Slavery -or human trafficking, as it is called in the 20th and 21st centuries- is a present practice in contemporary Africa, as Nobel Laureate from Uganda Wole Soyinha explains in a recent Podcast about writing and African politics.
Any cursory consideration of historical and contemporary evidence shows that slavery and bondage are common practices amongst African and Middle Eastern nations.
Professor Thomas Sowell wrote and explained extensively about the role of African tribal leaders and practices in the slave trade.
Europeans rarely ventured into the Continent to capture and enslave Africans. Slaves were largely captured and sold in local markets by African warlords as a common practice documented since the 15th century -way before 1619 or 1776-.
Looking after current slavery in Africa we can find that there is an active and lucrative industry in many Subsaharan Africa countries, led by African human traffickers, fundamentalist terrorists and Middle East human traders:
"Uganda is a source and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Ugandan children are trafficked within the country, as well as to Canada, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia for forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. Karamojong women and children are sold in cattle markets or by intermediaries and forced into situations of domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, herding, and begging. Security companies in Kampala recruit Ugandans to serve as security guards in Iraq where, at times, their travel documents and pay have reportedly been withheld as a means to prevent their departure. These cases may constitute trafficking.[1]
Pakistani, Indian, and Chinese workers are reportedly trafficked to Uganda, and Indian networks traffic Indian children to the country for sexual exploitation. Children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (D.R.C.), Rwanda, and Burundi are trafficked to Uganda for agricultural labor and commercial sexual exploitation. Until August 2006, the terrorist rebel organization, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), abducted children and adults in northern Uganda to serve as soldiers, sex slaves, and porters. While no further abductions of Ugandan children have been reported, at least 300 additional people, mostly children, were abducted during the reporting period in the Central African Republic and the D.R.C.[1]"
Well before European traders came in, African kingdoms practiced slavery and bondage in open markets. During the Middle Ages, African-captured slaves were sold internally and exported through maritime and land routes.
These facts do not by any means make slavery less abhorrent. On the contrary, they show that rather than the "original sin" of a single country or race, this practice has been the shared shame of almost all countries and races, and also that Africa -the cradle of the Homo Sapiens species- has also been and continues to be the place where it's more prevalent.
Present-day human trafficking, bondage, and slavery explain why millions of desperate migrants try to reach countries where the practice has been abolished in search of not just better economic conditions but of basic human dignity and human rights.
Independent readers interested in this dramatic reality that flies in the face of political agendas on the Left and the Right will find these two lectures by 1984 Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinha highly educational:
And with regard to the US Founding Fathers, it might be also good to look at slavery from a historical instead of an anachronistic perspective based on contemporary politics:
A recent op-ed in the New York Times shows the enduring influence of James Madison -a Democrat- in modern times.
Madison's constitutional design sets limits not only to direct democracy (which has turned California into referendum-driven chaos for taxpaying residents and businesses) but also to big-spending, high-impact legislation such as Obamacare and now Built Back Better.
Madison's Republic combines the empowering of states (Electoral College) and SCOTUS with midterm elections -POTUS, COTUS- to check what he called "slim majorities" from overreaching and passing major legislation without bipartisan consensus.
Regardless of the merits of Obamacare and Build Back Better, they have been curtailed for lack of what Madison called a "fixed majority". In 1791, Madison explained that:
"Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.
As there are cases where the public opinion must be obeyed by the government; so there are cases, where not being fixed, it may be influenced by the government. This distinction, if kept in view, would prevent or decide many debates on the respect due from the government to the sentiments of the people." (For The National Gazette, 1791)
Biden's slim majority -likely to be reversed in the coming midterm elections like almost all the presidents since LBJ- doesn't meet Madison's requirement for major legislation -what we now call a "mandate" supported by a landslide majority such as those behind the New Deal and the Great Society structural legislation-.
Despite progressives' urge for rushing to pass BBB before they lose control of the Senate and House, the Madisonian rule is likely to prevail. If not, the fluctuating majority will block or modify its implementation.
And those are good news for the US economy and political stability. A house divided cannot stand unless it has checks and balances that force negotiation.
James Carville's anger after the Democrats' midterm beating channeled the feeling of the Democratic center almost as well as Lynn Cheney's anger at Trump's preposterous attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
Voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and Baltimore send a clear message of rejection to the Democrats' Far Left agenda. David Brooks summarized it in an opinion piece in the NYT alerting about the growing disconnect between the "woke" agenda pushed too far and too fast by the progressives and the priorities of a country that still is 73 % white and
center-right:
Washington Post's columnist Gary Abernathy's analysis of the causes of the Democratic defeats on the moderate liberal PBS Newshour and his debate with progressive Democrat columnist Jonathan Capehart captured the perspective of the middle America that pushed back against the Far Left agenda.
"For most voters, the 2020 election was not about policy promises. It was a referendum on Trump. To present an alternative palatable to the largest pool of voters, Democrats settled on their most inoffensive candidate. During the campaign, Biden promised support for parts of the far-left agenda, but voters understood he had to pay lip service to that wing. They didn’t elect Biden to do big, historic things. They elected him to restore a sense of calm."
So far, even the much-maligned "liberal media" was fast in reacting -although after the fact- and asking the current Democratic administration and COTUS leadership to correct course away from the Far Left agenda items that turn off critical constituencies -such as the "Farmers and Labor" that once were part of the official name of the Democratic Party in some states or other non-urban, non-college-educated segments of the 73% white voters majority-. Thus, the Fourth Power worked slowly but did work.
The other two controls over POTUS did work as well.
Much to the chagrin of conservatives in the Right and Far Right, Trump appointees to the Supreme Court decided against attempts by the Trumpist governor of Texas to circumvent Roe v. Wade and allow vigilantes to sue women who abort in the State.
COTUS also worked with remarkable effectiveness. Two moderate Democratic senators blocked the unpopular 3.5 trillion-dollar budget pushed by the progressives and six progressive representatives voted against the popular 1 trillion Infrastructure bill that finally passed with Republican votes in a bipartisan way as the voters who voted Trump out of office and Biden in wanted.
Both parties and their partisan media (Fox for the Republicans, CNN, and MSNBC for Democrats) claims that US democracy is dysfunctional are in part bogus. Parties are supposed to be dysfunctional and... partisan. That is part of a democracy, but the United States is first and foremost a Republic -as Benjamin Franklin famously explained in 1787- but voters and SCOTUS seem to know better and the constitutional institutions created by the Framers to control them demonstrated that checks and balances work.
As for POTUS, Donald Trump is no longer president and Joe Biden got a serious warning to turn to the center or become a lame duck.
The Economist also noticed another feature of the US constitutional system that works wisely to prevent parties from obtaining what Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci called "hegemony" - the eternal extremist dream-.
Parties that control the Executive tend to lose seats and control of COTUS during the midterms. The hurry to push critical legislation on a temporary partisan majority -brought as coattails by presidential elections- is contained precisely by midterms. President Obama learned that lesson the hard way with Obamacare. Republicans learned that SCOTUS is not COTUS shortly after when Bush-appointee Justice Roberts gave the deciding vote to prevent them from striking down Obamacare.
The fundamental institutions of the United States have been tested twice in the last two years and passed the test successfully: in 2020, when COTUS certified a legitimate election despite an insurrection promoted by a defeated President refusing to concede, and in 2021, by voters and COTUS preventing a partisan minority from exceeding its mandate-.
In his recent book Forward, former
presidential and New York majoral candidate Andrew M. Yang puts forward two promising
and concrete ideas: (1) open primaries and (2) ranked-choice voting.
Yang argues that these two
mechanisms might correct the current process of polarization by creating
positive stimulus for candidates to respond to the 51-61 percent of the electorate
that has moderate, pragmatic views instead of those who espouse fringe Far
Right or Far Left, unrealistic and dogmatic positions.
Both mechanisms have been proven
in Alaska, allowing an anti-Trump Republican moderate such as Senator Lisa Murkowski
to resist and survive reelection.
Ranked-choice elections in New
York also kept in check the Far Left candidacies that brought before the extreme
and disastrous tenure of Bill de Blasio.
Food for thought.
I, for one, will
read Yang’s book in the hope that moderation and common sense can find a way
back to where they should be since they represent a steady majority of the
American electorate.
In her book Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality, The Economist writer Helen Joyce presents a compelling study of what is behind the "non-binary" movement.
Joyce argues that while sex is a biological reality and gender a social convention, using surgery to change the former on behalf of the latter is not "liberating" but restricting future options. Joyce studied what is behind the extreme "sex-reassignment" hormonal treatments and surgery -especially in children-.
Rather than focusing on the "non-binary" versus "binary" false discussion -sexuality has a spectrum that determines that no person is 100 percent male or female and cross-dressing and homosexual sex and relationships have always been part of normal sexuality-, Joyce focuses on what she calls "transactivism" and the special interests behind its agenda. She explains:
"It is a story of
policy and institutional capture; of charitable foundations controlled by
billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying
behind the scenes for legal change. They have won over big political parties,
notably America’s Democrats, and big businesses, including tech giants.
They are backed,
too, by academics in gender studies, queer theory, and allied fields, and by the
pharmaceutical and health- care industries, which have woken up to the fortunes
to be made from ‘gender- affirmative’ medicine.
This powerful new
lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for.
And it serves their
interests very poorly. Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone
who does not support gender self-identification – which includes many post-operative transsexuals, who are under no illusion as to how much bodies matter.
It also ignores
other possible solutions to problems faced by trans people – research into the
causes and treatment of gender dysphoria, for instance, or adding unisex
facilities alongside single-sex ones. Its overreach is likely to provoke a
backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and
social acceptance.
When the general
public finally realizes what is being demanded, the blame may not land with the
activists, where it belongs."
Joyce explores the forces behind "transactivism" and the perils for minors and their parents of itas agenda and clarifies several concepts focusing on the consequences:
"This is a book
about an idea, one that seems simple but has far-reaching consequences.
The idea is that
people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they
declare, instead of their biology. It’s called gender self-identification, and
it is the central tenet of a fast-developing belief system that sees everyone
as possessing a gender identity that may or may not match the body in which it
is housed.
When there is a
mismatch, the person is ‘transgender’– trans for short – and it is the
identity, not the body, that should determine how everyone else sees and treats
them. The origins of this belief system date back almost a century, to when
doctors first sought to give physical form to the yearnings of a handful of
people who longed to change sex.
For decades such
‘transsexuals’ were few and far between, the concern of a handful of maverick
clinicians, who would provide hormones and surgeries to reshape their patients’
bodies to match their desires as closely as possible. Bureaucrats and
governments treated them as exceptions, to be accommodated in society with
varying degrees of competence and compassion. But since the turn of the
century, the exception has become the rule. National laws, company policies,
school curricula, medical protocols, academic research and media style guides
are being rewritten to privilege self- declared gender identity over biological
sex.
Roughly, sex is a
biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are
oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed.
In the simplistic
version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy,
gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable:
something like a sexed soul.
What is being
demanded is no longer flexibility, but a redefinition of what it means for
anyone to be a man or woman – a total rewrite of societal rules.
liberal, secular
society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually
contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on
everyone else.
Gender
self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label
is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a
member of the sex you proclaim. Since evolution has equipped humans with the
ability to recognize other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with
exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so
to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are
telling them."
Joyce explores and predicts several backlashes that transactivism is already generating in different areas such as:
Sports
"Their entire
purpose is to enable fair competition, since the physical differences between
the sexes give males an overwhelming athletic advantage, and competing
separately is the only way that exceptional females can get their due.
Allowing males to
identify as women for the purposes of entry to women’s competitions makes no
more sense than allowing heavyweights to box as flyweights, or able-bodied
athletes to enter the Paralympics, or adults to compete as under- eighteens.
And yet, under pressure from transactivists, almost every sporting authority
right up to the International Olympic Committee has moved to gender self-identification. The sight of stronger, heavier, faster males easily beating the
world’s best female athletes is sure to outrage deep-seated intuitions about
fair play – once it comes to wider notice. "
Pediatric Gender Surgery
"Until recently,
hardly any children presented at gender clinics, but in the past decade the
number has soared. Every one of the dozen or so studies of children with gender
dysphoria – discomfort and misery caused by one’s biological sex – has found
that most grow out of it, as long as they are supported in their gender
non-conformity and not encouraged in a cross-sex identification. Many of these
‘desisters’ are destined to grow up gay: there is copious evidence of a strong
link between early gender non-conformity and adult homosexuality.
But as gender clinics have come under activists’ sway, the treatment
they offer has taken an ideological turn. Instead of advising parents to watch
and wait with sympathy and kindness, they now work on the assumption that
childhood gender dysphoria destines someone to trans adulthood. They recommend
immediate ‘social transition’– a change of name, pronouns and presentation –
followed successively by drugs to block puberty, cross- sex hormones and
surgery, often while the patient is still in their teens. This treatment
pathway is a fast track to sexual dysfunction and sterility in adulthood."
The book also covers the negative impact this agenda has on women's rights and the cultural acceptance of alternatives such as bisexuality and homosexuality as not just lifelong but personal, private, and changing options.
Ancient societies such as Classical Greece had already achieved a better balance as any reader of Plato can verify. But Plato and the Great Books are temporarily (we hope) out of fashion, so Joyce's book is a very helpful alternative to distinguish between reason and nonsense.
Adam Smith could be considered an "invisible" Founding Father of the United States economic system. Although Smith never visited the British colonies that proclaimed their independence the same year he published The Wealth of Nations, the seeds of the system he described had already traveled with the early settlers in the form of entrepreneurial capitalism.
These are some interesting facts that Professor Miller points out:
During its first 100 years, in the period between 1801 (Jefferson) and 1901 (Theodore Roosevelt), the United States population grew from 7 to 77 million, and the territory quintupled to the West and South.
The first American factory was established by Moses Brown in 1789 using a water mill to power looms in Pawtucket Falls, Rhode Island. A few months later, they acquired a patent to use a 32-spin loom to expand. Facing problems with the new technology, they hired a British partner, Samuel Slater, who had worked with the system in Britain. The factory employed mostly women and children from what continued to be a rural community. Men kept working as farmers, and women and children earned extra income working in barns turned into factories. What would be called today illegal child labor was in fact a bonus for the new employees, who already toiled 70 hours a week in rural labor much harder and exacting to the body that working on looms inside the barns.
Hamilton was strongly in favor of the urban capitalistic model. Jefferson preferred the agrarian version of the part-time farm/factories, farmers/workers.
At the time "child labor" was normal, particularly in farming, where having as many children as possible was a competitive advantage over hiring (and paying for) hands outside the owning family,
The westward expansion between 1801 and 1901 went hand-in-hand with the entrepreneurial capitalist model embraced by all parties.
Business-financed channels and railroads connected the East Cost, NY transatlantic trade with the Great Lakes and prairie land beyond the Appalaches. \
The "invisible hand" of the growing markets and free enterprise created a century of prosperity and growth, making Adam Smith an "invisible" founding father.
A significant part of the relationship between the United States
and Latin America during the 20th century was defined by our relationship
with Cuba. What turned Cuba and the US into rivals was not the 1959 triumph of the young guerrilla men and women that
defeated and deposed the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, but instead
on December
2, 1961, when Fidel Castro declared his new government communist and turned
to an alliance with the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War. Until then, the
American press primarily portrayed Castro as a freedom fighter that would
deliver some form of liberal democracy after Batista.
From 1957 to 1961, the US and Cuba were, as during much of their previous history, a sort of quarrelous allies. And in 1959 friendship reached a high point. Castro put special care into befriending American media during his guerrilla campaign. US reporters interviewed Castro, Che Guevara, and
Camilo Cienfuegos several times in their Sierra Maestra quarters. The US and Fidel were undoubtedly
playing both ends of the nascent Cold War until the CIA fiasco of the Bay of Pigs
invasion in April 1961 signaled the final break with the US and the beginning of
a direct alliance with the USSR.
"Cuba,
An American History," by historian Ada Ferrer provides a long-view
perspective of the Cuba-US history. As an American citizen born in Cuba who has
continued to return to the island since she left it as a child, Ferrer combines
her personal experience with solid scholarship in terse prose to provide a
well-balanced portrait of the complex relations between Cuba and the United
States.
The result is
a picture of unusual clarity, precisely because Ferrer does not fudge
complexity and stick to historical facts. The book starts the history of Cuba
and the US with the first trip of the now vilified Christopher Columbus and
follows up to the times of Donald Trump. Ferrer's focus on the people's history
rather than the government's only shines light on the US and Cuba's critical
common ground and ideals rather than on the apparent confrontations. To do so,
it avoids the political narratives espoused and promoted by the rival
governments to focus on the actual relationships between Americans and Cubans
from 1959 to -almost- the present.
Ferrer shows how history repeats itself in both directions. How
American independence was supported and launched from Cuba (which controlled
Spanish Florida), secession and the slave trade, and how the Cuban flag and its
independence founders came from New York and New Jersey.
The book prologue provides a good example:
"Prologue: There and Here
"The connections between Cuba and the
United States stretch back over centuries and run in both directions. Few
Americans have likely considered the significance of Cuba for the United
States. During the American Revolution, Cubans raised funds in support of
Washington’s army, and soldiers from Cuba fought against the British in North
America and the Caribbean.
As the thirteen colonies lost access
to other British possessions, the Spanish colony of Cuba became a vital trading
partner. In fact, Havana’s storehouse of coveted silver currency helped finance
the new nation’s first central bank. Later, after Florida and Texas became
states of the Union in 1845, propertied southerners—and even some
northerners—looked to Cuba as a potential new slave state or two, as a way to
buttress the power of slavery and its economy.
In 1898, the United States intervened
militarily in Cuba and declared war on Spain. With that intervention, the
United States turned what had been a thirty-year movement for Cuban
independence into the conflict that history usually remembers as the
Spanish-American War.
The end of some four hundred years of
Spanish rule was ritually observed at noon on January 1, 1899, with the
synchronized lowering of every Spanish flag on the island. But the flag raised
in its place was not a Cuban flag but an American one. With that began a
full-fledged military occupation that ended four years later, only after Cuban
leaders, under enormous pressure, agreed to grant the US government the right
of intervention in Cuba. If the events of 1898 were fateful for Cuba, they also
helped produce two consequential developments in the United States: first, the
reconciliation of the white South and North after decades of disunion and,
second, the emergence of the United States as an imperial power on the world
stage.
For more than a century, the role of
the United States in Cuban independence has been the subject of disagreement— a
shared history viewed in radically divergent terms. Historically, American
statesmen have tended to view US intervention in 1898 as an illustration of
American benevolence. The United States had rallied to the cause of a
neighbor’s independence and declared war to achieve it. In this version of history,
Cuban independence was a gift of the Americans, and for that Cubans owed them a
debt of gratitude. In Cuba, however, 1898 represents something entirely
different: more theft than gift. There, 1898 was the moment when the United
States swept in at the end of a war the Cubans had already almost won, claimed
victory, and proceeded to rule over Cuba as a de facto colonial power. Cuba
Does Not Owe Its Independence to the United States read the title of an
important book published in Havana in 1950.
Alongside that American presumption
and Cuban resentment, however, existed dense networks of human contact forged
over decades by people of all kinds in both countries.
Cuba’s flag was designed and flown for
the first time by Cuban exiles in the United States.
The first pro-independence Cuban
newspaper was published in Philadelphia, and the first national novel was
written in New York.
Cuba’s most famous patriot and
writer, José Martí, spent more of his adult life in the United States than in
Cuba, and the largest memorial service for Cuba’s most important war hero,
Antonio Maceo, was held at Cooper Union in New York.
Cubans traveled to the United States
to study at Harvard and Tuskegee, to shop in Miami, to play baseball in the American
Negro Leagues, to escape dictators, and to view the famous falls at Niagara.
Americans traveled in the other
direction: to drink during Prohibition in the States, to buy land and cigars,
to convert people to Protestantism, to forge networks of Black solidarity, to
honeymoon and to fish, to hear jazz and get abortions.
Americans listened to Cuban music, and Cubans watched American movies.
Americans bought Cuban sugar; Cubans bought American appliances. Actually,
Cubans bought just about everything (except sugar) from the United States."
Then Fidel Castro came along for almost 50 years and Cuba-US relationships seemed to take a 180 turn at the political level. At the social level, relationships remained like those of a family divided by forced migration, with one-third of Cubans living in the United States -most barely 100 miles away in Florida- while the other two-thirds remained -willingly or not- in their home country. After reading Ferrer's book the concept of "home country" for Cubans becomes healthily extended.
The video at the beginning of this entry is worth watching in its entirety. Ferrer was interviewed in 2018, shortly after Barak Obama's trip to Cuba, and spoke candidly and presciently about its repercussions. At that time, the book we are discussing was still unpublished -Ferrer read the manuscript here and there-, and a well-informed American and Cuban audience made sharp and enriching questions and comments.
The book now includes Trump's four-year return to hostilities and Biden's more recent return to Obama's opening.
Cuban-American history is still in the making, but it is clear that it will not be long before returning to its traditional roots. Cubans will be freer, and Americans will discover more about their Southern cousins.
"Be careful with what you wish, because it can become true"
The fall of Kabul and the collapse of Afghanistan shows several of the unavoidable consequences of being a global power:
You can't "opt-out"
Safety can only be achieved through strength
You cannot negotiate with totalitarian extremists
You cannot "build" institutions for others
You must trust but verify
Powell Doctrine, Truman Doctrine, Monroe Doctrine, TR doctrine are all proven true
Blockades, permanent military occupation, and immigration control are the lesser of evils against evils
"Multinational government" doesn't work, economic globalization combined with strong military power and alliances does.
There is no shame in being a global power. There is shame in appeasement and self-blame
Ignorance is lethal. Pandering to ignorance and conspiracy theories must be criminalized.
I can expand later on all these 10 points, but they are self-explanatory.
Churchill, FDR, JFK, Thatcher, Truman, Reagan did the right thing in confronting all-out the enemies of the West.
The enemies of the West are also the enemies of the basic principles and freedoms that its foundations:
Rule of law
Division of Power
Checks and balances
Independent Judiciary, Monetary authority
Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948
Those 5 elements cannot be negotiated. They must be defended and imposed at any cost. There is no "pacific coexistence" with regimes or civilizations that don't share them.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand." Abraham Lincoln June 16, 1858
“The common and continual mischief's of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.”
History repeats, but not always as
a farce, as Marx had it. There seem to be secular themes in the US and other
countries that come back in rather dramatic ways.
160+ years ago, Abraham Lincoln warned
for the first time that “a house divided cannot stand.” That was the last, desperate warning before the Civil War that still reverberates in the North-South cultural
divide.
Back from a road trip across
seven states -Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida- I noticed
the differences between the world of the big cities and small-town America. I found most of those differences enriching and valuable. But also noticed how easily they could be exploited by populist politicians to sow divisions for political gain. The cemeteries and battle sites I found along the 1,300 miles of my trip reminded me that this happened before.
This time history repeats in dramatic
form. Almost one million Americans died during the 1861-1864 Civil War, and 608,000
have died already during the 2020-2021 COVID 19 pandemic that is still in course.
The final count might be very close, primarily because of the “house divided”
factor.
The current house is divided by
politics once again. This would not be news but for a dramatic, life-threatening
factor: vaccination rates.
Although Trump could take credit
for speeding the development of new vaccines, it must also take responsibility for encouraging
vaccine avoidance in the states that voted for him. County by county, the vaccination
map reproduces the 2020 election map. Unfortunately, the infection rates -90+percent
among non-vaccinated- also reflect the partisan divide. And that is a lethal
difference when the new Delta variant starts to spread in the United States.
I cannot avoid remembering George Washington’s warning against partisan factions. I already wrote about his
farewell speech, prescient of the Civil War. Back then, populist
politicians and politics turned the partisan division into a deadly war between
Americans. Now, once again, toxic populist politics -fanned by the speed and
reach of social media conspiracy theory networks- are exposing unnecessarily
millions of Americans to a deadly virus.
Lincoln’s advice stands even more
prescient than Washington’s. A house divided -half vaccinated and half not-
cannot stand in the war against a virus that can mutate and reinfect almost endlessly
unless checked by vaccination.
Hard as it is to believe in the
21st century and in the country that developed the vaccines against
the disease, the United States runs the risk of losing thousands of lives unnecessarily.
Blaming the Internet or Facebook
for vaccine avoidance deflects responsibility from those who should be criminally
accountable for spreading conspiracy theories, rumors, and false information. That
buck stops right at the table of former President Mr. Donald J. Trump, who
still could use his significant influence to encourage vaccination among his
followers. He seems so far too busy disputing the 2020 elections and
campaigning for a return in 2024.
The alternative is much less effective
and painful: a combination of fear of dying and the negative self-selection of
death will undoubtedly do the hatchet job.
Looking for a silver lining is
very difficult. Perhaps if there is a lesson to be learned -as it happened after
the Civil War- we can hope it will last for a couple of generations, which -as Ronald
Reagan said of freedom- will be that far from extinction.
In a first, unforced strategic error, the Biden administration reversed critical policies instituted by the Trump Administration to control immigrants' flow. The reversal not only was hurried but plagued with ambiguous messages such as "don't come... now".
The response was a colossal and predictable surge:
"U.S. Border Patrol agents made about 97,000 arrests of migrants crossing the border illegally in February, the highest monthly total since 2019 when there was also a surge in U.S.-bound migration. Record numbers of unaccompanied minors crossing the border have posed the greatest problem for U.S. immigration authorities."
Biden was forced to use a Trump-era COVID resolution to justify sending back thousands of unaccompanied minors illegally smuggled from Central America to the border and put VP Kamala Harris in charge of negotiating a temporary halt with Mexico and Central American governments.
Milton Friedman explained almost 50 years ago the fundamentals to think about immigration policies between underdeveloped neighbors and a high-income society with a large welfare state like the US.:
The current crisis proves Friedman right by way of the absurd. Opening the border to poorly defined "asylum-seekers" is the equivalent of inviting millions across the border to come to a Black Eye Friday sale.
The long view of the problem is clear: immigration can be managed much better only through an internal agreement between special interests represented by both Democrats and Republicans.
Extremist, simplistic fixes such as "building the wall" or "humanitarian asylum" not only don't solve the problem but exacerbate it.
Border control -as Biden has learned the hard way- is a first priority and necessity and top-rated demand in the border states exposed to uncontrolled inflows of migration managed and promoted by a mix of human traffickers, failed states, and political extremists.
For all his harmful and insulting rhetoric, Trump addressed that claim. Biden's reversal shows that moderates understand reality much better than extremists on both ends of the political spectrum. Immigration policy is neither an academic debate nor a campaign bumper sticker.
The welfare state party can do better to serve it by keeping control of the border before negotiating a true migratory reform that serves and prioritizes US stakeholders.
Like Sarah Palin in 2008, Donald Trump's populism has become a deadly boomerang for the old GOP.
Populist leaders and party rules and principles make odd and short-lived marriages.
Trump's 2016 narrow victory over an out-of-touch Hillary Clinton might have been grossly overstated as a sign of a trend towards conservatism and republican values.
Except for his tax cuts and deregulatory measures, Trump's nationalistic and protectionist policies fit better with Bernie Sanders' Left-wing democrats than with orthodox Milton Friedman-Ronald Reagan republicanism.
The underlying demographic trend shows a fast migratory transformation, explained in detail by Nate Silver.
Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and Texas are moving towards the Democratic party, as millions of college-educated Californians and Midwesterns move towards the Sunbelt states looking for lower taxes, affordable housing, and more efficient government.
Republicans' success in state government has attracted liberal voters that are already turning the tide towards a more progressive, minority-friendly type of politics than Trump's populist version of the Republican party.
Trump's three consecutive defeats between 2018 and 2020, losing control of the Senate and the White House are the price for extreme polarization and catering to a steady but not expandable segment of the traditional Republican electorate: white, non-college-educated voters in traditional protected industries.
If Trump keeps veering to the Far-Right his populist agenda and doesn't check his personalist impulses, he will put in jeopardy GOP governors and senators' tenure in the states that are turning demographically and culturally to more progressive politics. Such fracture would make possible a Harris 2024 presidency, in the same manner as Ross Perot helped Bill Clinton defeat Bush 41.
Future trends are clear for both traditional parties to be aware of: republicans must move back to the center to keep chances with a new, younger, better educated, and more diverse electorate moving to formerly "red" states. Democrats must take account of their slim 2020 victory in such states doing the same and moving away from Sanderism and the Gang of Four.
So far, both parties seem to be uncertain and in a process of internal divisions.
