political change essay

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Social and Political Changes'. 18 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Social and Political Changes." December 18, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-and-political-changes/.

1. IvyPanda . "Social and Political Changes." December 18, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-and-political-changes/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Social and Political Changes." December 18, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-and-political-changes/.

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The challenging politics of climate change

Subscribe to governance weekly, elaine kamarck elaine kamarck founding director - center for effective public management , senior fellow - governance studies @ekamarck.

September 23, 2019

“We don’t really worry about climate change because it’s too overwhelming and we’re already in too deep. It’s like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you’re like, ‘OK, I’ve got to pay this dude back.’ But if you owe your bookie $1 million dollars, you’re like, ‘I guess I’m just going to die.’”

⁠— Colin Jost, Saturday Night Live, 10/13/18

The above quote is from a Saturday Night Live skit on the weekend following release of a report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report was one of the most dramatic ones yet, predicting that some of the most severe social and economic damage from the rise in global temperatures could come as soon at 2040. And yet, two comedians, Colin Jost and Michael Che, summed up the difficult (and perhaps impossible) politics of the issue in less than three minutes. You don’t have to be a climate denier to be, in the end, indifferent to the issue.

As the climate crisis becomes more serious and more obvious, Americans remain resistant to decisive and comprehensive action on climate change. In “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” David Wallace-Wells paints a frightening picture of the coming environmental apocalypse. Whole parts of the globe will become too hot for human habitation and those left behind will die of heat. Diseases will increase and mutate. Food shortages will become chronic as we fail to move agriculture from one climate to another. Whole countries like Bangladesh and parts of other countries like Miami will be underwater. Shortages of fresh water will affect humans and agriculture. The oceans will die, the air will get dirtier. “But,” as Wallace-Wells argues, “what lies between us and extinction is horrifying enough.” 1 That’s because, as climate change takes its toll on Earth’s physical planet, it will also cause social, economic, and political chaos as refugees flee areas that can no longer sustain them. If this prediction seems a bit extreme, all we have to do is look at recent weather events that keep breaking records to confront the possibility that the threat from climate change may indeed be existential.

public opinion on the climate crisis

Yet, in spite of the evidence at hand, climate change remains the toughest, most intractable political issue we, as a society, have ever faced. This is not to say that there hasn’t been progress. In the United States, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions has held steady since 1990–even though our economy and our population has grown. 2 But globally, greenhouse gases have increased since then, bringing humanity very close to the dangerous levels of global warming that were predicted. 3 As scientific evidence about the causes of climate change has mounted and as a consensus has evolved in the scientific community, the public has remained divided and large, important parts of the political class have been indifferent. For instance, although 2017 was a year of 16 different billion-dollar natural disasters, 4 according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the percentage of voters who were “very concerned” about climate change stayed within the 40% range–where it has been rather stubbornly stuck for the past two years. 5 The following chart shows Gallup public opinion polling for the past two decades. 6 During this period, but especially in the most recent decade, about a third to almost half of the public believes that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated.

Dramatic and unprecedented natural disasters have had little effect on the public. Following blizzards and an unusually frigid winter in 2015, only 37% of Americans said climate change would pose a serious threat to them in their lifetimes. 7 After Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in 2017, concern about climate change increased by 7 points among Republicans and 2 points among Democrats. 8 But in the next year, an August 2018 poll taken shortly after the California wildfires showed concern among Republicans down to 44% and up to 79% among Democrats. 9 In a YouGov poll in the summer of 2019—during record heat waves in the U.S. and Europe—only 42% of the public said that they were very concerned and only 22% of Republicans said that they were” very concerned about climate change.” 10

If natural disasters don’t affect attitudes toward climate change, partisanship does. The following chart from Pew Research shows the gulf that exists between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. 11

The partisan divide began in the late 1990s and has increased over time. In 1997, nearly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans said that the effects of global warming have already begun. Ten years later, the gap was 34%: 76% of Democrats said the effects had already begun, and only 42% of Republicans agreed.

Republican resistance on this issue is one but not the only reason why, in the face of mounting evidence, the public remains lukewarm on this existential issue. The dire warnings, the scientific consensus, and the death toll from unprecedented climate events have failed to move the public very much. For two years now, the number of Americans who say they are “very concerned” about climate change fails to reach 50%, as a look at polling from Quinnipiac illustrates. 12

An even more telling piece of evidence on public indifference to climate change comes from 30 years of open-ended polling conducted by Gallup. Open-ended polling is especially interesting since it elicits an unprompted response from the individual. Between 1989 and 2019, Gallup has asked “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” Jobs, the economy, and health care are often at the top of the list. “Environment/pollution” is not often mentioned. In fact, over a 30-year period, it was mentioned by anywhere from less than 0.5% to 8% of the public. In the most recent 2019 poll (August), “the government/poor leadership” was mentioned by 22% of the public, and “immigration” by 18%. “Environment/pollution/climate change” garnered only 3% of the public. And in some earlier polls, climate change is not even mentioned by a significant portion of the public (although people could be including that within the term environment.) 13

Why can’t we get our heads around this?

Given the severity of the climate crisis and the potential for existential damage to the human race and planet, the lack of intensity around the issue is simultaneously incomprehensible and totally understandable. So let’s look at the latter. The explanations fall into at least four categories: complexity; jurisdiction and accountability; collective action and trust; and imagination.

Complexity is the death knell of many modern public policy problems and solutions. And complexity is inherent in climate change. The causes of global warming are varied, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. As the climate warms, it affects glaciers, sea levels, water supply, rainfall, evaporation, wind, and a host of other natural phenomenon that affect weather patterns. Unlike an earlier generation of environmental problems, it is hard to see the connections between coal plants in one part of the world and hurricanes in another. In contrast, when the water in your river smells and turns a disgusting color and dead fish float on top of it, no sophisticated scientific training is required to understand the link between what’s happening in the river and the chemical plant dumping things into it. The first generation of the environmental movement had an easier time making the connection between cause and effect.

Evidence for this comes from approximately three decades of polling on the environment by Gallup. In the chart below, most of the polls took place between 1989 and 2019. 14 Note that, over time, the most worrisome environmental problems are visible pollution problems. Water, soil, and ocean and beach pollution are at the top. These are things average people can see and smell. Global warming or climate change is toward the bottom. These numbers change somewhat over time and understandably so, which is why data is included from 2019 where available. People are more worried about climate change than they used to be. Nonetheless, the complexity of the issue compared to the more straightforward cause-and-effect characteristics of other environmental issues is a major impediment to political action.

When former Vice President Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the prize was for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.” Through his books, his famous slide show, and his 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore made it his mission to explain the scientific processes that make global warming so dangerous. But the inherent complexity of cause and effect in climate change makes it a topic in need of continuous education.

Jurisdiction and accountability

The second major impediment to political action stems from problems of jurisdiction and accountability. From the beginning, modern government has relied upon the concept of jurisdiction–“territory within which a court or government agency may properly exercise its power.” 15 And implicit in the concept of jurisdiction is geography. But two of the stickiest problems of the 21 st century–climate change and cybersecurity–are challenging because it is so difficult to nail down jurisdiction. When we are able to establish jurisdiction we are able to establish rules, laws, and accountability for adherence to the law–the three bedrock principles of modern democratic governance. In the absence of jurisdiction, everyone is accountable and therefore no one is accountable.

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When a cybercrime or cyberattack occurs, we have trouble with jurisdiction. If the perpetrator of a cyberattack on an electrical grid is a Russian living in Tirana, Albania, who routes attacks through France and Canada, who can prosecute the individual? (Assuming, that is, that we can even find them.) Similarly, if coal plants in China and cattle ranching in Australia increase their outputs of greenhouse gases in one year and there are droughts in Africa and floods in Europe the next, who is responsible?

We currently attribute greenhouse gas emissions to individual countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and we attribute greenhouse gases to their sources within the United States via the Environmental Protections Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. But attribution without enforcement mechanisms is only half the battle–if that. Nationally and internationally there is no legal architecture that allows us to reward and/or punish those who decrease or increase their greenhouse gas emissions. Even the Paris Agreement–which President Trump pulled the U.S. out of–is only a set of pledges from individual countries. Measurement is a first step toward accountability, and measurement needs constant improvement. But measurement in the absence of accountability is meaningless, especially in situations where many people are skeptical of cause and effect.

The Toxic Release Inventory was established by Congress in 1982 as an amendment to the Superfund Bill. Over the years, the steady flow of information about the release of hazardous chemicals into the environment has had many positive effects on regulators, environmentalists, and industrialists. 16 Studies have shown that “facilities reduce emissions by an additional 4.28% on average, and their use of source reduction increases by 3.07% on average when the relative assessed hazard level of a chemical increases compared to when it decreases.” 17

But the Toxic Release Inventory has one advantage that the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program does not. The effects of dangerous chemicals on a population are generally fairly clear and obvious: dirty water, dirty air, difficulty breathing, unusual rates of cancer, etc. The cause and effect is often undeniable as the many lawyers who have represented communities and won their cases against large polluters can attest. Greenhouse gas emissions affect people thousands of miles away from their source and make it easier to believe that it wasn’t the fossil fuels at all, just the weather pattern or an act of God. Hence, the linkage between jurisdiction and accountability is weak.

Collective action and trust

Our increasingly hot summers drive the demand for air conditioning. However, air conditioning adds to the heat outside. Scientists estimate that under a realistic set of circumstances, “waste heat from air conditioners exacerbated the heat island effect, the phenomenon in which densely packed cities experience higher temperatures than similarly situated rural areas.” 18 Air conditioning could add as much as 1 degree Celsius (nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit) to the heat of a city. Which one of us, however, would voluntarily turn off their air conditioning knowing full well that hundreds of thousands of other “free riders” would not?

 “It is the lack of trust in government that may be one of the foundational barriers to effective environmental action.”

This is just one simplified version of the collective action problem. People may understand that they should act in a certain way for the greater good, but as individuals, they are loathe to turn off their air conditioning or stop flying places for vacations—knowing that others will not be joining them. This is why government is the most frequent solution to collective action problems. Combating climate change requires collective action on many fronts, and it requires collective action both nationally and internationally. But this is extremely difficult in democracies like the U.S., which face strong individualist traditions in the culture along with a lack of trust in government.

In fact, it is the lack of trust in government that may be one of the foundational barriers to effective environmental action. Writing in the journal Global Environmental Change , E. Keith Smith and Adam Mayer looked at 35 different countries. They found that a lack of trust in institutions blunts the public’s risk perceptions and therefore their willingness to support behaviors or policies to address climate change. 19

Their findings make intuitive sense especially in the American context. If you are skeptical about government in general, you are skeptical about your government telling you that you need to do something about climate change; you are even more skeptical about an international body like the United Nations telling you that climate change is a very serious problem. Below is a graph showing the moving average over time of Americans who say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” 20

Imagination

The final piece to the puzzle of why the political salience of climate change seems so out of step with the physical proof and urgency of the issue may have to do with the realm of imagination. As every journalist knows, it is important to be able to tell a story, and as every teacher knows, we learn best through stories. And novelists and screenwriters are the most effective and powerful storytellers we have in society. And yet, in an intriguing book called “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,” the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh writes that climate change is even more absent in the world of fiction than it is in nonfiction.

To see that this is so, we need only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews, for example, the London Review of books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Literary Journal, and the New York Times Review of Books. When the subject of climate change occurs in these publications, it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a noel or short story to the genre of science fiction. 21

The absence of climate change from novels means that it is also absent from movies and television–the great powerful purveyors of stories in our time. One can’t underestimate the power of fiction in shaping society’s attitudes. Some older Americans can remember how the 1958 novel “Exodus,” by Leon Uris, and the subsequent 1960 movie by the same name impacted a generation of non-Jewish Americans to be supportive of Israel. Or how the 2000 movie “Erin Brockovich,” based on a true story of a young woman who takes on an energy corporation, helped popularize the environmental justice movement.

Ghosh’s contribution to our understanding of this issue is not so much in his sections on politics as it is on his insight that fiction in our age is unable to deal with events that are so improbable and so removed from the agency of the individual that they cannot be written about in any realistic way.

All of which brings us back to our two Saturday Night Live comedians.

We have trouble imagining the potential devastation of climate change. We have trouble trusting governments to lead us into much needed collective action. We have trouble defining the links between jurisdiction and accountability. And we have trouble understanding the causality in the first place.

How can we fix this? And can we fix this in time to avoid the most severe consequences of climate change?

Some people, recognizing the political problem, hope for a technological fix such as carbon capture or some other geoengineering fix. The problem with technological fixes is that they are remote and may very well not be effective in time to stave off massive amounts of social and economic disruption. On the other hand, early-1950s America faced what seemed to be an endlessly heartbreaking polio epidemic; in less than a decade, however, a vaccine was developed and the epidemic ended. Given the technological miracles seen in our lifetime, we should not dismiss a technological solution, and we should invest heavily in one with both public and private dollars.

A second imperative is to increase basic scientific literacy so that the burden of pedagogy does not fall on folks like Al Gore alone. Some of this is already happening with the attention given to STEM training in education. But it is clear that climate change is only one of many complex scientific issues that average citizens will be called upon to understand and act on in the future. A renewed focus on scientific literacy may need to be implemented throughout America’s schools.

Which brings us to the storytellers. Just as Al Gore won an Emmy for a movie on climate change, the creative elements in our society need to help explain what’s at stake. They will find a receptive audience in the younger generation. As evidenced by their activism on this issue—this past week, millions marched in countries around the world to protest inaction around climate change—young people are especially concerned with the environment. 22 The millennial generation is a very large one, and they have so far shown themselves to be civic minded and environmentally engaged.

“Awareness without the ability to hold corporations, countries, and individuals accountable will not result in major action on environmental issues. But measurement and accountability without an understanding of the connections between a warmer planet and dangerous climate changes will not result in major action either.”

A third imperative is to strengthen the link between jurisdiction and accountability. Nationally and internationally, we need to be able to reward and punish private and public actors for their environmental actions. The condemnation of Brazil’s government for deforestation and fires in the Amazon was largely without consequences. Until there are penalties for things like greenhouse gas emissions, they will not be reduced in sufficient amounts.

Because this issue poses the ultimate collective action problem, it requires governmental action, such as treaties, taxes, and regulations, for starters. But very few citizens in our country are going to support governmental action without first trusting government to get it right. We need to restore trust in government. It has been on a steady downward slide since the George W. Bush administration. Unless we restore trust in government, we are not likely to achieve significant collective action.

Of course, all these things must proceed hand in hand. Awareness without the ability to hold corporations, countries, and individuals accountable will not result in major action on environmental issues. But measurement and accountability without an understanding of the connections between a warmer planet and dangerous climate changes will not result in major action either. Above all, we need to restore—through government and other means—our trust in collective action.

• David Wallace-Wells. “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” Tim Duggan Books. p. 34.
• ”Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks.” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Accessed at: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks .
• ”Global greenhouse gas emissions, per type of gas and source, including LULUCF.” Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Accessed at: https://www.pbl.nl/en/infographic/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-per-type-of-gas-and-source-including-lulucf .
• Adam B. Smith. “2017 U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters: a historic year in context.” Climate.gov. Accessed at: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2017-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters-historic-year#targetText=During%202017%2C%20the%20U.S.%20experienced,crop%20freeze%2C%20drought%20and%20wildfire.
• ”U.S. Voters Say No Wall And Don’t Shut Down Government, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Focus On Issues, Not Impeachment, Voters Tell Dems 7-1.” Quinnipiac Poll. Dec. 18, 2018. Accessed at: https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2590.
• ”Environment.” Gallup. Accessed at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx.
• Lydia Saad. “U.S. Views on Climate Change Stable After Extreme Winter.” Gallup. March 25, 2015. Accessed at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/182150/views-climate-change-stable-extreme-winter.aspx.
• Jacqueline Toth. “As Wildfires Rage, Divide Widens Between Democratic, GOP Voters on Climate Change.” Morning Consult. Aug. 22, 2018. Accessed at: https://morningconsult.com/2018/08/22/as-wildfires-rage-divide-widens-between-democratic-gop-voters-climate-change/.
• The Economist/YouGov Poll. July 27-30, 2019. Accessed at: https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/hash0nbry8/econTabReport.pdf.
• Brian Kennedy and Meg Hefferon. “U.S. concern about climate change is rising, but mainly among Democrats.” Pew Research Center. Aug. 28, 2019. Accessed at: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/28/u-s-concern-about-climate-change-is-rising-but-mainly-among-democrats/.
• The Roper Center, Cornell University. Accessed at: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/CFIDE/cf/action/ipoll/ipollResult.cfm?keyword=most+important+problem&keywordoptions=1&exclude=&excludeoptions=1&topic=Any&organization=Gallup&label=&fromdate=1%2F1%2F1980&todate=12%2F31%2F2019&studyId=&questionViewId=&resultsCurrentPage=1&paging=true&historyID=&keywordDisplay=&queryId=317679189933&sortBy=BEG_DATE_DESC&perPage=20
• ”Jurisdiction.” The Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Accessed at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/jurisdiction.
• See Chapter 6 in James Hamilton, “Regulation through Revelation: The Origins, Politics and Impact of the Toxic Release Inventory Program” (Cambridge University Press, 2005) for a history of the many impacts the TRI has had.
• Wayne Fu, Basak Kalkanci, and Ravi Subramanian. “Are Hazardous Substance Rankings Effective? An Empirical Investigation of Information Dissemination about the Relative Hazards of Chemicals and Emissions Reductions.” Manufacturing and Service Operations Management. May 17, 2018.
• Sydney Brownstone. “Whoops: Air Conditioning Is Making Cities Hotter, Not Colder.” Fast Company. June 11, 2014. Accessed at: https://www.fastcompany.com/3031696/whoops-air-conditioning-is-making-cities-hotter-not-colder.
• E. Keith Smith and Adam Mayer. “A social trap for the climate? Collective action, trust and climate change risk perception in 35 countries.” Global Environmental Change, Volume 49, p. 140-153. March 2018.
• ”Public Trust in Government: 1958-2019.” Pew Research Center. Accessed at: https://www.people-press.org/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019/.
• Amitav Ghosh. “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.” University of Chicago Press, p. 7.
• Sandra Laville and Jonathan Watts. “Across the globe, millions join biggest climate protest ever.” The Guardian. Sept. 21, 2019. Accessed at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/21/across-the-globe-millions-join-biggest-climate-protest-ever

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A Brief History of the Political Essay

From swift to woolf, david bromwich considers an evolving genre.

The political essay has never been a clearly defined genre. David Hume may have legitimated it in 1758 when he classified under a collective rubric his own Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. “Political,” however, should have come last in order, since Hume took a speculative and detached view of politics, and seems to have been incapable of feeling passion for a political cause. We commonly associate political thought with full-scale treatises by philosophers of a different sort, whose understanding of politics was central to their account of human nature. Hobbes’s Leviathan , Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , Rousseau’s Social Contract , Mill’s Representative Government , and, closer to our time, Rawls’s Theory of Justice , all satisfy that expectation. What, then, is a political essay? By the late 18th century, the periodical writings of Steele, Swift, Goldsmith, and Johnson had broadened the scope of the English essay for serious purposes. The field of politics, as much as culture, appeared to their successors well suited to arguments on society and government.

A public act of praise, dissent, or original description may take on permanent value when it implicates concerns beyond the present moment. Where the issue is momentous, the commitment stirred by passion, and the writing strong enough, an essay may sink deep roots in the language of politics. An essay is an attempt , as the word implies—a trial of sense and persuasion, which any citizen may hazard in a society where people are free to speak their minds. A more restrictive idea of political argument—one that would confer special legitimacy on an elite caste of managers, consultants, and symbolic analysts—presumes an environment in which state papers justify decisions arrived at from a region above politics. By contrast, the absence of formal constraints or a settled audience for the essay means that the daily experience of the writer counts as evidence. A season of crisis tempts people to think politically; in the process, they sometimes discover reasons to back their convictions.

The experience of civic freedom and its discontents may lead the essayist to think beyond politics. In 1940, Virginia Woolf recalled the sound of German bombers circling overhead the night before; the insect-like irritant, with its promise of aggression, frightened her into thought: “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death.” The ugly noise, for Woolf, signaled the prerogative of the fighting half of the species: Englishwomen “must lie weaponless tonight.” Yet Englishmen would be called upon to destroy the menace; and she was not sorry for their help. The mood of the writer is poised between gratitude and a bewildered frustration. Woolf ’s essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” declines to exhibit the patriotic sentiment by which most reporters in her position would have felt drawn. At the same time, its personal emphasis keeps the author honest through the awareness of her own dependency.

Begin with an incident— I could have been killed last night —and you may end with speculations on human nature. Start with a national policy that you deplore, and it may take you back to the question, “Who are my neighbors?” In 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested for having refused to pay a poll tax; he made a lesson of his resistance two years later, when he saw the greed and dishonesty of the Mexican War: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” But to Thoreau’s surprise, the window of the prison had opened onto the life of the town he lived in, with its everyday errands and duties, its compromises and arrangements, and for him that glimpse was a revelation:

They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn,—a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

Slavery, at that time, was nicknamed “the peculiar institution,” and by calling the prison itself a peculiar institution, and maybe having in mind the adjacent inn as well, Thoreau prods his reader to think about the constraints that are a tacit condition of social life.

The risk of political writing may lure the citizen to write—a fact Hazlitt seems to acknowledge in his essay “On the Regal Character,” where his second sentence wonders if the essay will expose him to prosecution: “In writing a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.” (His friend Leigh Hunt had recently served two years in prison for “seditious libel” of the Prince Regent—having characterized him as a dandy notorious for his ostentation and obesity.) The writer’s consciousness of provocative intent may indeed be inseparable from the wish to persuade; though the tone of commitment will vary with the zeal and composition of the audience, whether that means a political party, a movement, a vanguard of the enlightened, or “the people” at large.

Edmund Burke, for example, writes to the sheriffs of Bristol (and through them to the city’s electors) in order to warn against the suspension of habeas corpus by the British war ministry in 1777. The sudden introduction of the repressive act, he tells the electors, has imperiled their liberty even if they are for the moment individually exempt. In response to the charge that the Americans fighting for independence are an unrepresentative minority, he warns: “ General rebellions and revolts of an whole people never were encouraged , now or at any time. They are always provoked. ” So too, Mahatma Gandhi addresses his movement of resistance against British rule, as well as others who can be attracted to the cause, when he explains why nonviolent protest requires courage of a higher degree than the warrior’s: “Non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.” In both cases, the writer treats the immediate injustice as an occasion for broader strictures on the nature of justice. There are certain duties that governors owe to the governed, and duties hardly less compulsory that the people owe to themselves.

Apparently diverse topics connect the essays in Writing Politics ; but, taken loosely to illustrate a historical continuity, they show the changing face of oppression and violence, and the invention of new paths for improving justice. Arbitrary power is the enemy throughout—power that, by the nature of its asserted scope and authority, makes itself the judge of its own cause. King George III, whose reign spanned sixty years beginning in 1760, from the first was thought to have overextended monarchical power and prerogative, and by doing so to have reversed an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty that was tacitly recognized by his predecessors. Writing against the king, “Junius” (the pen name of Philip Francis) traced the monarch’s errors to a poor education; and he gave an edge of deliberate effrontery to the attack on arbitrary power by addressing the king as you. “It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people.”

A similar frankness, without the ad hominem spur, can be felt in Burke’s attack on the monarchical distrust of liberty at home as well as abroad: “If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.” Writing in the same key from America, Thomas Paine, in his seventh number of The Crisis , gave a new description to the British attempt to preserve the unity of the empire by force of arms. He called it a war of conquest; and by addressing his warning directly “to the people of England,” he reminded the king’s subjects that war is always a social evil, for it sponsors a violence that does not terminate in itself. War enlarges every opportunity of vainglory—a malady familiar to monarchies.

The coming of democracy marks a turning point in modern discussions of sovereignty and the necessary protections of liberty. Confronted by the American annexation of parts of Mexico, in 1846–48, Thoreau saw to his disgust that a war of conquest could also be a popular war, the will of the people directed to the oppression of persons. It follows that the state apparatus built by democracy is at best an equivocal ally of individual rights. Yet as Emerson would recognize in his lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and Frederick Douglass would confirm in “The Mission of the War,” the massed power of the state is likewise the only vehicle powerful enough to destroy a system of oppression as inveterate as American slavery had become by the 1850s.

Acceptance of political evil—a moral inertia that can corrupt the ablest of lawmakers—goes easily with the comforts of a society at peace where many are satisfied. “Here was the question,” writes Emerson: “Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for the hurt and harm of man? It was question whether man shall be treated as leather? whether the Negroes shall be as the Indians were in Spanish America, a piece of money?” Emerson wondered at the apostasy of Daniel Webster, How came he there? The answer was that Webster had deluded himself by projecting a possible right from serial compromise with wrong.

Two ways lie open to correct the popular will without a relapse into docile assent and the rule of oligarchy. You may widen the terms of discourse and action by enlarging the community of participants. Alternatively, you may strengthen the opportunities of dissent through acts of exemplary protest—protest in speech, in action, or both. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain the commanding instances in this regard. Both led movements that demanded of every adherent that the protest serve as an express image of the society it means to bring about. Nonviolent resistance accordingly involves a public disclosure of the work of conscience—a demonstrated willingness to make oneself an exemplary warrior without war. Because they were practical reformers, Gandhi and King, within the societies they sought to reform, were engaged in what Michael Oakeshott calls “the pursuit of intimations.” They did not start from a model of the good society generated from outside. They built on existing practices of toleration, friendship, neighborly care, and respect for the dignity of strangers.

Nonviolent resistance, as a tactic of persuasion, aims to arouse an audience of the uncommitted by its show of discipline and civic responsibility. Well, but why not simply resist? Why show respect for the laws of a government you mean to change radically? Nonviolence, for Gandhi and King, was never merely a tactic, and there were moral as well as rhetorical reasons for their ethic of communal self-respect and self-command. Gandhi looked on the British empire as a commonwealth that had proved its ability to reform. King spoke with the authority of a native American, claiming the rights due to all Americans, and he evoked the ideals his countrymen often said they wished to live by. The stories the nation loved to tell of itself took pride in emancipation much more than pride in conquest and domination. “So,” wrote King from the Birmingham City Jail, “I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

A subtler enemy of liberty than outright prejudice and violent oppression is the psychological push toward conformity. This internalized docility inhabits and may be said to dictate the costume of manners in a democracy. Because the rule of mass opinion serves as a practical substitute for the absolute authority that is no longer available, it exerts an enormous and hidden pressure. This dangerous “omnipotence of the majority,” as Tocqueville called it, knows no power greater than itself; it resembles an absolute monarch in possessing neither the equipment nor the motive to render a judgment against itself. Toleration thus becomes a political value that requires as vigilant a defense as liberty. Minorities are marked not only by race, religion, and habits of association, but also by opinion.

“It is easy to see,” writes Walter Bagehot in “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration,” “that very many believers would persecute sceptics” if they were given the means, “and that very many sceptics would persecute believers.” Bagehot has in mind religious belief, in particular, but the same intolerance operates when it is a question of penalizing a word, a gesture, a wrongly sympathetic or unsympathetic show of feeling by which a fellow citizen might claim to be offended. The more divided the society, the more it will crave implicit assurances of unity; the more unified it is, the more it wants an even greater show of unity—an unmistakable signal of membership and belonging that can be read as proof of collective solidarity. The “guilty fear of criticism,” Mary McCarthy remarked of the domestic fear of Communism in the 1950s, “the sense of being surrounded by an unappreciative world,” brought to American life a regimen of tests, codes, and loyalty oaths that were calculated to confirm rather than subdue the anxiety.

Proscribed and persecuted groups naturally seek a fortified community of their own, which should be proof against insult; and by 1870 or so, the sure method of creating such a community was to found a new nation. George Eliot took this remedy to be prudent and inevitable, in her sympathetic early account of the Zionist quest for a Jewish state, yet her unsparing portrait of English anti-Semitism seems to recognize the nation-remedy as a carrier of the same exclusion it hopes to abolish. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a widened sense of community is the apparently intuitive—but in fact regularly inculcated—intellectual habit by which we divide people into racial, religious, and ethnic identities. The idea of an international confederation for peace was tried twice, without success, in the 20th century, with the League of Nations and the United Nations; but some such goal, first formulated in the political writings of Kant, has found memorable popular expression again and again.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Ruling of Men” affords a prospect of international liberty that seems to the author simply the next necessary advance of common sense in the cause of humanity. Du Bois noticed in 1920 how late the expansion of rights had arrived at the rights of women. Always, the last hiding places of arbitrary power are the trusted arenas of privilege a society has come to accept as customary, and to which it has accorded the spurious honor of supposing it part of the natural order: men over women; the strong nations over the weak; corporate heads over employees. The pattern had come under scrutiny already in Harriet Taylor Mill’s “Enfranchisement of Women,” and its application to the hierarchies of ownership and labor would be affirmed in William Morris’s lecture “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil.” The commercial and manufacturing class, wrote Morris, “ force the genuine workers to provide for them”; no better (only more recondite in their procedures) are “the parasites” whose function is to defend the cause of property, “sometimes, as in the case of lawyers, undisguisedly so.” The socialists Morris and Du Bois regard the ultimate aim of a democratic world as the replacement of useless by useful work. With that change must also come the invention of a shared experience of leisure that is neither wasteful nor thoughtless.

A necessary bulwark of personal freedom is property, and in the commercial democracies for the past three centuries a usual means of agreement for the defense of property has been the contract. In challenging the sacredness of contract, in certain cases of conflict with a common good, T. H. Green moved the idea of “freedom of contract” from the domain of nature to that of social arrangements that are settled by convention and therefore subject to revision. The freedom of contract must be susceptible of modification when it fails to meet a standard of public well-being. The right of a factory owner, for example, to employ child labor if the child agrees, should not be protected. “No contract,” Green argues, “is valid in which human persons, willingly or unwillingly, are dealt with as commodities”; for when we speak of freedom, “we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying.” And again:

When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.

Legislation in the public interest may still be consistent with the principles of free society when it parts from a leading maxim of contractual individualism.

The very idea of a social contract has usually been taken to imply an obligation to die for the state. Though Hobbes and Locke offered reservations on this point, the classical theorists agree that the state yields the prospect of “commodious living” without which human life would be unsocial and greatly impoverished; and there are times when the state can survive only through the sacrifice of citizens. May there also be a duty of self-sacrifice against a state whose whole direction and momentum has bent it toward injustice? Hannah Arendt, in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” asked that question regarding the conduct of state officials as well as ordinary people under the encroaching tyranny of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Citizens then, Arendt observes, had live options of political conduct besides passive obedience and open revolt. Conscientious opposition could show itself in public indications of nonsupport . This is a fact that the pervasiveness of conformism and careerism in mass societies makes harder to see than it should be.

Jonathan Swift, a writer as temperamentally diverse from Arendt as possible, shows in “A Modest Proposal” how the human creature goes about rationalizing any act or any policy, however atrocious. Our propensity to make-normal, to approve whatever renders life more orderly, can lead by the lightest of expedient steps to a plan for marketing the babies of the Irish poor as flesh suitable for eating. It is, after all—so Swift’s fictional narrator argues—a plausible design to alleviate poverty and distress among a large sector of the population, and to eliminate the filth and crowding that disgusts persons of a more elevated sort. The justification is purely utilitarian, and the proposer cites the most disinterested of motives: he has no financial or personal stake in the design. Civility has often been praised as a necessity of political argument, but Swift’s proposal is at once civil and, in itself, atrocious.

An absorbing concern of Arendt’s, as of several of the other essay writers gathered here, was the difficulty of thinking. We measure, we compute, we calculate, we weigh advantages and disadvantages—that much is only sensible, only logical—but we give reasons that are often blind to our motives, we rationalize and we normalize in order to justify ourselves. It is supremely difficult to use the equipment we learn from parents and teachers, which instructs us how to deal fairly with persons, and apply it to the relationship between persons and society, and between the manners of society and the laws of a nation. The 21st century has saddled persons of all nations with a catastrophic possibility, the destruction of a planetary environment for organized human life; and in facing the predicament directly, and formulating answers to the question it poses, the political thinkers of the past may help us chiefly by intimations. The idea of a good or tolerable society now encompasses relations between people at the widest imaginable distance apart. It must also cover a new relation of stewardship between humankind and nature.

Having made the present selection with the abovementioned topics in view—the republican defense against arbitrary power; the progress of liberty; the coming of mass-suffrage democracy and its peculiar dangers; justifications for political dissent and disobedience; war, as chosen for the purpose of domination or as necessary to destroy a greater evil; the responsibilities of the citizen; the political meaning of work and the conditions of work—an anthology of writings all in English seemed warranted by the subject matter. For in the past three centuries, these issues have been discussed most searchingly by political critics and theorists in Britain and the United States.

The span covers the Glorious Revolution and its achievement of parliamentary sovereignty; the American Revolution, and the civil war that has rightly been called the second American revolution; the expansion of the franchise under the two great reform bills in England and the 15th amendment to the US constitution; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the mass movements of nonviolent resistance that brought national independence to India and broadened the terms of citizenship of black Americans. The sequence gives adequate evidence of thinkers engaged in a single conversation. Many of these authors were reading the essayists who came before them; and in many cases (Burke and Paine, Lincoln and Douglass, Churchill and Orwell), they were reading each other.

Writing Politics contains no example of the half-political, half-commercial genre of “leadership” writing. Certain other principles that guided the editor will be obvious at a glance, but may as well be stated. Only complete essays are included, no extracts. This has meant excluding great writers—Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill, among others—whose definitive political writing came in the shape of full-length books. There are likewise no chapters of books; no party manifestos or statements of creed; nothing that was first published posthumously. All of these essays were written at the time noted, were meant for an audience of the time, and were published with an eye to their immediate effect. This is so even in cases (as with Morris and Du Bois) where the author had in view the reformation of a whole way of thinking. Some lectures have been included—the printed lecture was an indispensable medium for political ideas in the 19th century—but there are no party speeches delivered by an official to advance a cause of the moment.

Two exceptions to the principles may prove the rule. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James C. Conkling was a public letter, written to defend the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, a few months earlier, President Lincoln had declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebelling states; he now extended the order to cover black soldiers who fought for the Union: “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Lincoln was risking his presidency when he published this extraordinary appeal and admonition, and his view was shared by Frederick Douglass in “The Mission of the War”: “No war but an Abolition war, no peace but an Abolition peace.” The other exception is “The Roots of Honour,” John Ruskin’s attack on the mercenary morality of 19th-century capitalism . He called the chapter “Essay I” in Unto This Last , and his nomenclature seemed a fair excuse for reprinting an ineradicable prophecy.

__________________________________

From Writing Politics , edited by David Bromwich. Copyright © 2020 by David Bromwich; courtesy of NYRB Classics.

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Essay on Politics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on politics.

When we hear the term politics, we usually think of the government, politicians and political parties. For a country to have an organized government and work as per specific guidelines, we require a certain organization. This is where politics comes in, as it essentially forms the government. Every country, group and organization use politics to instrument various ways to organize their events, prospects and more.

Politics does not limit to those in power in the government. It is also about the ones who are in the run to achieve the same power. The candidates of the opposition party question the party on power during political debates . They intend to inform people and make them aware of their agenda and what the present government is doing. All this is done with the help of politics only.

Dirty Politics

Dirty politics refers to the kind of politics in which moves are made for the personal interest of a person or party. It ignores the overall development of a nation and hurts the essence of the country. If we look at it closely, there are various constituents of dirty politics.

The ministers of various political parties, in order to defame the opposition, spread fake news and give provocative speeches against them. This hampers with the harmony of the country and also degrades the essence of politics . They pass sexist remarks and instill hate in the hearts of people to watch their party win with a majority of seats.

Read 500 Words Essay on Corruption Here

Furthermore, the majority of politicians are corrupt. They abuse their power to advance their personal interests rather than that of the country. We see the news flooded with articles like ministers and their families involving in scams and illegal practices. The power they have makes them feel invincible which is why they get away with any crime.

Before coming into power, the government makes numerous promises to the public. They influence and manipulate them into thinking all their promises will be fulfilled. However, as soon as they gain power, they turn their back on the public. They work for their selfish motives and keep fooling people in every election. Out of all this, only the common suffers at the hands of lying and corrupt politicians.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Lack of Educated Ministers

If we look at the scenario of Indian elections, any random person with enough power and money can contest the elections. They just need to be a citizen of the country and be at least 25 years old. There are a few clauses too which are very easy.

The strangest thing is that contesting for elections does not require any minimum education qualification. Thus, we see how so many uneducated and non-deserving candidates get into power and then misuse it endlessly. A country with uneducated ministers cannot develop or even be on the right path.

We need educated ministers badly in the government. They are the ones who can make the country progress as they will handle things better than the illiterate ones. The candidates must be well-qualified in order to take on a big responsibility as running an entire nation. In short, we need to save our country from corrupt and uneducated politicians who are no less than parasites eating away the development growth of the country and its resources. All of us must unite to break the wheel and work for the prosperous future of our country.

FAQs on Politics

Q.1 Why is the political system corrupt?

A.1 Political system is corrupt because the ministers in power exercise their authority to get away with all their crimes. They bribe everyone into working for their selfish motives making the whole system corrupt.

Q.2 Why does India need educated ministers?

A.2 India does not have a minimum educational qualification requirement for ministers. This is why the uneducated lot is corrupting the system and pushing the country to doom. We need educated ministers so they can help the country develop with their progressive thinking.

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UC San Diego

Essays on the Politics and Political Effects of Climate Change

• Obradovich, Nicholas Anthony
• Advisor(s): Fowler, James H ;
• Gibson, Clark C

This dissertation focuses on the politics and potential effects of climate change on political systems. I examine aspects of three broad questions. First, how might future climatic stressors alter the stability of political systems? Numerous studies investigate this question through the lens of conflict. Yet most political change does not arise through violent upheaval. In democratic nations at least, most political change arises through regular elections. In my first chapter, I examine the potential for climate change to disrupt the functioning of political systems through alterations in political behaviors at the ballot box. I find that -- if historical relationships persist -- the climatic distributions projected for the latter part of this century may increase rates of democratic turnover, especially in poorer nations with already weaker democratic institutions. My second question relates to the political feasibility of policies designed to address climatic changes in lower income democracies. In my second chapter, I investigate the willingness of voters and politicians in Sub-Saharan Africa to lend political support to climate change policies. Evidence from these studies suggests that voters are reticent to support climate policies and that politicians are reluctant to pursue climate policies. My third question focuses on the behavioral motivations for taking individual political action to address climate change. Organizations looking to motivate action on climate change often make appeals that emphasize an individual's personal responsibility for the problem, with the notion that emphasizing diffuse collective responsibility may diminish individual action. In my third chapter, I conduct a series of survey experiments with members from the National Audubon Society and from the general public and find that -- contrary to expectations -- emphasizing personal responsibility produces no significant increase in climate change action whereas emphasizing collective responsibility amplifies climate action. These three chapters represent a foray into vital areas of my future research program: the potential effects of climate change on political systems, the political feasibility of climate policies, and the underpinnings of political behaviors related to climate change.

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Friday essay: Project 2025, the policy substance behind Trump’s showmanship, reveals a radical plan to reshape the world

Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

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Emma Shortis is Senior Researcher in International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.

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In April 2022, conservative American think tank the Heritage Foundation, working with a broad coalition of 50 conservative organisations, launched Project 2025 : a plan for the next conservative president of the United States.

The Project’s flagship publication, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise , outlines in plain language and in granular detail, over 900-plus pages, what a second Trump administration (if it occurs) might look like. I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to.

The Mandate’s veneer of exhausting technocratic detail, focused mostly on the federal bureaucracy, sits easily alongside a Trumpian project of revenge and retribution . It is the substance behind the showmanship of the Trump rallies.

Developing transition plans for a presidential candidate is normal practice in the US. What is not normal about Project 2025, with its intertwined domestic and international agenda, are the plans themselves. Those for climate and the global environment, defence and security, the global economic system and the institutions of American democracy more broadly aim for nothing less than the total dismantling and restructure of both American life and the world as we know it.

The unapologetic agenda, according to Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is to “defeat the anti-American left – at home and abroad.”

Recommendations include completely abolishing the US Federal Reserve in favour of a system of “free banking”, the total reversal of all the Biden administration’s climate policies, a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use, ending economic engagement with China, expanding the nuclear arsenal and a “comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations” including the UN and its agencies. And that’s not all.

Australia itself is mentioned just seven times in the substantive text, with vague recommendations that a future administration support “greater spending and collaboration” with regional partners in defence and send a political appointee here as ambassador. But even if only partially implemented, the document’s overarching recommendations would have significant implications for Australia and our region.

Project 2025 is modelled on what the Foundation sees as its greatest historical triumph. The launch of the first Mandate for Leadership coincided with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. By the following year, according to the Foundation, “more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy”.

Four decades later, Project 2025 is trying to repeat history.

The Project is not directly aligned with the Trump campaign: it has in fact attracted some ire from the campaign for presuming too much. Trump is under no obligation to adopt any of its plans should he return to the White House. But the sheer number of former Trump officials and loyalists involved in the Project, and its particular commitment to supporting a Trump return, suggest we should take its plans very seriously.

Much of what is happening now in the US is unprecedented. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is currently locked in a Manhattan courtroom defending himself from criminal charges . Despite this unedifying spectacle, current polling separates Biden and Trump by a gap of just 2% , according to the latest poll. This year will be an existential test for American democracy.

Read more: Is America enduring a 'slow civil war'? Jeff Sharlet visits Trump rallies, a celebrity megachurch and the manosphere to find out

The four pillars

Project 2025’s chosen method for engineering its radical reshaping of that democracy takes a startlingly familiar bureaucratic approach. It aims to create a system where any potential chaos is contained by an administration and bureaucracy united by the same conservative vision. The vision rests on four “pillars”.

Pillar one is the 920-page Mandate – the manifesto for the next conservative president (and the major focus of this analysis).

Pillar two is the foundation’s recruitment program: a kind of conservative LinkedIn that aims to build a database of vetted, loyal conservatives ready to serve in the next administration.

The program is specifically designed to “deconstruct the Administrative State”: code for using Schedule F , a Trump-era executive order (since overturned), that would allow an administration to unilaterally re-categorise, fire and replace tens of thousands of independent federal employees with political loyalists.

Pillar three, the “Presidential Administration Academy”, will train those new recruits and existing amenable officials in the nature and use of power within the American political system, so they can effectively and efficiently implement the president’s agenda.

Pillar four consists of a secret “ Playbook ” – a resources bank of things like draft executive orders and specific transition plans ready for the first 180 days of a new administration.

The four pillars inform each other. The Mandate, for example, doubles as a recruitment tool that educates aspiring officials in the complex structures of the US federal government.

A response to Trump’s failures

The Mandate doesn’t specify who the next conservative president might be, but it is clearly written with Trump in mind. As it outlines, “one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States”. What the Mandate can’t acknowledge is that the man aiming to be the 47th president was notorious for not reading his briefs when he occupied the Oval Office.

An unspoken aim of Project 2025 is to inject some ideological coherence into Trumpism. It aims to focus if not the leader, then the movement behind him – something that did not happen in the four years between January 2017 and January 2021. The entire project is a response to the perceived failures and weaknesses of the Trump administration.

Project 2025’s vision rests on almost completely gutting and replacing the bureaucracy that (in the view of its authors) thwarted and undermined the Trump presidency. It aims to remodel and reorganise the “ blob ” of powerful people who cycle through the landscape of American power between think tanks, government and higher education institutions.

It explicitly welcomes conservatives to this “mission” of assembling “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State”. “Conservatives”, in this framing, are not those who would defend and protect the institutions and traditions of the state, but rather right-wing radicals who would fundamentally change them.

The choice of language – “mission”, “army” – is also deliberate. The Mandate repeatedly distinguished between “ real people ” and what it sees as existential enemies. “America is now divided,” it argues, “between two opposing forces”. Those forces are irreconcilable, and because that fight extends abroad, “there is no margin for error”.

This framing of an America and a world engaged in an existential battle is underpinned by granular, bureaucratic detail – right down to recommendations for low-level appointments, budget allocations and regulatory reform. Effective understanding – and use of – the machinery of American power is, the Heritage Foundation believes, essential to victory.

That is why the Mandate is 920 pages from cover to cover, why it has 30 chapters written by “hundreds of contributors” with input from “more than 400 scholars and policy experts” and why it can now claim the support of 100 organisations .

What follows is a broad analysis of the implications of Project 2025 for the world outside the United States.

Drill baby, drill: climate and the environment

In late 2023, Donald Trump was asked by Fox News anchor Sean Hannity if he would be a “dictator”. Trump responded he would not, “ except on day one ”. In the flurry of coverage that followed, rightly condemning and outlining Trump’s repeated threats to American democracy , the aspiring president’s stated reasons for a day of dictatorship were overshadowed.

But Trump was explicit: “We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling.” While Trump himself may not be across or even aligned with the specific detail of much of Project 2025’s aims, on “drilling, drilling, drilling,” they are very much in sync.

The Mandate condemns what it describes as a “radical climate agenda” and “Biden’s war on fossil fuels”, recommending an immediate rollback of all Biden administration programs and reinstatement of Trump-era policies.

One of Biden’s signature legislative achievements, the Inflation Reduction Act , attracts a great deal of attention. Unsurprisingly, the broad recommendation is that the Act be repealed in its entirety. But the recommendations are also specific: repeal “credits and tax breaks for green energy companies”, stop “programs providing grants for environmental science activities” and ensure “the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs”. This would include removing “federal mandates and subsidies of electric vehicles”.

There is, in all, a great deal to “eliminate” – a word that appears in the Mandate over 250 times. In environmental policy, programs on the elimination list include the Clean Energy Corps , energy efficiency standards for appliances , the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations in the Department of Energy, and the entire National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration .

But this is not all. The elimination of climate-focused programs, legislation, offices and policies would be accompanied by a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use – a reversal of Biden’s “war”.

The chapter on the Department of the Interior, which manages federal lands and natural resources, recommends it “conduct offshore oil and natural gas lease sales to the maximum extent permitted” and restart the coal-leasing program.

This should include returning to the first Trump administration’s plans to further open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil fields development. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should, likewise, “not use environmental issues like climate change as a reason to stop LNG projects”.

Given the size and influence of the US economy, these policies would inevitably have global implications. This is not lost on the Mandate’s authors: the fight against the “radical climate agenda” is both local and global.

The chapter on Treasury, for example, recommends that a conservative administration “withdraw from climate change agreements that are inimical to the prosperity of the United States”. This includes, specifically, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement (which Trump withdrew the United States from in 2020, and Biden rejoined in 2021).

Analysis by the Guardian argues that taken together, these plans for rewinding climate action and accelerating fossil fuel extraction and use would be “even more extreme for the environment” than those of the first Trump administration.

This would not be a straightforward case of the US reverting from being a “good” actor on climate to a “bad” one. While the Biden administration has presided over some of the most significant climate legislation and actions in US history, domestic oil production has also hit a record high under Biden’s leadership . The US is already the second highest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

Several nations, including Australia, might find it convenient to hide behind the much more explicitly destructive policies of a future conservative US administration.

According to modelling by UK-based Carbon Brief , which does not include the increases in fossil fuel extraction and use outlined by the Mandate, a second Trump administration could result in an increase in emissions “equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries”.

That would mean, even without accounting for the opening of new oil reserves in places like Alaska, “a second Trump term […] would likely end any global hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5C”.

Project 2025’s authors are, of course, unapologetic. The Mandate demands that the next conservative administration “go on offense” and assert “America’s energy interests […] around the world” – to the point of establishing “full-spectrum strategic energy dominance”, in order to restore the nation’s global primacy.

A world on fire: security and defence

Restoring that global primacy is the focus of Section 2 of the Mandate. This section argues the Departments of Defense and State are “first among equals” with the executive branch, suggesting international relations should be a major focus for the next conservative presidency. It argues the success of such an administration “will be determined in part by whether [Defence and State] can be significantly improved in short order”.

Why is that improvement so important? Because, according to the Mandate, the US is engaged in an existential battle with its enemies, in “a world on fire”. China is, unsurprisingly, the main game: “America’s most dangerous international enemy”.

The Mandate’s overwhelming focus on China and its assessment that the world is in an era of “great power competition” is not radically different from the position of the current administration – nor the rest of the Western world. But the Mandate’s suggested response is different.

“The next conservative President,” the Mandate claims, “has the opportunity to restructure the making and execution of U.S. defense and foreign policy and reset the nation’s role in the world.”

For Defense, this reset means restoring “ warfighting as its sole mission” and making its highest priority “defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party”. It means dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and bringing its remit under Defense. It then recommends the department help with “aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border” and deploy “military personnel and hardware to prevent illegal crossings”.

Along with this expanded, more aggressive role for the Pentagon, the Mandate advocates for a dramatic expansion in defence personnel. A reduced force in Europe would be combined with an increase in “the Army force structure by 50,000 to handle two major regional contingencies simultaneously”.

It’s not quite clear how recruitment would be boosted so quickly. But at one point, the Mandate recommends requiring completion of the military entrance examination “by all students in schools that receive federal funding”. This is one of many lines that hints at a radical reshaping of American life.

The “two major contingencies” the department must prepare for appear to be “threats” from both China and Russia. As the long fight over US funding for Ukraine has demonstrated, however, many Trump-aligned conservatives have an ideological affinity with Putin’s Russia. This radical turnaround in the recent history of US–Russia relations marks a clear tension in conservative politics.

The Mandate acknowledges Russia now “starkly divides conservatives”. But it offers no real resolution, suggesting this would be left up to the president. Inevitable contradictions like this run throughout.

Even on China – one of very few issues that unites conservatives and liberals – the Mandate can contradict itself. One chapter, for example, worries about China blocking market access for the United States. Another advocates complete market decoupling.

Modernise, adapt, expand: on the nuclear arsenal

Trump has repeatedly toyed with the possibility of using nuclear weapons. In 2016, the then-candidate was pressed on why he wouldn’t rule out using them. He responded with his own question: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”

As president, Trump repeatedly bragged about the US nuclear arsenal and weapons development, and allegedly illegally removed classified documents concerning nuclear capabilities from the White House. During his presidency, the US also dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb, nicknamed with characteristic misogyny the “ mother of all bombs ”, on Afghanistan.

The Mandate encourages more weapons development. It argues the Department of Energy should refocus on “developing new nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors”. Its recommendation that the United States “expand” its nuclear arsenal in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously” will especially concern advocates of non-proliferation .

The Mandate also recommends the next administration “end ineffective and counterproductive nonproliferation activities like those involving Iran and the United Nations”.

“Friends and adversaries” abroad

This ramping up of American militarism should be accompanied, according to the Mandate, by a radical shakeup of American diplomacy. The next administration should

significantly reorient the U.S. government’s posture toward friends and adversaries alike – which will include much more honest assessments about who are friends and who are not. This reorientation could represent the most significant shift in core foreign policy principles and corresponding action since the end of the Cold War.

In a line that inevitably provokes thoughts of regime change , the Mandate suggests “the time may be right to press harder on the Iranian theocracy […] and take other steps to draw Iran into the community of free and modern nations”. It is, of course, silent on how disastrous regime change has proved to be in the conduct of US foreign policy over the past half century.

The Mandate also suggests a return to the Trump administration’s “tough love” approach to US participation in international organisations, ensuring no foreign aid supports reproductive rights or care, and that USAID , the nation’s major aid agency, “rescind all climate policies”.

All of this would mean installing “political ambassadors with strong personal relationships with the President”, especially in “key strategic posts such as Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)”. In the State Department specifically, “No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day.”

Perhaps most significantly, Roberts argues in the Mandate’s foreword that “Economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.” The chapter on the Department of Commerce similarly argues for “strategic decoupling from China”.

Given the size and scope of the American and Chinese economies, and smaller nations like Australia’s reliance on stable economic relations with both, such a “decoupling” from China, alongside a ramping up of militarism, would have significant, wide-ranging consequences.

Another recommendation is that the United States “withdraw” from both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and “terminate its financial contribution to both institutions”. The global consequences of even more radical suggestions like a return to the gold standard, or even “abolishing the federal role in money altogether” in favour of a system of “free banking”, are genuinely mind-boggling.

A new, frightening world in the making?

Project 2025 opens a window onto the modern American conservative movement, documenting in minute detail just how much it has reoriented itself around Trump and the ideological incoherence of Trumpism more broadly. The success, or not, of this effort to unify the movement will also have international implications, as those same organisations and individuals cultivate their connections with the far-right globally.

While Trump, as always, is difficult to predict, there are long and deep links between his campaign and supporters and the Project’s supporters and contributors. Nothing is inevitable, but should Trump return to the White House, it is highly likely at least some of Project 2025’s recommendations, policies, authors, and aspiring officials will join him there. These include people like Peter Navarro, a former Trump official, loyalist and Mandate author, who is currently serving a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress because he refused to comply with a congressional subpoena during the January 6 investigation.

Project 2025’s Mandate is iconoclastic and dystopian, offering a dark vision of a highly militaristic and unapologetically aggressive America ascendant in “a world on fire”. Those who wish to understand Trump and the movement behind him, and the active threat they pose to American democracy, are obliged to take it seriously.

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Essay on Role of Youth in Politics

Students are often asked to write an essay on Role of Youth in Politics in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Role of Youth in Politics

Introduction.

Youth, the future of a nation, play a crucial role in politics. They are the backbone of a country who can lead towards progress.

Political Awareness

Youths should be politically aware to understand the country’s issues. With their energy and fresh ideas, they can bring about significant changes.

Participation in Politics

Active participation in politics is vital. Youths can join political parties, participate in elections, or voice their opinions to contribute to the political process.

The role of youth in politics is significant. They can shape the future of the nation with their enthusiasm and innovative ideas.

250 Words Essay on Role of Youth in Politics

The role of youth in politics is crucial in shaping the future of a nation. As the torchbearers of change, they are instrumental in driving the political landscape towards a more inclusive and progressive direction.

Political Participation

Youth participation in politics is not just about voting; it extends to engaging in political debates, policy-making, and even holding political office. Their fresh perspectives and innovative ideas can contribute to the creation of more effective and relevant policies.

A Catalyst for Change

Young people, with their energy and passion, often serve as catalysts for political change. They are typically more open to embracing new ideas and are less constrained by traditional political ideologies. This makes them a potent force in challenging the status quo and pushing for political reform.

Overcoming Challenges

However, the path to political participation for the youth is not without challenges. They often face barriers such as age restrictions, lack of opportunities, and the perception that they are inexperienced. Overcoming these obstacles requires concerted efforts from all stakeholders, including the government, educational institutions, and civil society.

In conclusion, the youth’s role in politics is vital for the growth and development of a nation. They bring a fresh perspective, are willing to challenge the status quo, and are often at the forefront of political change. Encouraging and facilitating their participation in politics is essential for a vibrant and progressive political landscape.

500 Words Essay on Role of Youth in Politics

The significance of youth in politics.

The role of youth in politics is pivotal, being the backbone of any nation. They represent the future and are responsible for shaping society’s political landscape. The youth’s energy, innovative ideas, and resilience can bring about significant changes in the political sphere, highlighting their importance in the process.

Driving Change and Innovation

Young people, with their fresh perspectives and willingness to challenge the status quo, often act as catalysts for change. They question existing political systems and advocate for reforms, leading to a dynamic and evolving political environment. Their innovative ideas can lead to the creation of policies that are more in line with the changing times and societal needs.

Representation and Inclusion

The youth constitutes a significant portion of the population in many countries. Hence, their representation in politics is crucial to ensure the interests of this demographic are catered to. Their active involvement in politics can lead to the inclusion of youth-centric policies, addressing issues like education, employment, and mental health.

Political Awareness and Participation

Political awareness among the youth is essential for a robust democracy. It enables them to make informed decisions, participate in debates, and contribute to the political discourse. Their participation, either as voters or candidates, can significantly impact election outcomes.

Challenges and Solutions

Despite the potential benefits, youth participation in politics is often hindered by various barriers. These include age restrictions for candidacy, lack of opportunities, and societal stereotypes. To overcome these challenges, it is essential to create a conducive environment that encourages youth participation. This can be achieved through measures such as lowering the age limit for political candidacy, providing mentorship programs, and promoting political literacy among the youth.

The Way Forward

Promoting youth participation in politics is a collective responsibility. Governments, educational institutions, and civil society organizations need to work together to foster an environment that encourages youth engagement in politics. It is also crucial for the youth to seize the opportunities and make their voices heard.

In conclusion, the role of youth in politics is integral to the development and progression of any nation. Their active participation can lead to a more inclusive and forward-thinking political landscape. As the leaders of tomorrow, the youth have the power to shape the future of their countries, making their involvement in politics not just desirable but necessary.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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A Political Scientist on How Protests Can Change Minds or Backfire

Derek and political science professor Omar Wasow talk about what made 1960s protests different, how protests succeed, how protests backfire, and how Wasow’s research applies to today

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In the last week , hundreds of protests across college campuses and American cities have taken place in response to the war in Gaza. Campus life has shut down at Columbia University in NYC. The news is strewn with images of police confrontations on campuses, from Texas to California. Hundreds of demonstrators across the country have been taken into police custody. And many people now anticipate that, without a major course correction in the war in Gaza, demonstrators will converge on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in a replay of the infamous 1968 anti-war protests and police riots that defined that national convention. Next week, we’re going to have a full episode on the war itself. Today, I want to talk about the nature of protest itself. Omar Wasow, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, is the author of an influential paper about the history of 1960s protests. Today we talk about what made the 1960s protests different, how protests succeed, how protests backfire, and how his research applies to today.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected] .

In the following excerpt, Derek and Omar Wasow compare and contrast different eras of protests, from the 1950s up to today.

Derek Thompson: So today, with protests spreading across the country of the war in Gaza and the rising likelihood of major protests at the Democratic National Convention this summer, I really wanted to talk to you about how this moment compares to similar protests in the 1960s. In 2020, you published a paper on the effect of 1960s protests on elite opinions. Before we get into that paper and exactly what you found, I would love you to situate it within the larger literature in this space. What had been the prevailing wisdom? Did previous political scientists find that mass protests often succeed, or were they generally of the opinion that protesters are screaming into the void?

Omar Wasow: It’s a great question, and there’s a large body of work in political science and sociology that’s looked at this, and there’s a range of results. But in political science, the dominant position has been that elites really dominate political communication. There’s work by, for example, two scholars—Gilens and Page—that looked at a wide range of issues and just found that mass influence on these different issues was almost nonexistent. There were people like lobbyists who had some influence and there were other elite actors—say, in the media—who had influence, but the mass public had very little influence. There’s other work by scholars like Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth that found cross-nationally nonviolent protests were successful about 50 percent of the time, and protests that had some degree of violence, about a quarter of the time. So there has been some evidence of success, but broadly in the U.S. context, the sense is elites dominate political communication and sort of these bottom-up voices often go unheard.

Thompson: I’m going to hold on a couple words that you said and remind myself and listeners, we’re going to get back to them later in the show. Political opinion, elite opinion, is fundamentally a top-down phenomenon. Protests are, by definition, a bottom-up phenomenon. There’s no point in protesting something if all the elites already agree with you. There are some ways in which I think the world is becoming a little bit more upside down, a little bit more bottom-up. And so, I’m interested in your opinion about that, but I’m putting that in the refrigerator and keeping it for later. First, if you could, set the scene of the 1960s protests. What should we know about the protests, their political context? Maybe the right way to frame this is: What have we potentially forgotten about the protest environment of the 1960s that is so important to remember today, given the environment of protests right now?

Wasow: So very generally—I mean, not just in the 1960s—protest movements tend to be episodic, and so you have these waves of activity and then it often fades rather quickly. And what we see in the 1960s, and it really even begins in the late 1950s, is this kind of building set of sit-ins and people trying to integrate buses. And that activity builds quite dramatically in the early 1960s in terms of activity. You see events like the march on Washington: a quarter of a million people converging on D.C. And then there’s this sort of remarkable period of legislation, ’64 Civil Rights Act, ’65 Voting Rights Act. And then it starts to fade rather quickly in that kind of episodic model and are consistent with that kind of episodic model. And then what we see in the kind of latter half of the ’60s and early ’70s is another wave, but where the protests often escalate to violence—protestor-initiated violence, not just violence by the state against protesters.

Thompson: Last question before we jump right into your paper. The civil rights protests (so the late 1950s and 1960s): Were there ways in which these protests were qualitatively different from previous eras of protest, whether it was for women’s right to vote or labor strikes or Luddite-style protests against the introduction of new technologies? Is there something that political scientists who study protests set aside the ’50s and ’60s civil rights protests away from these previous generations of protests because they were just different in some way?

Wasow: So I think that’s a really good question. And there are a number of things that we might point to in the 1960s. I mean, one thing that I loop on a lot is that in 1950, something like 2 percent of people had a television and by 1960, more than 90 percent of people had a television in their home. And so there’s this really radical transformation in the media environment in that era, and that lays the groundwork for a different kind of visual style of protest. There’s a great book, a Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the history of reporting on the civil rights movement called The Race Beat . And what they show in that book is that, essentially, civil rights, when TV news first comes out in the ’60s, people are trying to figure out: What is this good for? They have 15 minutes a day, and they don’t know what to do with it.

And essentially, to use a modern term, civil rights protests become the killer app of TV news, and it sort of justifies the existence of TV news. And there’s this whole wave of national reporting from outside of the South that starts to cover the civil rights movement and really creates a different kind of protest strategy, which is that you create these very dramatic events that then help to get national and international news coverage that puts pressure on local actors. That, I think, is distinctive. It’s not totally novel. There are people doing things in earlier periods that look like that, but just the media environment makes this much more available as a strategy.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Omar Wasow Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Arsenal Win the North London Derby, Man City a Point Behind at the Top

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Guest Essay

Xi Thinks China Can Slow Climate Change. What if He’s Right?

By Jacob Dreyer

Mr. Dreyer, an editor and writer who focuses on the Chinese political economy and science, wrote from Shanghai.

At first glance, Xi Jinping seems to have lost the plot.

China’s president appears to be smothering the entrepreneurial dynamism that allowed his country to crawl out of poverty and become the factory of the world. He has brushed aside Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious” in favor of centralized planning and Communist-sounding slogans like “ ecological civilization ” and “ new, quality productive forces ,” which have prompted predictions of the end of China’s economic miracle.

But Mr. Xi is, in fact, making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.

It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels , batteries and electric vehicles . Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that.

This raises an important question for the United States and all of humanity: Is Mr. Xi right? Is a state-directed system like China’s better positioned to solve a generational crisis like climate change, or is a decentralized market approach — i.e., the American way — the answer?

How this plays out could have serious implications for American power and influence.

Look at what happened in the early 20th century, when fascism posed a global threat. America entered the fight late, but with its industrial power — the arsenal of democracy — it emerged on top. Whoever unlocks the door inherits the kingdom, and the United States set about building a new architecture of trade and international relations. The era of American dominance began.

Climate change is, similarly, a global problem, one that threatens our species and the world’s biodiversity. Where do Brazil , Pakistan , Indonesia and other large developing nations that are already grappling with the effects of climate change find their solutions? It will be in technologies that offer an affordable path to decarbonization, and so far, it’s China that is providing most of the solar panels , electric cars and more. China’s exports, increasingly led by green technology, are booming, and much of the growth involves exports to developing countries .

From the American neoliberal economic viewpoint, a state-led push like this might seem illegitimate or even unfair. The state, with its subsidies and political directives, is making decisions that are better left to the markets, the thinking goes.

But China’s leaders have their own calculations, which prioritize stability decades from now over shareholder returns today. Chinese history is littered with dynasties that fell because of famines, floods or failures to adapt to new realities. The Chinese Communist Party’s centrally planned system values constant struggle for its own sake, and today’s struggle is against climate change. China received a frightening reminder of this in 2022, when vast areas of the country baked for weeks under a record heat wave that dried up rivers , withered crops and was blamed for several heatstroke deaths.

China’s government knows that it must make this green transition out of rational self-interest or risk joining the Soviet Union on history’s scrap heap, and is actively positioning itself to do so. It is increasingly led by people with backgrounds in science, technology and environmental issues. Shanghai, the country’s largest city and its financial and industrial leading edge, is headed by Chen Jining, an environmental systems expert and China’s former minister of environmental protection. Across the country, money is being poured into developing and bringing to market new advances in things like rechargeable batteries and into creating corporate champions in renewable energy .

To be clear, for Mr. Xi, this green agenda is not purely an environmental endeavor. It also helps him tighten his grip on power. In 2015, for instance, the Central Environmental Inspection Team was formed to investigate whether provincial leaders and even agencies of the central government were adhering to his green push, giving him another tool with which to exert his already considerable power and authority.

At the same time, locking in renewable energy sources is a national security issue for Mr. Xi; unlike the United States, China imports almost all of its oil, which could be disrupted by the U.S. Navy in choke points like the Malacca Strait in the event of war.

Mr. Xi’s plan — call it his Green Leap Forward — has serious deficiencies. China continues to build coal-fired power plants , and its annual greenhouse-gas emissions remain far greater than those of the United States, though American emissions are higher on a per-capita basis. China’s electric vehicle industry was built on subsidies , and the country may be using forced labor to produce solar panels. Those are serious concerns, but they fade into the background when Pakistan floods or Brazil wants to build an E.V. factory or South Africa desperately needs solar panels for a faltering energy grid.

American politics may be inadvertently helping China gobble up global market share in renewable energy products. When the United States — whether for national security or protectionist reasons — keeps Chinese companies like Huawei out of the American market or rolls up the welcome mat for electric vehicle makers like BYD or companies involved in artificial intelligence or self-driving cars, those businesses must look elsewhere.

President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act , aimed at tackling climate change, has put the United States on a solid path toward carbon neutrality. But America’s decentralization and focus on private innovation means government policy cannot have quite the same impact that it can in China.

So it is crucial for Americans to recognize that, for most of the world, perhaps for all of us, China’s ability to provide low-cost green technology is, on balance, great news. All of humanity needs to move toward renewables at a huge scale — and fast. America still leads in innovation, while China excels in taking frontier science and making its application in the real world cost-effective. If American politicians, investors and businesses recognize that climate change is humanity’s biggest threat, that could open pathways for diplomacy, collaboration and constructive competition with China that benefit us all.

Together, China and the United States could decarbonize the world. But if Americans don’t get serious about it, the Chinese will do it without them.

And if the United States tries to obstruct China, by way of corporate blacklists, trade or technology bans or diplomatic pressure, it will end up looking like part of the climate problem. That happened earlier this month when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, during a visit to China, urged officials here to rein in green technology exports that the United States says are hurting American companies.

Mr. Xi won’t completely toss out the polluting manufacturing-for-export economic model that has served China so well, nor does he seem ready to halt construction of coal plants. Both are considered necessary for economic and energy security until the green transition is complete. But they are now only a means to an end. The endgame, it seems, is to reach carbon neutrality while dominating the industries making that possible.

Much like how the United States showed up late for World War II, China’s clean-tech companies are latecomers, piggybacking on technology developed elsewhere. But history rewards not necessarily who was there first but who was there last — when a problem was solved. Mr. Xi seems to discern the climate chaos on the horizon. Winning the race for solutions means winning the world that comes next.

Jacob Dreyer is an American editor and writer focused on the intersection of the Chinese political economy and science. He lives in Shanghai.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Example Of Using Film For Political Change Essay

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: United States , Politics , Cinema , Martin Luther King , America , Film , Movies , Violence

Words: 2250

Published: 02/17/2020

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Introduction

Political change is the altering in the theory and practice of influencing individuals of the same interest. In its narrow sense political change is the modification of ways of achieving and practicing of governance position. Various methods and tools are used in bringing about political change in the society. The tools usually employed in bringing about political change are far reaching tools and methods like movies, media and general political campaigns. Political change in this case is the promotion of intended political perspective on matters pertaining making laws, negotiation amongst political subjects, exercising force and general governance. Film is one way of impacting political change in a society. Film is usually chosen for this because of its far reaching characteristics and the capturing of large audience. The film Doing the Right Thing by Spike Lee is a political tool used to impact and address political dynamism to the minds of its audience. The movie is a depiction of street living in one of the pronounced intense summer waves at Brooklyn neighborhood. The movie reflects the engagement that existed between the residents and the vendors of the local Pizzeria in addition to their interaction with the area police. Racial tensions rose with the same warmth like the summer heat, until it caused the culminating riot that claimed the life of an Africa-American young Radio Raheem in addition to property destruction at the popular Pizza restaurant. Spike Lee presents this political agenda between the current and older generation and the general political difference the whites and blacks. The movie takes its main character Mookie and moves along with audience as he distributes pizza to the neighborhoods. This is represents the Bugging’ Out’s intent at boycott of Sal’s Smiley’s high regard for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcon X. Thus this was a representation of another way of doing politics (Lee 12). Spike Lee’s work exhibits a generational difference between current youth and older generation youths and how they are in the move to politically look for ways of gaining control of their history and change the all political scene of stereotypes and the way to react to situations like that of the Radio Raheem death (Lee 42). Lee in this movie presents the historic situations that were used in an attempt to bring democracy and equality to America and pass the same to various generations (Lee 18). Lee uses historic examples like commercial nervousness that prevailed after the civil war in addition to the hip hop political impact, the stereotypical prevalence, riots and boycotts in the Africa-America history of the US. In the movie, Lee talks of the intra-racial division existing between Mother Sister (Ossie Davis) and Da Mayor thus showing the bloc of elders in political agenda. Buggin’ Out’ and Radio Raheem are restless to move with political change. This is a replica of a radical political environment where some people are left in political dilemma and disillusion. Similarly Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcon X differ in political ideologies for achievement of Justice, the Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SNLC) and StudentNonviolent Coordination committee (SNCC) show disagreement on achievement of justice in the US. Lee makes an ambiguous quotation that shows the difference in political agendas of Malcon X and Martin Luther King, Jr. “violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral,” Malcolm X claims, “I am not against using violence in self defense. I don‟t call it violence when it‟s self defense, I call it intelligence.” (Powell 32). The film represents both these political ideologies during the various mixed reactions towards the death of Radio Raheem. Mother Sister and Da Mayor who preferred legal procedures in addressing the situation represented the political ideas of Martin Luther King Jr. while Mookie and Buggin’ Out’ represents those of Malcon X, since the prefer violence as the vital resolution to solving the prevailing injustice. They saw physical destruction of Sal’s as important for protection of justice (Lee 34). Da Mayor is similar to Martin Luther King Jr. representation of the voice of rationality and the un-official representation of the needs of black people. This is similar to Martin’s appeal to the whites and blacks of the middle class. The difference in political ideologies between the older and young generations in Lee’s work is a replica of the historic difference between the SNCC and the SCLC along with the National Association of Colored People (NAACP). The SNCC in this case is known of pushing violence, boycotting and rioting against the continuing social injustices in the US than the SCLC. For instance in the film, Buggin’ Out’ at the Sal’s boycotting influentially talks to youth groups and instructs them on the use of direct action which was a famous technique with the NAACP. When reflecting back to the historic division between the SNCC and the SCLC during the 1961 voter education project, the NAACP grew cautious of their direct action policy as it had the possibility of fostering diversionary and problematic operations that will move away from the goal of the orientation (Powell 50). This is the same thing that happens in the film as Da Mayor and Mother Sister are uncomfortable with direction action that was characterized by violence and riots whereas the neighborhood youth are comfortable with direct action as a way of self defense and a method of garnering the whites’ reaction on the matter. Mister Senior Love Daddy whole plays a vital role in the movie applauds on his radio show the African-American artists music. He draws the list of African-American singers despite of the riot. Leroi Jones was among the listed African-American singers. His music was analyzed by Senor Love Daddy and his audience during the Radio show. To their realization are the sporadic changes in reaction of the Negros towards America. The various changes were clearly reflected in Leroi’s music. The other issue depicted in the music is fact that African-America culture is at the same as American culture. The Italian Sal makes statements that his wall of fame has no relation with the blacks though they were his major customers. This was a political denial of the rights to contribute to the American culture. This is in addition to the civil war; the Sal pizza showed how the suppliers were biased that consumers are always white. The whole film is a replica of the political difference and change that existed in the African-American world. The film is used to impact the need for political change in the society though people will always differ in political ideologies. The film helps in freeing justice from the violence of its designated confinement within the terms forged in by racism. Malcolm X is amongst the celebrate films in the American history that played a big role in the fight for equality in the America society. The film also is an inspiration to viewers who watch the film and get to understand the power of success in our lives lies in our own hands (Marcus 34). The story of Malcolm X symbolizes the rising of the foreign Americans who believed in the American dream that everybody has equal chance of succeeding no matter the background. In this section, we are to discuss the role of the film Malcolm X in the political change of America as it influences the American people. The film begins with a brief history of the Malcolm X. the film starts with a brief historical background of Malcolm x family, where his father believed the natives Americans would never accept black people in their society and the hope of having a good life was return to Africa. During his early life, Malcolm was victim of violence. He witnessed his father’s death, white clan burn their house down and having to depend on their mother who was unable to cater for their own needs. The film exposes the difficult situations African America children were forced to grow up in witnessing separation within the American society where there were schooled reserved for black children alone while other were meant for white children. The film has a lot of issues being raised (Lee, Marvin 112). One of the important issues is equality in humanity to all citizens despite their color and background. In the movie, there is focus of racism against black children, which dehumanizes them after several attempt of Malcolm trying to join school and a teachers tells him that he should look for something to do and work with his hands. This action makes him feel that there are using him because there though they were different from black people. In return Malcolm dehumanizes some white people in revenge of the subjugation he faced from the white teacher. This movie play a big role in assembles political leaders who share some ideology with Malcolm X. Malcolm X ideologies was to make shape the society to be a fit for all social groups to live together in peace and harmony. In the modern political arrangement between the democrats and republican there are divided by the political ideologies of what Malcolm left in America. Each political party champions for equal right in all citizens despite of their background in order for every citizens. In addition, Malcolm started to acknowledge the presence of good white people after he meets white skinned people in Mecca who treated him as equal to them. This incident is very symbolical to the current political arena. There is a great improvement of political leaders who acknowledge the kindness of white in the society. This comes after realization that whether white or black, blood is red and we all experience same issues (Lee, Marvin 132). Whether you are white or black, you feel the pressure of gas prices when their go up and thus hating each other because of skin color will not solve the social economical challenges we experience. The movie makes the audience understand that as citizens we all go through same economical challenges and we all the same. The films movies aims to makes Americans understand the whole idea of humanity. In the film, Malcolm character is used to reflect on the dark past of America racism and unfairness in the society. The movie helps political leaders champion for equal opportunity in the society which Malcolm never lived to see. The change in the political field is as a result of political influence of political style of Malcolm and the America he wanted to live in. the destiny of America has been influence by its dark history, which up to date has an influence on the political life of Americans. When we choose leaders, there are characters of leadership which we ought to see in every candidate that represent the wish of America. In the film, Elijah Muhammad uses Malcolm to strengthen his organization for the fight of Muslim laws to be included in the American constitution (Marcus 56). Today, the sheria laws which are similar to Muhammad will are being considered by political leaders who want to scope the Muslim vote. The politics in America are issue based and politicians are supposed to talk about issues affect all citizens not by representing a small group with their own interest. The movie takes a role of educating Americans on choosing issues that represent all nationalities, races and gender hence shaping the political future of political in America since all citizens are aware of negative of racism based politics and the harm on the economy of the country. Both films are source of media for of disseminating information to the public. The influence caused by the two films in shaping the political future of America has made a difference in the way politics are played today. In both movies, there is deep revelation the harm caused by negative vices America experienced before early 60’s. Politicians and political parties are keen to identify ideologies that are aimed towards lifting the lives of American to a higher standard. Adding to this, both films are educative about the dangers of social segregation towards the people and the economy. In do the thing right, the symbolism of humanity. The movie discourages racism based politics (Marcus 117). The same theme is well represented in Malcolm X where the main character act spreads the word of humanity to all citizens despite their skin color. In conclusion, the film industry is keen on speaking on social injustices within the society of America. The movie makers have represented the ideology of an equal society where all citizens are equal before the government. The two films represent an error when America was divided by social status and skin color and some individuals seemed to enjoy more rights than the other. Adding to this, the films advocate for the need of having a political life that is aimed towards ensuring that citizens live a good life as the government promised the slaves. In my own opinion, I think the two films are a good stepping stone in uniting American and bring us to a common understanding. If you are keen in understanding the politics of America, there is much affiliation to the ideologies of Malcolm. More films should be created to encourage healthy political competition in the future in order to educate more Americans who prefer movies over new and other form of sharing information.

Works Cited

Lee, Spike, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Bill Nunn, Richard Edson, Rosie Perez, Giancarlo Esposito, and John Turturro. Do the Right Thing. Irvington, NY N.p., n.d. Print. Lee, Spike, Marvin Worth, Arnold Perl, Terence Blanchard, Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Albert Hall, Al Freeman, and Malcolm X. Malcolm X. Burbank, CA N.p., n.d. Print. Marcus, Alan S. Celluloid Blackboard: Teaching History with Film. Charlotte, NC: IAP-Information Age Pub, 2007. Print. Powell, Gerald A. A Rhetoric of Symbolic Identity: An Analysis of Spike Lee's X and Bamboozled. Dallas: University Press of America, 2004. Print.

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