Is liberalism dead? Not yet, but not feeling well.

"Liberalism created the conditions, and the tools, for the ascent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge to understand its own culpability."                            Deenen, P. (2016) Why Liberalism Failed (Politics and Culture)

After the unexpected victories of populism in the United States and Britain and its ascent in Europe and a good part of the developing world, some political scientists and many politicians have began to wonder if we are witnessing a deeper turn away from the global liberal order so hardly won after World War II.

Patrick Deenen's argues that the global expansion of a liberal order -based on democratic rule, free markets, free trade and universal rule of law (not to confuse with  "progressivism" as it's incorrectly done in US politics)- has actually exposed the limitations of the rationalistic and excessively optimistic premises of the liberal thought proposed by Emmanuel Kant, John Locke and Adam Smith -to mention the most consequential thinkers usually associated with our current liberal order and open societies-. 
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How we define Liberal in this article:

Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality.  Liberals generally they support ideas and programs such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free markets, civil rights, democratic societies, secular governments, gender equality and international cooperation. (More about it)

Looking at the traditional Dickinson's political spectrum (referred to US political tendencies) we can see that the characteristics of "liberal" -as defined in this article and in political sciences- are mostly coincidental with "Hybrid" and "Moderate" -something that few today associate with Trump's Republicans or Bernie Sanders' Democrats-

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The larger division between those benefited by the open world and society created by the globalization based on liberal values seems to be between highly educated "elites" able to work anywhere, multilingual and with a "cosmopolitan" sense of "world citizenship" and those left behind for lack of those same attributes, which are strongly correlated with wealth and affluence.

For those left to lead "local" lives tied to less open places, cultures, countries and labor opportunities, globalization seems to be the cause of steady deterioration in their income, standards of living and employment opportunities. For those that stay (or feel "left") behind, the face of globalization is the closing of local employers, outsourced jobs, stagnant incomes and immigrant inflows competing for fewer jobs and lower pay.

On those realities -as perceived by the "losers" in this game- nationalism, populism and xenophobic politics can and are thriving.

Deenen takes that point of view to warn that the liberal order as we know it might be unsustainable

"From that vantage, I hinted that such a political condition was ultimately untenable, and that the likely popular reaction to an increasingly oppressive liberal order might be forms of authoritarian illiberalism that would promise citizens power over those forces that no longer seemed under their control: government, economy, and the dissolution of social norms and unsettled ways of life. 

And it might provoke a swing towards the other extreme of the political spectrum, characterized as:

"The breakdown of family, community, and religious norms and institutions, especially among those benefiting least from liberalism’s advance, has not led liberalism’s discontents to seek a restoration of those norms. That would take effort and sacrifice in a culture that now diminishes the value of both. Rather, many now look to deploy the statist powers of liberalism against its own ruling class.Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance." 

The emergence of leaders like Donald Trump in US, Nigel Farage in Britain and the rest of EU populist parties (from Spain's Podemos and Catalonian nationalists to Syriza in Greece or the far Right nationalists in Northern Europe, France and Germany) show the relevance of Deenen's question.

In a similar line of discussion, Niall Ferguson debated Fareed Zakaria on the subject "Is the Liberal Order dead?", confronting Zakaria's liberal optimism with Ferguson's more skeptical vision of the "wisdom of the people" behind populist claims:

David Goodhart makes a similar analysis of the Brexit vote in Britain in his also thought-provoking book "The Road to Somewhere" showing similar forces behind the paradox of a slim majority voting for local reasons in a matter of national and regional impact:

I find both positions enormously thought-provoking and rich in insights about the origins of "cultural wars" that have been going on for centuries in both US and EU, and also lacking in balance.

The very idea of a "global order" should call us to some restraint. The current "global order" seems to me very different if we look at it from the viewpoint of longstanding, advanced republican systems such as US, UK, or NW Europe than if we look at it from the systems that emerged from the rubble after the collapse of the Soviet empire just 30 years ago. Most of the latter are still ruled by the same elites that ruled under communism, and to great extent -Putin's Russia being the model- with the same "rule of the leader" rather than rule of the law, in open contempt for any form of "liberal order". China and most authoritarian governments in Asia look no different.

How can a "global liberal order" exist when 70 to 80 percent of the countries and population still live under the rule of military, religious or elected dictators?

If we look at the Democracy Index elaborated by The Economist, we can see that only 4.5 % of the entire global population lives in a full democracy (dark blue). You may notice that US and UK are not at that level, precisely because of their populist revolts and their systems' swings during the last 20 years (think from Thatcher and Clinton to May and Trump).

If we limit Deenen's concept to US and UK -so far the cradles and champions of republican liberalism- we might be closer to a balanced argument.

US with Trump and UK with Brexit are certainly way off their traditional political boundaries, strongly tilted towards an unusually populist direction in their domestic and foreign policies.

In both cases, both experiments seem to be sinking fast in lack of direction, as it has been the case with populism in power in Latin America and Fascist Europe. Populist rage and hatred politics are highly flammable fuel, and as such, they have very little lasting power. 

Neither President Trump nor PM May seem to know what to do to keep the promises that got them elected save for kicking the can further or engaging in distraction tactics. Their "new order" seems less cohesive by the week and the "strong leaders" weaker at each turn, facing ever higher chances of being kicked out of office.

Once again, Kant rule applies: if all the countries in the world were to try nationalistic and populist policies (as it was in 1914, 1930 and 1939) what would the "world order" look like?

We know the response, but those who experienced the last "populist world order" are in their eighties or nineties. Or mostly within the 20 million dead in WWI and 70 million killed in WWII. 

But millions of  people, young and middle age living in US, UK and EU know it well today. 

They are -we are- the millions of Latin Americans, Eastern European, Asian and African immigrants that have experienced illiberal systems -all the gamut from elected populist dictatorship in "banana republics" to money-laundering kleptocracies and autocracies serving plutonium cocktails, using hungry dogs or antiaircraft cannons for firing dissidents- and came to the remaining liberal-ruled republics seeking for rule of law.

We certainly can compare the alternatives and know the consequences of illiberal governance.

Today's challenge seems to me to find a way out of the populist-nationalist trap before it starts to harm the economy or becomes belligerent again.

I comes to my memory what Ronald Reagan said in 1961 about this subject.

"Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction"    

Ronald Reagan 

Immigration Menu: "melting pot", "salad bowl" or "blood and soil"?

"America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” 

― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The debates about legal immigration, paths to citizenship and the status of millions of undocumented long term residents not born in the US territory has been part of the history of a country of immigrants.

Until 1924, when the first Act restricting and selecting immigration was implemented, immigrants from all over the world were actively encouraged to come and settle in the expanding territory of the United States. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed any resident in America, included free slaves, to put claim over 160 free acres of Federal Land. Ultimately 1.2 million claims were approved and 400,000 acres of federal land became property of residents.

That sounds like a far cry from the current DACA negotiations about protecting from illegality and deportation 800.000 young residents brought as children illegally to the US or the bargaining about building border walls, establishing "merit-based" quotas and prioritizing immigration by countries of origin (creating a new "shit hole" category for the unwanted).

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt advocated for the "melting pot" doctrine, under which all Americans must be willing to adopt and embrace the Constitution and laws of the country, abandoning all allegiances to their native cultures that might stand in the way. This for Roosevelt, included adopting a simple, non-hyphenated "American" identity.

TR was however, a self-declared "progressive" -in a time when that wasn't incompatible but even politically expedient and popular for a Republican running for office-. As immigration grew, so did  successive laws  restricting and selecting immigration -from the original free immigration stance of the Naturalization Act of 1790 to the present-

From the "give me your poor, huddle masses" poem written in the Statue of Liberty to reality there has been so many twists and turns as Charlie Chaplin -later himself an immigration case- immortalized in The Immigrant:

The "melting pot" doctrine remained, however, based as it was in the fact that the United States is a voluntary federation of preexisting independent states which retained a substantial part of their sovereignty and remains open to accommodate new members (from 14 to the current 50+Puerto Rico) based on the oath of loyalty to the law of the land, not ethnicity, religion, culture or country of origin. 

Not a minor feat for a 327 million people country that according to scholars includes 11 different cultural "nations" :

That is why the Naturalization Oath of Allegiance  ask those who was for American citizenship to renounce to any previous allegiance to any "foreign sovereignty" . After all, our first generation Americans -this country's Founding Fathers were citizens or subjects or foreign countries (8) and also of 13 different new colonies now turning into States (48). 

"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."

An emotional event that documentarist Alexandra Pelosi filmed in the 50 states:

Under the First Amendment, all people in the US (residents or visitors) are free to speak and practice their religion.

But becoming new US citizens carries also a duty, explicit in that public oath: they must put the US Constitution over any other law and obey the laws of the land regardless of their religious or personal beliefs. Hence, sharia law or any other religious practices remain private and not enforceable on anybody.

Traditionally, "melting pot" meant also learning and using English as a common language -something much easier now that the entire world has adopted English as the "common language of work and trade-.

Ethnic-nationalists on the Left (like La Raza o Black nationalists) or Islamic fundamentalists think otherwise, conceiving the US as a "salad  bowl" like the European Union. where "multiculturalism" means keeping separate cultures and norms, and even languages.

Some of them -like the Amish- choose to live in close communities and endogamy to preserve their traditions, others establish ethnic neighborhoods and ghettos.

The "salad bowl" doctrine has historically provoked backlashes, especially when jobs are hard to find. 

More recently, White nationalists and White Supremacists have pushed for a "blood and soil" criterion that puts "their" "America First". This means not just prioritizing Americans over immigrants, but those born over those naturalized and those "white" poor over "colored minorities".

The swings between these two un-American doctrines: multiculturalism and ethnic nationalism have been stronger since US elected its first Black president, succeeded by a president who ran in an white nationalist platform.

Both multiculturalism and ethnic nationalism share the concept of backward-looking  "identity politics' as opposed to our forward-looking Constitution and are one of the key sources of the current lack of civility:

Midterm elections invite populist politicians to play identity politics to shore their ethnic vote bases increasing the likelihood of "hang up parliaments" and gridlock.

Whichever way identity-based politics weigh in the coming elections, the result will be a more fractured and incivil civil society.

The civil way: make yourself an American

After all, this is a country of self-made people who can even chose (and often do) change their last names to start over again.

The problem with "salad bowls" is on plain sight with the ethnic riots in EU and US. "Blood and Soil" is a civil war solution that US and EU have tried with very well-known consequences. Starting a new one over the monuments of the previous is not a good idea.

Peter Schrag describes this paradox of immigrants against immigrants in his book "Not Fit for Society: Immigration and Nativism in America":

"Our contemporary immigration battles, and particularly the ideas and proposals of latter-day nativists and immigration restrictionists, resonate with the arguments of more than two centuries of that history. Often, as most of us should know, the immigrants who were demeaned by one generation were the parents and grandparents of the successes of the next generation." 

The "melting pot" metaphor may also be unrealistic: people are not alloys and cultures do not "melt" well in a few years. Becoming a non-hyphenated American is not automatic. It doesn't come with legal citizenship papers. It comes with an open, forward-looking attitude. Learning English and the country's ways. And time, a lifetime of self-building hard work.

The "melting pot" works better if we conceive it as it is: a slow, multi-generational process in which the first generation sacrifices its native language giving a big handicap in the labor market to help the next generation become fully and easily integrated.

Another way to understand how the immigration process has worked for the past 250 years in the United States, is by noticing that each one of the three alternatives is part of the process itself.

When immigrant arrive in large numbers when jobs declines (which tends to be always the case, since US economy drags or propels the rest of the world), the first reaction they provoke is "blood and soil" attacks on the newcomers. It happened with Irish, Germans, Chinese and Mexicans, on top of black slaves forced to live here. 

The second phase starts almost in parallel, with the newly arrived immigrants turning their lower-income neighborhoods and adoptive towns into multilingual "salad bowls" while they learn English to communicate with their neighbors and send their children to school. 

There, at school and at work starts the "melting pot" phase:  immigrant children and adults "melt" together with a long time of hard working, volunteering in wars and taking hard and dangerou

Finally,  those who went through the long process feel full-fledged, taxpaying Americans and start complaining about the next wave of illegal immigration.

There is no way around for first-generation immigrants. I'm one of them and we know that very well. We accepted the challenge when we applied and swore to play by the rules of the Constitution.

Members of each immigrant generation can become Americans by following a true and tried set of  civility rules: pull your own weight (and your family's), master English, drop the hyphen (hyphens are chains), practice real diversity by joining and share a culture different from your parents'.

And, over all: Don't take the  bait of either side of identity politics.

Standing up Against "Speech policing" : Lessons from George Orwell and Heberto Padilla

The closest my generation got to the great George Orwell must have been the great and unfortunately late Christopher Hutchins, who wrote precisely about the former explaining why going against "group thinking" is so important.

Hitchens and Orwell criticized with some of the most beautiful English prose I read the anomalies and hypocrisy of the Left. Here is a brief excerpt from Orwell's "1984" explaining "newspeak" (bold is mine):

"Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you [...] 

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”

Orwell charged against totalitarian control of the language back in the 1930s, when the Left (to which he belonged to the point of volunteering to defend Barcelona during the Civil War) was in full ascent, before the Moscow trials shredded the last vestiges of civility in the Bolshevik dictatorship.

Silencing dissenting voices was (and is) a lamentable characteristic of Left-wing incivility, one that is required for suppressing unpleasant facts.

I was young enough to witness one equivalent to the Moscow trials when Castro's dictatorship jailed and forced laureate poet Heberto Padilla to the humiliation of public apology for "crimes against the revolution" for his poetry. On top of being critical of the government (very midly, for our standards), Padilla was also homosexual, another condition that the Cuban regime treated as an "illness" (here an eerie parallel with our Christian Right) with internment camps and electroshock "cures".

I am old enough also, to witness the suppression of free speech and tolerated infringement of our First Amendment rights by Left wing campus organizations, as in the case of Charles Murray, a scholar whose work -which the protesters haven't read- was deemed "unfit" for a presentation in campus to the point of physical aggression to the liberal hosting professor.

This kind of uncivil behavior in campus is not only condoned by intimidated administrators that do not take stronger measures to guarantee the speakers' (and a majority of the students interested in listening to different ideas and points of view) but also by those Far Left web and press venues that justify and created the concept of "political correctness" and now extended it to its natural logical sequel, the institution of "free zones" where free speech is not tolerated on behalf of not hurting "beliefs" or racial, gender or sexual orientation "identities".

Gross infringements on freedom of speech like these come in two forms of uncivility: "hard" , suchs as mobbing and physically impeding free speech and "soft", with the institution of "speech policing" under "political correctness" rules (as defined by those in control of speech) and the most recent institution of "safe zones" where those claiming to be "harmed" by "hate speech" can demand free speech to be turned off.

A good discussion -and rejection- of these abuses is long overdue. They have turned upside down the function of higher education institutions -from safe places for dissent and argument to congregations of mutually intolerant sects and their dogmas.

Those in the moderate, classical liberal Left of the spectrum -as President Obama is widely considered to be (with the probable exception of the Alt and Far Right that equate him with Saul Alinsky) have spoken against "safe zones" and other forms of Left-wing incivility:

Yet, they seem not to be strong or convincing enough for some campuses administrators to act like the University of Chicago did, formulating explicit condemnation of incivil practices.

For those who defend "safe zones" as if college students were unable to survive a debate of ideas without suffering irreparable psychological harm, perhaps this commencement speech by Chief Justice John Roberts may give some healthy suggestions:

Few things are more mind-building that a stern practice on scholarly debate. That's what our universities and high schools have been teaching for more than a century:

Civility can't harm anybody. Or perhaps we should debate it?

Here is an example from Intelligence Squared debates about this topic:

References & Sources:

IQ2us
Orwell, G. Politics of the English language

Trump tries civility

(Click to see the full session)

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities."   Sir Winston Churchill

Today President Trump truly surprised their supporters and rivals with a new approach: civility. 

CNN cameras captured an almost one hour-long bipartisan meeting between POTUS and the Senate commitee leaders. As if to refute the recent revelations of Michael Wolff's book on the partisan dysfunctionality of the current White House, Trump conducted the meeting with... civility.  (Click to see the full session)

He asked questions, listened and responded courteously to the answers, cajoled, bargained and spoke against partisanship and Far Right-Far Left extremism with surprised Republican and Democrat senators.

Trump stakes on immigration are high, since his entire campaign and MAGA program was tied to his "build the wall" promise. 

Now "the wall" seems to be more reasonable and negotiable, and so is the promise of a "law of love" for the Dreamers.

In any case, the televised meeting might help the viewers understand first hand the ways Washington and a republic really work: by compromise and negotiation, with rules of civility.

That's the way Washington and the US government was designed by the Framers of our Constitution. The way Madison thought of making checks and balances control partisanship.

We will see if civility works better than civil war. That didn't work too well for the past year. Perhaps this session was a mirage, or a show put to quell the scandals unleashed by Bannon's last stand against moderates in the White House. 

But even if this meeting was a "Potemkin Village" -named after those fake towns erected to fool the Russian czars and Soviet Union visitors with nonexistent progress- it shows how civility looks in comparison with what we have had during the past year. 

And, last but not least, Trump has shown he's able to use it when he wants it.

Radical Chic: When the American Left started to lose its mind

I grew up in Argentina, and during my my college years during the sixties and seventies we were flooded with Spanish translations of the Left-wing rhetoric of Leroy Jones, Angela Davis, Malcom X and the radical Left protests that started on May 68 in Paris and Berkeley. 

The orthodox communist parties were left behind by a new wave of radical firebrand revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung and the iconic Black Panthers. 

Little did we know during those days of our juvenile enthusiasm about Tom Wolfe's piece on a party at Leonard Bernstein's Manhattan apartment with a group of Black Panthers. To the surprise and horror of the mostly Jewish and well-off, well-educated intellectuals gathered there in adoration of the revolutionary young people in cool leather jackets and attitude, they received a bash of anti-Semitic rants read aloud by the guests of honor.

"Radical Chic", the article that Wolfe wrote about that evening deserves to be read again for those like me (and much younger) who didn't know the actual story of the Black Panthers movement in America.

Let me quote some scenes of it that I read 30 years late:

"So . . . Radical Chic was already in full swing by the time the Black Panther party began a national fundraising campaign late in 1969. The Panthers’ organizers, like the grape workers’, counted on the “cause party”—to use a term for it that was current 35 years ago—not merely in order to raise money. The Panthers’ status was quite confused in the minds of many liberals, and to have the Panthers feted in the homes of a series of social and cultural leaders could make an important difference. Ideally, it would work out well for the socialites and culturati, too, for if there was ever a group that embodied the romance and excitement of which Radical Chic is made, it was the Panthers." [...]

Bernstein's dinner ended in epic disaster, and Wolfe exposed in his now legendary New Yorker piece the true and crude reality behind the Black Panthers and its adoring "Radical chic" using the same kind of "fly on the wall" acid prose that Truman Capote used on other less intellectual part of the rich and famous:

But if the Bernsteins thought their main problem at this point was a bad press, they were wrong. A controversy they were apparently oblivious of suddenly erupted around them. Namely, the bitterness between Jews and blacks over an issue that had been building for three years, ever since Black Power became important. The first inkling the Bernsteins had was when they started getting hate mail, some of it apparently from Jews of the Queens-Brooklyn Jewish Defense League variety. Then the League’s national chairman, Rabbi Meir Kahane, blasted Lenny publicly for joining a “trend in liberal and intellectual circles to lionize the Black Panthers . . . We defend the right of blacks to form defense groups, but they’ve gone beyond this to a group which hates other people. That’s not nationalism, that’s Naziism. And if Bernstein and other such intellectuals do not know this, they know nothing.”

The Jewish Defense League had been formed in 1968 for the specific purpose of defending Jews in low-rent neighborhoods, many of which are black. But even many wealthier and more cultivated Jews, who look at the Defense League as somewhat extremist, Low Rent and gauche, agreed essentially with the point Kahane was making. One of the ironies of the history of the Jews in America was that their long championship of black civil liberties had begun to backfire so badly in the late 1960s. 

As Seymour Lipset has put it, “The integrationist movement was largely an alliance between Negroes and Jews (who, to a considerable extent, actually dominated it). Many of the interracial civil-rights organizations have been led and financed by whites, and the majority of their white members have been Jews. Insofar as a Negro effort emerged to break loose from involvement with whites, from domination of the civil-rights struggle by white liberals, it meant concretely a break with Jews, for they were the whites who were active in these movements. 

The Black Nationalist leadership had to push whites (Jews) ‘out of the way,’ and to stop white (Jewish) ‘interference’ in order to get whites (Jews) ‘off their backs.’”

“. . .‘If you’re for freedom,’ says Otto Preminger, ‘tell me dis: Is it all right for a Jew to leave Russia and settle in Israel?’. . .”

Meanwhile, Black Power groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers were voicing support for the Arabs against Israel. This sometimes looked like a mere matter of black nationalism; after all, Egypt was a part of Africa, and black nationalist literature sometimes seemed to identify the Arabs as blacks fighting the white Israelis. Or else it looked like merely a commitment to world socialism; the Soviet Union and China supported the Arabs against the imperialist tools, the Israelis. 

But many Jewish leaders regarded the anti-Zionist stances of groups like the Panthers as a veiled American-brand anti-Semitism, tied up with such less theoretical matters as extortion, robbery and mayhem by blacks against Jews in ghetto areas. 

They cited things like the August 30, 1969, issue of Black Panther, which carried an article entitled “Zionism (Kosher Nationalism) + Imperialism = Fascism” and spoke of “the fascist pigs.” The June, 1967, issue of another Panther publication, Black Power, had carried a poem entitled “Jew-Land,” which said: 

Jew-Land, On a summer afternoon,/Really, Couldn’t kill the Jews too soon,/Now dig. The Jews have stolen our bread/Their filthy women tricked our men into bed So I won’t rest until the Jews are dead . . .In Jew-Land, Don’t be a Tom on Israel’s side / Really, Cause that’s where Christ was crucified.

 But in the most literate circles of the New Left—well, the Panthers’ pronouncements on foreign affairs couldn’t be taken too seriously. Ideologically, they were still feeling their way around. To be a UJA Zionist about the whole thing was to be old-fashioned, middle-class middle-aged, suburban, Oceanside-Cedarhurstian, in an age when the youth of the New Left had re-programmed the whole circuitry of Left opposition to oppression. The main thing was that the Panthers were the legitimate vanguard of the black struggle for liberation—among the culturati whom Leonard Bernstein could be expected to know and respect, this was not a point of debate, it was an axiom. The chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic, 

The New York Review of Books, regularly cast Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver as the Simón Bolívar and José Martí of the black ghettos. On August 24, 1967, The New York Review of Books paid homage to the summer urban riot season by printing a diagram for the making of a Molotov cocktail on its front page. In fact, the journal was sometimes referred to good-naturedly as The Parlour Panther, with the -our spelling of Parlour being an allusion to its concurrent motif of anglophilia.

The Review’s embracing of such apparently contradictory attitudes—the nitty-gritty of the ghetto warriors and the preciosity of traditional English Leavis & Loomis intellectualism—was really no contradiction at all, of course. It was merely the essential double-track mentality of Radical Chic—nostagie de la boue and high protocol—in its literary form. In any case, given all this, people like Lenny and Felicia could hardly have been expected to comprehend a complex matter like the latter-day friction between blacks and Jews."

It was later when I came into contact with yet another chronicle of the hallucinated distortions that came to be known as the "Left" in American campuses and broader cultural wars -to which we were not part down in Latin America, busy as we were trying to survive actual dictators, real fascists and communists and open warfare and torture-.

The author was David Horowitz, who had been a second generation Marxist Jew and supporting member of the Black Panthers Party. Horowitz also had his experience of being mugged by reality, and he told it in "Radical Son" and other books reporting the American Left domination of humanities and social sciences studies after the sixties and seventies.

Forty years later, and after the fall of the USSR, the conversion of China to "market Communism" and Vietnam in a close commercial ally of US, the images of Mao, Guevara, Cuba and Vietnam have taken a deep and well-deserve scrutiny and beating among those who look at the actual facts as they happened with the benefit of not having being part of them.

The distortion of Marx's and Engels' scientific materialism theories into postmodern anti-rationalism and relativism as embraced by the American Left is so incredible that deserves a separate treatment, which I prefer to leave for another entry.

William F. Buckley is dead and David Horowitz has taken yet another turn towards pro-Trumpian self-immolation, so the landscape of critical thinking about the Left seems rather limited to explain electoral losses.

The American Left still reveres the Cuban dictatorship, compares Israel with South Africa and engages in identity politics and arbitrating political correctness in speech. Not a drop of George Orwell's "newspeak" and "Animal Farm", "1984" and "Politics and the English Language" seem to have survived the massive wipe-out of actual Left thinking required to build the Pisa Tower of the American Left intellectual construct.

But fortunately there are still fragments in the Web for those who want to keep them in sight, for as Ronald Reagan wisely commented, "liberty is always a generation away from extinction".

Alan Sokal made good fun of exposing the American (and French) Left and its post-modern frauds, but the tenured American Left hold on American campuses keeps these stories out of reach of younger generations.

Let's end this entry by just suggesting that the 'Left" and "Right" concepts -derived from where the French Assembly sat in 1789 until the Reign of Terror- have survived their expiration date in very curious and malignant forms.

To be continued.

Blacks Lives Really Matter: Heather MacDonald, Daniel Moynihan

One of the paradoxes for a naturalized American is the strange dance around the astonishing rate of black on black crime. Any sane person might think that black Americans might be asking for more police and more policing to protect their lives and neighborhoods from gang shootings and violence where over 90 percent of the victimaries and victims are black.

And this is not the case in every survey taken to white and non-white Americans.

There are huge differences in trust towards police between whites and non-whites:

Is this difference in perception a cause or a consequence of the attitudes towards policing? It certainly seems that there are extremists -racists even- who blame each other race for the problem. Those stereotypes work on both sides: police officers and white neighbors fear unknown black people and black residents in poor neighborhoods fear police will treat them as criminals. A cycle of "self-fulfilling prophecies" escalates the problem. 

But not only non-black people hesitate in crossing black neighborhoods at certain hours or at all: so do black residents and visitors as well, because they are 6 times more likely to be shot by gangs than non-blacks. Police officers usually act rougher or less respectfully with black people, and peaceful black neighbors -especially the very young- are afraid of being confused with gang members.

The mix of need and fear of policing among non-whites, and particularly black citizens compounds the root problems of of gang violence and the revenge homicides and shootings in predominantly black neighborhoods.

The most active black leaders in America, however, seem to be heading in a one-sided direction: while everyday black-on-black homicides accumulate at a frightening pace, marches and protests prioritize those cases when a white police person kills a black person, turning a much more serious problem into a simplistic -and unsolvable- "systemic racism" mantra that prevents further analysis from becoming politicized. 

Black leaders certainly denounce and address very actively other frightening problems such as the racial bias, excessive use of deadly force and incarceration for minor offenses,  but not the incivility and violence that suffer black communities in large cities from gangs and among community members. 

Incivility towards neighbors - dumbly celebrated as "attitude" and "coolness" - is the gateway to violence, escalated and compounded by drugs and lack of trust in the basic institutions of civil life: school, work, police.

The "Ferguson effect" -as the police restraint from policing caused by that incident is called- is actually increasing the casualties. Pew polls on police members reveal the stress  and internal division these clashes cause.

Police inaction, which is much more lethal and hard to detect than police abuse, compounds the systemic violence problem giving gangs and criminals the control of streets and terrorized neighborhoods. 

Police inaction creates "safe zones" for crime that turns neighbors into hostages, imprisoned in invisible "red lines" violently enforced "gang districts".

Where police doesn't police, gangs do. And they have no accountability to cameras and no witnesses willing to take the risk of denouncing or protesting against them. 

MacDonald -who advocates both for more policing and for police accountability with data- has been targeted by violent activists trying to prevent her from speaking on campuses.

While overall violent crime has been trending down for the past 30 years in the entire US (1980-2008), black homicide rates are 6 times higher than white

Of those already high rates, 90-91 percent of the black homicides are committed by black people, not police:

The trend is also visible comparing cities with large black population 

Since the famous Moynihan report issued in March 1965 -and even then received with strong resistance by a radical segment of the black leadership -the one that followed the ideas of Malcom X and radicals like Franz Fanon, and the Black Panther Party- that considered Moynihan description of the root of black problems prejudiced and even racist.

Moynihan found the disintegration of negro family as the root cause of systemic poverty and behavior deterioration. He attributed the tendency of black men to grow without their fathers to a combination of the heritage of racism and slavery -when the black families were divided to sell as slaves separately- and the cycle of crime and incarceration that was already starting with the drug trade as the main source of income in segregated and poor neighborhoods.

Since the topic of black on black crime became politicized, we could say that the Moynihan report ended having an unexpected reverse effect to the one his author sought:

While the political leadership -across the racial spectrum- continues to shut down unpleasant facts, black citizens vote with their feet to solve their problem, fleeing away ghettos for more integrated cities and neighborhoods. Given the choice, black citizens vote for integration and civility first.

But those caught in "poverty traps'" face grim options: joining gangs to escape from another gangs, get in jail -where at least survival rates are higher- and live between unemployment, violence and incarceration periods while political leaders spend billions funding "politically correct" initiatives that window-dress the problem until the neighborhood is ready for redevelopment and gentrification.

If we don't know the solution to this problem, we certainly have tried and know what doesn't work.

Some additional interesting reading:

• BSJ (Bureau of Justice Statistic) Homicide Trends in the US since 1976
• Flaherty & Sethi (2010) Homicide in Black and White . University of Columbia
• Moynihan, P. (1965) The Negro Family (full report