Dem chorus rising: Don't let them take your freedom

Subscribe (free) to xpostfactoid

For most of the post-January 6 era, the U.S. has seemed to be sleepwalking toward autocracy. 

Republicans swiftly fell in all but unanimously behind Trump's Big Lie that he won the 2020 election; red states passed a raft of voter suppression laws; Trump acolytes positioned themselves to seize control of election administration and machinery; pardoned Team Trump criminals and the RNC encouraged thousands to sign up as poll workers; and diehard election deniers won Republican primaries for secretary of state, attorney general and governor in key states.

Meanwhile, inflation dominated headlines, Biden's approval rating sank to record lows for a first- and second-year president, courts upheld Republican gerrymanders and struck down Democratic ones, off-year elections swung heavily toward Republicans, and Republicans led in generic Congressional polling.

Then came the riveting January 6 Commission hearings in June and July, with Republican officials laying bare Trump's criminality and pathology -- and smack in the middle of that timeline, the intense shock of the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs, overturning Roe v. Wade. Democrats woke up -- some Democrats, anyway. Gavin Newsom laid down a keynote in a July 4 ad aimed at Floridians ("inviting "them to move to California): freedom is under attack in your state...don't let them take your freedom.

Hobson's choices in Syria

Re Syria, the FT's Gideon Rachman is at his best -- teasing out the geopolitical crosscurrents tugging at those countries that fancy themselves able or compelled to try to influence events, and noting the extent to which appearances may be deceptive:

As the world edges towards a peace conference on Syria, three ideas about the west’s role in the conflict are widely accepted. First, that the longer the conflict goes on, the greater the chances of direct or indirect western military intervention. Second, that there is a deep and bitter division between the US and Russia that is making progress much harder. Third, that the Syrian civil war is dominating western thinking on the Middle East. Few people publicly dispute these propositions. And yet they are all distinctly questionable (my emphasis).

Western inhibitions about intervention are driven not just by the debacle in Iraq but by the "success" in Libya:

Gideon Rachman takes on Krugman on Eur-austerity

Since the fullest flush of the financial crisis, Paul Krugman has been a relentless voice for stimulus, infrastructure spending and all-out war against high unemployment. Throughout his tenure at the Times, he has been so often right on fundamentals -- the Bush tax cuts, the housing bubble, the size of the 2009 stimulus -- that I would guess his credibility is unsurpassed among lay liberal readers.

So it's interesting to see a fact-based, more or nonideological commentator take on Krugman with regard to Euro-austerity. The dissenter is the Financial Times'  Gideon Rachman, repeat winner of xpostfactoid's Wolf Munch Rock award, so named because the truth is hard to digest.  Krugman calls European austerity policies "insane," Rachman notes, "with characteristic understatement."  There's a bit of a tonal joke there, methinks, because for Rachman, understatement really is characteristic.

Rachman shares the FT Comment page with Martin Wolf, Wolfgang Munchau and others who have lamented the slow-motion Eurozone train wreck these past two years -- and the drastic effects of cutting spending as economies contract. He recognizes the basic Keynesian equation. But his argument about stimulus in Europe is a kind of mirror image of progressives' take on tax cuts for the wealthy in the US: we are tapped out on that front. So is much of Europe, he argues, on infrastructure spending, government payrolls and social services:

Cold War 2.0?

Is a tempting alternative to western democracy gaining currency in the developing world? So I wondered when I read the warning in yesterday's Times by Mohamed Keita, Africa advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, of growing media suppression across Africa:

As Africa’s economies grow, an insidious attack on press freedom is under way. Independent African journalists covering the continent’s development are now frequently persecuted for critical reporting on the misuse of public finances, corruption and the activities of foreign investors. ...

Keita attributes the trend in large part to

the influence of China, which surpassed the West as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Ever since, China has been deepening technical and media ties with African governments to counter the kind of critical press coverage that both parties demonize as neocolonialist.

Münchau to EU: Signal now that Eurobonds are forthcoming

Today, an eponymous Wolf Munch Rock award (so named because the truth is hard to swallow) to Wolfgang Münchau, for an op-ed that's at once a primer on the dynamics of the European sovereign debt crisis  and a powerful brief (judged on its own terms) for issuing Eurobonds sooner and working out the political implications later.

First, for the uninitiated, Münchau spells out why it's so destabilizing for the solvency of member states to come in doubt -- and why the haircut for banks holding Greek debt may have exacerbated rather than relieved the markets' panic:

I am hearing from Berlin that the German government believes that the arrival of Mario Monti as Italian prime minister is all it will take to calm the markets. This unsurprisingly complacent view misjudges the underlying dynamic of the most recent events. The cause of the panic attack was the European Council’s decision on October 26 to renegotiate the private sector participation of Greek sovereign debt holders. With that decision European leaders destroyed what was left of a functioning eurozone government bond market. Investors interpreted it – correctly in my view – as a precedent. They then dumped their Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and even French government bonds. As of now, there is only one significant risk-free asset in the eurozone – German government bonds.
The German government bond market is large and liquid, but not large enough to sustain the world’s second largest economy. The presence of a risk-free asset can hardly be overstated in a modern financial system. Each insurance company, each pension fund needs to invest part of its income in such assets. Through a combination of short-sightedness and financial illiteracy, the European Council has now put itself in a position where it desperately needs Eurobonds, if only to assure the existence of a functioning financial sector.

Next, why the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) is inadequate:

Spencer Ackerman writes a short Obama Doctrine

In response to Obama's speech on Libya, Spencer Ackerman hones in on a passage that I flagged as a sign that Obama's harks back to the future of George H.W. Bush:

One more thing, and it’s peripheral to Libya. But there’s a lot of debate over whether there’s an “Obama Doctrine” or not. (I’d had my own take on that since the 2008 campaign.) It won’t do to simply say it’s to intervene militarily when U.S. interests and values align to stop a given atrocity, since every post-Cold War president says that.

This line may be more instructive: “American leadership is not simply a matter of going it alone and bearing all of the burden ourselves. Real leadership creates the conditions and coalitions for others to step up as well; to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and pay their share of the costs; and to see that the principles of justice and human dignity are upheld by all.” 

Then Ackerman comes out himself with what strikes me as a nice concise formulation of the Obama Doctrine-in-progress (my emphasis):

The Financial Times hearts dithering

The Financial Times Comment crew is bidding fair to turn "ditherer" into a term of honor. Clive Crook, who slapped the term on Obama during his deliberations over Afghan policy, yesterday cataloged the virtues of dither-beration in the emergence of the strategy in Libya. Today, Gideon Rachman sings a similar tune.

Crook notes that in Obama, Europe has the antidote to Bush it thought it wanted:

Not long ago, Europe complained that the US was bullying, reckless and high-handed. Not long ago, Europe was ecstatic at Mr Obama’s election because this was not his style. You would think, having longed for a president who was cautious, deliberate and respectful of other countries’ opinions – and having voiced contempt for George W. Bush because he was none of those things – Europeans would hesitate to say: “The time for talking is over. Just start shooting.” 

Both kinds of critic – US hawks and Europe’s militant multilateralists – are right to say dithering held up the allied attacks and made the mission harder. The problem for multilateralists is that dithering is built into the system they advocate. If you cannot tolerate dithering, better not demand UN authority for your military interventions.

What we should talk about when we talk to Donald Rumsfeld

The estimable Gideon Rachman left out the most important thing, IMO, as recorded in today's Financial Times:

Sir, I love Gideon Rachman’s regular column, but his lunchtime interview with Donald Rumsfeld (“Are we better off now? You bet”, Life & Arts, February 12-13) was noteworthy chiefly for its lacuna. There was no mention of Mr Rumsfeld’s role in approving a systematic programme of torture for US detainees, first at Guantánamo Bay and then at Abu Ghraib.

The rest is here.  FT content is available after a free, brief signup that entitles you to access a set number of articles per month.  Worth the trouble: the FT has the best columnist roster that I  know of anywhere. (A print subscription is a bargain; I've never had to pay over $150 for a year.)

My full FT file letter file back to 2006 is here.

Gideon Rachman cries wolf, and bids us listen

As a presumable preview of his forthcoming book, Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety the FT's Gideon Rachman has a cover story in Foreign Policy that seeks to strip away a cocoon of denial regarding American decline:

In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.

While the Soviet and Japanese challenges to U.S. economic hegemony faded, China's 30 year track record make its accession as the world's largest economy all but inevitable.  In raveling out the implications, Rachman takes on what he sees as a series of comforting myths: that "America still leads across the board" and will continue to do so for decades; that "globalization is bending the world the way of the west" and that China will inevitably become a democracy; that in a world in which all consequential countries are democracies, cooperation will trump conflict and mutual enrichment will result.

In response, Rachman gives us to understand that the U.S. lead is evaporating more quickly than anticipated; that China has managed 30 years of near-double digit growth without liberalizing as predicted; that as U.S. hegemony fades, so does mutual cooperation among democracies; and that protection is building momentum as the western consensus frays post-crisis.

Program note

If you're visiting via James Fallows' "via," tributes to Gideon Rachman's low-key contrarianism are here,  here and here.  Plus one dissent -- though I'd have to say in retrospect that Rachman was more than half right on this front. 

The clock ticks for liberalization in China

I have argued before -- or rather, deployed more knowledgeable people's observations about China to suggest -- that China is the world's main test case of the Fukuyaman proposition that sheer economic competition pushes all human societies toward democracy as well as capitalism.  It is curiously common for China watchers -- e.g.,  David Pilling and Gideon Rachman, both of the FT -- first to suggest that China's rapid development under an authoritarian regime seems to disprove the notion that prosperity breeds democracy -- and then to tack about and note China's internal pressures in that direction.

So it is with Jonathan Fenby, writing in the FT, who first tells us:

The forecasts in the west in the 1990s that economic liberalisation in emerging countries was bound to bring political liberalisation have been disproved in China, though not across the Taiwan Strait. The mainland’s middle class has been co-opted into the system rather than playing the role of the bourgeoisie in 19th-century Europe, and probably has little desire to see hundreds of millions of poorer urban and rural residents getting the vote to press their own interests.

Then brings the counterpoint:

Still, setting aside moral and ethical arguments for democracy, there is a practical issue at stake and it has been brought to the fore by no lesser a figure than Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister. In remarks at the end of August in the southern city of Shenzhen, the symbolic home of the Dengist revolution, Mr Wen said China needed to protect the democratic and legal rights of the people; mobilise citizens to manage state, economic, social and cultural affairs in accordance with the law; resolve the problems of a centralised power that lacks checks and balances; tackle corruption; and open channels for public monitoring and criticism of government.

Gideon Rachman on Richard Milhous Obama

Gideon Rachman levels a serious (if slightly conditional) charge against Obama and his AfPak policymakers:

"When western politicians talk about “credibility” in Afghanistan, it is often their own credibility they are worrying about most."

Rachman compares the US approach to Somalia, where the "central government controls little more than a few blocks around the presidential palace in Mogadishu and the airport," and implicitly suggest that the US should

apply the Somali model to Afghanistan. That would mean accepting that outside military intervention is often counter-productive, that its human costs are too high, that state-building is unlikely to work and that the west should concentrate on bottling terrorism up, rather than trying to defeat it on the battlefield.

Hillary Clinton, fisher of men

Journalistic image of the day:

When answering, Clinton sometimes opens her eyes wide as she emphasises a phrase; at other moments, seemingly at random, she pulls her hands apart as if demonstrating the size of a fish.

That's from  from Daniel Dombey's long profile of Hillary Clinton, as he watches her interact patiently with 700 Brazilian students. It cracked me up.

It's curious, how Clinton has segued from the punishing Presidential campaign to an "endless campaign" abroad -- and that's not meant in a bad way. When she said, following her upset win in New Hampshire in Feb. '08, "Over the last week, I have listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice," it was true in some fundamental sense -- notwithstanding her workaholic's 5,000+ public appearances as New York's senator, she learned to engage on a whole other level in the last four months of that grueling campaign.  And strange to think that while Bill Clinton was the preternaturally gifted people person in the pair, Hillary has by some measures been on a national-international stage longer than Bill was.

The death and birth of Europe

In a recent column, Gideon Rachman trembled at the prospect -- he did not really indicate how likely a prospect -- of "the death of the European dream":*

It is natural that international attention should focus first on the economics of the crisis in Europe. But there are also broader, if less immediately obvious, political consequences. It is easy to mock the pretensions of the authorities in Brussels. But the fact is that the EU does – or perhaps did – stand for something important on the world stage.

What Europe represents is not so much raw power as the power of an idea – a European dream. For internationalists everywhere, for believers in much deeper co-operation between nations, for those pushing for the establishment of an international legal order, the EU is a beacon of hope.

If the European experiment begins to unravel – after more than 60 years of painstaking advances – then the ideas that Europe represents will also suffer severe damage. Rival ideas – the primacy of power over law, the enduring supremacy of the nation state, authoritarianism – may gain ground instead.

It should be noted that the "European dream" that Rachman semi-eulogizes is not real political union -- a United States of Europe. Rather, he admires the model of increased cooperation among nation-states, a kind of multilateralism-on-one-continent or U.N. of the future. He fears that the current crisis is devaluing the demonstration effect of the model. Beyond that modest correction in intellectual markets is a darker fear, expressed in a prior column (March 2, 2009):

The Tories' 3/8 mandate

In the next chapter of Adventures in Inexpert Blogging, we turn to British politics.

I do not understand the moral high dudgeon of various Brit observers contemplating the possibility of a Liberal-Labour coalition -- which flared briefly as a live possibility when Gordon Brown resigned on Monday (his personality and perhaps track record had apparently impeded prior talks).  Here's Alex Massie in today's Times (New York):

...looking back, it was touch and go. On Monday evening it seemed as though Mr. Brown’s audacious, last-gasp maneuver might work. Although Mr. Clegg had suggested that the Conservatives’ plurality in last Thursday’s vote gave them the first right to form a government, Mr. Brown revealed on Monday that the Liberal Democrats were courting Labour.

Then, a seemingly endless parade of Labour ministers appeared on television insisting that, despite losing 91 seats in the House of Commons and getting two million votes fewer than the Conservatives, they had not actually lost the election. Like Monty Python’s Black Knight, they claimed defeat was “only a flesh wound” and nothing serious enough to require a change of government.

And so the electorate was asked to contemplate the extraordinary spectacle of a Labour-Liberal Democrat “Losers’ Alliance.” While constitutionally permissible, such an arrangement can’t be squared with any residual British sense of fair play. More pertinent, it wouldn’t even have commanded a majority in the House of Commons, and would have had to purchase the support of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parties.

Fortunately, sanity prevailed. Talks with Labour broke down...

To those steeped in the norms of British politics (especially Tories), perhaps a Lib-Lab coalition would have seemed like an end run. There seems to be an expectation that the single party with the most votes, whether or not it wins a majority,  has not only first dibs on forming a government but a moral right to form one, barring extraordinary circumstances. 

Reverse field opinion writing at the FT

Near the outset of his column today, the FT's David Pilling has this to say about a traditional article of faith in what you might call a mainstream American view of history:

Former US president Bill Clinton proselytised the idea that, in a knowledge economy, only those states that were politically open would prosper. China has proved him spectacularly wrong. Indeed, Beijing is busily creating the biggest middle class in the history of the world, yet the Communist party’s hold on power looks as firm as ever.

To rub it in, economies in countries that do not bother with elections have generally performed better than those that regularly go through the rigmarole of transferring power. Even the late Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, gunned down in 1983 for his principled opposition to the Marcos dictatorship, said that freedom of speech meant little to those not free from hunger. China’s growth has averaged 10 per cent a year in the past 30 years. The Philippines has not even managed 4 per cent. 

I start scribbling: Clinton wasn't wrong, just early.  I prepare to cite Pilling's colleague Gideon Rachman in rebuttal:

The punch that landed: Rachman writes Obama's second chapter

Eons ago, back in October, I took a bit of umbrage when the award winning columnist Gideon Rachman suggested that Obama was displaying "a failure to get things done behind the scenes," that the "notion that he was a weak leader" was spreading at home and abroad, and that he "needs to show that he can pack a punch."

I scoffed that Rachman was misrepresenting "the realities and pacing of the American political process, not to mention of international diplomacy" and forecast that "when sweeping healthcare reform, however flawed, is passed before year's end, the pace will look like lightning in retrospect; President Obama will be seen to have moved a mountain in his first year in office."

Didn't happen quite that way, did it? During the long stall-out -- not only over healthcare but in negotiations with Iran, and with Russia, and in the climate summit debacle -- I thought about Rachman's column from time to time. He was right. He didn't say Obama couldn't land a punch. He said he needs to. Boy has that been true.

Today, Rachman wrote the second chapter:

Summers channels Krugman chanelling Uncle Sam(uelson)

Compare Larry Summers' message at Davos (relayed by Gideon Rachman) to Paul Krugman's shot across China's bow back on New Year's Day.

Summers:

Larry Summers, the chief economic adviser in the White House, was rather more subtle in his flirtation with protectionism. He told the Davos audience that one in five American men aged between their mid-20s and their mid-50s is now out of work. In the 1960s, he pointed out, 95 per cent of this age cohort had been employed. Mr Summers was careful to say that the US remains committed to open trade and can gain from globalisation. But he also pointed out that Paul Samuelson, a famous economist (and uncle of Mr Summers), had argued that the case for free trade might not apply when countries were trading with nations that were pursuing mercantilist policies. The reference to China did not need to be spelled out.

Krugman:

I usually hear two reasons for not confronting China over its [mercantilist] policies. Neither holds water....

...there’s the claim that protectionism is always a bad thing, in any circumstances. If that’s what you believe, however, you learned Econ 101 from the wrong people — because when unemployment is high and the government can’t restore full employment, the usual rules don’t apply.

Let me quote from a classic paper by the late Paul Samuelson, who more or less created modern economics: “With employment less than full ... all the debunked mercantilistic arguments” — that is, claims that nations who subsidize their exports effectively steal jobs from other countries — “turn out to be valid.” He then went on to argue that persistently misaligned exchange rates create “genuine problems for free-trade apologetics.” The best answer to these problems is getting exchange rates back to where they ought to be. But that’s exactly what China is refusing to let happen.

For the Lord and for Gideon...

Xpostfactoid was forced to tangle on the pages of the FT with our favorite columnist, Gideon Rachman, after one of his periodic bouts of Obamaskepticism. Deja vu...

Another respondent to Rachman has an interesting scope on the rope-a-dope trope.

Ah, the FT...our home away from home.

Dispelling dystopian dyspepsia

Gideon Rachman goes dystopian on us with a forecast of international failure on the Iranian front backlit with back-to-the-future foreboding of a new era of blood and iron. In a comment, I try to clear the air via Gary Sick and Roger Cohen's congruent glimpses of a route to a negotiated solution with Iran.