Thursday, October 17, 2024

They Say There’s Never Been a Man Like Donald Trump in American Politics. But There Was—and We Should Learn From Him.

Zachary D. Carter
Wed, October 16, 2024


The story of Georgia’s political firebrand Tom Watson will never be a defining national myth. Its extraordinary implications for American democracy notwithstanding, Watson’s life is saturated with too much tragedy to qualify for the righteous optimism demanded by the national canon. When Watson’s statue was removed from the steps of the Georgia state Capitol in 2013, the event went virtually unnoticed outside Atlanta. Without historian C. Vann Woodward’s transcendent 1938 biography, Watson would have surely disappeared even from academic study, like most politicians of his era.

But Watson’s life retains an unsettling power that, once encountered, inescapably colors interpretations of the American past and present. Watson was the most charismatic leader of the late-19th-century political thunderclap that came to be known as American populism, and his story resonates with the full promise and peril of the American project—he can be understood without exaggeration as the heroic scion of the Boston Tea Party and the fevered progenitor of Donald Trump’s violent fantasies.

Born to slave-owning Confederate parents, Watson watched his family descend into poverty after the Civil War, and rose to prominence in Georgia politics as a lawyer and newspaperman who assailed the prevailing economic order. Watson accurately described Gilded Age political rule as a predatory alliance of Southern political bosses and Northern capitalists. As the 1880s turned to the 1890s, Watson came to understand racial division as an essential tool of this bipartisan system—one that elites in both parties inflamed to weaken the political power of Black and white working people by turning them against each other. He ran for Congress as a member of the independent People’s Party, winning support from prominent Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, with his pledge to erase America’s “color line” in pursuit of agrarian liberation. The radicalism of the People’s Party is easily obscured by the fact that so many of its early demands were eventually enacted, from an eight-hour workday to free mail delivery to a progressive income tax. But the most extraordinary aspect of the Populist Party was its coalition. When Georgia police arrested Black voting rights activist H.S. Doyle on the streets of Augusta ahead of the 1892 election, one of Watson’s henchmen sprang Doyle from prison and sheltered him at Watson’s estate, where more than 2,000 members of the People’s Party armed themselves to successfully defend Doyle from a state-backed lynch mob.

But Watson eventually lost his 1892 campaign, and the populist movement that had gripped the country disintegrated within a few years. By the early 20th century, the party was gone, and Watson had transformed himself from a prophet of racial cooperation into a fountain of white-hot racial resentment. He endorsed the complete disenfranchisement of Black voters, ranted against Catholics and socialists, and eventually used his newspaper to incite a lynch mob into murdering Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank.

Watson’s embrace of the dark side brought him his greatest electoral success. When he died in 1922, Watson was a United States senator from Georgia, representing the very Democratic Party he once denounced.

Watson was an effective demagogue because he practiced a politics of anger in an era that demanded it. Even at his most inspiring—and his losing 1892 campaign was an intoxicating cultural phenomenon—Watson didn’t so much promise to help as fight. He had a policy platform, but he was also operating an economic cooperative and very nearly an armed rebellion. Throughout the Gilded Age, workers and farmers really were being exploited by a predatory oligarchy. The political system was indeed thoroughly corrupt, and the economy was a system of mass deprivation marked by financial crises, endless deflation, agricultural mismanagement, mechanized industrial cruelty, and child labor. People had a right to be angry.

Today’s global economy is for the most part gentler, but a similar politics of anger has returned. The 2008 financial crisis distilled a sense that the game was rigged against ordinary people. The federal government saved banker bonuses and shrugged off financial fraud as unemployment soared to 10 percent and more than 9 million homes were lost to foreclosure. The wealthiest one percent of American households captured half the economic gains across Barack Obama’s presidency, and by the close of 2015, the bottom 99 percent had recovered only about two-thirds of the income it had lost during the crash.

It’s not hard to understand how a politics of anger can be mobilized when the political system fails ordinary people while taking extraordinary measures to protect the wealthy. What is more difficult to process is how that anger has been sustained over the past eight years.

The unemployment rate was below 5 percent for all but the final nine months of Donald Trump’s presidency and for all but the first six months of Joe Biden’s. For context, the unemployment rate never moved below 5 percent between January 1974 and April 1997. And while nobody enjoyed the bout of inflation that set in between 2021 and 2022, worker wage gains have outpaced price increases since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation peaked at 7.2 percent in June 2022—but inflation was actually higher across the entire first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (followed by nine consecutive months of double-digit unemployment) without a populist uprising. The U.S. labor market hasn’t been as robust as it is today in 50 years, and even accounting for inflation, the overall economic performance of the past two years has been the best since at least the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The U.S. economy is not without problems; housing is too expensive, for instance, and just about everything associated with being a parent has become extremely difficult. But it just isn’t true that the nation’s political system has been ignoring the plight of ordinary workers. It has responded quite vigorously to their needs in the form of repeated multi-trillion-dollar investments in domestic industry and direct household support.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance will almost certainly secure the votes of nearly half the American electorate this November, deploying a campaign of vicious dishonesty that would make Sen. Watson proud. This isn’t a populist campaign in any meaningful economic sense; Trump’s vow to repeal Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is a promise to renege on more than $1 trillion in American manufacturing. But it remains a campaign predicated on anger. At the recent vice presidential debate, Vance repeatedly squeezed anti-immigrant vitriol into his economic commentary—claiming that illegal immigration was “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in this country” (a transparently ludicrous explanation for the post-COVID rise in home prices, which was produced not by a mass influx of foreigners but by the dislocations of the pandemic). One week, Trump and Vance are roiling Springfield, Ohio, with preposterous lies about immigrants eating pets; the next, they’re inventing fables about the government diverting disaster-relief aid to undocumented workers and ranting about immigrants bringing “bad genes” into the country. Occasionally Trump or Vance pays lip service to a policy idea for a few hours—not even their most fervent supporters pretend to care—before getting back to the campaign’s main business of bashing immigrants.

Why on earth would such madness get political traction? For many liberals, the answer is simply that the country is riddled with racism, a response that is both true and trivial. Racism has bedeviled this continent for centuries, but demagogues who seek power through raw resentment fail all the time. New York Mayor Eric Adams has been trying to pin the city’s troubles on migrants for years now, and everybody hates him. Pat Buchanan and David Duke tried to do the same thing in the 1990s and couldn’t win over their own party. Watson’s story shows that, for a time, the right leader could inspire even ex-Confederates to literally fight on behalf of Black voting rights.

Something important happened at the end of Trump’s presidency and the beginning of Joe Biden’s. Nobody wants to talk about it—not even conservatives bring up masks and school closures anymore, and much of the discourse surrounding inflation studiously avoids reference to the massive economic disruption of COVID-19. But one of the most important cultural artifacts of the period is the sudden spread of vaccine skepticism to the cultural mainstream. The anti-vaxxer delusion that vaccines cause autism has lingered at the fringes of the autism community in no small part because it provides narrative meaning to a difficult and random experience. There is tremendous joy in the life of a special needs parent, but there is also a great deal of fear and pain. Fear, because you do not know how the world will respond to your child, and pain, because you must watch your child struggle for no fault of their own. For many, it is more comforting to believe that their child’s hardships are not a random act of fate but a product of deliberate malfeasance. The idea that bad things happen for bad reasons is more palatable than the belief that they happen for no reason at all.

It is not only anti-vaxxers who seek such comfort. Americans on both the left and the right avert their eyes from the story of Tom Watson not only because the story is ugly and violent but because we insist on being able to control our own destiny. From Huck Finn to Indiana Jones, American mythology tends to write its heroes as variations on the story of David and Goliath—tales of underdogs who secure unlikely triumphs against an overbearing order. Even when that order is part of America itself, individual heroism soothes the audience with the promise that the world’s wrongs can be righted with enough derring-do. Horatio Alger’s novels of children born into poverty could be read as an indictment of the Gilded Age social order, but the romance of these stories always lies in a boy taking fate by the horns. Watson disturbs us not only because he turns to evil but because an extraordinary leader’s earnest, Herculean attempt to right the world’s wrongs comes up short. To win, he assents to the dominion of dark forces beyond his control.

By the time the peak of the pandemic had passed, Joe Biden was too old to provide his country with the leadership that might have helped it process the tragedy it experienced in 2020 and 2021. One of Biden’s unique gifts as a public communicator has always been his ability to translate his experience with personal tragedy into public consolation—at his best, he is a remarkably empathetic orator, capable of connecting with people from wildly different walks of life through the common experience of pain. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, do that in his 80s. By the end of his presidency, Biden was holed up in the White House with his family, assiduously denying both political reality and his own fate.

We all lost something in the pandemic, but the nation has never mourned those losses in any meaningful collective manner. A politics of anger is not a particularly clean fit for an era of fear and pain, but for millions of Americans, it is a more comforting substitute than a politics of hope.

Kamala Harris Pushes Back as Bret Baier Repeatedly Cuts Her Off in Fox News Interview: ‘You Have to Let Me Finish’ 

Sharon Knolle
Wed, October 16, 2024 


Kamala Harris frequently pushed back against “Special Report” Fox News host Bret Baier while interviewing with the network for the first time Wednesday.

At one point during the combative exchange, which kicked off early in the sit-down with Baier’s first question about the U.S.-Mexico border policy, the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee told him, “You have to let me finish.”

Baier quizzed Harris about her immigration and border policy, and redirected questions about Republican nominee Donald Trump’s mental acuity with questions about current President Joe Biden.

Harris clarified that she does not believe in criminalizing border crossings: “I’ve not done that as vice president and I will not do that as president,” she said.

The VP continued, “I’m the only person who’s running for president who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations from the Sinaloa Cartel to the Guadalajara cartel to people who have trafficked in guns, drugs and human beings. I have spent a significant part of my career going after people who present a threat to the safety of the American people and cross our border with the intent of doing us harm and cross our border illegally.”

“Joe Biden is not on the ballot,” Harris reminded him.

She added, “I would like that we would have a conversation that is grounded in full assessment of the facts, which includes, I think this interview is supposed to be about the choices that your viewers should be presented about this election, and the contrast is important.”

To which Baier replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

“I have much more to say,” the Democratic nominee said as Baier was repeatedly told to wrap up. She then directed people to her website, encouraging them to read its 80 pages of comprehensive policy.

Baier also asked Harris which country she considers the biggest threat to America right now, and was surprised when she said it was Iran.

“Each occasion that Iran posed a threat to Israel, I was there … in the Situation Room and the most recent attack, working with the heads of our military and doing what America must always do to defend and to support Israel … to allow Israel to have the resources to defend itself against attack, including from Iran and Iran’s terrorist proxies in the region. And my commitment to that is unyielding and unwavering,” Harris said.

Watch a segment from Harris’ sit-down with Baier in the videos above and below.

The post Kamala Harris Pushes Back as Bret Baier Repeatedly Cuts Her Off in Fox News Interview: ‘You Have to Let Me Finish’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.

Power Demand from Data Centers Keeping Coal-Fired Plants Online

Darrell Proctor
Wed, October 16, 2024 

The power generation sector is looking at numerous ways to provide enough electricity to satisfy demand from data centers. Bloomberg Intelligence recently said its research shows data centers, buildings filled with servers and other computing equipment for data storage and networking that supports operations and artificial intelligence (AI), could be responsible for as much as 17% of all U.S. electricity consumption by 2030. The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) has said one data center can require 50 times the electricity of a typical office building. Several technology groups are looking at nuclear power, including the use of small modular reactors (SMRs), to meet their electricity needs. Energy analysts have said natural gas, whether burned in large-scale facilities or peaker plants, also will be important. Power consumption from data centers, though, also is benefiting coal-fired power plants, some of which may be kept running longer than expected in order to meet the increased demand for electricity from companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and others. Some coal-fired plants already have gotten a reprieve in areas where more energy is needed as data centers come online, or are in the planning stages. The topic reportedly was discussed when C-suite executives from Alphabet (Google), AWS, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, and OpenAI met with government officials in Washington, D.C., last month to discuss ways to support U.S. infrastructure for AI, including data centers. Part of the discussion was about repurposing old coal sites as data center campuses. The DOE has said it will share resources with data center developers about how to repurpose former coal mines, or coal-fired power plants, to be home to data centers. Energy DELTA Lab, a collaborative effort that includes Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power, already is working on the Data Center Ridge project at a former mining site in Wise County, Virginia.
Life Extension

Maksim Sonin, an energy expert who has collaborated with several companies, including Chevron and Shell, and is a Sloan Fellow at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, said, "Driven by recent trends in AI development, projected power consumption by data centers in the U.S. is expected to increase in the range from 8% to 17% by 2030—or potentially even higher, as progress in AI technologies is not linear but exponential, as seen in Silicon Valley today." Sonin told POWER, "With this sharp upward trend, it is highly likely that coal-fired power plants will remain a part of the U.S. energy system for longer, although their role is expected to diminish," as more renewable and other energy resources come online. "Coal plants will have an extension of their life due to data center demand," said Tim Echols, a commissioner and vice-chair of the Georgia Public Service Commission. Echols' home state is actively recruiting data centers and manufacturing facilities to provide jobs and boost local economies. It already added a significant new source of power when two nuclear reactors entered service at Plant Vogtle last year and this year, providing about 2,200 MW of new electricity output in the state. Plant Vogtle, where two other reactors have operated since the 1980s, is now the nation's largest nuclear power plant, with more than 4,600 MW of generation capacity. Echols told POWER in an Oct. 16 interview that Georgia is preparing for a large increase in power demand. "There could be a massive increase of capacity approved next year. Data centers will account for most of it," he said. How to satisfy data center power demand is being discussed by utilities and energy officials nationwide. Allan Schurr, chief commercial officer with Texas-based Enchanted Rock, which provides microgrid backup power solutions to data centers and other critical infrastructure, said the debate also should include onsite generation. "AI data centers require more generating capacity—that's a given," said Schurr. "While we are waiting for nuclear power to bring substantial additional baseload to the grid, we don't want to needlessly 'recarbonize' our energy resources by extending the life of older, less-efficient fossil generation plants like coal. Schurr told POWER, "Today's grid has significant available capacity with the exception of about 500 hours per year that can be mitigated with dispatchable generation. And the grid needs those 500 hours of additional capacity so we can continue to add solar and wind resources into the energy mix. Data centers can facilitate this dispatchable generation from their own onsite generation, making them assets to the grid instead of liabilities." The utilities and grid operators arguing to keep coal-fired plants online say it makes sense to keep existing baseload power sources operating, at least until more nuclear or renewable energy is available. That's why states including Nebraska, Virginia, and Utah among others, have plans to keep coal-fired units running to support the supply of electricity.

Virginia is World Data Center Leader

DC Byte, a UK-based research group that tracks data centers worldwide, has said the U.S. is the world leader in the buildout of data centers. The group said Virginia—home to about half of all U.S. data centers—is the largest data center market worldwide. Loudoun County in Virginia is known as "Data Center Alley." PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that serves Virginia, the District of Columbia, and 12 other states, has conceded some coal-fired power plants will need to continue operating, and miles of new transmission lines must be built, to satisfy ever-increasing demand for electricity. Other power sources will help—Japan's Sumitomo Corp. on Tuesday announced it will partner with CEP Solar (based in Richmond, Virginia) to add 1.5 GW of solar and battery energy storage to support data center growth in the region. "The system is in a major transition right now, and it's going to continue to evolve," Ken Seiler, PJM’s senior vice president in charge of planning, said in a December stakeholders' meeting about how the grid operator can supply more power as it waits for more renewable energy resources to come online. "And we'll look for opportunities to do everything we can to keep the lights on as it goes through this transition." DC Byte in its 2024 Global Data Center Index wrote, "Virginia currently has over 6 GW in the development pipeline including projects under active construction as well as Committed and Early Stage campuses." The group noted, "Cloud is the greatest driver of growth in Virginia. AWS [Amazon Web Services] operates over 40 facilities in the state and Microsoft operates a massive campus in Boydton as well as a smaller facility in Loudoun County. Both companies have more self-build campuses in the pipeline and are also major colocation tenants across the market." DC Byte added, "In 2022, Loudoun County's primary power supplier Dominion Energy announced that it would not be able to meet power demand in the market. Delays in power delivery are expected until 2025 or 2026 while new power infrastructure is built. In the meantime, Dominion Energy would be providing power incrementally." Dominion officials have said they project that power demand in the utility's territory will increase by 85% over the next 15 years. [caption id="attachment_224586" align="alignnone" width="640"]



The 1,100-MW Fort Martin Power Station is located in Maidsville, West Virginia, on the Monongahela River. It has two coal-fired units. It is owned by Monongahela Power (Mon Power), part of FirstEnergy Corp. Source: Mon Power[/caption] PJM is backing a $5.2 billion plan for new transmission lines across several states to bring power to Virginia. The lines would carry electricity produced at several coal-fired power plants that have been slated for closure, including the Longview, Fort Martin, and Harrison stations in West Virginia. In Maryland, meanwhile, PJM has asked Texas-based Talen Energy Corp. to keep Brandon Shores and Herbert A. Wagner—two other coal-fired facilities located near Baltimore—online at least through 2028. The plants had been scheduled to close by June 2025.

Operating Extension for Omaha Coal Plant

The 644-MW North Omaha Station in Nebraska was scheduled to close in 2023. Instead, Google and Meta data centers caused the area's power demand to spike, which led the Omaha Public Power District to decide that the two coal-fired units at North Omaha were needed to maintain reliability of the local power grid. The utility has said it will keep the coal-burning units online at least through 2026. One Google data center is in Papillon, a town about 12 miles southwest of Omaha. DC Byte said the Google facility uses more power than the Meta office, and added that its data shows Google uses more electricity in Nebraska than it uses elsewhere in the U.S. The company also is planning more data centers in the state. Data from Meta and other groups shows that the company's data center in Sarpy County, about 25 miles southwest of Omaha, last year used almost as much power as the North Omaha station produced. The Meta campus includes nine separate complexes, encompassing about 4 million square feet. The Omaha Public Power District has estimated that as much as two-thirds of the projected growth in power demand around Omaha will come from data centers, which are being built on what used to be farmland. Local officials have said opposition to wind and solar farms in rural areas has curtailed additional renewable energy resources that could supply power. The utility has been developing a 2,800-acre solar power project in rural York County, about 100 miles from Omaha, but area residents have voiced concerns about the installation. The utility also has said regulatory issues have slowed plans to replace coal-fired generation with natural gas-fired units. Meta's presence in Omaha was sought by state and local officials; a special electricity rate for industrial customers was created in 2017. That rate was then marketed to Google to entice the search engine giant to build in the area.
Georgia Courting Data Center Operators

Georgia Power is buying electricity from a sister company, Mississippi Power (both are part of Southern Co.), to help meet power demand in Georgia. The deal came after Georgia Power officials reportedly told state regulators that growing demand for electricity would overrun supply by year-end 2025. Georgia officials have been actively looking to bring data centers and manufacturing plants to that state, and Gov. Brian Kemp earlier this year vetoed a bill that would have suspended a tax break for data centers (the bill had bipartisan opposition). Had the bill become law, the tax break would have been under the review of a special commission on data center energy planning. Kemp in a statement said, "The bill's language would prevent the issuance of exemption certificates after an abrupt July 1, 2024 deadline for many customers of projects that are already in development—undermining the investments made by high-technology data center operators, customers, and other stakeholders in reliance on the recent extension, and inhibiting important infrastructure and job development." Georgia Power has a deal with Mississippi Power to buy 750 MW of electricity through 2028. Mississippi Power is providing the energy from its Victor J. Daniel Electric Generating Plant, better known as Plant Daniel, where two coal-fired units have operated for the past 50 years. The plant also has two natural gas combined-cycle units. It is the state's largest power plant, with nearly 1.6 GW of generation capacity, including 500 MW from its two coal-fired units. Mississippi Power had planned to retire the coal-burning steam turbines in 2027. The deal with Georgia Power, though, could extend that lifecycle. Jeffrey Grubb, the utility's director of resource planning, reportedly was asked by Georgia Power's lawyers about the agreement, and said, "Because those units would have been either retired or sold off-system and we needed certainty that they would be there to serve our customers." Echols, the PUC co-chair, on Wednesday told POWER the contract with Mississippi Power is open to any kind of generation source. "Our contract with Mississippi Power calls for 750 MW, and it doesn't matter where it comes from. That may mean an [operating] extension for the coal plant, or it may not," he said. "Mississippi could do 750 MW of solar plus storage, they could bring in 750 MW of wind power from a neighboring state." Echols noted that a move by regulators in 2022 extended operations for two coal-fired units at Georgia Power's Plant Bowen, one of the nation's largest coal-burning power plants, with about 3.4 GW of generation capacity. Echols said, "In the 2022 IRP [integrated resource plan] ... our commissioners delayed the closure of units 1 and 2 at Plant Bowen. I imagine as we evaluate that in next year's IRP, we will also delay the closure for another three years. We'll have to wait and see what the utility is asking for and how the commissioners feel we need to move forward." Echols told POWER, "There could be a massive increase of capacity approved next year. Data centers will account for most of it." Echols also offered, "I think there is a scenario where we approve two more AP1000 [reactors] at Plant Vogtle if the federal government provides bankruptcy insurance or overrun insurance" for another expansion at the site.
Other Efforts

DC Byte has identified Salt Lake City, Utah, as a growing market for data centers. Meta already operates a 4.5-million-square foot complex in Eagle Mountain, Utah, south of Salt Lake City. State lawmakers have pushed legislation to keep the Intermountain Power Project, a coal-fired station near Delta, Utah, open past the facility's scheduled 2025 closure date. Officials have looked at ways to have the state take over the plant. Lawmakers this year did pass legislation intended to extend the life of Rocky Mountain Power's coal-fired stations in Emery County. Stuart Adams, president of the Utah Senate, during the legislative session this summer said, "The United States has a real problem. We do not have enough power for our data centers. AI development is technology that we have to embrace, and power is the key to it." Building more infrastructure to support that AI development was among the reasons those tech company execs met last month on Capitol Hill. Reports said the discussion included repurposing former coal sites to house data center campuses, in part because those sites usually have access to power lines, water, and a local workforce. The DOE's Pacific Northwest National Lab, which is leading the "coal-to-X" redevelopment campaign, in a guide to the program wrote, "A retired coal site could even be redeveloped to combine a data center with new clean energy on the same site." As Schurr of Enchanted Rock noted, generating onsite power via a microgrid, or through a renewable energy resource, could be preferable to using coal-fired generation. That's of particular importance for data center operators looking to build in remote areas where they need plenty of land, and where there's a lack of transmission infrastructure. Sonin reiterated that coal will play a role in satisfying power demand from data centers, but like Schurr, noted other fuels could work with coal to reduce the environmental impact of keeping coal-fired power plants online. Sonin told POWER, "Emerging technologies that, for instance, allow for substituting some of the coal with ammonia, a carbon-free hydrogen derivative, through a process known as co-firing, may help address public environmental concerns. Current advancements, particularly the potential for upscaling production trains, could reduce the cost of ammonia facilities by 30% and more, making this chemical a viable solution for cutting emissions from coal plants." 

—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).
ABOLISH MONARCHY

Qatar's ruler says his nation will vote on abandoning legislative elections after just one poll

JON GAMBRELL
Tue, October 15, 2024 

 Qatar's ruling emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani addresses the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Qatar's ruling emir said Tuesday his small, energy-rich nation will hold a referendum on ending a short-lived experiment in electing members of the country's advisory Shura Council.

Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani offered no immediate timeline for the referendum in an annual address to the Shura Council, which drafts laws, approves state budgets, debates major issues and provides advice to the ruler. The body does not have sway over matters of defense, security and the economy.

However, it marks yet another rollback in the hereditarily ruled Gulf Arab states in its halting steps to embrace representational rule, however tentative, following efforts by the United States to push harder for democratic reforms in the Middle East after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and hopes for democracy in the region rose in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring.

From its perspective, Qatar saw the one-time 2021 vote likely as increasing tensions between tribes and families in the country just months after a diplomatic crisis between Doha and four Arab nations ended.

“We are all one family in Qatar,” Sheikh Tamim said, according to a transcript published by the state-run Qatar News Agency. “The contest between candidates for membership in the Shura Council took place within families and tribes, and there are different views regarding the repercussions of such competition on our norms, traditions, as well as the conventional social institutions and their cohesion.”

The emir added: “The contest assumes an identity-based character that we are not equipped to handle, with potential complications over time that we would rather avoid.”

The country’s electoral law distinguishes between born and naturalized Qatari citizens and bars the latter from electoral participation. Human Rights Watch described the system as “discriminatory,” excluding thousands of Qataris from running or voting. The disqualifications have sparked minor tribal protests that led to several arrests.

Qatar first introduced plans for the legislative elections in its 2003 constitution, but authorities repeatedly postponed the vote. The country finally held the vote to elect two-thirds of the Shura Council in October 2021, just after the end of a boycott of Qatar by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that tore the Gulf Arab states apart.

The vote also came about a year ahead of Qatar hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, an event that drew intense scrutiny from the West to both Doha's treatment of foreign laborers and its system of governance. Qatar remains an important nation to the West as it hosted the Taliban and assisted in the chaotic 2021 NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan and as a mediator as the Israel-Hamas war rages in the Gaza Strip and has expanded to Lebanon.

Qatar, like other Gulf Arab states, is ruled by a hereditary leader with ultimate say in how the country is governed. Before the oil industry roared into the Gulf and upended hundreds of years of governance, rulers led by consensus among their people.

The U.S. after the Cold War began a push for democracy in the Mideast, while carefully balancing its relationships with longtime client states it cultivated in its competition with the Soviet Union and its support of Israel. That push strengthened under then-President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks, which saw Gulf Arab states make tentative moves toward some type of representation.

The U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for comment over the announcement by Qatar, home to the massive Al-Udeid Air Base hosting the forward headquarters of the U.S. military's Central Command.

Governance by consensus is something Gulf rulers attempt to maintain even today even as some sit atop vast sums of oil and gas wealth that have transformed their countries.

Sheikh Tamim alluded to that in his speech Tuesday, maintaining that “the Shura Council is not a representative parliament in a democratic system.”

“In Qatar, the people and the government have a direct civic relationship, and there are recognized norms and mechanisms for direct communication between the people and the governance,” he said.

But it's not just Qatar rolling back on its experiment in representational government. In May, the ruler of oil-rich Kuwait dissolved his country's parliament for as much as four years. While the Kuwaiti parliament had struggled, it represented the Gulf Arab state's most free-wheeling legislative body and could challenge the country's rulers.

Over a decade on from the 2011 Arab Spring protests, “we’ve seen this kind of retreat coming for some time,” said Kristin Smith Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“It's important to recognize there has been a debate on this and there was a popular push from below for more representation and accountability,” Diwan said. “But it seems like that moment has passed.”