Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
Most presidential elections in America have been contests over different policy solutions and approaches but rooted in a commonly agreed reality. This time around, as the back-to-back Republican and Democratic conventions have demonstrated, the dispute is over what constitutes reality itself. More than anything else, this election is about defining what America is.
Nominating conclaves used to be mainly about gritty political tradeoffs among factions in order to reach consensus on a candidate. These conventions were Hollywood-style orchestrations, replete with celebrity testimonials and musical performances, aimed at convincing the larger public of which reality to believe. Donald Trump and company argue we should be afraid, very afraid, because de-nationalized cosmopolitan elites have lost the will to protect the safety and economic well-being of Americans in a dangerous and ruthlessly competitive world. Climate change, which they recklessly deny, doesn’t make their list of concerns.
Hillary Clinton and company argue that President Obama has set America on the right course, disengaging from a war footing and celebrating diversity as the nation’s greatest strength. For them, the real danger is not Trump’s Mexicans or Muslims but intolerant and divisive nativism. And for the Democrats, in the end it is the chastised establishment insiders, not disenchanted outsiders, who are the most competent to implement incremental change that will reduce inequality and curb the inordinate influence of the one percent.
The contest over defining who we are seems to have come about for two reasons. First, the consciousness of most Americans now dwells in media silos that are echo chambers of their own worldview and not objective platforms that establish a common grasp of the facts. Second, America, like the rest of the world, is in the midst of a Great Transformation in which the established institutions that sustained stability and progress for decades are ill suited to face the social upheaval of rapid technological change and globalization that is creating new classes of winners and losers. Caught in the purgatory of no longer and not yet, a clear path to salvation eludes the unsettled body politic.
The left-populist filmmaker Michael Moore lays out several reasons he is convinced that Trump will win the presidency. As Moore sees it, the Republican candidate will triumph in the key economically depressed Midwestern states, an outcome he calls America’s “Rust Belt Brexit.” Further, white men full of resentment at being left behind in an ever more diverse society will vote in Trump’s favor. Hillary is just too unpopular among the general public, says Moore, while the reluctant stance of disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters will translate into a weak showing for her at the polls. Lastly, Moore expects the mischievous “Jesse Ventura effect” of voters who want to upset the applecart “to make Mommy and Daddy mad.”
An even more bizarre overlay in this year’s election is the apparent strongman sympathies between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, compounded by the “high confidence” judgment of American intelligence that the Russian government hacked into the Democratic National Committee emails.
Writing from Moscow, Anastasya Manuilova says that while it is “not implausible to say that such government-backed hackers do exist” in Russia, most of her colleagues at the Kommersant newspaper found the allegations “too far-fetched” or lacking enough proof to make such an elaborate scheme believable.
Russian chess champion and thorn in Putin’s side, Garry Kasparov, is not surprised by alleged Russian meddling in American politics on behalf of “the extraordinarily disruptive and unpredictable” Trump. “Putin wants to stoke chaos and discord in the West,” he writes.
Writing from Armenia, Armine Sahakyan says she is “convinced that not just Putin but also every other dictator in the former Soviet Union would love a Trump presidency. That way the United States would stop harping on their corruption, human rights abuses and other shortcomings — and let them kill and imprison political opponents and subjugate neighbors with impunity.”
Continuing terrorist attacks in Europe, including the brutal throat slitting of an elderly Catholic priest in France by terrorists who claimed allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, are leading to a more urgent reverberation of the divisive American debate. Writing from Paris, Frederic Sicard argues against the state of emergency declared by President Francois Hollande. “Faced with barbarity, can’t our democracies choose not to seek safety only by sacrificing the very foundations of our society of law and freedom?” he asks. “By muting our deepest aspirations, are we not playing into the hands of terrorism?”
Writing from Germany, Roland Tichy reflects on the recent string of terror acts in his country. “The stark political divisions on display in the U.S.,” he says, “now appear in Germany as well. Germany is becoming more colorful, thus becoming more American: It is also growing more violent in its hostilities, more unforgiving. This divide will increase along the ethnic and social fault lines.”
As a pervasive sense of insecurity spreads across Europe, it is also about to be hit with a new financial crisis over Italy’s insolvent banks. Despite EU rules against bailouts, Steve Hanke argues that “an Italian state rescue” is the most sensible way to recapitalize the troubled banks. Europe’s tough and powerful commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager, lays out why and how markets must work for citizens.
Wikileaks is not only roiling the U.S. election through the release of internal DNC emails. It also helped publicize the so-called “Erodgan emails” in the wake of the recent coup attempt in Turkey. Zeynep Tufekci slams Wikileaks and the hackers behind the data dump for irresponsibly publicizing documents that shed no light on the regime but which instead included the identities, addresses and contact details of women who belong to the ruling Justice and Development Party. “Their addresses are out there for every stalker, ex-partner, disapproving relative or random crazy to peruse as they wish,” she writes. As a result of our post, the uploaded files to which Wikileaks linked have been removed.
James Dorsey scores the anti-Gulenist purge underway in Turkey as strengthening militants and jihadists in Pakistan as the Turkish government demands the closure of the “PakTurkey” schools run by Gulenists there that teach science and moderation instead of extremism. In an interview, sociologist Joshua Hendrik explains what we need to know about Fethullah Gulen and the Hizmet (“service”) organization over which he presides. WorldPost correspondent Sophia Jones reports from Istanbul on a major demonstration this week by opposition groups to show solidarity against the recent coup from across the political spectrum.
As the Olympics are about to get underway in Brazil, Yale’s Joseph Lewnard contends that the fear of the Zika virus spreading as a result of large numbers of people gathering at the Games is highly exaggerated.
Criminologist John Carl takes a critical look at the prison system in America, which has the world’s largest incarcerated population per capita, tracing its origins to the unforgiving Puritan culture from which it was born.
Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden examine China’s growing military presence in Africa, ranging from greater engagement in United Nations peacekeeping missions to anti-piracy patrols to its nearly completed navy outpost in Djibouti.
This interactive world map reshapes countries and continents if we look at the factor of wealth instead of geography and population.
Our Singularity series this week looks at a new bio-robot shaped like a stingray and made of heart cells that can be controlled by light.
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s news coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.
CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
