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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Demographies [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-05
We begin today with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times and her wide-ranging “exit interview” with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
[GARCIA-NAVARRO]: ...His approach to foreign policy writ large seems to be to avoid engaging militarily while wanting the world to be scared of us. He doesn’t seem terribly interested in the work of diplomacy. I’m curious how you would define that foreign-policy philosophy and what you think of that approach. [BLINKEN]: To me...in the absence of American diplomacy, you’re going to have diplomacy by lots of other countries that are going to shape the world in ways that may not be so friendly to our own interests and our own values. So that’s the choice. We can disengage. We can not be present. We can stand back. But we know others will step in, and we have to decide whether that’s in our interest. [GARCIA-NAVARRO]: It’s not that he wants to stand back. It’s that he uses other methods to make countries bend to America’s will. [BLINKEN]: Let’s take a concrete example. Let’s talk about China for a minute. I think President Trump was right during his first administration in identifying some of the challenges posed by China. No country has the capacity that China does to reshape the international system that we and many others put in place after the Second World War... Where I would disagree with the approach he took and where I would commend to him the approach that we pursued is, we’re so much more effective in dealing with the challenges posed by China when we’re working closely with other countries. When we took office, the European Union was on the verge of signing a major trade agreement with China. They weren’t sure if they could count on the United States. We’d had real challenges in the relationships in the preceding four years, and they were hedging toward China. So were many other countries. We were really on the decline when it came to dealing with China diplomatically and economically. We’ve reversed that. The way we’ve approached it is we’ve sought to bring other countries in when we’re dealing with China’s economic practices that we don’t like. We’re 20 percent of world G.D.P. When we aligned Europeans, key allies and partners in the Asia Pacific, we’re suddenly 40, 50, 60 percent of world G.D.P., something that China can’t ignore. And I know it’s succeeding because every time I meet with my Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, the foreign minister, he inevitably spends 30 or 40 minutes, 60 minutes complaining about everything we’ve done to align other countries to build this convergence in dealing with things that we don’t like that China is pursuing. So to me, that is the proof point that we’re much better off through diplomacy.
Good interview with a lot of adversarial questioning.
I wonder if legacy media like The New York Times will be as thorough and adversarial with the incoming administration.
Paul Krugman writes for his “Krugman wonks out” Substack about the general ignorance of the rich and powerful when it comes to public policy.
I don’t know about you, but I’m still extremely unsure what the incoming president will actually do about trade. The Smoot-Hawley level tariffs he promised during the campaign would be disastrous, but sometimes I think he may have at least a vague sense of the damage those tariffs would do, so what he’s really aiming for is an extortion scheme — one in which most companies would secure exemptions via political contributions and/or de facto bribes (e.g. buying Trump crypto.) But then he’ll come out with something...and I’ll be reminded that wealthy and powerful people like Trump or Andreesen or, of course, Elon Musk are often far more ignorant than policy wonks can easily imagine. You might assume otherwise. After all, billionaires could afford, if they chose, to put the top experts in practically every field on permanent retainer. In fact, I once did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured out that Musk in particular could afford to maintain a private intelligence service on the same scale as, say, Britain’s MI5. But Trump, we know, disdains expertise; Musk appears to get what he thinks is intelligence from random posts on X. The thing is, it takes considerable strength of character for a wealthy and powerful man to become and remain well-informed about policy issues.
Mr. Krugman, don’t give Musk any ideas! (I’m pretty sure that EM already has some sort of private intelligence service, though not on the scale of MI5.)
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo takes the media to task for inadequate coverage of the two political manifestos by Matthew Livelsberger, the renter of the Cybertruck that exploded outside of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on New Years Day.
Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone. Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr. [...] I encourage you to read the two minifestos all the way through. They’re not long. I excerpted at least half above. You can find them here. I should note they capture what we might call the ideologically polyglot... He also rails against the 1%, excessive screen time for kids, wars with no clear strategic purpose, obesity. We should also note explicitly that Livelsberger can both be a violent extremist and a victim of PTSD, and in a broader sense part of the human collateral damage of the wars that occupied the U.S. military through the first two decades of the 21st century. Our minds should be big enough for both those realities. But the through-line is pretty clear: If you’re a Democrat or someone who is Democrat-coded, Livelsberger’s version of national rebirth probably isn’t a fun one for you.
Tim Henderson of Michigan Advance/Stateline notes that U.S. life expectancy is improving after COVID but at a rate slower than other high-income countries.
Bad habits such as junk food, smoking and illicit drug use are preventing longer lifespans even as technology brings major progress in diseases such as cancer and heart disease, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. By 2050, U.S. life expectancy is projected to increase from 79.1 years to 80.4 years for babies born in that year, a modest improvement that would drop the United States behind nearly all other high-income countries, according to the study. Poverty and inadequate health insurance are slowing progress in some states. Wealthier, more urban and better-educated states are doing better and are more likely to adopt policies that save lives, from curbing gun access to offering income supports for young mothers. Nine of the 10 states (all but North Dakota) with the longest life expectancies for babies born this year are dominated by Democrats, and all 10 have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. All 10 states with the shortest life expectancies are controlled by Republicans (though Kentucky has a Democratic governor), and they include five of the 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid. A Stateline analysis of data from the study shows how some states have risen, and some have tumbled, in terms of life expectancy.
Jeff Diamant of Pew Research Center looks at the overwhelming Christian affiliations of the members of the 119th Congress, far exceeding (percentage-wise) the number of Christians in the U.S. population as a whole.
Overall, there will be 461 Christian members of Congress when the 119th Congress meets, compared with 469 in the previous Congress and 491 during the 2015-17 session. It will be the lowest number of Christians since the start of the 2009-2011 congressional session, the first for which Pew Research Center conducted this analysis. (This analysis does not include three vacant – or soon to be vacant – seats whose eventual occupants are unknown, including the Ohio Senate seat of Vice President-elect JD Vance.) And yet, at 87%, Christians still make up the lion’s share of the Congress, far exceeding the Christian share of all U.S. adults, which stands at 62% after several decades of decline. In 2007, 78% of American adults were Christian, according to Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study from that year, and in the early 1960s more than nine-in-ten U.S. adults were Christian, according to historical Gallup polling. The new Congress is also more religious than the general population by another, related measure: Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28%) are religiously unaffiliated, meaning they are atheist or agnostic or say their religion is “nothing in particular.” But less than 1% of Congress falls into this category, with three religiously unaffiliated members: incoming Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Emily Randall of Washington, both of whom are Democrats, and incoming Rep. Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona, a Republican.
Jacob L. Nelson of Columbia Journalism Review takes a look at the political polarization of the American Jewish community through the eyes of its journalists.
As a communication scholar who has spent the past decade researching the relationship between journalism and the public, I have learned that if you want to understand a group of people, you could do a lot worse than asking the journalists writing for and about them. So, over two weeks in November, I interviewed fifteen journalists and editors who contribute to or work for news organizations dedicated to the American Jewish community. These organizations include those focused on local Jewish communities, such as J. The Jewish News of Northern Californiaand the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, as well as those focused on the broader American Jewish community, such as daily news sites like The Forward and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), and online magazines such as Jewish Currents and Tablet. While most journalists are increasingly interested in understanding and engaging with their audiences, journalists with the Jewish press have spent the past year enduring the disorienting experience of watching their own audiences change. “I serve an audience today that is changed from October 6 of last year,” said Rob Golub, the editor of theWisconsin Jewish Chronicle. “It’s almost like a different community.” [...] The journalists I spoke with have seen these changes up close. They hear about them from readers who email them or stop them at events or in the supermarket. They follow their audience’s reactions to their stories on social media. They see the changes as symptomatic of a community grappling with a profound sense of hurt and vulnerability.
Antonio Pita of El País in English describes the narco-state that Syria had become under the leadership of Bashar al-Assad and Assad’s brother, Maher.
It was an open secret that, in the face of international sanctions, the now-deposed regime of Bashar al-Assad had turned Syria into a narco-state with the production and smuggling of captagon, a cheap and easy-to-produce drug nicknamed “poor man’s cocaine.” It was also an open secret that Maher, the dictator’s younger brother, whose whereabouts are now unknown, oversaw a business that, according to research by the New Lines Institute in New York, generated $2.4 billion annually. This money flowed into a system where corruption was not the exception, but the norm. Maher al-Assad commanded the Army’s Fourth Armored Division and was, in effect, the second most powerful man in the country. Rebel fighter Baker Sham knew all this, but is still shocked by the scale of the operation, as he displays how the drug was produced, packaged, and hidden inside wooden tables, decorative plastic fruit, LED lights, and electric generators at a center on the outskirts of Damascus. “What we found when we arrived would have sold for millions of dollars on the market,” says Sham, as he picks up the slats from the ground to turn the liquid mixture into pills and 100-gram bags of hashish. Assad’s Syria accounted for 80% of the world’s captagon production, according to U.N. estimates. [...] Captagon is the former trade name for fenetylline, a psychostimulant that was first developed in Germany in the 1960s to treat narcolepsy, depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was smuggled into the Middle East from Eastern Europe in the 2000s, shifting the focus of the drug. While most European countries had been banning it since the 1980s, after discovering that it was highly addictive, it was already becoming popular in the Middle East, especially among combatants in battle. For years, it was known as the “jihad drug.”
The independent Russian media outlet Meduza looks at the Russian youth politics of “Generation P.”
The Kremlin wants Generation Putin’s loyalty. Sociologist Iskender Yasaveyev told Signal that scholars approach studying Generation Putin with great caution. He points out that a united youth politics did not immediately emerge when Putin took power in Russia. Moreover, the concept of “youth,” including its legal definition, has changed several times under Putin. It originally signified people between 14 and 30 years old, then it was expanded to 35, and in the future the upper limit of “youth” may be raised to 38. Since the mid-aughts, Russian authorities have been trying to control young Russians’ political activity. They have not been especially successful, however. The protests of the winter of 2011–2012 changed the country’s entire political situation dramatically. Since then, the authorities have markedly increased the amount of “patriotic programming” in educational curricula, and have also made more active attempts to influence young people on the Internet. [...] Support for Putin among Russia’s youth is a direct result of the war in Ukraine. Since 2022, it has become abundantly clear to everyone what can and cannot be said in public. Young people’s answers to opinion polls show not what they themselves really believe, but what they currently understand to be acceptable to believe and to say. External pressure on Russia also plays a role. “Many people who are growing up now have never been outside of Russia,” the Levada Center researcher said. “In addition, the war [against Ukraine] has seriously changed the Western world’s relationship to Russia, and the media and culture reflect this. It has an effect on the mood of the youth. The authorities’ ideological work only intensifies these processes.”
Finally today, Renée Graham of The Boston Globe shares her New Years resolutions.
2. Hobbies From stamp collecting and baseball cards in my youth to vintage Black film posters and typewriters in adulthood, I’ve always been a serial hobbyist. Much of the past year was consumed with my latest obsession — Lego. As much as I convinced myself that I was too old for another space, time, and money-consuming hobby, building everything from food trucks to a winter village kept me occupied; focused on something other than the dire state of the world (which is essentially my job); introduced me to fellow enthusiasts; and fed my inner nerd. We’re going to need some distractions to cool our overheated minds. Can’t go wrong with a satisfying and involving hobby. 3. More books, fewer screens. I do most of my reading on a Kindle. (And yes, I know Jeff Bezos is evil, but e-readers are lightweight; I can download books from my local library; and physical books require space I don’t have.) But I also spend far too much time staring at other screens. Sometimes it’s work related, but just as often I plunge down in a rabbit hole of old clips from “The Midnight Special,” “Soul Train,” or baseball bloopers. It’s the potato chip effect — I can never stop at just one. Next thing I know, 30, 40, or 60 minutes has gone by — we’ve all been there. I can afford to spend my precious free time more wisely. [...] 6. Resist. At the height of the AIDS pandemic, the grassroots activist group ACT UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — adopted the slogan, “Silence = Death.” With thousands dying, its unvarnished urgency was necessary. As I did in 2016 when Donald Trump won the presidential election, I find myself thinking again about what it means to resist and speak out against powerful people and institutions determined to cause harm, especially to already vulnerable populations. Silence, acquiescence, and appeasement are not options for anyone who wants to save their country, their democracy, themselves, or those they love. And I know that after 92 percent of Black women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, we’re supposed to step back and leave this mean old world to its own devices. But if I’m not resisting and fighting for me, who will? 7. Savor gentle moments. The world is already too unkind. Go easy on yourself.
Everyone try to have the best possible day!
[END]
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