Nobody Can Govern America from the Left. By Robert W. Merry.

Nobody Can Govern America from the Left: The Real Midterm-Elections Lesson. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, November 5, 2014.

The Psychology of Barack Obama. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, November 6, 2014.

This Man Is an Island: Obama Stands Alone. By David Rothkopf. Foreign Policy, November 5, 2014.

My American exceptionalism fantasy is over: How these midterms sealed the deal. By Andrew Cotto. Salon, November 6, 2014.


Merry [Nobody]:

Much has been written, and more will be, about what the 2014 elections mean, and most of it will focus on the small stuff—whether it was a “wave” or not, whether it was an anti-incumbency or anti-Obama phenomenon, what the president does now, what happens to gridlock and so on. Place all that to the side for the moment, and let’s get to the big picture on what this election demonstrates.

It demonstrates that nobody can govern America from the left, because the country doesn’t want to go there, and because whenever it has been tried in recent decades, it has failed. While the elites of the media, academia and the managerial class can’t seem to absorb this fundamental reality, the American people know it.

This reality comes into focus with a review of the country’s history since the emergence of the Great Depression of 1929-1942. Franklin Roosevelt attacked the problem from the left, marshaling governmental power as never before and rolling over traditional views, going back to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, about small government and strict construction of the Constitution. Many conservative thinkers—for example, in recent years, Amity Shlaes—have argued that FDR’s policies failed to address the persistent economic dislocation. But in political terms, Roosevelt was a great success. He spurred substantial economic growth year after year and demonstrated that, in times such as those, governing the country from the left was not only acceptable, but probably necessary. The country loved the guy.

But we should be mindful of what happened to Roosevelt’s New Deal—the greatest aggrandizement of governmental power in our history—after his 1936 landslide reelection and his ill-conceived effort to aggrandize his power further by “packing” the Supreme Court. The voters concluded that Roosevelt had gone far enough, and they placed a clamp on his presidency. Republicans picked up eighty House seats in 1938 and six Senate seats. There was no New Deal reversal, nor would there be one, because the American people liked the country’s new power alignments. But further significant governmental expansion now wasn’t in the cards.

That was the state of play in American politics through the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who never sought to dismantle the New Deal, because he knew the voters wouldn’t stand for it. At the same time, he also knew the voters weren’t looking for any serious expansion.

But the country faced a huge agenda of unfinished business in the area of civil rights, and Lyndon Johnson leveraged the civic emotions of the Kennedy assassination to address that lingering necessity through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the process, he fostered a further expansion in the scope and reach of the federal government, then extended this expansion further with his Great Society initiatives to fight poverty, establish Medicare and Medicaid, and address housing, education and nutrition issues. Again, the American people generally accepted this expanded governmental role, over the loud objections of conservatives, but then resisted efforts to expand it further.

That has been the state of play in American politics ever since. The great fault line has been on the question of governmental aggrandizement. And, while there have been some initiatives along these lines over the years (creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and the Education and Energy departments), the country generally has resisted building upon the New Deal and Great Society in any serious way. That means little prospect for presidents to succeed while seeking to govern from the left.

Consider the history. Jimmy Carter tried to govern from the left—and failed. Bill Clinton tried it for his first two years—and had his head handed to him in the 1994 midterm elections, when the country gave both houses of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in more than forty years. At that point, Clinton brilliantly defaulted to a carefully calibrated governing philosophy designed to place him just to the left of center. It worked handsomely, and his presidency generally is considered to have been a success.

Then came Obama, whose grand aim was to achieve historical greatness by building upon the governmental structures created by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. This was seen in his big economic stimulus program, his Affordable Care Act, his “cap and trade” energy initiative, his Dodd-Frank bill with its new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and expansive bureaucratic meddling into markets, his plans to use the tax code for income redistribution, his expansion of the country’s regulatory apparatus and his exploitation of executive powers far beyond anything seen before in any president. His aim was to establish a new era of big government. As the New York Times’ David Brooks has written, “Capitalism is just a feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.”

It didn’t work. It didn’t work in part because the American people never gave him a mandate for that kind of governmental expansion. This is reflected most starkly in the way his congressional allies pushed through Congress the Affordable Care Act—by distorting traditional procedures, without collecting a single vote from the opposition party. Neither Roosevelt, nor Johnson would have dreamed of embracing such a politically dangerous tack when they sought to take the country into new territory of governmental expansion. They knew such initiatives had to be undertaken with a broad national consensus or shouldn’t be undertaken at all. They mustered the requisite mandates before proceeding. Obama didn’t.

But, if Obama’s program didn’t work in political terms, it also didn’t work in structural terms. The stimulus program didn’t stimulate. Obamacare quickly went awry and has not worked as advertised. The president’s energy program—particularly his opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline—is widely seen as stifling economic growth. His redistributionist plans can’t spur growth. His jobs performance is mediocre at best. His promiscuous use of executive authority is edging the country toward an unnecessary constitutional crisis.

The Obama presidency constitutes one of the great missed opportunities in American political history. He assumed office with an immense reservoir of goodwill at a time when the country was beset by an economic crisis that rendered voters highly receptive to bold action. The opposition party was in disarray as a result of its own failed presidency. Voters were ready for a new direction based upon a new matrix of political thinking that could foster new coalitions of citizens weary of the old fights and hungry for a new national coalescence.

No such national coalescence was possible by building upon the New Deal and Great Society foundations of old. They may have been right for their time, but they aren’t right for ours, as the American people have declared this week with emphatic bluntness. The folks over at MSNBC will never get it, but the next Democratic president should give it some serious thought.

In the meantime, while the country can’t be governed from the left, it has to be governed. And the challenge of new thinking and new coalitions applies to Republicans as much as it does to Democrats. The voters didn’t turn to the GOP this week because they have any particular faith in that party. They turned to the opposition because that’s what they do in our two-party system when they are grappling with a failed presidency.

And so the struggle will continue until one party or the other—or perhaps even a new party—will finally exploit the opportunity born of crisis to lead us out of the current mess.

Campaigning for ISIS in the West. By Clarissa Ward.

Campaigning for ISIS in the West. By Clarissa Ward. Video. 60 Minutes. CBS News, November 2, 2014.

Sam Harris Discusses Religious Violence and Islam with Cenk Uygur and Fareed Zakaria.

Sam Harris and Cenk Uygur Clear the Air on Religious Violence and Islam. Video. The Young Turks, October 23, 2014. YouTube. With commentary at SamHarris.org.




Fareed Zakaria vs. Sam Harris on Radical Islam: “Islam Has Been Spread By The Sword For Over 1,000 Years.” Video and transcript. Real Clear Politics, November 2, 2014. YouTube. YouTube. Breitbart. Haaretz.

Sam Harris on GPS “Islam has been spread by the sword.” Video and transcript. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, November 2, 2014.

Harris on inter-spiritual struggle vs. holy war. Video and transcript. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, November 1, 2014.




Fareed Zakaria GPS Transcript:

One month ago the celebrated atheist, author, and neuroscientist Sam Harris appeared on “Real Time,” Bill Maher’s HBO show. The conversation about Islam that ensued created quite a bit of controversy. Harris said, among other things, that, quote, “Islam at this moment is the mother lode of bad ideas.” Unquote. He went on to say that more than 20 percent of Muslims are either jihadists or Islamist who want to foist their religion on the rest of humanity. That comes out to about 300 million people.

I beg to differ and said as much when I responded with my own thoughts on the show. But I wanted to talk to Mr. Harris in person so here he is. He’s the author of a new book Waking Up, and we might get to it.

SAM HARRIS, AUTHOR, WAKING UP: Yes.

ZAKARIA: But first I want to ask you about that number.

HARRIS: Sure.

ZAKARIA: Which struck me as sort of pulled out of a hat. If you do have, you know, something in the range of 20 percent of all Muslims who are either jihadists or Islamists and, you know, which implies condoning violence and such, I’m just doing the math, that comes to about 300 million.

HARRIS: Correct.

ZAKARIA: So there’s – there were 10,000 terrorist events last year. Let’s assume that 100 people – let’s assume all of those were Muslim. Let’s assume each event was planned by 100 people, neither of those assumptions is right but I’m being generous.

HARRIS: Right.

ZAKARIA: That comes to about a million people who are jihadists. So that still leaves us with 299 million missing Muslim terrorists.

HARRIS: Yes. Right. Well, there are a few distinctions, I think, we have to make. One is there’s a difference between a jihadist and an Islamist. And there I was talking about Islamists and jihadists together. And so Islamists are people who want to foist their interpretation of Islam on the rest of society and sometimes they have a revolutionary bent, sometimes they have more of a normal political bent, but they do want –

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: But the fact that somebody may believe that, for example, Sharia should obtain and women’s testimony should be worth half a man's in court.

HARRIS: Right.

ZAKARIA: Doesn’t mean that they want to kill people.

(CROSSTALK)

HARRIS: Well, no –

ZAKARIA: Being conservative and religious, which by the way is not my orientation at all, but it’s different from wanting to kill people.

HARRIS: Yes, yes. Well, we should – again, you have to this on specific points like, do you favor killing apostates? Do you think adulterers should be killed? And even among Islamists you’d find more subscribing to one versus the other depending on the poll you trust. But I didn’t just pull the number out of a hat. There’s a group at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill that looked at 40 years of parliamentary elections in the Muslim world. Literally every election that has occurred and found Islamists got 15 percent of the votes.

So I would say that – if you take that number 15 percent who will vote for Islamist parties and then you look at the poll results on specific implementation of Sharia law, so do you want adulterers and thieves given the traditional punishments or should apostates be killed, you find – you never find the number with very few exceptions. You never find the number as low as 15 percent voting in favor of those punishments. It’s often 60 percent depending on the society.

ZAKARIA: Right. And –

HARRIS: So I was – I believe nudging that up to something around 20 percent is still a conservative estimate of the percentage of Muslims worldwide who have values relating to human rights and free speech that are really in zero sum contest with our own. And I just think we have to speak honestly about that.

ZAKARIA: Clearly Islam has a problem today but there have been periods when Islam was at the vanguard of modernity. You know, it was the place that preserved Aristotle and preserved science. So if it was Islam that was the problem, how come it was OK then? In other words that would suggest that it is the social and political conditions within Muslim societies or – you know, the people – in other words clearly Islam has been compatible with peace and progress and it is compatible with violence I would argue just like all religions.

HARRIS: Yes. Well, up to a point. I would say that specific ideas have specific consequences, and the idea of jihad is not a new one. It’s not an invention of the 20th century. Many people are now spreading a very PC and sanitized history of religious conflict.

Islam has been spread by the sword for over 1,000 years, and, yes, there are – there’s been an intensification for obvious political reasons of intolerance in the 20th century, but the idea that life for Christians and Jews as Dhimmi under Muslim rulers for 1,000 years was good doesn’t make any sense and certainly life for Jews when you –

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: Wait a second –

HARRIS: When you compare it to medieval Christendom then OK it might –

ZAKARIA: But that was the main alternative.

HARRIS: Yes.

ZAKARIA: I mean, that’s why when the Jews left Spain and were expelled they went to the place that they thought was most hospitable to them which was the Ottoman Empire.

HARRIS: Yes. OK. But so –

ZAKARIA: Which is the caliphate, right?

HARRIS: You know, I criticize Christianity as much as anyone. I wrote a book Letter to a Christian Nation.

ZAKARIA: Right.

HARRIS: Which just say a vilification of the history of Christianity, the influence of the beliefs in the modern world –

ZAKARIA: I would have thought having written that book you would recognize that there are elements of Christianity that, as you point out in that book are –

HARRIS: There are. There are.

ZAKARIA: -- compatible and celebrate slavery and violence.

HARRIS: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

ZAKARIA: And, you know, all these very, very backward attitudes, and yet there are times when Christianity represented that and at times when it represented peace and modernity.

HARRIS: OK. But there’s a few things we have to distinguish here. One is, specific ideas have specific consequences. So when you ask why Jews aren’t living out of Leviticus and Deuteronomy anymore and not – they’re not sanctioning genocide, they’re not sanctioning killing people for working on the Sabbath, there are several answers to that question. One is that there is no Sanhedrin. But the fact that they don't have a Sanhedrin makes –

ZAKARIA: Explain what a Sanhedrin means.

HARRIS: It’s a consecrated body of elders in the community that can judge whether or not somebody should be killed for working on the Sabbath. So the details matter. And one of the details here is that a belief that in Islam that the one true faith has to conquer the world through jihad essentially and that free speech –

ZAKARIA: But jihad means different things to different people.

HARRIS: I agree with you that we have to convince the Muslim world or get the Muslim world to convince itself that jihad really just means an inner spiritual struggle. But that is the end game for civilization but the reality is an honest reading of the text and an honest reading of Muslim history makes jihad look very much like holy wars.

ZAKARIA: So in that sense, the problem is you and Osama bin Laden agree.

HARRIS: Well –

ZAKARIA: Because after all you're saying this is – his interpretation of Islam is correct.

HARRIS: Well, his – this is the problem. His interpretation of Islam is very straightforward and honest, and you really have to split hairs and do some interpretative acrobatics in order to get it look – get it to look non-canonical.

ZAKARIA: But do you really think that the path to reforming Islam is to tell Muslims that their religion is the mother lode of bad ideas, that they should become atheists or symbolic followers or nominal I think was the word you used. These nominal followers.

HARRIS: Right.

ZAKARIA: I mean, do you really think that 1.6 billion devout Muslims are going to go, oh, damn, of course, Sam Harris is right, my religion is crap and I should just abandon it?

HARRIS: No. No. Well, and I slightly misspoke there. I didn’t mean nominal followers in the sense that only Muslim atheists could reform the faith. What I meant is followers who don’t take these specific dangerous beliefs very seriously and want to interpret jihad as an inner spiritual struggle as opposed to holy war.

ZAKARIA: But do you think you're helping them or you’re making it harder for them by, as I said, adopting the Osama bin Laden interpretation?

HARRIS: I’ll tell you who's making it harder for them. Liberals who deny the problem. I get e-mails every day from atheists and secularists living in the Muslim world who say I can’t –

ZAKARIA: Forget about others.

(CROSSTALK)

HARRIS: No. I'm telling –

ZAKARIA: I do help –

HARRIS: I’m telling you the only metric I have for that is I hear from people living in Pakistan, for instance, who say if a liberal like you can't even speak honestly about the link between ideology and violence, what hope is there for me?

I can’t even tell my mother what I believe about God because I would be afraid of my own family or village killing me.

Bill Maher Debates Rula Jebreal on Islam and Free Speech.

Maher vs. Muslim Guest on Berkeley Speech. Video and Transcript. Real Clear Politics, October 31, 2014. Also at Haaretz. (cached).

Bill Maher Spanks Berkeley Students as Commencement Speech Flap Continues. By Lisa de Moraes. Deadline Hollywood, November 1, 2014.

Rula Jebreal to Bill Maher: “When you talk about Islam in a certain way… some people feel threatened.” Salon, November 1, 2014.

The hypocrisy of Rula Jebreal. Elder of Ziyon, November 2, 2014.

Rula Jebreal sounds off on Bill Maher Islam spat: “What he is doing is un-American.” By Luke Brinker. Salon, November 3, 2014.

Wake up and oppose theocracy: Bill Maher, Rula Jebreal and the urgent Islam debate. By Jeffrey Tayler. Salon, November 15, 2014.

Muslims’ beliefs are “untrue” and “ridiculous,” Salon author says, offering support for Maher’s intolerance. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, November 18, 2014.

Political Correctness Is Back. By Peter Beinart. The Atlantic, October 31, 2014.

Don’t Muzzle the Clown: Berkeley Students Shouldn’t Censor Bill Maher. By Timothy Egan. New York Times, October 30, 2014.

UC Berkeley students organize to block Bill Maher from speaking on campus. By Aleister. Legal Insurrection, October 28, 2014.

Berkeley on offense for Bill Maher. By Amy Miller. Legal Insurrection, October 20, 2014.

Bill Maher Responds to UC Berkeley Petition. Video. Real Time, October 31, 2014. YouTube.




Real Time with Bill Maher: Islam and Free Speech. Video. Real Time, October 31, 2014. YouTube. Also here. Overtime.



Transcript:

BILL MAHER: Next issue, Berkeley. Normally, I would throw out an issue and let the panel then just interrupt me, which they always do before I finish the question. But all week long I’ve had all these request for interviews about this. Let me just get out my statement about it because people have been asking. I said I would save it for HBO because they pay me.

So here’s what happened. A couple of months ago I was asked to deliver a commencement speech for Berkeley's December graduation. I was like great. I love Berkeley, I’m off in December and it will be a sentimental journey. Who doesn’t remember their graduation in December? But whatever, I’m happy to do it because although I never attended Berkeley, I was very aware of their place in the American debate. On the far left in a country where the Democratic party has sold out to the center and even the right, this is what is needed. This is why I wanted to accept this invitation and they invited me because it was the 50th anniversary of something that is legendary on that campus, The Berkeley Free Speech Movement. I guess they don’t teach irony in college anymore.

And then a few weeks ago, Ben Affleck was on our show and we had a discussion about Islam that I’ve had a thousand and one nights with a lot of other people, but he’s an A-list movie star so our very deep media started to care about it. It’s always easy to do a story about somebody being mad as somebody so when a few thousand people online who didn't have to do anything more than click a button, who didn’t even go to Berkeley necessarily wanted me to be disinvited as the commencement speaker, because, you know, I'm a racist. Right, because Islam is a race.

You know, this is the level of logic we are dealing with. By the way, even Reza Aslan, my most strident critics has gone to pains to say he doesn’t think I’m a bigot. Here’s what he said on HuffPost Live – “Bill Maher is not a bigot. I know him. We are friends. We hang out with each other backstage. He loves having me on the show despite the fact that he disagrees with me on a lot of things and that shows the kind of person that he is.” If even my most respectable critic who is a Muslim says this, what leg does the “protest” have to stand on? He and I disagree on some stuff but he’s always welcome on this show. That’s how it’s done, kids. Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn’t upset you?

So anyway, the university has come down on my side, saying what I hoped they would say all along, which is that we’re liberals, we’re supposed told like free speech. So I want to come. I’m planning to come. I’m planning a trip to the Redwoods the next day. My only reservation in not coming is the argument that it will be a media circus and turn which should be a day about the graduates, which it should be, you, into something else. I don’t want to do that. It’s the only reason I would ever pull out.

But let me say this to those students worried about that: I promise this will be your day. This is a commencement speech. The issue is you. My speech was, is, I hope, going to be about you and whatever tips I thought that could actually help you in life because I already lived through it. That and my funk about how Jewish women hate to have sex. So here’s my final plea to you liberal – in the truest sense of the word – college students. Not just as Berkeley but all over the country. Please, weigh in on this. My reputation isn’t on the line. Yours is.

Okay, so what do you think about this? There’s my piece.

RULA JEBREAL, GUEST: I don’t think it’s about free speech. I’m sorry to tell you this, Bill. And I’ll tell you why, it’s very simple. These same students who signed that petition actually invited you to a debate. And they said they are welcome so they can have a conversation, they can ask you a question. If they don’t like your views on television, they can switch channels. But the commencement speech, it’s a platform, actually, that doesn’t give the opportunity for questions, it doesn’t give an opportunity for push back, even for a debate. It’s a monologue, it’s not a dialogue. These same students feel offended that your views of Islam – the generalization, and they said it clearly in their declaration, they said the generalization perpetrates bigotry. This is what they said.

Look, I am all for freedom of speech. I love debates; I hate monologues. When you invite somebody to a commencement speech, you said it, it’s about the students. And The New York Times, in this piece this morning said you can’t counter a bad speech with a good speech except they don’t have that venue. They don’t have that opportunity on that day of graduation. They can’t out of that.

MAHER: I’m not coming to speak about that subject as I just said.

SEN. ANGUS KING (I-MAINE): Does that mean we never have speeches? Every speech has to be two people?

JEBREAL: But this is a commencement speech. This is a commencement address.

KING: Every commencement speech has one speaker.

JEBREAL: Listen, would you accept an openly anti-Semitic person to give a commencement speech to Jewish students? I actually would not accept that.

 MAHER: As I just said, even Reza Aslan says I’m not a bigot. So I rather resent the idea that I’m comparable to an anti-Semite. All I’ve ever done was basically read facts.

JEBREAL: What facts did you read? I’m sorry, you are comparing jihadists, Salafists, Sunni, you don’t know the difference. You are comparing all Muslims in one part –

MAHER: You are Palestinian?

JEBREAL: I am actually a secular Muslim. And when you talking about Islam in a certain way, I have to tell you, it’s offensive sometimes.

KING: But it’s okay to be offensive. That’s what free speech is all about. If free speech is only speech you like, it’s not free speech.

JEBREAL: No, but they invited him for a debate. He can go to that debate. I can accompany you on that debate if you want. I am happy to have that debate wherever you want.

KING: He was invited to be a commencement speaker and then he made a statement that people didn’t like.

JEBREAL: I don’t know what to say.

MAHER: Can you be gay in Gaza?

JEBREAL: Yes, you can.

MAHER: Really?

JEBREAL: Yes you can.

MAHER: And live?

JEBREAL: Absolutely, you can. You know what? It’s even more offensive because you are saying –

MAHER: I’m just asking because –

JEBREAL: You can be gay in Gaza.

MAHER: Really?

JEBREAL: I've traveled the Middle East.

MAHER: Is there a gay bar in Gaza?

JEBREAL: This is what I do for a living. You are comparing the majority of Muslim states with Saudi Arabia or with

KING: Should I call [Ben] Affleck and get him back here?

JEBREAL: You know – do you want to listen or do you want to –

RET. GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I think the issue is beyond Muslims. I think it’s about whether someone can be invited to give a speech and people will listen. Maybe they’ll agree, maybe they won’t. But we don’t have a situation in Berkeley where people can’t give a speech. I mean, that’s the whole essence of the American system, people can give a speech, not everyone has to agree.

JEBREAL: That’s ridiculous, I’m sorry General. The Muslim community in this country, you are treating them like Fifth Columnists, and they are not.

MAHER: No I am not.

JEBREAL: And guess what? If these people – the Muslim community feels threatened and feel offended and they were underrepresented in the media and underrepresented in political avenues. You never invite them here on these issues.

MAHER: Never invite them here? You’re here.

JEBREAL: On these issues.

MAHER: Reza is here. They’re here all the time.

JEBREAL: On these issues.

MAHER: What do you mean on these issues? I’m the one who says I want to stop talking about this. I can’t because things happen in the news.

JEBREAL: Reza Aslan was inviting to talk about something else. It was August 1st.

MAHER: Well, Reza’s been here a lot.

JEBREAL: And I'm happy that he’s been here and I’m here and I’m so happy to be invited here. However, if you want to have a serious conversation about Islam, and I’m sorry to say this Bill –

MAHER: Every time I tell you something you don’t like it’s not a serious conversation or I’m a bigot. I’m sorry, in your world either I say exactly what you want me to say or else I’m a bigot. It doesn’t work that way.

JEBREAL: Look, if you’re – you don’t have to say what I want because what I want is not a war on Islam. I want to win the war on terror. When you are repeating the same things that actual al Qaeda says, the same thing, you are doing the work for them. Al-Zawahiri used to say, bin Laden used to say this is not a war on terror, this is a war on Islam. My father was Muslim, he was Sufi. Guess what, let me tell you something. You don’t even know the difference between Sufi, Sunni, Sunni Shafi’i, Sunni Hanbali.

MAHER: Yeah, I do.

JEBREAL: You don’t. For you, we are all jihadists.

MAHER: I know that in many places in the world, if you left your religion, what would happen?

JEBREAL: Guess what, let me tell you something. Many people in Indonesia –

MAHER: You could walk inside a door in Gaza and say you know what, I’m a Presbyterian today?

JEBREAL: Maybe not in Gaza, to be honest. But you can do it in Jordan, you can do it in Lebanon. The majority of – you are blaming the majority for the criminal acts of a minority. Unfortunately, the majority are disorganized and there's a small minority that are well-organized and controlling the majority.

MAHER: I have to move on.

JEBREAL: I am happy that you’re moving on but I’m telling you, there are some people who – if you would have said some of the things you would have said about African-Americans and about Jews, you would be fired.

MAHER: But African-Americans and Jews don’t belong to a religion that wanted to kill Salman Rushdie for writing a book, if we want to get back to the free speech issue. So, I’m sorry, that’s called false equivalency. Not all religions are alike. I have to move on. I’m so sorry. (HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, October 31, 2014)

Gene Simmons to Women: Stop Depending on Men.

Gene Simmons to women: Stop depending on men. Video. Trending with Tantaros. FoxNews.com, October 24, 2014. YouTube. Also here.




Gene Simmons to women: Stop depending on men, eventually your husbands will leave you. By Jenny Kutner. Salon, October 27, 2014.

Gene Simmons: Young women should marry older men. By Nicki Gostin. FoxNews.com, October 21, 2014.

A New Jacksonian Anthem: American Middle Class by Angaleena Presley.

Angaleena Presley: American Middle Class. Official Audio. Angaleena Presley, September 29, 2014. YouTube.

 


Angaleena Presley: American Middle Class Live on David Letterman. Video. Late Show with David Letterman, October 11, 2014. YouTube.




Angaleena Presley website.

About Angaleena:

If there’s a pedigree for a modern country music star, then Angaleena Presley fits all of the criteria: a coal miner’s daughter; native of Beauty, Kentucky; a direct descendent of the original feuding McCoys; a one-time single mother; a graduate of both the school of hard knocks and college; a former cashier at both Wal-Mart and Winn-Dixie. Perhaps best of all the member of Platinum-selling Pistol Annies (with Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe) says she “doesn’t know how to not tell the truth.”

That truth shines through on her much-anticipated debut album, American Middle Class, which she co-produced with Jordan Powell. Yet this is not only the kind of truth that country music has always been known for—American Middle Class takes it a step further by not only being a revealing memoir of Presley’s colorful experiences but also a powerful look at contemporary rural American life. “I have lived every minute on this record. My mama ain’t none too happy about me spreading my business around but I have to do it,” Presley says. “It’s the experience of my life from birth to now.”

Yet the specificity of the album’s twelve gems only makes it more universal. While zooming in on the details of her own life, Presley exposes themes to which everyone can relate. The album explores everything from a terrible economy to unexpected pregnancies to drug abuse in tightly written songs that transcend the specific and become tales of our shared experiences. “I think a good song is one where people listen to a very personal story and think ‘That’s my story, too,’” Presley says.

Mission accomplished.

She has created a hugely resonant album, one that is simultaneously a completely new sound and also deeply entrenched in the beloved traditions of country music, much like Presley herself. Her early life in the mountains was one that taught her to respect her heritage while being invested in the future at the same time.  Her parents made sure she knew Carole King and Janis Joplin as well as Ralph Stanley, Merle Haggard, and Bill Monroe. She studied the melodies and lyrics of Indigo Girls yet sometimes skipped school so she could drive over to Loretta Lynn’s home at Butcher Holler to seek inspiration.

Presley grew up in a place where the lush mountains and dignity of the people were juxtaposed against a spreading prescription pill problem and rampant unemployment. She doesn’t hold back from exploring these tough issues while also managing to have a rollicking time on the record, often combining the harder subjects with a more driving and joyous delivery but without ever sacrificing the seriousness of the topics she is cutting wide open. 

Before creating this solo effort Presley meticulously crafted her own sound for years. “I have paid my dues. I’ve been through the grind, and so many people have told me no.  But I kept on making music.  I had to,” Presley says. “I never would compromise because I couldn’t.  Part of the waiting has been my own unwillingness to follow the formula but now I feel like the formula has caught up with me. Maybe I was just ahead of my time.”  

That particular sound is one that is equal parts tradition and originality on a concept album in the tradition of Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger or Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, albums that tell a succinct and powerful story through a signature sound and masterful songwriting of true artists. Presley knows how to have a big time but she is also fiercely dedicated to her music, keenly intelligent, and determined to tell her own truth. 

Presley wrote five of the twelve songs by herself and her co-writers are a virtual Who’s-Who of the best songwriters in the business:  Mark D. Sanders, Matraca Berg, Lori McKenna, Sarah Siskind, Bob Dipero, Barry Dean, and Luke Laird. She credits her co-producer, Jordan Powell, with assembling an enviable cast of pickers on a record that allows room for the instrumentalists to shine. Among them are Keith Gattis (who’s acoustic solo on “Life of the Party” offers a standout moment) and Audley Freed on guitars, mandolins, and dobros; Josh Grange on a beautifully grieving pedal steel; mandolins, and dobros; Fred Elrtingham keeps things rocking along on drums; Grammy winner Glenn Worff and Motown-influenced Aden Bubeck on bass (with both upright and electric bass adding sizzle to “Knocked Up”), David Henry on haunting cello and strings; and John Henry Trinko driving it all home with a wonderful job on organ and piano. To cap it all off, there are also amazing harmony vocals from standouts such as Patty Loveless, Chris Stapleton, Angie Primm, Keith Gattis, Kelly Archer, Sarah Siskind, Gale Mayes and Emily Saliers (Indigo Girls). 

The honesty, the aching delivery, the picking, the beautifully crafted songs—they all come together to form an album that has been awaited with bated breath by fans and the industry alike and does not disappoint, announcing a bonafide country music star who doesn’t just have the pedigree, she also has the magic in her to transform and move her listeners. 

“In this fast-paced day and age, it’s so hard for us to slow down and live in the moment,” Presley says. “I just hope my songs can be three minutes for a person to experience something in the moment, to connect, and to feel something, whether that be tragedy or joy or something in between.  I want to tell the truth.”

That truth is something that listeners know when they hear it. It’s the solid truth of someone like Presley, who doesn’t just talk the talk but has walked the walk and knows what she’s talking about. That’s real country music and with American Middle Class Angaleena Presley emerges as the clear, fierce, and joyous voice of her generation.

Angaleena Presley Is a Coal Miner’s Daughter, Too. By Jewly Hight. CMT, October 23, 2014.

Angaleena Presley’s music honors and celebrates of the strength, resilience, and moral values of the Jacksonian folk community, otherwise known as the American Middle Class.

The Social Blog: Single Life in 2014

The Social Blog: Single Life in 2014. Video. i24News, October 7, 2014.

The Fear of Greater Chaos. By Robert D. Kaplan.

The Fear of Greater Chaos. By Robert D. Kaplan. Real Clear World, October 9, 2014. Also at Stratfor.

Why So Much Anarchy? By Robert D. Kaplan. Real Clear World, February 6, 2014. Also at Stratfor. 

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. By Robert D. Kaplan. New York: Random House, 2000. Also here.

The Coming Anarchy. By Robert D. Kaplan. The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994. 

Was Democracy Just a Moment? By Robert D. Kaplan. The Atlantic Monthly, December 1997.

Freedom vs. Stability: Are Dictators Worse than Anarchy? By Christiane Hoffmann. Spiegel Online, October 8, 2014. 

Anarchy vs. Stability: Dictatorships and Chaos Go Hand in Hand. By Mathieu von Rohr. Spiegel Online, October 9, 2014. 


Kaplan [Why So Much Anarchy?]: 

Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet.” I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms – making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated.

However, what is not in dispute is that significant portions of the earth, rather than follow the dictates of Progress and Rationalism, are simply harder and harder to govern, even as there is insufficient evidence of an emerging and widespread civil society. Civil society in significant swaths of the earth is still the province of a relatively elite few in capital cities – the very people Western journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the size and influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.

The anarchy unleashed in the Arab world, in particular, has other roots, though -- roots not adequately dealt with in my original article:

The End of Imperialism. That’s right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities – both artificial and not – and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.

The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been democratic in the Middle East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi and the Nasserite pharaohs in Egypt right up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category, which, like that of the imperialists, has been quickly retreating from the scene (despite a comeback in Egypt).

No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population – a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure. (Alas, urban societies are more demanding on central governments than agricultural ones, and the world is rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions that fill the gap between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom. Thus, with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.

Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble or are brought low, it is non-state identities that fill the subsequent void. And in a state configured by long-standing legal borders, however artificially drawn they may have been, the triumph of non-state identities can mean anarchy.

Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days – a millennium ago – when the West was called “Christendom.” Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity. And because there are variations of belief even within a great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious identity and the consequent decline of state identity means the inflammation of doctrinal disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early medieval era, the Byzantine Empire – whose whole identity was infused with Christianity – had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those opposed to graven images like icons) and iconodules (those who venerated them). As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.

Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. But while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state -- with anarchy sometimes the result.

Because we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specific events, anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until new political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily democratic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior to World War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies. But the Middle East and much of Africa lack such bourgeoisie traditions, and so the fall of strongmen has left a void. West African countries that fell into anarchy in the late 1990s -- a few years after my article was published -- like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, still have not really recovered, but are wards of the international community through foreign peacekeeping forces or advisers, even as they struggle to develop a middle class and a manufacturing base. For, the development of efficient and responsive bureaucracies requires literate functionaries, which, in turn, requires a middle class.

The real question marks are Russia and China. The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.

The future of world politics will be about which societies can develop responsive institutions to govern vast geographical space and which cannot. That is the question toward which the present season of anarchy leads.