NOVA: Dawn of Humanity.

The first human? Homo naledi, a new branch of the human family tree. National Geographic.

Dawn of Humanity. Video. NOVA. PBS, September 10, 2015. Also here.

Homo Naledi, New Species in Human Lineage, Is Found in South African Cave. By John Noble Wilford. New York Times, September 10, 2015.

Naledi Fossils: This Face Changes the Human Story. But How? By Jamie Shreeve. National Geographic, September 10, 2015.

Naledi Fossils: Mystery Lingers Over Ritual Behavior of New Human Ancestor. By Nadia Drake. National Geographic, September 15, 2015.

In this artist’s depiction, Homo naledi disposes of its dead in South Africa’s Rising Star cave. Though such advanced behavior is unknown in other early hominins, the scientists who discovered the fossils say no other explanation makes sense. ART BY JON FOSTER. SOURCE: LEEBERGER, WITS

Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa. By Lee R. Berger et al. eLife, September 10, 2015.

Geological and taphonomic context for the new hominin species Homo naledi from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa. By Paul H.G.M Dirks et al. eLife, September 10, 2015.

The many mysteries of Homo naledi. By Chris Stringer. eLife, September 10, 2015.





Wilford:

Acting on a tip from spelunkers two years ago, scientists in South Africa discovered what the cavers had only dimly glimpsed through a crack in a limestone wall deep in the Rising Star Cave: lots and lots of old bones.

The remains covered the earthen floor beyond the narrow opening. This was, the scientists concluded, a large, dark chamber for the dead of a previously unidentified species of the early human lineage — Homo naledi.

The new hominin species was announced on Thursday by an international team of more than 60 scientists led by Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The species name, H. naledi, refers to the cave where the bones lay undisturbed for so long; “naledi” means “star” in the local Sesotho language.

In two papers published this week in the open-access journal eLife, the researchers said that the more than 1,550 fossil elements documenting the discovery constituted the largest sample for any hominin species in a single African site, and one of the largest anywhere in the world. Further, the scientists said, that sample is probably a small fraction of the fossils yet to be recovered from the chamber. So far the team has recovered parts of at least 15 individuals.

“With almost every bone in the body represented multiple times, Homo naledi is already practically the best-known fossil member of our lineage,” Dr. Berger said.

The finding, like so many others in science, was the result of pure luck followed by considerable effort.

Two local cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, found the narrow entrance to the chamber, measuring no more than seven and a half inches wide. They were skinny enough to squeeze through, and in the light of their headlamps they saw the bones all around them. When they showed the fossil pictures to Pedro Boshoff, a caver who is also a geologist, he alerted Dr. Berger, who organized an investigation.

Just getting into the chamber and bringing out samples proved to be a huge challenge. The narrow opening was the only way in.

Paul Dirks, a geologist at James Cook University in Australia, who was lead author of the journal paper describing the chamber, said the investigators first had a steep climb up a stone block called the Dragon’s Back and then a drop down to the entrance passage — all of this in the total absence of natural light.

For the two extended investigations of the chamber in 2013 and 2014, Dr. Berger rounded up the international team of scientists and then recruited six excavating scientists through notices on social media. One special requirement: They had to be slender enough to crawl through that crack in the wall.

One of the six, who were all women and were called “underground astronauts,” was Marina Elliott of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She said the collection and removal of the fossils involved “some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions ever encountered in the search for human origins.”

Besides introducing a new member of the prehuman family, the discovery suggests that some early hominins intentionally deposited bodies of their dead in a remote and largely inaccessible cave chamber, a behavior previously considered limited to modern humans. Some of the scientists referred to the practice as a ritualized treatment of their dead, but by “ritual” they said they meant a deliberate and repeated practice, not necessarily a kind of religious rite.

“It’s very, very fascinating,” said Ian Tattersall, an authority on human evolution at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was not involved in the research.

“No question there’s at least one new species here,” he added, “but there may be debate over the Homo designation, though the species is quite different from anything else we have seen.”

A colleague of Dr. Tattersall’s at the museum, Eric Delson, who is a professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, was also impressed, saying, “Berger does it again!”

Dr. Delson was referring to Dr. Berger’s previous headline discovery, published in 2010, also involving cave deposits near Johannesburg. He found many fewer fossils that time, but enough to conclude that he was looking at a new species, which he named Australopithecus sediba. Geologists said the individuals lived 1.78 million to 1.95 million years ago, when australopithecines and early species of Homo were contemporaries.

Researchers analyzing the H. naledi fossils have not yet nailed down their age, which is difficult to measure because of the muddled chamber sediments and the absence of other fauna remains nearby. Some of its primitive anatomy, like a brain no larger than an average orange, Dr. Berger said, indicated that the species evolved near or at the root of the Homo genus, meaning it must be in excess of 2.5 million to 2.8 million years old. Geologists think the cave is no older than three million years.

The field work and two years of analysis for Dr. Berger’s latest discovery were supported by the University of the Witwatersrand, the National Geographic Society and the South African Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation. In addition to the journal articles, the findings will be featured in the October issue of National Geographic Magazine and in a two-hour NOVA/National Geographic documentary to air Wednesday on PBS.

Scientists on the discovery team and those not involved in the research noted the mosaic of contrasting anatomical features, including more modern-looking jaws and teeth and feet, that warrant the hominin’s placement as a species in the genus Homo, not Australopithecus, the genus that includes the famous Lucy species that lived 3.2 million years ago. The hands of the newly discovered specimens reminded some scientists of the earliest previously identified specimens of Homo habilis, who were apparently among the first toolmakers.

At a news conference on Wednesday, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a senior author of the paper describing the new species, said it was “unlike any other species seen before,” noting that a small skull with a brain one-third the size of modern human braincases was perched atop a very slender body. An average H. naledi was about five feet tall and weighed almost 100 pounds, he said.

Tracy Kivell of the University of Kent, in England, an associate of Dr. Berger’s team, was struck by H. naledi’s “extremely curved fingers, more curved than almost any other species of early hominin, which clearly demonstrates climbing capabilities.”

William Harcourt-Smith of Lehman College, another researcher at the Museum of Natural History, led the analysis of the feet of the new species, which he said are “virtually indistinguishable from those of modern humans.” These feet, combined with its long legs, suggest that H. naledi was well suited for upright long-distance walking, Dr. Harcourt-Smith said.

In an accompanying commentary in the journal, Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, found overall similarities between the new species and fossils from Dmanisi, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, dated to about 1.8 million years ago. The Georgian specimens are usually assigned to an early variety of Homo erectus.

Much remains to be discovered in the Rising Star Cave, like determining the ages of the fossils and the evolutionary position of H. naledi in the genus Homo and the human family tree. The discovery chamber has not given up all of its secrets. “There are potentially hundreds if not thousands of remains of H. naledi still down there,” Dr. Berger said.

At the news conference in South Africa on Thursday announcing the findings, Dr. Berger said: “I do believe that the field of paleoanthropology had convinced itself, as much as 15 years ago, that we had found everything, that we were not going to make major discoveries and had this story of our origins figured out. I think many people quit exploring, thought it was safer to conduct science inside a lab or behind a computer.” What the new species Naledi says, Dr. Berger concluded, “is that there is no substitute for exploration.”

Is Donald Trump Following in the Footsteps of Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan?

Is Donald Trump Another Andrew Jackson? By Alfred J. Zacher. History News Network, September 14, 2015.

Donald Trump Is Reagan’s Heir. By Matthew Pressman. The Atlantic, September 16, 2015.

Donald Trump is brilliant revenge: The GOP’s demise looks a lot like this. By Heather Cox Richardson. Salon, September 8, 2015.


Zacher:

The possibility of Donald Trump becoming the Republican nominee for president and thereafter being elected to that high office elicits an historical perspective. The name that most readily reflects the credentials and character of Donald Trump is Andrew Jackson. The seventh president was not part of the establishment of the Democratic Party that imparted the thoughtful sometimes-scholarly qualities of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. He was not a member of the Founders. Jackson like Trump was a popular figure of power and success as the general who won the battle of New Orleans. He was a successful lawyer and judge, though known as being hot headed, vulgar and impulsive. He had minimal experience in government serving relatively briefly in the House of Representatives and in the Senate. Jackson entered the political arena at a time of transition and great upheaval in the country. Americans were leaving the comfort of their homes and the country life they knew to work in cities or risking their lives moving to farmlands in the Middle West. This was a rugged, individualistic striving newly enfranchised citizenry who found in the roughhewn outspoken Jackson the personification of themselves. Jackson believed the government was benefiting the wealthy and monopolies to the detriment of the average American.

Jackson clearly represented the views of the majority of electorate during his two terms in office. He met both his and their goal of destroying the Bank of the United States, the institution that carried on some of the functions of the present day Federal Reserve. He and his followers believed the Bank served the wealthy and the monopolies at the expense of the average citizen. Once successful in closing the bank, Jackson established state banks whose easy lending policies led to speculation that ended in a severe depression lasting five years.

Another of his objectives and of the majority of the electorate was the removal of Native Americans from Georgia. Jackson ignored the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, which found unconstitutional the State of Georgia law which disposed of all of the property belong to Native Americans. Further, the law ordered them to leave Georgia. Countless thousands of Native Americans were forced to march to the Oklahoma Territory, with many dying along the way.

Andrew Jackson left office a popular president, appearing to have fulfilled the objectives of the rising segment of the population, who were demanding an opportunity to share in the wealth of the nation. They did not blame Jackson for the depression and they were solidly behind the removal of the Native American.

From this historical perspective, the chances of Donald Trump being the Republican nominee and the next president may reside in the degree of discontent there is within the electorate and their belief he has the wherewithal to resolve that discontent.

The American Jewish Divide Is About Much More Than Iran. By Peter Beinart.

The American Jewish Divide Is About Much More Than Iran. By Peter Beinart. Haaretz, September 9, 2015.

Beinart:

Since the 1960s, American Christians have been waging a bitter culture war. American Jews are now prominent combatants on opposing sides.

Journalists keep saying that the fight over the Iran nuclear deal has bitterly divided the American Jewish community. I think that’s wrong. The fight over the Iran nuclear deal has shown that the American Jewish “community” does not exist.

Community is not an easy term to define, but it suggests a group of people who share a common set of behaviors or beliefs. Shared ancestry doesn’t, by itself, create community. Millions of Americans hail from the British Isles but there is no Anglo-American community because Americans from the British Isles don’t share behaviors or beliefs that distinguish them from Americans as a whole. Shared religion doesn’t, by itself, create community either. There are millions of American Catholics. But knowing an American is Catholic, as opposed to Protestant, tells you almost nothing about how she lives or thinks.

In 2015, knowing that an American is Jewish doesn’t tell you much about how she lives or thinks either. There are today basically two American Jewish communities (though of course some American Jews fall in between), each of which has more in common with a group of American gentiles than with each other. The Iran deal has pitted these two communities against each other. But they’ve been separate for a long time.

Community number one is heavily Orthodox, although it includes some older and more traditional members of the Conservative movement. It’s smaller numerically: Orthodox Jews comprise only 10 percent of American Jewry. Add in the traditionalist Conservatives and you have perhaps 20 percent. (That’s based on the percentage of American Jews who keep kosher). But on Iran, and anything else having to do with Israel, community number one punches above its weight because its members are far more likely to devote themselves to Jewish organizations and causes.

Understanding community number one begins with understanding the way it lives: apart. Orthodox and the most traditional Conservative Jews may work among non-Jews. But they don’t really live among them. According to a fascinating new paper by the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of Orthodox Jews say most or all of their friends are Jewish. Among non-Orthodox Jews, the figure is 26 percent. Eighty-one percent of Orthodox parents send their children to Jewish-only schools. Among the non-Orthodox, the figure is 11 percent. 

There’s a reason community number one lives apart. It is deeply religious, and defines being religious as observing a set of laws that require separation. It’s hard to have close non-Jewish friends when you can’t eat at their homes. It’s hard for your kids to make non-Jewish friends when they don’t go to school or camp with them, and can’t participate in extracurricular activities on Shabbat. 

In its effort to buffer itself against a cultural mainstream it considers threatening to its religious values, community number one shares little with more secular American Jews. But it shares a lot with conservative American Christians. And since the September 11 attacks, these similarities have blossomed into a political alliance based on a shared commitment to Israel, a shared belief that Islamists threaten both Israel and America, and a shared belief that American liberals will not adequately combat that threat.

In the Republican Party, which now claims the allegiance of most Orthodox Jews, community number one works with evangelical Christians extremely effectively. In 2012, Meir Soloveitchik, scion of one of American Orthodoxy’s most famous dynasties, gave the invocation at the Republican National Committee. Ted Cruz has made the Orthodox community central to his presidential fundraising. And the struggle against the Iran deal is largely a product of this conservative Jewish-Christian alliance. In the South, where Jews are scarce, the most prominent opponents of the deal have been evangelical Christians like Cruz and Mike Huckabee. In the northeast, the most prominent opponents have been Orthodox Jews like Joe Lieberman and Brooklyn state Senator Dov Hikind. It’s no coincidence that the only three Democratic senators to oppose the Iran deal (as of this writing) hail from New York, New Jersey and Maryland, states whose Jewish populations are disproportionately Orthodox. Or that later this month, Schumer will attend a fundraiser thanking him for his vote in Teaneck, New Jersey, one of the most prominent Orthodox towns in the country. 

If community number one lives according to a series of boundaries between us and them, right and wrong, community number two is defined by its lack of clear boundaries. If Orthodox Jews anchor community number one, community two is anchored by the more than one-fifth of American Jews who define themselves as Jewish by culture but not religion. These cultural Jews intermarry at a rate of almost 80 percent. Only one in seven say that all or most of their friends are Jewish. 

If the Jews in community number two don’t live tribally, they don’t think tribally either. According to Pew, they reject the idea that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews. They don’t think the current Israeli government wants peace. And they overwhelmingly support a Palestinian state.

In other words, they don’t equate Israel with morality and its adversaries with immorality. Whereas community number one is Manichean, community number two is relativistic. It doesn’t see Israel, or Jews, as having any special claim on morality or truth.

If the religious Jews of community number one have much in common with conservative Christians, the secular Jews of community number two have much in common with secular gentiles. In fact, surveys show that in their political and moral views, non-Orthodox Jews share more with atheists than with any American denomination.  

If community number one is an integral part of the conservative Republican coalition, community number two is an integral part of the liberal Democratic one. Secular Jews help define the values of blue state America: tolerance, diversity, irony, empathy. Just think of blue state America’s patron saint: Jon Stewart.

Secular Jewish identity is so interwoven into liberal American identity, in fact, that liberal American Jews often see them as one and the same. As the sociologist Chaim Waxman has observed, “Increasing numbers of young American Jews assume that liberal American values are actually Jewish values.” Especially since the Iraq War, diplomacy has been a core element of those liberal values. And since 2008, no American politician has articulated them more effectively than U.S. President Barack Obama. Which helps explain why community number two, overwhelmingly, supports Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

For all the current talk of intra-Jewish healing, the rift between America’s two Jewish communities will likely grow. One big reason is generational. Some American Jews have a foot in both camps, but they’re disproportionately older. It’s among the older generation that one more often finds Jews who are secular but intensely tribal (Ed Koch was a good example), and thus live like the members of community number two but view Israel like the members of community number one. It’s also more common to find older religious Jews who are nonetheless politically liberal (Jack Lew is a good example) because they came of age before the Orthodox community moved en masse into the GOP.

Among the young, the divide is sharper. Younger religious Jews are more cloistered than their parents and grandparents. (When Jack Lew and Joe Lieberman were growing up, many Orthodox Jews still attended public school). Younger secular Jews are more assimilated and less tribal than their parents and grandparents.

In the past, I’ve speculated about ways to bridge this divide. But doing so will be hard because Iran is not the cause of the current American Jewish disunity. It’s a symptom. Since the 1960s, American Christians have been waging a bitter culture war. And American Jews are now prominent combatants, on opposing sides. 

The Roots of the Migration Crisis. By Walter Russell Mead.

The Roots of the Migration Crisis. By Walter Russell Mead. Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2015.

Mead:

The Syrian refugee disaster is a result of the Middle East’s failure to grapple with modernity and Europe’s failure to defend its ideals.

The migration crisis enveloping Europe and much of the Middle East today is one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the 1940s. Millions of desperate people are on the march: Sunni refugees driven out by the barbarity of the Assad regime in Syria, Christians and Yazidis fleeing the pornographic violence of Islamic State, millions more of all faiths and no faith fleeing poverty and oppression without end. Parents are entrusting their lives and the lives of their young children to rickety boats and unscrupulous criminal syndicates along the Mediterranean coast, professionals and business people are giving up their livelihoods and investments, farmers are abandoning their land, and from North Africa to Syria, the sick and the old are on the road, carrying a few treasured belongings on a new trail of tears.

It is the first migration crisis of the 21st century, but it is unlikely to be the last. The rise of identity politics across the Middle East and much of sub-Saharan Africa is setting off waves of violence like those that tore apart the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. The hatreds and rivalries driving endangered communities to exile and destruction have a long history. They probably have a long future as well.

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.

The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.

There is no point in rehearsing the multiple failures since Britain’s defeat of the Ottoman Empire liberated the Arabs from hundreds of years of Turkish rule. But it is worth noting that the Arab world has tried a succession of ideologies and forms of government, and that none of them has worked. The liberal nationalism of the early 20th century failed, and so did the socialist nationalism of Egypt’s  Gamal Abdel Nasser and his contemporaries. Authoritarianism failed the Arabs too: Compare what  Lee Kwan Yew created in resource-free Singapore with the legacy of the Assads in Syria or of  Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Today we are watching the failure of Islamism. From the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamic State, Islamist movements have had no more success in curing the ills of Arab civilization than any of the secular movements of the past. Worse, the brutal fanaticism and nihilistic violence of groups like Islamic State undercuts respect for more moderate versions of Islamic spirituality and thought.

The Turks and the Iranians have had more economic and institutional success than the Arabs, but in both Turkey and Iran today, the outlook is bleak. Iran is ruled by a revolutionary alliance of reactionary clerics and hungry thugs, and it is committed to a regional policy of confrontation and sectarian war. Like the Soviet Union, Iran is an uneasy conglomeration of national and cultural groups held together by a radical but increasingly stale ideology. Turkey, too, is cursed by blind Islamist enthusiasm and unresolved ethnic and ideological chasms. Neither country is immune to the violence sweeping the region, and neither country has been able to develop policies that would calm rather than roil their turbulent surroundings.

At the same time, foreign values are challenging traditional beliefs and practices across the region. Women throughout the Islamic world are seeking to shape theological and social ideas to better reflect their own experience. Modern science and historical and textual criticism pose many of the questions for traditional Islamic piety that 19th-century science and biblical criticism posed for Christianity. Young people continue to be exposed to information, narratives and images that are difficult to reconcile with traditions they were raised to take for granted.

As hundreds of thousands of refugees stumble from the chaos of an imploding Arab world toward Europe, and as millions more seek refuge closer to home, we see a crisis of confidence in the very structures of Middle Eastern civilization, including religion. Reports that hundreds of Iranian and other refugees from the Islamic world are seeking Christian baptism in Europe can be seen as one aspect of this crisis. If people feel that the religion they were raised in and the civilization of which they are a part cannot master the problems of daily life, they will seek alternatives.

For other Muslims, this means the embrace of radical fundamentalism. Such fanaticism is a sign of crisis and not of health in religious life, and the very violence of radical Islam today points to the depth of the failure of traditional religious ideas and institutions across the Middle East.

In Europe and the West, the crisis is quieter but no less profound. Europe today often doesn’t seem to know where it is going, what Western civilization is for, or even whether or how it can or should be defended. Increasingly, the contemporary version of Enlightenment liberalism sees itself as fundamentally opposed to the religious, political and economic foundations of Western society. Liberal values such as free expression, individual self-determination and a broad array of human rights have become detached in the minds of many from the institutional and civilizational context that shaped them.

Capitalism, the social engine without which neither Europe nor the U.S. would have the wealth or strength to embrace liberal values with any hope of success, is often seen as a cruel, anti-human system that is leading the world to a Malthusian climate catastrophe. Military strength, without which the liberal states would be overwhelmed, is regarded with suspicion in the U.S. and with abhorrence in much of Europe. Too many people in the West interpret pluralism and tolerance in ways that forbid or unrealistically constrain the active defense of these values against illiberal states like Russia or illiberal movements like radical Islam.

Europe’s approach to the migration crisis brings these failures into sharp relief. The European Union bureaucracy in Brussels has erected a set of legal doctrines stated in terms of absolute right and has tried to build policy on this basis. Taking its cue from the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other ambitious declarations and treaties, the EU holds that qualified applicants have an absolute human right to asylum. European bureaucrats tend to see asylum as a legal question, not a political one, and they expect political authorities to implement the legal mandate, not quibble with it or constrain it.

This is, in many ways, a commendable and honorable approach. Europeans are rightly haunted by what happened in the 1930s when refugees from Hitler’s Germany could often find no place to go. But solemn declarations to “do the right thing” do not always lead to sound policy.

Under normal circumstances, the rights-based, legalistic approach can work reasonably well. When refugee flows are slack, the political fallout from accommodating them is manageable. But when the flow of desperate people passes a certain threshold, receiving countries no longer have the will (and, in some cases, the ability) to follow through. Ten thousand refugees is one thing; 10 million is another. Somewhere between those extremes is a breaking point at which the political system will no longer carry out the legal mandate. To pretend that this isn’t true is to invite trouble, and Europe is already much closer to a breaking point than Brussels or Berlin would like to admit.

In eastern and central Europe, the social and economic conditions for absorbing mass migration from the Middle East simply don’t exist. The relatively homogenous ethnic nation states that now comprise the region were created through generations of warfare, often accompanied by episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Most of these states enjoyed a brief period of independence between the two world wars and were then engulfed, first by the Nazis and later by the Soviet empire. Their independence and security still feel fragile, and most of their citizens still believe that the role of the state is to protect the well-being of their own ethnic group and express its cultural values.

Larger, more self-confident and richer societies in Europe’s west and north are better prepared to cope with immigration. But rules that work for Germany and Sweden can produce uncontrollable backlashes in other parts of Europe. Add to this picture the continuing budgetary and welfare crises and the mass youth unemployment in many Eurozone economies, and it is easy to envision a point at which Europe’s capacity to absorb refugees reaches a ceiling.

And the flow of refugees to Europe could easily grow. The Turkish war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party could escalate. Social breakdown or the victory of radical Islamist forces in Egypt could provoke a mass flight of the Copts, the last remaining large Christian population in a region that has seen one Christian community after another exterminated or forced into exile over the last 150 years. The sectarian war in Syria could intensify and spread into Lebanon. The intensifying religious conflict across the Sahel and northern sub-Saharan Africa could create the kind of political and economic insecurity that would produce vast flows of desperate migrants and asylum seekers.

The breaking point may be reached sooner rather than later. In the short term, Europe’s attempts to welcome and resettle refugees will accelerate the flow. The news that rich countries like Germany are welcoming migrants will stimulate many more people to hit the road. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, is calling on member states to accept 160,000 migrants through a quota system. What will be the response when the number of migrants shoots well past that number?

The EU has failed to see that refugee and asylum policy must have three distinct components: the compassionate embrace of those in great need, a tough-minded effort to reduce the flow at the source by correcting or preventing the problems that give rise to it, and an effective border-control regime that limits the number of refugees and migrants who reach EU soil.

When it comes to reducing the number of migrants at their source, the Europeans have gotten it partly right. The EU has been relatively generous with economic-development aid to North Africa and the Middle East. That aid often falls short of the hoped-for results, but at least the Europeans are trying.

There is a second dimension to this policy that runs into a buzz saw of European assumptions and beliefs: the security question. Poverty is one driver of migration to Europe, but what has turned a policy problem into an international crisis is the intersection of poverty and insecurity. It is the brutal war in Syria that has displaced millions of people from their homes and sent them streaming into refugee encampments from Amman to Budapest. It was the breakdown of order in post-intervention Libya that made the Libyan coast a point of embarkation for desperate refugees from Libya and farther south.

The humanitarian question of refugees and asylum seekers cannot be separated from the bankruptcy of Western security policy in Syria and Libya, and the bankruptcy of Western policy cannot be separated from the long-standing difficulties that many European states have in taking a responsible attitude toward questions of military security.

The utter failure of Western policy in both Libya and Syria has to be seen for what it is: not just a political blunder but a humanitarian crime. The feckless mix of intervention and indifference in Libya and the equally feckless failure to intervene in Syria have helped to trigger the flows of migrants that are overwhelming Europe’s institutions.

It is impossible to have a humane and sustainable asylum policy without an active and engaged foreign policy that from time to time involves military action. The West’s current stance on human rights and asylum is reminiscent of the liberal approach to questions of peace and war in the early 1930s. On the one hand, the West adopted a high-minded, legalistic stand that declared war illegal (the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928); on the other, we adhered to a blind commitment to disarmament. A noble ideal was separated from any serious effort to create the conditions that would make it achievable.

The dream of a liberal, humanitarian peace that both the Obama administration and the EU share may not be achievable in the wicked and complicated world in which we live. It certainly cannot be achieved with the kinds of policies now in favor in capitals on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Time Has Come to Open Our Eyes to the Arab Disaster. By Ari Shavit.

The Time Has Come to Open Our Eyes to the Arab Disaster. By Ari Shavit. Haaretz, September 10, 2015.

Shavit:

The dysfunction that made Syria so different from Indonesia, and Iraq so different from South Korea, was never recognized, diagnosed or treated.

The Arab humanitarian disaster is now migrating from the Middle East to central Europe. Millions of refugees are looking for a home, hundreds of thousands of desperate people are making their way on foot. Thousands are drowning in the sea. An infant’s body is washed ashore and awakens the latent conscience of an obtuse world.

But in all this horrifying human pandemonium – ramshackle boats, loaded trains, displaced people’s camps – no one can honestly and seriously say what is happening here. Why now. What has caused us to witness such a horrifying massive, painful migration?

The first reason for the Arab humanitarian disaster is the Arab political failure. What are the political options that the Arab world has to offer its youngsters? A reactionary monarchy, a military dictatorship, an Islamic theocracy or murderous chaos. Some hope may still be flickering in Tunisia, in Beirut things are somewhat different. But basically the region we live in is depressing and without hope. There are no human rights, no human dignity, no separation of powers.

When the globalization of the media demonstrates to the hopeless the gap between the (Arab) world they live in and the (European) world next door – they get up and go. Millions are voting with their feet against the colossal failure of the national Arab project that failed to produce a single state combining prosperity and freedom.

The second reason for the Arab humanitarian disaster is the West’s strategic failure. In the second half of the 20th century the United States and Europe contributed to stabilizing a post-colonial order in the Middle East. This order was rotten and corrupt. It was based on a shady deal of supporting dark regimes in exchange for a regular oil supply. But, in its distorted way, the rotten, corrupt order worked. It reduced the number of wars in our region and restricted the extent of human suffering.

But in the early 21st century the United States and Europe toppled the old Middle Eastern order with an insane war in Iraq, an idiotic war in Libya and indirect support for the Muslim Brotherhood. The result wasn’t an alternative order that stabilizes enlightened regimes and advances democratic values, but utter disorder. It was civil wars and fanatics’ wars and inter-tribal wars. The Western powers’ idealistic ambition – naïve, idealistic and cut off from reality – wreaked havoc in the last 12 years throughout the Middle East.

The third reason for the Arab humanitarian disaster is political correctness. Professor Edward Said and his students caused indescribable damage to the ability to think or speak the truth when it comes to the Arab world. Their wacky intellectual legacy did not permit talking about the region’s residents as anything but victims. The grand Arab nation – with its rich history, profound culture and considerable economic power – was treated like a juvenile who isn’t responsible for his actions. So all the ills of Arab politics were attributed to others – imperialists, colonialists, Zionists. So no real criticism of the Arab world was permitted and no one demanded it mend itself.

The dysfunction that made Syria so different from Indonesia, and Iraq so different from South Korea, was never recognized, diagnosed or treated. Thus, following the fatal junction of the Arab failure, the Western failure and political correctness, states crumbled, hundreds of thousands of people were murdered and millions lost their homes.

The time has come to open our eyes. There will be no isolated solution to the tragedy of the displaced people now flooding central Europe. The only answer is to acknowledge that the Middle East is a disaster-stricken area and initiate a comprehensive Marshall plan to deal with its fundamental problems, which are consuming the lives of its residents and refugees.

The Donald and the Demagogues. By Bret Stephens.

The Donald and the Demagogues. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2015.

Stephens:

Democracies that trade substance for charisma don’t last. Trump is America’s answer to Hugo Chávez.

If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.

If you have reached physical maturity and still chuckle at Mr. Trump’s pubescent jokes about Rosie O’Donnell or Heidi Klum, you will never reach mental maturity. If you watched Mr. Trump mock fellow candidate Lindsey Graham’s low poll numbers and didn’t cringe at the lack of class, you are incapable of class. If you think we need to build new airports in Queens the way they build them in Qatar, you should be sent to join the millions of forced laborers who do construction in the Persian Gulf. It would serve you right.

Since Mr. Trump joined the GOP presidential field and leaped to the top of the polls, several views have been offered to explain his popularity. He conveys a can-do image. He is the bluntest of the candidates in addressing public fears of cultural and economic dislocation. He toes no line, serves no PAC, abides no ideology, is beholden to no man. He addresses the broad disgust of everyday Americans with their failed political establishment.

And so forth and so on—a parade of semi-sophisticated theories that act as bathroom deodorizer to mask the stench of this candidacy. Mr. Trump is a loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians. These vulgarians comprise a significant percentage of the GOP base. The leader isn’t the problem. The people are. It takes the demos to make the demagogue.

There will be other opportunities to write about the radical affinities and moralizing conceits of Democrats and liberals. For now let’s speak plainly about what the Trump ascendancy says about the potential future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

It says that we may soon have a conservative movement in which the American creed of “give us your tired, your poor” could yield to the Trumpian creed that America must not become a “dumping ground” to poor immigrants from Latin America, as if these millions of hardworking and God-fearing people are a specimen of garbage.

It says that a party that carries on about the importance of e pluribus unum and rails against the identity politics of assorted minorities is increasingly tempted to indulge the paranoid (and losing) identity politics of a dwindling white majority.

It says that a sizable constituency in a party that is supposed to favor a plain reading of the Constitution objects to a plain reading of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

It says that a movement that is supposed to believe in defending old-fashioned values and traditions against the assorted degradations of the postmodern left might allow itself to be led by a reality-TV star whose meretricious tastes in trophies, architectural and otherwise, mainly remind me of the aesthetics of Bob Guccione.

It says that a party that is supposed to believe in the incomparable awesomeness of America thinks we are losing the economic hunger games to the brilliant political leadership of . . . Mexico. It says that a movement that is supposed to believe in economic freedom doesn’t believe in the essence of economic freedom: to wit, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labor.

It says that many of the same people who have bellyached nonstop for the past seven years about the cult-of-personality president currently in the Oval Office are seriously willing to consider another cult-of-personality figure on the off-chance he’s peddling the cure America needs. Focus group testing by pollster Frank Luntz suggests that Mr. Trump’s fans could care less about his flip-flopping political views but responded almost rapturously to his apparently magnetic persona.

When people become indifferent to the ideas of their would-be leaders, those leaders become prone to dangerous ideas. Democracies that trade policy substance for personal charisma tend not to last as democracies. They become Bolivarian republics. Donald Trump may be America’s Hugo Chávez, minus the political consistency.

***

Because the Republican Party has not lost its mind—at least not yet—I doubt that Mr. Trump will be its presidential nominee. A single bad poll could break him. The summer before an election-year summer tends to be a political clown-time. Voters, like diners in a fancy restaurant, may entertain the idea of ordering the pigeon, but they’ll probably wind up with the chicken.

Still, Mr. Trump’s political star is rising in a period when fringe politics, both on the right and the left, are making a comeback in the West. Marine Le Pen in France. Beppe Grillo in Italy. Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party. Every now and then some of these characters get into office. Look at Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Alexis Tsipras in Greece.

Republicans like to think of America as an exceptional nation. And it is, not least in its distaste for demagogues. Donald Trump’s candidacy puts the strength of that distaste to the test.

Donald Trump and Jacksonian Populism.

The Trump Virus and Its Symptoms. By Charles C.W. Cooke. National Review Online, August 10, 2015.

The Nihilistic Populism of Donald Trump. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, August 11, 2015.

Donald Trump, the Hipster Candidate. By Tom Nichols. The Federalist, August 11, 2015.

Donald Trump: The Golden Haired Sun Eater Who Says “Go America.” By Ben Domenech. The Federalist, August 12, 2015.

Angry Taxpayers, Not Stupid People, Are Backing Trump. By D.C. McAllister. The Federalist, August 12, 2015.

Trump Derangement Syndrome. By Esther Goldberg. The American Spectator, August 17, 2015.

America Needs Better, Classier Immigration Reformers. By Nicholas M. Gallagher. The American Interest, August 20, 2015.

Of Nationalists and Cosmopolitans. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, August 21, 2015.

Le Donald, and Western Democracy’s Populism Problem. By Benjamin Haddad and Neil Rogachevsky. Foreign Policy, August 21, 2015.

Are Republicans for Freedom or White Identity Politics? By Ben Domenech. The Federalist, August 21, 2015.

The Secret to Donald Trump’s Massive Rise in the Polls. By Matt Purple. The National Interest, August 22, 2015.

Saving America from a European Future. The American Interest, August 23, 2015.

Donald Trump Is Not a Populist. He’s the Voice of Aggrieved Privilege. By Jeet Heer. The New Republic, August 24, 2015.

Donald Trump’s Secret Weapon: The Silent Majority? By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, August 27, 2015.

America Is So in Play. By Peggy Noonan. Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2015.

Noonan:

America is so in play.

And: “the base” isn’t the limited, clichéd thing it once was, it’s becoming a big, broad jumble that few understand.

***

On the subject of elites, I spoke to Scott Miller, co-founder of the Sawyer Miller political-consulting firm, who is now a corporate consultant. He worked on the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 and knows something about outside challenges. He views the key political fact of our time as this: “Over 80% of the American people, across the board, believe an elite group of political incumbents, plus big business, big media, big banks, big unions and big special interests—the whole Washington political class—have rigged the system for the wealthy and connected.” It is “a remarkable moment,” he said. More than half of the American people believe “something has changed, our democracy is not like it used to be, people feel they no longer have a voice.”

Mr. Miller added: “People who work for a living are thinking this thing is broken, and that economic inequality is the result of the elite rigging the system for themselves. We’re seeing something big.”

Support for Mr. Trump is not, he said, limited to the GOP base: “The molecules are in motion.” I asked what he meant. He said bars of support are not solid, things are in motion as molecules are “before combustion, or before a branch breaks.”

I end with this. An odd thing, in my observation, is that deep down the elite themselves also think the game is rigged. They don’t disagree, and they don’t like what they see—corruption, shallowness and selfishness in the systems all around them. Their odd anguish is that they have no faith the American people can—or will—do anything to turn it around. They see the American voter as distracted, poorly educated, subject to emotional and personality-driven political adventures. They sometimes refer to “Jaywalking,” the old Jay Leno “Tonight Show” staple in which he walked outside the studio and asked the man on the street about history. What caused the American Civil War? Um, Hitler? When did it take place, roughly? Uh, 1958?

Both sides, the elites and the non-elites, sense that things are stuck.

The people hate the elites, which is not new, and very American. The elites have no faith in the people, which, actually, is new. Everything is stasis. Then Donald Trump comes, like a rock thrown through a showroom window, and the molecules start to move.

Donald Trump, Traitor to His Class. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, August 29, 2015.

The Donald and the Demagogues. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2015.

Bret Stephens and Trump. By Mark Bauerlein. First Things, September 2, 2015.

The Trump Movement Isn’t About Conservatism – It’s About Americanism. By Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh.com, September 2, 2015.

Limbaugh: Trump Movement Exposes Low Regard Conservative Intellectuals Have for Ordinary Americans. By Jeff Poor. Breitbart, Sept 2, 2015.

Is Trumpism supplanting Reaganism? By David Freddoso. Conservative Intel, September 7, 2015.

Obama and the Downsizing of the American Dream. By Joel Kotkin.

Obama, the Left downsizing the American Dream. By Joel Kotkin. Orange County Register, August 16, 2015.

Kotkin:

Barack Obama has always wanted to be a transformational president, and in this, at least, he has been true to his word. The question is what kind of America is being created, and what future does it offer the next generation.

President Obama’s great accomplishment, arguably, has been to spur the evolution of a society that formerly rested on individual and familial aspiration, and turn it into a more regulated and centralized regime focused on broader social and environmental concerns. This tendency has been made much stronger as the number of Americans, according to Gallup, who feel there is “plenty of opportunity ahead” has dropped precipitously – from 80 percent in 1997 to barely 52 percent today.

The shift away from the entrepreneurial model can also be seen in the constriction of loans to the small-business sector. Rates of business start-ups have fallen well below historical levels, and, for young people in particular, have hit the lowest levels in a quarter century. At the same time, the welfare state has expanded dramatically, to the point that nearly half of all Americans now get payments from the federal government.

In sharp contrast to the Bill Clinton White House, which accepted limits on government largesse, the newly emboldened progressives, citing inequality, are calling for more wealth transfers to the poorer parts of society, often eschewing the notion that the recipients work to actually improve their lives. The ever-expanding regulatory state has powerful backing in the media, on campuses and among some corporations. There is even a role model: to become like Europe. As the New York Times’ Roger Cohen suggests, we reject our traditional individualist “excess” and embrace, instead, Continental levels of material modesty, social control and, of course, ever-higher taxes.

Progressive Advances

Three ideas prevail in shaping today’s new politics: sexual liberation, racial redress and environmental determinism. The first notion has made rapid progress, in that gay marriage now is, rightfully, legal, and women are making steady gains across the employment spectrum. No matter how much Republicans fulminate in debates or on the campaign trail, this aspect of the basic progressive agenda has been largely accomplished, and is particularly accepted among the young.

The second major thrust of the reconstituted American Dream is the imposition of a regime of permanent racial redress. In contrast to assuring equal rights, the new drive is to guarantee similar results. In every aspect of life, from immigration and housing to school and work, “people of color,” which increasingly excludes Asians, will be categorized by race. This includes the call for “reparations” for African Americans and essentially open borders for undocumented immigrants.

This logic carried to extremes can be seen in the “disparate impact” rules promulgated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and now blessed by the Supreme Court. Under this concept, any town can have its zoning and planning upended if the bureaucracy, or some plaintiffs, decide the town is too white, too Asian or too affluent to meet the standards of “social justice.” This could be extended down the line to every institution, from the workplace to the university. The new approach could be accurately characterized as affirmative action on steroids.

The Green Dilemma

When the United States took big steps in the 1960s to open its society, the economy was basically very strong, with lots of jobs, making initial accommodations to new entrants, minorities or women, much easier. But economic growth in the current “recovery” has been somewhat meager and wage gains all but nonexistent. Any attempt to extend the new version of “civil rights” protections – essentially taking opportunity away from the majority – would be far riskier at a time of economic torpor.

Worse still, the third major lodestone of current reigning ideology – environmentalism – increasingly tends to tilt against broad-based economic growth. Environmentalism, defined as a movement of conserving resources, extending parks and improving environmental quality could co-exist with an expanding economy, generating the funds to finance such improvements.

But today’s climate-change-focused environmentalism increasingly opposes economic growth per se, seeing in it a threat to the planet. For some people, the solution for the planet lies in depressing living standards by such steps as ratcheting up the cost of basic necessities, from energy to housing. Environmental advocates often work in concert with those who benefit from subsidies for everything from solar energy to transit lines, but the goal remains to constrain consumption and raise prices for such basics as housing and energy.

Yet these negative impacts don’t mean much to many green activists who, notes the Guardian’s George Monbiot, see the climate struggle as a way to “redefine humanity.” The target here is the economy itself, which remains driven largely by the desire for material wealth, upward mobility and support of families. Monbiot envisions a war against what he calls the “expanders” by the rational legions of green “restrainers” who will seek to curb their foes’ economic activities.

The celebration of economic stagnation is accepted openly among European greens who support an agenda of “degrowth.” It is also reflected in American calls for “de-development,” a phrase employed by President Obama’s Science Adviser John Holdren. The agenda, particularly in high-income countries, seeks to limit fossil fuels, raise energy prices, stem suburban development and replace the competive capitalism system with a highly regulated economy that favors designated “green’ energy industries over others.

What of future generations?

Constantly expanding pressures to accommodate both the environmentalist credo and the demands of protected identity groups may continue to shift older Americans to the political right. Forced to pick up the bills while enduring insults about their unconscionable “privilege,” it’s hard to see how they, for the most part, can become anything but more alienated by the progressive credo.

One worry for the older generation is their kids and, particularly, their grandchildren. Parents today generally see things getting worse for their offspring and grandchildren, with only 21 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, expecting things to get better for the new generation, compared with 49 percent in 2001. These sentiments may make older folks more solicitous about helping their own, but one doubts how much they desire to pour out their retirement savings to save someone else’s kids.

The biggest impact of the new politics, however, will be felt by the new generation. Some of their attitudes are certainly congenial to the progressive positions in such areas as interracial and gay marriage, and a certain commitment to greater social justice. Yet they might find they, too, need a little “justice” themselves, since their incomes, adjusted for inflation, are actually lower than those of their counterparts in 2000, or even 1980. They may be better educated than their predecessors, but it’s not quite paying off.

Take, for example, that more millennials are living with their parents than in predecessor generations. Many also are burdened with enormous student debt, which makes moving forward, for example, by starting a business or buying a house, more difficult. Most disturbingly, pessimism about the future is greatest among the youngest millennials, those still in high school.

This decline in prospects – as evidenced by consistently weak income and growth numbers – could, ultimately, reshape politics. Millennials may have different social attitudes than their parents, but that doesn’t mean they reject their parents’ aspirational dream, most notably to buy a house, preferably with some decent space. Although they have been far less able to achieve homeownership, surveys consistently show that most millennials want to own a house, get more space and seem increasingly willing to move to the suburbs, even the exurbs, to get it.

This will no doubt prove a disappointment for the highly influential cadre of generally wealthier, environmentally focused baby boomers, who celebrate millennials being satisfied as apartment renters – for life. Perhaps this is one reason that, in recent surveys, young people have been less likely to identify as “environmentalist” than previous generations.

Similarly, millennials may be very tolerant and welcoming of diversity, but one has to wonder how many – particularly those outside the protected classes – are likely to chafe at a regime that disfavors their own prospects. The fact that white millennials have been trending Republican should be seen by Democrats as something of a warning sign.

Ultimately, the future of American politics will not be determined by those mostly graying legions rallying to Donald Trump. It will be largely forged by young people seeking some way to transcend a weak, and largely unpromising, economy. They will be the ones to decide whether the aspirational model still fits America, or how far they want to embrace a new, more Europeanized version imposed from above.