Democracy Promotion in East Asia, "Behind the New Iron Curtain (Russia)", How Diversity "Narrows the Mind", The End of Pitchfork, American Accents and Dialects
Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
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During a news conference on August 12, 1986, President Ronald Reagan famously uttered the line: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. " This resonates with a lot of people to this day, particularly those of a more libertarian philosophical view.
I think that the same effect can be generated from this fictional line (courtesy of yours truly): “We’re from the US Government and we’re here to help spread democracy”.
“Democracy promotion” has seen its value slide in recent years due to the many failures (and a few disasters) that have resulted from it. Democracy promotion by way of Colour Revolutions saw rump Yugoslavia officially lose Kosovo in 2006. It also set the stage for Georgia to be defeated in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Even more importantly, democracy promotion by way of Colour Revolution has resulted in the death of over 100,0001 Ukrainian soldiers and the loss of 20% of its territory.
Democracy promotion in Egypt saw the Muslim Brotherhood take power, only for the Egyptian Army to take it back. Democracy promotion in Libya led to the destruction of that state, the collapse of its living standards, and the opening up of slave markets and migrant pipelines into Europe…all atop a civil war. Democracy promotion in Syria led to al-Qaida and ISIS threatening to take power in Damascus. Democracy promotion in Iraq strangled the state, unofficially partitioning it into three autonomous zones.
You would think that after all of these setbacks2 that the realists in the US foreign policy community would have won the debate regarding democracy promotion vs. hard power realism. Those who think that way think wrong. The Biden regime has attempted to position its foreign policy approach as “defending democracy against authoritarianism”. This means that it is committed to maintain democracy abroad…whatever definition of ‘democracy’ is applicable on that day.
Michael Green and Daniel Twining (both part of the US foreign policy community) argue that there is a strategic case for democracy promotion in Asia, in that “the spread of liberal values gives the USA a competitive edge over China”.
Democracy promotion is falling out of fashion in U.S. foreign policy circles. This is especially true when it comes to Asia: policymakers tend to believe that if the United States dwells on principles when engaging with that region, it will become distracted and lose the edge to China—purportedly a more pragmatic country focused on economic prowess and hard power. Beijing’s grand strategy undoubtedly focuses on dominating the Indo-Pacific, controlling the development and production of the most advanced technologies, and making China the hub of the global economy.
China goes around the world and builds infrastructure in poor countries. The USA sends its people around the world to lecture countries on human rights, and then also demands that they upend their cultures in order to conform with prevailing social mores in the West. Which of the two is more appealing to non-allied countries?
Here’s a conceit:
But Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ambitions are also ideological: he aims to shift global opinion toward an admiration for authoritarian rule and thereby forge a world safe for his autocracy and eager to welcome Chinese influence.
China’s soft power approach abroad is what leads many to admire China and welcome its influence, especially in comparison to the heavy-handed and increasingly clumsy USA.
These efforts deserve more American encouragement and support. The United States should partner with Asian allies working to strengthen democratic institutions from the Maldives to Mongolia and engage more robustly with civil-society watchdogs that fight against corruption that corrodes national sovereignty and threatens U.S. interests. Of course, many countries in Asia remain only partly free, and some still have authoritarian governments. But most of Asia’s one-party states still support a free and open Indo-Pacific rather than the international order China’s revisionist autocracy wishes to create—a hierarchical world in which expansionism is celebrated and great powers are free to suborn the independence of their neighbors.
Translation of the bolded portion: “only through multiparty democracy can we, the USA, play one side off against the other in order to keep that country in our orbit. Civil society works on our behalf to keep their leaders and institutions in check and under our control.”
Countering China in its own neighbourhood:
President Joe Biden has signaled that he believes the global fight for democratic values is crucial. He has struggled, however, to frame democracy as a critical part of the United States’ Asia strategy. His administration has become so focused on dominating the narrative in its great-power competition with China that it has inadvertently reinforced the impression that Washington is mainly concerned with its own economic and military rivalry with Beijing, not with how China’s ambitions affect other states in the region. But the fact remains that the most powerful states in China’s neighborhood have far more values in common with Washington than they do with Beijing. U.S. strategy needs to reflect that favorable ideological balance of power in Asia.
The key word here is “values”, which should be read as “conforms with our foreign policy and regional economic objectives”.
This next bit is very funny:
While some American policymakers are questioning whether values-based internationalism may be a liability in strategic competition, many Asian countries are prioritizing support for a value-based foreign policy. Japanese leaders, for instance, understand clearly that they must defend democracy in Europe if they hope to defend it in Asia. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has championed support for Ukraine against Russia’s assault, saying in 2022 that “Ukraine today could be Taiwan tomorrow.”
Ukraine is nowhere near being a liberal democracy today, as many continuously point out. This “defense of democracy” is just support for its main ally’s strategic objectives, and has zero to do with actual political philosophy.
The fear:
If the United States merely follows a realist strategy in Asia, that would play into China’s hand. China, after all, is not leaving ideology off the table. The CCP sanctions pro-democracy groups, politicians who stand up for human rights, and independent activists abroad precisely because it believes that appeals to accountability, transparency, and democratic values undercut China’s geostrategic advantages.
The Chinese are well-aware of US attempts to destabilize their country “in the name of democracy”.
What the authors here are actually saying is the following: “we need Asian states to conform to our standards of democratic rule in order to be better able to keep them under our own control.”
That’s really all there is to this essay.
For the average western normie, Russians are suffering under a brutal and vicious dictatorship, and cannot wait for the day that Putin loses power and western liberal democracy becomes the law of the land.
None of you reading this are normies, and all of you know full well that the overwhelming majority of Russians are not buying what western media and think tanks are selling. They have a unique (and foreign) history and culture that has at times moved towards Europe, but they have always managed to stand apart. This informs how Russians view their country and how they deal with the rulers that rule over them.
Many had hoped that the War in Ukraine would finally see Russians rise up against their own government and remove it from power. Those hopes were always misplaced and naive. Western journalists have long been blinded by their own false assumptions regarding the “superiority of western liberal democracy” and Russian sentiment. “Why can’t these Russians see how they’re being oppressed?”, is the generalized refrain. Harper’s Magazine sent two journalists to explore Russia along the Volga River, and what they found was a culture far removed from the West, and very proud of its own. It’s a long piece, so here are some highlights:
Piotrovsky, who is mild-mannered and cerebral, and who wore his jacket loosely over hunched shoulders, seemed to have become a warrior. “Russia is many people, but one nation,” he asserted. “Russia along the Volga was able to incorporate everyone. Islam is just as much a religion of Russian tradition and identity as is Christian Orthodoxy. In Europe, in America, you speak of nothing but multiculturalism, but your cities are bursting with hate. For us, it didn’t take much to include everyone, because we’re an imperial civilization.” Then he grew more animated. “Look at the Hermitage!” he said, opening his arms to the room around us, widening his eyes. “It’s the encyclopedia of world culture, but it’s written in Russian because it’s our interpretation of world history. It may be arrogant, but that’s what we are.”
On renewed trade with Asia:
Sergeeva took me to see the Jewish, Armenian, and Iranian neighborhoods of Astrakhan. An exhibition of photographs highlighting the civilian volunteers supporting the military was being set up outside of a park. At sunset, the elegant riverfront was swarmed with families and groups of young people talking and laughing in hushed tones. Couples sat on railings eating watermelon while food stalls projected multicolored lights on the Volga. There was a fin de siècle quality to the atmosphere, curls of smoke emanating from shashlik grills, a warm breeze delivering the lament of a distant violin. No military uniforms in sight.
The café façades and the wrought-iron balconies reminded me of New Orleans. Sergeeva pointed out the renovations along the canal that runs through the old town, indicating the nineteenth-century wooden villas that will soon become hotels and luxury homes. “They seemed destined to crumble,” she said. “But now that money is going around, Astrakhan is once again the gateway to European Russia, Central Asia, and India. This is how it is for now. Later, we’ll see.”
and
In Astrakhan, it was rumored that the Iranians had invested billions in the development of the Caspian-Volga-Don corridor. There was talk of trafficking agricultural products and oil, but also turbines, spare mechanical parts, medicine, and nuclear components. I couldn’t verify this, but it was clear that Astrakhan is central to the anti-Western economic bloc’s efforts to turn east.
The general opinion in February of 2022 was that the Russians would easily seize much of Ukraine, but that they would pay a very large economic price, possibly the destruction of their entire economy. This was a safe bet, and it was totally wrong.
Import substitution:
“The Russians are reacting to the sanctions in an extraordinary way, even with a weak ruble and the inevitable inflation. The prices of essential goods have held steady. And now we’re consuming better and healthier products than before the war, even exceptional cheeses.”
I had never imagined that the rise of hyperlocal food would be one of the recurring themes of this trip. But it appears that the Western sanctions and war economy have intensified a traditional Russian gastronomy movement. Western products had piqued the palates of average urban Russians, and local producers were trying to fill their vacuum, proudly offering Russian-made Camembert and prosciutto, as if to provide some material evidence of Russkiy Mir, Putin’s ideology of Russian supremacy. As I dined along the Volga, menus often specified the farms from which ingredients had been sourced. Restaurants served svekolnik and okroshka, simple cold summer soups, exalting the quality of local radishes grown without Western fertilizers.
An ethnic Tatar foodstuffs producer from Kazan, Tatarstan on the sanctions regime leveled against Russia:
Since then, the company’s net worth has become the stuff of legend. But Kazankov, too, is a great supporter of Western sanctions: “They’re an incredible developmental tool for Russia,” he told me. “The West should have imposed them back in the Nineties. We’d be the engine of the world by now. Too bad.” For him, the sanctions are pure adrenaline, and to prove it he added that his company has copied Italian, German, and Israeli “production means” to the letter: “We doubled processing in one year and we supply almost a thousand supermarkets in all of Russia.” Ivan believes that his “full-circle communist company” is the ideal model for “rebuilding a new Soviet Union with healthy local food from our lands.”
On the loss of vacationing in Europe:
Was this fatalism? Indifference? Or arrogance, as Piotrovsky had implied back at the Hermitage? I struggled to find room in hotels or on ferries, all of which were overflowing with tourists forced to give up on the Mediterranean and make do with the Volga. Take Tatiana, the middle-aged manager of a supermarket chain. When I met her on a ferry in Yaroslavl, she wore a Panama hat, Gucci sunglasses, and capri sandals; she was heading downstream, to the same dacha where she had spent her summers as a girl. “I’ve had a boat docked in Mykonos for three years—who knows when I’ll see it again,” she told me. “I’m getting to know my river again. I’m running into friends I haven’t seen in thirty years. An interesting vacation.” I told her she looked a bit sad and resigned. “Russians have been sad and resigned for thousands of years,” she replied. “It’s how we stay resilient. I’m against this war, but I can’t do anything but wait, like everyone else. They manipulate us with artificial ideas. Garbage. But the West has been humiliating us for too long. Don’t we also have a right to be who we want to be without feeling like barbarians?”
Click here to read the article in its entirety. There are some interesting photos too.
What we called “Political Correctness” in the 1980s and 90s gradually morphed into what became known as “Wokeness” a little over a decade ago. Grounded in Critical Theory and nested in US and Canadian academia, its influence is massive and so ever-present that it is a constant point of discussion, often very heated.
One of its truisms is the slogan that “Diversity is our Strength”. We all like a bit of diversity in our lives, but we also know that this slogan cannot be factually correct, and is very often the opposite of what is actually true. In 2018, Heather Mac Donald’s “The Diversity Delusion” was released. Her argument was that America’s competitive edge is “at risk” due to the focus on diversity in all aspects of life, as it runs counter to meritocracy, creates a surging market for victimology where individuals are “primed for grievance”, and that above all else, it “narrows the mind”.
Friend of this Substack (and frequent participant in the comments section)
To be a believer in personal responsibility in the contemporary West is to be continually assailed by invocations to feel guilty about the - largely baseless - alleged grievances of an ever-growing list of ‘victims of society’. This competitive victimhood narrative originated in academia but now oozes daily from the liberal media and has progressively been absorbed as orthodoxy in each and every one of our institutions, all the way from schools to armed forces. It is so relentless, in ‘news’, entertainment, in officialdom and institutions of all kinds, that individual examples, though legion, are quickly consigned to the memory’s ashcan.
‘Relentless’ is a very good word to describe this media-generated psychological terrorism. Everyone in North America needs to be able to assess the “history of oppression” experienced by anyone that they encounter, lest they “offend” them and commit a faux pas. I might sound flippant, but that is the culture that has been shaped by this trend of the past few decades.
Some of this is common knowledge, but it does bear repeating:
In exhaustive detail she demonstrates that these students (especially if black) have in fact long been the beneficiaries of a raft of racial preference policies whereby they gain admission to elite institutions with far lower entry qualifications than white or Asian students. In 2003 it was “disclosed that Berkeley had admitted 374 applicants in 2002 with SATs under 1000 – almost all of them students of colour – while rejecting 3,218 applicants with scores above 1400”. At Arizona State University in 2006, white and black students with the same academic credentials had respectively a 2% and a 96% chance of admission. She refrains from driving home the obvious corollary that the white and Asian applicants were the real victims. There is the occasional light relief in this depressing catalogue of misguided social engineering: when Berkeley tried to get round California’s 1996 Proposition 209 bar on racial preference, by substituting low-income preference instead, “the device backfired when it yielded a wealth of Eastern European and Vietnamese admits – not the kind of ‘diversity’ that the university had in mind”.
“Equality of Outcome” is a dangerous path to tread down, as it takes a hammer to the legitimacy of institutions like universities. It also works to disincentivize behaviours that should be encouraged, as guaranteed qualification/admission at a lower level for some reduces competitiveness.
In the second half of the first decade of this new century, I would scan the reviews over at Pitchfork Magazine to find new music to listen to. By that point in my life, I was already well-past the phase where music was very central to my existence. Supposedly, your musical tastes are set in stone between the ages of 27 and 33. For us Gen Xers, the music that you listened to as a teen dictated who you hung out with, what kind of clothes you wore, and oftentimes how you spoke.
In university, my roommates were very much into music and the scenes around certain genres and bands. This spoiled me because they introduced me to music that I would have never found on my own. Fast forward a few years and I had no one to rely on to suggest bands for me to listen to. I’ve always been into listening to different types and styles of music, so I enjoyed getting recommendations from others. The segue from university to living on your own (and getting older) put a dent into that approach.
The friends I had outside of university were not the music-crazy types that my uni roommates were, so I was cast adrift and forced to search for new music all on my own. I came across Pitchfork online, and for a few years it was my only resource to source new music. Without it, I never would have come across Panda Bear, LCD Soundsystem, Deerhunter, Destroyer, The Beta Band, Battles, Belle and Sebastian, Of Montreal, Cut Copy, and a few others. I did this for about five years until I simply stopped looking for new music, as my tastes were not reflected in the newer stuff coming out and appearing on the pages of that magazine.
In a way, Pitchfork served as a tastemaker for me as well, and for many others. Two weeks ago, it was announced that Pitchfork laid off its staff and that the publication would be rolled into GQ. I had long ago parted ways with it, but for many, many others, it was the end of an era.
This Pitchfork writer was guilty of doing what Pitchfork did constantly in its last years: fighting a battle that had been won years and years ago, the battle of pop supremacy against supposedly-snootier challengers like indie or just “rock.” The Pitchfork collective didn’t so much pick a side and fight for it, but rather fought for the quaint notion that there were still other sides left to fight. This is a going concern, in the 21st century - helping people preserve the appearance of various cultural skirmishes after they stop being salient because they feel comforted by fighting them. But Taylor Swift had won a flawless victory, an unqualified victory, long before she decided to start re-recording albums. “Indie rock” would have signaled an unconditional surrender but there was no one left around to do so. In this way, large parts of the music press reminds me very much of those Japanese soldiers who kept fighting years after the American victory, unwilling to believe that the battle was over - only here, the problem was not a refusal to believe that they had lost, but a refusal to believe that they had won.
Actually very funny. I enjoyed reading that paragraph quite a bit.
Here’s his main point:
With Pitchfork, you have the site’s strange, bifurcated history, split between its period of good-natured snobbery and interest in the then-salient concept of indie music and its sudden, totalizing embrace of poptimism, the school of music criticism that effortlessly colonized the entirety of the music journalism industry starting sometime in the mid-aughts. What’s interesting about a lot of the coverage is that these reminiscences can’t help but reveal that strange and sudden evolution, but most of the people writing them seem uncomfortable with actually describing it. This discomfort, I think, is telling.
more
In his New York Times piece on Pitchfork’s apparent demise, Sopan Deb doesn’t mention the poptimist turn at all. Neither does Ezra Klein’s. Nor does Casey Newton’s. Former Pitchfork staffer Jamieson Cox maybe waves in that direction when he talks about changes in editorial direction “righting old wrongs,” by which he likely means “bringing the site’s tastes into line with current quasi-political mores.” Fellow ex-Pitchforker Eric Harvey nods to poptimism obliquely, but only by referring to it as a welcome diversification of the staff, not a total ideological overhaul.
……….
This coyness about the single most obvious evolution in Pitchfork’s coverage is bizarre from a straight newsgathering perspective; anyone who has read the site for a long time would have noticed that change, from a font of hipster taste-making to the single most aggressive enforcer of the poptimist consensus. Several of them mention the absurd rescoring of old records, giving old music from diverse artists (whatever that means) pity score upgrades and dinging musicians like Grimes for culture war sins. But they do nothing to inform readers about why that rescoring happened - because at some point music criticism ceased to be about music itself and instead became a vehicle for advancing a particular vision of the self as a worldly and progressive person. Pitchfork was a central cog in the machine that took diverse musical tastes and imprinted on them a political mandate to conform, and most people of the type to read Pitchfork did in fact conform.
Freddie is talking about ideological capture, and how it went against the entire point of music criticism.
Was this the point that western culture stopped being “cool”? Hopefully others will explore this idea, as I don’t think I’m best-suited to explore it.
The effect of the ideological capture:
And while the political upheaval of the past 15ish years has conspicuously failed to make the world more equitable for “marginalized identities,” it has created a palpable fear among certain perpetually-anxious members of dominant groups, a feeling that they should be meek and pliable in how they interact with said marginalized people. I have called this tendency the politics of deference in the past, this Robin DiAngelo-inflected vision of progressive politics that assumes that the essential role of a white or male or straight or able-bodied person is to treat members of minority groups with a vague embarrassment, a sense that we’re sorry for existing in their space and that we will accordingly defer to them as much as possible.
This is great:
The result was stuff like Pitchfork’s roundtable on Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money,” which is legitimately one of the five or so most embarrassing professionally-published pieces I’ve read in 30ish years of consuming written media. It’s a masterclass in the overeducated urbanite investment in artistic consumption as substitute for mass politics that was so central to the 2010s. And because the people involved were all competing to show the most unhinged devotion to a Black woman musician (who never asked to be turned into a master’s thesis on semiotics) it involved some of the most ill-conceived overwriting I can imagine. Here is a writer out so far out over her skis that I’m afraid she’s about to pull a Sonny Bono:
To those currently drafting your thinkpiece about how it wasn’t very #feminist of Rih to torture that poor rich lady: nooooo one cares about your basic-ass, probably non-intersectional praxis. Rihanna doesn’t need to spell it out for you if you still don’t get it yet; time is money, bitch.
A white woman wrote those words, I believe. (She’s not “Rih” to you.) This is the sort of thing that became Pitchfork’s stock in trade, this confused muddle of politics and pop, stuffed with trendy terms from cultural studies and the insistence that liking music was a form of activism.
Read the rest of this very fun essay by clicking here.
The U.S. is commonly divided into distinct regions: the West, the Midwest, the Southwest, the Southeast and the Northeast. But broad accent categories based on these regions are more accurately broken down into diverse dialects across different localities.
Dialects in the Deep South—encompassing Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina—are distinct from those in Texas, a large state that’s home to several linguistic varieties, as well as a mix of Spanish and English (nicknamed Spanglish) closer to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The South gets stereotyped as a monolith, which is really unfair,” says Nicole Holliday, a linguist at Pomona College.
The many variations in the American South include South Midland, Ozark, Coastal Southern, Virginia Piedmont, Gullah, Cajun English and Gulf Southern.
The popularity of specific dialects is often tied to regional history. When English colonists first arrived in North America in the early 17th century, they landed on the East Coast, establishing English-speaking communities in the North and the South. The French, the Dutch, the Spanish and other European powers also introduced their ownlanguages as they colonized different parts of the continent. Speaking styles in different colonies remained distinct because travel opportunities were limited at the time, says Jessi Grieser, a linguist at the University of Michigan. “Historically, it’s about migration and who went where,” she adds.
English settlers succumbed to competing influences when they came into contact with Native Americans and colonists from other countries, all while isolating themselves from England. Centuries of settlement on the East Coast resulted in more linguistic variation among the region’s cities because English was spoken there longer, Holliday says.
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Not every people, ethnic group, culture or nation is ready for democracy. In fact some don't believe in it. We need to stop seeing the world through American rose colored glasses.
And please do check out the second part in my series on the Spanish Civil War - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-spanish-civil-part-2-el-bienio
Not every people, ethnic group, culture or nation is ready for democracy. In fact some don't believe in it. We need to stop seeing the world through American rose colored glasses.