Four Al Jazeera journalists — and three others — were killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza this month. We need to talk about that.
I usually only share reporting I’ve done, or topics where I have real expertise. International politics isn’t my beat, so I don’t pretend to have unique insight there. But this is different.
Continue reading The Committee to Protect Journalists reports Israeli forces have killed nearly 200 journalistsDemocrats should be able to campaign by saying ‘vote for us, we’ll govern like California.’ Instead Republicans campaign by saying ‘vote for us, or they’ll govern like California.”
The American left lacks a central organizing principle, other than slowing progress with an ever growing checklist of rules: they need an alternative. So argues Abundance, a book by prominent, center-left national journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As a perfect representation of the divided era, the book’s commercial success and the author’s rising popularity has created a backlash from many progressives. Classic liberal Klein in particular just seems to irk a whole class of leftists.
As the authors write in the book: “One way of understanding the era we are in is as the messy interregnum between political orders.”
Their “abundance agenda” is polarizing in part because their interest is in operating the current system, and many of their would-be-allies turned critics are not. The identifiers of “liberal,” “progressive,” “leftist” and “socialist” are discussed tirelessly among smart people with graduate degrees and little serious focus on governing. Many of them contribute to the dismaying see-sawing of elected Democrats, that have for generation focused on appeasing a diverse coalition.
The left, the authors write, “seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.“ The United States is a big distributed republic, with thousands of layers of government, at town, county and state levels, to experiment and demonstrate an ability to solve problems. Instead, as the authors argue, rather than solving homelessness in some Democratic city, leaders oversee a multi-year research phase to hire a BIPOC-led consulting firm that confers with a full list of constituent groups from identities, environmental and social causes to gather community feedback.
Nothing is solved, everyone complains. Most vote elsewhere next go-round. This has gotten Klein and Thompson lots of glowing praise from centrists, and ferocious pillorying from progressives. One small contribution I kept thinking about while reading the book: Lots of their perspective would play nicely in local political contexts, rather than vicious national conversations.
Meanwhile, public trust continues to decline, and green infrastructure is slowed. Setting aside the Biden administration’s ambitious IRA green energy bill and the Chips and Science Act focused on industrial policy, Democrats long ago gave up “supply side” policies. Their book argues that should change.
Politics today is a fight over what we have, or had — not what we can create.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading AbundanceWhy does there remain a plethora of social ills the disproportionally affect Black people in America over 150 years after chattel enslavement has ended? “The answer: black communities have been subjected to unrelenting an ongoing historical trauma.“
That’s from The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America by Dr. Lawrence T Brown in 2021. He coined the term “black butterfly” to refer to the patterns of racial segregation in Baltimore, which mirrors patterns in other US cities.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading What Baltimore’s “Black Butterfly“ teaches the rest of usCoalitions strengthen a nation, and then strangle it whole.
Or so it’s been argued. In his influential 1982 political treatise called The Rise and Decline of Nations, political scientist Mancur Olson (1932-1998) builds on his earlier work on collective action to argue that stable societies tend to accumulate powerful special-interest groups over time, which in turn create institutional sclerosis.
These groups—unions, industry associations and other lobbying blocs—develop to protect their members’ economic rents, but their growing influence eventually stifles innovation, efficiency and long-term economic growth. Olson argues that this “accumulation of distributional coalitions” explains why some rich nations stagnate while others surge ahead. Post-war Germany and Japan, having lost these entrenched coalitions due to military defeat, grew rapidly in contrast to countries like the UK or the US, which retained their institutional inertia. I share notes from the book below.
Continue reading The Rise and Decline of NationsIn 1946, George Orwell wrote that “the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”
That sense is back, and since the word is used so often again, I wanted to return to a foundation. I didn’t have clear memories from my undergraduate political science reading so I picked up Fascism, an influential, well-regarded, thick, dense, 400+ page collection of writings on the topic published in 1995 and edited by Oxford political theorist Roger Griffin.
It was a slog but a firm foundation, in which the point is argued that the word was almost immediately stretched and packed with various meanings from its modern launch in the 1920s. In the simplest interpretation I can put together, fascism is a political strategy “idealizing abstraction” that uses power to protect a “mythic core” of kinship around a nation from out-groups.
Judging by the 400-page book, and oodles of dissertations and academic writing, that’s of course incomplete. I have more listed below for that matter. But it does arm me with a clearer picture, grounded in academia and without cartoonish exaggeration. Below I have other notes from the book for future reference.
Continue reading What is Fascism?Shame the extremes with facts, not name calling or exaggeration. Appeal to the “movable middle.” Document. Build coalition methodically.
That’s the playbook outlined in Kenneth Roth’s new memoirs called Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. It’s drawn from his nearly 30-years as executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is someone I deeply admire.
The book offers an insider’s perspective on the organization’s strategies to expose and combat human rights abuses worldwide. Central themes include the use of “naming and shaming” to hold perpetrators accountable and the challenges of advocating for human rights in a complex geopolitical landscape.
Below I share notes for future reference.
Continue reading Appeal to the “movable middle,” says Human Rights Watch veteran leaderI have a troll. I’ve had them before, and I’ll have them again. This one though has passed more standard comments and emails, and has shown up in person. He was there a year ago when I got struck in the face at an event by a protestor I had to remove. Now, last month, he wrote up and printed hundreds of flyers with a long missive about me. He and some others posted them up on poles around my work conference, and handed many more to the volunteers at the conference’s registration table.
I do not think about this man, but gosh, he sure does think about me — he appears to be a retiree with a lot of free time. (I’m beginning to assume he kinda has a thing for me). His attacks were fairly strange, but easy enough to dispute that I thought I’d do that here for my own well-being.
Continue reading My response to a trollMost Americans report no real difference in how likely they’d be to support a female candidate over a similar male one. The difference is that more Americans think that other Americans would be less likely to support a female candidate. They believe others believe something.
That’s an example of what some researchers call “pluralistic ignorance,” and comes from Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions, a February 2022 book by Todd Rose, who leads a nonprofit polling and think tank. As the title implies he calls these examples “collective illusions,” and there are many.
Most Americans still identify as patriot; bad actors really do use bots to amplify otherwise unpopular extremist political views and we really did create a toilet paper shortage during the covid-19 pandemic. As Rose puts it: “When individuals conform to what they think the group wants, they can end up doing what nobody wants.”
This is especially true about bad, or simply incorrect, ideas we hear again and again: “Like a glitch in our biological software, repetition has no logical connection to truth. Yet it has somehow become a trap door to our beliefs.”
Rose’s book is sharp, thoughtful and interesting. I recommend it.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading The electability of female candidates and other “collective illusions”What’s the greater priority: universal human rights or sovereign rights? What rights, if any, are truly universal? How far should other nations go to challenge a sovereign power who is taking such rights away from residents within their boundaries?
After the horrors of the world wars, the United Nations marked in 1948 its “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” This gave moral currency to dozens of international actions over the next 80 years. The drafting committee included philosophers from China and Lebanon, yet these are criticized by some as Eurocentric. Overreach under the UDHR banner complicated its message, and gave authoritarians greater cover.
Where does that leave us? I’ve thought about that since completing “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic,” a 2024 biography written by Mark Clifford.
Continue reading Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s troublemakerIn 2002, The Emerging Democratic Majority book based its arguments on two key points: that the population of the United States was becoming less white, and that non-white voters voted for Democrats more often than Republicans.
Though the multiracial Obama coalition seemed to make their case. The Trump era has looked very different. In 2023, within the Biden presidency, Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini wrote “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,” which looked prescient in November 2024.
Looking closely at the 2016 and 2020 elections, Ruffini argued that Hispanic, Asian and mixed-race voters were following voting patterns of immigrants before them. Very unlike Black American voters, and Native Americans too, with their distinct historical context, waves of immigrants often vote their liberal interest, then grower richer and vote a different interests.
The Emerging Democratic Majority rightly demonstrated how much more diverse the American electorate would get, but badly misunderstood how that more diverse electorate would vote. The 2024 election put this on full display: Democrats look like a party of rich, educated people, alongside Black supervoters; whereas Republicans look now like a multiracial populist coalition. This is so far from the Republican jokes that left-leaning voters told in the 2000s and 2010s. Whatever comes to pass, the book is rich with insight.
Below my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP
