“Outside of buttressing a U.S. Marine detail to protect the U.S. Embassy, the Biden administration is wary, if not outright opposed, to Haiti’s request for a U.S. troop deployment. While the prospect of thousands of Haitians fleeing to the United States can’t be ruled out if the situation further deteriorates, President Joe Biden is right to reject the Haitian government’s request. The last thing Washington needs is yet another ill-advised, reactive military intervention in a de facto failed state—particularly at a time when the White House appears intent on extricating U.S. forces from wars that have cost too much, have gone on for too long, and have had next to no return.
Even before Moïse’s late-night assassination, Haiti was in the midst of extreme political and economic turmoil. The nation of 12 million people has been without a functioning parliament for a year and a half. Due to the absence of a legislature, the entire government has operated by decree. Approximately 30 gangs control a large area of Port-au-Prince; thousands of Haitians have fled their neighborhoods from intergang violence. René Sylvestre, the head of Haiti’s Supreme Court, passed away from COVID-19, a virus that is ravaging the broader population.
Moïse’s killing has taken this dire situation and turned it into a catastrophe. Today, there are three separate Haitian politicians claiming to be Moïse’s successor, a political contest for power bearing the markings of a serious confrontation. One of Haiti’s powerful gang bosses is readying his own troops for action, claiming the assassination was a large foreign-orchestrated conspiracy against the Haitian population. The police, corrupt and riven by schisms, aren’t exactly in a position to quell any violence that may erupt.
The U.S. military, however, isn’t in a position to do so either. In fact, it’s questionable whether foreign troops in any capacity would have the resources, patience, and fortitude to save Haitians from the depravity of their own politicians. There was a time not so long ago when United Nations peacekeepers were authorized to return democracy to the island during yet another fractious period in its history—the forced exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That U.N.-authorized peacekeeping mission would last for more than 15 years, and the result was anything but the peace, democracy, and stability Washington and its partners on the Security Council hoped to accomplish. Instead, Haiti’s problems arguably multiplied. The mission was not only implicated in human rights abuses, but brought a deadly cholera epidemic to the country which killed upward of 10,000 people.
The U.S. military has some experience in Haiti as well. In 1994, 25,000 U.S. troops were sent to the island in a mission code-named Operation Uphold Democracy, a deployment designed to restore the democratically elected government to power after being ousted in a military coup three years earlier. While the mission succeeded in ridding the military junta from the capital and negotiating the exile of the coup’s architect (Lt. Gen. Raoul Cédras), one can hardly call it a long-term success given Haiti’s current circumstances.”
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“To task U.S. troops with political missions is to saddle them with responsibilities they can’t reasonably be expected to meet, all the while providing the host government with the cover to continue business as usual. Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Haiti, deployments like these create more problems than they solve, shift the ultimate responsibility for fixing them onto the backs of U.S. soldiers, and can easily expand from months to years.”
“”Defining ‘misinformation’ is a challenging task, and any definition has limitations,” Murthy concedes. “One key issue is whether there can be an objective benchmark for whether something qualifies as misinformation. Some researchers argue that for something to be considered misinformation, it has to go against ‘scientific consensus.’ Others consider misinformation to be information that is contrary to the ‘best available evidence.’ Both approaches recognize that what counts as misinformation can change over time with new evidence and scientific consensus. This Advisory prefers the ‘best available evidence’ benchmark since claims can be highly misleading and harmful even if the science on an issue isn’t yet settled.”
Who decides what the “best available evidence” indicates? Trusting government-appointed experts with that job seems risky, to say the least.”
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“If those recommendations become commands, they would clearly impinge on the First Amendment rights of social media companies and people who use their platforms. But even if such regulations could pass constitutional muster, they would face the same basic problem as voluntary efforts to curb “misinformation”: Once you get beyond clear examples like warnings about vaccine-induced mass sterility, misinformation is in the eye of the beholder.”
“voters like bipartisanship more in theory than in practice. But that doesn’t mean bipartisan support isn’t still important politically. Voters may prefer more partisan policy results, but their stated desire for bipartisanship means that politicians can still benefit by at least trying to work together.”
“Members from the other party were once more willing to give a new president some benefit of the doubt early on — or at least, their opposition was not quite so baked in, as the figures for both Bush and Barack Obama suggest. What’s more, there hasn’t been a corresponding change in how strongly the president’s own party feels about him. Members of the president’s party overwhelmingly support him, but there hasn’t been an uptick in those who say they strongly approve of him.
This lack of crossover support for presidents in their first term in office points toward one of the most animating forces in American politics today: Increased disdain and hatred of one’s political opponents, known as “negative partisanship.” As the chart below shows, opinions about the other party have become far more unfavorable since the late 1970s.”
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“Such hostile sentiments reflect a world in which each major party increasingly believes the other poses a threat to the country’s well-being.”
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“such deep dislike will likely keep Republicans opposed to Biden regardless of his administration’s actions. It also means that like Trump, Biden will likely have to rely on his own party’s support to buoy his overall numbers.”
“In order for democracy to work, competing parties must accept that they can lose elections, and that it’s okay. But when partisans see their political opposition not just as the opposition, but as a genuine threat to the well-being of the nation, support for democratic norms fades because “winning” becomes everything. Politics, in turn, collapses into an all-out war of “us against them,” a kind of “pernicious polarization” that appears over and over again in democratic collapses, and bears a striking similarity to what’s currently happening in the U.S.
There’s no shortage of plausible explanations for why U.S. politics has become so polarized, but many of these theories describe impossible-to-reverse trends that have played out across developed democracies, like the rise of social media and the increased political salience of globalization, immigration and urban-rural cultural divides. All of these trends are important contributors, for sure. But if they alone are driving illiberalism and hyper-partisanship in the U.S., then the problem should be consistent across all western democracies. But it isn’t.
What’s happening in the U.S. is distinct in four respects.
First, the animosity that people feel toward opposing parties relative to their own (what’s known as affective polarization in political science) has grown considerably over the last four decades. According to a June 2020 paper from economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, the increase in affective polarization in the U.S. is the greatest compared to that of eight other OECD countries over the same time period.
Second, the change in how Americans feel about their party and other parties has been driven by a dramatic decrease in positive feelings toward the opposing party. In most (though not all) of the nine democracies, voters have become a little less enthusiastic about their own parties. But only in the U.S. have partisans turned decidedly against the other party.”
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” Third, more so than in other countries, Americans report feeling isolated from their own party. When asked to identify both themselves and their favored party on an 11-point scale in a 2012 survey, Americans identified themselves as, on average, 1.3 units away from the party that comes closest to espousing their beliefs”
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“This gap is the highest difference Rodden found among respondents in comparable democracies. This isolation matters, too, because it means that parties can’t count on enthusiasm from their own voters — instead, they must demonize the political opposition in order to mobilize voters.
Fourth, and perhaps most significant, in the U.S., one party has become a major illiberal outlier: The Republican Party. Scholars at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have been monitoring and evaluating political parties around the world. And one big area of study for them is liberalism and illiberalism, or a party’s commitment (or lack thereof) to democratic norms prior to elections. And as the chart below shows, of conservative, right-leaning parties across the globe, the Republican Party has more in common with the dangerously authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey than it does with conservative parties in the U.K. or Germany.
The U.S. is truly exceptional in just how polarized its politics have become, but it’s not alone. People in countries with majoritarian(ish) democracies, or two very dominant parties dominating its politics like in the U.S. — think Canada, Britain, Australia — have displayed more unfavorable feelings toward the political opposition.
In fact, in a new book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” another team of scholars, Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, shows that citizens in majoritarian democracies with less proportional representation dislike both their own parties and opposing parties more than citizens in multiparty democracies with more proportional representation.”
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“there is also something particular about what’s happening in the U.S., even compared to other majoritarian(ish) democracies. For example, the major parties on the right in Canada and Australia have not become as illiberal as their American counterpart.”
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“While it is both easy and appropriate to criticize Trump and fellow Republicans for their anti-democratic descent in service of the “Big Lie,” it takes more work to appreciate how the structure of the party system itself laid the groundwork for the former president’s politics of loathing and fear. A politics defined by hatred of political opponents is a politics ripe for hateful illiberalism.
The new scholarship on comparative polarization is crucial in understanding this dynamic. In one sense, it offers a very depressing view: Given the current binary structure of American party politics, this conflict is mostly locked in. No level of social media regulation or media literacy or exhortation to civility is going to make much of a difference. But it also offers a kind of master key: If the structure of a party system is as crucial as these studies suggest it is, then the solution is obvious: The U.S. may want to change its voting system to become more proportional.”
“In a performative bid against “human trafficking,” Texas has raised the legal age for working at a strip club from 18 to 21 years old, putting many employees out of work and putting clubs that hire them—even inadvertently—in risk of serious legal penalties, including up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The state also updated part of its penal code to define “child” as anyone under age 21.
There’s no evidence that legal strip clubs in Texas are rife with underage workers (which would already be against the law), nor that young adults working in these clubs are at higher risk of human trafficking. Texas lawmakers—and their counterparts in Congress and in states across the country—love to Do Something About Sexual Exploitation even if that thing has serious ancillary consequences and no chance in hell of accomplishing its stated goals.
What the new Texas law (S.B. 315) will do is make it illegal for young adult women inclined to work at a strip club to do so—driving up the likelihood that some of them will instead engage in more risky forms of sex work and/or fall into the arms of exploitative third parties (those who police call “traffickers” and “pimps”). Meanwhile, someone already under the control of a “trafficker” will still be, but in a location further underground.
“Those who pushed the bill may feel like heroes for ‘rescuing’ 18, 19, and 20-year-olds from what they believe to be the horrors of the sex industry,” writes Jessie Sage—managing editor of Peepshow mag and a self-described erotic laborer—in a blog post about the Texas legislation and those who will be pushed out of employment because of it. “Yet, in the wake of a global pandemic that has devastated the economy, and a lack of employment protections for sex workers, the sure harms of such laws far outstrip any imagined benefit, particularly for the young dancers whose livelihoods now hang in the balance.””
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“Strip clubs aren’t the only ones affected. The law—which was signed into law on May 24 and took effect immediately—says all “sexually oriented businesses” must comply with the new age limit. So working at shops selling sex toys, porn, or other adult goods is now off limits for adults under age 21, even though it’s legal for these same adults to purchase sex toys, purchase porn, or go to strip clubs and other sex-related businesses. Adult modeling studios, webcam studios, and their ilk are off limits too.
Any sexually oriented business found employing someone 18 to 20 years old in any capacity (with the exception of as an “independent contractor solely performing repair, maintenance, or construction services at the business”) is now guilty of a class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
Anyone employing an 18- to 20-year-old to work nude, topless, or “in a sexually oriented commercial activity”—that is, “a massage establishment, nude studio, modeling studio, love parlor, or other similar commercial enterprise the primary business of which is the offering of a service that is intended to provide sexual stimulation or sexual gratification to the customer”—is now guilty of violating the state’s law against Employment Harmful to Children, a felony.
Employing someone ages 18 to 20 to work nude, topless, or in a sexually oriented commercial activity has become a second-degree felony, punishable by a mandatory minimum of two years in prison (and possibly as many as 20 years in prison), plus a fine of up to $10,000. “Conduct under this section constitutes an offense regardless of whether the actor knows the age of the victim at the time of the offense,” the law states.”
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“”Rather than pearl-clutching moralism, law makers would be better off listening to the chorus of sex workers who tell them that these laws are harmful to their community and young people who will be pushed into making more dangerous choices when clubs are no longer available to them,” suggests Sage. “If they were actually interested in protecting young sex workers, they would listen to them; sex workers know what they need, and it’s not less opportunity.””
“while some circumstantial evidence supports the lab leak theory, there is still no scientific consensus on whether COVID-19 emerged from a research facility, a wet market, or somewhere else.”
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“Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal..: It no longer forbids users from touting the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps,” the social media platform declared in a statement.”
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“the lab leak theory—the idea that COVID-19 inadvertently escaped from a laboratory, possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology—has gained some public support among experts. In March, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) chief Robert Redfield said that he bought the theory. (His admission earned him death threats; most of them came from fellow scientists.) Nicholson Baker, writing in New York, and Nicholas Wade, formerly of The New York Times, both wrote articles that accepted the lab leak as equally if not more plausible than the idea that COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans in the wild (or at a wet market). Even Anthony Fauci, the White House’s coronavirus advisor and an early critic of the lab leak theory, now concedes it shouldn’t be ruled out as a possibility.
This has forced many in the media to eat crow. Matthew Yglesias, formerly of Vox, assailed mainstream journalism’s approach to lab leak as a “fiasco.” The Post rewrote its February headline, which now refers to the lab leak as a “fringe theory that scientists have disputed” rather than as a debunked conspiracy theory. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait noted that a few ardent opponents of lab leak “with unusually robust social-media profiles” had used Twitter—the preferred medium of progressive politicos and journalists—to promote the idea that any dissent on this subject was both wrong and a sign of racial bias against Asian people.”
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“Big Tech takes its cues from the mainstream media, making decisions about which articles to boost or suppress based on the prevailing wisdom coming from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elite media fact-checkers. (That’s according to information I obtained from insiders at Facebook during research for my forthcoming book, Tech Panic.)”