Daily Archives: January 9, 2021

Hardly anyone in Turkey thought they would bid farewell to 2020 amid a fresh controversy surrounding the Islamic headscarf.

The response to Ali Babacan, who chairs the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), tearing up while talking about his sister's removal from the university during the infamous Feb. 28 process, fueled the debate anew. At the same time, Fikri Salar, a main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) heavyweight and former Cabinet minister, sparked controversy by publicly targeting women who cover their hair.

That Babacan, who cozied up to secularists and liberals for a while, reached out to conservatives with a reference to the headscarf ban unsettled skeptics, who have been urging him to engage in "self-criticism." Some have accused the former Justice and Development Party (AK Party) politician of "exploiting the past suffering of religious people." Others have said Babacan is "a follower of political Islam in the guise of a liberal."

Babacan could not even appease his critics by charging the ruling party for "using political power to oppress other groups." Instead, he was promptly asked to come clean and criticize his own political career.

Ironically, the former finance minister had emerged as a vocal critic of the AK Party government, brushing aside Generation Z's demand for reconciliation and mild language much like his former colleague, Ahmet Davutolu, who currently chairs the Future Party (GP).

The secularist backlash against Babacan's latest attempt to maintain his ties to conservatives speaks volumes about the dilemma facing Turkey's recently established political parties. Their fellow opposition figures do not tolerate the slightest outreach to conservatives Muslims, even if former AK Party politicians jump on the CHP's "dictatorship" bandwagon and agree to the restoration of a parliamentary system. In other words, they are strictly forbidden from paving a third way between the ruling party and the anti-government coalition, dominated by the CHP, the Good Party (IP) and the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).

To make matters worse for them, the AK Party remains the true representative of conservative voters. President Recep Tayyip Erdoan abolished the headscarf ban that made Babacan weep. They cannot embrace the charge of authoritarianism or other liberal demands because everything is already taken.

Spokespeople for the DEVA and the GP target the government with the CHP's rhetorical ammunition, but they haven't uttered a single word yet to criticize opposition parties. One thing is clear: They cannot speak a genuine political language under that ultra-secularist oppression. They will end up further alienating conservatives, from among whom they emerged, and failing to make liberals and secularists happy.

I was deeply troubled by Salar expressing doubt about a judge, wearing a headscarf, protecting his rights and delivering justice. Those comments may have been dismissed as an act of ultra-secularist militance, not uncommon on the pro-CHP network Halk TV's shows, had the commentator been a leftist with extreme views. Instead, those words came from Salar, a prominent Social Democrat, revealing the deeply entrenched anti-headscarf sentiment among CHP's ranks.

It seems that the dream of reinventing the oppression that Turkey's religious citizens endured during the Feb. 28 process is still alive. That sentiment not only revives the outdated headscarf debate specifically, the arbitrary distinction between the providers and recipients of public services but also shows that the idea of "the reactionary threat" is very much alive in secularist minds.

To be clear, I do not expect the secularism debate in Turkey to come to an end. It is quite surprising, however, that such primitive interpretations of that principle are still so popular. One would have at least hoped that the crude, French-Jacobinist version was replaced by the Anglosaxon approach.

The fierce opposition to the religious headscarf, which Salar reaffirmed, clearly demonstrates that Turkey's Kemalists, leftists and secularists have not undergone the transformation necessary to appeal to voters. That's enough to understand why they cannot win elections.

The obvious question is whether conservatives should be concerned. It is no secret that conservative voters could experience another Feb. 28 process once the AK Party is no longer in power. The CHP leadership manages to conceal its thirst for revenge yet, perhaps, fortunately, pro-CHP networks like Halk TV kindly share the movement's real thoughts with the general public. There is a broad spectrum of CHP figures from those advocating a coup to those who want the call to prayer to be recited in Turkish and those who want to convert the Blue Mosque into a museum.

In contrast, the state's relationship with religion underwent a serious period of normalization under the AK Party. Muslim demands came to occupy a certain space in the public domain legally, as the secular lifestyle remained widespread. Outside the aggressive realm of politics, a fresh interaction between secularists and religious people became possible in socioeconomic life.

A brand of politics, which respects the religious demands of conservatives, will remain at the heart of Turkish politics. There is no reason to worry, as Erdoan's brand of struggle (rather than the liberal impostors bullied into self-critique) will be Turkey's strongest political current in the future.

View post:

Turkish politics and discussions on Islamic headscarf | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah

Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt served in four tours of duty during her 14-year US Air Force enlistment. A high-level security official, she survived some of the deadliest war zones in the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Her life came to an abrupt end on Wednesday, not in a foreign country but in the US Capitol, where she was shot and killed by a plainclothes Capitol police officer after she and other rioters sought to breach a barricade in the building.

Im numb. Im devastated. Nobody from DC notified my son and we found out on TV, Babbitts mother-in-law told the New York Post.

Babbitt was one of five people who died during the violence, three others from medical complications including several heart attacks and one police officer who died from injuries inflicted by rioters. The riots, which come on the heels of the most violent summer in American since the 1960s, sought to disrupt Congresss vote to certify the Electoral Colleges vote for Joe Biden as president.

For months, President Trump and many of his supporters claimed Joe Bidens electoral college victory was illegitimate because of systemic voter fraud, a claim disputed by the Justice Department and multiple Republican state officials in the states where said fraud allegedly took place.

This is total fraud, Trump told Fox News following the election. And how the FBI and Department of Justice I dont know, maybe theyre involved. But how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable.

In the days leading up to Congresss January 6 certification vote, thousands of aggrieved supporters of Trump poured into the nations capital believing, as does the president himself, that widespread voter fraud and irregularities mean the November presidential election was stolen.

Things quickly spiraled out of control.

The U.S. Capitol has been locked down after pro-Trump protesters broke into the building following an incendiary speech from the president in which he vowed never to concede defeat and called on his supporters to march on Congress, the Washington Examiner reported amid the chaos. After the defiant speech, thousands of rallygoers who had arrived in Washington to contest the results of the presidential election swarmed the outside of the Capitol, breaking past U.S. Capitol Police and metal fencing.

The Senate and House were adjourned, with leaders rushed off the floor by their security details as the groups breached several layers of security and gained access to the Capitol chambers, the report continued. At least one person is in critical condition after being shot during the chaos, while at least another five people have been transported to hospital.

Among them was Babbitt, a 35-year old woman from San Diego who ran a swimming pool supply store in Spring Valley. A self-described patriot, she was determined to be on hand to support her country and stop the steal.

"Nothing will stop us, Babbitt tweeted on January 5. [T]hey can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours....dark to light.

Twenty four hours later she was dead and the capital city was left scarred by violence.

There is no question that this loss of life is a tragedy. And we will leave aside the question of whether Babbitts killing was an excessive use of force. What we seek to answer is whether the siege of the Capitol that led to her death was a just political act, or whether her life was wasted in a misadventure that was foolish and wrong.

Sadly, the latter is the case.

The right to peaceful protest is a cornerstone of American society. The license to engage in violence, vandalism, and intimidation is not.

Once political protest descends into violence, it crosses the line of justice.

The extent to which voter fraud played a role in the 2020 election can be debated, like any other subject. Trump and his supporters are entitled to believe the presidential election was stolen and rigged. (We do not share this belief, and as noted earlier, neither does the Department of Justice, which said we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.)

Moreover, Trump supporters have every right to gather in Washington and protest the election results. This is a simple matter of free speech and assembly, both of which are protected under the Constitution.But a faction went much further than that Wednesday, perpetrating vandalism, property destruction, and trespass, as can be seen in these videos:

Political protest loses moral and constitutional legitimacy as soon as it becomes destructive or violent.

All Americans have the right to speak out and make our case in the public square. But the moment the first brick is thrown or a window is smashed, it crosses the line between exercising rights and violating the rights of others.

Some would counter that in the face of what they consider a stolen election and an America where their rights and freedoms are slipping away, violent unrest is justified by the extremity of the situation we face as a country.

A scan of Babbits Twitter feed reveals such concerns. From social media censorship, to compulsory lockdowns, businesses gone bankrupt or looted, political corruption, and voter fraud allegations, theres a powerful and understandable sense of grievanceand its a feeling gripping millions of Americans. Of injustice and oppression. Of the belief that everyday citizens are being trampled by political elites.

Underlying rioters rage is a sense of powerlessness; an absence of control or agency. These are conditions from which violence tends to spring.

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same, the philosopher Hannah Arendt once observed. Power and violence are opposites.

To be powerless in the face of injustice, in other words, is in many ways a recipe for violence.

It invites an important question. Can violence be used to set the world right? Injustice is very real, after all. Its something almost everyone has experienced at one time or another, albeit it to greatly varying extents. If violence can be used as a means to make things better, why should it not be employed in such a fashion?

This is not a new question, of course. And while Americans today, including many academics, increasingly see violence as a justifiable tool for political change, the answer to this age-old question is still a resounding no.

Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. artfully noted.

Kings words appear especially true in the dawn of 2021.

For the better part of a year, Americans have watched violence spread across our country, feeding on itself like some other-worldly organism. George Floyds death, captured by jarring images and moving video, naturally shook Americans. But what did the riots that ensued accomplish beyond at least 19 direct deaths and billions of dollars in property damage? They only sabotaged the police reform movement and led to more violence. More riots followed, devouring cities from Atlanta to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and beyond. Homicides also surged, increasing by 250 percent in some US cities.

Theres no denying that the riots brought additional attention to the issue of police brutality, but at what cost? Moreover, MLK reminds us that these victories are likely to be fleeting.

In spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace, the civil rights icon said. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

King was exactly right. Unfortunately, the percentage of US adults who say violence is a justifiable means to advance political change has surged in recent years, among both Democrats and Republicans.

If Americans make excuses for or engage in violent agitation when its a cause they support, it becomes ever more likely theyll soon have the same behavior imposed upon them by their opponents.

Actions that undermine our natural rights can never advance progress.

To argue that violence is a justifiable means to confront injustice is to inevitably invite perpetual conflict. We live in a world of scarcity, but the one thing there has never been a shortage of is injustice. Its a bitter pill we all have tasted and experienced, to varying degrees.

This was especially true in 2020, a year of racial unrest, sweeping violence, and government overreach in which millions of Americans were ordered confined to their homes. Many saw their jobs, savings, and businesses evaporate before their eyes while lawmakers and corporations exempted themselves.

Injustice is real.

Just ask the family of Andre Maurice Hill, a 47-year-old unarmed black man who last month was killed in a garage by Ohio police responding to a non-emergency call. Hill, who was holding a phone, was shot by police within 10 seconds. Officers reportedly made no effort to save Hill, who residents described as an "expected guest," and he soon bled out.

"From what we can see, none of the officers initially at the scene provide[d] medical assistance to Mr. Hill, Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said. No compression on the wounds to stop the bleeding. No attempts at CPR. Not even a hand on the shoulder and an encouraging word that medics were en route."

Is this injustice? Most certainly. But violence is not the solution to injustice, though many have a hard time believing this.

You truly really believe that non-violence is the sole and universal answer to injustice and oppression? an interviewer once asked King.

Very definitely, King responded. I feel that non-violence...organized non-violent resistance is the most powerful weapon that oppressed people can use in breaking aloof from the bondage of oppression.

King was not saying injustice should be accepted or confused with cowardice or inaction.

Non-violent resistance does resist, King noted. It is dynamically active. It is passive physically but it is strongly active spiritually.

The scene witnessed at the nations capital Wednesday was sad. It was also intolerable. All Americanseven those who support President Trump and agree with his election claimsshould condemn it.

In particular, conservatives and libertarians who criticized the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, as we did, must similarly condemn the political violence in the nations capital. There is no coherent moral framework where the destruction of property and violence carried out in the name of racial justice is wrong, but similar violence of a right-wing persuasion is fine. (Or vice versa.)

Theyre both wrong. Alwaysyes, even in the presence of injustice (both real and perceived). Because violence is a monster that grows the more it is fed.

And sadly, its the most powerless who usually pay the price when it does.

Originally posted here:

US Capitol Attack a Reminder of the Perils of Using Violence in the Name of Fighting Injustice | Jon Miltimore, Brad Polumbo - Foundation for Economic...

David Graeber once postulated that the reason conservatives hate Hollywood is not just because of the film industrys sanctimonious liberalism but because this liberalism is disseminated by an industry that is profoundly nepotistic. From the Coppolas to the Barrymores to the Fondas to the Gyllenhaals to Gwyneth Paltrow, Matthew Broderick, Daniel Radcliffe, and Jaden Smith, Hollywood has notoriously and shamelessly granted opportunity, irrespective of merit, to those with the right connections at the expense of everyone else. Conservatives, Graeber argues, reject Hollywood because, in contrast to supposedly meritocratic (at least in the conservative imagination) industries such as business, Hollywood isunfair. That Hollywood is also bent on socially engineering the masses with the liberal fads of the day, while simultaneously trading in unending sex and violence, merely adds insult to injury.

Graebers recognition of conservatives overriding concern with fairness helps explain conservatives steadfast support for Donald Trump. Trump of course began his presidential run as an ostensibly unbeholden political outsider who took down the Bush and Clinton dynasties by asserting that he would halt all manner of global cheating and put America first. Promising to drain the swamp, the incoming Trump administration was characterized by an unusual and sometimes surreal openness as celebrities, eccentrics, and hangers-on dropped by to share their views with the president-elect.1A 21st-century version of Andrew Jacksons inaugural ball, this spectacle conveyed an administration freed from technocratic elites, micromanagers, and other unaccountable insiders (which is one reason why Trumps incompetence rarely concerns his supporters, since it is merely more evidence of his overarching authenticity). Indeed, it would be interesting to examine the publics letters to the president during those first months to determine whether there was an unusually high number of offers of assistance and auditions for employment given the perception, at least among his supporters, that the Trump White House was uncharacteristicallyaccessibleto those on the margins of the establishment.

Fundamentally, the notion that the Trump presidency is bent on establishing, or restoring, fairness mistakes appearance for reality. This critical distinction is obscured in Arlie Russell HochschildsStrangers in Their Own Land(2016), in which the Berkeley sociologist travels to Louisiana to explore the thinking of Trump-supporting conservatives.2Spending time with conservatives on their own turf and observing their interactions with their churches, workplaces, and neighbors, Hochschild pursues adeep understanding of conservatives from the inside. What she arrives at is a conservative deep story that is based on an extended metaphor of waiting in line. In sum, resentful, Trump-supporting, white people feel as if they have played by the rules by waiting in line in order to earn their rightful portion of the American Dream, but women, African Americans, immigrants, government workers, and even endangered birds are, with the aid of liberal government officials, increasingly cutting in front of them. When conservatives criticize the unfairness of this situation, they are shouted down for being racist ogres whose devotion to the Christian God, family, and country is the source of endless ridicule in mainstream culture.

Because much of Hochschilds examination relies on her acceptance of the aptness of the line metaphor, it is important to note that such a notion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of contemporary life. Capitalism has never been based on a line in which the good life is a reasonable outcome for those who dutifully work and wait for it. This idea is incapable of explaining, for instance, the fixed poverty of fast-food workers or among migrant farmworkers whose political vulnerabilitywhich the state and business respectively produce and exploitindicates that they are less willing, as Hochschild and her interviewees would have it, than forced to work for sub-minimum wages. On the contrary, the image of a linein which people face the same direction in a single filemystifies the nature of a class society in which the power of a small elite is generated through exploitativeinteractionwith the majority. Unable to transcend the contradiction inherent in wages, which are simultaneously a negative cost of business and the primary means of workers survival, the system reproduces poverty, even as the number and identity of its victims can vary under different historical circumstances.

Needless to say, Hochschilds white conservative interlocutors do not blame their economic and other struggles on capitalism. On the contrary, Hochschilds interviewees, some of whom express faith in impending rapture, complain about illegitimate outsiders and societys supposed replacement of an honorable and rooted existence with cosmopolitan selves [that are] directed to the task of cracking into the global elite [who make] do with living farther away from their roots[and take] pride in liberal causes. Such concepts, Werner Bonefeld reminds us, have long been used to express a violently reactionary and anti-Semitic worldview that positions itself against an enemy that is viewed as abstract, fluid, universal, mobile, intangible, rootless, landless, and represented by money and society, all of which are attempting to destroy rooted communities that are connected to the land through farming and industry, blood and soil.3

Such language has an undoubtedly dangerous pedigree, but Hochschild intends for us to listen to it so that we might cultivate a mutual understanding that will enable the national community to repair itself, which begs the question of not only what a national community entails but also whether Hochschild is reversing cause and effect. Conservatives and liberals are in conflict not merely because they fail to understand one another but because they understand all too well that they are separated by increasingly unbridgeable interests. Conservatives, Hochschild notes, reject government regulation of their weapons and investments, i.e., their own self-interested pursuits. When it comes to restricting womens access to abortion or policing people of color, however, conservatives, whose political, social, and economic power is predicated on the domination of others, become ardent proponents of the regulatory state. Seeking to overcome such antagonistic interests through mutual understanding thereby constitutes a wrong answer to a wrong question. Conservatives do not conceive of themselves as merely one of many interest groups competing for influence over the government. On the contrary, they, not unreasonably, see themselves as occupying a fundamental and inviolable position within society precisely because of their historically aligned relationship to the state. Hochschild suggests this inheritance when she joins her interlocutors in describing US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as our troops, and in the very fact that she accepts on faith that it is conservatives own land in the first place and that conservatives estrangement from it constitutes an unambiguously legitimate source of grievance. Reporting on her subjects as she finds them, Hochschild evades US militarism and the genocidal settlement of the land (i.e., US societys material preconditions) and, as a result, divorces her interviewees ideas from the imperial context that helped shape them. In so doing, she obfuscates what she seeks to explain.

Greg GrandinsTheEnd of the Mythcontextualizes todays crises through the metaphor of not a line of atomized individuals waiting for their turn but a frontiera border that evolved into a cultural zone or a civilizational struggle through the settlement of the West and beyond.4Unlike the line, the frontier produces aninsidethat is defined through antagonistic exchange with thoseoutsidewhether of shifting geographic boundaries or the domestic body politic. Whereas historians often debate whether the Constitution expanded or reversed the revolutionary spirit of the Declaration of Independence, Grandin highlights the racist expansionismwithinthe Declarations enlightened universalism. Beyond taxes and billeting, Jeffersons litany of King Georges crimes included the complaint that Britain was preventing the colonists from conquering the land of the merciless Indian Savages. That is, America may have been born free, but it was a freedomfroma government that sought to constrain its subjects violent oppression of others.

We see this conception of negative freedom again and again, as in a story Grandin recounts of a young Andrew Jackson, who when transporting slaves through federally protected Indian land, became outraged after a government official requested to see his passport. Writing My God, is it come to this Are wefreemen or are we slaves? Is this real or is it a dream?, Jackson threatened to murder the agent and devoted himself to getting him fired. Jackson, of course, would have the last laugh as, once president, he would expel (ethnically cleanse in todays language) the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and other Indigenous peoples from the southeast, where expanded chattel slavery and accelerated national expansion would take their place.

Such freedom not only drove early Western expansionmost dramatically via the Mexican land grabbut, once the continental frontier was closed, continued overseas through the Spanish-American War, the World Wars, and the seemingly unending US wars since. To be sure, the understanding of expansion itself evolved from the merely territorial (as with the taking of Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and other territories) to the economic (outlined in the Fourteen Points and at Bretton Woods Conference) to the political and the cultural. Along the way, the problems produced by expansion were resolvedor at least displacedby ever more expansion, an approach to national development that, Grandin argues, has left the US disoriented and destabilized now that its ability to expand has finally come to an end. US racist violence and other pathologies, provided no effective outlet in a contracting and crisis-ridden world system, have come home to roost under Trump, who can only offer the frontiers antithesis: the wall (one nevertheless wonders about the intensification of domestic racism attending, and surely lingering after, moments of US expansion, e.g., the virulent anti-Chinese racism during the settlement of the West and the anti-Japanese racism of WWII).

The End of the Mythperforms a vital service in tracing the intrinsic violence of US historical development, showing that this violence does not constitute a one-time original sin but is instead recursive as it is enmeshed within the assumptions of American freedom itself. Yet, notwithstanding Grandins attempts to juxtapose US development with seemingly more peaceful national paths (he favorably looks upon the South American republics, notwithstanding their own eventual warfare), US history and its current crises reflect not only the peculiarities of US development, but also the demands and contradictions of a fundamentally violent global system.

Indeed, neither Trump nor his racist immigration policieswhich include antecedents such as Operation Wetback, Pat Buchanan, and Californias Proposition 187are new to US history, as Grandin writes. But neither are they unique to contemporary global politics. As harrowing as the border patrols on the Mexican border are, one can find comparable brutality in the Mediterranean, which, as Nicholas De Genova writes, the EUs immigration policies have actively converted into a mass grave.5Similarly, the USs rightward shift may have been articulated by Ronald Reagan, but it was born in the crises of the global economy of the 1970s, which incapacitated the Left while emboldening the Right, not only in the US but also in countries including Germany, France, and the UK. Clinton was Reagans greatest achievement, but Reagan was the achievement of both a reemergent US South and an oversaturated global economy.

Lest we reduce striking similarities between the US and other countries to mere coincidence, we ought to look at not only the ideas animating and justifying US development but also the structure of the global system itself. The United States has, since at least WWII, been the most powerful country in the world, so it is easy to forget that in some ways it is also the quintessential nation-state, the first to have based its legitimacy on what is now the reigning system of government today: republican pluralism. Madison developed this concept in his discussion in Federalist No. 10 of the threat posed by factions, which he defines as a number of citizens, whether amounting to amajorityor a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.6Notably for Madison, the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

Madisons solution to the problem of factions is brilliant, but he leaves us with a paradox: what is the difference between a majority faction of 99 percent of the population (which Madison would oppose) and the aggregate interests of the community or common good (which he supports)? What exactly does the common good consist of if not what the majority wants? Grandin suggests that Madison saw the common good as virtue and virtue as diversity itself, yet the contradictory interests contained within this diversitye.g., the mutually exclusive antagonisms between boss and worker or landlord and tenantcannot constitute the aggregate interests of the community, since it is not possible to aggregate contradictions without destroying one or the other, something Madison steadfastly opposes. When we talk, for instance, about hegemonic ideologies that claim to aggregate disparate interests, we are in reality speaking about the subordination of some ideologies (e.g., identities based on fidelity to family, city, or religion) to a dominant one (e.g., nationalism). Indeed, Madison recommends extend[ing] the sphere of government, not because he valued diversity as such, but in order to multiply factions so that they can offset one another, a specifically counter-majoritarian maneuver designed to make it more difficult for all who feel a common interest to discover their own strength. But what precisely is it that Madison is trying to protect?

Madisons purpose is made explicit when he defends his plan precisely because under it a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it. Writing amid Shays Rebellion, Madison was profoundly concerned with protecting natural property rights, not from the perspective of the framers narrow self-interest, a view frequently attributed to Charles A. Beard, but in general. Yet, even in general terms, private property, which is premised on the exclusion of the unpropertied, could not by definition constitute the common good. Madisons common good, then, could only be the wellbeing of a modern and decidedly unneutralstate that derives its power from asystemof private property that secures both the interests of property holders and the concomitant dependency of everyone else.

And this modern state, consolidated with the American and French Revolutions, was born into asystemof states in which the territory and power of each were inherently relational to the other. The US was founded through breaking away from Britain, and its earliest tasks, as Grandin notes, were to strengthen itself through acquiring land not only from stateless Indigenous peoples but also from its Spanish, British, and French rivals. It was within this geopolitical and national context that settlers, whom Grandin casts in a leading role in the story, helped spearhead Western expansion. Although these settlers often resented and exceeded the given policies of the federal government, their material wellbeing and political support were nevertheless contingent upon the state, which both protected them and capitalized on their efforts. Indeed, this good cop/bad cop dynamic of government/settler expansion is not unique to the US but reflects a pattern of development that can be found in numerous states including, perhaps most prominently today, Israel. That is, the determinative factor in US historical development was less, as Grandin suggests, an endogenous ideology or the settlers and other agents who articulated it, than a global system that provided the structure into which the US states material exigencies and ambitions were born.

US leaders were, to be sure, free to ignore the rules of the international system and not pursue state-building (as Grandin suggests in his comparison between the relatively humane John Quincy Adams and the genocidally-racist Andrew Jackson), but such dereliction was bound to come at a cost, paid for by either the individual (John Quincy Adams never received a majority vote and lost reelection) or the state itself. Justifying the USs annexation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, William McKinley, who originally opposed annexation as a criminal aggression,7was cognizant of these systemic pressuresnot least the urgent need to relieve an economy depressed by overproduced goodswhen he warned that if the US did not act it would be bad business and discreditable since its similarly glutted imperial rivals assuredly would.

None of this is to suggest that the development of a given state is a purely mechanistic affair, as there are of course contingencies as well as unique national cultures that influence all countries. Just the same, the cultural and the structural shape each other, and historically the former more often than not evolves upon material terrain shaped by the imperatives of the latter. Perhaps no event more than the Civil War, which Grandin only briefly discusses, demonstrates the confluence between the distinctively American version of freedom and the world system into which the US was integrating.

Although the existence of the federally intrusive Fugitive Slave Act gives lie to the Souths insistence that it was fighting for states rights as such, the South was just as assuredly fighting for its freedomtooppress Black people who provided the basis of its material and cultural way of life. To be sure, as Richard Hofstadter has shown, Southerners such as John Calhoun insisted that the Southern system protected slaves from the perverse freedomsfreedom to starve or lose limbs to industrial machineryof the North.8While the Souths brutally racist violence belied its professed paternalism and revealed Calhouns accusation against the North as atu quoque, both sides did fight over whose interests Black people would be forced to advance: the sectional and parochial aggrandizement of plantation owners or the expansion of an increasingly industrial national economy that was in competition with other states through the apparatus of wage-labor based capitalism. For it is too infrequently noted that the slaves were emancipated in the same decade as the liberation of both the Russian and Japanese serfs, indicating that even disparate nation-states were pursuing the same goal, and with the same techniques, of 19th-century modernization.

The Civil War showed that the US wouldunder the systemic pressures of growth or declineadapt itself to successfully compete in the global system, even as the war and its aftermath shaped a unique political culture. Although Reconstruction ended with the 1877 Hayes Compromise, it was not until the Spanish-American War that the South, Klan and all, was reincorporated into the nation on its own terms, as that war, as Grandin puts it, both re-legitimated the Confederacy and allowed resurgent racists to drape themselves in the high ideals of a now-reconciled national history. Taking redemptive pride in their contributions to US expansion, Southerners were now able to atone for their sedition against the nation, even as they carried the banner of that sedition to the farthest corners of the earth. With Woodrow Wilson segregating the federal government and Nixon adopting the Southern Strategy, the South won a peace that was predicated on the relegation of African Americans to a permanent underclass subsidizing postbellum capitalist society.

To speak, then, of Trumps fairness presupposes a historically specific understanding of that term. On one hand, Trump is likely the most flagrantly nepotistic and corrupt president in US history. Yet such conduct little matters to his supporters; insofar as his dealings are self-serving, they are necessarily a challenge to the far largersystemof corruption that he combats every day. Why criticize Ivanka for enriching herself through sweetheart deals abroad since this only means that the Trump family will now be further empowered to do battle against the Swamp?

On the other hand, Trumpian fairness, in its ideal form, is contingent upon foundational violence that naturalizes ongoing exclusion and oppression as timeless and apolitical. Accordingly, advocates of such fairness ferociously oppose any semblance of social or economic corrective as fundamentally artificial, exogenous, and unfair. It is furthermore a fairness based on conceptions of a masochistic self-sacrifice whose only assurance is not an acceptable standard of living but the freedom to destroy oneself in attempting to achieve it. For ordinary conservatives do not see that theywhether as Grandins settlers or Hochschilds workerswere never in charge of a state that, its flattery notwithstanding, has increasingly little use for them. Projecting their sense of a lost and exaggerated agency onto their enemies, they dangerously believe that those who have been historically trampled are somehow now in charge. For in the final analysis, the fairness of conservatives is built upon the vain attempt to recapture a freedom that is not only based on the oppression of others but was never designed to transcend its subordination to the state.

Notes.

1. Among others, Kanye West, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock visited the new president. Trumps later decision to commute the sentences of Alice Marie Johnson and other prisoners was influenced by reality TV star Kim Kardashian, and Trump has helped create new celebrities such as his fans Diamond and Silk.

2. Arlie Hochschild,Strangers in Their Own Land, New Press: New York, 2016.

3. Werner Bonefeld, Notes on Anti-Semitism,Common Sense, Issue 21, 1997, pp. 60-76.

4. Greg Grandin,The End of The Myth, Metropolitan Books: New York, 2019.

5. Nicholas De Genova,The Borders of Europe, Duke University Press: Durham, 2017.

6. James Madison, Federalist No. 10, in James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John JayThe Federalist Papers, Penguin Classics: New York, 1987.

7. William McKinley, Decision on the Philippines,Digital History, accessed August 17, 2020,https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1257.

8. Richard Hofstadter,The American Political Tradition, Vintage Books Edition: New York, 1989.

This essay originally appeared in the Brooklyn Rail.

Read more from the original source:

Trump, the American Dream and the Frontier - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch