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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Putting democracy back together again [1]

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Date: 2023-10-17  

We begin today with Luke Broadwater of The New York Times reporting that Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan’s pressure campaign to persuade Republicans to elect him speaker of the House is working but, as of last night, there were still too many holdouts.

Several mainstream Republicans who had said they could not countenance a vote for Mr. Jordan, the hard-line co-founder of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, fell into line after a pressure campaign by his right-wing allies and a series of one-on-one calls with him. Their reversals suggested that Mr. Jordan was within striking distance of the 217 votes he would need to be elected in a planned vote around noon on Tuesday. But the outcome remained far from certain. “The role of the speaker is to bring all Republicans together. That’s what I intend to do,” Mr. Jordan said in a letter sent to his Republican colleagues on Monday. In it, Mr. Jordan acknowledged the deep divisions in the G.O.P. and said he would give more lawmakers input into the party’s agenda. [...] People close to Mr. Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the number of Republican holdouts had shrunk from around 50 to around 10. That is still enough to block his election, but he planned to press ahead anyway, counting on his remaining opposition to cave under pressure on the House floor.

Rex Huppke of USA Today writes that Judge Tanya Chutkan gave Number 45 something new to whine about by ordering a limited gag order on him.

If you thought Trump’s yearslong journey to become the sorest of sore losers by ceaselessly braying about the 2020 presidential election he lost was growing tiresome, just you wait. Monday’s order provides fresh fodder for his persecution cannon, which I’m sure will be red hot from firing as the former president processes the fact that he, like anyone facing criminal charges, can’t freely intimidate witnesses, prosecutors or court personnel. In issuing the order, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said: “Mr. Trump can certainly claim he’s being unfairly prosecuted, but I cannot imagine any other case where a defendant is allowed to call the prosecution ‘deranged,’ a ‘thug’ or anything else.” She added: “His political campaign does not give him carte blanche to vilify public servants for simply doing their job.” [...] I’m not above the law, you’re not above the law and Trump, sad as it may be for him to learn, is not above the law. But at least now he has some new material to work with. When your very essence is defined by aggrievement, a legal setback provides fresh paint for your victimhood self-portrait.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times wonders if the Pax Americana has come to an end.

...even serious students of international affairs are noting that the world seems to be becoming more dangerous, with many local cold wars turning hot, and suggesting that we may be witnessing the end of the Pax Americana, the long era in which U.S. economic and military dominance limited the potential for wars of conquest. But why is the Pax Americana in decline? You might be tempted to engage in economic determinism, saying that the United States has lost influence because it doesn’t dominate the world economy the way it once did. But while there was a big decline in America’s share of world G.D.P. between 1960 and 1980, since then that share hasn’t had a clear downward trend, although it has fluctuated with the foreign exchange value of the dollar. Indeed, our strong recovery from the Covid recession, combined with the stumbles of some geopolitical rivals, makes U.S. economic dominance look more durable than it has for a long time. Notably, many observers are now suggesting that China’s G.D.P., measured in dollars, may never overtake America’s. (China’s economy is already larger in terms of domestic purchasing power, but this is less relevant for global influence.)

Krugman needs to flesh out a more specific meaning of Pax Americana than he does in this essay. For myself, I’ll stick with September 11, 2001, as an end date although I could, perhaps, be persuaded that a true Pax Americana never really existed.

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post reminds us of the power of the people in times of crisis.

And in the conduct of the war, it has been President Biden, not Netanyahu, who has spoken most empathetically and reached out to families of hostages. Netanyahu only Sunday met with representatives of the families of people believed to be held hostage by Hamas. His failures combine the weakness of Neville Chamberlain, the radicalism of four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump and the ineptitude of Liz Truss. [...] In place of a competent government, ordinary people are stepping up. “Israelis are in the midst of a nation-wide effort to support those in need — families evacuated from the south, soldiers called up for duty, families who have lost or are still missing loved ones, and small businesses that are struggling,” wrote Nimrod Goren, senior fellow for Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute. “Almost every town now has a hub for donating, cooking, collecting, and hosting. The sense of civic empowerment that many Israelis developed during the struggle to safeguard their country’s democracy is now spilling over to a new arena.” He added, “The same networks set up throughout 2023 for pro-democracy community organizing are now being used to collect and distribute aid.” In other words, the sense of collective responsibility stirred in opposition to the Netanyahu government’s “judicial reform” push is now manifesting itself as collective care for one another. In a democracy, it is ultimately the people who must take responsibility for themselves; passive dependency on government is a recipe for disaster. Meanwhile, House Republicans show themselves abjectly incapable of picking a leader — forget legislating! Their incompetence should confirm for Americans the peril of substituting performance politics for public service, conspiracy-mongering for careful governance and zealotry for collaborative leadership. Trump, as he often does, praises evil actors for guile and cleverness (“very smart,” he called Hezbollah, as he did another brutal invader, Russian President Vladimir Putin) and makes the tragedy of millions all about him. In the House, Republicans remain paralyzed, unable for now to come up with an aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. Their dysfunction reminds voters that elections must be more than a primal scream.

Dahlia Scheindlin of Haaretz looks at a wide variety of polling data suggesting some depth to Israeli citizen dissatisfaction with the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already reflected in other polling.

This survey was conducted by Camil Fuchs among Israel’s Jewish population only (I personally do not approve of Jewish-only polling, but the survey was conducted on commission for a private group, and the data is worth including here because it is so indicative). The survey asked if the Hamas attack showed there was a “leadership debacle“ in Israel or not. A near-consensus of 84 percent of the (Jewish) respondents said there had been a debacle – including sweeping agreement from 79 percent of those who voted for the current coalition last November. [...] In the unrelenting darkness of these times, perhaps it is notable that 43 percent of Jews in the Hebrew University poll believed that the Israel Defense Forces should make strong or moderate efforts to avoid harming innocent people in its assault on Gaza. More encouraging still is that the Arab sample for this study (over 500 people, far larger than normal media surveys) showed unambiguous majorities opposed to Hamas’ actions: 77 percent opposed the attack. Eighty-five percent opposed holding civilian hostages, including women and children (as per the question text), and of those few who did not oppose these things, most are not sure – only tiny percentages actually supported them. Two-thirds of these Palestinian citizens believed that Arab political leaders should condemn the attacks, and in fact both United Arab List head Mansour Abbas and Hadash leader Ayman Odeh have done so.

However, only 4% of those who voted for the coalition government want Netanyahu to resign.

Marc Owen Jones writes for AlJazeera that since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel, much of the misinformation and disinformation disseminated on social media was produced and spread by accounts based in India.

But an intriguing element of the disinformation that has flooded social media since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel is that a lot of it has been produced or spread by right-leaning accounts based out of India. Some of these fake stories include Hamas kidnapping a Jewish baby and beheading a young boy on the back of a truck. Blue check accounts have pushed false reports into the stratosphere of virality. One extremely popular tweet shared by thousands of people even claimed the Hamas attack was a US-led psyop. [...] It is no secret that India has an Islamophobia problem, one that has only increased since the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).[...] While the BJP’s IT Cell may have an Islamophobia problem, it also has a disinformation problem, and it is coming to the conflict in Gaza. Pratik Sinha, a co-founder and editor of the Indian non-profit fact-checking website AltNews, tweeted: “With India now exporting its disinformation actors in the Indian mainstream media and on social media in support of Israel, hopefully the world will now realise how the Indian right-wing has made India the disinformation capital of the world”.

Andrew Higgins of The New York Times wonders that even with the opposition now poised to control the parliament in Poland, how much of the democratic erosion can be undone.

With 99 percent of the votes counted by late Monday night and aligning very closely with the outcome forecast by exit polls, Poland is on the cusp of what many see as the most significant change of power since voters rejected communism in the country’s first partly free election in 1989. The big question now, however, is not only whether the opposition can form a government but, if it does manage to take power, can it actually wield it in a system where public broadcasting, the constitutional court, the judiciary in general, the central bank, the national prosecutor’s office and other branches of state have been packed with Law and Justice loyalists who, in many cases, cannot be easily dislodged? “This is the really important question: How to unwind an illiberal democracy?” said Wojciech Przybylski, the head of Res Publica Foundation, a Warsaw research group. More alarmist voices are warning that the opposition, despite winning an apparent majority in Parliament, might not even get a chance to start unwinding anything.

Finally today, Shaun Walker of The Guardian looks at a number of issues facing the incoming Polish parliament attempts to put a more liberal democracy back together again.

Over the past eight years, PiS has attempted to install political appointees in various supposedly neutral bodies, most notably courts and legal institutions. Reversing this politicisation has been one of the key promises of the opposition during the election campaign. “I think it’s extremely important to put forward a new vision of Poland in which the rule of law and the constitution are respected,” said Adam Bodnar, Poland’s former human rights ombudsman, who stood for election to the senate, the upper house of parliament, from Civic Coalition. Bodnar said returning the judicial system to normality would be difficult “under pressure of hijacking from the president and the constitutional court,” which has been packed with PiS appointees, and that the new government would have to be clever and flexible. “It will be like a chess game,” he said in an interview before Sunday’s vote. The new government would also need to decide to what extent it wants to prioritise potential criminal cases for abuses of power during the PiS years.

Everyone try to have the best possible day!

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