| | | | Is America Headed for Civil War? | | In the New Yorker, Robin Wright considers the fragility of "the Union, our republic, and a country that has long been considered the world's most stable democracy." She cites a Foreign Policy survey that found a consensus among a group of national-security experts of a roughly 35 percent chance of civil war breaking out in the next 10 to 15 years, and interviews one of those experts, Keith Mines, a former diplomat, who puts the chances of civil war at 60 percent.
"We keep saying, 'It can't happen here,' but then, holy smokes, it can,' Mines told me after we talked, on Sunday, about Charlottesville," Wright writes.
"Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the 'in' way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes."
"The dangers are now bigger than the collective episodes of violence," Wright writes.
-- But in Business Insider, Josh Barro calls Wright's article "very irresponsible." He notes that the Foreign Policy survey was far from scientific, and relied on a broad definition of "civil war": "widespread political violence with parallel (though not necessarily connected) efforts to reject current political authority in certain legal domains or physical spaces."
"By this definition," Barro notes, "America experienced a civil war from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, when race riots engulfed major American cities, four major political figures were assassinated, and the federal government had to send National Guard troops into Southern states to enforce integration over the objections of both local officials and violent white mobs.
"I agree there is a real risk that the US will return to 1950s-1970s levels of political violence and social upheaval. I'm worried about this," Barro writes. "But calling such a situation a 'civil war' just makes everybody dumber."
| | CEOs Need to Step Up: Summers | | In the Financial Times, economist and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers calls out "the abdication of moral responsibility" by business figures on the President's advisory councils.
"No advisor committed to the bipartisan American traditions of government can possibly believe he or she is being effective at this point. And all should feel ashamed for complicity in Mr Trump's words and deeds. I sometimes wonder how they face their children."
"After this weekend, I am not sure what it would take to get the CEOs to resign," Summers writes. "Demonising ethnic groups? That has happened. Renouncing international agreements that have supported business interests? That has happened. Personal profiteering from the presidency? Also happened. Failure to deliver on ballyhooed promises? That has happened as well."
| | The Limits to the Second Amendment | | | University of Virginia professor Philip Zelikow, a former government official who helped develop a legal standard to regulate private military activities, argues in Lawfare that the Second Amendment arguments supporting militias like those seen in Charlottesville over the weekend "can be—and have been—overcome."
"For those close to the action, including the law enforcement personnel on duty, hardly any aspect of the Charlottesville confrontation was more menacing than the appearance of organized, often uniformed, private bands of men in military getups, openly brandishing assault rifles and other long gun," Zelikow writes.
"This is an ominous development, but it is not a new one. And it can be—and has been—countered with legal action," Zelikow writes.
"Individuals may have a right to bear arms for self-defense, but they do not have a right to organize and train as a private military group."
"In 1886 the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for controlling what the Second Amendment calls a 'well-regulated Militia,' when it held that '[m]ilitary operations and military drill are subjects especially under the control of the government of every country. They cannot be claimed as a right independent of law.' A New York appellate court noted in 1944: 'The inherent potential danger of any organized private militia is obvious. Its existence would be sufficient, without more, to prevent a democratic form of government, such as ours, from functioning freely, without coercion.' That language seems awfully resonant today," Zelikow writes.
| | The Memo That Google's Boss Should've Sent | | The Economist has imagined a letter that it wishes Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet (Google's parent company), had written in response to the controversial company memo sent earlier this month by (now fired) Google engineer James Damore. Here's just a small portion:
"Your memo was a triumph of motivated reasoning: heads men win; tails women lose. Here are a few psychological differences between the sexes that you didn't mention. Men score higher on measures of anger, and lower on co-operation and self-discipline. If it had been the other way round, I'm betting you would have cited these differences as indicating lack of suitability for the job of coder. You lean on measures of interest and personality, rather than ability and achievement, presumably because the latter don't support your hypothesis. In many countries girls now do better in pretty much every subject at school than boys—again, if it had been the other way around I'm sure you wouldn't have neglected to mention that fact."
The imagined letter concludes: "I shouldn't have had to write this. I'm busy and a little effort on your part would have made it unnecessary. But I know I have it easy. Women in our industry have to cope with this sort of nonsense all the time."
| | Neighborly Advice for Venezuela | | | In Project Syndicate, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos says that in the debate between two competing models for development, Venezuela's "twenty-first-century socialism" versus Colombia's "Third Way," "history has finally spoken, and the verdict is conclusive."
"Colombia has grown well above the Latin American average in recent years, and inflation stands at less than 4%," Santos notes. "Moreover, Colombia has become an increasingly attractive investment destination, as it has made great strides in poverty reduction, job creation, infrastructure development, and education reform."
"Meanwhile, Venezuela's economy has contracted by nearly 40% under the weight of large debts and the world's highest inflation rate. Some 82% of Venezuelans are now impoverished."
"[Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro,] Chávez's handpicked successor, has blamed Colombia for Venezuela's economic disaster," Santos writes. "When I mentioned that I had warned Chávez seven years ago that his economic program would fail, Maduro was offended. Yet that failure could not be more obvious."
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