The Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series that collects important political debate and analysis from around the internet and publishes it every morning.
We start today with an article by Matt Bayh of The Washington Post suggesting that today’s political climate can be seen as finally filling the huge power vacuum left after the end of the Cold War.
Americans, for better or worse, have always been defined by the struggle of existence. Since our founding, we have been bound together not by a common race or religion but by a radical idea of human freedom and self-governance, by the idea that our nation is more than a place to live; it is a living force for human progress.
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Then came the end of the Cold War, which social theorist Francis Fukuyama optimistically called “the end of history.” What Fukuyama meant was that all forms of absolutism — monarchy, fascism, communism — had finally run out of steam, to be permanently replaced by liberal democracy made in our image. We would, in effect, be living through the final battles of a broader American revolution.
Fukuyama was wrong, of course: freedom has not won a final victory over tyranny in this world, and there was no great honeymoon, but he was right in the sense that the clash of civilizations that had dominated our political debate for so long suddenly disappeared.
I think Baik is right about the collapse of external rivals like the Soviet Union, but his thesis is incomplete.
The “clash of civilizations” within American “political discourse” (racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, economic inequality, etc.) continued unabated throughout the 1990s.
Meanwhile, “external rivals” (primarily Russia and China) are increasingly understanding that fires in the United States are being simmered to the boiling point even today by using the (relatively) new technology of social media to spread misinformation and disinformation.
(To cite a recent example, some TikTok users have said Americans should have listened to Osama bin Laden’s letter about Israel and Palestine. Another example is the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19.)
Vox’s Umar Irfan questions why the city of Houston appears to have learned so few lessons from 2017’s Hurricane Harvey.
For some Houston residents, Beryl brought back memories of Hurricane Harvey. “This hurricane triggers PTSD,” said Pablo Pinto, a public policy professor at the University of Houston whose home was damaged in Harvey.
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Pinto is also co-author of a 2022 report looking back on Harvey and its long-term impact on Houston. Nearly one in five residents surveyed said they still hadn’t fully recovered from the storm. The storm also changed people’s attitudes toward building regulations in a city famously lacking zoning laws. More than 90% of respondents said they support policies like limiting building in floodplains, blocking development in wetlands and building codes that require flood-prone homes to be built higher.
But many of those measures were targeted at the damage specific to Harvey, which was caused primarily by extreme flooding, rather than the high winds that could wreak havoc with a stronger storm. “We tend to prepare for past wars, and that’s how we allocate resources,” Pinto said.
And many of the post-Harvey proposals have been ignored.
Perhaps Project 2025 will solve that.
The Atlantic’s Mackay Coppins points out how public servants live in fear.
In the days after the assassination attempt on Trump, various leaders and commentators responded by repeating the same assertion: “Political violence has no place in America.” This is a good aspirational statement, but patently untrue as a factual assertion. The Butler shooting fits into a disturbing pattern of violence targeted at U.S. government officials, as my colleague David A. Graham recently detailed. To hold public office in America today is to know that people may try to kill you.
Political assassinations are by no means a new phenomenon, and anyone who has worked in a congressional office or the governor’s mansion can tell you they are taught protocols for dealing with death threats. But early in his career as a congressman in the early 2000s, Flake told his staff not to worry about such dangers. “I would brush them off lightly and say, ‘Bear with it, this is part of the job,'” he told me. But after Giffords was shot, that ended. He realized the threats were real, not just to him, but to his staff, his family, even his supporters. The tone of our nation’s politics — heightened tension, to use a favorite metaphor now — makes this reality hard to ignore. “I never take it lightly,” he said.
The number of close calls in recent years is similarly impossible to ignore. For me, this fact was underscored when I looked back at the politicians I’ve covered for the magazine and realized that many of them have been targets of violence. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh turned himself in to police at the last minute after a man plotting to kill him showed up at his Maryland home. Former Vice President Mike Pence was rushed out of the U.S. Capitol by the Secret Service on January 6, 2021, as rioters called for him to be hanged. Sen. Mitt Romney narrowly escaped the same mob and then spent $5,000 a day on private security for his family.
Coppins noted there was no mention of threats against Democratic officials like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or Michigan Gov. Jocelyn Benson.
Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post notes that another reason President Biden is probably not stepping aside for another candidate is that polls in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have remained largely unchanged since the presidential debate (according to many of the polls).
The attempted shooting of former President Donald Trump on Saturday shifted attention away from Biden’s struggling race. But even before the shooting, there were serious doubts within the party about whether Biden could win the November election, and yet only about two dozen of the 264 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in Congress had called for the president to step down. The lack of public support for Biden is partly because the president really wants to run and many in his party are unwilling to sideline him against his wishes.
But another reason Biden can’t be unseated so easily is the polls. I think there would be much more calls for the president to drop out of the race if he had no path to victory and another Democratic candidate had a clear path. But neither of those conditions exist. The Washington Post polling average has the president slightly behind Trump in Michigan (3 percentage points) and Pennsylvania (less than 1 point), and he’s virtually tied in Wisconsin. (Other media averages vary slightly, but generally show very close margins in those three states.) […]
The New York Times’ Paul Krugman says the Republican policy pledge to “make America affordable again” could lead to economic disaster.
The third item in the 2024 Republican platform, following promises of closing the border and mass deportations, is a pledge to “end inflation and make America affordable again.”
The first part of this pledge leaves me wondering if the platform’s drafters (who appear to have mostly copied and pasted items from Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts) are aware that inflation has already fallen substantially. But the second part is more interesting: What does it mean to make America affordable again? Depending on your interpretation, that’s either something that’s already happened or a very bad idea. […]
The problem is that to get back to prices like they were in, say, 2019, the U.S. economy would have to experience massive deflation — a fall in prices — and the historical evidence is clear: if you impose significant deflation on a modern economy, you will end up with very high unemployment.
Finally, today, Rachel Savage in the Guardian says that research suggests that political corruption and mismanagement are eroding support for democracy in some African countries.
Afrobarometer reports that support for democracy has fallen in Africa following a series of military coups and complaints of corruption and mismanagement, but Africans still have a stronger desire for democratic rule than many other parts of the world. […]
“Africans’ preferences for democracy remain stable despite the deterioration of many indicators of socio-economic performance. Rather, changes in public support over the past decade are linked to changes in the political landscape, including a decline in the quality of elections, increased corruption and a failure to promote the rule of law,” the report by pan-African research institute Afrobarometer said.
The survey found that Africans have become less satisfied with the state of democracy in their countries over the past decade, with growing dissatisfaction linked to worsening economic conditions and perceptions of increasing corruption and impunity.
Hope you all have a great day!
