Politics

Trump’s unprecedented call for protests is the latest sign of his aim to degrade America’s institutions

-Shelley Inglis, Executive Director, University of Dayton Human Rights Center, University of Dayton In a social media post on March 18, 2023, former President Donald Trump announced that he would be arrested on March 21 on charges stemming from an investigation led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Bragg’s office is probing hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, which were allegedly made to spare candidate Trump embarrassment on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. Scholar Shelley Inglis spent more than 15 years with the United Nations, where she advised governments and democracy advocates on how to strengthen the rule of law, human rights and democratic governance. We asked her about Trump’s post. What did you think about when you heard his call for protests? Let me begin by quickly describing populism, because it’s important to my thoughts about Trump’s post. Populist movements portray “the people in a moral battle against elites,” as scholars Jane Mansbridge and Stephen Macedo describe it. Some level of populism is inherent in democracies where candidates appeal to be elected by “the people.” But what I call autocratic populists use this narrative to claim they are the sole voice of “the people” and those against them are “bad” or even “evil.” They undermine any and all opposition to them and attempts to hold them accountable, including independent institutions like courts, elections and the media. This is how such populists become so dangerous for democracy and the rule of law. Members of the media set up cameras in front of the courthouse on March 20, 2023, in New York, ahead of former President Donald Trump’s anticipated indictment. AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez Trump has that autocrat’s populism, in which he says that not only is he anti-elite but that he is “the only one” who can represent the people and […]

IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

– Jill Lepore A brilliant, revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century, from the author of the acclaimed international bestseller, These Truths. The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilised politics, and disordered knowledge–decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behaviour, deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, unearthed from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm. “A person can’t help but feel inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Jill Lepore. Knowing that there is a mind like hers in the world is a hope-inducing thing.” –George Saunders “Everything Lepore writes is distinguished by intelligence, eloquence, and fresh insight. If Then is that, and even more: It’s absolutely fascinating, excavating a piece of little-known American corporate history that reveals a huge amount about the way we live today and the companies that define the modern era.” –Susan Orlean “Data science, Jill Lepore reminds us in this brilliant book, has a past, and she tells it through the engrossing story of Simulmatics, the tiny, long-forgotten company that helped invent our data-obsessed world, in which prediction is seemingly […]

“Pigs at the trough” – Chums by Simon Kuper

There are, it seems to me, two kinds of people in the world: those who have woken in despair a great many times since 2016 and those who think the UK is on the right track. There are those, even now, even after letting the bodies pile up, even after the parties and the public money given to donors, even after the pornography in the Commons and the Electoral Commission being deprived of its independent status and – you know – all the rest of it, who would still vote for the Conservatives tomorrow. I can’t imagine for one second that reading Simon Kuper’s book, Chums (How a tiny caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK), would change any of their minds. This book, Kuper tells us, “is not an attempt to relitigate the Brexit referendum” nor is it “a twee Oxford tale of witticisms exchanged by long-dead dons”; rather it is “an attempt to write a group portrait of a set of Tory Brexiteers” because “it won”: “It ended up making Brexit and remodelling the UK. To understand power in today’s Britain requires travelling back in time to the streets of Oxford, somewhere between 1983 and 1993.” Kuper, you’ll come to understand, was at Oxford at more or less the same time as Johnson, Gove, Rees-Mogg, Cameron, Dominic Cummings (and their cheerleaders Toby Young, Nick Robinson etc). While there is a little of Kuper here (his own fleeting experience of Oxford shimmers like a heat haze around the story he is telling), what we are doing is following a small group of men as they transfer all of the advantage of Eton to Oxford, walking around like they own the place, doing what they please because no one has ever told them otherwise and getting away with it, time and […]

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality

A landmark, radically uplifting account of our species’ progress from one of the world’s pre-eminent thinkers – with breakthrough insights into the power of diversity and our capacity to tackle climate change. In a captivating journey from the dawn of human existence to the present, world-renowned economist and thinker Oded Galor offers an intriguing solution to two of humanity’s great mysteries. Why are humans the only species to have escaped – only very recently – the subsistence trap, allowing us to enjoy a standard of living that vastly exceeds all others? And why have we progressed so unequally around the world, resulting in the great disparities between nations that exist today? Immense in scope and packed with astounding connections, Galor’s gripping narrative explains how technology, population size, and adaptation led to a stunning “phase change” in the human story a mere two hundred years ago. But by tracing that same journey back in time and peeling away the layers of influence – colonialism, political institutions, societal structure, culture – he arrives also at an explanation of inequality’s ultimate causes: those ancestral populations that enjoyed fruitful geographical characteristics and rich diversity were set on the path to prosperity, while those that lacked it were disadvantaged in ways still echoed today. As we face ecological crisis across the globe, The Journey of Humanity is a book of urgent truths and enduring relevance, with lessons that are both hopeful and profound: gender equality, investment in education, and balancing diversity with social cohesion are the keys not only to our species’ thriving, but to its survival.

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas

-Gal Beckerman From intimate conversations grow world-shaking movements, argues this probing intellectual history. New York Times Book Review editor Gal Beckerman (When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone) surveys small circles that incubated subversive thinking, including 17th-century French polymath Nicolas Peiresc’s scientific letter-writing network; Britain’s 1839 Chartist campaign for universal suffrage, which galvanised working-class politics; Soviet dissident Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s samizdat journal, the Chronicle, which landed her in a psychiatric hospital; and the 1990s feminist punk scene sparked by the zine Riot Grrrl. He also investigates the internet’s role in modern-day movements: the Facebook page that publicised Egypt’s Tahrir Square demonstration; the Discord chat rooms where alt-right activists organised the 2017 Unite-the-Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.; and the Red Dawn email group of health experts who brainstormed Covid-19 interventions. Drawing on communications theory, Beckerman analyses these intellectual channels for their ability to foster accessible but private conversations that shape innovative ideas, though he’s skeptical of social media as an organising tool because it’s too public, volatile, emotional, and virtual to nurture serious thinking and politics. Beckerman unearths fascinating lore about these ideological hothouses, from the Futurists’ love triangles in early 20th-century Italy to the alt-right’s public-messaging strategies. The result is a timely and stimulating take on how the fringe infiltrates the mainstream.

Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us

By Brian Klaas “Does power corrupt, or are corrupt people drawn to power?” So asks Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London, at the outset of this absorbing survey. The answer is yes. The author delivers a provocative argument to support that claim, whether discussing the case of an African strongman who cannibalized his political enemies or the martinet president of a homeowners association. Two memorable examples come early: One is a “psychopathic pharmacist” who organised the survivors of a 1629 shipwreck on an Australian island to commit more than 100 murders at his whim. The second is a similar marooning, four centuries later, in which a group of young Tongan men lived for more than a year in a flatly organised shared-power-and-responsibility system. That all survived may have been a fluke given that we tend to create hierarchies in which “upstarts who would’ve previously faced ostracism, humiliation, or death now had a real prospect of becoming genuinely powerful.” Because power thrives on conflict, the rate of violence increases; because people fear violence, powerful people who offer security thrive. Hierarchy itself isn’t bad, writes Klaas; it’s just that it attracts corrupt people who flourish in competition. Today, “much of the world is dominated by systems that attract and promote corruptible people.” Some make no effort to disguise their corruption (Putin, Trump, etc.); others are more sophisticated. Is it nature or nurture? “We don’t know,” writes Klaas. The implications are far-reaching. For example, since police work attracts former soldiers who enjoy exercising power, real police reform will involve not hiring such people. To keep people from abusing power, those with power within a hierarchy must be rotated and kept an eye on, given that “watched people are nice people.

How Africa’s autocratic elites cycle in and out of power

Andrea CarboniPostdoctoral research fellow, University of Sussex Clionadh RaleighProfessor of Political Geography, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex In 2021, coups d’état ousted four heads of state in sub-Saharan Africa. Army interventions in Chad, Mali, Guinea and Sudan halted a years-long decline in military takeovers. Some heralded this as the comeback of the army in African politics. Elsewhere in Africa, elected leaders in Tunisia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, among others, were accused of pivoting to authoritarian rule. Common authoritarian measures include suspending parliamentary assemblies, confining opposition leaders, extending term limits and violently repressing opposition and dissent. Here lies an apparent paradox: despite decades in which democratic institutions have become prevalent across the continent, African states continue to be vulnerable to military takeovers and autocratic forms of power. Multiple interpretations aim to explain this seeming contradiction. A popular explanation suggests that the world, and especially Africa, is entering a new phase of ‘democratic backsliding’. This follows a decades-long era during which several leaders were ousted by popular movements. Nowhere was this more evident than in North Africa. Here, the democratic aspirations of the 2011 Arab Spring were overshadowed by a return to authoritarianism and conflict. Yet, in many of Africa’s competitive autocracies, the removal of leaders is not associated with revolutionary change. In fact, there is a remarkable stability of senior elites and institutional practices across regimes. This seems to point to their resilience in the face of a supposed trajectory towards democracy. The literature on political survival provides a more compelling narrative to explain political change in competitive autocracies. A leader’s survival is conditioned on the support of senior elites. Leaders can typically spread power among their ‘rival allies’ to keep it and co-opt enough of those elites in exchange for political support. These actors can in turn leverage their collective power to secure greater influence and rewards from […]

The psychology of riots – and why it’s never just mindless violence

Matthew RadburnPostdoctoral Research Fellow, Keele University Clifford StottProfessor of Social Psychology, Keele University It seemingly can happen anywhere – and at any time. From London to Hong Kong, apparently peaceful cities can sometimes erupt suddenly into widespread, and often sustained, unrest. But what role does psychology play in this? And can it explain how, why and when crowds turn to violence? The recent film Joker tells the bleak story of how a mentally ill loner, Arthur Fleck, becomes the infamous comic book villain – and inspires a riotous popular movement. In the film, the stage seems well set for a riot. Gotham City is depicted as “… a powder keg of lawlessness, inequality, corruption, cuts and all-round despair”. But is the crowd protesting this – or acting as a mindless mob? As commentator Aditya Vats has pointed out, the film appears to reflect the views of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who argued that society has a drive towards chaos and destruction. In the film, Fleck is portrayed as the individual who unleashes these apparently innate tendencies when he brutally kills first three wealthy young bankers – and then a TV talk show host live on air. Subsequently, thousands of rioters in clown masks are shown rioting, looting and killing, seemingly inspired by his actions. This is a simple, and popular, representation of real-world crowd violence. But does it accurately reflect the true psychology underpinning “riotous” behaviour? There are three “classical” theoretical explanations of the crowd that endure in the popular imagination. The first, “mad mob theory”, suggests that individuals lose their sense of self, reason and rationality in a crowd and so do things they otherwise might not as an individual. The second is that collective violence is the product of a convergence of “bad” – or criminal – individuals enacting their violent personal predispositions together in the same space. The third […]

Capitol assault: the real reason Trump and the crowd almost killed US democracy

Stephen ReicherBishop Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews Alex HaslamProfessor of Psychology and ARC Laureate Fellow, The University of Queensland Evangelos NtontisLecturer in Psychology, The Open University Klara JurstakovaPhD Candidate, Canterbury Christ Church University It was the moment that could have brought US democracy to its knees. One year ago, around noon on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump gave the concluding speech to a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington DC. Within an hour, protesters attacked and then breached barricades around the Capitol Building, seat of the US Congress. By 1.30pm, they had invaded the building itself. And by the time they left, five people had died. To what extent were the two events related? Did Trump’s words incite his followers to assault the Capitol? Or did the rioters act independently and of their own accord? These were the questions on which Trump’s second impeachment trial turned. More specifically, the debate centred on whether Trump’s words contained clear instructions that guided what happened next, with special attention given to a specific sentence in the speech: If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. For the prosecution, this was the smoking gun. For the defence, the word “fight” was a mere metaphor, akin to “fighting for one’s principles”. To quote from the opening statement of Trump’s lawyer, Michael van der Veen: This is ordinary political rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from the language that has been used across the political spectrum for hundreds of years. In the end, interpretation split clearly along party lines. In the Senate, 48 Democrats voted for impeachment, none against, while 43 Republicans voted against impeachment and seven for. The total in favour failed to reach the two-thirds threshold, so Trump was acquitted as not guilty. But whatever one […]

Global Shapers Community driving change

As it marks its 10 years anniversary, the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community continues to drive change and disrupt the status quo in cities and communities across the world. The community is a network of more than 14,000 young people driving dialogue, action and change in more than 450 hubs across 150 countries and territories around the world. Their projects range from providing disaster relief to combating poverty to fighting climate change to building inclusive communities. This is an incredibly diverse community, but they all have one thing in common: they want to create real, meaningful change. For many people around the world, 2021 has been a reminder of the fragility of our global system. For others, this year has been a time of hope as countries race to vaccinate their population with the aim of going back to normal. But for many members of our community, “normal” is the problem. Young people today believe that they can and will change the world for the better. The Global Shapers Community was created with the mission to empower young people through enabling them to self-organise and amplifying their voices. Global Shapers have sense of shared responsibility, an urgency to make the world a better place and an attitude of cooperation irrespective of differences. The ambition is to support a global community of young changemakers taking action to improve the state of the world, one local community at a time. To achieve this goal, the Global Shapers Community seeks to create meaningful impacts on individual Shapers, who in turn create change within their communities through city-based Global Shaper hubs and the projects these hubs develop, launch and implement. Through the work of Shapers, hubs and their projects, citizens become engaged in their communities, become proud of their communities, and develop a greater sense […]

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