Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Political Theory

  • Europe Doesn’t Need a Biden

    Joe Biden
    American president Joe Biden boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, February 5 (White House/Adam Schultz)

    European leaders are “weak”, the American president is “bold”. It’s a trope so old, at this point it tells us more about the people who perpetuate it than about elected officials on either side of the Atlantic.

    Romano Prodi was “weak“. José María Aznar was “weak“. François Mitterrand was “weak“. His successor, Jacques Chirac, lacked “gravitas“.

    A year before the election of Donald Trump, Robert Kaplan disparaged the “grey, insipid ciphers” who wandered Europe’s halls of power. An article in Foreign Affairs accused the continent’s “cowardly” leadership of rendering the EU “irrelevant”. A 2005 op-ed in The New York Times lamented the “weakness” of European leaders at the very time President George W. Bush called for a “renewal” in transatlantic relations. (The same George W. Bush who two years earlier had created the deepest crisis in transatlantic relations since the end of the Cold War by invading Iraq.)

    Here we go again. Jef Poortmans, a commentator for Belgium’s Knack magazine, compares Joe Biden’s “zeal” with Europe’s “washed out” leadership. Timothy Garton Ash, whose expectations the EU has never met, argues the bloc faces “one of the biggest challenges of its life” (again). Philip Stephens contrasts Biden’s “ambition”, “audacity”, “energy” and “resolve” with the “defensive incrementalism” of his European counterparts, in particular Angela Merkel.

    The “real significance” of Biden’s agenda, writes Stephens in the Financial Times — a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue program and a $3 trillion education and infrastructure bill — “lies in a bold reassertion of the responsibilities of government.”

    His mistake is to assume America and Europe are starting from the same point. (more…)

  • Fragmented Dutch Parliament Lacks Experience

    Dutch parliament The Hague
    Dutch lawmakers listen to a debate in parliament in The Hague, September 29, 2020 (Tweede Kamer)

    Regular readers know I’m not a fan of two-party democracy. It reduces politics to simplistic either-or choices. It encourages parties to radicalize their supporters and appeal to the extremes rather than the center. Multiparty democracy, by contrast, engenders moderation and compromise.

    Multiparty democracies are superior on almost every metric: their voters show higher trust in government and each other; their electoral systems are more responsive to changes in public opinion; their economies are more competitive and their societies less divisive.

    But there is a tradeoff. When voters aren’t loyal — which is itself a good thing; they should judge parties on their performance — turnover in parliament can be high, which robs it of experience and expertise. (more…)

  • Italy Shouldn’t Need Draghi

    Mario Draghi
    European Central Bank president Mario Draghi walks to a news conference in Frankfurt, October 25, 2018 (ECB/Martin Lamberts)

    It’s not an endorsement of Italian democracy that the country needs another above-the-fray technocrat to pull it out of the mud.

    If Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief, wins the support of parliament, three of the last six Italian prime ministers will have been apolitical appointees.

    I hope Ferdinando Giugliano is right and Draghi will succeed where his predecessors failed, but recent history — and Giugliano points this out too — does not inspire confidence. Neither Mario Monti nor Giuseppe Conte was able break the political logjam to enact much-needed reforms. (more…)

  • Scotland Is a Country!

    Scotland flag
    Flag of Scotland (Paul Morgan)

    My most recent article about Scottish independence, from last summer, got more than a hundred angry replies on Twitter today.

    Not a lot of substantive comments, unfortunately, although I had good discussions with those Scots who argued I had overstated the risks of dissolution and underestimated the opportunities.

    No, nearly all replies hounded me for describing Scotland as a “region” and not a “country”, which I know it is.

    The reason I use “country” as well as “region” is that Scotland’s constitutional status — a country within a country — can be confusing to readers who aren’t familiar with the UK. That’s all. I meant no offense. (more…)

  • America Needs a de Gaulle

    Charles de Gaulle Lyndon Johnson
    Presidents Charles de Gaulle of France and Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States meet at the memorial service for Konrad Adenauer, the former chancellor of West Germany, April 25, 1967 (LBJ Library)

    Charles de Gaulle’s great accomplishment, to paraphrase his British biographer, Julian Jackson, was that he reconciled the French left to patriotism and the French right to democracy.

    The history of France since 1789 has been a consistent struggle between a universalist left and the conservative right; between republic and monarchy; the Enlightenment and Catholicism; labor and capital; Paris and La France profonde.

    History hasn’t ended. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen embody opposite visions of France today. But de Gaulle narrowed the divide and helped Frenchmen and -women think of each other as opponents rather than enemies.

    That America could use a whiff of Gaullism isn’t my idea. Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist of The New York Times, called for an American de Gaulle two years ago.

    I suspect he envisaged an authority figure on the right. Instead we have Joe Biden. Can he play the same role? (more…)

  • There’s Only So Much Race Can Tell Us

    Democratic voters Davidson North Carolina
    Democratic voters in Davidson, North Carolina listen to a speech, October 12, 2016 (Hillary for America/Alyssa S.)

    American journalists continue to parse the November electorate, specifically the Latino vote.

    Matthew Yglesias, formerly of Vox, has a good newsletter about Donald Trump’s gains with Latino voters in which he links to Harry Enten’s analysis for CNN. It turns out Trump didn’t appeal to just Latinos of Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan descent, who may have been alarmed by Democratic flirtations with socialism given the experience in their home countries; he did better with Latinos of all backgrounds compared to four years ago.

    This is fascinating to political junkies like us, but having just moved back to the Netherlands, where the campaign for the general election in March is slowly getting underway, I’m reminded that this sort of demographic analysis is almost entirely absent in Europe. (more…)

  • Race Is a Poor Predictor of How Americans Will Vote

    Miami Florida
    Skyline of Miami, Florida (Unsplash/Ryan Parker)

    For years, it looked like Republicans were becoming the party of white, left-behind America and Democrats the party of upper-class whites and racial minorities.

    Tuesday’s election hasn’t upended that narrative, but it has put a dent in it.

    If you had to pick one characteristic to predict party affiliation, it would be education. The better educated Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.

    Gender is another fair predictor. Women historically vote more Democratic than men. But relatively fewer men voted for Trump this year than in 2016, according to exit polls. (more…)

  • One Clear Verdict from 2020 is That Trumpism Is Here to Stay

    Donald Trump
    Portrait of Donald Trump in West Des Moines, Iowa, January 23, 2016 (Tony Webster)

    Former vice president Joe Biden could still win America’s presidential election, but Donald Trump’s performance in the wake of a deadly pandemic, hugely negative polls and a mainstream media almost universally hostile to him shows that cultural and political elites in the United States keep getting things wrong. (more…)

  • Viktor Orbán’s Authoritarian Playbook

    Viktor Orbán
    Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán arrives to a European Council meeting in Brussels, October 16 (European Council)

    For too long has the European Union tolerated the formation of a self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy” in its midst. A recent European Court of Justice ruling underscores that Hungary is not only in beach of the rule of law, but violates the very rights and values on which the EU is founded.

    The court ruled earlier this month that restrictions imposed on foreign universities — which forced the George Soros-funded Central European University to relocate from Budapest to Vienna — were “incompatible” with the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

    Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, a French member of the European Parliament and its rapporteur on the situation in Hungary, commented that the ruling “should send a warning to Viktor Orbán: that it’s time to step back from the brink of autocracy and reverse the Hungarian government’s undemocratic path.”

    Orbán, prime minister since 2010, has come a long way. He started his political career as a liberal anticommunist and ended up the most right-wing, authoritarian government leader in the EU.

    If the rest of the bloc is to rein him in, it must first understand how he has been able to gain, and keep, his power.

    This is Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian playbook. (more…)

  • Demographics of the American Election

    Donald Trump
    Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, October 29, 2016 (Gage Skidmore)

    Donald Trump has lost support across demographics since 2016. The president is down with white voters and voters of color; men and women; Catholics and Jews; millennials and boomers.

    National polls give the Republican an average of just 42 percent support against 52 percent for Joe Biden.

    However, because Democrats cluster in big cities, which are underrepresented in the Electoral College, Biden needs to win by 3 points nationally to have an even chance of winning the election.

    Trump’s hope is to keep his losses among four (partially overlapping) constituencies in the states which hold the balance in the Electoral College to a minimum: white voters with and without a college degree, women and Latinos. (more…)

  • Why the Left Hasn’t Been More Successful

    Frans Timmermans Nicola Zingaretti Pedro Sánchez
    Dutch, Italian and Spanish socialist party leaders Frans Timmermans, Nicola Zingaretti and Pedro Sánchez meet in Brussels, March 21, 2019 (PES)

    The 2008-09 financial crisis. Climate change. The coronavirus pandemic. Rising inequality in the United States. Stagnant middle wages.

    It shouldn’t be difficult for left-wing parties to make the case for bigger government, and yet they are out of power in most Western countries.

    Ruy Teixeira, who argued in 2002 that demographic changes would give Democrats in the United States an “emerging majority”, and who later criticized those same Democrats for forgetting about working-class white voters, believes there are five reasons the left has been unable to build durable mass support.

    His perspective is American, but the European left has committed some of the same what he calls five “deadly sins”. (more…)

  • How to Restore American Democracy After Trump

    United States Capitol Washington
    United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Brandon Bourdages)

    Donald Trump’s presidency has exposed and exacerbated fundamental weaknesses in American democracy. He must be voted out in November, but that won’t be enough.

    If Democrats gain power, they must make five reforms to restore fairness, restore balance between the three branches of government and reverse the polarization that has made it impossible for the two parties to compromise on everything from climate change to gun laws to health care to immigration:

    1. Abolish the Electoral College.
    2. Add states.
    3. Put Congress first.
    4. Make it easier to remove the president.
    5. Abolish the two parties. (more…)

  • Spain’s Judicialization of Catalan Separatism Has Failed

    Palau de la Generalitat Barcelona Spain
    Palace of the Catalan regional government in Barcelona, Spain at night (iStock/Tomas Sereda)

    Successive Spanish governments have treated Catalan separatism as a legal, rather than a political, problem. This has done nothing to weaken support for independence. It has radicalized Catalans.

    The dismissal of Catalan president Quim Torra is the latest episode in a decade-long legal drama. Spain’s Supreme Court removed him from office on Monday for hanging a “partisan” banner from the balcony of his government’s medieval palace in the center of Barcelona during the 2019 election.

    The banner didn’t express support for a political party, but rather called for the release of the nine separatists who were imprisoned for leading a failed breakaway from Spain in 2017.

    Torra’s removal triggers early elections, which polls predict the separatists will win.

    He is the second Catalan president in three years to be unseated by the Spanish judiciary. His predecessor, Carles Puigdemont, was ousted after leading the 2017 independence bid. He fled to Belgium to escape prosecution. (more…)

  • How Trump Will Try to Steal the Election

    Donald Trump
    American president Donald Trump enters a limousine at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, September 17 (White House/Shealah Craighead)

    America could be heading into its worst political crisis since the Civil War.

    If, as the polls predict, Joe Biden wins more votes in November but Donald Trump refuses to leave, there is no template for how to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.

    Asked on Wednesday if he would commit to one, the president said, “We’re going to have to see what happens.”

    You know that I have been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster. … Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer frankly. There’ll be a continuation.

    He also explained why he’s in a rush to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court:

    I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.

    Ginsburg, a liberal justice appointed by Bill Clinton, died a week ago. The Court now has five conservative and three liberal members.

    In 2016, Trump told supporters he would only accept the outcome if he won.

    When he did win, Trump claimed — without evidence — that three million people had voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, the very margin by which she won the popular vote. Trump prevailed in the Electoral College.

    If Trump loses this year and refuses to concede, that alone could throw the period between the election on November 3 and the inauguration on January 20 into chaos.

    But there’s more Trump and his party could do to stay in power. (more…)

  • Stakes in Supreme Court Nominations Are Too High

    United States Supreme Court Washington
    Mourners gather outside the United States Supreme Court in Washington DC after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, September 19 (Ted Eytan)

    The death of one Supreme Court justice shouldn’t plunge the whole country into crisis. The fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s has is more proof that America’s top court is too powerful.

    In no other democracy does the highest court feature so prominently in the public imagination.

    Here in Catalonia, Spain’s Supreme Court is controversial for consistently ruling against Catalan interests, but I doubt many Catalans know the names of individual Supreme Court justices. Certainly the average Dutch person or Italian doesn’t.

    Even in Poland, where the ruling far-right party has created a parallel legal system to sideline a Supreme Court it considers to be dominated by liberals, the fate of individual justices doesn’t provoke such strong emotions as in the United States.

    American justices have been aware of the danger. Antonin Scalia, a conservative, cautioned a year before his death in 2016 that America could find itself governed by a “black-robed supremacy” unless its rediscovered its tradition of “self-rule”. (more…)