This week, hundreds of people lined up at Midtown Comics in New York to purchase the first edition of Marvel's new Spiderman issue, featuring Barack Obama. Some were skipping work, and some had even flown in that morning from out of town for the occasion. All of them stood outside for hours bracing sub-zero temperatures, and by 9 am the comic book was sold out. Obama's image -on t-shirts, buttons, commemorative coins, periodical magazines, coffee mugs, stamps, plates, bobblehead dolls, posters, comic books, and regular books- is the only thing that sells in these recessionary days. Why else would Doris Kearns Goodwin's one-thousand-page-long book about Lincoln rise up to the top of best-seller lists more than two years after publication? You can call it Obama's first stimulus package.
Similar crowds are flocking to train stations in the Northeast to catch a glimpse of the Amtrak cars taking Obama to Washington for the inauguration, replicating the last leg of Lincoln's journey in 1861. And millions are expected in the nation's capital on Tuesday for the great finale of a two-year love affair of Hollywoodesque proportions. I hear Bill Clinton prefers the moniker "greatest fairy tale ever."
I have partaken in this collective fever as much as anyone, but I cannot help detecting a hint of desperation (or is it hope?) in these quasi-religious manifestations of faith and devotion. It showcases -slightly altering a quote from Bill Maher- the genius of our marketing and the gullibility of our people. It follows the script of any typical American movie: the crisis is systemic and only an exceptional individual can redeem us and guide us through the valley of darkness. Americans chant Yes We Can, but what they mean is I Hope He Can.
And it's not just Americans. People all over the world welcomed Obama's election enthusiastically (with special intensity in Kenya and, for less sentimental reasons, in Obama, Japan). However, this should not be misconstrued as an expression of the world's hunger for American leadership. With few exceptions (Georgia, Taiwan and other East Asian countries, the littoral Arab statelets that surround Saudi Arabia, Darfur), most people want less America, not more. What they cheer is the end of American hegemony and unipolarity; what they hope for is a less intrusive and arrogant Uncle Sam. Be nice to the countries that lend you money, says the overseer of China's two-trillion dollars' worth of US bonds. Stay off the Middle East. Let Latin America follow its preferred course. Draw down the globe-spanning stretch of the US military. Spare other countries the lectures about democracy or capitalism. At a time when the United States' image in the world is associated with preventive war and torture, and Israel's actions are deemed monstrous by most people outside the United States, Western criticism of Russia's intervention in Georgia, or China's heavy-handed treatment of Tibetan dissidents only provokes laughter.
And that is why I am also apprehensive about the end of the honeymoon and the inevitable disappointment. I dread the day that a US bomb kills five children with Obama as commander-in-chief. I contemplate the possibility that the new president will not significantly cut down military spending, which doubled in the last eight years. I fear waking up to another victim of the tragedy of American diplomacy -William Appleman Williams' prescient opus on US foreign policy-, which suggests that Americans believe that other people cannot solve their problems unless they follow America's formula. Most of these nightmarish scenarios, in case you were wondering, feature Rahm Emanuel at one point or another.
If you read books about foreign policy, you have probably noticed that all of a sudden everyone is talking about a post-American world, a non-American world, and the end of American exceptionalism. The most prescient ones -Michael Mann, Emmanuel Todd, Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson, and Yale Ferguson, among others- had been saying the same since 2003, dismissing as humbug all the hype about America's empire. The party is over in Wall Street, in the real estate market, and in consumption indexes, and US foreign policy should reflect this. One suspects that the United States will be better served by an Administration trying to transition smoothly into the new reality, rather than one that makes a last-ditch effort to stay on top and police the world. My careful reading of Obama's words gives me reasons to be optimistic, but I also know that effective politicians can be many things to many people, and new politicians are like blank pages onto which we project our own aspirations. Besides, that presidential bubble can be very hard to puncture. Even if they let him keep his BlackBerry.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Like stuck in traffic
The Oscar-winner "Crash" begins with this quote from Don Cheadle's character, setting up the tone and message of this metaphor-movie about racism, prejudice, and solipsism in crowded places: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."
I find metaphors about cars and traffic particularly illustrative of American society. As we all know, Americans love their cars, and road rage, wasted fuel, rising insurance costs, expensive gas, maddening traffic, melting ice caps, and billions of dollars in bailouts will not change that. Invariably, the Americans I meet have sharper and more coherent opinions about the 14-billion-dollar rescue package to keep Detroit afloat than about the more than one trillion dollars haphazardly dispensed to save the banking and mortgage industry. We might not know our ABCs, but we know our cars.
I have always found that driving a car and trying to navigate traffic brings the worst in us. It's a very antisocial behavior. Behind the wheel, we are always the good guy, and everyone else is a suspect, a faulty driver, and you can only rely on yourself. Driving would be a pleasant activity if it wasn't for all those terrible drivers out there (which I have yet to meet - I have met self-defined "aggressive" drivers, but never self-defined "bad" drivers). We all consider ourselves relatively good, play-by-the-rules drivers, and when we cut someone off or merge too late, we consider it an exception that we can allow ourselves for all those times that we were the victim of such infraction. And, protected by all the metal and glass, we can yell, and feel aggravated, and say all the impolite things that we don't say in the subway when we're standing shoulder-to-shoulder with annoying strangers.
Too many of us see the world as if we were always driving a car, always behind the wheel. As if we were always virtuous and good citizens, and a few maladjusted, misbehaving party-poopers were ruining it for everyone. Around us, people morph easily into welfare queens, cheaters, and system-abusers. It is hard to conceptualize the intricacies of capitalism, or the hydraulics of our imperfect government, or the lobbying tentacles of Big Pharma, but it is easy to remember that person in front of you at an overcrowded emergency room. Mike Huckabee, a presidential contender in this past cycle and a likely candidate in 2012, just published a new book, "Do The Right Thing," in which he essentially concludes that in order to get government off our backs we just need to be better people. We don't have a health care crisis in America, he would say. We have a health crisis. No need to fight over single-payer universal health care or the other patchy, piecemeal approaches in the menu if we just start eating right, and taking care of ourselves, and exercising daily. I hear this often in my classes, and I call it the New Year's resolution approach to government. Frankly, I think James Madison put it much more eloquently when he said "if men were angels..."
Most people remember Obama's 2004 DNC speech by his "there's not a red America, and a blue America, there's the United States of America" line, but my personal favorite is when he laid out the basic creed of progressivism: "If there's a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties." And although he often appeals to our sense of personal responsibility -especially in front of African-American audiences, to Reverend Jackson's chagrin- his most important trait to me is his fine sense of empathy, and the belief that we have a crisis of empathy in America.
It feels strange to speak ill of American individualism and selfishness only a few weeks after record-breaking Americans elected this man to the highest office, but I fear that he convinced lots of people less empathetic than he is into voting for him, and very soon we will have to have our seventh national conversation about universal health care since World War One. Maybe it is true that 2008 is not 1993, but Princeton University's Uwe Reinhardt, America's leading expert on health-care economics, is not so optimistic. Why? There is no social solidarity in America. Maybe it's just one of those days, but I happen to agree.
I find metaphors about cars and traffic particularly illustrative of American society. As we all know, Americans love their cars, and road rage, wasted fuel, rising insurance costs, expensive gas, maddening traffic, melting ice caps, and billions of dollars in bailouts will not change that. Invariably, the Americans I meet have sharper and more coherent opinions about the 14-billion-dollar rescue package to keep Detroit afloat than about the more than one trillion dollars haphazardly dispensed to save the banking and mortgage industry. We might not know our ABCs, but we know our cars.
I have always found that driving a car and trying to navigate traffic brings the worst in us. It's a very antisocial behavior. Behind the wheel, we are always the good guy, and everyone else is a suspect, a faulty driver, and you can only rely on yourself. Driving would be a pleasant activity if it wasn't for all those terrible drivers out there (which I have yet to meet - I have met self-defined "aggressive" drivers, but never self-defined "bad" drivers). We all consider ourselves relatively good, play-by-the-rules drivers, and when we cut someone off or merge too late, we consider it an exception that we can allow ourselves for all those times that we were the victim of such infraction. And, protected by all the metal and glass, we can yell, and feel aggravated, and say all the impolite things that we don't say in the subway when we're standing shoulder-to-shoulder with annoying strangers.
Too many of us see the world as if we were always driving a car, always behind the wheel. As if we were always virtuous and good citizens, and a few maladjusted, misbehaving party-poopers were ruining it for everyone. Around us, people morph easily into welfare queens, cheaters, and system-abusers. It is hard to conceptualize the intricacies of capitalism, or the hydraulics of our imperfect government, or the lobbying tentacles of Big Pharma, but it is easy to remember that person in front of you at an overcrowded emergency room. Mike Huckabee, a presidential contender in this past cycle and a likely candidate in 2012, just published a new book, "Do The Right Thing," in which he essentially concludes that in order to get government off our backs we just need to be better people. We don't have a health care crisis in America, he would say. We have a health crisis. No need to fight over single-payer universal health care or the other patchy, piecemeal approaches in the menu if we just start eating right, and taking care of ourselves, and exercising daily. I hear this often in my classes, and I call it the New Year's resolution approach to government. Frankly, I think James Madison put it much more eloquently when he said "if men were angels..."
Most people remember Obama's 2004 DNC speech by his "there's not a red America, and a blue America, there's the United States of America" line, but my personal favorite is when he laid out the basic creed of progressivism: "If there's a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties." And although he often appeals to our sense of personal responsibility -especially in front of African-American audiences, to Reverend Jackson's chagrin- his most important trait to me is his fine sense of empathy, and the belief that we have a crisis of empathy in America.
It feels strange to speak ill of American individualism and selfishness only a few weeks after record-breaking Americans elected this man to the highest office, but I fear that he convinced lots of people less empathetic than he is into voting for him, and very soon we will have to have our seventh national conversation about universal health care since World War One. Maybe it is true that 2008 is not 1993, but Princeton University's Uwe Reinhardt, America's leading expert on health-care economics, is not so optimistic. Why? There is no social solidarity in America. Maybe it's just one of those days, but I happen to agree.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Transatlanticism: Swinging to the right, swinging to the left
Tony Judt, possibly one of the best political historians of our time, likes to remind us that Austria never exorcized its Nazi past. As Hitler's first 'victim,' it never intoned the kind of national mea culpa that Germany, grudgingly and painfully, let out over time. But Austria was not only Adolf Hitler's birthplace; it provided a disproportionate amount of SS agents, concentration camp administrators, and Nazi sympathizers, on a higher per capita basis than Germany itself. In the absence of accountability and collective soul-searching, the echoes of Austria's post-war deafening silence reverberate today.
Austria's 2008 general elections have just yielded the strongest electoral result of the far-right in Europe since the end of World War II. Surpassing Jörg Haider in 1999 and Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, the new poster boy of xenophobic, anti-Brussels Europe, Heinz-Christian Strache is the rising star in a country that embodies European civilization and is one of the highest contributors to the EU coffers. The young Strache and his former mentor, Haider, combined for one-third of the vote, holding a key to the success of any governing coalition emerging from the elections. A former dentist (am I the only one who finds that extremely appropriate?), Strache has been filmed in military fatigues training alongside known neo-nazis; wants to repeal a ban on swastikas and other Nazi symbols but prohibit the construction of minarets; enjoys calling headscarved women "female ninjas" and seems distressed that many Austrians prefer falafels, kebabs, and couscous over Wiener schnitzels and sausages; and his rhetoric and programs are unashamedly anti-gay rights, anti-immigration, anti-Islam and, perhaps most importantly, anti-EU. All of the above brings him close and tight with extreme right-wingers in France, Flanders, Bulgaria, Serbia, and elsewhere.
And it is not just Austria. A former fascist party, Alleanza Nationale, is part of Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition. Alessandra Mussolini, Benito's granddaughter, is growing more outspoken every day. While her cohorts harass Gypsies and immigrants, Berlusconi wants to make illegal immigration a punishable criminal offense and fingerprint the Roma minority. Similar anti-Islam and anti-immigration sentiment is growing in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Poland.
More mainstream conservatism is also on the rise. The Labour Party is crumbling in the United Kingdom, Sarkozy is winning his battle against the unions in France, and at least one of the Polish twins keeps quarrelling with Brussels over the death penalty. Not even Sweden is a social-democratic paradise anymore.
Meanwhile, the United States, a country whose political center is supposed to be markedly to the right from Europe, is in the midst of the biggest government intervention in its economy since the New Deal. American leaders are embracing words like 'bailout' and 'nationalization,' and railing against 'the unfettered free market' and 'deregulation' -although one could equally argue that "socialism for the rich," the only acceptable socialism in America according to John Kenneth Galbraith, has always been part of the conservative agenda. While stocks plunge in Wall Street, the political capital of atheism, universal health care, same-sex marriage, and taxes for the rich is steadily increasing. And unless something dramatic happens, Americans are about to elect a young, black, progressive man from the South Side of Chicago called Barack Hussein Obama to the highest office of the land.
It's almost as if a law of opposites informs the variable distance between the political centers of America and Europe, or as if the pendular swing of politics moves too fast to give all those books that came out at the beginning of the decade any respectable shelf life. Robert Kagan, who famously declared that Americans hail from Mars and Europeans hail from Venus, should look for new planets to explain the transatlantic gap. Jeremy Rifkin and others should wake up from their European Dream. Congressman Tom Tancredo, known for his hardline anti-immigration positions, is about to retire from his seat in the House of Representatives after failing to get Americans to embrace massive deportation. Well, maybe he should just move to Europe!
Austria's 2008 general elections have just yielded the strongest electoral result of the far-right in Europe since the end of World War II. Surpassing Jörg Haider in 1999 and Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, the new poster boy of xenophobic, anti-Brussels Europe, Heinz-Christian Strache is the rising star in a country that embodies European civilization and is one of the highest contributors to the EU coffers. The young Strache and his former mentor, Haider, combined for one-third of the vote, holding a key to the success of any governing coalition emerging from the elections. A former dentist (am I the only one who finds that extremely appropriate?), Strache has been filmed in military fatigues training alongside known neo-nazis; wants to repeal a ban on swastikas and other Nazi symbols but prohibit the construction of minarets; enjoys calling headscarved women "female ninjas" and seems distressed that many Austrians prefer falafels, kebabs, and couscous over Wiener schnitzels and sausages; and his rhetoric and programs are unashamedly anti-gay rights, anti-immigration, anti-Islam and, perhaps most importantly, anti-EU. All of the above brings him close and tight with extreme right-wingers in France, Flanders, Bulgaria, Serbia, and elsewhere.
And it is not just Austria. A former fascist party, Alleanza Nationale, is part of Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition. Alessandra Mussolini, Benito's granddaughter, is growing more outspoken every day. While her cohorts harass Gypsies and immigrants, Berlusconi wants to make illegal immigration a punishable criminal offense and fingerprint the Roma minority. Similar anti-Islam and anti-immigration sentiment is growing in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Poland.
More mainstream conservatism is also on the rise. The Labour Party is crumbling in the United Kingdom, Sarkozy is winning his battle against the unions in France, and at least one of the Polish twins keeps quarrelling with Brussels over the death penalty. Not even Sweden is a social-democratic paradise anymore.
Meanwhile, the United States, a country whose political center is supposed to be markedly to the right from Europe, is in the midst of the biggest government intervention in its economy since the New Deal. American leaders are embracing words like 'bailout' and 'nationalization,' and railing against 'the unfettered free market' and 'deregulation' -although one could equally argue that "socialism for the rich," the only acceptable socialism in America according to John Kenneth Galbraith, has always been part of the conservative agenda. While stocks plunge in Wall Street, the political capital of atheism, universal health care, same-sex marriage, and taxes for the rich is steadily increasing. And unless something dramatic happens, Americans are about to elect a young, black, progressive man from the South Side of Chicago called Barack Hussein Obama to the highest office of the land.
It's almost as if a law of opposites informs the variable distance between the political centers of America and Europe, or as if the pendular swing of politics moves too fast to give all those books that came out at the beginning of the decade any respectable shelf life. Robert Kagan, who famously declared that Americans hail from Mars and Europeans hail from Venus, should look for new planets to explain the transatlantic gap. Jeremy Rifkin and others should wake up from their European Dream. Congressman Tom Tancredo, known for his hardline anti-immigration positions, is about to retire from his seat in the House of Representatives after failing to get Americans to embrace massive deportation. Well, maybe he should just move to Europe!
Sunday, May 4, 2008
What is Holding Turkey Back?
To understand Modern Turkey, one must examine the mentality of the country’s founder and first strongman, Kemal Ataturk, and his legacy in Turkey today. Under his leadership, the remains of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and Asia Minor were forged into Modern Turkey. The Turkish transformation from the dismantled Ottoman state to the Turkish Republic was made in the image of this man, whose last name translated means “father of the Turks.”
Quite the contrary to what Turkish citizens believe, and have marketed to the rest of the world, the Kemalist ideology is exactly what is preventing the country from moving forward. As has been noted by Marcus A. Templar in his recent study Tasting the Bitter Pekmez: Causes of Turkey's Instability argues that:
The reality that haunts the Turkish Republic from its inception is dangerously revealing itself. Kemal's dream was to Europeanize Turkey, but the foundations he forcibly set have remained stagnant while Europe keeps developing. Government institutions in Turkey look back to Kemalism fearing that deviation from Kemalist ideals could bring the end of their state. Turkey has been built on the principles of Pan-Turkism that are no longer acceptable in Europe and, as she is not an ethnically and racially homogenous country, this alone is the cornerstone of its instability.1
The Kemalist ideology also appears to be the main reason why Turkey cannot be relied on to abide by treaties, thereby hindering the normalization of relations between itself on the one hand, and Greece, Cyprus and the European Union on the other.
[1] Marcus A. Templar, "Tasting the Bitter Pekmez: Causes of Turkey's Instability" in Journal of Global Change and Governance Volume I, Number 2 (2008).
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Bonfire of the Vanities
One of the best lessons of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938) is the fratricidal viciousness of the left's internal squabbles, seemingly more passionate about fighting each other than about fighting General Franco. An unforgettable vignette from Monty Python's Life of Brian parodies a similar dysfunction, with the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea, and -with only one member- the Popular Front of Judea all too busy in petty internal disagreements to have any effectiveness against mighty Rome. Highbrow or lowbrow, a common thread is inescapable: allowing for exceptions and varying degrees, the political left tends to divide itself and amplify internal differences, while its opponents on the right do exactly the opposite.
To the disbelief of most observers, Silvio Berlusconi became Prime Minister of Italy for the third time a couple of weeks ago, commanding a coalition that stretched from the political center to the secessionist and xenophobic Lega Nord. The anti-Berlusconi camp, appalled that the wealthiest man in Italy, routinely indicted and prosecuted for corruption, and owner of more than half of all media outlets, was too divided to prevent Berlusconi's resounding success.
This pattern can manifest itself not only in multi-party, parliamentary democracies, but also in bipartisan, presidential ones like the United States. American progressives usually blame the corporate media, or, more abstractly, the "system" for their electoral under-performance, but sometimes, and not only when Ralph Nader shows himself, they should blame themselves. The Democratic primary is still ongoing, despite being almost mathematically clinched since the Wisconsin primary two months ago. Barack Obama, now running out the clock, would prefer to use this time to pool some of Clinton's advisers and money, campaign in Florida and Michigan, win over skeptics in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and peel off McCain's support among independents instead of courting white, working-class Democrats. Both candidates are getting scratched up and battered, more by the insufferable and exhausting length of the race than by a gaffes-obsessed media. The Democrats, who are right about the issues but are quite clumsy about process, are readying themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and lose another unlosable election.
If ignorance is the cardinal sin of the right, vanity is the cardinal sin of the left. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, spent the weekend on a vanity tour that could only damage the electoral prospects of the member of his church. But it is not just Wright that is vain or narcissistic. Since Obama won eleven contests in a row and emerged as the front-runner, the senator has received as much venom from allegedly liberal journalists as from conservative ones. Tavis Smiley, for example, is less than enthusiastic about Obama, partly because his views don't go far enough for his political taste, partly because Obama did not show up at his State of the Black Union event in New Orleans. In response, Bill Maher summed up the feeling of many viewers when he said: "I know, he won't do my show either, but if that's what he has to do, and it's working for him, maybe we should accept it and get over ourselves." Paul Krugman, who many expected to support the anti-war candidate, has spent most of his columns this year attacking Obama over disagreements with details of his health care reform plan. Markos Moulitsas, a strong Obama supporter, spoke in the harshest terms against Obama's decision to be interviewed by Chris Wallace in FoxNews. Obama may be the first liberal Democrat to be elected in a long, long time, but all of us have left-leaning friends that refuse to join the bandwagon because of disagreements over the candidate's policy on Israel, or a specific trade deal, to name only a few.
On a New York Times' article commenting Reverend Wright's exercise of narcissism, Alessandra Stanley closed with a quote from Chuck Todd (and a Carly Simon song): "You're so vain, I bet you think this campaign is about you." But that's all of us. It's who we are, and it's why we lose. We are so vain, we think this campaign is about us. And not "us" as in community, or country, or even the progressive movement, but "us" as individuals.
To the disbelief of most observers, Silvio Berlusconi became Prime Minister of Italy for the third time a couple of weeks ago, commanding a coalition that stretched from the political center to the secessionist and xenophobic Lega Nord. The anti-Berlusconi camp, appalled that the wealthiest man in Italy, routinely indicted and prosecuted for corruption, and owner of more than half of all media outlets, was too divided to prevent Berlusconi's resounding success.
This pattern can manifest itself not only in multi-party, parliamentary democracies, but also in bipartisan, presidential ones like the United States. American progressives usually blame the corporate media, or, more abstractly, the "system" for their electoral under-performance, but sometimes, and not only when Ralph Nader shows himself, they should blame themselves. The Democratic primary is still ongoing, despite being almost mathematically clinched since the Wisconsin primary two months ago. Barack Obama, now running out the clock, would prefer to use this time to pool some of Clinton's advisers and money, campaign in Florida and Michigan, win over skeptics in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and peel off McCain's support among independents instead of courting white, working-class Democrats. Both candidates are getting scratched up and battered, more by the insufferable and exhausting length of the race than by a gaffes-obsessed media. The Democrats, who are right about the issues but are quite clumsy about process, are readying themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and lose another unlosable election.
If ignorance is the cardinal sin of the right, vanity is the cardinal sin of the left. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, spent the weekend on a vanity tour that could only damage the electoral prospects of the member of his church. But it is not just Wright that is vain or narcissistic. Since Obama won eleven contests in a row and emerged as the front-runner, the senator has received as much venom from allegedly liberal journalists as from conservative ones. Tavis Smiley, for example, is less than enthusiastic about Obama, partly because his views don't go far enough for his political taste, partly because Obama did not show up at his State of the Black Union event in New Orleans. In response, Bill Maher summed up the feeling of many viewers when he said: "I know, he won't do my show either, but if that's what he has to do, and it's working for him, maybe we should accept it and get over ourselves." Paul Krugman, who many expected to support the anti-war candidate, has spent most of his columns this year attacking Obama over disagreements with details of his health care reform plan. Markos Moulitsas, a strong Obama supporter, spoke in the harshest terms against Obama's decision to be interviewed by Chris Wallace in FoxNews. Obama may be the first liberal Democrat to be elected in a long, long time, but all of us have left-leaning friends that refuse to join the bandwagon because of disagreements over the candidate's policy on Israel, or a specific trade deal, to name only a few.
On a New York Times' article commenting Reverend Wright's exercise of narcissism, Alessandra Stanley closed with a quote from Chuck Todd (and a Carly Simon song): "You're so vain, I bet you think this campaign is about you." But that's all of us. It's who we are, and it's why we lose. We are so vain, we think this campaign is about us. And not "us" as in community, or country, or even the progressive movement, but "us" as individuals.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Digital/Medieval Finance: Speed and Chaos as Architecture
I am presenting next Friday at the DGA Conference and wanted to try out some of the ideas from my presentation here with you. The following is a brief snippet. Any comments/suggestions are always welcomed.
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One of the most significant enablers of a distinctively new configuration of global finance is the recent application of digital information technologies in financial transactions. These technologies have facilitated the nearly instantaneous transaction of more complex financial instruments by a wider array of investors at lower costs.
Digital financial transactions have reconfigured these global, fast-paced conduits into new hierarchical formations where governmental institutions do not necessarily occupy the top layers. For example, the application of digital technologies in finance has allowed for an interconnected and distributed network of a larger number of investors and instruments to end up as a kind of concentrated power not previously observed.
It is not impossible to imagine a large-scale financial crisis occurring before the wide-spread use of digital technologies; the Great Depression of the 1930s is the most well-known example of such. However, it is perhaps difficult to imagine millions of decisions from a multitude of dispersed investors coalescing around a handful of countries to severely affect their national markets in a matter of a few weeks, such as what occurred during the 1997 Asian crisis.
The speed of action of this concentrated power, and not only its scale, becomes a major transformative feature in our current architecture of global finance.
It is largely through the interplay between money and digital technologies, complex financial instruments, private knowledge networks, and other phenomena that I believe global financial markets have been able to overgrow the centripetal pull of governmental frameworks, whether national or international.
As with other social structures becoming transfixed by globalization, the emerging architecture of global finance lets us peer into a medieval-like future of overlapping authority, competing allegiances, and a diffuse patchwork of social dynamics.
---
One of the most significant enablers of a distinctively new configuration of global finance is the recent application of digital information technologies in financial transactions. These technologies have facilitated the nearly instantaneous transaction of more complex financial instruments by a wider array of investors at lower costs.
Digital financial transactions have reconfigured these global, fast-paced conduits into new hierarchical formations where governmental institutions do not necessarily occupy the top layers. For example, the application of digital technologies in finance has allowed for an interconnected and distributed network of a larger number of investors and instruments to end up as a kind of concentrated power not previously observed.
It is not impossible to imagine a large-scale financial crisis occurring before the wide-spread use of digital technologies; the Great Depression of the 1930s is the most well-known example of such. However, it is perhaps difficult to imagine millions of decisions from a multitude of dispersed investors coalescing around a handful of countries to severely affect their national markets in a matter of a few weeks, such as what occurred during the 1997 Asian crisis.
The speed of action of this concentrated power, and not only its scale, becomes a major transformative feature in our current architecture of global finance.
It is largely through the interplay between money and digital technologies, complex financial instruments, private knowledge networks, and other phenomena that I believe global financial markets have been able to overgrow the centripetal pull of governmental frameworks, whether national or international.
As with other social structures becoming transfixed by globalization, the emerging architecture of global finance lets us peer into a medieval-like future of overlapping authority, competing allegiances, and a diffuse patchwork of social dynamics.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Transatlanticism: Politics and Sexual Scandals
Alan Dershowitz, arguably one of the most famous faculty members of Harvard Law School, must enjoy being unpopular. In 2002, he began advocating in favor of legalizing torture. In 2006, he defied international outcry in a series of articles that argued that Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli bombs were fair game, and compared Lebanon's collective culpability to Austria under the Nazis. In the face of mounting criticism against the Israel lobby and its outsize influence in Washington, he accused former President Carter and professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of bigotry and anti-semitism. These days, he is one of the few people defending New York's Governor, Eliot Spitzer, recently linked to a prostitution ring and likely to experience one of the most vertiginous political downfalls in memory.
Professor Dershowitz contends that the politicians' minor sexual peccadilloes are private matters that should not be exploited for political purposes, and that this would never happen in Europe. According to him, sexual scandals get bumped to the lifestyle section of the newspaper and then fade away. This is just another manifestation of the transatlantic gap, and most Europeans would proudly agree. François Mitterrand had numerous extramarital affairs but went on to become the longest serving President of France. The pornstar Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, was elected in 1987 to a seat in the Italian Parliament, representing the Lazio district of Rome. Pim Fortuyn, the anti-immigration and anti-Islam Dutch politician murdered by an animal rights activist, was believed to have had sex with Moroccan teenagers. Europeans carry these anecdotes like badges of honor, and never miss an opportunity to mock American puritanism.
However, the transatlantic divide is not as wide as Dershowitz suggests. A quick review of sexual scandals involving politicians offers a mixed bag: on both sides of the Atlantic, some political careers survived, while others were doomed. In the United States, President Clinton held very high approval ratings in the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal. "Gropegate" did not damage Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became Governor of California. Representative Mark Foley resigned, but senators Larry Craig and David Vitter kept their seats. Barack Obama's first adversary in his senatorial race, Jack Ryan, dropped out after his wife filed for divorce and aired her husband's uncommon sexual habits. So did Senator Gary Hart when he ran for President in 1988. But JFK remains one of America's most popular presidents, and he was hardly a boy-scout. In Europe, sexual scandals have dogged the careers of many politicians. Angela Merkel feared for the stability of her coalition cabinet because Günter Verheugen, the Vice President of the European Commission, was having an affair with his chief of staff. The Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan is still battling one of Rupert Murdoch's tabloids. The pretender to the Italian crown, the prince Vittorio Emmanuele, spent time in jail in 2006 due to his connection to a prostitution ring. And many believe that the Profumo Affair in 1963, involving John Profumo and a prostitute, helped topple the Conservative government of Harold MacMillan. Even the French (!) are slightly bothered by President Sarkozy's choice of the supermodel Carla Bruni as his new wife.
Nevertheless, we are mixing apples and oranges. Spitzer is likely to be charged with a federal crime, after making a name for himself busting prostitution rings. It is a story that writes itself, regardless of cultural idiosyncrasies. It is patently untrue that a case similar to Eliot Spitzer would not make it to the front page of European newspapers. In fact, Spitzer's case itself did make it to the cover of many European newspapers that had never even mentioned him before. Imagine that Judge Garzón had been found to spend a small fortune in cocaine for his private use after devoting a lifetime sending cocaine smugglers to prison; if Beppe Grillo had been accused of corruption after decades of unmasking the corruption of others; or if Eliot Ness had been buying for himself some of Al Capone's alcohol during Prohibition. Those would be fairer comparisons to Spitzer's case than Mitterrand's double life. Europeans may be more tolerant than Americans towards nudity, but are equally uneasy with corruption, hypocrisy, and wrongdoing.
Italy might be an exception. With twenty-four convicted legislators and fifty-seven appealing guilty verdicts, Italy is in a category of its own. Perhaps if Professor Dershowitz used Italy as a frame of reference, he could aptly argue that Spitzer's expensive philandering is just a drop in the bucket. That way he could continue to antagonize public opinion and common sense.
Professor Dershowitz contends that the politicians' minor sexual peccadilloes are private matters that should not be exploited for political purposes, and that this would never happen in Europe. According to him, sexual scandals get bumped to the lifestyle section of the newspaper and then fade away. This is just another manifestation of the transatlantic gap, and most Europeans would proudly agree. François Mitterrand had numerous extramarital affairs but went on to become the longest serving President of France. The pornstar Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, was elected in 1987 to a seat in the Italian Parliament, representing the Lazio district of Rome. Pim Fortuyn, the anti-immigration and anti-Islam Dutch politician murdered by an animal rights activist, was believed to have had sex with Moroccan teenagers. Europeans carry these anecdotes like badges of honor, and never miss an opportunity to mock American puritanism.
However, the transatlantic divide is not as wide as Dershowitz suggests. A quick review of sexual scandals involving politicians offers a mixed bag: on both sides of the Atlantic, some political careers survived, while others were doomed. In the United States, President Clinton held very high approval ratings in the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal. "Gropegate" did not damage Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became Governor of California. Representative Mark Foley resigned, but senators Larry Craig and David Vitter kept their seats. Barack Obama's first adversary in his senatorial race, Jack Ryan, dropped out after his wife filed for divorce and aired her husband's uncommon sexual habits. So did Senator Gary Hart when he ran for President in 1988. But JFK remains one of America's most popular presidents, and he was hardly a boy-scout. In Europe, sexual scandals have dogged the careers of many politicians. Angela Merkel feared for the stability of her coalition cabinet because Günter Verheugen, the Vice President of the European Commission, was having an affair with his chief of staff. The Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan is still battling one of Rupert Murdoch's tabloids. The pretender to the Italian crown, the prince Vittorio Emmanuele, spent time in jail in 2006 due to his connection to a prostitution ring. And many believe that the Profumo Affair in 1963, involving John Profumo and a prostitute, helped topple the Conservative government of Harold MacMillan. Even the French (!) are slightly bothered by President Sarkozy's choice of the supermodel Carla Bruni as his new wife.
Nevertheless, we are mixing apples and oranges. Spitzer is likely to be charged with a federal crime, after making a name for himself busting prostitution rings. It is a story that writes itself, regardless of cultural idiosyncrasies. It is patently untrue that a case similar to Eliot Spitzer would not make it to the front page of European newspapers. In fact, Spitzer's case itself did make it to the cover of many European newspapers that had never even mentioned him before. Imagine that Judge Garzón had been found to spend a small fortune in cocaine for his private use after devoting a lifetime sending cocaine smugglers to prison; if Beppe Grillo had been accused of corruption after decades of unmasking the corruption of others; or if Eliot Ness had been buying for himself some of Al Capone's alcohol during Prohibition. Those would be fairer comparisons to Spitzer's case than Mitterrand's double life. Europeans may be more tolerant than Americans towards nudity, but are equally uneasy with corruption, hypocrisy, and wrongdoing.
Italy might be an exception. With twenty-four convicted legislators and fifty-seven appealing guilty verdicts, Italy is in a category of its own. Perhaps if Professor Dershowitz used Italy as a frame of reference, he could aptly argue that Spitzer's expensive philandering is just a drop in the bucket. That way he could continue to antagonize public opinion and common sense.
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