politics – Page 2 – CGW's Blog

What Baltimore’s “Black Butterfly“ teaches the rest of us

Why does there remain a plethora of social ills the disproportionally affect Black people in America over 150 years after chattel enslavement has ended? “The answer: black communities have been subjected to unrelenting an ongoing historical trauma.“

That’s from The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America by Dr. Lawrence T Brown in 2021. He coined the term “black butterfly” to refer to the patterns of racial segregation in Baltimore, which mirrors patterns in other US cities.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The Rise and Decline of Nations

Coalitions strengthen a nation, and then strangle it whole.

Or so it’s been argued. In his influential 1982 political treatise called The Rise and Decline of Nations, political scientist Mancur Olson (1932-1998) builds on his earlier work on collective action to argue that stable societies tend to accumulate powerful special-interest groups over time, which in turn create institutional sclerosis.

These groups—unions, industry associations and other lobbying blocs—develop to protect their members’ economic rents, but their growing influence eventually stifles innovation, efficiency and long-term economic growth. Olson argues that this “accumulation of distributional coalitions” explains why some rich nations stagnate while others surge ahead. Post-war Germany and Japan, having lost these entrenched coalitions due to military defeat, grew rapidly in contrast to countries like the UK or the US, which retained their institutional inertia. I share notes from the book below.

What is Fascism?

In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “the word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”

That sense is back, and since the word is used so often again, I wanted to return to a foundation. I didn’t have clear memories from my undergraduate political science reading so I picked up Fascism, an influential, well-regarded, thick, dense, 400+ page collection of writings on the topic published in 1995 and edited by Oxford political theorist Roger Griffin.

It was a slog but a firm foundation, in which the point is argued that the word was almost immediately stretched and packed with various meanings from its modern launch in the 1920s. In the simplest interpretation I can put together, fascism is a political strategy “idealizing abstraction” that uses power to protect a “mythic core” of kinship around a nation from out-groups.

Judging by the 400-page book, and oodles of dissertations and academic writing, that’s of course incomplete. I have more listed below for that matter. But it does arm me with a clearer picture, grounded in academia and without cartoonish exaggeration. Below I have other notes from the book for future reference.

Appeal to the “movable middle,” says Human Rights Watch veteran leader

Shame the extremes with facts, not name calling or exaggeration. Appeal to the “movable middle.” Document. Build coalition methodically.

That’s the playbook outlined in Kenneth Roth’s new memoirs called Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. It’s drawn from his nearly 30-years as executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is someone I deeply admire.

The book offers an insider’s perspective on the organization’s strategies to expose and combat human rights abuses worldwide. Central themes include the use of “naming and shaming” to hold perpetrators accountable and the challenges of advocating for human rights in a complex geopolitical landscape.

Below I share notes for future reference.

My response to a troll

I have a troll. I’ve had them before, and I’ll have them again. This one though has passed more standard comments and emails, and has shown up in person. He was there a year ago when I got struck in the face at an event by a protestor I had to remove. Now, last month, he wrote up and printed hundreds of flyers with a long missive about me. He and some others posted them up on poles around my work conference, and handed many more to the volunteers at the conference’s registration table.

I do not think about this man, but gosh, he sure does think about me — he appears to be a retiree with a lot of free time. (I’m beginning to assume he kinda has a thing for me). His attacks were fairly strange, but easy enough to dispute that I thought I’d do that here for my own well-being.

The electability of female candidates and other “collective illusions”

Most Americans report no real difference in how likely they’d be to support a female candidate over a similar male one. The difference is that more Americans think that other Americans would be less likely to support a female candidate. They believe others believe something.

That’s an example of what some researchers call “pluralistic ignorance,” and comes from Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions, a February 2022 book by Todd Rose, who leads a nonprofit polling and think tank. As the title implies he calls these examples “collective illusions,” and there are many.

Most Americans still identify as patriot; bad actors really do use bots to amplify otherwise unpopular extremist political views and we really did create a toilet paper shortage during the covid-19 pandemic. As Rose puts it: “When individuals conform to what they think the group wants, they can end up doing what nobody wants.”

This is especially true about bad, or simply incorrect, ideas we hear again and again: “Like a glitch in our biological software, repetition has no logical connection to truth. Yet it has somehow become a trap door to our beliefs.”

Rose’s book is sharp, thoughtful and interesting. I recommend it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s troublemaker

What’s the greater priority: universal human rights or sovereign rights? What rights, if any, are truly universal? How far should other nations go to challenge a sovereign power who is taking such rights away from residents within their boundaries?

After the horrors of the world wars, the United Nations marked in 1948 its “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” This gave moral currency to dozens of international actions over the next 80 years. The drafting committee included philosophers from China and Lebanon, yet these are criticized by some as Eurocentric. Overreach under the UDHR banner complicated its message, and gave authoritarians greater cover.

Where does that leave us? I’ve thought about that since completing “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic,” a 2024 biography written by Mark Clifford.

Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP

In 2002, The Emerging Democratic Majority book based its arguments on two key points: that the population of the United States was becoming less white, and that non-white voters voted for Democrats more often than Republicans.

Though the multiracial Obama coalition seemed to make their case. The Trump era has looked very different. In 2023, within the Biden presidency, Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini wrote “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,” which looked prescient in November 2024.

Looking closely at the 2016 and 2020 elections, Ruffini argued that Hispanic, Asian and mixed-race voters were following voting patterns of immigrants before them. Very unlike Black American voters, and Native Americans too, with their distinct historical context, waves of immigrants often vote their liberal interest, then grower richer and vote a different interests.

The Emerging Democratic Majority rightly demonstrated how much more diverse the American electorate would get, but badly misunderstood how that more diverse electorate would vote. The 2024 election put this on full display: Democrats look like a party of rich, educated people, alongside Black supervoters; whereas Republicans look now like a multiracial populist coalition. This is so far from the Republican jokes that left-leaning voters told in the 2000s and 2010s. Whatever comes to pass, the book is rich with insight.

Below my notes for future reference.

Patriot by Alexi Navalny

We must separate “a good people with a bad state.”

The defining representation of this is Alexi Navalny, the Russian lawyer turned good-government advocate that stood, and died, as the world’s most prominent anti-authoritarian activist — and foil to Russian despot Vladimir Putin.

In Patriot, his posthumous memoir that was published last fall, Navalny’s charm and commitment shone through. I admire him greatly. The book is rich with anecdotes about growing up under late-stage Soviet Communism, some of his tactics and his hopeful worldview.

“My family had a deep love of our country and was exceedingly patriotic,” he wrote. “Nobody however had any time for the state, which was regarded as a kind of annoying mistake — one we ourselves had made, but a mistake nevertheless.”

More broadly, as the book cover itself aptly puts it:: “Life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay.”

Below my notes for future reference.

No, Elon Musk isn’t attempting a coup. He just really thinks he’s that much smarter than everyone else.

A former journalist-coworker of mine emailed me a couple weeks back: Is Musk attempting a coup?

An op-editor at a metro newspaper, she was referring to the bombastic and destructive collusion of the world’s richest man Elon Musk into the Donald Trump-led shock to the federal bureaucracy under the guise of the irreverently named DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency — a boyish reference to a memecoin.

I suppose it’s possible, I wrote her. Instead, what I see in Elon Musk is a kind of arrogance I’ve found in other entrepreneurs. Brilliant in one domain and successful in others, I’ve seen plenty of them storm into some situation truly and genuinely oblivious to how over their head they really are.