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The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Harry Marks
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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I have been enjoying vacation with family. Sorry for the neglect and delay, but, well, you know . . .
Robert Tulip wrote:The suggested counterfactual that greater investment in black education would have delivered higher economic growth in South Africa assumes that this education could have occurred in a context of relatively weak governance systems.
I really don't see what you are saying here. There was nothing blocking the White power structure from educating the Black citizens during the apartheid era. Some effort was made, but its inadequacy was well known and well accepted. There have been considerable improvements under the ANC. Again, schools are not rocket science.
Robert Tulip wrote:South Africa was the richest and best run country in Africa because of the presence of its 5 million whites, but “domestic issues” (code for government corruption and incompetence under the ANC) have seen it lose that mantle of Africa's biggest economy behind Nigeria and Egypt
Those were not statistics on which you can rely. Since exchange rates are used to compare currency values, rather than Purchasing Power Parity adjustments, the apparent value of the economy depends directly on investor confidence. That says useful things about an economy, but comparing size or productivity is not its most helpful use.
Robert Tulip wrote:To say that this slide, including the steady depreciation of the rand, could have been averted by investment in public education is like saying you can move a string by pushing on it. The ideology of primary education as a first order development priority needs to be set in the context of the prior importance of good governance.
The statistics are very consistent. Education has a very high rate of return, with social return being considerably higher than private return. Education is helpful with terrible governance, even though it is more helpful with good governance. And governance has little to do with the effect of education on choices about family size.
Robert Tulip wrote:The main factors having to do with race that affect economic growth in Africa are summed up in the political risk perception of investors.
I would agree with this. African bad governance rarely even rises to the level of the manipulative "crony capitalism" of SE Asia. Where power is about violence and income is about power, the institutions are likely to be actively hostile to foreign investment.
Robert Tulip wrote:This map of political risk has obvious racial correlations.
Ascribing the effects of culture to race has a long history of silliness and pathology. Whenever you are tempted to blame genetic differences, remind yourself that the temptation says more about you than it does about reality. African culture is not as advanced as Asian or European. This has far more to do with geography, history and geopolitical policies than with any genetic differences which may be present.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: It is a little strange to expect effective African institutions to emerge suddenly in a decade or two after independence, or to cling to the notion that self-governance is simply impossible.
When you look at the naïve optimism for African development from the 1960s, it is very clear that false political assumptions overrode expert advice. There was a broad failure by decision makers to appreciate the depth of institutional weakness in terms of capacity for effective regulation. Insistence on unfactual claims which are more congenial to prevailing political culture is a recipe for failure.
Well, that is pretty vague. Experts often get it wrong when approaching very foreign places: look at Western analysis of China in the 30s to 50s when Nationalists struggled against Communists, or at Western predictions and prescriptions for Russia after the end of the Soviet Union.

African institutions have struggled to deal with commodity dependence, outside arms and high population growth rates. They are hardly in the clear as of yet. But international development assistance has targeted incentives for institutional development and the results are pretty good. If policies of the rich countries do not actively inhibit them, we will see an average of good results over the next 20 years.
Robert Tulip wrote:My view is that countries that demonstrate serious failure of governance should lose the right to sovereignty.
Always good to hear from the fringe. Note the temptation to interpret this as: "countries who expropriate the investments of my group should be taken over by my group." One big reason why we don't proceed this way is that outsiders are usually even worse. For all of its advantages over other colonial systems, the British Empire was still a source of regress more than of progress.

Evolve a competent and constructive system for implementing governance by outsiders and there will probably be takers, but also probably some mechanism would be added for ultimate accountability to the people served. After all, the basic idea of a bureaucracy is that it can be run on the basis of professionalism, with only occasional interventions to maintain accountability to the public.
Robert Tulip wrote:But when you compare Africa to Asia, looking at countries that had similar poverty levels seventy years ago, the main different factor behind Asia's success is human capital.
Asia has achieved middle and even high income status due to cultural values which promote human capital formation.
I would agree with this as well, at least if you are willing to grant important status to related factors such as the lack of valuable mineral resources in Asia, which removed the temptation to take a zero-sum approach to governance, and ethnic unity (sometimes cited as Botswana's big advantage).
Robert Tulip wrote:This core role of cultural values, for example in entrepreneurial risk, investment in skills and support for rule of law, illustrates themes which cause Trump supporters to react to political correctness with repugnance.
Considering the general inability of Trump supporters to recognize his contempt for rule of law and his Third World approach to public accountability, as well as their proud embrace of ignorance, I would say it is likely something else is going on, along the lines of tribalism.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:But to simply give up before development has a real chance to be tried is quite foolish and, yes, racist.
Realist, not racist. The best way to improve African values and wealth would be to appoint international military governments in failed states, with a mandate to use the resources of the country for national development, remove kleptocrats and cancel democracy for several decades in order to smash the patronage system.
Time for a check on those meds, if you ask me. Among the many problems with this is the notion that democracy can only function in the absence of patronage. You might want to look up rotten boroughs, Andrew Jackson, and Boss Tweed for examples. Then there is the problem of who enforces the "mandate to use the resources for national development." Would that be Trump? In which case one asks, for which nation?
And finally there is the problem that democracy takes root when people take ownership of it. I have had the privilege of watching the institutions of democracy flexing their muscles here in West Africa, and frankly it is impressive. Outside intervention has been part of that, and I find myself wondering for how much longer the U.S. will be considered committed to the rule of law and to institutions of accountability and human rights.
Robert Tulip wrote:Anti-racism has been tried extensively, and has become a sort of dogma within green elites, expressed by anti-racists as a loathing of western civilization.
Sounds to me like any ideas you disagree with get lumped into "anti-racism".
Robert Tulip wrote:The key factor behind much of the sentiment driving voter choice in the Presidential election turned on attitudes of respect for America’s heritage.
Well, Trump is certainly the first president in a long time to respect the KKK part of America's heritage. Preferring myths to facts is also part of that heritage, but it takes monumental ignorance to assert that such preferences made America great. Of course there are some who think of Joseph McCarthy, Father Coughlin, and D. W. Griffith as representatives of American greatness, but most of us recognize that it is the passing of such hate-mongers that have allowed America to stand honestly for freedom.
Robert Tulip wrote:Anti-racism seeks to overcome the guilt of white power and status and wealth by expressing disrespect for America’s heritage, to subvert and undermine the traditional culture which Trump argues made America great.
You label "disrespect" the effort to achieve a culture whose morality and justice matches its affluence and technical skill. I would guess that is a common interpretation, but it does not make sense to me. I don't understand how more rule of law undermines rule of law. I don't understand how further protecting free speech subverts constitutional protections. The whole accusation rings false to me. Maybe I just don't know the right anti-racists.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: Second, Black majority rule in Africa, which is simple justice, is not part of the picture in the U.S. where less than 20 percent of the population is African-American.
It is not “simple justice” to defend a failed experiment. The relevance of Africa to American politics is that Trump voters, as I read it, see liberal politics in monolithic terms. Part of the monolith that they reject is the cultural relativist idea that cultures with a worse track record are just as good as America. An attitude of cultural superiority is not the same as racism, since people in other cultures are always at liberty to adopt superior values, without demeaning their race or disrespecting their own identity and cultural heritage.
But who is to say there is an issue of cultural superiority? Multiculturalism accepts that people can choose their own culture just because it is their own, and we do not use some abstract test of virility to decide who gets to lord it over whom. The soft power of persuasiveness is already part of American culture, and much of its persuasiveness comes from the history of choosing whatever is persuasive, resulting in cultural blending. I think it was George Will who observed in the 80s that Russia had Gary Kasparov and America had the Pointer Sisters, and both have some soft power appeal. Americans have always been able to pick and choose, and have not generally cared whose ways they were adopting.
Robert Tulip wrote:The problem of racism is that it asserts that it is impossible for the allegedly inferior race to change. That false racist assertion is what in logic is called a genetic fallacy. But the reason Trump is not racist is that he is calling for the deadbeat cultures to junk their failed values and become like America as a beacon of hope and prosperity to the world.
That is not my reading of Trump at all. From his proposals to carpet-bomb Syria as a strategy against ISIS to his promises to renegotiate the major trade deals of the 90s, his theme has been that we are the strongest and richest so we don't have to accept anything we don't feel good about.

The leadership America has exerted in the world since the late 70s has been by example and by international agreement. Conservatives have sometimes led that effort and other times undermined it, but until Trump they at least understood how leadership works. His approach is that of a real estate deal-maker. It may look impressive because there is a building with your name on it, but it takes no responsibility for the community in which it sits. That kind of fragmented, dog-eat-dog approach to international affairs has never reflected well on its leading powers.
Robert Tulip wrote:Comparing white conservatives with Robert Mugabe is the sort of exaggeration that brings liberal demonisers into disrepute.
Well, actually, there is some basis for it. Exploiting tribal rivalry to cover failure? Check. Blaming others for economic failures caused by own bad policy? Check. Inability to compare rhetorical claims to realized outcomes? Check. Appeal to antagonistic fear-mongering as a substitute for responsible policy-making? Check. Political over-reach based on temporary ascendancy (often a pre-cursor to tyrannical usurpation of rights)? Check.

Republicans dropped government intervention in agriculture when they came to majority in 1994, only to have to re-instate subsidies on a more costly and less successful basis within two years. They have opposed action on climate change, including the policies now supported (at least on paper) by Exxon-Mobil. They promised term limits, but dropped that promise like a hot potato after it was their term they would be limiting. They pushed privatization of Social Security until the stock market crashes of the '00s made it obvious that the idea was foolish gambling with people's retirement. They seriously reduced regulation of banks, generating the largest recession since the 30s, opposed rescuing the U.S. auto industry, opposed providing stimulus to end the recession more quickly, including money to allow states to keep teachers and police officers, opposed providing health care coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, and predicted runaway inflation when the Fed used the pitiful stimulus of Quantitative Easing. If there is any significant issue they have gotten right, I am unaware of it.

After correcting for the relative advancement of the society in which they operate, I would say they are remarkably similar in wrong-headedness.
Robert Tulip wrote: I think the USA should have waited until after Cuba held a democratic election before offering support, but Obama’s decision was a testament to his anti-racist credentials and ideology.
There has been no support offered. The end of the embargo is no more than was done thirty years ago with other "tyrant states" including China and the USSR. Somehow trying to squeeze this into a mould of "anti-racism" is beyond ridiculous.
Robert Tulip wrote:There is no question that the conformity and momentum of industrial civilization causes massive problems and stress which can be avoided in a small island. But I don’t think that siren song of 'stop the world I want to get off' makes sense when you consider it seriously, since the lack of political freedom should be recognised as a fundamental problem preventing a whole range of other freedoms.
I was not arguing for "the simple life." It is frequently observed that the former Communist countries have a high standard of living compared to their GDP per capita. This is due to two factors: communism holds down production, due to lack of incentives, but communism makes better use of the resources available for alleviating human suffering. Needs get met and life is therefore relieved of much anguish and strife. People can focus on the family and friends which are the reliable and effective sources of human happiness.
Robert Tulip wrote:Linking all this back to the thread topic, Rural White America has a much better connection, compared to the urban elites, to these basic intuitions about politics and society that Trump is responding to. So it is far from a "cop out" to say that we need to understand Rural White America, it is an important corrective to the group think of urban society with its ideological sympathies to failed policies.
Well, I am willing to grant that they have a better grasp on what makes small-town America tick. But the idea that America's future or its basic values can best be understood from that framework is a non-starter. It is like the passengers rejecting the arrogant attitude of the pilot that pilots know more about flying an airplane (perhaps you have seen that cartoon going around the internet) and voting to put one of their own in charge.
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Harry Marks
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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It's a good article, and I tend to agree with the specifics and the evidence. Just not the conclusion.

Yes, sure, racism made the crucial difference, and there is a tremendous amount of "othering" of non-white voters among Tea Party Trumpistas. I have seen it and heard it - I am not just responding to some liberal party line.

But, once again, a number of things can be seen to have made the crucial difference - it was a really close election. It is certainly not a myth that Rust Belt workers are angry and afraid because of the effects of trade. It has been well documented, and may have gotten a lot of attention because it actually matches facts (unlike the narrative that says this is "our country" belonging to Whites with some special privilege.) The fact that Bernie Sanders benefited from it as well as Trump also makes it a particularly interesting phenomenon. And it is quite true that close votes in Rust Belt states turned a popular vote loss into an electoral vote win [edit from "gain"]. So "look over here at the racism and stop looking at the problem of working class jobs" is just more propaganda.

It is both/and, not either/or.

A couple of observations. One is that Republican personalities tend to prefer both narratives of threat and narratives of ethnic conflict. This seems to be very close to hard-wired. If it isn't the Russians it will be the Mexican rapists, and if not them, then it will be the Syrian terrorist Skittles. On that end of the spectrum, that is what politics and government is for: to oppose "them" and thus defend "us."

Racism will therefore continue to arise and be passed on, and we may more easily hold it at bay by reducing sources of threat (such as job loss) than by trying to educate it away. To paraphrase the quote on which the title of the article is based, "It's the economy, stupid".

The second observation, which I have made before, is that the Clinton/Reich wing of the Democratic Party has not yet found a compelling narrative with which to oppose populist critiques. They argue that they are embracing the future and being realistic, and that makes a lot of sense, but it still looks pretty scary to folks whose communities are devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs. The Sanders wing has a villain, (Wall Street,) but the Clinton wing will forever be seen as close to Wall Street, with nothing more substantial than Dodd-Frank to show for resistance to down-sizing, off-shoring and tax-inverting.

I wish I could say I know what they should say, but frankly I don't. I don't see Bernie Sanders as a stronger candidate, but it may be that a less frankly-socialist candidate like Al Franken could mine the same vein with better results.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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http://www.booktalk.org/post159771.html#p159771

Harry, thank you for your detailed comments on Africa, which certainly gave me pause for thought on the problems of racism and Donald Trump. I think it is useful to discuss attitudes to Africa in the context of Trump’s alleged racism, as many of the misguided views about how Africa can escape from poverty have a continuity with distorted views about Trump and his supporters.

The bottom line should be that the cultural relativism central to critiques of Trump fails as a moral compass, due to an inability to provide clear and simple guidance about what is good or bad. In the end your arguments did not shake my view that if I was an American I would have voted for Trump. He has superior strategic principles, can shake up the political and economic debates in a more contestable way, is less hypocritical than the Democrats and is more likely to build a strong growing America, which is in the best interests of the world.
Harry Marks wrote: There was nothing blocking the White power structure from educating the Black citizens during the apartheid era. Some effort was made, but its inadequacy was well known and well accepted. There have been considerable improvements under the ANC. Again, schools are not rocket science.
The main things blocking the apartheid regime from educating blacks included its pervasive boorish racist stupidity, pig-headedness, spite and fear. It is perfectly possible to critique the historical failures of white racism without just assuming those same errors are at play today in simple terms. A more visionary outlook on how to reconcile and integrate South Africa before Mandela could have done much to reduce black suffering under white racism, and to reduce the trauma and division and missed chances that racism has caused. Unfortunately the boers retreated to the laager because their critics attacked them with such hostile contempt, closing out such visionary leadership as shown by Mandela’s support for the springboks. While it is true that relationships can provide better security than walls, there is the argument that good fences make good neighbours, and that relationships are harder to build and create bigger short term risks than barriers.

The best way for people to advance is by respecting and copying people who are the most capable. The difficulty is that the most capable people often develop stereotypes of superiority and inferiority, prejudging the ability of people to overcome expectations. That attitude congeals into racism. Its converse, the denial of any cultural superiority, produces the ideology of anti-racism, the relativist idea that no culture is better or worse than another.
Harry Marks wrote: Ascribing the effects of culture to race has a long history of silliness and pathology. Whenever you are tempted to blame genetic differences, remind yourself that the temptation says more about you than it does about reality. African culture is not as advanced as Asian or European. This has far more to do with geography, history and geopolitical policies than with any genetic differences which may be present.
Everyone should accept your genetic point here, just on ethical grounds since racial generalisation is so damaging, but we still have the major problems of geographical difference in productivity that you lump under the term “culture”.

Cultural attitudes form around individual and group identity. Around practices such as planning, management and maintenance, different cultures vary wildly in their performance standards. A few years ago we had a booktalk.org discussion of Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, a controversial book which argues that European domination is due to geography. His anthropology is presented in ways that his critics widely see as racist. For example, it can easily be seen as racist to make the geographical observation that northern European culture evolved a focus on annual planning in order to survive harsh winters, while tropical societies have less need for planning because their climate is more fecund and stable. Racists have used this geographical determinism as a variant on the resource curse seen as the product of cultural evolution.

The situation now is that countries such as the USA wish to copy the most successful societies. That this means copying European values of competitive excellence more than African values should not be condemned as racist.
Harry Marks wrote: Experts often get it wrong when approaching very foreign places: look at Western analysis of China in the 30s to 50s when Nationalists struggled against Communists, or at Western predictions and prescriptions for Russia after the end of the Soviet Union.
Yes, with China, the West tried to save them from the communist tyrants, but Mao, the worst mass murderer in world history, took power from the barrel of the gun and killed seventy million people, double Hitler’s toll, while massively destroying China’s traditional cultures in a pathological and traumatic series of unpredictable evil purges of the four olds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds In the similar circumstances of Korea and Vietnam, the USA saved South Korea, while North Korea and all of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were lost to the stagnant poverty and corrupt oppression of communism. After 1989 people hoped that Russia was advanced enough to escape from its cultural backwardness, but unfortunately this has not proven possible to date.

These issues are about western efforts to promote advanced trends and oppose backward trends. Trump has shown mixed pragmatic views, promoting advanced democratic culture in Taiwan but backward autocratic culture in Russia, based on his assessment of American interests.
Harry Marks wrote:
African institutions have struggled to deal with commodity dependence, outside arms and high population growth rates. They are hardly in the clear as of yet. But international development assistance has targeted incentives for institutional development and the results are pretty good. If policies of the rich countries do not actively inhibit them, we will see an average of good results over the next 20 years.
You primarily blame poverty on factors outside of the control of African communities. Such a fatalistic approach can divert attention from the factors which they can change, which are primarily about social values.

Do you really think aid has been successful? I don’t. Aid has been infested by ideological error, around misguided charitable concepts of poverty reduction, for which Trump’s attitudes should prove a welcome corrective.

My reading is that the most successful aid project in history, primarily responsible for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, was Singapore’s export of its capitalist regulatory systems to China. This occurred in response to the request from Chairman Deng to Mr Lee for help in implementing his principle that to get rich is glorious. I wish African countries had similar visionary leadership. Trump is more aligned to those principles of respect for prosperity than Clinton is. Africa’s problems are more domestic than foreign.

It is not correct to list commodity dependence, outside arms and population growth rate as primary development issues. These are secondary causes of poverty, compared to the primary constraints of lack of human capital, bad governance and cultural acceptance of corruption rather than rule of law.

I explained some of my views on this broad topic of commodity economics in Africa in a book review published in the journal Mineral Economics of the book One Thing Leads to Another, looking at how commodity dependence can provide opportunities for up and down stream activity. http://link.springer.com/article/10.100 ... 013-0029-1 It is not commodity dependence but the weak governance systems associated with mining that entrenches poverty.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:My view is that countries that demonstrate serious failure of governance should lose the right to sovereignty.
Always good to hear from the fringe.
Ha ha. Remember Trump and Farage are fringe by that standard. Sorry to see your support for ‘rights’ of failed states like the CAR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_A ... since_2003 is a depressing read about the results of this broadly accepted “right” to sovereignty, not that Trump is likely to do anything about such hellholes as the CAR other than point to them as a cautionary moral example.
Harry Marks wrote:Note the temptation to interpret this as: "countries who expropriate the investments of my group should be taken over by my group."
Are you defending the right to steal? Language about expropriating the expropriators is a cynical resentful stupid and harmful communist ideology, producing basket cases rather than serious countries. Attracting investment is the basis of prosperity. If the White Russians had defeated the Bolshevik insanity back in the 1920s much of this communist nonsense of theft as the path to riches might have been avoided, but unfortunately people had to work through the failings of socialism to see the dangers of expropriation.
Harry Marks wrote: One big reason why we don't proceed this way is that outsiders are usually even worse. For all of its advantages over other colonial systems, the British Empire was still a source of regress more than of progress.
It is wrong to cite the errors of the nineteenth century as reason to prevent action in the present. That negative comment about Britain as regressive is wrong. Your comment could be read as saying that because there were problems of racist oppression a long time ago, we should now hold to a romantic vision of Africa as having suffered under the wicked heel of the dastardly Brits who are never to be trusted. Trump voters regard similar self-loathing “regress” comments from the Clinton camp as dubious. The British and French could have done much more for Africa, but to some extent they did introduce railways, roads, printing, electricity, banking, rule of law, democracy and industrial products to the world, and remain far advanced on these basic measures of infrastructure and governance.
Harry Marks wrote: Evolve a competent and constructive system for implementing governance by outsiders and there will probably be takers, but also probably some mechanism would be added for ultimate accountability to the people served. After all, the basic idea of a bureaucracy is that it can be run on the basis of professionalism, with only occasional interventions to maintain accountability to the public.
The need for such independent governance of failed states seems to me more likely to emerge as a result of the tough-minded attitudes of Donald Trump than from the political spin and deception of the Obama/Clinton camp. The challenges of transparent accountability in poor countries are immense, and the absence of scrutiny provides the fertile soil where corruption flourishes. Bureaucratic incentives that reward accountability confront cultural norms of laziness, venality, indifference and secrecy. This cultural problem of corruption plays into the US political debate on size of government, since a non-intrusive state finds it hard to build effective systems for monitoring and evaluation. A risk with Trump is that he will evaluate by spin.
Harry Marks wrote:
lack of valuable mineral resources in Asia removed the temptation to take a zero-sum approach to governance
The type of rent-seeking that enables the resource curse in Africa is a major risk in US politics, given the scale of spoils available to the victors and the weak systems to minimise corporate ownership of politics. I am not convinced that the Republicans are any worse than the Democrats on this broad cultural issue of governance standards.
Harry Marks wrote: Considering the general inability of Trump supporters to recognize his contempt for rule of law and his Third World approach to public accountability, as well as their proud embrace of ignorance, I would say it is likely something else is going on, along the lines of tribalism.
Cultural divisions in the USA are tribal, and your language here looks like a tribal exaggeration. The fact that Trump thinks Clinton should be in jail is completely different from efforts to corrupt the judiciary to actually put her in jail contrary to law. But critics of Trump cite his remark at the debate as indicating contempt for rule of law.
Harry Marks wrote: who enforces the "mandate to use the resources for national development." Would that be Trump? In which case one asks, for which nation?
It is sad that such cynical distrust and suspicion has become such an automatic assumption in relation to mining, based on how experience of piratical exploitation, environmental destruction and tax evasion has wrecked the reputation of the mining industry.

I would like to see the development debate shift to questions such as how we can sustain economic growth through reliable commodity supply, based on promoting mining. That would make it in the commercial interest of mining companies to ensure good governance. That is an objective that despite all the cynicism needs to centrally involve the Exxons and big miners like BHP, so Tillerson’s appointment presents opportunities to shift the conversation in productive ways.

Social licence to operate and corporate reputation are central to political risk insurance in the resources industry, making the effective commercial management of resource use a topic that can produce effective results. I quite like the work of the Natural Resource Governance Institute on this topic of development incentives for resource governance.
Harry Marks wrote:
democracy takes root when people take ownership of it. I have had the privilege of watching the institutions of democracy flexing their muscles here in West Africa, and frankly it is impressive. Outside intervention has been part of that, and I find myself wondering for how much longer the U.S. will be considered committed to the rule of law and to institutions of accountability and human rights.
Having read accounts of state failure in Sierra Leone, Niger, Nigeria, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and other African nations, for example in the book The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, it is interesting to see your positive views on civil society in a region widely seen as failing. http://www.atlasandboots.com/16-failing-states/ shows that much of Africa has no effective state institutions.

Despite Trump’s tilt to Putin and the questions about Trump University, I still have the impression that the principle of rule of law will remain fundamental to Republican politics in the Trumposphere. Unfortunately, the concept of human rights has been compromised by the political debate on which rights have priority, such as between liberty and equality. To say an excessive focus on equality could produce worse results seems a fair argument, for example see https://www.libertarianism.org/publicat ... erspective
Harry Marks wrote: Sounds to me like any ideas you disagree with get lumped into "anti-racism".
Far from it. I am using ‘anti-racism’ as a label for the dominant moral framework of liberal politics which perceives conservative attitudes as incorrigibly prejudiced. Anti-racism as practiced in political debate involves decrying conservative views as racist regardless of evidence.
Harry Marks wrote:
Trump is certainly the first president in a long time to respect the KKK part of America's heritage. Preferring myths to facts is also part of that heritage, but it takes monumental ignorance to assert that such preferences made America great. Of course there are some who think of Joseph McCarthy, Father Coughlin, and D. W. Griffith as representatives of American greatness, but most of us recognize that it is the passing of such hate-mongers that have allowed America to stand honestly for freedom.
That is an exaggerated partisan distortion. Duke supported Trump, but Trump has not supported Duke. Unlike the anti-Semitic Coughlin, Trump strongly supports Israel. Throwback slavers like Griffith are not relevant.

As for McCarthyism, that is a very complex topic raising a context of American history where a communist fifth column was seeking to subvert American values. Sure, some of the alarm was excessive, but it has to be placed in context of the big sweep of history, and the fact that McCarthy’s basic anti-communist intuitions involved a sound rejection of tyranny.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Anti-racism seeks to overcome the guilt of white power and status and wealth by expressing disrespect for America’s heritage, to subvert and undermine the traditional culture which Trump argues made America great.
You label "disrespect" the effort to achieve a culture whose morality and justice matches its affluence and technical skill. I would guess that is a common interpretation, but it does not make sense to me. I don't understand how more rule of law undermines rule of law. I don't understand how further protecting free speech subverts constitutional protections. The whole accusation rings false to me. Maybe I just don't know the right anti-racists.
Thanks Harry, I think your comments here get to the nub of understanding the problem of racism in politics. I have been thinking about these problems against the religious framework of the teaching of Jesus that the last will be first in the kingdom of god, something which aligns closely to your vision of a culture whose morality and justice matches its affluence and technical skill.

It is often said that the morality of a society is revealed by how it treats its weakest and most marginal members. See sample quotes at http://www.topix.com/forum/city/caruthe ... EAJ1BP1QS6

The problem I see in this paradox of ‘the last will be first’ is how it engages with moral incentives for competition and cooperation. Just saying be nicer is not a way to improve the world. The central problem as I see it is that a more competitive society will be richer, providing high incentives for productivity and achievement, and the fruits of competition will provide even more resources to help those who are genuinely in need. By comparison, a more cooperative society which lacks ruthless standards of technical skill will be less productive and will generate less ability to sustain help for the poor.

That is the key to why I support Trump rather than Clinton, that despite the seemingly heartless dystopia and inequality of a dog eat dog world, such harsh competitive values actually generate sustained abundance and creative innovation, and over time provide more ability to help those at the margins than a more compassionate and egalitarian ideology.
Harry Marks wrote: who is to say there is an issue of cultural superiority? Multiculturalism accepts that people can choose their own culture just because it is their own, and we do not use some abstract test of virility to decide who gets to lord it over whom. The soft power of persuasiveness is already part of American culture, and much of its persuasiveness comes from the history of choosing whatever is persuasive, resulting in cultural blending. I think it was George Will who observed in the 80s that Russia had Gary Kasparov and America had the Pointer Sisters, and both have some soft power appeal. Americans have always been able to pick and choose, and have not generally cared whose ways they were adopting.
Listening to a recent interview of Garry Kasparov by Sam Harris it was interesting to hear Kasparov express support for the Gulf War, based on the value of opposition to tyranny and his sense that Saddam Hussein was like Vladimir Putin.

We in Australia have a vigorous debate about multiculturalism, including about the related topics of assimilation and integration of migrants and minorities into the dominant mainstream culture, with reference especially to problems of indigenous culture and Islamic culture, and the free speech right to offend those who you disagree with. The core problem is the tolerance of intolerance, seen particularly in the intolerant attitudes of terrorists, but also in the intolerant attitudes of white racists.

Part of America’s persuasiveness includes attitudes that do not tolerate failure, and I think Donald Trump picks up on that with his apprentice values.
Harry Marks wrote:
The leadership America has exerted in the world since the late 70s has been by example and by international agreement. Conservatives have sometimes led that effort and other times undermined it, but until Trump they at least understood how leadership works. His approach is that of a real estate deal-maker. It may look impressive because there is a building with your name on it, but it takes no responsibility for the community in which it sits. That kind of fragmented, dog-eat-dog approach to international affairs has never reflected well on its leading powers.
It is like you are comparing Trump’s imperial Pax Americana with the divide and rule methods of the ancient Pax Romana. I frankly think it is ridiculous to imply that property developers who convert run down slums into vibrant communities are irresponsible. Urban development is the core of prosperity, with massive spill-over benefits to those at the social margins.
Harry Marks wrote: Exploiting tribal rivalry to cover failure? Check. Blaming others for economic failures caused by own bad policy? Check. Inability to compare rhetorical claims to realized outcomes? Check. Appeal to antagonistic fear-mongering as a substitute for responsible policy-making? Check. Political over-reach based on temporary ascendancy (often a pre-cursor to tyrannical usurpation of rights)? Check.
I do not think the USA is at risk of tyranny in the short term, although perhaps it would have been if Clinton had won, given the seething fury of Trump voters towards the culture of political correctness. A Trump Presidency offers some potential to lance that boil, even if the long term fascist risks remain strong.

My long term view of history is that the USA is on the same trajectory as ancient Rome, with the causal structure revealed by events 2150 years apart, meaning the American situation now is like the late Roman Republic in the second century BC, with civil war and shift to overt military empire on the horizon over the next century. But I do not think the USA will establish a formal world empire, since unlike ancient Rome it faces strong constraints from the global power and influence of other nations.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Harry Marks wrote:
It is certainly not a myth that Rust Belt workers are angry and afraid because of the effects of trade. It has been well documented, and may have gotten a lot of attention because it actually matches facts (unlike the narrative that says this is "our country" belonging to Whites with some special privilege.) The fact that Bernie Sanders benefited from it as well as Trump also makes it a particularly interesting phenomenon. And it is quite true that close votes in Rust Belt states turned a popular vote loss into an electoral vote win [edit from "gain"]. So "look over here at the racism and stop looking at the problem of working class jobs" is just more propaganda.

It is both/and, not either/or.
This ignores racism rather than explains it or refutes it. Sanders benefited from the dissatisfaction? What of it? How does one go from voting for Sanders to voting for Trump unless one has a HUGE racial blindspot? Or do you think Sanders would approve of someone telling him that she's going to vote for Trump now that he--Bernie--is out? The mentality of "I don't care how bad life becomes for minorities as long as Donald brings me a job" certainly smacks of racism to me and some such thought had to cross the mind of a Trump-voter and they didn't care and if such a thought didn't cross their minds, it should have. That's dangerous enough but then it goes from not caring what happens to minorities to blaming them for one's own unemployment, the situation becomes volatile.
A couple of observations. One is that Republican personalities tend to prefer both narratives of threat and narratives of ethnic conflict. This seems to be very close to hard-wired. If it isn't the Russians it will be the Mexican rapists, and if not them, then it will be the Syrian terrorist Skittles. On that end of the spectrum, that is what politics and government is for: to oppose "them" and thus defend "us."
And that end of the spectrum is now in power. Am I supposed to feel good?
Racism will therefore continue to arise and be passed on, and we may more easily hold it at bay by reducing sources of threat (such as job loss) than by trying to educate it away. To paraphrase the quote on which the title of the article is based, "It's the economy, stupid".
I would much rather try to educate it away. There will ALWAYS be job loss. I don't care how good times are, there will always be rustbelt whites out of jobs because of the nature of the types of jobs they seek. So that means the racism never goes away, its always right up there and it's cost this nation enough already. It is not the economy and never has been. The economy is not a substitute for racism.
The second observation, which I have made before, is that the Clinton/Reich wing of the Democratic Party has not yet found a compelling narrative with which to oppose populist critiques. They argue that they are embracing the future and being realistic, and that makes a lot of sense, but it still looks pretty scary to folks whose communities are devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs. The Sanders wing has a villain, (Wall Street,) but the Clinton wing will forever be seen as close to Wall Street, with nothing more substantial than Dodd-Frank to show for resistance to down-sizing, off-shoring and tax-inverting.
Populism works on a certain type of people--those who want to blame others for their lack of status. It is not the case that Clinton can't win them over because she represents Wall Street; she can't win them over because she is an educated woman. Populists want a MAN to get up on that soapbox and tell them who the enemy is. Trump understood that much. Even now his team is saying that America finally has a "real man" in the White House:

http://crooksandliars.com/2016/12/trump ... ampaign=im

Not a gay, little, milquetoast pussy like Obama and not a woman--a REAL MAN! That's the only type of leader populists can respect and, of course, it goes without saying that that man must be white and preferably Christian who wants to go back to the way things were when straight, god-fearing whites in this country had everything. That's what Hillary Clinton represents to them--the change they HATE. The bitch who refused to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen telling our womenfolk that they should go to college and have careers and stand up to their men--that FOUL bitch!! Trump does it right--women are for giving us men babies (preferably male children) and being our playthings like at the local titty bar. Women with degrees, careers, education, thoughts, leadership skills--have no place in the the rustbelt workers' world--they are alien and un-American and need to burn in hell.
I wish I could say I know what they should say, but frankly I don't. I don't see Bernie Sanders as a stronger candidate, but it may be that a less frankly-socialist candidate like Al Franken could mine the same vein with better results.
Donald Trump had no more votes than Romney or McCain. There is no mystery to why he won. Non-whites and younger whites who turned out en masse for Obama simply didn't turn out for Clinton. If they had, she would have won easily. At this point, the system is totally broken and I don't see it being fixed anytime soon. It will take many years to fix everything Trump fucks up and that's assuming no more idiots like him get elected and I see no hope of preventing that either. I had faith in the younger generations at one time but now I see how hopelessly stupid and clueless they are. They can't and won't fix anything.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Just a comment on Guns, Germs, and Steel. If Diamond has critics accusing him of racism, they are misreading him. It would be more logical to see an anti-racism theme in his exposition of the crucial role played by the distribution of easily domesticated plants and animals, as well as of physical geographical barriers. It was not any innate differential in smarts that gave the Europeans their head start against the rest of the world. I don't recall Diamond making the simplified geographical determinism argument that Robert alludes to: that northern climates encouraged industry, while southern ones tended to favor indolence. That, I think, is from a earlier era.

It may be that some have faulted Diamond for not making racism a primary driver of European conquests. But even if the author can be held accountable for an omission, it hardly makes him a racist.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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DB Roy wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: So "look over here at the racism and stop looking at the problem of working class jobs" is just more propaganda. It is both/and, not either/or.
This ignores racism rather than explains it or refutes it. Sanders benefited from the dissatisfaction? What of it? How does one go from voting for Sanders to voting for Trump unless one has a HUGE racial blindspot? Or do you think Sanders would approve of someone telling him that she's going to vote for Trump now that he--Bernie--is out? The mentality of "I don't care how bad life becomes for minorities as long as Donald brings me a job" certainly smacks of racism to me and some such thought had to cross the mind of a Trump-voter and they didn't care and if such a thought didn't cross their minds, it should have.

I'm glad you put it that way, because that is my view of the main forces in operation. Huge ("HUGE") racial blindspots. A very different reaction to the statement "Black people have gotten more than they deserve" than to "Ordinary people have gotten more than they deserve." Interpretation of "Black lives matter" as "White lives don't matter." Aggressive defensiveness triggered by anything drawing attention to past White abuse. This is very similar to the mindset which looks at $30 Billion of U.S. aid (a fifth of it each going to Israel and Afghanistan) and estimates it to be "about 25 percent of the Federal Budget". Ignorance distorting facts into a narrative with themselves as some kind of victim. I am certainly not for ignoring the racism, or somehow coming to terms with it. But, like poverty, it is complex and needs to be both kept in perspective and attacked indirectly as well as directly.
DB Roy wrote:That's dangerous enough but then it goes from not caring what happens to minorities to blaming them for one's own unemployment, the situation becomes volatile.
We know from history that racial resentments can be exploited in times of deep economic distress and entrenched frustration with leadership. I assure you that there are large swaths of the Rust Belt in which NAFTA and immigration from Mexico are blamed for their troubles. I doubt if many people in these communities know or care that NAFTA has turned net immigration negative, with more returning to Mexico than immigrating from there. They want someone from outside their group to blame, and "elites" who passed free trade agreements will do just as well as "Mexicans."

Volatile? I would say so, although the economy in the U.S. is so close to being back to normalcy that I am not so afraid anymore. Of course, now the damage has been done and I am afraid of the administration instead of the economy.
DB Roy wrote:
A couple of observations. One is that Republican personalities tend to prefer both narratives of threat and narratives of ethnic conflict. This seems to be very close to hard-wired. If it isn't the Russians it will be the Mexican rapists, and if not them, then it will be the Syrian terrorist Skittles. On that end of the spectrum, that is what politics and government is for: to oppose "them" and thus defend "us."
And that end of the spectrum is now in power. Am I supposed to feel good?
By no means. I don't wear a safety pin (I live in West Africa) but I do recognize the danger. Jeff Sessions is as much of a threat as Trump himself. What I meant to point out is that keeping the kettle off the boil by looking after the economy has to be a priority for anyone concerned about ethnic conflict.
DB Roy wrote:
Racism will therefore continue to arise and be passed on, and we may more easily hold it at bay by reducing sources of threat (such as job loss) than by trying to educate it away. To paraphrase the quote on which the title of the article is based, "It's the economy, stupid".
I would much rather try to educate it away. There will ALWAYS be job loss. I don't care how good times are, there will always be rustbelt whites out of jobs because of the nature of the types of jobs they seek. So that means the racism never goes away, its always right up there and it's cost this nation enough already. It is not the economy and never has been. The economy is not a substitute for racism.
Well, again, it's both/and. The education process has made great strides, and college educated young people these days tend to have a very clear sense of where the difficulties are and how the systems work without awareness. On the other hand, awareness of racism, sexism and homophobia becomes one more class issue, with non-college educated Whites thinking that "liberals have no common sense" and telling themselves stories, at church, bar and filling station, of how conservatives are victimized.

So I conclude that looking after economic stress is a vital part of getting people over the divisions, and taking the venom out of those stories of victimization.
DB Roy wrote:Populism works on a certain type of people--those who want to blame others for their lack of status. It is not the case that Clinton can't win them over because she represents Wall Street; she can't win them over because she is an educated woman. Populists want a MAN to get up on that soapbox and tell them who the enemy is.
I hate to admit it but I think that is very insightful. Again, it is very much about perceptions, but people who couldn't afford college or couldn't bring themselves to make passing grades are very likely to agree with any characterization of a successful, powerful woman as corrupt, playing a rigged game, out of touch with the realities of combat, etc, etc, etc.

I suspect that if Biden had been able to approach the process with Clinton's determination, he would have won. We will never know, of course. But he is less associated with free trade and his wife has made a real difference on vocational education policy. And he isn't an uppity woman, standing for all of the threats out there to the male ego.
DB Roy wrote: That's the only type of leader populists can respect and, of course, it goes without saying that that man must be white and preferably Christian who wants to go back to the way things were when straight, god-fearing whites in this country had everything. That's what Hillary Clinton represents to them--the change they HATE. The bitch who refused to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen telling our womenfolk that they should go to college and have careers and stand up to their men
There has been some interesting work done by Fred Clark, whose "Slacktivist" blog runs on Patheos Progressive Christianity, on the intertwinement between Evangelical Christianity and White Supremacy. From what I have seen of it, he doesn't do enough with the male ego issue (I am not an authority on Fred Clark, and may be missing major counterexamples) but he has an interesting take on the way abortion was seized on and built into a litmus test about the time that Jim Crow was taken off the table as a barrier to Evangelicals getting involved in politics. Obviously gay rights has been a godsend (so to speak) to the Religious Right in terms of giving them an enemy to use in reinforcing their parishioners' sense of self-righteousness and victimhood. The Bathroom Bill approach has been the latest re-incarnation of this spectre.
DB Roy wrote:It will take many years to fix everything Trump fucks up and that's assuming no more idiots like him get elected and I see no hope of preventing that either.
It's a serious issue. The damage done by Reagan has not been undone yet - the trajectory of policy which reinforced inequality increases was primarily determined in his first term.
On the other hand, facts have a way of undermining a good fraud. The hawkish wing on foreign policy came into the Reagan years arguing that communism had to be confronted with unique vehemence because it could never change and the lock-in would be irreversible if any country "fell" to it. The realist forecasts on the deficit turned out to be correct and the Supply Side fiction shown to be fantasy, and the imposition of budget discipline led to a very helpful decrease in the military budget (at least, as a proportion of GDP) when the Cold War ended.

And. . . Obama won. I have read cynical disparagement of "arc of history" Democrats, but hey! Obergefell. A woman received a popular vote majority of over 2 million. Exxon-Mobil claims to support a carbon tax, and the Koch Brothers' skeptical study to de-bunk climate change turned out to endorse it. There are reasons to hope.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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note - edited for clarity.
DWill wrote:Just a comment on Guns, Germs, and Steel. If Diamond has critics accusing him of racism, they are misreading him. It would be more logical to see an anti-racism theme in his exposition of the crucial role played by the distribution of easily domesticated plants and animals, as well as of physical geographical barriers.
While I am not sure of the wisdom of continuing to try to poke this bear, I do wish to make some more comments about Jared Diamond, since the debate about his work illustrates the sensitivities around race. I don’t think anyone accuses him of promoting racism. People do think though that there is an implicit racism embedded in the environmental determinism of Guns, Germs and Steel, somewhat like the ideas that President Jefferson expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia. This is discussed at the wikipedia page on environmental determinism.

It is not always easy to see where racism precisely enters the picture in the way that circumstances provide more or less opportunities for different people. To some extent these opportunities correlate with racial identity, but that is properly seen as a result of historical oppression and cultural patterns rather than innate difference. The caution always in such material is that scientific research could be used by people with nefarious motives. That is why Diamond is at such pains to explain his opposition to any racist use of his observations about why Europe conquered the world.

How this all plays into the Trump Presidency arises in relation to the intense advocacy of moral relativism by his opponents. Trump's supporters are calling time on the logical implication of cultural relativism that we cannot say one society is any better or worse than another. So when President Obama refuses to condemn radical Islamic terrorism, there is a sense that the US is fighting this war with one hand tied behind its back, denying the military the power to name its opponent.
DWill wrote: It was not any innate differential in smarts that gave the Europeans their head start against the rest of the world.
Sure. And neither is there an innate differential in smarts that gives the child of brilliant parents a head start. It is difficult with such material to differentiate between what we find politically desirable and what is scientifically based. Just because people find conclusions offensive or harmful is not a basis to assert that those conclusions are untrue.
DWill wrote:I don't recall Diamond making the simplified geographical determinism argument that Robert alludes to: that northern climates encouraged industry, while southern ones tended to favor indolence. That, I think, is from a earlier era.
Yes, the wiki link above cites President Jefferson and Adolf Hitler as sources. It is clearly an appalling racist idea. Hitler at http://carolynyeager.net/why-we-are-ant ... C3%A4uhaus said “in the northern part of the world, men were forced to fight for their existence, for things which were, in the smiling South, available without work, and in abundance. The North forced men to further activity – production of clothes, building of abodes. He created a principle, the principle of work.”
There appears to be a logical link from such racist ideas to the Holocaust. That is why people see the recrudescence of these racial beliefs in Trump so disturbing. The fear in such material is that people find it so hard to discern the difference between what is true and what they want to be true.
DWill wrote: It may be that some have faulted Diamond for not making racism a primary driver of European conquests. But even if the author can be held accountable for an omission, it hardly makes him a racist.
The wiki linked above provides extensive discussion of Diamond, saying he sparked a revival in the theory that climate and terrain largely determined human activity and psychology. Seeing how such eugenic ideas were used persuasively by Hitler illustrates that any discussion of it is playing with fire.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Robert Tulip wrote:While I am not sure of the wisdom of continuing to try to poke this bear, I do wish to make some more comments about Jared Diamond, since the debate about his work illustrates the sensitivities around race. I don’t think anyone accuses him of promoting racism. People do think though that there is an implicit racism embedded in the environmental determinism of Guns, Germs and Steel, somewhat like the ideas that President Jefferson expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia. This is discussed at the wikipedia page on environmental determinism.
It must be that since Diamond does say that certain large groups fared better than others, and since it has seemed possible to roughly categorize the winners and losers by race, he is said to be implicitly racist. But just saying some did better than others economically and militarily should not be, but apparently is, a sensitive matter. The race connection itself is bogus, as is the whole concept of race as providing meaningful distinctions apart from some physical features. It was interesting in the current Bryson book to see a theory that a huge volcanic blast in Sumatra 74,000 years ago might have reduced the human population to 30,000 or so. If that happened it could account for the lack of genetic diversity in today's humans.
It is not always easy to see where racism precisely enters the picture in the way that circumstances provide more or less opportunities for different people. To some extent these opportunities correlate with racial identity, but that is properly seen as a result of historical oppression and cultural patterns rather than innate difference. The caution always in such material is that scientific research could be used by people with nefarious motives. That is why Diamond is at such pains to explain his opposition to any racist use of his observations about why Europe conquered the world.
The only place in Diamond's book where I saw racism, though it was of an odd sort, was in the introduction where he says New Guineans have evolved to be smarter that people who do not face such challenges in eking out their livings.
How this all plays into the Trump Presidency arises in relation to the intense advocacy of moral relativism by his opponents. Trump's supporters are calling time on the logical implication of cultural relativism that we cannot say one society is any better or worse than another. So when President Obama refuses to condemn radical Islamic terrorism, there is a sense that the US is fighting this war with one hand tied behind its back, denying the military the power to name its opponent.
Boy is there a lot of moral relativism in getting cozy with Putin's Russia. But I have never seen a Trump supporter make the argument you say his supporters are making. If someone has, it's not any major strand in Trump's support. He won because he was not a normal politician, he promised to bring back manufacturing jobs, he stoked racial and ethnic animosities, he pledged to get tough with our enemies, and he was not Hillary Clinton.

That "can't fight the enemy if we don't name it" charge is rather mindlessly repeated over here. What have we been doing with major wars in Muslim countries and many hundreds of drone strikes, if not fighting extremist enemies? We've identified them quite well. What the most hawkish would like is a holy war, along with its rhetoric. President Obama has rightly refused to declare ideological war against Islamic extremism. To do so would increase the recruitment power of the extremists. When Christian individuals or groups have conducted terrorism in the U.S. no one has clamored to label them "Christian extremists."
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote: It was not any innate differential in smarts that gave the Europeans their head start against the rest of the world.
Sure. And neither is there an innate differential in smarts that gives the child of brilliant parents a head start. It is difficult with such material to differentiate between what we find politically desirable and what is scientifically based. Just because people find conclusions offensive or harmful is not a basis to assert that those conclusions are untrue.
I agree with that last sentence. If you're saying, however, that science has found a connection between race and intelligence that we should not be afraid to acknowledge, I question that.
The wiki linked above provides extensive discussion of Diamond, saying he sparked a revival in the theory that climate and terrain largely determined human activity and psychology. Seeing how such eugenic ideas were used persuasively by Hitler illustrates that any discussion of it is playing with fire.
But again, I see no basis for calling Diamond's ideas eugenic. That is merely misconstruing him.
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Re: The Cop-Out That We Need To Understand Rural, White America

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Robert Tulip wrote: The bottom line should be that the cultural relativism central to critiques of Trump fails as a moral compass, due to an inability to provide clear and simple guidance about what is good or bad.
Apologies for taking so long to resume this discussion. I wrote a response more than a week ago, then lost it due to my clumsiness with the Booktalk setup.

I don't think the critique of Trump that often gets called "political correctness" is about cultural relativism. I know that a lot of Tea Party types are convinced they have to stop immigration from Latin America for racist reasons, but they have no justification for thinking that immigrants do not assimilate into American culture. All the evidence says that they do. Even when there are structural impediments, such as unwillingness by the White economic power structure to hire minorities for decent work, the assimilation happens. If anything, Trump is deficient as a leader precisely because he prefers to limit and oppose the things that make American (and European) society worth emulating.
Robert Tulip wrote:The main things blocking the apartheid regime from educating blacks included its pervasive boorish racist stupidity, pig-headedness, spite and fear.
Well said.
Robert Tulip wrote:Unfortunately the boers retreated to the laager because their critics attacked them with such hostile contempt, closing out such visionary leadership as shown by Mandela’s support for the springboks.
Blaming it on outside contempt is evasive. I expect the dynamics were complex, including some of the same resistance to the English that Ireland felt, and some of the strange resistance to self-criticism that deep Calvinism seems to generate. They had a good point that outsiders did not understand the situation and were hypocritical on moral issues, but they should have realized the cost that would be incurred by becoming a culture of "baas"-es.
Robert Tulip wrote:While it is true that relationships can provide better security than walls, there is the argument that good fences make good neighbours, and that relationships are harder to build and create bigger short term risks than barriers.
Short-term and long-term. Pretty well sums up the nature of the issues.
Robert Tulip wrote:That attitude congeals into racism. Its converse, the denial of any cultural superiority, produces the ideology of anti-racism, the relativist idea that no culture is better or worse than another.
The problem of comparing cultures is not mainly the one of getting our ideals wrong by refusing to acknowledge superiority, it is insisting on comparing an entire bundle of cultural characteristics as a package. Anyone who thinks America's use of the imperial system of weights and measures is "superior" because America's GDP per capita is higher has a screw loose.
Robert Tulip wrote:Cultural attitudes form around individual and group identity. Around practices such as planning, management and maintenance, different cultures vary wildly in their performance standards. A few years ago we had a booktalk.org discussion of Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, a controversial book which argues that European domination is due to geography.
And I would add luck, since the Americas are more remote from Asia than from Europe. I like Diamond's argument. He convinced me that at least he was discussing important relevant factors.
Robert Tulip wrote: it can easily be seen as racist to make the geographical observation that northern European culture evolved a focus on annual planning in order to survive harsh winters, while tropical societies have less need for planning because their climate is more fecund and stable.
To argue that this difference has created an insurmountable gap would be kind of racist, but I find the straightforward speculation to be somewhat appealing. I don't think it is even presented in Diamond, much less endorsed.
Robert Tulip wrote:massively destroying China’s traditional cultures in a pathological and traumatic series of unpredictable evil purges
I rather agree that Mao was a monster and communism a tragedy. However it should be kept in mind that the party overturned centuries of stultifying feudalism, a system which was paralyzing Chinese culture and oppressing the peasantry (a fifth to a quarter of humanity) mercilessly. We now know that the Nationalists were financed by drug lords (read "The Soong Dynasty" or Edward R. Slack (2001). Opium, State, and Society: China's Narco-Economy and the Guomindang, 1924–1937. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. p. 240. ISBN 0-8248-2361-3.) As often happens, a thoroughgoing system of violent exploitation will lead to intemperate responses.
Robert Tulip wrote: Racists have used this geographical determinism as a variant on the resource curse seen as the product of cultural evolution.
You primarily blame poverty on factors outside of the control of African communities. Such a fatalistic approach can divert attention from the factors which they can change, which are primarily about social values.
The response to the resource curse is something they can manage. It has not been a total disaster - funds from oil have indeed financed education and infrastructure in Nigeria. But on balance, it looks like damage. Among other things, the urgency of institutions which allow businesses to profit has been seriously compromised by the illusion of riches available to those raking off a percentage of mineral income.

High population growth is also something that can be managed internally. Elites in Africa still endorse the prevailing pro-natalist culture and resist the shift in the rest of the world to smaller families.

Guns are the main problem from the outside world these days (though trade policy could be more helpful. It has made a long journey of progress since 1980). I don't know the answer, but I don't see Putin or Trump interfering with arms sales out of concern for African institutions.
Robert Tulip wrote:Do you really think aid has been successful? I don’t. Aid has been infested by ideological error, around misguided charitable concepts of poverty reduction, for which Trump’s attitudes should prove a welcome corrective.
Charity has not been the problem with aid. The bulk of the failure and waste generated by aid has come in the form of two weaknesses: political motivation, particularly in the Cold War, which led to massive boondoggles and corruption; and tied aid in which governments really provide aid to their own corporations, as by buying earth-moving equipment and shipping it to some poor country as aid.

Actual targeting of poverty reduction has a pretty good history. It helped dramatically to raise education rates, especially for girls, and the knock-on effect of lower family size has been just as dramatic. Reductions in malnutrition-based disease have likewise been dramatic, leading to increases in education and productivity of the generation now in their 20s. The high private and social returns on education are a durable result known for 50 years.
Robert Tulip wrote:My reading is that the most successful aid project in history, primarily responsible for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, was Singapore’s export of its capitalist regulatory systems to China. This occurred in response to the request from Chairman Deng to Mr Lee for help in implementing his principle that to get rich is glorious.
I was not aware of Singapore's role, although I imagine the Party is much more willing to trust a benevolent dictator like Lee than an academic like, say, Jeffrey Sachs.

I do consider Deng Xiaoping to have been a genius at steering his reforms through the shoals of party politics. For the first 10 years of capitalism in China the private enterprises were "township enterprise", owned at least formally by townships (which typically have 100,000 citizens or more).

The Millenium Development Goals do indeed owe their success largely to China's progress, though I would not lay that entirely at Deng's door. For example, the trade push started by the George H.W. Bush administration and leading to the 1995 ratification of the Uruguay Round agreement has made a tremendous difference to China, especially after its accession to the WTO was negotiated. Deng helped put in place the one-child policy, which, while draconian, has made a huge difference to Chinese development. But he also helped to hold back secondary and post-secondary education, which only really surged 10 years after the end of his time as chairman.
Robert Tulip wrote:It is not correct to list commodity dependence, outside arms and population growth rate as primary development issues. These are secondary causes of poverty, compared to the primary constraints of lack of human capital, bad governance and cultural acceptance of corruption rather than rule of law.
It is pretty hard to rank those issues. Most economists would consider all of them (except maybe outside arms, even in Africa's case) to be pretty equal in importance. Countries have thrived with high levels of corruption and other poor governance, for example, but on balance it holds a country back significantly. Some countries have developed with education trailing behind income while others have gained income only after education was invested in. Still others, notably Sri Lanka and Kerala, have invested in education but other problems hostile to business have held back their development. The interactions are at least a little bit complex.
Robert Tulip wrote: It is not commodity dependence but the weak governance systems associated with mining that entrenches poverty.
That is the nature of the resource curse, in most analyses. (No one considers the Dutch Disease issue to be anything like insurmountable.) In a few countries which had strong institutions before they were major resource exporters, such as Norway, the UK, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands, the resources have been a pretty much unmitigated blessing.
Robert Tulip wrote:My view is that countries that demonstrate serious failure of governance should lose the right to sovereignty.
This is some people's interpretation of IMF conditionality. Honestly, international institutions cannot even agree to protect citizens from genocide and other gross violations of human rights. It will be many decades before they are able to put together institutions which will impose good government.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:Note the temptation to interpret this as: "countries who expropriate the investments of my group should be taken over by my group."
Are you defending the right to steal? Language about expropriating the expropriators is a cynical resentful stupid and harmful communist ideology, producing basket cases rather than serious countries.
In general I am not in favor of expropriation, though I think a good land reform can work wonders. Cuba's expropriation was probably a net plus for their economy, and it is sad that the Cold War context led to such a hostile response by the U.S. I am not generally in favor of the "right of first seizure" however, nor the notion that the first regime with legally registered claims is necessarily the rightful owner. It is an issue that might have been decided by the evolution of good international law and arbitration if not for the context of colonialism and the Cold War in which it mostly arose.
Robert Tulip wrote:Attracting investment is the basis of prosperity.
At least potentially, and on the whole, it has played a significantly positive role. I made this argument in the 70s and I was treated as some sort of Nixonian apologist for the Allende murder.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: One big reason why we don't proceed this way is that outsiders are usually even worse. For all of its advantages over other colonial systems, the British Empire was still a source of regress more than of progress.
It is wrong to cite the errors of the nineteenth century as reason to prevent action in the present. That negative comment about Britain as regressive is wrong. Your comment could be read as saying that because there were problems of racist oppression a long time ago, we should now hold to a romantic vision of Africa as having suffered under the wicked heel of the dastardly Brits who are never to be trusted.
Although I am not a true expert, I stand by my claim. While the British did a good job creating infrastructure and social institutions such as higher education and courts, they also actively held back industrial development in order to exploit markets, and set an enduring precedent that the central institutions run to facilitate the profits of the elite rather than to develop the life of the people.
Robert Tulip wrote:The British and French could have done much more for Africa, but to some extent they did introduce railways, roads, printing, electricity, banking, rule of law, democracy and industrial products to the world, and remain far advanced on these basic measures of infrastructure and governance.
The point is they should be compared to a baseline of what would have developed without the outside exploitation, such as the Philippines, Brazil or Thailand, rather than to the disasters made by other colonial powers such as Belgium or Portugal.
Robert Tulip wrote:The challenges of transparent accountability in poor countries are immense, and the absence of scrutiny provides the fertile soil where corruption flourishes. Bureaucratic incentives that reward accountability confront cultural norms of laziness, venality, indifference and secrecy.
Since at least 1993, the policy of leading development partners such as the U.S., Germany and the U.K. has been to link much assistance to institutional development. These days, democracy pays direct dividends. Institutional arrangements for accountability are also making substantial progress in most of Africa, and it is widely recognized that they benefit the whole society even if individuals lose some ability to rake off personal graft.

The new trend, building on the experience of Kenya's internal conflict after their elections, is to avoid "winner take all" government through various arrangements. When democracy becomes a dynamic process of building in responsiveness instead of a fight over who gets the meager spoils of minerals or aid, the country turns the corner and begins self-reinforcing development.
Robert Tulip wrote:This cultural problem of corruption plays into the US political debate on size of government, since a non-intrusive state finds it hard to build effective systems for monitoring and evaluation. A risk with Trump is that he will evaluate by spin.
I agree that the skepticism of government brought by the Reagan Revolution had some wisdom in it. However, the Tea Party and their boy Trump has turned it into ideology without facts. They listen to mindless rhetoric of the Rush Limbaugh pattern and have no check on whether it accords with reality.

Evaluation by spin was firmly in place by the time the Bush II administration came in and simply abdicated government responsibility across the board. FEMA, the SEC, the EPA, the NLRB and even the FDA were gutted in favor of corporate priorities. It was and remains a disaster.
Robert Tulip wrote:The fact that Trump thinks Clinton should be in jail is completely different from efforts to corrupt the judiciary to actually put her in jail contrary to law. But critics of Trump cite his remark at the debate as indicating contempt for rule of law.
Trump had already demonstrated his contempt for rule of law, buying off state Attorneys General over Trump U, implying that a judge could not be impartial to someone who was attacking their ethnicity, and notoriously exploiting weaknesses in the legal system to intimidate suppliers. The comment to Clinton simply continued his shameless approach of scoffing at orderly institutions in order to present himself as an outsider and champion of the uneducated.
Robert Tulip wrote:I would like to see the development debate shift to questions such as how we can sustain economic growth through reliable commodity supply, based on promoting mining. That would make it in the commercial interest of mining companies to ensure good governance. That is an objective that despite all the cynicism needs to centrally involve the Exxons and big miners like BHP, so Tillerson’s appointment presents opportunities to shift the conversation in productive ways.
I am trying to withhold judgement on the Tillerson nomination, but I have to say it doesn't look good. Maybe he can rise above his background, in the manner of Henry Paulson in the last Republican administration, but if Paulson is any indication he will still make the bulk of his day-to-day decisions with a corporatist bias.
Robert Tulip wrote:Social licence to operate and corporate reputation are central to political risk insurance in the resources industry, making the effective commercial management of resource use a topic that can produce effective results. I quite like the work of the Natural Resource Governance Institute on this topic of development incentives for resource governance.
I will look up the work of the Institute. It strikes me that political risk insurance is a great piece of leverage against corporate malfeasance of a certain type, but I am skeptical of their ever taking a truly responsible role in host country societies.
Robert Tulip wrote:Having read accounts of state failure in Sierra Leone, Niger, Nigeria, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and other African nations, for example in the book The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, it is interesting to see your positive views on civil society in a region widely seen as failing.
Even Sierra Leone is typically seen as having done a responsible if clumsy job with the ebola epidemic. The heroism of their medical personnel is an inspiration to other professionals in Africa. Civil society and basic government are indeed functioning, if not very well in many cases.

Some countries, such as Niger, CAR, Cameroon and Congo, are so far from effective institutions that no one expects much of them, but remember that even the USA is capable of massive "state failure" (on climate change, for example, and bank regulation). There are good prospects for Cote d'Ivoire and Nigeria, even though few are making big bets on it.
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