This weekend I finally finished reading two important recent books on Africa: Martin Meredith’s massive The Fate of Africa: From The Hopes of Freedom To The Heart of Despair, and Gerard Prunier’s relatively short but intense Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Both books are already helping fuel a growing debate in the U.S. and in Europe about what if anything “the international community” can do to solve Africa’s general problems, and the immediate and deadly crisis in Darfur.Meredith’s book, which attempts a panoramic history of post-colonial Africa, is fascinating, instructive, and impressively well-written, but as the subtitle suggests, his tale is one of unremitting woe and disillusionment. As you read through his roughly chronological account which shifts from region to region, the bright spots of independent Africa steadily blink out, and country after country devolves into corruption, tyranny, bankruptcy, and savage armed conflict (Botswana is the only country earning unqualified praise from Meredith, with South Africa being judged a qualified success).Indeed, I fear that Meredith’s book may have an impact on general readers similiar to that of Robert Kaplan’s 1993 book Balkan Ghosts, a cautionary tale about the depth of ethnic confilicts in the post-communist Balkans that reportedly influenced Bill Clinton to avoid U.S. intervention in the Bosnian civil war. Why bother trying to do anything about impossible people in impossible places?But Meredith has a very distinct point of view about what’s gone wrong in Africa, and what that means for non-Africans who want to do something constructive about it. As he relentlessly tells us, Africa’s failure is above all a failure in political leadership, and until its elites figure that out and do something fundamental about it, nothing else matters. As Andrew Rice usefully explained in The Nation a few weeks ago, this position places Meredith near one extreme, with Jeffrey Sachs on the other, in the ongoing chicken-and-egg debate on whether Africa’s poverty causes misgovernment, or its misgovernment causes poverty. (You should also read Sam Rosenfeld’s October interview with Meredith on the American Prospect site, wherein Meredith makes it clear he is indeed skeptical of the current Blair-and-Sachs-led effort to dramatically boost no-strings aid to Africa). Like Meredith, the French ethnographer Gerard Prunier focuses on political factors in his complex and ultimately angry book about Darfur. And even more than Meredith, he is disdainful of those who think humanitaritan assistance will solve the conflict that has probably killed over 300,000 people and displaced–while destroying the livelihoods of–more than two million people. But Prunier certainly doesn’t counsel international inaction until such time as the Sudanese get their act together. Au contraire: the major thrust of his book is to explain how Darfur was dragged into the current nightmare by the conflicts and intrigues of its neighbors, and then to indict the many excuses “the international community” has given itself from taking the diplomatic and military steps that could have stopped the killing, and still could.I’m writing a full review of Prunier’s book for Blueprint Magazine, but I encourage anyone interesed in Africa to read it, and to read Meredith as well.
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By Ed Kilgore
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July 3: The Democratic Message on Trump’s Megabill Isn’t Reaching the Voters Who Need to Hear It
After months of watching and writing about Trump’s huge budget reconciliation bill, I wrote my final assessment today…but then saw a poll that made me rethink the whole thing, and wrote that up at New York:
When top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries chose to exploit a loophole in the House rules, which allows party leaders to talk as long as they want, to discuss at record length the baleful effects of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, it initially looked like a bit of a publicity stunt, albeit it a good one. It delayed for hours a very big moment of Republican self-congratulation over the final passage of this enormous package of legislation. It probably screwed up a lot of congressional flight arrangements to get members home for Independence Day. And it likely put a few kinks into plans for Trump’s own festive July 4 signing ceremony, wherein the president will surely praise himself, thank his vassals, and tell more than a few fibs about what his grim masterpiece will do.
But beyond all that, it’s becoming clear that Democrats need to do a much better job articulating their take on this bill and its profoundly reactionary effects on the social safety net. To those of us whose job it is to listen to arguments over 940-page bills as they chug through Congress for months, it may seem like congressional Democrats have been grinding away at the message that Republicans are cutting Medicaid to give a tax cut to billionaires. Some of them held up signs about Medicaid cuts when Trump delivered his belligerent address to a joint session of Congress four months ago. Yet a startling new poll shows the extent to which that messaging — and for that matter, Republican messages hailing the megabill as a people-pleasing growth engine for the U.S. economy that doesn’t touch Medicaid benefits at all — isn’t really breaking through, as Sam Stein reported:
Meanwhile, the kind of people Democrats need to reach but often don’t aren’t hearing much at all:
“73% of 2024 Trump supporters who didn’t vote in 2020 and 56% of Biden-to-Trump flippers have heard nothing about the bill. These shares are 20 points higher than their Harris supporting counterparts — indicating the urgent opportunity if Democrats break out of our own media silos.”
Part of the problem, to be sure, is that Trump’s megabill is incredibly broad and complicated, and the budget reconciliation process by which it was developed, debated, and enacted is insanely complex and obscure. It’s all about as remote from the civics-book understanding of how laws are made as you can get, and it has been understandably difficult for Democrats to describe it compellingly in a sound bite, a protest sign, a TV ad, or indeed, in Jeffries’s eight-hour speech. It was designed that way, and that’s why half the public isn’t absorbing anything about it, and a lot of others are simply processing it via big, vague party-driven narratives.
The bottom line is that the struggle to define this consequential legislation has just begun. For Democrats, finding ways to convey the horror the megabill inspires in those who have studied it closely, and the concrete damage it will do to actual people, must continue right up until the midterm elections. Yes, Trump and his allies will do many other things that might galvanize voters, from his reckless foreign policies to his cruel mass-deportation initiative to the lawless conduct he exemplifies and encourages among his appointees. But nothing is likely to match the megabill in magnitude or in the malignancy of its authors. If voters march to the polls in 2026 or 2028 with no better than a rough idea of what it means, America will get more of the same.