The U.S. leads the free world in its helplessness
before the dissolution of its most cherished values.Walter Lippmann worried that the promise of private wealth-creation was a weak moral basis for a national community.
For many midcentury thinkers, nihilism, a catastrophic breakdown of faith in national ideology and institutions that had occurred in Europe, was also a possibility in America.
.. The 1960s and 1970s did turn out to reveal a country sharply divided along generational, racial, religious, gender and political lines. White and black, gay and straight, men and women, religious and secular, antiwar protesters and hard-hatted patriots all faced off. For a time, the founding principles of American society — the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — seemed like they would be unable to adjudicate between the competing, often clashing, interests.
.. It has been too easily forgotten that the calamitous failure of these “market Bolsheviks,” as the economist Joseph Stiglitz called them, helped spawn the first major demagogue of our time: Vladimir V. Putin.
.. In another self-protective move, these intellectuals have taken to blaming identity politics for Mr. Trump’s support among white male voters.
.. It could be argued that this frequently asserted and widely believed American creed of continuous and irreversible progress is what saved a diverse society not only from tragic social conflicts, but also from the mass manipulators who have periodically ruined other countries with their quack solutions. Today, however, more people seem to have seen through the constructed nature of this quasi-religious faith: It’s credible only if you believe in it.
.. They feel deceived by a class of politicians, experts, technocrats and journalists which had claimed to be in possession of the truth and offered a series of propositions that turned out to be misleading or wrong:
- the rising tide of globalization will lift all boats,
- the market is free and fair, shock therapy would bring capitalism to Russia,
- shock-and-awe therapy would deliver democracy to Iraq.
Many of the aggrieved now see the elites, who offered to expedite progress while expanding their own power and wealth, as self-serving charlatans.
.. America has accelerated its most insidious tendency: nihilism.
No, Erdogan was not an authoritarian all along
The idea that Erdogan is nothing more than a power-seeking megalomaniac is hard to reconcile with his first term as prime minister. After he assumed that office in March 2003, he oversaw three rounds of political reforms, including diminishing the role of the military in politics, strengthening the freedom of the press, doing away with state security courts and changing the penal code.
.. Erdogan is an extraordinarily shrewd and paranoid politician, character traits that feed off of, and complement, each other. His fears are compounded by the fact that the military high command and the Constitutional Court shuttered four of the AKP’s predecessor parties between 1971 and 2001 for anti-secular activities.
.. And in 2007, the Turkish General Staff attempted to prevent Gul from becoming president because his wife wears a hijab, an indicator of reactionary values for Turkey’s ideologically committed secularists.
.. in 2008, prosecutors brought a case against the AKP in Turkey’s Constitutional Court, charging the party with being a “center for anti-secular activities” and seeking its closure. The party narrowly escaped that fate and was forced to pay a $20 million fine instead.
.. Taken together, these episodes amounted to victories for Erdogan, but they convinced him that Turkey’s elites would never rest until the AKP was brought low.
.. Europe’s ambivalence after negotiations began undermined them. This wavering was a result of collective disbelief that the Turks had undertaken enough reforms to start negotiations and, even more central, uncertainty among Europeans about the nature of their union. Was it a club of democracies that were coterminous with predominantly Christian countries, or was it based on shared values, ideals and norms?
.. French and Austrian governments declared that they would hold referenda on Turkey’s membership even after the successful completion of negotiations — a measure these governments never contemplated for other E.U. candidates.
.. With Europe making it clear that a large, overwhelmingly Muslim nation was not welcome, public support in Turkey for the E.U. project, which was as high as 73 percent in 2004, registered as low as 40 percent in 2007, leaving the country with no external anchor for reform.
.. Because Turkey is regarded as an ally in so many areas of importance to the United States — including the Middle East, Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, the Caucuses and Central Asia — successive U.S. administrations have been loath to publicly criticize Erdogan and the AKP for their domestic excesses. Regardless of what might have been said in private, Turkey’s ruling party used American reluctance to call it out, especially during the Obama years, as license to continue to repress and intimidate its opponents.
.. And yes, publicly chastising Erdogan may not have changed his behavior. But it would have signaled American support for principles the United States holds dear — and that at least some of the Turkish leader’s opponents share.
.. it is important to understand that the circumstances in which Turks now find themselves are a product of their country’s contested political environment, which is often defined in existential terms; European cynicism; and American indifference to anything other than security. The unfortunate result is a country that is both authoritarian and unstable.
America’s Epidemic of Infallibility
This administration operates under the doctrine of Trumpal infallibility: Nothing the president says is wrong, whether it’s his false claim that he won the popular vote or his assertion that the historically low murder rate is at a record high. No error is ever admitted. And there is never anything to apologize for.
.. American politics — at least on one side of the aisle — is suffering from an epidemic of infallibility, of powerful people who never, ever admit to making a mistake.
.. More than a decade ago I wrote that the Bush administration was suffering from a “mensch gap.” (A mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions.) Nobody in that administration ever seemed willing to accept responsibility for policy failures, whether it was the bungled occupation of Iraq or the botched response to Hurricane Katrina.
.. Later, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, a similar inability to admit error was on display among many economic commentators.
.. the open letter a who’s who of conservatives sent to Ben Bernanke in 2010, warning that his policies could lead to “currency debasement and inflation.” They didn’t. But four years later, when Bloomberg News contacted many of the letter’s signatories, not one was willing to admit having been wrong.
.. one of those signatories, Kevin Hassett — co-author of the 1999 book “Dow 36,000” — will be nominated as chairman of Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Another, David Malpass — the former chief economist at Bear Stearns, who declared on the eve of the financial crisis that “the economy is sturdy” — has been nominated as undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs.
.. less to do with ideology than with fragile egos
.. inability to engage in reflection and self-criticism is the mark of a tiny, shriveled soul
.. Many Americans no longer seem to understand what a leader is supposed to sound like, mistaking bombast and belligerence for real toughness.
.. we can at least hope that watching Mr. Trump in action will be a learning experience — not for him, because he never learns anything, but for the body politic.
The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame
But he goes back to 1775, when the American Revolution turned into the Revolutionary War, to locate the origins of racial exclusion in the society that would become the United States of America. It was during these days, Parkinson says, that patriot leaders made a fateful choice. They embarked upon a specific and concerted plan to place blacks and Native Americans—no matter what their condition, whether they believed in the patriots’ ideals or not—firmly outside the boundaries of America’s experiment with democratic republicanism.
.. “Men like Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Washington,” Parkinson writes, “developed a myth about who was and was not a part of the Revolutionary movement; about who had an interest and who did not.” Other esteemed advocates of the Revolution, such as Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette, joined the effort. According to Parkinson, these men chose to prosecute the American war for independence in a way that put race at the heart of the matter. They used—actually helped foment—racial prejudice as the principal means of creating unity across the thirteen colonies in order to prepare Americans to do battle with Great Britain. The base sentiments they promoted for “political expediency” survived the fighting, and the “narrative” that dismissed blacks and Native peoples as alien to America—and conflated “white” and “citizen”—“lived at the heart of the republic it helped create for decades to come.”
.. Effective war stories were definitely required because despite the colonists’ complaints about tyranny and being reduced to—of all things—“slavery,” they were “the least taxed, most socially mobile, highest landowning, arguably most prosperous people in the western world.”
.. Eloquent words about abstract rights would not do. History has taught the sad lesson that fear and contempt are the most predictably powerful motivators for galvanizing one group to move against another.
.. They tied blacks and Indians and, for a time, Hessian mercenaries to George III, labeling them as his “proxies.” They were all to be considered “strangers,” even though blacks (enslaved and free) had lived among white Americans for years and, in spite of the many conflicts with Native peoples, whites and Indians did not only meet in battles.
.. British overtures to Indians and blacks were, according to Benjamin Franklin, enough to “dissolve all Allegiance” with the Mother Country.
.. Franklin made up stories about groups being used by the British—proxies—and worked with Lafayette to prepare a book (never published) with illustrations for “children and Posterity” detailing British abuses of Americans. Of the twenty-six proposed illustrations—we have Franklin’s suggested twenty and Lafayette’s six in their own hands—many revolve around proxies. Lafayette suggested an illustration showing “prisoners being ‘Roasted for a great festival where the Canadian Indians are eating American flesh.’” He also proposed a scene depicting “British officers” taking the “opportunity of corrupting Negroes and Engaging them to desert from the house, to Robb, and even to Murder they [sic] Masters.”
.. By “the summer of 1775,” the “majority” of the stories on the inside of colonial newspapers were about “the role African Americans and Indians might play in the burgeoning war.” While historians have focused much attention on George Washington’s going to Cambridge to head the Continental Army, the real story of 1775, Parkinson says, was the “hundreds of smaller messages” that were pushed through colonial newspapers about the threat that blacks and Indians, allegedly under the total control of the British, posed to patriot lives.
.. The offer of Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, to free men enslaved by patriots in return for their military service inflamed white colonists and brought scores of blacks to the British side. And some Native Americans, long accustomed to playing European power politics, sided with the British. Patriot leaders “worked assiduously to make this the foundation of why colonists should support resistance [to the British] and, eventually, independence.” They did so despite the fact that other blacks and Indians fought alongside white patriots, and more would have done so had the patriots been willing to put more of them in uniform.
.. Parkinson shows, however, that the newspapers did not circulate stories about black and Indian patriots:
Unless Americans watched the army march by, they had scarcely any idea that there were hundreds of African Americans and Indian soldiers serving under Washington’s command. Even though the Continental Army would be the most integrated army the United States would field until the Vietnam War, most Americans had little knowledge of their service in fighting for the common cause.
.. After Washington soundly defeated them at the Battle of Trenton, these white men were gradually transformed into sympathetic victims of the British. Eventually they were offered permanent places—land—in the new country they had tried to prevent from coming into being. There would be no redemption for their fellow “proxies.”
.. the patriots’ rhetoric of the common cause exploited fears about the “proxies” of George III, it is likely because of Jefferson’s recitation, at the end of the Declaration of Independence, of the monarch’s “long train of abuses.” These included “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death,” inciting “domestic insurrections amongst us,” and endeavoring “to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” Parkinson sees that language, and the other grievances, as central to the patriots’ cause. In his view,
the Declaration was an effort to draw a line between friends and enemies, between “us” and “them”—or…between “we” [the Americans] and “he” [the King].
It is the “first assertion of an ‘American people.’”