Making Sense of the Madness: Smart Takes on Our Political Crisis
+ a new workshop on spirituality and social justice + Power of the Dog, Vaccine Apartheid, Africa’s Past & Future
In this issue, we feature some smart and provocative takes on various dimensions of the political crisis we find ourselves in.
Rebecca Traister excavates the deep history behind the dire threats to Roe v. Wade and sketches the long road back.
Amory Gethin, Clara Martinez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty are out with an important new cross-national study that dissects the growing education gap in politics.
Bill Fletcher has a brilliant take on today’s Democratic Party and its contradictions that should be required reading for leftists.
Jamelle Bouie succinctly describes the escalating threats against multi-racial democracy.
And in the Delights and Provocations section, we feature Jane Campion’s masterpiece takedown of toxic masculinity, The Power of the Dog; some music we love; a brilliant Twitter video by Karan Menon on “Vaccine Apartheid”; and an excerpt from Howard French, “Africa is Central to the Modern World’s Past – and It’s Future.”
But first, two announcements . . .
December 13th is the application deadline for the Movement Leader Fellowship, a program of the Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice. More information here.
The Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice at the Colin Powell School and CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies invites applications for the inaugural cohort for our Movement Leader Fellowship, a program designed to give established professionals in the social justice sector an opportunity to hone their leadership skills, immerse themselves in theory and practice, and expand their community in movement work. This year-long program provides an intensive cohort experience, granting people the chance to connect and build relationships across issues, take space for reflection, and prepare themselves for the next level of leadership. The program offers a unique combination of academic coursework to expose practitioners to relevant fields in political economy, policy, and organizing with practical skills such as management, communications, and strategy development to support participants’ growth.
The Movement Leader Fellowship is for leaders in labor, advocacy, and community organizing with approximately 10-15 years of experience in social justice work. We are especially seeking applicants from historically marginalized backgrounds such as Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), women and nonbinary people, LGBTQ+ people, and people from low-income, working-class, and immigrant backgrounds.
And, we’re happy to announce a new series of workshops, “The Path of Sacred Warriorship: Invitation to An Experimental Workshop at the Intersection of Spirituality and Social Change,” co-taught by Deepak, Oxiris Barbot, John Churchill, and Nicole Churchill. Applications are due December 22nd. You can find out more and apply here.
About
The workshop will draw on a variety of traditions and disciplines, including contemplative, spiritual and social movement lineages, and psychology, sociology, political science and medicine. It is designed for experienced social change practitioners who also have a spiritual practice of some kind.
The workshop will engage material such as:
how to navigate and hold power, how to alter power relations and be comfortable exercising power
how to engage conflict and polarization skillfully, including working with projection and the shadow
working with trauma and cultivating healing and resilience
channeling, holding and transmuting strong emotions at the level of individuals and groups
how to help others scaffold their own development
connecting to sacred lineage in the past, present, and future
compassion practices and holding energy at the heart
Analyses of Our Political Moment
In her New York magazine essay “The Betrayal of Roe,” Rebecca Traister explains how we’ve come to the precipice of a historic defeat for abortion rights and reflects on the long march back.
The overturn of Roe will not be about one failed electoral campaign or badly timed Supreme Court death or failure to retire — though as with any historical cataclysm, its timing and shape will have been determined by those factors, sure. But Roe — like the Voting Rights Act that was gutted in 2013, and the labor and climate and anti-corporate and gay-rights protections that have been and will continue to be rolled back — would not have been made vulnerable to these quirks of timing and personality had it ever had the kind of institutional, ideological, intellectual, and emotional muscle behind it that it deserved. Its loss will reflect years of inattention from those entrusted with its guardianship, by definition the people nearest to the top of our power structures, people who advertise themselves as invested in the rights and protections of people closer to the bottom, yet who have repeatedly failed to prioritize those people’s dignity and well-being — to even really see, much less care about, the daily, lived impact of abortion prohibition. . . .
The voting and reproductive and labor rights now being undone were won over generations, not by those at the top of our systems, but by the most vulnerable bodies, working in coalition through their lives on a project that would extend well beyond their deaths, over centuries. The irony is that when those rights and protections were finally codified, they were put under the protection of a party and covered by a press that simply didn’t take any of that work, those sacrifices, those stakes, seriously. . .
Instead the future is messy and sad and difficult and extremely bleak. If the Supreme Court does indeed strike down Roe, many of us will not live to see its reverse. These rights were decades in the winning, decades in the undoing, and will again be decades in the remaking.
Yet this does not mean despair or accepting defeat, which would be yet another instance of giving in to short-term comfort and ease. It’s incumbent on us to not check out, to not give up, as it will be tempting to do on most days: to not evade responsibility by shifting the blame to others, but instead to face the future with the respect owed to our forebears and a crystal clear vision of who is going to be suffering right now and in the coming years. To settle into the work ahead, knowing that the answers won’t come in the form of a superhero candidate or a single election cycle, but rather in a rethinking of who’s authoritative and who’s hysterical; of who should be at the center and who should be at the margins; in staying committed through both wins and losses because people’s lives, and not just our own grievances, are at stake. We must reimagine whose lives and experiences should guide us into a future that must, now, be different from our recent past. . . .
One of the great puzzles of our current era has been the flip of historical voting allegiance by education — the gravitation of higher-educated groups to liberal and left parties and the movement of low-educated groups to conservative and proto-fascist parties. Amory Gethin, Clara Martinez, and Thomas Piketty address this in a remarkable new paper for the Quarterly Journal of Economics: “Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948-2020.”
This article sheds new light on the long-run evolution of political cleavages in 21 Western democracies. We exploit a new database on the socioeconomic determinants of the vote, covering more than 300 elections held between 1948 and 2020. In the 1950s and 1960s, the vote for social democratic, socialist, and affiliated parties was associated with lower-educated and low-income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher-educated voters, giving rise in the 2010s to a disconnection between the effects of income and education on the vote: higher-educated voters now vote for the “left,” while high-income voters continue to vote for the “right.” This transition has been accelerated by the rise of green and anti-immigration movements, whose distinctive feature is to concentrate the votes of the higher-educated and lower-educated electorates. Combining our database with historical data on political parties’ programs, we provide evidence that the reversal of the education cleavage is strongly linked to the emergence of a new “sociocultural” axis of political conflict. . . .
As a result, many Western democracies now appear to have shifted from “class-based” to “multidimensional” or “multiconflictual” party systems, in which income and education differentially structure support for competing political movements. One might call these systems “multi-elite” party systems, in which governing coalitions alternating in power tend to reflect the views and interests of a different kind of elite (intellectual versus economic), assuming that elites have a greater influence on political programs and policies than the rest of the electorate.4 . . .
We find little evidence that the shifts in electoral divides we observe were driven by single, major events such as the end of the Cold War, the increasing salience of immigration since the 2000s, trade shocks, or the 2007–2008 crisis. What seems to have happened instead is a very progressive, continuous reversal of educational divides, which unfolded decades before any of these events took place and has carried on uninterruptedly until today. . . .
[T]he gap in left votes between higher-educated voters and lower-educated voters is today highest in countries such as the United States, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, largely due to the particular salience of identity-based concerns and the strength of anti-immigration and green movements in the latter two countries (Durrer de la Sota, Gethin, and Martínez-Toledano 2021).
Despite these variations, the tendency of high-income voters to support the right in contemporary Western democracies has proved remarkably resilient over time, pointing to the persistence of conflicts over economic issues and redistributive policy. The only country where a flattening of the income effect could well be underway is the United States (as well as Italy, due to the recent success of the Five Star Movement among the low-income electorate), where in 2016 and 2020, for the first time since World War II, top 10% earners became not significantly less likely to vote for the Democratic Party. . . .
Results combining data on political supply and demand therefore suggest that the emergence of a new sociocultural axis of political conflict is tightly linked to the reversal of the education cleavage in Western democracies. As parties have progressively come to compete on sociocultural issues, electoral behaviors have become increasingly clustered by education group. This relation holds at the country level, with the divergence between education and income being more pronounced in democracies where parties compete more fiercely on this new dimension of electoral divides.
New generations have thus become increasingly divided along educational lines, suggesting that the education cleavage could continue rising in the future, as old generations voting along historical class lines gradually disappear from the political landscape.
The divergence of political conflicts related to income and education documented in this article, two strongly correlated measures of socioeconomic status could also contribute to explaining why rising income and wealth disparities have not led to renewed class conflicts. It might shed light on the reasons growing inequalities have not been met by greater redistribution in many countries, as political systems could come to increasingly oppose two coalitions embodying the interests of two kinds of elites.
Bill Fletcher has a brilliant and crucial piece in Organizing Upgrade, “The Democrats and the Un-Republican Party.”
Liberal commentators obsess on the factional differences and flareups within the Democratic Party and incessantly call for unity. What they continue to miss is that the Democratic Party is not one party or, to put it another way, it is the Un-Republican Party. . . .
The Republican Party has consolidated into a hard right-wing authoritarian party which supports dictatorship. While there have always been authoritarian tendencies within both parties, it is critical to appreciate the qualitative change we have witnessed. No longer is it appropriate to view the Democrats and Republicans as Tweedle-dee and tweedled-dumb. The Republicans are now the party for dictatorship, and it is highly unlikely that there is a way for them to walk that back.
This means that the electorate which wishes to oppose the authoritarian direction can choose to be independent, Democratic or disengaged. For those who remain engaged, the Democrats will offer a home. The problem that results is that the diversity within the Democratic Party will inevitably expand. Distinguishing oneself from the Republicans will primarily mean one’s stand on the question of democracy and dictatorship. But that distinction, while critically important, will not translate into programmatic unity. As one can see in the current debates surrounding the budget, conservative elements of the Democratic Party are, more than anything, going to assert a neoliberal framework and the necessity to downplay the political, economic and environmental crises we are facing. . . .
Thus, one implication is that we should ignore and dismiss the handwringing concerning disputes within the Democratic Party. Those disputes are no different than the disputes that take place in parliamentary systems where there are fights between parties within an electoral coalition. This is why [Carl] Davidson’s essay remains so relevant.
A second implication is that, within the Democratic Party, if you do not have the votes, you are forced to compromise. Compromise should not be seen as a bad word. It is a recognition of the balance of power.
A third implication is the recognition of the Democratic Party as a flawed united front against authoritarianism. As the Un-Republican Party, it should garner all those who stand in opposition to authoritarianism, but this should not be mistaken for party-level unity. This unity is temporary and very fragile. . . .
Finally, the left/progressive forces within and around the Democratic Party must be strengthened, particularly at the state level. The Republicans have successfully carried the battle for national political power into the states. Their success with voter suppression and now abortion suppression is a testament to their approach.
In “The Trump Conspiracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight,” Jamelle Bouie takes stock of right-wing efforts to take over local election machinery, gerrymander Congressional lines, and give state legislatures the power to override voters and hand electoral votes to the presidential candidate of their choosing. He soberly and correctly concludes
Increasingly untethered from any commitment to electoral democracy, large and influential parts of the Republican Party are working to put Trump back in power by any means necessary. Republicans could win without these tactics — they did so in Virginia last month — but there’s no reason to think that the party will pull itself off this road.
Every incentive driving the Republican Party, from Fox News to the former president, points away from sober engagement with the realities of American politics and toward the outrageous, the antisocial and the authoritarian.
None of this is happening behind closed doors. We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.
Delights and Provocations
We were mesmerized by Jane Campion’s taut drama The Power of the Dog (Netflix), which manages to utterly reinvent the western, subvert tropes of toxic masculinity, and end with a genuine surprise. Cast against type, Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a superb performance as a menacing rancher with a secret past. This review from The Guardian unties several strands of the film’s genius but gives so much away that you’ll want to save it for after you watch.
We’ve both been listening obsessively to Marjan Mozetich’s gorgeous violin concerto “Affairs of the Heart” and the music of classical Indian musician Ali Akbar Khan, whose virtuosity on the sarod is awe-inspiring.
Comedian and “woke TikTok king” Karan Menon called out “Vaccine Apartheid” on Twitter:
Finally, in World Politics Review Howard French contends that “Africa is Central to the Modern World’s Past – and It’s Future,” previewing some of the arguments in his new book, which we’re excited to read.
No regular reader of my columns at World Politics Review can be surprised by now that I believe the future of Africa is one of the most important as well as one of the most neglected questions facing humankind.
Africa is so routinely marginalized from the concerns of global affairs that even among otherwise well-informed people, most are unaware that it is the continent where almost all the action is taking place in terms of worldwide demographic growth. So it bears repeating here what I have written before: Africa’s population, which at the outset of my own career was about 800 million people and is currently estimated at 1.2 billion, is projected to rise to 2 billion people by the middle of this century. Naturally, the further into the future one projects, the more uncertain such things become, but by this century’s end, Africa could potentially have as many as 4.5 billion people, according to the United Nations, making it more populous than two Chinas and an India combined.
More imminent changes in global demographics are in some ways even more impressive. Pause to consider that by 2030, Africa is projected to be home to 60 percent of the world’s working-age population. This should concern everyone, even those who usually never give a thought to Africa, and it confronts governments worldwide as well as global bodies—like the U.N. and World Bank, for example—with challenges whose urgency is totally out of proportion to the energy being devoted to Africa as a topic.
At present, the politics of many rich countries are driven by the obsessive but largely unrealistic idea of sustaining their privilege in a kind of blessed isolation, meaning by keeping immigration to a minimum. But their own demographic fundamentals—driven by rapid aging, population stagnation and, in some cases, outright decline—combined with Africa’s present path will soon render this posture baldly untenable. The very future of work is bound up in the future of Africa, as is the future of economic demand, climate change, conflict, global health and much more. . . .
To understand something so antithetical to conventional wisdom as the idea that Africa is the key to our global future, it is helpful to understand something equally remote from standard Western narratives about the world: how extraordinarily central Africa was to the very creation of our familiar world. This, indeed, was one of my main purposes in writing my new book, “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War.”