Author: Andrew Sullivan

It was as recently as the 1970s:

Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Eye-opening.

Reihan entertains the idea:

There is a longstanding view, rooted in the rise of the centralized fiscal state in early modern Europe and, more recently, in the rise to affluence and power of states like South Korea, that states often adopt growth-enhancing policies when they’ve run out of other options, e.g., when they face a formidable military threat and find themselves unable to extract aid, or enough aid, from allied states, thus forcing them to rely on internal resources. (Nicholas Eubank’s work on Somaliland offers a distillation of some of this literature.) Yet when states have an easily-accessible resource at their disposal, like point-source natural resources (oil and gas) or government-to-government transfers, they don’t necessarily have to adopt growth-enhancing policies, as political elites can take the easy root of just turning on the spigot and skimming off their cut.

Dalibor Rohac, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, has thought deeply about this question, and when I asked him to write something for The Agenda on the subject, he kindly agreed to do so. If Dalibor is right, the European Union hasn’t just failed to prevent the deterioration of liberal-democratic norms in central and eastern Europe. It has exacerbated the problem. Dalibor calls this “the curse of European structural funds,” and I think he makes a rock-solid case.

The heart of Rohac’s argument:

The inflow of EU funds into countries with weak institutions does not mean just wasteful spending but also breeds corruption. The impact may be hard to quantify but is very visible. Before joining the EU, Eastern European countries had made significant progress in reducing cronyism and corruption – mainly because of the numerous reforms they had to adopt in order to qualify for EU membership in the first place. After the accession, not only did the progress come to a halt but some measures of corruption actually deteriorated.

Nicole Hemmer looks back at three political paperbacks released in the spring of 1964 that sold an astonishing 16 million copies between them in just six months – a publishing phenomenon she calls the “leading edge of conservative media’s first presidential campaign”:

Appearing in rapid succession, the books startled observers with their dark and conspiratorial interpretation of American history. In None Dare Call It Treason, John Stormer spun a tale of internal subversion and weak-willed foreign policy that marked “America’s retreat from victory” in the Cold War. “Every communist country in the world literally has a ‘Made in the USA’ stamp on it,” he wrote. Phyllis Schlafly, author of A Choice Not an Echo, accused “a few secret kingmakers” in the Republican Party of conspiring to keep conservatives out of power. J. Evetts Haley’s A Texan Looks at Lyndon served up 200 pages of greased palms, stolen elections, and suspicious deaths to argue that President Johnson was better suited to the penitentiary than the presidency.

Haley’s claims rivaled the darkest and most bizarre Clinton conspiracies.

The author, a Texas cowman, called Johnson an “inordinately vain, egotistical, ambitious extrovert” and claimed Lady Bird Johnson mirrored “Lady Macbeth’s consuming ambition for the growth of her husband’s power.” Of the Kennedy assassination he wrote, “What a strange coincidence.”

These “hatchets with soft cover sheaths,” as the Chicago Tribune characterized them, owed their success to the conservative movement’s innate populism and its institutional architecture. Conservatives, like most populists, harbored deep suspicions of institutions not under their control, particularly the media and the Republican Party. If the newsmen of the Washington Post and the grandees of the GOP were left to shape the campaign narrative, the right believed, Goldwater’s campaign would be over before it began. So conservatives used their own media to craft an alternative campaign unmediated by outside institutions.

Dara Lind examines it:

When the Chinese government started the current wave of panda loans, [researcher Kathleen] Buckingham and her coauthors discovered a pattern: pandas were sent to trade partners shortly after major trade agreements were signed, as a way of expressing a desire to build a long-term trade relationship. …

The choice of which zoos get pandas within a country is important, too.

The pandas loaned to the United Kingdom, for example, don’t live in the London Zoo, which would be the logical place for them — they were sent to the Edinburgh Zoo, as an acknowledgment of $4 billion in trade deals for exporting Scottish salmon and Land Rovers to China.

But China also uses panda loans (as well as the trade deals themselves) to exert political pressure on countries. China turned to Scotland for its salmon imports, for example, as a replacement for longtime salmon supplier Norway. After the Nobel Peace Prize committee gave the award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, China took its salmon money somewhere else. Sometimes economics and politics intersect: the panda loan China and Denmark agreed to just last month could be seen as an expression of Chinese interest in Greenland’s natural resources, or as a reward for Denmark walking back its support of Tibetan independence five years ago.

(Photo: Picture taken on July 5, 2000 shows Bao Bao, the oldest captive male panda in the world, in his enclosure at the Berlin zoo. A gift from China to former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Bao Bao died at the age of 34 on August 22, 2012. By Stephanie Pilick/AFP/Getty Images)

Anna Nemtsova profiles the female militants taking part on both sides of the civil conflict:

Women build barricades, pour gas for Molotov cocktails, or throw bricks at policemen — sometimes with more passion and anger than the men. On the Maidan, some of them joined Unit 39, a largely female group within the demonstrators’ Self-Defense Forces, where their tasks included persuading members of Berkut, the paramilitary police, to defect. Last month, activist Irma Krat, one of the leaders of the Maidan’s female militia forces, was detained by rebels in Sloviansk. The interrogators have accused her of torturing anti-Maidan activists and killing a Berkut officer.

But the pro-Ukrainian contingent certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on women militants. Since late April, leaders of the separatist movement have been calling on both men and women to mobilize and prepare for a real war against Kiev. Last weekend, a pro-Russian website issued a video that showed four masked women warriors from Lugansk declaring “a war against the junta,” as pro-Russian forces refer to the interim government in Kiev. In the video, women dressed in camouflage with Kalashnikov rifles slung across their chests introduce themselves as female fighters in the Russian Orthodox Army: “We took up weapons because we’re fed up,” one of the women says.

It’s not just young women, either. Last week, Julia Ioffe took a look at the role grandmothers (baby, plural of baba) were playing in separatist movements in eastern Ukraine:

Baby were reportedly deployed in April outside Slovyansk, where the Ukrainian government’s troops, in a massive embarrassment to the provisional government in Kiev, surrendered their tracked and armored personnel carriers, as well as their assault rifles, to the rebels.

How did it happen?

The machinery rolls in, and a battalion of grannies surround it, hectoring and jeering at the young men in Ukrainian uniform, shaming them for coming to kill them. The Ukrainian soldiers were not going to shoot or plow through unarmed babushki, so they sat there and waited while the grannies hooted and hollered. But before the soldiers knew it, their men arrived, with guns, and the game was lost.

Just last week, Russian state media reported that, outside Slavyansk, Ukrainian troops were again turned back by the granny shock troops. When the Dniepropetrovsk unit had stopped outside town, it was surrounded by baby, cooing at the young soldiers. Then they fed them cakes packed with sedatives, and when the soldiers fell asleep the separatists came and captured their weaponry.