""[Theresa May's] most likely successor, given the extent of rabid pro-Brexit sentiment among Tories, is Boris Johnson, the unscrupulous, ramshackle, flip-flopping, dissembling former foreign secretary..."

"... whose uncertain relationship with the truth and unwavering narcissism resemble Donald Trump’s. 'He’s got what it takes,' Trump, who will visit Britain early in June, has ominously proclaimed of Johnson. The adulation has been reciprocated. Both are men gifted in the dark arts. With Johnson as leader, the chances would increase of a so-called 'Hard Brexit' — Britain crashing out of the European Union at the new deadline of Oct. 31 without any arrangement to govern its future relationship with its neighbors."

From "Britain on the Brink of Boris Johnson and Chaos/Theresa May exits but the Brexit impasse will endure for the simple reason it makes no sense" by Roger Cohen in the NYT. Boldface added.

"In nearly every case, there is a better, more precise way to describe a current political phenomenon than the word 'populist.'"

"It just requires thought, or even the effort to get out to the heartland and talk to people. When I’ve done that I’ve generally found Trump supporters to be agents rather than victims. They’ve not been seduced by 'populism.' They are not 'populists.' They have few illusions about the president. They think he’s a loose cannon, needy, narcissistic, erratic. They like the way he’s an outsider and 'tells it like it is.' They wanted disruption of what they saw as a rigged system; he delivers it, daily. Jan-Werner Muller, professor of politics at Princeton University, has written in The Guardian, 'The profile of supporters of populism obviously matters, but it is patronizing to reduce all they think and say to resentment, and explain the entire phenomenon as an inarticulate political expression of the Trumpenproletariat and its European equivalents.' For me, the key word here is 'patronizing.' Liberal contempt is rampant."

From "It’s Time to Depopularize ‘Populist’" by Roger Cohen (NYT).

I selected the quote you see above, but now I'm reading the comments at the NYT, and they seem to be fixated on something else:

It’s critical to distinguish between a nationalist xenophobe and a reasonable voter who has made the plausible choice that Trump was a better option than other candidates....

They're all "PLAUSIBLE!!!!?!!"

"And so it begins. With the Dutch election on Wednesday, Europe embarks on a yearlong test of how far it’s ready to realign itself..."

"... as an anti-immigrant, pro-Russian continent marked by ascendant nationalism, alt-Right intolerance and the fragmentation of the European Union. The worst could happen. Nobody who has watched the British decision to quit the European Union in a strange little-England huff, or the election of Donald Trump with his 'America First' anti-Muslim jingoism, can think otherwise. The liberal order has lost its center of gravity. People without memory are on the march. They have no time for the free world if the free world means mingling and migration...."

From Roger Cohen (in the NYT).

A screen-grab from the NYT gives a good hint why Trump won.

Click to enlarge:



I'm sure the NYT must notice the dissonance between the editorial content and its own readers' response.

"It is not working. President Obama’s slow-but-steady strategy to defeat the Islamic State..."

"... is clawing back a little territory in Syria and Iraq but is doing nothing to dent the charismatic appeal of the militant group, disrupt its propaganda or prevent it from killing Europeans.... Since the Paris attack, Obama has insisted that an anti-Islamic State coalition with European and other allies is getting the job done. More than 20 percent of the group’s territory has been recaptured. The president has suggested that more radical military action to crush the militants — essentially the deployment of infantry — would drag the United States into another Middle Eastern war and increase the appeal of the Islamic State. His argument has been: Defeating the Islamic State is militarily feasible, but then what? This is a very high-risk policy — too high in my view. It allows the Islamic State to strut its pure evil in and from Raqqa. The Obama approach posits that the Islamic State can be beaten before European and American societies are undermined.... But today at least the West’s ponderous wait-them-out approach to the murderous fanatics of the caliphate looks like capitulation."

Writes Roger Cohen, a NYT columnist. And another NYT columnist made a similar move. Here's Thomas L. Friedman:

Obama’s primary goal seems to be to get out of office being able to say that he had shrunk America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, prevented our involvement on the ground in Syria and Libya, and taught Americans the limits of our ability to fix things we don’t understand, in countries whose leaders we don’t trust, whose fates do not impact us as much as they once did.... Initially, I thought Obama made the right call on Syria. But today the millions of refugees driven out of Syria — plus the economic migrants now flooding out of Africa through Libya after the utterly botched Obama-NATO operation there — is destabilizing the European Union..... Unfortunately, Obama seems so obsessed with not being George W. Bush in the Middle East that he has stopped thinking about how to be Barack Obama....

"I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on."

Writes Roger Cohen in a vivid NYT op-ed:

I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her....

“Can’t the United Nations help us?” one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. “So,” she said, “we are on our own.”

Too much moral clarity?

In today's NYT, Roger Cohen writes about the Bush Administration's embrace of Natan Sharansky's book "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.":

Here is Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, explaining last month what will guide her policy: "The world should apply what Natan Sharansky calls 'the town square test': if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a fear society has finally won their freedom."

The idea of the town-square test appears on Page 40 of Mr. Sharansky's book. By this point, he has developed the arguments that are repeated in various guises through the remaining 263 pages. These may be summarized as follows: Freedom is attainable for every person on earth. It is the best guarantee of global security, because democratic societies are nonbelligerent. Totalitarian or, as he puts it, fear societies are dangerous because they always seek external enemies as a means of self-preservation.

To act on the above requires "moral clarity." This phrase is repeated with bludgeoning insistence. By moral clarity, Mr. Sharansky means the courage to bring down autocracy wherever it may exist, including the Middle East. "We must recapture moral clarity," he writes, "by recognizing that the great divide between the world of fear and the world of freedom is far more important than the divisions within the free world."

Cohen calls the book too "simplistic," too "pat."

The danger now is that the beauty of his argument may become a form of blindness. He uses America's abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison mainly to laud the response of a free society to such an outrage: investigation, public debate, judgment and punishment.

But Mr. Sharansky might also have taken Abu Ghraib as an illustration of what can happen when a society becomes too certain of its mission, too giddy with its might, too negligent of constitutional safeguards of liberty and too blind to the humanity of people from another culture. Moral clarity in the name of freedom is one thing. But the slogan of freedom masquerading as moral clarity is quite another.

Cohen is right to raise these concerns. It's important to have values, but you also must constantly pay attention to what you are actually doing. Ideologues are dangerous, even if some ideology is important in the practical work of making the world a better place. Real moral clarity involves clearly seeing the effects you are having and not falling blindly in love with your own ideas.