Benghazi

One of the few really steady jobs in liberated eastern Libya these days is that of caricaturist, and guys such as Adil Mansur are cleaning up. The 30-year-old history student has drawn posters of dictator Moammar Gadhafi as a dog, a snake and a hanging victim. Today he is producing a large image of rebel interim-government leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil as a mellow and saintly figure.

Another growth field is TV talk-show host. While the regime’s network still broadcasts hours of Col. Gadhafi and his deputies in empty rooms staring straight at the camera and shouting for hours about the crimes of Libya’s enemies, the rebel-controlled network instead offers local celebrity Mahmoud El Warfari, who stares straight at the camera in an empty room and shouts for hours about the crimes of Col. Gadhafi.

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Subtlety is in short supply here these days. So is self-criticism: Of the 126 newspapers and more than 100 civil organizations that have sprung up in rebel-held east Libya since a Feb. 17 uprising began the fight against Col. Gadhafi’s control, only one or two offer much other than variations on “Down with Gadhafi” and “Up with the revolution.”

At first, this seemed fair enough. This is, after all, a country at war, and as long as this region’s young men are dying every day in a prolonged and bloody battle for the country’s freedom, a certain amount of cheerleading and patriotic vitriol seemed appropriate.

But now, as the conflict passed its five-month point Sunday, some people here in the rebel capital of Benghazi are starting to worry. The voices of rebel anger and pride, they fear, are starting to sound like mirror images of Col. Gadhafi’s jingoism – and since the schools have been shut down since Feb. 17, they’re worried that all this full-throated zealotry is giving kids the wrong idea.

“It’s been 42 years that we’ve all been hearing the same man yelling at us in the same voice, and now that he’s not here, it’s going to take some time to get used to the sort of world where you can speak with self-criticism or have a diversity of voices,” says Hana El-Gallal, an activist who is pushing for a more open and less homogeneous rebel administration.

Ms. El-Gallal was education minister in the rebels’ National Transitional Council (which Canada and 29 other countries now recognize as the legitimate governing body of Libya), and she pushed to have schools open on Sept. 5 – even if the makeshift government has no money – in large part so children can have something other than a constant diet of revolutionary propaganda.

Now she is part of a small circle of people who are trying to turn the 1.5 million people of eastern Libya and their transitional government from a radical movement into a normal community, complete with disagreements and the questioning of goals.

“We’ve been living in an information blackout and a propaganda state for our entire lives, and now we’re finally allowed to have opposition politics and disagreements within the government without risking our lives – it’s important to do that,” said Enas Al-Drisey, a 23-year-old physics graduate who founded the organization Take Back the Revolution as a voice that criticizes the internal workings of the NTC while still supporting its goals.

That kind of organization would have been unthinkable in Col. Gadhafi’s Libya, and older Libyans are still inured to the idea that theirs is a society without parties, factions or disagreements.

To dispel that notion, Ms. Al-Drisey helped create the newspaper The Reality, which she describes as “the first opposition newspaper.” It began two months ago by criticizing the NTC for turning a blind eye to the theft of food and medical supplies by civil servants – a practice which, she claims, came to a halt as a result of the paper’s muckraking.

While some older and more conservative Libyans have raised eyebrows, this dissent has, for the most part, been tolerated and even welcomed by the NTC.

“Despite the fact that they were kind of slow to do it, I would say that yes, they are turning into a proper government,” Ms. Al-Drisey said. “But there are still a lot of things to overcome. Why don’t they show that they can start fulfilling all the functions of government, and start moving more quickly? After all, they’ve had five months.”

It might take longer. While the NTC has impressed almost everyone by managing to turn eastern Libya into a peaceful and comparatively well-governed place while incorporating every opposition movement under its umbrella and overseeing a war, it still echoes many of the governing and communications methods of the old regime.

On one hand, it has run a surprisingly modern and well-organized media office – something that some fully-formed and well-established countries haven’t yet figured out how to do – right from the beginning.

On the other, it still sends a couple dozen of its female employees out onto the street every afternoon to wave revolutionary placards and whack photos of Col. Gadhafi with shoes in a not-very-impromptu protest.

“As long as Gadhafi’s still around, people are going to want to present a unified front,” Ms. El-Gallal said. “But we can’t put everything aside until the war is over. We have to start being a free society now.”

Original Article

London

For decades, they were the untouchable monoliths of politics: The big nation-wide parties that straddled the centre ground, leaning slightly to the left or right, capturing big swathes of votes across the spectrum, forming the lion’s share of national governments during the half-dozen decades after the Second World War.

The Liberals in Canada. The Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in many European countries. Labour in Britain and the Netherlands, and the Socialists in Spain and France. These big-tent operations covered so much of the electoral horizon, and spent so much time in power, that they came to be known in many countries as the “natural governing party.”

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Suddenly, they are falling apart, their gradual seepage of voter support during the past 10 or 15 years exploding into sudden ballot embolisms. Canadians experienced the meltdown firsthand last month with the dramatic collapse of the Liberal party – in which fewer than one in five Canadians voted for a party that had dominated politics for a century, and its standing fell from 77 seats to 34 overnight, all but disappearing in Quebec and the west.

This was merely one event in a season of big-party cataclysms across the Western world. Like a row of wave-battered skyscrapers collapsing into the ocean, the world’s mighty centrists are being humbled by formerly fringe challengers from the left and the right. The big political party seems to be headed for extinction.

“We’ve seen a real hollowing-out of the mainstream parties,” says Olaf Cramme, director of the London-based European think tank Policy Network, which has recently completed a large-scale study of the factors that decimated Europe’s big centre-left parties in the last several years.

“It’s been a general decline on both sides – it affected the social democrats and liberals earlier than the centre-right, but the decline has hit the mainstream parties wherever you look,” he says.

Like dominoes

Only weeks before the Liberal collapse in Canada, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, the conservative party that has governed Germany more often than not in the decades since the war, suffered its most humiliating defeat. In Baden-Württemberg, one of Germany’s most wealthy, populous and loyally conservative states, her party suffered a mammoth defeat at the hands of the previously marginal Green Party – closely following another shock defeat in Hamburg state elections, and a deep slide in national poll standings. It is not as if her traditional big-tent opponents, the Social Democrats, are doing better: They have suffered a deep fall in support, losing votes to the neo-communist Left Party, the Greens and other fringe voices.

And only days after the Liberals melted down, Britain’s already humbled Labour Party suffered a similar beating in Scotland, losing most of its traditional voter support to the separatist Scottish National Party, which won a majority. And their broad-spectrum opponents, the Conservatives, have been unable to govern Britain without the backing of the once-marginal Liberal Democrats – leading many pundits to say that Britain is unlikely to have a majority government again.

The meltdown continued this week: The arrest of French IMF chief and presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sex-assault charges in New York City didn’t just strip the centre-left Socialist Party of its most viable candidate; it also revealed that the party’s support has badly fallen, that it lacks the talent pool to throw up any other inspiring candidates, and that it may well lose badly to more extreme parties. President Nicolas Sarkozy had little reason to gloat, though: His conservative UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) party, the descendent of the party founded by Charles de Gaulle and a permanent fixture on the French landscape, is at its lowest level in recent history, and polls all year have shown that the extreme right wing National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, is now the second most popular party in France, stealing a huge chunk of the formerly secure UMP vote. As with Silvio Berlusconi’s Italian coalition, many observers wonder if the UMP will exist as a big party after the 2012 election.

And so it has continued: In the Netherlands, the powerful Labour Party was emasculated and booted out of the governing coalition in this year’s elections. In Ireland, the twin centrist forces of the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael parties were chiselled down to stumps in this year’s election, with once-tiny parties gaining considerable ground.

This is a phenomenon across most of the Western world. According to the Parties and Elections in Europe database, the combined standing of the two largest parties in Britain, Germany, Austria and Ireland has fallen from 75 per cent of the vote in 2000 to barely 50 per cent today; other countries, like the Netherlands, have seen even steeper declines.

Before the meltdowns, the meltdown

The hemorrhage of centrist votes began in earnest with the financial crisis of 2008, when a surprising number of voters shifted away from the big all-in-one parties to “outsider” voices – single-issue parties such as the Greens and the anti-immigration parties of the Netherlands and Scandinavia, traditional parties of protest such as the NDP in Canada, anti-system parties such as the Scottish and Catalan separatists, or forces of indiscriminate anger, such as the right-wing National Front in France.

This is not so much a shift of voters to more extreme politics, Mr. Cramme and his colleagues concluded in their analysis of polling in a dozen countries, but rather a surprising but predictable response to the way the crisis unfolded: While it began, in 2008, as a private-sector crisis of bad debt and unsupported credit in the financial and banking sectors, this was quickly followed by bailouts and rescues that shifted the burden to the state. Private-sector debt and potential insolvency turned into public-sector debt and higher taxes to pay for it, and the parties in power got blamed.

In essence, the bailouts worked all too well. The banking, finance and insurance industries were rescued by the state, so voters never experienced anything that would have turned their rage against the private sector: runs on banks, disappearing mortgages, lost retirement savings.

Many voters’ first personal experience of the crisis was an announcement of a tax hike, massive government debt, or slashed public service being used to pay for the crisis; this, combined with a job loss and a fuel-price spike, turned people against the parties that oversaw the crisis.

On top of this, the parties of the centre-left, like the Liberals in Canada and Labour in Britain, attempted an experiment in the 1990s and 2000s that they hoped would bring both rising equality and rising prosperity: A largely free and unfettered market economy, combined with low government debt and big investments in social services. The idea was that the booming economy would finance a state-supported rise in equality. The experiment mostly failed: While life did improve for the poor in the West, it didn’t change at all for the middle class, and often got worse, as they watched the wealthy become ultra-wealthy. The increasingly angry “squeezed middle” are the people who tend to vote in elections, and many were driven to distrust the big parties whose experiment failed them.

The big box is closed

The big-tent parties functioned, during their glory years in the postwar decades, as the paternal overlords of protected, closed national economies, engaging in brokerage politics whereby the fruits of growth could be spread out among clients and beneficiaries on the left and right. The big political parties were like family heirlooms, their loyalties kept for life and passed on between generations – badges of personal identity, like Ford and Chevy, Coke and Pepsi, Apple and Microsoft. Membership had its benefits.

But then, in the 2000s, there was what Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Paris’s Institute of Political Studies who analyzed dozens of elections, calls a “generational rupture”: Suddenly, he says, voters no longer see parties as badges of loyalty or symbols of lifelong personal identity, but as consumer products, as tools that can be used to address specific concerns.

The new, more open and borderless world of the past 20 years has meant that the big centrist parties continue to work well for the winners, for the in-groups that benefit from their specific programs. But for those who become disconnected or distanced from the state, who have no daily need for government (as the very poor do) but also do not feel its benefits (as the wealthy do not), the big party no longer means anything.

“Since the opening up of the world after the end of the Cold War, we’ve see that mainstream parties find it increasingly difficult to present political programs that address winners and losers at the same time,” says Mr. Cramme. “You basically have both left and right-wing mainstream parties essentially speaking to winners – and all those who are left behind due to globalization, technological change, cultural disaffection, are not adequately represented by mainstream political parties, so we see a surge of extremist parties on both the right and the left.”

This helps explain one of the paradoxes of the moment: The range of political views in most countries has not become more extreme; there are about as many left-wing people and as many right-wing people as before, and fringe views haven’t increased much. But the parties of the fringe have expanded dramatically. Until recently, the big parties of the centre were able to absorb voters with a strong dislike of immigrants or of capitalism, offer them some token recognition, and reward them with the benefits of mainstream power. Now, in a tougher age, that power means little, and the big ideological supermarkets of the democratic world have given way to dusty alleys lined with colourful boutiques.

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Toronto

It’s easy enough to find her. Just stroll westward past the bookstores and cafés of Bloor Street and head north on leafy Albany Avenue. Step up to the narrow red-brick house with the big front porch, and knock on the door. There will be a shuffling, and finally you will be greeted by a little old lady with an apple-doll face and a warm smile.

Be careful, though: She isn’t what she seems. Around here she is regarded as something of a guardian angel, and a fierce one at that. People remember the days when she applied her obstinate, quietly bullish logic to the task of holding back the bulldozers that threatened to gouge much of downtown Toronto into 16-lane expressways.

She’s the lady who saved the neighbourhood. And throughout the wider world she is known as the lady who resurrected The Neighbourhood: the whole notion of the city as a good and self-sustaining entity. Her epochal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities made millions of North Americans realize that “urban renewal” and government-planned development were hurting cities, and that bustling streets, tight-packed neighbourhoods and downtown clutter were actually good things.

Even then, she isn’t what she seems. On Wednesday, hundreds of planners, politicians, academics, architects and activists will gather in Toronto for a weeklong international conference devoted to her body of thought, titled Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter. Some will be shocked to discover that her vision extends far beyond urban planning and neighbourhood advocacy. Others may want to ignore the full implications of her theories, as they do not fit easily within conventional ideology — at times, they can alarm and offend even her most ardent supporters.

In a handful of carefully argued books published over the past 36 years, Jacobs has constructed one of the most significant bodies of social and economic thought of the postmodern era. From the outset, her work has confronted the stern rigidities of Enlightenment reasoning, from the imposed order of planned housing right up to the artificial unities of the nation-state and the conventions of public morality.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if future historians look back and say she was really one of the first positive, useful postmodernists,” said Sally Goerner, a computer scientist and psychologist who runs the Centre for the Study of Complex Systems at Duke University in North Carolina. “Her work is a real break from the reductionistic, materialistic clockwork universe. It’s a real transformation in how we look at the world.”

At 81 years of age, Jacobs shows no sign of stopping. She moves more slowly, taking careful steps through her slightly overgrown yard and her spacious, well-used kitchen. She still speaks in carefully considered phrases with a touch of the Yankee drawl she developed growing up in the coal-mining town of Scranton, Pa. She listens carefully, nodding and smiling, pauses for thought and then draws on an enormous store of knowledge and experience — years as a New York magazine writer in the thirties and forties, as an architecture critic in the fifties and as an independent scholar in recent decades.

These days she spends long hours before her typewriter, building a new plateau to the project she began at the street level in the 1950s. Her next book is an enterprise she has suggested in virtually all of her previous works: an examination of “human systems” as functioning parts of ecological systems. In other words, she is describing cities and commerce and trade as part of nature, after three centuries of thinkers have placed them in opposition to nature. Though lofty, this is an organic extension of her previous works.

“My thinking about this keeps getting more embracing,” she said in a matter-of-fact way between bites of homemade peach pie in her book-lined front room. “First I was writing about neighbourhoods, and I wrote about their economies too, because how they work has a lot to do with their life. And then I asked, ‘How does this work in cities, since they are part of cities.’ And then in Cities and the Wealth of Nations [1984] it was how they worked within their nations. And now this is how it works in the world.”

These are very busy times for Jacobs, and deliberately so. She is working hard to fill the hole in her life left by the death last year of Robert Jacobs, her best friend, colleague and husband of 52 years (and a monumental figure in his own right, an architect who was generally acknowledged as North America’s foremost designer of hospitals). If she is grieving, she does not show it.

Her house is a constant bustle of friends, neighbours, journalists (CBC producer Max Allen is rooting around in her basement, gathering files for a biography to be published during the conference) — and an amazingly varied group of supporters.

Take a closer look at those supporters. It is easy to pigeonhole them all on the political left. After all, this is the woman who headed to Toronto from Greenwich Village in 1967 so her sons wouldn’t have to go to jail for evading the draft. This is the sly organizer of protests who once urged a Toronto mob to tear down the hoardings around a demolition site (the workers can’t proceed without a hoarding, she reasoned — and she was right). This is the woman who took on the developers and banks and the investors on behalf of little impoverished neighbourhoods, after all. It’s a left-wing thing, isn’t it?

Look again. From the beginning, the Jacobs philosophy has been about a smaller and less controlling role for government, about the triumphant powers of unfettered commerce and open trade among cities. Her theories champion the privatization of utilities, the elimination of agricultural subsidies and marketing boards and deposit insurance, the reduction of transfer payments to poor regions (which are “transactions of decline”). Her heroes do not operate in the sphere of political action, but rather, as she wrote in 1961, they are “incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contributing outside the formal framework of public action.”

Though she believes that governments should police commerce and development and redistribute income to the worst-off, she has nothing but scorn for Marx and his legacy of central planning — and reserves her greatest disdain for nationalism in all its forms, especially Canadian nationalism. She has long argued that some cities should become independent economic and political bodies, and her 1980 book The Question of Separatism argued that Quebec would have a stronger and more vital economy and public life if it left Canada, as long as it minted its own currency.

She still stands by that book (“Today, parts of it seem amazingly dated,” she said, and then paused. “And parts of it don’t”), and can’t understand why people get so upset about a country splitting up into its natural economic regions: “People feel so strongly about this. I’m always taken aback. And I don’t turn up my nose at people feeling emotional about things. Emotion is valid. But I’m just surprised at how emotional people get about Quebec.”

By no means are her disciples all left-wing. Lawrence Solomon, editor of the right-wing libertarian magazine The Next City and head of Toronto’s Energy Probe, the environmental foundation that has long called for Ontario Hydro’s privatization, has a venerable and close relationship with Jacobs. She is a founding board member of Energy Probe and still supports its aims; she has credited him in her books. “In many ways the foundation is a reflection of Jane Jacobs’s ideas,” Solomon said.

At the same time, by no means are her left-wing supporters entirely comfortable with all her ideas. Even John Sewell, the former Toronto mayor who has virtually devoted his life to popularizing and realizing Jacobs’s urban-planning ideas, draws the line somewhere. “She doesn’t deal with the really big corporations and some of the troubles they cause,” he said. “But I’m willing to forgive her that for all the other wonderful things she’s done.”

Jacobs is well aware that many of her admirers have trouble accepting the full implications of her theories. “Nearly all, maybe all my books, offend some people — even people who would like to like them because they like part of them. That doesn’t worry me; I’m not trying to win a popularity contest or keep from jolting people.”

From the outset, her work has utterly disregarded the conventions of ideology and the niceties of academic writing. Perhaps this is because she lacks a formal education — although she took courses for years at Columbia University during her off hours, she has never received a degree. Or perhaps it is because she was an outsider from the beginning, a woman writing about architecture at a time when it was strictly a boys’ game.

“I have a lack of ideology, and that’s not because I’m anti-intellectual or have an animus against any particular ideology; it’s just that they don’t make sense to me,” she said. “I think they get in the way of thinking. I don’t see what use they are.”

By her account, it came all at once, in a shock of realization that ought to be remembered as one of the great epiphanies of our time. It was 1958, and she was writing for Architectural Forum. It was the age of the utopian housing project, that ultimate edifice of modernity. The most advanced form of this planning was taking place in Philadelphia, where planner Edmund Bacon was regarded as a saviour, and the magazine sent Jacobs down to check it out.

“The drawings looked wonderful with all these little people in them,” she remembered. “And I went down to see it. It was just like the picture — except all those little people weren’t in it. The only person in it, in the whole thing, for blocks, was a little boy — one lone little boy who was sort of disconsolately kicking at a tire.

“And Bacon was with me and I kept saying, ‘Where’s the people?’ And he kept saying, ‘Look at this vista. Stand here and look.’ And I said, ‘Don’t you think it’s funny that the people aren’t here? Where are they?’ … So then we went over to the old neighbourhood — just one block away. And the streets were just teeming with people. And they were sitting around on steps and they were shopping and they were talking with one another and they were all ages. And one reason there was so many of them, I soon figured out, was that all those people from over there in the new place had gone a block away… . He’d taken me [to the old neghbourhood] to show me how bad things were and what was the next thing that was going to be wiped out.”

Contained in that moment were virtually all the major observations that would shape her first book. “As my father-in-law said, sometimes you get your education awful fast. And I was getting it awful fast in between those two blocks.”

From there grew a sense that she could examine all of the modern world anew, that careful observation of its workings could yield a new set of concepts. In The Question of Separatism, she noted that much of social and political thought — and ideology — are still shot through with the ideals of the Enlightenment. “University and uniformity, as ideals, have subtly influenced how people thought about education, politics, economics, government, everything,” she wrote.

Natural scientists know otherwise. She wrote that they have found it “impossible to continue thinking of nature as a force promoting uniformity. On the contrary, what they found in nature was a force forever hostile to uniformity, a force that insisted upon diversity.” A force, in other words, much like Jacobs herself. “As you may have noticed by now,” she concluded, “that sort of view has worked a strong influence on me; it did so long before I was conscious of its source in the thinking of naturalists.”

As she prepared to return to work in this old house in the middle of a quiet neighbourhood, she marvelled at the extent to which her life has created a single, consistent and entirely novel view of the world. “I didn’t plan it that way,” she said, and suddenly it was apparent that her mind works the way she would have cities work: “One thing seemed to follow logically from another, and I just got interested in one thing after another.”

A Jane Jacobs bookshelf

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961): Cities rely on access to sidewalks and parks, high-density housing with a mix of incomes, uses and ages of buildings, and hands-off planning.

The Economy of Cities (1969): Urban economies are based on replacement of imports with indigenous products. Cycles of trade and entrepreneurship are vital to urban life.

The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle for Sovereignty (1980): Like Norway’s separation from Sweden, Quebec’s from Canada can be good for both parties if they maintain separate currencies.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (1984): National economies are in fact the economies of urban regions, and national economies work best when cities are given maximum autonomy. Backward cities should trade with one another and consider secession.

Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992): Human societies rely on two distinct systems of morality: “commercial” and “guardian.” Both are vital, but troubles arise when the two are combined.

A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece (1995): Jacobs reconstructs the journals of her great aunt, part of the U.S. “civilization” of Alaska at the turn of the century, and annotates them with short essays on the civil and political life of a fledgling society.

Original Article