It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, May 25, 2020
‘This is Trump’s plague’ and the ‘blood’ on his hands will doom his re-election: Charles Blow
In a column for the New York Times, Charles Blow makes the case that Joe Biden would be smart to lay low — and thus avoid making major gaffes that could hurt his presumptive Democratic presidential nomination — and let the focus remain on Donald Trump who has cratered his re-election chances with his mishandling of the coronavirus health crisis.
Blow began his column by making a pointed observation by writing, “As the United States’ death toll raced toward 100,000, Donald Trump went golfing.”
Writing, “Trump put politics, his own political fortunes, over the lives of the American people, and the result has been catastrophic,” he further explained, “The number of deaths never had to reach such a staggering figure — and it will surely climb far beyond it — but it did because in the early days, Trump made excuses for the Chinese response, dragged his feet on an American response, and repeatedly made statements that defied truth and science.”
Noting that president prematurely congratulated himself on March 10th when there were only 959 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 28 deaths — telling reporters “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away” — Blow claimed the president did too little until it was likely too late.
“The virus wasn’t aware of the politics of the moment. The virus wasn’t aware that he had been lying and deflecting. The virus wasn’t aware that it should wait until the American president was cowed into correct action. It was doing what viruses do: It was spreading and it was killing,” he explained. “Trump dragged his feet, trying to con his way through a pandemic, to rewrite reality, to pacify the public until the virus passed, and that has led to untold numbers of people dead who never had to die.”
“There is not only blood on Trump’s hands, he is drenched in it like the penultimate scene from the movie ‘Carrie,'” he charged.
According to the columnist, nothing Trump can say, including blaming the Chinese for the virus or governors in the U.S. battling to stem the tide of the pandemic-related deaths can absolve the president of his responsibility for the damage that has been done.
“In America, this is Donald Trump’s plague, and he is yoked with that going into the election in November,” he predicted.
New comments from the renowned academic come after he accused Trump of wanting “to destroy the prospects for all organized human life… in the near future.”
World-renowned intellectual and author Noam Chomsky called U.S. President Donald Trump a “sociopathic megalomaniac” whose leadership drove the U.S. to become “singularly unprepared” for the coronavirus pandemic.
Chomsky’s fresh criticism of the president came in an interview with Agence France-Presse published Monday.
“The White House,” said Chomsky, “is in the hands of a sociopathic megalomaniac who’s interested in nothing but his own power, electoral prospects.”
Trump “doesn’t care what happens to the country, the world,” though he’s still reliant on “his primary constituency, which is great wealth and corporate power,” Chomsky said.
The administration has “no coordinated plan” for addressing the pandemic, meaning the nation will see “a lot more” deaths from Covid-19 on top of the nearly 100,000 confirmed fatalities that have already occurred, he added.
Setting the stage for the current situation is that Trump kicked off his administration by moving to take apart “the entire pandemic prevention machinery,” including by “canceling programs that were working with Chinese scientists to identify potential viruses,” Chomsky said. Another contributing factor to the flawed response, said Chomsky, is that the nation is “in the stranglehold of private control,” an example of which is the lack of a national single-payer healthcare system. “It’s the ultimate neoliberal system, actually,” he said.
While Chomsky predicted a recovery from the pandemic will come eventually and “at severe cost,” the same cannot be said of the climate crisis. “There isn’t going to be any recovery from the melting of the polar ice caps and the rising of sea levels,” he warned.
Chomsky’s fresh comments to AFP follow similarly scathing recent rebukes of the Trump administration.
In an interview earlier this month with the Guardian, Chomsky was asked if Trump was “culpable in deaths of Americans.”
“Yes,” responded, “but it’s much worse than that, because the same is true internationally. To try and cover up his criminal attacks against the American people, which have been going on all of this time, he’s flailing about to try and find scapegoats.”
Chomsky also recently took aim at Trump’s policies that are worsening the climate crisis, telling Canada’s National Observer last month that the U.S. president “wants to destroy the prospects for all organized human life. And in the near future. That’s what it means to maximize the use of fossil fuels, to cut regulations that might diminish or restrict that danger.”
But as bad as Trump is, Chomsky noted that the groundwork was laid well before the failed business owner walked into the Oval Office. In an April interview with Democracy Now!, Chomsky said:
Trump is taking a failing, lethal system and turning it into a monstrosity, but the roots were before him. Just think back to the reason why the pandemic occurred in the first place. Drug companies are following capitalist logic. They don’t want to do anything. The neoliberal hammer says the government can’t do anything the way it did in the past. You’re caught in a vise. Then comes along Trump and makes it incomparably worse. But the roots of the crisis are pre-Trump.
The same with the healthcare system. Like we know that—everyone knows—they should know the basic facts. It’s an international scandal: twice the costs of comparable countries, some of the worst outcomes. The costs were recently estimated by a study in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals. They estimated that the costs, the annual—annual costs to Americans are close to half a trillion dollars and 68,000 lives lost. That’s not so small. Going forward, Chomsky suggested there are lessons to be learned from the coronavirus crisis.
“One lesson is that it’s another colossal failure of the neoliberal version of capitalism. Massive failure,” Chomsky told Efe last month.
“If we don’t learn that lesson,” he said, “it’s going to recur worse next time.”
These psychological motives have shaped right-wing conservatism in America ever since the Civil War
Many people who see little rational basis for supporting Donald Trump ask themselves: Why is he so popular? Relatedly, why did so many people support Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler, and other avatars of popular right-wing conservatism? There are, of course, many different reasons for each situation. But there also key commonalities that have been identified in meta-analyses of the topic written by the psychologist John T. Jost and colleagues. In relation to Jost’s work, I have examined aspects of the antebellum South in order to better understand its political culture, especially aspects of that culture that prompted many Southerners to become more emotionally receptive to the appeals of “fire-eater” secessionist conservatives. More broadly, this historical lens can help illuminate the mass appeal of conservatism in general, focusing particularly on the psychological factors that tend to underlie this appeal.
Among the various scholars writing on the topic since World War II, Jost found agreement that an inclination to respect tradition in resisting change and to respect hierarchy in sustaining inequality are two key interrelated core conservative ideological characteristics. He found that several psychological motives increase the likelihood that people will manifest these ideological characteristics. These psychological motives include tendencies toward “fear and aggression . . ., dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity . . ., uncertainty avoidance [including less openness to new experiences] . . ., need for cognitive closure . . ., need for structure . . ., and [support for] group-based dominance.” The desire to keep under tight reins any conditions that evoke uncertainty or fear is the most prominent and overarching of these motives, which often translates into ideologically-based preferences to hold tight to elements of society and political culture identified with traditional authority.
For decades, antebellum Southern whites were exposed to a regular drumbeat of fearful rumors that bloody slave insurrections would result if slaves were emancipated, which rabidly pro-secessionist political leaders (the fire-eaters) contended would happen if Abraham Lincoln were elected president in 1860. This fear, along with racist attitudes toward African-Americans, reinforced the Southern white craving for order, the inclination to value the certainties that they felt they knew, and wariness about the possibilities of change.
Fear boosted the strength of leaders in politics, press, and pulpit whose cries about the dangers of slave revolt made people more inclined to emotion-based political decision-making rather than reason-based thought. In his role as one of the secession commissioners sent by the early-seceding states to coax other Southern states to join their cause, Stephen F. Hale of Alabama expressed many Southerners’ fears in portraying Lincoln’s election as “[inaugurating] all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection [referring to the bloody slave liberation struggle during the era of the French Revolution in the country later known as Haiti], consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollutions and violation to gratify the lust of half civilized Africans.” Slave emancipation and equal rights for African-Americans would result in the obsessively-feared “amalgamation” of the races through interracial sex, or “an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the country.” “With us [Southerners],” Hale observed, “it is a question of self-preservation. Our lives, our property, the safety of our homes and our hearthstones, all that men hold dear on earth, is involved in the issue.”
Contention over slavery was also part of a broader web of controversy arising from what many Southerners thought of as a decades-old culture war over the differing social arrangements and values of the North and South. Pointing to the fact that abolitionists were usually active in other reform movements in the North (that were virtually non-existent in the South), Southern leaders saw these movements as being of one piece with abolitionism, in dangerously seeking to extend the concept of human rights and opportunity to out-groups—often singling out the feminist movement in this regard—and in seeking to lure people away from traditional social relations and socioeconomic structures.
Southern leaders sought to stereotype reform activism as more radical and pervasive in the North than was actually the case. The historian Manisha Sinha observes that the North was portrayed as an atheistic land “in which property, marriage, female subordination, religious fidelity, and other pillars of social order were constantly challenged.” The fire-eater James D.B. De Bow on the eve of sec Southern leaders sought to stereotype reform activism as more radical and pervasive in the North than was actually the case. The historian Manisha Sinha observes that the North was portrayed as an atheistic land “in which property, marriage, female subordination, religious fidelity, and other pillars of social order were constantly challenged.” The fire-eater James D.B. De Bow on the eve of secession spoke of Southerners as “adhering to the simple truths of the Gospel and the faith of their fathers, they have not run hither and thither in search of all the absurd and degrading isms which have sprung up in the rank [Northern] soil of infidelity. They are not Mormons or Spiritualist [sic], they are not Owenites, Fourierites, Agrarians, Socialists, Free-lovers or Millerites.” ession spoke of Southerners as “adhering to the simple truths of the Gospel and the faith of their fathers, they have not run hither and thither in search of all the absurd and degrading isms which have sprung up in the rank [Northern] soil of infidelity. They are not Mormons or Spiritualist [sic], they are not Owenites, Fourierites, Agrarians, Socialists, Free-lovers or Millerites.”
The South’s dominant approach to the Christian religion produced an atmosphere conducive to the fearful imaginings of a culture war, and reinforced the sorts of personality characteristics that Jost believes are conducive to the formation of right-wing conservative political beliefs. The tendency to demonize the North and its reform movements grew, in part, from a more general Manichean outlook emphasized within Southern churches, which divided the world into harshly drawn categories of good and evil. In this perspective, the only alternative to a slave-based traditional way of life in the South was considered apocalyptic ruin. Thus, the influential Rev. James H. Thornwell of South Carolina thundered that “the parties in this [cultural] conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.”
Rather than pressing their congregants to realistically face the moral challenge of slavery, clergymen were crucial in helping Southerners circle their attitudinal wagons in defense of the peculiar institution, using a narrow literal interpretation of the Bible to defend it while insisting that the South had a God-given stable order far superior to that of the urbanizing “ism”-plagued North. Seeking to contain the moral ferment of the North and its potentially destabilizing effects, clergymen focused their congregants on personal salvation, shunning the direction of many Northern churches that sought to reform society in order to remove impediments to godliness.
Rather than seeking to treat certain passages of the Bible as allegory or historical custom in order to reconcile Scripture with more conscientious attitudes toward slavery (and to reconcile with scientific discoveries such as the geological findings proving a much older earth than that found in the Bible’s accounts), clergymen sought instead to squeeze reality into a rigid literal interpretation of the Bible. Thus, they offered their adherents a way of escape from the use of reason and dialogue in performing moral calculus, and demonstrated how to ground their beliefs and behaviors in what made them feel emotionally secure in the present. This helped hide the immorality of slavery from Southern eyes, and it hid the falsity of Southerners’ belief that their security depended on the continuation of slavery.
This religious approach reinforced the closed nature of a society in which dissenting viewpoints and the give and take of civil dialogue were only tolerated when concerning issues that did not challenge the structures of society. This was most particularly the case from the early 1830s onward, as the rise of abolitionism and other reforms prompted the highly defensive approach to issues that would mark the final decades of the antebellum era. Using the “isms” of the North as a foil, Southern right-wing leaders began to frame slavery as a “positive good,” in contrast to the previous view of slavery as a morally troublesome institution that was nevertheless too difficult to abandon due to economic and security concerns. Leaders thus placed the South on a fateful path, rejecting what had been a relatively open political culture in which civil discussion about weaning the South off slavery had been tolerated.
Believing themselves to be sitting atop a social volcano, Southern leaders sought order by isolating the region’s people from the culture of what they considered to be a decadent North and indeed from a decadent Western civilization in general. Psychological, economic, and physical bullying upheld the closed nature of the South, as did the forceful exclusion of antislavery newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets—backed by the federal government’s acquiescence in banning the distribution of supposedly incendiary works through the mail in Southern states. Thosewhovoiced heterodox views could readily find their businesses shunned and their standing in society ruined. “Vigilance committees” filled with men itching to prove their masculinity sprang into action at rumors about whites advocating abolition and rumors that slaves may be planning to revolt. Many were forcefully exiled from the region, beaten up, or hanged as a result.
The suppression of thought in the antebellum South helped ensure that the individual dispositions of many whites would gravitate toward Jost’s categories of fear, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and support for group-based dominance, all of which left many Southerners ill-equipped—in their lack of knowledge and in their fearful, conformist attitudes—to stand up to the fire-eaters during the secession crisis of 1860-1861. Seeking order above all, the South disallowed the possibility of evolutionary change from the 1830s onward, obtaining as a result bloody revolutionary change in the 1860s.
Ideally, more history and political science professors will recognize the value of using historical case studies as a lens for better understanding the psychology of right-wing conservatism, particularly in understanding its mass appeal. Given the propensity of right-wing conservatism toward authoritarianism, such a curricular element could help sensitize citizens to the potential danger that the emotion-driven inclinations characteristic of conservatism pose to the maintenance of a civil democratic polity. I would recommend the study of the social psychology of past right-wing political movements as a normative element in college-level U.S. history courses and other humanities and social sciences courses geared toward teaching the foundations of civic knowledge. Ideally, an awareness of the social psychological basis of right-wing conservatism might even suffuse down into the quotidian teaching of history and civics on a secondary school level. The ascendancy of Donald Trump illustrates how important it is to increase our citizens’ ability to take such historical issues into account in examining current events.
Each week, I'll present a new album for your consideration—a means for passing these uncertain times in musical bliss. For some readers, hearing about the latest selection might offer a chance reacquaintance with an old friend. For others, the series might provide an unexpected avenue for making a new one.
By the advent of the band's "Rubber Soul" album in 1965, the Beatles had begun self-consciously challenging themselves to create new sounds with each new LP. The extreme musical shifts from "Rubber Soul" to "Revolver" are a terrific case in point. In later years, George Harrison would come to describe the records as parts one and two of the same album. In this instance, the Quiet Beatle couldn't have been more wrong. The folkish, melodic sounds of "Rubber Soul" exist in sharp contrast with "Revolver"'s dramatic generic shifts and brash experimentation.
For Harrison especially, "Revolver" exists as a genuine renaissance — the moment when he contributed a previously unheard of three songs to a Beatles long-player. In addition to the Eastern sounds of "Love You To" and the straight-ahead rock stylings of "I Want to Tell You," Harrison's "Revolver" contributions are highlighted by "Taxman," the album's high-octane opener. The song is a marvel of virtuosity, as evidenced by McCartney's looping bass lines, as well as his overdubbed high-octane guitar solo, which he played, raga-like, on his Epiphone Casino with a characteristic Indian flavor and tempo.
Listen to "Taxman":
By "Revolver," the Beatles and producer George Martin had proven themselves to be masters of pop-music sequencing. With their latest release, they cleverly counterpoised each new track with dramatic shifts in style and tone. Beatles fans might understandably expense aural whiplash during the shift from "Taxman" to "Eleanor Rigby," McCartney's elemental study of loneliness and despair set against a classical backdrop that Martin created with a nod to Bernard Hermann's "Psycho" soundtrack (1960). The result is simply breathtaking.
Listen to "Eleanor Rigby":
With "Revolver," Martin and the Beatles had succeeded in establishing what is arguably the most profound demographic growth in the history of entertainment. During their early years, the band appealed to a narrow swathe of teens and young adults. But all of that changed with "Yesterday," which Martin adorned with a string quartet. Not only did "Yesterday" emerge as a chart-topping American hit, but the groundbreaking song also saw the band growing their demographic to include the highly desirable world of working adults, ages 25-54, who longed for something more sophisticated.
And then there was Revolver's "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine." In one fell swoop, the Beatles penetrated two more demographics. "Eleanor Rigby" attracted a post-55 audience in droves, while the good-natured storyline and nautical sound effects inherent in "Yellow Submarine" drew children and pre-teens into the Beatles' camp. Quite suddenly—and scarcely more than two years after their triumphant American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show—the group dominated nearly every quadrant of the consumer age range.
Listen to "Yellow Submarine":
With Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick embracing newfangled production techniques associated with the Leslie Speaker, backwards guitars, and Artificial Double-Tracking, which had been invented expressly for the Beatles by EMI engineer Ken Townsend, Revolver saw the bandmates' imaginations running wild. Within the space of a few short tracks, the band would range from the quietude of McCartney's "For No One," Lennon's mesmerizing "She Said, She Said," and the brass-infused "Got to Get You into My Life."
But for all of the LP's musical and engineering triumphs, nothing could have prepared listeners for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the album's mind-blowing climax. In a single masterstroke, the Beatles created a psychedelic tapestry that ushered in new ways of thinking about the concept of "recording artists," not to mention rock and roll as a musical genre.
In its early manifestations, "Tomorrow Never Knows" sported the working titles of "Mark I" and "The Void," clear indications, in and of themselves, about the composition's avant-garde nature. For the Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows" exerted a profound before-and-after effect upon their listeners. A powerful listening experience unlike any of their previous work, "Tomorrow Never Knows" was akin to Alice's Looking-Glass: once you get on the other side, things will never be the same again.
Listen to "Tomorrow Never Knows":
The genius of the Beatles' "Rubber Soul" Welcome to our new series, "Sheltering in Place with Classic Albums," a guide to solid music for uncertain times KENNETH WOMACK MARCH 21, 2020
Welcome to the "Sheltering in Place with Classic Albums" series. Each week, I'll present a new album for your consideration—a means for passing these uncertain times in musical bliss. For some readers, hearing about the latest selection might offer a chance reacquaintance with an old friend. For others, the series might provide an unexpected avenue for making a new one. For the inaugural selection in our series, we begin with "Rubber Soul," arguably the Beatles' maiden voyage into classic album-hood. No less than the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson described "Rubber Soul" as the greatest LP of all time. When he first heard it, Wilson recalled, "I couldn't deal with it. It blew my mind."
Released in December 1965, the Beatles' sixth studio album took its name from Paul McCartney's concept of "plastic soul." In his coinage, plastic soul referred to the band's penchant for transforming musical forms — often American rhythm and blues — into their own image, retaining their fundamental qualities in the process of making them their own. Perhaps even more dramatically, the record featured several tunes that upended prevailing 1960s thinking about gender norms at the time, making the album revolutionary in more ways than one.
If for no other reason, "Rubber Soul" enjoys classic album status by simply standing the test of time. The LP is chock-full of greatness, from top to bottom, albeit with one glaring exception. The record is composed of one classic cut after another — from "Drive My Car" and "Michelle" to "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and "In My Life," among a host of others.As the group's musical valentine to their American rock 'n' roll roots, "Rubber Soul" begins, pointedly, with the ear-catching flourish of George Harrison's bluesy guitar, which kick-starts "Drive My Car" into life. With McCartney's relentless bass and Ringo Starr's cowbell propelling the rhythm, "Drive My Car" challenges the highly gendered expectations of the Beatles' mid-1960s audience. As "Drive My Car" emphatically demonstrates, the everygirl from the songs of the early Beatles was very quickly transforming into an everywoman, complete with an ego and agenda that wasn't playing second fiddle to any masculine other.
Listen to "Drive My Car":
And then there's "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," which featured Harrison's first deployment of the sitar on a pop tune. In so doing, he provided a curious palette for John Lennon's confessional tale about an extramarital affair. Lennon's lyrics — far from underscoring love's everlasting possibilities — hint at something far more fleeting, even unromantic: "She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere / So I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair." Compare the words of "Norwegian Wood" with such earlier phraseology as "I ain't got nothing but love, babe / Eight days a week," and Lennon and McCartney's development on "Rubber Soul" as poets and storytellers becomes resoundingly clear.
In "Norwegian Wood," the speaker ponders the nature of a past affair, particularly in terms of the ironic, and, in hindsight, confounding difference between his and his lover's expectations for the liaison: "I once had a girl, / Or should I say, / She once had me." After relaxing in her flat, sharing a bottle of wine, and talking into the wee hours, she coolly announces that "it's time for bed." Is it an emotionless come-on for a little rough-and-tumble, or conversely, is it the curt declaration that their evening together has met its end? "She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh," the speaker reports. "I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath."
Listen to "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)":
Arguably the most significant and lasting composition on "Rubber Soul," Lennon's "In My Life" likely originated from the songwriter's youthful reading of Charles Lamb's eighteenth-century poem "The Old Familiar Faces": "For some they have died, and some they have left me, / And some are taken from me; all are departed; / All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." With "In My Life," Lennon deftly examines the power and inevitable failure of memory. While some places and people remain vivid, others recede and disappear altogether. "Memories lose their meaning," John sings, although he knows that "he'll often stop and think about them," referring, yet again, to the past's elaborate layers of character and setting.
Fittingly, "In My Life" features producer George Martin's wistful piano solo, which he later described as his "Bach inversion." With its Baroque intonations, the piano interlude participates in establishing the track's nostalgic undercurrents. The song's closing refrain — "In my life, I love you more" — suggests obvious romantic overtones, as well as a lyrical posture in which the speaker commemorates the all-encompassing power of romantic love. Yet it also underscores our vexing relationship with the past, which exerts a powerful hold upon the present, in one sense, while slowly fading from memory and metamorphosing into other, perhaps more pleasing or less painful memories with each passing year.
Listen to "In My Life":
If the album has a weakness, it reveals itself in the form of Lennon's "Run for Your Life," a blatant and unnecessary rip-off of Elvis Presley's "Baby, Let's Play House." With "Run for Your Life," the speaker coldly threatens his beloved with knee-jerk homicide if she strays from their relationship and, even more discomfiting for the speaker, beyond his steely-eyed control: "I'd rather see you dead, little girl / Than to be with another man," Lennon sings. John later confessed to being embarrassed by the lyrics' brutishness, but there's no denying the beastly honesty inherent in the boorish speaker's wrath. He means business alright, and he won't be shielding his intentions behind the pretty words of romantic love. Given the high quality of "Rubber Soul"'s timeless contents, "Run for Your Life" makes for an unwelcome eyesore, especially on a record that for the most part champions progressive gender ethics.
Listen to "Run for Your Life":
For the Beatles and the world, "Rubber Soul" marked a watershed moment — an unmistakable harbinger for innovative and even more provocative works of musical art. Take the LP's eye-catching cover photograph by Robert Freeman. Shot in the garden of Kenwood, Lennon's Weybridge estate, the photo was intentionally distorted at the group's request. In itself, the warped vision of the four Beatles on the cover was a hint of things to come — an arresting and skewed image of ambiguity for a new musical age.
According to a poll conducted on Saturday and Suday, Abe's approval rating now stands at 29 percent, down from 41 percent on April 18-19. The latest poll numbers are the lowest since Abe assumed office.
By Elizabeth ShimWORLD NEWSMAY 25, 2020 / 2:40 AM Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's approval rating has dropped amid the global coronavirus pandemic. File Photo by Keizo Mori/UPI | License Photo May 25 (UPI) -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's approval rating has dipped by double digits in the wake of his administration's response to the global coronavirus pandemic.
According to a poll conducted by local paper Asahi Shimbun on Saturday and Sunday, Abe's approval rating now stands at 29 percent, down from 41 percent on April 18-19. The latest poll numbers are the lowest since Abe assumed office, according to the report.
Tokyo's declaration of a state of emergency came after the postponement of the 2020 Summer Olympics. Medical professionals have criticized the administration for under-testing for COVID-19.
According to the Asahi poll, 48 percent of respondents said their confidence in Abe has waned, while 5 percent said their confidence has risen following the coronavirus response.
Abe is also being evaluated based on his decisions on prosecutor appointments. The poll showed 68 percent of respondents hold the prime minister responsible for attempting to extend the retirement age of Hiromu Kurokawa, head of the Tokyo High Public Prosecutors Office.
Kurokawa, Abe's choice for prosecutor-general, was to succeed Nobuo Inada, who may have been planning to retire this summer, the Mainichi Shimbun reported last week.
When Inada refused to resign as suggested, Abe's office proposed extending the retirement age so that Kurokawa could still serve as prosecutor-general. Kurokawa's closeness to the prime minister also came under criticism, according to the Mainichi.
Kurokawa was eventually forced into resignation this month, when it was revealed he had been gambling during coronavirus quarantine.
Japan ended a state of emergency in some of its major cities last week.
The Nikkei reported Monday the coronavirus alert for Tokyo is being lifted, allowing movie theaters, commercial facilities and private academic institutes to reopen in the city.
OMD: Live From Your Sofa •Premiered May 9, 2020 Footage of the full gig from Eventim Hammersmith Apollo in November 2019, a date on the Souvenir Greatest Hits Tour
Taiwan vows 'necessary assistance' to Hong Kong residents
Protests reignited in Hong Kong over the weekend against Beijing's move to pass national security legislation, resulting in at least 180 arrests, police said. Police charge down the street during clashes with protesters in Hong Kong on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019. Photo by Thomas Maresca/UPI | License Photo
May 25 (UPI) -- Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen has promised "necessary assistance" to the people of Hong Kong after protests reignited in the semi-autonomous region over the weekend against Beijing's move to pass controversial national security legislation.
On her Facebook page late Sunday, Tsai said the people of Taiwan stand with those of Hong Kong in their struggle against China's introduction of a new security law.
"If the law is implemented, the core values of Hong Kong's democratic freedom and judicial independence will be severely eroded," she said, stating it "seriously threatens Hong Kong."
Late last week, China announced it was planning to pass legislation that would criminalize treason, secession, sedition and subversion against the central Beijing government and permit central government security forces to perform national security duties in the region.
The legislation's announcement followed months of often violent pro-democracy protests that rocked the semi-autonomous region starting last summer but have simmered for months amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Following the law's announcement, protesters returned to the streets over the weekend, resulting in police firing tear gas and water cannons at demonstrators.
Police said at least 180 people were arrested, mainly for participating in an unauthorized assembly, unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct. In a statement, police said "rioters" damaged stores and smashed windows, built barricades along roads and attacked officers and those they disagree with.
"Some injured victims have been hospitalized for treatment," police said in the statement.
The law has attracted international condemnation as it is widely viewed as in violation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that returned Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule in 1997. The agreement states Hong Kong must exercise a "high degree of autonomy, rights and freedoms" for 50 years after returning to Beijing rule.
A Hong Kong government spokesman disregarded the criticism on Sunday as smacking of hypocrisy to suggest China "does not have the right to legislate to protect national security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region."
"The proposed law will only target acts of secession, subversion, terrorist activities as well as activities interfering with HKSAR's internal affairs by foreign or external forces," the spokesman said in a statement. "The vast majority of law-abiding Hong Kong residents, including overseas investors, have nothing to fear."
In her statement Sunday, Tsai said in the face of the protesters' demands for freedom, the answer is not bullets and repression by security forces but "the real implementation of freedom and democracy."
"This is the only way that Beijing and the Hong Kong government will regain trust and return Hong Kong society to freedom and calm," she wrote.
Foreign governments, she said, have extended "a helping hand" to the people of Hong Kong amid the protests and Taiwan will do the same.
Taiwan will "provide the necessary assistance to the people of Hong Kong," she said, without elaborating.
Tsai was inaugurated for her second term as Taiwan's president last week, stating in her inauguration speech that she rejects Beijing's demand for Taiwan to reunify with China.
Like Hong Kong, Taiwan is claimed by China but many on the island state, including Tsai, say it is an independent country.
Appeals court upholds California order keeping places of worship closed
AMERICAN PROTESTANTS FORGET THEIR HISTORY WORSHIP IN CHURCH IS PAPIST SAID CROMWELL https://youtu.be/30wnEFouh5k California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom speaks on day three of the Democratic National Convention at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 27, 2016. Hillary Clinton claims the Democratic Party's nomination for president. Photo by Ray Stubblebine/UPI | License Photo
May 24 (UPI) -- A federal court upheld California Gov. Gavin Newsom's restrictions on church services as part of the state's stay at home order as President Donald Trump has called governors throughout the country to reopen places of worship.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to keep the provision of the order that keeps churches and other places of worship closed in place, denying a request by the Sout Bay United Pentecostal Church. In their decision late Friday, Judges Jacqueline Nguyen and Barry Silverman wrote that the state's decision to close places of worship amid the COVID-19 pandemic does not "infringe upon or restrict practices because of their religious motivation" nor does it "impose burdens only on conduct motivated by religious belief" in a selective manner.
"We're dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there is presently no known cure," the judges wrote.
Judge Daniel Collins wrote a dissenting opinion stating that Newsom's order "illogically assumes that the very same people who cannot be trusted to follow the rules at their place of worship can be trusted to do so at their workplace."
The South Bay United Pentecostal Church filed an emergency motion on Saturday calling for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday released guidelines for places of worship to reopen, including requiring that they provide hand sanitizer, encourage the use of facial coverings and enforce social distancing.
On Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that he believes places of worship should be able to hold in-person services as long as they are taking "appropriate precautions."
"You sign up so that they don't get overcrowded. You get screened for temperature as well as symptoms as you come in, you socially distance among family units in the church," he said.
Trump on Friday identified churches, synagogues and mosques as "essential places that provide essential services, while also threatening he would override governors that do not take steps to reopen places of worship over the weekend.
Reclaiming "freedom" in the age of coronavirus: Don't allow Trump and the right to claim it
Conservatives think they control the concept of "freedom." But progressives have a deeper, richer tradition
There is a primordial American tradition going back to the Founders of being freedom-obsessed, even though we are a country founded on slavery and genocide, being freedom-obsessed to the point that we're always so afraid of the government coming for us that we're blind to other types of threats, whether it's a virus, whether it's bank malfeasance, climate change, what have you.
He went on to note how Ronald Reagan had intensified the fear of government, how neoliberal Democrats after him had distanced themselves from government, and how Donald Trump has epitomized the logic of "Government doesn't work — elect me and I'll prove it" that's now the icing on the cake. But it was that initial formulation that really grabbed people's attention.
Not just obsessed with the idea of freedom, but with strangely perverted versions of it, defined by slaveholders at nation's birth, defined by settlers claiming others' land before & after, defined as "market freedom" by neoliberal theorists, the list goes on & on. "Free for me!"
The right is always appalled that anyone would ever say anything remotely critical about "freedom," because conservatives have spent decades trying to brand the word and the concept as their private property. Efficient branding is pretty much the opposite of critical understanding. Yes, liberals may care about equality, right-wingers may acknowledge, but in doing so they trample on freedom! This is why, for example, Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act, and why Sen. Rand Paul struggled incoherently when Rachel Maddow asked him how he felt about it half a century later, and never owned up to where he stood. The ghost of slaveholder freedom is not easily laid to rest.
Of course progressives do believe in freedom, of a very different sort: The freedom sought by slaves and their descendants, most starkly, echoed in freedom songs and an explosion of liberation movements in the 1960s. Now, in the age of coronavirus, what could be more pressing than to be free of the virus — not just individually, not just nationally, but globally, as a species?
It's not government tyranny that's keeping us from living normal lives. It's the virus that's doing that. Those who are demanding their freedom to spread the virus are just prolonging its tyranny over the rest of us. They are furthering our oppression, and endangering our lives. Two models of freedom
There are many ways you can slice this, but perhaps the simplest comes from George Lakoff in "Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea." He explains that abstract notions of freedom all derive from physical, bodily ones. The physical experience of being able to move freely is the foundation of all ideas of freedom.
Liberals and conservatives may have different ways of shaping their concepts of freedom, based on different worldviews, but this is what they have in common — making freedom an "essentially contested concept," as first described in an essay by W.B. Gallie. It's vital to understand what these two concepts of freedom have in common, as well as what they do not, and the reasons for both. Otherwise conservatives will continue to wield "freedom" as a sword, blinding us to what's actually going on as they imperil the freedom of all.
"The central thesis of this book is simple," Lakoff writes. "There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political worldviews dividing the country. The traditional idea of freedom is progressive. One can see traditional values most clearly in the direction of change that has been demanded and applauded over two centuries."
He provides a wealth of examples, starting with the expansion of voting rights and citizen participation, from white male property owners to all white men, then to formerly enslaved men, then women, then younger voters. Lakoff goes on to cite the expansion of economic opportunity, working conditions and workers' rights, public education and "the expansion of knowledge," public health and life expectancy, consumer protection and so on.
These popular examples might not immediately seem like instances of freedom, at least partly because progressives haven't used that term nearly as much as conservatives have — even when talking about the black freedom struggle. Indeed, conservatives have used the term far more often to invoke rolling back those expansions of freedom.
But if freedom is at least partially about having the capacity to realize your dreams, then everything Lakoff lists above surely belongs in that realm of freedom — as progressives could and should claim, if they used that language more robustly. As we struggle to free ourselves from this pandemic, that's exactly what we should be doing.
"Progressive freedom is dynamic freedom. Freedom is realized not just in stasis, or at a single moment in history, but in its expansion over a long time," Lakoff writes. "You cannot look only at the Founding Fathers and stop there. If you do, it sounds as if they were hypocrites: They talked liberty but permitted slavery; they talked democracy but allowed only white male property owners to vote. But from a dynamic progressive perspective, the great ideas were expandable freedoms." The opposite is true of conservatives, he concludes:
What makes them 'conservatives' is not that they want to conserve the achievements of those who fought to deepen American democracy. It's the reverse: They want to go back to before these progressive freedoms were established. That is why they harp so much on narrow so-called originalist readings of the Constitution — on its letter, not its spirit — on "activist judges" rather than an inherently activist population."
A common core — and contested views
Despite these deep differences in how freedom is viewed, there is a common core meaning and logic involved.
"Freedom is being able to do what you want to do," Lakoff writes, "that is, being able to choose a goal, have access to that goal, pursue that goal without anyone purposely preventing you. It is having the capacity or power to achieve the goal and being able to exercise your free will to choose and achieve the goal." In addition, "Political freedom is about the state and how well a state can maximize freedom for all its citizens."
This represents the uncontested core of what simple freedom and political freedom are all about. And the underlying physical foundation is straightforward:
We all had the experience as children of wanting to do something and being held down or held back, so that we were not free to do what we wanted. These bodily experiences form the basis of our everyday idea of simple freedom — for reasoning about freedom as well as for talking about freedom.
"Freedom is being able to achieve purposes," Lakoff summarizes, which in turn is "understood metaphorically in three fundamental ways of functioning with one's body." First, "Reaching a desired destination (by moving through space)." Second, "Getting some desired object (by moving one's limbs)." Third, "Performing a desired action (by moving one's body)."
He goes on to make two important points. The first is about freedom as a visceral concept, "tied, fundamentally via metaphor, to our ability to move and to interference with moving. There is little that is more infuriating than interference with our everyday bodily movements."
The second is about its cultural significance in America:
Part of being an American, culturally, goes beyond achieving isolated purposes to having a purposeful life. Thus, life itself becomes structured in terms of space — goals you want to reach (where you want to be in life), things you want to get (rewards, awards, things that symbolize success), and things you want to do or achieve. Dreams are seen as lifetime purposes. "The American Dream" is based on this metaphor.
All the above applies to the uncontested core meaning of freedom, Lakoff explains. But liberals and conservatives differ sharply on how that uncontested core is fleshed out. Conservative talk a great deal more about freedom, he notes:
The radical right is in the process of redefining the very idea. To lose freedom is a terrible thing; to lose the idea of freedom is even worse.
The constant repetition of the words "liberty" and "freedom" by the right-wing message machine is one of the mechanisms of the idea theft in progress. When the words are used by the right, their meaning shifts — gradually, almost imperceptibly, but it shifts.
What distinguishes the progressive from the conservative version of "freedom" is the underlying worldview that in both cases fill in the contested areas in metaphorical logic. Lakoff first characterized these competing views in "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think" (my review here) as metaphorically structured by two distinct parenting styles, first distinguished by Diane Baumrind: that of the nurturant parent ("authoritative" in Baumrind's typology) vs. the strict father family ("authoritarian"), as Lakoff calls them.
Lakoff's terms underscore their differences, while Baumrind's capture something critical about their more nuanced relationship. Authoritarian parenting is often justified by the false assumption that the only alternative is indulgent, "permissive parenting," a third alternative that Baumrind described. (A fourth alternative, "neglectful parenting," was added later.) But authoritative parents combine permissive parents' nurturing, responsive approach with the authoritarian parents' willingness to set high standards — albeit sometimes quite different ones.
As Lakoff notes, authoritative parents are more successful in raising children to be the autonomous moral agents, capable of acting freely and responsibly, that authoritarian parenting is supposed to produce. So there's a valid argument that progressives have a better grasp of freedom than conservatives do.
Threats to freedom and the role of security
One part of Lakoff's discussion involves interference with freedom, specifically in the form of harm, coercion, or limitations on property — each of which is also a contested concept. These lay the foundations for understanding the fundamental role that security plays in protecting (and thus advancing) freedom. There is, in short, a common logic, which gets filled in differently by progressive and conservative worldviews.
By harm, Lakoff means something serious: "sufficient to interfere with normal functioning." For example: "If someone breaks your leg, she is interfering with your freedom to move. If someone kills you, he is interfering with your freedom to live your life."
Metaphorical harm — such as economic harm — can be trickier. What counts as harm? As Lakoff notes: "Many conservatives believe that social programs harm people because they make them dependent on the government, while progressives tend to believe that they help people."
This is a direct consequence of Lakoff's characterization of progressive and conservative worldviews: that of nurturant parenting vs. the strict-father family. It's also an empirically testable question: Only a tiny fraction of social spending goes to people who could even conceivably fit the conservative stereotype of the "welfare cheat" — people who could work but do not, for whatever reason.
In contrast, recall that Giridharadas spoke about "other types of threats," and mentioned the pandemic, financial mismanagement and climate change. These are all forms of harm that can limit our freedom. As Lakoff explains, such limits must come from human actions — someone breaking your leg, not having a tree fall on you. But if government fails to protect you when it should — as happened with Hurricane Katrina, for example — that malign neglect certainly qualifies as interfering with your freedom.
Coercion is being forced to act against your will, which has a straightforward physical foundation: "One of our major metaphors for the freedom to engage in purposeful action is the freedom to move to a desired destination," Lakoff explains. "Coerced action is, metaphorically, forced motion to an undesired location." What's more, "Further metaphors map physical coercion onto economic coercion, social coercion, and religious coercion."
Property is linked to freedom in two ways. As Lakoff puts it, "the freedom to achieve one's purposes is, metaphorically, the lack of any interference in getting and keeping desired objects." Second is the literal fact that "wealth can buy many kinds of freedom." So property means freedom, literally as well as metaphorically. But as Lakoff cautions, "[I]t is often contested whether certain property is properly yours."
In a nation built on land dispossessed from its native inhabitants, whose vast wealth was in large part created by slave labor, this is a touchy subject. Lakoff takes a less confrontational approach:
Take the issue of taxes. Conservatives say, "It's your money. The government wants to take it away." But almost everyone gains part of his or her income through the use of a government-supplied infrastructure (highways, the Internet, the banking system, the courts). Is there a moral debt to pay to maintain that system?
Thomas Paine certainly thought so. Here he is, from "Agrarian Justice":
Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.
Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich…. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.
While the Tea Party movement, funded by the Koch brothers, tried to give its anti-taxation agenda a patriotic Boston Tea Party gloss, America's anti-tax tradition actually stems from the Southern slaveholding economy, as Robin Einhorn explained in "American Taxation, American Slavery."
"What I found is that in early American history, slaveholders in particular were terrified of majorities deciding how to tax them," Einhorn told me in an interview. "So they came up with strategies of how to stop that. There is a long tradition of denying majorities the right to decide how to tax wealth in this country." You can call that tradition anything you want, but it's strange to insist that it's quintessentially about "freedom."
Finally, Lakoff discusses the crucial role of security:
If harm, coercion, and limitations on property interfere with freedom, then security is a guarantee that such freedom will be preserved. Just as physical harm and physical coercion are the prototypical forms of harm and coercion — what we first think when we think of harm and coercion — so physical security is the prototypical form of security. Physical security of oneself and one's property is central to the concept of freedom.
Security is central to the Anglo-American idea of freedom in another way. It lies at the very foundation of John Locke's legitimation of government in Section 123 of his "Second Treatise on Government." Rights are God-given, enjoyed without limit in a state of nature, Locke argues. But the "enjoyment" of the property a person has in this state "is very unsafe, very unsecure," he argues. "This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers," so governments are formed voluntarily, surrendering absolute claims to all rights in order to secure what is most fundamental. Locke's thinking was echoed as well in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, with its declared purpose to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
The role of security is thus fundamental to any conception of freedom in modern liberal democracies. It is the very reason why we form such political orders in the first place, and it is also why Donald Trump and his fellow authoritarians, from Vladimir Putin to Jair Bolsonaro to Viktor Orbán and so on, revel in making us all so existentially insecure.
When Giridharadas spoke about "other types of threats," including the virus, "bank malfeasance" and climate change, those are threats to our freedom in a fundamental sense, because they undermine the social foundations on which all our freedoms rest. Not the abstract, theoretical foundation of "God-given rights," but the pragmatic, real-world foundations that secure them for us in the here and now.
Final points
I've only scratched the surface of Lakoff's book, tracing a few consequences of the simple core message: Freedom is an essentially contested concept rooted in physical experience, and its liberal and conservative versions derive from very different worldviews. Three more points Lakoff touches on are worth noting.
First, political conservatives often want to live in nurturant communities too. As Lakoff observes, "Fundamentalist communities can be nurturant and loving toward members who fit in." There's an underlying sense in which "liberal" values — grounded in nurturance and empathy — are universally recognized, although conservatives perceive them as conditional, only for those who are deemed worthy.
For example, there's significant conservative support for large government programs like Social Security and Medicare, and Donald Trump made a point in 2016 of pretending he would defend them, while accurately noting that other Republicans would not. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic having claimed nearly 100,000 American lives, Trump's lack of empathy and abdication of nurturant leadership are painfully clear.
Second, Lakoff notes a difference in understanding causation in moral and political disputes, "where the progressives argue on the basis of systemic causation (within a social, ecological, or economic system) and the conservatives argue on the basis of direct causation (by a single individual)."
This helps explain why progressives see moral harm in environmentally destructive practices like mountaintop removal mining, for example, while conservatives "tend to argue that your coal mine would not directly cause any known particular deaths or illnesses, and so you — and others — should be free to mine your coal." If the government prevents you from maximizing potential profits, that specific, individual restriction of "freedom" is the only one they claim to see.
That's similar to how the "reopen" demonstrators seem to think. They don't recognize the systemic risk posed by the virus, and claim not to believe that their activities make it easier for the virus to spread. They only see government action — which they mistakenly blame for shutting down the economy — as an act of tyranny or spiteful malevolence.
Third, Lakoff argues that political freedom has a common, uncontested core:
Political freedom begins with the idea of self-government: Tyrants and dictators can be avoided if we choose those who govern us and make sure that none of them has overriding power. The attendant concepts to simple political freedom are self-government and its democratic institutions — within the national government: Congress, the administration, and an independent judiciary, with a balance of powers and similar structures at lower levels; within civil society: free elections and political parties, a civilian-controlled military, a free market, free press/media, and free religious institutions.
At this level of oversimplification, all of this is uncontested. The details are, however, thoroughly contested….
At least that's how things stood in 2006, when "Whose Freedom?" was published. That's no longer the case 14 years later, with severe democratic backsliding underway in America. If Donald Trump is leading the way, he's by no means alone. The "contested" details of the past have prepared the way for our current crisis, and there's considerable continuity over the decades, as I've discussed in previous articles about "constitutional hardball," for example. But it is clear that Trump has utter disregard for any balance of powers that would curb his own, and we're now in a qualitatively different place than before the 2016 election. It's no longer the case that progressives and conservatives both believe in the uncontested core of political freedom. The American right appears to have turned its back on that shared assumption once and for all.
"Whose Freedom?" is not the only guidebook to our current situation, but it helps delineate major aspects of the task before us: First, not to let conservatives claim to be the only ones who care about freedom, as if it had a simple, uncontested meaning. Second, to articulate a more robust progressive model of freedom, and make clear how it applies in the current moment. Third, to prioritize combating the most grave and substantial threats to freedom — threats like the coronavirus that is killing thousands of us every day, and like the climate catastrophe that may devastate our world for centuries to come.
If we can preserve ourselves and our freedoms from these threats, we will have time and opportunity for legitimate debate on the contested aspects of the idea of freedom. In other words, we will have the freedom to shape a better future for everyone.
PAUL ROSENBERG
Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.
