Feeling Out Of Step
Hey folks, this week was Fall Break here in the Gulf. Hope and I spent a long weekend in Yerevan, Armenia. If that sounds familiar it’s because we did the same thing this time last year. I will have more on the trip next week and Hope will likely throw something up on BowlingsAbroad before then.
Here’s a couple of Yerevan photos before we get to the meat of the newsletter today.
I was slightly caught off guard recently to receive an email from HR asking me to fill out a non-binding survey regarding my intent to return next year. I can't believe it's already time to make this call. This is somehow our sixth year in Abu Dhabi and we’re being asked to decide to renew for a seventh by the end of this month. Long-term readers may remember that this was supposed to be a two-year “adventure” but a combination of the pandemic, liking life in the Gulf far more than we expected to, and conditions back home have extended our time away.
I think I wanna zero in on that last one, especially some of the political dynamics at play.
I've really struggled with this election. In another newsletter, I ranted that the electoral cycle feels too damn long but in hindsight that's a cop out. It’s not the longevity—it’s the seeming futility.
To be clear, I find the threats of mass deportation towards immigrants and migrants being lobbed about to be fascistic and beyond the pale. Hell, I am an immigrant myself.
To be further clear, I find the attacks on the reproductive rights of women to be a gross violation of individual liberty. As I've pointed out elsewhere, the abortion laws being passed by some state legislatures are to the right of the abortion access laws in places like Saudi Arabia.
I cast my vote against people making those threats and attacking those rights. But the reality is that the outcome of the election is unlikely to change the policies that are most important to me.
During the pandemic, as over a million Americans died from COVID-19, I found myself gobsmacked by the casual way large portions of the population disregarded mass, preventable death. But the more you look for it, the more of it you see.
For employment reasons, I walk a bit of a tight-rope around what I can say about the current conflicts in the Middle East and the US’s role in them but ho-boy, do I have thoughts.
The sanctioned violence of American foreign policy is deeply rooted in the nation’s psyche and love of frontier justice. On the global stage, U.S. policy props up colonial projects, bolsters oppressive regimes, and helps deliver a relentless drumbeat of death from above. Domestically, this same logic manifests in the over-policing of marginalized communities, the militarization of local police departments, and a justice system fixated on punishment.
This is the story of Cold War proxy wars, the invasion of Vietnam, and support for the colonial regimes in Angola and South Africa deeeeeep into the late twentieth century. But each of those faced robust domestic dissent rather than mutual acquiescence by both political coalitions.
After flirting fleetingly with more just models, following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, the policy pendulum is swinging back toward the tough-on-crime ethos that dominated US politics throughout the 90s. According to Pew, today 6 in 10 respondents say “reducing crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress to address this year.” This is reflective of a false bipartisan consensus that we over-corrected by “defanging” and “defunding police.”
The data says otherwise.
Police budgets remain robust: Between 2020 and 2023, U.S. spending on law enforcement, particularly at the federal level, saw an upward trend. In 2023, President Biden's budget proposal allocated $32 billion specifically for crime prevention and law enforcement activities, marking a $2.63 billion increase over the previous year's funding.
Police violence and killings have risen: Mapping Police Violence has data on police killings going back to 2013. US police have killed over a thousand people in every one of those years. Despite the rhetoric in US media about “officers having their hands tied,” the number of killings has only increased since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests: 1,186 in 2021, 1,266 in 2022, and 1,353 in 2023.
VP Harris flirted with backing law enforcement reform in her unsuccessful 2020 campaign and has returned to her natural prosecutor-in-chief position. And Lord, the less said about DJT on these issues—the better.
Rather than a choice, on these issues, it's a matter of incremental degrees of wrongness. I cast my ballot in late September but I did so with the understanding that I am increasingly out of step with the mood and popular opinion at home.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.