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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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 26: The Obama Coalition Revisited
It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:
During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.
Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.
There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:
“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …
“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”
Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.
Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:
“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”
Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.