|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
December 23, 2013
December 22, 2013
December 21, 2013, 1:42 pm
29 Comments
To get there, you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings you to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers, each in a locked cabinet and each cooled by blasts of Arctic air shot up from vents in the floor.
These computers are the laborers of the virtual mines where Bitcoins
are unearthed. Instead of swinging pickaxes, these custom-built
machines, which are running an open-source Bitcoin program, perform
complex algorithms 24 hours a day. If they come up with the right
answers before competitors around the world do, they win a block of 25
new Bitcoins from the virtual currency’s decentralized network.
The network is programmed to release 21 million coins eventually. A little more than half are already out in the world, but because the system will release Bitcoins at a progressively slower rate, the work of mining could take more than 100 years.
The scarcity — along with a speculative mania that has grown up around digital money — has made each new Bitcoin worth as much as $1,100 in recent weeks.
Bitcoins are invisible money, backed by no government, useful only as
a speculative investment or online currency, but creating them commands
a surprisingly hefty real-world infrastructure.
“What we have here are money-printing machines,” said Emmanuel Abiodun, 31, founder of the company that built the Iceland installation, shouting above the din of the computers. “We cannot risk that anyone will get to them.”
Mr. Abiodun is one of a number of entrepreneurs who have rushed, gold-fever style, into large-scale Bitcoin mining operations in just the last few months. All of these people are making enormous bets that Bitcoin will not collapse, as it has threatened to do several times.
Just last week, moves by Chinese authorities caused the price of a Bitcoin to drop briefly below $500. If the system did crash, the new computers would be essentially useless because they are custom-built for Bitcoin mining.
Miners, though, are among the virtual-currency faithful, believing that Bitcoin will turn into a new, cheaper way of sending money around the world, leaving behind its current status as a largely speculative commodity.
Most of the new operations popping up guard their secrecy closely, but Mr. Abiodun agreed to show his installation for the first time. An earnest young Briton, with the casual fashion taste of the tech cognoscenti, he was a computer programmer at HSBC in London when he decided to invest in specialized computers that would carry out constant Bitcoin mining.
The computers that do the work eat up so much energy that electricity costs can be the deciding factor in profitability. There are Bitcoin mining installations in Hong Kong and Washington State, among other places, but Mr. Abiodun chose Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric energy are plentiful and cheap. And the arctic air is free and piped in to cool the machines, which often overheat when they are pushed to the outer limits of their computing capacity.
The operation can baffle even those entrusted with its care. Helgi Helgason, a burly, bald Icelandic man who oversees the data center that houses the machines, said that when he first heard that a Bitcoin mining operation was moving in he expected something very different. “I thought we’d bring in machines and put bags behind them and the coins would fall into them,” said Mr. Helgason, with a laugh.
Since then, the education he has received about Bitcoins has been enlightening, but only to a point.
“It’s a strange business,” he said, “and I can’t say that I understand it.”
Until just a few months ago, most Bitcoin mining was done on the home computers of digital-money fanatics. But as the value of a single Bitcoin skyrocketed over the last few months, the competition for new coins set off a race that quickly turned mining into an industrial enterprise.
“Even if you had hardware earlier this year, that is becoming obsolete,” said Greg Schvey, a co-founder of Genesis Block, a virtual-currency research firm. “You are talking about order-of-magnitude jumps.”
The work the computers do is akin to guessing at a lottery number. The faster the computers run, the better chance of guessing that right number and winning valuable coins. So mining entrepreneurs are buying chips and computers designed specifically — and only — for this work. The machines in Iceland are worth about $20,000 each on the open market.
The energy required to run these computers is huge, and has led to criticism that Bitcoin mining is wasteful, not to mention socially useless. But Mr. Abiodun prides himself on using renewable power, at least in Iceland.
When Mr. Abiodun first heard about Bitcoin mining in 2010, he thought it was a scam. Begun in 2009 as the imaginative creation of an anonymous programmer (or group of programmers) known as Satoshi Nakamoto, it was initially little more than a tech world curiosity. As early users connected their computers into the network, they became a part of the decentralized infrastructure that hosts Bitcoin’s open-source program. The computers joining the network immediately began capturing virtual coins. The network’s protocol was designed to release a new block of Bitcoins every 10 minutes until all 21 million were released, with the blocks getting smaller as time goes on. If the miners in the network take more than 10 minutes to guess the correct code, the Bitcoin program adapts to make the puzzle easier. If they solve the problems in less than 10 minutes, the code becomes harder.
Mr. Abiodun’s opinion of Bitcoin changed in January, when he saw the price rising. He installed a free application on his home computer that linked him into the Bitcoin network and set it to mining, harnessing the power of his graphics card, which is the part of a normal computer best suited to doing the code work.
Mr. Abiodun’s computer was in the guest room of his house in southeast London. Working at HSBC during the day and tinkering with his Bitcoin system at night, he realized if he wanted to make any money, his computer would have to run around the clock.
The constant computing, however, overheated the graphics card and pushed the computer’s exhaust fans into overdrive. When he added another graphics card, then a new computer, the room became too noisy for guests to sleep, and the windows had to be kept open to release the heat. That did not make his wife, Gloria, who was pregnant at the time, very happy.
“It just created a scenario where there was no way our parents would come over to stay,” he said. “I did offer to put her parents in a hotel, but that didn’t go down well.”
Mr. Abiodun’s wife finally gave him an ultimatum — either the computers had to go, or he did. At the same time, he was making money, and friends were asking if they could invest in his mining operation.
In February, Mr. Abiodun used the investors’ money to buy machines from a start-up dedicated solely to manufacturing specialized mining computers. The competition for those computers is so intense that he had to pay for them and wait for delivery.
When the delays became lengthy, however, he went on eBay and paid $130,000 for two high-powered machines, which he set up in June in a data center in Kansas City, Kan.
This was the beginning of Mr. Abiodun’s company, Cloud Hashing, which rents out computing power to people who want to mine without buying computers themselves. The term hashing refers to the repetitive code guessing that miners do.
Today, all of the machines dedicated to mining Bitcoin have a computing power about 4,500 times the capacity of the United States government’s mightiest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, according to calculations done by Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The computing capacity of the Bitcoin network has grown by around 30,000 percent since the beginning of the year.
“This whole new kind of machine has come into existence in the last 12 months,” said Professor Taylor, who is studying mining hardware. In the chase for the lucky code that will unlock new Bitcoins, mining computers are also verifying and assigning unique identifying tags to each Bitcoin transaction, acting as accountants for the virtual currency world.
“The network is providing the infrastructure for making sure the currency is being transferred between people according to the rules,” Professor Taylor said, “and making sure people aren’t creating currency illegally.”
Even before Mr. Abiodun’s machines in Kansas City were up and running, it was clear that they wouldn’t be enough. So he ordered about 100 machines from a start-up in Sweden and, in October, had them moved to the facility in Iceland. In just a few months, that installation has generated more than $4 million worth of Bitcoins, at the current value, according to the company’s account on the public Bitcoin network.
At the end of each day, the spoils are divided up and sent to Cloud Hashing’s customers. Last Wednesday, for example, the entire operation unlocked 225 Bitcoins, valued at around $160,000 at recent prices. Cloud Hashing keeps about 20 percent of the capacity for its own mining.
The unregulated Bitcoin-mining industry is ripe for abuse, and ventures that sound similar to Cloud Hashing have turned out to be scams. Mr. Abiodun’s company has proved itself real, but it is still unclear if it is a good deal for customers. Cloud Hashing charges $999 to rent a tiny portion of the company’s computing power for one year. That’s an expensive price for the computing capacity they are getting, but Mr. Abiodun argues that it’s a good value because individual miners would not be able to buy his modern machines outright. It’s a little like buying a fractional ownership in a private jet; you might not want responsibility for the jet itself, and it’s out of your price range anyway. He also says he provides the maintenance and keeps away thieves and hackers.
Some Cloud Hashing customers have also complained on Internet forums that it can be hard to get a response from the company when something goes wrong. But this has not stopped new contracts from pouring in. Cloud Hashing now has 4,500 customers, up from 1,000 in September.
Mr. Abiodun acknowledges that the company has not been prepared to deal with its rapid growth. He said he had used $4 million raised from two angel investors to add customer service representatives to offices in Austin, Tex., and London. Cloud Hashing is now preparing to open a mining facility in a data center near Dallas, which will hold more than $3 million worth of new machines being produced by CoinTerra, a Texas start-up run by a former Samsung chip designer.
The higher energy costs — and required air-conditioning — in Texas are worth it for Mr. Abiodun. He wants his operation to be widely distributed in case of power shortages or regulatory issues in one location. But he is also expanding his Icelandic operation, shipping in about 66 machines that have been running for the last few months near their manufacturer in Ukraine.
Mr. Abiodun said that by February, he hopes to have about 15 percent of the entire computing power of the Bitcoin network, significantly more than any other operation.
Inside the Iceland data center, which also hosts servers for large companies like BMW and is guarded and maintained by a company called Verne Global, strapping Icelandic men in black outfits were at work recently setting up the racks for the machines coming from Ukraine. Gazing over his creation, Mr. Abiodun had a look that was somewhere between pride and anxiety, and spoke about the virtues of this Icelandic facility where the power has not gone down once.
“We don’t want downtime — ever, never,” he said. “Not with what we paid. Not with Bitcoin.”
Into the Bitcoin Mines
By NATHANIEL POPPER On the flat lava plain of Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, near the Arctic Circle, you can find the mines of Bitcoin.To get there, you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings you to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers, each in a locked cabinet and each cooled by blasts of Arctic air shot up from vents in the floor.
The network is programmed to release 21 million coins eventually. A little more than half are already out in the world, but because the system will release Bitcoins at a progressively slower rate, the work of mining could take more than 100 years.
The scarcity — along with a speculative mania that has grown up around digital money — has made each new Bitcoin worth as much as $1,100 in recent weeks.
“What we have here are money-printing machines,” said Emmanuel Abiodun, 31, founder of the company that built the Iceland installation, shouting above the din of the computers. “We cannot risk that anyone will get to them.”
Mr. Abiodun is one of a number of entrepreneurs who have rushed, gold-fever style, into large-scale Bitcoin mining operations in just the last few months. All of these people are making enormous bets that Bitcoin will not collapse, as it has threatened to do several times.
Just last week, moves by Chinese authorities caused the price of a Bitcoin to drop briefly below $500. If the system did crash, the new computers would be essentially useless because they are custom-built for Bitcoin mining.
Miners, though, are among the virtual-currency faithful, believing that Bitcoin will turn into a new, cheaper way of sending money around the world, leaving behind its current status as a largely speculative commodity.
Most of the new operations popping up guard their secrecy closely, but Mr. Abiodun agreed to show his installation for the first time. An earnest young Briton, with the casual fashion taste of the tech cognoscenti, he was a computer programmer at HSBC in London when he decided to invest in specialized computers that would carry out constant Bitcoin mining.
The computers that do the work eat up so much energy that electricity costs can be the deciding factor in profitability. There are Bitcoin mining installations in Hong Kong and Washington State, among other places, but Mr. Abiodun chose Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric energy are plentiful and cheap. And the arctic air is free and piped in to cool the machines, which often overheat when they are pushed to the outer limits of their computing capacity.
Richard Perry/The New York Times The
energy required to run these computers is huge, and has led to
criticism that Bitcoin mining is wasteful, not to mention socially
useless.
The operation can baffle even those entrusted with its care. Helgi Helgason, a burly, bald Icelandic man who oversees the data center that houses the machines, said that when he first heard that a Bitcoin mining operation was moving in he expected something very different. “I thought we’d bring in machines and put bags behind them and the coins would fall into them,” said Mr. Helgason, with a laugh.
Since then, the education he has received about Bitcoins has been enlightening, but only to a point.
“It’s a strange business,” he said, “and I can’t say that I understand it.”
Until just a few months ago, most Bitcoin mining was done on the home computers of digital-money fanatics. But as the value of a single Bitcoin skyrocketed over the last few months, the competition for new coins set off a race that quickly turned mining into an industrial enterprise.
“Even if you had hardware earlier this year, that is becoming obsolete,” said Greg Schvey, a co-founder of Genesis Block, a virtual-currency research firm. “You are talking about order-of-magnitude jumps.”
The work the computers do is akin to guessing at a lottery number. The faster the computers run, the better chance of guessing that right number and winning valuable coins. So mining entrepreneurs are buying chips and computers designed specifically — and only — for this work. The machines in Iceland are worth about $20,000 each on the open market.
The energy required to run these computers is huge, and has led to criticism that Bitcoin mining is wasteful, not to mention socially useless. But Mr. Abiodun prides himself on using renewable power, at least in Iceland.
When Mr. Abiodun first heard about Bitcoin mining in 2010, he thought it was a scam. Begun in 2009 as the imaginative creation of an anonymous programmer (or group of programmers) known as Satoshi Nakamoto, it was initially little more than a tech world curiosity. As early users connected their computers into the network, they became a part of the decentralized infrastructure that hosts Bitcoin’s open-source program. The computers joining the network immediately began capturing virtual coins. The network’s protocol was designed to release a new block of Bitcoins every 10 minutes until all 21 million were released, with the blocks getting smaller as time goes on. If the miners in the network take more than 10 minutes to guess the correct code, the Bitcoin program adapts to make the puzzle easier. If they solve the problems in less than 10 minutes, the code becomes harder.
Mr. Abiodun’s opinion of Bitcoin changed in January, when he saw the price rising. He installed a free application on his home computer that linked him into the Bitcoin network and set it to mining, harnessing the power of his graphics card, which is the part of a normal computer best suited to doing the code work.
Mr. Abiodun’s computer was in the guest room of his house in southeast London. Working at HSBC during the day and tinkering with his Bitcoin system at night, he realized if he wanted to make any money, his computer would have to run around the clock.
The constant computing, however, overheated the graphics card and pushed the computer’s exhaust fans into overdrive. When he added another graphics card, then a new computer, the room became too noisy for guests to sleep, and the windows had to be kept open to release the heat. That did not make his wife, Gloria, who was pregnant at the time, very happy.
“It just created a scenario where there was no way our parents would come over to stay,” he said. “I did offer to put her parents in a hotel, but that didn’t go down well.”
Mr. Abiodun’s wife finally gave him an ultimatum — either the computers had to go, or he did. At the same time, he was making money, and friends were asking if they could invest in his mining operation.
In February, Mr. Abiodun used the investors’ money to buy machines from a start-up dedicated solely to manufacturing specialized mining computers. The competition for those computers is so intense that he had to pay for them and wait for delivery.
When the delays became lengthy, however, he went on eBay and paid $130,000 for two high-powered machines, which he set up in June in a data center in Kansas City, Kan.
This was the beginning of Mr. Abiodun’s company, Cloud Hashing, which rents out computing power to people who want to mine without buying computers themselves. The term hashing refers to the repetitive code guessing that miners do.
Today, all of the machines dedicated to mining Bitcoin have a computing power about 4,500 times the capacity of the United States government’s mightiest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, according to calculations done by Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The computing capacity of the Bitcoin network has grown by around 30,000 percent since the beginning of the year.
“This whole new kind of machine has come into existence in the last 12 months,” said Professor Taylor, who is studying mining hardware. In the chase for the lucky code that will unlock new Bitcoins, mining computers are also verifying and assigning unique identifying tags to each Bitcoin transaction, acting as accountants for the virtual currency world.
“The network is providing the infrastructure for making sure the currency is being transferred between people according to the rules,” Professor Taylor said, “and making sure people aren’t creating currency illegally.”
Even before Mr. Abiodun’s machines in Kansas City were up and running, it was clear that they wouldn’t be enough. So he ordered about 100 machines from a start-up in Sweden and, in October, had them moved to the facility in Iceland. In just a few months, that installation has generated more than $4 million worth of Bitcoins, at the current value, according to the company’s account on the public Bitcoin network.
At the end of each day, the spoils are divided up and sent to Cloud Hashing’s customers. Last Wednesday, for example, the entire operation unlocked 225 Bitcoins, valued at around $160,000 at recent prices. Cloud Hashing keeps about 20 percent of the capacity for its own mining.
Richard Perry/The New York Times Inside a high-security facility in Iceland, one company’s powerful computers toil nonstop on the project.
The unregulated Bitcoin-mining industry is ripe for abuse, and ventures that sound similar to Cloud Hashing have turned out to be scams. Mr. Abiodun’s company has proved itself real, but it is still unclear if it is a good deal for customers. Cloud Hashing charges $999 to rent a tiny portion of the company’s computing power for one year. That’s an expensive price for the computing capacity they are getting, but Mr. Abiodun argues that it’s a good value because individual miners would not be able to buy his modern machines outright. It’s a little like buying a fractional ownership in a private jet; you might not want responsibility for the jet itself, and it’s out of your price range anyway. He also says he provides the maintenance and keeps away thieves and hackers.
Some Cloud Hashing customers have also complained on Internet forums that it can be hard to get a response from the company when something goes wrong. But this has not stopped new contracts from pouring in. Cloud Hashing now has 4,500 customers, up from 1,000 in September.
Mr. Abiodun acknowledges that the company has not been prepared to deal with its rapid growth. He said he had used $4 million raised from two angel investors to add customer service representatives to offices in Austin, Tex., and London. Cloud Hashing is now preparing to open a mining facility in a data center near Dallas, which will hold more than $3 million worth of new machines being produced by CoinTerra, a Texas start-up run by a former Samsung chip designer.
The higher energy costs — and required air-conditioning — in Texas are worth it for Mr. Abiodun. He wants his operation to be widely distributed in case of power shortages or regulatory issues in one location. But he is also expanding his Icelandic operation, shipping in about 66 machines that have been running for the last few months near their manufacturer in Ukraine.
Mr. Abiodun said that by February, he hopes to have about 15 percent of the entire computing power of the Bitcoin network, significantly more than any other operation.
Inside the Iceland data center, which also hosts servers for large companies like BMW and is guarded and maintained by a company called Verne Global, strapping Icelandic men in black outfits were at work recently setting up the racks for the machines coming from Ukraine. Gazing over his creation, Mr. Abiodun had a look that was somewhere between pride and anxiety, and spoke about the virtues of this Icelandic facility where the power has not gone down once.
“We don’t want downtime — ever, never,” he said. “Not with what we paid. Not with Bitcoin.”
December 13, 2013
| December 13, 2013 Connect with Us  
 Donate to Support Our Mission |
A Catholic school or college can lift its students to Heaven, quite literally! But let's face it, some of what passes for Catholic education today is for the birds…or the chimps.
As we reported this week, a law professor at St. Thomas University in Miami is asking a court to declare a chimpanzee an "autonomous legal person." And a Fordham theologian thinks bringing pro-abortion Peter Singer to campus is healthy, but eating certain farm-raised animals violates God's law. Are these the top concerns of Catholic professors today?
We live in an age when the personhood of innocent babies is denied; marriage and family are threatened; and Jesus himself would not be "religious" enough for an exemption from federal law mandating insurance coverage for sterilization and contraception. Human dignity is under attack, and the culprits include Catholic university professors.
For instance, there's Georgetown University law professor Nina Pillard, who was confirmed yesterday to the D.C. Circuit Court after writing in a Georgetown journal that abortion rights are necessary to help "free women from historically routine conscription into maternity." The Court until now has been a wall of protection for religious freedom, particularly against the National Labor Relations Board which is now asserting unconstitutional power over a fourth Catholic university.
But enough of that—it's Advent, a great time to remind ourselves that all begins and ends with Christ, no matter how dark things may seem. Jesus was born into an age darker than our own, and He is a light to the nations.
And the Newman Guide colleges give
evidence of that. Just listen to the angelic
voices of the Thomas Aquinas College students whose "flash mob" delighted
shoppers in California. Laus Deo!Teach a chimp to sing like that.
As you prepare for Christmas, please remember our work to promote and defend faithful Catholic education.
Gratefully yours,
Patrick J. Reilly
President
November 18, 2013
Martin Bashir apologizes for dirty, disgusting slam at Sarah Palin
FILE: Martin Bashir on the second day of Michael Jackson's child molestation trial in Santa Maria.reuters
No responsible cable news host would call for defecating on a public figure. That’s just beyond the pale, right?
But that’s exactly what Bashir did on his MSNBC show, while spewing venom at Sarah Palin.
He made an abject apology yesterday, and we’ll get to that in a moment.
I’ve long been amazed by Bashir’s brand of name-calling. He despises Republicans, we get it. But the highly personal nature of his assaults, while delivered in an erudite British accent, stands out even by the loose standards of cable news.
This guy was a co-anchor of “Nightline” when he was at ABC, but was apparently seething with liberal resentment that we now see displayed daily on his weekday show. MSNBC once suspended Ed Schultz for calling Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut”; why on earth does it tolerate Bashir's brand of bile?
Bashir once said that the NRA “deserves to be equated with Hitler,” so he’s practiced at indendiary comparisons.
What happened last week is that Bashir used his hatred of Palin—calling her the country’s “resident dunce” and a “world-class idiot”—to descend deeper into the gutter than I ever thought he’d go.
Now the issue on which he went after the former Alaska governor and Fox News contributor is fair game. Palin had spoken in Iowa of borrowing
Lots of people didn’t approve of Palin likening government borrowing to the awful legacy of buying and selling African-Americans.
But Bashir chose to tell his audience of the diary of a plantation overseer in Jamaica named Thomas Thistlewood.
“In 1756, he records that a slave named Darby ‘catched eating kanes had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, sh** in his mouth.’
“This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of inhumanity. And he mentions a similar incident in 1756, his time in relation to a man he refers to as Punch. ‘Flogged punch well, and then washed and rubbed salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper, made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.’”
And that brings Bashir to his disgusting denouement: “When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.”
That’s right. Wrapped in the language of literary allegory, Bashir is saying he’d like to see someone assault and abuse Sarah Palin in this horrifying fashion.
And no one at MSNBC
What would MSNBC say if a conservative had talked about defecating on, say, Hillary Clinton?
In his televised apology, directed to both Palin and to viewers, Bashir said his remarks were “unworthy” and “deeply offensive,” and that he is “deeply sorry.” He said he wished he had been “more thoughtful” and “more compassionate.” He said “the politics of vitriol and destruction is a miserable place to be and a miserable person to become,” and promised to learn a lesson.
An abject apology is all well and good. But as Mediaite’s Joe Concha writes, invoking MSNBC President Phil Griffin: “Could you imagine if Neil Cavuto or Jake Tapper, who occupy the same timeslot on Fox and CNN, respectively, suggested anyone s*it in anyone’s mouth on national television, as Bashir did last week?
“And it’s not as he’s killing it in the ratings. Day after day, Bashir easily owns the lowest-rated show in his timeslot among the big three. If Griffin were smart, he’d use this episode as an excuse to get rid of Bashir.”
MSNBC rightfully suspended Alec Baldwin for two weeks for hurling an anti-gay slur at a photographer. But the corporate attitude is different because Palin is the target?
This is nothing short of shameful, as even Martin Bashir now seems to recognize.
All Ford All The Time
You might think a mayor might lay low for awhile after admitting to smoking crack, getting too drunk, threatening to murder someone, and using a sexually explicit term on live television while denying that a female friend was a hooker.
Not Rob Ford.
Instead, Toronto’s hard-living chief executive gives interviews to Fox and CNN as he prepares to launch his own Canadian TV show. Oh, and he knocked over a female City Council member yesterday as he rushed to help his brother in an “altercation.” Oh, and he’s thinking of running for prime minister.
"I’m seeking professional help, I’m not an alcoholic, I’m not a drug addict," Ford told Fox’s John Roberts. "Have I had my outbursts in the past? Absolutely I have John. But you know what I’m only human. I’ve made mistakes I’ve apologized. That’s all I can do."
Ford also turned on CNN’s Bill Weir, saying: “I’m not an addict. You can spin it. You can tell me whatever you want. These people know that I’m not—have you ever got drunk before, Bill?” After Weir allowed that he had, Ford said: “I don’t look at myself as the mayor. I look at myself as just a normal, regular person.”
“Normal” and “regular” are not the first words that come to mind. There’s a reason that “SNL” is lampooning Ford, who crashed a Toronto Argonauts Canadian football game despite a request by the league’s commissioner that he stay away.
Why do we give Ford all this coverage? Most politicians are boring, and this one is a slow-motion train wreck. Every day he seems to top himself. And Canada, usually ignored by the American media, hasn’t gotten this much coverage since the War of 1812.
November 15, 2013
Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response
Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
Hours after announcing changes
to his health care law, President Obama spoke to steelworkers in
Cleveland on Thursday. “We are not going to gut this law,” he said,
vowing to “push back.”
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: November 14, 2013
WASHINGTON — Barack Obama won the presidency by exploiting a political
environment that devoured George W. Bush in a second term plagued by
sinking credibility, failed legislative battles, fractured world
relations and revolts inside his own party.
President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous
rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his
agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way
that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina
undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.
But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally
cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition
that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health
care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn. A
contrite-sounding Mr. Obama repeatedly blamed himself on Thursday for
the failed health care rollout, which he acknowledged had thrust
difficult burdens on his political allies and hurt Americans’ trust in
him.
“It’s legitimate for them to expect me to have to win back some
credibility on this health care law in particular and on a whole range
of these issues in general,” Mr. Obama said. The president did not admit
to misleading people about whether they could keep their insurance, but
again expressed regret that his assurances turned out to be wrong.
“To those Americans, I hear you loud and clear,” Mr. Obama said as he
announced changes intended to allow some people to keep their insurance.
But earning back the confidence of Americans, as he pledged to do, will
require Mr. Obama to right more than just the health care law. At home,
his immigration overhaul is headed for indefinite delay, and new budget
and debt fights loom. Overseas, revelations of spying by the National
Security Agency have infuriated American allies, and negotiations over
Iran’s nuclear arsenal have set off bipartisan criticism.
For the first time in Mr. Obama’s presidency, surveys suggest that his
reserve of good will among the public is running dry. Two polls in
recent weeks have reported that a majority of Americans no longer trust
the president or believe that he is being honest with them.
“When you start losing the trust and confidence, not only of Congress,
but the American people, that makes it even more difficult,” said
Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia. “You can work
yourself out. But you have to be sincere, and you have to be honest.”
The difficulties have put Mr. Obama on the defensive at exactly the
moment he might have seized political advantage in a dysfunctional
Washington. If not for the health care disaster, the two-week shutdown
of the government last month would have been an opportunity for Mr.
Obama to sharpen the contrast with Republicans. Democratic lawmakers
expressed growing frustration on Thursday with the opportunities the
party had missed to hammer home the ideological differences between the
two parties. The lawmakers say there is intensifying anxiety within the
Democratic caucus that the poor execution of the health care law could
bleed into their 2014 re-election campaigns.
Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison. “The echoes
to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,” said Peter D. Feaver, a top
national security official in Mr. Bush’s second term. “Katrina, which is
shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of
the website.” Looking back, he said, “we can see that some of the things
that we hoped were temporary or just blips turned out to be more
systemic from a political sense. It’s a fair question of whether that’s
happening to President Obama.”
The president’s top aides vehemently reject the comparison of Mr.
Obama’s fifth year in office to the latter half of Mr. Bush’s second
term. They say Americans lost confidence in Mr. Bush because of his
administration’s ineptitude on Hurricane Katrina and its execution of
the war in Iraq, while Mr. Obama is struggling to extend health care to
millions of people who do not have it. Those are very different issues,
they said.
“I’m always very leery of these apocalyptic predictions,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama.
Senior White House officials are nonetheless in crisis mode over the
failure so far of what was supposed to be the president’s most
significant legislative achievement. “We get that it is a big deal for
him, for the law, for the Democrats who voted for him,” said Jennifer
Palmieri, the White House communications director. “We are taking it
deathly seriously.”
Some Democrats are warning their colleagues against a rush to count Mr.
Obama out prematurely. Steve Elmendorf, who was an influential
Democratic aide on Capitol Hill in President Bill Clinton’s second term,
insisted that Mr. Obama would recover and thrive, much as Mr. Clinton
did.
That message was echoed in a memo that Representative Steve Israel,
Democrat of New York, distributed to his colleagues during a caucus
meeting on Wednesday. In the memo, Mr. Israel, who is the head of the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said coming clashes with
Republicans over the budget and the debt would once again play to the
strengths of Democratic candidates.
In an interview, Mr. Israel said that he was confident that the
administration would be able to put Mr. Obama’s current troubles behind
it. “The website will get fixed,” Mr. Israel said. “The issue with
insurance policies has been addressed.”
Still, the president’s own words on Thursday betrayed a realization
inside the White House that for all his travails over the last five
years, this situation could be different.
Never before has Mr. Obama been as hard on himself and his staff in
describing failures of both policy and politics. He repeatedly
apologized and said that the criticism of the health care rollout was
more justified than criticism of him in the past.
“There were times I thought we got slapped around unjustly,” the president said. “This one is deserved. It’s on us.”
But speaking to steelworkers later in the day in Cleveland, Mr. Obama
was combative. “We are not going to gut this law,” he said, adding that
to “those who say they are opposed to it and can’t offer a solution,
we’ll push back.”
November 12, 2013
Chris Christie's provincial problem: Can he win outside the Northeast?
A recent poll indicates that Christie's popularity might not extend far beyond his home state
There's a whole lot of country out there.
(AP Photo/Rich Schultz)
I
f the entire nation were one big New Jersey, Chris Christie would have the 2016 Republican presidential nomination in the bag.
Except there is only one New Jersey and, as a result,
Christie's hypothetical path to the nomination will have to wind through
far less favorable territory than solely the Garden State. And while
it's tempting to extrapolate Christie's blowout re-election last week as
a sign of his superior electability and presumed frontrunner status,
there are questions about whether the New Jersey governor's broad
support will extend beyond his home turf.
In the latest such indicator, an NBC poll
out Tuesday found that Christie was the preferred candidate of GOP
voters in just one region, the Northeast. There, 57 percent of
Republicans said they would support Christie in a GOP primary versus 22
percent who said they would not.
However, pluralities of Republicans everywhere else said
they would prefer a different candidate. Christie trailed a generic
"other" GOPer in the Midwest (35/30 percent), the South (29/27 percent)
and the West (40/22 percent.)
All told, Republican respondents nationwide are equally
split between Christie, anti-Christie, and unsure. Of course, this poll
might just illustrate the power of hometown advantage — Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas) could be the preferred candidate in the West, for instance —
but it does highlight the governor's main problem should he launch a
presidential campaign. Though he has significant bipartisan appeal — he
won a third of Democrats and two-thirds of Independents in his
re-election bid, according to the New York Times' exit polling data — that might not be much of a draw to many conservatives.
Other recent polling bears out that point.
In a recent survey
conducted by Quinnipiac, only one-third of self-identified
conservatives nationwide had a favorable opinion of Christie, while
one-quarter viewed him unfavorably. And while Christie took the top spot
in a PPP survey
of a theoretical GOP primary earlier this month, he was the top choice
among only three percent of "very conservative" respondents. That put
him dead last with that demographic, behind the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz,
Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio — as well as some more farfetched candidates
like Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Matt Lewis remarked on this problem in The Week
way back in February, comparing Christie to Jon Huntsman, the former
Utah governor who positioned himself as the electable moderate in 2012
only to fizzle out in remarkable, whimpering fashion. Though Christie
had some true conservative bona fides, Lewis wrote, conservative voters
still suspected his high popularity back home was more so "directly
related to his willingness to throw fellow Republicans under the bus. "
Christie has notably sparred with unions, slashed state
spending, and wagged his finger at teachers, all of which should win him
support with conservatives. But he's also developed a moderate image,
dropping a challenge to gay marriage, endorsing some limited gun control
reforms, and suggesting illegal immigrants should be given in-state
tuition rates.
Those latter positions, which padded Christie's
re-election margin, could become huge liabilities in a Republican
primary with its typically more conservative electorate. Fox's Brit Hume noted that problem
on Sunday, saying Tea Party types "are not persuaded by electability
arguments, and they don't like anybody who they think may turn out to be
a moderate."
"In some respects Chris Christie is indeed a moderate," he added, "so he has that to be concerned about."
Plus Christie infamously embraced President Obama
following Hurricane Sandy, drawing ire from virtually everyone else in
his party in the process. If he does indeed run, you can only imagine
what sort of fun his opponents would have with all the pictures of him hugging, high-fiving, and just plain broing out with Obama.
Christie, with his name recognition and enviable
fundraising platform, would be a formidable candidate in a general
election. Yet the biggest question about his 2016 ambitions may not be
whether he can defeat Hillary Clinton or whoever else emerges from the
Democratic side, but whether he can first convince his own party's
skeptics that he's really one of them.
November 10, 2013
Up in Arms
THE BATTLE LINES OF TODAY’S DEBATES OVER GUN CONTROL, STAND-YOUR-GROUND LAWS, AND OTHER VIOLENCE-RELATED ISSUES WERE DRAWN CENTURIES AGO BY AMERICA’S EARLY SETTLERSLast December, when Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with a rifle and killed twenty children and six adult staff members, the United States found itself immersed in debates about gun control. Another flash point occurred this July, when George Zimmerman, who saw himself as a guardian of his community, was exonerated in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. That time, talk turned to stand-your-ground laws and the proper use of deadly force. The gun debate was refreshed in September by the shooting deaths of twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard, apparently at the hands of an IT contractor who was mentally ill.
Such episodes remind Americans that our country as a whole is marked by staggering levels of deadly violence. Our death rate from assault is many times higher than that of highly urbanized countries like the Netherlands or Germany, sparsely populated nations with plenty of forests and game hunters like Canada, Sweden, Finland, or New Zealand, and large, populous ones like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. State-sponsored violence, too—in the form of capital punishment—sets our country apart. Last year we executed more than ten times as many prisoners as other advanced industrialized nations combined—not surprising given that Japan is the only other such country that allows the practice. Our violent streak has become almost a part of our national identity.
What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.
The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.
There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence, as well as everything else, in its own way.
The precise delineation of the eleven nations—which I have explored at length in my latest book, American Nations—is original to me, but I’m certainly not the first person to observe that such national divisions exist. Kevin Phillips, a Republican Party campaign strategist, recognized the boundaries and values of several of these nations in 1969 and used them to correctly prophesy two decades of American political development in his politico cult classic The Emerging Republican Majority. Joel Garreau, a Washington Post editor, argued that our continent was divided into rival power blocs in The Nine Nations of North America, though his ahistorical approach undermined the identification of the nations. The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer detailed the origins and early evolution of four of these nations in his magisterial Albion’s Seed and later added New France. Russell Shorto described the salient characteristics of New Netherland in The Island at the Center of the World. And the list goes on.
The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps—including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history. Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities, a phenomenon analyzed by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in The Big Sort (2008). Even waves of immigrants did not fundamentally alter these nations, because the children and grandchildren of immigrants assimilated into whichever culture surrounded them.
Before I describe the nations, I should underscore that my observations refer to the dominant culture, not the individual inhabitants, of each region. In every town, city, and state you’ll likely find a full range of political opinions and social preferences. Even in the reddest of red counties and bluest of blue ones, twenty to forty percent of voters cast ballots for the “wrong” team. It isn’t that residents of one or another nation all think the same, but rather that they are all embedded within a cultural framework of deep-seated preferences and attitudes—each of which a person may like or hate, but has to deal with nonetheless. Because of slavery, the African American experience has been different from that of other settlers and immigrants, but it too has varied by nation, as black people confronted the dominant cultural and institutional norms of each.
The nations are constituted as follows:
YANKEEDOM. Founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, Yankeedom has, since the outset, put great emphasis on perfecting earthly civilization through social engineering, denial of self for the common good, and assimilation of outsiders. It has prized education, intellectual achievement, communal empowerment, and broad citizen participation in politics and government, the latter seen as the public’s shield against the machinations of grasping aristocrats and other would-be tyrants. Since the early Puritans, it has been more comfortable with government regulation and public-sector social projects than many of the other nations, who regard the Yankee utopian streak with trepidation.
NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.
THE MIDLANDS. America’s great swing region was founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies like Pennsylvania on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate. An ethnic mosaic from the start—it had a German, rather than British, majority at the time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, though it rejects top-down government intervention.
TIDEWATER. Built by the younger sons of southern English gentry in the Chesapeake country and neighboring sections of Delaware and North Carolina, Tidewater was meant to reproduce the semifeudal society of the countryside they’d left behind. Standing in for the peasantry were indentured servants and, later, slaves. Tidewater places a high value on respect for authority and tradition, and very little on equality or public participation in politics. It was the most powerful of the American nations in the eighteenth century, but today it is in decline, partly because it was cut off from westward expansion by its boisterous Appalachian neighbors and, more recently, because it has been eaten away by the expanding federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk.
GREATER APPALACHIA. Founded in the early eighteenth century by wave upon wave of settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands, Appalachia has been lampooned by writers and screenwriters as the home of hillbillies and rednecks. It transplanted a culture formed in a state of near constant danger and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and a commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty. Intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike, Greater Appalachia has shifted alliances depending on who appeared to be the greatest threat to their freedom. It was with the Union in the Civil War. Since Reconstruction, and especially since the upheavals of the 1960s, it has joined with Deep South to counter federal overrides of local preference.
DEEP SOUTH. Established by English slave lords from Barbados, Deep South was meant as a West Indies–style slave society. This nation offered a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. Its caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight against expanded federal powers, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer regulations.
EL NORTE. The oldest of the American nations, El Norte consists of the borderlands of the Spanish American empire, which were so far from the seats of power in Mexico City and Madrid that they evolved their own characteristics. Most Americans are aware of El Norte as a place apart, where Hispanic language, culture, and societal norms dominate. But few realize that among Mexicans, norteños have a reputation for being exceptionally independent, self-sufficient, adaptable, and focused on work. Long a hotbed of democratic reform and revolutionary settlement, the region encompasses parts of Mexico that have tried to secede in order to form independent buffer states between their mother country and the United States.
THE LEFT COAST. A Chile-shaped nation wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade and Coast mountains, the Left Coast was originally colonized by two groups: New Englanders (merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen who arrived by sea and dominated the towns) and Appalachian midwesterners (farmers, prospectors, and fur traders who generally arrived by wagon and controlled the countryside). Yankee missionaries tried to make it a “New England on the Pacific,” but were only partially successful. Left Coast culture is a hybrid of Yankee utopianism and Appalachian self-expression and exploration—traits recognizable in its cultural production, from the Summer of Love to the iPad. The staunchest ally of Yankeedom, it clashes with Far Western sections in the interior of its home states.
THE FAR WEST. The other “second-generation” nation, the Far West occupies the one part of the continent shaped more by environmental factors than ethnographic ones. High, dry, and remote, the Far West stopped migrating easterners in their tracks, and most of it could be made habitable only with the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and irrigation systems. As a result, settlement was largely directed by corporations headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, or by the federal government, which controlled much of the land. The Far West’s people are often resentful of their dependent status, feeling that they have been exploited as an internal colony for the benefit of the seaboard nations. Their senators led the fight against trusts in the mid-twentieth century. Of late, Far Westerners have focused their anger on the federal government, rather than their corporate masters.
NEW FRANCE. Occupying the New Orleans area and southeastern Canada, New France blends the folkways of ancien régime northern French peasantry with the traditions and values of the aboriginal people they encountered in northwestern North America. After a long history of imperial oppression, its people have emerged as down-to-earth, egalitarian, and consensus driven, among the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in the economy. The New French influence is manifest in Canada, where multiculturalism and negotiated consensus are treasured.
FIRST NATION. First Nation is populated by native American groups that generally never gave up their land by treaty and have largely retained cultural practices and knowledge that allow them to survive in this hostile region on their own terms. The nation is now reclaiming its sovereignty, having won considerable autonomy in Alaska and Nunavut and a self-governing nation state in Greenland that stands on the threshold of full independence. Its territory is huge—far larger than the continental United States—but its population is less than 300,000, most of whom live in Canada.
If you understand the United States as a patchwork of separate nations, each with its own origins and prevailing values, you would hardly expect attitudes toward violence to be uniformly distributed. You would instead be prepared to discover that some parts of the country experience more violence, have a greater tolerance for violent solutions to conflict, and are more protective of the instruments of violence than other parts of the country. That is exactly what the data on violence reveal about the modern United States.
Most scholarly research on violence has collected data at the state level, rather than the county level (where the boundaries of the eleven nations are delineated). Still, the trends are clear. The same handful of nations show up again and again at the top and the bottom of state-level figures on deadly violence, capital punishment, and promotion of gun ownership.
Consider assault deaths. Kieran Healy, a Duke University sociologist, broke down the per capita, age-adjusted deadly assault rate for 2010. In the northeastern states—almost entirely dominated by Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Midlands—just over 4 people per 100,000 died in assaults. By contrast, southern states—largely monopolized by Deep South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia—had a rate of more than 7 per 100,000. The three deadliest states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, where the rate of killings topped 10 per 100,000—were all in Deep South territory. Meanwhile, the three safest states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Minnesota, with rates of about 2 killings per 100,000—were all part of Yankeedom.
Not surprisingly, black Americans have it worse than whites. Countrywide, according to Healy, blacks die from assaults at the bewildering rate of about 20 per 100,000, while the rate for whites is less than 6. But does that mean racial differences might be skewing the homicide data for nations with larger African-American populations? Apparently not. A classic 1993 study by the social psychologist Richard Nisbett, of the University of Michigan, found that homicide rates in small predominantly white cities were three times higher in the South than in New England. Nisbett and a colleague, Andrew Reaves, went on to show that southern rural counties had white homicide rates more than four times those of counties in New England,
Middle Atlantic, and Midwestern states.
Stand-your-ground laws are another dividing line between American nations. Such laws waive a citizen’s duty to try and retreat from a threatening individual before killing the person. Of the twenty-three states to pass stand-your-ground laws, only one, New Hampshire, is part of Yankeedom, and only one, Illinois, is in the Midlands. By contrast, each of the six Deep South–dominated states has passed such a law, and almost all the other states with similar laws are in the Far West or Greater Appalachia.
Comparable schisms show up in the gun control debate. In 2011, after the mass shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others in Tucson, the Pew Research Center asked Americans what was more important, protecting gun ownership or controlling it. The Yankee states of New England went for gun control by a margin of sixty-one to thirty-six, while those in the poll’s “southeast central” region—the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi and the Appalachian states of Tennessee and Kentucky—supported gun rights by exactly the same margin. Far Western states backed gun rights by a proportion of fifty-nine to thirty-eight.
Another revealing moment came this past April, in the wake of the Newtown school massacre, when the U.S. Senate failed to pass a bill to close loopholes in federal background checks for would-be gun owners. In the six states dominated by Deep South, the vote was twelve to two against the measure, and most of the Far West and Appalachia followed suit. But Yankee New England voted eleven to one in favor, and the dissenting vote, from Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, was so unpopular in her home state that it caused an immediate dip in her approval rating.
The pattern for capital punishment laws is equally stark. The states dominated by Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Far West have had a virtual monopoly on capital punishment. They account for more than ninety-five percent of the 1,343 executions in the United States since 1976. In the same period, the twelve states definitively controlled by Yankeedom and New Netherland—states that account for almost a quarter of the U.S. population—have executed just one person.
Why is violence—state-sponsored and otherwise—so much more prevalent in some American nations than in others? It all goes back to who settled those regions and where they came from. Nisbett, the social psychologist, noted that regions initially “settled by sober Puritans, Quakers, and Dutch farmer-artisans”—that is, Yankeedom, the Midlands, and New Netherland—were organized around a yeoman agricultural economy that rewarded “quiet, cooperative citizenship, with each individual being capable of uniting for the common good.” The South—and by this he meant the nations I call Tidewater and Deep South—was settled by “swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble or landed gentry status, who took their values . . . from the knightly, medieval standards of manly honor and virtue.”
Continuing to treat the South as a single entity, Nisbett argued that the violent streak in the culture the Cavaliers established was intensified by the “major subsequent wave of immigration . . . from the borderlands of Scotland and Ireland.” These immigrants, who populated what I call Greater Appalachia, came from “an economy based on herding,” which, as anthropologists have shown, predisposes people to belligerent stances because the animals on which their wealth depends are so vulnerable to theft. Drawing on the work of the historian David Hackett Fisher, Nisbett maintained that “southern” violence stems partly from a “culture-of-honor tradition,” in which males are raised to create reputations for ferocity—as a deterrent to rustling—rather than relying on official legal intervention.
More recently, researchers have begun to probe beyond state boundaries to distinguish among different cultural streams. Robert Baller of the University of Iowa and two colleagues looked at late-twentieth-century white male “argument-related” homicide rates, comparing those in counties that, in 1850, were dominated by Scots-Irish settlers with those in other parts of the “Old South.” In other words, they teased out the rates at which white men killed each other in feuds and compared those for Greater Appalachia with those for Deep South and Tidewater. The result: Appalachian areas had significantly higher homicide rates than their lowland neighbors—“findings [that] are supportive of theoretical claims about the role of herding as the ecological underpinning of a code of honor.”
Another researcher, Pauline Grosjean, an economist at Australia’s University of New South Wales, found strong statistical relationships between the presence of Scots-Irish settlers in the 1790 census and contemporary homicide rates, but only in “southern” areas “where the institutional environment was weak”—which is the case in almost the entirety of Greater Appalachia. She further noted that in areas where Scots-Irish were dominant, settlers of other ethnic origins—Dutch, French, and German—were also more violent, suggesting that they had acculturated to Appalachian norms.
But it’s not just herding that promoted a culture of violence. Scholars have long recognized that cultures organized around slavery rely on violence to control, punish, and terrorize—which no doubt helps explain the erstwhile prevalence of lynching deaths in Deep South and Tidewater. But it is also significant that both these nations, along with Greater Appalachia, follow religious traditions that sanction eye-for-an-eye justice, and adhere to secular codes that emphasize personal honor and shun governmental authority. As a result, their members have fewer qualms about rushing to lethal judgments.
The code of Yankeedom could not have been more different. Its founders promoted self-doubt and self-restraint, and their Unitarian and Congregational spiritual descendants believed vengeance would not receive the approval of an all-knowing God. This nation was the center of the nineteenth-century death penalty reform movement, which began eliminating capital punishment for burglary, robbery, sodomy, and other nonlethal crimes. None of the states controlled by Yankeedom or New Netherland retain the death penalty today.
With such sharp regional differences, the idea that the United States would ever reach consensus on any issue having to do with violence seems far-fetched. The cultural gulf between Appalachia and Yankeedom, Deep South and New Netherland is simply too large. But it’s conceivable that some new alliance could form to tip the balance.
Among the eleven regional cultures, there are two superpowers, nations with the identity, mission, and numbers to shape continental debate: Yankeedom and Deep South. For more than two hundred years, they’ve fought for control of the federal government and, in a sense, the nation’s soul. Over the decades, Deep South has become strongly allied with Greater Appalachia and Tidewater, and more tenuously with the Far West. Their combined agenda—to slash taxes, regulations, social services, and federal powers—is opposed by a Yankee-led bloc that includes New Netherland and the Left Coast. Other nations, especially the Midlands and El Norte, often hold the swing vote, whether in a presidential election or a congressional battle over health care reform. Those swing nations stand to play a decisive role on violence-related issues as well.
For now, the country will remain split on how best to make its citizens safer, with Deep South and its allies bent on deterrence through armament and the threat of capital punishment, and Yankeedom and its allies determined to bring peace through constraints such as gun control. The deadlock will persist until one of these camps modifies its message and policy platform to draw in the swing nations. Only then can that camp seize full control over the levers of federal power—the White House, the House, and a filibuster-proof Senate majority—to force its will on the opposing nations. Until then, expect continuing frustration and division.
Colin Woodard, A91, is the author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. An earlier book, The Republic of Pirates, is the basis of the forthcoming NBC drama Crossbones. He is currently state and national affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where he won a George Polk Award this year for his investigative reporting.
November 8, 2013
Right Wing’s Surge in Europe Has the Establishment Rattled
Laerke Posselt for The New York Times
Mikkel Dencker, a mayoral
candidate in Hvidovre, Denmark, put up campaign posters. He has made the
removal of meatballs from kindergarten in deference to Islam a campaign
issue.
By ANDREW HIGGINS
Published: November 8, 2013
HVIDOVRE, Denmark — As right-wing populists surge across Europe,
rattling established political parties with their hostility toward
immigration, austerity and the European Union, Mikkel Dencker
of the Danish People’s Party has found yet another cause to stir public
anger: pork meatballs missing from kindergartens.
A member of Denmark’s Parliament and, he hopes, mayor of this
commuter-belt town west of Copenhagen, Mr. Dencker is furious that some
day care centers have removed meatballs, a staple of traditional Danish
cuisine, from their cafeterias in deference to Islamic dietary rules. No
matter that only a handful of kindergartens have actually done so. The
missing meatballs, he said, are an example of how “Denmark is losing its
identity” under pressure from outsiders.
The issue has become a headache for Mayor Helle Adelborg, whose
center-left Social Democratic Party has controlled the town council
since the 1920s but now faces an uphill struggle before municipal
elections on Nov. 19. “It is very easy to exploit such themes to get
votes,” she said. “They take a lot of votes from my party. It is
unfair.”
It is also Europe’s new reality. All over, established political forces
are losing ground to politicians whom they scorn as fear-mongering
populists. In France, according to a recent opinion poll, the far-right
National Front has become the country’s most popular party. In other
countries — Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland and
the Netherlands — disruptive upstart groups are on a roll.
This phenomenon alarms not just national leaders but also officials in
Brussels who fear that European Parliament elections next May could
substantially tip the balance of power toward nationalists and forces
intent on halting or reversing integration within the European Union.
“History reminds us that high unemployment and wrong policies like
austerity are an extremely poisonous cocktail,” said Poul Nyrup
Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister and a Social Democrat.
“Populists are always there. In good times it is not easy for them to
get votes, but in these bad times all their arguments, the easy
solutions of populism and nationalism, are getting new ears and votes.”
In some ways, this is Europe’s Tea Party moment — a grass-roots
insurgency fired by resentment against a political class that many
Europeans see as out of touch. The main difference, however, is that
Europe’s populists want to strengthen, not shrink, government and see
the welfare state as an integral part of their national identities.
The trend in Europe does not signal the return of fascist demons from the 1930s, except in Greece, where the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn has promoted openly racist beliefs, and perhaps in Hungary, where the far-right Jobbik party backs a brand of ethnic nationalism suffused with anti-Semitism.
But the soaring fortunes of groups like the Danish People’s Party, which
some popularity polls now rank ahead of the Social Democrats, point to a
fundamental political shift toward nativist forces fed by a curious mix
of right-wing identity politics and left-wing anxieties about the
future of the welfare state.
“This is the new normal,” said Flemming Rose, the foreign editor at the
Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. “It is a nightmare for traditional
political elites and also for Brussels.”
The platform of France’s National Front promotes traditional right-wing
causes like law and order and tight controls on immigration but reads in
parts like a leftist manifesto. It accuses “big bosses” of promoting
open borders so they can import cheap labor to drive down wages. It
rails against globalization as a threat to French language and culture,
and it opposes any rise in the retirement age or cuts in pensions.
Similarly, in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders,
the anti-Islam leader of the Party for Freedom, has mixed attacks on
immigration with promises to defend welfare entitlements. “He is the
only one who says we don’t have to cut anything,” said Chris Aalberts, a
scholar at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and author of a book based
on interviews with Mr. Wilders’s supporters. “This is a popular
message.”
Mr. Wilders, who has police protection because of death threats from
Muslim extremists, is best known for his attacks on Islam and demands
that the Quran be banned. These issues, Mr. Aalberts said, “are not a
big vote winner,” but they help set him apart from deeply unpopular
centrist politicians who talk mainly about budget cuts. The success of
populist parties, Mr. Aalberts added, “is more about the collapse of the
center than the attractiveness of the alternatives.”
Pia Kjaersgaard, the pioneer of a trend now being felt across Europe,
set up the Danish People’s Party in 1995 and began shaping what critics
dismissed as a rabble of misfits and racists into a highly disciplined,
effective and even mainstream political force.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, has embarked on a
similar makeover, rebranding her party as a responsible force untainted
by the anti-Semitism and homophobia of its previous leader, her father,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who once described Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of
history.” Ms. Le Pen has endorsed several gay activists as candidates
for French municipal elections next March.
But a whiff of extremism still lingers, and the Danish People’s Party
wants nothing to do with Ms. Le Pen and her followers.
Built on the ruins of a chaotic antitax movement, the Danish People’s
Party has evolved into a defender of the welfare state, at least for
native Danes. It pioneered “welfare chauvinism,” a cause now embraced by
many of Europe’s surging populists, who play on fears that freeloading
foreigners are draining pensions and other benefits.
“We always thought the People’s Party was a temporary phenomenon, that
they would have their time and then go away,” said Jens Jonatan Steen, a
researcher at Cevea, a policy research group affiliated with the Social
Democrats. “But they have come to stay.”
“They are politically incorrect and are not accepted by many as part of
the mainstream,” he added. “But if you have support from 20 percent of
the public, you are mainstream.”
In a recent meeting in the northern Danish town of Skorping, the new
leader of the Danish People’s Party, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, criticized
Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, of the Social Democrats, whose
government is trying to trim the welfare system, and spoke about the
need to protect the elderly.
The Danish People’s Party and similar political groups, according to Mr.
Rasmussen, the former prime minister, benefit from making promises that
they do not have to worry about paying for, allowing them to steal
welfare policies previously promoted by the left. “This is a new
populism that takes on the coat of Social Democratic policies,” he said.
In Hvidovre, Mr. Dencker, the Danish People’s Party mayoral candidate,
wants the government in, not out of, people’s lives. Beyond pushing
authorities to make meatballs mandatory in public institutions, he has
attacked proposals to cut housekeeping services for the elderly and
criticized the mayor for canceling one of the two Christmas trees the
city usually puts up each December.
Instead, he says, it should put up five Christmas trees.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)