Oh this is good. And it extends beyond the global south:
> Instead of exhausting all redressive options before turning to repression, policymakers operated in reverse, treating politics as something one resorts to only after violence fails. Instead of redressing the root causes of political discontent, they mandated the military to prosecute an unwinnable global war on its symptoms — with devastating consequences for life and liberty both abroad and at home.
Substitute "police" in there and you have the BLM situation. A hundred days and nights of teargassing the public rather than addressing their political demands, i.e. that it should not be legal for the police to execute people in the streets on mere suspicion of a crime, and that such crimes should be effectively prosecuted resulting in conviction and imprisonment of the individuals responsible and any co-conspirators.
> Political grievances, by contrast, run deep and are easier to build a sustained strategy around. If, for example, Russia ends up exploiting the marginalization of African Americans in order to sow domestic discord, as suggested in Thomas Rid’s New York Times op-ed (Rid, 2020), then the policy response should be twofold. Yes, we should detect and uproot Russian propaganda infrastructure where practicable. But, policymakers should also seek to redress the mistreatment and social injustice that made audiences receptive to such propaganda in the first place.
I think that the working-class prosperity the US enjoyed from the 1950s through the 1970s was not just because the US was the only major economy not devastated by war. I think it was also because business owners were afraid of communism, and were therefore treating their employees somewhat better, to head off any ideas they might have of getting a better deal by revolution. Something like that could happen again... if business owners become concerned enough about the possibility of the workers revolting.
The "working class" in that context doesn't mean the whole working class including those discriminated against. They tend to get ignored when talking about the good old days of the "in group" as usual. They had an artifically deflated labor pool that kept out competitors driving up their wages, effectively a cartel. This bigotry in labor was also the seed of their downfall as those excluded started their own and undid the monopoly on labor bargining. Cartels either hold the world back or are passed by it. The gatekeeping approach has failed recursively with non-union shop prevalence, increased automation paired with professionalization as opposed to trade shifts, and outsourcing.
From what little I can tell about many European labor union styles they avoided this shortsighted xenophobic fracturing of their bargining power.
> Instead of exhausting all redressive options before turning to repression, policymakers operated in reverse, treating politics as something one resorts to only after violence fails. Instead of redressing the root causes of political discontent, they mandated the military to prosecute an unwinnable global war on its symptoms — with devastating consequences for life and liberty both abroad and at home.
Substitute "police" in there and you have the BLM situation. A hundred days and nights of teargassing the public rather than addressing their political demands, i.e. that it should not be legal for the police to execute people in the streets on mere suspicion of a crime, and that such crimes should be effectively prosecuted resulting in conviction and imprisonment of the individuals responsible and any co-conspirators.
> Political grievances, by contrast, run deep and are easier to build a sustained strategy around. If, for example, Russia ends up exploiting the marginalization of African Americans in order to sow domestic discord, as suggested in Thomas Rid’s New York Times op-ed (Rid, 2020), then the policy response should be twofold. Yes, we should detect and uproot Russian propaganda infrastructure where practicable. But, policymakers should also seek to redress the mistreatment and social injustice that made audiences receptive to such propaganda in the first place.
Well, that's not going to happen, is it?