Atlantic Sentinel

Category: Top Story

  • Give America’s Cities the Power They Deserve

    Columbus Circle New York
    Columbus Circle in Manhattan, New York at night, December 15, 2007 (Thomas Hawk)

    Will Wilkinson has another excellent op-ed in The New York Times about the maldistribution of power in the United States between rural and urban areas.

    Part of the problem is that America’s federal system gives sparsely populated parts of the country way more power than the cities. That wasn’t such a big problem until the rural-urban divide became partisan. Now the largely white countryside and small towns vote overwhelmingly Republican while multicultural cities elect mostly Democrats. American democracy has been thrown into a crisis of legitimacy and dysfunction as a result.

    Our politics is cracking up over the density divide. Big cities and their distinctive interests are suffering a density penalty and need more visibility in our scheme of representation.

    (more…)

  • America’s Supreme Court Has Become Too Powerful

    United States Supreme Court
    Supreme Court of the United States in Washington DC (iStock)

    Ezra Klein makes an excellent point in Vox: the stakes of Supreme Court nominations in America are too high.

    Candidates serve for life — which, given modern life spans and youthful nominees, can now mean forty years of decisions — and no one knows when the next seat will open.

    No other democracy in the world allows judges to serve for life. And in no other democracy is the process of appointing high-court judges so broken. (more…)

  • Fetishizing Victimhood: From Poland to America

    Poland’s ruling nationalist party has coined the awkward term “Polocaust” to describe the country’s suffering in World War II. At least one minister wants to dedicate a separate museum to the 1.9 million non-Jewish Poles who lost their lives in the conflict.

    This comes after the government criminalized blaming Poles for the Holocaust and referenced its 123 years of partition by Austria, Germany and Russia when called out by the EU for illiberal judicial reforms.

    Poland, according to the Law and Justice party, has only ever been a victim — until it came to power and restored Polish pride.

    It is no coincidence that Law and Justice is popular in the eastern and more rural half of the country, where people have long felt marginalized by the Western-oriented liberal elite.

    Nor is the party’s victim-mongering unique. (more…)

  • Don’t Call Them Illiberal Democrats

    Viktor Orbán Vladimir Putin
    Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and Russian president Vladimir Putin answer questions from reporters in Moscow, February 17, 2016 (Facebook/Viktor Orbán)

    Michael Meyer-Resende of Democracy Reporting International argues for Carnegie Europe that applying the term “illiberal democracy” or “majoritarianism” to the politics of Hungary and Poland is a misnomer. The ruling parties there are not undermining democracy — by taking control of the (state) media, stacking the courts and rewriting election laws — for the sake of the majority, but rather to maintain their own power.

    Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party pretend to apply a majoritarian logic while colonizing the institutions of checks and balances:

    For now, it means the majority can rule without constraints. Tomorrow, it means they can thwart another majority by using their control of the judiciary and state media. (more…)

  • With the Castros Gone, Is Change Afoot in Cuba?

    Havana Cuba
    Skyline of Havana, Cuba (iStock/Spooh)

    The appointment of a new president in Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, sixty years after the island’s socialist revolution, feels like a turning point.

    Once anointed by the 605-strong National Assembly as Cuba’s first non-Castro president in decades, Díaz-Canel vowed to modernize the economy and make government more responsive to its people.

    What does the change mean in practice?

    Not having a Castro, neither Fidel (1976-08) nor Raúl (2008-18), as leader carries with it great symbolism for sure. For the first time in many years, the powerful roles of president and head of the Communist Party are no longer combined. (Raúl remains party leader for three years.) But the Castro years weren’t quite as monolithic as they are sometimes portrayed and the next few years are unlikely to see a turnaround. (more…)

  • Debunking Trump in the Russia Scandal

    Donald Trump
    Donald Trump gives a speech in Derry, New Hampshire, August 19, 2015 (Michael Vadon)

    American president Donald Trump and his allies have come up with various defenses in the Russia scandal: There was no collusion; Collusion isn’t a crime anyway; The FBI is biased; Trump had every right to fire James Comey; And what about Hillary Clinton?

    Here I’ll debunk those arguments. (more…)

  • This New Cold War Is Ideological Too

    Moscow Russia
    Moscow, Russia in the early morning (Unsplash/Jean Colet)

    Because Russia promotes an agenda that is native to Europe, few seem to realize this Second Cold War is just as ideological as the first.

    If anything, the fact that Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine can tap into a homegrown Western reactionary movement that shares its beliefs makes the ideological challenge he poses more insidious. (more…)

  • Trump Accelerates Demise of American World Order

    American EA-18G Growler jet
    An American EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft prepares to launch from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush on deployment in the Mediterranean Sea, June 9 (USN/Matt Matlage)

    Donald Trump hasn’t ushered in a post-American world yet. But he is accelerating the demise of a benign hegemony that has made the world more peaceful and more prosperous with his policy of “America first”. (more…)

  • An Old Conflict in New Form

    I used to think that the rise of far-right populism, the crisis of social democracy and growing divides along class and educational lines were creating a new political reality in the West.

    In a 2016 report for the consultancy Wikistrat, I argued that the political spectrum was shifting from left-right to cosmopolitan-nationalist.

    Others made similar observations:

    • Andrew Sullivan observed in 2014 that America’s blue-red culture war had come to Europe: “Blue Europe is internationalist, globalized, metrosexual, secular, modern, multicultural. Red Europe is noninterventionist, patriotic, more traditional, more sympathetic to faith, more comfortable in a homogeneous society.”
    • Stephan Shakespeare, a British pollsters, argued a year later that people were either “drawbridge up” or “drawbridge down”.
    • The Economist characterized the divide as between open and closed: “Welcome immigrants or keep them out? Open up to foreign trade or protect domestic industries? Embrace cultural change or resist it?”
    • David Goodhart divided people into “anywheres” — mobile and open-minded — and “somewheres” — attached to country, community and family.

    I still think this is broadly correct, but now I wonder how new this split really is. (more…)

  • It’s Not the Economy, Stupid!

    Donald Trump
    Donald Trump gives a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, February 27, 2015 (Gage Skidmore)

    The votes for Brexit, European populism and Donald Trump weren’t working-class revolts.

    Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Serwer have argued that mostly-white elites are drawn to the “economic anxiety” thesis because it absolves them of responsibility for more intractable problems, like racism, xenophobia and self-delusions about both.

    If nativists are motivated by stagnating wages, then there are policy solutions for bringing them back into the mainstream.

    But what if their grievances aren’t so concrete? (more…)

  • Poland Makes Mistake Engaging with France But Not Germany

    If Poland believes it can make up for its poor relations with neighboring Germany by deepening ties with France, it is making a mistake. (more…)

  • Lessons for Democrats from Europe

    Alexis Tsipras Martin Schulz
    Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and European Parliament president Martin Schulz answer questions from reporters in Brussels, February 4, 2015 (European Parliament)

    How can Democrats win back working-class voters who have switched to the right?

    The obvious solution is to become more populist. Less Hillary Clinton, more Bernie Sanders. Tax the rich, spend more on welfare, make health care universal and oppose new trade deals.

    Except we have seen social democrats try this in Europe and it didn’t work.

    When left-wing parties cling to a shrinking working-class electorate, they end up neglecting middle-income supporters — and satisfy neither. Parties that takes sides are more successful. (more…)

  • Merkel’s Answer to Populist Challenge: Shift to the Left

    Angela Merkel
    German chancellor Angela Merkel arrives in Kiev, Ukraine, February 5, 2015 (Bundesregierung/Steffen Kugler)

    Angela Merkel’s answer to the defection of right-wing voters is — counterintuitively — to shift further to the left.

    Der Spiegel reports that the German chancellor recently told members of her Christian Democratic party (CDU) they need to do better on pay, pensions and housing.

    They were expecting a harder line on immigration, which is the issue that galvanized the Alternative for Germany’s voters.

    This new far-right party placed third in last month’s election with nearly 13 percent support.

    Merkel’s Christian Democrats still won, but with only 33 percent support — their lowest vote share in over half a century. (more…)

  • A Failure of Leadership in Spain

    Mariano Rajoy
    Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy arrives at Congress in Madrid, October 29, 2016 (La Moncloa)

    The unstoppable force of Catalan separatism is about to meet the unmovable object that is Mariano Rajoy.

    The Spanish prime minister and conservative party leader has vowed to prevent an independence referendum in the northeastern region at all costs. The Catalans are determined to vote anyway.

    Neither side will be able to claim victory on Monday.

    Rajoy may succeed in blocking the vote, but his intransigence has already convinced moderate Catalans there isn’t a future for them in Spain. The separatists may manage to organize a referendum, but it will be so marred by illegality and irregularity that the outcome cannot possibly be considered a mandate to break away. (more…)

  • Iraq’s Kurds Deserve the West’s Support for Their Own State

    Western countries are falling into the familiar habit of discouraging Kurdish self-determination.

    American and European officials have urged Iraq’s Kurds to delay their independence referendum, scheduled for next Monday.

    The reasons are by now well-known: a Kurdish state would anger the Turks, destabilize Iraq and complicate the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

    All of which is true, but there will always be a reason to deny the Kurds self-rule. They have been stateless for generations. If it isn’t Turkish apprehensions today, it will be fears of an Iranian-Turkish condominium tomorrow.

    The Kurds, one of the most progressive people in the Middle East, deserve better. (more…)