Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. May 2, 2024 | |
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"The campus is coming for Joe Biden," The Economist declared recently, as American college students ramped up their protests of US support for Israel amid its post-Oct. 7 war against Hamas. Asking what all this could mean for the US presidential election, commentators point to a historical parallel: 1968, when the Democratic convention in Chicago—where Democrats will gather again this year—featured a televised police crackdown on anti-Vietnam War protesters. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey would lose to Richard Nixon. The Economist quotes former leftist activist Bill Ayers as calling the parallel "unavoidable … Humphrey, the great liberal from the Midwest, tried way too late to extract himself from being a cheerleader for [the] Vietnam [War]."
Some point to a fracture in the Democratic coalition; others, to how the right can benefit from the disruption and chaos these left-leaning demonstrations have entailed. "Most media retrospectives of the 1960s celebrate the marchers, the protests, the peace signs along with the compulsory Buffalo Springfield lyrics," Jeff Greenfield writes for Politico Magazine. "The reality is those upheavals were an enormous in-kind contribution to the political fortunes of the right. And if history comes even close to repeating itself, then the latest episode will redound to [former President] Donald Trump's benefit." At The Atlantic, Charles Sykes writes: "Like Nixon and [segregationist Alabama governor George] Wallace before him, Trump (and the congressional GOP) will seize on the protests' methodology and rhetoric—this time to further polarize an already deeply polarized electorate."
Humphrey tried to split the difference between the wings of his party and had refused to turn on the left-leaning anti-war activists, James Traub writes in a Wall Street Journal essay. "This is a painfully familiar dilemma for President Biden, another moderate liberal in an age of extremism. … He, too, is blamed for an unpopular war, yet, like Humphrey, is reluctant to make a sharp break both as a matter of personal conviction and as a political calculation, since so many Americans who are not young and not liberal actually support the war. … [T]he lesson of 1968 is that while the fireworks are on the left, the votes are on the right. … [Biden] must halt the losses he is suffering among working-class voters, very much including Blacks and Hispanics, who recoil at much of the progressive agenda." |
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How US Guns Fuel Mexican Narco-Violence |
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After Passage, UK's Rwanda Law Remains Controversial |
After Britain's Parliament last month passed a controversial plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda, James Heale writes for The Spectator that comments by Ireland's deputy prime minister—who said the policy is steering newly UK-wary migrants toward Ireland—"have been seized upon in London as proof that the scheme is working." More broadly, Heale writes, the policy is allowing London to have harder conversations with EU countries about returning migrants to places they've passed through.
Needless to say, the policy has its vehement critics. In a New York Times guest opinion essay, Daniel Trilling calls it a promise of "cartoonish cruelty" to would-be migrants. Many Brits support the law, Trilling writes, but many also don't believe anyone will really be sent to Rwanda. At the European Council on Foreign Relations, Mireia Faro Sarrats and Tarek Megerisi write: "The Rwanda bill is, after all, just an extreme version of the failing externalisation policies which already dominate European migration policy. Externalisation policies aim to push border management onto a third country, thereby stopping and processing migrants before they cross into Europe. Over the past decade, Europeans have desperately and enthusiastically engaged in such deals with almost every southern neighbourhood country." |
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Brittney Griner on Her Imprisonment |
At The New York Times Magazine, J Wortham interviews WNBA star Brittney Griner about her high-profile detention in Russia, writing: "On May 7, Griner will publish her memoir 'Coming Home,' written with Michelle Burford, documenting her harrowing ordeal in Russia and her return home. The book is brutal, rendering in excruciating detail the conditions of her imprisonment and the fear and desperation that consumed her daily. Griner has always relied on writing for her sanity, starting in middle school, when she endured bullying for her height and androgynous appearance, and this memoir reveals someone deeply familiar with her interiority—she's vulnerable and raw but has also had enough therapy to use humor to process tragedy. In Russia, she journaled in the margins of her Bible and a Sudoku book, but the details are also seared in her mind. 'I will never forget any of it,' she told me, enunciating each word to make her point." |
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