mtgreenee of committee assignments: “It would be very hard for me if I was over there and going to cast a vote… that I could support somebody be on the education committee that doesn’t believe that school shootings are really school shootings.” pic.twitter.com/fSk7f7tDHU

      February 3, 2021

      The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has refused to remove Greene from her committee assignments, so the Democratic leadership is moving forward with a full chamber vote to do so.

      Updated
      at 4.40pm EST

      3.59pm EST15:59

      Pelosi mocks McCarthy as a member of the ‘Q’ party

      Nancy Pelosi has just released a scathing statement about minority leader Kevin McCarthy’s refusal to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments over her racist, antisemitic and fringe beliefs.
      The Democratic speaker’s press release identifies the Republican leader’s party and state affiliation as “Q-CA,” rather than “R-CA”.

      Kadia Goba
      (@kadiagoba)
      Another example Dems are making QAnon the center of their strategy against Republicans. McCarthy’s party designation is now a “Q” in Pelosi’s latest note. pic.twitter.com/2YqgMIitvo

      February 3, 2021

      “After several conversations and literally running away from reporters, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Q-CA) made clear that he is refusing to take action against conspiracy theorist Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Pelosi said in the statement.
      “As a result, the House will continue with a vote to strip Greene of her seat on the esteemed House Committee on Education & Labor and House Committee on Budget. McCarthy’s failure to lead his party effectively hands the keys over to Greene – an antisemite, QAnon adherent and 9/11 truther.”
      Pelosi noted that several Republicans, including No 2 Senate Republican John Thune, have outlined the need to denounce Greene’s racist and antisemitic rhetoric.
      Quoting Thune, Pelosi said, “McCarthy has chosen to make House Republicans ‘the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon’ and Rep Greene is in the driver’s seat.”

      Updated
      at 4.15pm EST

      3.46pm EST15:46

      Jim McGovern, the Democratic chairman of the House rules committee, said he believed removing Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments was “the minimum” that the House should do.
      “I personally think she should resign,” McGovern said. “I don’t think she’s fit to serve in this institution.”
      Other Democrats have also called on Greene to resign, but she has refused to do so, instead sending fundraising pitches linked to the outcry over her racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.

      3.41pm EST15:41

      Congressman Ted Deutch, a Democratic member of the House rules committee, got choked up as he discussed the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school during today’s hearing.
      Marjorie Taylor Greene has suggested the shooting was a hoax. That is of course not true. The shooting was real, and 17 people were killed in the attack.
      The shooting took place in Deutch’s district, and the congressman started his comments by reading off the names of the Parkland victims.
      “There are not words in the English language to properly describe how the remarks of Ms Greene makes these communities feel,” Deutch said. “This makes it so much worse.”

      Updated
      at 3.45pm EST

      3.29pm EST15:29

      Tom Cole, the top Republican on the House rules committee, said he considered today’s hearing to be “premature”.
      Cole described Marjorie Taylor Green’s racist, antisemitic and violent comments as “deeply offensive,” but he suggested the matter should be referred to the House ethics committee before she is removed from her committee assignments.
      The House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, has already said the full House will vote on removing Greene from her committee assignments tomorrow.

      Updated
      at 4.15pm EST

      3.22pm EST15:22

      House rules committee holds hearing on punishing extremist Greene

      The House rules committee is now holding a hearing on removing Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman who has voiced support for the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory QAnon, from her committee assignments.
      Jim McGovern, the Democratic chairman of the committee, opened the proceedings by noting, “We have never had a hearing like this before.” McGovern said of Greene’s racist and fringe beliefs, “This is sick stuff.”
      McGovern argued that serving on House committees should be seen as a privilege rather than a right and the chamber was required to hold its members to a certain standard.
      “It is not about canceling anybody with different political beliefs,” McGovern said. “It is about accountability and about upholding the integrity and the decency of this institution. If this isn’t the bottom line, I don’t know where the hell the bottom line is.”

      3.07pm EST15:07

      The Biden administration has said it cannot release the visitor logs from the Trump White House.
      “We cannot [release them],” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said this afternoon. “That is under the purview of the National Archives, so I’d certainly point you to there.”

      CBS News
      (@CBSNews)
      Psaki says Biden administration cannot release Trump White House visitor logs, which are controlled by the National Archives. The Trump White House cut off public access to the logs in April 2017.Psaki says Biden visitor logs will be released quarterly https://t.co/Nj065CIsxp pic.twitter.com/RNPmUHhPzR

      February 3, 2021

      Reporters have asked the new administration about the visitor logs amid questions over whether Donald Trump hosted anyone who participated in the January 6 insurrection in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol.
      The Biden White House has pledged to release its own visitor logs every quarter, as Barack Obama’s administration did.

      2.50pm EST14:50

      Leyland Cecco reports for the Guardian from Toronto:
      Canada has designated the far-right Proud Boys group as a terrorist organization alongside Isis and al-Qaida, amid growing concerns over the spread of white supremacist groups in the country.
      On Wednesday Bill Blair, public safety minister, also announced the federal government would designate the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups the Atomwaffen Division, the Base and the Russian Imperial Movement as terrorist entities. The federal government also added offshoots of al-Qaida, Isis and Hizbul Mujahedin to its list.
      “Canada will not tolerate ideological, religious or politically motivated acts of violence,” Blair said.
      The move by the federal government follows allegations that the Proud Boys played a role in the mob attack on the US Capitol in January. During the 2020 presidential debates, when Donald Trump was asked to condemn white supremacist groups, he instead told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”.
      In late January, Canada’s parliament unanimously passed a motion calling on the federal government to designate the rightwing Proud Boys as a terrorist group. The motion had no practical legal impact, but spoke to a growing worry over rightwing extremism in Canada.
      Ahead of the announcement, Canadian officials told reporters that they had been monitoring the Proud Boys before the Capitol Hill attack, but the event helped with the decision to list the organization. More

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      Republican showdown looms as divided party weighs fates of Cheney and Greene

      by

      Republicans faced a reckoning on Wednesday as leaders in the US House of Representatives confronted calls to punish two prominent congresswomen who represent clashing futures for a party with no dominant leader since Donald Trump left the White House.
      Those loyal to the former president are demanding Republicans strip Liz Cheney, the No 3 Republican in the House, of her leadership post as punishment for her vote last month to impeach Trump.
      At the same time, Republicans are facing mounting calls from Democrats and some moderate Republicans to remove the newly elected congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from her powerful committee assignments because of her history of bigoted and violent commentary on social media.
      The Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, met with Greene, a devotee of the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon, who indicated support in the past on social media for executing Democratic politicians , to discuss her committee assignments on Tuesday night.
      But the congresswoman apparently refused to resign from those positions.
      On Wednesday, the Democratic House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said Democrats were left with no choice but to move forward with a resolution to strip Greene of her assignments.
      After a discussion with McCarthy, Hoyer said it was “clear there is no alternative” to holding a vote on the floor of the House, an indication that Republican leadership was not willing to strip Greene of her assignments. The vote was scheduled for Thursday.
      Earlier this week, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, assailed Greene’s embrace of what he termed “loony lies and conspiracy theories,” calling her views a “cancer for the Republican party”.
      But McCarthy and other leaders have been far more circumspect, aware of her sway among the party’s grassroots – and with Trump, whom she met with earlier this week at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he has been holed up since leaving Washington on 20 January without attending election victor Joe Biden’s inauguration.
      The resolution, introduced by Democrats, cites Greene’s “recent conduct”, a reference to her social media posts that include support for an array of conspiracy theories.
      Other Democrats have introduced measures to censure Greene on the House floor or expel her from the chamber, an extraordinary step that would require support from dozens of Republicans.
      Greene has defended herself on Twitter, claiming that Democrats’ efforts to remove her from the House labor and education committee are an attack on her identity as a “White, Woman, Wife, Mother, Christian, Conservative, Business Owner”.
      But her appointment to the education committee was particularly problematic after it was revealed that she had wrongly claimed the 2018 deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was a “false flag” event staged by those opposing lax gun rights. She has also publicly harassed a survivor of that massacre in person.
      Greene also serves on the House budget committee.
      McCarthy, a staunch ally of Trump who voted to overturn the election results in two states based on spurious allegations of voter fraud in the hours after the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January, also faces pressure from members of his own party to reprimand Cheney during a closed-door meeting later on Wednesday.
      Cheney, the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney and now a Republican representative for the family’s home state of Wyoming, has received support from Republican leaders, including McConnell.
      He called her “a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them”. The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a frequent defender of Trump, said Cheney was “one of the strongest and most reliable conservative voices in the Republican party” and called her leadership in the party “invaluable”.
      The fates of the two congresswomen underscore the deep internal tensions within the Republican party as it grapples with the aftershocks of Trump’s presidency. More

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      Biden and Yellen urge Democrats to go big and bold on Covid relief package

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      Joe Biden and his new treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, are encouraging Democrats in Congress to go big and bold on the Covid-19 relief package and have effectively panned a Republican alternative that is less than a third the size of the president’s $1.9tn rescue plan.Senate Democrats took steps on Tuesday to push ahead with the huge bill, with or without Republican support, despite the ostensibly amicable bipartisan talks at the White House the day before.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, warned that the coronavirus crisis could drag on for several years unless maximum effort for large-scale relief is made on Capitol Hill.Democrats voted to launch a process that could approve the sweeping rescue package on their own if necessary.On Tuesday, Biden and Yellen joined the Democratic senators for a private virtual meeting and both declared the Republicans’ $618bn relief offer too small.They urged ambitious and fast action to stem the coronavirus pandemic crisis and its economic fallout.Biden on Wednesday was meeting with congressional Democrats. In a call-in to the weekly meeting of Democratic representatives he said he was willing to consider tighter limits on who gets $1,400 direct payments under his Covid-19 relief plan but not the size of the checks, CNN reported.The president invited incoming Democratic chairs of some key Senate committees to the Oval Office.“This is their new home for a while anyway,” Biden said. “And with a little bit of luck, the grace of God and the goodwill of the neighbors, and the crick not rising, it’s going to be longer than just four years.”Asked whether he believed any Republican lawmakers would support his relief proposal, Biden replied: “I think we’ll get some Republicans.”“I think we’ll get some Republicans,” Biden told us in Oval, referring to GOP votes on latest coronavirus stimulus spending plan. pic.twitter.com/VrZXudKJQh— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) February 3, 2021
      Earlier, Senators Chris Coons and Tom Carper of Delaware emerged from an hour-long meeting with Biden at the White House.Carper said the trio discussed the need to confirm Biden’s cabinet nominees, as well as president’s coronavirus relief proposal.Coons pushed for financing global vaccine relief. He noted to reporters after that it is in Biden’s coronavirus relief proposal but not in the counter proposal from 10 Republicans, and is how US can restore its global leadership.As the White House reaches for a bipartisan bill, Democrats marshaled their slim Senate majority, voting 50-49, to start a lengthy process for approving Biden’s bill with a simple majority.The goal is to have Covid-19 relief approved by March, when extra unemployment assistance and other pandemic aid expires.“President Biden spoke about the need for Congress to respond boldly and quickly,” Schumer said after the lunch meeting, and, referring to the GOP counter offer, he added: “If we did a package that small, we’d be mired in the Covid crisis for years.”Biden framed his views during the virtual lunch meeting with Democrats by talking about the need not to forget working- and middle-class families – even those like nurses and pipe-fitters making $150,000 for a family of four – who are straining during the crisis, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss the private call.The night before, Biden met with 10 Republican senators pitching their $618bn alternative, and let them know it was insufficient to meet the country’s needs. The president made it clear that he will not delay aid in hopes of winning GOP support.While no compromise was reached during the late Monday session, White House talks with Republicans are privately under way.The outcome will test the new president striving to unify the country but confronting a rising Covid-19 death toll and stubbornly high jobless numbers, with political risks for all sides.Vaccine distributions, direct $1,400 payments to households, school reopenings and business aid are all on the line.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, criticized the Democrats for pressing ahead on their own. He said he had spoken to Biden ahead of his meeting with the 10 GOP senators.“They’ve chosen a totally partisan path,” McConnell said. “That’s unfortunate.”White House officials have previously cited the US Chamber of Commerce as evidence of broad support for their plan, but the nation’s most prominent business group issued a letter on Tuesday that urged a bipartisan compromise.“There ought to be common ground for a bipartisan proposal that can become law,” Neil Bradley, executive vice-president and chief policy officer, said in an interview.The cornerstone of the GOP plan is $160bn for the healthcare response and vaccine distribution, a “massive expansion” of testing, protective gear and funds for rural hospitals, similar to what Biden has proposed.But from there, the two plans drastically diverge. The vote on Tuesday opens 50 hours of debate on a budget resolution, with amendment votes expected later this week. More

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      Good Bye, American Exceptionalism

      by

      Wednesday, January 20, 2021, was a bright day. The inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States seemed to mark the end of the dysfunctional period of Donald Trump. The transition comes amid powerful calls to overcome the bitterness of polarized politics, appealing to the better angels of a battered national ego and levitating from Amanda Gorman’s pristine poetics. The relief that day provided may have ushered for a majority of Americans a perception that the country is coming back to its senses. Even that American exceptionalism — the notion that the United States, for whatever reason, is unique as a nation — is back on its feet. But is it really?

      Those like myself who grew up in Venezuela, a country where, in the second half of the 20th century, democracy had a great shot for some four decades until it fell into the arms of a populist lieutenant colonel, understand that the era of anger politics in America may not be over just yet. Historians who interpret these tumultuous times probably ponder whether American exceptionalism held true only until an earlier Wednesday, the ill-fated January 6, which witnessed the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters seeking to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election. That fateful day, the light on the hill was dimmed. It might have been only for a short period, but it was enough. That light may be flickering again, but we all know that things will not be exactly back to normal, not like they used to be.

      Donald Trump: The Worst Kind of Populist

      READ MORE

      As exceptionalism faltered, it gave way to one of the most pernicious attempts at unmaking the great promise of American democracy: that it can improve itself around the ideals of justice, individual freedom, equality and the rule of law. But, more importantly, that power transitions always take place peacefully. It may have been Alexis de Tocqueville who coined the notion of America’s exceptionalism, but as the United States was winning the race to first world power, it acquired a more grounded sense. Due to its origin out of revolution, its civic religion of democracy, its strong individualism and its egalitarianism, the United States was spared the vagaries of socialism and class struggle that characterized other Western democracies.

      Until the first decade of the 21st century, the US was granted a stable political system where the rule of law reigns and federalism is the major institutional cement holding it all together. So what happened? Why was the latest political transfer of power not entirely peaceful?

      The Past Coming to Haunt Us

      As well as the notion of exceptionalism born in the 19th century, the responses may be also ingrained in the past. One is the racial stain that marked the making of the nation from its beginning. The US has come a long way in overcoming the racial atrocities of its past, their resolution first postponed and then frozen for decades under the Jim Crow status quo. The civil rights movement broke that status quo, allowing for a new beginning, one that remade the Americans’ perception of themselves, now made up of more diverse images.

      But as the movement faded in its strength, the normalcy of politics only made possible a slower overcoming of the realities of racial segregation. Be it the grim realities of urban America — where most blacks were concentrated in rundown inner cities while the suburbs provided the new image of the affluent and still dominant white majority — or the astonishing rate of imprisonment of African Americans, for decades social segregation seemed to carry the way. In the midst of these changes, white America still dominated the cultural scene and personified the nation, because yes, whites were still a majority census after census — until they ceased to be.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Strangely enough, it was the world of marketing and advertisement, with its capacity to capture the subtle changes in the composition of society, that started speaking a different language, talking to and about a growingly diverse society. The warning cry of this new reality and the perils it could involve for a nation born of a predominant Anglo tradition was provided by no less than Samuel Huntington. In his latest book, with a title that speaks loudly, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” Huntington contended that the America born from its early tradition was about to be lost because of the unstoppable migration trends, especially from Latin America, which created a new ethnic composition that menaced making the country another Brazil. In the last analysis, one could argue that Huntington was the intellectual voice of today’s white supremacists.

      The new realities of ethnic transition depicted by Huntington and experienced by ordinary Americans in their daily lives percolated to society at large, as a rumor. But when Barack Obama won the 2008 election, all hell broke loose. The deindustrialization of the Midwest, the cultural isolation of rural America and the financial crisis of 2007 were too strong a cocktail. The most powerful nation on earth began to show feet of clay. The main political phenomenon of those years was not the leadership of an African American head of state, which seemed logical in that it emerged from a diverse society. It was the Tea Party, the massive movement that repealed, if not in direct words then at least in its symbols and innuendo, the aggiornamento of American politics to its new social realities.

      Without admitting it openly, the Tea Party incarnated the revulsion of white America in facing a country that it interpreted as losing its heritage — exactly what Huntington had feared. No wonder why the birthers’ claim rang a loud bell for the part of America that Hillary Clinton mischaracterized as the “basket of deplorables.” In comes Trump with his “Bring Back White America” — the real subtext of “Make America Great Again” — and the rest is history.

      Trump, Polarization, Populism

      America may have been spared socialism in the 20th century — the real one, not the watered-down system Bernie Sanders chose to sell us — but it couldn’t avoid populism. The prominent French political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon has argued that the 21st century is the century of populism. There may have been precedents in both in Europe and in the US, and especially in 20th-century Latin America, but the recent erosion of liberal democracy around the world has prompted the emergence of a new breed of populism. It translates into the political body as alternative expressions of the discontented masses around charismatic leaders who reject the status quo, who seek a direct connection with their followers (today mainly through social media) and who storm the world of politics with their rhetoric of hatred. The US has not only proved to be susceptible to this brand of populism, but has experienced it on a dramatic scale.

      Trump certainly surfed the waves created by the Tea Party, but his populist revolt was only made possible because of the advent of a second and more recent trend: polarization. Polarization, along with the outburst of political emotions, is the main instrument of populism, one that turns internal adversaries into irreconcilable enemies. While Hugo Chavez, and some of his followers in Latin America, led the people against the oligarchy, in the US, it came to be the people against the “deep state” or the Washington “swamp.”

      Ironically, the advent of this new brand of polarization in American politics may have been the result of the collapse of communism. As film-maker Ken Burns suggested in a recent interview, as communism was riding its way to the dustbin of history, America lost the common enemy uniting the country, the one that had strengthened its vision as an exceptional nation, the cradle of liberty and the dominant power of the 20th century. In a twist of history, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the notion of the enemy in politics coined by Carl Schmitt, a political scientist of the Third Reich, came back to haunt us right when we thought the world was ready for an unhinged future of democracy and freedom.

      The “enemy” shifted from external to internal forces, pushing the US into a tumultuous political era. With the alleged 30,000 lies spilled over America in his four-year tenure and riding on the back of the Tea Party wave, Trump more than anyone has helped create the current divide between Republicans and Democrats. Anyone who watched the debate in the House around the second impeachment of Donald Trump certainly perceived not only the abyss between the parties but also the rancor, bringing into the Chamber of Representatives the nastiness and the delusion that transpired in the aftermath of the election.

      America will never fully restore its perception as an exceptional nation. It ought to claim a different status, that of a powerful survivor of the 21st-century populist wave. But of course, that is still something hanging in the air. Perhaps President Biden will be the best antidote to the populist pandemic corroding the world. I certainly hope he is.

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