Weekly Grounding #17
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader mission. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden”
Nate Cohn reports on Joe Biden’s continued poor polling among nonwhite voters for the New York Times: “Democrats have lost ground among nonwhite voters in almost every election over the last decade, even as racially charged fights over everything from a border wall to kneeling during the national anthem might have been expected to produce the exact opposite result. Weak support for Mr. Biden could easily manifest itself as low turnout — as it did in 2022 — even if many young and less engaged voters ultimately do not vote for Mr. Trump.” As also discussed in Weekly Grounding #14, there is a significant class aspect to this trend: “Mr. Biden is underperforming most among nonwhite voters making less than $100,000 per year, at least temporarily erasing the century-old tendency for Democrats to fare better among lower-income than higher-income nonwhite voters…Overall, he retains a 61-23 lead among nonwhite college graduates, compared with a mere 49-31 lead among those without a four-year degree.”
“Residents Protest Plan to House 300 Migrants at Hyde Park Area Motel”
Handful of Earth strives to address key political, cultural, and technological issues and debates with an acknowledgement of their immense complexity. While it may be tempting to simply think about “nonwhite” or “Black and Hispanic” voting blocs in American politics in light of the media framing of poll results, that is only part of the picture. CBS News Chicago reports on many Black residents’ opposition to a city plan to house hundreds of migrants in a Hyde Park motel for an indefinite period: “‘You've got 73 percent of the people homeless in this city are Black people,’ a woman said. ‘What have you done for them?’” For more on this topic, see Weekly Grounding #8.
“77% of US Youth Unqualified for Military Service”
Gabriel Honrada reports on the U.S. Military’s deepening recruitment crisis for Asia Times. Major drivers include obesity, mental and physical health conditions, and drug and alcohol abuse. Honrada also highlights a number of other contributing factors, including the tarnished image of the military in American society: “The protracted US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by the disastrous 2021 US withdrawal from the former, may have engendered a sense of pessimism in US public and policymaking circles, damaging US society’s perceptions of the US military.” A recent Gallup poll cited in the article demonstrates that this trend holds across political affiliation:
“The Dawn of the Brics World Order”
Meanwhile, outside the United States, massive geopolitical and economic shifts are underway.
illustrates the multifaceted reasons for the recent expansion of BRICS at Unherd. On the one hand, this is a result of Western (especially American) decline, of which the aforementioned U.S. military recruitment crisis is but one symptom: “Over the past decades, Western economies have become increasingly financialised and seen their industrial production stagnate, meaning that a large part of their GDP doesn’t represent the production of actual goods but rather of financial assets. If we look at actual production — manufacturing — the gap between the West and the Brics is even starker: the G7 countries as whole contribute to global manufacturing output roughly as much as China does on its own.” On the other hand, many non-Western countries have their own motivations for joining BRICS: “For some, the Brics represents a ‘geopolitical umbrella’ ostensibly offering a degree of protection in the face of the West’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy, epitomised by the Biden administration’s ‘dual containment’ strategy against China and Russia, and the expansion of Nato and Nato-like alliances around the world. For others, the motivation might be the opposite: they might, as Branko Milanovic suggests, view the Brics as ‘the only place where nations not interested in participating in the new Cold War, or even in a possible hot war between the superpowers, can ‘runaway’ in order not to have to choose sides.’ For others still, the motivation is more ideological: it is about explicitly challenging and weakening the West’s 500-year-old grip on global affairs, in what may be likened to a new decolonisation movement. This is particularly evident in some African countries.”
“Documents Reveal Widespread Use of Fake Social Media Accounts by DHS”
The Brennan Center for Justice reports: “The Department of Homeland Security routinely uses fake social media accounts to collect information about people, according to over 3,000 pages of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit…The internal records include guidance for agency personnel and emails — but there is little or no evidence of adequate rules to protect Americans’ privacy rights.” While government officials regularly bemoan the spread of online misinformation, they simultaneously sow confusion and discord through their own operations: “Homeland Security Investigations’ undercover activities are governed by its Undercover Operations Handbook — but because the handbook is secret, we do not know whether it accounts for the greater risks posed by government agents engaging in undercover activity online, where they can take on nearly endless identities and communicate with multiple people at once with little effort. These capabilities evade the natural constraints imposed on ‘real world’ undercover efforts, where the number of personas and contacts are necessarily limited.”
- writes a fascinating review of Neil Howe’s recent book, The Fourth Turning Is Here, at . Lyons contests Howe’s techno-optimism: “Despite an entire chapter castigating the ‘linear’ view of history and advocating cyclical thinking, he remains trapped within an inadvertently Hegelian progressive worldview. Crises may keep recurring, propelled by a sort of dialectic of opposites, but in every case, America emerges stronger and more advanced, spiraling ever upward toward a future of greater complexity, centralization, and techno-rationalism. It never seems to occur to Howe that the American regime (and the whole Western world) could be structurally failing precisely because it has been captured by run-away progressive managerial technocracy—and that eliminating all remaining opposition to this regime will only accelerate its self-induced insanity and dysfunction.” However, Lyons concludes that “The Fourth Turning Is Here is worth reading. Filled with fascinating historical data and incisive observations, it succeeds in making a convincing case that the crisis we can all feel coming has indeed reached our doorstep. Howe offers us the hope, at least, that it will entail a creative form of destruction. One way or another, America will soon change into a very different country.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.