How the fear of death makes people more Right-wing

Bobby Azarian

is a cognitive neuroscientist, a researcher in the Visual Attention and Cognition Lab at George Mason University, and a science writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times and Scientific American, among others. His research has been published in journals including Cognition & Emotion and Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. He also runs the blog Science Is Sexy.
Published on Aeon

A string of terror attacks across the globe have shaken the world’s most powerful nations to their core. As a result of these tragic events, and the fear-mongering from politicians hoping to exploit them, many feel that an existential threat is nigh.

To make matters worse, a highly influential and experimentally verified theory from social psychology predicts that, as long as an existential threat looms, the world will grow ever more divided and increasingly hostile. Terror management theory (TMT) explains how and why events that conjure up thoughts about death cause people to cling more strongly to their cultural worldviews – siding with those who share their national, ethnic or political identity, while aggressively opposing those who do not.

Consequently, sharp increases in deadly terror attacks around the world serve to create a sweeping psychological condition that sets the stage for waves of far-Right nationalist movements that encourage prejudice, intolerance and hostility toward dissimilar others.

Europe’s nationalist surge, Brexit in the United Kingdom and the presidency win for Donald Trump in the United States are just the most recent demonstrations of TMT, first proposed by social psychologists in the 1980s and derived from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work of philosophy and psychology, The Denial of Death (1973).

Becker’s big idea was that much of human action is motivated by a fear of death. Unlike other animals, which lack higher cognition and the ability to reflect, humans recognise the inevitability of their own death. The conflict that results from this realisation and the natural desire to live produces cognitive dissonance that causes profound terror and anxiety. According to Becker, humans invented culture as a buffer for the terror. By adopting cultural worldviews that instil life with meaning and value, one can effectively manage the subconscious dread that is always bubbling below the surface.

While religions offer a path to literal immortality through the belief in an afterlife, non-religious cultural worldviews – such as political ideologies and national identities – provide paths to symbolic immortality. Symbolic immortality refers to being part of something larger that will ultimately outlive the individual, such as a great nation or a movement with a collective identity and pursuit. Much of human effort is dedicated to acts that might help one be remembered by groups or society long after death.

Of course, no matter how logical or intriguing a theory might sound, it is merely speculation if it makes no testable predictions that can be confirmed or disproven by experiment and measurement. What might be most impressive about TMT is how much success it has had in the laboratory. Hundreds of empirical studies have provided support for the theory by confirming something called the mortality salience hypothesis.

According to this hypothesis, if we do in fact adopt cultural worldviews to curb a fear of death – as TMT posits – then reminders of our mortality should produce actions that serve to strengthen faith in our worldviews. Specifically, death reminders should motivate individuals to invest more in groups to which they belong and, conversely, to act more aggressively towards those with different cultural worldviews and national or ethnic identities.

A particularly amusing experiment used hot sauce to measure the phenomenon. Students were broken into two groups and asked to write an essay about their own death or another, more benign topic. They were then presented with someone who did or did not disparage their political views, and asked to decide on the amount of mouth-burning hot sauce that person should have to consume. In line with TMT and the mortality salience hypothesis, participants who’d written about death allocated a large dollop of hot sauce to those who didn’t share their worldview, while those in the control condition did not.

Another mortality salience study on aggression conducted on both Iranian and US college students shows disturbing results. One group of students was asked to ‘jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die,’ and to describe the emotions aroused. Participants in the control condition were given similar questions related to dental pain. The results showed that Iranian students who were made to think about death were more supportive of martyrdom attacks against the US, while those in the control condition opposed them. Similarly, death reminders made US students who identified as politically conservative more supportive of extreme military attacks on foreign nations that could kill thousands of civilians.

From these findings, it is easy to see how nations under attack can quickly grow more divided and increasingly hostile towards those from outside cultures. In fact, studies have shown that mortality salience can amplify nationalism and intensify bias against other groups. Evidence suggests that reminders of death can even influence elections, pushing voters to favour candidates on the Right. Five weeks before the 2004 US presidential election, scientists conducted studies on New Jersey voters to see whether mortality reminders influenced voting directly.

Participants were given the same questions about death as the Iranian students in the previously mentioned study, while those in the control condition received parallel questions about watching television. What they found was pretty astonishing. Those voters prompted to think of death said they intended to vote for George W Bush, the hawkish conservative president, by a three-to-one margin; those prompted to think about TV strongly favoured the Left-wing challenger, John Kerry. Such results could help to explain why, after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush went from having some of the lowest approval ratings ever to being extremely popular with both Republicans and Democrats.

So what does this all mean for the world today? If massively destructive terror attacks continue, terror management theory predicts that societies will grow exponentially more chaotic and divided. Heightened aggression towards dissimilar others produces a tendency to favour war over peace. Right-wing nationalism will thrive along with prejudice and intolerance. Islamic fundamentalism will flourish while terror attacks grow more frequent. Raised tensions between nations, ethnicities and political groups will lead to further conflict, creating a devastating feedback loop of suspicion and violence.

But it is critical that we not lose optimism in these challenging times. By becoming cognisant of the inflammatory and divisive effect that death reminders and perceived existential threat have on all of us, we can begin to take steps toward defending against it. After each terrorist attack we must actively work to unite groups with different nationalities, ethnicities and cultural worldviews. We must help build bridges between dissimilar communities, and discourage ideas such as immigration bans. And we must be conscious of the way some politicians use fear-mongering and propaganda to manipulate voters. Such efforts, combined with a calm and cool temperament, can help manage the terror of mortality in ways that preserve rationality, compassion and peace.

Noam Chomsky "The History of Neo-Liberalism"

Want Geniuses? Welcome Immigrants

By  Frank Bruni

Maybe “some are rapists,” in Donald Trump’s nasty words. But many are geniuses. Just ask the MacArthur Foundation, which responded to our president’s frequent demonization of immigrants, including that infamous phrase, by doing a little math.

Every year since 1981, the foundation has bestowed so-called genius grants on more than 20 of the country’s most accomplished and promising scientists, scholars, artists and writers. These awards are a huge deal, trumpeted in the media and worn with pride forevermore. And the winners, typically in the middle of their careers, get $625,000 each.

Of the 965 geniuses (or, more properly, MacArthur fellows) to date, 209 were born outside the United States, according to Cecilia Conrad, who leads the fellowship program. That’s 21.7 percent. The 2010 census determined that less than 13 percent of the American population is foreign-born.

Conrad wondered whether MacArthur fellows are anomalies. They’re not. She looked back over the past three and a half decades — which is the life span of the fellowships — to see who’d received other top honors given only to United States citizens and residents.

She found that immigrants were overrepresented among the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for music, of the National Humanities Medal and especially of the John Bates Clark Medal, which recognizes brilliant American economists under the age of 40. Thirty-five percent of these economists were foreign-born, including people from India, Turkey and Ukraine.

The far-right paranoiacs and scaremongers who pressured Trump to end DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) hate to acknowledge what we reality-moored types understand:

 

 Many of our country’s finest minds and brightest ideas are forged when dreamers from elsewhere encounter an unfamiliar place with unimagined possibilities. There’s a creative spark in that convergence. It has powered American greatness.

 

That’s the moral of the MacArthur Foundation’s math, which it shared first with The Times. That’s also the moral of the Nobel Prizes. According to an analysis late last year by Adil Najam, a Boston University professor: “Since its inception in 1901, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences have been awarded 579 times to 911 people and organizations. The U.S. alone has had more than 350 Nobel winners. More than 100 of these have been immigrants and individuals born outside of the United States.” If immigrants to the United States were considered their own country, Najam wrote, their tally of Nobels would exceed that of every country but the United States.

 

An article about immigrants in The Atlantic just a few years ago noted that the four United States-based physicists who sounded the 1939 warning about nuclear weapons that led to the Manhattan Project were born outside the United States. The article went on to point out that “immigrants or the children of immigrants have founded or co-founded nearly every legendary American technology company, including Google, Intel, Facebook, and of course Apple (you knew that Steve Jobs’s father was named Abdulfattah Jandali, right?).”

 

And Jennifer Hunt, a professor of economics at Rutgers University, has done research showing that among graduates of American colleges, immigrants are twice as likely to receive patents as native-born Americans. Her research further suggests that this doesn’t come at the expense of native-born Americans but in fact stimulates their innovation, too. “You’re bouncing ideas off each other,” Hunt told me.

Her findings speak to the oft-charted success of American immigrants in STEM (science, technology, economics and math) fields. The MacArthur grants cover the humanities, too; the past decade’s winners include such celebrated writers as Junot Díaz, born in the Dominican Republic; Edwidge Danticat, born in Haiti; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of “Americanah,” born in Nigeria.

José Quiñonez, named a genius last year for his pioneering work in financial services, was born in Mexico, the country vilified in Trump’s “rapists” remark. He told me that he and his siblings immigrated illegally in 1980, after their mother died, to live with relatives in San Jose, Calif. He was 9.

He studied hard and got a master’s degree from Princeton. He said that his four siblings, like him, have good jobs, two as high school teachers. Long before Trump’s campaign, he heard and cringed at complaints that Mexican immigrants were criminals, freeloaders. “Especially early on, I began to believe: Maybe I was lazy, maybe I was broken?” said Quiñonez, 46, who now lives in Oakland, Calif. “But there was something in our family that helped us reject that narrative. We fought back against that narrative. I never allowed it to seep into my soul.”

It’s possible that the bounty of immigrants who’ve won MacArthur grants demonstrates some predisposition among foundation executives toward certain life stories and a desire to promote people who have been overlooked and underappreciated. Some critics of the foundation have asserted that.

But it’s worth noting that if the foundation took into account children of immigrants as well as immigrants themselves, the percentage of its geniuses that reflects the benefits of immigration would be higher than 21.7. It’s also worth noting that for most of the grant’s history, foreign-born people constituted less than 10 percent of the United States population.

The immigrants who’ve won MacArthur grants include refugees, and I spoke with one, An-My Lê, 57, who fled Saigon as a teenager at the end of the Vietnam War. She finished high school in Sacramento, went to college at Stanford, got graduate degrees there and at Yale, and drew acclaim for photography with war and military themes. Her work has been exhibited at the country’s most prominent museums. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Bard College in upstate New York.

 I asked her what she made of immigrants’ prevalence among MacArthur geniuses. “I think most of us feel very lucky to be here, so we work extremely hard,” she said. “I think maybe trauma is part of what drives us.” She added that in terms of innovation, “Having the different perspectives, having the different life experiences, makes you see things differently.” Fresh ideas and great art are often born that way.

Conrad, the MacArthur Foundation executive, said that in all the debate lately about how many immigrants our country needs for jobs of varying skill levels, she hears too little about the ambient impact of immigrants on America’s creative climate. “They have certain attributes,” she told me. “They are risk takers.” And their thinking and discoveries are nourished by “the experience of dislocation, of navigating a new culture and a new set of norms,” she said.

They come with a sort of hunger and a kind of gaze that don’t subtract from what those of us already here have but, instead, add to it. They give us insights, inventions, art. Embracing their genius is the genius of America.

Noam Chomsky (2017) "Making The Future: Hopes and Challenges" [New Interview with Wallace Shawn]

Bernie Sanders To Democrats: This Is What a Radical Foreign Policy Looks Like

By Mehdi Hasan

Bernie Sanders, now the most popular politician in the United States by a country mile, has long been obsessed with breaking up big banks and getting Medicare for all Americans. He can speak for hours about the evils of income inequality and the grotesquerie of the “billionaire class.”

On foreign policy? Not so much. 

Yet this week, the independent senator from Vermont finally delivered his major foreign affairs speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, part of the Green Foundation Lecture series. Winston Churchill gave his “Sinews of Peace” speech at Westminster College — in which he famously introduced the world to the concept of “The Iron Curtain” — as part of this lecture series in 1946. Mikhail Gorbachev’s memorable 1992 account of how the Cold War ended was also part of this series. Thus, on the basis of his appearance in Fulton, you might say that Sanders is now playing in the Foreign Policy Big Leagues. 

Beforehand, he sat down with me to talk through his thinking on global affairs. 

“I think what we have to do is take a hard look at where we are today in terms of foreign policy, and where we have been for many years,” Sanders tells me when I go to meet with him in his Senate office in Washington, D.C. the day before his big speech in Missouri. “And I think the main point to be made is that no country, not the United States or any other country, can do it alone.  That if we’re going to address the very deep and complicated international issues that exist, we need to do it in cooperation.”

The senator is tieless, in a crumpled navy suit and light blue shirt. His shock of white hair is, as usual, unruly. He looks distracted and exhausted, perhaps the result of having spent the previous week pitching his landmark Medicare for All single-payer bill to Congress and to the country. 

“Many of my colleagues, Republican colleagues, here in the Senate, for example, disparage the United Nations,” he says, sitting across the table from me, in front of a wall of Vermont tourism posters. “While clearly the United Nations could be more effective, it is imperative that we strengthen international institutions, because at the end of the day, while it may not be sexy, it may not be glamorous, it may not allow for great soundbites, simply the idea … of people coming together and talking and arguing is a lot better than countries going to war.”

I ask him how such rhetoric differs from past statements in defense of the U.N. and of international cooperation offered by leading Democrats, such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.

“Excuse me.” Sanders doesn’t like to be interrupted. “Let me just talk a little bit about where I want to go.” 

The senator makes clear that “unilateralism, the belief that we can simply overthrow governments that we don’t want, that has got to be re-examined.” After referencing the Iraq War — “one of the great foreign policy blunders in the history of this country” — the senator touches on another historic blunder which, to his credit, few of his fellow senators would be willing to discuss, let alone critique. “In 1953, the United States, with the British, overthrew [Mohammed] Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran – and this was to benefit British oil interests,” he reminds me. “The result was the shah came into power, who was a very ruthless man, and the result of that was that we had the Iranian Revolution, which takes us to where we are right now.”

Does he regret not speaking with such passion, bluntness, and insight on international affairs during his failed primary campaign against Clinton? He shakes his head. “No, I think we ran the kind of campaign that we wanted to run.” There’s a pause. “But I think that foreign policy is clearly very, very important.”

During the Democratic presidential primaries, politicians and pundits alike agreed that Sanders had a foreign policy deficit. “Foreign policy,” wrote David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s foreign affairs doyen, “is the hole in Sanders’s political doughnut.” Patrick Leahy, Sanders’s fellow senator from Vermont, was only a tad more diplomatic in an interview with the New York Times. “It’s not the subject he gravitates to, that’s fair to say,” acknowledged Leahy.

A long-promised set piece speech on foreign policy during the campaign never came, and the Sanders campaign website lacked a foreign policy page for the first few months of his candidacy. Some of the figures identified by the senator as outside advisers on national security issues later claimed to hardly know him.

His discomfort with the topic is palpable, but the truth is that the 76-year-old Sanders is far from a foreign policy neophyte. In the 1980s, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he was an outspoken critic of U.S. interventions in Latin America, becoming the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to visit Nicaragua and meet with President Daniel Ortega (which earned him the soubriquet “Sandernista”). He even went on honeymoon to the Soviet Union in 1988, as part of his effort to establish a sister city program between Burlington and Yaroslavl.

Since 1991, Sanders has served in Congress, as a member of the House and then the Senate, debating and voting on military action, foreign treaties, trade deals, arms sales, international aid, and climate change agreements. Few critics have paused to consider the fact that a President Sanders would have arrived in the White House in January 2017 with far more foreign policy experience under his belt than Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. (Oh, and of course former reality TV star Donald J. Trump.) 

Nevertheless the impression persists that Sanders is out of his depth when it comes to the outside world. Perhaps in anticipation of another presidential bid in three years time, the Vermont senator has been taking steps to correct that impression. So far this year, Sanders has hired Matt Duss, a respected foreign affairs analyst and former president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), as his foreign policy adviser, and has given speeches at the liberal Jewish lobbying group, J Street, where he condemned “Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories” as being “contrary to fundamental American values,” and at the centrist Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, where he rebuked Russian President Vladimir Putin for “trying to weaken the transatlantic alliance.”

Last week, my colleague Glenn Greenwald penned a column in The Intercept headlined, “The Clinton Book Tour Is Largely Ignoring the Vital Role of Endless War in the 2016 Election Result.” Greenwald argued that Clinton’s “advocacy of multiple wars and other military actions” pushed some swing voters into the arms of both Donald Trump and third-party candidates, such as Jill Stein. I ask Sanders whether he agrees with this analysis.  
“I mean, that’s a whole other issue. And I don’t know the answer to that.”


I persist. Surely he’d concede that foreign policy was a factor in Clinton’s defeat?
He doesn’t budge. “I want to talk about my speech, not about Hillary Clinton.”

So foreign policy plays no role in elections?

“The answer is, I don’t know,” he responds wearily. “You can argue that somebody would say, ‘Well Bernie Sanders was too soft on defense, I’m not gonna vote for him because he’s not prepared to bomb every country in the world.’ Do you know how many voters I’ve lost because of that? We don’t know, that’s speculation.” (Not quite: Greenwald cited an academic study published earlier this year which argued “that had the U.S. fought fewer wars, or at least experienced fewer casualties, Clinton would have … won the election.”)

I ask him if there is a foreign policy equivalent to Medicare for All — that is, a radical progressive policy proposal that Sanders intends to campaign on and make mainstream.

“I wouldn’t look at it like that,” he tells me. “Anyone who thinks there is a simple solution in dealing with all of the horrific and longstanding conflicts in the world would be mistaken … Where we’ve got to be radical is to understand we cannot continue with simply using military as a means of addressing foreign policy issues.” 

Despite once having hung a picture of legendary antiwar activist Eugene Debs in his congressional office, Sanders is not a pacifist. He backed NATO’s air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. Yet he opposed the Iraq War and voted against the arming and training of Syrian rebels. So, I wonder, does he have his own test that has to be met before the United States should use force? 

The senator makes it clear to me that, in his view, military action should be a last resort, except in cases of genocide. “I think there has to be a legitimate understanding that American interests are being threatened. Obviously if someone was going to wage war against the United States, attack the United States, there is very good reason to respond.” He continues: “When you’re looking at genocidal situations, where people are being slaughtered right and left … we need international peacekeeping force to address that.”

Earlier this week, the president of the United States made what some might call a genocidal threat at the U.N. in New York: “If [the U.S.] is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

I remind the senator that both Obama and Trump came to office pledging to meet with their North Korean counterparts — yet Obama never did while Trump is now busy mocking Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man.” Does Sanders think a meeting between the two heads of state would be of value?

The senator says he would not object to “face-to-face meetings done in good faith” — rather than as cynical photo opportunities — and says that “in general, discussions and face-to-face meetings” are worthy of support. 

So, to be clear, would he support a U.S. president sitting down with the leader of North Korea to try and resolve the nuclear crisis? He shrugs. “Could I see that? Yeah, I could see that, yeah.”

One foreign policy issue, however, on which Sanders has attracted criticism from members of his own left-wing base is the Israel-Palestine conflict. Some pro-Palestinian progressives have accused him of giving Israel a pass. In an interview in April, for example, Sanders dismissed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; he also signed his name to a controversial letter attacking the U.N. for having an “anti-Israel agenda.”

Nonetheless, it is undeniable that in recent years the Vermont senator, who is Jewish and briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel in the 1960s, has taken a more pro-Palestinian position on the conflict and, specifically, against the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. “There comes a time when … we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time,” he told Clinton during a Democratic primary debate in April 2016.

These days, unlike other members of Congress, Sanders has no qualms about identifying, and decrying, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But does he accept that the United States is complicit in Israel’s occupation, through its military aid and arms sales? And does he also accept, therefore, that the occupation of the Palestinian territories will never end until the U.S. stops arming and funding the Jewish state?

“Certainly the United States is complicit, but it’s not to say … that Israel is the only party at fault,” he tells me. However, he adds, “in terms of Israeli-Palestinian relations the United States has got to play a much more even-handed role. Clearly that is not the case right now.”

Would he, therefore, ever consider voting to reduce U.S. aid to Israel — worth at least $3bn per annum — or U.S. arms sales to the Israeli military?

“The U.S. funding plays a very important role, and I would love to see people in the Middle East sit down with the United States government and figure out how U.S. aid can bring people together, not just result in an arms war in that area. So I think there is extraordinary potential for the United States to help the Palestinian people rebuild Gaza and other areas. At the same time, demand that Israel, in their own interests in a way, work with other countries on environmental issues.” He then, finally, answers my question: “So the answer is yes.”

It is — by the depressingly low standard of modern U.S. politics — a remarkable and, dare I say it, radical response from Sanders. “Aid to Israel in Congress and the pro-Israel community has been sacrosanct,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted earlier this year, “and no president has seriously proposed cutting it since Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s.”


Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom, who is constantly compared to Sanders, grabbed headlines in May after urging Britons in a speech, to “be brave enough to admit the war on terror is simply not working” and to draw “connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.” In the past, the Labour leader has labelled NATO a “danger to world peace” and called for engagement with groups, such as the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, and Hamas. 

You might say Corbyn is a genuine radical on foreign policy. Is the more cautious Sanders willing to match the Labour leader’s rhetoric on terrorism and the West’s response to terrorism? Does he, for example, think the United States has lost the so-called war on terror?

“Well, no, that’s too general of a question,” he replies dismissively. “I think you best deal with terrorism by trying to understand the root causes of those problems: the massive poverty that exists, the lack of education that exists, that when you drop a drone, for example, that kills innocent men, women, and child, that it only forms more antagonism toward the United States.”

I ask about the role of Saudi Arabia in allegedly supporting and funding terrorism. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers, lest we forget, were Saudi citizens. So is it an ally or enemy of the United States?

“It is not just that many of the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia,” he says, “what I think is more significant is their … continuing to fund madrasas and to spread an extremely radical Wahhabi doctrine in many countries around the world. And they are funding these mosques, they’re funding the madrasas, and they are fomenting a lot of hatred.”

Sanders wants the United States to pivot away from blind, uncritical support for the Gulf kingdom. He even seems to suggest that the United States should embrace the Saudis’ mortal enemy: the Iranians.

So could this be his foreign policy equivalent of Medicare for All? Trying to end almost four decades of hostility and mistrust between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran? Without firing a shot? It would be a dramatic and historic shift in approach. During the presidential primaries, Sanders was attacked for suggesting that the U.S. should “move as aggressively as we can to normalize relations with Iran.”

Yet, almost two years later, he isn’t afraid to make the case again. “I think that one of the areas that we have got to rethink, in terms of American foreign policy, is our position vis-a-vis Iran and Saudi Arabia,” he tells me, leaning forward in his chair. “For whatever reason — and I think we know some of the reasons having to do with a three-letter word called oil — the United States has kind of looked aside at the fact that Saudi Arabia is an incredibly anti-democratic country and has played a very bad role internationally, but we have sided with them time and time and time again, and yet Iran, which just held elections, Iran whose young people really want to reach out to the West, we are … continuing to put them down.”


While Sanders has “legitimate concerns … about Iran’s foreign policy” he wants a more “even-handed” approach from the United States to the “Iran and Saudi conflict.”

So I try to pin him down on the nature of the U.S.-Saudi relationship and ask again: Does he or does he not consider Saudi Arabia to be ally of the United States in the so-called war on terror?

He pauses. “Do I consider them an ally? I consider them to be an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world, it has funded terrorism, so I can’t … No, they are not an ally of the United States.”

Wait, maybe this is the foreign policy Medicare For All — downgrading diplomatic ties with one of the world’s worst regimes. Distancing Washington from Riyadh. But could Sanders really pull it off? Help persuade his fellow senators, on both sides of the aisle to depart from the decades-long bipartisan consensus on Saudi Arabia as a key U.S. ally? In June, the senator joined four Republicans and 42 Democrats to try and block a $510 million sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia. They were defeated — but by only six votes.

Greeted by a cheering crowd of students Thursday and awarded an honorary degree by the college in advance of his speech, a stern Sanders denounced the global war on terror as “a disaster for the American people” because it “responds to terrorists by giving them exactly what they want.”

He also offered a rousing defense of Obama’s key foreign affairs legacy: the Iran nuclear deal. “We must protect this deal,” Sanders told his audience, citing the nuclear agreement as an example of “real leadership” on the part of the United States.

Over the course of an hour on Thursday, the independent senator offered an unashamedly progressive, diplomacy-oriented, non-militarized vision of U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century: “The goal is not for the United States to dominate the world. … Our goal should be global engagement based on partnership, rather than dominance.

At a time when the U.S. president is beating the drums of war, threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea and tear up the Iran nuclear deal, it is both refreshing and admirable to hear a leading U.S. politician speak in this direct way. Sanders tells me that he wants a “serious discussion about foreign policy” — which, shamefully, is something his Democratic colleagues in the Senate have yet to agree to. For example, he points to a vote in the Senate on Monday, which authorized a whopping $80 billion annual increase in Pentagon spending. “Is that really a wise investment?” he asks.


“I dare say,” he adds acidly, “that most of the people who voted for this huge increase in military spending really would not be able to tell you exactly why it is needed.” 

Only four Senate Democrats joined Sanders to vote against the bill. Why does he think the rest of them voted for it?

“You’ll have to ask them,” is the curt rejoinder. 

Some of his critics on the left, however, don’t think Sanders goes far enough. Writing in July, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic castigated Sanders over his “relative silence on Obama’s foreign policy” and his “fairly conventional foreign policy thinking throughout his Washington career.” Such critics tend to want to see a full-throated, Noam Chomsky-style denunciation of U.S. imperialism from Sanders — and they want to see it yesterday. 

Interestingly, in 1985, Sanders invited Chomsky to speak in Burlington City Hall, introducing him to the crowd as “a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America” and saying he was “delighted to welcome a person who I think we’re all very proud of.” In 2016, when I interviewed Chomsky for my Al Jazeera English show, UpFront, the veteran philosopher and foreign policy critic heaped praise on Sanders as a “decent, honest” politician with “the best policies.”

I ask Sanders if, three decades later, he still agrees with Chomsky’s blistering critique of U.S. foreign policy across the board, including his provocative description of the United States as a “rogue state.”


Sanders cuts me off before I can finish my question. “OK, I get it. Noam Chomsky has played an extraordinarily important role. I am a United States senator. We live in different worlds.” He quickly — and conveniently — changes the subject. “Bottom line is I think we need to rethink foreign policy … and that means dealing with issues like income and wealth inequality, which is not only an American issue, it is a horrific global issue.” 

Sanders is now in his element and on a roll. “We have six of the wealthiest people who have more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. We need to deal with the issue of climate change, because if we don’t get our act together internationally on that, we may not have much of a planet left for our children and our grandchildren.” 

Let’s be clear: On foreign policy, Sanders does not go as far in a left-wing direction as his old friend Noam Chomsky or even his U.K. counterpart Jeremy Corbyn. But his renewed interest in foreign policy and his willingness to break with the established consensus could be among his most radical acts yet.

“Where we’ve got to be radical,” Sanders tells me, “is to understand that we cannot continue with simply using military as a means of addressing foreign policy issues. Where we have got to be radical and forceful, in an unprecedented way, is to force debate and discussion on the causes of international conflict – and certainly, we have not been doing that, and we need more American leadership to do that.”

Barack Obama's INCREDIBLE Speech Making Trump Look Like A Fool (video)

Rich People Just Care Less

By Daniel Goleman

Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.

These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States.

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.

Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.

Mr. Keltner suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.

While Mr. Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.

This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap. As political scientists have noted, redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,” a theme repeated by Vamik D. Volkan, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who was born in Cyprus to Turkish parents. Dr. Volkan remembers hearing as a small boy awful things about the hated Greek Cypriots — who, he points out, actually share many similarities with Turkish Cypriots. Yet for decades their modest-size island has been politically divided, which exacerbates the problem by letting prejudicial myths flourish.

In contrast, extensive interpersonal contact counteracts biases by letting people from hostile groups get to know one another as individuals and even friends. Thomas F. Pettigrew, a research professor of social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzed more than 500 studies on intergroup contact. Mr. Pettigrew, who was born in Virginia in 1931 and lived there until going to Harvard for graduate school, told me in an e-mail that it was the “the rampant racism in the Virginia of my childhood” that led him to study prejudice.

In his research, he found that even in areas where ethnic groups were in conflict and viewed one another through lenses of negative stereotypes, individuals who had close friends within the other group exhibited little or no such prejudice. They seemed to realize the many ways those demonized “others” were “just like me.” Whether such friendly social contact would overcome the divide between those with more and less social and economic power was not studied, but I suspect it would help.

Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century. This widening gulf between the haves and have-less troubles me, but not for the obvious reasons. Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes. Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.

Noam Chomsky: Who Owns the World?

Stop being afraid of more government. It’s exactly what we need.

By Fareed Zakaria

Seeing the devastating effects of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and of wildfires out West, one cannot help but think about the crucial role that government plays in our lives. But while we accept, even celebrate, the role of government in the wake of such disasters, we are largely blind to the need for government to mitigate these kinds of crises in the first place.

Ever since President Ronald Reagan, much of the United States has embraced an ideological framework claiming that government is the source of our problems. Reagan famously quipped, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Reagan argued for a retreat from the vision of an activist state and advocated instead a strictly limited role for government, one dedicated to core functions such as national defense. Outside of these realms, he believed, government should simply encourage the private sector and market forces. 

Reagan’s worldview grew out of the 1970s — a period marked by fiscal mismanagement, government overreach and slowing growth. It might have been the right attitude for its time. 

But it has stayed in place for decades as a rigid ideology, even though we have entered a new age in which America has faced a very different set of challenges, often desperately requiring an activist government. This has been a bipartisan abdication of responsibility.

For decades now, we have watched as stagnant wage growth for 90 percent of Americans has been coupled with supercharged growth for the richest few, leading to widening inequality on a scale not seen since the Gilded Age. It has been assumed that the federal government could do nothing about this expanding gap, despite much evidence to the contrary. 

We have watched China enter the global trade system and take advantage of its access to Western markets and capital, while still maintaining a massively controlled internal economy and pursuing predatory trade practices. And we have assumed that the U.S. government can’t do anything about it, because any action would be protectionist.

We watched as financial institutions took on more and more risk, with other people’s money, effectively gambling in a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose system. Any talk of regulation was seen as socialist. Even after the system blew up, causing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the calls soon came to deregulate the financial sector once again because, after all, government regulation is obviously bad.

In this same period, technology companies have grown in size and scale, often using first-mover advantage to establish quasi-monopolies and quash competition. The digital economy was supposed to empower the individual entrepreneur, but it has instead become one in which four or five companies utterly dominate the global landscape. A new technology company today aspires simply to be bought by Google or Facebook. And we assume that the federal government should have had no role in shaping this vast new economy. That would be activist and bad. Better for government to simply observe the process, like a passive spectator watching a new Netflix drama.

And then there is climate. These hurricanes have not been caused by global warming, but their frequency and intensity have likely been magnified by climate change. Particularly calamitous hurricanes have their names retired, and in the last 20 years there have been about as many names retired as in the preceding 40 years. California has had more than 6,400 wildfires this year. The 17 hottest years on record have all taken place in the past two decades. 

And yet, we have been wary of too much government activism. This is true not just in tackling climate change but in other areas that have contributed to the storms’ destructive power. 

Houston chose not to have any kind of zoning that limited development, even in flood-prone areas, paving over thousands of acres of wetlands that used to absorb rainwater and curb flooding. The chemical industry has been able to persuade Washington to exercise a light regulatory touch, so there is limited protection against fires and contamination, something that was made abundantly clear in the past couple of weeks. And now, of course, low-tax and low-regulation Texas has come to the federal government, hat in hand, asking for more than $150 billion to rebuild its devastated state. 

We are living in an age of revolutions, natural and human, that are buffeting individuals and communities. We need government to be more than a passive observer of these trends and forces. It needs to actively shape and manage them. Otherwise, the ordinary individual will be powerless. I imagine that this week, most people in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico would be delighted to hear the words “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

The deal Trump wanted with Russia

By Ruth Marcus

There comes a point in the unspooling of every complex political-financial-legal scandal when the story becomes so complicated that it’s easy to lose the thread of what matters. The facts dribble out, in ever more confusing increments. The lengthy cast of characters resembles a Russian novel. Competing news demands our attention. 

That is where we are now when it comes to the investigation of President Trump and Russia. Harvey deluged the Texas Coast, drowning out the news about Trump’s involvement with Russia. Still, that news is, or should be, huge. The latest revelations feel, at least for now, like more of a political bombshell than a legal problem, but the two are closely related; consider how many public officials have landed themselves in legal jeopardy trying to save their political hides.
To recap, what we know now that we did not know a week ago:

While he ran for president, Trump was simultaneously — and secretly — pursuing financial opportunities with a foreign adversary. Not just any adversary, but Russia, a country described by his party’s previous presidential nominee as the United States’ “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” And not just pursuing financial opportunities in Russia, but actively seeking the help of at least one senior Russian official to gain government approval for the project.

Once again: This is not okay. When you run for president, you cannot — you should not — put yourself in the position of using that candidacy as a door-opening business opportunity. You cannot — even if the prospect of winning seems remote — put yourself in a position of being financially beholden to a hostile foreign power.

Trump Tower Moscow was not another instance of Trump as unabashed cross-promoter-in-chief, like using the campaign press corps to help tout the reopening of his Scottish golf course. It represented something much more disturbing, even unpatriotic.

It was possible, when The Post first broke the news of the failed deal, to discount the proposal as braggadocio from Felix Sater, the Russian-born real estate developer pushing the deal. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater emailed Trump Organization executive vice president Michael Cohen, detailed by the New York Times.

But as it turned out, this was more than Sater freelancing in Trump’s name. The Post next reported that Cohen emailed Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in January 2016 in a bid to save the languishing deal; that Cohen discussed the project with Trump on three occasions; and that the effort was dropped when Russian government permission was unforthcoming.

The Trump Organization not only pursued this opportunity in secret, it — indeed, Trump himself — actively misled the public. Imagine how much more sharply people would have responded to Trump’s already repulsive praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin during that time — “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country” — if they knew that Trump had just signed a letter of intent with a Russian firm to develop a Trump-branded tower in Moscow.

And as the question of Trump’s Russian connections became increasingly controversial, he somehow omitted the just-abandoned deal. “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia,” he tweeted in July 2016. This past January, as Trump prepared to take office, he reiterated, “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA — NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” Shades of Bill Clinton — it depends on what the meaning of “have” is.
As recently as his interview this summer with the New York Times, Trump disingenuously played down his financial interests in Russia. “I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something, so, you know, I sell a lot of condo units, and somebody from Russia buys a condo, who knows? . . . They said I own buildings in Russia. I don’t. They said I made money from Russia. I don’t. It’s not my thing. I don’t, I don’t do that. Over the years, I’ve looked at maybe doing a deal in Russia, but I never did one.” Including the one he was pursuing while running for president, but failed to mention.

We have become inured to Trumpian self-dealing, from doubling membership fees at Mar-a-Lago to profiting off his government-owned D.C. hotel. This one goes beyond pure greed. It edges into serious questions about whether Trump’s positions on Putin and Russia have been and remain tainted by considerations not of what is best for the nation but what benefits Trump’s bottom line.

On Voting Reforms, Follow Illinois, Not Texas

Editorial of the New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

In the face of America’s abysmal voter participation rates, lawmakers have two choices: They can make voting easier, or they can make it harder. 

Illinois made the right choice this week, becoming the 10th state, along with the District of Columbia, to enact automatic voter registration. The bill, which could add as many as one million voters to the state’s rolls, was signed by Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican who had vetoed similar legislation last year.

Under the new law, all eligible voters will be registered to vote when they visit the Department of Motor Vehicles or other state agencies. If they do not want to be registered, they may opt out.

“The right to vote is foundational for the rights of Americans in our democracy,” Mr. Rauner said at a bill-signing ceremony on Monday. “We as a people need to do everything we can to knock down barriers, remove hurdles for all those who are eligible to vote, to be able to vote.”

Consider Texas, which is pushing relentlessly in the opposite direction of Illinois. Republican lawmakers there passed in 2011, and continue to defend today, one of the nation’s most restrictive voter-ID laws, which has been tied up in court challenges from the start. Last week a federal judge in Corpus Christi struck down the law on the grounds that it intentionally discriminated against black and Latino voters, who tend to vote Democratic, in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. The acceptable forms of identification — a gun permit, for example, but not a student ID card — were more likely to be held by white voters, the judge found.

The judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, had invalidated portions of the law in 2014, but gave the state a chance for a do-over. In her latest ruling, Judge Ramos found that Texas’ fixes offered no improvement. For instance, a new provision requires prospective voters without a photo ID to sign an affidavit that threatens severe penalties for perjury — but that only “trades one obstacle to voting with another,” the judge wrote. (President Trump’s Justice Department disagreed. The department under President Barack Obama had sued to block the original law, but now it has switched sides, arguing that the revised law is not discriminatory.)

The voter-ID law is one of several recent cases in which federal courts have found that Texas is discriminating against minorities in voting. You’d think state officials would get the message, but they’re as defiant as ever. Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, has appealed the rulings, calling them “outrageous.”

What’s really outrageous is the brazenness with which Republican lawmakers continue to hawk their antivoter laws, and their bogus claims of widespread fraud, pretending to care about electoral integrity when what they’re really after is a smaller, whiter electorate that they believe is their ticket to eternal victory. If Texas really cared about integrity, it would invest in educating the public about how to get the free identification that it now offers as one option. 

But even though an estimated 600,000 registered Texas voters lack that ID, the state issued only 869 free IDs between 2013 and 2017, according to a report by ProPublica.

Meanwhile in Oregon, which in 2015 became the first state to pass automatic voter registration, more than 272,000 people were registered in the law’s first year, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress. Of these, 116,000 were found to be unlikely to have registered otherwise, and 40,000 of that group voted in 2016, helping Oregon achieve the nation’s largest turnout increase from 2012 — 4.1 points, to 68.3 percent. Contrary to Republican fears, that increase did not equal Democratic gains. Democrats lost seats in the State Legislature, even though the new voters were more racially diverse than previously registered voters.

In other words, increasing voter participation should be a bipartisan project. That hasn’t been the case for years, and it won’t be as long as President Trump is in the White House, deputizing his merry band of vote suppressors to justify his myth of illegal voters.