NOVA: Vikings Unearthed.

Vikings Unearthed. Video. NOVA. PBS, April 4, 2016. Also here.

View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site in North America. By Ralph Blumenthal. New York Times, March 31, 2016.

Possible Viking Settlement Discovered in Canada. By Tessa Berenson. Time, April 1, 2016.





Blumenthal:

A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology — a second Norse settlement in North America, further south than ever known.

The new Canadian site, with telltale signs of iron-working, was discovered last summer after infrared images from 400 miles in space showed possible man-made shapes under discolored vegetation. The site is on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, about 300 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, the first and so far only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, discovered in 1960.

Since then, archaeologists, following up clues in the histories known as the sagas, have been hunting for the holy grail of other Viking, or Norse, landmarks in the Americas that would have existed 500 years before Columbus, to no avail.

Douglas Bolender, left, and Sarah H. Parcak, right, looking for evidence of a Viking presence at a remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, in Newfoundland. If confirmed, the site would be the second known Viking settlement in North America. Credit Greg Mumford.

But last year, Sarah H. Parcak (pronounced PAR-kak), a leading space archaeologist working with Canadian experts and the science series NOVA for a two-hour television documentary, “Vikings Unearthed,” that will be aired on PBS next week, turned her eyes in the sky on coastlines from Baffin Island, west of Greenland, to Massachusetts. She found hundreds of potential “hot spots” that high-resolution aerial photography narrowed to a handful and then one particularly promising candidate — “a dark stain” with buried rectilinear features.

Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, a grassy headland above a rocky beach an hour’s trek from the nearest road, showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and a fire-cracked boulder — signs of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region.

In addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped persuade scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the site’s promise. The experts are to resume digging there this summer.

A lump of what scientists say is bog iron ore, and one of the samples being tested from the possible

Viking site at Point Rosee. This roasted ore is a sign of metallurgy not associated with native people

 of the region. Credit Greg Mumford.

“It screams, ‘Please excavate me!,’ ” said Dr. Parcak, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who won the $1 million TED prize last year for her pioneering work using satellite images to expose the looting of ancient Egyptian antiquities and is using it to globally crowdsource new archaeological sites from space.

The NOVA program will stream online at http://pbs.org/nova in the United States at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Eastern time, (along with a BBC program in England), and will be broadcast on PBS at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Given the dashed hopes of previous searches and the many spurious claims of Viking presence in the Americas, scientists on the project as well as outside experts have voiced caution.

“Tremendous, if it’s really true,” said William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center and Curator in Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. “It wouldn’t be unexpected,” he said, but added that he wanted to see the data.

“There’s no lock that it’s Norse, but there’s no alternative evidence,” said Douglas Bolender, a research assistant professor at the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archeological Research and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who joined the expedition. He said a buried structure there could be a smithy for longboat nails and weaponry, another strong indicator of Viking presence.

“It would just be logical that there’s more than one site,” said Gerald F. Bigelow, a lecturer in history at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., and a specialist in archaeology of the North Atlantic.

One of the satellite images used by Sarah H. Parcak to identify potential Viking settlement sites along North America’s Atlantic coast. Darker areas were seen as potential structures. Credit DigitalGlobe.

Davide Zori, an assistant professor of archaeology at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., and a specialist on Viking expansion in the North Atlantic, called the find potentially “very important.”

Much depends on what else is found at the site. In archaeology, context is everything. A famous prehistoric site in Brooklin, Me., yielded an 11th century silver Norse coin but it is believed to have landed there through trade and not as proof of Viking settlement.

Master shipbuilders and seafarers, warriors, traders and raiders, the Vikings boiled out of the Scandinavian fjords starting around the 8th century, marauding through Asia and the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The Vikings focused particularly on the British Isles, and west to Iceland and Greenland, as memorialized in oral narratives and later recorded as the sagas by 13th-century Icelandic monks.

Around 1000, Leif Ericson led an expedition to what became known as Vinland at the northernmost point of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows (the name an obscure corruption from the French) where explorers starting in 1960 discovered remnants of an extensive colony, including dwellings, a forge, and carpentry workshop — the Vikings’ first and so far only known landmark in the New World. They appear to have been routed by indigenous people the Norse called Skraeling.

One intriguing find was the seeds of a butternut tree, which did not grow that far north and hinted of travels to milder climates in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But evidence of other Viking settlements has been lacking.

Dr. Parcak began her research by using a commercial satellite called WorldView-3, belonging to the company DigitalGlobe, to search known Norse sites on minuscule Papa Stour in the Shetland Islands of Scotland. Using the near-infrared spectrum invisible to the human eye, the satellite detected buried walls, and digging yielded a carnelian bead from India similar to those found at other Viking sites. Dr. Parcak then focused her satellite search on thousands of miles of coastline from the Canadian Arctic to New England.

After two weeks of digging at Point Rosee, an unexpected find in a flooded trench excited the explorers — several seeds, or perhaps blueberries, which were hurriedly sent for testing. The dates came back wildly off — 700 years after the Vikings, maybe even contemporary. They seem to have migrated onto the site much later.

“You feeling nervous, Sarah?” a NOVA reporter asked Dr. Parcak.

“No, I’m not,” she said.

The Eleven Nations of North America. By Colin Woodard.

Up in Arms. By Colin Woodard. Tufts Magazine, Fall 2013.

Woodard:

What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.

The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.

There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence, as well as everything else, in its own way.

The precise delineation of the eleven nations—which I have explored at length in my latest book, American Nations—is original to me, but I’m certainly not the first person to observe that such national divisions exist. Kevin Phillips, a Republican Party campaign strategist, recognized the boundaries and values of several of these nations in 1969 and used them to correctly prophesy two decades of American political development in his politico cult classic The Emerging Republican Majority. Joel Garreau, a Washington Post editor, argued that our continent was divided into rival power blocs in The Nine Nations of North America, though his ahistorical approach undermined the identification of the nations. The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer detailed the origins and early evolution of four of these nations in his magisterial Albion’s Seed and later added New France. Russell Shorto described the salient characteristics of New Netherland in The Island at the Center of the World. And the list goes on.

The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps—including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history. Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities, a phenomenon analyzed by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in The Big Sort (2008). Even waves of immigrants did not fundamentally alter these nations, because the children and grandchildren of immigrants assimilated into whichever culture surrounded them.

Before I describe the nations, I should underscore that my observations refer to the dominant culture, not the individual inhabitants, of each region. In every town, city, and state you’ll likely find a full range of political opinions and social preferences. Even in the reddest of red counties and bluest of blue ones, twenty to forty percent of voters cast ballots for the “wrong” team. It isn’t that residents of one or another nation all think the same, but rather that they are all embedded within a cultural framework of deep-seated preferences and attitudes—each of which a person may like or hate, but has to deal with nonetheless. Because of slavery, the African American experience has been different from that of other settlers and immigrants, but it too has varied by nation, as black people confronted the dominant cultural and institutional norms of each.

The nations are constituted as follows:

YANKEEDOM. Founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, Yankeedom has, since the outset, put great emphasis on perfecting earthly civilization through social engineering, denial of self for the common good, and assimilation of outsiders. It has prized education, intellectual achievement, communal empowerment, and broad citizen participation in politics and government, the latter seen as the public’s shield against the machinations of grasping aristocrats and other would-be tyrants. Since the early Puritans, it has been more comfortable with government regulation and public-sector social projects than many of the other nations, who regard the Yankee utopian streak with trepidation.

NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.

THE MIDLANDS. America’s great swing region was founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies like Pennsylvania on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate. An ethnic mosaic from the start—it had a German, rather than British, majority at the time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, though it rejects top-down government intervention.

TIDEWATER. Built by the younger sons of southern English gentry in the Chesapeake country and neighboring sections of Delaware and North Carolina, Tidewater was meant to reproduce the semifeudal society of the countryside they’d left behind. Standing in for the peasantry were indentured servants and, later, slaves. Tidewater places a high value on respect for authority and tradition, and very little on equality or public participation in politics. It was the most powerful of the American nations in the eighteenth century, but today it is in decline, partly because it was cut off from westward expansion by its boisterous Appalachian neighbors and, more recently, because it has been eaten away by the expanding federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk.

GREATER APPALACHIA. Founded in the early eighteenth century by wave upon wave of settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands, Appalachia has been lampooned by writers and screenwriters as the home of hillbillies and rednecks. It transplanted a culture formed in a state of near constant danger and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and a commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty. Intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike, Greater Appalachia has shifted alliances depending on who appeared to be the greatest threat to their freedom. It was with the Union in the Civil War. Since Reconstruction, and especially since the upheavals of the 1960s, it has joined with Deep South to counter federal overrides of local preference.

DEEP SOUTH. Established by English slave lords from Barbados, Deep South was meant as a West Indies–style slave society. This nation offered a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. Its caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight against expanded federal powers, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer regulations.

EL NORTE. The oldest of the American nations, El Norte consists of the borderlands of the Spanish American empire, which were so far from the seats of power in Mexico City and Madrid that they evolved their own characteristics. Most Americans are aware of El Norte as a place apart, where Hispanic language, culture, and societal norms dominate. But few realize that among Mexicans, norteños have a reputation for being exceptionally independent, self-sufficient, adaptable, and focused on work. Long a hotbed of democratic reform and revolutionary settlement, the region encompasses parts of Mexico that have tried to secede in order to form independent buffer states between their mother country and the United States.

THE LEFT COAST. A Chile-shaped nation wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade and Coast mountains, the Left Coast was originally colonized by two groups: New Englanders (merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen who arrived by sea and dominated the towns) and Appalachian midwesterners (farmers, prospectors, and fur traders who generally arrived by wagon and controlled the countryside). Yankee missionaries tried to make it a “New England on the Pacific,” but were only partially successful. Left Coast culture is a hybrid of Yankee utopianism and Appalachian self-expression and exploration—traits recognizable in its cultural production, from the Summer of Love to the iPad. The staunchest ally of Yankeedom, it clashes with Far Western sections in the interior of its home states.

THE FAR WEST. The other “second-generation” nation, the Far West occupies the one part of the continent shaped more by environmental factors than ethnographic ones. High, dry, and remote, the Far West stopped migrating easterners in their tracks, and most of it could be made habitable only with the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and irrigation systems. As a result, settlement was largely directed by corporations headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, or by the federal government, which controlled much of the land. The Far West’s people are often resentful of their dependent status, feeling that they have been exploited as an internal colony for the benefit of the seaboard nations. Their senators led the fight against trusts in the mid-twentieth century. Of late, Far Westerners have focused their anger on the federal government, rather than their corporate masters.

NEW FRANCE. Occupying the New Orleans area and southeastern Canada, New France blends the folkways of ancien régime northern French peasantry with the traditions and values of the aboriginal people they encountered in northeastern North America. After a long history of imperial oppression, its people have emerged as down-to-earth, egalitarian, and consensus driven, among the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in the economy. The New French influence is manifest in Canada, where multiculturalism and negotiated consensus are treasured.

FIRST NATION. First Nation is populated by native American groups that generally never gave up their land by treaty and have largely retained cultural practices and knowledge that allow them to survive in this hostile region on their own terms. The nation is now reclaiming its sovereignty, having won considerable autonomy in Alaska and Nunavut and a self-governing nation state in Greenland that stands on the threshold of full independence. Its territory is huge—far larger than the continental United States—but its population is less than 300,000, most of whom live in Canada.

If you understand the United States as a patchwork of separate nations, each with its own origins and prevailing values, you would hardly expect attitudes toward violence to be uniformly distributed. You would instead be prepared to discover that some parts of the country experience more violence, have a greater tolerance for violent solutions to conflict, and are more protective of the instruments of violence than other parts of the country. That is exactly what the data on violence reveal about the modern United States. 

Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era. By Michael Mandelbaum.

Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era by Michael Mandelbaum. Video. SAIS Events, April 5, 2016. YouTube.

Foreign Policy Fueled by Fantasy. By Peter Berkowitz. Real Clear Politics, April 5, 2016.





Berkowitz:

In an extensive interview with Barack Obama in the April issue of The Atlantic, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg recounts a rebuke that the president delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader had been explaining “the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives,” when Obama cut in.

“Bibi, you have to understand something,” the president said. “I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

Obama apparently not only believes that his distinctive background and powers of persuasion—rather than, say, a solid grounding in foreign languages, comparative politics and economics, and diplomatic and military history—equip him to understand the geopolitical complexities of tumultuous, faraway regions. Moreover, he and his inner circle also seem to have been convinced since before he was elected president that his personal qualities and special experiences would enable him to change the world. In February 2015 in Foreign Policy, James Traub reported, “Obama, and those closest to him, believed that his voice, his (non-white) face, his story, could help usher the people of the world to a higher plane.”

Notwithstanding his pretensions to have inaugurated a new era in America’s foreign affairs, the 44th president’s conduct of foreign policy represents an unwitting continuation of, and also brings an unintended close to, an era that encompasses the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

That surprising claim is central to Michael Mandelbaum’s superb new book, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era. Mandelbaum’s bold title evokes Bush’s speech on May 1, 2003, on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln—an aircraft carrier recently returned from the Persian Gulf. Scarcely six weeks after American-led forces opened fire against Saddam Hussein’s regime, Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The banner behind the president proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” As Iraq descended into sectarian and religious violence, the banner became a symbol for many of Bush administration naiveté and hubris.

Mandelbaum contends, however, that the failure to bring democracy to Iraq does not distinguish the Bush administration from the preceding post-Cold War administration or the one that followed. Like Bush, Mandelbaum shows, Clinton and Obama pursued foreign policies that elevated the advancement of American values over the pursuit of vital national security interests. In their efforts to transform regimes, Mandelbaum concludes, all three presidents failed.

Mandelbaum is a professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, a prolific author of serious and accessible books on American foreign policy, and—having been educated at Yale, King’s College, Cambridge, and Harvard, and having enjoyed a long tenure as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations—a product of the American foreign policy establishment. Yet Mandelbaum’s trenchant assessment of American foreign policy from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to the Russian conquest of the Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 as a series of failures could not be better calculated to outrage the foreign policy establishment.

The U.S. inclination to use “the formidable power with which it emerged from the conflict with the Soviet Union” to liberalize and democratize regimes was, according to Mandelbaum, “distinctive and unprecedented.” To be sure, the American impulse to improve others stretches back to the nation’s Puritan forebears who sought to build a political order that would serve as a model to the world, and it extends through the whole of American history. But the traditional aim of foreign policy—to provide security in a dangerous world—dominated American thinking from the nation’s founding through the Cold War, when the aim was “containment” of Soviet communism. The tremendous new power America enjoyed as a result of its victory in the Cold War and its emergence as the world’s lone superpower, however, provided the luxury of embracing a new goal—“transformation.”

Mandelbaum deftly recounts the numerous missions across three presidencies in which America has sought to transform other countries’ internal politics. The Clinton administration sought to foster human rights in China, democracy in Russia, and regime change in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. It failed in every case.

The Bush administration endeavored to build free and democratic governments in Afghanistan and Iraq in the hope of transforming the greater Middle East. It failed.

Like the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Obama administration strove to bring peace to the Israelis and the Palestinians. And it failed.

Mandelbaum appreciates the benefits that would accrue to the United States from success in such missions. The problem with the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations and the foreign policy elites that advised them, he argues, is that they overestimated America’s capacity to accomplish these goals.

In China and Russia the missions failed, according to Mandelbaum, because Beijing and Moscow “were able to resist the kinds of changes the United States was trying to introduce.” In Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the mission failure “stemmed from the absence of the social conditions necessary to support the public institutions the United States hoped to install.”

With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, three presidential administrations failed because Palestinian leadership—first under Yasser Arafat and for the last 11 years under Mahmoud Abbas—declined to build transparent and accountable political institutions and even encouraged fellow Palestinians to regard a Jewish state of any size or shape in the land of Israel as irredeemably illegitimate.

In sum, three successive administrations have too often viewed the world not as it is but as they wish it to be. Obama’s and his team’s conviction that his multicultural background and electoral success uniquely enable him to conduct America foreign policy is only the latest source of such error.

If Mandelbaum is correct that the rise of Chinese adventurism and Russian irredentism reaffirms the primacy of power politics even as America retains an interest in prudently employing the nation’s highly limited tools to back the forces of freedom around the world, then the United States can ill afford a foreign policy nourished by fantasy.

Why Trump? Blame the Gap Between Elites and the People. By Leon Aron.

Why Trump? Blame the Gap Between Elites and the People. By Leon Aron. Newsweek, April 5, 2016. Also at AEI.

Trump Democrats Explain Themselves to the Conservatives Who Insult Them. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, April 4, 2016


Aron:

From Alabama to Denmark and Nevada to the Netherlands, and from Arizona to Sweden and Germany, Hungary and Poland, voters are flocking to right/left populist, nationalist, isolationist and nativist demagogues, parties and movements.

The trend sweeping Europe and the United States is broader and deeper than politics. The attraction of these suddenly popular phenomena appear to stem in a larger measure from an enormous gap between the beliefs of the “post-modern” and largely post-Christian Western elites (political, media, cultural, academic), on the one hand, and their countries’ hoi polloi on the other.

This chasm is not merely ideological. It is ethical, linguistic — almost anthropological.

For the elites, nothing, or almost nothing, is “written in stone.” Everything is fluid, situational, pragmatically determined. As the founder of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “existence precedes essence.” With “God dead,” as Nietzsche famously proclaimed, ethical absolutes are no more. Values are a matter of personal choice — and one is just as good as another. Nothing and no one is better or worse. Just “different.” There is no “truth” but multiple “truths.” And, following another postulate of post-modernism articulated by Nietzsche, “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Hence the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand approach of elite media which gives equal credence to, say, democratically elected governments and unelected dictatorships.

Similarly, there are neither “just” defensive wars nor “unjust” wars of aggression. All are “conflicts” and “violence.” Hence, any “peace” (aka, “political solution”), no matter how strained, short-lived, or outright fraudulent, is preferable to the battle for the victory of good over evil.

Borders and national sovereignty are atavisms. Hence such quintessentially elite bureaucratic projects as the EU, the Schengen “Europe without borders,” and the single European currency. The military is just as obsolete both as an instrument of geopolitics and a means of defending one’s values or those of one’s allies or clients. Ideologies, and the hatreds they inspire, should not exist and, in any case, can be resolved by a “dialogue.”

On the other side of the chasm are millions who crave certainties. They believe that there is an absolute hierarchy of values. That there is “right” and “wrong.” Their moral credos or “essence” shape and guide their “existence,” not the other way around. To them, God is not dead. In President Obama’s words, they cling to their guns and their religion.

They believe that there is truth and that some facts are irrefutable and not open to interpretations. One such fact is that some hatreds are inexpiable, that conflicts they lead to are unappeasable and cannot be resolved by negotiations or concessions but only by a victory of the one side over the other. And in such cases they believe one should strike first. They also believe that borders are sovereign and that militaries exist to be used to defend principles and territories.

They seem to feel that political correctness is rendering their countries incapable of conducting conversations on matters they consider vital. It took a series of simultaneous attacks by Islamic militants in Paris last year for the French president to identify their credo as islamisme radical. But President Obama could not bring himself to define the terrorists in these terms. He called them “a bunch of zealots” and he refused to acknowledge the religious and racial hatred as he described the killing of the shoppers in a Jewish deli as “randomly shoot [ing] a bunch of folks.”

The “cultural” difference between the elites and the “people” has always existed.

The deep weariness of such euphemisms and obfuscations may account for the almost reflexive, near-cathartic enthusiasm (no matter how misguided) for those who are “telling it like it is” – something that a plurality of Donald Trump’s primary voters cite as the key to their support.

This is not to argue for or against each of these Weltanschauungs. The “cultural” difference between the elites and the “people” has always existed. But the size of the gulf today may have rendered populist demagogues on both the right and left dangerously more attractive.

Let us hope that the Western establishment sees the danger and starts adjusting its vocabulary and values to the point where it can talk to its people in ways that the latter will find credible, respectful, and understandable.

Why Westerners Make Inviting Targets for Terrorists. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Mourners in Paris pay tribute to victims of Brussels terrorist attack. Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images.

Why Westerners Make Inviting Targets for Terrorists. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, March 31, 2016.

Hanson:

China has a long record of persecuting its Muslim minorities. Russia has brutally suppressed the separatist movement of the predominantly Muslim Chechens with bombing and shelling. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered airstrikes against Syrian Muslims without much worry over collateral damage. India has zero tolerance for Islamic radicalism and hits back hard any time Muslim terrorists attack.

Given such severe backlash elsewhere, why do radical Islamists prefer to strike Europeans and Americans — from Paris and Brussels to Boston and San Bernardino?

No place has been more open to Muslim refugees than the United States and the European Union. Together they have accepted several million emigrants from the Middle East since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The EU and the U.S. lavish foreign-aid money on the Palestinians. America has offered a half-century of support to Jordan and Egypt. It is much easier to be a Muslim in Europe than a Christian in the Middle East.

Barack Obama started his presidency eager to win over the Muslim world. In a 2009 interview with Dubai-based TV news channel Al Arabiya, he emphasized that he has Muslim family members. Obama’s NASA director redefined the space agency’s “foremost” mission as Muslim outreach.

Obama has sought a closer relationship with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan despite Erdogan’s Islamization of Turkey’s shaky democracy. In contrast, Obama alienated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the most steadfast friend America has in the Middle East.

Obama has publicly deferred to Muslim interests while abroad. He apologized to the Turkish parliament for a host of supposed past American sins — “some of our own darker periods in our history.” In symbolic fashion, Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The president’s Cairo speech mythologized Islamic contributions throughout history and downplayed Western achievement.

The Obama administration has in effect banned the use of the terms “jihadism” and “Islamic terrorism.” It prefers a host of euphemisms for Islamic terrorist acts, from “workplace violence” to “man-caused disasters.” CIA director John Brennan redefined jihad as a “holy struggle” of Islamic self-purification rather than a Koran-sanctioned campaign against infidels.

Obama granted theocratic Iran plenty of concessions in the agreement to restrict Iranian nuclear proliferation.

Despite all of that extraordinary presidential outreach, the West remains under constant terrorist threats and episodic attacks, often from Muslim youths who were offered sanctuary in places such as Belgium, France, Massachusetts, and California.

There are a number of reasons why jihadists prefer to target Westerners.

The West is wealthy, sensual, and liberal, and it offers the chance of global publicity to killers.

Muslim immigrants from the Middle East prefer the higher standard of living in Paris than the abject poverty at home. But they also hate how such affluence insidiously tempts their own religious fundamentalism. They do not praise Europe for its generosity, but rather blame it for its decadence.

The West is obsessed with mandated equality. The Muslim immigrant — who often arrives without education, language facility, or money — easily learns how to blame his relative poverty on his hosts. He is rarely reminded that not being relatively well off in Frankfurt or Boston is still far better than being unsafe and poor in Yemen or Chechnya.

America asks little of its immigrants. U.S. policies allow illegal entry en masse. America does not insist that newcomers learn English, and it largely prefers the trendy multicultural salad bowl to the time-tested assimilationist melting pot. As a result, there are entire communities where recent immigrants and their families prefer to guilt-trip, rather than show affinity toward, their adopted countries.

The West is also lax. A jihadist knows that he has a good chance of reentering the U.S. or Europe from the Middle East without detection. If he’s caught, the penalties are far less severe than they would be if he tried to start a terrorist cell in China or Russia. Extenuating claims of multicultural victimhood would not work in either autocracy.

Many Westerners are more scared of being labeled as illiberal or nativist than they are of being unsafe.

Islamic terrorists sense that Westerners are increasingly materialist rather than spiritual. Europeans in particular are becoming more secular. Their birthrates are declining. And they seem to believe more in satisfying their appetites than in finding transcendence through children and religion.

As a result, jihadists trust that they can cull a handful of Westerners every few weeks from an otherwise indifferent herd. Their only challenge is to keep the harvest of Westerners down to a few dozen and not to get greedy in their bloodlust.

Terrorists seem to believe that as long as they avoid another 9/11-like massacre, they can continue to take lives and insidiously weaken the West without awakening it from its morally indifferent slumber.

And they may be right.

Europe at the Edge of the Abyss. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Europe at the Edge of the Abyss. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, March 28, 2016.

Hanson:

America can still avoid sharing Europe’s fate. But only if we take action.

Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide.

After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in order to protect its national interests. But a France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations.

As part of the European Union, France and Belgium have, for all practical purposes, placed their own security in the hands of an obdurate Angela Merkel’s Germany, which is hellbent on allowing without audit millions of disenchanted young Middle Eastern males into its territory, with subsequent rights of passage into any other member of the European Union that they wish. The 21st-century “German problem” is apparently not that of an economic powerhouse and military brute warring on its neighbors, but that of an economic powerhouse that uses its wealth and arrogant sense of social superiority to bully its neighbors into accepting its bankrupt immigration policies and green ideology.

The immigration policies of France and Belgium are unfortunately also de facto those of Greece. And a petulant and poor Greece, licking its wounds over its European Union brawl with northern-European banks, either cannot or will not control entrance into its territory — Europe’s window on the Middle East. No European country can take the security measures necessary for its own national needs, without either violating or ignoring EU mandates. That the latest terrorist murders struck near the very heart of the EU in Brussels is emblematic of the Union’s dilemma.

As far as America is concerned, a fossilized EU should remind us of our original and vanishing system of federalism, in which states were once given some constitutional room to craft laws and protocols to reflect regional needs — and to ensure regional and democratic input with checks and balances on statism through their representatives in Congress. Yet the ever-growing federal government — with its increasingly anti-democratic, politically correct, and mostly unaccountable bureaucracies — threatens to do to Americans exactly what the EU has done to Europeans. We already see how the capricious erosion of federal immigration law has brought chaos to the borderlands of the American Southwest. It is a scary thing for a federal power arbitrarily to render its own inviolable laws null and void — and then watch the concrete consequences of such lawlessness fall on others, who have been deprived of recourse to constitutional protections of their own existential interests.

Europe’s immigration policy is a disaster — and for reasons that transcend the idiocy of allowing the free influx of young male Muslims from a premodern, war-torn Middle East into a postmodern, pacifist, and post-Christian Europe. Europe has not been a continent of immigrants since the Middle Ages. It lacks the ingredients necessary to assimilate, integrate, and intermarry large numbers of newcomers each year: There is no dynamic and fluid economy, no confidence in its own values, no belief that class and race are incidental, not essential, to one’s persona, no courage to assume that an immigrant made a choice to leave a worse place for a better one. And all this is in the context of a class-bound hierarchy masked and excused by boutique leftism.

Naturally, then, Europeans are unable to understand why a young Libyan came to Europe in the first place, and why apparently under no circumstances does he wish to return home. Specifically, Europeans — for a variety of 20th-century historical and cultural reasons — often are either ignorant of who they are or terrified about expressing their identities in any concrete and positive fashion. The result is that Europe cannot impose on a would-be newcomer any notion that consensual government is superior to the anarchy and theocracy of the Middle East, that having individual rights trumps being subjects of a dictator, that personal freedom is a better choice than statist tyranny, that protection of private property is a key to economic growth whereas law by fiat is not, and that independent judiciaries do not run like Sharia courts. It most certainly cannot ask of immigrants upon arrival that they either follow the laws of a society that originally made Europe attractive to them, or return home to live under a system that they apparently rejected. I omit for obvious reasons that few present-day Europeans believe that Christianity is much different from Islam, and apparently thus assume that terrorists might just as well be Christians.

Even worse is the European notion of medieval penance: Because one in the concrete present apparently wants little to do with a Moroccan second-generation ghetto dweller, he fabricates abstract leftist bromides to square the circle of hypocrisy and assuage his guilt — sort of like Hillary Clinton or Mark Zuckerberg calling for perennial open borders to justify their Wall Street–funded luxury and tony apartheid existence.

In Europe, immigrants are political tools of the Left. The rapid influx of vast numbers of unassimilated, uneducated, poor, and often illegal newcomers may violate every rule of successful immigration policy. Yet the onrush does serve the purposes of the statist, who demagogues for an instantaneous equality of result. Bloc voters, constituents of bigger government, needy recipients of state largesse, and perennial whiners about inequality are all fodder for European multicultural leftists, who always seek arguments for more of themselves.

So unassimilated poor immigrants from the former Third World become easy proof that inequality and unfairness are still here and must be addressed with someone else’s money — as if France has failed because it did not make an immigrant born in Algeria a good French socialist restaurant owner in 20 years.

The same phenomenon is with us in the United States. Without open borders, the Democrats would have had to explain to Americans how and why more taxes, larger government, more subsidies, less personal freedom, racial separatism, ethnic chauvinism, and a smaller military make them more prosperous and secure. Yet importing the poor and the uneducated expands the Democratic constituency. The Democrats logically fear measured, meritocratic, and racially and religiously blind legal immigration of those who want to come to America to seek freedom from statism. If a poor Oaxacan, who crossed into the U.S. three years ago — without education, legality, or knowledge of English — does not have a good car, adequate living space, and federalized health care, then the Koch brothers, Wall Street, Fox News, or the Chamber of Commerce — fill in the blank — is to blame, and legions of progressives are available to be hired out to redress such social injustice.

The Western therapeutic mindset, which maintains that impoverished immigrants should instantly have what their hosts have always had, trumps the tragic view: that it is risky, dangerous, and sometimes unwise to leave one’s home for a completely alien world, in which sacrifice and self-reliance alone can make the gamble worthwhile — usually for a second generation not yet born.

Demography is Europe’s bane. One engine of unchecked immigration has been the need for more bodies to do the sorts of tasks that Europeans feel are no longer becoming of Europeans. Demographic implosion is an old and trite observation; but more curious is the reason why Europe is shrinking — the classic and primary symptom of a civilization in rapid decline.

Europeans are not having children for lots of reasons. A static and fossilized economy without much growth gives little hope to a 20-something European that he or she can get a good job, buy a home, have three children, and provide for those offspring lives with unlimited choices. Instead, the young European bides his time, satisfying his appetites, as a perpetual adolescent who lives in his parents’ flat, seeks to milk the system, and waits for someone to die at the tribal government bureau. After a lost decade, one hopes to hook up with some like soul in her or his late thirties. The last eight years in the U.S. have seen an acceleration of the Europeanization of America’s youth.

Socialism also insidiously takes responsibility away from the individual and transfers it to the anonymous, but well-funded, state. The ancient Greek idea that one changes one’s children’s diapers so that one day they can change his is considered Neanderthal or just crudely utilitarian. Why seek children and the honor of raising and protecting them when the state can provide all without the bother and direct expense? Why have a family or invest for the future, when the state promises a pleasant and politically correct old-age home?

Without a Second Amendment or much of a defense budget, Europeans not only divert capital to enervating social programs, but also have sacrificed any confidence in muscular self-protection, individual or collective.

Even postmodern nations remain collections of individuals. A state that will not or cannot protect its own interests is simply a reflection of millions of dead souls that do not believe in risking anything to ensure that they are safe — including their own persons and those of their family. Finally, Europe is Petronius’s Croton. It does not believe in any transcendence as reified by children or religion. If there is nothing but the here and now, then why invest one’s energy in children who live on after one dies? Like atheism, childlessness reflects the assumption that ego-driven rationalism and satisfaction of the appetites are all there is and all that there ever will be.

Europe’s perfect storm is upon us. A shrinking, statist, and agnostic society that does not believe in transcendence, either familial or religious, is now in a war with near neighbors of a very different sort. In the Middle East, the fundamentalists are growing in numbers, and they most certainly do believe that their own lives are nothing in comparison to the Phoenix-like resurrection of their Caliphate and the sensual pleasures in the hereafter that will reward their martial sacrifices in the here and now. Of all the many reasons why immigrants to Europe so often dislike their generous hosts, the simplest may be because they so easily can.

Even H. G. Wells could not dream up any better harvest of Eloi by Morlocks, and it would take another St. Jerome (“All were born in captivity and siege, and do not desire the liberty they never knew. Who could believe this?”) to chronicle the Western tragedy.

As a general rule, whatever Europe is now doing, we should do the opposite — for our very survival in an increasingly scary world.

How Crony Capitalism Works. By Jason Willick.

How Crony Capitalism Works. By Jason Willick. The American Interest, March 28, 2016.

Willick:

In a provocative Brookings essay, Jonathan Rothwell challenges standard assumptions about economic inequality on the left (which tends to assume that markets inherently lead to exploitation of workers by capitalists) and right (which often assumes that the existing wealth distribution is a fair reflection of workers’ talents and abilities). A major source of growing inequality, he says, is not an excess of capitalism, but the distortion of it: The force of market competition has been concentrated on workers and small businesses, while elite professionals and financiers (who encompass the lion’s share of the 1%) have managed to engineer protectionist rackets.

Some examples: Dentists lobby for rules that prevent dental hygienists from performing teeth-whitening; the lawyers’ guild sustains extortionate rates in part by making sure that less-credentialed workers are blocked from performing even basic administrative legal tasks; college administrators earn top-flight salaries while the federally-enforced accreditation system suppresses alternative education models; the American Medical Association strains to minimize the scope of work available to nurses and nurse practitioners; and hedge fund managers push finance regulations make sure they have a leg up on less-sophisticated investors. As Rothwell writes:

Politicians and intellectuals often champion market competition—but what they mean by that is competition among low-paid service workers, production workers, or computer programmers who face competition from trade and immigration, while elite professionals sit behind a protectionist wall. Workers in occupations with no higher educational requirements see their wages held down by millions of other Americans denied a high-quality education and competing for relatively precious vacancies.

Read the whole thing. The essay highlights that what we at Via Meadia call the decline of the blue model—the fading of the midcentury economic system built on monopolistic cooperation between unions, government, and business—has been uneven. Some industries (media, software, entertainment) have grown more competitive and dynamic, while others (finance, law, higher education, medical services) remain heavily regulated, often through hidden channels, in ways that benefit those at the top. It’s a similar story when it comes to labor: Private sector unions have been hammered by globalization and technology, but public sector unions have captured enough state and local governments that they can still provide their workers with lavish benefits. In other words, privileged insiders have been able to retain the parts of the old blue model system that suits their material interests.

The solution to this problem is not to try to reconstruct the blue model by strengthening monopolies and jacking up taxes and regulations. Rather, it’s to introduce competition into industries that have so far been shielded from it, by, for example, undoing repressive occupational licensing rules, modernizing higher educational accreditation, and repealing hedge-fund friendly financial regulations. This project couldn’t be more urgent: At a time when working class Americans are revolting against the democratic-capitalist order, it’s imperative that elites take steps to prove that markets and competition can also work for those who don’t have access to political power.