Quote of the Day (Lars-Erik Cederman, on Economics and Ethnic Nationalism)

“[E]thnic nationalism tends to attract the most support from those who have been disadvantaged by globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. Populist demagogues have an easy time exploiting growing socioeconomic inequalities, especially those between states’ geographic centers and their peripheries, and they blame ethnically distinct immigrants or resident minorities. Part of the answer is to retool immigration policies so as to better integrate newcomers. Yet without policies that reduce inequality, populist appeals that depict out-groups as welfare sponges will only gain traction. So governments hoping to amp down ethnic nationalism should set up programs that offer job training to the unemployed in depressed regions, and they should prevent the further hallowing out of welfare programs.”— Swiss-Swedish political scientist Lars-Erik Cederman, “Blood for Soil: The Fatal Temptations of Ethnic Politics,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019

The image of Lars-Erik Cederman that accompanies this post was taken on Nov. 1, 2018, by AliceRuth11.

Quote of the Day (Jill Lepore, Differentiating Patriotism From Nationalism)

“Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.”— Harvard Univ. history professor Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019)

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Fascism and Political Faith)

“Most people desire certainties, feel the need of a faith. Modern education makes religious faith difficult, but has done nothing to undermine political faith. Masses of men and women think themselves too intelligent and well-informed to believe in miracles or the divinity of Christ, but find not the smallest difficulty in accepting the infallibility of a Leader. The worship of God is an intellectual impossibility for thousands to whom the worship of a divine being, called the Nation, seems the most natural thing in the world. The old tendencies have not been abolished (they never are); they have merely taken new and, on the whole, less desirable channels. Fascism digs these new channels for worship and provides, in its cult of the divine Nation, a kind of lightning-conductor, upon which thousands of reluctant infidels can discharge the accumulations of their will to believe.”— English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Prospects of Fascism in England,” March 3, 1934, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

Quote of the Day (Will Durant, Arguing Against Utopias and Nationalism)

“In the end we must steel ourselves against utopias and be content, as Aristotle recommended, with a slightly better state. We must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves. Perhaps, if we can broaden our borders with intelligent study, impartial histories, modest travel, and honest thought — if we can become conscious of the needs and views and hopes of other peoples, and sensitive to the diverse values and beauties of diverse cultures and lands, we shall not so readily plunge into competitive homicide, but shall find room in our hearts for a wider understanding and an almost universal sympathy. We shall find in all nations qualities and accomplishments from which we may learn and refresh ourselves, and by which we may enrich our inheritance and our posterity. Someday, let us hope, it will be permitted us to love our country without betraying mankind.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning American philosopher and historian Will Durant (1885-1981), Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God (2014)

Quote of the Day (Eric Hoffer, on Why ‘The Ideal Devil is a Foreigner’)

“Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry. Hitler found it easy to brand the German Jews as foreigners. The Russian revolutionary agitators emphasized the foreign origin (Varangian, Tartar, Western) of the Russian aristocracy. In the French Revolution, the aristocrats were seen as ‘descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans.’ In the Puritan Revolution the royalists ‘were labeled “Normans,” descendants of a group of foreign invaders.’”— American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)

 No movie or fiction will scare me this Halloween quite like this analysis of political fanaticism. Thirty-five years after its author's death, it bears rediscovery and reflection...

Quote of the Day (Lech Walesa, on ‘Polish Aspirations to Freedom’)

“I think that all nations of the world have the right to life in dignity. I believe that, sooner or later, the rights of individuals, of families, and of entire communities will be respected in every corner of the world. Respect for civic and human rights in Poland and for our national identity is in the best interest of all Europe. For, in the interest of Europe is a peaceful Poland, and the Polish aspirations to freedom will never be stifled. The dialogue in Poland is the only way to achieving internal peace and that is why it is also an indispensable element of peace in Europe.”—Former Polish President, union leader, and democracy icon Lech Walesa, “Nobel Peace Prize Address,” Dec. 11, 1983

Lech Walesa was born 75 years ago today in Popowo, Poland. The arc of his career—first leading the exhilarating battle for freedom in Eastern Europe, then increasingly marginalized in this region as it embraces the worst form of nationalism—is familiar but dismaying.

In 1980, Walesa sparked a series of strikes that won for Solidarity the right to represent workers. The free world cheered again as he endured house arrest and systematic harassment during Polish General Jaruzelski's imposition of martial law. Late in the decade, he proceeded from triumph to triumph, as Solidarity negotiated the right to free elections in Poland. A decade after the Gdansk strike, he became the first freely elected President of Poland. 

Unfortunately, Walesa was less adroit as President than as dissident and union leader. His alienation of former allies and inability to ensure a stable post-communist economy ensured a narrow defeat at the polls in his 1995 re-election bid—ironically enough, to a former communist functionary.

In the wake of that defeat, many believed that the freedoms Walesa had helped secure would survive in his homeland. But, while there has been no going back to Poland’s communist past, the nation has taken another problematic political turn, with the ruling nationalist Law and Justice Party supplanting liberal news anchors and talk-show hosts on state media with more congenial right-wing voices. At the same time, the new leadership also packed the Constitutional Court with five justices of their own liking and, particularly heinously, adopted a law (since modified) restricting public debate on the Holocaust.

Under the new regime, Walesa’s once-bright star has dimmed. He’s been forced to deny accusations that he served as a communist informer in the 1970s before he rose up the union ladder. More recently, he was pointedly excluded from any speaking role at recent anniversary celebrations of Solidarity. 

Poland is “now being destroyed,” Walesa explained to Bloomberg in discussing why, in his mid-70s, he felt compelled to step back into the political arena to monitor his country’s elections. His case illustrates how voters the world over, riven by socioeconomic discontent, might turn away from the liberal free-trade regime that preserved European collective security after WWII.

Quote of the Day (John McCain, on ‘Half-Baked, Spurious Nationalism’)

“To fear the world we have organized and led the three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”—John McCain (1936-2018), U.S. Senator (R-AZ), Presidential nominee, and Vietnam veteran and POW—and American hero, speech accepting the Liberty Medal, National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, Oct. 16, 2017

If someone were to update John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage today, John McCain would be among the half-dozen U.S. Senators selected for this new pantheon. He was not perfect, any more than the figures JFK picked to honor in his Pulitzer Prize-winner were. But like them, he also found a point beyond which he could not be pushed.

In the last three years, that has come in his relationship with Donald Trump. It had to bother the President that the senior Senator from Arizona could not be bullied. Trump may have scoffed at McCain’s captivity in Vietnam, but that period of anguish and torture left him singularly unmoved by any sarcasm or threats Trump could hurl. 

I am not surprised that one of McCain’s favorite books was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. There were so many quotes about freedom, the preciousness of life, and the brotherhood of men in arms that must have appealed to him. 

But I think that another quote from that novel must have struck him with full force as he witnessed the threat that Donald Trump posed to the cooperative style of legislating and the international security arrangements to which McCain dedicated his adult life: “There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”