Should the people of a given country be allowed to vote in free and fair elections, even if the people they elect are fundamentally hostile to the United States?
That is the great question which is facing America today, as protests have toppled the leader of Tunisia and now threaten the presidency of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Most informed Americans do not have a high opinion of Bolivian president Evo Morales. They think that Mr. Morales is an anti-American leftist aligned with President Hugo Chavez and former President Fidel Castro.
None of these facts is strictly wrong. President Evo Morales is a leftist; he is an ally of Venezuela and Cuba; and he certainly hates the United States.
Yet Mr. Morales is not just this. To many people in Bolivia, Mr. Morales is the Barack Obama of their country. He is the first democratically elected indigenous president, much like Mr. Obama is America's first black president, in a country where two-thirds of the people are indigenous.
America's economy is in a bad way. The economic recovery has turned out to be disturbingly weak, and joblessness rates are still actually rising. Investment is down, Americans are depressed and angry, and there are even worries about a double-dip recession.
There has not been much analysis of the causes behind today's economic stagnation. Most experts talk about how weak recoveries generally follow financial crises. Politically, Republicans blame Democrats, and Democrats are generally too busy trying to fix the problem than to think about what caused it.
Yet there is indeed something that did badly damage the recovery - an event very few nowadays link to America's economic woes.
Inequality constitutes a rising problem in United States. Ever since the 1970s, it has been steadily increasing; today, income inequality is at its highest since the Great Depression. The fact that America is currently mired in the worst economic crisis since that period may not be a coincidence.
This site has found fifteen striking charts of inequality. Some are better at conveying the problem than others. Nevertheless, overall it does a decent job at presenting the magnitude of American inequality. Pictures like the one below are especially effective:
On November 4, 2008 Senator Barack Obama was elected president, winning a substantial margin over Republican candidate John McCain. In the popular vote, Mr. Obama won 52.9% of the electorate to Mr. McCain's 45.7%; he thus took a 7.2% margin.
Mr. Obama, however, did not do so well with white, non-Hispanic voters. According to exit polls, the newly elected president lost whites by double-digits; taking 43% of the white vote to Mr. McCain's 55% support.
This is not anything new; for decades now, the Democratic Party has been losing the white vote. Indeed, the last time a Democratic presidential candidate actually won whites was in 1964, when Texan Lyndon Johnson delivered a landslide pummeling to Senator Barry Goldwater.
Ever since then Democrats have been in a bad way with whites:
Presidential election results are often pictured through electoral college maps, a useful and simple tool. Looking at the competition of the two parties throughout time provides a quite interesting exercise. Certain states turn blue, then red, then blue again. Others stay the same color. One election the map is filled with red; the next election blue makes a comeback. And on and on it goes.
This is in fact quite deceiving. What the electoral college does not show is the history of third-party challenges to the two-party system. In 1992, for instance, presidential candidate Ross Perot finished with 18.9% of the vote - yet not a single state in the 1992 electoral college showed his third-party run.
Since 1992, however, third-parties have had quite a rough run. This graph shows the third-party vote after that year:
The recent signing of Arizona's harsh anti-immigrant bill reminded me of another law passed a while ago. Commonly called the Bennett law, it aimed to make the teaching of English mandatory in all public and private schools. Like Arizona's law, it constituted a response to large immigration, ignited by nativist sentiment.
The Bennett law reacted to similar anti-immigration feelings as those present in Arizona today. To many Americans, immigrants were unwanted foreigners taking away American jobs. They spoke a foreign language and came from a foreign land. They did not speak English and were accused of refusing to do so. They had a different culture and stayed together amongst themselves; assimilation did not seem to work with them. They seemed less loyal to the United States and more loyal to their homeland. At core, they seemed "un-American."
I am speaking, of course, about German immigrants in Wisconsin.
One of the greatest strengths the United States has constitutes its ability to admit mistakes - to apologize and acknowledge that America has not always been right, and that it has sometimes done things terribly wrong. This capacity has always served the country well; if America has often traveled down the wrong road, it has even more often corrected its path.
Yet although people do the country a great service in perceiving in faults, sometimes the criticism goes a bit too far.
Take my college, for instance, a great institution which I love - but which exemplifies this excessive self-criticism. I have taken classes in which professors have labeled America a nation founded upon "white supremacy." Another course, supposedly chronicling America's history, turned out to be a litany of how the United States had oppressed blacks, women, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, the poor, homosexuals, Third World countries, the environment, and everything in between.
I have conversed with friends convinced that the United States has hurt the world far more than it has helped it. I know students so blinded by bitterness and hatred for America's wrongdoings that it is frightening and very sad - who find racism and oppression in every TV show or every action of the Republican Party. Sometimes I feel the blindness creeping on myself.
So in the spirit of fighting this blindness, here are five things America has done right:
On April 7, 2010 the people of Kyrgyzstan, a far-away country straining under an increasingly oppressive president, liberated themselves. In a revolution recalling those of 1989, protests unexpectedly toppled the authoritarian government. The opposition quickly took control, promising free and fair elections.
The United States government promptly asked if the new administration would allow America to keep its air base in the country.
Last year, former governor Sarah Palin famously campaigned on a theme of "real America." This widely derided message implied that only "real Americans" vote Republican.
Yet there is something to Mrs. Palin's theory. However unintentionally, it lays bare a fundamental truth of American politics.
Think about how most people picture Americans. In fact, take a moment to imagine an average American: detail everything possible about this person.
Here is how I picture this American - let's name him Bob Smith.
Switzerland's landslide vote to ban Muslim minarets surprised many pundits and commentators, more familiar with the nation's image as a bastion of tolerance and European enlightenment.
These results, in fact, are not so surprising. They derive from the peculiar structure of Swiss democracy, which effectively creates a voter base less diverse than the general public. These voters are generally predisposed to support such initiatives as the minaret vote.
I am specifically talking about Swiss citizenship. Becoming a Swiss citizen implies that one has become part of the Swiss people, and the Swiss have a very strict definitions of what this means. Since - of course - only citizens may vote, this strictness directly impacts the Swiss electorate.
Hello again my Brothers And Sisters. Today I've been musing on the hypocrisy that we so often see from the Right Wing of American politics. Now one of the best hypocrisy busters out there is Rachel Maddow. She along with Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, and Stephen Colbert, are routinely pointing out the number of things said by specific Republicans out of one side of their mouth, only to later be contradicted by what they say out of the other side.
However there are on occasion examples of hypocrisy that are not necessarily attributable to any one specific individual, but rather to Republicans as a whole. Today I want to discuss two recent examples.
Many people mistakenly believe that the Eastern Martial Arts like Karate, and Jiujitsu They are really not. Rather they are about the application, direction, and management of force. Whether it is physical, mental, or in some cases political.
One of the best and easiest to learn lessons of martial arts is that if you are being attacked, it is often for the best to not meet force with force. In fact what is best is if you can just move out of the way of the enemies attack, and let their excessive force cause them to over balance, leaving them vulnerable to your attack. What is even better is if they have put so much energy into attacking that they end up damaging themselves without you having to lift a finger.
And we are back. Yesterday I took a look at some of the Republican ideas for Health Care Reform, and while some of them aren't bad, some of the ideas I have learned are already essentially being done, and others are pretty much pure bullshit. But surely the ideas that President Obama has presented are all wonderful right? Right? Uh, well, not exactly.
Well it looks like it's mid afternoon in Health Care Reform land. You remember Health Care Reform don't you? That thing that some of the talking heads were carrying on was a dead thing? Yeah well about that, not so much. People might not completely agree on details, but the one thing that pretty much everyone who's not a politician or a CEO Can agree on is that we are sick and tired of having to go through our days living in terror of getting sick. The system is broken and we want something done about it. NOW!
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