White House have a robust dialogue with Pyongyang

White House must conquer its own chaos and stop improvising to have a robust dialogue with Pyongyang

Adam Cathcart South China News

Donald Trump’s preoccupation with the Russian collusion scandal shows signs of breaking down the US message on North Korea

US President Donald Trump is tweeting about his disappointments, particularly with China and its lack of action on North Korea

We live in strange times. In the US’ White House, the politics of misinformation have metastasized. Analysts who wish to discuss traditional US security and diplomatic interests in northeast Asia must therefore contend with an array of demented statements by the president, thick performances of outrage by his closest aides against what they call “the fake news industrial complex”, the weird convergence of US foreign policy with Trump family interests, the crimson visions of Steven K. Bannon, and of course the tendency of US-Russia relations to overshadow all else amid an expanding investigation of the Trump campaign.

Trump has frustrated and exhausted his secretary of state, is already on his second national security adviser, and has left a number of key foreign policy posts unfilled.

US President Donald Trump has taken an activist approach to discussions with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping over the North Korea issue. 

For all of that, in the first six months of its existence, the Trump administration has invested considerable time in the North Korea issue and demonstrated thereby an ability to function with a due level of focus. In an April 4 speech at Johns Hopkins University, scholar Jonathan Pollack noted Trump’s assiduousness with North Korea intelligence briefings, and there has been the general sense that this president has, if nothing else, succeeded briefly in appearing to change the terms of debate.

Trump took an activist approach to discussions with Xi Jinping over the North Korea issue, spontaneously sharing his tweet-sized thoughts on Chinese-North Korean relations. Both James Mattis’ remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue and Rex Tillerson’s extended remarks at the US State Department on May 3 indicated that North Korea and China’s role in influencing the DPRK has been a preeminent area of foreign policy focus.

Trump orders ‘new approach with military option’ to resolve North Korea nuclear crisis

However, the Trump administration’s desired outcome with respect to North Korea remains unclear, and North Korea policy debates may already have been submerged into the general morass of chaos enveloping the White House.

What does the Trump administration ultimately want from North Korea? The North Koreans see Trump as behaving in the pattern of his predecessors, using overt military intimidation alongside subversive sponsorship of initiatives meant to undermine the North Korean leadership and overthrow the social system.

Rodong Sinmun’s editorial of July 18 targeted James Mattis as “an old warmonger” whose assurances about the US desire for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear issue were not to be trusted.

In addition to his extensive ties to South Korean security and intelligence organisations, North Korean strategists surely noticed that Mattis has been either on the fence or entirely silent on the question of the DPRK’s sovereignty. When he was asked explicitly at Shangri-La by a reporter (it was Richard Lloyd Parry of the Times of London) if North Korea had a right to exist, Mattis sidestepped the question entirely, leaving behind an ominous silence.

US threat to strike North Korea is ‘aimed at Beijing’s ears’

Rex Tillerson has said that the US would not seek to hasten North Korea’s collapse, nor would it force reunification on Pyongyang. These statements have echoes in the new South Korean line put forth by President Moon. But Tillerson’s counterparts in the North Korean foreign ministry have only to spend a few precious minutes online to figure out that Tillerson’s words do not necessarily hold much currency with the president of the United States, who may instead be listening to the mustachioed hard liner John Bolton about both overthrowing the Kim dynasty and a future line-up at the State Department.

The North Korean government listens with exquisite care to public statements in Washington. When then-President Obama answered a viewer question about North Korea during an otherwise random YouTube live chat in January 2015, the DPRK was listening, and thereafter brandished his answer as incontrovertible proof that his policy toward North Korea was one of “strategic suffocation”.

Today, the White House preoccupation with putting out fires over the Trump campaign’s Russian collusion scandal has already shown signs of breaking down the administration’s message on North Korea. On the day that Donald Trump Jr published his now-infamous e-mails, then White House chief of staff Reince Prebius bizarrely tried to deflect criticism from Russian interference in the US election by saying that North Korea and China had interfered in US elections “consistently over many, many years”. This kind of desperation from any senior official is not helpful in conducting diplomacy.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says military action against North Korea an ‘option on the table’

If Washington’s message to North Korea has been incoherent, Xi Jinping’s government in Beijing has been hearing a more consistent word from the Trump administration: As one particularly carefully crafted question put it at the July 11 foreign ministry briefing in Beijing, the US wants more responsibility, more action and more pressure from China on North Korea. Geng Shuang’s answer was to lambaste Washington’s “China responsibility theory” for North Korea, likening the US and DPRK role in the nuclear crisis to a tai-chi duet of “pushing hands”.

What was the White House or State Department response to this push back from Beijing, the most explicit rebuke of Trump’s approach to the North Korean problem to date? Nothing whatsoever.

If the Trump administration is looking for an ongoing robust dialogue with China on the North Korean issue, or any form of dialogue with North Korea in the next three years, the White House is going to need to tamp down its organisational and communications chaos, and stop improvising.

Adam Cathcart is a lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Leeds

Breitbart Media's Disinformation

Study: How Breitbart Media's Disinformation Created the Paranoid, Fact-Averse Nation That Elected Trump

Democrats and progressives turned to wider and more reputable sources.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet 

Right-wing media evolved into a hall of mirrors in 2016, when Breitbart displaced Fox News as the key agenda-setting and attack-leading epicenter of a disinformation-filled, paranoid ecosystem promoting Donald Trump and his pro-white America agenda.

Breitbart not only led the right’s obsessive, hostile focus on immigrants, it was also the first to attack professional reporting such as the New York Times and Washington Post. Breitbart's disruptive template fueled the political and information universe we now inhabit, where the right dismisses facts and embraces fantasies.

There is no corollary dynamic on the left or among pro-Clinton audiences in 2016. The left's news sources, media consumption and patterns of social media-sharing are more open-minded and fact-based and less insular and aggressive. Still, Breitbart’s obsessive focus on fabricating and hyping scandals involving Hillary Clinton (and Jeb Bush early in the primary season) pushed mainstream media to disproportionately cover its agenda.

These observations are among the takeaways of a major study from Columbia Journalism Review that analyzed 1.25 million stories published online between April 2015 and Election Day 2016. While the study affirmed what many analysts have long perceived—that right-wing media and those who consume it inhabit a paranoid and dark parallel universe—it also documented shifts in the right’s media ecosystem; namely, Breitbart supplanting Fox News as the leading purveyor of extreme disinformation.

“A right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart [has] developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world,” CJR wrote. “This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.”

The CJR report said Americans’ media consuming habits are “asymmetric,” meaning those on the left—progressives and Democrats—rely on more diverse outlets and content, compared to the right.

“Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites,” CJR wrote. “But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.”

The pro-Trump media specialized in what CJR called “disinformation,” where facts are presented in isolation or stripped of context, and then exaggerated or hyped to produce false sense of alarm or crisis. This is more sophisticated than merely lying, they said.

“Rather than ‘fake news’ in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading,” CJR said. “Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent ‘Bowling Green massacre.’”

CJR's methodology looked at how the 1.25 million stories were shared or referenced online; e.g., if a person shared a story from Breitbart, what other sites was he likely to share or hyperlink to? CJR used an open source program called Media Cloud, which was developed for studying media at Harvard University and MIT.

The most frequently shared sources among Trump supporters, in descending order, were Breitbart, The Hill, Fox News, Gateway Pundit, Politico, Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Donald j Trump.com, Conservative Tree  house, InfoWars, Daily Mail, Truth Feed, New York Post, Investors, the Right Scoop, states poll.com, and Conservative Tribune.

The most frequently shared sources among Clinton supporters, in descending order, were Washington Post, Huffington Post, New York Times, The Hill, CNN, Politico, Politicus USA, Daily Kos, Raw Story, hillaryclinton.com, MSNBC, Salon, Think Progress, Daily Newsbin, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, Daily Beast, Media Matters, NBC News and Vox.

Notably, there was virtually no middle ground. The most centrist news source, as measured by comparable volume of shares by Trump and Clinton supporters was the Wall Street Journal, CJR found.

“There are very few center-right sites: sites that draw many Trump followers, but also a substantial number of Clinton followers,” they said. “Between the moderately conservative Wall Street Journal, which draws Clinton and Trump supporters in equal shares, and the starkly partisan sites that draw Trump supporters by ratios of 4:1 or more, there are only a handful of sites. Once a threshold of partisan-only attention is reached, the number of sites in the clearly partisan right increases, and indeed exceeds the number of sites in the clearly partisan left.”

Hyper-Partisan Disinformation

The emergence of a self-segregating, far-right media universe is a relatively recent development. This fractured and self-referencing ecosystem barely existed before Barack Obama became president in 2008. As CJR noted, when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, the only far-right publication was the New York Post. By the time Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, there was “only the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and arguably Sean Hannity.” In 1996, Fox News was launched, and Alex Jones of InfoWars went on the radio. Breitbart was not founded until 2007.

Breitbart first displaced Fox News in the GOP’s crowded primary season early in 2016, CJR reported, when there was a field of 17 candidates and no clear frontrunner.

“The pattern of hyper-partisan attack was set during the primary campaign, targeting not only opposing candidates but also media that did not support Trump’s candidacy,” it said. “The February map [of the most read and shared websites], for example, shows Fox News as a smaller node quite distant from the Breitbart-centered right. It reflects the fact that Fox News received less attention than it did earlier or later in the campaign, and less attention, in particular, from users who also paid attention to the core Breitbart-centered sites and whose attention would have drawn Fox closer to Breitbart.”

CJR explained that Breitbart started to attack Fox News early in 2016. “The top-20 stories in the right-wing media ecology during January included, for example, ‘Trump Campaign Manager Reveals Fox News Debate Chief Has Daughter Working for Rubio.’ More generally, the five most widely shared stories in which Breitbart refers to Fox are stories aimed to delegitimize Fox as the central arbiter of conservative news, tying it to immigration, terrorism and Muslims, and corruption.” The list is:

The Anti-Trump Network: Fox News Money Flows into Open Borders Group

NY Times Bombshell Scoop: Fox News Colluded with Rubio to Give Amnesty to Illegal Aliens

Google and Fox TV Invite Anti-Trump, Hitler-Citing, Muslim Advocate to Join Next GOP TV-Debate

Fox, Google Pick 1994 Illegal Immigrant To Ask Question in Iowa GOP Debate

Fox News at Facebook Meeting Is Misdirection: Murdoch and Zuckerberg Are Deeply Connected Over Immigration

Those attacks ceased by late spring, when the finalists for the GOP nomination were Trump and Ted Cruz. By then, CJR reported that the most-shared news sources on the right were, in descending order, Breitbart, Fox News, Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, Washington Examiner, WikiLeaks and InfoWars. On the left, the most shared sources as the primaries ended were: CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Hill and Politico.

But even as red and blue America turned to differing media, CJR noted that the right’s aggressive and hyperbolic political attacks shaped coverage by more mainstream and professionalized outlets. “The right-wing media was also able to bring the focus on immigration, Clinton emails, and scandals more generally to the broader media environment,” CJR said.

“A sentence-level analysis of stories throughout the media environment suggests that Donald Trump’s substantive agenda—heavily focused on immigration and direct attacks on Hillary Clinton—came to dominate public discussions,” it continued. “The right-wing media was also able to bring the focus on immigration, Clinton emails, and scandals more generally to the broader media environment… [and these] came to dominate public discussions.”

Right-wing media wasn’t just setting the topical news agenda, it was shaping the angles or slants taken, CJR noted. “While mainstream media coverage was often critical, it nonetheless revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set: immigration. Right-wing media, in turn, framed immigration in terms of terror, crime, and Islam, as a review of Breitbart and other right-wing media stories about immigration most widely shared on social media exhibits."

As the campaign crested, right-wing media was churning out a fount of propaganda, CJR said, saying its disinformation epitomized “the paranoid” in our politics.

“What we find in our data is a network of mutually reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world,” CJR said. “‘Fake news,’ which implies made of whole cloth by politically disinterested parties out to make a buck of Facebook advertising dollars, rather than propaganda and disinformation, is not an adequate term. By repetition, variation, and circulation through many associated sites, the network of sites make their claims familiar to readers, and this fluency with the core narrative gives credence to the incredible.”

CJR gave stunning examples. It cited examples by Ending the Fed, which was one of the most frequently shared right-wing sites on Facebook.

“While Ending the Fed clearly had great success marketing stories on Facebook, our analysis shows nothing distinctive about the site—it is simply part-and-parcel of the Breitbart-centered sphere,” it wrote. “The false claims perpetuated in Ending the Fed’s most-shared posts are well established tropes in right wing media: the leaked Podesta emails, alleged Saudi funding of Clinton’s campaign, and a lack of credibility in media. 

The most Facebook-shared story by Ending the Fed in October was ‘IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked & It’s Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined.’ See also, InfoWars’ ‘Saudi Arabia has funded 20% of Hillary’s Presidential Campaign, Saudi Crown Prince Claims,’ and Breitbart’s ‘Clinton Cash: Khizr Khan’s Deep Legal, Financial Connections to Saudi Arabia, Hillary’s Clinton Foundation Tie Terror, Immigration, Email Scandals Together.’

“This mix of claims and facts, linked through paranoid logic characterizes much of the most shared content linked to Breitbart,” CJR continued. “It is a mistake to dismiss these stories as ‘fake news;’ their power stems from a potent mix of verifiable facts (the leaked Podesta emails), familiar repeated falsehoods, paranoid logic, and consistent political orientation within a mutually reinforcing network of like-minded sites.”

Needless to say, CJR believes the right’s fact-averse, hyper-partisan hate-mongering is extremely dangerous for American culture and politics. That’s because wide disinformation erodes the prospect of governing based on compromises. If there’s any silver lining to CJR’s analysis, it is that red and blue America still “pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites.”

But there is no going back to a simpler, pre-internet past. Today’s press must recognize “it is operating in a propaganda and disinformation rich environment,” CJR said. “Rising to that challenge could usher in a new golden age for the Fourth Estate.”

CJR ended its report on that upbeat note. For the rest of us, its research and reporting tell us it is no accident that Breitbart’s Steve Bannon is in the White House as Trump’s senior strategist. He helped put Trump there by fanning an unheralded wave of dark propaganda and opening a Pandora’s Box that is not about to be closed.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and the co-author of Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry (AlterNet eBook, 2016).Net eBook, 2016).

This was a great week for conservatism.

The Triumph of Obama’s Long Game

By Andrew Sullivan New York Magazine

This was a great week for conservatism.

I know, I know. That word — as it has been reverse engineered by the modern GOP — no longer means in America what it once meant across the West, and I should probably stop pretending otherwise. I’m told repeatedly, and understandably, that my support for the long Anglo-American tradition of conservative political thought is quixotic, perverse, and largely counterproductive. Pragmatism, moderation, incrementalism, reform: These might be conservative virtues in principle, but in practice, the American right junked them years ago. I’m told I should admit that, in the current American context, I’m a de facto, Obama-loving leftist. To cheer the collapse of the brutal repeal of Obamacare has not an inkling of conservatism about it.

So let me explain a little why I found this past week so encouraging. It represented, in my view, the triumph of reality over ideology. And conservatism — from Burke and Hume to Hayek and Oakeshott — has always been, at its core, a critique of ideology in favor of reality. The world is as it is, the conservative argues. Any attempt to drastically overhaul it, to impose a utopian vision onto a messy, evolving human landscape will not just fail, it will likely make things worse. To pretend that the present exists for no good reason — and can be repealed or transformed in an instant — is a formula for ruin. The leftist vision of perfect “social justice” is therefore as illusory and as pernicious as the reactionary’s dream of restoring a mythical past. And the great virtue of America’s deeply conservative Constitution is that it throws so many obstacles in the way of radical, ideological change — to the left or right — that it limits the harm that humans can do to themselves in moments of passion or certainty or in search of ideological perfection.

The utopia the GOP wanted was to return health care to the free market, where choice would be maximized and costs curtailed by consumers. You can see the ideological appeal. But health care is a product unlike any other, and that freewheeling vision had already been decisively rejected by a majority of Americans. Obamacare itself was, in fact, a response to that shift in opinion — and the president was reelected after passing it. The personal bankruptcies, the soaring costs of treating the uninsured and very sick, the impossibility of getting insured with a preexisting condition: A huge majority hated that status quo ante. In the end, there was no going back.

And morally, American culture had already dispensed with the cruelty of allowing our fellow citizens to suffer and die because of a lack of resources. Ronald Reagan was in some ways the first to concede this. In 1986, he signed the law that made it illegal for hospitals to turn away the very sick if they could not pay for treatment. Once that core concession was made by the icon of the conservative movement — that the sick should always be treated in extremis — the logic of universal coverage was unstoppable.

And if universal coverage was unstoppable, the most conservative response to that change was … something very much like Obamacare. It was an incremental reform, it kept the private insurance market, and it attempted to create as big a risk pool as possible. No one argued it was perfect. But it adapted ideas from left and right into a plausible, workable synthesis. And yet the GOP — still fixated on abstract ideology — pretended none of this had happened. Caught in the vortex of their own talk-radio fantasies, they opted to repeal and replace 21st-century reality. And — surprise! — reality won.

Maybe if they’d made a case that this was essential unless we wanted the country to go bankrupt, they might have had a chance. But when they combined it with massive tax cuts for the rich, they were never going to win, except by diktat. So they tried diktat. They lied about their bill; they attempted to ram it through quickly; they suppressed public hearings and any semblance of a deliberative process; they all but ended senatorial debate; they made no compelling public case for the bill (because there was none); they passed it in the House before even scoring it; they tried to force it through by a reconciliation process that was never designed for such a thing.

They tried everything, in other words — led by one of the wiliest Senate Majority Leaders in modern times, and a president with a cultlike hold on his own voters. They controlled the House and Senate and had a chief executive willing to sign literally anything he could call a victory. And they still failed. Rejoice!

Obama, in fact, was the conservative in all this — nudging and amending, shaping and finessing as American society evolved — while the GOP flamed out in a reactionary dead end. But Obama’s conservatism has nonetheless brought about an epochal, defining achievement for American liberalism: a robust American consensus in favor of universal health insurance. Yes, he could.

It is hard to overstate the salience of this victory in Obama’s long, long game — and perhaps we are still too close to events to see it as clearly as we should. But here it is: a testament to the skills and vision and tenacity of our greatest living president, whose political shadow completely eclipses the monstrous, ridiculous fool who succeeded him. Like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, we’ve seen this story many times before in the last eight and a half years. And we also know the ending.

Meep, meep.

Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology. This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.

And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is being removed from announcements on the Tube, for fear someone might feel left out. We have dozens of new pronouns in colleges (for all those genders that have suddenly sprung into existence), and biological males competing in all-female high-school athletic teams (guess who wins at track). We also have irreversible genital alteration for minors, who believe, as many kids often have, that they are girls in boys’ bodies and vice versa. We have elections about who gets to go to which bathroom.

Worse, we have constant admonitions against those who actually conform, as most human beings always have, to the general gender rule. Boys who behave like boys have always behaved are suddenly displaying “toxic masculinity” and must be reprogrammed from the get-go. Girls who like pink and play with Barbies are somehow not fully female until they’ve seen the recent Wonder Woman movie or absorbed the stunning and brave decision to make Doctor Who a woman. We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”

I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles. It’s a free country, after all. But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist. And this strikes me as the core contradiction of ideological transgenderism. By severing the link between sex and gender completely, it abolishes the core natural framework without which the transgender experience makes no sense at all. It’s also a subtle, if unintentional, attack on homosexuality. Most homosexuals are strongly attached to their own gender and attracted to traditional, natural expressions of it. That’s what makes us gay, for heaven’s sake. And that’s one reason the entire notion of a common “LGBT” identity is so misleading. How can a single identity comprise both the abolition of gender and at the same time its celebration?

Exceptions, in other words, need a rule to exist. Abolish gender’s roots in biology and sex — and you abolish gay people and transgender people as well. Yes, there’s a range of gender expression among those of the same sex. But it’s still tethered among most to the forces of chromosomes and hormones that make us irreducibly male and female. Nature can be interpreted; it can even be played with; but it cannot be abolished. After all, how can you be “queer” if there is no such thing as “normal”?

Transgender people exist and should be treated with absolutely the same human respect, decency, and civil equality as anyone else. But they don’t disprove traditional notions of gender as such — which have existed in all times, places, and cultures in human history and prehistory, and are rooted deeply in evolutionary biology and reproductive strategy. Intersex people exist and, in my view, should not be genitally altered or “fixed” without their adult consent. But they do not somehow negate the overwhelming majority who have no such gender or sexual ambiguity. Gay people exist and should not be coerced into behaving in ways they find alien to their being. But the entire society does not need to be overhauled in order to make gay or trans experience central to it. Inclusion, yes. Revolution, no.

The added problem with this war on nature is the backlash it inevitably incurs. There’s a reason so many working-class men find it hard to vote for Democrats any more. And there’s a reason why a majority of white women last year voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault if the alternative was a triumph for contemporary left-feminism. You can’t assault the core identity of most people’s lives and then expect them to vote for you. As a Trump supporter in Colorado just told a reporter from The New Yorker: “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life. The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.” And one of the core things that liberals hate about Trump voters is their expression of their gender.

One of the features you most associate with creeping authoritarianism is the criminalization of certain political positions. Is anything more anathema to a liberal democracy? If Trump were to suggest it, can you imagine the reaction?

And yet it’s apparently fine with a hefty plurality of the Senate and House. I’m referring to the remarkable bill introduced into the Congress earlier this year — with 237 sponsors and co-sponsors in the House and 43 in the Senate — which the ACLU and the Intercept have just brought to light. It’s a remarkably bipartisan effort, backed by Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz, among many solid Trump-resisting Democrats and hard-line Republicans. And it would actually impose civil and criminal penalties on American citizens for backing or joining any international boycott of Israel because of its settlement activities. There are even penalties for simply inquiring about such a boycott. And they’re not messing around. The minimum civil penalty would be $250,000 and the maximum criminal penalty $1 million and 20 years in prison. Up to 20 years in prison for opposing the policies of a foreign government and doing something about it! And, yes, the Senate Minority Leader is leading the charge.

Look: I’m not in favor of boycotting Israel when we don’t boycott, say, Saudi Arabia. But seriously: making it illegal? Every now and again, you just have to sit back and admire the extraordinary skills of the Greater Israel lobby. You’ve never heard of this bill, and I hadn’t either. But that is partly the point. AIPAC doesn’t want the attention — writers who notice this attempted assault on a free society will be tarred as anti-Semites (go ahead, it wouldn’t be the first time) and politicians who resist it will see their careers suddenly stalled. I doubt a single sponsor of this bill will go on the record to oppose it (so far, none has). That’s how complete the grip of AIPAC is. And pointing out this special interest’s distortion of democracy is not the equivalent of bigotry. It’s simply a defense of our democratic way of life.

See you next Friday.

WHERE THE CARBON IS COMING FROM

HOW DO WE KNOW WHERE THE CARBON IS COMING FROM?

by Paul Braterman 3 Quarks Daily

Charles Keeling of Scripps Institution of Oceanography began regular measurements of carbon dioxide concentration at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. By 1960, he was already in a position to report a steady increase, together with seasonal variations. In the northern atmosphere, CO2 concentration falls during the spring and summer growing season, but recovers during autumn and winter as vegetable matter decays. This saw-tooth pattern is superposed, however, on a steady overall increase.

Above, R: Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Invertzoo via Wikipedia)

The Keeling curve and beyond

Charles Keeling died in 2005, but the work is being continued by his son Ralph. When I visited Scripps in 1995, I saw Charles Keeling's original curve, ink on graph paper, on the wall in the corridor outside his office. That curve has now been designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark, and there are commemorative plaques both at Scripps and at the Mauna Loa Observatory. Charles Keeling's original paper, freely available here, goes into meticulous detail regarding sample collection, calibration, precautions taken to prevent local contamination, and comparisons between the Mauna Loa data and those that numerous other sites, including the Antarctic and samples collected from an aircraft.

Carbon Atmospheric CO2 via Forbes

L: Atmospheric CO2, 1700 - 2014; NASA via Forbes. Click to enlarge. Note that the zigzags for atmospheric data are not error bars, but annual fluctuations.

By 1985, the record had been extended backwards in time by analysis of air bubbles trapped in ice cores, with dates ranging from the 1980s to the 1600s and earlier. These dates overlap Keeling's data, and take us back to pre-industrial times. Before long, the ice core record had been extended to an 160,000 years, taking us into the Ice Ages, while further work has pushed it back to 800,000 years. We have estimates going back far beyond that, but employing indirect methods and with higher uncertainty.

During the Ice Ages, carbon dioxide played a dual role, as product and as agent. The temperature oscillations at this time were driven primarily by subtle changes in the Earth's motion (so-called Milankovitch cycles). But carbon dioxide is less soluble at higher temperatures (which is why your carbonated drink fizzes inside your mouth). And so in the first place the rise and fall of temperature led to a rise and fall of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as the oceans released and reabsorbed the gas. But then, the changes in carbon dioxide concentration amplified the original effect, since more carbon dioxide acting as a greenhouse gas makes the Earth lose heat less efficiently into space.

To summarise the results, current levels of CO2 are the highest they have been for over twenty million years. In the centuries leading up to 1800, levels were steady at 280 parts per million (ppm); a slow but steady increase took place throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, so that levels had reached over 310 ppm when Charles Keeling began his studies; this increase has accelerated steadily since then; the present value is over 400 ppm; and the current rate of increase appears to be unprecedented in the geological record.

So where is it all coming from?

There are three great reservoirs of carbon that we need to consider. The first one is what we might call circulating carbon. This includes the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that dissolved in the oceans. It also includes the carbon in living things. In photosynthesis, plants convert the carbon in atmospheric carbon dioxide into organic material, releasing oxygen. But sooner or later, nearly all this organic material gets re-converted to carbon dioxide, as the plants themselves or the organisms that feed on them use this organic material as food. Next, there is the carbon in non-fossil minerals, mainly as calcium carbonate in chalk and limestone. Finally, there is buried biologically processed carbon. This includes all deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas. In addition, it includes enormous amounts of buried organic matter finely dispersed in sediments. Truly enormous amounts. All the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere was produced by photosynthesis from carbon dioxide, meaning that over the course of the Earth's history, an equivalent amount of carbon has been buried in the sediments.

Over very long timescales, there are links between these three reservoirs. When living things die, most of their carbon is converted by scavengers or bacteria to carbon dioxide, but some gets added to the pool of buried organic material. Carbon dioxide is being slowly removed from the atmosphere by the weathering of rocks; to put it simply, silicate-containing rocks react with carbon dioxide to produce carbonate-containing rocks and silicon dioxide (the silica in sand). Sediments containing buried fossil carbon are slowly dragged back into the Earth's mantle by the conveyor belt of plate tectonics, while atmospheric carbon dioxide is continually replenished from the mantle by volcanoes.

So which of these pools is responsible for the added CO2 in the atmosphere, or is it, perhaps, more than one? The obvious culprit is the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil, or natural gas, and the amount of carbon dioxide that we have produced in this way over the past two centuries is more than enough to account for the increase in the atmosphere. Indeed, the only reason that atmospheric CO2 is not already way above 500 ppm, is that roughly half this added carbon dioxide has ended up in the oceans. This is making the oceans measurably more acidic (or less alkaline). Since the added CO2 tends to dissolve calcium carbonate,1 this is going to make life more difficult for all the organisms, from corals to cuttlefish, that incorporate calcium carbonate in their structure.

So the arithmetic strongly implicates fossil fuels. But no scientist would be happy to let so momentous a conclusion rest on one single line of evidence. How can we really be sure that there is nothing else going on, such as a change within the circulating pool, or increased weathering of carbonate rocks, or something else we haven't even thought about?

Three kinds of carbon atom

We can find out more by looking at the abundances of the three isotopes of carbon that occur in nature. Isotope: Greek isos, same, topos, place; same place in the periodic table. There is carbon-12 (12C for short), the most common form, generated in stars by the fusion together of three helium-4 nuclei in red giant stars; this makes up just under 99% of the carbon here on Earth. There is carbon-13 (13C), formed late in the life of such stars by addition of a neutron to carbon-12. And finally there is carbon-14 (14C), the isotope used in radiocarbon dating. All carbon atoms contain six protons in their nucleus, and six electrons outside it, and these electrons dominate the chemistry. 12C has six neutrons in its nucleus; 13C, seven; and 14C, eight. 12C and 13C on Earth are stable, while 14C is radioactive, with a half-life of 5730 years.2

Real bombs, fake wines, and radiocarbon dating

Carbon-14 is unique among the Earth's radioactive isotopes. The others all come from radioactive materials dating back to the formation of the solar system itself. Any such ancient 14 C would have long since disappeared. Fresh 14 C, however, is being generated on this planet all the time by cosmic ray bombardment of nitrogen-14 in the upper atmosphere. That 14 C, in the form of carbon dioxide, then mixes with the lower atmosphere and the oceans, where is taken up by plants through photosynthesis and hence by animals, only to be breathed out again. So the 14 C in the reservoir of circulating carbon dioxide is continually being replenished. At the same time, it is being removed by radioactive decay, and so it builds up a steady concentration, where the amount being produced is equal to the amount being removed. As long as an organism is alive, its carbon is part of the circulating pool. But once it dies, the carbon is withdrawn from the pool, and starts to decay, with a half-life, as I've mentioned, of 5,730 years. This is what is used in radiocarbon dating. There are details and refinements which might form part of a later post. However, all we need to notice here is that if carbon contains no more than trace amounts 3 of 14 C, it must been out of circulation for tens of thousands of years, and perhaps much much longer.

 Over the past decades, there have been major disturbances to the 14 C budget. One of these was above ground nuclear testing. This added large quantities to the atmosphere in the decade leading up to the 1963 partial nuclear test ban treaty. France and China continued above ground testing after that date, but the much more extensive US and USSR atmospheric tests peaked around 1960 before coming to an end in 1962. The test ban treaty was not popular in all quarters. In 1952, because of his agitation in favor of the ban, the State Department refused the chemist Linus Pauling a passport. However, they did restore it in 1954, in time for him to go to Stockholm to collect a Nobel Prize for his contributions to chemistry. In 1960, to universal approval, Pauling was to collect a second Nobel Prize, this time the Peace Prize, for his political activities.

R: You can't judge a wine by its bottle Carbon Wine bottle-50573_960_720

If you want to study the year-on-year variation of 14 C effects, you need recent samples with well-attested dates. There was much good-humored teasing when Murdoch Baxter, my colleague at Glasgow University, started collecting samples of vintage malt whiskies and French wines from the bottlers. But there was good reason to do so. The alcohol in these came from grapes and barley of known date, a sample of that year's distribution of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere. The results were striking; there was a steady increase from 1955 through 1965, when atmospheric 14 C reached almost twice its pre-test level, followed by a decline. (One odd surprise, though; a much-prized wine labelled 1918 proved to date from 1963.)

Much of the 14 C from bomb blasts would have been carried up into the stratosphere, taking a few years to mix with the atmosphere at ground level, hence the time lag from 1960 to 1965. As for the decline, it is much more rapid than the decline due to radioactive decay, and by 2010 atmospheric 14 C was back to within 10% or so of its pre-bomb levels. There are two sources for this decline. One is circulation between atmosphere and oceans, and to a smaller extent between atmosphere and living things, within what I have called the circulating reservoir, and this was the main effect until about 1990. The other is the addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which is decreasing the concentration of 14C as surely as adding water to whisky decreases the concentration of alcohol. And the rate of decrease shows that the added CO2 itself is itself free from 14C, since otherwise the decline would be much slower. This tells us that the added CO2 has not come from a redistribution within the circulating pool. But that still isn't enough to tell us whether it came from fossil fuels, or from the mineral pool. For that, we must turn to the testimony of the other two isotopes.

Lies your teacher told you

IMG_6843L: The carbon in this rosebush is measurably different from the carbon in the atmosphere. Image by author

You will probably told at school that different isotopes of an element have different physical properties (an atom of the heavier isotope weighs more), but identical chemical properties. Like so many of the things you were told at school, this is not quite true. Consider 12 C and 13  C; they both have the same number of protons (6) in the nucleus, and that same number of electrons (6 again) outside the nucleus, and these are the electrons involved in chemical bonding. The only difference is that 12 C has 6 neutrons in its nucleus, while 13 C has 7. But as a result of quantum mechanics,4 this does give rise to a very small difference in their chemical behavior. 13  C tends to settle down in situations where it is most tightly bonded (in carbon dioxide, for example), and to react slightly more slowly. As a result, biological carbon is slightly depleted in 13 C. The difference is not great, and the shifts in relative abundance are around 20 to 25 parts per thousand,5 but modern mass spectrometers can readily measure these. Importantly, fossil fuels including coal and petroleum inherit this difference. So isotopic analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide should tell us about its origins.

Keeling's original data, now verified many times, provide a check on our reasoning. Remember that atmospheric carbon dioxide decreases, because of plant uptake, during the growing season. The carbon dioxide that has disappeared to produce biomass will be relatively depleted in 13C, so that what remains should be relatively enriched, and the 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere should increase. During the winter, when more organic matter decays than is produced, the trend should be reversed. This is exactly what is found.

The culprit identified

We can now distinguish between the three possible sources of added CO2. We can immediately excludes the circulating pool, because the added CO2 contains no 14C. Of the remaining two possible sources, carbon dioxide from fossil fuels will be depleted in 13C relative to a mineral standard, while carbon dioxide from mineral sources will not. So the question is, has atmospheric carbon dioxide become more depleted in 13C over time, as its amount has risen?

Unambiguously yes. We have been following the process in real time since the late 1950s. We have extended the record back a thousand years using air trapped in ice cores, and have verified the change by examining the carbon isotopes in tree rings, which we can date by direct counting. (Tree ring carbon is of course depleted in 13C relative to atmospheric CO2, but it is depleted by a constant amount, so changes between rings match changes in the atmosphere). What we find is that over the past two hundred years, after having been nearing constant for centuries or more, atmospheric CO2 has become progressively more depleted. And the degree of depletion is exactly what we would expect if the added CO2 comes from an organic source. But remember that we have already excluded any living source, because of the absence of added 14C. That leaves fossil fuels as the only possibility.

One last piece of evidence

One final check, using a completely independent method developed around 1990 by Ralph Keeling, Charles's son, as his Ph.D. project.

If we are generating CO2 from mineral sources such as limestone, this should not affect atmospheric oxygen, since carbon is already fully bonded to oxygen. But if we are generating it by burning organic material, either rapidly as fuel, or more slowly through metabolism, then for every added CO2 in the atmosphere there should be one less oxygen (O2) molecule. The trouble is, the atmosphere is something like 21% O2, but the kind of change we are talking about is only a few parts per million. So we would need a way of measuring O2 concentration to very high accuracy.

The method used is interferometry, a technique that measures extremely small changes. This was the method used by Michelson and Morley in their famous attempt to measure the speed at which the Earth was moving through the light-carrying ether (answer; no such thing). More recently it was in the news for its use in detecting gravitational waves by way of the extremely small distortion that they caused in distances. Here the change measured relative to a fixed standard depends on the difference in refractive index (the extent to which the speed of light is modified) between oxygen and nitrogen, which differ in the fifth decimal place. The results show the expected variation. An increase in carbon dioxide corresponds to a decrease in oxygen, and this is true both the seasonal variations, and of the underlying trend. Scripps is now host to a research group dedicated to monitoring such oxygen fluctuations at a number of sites throughout the world.

CarbonScrippsO2Rev

O2 and CO2 at Mauna Loa, as published by Scripps O2 program

Why do we need to monitor at several different sites, and why do we need to monitor both oxygen and carbon dioxide? Because plants grow, winds blow, and ocean currents flow. Because oxygen is released, and carbon dioxide absorbed, by plankton in the oceans. Because circulation mixes the atmosphere in different places, and at different levels, on a timescale of years. Because there is exchange on the hundred year timescale between deep ocean currents and surface water, and because the surface water exchanges both oxygen and carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. Because this last exchange, as already mentioned, increases the acidity of the oceans at a rate unprecedented for at least many millions of years, with serious possible implications for everything that lives there. Because we need to understand more fully what we are doing to the planet in order to develop sensible policies for controlling it. And because every major industrial or industrialising nation on Earth, including every member of the G20, recognises the need for such policies.

With one exception.

For more of Paul Braterman's writing, see Primate's Progress.

This blog post goes into more detail than the skeptoid podcast on the subject, which triggered it. Yet more detail and references to this specific topic at realclimate. An excellent general source for information about carbon dioxide and the evidence for human-caused climate change, with detailed analysis of claims to the contrary, is Skeptical Science.

I thank Eric Steig of the University of Washington, Dana Nuccitelli of Skeptical Science, and Brian Dunning of Skeptoid, for useful discussions.

1] We can write chemical equation for how excess carbon dioxide tends to dissolve calcium carbonate:

CaCO3(s) + H2O + CO2 = Ca2+ + 2 HCO3-

Or, in words,

Solid calcium carbonate + water + carbon dioxide gives soluble calcium bicarbonate

Actually, many organisms (including cuttlefish and coral) build their structures out of aragonite, a tougher but slightly more soluble form of calcium carbonate than the calcite found in limestone, which makes things worse.

2] So after one half-life we have one half the original amount of material; after two half-lives, one quarter; after three, one eighth and so on, down to roughly one thousandth after ten half-lives, which takes us to the limits of detection. But all that matters for our purposes is that the amount of 14C, in all material that has spent many tens of thousands of years outside the circulating atmosphere-biosphere-ocean pool, is negligible.

3] It has been known for a long time that coal, even several hundred million years old, contains very small amounts of 14C. This is thought to arise from radioactive bombardment of nitrogen present in the coal. As we would then expect, the amount of 14C depends on the amount of nitrogen, being greater for soft coal than for anthracite, and undetectable in graphite formed alongside the coal.

4] This is a result of what is called zero point energy, energy trapped in molecular vibrations even at absolute zero of temperature. Higher mass, same forces, lower vibrational frequency, lower zero point energy. In CO2, carbon makes very stiff bonds to oxygen, which are more difficult to disrupt for the heavier isotope.

5] I.e. around 20 parts per thousand of the 1.1% 13C, or roughly 22 parts per hundred thousand of the total.  Some smaller variations depending on the kind of plant, but these are not enough to affect the present argument. There is also slightly diminished uptake of 14C into plants, relative to the atmosphere, but radiocarbon dating takes this into account by using organic material, not the atmosphere, as its reference point.

Achieving Our Country

Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

Richard Rorty

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF   The Atlantic

The Book That Predicted Trump’s Rise Offers the Left a Road map for Defeating Him

Twenty years ago, in a series of lectures on the history of American civilization, the philosopher Richard Rorty offered a prediction. His words languished in relative obscurity until the unexpected rise of Donald Trump made them seem prescient.

Labor unions and unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that “their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported,” he posited. And they will further realize that “suburban white-collar workers, themselves desperately afraid of being downsized, are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.” At that point, “something will crack,”  he warned. “The non suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

That passage, considered from the vantage of November 9, 2016, caused a spike of interest in Achieving Our Country, the compilation of Rorty’s lectures. The full book contains criticism for the political left as earnestly constructive and thoughtfully formulated as any I have encountered in my recent roundups—and I say that despite disagreeing with Rorty’s  uncharitable assessments of the American right, among other things.

His book is worth revisiting as the Democratic Party smarts from losses in recent special elections and considers how it might win back the House in the 2018 midterms.

What is wrong with its current incarnation?

Rorty argued that an ascendant strain of postmodern Leftism with its roots in the academy has tended “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”

This Left is more likely to participate in a public shaming than to lobby for a new law; it is more likely to mobilize to occupy a park or shut down a freeway than to register voters. It “exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics, and wastes its energy on sophisticated theoretical analyses of the significance of current events.” Its adherents “have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics, and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to the public debate.”

Yet framing the public debate in that manner plays to the strengths of the political right.

Rorty sympathizes with the reasons that an ascendant Leftist faction lost faith in American institutions. He is as horrified as they are by the historic treatment of indigenous people and African Americans, and by America’s behavior in the Vietnam War.

But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents—either individuals or nations—cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate. Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960's, he argued, to a movement more than a century old “that has served human liberty well.” It would help, for example, “if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.”

If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice.

He urges the Left to be more realist at length:

In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts. The Left in America has made a lot of progress by doing just that. The closest the Left ever came to taking over the government was in 1912, when a Whitman enthusiast, Eugene Debs, ran for president and got almost a million votes. These votes were cast by, as Daniel Bell puts it, “as unstable a compound as was ever mixed in the modern history of political chemistry.” This compound mingled rage at low wages and miserable working conditions with, as Bell says, “the puritan conscience of millionaire socialists, the boyish romanticism of a Jack London, the pale Christian piety of a George Herron … the reckless braggadocio of a ‘Wild Bill’ Haywood … the tepid social-work impulse of do-gooders, inarticulate and amorphous desire to ‘belong’ of the immigrant workers, the iconoclastic idol-breaking of the literary radicals … and more.”

Those dispossessed farmers were often racist, nativist, and sadistic. The millionaire socialists, ruthless robber barons though they were, nevertheless set up the foundations which sponsored the research which helped get leftist legislation passed. We need to get rid of the Marxist idea that only bottom-up initiatives, conducted by workers and peasants who have somehow been so freed from resentment as to show no trace of prejudice, can achieve our country. The history of leftist politics in America is a story of how top-down initiatives and bottom-up initiatives have interlocked.

Rorty wasn’t dismissing bigotry as unimportant. He was quick to praise the post-’60's Left for being attentive to racial injustice and recognizing that sadism against minority groups would have persisted even apart from economic inequality. Still, he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psycho sexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.

Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”

For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

Thankfully, the backlash hasn’t gone that far. Yet.

To avoid that future, to compete in national politics, Rorty believed that the Left would have to find a way to better address the consequences of globalization, and that it could only do so by “opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions.” What’s more, the Left “would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.” In service of that transition, he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and  to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”

What exactly did he mean by “kicking the philosophy habit”?

The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique…

Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematical concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly “subversive” books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.

Even though what these authors “theorize” is often something very concrete and near at hand—a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal—they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize one’s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectator approach to the problems of its country.  

This disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’” This obsession with power elicited scathing words:

In its Foucault usage, the term “power” denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going … Only interminable individual and social self-analysis, and perhaps not even that, can help us escape from the infinitely fine meshes of its invisible web.

The Ubiquity of Foucaldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin—that diabolical stain on every human soul ... in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

What stories about blue-eyed devils are to Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural Leftists ... To step into the intellectual world which some of these Leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce ... in which all the daylight cheerfulness of Whitmanesque hyper-secularism has been lost, and “liberalism” and “humanism” are synonyms for naivete—for an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation.

In his estimation, however, the Foucault Left and its focus on cosmopolitan identity politics, enforced through stigma, is easily the more naive approach to advancing justice.

It is naively internationalist, he posited all those years before Brexit:

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

It is too abstract:

This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country.

Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms.

Instead, “the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like ‘late capitalism’ suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution.”

And its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner, he argued:

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.

By contrast, the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it … If the cultural Left insists on continuing its present strategy—on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences—then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

On this last matter, Rorty’s critique is not only that the present form of identity politics cannot win, but that even if it did win, the result would not in fact be social justice.

Thus the core of his advice:

The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites.

These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it. I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.

This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. We Americans should not take the point of view of a detached cosmopolitan spectator. We should face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take those truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.

What strikes me now about Achieving Our Country is not only that the features of the Left that it critiqued are ascendant, but that they are ascendant despite the intervening example of Barack Obama, who handily won successive presidential elections for the Democratic Party as if he was heeding much of Richard Rorty’s advice.

The theme struck Ross Douthat way back in 2009, when he remarked on the left-wing patriotism that the Obama coalition assimilated into its presidential campaign.

The 2008 campaign stressed real politics from the start: Obama was masterful at stoking in his supporters a feeling that to get out and vote was the way to affirm his political movement. He was insistent about what could be achieved by reforming and working within the existing system. And he stressed a willingness to reach across the aisle and compromise for the greater good, casting conservatives and folks in Red States as good people, and winning over a great many independent voters.

As for bridging divisions, Obama didn’t merely embrace melting-pot themes. He cast himself as a personification of the American melting pot who would help bridge racial divisions. He didn’t merely reconcile America’s bygone sins with pride in its achievements. He pridefully cast his own story as proof of what could be achieved in this country. Little wonder that he spent the last year of his presidency expressing frustration at the style of cultural politics gaining traction on elite campuses: He saw how it contradicted the blueprint that he had created for a Left that can win.

Would the cultural Leftists in the Democratic Party ever support candidates who heed Rorty’s advice as much as did Obama, but who aren’t vying to be the first black president?

The 2018 midterms may turn on the answer.