Can America’s Divisions be Healed?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This past semester, in a course on American political culture, one of the books we used was Richard Kreitner’s Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union.

A writer for the left liberal Nation magazine, Kreitner’s thesis is that, virtually from its foundation, the United States has had one or more regions, or groups of people, so angry with the post-1789 political order that they would rather leave the Union. The horrific Civil War of 1861-1865, fought over the issue of African American slavery, is only the best-known of such attempts.

Kreitner’s incisive analysis delves into how secession, division and other forces that separate Americans have played into the nation’s history, from revolutionary days until now.

Have we, in the Donald Trump era, entered another such age? President Trump’s victory in the 2016 election left liberals aghast; they refused to accept it and called themselves a “resistance.” This time around, a majority of Republicans, including members of Congress, believe Joe Biden stole the election through “ballot-harvesting” mail in votes. In effect, the equivalent of stuffing ballot boxes.

Biden has said the country’s democracy was “pushed, tested and threatened” and “proved to be resilient, true and strong.” Does he really believe that?

Consent-based political systems require shared, fundamental “ends.” In his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy, economist Anthony Downs wrote: “A two-party democracy cannot provide stable and effective government unless there is a large measure of ideological consensus among its citizens.” The “means” may sustain dispute, but foundational assumptions must be shared.

Not anymore in today’s America, it seems. The strife is economic, cultural and political. Not only do the two political parties adhere to different views, but they inhabit increasingly different economies and environments.

A Sept. 19, 2019 Brookings Institution study by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton, “America has Two Economies -- and They are Diverging Fast,” notes that the people in each of these do completely different jobs, in different industries, in different places, for different pay.

The gulf in living standards between prosperous areas in California or on the East Coast and much poorer sections in the country is immense and reflects this abyss.

The ramifications are concerning. For example, the donors to American politicians in all 50 states are concentrated in a few ZIP postal codes. Of those that delivered the most campaign funding for the Democrats in 2020, four of the top five were in New York City, followed by Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Other top Democratic ZIPs this year were Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in greater Boston.

New York City was also over-represented among donors to the Republican Party, whose donor base is more geographically diverse, with a lot of money coming from Dallas, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Palm Beach, Florida.

The influence of money has polarized politics and has led to a major shift in the American public’s political values over the past two decades.

The share of Americans with ideologically consistent values has increased over this time and these political values also have become more strongly associated with partisanship.

Partisan identities have become much more closely aligned with other social identities. Partisan divides now overlay religious divides, cultural divides, geographic divides and racial divides. Americans feel like two peoples because they have become two peoples.

Politics has devolved into a contest between two sides where there is no bargaining, because there are no negotiable principles, just team loyalties. In 1960, five per cent of Republicans and four per cent of Democrats did not want their children to marry across party lines. Today, a majority of both hold this view.

Observes James Hankins, a professor of history at Harvard University, in his article “Hyperpartisanship: A Barbarous Term for a Barbarous Age,” published in the winter 2020 Claremont Review of Books, “Partisanship is normal; hyperpartisanship is not.”

Hyperpartisans live in bubbles, writes Hankins, cut off from rival claimants to public authority by mutual incomprehension and mutual revulsion. They are dogmatic, intolerant, unable to sympathize with alien points of view.

“Opponents are demonized, their reputations destroyed by all means possible. Democratic deliberation becomes impossible and political deal-making -- the normal business of interest-group politics in pluralist societies -- is despised as an intolerable violation of principle. Politics turns into a battle between non-negotiable demands. Compromise is impossible; the enemy must be crushed.” That way lies disaster.

When both of those sides are convinced that the other does not respect them, and does not think them equal or worthy, is reconciliation possible?

A chasm has opened up. Unfortunately, the usual way that polities exit from periods of hyperpartisanship is via war, revolution, or tyranny, Hankins cautions. Not a very comforting thought, is it.

 

Few Global Bright Spots in a Year to Forget

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

The year of the pandemic has been the year from hell. In 2020, we faced a global medical disaster not seen in more than a century.

COVID-19 has overshadowed every other story, and its consequences will be felt next year and for many years to come. Lockdowns, social restrictions, fatalities, and a global economic downturn resulted. It’s by far the biggest event of 2020.

What else will the year be remembered for? Most notably, the continued rise of China as a world power; the defeat of Donald Trump in the November presidential election in the United States; and the prospects for peace between Israel and many of the Arab countries in the Middle East.

We all know the grim statistics around the coronavirus. More than 1.7 million deaths worldwide, including at least 320,000 in the United States and more than 14,000 in Canada. When the various vaccines will finally wind it down, the celebrations will equal those like the V-E and V-J days that ended the Second World War.

While the European Union has faced unprecedented fractures due to the pandemic, with Hungary and Poland, in particular, showing increasing irritation with the bureaucrats in Brussels, China has gone from strength to strength. It has already outlasted Donald Trump’s attempt to slow its path to becoming the hegemonic power in East Asia – and perhaps farther afield.

The coronavirus early in the year posed a domestic crisis for President Xi Jinping, the country’s most powerful leader in decades, as well as a setback to his ambitions to project China’s power on the global stage. But Xi has managed to overcome this setback and place his country in a strong position heading into 2021.

China’s success in containing COVID has allowed Beijing to focus on longer term economic and development goals, as outlined in the 14th Five Year Plan. Since 1953, these have been the guiding documents signaling the policy direction for the country’s future economic and social development.

While observers will have to wait until March for the release of the full plan, the Communist Party leadership has indicated that it aims for China becoming a “moderately developed” economy by 2035 with a per capita GDP of about US$30,000, nearly three times the 2020 level.

China will continue the transition from producing cheap low-tech goods to be the high-end and specialized producer of goods and it will encourage the transition to “tech self-sufficiency.”

In foreign policy, Beijing will continue to aggressively build its air, land and naval forces, and project power in the East and South China Seas, testing American, Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean reactions. It has become more strident in its insistence that Taiwan is an indissoluble part of the Chinese nation and must return to the motherland.

Great power rivalry is at the core of China’s relationship with Washington. Divergences between their political structures are bringing irreconcilable differences to the fore. The rivalry has become a clash of values.

The United States sees China as a repressive regime that will use its economic clout to punish its foes and limit criticism from overseas, while China sees the United States as a hegemony that wants to stunt the growth of, and sow division within, its rival. This is a narrative that Xi has used to enhance the Communist Party’s legitimacy and his own consolidation of power.

China has also recently clashed with India along their contested Himalayan border, the latest skirmish in a conflict that has simmered since May. Tensions have continued to rise, with both sides reinforcing their troops in the area.

China is increasingly willing to leverage its growing economic and military power to advance its national interests in Asia, especially over disputed territory. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi feels growing pressure from populists to push back, despite the potential short-term economic consequences.

In the U.S., we near the end of the Donald Trump saga, with the outgoing president metaphorically being dragged out of the White House kicking and screaming that the election was “stolen” by the Democrats. This type of behaviour is a sign of the deep polarization that has become endemic in the United States.

Along with the nationwide protests led by Black Lives Matter that followed the death of George Floyd last May, the pandemic destroyed Donald Trump’s presidency. But he was already under constant and fierce attack.

But this was nothing new, really. The last four presidents have, for one reason or another, been considered illegitimate by wide sectors of the country.

George W. Bush was handed victory over Al Gore by the Supreme Court in 2000, and it’s possible that the latter might have otherwise prevailed. Barack Obama faced the “birther” claims that he was ineligible to assume the office because he had been born outside the country. Donald Trump was faced from Day One by a “Resistance” that insisted he was placed in office by Vladimir Putin (who, by the way, remains firmly in control of Russia).

And now, large numbers of Republican legislators and voters are convinced the Democrats engaged in fraud through the use of mail-in ballots to overcome what were substantial leads by Trump on election night in a number of states that he narrowly lost. Absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. So it’s now Joe Biden’s turn to face this challenge. Is the United States becoming virtually ungovernable?

Meanwhile, is peace – or at least normalization – breaking out in the Middle East? The new ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco have marked the beginning of a new regional order. Oman may be next.

While cooperation on security and economic matters between Israel and many Arab states had been growing for years, this year saw economic, security, and pragmatism trump ideological considerations. They will now maneuver more openly and effectively in response to perceived shared regional threats from Iran and Turkey.

Joe Biden’s promise to take a harder stance on Saudi Arabia on its human rights record and its war in Yemen may move Riyadh, which fears Iran above all else, closer to Israel as well.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who dreams of the past glories of the Ottoman Empire, has of late issued numerous threats against not just Israel, but also Greece and the Greek-run part of Cyprus, and Ankara is now militarily involved in the anarchy that has enveloped Libya.

Iran remains the wild card in the region. In 2020 it continued to send weapons to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, and Houthis in Yemen. Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, cancelled by Trump in 2018, did nothing but embolden Tehran.

With Trump gone, will the Tehran regime expect to see the Biden administration return to diplomacy in order to thwart its regional ambitions and desire to wipe Israel off the map?

Latin America has been hard hit by the pandemic, with staggering death tolls in Brazil and Mexico. But Brazil’s populist president Jair Bolsonaro seems to have weathered the storm. As for the two Marxist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, both are in a bad state.

Over the past three years post-Castro Cuba has been hit hard by the U.S. embargo of Venezuela, which undercuts Caracas’ ability to provide external support. As for Venezuela itself, political discontent under President Nicolas Maduro, in power since 2013, has been fuelled by hyperinflation, power cuts, and shortages of food and medicine. More than five million Venezuelans have left the country in recent years.

Venezuela held parliamentary elections on Dec. 6, but they were boycotted as fraudulent and illegal by the opposition led by Juan Guaido, the speaker of the outgoing National Assembly. Things will only get worse in 2021.

 

Is Ghana Still a Democracy?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

The West African nation of Ghana held presidential and legislative elections on Dec. 7, with incumbent President Nana Akufo-Addo from the center-right New Patriotic Party (NPP) again besting opponent John Dramani Mahama of the center-left National Democratic Congress (NDC) with a slim majority of 51.59 per cent of the vote against Mahama’s 47.36, thus avoiding a second round.

The two also went head-to head in 2016, when Akufo-Addo defeated Mahama, who had himself four years earlier won the presidency against then challenger Akufo-Addo. In 2008, running on the NPP banner, Akufo-Addo lost to the NDC’s John Atta Mills, who died in office.

This will be Akufo-Addo’s final term in accordance with the Ghanaian constitution. Mahama’s defeat in the 2016 presidential race had marked the first time since the reintroduction of democratic rule that an incumbent president had stood for re-election and lost.

Both men hail from long-established political families. Akufo-Addo’s father, Edward, was one of the so-called “Big Six” who led Ghana to independence in 1957. John Mahama’s father, Emmanuel Adama, was one of the first ministers of state for the northern region under Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah.

Akufo-Addo’s NPP and Mahama’s NDC each won 137 seats. One constituency was won by an independent candidate.

Youth unemployment, security concerns and effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy were among the top issues Ghanaians were considering when voting. The NPP administration had introduced free senior high school, which the party campaigned heavily on.  

This was the first time that an election was held without the presence of former president Jerry Rawlings, who died Nov. 12. Rawlings, a military officer, came to power in a coup d'état in 1979 and headed a military junta until 1992.

Although the election was peaceful, the post-campaign period was contentious. There had already been clashes between NPP and NDC supporters, with some killed, as well as attacks on Electoral Commission officials.

Moreover, civil society representatives raised concerns about what they claimed were alarming levels of ethnocentric hate speech used by politicians and alleged abuse of state resources.

Ethnolinguistic affiliations play a role in Ghana, opposing the poorer North to the wealthier Ashanti region. Politicking and political communication in Ghana during elections rely heavily on ethnic influence, with the NDC representing the Ewe in the poorer Northern Volta region, and the NPP representing the Akans in the Ashanti region.

Ethnic polarisation has aligned with political polarisation to the extent that most people who belong to a certain ethnic group become members of a particular political organization or party aligned with it.

The NDC has rejected the results and said they planned to appeal. Mahama warned his opponent not to “steal” the election, accusing the sitting president of using the military to intimidate voters, and saying the verification process hadn’t been followed, making the vote “illegal.” He also claimed his party really won 140 parliamentary seats.

John Boadu, general secretary of the NPP warned about the implications of accusations coming from the NDC. “Creating insinuations creates a lack of credibility on our whole election process.”

This is a disturbing turn of events because Ghana has held competitive multiparty elections and undergone peaceful transfers of power between the two main political parties since 1996, following the resumption of democracy, with the NPP victorious four times, the NDC three.

Ghana is one of only four sub-Saharan African countries ranked “free” in 2020 on the Freedom of the World index that measures political rights and civil liberties. One reason? Ghana has a strong and independent media and consistently ranks in the top three countries in Africa for freedom of speech and press freedom.

As Joseph Yaw Asomah, a sociologist at St. Thomas University in Fredericton asserts, Ghanaian private media address political corruption through investigative reporting, agenda-setting, providing a forum for anti-corruption discussions, and acting as a pressure group for institutional and legal reforms as well as political accountability.

But the improper exploitation and deployment of ethnic sentiments for party support can pose a danger to democratic development. Ahead of the election, Mahama and Akufo-Addo had signed a peace pact committing to non-violence regardless of the outcome of the vote. We’ll see if this holds.

 

China's Reach is Extending to the Caribbean

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Jamaica has emerged as an anchor of Chinese activity in the Caribbean. It has received more Chinese government loans than any other Caribbean island nation, according to the Inter-American Dialogue, which closely tracks Chinese government financing in the region.

Over the past 15 years, Beijing has lent Jamaica some $2.1 billion for building roads, bridges, a convention centre and housing, according to the group. Grants have financed a children’s hospital, schools and an office building for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, among other projects, according to the Planning Institute of Jamaica.

And direct investments from Chinese firms in Jamaica poured more than $3 billion into projects like bauxite mining and sugar production.

China’s efforts in Jamaica are part of its global strategy to forge deep economic ties and strong diplomatic relationships around the world, in part through the building of major infrastructure projects under its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, the  global strategy adopted by Beijing in 2013 to invest in nearly 70 countries and international organizations.

Jamaica, near the geographic centre of the Caribbean region, became a partner in the initiative in April 2019, in order to develop Special Economic Zones and ports so that its global logistics hub would become an essential component of the project.

Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing in November of 2019, to discuss further economic cooperation. Also addressed were renewable energy, border security, agriculture, health care, and higher education.

While the Jamaican government announced that it would stop negotiating new loans from China, it would continue to cooperate with the Chinese on major infrastructure projects through joint public-private partnerships.

Jamaican officials maintain that outstanding Chinese loans are not putting an extraordinary burden on the country. They amount to about four per cent of Jamaica’s total loan portfolio.

In turn, the United States has stepped up warnings about the risks of doing business with Beijing, underscoring what it says are potential hazards ranging from shoddy construction to predatory loans and espionage.

The current American ambassador to Jamaica, Donald Tapia, cautioned against installing fifth-generation mobile networks made by Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese firms. Tapia called China “a dragon with two heads.”

He scolded China for its geopolitical game of chess, centred, he said, on extracting natural resources with ulterior motives. When they go into a country, he warned. they go after two things -- the minerals and the ports. “I could tell you horror stories of countries where they have taken over the ports because those countries could not pay for their investment.”

During a visit to Jamaica Jan. 22, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Prime Minister Holness and told him it was “tempting to accept easy money from places like China.”

The Chinese Embassy in Kingston, responding to Pompeo’s remarks, said it had deepened its involvement with Caribbean states “on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.”

“It seems that some U.S. politicians cannot go anywhere without attacking China, tarnishing China’s reputation, starting fires and fanning the flames and sowing discords,” the Chinese Embassy declared. “They can go on talking the talk if they so wish, but we will continue walking the walk. The world will tell plainly who is stirring up trouble and who is trying to make a difference.

“Latin America and the Caribbean countries, as independent sovereign countries, have every right to determine their own foreign relations including choosing their trade and investment partners. Others are in no position to impose interference or coercion out of ulterior motives.”

The pandemic has allowed China to strengthen the relationship further by donating or selling personal protective equipment, in what has come to be called “mask diplomacy.” The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, pledged in July that China would extend $1 billion in loans for vaccines to Latin American and Caribbean countries.

A crucial motivation for China’s Caribbean strategy also involves winning over the four remaining nations that officially recognize Taiwan instead of China as the country’s legitimate government, though this does not affect its policy towards Jamaica. Kingston established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1972 and is one of nine in the region that recognize the People’s Republic.

 

Jamaica’s Brutal Colonial Legacy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Caribbean island of Jamaica has a population of less than three million, yet this small country has a global importance greater than many that are far bigger. This is the focus of The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson’s recently published book.

Himself Jamaican, Patterson contends that the extremely brutal history of the island’s slave system explains much of modern Jamaica’s dysfunction, including a high incidence of violence: last year 1,332 people were murdered, a per capita rate three times higher than the average for Latin America and the Caribbean.

In January 2018, due to rampant violence and murders, the government of Jamaica declared States of Emergency and Zones of Special Operations for several parishes.

Numerous historians have documented that more abducted Africans were brought to Jamaica over the course of the slave trade than were imported to the entire continent of North and Central America and the enslaved were worked to death. Poverty remained the lot of most of its population after slavery was abolished and even after independence in 1962.

On paper, the country created a Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, with the consolidation of the country’s two main political parties, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNP), both founded in the early 1940s. The 63 members of the House of Representatives are elected in single-member constituencies by first-past-the-post voting.

On Sept. 3, the centre-right JLP won 49 of 63 seats in a general election. Prime Minister Andrew Holness had called for the early vote in what analysts saw as a bid to capitalise on people’s satisfaction with his economic agenda and early response to the COVID-19 virus.

The result was one of the larges margins of victory in decades, with the JLP gaining 17 new seats, but also one of the lowest voter turnouts at 37 per cent. The left-of-centre PLP, under Peter Phillips, remained in opposition, with 14. The two parties have monopolized power since independence.

In 2011 Holness lost an election to the PNP’s Portia Simpson Miller, the country’s first female head of government. Four years later, the tables were turned, and Holness beat Miller.

All of this hid another reality: by the time it was granted independence, Jamaica had established a pattern of political clientism which permeated partisan politics. The fact that jobs, houses, and other rewards were distributed and controlled by the victors of an election added to the stakes of party affiliation.

For politicians, the dispensation of patronage proved a powerful means of securing electoral support, and thus violence erupted around it. After all, for members of the various constituencies, ensuring that their candidate won was tied very directly to the material conditions of their lives. As one commentator put it, “when your party is in you eat; when the other man’s party is in you starve.” Under these circumstances, violence began to supplement the electoral process.

It led ultimately to the two parties losing control of their respective gangsters, who ran their own protectionist shadow governments within the poor and violent slum areas around Kingston and Spanish Town, commonly referred to as “garrison communities.”

By the 1970s, near civil war between gangs acting as proxies for the political parties left hundreds dead from gun battles. I travelled around Jamaica on public buses in 1975-1976 and it was indeed fraught with danger, especially in and around Kingston.

This was the period when government was controlled by the PLP under Prime Minister Michael Manley, whose brand of democratic socialism “scared the professional and capitalist classes,” writes Paterson (who served as a special advisor to Manley from 1972 to 1979).

Patronage, however, is not the only way that “the democratic process both enables and is enabled by violence,” he asserts. While we tend to think the ballot replaces the bullet, Patterson maintains that in Jamaica the bullet followed the ballot. Democratization coincided with extreme levels of violence.

The forms of mobilization that large-scale democracies require tend to calcify political identities and exacerbate conflict, he concludes, and he demonstrates how parties and elections inspire a solidarity and loyalty that ultimately entrench divisions and violence within a society. He calls this the “tribalism” of democracy. It’s a problem in all too many countries.

 

Trump's Surprising Success Among Minorities

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

As we know, President Donald Trump’s four years in office saw charges of racism and nativist xenophobia constantly levelled against him. So, in the 2020 election, how did he fare with the groups who were the main targets of his alleged wrath? Surprisingly, better than we might have expected.  

For the second straight presidential election, the polling industry missed the mark, though it was not as blatant as in 2016, when polls were certain that Donald Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton.

This has now happened twice in a presidential row. Perhaps once is a fluke, but twice shows inherent problems. My guess is that far less attention will be paid to polls in the future.

While Joe Biden won the White House this year, it didn’t signal the blue tidal wave that Democrats expected. Rather, Trump’s supporters kept pace.

As we search for reasons why polling seems to capture Democratic vote share but not Republican, a narrative is emerging: Minority groups included “shy” Trump voters the pollsters missed, and probably some respondents refused to answer honestly.

The less than impressive Biden victory supports the theory that there was a shift among minority voters, who moved slightly towards Trump, cutting into Biden’s margins. Biden underperformed compared to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers among voters of colour and other minorities who usually tilt Democratic. They still voted for the party, but by smaller margins than four years ago.

The AP VoteCast, a survey of the U.S. electorate conducted over several days before Nov. 3, and continuing until the polls closed, included interviews with more than 110,000 people across the U.S.

The survey was conducted online and via telephone. The margin of error was 0.6 percentage points for voters and 0.9 percentage points for non-voters, 19 times out of 20.

AP VoteCast found that African Americans remained overwhelmingly Democratic, with only eight per cent supporting the GOP. Even here, though, the vote for Trump increased by about two per cent.

The numbers were more mixed for other groups that Democrats assumed were in their corner because of ethnic or religious identity.

Some 28 per cent of Asians voted for Trump, up five per cent, and, perhaps most surprising, so did a full 35 per cent of Hispanic and Muslim voters. Trump also received 30 per cent of the Jewish vote, up six percent from 2016, despite being accused of anti-Semitism throughout his four years in office. 

Trump’s performance among Latinos, up three per cent nationally, alarmed the Democrats. He won 47 per cent of the Hispanic vote (as well as 41 per cent of the Jewish vote) in Florida, and it helped him keep the Sunshine State. He also gained Latino support in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas and held the Lone Star State as well.

Trump was also accused by those on the left of the spectrum of being anti-Muslim, if not indeed an Islamophobe. But Trump’s support grew by approximately four percentage points among this growing sector of the American population.

This trend has been causing consternation and disbelief within progressive circles who mechanically assume members of marginalized groups view themselves primarily or wholly in terms of their ascriptive identities.

What else may have motivated such voters this year? Many Blacks and Latinos are devout Christians and “pro-life,” hence supported Republicans. And some African Americans were pleased with the low unemployment numbers and Trump’s desire to reduce the injustices of mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects them.

Many small business owners from minorities liked Trump’s economic policies. For example,Vietnamese Americans, many of them entrepreneurs, actually favoured Trump outright. Among Jewish voters, Trump’s perceived pro-Israel positions were a major factor.

People are not automatons or robots. They have agency and free will. Is it not possible those who didn’t follow the left-wing dogma that they should be unthinking Democrats are assimilating more fully into an American culture in which they feel freer to define themselves?

In fact, Biden might have white men, more than any other group, to thank for entering the White House. In 2016, Trump won white men by a margin of 31 percentage points over Clinton. This time? Just 23 percentage points over Biden.