Turkey’s election is a warning about Trump

By BRET STEPHENS

“The totalitarian phenomenon,” French philosopher Jean-François Revel once noted, “is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or — much more mysteriously — to submit to it.”

It’s an observation that should help guide our thinking about the reelection this week of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. And it should serve as a warning about other places — including the Republican Party — where autocratic leaders, seemingly incompetent in many respects, are returning to power through democratic means.

That’s not quite the way Erdogan’s close-butcomfortable victory in Sunday’s runoff over former civil servant Kemal Kilicdaroglu is being described in many analyses. The president, they say, has spent 20 years in power tilting every conceivable scale in his favor.

Erdogan has used regulatory means and abused the criminal-justice system to effectively control the news media. He has exercised his presidential power to deliver subsidies, tax cuts, cheap loans and other handouts to favored constituencies. He has sought to criminalize an opposition party on specious grounds of links to terrorist groups. In December, a Turkish court effectively barred Erdogan’s most serious prospective rival, Mayor Ekrem

Imamoglu of Istanbul, from politics by sentencing him to prison on charges of insulting public officials.

Then, too, Kilicdaroglu was widely seen as a colorless and inept politician, promising a return to a status quo ante that many Turks remember, with no fondness, as a time of regular economic crises and a kind of repressive secularism.

All of this is true, as far as it goes, and it helps underscore the worldwide phenomenon of what Fareed Zakaria aptly calls “free and unfair elections.” But it doesn’t go far enough.

Turkey under Erdogan is in a dreadful state and has been for a long time. Inflation last year hit 85% and is still running north of 40%, thanks to Erdogan’s insistence on cutting interest rates in the teeth of rising prices. He has used a series of show trials — some based in fact, others pure fantasy — to eviscerate civil freedoms. February’s earthquakes, which took an estimated 50,000 lives and injured twice as many, were badly handled by the government and exposed the corruption of a system that cared more for patronage networks than for well-built buildings.

Under normal political expectations, Erdogan should have paid the political price with a crushing electoral defeat. Not only did he survive, he increased his vote share in some of the towns worst hit by, and most neglected after, the earthquakes. “We love him,” explained a resident quoted in The Economist. “For the call to prayer, for our homes, for our headscarves.”

That last line is telling, and not just because it gets to the importance of Erdogan’s Islamism as the secret of his success. It’s a rebuke to James Carville’s parochially American slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Actually, no: It’s also God, tradition, values, identity, culture and the resentments that go with each. Only a denuded secular imagination fails to notice that there are things people care about more than their paychecks.

There is also the matter of power. The classically liberal political tradition is based on the suspicion of power. The illiberal tradition is based on the exaltation of it. Erdogan, as the tribune of the Turkish Everyman, built himself an aesthetically grotesque, 1,100-room presidential palace for $615 million. Far from scandalizing his supporters, it seems to have delighted them. In it, they see not a sign of extravagance or waste, but the importance of the man and the movement to which they attach themselves and submit.

All this is a reminder that political signals are often transmitted at frequencies that liberal ears have trouble hearing, much less decoding. To wonder how Erdogan could possibly be reelected after so thoroughly wrecking his country’s economy and its institutions is akin to wondering how Vladimir Putin appears to retain considerable domestic support in the wake of his Ukraine debacle. Maybe what some critical mass of ordinary Russians want, at least at some subconscious level, isn’t an easy victory. It’s a unifying ordeal.

Which brings us to another would-be strongman in his palace in Palm Beach. In November, I was sure that Donald Trump was, as I wrote, “finally finished.” How could any but his most slavish followers continue to support him after he had once again cost Republicans the Senate? Wouldn’t this latest proof of losing be the last straw for devotees who had been promised “so much winning”?

Silly me. The Trump movement isn’t built on the prospect of winning. It’s built on a sense of belonging: of being heard and seen; of being a thorn in the side to those you sense despise you and whom you despise in turn; of submission for the sake of representation. All the rest — victory or defeat, prosperity or misery — is details.

Erdogan defied expectation because he understood this. He won’t be the last populist leader to do so.

Por Cybernews

GUAYNABO – La comisionada residente, Jenniffer González Colón, animó el lunes a las pequeñas y medianas empresas a utilizar las oportunidades diseñadas por el gobierno federal para expandir sus negocios. Sus palabras se dieron durante el primer evento “Construyendo Puentes Hacia los Mercados Globales”, organizado por el Servicio Comercial de la Administración de Comercio Internacional del Departamento de Comercio de Estados Unidos.

“Nuestro objetivo debe ser aumentar nuestra capacidad comercial y empoderar a las pequeñas y medianas empresas de nuestra isla para que comercialicen sus bienes, productos y servicios en todo el mundo”, comentó la comisionada residente en declaraciones escritas.

La Iniciativa de Exportación de Diversidad Global de la Agencia pretende presentar a las empresas de Puerto Rico contactos confiables, información precisa y recursos listos para usar que conducen al éxito comercial al expandir sus rutas de productos y servicios.

Por Cybernews

“Según las estadísticas de comercio exterior de la Oficina del Censo, en 2022, Puerto Rico exportó veinte mil setecientos millones de dólares en bienes, lo que lo convierte en el exportador número 25 entre los 53 estados y territorios exportadores de los Estados Unidos”, detalló González Colón.

En el evento, González Colón y Arun Venkatraman, secretario adjunto de Comercio para Mercados Globales, otorgaron el Premio al Logro de Exportación a tres empresas: Joyería Krystalos, Avery Dennison Corporation y B & B Manufacturing Corporation.

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AN JUAN – El Panel sobre el Fiscal Especial Independiente (FEI) anunció que el 7 de junio de 2023 a las diez de la mañana, los fiscales presentarán nuevamente cargos contra Albert Torres Berríos, senador por el distrito de Guayama, en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia de San Juan.

Entre los cargos están soborno, y violaciones al Código de Anticorrupción, entre otros.

El martes 18 de abril de 2023, la jueza Alfrida M.

Tomey Imbert determinó que no había causa para arresto contra el senador Torres Berríos, miembro del Partido Popular Democrático (PPD).

Los cargos se derivan de eventos que supuestamente ocurrieron en 2021, cuando Torres Berríos solicitó dinero a sus empleados y cometió acoso laboral. Se sometieron ocho declaraciones juradas para este caso.

Entre los denunciantes figuró el secretario del Departamento de Agricultura, Ramón González Beiró.