What’s Wrong and How to Fix It. By Adam Garfinkle.

Broken: A Primer on American Political Dysfunction. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, January/February 2013.

What’s Wrong and How to Fix It. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest.

Part 1: Introduction and Globalization/Automation. October 9, 2012.

Part 2: Political/Institutional. October 15, 2012.

Part 3: Corruption/Plutocracy. October 25, 2012.

Part 4: Television and Politics. November 2, 2012.

Part 5: The Financial System. December 17, 2012.

Part 6: Tax Reform. January 2, 2013.

Part 7: Health Care. January 9, 2013.

Part 8: Repeal the 17th Amendment. February 4, 2013.

Part 9: Government Design. February 5, 2013.

Part 10: Institutional Reform. February 6, 2013.

Part 11: National Service. February 7, 2013.

Part 12: Relocate the Culture Wars. February 8, 2013.

Part 13: The New Homestead Act. February 8, 2013.

Part 14: Dreaming the New/Old Liberalism. February 9, 2013.

Part 15: A Foreign Policy/National Security Coda. February 10, 2013.


Garfinkle, from Part 4:

I’m neither a registered Democrat (anymore) nor a registered Republican (never have been), and I have already suggested why: I don’t want to go back to 1965 or to 1925. But let me briefly restate my antipathy to both sets of party orthodoxy in somewhat different language before getting to my ten proposals.

The Left in this country, generally speaking, tends to excoriate corporations, even to disparage the profit motive itself, and to think of government as a proper vehicle not only for battling the depredations of capitalism but also for forcing on the nation the kinds of multicultural, politically correct social biases it likes. It has inculcated within itself the old countercultural notion of consciousness-raising, in which it presumes to know more about what’s good for you than you do. It is the self-appointed Robin Hood of our political soul, though its populist pretensions are belied by its elitist ways. The Left displays a blindness to the benefits of a non-distorted market economy, and an even more grievous blindness to the limits of what government can accomplish—especially a government that tries to do more than it should in what has become a misaligned Federal system.

The Right these days, generally speaking, tends to excoriate government, to dismiss the idea of an inclusive and fairly governed national community, and to blame those who are genuinely poor for their own poverty. Much of the Right, having regrettably abandoned its own Burkean heritage, sees through a crude Social Darwinist prism that acknowledges only individual judgment, ignoring the social context in which that judgment is seated. It is blind to plutocratic corruption and doesn’t see, either, the widening cultural gap between an isolated elite and those Americans who are falling out of an often recently won and still fragile middle-class status. It is particularly blind to the fact that a distorted market system dominated by large corporate oligarchies that deploy increasingly sophisticated advertising methodologies can be responsible for undermining both social trust and the founding virtues.

Again, there’s no reason to choose between the problems caused by the public sector (a sclerotic, dysfunctional and wildly expensive government) and the problems caused by the private sector (a predatory corporate leadership class, and especially an increasingly powerful parasitic financial elite, that has become an extractive rather than a productive asset for the nation as a whole). Both problems exist, and both are getting worse.

Moreover, these problems are not really separate; they feed one another. Private sector abuses feed the appetite for government protection, but government is too dysfunctional to provide that protection; instead its efforts tend to harm small businesses that lack the arsenals of specialist lawyers and accountants that huge businesses use to evade government attempts to hem them in. You get a hint of this by looking at what the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements have had in common, which is a fair bit more than either group likes to admit.

Morsi’s Hamas Connection. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Morsi’s Hamas Connection. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, February 8, 2013.

The Hamas-Egyptian Alliance. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Gatestone Institute, February 8, 2013.

More posts on Morsi and Egypt here and here.

Tobin:

Apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt have spent much of the last year attempting to argue that the Islamist movement is not the extremist group its critics make it out to be. They claim it is not only moderate in its religious views but that it is a pragmatic organization that can be a stabilizing force in the region. The whitewash of the Brotherhood’s ideology is made possible by both the general ignorance of the American people about the group’s origins and its beliefs as well as by the willingness of many in the American media to buy into the transparent propaganda they’ve been fed about their goals. However, the hate speech of President Mohamed Morsi and his putsch to seize total power in the manner of his authoritarian predecessor Hosni Mubarak, as well as the group’s efforts to impose their version of sharia law on the rest of Egyptian society, should have cured them of their ignorance.

But the latest evidence of the radical nature of the Brotherhood government comes from its ally Hamas. Under Morsi, Egypt has become a helpful friend to the Gaza regime, a marked change from the hostility that Mubarak demonstrated toward it. But as Khaled Abu Toameh reports at the Gatestone Institute website, friendship between the Brotherhood and Hamas is a two-way street. He reports that Egyptian media outlets are saying that a large number of Hamas militiamen may have crossed from Gaza into Sinai in the last week and then headed to various Egyptian cities to help the Brotherhood suppress pro-democracy and anti-Islamist protests that have broken out across the country. If true, this not only means that the ties between the supposed “moderates” of the Brotherhood and the terrorists of Hamas are closer than ever, but that Morsi is seeking to use these killers as a counter-force against possible action by the Egyptian army to check his attempt to seize total power.

That operatives of a group that is labeled by the United States as a terrorist group may have become the shock troops of the leader of an allied country like Egypt may be shocking to many Americans. But it will come as no surprise to anyone who is aware that Hamas was founded as an offshoot of the Egyptian Islamist movement. The connection between the two groups as well as their supporters in other Muslim countries is no secret.

. . . . . . . . . .

The alliance between Hamas and the Brotherhood has great advantages for both groups.

Morsi’s Egyptian followers may be highly organized, but they lack the experience in street violence and terror that Hamas members have. They also may have scruples about killing and torturing fellow Egyptians. The Palestinians are used to ruthlessly suppressing dissent in Gaza. Hamas staged a bloody coup in 2006 to oust Fatah from control there and thus knows what it stakes to secure power.

On the other hand, Hamas’s stock among Palestinians has risen markedly since the Brotherhood took power. Egypt no longer enforces the blockade of Gaza. Rather than worrying about holding onto Gaza, as they may have done when they were locked in a vise between the Israelis and Mubarak’s Egypt, they are now thinking seriously about how best to wrest control of the West Bank from their Palestinian rivals.

The Hamas connection should send a chill down the spines of anyone who still held onto hope that the Arab Spring would produce more, rather than less, freedom for Egypt. But it should also remind Americans that they are still sending more than $1 billion a year in U.S. aid and selling F-16 aircraft to Morsi’s Egypt. Members of Congress who continue to back this foolish policy need to ask themselves whether it makes sense to funnel taxpayer dollars to Egypt in the hope of supporting regional stability if what they are really doing is bolstering a government that depends on Hamas terrorists to stay in power.

Transformations in the Arab World. WEF Panel.

Transformations in the Arab World. Panel moderated by Fareed Zakaria. Video. World Economic Forum, January 25, 2013. Also find it at C-Span and YouTube.

How can the promise of the Arab Spring be advanced in light of deepening social and political uncertainties?

Why the GOP Is the Party of White People. By Sam Tanenhaus.

Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people. By Sam Tanenhaus. The New Republic, February 10, 2013. Also find it here.
 
The New Republic: The Magazine of White People. By Ace of Spades. Twitchy, February 9, 2013.

Is Republicanism a white ideology? By Samuel Wilson. The Think 3 Institute, February 19, 2013.

Tanenhaus:

“American politics,” Gary Wills wrote in 1975, “is the South's revenge for the Civil War.” He was referring to the rise of Southern and Sunbelt figures—the later ones would include Jimmy Carter, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and the two Bushes—whose dominance of presidential politics ended only with Obama’s election in 2008. However, the two parties dealt with race differently. Carter and Clinton had pro–civil rights histories and directly courted black voters. But as the GOP continued remolding itself into a Southern party—led in the ’90s by the Georgian Newt Gingrich and by the Texans Dick Armey and Tom DeLay—it resorted to an overtly nullifying politics: The rise of the Senate veto as a routine obstructionist tool, Jesse Helms’s warning that Clinton “better have a bodyguard” if he ever traveled to North Carolina, the first protracted clashes over the debt ceiling, Gingrich’s threat to withhold disaster relief, the government shutdown, Clinton’s impeachment despite public disapproval of the trial. All this, moreover, seemed to reflect, or at least parallel, extremism in the wider culture often saturated in racism: Let’s not forget Minutemen and Aryan Nation militias, nor the “anti-government” terrorist Timothy McVeigh, whom the FBI linked to white supremacists. The war on government—and against agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—had become a metaphor for the broader “culture wars,” one reason that the GOP’s dwindling base is now at odds with the “absolute majority” on issues like gun control and same-sex marriage.

Reformers in the GOP insist that this course can be reversed with more intensive outreach efforts, better recruitment of minority candidates, and an immigration compromise. And a new cast of GOP leaders—Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio—have become national favorites. But each remains tethered to movement ideology. At the recent National Review Institute conference in Washington, Cruz even urged a “partial government shutdown,” recalling the glory years of the ’90s, but downplaying its destructive outcome.

Denial has always been the basis of a nullifying politics. Calhoun, too, knew he was on the losing side. The arithmetic he studied most closely was the growing tally of new free territories. Eventually, they would become states, and there would be sufficient “absolute” numbers in Congress to abolish slavery. A century later, history pushed forward again. Nonetheless, conservatives, giving birth to their movement, chose to ignore these realities and to side with “the South.”

Race will always be a complex issue in America. There is no total cleansing of an original sin. But the old polarizing politics is a spent force. The image of the “angry black man” still purveyed by sensationalists such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza is anachronistic today, when blacks and even Muslims, the most conspicuous of “outsider” groups, profess optimism about America and their place in it. A politics of frustration and rage remains, but it is most evident within the GOP's dwindling base—its insurgents and anti-government crusaders, its “middle-aged white guys.” They now form the party’s one solid bloc, its agitated concurrent voice, struggling not only against the facts of demography, but also with the country’s developing ideas of democracy and governance. We are left with the profound historical irony that the party of Lincoln—of the Gettysburg Address, with its reiteration of the Declaration's assertion of equality and its vision of a “new birth of freedom”—has found sustenance in Lincoln’s principal intellectual and moral antagonist. It has become the party of Calhoun.


Wilson:

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, is writing a biography of William F. Buckley. He may be naturally inclined to make large claims for Buckley and his magazine, National Review. In the current New Republic, Tanenhaus echoes the warning heard with increasing frequency that Republicans are likely to find themselves ethnically marginalized in the future, unable to appeal to nonwhite voters. Seeking a reason for this, Tanenhaus picks up an obscure intellectual trail leading from National Review to the 19th century slaveholding ideologue of minority rights, John C. Calhoun. To an extent this is a familiar story told from an unusual angle, an attempt to define the intellectual origins of the GOP's ultimately successful “Southern strategy” of the 1960s. Tanenhaus notes that Republicans supported civil rights as late as the Eisenhower administration, but began to change its tune with the advent of Barry Goldwater, aided by Buckley and National Review. These elements added a strident libertarian note to traditional Republican conservatism, particularly a fresh hostility to centralized government that led self-styled champions of liberty, in their resistance to federal civil-rights legislation, to rank state rights above individual rights. Here Tanenhaus sees Calhoun’s influence. Calhoun argued that each state retained inviolate sovereignty over social relations within its own borders, and that the rights of individuals within states, except where enumerated in the Bill of Rights, were none of the federal government’s business. That is, Calhoun denied federal right or authority to mandate racial or gender equality throughout the Union. Perhaps more influentially, Calhoun challenged the sovereignty of “numerical majorities” on the national level, fearing that their tendency toward absolute power inevitably trampled on the rights of sovereign communities or economic interests. He believed that the country would be best governed by “concurrent majorities” in which each recognized interest was equally represented and retained a right to veto government action. If Calhoun retains much influence today, however, it’s an influence the man himself might have repudiated. He never reconciled himself to party government, believing political parties the forces most likely to use numerical majorities to tyrannize the states or other core interests. Yet 21st century Republicanism seems to be tending toward seeing parties themselves, or the ideologies parties seem to represent, as rightful members of an ideally concurrent majority. At least it seems as if they believe that the rights of “conservatives,” for instance, are violated in some unacceptable way when conservatives are shut out of political power. They may also believe that democracy itself, at least as expressed in votes for the Democratic party, inevitably violates individual (economic) and group (cultural) rights unless adequately checked. But what is “white” about this, apart from its historical parentage? Why does the anti-statist, pro-local, individualist stance of 21st century Republicans seem to be a nonstarter with most nonwhite (and many nonmale) voters?

Tanenhaus joins many other observers in assuming that Republicans envision the “takers” or the “47%” as darker people than themselves. You can’t hear Mitt Romney say that, of course, but Tanenhaus blames both Romney and his running mate, Rep. Ryan, for expressing patronizing attitudes during their rare appearances before black audiences. He finds it patronizing, for instance, for Romney to tell back students to form two-parent families when they grow up, or for Ryan to recommend “good discipline and good character” to another black crowd. This might be enough evidence to show that Tanenhaus may be half right. Republicans like Romney and Ryan may have an irrepressible contempt for groups they perceive as constituents and clients of the enemy party, but I’ve always been reluctant to accept that Republicans feel that way only about “minorities.” White people still form 72% of the American population as of 2010, and thus must form a good portion of Romney’s despised 47%. I understand, however, that Tanenhaus and others are trying to account for the demographic concentration of Republican voters in the white South. Voters are inevitably less intellectual than politicians and propagandists, and bigotry is probably a bigger motivator of Republican votes than Republican leaders care or dare to admit. But that's only half the equation. Republicans boast of being a party of ideas and values. Those ideas and values may be tainted by association with racism, but are they themselves inherently bigoted. Do blacks or Hispanics have some cultural antipathy toward the ideas of limited government or laissez-faire capitalism? Or is the perpetuation of class hierarchies that are also often racial in nature the original motivation for those ideologies? Tanenhaus’s brief account seems to make bigotry the driving force, but Joseph Crespino's recent biography of Strom Thurmond (mentioned only in passing by Tanenhaus) argues a subtler point about class rather than race. Crespino writes that Republicans began to grow sympathetic toward a South long seen as impenetrably Democratic when they discovered, not necessarily a common hatred for blacks, but a shared antipathy toward federal interference with business, and specifically with hiring practices. The South appealed to increasingly reactionary Republicans not so much because it was racially segregated but because it was the region most resistant to organized labor. Republican contempt for the working class persists today, the party’s avowed desire to accelerate job creation notwithstanding, and that alone could explain increasing antipathy toward the GOP everywhere but in the South. Maybe they don’t believe in solidarity or equality down there, but that might be more a “South” problem than a “white” problem. It’s a Republican problem either way, and the GOP’s challenge is to reach back beyond the South without alienating the South, or to take the same risk of losing the region (to whom?) Lyndon Johnson took when he came out for civil rights. We can’t test whether racial minorities will ever embrace conservatism until more conservatives are willing to take that risk in whatever form.

Will Obama Fight or Compromise? By Fareed Zakaria.

Will He Fight or Compromise? By Fareed Zakaria. Time, February 18, 2013. Fareed Zakaria GPS video here.

Meet the Press Roundtable Makes Predictions for Obama’s Second Term.

Meet the Press Roundtable Makes Predictions for Obama’s Second Term. Video. Meet the Press. NBC News, February 10, 2013. Also find complete video here and here, segment clip here and here.

KATTY KAY:

Yeah, he’s got this kind of fairly short window where he’s just been reelected, it’s his first State of the Union where he’s not running for reelection. He can take that on board and decide he’s going to try and push his agenda. But the window is short because, fairly soon, all of the members of the House are going to start thinking about those midterm elections.

If he wants to get big things done, he’s going to have to get them done fairly soon. In 2012, he promised a fairer America. He raised taxes with the House, at the end of the year. And we’ll see where inequality levels start to come down in America. But the big thing he’s going to have to do is promise to get jobs for the country.

We’re living in a world where robots are cheap and efficient and people are expensive and inefficient. And he’s got to find a post-manufacturing America and lay out a plan for it where there is job growth. And that’s the single biggest priority of his second term.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Know Your Israeli Enemy. By Amal Al-Hazzani.

Know Your Enemy. By Amal Al-Hazzani. Asharq Al-Awsat, February 7, 2013.

The Israel We Do Not Know. By Amal Al-Hazzani. Asharq Al-Awsat, January 31, 2013.

Putin Appeals to Russia’s “Silent Majority.” By Walter Russell Mead.

Putin Appeals to Russia’s “Silent Majority.” By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, February 9, 2013.

Parsing the Marriage of Ksenia Sobchak, Russia’s Paris Hilton. By Leonid Bershidsky.

Parsing the Marriage of Russia’s Paris Hilton. By Leonid Bershidsky. Bloomberg, February 5, 2013.

Twitter End to Love Story Born in Russia’s Protests. By Andrew E. Kramer. New York Times, February 2, 2013.

Socialite Sobchak Secretly Marries Opposition-Minded Actor. By Lena Smirnova. Moscow Times, February 3, 2013.

Ilya Yashin and Ksenia Sobchak, the Russian Opposition’s Romeo & Juliet. By Anna Nemtsova. The Daily Beast, December 17, 2012.

Ksenia Sobchak, puzzled by sexism. By Eliot Borenstein. Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, October 24, 2012.

From Party Girl to Putin’s Threat. By Elisa Lipsky-Karasz. Harper’s Bazaar, July 2012. Also find it here.

Ksenia Sobchak, the Stiletto in Putin’s Side. By Andrew Meier. New York Times, July 3, 2012. Also find it here.

Ksenia Sobchak in her Moscow restaurant.

   

Ksenia Sobchak in a more revealing position.



Archaeologists Reveal a Desecrated Iron Age Temple and Find Possible Evidence of Samson at Beth Shemesh.

Tel Beth-Shemesh, the ancient meeting point of the Canaanites, Philistines and Israelites. Tel Aviv University archaeologists are excavating the site, looking for evidence that it once was an ancient border.

 

Archaeologists Reveal a Desecrated Iron Age Temple at Beth-Shemesh. By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, November 13, 2012.

Desecrated Ancient Temple Sheds Light on Early Power Struggles at Tel Beth-Shemesh. American Friends of Tel Aviv University, November 12, 2012.

Holy Site Desecration Traced to Philistine Era. By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu. Israel National News, November 13, 2012.

Israel Temple Discovery Shows War Horror, Ancient Border. By Gwen Ackerman. Bloomberg, February 4, 2013.

Ackerman:

We are standing in the middle of Israel on a quiet hill overlooking a fertile green valley.

Some 3,000 years ago, this peaceful place was right at the center of conflict, says archaeologist Shlomo Bunimovitz.

“The border lies somewhere between here and there,” he says, pointing to the west. He is co-leading excavations which have found the remains of a temple which was later desecrated and used as animal pens.

This is Tel Beth-Shemesh, the ancient meeting point of the Canaanites, Philistines and Israelites. The Bible describes it as the northern border of the Tribe of Judah. The area also features in the story of the return of the Ark of the Covenant, earlier captured by the Philistines. King Solomon ruled the district and it was the site of the battle between Joash and Amaziah, the respective kings of Israel and Judah.

“We are looking for evidence that this was a border, tangible evidence in the material culture that reflects this,” says Bunimovitz, from Tel Aviv University.

The excavation, just outside the modern Israeli town now called Beit Shemesh, is investigating the extent of Philistine dominance some 3,000 years ago and the impact its culture had on the indigenous Canaanites.

Tel Aviv University started excavating in the early 1990s. Bunimovitz says that Beth-Shemesh may have been the first line of resistance against the Philistines, the seafaring people who began to settle there.

Philistine Pottery

He produces plastic-covered charts that show how as excavations moved eastward, there were less remains of decorative Philistine pottery and a complete disappearance of pig bones.

“The Philistines wanted this fertile valley,” Bunimovitz says, “but had this pain in the neck here at Beth Shemesh.”

Before the Philistines settled, the Canaanites did eat a little pork, he says. Then they seemed to want to set themselves apart from newcomers and maintain a distinct culture.

“There is a modern example of this, in the wearing of keffiyehs (headscarf),” he says. “Israelis always wore them until Yasser Arafat adopted it. Now you won’t see any Israelis with it. Suddenly the keffiyeh becomes an ethnic marker.”

His team has uncovered the outer wall of what they say is an ancient temple, with a row of three flat stones. One was surrounded by chalices and goblets, another surrounded by bones -- evidence of offerings to the gods or sacrificial slaughter.

Black Lines

Most interesting to Bunimovitz is the black lines that run through the hill along the temple that has yet to be uncovered.

“Normally I would say these are destruction layers, there was a temple, it was destroyed, and that’s it,” Bunovitz says. “But we ran chemical checks on this and found out that what caused the lines was animal dung. Someone came and used the place after the temple was destroyed for animal pens. We surmise it must have been their enemies. If you want to overcome resistance you desecrate a temple.”

There is a possibility that the Canaanites living in Beth Shemesh may have further evolved into being part of the Israelite people, he says. “We see a process of becoming something not eating pig that will later become an identity marker of the Israeli monarchy. This may or may not be an evolution into being Israelites or part of the Israelites.”

Beth Shemesh later became part of the Israelite monarchy, although the Bible never calls the people there Israelites, only the people of Beth Shemesh, he says.

Pig Bones

Neil Silberman, a historian at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, cautions against reading too much into archaeological findings. The absence of pig bones may be an environmental issue, such as the climate no longer being conducive to the raising of the animals.

“What is interesting about Beth Shemesh is the concept of it not only being a border town between the Philistines and the kingdom of Judah, but also of the inevitable tension between the two,” he says by telephone. “Archaeology is sort of like Sherlock Holmes at a crime site: Unfortunately in archaeology there isn’t an end to the process.”


Lion Seal from Beth Shemesh Sparks Samson Discussion. By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, July 30, 2012.

Does this coin found near Jerusalem prove that Samson lived . . . and that he did fight the lion? By Leon Watson. Daily Mail, July 31, 2012.

Seal found by Israeli archaeologists may give substance to Samson legend. By Nir Hasson. Haaretz, July 30, 2012.

Israeli scholars claim possible evidence of Samson. By Adrian Blomfield. The Telegraph, July 30, 2012.

Beth Shemesh: Culture Conflict on Judah’s Frontier. By Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman. Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1997.

The Archaeology of Border Communities: Renewed Excavations at Tel Beth-Shemesh, Part 1: The Iron Age. By Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman. Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 72, No. 3 (September 2009).

Canaanite Resistance: The Philistines and Beth-Shemesh—A Case Study from Iron Age I. By Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 364 (November 2011).

Abstract:

In two excavation cycles conducted at Tel Beth-Shemesh in the early 20th century, a scholarly myth about Philistine domination at the site during Iron Age I was born. Renewed excavations at Beth-Shemesh by the authors dispelled this unfounded hypothesis. In a sequence of Iron I levels, Canaanite cultural traditions are dominant. Only a meager amount of Bichrome Philistine pottery was found, and other items of Philistine affiliation are missing. Furthermore, pork consumption was completely avoided at Beth-Shemesh in contrast with adjacent Philistine sites. Review of geopolitical changes in the Shephelah during the Late Bronze-Iron Age transition indicates that the Canaanite inhabitants of Beth-Shemesh took advantage of their location at the Philistine periphery and resisted Philistine hegemony. By denying foodways (eating and drinking) that symbolized their new aggressive neighbors, the people of Beth-Shemesh culturally identified themselves as “non-Philistine.” But since an inverse process, by which elements of Philistine culture were adopted by Canaanites living within the Philistine territory, is also evident, it is apparent that whether adopting or denying Philistine cultural elements, the indigenous population of the Shephelah changed its previous way of life during Iron Age I.


Ceramics, Ethnicity, and the Question of Israel’s Origins. By William G. Dever. The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December 1995).

How to Tell a Canaanite from an Israelite. By William G. Dever. In Hershel Shanks et al., The Rise of Ancient Israel. Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991.

How Did Israel Become a People? The Genesis of Israelite Identity. By Avraham Faust. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 35, No. 6 (November/December 2009).

Ethnicity, Assimilation and the Israelite Settlement. By Pekka Pitkänen. Tyndale Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2004).

The Rise of Secondary States in the Iron Age Levant. By Alexander H. Joffe. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2002).

This 11th century BC seal from Beth Shemesh shows a person next to a leonine figure. The site and chronology have led some to associate the seal with the Biblical story of Samson.

How the Gun-Control Movement Got Smart. By Molly Ball.

How the Gun-Control Movement Got Smart. By Molly Ball. The Atlantic, February 7, 2013.

Egypt’s Incompetent Politics Turn Citizens Against the State. By Issandr El Amrani.

Egypt’s incompetent politics turn citizens against the state. By Issandr El Amrani. The National, February 7, 2013.

More posts on Egypt and Morsi here.

Soviet Lessons for the Arab World. By Anne Applebaum.

Preparing for freedom before it comes. By Anne Applebaum. Washington Post, February 7, 2013. Also in National Post, and Slate.

More on Egypt and Morsi here.

China Marches West. By Yun Sun.

Westward Ho! By Yun Sun. Foreign Policy, February 7, 2013.

As America pivots east, China marches in the other direction.

For the Taliban Love Is a Battlefied. By Mujib Mashal.

Love Is a Battlefield. By Mujib Mashal. Foreign Policy, February 5, 2013.

Are the Taliban using sex to fight America?

Florence and the Drones. By David Brooks.

Florence and the Drones. By David Brooks. New York Times, February 7, 2013.

Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? By Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.

Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart. By Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. New York Times, February 6, 2013.

Andrew Jackson Teaches Us To Rein In Bureaucrats. By Dick Morris.

Andrew Jackson Teaches Us To Rein In Bureaucrats. By Dick Morris. Video. DickMorris.com, February 9, 2013. Also find it here.

“Suicide Conservatives.” By Charles Blow.

“Suicide Conservatives.” By Charles Blow. New York Times, February 8, 2013.

See also here and here.

The White South’s Last Defeat. By Michael Lind.

The white South’s last defeat. By Michael Lind. Salon, February 5, 2013.

Hysteria, aggression and gerrymandering are a fading demographic’s last hope to maintain political control.

Lind:

In understanding the polarization and paralysis that afflict national politics in the United States, it is a mistake to think in terms of left and right. The appropriate directions are North and South. To be specific, the long, drawn-out, agonizing identity crisis of white Southerners is having effects that reverberate throughout our federal union. The transmission mechanism is the Republican Party, an originally Northern party that has now replaced the Southern wing of the Democratic Party as the vehicle for the dwindling white Southern tribe.

As someone whose white Southern ancestors go back to the 17th century in the Chesapeake Bay region, I have some insight into the psychology of the tribe. The salient fact to bear in mind is that the historical experience of the white South in many ways is the opposite of the experience of the rest of the country.

Mainstream American history, from the point of view of the white majority in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, is a story of military successes. The British are defeated, ensuring national independence. The Confederates are defeated, ensuring national unity. And in the 20th century the Axis and Soviet empires are defeated, ensuring (it is hoped) a free world.

The white Southern narrative — at least in the dominant Southern conservative version — is one of defeat after defeat. First the attempt of white Southerners to create a new nation in which they can be the majority was defeated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Doomed to be a perpetual minority in a continental American nation-state, white Southerners managed for a century to create their own state-within-a-state, in which they could collectively lord it over the other major group in the region, African-Americans. But Southern apartheid was shattered by the second defeat, the Civil Rights revolution, which like the Civil War and Reconstruction was symbolized by the dispatching of federal troops to the South. The American patriotism of the white Southerner is therefore deeply problematic. Some opt for jingoistic hyper-Americanism (the lady protesteth too much, methinks) while a shrinking but significant minority prefer the Stars and Bars to the Stars and Stripes.

The other great national narrative holds that the U.S. is a nation of immigration, a “new nation,” a melting pot made up of immigrants from many lands. While the melting pot story involves a good deal of idealization, it is based on demographic fact in the large areas of the North where old-stock Anglo-Americans are commingled with German-Americans, Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans, along with more recent immigrant diasporas from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

But even before the recent wave of immigration from sources other than Europe, the melting pot never included most of the white South. From the early 19th century until the late 20th, the South attracted relatively few immigrants. Who wanted to move to a backward, rural, apartheid society dominated by an oligarchy of a few rich families? Apart from several encapsulated minorities — Cajuns in Louisiana, Germans in central Texas — most white Southerners remained descendants of colonial-era immigrants from the British Isles, chiefly English and Scots-Irish. And while Irish and German Catholics and Jews diversified the religious landscape of the North, the South was dominated by British-derived Protestant sects like the Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists from Virginia to Oklahoma and Texas.

Two maps illustrate the demographic distinctiveness of the white South. The first shows the close correlation of evangelical Protestantism with the states of the former Confederacy. The second map is even more revealing.  It shows the concentration of individuals who identified themselves to census takers as non-hyphenated “Americans.”

It is clear from the map that most self-described unhyphenated “Americans” are, in fact, whites of British descent — many if not most of them descendants of the Scots-Irish diaspora that emigrated from Ulster to the British colonies in the 1700s.  The point is that many white Southerners do not think of themselves as having any “ethnicity” at all. Others — German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans — are hyphenated Americans. White Southerners tend to see themselves as “pure” Americans, “real” Americans, “normal” Americans. Long after Mayflower descendants were submerged by waves of  European migration in New England, large regions of the white South remain the last places in the country where local majorities can trace their family ancestry back to before 1776 in British America.

As difficult as it may be, outsiders should try to imagine the world as viewed by conservative white Southerners, who think they are the real Americans — that is, old-stock British-Americans — and the adherents of the true religion, evangelical Protestantism. In this perspective, the rest of the country was taken over by invading hordes of Germans, Irish and other European tribes in the first half of the 19th century, leaving the South, largely unaffected by European immigration, as the last besieged pocket of old-stock British-Americans, sharing parts of their territory with subjugated and segregated African-Americans.

This local British-American ethno-racial hegemony in the South was eroded somewhat by the migration of Northeasterners and Midwesterners to the Sun Belt following World War II and the advent of air-conditioning. And now, predominantly nonwhite immigration from Latin America and Asia threatens to make white Southerners of British Protestant descent a minority in their own region. Texas and Florida are already majority-minority states. It is only a matter of time before the same is true of every state in the South. Southern whites will go from being a minority in the nation as a whole to a minority in the South itself.

If Southern culture had a tradition of assimilating immigrants, then cultural “Southernness” could be detached from any particular ethnicity or race. One could be an assimilated Chinese-American good old boy or a Mexican-American redneck.  To some degree, that is happening. And Southern whites and Southern blacks have always shared many elements of a common regional culture.

But it is difficult, if not impossible, for many white Southerners to disentangle regional culture (Southern) from race (white) and ethnicity (British Protestant). The historical memory of white Southerners is not of ethnic coexistence and melting-pot pluralism but of ethnic homogeneity and racial privilege. Small wonder that going from the status of local Herrenvolk to local minority in only a generation or two is causing much of the white South to freak out.

The demographic demise of the white South is going to be traumatic for the nation as a whole. A century ago, when European immigration made old-stock Yankee Protestants a minority in much of the Northeast and Midwest, one response was hysterical Anglo-American nativism. In a 1921 essay in Good Housekeeping titled “Whose Country Is This?,” then Vice President Calvin Coolidge, an old-stock Yankee from Vermont, explained:  “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” Patrician Yankees promoted immigration restriction to prevent “inferior” European races from further contaminating America. Some eminent Americans of New England descent, including Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, all of them nasty anti-Semites, took the extreme step of expatriating themselves. James and Eliot became British subjects and Pound made anti-American broadcasts for Mussolini during World War II.

Just as white Southerners today are gerrymandering congressional districts and contemplating gerrymandering the Electoral College to compensate for their dwindling numbers, so the outnumbered Yankees of the North sought to dilute the political influence of European “ethnics” in the early 1900s.  When the 1920 census revealed that largely European urbanites outnumbered mostly old-stock Anglo-American rural voters, Congress failed to reapportion itself for a decade, because of the determination of small-town Anglo-Americans to minimize the power of “white ethnics.”

By the 1970s, the social divisions among old-stock Anglo-Americans and the “white ethnics” had faded to the point that most white Americans in the North had ancestors from several Western European nationalities. Similarly, the trans-racial melting pot in the U.S. will probably blur or erase many of today’s racial differences by the middle of the 21st century.

But the old-stock Yankees in the Northeast and Midwest did not accept their diminished status in their own regions without decades of hysteria and aggression and political gerrymandering. The third and final defeat of the white South, its demographic defeat, is likely to be equally prolonged and turbulent. Fasten your seat belts.

The World George H. W. Bush Built. By Robert Kaplan.

The World George H. W. Bush Built. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, February 8, 2013.

Morsi and Egypt. List of Relevant NJB Repository Posts.

Cut Egypt Off. By Joseph Raskas. February 7, 2013.

Letter from Cairo: Back Street’s Back. By Elijah Zarwan. February 6, 2013.

When Tyrants and Hatemongers Embrace. By Jonathan S. Tobin. February 5, 2013.

“Groundhog Day” in Cairo. By Ashraf Khalil. February 5, 2013.

Deadly Deserts. By Ralph Peters. February 3, 2013.

Sen. Rand Paul on Failure to Ban Transfer of F-16s From US to Egypt. February 2, 2013.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and Femen Protest Against Morsi in Stockholm. February 2, 2013.

Mark Levin: “The Muslim Brotherhood Has Infiltrated Our Government, It’s Called Barack Obama.” January 31, 2013.

Think Again: The Muslim Brotherhood. By Eric Trager. January 30, 2013.

Aide to Egyptian President Morsi Claims Holocaust a US Hoax. By Paul Alster. January 30, 2013.

Hillary Clinton Talks Benghazi With Greta Van Susteren In All-Encompassing Foreign Policy Interview. By Josh Feldman. January 29, 2013.

Is Egypt Facing Another Revolution? By Ariel Ben Solomon. By January 29, 2013.

Is Morsi a Two-Faced Manipulator? By Dieter Bednarz and Volkhard Windfuhr. January 29, 2013.

Why Is Obama Bragging About Egypt? By Jonathan S. Tobin. January 28, 2013.

Morsi Declares State of Emergency in Three Egyptian Cities. By David D. Kirkpatrick. January 28, 2013.

There He Goes Again: Egypt’s Morsi Stuns U.S. Senators In Meeting With “Jews-Control-Media” Slur. By Richard Behar. January 27, 2013.

Apes, Pigs, and F-16s. By Andrew C. McCarthy. January 26, 2013.

Rand Paul: “Attack On Israel Will Be Treated As An Attack On US.” January 26, 2013.

Senator Rand Paul on US, F-16 Fighters, Egypt and Israel. January 25, 2013.

Kerry Defends Weapons Giveaway to Muslim Brotherhood Terror Regime. By Daniel Greenfield. January 24, 2013.

Morsi Explains Anti-Semitic Remarks by Saying Jews Control Media. By Walter Russell Mead. January 24, 2013.

Ralph Peters on Benghazi Hearing and Gift of F-16 Fighter Jets to Egypt. January 23, 2013.

Egypt: The Rule of the Brotherhood. By Yasmine El Rashidi. January 23, 2013.

Rand Paul Questions Hillary Clinton at the Senate Benghazi Hearings. January 23, 2013.

In Light of Benghazi Hearings, Taking Stock of Arab Spring, North Africa Turmoil. January 23, 2013.

Mark Levin Interviews Rand Paul on Benghazi Hearing. January 23, 2013.

Basmallah, Three-Year-Old Egyptian Girl: Jews Are Apes and Pigs. January 22, 2013.

Bring Back Mubarak! By Jamie Dettmer and Mike Giglio. January 22, 2013.

Egyptian protestors attack Morsi look-a-like. January 19, 2013.

New clips quote Morsi calling Obama a liar, urging Muslims to nurse hatred of Jews. January 18, 2013.

Morsi’s Anti-Semitic Rant Comes to Light. By Walter Russell Mead. January 15, 2013.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi says Israelis are the blood-sucking “descendants of apes and pigs.” January 9, 2013.

Egypt Official: Israel Will Be Wiped Out in a Decade. By Roi Kais. January 1, 2013.


Newer posts on Morsi and Egypt, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here, here, here, here, here, here. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.