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xtruss · 3 years

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'Democratic alliance' Degrades West's Politics, Advocates US Hegemony: Global Times editorial

Global Times | May 10, 2021

Crumbling US democracy. Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The Copenhagen Democracy Summit 2021, hosted by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation in Denmark, is scheduled on Monday and Tuesday. The summit again invited the Taiwan regional leader and Hong Kong secessionists via video, in an attempt to stir more confrontations.

During the so-called democracy summit last year, then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo made an extremely vicious attack on the Communist Party of China (CPC) through a video speech. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation was established in 2017 by former NATO secretary general and former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The foundation was sanctioned by the Chinese government in March.

There is a group of "democratic fundamentalists" in the West today. They are hysterically hostile to China's rise and morbidly describe the world today as a confrontation between democracy and autocracy, inciting a sense of crisis in Western society. They have betrayed the basic principle of democracy which is fairness and justice, and they are obsessed with the fanatical pursuit of "Western superiority" and "Western privilege." They are sharply opposed to the reality of this era.

Conference for 'democracy' inviting Taiwan, HK separatists looks like 'alliance of losers'. — Yang Sheng

The biggest challenge to the governance of all countries, including China, is how to meet people's needs for a better life. The success of China's current system lies in its ability to focus more on this mission and to develop fast enough. This is the essence of Chinese politics. Western forces involved in the "democratic alliance" have deliberately put geopolitical tags on different countries' development and competition, describing it as confrontation between different systems. Their perception twists facts, calling white black.

The essence of containing China's rise is to deprive 1.4 billion Chinese people of their right to further improve their destiny and live a better life. China is not empty. The country is composed of individuals and families who need higher-income jobs, better welfare guarantees and ecological environment and more confidence in security. All of this needs to be supported by economic development as well as technological progress.

Human society in the 21st century should be able to coordinate all countries' development in a democratic manner, in accordance with the rules of the UN Charter. We should also prevent this issue from returning to a geopolitical dead end or creating a new round of world division and confrontation.

Chinese FM slams Copenhagen 'democracy summit' as political farce. — Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying.

The so-called "democracy conference" held in Copenhagen, hosted by an organization known for spreading rumors and lies about China, is "a downright political farce" filled with ideological prejudices, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Tuesday.

However, this so-called democracy summit runs counter to the progress of the times. It openly advocates creating a new "alliance," calls on "democratic states" to be loyal to the US and collude against China and Russia. This is to turn back the wheel of history and drag the world back into darkness again.

The Danish Alliance of Democracies Foundation has no democratic spirit at all. It is a lapdog of the US. We can't help but say that this is a degradation of the Western political environment in which democracy can be carried out under the banner of advocating American hegemony.

The "summit" invited a series of infamous persons, including the leader of the secessionist authority in China's Taiwan island, a fugitive separatist from Hong Kong, and other "democratic activists" Worldwide

Starting in the US, it is popular among Western countries to clamor for "democracy" and try to show some kind of solemnity. This is very ridiculous. In terms of development, Western democracy has shown its weakness in competitiveness, and reform should have been its way to make up for the weakness. But instead, Western countries are angrily accusing China of being "undemocratic," as if their problems are all caused by China. This is like Western countries are having diarrhea and are forcing China to take medicine.

The Western-style democratic system has been running for a long time, and aging is normal. It is a pity that the system has produced such a group of leading but good-for-nothing elites. They do not want to seriously promote reforms and are best at passing the buck. They also try hard to form small circles, desperately trying to justify each other's wrong moves and ideas. History will laugh at those incompetent people who hype "democratic alliance" in the 21st century.

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friendship-korea-japan · 3 years

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9.10. Summary - After Japan’s withdrawal from Korea

Question 9: Korea's situation after Japan's withdrawal › 10. Summary - After Japan’s withdrawal from Korea

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9.10. Summary - After Japan’s withdrawal from Korea

(1) Japan had left behind numerous invisible assets in Korea. It eliminated the problems of misappropriation of tax money by public officials and selling of official posts and titles by the king. It also made the yangban give up plundering, and instead, start doing their jobs. It turned the commoners and slaves who were under oppression during the era of the Joseon Dynasty to equal members of the national public. It provided opportunities for anybody to go to school. Japan left behind an environment where every person could live as a member of a modern nation.

(2) The tangible assets that Japan left behind when withdrawing from Korea include: 160,000 houses that were previously occupied by the Japanese people, more than 6,500 schools (from elementary schools to universities as well as vocational schools), many factories and banks, roadways and railroad networks constructed throughout the Korean Peninsula, telephone and other telecommunication facilities, and hospitals, all of which were non-existent in the era of the Joseon Dynasty. The total amount for them would be 122,700,000,000,000 yen + A + B + C + D in present value.

(3) In addition, the “Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea” and the “Agreement on Claims and Economic Cooperation with South Korea” were concluded to facilitate a total aid of 800 million dollars (consisting of 300 million dollars on a non-repayable basis, 200 million dollars on a repayable basis, and 300 million dollars from the private sector) to South Korea. That amount was about 2.3 times as much as the national budget of South Korea at the time.

(4) Moreover, after the normalization of Japan-South Korea diplomatic relations in 1965, about 3 trillion yen (in present value) was provided through ODA or on a non-repayable basis for as many as 113 projects to support the development of South Korea.

(5) According to a survey conducted by an American scholar who interviewed 51 elderly Korean-Americans about the reality of the situation during the era of Japanese rule, it was found that they all lived peacefully in prosperity and got along with the Japanese people without oppression or deprivation by the Japanese. This apparently demonstrates the truth of the era of Japanese rule because they had not received an anti-Japanese education by the present South Korean government.

(6) War apology statements to South Korea were issued 24 times in total, and these were made by Emperors of Japan, previous Prime Ministers and chief cabinet secretaries, as well as in the form of an apology resolution passed in the National Diet of Japan.

But, can we really say that “there was an unfortunate past between us for a period in this century” in relation to what Japan had done in Korea? It might have been unfortunate for the Japanese to have had their hard-earned tax money spent in Korea, but can’t we say that the changes made in Korea as described in Question 8 were not unfortunate?

Besides, what even was the “great suffering” being referred to in the apology statement to South Korea by a Prime Minister of Japan of “Japan brought about great suffering upon your country and its people”?

Although a Prime Minister of Japan apologized by saying, “the people of the Korean Peninsula went through unbearable pain and sorrow as a result of our country’s actions during a certain period in the past”, in actuality, the Korean people operated freely to be prosperous under Japanese rule. Did becoming prosperous cause “unbearable pain and sorrow”?

Furthermore, while a Japanese Prime Minister apologized by saying, “Japan caused, during a certain period in the past, tremendous damage and suffering to the people of the Republic of Korea through its colonial rule…”, Japan on the contrary generously invested enormous amounts of tax money, capital fund, human resources, and expertise to help improve the miserable state in the era of the Joseon Dynasty. Did it actually cause “tremendous damage and suffering” to the Korean people?

Why did the Japanese government apologize repeatedly without even fact-checking? If you apologize, your fault would be admitted as fact, and thus, you would have to accept whatever punishment is demanded by the other party; such common sense is prevalent internationally. It was well known in the Joseon Dynasty that you could be executed with a forced confession by torture even if you had not committed a crime.

(7) The claim of South Korea that “Japan had forcibly taken away Korean women” is a fiction that had been established and spread around the world through 18 stories reported by The Asahi Shimbun during an extended period of 14 years. Although The Asahi Shimbun admitted and retracted the reports as false 34 years after it was first published, at that point the story had already been recognized and spread around the world as truth. Even now, as of 2020, the “Issue of Comfort Women” remains as the focus of anti-Japanese movement in South Korea.

(8) Looking into the situation at the end of the era of the Joseon Dynasty, there were an opportunistic and irresponsible king selling official posts and titles, and senior bureaucrats who spent their time on false accusations and partisan battles. There were also widespread corruption, misappropriation, fraudulent acts, and deprivation throughout lower-ranked government officials. Even farmers and fishermen pretended to be lazy to shield themselves from exploitation and to hide behind poverty. For such a Joseon Dynasty that had sunk in a morass of corruption from the top-down, Japan worked for reformation by investing the hard-earned tax money and capital fund of the Japanese people totaling over 40 trillion yen in present value.

(9) Nonetheless, South Korea as of 2020 is trying to dig up the issues that are supposed to be already resolved and making new demands to the Japanese government, advocating that the Japanese rule of Korea in the past was illegal, unjust, and invalid, and thus the “Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea” and the “Agreement on Claims and Economic Cooperation with South Korea” shall be null and void.

(10) If the Treaty and the Agreement mentioned in the previous paragraph were null and void, then Japan should be entitled to demand restitution of assets of 122,700,000,000,000 yen + A + B + C + D as well as the paid-in 800 million dollars (1,008,000,000,000 yen in present value) from South Korea.

(11) Moreover, Japan is also entitled to make an additional claim for the following money accumulated during a period of 75 years from 1945 to 2020 in accordance with Article 4 (a) of the Treaty of Peace with Japan.

(i) The surplus amount accumulated during the 75 years after deducting the expenses in the electricity charges for the electric power as of 1945

(ii) The amount accumulated during the 75 years attributed to the increase of harvest from the cropland the area of which had doubled since 1945, deducting the expenses for farmers, as well as the amount corresponding to Japan’s contribution for breed improvement leading to increased revenue per unit area

(iii) The profit accumulated during the 75 years from the railroad fare as of 1945, deducting the expenses

(iv) The benefit of sale accumulated during the 75 years of the products manufactured in various factories that Japan left behind

(v) The profit accumulated during the 75 years from facilities, as of 1945, for telecommunication, aquaculture, and silk products that had been developed under the leadership of Japanese experts

(12) After the Treaty on Japan-South Korea Basic Relations was concluded in 1965 in relation to the Japan’s withdrawal from Korea, Japan had reestablished close relationships with South Korean companies. Japan provided a huge amount of financial assistance and full-scale technical support to Korean companies, and that, in combination with competent Korean businesspeople, helped many Korean companies grow into global enterprises. Samsung and POSCO are good examples.

We think Japan is able to claim the amount listed above after scrutinizing and collecting more information about each item and the related amount. But the Japanese government has not made a claim to South Korea at this point because the Treaty on Japan-South Korea Basic Relations and the Agreement on Claims and Economic Cooperation with South Korea are effective, and also because Japan apparently wishes to maintain and enhance her friendly relationship with South Korea.

Nonetheless, for some reason, the South Korean government along with the media, some civilian groups, as well as some school teachers are advocating anti-Japanese movement as if that is the national cause, treating the pro-Japanese as traitors to the country. They advocate elimination of any Japanese legacy as well.

Why does South Korea so persistently maintain the anti-Japanese movement as if it is a fundamental ideology of the nation? One possible cause may be the underlying and still-unclosed perception gap between Japan and South Korea of the legality of the Japanese annexation of Korea that was brought up in the bilateral negotiations that started in 1952. In the negotiations, South Korea insisted the Japanese annexation of Korea was illegal and unjust while Japan countered that it was legal and legitimate.

Japan has faithfully adhered to the provisions in the Japan-Korea Treaties executed between 1904 and 1907 as well as the Japanese-Korea Annexation Treaty. As a result, Japan had brought in irreversible transformation and wealth to Korea as discussed at full length in sections (1) to (26) in Question 8, and left behind tangible assets described in Sections 2. (1) to (21) as well as gave intangible influences as stated in Sections 3. (1) to (26). They include: the establishment of social and economic order by abolishing the class system in Korea, administering fair trials, abolishing whipping, improving prison, cleaning up the custom of bribery, disabling the system for exploitation and misappropriation, enabling the private ownership system, and adopting free choices of employment and location of residence; the vitalization and development of economy with the construction of railroads, roadways, bridges, waterworks, and sewage systems, urban reform, and the provision of electricity and other infrastructure; the development of agriculture and fisheries; the spread of education; the modernization of the medical system; and the establishment of disease prevention. All of these measures have provided opportunities for every Korean person to act freely, made Korea a modern nation, brought in irreversible and significant transformation, and left behind a national foundation for further development.

As discussed in Question 7, the irreversible and significant transformation could not have happened domestically by their own people under the order of the Korean Empire.

Such irreversible and significant transformation has brought in freedom, wealth, human resources, and a new economic system to Korea. Which aspect of the Japanese annexation of Korea are they saying is illegal and unjust?

Regardless of whether the Japanese annexation of Korea was illegal and unjust or not, the significant changes that Japan brought in as a consequence of the Japanese annexation of Korea, are starkly present as a fact. This fact is inerasable and irreversible even if the Korean people advocate the Japanese annexation of Korea as being illegal and unjust. Furthermore, present South Korea is a nation founded based on the inerasable historical facts. Therefore, trying to deny and erase the results of the Japanese annexation of Korea as being illegal and unjust is equivalent to denying the bases, and ultimately, the very existence of South Korea.

However, it is impossible to completely erase the traces and marks that Japan left behind in Korea, including tangible and intangible assets, as well as already-provided ODA. And it must be very difficult to visualize present-day Korea without considering all these gains such as the dramatic changes, tangible and intangible assets, the outcome of the 113 projects with ODA, and the capital fund and technical support invested in companies such as Samsung and POSCO. The anti-Japanese movement and the campaign to eliminate Japanese influences are “doing no good and a lot of harm” for South Korea.

Besides, the past is unchangeable. We can cultivate the future on our own will. We should not sacrifice our future by getting stuck in the past.

Thus, a matter of the utmost importance for South Korea now is, instead of disputing with Japan, to cherish the traces, marks, and influences of Japan that remain in South Korea as symbols of the collaborative work of the people of two countries who made efforts to modernize Korea, to free the people from the class system, and to make a prosperous country, as well as to make improvements in their bilateral relationship. We believe there is no other way to make the people of both countries happy. If the Korean people remain anti-Japanese as if it were the national cause even after learning about many of the facts discussed above, they may be regarded from all over the world as people “that return evil for good”.

We would like to ask all the people around the world whether they agree or disagree with our beliefs and perspective.

#Korea #about south korea #history of korea #korean people #korea-japan

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gianprod1 · 5 years

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Week 3

In today’s reading, the text describes in detail the horrific mass shooting at Virginia Tech by Seung-Hui Cho. Seung killed 32 people before shooting himself in the head. Now I’m not surprised by these kinds of shootings, it’s not a coincidence the United States has so many shootings since they don’t want to get rid of their guns. Also, these kinds of shootings happen quite frequently at universities and honestly, it sounds bad to say buts its almost normalized at me, but I’d be kind of surprised if it happened at Brock. What did surprise me was the text explained the possible motives for Seung’s actions was his history of playing violent video games. The chapter assigned for this week explains how individuals are affected by media negatively and explore these concerns when film and radio were the main sources of information and entertainment.

The text explains that the early 20th century was the era in which industrial change flourished in the United States and around the world. Watching films in the cinemas was established as a common-leisure activity amongst families, and youth. When television was introduced, families that owned T. V’s now had the option to watch programs in the comfort of their own homes, including their children. Television in the early (20th century) was nothing like it is today, with realistic special effects, blood and gore, and CGI; most of these aspects are a given when watching a big-budget action flick. However, when T.V was first introduced many aspects we see in most action now was revolutionary back in that time. So, when television started its increase in popularity scholars, politicians, and progressive reformers started to raise some concerns about the number of television people are consuming, especially in young children. Charles Horton Cooley, a professor at the University of Michigan “outlined that the significance of “communication” in giving societies a sense of themselves, beginning with observation and imitation process that children adopt as they mature.” (p.27) He also described that communication as “the mechanism through which human relations exist and develop” (p .27) this includes facial expressions, attitudes, tone of voice, words, and writing. Hügo Munsterberg a Harvard psychologist also examined the perpetual processes that were found amongst the audiences when looking at moving pictures on a screen. “In order to understand and engage with a film’s plot and character’s, he argued, the audience must first place themselves within the conceptual world of visual images on the screen.” (p.28) This part of the reading really stood out to me, because I believe this is necessary when you really engage with a story, whether it be a movie, book, or video game. Video games have become more and more story-oriented, and unlike a book or movie you control the character's movements and decisions, thus making Münsterberg’s argument even that more interesting. Münsterburg suggests that unique cognitive and emotional states audiences experience during a film screen leaves audiences vulnerable to forms of psychological suggestion and doubt. Basically, what Münsterberg is saying that after a movie’s audiences become vulnerable to forms of psychological suggestion and doubt. I can relate to this almost entirely, after watching a film or finishing a series, there are specific characters that people tend to grow an attachment with. Whether it be there personality, presence on-screen, appearance or their philosophies. One of my favorites shows House of Cards created by Beau Williom tells the story of Congressman Frank Underwood. Frank is a power-hungry, sociopathic, smooth-talking official who lets nothing, and nobody gets in his way. One of the aspects the show includes is small segments where Frank addresses the audience and is aware that “we” are watching him. In most cases Frank likes to spew a bit of wisdom to the audience before or after a major scene. One line that stood out to me was, during the show the President depended on Frank to carry out an education bill to end the rallies of teachers striking across the United States, Frank is struggling to come to terms with the senators however he is sure of his plan and when the President tells Frank to pull the plug he answers “No, Sometimes the only way to gain your superior’s respect is to defy him”.

By 1935 about 70% of Americans owned a radio and became a medium of information, entertainment, and comfort just like today. However, Harvard psychologist and Hadley Cantril – former graduate argued that “rhetorical conventions of radio radically oversimplified many complex issues, reducing them to “black or white” dichotomous terms” (Pandora, 1998). They were worried that radio was taking over the lives of the listeners, with content that would tell their listeners how to live their daily lives, and they had the right to be. When CBS broadcasted “War of the Worlds” in 1938 people ran out of their homes in fear thinking that the U.S was under attack by Martians. “In all, an estimate of 1 million people out of the several million who turned into the broadcast were frightened by what they heard.” (pg. 35) When the world turned into a battlefield in World War 2, American scholars looked into the perfectiveness of Nazi propaganda and how they were able to persuade the citizens of Germany to support their regime. So, the U.S military hired Hollywood director Frank Capra to create a film to counter the propaganda and educate the U.S soldiers and citizens of the Nazi party. Capra produced Why We Fight (1943) and it was a success, the film was screened in lectures and in theatres all across the United States. This is not a coincidence, the film happens to be one of the most popular mediums in the digital age today, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be effective then.

After the war Carl Hovland a psychologist at Yale University “wanted to carefully isolate and explore the mechanism through which humans made decisions about their environment.” (pg. 40) Hovland’s research led him to create “consistency theory” “argued that the human being’s drive for cognitive consistency (the mental agreement between someone’s beliefs about an object or event) was the prime motivator for all human behavior.” (p.40)

Now coming into the digital age video games are a huge part of today’s world. Video games are so popular in fact that it’s almost considered a sport. Like the film, video games come in a serious of genres such as action, adventure, role-playing games (RPG), fighting and shoot-em-up. As video games began to become more and more realistic with real-world settings, blood and gore, and facial expressions, scholars are concerned that the amount of violent video games youth is playing has an effect on their mental state. Some scholars and my dad believe that the reason why youth are committing mass murders and killing sprees is directly linked to the prolonged exposure to violent video games such as “Call of Duty”, “Grand Theft Auto”, and “Mortal Kombat”. Now I purposely put my dad next to the scholars because I played a lot of these games growing up and as a small kid still maturing my raging hormones mixed with violent video games sometimes didn’t bring the best out of me. As a kid, I had a video game addiction, which meant I neglected my daily responsibilities, school-work, and other duties to play video games. This did not stand with my parents and lead to years of grounding and discipline and strategies for me to get off video games and do other things to spend my time. As a more mature young adult, you learn to control your emotions when playing these games because.... well it’s a game, and games are meant to be fun.

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dangkynhanhieusanphamcom · 5 years

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What Went Wrong (and Right) with Conservative Philanthropy – Law & Liberty

To those who know the history of American conservatism, it is a familiar and oft-told story. Oversimplifying: From a relatively small base up until then, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s traumatic loss in the 1964 presidential election birthed an ideologically driven conservative “counter-establishment” of journals and magazines, academic centers, and think tanks that took shape slowly, and then grew to the point at which it could help intellectually anchor, and make effective arguments for, the rise of Ronald Reagan, after which it helped implement his proposals.

Conservative philanthropic giving played a vital role in the initial creation and the growth of this counter-establishment. The individuals and institutions who underwrote the conservative movement were able to balance the formulation of ideas and the application of them, yielding policies that were geared toward results over the long term. Liberals generally do not contest this story, and they sometimes even honestly laud the effectiveness of the givers who were a key part of it.

Donald Trump’s dramatic victory in Election 2016 was traumatic, too—to liberals, who assumed their candidate would win, but also to what had become an actual, outright conservative establishment of its own. Trump was neither a product nor a beneficiary of the latter. For the most part, and for many reasons, nonprofit giving on the Right basically “missed” Trump and that which gave rise to him.

Not only did politically-minded conservative givers largely support other candidates in the Republican primaries, but policy-oriented and ideas-driven conservative givers didn’t seem to grasp the underlying causes for his overtaking those candidates. If the presidency was a victory that conservative givers were looking to help inform and assist, they failed.

Something was off-balance.

The Goldwater and Trump milestones were dramatic (and traumatic) for conservatism but in opposite ways. With some exceptions, conservative givers cannot plausibly claim much credit for policy victories achieved by Trump either now or for the rest of his tenure, which might extend to 2024. In fact, Trump would probably have been helped very much, before his victory and now, by a better giving balance between the three basics: ideas, policy, and patience. Conservatism, too, would have benefited from a better balance between these. However defined or redefined, conservatism would likely have been more securely anchored in lasting ideas, its policies probably better vetted and more likely to be instituted and implemented, over a longer term.

After Goldwater’s loss, there were years’ worth of ideas-driven building of institutions—then ultimate success, including electorally. There was not the same type or length of building before Trump’s electoral success. A rebalanced giving may still yield benefits in the future, so it is well worth considering how to go about achieving this.

Initially, Ideas

First, a backward look is necessary. Let us turn for guidance to James Piereson—a noted political theorist and the author of 2007’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Piereson was the last executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation which, by design, depleted its assets in 2005. As he has recounted, after the end of the Second World War, “despite critics who viewed the concept of conservative ideas as a contradiction in terms,” many conservative philanthropists, “including the classical liberals in this camp, looked at books and ideas for guidance to a surprising degree.”[1]

This postwar period was the “classical era of conservative philanthropy,” in the words of Johns Hopkins political theorist Steven Teles. Both Piereson and Teles (at an important colloquium seven years ago at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal) cited the guidance provided to conservative grantmakers by the thought of F.A. Hayek, most notably the Austrian economist’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. Conservatives took to heart Hayek’s warning about the danger of tyranny resulting from governmental central planning. As Piereson notes: “modern conservatives and classical liberals have generally been able to work toward a common goal of limiting the reach the state and the intrusion of politics into the life of civil society.”

In general, Hayek strongly emphasized the importance of ideas as the undergirding base of any successful political movement. An example that Hayek knew well: socialism. “In every country that has moved toward socialism,” said Hayek in a 1949 essay, “the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded for many years by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals.”

Teles points to three philanthropies as typifying this “classical era,” and significantly, none was in Washington, D.C., or even on the East Coast. They were the William Volker Fund in Kansas City, Missouri, the Earhart Foundation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Pierre F. Goodrich’s brainchild, the Liberty Fund of Indianapolis, patron and publisher of the web site you are now reading.

Their Hayekian giving clearly and purposely balanced ideas with patience. These ideas were immanent.

Teles brought to light a 1956 internal Volker Fund document, blandly entitled Review and Recommendations, describing its grantmaking—which, as is the case for all private foundations, went to organizations that were classified under the Internal Revenue Code’s §501(c)(3) as being created for “charitable purposes,” including the education of policymakers and the public.

The Volker Fund’s list of principles included:

Risk-taking that involves disappointments;

Patience on the order of generations for ideas to germinate;

Actively seeking out people and ideas to support as opposed to waiting for requests to come in “over the transom”; and

The placement of ideas and values over mere metrics, mechanics, and techniques in grant consideration.

Adding Policy

The 1960s saw a cultural and political assault on many things, among them conservative ideas and conservatism—as evidenced in the lopsided, 44-states-to-six, 61.1 percent to 38.5 percent electoral result of November 3, 1964 in favor of President Lyndon Johnson. The liberally energetic Great Society that followed, and its aftermath, stirred action on the part of discontented conservative givers. Not a few were formerly liberal intellectuals who had grown weary of liberalism’s overreach and the damage it had wrought.

Conservative givers now mixed with many a “neoconservative” thinker and writer, their work in a tradition linked to Edmund Burke. The intellectual energy among these distinct intellectual tendencies was deemed worthy of substantial support.

According to Piereson:

The neoconservatives came from the left, accepted the New Deal, not necessarily the Great Society, dismissed the argument for free enterprise and placed great weight on cultural arguments in defense of the family, religion, and the institutions of civil society. . . . Few were academics. None that I know was an economist. They were essayists and editors used to making arguments about politics and culture, and in contrast to the Hayekians, they wanted to address immediate controversies. Far more than the classical liberals, they were interested in foreign policy, religion, and culture.

To some of them, the immanent religious ideas were transcendent.

Givers associated with this later era of conservative philanthropy (its “modern era,” as Teles labeled it during the 2012 discussion) include the now-defunct Olin Foundation in New York City, the Smith Richardson Foundation in Westport, Connecticut, and two not on the East Coast: the Scaife Foundations in Pittsburgh, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. One of the prime influencers of this group of institutions was the writer and editor Irving Kristol, considered the “godfather of neoconservatism.” Their Kristolian giving consciously balanced the three basics to which we referred: ideas, policy, and patience.

According to William A. Schambra, our former colleague at the Bradley Foundation, at Kristol’s urging, Olin, Scaife, and Bradley all underwrote studies that were “aimed at recovering the political philosophy of the American Founding, as expressed most authoritatively in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” These studies were undertaken at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Claremont McKenna College, and other campuses, and at think tanks like AEI, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution.

This burst of activity marked a revival of “otherwise obscure and seemingly antiquated political philosophers . . . that American progressivism had long since dismissed as so 18th century—so hopelessly out of step with the needs of modern society,” said Schambra. He made these observations at an underappreciated 2006 seminar held at Duke University, where he went on to say:

If conservative foundations did one thing during the rise of modern conservatism that was not likely to have been done by anyone else—that was, in other words, its unique and indispensable contribution—it was precisely funding the scholars, university centers, and policy institutes aimed at recapturing the Founders’ understanding of America, which would then animate and unite conservatism’s specific political, social, and economic programs.[2]

The roster of ideas and proposals came to include: supply-side economics and across-the-board tax cuts, “law and economics” and deregulation, aggressive foreign policy and national security stances through the whole of the Cold War and afterwards, “broken-windows” policing, work-based welfare reform, school choice in the form of vouchers and later charter schools, and a place for faith in the “public square.”

There were policy defeats, to be sure. Americans do not have individualized retirement accounts, higher education has not been reformed, and Obamacare was put in place. In and for the long term, however, conservative philanthropy ultimately helped yield some substantial policy achievements beginning when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, more than a quarter of a century after Goldwater’s loss. Among them: an expanding economy and bull market, victory in the first Gulf War, the fall of the Soviet Union, welfare reform, and expanded school choice.

External Envy

Conservatives have well-chronicled the philanthropic role in conservatism’s successes. John J. Miller’s 2003 Philanthropy Roundtable monograph Strategic Investment in Ideas: How Two Foundations Changed America is especially good, as is Miller’s 2005 book A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

The success was so marked that liberals accepted the premises of conservative effectiveness—usually while enviously urging its replication by the foundations on the Left. In No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda (1996), for example, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado of the University of Colorado Law School write: “We could not help being impressed with the professionalism and cold precision with which the right has been waging and winning struggle after struggle. . . . The dedication, economy of effort, and sheer ingenuity of much of the conservative machine are extraordinary.”

For another example, in the influential National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations (1997), Sally Covington thoroughly examined the grantmaking of 12 conservative philanthropies: Earhart, Olin, the Sarah Scaife and related Carthage Foundations, Smith Richardson, and Bradley, along with the Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch Charitable Foundations, the related Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, the Philip M. McKenna Foundation, the JM Foundation, and the Henry Salvatori Foundation. There was also a 1996 report from Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, the invidiously titled Buying a Movement: Right-Wing Foundations and American Politics, which included the Adolph Coors Foundation in its study. Inside Philanthropy, moreover, noted that the Searle Freedom Trust should be included among effective conservative foundations.

“Although this effort has often been described as a ‘war of ideas,’ it has involved far more than scholarly debate within the halls of academe,” Covington writes. “Since the 1960s, conservative forces have shaped public consciousness and influenced elite opinion, recruited and trained new leaders, mobilized core constituencies, and applied significant rightward pressure on mainstream institutions, such as Congress, state legislatures, colleges and universities, the federal judiciary and philanthropy itself.”

In a 1998 American Prospect article about the “Lessons of Right-Wing Philanthropy”, Karen Paget, at the time a fellow of the Open Society Institute supported by George Soros, lamented that “the conservative infrastructure has far outstripped the left’s organizational capacity and resources. … The left has recently lost repeated battles to this conservative coalition over major initiatives such as affirmative action, welfare, immigration, English-only programs, and school vouchers.”

These self-critiques on the Left helped pave the way for the establishment, in 2003, of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank in Washington, and also the creation of the Democracy Alliance group of active liberal donors in 2005. Covington’s report in particular, said the Democracy Alliance’s president, Gara LaMarche, “crystallized for a lot of progressives the idea that the conservative foundations were kind of eating their lunch and then they were setting the terms of the debate in a way that the progressive foundations were not doing.”

“So looking to Olin and looking to Bradley, there was a challenge that was really laid down,” said LaMarche. He expressed admiration for “a very strategic use of money” by conservatives even though he disagreed with the ends of conservative philanthropy.

Internally, Another Explanation

Just as the Volker Fund internally catalogued what it believed were the characteristics of successful grantmaking in its 1956 review, Bradley program staff in Milwaukee made a similar effort in an internal 1999 document bearing the rather provocative title, The Bradley Foundation and the Art of (Intellectual) War. The two descriptions are quite consistent with each other.

According to Bradley’s Sun Tzu piece, there are four stages of policy initiatives: initiation, development, implementation, and consolidation. These yield 10 “rules of thumb” for good grantmaking:

Think of public policy making as a morality play, not an academic debate;

Be patient;

Do each step in order;

There are no shortcuts;

The best projects are found, not created;

Be prepared for unorthodox allies;

Measurement of results is tricky;

Try it “at home” first;

Learning curves should become shorter; and

Change should become incrementally cumulative, unpredictable, and self-generating.

Following these steps enabled ideas, policy, and patience to be balanced, in large part to good effect.

Worries and Warnings

In 2005, near the end of an article he wrote for Commentary magazine, “Investing in Conservative Ideas,” Piereson noted an important development: that the institutional emphasis on ideas was “giving way to a greater focus on politics and the nuts and bolts of policy.” As Schambra had observed at the above-mentioned Duke seminar, “Resurrecting an understanding of the American constitutional order that had been airbrushed from history by a century of scholarship would be no quick or easy task.” It wasn’t, and a certain impatience had set in among grantmakers on the Right.

This led many of them, in fact, to begin emulating grantmakers on the Left. According to Teles, “Metrics, measurement, logic models and the rest of the apparatus of new philanthropy [were] becoming as popular among the conservative philanthropists who go to Philanthropy Roundtable meetings as they [were] to mainstream and liberal foundations.”

Content was yielding to functionalism. Crudely, ends were yielding to means, with major consequences for the organizations. The growing demand for numericized proof of progress was something that neither Hayek nor Kristol would have thought prudent. In fact, they would probably have thought reliance on metrics to betray a lack of faith in the truth of conservatism’s core content, its underlying ideas.

Presentism and Politics

The new way included shorter time horizons by which to measure grantmaking success. The ends of short terms are always imminent, of course. They are seldom conducive to long-lasting results.

At times, the shorter-term thinking risked becoming so short as to correspond with certain officeholding terms. That is to say, private foundations had become more mindful than before of the political calendar, and those givers in a position to do so began to weigh supporting §501(c)(3) charitable-purpose organizations against organizations classified under §501(c)(4). The latter is for entities promoting “social welfare,” and this classification permits givers to engage in partisan political campaign activity and lobbying, so long as it is not their “primary” purpose or activity.

Conservative philanthropy was becoming more explicitly political, and as it did so, it became aligned with one political party. This yielded some successes, including the rise of the Tea Party and many state-level reforms, including meaningful labor-policy ones.

Yet it would not be accurate to conclude that this altered balance caused the surprising results of November 8, 2016—30 states and 304 electoral votes for the Republican Trump, as against 20 states and 227 electoral votes for the Democrat Hillary Clinton. By the same token, if results matter, one must note that the altered giving balance was consonant with those important results. In hindsight, one wonders whether a different balance might have been preferable for the conservative ideas supposedly being furthered by the giving.

For clearly the Republican candidate rejected many of the ideas espoused by the intellectual infrastructure of the Right and, for the most part, stylistically rejected those very intellectuals and their institutions. Representatively, almost all of the contributors to the attention-getting “Against Trump” symposium that National Review published in January 2016 had some affiliation with one or more conservative (c)(3) nonprofit groups.

Trump’s successful performance cannot be considered a product of conservative political spending, including in the nonprofit sphere. (He got almost all of his media for free.) Other contenders in the Republican primaries benefited much more from support from conservatives, as did Clinton benefit more from liberal political spending in the general election.

There have been good and serious outcomes for conservatives during the last two years, including an economy growing at nearly four percent per year, tax and regulatory reform, a positive peopling of the federal judiciary, the retaking of virtually all territory held by ISIS, and an overdue buildup of the U.S. military. Moreover, some (but by no means all) conservatives would count criminal justice reform as a success. There have been big defeats, too; debt and deficits, if they count, and Obamacare’s survival among them.

Rebalancing and Reordering

Goldwater lost, badly. Trump won, barely—in large part by dismissing or at least questioning conservatism as it had been understood, and supported, by conservative philanthropists. His victory should cause givers on the Right to continue critically questioning themselves. They should also consider how to go about best effectuating their or their donor’s intent.

Even if only as a perhaps-helpful intellectual exercise, they should ask whether it might have been better had Henry Olsen’s The Working-Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism (2017) or Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) appeared before Election 2016. Or if Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) or Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (2018) had appeared before Election 2016. Or for that matter, if a version of Victor Davis Hanson’s new The Case for Trump had done so. Or if the American Affairs journal, founded in 2017, had preceded the current administration.

Why, one might ask, did they all come after?

An easy answer is that Trump’s victory at the polls heightened intellectual energy on the Right—the same effect that was seen after Goldwater’s defeat at the polls. “This time it is not centralized in a few journals, institutes, and godfathers,” wrote Christopher DeMuth in an astute essay in the Claremont Review of Books. DeMuth cited some of the above-mentioned works, adding:

Rather—reflecting the spread of wealth and education and improvements in communications …—it is distributed and reticulated. Dozens of new and old journals, websites, and think tanks, plus innovations such as long-form podcasts and celebrity recirculation platforms, are variously devoted to politics, policy, law, economics, society, culture, philosophy, and security and foreign policy. The digitized, networked competition of ideas has generated new conservative and libertarian divisions and alliances, a parade of impressive new talents, and the appearance almost daily of substantial books and essays and vigorous rebuttals and surrebuttals to what was published last week.

The energy is again worth supporting. For a better-anchored and longer-lasting conservatism in the future—however it ends up being defined or redefined in the coming years—conservative givers should wonder whether a rebalancing of ideas, policy, and patience on their part might be in order. They should summon the discipline to develop and hew to a clear-eyed, longer-term worldview.

And they should humbly allow the immanent to transcend the imminent, for as long as they can.

[1] James Piereson’s comments, and those of Steven Teles and Gara LaMarche, are from a 2012 event convened at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. The discussion allowed Piereson to update the thoughts on philanthropy laid out in his 2005 article in Commentary magazine, “Investing in Conservative Ideas,” which is reproduced as a chapter in his 2015 book, Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order. He is now president of the William E. Simon Foundation and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

[2] Presentation by William A. Schambra, “How Effective is Conservative Philanthropy?,” Terry Sanford Institute of Public Affairs, Duke University, December 6, 2006.

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duaneodavila · 5 years

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Dems’ Nominee: Only PDs Need Apply

The story is that Associate Justice Harry Blackmun was given authorship of the 7-2 majority opinion in Roe v. Wade because he was the Court’s medical maven. Before joining the Court, he had represented the Mayo Clinic, and so by some magic of osmosis, he absorbed medical knowledge sufficient to enable him to pen a more sound decision than the brethren.

This may well be true, not so much because Blackmun was personally capable of doing more than placing a band-aid on a boo boo, but because the rest of the Court was even more lacking in medical knowledge than Harry. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

At Slate, Kyle Barry calls for the Democratic candidates for president to make a commitment.

Since the Supreme Court decided Gideon v.Wainwright in 1963, states have been required to provide a government-paid lawyer to criminal defendants who cannot afford one, and for nearly six decades Gideon has been a celebrated part of this country’s constitutional bedrock. But last month, Justice Clarence Thomas took a narrow case about the right to appeal criminal convictions and turned it into an attack on the entire Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Thomas’ effort to undo a central criminal justice system safeguard speaks to a sad truth about our courts: Too few judges have any experience representing indigent criminal defendants, and without more public defenders on the bench, the rights of criminal defendants can never be fully secured. This is hardly a new problem but it has been exacerbated by Trump, who has yet to appoint a single public defender to the federal bench.

Putting aside the correctness of Thomas’ view was that the right to counsel for the indigent reflected in Gideon should be left to legislation, that the Constitution protects the right to counsel, but only if you can afford one, and that free counsel for the indigent is a policy choice that should be left to legislation, Barry slipped something in here that could easily escape notice. He didn’t call for a justice who was a criminal defense lawyer. He called for a public defender.

The lawyers who best understand the importance of these sorts of basic protections, of course, are public defenders. And the Supreme Court hasn’t had a justice with significant experience representing indigent criminal defendants since Thurgood Marshall, who founded the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, retired in 1991. Two current justices—Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor —worked as prosecutors. The rest have no hands-on experience with the criminal justice system, creating what Washington Post columnist Radley Balko has called a “massive blind spot” in the court’s decision-making.

Thurgood Marshall wasn’t a public defender. Alito’s holds dear to his prosecutorial experience, while Sotomayor, despite her record of conviction-affirmance on the Second Circuit, has shown a willingness to see crim law through a defense lens, has no actual experience to back up her empathy. But that reference to Radley Balko, to the “massive blind spot” on the Court, is somewhat disingenuous. The missing view is that from the defense table in the well. Nowhere does he suggest that the person at the table should be a public defender.

This absence of experience extends beyond the Supreme Court to the entire federal judiciary. Former public defenders are woefully underrepresented on both the trial-level district courts and the circuit courts of appeal, while experience as a prosecutor remains a common and largely unquestioned career path to the federal bench.

What is being promoted here is that the alternative to prosecutors are public defenders. There is nothing, per se, wrong with public defenders. They valued and necessary players on the defense side of the courtroom. But they are not the alternative to prosecutors, but merely a subset of the lawyers defending the accused.

On the whole, PDs are young, inexperienced and overworked. Working as a public defender has long been viewed as a training ground for competence criminal defense lawyers, gaining trial experience and savvy so that they will eventually emerge to be ready for prime time. Some are terrific lawyers. Some are warm bodies. Some are walking conviction machines. Just like all lawyers, they are as good as they are, and as bad as they are, at what they do. Being a PD isn’t magic.

It was only a few years ago that public defender Tina Peng took to the papers to proclaim her ineffectiveness and, yes, incompetence.

An unconstitutionally high caseload means that I often see my new clients only once in those two months. It means that I miss filing important motions, that I am unable to properly prepare for every trial, that I have serious conversations about plea bargains with my clients in open court because I did not spend enough time conducting confidential visits with them in jail. I plead some of my clients to felony convictions on the day I meet them. If I don’t follow up to make sure clients are released when they should be, they can sit in jail for unnecessary weeks and months.

Does this make her Supreme Court worthy? But the activists soon realize that this was horrible branding, and so they took to the criminal law reform twitters to proclaim their fierceness and virtue, turning themselves into the heroes of their own cries. To the wary, the gaps in their claims are painfully obvious, telling half-stories and making up nonsensical excuses for their failings. They’re pretty good at manufacturing sad tears for their clients. Whether they’re any good at defending anyone can’t be discerned.

But there is another aspect to the stories they tell, that PDs represent horrible people because of duty, not choice. They fulfill the constitutional mandate that every person is entitled to a defense, but they don’t sully their hands with filthy lucre, choose to be the person standing next to some person they would obviously prefer to execute than defend.

As Harvard lawprof Ronald Sullivan has seen of late, this distinction inured to his extreme detriment. It’s acceptable to defend unacceptable defendants, but only if it’s forced upon you. Choosing to do so, for a fee no less, makes you complicit in their offense. In order to elevate their position from public pretender to Supreme Court justice, they fostered antagonism between PDs and the rest of the criminal bar.

Barry’s pitch, about the need for a PD on the Supreme Court to counter both the prosecutors and non-criminal lawyers, isn’t accidental.

For progressives, the Trump era has ignited perhaps unprecedented interest in the courts and judicial nominations. On issues from immigration to the environment to voting rights, just to name a few, the federal courts have been the primary check on the Trump administration’s often cruel and discriminatory policies.

There is one thing that’s become nearly universal among young PDs that’s glaringly missing from the private criminal defense bar. They are not merely fierce and virtuous in their own minds and twits, but reliable social justice warriors. The private criminal defense bar, on the other hand, finds itself constrained by facts, logic and the understanding gleaned from years of experience. Barry doesn’t want us on the Supreme Court. Just PDs.

Dems’ Nominee: Only PDs Need Apply republished via Simple Justice

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omginstantpaperbouquetblr · 6 years

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By James M. Dorsey / Mid-East Soccer.

To understand that Western emphasis on human rights is at best a fig leaf to do business with autocrats whose rule is based on repression, contrast Winston Churchill’s encounter with Mohammed bin Salman’s grandfather, King Abdulaziz, with British prime minister Theresa May’s recent talks with the crown prince.

Meeting the king for lunch in Cairo in 1945, Mr. Churchill suggested that it was the “religion of his majesty to deprive himself of smoking and alcohol,” a reference to the king’s adherence to a puritanical strand of Islam that has dominated the kingdom since its founding in 1932.

Mr. Churchill, however, made clear that the king’s beliefs would not deter him from enjoying his smokes and drinks in the monarch’s presence. The prime minister’s rule of life “prescribes as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them,” Mr. Churchill said.

Enjoying tobacco and alcohol is certain not to have featured in Ms. May’s talks this week with Prince Mohammed. Human rights and the humanitarian cost of Saudi Arabia’s ill-fated military intervention in Yemen did.

In contrast to Mr. Churchill, who, perhaps insensitively and arrogantly, refused to compromise on his principles and pleasures, Ms. May’s statements were no more than words in what has become a ritual in interactions between democratic and autocratic leaders. The autocrats understand democrats’ need to maintain a fig leaf. The public admonishment of their tarnished human rights records is a small price to pay for the ability to conduct political and economic business.

The contrast between the two encounters is particularly significant in an environment in which abuse of human rights is on the rise and authoritarian and autocratic rule is spreading its wings across the globe from China to once liberal democracies. Democracy is on the defense.

It raises the question whether the refusal of democracies to stand up for their principles and pay a price will contribute to their demise and brutalization in a world in which the lessons of World War Two genocide and principles of good governance in warfare can be ignored with impunity. Russia and Iran-backed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s gassing and starvation of non-combatant Syrian civilians is a case in point.

Ms. May’s fig leaf approach to standing by basic democratic principles is but the latest incident in a long-standing Western willingness to pay a heavy price for sleeping with the devil in a bid to gain short-term geo-political and economic advantage. Guilt is widespread. Its not just governments. The same is true for non-governmental organizations such as international sport associations who for decades tolerated pre-modernity curtailing of women’s sporting rights in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran by restricting their criticism to words rather than deeds.

Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and author and long-time Saudi-watcher Robert Lacey noted in The Guardian that “the crown prince doesn’t listen to Saudis – why would he listen to Theresa May?”

Mr. Khashoggi, long closely associated with Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of Saudi intelligence and ambassador to Britain and the US, who often voices opinions Prince Mohammed does not want to do so publicly, went into voluntary exile last year on the eve of the crown prince’s power and asset grab under the mum of an anti-corrup0tion campaign.

One irony of Ms. May’s approach in her talks with Prince Mohammed is the fact that the kingdom is an exemplary case study of the price that democracies have paid for their toothless objections to a long-standing Saudi worldview that was intolerant, supremacist, and anti-pluralistic.

To be sure, Prince Mohammed has begun to shave off the rough edges of that worldview with his social and economic reforms but has yet to convey his willingness to achieve a clean break.

Holders of tickets for a concert in Jeddah by Egyptian pop sensation Tamer Hosny were recently surprised to receive vouchers that warned that “no dancing or swaying” would be allowed at the event. "No dancing or swaying in a concert! It's like putting ice under the sun and asking it not to melt,” quipped a critic on Twitter.

If anything, Prince Mohammed’s reforms have been underwritten by repression of any form of dissent.

Anti-death penalty group Reprieve reported that Saudi Arabia's execution rate had doubled since Prince Mohammed was appointed crown prince eight months ago. It said 133 people had been executed since June 2017 compared to 67 in the preceding eight months.

Equally fundamentally, the world is still reeling from at times short-sighted, opportunistic Western support for the export of Saudi-inspired Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism and at others a willingness to ignore its impact on Muslim communities across the globe. The same can be said for support of secular autocracies like the regime of Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, whose repression, brutality and failure to deliver public goods and services offer extremism a fertile breeding ground.

It is also true for states like Baathist Syria and Iraq that fell into the Soviet orbit during the Cold War, with Iraq. after the demise of the Soviet Union, enjoying US support during its war against Iran in the 1980s.

Geo-strategist Robert D. Kaplan, writing in Foreign Policy, argued that Syria and Iraq had descended into the Middle East and North Africa’s worst mayhems that have caused enormous human suffering and cost the international community significantly in political, diplomatic, and security terms because they were artificial, colonial-era geographic constructs. They lacked the civilizational history, centuries of some kind of statehood, and deep-seated identities that have helped keep Egypt or Tunisia territorially intact.

In South Asia, the United States went during the era of conservative Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq and the US and Saudi-backed war against the Soviets in the 1980s waged by Afghan mujahedeen as far as to distribute schoolbooks that propagated Saudi-inspired jihad and precepts of ultra-conservatism. In doing so it played havoc with Pakistan, a country that since its birth has struggled with its identity.

Western democracies ignored the fact that Saudi Arabia invested heavily over decades to push its austere worldview as an anti-dote to post-1979 Iranian revolutionary zeal. While not the only factor, the Saudi campaign created an environment in Pakistan and elsewhere in which militant Islam flourished, societies became ever more conservative and intolerant, and political violence increased.

Western democracies as well as others, including the kingdom, are paying a high price in terms of people’s lives and vastly expanded security to counter extremism and political violence.

Its an open debate whether policies that had been built on democratic values rather than support for autocracy and intolerant worldviews could have achieved similar geopolitical victories such as the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan at a lower cost and a reduced threat to those values.

What is certain, however, is the fact that the fallout of the failure to stand up for democratic values comes at an ever-steeper cost and uncertainty of how the pendulum will swing.

The unanswered question is whether in terms of cost-benefit analysis short-term hits resulting from adopting a principled stand may ultimately be a more reasonable cost and produce greater long-term benefit than the price of dealing with the fallout of policies that effectively ignore democratic principles and ultimately are likely to produce ever greater threats.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well as Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and the forthcoming China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

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