Links 36.2024
On a Personal Note
Disclaimer: The reason that I haven’t commented on the elections in Eastern Germany yet ain’t because I was too shocked last week. Rather, I was simply too busy and barely had time to look at the results in more in-depth. I might (or might not) link to some interesting resources once I have found to sit down this week.
And this already concludes the intro to this week’s newsletter. Forgive me, I’m still putting myself together after two weeks in Serbia and Gummersbach—which is kind of an interesting antithesis itself if you think about it.
Anyways, reminder that the world gets better by the day. Progress is unstoppable!
The Year of Elections Has Been Good for Democracy
As we already enter the last stretches of 2024 (where did the year go, really?), Francis Fukuyama gives an update on “The Biggest Election Year in History”—and it doesn’t look too bad from a liberal perspective. Amidst the great systemic rivalry between liberalism and authoritarianism, both sides were able to secure their respective W’s and L’s. Just some highlights:
Poland: Big W for liberal democrats.
Slovakia: The election of Fico might look like a W for the bad guys; but there are also lots of positive signals for the liberal democratic camp, such as the results of Progressive Slovakia in the EU elections.
EU Elections: Less bad L for liberals than expected. (Yes, it’s all about expectations).
Argentina: W for freedom (…if he doesn’t descend to madness)
Taiwan: DPP <3
India: Setback for Modi
El Salvador: New populist case study
South Africa: Mixed signals. Let’s see how the arranged marriage between the AND cand the DA will actually play out.
Much more in the article. Read the whole thing:
Liberals have engaged in a lot of catastrophic thinking during this “year of elections.” Many feared that authoritarian and populist politicians, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to India’s Narendra Modi, would consolidate their gains by increasing their shares of the vote. According to Freedom House’s February 2024 Freedom in the World analysis, the world has been in a phase of democratic backsliding for nearly two decades, exacerbated by the rise of authoritarian great powers such as China and Russia, hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the ascendance or advancement of populist nationalists in countries that seemed to be securely democratic—Germany, Hungary, India, and Italy. […] But liberals’ fears that this year would reflect the global triumph of illiberal populism have so far been proved wrong. Although authoritarian ideologies have made clear gains in several countries, democracy in many parts of the world has shown surprising resilience and may yet prevail in the United States.
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The year of elections is so named because an all-time-high number of citizens worldwide went to the polls; nearly 30 countries are holding elections that are both defining and competitive. This pivotal year really began in late 2023, most critically with the Polish election on October 15 that dethroned the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) and replaced it with a coalition of liberal parties. Law and Justice had been following a path blazed by Hungary’s right-wing Fidesz party, but the strong cooperation between Poland’s Civic Platform and other left-of-center parties—whose members worked hard to overcome their past differences and held massive rallies to get out the vote—drove a 41-seat loss for PiS, which also lost its majority in Poland’s lower house of parliament, the Sejm. This represented a major setback for populism in Europe, depriving Hungary of a major ally within the EU. The only other country in eastern Europe to move in a populist direction was Slovakia, as Robert Fico returned as prime minister in October and vowed to end his country’s strong support for Ukraine.
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In November 2023, Javier Milei defeated Sergio Massa in the second-round presidential vote in Argentina. Many in the United States understood Milei to be an Argentine Trump, given his antiestablishment personal style and embrace of the former U.S. president. But Milei was riding a wave of popular disgust with the ruling Peronists, who had led the country into deep economic stagnation. Although many populists embrace a strong state bent on enforcing conservative cultural values, Milei is a genuine libertarian. The early success of his economic stabilization program allowed him to retain his popularity despite having a weak base in the Argentine National Congress. The chief danger Milei poses is not that he will move in an authoritarian direction but that he will go too far in weakening the Argentine state.
Early 2024 saw mixed results for democracy. In January, Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party defeated the pro-Chinese Kuomintang, and Finland remained in a solidly democratic camp. In both cases, the winning parties had worked quietly but vigorously to build their legislative majorities. On the other hand, the following month, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele was reelected president with a remarkable 85 percent of the vote […]. The trend toward rewarding strongmen continued with the election of Prabowo Subianto to the Indonesian presidency. Human rights groups have accused Prabowo, a former special forces commander, of committing war crimes during Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste in the 1980s and 1990s; he had been banned from traveling to the United States from 2000 until 2020, when Trump’s State Department granted him a visa.
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The middle of the year brought two important elections, in South Africa and Mexico, that did not fit easily into the populist-versus-liberal framework. In South Africa, the African National Congress, which had dominated the country’s politics since it transitioned to democracy in 1994, lost 71 seats and its majority in the National Assembly. The rise of a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), associated with the country’s corrupt former president Jacob Zuma, was troubling, but in the aftermath of the election, the ANC went into a coalition not with MK but with the Democratic Alliance, a party that tends to represent white and so-called colored, or mixed race, voters. The DA gained three parliamentary seats, and the radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters party lost five. For all the corruption scandals and economic decline that South Africa has experienced in the past decade, the 2024 election was in some ways reassuring. Voters held the ANC accountable for its corrupt stewardship of the country and did not turn wholeheartedly to populist remedies.
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Another pivotal election was in India, where the vote occurred in stages between mid-April and early June. Prime Minister Modi—a charter member of the populist-nationalist club who had weakened his country’s media, courts, and civil liberties—was expected to increase the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s majority in India’s lower house, the Lok Sabha. Instead, the BJP lost its majority and was forced to enter into a coalition with other parties. Its losses were particularly great in its former northern Indian heartland, where it shed 49 seats, including 29 in the poor state of Uttar Pradesh.
Less globally influential but still significant was the election in Mongolia at the end of June. Wedged between Russia and China, the country has been the only state in central Eurasia to realize and maintain a democracy after exiting Moscow’s orbit following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the ruling Mongolian People’s Party, the successor to the Soviet-era Communist Party, turned in an increasingly authoritarian and pro-Russian direction between 2022 and 2024. The election, however, saw the opposition Democratic Party more than double its seat count as voters rejected a system pervaded by corruption. This outcome did not make headlines in the West, but it demonstrated the power ordinary voters can wield to defend democracy.
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Elections to the European Parliament took place in early June. Populist parties such as the Freedom Party in Austria, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France, the Alternative for Germany, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy all made gains. Across the 27-member bloc, the biggest losers were the Socialists and the Greens. This shift was unsettling but did not amount to the earthquake that some had predicted. Center and center-right parties such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Poland’s Civic Platform hung onto or even increased their vote shares. Poland’s Law and Justice party lost seats, as did Fidesz in Hungary, where a dissident party member, Peter Magyar, split the vote by forming his own party following a corruption scandal in Fidesz.
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There are still a number of important elections to come: in Moldova, where the liberal President Maia Sandu is likely to win reelection, and in Georgia, where the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party has a good chance of retaining power. But the most important election by far is the one occurring on November 5 in the United States between Trump and the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. At the time of the Republican National Convention in mid-July, a Trump victory against an aging Biden looked likely, but with Biden’s decision to step aside, the Democrats have been suddenly energized. Numerous polls, both nationally and in many of the critical swing states, now show Harris ahead of her opponent.
The outcome of the American election will have huge implications both for American institutions and for the world. Trump has expressed strong admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and at home, he has promised to weaken checks on executive power. He will almost certainly end U.S. support for Ukraine and has expressed great skepticism about the value of alliances such as NATO. He has vowed to end trade relations with China and to impose a ten percent across-the-board tariff on all foreign-produced goods. The Republican Party has decidedly abandoned the libertarian policies of the Ronald Reagan years and pledges to wield state power in the service of conservative ends.
But thus far, the year of elections has not been a terrible one for democracy worldwide. Populist and authoritarian parties and leaders have made gains in some countries, but they have lost in others. Citizens have expressed their opposition to authoritarian governance in other ways, as well. In July, Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly in favor of the opposition candidate Edmundo González, leading the regime of Nicolás Maduro to commit massive fraud in declaring him the winner. Maduro’s regime can survive only by turning openly authoritarian and abandoning any shred of democratic legitimacy. And in Myanmar, where a military junta abolished elections following a coup in 2021, an armed insurgency that allies the junta’s democratic opposition to a number of ethnic militias is making substantial territorial gains.
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The lesson to be drawn from the year of elections so far is that the rise of populist and authoritarian politicians is not inevitable. Democratic backsliding can and has been resisted in many countries that hold elections. But democratic norms cannot be secured with violence, judicial remedies (for example, the use of the 14th Amendment to disqualify Trump), the rise of a new charismatic leader, or any other quick fix. What remains effective is the steady, often boring work of democratic politics: making arguments, convincing and mobilizing voters, adjusting policies, building coalitions, and, if necessary, making compromises where the best gives way to the possible. Even in a dispiriting time for global democracy, citizens still have agency to move toward better futures.
Kamala Harris’ Foreign Policy Won’t Just Be More of the Same
Don’t worry. This ain’t really about the US election cycle; but rather about the terminology of a “human rights hawk”. What would that entail?
Using the levers of American power to protect civilians and assist refugees rather than going around using military force to overthrow autocratic governments—i.e. the neocon democracy promotion foreign policy
More direct support for Ukraine (meaning: more decisive than Biden)
Being tougher on Israel, i.e. protecting Israel against Iran but making protection of the civilian Palestinian population a priority.
Being tough on China (essentially a continuation of the Biden administration)
Getting more involved in Latin & Central America to deal with migration flows.
Looking at it, this probably comes closest to my own thoughts about foreign policy. I might just use the term “human rights hawk” from now on.
What will be the “Harris Doctrine”? […] We already have the record of a full four-year Trump term with which to gauge his foreign policy. Based on what has been said by him and his campaign to this point, a second Trump term would be marked by the isolationist and unilateralist leanings of his first. That likely explains why international relations scholars and experts, including a fair number that identify as Republican, by and large favor Harris over Trump.
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Based on what she has said and done to this point in her political career, a Harris foreign policy would likely be more human rights-centered than that of either of her immediate predecessors. She told the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin last year that, as vice president, she has “consistently raised human rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights and press freedom with foreign leaders,” and this emphasis on human rights has shaped her public positions on a wide spectrum of foreign policy issues, from U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia to Taiwan’s relationship with China. Indeed, one could even say that Harris favors a hawkish human rights foreign policy.
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This hawkish, human rights-focused perspective would also mean making Latin America a bigger priority than the Biden administration has to this point. A Harris administration would likely be more engaged in assisting and intervening to relieve the refugee crisis impacting several South and Central American countries.
Most of all, a hawkish human rights foreign policy would mean stronger opposition to Israel’s current policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Like Biden, Harris is on the record as maintaining Israel’s right to defend itself. And the Biden Administration has been critical of the manner by which Netanyahu’s government has prosecuted its war effort. But unlike Biden and secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Harris has more openly emphasized ending the suffering of the Palestinians caught in the war between the IDF and Hamas.
A Harris administration could express U.S. support of Israel against direct aggression by Iran, while simultaneously expressing and maintaining a complete intolerance for harm to the Palestinian population caused by Israel’s weapons of war. It would mean saying “too bad, do better” when Israeli officials claim that it’s too difficult to fight Hamas in Gaza without harming civilians.
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That Harris could end up being more hawkish than Biden in foreign policy would be consistent with what international relations scholars have found regarding the foreign policy approaches of women leaders in other countries. Because male leaders have a tendency to discount the views of women leaders, women leaders often push harder in a bargaining situation, some studies have found. Other studies have found that, throughout history, women-led states, including monarchies, have engaged in war more often than states led by men.
While there are marked similarities between the foreign policies of the Trump and Biden administrations, they do show distinctions in approach. Trump and his “America First” foreign policy chafed at the strictures of international institutions, was annoyed by allies, and sought to restrict the flow of people and goods into the U.S. economy. Biden epitomized realpolitik pragmatism with an internationalist flair. Along that spectrum, a Harris’ Doctrine could well look more like Biden’s than Trump’s. In that sense, those hoping that Harris will fully “reshape” U.S. foreign policy are likely to be disappointed. But Harris’ foreign policy is not likely to be a simple continuation of Biden’s approach. Instead, Harris seems poised to be a human rights hawk.
Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?
Okay, it comes as no surprise that the whole degrowth literature is kinda pseudo-scientific nonsense; however, this metastudy is just carnage:
the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis
few studies use quantitative or qualitative data
small samples or focus on non-representative case
most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice
Ouch! They did them drrrty. (Not that I’m complaining)
Abstract
In the last decade many publications have appeared on degrowth as a strategy to confront environmental and social problems. We undertake a systematic review of their content, data and methods. This involves the use of computational linguistics to identify main topics investigated. Based on a sample of 561 studies we conclude that: (1) content covers 11 main topics; (2) the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis; (3) few studies use quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones use formal modelling; (4) the first and second type tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases; (5) most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies; (6) of the few studies on public support, a majority concludes that degrowth strategies and policies are socially-politically infeasible; (7) various studies represent a “reverse causality” confusion, i.e. use the term degrowth not for a deliberate strategy but to denote economic decline (in GDP terms) resulting from exogenous factors or public policies; (8) few studies adopt a system-wide perspective – instead most focus on small, local cases without a clear implication for the economy as a whole. We illustrate each of these findings for concrete studies.
How long would it take to read the greatest books of all time?
This is a fun little tool: It maps a list of the 'Greatest Books of All Time' onto a scale based on how long it would take you to read each one. Perfect to play around a little bit…and to make some trade-offs!
“A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short,” wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher of the 19th century. People are living longer than they did in Schopenhauer’s day, but the number of books has increased by a much bigger factor. So his dictum ought to carry even more weight now than it did then.
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Still, the number of texts that people are told they should read seems overwhelming. One way to prune is to see where best-book lists overlap, on the theory that books that appear most often must be really worth your while. That is what a website called thegreatestbooks.org has done. Its creator, Shane Sherman, a computer programmer in Texas, has used more than 300 lists to come up with a list of lists, which he calls, not entirely seriously, the “greatest books of all time” (GBOATs). It has more than 10,000 books, ranked by how often they appear on the constituent lists. You can search the top 500 below and sort them by decade or century of publication, year of publication, language and length.
Americans who read at least one book a year—just over half of adults—complete 11 a year on average; a typical reader would therefore need just over 45 years to get through this list of 500 must-reads. To help readers spend time wisely, we’ve included roughly how long it would take to read each book on this list of lists using estimates provided by Harry Tong, the co-founder of howlongtoread.com, a search engine. (He uses the length of an audiobook to calculate roughly how much time it would take to read it silently.) People read at different speeds, and some books are slower-going than others: one book club took 28 years to read “Finnegans Wake” by James Joyce (ranked 325th), a book you can polish off in 12 hours, our data say.
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For Schopenhauer, shunning whatever is popular was an important part of reading wisely: “You should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.” That is probably too dogmatic for the BookTok generation. But the more tempered advice of C.S. Lewis, a scholar of literature and author of “The Chronicles of Narnia” series for children, is worth heeding: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” And if you’re reading mainly GBOATs, the odds are it will be time well spent.
Peace,
SG