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How paranoid nationalism corrupts

From The Economist

People seek strength and solace in their tribe, their faith or their nation. And you can see why. If they feel empathy for their fellow citizens, they are more likely to pull together for the common good. In the 19th and 20th centuries love of country spurred people to seek their freedom from imperial capitals in distant countries. Today Ukrainians are making heroic sacrifices to defend their homeland against Russian invaders.

Unfortunately, the love of “us” has an ugly cousin: the fear and suspicion of “them”, a paranoid nationalism that works against tolerant values such as an openness to unfamiliar people and new ideas. What is more, cynical politicians have come to understand that they can exploit this sort of nationalism, by whipping up mistrust and hatred and harnessing them to benefit themselves and their cronies.

The post-war order of open trade and universal values is strained by the rivalry of America and China. Ordinary people feel threatened by forces beyond their control, from hunger and poverty to climate change and violence. Using paranoid nationalism, parasitic politicians prey on their citizens’ fears and degrade the global order, all in the pursuit of their own power.

As our Briefing describes, paranoid nationalism works by a mix of exaggeration and lies. Vladimir Putin claims that Ukraine is a nato puppet, whose Nazi cliques threaten Russia; India’s ruling party warns that Muslims are waging a “love jihad” to seduce Hindu maidens; Tunisia’s president decries a black African “plot” to replace his country’s Arab majority. Preachers of paranoid nationalism harm the targets of their rhetoric, obviously, but their real intention is to hoodwink their own followers. By inflaming nationalist fervour, self-serving leaders can more easily win power and, once in office, they can distract public attention from their abuses by calling out the supposed enemies who would otherwise keep them in check.

Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, shows how effective this can be. Since he returned to power in 2006, he has demonised the United States and branded his opponents “agents of the Yankee empire”. He controls the media and has put his family in positions of influence. After mass protests erupted in 2018 at the regime’s graft and brutality, the Ortegas called the protesters “vampires” and locked them up. On August 23rd they banned the Jesuits, a Catholic order that has worked in Nicaragua since before it was a country, on the pretext that a Jesuit university was a “centre of terrorism”.

Rabble-rousing often leads to robbery. Like the Ortegas, some nationalist leaders seek to capture the state by stuffing it with their cronies or ethnic kin. The use of this technique under Jacob Zuma, a former president of South Africa, is one reason why the national power company is too riddled with corruption to keep the lights on. Our statistical analysis suggests that governments have grown more nationalistic since 2012, and that the more nationalistic they are, the more corrupt they tend to be.

But the more important role of paranoid nationalism is as a tool to dismantle the checks and balances that underpin good governance: a free press, independent courts, ngos and a loyal opposition. Leaders do not say: “I want to purge the electoral commission so I can block my political opponents.” They say: “The commissioners are traitors!” They do not admit that they want to suppress ngos to evade scrutiny. They pass laws defining as “foreign agents” any organisation that receives foreign funds or even advice, and impose draconian controls on such bodies or simply ban them. They do not shut down the press, they own it. By one estimate, at least 50 countries have curbed civil society in recent years.

An example is the president of Tunisia, Kais Saied. Before he blamed black people for his country’s problems, he was unpopular because of his dismal handling of the economy. Now Tunisians are cheering his bold stand against a tiny, transient minority. Meanwhile Mr Saied has gutted the judiciary and closed the anti-corruption commission, and graft has grown worse.

Abuses are easier when institutions are weak: the despots of Nicaragua, Iran or Zimbabwe are far less constrained than the leaders of say, Hungary or Israel. But in all these countries (and many more), the men in power have invented or exaggerated threats to the nation as a pretext to weaken the courts, the press or the opposition. And this has either prolonged a corrupt administration or made it worse.

Paranoid nationalism is part of a backlash against good governance. The end of the cold war led to a blossoming of democracy around the world. Country after country introduced free elections and limits on executive power. Many power- and plunder-hungry politicians chafed at this. Amid the general disillusion that followed the financial crisis of 2007-09, they saw an opportunity to take back control. Paranoid nationalism gave them a tool to dismantle some of those pesky checks and balances.

Because these restraints often came with Western encouragement, if not Western funding, leaders have found it easier to depict the champions of good government as being foreign stooges. In countries that have endured colonial rule—or interference by the United States, as have many in Latin America—the message finds a ready audience. If a leader can create a climate of such deep suspicion that loyalty comes before truth, then every critic can be branded a traitor.

First resort of the scoundrel

Paranoid nationalism is not about to disappear. Leaders are learning from each other. They are also freer to act than they were even a decade ago. Not only has the West lost faith in its programme of spreading democracy and good governance, but China—a paranoid nationalist that is inclined to spot slights and threats around every corner—is promoting the idea that universal values of tolerance and good governance are a racist form of imperialism. It prefers non-interference from abroad and zero-criticism at home. If only they could see through the lies behind paranoid nationalism, ordinary people would realise how wrong China’s campaign is. There is nothing racist or disloyal about wishing for a better life. 

No Affirmative Action in University Admissions: US Supreme Court

 From The Economist

Should a fair country allow citizens to be treated differently based on the colour of their skin? Most people would say that it should not. But others insist that it should—if the ends are suitably enlightened.

Not long after America dismantled two centuries of slavery and segregation, it embarked on a project of “affirmative action”: a system of legally sanctioned positive discrimination for African-Americans (later expanded to other “under-represented minorities”) who sought entry to selective universities. At the time the affront to liberal norms of fairness and equality under the law was assuaged by the fact that the beneficiaries of the policy were oppressed not long ago. Yet after half a century, one marked with more racial progress than setbacks, it remained the case that an applicant to America’s top universities with the right skin colour had a much better chance of admission than one with identical credentials but the wrong skin colour. On June 29th the Supreme Court terminated the scheme.

It was right to do so. That is because affirmative action rested on contorted constitutional logic. It was also broadly unpopular outside progressive circles. Worst of all, it only marginally ameliorated America’s yawning racial gaps. Despite the sermonising of its administrators, even with race-based affirmative action the country’s best universities never represented America. The very same universities offer extreme preferences to children of alumni and donors—a shadow, unjustifiable affirmative-action scheme for the white and wealthy hidden behind the prominent one for black and Hispanic applicants (a disproportionate share of whom were wealthy themselves).

The Supreme Court’s ruling will reverberate widely. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority opinion. This will surely encourage lawsuits to end racial preferences in other areas, such as government contracting. But the immediate impact will be on university admissions.

A touch of class

Something better can come out of the demise of the present regime. Start with the shaky legal justification for race-conscious college admissions. After the civil war, America’s constitution was amended to guarantee all of its citizens due process and equal protection under the law, regardless of their race. Yet for decades, under Jim Crow, many states prevented black people from voting, forbade inter-racial marriage and enforced racial segregation in schools, among other outrages. After the correction of the civil-rights era, America began to try to live up to its constitutional promise. It passed landmark civil-rights legislation that forbade unequal treatment “on the ground of race, colour, or national origin”.

Yet for decades the Supreme Court allowed positive discrimination in universities. How so? The policy was justified, the justices of the day argued, not as reparations for a terrible past, but because the value of diversity was compelling for promoting “cross-racial understanding and the breaking down of racial stereotypes”. It was always odd that affirmative action was explicitly crafted for the benefit of students’ white peers. Nonetheless elite universities leapt on the rationale of diversity, using it to construct racially balanced classes while suggesting that these were the happy result not of quotas, which are banned, but of “race-conscious” holistic admissions schemes that treated people as individuals and not as avatars for their racial group.

Contrary to the dissent of the court’s liberal justices, who claim the new ban “will serve only to highlight the court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound”, Americans were not happy with the old policy. In 2020 even liberal Californians voted down a referendum to reinstate affirmative action, banned in the state since 1996. Polls show that many more Americans oppose taking race into account for admissions than favour it. That is true also of Asian Americans, who typically lean left but bear the heaviest cost of race-based admissions because they are deemed “over-represented” (despite suffering discrimination in their own right).

The court’s decision could be the catalyst for fairer admissions. The extraordinary benefits that Harvard and Yale shower upon the children of alumni and donors make a mockery of meritocracy and those institutions’ self-professed progressivism. Those practices should go.

Universities that wish to do their bit for social justice should stop using race as an (often inaccurate) proxy for disadvantage and start looking at disadvantage itself. Instead of giving a leg-up to members of groups that are on average badly off, they should favour individuals who are actually poor. One randomised controlled trial found that simply offering application-fee waivers to promising students from poor backgrounds dramatically increased the chance of their applying to, and attending, highly selective universities.

There is reason to worry that elite universities will seek stealthy ways to preserve racial preferences. Many are dropping requirements for standardised tests, which would make quiet discrimination against members of unfavoured groups who do well on such tests harder to detect. Some are busily searching for loopholes. In a letter sent to its students and alumni, Harvard, which was party to one of the Supreme Court cases, quoted a portion of the majority opinion that opens the door to considering race if an applicant were to write about it in a submitted essay. “We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision,” its leadership wrote, impishly.

Rather than coaxing a generation of minority students into drafting adversity statements—and continuing to admit the hereditary mediocracy through the backdoor—schools like Harvard would do well to try to craft a fairer system of admissions. These universities should not be proud of the well-monied (albeit multicoloured) monoculture they have inculcated. They should take the opportunity to become the progressive institutions they claim to be. ■

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What elite American universities can learn from Oxbridge

Simon Kuper in The FT  

Both the US and UK preselect their adult elites early, by admitting a few 18-year-olds into brand-name universities. Everyone else in each age cohort is essentially told, “Sorry kid, probably not in this lifetime.”  

The happy few come disproportionately from rich families. Many Ivy League colleges take more students from the top 1 per cent of household incomes than the bottom 60 per cent. Both countries have long agonised about how to diversify the student intake. Lots of American liberals worry that ancestral privilege will be further cemented at some point this month, when the Supreme Court is expected to outlaw race-conscious affirmative action in university admissions. 

Whatever the court decides, US colleges have ways to make themselves more meritocratic. They could learn from Britain’s elite universities, which, in just the past few years, have become much more diverse in class and ethnicity. It’s doable, but only if you want to do it — which the US probably doesn’t. 

Pressure from the government helped embarrass Oxford and Cambridge into overhauling admissions. (And yes, we have to fixate on Oxbridge because it’s the main gateway to the adult elite.) On recent visits to both universities, I was awestruck by the range of accents, and the scale of change. Oxbridge colleges now aim for “contextual admissions”, including the use of algorithms to gauge how much disadvantage candidates have surmounted to reach their academic level. For instance: was your school private or state? What proportion of pupils got free school meals? Did your parents go to university?  

Admissions tutors compare candidates’ performance in GCSEs — British exams taken aged 16 — to that of their schoolmates. Getting seven As at a school where the average is four counts for more than getting seven at a school that averages 10. The brightest kid at an underprivileged school is probably smarter than the 50th-best Etonian. 

Oxbridge has made admissions interviews less terrifying for underprivileged students, who often suffer from imposter syndrome. If a bright working-class kid freezes at interview, one Oxford tutor told me he thinks: “I will not let you talk yourself out of a place here.” And to counter the interview coaching that private-school pupils receive, Oxford increasingly hands candidates texts they haven’t seen before. 

Oxbridge hosts endless summer schools and open days for underprivileged children. The head of one Oxford college says that it had at least one school visit every day of term. The pupils are shown around by students from similar backgrounds. The message to the kids is: “You belong here.” 

It’s working. State schools last year provided a record 72.5 per cent of Cambridge’s British undergraduate admissions. From 2018 to 2022, more than one in seven UK-domiciled Oxford undergraduates came from “socio-economically disadvantaged areas”. Twenty-eight per cent of Oxford students identified as “black and minority ethnic”; slightly more undergraduates now are women than men. Academics told me that less privileged students are more likely to experience social or mental-health problems, but usually get good degrees. These universities haven’t relaxed their standards. On the contrary, by widening the talent pool, they are finding more talent. 

Elite US colleges could do that even without affirmative action. First, they would have to abolish affirmative action for white applicants. A study led by Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University found that more than 43 per cent of white undergraduates admitted to Harvard from 2009 to 2014 were recruited athletes, children of alumni, “on the dean’s interest list” (typically relatives of donors) or “children of faculty and staff”. Three-quarters wouldn’t have got in otherwise. This form of corruption doesn’t exist in Britain. One long-time Oxford admissions tutor told me that someone in his job could go decades without even being offered a donation as bait for admitting a student. Nor do British alumni expect preferential treatment for their children. 

The solutions to many American societal problems are obvious if politically unfeasible: ban guns, negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Similarly, elite US universities could become less oligarchical simply by agreeing to live with more modest donations — albeit still the world’s biggest. Harvard’s endowment of $50.9bn is more than six times that of the most elite British universities. 

But US colleges probably won’t change, says Martin Carnoy of Stanford’s School of Education. Their business model depends on funding from rich people, who expect something in return. He adds: “It’s the same with the electoral system. Once you let private money into a public good, it becomes unfair.” 

Both countries have long been fake meritocracies. The US intends to remain one.

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Everything you need to know about US Supreme Court’s abortion decision

LINDA C. MCCLAIN and NICOLE HUBERFELD in The Print 


 

After half a century, Americans’ constitutional right to get an abortion has been overturned by the Supreme Court.

The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – handed down on June 24, 2022 – has far-reaching consequences. The Conversation asked Nicole Huberfeld and Linda C. McClain, health law and constitutional law experts at Boston University, to explain what just happened, and what happens next.

 
What did the Supreme Court rule?

The Supreme Court decided by a 6-3 majority to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In doing so, the justices overturned two key decisions protecting access to abortion: 1973’s Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided in 1992.

The court’s opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, said that the Constitution does not mention abortion. Nor does the Constitution guarantee abortion rights via another right, the right to liberty.

The opinion rejected Roe’s and Casey’s argument that the constitutional right to liberty included an individual’s right to privacy in choosing to have an abortion, in the same way that it protects other decisions concerning intimate sexual conduct, such as contraception and marriage. According to the opinion, abortion is “fundamentally different” because it destroys fetal life.

The court’s narrow approach to the concept of constitutional liberty is at odds with the broader position it took in the earlier Casey ruling, as well as in a landmark marriage equality case, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges. But the majority said that nothing in their opinion should affect the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Alito’s opinion also rejected the legal principle of “stare decisis,” or adhering to precedent. Supporters of the right to abortion argue that the Casey and Roe rulings should have been left in place as, in the words of the Casey ruling, reproductive rights allow women to “participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.”

The ruling does not mean that abortion is banned throughout the U.S. Rather, arguments about the legality of abortion will now play out in state legislatures, where, Alito noted, women “are not without electoral or political power.”

States will be allowed to regulate or prohibit abortion subject only to what is known as “rational basis” review – this is a weaker standard than Casey’s “undue burden” test. Under Casey’s undue burden test, states were prevented from enacting restrictions that placed substantial obstacles in the path of those seeking abortion. Now, abortion bans will be presumed to be legal as long as there is a “rational basis” for the legislature to believe the law serves legitimate state interests.

In a strenuous dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor faulted the court’s narrow approach to liberty and challenged its disregard both for stare decisis and for the impact of overruling Roe and Casey on the lives of women in the United States. The dissenters said the impact of the decision would be “the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” They also expressed deep concern over the ruling’s effect on poor women’s ability to access abortion services in the U.S.
Where does this decision fit into the history of reproductive rights in the US?

This is a huge moment. The court’s ruling has done what reproductive rights advocates feared for decades: It has taken away the constitutional right to privacy that protected access to abortion.

This decision was decades in the making. Thirty years ago when Casey was being argued, many legal experts thought the court was poised to overrule Roe. Then, the court had eight justices appointed by Republican presidents, several of whom indicated readiness to overrule in dissenting opinions.

Instead, Republican appointees Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter upheld Roe. They revised its framework to allow more state regulation throughout pregnancy and weakened the test for evaluating those laws. Under Roe’s “strict scrutiny” test, any restriction on the right to privacy to access an abortion had to be “narrowly tailored” to further a “compelling” state interest. But Casey’s “undue burden” test gave states wider latitude to regulate abortion.

Even before the Casey decision, abortion opponents in Congress had restricted access for poor women and members of the military greatly by limiting the use of federal funds to pay for abortion services.

In recent years, states have adopted numerous restrictions on abortion that would not have survived Roe’s tougher “strict scrutiny” test. Even so, many state restrictions have been struck down in federal courts under the undue burden test, including bans on abortions prior to fetal viability and so-called “TRAP” – targeted regulation of abortion provider – laws that made it harder to keep clinics open.

President Donald Trump’s pledge to appoint “pro-life” justices to federal courts – and his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices – finally made possible the goal of opponents of legal abortion: overruling Roe and Casey.
What happens next?

Even before Dobbs, the ability to access abortion was limited by a patchwork of laws across the United States. Republican states have more restrictive laws than Democratic ones, with people living in the Midwest and South subject to the strongest limits.

Thirteen states have so-called “trigger laws,” which greatly restrict access to abortion. These will soon go into effect now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe and Casey, requiring only state attorney general certification or other action by a state official.

Nine states have pre-Roe laws never taken off the books that significantly restrict or ban access to abortion. Altogether, nearly half of states will restrict access to abortion through a variety of measures like banning abortion from six weeks of pregnancy – before many women know they are pregnant – and limiting the reasons abortions may be obtained, such as forbidding abortion in the case of fetal anomalies.

Meanwhile, 16 states and the District of Columbia protect access to abortion in a variety of ways, such as state statutes, constitutional amendments or state Supreme Court decisions.

None of the states that limit abortion access currently criminalize the pregnant person’s action. Rather, they threaten health care providers with civil or criminal actions, including loss of their license to practice medicine.

Some states are creating “safe havens” where people can travel to access an abortion legally. People have already been traveling to states like Massachusetts from highly restrictive states.

The court’s decision may drive federal action, too.

The House of Representatives passed the Women’s Health Protection Act, which protects health care providers and pregnant people seeking abortion, but Senate Republicans have blocked the bill from coming up for a vote. Congress could also reconsider providing limited Medicaid payment for abortion, but such federal legislation also seems unlikely to succeed.

President Joe Biden could use executive power to instruct federal agencies to review existing regulations to ensure that access to abortion continues to occur in as many places as possible. Congressional Republicans could test the water on nationwide abortion bans. While such efforts are likely to fail, these efforts could cause confusion for people who are already vulnerable.
What does this mean for people in America seeking an abortion?

Unintended pregnancies and abortions are more common among poor women and women of color, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Research shows that people have abortions whether lawful or not, but in nations where access to abortion is limited or outlawed, women are more likely to suffer negative health outcomes, such as infection, excessive bleeding and uterine perforation. Those who must carry a pregnancy to full term are more likely to suffer pregnancy-related deaths.

The state-by-state access to abortion resulting from this decision means many people will have to travel farther to obtain an abortion. And distance will mean fewer people will get abortions, especially lower-income women – a fact the Supreme Court itself recognized in 2016.

But since 2020, medication abortion – a two-pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol – has been the most common method of ending pregnancy in the U.S. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated this shift, as it drove the Food and Drug Administration to make medication abortions more available by allowing doctors to prescribe the pills through telemedicine and permitting medication to be mailed without in-person consultation.

Many states that restrict access to abortion also are trying to prevent medication abortion. But stopping telehealth providers from mailing pills will be a challenge. Further, because the FDA approved this regimen, states will be contradicting federal law, setting up conflict that may lead to more litigation.

The Supreme Court’s rolling back a right that has been recognized for 50 years puts the U.S. in the minority of nations, most of which are moving toward liberalization. Nevertheless, even though abortion is seen by many as essential health care, the cultural fight will surely continue.