#political-confusion

#political-confusion

"We have a great opportunity in our movements to learn how to be opponents without being enemies," says Tanuja Jagernauth. This perspective emphasizes the importance of maintaining respect and understanding even amidst conflict.

Jefferson's words on equality are often seen as self-evident, yet they fail to encompass enslaved individuals, women, and other marginalized groups, revealing a significant contradiction.

From the moment Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term, he made clear that a major priority of his administration would be pursuing vindictive actions against his perceived enemies. One of the earliest targets of this agenda of retribution: law firms. In his first months in office, Trump signed executive orders that targeted firms that supported DEI, represented the Democratic Party, advocated for liberal causes, or employed prosecutors who had worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's 2016 campaign.

Collating data from the World Bank and other sources in innovative ways, he argues that globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was accompanied by then-unprecedented growth of income in both previously poor populations (notably in China) and people at the top of the world's income distribution (especially those in the West). By contrast, relative shares of world income stagnated or were thought to have declined for wealthy nations' middle and working classes, including in the United States.

It turns out: not that many world leaders or global citizens. That's because the Board of Peace, created last year by a UN security council resolution, and intended to have a singular focus on implementing a Gaza peace plan, is increasingly looking like a Donald Trump fiefdom, which could allow the US president to wade into other countries' affairs as he sees fit.

Populism may well have been the defining word of the previous decade: a shorthand for the insurgent parties that came to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal centre. But no sooner had it become the main rubric for discussing both the far left and far right than commentators began to question its validity: worrying that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or fuelling the forces to which it referred.

Any lingering doubts about the true motives behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq were dispelled when looters were ransacking Baghdad, carrying off millennia-old artifacts from the Iraqi capital's archaeological museum, while U.S. troops fortified the Ministry of Oilthe only government building left untouched and from which not a single document emerged. The disastrous and illegal invasion, spearheaded by the United States with military support from the United Kingdom

I lived in Argentina in the mid-1980s, just after the fall of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983. The country was taking its first, shaky steps back toward democracy. It was a time of great hope, but also of grave uncertainty - because while the generals were gone, the political culture that enabled them remained. Like most of the nation, I was captivated by the pioneering trials of the military generals that promised to restore justice.

Earlier this week, Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member in the red town of El Cajon, on San Diego's eastern outskirts, announced that he was crossing the aisle and joining the Democrats. Kendrick was the longest-serving Republican official in the region's local government. "I've been a Republican for 50 years," he said, in the statement explaining his action. "I just can't stand what the Republican Party has become. I'm formally renouncing the Republican Party."

The truth is that as a country we have often found one reason or another to let the powerful escape the consequences of their actions. Consider Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, commander in chief of a rebellion that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Davis spent two years in federal custody after the end of the war. The indictment against him was dismissed following his release, and he spent the rest of his life a free man.

When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It's easy, it's meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government's attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.

We are in the middle of at least four unravelings: The unraveling of the postwar international order. The unraveling of domestic tranquility wherever Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents bring down their jackboots. The further unraveling of the democratic order, with attacks on Federal Reserve independence and excuse the pun trumped-up prosecutions of political opponents. Finally, the unraveling of President Donald Trump's mind.