How the Middle East Sees a Democratic Win

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1825- November- 06/11/2020

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Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

www.majalla.com/eng As the world watch the US presidential elections closely, it is not a surprise that the sharp in-ternal divisions in America are also reflected in sharp divisions within the Middle East. It seems – according to many reports and analysis in both Washington and the Middle East – that Iran and its allies are hoping for a Biden victory, mainly to get rid of the sanctions and the repercus-sions of the Trump maximum pressure campaign on the Iranian regime, which have resulted in dire economic and political crises for the regime and its regional proxies. In this week’s cover story, Hanin argues that a Biden presidency may not dramatically alter America’s position on Iran.

Though America’s Presidential election still hangs in the balance, to be determined by a rela-tive handful of votes across in a few swing states, Joseph Braude writes that veteran observers can draw a few conclusions with certainty.

First, the Republican party has proven far more resil-ient than analysts assumed. Second, public opinion polling, at least with respect to presidential candidates, has taken a further blow to its credibility.

Ever since the UAE and Israel signed on September 15, 2020, the normalization agreement be-tween the two countries, a wave of interest of new economic horizons have emerged in the region, as previously untapped markets became open for business. Last week, former Labor Knesset member Erel Margalit, chair of Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) capital fund and one of the chief architects of Israel’s startup nation status, led a delegation of 14 CEOs and other lead-ing business people to Dubai where they held meetings with senior officials and innovation counterparts to build cooperation between the two nations’ business sectors. In an interview with Majalla, Margalit, who is one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, having backed more than 150 high-tech start-ups, discussed how the signing of the Abraham Accords will facilitate the two economic powerhouses to open their economies and grow entrepreneurship and techno-logical innovation, and in turn, address the region’s most pressing economic and social chal-lenges.

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Editor-in-Chief

Ghassan Charbel Editorial secretary Mostafa El-Dessouki HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Ltd 10th Floor Building 7 Chiswick Business Park 566 Chiswick High Road London W4 5YG Tel : +44 207 831 8181 Fax: +44 207 831 2310

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1825- November- 06/11/2020

24 America’s Pandemic Response Hangs in

the Balance

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France’s President Stands on Principle, But Stumbles in Practice

20 Americans Want to Engage the World

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Top Israeli Venture Capitalist Erel Margalit to Majalla: Technological Cooperation is the Gateway to Peace and Prosperity in the UAE, Israel and the Region 3

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The Long Road to Suffrage

56 Stuck at Home?

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State Secretary to the Minister of National Education and Sport, in charge of Youth and Engagement Sarah El Hairy (R) greets French gendarmes as she arrives for a tribute to French teacher Samuel Paty at the Honore d’Estienne d’Orves High School in Carquefou on October 02, 2020. AFP 5

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People visiting the newly re-opened Royal Chariots Museum at Bulaq district in Cairo, Egypt, 01 November 2020. The restoration project of the Royal Chariots Museum, which was first established during the reign of Khedive Ismail, was first launched on 2001, a few years afterwards it stopped completely then the restoration project was re-launched on 2017, and the museum was re-opened on 31 October 2020. EPA 6

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eekly news

Attack on Kabul University by Isis Gunmen Leaves 22 Dead At least 22 people were killed and 22 wounded after Islamic State-affiliated gunmen stormed Kabul University as it was hosting a book fair attended by Iran’s ambassador to Afghanistan, taking hostages and fighting gun battles with security forces for more than five hours.

The Afghan government has declared Tuesday a national day of mourning following the attack. Three attackers shot at fleeing students and gunned down others in their classrooms in what was the second assault on an educational facility in the country in recent weeks. The gunmen were shot dead by Afghan security forces, authorities said. On Monday evening, Isis took responsibility for the attack, claiming it had

ple in a rampage in Vienna on Monday was the only gunman, but Austria fumbled intelligence on him, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said on Wednesday. The gunman, who was shot dead by police within minutes of opening fire, was a 20-year-old with dual Austrian and North Macedonian citizenship. Born and raised in Vienna, he had already been convicted of trying to reach Syria to join ISIS and had spent time in jail. Austria arrested 14 people aged 18 to 28 on Tuesday in connection with the attack and is investigating them on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist organisation, he said. But it would also have to investigate its own actions, he added.

In July, neighbouring Slovakia’s intelligence service had handed over information suggesting targeted a “graduation gathering for judges and investigators of the apostate Afghan government”. It named two men as responsible. The attack began with an explosion at the gates of the university just after 11am on Monday that sent hundreds of students fleeing but left many others trapped inside. Photos shared by a senior government official showed students lying dead in classrooms, some next to their books. One student appeared to have been shot as they were climbing out of a window.

Vienna Gunman Kills 4 in Rampage Claimed by ISIS Large quantities of mobile phone footage have confirmed that the jihadist who killed four peo-

the attacker had tried and failed to buy ammunition there, Nehammer and a top ministry official, Director General for Public Security Franz Ruf, said.“In the next steps evidently something went wrong here with communications,” said Nehammer, who called for the formation of an independent commission to examine the errors made.

Denmark Announces Cull of 15 Million Mink Over Covid Mutation Fears The world’s largest mink producer, Denmark, says it plans to cull more than 15 million of the animals, due to fears that a Covid-19 mutation moving from mink to humans could jeopardise future vaccines. At a press conference on Wednesday, the Danish prime minister, Mette

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the TPLF of attacking a military camp in the region and attempting to loot military assets. “Our defence forces … have been ordered to carry out their mission to save the country,” he said.

“The final point of the red line has been crossed.

Force is being used as the last measure to save the people and the country.” Addressing the nation on TV, the prime minister announced that “several martyrs” had died in the attack in Mekele, the northern Tigray region’s capital, and Dansha town. The government declared a sixmonth state of emergency in the Tigray region.

Frederiksen, said 12 people are already infected with the mutated virus and that the mink are now considered a public health risk. “The mutated virus in mink may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine,” Frederiksen said.

She said the army, police, and national emergency service would be mobilised to help farms with the mink cull, which will eradicate the entire Danish herd. The authorities and breeders have already been culling the animals over the past few weeks in a bid to contain the spread of Covid-19.

Reuters reported that Denmark’s health minister said about half of 783 infected people in northern Denmark, home to a large number of mink breeders, had been found to have infections stemming from the farms.

In COVID Clampdown, China Bars Travellers from Britain, France, India China has barred non-Chinese travellers from Britain, France, Belgium, the Philippines and India, imposing some of the most stringent entry curbs of any country as coronavirus cases surge around the world. The restrictions, which cover those with valid visas and residence permits and take effect in conjunction with a more restrictive testing regime for arrivals from several other countries, drew a frosty response from Britain. “We are concerned by the abruptness of the announcement and the blanket ban on entry, and await further clarification on when it will be lifted,” said the British Chamber of Commerce in China as the blanket bans were announced by the five countries’ Chinese

embassies. England started a month-long lockdown on Thursday. Britain’s virus death toll is the highest in Europe, and it is grappling with more than 20,000 new cases a day. Belgium has Europe’s highest per capita number of new confirmed cases, while France and India are among the top five countries in the world with the most infections.

Fighting Reported in Ethiopia After PM Responds to ‘Attack’ by Regional Ruling Party Fighting has been reported in northern Ethiopia after the country’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, ordered a military response to an “attack” by the ruling party of the restive Tigray region on a camp housing federal troops. Analysts and diplomats have been warning for weeks that a standoff between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) could plunge Ethiopia into a bitter and bloody civil conflict. On Wednesday, Abiy accused the

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Counting Drags on in Cliffhanger U.S. Election As the country held its breath three days after Tuesday’s Election Day, Georgia and Pennsylvania officials expressed optimism they would finish counting on Friday, while Arizona and Nevada were still expected to take days to finalize their vote totals. Biden had a 253 to 214 lead in the state-by-state Electoral College vote that determines the winner, according to most major television networks, and was inching toward securing the 270 votes needed to win the state-by-state Electoral College in four undecided swing states. Biden, 77, would become the next president by winning Pennsylvania, or by winning two out of the trio of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Trump’s likeliest path appeared narrower - he needed to hang onto both Pennsylvania and Georgia and also to overtake Biden in either Nevada or Arizona. In Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral votes, Biden cut Trump’s lead to just over 18,000 by the early hours of Friday, while his deficit in Georgia, which has 16 electoral votes, shrunk to about 450. Those numbers were expected to continue to move in Biden’s favor, with many of the outstanding ballots from areas that typically vote Democratic, including the cities of Philadelphia and Atlanta. Trump, 74, has sought to portray as fraudulent the slow counting of mail-in ballots, which surged in popularity due to fears of exposure to the coronavirus through in-person voting. As counts from those ballots have been tallied, they have eroded the initial strong leads the president had in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.

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How the Middle East Sees a Democratic Win A Biden Presidency May Not Dramatically Alter America’s Position on Iran 10

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by Hanin Ghaddar As the world watch the US presidential elections closely, it is not a surprise that the sharp internal divisions in America are also reflected in sharp divisions within the Middle East. It seems – according to many reports and analysis in both Washington and the Middle East – that Iran and its allies are hoping for a Biden victory, mainly to get rid of the sanctions and the repercussions of the Trump maximum pressure campaign on the Iranian regime, which have resulted in dire economic and political crises for the regime and its regional proxies.

On the other hand, many of those in the other camp – that is the anti-Iranian regime camp – find themselves worried about a Democratic administration, mainly because the last one (Obama’s administration) didn’t really take their interests and concerns into consideration. Those who abide by this logic fear that a Biden administration is only going to be a third Obama administration, especially that Biden was Obama’s Vice President (2017-2009).

Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden arrives during an event at Iowa Central Community College on January 2020 ,21 in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

(Getty)

These fears increased as Biden’s campaign didn’t really address a clear strategy regarding the Middle East, beyond reassuring the Americans that he will go back to another nuclear deal with Iran. There are worries that Biden will re-engage with Iran, and with political Islam in general, allowing certain factions to be part of the political process, while thwarting the results and successes of the maximum pressure campaign applied by Trump’s administration in the past few years.

The main concerns is that how would all this reflect on the region, and on the very critical balance that Iran and others are trying to thwart. Is Biden going to empower Iran? Will he remove sanctions and help the Iranian regime recover from its financial crisis?

How will all this affect Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in the region? How will Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon look like? Will the Muslim Brothers thrive under a Biden administration? All these are questions that many in the region are asking, and they deserve some answers.

The answers should come from the democrats, mainly the Biden campaign or administration.

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There are worries that Biden will re-engage with Iran, and with political Islam in general, allowing certain factions to be part of the political process, while thwarting the results and successes of the maximum pressure campaign applied by Trump’s administration in the past few years.

However, there are some signs that might soothe some of these fears and concerns, especially when it comes to the differences between Biden and Obama, their campaign, and the different circumstances that surround their policies and priorities.

First, Joe Biden is not Barrack Obama. It is true that he was his VP for many years and responsible for much of his policies, but Biden – as President of the US – sees the world nowadays differently, mainly because circumstances and priorities have shifted, but also because Biden’s outlook to the region has been different.

For example, Obama’s relation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been clearly full of tension and antagonism, and Obama’s outlook towards Israel in general was very different from other Democratic presidents and officials. However, Biden has been very clear on this issue. He considers Israel’s security as one of his priorities and many in Israel are reassured about a Biden administration policy on Israel.

Before Trump – that is twenty years ago - Biden had acknowledged Jerusalem as a capital of Israel, supported a 1995 bill by congress to move the US embassy to Jerusalem in four years, and he said repeatedly during his presidential campaign that he will not return the embassy to Tel Aviv. He will only reopen a consulate in East Jerusalem in order to reconnect with Palestinian leadership. This has

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reassured many Israeli military and political officials.

On Iran, despite the fact that Biden stated many times that he will go back to a nuclear deal with Iran, the circumstances have changed since 2015.

First, Obama’s main legacy and priority when it came to foreign policy was the Iran deal. He wanted to leave his presidency with an achievement that the world can see and associate with him, and he had made many compromises in the region, and alienated many allies, in order to reach this deal. Biden – on the other hand – will probably have different priorities.

Before Iran, Biden wants to fight Covid19- in the US, recover the economy, while he focuses on China and Russia as his foreign policy priorities. In addition, he wants to restore his the US relations with Europe.

That would make the Iran deal less of a priority, and he will not immediately move to negotiations with Iran, or even lifting sanctions. This is going to take time. In an opinion piece he wrote to the CNN in September, Biden said that he “will continue to push back against Iran›s destabilizing activities, which threaten our friends and partners in the region. Drawing on the record-setting US-Israel security assistance agreement signed when I was Vice President, America will also work closely with Israel to ensure it can defend itself against Iran and its proxies. We will continue to use targeted sanctions against Iran›s human rights abuses, its support for « terrorism and ballistic missile program.”

As for political Islam in general, and the possibility of reengaging Islamic parties in the political process,

A Biden administration will have to play it right, and not give in too easily just for the sake of proving that his administration is the opposite of Trump’s administration

it is important to note that things have also changed on this level. European countries – last but probably not least France – have suffered greatly from political Islam in the last four years. If Biden really wants to restore the US relations with Europe, he will need to consider this factor and maybe prioritize Europe’s concerns over a certain trend within the Democratic Party that encourages a reengagement with political Islam.

Second, Biden will not be in a hurry as Obama was when he negotiated and signed the deal with the Iranian regime. As this was his priority and legacy, Obama was in a rush and was forced to make compromises as the Iranian regime played on the factor of time, which Obama didn’t have, as he was in his second term. On the other hand, the Iranian regime was not in a hurry as its economy and military might looked much better

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U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden (2nd L) arrives at a meeting with Senate Foreign Relations Committee members as he is welcomed by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) (L) July 2015 ,16 at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. (Getty)

than today. They didn’t feel that they had to rush into compromises. They were able to apply their strategic patience cunningly and unwearyingly.

Biden – on the other hand – is just starting his first term, with so much time on his hand to think and strategize. Not only is an Iran deal not going to be his legacy, he has time to make it right, without alienating the US allies in the Middle East. However, the Iranian regime and its regional proxies are in real hurry this time. The financial crisis that has recently hit them is unprecedented, and has affected their military and political operations in many countries in the region. Even their favorite child – Hezbollah – had to shift its budget repeatedly and stop most of its social services in Lebanon and Syria.

Accordingly, it is expected that Iran will not be able to apply its strategic patience and will have to make the

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compromises this time. But a Biden administration will have to play it right, and not give in too easily just for the sake of proving that his administration is the opposite of Trump’s administration. On the contrary, if Biden wins, he should build on the achievements of Trump’s maximum pressure campaign and use them to get the Iranian regime to make compromises.

This might lead to a deal that could reflect better on the region than the one made by the Obama administration, mainly on Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and would actually ease tensions rather than fuel divisions.

Hanin Ghaddar is the Friedmann Fellow at The Washington Institute’s Geduld Program on Arab Politics, where she focuses on Shia politics throughout the Levant.

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Another Blow to Pollsters After Trump Defies Expectations

The Republican Party Earns Six Million More Votes Than in 2016, Proving Far More Resilient Than Analysts Assumed

by Joseph Braude Though America’s Presidential election still hangs in the balance, to be determined by a relative handful

of votes across Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other swing states, veteran observers can draw a few conclusions with certainty. First, the Republican party has proven far more resilient than

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analysts assumed. Second, public opinion polling, at least with respect to presidential candidates, has taken a further blow to its credibility. Despite fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and a low approval rating, President Trump appears to have earned almost six million more votes than in 2016.

Meanwhile, far from correcting for their errors in 2016, the accuracy of several major polling firms deteriorated further.

REPUBLICAN TURNOUT DEFIES EXPECTATIONS Although the final result remains to be tallied and we cannot say with certainty whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be certified as President, it is clear that President Trump and the Republican party far exceeded expectations. Despite an ongoing pandemic which has led to a 33 per cent drop in GDP, and a presidential approval rating that averaged 40 percent — “the lowest in modern American history” — President Trump improved on his 2016 performance by nearly six million aggregate votes.

Supporters listen as President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Kenosha Regional Airport on November 2020 ,02 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Getty)

Of particular note, President Trump’s performance improved markedly with racial and ethnic minorities.

Despite consistent criticism for his handling of race relations, Trump appears to have substantially increased his vote-share among Hispanic Americans, winning crucial Hispanic-majority districts that voted for Clinton in 2016 and earning nearly 18 percent of the male African-American vote. His support in the Muslim-American and LGBT communities rose as well, from 2016, to 28 percent and 35 percent respectively.

The trend continues down-ballot, with respect to Republican Senate candidates. Around election day, renowned statistician Nate Silver assessed that Democrats had a 75 percent probability of taking control of the Senate. He gave Democrats a 68 percent chance of winning GOP-held seats in North Carolina, a 63 percent chance in Georgia, and a 59 percent chance in Maine. As of this writing, the Republican senators in all those states appear to have defeated their Democratic challengers. While Democrats were projected to gain at least 15 seats in the House, so far they have lost a net of 10. In state legislatures and gubernatorial races across the U.S., the projected

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Despite consistent criticism for his handling of race relations, Trump appears to have substantially increased his vote-share among racial and ethnic minorities.

Democratic realignment failed to materialize, leaving the Republican party dominant in wide swaths of the country.

THE BIGGEST LOSER: POLLS While a final winner has yet to be determined, it is already clear that both state and national polls are the most decisive loser. Throughout 2020, Joe Biden held an average lead in national polling over Donald Trump of over sevent points. And yet, as of this writing, his lead over Donald Trump in the popular vote has been reduced to a mere 2 points.

While pollsters in 2016 were careful to explain that, despite failing to detect Donald Trump’s lead in certain critical swing states, national pollsters correctly predicted Hillary Clinton’s two-point lead in the national popular vote, with Tuesday’s -5point miss, their 2020 performance appears considerably worse.

On the state level, matters are even more lopsided.

In almost every swing state, President Trump and the GOP outperformed their polls by large margins.

In Ohio, Trump exceeded his Real Clear Politics average by seven points. In Wisconsin and Iowa, he beat the average by six points. And in the must-win states of Texas and Florida, he outdid his polls by 5 points.

Far from correcting for their mistakes in 2016 — largely attributed to pollsters’ failure to anticipate the surge in turnout by college-educated white voters and weight their samples accordingly — these flaws in polling appear to have deepened still further. As one analyst put it, “If polling doesn’t work, then we are flying blind.”

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Will Trump Take the Election to the Supreme Court?

Trump Lays the Groundwork for Contesting Battleground States as he Slips Behind Biden Majalla - London As his hope of winning re-election at the polls fades, Donald Trump has been engaged in a flurry of legal activity to try to improve his chances and

cast doubt on the election results, laying ground for contesting the outcome in battleground states as he slipped behind Democrat Joe Biden in the hunt for the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

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TRUMP CLAIMS VICTORY AS LAWSUITS BREW Breaking -36hour silence during election count, Trump incorrectly declared victory based on incomplete vote totals across the rust belt and in Georgia in wee hours on Wednesday morning.

“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” the president said, as states continued counting hundreds of thousands of legally cast votes — both mail-in and Election Day ballots.”

US President Donald Trump leaves after speaking during a Make America Great Again rally at MiamiOpa Locka Executive Airport in Opa Locka, Florida on November ,2 2020. (Getty)

Later the same day, the Trump campaign filed lawsuits to contest counting in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. The new filings demand better access for campaign observers to locations where ballots are being processed and counted, and absentee ballot concerns, the campaign said.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, the campaign demanded access to voting sites to count each ballot; where both campaigns have poll watchers on site. Additionally, on Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign asked the Supreme Court to let it join an appeal by the Pennsylvania GOP where it is seeking to invalidate mail-in votes in Pennsylvania that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive by the end of Friday. Fox News also reported that the Trump campaign will also sue in Nevada over what it claims is voter fraud committed by «tens of thousands» people who do not live in the state.

The President then made a dramatic interjection Thursday morning, while ballots continued to be tallied in five swing states as Joe Biden pulled ahead of him in the race for the White House.

He followed that up with a second angry tweet, writing: «ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!» Twitter quickly flagged the missive as misleading, with different US states having different rules on accepting mail-in ballots that have a post mark for election day.

Trumps actions reveal an emerging legal strategy that the president had signalled for weeks.

He has been waging a months-long campaign

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Such a case only would demand the attention of the nation›s highest court should the vote in Pennsylvania have the potential to determine the outcome in the Electoral College. against mail-in voting in November by tweeting and speaking critically about the practice, which has been encouraged by more states to keep voters safe amid the coronavirus pandemic.

He has also on multiple occasions declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election. «We›re going to have to see what happens,» Trump said during the campaign.

«You know that I›ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.» Experts say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud.

Despite Trump’s warnings, states were contending with an avalanche of mail ballots driven by fears of voting in person during a pandemic. At least 103 million people voted early, either by mail or in-person, representing %74 of the total votes cast in the 2016 presidential election. Mail ballots normally take more time to verify and count. This year, because of the large numbers of mail ballots and a close race, results took longer.

TAKING THE ELECTIONS TO COURT Donald Trump vowed to take the 2020 US presidential election to the Supreme Court even as votes are still being counted and the overall result remains unclear. “We want the law to be used in a proper manner, so we’ll be going to the US supreme court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. OK? It’s a very sad moment,” Trump said.

“We will win this and as far as I’m concerned we already have won it,” he added.

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Trump’s comments evoked a reprise of the 2000 presidential election when a recount dispute in Florida’s vote between George W Bush and Al Gore was settled on 12 December that year.

But there are important differences from 2000 and they already were on display. In 2000, Republican-controlled Florida was the critical state and Bush clung to a small lead. Democrat Al Gore asked for a recount and the Supreme Court stopped it.

Following Trump’s threat to challenge the election result, the Biden campaign said they were prepared to fight any attempt to prevent votes from being fully counted. “If the president makes good on his threat to go to court to try to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

The president appears to be pinning hopes that a conservative majority on the supreme court, including his recent appointment Amy Coney Barrett, will rule in his favour. The role of the attorney general, William Barr, who has been loyal to Trump, could also be critical.

But legal experts have cast doubt on whether Trump could successfully prevent votes from being counted after election day, as there are legitimate arguments for the Supreme Court to decide that the November 6 deadline stays in place as that is what voters relied upon in choosing to vote by mail and as well as it being a standard

Donald Trump vowed to take the 2020 US presidential election to the Supreme Court even as votes are still being counted and the overall result remains unclear

feature of presidential elections. Moreover, the Supreme Court could decide to leave state issues to state courts. It’s also important to note that the Trump campaign cannot take their case straight to the Supreme Court – a case must, in most cases, must be heard in several state or federal courts as it makes it up the winding staircase that is the US judicial system.

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Supporters of President Donald Trump argue with a counter protester (R) on November 2020 ,05 in Detroit, Michigan. Two days after the U.S. national election, states continue counting votes. (Getty)

However, there are strong arguments over the state court›s authority to overrule the state Legislature›s Election Day deadline. Three justices – Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch – wrote last week that the high court›s action leaving in place the later deadline could be revisited after the election. For now, those ballots are being segregated to allow for

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court challenges.

Either way, such a case only would demand the attention of the nation›s highest court should the vote in Pennsylvania have the potential to determine the outcome in the Electoral College and should those late-arriving ballots have the potential to swing the state, the U.S. Supreme Court might well intercede.

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Americans Want to Engage the World The Beltway and the Public Are Closer Than You Think

by Jonathan Monten, Joshua Busby, Joshua D. Kurtzer, Dina Smeltz, Jordan Tama It has become an accepted truth in recent years that the U.S. foreign policy establishment is disconnected from the broader American public. In this view, the denizens of the Washington Beltway remain committed to

an expansive U.S. role on the international stage even as average Americans increasingly want the United States to mind its own business and care for its own citizens. According to Stephen M. Walt, for example, “an out-oftouch community of foreign policy VIPs� has led U.S. foreign policy astray. Republican candidate Donald Trump exploited this supposed divide during his 2016 campaign, riding to the presidency on what was said to be a

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After four years in office, Trump has failed to appreciably deflate public support for trade, immigration, and military alliances.

Instead, the public remains largely in sync with establishment views on these core issues. ternationally oriented interest groups. Together, these foreign policy opinion leaders play a large role in foreign policy debates, shaping agendas, opinion, and, ultimately, the policy decisions of the U.S. government.

When compared with prevailing public opinion about foreign policy, the results of our survey showed little evidence of a large gap between elite and popular opinion. Large majorities of both the foreign policy elite and the public support internationalist positions on trade, immigration, and alliances such as NATO. Large majorities of both groups also subscribe to the belief that the United States should play an active global role. Curiously, elite respondents substantially underestimate public support for these positions, incorrectly imagining Americans to be more inward looking than they really are. The U.S. foreign policy establishment may be guilty of misreading the public mood, but its views are not out of step with those of most Americans.

NOT SO FAR APART A man waves a US Flag outside the New Hampshire State House on November 2019 ,13.

popular backlash against the internationalism of Washington elites.

But is the U.S. foreign policy establishment really out of touch with the American public?

To answer this question, we recently surveyed more than 800 members of the U.S.foreign policy elite, including executive branch officials, congressional staff, think tank scholars, academics, journalists, and employees of in-

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In the latest of a series of surveys of foreign policy professionals, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs partnered with the University of Texas at Austin to poll the U.S. foreign policy community in August and September on key issues such as alliances, trade, immigration, and the United States’ global role.

(Approximately one-third of our respondents reported experience in government, including

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in the State Department, Defense Department, National Security Council, intelligence community, Congress, and other service abroad.)

We then compared our results with those of the July 2020 Chicago Council Survey, a nationally representative survey of the American public that asked identical questions. We also asked elite respondents to estimate the public’s answers to these questions in order to show how the establishment perceives the rest of the country.

A consistent pattern emerged in our comparison of elite and public opinion: large majorities of both groups support internationalist policies, although elites are generally more supportive. For instance, on the question of whether the United States should play an active part in world affairs—a benchmark question asked in Chicago Council surveys since 1974—97 percent of elite respondents say yes, compared with 68 percent of the public.

On trade, 99 percent of opinion leaders and 74 percent of the public think international trade is good for the U.S. economy.

At the same time, relatively few members of both the foreign policy elite and the public favor stepping back from commitments to international partnerships and to openness. Just nine percent of foreign policy professionals

and 24 percent of the public support reducing U.S. obligations to NATO. Only three percent of elite respondents and 27 percent of the public back decreasing legal immigration to the United States.

U.S. leaders should recognize that they have more political space to advance and defend internationalist positions than they seem to realize

Contrary to the notion that the foreign policy establishment and the public are moving further apart, the gap between the two has actually narrowed during the Trump presidency.

On Trump’s signature issues of trade and immigration, for example, the public has moved closer to the prevailing elite view: public support for the claim that trade is good for the U.S.economy increased by 15 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, while public support for decreasing legal immigration declined by 12 percentage points over the same period. Trump’s rhetoric deriding U.S. allies

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The degree of inaccuracy in elite estimates of public sentiment does not substantially vary across professional groups, political parties, or respondents in and out of government, indicating that decision-makers and opinion leaders across the board share these misperceptions.

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES Why does the U.S. foreign policy elite consistently mischaracterize the public’s view of the world? One possible explanation draws on political psychology: foreign policy officials and experts view members of the public as fundamentally different from them, which leads them to accept crude stereotypes about the public. The media may also be partially to blame. News stories that highlight conflicts between average Americans and an out-oftouch elite tend to attract a great deal of attention, reinforcing a narrative of greater polarization.

has also largely failed to significantly move the needle: the percentage of the public that wanted to withdraw from or decrease the U.S. commitment to NATO rose only modestly from 21 percent to 24 percent between 2016 and 2020.

On each of these issues, foreign policy officials and experts consistently imagine the public to be far more isolationist and hostile to internationalist policies than it actually is.

Elite respondents guess that 44 percent of the public favors decreasing the U.S. commitment to NATO—the true level is only 24 percent.

Elites overestimate public support for decreasing legal immigration by 22 percentage points, while underestimating public support for international trade by 21 points and for an active U.S. role in the world by 16 points.

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Dispensing with the notion of a growing divide between the views of the public and of the foreign policy establishment could have important benefits. Officials may be more willing to embrace policies that require deeper or more costly international commitments—including on climate change and fighting pandemics—if they believe the public will support those positions. Similarly, future policymakers might be more likely to roll back the immigration and trade restrictions enacted under the Trump administration if they are less afraid of a potential public backlash.

After four years in office, Trump has failed to appreciably deflate public support for trade, immigration, and military alliances. Instead, the public remains largely in sync with establishment views on these core issues. U.S. leaders should recognize that they have more political space to advance and defend internationalist positions than they seem to realize.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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America’s Pandemic Response Hangs in the Balance Biden Also Aims for Herd Immunity, but Without Paying the Unacceptable Price of Hundreds of Thousands of American Lives

by Angela Rasmussen In the final weeks of his reelection campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump vacillated between promising that a coronavirus vaccine would soon

be widely available and claiming that the pandemic was already over. On October 27, his Office of Science Technology and Policy put out a statement that listed “ending the COVID19- pandemic” as a crowning achievement of his first term. In fact, the

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virus continues to spread unchecked throughout the United States. And now that Election Day has come and gone without a vaccine, it is clear that Trump’s real strategy for confronting the disease is to simply surrender.

The president’s effort to accelerate the development of a vaccine, Operation Warp Speed, will likely continue, but the goal of universal immunization appears to have fallen by the wayside. Key Trump advisers, including Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the president’s coronavirus task force, have reportedly embraced a de facto strategy of herd immunity—or “herd mentality,” as Trump put it during a recent town hall event—through widespread natural infection.

Atlas denies that the White House has adopted such a strategy, but it is clear from his public statements on social media and to the press that this is precisely what he has recommended. Trump, meanwhile, has promised that herd immunity is “going to happen.”

This strategy has been widely criticized by public health scientists, including myself, since it would likely result in the death or permanent disability of millions of Americans.

Individuals who enter the Trump Rally have their temperatures taken to check for COVID19-.

Trump supporters flocked in and around Eugene F. Kranz Toledo Express Airport to see president Donald Trump speak. (Getty)

Former Vice President Joe Biden has put forward a detailed, seven-point plan for tackling the pandemic that contrasts sharply with Trump’s approach. It is scientifically driven and draws on his extensive experience battling infectious disease during his eight years as vice president. In addition to providing clear and evidence-based national guidance, including a mandate for masks, Biden has pledged to invest 25$ billion in manufacturing and distributing vaccines—not just to vulnerable populations but to every American. The end goal of Biden’s plan is the same as Trump’s plan—herd immunity—but through immunization, not natural infection.

CHASING HERD IMMUNITY A population is said to have achieved herd immunity to a pathogen when enough people have become immune that the pathogen can no longer find susceptible hosts. Viral pathogens are unable to reproduce on their own and do not last indefinitely in nature. If they cannot find a host, they will eventually sputter out and be eliminated from the population.

Herd immunity to viral disease has been achieved on a national or global scale only through immunization.

The natural spread of viral diseases such as polio and smallpox has conferred immunity on smaller populations, but it wasn’t until the advent of vaccines

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Until a vaccine is available, a Biden administration would focus on minimizing transmission—through a nationwide mask mandate, improved testing and contact tracing, and efforts to protect high-risk Americans. that these diseases were eliminated from national or global populations. In less than a decade in the1960s, widespread polio vaccination decreased the overall incidence of paralytic poliomyelitis from thousands of cases per year to zero. Similarly, an intensive global vaccination campaign enabled the World Health Organization to declare smallpox eradicated in 1980.

Yet the notion that widespread natural infection might yield herd immunity to viral pathogens has endured on the fringes of the scientific and public health communities, despite the lack of historical precedent.

This idea was the implicit basis for Sweden’s relatively relaxed coronavirus response. It also undergirds the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal for reaching herd immunity put forward by the libertarian American Institute for Economic Research that has attracted the vocal support of Atlas and others in the Trump administration. The Great Barrington Declaration calls for “focused protection” of vulnerable people at high risk of severe COVID19while encouraging young, healthy people to take no precautions against exposure, resulting in widespread infection and, eventually, herd immunity.

This strategy is misguided and doomed to fail, which may be why it is conveniently light on details about how the administration might implement it.

To begin with, if vulnerable people were defined by all COVID19- risk factors, including age, male sex, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma, more than half the population would need “focused protection.” Such an effort would require enormous public investment, and it might not even leave enough young, healthy (and unprotected) people to reach the threshold for herd immunity.

In addition, these young and healthy people could

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end up suffering lasting health problems as a result of COVID19-. Although the long-term consequences of the disease are largely unknown and are an active area of research, early findings indicate they can be serious even in people with mild cases. A growing body of evidence suggests that these patients can suffer serious neurological impairment, inflammation of the heart, and acute lung injury. In other words, the young, healthy people who would enjoy the benefits of herd immunity under the Great Barrington Declaration policy may also suffer chronic, debilitating disease.

LESSONS LEARNED Biden’s plan to reach herd immunity through the tried-and-tested method of immunization would likely save hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. Until a vaccine can be widely distributed, the plan seeks to curb transmission through the clear communication of evidence-based public health guidelines—a strategy that was clearly informed by Biden’s experience battling epidemics during his tenure as vice president.

In the spring of 2009, just months after Biden and President Barack Obama took office, an influenza pandemic swept across the border from Mexico and began to spread rapidly in the United States. In an interview on NBC’s Today show that in hindsight seems remarkably prescient, Biden said he would discourage friends and family from flying, riding the subway, or spending long periods of time in confined spaces. The Obama administration immediately

A growing body of evidence suggests that these patients can suffer serious neurological impairment, inflammation of the heart, and acute lung injury.

walked these comments back, fearing that they would invite panic, and instead reassured the public that the nation’s health agencies were responding and that a vaccine was being developed. These mixed messages caused confusion that, combined with later missteps related to the timing and rollout of the vaccine, likely contributed to the spread of the H1N1 virus.

The Obama administration mounted an aggressive campaign to develop and distribute vaccines, but unexpected laboratory delays set its timeline back by months. Producing influenza vaccines typically requires growing the virus in embryonated chicken eggs. The H1N1 virus grew more slowly in eggs than expected, however, slowing the production of vaccines and delaying their distribution to the public.

Additional manufacturing setbacks delayed the process further, as did confusion about the dosing regimen. As a result, the administration delivered less than half of the 100,000 doses it had promised by

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An ambulance sits parked on the plaza outside the U.S. Capitol March 2020 ,16 in Washington, DC. After taking the weekend off, the Senate will return on Monday afternoon and will take up the Housepassed coronavirus relief bill. (Getty)

most well-laid, seemingly foolproof plans can go wrong during a public health crisis.

Biden had an opportunity to put those lessons into practice during the Ebola epidemic that ravaged West Africa between 2014 and 2016, infecting nearly 30,000 people and killing 11,000. The Obama administration installed Klain as its Ebola “czar” in October 2014, a week after Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian citizen visiting family in Dallas, became the first Ebola patient to die in the United States. Biden successfully pushed Congress to pass a 5.4$ billion emergency funding package that supported efforts to fight Ebola abroad and sped up trials of Ebola vaccines that had been stuck in preclinical testing.

This time around, there was no muddled messaging about the dangers of Ebola to the public. Both Biden and Klain relied on trusted public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Tom Frieden, then the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to communicate with the public and to let the science drive the response. Ebola never gained a foothold in the United States and was eventually contained in West Africa. In 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to one of the vaccines that was funded in part by the aid package Biden championed.

A SAFER PATH TO IMMUNITY

October, and demand for them far exceeded supply throughout the fall of 2009.

Ultimately, the 2009 H1N1 virus infected 60 million Americans and caused approximately 14,000 deaths.

Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff during the 2009 pandemic, famously remarked in 2019 that it was sheer luck that prevented H1N1 from causing mass casualties—a quip that Trump seized on during the campaign and framed as an example of Biden’s “disastrous” pandemic response. That is a false interpretation of events. Biden could not have solved the vaccine development issues that caused the delays.

But the Obama administration’s conflicting messages about preventative measures and its failure to deliver the vaccine on time and in the quantities needed did erode public confidence in the federal response. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic was a lesson in the importance of clear, evidence-based communications to bolster trust in scientific and medical experts, since even the

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Biden’s plan to tackle COVID19- emphasizes three overarching lessons from these prior public health crises: listen to science; ensure public health decisions are informed by public health professionals; and restore trust, transparency, and accountability in government. The goal is to achieve herd immunity through universal immunization. But until a vaccine is available, a Biden administration would focus on minimizing transmission—through a nationwide mask mandate, improved testing and contact tracing, and efforts to protect high-risk Americans.

This approach could not be more different from Trump’s apparent plan to reach herd immunity through negligent inaction. Given his recent comments on the campaign trail, there is little doubt that he is resigned to letting the virus spread unchecked through the American population. The Biden plan also aims for herd immunity, but without paying the unacceptable price of hundreds of thousands of American lives.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Top Israeli Venture Capitalist Erel Margalit to Majalla: Technological Cooperation is the Gateway to Peace and Prosperity in the UAE, Israel and the Region

Chair of Jerusalem Venture Partners recently led a tech delegation to Dubai to build cooperation between the two nations’ business sectors

by Yasmine El-Geressi Ever since the UAE and Israel signed on September ,15 2020, the normalization agreement between the two countries, a wave of interest of new economic horizons have emerged in the region, as previously untapped markets became open for business.

Last week, former Labor Knesset member Erel Margalit, chair of Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) capital fund and

This partnership will not only generate a lot more business, but it is also about the positive social impact our partnership can have on segments of society.

one of the chief architects of Israel’s startup nation status, led a delegation of 14 CEOs and other leading business people to Dubai where they held meetings with senior officials and innovation counterparts to build cooperation between the two nations’ business sectors.

In an interview with Majalla, Margalit, who is one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, having backed more than 150 hightech start-ups, discussed how the signing of the Abraham Accords will facilitate the two economic powerhouses to open their economies and grow entrepreneurship and technological innovation, and in turn, address the region’s most pressing economic and social challenges.

The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q - You led a first of its kind delegation of Israeli business people visiting the UAE. Could you talk to us about your visit?

Our trip to the UAE was one of the most moving visits for us as business people and Israelis that we have ever

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The whole of Israel was listening. I initiated a vital dialogue that many Israelis see as a potential gateway to other Arab countries and a heralding of hope and change for the region. which are significant initiatives for both JVP and Israel.

Countries like Egypt, which is confronting a looming water crisis that has been exasperated by the construction of the Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia, which is facing more extreme heatwaves and water shortages, need new agricultural and food tech strategies that we can work on together. We can create centers in the UAE and Israel that can cooperate with our bases in New York and Europe, creating an international leadership strategy which both our counties will be at the pinnacle of.

Q – What distinguishes the UAE within a global context, and what are some of the synergies between the UAE and Israel that make deeper economic integration compelling?

One of the things that we›ve witnessed in the UAE is not just that it is a financial center. We witnessed a small country with the reach of a major power. The UAE is accessing markets of 3 billion people in a way that Israel does not.

UAE food security minister Mariam Al Mheiri and Erel Margalit, founder of Jerusalem Venture Partners, meet in Dubai.

(Photo: Elad Gutman)

had. I brought with me 14 CEOs and 10 JVP and Margalit Startup City partners, along with a variety of reporters, all of whom were very eager to join the trip. I took great interest in the discussions I had with ministers and innovation and investment counterparts about setting up innovation hubs and other exciting initiatives between the two counties. The delegation was perhaps the first significant high-tech delegation out of Israel. The whole of Israel was listening. I initiated a vital dialogue that many Israelis see as a potential gateway to other Arab countries and a heralding of hope and change for the region.

Q – You mentioned that JVP is in talks with potential partners in the United Arab Emirates to set up an innovation hub. Could you talk to us about this initiative?

The hub will focus on various booming sectors, including artificial intelligence, FinTech, InsureTech, and Healthcare IT. Other areas of innovation are FoodTech and AgriTech,

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Israel is a haven for technology and innovation, while the UAE is one of the world›s major trading countries and certainly a leader in the region. If you marry the business leadership of Dubai and Abu Dhabi with Israel›s technology leadership, the result is a lot more business, not only within the UAE but with the region and beyond.

If we›re selling artificial intelligence systems to banks in the UAE that are making significant investments in banks in counties such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and India, the model of change that we can present together is then replicated within those countries, bringing with it much more revenue, and thus, much more good.

For example, if we are working in Dubai within the area of Healthcare IT, which allows for remote patient care, management, and engagement, we can expand into other potential markets across the region with the help of Dubai›s business leadership. This partnership will not only generate a lot more business, but it is also about the positive social impact our partnership can have on segments of society.

Q - What are some of the most promising areas of

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cooperation for mutually profitable investment relations between the Gulf and Israel?

The world needs a new beginning following the Coronavirus pandemic. COVID19- has triggered an unprecedented demand for digital health technology solutions and has brought to the fore the need for healthcare reform in major countries. There needs to be an understanding that in addition to having vast hospitals, medical care in the home and monitoring patients at the community clinics are also essential. If medical technologies can deliver the same level of care to patients nationally, even in the most remote areas of a country, then you have a breakthrough.

The pandemic also underscores the importance of FoodTech, AgriTech. The crisis lays bare some of our globalized supply chains› fundamental flaws, including our food systems, aiming a powerful spotlight on the need for food self-sufficiency. This is important because it has direct implications for a country›s or region›s ability to grow crops to independently meet its population›s dietary needs, regardless of external circumstances such as extreme heat and water shortages.

The COVID19- crisis has also escalated the risk of cyber-crime and malicious cyber-attacks of various forms. Cybersecurity today means protecting the safety of flights, hospitals and patient medical records, banks, the oil and gas industries, and the individual›s rights and privacy. Therefore, cybersecurity is another big area for international cooperation.

Q - What are some of the promising areas for cooperation between Israel and other countries in the region, such as

We understand that Saudi Arabia’s position that full-ties can only happen when peace is reached with the Palestinians, but people need bridges, and where politicians fail, entrepreneurs will build those bridges.

Bahrain, Sudan, and Egypt?

Egypt and Israel can work together on high-tech agricultural projects with the help of the UAE as it is one of the prominent investors in the country. Accords to normalize relations with Bahrain has opened doors to technology cooperation. In Morocco, we are involved in FinTech and InsureTech within the financial sector, and cooperation can also be found in agriculture. Israel has also had discussions with Tunisia as it has some of the best AI engineers, and the time has come to join forces within this field through the UAE and independently.

Sudan, which has recently signed a peace agreement, is home to some of the world›s most fertile land. If we work together with the UAE, we can create a comprehensive FoodTech strategy that increases agricultural productivity.

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We need security cooperation to protect ourselves, but we also need innovation and cooperation to move towards a brighter and more prosperous future one that is full of hope, jobs, and a better future for the younger generation. over the country. In Jerusalem, we used innovation as a mechanism to connect Arabs and Jews and religious and secular groups. If innovation can change our city, it can also change our country and build bridges to the entire region. Let the entrepreneurs and technology lead the way, and politicians and the public will follow.

Q - How important is innovation today, not only for business but for our future survival?

Innovation is not only crucial for business; it is essential for social change. Innovation, education, and community are the three pillars of economic inclusion. What I found most striking in the UAE was that the successful people were not just about making money; they were about making a positive impact. We have a phrase in Hebrew, Tikkun Olam, which means mending of the world. Many of the Arab business leaders we met have the compassion to do good for their people and their region. If we can build businesses and cooperation together, which stems from a place of justice and a desire to improve people›s lives using innovation, we will fulfill our mission.

Erel Margalit, Founder and Executive Chairman of JVP and Margalit Startup City (photo: Shahar Azran)

This strategy of adopting new technologies and innovation could transform much of the agriculture and food industry in much of Africa and the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia has unique and influential leverage in terms of the region›s trajectory, and what we want to tell the Saudis that it›s time that we cooperate. Let us work together to transform the Kingdom›s oil-reliant economy into a knowledge economy. We understand that your position that full-ties can only happen when peace is reached with the Palestinians, but people need bridges, and where politicians fail, entrepreneurs will build those bridges. Provide us with the framework to work together and turn economic and technological cooperation into goodwill in the region.

We are working with Palestinian entrepreneurs in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Rawabi, Bethlehem, Hebron, and all

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Q - What is your vision for the future following the signing of the accord between Israel and the UAE? There are many young and dynamic people across our region. We probably have more young people than any other region in the world. In the past, they called it the Fertile Crescent, but the Fertile Crescent today needs water, and the water that it needs is the water of innovation, compassion, and cooperation. Let the agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates be an opening for a new era of cooperation and strength in the face of mutual security threats from terrorist networks and Iranian aggression. We need security cooperation to protect ourselves, but we also need innovation and cooperation to move towards a brighter and more prosperous future - one that is full of hope, jobs, and a better future for the younger generation.

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France’s President Stands on Principle, But Stumbles in Practice Emmanuel Macron Confronts Islamist Violence, the Yellow Jackets, and COVID- 19

by Justin E. H. Smith France elected Emmanuel Macron president in 2016 as a symbolic barrier against the rising global tide of illiberal populism. Four years later, as the chaos fomented by U.S. President Donald Trump builds toward some sort of crescendo in the United States, domestic tensions in France threaten to define Macron’s leadership and legacy.

The coronavirus pandemic is resurgent, leading the government to institute a strict new lockdown that will continue at least until early December; the mouvement des “gilets jaunes” (“yellow vest” pro-

test movement), has been simmering since late 2018; and a crisis that began in 2015, when Islamist terrorists twice attacked Paris, never went away and has in fact returned with new intensity in recent months.

These problems require divergent responses, and only an exceptional leader could navigate all of them with success. Macron has acquitted himself most poorly in those domains in which symbolism rings hollow and where concrete solutions matter most. The terrorism crisis and certain dimensions of the pandemic, however,

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underscore the importance of symbolism, backed by principle, in the face of nihilistic attacks and unprincipled abandonment by traditional allies.

Some of Macron’s domestic concerns are comparable to those that other world leaders face: populism and COVID-19 are global in scope and similar across localities. But France’s struggle against Islamist violence is in many ways particular. Macron’s response to it enjoys broad domestic support. Yet government and media figures in other countries have criticized France, finding the country’s unwavering commitment to secularism and freedom of speech to be out of step with prevailing sensibilities throughout the world. On the question of Islamist violence, France finds itself, for the most part, on its own.

STOCHASTIC TERRORISM A terrorist attack at the Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice on Thursday, October 29, left a trio of people dead: a man and two women, all three churchgoers. The attacker beheaded one of the women, just as another killer had done to his victim less than two weeks earlier in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Following the bloodshed in Nice, less successful attacks rippled throughout the country and beyond: in Avignon, the police killed a man wielding a knife; in Lyon, another man was arrested with a makeshift bomb; in Riyadh, the French consul general was attacked with a sharp object.

A boy runs past a sign protesting French president Emmanuel Macron outside the Institute Francais Gaza ahead of protests against French president Emmanuel Macron on October 30, 2020 in Gaza City, Gaza. / Getty

The distal cause of these events can be traced to 2015. That January, Islamist militants slaughtered 12 cartoonists and staff members of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The killers sought vengeance for the paper’s publication of explicit caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. All Muslims are prohibited from rendering images of the Prophet, but until the age of instantaneous global circulation of images, the same did not generally apply to non-Muslims living in secular republics. The problem, survivors from Charlie Hebdo noted in the aftermath, was not the drawing of blasphemous cartoons but their projection out into the world on the Internet, where they circulate without context, untethered to their intended audience.

A second attack came later the same year, on November 13. The scale was much larger but the focus less defined. Suicide bombers and mass shooters struck cafés, restaurants, the exterior of a football stadium, and the Bataclan nightclub, killing 130 Parisians simply for being Parisians. To the killers, in the contextless vacuum of the Internet, where radicalization occurs, the city as a whole had come to stand symbolically for a single, low-circulation magazine published within it.

This year, the terrorists focused their wrath on a civics lesson that a teacher named Samuel Paty taught at a middle school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Paty showed his class the Charlie Hebdo caricatures, but he gave students the option of leaving the classroom instead of viewing them. “Concerned parents,” who found the course content and methods displeasing, took to Facebook,

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The persistence of the yellow vests—far more than the pandemic or terrorism—suggests a failure of leadership on Macron’s part. where they doxxed and denounced the teacher—and where the killer, 18-year-old Abdoullakh Anzorov, found them.

Macron responded to the attack by making clear that the French Republic would not formally denounce the caricatures. Nor would it be swayed from its absolute commitment to the doctrine of laïcité, which among other things seeks to prohibit the creep of religious pieties into secular institutions. In response, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a boycott of French products and said that Macron needed to have his mental health examined. The prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, chastised the French president for “encourag[ing] the display of blasphemous cartoons” and for “provok[ing] Muslims.” Ninetyfive-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, called Macron “very primitive” and said that Muslims “have the right . . . to kill millions of French people” in response to past and present injustices. That declaration was removed from Twitter and Facebook for violating terms of service.

The manner in which Muslim world leaders piled onto Macron vividly recalls the cycle of white nationalist violence in the United States in recent years. Political leaders and media personalities launder and euphemize extremist views, until inevitably, some few, impressionable people with little to lose go and shoot up a synagogue or plow a car through a protest. Call it stochastic terrorism, ordered through the public channels of the Internet rather than through hidden networks, deniable even when its true causes are as plain as day.

LE CONFINEMENT The backstory of the Nice attack may extend to 2015, but it was nonetheless hard not to think, on that day of all days, that the attacker was simply out to do a little last-minute murdering, just as all the rest of us in France were doing our last-minute shopping and socializing before the 9 pm curfew that was to inaugurate the new nationwide pandemic lockdown.

The previous evening, Macron had announced that le confinement was to last until at least December 1 but would be more flexible than the first lockdown in the spring. Some businesses would remain open, as would all schools (though not universities). Restaurants could continue to serve takeout, and even bookstores might be included on the list of essential commercial operations. But as in the spring, residents would be required to carry a dated and signed attestation each time they left their

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homes, swearing to the legitimate reasons for their excursions, and no one would be permitted to travel more than a kilometer from home, other than for the purpose of esssential work. Macron laid these terms out clearly and in a reassuring tone. He ended the announcement, as is customary, with the rallying words “Vive la République. Vive la France.”

Barely half a day later, the president made an unexpected trip to Nice, in order to express his condolences to the murder victims and to reassert France’s unwavering refusal to buckle to violence.

I have heard several people remark on the near-perfect elision of the two stories and on the difficulty of recalling, already, for which of the two Macron uttered the rallying words of the republic.

In Paris on Thursday night, bars and restaurants were still full a few minutes before nine. In my neighborhood, on the Canal Saint-Martin—where the terrorist attacks took place in November 2015—the proud and defiant culture of la terrasse was out in full force, masks down, defying both the advice of public health experts and the threats of Islamist insurgents. If some of the people out drinking on the terraces looked anxious, one could not say whether this was because some approaching stranger had breathed on them or because that same stranger appeared to be concealing a knife.

The anxiety may also have reflected a deepening awareness of difficult times ahead. Local officials predict that hospitals could reach full capacity by mid-November at the present rate of infection, forcing French doctors to make the sorts of triage decisions ordinarily limited to wartime. “If we do not put a sudden brake on the contaminations, our hospitals will be filled to the limit very quickly,” Macron announced on October 28, following the projections of his health minister, Olivier Véran. Nor is it clear that the government, much praised for the liberal economic support it extended in the spring, can continue such spending indefinitely.

Government and media figures in other countries have criticized France, finding the country’s unwavering commitment to secularism and freedom of speech to be out of step with prevailing sensibilities throughout the world.

Signs of everyday desperation are multiplying in Paris and other cities. Indeed, the recent spate of Islamist violence, which always had an element of mundane youth delinquency to it in addition to its political and religious components, may even be partly a social consequence of COVID-19.

THE OTHER BAD NEWS The confluence of two different sorts of bad news puts the Macron administration in a difficult spot and threatens to send voters toward extreme alternatives in the next election, in 2022. The gilets jaunes movement, which burst onto the scene two years ago to protest new fuel taxes, continues to simmer. The yellow vests are in their essence an antiausterity movement, with their greatest centers of strength in small, provincial cities. They are ideologically nebulous and difficult to place on a left-right spectrum.

But in a time of worsening crisis, such as the combination of pandemic and terrorism, a xenophobic politician, such as Marine Le Pen or whoever succeeds her as leader of the Rassemblement National (National Rally, the successor to the National Front), could easily seize upon their anti-elite populism.

Disaffected French citizens, much like the young immigrants attracted to political Islam, are steeped in an environment of online

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French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech at the end of a visit on the fight against separatism at the Seine Saint Denis prefecture headquarters in Bobigny, northeastern suburbs of Paris, on October 20, )2020. (Getty

disinformation that has the potential to radicalize them. Such voters are then susceptible not only to the old-fashioned antiimmigrant rhetoric of the National Rally but also to the strange soup of the antivaccination movement, the antimask movement, and every conspiracy theory that has also poisoned politics in the United States. No single French personality corresponds exactly to Alex Jones, but few onlookers would be surprised to hear someone on the fringes of a yellow vest assembly worrying that environmental toxins are turning frogs gay.

Macron is in a particularly poor position to stem the tide of such disinformation and forestall the political crises it announces. He was elected four years ago, just a few months after Trump, as a sort of symbolic heir to the era of U.S. President Barack Obama: young, dynamic, rational, and centrist. A documentary released immediately after his victory featured a climactic scene in which the 44th American president calls on speakerphone to congratulate his French counterpart. But even in 2016, Macron’s election had the air of a stopgap measure, simply to prevent Le Pen’s victory in the final round, rather than a vote of confidence for the technocratic establishment Macron embodies. The world was changing—Trump had proven as much—and France wasn’t quite ready to change along with it, at least not at the electoral level.

FRANCE ALONE The persistence of the yellow vests—far more than the pandemic or terrorism—suggests a failure of leadership on Macron’s part.

Unlike in the United States, in Francerising COVID-19 cases are generally greeted as a natural phenomenon, a virus doing its thing, utterly indifferent to which party holds office. Terrorism, on the other hand, is not presumed to be “natural”; rather, it is the sort of thing that clear resolve and sound policy can prevent.

In 2017, Macron’s then prime minister, Édouard Philippe, proposed a new antiterrorism law. Since that time, opinion polls have shown that much of the French public favors strengthening measures against Islamist attacks and indeed treating such attacks as a military matter rather than merely a criminal one.

Macron has taken a heavy-handed approach to surveillance and enforcement—one that often goes well beyond what the U.S. Constitution would allow and that tests the legal and ethical limits of policing entire communities. Thus, most voters who value the rule of law fear the prospect of a National Rally administration that would be ready to move past that limit. Macron’s government already monitors the conversations of Muslim men in fitness clubs, for example, such as the ones where many Chechen immigrants, from the same community as Anzorov, train to become ultimate fighters.

The Macron government has framed the terrorism problem as a military one. After the attacks in Nice, Macron announced “Operation Sentinel,” which would increase from 3,000 to 7,000 the number of military personnel engaged in domestic counterterror-

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ism. The French government now commonly speaks of Islamist terrorism as “separatism”: an effort on the part of communities within France to secede and establish their own sovereignty. The language has a subjective appeal. As statistically unlikely as any one person is to fall victim to an attack, France still feels very much like a place under siege. The flashbacks I still have to November 13, 2015, are flashbacks of war.

Defining the problem as one of separatism helps Macron to project resolve and to appear as a symbol of French unity and an embodiment of republican ideals. Yet to continue to insist on these ideals in today’s world is a gamble. The leaders of many Muslim countries have made clear that they not only despise those ideals but believe it is within their rights to combat them, even within the borders of France.

The silence of other Western countries is particularly alarming.

For the most part, France’s allies have found in the cartoon wars a convenient pretext for showing sympathy for marginalized people, while ignoring entirely the principled commitment to freedom and toleration that positively constrains France to take the position it does. Other Western countries, of course, largely share the historical legacies and legal structures that undergird these commitments, and until recently they would not have been able to pretend not to know this. But in the era of inward-looking national populism, international solidarity on matters of principle seems antiquated, and it is all the easier to avoid it when doing so offers a cheap veneer of virtuous multiculturalism. And so France is left mostly on its own.

The polities of France’s historical allies, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, have degenerated into various species of illiberalism. There is the right-populist form that currently holds power in those places—and also the left-authoritarian form that dominates many cultural institutions and buys into the lie that when a terror cell with automatic weapons assassinates an office full of humble caricaturists, it is the latter who are the oppressors. That lie is at least as attractive in the English-speaking world now as it was in 2015. After the most recent decapitations, social media have been buzzing with false equivalencies and with what the courageous Turkish German journalist Deniz Yücel has called “the mendacious, shitty ‘but.’”

Increasingly isolated in a world of illiberals and their apologists, the French Republic carries on, for now. Macron has often been overeager to be seen as the personification of the republic. Early in his term, he seemed almost prepared to declare himself the new Napoleon and publicly defended G. W. F. Hegel’s old fantasy that what Europe most needed was a leader who embodies “absolute Spirit.” But when, in late 2020, the French president goes on television and says, “Vive la République,” one is glad indeed to hear it, and glad there is someone in charge still insisting on it.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Hocus-Pocus?

Debating the Age of Magic Money

by Raphaële Chappe and Mark Blyth The COVID19- recession has prompted states to offer vast amounts of financial support to firms and households. When combined with steps that central banks have taken in response to the financial crisis of 2008, the bailout is so large that it has ushered in what Sebastian Mallaby, writing in the July/ August 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, calls “the age of magic money.” The combination of negative interest rates and low inflation, Mallaby writes, has

created a world in which “don’t tax, just spend” makes for a surprisingly sustainable fiscal policy.

The thrust of that description is accurate. But the world Mallaby describes is not a direct result of responses to the financial crisis and the pandemic, as he contends. Nor should it come as much of a surprise.

The roots of the current moment lie in the late 1990s, when the U.S. Federal Reserveresponded

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to the collapse of a major hedge fund by cutting interest rates in an effort to help financial markets avoid more widespread losses. The practice of cutting rates whenever the economy hit a bump became widely known in the following decade as “the Greenspan put.” (In finance, a put option is a kind of contract that gives an investor the right to sell a stock at a predetermined price regardless of market conditions; it is a form of insurance against losses.) The Greenspan put served as an implicit guarantee to financial markets that the Fed would cut rates to accommodate shocks. The Fed made good on that pledge during the 2008 financial crisis, when large-scale asset purchases and quantitative easing expanded the central bank’s balance sheet to over 4$ trillion—a move that might be termed “the Bernanke put,” after the Fed chair at the time, Ben Bernanke. This year’s COVID19recession has prompted yet another put, this time with the Fed buying (or at least promising to buy) almost any debt security.

A bunch of American dollars banknotes ($1), US, circa 1985.

(Getty)

These interventions, each larger than the previous one, have transformed the structure of the U.S. economy in profound but barely recognized ways.

They have created a substantial moral hazard by allowing holders of protected securities and debt issuers to take enormous risks without much fear of the consequences. In doing so, they have trapped the Fed in a cycle of responding to shocks, buying assets, cutting interest rates, and then buying more assets, driving up overall leverage and debt across the financial system with each intervention.

Considering that history, the age of magic money does not seem new or extraordinary at all—it is a direct extension of the Fed’s past policy record.

The resulting borrowing spree, which companies used mostly to fund dividend payments and share buybacks, left corporate balance sheets increasingly fragile before the pandemic hit. a much wider range of assets from a much wider range of sellers, including corporate bonds rated below investment grade. The idea behind the move was that investors would trade the securities on the Fed’s “buy list” with the assumption that they were insulated from overall market conditions.

This helped restore market confidence, prompting a stock market rally in spite of widespread economic devastation and massive unemployment.

Whereas the Greenspan and Bernanke puts targeted interest rates to deal with shocks, this time around, the Fed has effectively put a floor under the price of a wide range of high-risk assets. Their valuations are now based on that floor rather than on the actual state of the economy. Investors that hold such assets can use them as collateral, secure in the knowledge that the Fed will eventually buy them to safeguard financial stability. As a result, investors have an incentive to take on more debt at the first hint of a new Fed put.

This is moral hazard as a business model—and its logic is familiar. Consider the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, which resulted in part from innovations MORAL HAZARD AS A BUSINESS MODEL that allowed the so-called shadow banking system to extend private credit outside the formal banking Under normal conditions, conventional monetary system. When the credit bubble burst, those private policy involves the Fed (and other central banks) liabilities threatened to derail the financial system directly influencing short-term interest rates by unless states could absorb them by creating outside buying and selling short-term government securities money—that is, money not generated by the assets through open-market operations. But in its efforts that were now failing. The Fed stepped in and did to contain the 2008 financial crisis and the present exactly that. The Fed’s put, however, fueled massive COVID19- recession, the Fed has departed from inflation in the price of financial assets, especially that model. In 2008, the policy of quantitative high-risk corporate debt products. The resulting easing extended these purchases to long-term borrowing spree, which companies used mostly to government debt and toxic assets such as mortgage- fund dividend payments and share buybacks, left backed securities. This past March, in response corporate balance sheets increasingly fragile before to the pandemic, the Fed publicly pledged to buy the pandemic hit.

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conomy

Now, the Fed has stepped in once again to exorcize financial demons that its own past rescue operations helped create. Its intervention may have saved the corporate bond market for the time being, but it has done so by engineering an even bigger debt bubble around the same assets that left companies vulnerable in the first place. In the months that followed the Fed’s move in March, U.S. companies issued bonds at a dizzying speed, flooding the market with corporate debt priced well below the firms’ risk profiles. Amazon, for example, raised 10$ billion in June in an offering that included a three-year bond with a 0.4 percent interest rate— what the Financial Times reported to be the lowest rate for any bond in U.S. corporate history.

The Fed’s lending practices may even end up benefiting private equity firms, which can access Fed support even as they use their large cash pools to buy up distressed assets. The net result—aside from turbocharged market concentration and increased economic inequality—is more debt, perpetuating the systemic fragility and overleveraging that will force the Fed to pick up the pieces when the next crisis inevitably hits.

BAILOUTS FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE In severing any remaining ties between financial markets and the real economy, policymakers seem to believe that the rising value of stocks and bonds will trickle down enough to produce GDP growth.

But the belief that increased wealth can replace wage growth as the driving force in lifting aggregate demand ignores the fact that the vast majority of U.S. households are not able to build wealth in the first place. According to recent research by Goldman

The only real question is how many more rounds the global economy can endure before it finally breaks.

Sachs, the bottom 90 percent of Americans hold a mere 12 percent of the value of stocks owned by U.S. households. The U.S. economy has failed to deliver inclusive growth for decades, as real wages for many workers have been stagnant since the mid1970s. The Fed itself determined last year that the majority of American adults would not be able to cover a hypothetical unexpected expense of 400$— a scenario that for millions of Americans became a reality when the pandemic forced the country to shut down. The only remaining recourse for typical consumers struggling to maintain their standard of living is to rely on ever more expensive credit.

In short, the United States seems to have stumbled into a monetary policy regime that has untethered the fate of economic elites, who derive most of their income from state-protected financial assets, from that of ordinary people, who rely on low and precarious wages. Such a regime offers permanent protections to those with high incomes from

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Traders work during the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on March ,16 2020 at Wall Street in New York City. (Getty)

rates, particularly given the increased debt loads that U.S. states have taken on over the course of the pandemic. Pursuing those policies, as Philip Aldrick of The Times of Londonhas noted, would only exacerbate “the rule of the markets, the rise of asset prices, the enrichment of the plutocratic elite and a growing sense of injustice that comes with widening inequality even if everyone is getting richer.” In other words, it would mean another round of puts, with the same payoffs and risk buildups as before.

One could argue that during the current crisis, the Fed’s promises have been more effective than its purchases, and so the effect of the Fed put this time has been limited. The Fed has thus far used only 100$ billion of the 2.6$ trillion it said it would deploy; it still has plenty of firepower at its disposal. Yet since the start of the pandemic, the Fed’s balance sheet has nonetheless increased dramatically, from 4$ trillion to 7$ trillion, and many on Wall Streetanticipate that it could soon hit 10$ trillion. But this is a part of the problem, not the solution. Every time the Fed acts, more debt gets added to the system, which increases the size of the future shocks it will need to address. The cure feeds the disease. The only real question is how many more rounds the global economy can endure before it finally breaks. financial assets; everyone else gets little more than temporary help in times of crisis. In a world of high inequality and intense polarization, this is a dangerous policy mix.

The numbers speak for themselves. By this past June, some 45.5 million Americans had filed for unemployment, and more than 6.5$ trillion in household wealth had vanished. Meanwhile, between March 18 and August 5, according to data from Forbes, the net worth of U.S. billionaires surged by over 20 percent, reaching a total of 3.6$ trillion. But this soaring wealth is so poorly distributed, it cannot increase aggregate demand enough to stimulate wage growth. As such, the gulf between those who live in the precarious real economy and those who live in the insured financial economy widens with each iteration of the game.

Curbing this inequality would require yet more quantitative easing and rock-bottom interest

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The United States had an opportunity to break this cycle last spring. It could have done what many other countries have done, which was to bail out the labor market by giving direct payments to workers and by providing liquidity to solvent firms that could not access the public markets. Instead, Washington bailed out insolvent firms and, for the most part, let the labor market crash, spinning the wheel of moral hazard once again.

Washington can do better. But to do so, policymakers need to remember that in capitalism, firms are supposed to fail, and in a democracy, the state is supposed to protect its citizens. Twenty years of misguided Fed policy have upended those basic rules. It is time to put them back in place.

RAPHAËLE CHAPPE is Assistant Professor of Economics at Drew University and Economic Adviser at the Predistribution Initiative.

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Coronavirus Mutation Unlikely to Adversely Impact Vaccine Efficacy, But We Must Remain Vigilant Global Experts Discuss Global Challenges and Prospects of Covid- 19 Vaccine in Saudi Forum Majalla - London As the pandemic rages on, pressures are mounting to get a vaccine available for use as soon as possible. The 11th

KAIMRC Annual Forum for Medical Research, was held virtually this week to discuss global challenges and prospects of a Covid-19 vaccine. 32 international experts from global academic institutions including the Universities of Oxford,

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Harvard, and Stanford participated in the 2-day forum to review all aspects of vaccine development and production to ensure global participation from decision-makers, media outlets, health workers and the gen-eral-public.

HOW CLOSE ARE WE TO A VACCINE

The race for a COVID-19 vaccine is edging towards the finishing line, but with the continuing rising of cases and many countries going into second lockdowns, many are wondering more than ever if we are any closer to a vaccine.

A coronavirus vaccine could be the vital game changer in this pandemic to save lives and ensure no further lockdowns are needed.

Governments around the world are making a big bet that the first vaccines for COVID-19 could be made with genetically engineered viruses such as the AstraZeneca/Oxford and the Harvard/J&J vaccines. The engineered viruses, called adenoviral vectors, are designed to shut-tle a gene from SARSCoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, into our bodies where our cells will read it and make coronavirus spike proteins.

Some scientists say that adenoviral vector vaccines, and Oxford’s vaccine in particular, may be society’s best chance for a return to normalcy. But Dr Sarah Gilbert Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford and lead on the Oxford vaccine trial, says that we still can-not predict at this stage when these vaccines will be rolled out.

“It is impossible to know as it is going to take some months even after we have efficacy results and regulatory approval to then immunise large parts of the population. And of course when we do come to vaccine roll out, it won’t be the entire population that gets the vaccine on the same day, so there has to be a process of prioritisation within countries to decide who to give the vaccine to first. The two top targets groups are healthcare workers and the older part of the population,” she said during a discussion led by forum Co-Chairman, Dr. Ahmed M. Salman, Senior Immunologist-Vaccinologist at The Jenner Institute, University of Oxford.

“We expect to be starting this process in terms of getting the efficacy results and then moving forward to applying for regulatory approval by the end of the year,” she added.

Dr. Dan Barouch, a vaccine researcher at Harvard and collaborator on Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, echoed Dr Gilbert’s sentiments.

“I think we have to be very careful of giving calendar dates as dates previously proposed and have now been revised. It’s very difficult to predict when the phase III trial will end, and when they do end, if they show efficacy, there will still be a time period for regulatory review and approval as well as the

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But Dr Sarah Gilbert Professor, lead on the Oxford vaccine trial, says that we still can-not predict at this stage when these vaccines will be rolled out. actual roll out, assuming that manufacturing is not a factor,” he said.

“There are a lot of uncertainties, but if everything goes well, we are hoping for efficacy data by the end of this calendar year, possibly the beginning of 2021,” he added.

COULD VIRUS MUTATION HAMPER VACCINE DEVELOPMENT

Most vaccines under development worldwide have been modelled on the original ‘D-strain’ of the virus, which were more common amongst sequences published early in the pandemic. Since then, the virus has evolved to the globally dominant ‘G-strain’, which now accounts for about 85 percent of published SARS-CoV-2 genomes. There had been fears the G-strain, within the main protein on the surface of the virus, would negatively impact on vaccines under develop-ment.

In response to Majalla’s question regarding virus mutation, experts assured that they have found no evidence that the change would adversely impact the efficacy of vaccine candidates.

“So far we haven’t seen any drop in the ability of antibodies induced by a vaccination to neu-tralise the spike protein that is now in circulation. Obviously, we have to keep an eye on muta-tions that arise and it would be possible with this type of technology to insert a different spike protein once it’s necessary, but as of yet we haven’t seen any indication that that this going to be necessary,” said Professor Sarah Gilbert.

Dr. Dan Barouch said that the mutations that have arisen to date do not appear to impact neu-tralisation and therfore J&J are optimistic that that the current vaccines under development around the world will be effective. “However,” he added “I think we need to remain vigilant.”

“There is a theoretical possibility that since virtually all the vaccines are currently in trials today are based on the original sequence from Wuhan, that there could be a risk of crossresistance. I am optimistic that it is a virus that doesn’t

Dr. Naif Alharbi, Director of Vaccine Development at King Abdullah .International Medical Research Center

Professor Adrian Hill, founder and director of the University of .Oxford’s Jenner Institute

mutate very quickly, however, I do think that the sci-entific community should remain vigilant and continue to sequence viruses for possible re-sistance. But as of now, we believe that the current viruses should be sensitive to neutralising antibody titers raised by these vaccines,” he said.

coronavirus vaccine showed that vaccine-induced protection in the subjects that we immunised had immune responses a year after vaccination,” said Sarah Gilbert Profes-sor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford and lead on the Oxford vaccine trial.

LONGEVITY OF THE IMMUNE RESPONSE

“Therefore, we certainly expect with our Covid-19 vaccine will provide an immunity response for up to a year after vaccination. As part of our clinical trials, we will continue to follow up with our volunteers to look at the persistence of those immune responses but it is not data that we have yet,” she added.

Since the onset of the coronavirus outbreak, a vaccine has been widely regarded as the best path toward reopening society and returning to normalcy. Yet, despite these Herculean efforts, sci-entists say a one-time cure-all is unlikely. Data on close cousins of the COVID-19 virus, sug-gests the COVID-19 vaccine will offer short-term protection -- although more research is need-ed to understand how well and for how long a potential vaccine could work.

“We don’t have preclinical data on the durability of the coronavirus vaccine, but clinical data from our MERS

Professor Hill also emphasised that the pandemic has brought light that vaccines and vaccinol-ogists are underrated and not believed by government.

Dr. Dan Barouch, a vaccine researcher at Harvard and collaborator on Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine says that while durability data in monkeys and humans are not yet available as those studies take longer to complete, J&J do have data on the durability of the Zika and HIV vac-cines which is “very good in humans as well as monkeys.”

Still, “there can be differences, so we have to wait to empirically measure the durability of the covid-19 vaccine in animals and humans.”

When researchers tracked COVID-19 patients over time, they found that the amount of anti-body peaked in the days following the onset of symptoms, then began to decline.

In some study participants, the antibodies were practically undetectable within about three months. Several ma-jor media outlets reported this as a loss of immunity, saying that it would complicate vaccine efforts.

In a discussion on Saudi Academic Efforts for COVID-19 Sciences and Vaccines, Dr. Naif Alharbi, Director of Vaccine

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Sarah Gilbert

t Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford and lead on the Oxford vaccine trial.

Dr. Dan Barouch, a vaccine researcher at Harvard and collaborator on Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine.

Development at King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, said that while reinfection is happing, it is still considered rare and does not mean that a vaccine will be less effective.

“If your first infection is severe, you are less likely to get another infection, but if it is mild or asymptomatic, you are more likely to get a second infection because your body did not induce antibodies that are strong enough and therefore diminish more quickly over time,” he said.

“I do not believe that this is a counter issue for vaccine development. We found from our MERS vaccine trials on camels that while camels can become re-infected multiple times, once they are vaccinated, enough antibodies are produced to protect them against reinfection,” he added.

“Any vaccine that induces a good immune response for a year would be able to break the chain of the virus and bring it under control. A vaccine is not a miracle solution, but a method of con-trolling the virus.”

Dr al-Harbi also noted that there are age-related changes in immune function.

“It is important to evaluate the vaccine in the older population as it is expected that the immune response aging decreases antibody responses. However, we have seen data from some vaccine developers that so for the results seem promising in the above 65 age group.”

LESSONS LEARNED

Beyond immediate priority of everyone’s health and livelihoods, the crisis is an opportunity to rethink the way we plan, develop and manage future vaccines, to make sure

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better prepared to protect everyone when the next emergency arises, said Professor Adrian Hill, founder and di-rector of the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute.

“Peacetime” vaccine development is far too slow. The reason that normal vaccine development takes a decade although when it can be done in a year although you are doing the same trials, same review bodies and have to overcome the same hurdles, it is all to do with the time it takes to do the administrative stuff, and not because I takes a decade to test the vaccine’s safety,” he said.

“The field has shown that you can get lots of vaccines through in a year. Right to phase III and efficacy assessments. While I don’t think that we will generally be making vaccine in a year in the future but 3 years would be a bit more realistic,” he added.

Professor Hill also emphasised that the pandemic has brought light that vaccines and vaccinol-ogists are underrated and not believed by government.

“We shouted after Ebola, we made a fuss with swine flu, and we pointed out that the risks were there of something much nastier than swine flu come about. Virologists produced data of what the risks were and epidemiologists predicted what might happen and well, it happened - there is a major global pandemic and we should have been better prepared.”

He said.

“The IMF said last week that the likely economic cost of Covid in terms of lost economic de-velopment, will be in the order of tens of millions of dollars. With that in mind, investing in be-ing better prepared would have been good investment.”

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Democracy and the Movies: Simple Acts of Solidarity Under Threat www.majalla.com

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Democracy and the Movies: Simple Acts of Solidarity Under Threat Are we Witnessing the End of the American Experiment?

Or Just the End of the Movies?

by Justin Chang

an experience of public togetherness.

Whether you find these questions merely alarmist or genuinely alarming, they may seem odd to raise in the same breath. But for some of us, they have been curiously entwined sources of anxiety since earlier this year, when the COVID19- pandemic sent the nation into social, economic and political freefall — and dealt a particularly cruel blow to an industry that, like the idea of democracy itself, thrives on

With film production and the industry›s usual distribution and exhibition mechanisms thrown into turmoil by the pandemic, the movie business faces a crisis of economic, logistical and existential proportions. The pleasures of casually, unconcernedly going out to the movies may return someday, but for some of us right now, it feels as distant a prospect as, well, bipartisan unity or a commitment to a

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peaceful transfer of power by the Trump administration.

Yet if our democracy can withstand the traumas of a sickened, demoralized electorate there is every reason to hope that the pleasures that sustain us, especially the art that we love, will also survive in the long run. Our national recovery could take years, and it will bring with it a sweeping reconsideration of how people behave and how industries do business. But when I envision the future of a healthy, hopeful, fully vaccinated electorate (a citizen can dream), I still can›t help but envision a movie theater — crowded with people who, in congregating together, are committing a simple yet powerful act of social solidarity.

It is often said that the movies are our most democratic art form, the entertainment pastime that, more than any other, has a way of bringing us all together. There are reasons to be suspicious of this characterization, which can sound like naivete at best and sham populism at worst, and which often overlooks the sexist, racist and homophobic norms that have governed Hollywood for the better part of its existence, keeping a tight rein on which stories can be told and exactly who might tell them. But even if the democratic spirit of movie going is more dream than reality, it›s a dream I cling to fiercely all the same, perhaps even more so at a time when democracy itself has rarely seemed more imperiled.

Sacha Baron Cohen in «Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,» a sequel to his 2006 comedy, «Borat.» / Amazon Studios

Movies are fundamentally democratic for a number of reasons, including the sheer range of artistic influences they draw upon: They are «the bastard art,» as Pauline Kaeldescribed them, capable of synthesizing literature, drama, photography, music and other art forms into a medium unparalleled in its emotional directness and popular appeal. And then there is the intensely collaborative process by which they are made — a process that depends on innumerable contributions big and small from cast and crew, which are then pulled together (hopefully) by a director›s unifying vision, even when said vision may be subject to ratification, revision and even rejection by producers and studio executives.

The egalitarian nature of movies also has something to do with the large public gatherings in which they are ideally — but of course, not exclusively — consumed. We can debate the pleasures of movie theaters and look askance at those who tend to wax poetic (guilty as charged) about a joyous communal experience that often means tolerating sticky floors, subpar projection and the hell that is other people.

(Democracy can be a messy, ugly business.) And we can still mourn this year›s COVID-mandated closures of theaters nationwide, cherishing our fond memories of sitting alone together all those months ago in the dark, unmasked and untroubled.

For better or worse, theaters have reopened in some parts

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While these acts of cinematic and political defiance might sound like business as usual for liberal Hollywood, it is worth remembering that the film industry has never been as progressive or ideologically homogeneous as some would like to think. of the country, and certain pictures, notably Christopher Nolan›s «Tenet,» have helped keep them up and running.

The resurgence of drive-in venues across the country has been one of the crisis› more interesting — and heartening — secondary narratives. But the future of theatrical moviegoing nevertheless looks bleak. One -2020dated Hollywood release after another, from the James Bond film «No Time to Die» to «Wonder Woman 1984,» has fled to the hopefully sunnier climes of 2021. Others, like Disney›s upcoming «Soul,» have abandoned theatrical plans in favor of a video-on-demand release. Major entertainment conglomerates like Disney and WarnerMedia have imposed sweeping layoffs and announced plans to make streaming content their primary focus, expressing a vote of no confidence in theaters.

Moviegoing in 2020 has already become a largely isolated undertaking: the province of on-demand platforms like Netflix, Amazon, HBO Max and Disney+, as well as virtual festivals and online screenings by independent theaters.

And to push the cine-political metaphor a bit further on this momentous election eve: If moviegoing is its own regular form of democratic expression, then streaming platforms might well be likened to a form of regular mail-in voting, a means of enjoying the satisfactions of cinema safely and conveniently, minus the risk — but also minus the social solidarity, the communal pleasure — of lining up to participate with others.

The electoral implications of moviegoing are not limited to 2020. If we vote with our wallets, then every new picture that enters the market is bidding for some fraction of our support and perhaps even our love. We don›t elect movies as presidents, though we do anoint box office champions and Oscar winners, symbols of excellence (or at least profitability) that serve their own terms, some more limited than others, as Hollywood›simage bearers and cultural ambassadors. It›s an imperfect analogy: «Avengers: Endgame» may have won

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last year›s popular vote by a landslide, but does that mean «Parasite» prevailed in the Electoral College? (For what it›s worth, the Electoral College should be abolished; the motion picture academy, for all its issues, can stay.)

As has been clear for decades, for members of the industry, the annual Oscar derby more or less functions as an election season, with its own built-in system of primaries and caucuses: film festivals, gala premieres, industry Q&As and other functions designed to weed out also-rans, boost profiles and secure votes. The narratives are shaped by media commentary, pundits› predictions and highly unscientific polls, sustained by pricey campaigns and sometimes complicated by studio smear tactics. Along the way, some of the most interesting, exciting candidates are invariably deemed too niche to earn widespread support, forcing the general electorate to choose the lesser of two (or three) evils.

All roads eventually lead to consensus, which can mean compromise and disappointment.

Those rituals have been upended this year, and some have even suggested they be suspended completely in the wake of the pandemic — for the Oscars, already postponed until April, to be canceled outright. But so far, there seems to be a stronger push to keep the season going, even if it requires significant adjustments. The idea of taking stock of a year largely devoid of theatrical releases and Hollywood prestige pictures doubtless makes many in the industry a little queasy, and maybe a little scared. But for those of us who have seen no shortage of excellent pictures from American independent filmmakers and filmmakers abroad, a season that forces voters to look beyond the usual suspects — and to weigh their candidates with greater care and discernment than usual — might be less a travesty than an opportunity.

It is often said that the movies are our most democratic art form, the entertainment pastime that, more than any other, has a way of bringing us all together

It might even force viewers to reckon with powerful stories told by women, people of color and others who have been as historically ignored, slighted and tokenized in society as in Hollywood. And they may find that many of these stories exist on a startling, resonant continuum with the politics of the present moment. One of these is «The Assistant,» Kitty Green›s incisive and empathetic portrait of the everyday hell of working for an abusive media mogul clearly modeled after Harvey Weinstein. Before his public downfall, arrest and conviction, of course, Weinstein was not only a serial abuser but also a master at manipulating Hollywood›s election season, aggressively pushing his candidates, stamping out rivals and abusing his power.

He is gone now, but the independent cinema that he claimed to champion continues to thrive in his absence, with renewed aesthetic boldness and political urgency. In a year of election-season controversy over the fate of the Supreme Court, it›s hard to imagine a more appropriate time to watch «Never Rarely Sometimes Always,» Eliza Hittman›s searing drama about a young woman›s right to determine her own

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Maria Bakalova and Sacha Baron Cohen in the movie «Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.» / Amazon Studios

«The whole world is watching!» the protestors in that film cry. But in a world largely bereft of movie theaters and the sense of belonging they offer, that sentiment can be hard to fully embrace or appreciate. I thought about this when I saw Sacha Baron Cohen, terrific as the activist Abbie Hoffman in «The Trial of the Chicago 7,» pull off another form of cinematic protest in the mock-documentary comedy «Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.» Launching a scabrous attack on sexism, anti-Semitism and science denialism in Trump›s America, it›s a sequel to the first «Borat,» a movie I saw in a crowded theater 14 years ago and still feel I haven›t stopped laughing at.

This one is more muted in its comic impact, partly because reality has largely matched Baron Cohen›s satire, outrage for outrage, and partly because what kills on the big screen often manages just a few glancing blows on a smaller one. At the same time, given that it takes on the subject of the coronavirus itself, «Borat Subsequent Moviefilm» was clearly, explicitly made for a moment without movie theaters. Like «Totally Under Control,» Alex Gibney›s even-toned but infuriating documentary about the Trump administration›s mishandled pandemic response, it was fast-tracked to the screen in the midst of an escalating crisis with the unambiguous intention of galvanizing viewers and weaponizing their anger ahead of the election.

future. And in a year that has stirred a fresh consideration of America›s troubled legacy, its centuries-long history of class inequality, capitalist greed and racist subjugation of Native Americans and immigrants, the dramatic force and exquisite humanity of Kelly Reichardt›s «First Cow» can hardly be overestimated.

Some pictures, of course, seem perfectly timed to capitalize on the nation›s political unrest, few more blatantly than Aaron Sorkin›s «The Trial of the Chicago 7.» A sweeping historical portrait of the tumultuous events preceding and following the fateful 1968 election, it›s about the courage and fortitude it takes to speak truth to power, to protest in the streets and in the courts, often alongside people you may fervently disagree with in service of a greater cause.

It›s also an audience picture through and through, the kind that should be watched elbow-to-elbow with your fellow moviegoers, forcing you to lean in so as not to miss a scrap of dialogue over the snorts, chuckles and expressions of vigorous assent around you.

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But while these acts of cinematic and political defiance might sound like business as usual for liberal Hollywood, it is worth remembering that the film industry has never been as progressive or ideologically homogeneous as some would like to think. That›s one of the more intriguing insights of «Mank,» David Fincher›s forthcoming drama about the Oscar-winning screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, which whisks us back to the 1930s and ‹40s, when the allpowerful Hollywood studio system advanced the interests of the Republican Party, using industry-wide pressure and dishonest propaganda. Mankiewicz›s wry defiance of that pressure is depicted as a quietly heroic — and, in retrospect, profoundly democratic — act of resistance, and an essential part of the personal history and insight he brought to «Citizen Kane,» one of the greatest works of popular art the industry has ever produced.

«Mank» is not the only recent picture to give Hollywood a much-needed slap on the wrist. So, in its own way, does «Da 5 Bloods,» an impassioned rebuke to the historical and cinematic record of Black military service during the Vietnam War. It›s also one of two Spike Lee joints this year, the other being his joyous concert picture «David Byrne›s American Utopia,» which reminds us that art can be an act of protest and protest can be a work of art. In a better world, we moviegoing people might have seen these films together in a darkened theater. In a better future, perhaps we will.

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The Long Road to Suffrage How Women Won the Right to Vote

by Jean H. Baker Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, by Martha S. Jones. Basic Books, 352 ,2020 pp.

Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote, by Ellen Carol DuBois. Simon & Schuster, 400 ,2020 pp.

As Hillary Clinton proclaimed near the end of a fiery speech delivered to an international audience in Beijing in 1995, “Human rights are women’s rights,

and women’s rights are human rights.” Some officials at the U.S. State Department were nervous about her address, believing that even such a seemingly benign mention of human rights would irritate the Chinese hosts of the UN-sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women. But in the United States and elsewhere, the phrase resonated—and still does.

Yet the fact that it was necessary to make explicit such an anodyne sentiment spoke to the troubling

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reality that for decades, the conventional wisdom held that women’s rights had nothing to do with human rights. They were instead relegated to what was known in the nineteenth century as “the woman question,” which was really a bundle of questions, the answers to which were generally no. Should women receive more than a primary education? Should they control their own wages? Should they enjoy guardianship rights with respect to their children?

And of increasing concern, should they have the right to vote? Nearly two centuries later, a version of this discourse still exists in the United States, where Americans often speak of “women’s issues.” There is no corollary for men’s matters.

From the republic’s earliest days, women were constrained by a British inheritance: the common law, which dictated that women were essentially the charges of their husbands or, if unmarried, of their fathers or brothers. Women were “civilly dead,” in the words of the Declaration of Sentiments, the document that emerged from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first women’s rights convention in the United States. In a society that privileged religion, women were also casualties of biblical interpretations that emphasized their original sin: Eve over Deborah, Jezebel over Sarah. Meanwhile, powerful social norms and cultural traditions relegated women to the home and demanded that they be pious, subservient, and obedient, further removing them from the public sphere.

A group of Women›s Suffrage activists march in a parade carrying a banner reading ‹I Wish Ma Could Vote› circa 1913. (Getty)

But women had voices and pens, and so they began a long crusade that ultimately focused on the right to vote. This year marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which extended that right to women—or to most of them, at least. Two new books by first-rate scholars of the women’s rights movement explore this complex history, revealing the ways in which progress rarely proceeds in a linear manner. They serve as timely reminders of the fact that freedoms as fundamental as the right to vote are hard won and remain under constant threat from antidemocratic, repressive forces.

RIGHTS AND WRONGS Black women in the United States have long faced a kind of triple jeopardy, suffering on account of not only their gender and their race but also their invisibility in the historical record. Before 1863, they were mostly enslaved, a dehumanizing condition that deprived them of liberty and also subjected them to

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constant sexual violence. “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs,” the Black poet, educator, and antislavery activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper tartly informed her colleagues in the American Equal Rights Association in 1866. The voices of Black women such as Harper have mostly been overlooked by historians in accounts of the battles over suffrage. As a result, one of the central developments in U.S. history has been rendered as a tale of persistent, courageous white women.

Thanks to Martha Jones’s Vanguard, Black women’s rightful place in this history has been restored. Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, places Black women front, center, and in many instances ahead of white women in the fight for civil rights in the United States. “Black women built their own many-faceted and two-centuries-long women’s movement,” she writes. What this work amounted to, Jones explains, was “a shared mission: winning women’s power that would serve all humanity.”

Simply put, she writes, “Black women led American women, showing the way forward.”

Although Jones is careful to credit her scholarly forebears, such as Paula Giddings and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Vanguard is unique: there is nothing like it in the historical literature. Jones reaches back to the period immediately following the American Revolution to unearth the stories of Black women who entered the public arena. Among those active in the early nineteenth century were Jarena Lee, a traveling minister, teacher, and abolitionist, and Maria Miller Stewart, who addressed so-called promiscuous audiences (those that included men and women) and wrote in newspapers encouraging “the daughters of Africa” to take on public roles. Sarah Mapps Douglass, the Black founder of Philadelphia’s Female Literary Association in 1831, was lecturing on the sins of slavery well before two white sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, took up the cause and became two of the earliest nationally known female abolitionists. In investigating a period for which limited historical sources exist to shed light on the thoughts and activities of such Black women, Jones is adept at using letters to the editors of newspapers, including the abolitionist weekly The Liberator, as one means of ferreting out their views on a wide range of issues. For example, Douglass, writing to The Liberator under the pen name Zillah, opposed efforts to persuade American Blacks to emigrate to Haiti; in another letter, she expressed her encouragement at the sight of Black and white Americans in Philadelphia “mingling together . . . without a shadow of disgust.”

By the time of the Civil War, Black women had

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become a controversial presence at antislavery conventions, where their race and gender disqualified them from leadership positions. But many took another route to public life: through Black churches, where they persistently fought for and won the right to preach. Then, beginning in the late 1860s and early 1870s, after the 14th and 15th Amendments had opened some doors for African Americans, Black women joined the American Equal Rights Association, attended the Colored National Labor Union, and were present at meetings of the newly formed National Woman Suffrage Association— although the last proved a hostile environment, given the co-founder Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s blunt assertions of Black inferiority.

Characteristic of the fascinating but lesser-known figures from this era of Black female activism is Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a schoolteacher in Washington, D.C., who took direct action by joining white women in attempting to register to vote in 1871. Rebuffed, she sent messages to congressional committees about the need to revise the texts of existing laws by removing the word “male.” Shadd Cary, born in Delaware in 1823 to free parents, was “an upstart,” Jones writes. She emigrated to Canada, founded the weekly Provincial Freeman, and returned to the United States during the Civil War to help recruit Blacksoldiers for the Union. A more celebrated activist of this era is Mary Church Terrell, who was born in 1863 to freed slaves in Tennessee and went on to graduate from Oberlin College, serve as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and travel to Berlin in 1904 to lecture (in German) on African American history. Terrell was a committed suffragist who saw the vote as an essential instrument to end lynching and the segregation of public accommodation and who deftly navigated the undercurrents of racism within the suffrage movement. In 1913, many white members of the movement’s most influential organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (which succeeded the National Woman Suffrage Association), objected to the participation of Blackwomen in a parade that the group was planning to hold in Washington, D.C. The leader of the local NAWSA chapter, Alice Paul, considered excluding them, and some Black activists were also uneasy with the idea of marching. But Terrell, undaunted,

joined a contingent of dozens of Black women who took part in the parade, which nearly devolved into a riot when, Jones writes, counterprotesters showed up and “jeered at, spit upon, and assaulted the women” while police officers looked on and let the marchers “fend for themselves.”

PAVING THE WAY As Jones makes clear, for Black female activists of this generation, suffrage was only one of a number of goals. Their causes were, as the Black activist Anna Julia Cooper wrote in her

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U.S. Congress, in 1968, and Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman from Texas to do so, in 1972. Others are less well known, including the lawyer Lani Guinier, who had earned a great deal of respect as an official in the Justice Department but whose nomination for a higher position was withdrawn in 1993 by President Bill Clinton after critics attacked her for espousing views they considered radical. And finally, there is Stacey Abrams, the bold Black woman who nearly won the gubernatorial race in Georgia in 2018 and who this past spring refused to hide her ambitions for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination—in marked contrast to the eventual nominee, Kamala Harris.

1892 manifesto, A Voice From the South, “the rights of humanity.” And for them, the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 was hardly a watershed, since for decades after its passage, the vast majority of Black women (and men) in the South continued to be denied the right to vote owing to disenfranchising tactics such as poll taxes and grandfather clauses.

For Black Americans, genuine democracy arrived only with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But just as histories of the women’s suffrage movement have tended to overlook Blackwomen, so, too, have many histories of the push for civil rights, in which men almost always appear as the main protagonists. Jones seeks to redress this lack of attention, as well, by focusing on four female leaders in the movement: Diane Nash, who organized efforts to integrate lunch counters and interstate buses; Pauli Murray, a trailblazing attorney; Rosa Parks, who became famous for her role in the 56–1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; and Fannie Lou Hamer, the celebrated voting-rights activist.

These Black women paved the way for others who would, in the decades that followed, gain political power through elective and appointive offices.

Some of these women are familiar, such as Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to win election to the

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Jones makes a vigorous case that Black women’s roles as political actors have shaped events far more than most Americans realize. As she writes, “The story of the Vanguard is still being written. Black women continue to innovate, challenge, and lead American politics to its best ideals in our own moment.”

Sometimes, however, she veers into hagiography.

And on occasion, one or two figures become “they,” standing in for all Black women. For example, the assertion that “when they gathered, Black women did so to serve the needs of everyone” is overly broad; indeed, many of the figures Jones profiles neglected to press hard for the rights of working-class women of any race. And the evidence in Jones’s book does not always back her contention that, collectively, female Black activists built a movement of their own. Some were soloists, and although Jones convincingly demonstrates the intergenerational and familial legacies among them, many operated within organizations run by men. These, however, are minor flaws in a book that takes a critical step forward in understanding U.S. history and that is a welcome corrective to the conventional narrative of women’s rights.

A BALANCED VIEW Jones’s work stands out as particularly valuable because other, less nuanced attempts to correct the record in this centennial year have often missed the mark. The anniversary, in fact, has sparked something of a backlash, driven by complaints that celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment and its best-known champions—all of whom are white— contributes to the erasure of nonwhite voices from the suffrage story. In the most reductive examples of this revisionism, the traditional heroes of the story— women such as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony— are cast as something closer to villains, worthy not of celebration for their work on suffrage but of

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condemnation for their white supremacy. In August, an editorial in The New York Times decried the mythologizing of the movement led by Stanton and Anthony, who “got a stranglehold on the historical record . . . [and] established an enduring, self-serving legacy.”

It is certainly true that most white suffragists held views on race that are anathema today. But should their failure to live up to contemporary standards overshadow their contribution to civil rights? As Ellen Carol DuBois points out in Suffrage, her impressive new history of the movement, other whitedominated political movements of that era, including the labor movement and the Progressive movement, also “accommodated to insurgent white supremacy.”

Yet compared with those movements, the push for women’s suffrage seems to take far more criticism for the racism in its ranks. Few other centennial celebrations of undeniable advances in human rights have elicited such fierce criticism.

It is, then, a considerable blessing that DuBois’s book provides an informed, balanced history of the movement. DuBois, a professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, is considered the dean of suffrage studies in the United States.

Few scholars bothered with the subject before DuBois published Feminism and Suffrage in 1978, a trailblazing study in which she explained how allowing women to vote undermined the traditional American family system by giving women an independent voice. Her most recent contribution to the field is a readable narrative of the -72year campaign for the enfranchisement of women. It is intended for a general audience, and scholars will not find much new material in it. But all will find a thoughtful history full of striking details.

DuBois begins with the Seneca Falls Convention, the iconic event in most origin stories of the movement.

Like Jones, DuBois relies on capsule biographies to propel the story forward, and she narrates this phase of the movement through the lives of Stanton and Anthony, as well as those of some less familiar figures, such as Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone. These activists believed that as long as women were denied the right to vote, the United States would fail to live up to its founding ideals, and they hoped for an alliance

with like-minded men. DuBois quotes Harper, the poet, educator, and activist, who said in a speech in 1866, “Justice is not fulfilled as long as woman is unequal to man. We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.”

That generation’s attempts failed, however, and the post-Reconstruction years represented something of a nadir for the movement; not until the twentieth century did its fortunes improve. As few others have, DuBois credits Frances Willard, who served as president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, with helping revive the suffrage movement.

The central mission of the WCTU, which specifically appealed to Christian women, was to promote temperance in drinking habits by challenging the liquor interests. Willard argued that temperance would provide protection for women by loosening the grip of alcohol on their family members, and she saw the right to vote as a crucial tool in spurring such change. Ballots in the hands of women would, in Willard’s words, “converge on the rum shop” and destroy it. That message, DuBois shows, resonated more strongly with women in small towns and rural areas than did more abstract arguments about individual rights.

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View of members of the National League of Women Voters, seated around a table, holding signs that read ‹VOTE›, September 1924. (Getty)

effigy in nearby Lafayette Park. Arrested and jailed, Paul and her followers engaged in hunger strikes.

The authorities retaliated by brutally force-feeding them—treatment that, when publicized, shocked the nation.

DuBois credits P aul with invigorating the movement but rejects the idea that her tactics alone produced the congressional victories in 1918 and 1919 that led to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Suffrage covers in dramatic detail the showdown that culminated in the amendment’s adoption and the subsequent fight for ratification in the states. DuBois quotes a prominent suffragist, Maud Wood Park, who concluded that it was not the social change produced by World War I that led to the “simple justice of votes for women,” or even the president’s grudging support. Success came, rather, as the result of a “campaign carried on by two generations of suffrage workers.”

THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD

DuBois also pays close attention to Black women suffragists, especially Terrell and Ida B. WellsBarnett, whose anti-lynching work should not obscure her contributions to the women’s rights movement. DuBois also makes visible the contributions of working-class women, such as those who in 1917 stationed themselves on subway platforms in New York City carrying placards urging a yes vote on New York State’s referendum on women’s suffrage. She credits Harriot Stanton Blatch, the subject of her previous biography (and Stanton’s daughter), with developing a strategy for political action that moved beyond petitioning and lecturing and that encouraged suffragists to engage in retail politics.

DuBois argues, however, that it was ultimately Paul, the NAWSA leader, trained in the radicalism of British suffragettes, who rejected such moderate measures and who helped push President Woodrow Wilson to support a national amendment. Paul backed confrontational strategies of civil disobedience that had been rejected by the more conservative women of NAWSA. In 1917, members of Paul’s National Woman’s Party picketed the White House carrying signs challenging Wilson; others burned Wilson’s

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Both these books illuminate the legacies of women who struggled, as Clinton put it in Beijing, “to participate fully in the social and political lives of their countries.” Their stories bear remembering as the United States finds itself in an election year in which voter suppression has become a Republican Party strategy. Today, as during the suffrage battles, powerful forces seek to divide groups that might otherwise find common ground. Today, as then, a useful tactic in that effort is to limit voting. The present strongly echoes the past as President Donald Trump rails against mail-in ballots, uses Twitter to address “the Suburban Housewives of America” with barely veiled racist warnings about an invasion of “low income housing,” and suggests that the only fair election is one that he wins.

Yet in a testament to the success of the suffragists, more women vote in the United Statestoday than do men, a Black woman is the vice-presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, and more women than ever, especially Black women, are either in elected office or running for it. Like all social movements, the fight for women’s suffrage was flawed and imperfect. But its history is mostly a tale of triumph.

JEAN H. BAKER is Professor Emerita at Goucher College and the author of Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists.

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Stuck at Home?

You Can Get a Good Workout Anyway Harvard Health The winter months present numerous challenges to maintaining your fitness in a typical year. This year, with the COVID19- pandemic, it may be harder than ever to get to the gym or your usual

exercise class.

What can you do to keep your body in motion and not lose ground as the weather turns colder? The answer, luckily, is plenty, says Dr. Beth Frates, an assistant professor physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. There

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AEROBIC ACTIVITY To get your heart pumping, you›ll want to participate in at least 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate-intensity activity (that is, a level where you can talk but not sing). If you can›t hit the elliptical machine at the gym, you still have several options. Start with something as simple as walking around your house. If you are able, go up and down the stairs for a more intense challenge, says Dr. Frates. «Walking helps to increase the strength in the muscles around the joints, which helps to support the joints,» says Dr. Frates. It›s also a great exercise if you have arthritis.

Cycling is another joint-friendly choice to build your aerobic capacity. Again, if you›ve got arthritis, a lot of exercises can put strain on your knee joints, causing pain, but biking is not one of them. If you›re working out at home this winter, consider investing in a portable pedaler, a little set of bike pedals (without the bike) that rests on the floor. These devices can cost less than 50$. With your pedaler, you can squeeze in an effective workout while you›re watching television or working on your computer.

It›s a great way to get started with a cycling workout, and if you like it, you can eventually upgrade to a stationary bike or even take an online spin class to get a higher-intensity workout, says Dr. Frates. are many effective workouts that don›t require a large space, a gym, expensive equipment, or even a live instructor.

DESINGING YOUR EXERCISE PLAN Any workout plan should focus on three different areas, says Dr. Frates, president-elect for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.

These include aerobic activity, to improve cardiovascular fitness; stretching, to increase flexibility and range of motion; and strength training, to build muscle and protect against bone loss. Below is a sampling of possibilities in each category that you can use to achieve your workout goals.

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STRETCHING In addition to aerobic activity, you›ll also want to find exercises that stretch your body to improve flexibility and increase your range of motion.

Maintaining flexibility can help ensure that your joints move freely. It can also improve your posture and reduce your risk of injuries.

Tai chi and yoga are two choices that require little more than an inexpensive mat or a soft rug along with an online workout video to get started. If you have trouble with a traditional yoga workout, you can try a chair yoga variation, which will allow you to stretch and strengthen muscles while you›re sitting, avoiding pressure

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on painful joints, says Dr. Frates. Tai chi, often called meditation in motion, is an ancient Chinese practice that consists of sequences of slow, flowing movements that promote both fitness and relaxation. As a workout, it›s part balance, part flexibility.

«It›s good for variety. It›s also good for the mind in helping to reduce your stress levels,» says Dr. Frates.

When performing stretching exercises, be sure to listen to your body to avoid overstretching, which can lead to injury. A slight pull in the muscle is okay, but stop if you feel a sudden or sharp pain.

STENGTH TRAINING To keep your body and joints strong, you should also squeeze in some strength training at least two days a week, working the different muscle groups: your legs, your arms, and your back and core.

An easy way to do this at home is to use resistance bands. These are essentially oversized rubber bands that provide resistance to build your muscle strength. You can purchase them online or at a sporting goods store. Many video workouts using resistance bands are available to get you started, says Dr. Frates.

If you don›t have resistance bands, you can use objects such as soup cans in lieu of weights, or choose exercises that use your own body weight

There are many effective workouts that don›t require a large space, a gym, expensive equipment, or even a live instructor.

to provide resistance.

You might also want to try Pilates, a low-impact, full-body strength workout that also helps to improve flexibility. Pilates is typically done using special equipment in a studio with a live instructor, but you can do it at home using a yoga mat and an online video.

Strengthening exercises not only protect your bone health, but also speed your metabolism and improve your balance. In addition, building stronger muscles helps to protect and stabilize your joints, which can prevent injury and ease discomfort, says Dr. Frates.

HOW TO STAY PUMPED ABOUT HOME WORKOUTS It can be tough to stay motivated about a home workout routine. There›s no one there to urge you on, and it can be tempting to just skip your daily session in favor of the couch.

Here are some strategies that can help you stay motivated, from Dr. Beth Frates, a lifestyle medicine specialist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

Get a workout buddy. «One of the best ways to stay motivated is to find a friend who will work out with you either remotely or in person,» says Dr. Frates. If you can›t meet face-to-face (preferably outdoors), try videoconferencing. Or tune in to the same online yoga class and follow it together, from your separate homes.

Invest in a personal trainer. If you have the resources, consider hiring a personal trainer to work with you remotely or to design an exercise plan for you to follow. «If you can afford it, this provides terrific accountability,» says Dr. Frates.

You›re less likely to skip a workout if you paid for a session with a trainer, who is waiting to work with you at a specified time.

Try an online class. Many exercise classes are now held virtually, says Dr. Frates. Research has

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found that people are much more likely to follow through with workouts when they›re paying for them, so there are advantages to investing in a formal class. But if you prefer, there are many free classes online as well.

your goals, so you can see how you›re doing,» says Dr. Frates.

Stick to a schedule. Plan exercise into your week just as you would meetings or appointments.

Blocking off time for a session makes it less likely to fall victim to a busy day.

Have fun. Find activities that you enjoy; if you look forward to them, you›re more likely to stick with them. Remember, moving doesn›t only involve jogging or traditional workouts.

Try something new, such as hula hooping, says Dr. Frates. Dancing or gardening qualifies as movement as well.

Chart your progress. Even something as simple as a calendar you use to log your workouts can help keep you on track. «Set it up where it›s visible and check off the days when you meet

Add music. Any workout can be more fun with the addition of some upbeat music to get you in the mood. Put together a great playlist that will get you looking forward to exercising each day.

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