WP_Post Object
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    [ID] => 7813
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2025-02-03 23:03:39
    [post_date_gmt] => 2025-02-03 23:03:39
    [post_content] => 

From my recent travels, the answer seems to be "no."

I’ve been to at least 15 countries in the last two and a half years, some of them repeatedly, including frequent trips to Nigeria and the United Kingdom for personal and family commitments. But most of my travel has been while working on my forthcoming book, Foremothers, including visiting new countries for the first time, such as Brazil, or some, for the first time in a long time, like South Africa. 

Foremothers, slated for release in the near future, has taken much more time and much more out of me than I thought it would when I first conceived of it over seven years ago. Surprisingly, this hasn’t just been because of the laborious effort of working on a cross-continental, multicultural, multigenerational, women-centered historical nonfiction book. It has also been due to the universal sentiment of doom and gloom I kept encountering while researching and writing it—raising my internal and intellectual alarm bells beyond the scope of the project. As such, in the wake of my travels, I’ve found myself repeatedly considering a new and troubling question: Is it just me, or is anyone, anywhere having a good time?

Of course, the very premise of this good time and its practice may not even be universally defined. What constitutes a good time in Dakar, Senegal may not be the same as in Lagos, Portugal. But even if the specifics of a good time and good times are relative, we can all agree—as difficult as it may be for us to do, given our abundant disagreements—that having a good time on a broader scale must consist of some fundamentals. For any country or society or group of people anywhere to claim it, for example, there must be established, uncontestable liberties that its people, irrespective of their differences, enjoy collectively. Healthy, nourishing, affordable food must be available to its inhabitants. Their most humble abodes, whatever they look like, ought to be functional and secure to the environment they live in. Basically, there should be basic human rights, and then some, for all. And even though, across communities and nations, these good time aims may not previously have been achieved, this did not change its pursuit for and by subsequent generations. It seems, however, this is no longer the case. 

To the pessimists and realists, whose differences have become the same, these so-called “good times” have always been little more than a post-World War II mirage, chased by the utopic dreamers who don’t understand the real world and how it works. To others, the vision has long lost its luster because too many of us are unwilling to pay the price it would take to accomplish it, from living with less, to partaking in simultaneous revolutions more. This view, most embodied by the old-school retired optimists, has also found favor with the apolitical and the nihilistic, who mimic each other so closely they can hardly be told apart. But even for the optimists still-in-residence, and indeed those rare fools who dare to be counted and characterized as the hopeful, the dream of a good time appears increasingly illusive, increasingly difficult to hold onto. This, I think, has been the greatest throughline of my travels, and perhaps the most worrying, too—a collective loss of hope among everyone, but especially amongst the hopeful.

The reasons why appear obvious enough. COVID and its poor handling by political and public health institutions alike around the globe. The economic frustrations stemming from a widespread rise in cost of living and inflation, and the ebbs in job opportunity and security; everywhere, the rich have got richer, and the poor have got poorer, with fewer people able to make it to, and stay within, the in-between. Climate change is unequivocally upon us and we are living through its effects, wondering with each unprecedented event or catastrophic change to a people’s way of life, the longevity of our human existence on Earth. We have become witnesses to, if not reluctant consumers of, the daily accounts of the violence of apartheid, war, and the unjust global nation-state dynamics respective to Palestine-Israel, to Sudan, and elsewhere, mainly in the Global South—even as the most hopeful among us have protested and petitioned continuously in the face of ever-creeping sentiments of powerlessness. 

All this has also come as trust in news media everywhere, but especially in the United States’ conglomerates, remains at record lows, and in the midst of a technological insurgency of misinformation and disinformation where even the media literate are as liable to conspiracies as they are to good-faith misinterpretations. Add to that a broken faith in political systems that no longer appear built for the world we live in today, tightly tethered to a system that continues to serve the most materially advantaged. But even more alarming still, is the broken trust permeating through the people we live near to and alongside, as a contagion of loneliness sweeps through the world, posing as much threat to our species’ health and well-being as future pandemics inevitably will—all of which is, in part, an outcome of a rise of individualism around the world. 

This incomplete list of gloom and doom sounds bleak, because it is. Yet much of what has even been listed has always been true of our collective human experiences, in eras long past that in important ways were objectively worse than this one. What we are experiencing now, then, is just the latest iteration of the human condition, the sufferings and the sufferers altering every few hundred years or so. But this reality also stands in contrast with the objective progression of this time—in science, in medicine, in technology, in faith; in short, in all that we know makes for a good life, and a good time, for the many. In the context of our human history, perhaps these progressions frustrate us all the more because in spite of them, the human condition has not been permanently altered. But maybe the biggest difference between the eras of yesteryear and today, is that so many of the people I have encountered in my travels, whatever their politics and whatever our disagreements, do not believe that those who come after them will enjoy a better future.

From what I’ve observed during my travels, it’s not difficult to see why. In Nigeria, the country of my birth, years of unfettered greed and complacency by politicians and the rise of high-influence people who prop up ethnocentrism and religious bigotry, in tandem with a return to the old-school tricks of its former dictatorship era, including threats of violence and free speech suppression, have led to a national mood of despondency for an otherwise almost hazardously hopeful people—a people I ordinarily advise to be more skeptical. This has dashed the reveries of my elders, peers, and juniors, some of whom returned home at the turn of the late aughts, in the midst of a prodigious cultural boom, to partake in a contemporary attempt of nation-building when the country looked on the ascent economically. Today, Nigeria is experiencing what has been called its worst economic crisis in a generation, and the high cost of basic needs has resulted in over 30 million people facing food insecurity in 2025. 

In South Africa, high unemployment and depletion in the quality of public services have resulted in the economic disempowerment of everyday citizens, who blame migrants with its cause, stoking the country’s African-centric xenophobia. All of this has been laid at the feet of its African National Congress (ANC) party, the former heroes of the apartheid struggle who lost their 20 years of political dominance in 2024. Following South Africa’s elections last May, the ANC was all but forced to form a political coalition with the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, the latter of which a journalist friend of mine referred to as “the residual party of white privilege.” 

But even the more hopeful chances we might have anticipated at achieving a “good time” have struggled to achieve it. This includes Brazil, a place where the people seem to most demonstrate the desire for a good time—partly because that Brazilian label runs deep in the national fabric, and partly as a result of their 2022 election in which leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva  replaced the authoritarian-like Jair Bolsonaro. In the weeks after Lula was sworn in, I attended carnival in both Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, documenting the joyous tradition and its history, and was told by many of the relief they felt at Lula’s return, his third time at the helm of the nation. Yet Bolsonaro’s continued influence prevails to the point of his own possible comeback, even despite a recent police report of his attempt at a failed coup in those same 2022 elections. 

Meanwhile, as in much of the West, right-wing extremists in Portugal gained support via parliamentary representation during its general elections in March last year, and the once open, migrant-friendly policies of the country that drove its digital nomad explosion are now set to be restricted. In the UK, the self-inflicted Brexit wound has come to fester in the last few years following its summer 2016 vote. Compounded with the COVID years, it has left the country’s economy smaller, and exacerbated its cost of living crisis; any night out in London will confirm a decimated scene, unveiling how the once Swinging City hardly deserves to be mentioned among its global equivalents anymore. In the United States, where I have lived for much of my adult life, the early days of a second Trump presidency have already brought about a sense of impending chaos and doom throughout structures and institutions, political, cultural, and economic, after his landslide victory in November. Much ink will continue to be spilled as to how and why he was reelected at all, but the fears of the authoritarianism that accompany Trump’s presence long preceded his first administration, and will supersede the current one. It’s unclear, too, if the coalitions that oppose his presidency even have the wherewithal to form and execute an integrated vision that will safeguard the communities they claim to defend, not only against Trump’s actions, but for the good of the people, regardless of who sits in The White House. 

Of course, some ordinary people—and not those who actually benefit from these global state of affairs—have boasted of victory in all of these instances. Their overall political participation (and not just their electoral one), or lack thereof, stems from a plethora of grievances and discontent—many real, some imagined—leading to a need to believe that their side will at least see gains, or more honestly, not suffer quite as much as the “losers.” This of course is an effective political strategy set up by those who truly benefit—convincing their base that despite the lack of evidence that surrounds them, they have been victorious. But a cursory examination of the whole, along with the many candid if unsuspecting admissions people have shared with me during my travels—including from those claiming electoral victory—nonetheless reveals that none, regardless of which political side they may be on, believe that their life will marginally improve after an election. The winning side confesses deep-seated dejections as much as the imagined losing side, in sometimes unspoken but always communicated anxieties that the good times are no longer within one’s reach, nor within one’s children’s reach, if they ever even were. 

The privilege of observing this phenomenon these last few years has been witnessing how its cultural ramifications have grown alongside its political ones. This is obvious in the rise of the rhetoric and content of trad wives and the manosphere, indicating a desire to suppress women’s rights and keep men in less empowered, less diverse visions of masculinity. Oppression begets repression to more than its victims, and because it does, a good time becomes impossible for all, oppressor and oppressed alike. Relatedly, another cultural consequence can be seen in the choice—when it is a choice—to delay or wholly repudiate parenthood, not only because of the real expenses associated with it, but because so many have decided they would rather deny themselves the experience than foist the offerings of this dystopia we are headed towards onto their potential offspring. But less obvious manifestations can also be seen in how so much of the latest sociotechnological innovations are not improving our material lives but instead inviting us to escape into virtual apathy and antipathy. It struck me continuously throughout my travels how much even when around others, people expressed a desire to abscond into their digital lives, most often to nurse parasocial relationships where they imagined their counterparts as more fulfilled than them, counterparts who they seem to have outsourced their hopes and dreams to. Witnessing all this and more, and as someone who ordinarily accepts that little is new under the sun—seasons of plenty and joy live alongside seasons of paucity and pain as a fact of life, and we are called to persist in all of them—I, who considers myself among the hopeful, began to wonder if hope here is even the answer. Moreover, what does hope even look like under such universal malaise? 

The truth is I don’t have a unanimous solution, or at least, not yet. Certainly, building coalition across issues in ways that acknowledge our political and social differences has been advocated for by those more knowledgeable than I, as have mutual aid collectives in our communities by movement leaders at the frontlines of our despair. There are guides to survival that have been written in the form of literature, such as Octavia Butler’s Parables, or nonfiction directives we can follow to address the underlying litany of systemic problems we face, offered in books like David Graber’s The Utopia of Rules. But because of the work I do as a journalist and the work I have been doing as a forthcoming author, and because of who I am—a person whose imagination is wired to pursue history in order to realize the future—I have found myself meditating on not only the stories of significant women of the past that I’ve collected for Foremothers, but on those of my own foreparents, too. 

In the past year especially, I have contemplated not infrequently the lives of my foreparents, including those I never met and those that in my own lifetime transitioned beyond the physical realm. I have thought about the conditions they endured—from illness to war to colonization to migrations, new and old. And I have thought about the fears they overcame, the joys they found, and the unwavering perseverance they had to continue on; at least in part, for the sake of descendants they would never meet. And they did this not always because they believed they could promise their descendants a good life, but because they believed that whatever progress they made—even the most minute—should never see its end when their own lives ended on this Earth, but instead, be built upon with each generation that followed. Their responsibility to those who they could not know would come after them, was, above all else, a refusal to succumb to whatever hopelessness their circumstances presented, and instead a choice to hold onto an imagination that made no promises of what was to come, but only of what is possible. 

For what it’s worth, although I didn’t hear this same sentiment expressed in great quantities throughout my travels, the debt of continuing to carry as a testament to one’s forebearers was the singular throughline even the most faintly hopeful people managed to convey. From a source in Luanda, Angola who told me how our dues to our ancestors is what can propel us forward in times of difficulty, to colleagues I encountered in Nairobi, Kenya who proposed that in order to keep moving forward, we must look continually to all those who have survived before us.  

All the same, I cannot promise myself a good time knowing what I have seen these last few years and even prior to them, much less can I promise a good time to anybody who will come after me. I also cannot promise relief will come anywhere, because for most of us, even those of us who might have the means and privilege of movement, there is nowhere to run to, to escape this intercontinental anguish. But alongside the pragmatism of collective coalitions in our communities, small and big, that we must adopt in order to persist, we owe it to the foreparents gone and the foreparents still to come to never let our imagination yield to believing that both good and better times are not possible. Our collective survival depends on it.

[post_title] => Is Anyone, Anywhere Having a Good Time? [post_excerpt] => From my recent travels, the answer seems to be "no." [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => is-anyone-anywhere-having-a-good-time [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-02-03 23:06:17 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-02-03 23:06:17 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7813 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
An illustration of various women from around the world going around in a large circle, all crying and exhausted.

Is Anyone, Anywhere Having a Good Time?

WP_Post Object
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    [ID] => 7768
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2025-01-24 22:40:34
    [post_date_gmt] => 2025-01-24 22:40:34
    [post_content] => 

To believe things can get better, we must first accept they can get worse.

I find Trump so repulsive that I wasn't willing to engage with the reality of his second term until he won and I had no choice. In the weeks following, I braced myself for Christo-fascism, knowing every day he wasn’t president was a day to cherish. I told anyone who would listen to prepare for the worst. 

In the days since he was sworn in, I’ve been frustrated but not surprised that people still don't get it. “Is he really a fascist?" "Was that really a Nazi salute?" "Is this really going to be that bad?" Girl, yes. In fact, it’s probably going to be worse than most can imagine, considering it was a massive failure of imagination that led us here in the first place: American optimism has done us no favors this time around, and now we're all paying the price. 

Millions failed to imagine that fascism really was popular enough to get Trump reelected. They failed to imagine that the outlandishly evil Project 2025 could really be the GOP manifesto, and clung to the obvious lies and denials of its authors (who are now overwhelmingly employed by the White House). Immigrants who fled failed states and autocracies only to vote for Trump failed to imagine this country having the exact same problems as the ones they’d left. It was a collective failure of imagination that the Supreme Court would actively cover for a coup, let alone that they’d reward the man who incited it with immunity. Personally, I failed to imagine that losing reproductive rights would have so little impact on white women's presidential votes; and these same women who chose to split their tickets failed to imagine state abortion protections could be undone by a national ban.

Americans have an escalating autocracy problem, but underlying that is an emotional and psychological problem. At every turn, we get tripped up by reality, especially around humanity's capacity for evil at scale, not to mention imperial decline. Putting these criminals in charge has likely poisoned the United States for generations. Anyone who thinks it will be over in four years is deluding themselves. But few want to wrap their heads around the fact that most checks on executive power are already gone. No one wants to imagine themselves being targeted until it's too late. We don’t want to believe that things can, and will, get worse. But our failures of imagination won't stop the bad things from happening. They’ll just ensure we won’t be prepared to handle them—which is exactly how we’ve ended up here. 

There's a Russian proverb, "Когда я думала, что достигла дна, снизу постучали." "Just when I thought I'd hit rock bottom, someone knocked from below."

These last few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, and about people's readiness to accept lies at face value when the truth is too painful. It's the corollary of our failure to imagine atrocities before they happen. When Trump was elected the first time around, I wrote a piece on what the Nazis were thinking when they committed genocide—a warning on how dehumanization and propaganda create the conditions for mass murder. I compared the interviews a Jewish US Army psychiatrist did with the Nuremberg defendants to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, which argued that an autocratic cult of personality can lead mild-mannered people to abdicate their own moral compass and commit atrocities in the name of Dear Leader. Since then, the Eichmann tapes have surfaced—a 1957 recording of an interview Eichmann did in Buenos Aires, in which he admitted to a fellow Nazi that of course they knew they were murdering all those Jews, and he'd have been happy had they completed the job. Countless academics and practitioners, myself included, have spent decades debating the banality of evil and individual agency: whether people intentionally commit mass murder or are "just following orders." Fields have developed, careers have been made, and centers have been built around the question of whether perpetrators are cynics or true believers—when all this time Eichmann was just a fucking liar.

The day after Trump won last November, when Steve Bannon slithered out of some hole to rub Project 2025 in our faces, I thought: This is the Eichmann tapes all over again. The inauguration, and what has followed, has done little to change my mind. Take Elon's Nazi salute, which he performed (twice) at a fascist inauguration bought with his fascist money. The discourse and debate and scrambling that has followed has been nothing short of infuriating: Is the apartheid oligarch who runs a Nazi-friendly site, calls himself Kekius Maximus, promotes eugenics and the Great Replacement Theory, and bought the US presidency while campaigning for the German far-right a Nazi, or is it autism?

People are clinging to the fact that Musk is a troll, as if pushing boundaries then retreating isn't part of the fascist playbook. Trolling doesn't diminish his responsibility for his behavior, lessen the salute's impact, or alter the context in which he performed it. People similarly brushed off Trump's insistence that Haitians are eating pets as a joke, sharing cat memes that will haunt them when he ends Temporary Protected Status and deports their neighbors. 

Orwell had words for the West's failure to imagine autocracy: "If you have grown up in that sort of [liberal] atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic regime is like….Such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism." Orwell was writing here about Western leftists' apologism for Stalin (also embarrassingly still a thing in some circles), but the reasoning still applies.

This inability to imagine an end to America as we know it was more understandable during Trump's first round, though that still required ignoring our long history of white supremacy and corruption. At this point, the failure to acknowledge that far-right extremists are in charge of all three branches of government feels willful. The cognitive dissonance when a rich white man does a bad thing is astounding, no matter how many flagrant crimes he's committed in the past, how many people he's violated. Suddenly everyone's parsing intent like they're guest judges on Law and Order. 

Is evil really banal? Or are we simply unable to process the insidious truth that extreme abuses of power are so common? Frequency and severity are not the same thing. I've been writing for over eight years now about the delusions of exceptionalism, and how the failure to imagine America's decline ensures it. I’ve also written at length about how abuse distorts reality, and how state abuses mirror interpersonal abuse. As a survivor of childhood narcissistic abuse, I watched otherwise decent adults ignore or make excuses for monstrous behavior they personally witnessed, because taking a stand would cost them too much, or at least more than throwing me under the bus might keep them up at night. I don't have to imagine the depths people will reach to avoid what's right in front of their eyes, because I've lived it. Abuse thrives where reality is too painful to digest, when people get exhausted, look away, give up, blame the victims, apologize for power and patriarchy, follow charlatans, accommodate in advance. Abuse leads us to blame the people or institutions who failed to keep us safe, even when they aren't the ones hurting us. Expected violence is perversely easier to accept than failed promises. And all of us are tired of being let down.

Unsurprisingly, lost in all the questions about why the Democrats have lost the information war, or why mainstream media keeps sane-washing a decompensating narcissist, is the fact that it's safer to attack Democrats for the things they didn't do than to pick a fight with Trump over the things he's done and is doing. To be clear, Democrats have absolutely betrayed voters' trust by campaigning on Republicans wanting to end democracy, and then caving to collegiality. How is it that in the past few days only AOC seems appropriately angry, and brave enough to show it? Meanwhile legacy media is on the path to both-sides-ing themselves into extinction, and wondering why they’ve lost everyone's trust. But whether or not their actions are motivated by corruption or naivete is, again, besides the point. Focusing on unprovable intent—what's in people's hearts and minds, whether bones are racist—is safer than confronting what's observable: that the federal government and civil rights are being dismantled before our eyes. Principles come at a cost, and most Americans, including Democratic leadership, seemingly do not want to pay. Bargaining to avoid a fight while someone is already beating you is the ultimate failure of imagination.

Scared people say and do dumb things, and many of us are terrified. But fascism feeds on fear, and it’s only through brave, principled opposition that we can begin to overcome these seemingly impossible circumstances. I founded The Conversationalist to combat the nihilism and despair that oligarchs and autocrats depend on, in the hopes that we'd stop the cancer from metastasizing. Only now that it's spread through the entire body politic do we get dire warnings from President Biden on his way out the door about the dangers of oligarchy and disinformation. Now that autocracy is entrenched, and we're deep into the destruction of democracy and rule of law, there are finally articles in the mainstream arguing what I was called hysterical for saying in 2016. Better late than never, but hardly a model of courage.

To be fair, denial is deeply human. Most of us crave a stable life that allows us to follow our dreams and our loved ones to thrive. Puncturing those dreams with the ugly reality of autocracy is a hard sell to those privileged enough to avoid it. But as American institutions collapse around us, those dreams move further and further away. Americans are so accustomed to the costs of our colossally bad ballot box decisions being born by voiceless others elsewhere, that we’ve kneecapped ourselves and expected it not to hurt. But if there’s one message I wish everyone would hear, it’s that this round is not going to be like the last one, and may last way longer, too. 

A lot of the election autopsies have chosen to pit economic concerns as separate from the transphobia, misogyny, and xenophobia that Republicans ran on, which is odd considering how fascism works. In less than a week, we’ve already seen this play out via a blitz of ChatGPT-authored executive orders stopping refugee entry, attempting to end birthright citizenship, denying trans people's existence, and firing any federal employee who was part of a DEI program (including a snitch hotline for people who want to denounce their colleagues of color). It was a banner week for far-right terrorists with pardons for January 6 insurrectionists and anti-abortion extremists. Trump has threatened to invade Canada, and wants to reinstitute tariffs. He's withdrawing from climate treaties, ending FEMA, and withholding aid for California wildfires unless they cave to Republicans. 

Taking hostages is par for the course: The message Trump was selling wasn’t economic prosperity for all, but economic prosperity for his supporters, at the expense of the rest. Fascism is all about prosperity through persecution. Help us get rid of the bad, undeserving folks, and there will be more left for you. No, not every Trump voter is chomping at the bit to deport 20 million people. Some just wanted to stick it to the incumbent administration, and others weren't paying much attention either way. Their intentions are irrelevant, however, because they gave the electorate's power away, and effectively voted for Americans to not freely and fairly vote again.

When you replace your civil servants and judiciary with loyalist hacks, and corrupt the processes that keep them in check, institutions do not hold. And yet most narratives still talk about future elections as if they’ll be recognizable. The US has devolved into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism or electoral autocracy, a hybrid system that maintains the veneer of elections with rigged outcomes for the ruling party. A friend described our current state as Schroedinger's democracy: both here and not. Trump's primary focus in office will be making sure he never leaves again. 

Unfortunately, Trump's not starting from scratch here, and he's got a lot of help. Between his first term; the coup; the captured Supreme Court that rejected the plain language of the 14th amendment to let him run for office again, and gave him immunity while president; the transnational cabal of autocrats, oligarchs, white supremacists, and religious fundamentalists rooting for him while actively plotting our dystopian future; and the Democrats' failure to mount proper opposition at any point along the way—the frog has already boiled several times over. Already there are Republican proposals to amend the Constitution and give him a third term. In this election alone, the GOP (with foreign assistance) suppressed the vote with legislation, lawsuits, Russian bomb threats, and other acts of violence, while billionaire oligarchs amplified extremist propaganda from captured media outlets and platforms. Rather than pay the consequences for these actions, all of them got to celebrate at the White House this week.

Before we become too cynical, it's important to remember: Just because Trump is determined to gut the country and die in office doesn't mean he'll succeed—electoral autocracies are fragile and we don't have to make it easy for him. He lacks the resources and the competence to accomplish all his goals. But picking a fight with a bully like Trump could lead to being targeted by him. He's coming for the DOJ, the civil service, the military, private business, late night TV hosts—his goal is to make it illegal to oppose him and require everyone to beg for his favor.

Cronyism and kleptocracy aren't new to this country. Historical examples include the robber barons and the Jim Crow South. In our current day, we have no safety net, healthcare is a scam, and guns are everywhere. And still, we have a lot to lose. People think eggs were expensive before. Just wait until they're double the price, half as available, and ten times more likely to poison you with avian flu. We're going to miss career civil servants, food safety, consumer protections, postal service, air and water quality, public health, public education, libraries, a free press, a depoliticized military, rule of law, and free and fair elections when they're gone. We're going to miss support for climate science, contraceptives, and measles vaccines. We're going to miss the immigrants who are the backbone of our economy and our culture. We're especially going to miss being able to remove the politicians responsible for predatory policies. A lot of Trump voters depend on Medicare and Social Security. Congrats, you’ve played yourself. It's not that we didn't have serious problems before. It's that in a year from now, we're going to be nostalgic for them. We're going to miss the good government we took for granted once it's gone.

Which isn't to say we should give up—quite the opposite. If there was ever a time to fight for our future, our values, and our communities—this is it. All is not lost. A failure to imagine the problem implies a failure to imagine its solution, as well. In fact, we must imagine how bad things can get in order to plan and prepare to overcome them. It isn’t too late—is never too late—to turn things around. There are millions of people around the globe that have fought fascism and won. We can learn from them, and from our past. Our history isn't just atrocities. We have so many role models, as well; people who fought under even worse circumstances for this country to be a better version of itself. We don’t have to wait for the next horror to happen before we choose to believe it’s possible to do the same.

[post_title] => A (State) Failure of Imagination [post_excerpt] => To believe things can get better, we must first accept they can get worse. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => state-failure-of-imagination-fascism-autocracy-united-states-of-america-donald-trump-inauguration-elon-musk-nazi-salute [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-01-24 22:43:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-01-24 22:43:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7768 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
An illustration of an austere gray room, with a man holding an American flag looking at his reflection in a curved, floor-length mirror. In his reflection, the flag is much smaller, and his upper body is on fire and smoking, obscuring his face.

A (State) Failure of Imagination

WP_Post Object
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    [ID] => 7742
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2025-01-23 00:13:35
    [post_date_gmt] => 2025-01-23 00:13:35
    [post_content] => 

Last year was considered one of the biggest election years in history. Here's a quick overview of some of its most influential results.

In 2024, it was estimated that half of the world’s population would have the chance to participate in what observers called “the biggest election year in history,” with over 60 countries holding national elections throughout the year. Now, in 2025, people around the world may begin to experience the consequences. 

Despite the varied histories and contemporary politics across countries and regions, a number of noticeable themes were evident in last year’s elections. The biggest one being that, from Portugal to Indonesia, right-wing parties were successful at the polls. This comes as young populations have become more electorally influential: In Iran, 60% of the population is under 30 years old and over 60% of people in Botswana and South Africa are younger than 35. Meanwhile, across the various elections that took place, only five women were elected heads of government, and globally, a mere 27% of parliament members are women. Opposition parties also gained considerable success, most notably in Senegal, South Korea, and Ghana. 

Over the next few years, the aftermath of these outcomes will reverberate throughout their respective nations and throughout all of us together, as a global community. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of some of 2024’s most consequential elections, and where to pay attention in 2025.

Senegal

In late March, opposition candidates Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Ousmane Sonko were elected president and vice president, respectively. Faye, who was relatively unknown before the election, was endorsed by Sonko, who had been arrested in 2023 in what some supporters and international observers alike determined was “political prosecution.” Both Sonko and Faye were in jail until just before the election. The election was originally slated to take place in February, but was postponed by then-president Macky Sall, leading to protests around the country. Faye’s victory was celebrated as a potential shift away from Western dependence; one proposal of his was to create a currency that is independent from the Euro, unlike the West African CFA Franc, which is what the country currently uses. At 44, Faye is also currently Africa’s youngest president. 

Indonesia

Prabowo Subianto and Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the son of former Indonesian president Joko Widodo, announced victory in February. Subianto, 72, was the former Indonesian Defense Minister and there were concerns of Subianto’s human rights record from when he was in the military; activists allege that he was involved in various abuses, which led to him being banned from the United States and Australia until 2020. It was Subianto’s third time running for president in the “world’s third-largest democracy.

Russia

Vladimir Putin, who has been president since 2012 but involved in Russian politics as either president or prime minister since 1999, was re-elected in March in what the European Parliament described as a “carefully staged legitimisation ritual.” Alex Navalny, one of Putin’s most prominent critics, also died in prison the month prior. Russia’s Central Election Commission claimed that Putin secured over 87% of the vote, but a watchdog group noted that “voter intimidation” occurred, which likely affected the integrity of the votes. Putin’s win means that he will be in power until at least 2030.

Iran

Elections were held in the Western Asian country around 6 weeks after the sudden death of then-president Ebrahim Raisi. Two rounds of elections were held and reformist Masoud Pezeshkian won. The race, in which less than half of the eligible population voted, was described as a “silent protest” of dissatisfaction with previous regimes. Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon, will have to balance reformist politics with Iranians’ frustration at conservative policies. Notably, in Iran, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, actually holds the highest title in the nation and the president ultimately reports to him, which may limit what Pezeshkian can actually achieve.

Venezuela

Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s incumbent president since 2013, once again won last July’s election. His main opponent, Maria Corina Machado, was banned by the country’s Supreme Court from running against Maduro due to alleged “financial irregularities that occurred when she was a national legislator,” which was considered a politically motivated move as Machado was a popular opposition candidate. Venezuela’s elections have been widely criticized by various countries, including the United States and Denmark, as “fraudulent.” According to the US, Edmundo González, another candidate who ran, should have been considered the winner. But González fled to Spain in September 2024, saying he was forced to recognize Maduro’s win before being allowed to leave. This is not the first time Maduro has claimed victory in a disputed election; he also did so in 2013 and 2018. Maduro remains a controversial figure, his government having led the country while it continues to experience severe inflation and inflicts human rights abuses, including the torture of political critics. 

Ghana

In early December, citizens of Ghana cast their votes, and opposition candidate John Mahama won against incumbent vice president Mahamadu Bawumiua in “the biggest margin of victory in the country for 24 years.” Mahama, who had previously been Ghana’s president from 2012 to 2017, ran with Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang, who became the nation’s first female vice president. Parliamentary elections also took place, and all 276 seats were up for election. In addition to Maham’s prior term as president, he has also occupied a number of other roles, including “MP, deputy minister, minister” and “vice-president.” While running, Mahama pledged to transform the cocoa industry

Mexico

In early June, Claudia Sheinbaum won Mexico’s presidential election. Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor and scientist, became the country’s first female president. According to one election observer, despite some reports of polling stations facing “various threats, the voting process seemed to roll out relatively smoothly in most places, even if the process was slow in some stations.” Multiple candidates for various offices, including mayoral roles throughout Mexico, were killed during the general election season.

United Kingdom

Last July’s general election marked a rare swing to the left last year, with the Labour party winning a majority for the first time in over a decade, and its leader, Keir Starmer, elected Prime Minister. The Labour party gained 211 seats for a total of 412 out of 650 total seats in Parliament, in contrast to the Conservative party’s 251-seat loss. This win has been aptly described as a “landslide victory.” 

Namibia

In November, the southwest African nation elected its first female president. However, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah’s victory has been called into question by one of her opponents, Panduleni Itula. Nandi-Ndaitwah has a long history of involvement in Namibian politics; she was also once in exile as a result of her work with South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), which was once a liberation movement and is currently a political party. SWAPO has been Namibia’s ruling political party since 1990, when it gained independence from South Africa, but the most recent election reflected its lowest levels of support so far.

El Salvador

Nayib Bukele declared victory in the El Salvadoran presidential election last February. The self-described “coolest dictator in the world” has been head of the Central American country since 2019 and was previously mayor of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador. He has been responsible for jailing over 70,000 people in El Salvador in order to “fight organized crime,” which has made him “popular” across the country, but human rights groups have raised concerns over potential violations. Bukele’s New Ideas party won 54 out of 60 National Assembly seats. Of his win, Bukele said, “El Salvador has broken all the records of all democracies in the entire history of the world.”

Tunisia

Kais Saied was declared the winner of the North African country’s October presidential race, but the election has been described as “Tunisia’s first undemocratic presidential election in almost fourteen years.” Saied, who has been head of state since 2019, won more than 90% of votes. However, fewer than 30% of voters cast their ballots, representing a general lack of enthusiasm among Tunisians who were eligible to vote.

South Korea

The opposition party won 175 out of 300 parliamentary seats in South Korea’s April 2024 general elections. This was a reflection of South Koreans’ dislike of incumbent President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has been in office since 2022. In December, Yoon declared martial law, but it was reversed a few hours later after parliament opposed it. Then, a few days later, an impeachment attempt was blocked, but a later effort was successful. The government has been thrown into chaos since, and a few days ago, Yoon was arrested.

Botswana

October’s general election saw the end of the Botswana Democratic Party’s (BDP) rule after almost 60 years. The BDP, which had been in power since the country’s 1966 independence, lost to the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC). “Recent poor economic growth and high unemployment” were among some of the factors that affected the BDP’s loss of power. Duma Boko, the head of the UDC, replaced BDP’s Mokgweetsi Masisi as president. BDP is a center-left party, which may reflect Botswana’s youth leaning left, unlike elsewhere.

South Africa

South Africa’s late-May legislative elections marked a shift in the nation’s political history. The African National Congress (ANC) party, formed from a “liberation movement" for Black South Africans, and which had been in power since the country ended apartheid, lost its majority. The ANC, once led by Nelson Mandela, still has a plurality of seats, meaning it has more seats than the other parties, but it no longer has more than half the seats. The ANC and “centre-right party,” the Democratic Alliance (DA), formed a coalition in June, which gave incumbent Cyril Ramaphosa enough votes to remain president. The DA and ANC “have been rivals for decades,” and this coalition reflected a change in how the ANC had to operate in order to remain in power. The ANC’s loss of majority reflected many South Africans’ frustration with “the state of the country, and a desire for change.

[post_title] => The Global Elections That Led Us to 2025 [post_excerpt] => A quick overview of some of the most influential elections of last year. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => global-international-elections-2024-right-wing-conservative-opposition-party-russia-senegal-indonesia-iran-venezuela-ghana-mexico-united-kingdom-namibia-el-salvador-tunisia-south-korea-botswana-south [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-01-23 00:16:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-01-23 00:16:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7742 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
Photo portraits of the UK's Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Senegal's President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian, Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum, Indonesia's President Prabowo Subianto, and Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

The Global Elections That Led Us to 2025

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    [post_date] => 2024-12-13 23:13:25
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    [post_content] => 

How the "separation barrier" changed everything.

There was a time when people would ask, "Do Israelis and Palestinians hate each other?" and I would say "no."  Then, the walls came up. Now, that time is increasingly hard to imagine, even in memory.

As a Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank and would frequently return to visit, I vividly recall the first time I witnessed the walls rising in the early 2000s along a road to Ramallah, a city in the occupied West Bank near Jerusalem. I thought: Why did the Israelis do this? Why has it been erected with such disregard for the communities living behind it? I understood, even then, that this division would only tear neighbors apart, and more alarmingly, further separate "enemies" from one another.

In just a few years, the walls would stretch over 400 miles, dividing the occupied Palestinian territories from Israel. These walls and fences, which Israelis called the separation barrier, would not just be physical barriers, but the hardening and entrenchments of dueling positions in this conflict. They still stand today: In some stretches, the walls are made of concrete and 30 feet high.

What Palestinians call Al Jidar—Arabic for "the Wall," connoting "the Apartheid Wall"—was, according to Israelis, mainly erected to prevent suicide bombings and violent attacks, which were accelerating at a rate they alleged left them with very few options. In 2002, during its construction, Human Rights Watch reported that "more than 415 Israeli and other civilians have been killed, and more than two thousand injured, as a result of attacks by armed Palestinians between September 30, 2000 and August 31, 2002,” with most of the harm “caused by so-called suicide bombings.”

But while I could understand the horror and the pain and the fear these attacks had caused, I could never understand how the wall was the solution. 

A child of the occupation 

As a child, I discovered a fear that would forever shape my understanding of the military occupation.

I have seen soldiers for longer than I can remember, but through childhood eyes, they’d always seemed friendly. One night, however, that changed.

I was maybe 5 or 6 years old when I demanded that I be allowed to mop the store floor in my small town in the West Bank. It was a sign of growing up, and behaving as I saw the adults around me do—working, tidying, driving, living. While I was mopping, a group of soldiers came into the store to buy some things. I remember being unable to control the joy I felt, performing this adult chore, while trying to control the mop, which was three times my size. I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings, until I accidentally hit one of the soldiers with the mop’s handle.

When I looked up, I saw something I’d never seen before—the soldier's hand on the trigger of a very long weapon and, oddly, his bared teeth. I still remember these teeth without a face, and how they scared me as much as the trigger on his weapon. I knew I’d made a mistake—and that night, I learned how easily a mistake could cost me my life.

I’d finally met my "master," and understood the divide between "us" and "them."

The "solution" that created the "monsters"

After the wall, this divide grew bigger. For Palestinians, the wall separated us from life.  It turned our cities and towns into cages, where the sky above us was the only place outside that felt within reach.

Solutions to this conflict were never going to be easy, if ever achieved. Yet the wall allowed both Israel and the international community to sidestep its complexity, disregarding the future of both Palestinians and Israelis alike. It decreased all human interaction with the “other side,” regardless of which side of the wall you stood. It was not a solution at all, but the deference or maybe even the ignorance of one. It was also a boiling pot: I say this because I saw it, and I felt it, and I lived it. 

The wall disconnected me from both friends and "enemies," but in time, I was no longer interested in seeing either. It isolated all of us and confined us to our own causes and anger, not caring for how the "other" felt. After all, I could only feel my anger when standing at a checkpoint. I could only feel my hatred when looking at the wall in front of me. I could only feel my outrage that my freedom to move was restricted by a permit, which I was required to obtain whenever I wished to leave, and that it was something I needed to be deemed “acceptable” to acquire.

For some Palestinians, receiving this permit may have brought joy, because they felt like the "lucky" ones. But for me, I often felt better just going about my life, refusing to get one, because living inside the wall felt more dignified than seeking permission to leave it.

I did not always prioritize my dignity in this conflict. I looked for friendships and ways to enjoy life despite the violence and the vitriol that surrounded me. But eventually, all these constant humiliations chipped away at me. Chipped away at the hope and joys I sought—all the things available to most human beings, but not to me. It offered me no choice but to instead look at what I did not have: my freedom, my rights, even my will to love, something I cannot have when I am stripped every day of everything that is mine.

The wall did this. And I wondered as I wonder now, when people are unable to meet freely, is our only alternative more war and more killing?

Before the wall

There was a time when American-Palestinians from the West Bank could drive what we called a "yellow tag" car, which felt like the height of "privilege," because it meant you could drive freely in the West Bank and Israel. At the time, if you had one of these cars, it felt as if all you had to do was drive by the checkpoint and get waived through, most times without your ID even being checked. (Over the years—just like the ever-changing restrictions—civilian cars with a Palestinian tag couldn’t enter Israel and most parts of Jerusalem. Those rules continue to change even now, depending on the political climate.)

I drove a car like this once to go and meet with a friend for a swim in Tiberias, an Israeli town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Just writing this seems absurd in the year 2024. But it did happen often once, and not just for me, but for others, as well—although for Palestinians with limited "privilege" today who have an Israeli residence or hold an Israeli passport, it can still be a daily occurrence should they wish, because those people are considered "outside" the wall.

When driving back from my trip, I had to pass another checkpoint when leaving Tiberias. While I have an American passport, I also hold a West Bank ID, which placed restrictions on what car I could drive at the time. The restrictions had recently become stricter, and technically, I was not allowed to drive the "yellow tag" car I was driving.

I was nervous, but as I passed the checkpoint, the soldiers mistook me for Israeli. They asked me a question in Hebrew that I did not fully understand, and I said "yes." I thought they were asking if I was from Jerusalem, which would have allowed me to drive that car, and hoping they’d let me pass, I lied.

Seconds later, three soldiers entered my vehicle. Afraid of being caught violating the law, I just smiled and started driving. I soon realized that the soldiers wanted to hitch a ride to Jerusalem, something that might have allowed me to get away with my transgression, except I wasn’t going to Jerusalem, but home to a village in the West Bank. Not knowing what to say or do, I kept driving.

Amidst my panic driving along the winding road that night, one of the soldiers asked, "You came from America?" I said that I had. Then, he asked, "How come your parents didn’t teach you Hebrew?"

I knew this was the moment I should tell them I am Palestinian, so I replied, "Because my parents taught me Arabic."

After, it felt as if the world stopped turning and it was just me and the soldiers in the car. We were silent for a long time. My face turned hot, so hot I can still feel it all these years later. I could feel the soldiers were tense, too.

I’d made a mistake not confessing that I was not authorized to drive that vehicle and they’d made a mistake not vetting me at that checkpoint. In any other context, this might have been a moment of silent honor amongst harmless lawbreakers, but instead, it felt like a dangerous mess for us all.

For their safety, those soldiers should not have been in my car. For my safety, I should not have let them in.

"So, what are we going to do?" I asked after another long pause. "I cannot drive you to Jerusalem because I am almost out of gas and we must go through a checkpoint, and I cannot leave you on the side of the road just anywhere." We started strategizing when and where I could drop them off that was familiar to them, but was also somewhere I could go unnoticed. Eventually, we chose a place and parted ways, and never saw each other again.

This incident would not play out the same today—or maybe, more accurately, after the walls went up, it couldn’t: I’d see them differently now, and they’d see me differently, too.

You cannot contain hate

The wall did not just create a cage for "us." Israelis were also not free; instead, they were caged in fear.  

You see, I am a person who is "occupied." I grew up understanding "they" rule me, and my rulers will kill "us" if we dare to rise and demand our freedom, the right of every human being on this earth. A right that is not to be granted or given. A right that we are born with and that belongs to us. Both of us also have a right to not live in fear. Yet it is their fear which is why we are made to stand, stripped of everything, in front of an enemy with an arsenal of weapons with which to annihilate us.

Killing, however, is not a right—not for "them" or for "us." As societies, we find different ways to justify it, support it, and, at times, speak proudly of it. Yet when we do so, we all lose, because there is no pride in killing. There is, I believe, no justification for taking a human life. And nothing can exonerate us from our complicity when we support it, even when it’s in service of pursuing our freedom. 

When I was still a young aspiring documentary filmmaker, I remember once having to ride on an Israeli bus. As a Palestinian, I had no permit, and I remember being grateful I was still able to board, but was unprepared for how I felt throughout the ride.

I felt fear! What if there was a suicide bomber on this bus? One of my people, I remember thinking. Filled with anxiety, I surveyed every person who got on the bus at every stop, worried if "this person" could be the one. And in that moment, I understood there was no human difference between the fear Israelis must experience and my own.

But I also wondered if they would ever understand that, too. When I felt "their fear," I also wished they could know mine, and how we, the Palestinians, feared "them"—their cruelty, their disproportionate response to "our" attacks. Their collective punishment without mercy against the people inside the wall.

Witnessing horror in the making 

As time passed, I grew accustomed to the wall's presence, and it became acceptable to see it everywhere without staring at or questioning it for too long. But the anger remained, an anger that is difficult to understand for those who have not lived on the "other" side of it. 

Visitors saw the wall as an "ugly" thing, a sign of injustice, at most. But they were not witnesses to what has happened to the people for whom this wall represents the circumference of their existence. We were not living—just existing. Constantly adjusting to everything, from restrictions to violations, because we had no choice.

The years have gone by, and like many, I’ve seen less hope and more hate every year, with no way to correct it. My privilege as an American-Palestinian has allowed me to see the severity of these changes with each visit: the deteriorating living conditions, the increased restrictions, the endless violence, almost always without consequence.

But I have also observed something far sadder and more terrifying: a generation growing up without seeing their "enemy" as human.

You see, I am of a different generation. A generation that grew up under occupation and was constantly reminded that I had a "ruler." But before the wall, no matter how I felt about the occupation and my oppression, I could still see the people who "ruled" me; I could still see their humanity, because I could still see their faces.

Now, the wall has made the "enemy" soulless and faceless. And I wonder, on the other side of the wall, is there also a generation that fears their enemy and thinks of us as non-human, too? As people who not only do not belong to this world, but who also wish to cause them harm—to kill them? 

I pictured a generation of people on either side, fighting an enemy they’ll never know, and I worried about what would happen when the walls come down, because walls always do. It’s because of this, when the time came, and people would ask me, "Do they hate each other?" My answer became, "Yes, they do."

The children of the wall    

October 7, 2023 happened over two decades after the walls were built. To this day, I do not want to watch the videos that were plastered on every television screen. It is the nightmare I imagined, but even worse, because it was real. In the aftermath, many people—the media, acquaintances, colleagues—called the Palestinians who did it "monsters." Then, we saw the other "monsters" emerge, the Israelis.

On October 7, more than 1,200 people were killed in Israel, including about 800 civilians, 346 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, and 66 police officers, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thousands were also injured in the attack and about 250 men, women, and children were abducted.

Since then, Israel’s retaliatory war on Hamas has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, with more than half of them women and children. Gaza has become “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history,” according to a UN official. Entire bloodlines have been erased. The videos that have emerged have been equally unbearable to watch as those from October 7: As ABC reported, "in many pictures and videos that have circulated since the conflict began… IDF soldiers are seen blowing up buildings in Gaza while in combat, waving women’s underwear like flags and rifling through the possessions of Gazans with gleeful expressions."    

Many families of the Israeli hostages who were not released or rescued are still waiting on their loved ones to come home, dead or alive; while thousands of unidentified Palestinian children are either buried under the rubble in Gaza or have been left orphaned and injured and starving. Mass graves are only a sign of the times for the people in Gaza: Their "open-air prison" is now a graveyard.

Many may uphold that staying in Gaza is a heroic honor—and it absolutely is. But when there is no choice but to stay, we cannot call it a choice at all. Those still alive in Gaza continue to have nowhere to go, their right to move and live freely taken from them. The children, especially, deserve to grow up and decide their position on a war they did not choose to be a part of. But we have robbed them of that. We are spectators with a cause: We count the dead but look away from the living. The Israeli soldiers and the Palestinian fighters, even Hamas—all of them chose to fight in this war. The children did not.

Are we comfortable with Gaza’s children dying for "our" cause? I am not. But there are no winners in war: What good is winning when the land is drenched in blood?  

So, who is the monster? 

Neither of us were created to suffer. It is not our destiny, or theirs. While I’m not a peace activist, I did—and still do—believe that the only way through this conflict is to be seen, to be heard, and to share without hate and fear. But we can only do that by opening ourselves to the idea of peace, to opening the doors for peace. Not by walling them up.

Like the Israelis soldiers in Gaza killing Palestinians, many of those who killed Israelis on October 7 are from "behind the wall." The same wall that taught them that neither of them is human, that the people on the other side are objects to destroy, to seek revenge from, and to win against, no matter the cost. It’s a matter of perspective.

But I do not believe it is only the people who pulled the trigger who are to blame. To me, all who were silent when the walls came up, who witnessed  human rights violations increase every year, who watched two generations living side by side while growing to hate and fear one another—they are to blame.

All of us, then, are to blame. 

Every educator, every media personality, every politician, every international leader who did not speak loudly and demanded solutions. Every person who only chose to look after it was too late. All of us are complicit in the death of every child and civilian in Gaza, and Jerusalem, and the occupied West Bank, for the death of every person and child on October 7, and for the fear every hostage and citizen feels in Gaza today. This misery was created by us all. The deadly airstrikes, the starvation, the inhumane conditions that people are living under, the unknown fate of the hostages—all of it was made and maintained by us. Whether consciously or not, through our complicity, through losing sight of our shared humanity, we have all become the monsters we most purport to fear. Because the truth is, when we choose to build walls, we are the ones making a monster out of the people on the other side—and a monster out of ourselves in the process.                

We must all ask ourselves, then, if the right conditions were set, the right circumstances—would we become a monster, too? I don’t know that I can say “no” for certain; my privilege, relative though it may be, does not allow me to give definitive answers. I was born a Palestinian by chance, just as we all are born into our circumstances by chance. But maybe in another life, I, too, could have turned into the "monster" behind the wall in this one.

[post_title] => The "Monsters" Behind the Wall [post_excerpt] => How the "separation barrier" changed everything. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => monsters-wall-israel-occupied-west-bank-palestine-separation-barrier-gaza-war-al-jidar-apartheid [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-12-14 01:39:23 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-12-14 01:39:23 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7547 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
RAMALLAH, WEST BANK - FEBRUARY 07: Palestinian demonstrators try to climb the separation wall during a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's Middle East plan near a town in Ramallah, West Bank on February 07, 2020. (Photo by Issam Rimawi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The “Monsters” Behind the Wall

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On building something better than what we've been given.

I was a young writer relatively early in my career when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Based out of California with most of the team in New York, I was also the only writer still online at the magazine where I worked when the election was called. In a fugue state, I wrote the story I’d been assigned: a neutral news piece laying out the facts. Then, I drank a Miller High Life and went to bed, knowing there wasn’t much else I could do until morning.

Two election cycles later, and again, I was the only one still online at my job when they announced the results of the race. But this time, my mother was sitting next to me. It was her fourth presidential election cycle as an American citizen, and watching the television screen, we both held our breath—not just in anticipation of the results, but for everything before and beyond them, and the chaos we knew would follow, regardless of who won. 

When it was finally called, we both exhaled. Despite whatever other feelings we might have had as individuals, neither of us, I think, was surprised: Between us, there was a mutual understanding that anything is possible in America—for better but, more often, for worse. 

~

It is impossible to convince someone who has bought into their own delusions that what they see in front of them is, in fact, a delusion. This fact is non-partisan, and applies as much to the Democratic Party as it does to the millions of Trump supporters who voted in favor of a candidate whose policies would cause them harm. If you are surprised by Trump’s victory this year, then you, too, have bought into a delusion—an idea of security either afforded to you by privilege or passivity or both. This is different from being disappointed, or scared, or even angry about it, although sometimes they can all feel the same. 

“A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his new book, The Message, which grapples with the narratives we tell ourselves in order to maintain our sense of moral righteousness when confronted with an immoral reality. Coates cites the Trump years as proof of this: The illusion of America has been crumbling for years, but accepting this requires facing your complicity in the facade—something not everyone chooses to do, particularly those that benefit from it. 

Our democracy has long been broken. The 2024 election just tore down the last vestiges of the veneer for those still unable to see it. Now, the US must reckon with what remains. We cannot call ourselves a democracy when we live in a country where nearly 38 million people live below the poverty line, where basic healthcare isn’t a human right, and where ordinary citizens have no say in what wars we participate in and who we send weapons to. Nor can we call ourselves a democracy when the salary for a sitting member of Congress is more than twice the average total household income, and when the judges that sit on the nation’s highest court are appointed for lifelong tenures, able to change the fate of an entire generation, and entirely dependent on the political party in power when a justice either steps down or dies. Perhaps most obviously, we also cannot call ourselves a democracy when we elect a president based on an electoral college rather than a popular vote—and the outcome of any election, including this one, should not change our stance that this is fundamentally undemocratic; as is the frequent redlining, gerrymandering, redistricting, and voter suppression that happens openly and without shame. 

This is not the track record of a country with a functioning moral compass, although it begs the question if a country can even have one. Morality is a thing for people, not for nation-states. Change in this country, in perhaps all countries, has almost always been reactionary. So, too, will change be on the other side of this, whatever shape “this” takes; something I would have said even prior to the election, because no amount of voting has ever been enough to save us from ourselves, to guarantee the safety of the millions affected by our government’s actions, or to definitively “fix” things for good. 

A “functioning” democracy is dependent on the buy-in of its people, but I’d argue also on an electorate's collective desire to do what’s best for the majority of its populace. This baseline isn’t automatic, but built through its foundations, which are fortified by the choices we make each day in showing up for one another, far beyond the ballot box. When we treat voting as our only tool against oppression, we’ve already lost. When we only engage, and demand, and pay attention every two or four years, we’ve already lost. This doesn’t mean that voting isn’t important, just that we cannot solely rely on something that was originally designed to exclude the vast majority of us to enact meaningful change for that same majority. 

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde said, something I see quoted time and time again. But people rarely seem to include the rest of the sentiment, and its context: “They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” The reality, should we choose to see it, is our toolbox is often much larger than we believe it to be, our sources of support much wider. It is, I believe, our moral obligation to utilize both. 

To do so, however, requires us not to do the work of our oppressors for them. “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression,” Lorde said in the same speech. “But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” 

If a diverse people’s history of the country is our guide, when has the United States ever been a beacon of morality? When has what is ethically sound ever been achieved in this country without an uprising or without violence, or at least some degree of incivility? The modern Republican Party has always understood—and, arguably, romanticized—this in a way the Democratic Party has not, because the latter fundamentally believes the system works when it has continuously proven it doesn’t. (At least, never for all of us, or even for most.)  

The real work, then, is in building the world we want to live in through organizing and action and care, not by solely relying on systems of bureaucracy and government that depend on our dysfunction and discord to keep us reliant on their mercurial benevolence in order to continue funding themselves. The work is in taking care of each other when the systems that purport to have our best interests at heart continuously fail to protect them. The work is in not only dreaming that something better is possible, but realizing it, every day, in our actions and in our communities, both close to us and far away. We achieve this by investing in our communities, not just financially, but through the creation of long-term, sustainable support systems and networks of care; by establishing community processes that encourage collaborative, collective decision-making and problem-solving; by sharing responsibility for our communities’ well-being and safety; and by making resources accessible to anyone who needs them, whether healthcare, food, or otherwise. 

In spite of everything, we have done this. We are doing this. Even before the election, I saw the fruits of these efforts in my community every day: people rallying to find breastmilk for a baby who needed it, someone looking for help doing their dishes while struggling with their mental health, another person looking for housing leads after their current living situation proved unsafe. All three found the support they needed, not from the government, but from their neighbors.

So if you are seeking comfort right now, this is the one thing that has given some to me: We still have each other. 

~

The day after the election, I text back and forth with a friend. He is disappointed, hungover, knee-deep in political analysis, doomscrolling. 

“I left one country 15 years ago because I tried to be a part of something, and ultimately it led to me having to flee, and then everything got a lot worse than I even anticipated at that time,” he says. “Now I see the same thing happening here, but this time I don’t actually believe that anything will get better.”

What do you say to someone who’s already lived through worse? I tell him that I’m sorry and I love him and he deserves more. 

~

In the lead-up to this year’s election, I am often very angry. Around me, a lot of people are, too. While some of this anger seems to circle around the election specifically, much of it does not—and it might be more accurate to say it is actually the election which is orbiting around the anger, and not the other way around. This is mostly because there’s been so much to be angry about: the way the United States continues to fund a genocide; the catastrophic reality of climate change; the endless threats to abortion and bodily autonomy; the rampant racism, transphobia, and xenophobia; how quickly the world has backslid into fascism, embracing right wing extremism in elections around the globe. All of it feels impossible to ignore, an endless cacophony of horrors; but still, some people manage, and this makes me angry, too. 

None of this goes away after the election is over. 

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about anger since Trump was first elected in 2016; about its manifestations, its purpose. This curiosity began, in part, because of my own relationship to it: Historically, I’ve never been good at holding on to interpersonal anger, yet I’ve always felt it, deep and terrifying, in response to the world’s seemingly endless capacity for injustice, violence, and other forms of harm. I see it everywhere, notice the various shapes it takes. I learn that rage can be a guiding force when we really listen to it, or a parasite that hollows us out when we don’t. I ask my friends what pisses them off, discuss what our anger tells us about ourselves, and try to better understand what my anger might tell me about me. 

What enrages us often reveals something that terrifies us, anger and fear just two sides of the same coin. People often vote (or don’t vote) because they’re angry about something. But fear, too, drives people to the polls: fear for how their lives might change if it goes one way or the other, fear for their livelihoods, their family, their friends, their safety, themselves, the world; and, inversely, fear of other people—although history suggests this isn’t anything new. “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Life of the Mind, her final unfinished work. But somehow, this has always felt scarier to me, more dangerous, more unpredictable than the alternative. When morality is an afterthought, evil is gradual, more insidious, a slow burn that starts small, until eventually we’re so deep into it, it feels impossible to close the gap between where we are and where we were and where we want to be. 

How, then, do we push back? The most optimistic answer I can come up with is by making the “good” so obvious a choice that there are actual consequences to being “evil,” rather than a deepening of the status quo. Rather than moving the threshold for what we accept, for how we categorize and define “good” and “evil,” we make up our minds not to waver from what we know is right—critically, not just in our elections, but in how we move through the world every day. It is stoking the fire of our anger, and our terror, and actually using it for good.

Back in 2020, I read On Anger, a Boston Review forum led by philosopher Agnes Callard. The book was released just before COVID shut everything down, a few months before that year’s election. “Maybe anger is not a bug of human life, but a feature—an emotion that, for all its troubling qualities, is an essential part of being a moral agent in an imperfect world,” editors Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen write in the book’s introduction. Some of the writers agree; others less so. There is debate on whether it is possible to be both justifiably angry and morally sound; whether anger is “useful” from an evolutionary standpoint; whether anger is, in fact, what makes us human. All seem to agree that it’s a powerful emotion; Callard, perhaps, most of all.

“When people commit injustice against us, we feel it: our blood boils,” she writes in the book’s seminal essay. “At that point, we have to decide how much we want to fight to quell our anger, how much effort we are going to put into repressing and suppressing that upswell of rage.”

“The answer,” she concludes, “is rarely none.”

~

The night of the election, a friend calls me, afraid and alone in her grief, her husband already asleep. “I feel guilty for calling,” she says. I tell her not to, that I’m glad she did. The next day, another friend calls. He asks why I sound so calm. “Aren’t you worried about NATO?” he asks. “I’m worried about NATO.” 

“Well,” I say. “Everything is shit.” 

“Everything is shit,” he repeats. 

Another friend and I text back and forth on Election Day. “I’m so deeply jaded by this country at this point,” she says. “I feel like politicians aren’t as scared of us as they should be.” My response is immediate. “Well, to be fair, I don’t think we’ve given them enough reason to be.”

~

Much like America itself, the American Dream has always been one of deluded and individualistic self-exceptionalism, selling itself as a meritocracy when in reality, it is a lottery stacked in favor of a very small minority, the buy-in rarely worth the pay-out.

While American exceptionalism is unlikely to be the death of us all, it’s already been the death of too many of us, the vast majority not even American, but people whose greatest sin was being born somewhere the US had a financial and/or political interest in, a Venn diagram that I’m pretty sure is just a circle. But to believe this type of unfettered power through violence could be limitless and without consequence is foolish: Global imperialism is a cancer, and like all cancers, it ultimately feeds on the host. “Nobody is exceptional, we are all just people worthy of life and dignity,” writer Fariha Róisín posted in a message on Instagram. “US Americans made domination a world order and what they didn’t realize was that fascistic glean would rear its ugly head and turn inward.” It should come as no surprise that fascism is now in full bloom on American soil: Its keepers have been watering it for years. 

There is little we can do but try to plant something better that might outgrow it, by not abandoning our humanity when it may feel “easier” to give it up. I often revisit Muriel Rekeyser’s poem, “Elegy in Joy,” as a reminder it is always possible to grow something new: “Not all things are blest, but the / seeds of all things are blest. / The blessing is in the seed.” Each choice we make is a seed, each choice a new beginning. Not all will bear fruit, but that doesn’t mean the planting is fruitless.

I know we—the collective we—will survive this, in part because there isn’t much of a choice. What devastates me and enrages me is how many will suffer unnecessarily in the process, how many already have; and the people who won’t survive this at all, who already haven’t. “Where there is power, there is resistance,” writes Foucault. And it’s true: As long as people give a shit, there will be resistance. As long as there are people who haven’t given into their own complacency, there will be resistance. And for all my own disillusionment, I’m not so far gone that I can’t see it’s there: Right now, there is despair, but despair is just a reminder there’s still something human left in you yearning for better, that there’s still some sliver of hope, kicking and screaming and furious and terrified, buried underneath the muck.

“Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country,” Ursula K. Le Guin said during her commencement address at Mills College in 1983. “Why [do] we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there…Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”

It is also in this darkness where we must grow a backbone, because the longest stretch of the fight is always still to come. 

~

Late Thursday afternoon, two days after the election, my mom’s phone dings. Looking at it, she groans.

“Forget it, Nancy Pelosi,” she says. “Jesus. It’s over!”

~

In the early afternoon, long before any of the polls closed on Tuesday, I began donating. Not to any political campaign (despite the onslaught of texts, I never understood what possible use my $20 would do in changing an election on Election Day), but to Palestine, to Sudan, to mutual aid. I signed up to make lunches for my unhoused neighbors. I spoke with friends. I chose to respond to a situation that felt dependent on the cooperation of millions, many not interested in mutual liberation, with small choices that felt, comparatively, within my control—a practice I try to keep in my everyday life. These actions may have been insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but they felt more significant than any vote I’ve ever cast, more fortifying. Closer to a version of the world I want to live in, but don’t. 

At the 2001 Connecticut Forum, Toni Morrison was asked, “How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something?” She took a moment to gather her thoughts. “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part,” she said. “But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about, you know, being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.”

For the last few years, so much has felt impossible. So much has felt enraging, and heartbreaking, and terrifying, and worse. But I’ve seen enough jokes about the relentlessness of living in “unprecedented times,” and counter-jokes from historians that the times are not, in fact, unprecedented at all, to know that what feels impossible is less impossible than we might believe. 

“The worst thing about being human is our ability to adapt,” a friend tells me. But maybe it’s one of the best things, too. Even if we are no longer whole, we are changed—and it's precisely because of this change that we can begin to build a new whole from our parts.

[post_title] => Fear and Rage and Grief and Joy [post_excerpt] => On building something better than what we've been given. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => united-states-2024-election-community-building-american-exceptionalism-fascism [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-11-20 07:25:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-11-20 07:25:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7425 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
A paper collage of blue, green, and red cutouts, with a red swirl cutout overlayed on the green.

Fear and Rage and Grief and Joy

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    [post_date] => 2024-10-25 17:34:53
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    [post_content] => 

Why you should pay attention to Arizona's Proposition 314 this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

Emily Sotelo Estrada knows firsthand the ramifications of letting local police departments enforce federal immigration laws.

She was seven years old when her father was supposed to pick her up from school one day but never arrived. Later, she discovered he’d been taken into custody by local law enforcement after a traffic stop. Her father spent almost five months separated from his family before they were eventually reunited. 

“It’s a really hard thing to understand as a child that, because your parents don't have proper documentation, that they’re gone,” says Sotelo Estrada, who grew up in Prescott, Arizona, about an hour and a half north of Phoenix. “It’s something that’s really hard and traumatic for children and because of that, I grew up in fear of law enforcement.”

Sotelo Estrada’s parents are immigrants from Mexico, and her father had been arrested after the 2010 passage of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070—colloquially known as the “show me your papers” law—which allowed local and state law enforcement agencies to ask for proof of citizenship if they suspected someone was in the country without authorized documentation. It was one of the strictest anti-immigration laws in the country, and its passage led to both national and international outcry, including marches and boycotts.

Sotelo Estrada, 20, now attends Arizona State University, and is one of many activists throughout the state speaking out against a new measure—Proposition 314—that will ask voters to once again let the state enforce federal immigration laws. She is currently an Arizona’s Future Fellow with Aliento, a youth-led organization that advocates for undocumented immigrants, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and families with mixed immigration statuses within their household. Through this leadership development program, she’s been working to educate voters on the potential effects of the proposition, hosting voter registration drives, and conducting outreach campaigns within her community and on college campuses.

If passed, Proposition 314 would make it a state crime for migrants to enter the country at any location that’s not a port of entry, allow state and local police to arrest noncitizens who have entered the country illegally, and allow state judges to order deportations. The proposition would also criminalize migrants who knowingly submit false documentation when applying for federal, state, or local public benefits, as well as those who submit false information or documents to an employer to avoid detection of employment eligibility under the E-Verify program. (E-Verify is an online system that allows employers to confirm whether their employees can work in the United States.) If passed, the law would also enact certain penalties, such as an additional five years added to any prison sentence for anyone who knowingly sells fentanyl that was smuggled into the United States and causes the death of another person. 

The Republican-controlled Arizona State Legislature passed a similar law in March during the legislative session, but Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed the measure. At the time, Hobbs said the bill would hurt businesses and communities around the state while overburdening law enforcement and potentially attracting lawsuits.

The state legislature referred the measure to the November ballot in June, and in August, the Arizona Supreme Court helped the proposition clear a final hurdle after it rejected a legal challenge from Latino advocacy groups who questioned the constitutionality of the law, allowing it to remain on the ballot.

In the leadup to the election, Proposition 314 has drawn the ire of activists, civic groups, religious leaders, and even some law enforcement personnel, who view the measure as an unfunded mandate that could pack the state’s prisons, overwhelm police and sheriff’s departments, promote racial profiling, and instill fear into immigrant communities throughout the state. 

“It’s a huge overreach in regard to law enforcement overstepping boundaries, leading up to potential racial profiling,” says Alicia Contreras, executive director of Corazón Arizona, an interfaith grassroots organization that has spoken out against the proposition. “It really puts extreme risk and harm in our community, and when we talk about our communities, that’s our Black, brown, [and] indigenous people of color in [our] community.”

Corazón Arizona has worked with a coalition of other groups to conduct voter registration drives, host a press conference, engage the community through town halls and roundtable conversations, and work with faith leaders to help educate their congregations, Contreras says. She believes the work will continue beyond election day.

“Nov. 5 is not the end,” she said. “We’re going to continue to fight with our communities, organize with our communities, and stand up to unjust laws.”

Contreras referred to the proposition as “SB 1070 on steroids,” saying it could cause further division within communities across the state and harm Arizona’s most vulnerable populations.

“It is not going to support us, and, to be clear, it does nothing to improve our immigration system,” says Contreras, who organized and protested against SB 1070 14 years ago.

Arizona recently ranked as the state with the highest number of migrant crossings, although the number of crossings along the Mexico border have plummeted after President Joe Biden enacted asylum restrictions this summer. Biden implemented the restrictions at a time when more Americans, including Democrats, have become more resistant to immigration

In Arizona, a poll released in September by Noble Predictive Insights showed that Arizona voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 314, with 63% saying they would support it and 16% saying they would vote in opposition to the measure. However, if passed by voters, Proposition 314 wouldn’t become law unless a similar measure in Texas, Senate Bill 4, is deemed constitutional. The Texas law, which was passed by its state legislature in 2023, has been blocked due to legal challenges.

The state’s Republicans have continually described the arrival of migrants as an “invasion,” with Republican State Sen. John Kavanagh saying during a televised debate last month that the proposition would attempt to address problems caused by the “tsunami of illegal immigrants.”

According to Kavanagh, Proposition 314 is supposed to target the “worst of the worst” such as drug smugglers, human smugglers, those on the terrorist watchlist, and others who wouldn’t qualify for asylum.

Kavanagh, who supported SB 1070 and defended the controversial law during the debate, said this measure is supposedly different because of its “laser beam” focus on stopping criminals and smugglers, instead of authorizing law enforcement to conduct roundups of migrants.

Democratic State Rep. Analise Ortiz called the proposition “unconstitutional” and a “waste of your tax dollars” during the debate with Kavanaugh. She also argued that it wouldn't “secure the border” and invoked its similarities to New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy, turning law enforcement and civil servants into immigration agents without the financial backing. 

Sotelo Estrada, meanwhile, only remembers the trauma of not seeing her dad for months, and has expressed fear that children and their families could experience the same hardships if this proposition is approved by voters.

“No matter your immigration status, it’s going to impact so many different families within the state of Arizona,” she says. “Our biggest thing is we don’t want children to grow up in fear.”

[post_title] => When Local Police Enforce Federal Immigration [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Arizona's Proposition 314 this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => arizona-proposition-314-immigration-border-control-patrol-law-enforcement-deportation-law-united-states-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-25 17:34:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-25 17:34:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7357 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
An illustration of the welcome sign for the state of Arizona, with a white star in the center emitting red and yellow stripes, with the text "The Grand Canyon State Welcomes You." The sign is in front of a brick wall, and behind a chainlink fence with barbed wire.

When Local Police Enforce Federal Immigration

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    [post_date] => 2024-10-24 07:12:28
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    [post_content] => 

Why you should pay attention to Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund Amendment this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

While wind energy production in the Gulf of Mexico is still a nascent industry, Louisiana voters will soon decide whether potential royalties from offshore renewables should be spent on protecting and restoring the state’s sinking coastline.

Louisiana has lost more than 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s, in large part because of the construction of levees along the Mississippi River meant to prevent flooding, which have blocked sand and mud carried by the river from replenishing the coast. Canals dredged through the marsh by oil and gas exploration companies and sea level rise have also contributed to the state’s land loss. As the coast has eroded, communities have retreated inland, landmarks have been wiped off the map, and the threat of hurricane storm surge has increased. Native American communities once driven to the coast by white settlers are now among the most vulnerable to storms and sea level rise. Indigenous fishing villages like Grand Bayou, Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-au-Chien have also been left outside of the federal levee system. Their populations have dwindled as frequent hurricanes have destroyed their homes and saltwater intrusion has made it difficult to grow crops.

“We’re talking about part of the country not being here anymore because of man made environmental change,” says Charles Sutcliffe, a resilience, climate, and coastal policy specialist for the National Wildlife Federation. And energy production in the Gulf of Mexico depends on the people and ports along Louisiana’s coast, he explains. 

As one potential solution, a November 5 ballot measure asks voters, “Do you support an amendment to require that federal revenues received by the state generated from Outer Continental Shelf alternative or renewable energy production be deposited into the Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund?” The Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund at the center of the measure is a trust fund that the state’s constitution says must be spent on projects in line with Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, a roadmap of projects aimed at protecting residents from flooding and restoring the state’s wetlands. The plan includes a $2.9 billion project to unleash the Mississippi River into degrading wetlands downriver of New Orleans and a $1.9 billion project to elevate thousands of flood-prone homes. Currently, a portion of the royalties from offshore oil and gas production is already directed to the state’s $50 billion Coastal Master Plan. If passed, the measure would also direct royalties from alternative energy production towards the same efforts. 

State Rep. Joseph Orgeron introduced the Constitutional amendment in the legislature this spring. He said he’s been asked whether the measure is putting the cart before the horse, since there isn’t a federal law yet that directs the Department of the Treasury to share offshore renewable royalties with states like there is for offshore oil and gas. 

“Louisiana is moving from only oil and gas to any energy,” Orgeron says. “If there are federal revenues to be received from them we would like those to also be dedicated to the Coastal Restoration Fund.”

The Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA) allocates a portion of the revenue from oil and gas pulled from federal waters of the Gulf to Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Before former Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) pushed to get GOMESA passed in 2006, Louisiana lawmakers created state legislation to dedicate revenue from offshore oil and gas to coastal protection and restoration, Orgeron noted. 

“It would have been difficult for her to pass that legislation if it was not for her state legislature the year before making this legislation,” he says. “Mary Landrieu used that to go to Congress and say that we’re not going to use it on splash parks and butterfly museums.”

According to Oregron, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is following Landriue’s footsteps with his efforts to get a slice of the royalties from offshore renewables sent to states. Sen. Cassidy introduced legislation last year that would send 37.5% of offshore wind revenue to states adjacent to offshore wind farms. The bill has bipartisan support and is expected to pass out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee next month, says Molly Block, Senator Bill Cassidy’s Communications Director. As written, the bill would also lift a cap on the amount of revenue states receive through GOMESA.

So far, Louisiana has secured about $21 billion of the $50 billion needed to construct all of the projects in its Coastal Master Plan. Gulf states have received more than $2 billion from offshore oil and gas royalties under GOMESA since 2009. But the $8 billion Louisiana received in legal settlements and fines resulting from BP’s 2010 oil spill in the Gulf has made up the lion’s share of funding for Louisiana’s flood protection and coastal restoration projects. Oil spill settlement payments to the state will end in 2031, leaving Louisiana’s delegation in search of more funds.

Royalties from offshore wind in the Gulf are unlikely to shore up the state’s funding shortfall for coastal projects. There are currently two offshore wind projects planned in Louisiana waters, and a third project further out in federal waters off the coast of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The offshore wind industry is expected to create thousands of jobs in Louisiana over the next decade. Proceeds from wind lease sales in federal waters go to the U.S. Treasury General Fund. Wind farm companies also pay the federal government annual rental fees during construction and operating fees once the projects start generating electricity, says John Filostrat, Director Of Public Affairs at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

But those fees are smaller than the severance fees collected on oil and gas production in the Gulf, Orgeron notes. “There is no severance. It’s not like you’re extracting oil and gas and you’re taking something from the ground. Wind works differently because you're returning the molecules of air on the other side of the blade,” he says. “You’re not severing anything.”

Last year, two million barrels of oil per day were produced from the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, generating $6 billion in federal revenue. At most, wind energy in the Gulf could produce about a tenth of the royalties that Louisiana gets from oil and gas production, Orgeron says. 
Still, Sutcliffe says the state could use every penny it gets to put towards its coast, where nearly two million people call home. “I think it’s too early to know how much it’s going to produce, but right now it’s zero,” he says. “This amendment is just trying to say however that works out those dollars are dedicated to the coast.”

[post_title] => Paying the Bill for Lousiana's Crumbling Coast [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund Amendment this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => louisiana-outer-continental-shelf-revenues-for-coastal-protection-and-restoration-fund-amendment-down-ballot-climate-change-united-states-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-24 07:12:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-24 07:12:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7341 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
An illustration of a light blue graph charting upwards, while in the background, local Louisiana flora rises proportionally. In the foreground there's a blue heron and an alligator.

Paying the Bill for Lousiana’s Crumbling Coast

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    [post_date] => 2024-10-23 04:23:19
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Why you should pay attention to the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

As voters around the United States prepare for a tight presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, they will also have to make pivotal decisions on ballot referendums in their respective states. In Wisconsin, one of the questions this year revolves around noncitizen voting. 

Noncitizen voting is illegal at the state and federal level in the U.S. On voter registration forms, people must sign under the penalty of perjury that they are a citizen, facing punishment of fines, imprisonment, or deportation if they are not. But on a local scale, noncitizen voting is allowed in some cities and towns in Vermont, California, and Maryland, allowing residents to cast a vote in school board and city council elections. 

At this time, there are no elections in Wisconsin that allow for noncitizen voting. Wisconsin previously allowed noncitizen voting in 1848, but that was disallowed by 1912. In a ballot initiative on deck for Nov. 5, however, a coalition of Wisconsin Republicans are seeking to change language in the state’s constitution around citizen voting, making it as explicit as possible that noncitizens cannot vote in any election in Wisconsin. 

Currently, the state’s constitution reads “every United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district who may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum.” The referendum, however, would change the language to “only a United States citizen age 18 or older who resides in an election district may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum.”

A yes vote for the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment would allow the language change and a no vote would prevent any changes to the constitution. 

Behind the bill

There are 14 Wisconsin state senators and 41 state representatives behind the push to pass this referendum, an effort which began in September of 2023

While several members of the Wisconsin Legislature did not reply to requests for interviews, Sen. Julian Bradley, a Republican among the coalition that introduced the ballot measure, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that their goal is to make it extremely difficult for noncitizens to ever have an opportunity to vote in Wisconsin. He also said he wants less room for interpretation around the law. 

"If you want to vote in elections, then you have to declare your citizenship, and you have to go through the process," he told the Sentinel.

However, Debra Cronmiller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, says the initiative is unnecessary and could foster misinformation. The league was one of 30 organizations that has endorsed a no-vote on the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment and also released a toolkit with information about the ballot. 

“It creates an opportunity to suggest, imply, whatever word you want to insert there, that this is a problem. This is not a problem. That's been documented time and time again,” she says. “It makes me wonder, is the real motivation here not to change the constitution to prohibit noncitizens from voting in municipal races, but is it to fuel a conversation that is more about us and them, who should have the rights and who shouldn't have the rights.”

Cronmiller compared the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment to a 2011 push by Republicans in Wisconsin to require voter IDs during elections. She said that on its surface, both sound good: ensuring that only citizens of Wisconsin are voting in elections. But she also pointed out the unintended consequences of these policies. In the case of voter IDs, not everyone has a driver's license or works for the state or is a member of a tribal community. And in 2017, the Associated Press reported that the law ultimately turned eligible voters away as a result. 

“There's too many people who were unnecessarily disenfranchised because of what sounded like a good idea,” she says. “We suspect [the same] in this instance, where only a citizen should vote sounds good, but the constitution actually already guarantees that.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission, a six-member board created in 2015 to oversee election processes, reported 30 potential cases of fraud from July 1, 2023 through September 12, 2024. However, none of the cases were related to citizenship, and most were related to people voting twice or involved people with felonies. 

In October of 2023, a woman in Wisconsin was charged with election fraud for voting in an April school board election, despite not being a citizen. But she admitted to the act, saying that it was a misunderstanding and that her daughter-in-law completed the paperwork due to an English language barrier, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She has since entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and the charges will be dismissed. 

Anti-immigrant concerns

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin organization that works with the civil rights of immigrants, says the drive behind the ballot initiative is anti-immigration sentiment and disinformation.

“My greatest concern is that this is being used to create a narrative that is intended to motivate part of Trump’s MAGA base to turn out on election day and based on how people look, and if they’re not English dominant, they will try to intimidate and harass U.S. citizen voters to try to steal the elections,” she says. 

Neumann-Ortiz is also concerned that the ballot initiative is part of a longer-term strategy of voter suppression.

“It’s been a very calculated agenda by the right wing,” she says. “There’s been a relentless attack on eroding voting rights.”

She pointed to a lawsuit, Cerny v Wisconsin Elections Commission, filed by a citizen in Wisconsin in August. In the case, Ardis Cerny, a resident of Pewaukee, sued the commission and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to challenge how the state verifies the citizenship status of voters with drivers licenses. Cerny alleges that the commission does not check the registration of applicants with the Department of Motor Vehicles list of driver’s licenses and identification cards to ensure they have citizenship. The lawsuit is still ongoing. 

Neumann-Ortiz believes that the amendment would “disenfranchise so many people,” because when residents become naturalized U.S. citizens, they don’t have to go to the DMV to update immigration status, meaning the documentation isn’t always aligned. When they register to vote, however, they have to show evidence of citizenship, she says. 

Immigrants who are working to gain citizenship are not interested in registering to vote illegally and jeopardizing their future, Neumann-Ortiz added. 

“It’s more anti-immigration rhetoric, it’s more disinformation, and it’s voter suppression for all voters,” she says. “It’s an attack on democracy.”

The Wisconsin constitution has been amended 148 times, with the most recent change in April of 2023. In regards to voting, previous amendments have been made to expand rights based on race, gender, and age. It will also not be the only state where noncitizen voting is on the ballot in November: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina also have ballot measures regarding noncitizen voting this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislature, a coalition of members of state legislatures around the U.S.

“This question on the ballot sounds pretty good, but what you have to do as a conscientious voter is look behind the question. Why is it being asked? What could be the unintended consequences?” Cronmiller says. “Our elections are fair, they're safe, they're accountable, only the people who should be getting ballots are getting ballots. There's no problem to fix here and I think we're actually potentially creating a future problem by enacting this particular constitutional change.”

[post_title] => Is Noncitizen Voting Actually a Non-Issue? [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => noncitizen-voting-wisconsin-citizenship-voting-requirement-immigration-local-state-federal-united-states-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-23 04:23:20 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-23 04:23:20 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7331 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
A colorful illustration of a city hall, with red tape over its front doors. The top of the roof mimics a vote-by-mail drop-off box, with a completed ballot halfway into it.

Is Noncitizen Voting Actually a Non-Issue?

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Why you should pay attention to Massachusetts's Question 5 this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

A contentious ballot question has Massachusetts wait and bar staff fearing a dramatic change in their hourly take home pay following this November. For Corri DePatra, a bartender and server since 2001, the potential industry change is maddening.

“They’re trying to pull on heartstrings,” DePatra says. “I just think it is very emotionally manipulative.”

Question 5 on the Massachusetts ballot this election year is an initiative proposed by One Fair Wage, a national nonprofit and NGO. If the measure passes in the state, it would lead to a gradual rise in the minimum wage base pay for tipped workers from its current $6.75 to $15 an hour in the next five years. Eventually, the change would also allow for a shared tip pool between the front and back of the house to be managed by restaurant owners. But many restaurant workers have come out in opposition to its passing, arguing it would likely actually decrease their take home pay. 

“We were all at city hall and I went in to listen to the hearing,” DePatra says, noting that she was particularly outraged by One Fair Wage’s closing arguments, which pointed to discrimination against women as a driving factor for the initiative. As a waitress standing with others at the hearing, DePatra felt they were invalidating her experiences as a woman working as a tipped restaurant worker, and misrepresenting the amount of hard work that goes into being a part of the restaurant industry.

DePatra works at The Kenmore, a Boston pub specializing in fresh pregame eats and draft beers, where signs to “vote no” adorn the walls in hopes of informing customers of how their restaurant workers feel. To learn more, all signs point to a website for a coalition of small and large restaurants known as the Committee to Protect Tips.

The Committee is spearheaded by two of the largest groupings of restaurant leaders in the state: Massachusetts Restaurants United (MRU), a coalition of industry leaders from various sized restaurants and cafes that began after the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Massachusetts Restaurant Association (MRA), a not-for-profit lobbyist group. Their joint mission against Question 5 has so far been endorsed by eight local mayors, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and hundreds of Massachusetts restaurant workers.

“A lot of people are going to lose their jobs if this passes,” says Ryan Lotz, president of MRU and leader at Traveler Street Hospitality. “We’re going to see secondary and incurred costs go up for the restaurant operators and owners.”

Earlier this year, an MRU poll about industry crises noted that 85% of restaurant leaders said they are one surprise expense away from having to close. According to Lotz, restaurants are going to see an increase of over $18,000 per year per employee if the initiative is fully deployed, something most simply can’t afford. Restaurants will be forced to shift to models with fewer servers but quicker service, he argues, implementing functions like QR code menus or counters. And for guests, it will also mean higher menu prices and more fees on their checks when it comes to processing service. 

“I think that people don't really understand the restaurant industry, and don't really understand how slim the margins are,” Lotz says.

These profit margins typically fall in the 0-15% range, with the bulk of restaurants falling around the 3-5% mark, according to national restaurant system Toast. Most of those restaurants are only able to stay open, Lotz argues, because of tips.

Currently, Massachusetts, like the majority of the United States, operates on a tip credit across the restaurant industry. This translates to every server or bartender making a base pay and tips filling in the rest of the minimum wage and more. Server Adam Dougherty has been in the industry for seven years and currently works at Fenway sports bar Cask ‘N Flagon. Even on a slow day, he says he already surpasses the $15 bar.

“People will probably tip less,” says Dougherty. “I’m going to be voting no.”

Advocates for the ballot question, meanwhile, argue that tipped wages need to become a thing of the past, and allege that the tip credit model is particularly harmful for women and people of color across the industry. This is because it can allow restaurants to get away with paying staff less than a livable wage without consequence, while putting the burden on customers to make up the difference. 

One Fair Wage, which is headquartered in California, champions the initiative across the country via satellite organizing heads which advocate for tipped worker payment changes state-by-state. According to Grace McGovern, one of two Massachusetts full-time state organizers working for One Fair Wage, who has been a tipped worker herself, combating misinformation has been difficult. 

“So many people are just so surprised that a subminimum wage is still in place,” says McGovern.

She adds opposition from the Committee to Protect Tips has also weaponized their research.

“Even if 90% of the 300 people that they had completed their survey answered that they want things to stay the same, there are still 124,700 tipped workers in Massachusetts—at least—without their voices heard,” McGovern says.

Massachusetts is one of six active campaign efforts targeted at raising the minimum wage this year, with other states including Rhode Island, Arizona, and Missouri. But in total, One Fair Wage has initiated 16 total targeted campaigns in states or territories, according to their website

One place where the campaign has been successful is Washington, D.C., where according to McGovern, there has been a positive increase in the earnings of workers. Lotz, on the other hand, sees it as a tragedy.

“This passed recently, and when it did, we saw approximately 6,000 jobs lost and restaurants closing,” Lotz says.

Another hotly debated aspect of the Massachusetts ballot question is the change to the shared tip pool. Currently, Massachusetts does not have comprehensive shared tips legislation. According to McGovern, the initiative would eventually allow for tip sharing with front and back of house, but it is not immediately required. Its ultimate purpose, however, is to move us away from tipping culture as a whole, and instead make a higher minimum wage the norm. 

Jay Zagorsky, professor of public policy and law at the Questrom School of Business, agrees that tips should be eliminated, but thinks Question 5 is not the answer.

“Question 5 is poorly written and poorly thought out,” he says. 

According to Zagorsky, one of the biggest indicators of Question 5’s failure comes in the form of the legislative committee’s comments in the ballot guide, which states in all capital letters that it "OUGHT NOT TO BE ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE AT THIS TIME."

So if Question 5 is not the answer, what is? Those voting no are not quite sure.

“Eliminating the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers on a state-by-state basis is not the right way to go,” says Zagorsky, pointing out how rising labor costs will directly lead to fewer jobs and those that remain will be “worse off.”

For Lotz, fighting the current initiative remains his first priority. He can’t quite think of anything else before that’s resolved.

“I would be more than happy to start working on that if this doesn’t pass,” Lotz says. “What keeps me awake at night is that people are going into the voting booth in November with a lack of knowledge. We need to get as many people to understand the gravity of this question before November.”

[post_title] => The Tipping Point [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Massachusetts's Question 5 this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => massachusetts-question-5-minimum-wage-tips-restaurant-workers-initiative-one-fair-wage-state-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-22 19:08:26 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-22 19:08:26 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7313 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
An illustration of interchanging layers of dollar bills and paper checks, getting smaller and smaller with each layer. On top are a few pieces of candy and some loose change. In the left top corner is a red, white, and blue button that reads 2024.

The Tipping Point

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Why you should pay attention to California's Proposition 6 this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

When you’re incarcerated in California and the prison system says you have to work, you can’t say no. It’s the law.

Some prison jobs are basic, like cleaning the showers or the mess hall. Other assignments are more dangerous, such as in 2020, when women at a Chino prison in San Bernardino County said they spent as many as 12 hours a day during the COVID-19 outbreak stitching masks they were forbidden from wearing. Injuries are common, with everything from cuts and bruises and carpal tunnel syndrome all the way up to amputations of fingers and hands. Sometimes, the risks are even higher. When she was incarcerated, Leesa Nomura of Koreatown, Los Angeles, remembers other women crying in fear when ordered to join the prison crews fighting the state’s wildfires, a dangerous and occasionally deadly assignment with pay topping out at $10.24 a day. That’s on the high end. Some prison assignments pay as low as eight cents an hour.

“How do you want your neighbor to come home from prison? You want them to come home beaten down and broken by a system that doesn’t care about them?” asks Nomura, a membership organizer for the nonprofit California Coalition for Women Prisoners. “Something that is breaking down their bodies, that is breaking down their internal resolve over time? Involuntary servitude to a system that is totally, 100% benefiting off of them at cents on the dollar?”

The fundamental power of every worker against dangerous or unfair working conditions is the right and the ability to quit. But on the inside, work stoppages are “serious rule violations” on par with trying to escape. To advocates, that’s why prison work has a likeness to an older practice, especially given that a vastly disproportionate share of prisoners are Black.

“Slavery is slavery, whether you are on the plantation picking cotton, or doing work at the CCWF [Central California Women's Facility] or at San Quentin,” says Katie Dixon, Policy & Campaign Coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.

On November 5, Golden State voters could complete the unfinished business of 1865, when states like California followed the lead of the U.S. government in banning chattel slavery but not forced prison work under the 13th Amendment after the Civil War. Approval of Proposition 6 would remove the “involuntary servitude” exemption in California’s state constitution and trigger a companion law, AB 628, that requires the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to develop a voluntary system where prison work can be rewarded, but not punished. 

Currently, nearly 60,000 of the roughly 90,000 people incarcerated in California state prisons have work assignments, and “when assigning an individual to work, academic, therapeutic or other institutional programs, the individual’s expressed desires and needs are among the factors that are considered,” Terry Hardy, press secretary for the state prisons, said in an email, declining to comment on the ballot measure. But this doesn’t mean these considerations are without consequences: Saying no to work can mean punishments, such as less time out of your cell, and fewer privileges, including losing out on an early release

Still, many people who are incarcerated want to work for reasons of their own, and some studies have suggested participation in the California Prison Industry Authority, which runs prison manufacturing and training programs, is associated with lower recidivism. “The alternative to not being out of your cell is being in your cell 24 hours a day,” Donald Hooker, who prefers to be called “C-Note,” says in a phone interview from the Los Angeles County state prison in Lancaster. “You’re in the cell, how far can my thoughts really go? My body, I’m freer. That’s the incentive. Not being cooped up in what is in essence 9 by 15 inches [feet] of cell space, and you’re sharing this with another person. That alone, being in that environment, is incentive enough for many people.”

But when he recently received an assignment for kitchen duty, he refused. “This is intense, intense manual labor, and I’m turning 59 in December,” C-Note says. “I would have been exhausting the remainder of my life force in the service of Gavin Newsom or whoever the governor is. And I can’t see the rest of my limited days on planet Earth exhausting my life force for the state.”

C-Note received corrective action but didn’t realize until later that the notation in his personnel file could have an even bigger impact. “If you have to go to the parole board, as I do, they’ll see that,” he says. “And those could make you stay in prison longer.”

Banning forced prison work altogether has also been a major objective of California’s advocates for reparations to Black Americans. While it would not make prison work illegal, including for pennies an hour, Proposition 6 would allow inmates the option to say no and to have a choice in participating in work.

“People talk about California being a free state [before the Civil War], but we had a law on the books: If someone had slaves when they moved to California, they could continue to own slaves,” says Assemblymember Lori D. Wilson, the Democratic chair of the legislature’s Black Caucus, who sponsored the legislation creating the ballot measure. “We, as Californians, have done historic harm.”

It’s a criminal justice issue where often-progressive California is a follower, not a leader. The state is one of 16 with an involuntary servitude provision on the books even as seven have issued repeals since 2018. An initial effort by California lawmakers stalled in 2022 after a provision to mandate minimum wage for prison work was estimated to cost $1.5 billion annually. The wage demand was dropped for the version on this November’s ballot, which has bipartisan support and little official opposition apart from a couple of newspaper editorials. 

“Inmates should not be legally empowered to dictate what chores they’re willing to do while behind bars,” the Mercury News and East Bay Times wrote. “The fundamental question here is whether inmates should be required to provide work that contributes toward their room and board. We believe they should, just as the rest of us on the outside who have not committed crimes must also do.” (The cost of incarcerating each person in California is now $132,860, having skyrocketed in recent years.) 

Voters are also skeptical. Fifty percent of likely voters said they oppose Proposition 6, while 46% said they would vote yes, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll. Supporters chalk up some voters’ caution to the ballot measure’s adjacency to another, far more hotly contested criminal justice ballot measure, Proposition 36, which would increase penalties for drug and theft crimes.

“Our polling was very similar to PPIC’s,” says Esteban Núñez of the consulting firm Actum, one of the lead campaign consultants on the Anti-Recidivism Coalition’s ballot push. “We knew this from the gate, but nobody knows what the fuck ‘involuntary servitude’ was. It’s a legal term.”

Proposition 6 supporters are still optimistic they can pull out a victory on Nov. 5 by putting in campaign work in the coming weeks. And a win in the nation’s most populous state could add momentum to the national movement to repeal similar policies at the state and federal levels. 

“It’s about making the case between now and then. People are getting their ballots,” says Wilson. “I just don’t want to wake up the day after election day and find out California voters said it was okay to have slavery on the books.”

[post_title] => California Voters Can End Forced Prison Labor [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to California's Proposition 6 this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => california-proposition-prop-6-indentured-servitude-prison-slave-labor-incarcerated-peoples-rights-state-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-22 16:12:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-22 16:12:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7316 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
An illustration of three incarcerated people standing in front of a yellow police lineup wall with heights listed on the left. The face of each inmate is cropped out, but each is wearing an orange jumpsuit. The two on the outside are holding white pieces of paper, one with a check mark and the other with an x. The inmate in the center is holding a ball and chain, with a check mark on it.

California Voters Can End Forced Prison Labor

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Why the Abraham Accords could not bring peace to the Middle East.

In its November/December 2023 issue, the political magazine Foreign Affairs published a longform essay titled “The Sources of American Power,” which posited that the United States needs to “lay a new foundation of American strength” in the Middle East “that protects its interests and values and advances the common good.” Written shortly before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 (but published after), the author argued that “although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades” thanks to the Biden administration’s responsible stewardship. This lapse of critical judgment might have been forgivable had its writer not been US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.1 But he was also not the only American official who had lulled himself into false security. 

Since taking office, the Biden administration, with great fanfare, had chosen to double down on the Trump era’s diplomatic coup, the Abraham Accords, in hopes it would become the crown jewel of regional foreign policy: building a new Middle Eastern economic and security architecture between the Gulf and Israel that would successfully confront and contain their mutual regional antagonist, Iran.

The Abraham Accords’ sleight of hand was subverting the Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking paradigm in the process. Instead of normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Middle East in exchange for a Palestinian state, as was the guiding principle of negotiations since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, the 2020 Abraham Accords dropped the question of establishing a Palestinian state altogether, making instead vague allusions to peace. Its supporters didn’t seem to mind. In Abu Dhabi and other regional capitals, they believed the time was ripe to put aside “tedious” questions of protecting Palestinians or their unrealized sovereignty, and to instead focus on the much more tangible and lucrative questions of trade, defense cooperation, and intelligence-sharing, as well as upgraded strategic relationships with the United States.

In this respect, it worked. Through the Abraham Accords, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan all signed up for normalization agreements with Israel, and a flurry of diplomatic, touristic, and commercial enterprises sprung up in their wake. Israelis partied in Dubai; Bahrainis headed to Tel Aviv. Defense and intelligence sharing accelerated. All the while, the Biden administration continued to pursue Trump’s ultimate goal of bringing Saudi Arabia into the normalized fold. Pundits in the US crowed about a new era of peace.                    

Today, conditions across the region could hardly be worse. Escalations and counter-escalations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen threaten to deepen the abyss of violence and suffering for civilians. A year ago, on October 7, 2023, Hamas’s attack killed over 1,300 Israelis. The attack was strategically timed, in part, to disrupt Israeli-Saudi normalization. In the months since, Israel has killed some 42,000 Palestinians. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what was Gaza. A hundred thousand Palestinians are wounded. Two million Gazans languish amid devastation under Israeli military occupation. The Israeli apartheid machine continues to destroy lives and cities apace in the West Bank. Palestinians confront ongoing Israeli settler violence under the full imprimatur of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Near 10,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned without pretense of due process. Some 2,000 civilians are already dead in Lebanon just in the last week, as Israel launched yet another invasion to fight Hezbollah. Ninety-seven Israeli hostages remain in Hamas’s custody in Gaza. The Red Sea has become a perilous commercial passage owing to Houthi attacks. And the prospect of a full-blown war between Israel and Iran grows ever more acute as Tehran executes another dramatic but fruitless missile barrage. No ceasefire is in sight on any front.

How did the Abraham Accords, heralded as a new paradigm for the Middle East, yield a total collapse of security and stability across the region? The answer lies in the deliberate effort of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his foremost backer, the United States, to sustain Israel’s control over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely. American officials—Republican or Democrat—may be loath to acknowledge this reality, but the central conceit (and consequently the failure) of the Abraham Accords lay in imagining a world where Palestinians did not exist. The status quo, which seemed quiet enough to Mr. Sullivan, was, in reality, deeply toxic. Though US policy formally sustains the fiction of a two-state solution, the Abraham Accords in effect tried to bury the question of when—or whether—Palestinians should ever be free and see an independent state come to fruition.

The desperate charm offensive led by Biden administration officials Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein to convince Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman to accede to the Abraham Accords, dangling offers of a defense pact among other political inducements, has failed. Even authoritarians need to keep their fingers on the pulse of public sentiment—and in Arab states, establishing diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel is deeply unpopular. Mohamed bin Salman has admitted the carnage in Gaza makes the prospect of normalization a political nonstarter in the Kingdom.

The Gulf states are now in an awkward position. On the one hand, states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain had already been working steadily to stabilize relationships with Iran, despite overriding tensions for the past several years. At a strategic level, there’s a clear understanding that diplomatic exchanges can head off the worst types of violent confrontation. We see these ongoing efforts as Saudi Arabia and Iran attempt rapprochement: The Kingdom is unquestionably nervous about the threat on its southern border from a febrile and trigger-happy Houthi movement. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are equally pleased to see the destruction of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which they see as Islamist-Iranian proxies that pose a direct challenge to their visions of a consolidated Gulf hegemony in the Middle East. 

Reports that American officials greenlighted the Israeli escalation against Hezbollah after the two sides had agreed to a 21-day ceasefire opens the prospect of a more dangerous phase to this transnational conflict, wherein the US and Israel take this moment as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the security architecture of the Middle East. The risk is that Israel could continue pursuing “greater strategic objectives” in responding to Iran’s missile attack on October 1, and drawing in American support for what would be a cataclysmic war of regime change in Iran.

None of this is inevitable. It’s possible that the US will be able to convince Israel to deliver a calibrated military response to Iran’s latest attack, tamping down further escalation for a brief window of time. But it feels increasingly likely that the delicate balancing act between security actors in the region that has prevailed over the last decade is about to come crashing down in the face of Israel’s unabashed impunity in both Gaza and Lebanon. This is not just because Arab states are unwilling to undo their peace agreements with Israel (Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi underscored again last week that Arab nations stand ready to ensure Israel’s security), but because it is unlikely that Israel will ever permit the creation of a Palestinian state, and none will emerge short of an internationally-enforced partition of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The stark reality that Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi should grasp is that the fastest means to defanging the “Axis of Resistance” is the establishment of said Palestinian state. That state is not going to be the product of negotiations, if it ever comes. The occupation will end abruptly; there are no piecemeal negotiated solutions to apartheid. For the sake of his own political survival, Netanyahu will continue to foment chaos across the Middle East to retain power for as long as Washington allows him free rein. And in large part, the Abraham Accords are to blame. In saying the lives of Palestinians were less important than normalization, the brokers of the Abraham Accords helped embellish Israel’s fiction that it could sustain the status quo with Palestinians without friction or blowback. They were grievously wrong.

[post_title] => Biblical Failure [post_excerpt] => Why the Abraham Accords were never going to bring peace to the Middle East. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => abraham-accords-middle-east-united-states-foreign-policy-peace-israel-palestine-lebanon-uae-sudan-morocco-bahrain-saudi-arabia-war [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-08 21:36:42 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-08 21:36:42 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7261 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump, Foreign Affairs Minister of Bahrain Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, and Foreign Affairs Minister of the United Arab Emirates Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords on the South Lawn of the White House September 15, 2020 in Washington, DC, USA. They stand on a balcony, waving at the photographers below. Photo by Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA(Sipa via AP Images)

Biblical Failure

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Who's taking the biggest hit in the global fast food boycott?

In the proxy war over fast food that’s now enveloping the Muslim world, it’s clear who took the first shot. But unlike the war that triggered it, who exactly is footing the bill is another matter.

In the early days of the War in Gaza, Israel’s McDonald’s franchisee, Alonyal Ltd, set off a tidal wave of controversy when it announced it would give free food to Israeli soldiers. In January, the Israeli franchisee behind Pizza Hut appeared to follow suit, when the Palestinian news source Quds News Network posted screenshots from Pizza Hut Israel’s Instagram account of smiling IDF soldiers holding stacks of pizza boxes which, according to the caption, Pizza Hut had given them for free. 

Both Alonyal and Tabasco Holdings, the Israeli Pizza Hut franchisee, appear to have acted alone, without approval from the American companies that own their respective brands. But their decisions to give food to soldiers fighting perhaps the world’s most watched conflicts has led to serious global ramifications. As the news ricocheted around social media, regular McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and KFC customers all over the world, but especially in predominantly Muslim countries, announced plans to boycott all three restaurants. (The KFC and Pizza Hut brands are both owned by the same company, Yum! Brands.) 

Attempting to quell the outrage, McDonald’s Corporation, the US company that Alonyal paid to use the Golden Arches logo and menu, released statements insisting McDonald’s was politically neutral and had no ties to either side of the conflict. Soon after, McDonald’s franchisees from Turkey to Oman—all of them unrelated to Alonyal, except in their common relations to the McDonald’s brand—distanced themselves from Alonyal by issuing their own statements of support for the people of Gaza and pledging support for relief efforts in the region. 

But for millions of customers, the presumed complicity of any business wearing the brand of a global fast food company was already a foregone conclusion. Either they did not grasp the fact that franchisees were independently owned, or they believed independent ownership did not absolve them from their Israeli counterpart’s choices. The fact that the United States government is the leading international sponsor of the IDF only added fuel to the flames: Regardless of ownership, customers still considered these brands to be inherently American. Franchisees in countries with large Muslim populations in the Middle East and Asia soon reported massive drops in sales. In February, the McDonald’s Corporation announced it had missed sales estimates for the first time since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Boycott promoters on social media took declining sales as a clear sign they were hitting the intended target. “Let this be a lesson to any company that wants to continue supporting the Zionist entity,” a PhD student in Canada, who goes by the handle @palfolkore, said in a TikTok with over 14 thousand likes, posted the day McDonald’s released its sales figures. “Your stocks will drop. Your earnings will be hit … There is no amount of rebranding you can do to dissuade us … We know what you are. We know what your politics are.” (@palfolkore did not respond to a request for comment.) Their post was one of countless others celebrating the apparent victory, and the boycott continues to this day.

The conceptual simplicity of a boycott, and a fast food boycott in particular, has made it especially easy for activists to get behind: Fast food companies are huge, global, and, unlike arms manufacturers, whose connection to the war is as direct as it is obvious, they depend on money from the general public to keep going. But fast food, like globalization itself, does not easily lend itself to such a straightforward line of attack. Before taking aim at fast food, it helps to understand who’s actually behind it. 

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If you know something about how the fast food industry works, you’re probably familiar with the concept of franchising. It works like this: The fast food company, called the “franchisor,” gives a company or individual, the “franchisee,” the right to use its name, menu, and likeness in a given area. In exchange, the franchisee typically pays the franchisor an annual fee and gives it a cut of its revenue. During the industry’s early rise in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, franchising gave companies like McDonald’s and Burger King a way to expand without staking their own capital. Instead of borrowing money themselves to build new restaurants, they could rely on people with their own savings and lines of credit to underwrite new operations. It would ultimately benefit customers, too: A person could walk into a McDonald’s in Portland, Maine and another three thousand miles away in San Diego, California and expect the same food and service, despite the fact that each was independently owned. 

As the industry became larger and richer, the capital advantage of franchising became less important. Many companies backed off the practice, electing the more profitable route of opening their own restaurants. But overseas, franchising still proved critical to the industry’s expansion. First, franchisees knew their own regions more intimately than a large corporation, headquartered on another continent, ever could. Secondly, local ownership allowed the industry to blur the lines around its own national identity. Depending on the mood of its customers, McDonald’s or KFC could be an American brand, a local one, or some indistinct fusion of the two. 

But almost as long as global fast food companies have maintained a presence outside the US, they’ve been the subject of political protest, and even political violence, as was the case in a series of attacks and bombings in Latin American countries, such as El Salvador and Peru, from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and in majority Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Lebanon in the 2000s and the 2010s. In many cases, it was clear the activists, rebels, or terrorists who targeted a particular fast food outlet intended to make it a proxy for something bigger. Often, the United States was the primary target. Other times, it was globalization itself. In his book-length account of his travels in India, The Age of Kali, William Dalrymple recounts how, on the 51st anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1999, members of a farmers’ union in Bangalore trashed a KFC in the name of a “second freedom struggle” to stop “the invasion of India by multinationals.” 

Drawing a line from India’s independence struggle to KFC may have been a stretch. But it made striking at a locally-owned fast food outlet easier to justify. After all, if multinational corporations were colonial powers, what were franchisees if not their collaborators? 

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A similar question hovers over the current wave of consumer action sweeping the Muslim world. If symbolism is the point, does it matter who among the multitude of people and institutions behind various international fast food brands takes the biggest hit during a boycott? Fast food corporations may be nebulous, but franchised restaurants are their real-world manifestations. They may be independently owned, but they are nothing if not closely affiliated with the corporations whose names they carry. Why not go after them? 

We might see the current wave of boycotts as an attempt to apply that same logic on a massive scale. But the result has been that people are going after franchisees with no business in Israel at all. In August, Americana Group, a franchisee that owns more than 2,000 KFCs and other restaurants across the Middle East and Kazakhstan, reported a 40 percent loss in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2023. QSR Group, the leading KFC and Pizza Hut franchisee in Southeast Asia, temporarily closed over one hundred KFCs in Muslim-majority areas. 

“Let’s give it up for Malaysia, everybody,” another TikToker going by the handle @anti__mia said of the news. “The Malaysians really know how to boycott.” 

Yet the people most affected by these boycotts may not actually be protesters’ intended target: Neither Americana nor QSR Group has any business in Israel. In fact, the largest backers of both franchisees are agencies of governments that have taken positions against Israel. Americana Group’s largest investor is the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—a country which has never recognized Israel and has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. The controlling shareholder of QSR Brands is an investment company owned by the Malaysian state of Johor, and one of its largest minority shareholders is another government entity, a pension fund controlled by the Malaysian Ministry of Finance. The Malaysian government is so at odds with Israel that, last year, it adopted a boycott of its own, banning all Israeli ships from entering its ports. 

Fast food ownership might be fuzzy by nature, but the effects of the current boycotts are quite vivid. Earlier this year, QSR Brands intended to put itself up on the local stock exchange, attracting more investors and likely bringing in additional money for the state-owned agencies that control it. But after closing stores and watching profits tumble, those plans are indefinitely on hold. Despite the avowedly pro-Palestinian position of the Malaysian government, to activists and Gaza-watchers on TikTok, the KFC name—and its American ties—speaks louder. 

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Back in Israel, McDonald’s has gone through an even more dramatic transition. In April, McDonald’s Corporation made the drastic choice to buy back all 225 of Alonyal’s restaurants for an undisclosed sum. Owning Israeli McDonald’s outright will expose the company to more risk, but it will also give the company more control, and the local stores more stability during a period of political upheaval. Boycott or not, the fast food industry finds a way. 

Ownership also means McDonald’s Corporation gets to capture the profits for itself instead of sharing them with a local partner. Ironically, a boycott of Israeli stores now would do more harm to the US company’s bottom line than it did when the boycott began. Despite the protestations of its corporate masters, the fast food industry—like any global industry—is enmeshed in world politics, after all.

[post_title] => The Proxy Fast Food War [post_excerpt] => Who's taking the biggest hit in the global fast food boycott? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => global-fast-food-boycott-gaza-palestine-israel-middle-east-mcdonalds-kfc-pizza-hut [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-04 01:41:16 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-04 01:41:16 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://old.conversationalist.org/?p=7248 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
A dark green toy soldier shaped like Ronald McDonald doing a salut, wearing a helmet. It's on a bright yellow background.

The Proxy Fast Food War