There will surely be turf wars and palace intrigue within the administration
but there is little reason to think that its core figures will fracture in the pursuit of their basic goal: to break the twentieth-century state
The onslaught of the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term was predictable
It was always clear that the goal was to overwhelm the opposition with a blitzkrieg of executive action—“flood the zone” and “shock and awe” were the terms floated by Trump’s allies—before momentum bogged down in Congress and the courts
On a psychological level it has been effective
On the question of long-term institutional success
The most surprising element has been the leading role played by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
which has been the tip of the spear in the war against the federal government
smart money held that DOGE would be more bark than bite
a glorified blue-ribbon commission designed as a safe landing spot for an important but volatile Trump ally
It has been apparent that DOGE would be something far more significant since news broke at the beginning of February that Musk’s team had gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments system
In exchange for over $250 million in campaign contributions
Musk may have purchased de facto fiscal sovereignty over the U.S
government—even if the scope and durability of DOGE’s cuts remain uncertain
Trump’s opponents have an understandable desire to find internal fissures within his administration
And here the contrasts write themselves: Middle America versus Silicon Valley
Fordist nostalgia versus Promethean futurism
These contrasts speak to some real tensions
above all between the predatory capitalism of Trump’s policy agenda and the class composition of his electoral coalition
But an exclusive focus on fissures can cause us to lose sight of what binds the administration together
For most of the key figures slotted into one or the other camp share a deep set of personal connections and ideological commonalities
And the notion that Musk and the tech right represents a sharp break from true MAGA populism rests on a misunderstanding about what MAGA has been from the beginning
Instead of starting from a set of stylized contrasts about what we assume the tech and populist right represent
we should begin by examining the actual people under discussion
The narrative about the tech industry’s rightward swing can be misleading in a few ways
it tends to occlude that this is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of founders and upper management rather than the industry as a whole
increased labor militancy among tech workers was a key radicalizing force on their bosses.) Even among the set of tycoons who sat behind Trump at his inauguration
most are clearly reacting to the political shift rather than driving it—notwithstanding Mark Zuckerberg’s characteristically cringeworthy attempt to tap into the new mood by calling for more “masculine energy” in the corporate world
Miller became close to Musk during Trump’s interregnum and helped guide the billionaire’s political donations; Miller’s wife Katie now works for DOGE
When Vought was in political disfavor following the public backlash to Project 2025
Musk and Ramaswamy helped engineer his appointment as budget director
And both Miller and Vought have been key guides for Musk in planning his war on the federal government
The figure typically cited as the populist wing’s champion in the administration is Vice President JD Vance
No doubt this stems largely from his origin story
even if attentive critics of Hillbilly Elegy have always noted that the book’s depiction of a white working class held back by cultural pathology was far from uncongenial to economic elites
Vance has also offered some gestures of support for organized labor (which not coincidentally came during his brief political career in Ohio
where organized labor remains electorally significant)
But there is no real reason to view him as a counterweight to the tech oligarchs
it is misleading to imagine two distinct factions at the core of the administration’s domestic and economic policy
Any administration will have internal conflicts and palace intrigues—this one more than most—and there may be more salient divisions when it comes to foreign policy or social issues
But what stands out about the group just surveyed is its cohesion
These figures have a rich history of personal connection and professional collaboration
What is the ideological basis for this cohesion? Answering this question becomes needlessly difficult if we accept the characterization of MAGA put forward by many of its propagandists: that Trumpism is fundamentally populist not just in its social base but in its substantive agenda
combining a robust welfare state with nativism and social conservatism
Such propagandists typically grant that Trump’s first term didn’t live up to this promise
but blame it on the good king’s wicked establishment advisors; once freed from these evil influences
Opponents on the left sometimes echo such a view of Trumpism as “Herrenvolk social democracy,” with the perceived electoral potency of such a formula reflecting anxieties that the left is weighing down its populist economic message with unnecessary cultural and identitarian baggage
If this were an accurate view of MAGA, then the conflict with the tech right’s implacable hostility to the welfare and regulatory state would indeed be insoluble. So the first step in understanding MAGA’s rapprochement with Silicon Valley is recognizing that genuine economic populism has always been toothless and irrelevant within the Trump coalition
The history of the last decade bears out this irrelevance
Although Trump’s willingness to rhetorically defy the conventions of traditional Republican austerity politics was key to his initial electoral success
he governed as a conventional Republican in office
Despite efforts by his apologists to blame this on Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in Congress
the figures to whom Trump gravitated as his term wore on were
has also shaped Trump’s second-term staffing and agenda through his America First Policy Institute.)
The Biden administration attempted to build bipartisan support by following through on some of Trump’s unfulfilled populist promises
but its scant success illustrated the lack of any stable constituency for such measures among the MAGA political class
whose disappearance from Trump’s first-term agenda had become a running joke
passed narrowly with votes from moderate rather than MAGA Republicans; the expanded child tax credit
potential springboard for a pro-family agenda
died on the vine without attracting any significant Republican support
the center of gravity has shifted from the seedier wing of the FIRE industries to the fashier wing of Silicon Valley
but the agenda remains much the same: tax cuts and deregulation
most likely paid for with steep cuts to Medicaid
Trump has expanded his share of the working-class vote across three electoral cycles
and the longer-term trend of class dealignment has continued apace
This hardly means that workers are indifferent to economic outcomes: it is crucial to bear in mind that Trump’s first term has been remembered as a period of relative economic prosperity sandwiched between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 shock
(In this regard he looks a bit like Bill Clinton
whose substantively anti-worker policies were likewise cushioned by an economic boom.) But the basic lesson that the right took from Trump’s record is that successful populist politics doesn’t actually require economic follow-through
so long as you kick up enough culture-war dust
and his overstated reputation as Trump’s Thomas Cromwell the only thing separating him from a hundred other professional YouTube shouters
Despite his railing against the influence of the oligarchs
Bannon has already announced his unconditional support for Trump
regardless of what the president does in his second term
it’s unsurprising that the populists have never exerted any real influence on economic policy
If battles within MAGA over taxes and regulation have always resulted in easy victories for the plutocrats
immigration might seem to pose a more intractable challenge
The basic conflict between MAGA’s foundational hostility to mass migration and the GOP donor class’s need for immigrant labor is familiar enough to need no elaboration
The outlines of a rapprochement are nonetheless visible
The tech right may demand a carveout for its engineers and coders
but it has shown no objection to a broader crackdown on working-class immigrants who don’t affect its bottom line
In some cases this may reflect real xenophobia; Musk is doing a very convincing impression of someone genuinely obsessed with racial and cultural cohesion
In other cases it may reflect a pragmatic acceptance of anti-migrant sentiment as a kind of socialism of fools—a lone concession to economic populism that frees the right from having to moderate on economics in any other way
a maximalist attempt to deport all the undocumented would indeed pose serious problems (which is one reason to doubt that it will happen)
in which the ubiquitous threat of deportation produces a docile workforce afraid to complain about labor conditions or wage theft
A campaign of high-profile deportation raids in blue cities that only sporadically targets the red hinterland would combine culture war and labor discipline
Thus there is little reason to imagine that the core of the administration is destined to fracture over either economic policy or immigration
the pro-worker elements of MAGA are too weak to put up a fight
the tech right can afford to make significant concessions to nativism—and may not even view them as concessions
But there is also a positive program that unites figures ranging from Musk and Andreessen to Vance and Bannon
and that connects them back to the broader history of the American right
Both plans made purging the federal civil service a central priority
And in practice the assault has been a joint effort: USAID is being dismantled by DOGE
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by Vought (formerly of Project 2025)
the Department of Education by its own leader Linda McMahon (formerly of AFPI)
Whether Musk remains in the driver’s seat or falls from favor
the basic project will remain central to Trump’s presidency
The alleged populist wing does not dissent in the slightest from this project
Bannon has been demanding the “deconstruction of the administrative state” since he came on the scene
while Vance has called on Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat
every civil servant in the administrative state” and to defy court orders if needed to accomplish it
Innumerable Substackers now offer garbled denunciations of the “deep state” and the managerial class
appropriating categories originally applied to intelligence operatives and corporate executives to justify the purging of park rangers and veterans’ affairs caseworkers
while the most heterodox member of the Trump administration is Trump himself—which is why so much effort has been expended over the last four years to surround him with the proper ideological cadres for his return to power
The Long New Right’s quest to break the twentieth-century state has occasioned more frustration than triumph
Ronald Reagan came the closest to winning ideological hegemony for its cause
But even he was never able to build a majority sufficient to undo the New Deal and Great Society legislatively
and Paul Ryan was the last figure to really attempt the project
Conservative Republicans and neoliberal Democrats alike would nibble away at the state
but its basic institutions remained stubbornly on the books—above all because the public at large did not share the right’s zeal to undo them
And so the Long New Right took on a pattern familiar from revolutionary movements of the left: new generations of insurgents toppled their elders only to be deemed traitorous accommodationists in turn
These cycles never involved much genuine reevaluation of the movement’s substantive goals
The charge against “RINOs” and “Conservatism Inc.” was rather that they were unwilling to fight ruthlessly enough in support of these goals
Hence the familiar mantra justifying allegiance to Trump: he fights
The second Trump term can be understood as a culmination of this history
The aim is no longer to build a congressional majority to legislate the twentieth-century state away
but rather to end the need for majority legislation altogether and dismantle the state by executive fiat
This is why the administration’s key gambit thus far
the executive’s unilateral and illegal refusal to spend money appropriated by Congress
The view of Trump as populist herald of Herrenvolk social democracy was always naive
The Long New Right saw something else in him: the battering ram that could be used to break the twentieth-century state by force after the decades-long failure to achieve this goal by democratic persuasion
but there is little reason to think that its core figures will fracture in the pursuit of this basic goal
To say that these figures are ideologically cohesive
is not to say that they will be successful
The continuing fact of class dealignment means that Trump’s 77 million voters are more dependent than ever on state provision
The twentieth-century state came into being for a reason and endured
for a reason; gutting it would unleash forces that no one can predict or control
If the project of Trump’s second term fails
it will not be because its protagonists turned on one another
but rather because the ice broke beneath their feet
Daniel Luban teaches political science at Columbia
Following the teachings of Murray Rothbard
Javier Milei wants to dismantle the state while also using it to consolidate his power
Organized labor and its allies can and must do much more to respond to the crisis created by DOGE and the Trump administration
Too many of us on the left treat the right as a monolith—and it’s keeping us from effectively fighting back
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Chief reporter at the Global Times covering China's macroeconomy
Tajikistan's teacher (left) and students operate an instrument at the Luban Workshop on April 17
A Chinese knot made by using pipe bending technology at the Luban Workshop Photo: Li Xuanmin/GT
Before becoming teachers at Luban Workshop
Gao Yang and her husband Jiang Jiang had been teaching in Ethiopia ..
Against the backdrop of the protracted impact of COVID-19 and geopolitical uncertainties including growing China-US tensions
sits a several-square-meter-large Luban Workshop
principal of Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta
speaks during the inauguration ceremony of the Indonesian Luban Workshop Intelligent Manufacturing Center at Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta in Jakarta
jointly established by China's Yangzhou Polytechnic Institute and Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta from Indonesia
28 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian Luban Workshop Intelligent Manufacturing Center
was officially inaugurated at the university on Friday
aims to deepen the integration of vocational education with industry demands
fostering highly skilled technical professionals in Indonesia
Electrical Assembly and Smart Production Line
designed to support talent development in Indonesia's electrical and automation industries
highlighted the significance of the center in strengthening industry-academia collaboration between the two countries
"The establishment of this center reflects our proactive efforts to align with Indonesia's industrial development needs
we aim to advance China-Indonesia cooperation in vocational education and promote mutually beneficial industry-academia partnerships," Chen said
"The launch of this center demonstrates the strong collaboration between China and Indonesia in vocational education," said Mamun Murod
"By partnering with Yangzhou Polytechnic Institute and Chinese enterprises
we have introduced advanced teaching resources and technologies
providing Indonesian students with valuable hands-on experience
This will help them better adapt to industry needs and lay a solid foundation for their future careers," he noted
chief operating officer of Jiangsu Shuanghui Electric Power Development Co.
also underscored the company's commitment to industry-education integration
He said he hoped the program will contribute to Indonesia's efforts in cultivating highly skilled talent
According to Yangzhou Polytechnic Institute
the Indonesian Luban Workshop at Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta has trained over 300 professionals equipped with technical expertise
and cross-cultural adaptability since its establishment
Guests cut the ribbon during the inauguration ceremony of the Indonesian Luban Workshop Intelligent Manufacturing Center at Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta in Jakarta
Students have a hands-on session at the Indonesian Luban Workshop Intelligent Manufacturing Center at Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta in Jakarta
Students pose for photos after the inauguration ceremony of the Indonesian Luban Workshop Intelligent Manufacturing Center at Muhammadiyah University of Jakarta in Jakarta
by communicating with Cassidy Hutchinson without going through her lawyer
the Subcommittee urges the FBI to investigate Cheney for the crime of witness tampering (p
it is not the legal ethics violation that the House report focuses upon
That accusation is based on a selective quotation of the anti-contact rule
leaving out the very words that prove that it does not apply
The effect is to create a public show that may well serve political purposes
but should be a complete nonstarter under any bona fide legal review
in which Hutchinson was represented by Passantino
Cheney secretly contacted Hutchinson through an intermediary
The House report quotes excerpts from both Hutchinson’s and Cheney’s memoirs about what transpired
Hutchinson told her she was inclined to represent herself going forward
but Cheney cautioned her to get independent legal advice
Hutchinson’s version is that she asked Cheney if she could recommend a lawyer
Hutchinson fired Passantino and retained counsel recommended by Cheney
Hutchinson’s subsequent testimony was very damaging to Trump
One might quibble with these facts about the communications between Cheney and Hutchinson or add more to them
but I assume they are generally correct for the purpose of this analysis
The House report explains what the supposed ethics problem is for Cheney: a violation of the bar’s rule on communicating with a person represented by counsel (D.C. Rule 4.2(a)):
It is unusual – and potentially unethical – for a Member of Congress conducting an investigation to contact a witness if the Member knows that the individual is represented by legal counsel
and an attorney who circumvents an individual’s legal representation would violate well-established attorney ethics standards and the Washington D.C
Bar would apply this rule to an attorney who also sits as a Member of Congress
its rules state that “a lawyer shall not communicate or cause another to communicate about the subject of the representation with a person known to be represented by another lawyer in the matter ….” This appears to be precisely what Representative Cheney did at this time
and a 2011 case that “bears a striking resemblance to Representative Cheney’s communications with the represented party Hutchinson.”
because the rule applies only to lawyers who are representing clients – which Cheney was not
Both the House report and the America First Legal complaint conspicuously lop off the first seven words of the sentence they quote from Rule 4.2(a)
which make it clear why the rule doesn’t apply:
During the course of representing a client
a lawyer shall not communicate or cause another to communicate about the subject of the representation with a person known to be represented by another lawyer in the matter
unless the lawyer has the prior consent of the lawyer representing such other person …
The House report and the bar complaint similarly fail to mention Comment [7] to the D.C. Rule:
[7] This rule also does not preclude communication with a represented person who is seeking advice from a lawyer who is not otherwise representing a client in the matter (emphasis added)
Cheney was not “otherwise representing a client in the matter.” Whatever else you may think of her communications with Hutchinson
Only lawyers representing another person in the matter are bound by the anti-contact rule; lawyers “not otherwise representing a client in the matter” are not
This distinction is not a mere technicality – it’s a vital protection of the client’s right to seek a second opinion
Suppose you are unhappy with the way your lawyer is representing you
you suspect they aren’t acting in your best interests
Maybe they haven’t moved on your case for six months
Or maybe you think they have a conflict of interest
You want to do a reality check with a second lawyer – a friend
perhaps – to confirm or allay your suspicions about your lawyer
you don’t want to ask your current lawyer’s consent to that reality check
It’s not simply that they might not consent
It’s also that you don’t want to tip your lawyer off that you don’t entirely trust them
Construing the anti-contact rule the way that the House report and the America First Legal complaint do would strip away the client’s right to get a second opinion about her lawyer without that lawyer’s permission
No wonder one has to perform cosmetic surgery on the rule to reach their conclusion
Passantino (according to her testimony) reassured her that “[t]he committee doesn’t know what you can and can’t recall.” These would be good reasons to want independent advice without having to ask Passantino’s consent – and Comment [7] to the anti-contact rule makes it clear that the rule does not take away her right to speak to another lawyer
As for the disciplinary case that the Report says “bears a striking resemblance to Representative Cheney’s communications with the represented party Hutchinson,” it is this:
Bar Counsel issued Hovis an informal admonition
Hovis inappropriately communicated about the subject of the representation with a party she knew to be represented by another lawyer in the matter
It seems that the only pertinent legal ethics rule might be the prohibition on frivolous complaints (D.C
Rule 3.1) – and it could well apply to America First Legal’s complaint
A lawyer shall not bring … a proceeding … unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous
which includes a good-faith argument for an extension
Perhaps America First Legal has a good-faith argument for extending the anti-contact rule to limit clients’ right to obtain advice without clearing it with the very lawyer the client mistrusts
their complaint doesn’t offer it – perhaps because then they would have to admit that they didn’t quote the existing rule correctly
Upping the Stakes: The Accusation of Witness Tampering
As I mentioned, the report recommends that Cheney be investigated by the FBI for witness tampering, in violation of 18 USC §1512
The relevant clauses of §1512 make it a crime to knowingly and corruptly persuade or attempt to persuade someone
with intent to influence their testimony in an official proceeding (§1512(b)(1))
The question is what makes Cheney’s contacts with Hutchinson “corrupt.” Here is what the Report says (p
Evidence uncovered by the Subcommittee revealed that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney tampered with at least one witness
by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge
but it appears that the ethics violation – the violation of the anti-contact rule – is what makes Cheney’s contact with Hutchinson “corrupt.”
The report also accuses Hutchinson of perjury
The accusation against Cheney would have merit only if Hutchinson did perjure herself
These are matters of fact (or fiction) that I cannot comment on
that might provide an independent reason to suppose that Cheney contacted Hutchinson “corruptly.” But if they are false
then there is no basis for any criminal accusation against Cheney
The House Subcommittee would be doing exactly what they accused the January 6th select committee of doing: weaponizing the justice system for low political gain
David Luban (LinkedIn) is University Professor in Law and Philosophy at Georgetown and a member of the editorial board of Just Security
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The chatter at the alternative data industry's annual shindig
the BattleFin conference at Nobu's five-star Miami Beach resort
isn't about the latest AI tool being unveiled but the legal fight between two of the field's biggest names
Alternative data is a catch-all term for information that traders use beyond typical market data
The industry has exploded over the past decade as credit-card transactions
and web-scraping bots have provided hedge funds with insight into companies' statuses
Yipit originally sued two former employees
accusing them of stealing "secret information at the heart" of its business
The lawsuit said the pair shared the information with the firm's rival M Science
In a motion filed in the federal district court in Manhattan on Thursday
and Roduit encouraged and directly participated in Emmett and Pinsky's theft of Yipit's trade secrets."
An attorney for Pinsky did not respond to requests for comment
or legal counsel could be found for Emmett
M Science on Tuesday brought its own lawsuit against Yipit
accusing the credit-card-data company of many of the same practices
a Yipit vice president who previously worked for the Hong Kong hedge fund Tybourne Capital
was granted an M Science login to access the data provider's reports while working for Tybourne
he continued to use his M Science login to access his now-competitor's report and data
The M Science complaint says Luban used his login nearly 200 times from 2020 to 2022
alleging he accessed data that "someone in a product development role at a competitor could use to gain an unfair advantage over Plaintiffs in developing or enhancing the specialized in-depth research that Plaintiffs' customers are willing to pay substantial sums for."
Luban did not respond to a request for comment
Yipit said in a statement: "This complaint is nothing but a meritless smokescreen concocted by M Science."
"The allegations in this case are circumstantial
magical thinking by M Science and relate to purported events from five years ago
demonstrating their complete lack of merit," the statement added
The result of this dirty laundry airing is an industry on edge
"We are all in this connective chain of data collection and data delivery
There was an understanding among the players that disputes could be settled between one another," said D'Amico
who was previously the general counsel for the data consultancy Neudata
"All of this stuff is done on a trust basis
The original Yipit lawsuit alleged Pinsky and Emmett stole information on Yipit's hedge-fund clients
including those with approaching renewal dates that could be targeted by M Science
of downloading client information to personal devices as he was leaving Yipit
via messaging platforms on Facebook and LinkedIn
The original suit said he attempted to conceal files by renaming some with titles like "ZEtaxes2024."
Yipit's motion claims the pair of salespeople did not act alone but were encouraged by M Science's leadership
and M Science's intentional acts of theft and conspiracy" will be outlined in the amended complaint
The filing adds that it has "reached settlements in principle" with its two former employees but could not reach an agreement with M Science
accuses Yipit and its employees of conduct "contrary to honest industrial and commercial practices."
While it's not clear whether these fights will be settled before a trial
there's already a clear loser: alternative data
its infighting is threatening sectorwide collateral damage as two of its most-well-known brands take each other to court
"Trust is going down as the stakes are going up," D'Amico said
referring to the increased revenues flowing into the industry thanks to an uptick in buyers and prospective datasets
"is this brings a lot of instability to the market
App
I think it's giving us a great chance for better education chances and more practice," said a trainee at a Luban Workshop in Egypt
Luban Workshop is a project named after an ancient Chinese craftsman to provide vocational skills training for local people
This Chinese vocational education program attracts students from around the globe to learn in China
the students acquire techniques to earn a living and develop open minds
Serving as a platform for technology exchange between the SCO member states
Luban Workshop contributes to a global community that is focused on a shared future
Established in February 2022 through a partnership between Chinese institutions and the University of Antananarivo
the Luban Workshop in Madagascar has already trained more than 100 students
Luban Workshop graduates are highly sought after in the local job market
27 (Xinhua) -- In the garage of China Railway Construction Corporation Limited on the southern outskirts of Antananarivo
Nancy Ratianarinoro carefully adjusts the position of a vehicle's wheels
A recent graduate of Madagascar's Luban Workshop with a degree in automotive maintenance
she is refining her skills before officially entering the workforce
"The equipment here is similar to what we used during our training
which makes it easier to get to grips with," the 21-year-old said confidently
At the Polytechnic School of the University of Antananarivo
demonstrates the operation of a hydraulic and pneumatic transmission device as a teaching assistant
I feel I'm one of the pillars of their business because I'm focusing on automation
and few students have had as much practical work as we have," she said
referring to her current internship at a major construction firm
the Luban Workshop in Madagascar has already trained more than 100 students across four disciplines: automotive maintenance
the first cohort of 29 students has graduated
most of whom have secured jobs with major companies
while others have opted to continue their studies
"Luban Workshop graduates are highly sought after in the local job market
Even second- and third-year students are already receiving job offers," said Edmond Randriamora
head of the Electrical Engineering Department and a teacher at the workshop
Randriamora attributes this demand to the program's emphasis on practical training
noting that the curriculum is designed with 25 percent theory and 75 percent hands-on practice
making graduates highly adaptable to industry needs
With support of the Sino-African cooperation framework for vocational education
the workshop has set up an automotive maintenance training base and equipped several specialized classrooms with advanced teaching equipment
head of the mechanical engineering program
is proud to showcase the workshop's computer numerical control (CNC) machines
which are used to manufacture mechanical parts with high precision and efficiency
"This type of teaching equipment is unique in Madagascar," he said
He acknowledged that most manufacturing companies in the country still rely on manual machine tools
while CNC machines offer superior precision and speed
"Mastering this technology is essential for the country's industrial modernization," he stressed
Madagascar has been actively pursuing economic transformation through its national revitalization plan
including the "One District One Factory" initiative to boost industrialization across the country
Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Loulla Chaminah said the establishment of the Luban Workshop and Madagascar's close collaboration with China in vocational education align with the nation's broader development strategy
The introduction of advanced technological equipment
combined with a strong focus on equipping young engineers and technicians with practical skills
will not only significantly accelerate local industrialization but also enhance the country's human capital
(Editor’s Note: This article is part of our new symposium on the ICC and the Israel-Hamas war.)
the Court will issue warrants against Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar (Hamas’s head in Gaza)
Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri (leader of Hamas’s military wing
and Ismael Haniyeh (head of Hamas’s political bureau
The Prosecutor accuses them of eight different war crimes and crimes against humanity: murder
and “other inhumane acts” – the last six of these “in the context of captivity” of the hostages
Prosecutor Khan has also requested arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant
accused of seven war crimes and crimes against humanity
These are starvation of civilians as a weapon of war
willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health
intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population (all these are war crimes) plus extermination and/or murder
and “other inhumane acts” as crimes against humanity
Nobody claims that these leaders have personally killed or tortured anyone. That doesn’t matter, because anyone who “orders, solicits, or induces” others to commit Rome Statute crimes can be charged as a principal (art. 25(3)(b))
What follows are some preliminary thoughts and questions – explaining some of the charges
but also asking why certain charges were not in Prosecutor Khan’s request
One way they are not equivalent is that Israel can stop the ICC investigation in its tracks by launching its own investigation
Under the ICC’s founding principle of complementarity
a case is “inadmissible” if it is being “investigated or prosecuted by a State which has jurisdiction over it
unless the State is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution” (Rome Statute art
Israel has one of the world’s most sophisticated justice systems
It is clearly able to investigate the charges
on the other hand – meaning the Palestinian Authority – is in no position to investigate and prosecute war crimes by Hamas committed in Israel and Gaza
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has accused the Prosecutor of ignoring complementarity by not “allowing the Israeli legal system a full and timely opportunity to proceed
… The prosecutor did not afford the same opportunity to Israel
which has ongoing investigations into allegations against its personnel.” This too misses the mark
It may be that Israel is investigating war crimes allegations against individual IDF fighters on the ground – but it shows no intention of investigating Netanyahu and Gallant
and these are the men the prosecutor has accused
It is not too late for Israel to exercise complementarity by investigating the accusations against its leaders
counts in the request are the accusations against both sides’ leaders of “extermination” as a crime against humanity – and the conspicuous absence of the charge of genocide
whose “Anatomy of a Genocide” draft report speculatively dismissed all of Israel’s military justifications for the Gaza war as mere “humanitarian camouflage” for genocide
adding that in her opinion genocide is “inherent to settler-colonialism” (and
assuming without argument that Israel is a settler-colonialist state)
South Africa has accused Israel of genocide
in litigation before the International Court of Justice
and it may seem as though Prosecutor Khan is now confirming that accusation by accusing Netanyahu and Gallant of extermination
because the two crimes are quite different.To be clear: with or without genocide
the other accusations against the Israeli leaders are exceptionally grave
The Hamas defendants are also charged with extermination
there is actually a strong case for calling the October 7th attack genocide against a part of the Israeli people
we need to examine the difference between the crimes
“Genocide” requires something even more sinister: an intention to destroy a national
or religious group as such “in whole or in part.” A key difference is the presence or absence of genocidal intention – the intention to destroy the group
called it a duty.) Israel argues that the civilian casualties are unintended collateral damage (“incidental” in the antiseptic language of international humanitarian law)
inevitable because Hamas has so deeply embedded itself in the vicinity of civilians – which is itself a war crime
Israel has denied that the IDF targets civilians
and it insists that it complies with the laws of war
The panelists clarify that the charge refers to “the killing of civilians who died as a result of starvation,” adding that “a large number of Palestinian civilians have already died in these circumstances.” Ominously
“The Panel’s assessment is that there are reasonable grounds to believe that … the suspects meant these deaths to happen or … they were aware that deaths would occur in the ordinary course of events as a result of their methods of warfare.”
the Statute explains that “extermination” can include “the intentional infliction of conditions of life
inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine
calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population” – and that seems to be the heart of the accusation against Israel
It runs parallel to another accusation in the Prosecutor’s statement: that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war
But the Prosecutor did not charge genocide, which signals that he does not have sufficient evidence of the intent to destroy the Gazans in whole or in part. And while he left the door open to potential future charges
the omission of genocide at this stage means something
because his team has been looking for evidence for months
His accusations are based on “interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses
satellite imagery and statements from the alleged perpetrator group” – presumably
better evidence than we have seen in the noisy public debates and ICJ filings
Implicitly, then – and whether he meant to or not – Prosecutor Khan has buttressed Israel’s repeated insistence in the ICJ litigation that there is no plausible genocide case against Israel – in which case, as the Israeli Judge Aharon Barak argued (here
the ICJ has no jurisdiction over the Gaza war because South Africa’s case was brought solely under the Convention Against Genocide
The absence of a genocide charge in today’s arrest warrant request strongly suggests that Prosecutor Khan agrees that flamethrowing populist rhetoric by figures outside the chain of command is not evidence of genocidal intent within the chain of command
the other accusations against Netanyahu and Gallant are terrible enough
Prosecutor Khan comes perilously close to a genocide accusation when he writes that along with eliminating Hamas and returning the hostages
the leaders’ third war aim is to “collectively punish the civilian population of Gaza
whom they perceived as a threat to Israel.” Furthermore
his arrest warrant request accuses them of persecution as a CAH
defined in the Rome Statute as “the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity.” In other words
he charges group-based animus and serious deprivation of fundamental rights
What is lacking for the charge of genocide is the intent to destroy
The October 7th “Al Aqsa Flood” attack included multiple actus rei of genocide
most obviously the murder of over a thousand people and the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm on hundreds more
The significance and prominence of this group of victims could hardly be more obvious
and they probably qualify as a substantial part of the Israeli nation as a whole on the ICTY’s Krstić test
The individual crimes “took place in the context of a manifest context of similar conduct” – a requirement in the Elements for the crime of genocide
It does not matter that the 2017 revision of Hamas’s charter removed the overt antisemitism of its 1988 original. It now explains that Hamas’s struggle is not against Jews because of their Jewishness (i.e., their membership in a religious or ethnic group), but against the “Zionists who occupy Palestine” (here
The phrase can be interpreted in more than one way
but the most natural is that it refers to Israeli Jews
are protected by the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute
did the prosecutor not charge genocide against the Hamas leaders
Here I can only speculate that given the enormous disparity in the number of casualties
it would have seemed bizarre and one-sided to charge Hamas with genocide without levying that charge against Israel as well
I have focused on genocide and extermination
and considered the significance of Prosecutor Khan’s decision not to charge genocide
The first is Hamas’s deep embedding in and beneath civilian structures – human shielding that surely accounts for a great deal of the devastation caused by Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas
human shielding is a war crime: “Utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points
areas or military forces immune from military operations” (Rome Statute
Now it might be objected that Hamas’s aim was never to make its forces immune from attack
but rather to provoke it – to delegitimize Israel by making sure that when the IDF responded to October 7th (as it inevitably would) the result would be horrifying and highly visible damage to Gazan civilians
Of course that is speculation by Hamas’s enemies
and legally Hamas’s expectations of what the IDF would do are irrelevant
The Elements explains that the crime is committed if the perpetrator “took advantage of the location of one or more civilians” intending “to shield a military objective from attack or shield
favour or impede military operations.” At the very least
it seems clear that Hamas intended that placing military assets in civilian structures would impede Israeli military operations
“Common sense would suggest that such rules
and the limits they impose on the way war is waged
should be equally applicable in international and non-international armed conflicts” (vol
Cabining off one of Hamas’s most serious offenses against its own civilians seems artificial and legally unnecessary
If the Gaza War is indeed part of an international armed conflict with Palestine
it was surely open to the Prosecutor to apply the IAC rules to this egregious violation
and more minor (but puzzling nonetheless): Prosecutor Khan charged Israeli leaders with the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population – but did not charge the same crime against Hamas leaders
because intentional attacks on a civilian population are Rome Statute crimes in both international and non-international armed conflicts
the current set of accusations concerns only Gaza
But the West Bank is also part of the “Situation in Palestine” that the Prosecutor has been investigating for several years
So we may see indictments involving the West Bank in the not-too-distant future
Meron still believes that applying the law faithfully is in Israel’s interest
Students listen as a teacher gives instructions at the Luban Workshop in Dushanbe
general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and Chinese ..
The global value chain cooperation between China and the US in the high-end consumer market is a vivid ..
Cooperation between China and Hungary will not settle for merely achieving a perfect score; instead
a 34-year-old PhD student at the Tianjin University of Technology and Education and a key instructor at the Luban Workshop in Ethiopia
has garnered international recognition for his profound insights into teaching methodologies among the 33 workshops spanning Asia
The Ethiopian teacher is currently receiving invitations to various international forums
including the upcoming Second World Vocational and Technical Education Development Conference scheduled to take place in Tianjin later this year
They are aimed at enhancing the vocational technological skills of African students
"Africa's vocational education is still in its starting stages due to challenges such as inadequate infrastructure
certain vocations face difficulties in some countries
lacking established models to guide students toward successful careers
The Luban Workshop plays a crucial role in addressing these challenges and fostering improvement," he said
Alemu serves as an educator at the Technical and Vocational Training Institute in Ethiopia
where a Luban Workshop was established three years ago through a collaboration between his institute and Tianjin University of Technology and Education
His university stands as a leading vocational institution in Ethiopia
and is recognized for its high-quality personnel training and educational programs
April 4 (Xinhua) -- A new Luban Workshop will be established in Nicaragua to develop new-generation tech talent in the Central American country
in one of the key projects of China-Nicaragua cooperation announced since the two countries resumed diplomatic relations over three years ago
Luban Workshop is a Chinese vocational education program named after Lu Ban
a woodcraft master in ancient China who represents the tradition and spirit of Chinese craftsmanship
The Nicaraguan Luban Workshop is a joint project between the Tianjin University of Technology and Education (TUTE)
Tianjin Bohai Vocational Technical College and the National Technology Institute of Nicaragua
It will be built in phases at facilities under the Nicaraguan institute
the program's four priority majors will be tailored to Nicaragua's needs: Internet of Things application technology
and mechanical manufacturing and automation
The two Chinese institutions involved will offer short-term training and degree advancement programs for Nicaraguan vocational teachers
develop Chinese-Spanish bilingual teaching resources and standards
and share China's innovative approaches to engineering education to enhance Nicaragua's vocational education system and youth employability
The Luban Workshop is a project launched and supported mainly by the government of north China's Tianjin Municipality
Upon the establishment of the Nicaragua workshop
35 Luban Workshops will have been opened in 31 countries and regions
At the 2024 World Vocational and Technical Education Development Conference in Tianjin last November
32 countries adopted a ministerial declaration on the development of vocational education
The conference championed skills as a universal language fostering cross-cultural understanding and international cooperation
Party secretary of Tianjin Bohai Vocational Technical College
highlighted the workshop's multifaceted advantages
"It will help upskill Nicaraguan youth to support poverty reduction work
provide a skilled workforce for local Chinese enterprises
The Luban Workshop program between China and Cote d'Ivoire is poised to open a new chapter of collaboration
according to representatives from Tianjin University of Technology and the National Polytechnic Institute Felix Houphouet-Boigny
a delegation from the Cote d'Ivoire institute toured the Engineering Training Center and Electron Microscopy Laboratory at TUT to observe the cutting-edge facilities that underpin joint research initiatives
emphasized the workshop's role as a cornerstone for advancing practical education and technological innovation across Africa
the Cote d'Ivoire Luban Workshop—a joint effort between TUT and INP-HB—has trained over 7,000 students from 10 Ivorian universities
The initiative has become a regional talent hub by offering programs in electrical automation and mechanical engineering aligned with national development priorities
Diaby noted that 94 percent of workshop graduates secure technical roles
directly supporting the country's industrial modernization
"This platform accelerates technological transformation while fostering Sino-African ties," he remarked
The project recently passed its 2024 quality evaluation
broadening the path for China-Africa educational cooperation
highlighted plans to expand dual-degree graduate programs
enhance cross-border research partnerships and establish international training bases to amplify the Luban Workshop's impact
"Our collaboration must evolve to address Africa's industrialization challenges while empowering young talents with globally competitive skills," Lian said
Two Ivorian graduate students shared their academic journeys during the visit
a second-year industrial engineering student pursuing control science at the School of Electrical Engineering
described how hands-on automation projects have equipped him to tackle infrastructure challenges in West Africa
specializing in mechatronics at the Mechanical Engineering School
emphasized the transformative value of China's applied research ecosystem: "The systematic approach here allows us to bridge textbook theories with real-world industrial solutions."
who is determined to excel in information and communication technology (ICT)
30 (Xinhua) -- Jacqueline Mokaya's mastery of computing has impressed both her tutors and peers at Machakos University's Luban Workshop
located about 65 kilometers southeast of the Kenyan capital
The 22-year-old information security major joined the Luban Workshop at her university in 2021
becoming one of the first students to benefit from its advanced training on computing
"Everything in me has just improved because of the course that I am taking (cloud computing) and the training that I have been receiving from the Luban Workshop," Mokaya told Xinhua during an interview on Wednesday
Besides acquiring skills in cloud computing
she has also been participating in Huawei-sponsored courses on data communication
Mokaya wants to become an accomplished cloud architect
knowledgeable in networking and cybersecurity
which is trying to grow its digital economy
the Luban Workshop at Machakos University has been a hub for digital skills development
local youth at the workshop have been rewriting the legacy of Lu Ban
the revered Chinese patron saint of builders and contractors
established with support from Tianjin City Vocational College and Huawei
has been equipping Kenyan enrollees with advanced digital skills
the dean of School of Engineering and Technology at Machakos University
said more than 100 students have trained in the elite ICT courses offered at the Luban Workshop since 2021
upgrading their skills and enhancing their employability in the digital economy
"This Luban Workshop has made our students really marketable out there
and we have employed some of them as technicians," he said
ensuring that the students practice what they learn and solve pressing societal challenges
He said that courtesy of this teaching model
the students have come up with many innovations
including a mobile application that can help visually impaired individuals navigate their surroundings
modern computers and high-speed connectivity
Machakos University's Luban Workshop is a prized attraction to students aspiring for digital literacy and competence
a 22-year-old information technology major
crediting its modern facilities for improving his skills set in computing
"The specific skills that I have acquired at the Luban Workshop are networking
and my future career dream is to become a software engineer," he said
I would like to pursue a course in AI and cybersecurity."
China has set up 17 Luban Workshops in 15 African countries
as part of its international vocational education cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation
Chinese tech giant Huawei has been at the forefront of bridging the digital skills gap in Kenya through training
an instructor at the Machakos University Luban Workshop since its launch in 2021
said it has revolutionized training on advanced ICT courses through collaboration with industry
enhancing the competitiveness of students on the job market
"Students now are able to interact with the industry standards
We have the tools to conduct more practical training that helps to bridge the academia and industry gap," he said
Thanks to skills acquired at the Luban Workshop
the students have also established commercially viable startups that are impacting positively on the local economy
is helping cultivate technical skills in Tajikistan
Tianjin meeting focuses on attributes and requirements young people need to advance in global market
At the just-concluded 2024 World Vocational and Technical Education Development Conference held in Tianjin
briefed visitors on an industrial robot-training platform at the Ethiopia Luban Workshop booth
a skilled all-around craftsman and inventor during the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC)
is often referred to as the Chinese master of carpentry
China's national commission for UNESCO and the Tianjin government
the conference ran from Nov 20 to 22 under the theme of "Innovation Empowers the Future
including 600 from about 100 countries and regions
Kalkidan received training from 2021 until September at the Luban Workshop in Ethiopia
Established by the Tianjin University of Technology and Education and the Ethiopian Federal Technical and Vocational Training Institute
the workshop specializes in industrial robotics
providing valuable skills to Ethiopian students in various fields
The presence of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) virus in dairy cattle and milk has put public health experts on high alert
Freelander Memorial Professor in AIDS Research and professor of molecular medicine
provided key insights and perspective on pressing concerns
Q: Why is avian flu considered a top concern among infectious diseases?Luban: The highly pathogenic avian influenza
has long been on the radar of health experts due to its potential to cause severe illness in humans
almost all of these human cases resulted from direct contact with poultry
H5N1 does not easily spread person to person
What is alarming now is that H5N1 is spreading cow to cow
This is of concern since cows are mammals like us
and there is the potential that H5N1 will change in a way that would permit it to spread person to person
Q: What do we currently know about avian flu and its spread?Luban: Avian flu is widespread across the planet
facilitated by the migratory patterns of birds
The vast majority of H5N1 cases in mammals involve direct transmission from birds to mammals
carnivores like foxes have probably been infected by eating bird carcasses
Human cases have involved direct contact with infected poultry
Cows probably became infected via direct contact with infected birds or with cattle feed that had been exposed to birds
How H5N1 spreads from cow to cow is unknown
Q: What are the implications of avian flu adapting to mammals?Luban: To date
there has been no evidence of widespread human-to-human transmission
There have been a few examples of H5N1 genomes acquiring mutations that would facilitate infection of humans or other mammals
If the virus spreads from mammal to mammal
it has potential to acquire more mutations that will make human-to-human transmission more efficient
It is very important that we monitor closely for any signs of such adaptations and to be prepared with effective countermeasures
Q: What about the risk of transmission through dairy consumption?Luban: A survey of milk from around the U.S
has found that one out of five samples tested positive for H5N1 genetic material
flu viruses are efficiently killed by heat like that used in pasteurization
Attempts to culture infectious virus from milk samples that tested positive for H5N1 RNA have all been negative
We do not know if drinking unpasteurized milk puts you at risk for H5N1 infection
we do not know if exposure to unpasteurized milk by farm workers puts them at risk for infection
Q: What progress has been made in vaccine development for avian flu?Luban: Promising prototype H5N1 vaccines already exist
but they have not undergone comprehensive testing for real world effectiveness in people
H5N1 would need to acquire mutations that might decrease the effectiveness of any current prototype vaccines
even if we know the design of a perfect vaccine
we will need to scale up production of the vaccine so that enough people can be vaccinated
and such vaccine production will require funding from Congress
Q: Are antiviral medications like Tamiflu effective against H5N1?Luban: We are monitoring the H5N1 sequences to see if the virus acquires mutations that would make it resistant to antiviral medications
the H5N1 strains that are infecting dairy cows are sensitive to current antiviral medications
government has stockpiles of these medications
If H5N1 started spreading person to person it would be important to distribute the drugs quickly
especially because the drugs are only effective if given within 48 hours after a person develops symptoms of an infection
Q: Why haven't we seen cases of avian flu in European dairy cows?Luban: The absence of reported cases of H5N1 in dairy cows in Europe could be attributed to various factors
are infected with a genetic subvariant of H5N1 called B3.13 that is more common in birds in the U.S
Experiments in the lab may determine whether B3.13 has mutations that enable H5N1 to better infect cows
Another possible explanation is differences in animal husbandry
including transport of lactating cows or feeding practices
Q: What actions are being taken to address the potential threat of avian flu?Luban: Organizations like the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness
are actively engaged in discussions and planning to mitigate the risk of avian flu
This includes hosting symposiums to communicate what we know about H5N1 and strategy sessions so that clinicians
researchers and public health entities are better prepared should the virus acquire mutations that enable it to spread person to person
While the current risk of an H5N1 pandemic may be low
experts are taking the threat seriously and working behind the scenes to stay ahead of a potential outbreak
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More than 100 young Ethiopians on Monday successfully graduated from a China-supported training program aimed at empowering locals through a comprehensive and systematic talent development framework.
22 (Xinhua) -- More than 100 young Ethiopians on Monday successfully graduated from a China-supported training program aimed at empowering locals through a comprehensive and systematic talent development framework
also known as the "Seagull Talent Nurturing Project," is an initiative of the China First Highway Engineering Company (CFHEC)
a subsidiary of China Communications Construction Company
A special ceremony was held Monday to mark the program's completion in the presence of senior Ethiopian government officials
representatives from the Ethiopian Federal Technical and Vocational Training Institute
The program has seen a total of 102 Ethiopian youth improve their competency through the provision of professional and technical classes in building construction
said the program has equipped them with theoretical knowledge and practical skills that are crucial for managing construction efficiency as well as enhancing project productivity and innovation
"We would like to thank the Chinese company and others for hosting this valuable training opportunity
The program not only enriched our knowledge but also provided us with important and much-needed practical skills," Berihun said
He underscored the trainees' keen commitment and devotion to translate their newfound knowledge and skills toward the development of their country
Noting the vital importance of the program in further advancing their day-to-day professional endeavor
Berihun also vowed to share the knowledge and skills with fellow Ethiopians
said the program has enabled participants to comprehensively improve their knowledge
and business capabilities across various fields in line with the latest standards in the industry
the program further augmented participants' business skills and capabilities
eventually building a group of Ethiopian talents with international vision
and cross-cultural communication capabilities
CFHEC has been actively engaged in the East African country
training a substantial number of professionals and technical experts across various fields
Wei said that over 4,000 of these professionals have progressed into mid-level management positions
eventually contributing to the socioeconomic development of Ethiopia
The project is jointly organized by the Ethiopian Federal Technical and Vocational Training Institute
Through training courses including corporate culture
the initiative equipped the young Ethiopian engineers with the latest technologies and constructional knowledge
the Chinese-built Ethiopian Luban Workshop
hosted inside the premises of the Ethiopian Federal Technical and Vocational Training Institute
training over 1,000 local teachers and students
ultimately becoming a key achievement in China-Ethiopia vocational education cooperation
established by China's Tianjin University of Technology and Education under the guidance of the Chinese Ministry of Education
providing valuable skills for Ethiopian students in various technological fields
chairman of the University Council of Tianjin University of Technology and Education
reiterated the Chinese university's strong commitment to augment the institutional capabilities of the Ethiopian Luban Workshop
further cementing its successes in the transfer of knowledge and skills in the fields of science and technology.■
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after a four year courageous battle with Breast Cancer
Jill graduated high school in 1988 before attending North Dakota State University where she majored on Early Childhood Development
In September of 2000 she married Brett Freking
whom she met at a mutual friend’s going away party
Her pride and joy followed with the arrival of their two sons
She was an immensely loving and caring wife and mother and will forever be missed
As an avid Minnesota Wild and NDSU Bison fan and an all-around sports enthusiast
she loved attending and cheering on her boys in all their school sporting events and did so till the very end
Jill was so loved by her family and always put them first in her life
boating and many other outdoor activities with them
and generosity will be greatly missed by those fortunate enough to know her well
Jill is survived by her husband Brett Freking; Children Jarrett Freking and Nikolas Freking; sisters
She was preceded in death by her mother Audrey Pietrick and father James Luban
A Memorial Service will be held on Wednesday June 5
Alice's Catholic Church in Pequot Lakes
There will be a visitation held one hour prior to the service at the church
A private family burial will be held at the Pelican Woods Cemetery in Breezy Point
Arrangements are entrusted to Brenny Family Funeral Chapel
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2024Photo: Courtesy of Shangri-La Al HusnSave this storySaveSave this storySaveAll products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors
we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links
Welcome to Vogue’s first-ever spa guide—a compendium of the 100 best spas worldwide
pulling from the expertise of our global editors
There is a lot out there in the world of wellness
and we are here to sort the cryo from the cold plunge
the infrared light treatment from the IV infusion
Or if your path is a more holistic one—there’s something for you here
the ancient ingredient which is also known as—you guessed it—“luban.” Frankincense isn’t just known as one of the fabled gifts from the Three Wise Men: It also has potent healing properties
Photo: Courtesy of Shangri-La Al HusnWhat’s the vibe?The palatial hotel is relatively old-school—think silk Persian carpets
and abundant buffet breakfasts—and attracts as many Omanis as it does those from overseas
With a palm-tree-lined courtyard where you can sip cocktails at sunset as the heat burns off
there are also numerous delicious places to eat within the resort
Photo: Courtesy of Shangri-La Al HusnThe history?The iconic queen of Sheba supposedly built her summer palace in the south of Oman
so the country itself is steeped in history
the hotel did feel like a personal palace during my stay in Oman; however
A 20-minute drive from Muscat’s old town and the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque (which is well worth a visit to see the mesmerizing architecture)
there is a rich source of history right on your doorstep
Photo: Courtesy of Shangri-La Al HusnWhat should you try?Melt muscular tension away by booking in for the Wahiba Golden Sand massage
which utilizes frankincense oil—known for its antimicrobial and wound-healing properties—alongside different types of Arabian Oriental massage
stand-up paddleboarding is also on offer; exploring underneath the arched rock just off the private beach when the sea is calm isn’t just a great workout (whether you manage to stand up or not)
Photo: Courtesy of Shangri-La Al HusnHow environmentally friendly is it?The hotel’s motto is to leave a better world behind
so it continues to make good efforts to look after the planet
Whether that’s its Care for People project
which focuses on uplifting underprivileged communities and sees staff donate clothes and hotel linens and bathrobes to a local charity
there are also water refill stations around the hotel in lieu of plastic bottles
If you don’t mind forgoing alcohol outside your bedroom during the daytime
you’ll get a cheaper room (and quieter hotel) during the month of Ramadan
Highly recommend asking the concierge when the baby turtles might hatch—a magical event by all accounts
witnessing them make their way to the sea is a pleasure you just don’t get in many destinations
Also head to Muscat’s old town to mooch around the busy souks and buy some spices to boot
Anyone is welcome to visit the spa—just be sure to book an appointment
Address: HM36+78X، Muscat 100 Muscat Muscat
Read more from Vogue’s Global Spa Guide.
Picture shows a platform at the Nagad railway station in Djibouti of the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway on January 3
A Chinese teacher (second from left) has class for Thainland students at the Tianjin Bohai Vocational Technical College (TBVTC) in September 2023
Teachers from the East Kazakhstan Technical University attend a theory lesson at Tianjin Vocational Institute on August 7
The China-donated Integrated Center for Technological Training (CINFOTEC) Huambo
Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to China
SHANGHAI — As shoppers step into the bustling wet market on downtown Luban Road
they are now greeted by a vast LED screen displaying the fresh produce on sale and the day’s prices
It’s the most visible sign of the back-to-the-future campaign taking place across Shanghai
as the city of 25 million tries to reinvent traditional wet markets for the 2020s
wet markets have been a riotous hub of community life in China’s major cities
The markets bring together dozens of stalls selling fresh meat
there are hundreds of wet markets all over Shanghai
Though they’re hardly relaxing places to shop
cheap produce within a few minutes’ walk of their homes
But the city is now giving the markets a much-needed upgrade
aiming not only to improve hygiene and food safety standards but also to help them attract younger customers who have increasingly been switching to online grocery platforms
Luban Road is one of the latest targets of this campaign
The market underwent renovation works in May
The market is divided into three separate zones: vegetables on the left
Air conditioning has been installed to keep the place cool even amid the current punishing heat wave
Around the sides are new stores selling popular local dishes
such as braised fish and scallion pancakes
there are now artificial intelligence-powered smart scales prominently placed at the front of each stall
Rather than haggling with vendors over prices
customers now simply place their produce on the scales
Luban Road is one of 60 wet markets to undergo renovation so far this year. Shanghai aims to complete work on another 20 by the end of 2024
saying that they are more efficient and can handle double the weight capacity of old digital scales
who say they used to shop for groceries online but have now returned to using wet markets as a result of the renovation campaign
“The fruits and vegetables here are not only fresher; I can also handle them
which gives me a feeling of reconnecting with nature,” Chen Yuqi
a 35-year-old who moved to the area a few months ago
there’s no need to calculate the bill myself
making the entire shopping experience more convenient and relaxing.”
At wet markets on Madang Road and West Mengzi Road
vendors said they had noticed a decrease in foot traffic since the renovations
Regular customers were forced to shop elsewhere while the markets were shut down
“A lot of our previous customers haven’t come back,” said one vendor
The segregation of markets by produce type has also had drawbacks for vendors
customers would often browse the stalls at random
they can simply head straight to the stalls selling the produce they most need
“That’s led to a decrease in incidental foot traffic that used to occur as a result of cross-sectional browsing,” said one vegetable vendor surnamed Huang at the West Mengzi Road market
it may be that the renovations are necessary to help wet markets remain competitive in the long run
Online platforms offering fresh groceries at rock-bottom prices have grown explosively in China over recent years
an associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Design
wet markets mainly rely on repeat purchases by older customers and attracting new younger customers,” said Zhang
which cannot be achieved solely through design.”
Renovated markets at least offer customers more convenience by making it easier for buyers to find the items they’re looking for
describing how wet markets used to be chaotic and unhygienic places where vendors often employed cutthroat methods to stay competitive
Wet markets are also introducing a range of other measures to stay competitive
Customers can now pay using digital payment apps and have food delivered to their homes
Some markets have also tried to appeal to younger consumers by introducing stalls selling items like coffee and flowers at affordable prices
In 2021, one market in central Shanghai even partnered with the fashion brand Prada by displaying the Italian label’s logo on its vegetable stalls. The campaign brought massive crowds — and hordes of influencers — to the market
though it’s unclear how many of them became regular customers after the campaign ended.Additional reporting: Li Yanshu and Dong Ziqing
(Header image: The wet market on Madang Road
In a new episode of the Voices of UMass Chan podcast
Freelander Professor in AIDS Research and professor of molecular medicine
reflected on what researchers have learned about SARs-CoV-2 and other pandemics
Luban has been fascinated by the interaction between human cells and deadly pathogens—from the 1918 influenza pandemic to HIV
We are still baffled by it,” Luban said of SARS-CoV-2
and a lot of the confusion is because people are trying to simplify things and make clear decisions about something that we have partial information about.”
“The vaccines are extremely effective at doing what matters most: keeping people from being hospitalized and going into intensive care units.”
He also weighed in whether a yearly COVID-19 booster may be recommended versus periodic boosters
“There may be an annual booster designed to target the current strains that are circulating
It may be that it will end up being the kind of situation we had before with flu where only those people who are at risk for severe disease will be recommended to get a vaccine,” he said
Luban said once everyone in the population has been exposed
there’s a possibility we won’t need boosters
The Voices of UMass Chan is produced by the Office of Communications at UMass Chan Medical School
Listen to the full Voices of UMass Chan podcast here: umassmed.edu/voices. Subscribe through SoundCloud, Apple Podcast, Spotify
Gumilyov Eurasian National University will construct China's second Luban Workshop in Kazakhstan
and we plan to collaborate with the local university in the field of information technology applications to provide sufficient talent support for the development of the artificial intelligence industry in Kazakhstan."
He explained: "Kazakhstan is a leading digital and financial technology center in Central Asia
and information technology is a crucial cornerstone of the digitalization process."
The Luban Workshop is a globally renowned brand in vocational education initiated by Tianjin
which has led in promotion and implementation
An increasing number of Luban Workshops have been set up in countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative
a Luban Workshop jointly constructed by Tianjin Vocational Institute and East Kazakhstan Technical University was put into use in Kazakhstan
The initial phase offers training in transportation equipment and technology
with four practical training areas for vehicle maintenance
new energy vehicles and smart connected vehicles
Tianjin Vocational Institute has tailored five course standards for the nation's Luban Workshop
including pure electric vehicle operation theory
advanced driver assistance systems and unmanned vehicle assembly technology
The first Luban Workshop in Kazakhstan currently has over 400 students who
guided by advanced vocational education concepts from China
will develop into high-level skilled talents needed locally
"We will continue to construct the second Luban Workshop in Astana
at a high level and strive to run the first Luban Workshop in East Kazakhstan region well
creating more opportunities for the career development of local youth," Wu said
Utilities Middle East
Home » NEWS » OQ Launches Luban LL-8446.21 to Combat Global Water Scarcity
an advanced rotomoulding-grade polymer designed to address the urgent challenges of water scarcity and food security
The product was unveiled at Arabplast 2025
highlighting its potential to serve communities in water-stressed regions with innovative
with worsening conditions driven by population growth and climate change
OQ’s Luban LL-8446.21 offers a practical response
long-lasting water tanks tailored for regions facing severe resource shortages
“Water scarcity remains one of the most pressing challenges of our time
and Luban LL-8446.21 reflects our commitment to addressing this issue with solutions that benefit communities and industries,” said Abdul Rahman Al Tamtami
This linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE) grade is designed for optimal performance in harsh environments and promotes sustainability through:
Luban LL-8446.21 has earned OQ a nomination for the prestigious 2024 OPAL Best Practices Award
The product has already received approvals from over 100 customers worldwide
“This OPAL nomination showcases the strong impact of Luban LL-8446.21 on both our business and the industries it serves,” said Sadiq Al Lawati
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charleshutchpress
this seems to be an unlikely meeting of minds
former BBC New Generation Artist specialising in contemporary classical music
learned the fiddle in the West Highland style and has his roots firmly planted in Scottish and Irish music
my fear when two very different musical cultures combine
is that we find an all too often lazy ‘cross-over’ music or
as Aidan O’Rourke puts it: a “classical world …trying to reverse-engineer the blurring of boundaries”
Joining the party were guests John Dowland and Robert Johnson
both famous 16th-century English Renaissance composers
The programme opened with Aidan O’Rourke taking centre stage and performing a continuous flow of Scottish folk-inspired tunes and understated dances or reels
As there were no programme notes or playlist
one had to rely on the softly spoken Mr O’Rourke for steerage
I quickly decided to focus solely on the music itself
sometimes singing free and sometimes accompanied
harmonised in a way that had echoes of Bach
a jig – all understated yet utterly engaging
We then returned to the song and accompaniment
Mr O’Rourke closed this medley (for want of a better term) with a fast
rhythmically-driven dance to round things off
He teased out the most beautiful of lute melodies emerging from various lute textures
The two performers combined to perform some 17th-century dance tunes
The initial lead was very much fiddle driven where the syncopated
The first half closed with a delightful set of violin and lute duets
Each instrument had a distinct musical identity whilst still cohabiting with and enriching each other
A sober processional ushered in the start to the second half
the violin playing just two notes throughout (a major second interval if memory serves)
instead it transformed into a lovely Dowland-esque song infused with folksong flavours
The instrumental roles were then exchanged with the violin singing a gentle
melancholic jig and the lute breathing the air of Dowland
it was once again the quirky rhythmic twists that really added to the vitality of the performance
seated on a stool on the stage was the elephant in the room in the form of an electric guitar
I was reminded of the ‘infamous’ Bob Dylan response to a folksy heckler (Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966) objecting to the electric betrayal: “Play it …loud,” he said to the band
Sean Shibe created a gentle cushion of support for the fiddle lament
The electric guitar playing gradually evolved
using a foot pedal and harmonics – the violin lament remaining a constant
Following a return to the lute and the musical wonderland of 16th-century English Renaissance John Dowland or Robert Johnson
This time it was Aidan O’Rourke playing a violin ostinato or loop
exploiting the colour of the strings and harmonics
How we arrived here was quite as mysterious as the sound-world being expressed: eerily beautiful
and Aidan O’Rourke seemed to be omnipresent
that for Cage the sounds of the odd empty beer bottles being knocked over would constitute the ambient sound intended to contribute to the performance
Sean Shibe and Aidan O’Rourke promised us a “shared language [we] might find in the backstreets
byways and marginalia of ancient Scottish lute and fiddle manuscripts”
And thanks to their quite remarkable musicianship and insight
All content copyright of Charles Hutchinson
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the Trumpist outlet American Greatness published an “epitaph” for the War on Terror by the right-wing writer and scholar Angelo Codevilla
Pegged to the twenty-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks
it recapitulated the themes that had preoccupied Codevilla throughout the twenty-first century—above all
the misdeeds of a feckless American Ruling Class that had muddied the distinction between war and peace
losing sight of the essential truth that “all war
is about whether a body politic lives or dies.” It was the last piece of writing that the seventy-eight-year-old published in his lifetime
he died in a car crash driving home to his vineyard in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada
Codevilla’s death was mourned within conservative circles but mostly unnoticed outside of them
Friends and comrades offered tributes at his longtime intellectual home
the Claremont Review of Books: “an inspirational mentor,” per Peter Thiel; “the prophet who foretold the rise of Donald Trump,” per David P
noted that he “both predicted and gave intellectual shape to the populist revolt against the [Republican] party’s establishment that coalesced behind Donald J
Codevilla’s youngest son offered lore from his father’s impoverished boyhood in postwar northern Italy: stealing fruit from orchards
lectures on familial duty from his dressmaker mother at his own father’s graveside
a first experience of hot running water on the boat that brought him to America at age twelve
Codevilla was an idiosyncratic figure: a working-class immigrant son of Fort Lee
and rancher; a political theorist of the “West Coast Straussian” school; a Hill intelligence staffer and ultra-hawkish foreign policy analyst; an early adversary of what his allies would eventually call the “deep state”; a translator of Machiavelli; a prominent critic from the right of the Bush administration’s War on Terror; a late-life champion of populist class revolt
there is a case to be made that he was the emblematic intellectual of the twenty-first-century American right—not the most famous or original intellectual
but the one whose individual trajectory most closely signaled that of the broader movement
Examining Codevilla’s career is particularly useful as a corrective to the pat narratives of sharp discontinuity that dominate punditry about the contemporary right
The typical story goes like this: the post-9/11 era was dominated by the war in Iraq
which served as the central axis of partisan contention throughout George W
(Over 90 percent of Republicans supported the Iraq invasion at its 2003 onset
and 73 percent stood by that decision at the end of the Bush years.) But the Bush formula
which combined hawkish foreign policy with a qualified acceptance of government intervention at home
came apart as soon as its standard-bearer left office
publicly justified as a libertarian revolt against big government
whose supporters evoked a muscular America First nationalism that rejected Bush-style foreign adventurism and Tea Party economic libertarianism alike
Trump himself was willing to lie about his support for the Iraq War
fat mistake” during a 2016 primary debate in South Carolina
thereby making dissensus on the war permissible
The post-Trump ideologues who gathered under banners like “national conservatism” and “post-liberalism” called for a populist economics that abandoned Reaganite distrust of state power
This story of discontinuity is also the one that the self-described New Right tells about itself
and media coverage has tended to echo its rendering of conservative history
the stark ideological contrast between the Tea Party and Trumpism dissolves on closer inspection
Whatever the Tea Partiers’ green-eyeshade public image
concerns about immigration and racial identity were always central to the movement
as analysts like Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson noticed early on
Trump’s reversion to GOP orthodoxy on tax cuts and deregulation provoked remarkably little backlash among supporters who claimed to want to smash the Reaganite “dead consensus.” More broadly
if we step back from the right’s various self-presentations and identify its leading participants
we find that the apparent discontinuity of programs has helped disguise a basic continuity of personnel
Trump’s seventy-four million voters encompassed a wide range of social strata and ideological currents
Viewed more narrowly in terms of its core activists and operatives
today’s MAGA right consists largely of people who were Tea Partiers under Obama and War on Terror hawks under Bush
While the Trump era triggered some prominent defections from conservatism—notably among neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin—the reverse kind of defection has been rarer; Trumpist intellectuals and activists have overwhelmingly been drawn from within the conservative movement rather than outside of it
(“We’d like to dislike Bill Kristol,” one attendee at a recent National Conservatism conference explained to David Brooks
“but he got us all jobs.”) How then did yesterday’s Iraq hawks and Tea Partiers come around to a worldview so apparently hostile to everything they once believed
whose work prefigures the eventual populist revolt against conservative orthodoxy
when nearly all conservative intellectuals (and many liberal ones) were rallying around the Bush administration
Codevilla was an influential and persistent critic of the administration’s waging of the War on Terror
he helped distill the critique of big government and liberal elitism into a language of class revolt in his essay-turned-book The Ruling Class
popularizing the rhetoric that today is fed nightly to viewers of Tucker Carlson’s show and other right-populist media
he fatalistically embraced Trump before many other right-wing elites did
warning in his Claremont Review essay “After the Republic” that the old American regime was dead
leaving Trump as the only choice for conservatives to defend themselves in its aftermath
Yet Codevilla’s critique of Bush’s foreign policy did not challenge the wisdom of regime change in the Middle East
his main complaint was that Bush wasn’t ruthless and wide-ranging enough in pursuing the “exemplary killing of enemy regimes.” Likewise
Codevilla’s attack on “the Ruling Class” stripped the concept of all economic content
providing a language of anti-elitism that could be wielded against any disfavored group
And the paranoia of his final years—culminating in calls for revolt against an “oligarchy” whose malevolent hand was evident in stolen elections
and racial-justice rioting alike—was not an entirely unexpected denouement
Codevilla’s intellectual arc was one of continuity more than discontinuity
its apparent twists masking an underlying consistency
In this regard it might stand in for the fortunes of the American right in an era of continuous war—a war whose front lines gradually moved from the Middle East to Middle America
Codevilla was one of the leading lights of the right-wing faction centered on the Claremont Institute in Southern California
The “Claremonsters” have achieved notoriety as the most vocal and committed group of Trumpist intellectuals since the beginning of the MAGA movement
whose 2016 screed “The Flight 93 Election” was published in the institute’s journal
longtime president of Hillsdale College and head of Trump’s 1776 Commission; and John Eastman
legal scholar and architect of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election
The intellectual godfather of the Claremonsters
died a few months before their champion descended the escalator at Trump Tower
renegade disciple of the political philosopher Leo Strauss
There is a case to be made that Angelo Codevilla was the emblematic intellectual of the twenty-first-century American right
Strauss’s thought was built around a set of stark polarities: between philosophy and religion (“Athens and Jerusalem,” in Straussian parlance) and between ancient and modern politics
Strauss himself inclined toward the first term in each pair
The moderns had built on the “low but solid ground” of material interest
would never attain the heights of classical antiquity
A German-Jewish émigré who had fled the Nazis
Strauss did not hesitate to take the American side in the Cold War
but his attitude toward his adopted country remained ambivalent and faintly patronizing
And when orthodox Straussians examined the American founding
they tended to treat it as a pragmatic and somewhat cynical endeavor
Sometimes the results were impressive: for instance
showed how Madison and Hamilton had stolen the label “Federalist” to describe the rather centralized and unfederal government they favored
Harry Jaffa was Strauss’s first famous protege
His early masterpiece Crisis of the House Divided displayed a certain complexity in its attitude toward America
lionizing Lincoln as the hero needed to correct the genuine flaws of the American founding
Jaffa embarked on a series of feuds with former comrades (beginning with Martin Diamond) meant to purge the movement of any lingering doubts about the sanctity of the American project
Thus was born the star-spangled Straussian heresy known as West Coast Straussianism
formed in opposition to the more orthodox East Coast branch
Jaffa’s mature doctrine cast the American founding as simply “the best regime,” reconciling reason and revelation
Aristotle and Locke—all while maintaining a proper hostility to “lesbians
and pornographers.” His obsessive homophobia (on display in the most famous of his feuds
with the lightly-closeted leading East Coast Straussian Allan Bloom) reflected the tight alliance with movement conservatism and the Christian right into which he and his followers had entered
Though East Coast Straussians recoiled from the New Left and shared some of the skepticism about Great Society liberalism common in the neoconservative circles in which they often traveled
they had none of the white-knuckle rage against the New Deal order to be found in other segments of the right
American democracy had been a pragmatic enterprise from the beginning; if Madison had stolen a base or two to get it off the ground
it was no tragedy if FDR had stolen another few to keep it going
the perfection of the American founding made subsequent deviations from it all the more intolerable
Casting Woodrow Wilson and his fellow Progressives as the satanic figures who buried American equality beneath an oppressive administrative state
they sought to roll back the pernicious legacy of the whole twentieth century
as a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign
had penned the famous line that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice
and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Angelo Codevilla came to prominence as a foreign policy pundit
but he never left behind his formation as a West Coast Straussian political theorist
He was Jaffa’s student (and briefly Strauss’s as well)
receiving a doctorate in political science from the Claremont Graduate University in 1973
seem to have been fully formed by the time he arrived at Claremont in the late 1960s
Codevilla learned English from John Wayne movies and had a grateful immigrant’s uncomplicated American patriotism; each year he celebrated the anniversary of the day (August 8
1955) that his ship from Italy pulled into New York harbor
His anti-communism dated back to boyhood brawling with communist rivals in the old country
and he sparred in turn with the campus New Left at Claremont
His devout Catholicism was suited to the West Coast Straussians’ unapologetic embrace of Christianity rather than the more ambivalent East Coast attitude
history that he upheld throughout his career was very much the Claremont story: America
which was essentially good and healthy from the Founding onward
lost its way with the coming of twentieth century Progressivism
But while his Claremont comrades tended to focus on the fortunes of the American regime at home
Codevilla made his mark writing about its conduct abroad
And while most of them shepherded Jaffa’s legacy from their scattered footholds in the universities
Codevilla’s own path included a long detour from the academy
A stint in the Navy interrupted Codevilla’s academic career
after which he found himself stuck teaching at what he would remember in a 2019 interview with Tablet as “a jerkwater college in Pennsylvania.” Looking for an exit
then ended up working for Senator Malcolm Wallop
As a staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee
his day-to-day concerns centered less on political theory than on spies
He would later describe poring over the two-foot-tall stack of budget requests for the entire U.S
asking officials some of “Aristotle’s simple questions”—What purpose does this activity serve
By what standards is it judged?—and coming away unimpressed with their answers
If we step back from the right’s various self-presentations and identify its leading participants
Codevilla served on its transition teams for the State Department and the CIA
the two agencies he loathed above all others
as “an extremely conservative fire-thrower” looking to break up the agency.) Through the end of the Cold War he was a hawk’s hawk
a champion of Reagan’s doomed Strategic Defense Initiative—the missile-defense plan nicknamed “Star Wars”—and an opponent of arms control agreements with the USSR
He joined other right-wing critics of the mainstream intelligence community—Albert Wohlstetter
Richard Perle—who charged that the CIA was too sanguine about Soviet good faith and the deterrent effects of mutually assured destruction
this cohort had pushed the “Team B” project
which publicized alarmist and largely inaccurate claims about Soviet military capabilities and belligerent intentions
(Similar concerns in the run-up to the Iraq War led to the formation of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans
which cherry-picked the most lurid claims about Saddam Hussein’s regime to counter the CIA’s allegedly dovish bias.) Their pet project
was intended to render mutually assured destruction obsolete by enabling the United States to fight and win a nuclear exchange with the USSR
For Codevilla it would remain a lifelong fixation: even at the end of his career
when he had become gloomily resigned to America’s slide into a “cold civil war,” he retained a wistful hope that the country’s feuding tribes might manage to “unite around missile defense.”
Codevilla’s sharpest books date from this period
coauthored with the political scientist Paul Seabury
laid out the astringent view of military strategy that would underpin his later foreign policy writings
requires a prior understanding of the peace that one hopes to attain
a clear-eyed identification of the enemies who stand in the way of this peace
and a ruthless willingness to dispatch these enemies
In emphasizing the need to sharply distinguish peace and war
Codevilla claimed inspiration from Augustine: “War is the avenue to peace via the gateway of the enemy’s death or submission,” he would later write
and the whole point of waging wars is to end them
Informing Statecraft offered an enjoyably acerbic takedown of the U.S
intelligence community in general and the hated CIA in particular
Codevilla’s populist sensibility was on display here
as the proudly plebeian Jersey boy took an evident pleasure in skewering tweedy CIA mandarins with impossibly Waspy names like Sherman Kent and Abbot Smith
But there was a deeper point to his attacks
one shared with other Straussian critiques of the foreign policy establishment like Gary Schmitt and Abram Shulsky’s “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence.” The CIA mandarins imagined a value-neutral world in which their rivals were cosmopolitan reflections of themselves
failing to understand that they lived in a world of warring values
of enemies who genuinely believed in the ideals they proclaimed
and of regimes that differed from American democracy in their very essence
Codevilla left the Hill in 1985 for Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution (where a young Peter Thiel worked as his research assistant)
then moved in 1995 to a professorship at Boston University
there was little differentiating him from the neoconservative defense hawks who blurbed his books and read his articles in Commentary
His criticism of the first Bush administration for leaving Saddam Hussein in power after the Gulf War would soon be shared by many neocons
Nor was his lack of interest in democracy promotion unusual; contrary to the common identification of neoconservatism with democratization
the movement spent the Cold War urging support for friendly “authoritarian” governments of the right against those ostensibly “totalitarian” ones of the left
The Soviet threat had helped paper over a range of underlying differences among American hawks; the splits between them became evident only in the twenty-first century
There was a distinct Claremont line on the War on Terror
and Codevilla was the person most responsible for formulating it
He acquired his reputation as a foreign policy dissident in the immediate aftermath of 9/11
laying out his indictment in a series of articles in the Claremont Review that were later collected as the book No Victory
His willingness to criticize the Bush administration became a central pillar of his later reputation
and his admirers have been happy to encourage the impression that he opposed the Iraq War
(Recent features on the Claremont Institute in both the New York Times and Washington Post have followed the Claremonsters’ own depictions of themselves as Iraq War opponents.) To the contrary
Codevilla emerged after 9/11 as the single most forceful advocate of the invasion
Codevilla came to prominence as a foreign policy pundit
Afghanistan was “just a place on the map,” a distraction from the real task at hand
Codevilla had his doubts about the extent of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11
suspecting that the attacks had actually been “organized by Iraq.” Besides
he saw it as a mistake to focus too much on the precise culpability for any individual attack; the key question
was “who is the enemy whose death brings us peace?” Answering this correctly meant “not bothering much with al-Qaeda,” for the enemy could not be an ill-defined phenomenon like terrorism
that central term of classical as well as Straussian political theory
Killing regimes entailed not just a formal change of leadership
but the literal killing of the few thousand people who made up the regime’s core
showed little sign of recognizing this fact
were intent on limiting the war to a police operation against al-Qaeda
The president himself was fatally indecisive—Codevilla nicknamed him “Hamlet.” Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon at least understood that “the path to victory lay in changing hostile Arab regimes,” but even that was not specific enough
What was required was “the exemplary killing of enemy regimes,” not to be confused with democratizing them
Not that the United States would have to perform this task by itself: “Fortunately
those regimes whose death would give us peace have enemies who are eager to kill them.” In Iraq
this meant arming the Shiites and Kurds who had been oppressed under Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime
then leaving them after the invasion to do as they wished
They were unlikely to be careful about “killing only the strictly guilty,” but the regime core would surely be included among the much larger number of slaughtered Sunnis
It mattered little what kind of government ruled Iraq when the dust settled
Anyone would grasp the need to avoid Saddam’s fate by rooting out the sources of anti-American terrorism
The war would begin in Iraq but could not end there
for there were other terror regimes to be killed
He urged the United States to support an Israeli invasion of occupied Palestine to annihilate the Palestinian Authority
it would be Syria’s turn.” If a palace coup in Damascus failed to materialize
invasion of the country would be necessary
(The fallout of empowering a Shiite majority to kill a Sunni regime in Iraq while aiding a Sunni majority to kill an Alawi regime in neighboring Syria was not a U.S
concern.) The Saudi regime would likely collapse of its own accord
after which the one part of the country that mattered—its oil fields—could be placed under the “joint international supervision” of the United States and Russia
the United States could turn to smaller matters like Iran
Codevilla’s immediate message was the need to attack Iraq—yesterday would have been best
The war would surely have happened with or without his intervention: contrary to his fretting
the Bush administration seems to have been set on the invasion from early on
aging founder of the modern conservative movement
in a 2002 symposium on Codevilla’s thought
Buckley spelled it out: “Something much larger than bin Laden needed decapitation,” and “a great deal was to be gained by precisely condemning a real enemy—Saddam Hussein
Bush a debt of thanks,” Codevilla wrote as the war got underway in spring 2003
He never subsequently wavered in his belief that the invasion was correct
But in later years he came to distinguish between “two Iraq Wars,” the invasion and the subsequent occupation
the latter of which squandered the initial victory in the naive hope of establishing a democratic Iraq
this could be misread as an antiwar stance
in part because the Iraq War has been conflated in retrospect with democracy promotion
Once the initial war rationale based on weapons of mass destruction collapsed
Bush himself leaned harder on democratization as a justification
most famously in his 2005 second inaugural address
which suggested that America’s only sin was to be too good-hearted and optimistic
The actual arguments made in the run-up to the war tended not to be so philanthropic
perhaps the most prominent liberal promoter of the war in the American press
reflected in a moment of uncharacteristic lucidity that democratization
wasn’t the “real reason”—which was the need
“to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something.” While few pundits were so honest
Codevilla and his allies were not squeamish about owning up to the real reason for war
They were known for a time as the “superhawks”—the nickname that Norman Podhoretz bestowed on Codevilla and his Claremont colleagues Charles Kesler and Mark Helprin—due to their enthusiasm for the use of force combined with their indifference to what befell the countries on the receiving end
Far from being dissenters from post-9/11 war fever
If Codevilla was anything but the war skeptic portrayed by his admirers
his actual position—hawkishness shorn of any pretense of humanitarianism—gives a truer indication of the energies that would come to dominate the right
Genealogies of Trumpism often trace it back to paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul
who represent one of the only factions on the right that did oppose the Iraq War
But rather than the paleocons using Trump as a springboard to power
it would be more accurate to say that Trumpism colonized paleoconservatism
feeding on its emotional wellsprings and claiming its voter base while discarding much of its actual program
The leading exponents of MAGA foreign policy
had far more in common with the superhawks
or respite” inspired Dick Cheney in the run-up to Iraq
and who in 2019 hit the bestseller lists with The Case for Trump
Or erstwhile fascism scholar Michael Ledeen
who in 2002 was demanding that America turn the Middle East “into a cauldron
please,” and who would later become a close collaborator of Trump’s disgraced national security adviser and Stop the Steal deadender Michael Flynn
back then an Army colonel pitching a harebrained scheme to conquer Iraq in a blitzkrieg by fewer than thirty-five thousand troops (over four times smaller than the eventual and inadequate invasion force)
later Trump’s failed nominee for ambassador to Germany
and today a frequent purveyor of pro-Kremlin talking points on Tucker Carlson’s show
an enthusiastic Iraq hawk who later soured on the war
concluding that Iraqis were “semiliterate primitive monkeys” unfit for democracy
but this time its task was to defend against invasion
There was no point wasting energy abroad when the real enemies—non-white migrants and the Ruling Class that abetted them—were here at home
Carlson was not the only one to make this turn
The third act of Codevilla’s career began in the summer of 2010
when he published a long article in the American Spectator entitled “America’s Ruling Class.” The essay impressed Rush Limbaugh
still the dominant figure in conservative media
just as he would later do for Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election.” Limbaugh’s endorsement spurred Codevilla to put out a book later that year
which was basically the original essay padded out to justify the purchase price
(A third of its page count was spent reproducing the full text of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.) Codevilla was hardly the first thinker to appropriate the language of class for the right; the ex-Trotskyist National Review cofounder James Burnham was a notable predecessor
But his suggestion that America had “a bipartisan Ruling Class” of corporate and political elites was novel to Tea Party-era conservatives
Codevilla used the term “class,” but what did he mean by it
He made clear that it was not about economic position
Wealthy “Texas oilmen or California farmers” were not part of the Ruling Class
whose members were united not by any given level of wealth but by the fact that “their careers and fortunes depend on government.” Thus the Ruling Class was actually quite economically heterogeneous: at the top were the true elites
and government employees,” and at the bottom were “those who live on any of America’s Dr
streets,” the government’s dependent clients
political power by itself did not confer membership
Even figures of extraordinary authority like Ronald Reagan and Clarence Thomas did not qualify
since they were not “taken seriously by the Ruling Class.” The ultimate test depended on subjective attitudes
and the interests of the class,” and feeling a “sense of intellectual and social superiority over the common herd.”
Much as Marx had seen the modern bourgeoisie generating the proletariat destined to overthrow it
Codevilla saw the Ruling Class generating a rival Country Class “defined in terms of its lack of connection with government
and above all by attitudes opposite to those of the Ruling Class.” This definition meant that the line between classes could cut through an individual C-suite: one corporate executive
who wants his company “to grow by producing a better product at a lower cost,” is Country Class
while “the fellow in the next office,” who “wants it to grow by moving it as close to the feeding trough as possible,” is Ruling Class
since public schools were one of the central bulwarks of the rulers’ power
sending one’s children to private school became legible as an act of class rebellion
The Country Class’s “inherently revolutionary objectives” turned out to be indistinguishable from those of the Tea Party: cutting taxes and welfare programs
breaking the power of public-sector unions
and striking every blow against the smug superiority of the rulers
Codevilla’s book did not signal any substantive breakthrough in the right’s thinking about the relationship of state and economy
it marked a rhetorical breakthrough of sorts—a realization that the language of class revolt was malleable enough to be harnessed to a variety of political programs
very much including the revolt of the exurban gentry against the urban poor
While the GOP may never become a genuine workers’ party
it has certainly learned this rhetorical lesson well enough
Fiery denunciations of “elites” are today de rigeur for every up-and-coming Republican politician
even if none of their policies pose much of a threat to Peter Thiel’s bank account
Codevilla’s favored presidential candidate in 2016 was Ted Cruz
whose domestic program aimed to pummel the Ruling Class with a heavy barrage of upper-bracket tax cuts
and whose foreign policy pronouncements (“I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark
but we’re going to find out!”) promised a healthy dose of the old ultraviolence
But once Trump’s victory in the primary was evident
Codevilla joined his Claremont comrades in getting behind the nominee
“This election is about whether the Democratic Party
will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever,” he wrote in “After the Republic” in September 2016
“or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back
the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone.” Codevilla never pretended to warm to Trump’s personal qualities
but he stood by the president four years later
“Though reelecting Trump makes the republic’s survival possible,” he argued in autumn 2020
“Trump’s defeat guarantees disaster—like in 2016
not through a genuine defeat but through “an openly manipulated election.” The final year of Codevilla’s output was not very inspiring—a steady stream of stolen-election accusations
and January 6 apologetics published in American Greatness and American Mind
the repetitively named popular outlets of the Claremont set
he maintained the same basic orientation toward regimes that had guided his career
America had failed to kill the enemy regimes that stood in its way after 9/11
but its own Ruling Class had mutated into an outright “oligarchy” and had set to work “killing the American regime” itself
Now the country faced an outright war between the ruling oligarchy and the remnants of the old republic
“If we are to avoid becoming the oligarchy’s mere subjects,” he wrote in May 2021
“we can and must treat them as the enemies they are.”
As the police were on the oligarchy’s side
friends of the republic faced the same choice between collaboration and defiance as Germans had in 1938
Their only option was to stockpile arms and prepare to fight back
“But the essence is the same: rely on yourself and on people who have known each other for a long time—no infiltrators
please—united and armed to take care of themselves as they think best.” The unfinished war had fully come home
is America’s Rise and Fall among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams
The title evokes the standard Claremont narrative of American history—the greatness of the Founding corrupted by Progressivism—that underlay his many previous treatments of U.S
The subtitle might seem more surprising: John Quincy Adams
who proclaimed that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” namesake of the country’s leading non-interventionist think tank
tends to be a hero to foreign policy doves
Codevilla saw the Ruling Class generating a rival Country Class
The book quickly dispels any impression that Codevilla turned over a new leaf at the end of his career
he complains that figures like Adams and George Washington have been appropriated by those seeking “to justify their longstanding preference for diminishing and disarming America,” and aims to restore these statesmen to their proper place as “proud advocates of American greatness.” The book imagines how Adams would respond to the foreign policy challenges of 2022
and the sixth president turns out to be a superhawk in his own right
“Adams would impose total secondary sanctions on Iran
possibly including blockade—not to democratize its regime
but to kill this enemy for its enmity for America and to do it in exemplary fashion.”
While he always disdained the high-minded ideals with which the American governing class justified its foreign adventurism
was even more militaristic when applied to real-world situations
While he always had a populist sensibility and a hatred for elites
he could only understand this group in terms of government power and cultural snobbery
and thus his economics never moved beyond free-market bromides
rather than any underlying change in philosophy
that made him look at different points like a Reaganite
And however distinctive an individual Codevilla might have been
he was typical in these respects of the broader American conservative movement
For those who see the story of this movement as one of sharp breaks
The fact that he maintained a basically hawkish foreign policy and a basically plutocratic domestic policy matters less than his rhetorical gestures at non-interventionism abroad and populism at home
which surely point the way to the future of the right
For those who take such claims of discontinuity with a grain of salt
today’s right need not be a bridge to anything markedly different
Invocations of America First that never lead to less war
attacks on “elites” that never touch actual hierarchies of wealth and power—these are longstanding American traditions
Readers who know Codevilla only by the policies he advocated are likely to be surprised by the centrality of peace to his thought
War can only be justified as the gateway to peace
and waging war without a plan to finish it is immoral as well as imprudent
He loathed the post-9/11 world of TSA protocols and color-coded terror alerts
The brutal series of regime killings that he demanded was meant to bring the post-9/11 era to a decisive conclusion
permitting a return to the way things were before
America would live alongside other nations much as its citizens would live alongside one another
seeking only to pursue their own interests without interference
But neither states nor individuals have neatly delimited spheres of activity; they interfere with one another in ways that vary according to historical circumstances
The relevant question is not whether we should advocate the impossible ideal of non-interference
of leaving others alone to be left alone in turn
The question is how we deal with our inevitable interdependence
Do we accept it in a spirit of reciprocity
Or do we jealously guard our own imagined sphere
treating each intrusion as a threat to be met with force
The American right might genuinely feel that it seeks peace of a sort
If peace requires strict fidelity to the legacy of the American founding
it is threatened by the most basic attempts to exert collective control over a capitalist economy and to uproot entrenched racial hierarchy
If it requires untrammeled access to the world’s natural resources
it is threatened by any waning of American hegemony or recognition of impending ecological collapse
These days the list of threats expands dizzyingly: migrants
and little reason to think that it ever could
In a media environment that tolerates tail-chasing
The Baffler is a rare publication willing to shake the pundit class free of their own worst impulses
But running a charitable organization of this magnitude requires serious dough
and subscriptions only cover a fraction of our costs
we rely on the good will of generous readers like you
So if you like the article you just read—or hate it
so you can ridicule us online for years to come—please consider making a one-time donation to The Baffler
Daniel Luban is a writer and scholar teaching at the University of Chicago
He previously covered the American foreign policy right as a journalist for Inter Press Service
an international vocational education project
has been established in Kenyan universities since 2019
aiming to equip students with modern computing knowledge
July 11 (Xinhua) -- Inside a workshop at Machakos University
southeast of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi
guided on how to join different computer parts
a young instructor picks up a computer chip and explains how it is linked to other components
the other instructor holds a computer chip and a USB cable
is one of the most popular establishments at the institution
with tens of students visiting daily for lessons
Machakos University established the Luban Workshop in 2019 with support from Chinese technology giant Huawei and Tianjin City Vocational College (TCVC)
It was the first Luban Workshop at a Kenyan university
aiming to equip students with innovative digital technology skills such as artificial intelligence (AI)
Luban workshops have been established at several other institutions of higher learning across Kenya
including Meru University of Science and Technology and Taita Taveta University
These universities leverage the Luban workshops to equip students with modern computing knowledge
chairman of the Computing Department at Machakos University
said the Luban Workshop caters to students from various courses
The university operates Google Developers Club
which bring together students who utilize the workshop's resources
"The workshop has a capacity of 100 people and can run two classes concurrently," Omuya added
a third-year economics student at the university
credits the Luban Workshop for sparking his interest in computing
especially emerging technologies like AI and big data
I now understand how I can apply technologies like AI in my field of study," he said
the Luban Workshop focuses on petroleum and petrochemical engineering
it trains oil and gas specialists from Kenya and neighboring countries
"Some of our lecturers have already been trained in China
and others are undergoing training," said Vice Chancellor Fred Barasa during the launch three years ago
The Luban Workshop at Meru University of Science and Technology was launched in September 2023
It features vocational education and Silk Road e-commerce centers
each designed to empower students and professionals with practical skills and knowledge aligned with the demands of modern jobs
TCVC's Deputy Vice Chancellor Liu Sheng said the programs offered at the workshop equip learners with the skills and knowledge required for the dynamic job market
fostering knowledge exchange and cultural understanding between Kenya and China
named after the ancient Chinese craftsman Lu Ban
is an international vocational education project offering the latest AI
big data and cloud computing courses to Kenyan students
said the workshops help strengthen Kenya-China ties and support economic growth by creating a more skilled workforce
Luban Workshop is part of China's path to economic success
Kenya is on the right track," he said. ■
a vocational education program jointly carried out by China and its partner countries
aims to provide useful technical training for those in need
the two Luban Workshops are widely welcomed by teachers and students
The Yagshygeldi Kakayev International University of Oil and Gas hosted a solemn opening ceremony for professional development courses for educators
organized as part of the "Luban Workshop" project
The event was attended by representatives of the Ministry of Education of Turkmenistan
the Shaanxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China
the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Turkmenistan
the Turkmenistan branch of the Chinese company CNPC
and Shaanxi Vocational and Technical College
The Chinese delegation was introduced to the structure of the Yagshygeldi Kakayev International University of Oil and Gas
and scientific research conducted at the university
a working meeting was held among participants to discuss cooperation tasks related to the "Luban Workshop" project
they discussed topics such as construction and installation work at the workshop site
and preparing for the launch of professional development courses for university educators
These courses will focus on areas such as "Geology and Mineral Exploration" and "Information Systems and Technologies (in the oil and gas sector)."
Attention was also given to the selection and admission process for talented graduates from Turkmenistan's university in 2025 to pursue master's studies at Xi'an Petroleum University under a joint educational program
Recall that the initiative to promote the "Luban Workshop" project in Turkmenistan was announced in a Joint Statement signed by President of Turkmenistan Serdar Berdimuhamedov and President of China Xi Jinping following their negotiations in Beijing in January 2023
a five-party Memorandum of Understanding on establishing a Luban Workshop in Turkmenistan was signed in Xi'an (China) between the Yagshygeldi Kakayev International University of Oil and Gas
China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC)
and the China Education Association for International Exchange
It should be noted that Luban Workshops are named after the legendary ancient Chinese inventor
The system of Luban Workshops originated in China and has gained popularity worldwide
These workshops are successfully operating in more than twenty countries across Asia
Luban Workshops represent a grand project that has created a platform for international exchange and cooperation in science and professional education
The establishment of a Luban Workshop in Turkmenistan will significantly contribute to training highly qualified specialists—engineers and technologists equipped with deep knowledge and professional skills—within rapidly developing innovative technologies
October 11, 2018JPEG
While much of the Western Hemisphere has been focused on the destructive Hurricane Michael
two storms have also roiled the northern Indian Ocean
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this natural-color image of Cyclone Luban in the early afternoon of October 11, 2018. The storm is the third to develop in the Arabian Sea in 2018
The region is a major crossroads for ships passing from the Atlantic and Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean by way of the Suez Canal and Strait of Hormuz
Luban had sustained winds of 65 knots (75 miles/120 kilometers per hour) around midday on October 11
Maximum wave heights were estimated at 26 feet (8 meters)
The storm was centered about 250 miles (400 kilometers) southeast of Salah
and moving westward at just 2 knots (2.3 miles per hour)
Oman’s Public Authority for Civil Aviation reported that the outer bands of the storm had already brought rainfall and increased winds near Dhofar and Al Wusta. Forecasters predict that Luban will make landfall in Yemen as a tropical storm on October 14
Forecasters warned of dangerous landslides and flash flooding when the storm hits the normally bone-dry
Twelve cyclones have formed in this region since 2010
but very few reach the Arabian Peninsula at cyclone strength; they usually weaken to tropical storms as dry desert air and wind shear sap their energy
October 11, 2018JPEG
In a 2011 paper
atmospheric scientists argued that increasing air pollution—particularly an increase in aerosols—over the northern Indian Ocean has likely reduced vertical wind shear
a phenomenon that could alter monsoon weather patterns and allow more cyclones to form
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview
View this area in EO Explorer
Luban is the third cyclone to develop in the Arabian Sea in 2018
Cyclones tend to form between April and December
fueled by changing seasons (in the west) and the monsoon (in the east)
this natural-color image shows Tropical Cyclone Phet spanning most of the coastline of Oman
The swirling clouds of Cyclone Phet cover much of northern Oman and all of the Gulf of Oman in this photo-like satellite image from June 4
The storm reached the coast of the Arabian Peninsula with maximum winds between 120-130 kilometers per hour
this natural-color image shows Tropical Cyclone Phet off the southeastern coast of Oman
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jason Luban
who made the decision to relocate from their longtime home of Oakland
The essay has been edited for length and clarity
Luban: We met in California and we both had already been there for a while
Medlen: It was just a good place to be economically and build your career — there's a lot of opportunity there
and had just had a very expensive failed round of IVF
In spite of the fact that I worked as an acupuncturist
I was so stressed out that I became an insomniac and basically forgot how to sleep
the expense of living in the Bay Area was wearing us down
Medlen: I really thought we needed a break from our current lives and just sort of a reset
we had a long-planned two week trip to southern Spain on the books
Medlen: We both fell in love with Ronda because of how beautiful it was
We also saw that the rents were so much lower than in Oakland
the dollar was pretty strong against the euro
Luban: We were so desperate for change that on the way home
I would move to Ronda." I sold it in six weeks
three months after first visiting our village
It is surrounded by mountain ranges and undulating hills
It's visited by tourists from around the world all year
so you don't feel like you're isolated from the world
but in a way it's kind of apart from the buzz of a modern city
Luban: In the morning we can go for a walk and bike ride
We can work from anywhere and also get on a plane to travel anywhere in Europe within an hour or two
Luban: We've downsized significantly from the United States
We are paying €600 per month for a three-bedroom
It's 1/6 of what we paid in rent for our home in Oakland
It would be over $5,000 for the house now to rent it out
Luban: We have private healthcare that is about 1/10 the cost that we were paying for a good health plan in the United States
The cost of food and going out is about 25% of what it would be had we stayed in California
We can leave our place unlocked and my wife can walk the dog at midnight without worrying about a thing
Luban: It's really the people that keep us here
There are two levels of moving to a new place: One is you meet all the expats
and the second — which is important and not everybody does it — is to really try to get involved with the local people
The people in Ronda are some of the friendliest people anywhere
You can walk outside with a dog and you'll make a new friend
Medlen: We're not 100% sure that we want to live here forever
Luban: Although there are tons of stories about how great and how easy and cheap it is to buy a house in Europe
and governmental situation that you are not familiar with — and will never be familiar with
Medlen: They don't have disclosures and there's no such thing as a buyer's agent
There's no one looking out for you unless you hire a lawyer
Luban: It can be a challenge to be this far away from our families
but the ability to work only 20 hours a week and more than cover all of our expenses
Medlen: One of the bigger benefits for us is that we have more because of the lower cost of living
We don't feel the pressure to keep making more and more every year because prices are going up
Luban: It's incredible to realize now how stressed out we were trying to keep our lives going in the United States
But it's incredible to realize what a toll the stress of life there was taking on us
There's no way to really know until you step away from it
the Spring Festival lantern fairs demonstrate the flourishing cultural economy and rich heritage in ..
David Luban (LinkedIn) is University Professor in Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University Law Center
and Law (Cambridge 2013) and Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge 2007)
as well as textbooks on international criminal law and legal ethics
Luban has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center
and received awards from the American Bar Foundation and the New York Bar Association for distinguished scholarship
In 2011 he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem
and in 2013-14 he is serving as Distinguished Visitor at the Stockdale Center for Ethics
Freelander Professor in AIDS Research and professor of molecular medicine
is a physician-scientist who studies the interaction between human cells and deadly pathogens
His research into the significance of SARS-CoV-2 mutations received support early in the global pandemic from the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness
a collaborative effort that includes scientists and clinicians from Harvard; MIT; Boston University; Tufts University; University of Massachusetts; and local biomedical research institutes
biotech companies and academic medical centers
Luban talked about what many scientists and public health experts describe as an endemic stage
the eventual equilibrium in which society learns to live with the SARS-CoV-2 virus
What is meant by endemic in the context of a virus?Jeremy Luban: The term endemic is being used to describe an eventual state in which we have reached a kind of détente with SARS-CoV-2
When this virus infected the first human beings in 2019 it was a brand-new infectious challenge that none of us had ever seen before
Whenever you introduce a new infectious agent into a population there is the potential for dramatic things to happen
When Europeans first arrived in the Americas
highly pathogenic viruses were brought with them that had never been seen by the population here in the Americas
SARS-CoV-2 has killed millions of people because we had never been exposed to this pathogenic virus before
Now that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been raging for two-and-a-half years
most of us in Massachusetts have either been vaccinated against
If we get to the point where the virus continues to spread and infect us
but it rarely causes severe disease because most of us have some immunity against it
we would say that SARS-CoV-2 has become endemic
We have a model for what might happen with SARS-CoV-2
which is the model of the seasonal coronaviruses
We know about four of these viruses but there may be more out there
We’ve all grown up with the seasonal coronaviruses; certainly
by the time we’re teenagers we’ve all had them
It appears to be the case with these viruses
that if we’re young when we’re first infected
There are exceptions and clearly SARS-CoV-2 has killed very young people
but the outcome tends to be milder disease if you are infected with these viruses as a child
that could be where we’re headed with SARS-CoV-2
I think there are plenty of virology experts who are entertaining this as a possible end game
once we’ve all seen it—either directly being infected by the virus and getting sick from it or getting vaccinated sufficiently—that we will get to this stage that the media has talked about a lot
this idea of herd immunity that keeps us from getting sick enough that we require hospitalization or that we die
Then the virus moves more into the background and is no longer the front-page story the way it’s been for the past two-and-a-half years
How are we tracking the evolution of this virus?JL: The technologies that we’re applying to track these viruses are relatively new
The kinds of sequencing tools that were applied here were arguably first applied to the Ebola virus disease outbreak in 2013 to 2016 in West Africa
So we’re learning a lot in real time about this specific virus
but also more generally about how people and infectious diseases interact with each other
How can we tell if we’re approaching an endemic stage soon
but it is interesting to compare our current situation with the fall of 2021
We were coming out of the wave of deadly infections with the delta variant and people had the sense that we were reaching an equilibrium with the virus
that things were finally going to quiet down
on Thanksgiving we learned that the omicron variant was on its way and shortly thereafter came the explosion of COVID-19 cases with hospitals filling up and many people dying
Many more people have developed a level of anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunity
We’ve learned that boosters have an important role to play in terms of protecting against severe disease
though there are still big proportions of the population that haven’t been boosted
But it’s possible that this coming fall is going to be the first relatively normal period for us since the beginning of the pandemic
It may be the beginning of the real endemic phase for us
where most people who get infection have a common cold
But we don’t know that with any certainty
and with SARS-CoV-2 we have to be prepared for the worst
How might social behavior change when the virus is endemic
Will people go back to 2019?JL: I think it’s likely that we will go back toward a situation like what we had pre-pandemic
Before SARS-CoV-2 there were other respiratory viruses that are plenty deadly
most people don’t take influenza virus very seriously
But it is a serious killer in the United States
There are years when tens of thousands of people die from influenza infection
People who work in medical centers or are elderly are expected to get vaccinated every year
I think it’s likely we’re going to end up going toward something like the situation with influenza virus
where at least people at risk for severe disease are going to require annual vaccination
What are considerations to keep in mind to prevent the pandemic from getting worse again?JL: When we think about our response to the virus
we have to consider different perspectives
We have to think of the perspective of the individual person
whether our actions will affect other people
And then we have to think at the global level
what are the consequences for our country and for the world
If our hospitals are overrun with people being treated for SARS-CoV-2 and we don’t have the capacity to take care of those people
whether they’re in need of medical care for SARS-CoV-2 or something else
If the burden of severe cases starts to rise it will be obvious that something needs to be done
But we have tools for monitoring the virus that we did not have at the beginning of the outbreak
that we did not even have in place a year or so into the outbreak
that we can use to give us warning signs before we get to that point
What is your outlook now on this evolutionary phase of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic?JL: I’m optimistic about the outbreak
Clearly the virus is capable of mutating and escaping our antibody responses
and we know it’s likely that kind of thing is going to continue
we can see that certain aspects of the immune response have been pretty solid; the ones that keep you from going to the hospital
the ones that keep you from requiring intubation and intensive care treatment
despite the fact that the numbers of people infected currently are high
we’re not seeing the same enormous numbers of people in the hospital that we saw in previous waves
I think that’s a reflection of the immunity that people have acquired with from vaccination
How might the research agenda be affected by phasing into endemic stage
What would you want to be researched next?JL: There are a couple of topics that are high priority
One area of investigation concerns the evolution of SARS-CoV-2
How great is the capacity of the virus to change and where might it go in the future
The virus has surprised us quite a bit over the course of the pandemic and we have to entertain the possibility that it will come up with new tricks and surprise us again
We’ve been working on HIV-1 vaccines since the 1980s and we still don’t have one
With the success of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines at preventing severe disease we dodged a bullet
But SARS-CoV-2 has shown itself to be capable of escaping from the immune responses that prevent transmission of the virus from person-to-person
an important research question going forward is whether we can develop vaccines that will prevent transmission
Another question concerns the long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection
There are many indications that SARS-CoV-2 can have long-term effects on people’s health
We know little about these long-term effects and this is a very important area of research
No one has the stomach to burn out the tongues of blasphemers anymore
even if some remain too ornery to admit it
Perhaps breaking free of liberalism is harder than it looks
but everyone can agree that it’s on the rocks
A thousand think pieces have made the litany familiar: Trump
add whatever terms appear on your particular bingo card
Rival cottage industries pit liberal critics of “populism” against left and right critics of “liberalism.” These warring camps share a sense of liberalism’s evident decline
it is sometimes projected back two or more centuries earlier
its precise relationship with them is nonetheless not obvious; liberals have not always been democrats and probably need not be capitalists
Liberalism can equally refer to a set of political principles (freedom and equality
or individual rights) or to a certain political style (conciliatory and consensus-driven
There may be a broad affinity between the principles and the style
The Jacobins used radical means in pursuit of what often look like liberal ends
every society has contained consensus-seekers
but it would be odd to describe moderate Spartans or Aztecs as liberals absent any commitment to recognizably liberal principles
Recent debates have tended to confuse rather than clarify matters
“liberalism” and “leftism” are often invoked as respective shorthand for neoliberalism and social democracy
Neither of these positions sits outside the boundaries of liberalism
and most of the positions currently marked as leftist have been supported in other times and places by those we’d describe as liberals
even if this confrontation doesn’t signal a verdict on liberalism tout court
it does at least provide clear battle lines in a conflict with real stakes
Many conservatives in the United States still portray themselves as the true liberals
heirs to a tradition that was hijacked by progressives
but a growing number have cast themselves in opposition to liberalism as such
perhaps even back through the American founding
this trend remains more an impulse and a branding strategy than a coherent philosophy
One obvious reason is that critiques of liberalism on the right have coalesced around the figure of Donald Trump
The result has been a tendency to subordinate ideological coherence to the leader’s shifting whims
and an intellectual environment that offers fertile soil for charlatans
But this incoherence isn’t due entirely to Trump
who reflects the movement that brought him to power more than vice versa
fostered recently by self-proclaimed “national conservatives” and “post-liberals,” claims that pre-Trump conservatives were entirely wedded to small-government classical liberalism
thereby scapegoating libertarians for the sins of the broader movement
Yet American conservatism has always combined libertarian tendencies with statist and ethno-nationalist ones
and the leading Trumpist partisans have been adept at oscillating between these registers
has the alleged shift away from libertarianism resulted in a visibly less plutocratic economic program
Alarmism about “woke capital” has rarely extended to non-woke capital; corporations are in the clear so long as they refrain from tweeting out Pride celebrations and focus on brutalizing their workers
there are careers to be made in the post-liberal moment
The formerly neoconservative journalist Sohrab Ahmari underwent well-publicized conversions to Catholicism and Trumpism in rapid succession
then shot to fame by picking a fight with the prominent anti-Trump conservative David French
His memorable call “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good” was representative
at least in its incongruous mixture of pious moralism and macho bluster
(“Enjoying the spoils” isn’t a phrase that figures prominently in the Gospels.) The freshman senator Josh Hawley
a banker’s son who had heretofore spent his entire life grasping for every meritocratic brass ring placed in front of him
rebranded himself as a scourge of “cosmopolitan elites” and won positive press for his ostensible departures from laissez-faire orthodoxy
this did not require any sharp break with the standard program of cutting taxes for the rich and gutting benefits for the poor
it mainly involved a crusade against Big Tech—a well-chosen target
fronted by callow millennials with names like Zuckerberg
The journal most identified with these trends is First Things
founded in 1990 as an intellectual forum for the religious (and chiefly Catholic) right
Under its late founder Richard John Neuhaus
the journal had hewed close to the postwar fusionist consensus (socially conservative but also hawkish and pro-market); this year
it hosted an open letter warning against any attempt to revive “the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump.” At times
Reno has offered a genuine rethinking of old pieties
a cynic might detect an underlying continuity of mission: to produce an intellectually and theologically respectable pedigree for the Republican program du jour
Aquinas can be conscripted in support of trade wars and Muslim bans as easily as he once was in support of supply-side economics and the Iraq invasion
Can we detect any lasting substance in the post-liberal moment on the right
or is it a more ephemeral product of the aftermath of 2016
Several recent books have sought to put some intellectual meat on the bones of these debates
turning to history to make sense of liberalism and the alternatives to it
Together they point to some of liberalism’s perplexities—but equally to the difficulty of getting out from under its shadow
The most prominent entry in the genre is Patrick J
which became a surprise hit upon its 2018 publication (it was blurbed by none other than Barack Obama)
might broadly be described as a Catholic communitarian
which puts him at a useful remove from the more party-line Trump-era conservatives
His localist inclinations make him lukewarm about nationalism—although perhaps not lukewarm enough
as evidenced by his recent photo op with Orbán—and he is relatively open to environmentalism and to critiques of capitalism
The conflict between conservative liberals and conservative anti-liberals often seems to pit worshippers of the market against worshippers of the state
but Deneen casts both state and market as linked manifestations of liberalism’s pathologies
The apparent timeliness of Deneen’s book no doubt explains much of its success
but his basic narrative will be familiar to readers of older (and frankly better) works like Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953) or Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981)
This is a story of modernity rupturing a more cohesive moral and intellectual universe
Under “classical and Christian thought and practice,” Deneen suggests
liberty was conceived as a form of self-rule requiring self-limitation
individuals were understood as parts of larger relational wholes
and humanity itself was continuous with nature
It was the philosophers who unmade this universe: “The foundations of liberalism were laid by a series of thinkers”—Bacon and Descartes
Hobbes and Locke—“whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms.” The result was a conception of liberty as unfettered choice
of individuals as separate and prior to larger communities
and of humanity confronting nature as a hostile conqueror
Such assumptions remain common to both “first-wave” classical liberals on the right and “second-wave” progressive liberals on the left
But the evident consequences—social atomization
and the jointly increasing power of state and market—make clear that “liberalism’s end game is unsustainable in every respect.” It is a victim not of incomplete implementation but of its own success
Yet Deneen’s choice of “liberalism” as his object of analysis merits some comment
for this choice was not self-evident to all of his predecessors
His arguments about social atomization leading to statism
who formulated them about “democracy.” The arguments about modernity’s depletion of the premodern cultural reservoirs on which it depends recall Schumpeter’s
for our object of analysis reflects our understanding of how the changes in question actually occur
as mass social formations demanding large-scale historical explanations
the project of a few early modern philosophers
The old premodern values were “philosophically undermined,” he writes
to these goods being undermined in reality,” without any hint of the mechanism by which the philosophy of Descartes or Hobbes came to determine the everyday lives of billions
Putting such weight on the philosophers increases the stakes of interpreting them correctly
and Deneen is not always careful in this regard
John Locke should be viewed as “the first philosopher of liberalism,” then presumably it matters that Locke was not actually a secular champion of unrestrained individual choice
instead insisting that human freedom is bounded by a “law of nature” rooted in our being “all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker.” Insisting on secular philosophy as the driving force of modernity also leads to some striking omissions
Figures like Luther and Calvin do not appear in the book
although if any thinkers might be thought to have radically reshaped modern consciousness
they would have a far stronger case than Hobbes or Locke
would raise broader questions about Protestantism’s role in fostering individualism
which would undermine the contrast between a uniform “classical and Christian” premodernity and liberal modernity
although Deneen is well-known as a Catholic public intellectual
No doubt this reflects a desire to make the case against liberalism on terms that can convince a variety of readers
But his unwillingness to stake out a more determinate position of his own—like the proudly reactionary Catholics (Joseph de Maistre
Carl Schmitt) who have served as liberalism’s fiercest enemies since the French Revolution—blunts his critique
the figure whom he echoes most closely in both his diagnoses and his remedies is Tocqueville—who was
the communitarian critique of individualism that Deneen recapitulates is probably best understood as a particular strand of liberalism rather than an alternative to it
He doesn’t hope to undo modernity and doesn’t deny liberalism any historical achievements
he sees these achievements as essentially ones of implementation: the classical and Christian past also upheld “ideals of liberty
and justice,” but with a “vast disconnect” between these ideals and its inegalitarian practices
even as it distorted these inherited ideals
nonetheless ensured their wider proliferation
demonstrating “the profound success of the West’s most fundamental philosophical commitments.” Yet we might wonder whether this vindication of the West’s deepest commitments is bought at the price of tacitly liberalizing the premodern past
Was it always the case that its injustices were a matter of hypocrisy
Or might it be possible that such ideals weren’t widely held at all—that universal equality here on earth
just wasn’t a value that many people before liberalism aimed to realize
If the goal is simply to renounce something called “liberalism,” it’s easy enough to cobble together a definition that will identify it with the things we dislike and not those we want to keep
and if we suspect that liberalism’s merits and demerits are more messily intertwined
then Deneen’s position might look a bit evasive
less an anti-liberalism than a crypto-liberalism
Perhaps liberalism is not godless but rather heretical
is the theme of a recent intervention by Josh Hawley assailing America’s current “Pelagian public philosophy.” The reference is to Pelagius
the theologian whose optimistic vision of humans’ capacity to win salvation by their own merits came under sharp attack by Augustine in the fifth century
We need not linger on the specific indictment offered by Hawley
who often combines a predilection for fancy words with a somewhat shaky command of them
(Hawley was previously leveling similar charges against “Epicurean liberalism”—attributed
the po-faced Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson—and he has recently trotted out an indistinguishable denunciation of “Promethean politics.”) But the basic charge is a familiar one: liberalism casts us as limitless self-makers
ignoring our essential finitude and dependence on others
The thesis of Eric Nelson’s fascinating book The Theology of Liberalism
is that contemporary liberalism is not Pelagian enough
a rejection of original sin and a belief in humans’ essential dignity
that motivated early proto-liberals like Milton
“took a fateful wrong turn in the 1970s.” Abandoning its old belief in individuals’ responsibility for their fates
it came to see all of their attributes—not just wealth and status
but also intelligence and industry—as the morally arbitrary products of chance or fate
The result is a contradiction “between liberalism’s commitment to the fundamental dignity of human beings as choosers and the conviction that vast numbers of choices” are out of our hands
making it hard to see why we should value autonomy in the first place
The wrong turn can be dated still more precisely: Pelagianism remained central to all liberal accounts of autonomy “until 1971,” when John Rawls published A Theory of Justice
Readers without a background in Anglo-American political philosophy might be surprised by the extent to which Rawls and his disciples stand in here for liberalism as a whole
Nelson’s argument is framed as an intervention within academic political philosophy
but the focus on Rawlsianism does raise questions about its wider implications
liberals have indeed grown more skeptical of notions of individual responsibility
might deeper historical changes explain this shift better than the idiosyncrasies of a single thinker
is contemporary liberalism really so committed to a denial of individual merit
or might the frequent associations of liberalism with meritocracy indicate that this denial never traveled far beyond the philosophy department
(Historians of neoliberalism often depict the 1970s as precisely the opposite kind of watershed
the moment when the crisis of social democracy gave rise to the entrepreneurship of the self.)
Nelson’s book traces the fortunes of Pelagianism and Augustinianism in their various guises over the last four centuries
Although this historical and theological focus might lead us to lump him in with the post-liberals
he is anything but—as indicated by the suggestion that liberalism was chugging along fine until the 1970s
He instead comes across as a kind of classical liberal seeking to rescue contemporary liberalism from its egalitarian excesses
The book’s strength lies in the historical chapters that make up its first half
A brilliant chapter traces the connections between seventeenth-century theological debates about original sin and the political struggles of the English Civil War
in which the defenders of royal authority are counterintuitively revealed as Pelagian believers in free will
Another chapter examines Rawls’s own trajectory
suggesting that his youthful anti-Pelagian theology persisted even after he lost his faith
with his continued denial of the possibility of human merit demonstrating “the perils of secularization.” In later chapters
Nelson uses this history as a springboard into current debates
His basic position is that concerns about the arbitrariness of individual endowments or the legacy of historical injustice cannot disprove the possibility that the more fortunate really deserve their assets
Given how obviously unappealing this position is
and accordingly the second half of the book is less satisfying than the first
Without the majestic historical sweep of the early chapters
the reader might feel a familiar sense of being trapped in an argument with a very smart but somewhat dogmatic libertarian
Nelson’s case centers on what he calls “the theodicy challenge”: we can’t say that the current distribution of assets and endowments is unjust “unless we establish that a counterfactual
perfectly just Distributor could not have chosen it.” That would be tantamount to disproving the possibility of theodicy
the belief that our world reflects the will of an omnipotent and perfectly just God
But to say that theodicy is notionally possible isn’t to say that it’s plausible
and in any case Nelson never really shows why its possibility should serve only to bolster the current distribution of assets
(If we find ourselves endowed with an uncontrollable desire to despoil the rich of their gains
can it be definitively proven that this desire wasn’t implanted by a just and beneficent God?) On another level
the basic framing of the question is misleading
We aren’t confronted with a prepolitical distribution of assets to which politics must then decide how to respond
Any current distribution is already an artifact of political processes
and leaving it alone would be a political decision
Pelagian liberalism might have some of the right enemies
but that isn’t sufficient reason to get behind it
Nelson’s historical acuity makes his book well worth reading
but his own political alternative risks making liberalism’s wrong turn feel very right
we find the small but vocal tribe of Catholic integralists
who have become an unlikely vanguard of the post-liberal right
the Harvard law professor and indefatigable Twitter warrior Adrian Vermeule
wrote an influential critique of Deneen’s book as a “relapse into liberalism,” in which he called for Catholics to renounce localism and focus on capturing the administrative state.) The recent book that has most captured their imagination
hailed in First Things as “an integralist manifesto,” is not principally a work of theology or political theory but of medieval history: Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State
The book is a study of thirteenth-century France
framed especially around the figures of the crusader-king Louis IX and his client and ally Gui Foucois (later Pope Clement IV)
The close ties between the two men serve as a concrete illustration of Jones’s thesis: that we shouldn’t view this society as one in which “church” and “state” battled for supremacy
but rather as one whose civil and ecclesiastical functions were complementary pieces of “an integral vision which included all of social reality.” In thirteenth-century France there was no church
“a State with a Christian ideology,” but rather a kingdom that “was Christian
the very divide between religious and secular had yet to be invented; empirically
the figures whom we might be tempted to assign to either church or state worked toward the same goals and were often the same people
can serve as a model for the world after liberalism
Jones has written an interesting and intelligent book
although perhaps not the book that he claims to have written
I leave it to the medievalists to assess the granular accuracy of his history
but the general features of his approach are evident even to a non-specialist—above all
its tendency to glide quickly from statements about ideas and ideology to statements about social reality
He claims to depict how French society “actually functioned,” how it provided a shared and “coherent vision.” Yet the kinds of evidence he relies on—royal ordinances
letters of kings and popes—are ill-suited to prove these claims
like trying to piece together a comprehensive picture of the contemporary United States from presidential speeches and Supreme Court decisions
The question of how much ordinary people shared the theological vision of their rulers
which has preoccupied scholars of medieval popular religion for decades
Jones’s account is therefore best understood not as a depiction of what medieval France was actually like
but as a portrait of its ruling ideology and of the institutions constructed on this basis
for Jones is admirably unwilling to sand off the rough edges of his material
Thirteenth-century France was what the historian R
Moore dubbed a “persecuting society.” Although Jones doesn’t use this language
his account reinforces Moore’s suggestion that this society’s various forms of repression were part of a systematic and coherent edifice
Jones particularly stresses that the ferocious efforts to extirpate heresy throughout the century—most notoriously
the massacring of the Cathars of southern France—were inextricable from the broader effort to impose civil order
heresy became synonymous with rebellion and vice versa; merely to live as a Cathar was by definition an act of violence against the social order
Nor was Louis IX markedly friendlier to the infidel than to the heretic
Resisting the temptation to write off the king’s anti-Jewish measures as a regrettable sideshow to his bureaucratic reforms
Jones insists that they were “integral to the rest of the program.” And the fact that the king spent much of his reign on crusade against the Muslims was hardly accidental
for in this world “the legitimate use of force becomes identical to holy war,” meaning that in practice “the drift of all sustained conflict
Was the Most Christian Kingdom therefore an oppressive theocracy
because “the overriding logic of this understanding is the logic of peace
not that of violence.” Whereas modern social thought assumes a foundational conflict of interests
so that coercive force was “legitimate only as a reaction to violence
only when directed at restoring the peace.” This becomes rather less comforting when we recall that any departure from orthodoxy constituted “violence” by definition
and that deviants could therefore be understood as “rebels against peace itself.” (Jones describes a letter from Clement IV to Louis IX encouraging the severe punishment of blasphemous speech
in which the pope “reassures the king that this is not an act of violence on his part
for it is the blasphemers who have attacked God.”) Given this “logic of peace,” readers might be forgiven the thought that a “logic of violence” can’t be all bad
if it simply means accepting the inevitability of some level of social conflict and dissidence
This vision could hardly be accused of crypto-liberalism
If the goal is to depict an alternative that sits outside even the broadest definition of liberalism
if the goal were to present the medieval social order as inherently fanatical and bloodthirsty
How seriously should we take the integralists’ professions of enthusiasm for this world
(It’s telling that the book’s admirers have read into it a vision of peaceful organic community that is quite at odds with its actual contents.) Perhaps some of them are would-be Torquemadas; most are probably unsure what they want
Part of the difficulty is that the Second Vatican Council pulled the rug out from under this whole political project
proclaimed that “all men are to be immune from coercion” by “any human power” in religious matters; those absolutely committed to viewing this as continuous with past practice will find ways to convince themselves
but the intuitive reading is that it represented the church reconciling itself to liberalism
pursued most notably by the excommunicated archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
is to keep waging war on liberalism even to the point of defying the church
But those unwilling to take this path face a trickier task
and the integralists’ guns-blazing rhetorical style sometimes seems to mask tacit concessions
On the question of whether Catholicism should be imposed through outright coercion rather than mere persuasion
Vermeule grumbles that the distinction is “nearly useless,” before offering an answer that is cryptic to the point of incomprehensibility
the integralist state will indeed forswear brute coercion in favor of persuasion and Cass Sunstein–style nudging—but this will be a forceful and manly kind of persuasion and nudging
not at all to be confused with the wimpy liberal version
Such difficulties help explain the curiously abstract nature of many of the integralists’ claims
We get innumerable denunciations of liberalism’s denial of truth and the good
but fewer suggestions of what their regime would actually do in power
maybe (although even here we can detect some newfound waffling); then what
If attempts to sketch a post-liberal program often bounce between rote communitarianism and empty theatrics
this may reflect the fact that the historical project that gave Louis IX’s France its coherence—what Jones calls “a sort of permanent crusade,” unapologetically wielding an entirely non-metaphorical sword against the heretic and the infidel—no longer seems attractive even to most self-styled reactionaries
No one really has the stomach to burn out the tongues of blasphemers anymore
If right-wing post-liberalism remains more bark than bite
are there any lessons that the left can draw from its difficulties
that we must run to defend something called “liberalism” at all costs: the term can mean so many different things
many of which are not especially worth defending
there’s good reason to resist the facile suggestion that liberalism is currently besieged by democracy run amok
We still suffer more from a deficit of democracy than an excess
and what’s valuable in liberalism is likely to survive or fall in conjunction with democracy more broadly
a politics that aims to purge itself of all traces of liberalism is likely to be sterile or worse
and many who would disclaim the label still hold onto ideas—about the necessity of certain formal freedoms
or the importance of some constraints on state power
or the inevitable pluralism of social life—that came in its wake
Certainly this is true of the recent leftist upsurge in the United States
who has explicitly cast himself as an heir to New Deal liberalism
But something similar could be said about a work like Bhaskar Sunkara’s Socialist Manifesto
which charts a path through social democracy toward market socialism while insisting on the perennial need for “civil rights and freedoms” along with “a free civil society and robust democratic institutions.”
can choose to jury-rig definitions that will let us hold onto the parts of liberalism we like while avoiding the label itself
There are figures in the history of the left whose significance lies partly in having facilitated this task—Rosa Luxemburg
whose unquestionable personal militancy and martyrdom helped them serve as conduits for ideas more often associated with liberalism
the enormous weight put on “democracy,” an easier term to feel enthusiastic about than “liberalism,” often seems to serve the same function
But on closer inspection it often looks more like liberal-democratic socialism: not simply enacting majority will
but also constraining it to protect individuals and minorities; not simply dismissing the traditional bourgeois freedoms as insufficient
Perhaps these maneuvers are harmless enough: what really matters is what we do
shadow-boxing with a “liberalism” that it can’t fully renounce
suggests that a lack of clarity can have costs
channeling energy into symbolic struggles against an imagined enemy at the expense of figuring out what we actually think
To reject a politics of anti-liberalism at all costs is not to say that everyone can get along
for any attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff in the liberal inheritance will necessarily involve conflict
which for many versions of liberalism are the central rights
must for any liberal-democratic socialist lose this exalted status
and this fact alone is enough to ensure a great deal of practical political conflict
But political conflict by itself is not a sign that we are dealing with entirely incommensurable visions
Nor is this a prediction of liberalism’s long-term survival
It’s simply to say that none of liberalism’s current critics have pointed to an alternative that is both normatively attractive and entirely non-liberal
and I doubt that we should hold our breath for the emergence of one
The starkest alternative to liberalism currently on offer is not democracy
or communitarianism—all of whose tensions with liberalism
are likely not irreconcilable—but an authoritarian capitalism that is equally opposed to all of these possibilities
The pressing task is to figure out what resources any of them might offer for avoiding such a future
Daniel Luban is a junior research fellow in politics at Oxford
Two recent memoirs by writers born under communism in Eastern Europe reflect on ideas central to the left: cosmopolitanism and socialism
class struggle is presented as just one more thing to be debated
Western elites forgot how precious and precarious liberal democracy really is
At the Human Rights Workshop on January 24, 2019, Georgetown University Professor of Law and Philosophy David Luban urged his audience to reconsider the “standard narrative” around the CIA’s systematic abuse of terrorist suspects in the 2000s
He argued that conventional interpretations fail to recognize that the CIA developed the methods it used in its rendition
and interrogation (RDI) program long before the publication of the “Torture Memos,” legal memoranda authored by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 that justified the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Luban explained that the CIA began developing its torture techniques in the 1960s
when it created the KUBARK manual to train its agents to render subjects passive and helpless by inflicting accumulated
the CIA published an updated version of its program in the Human Resources Exploitation Manuals
with which it trained agents and interrogators in Latin American counterinsurgent police forces
the CIA developed the now notorious RDI program
Luban strongly refuted claims made by the CIA that they had “lost institutional memory of earlier [torture] programs” — he pointed out that many CIA “veterans” remained from the 1980s at the time RDI was initiated
the most misleading part of the standard narrative around the RDI program is the tendency to “focus on the itemized list of torture techniques” contained in the Torture Memos
“misses the big point that’s there in plain slight — that the conditions of confinement in Guantanamo were abusive
What makes torture torture is the continuity of abuse — 24 hours a day
‘who sank the boat?’ It’s not the last one to board or any particular technique — it’s everything together that sinks the boat.”
203.432.4992
Karl Polanyi has become a totem for social democracy
Polanyi himself is an uneasy fit as spokesman for any specific social order
Karl Polanyi had thought of calling his magnum opus Origins of the Cataclysm
instead gave it the title by which it eventually became famous: The Great Transformation
Readers might imagine that “the great transformation” refers to the history the book traces: the imposition
of the market economy upon a recalcitrant society
spreading from England to encompass the globe and ultimately bringing on the collapse of world order in the twentieth century
But for Polanyi the great transformation lay not in the past but in the future
It referred not to the coming of market liberalism but of socialism
understood as “the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.” And this transformation would be the culmination of the dynamic that he famously called the “double movement,” in which the ravages of the market inevitably lead society to “protect itself” against depredation
The more optimistic title did not make the work a rousing success upon its publication in 1944
its itinerant author returned to London from the United States and promptly failed once again in his attempts to secure permanent academic employment
By the time he finally landed at Columbia a few years later
he was over sixty years old and approaching retirement
his brief New York Times obituary identified him simply as “an economist and former Hungarian political leader”—the indefinite article as revealing as the misleading choice of labels
It was only in the decades after his death that Polanyi and his book would become iconic
In recent years he has been ubiquitous: one recent commentary claims (debatably
but not laughably) that his popularity among contemporary social scientists is second only to Foucault’s
Yet Polanyi has had several distinct afterlives
consisted mostly of anthropologists investigating the distinctive economic logics of pre-capitalist societies
were sociologists anatomizing the social networks and institutions in which our own economic activities are inevitably embedded
Polanyi was taken up as a tribune of “counter-hegemonic globalization,” his double movement transplanted to the global South to analyze social movements in the age of Seattle and Porto Alegre
Polanyi has become something else: a totem for social democracy
much like Marx for communism or Hayek for neoliberalism
Both disciples and critics have portrayed him as the master theorist of the welfare state
with verdicts on the thinker reflecting deeper judgments of the system
Admirers have seen his work as the theoretical underpinning for a strong and slow boring of hard boards: a model of decommodification that can tame the market without toppling it
And this in turn has engendered the beginnings of a backlash among those—predominantly Marxists—who charge that the Polanyi revival stems from mere nostalgia for a postwar social-democratic order that always contained the seeds of its own destruction
Both sides of this debate have often accepted a model that deserves skepticism—one in which canonical theorists do battle on behalf of entire social orders
like ancient champions settling wars by single combat
To some extent Polanyi’s current popularity reflects the desire of the non-Marxist left for a champion of its own to compete with that other Karl
But this is likely a case of misplaced envy
since it is doubtful that either Marx or Marxism has been well-served by the identification of thinker and movement
Social democracy will stand or fall regardless of whether it has a master theorist to underwrite it
he was better at offering diagnoses than cures
the working title of The Great Transformation
gives a truer sense of the book’s contents and its value.) Polanyi grasped the interplay between the expansion of markets and the protective reactions against them
But such reactions (as he was well aware) can take a variety of forms
“Protection” was a notable keyword of Donald Trump’s recent inaugural address
second in prominence only to “carnage”—a pairing that would not have surprised Polanyi
although not even he could have anticipated The Donald in all his spray-tanned majesty
would a healthy rather than pathological kind of protection look like
Polanyi never answered with much specificity
except to make clear that the postwar Western order was not it
The coming transformation was one that he foresaw only murkily
And this murkiness is characteristic of his thought
for even the canonical Polanyian concepts—double movement
embeddedness—prove surprisingly elusive upon inspection
and could grow less convincing as he grew more systematic
But systematicity is not the only intellectual virtue
or even the most important; open-endedness
even at the price of tensions and ambiguities
What Polanyi offers is not so much a theoretical foundation or a practical program
but something vaguer and more inchoate: a vision of modern capitalism
The Polanyi revival has now yielded the first full-length intellectual biography of the thinker
Gareth Dale is the author of a previous monograph on Polanyi
and his new biography Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left does not wade deeply into the various interpretive debates that were surveyed in the earlier book; instead
it offers a brisk but thorough account of Polanyi’s life and times
Dale’s invaluable portrait unsettles some of the received images of its subject
above all by tracing his intellectual journey in its full sweep
Polanyi is unusual in being so deeply identified with a single book
and the temptation is to read The Great Transformation as the authoritative distillation of his thought
But it was only one step—and not the final one—in a career than was itinerant in both literal and intellectual terms
Polanyi grew up in Budapest to a prosperous German-speaking bourgeois family
but went bankrupt when Karl was a teenager and died five years later
Polanyi’s maternal grandfather was a rabbi; again like Marx
his immediate family was highly assimilated and felt a certain contempt for the “ghetto” of Jewish communal life
“Polanyi” was a Magyarized version of the Jewish “Pollacsek,” and although the family remained nominally Jewish—Karl remembered being raised with “an intense
religiosity”—both Karl and his brother Michael would eventually convert to Christianity
He grew up in the world of assimilated Budapest Jewry that would also produce his friends György Lukács and Karl Mannheim
Polanyi got his start as a journalist and political impresario rather than as a scholar
he helped his mentor Oscar Jaszi found the Radical Bourgeois (or Civic Radical) Party
aligned with the reformist socialism of Eduard Bernstein in Germany
he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army
serving as an officer until a bout of typhus forced him home toward the end of the war
In the chaotic period following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire
Polanyi and the Radicals joined with the Social Democrats in the government of the new Hungarian Democratic Republic
When its leader was replaced by the communist Béla Kun
Polanyi—although anti-Bolshevik himself—accepted Lukács’s offer to serve in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic
But he left Hungary in June 1919 to undergo hospital treatment in Vienna
and two months later Kun’s government fell
replaced the next year by the right-wing authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy
Polanyi would not return to Hungary until he was an old man
Polanyi lived in Vienna from 1919 until 1934
and it is in this period that his thinking began to mature
He was inspired by the city’s political culture under its new Social Democratic government; looking back upon it in The Great Transformation
he would write that Red Vienna’s attempt to transcend the market economy produced “one of the most spectacular cultural triumphs of Western history.” His politics shifted to the left
as he got to know the leading lights of Austro-Marxism and traded Jaszi’s reformism for guild socialism
In debates over the feasibility of a planned economy
he sought a middle way between central planners and free-market liberals
in the process crossing swords for the first time with Ludwig von Mises (who would serve as his main foil in The Great Transformation)
The most lasting new influence he encountered in the Vienna years was the woman who would become his wife: Ilona Duczynska
a revolutionary communist in exile from the counterrevolution in Hungary
Duczynska was bolder and more radical than her husband: during the First World War
she had plotted to assassinate the Hungarian prime minister
and she would be expelled first from the Hungarian Communist Party and then from the Austrian Social Democrats for refusing to toe the party line
Yet the scholarly Karl and the activist Ilona complemented one another
and Dale suggests that their views converged gradually (if never completely) over the course of decades
Their forty-year marriage appears to have been a largely happy one—even if its outlines could sometimes be depressingly traditional
as Ilona reluctantly changed countries and continents to accommodate the vagaries of her husband’s career
After an initial flirtation with Marxism in his youth
Polanyi had turned against it in the years leading up to the First World War
and he never became any kind of orthodox Marxist
Yet the common tendency to set the two thinkers against one another obscures a more complicated intellectual relationship
he became increasingly sympathetic to Marx once again
and was particularly struck by the Marxian theories of alienation and commodity fetishism
Although Polanyi would distinguish his own theory of fictitious commodities from commodity fetishism
his broader vision of the “disembedding” of economy from society bears its imprint
envisions relations between persons becoming subordinated to relations between things—the rise of a “spectral world,” as he glossed Marx’s theory
in which nonetheless the “specters are real.” And if this spectral world served as an acute diagnosis
Marx’s “community of free individuals” provided an ideal and a path forward
Upon the publication of Marx’s early writings in German—the same writings whose appearance in English and French a generation later would inspire the New Left—Polanyi declared that they “may still save the world.”
and he would remain a Christian for the rest of his life
The specifically theological content of his faith is unclear
Polanyi’s Christianity was always a political creed
Jesus had revealed that the “true nature of man” was freedom achieved in communion with others; Marx had gone “beyond Jesus” by showing what attaining this ideal required in a complex industrial society
And so every true Christian must be a Marxist and every true Marxist a Christian
Leaving Vienna for London in 1934—once again
a step ahead of the counterrevolution—he immersed himself in the world of Christian Socialism and struck up friendships with stalwarts of the interwar British left like R.H
Polanyi’s leftward turn in these years often put him at odds with intimates from his Budapest days—his former mentor Jaszi for one
whose writings on “spontaneous order” would be an inspiration to Hayek
The brothers clashed repeatedly over the decades on the subject of actually existing socialism
in ways that do not always do credit to Karl
Michael was angered by Karl’s credulous excuses for Stalin’s show trials
and particularly his mealy-mouthed response to the treatment of their niece Eva
who had emigrated to the USSR before being imprisoned and interrogated on trumped-up charges at the height of the Great Terror
(Eva’s ordeal was among the inspirations for her onetime friend Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.)
The political tensions between the brothers would never fully subside
Yet they evidently shared a bond that kept them close when politics would otherwise have driven them apart
Michael was generous in his response to The Great Transformation
although he could hardly have agreed with much of its content; as Karl worked away at the manuscript during the war years
Michael described him to Ilona as “a man whose purpose must be to reap
to collect and bring to final shape the gains of a lifetime of thought
It is the only good he can do; to himself and to society.” Perhaps this was just fraternal loyalty
But reading the anticommunist insist to the communist on the importance of a work that bore her imprint far more than his
we can begin to get a sense of why so many have found the final product so compelling
Polanyi had begun The Great Transformation in England in the late 1930s—much of his research on economic history began as drafts for the adult education lectures that were his primary employment—but he wrote the bulk of it from 1940–43 on fellowship at Bennington College in Vermont
His tranquil environs stood in sharp contrast to the chaos engulfing the rest of the world
but the book remains unmistakably a product of the war years
with the same urgency that marks contemporaneous works like Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment
itching to get back to Europe for the end of the war
he left the nearly finished manuscript with three friends who got it into publishable form: one a liberal
each of them “believing it to be essentially true.”
The Great Transformation is a mesmerizing and deservedly famous book
Some of this was due to the rushed circumstances of publication
some to Polanyi’s own cast of mind; even in less harried times he was never a methodical system-builder
The work is united by a set of broad themes: the impossibility of any society persisting on the basis of the market alone; the violence involved in attempts to impose a self-regulating market; the inevitable protective (and protectionist) measures by which society defends itself; the instability resulting from this “double movement.” Yet on the surface its changes of subject can be dizzying
as it jumps from the collapse of the international gold standard in the 1930s to the anthropological evidence of “primitive” non-market economies to the effects of the Industrial Revolution in England
Inevitably some parts have held up better than others
Polanyi’s English economic history—and particularly the enormous importance he attaches to the Speenhamland system of poor relief that began in 1795—has rarely found much favor with historians
The leading English socialist historians of the day
gave the book a polite but decidedly mixed response upon its publication; more recently
the sociologists Fred Block and Margaret Somers (in their sympathetic but not uncritical 2014 study The Power of Market Fundamentalism) have sought to salvage what is valuable in Polanyi’s Speenhamland narrative while discarding much of its historical account
Polanyi is hardly the only theorist to fall back on a little potted history
But the difficulties in the book extend to some of its main concepts
Polanyi’s theory of “fictitious commodities” holds that the commodification of land
and money has uniquely destructive effects upon society
and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them.” Although the theory is among Polanyi’s most well-known innovations
it has perplexed most commentators who have studied it closely—not least for the implication that other objects sold on the market simply are commodities in some natural and non-fictitious sense
However important decommodification might be as a political program
it is hardly obvious that it can or should proceed along the line demarcating Polanyi’s fictitious and non-fictitious commodities
And once again sympathetic critics like Nancy Fraser have tried to salvage what is valuable in the theory in ways that render it largely unrecognizable from the original version
Polanyi’s arguments might best be described as productively ambiguous
Consider the most famous Polanyian concept of all
“embeddedness.” What does he mean by the claim that “[e]conomic systems
It could be understood as a claim about human motivations; the same sentence goes on to specify that “distribution of material goods is ensured by noneconomic motives.” It could also be a claim about social structures: material distribution is governed by institutions other than price-making markets
and there is no economic sphere distinct from the broader society
Or it could be a claim about origins: markets do not exist naturally
but must be created by conscious and continuous political interventions
Does it mean “universally,” or “typically”
The ambiguity speaks to a deeper question in Polanyi’s work: is it possible for an economy to be disembedded from society
and is this what has happened under modern capitalism
Polanyi emphasizes that the classical economists’ faith in a self-regulating market—that is
But was it delusional because a disembedded economy is impossible
Polanyi looks rather different depending on our answers to these questions
Take him as a theorist of what Block and Somers call the “always-embedded market economy,” and he begins to look like a contemporary economic sociologist
the discipline that made embeddedness into a catchword by seeking to show the inevitable social underpinnings of markets and the networks connecting actors within them
and a useful check on the wilder speculations of the grand theorists—if sometimes a bit bloodless
bearing little resemblance to the Polanyi who aspired to grasp “the meaning of life in an industrial civilization.” Take him to be envisioning a genuinely disembedded economy
and Polanyi begins to look more like a classic social theorist along the lines of Marx and Weber
who had written of a “great transformation” separating Gemeinschaft from Gesellschaft.) This would be a more pessimistic Polanyi
envisioning the disembedded market as a specter that is nonetheless all-too-real
The “always-embedded” interpretation tends to find more favor with scholars today
but the evidence in Polanyi’s own work is scattered and ambiguous
Block and Somers suggest that Polanyi had gradually
left behind his Marxian roots in writing The Great Transformation; although he “glimpsed” the idea of the always-embedded economy
Dale is less convinced by this developmental story
and he suggests that over time Polanyi became more the grand social theorist
increasingly attached to the vision of a chasm dividing modernity from what came before
to resolve the question definitively; Polanyi’s ambiguity on this central point is part of what has made his thought so fertile
Polanyi had agreed with his publisher to write a sequel to The Great Transformation (with the unpromising title The Common Man’s Master Plan) spelling out the concrete political proposals implicit in the first book
and his failure to do so might indicate that he himself was unsure of the exact political implications of his argument
The two decades that passed between his masterpiece and his death saw the growth and zenith of the postwar welfare state that then began to disintegrate in the 1970s
This is the social order whose champion Polanyi is often held up to be
Yet anyone hoping to find a sustained justification of it in his later writing
will be disappointed; mostly it figures as an absence
This is not to say that he was entirely politically apathetic or withdrawn
He had initial high hopes for the Attlee government in Britain
International rather than domestic politics occupied the bulk of his political attention
and as the war wound down he trained his sights on Bretton Woods
He saw the new monetary system as a continuation of the same impulses that had underlain the gold standard and free trade
those “primitive Trotzkyist forms of capitalism” which he blamed for the collapse of world order
Only by further insulating themselves from the forces of international capitalism could Britain and other countries hope to build socialism at home
Polanyi was determinedly anti-anticommunist
even as comrades from earlier days lined up on the opposite side
(He spent his final years planning a journal to counter the various “pseudo-scholarly American-sponsored organs that are carrying on Cold War propaganda” abroad—a scarcely-veiled jab at his brother Michael
who had gotten into bed with Koestler’s Congress for Cultural Freedom.) He remained uncritical of the USSR to a fault
and his postwar optimism about the Soviets’ willingness to tolerate democracy in the Eastern Bloc has not aged well
although he was deeply moved by the 1956 Hungarian uprising when it came
Dale notes the “ambiguity and ambivalence” of Polanyi’s occasional treatments of market society’s postwar evolution
his gloomy view of the dawning “Machine Age” was consonant with that of other postwar critics of mass industrial society
What divided him from the nascent New Left was not so much his higher estimation of the Western status quo—for he shared many of their diagnoses—but his Old Left instincts when it came to actually existing socialism
Polanyi’s postwar career was hardly idle or unproductive
he began sustained investigation into a topic that had figured importantly
in The Great Transformation: the nature of economic life in non-market societies
he had been largely content to follow anthropological studies on the economics of “primitive man”; now he cast his net wider
looking beyond these stylized portraits of tribal life to examine kingdoms and empires in greater detail
His work in these years became the wellspring of the so-called “substantivist” school of economic anthropology
Its influence is visible in the works of his students and collaborators—Moses Finley’s The Ancient Economy
Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics—as well as in more recent works like Debt: The First 5,000 Years
What officially divided the substantivists from their opponents
the “formalists,” was a somewhat abstruse dispute about the proper definition of economics: the substantivists thought of it in terms of the satisfaction of material needs
the formalists (more abstractly) as any kind of rational choice under conditions of scarcity
the debate revolved around the broader question of whether economic concepts developed to analyze the workings of modern capitalism might legitimately be used to understand all societies across history
Polanyi and his followers insisted on the historical exceptionalism of modern market society
and the wide variety of ways that humans have organized economic life throughout history
Once we understand that market society is the aberration
history will no longer appear as one long quest to achieve laissez-faire
We will instead see history as a catalog of other ways that societies have organized themselves
Polanyi’s detractors across the political spectrum have always accused him of romanticism
of idealizing pre-capitalist societies and ignoring the forms of oppression that underlay them
for Polanyi never suggested that a return to earlier modes of life was possible or desirable
He aimed at “freedom in a complex society” (the title of The Great Transformation’s coda)
But on some level the charge sticks: a vision of Gemeinschaft is central to his work
and those allergic to that sort of thing will want to look elsewhere
the difference lying in which forces they took to be organic and which to be artificial
Karl’s aphorism that “[l]aissez-faire was planned; planning was not” is sharp and suggestive
but equally it illustrates the ways in which (as scholars like Philip Mirowski have pointed out) his thought often moved within the same dichotomies as his opponents’
The market becomes the artificial product of conscious intervention
society’s self-defense against the market becomes spontaneous and natural
A more effective response to the errors of classical liberalism would leave behind the unhelpful category of the “spontaneous” altogether
Doing so would let us see both sides of Polanyi’s double movement as products of willful and concerted interventions of various kinds
Certainly this seems a better angle from which to analyze our own predicament
Will society protect itself against the present ravages of the market
but if it does there will be nothing inevitable or spontaneous about it
was certainly aware that the second side of the double movement had its own dangers
but his categories risked eliding this fact
and subsequent Polanyians have often forgotten it
The current political moment should remind us that we cannot fall back on romanticized entities like “society” or “the people” to do our work for us
what traces of romanticism remain in Polanyi’s work have a value of their own
If he can glide over the oppressions involved in past forms of social life
he nonetheless offers a useful corrective to the more frequent tendency to see history as consisting of nothing but oppression and resistance to it
The longing for a pre-capitalist or pre-industrial past has played an enormous role in the popular history of the left
yet the movement’s resolutely modernist theoreticians have generally treated this impulse with embarrassment or outright contempt: at best a useful myth for the moment
ultimately destined to be swept away along with the rest of the idiocy of rural life
The theoreticians have often tried to purge all traces of nostalgia from the culture of the left
but have never been entirely successful in doing so—and
Polanyi offers a different orientation toward the past
one found infrequently among the left’s intellectuals and scarcely at all among its social theorists
Without surrendering to nostalgia—he remained
very much a modernist—he took it seriously as more than mere myth or misrecognition
and thought hard about what resources an industrial or post-industrial society might draw from other times and other places
Perhaps we should be more suspicious of the past than Polanyi sometimes was
But he reminds us that we cannot hope to leave it behind altogether—certainly not today
as we try to come to grips with our own cataclysms
Daniel Luban is a postdoctoral associate in the humanities at Yale University
Neoliberal globalization shifted the social risks of the economic system away from companies and the wealthy and toward workers and citizens
leftists must develop a politics of social protection to counter a surging right
“liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes
It determines not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments
The work of Hungarian thinker and statesman István Bibó provides a guide to his country’s twisted politics
A string of pseudo-populist conservative movements have reverted to the same agenda of tax cuts and deregulation
Joe Biden comes to the White House amid a punishing economic crisis
Yet the opposition he faces is entirely different
for Donald Trump has shattered the Republican Party’s old small-government pieties and ushered in a new working-class conservatism eager to use government to serve the common good
Just kidding: things will be almost exactly the same
Expect the GOP to offer up strong doses of deficit hysteria
and a congressional war of attrition aimed at bogging Biden down in an extended recession
the most striking thing about Trump’s takeover will be how little it affects the basic dynamics of the right in opposition
we’ll continue to hear all the hits from the Trumpian songbook: the migrants swarming across the border
the pedophilic cabals hiding in plain sight
To call these themes “populist” might be misleading because it implies that their sole or main appeal is to the working class
But if we simply take the term to mean this particular strain of reactionary berserk
Yet “right populism” in recent years often meant something more specific: a conservatism that rejected neoliberalism
combining economic provision with social conservatism to swap the old GOP business-class base for a working-class one
The Trump years have served to demonstrate the persistent weakness of this project
the chief expositors of these goals were “reformicons” like the New York Times’s Ross Douthat and National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru
who pushed the GOP to move away from Reaganite orthodoxy and be more receptive to the interests of non-rich voters
Already under suspicion in the Tea Party years for being insufficiently alarmist about the Islamo-Marxist radicalism of Barack Obama
they sealed their fates by opposing Trump in 2016 and sticking with it after he won
By showing an actual sustained commitment to their avowed goals
the reformicons guaranteed their own marginality to the MAGA populism industry
Those who took up the banner post-2016 were more swaggering
Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon was calling for a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and tax increases on the rich
“we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.” (Aspirations were quickly lowered: when Trump managed to crack 20 percent of the combined Black and Hispanic vote four years later
right populists triumphantly declared themselves the party of the multiracial working class.) Bannon
seems to have understood from the beginning that it was all a grift; he is currently awaiting trial for allegedly scamming donors hoping to fund Trump’s border wall
Yet many others continued to foretell the coming victory of right populism in apparent sincerity
The British political scientist Matthew Goodwin’s verdict on Boris Johnson’s electoral victory came to be widely cited: “it is much easier for the Right to move Left on economics than it is for the Left to move Right on culture.”
in an American context such confidence displayed a willful naïveté
It has been obvious for decades that many voters are both socially conservative and economically progressive
and that a Republican Party less rapaciously plutocratic in its policies would have a much easier time winning majority support
And yet the promised move left on economics never comes; the recent history of American conservatism includes a series of pseudo-populist movements (the Gingrich Revolution and Tea Party before MAGA) that unfailingly revert to the same donor-friendly agenda of tax cuts and deregulation
Rather than searching for the sources of this pattern
right populists have mostly been content to assume that this time things will be different
Workers did benefit from the hot economy of his first three years in office
which MAGA ideologists spun as proof of the president’s unique business acumen (much as Third Way ideologists had once taken the 1990s economic boom as proof of the virtues of Clintonism)
there was a massive corporate tax cut; instead of a family leave plan
there was a failed attempt to strip healthcare from tens of millions of people
a familiar cast of industry shills set to work dismantling labor rights and environmental protections
Trump’s most durable accomplishment was the rubber-stamping of scores of Federalist Society judges
each one a devoted steward of the interests of capital
If Bernie Sanders had won the White House only to spend his presidency cutting Social Security and deregulating industry
his core supporters would have reacted with fury
The reaction of avowed right populists to Trump’s abandonment of their ostensible program was strikingly different: they did nothing
Figures like Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley lined up in support of the administration
while the MAGA faithful bristled at any suggestion that Trump might not be keeping his promises
This dynamic came to a head in recent months
as Trump—by this point getting his advice from figures like Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore
high priests of supply-side theology—dithered in pressing for a second coronavirus relief bill
Perhaps a forceful push from his base might have stirred him to bully Senate Republicans into passing a bill
as the populist right instead focused its ire on Anthony Fauci and Black Lives Matter
Trump’s failure to press for relief in the run-up to the election might go down as the final fatal blunder of his presidency
movement publicists like Sohrab Ahmari were still issuing fawning odes to the leader for having “addressed the plight of the working class as an affront to national greatness.”
The striking thing about this record is not so much the lack of outright defections from Trumpism (with rare exceptions like Julius Krein
whose magazine American Affairs has been the most heterodox voice of the movement)
even as Trump made it ever-clearer that he had no interest in the agenda that right populists ascribed to him
This doesn’t look like the behavior of a faction genuinely dedicated to winning ideological battles
The character of Trumpism—less a fleshed-out ideological movement than a personality cult built around sharp friend-enemy divides—may help explain this timidity
Right populists make a point of sneering at the Republican “donor class,” but the true plutocrats have been on board with Trump since his election—after all
(Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer’s exuberant supply-side tribute Trumponomics is hackwork
but it offers a more honest defense of the president’s record than anything produced by the populists.) Likewise the Tea Partiers: despite stylized contrasts between “libertarianism” and “populism,” Trump’s strongest congressional supporters (and his last two chiefs of staff) came from the zealots of the House Freedom Caucus
The real enemies on the right were defined not by any particular economic philosophy but by the bare fact of disloyalty to the leader
Some right populists hope that the fabled move left on economics will finally come once Trump cedes the stage to a more reliable standard-bearer like Hawley or Marco Rubio
the future of the GOP still revolves around the Trump family—the prospect offers little immediate consolation
Hawley was elected to the Senate in 2018 on an utterly conventional platform—tax cuts
union-busting—but he has since shown a gift for taking headline-grabbing stands against suitably faraway targets: China
He has shown rather less interest in materially improving the lives of his constituents
During the biggest recent victory for working-class residents of his state
Missouri’s 2020 vote to extend healthcare to hundreds of thousands of people by expanding Medicaid
Hawley fell uncharacteristically silent as his allies fought to defeat the measure
who entered the Senate in the Tea Party wave of 2010
has started peddling something called “common-good capitalism,” developed with his consigliere Mike Needham (better known as one of the most militant crusaders for austerity during the Obama years)
allegedly rooted in Catholic social teaching
is mostly oriented toward confrontation with China
Rubio recently explained to the New Yorker that his road-to-Damascus moment came from observing the plight of deindustrialized communities during his 2016 presidential run
If Rubio managed to go the entirety of the Great Recession without realizing that the American working class was suffering—conveniently enough for his political prospects—we shouldn’t doubt his ability to replicate the feat for the duration of Biden’s term
the emergence of even a small bloc of Republican senators willing to support a robust economic recovery would have real significance
there’s little reason to expect such a development
Hawley and Rubio have their eyes on the presidency in 2024
They understand that their prospects in the Republican primary won’t be helped by collaboration with the enemy
and that their prospects in the general election increase in tandem with the economic suffering of the American populace over the next four years
both are likely to line up with the rest of their caucus in support of austerity
The small handful of people who actually take the project of working-class conservatism seriously might protest; the much larger number who jumped aboard to own the libs won’t mind
Right populists can tell themselves that these are just short-term compromises
but protracted experience suggests that we should only believe the American right can move left on economics once we’ve witnessed it happen
And if the Trump years have seen populism make inroads on a rhetorical level
their practical lessons are less promising for the movement: Trump expanded his support while tossing aside the program that populists claimed he had been elected to implement
The most basic obstacle facing right populism has been around for decades: the people who matter on the right would rather get filthy rich with 45 percent support than slightly less filthy rich with 55 percent support
and the configuration of American political institutions makes this a perfectly rational strategy
The way to change this calculus is not to convince them of their errors but to render the strategy unviable
That would require a democratization of American political life so that the pursuit of majority support becomes a necessity rather than a luxury
Daniel Luban is a research fellow at Oxford
The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private
The beneficiaries of existing social and economic hierarchies will always fight to maintain them against egalitarian movements for change
Introducing our Spring 2020 special section
once the result of a sort of strained political imagination
is increasingly real—and recognizing its potency will be central to building a new progressive movement in the United States
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