Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I found during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
Rana Faroohar at The Financial Times reflects on America’s “serious problems at home, such as dealing with falling living standards, a terrible healthcare system, and racial discrimination. Indeed, it may be those very issues that have led Americans to have a more negative view of themselves in the world than many allies do. Gallup data shows that only 37 per cent of Americans are satisfied with their country’s position in the world, versus a high of 71 per cent in 2002. This decline has led to an inwardness on international issues such as trade and global security, according to Pew.” She then discusses the how this has played out along party lines: “Less than half of [Republicans] now see trade as an opportunity, compared to 72 per cent of Democrats, according to Gallup. Likewise, three times more Republicans than Democrats believe that the US is doing too much for Ukraine. Both sides increasingly believe that China is an enemy, and co-operation will be impossible.”
“Most Americans Favor Restrictions on False Information, Violent Content Online”
This Pew Research survey chronicles the increasing acceptance of censorship among Americans since 2018. The survey dealt with both the questions of “false information” and “extremely violent content” online, questions which, I believe, should have been treated separately. Nevertheless, the results for the former category are significant and worthy of serious concern. Since 2018, Americans have becoming significantly more supportive of the government and tech companies regulating the circulation of information. The following figure documents this sizable shift in attitude over the course of just five years:
“US Reindustrialization Raises Many Questions”
Urban C. Lehner addresses the many question marks surrounding rapidly evolving American industrial policy for Asia Times. He writes that “For a country that has been deindustrializing for many years, the boom is good news. Deindustrialization gave consumers lower prices for many goods but it had significant downsides. It drove formerly middle-class workers into poverty, turned vibrant communities into rust buckets and denuded the labor force of important skills.” He then reflects on how difficult it will be to reverse this process: “The US is a high-wage country; can we really bring low-wage, labor-intensive manufacturing like textiles back? New high-wage, high-tech factories will be competing for a limited pool of skilled, educated workers. It could take decades to rebuild the domestic supplier networks that were dismantled during deindustrialization.”
“The Afghanistan Lithium Great Game”
At Counterpunch, Binoy Kampmark highlights the central importance of lithium reserves in the post-occupation geopolitics of Afghanistan: “Afghanistan has again piqued the interest of eager strategists drawing their salaries from the US government and assorted thinktanks. Such interest has nothing at all to do with the good citizenry of the Taliban-controlled state, be it the welfare of women or purported links to terrorist groups. They concern the presence of lithium reserves in the Chapa Dara district of Kunar province and, almost inevitably, a fear that the People’s Republic of China might muscle in. In 2010, a US Department of Defense memorandum valued the extent of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth as between $1 trillion and $3 trillion. And that was before the skyrocketing value of specific minerals that are becoming critical in the global energy transition.”
“Western Lockdowns Still Torment Africa”
Hassoum Ceesay and Toby Green explore the devastating consequences of WHO, World Bank, and EU-led pandemic policies in The Gambia for Unherd: What emerges is a clear assertion of Western imperialism in Africa executed under the guise of fighting covid-19: “Austerity has been forced on the country by external creditors and their incessant demands for information and compliance to protocols that, to most Gambians, were useless — and where Covid-19 was far from the greatest health threat they faced. As elsewhere around the world, vast levels of corruption were involved with the effective printing of money that went with the Covid response. Meanwhile, international solidarity collapsed, as Western activists appeared far more concerned by the political landscape in their own countries than by the effect of these policies on African lives — about which many remain reticent to this day.”
- traces the intellectual history of antihumanism at First Things. He argues that “We are already sliding toward a post-political mode of governance in which expert administration replaces democratic contest, and political sovereignty is relocated from representative bodies to a permanent bureaucracy that is largely unaccountable. Common sense is disqualified as a guide to reality, and with this disqualification the political standing of the majority is demoted as well. The new antihumanisms can only accelerate these trends: They serve as apologetics for a further concentration of wealth and power, and the further erosion of the concept of the citizen—by which I mean the wide-awake, imperfect but responsible human being on whom the ideal of self-government rests.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.