As to the rhetorical tactics that probably won Netanyahu the election, they shouldn’t be unfamiliar to any American. It is the same argument Kris Kobach makes about voter-ID laws. It is the same philosophy that underpinned the successful attempt to undermine the Voting Rights Act in front of the Supreme Court. It is the accepted wisdom at the heart of John Roberts’ Day of Jubilee. The Other is coming to hijack your democracy and steal your country. And the ghost of Atwaterism rolls back the stone and walks across the Holy Land.

—Charlie Pierce
Bibi’s Kids: The Rise Of The Scapegloat

Early in his political career, long before he became the all-powerful ruler of the Third Reich who was the target of assassination plots, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death. On 9 November 1923, when he and General Ludendorff led their followers in the final act of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, they were met by a hail of machine-gun fire from the police. One of the bullets struck down Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a close confidant of the Nazi leader; the two men had been marching arm-in-arm, and a slight difference in the trajectory of that bullet would have changed the course of history.

That was pure chance, but what happened the next day was something else. It is impossible to know whether Hitler was really about to shoot himself when he picked up his revolver in Helen Hanfstaengl’s house as the police were arriving to arrest him. But by grabbing the gun away from him and berating him for even thinking of such a thing, the American wife of Hitler’s propagandist Putzi Hanfstaengl may have played as pivotal a role as chance had the day before. If so, this was a clear case of the wrong person appearing at the wrong time.

All of which raises the biggest “what if” question of history: without Hitler, what would have happened to Germany after World War I? The Americans who lived through the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s rise to power, and the Nazi era did not explicitly address that question, which can never have a definitive answer. But the common thread that runs though so many of the Americans’ accounts is their fascination with Hitler. Their experiences and observations strongly suggest that, without Hitler, the Nazis never would have succeeded in their drive for absolute power. The country still might have embarked on an authoritarian course, possibly a military dictatorship. But whatever might have emerged would not have been on the terrifying scale of the Third Reich, with all its terrifying consequences.

—Andrew Nagorski
Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

Some experiences stay with us. When I was 16, my father was driving me home from a school play when we saw flashing lights. We hadn’t been speeding. I remember my father asking the police officer what was wrong. The officer ignored his question and demanded identification.

He pointed to me and asked in a tone I had never encountered before, “Who is she?” He made a condescending remark about my costume and questioned my father again: was he sure of “his story”? The questions had nothing to do with the rules of the road or how my father had been driving. Eventually, he checked my father’s license and, after what felt like a long time, let us go without a ticket.

I could tell my father was disturbed. We had been stopped for no reason, and he was powerless to stop the questioning or protect me from the officer’s judgments. As we drove off, I asked my dad why he had given up his license when he had done nothing wrong. He gently explained to me what so many African Americans of his generation know too well: “You don’t want to mess with the police. They can judge you unfairly and make life very hard.”

These words took on a special significance for me in recent months. Since late spring, I have experienced four disturbing stops by law enforcement…

Then there was the last stop, this month, which has become the subject of so many headlines. Many people believe they know what happened that day.

Here’s what I know. I was standing on the grass near a public sidewalk when a Los Angeles Police Department officer approached Brian. He said he had received a call about a couple engaged in lewd conduct and asked for our IDs. A few minutes before, Brian and I had been making out in his car; I was sitting on his lap. We were not having sex, and both of us had our clothes on…

Do I think the officer was “racially profiling” me by answering a call? I know police have to answer calls for service. But does that render invalid my initial question to the sergeant — “Do you know how many times the cops have been called… because I’m black and he’s white?”

Would someone have called the police if it had been a white couple? Would the sergeant have been so zealous in “investigating” what was clearly not a crime? Does bias have something to do with how and why Brian and I have been stopped this year? I think it probably does. And I think that the conversations our country has been having about the role of race in minor incidents, such as mine, and life-and-death ones, must continue.

One last question I can answer: if I had nothing to hide, why didn’t I just hand over my identification? I might have ended the stop much sooner, and I certainly would have avoided the avalanche of accusations, insults, slurs and even threats that I’ve received.

But in saving myself time and pain, I would have lost something far more valuable: my right as an American to limit intrusions by police. When I was forced into handcuffs, the detaining officer said it was because Sgt Parker ordered me to stay and I left. But the sergeant said no such thing. And California law does not require you to produce identification simply because a police officer demands it.

I objected — and I continue to object — because if we are unclear about our rights, and we continue to believe that in every case when a police officer tells you to do something, you have to do it, as I was told, we allow the police to abuse their power.

We have rights because people throughout history struggled and even died to secure them. If I had handed over my ID, I would have denied their efforts. And I would have turned my back on the 16-year-old who watched her father endure an unfair and humiliating stop by police.

—Daniele Watts
Daniele Watts, in Her Own Words

H/T: Steven D

The new era came with a real-world price tag, and the things we permitted to happen just so that we could live in its brilliant light for a few years are things we may never be able to undo or escape. In other lands where the advance of free trade is cheered on by our columnists as the greatest sort of empowerment, the battle to make the world safe for outsourcing has turned as bloody as any of our own nineteenth-century labor wars. In Colombia, recipient of a billion-dollar Clinton administration military aid package, union organizers have been assassinated every year in such numbers (around three thousand overall since 1987) that in 1997 they accounted for fully 50 percent of the trade union activists murdered worldwide. Our political thinkers imagined our money frolicking open-mindedly through the economies of the world, chasing the best return without regard to color or creed. But what ensured those returns was not the “inevitability” of the microchip but the guns and the muscle and the hard unanswering face of economic power. Wherever one turned, old-fashioned coercion was the silent partner of “New Economy” ebullience.

Here at home the price was the destruction of the social contract of mid-century; the middle-class republic itself. Our portfolios may have appreciated graciously, but they did so only to the extent that we countenanced the reduction of millions to lives of casual employment without healthcare or the most elementary sort of workplace rights. We caught the tail end of the Qualcomm wave and pretended not to notice as sweatshops reappeared on our shores. We wondered like tots at the majesty of Cisco, at the generosity of Gates, and we stood by as the price of a good education for our kids ascended out of our reach.

The less tangible cost of consensus was the atrophy of the idea of conflict. Economic fairness, many of us came to believe, was something that just happened, that materialized at the mall like a new line of Pokémon products. Democracy was a thing served up to us like a Happy Meal; it required no effort on our part. To be sure, it had a mysterious, counterintuitive quality to it: if we unilaterally gave up our power to compell humane treatment from the boss, like magic there would come some karmic payoff, some show of money from heaven, some ten-bagger in Yahoo! If we acquiesced to the holy process of deregulation, to the tossing of millions of single mothers out into the labor force, we would one day stumble upon some vast picnic spread out just for our gratification by the Archer Daniels Midland Company or JDS Uniphase. Someday we, too, would be invited to help ourselfs to the complimentary after-dinner mints. To board at our leisure.

But for others of us — the ones with no access to the Senator’s ear or the hip ad agencies or the prime commercial time on CNBC — the nineties only sharpened the sense that something had gone drastically wrong. To the casualization of work, to the destruction of the social “safety net,” to the massive prison roundup, the powers of commerce added the staggering claim of having done it all on our behalf. Out of the roaring chaos of everyday speech, they told us, they could hear the affirmations rolling up; from the chirped warning of the car alarms to the screeching of the modems they could hear America singing. But the great euphoria of the late nineties was never as much about the return of good times as it was the giddy triumph of one America over another, of their “New Economy” over our New Deal. Though they banged the drum with a fervor almost maniacal, the language of the euphoria still rang so patently false, sounded so transparently self-serving that it threatened to collapse in on itself almost as quickly as it bubbled up from the talk shows and the celebrated think thanks. And in the streets and the union halls and the truck stops and the three-flats and the office blocks there remained all along a vocabulary of fact and knowing and memory, of wit and of everyday doubt, a vernacular that could not be extinguished no matter how it was cursed for “cynicism,” a dialect that the focus group could never quite reflect, the resilient language of democracy.

—Thomas Frank
One Market Under God

Few experts have done more to try to understand the mindset of the young men and women who aspire to join the blood-drenched ranks of groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda than [Marc] Sageman. And few can match his qualifications, credentials or background. The 61-year-old, Polish-born psychiatrist and academic is a former CIA operations officer who was based in Pakistan in the late 1980s. There he worked closely with the Afghan mujahedin. He has since advised the New York City Police Department on counterterrorism issues, testified in front of the 9/11 Commission in Washington DC, and, in his acclaimed works Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad, closely analysed the biographies of several hundred terrorists.

Does he see religion as a useful analytical prism through which to view the rise of ISIS and the process by which thousands of young people arrive in Syria and Iraq, ready to fight and die for the group?

“Religion has a role but it is a role of justification,” he tells me. “It’s not why they do this [or] why young people go there.”

ISIS members, he says, are using religion to advance a political vision, rather than using politics to advance a religious vision. “To give themselves a bit more legitimacy, they use Islam as their justification. It’s not about religion, it’s about identity… You identify with the victims, [with] the guys being killed by your enemies.”

For converts to Islam in particular, he adds, “Identity is important to them. They have… invested a lot of their own efforts and identity to become this ‘Muslim’ and, because of this, identity is so important to them. They see other Muslims being slaughtered [and say], ‘I need to protect my community.'” (A recent study found that converts to Islam were involved in 31 per cent of Muslim terrorism convictions in the UK between 2001 and 2010.)

Sageman believes that it isn’t religious faith but, rather, a “sense of emotional and moral outrage” at what they see on their television screens or on YouTube that propels people from Portsmouth to Peshawar, from Berlin to Beirut, to head for war zones and to sign up for the so-called jihad. Today, he notes archly, “Orwell would be [considered as foreign fighter like] a jihadi,” referring to the writer’s involvement in the anti-fascist campaign during the Spanish civil war.

Religion, according to this view, plays a role not as a driver of behaviour but as a vehicle for outrage and, crucially, a marker of identity. Religion is important in the sense that it happens to “define your identity,” Sageman says, and not because you are “more pious than anybody else.” He invokes the political scientist Benedict Anderson’s conception of a nation state as an “imagined political community,” arguing that the “imagined community of Muslims” is what drives the terrorists, the allure of being members of — and defenders of — the ultimate “in-group.”

“You don’t have the most religious folks going there,” he points out. ISIS fighters from the west, in particular, “tend to have rediscovered Islam as teenagers, or as converts”; they are angry, or even bored, young men in search of a call to arms and a thrilling cause. The ISIS executioner Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John” — who was raised and educated in the UK — was described, for instance, by two British medics who met him at a Syrian hospital as “quiet but a bit of an adrenalin junkie.”

—Mehdi Hasan
How Islamic Is the Islamic State? Not at All.

The median household income in the US is around $52,000. So can households earning twice that much really consider themselves middle class? …

Americans’ conceptions of what it means to be middle class seem to defy logic. But given what the middle-class lifestyle costs, it may be that you simply have to be rich to be middle class in America.

Here’s one fascinating finding: only 1 percent of Americans consider themselves upper class…

Not only that, but a majority of people in households earning $100,000 or more per year consider themselves middle class…

Depending on how you look at it, the numbers can seem downright ridiculous — if you count the upper-middle and lower-middle groups as part of a broader middle, 87 percent of Americans are middle class, leaving very little to be in the middle of.

—Danielle Kurtzleben
Why Do so Many Rich People Consider Themselves “Middle Class?”

In the 1970s, the two-tiered family structure was closely correlated with race, but since that time it has become increasingly associated with parents’ social class more than race… College-educated blacks are looking more like college-educated whites, and less-educated whites are looking more like less-educated blacks…

In the 1970s, there were virtually no class differences in how much time a child got with mom or dad. By 2013, however, the average infant or toddler of college-educated parents was getting half again as much Goodnight Moon time every day as the average infant or toddler of high-school educated parents… Rich kids get more face time, while poor kids get more screen time.

—Robert Putnam, Our Kids
Quoted in Immobile in America

In an open letter organized by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark, 47 Senate Republicans today warned the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal reached with President Barack Obama could expire as soon as he leaves office.

Tomorrow, 24 hours later, Cotton will appear at an “Off the Record and strictly Non-Attribution” event with the National Defense Industrial Association, a lobbying and professional group for defense contractors.

The NDIA is composed of executives from major military businesses such as Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications, ManTech International, Boeing, Oshkosh Defense and Booz Allen Hamilton, among other firms.

Cotton strongly advocates higher defense spending and a more aggressive foreign policy. As The New Republic’s David Ramsey noted, “Pick a topic — Syria, Iran, Russia, ISIS, drones, NSA snooping — and Cotton can be found at the hawkish outer edge of the debate… During his senate campaign, he told a tele-townhall that ISIS and Mexican drug cartels joining forces to attack Arkansas was an ‘urgent problem.'”

On Iran, Cotton has issued specific calls for military intervention. In December he said Congress should consider supplying Israel with B-52s and so-called “bunker-buster” bombs — both items manufactured by NDIA member Boeing — to be used for a possible strike against Iran.

—Lee Fang
Immediately After Launching Effort to Scuttle Iran Deal, Senator Tom Cotton to Meet with Defense Contractors

The contrast yesterday in Selma between the president’s largeness of spirit and Republicans’ small response was fairly astonishing. Two presidents Bush attended, to their credit. Some senior Republican lawmakers scrambled to attend once their pending absence became embarrassing news. But where was John Boehner? Where was Mitch McConnell? Where was Paul Ryan? Where were the main Republican 2016 presidential candidates? Where was Mitt Romney, whose father did so much to advance civil rights?

This was horrid optics bordering on the politically incompetent. A party trying to reassure moderates that it’s more than a party of cranky old conservative white people might have used this occasion to mark its own civil rights heroes who helped pass landmark civil rights legislation. The Republican Party of 1960 actively competed for black votes…

That was a long time ago…

Republicans’ awkward handling of an event sacred to African-Americans sent an unavoidable message: these are not our people. It strains credulity to imagine Republicans would have offered up the same bumbling and belated response if African-American voters were key constituents in Republican primaries or in Republican fundraising. More Republican candidates participated in Sheldon Adelson’s various personal primaries than chose to make their appearance yesterday in Selma.

Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and others damaged the soul of the Republican Party to court race-conservative whites. There’s no denying that the southern strategy and its successors helped win big elections. Such discomfort with a widening circle of “others” still works for many in the congressional GOP, especially in non-presidential years. On a national level, it is increasingly out of step with a changing society.

—Harold Pollack
The GOP’s Political Incompetence in Selma

In 1959, Dissent published an article by the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt. A criticism of desegregation and a defense of states’ rights, “Reflections on Little Rock” was controversial, offensive, and wrong-headed in almost every way. But one point — beyond the immediate question of integration, about which she was wrong — Arendt got it right. Why, she wondered, do we “burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve?” It’s an age-old dream, she acknowledged in a reply to her critics, that “one can change the world by educating the children in the spirit of the future.” But doesn’t that dream just shift “the burden of responsibility from the shoulders of adults to those of children”?

In the United States, we often try to solve political and economic questions through our schools rather than in society. Instead of confronting social inequality with mass political action and state redistribution, we prefer to educate poor children to wealth. Education can involve some redistribution: making sure, for example, that black, Latino, and working-class students have comparable resources, facilities, and teachers as white or wealthy students. But one need only compare the facilities at the Park Slope school my daughter attends with those of an elementary school in East New York — or take a walk around James Hall at Brooklyn College, where I teach political science, and then take a walk around the halls at Yale, where I studied political science — to see we’re a long way from even that minimal redistribution.

—Corey Robin
The One Percent’s White Privilege Con