The Predicament of Paradoxes: Overcoming Lethargy on the Left
Understanding Ukraine and the contradictions of immigration and economic policy
In this issue, our essay takes stock of the paradoxes we face at home and abroad, the resultant glum mood on the left, and the path forward.
We also feature:
A variety of smart takes about Russia and Ukraine from Cédric Durand, Timothy Snyder, Fred Kaplan, Fintan O’Toole, and Kyiv-based human rights campaigner Roman Romanov; a must-read article by Felicia Wong about the struggle to define what comes after neoliberalism; articles by Kovie Biakolo, Mae Boeve, Mitzi Jonelle Tan, and Nisha Agarwal that explore the contradiction between the warm welcome that is justly being given to Ukrainian refugees and the brutal treatment of refugees from the Global South in both the U.S. and Europe; an article by Thea Riofrancos and David Adler examining the paradox of the “pink tide” in Latin America, set against the backdrop of rising authoritarianism in the region; and a profound essay by Vivan Gornick about shame and humiliation, key drivers of the authoritarian tide.
A great job is posted: Career Counselor for Labor and Social Justice Organizations at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.
As a parting delight, we recommend the dance of Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE and the music of Oumou Sangaré.
The Predicament of Paradoxes: Overcoming the Lethargy on the Left
Many progressives are downcast in these early months of 2022. A representative example of this exaggerated pessimism can be found in the new issue of Jacobin titled “The Left in Purgatory.” The lead editorial begins somberly:
Here is a place where time stretches on. Where food has no flavor. Where we grow neither old nor young. It’s not bad, exactly. But it’s not where we had hoped to be.
Don’t worry, American socialist, you’re not in the Inferno — hey, it’s not like we’ve ever had the power to err and commit mass crimes — you’re in Purgatory!
When we use the word “purgatory” today, we tend to think of stasis, interregnum, even unresolved contradiction. It’s a place between places, a somewhat empty impermanence.
There’s certainly lots of sobering news, from the war in Europe to disappointments about federal legislation to the ongoing climate catastrophe and a vicious racial backlash on full display in the Republican Senators’ racist questioning of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Dispiritedness sometimes leads people to step away from movement work or to engage in sectarian squabbles. When people are discouraged about if or how they can make change in the world, they too often succumb to what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences,” turning their fire on targets close to home, to people and groups who are close politically and vulnerable to attack, rather than the actual opponents. These inward-looking and defeatist tendencies, a kind of cultural involution, are especially dangerous in a time of rising authoritarianism. We must resist them.
Part of the challenge is that we are living in a period of paradoxes that demand both judgment and conviction in the face of complexity. Life was simpler in 2020, when unity against Trump provided a clear focal point for action. The major issues today demand more nuanced responses. Consider the paradox of the war in Ukraine: Putin’s barbaric invasion is completely unjustified, and aid to Ukraine is warranted—yet we must be conscious of the very real dangers of escalation that could lead to civilization-ending nuclear war and resurgent militarism in spending and politics. Or consider the paradox of the Ukrainian refugee crisis: millions of Ukrainian refugees deserve the warm welcomes they are getting—but so too do millions of other asylum seekers from the Global South who have been hypocritically and brutally denied entry by Europe and the U.S. Or consider the paradox of the U.S. role: the United States’ war on terror has, according to a major study by Brown University’s Costs of War project, cost $8 trillion and cost some 900,000 lives, and U.S. policy in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union fueled the rise of oligarchs, kleptocracy, and authoritarianism. Yet, for all that complexity, the imperative to defend and support democracy in Ukraine is compelling and unambiguous, and Biden’s approach has so far been wise and worthy of support. As historian Timothy Snyder recently told Chris Hayes, “If you’re against stupid, criminal wars, you’re against stupid, criminal wars.”
The way to reconcile the contradictions is to understand that the fight for multi-racial democracy is the central, defining fight of our time, globally and domestically. Authoritarian leaders and movements are explicit allies—Trump, Putin, Tucker Carlson, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro, much of today’s Republican Party, and far-right movements around the world support one another, share noxious nationalist ideologies based on race, ethnicity, and religion, and propagate big lies. It’s clear, then, what stance progressives should take. Global solidarity with besieged democratic movements abroad is not a distraction from domestic troubles, because threats abroad feed the menace at home and vice versa.
This view also implies a twofold response in domestic politics. On the one hand, progressives have an obligation to make common cause with moderate and even conservative forces who support democracy—despite vast differences on policy—because the authoritarian threat supersedes all other considerations. And progressives can best defend multi-racial democracy at home not by trimming our sails but by unapologetically challenging failures to live up to democratic ideals. In that context, it’s perfectly consistent to applaud the decision by the Biden administration to admit 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, criticize the Biden administration’s continued exclusion of asylum seekers from the Global South by maintaining Trump-era policies, and point out that the welcome extended to Ukrainians shows that it is possible to welcome large numbers of migrants wherever they come from. Both parts of that response are necessary—the united front bringing together diverse social forces and the forthright defense of progressive values.
Domestic policy also presents paradoxes. The failure of Build Back Better was a profound setback after hopes were raised for sweeping, long-sought policy reforms. (We’re, of course, hopeful that something meaningful can meet the Manchin test and still pass.) Yet, there have been major policy gains and improvements in material conditions that are the result of progressive organizing, wins that are important to celebrate in the light of upcoming midterm elections. In the Trump years, we had a target around which to rally diverse voices. It’s been far more challenging to maintain unity in a governing period when the record of accomplishments is mixed with real disappointments and governing failures by Democrats who hold unified control of the government.
So, what is to be done? In March 2020, Deepak wrote a piece for The Nation, “From Resistance to Governing,” looking forward to how we should approach a governing moment if Trump was defeated.
Moving from resistance to governing—should we be fortunate enough to have that problem—is going to be very hard. Trump has provided a focal point and a cause for unity; his departure would be the occasion for long-standing fissures of vision and strategy to quickly reemerge. And the damage of the Trump years has been so profound that competition among constituencies and issue-based groups for attention is inevitable. As a leader of a progressive organization from the Obama to Trump years, I’ve thought long and hard about how we might approach governance and movement-building in a next Democratic administration. What can we learn from the choices that Democrats, movement actors, and the right made in that fateful 2009–10 period to better prepare us for taking and exercising power this time? . . . Should President Sanders or Biden be in the White House, the Tea Party will be a pale shadow of the kind of right-wing opposition in the streets that progressives will face. The demons let loose in Charlottesville and supported from the Trump White House will not easily be put back in their bottles.
The article made several recommendations that seem particularly important to revisit now. First, the need to polarize against villains. Obama’s administration resisted laying blame for the 2008 financial crisis on bankers, despite massive foreclosures that stripped wealth from communities of color. To define the sides and stakes today, it’s essential that we focus on the actors driving bad outcomes: corporate plutocrats, fossil fuel companies, and white supremacists.
Second, even without legislation, there are many things Democrats could be pushed to do to build the power of progressive constituencies and take away power from right-wing ones. Using policy to alter relations of power has been the signature strategy of the right for decades. When in power in states or federally, the right pursues measures that weaken progressive groups and constituencies—like voter suppression laws and measures to weaken unions. The success of these measures has reshaped politics. The Biden administration could copy this right-wing playbook and use the immense power of the federal government, for example, by launching a campaign to naturalize eight million Legal Permanent Residents, and thereby change the math for future elections. And it could more aggressively prosecute groups threatening violence against election officials. (The Congressional Progressive Caucus has developed an excellent list of potential executive actions).
Third, more could be done to make benefits visible to beneficiaries—there are billions of dollars flowing from the American Rescue Plan Act and the infrastructure bill to crucial projects, for example, to replace lead pipes in places like Flint, Michigan. These victories of the progressive movement are producing real material improvements in people’s lives—but they will not register as such without skillful outside campaigning to implement the legislation.
Finally, as the 2020 Nation article argued,
Perhaps most crucially, the focus of progressive leaders must be on recruitment as well as mobilization, because without growth, we cannot even hope to hold our position. The temptation to turn inward to the machinations of Washington will be strong. But it must be resisted, with major resources devoted to engaging the millions of people beyond the choir who will still be struggling after the election—and in need of major change.
Biden has not yet had an FDR-scale presidency—but that’s in part because he hasn’t been met or challenged by major outside movements in the way that Roosevelt was challenged by workers, unemployed people, and older Americans demanding relief. It’s never too late to organize at scale. And it was steady, slow, and deep organizing work in states like Georgia and Arizona by grassroots groups over many years that saved democracy in 2020. More resources, talent, and attention for that crucial work in the states is the highest imperative.
The Nation article also argued for a certain temperament to meet the challenges ahead:
Putting chess moves of this kind on the board will require less political hackery, less policy wonkery, and less sectarianism. Key leaders on the “inside” and “outside” will instead need to model a new kind of principled, pragmatic radicalism: visionary in the social transformation it seeks, but deeply sober about the state of power relationships that exist and must be built to win. This tradition of progressivism, which extends from the abolitionists and radical Republicans through the best of the New Dealers and CIO unionists to the civil rights movement organizers and OEO leadership, is unfashionable now but can and must be reinvigorated.
Looking at our current predicament of paradoxes, we can respond with judgment but also strength. We’ve lost the simple plot of the Trump years, but we can be protagonists in a more complex story now. We can support Ukraine and actively resist a spiral into global, potentially nuclear, war. We can support welcoming Ukrainian refugees and demand that refugees from the Global South receive the same treatment. We can make necessary tactical alliances with centrists and conservatives to uphold democracy and press forward with bold campaigns that speak to the real needs of core progressive constituencies. We can own the wins we’ve had (not just mourn the ones we didn’t secure) and recommit to the organizing and movement building outside the Beltway that made them possible.
And to dispel the lethargy on the left, we’ll above all need to move energy and emotion. To arouse their base, the right manufactures an unending stream of moral panics, for example about Critical Race Theory or asylum seekers at the southern border. In response, progressives too often focus on technocratic policy agendas, poll-tested messages, and cerebral appeals. If we’re going to win the wars for democracy ahead of us, we’re going to need to stir emotion—anger, but also grief, compassion, hope, and joy to inspire the kind of action needed to meet this moment in history.
Reading Recommendations on the Paradoxes of our Historical Moment
On the paradoxes of the Ukraine situation and Russian politics, we recommend a few pieces. First, Cédric Durand’s New Left Review article “Cold Peace” surveys the Russian economy since the fall of the Soviet Union and explains how free-market “shock therapy” and privatization paved the way for Putin’s kleptocracy. (See Durand’s chart below.)
In “A Bridge too Far,” Fred Kaplan considers the paradoxes of NATO expansion.
Is NATO enlargement to blame for Putin’s revanchism, or has it served as a pretext for fulfilling his obsessive nostalgia for empire? Probably a bit of both. His resentment over Russia’s loss of empire following its cold war defeat has some valid basis. But that doesn’t give him, or the leader of any country, the right to reverse that loss by fiat and force. Three American presidents pushed NATO enlargement too eagerly, with too many insincere assurances that the latest step was the last one. [Prodded by George W. Bush,] NATO’s declaration at [the] Bucharest [conference in 2008] that Ukraine and Georgia “will” be brought into the alliance at some point was a profound error, as most member states realized at the time, not least because there was no real intention to bring them in anytime soon, and saying otherwise merely handed Moscow a gratuitous provocation and filled Kyiv and Tbilisi with false hopes. Still, the former captive nations of the Soviet empire were—and in the case of Ukraine and Georgia, still are—genuinely eager to ally with the West after suffering the oppression of the East for so long.
In any case, a Russian leader more reasonable than Putin would not have demanded a legal document guaranteeing that Ukraine would never join NATO. Knowing that no such document could exist as a practical matter, he would have discerned the many reasons that membership wouldn’t be offered, probably in his lifetime or beyond. Biden in fact publicly said as much. He also offered Putin transparency in military exercises in the region; onsite inspections of the US missile-defense launchers in Poland and Romania, to verify that they couldn’t fire offensive cruise missiles (as Putin has charged they could); and a conference to reconsider twenty-first-century European security, with special attention to legitimate Russian interests. A less grandiose leader—especially one with an interest in building a more inclusive society and a more productive economy (neither of which has been a goal of Putin’s in his twenty-two years of rule)—might have seen the political advantages to be gained from these “confidence-building measures” and recognitions of his grievances. . . .
The transformative events of the past two decades—the expansion of NATO, the failure of Russian reform, and the rise of empire nostalgia in Moscow’s ruling circles, climaxing with the annexations and finally the brutal invasion of Ukraine: none of them was inevitable. But especially with the rise of someone like Putin, they would have been hard to prevent.
On Ezra Klein’s podcast, historian Timothy Snyder, who has written six books on Ukraine, echoed Kaplan’s stress on the importance of Putin’s character but went further in stressing the peculiar, mystical, nationalist ideology that drives him—an ideology incommensurable with liberalism:
That philosophy starts from the position that you don’t think about other people at all. You don’t think about ethics at all. The only thing that matters in the world is God. And what matters with God is that he’s left us behind this kind of spoiled world. And the only way . . . to repair the world, to heal the world, to bring all the pieces back together is for there to be a certain kind of Russia. And that Russia, how do we know it’s the right kind of Russia? We know it’s the right kind of Russia because it doesn’t have any fragmentation in itself. In other words, there’s none of this messy business about counting votes. There’s none of this messy business about people having different opinions. There’s just a leader. And the leader, by way of his clear decisions and actions, asserts, embodies, creates this unity on the scale of a nation. That’s when we can tell that it’s the right sort of Russia, the kind of Russia whose mission it is to bring a sort of unity to the world.
Last July, Putin authored a 7,000 word essay called “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine.” But, as Snyder explains, the “history” Putin relies on is a bogus story contrived for political gain by Ukrainian priests in the late 17th century.
There’s 1,000 years of history of the land around Kyiv before there’s any contact between Kyiv and Moscow. 1,000 years, that’s a long time. And so this business of there being some kind of organic connection doesn’t make any sense historically.
Snyder contends that many western commentators prefer to talk about Putin’s objections to NATO expansion because his belief in the mystical unity of Russia and Ukraine “appears strange,”
Where “strange” means something like “dismissible.” And “dismissible” means something like, “it can’t be that.” So let’s go back to more familiar things like, “Is it NATO expansion? yada, yada.” You know, whereas clearly like that geopolitical framework, it’s very comfortable for us because we want it all to be reasonable.
It’s also very comfortable for us because it allows us as Americans to think that, you know, we’re at the center of things. But it’s obviously nonsense. I mean, whatever Putin is doing with respect to Ukraine, it can’t be motivated geopolitically. Because geopolitically speaking, all that he’s doing is pushing his country faster and faster into being a vassal of China. That’s the main geopolitical outcome of this. This staring at NATO and staring at Ukraine, as Mr. Putin invites us to do, is fine.
But any sensible analysis of Russian geopolitics would begin from the fact that they have a long border with a very powerful neighbor that basically sees them as a source of natural resources and that every time Russia antagonizes the West, it deprives itself of the ability to balance between China and the West. So Mr. Putin’s geopolitical legacy is that he’s accelerated the process quite drastically of turning Russia into a kind of appendix to China. So, I mean, I don’t think geopolitics is much of a starter. I just think it’s where we find ourselves more comfortable. It’s kind of default for us. It’s a place where we feel OK.
The latest Strength and Solidarity podcast asks, “Will Russia be held accountable for its war on Ukraine?” Host Akwe Amosu and Kyiv-based human rights campaigner Roman Romanov probe another paradox of this war: existing human rights instruments like the International Criminal Court and special tribunals are slow and opaque, but the atrocities committed by Putin and his forces call for a powerful, international rebuke, and the promise of justice offers hope for Ukrainians who, as you read this, are bravely documenting war crimes.
AA: And are the human rights organizations and defenders and activists who’ve been working over the years in the field, are they talking to each other? Are they coordinating their work? How are they reacting together to this moment?
RR: First of all, what started is a kind of enormous chaotic effort, of everyone to do everything possible. Like, if you cannot fight then just document injustice. But it’s not productive since over-documentation could be source of a number of problems, especially for victims, witnesses… at certain moment, the coordination became real. Quite recently, 16 leading human rights groups established quite a broad coalition. They call themselves “Ukraine 5:00 AM.” It’s the time when everyone in most cities of Ukraine woke up from bombshells and missiles attack on their peaceful cities. Now this coordination is, at least, established and I hope that it will lead towards efforts on advocacy, efforts on litigation, efforts on communication with our Ukrainian people, as well as international community.
AA: So before we get into that whole question of the documentation and the accountability, because there’s so much to talk about there, is there anything else that Ukraine 5:00 AM is prioritizing as human rights work at this moment or is the state of the crisis such that you can’t do other work – around protection, around discrimination, around other forms of kind of traditional human rights work?
RR: Oh, absolutely. It’s important to follow different developments. It’s a large-scale conflict. It’s very dynamic. There are lots of things happening around, so our colleagues from civil society organizations made a number of important statements. The first one was addressed to the Ukrainian authorities just to make sure that no discrimination exists on the border. People were trying to leave the country, among them there are lots of foreigners from different countries who don’t speak Russian Ukrainian languages. And, just to make sure that they are informed well, we just urged the, you know, different parts of the Ukrainian government, as well as the legal aid system of Ukraine to provide all necessary support for those people, just to avoid discrimination. Secondly, it was important call for the Ukrainian authorities to make sure that the treatment towards the Russian prisoners of war – there are just hundreds of them – is in line with the requirements of the Geneva Convention, that the international humanitarian law is not violated from the side of the Ukrainian military forces. Then, very unfortunate developments are happening on the territories which are occupied by Russia’s military forces because we have more and more reports about forced disappearances, executions as extrajudicial killings, torture. Um, unfortunately the organizers of pro-Ukrainian protests on those territories, members of municipal councils and other people being targeted to be persecuted. And of course the Ukrainian authorities could do nothing with that. And we recently addressed the appeal to UN Special Rapporteurs and different international institutions to pay attention to these very dangerous developments. So there’s just an examples of immediate reaction of Ukrainian civil society for different issues, all linked to the human rights developments in Ukraine.
In “The Last of Her Kind,” an exceptional review of a new biography of Angela Merkel, Fintan O’Toole contrasts the trajectory and relationship of Merkel and Putin, two leaders who emerged from the rubble of the Soviet era, and reflects on the future of the European right after she stepped down as Chancellor.
These very different ways of understanding the experiences that shaped them both may be why Putin always seemed to be more anxious about Merkel than any other world leader. He plays childish power games with visiting presidents and prime ministers—most recently seating French president Emmanuel Macron and then Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, at the far end of an absurdly long table. But with Merkel, the games were more serious and more personal. In 2007, at a meeting between them in Sochi, he made sure that his big black Labrador was free to approach and sniff at Merkel, who was known to be frightened of dogs. She was indeed visibly scared.
Yet she surely also realized that this stunt was a backhanded compliment. Putin had taken the trouble to think about her as a person, deploying his KGB training to imagine what might make her vulnerable to coercion. The trick did not work, because Merkel had a remarkable gift for not taking things personally, and also a woman’s skepticism about male display. “I understand why he has to do this—to prove he’s a man,” she told a group of reporters. “He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”
It does not seem too much of a stretch, then, to see Putin’s ratcheting up of his long war on Ukraine as another backhanded compliment to Merkel. She announced in October 2018 that she would not seek another term in office, setting in train a long farewell that surely loomed large in Putin’s mind. The buildup to his invasion of Ukraine began in November 2021, just as her chancellorship was winding down. The timing was probably not accidental. What better moment to test the nerve of Western Europe, and of the wider NATO alliance, than that at which it was losing its Lehrmeisterin, the quiet authority figure who had come to seem, in a world of demagogues and dictators trying to prove their manhood, an increasingly indispensible marker of reassurance and stability? . . .
Hence the larger paradox of the Merkel era: the leadership of a centrist Christian Democrat as the undisputed first among equals in the EU coincided with the loss of Christian Democracy’s dominance of the right-of-center space in European politics. The rise of far-right parties like the AfD, the League in Italy, Poland’s Law and Justice, the National Rally in France, Spain’s Vox, and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary has created a profound identity crisis in what used to be the dominant conservative parties, leaving them unsure whether they should fight against what Orbán calls “illiberal democracy” or shore up their own support by embracing it. In a short essay on Merkel’s departure, Orbán claimed that while Kohl had been “a dear, old friend, a Christian brother,” Merkel had created a “rupture” on the European right by supporting the “migratory invasion” of 2015.
The temptation to heal that breach by adopting the rhetoric of the far right is, for the old centrist conservatives, very strong. In France, for example, Valérie Pécresse—the presidential candidate of the Republicans, the mainstream center-right party, whose former leader Nicolas Sarkozy was once Merkel’s closest European ally—has now legitimized the white supremacist trope of the “great replacement” of white Christians by people of color and Muslims. It is increasingly hard to see, among Europe’s established conservative parties, Merkelism surviving without Merkel.
The wider question Merkel has left unanswered is whether it is possible, in the new wartime that Putin has inaugurated, for a leader of the democratic world to combine ambition and vision on the one hand with modesty and decency on the other. She mattered so deeply because she had no interest in what has animated Putin and so many of his fellow nationalist authoritarians: the pursuit of greatness. The promise to make Russia (or America or Britain or China) great again has been at the core of reactionary politics over the past decade.
Merkel always knew that Germany, above all, must not be great. She visibly winced in 2011 when, during the eurozone debt crisis, the leader of her party’s parliamentary bloc, Volker Kauder, boasted, “Now, all of a sudden, Europe is speaking German.” Merkel’s desire was to make Germany not great, but ordinary. Her relentless personal modesty—she continued as chancellor to live in an unpretentious flat in a pre-war building in east Berlin and to push her shopping cart around the local supermarket—was her intimate and miniature version of how she thought her country should be. No contemporary leader had less truck with national exceptionalism. “I don’t think,” she once said, “Germans are particularly bad, or outstandingly wonderful…. I grew up here. I like living here. I have confidence in this country, I am part of its history, with all its pain and all the good things.” That understated sanity became, over the course of her chancellorship, paradoxically remarkable. Being unflashy made Merkel, however reluctantly, a shining beacon.
As part of the symposium “Beyond Neoliberalism” in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Felicia Wong brilliantly explores the paradox of the debate about economic policy in the U.S.: neoliberalism as an ideology is on the ropes, but what replaces it is very much up for grabs.
The neoliberalism that many of us knew in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—that unquestioning faith that the way forward in America was to strive for education, college if you could; to get a good job; and to get ahead—is gone, never to return. But the post-neoliberalism we are now living through is chaotic and, for many, terrifying. We are at some kind of inflection point, not only because of COVID, but also because the ideas that had held sway and governed our sense of right and wrong have lost their explanatory power. We are living through the midst of paradigm change. And we are just as likely to come out on the dark side—a racist, populist economics upheld by an authoritarian regime—as we are to come out looking more like some combination of the New Deal and the Great Society, updated for a multi-racial twenty-first century.
On the paradox of the generous welcome given to Ukrainian refugees as compared to the vicious and racist migration policies of the U.S. and Europe, we recommend several pieces.
In an in-depth report for The Nation, “The Black Migrant Trail of Tragedies,” Kovie Biakolo tells the story of two asylum seekers, Juliana Essengue and Emerson Dalmacy, from Cameroon and Haiti respectively, who made it to the U.S. after a life-threatening ordeal only to end up in limbo.
Neither Dalmacy nor Essengue has any guarantee of a long-term future in the US. Essengue told me she had a court date set for January that she was waiting to have rescheduled. In late January, US Citizenship and Immigration Services denied her application for a work authorization, though she said her lawyer will be reapplying. While asylum cases are supposed to be determined within 180 days, there is currently a backlog of over 667,000 cases. It could be months or years before she and Dalmacy obtain decisions.
Temporary protected status, which is afforded to citizens from 12 countries including Haiti, leaves many migrants unable to plan a future here beyond a limited period of time. Yet advocates like the Haitian Bridge Alliance keep pressing for an extension for Haitian migrants, while others, like the Cameroon Advocacy Network, are pushing the US government to grant it to Cameroonian nationals. Despite TPS’s uncertain duration, it could offer Cameroonian nationals who are already here, like Essengue and others arriving at the southern border, some protection.
“We have the elements of TPS, which has to do with temporary inhumane conditions that are happening [because] of human rights abuses,” Daniel Tse, who founded the Cameroon Advocacy Network, said. “Cameroon meets the criteria for this TPS. . . . How long do they want to evaluate the country? It’s not that this country doesn’t meet the criteria. It’s just that they don’t want to give it.” . . .
In a 2021 report coauthored by the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) and FWD.us, a bipartisan group focused on immigration and criminal justice reform, Azadeh Erfani and Maria Garcia conclude that the migrant relationship between rich countries and poor countries is designed to keep those in the latter from seeking asylum in the former. FWD.us’s Garcia pointed out that for Black migrants in particular, these policies prolong their trek, because they often must travel through many more poor countries and dangerous sites to get to safety. For migrants coming from either Africa or the Caribbean, racially prejudiced policies may keep them longer in each place they pass through before reaching their final destinations. “I think Guerline Jozef from Haitian Bridge Alliance has said this several times, but if you are a Black migrant, you can’t hide,” Garcia said. “And Black migrants are targeted because of the color of their skin.”
In Project Syndicate, Mae Boeve, Mitzi Jonelle Tan, and Nisha Agarwal ask, “What About the Climate Displaced?” Their argument is worth reading in full, but here’s the abstract.
While providing disturbing details of the threats facing humanity on a heating planet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has failed once again to recognize the centrality of migration. Yet the movement of people is already a key consequence of the broader climate crisis, and it could be a part of the solution.
In The New Statesman, Thea Riofrancos and David Adler consider “Gabriel Boric and Latin America’s Pink Tide,” finding many obstacles including a ferocious authoritarian resurgence.
In all cases, the obstacles to left governance are further complicated by the radicalisation of the region’s right wing. The dominant right-wing parties that the pink tide replaced were old, exhausted and out of ideas. Today, the right is rejuvenated, adopting tactics from the US Republican Party: fake news, false claims of electoral fraud, and a commitment to stymie the legislative agenda of their opponents. These tactics are deployed to channel broader social grievances in a right-wing direction – from the anti-corruption movement that propelled Jair Bolsonaro into the Brazilian presidency to anti-immigration sentiments fuelling the rise of José Antonio Kast in Chile. . .
The new generation of left leaders are not unaware of the threats these transformations pose to the progressive agenda. That is why, in so many cases, their ambitions reach beyond the ballot box to the constitution itself. From Xiomara Castro’s promise to convene a constitutional assembly as the president of Honduras, to Gabriel Boric’s defence of Chile’s own convention process, the leaders of the new pink tide hope to rewrite the rules of their democracies in ways that expand rights, deepen representation and guard against the destabilising effects of new structural, geopolitical and party political circumstances. Here, the present tide not only resembles its predecessor, which saw constitutional referendums in countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador, but by incorporating the bold ideas of its indigenous, feminist and environmental movements, the present generation also learns from the past – not just defending, but deepening democracy in the region.
On the principal emotions driving the authoritarian turn worldwide—shame and humiliation—we recommend Vivian Gornick’s essay in Harper’s, “‘Put on the Diamonds’: Notes on humiliation.”
Anton Chekhov once observed that the worst thing life can do to human beings is to inflict humiliation. Nothing, nothing, nothing in the world can destroy the soul as much as outright humiliation. Every other infliction can eventually be withstood or overcome, but not humiliation. Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever. It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives. . .
I believe the exaggerated response to humiliation is unique to our species. In feeling disrespected, each of these persons—Levi, the men in prison, my cousin, my ex-husband’s wife—felt they had their right to exist not only challenged but very nearly obliterated. Their inclination then—each and every one—was to crawl out from under the rock that held their prodigious capacity for shame in place, and stand up shooting. When we speak of ourselves as an animal among animals we misspeak. That is exactly what we are not. A four-footed animal may go berserk if attacked by another four-footed animal and not rest until it kills its attacker, but it will not experience the vengefulness that the walking wounded do when humiliated. . .
The first time I understood humiliation as world-destroying was the morning I watched the World Trade Center evaporate from a street corner in Greenwich Village and found myself thinking, This is payback for a century of humiliation. I have subsequently discovered that a wealth of scholarly literature argues that a national sense of humiliation is, more often than not, a key motive in a country’s decision to go to war. Evelin Gerda Lindner, a German-Norwegian psychologist affiliated with the University of Oslo, has spent her professional life hypothesizing humiliation’s central role in starting, maintaining, or stopping armed conflicts. A country understands itself (for whatever reason) to be discounted in the eyes of the world at large and passes down that sense of national insult, generation after generation, until a day arrives, however far in the future that day may be, when it requires retribution. Historians have observed that after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, an emotional sense of having been humiliated dominated the politics of France right up to the outbreak of war in 1914; a similar humiliation, doled out to Germany after it lost World War I, led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and a level of vengefulness that nearly destroyed the Western world.
A Parting Delight
To dispel all of this gloom, we highly recommend the music of Oumou Sangaré, who provided some of the score for an astonishing dance performance we saw last night by Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE at the Joyce Theater. (For those of you in NYC looking for a good way to spend the afternoon, the last performance is today at 2pm.)