Andy Beckett: The left urgently needs to lose its inferiority complex // Owen Jones: Even if Biden wins, the world will pay the price for the Democrats' failures

By Dilip -

This week Joe Biden – few people’s idea of an outstanding candidate – won the biggest presidential vote in United States history. Seven times in the last eight such contests, the Democrats have got more votes than the Republicans. You could see this latest popular-vote victory as further confirmation of a theory that’s been promoted by some political scientists and journalists for a quarter of a century, most notably in The Emerging Democratic Majority, a 2002 book by John B Judis and Ruy Teixeira. The theory says that American social trends, which are making much of the country more diverse, urban and better educated – all characteristics associated with voting Democrat – are slowly but inexorably shifting the US away from the Republicans.

This might sound like liberal wishful thinking, but it’s a view that has also been held by senior Republicans. In 2012, Senator Lindsey Graham warned his party: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Combined with the horror that many Americans feel at Donald Trump and how disastrously he has governed, this long-term leftward drift was widely expected this week to become an irresistible electoral force.

Instead, it met a series of seemingly immovable objects. First, Trump’s infamous aversion to ever being “a loser”. Second, his immense and again underrated appeal to conservative voters. Third, his party’s reluctance, which has intensified dramatically since the early 1990s, to accept any Democratic president as legitimate. Fourth, the Republicans’ willingness to use gerrymandering and voter suppression to tilt elections in their favour. And finally, the US’s rickety old election system itself..

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/06/left-inferiority-complex-pessimism-conservative-rule

Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise

Trump should have lost in a landslide. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes

Even if Biden wins, the world will pay the price for the Democrats' failures

When Bill Clinton’s administration backed trade agreements that devastated industrial jobs in the rust belt, here was another grievance waiting to be mined. And it was, by the most unlikely figurehead, the former host of the Apprentice. Trumpism has exploited racism, and fury at economic grievances, successfully welding both forces together. In the aftermath of the financial crash, Obama’s presidential campaign appeared to offer a break with the failures of successive Republican and Democratic administrations. But while he rescued the banks and let financial executives off the hook for their role in the 2008 crash, wages for millions of Americans stagnated or declined. 

While the slice of national income belonging to middle Americans fell from 62% to 43% between 1970 and 2018, the number of billionaires has surged: from 66 in 1990 with a combined wealth of $240bn, to 614 today, with a total fortune of nearly $3tn. America is now a society in which one in every 11 black adult is either in prison, or on parole or probation – racial injustices that Black Lives Matter has urgently underlined. The Democratic establishment has proved itself politically bankrupt and unable to meet these challenges. ..

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/05/biden-democrats-democratic-trump

George Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A Manifesto for Psychopaths

Tom McTague: The Decline of the American World

Donald Trump: Democracy’s mirror image? By Philip Manow / David A. Bell - Fascism or Caesarism?

Jonathan Freedland - Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart

Debt: The first five thousand years. By DAVID GRAEBER

HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars always Come Home

Jill Lepore  A History of America’s military spending

Jonathan Freedland: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight // Chauncey DeVega: Vigilantes are preparing ‘to launch a coup’

Chauncey DeVega: Trump is mentally ill but our real sickness runs much deeper

America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick

Black and Unarmed and Killed by the Police…an incomplete list…This is America….

Houston Police chief to Trump: Please, keep your mouth shut if you can't be constructive

Donald Trump and American carnage // Will Urban Uprisings Help Trump?

May 1968 - June 1989. It's been five decades since 1968, and things are somehow worse

Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves

Protests in USA over the death of unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of police - 25 cities have imposed curfews

Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness

Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Speech on the American Military Industrial Complex, January 17, 1961

Simi Mehta - Martin Luther King: Changing The World With Love

Adam Lusher - Story of the last survivor of the last slave ship to travel from Africa to US is published after 87 years

Michael Roberts: The top 1% own 45% of all global personal wealth; the bottom 50% own less than 1% // Global Economic Volatility and Socio Political Reactions

SUBMARINE STATE

Dismantling democracy? Virus used as excuse to quell dissent...

Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality

Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)

Book review: Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?

George Monbiot: ‘Try to stop me’ – the mantra of our leaders who are now ruling with impunity

Is Donald Trump the Second 9/11? Or Is He the Third? By Tom Engelhardt


Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Albert Camus's lecture 'The Human Crisis', New York, March 1946. 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'

By Dilip -
The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers .. The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slaves. He who is right is he who enslaves.  Albert Camus     La crise de l'homme : THE HUMAN CRISIS   (Text read by Viggo Mortensen on March 28 2016)   Ladies and Gentlemen: when I was invited to give a series of lectures in the United States of America, I felt some doubt and hesitation. I am really not old enough to give lectures, and I am more at ease with the process of thinking than I am making categorical statements... since I don't feel I have any claim on what is generally called the truth. I shared this reservation and was very politely told that my personal opinion didn't matter. What mattered was that I'd be able to offer some facts about France so that my listeners could form their own opinions. It was then suggested that I might
Read more

Etel Adnan - To Be In A Time Of War

By Dilip -
NB: Etel Adnan, writer, poet, artist and musician was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. This prose poem is the final chapter of her book  In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country .  Read more about her here  - DS To Be In A Time Of War To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window, to change one’s mind in the process, to return to one’s chair, to stand again, to go to the bathroom, to close the door, to then open the door, to go to the kitchen, to not eat nor drink, to return to the table, to be bored, to take a few steps on the rug, to come close to the chimney, to look at it, to find it dull, to turn left until the main door, to come back to the room, to hesitate, to go on, just a bit, a trifle, to stop, to pull the right side of the curtain, then the other side, to stare at
Read more

After the Truth Shower

By Dilip -
Dear Readers Thank you for reading my blog for the past eleven years. (This is a link to the new one) During this time it has had nearly 1.7 million hits; and I have posted over 9500 posts covering a variety of themes. From July 11 to 19, 2022, my blog was withdrawn by the Blogger administration on account of what its machinery suspected to be 'Impersonation'. It took over a week and the efforts of several well-wishers to get it back online I thank them all for their kindness and goodwill  My blog has always been - and remains - non-commercial. I have used it for academic purposes; and to foster a culture of debate and informed commentary in civil society. Because it contains a large amount of material gathered and collated for over a decade, I cannot afford to lose its contents. I hope it will remain undisturbed now and function as an archive. However, I have decided to use a new blog on WordPress as a platform for my newest comments and posts The new blog is titled After the
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more