“It’s happened. And it’s bad. America has elected as president a man who doesn’t really bother hiding his authoritarianism. Again. It is alarming. And yet to give way to alarmism at a time like this is a mistake. If American democracy is to survive the test of the next four years—and no, that is not a given—it will be because we’ve understood clearly what this moment means.

To those of us raised to revere constitutional democracy, seeing millions of people line up to vote to weaken constitutional democracy will always be upsetting. Yet in voting for a candidate who promised to use the repressive power of the state to persecute and punish his political opponents, who refused to accept a previous election defeat and rails against the notion that anything lies outside the president’s powers, tens of millions of Americans have just done precisely that. It feels inexplicable.

But it isn’t.

Political scientists have thought carefully about the kind of situation we’re in. Back in 2011, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a paper together with Ragnar Torvik titled “Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances?” that doubles as a Rosetta Stone to our political moment.

Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik built a model to show there are circumstances where it is rational for voters to prefer leaders who reject democratic institutions. This doesn’t normally happen in well-functioning democracies. But where unelected elites have outsized power, checks and balances can function to hem politicians in, preventing them from enacting policies a majority of voters want. In those circumstances, voters can rationally interpret a leader’s disdain for democratic institutions as a feature, not a bug: checks and balances come to be seen as the eggs you have to crack to make the democratic omelet.  “

“If the American polity isn’t going to break apart completely over the next four years, it’s important for everyone to accept Trump voters as rational actors. Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik theorize that voters can come to see even the corruption that their preferred candidate is sure to engage in as a price worth paying for the enactment of policies that have no chance otherwise. The calculus Trump’s supporters have made may be appalling, it may be reckless—surely it is—and it may spectacularly backfire.

But irrational it is not.”

Full Article

posted by f.sheikh

Never underestimate the power of anger of being dismissed as irrelevant. That is the grave mistake Democratic leadership, Biden, and Harris made and arrogantly dismissed Arab Americans as irrelevant and refused to give an inch on their genocidal Gaza policy. They thought Arab Americans, like Blacks and Latino, have no place else to go and in the end will come back home. In this election, Blacks and Latino voters also had enough for being taken for granted for decades, and started deserting Democratic party.

Democratic Leadership and Harris moved away from the winning coalition of minorities, championed by Obama, and instead cared for only one constituent-Israeli Lobby, at the expense of everyone else and every other cause-and spent our hard earned tax dollars to fund the genocide in Gaza. Democratic Leadership, Biden, and Harris brought this humiliating defeat upon themselves at the hands of most flawed and profane candidate-Donald Trump.

 Unfortunately, it is not the end of Democratic Party’s problems, as there will be future elections, both at federal and local level, and many constituents who deserted Democratic Party, may never come back.

Excerpts from article; Donald Trump is returning to the White House, and while this will not change what most critics think of him, it should compel them to take a close look in the mirror. They lost this election as much as Mr. Trump won it.

This was no ordinary contest between two candidates from rival parties: The real choice before voters was between Mr. Trump and everyone else — not only the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and her party, but also Republicans like Liz Cheney, top military officers like Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. John Kelly (also a former chief of staff), outspoken members of the intelligence community and Nobel Prize-winning economists.

Framed this way, the presidential contest became an example of what’s known in economics as “creative destruction.” His opponents certainly fear that Mr. Trump will destroy American democracy itself.

To his supporters, however, a vote for Mr. Trump meant a vote to evict a failed leadership class from power and recreate the nation’s institutions under a new set of standards that would better serve American citizens.

Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. The names themselves are symbolic: In 2016 Mr. Trump ran against a Bush in the Republican primaries and a Clinton in the general election. This time, in a looser sense, he beat a coalition that included Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Full Article

An aerial view of the Great Pyramid of Giza (bottom), built by the pharaoh Khufu, showing its proximity to the Grand Egyptian Museum site (top). Credit: Amir Makar/AFP Via Getty

Egypt is building a $1-billion mega-museum. Will it bring Egyptology home?

Fra Angelico, The bust of a cleric, c. 1447-50 (Photo: Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust)

Why bother looking at drawings when paintings are so much bigger, more colourful, and, well, finished? If you’re on the side of the sceptics, a new exhibition at the King’s Gallery is your tonic, guaranteed to persuade you that drawings are so much more than workings-out that have escaped the wastepaper basket. With around 160 works on paper by more than 80 artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and the Carracci brothers, as well as less familiar names, this exhibition of works from the Royal Collection is the most expansive survey of Renaissance drawings to have been mounted in the UK.

Drawing the Italian Renaissance review: This will delight Da Vinci and Michelangelo fans

Rosario de Velasco

Edited by Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber. 304 pp. incl. 240 col. ills. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2024), £45. ISBN 978–0–87633–304–4.

For art historians interested in understanding the contributions of women artists to twentieth-century art, this is a most welcome publication. It accompanies a travelling exhibition dedicated to the work of the Spanish artist Rosario de Velasco (1904–91), which opened at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.[1] Curated by Toya Viudes de Velasco, the artist’s great-niece, and Miguel Lusarreta, it follows the museum’s retrospective of the realist painter Isabel Quintanilla (1938–2017) and is part of wider efforts in museology to recover forgotten women artists.[2] Sometimes such ‘rescue’ missions tend towards overblown and superficial narratives of female artistheroes. Fortunately this is not the case with Rosario de Velasco. 

The Burlington Magazine

Museum shows can be death for street art. Osgemeos look alive and well.

Sebastian Smee | Yahoo | 1st November 2024

Apart from rare examples like Keith Haring, graffiti artists just don’t get art world attention. Brazilian duo Osgemeos seem another exception to this rule. Their art comes out of 1980’s hip hop and comprises intricate drawings, paintings and sculptures. So, what allows them to straddle the street art / fine art divide? Their art is original but also “twee and repetitive”, prone to nostalgia for 1980’s-style graffiti. This writer found Osgemeos’ appeal came from elsewhere: “discernment is not the point: exuberance is.

posted by f.sheikh