Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 102

Hungary and Democratic Decay

Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Hungary will mark a turning point in the country’s modern political history. Either the governing party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will secure an unprecedented third consecutive majority and continue the construction of his particular brand of right-wing authoritarianism—an ugly mash of bigotry, fear-mongering, and corruption—or the scattered opposition and increasingly unhappy voters will surprise Orbán with an upset.

An upset is not being forecast, though it is worth noting that Orbán’s Fidesz party went from 53 percent of the vote in 2010 to 45 percent in 2014. Fidesz maintained its two-thirds majority nonetheless due to shameless gerrymandering, abetted by crafty laws that make it easier for (conservative-leaning) ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries to vote, while making it harder for (liberal-minded) young Hungarians studying or working in Western countries to vote. An additional feature this time is an astonishing government-led campaign to demonize George Soros so relentlessly that, as Charles Gati wrote last week, it has given rise to a new verb in Hungarian—sorosozni—which means to blame the Hungarian-American philanthropist for all the country’s problems, real and imagined.

Yet a few weeks ago in a mayoral race in Hodmezovasarhely, long a Fidesz party stronghold, a united opposition pulled off a stunning upset. To do so on a national scale will require unprecedented cooperation among the fractious and feckless opposition—and voters to choose change before they lose the chance to choose.

Long ago and far away, in March and April 1990, I was in Hungary as an official international election monitor for the historic parliamentary elections that brought an end to four decades of Soviet-backed communist rule.  Former Vice President Walter Mondale led our multinational delegation, which I organized for the National Democratic Institute, in one of NDI’s early forays into the region.

It was a remarkable moment, one repeated across Central and Eastern Europe that spring and summer, as mostly peaceful negotiations and elections brought an orderly end to dark chapters. Hungarians, characteristically, were not so much buoyant as purposeful; the voters would send six parties to parliament, ranging from Left to Right, old parties and new formations alike. Leaders were gaming the forthcoming coalition negotiations as if they had been doing it for years. We were part of the wider world that had arrived to celebrate.

Hungary emerged from the collapse of European communism as the poster child for seamless transitions, and many of us thought we could take this show on the road—and we did, bringing Hungarians to share the keys to their transition success with newer transitioning countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Yet today, a quarter century later, the future of Hungary looks more than a little like its pre-communist past, with more than a whiff of 1930s redux.

As Kristóf Szombati writes in Axios:

Consolidation of power has been a core element of the System of National Cooperation, the name Orbán gave his regime after Fidesz’s 2010 victory, which he hailed as a “revolution” comparable to the fall of communism.

It is sad that Hungary has now come to a place where an Orwellian-sounding slogan, “System of National Cooperation,” redolent of Mussolini’s rhetoric, is the official governing philosophy; where the premier can brag that he is building an alternative to western liberal democracy; and, where Orbán, having in his youth led the call for Soviet occupation forces to exit the country, now acts as one of Vladimir Putin’s best advocates inside NATO and the European Union.

So sad, in fact, that I have found myself this week signing on to a “Statement of Principles” drawn up by an impromptu gathering, convened at the Bipartisan Policy Center, including former legislators and government officials, Republicans and Democrats and independents, scholars, journalists, and activists who care about the fate of democracy in Europe.  As the statement makes clear, we “come together out of alarm that the erosion of democratic principles and weakening of democratic institutions among some of our European allies is putting at risk U.S. peace, security, and prosperity.” We also call on the U.S. Congress to convene hearings on the issue and to work with the Administration “to put in place a comprehensive strategy that dramatically increases diplomatic engagement, development assistance, and security cooperation in support of democracy in transatlantic and NATO countries.”

For such a strategy to succeed, of course, the people of Hungary have to want to get their country back on track toward democratic consolidation. International support can provide useful information, learning and incentives, but we cannot want their democracy more than they do. Elections provide opportunities for a nation to speak to this desire. Let’s see what Hungary says.

The post Hungary and Democratic Decay appeared first on The American Interest.

Poor Sportsmanship

In March, the madness begins. As the travel-team season starts up, suburban parents tailor their work schedules and their family obligations to fit the frenetic demands of their kids’ practices and games. Weekend tournaments, often hundreds of miles from home, require a punishing regimen of long-distance travel and overnight stays, fueled by caffeine and junk food. Checking accounts evaporate as costs mount for league fees, private coaches, designer equipment, and hotel rooms.

For many parents, retirement savings and car and mortgage payments take a back seat to their children’s athletic commitments. A 2014 University of Florida study found that the average travel-team parent spends $2,266 per year per child, while parents of the most elite players spend $20,000 a year or more. The average yearly cost of kid’s lacrosse is $8,000; for hockey, it is $7,000; for baseball, $4,000. Parents consider these expenses to be investments: 67 percent hope their children will achieve college athletic scholarships.

Sporting goods manufacturers, developers, and non-profits are cashing in on the youth sports mania. The working-class town of Aberdeen, Maryland has constructed a 5,500-seat minor-league stadium called Cal Ripken, Sr.’s Yard, a two-thirds’ scale replica of Oriole Park at Camden Yards. An on-site Marriott Hotel overlooks the field, so parents can watch their kids’ games in air-conditioned comfort. The Ripkin Baseball Complex’s other fields are replicas of Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Memorial Stadium, and Yankee Stadium.

On the West Coast, Big League Dreams houses 13 baseball diamonds that replicate different big league ballparks. At the center of the complex is an air-conditioned restaurant and bar where spectators can view the games. The town of Westfield, Indiana has invested $45 million to construct Grand Park Sports Complex, with 26 baseball and softball diamonds and 31 multipurpose fields for soccer, football, rugby, field hockey, and lacrosse. East Fishkill, NY is in the process of constructing a $25 million, 347,000 square foot indoor SportsKingDome complex with a dozen multisport fields. The facility will allow kids in the Northeast to play soccer, lacrosse, and baseball 12 months of the year, just as they do in the Southwest.

The United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA) is the biggest organizing body for U.S. travel teams: Its 80,000 teams have 1.3 million players. The company’s website includes national standings for teams in age groups that begin at “4 and under.” Although USSSA is registered as a not-for-profit, the organizations rakes in huge sums of money from parents who are willing to pay skyrocketing fees. In 2015, USSSA generated revenues of $13.7 million. Its chief executive, Don DeDonatis, was paid $831,200 in 2015, according to IRS filings that are available online. The median salary for CEOs working for not-for-profits of comparable size is $200,000.

The youth-sports industrial complex is new to America. Until quite recently, neighborhood kids transported themselves to playgrounds and vacant lots to organize their own games without adult supervision. They selected teams, assigned positions, made up rules, and resolved disputes. Kids on the field shared modestly priced bats, gloves, and balls. Town leagues were local and free to everyone who showed up. Sports were a way of socializing kids from poor and immigrant families into the American mainstream: The skills learned on the sandlot—negotiating and settling conflicts in an atmosphere of mutual respect—were the foundations for responsible American citizenship. As President Bill Clinton said, “Everybody I knew when I was young played team sports. Everybody. There were church leagues for basketball so people like me who couldn’t make the [school] teams could play. This is really important because the benefits flowed to everybody.”

Today, the sandlot and the Little League have been replaced by tryout-based, multi-season travel teams. This early specialization makes it difficult for casual players to join youth leagues, and, in most sports, youth-league participation has become a prerequisite for varsity high school teams. In 2015 the National Sporting Goods Association found that youth participation in baseball has dropped from 8.8 million to 5.3 million since 2000. Softball, soccer, and basketball have all suffered similar losses. Today, fewer than one in three children ages six to 12 engage in high calorie-burning exercise three times a week.

Not only does the travel-team model exclude lower-class and casual players, it places enormous stress on less-affluent working parents. In 2013, i9 Sports surveyed 400 moms with children in organized sports and found that, in most households, travel sports leads to compromised job performance, financial difficulties, and marital tension. Almost half of the moms say they are less productive at work because of their kids’ sports involvement, and 24 percent report marital conflict over kids’ sports. Unsurprisingly, 76 percent of mothers say that they are happiest when sports seasons are over.

Nor are impossible schedules the only source of anxiety. Bob Cook, a father of four kids, describes kids sports as an “arms race” that he is desperately trying to keep up with. As Cook wrote for Forbes, “If you learn the 8-year-old fireballer mowing down your daughter and everyone else in softball has gone to multiple pitching camps and worked individually with coaching experts, you can’t help but wonder sometimes if you’re doing your child a disservice by not doing the same.”

Fred Engh, executive director of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, writes that parents “behave as if they are watching the final four, world series, and super bowl all rolled up into one.” Although most parents are well-mannered, there are routine reports of parent-spectators yelling at kids, criticizing coaches, insulting referees, and sometimes getting into fistfights with parents of the opposing team. A growing number of parents have even filed lawsuits against coaches for benching or cutting their kids, alleging that the kids were thus disadvantaged in the competition for college scholarships. Ray Reid, a soccer coach at the University of Connecticut said, “I’m appalled by the attitude. My reaction is: ‘That’s interesting. Your son is a mutual fund.’”

The intensive, year-round training that is demanded of young athletes puts them at risk for injuries to tendons, bones, and joints. A 2015 survey in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found that 60 percent of all Tommy John tendon surgeries in the United States are performed on patients ages 15 to 19. Pediatrician Rebecca Demorest, who practices at New York City’s Hospital for Special Surgery, sees youth baseball pitchers ushered into her waiting room at the age of eight. Sports Management Professor Mark Hyman writes that such overuse injuries are a new phenomenon: “Children entertaining themselves at their own pace in their own way simply did not play sports until it hurt.”

We must find a way to bring sanity back onto the playing field, not only for the sake of kids who play, but also for kids who have been priced off of the playing field.

At the same time as an epidemic of overuse injuries plagues club sports participants, an obesity epidemic plagues lower-income kids and puts them at risk for diabetes, heart disease, strokes, joint and bone diseases, and depression. In 2016, children ages 6 through 12 whose family income was under $25,000 were nearly three times as likely to be “inactive”—meaning they played no sport during the year—as kids whose families made more than $100,000 per year. “Sports in America have separated into sports-haves and have-nots,” said Tom Farrey, the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society program.

There is a racial component to this disparity. Up2Us, not-for-profit established in 2009 to promote youth sports, cites a series of studies to show that middle-class white kids are 50 percent more likely to play sports than low-income children of color. In 2013, The Girls Scouts Research Institute reported that half of tenth-grade white girls get daily physically exercise, while only a third of tenth-grade African-American and Latina girls get daily exercise. In 2017, The Robert Wood Johnson foundation estimated that the annual medical costs of obesity in the United States was between $147 and  $210 billion.

Because the cost of inactivity is so high, public health officials demand that we broaden the range of opportunities for kids to play sports. We need to expand the range of opportunities for casual play by setting aside time for pick-up games at ballfields, gyms, and churches; we need to revitalize the local leagues and church-based teams that have been eclipsed by club teams; and we need tort reform so that our gyms, playgrounds and ballparks cease to be vipers nests of frivolous litigation.

Edmond, OK, Bayonne, NJ, and Methuen, MA have all succeeded in expanding casual play opportunities at very little cost to their communities. In Edmond, league coaches have started a weekly tradition of “disorganized baseball.” The coaches make gloves, helmets, and bats available and offer low-key supervision, but the kids direct their own pick-up games. Bayonne, NJ runs a summer camp that combines light coaching with pickup play. The program draws 100 players a day. Methuen attracts casual players to its recreation center with the slogan, “No parents, no coaches, no cost.”

Sporting Goods Manufacturers and major league teams are concerned about declining participation rates in sports and have been sponsoring such sandlot programs. Batters Up USA, a nonprofit organization supported by sporting goods companies, gives free bats and balls to towns interested in hosting sandlot baseball and softball games. “We’re trying to take the sport to kids who don’t have much opportunity to play,” said Jess Heald, Batters Up’s executive director.

The benefits of such programs extend far beyond physical health. After the city of Phoenix, AZ decided to keep basketball courts and other recreation facilities open until 2 a.m., the police saw an astonishing change: Calls reporting juvenile crime fell by more than 50 percent. Reports of crime go up again in the fall once gymnasiums go back to regular hours. The Trust for Public Land’s Green Cities Initiative concludes, “Compared to other crime-fighting measures, midnight recreation is a bargain. With 170,000 participants in Phoenix, the cost is 60 cents per youth.”

And there is also evidence that a more robust culture of pickup play could benefit even our best athletes by introducing more spontaneity and personality into organized athletics. In Best Practices for Coaching in the United States, the U.S. Soccer Federation advised coaches to organize less, say less, and allow players to play on their own. “Be comfortable organizing a session that looks like pickup soccer,” the report advised. The foundation wanted not just more players, but more creative players, like those emerging from the street soccer cultures of South America.

A return to the sandlot would be a first step toward reducing the professionalization of youth sports and returning them to the invaluable tool of civic education that they have always been.

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Seven Theses on the Marshall Plan

“The Marshall Plan must…be viewed as one of the most successful foreign policy initiatives—and perhaps the most successful peacetime foreign policy—in United States history.”

In June 1999, shortly before the 25th G-8 Summit, New York Times correspondent David Sanger reported that representatives would be discussing a plan to forgive roughly $130 billion in debt owed by some of the world’s poorest countries—a plan, Sanger explained, whose advocates regarded it as “a Marshall Plan for the poor.” “The use of the term,” he continued, “is no surprise: Congress despises foreign aid almost as much as it loves phantom tax cuts. But call it a Marshall Plan, and suddenly it’s not a handout, but a noble effort to turn beaten, bombed-out, or broke nations into models of democratic capitalism.” Hardly a day passes without calls for a “Marshall Plan” to assist some impoverished country or region; Washington Post opinion columnist David Ignatius wrote last June that “[i]f you do a Google search on the phrase ‘We need a Marshall Plan for…’, you get about 8,000 different entries.”

April 3, 2018 marks the 70th anniversary of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, which brought into force the European Recovery Program—more commonly known as the Marshall Plan, in honor of its chief architect, the late soldier-statesman George C. Marshall. Under its terms, the United States provisioned some $13.3 billion in aid—comprising $11.8 billion in grants and $1.5 billion in loans—to 16 countries in Europe, a figure that would be equivalent to roughly $135 billion today. There are many outstanding debates about the motives behind the Marshall Plan’s formulation and the impact of its application. Was it conceived primarily as an instrument for Western Europe’s economic resuscitation, a pillar of the Truman Administration’s incipient campaign to contain the Soviet Union, or some combination thereof? To what extent did it generate a recovery in Western Europe, as opposed to accelerating one that was already in motion? How much did it contribute directly to the region’s rehabilitation, as opposed to assisting indirectly (by giving countries therein breathing room to implement structural reforms)? Some observers even question whether it was necessary for Western Europe’s convalescence. Economic historian Niall Ferguson, for example, a noted advocate of counterfactual analysis, speculates that “Western Europe could have pulled through without the Marshall Plan.”

Few dispute, however, that that undertaking was a success, arguably without equal in the annals of U.S. foreign policy. Consider Western Europe’s economic position after Marshall Plan aid had been fully disbursed:

By the end of 1951, industrial production for all participating countries was 64 percent higher than in 1947. Total gross national product rose by about 25 percent. The dollar deficit that had been a major issue at the start of the Marshall Plan dropped from $8 billion to about $2 billion in 1952 and into an approximate balance by 1953. Three-quarters of the intra-European import quota restrictions that Europeans had promised to address were eliminated by 1951. At the end of that year, trade volume within Europe was almost double that of 1947.

The Marshall Plan also advanced the quest for European integration: The Council on Europe concluded in 1949 that “the American policy of economic aid, coupled with the pressure of the Communist danger, created conditions in which, for the first time, the unification of Europe became a practical possibility.” Henry Kissinger assesses its legacy in even grander terms: The Marshall Plan “inspired a new international order by enabling the nations of Europe first to rediscover their own identities in its pursuit, then to go on to build systems transcending national sovereignty, such as the Coal and Steel Community and, eventually, the European Union.”

Why was the Marshall Plan successful? As with much else in history, the answer is overdetermined; its achievements can only be understood by considering a confluence of mutually reinforcing phenomena. The late journalist Frank Trippett rightly observed four decades ago that it “arose out of a specific juncture of event, public mood, and leadership.” Seven factors deserve particular mention.

Seven Central Explanations  

Explanation 1 : The devastation that Western Europe suffered during the Second World War did not destroy its socioeconomic foundations.

The task of the Marshall Plan was to resuscitate industrialized polities, not to fashion new ones: As the late economist Walt Rostow explained a half-century after Marshall’s famed commencement address at Harvard, “Western Europe did not need to be invented, it simply had to be recalled. With its skilled and educated work force, its market experience, and its mature political structures, modern Europe is not easy to replicate.” As generous as the Marshall Plan was, moreover, it is more accurately understood as having accelerated a recovery already underway than as having initiated one: “By the time Marshall aid started to flow, in the spring of 1948,” explains journalist James Surowiecki, “Western Europe was hardly a wasteland. Most of the region’s industrial infrastructure—electrical grids, water systems, roadways, and railways—had already been rebuilt. Trains were carrying almost as much freight as they had carried before the war. Industrial production was rebounding.”

Explanation 2 : Marshall Plan aid gave Western European countries the freedom of maneuver to pursue urgent but risky economic reforms.  

It is unlikely that the Marshall Plan would have produced sustainable improvements in Western Europe’s economic condition had it simply been an act of charity. Economists J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen conclude that, instead, it “significantly sped Western European growth by altering the environment in which economic policy was made.” Without the Marshall Plan, they continue, countries in the region “would have soon faced a harsh choice between contraction to balance their international payments and severe controls on admissible imports.” Marshall and his colleagues concluded that conditioning the provision of aid on the implementation of contractionary policies would plunge Western Europe further into recession. Consequently, explains historian Charles Maier, “[p]ostwar American leaders repeatedly postponed austerity requirements when confronted with French and Italian tax evasion and budget deficits. They let Marshall Plan funds cover budgetary deficits, wagering correctly that growth would ultimately wipe out the deficits.”

Explanation 3 : The United States treated Western Europe as a full partner in the Marshall Plan’s implementation, not as a defeated subordinate.

While contemporary accounts of the Marshall Plan often, and properly, note the scale of its ambition, they sometimes neglect the extent to which it simultaneously reflected an appreciation for the limits of power. Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, executive editor of Foreign Affairs and author of a forthcoming book on Marshall’s mission to China in the late 1940s, explains that his failure to prevent the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government played a critical role in shaping his thinking about various proposals for reviving Western Europe’s industrial base: Marshall “learned in China that the United States could not force solutions from the outside. It could not want something more than its partners did.”

The Marshall Plan was consciously designed, then, to be a U.S. initiative, not a dictate. Near the conclusion of his commencement speech, Marshall explained that

there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government. It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative…must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program so far as it may be practical for us to do so.

He affirmed this point five days later in a letter to Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “[W]e should make clear that it is not our purpose to impose upon the peoples of Europe any particular form of political or economic association. The future organization of Europe must be determined by the peoples of Europe.” On January 12, 1948, Marshall testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the urgency of initiating a European recovery program. Committee Chairman Charles Eaton asked him how he would “meet the assertion…that if we follow out this program, we will interfere with the sovereignty and enslave these countries whom we are trying to set free.” Surprised by the question yet composed in his response, Marshall assured Eaton that the effort could hardly be construed as “a conspiracy for economic imperialism.” The late political scientist Stanley Hoffmann corroborated that conclusion three and a half decades later:

[F]or all its boldness, the Marshall Plan carefully preserved the sovereignty of the participants; they were being incited—prodded, some would say—to cooperate, they were not being asked to transfer power and resources to any supranational agency (otherwise, England would never have joined). As a result, the West European countries did not experience the tug-of-war that has plagued the European experiment since 1950: between obvious common interests in a variety of fields, and the separate interest of each state in preserving its own autonomy and the freedom of action needed to look after those of its interests that were anything but common to all.

Making Western Europe the principal agent of the Marshall Plan’s implementation was triply prudent. First, it neutered the Soviet charge that U.S. beneficence was a masquerade for imperialism. Second, it compelled the countries of the region to subordinate bilateral suspicions to collective aspirations; the provision of Marshall Plan aid, in fact, “was contingent upon each country committing itself to work with each other country.” Third, it boosted the region’s morale: According to the late Andrew Goodpaster, who helped Marshall draft his 1953 Nobel Peace Prize address, the “true heart and genius of the Marshall Plan was that it gave the people of Europe hope, restored their pride, and delivered on the promise of something better. It proposed that the countries of Europe, acting in concert, should tell the United States what they deemed best to meet their needs—not the other way around.” In this way, the Marshall Plan was always sensitive to, and conceived to mitigate, the damage that the war had inflicted upon Western Europe’s self-confidence: The late Tony Judt observed that the policy would likely not have succeeded “had the Marshall Plan been presented as a blueprint for the ‘Americanization’ of Europe.”

Explanation 4 : The Marshall Plan was imbued with, and impelled by, a clear strategic purpose.

The Marshall Plan did not originate in a strategic vacuum. Over two years before it was approved, George Kennan had published his influential “Long Telegram,” which articulated the framework of containment that would shape U.S. foreign policy for nearly a half-century. In a March 12, 1947 speech before Congress, moreover, President Truman enunciated what would come to be known as the Truman Doctrine, declaring that the United States would “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Two and a half months later, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs William Clayton advised Marshall that Europe was “steadily deteriorating. The political position reflects the economic. One political crisis after another merely denotes the existence of grave economic distress. Millions of people in the cities are slowly starving.” Without an infusion of U.S. assistance to underwrite its balance of payments deficit, which he estimated to be above $5 billion, he warned that “economic, social, and political disintegration” would “overwhelm Europe.”

Clayton’s analysis suggested that the Soviet Union could exploit that chaos to extend its realm of dominion. Historian Melvyn Leffler contends that postwar U.S. officials “wanted to redress the European balance of power and to enhance American national security….from their viewpoint, the most fundamental strategic interest of the United States was to prevent any potential adversary or coalition of adversaries from mobilizing the resources and economic-military potential of Europe for war-making purposes against the United States.” The Marshall Plan would emerge as the quintessential example of geoeconomic statecraft: Far from being incidental to or coincidentally aligned with President Truman’s high-level thinking on foreign policy, it was a linchpin of the Administration’s statecraft. According to Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a new history of the Marshall Plan, “economic rehabilitation became a primary tool of [America’s] so-called strongpoint defense of critical geostrategic regions…aimed at building up independent, self-confident, and energetic centers of power capable of resisting Soviet pressure.”

Explanation 5 : Fears of Soviet inroads weakened political opposition to the Marshall Plan.

It is little remembered today that the United States offered aid to the Soviet Union as part of the Marshall Plan. While the Soviets were wary, they did not immediately reject the possibility of participation. Ultimately, though, they came to conclude that the U.S. initiative was rooted in a desire to encircle Moscow: On July 3, 1947, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov accused its architects of trying to divide Europe into antagonistic camps, characterizing the Marshall Plan as “an attempt to use American economic power to undermine the newly established Soviet buffer zone in Eastern Europe.” Just a little over seven months later, on February 25, 1948, the government of Eastern Europe’s last democratic holdout, Czechoslovakia, resigned in face of a Communist uprising; the new leadership quickly aligned itself with the Soviets. Historian Evan Thomas notes that ensuing U.S. anxiety over the prospect of a Soviet incursion into Western Europe was inflated:

We now know that after World War II the Red Army began tearing up railroad tracks in Eastern Europe because Stalin feared an attack by the West against the Soviet Union. Exhausted by a war that cost the lives of 20 million Russians, the Kremlin was not ready to wage another. Because of poor intelligence, Washington did not fully appreciate Russia’s weakness. Top policymakers were aware, however, that the hysteria was exaggerated, that war was unlikely.

Still, the fear of Soviet aggression softened opposition to the Marshall Plan, especially in light of broader political currents within Western Europe:

With popular elections due in Italy on April 12 and the fear of a Communist victory there as well, the Communist Party in France gaining strength in the context of ongoing labor throughout the country, and funding of the interim food relief program about to run out, Congressional opposition to financing economic assistance to Europe under the Marshall Plan simply evaporated.

Advocates of the Marshall Plan stressed the primacy of strategic considerations over economic ones when doing so was politically expedient. Historian Kim McQuaid notes that when they sought to persuade or marginalize isolationist Republicans, “foreign aid often became politics first and economics second. The Marshall Plan was not charity…[but] a matter of self-interest and survival…minimalist conservatives had to cease their opposition to bigger government and support foreign aid as a necessary antidote to Soviet imperialism.”

Explanation 6 : The architects of the Marshall Plan were politically shrewd.

President Truman rejected a proposal for the plan to be called the “Truman Formula,” telling his counselor and speechwriter Clark Clifford that “[a]nything that is sent up to the Senate and House with my name on it will quiver a couple of times and then turn over and die.” Clifford recalls: “It was Truman’s idea that the speech [at Harvard’s commencement] be given by Marshall and that it be totally nonpolitical.” President Truman was adamant that the effort not bear his imprimatur, though, of course, he was perhaps its most important champion: “Can you imagine its chances of passage in an election year in a Republican Congress if it is named for Truman and not Marshall?” He also ensured that the campaign to refine the plan and sell its merits was bipartisan from the outset: “Immediately after Marshall’s Harvard speech, President Truman brought Senator Vandenberg into almost daily contact with Dean Acheson and Averell Harriman, who together with Marshall and other members of the Cabinet launched a nationwide campaign for public support.”

The policy’s architects could act as such savvy political operators in part because they commanded enormous respect in the first place. Just as ill-conceived proposals can gain traction in the hands of skilled messengers, visionary ones can founder in the hands of incompetent ones. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Distinguished Fellow Moisés Naím explains that the leaders

who pulled off this complex project were not merely brilliant and farsighted but also excellent organizers. Such men as George Marshall in the United States and Jean Monnet, Ernest Bevin, and Robert Schuman in Europe combined their vision with astute political instincts. Some, like Marshall, had been wartime leaders and could draw on a vast reservoir of public affection and trust. Others—including William Clayton, Paul Hoffman, and W. Averell Harriman—were recruited from the top ranks of U.S. businesses and brought extensive managerial experience.

Explanation 7 : The Truman Administration embarked on an intense public relations campaign to gain traction for the Marshall Plan.

The nostalgia that contemporary observers express for the Marshall Plan belies the political resistance it encountered upon its initial articulation. Congress was little inclined to provide charity, let alone on the scale that President Truman had requested; indeed, after approving comparatively far smaller sums of emergency aid to Greece and Turkey, it sought assurances that disbursements to Europe would end. Moreover, many members of Congress feared that approving the Marshall Plan would entail economic repercussions for the United States. According to one of its foremost historians, Michael Hogan, there was

a group of economy-minded legislators who were convinced that Marshall aid would aggravate existing shortages in the United States. It would drive up the wholesale price index, they argued, and end in new government controls over the economy. These arguments had more than a passing appeal to a population weary of wartime sacrifices, high taxes, government controls, and items in short supply.

In September 1947, the 16-country Committee on European Economic Cooperation asked the United States to furnish $19 billion in import support; that December, President Truman submitted to Congress a request of $17 billion. Republican Senator Robert Taft argued that “no nation can hope to repay such sums, any more than they were able to do so after the First World War.” He denounced the State Department for embarking on “a tremendous propaganda drive” in support of a program that was, in his judgment, largely tantamount to “a European TVA.” Taft also contended that Western European countries would have less incentive “to make the reforms in fiscal policy which are absolutely essential for their recovery” if they concluded that the United States would unilaterally underwrite the debts they had accrued during the war. Senator Bourke Hickenlooper derided the proposal as “a complete donation program from top to bottom.” Other critiques were even more scathing; Representative Roy Woodruff, for example, charged that there was “something so abnormal, so self-annihilating, about a program that calls upon a single nation to take care of so many other nations.” Selling the Marshall Plan would prove to be a far more demanding task than its architects had envisioned:

Despite evidence of support for the Marshall Plan in Congress and among the general public, it was apparent by the fall of 1947 that many people had either never heard of it or remained unconvinced of its necessity. The Truman administration consequently launched a massive public relations campaign to educate the American public, and it encouraged private citizens to participate in these efforts. Secretary Marshall, joined by other members of the administration, made numerous public appearances before various civic and trade groups to promote the European aid program. Indeed, Marshall made so many speaking trips, especially to rural communities in the South and Midwest, that he later remarked that he felt as if he were running for office.

Marshall was not alone in his Herculean exertions. Take Paul Nitze, then a geoeconomist at the State Department: Tasked with operationalizing the Marshall Plan, he “produced a series of famed ‘little brown books’, one on each of the participating countries. In the course of defending the program in 43 congressional hearings before what he recalls as ‘a very resistant’ Congress he lost some 15 pounds.” The rigorous scrutiny applied to the Marshall Plan before the program was unveiled ultimately helped convert even acute skeptics. Ironically, and tellingly, it was Senator Vandenberg—an erstwhile isolationist whose opposition the architects of the Marshall Plan had feared perhaps more than that of any other member of Congress—who arguably offered the most powerful testament to this point. In a rousing address to the Senate on March 1, 1948, he said that the Marshall Plan’s final text was “the final product of eight months of more intensive study by more devoted minds than I have ever known to concentrate upon any one objective in all my 20 years in Congress.”

The plan’s architects made their case to the whole country, not just Congress. Consider Harriman, who oversaw a committee that concluded, in November 1947, that the Marshall Plan could help convert an “old, compartmentalized pre-war Europe” to one “with a common economic market and strong political ties”:

After his committee’s report was finished, he flew all over the Midwest and West drumming up support in the months leading up to the vote in Congress. Flying great distances in an unpressurized DC-3, he adhered to what one of his companions considered a superhuman speaking schedule. Every day for several weeks he made three stops—in unglamorous cities like Fargo, Boise, and Walla Walla, bastions of isolationism. 

Concluding Reflections

The Marshall Plan was not an unqualified success. Acheson warned President Truman in a February 16, 1950 memorandum that “unless vigorous steps are taken, the reduction and eventual termination of extraordinary foreign assistance” under its auspices would render Western European countries “unable to obtain basic necessities which we now supply, to an extent that will threaten their political stability”; the Marshall Plan proved unable to eliminate this so-called “dollar gap.” Nor, as historian Simon Serfaty explains, did it significantly undermine “the electoral strength of the Communist parties in France and Italy.” It is important, as well, not to get carried away with the innumerable encomia, past and present, to the Marshall Plan’s generosity; in an address last May commemorating the undertaking’s 70thanniversary, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel observed that “George Marshall’s policy primarily had nothing to with altruism. It was a forward-looking policy, and a policy the U.S. adopted in pursuit of its own interest.”

The point of registering these caveats is to safeguard the Marshall Plan from retrospective mythology, not to diminish its self-evident impact. Seven decades on, it is difficult, if not impossible, to convey the audacity of that undertaking. For starters, it “went against the instincts and traditions of foreign policy at the time. Never before had a victor rebuilt the conquered.” The strategic logic that was implicit, if not inherent, in the Marshal Plan’s formulation—that the United States would be better positioned to steward the postwar era in partnership with a revitalized Europe—lay the foundation for the Transatlantic project, which, in turn, came to anchor the postwar order that has now prevailed for nearly three-quarters of a century. Its strategic innovation was rivaled only by its fiscal magnitude: “A $17 billion foreign assistance request was indeed an astounding amount. Even if stretched over several years, it constituted an enormous part of the federal budget. For fiscal year 1948, the estimated federal budget was $37.5 billion, which included $11.2 billion for national defense.”

The Marshall Plan exemplified the kind of “whole-of-government” initiative that contemporary policymakers so often tout yet so rarely seem capable of or interested in pursuing. The late Milton Katz, who served as one of its administrators, notes that “‘it represented a far-reaching consensus between [all parts of the American government]’ which rarely exists today.” One might even say that it embodied not simply a whole-of-government approach, but a whole-of-country approach. Katz observes that the Marshall Plan

began with the understanding and support of the Department of State; other departments of the executive branch, represented in the interdepartmental committees; the president, not only in an official sense, but the president in a personal sense and the president in a political sense—it was his commitment; the Congress; civic and community leadership; organized farm groups; organized labor groups; organized industry groups; and the general public. And it was finally incorporated and published in a statute, available for all to see, and this whole process of explanation, challenge, and eventual decision was renewed each year in connection with the annual requests for new appropriations.

The Marshall Plan’s legacy suggests that the energy that is invested in a pursuit scales with the ambition it reflects. At a dinner commemorating its 15thanniversary, John F. Kennedy declared that it “succeeded because it was conceived and operated on a scale commensurate with the task. It was an extraordinary reply to an extraordinary challenge.” In the judgment of Robert Beisner, one of Acheson’s biographers, the Marshall Plan “succeeded because it was audacious. Leaders slashed through minutiae to achieve large purposes, the opposite of Acheson’s definition of a failure, when people met ‘big, bold, demanding problems with half measures, timorous and cramped’.”

The frequency with which U.S. policymakers invoke the Marshall Plan’s example testifies not only to the improbable confluence of circumstances that enabled its success, but also, it follows, to the strong unlikelihood of its replication. Political scientist Paul Miller cautions that policymakers “need to learn discerningly [from that effort], not replicate slavishly….no policy template from one era should be slapped down onto other problems in dissimilar circumstances.” If the Marshall Plan does have a legacy, then, perhaps it is less prescriptive than aspirational: U.S. foreign policy can achieve great results when it matches the conclusions of strategy to the yearnings of humanity.

Greg Behrman, The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe (New York: Free Press, 2007): p. 339

“A Marshall Plan, on the Cheap?” New York Times (June 13, 1999)

“Are we ‘present at the destruction’?” Washington Post (June 5, 2017)

The $11.8 and $1.5 billion figures come from an entry by Christopher Cumo in James G. Ryan and Leonard Schlup (eds.), Historical Dictionary of the 1940s (London: Routledge, 2015): p. 241. The $135 billion estimate comes from data and a formula provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/community/financial-and-economic-education/cpi-calculator-information/consumer-price-index-1800.

“Dollar Diplomacy,” New Yorker (August 27, 2007)

Curt Tarnoff, “The Marshall Plan: 70thAnniversary,” Congressional Research Service (April 18, 2017)

Michael T. Florinsky, Integrated Europe? (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978): pp. 118-19

“Reflections on the Marshall Plan,” Harvard Gazette (May 22, 2015)

“The Marshall Plan: A Memory, a Beacon,”TIME (June 6, 1977)

“Lessons of the Plan: Looking Forward to the Next Century,” Foreign Affairs, 76:3 (May/June 1997)

“The Marshall Plan Myth,” New Yorker (December 10, 2001)

“The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Readjustment Program,” chapter 8 in Rudiger Dornbusch, Wilhelm Nölling, and Richard Layard (eds.), Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Lessons for the East Today (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993): pp. 190-91

“Europe Needs a German Marshall Plan,” New York Times (June 10, 2012)

“How the Marshall Plan Emerged from Failure: The Real Roots of a Foreign Policy Success,” Foreign Affairs (June 8, 2017)

The transcript of Marshall’s speech is available at http://marshallfoundation.org/library/digital-archive/marshall-plan-speech-original/.

Nicolaus Mills, Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2008): p. 22

The transcript of the hearing is available at http://marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2014/06/48.01.12-Postwar-Recovery-H.pdf.

“Final Remarks on the Marshall Plan,” chapter 15 in Stanley Hoffmann and Charles Maier, The Marshall Plan: A Retrospective (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984): p. 92

David J. Barron, “The Marshall Plan: Then and Now,” Harvard Crimson (June 11, 1987)

“George Marshall’s World, and Ours,” New York Times (December 11, 2003)

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006): p. 97

Clayton’s memorandum is available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1947v03/d136.

Chiarella Esposito, America’s Feeble Weapon: Funding the Marshall Plan in France and Italy, 1948-1950 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994): p. xviii

“The Marshall Plan and ‘America First’,”Project Syndicate (August 4, 2017)

Scott D. Parrish and Mikhail M. Narinsky, “New Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan, 1947: Two Reports,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 9 (March 1994)

“The Plan and the Man,” Newsweek (June 1, 1997)

Barry Riley, The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): p. 148

Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945-1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994): p. 45

Barbara Gamarekian, “The Marshall Plan; When a Triumph Rose from Ashes,” New York Times (June 5, 1987)

Stanley Weintraub, 15 Stars: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall: Three Generals Who Saved the American Century (New York: Free Press, 2007): p. 404

James Reston, “The Marshall Plan,” New York Times (May 24, 1987)

“Demise of a Metaphor,” Washington Post (November 4, 2007)

“Blueprint for Recovery,” American Studies Journal, No. 41 (Summer 1998): p. 15

Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr. (ed.), The Papers of Robert A. Taft: Volume 3, 1945-1948 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2003): p. 362

The Most Noble Adventure: p. 150

William F. Sanford, Jr., “The Marshall Plan: Origins and Implementation,” Department of State Bulletin (June 1982): p. 8

Gamarekian, “The Marshall Plan”

Harry Bayard Price, The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955): p. 64

Barry F. Machado, In Search of a Usable Past: The Marshall Plan and Postwar Reconstruction Today (Lexington, VA: George C. Marshall Foundation, 2007): p. 17

Robert E. Wood, From Marshall Plan to Debt Crisis: Foreign Aid and Development Choices in the World Economy (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 1986): p. 64

The Elusive Enemy: American Foreign Policy Since World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972): p. 65

“The Marshall Plan at 70: What We Must Remember and What We Must Do for the Future,” speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC (May 18, 2017)

“Truman’s Marshall Plan—a lesson in leadership,” POLITICO (June 11, 2008)

Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws that Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (London: Routledge, 2009): p. 246

Brooke A. Masters, “Experts Discuss the Marshall Plan,” Harvard Crimson (June 11, 1987)

Richard D. McKinzie’s interview with Katz, Cambridge, MA (July 25, 1975); the transcript is available at https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/katzm.htm.

“Message to the Guests at a Dinner Marking the 15thAnniversary of the Marshall Plan,” read by Paul G. Hoffman at the Statler Hilton Hotel, Washington, DC (April 6, 1963)

Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): p. 77

American Power and Liberal Order: A Conservative Internationalist Grand Strategy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016): pp. 138-39

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The Gaza Crisis and the Clash to Come

The death toll reached 18 on Monday after a weekend of clashes on the Israeli-Gaza border. Thousands of Palestinians took part in the start of a wave of protests ignited by Hamas, the Islamist terror faction in control of Gaza. As Hamas officials insisted the clashes would continue for weeks, their rival in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, declared a national day of mourning over the weekend and blamed Israel for the violence. These protests are taking place within an explosive context, amid a deep crisis in the peace process and among the Palestinian factions themselves, further increasing the risk of the situation in Gaza escalating out of control. Both Hamas and Abbas share a desire to ratchet up tensions with Israel and the United States, but not much else. Indeed, the recent outbreak of violence will surely only exacerbate months of simmering tensions between the two feuding Palestinian parties as each attempts to take credit for the protests.

Abbas seems keen on instigating a broader clash. The Palestinian Authority leader made headlines last month for calling the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a “settler son of a dog” in a speech admonishing the Trump Administration’s policies. The rhetoric was par for the course for Abbas, who has steadily upped the insults since Trump’s speech on recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December. Yet in the same speech Abbas also directed the bulk of his ire towards Hamas, the group that overthrew his Palestinian Authority in Gaza over a decade ago.

In slamming the Trump Administration’s peace proposal before its release, Abbas is not hiding his impending rejection of the plan. And yet in blaming Hamas for an explosion last month that targeted his Prime Minister and intelligence chief, Abbas is publicly mulling whether to further sanction an already impoverished Gaza Strip. Indeed, amidst increasing concern over his deteriorating health, it appears the 83-year old leader is looking to strike a confrontational tone in the final act of his presidency, no matter the costs.

It’s these costs that are starting to concern Israeli security officials. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman recently accused Abbas of attempting to incite another Hamas-Israel war by cutting off funds to Gaza. American officials have echoed these concerns at a recent White House meeting over the humanitarian situation in Gaza. These fears are well founded. In recent weeks, several Israeli soldiers have been wounded as militant factions in the Strip placed IEDs along border fences. This, coupled with Hamas’s ongoing mass protests in Gaza, as well as any additional economic sanctions Abbas may impose on Gaza, have many worried Liberman’s accusation is accurate.

Abbas’s antagonism is a far cry from his tone just a year ago, when during a White House visit he told Trump: “Now, Mr. President, with you we have hope.” Indeed, the Trump presidency has been a roller coaster for the Palestinian leadership, who initially worried his administration would bypass the Palestinians in favor of building regional support for a peace deal. These fears were largely assuaged when Trump called Abbas in March and told him he was his “strategic partner” before inviting him to Washington. And yet throughout the preliminary talks that followed, reports continued to trickle out that the White House was looking for more regional involvement, stoking long-held Palestinian paranoia of foreign meddling in their politics.

But the turning point for Abbas was Trump’s December speech recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which the Palestinians felt prejudiced the most emotive issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Minutes after the speech, Abbas blasted Trump’s speech, insisting “the U.S. can no longer function as a [peace process] mediator,” a few weeks later he publicly cursed Trump, and then he criticized the U.S. Ambassador to Israel last month. Though the White House chastised Abbas’s language, he’s unlikely to pay a heavy cost at home: A recent poll found that while a majority of Palestinians want him to resign, a majority likewise supports his confrontational stance with the United States.

The same cannot be said for his policies towards Hamas. At the start of the Trump presidency, Abbas announced a sweeping and unprecedented wave of economic sanctions against Hamas. For years, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank had shelled out millions of dollars for select resources in Gaza like electricity and for payments of PA employees, on the condition that they do not report to work under Hamas-controlled ministries. While this effectively created a Palestinian Authority subsidization of Hamas’s control over Gaza, it also prevented a complete humanitarian collapse in the Strip. Fed up, Abbas halted the practice in early 2017, plunging an already desolated Gaza into further darkness. The average Gazan saw mere hours of electricity a day while sewage plants went offline and began pumping into the sea.

Under heavy criticism, Abbas eased some of the sanctions as the two sides inked another reconciliation deal in late 2017. Yet that deal barely got off the ground before the two sides began trading accusations. Hamas allowed PA forces to regain control of several checkpoints in and out of Gaza last November, yet the faction dug its heels in regarding its two most sensitive issues: the status of its civil service workers and its standing military wing. The group insisted that the PA find a way of incorporating its domestic bureaucrats into the budget while simultaneously refusing to disband its military wing, the Qassam Brigades.

It was during this stalemate that PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and intelligence chief Majed Faraj visited Gaza last month, only to have their convoy hit with an improvised explosive device soon after crossing into the Strip. Hamas denied responsibility for the attack, yet PA officials quickly blamed the group for the overall security situation. Abbas then went a step further, directly accusing Hamas and vowing to take “national, legal and financial measures” against the group. Already teetering on the edge of humanitarian collapse, additional sanctions could push the Strip over the edge, leading inevitably to more instability.

The largest question mark is how Hamas responds to the additional pressure. The group’s internal elections have already tilted the balance of power in favor of the local military wing’s leadership, yet the group’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, has charted a pragmatic course by all accounts. He even offered to relinquish Hamas’s civilian control over Gaza (while insisting on retaining their military wing) and to re-align the group with Egypt, the sworn enemy of Hamas’s traditional backers in Turkey and Qatar. Sinwar calculated that reconciliation with the PA and improved relations with Egypt would bring enough economic and humanitarian benefits to Gaza to outweigh anyone who would accuse him of appeasement. Yet in recent weeks, this gamble seems to have failed, forcing Sinwar to keep a very low profile—appearing only once in recent days—and clearing the way for more confrontational elements in Hamas to again come to the fore.

And indeed, the more confrontational elements within Hamas appear on the rise. Setting aside the bombing of a PA convoy, the group’s rhetoric with respect to Abbas and the PA has also reached unprecedented levels, with some Hamas officials describing Abbas as a “microbe” and dubbing his rule illegitimate. Likewise, its approach to Israel is ominously following an all too familiar pattern. When faced with internal crises in Gaza in the past, Hamas has often opted to deflect attention through military escalation with Israel. The recent IED attacks against Israeli soldiers and the mass protests seem to follow this modus operandi. Indeed, Hamas admitted that some of its soldiers were leading the protests against Israel this weekend. While it is not clear that Hamas is seeking an all-out war, these escalations will dramatically increase the chances of the situation spinning out of control.

But a cornered Hamas is not such a clear win for Abbas either. Since the Palestinian split in 2007, the Palestinian public has tended to apportion blame for the continued disunity in roughly equal measure between Hamas and Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. This has changed since the last reconciliation agreement started to flounder, with the majority of the Palestinians now blaming Abbas and the PA for the failure: 45 percent in that same recent opinion poll compared to 15 percent who blame Hamas. With Abbas having long outlived his electoral legitimacy—and with 68 percent of his own public wanting him to step down—his hardline approach to Gaza will only add to the wider Palestinian polity’s dysfunction.

Abbas’s approach to Gaza has also deepened his diplomatic isolation. While his concerns regarding Hamas’s military wing are legitimate, his inflexibility has antagonized Egypt and convinced many European officials that he is not interested in improving the situation for Gazans. The international community has so far been loath to bypass Abbas when it comes to implementing any projects in Gaza, as the world still considers the PA, not Hamas, as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians. However, faced with an imminent humanitarian collapse, looming military confrontation, and a Palestinian President who seems intent on doing nothing for Gaza, some international actors may choose to abandon such arcane diplomatic considerations. In seeking to pressure Hamas, Abbas may ultimately find himself more internationally isolated than he is today and with an even more tenuous claim on representing all Palestinians.

Abbas’s recent combative tone and actions suggest he cares more about his legacy and less about the repercussions of his policies. In Gaza, a cornered Hamas appears to be replicating the playbook that led to previous wars with Israel. Neither side seems particularly interested in de-escalation. As the protests continue, the international community—and particularly those countries with the ability to rein in both Palestinian factions—should work to ensure cooler heads prevail. In the short term, the priority should be to de-escalate and ensure that a new war does not break out. In the longer term, however, stability in Gaza requires dealing with the humanitarian crisis there. For this, Abbas and the PA must be presented with a choice: Either be a partner in bringing relief to their compatriots in Gaza, or be bypassed in the international effort to do so.

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Non to Tocqueville!

Alexis de Tocqueville, the melancholy-eyed, floppy haired French noble setting out for the Mississippi, is not who he seems. A false impression reigns in America, where more have heard of him and his work than of almost anyone else writing in French today. And for a Frenchman who hasn’t been in the United States in over 185 years, it is quite something to see him so frequently rolled out as a liberal icon in the pages of America’s premier publications.

Take the New York Times. On January 13, de Tocqueville made an appearance in a Ross Douthat column questioning “Is There Life After Liberalism?” Just two weeks later he was back in the opening line of a Bret Stephens column on “The G.O.P.’s Bonfire of the Sanities.” Meanwhile, David Brooks wove the forever-young and venturing Frenchman into not one but two of his columns last year, having, of course, integrated him three times into his column the previous year, too. Over the last year de Tocqueville has also featured in Times columns on “How living abroad taught me to love America,” philanthropy, lawyers, Trump’s foreign policy, Charlottesville, and the Supreme Court, and just as frequently in the paper’s books and letters section on topics as diverse as American involvement in Asia and, oddly, Australia.

At first glance, what should be surprising here? Why wouldn’t an erudite figure from the upper reaches of aristocratic France be so often quoted chez les Anglo-Saxons? And why wouldn’t he also be canonized in French intellectual life?  

Nothing at all—until you realize that de Tocqueville was not only out of print, absent from the curriculum, and more or less unknown in France eighty years ago, whilst his name had not come up much even in America since the Civil War.

How de Tocqueville got dusted off is a secret history of how the canon gets made. Elegant, eloquent, an adventurer, de Tocqueville is fascinating. But even more intriguing is how exactly this forgotten nineteenth century politician was enshrined as a liberal icon, obscuring his role that mattered: as cheerleader and theorist of Algerian slaughter.

Unlike his cousin François-René de Chateaubriand, France forgot almost instantly about de Tocqueville, who died in 1859. His French revival did not flow from America, but straight from that systematic, little-examined, mid-twentieth century project: the quest for the anti-Marx.

In Anglo-American conservatism, this quest resulted in the elevation of the thin diatribes of Friedrich Hayek, the results of which can still be seen around us, in the stacks of The Road to Serfdom for sale at CPAC every year, and in the tomes that adorn the bookshelves of many a serious Senator. Not defending conservative thought the hard way (as a set of principles: skepticism, tradition, evolution), Anglo-American thinkers built a cult around Hayek’s work to rival that surrounding Das Kapital—valorizing a theory of capitalism, insisting on economic rules for history—with all the brittle dogmatism they scorned on the Left.

The French quest for the anti-Marx, however, has been far more skillfully executed, and was in all senses more profound. De Tocqueville became the liberal icon for a Fifth Republic badly shaken by the streets of May 1968—their philosophe.

Behind de Tocqueville’s rehabilitation stands the most brilliant intellectual operator of Gaullism, Raymond Aron. Though similarly sleight, Aron was the anti-Jean-Paul Sartre: anti-Soviet and pro-American, anti-Marxist and pro-free markets, a liberal both committed to Anglo-America, and—rarely for a Parisian of his time—frequently visiting Washington.  

In fact, Aron’s revival of de Tocqueville began in America. In a series of conferences in Berkeley in 1963 (which led to Essais Sur Les Libertés), Aron established him as both a competitor and superior to Marx. The project intensified by 1967, with Aron arguing (in Les Étapes De La Pensée Sociologique) that de Tocqueville was nothing less than an equal of Durkheim, Montesquieu and of course, Marx. The first new edition of Democracy in America for the general reader in France followed quickly—in 1968.  

As the student uprisings gathered steam, Charles de Gaulle did not fully appreciate what was happening, and rushed to Germany to ensure the French military tank division with NATO over the Rhine was loyal. But Aron better understood the stakes. “I played de Tocqueville,” wrote Aron, “just as others played Saint-Just, Robespierre, or Lenin.” He knew instantly that the mass protests, armed with the Marxist ideas, had broken de Gaulle’s charismatic authority and with it, had thrown the entire social order into question. (Once he realized this too, de Gaulle resigned in 1969, choosing fittingly to visit General Franco in Madrid on his first major foreign vacation.)

Aron knew he needed to fight back, and that he needed an anti-Marx whose thinking he could use to dismantle the triptych that was on the students’ lips: liberté, égalité, révolution. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon gospel cult of Hayek, which rather than dismantle simply inverts Marxist historical materialism (“free markets must lead to prosperity”) Aron’s cult of de Tocqueville was inspired, the start of a brilliant assault on 1789 by French conservative thinkers focusing on discrediting the revolutionary idea itself, not just Marxist economics.

What delighted Aron was that Democracy in America established a dichotomy between liberty and equality. The more equal men are, de Tocqueville argued, the less liberty they can enjoy because of the conformist “tyranny of the majority.” Better still, in The Ancien Regime and The Revolution, de Tocqueville argued French revolutions always fell back to the old centralized state of Louis XIV. In other words, revolutions are impossible, because state structures are entrenched beyond uprisings. You can never escape the old order. Together, these formed Aron’s anti-Kapital: not only will the state conquer all French revolutions, but liberté with equal égalité is not desirable. Therefore equality—the socialists’ égalité, the equality of conditions—must never be permitted.

Raymond Aron lost the hearts and minds of ‘68, but he won the war. Drawing on careful partnerships with financial and political authorities (perhaps inspired by his frequent visits to the Hudson Institute in DC’s nascent think-tank scene) he succeeded in creating a cult of de Tocqueville and inserting it into the French curriculum. His liberal conservatism, fringe amongst Parisian students at the time would be what the next generation found in their Baccalauréat.

There is something charming about the young intellectual setting sail across the Atlantic, to New York, to think democracy. There is nothing charming about the mature politician crossing the Mediterranean, to Algiers, to plan colonialism.

Who was the real de Tocqueville? In some senses, because that later man, that incarnation, did not endure, this question hardly matters. But when intellectuals collectively create a national monument out of a body of work, what they choose to ignore shows us what they think is irrelevant, revealing their true values. And the truth is, de Tocqueville’s hostility to egalité is hardly accidental in his earlier writing. It goes on to inform all his later work and life.

The de Tocqueville that shaped French history is not the famous writer, but a member of parliament from 1839 to 1851, a man who when he was briefly French foreign minister in 1849 appointed his friend Arthur de Gobineau (the author of Essay on The Inequality of The Human Races, the source of Aryan race theory) as his Chef de Cabinet. This is the de Tocqueville who was the rapporteur on the notorious 1847 Report on Algeria.

“I have often heard men who I respect,” de Tocqueville wrote, “but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women and children. These, in my view, are unfortunate necessities, but ones to which any people who want to wage war on Arabs are obliged to submit.” All this was to de Tocqueville, “a necessary barbarism.”

France’s anti-Marxist Nouveaux Philosophes, who followed on from Raymond Aron, have progressively debased the concept of totalitarianism. They, like Hayek, found it everywhere, in the many pushes for more equitable living conditions, in the conceptual framework of social democracy, and now in feminist call-out culture. But like Aron, they ignored de Tocqueville’s call in Algeria, “to ravage the country.” Worse than deny it, they shrug off de Tocqueville’s championing of colonialism, and with French liberalism’s pact with it, as just a detail of history.

The American cult of de Tocqueville had different roots, but also engaged in cherry-picking, albeit of a different sort. Democracy in America was acclaimed almost immediately as it was published in 1835 as a work staggering genius, but interest in it vanished completely after the outbreak of the American Civil War. With faith in democracy shattered, de Tocqueville read ridiculously and his books disappeared from print.

He was saved from obscurity in 1938 by the historian George Wilson Pierson. In the throes of the Great Depression, and perhaps not by chance at a moment of crisis in faith in American exceptionalism, Pierson reconstructed de Tocqueville’s journey in Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, to great acclaim. This placed him on the radar for the greatest moment of American triumphalism of all: the search to make sense of a destiny now manifested in 1945. New editions of Democracy in America appeared in 1945 (Knopf), 1947 (Oxford), 1951 (Henry Regnery), 1954 (Vintage) and 1956 (New American Library). This flurry of editions were quickly placed on the reading lists of the emerging fields of American Studies and Western Civilization, and soon became a cornerstone of U.S. politics in a Liberal Arts education.

And yet it’s easy to forget that Democracy in America was not written under President Lincoln, but under President Jackson, in the America of the Trail of Tears, and it can only feel strange that a book from this moment in time is the one frequently hailed as capturing some of America’s finest characteristics. True, de Tocqueville, an abolitionist, both condemned African-American slavery and Native American dispossession, and did so eloquently. Yet his democracy stops long before them, in his elegiac passages of the happy slaves at work in the fields, or in his conviction that “the Indians will never civilize themselves, or that it will be too late when they may be inclined to make the experiment.” One would happily toil, one would quietly vanish—that was de Tocqueville’s shrug.

In Algiers, like on the Mississippi, de Tocqueville seems to have found a sense of destiny. Though it might seem jarring to us, his jump from America to Algeria presented no contradictions to him. De Tocqueville saw his work as a colonial panorama: from America, the freed colony, to Algeria the future colony. America was his inspiration for Algeria. Algiers, he wrote in 1832—“it is Cincinnati transported to African soil.”

In Algeria, de Tocqueville found inferiors again. Writing to Arthur de Gobineau (who was by now well into developing his Aryan race theories) de Tocqueville announced that a study of the Koran had convinced him that “there are few religions as deadly to men as Islam.” It was worse than polytheism, “a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.” Degenerate, vile, amenable only to force, that was his Arab.

This is the real de Tocqueville: the politician who saw his vocation as the colonial expert of the Chamber of Deputies in advocating for France to build its own America in North Africa. This is why he wanted both to “ravage the country” but fiercely opposed “the dictatorship” General Bugeaud ran in Algiers. De Tocqueville’s indignation here was that Paris was slowing down European colonization. He was only opposed to dictatorship over Europeans in Algeria; as far as Arabs were concerned, he was a firm supporter of military rule. What he wanted was the white settler democracy he so admired in the United States to emerge in North Africa. The Swiss Colonization Society, he lamented, was sending families to the “wildest parts of North America” and not Algeria, because there settlers enjoyed democratic institutions and pacified terrain.

After the conquest, de Tocqueville rediscovered his enlightened imperialist, exhorting the French parliament not to repeat the worst excesses of New World genocidal colonization “that has dishonored the human race.” But this was not because he had renounced colonialism, but because he believed he had found a better approach, “the astonishing greatness of the British in India.” So infatuated was he with British India that during the 1857 revolt against the East India Company which neatly shattered the empire of France’s great rival, de Tocqueville angsted that a British withdrawal, “would be disastrous for the future of civilization and the future of humanity.” As soon as the so-called “Sepoy Mutiny” was crushed, he rejoiced in “a victory for Christianity and civilization.” A study of Britain in India was to be his great unfinished work: the capstone to his great colonial panorama.

Should Americans still read de Tocqueville? Absolutely. But they ought to consider the flattering and glibly quotable extracts so recurrent in columns in the New York Times less as timeless verities pulled from scripture but nuggets from a life dedicated to analyzing and actualizing empire.

To put it bluntly, the de Tocqueville America needs to grapple with is the writer who saw his hymn to white-settler society as a roadmap of sorts. Reading this de Tocqueville would mean facing the fact that for nineteenth century Europeans, the United States was not only, or even first and foremost, an inspiration for democracy, but also for colonization—that de Tocqueville, like Cecil Rhodes, saw in the great white empire stretching over the Mississippi, the sublime.

Democracy in America is a fabulous historical artefact. I am not arguing that it should somehow be forgotten once again. But it cannot be blindly quoted, as a visionary paean to simple virtues. It’s a lot more troublesome than that. And revealing.

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The Decline of the American Brand

What is the United States in functional, geopolitical terms?

In the words of the great British geographer of a century ago, Halford Mackinder, the temperate zone of North America is the greatest of the island-satellites of the Afro-Eurasian land mass, able to deeply affect the Old World while protected from its daily political eruptions at the same time. World War II damaged or decimated the infrastructure of every great power—except that of the United States.

Moreover, bordering not one ocean but two, the United States since its emergence on the world stage in the Spanish-American War of 1898 has been a naval power. Because of the moral taboo against the use of nuclear weapons, the Navy has always been America’s principal strategic instrument. One cannot deploy tens of thousands of American soldiers or marines overseas without a great public debate, but aircraft carrier strike groups—with their colossal firepower and thousands of sailors—move regularly from one geographic theater to another with barely any media notice. The deadliest navy in history aligned with a unique, resource-rich geography has made America a natural leader. After all, naval power by itself indicates a certain security on land, allowing for the luxury of liberal ideals in the first place.

For decades, the United States Navy has in large measure protected the sea lines of communications and maritime choke points, encouraging a free world trading order and universal access to hydrocarbons. Indeed, without the services of the U.S. Navy, globalization as we know it would be impossible to imagine. Historically, sea powers have fostered liberalism more than land powers. There are no places on earth more conducive to cosmopolitan values than ports and harbors. The empires of Venice and Great Britain, with all of their faults, are examples of this. “Without the Athenian navy,” writes Cambridge-educated historian John R. Hale, “there would have been no Parthenon, no tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides, no Republic of Plato or Politics of Aristotle.”

Free trade, liberalism, and, in our era, democracy and civil society are natural adjuncts to United States naval power. This has been a happy formula since 1945, culminating with President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, which formally completed the process of making the Pacific an American naval lake; and with the end of the Cold War in 1991, when the North Atlantic ceased being contested by American and Soviet submarines.

Now this formula is under great threat, mainly from the United States itself. President Donald Trump’s nationalist, protectionist, “America First” strategy fundamentally undermines Washington’s historic championing of free trade, human rights, and democracy: policies which are baked into the American brand, itself a consequence not only of America’s revolutionary ideals but of its very geography and maritime situation, which provide a deterministic basis for those ideals.

The United States may have overextended itself in Vietnam and Iraq. It may have practiced cynical power politics in support of authoritarian regimes during the Cold War. And it may not have always practiced free trade, as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 most famously demonstrates. But directionally, over the long term, it aspired to lofty values. Now there is an abrupt, directional reverse, with a President who doesn’t even rhetorically support the higher ideals that are the very complements of naval power.

Of course, Mr. Trump supports a much larger navy, up to 355 ships from under 300. But to what purpose? Navies historically work hand in hand with diplomats, since the relatively slow speed of warships permits negotiators time to alleviate crises. Navies function best under a higher purpose. But Mr. Trump has robbed American power of any such thing. To wit, the Administration’s initial withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership has drastically reduced the American vision in Asia from a liberal, free-trading order to a matter of better bilateral economic deals with China and South Korea, and the denuclearization of North Korea. Beating down TPP may be the single greatest self-inflicted American error in the Western Pacific since the Vietnam War.

This all occurs while great cultural, economic, and geographic processes are afoot in Eurasia. China’s Belt and Road Initiative seeks to recreate the medieval trade routes of the Yuan Dynasty extending Chinese power through Central Asia and Iran to the heart of Europe, and from the South China Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Russia is recreating a traditional zone of imperial-like influence in Central and Eastern Europe through the quiet subversion of democratic regimes from the Baltics to the Balkans. The most effective way the United States can impact and thwart these near-term trends is by promoting its own brand of free trade merged with individual rights, which are the bases of interconnected civil societies.

Instead, we are witness to the slow, corrosive destruction of the American brand, ongoing daily behind the breathless headlines, but geopolitically more consequential than anything in the headlines. For the first time in decades, America is consciously squandering the gifts of its geography, which is what has provided it with such advantages over China and Russia in the first place.

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You Can’t Fix Stupid?

As I hope is by now known to readers, The American Interest is embarked on an evaluation of the health of basic American institutions, notably those below the line of political sight, where our nation’s future mostly lies. The origins of this project rest in the comforting ministrations of those who told us after November 2016 that everything would be all right despite the insurgent occupant of the Oval Office, because basic American institutions are healthy. We thought it better to examine that premise than to accept it uncritically.

And we are doing it the way we are doing it because politics is the tip of the social iceberg, and cannot exist without that which floats below. This doesn’t mean that political institutions don’t have their own dynamics and histories; they obviously do. It is a cardinal error to assume a lock-step relationship between economic, social, and political domains, and it is an even greater error to underestimate the damage that bad governments can do even to good societies. So we do not ignore the dysfunctionality of the Congress, the Supreme Court, the party and electoral systems, the workings of American federalism, the budget process, and the rest.

Besides, there is inevitable and obvious overlap: We cannot evaluate the health of our judicial and penal institutions at the Federal and sub-Federal levels, for example, without discussing the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and now their decisions interact with law enforcement and courts at large. We cannot discuss the health of our agricultural and nutritional circumstances without discussing the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, and other bureaus and agencies of both the Executive Branch and the relevant congressional oversight apparatus. We cannot analyze the challenge to the American health care system without taking on an array of institutions—some of them governmental, like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Department of Health and Human Services, and some of them non-governmental, such as the American Medical Association, the nation’s preeminent university medical centers, and of course the major health care insurers. And so on for all thirteen of the institutional “baskets” in our purview.

We have already run seminal essays on medicine, labor, infrastructure, banking and finance, and other of the thirteen baskets. Most recently we have featured an essay, by William Bonvillian and Peter Singer, on the promise of advanced manufacturing as a potential generator of good middle-class sustaining jobs—arguably the greatest challenge before us in an age of continuing if more diversified outsourcing and waxing automation. But as the authors prove, part of the problem we have saddled ourselves with bears less on corporate greed and mindless techno-optimism than on intellectual confusion: namely, generic errors of mainstream economists as they have affected public policy now for decades. It is a sobering but ultimately a hopeful read.

Which brings me back to the subject of my previous editor’s note to the TAI print edition—about our greatest bane being not so much ignorance but excessive confidence in false knowledge.

It’s almost too easy to criticize economists, for much of what they have gotten wrong isn’t even really their fault. It’s more the fault of the artificial disciplinary definitions within which they labor, a problem whose origins go back roughly 80 years ago to the destruction of what used to be called political economy into economics as a supposed positive science and what has optimistically been called all these years political science. This severing, as well as the division of political thought from philosophy, has impoverished our capacity to think synoptically about these subjects because it has disorganized our inherited stock of knowledge into a pile of ill-fitting disciplinary shards.

Besides, there’s no reason to pick on economists above so many others. It is fair to describe economics as an institution, as shorthand for an example of a “stable, valued, recurrent pattern of collective behavior” organized for some necessary or desirable purpose, and that persists whatever individuals may come and go within its aegis.

All academic disciplines fit that description, those of the hard sciences as well as the social sciences. And it most pointedly includes, for purposes of understanding and making public policy, those that live at the juncture of the two, which we might call the “hard human sciences”: genetics, neurobiology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and primatology, to name obvious examples. These disciplines are more like the hard sciences than the social sciences in their methods, rules of evidence, and the material objects of observation, which can often if not always be observed in controlled laboratory conditions; but they are like the social sciences in that they concern human beings, and thus their generation of questions and findings invariably elides on moral and affective domains. In other words, we care in a different way about the answers.

Why raise this seeming esoterica here? Because it provides a tentative unified field theory for TAI’s project of evaluating the health of American institutions. Let’s see how.

Institutions are by nature conservative. They are resistant to change, because change is a burden from a sociological point of view. This has always been true, and as a result post hoc embarrassment in the sciences has been prolific.

Thanks to Thomas Kuhn, everyone knows about the resistance of Ptolemaic astronomers to Copernicus.

Everyone knows how many years, and how many unnecessary premature corpses, it took for the medical profession to accept the germ theory of disease.

Many know that until fairly recently, most geneticists believed that there had been no change in the human genome over the past 10,000 years; though why a process underway for eons should come to a stop just for our emotional convenience never made any sense.

Few know much about what once was the great debate between preformationism and epigenesis, possibly the longest lasting and most embarrassing scientific detour of all time—and one that furnishes the critical contextual backdrop for one of the most revolutionary developments in history: the transformation of gender conceptions still playing out before our eyes.

But here is the rub: None of these and hundreds of other embarrassments had much impact on public policy in days gone by for two reasons: the ambit of public policy was limited before the advent of welfare state ambitions; and the technological extensions of basic science were relatively few and slow to develop, so also few and slow to manifest impact on social and political affairs. Impact still happened, of course, for innovation never slowed to zero, even in the so-called European Dark Ages; anyone who has studied military history, for example, knows that. But the Industrial Revolution sharply accelerated the rate of innovation, in two phases: first the revolutionary harnessing of steam power to an array of applications, thanks initially to the Watt steam governor; and then the harnessing of innovation to basic science, which depended on no particular “thing” or gadget but rather on critical innovation in institutional design.

Ever since, the societies that have pioneered (or adapted) the scientific-technical revolution have been running a string of uncontrolled social science experiments on themselves, with decidedly mixed but hardly marginal results. The whirlwind of change, whether on balance positive, negative, or indeterminate, has rocked societies, and those societies have often found their political equipoise, such as it ever was, battered or even shattered as a consequence. The effects were not limited to national borders either. Three hegemonic wars—two hot, one cold—since the Industrial Revolution (Napoleonic, World, and Cold) in turn reshaped national politics in many ways. In the interstices of these wars the world recovered its social and political ballast only intermittently and, it now seems looking back from the current precipice, fleetingly.

Let’s keep the point as simple as possible: The changes wrought by scientific-technical innovation are far outrunning the capacity of our temperamentally conservative social and political institutions to keep up with them. And the cybernetic revolution, like the harvesting of steam power before it, is not a simple innovation but a generative one that is affecting virtually everything humans do. The Industrial Revolution in its essence substituted machine power for human labor; the cybernetic revolution is substituting forms of machine power for human thought, as contemporary anxiety about the implications of artificial intelligence illustrate. The difference is not trivial, and we frankly have no idea what it means, except that the error rate of public policy through sins of commission and omission both are bound to increase as the distance between our reliable stock of remedies and both the volume and the novelty of the challenges we must face grows.

In short, when it comes to effective public policy making, the smart money is on the proposition that we are bound to look, and to actually get, stupider and stupider as time passes—at least for a good while longer. In America at least, we will probably recover in due course, as we have before. But until we do, fairly or not, the broad social reputation of both science and government—and the elites associated with both—is going to suffer. John Wayne is famous for the remark “you can’t fix stupid.” In a way, the question before us is, just how expansively right was he?

It would be risible to blame Donald Trump for any of this. His political ascendance is clearly a symptom of ambient distress in American society, not the cause of it. His backward-looking mentality stands to make everything worse, of course, but that’s another story for another day. Besides, maybe things need to get worse, possibly much worse, before the American political class will find the courage to confront the yawning obsolescence of our institutional order, whose ossification and decay now gallop before our very eyes. That, of course, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, TAI will continue its own special kind of long march through the institutions. Stick around, please; it promises to be a great ride.

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Political Identity Politics

Columbia professor Mark Lilla is notorious for his opposition to identity politics. Lilla’s argument, in brief, is that liberal “moral panic” over affronts to identity politics, real and perceived, has alienated the “white working class and those with strong religious convictions,” pushing them into the welcoming arms of the far- or alt-Right.  Predictably, this analysis has infuriated many progressives: Yale historian Beverly Gage called Lilla’s writing “trolling disguised as erudition,” while Lilla’s colleague at Columbia, Kathrerine Franke, said he was “making white supremacy respectable.  Again.”  One might conclude that these reactions only served to prove Lilla’s point: According to his progressive detractors, Lilla was not simply mistaken; he was morally corrupt, irresponsible, and bigoted.

As Professor Gage concedes, Lilla raises some good questions, particularly with respect to whether it is possible to reconcile an increasingly strident insistence on diversity, defined as an unequivocal embrace of ever-growing number of cultures and identities, with any common vision of citizenship or civic virtue. But identity politics is hardly the greatest threat to the Republic, or even to a progressive political agenda. Lilla’s critique of identity politics misses the mark because rather than aiming at the bull’s-eye, he directs his fire at a mere reflection of it.

The unfortunate truth is that liberal identity politics is just a symptom of a much larger social pathology, one that many Americans of all races, creeds, sexual orientations, and political identifications share. As some of Lilla’s critics have pointed out, identity politics did not begin in the 1960s—politics has always appealed to identity, even if, at its best, it also gestures to something larger; as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias writes, “politics is not and will never be a public policy seminar . . . people are mobilized poitically around . . . identities.”  Similarly, Franke is right to insist that racial identity politics—in the form of white supremacy—has been a staple of American politics since the territory was called British Mainland North America.

What is new is not identity politics, but politics as identity—the bipolar identifications of the American politico. Today “liberal” and “conservative;” “Left” and “Right,” are, too often, less reasoned positions that could be subject to discussion, compromise, and thoughtful revision than pre-cognitive identifications that come with received dogmas, and require assent to a grab bag of logically distinct commitments and policy positions joined only by their association with an ideological platform that one must take or leave en tout. What, for instance, do opposition to abortion, Second Amendment absolutism, and a commitment to laissez faire economics, or, say, support for organized labor, an expanded welfare state and environmentalism, have in common, other than that each set holds together a historically contingent coalition of interest groups and is bundled and marketed as part of an ideology?

What we might call political identity politics leads us to take positions on political controversies by identifying the correct liberal or conservative position rather than by considering facts and merits. Ultimately, political convictions become elements of a carefully crafted individual self-image, much in the same way certain brands of consumer goods convey personality: flashy Versace as opposed to understated Hermes; macho Budweiser versus urbane microbrew; an ostentatious Cadillac Escalade as against a hyper-tech Tesla; Sean Hannity’s red-faced rage or Rachel Maddow’s low-key snark.

Political ideology has come to be as much a lifestyle as a philosophy. As evidence, consider that National Review has compiled a list of conservative rock songs, most of which bare no obvious relationship to the ideas of Edmund Burke or even Ronald Reagan. It includes, perhaps reasonably, “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd (I hope Neil Young will remember, southern man don’t need you around); implausibly, ”Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who, and “Heroes” by the outspoken poet of the late counterculture David Bowie; and, astonishingly, “Rock the Casbah” by the overtly socialist band, The Clash.

Ultimately the band, the music, and even the lyrics are all beside the point: Political identity politics is first and foremost a validation of the self through identification with a totem. Once the totem is chosen, the content is unimportant—what matters is what my identification says about me. So, what we have is something one would have thought impossible: Expressive individualism nested in group “identity” feathers.

The substantive politics of this strange mash-up are, as often as not, just bullshit. Before you take offense, understand that bullshit is not a term of profanity but of art: In his brief and savvy pamphlet, On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt explains:

Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about “our great and blessed country, whose founding fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.” . . . . the orator does not really care what his audience thinks about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our country’s history, or the like . . . the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. . . . What he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who is sensitive to the greatness of our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, etc.

Just as Frankfurt’s Independence Day orator really doesn’t care about any of the things he’s saying, but rather wants to come across as the kind of person who cares about them, so political identitarians adopt their positions to shore up their image and sense of self as committed partisans. Unlike race-based, feminist, or LGBT identity politics, this is not a substantive politics based on sincerely felt identity but rather an arbitrary politics filling up an empty identity. So perhaps it’s no surprise that many liberals who claim to be dismayed by the widening wealth gap and political cronyism happily overlooked Hillary Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street and the murky finances of her family’s foundation, and many conservatives who fret over moral decadence enthusiastically supported a two-time divorcee, compulsive liar, and serial adulterer for President and—oh yes, let we forget a loser—a likely child molester for Senator.

Self-validation through such arbitrary affiliations is ultimately unsatisfying, as every sports fan understands; such vicarious pride has, in the words of Bertrand Russell, only the virtue of theft over honest toil. As a consequence an enduring sense of victimization unites political identitarians of all colors and stripes—a self-pitying narrative more shrill and angry than all but the most belligerent extremes of identity politics—and far less justified. The self-righteousness and over-sensitivity of “liberal snowflakes” is an evergreen topic for middle-brow pundits, but it may have been conservatives who wrote the script for the righteously indignant ideological martyr. As Rick Perlstein noted in 2006 in The New Republic, the romance of a brave, beleaguered resistance to an oppressive status quo has been a mainstay of conservative rhetoric since the 1960s, when M. Stanton Evans had the audacity to claim, a mere ten years after the McCarthy era, that “for decades Liberalism has ruled the government and the opinions of the United States with little or no effective challenge to its pretentions.”

Today, with two of the three branches of Federal government controlled by conservatives and the third trending rightward with each Trump appointment, liberals have good reason to feel like victims. Conservative victimology, meanwhile, must focus on the “cultural elite” of the entertainment industry and, of course, academia. Conservatives bemoan a campus life dominated by political correctness that stifles conservative ideas and mocks traditional values. But progressives insist that the same colleges and universities are the instruments of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, and imperialism.

Both of these claims cannot be true; possibly, neither one is. What allows the simultaneity is that both groups self-identify as victims—of each other and of a power elite that always seems to side with their enemies. Unlike politics based on substance, where mutually beneficial compromise is possible, politics-as-identity is a competitive team sport where the game is rigged and both sides always lose.  So, if progressives demand “safe spaces,” conservatives must insist on the right to be offensive; if liberals want the inclusion of once-marginalized groups, conservatives lobby to preserve the conventions that kept those groups out or, failing that, mock their antagonists and demand “ideological diversity.”

College students are conspicuous targets, but only poor sports take the shot. It’s understandable that undergraduates, most of them away from their families for the first time, seek assurances that they are the favorite children of institutions that, at least symbolically, stand in loco parentis. What’s worrisome is that middle-aged adults and senior citizens seem to crave the same type of validation. What would David Riesman say, were he still with us, about the relative trajectories of inner- versus outer-directed personalities?

Indeed, maybe this similarity explains why so much such outrage and contempt is directed at the age-appropriate dramatics of teenagers on the cusp of young adulthood, and why pundits and talking heads express shock and horror at the sophomoric behavior of sophomores. The old lambaste the young for the traits they most abhor in themselves. And yet, in the weeks after the Parkland school massacre, a group of teenagers with their college years still ahead of them has reminded us what responsible and thoughtful political engagement looks and sounds like. Meanwhile, the grown-ups have responded like children, with name-calling and personal attacks, as if their very sense of self were being threatened. It is being threatened, because, artificial and shallow as it is, it doesn’t take very much these days to threaten it.

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March 1968 and the Contest of Memories

Fifty years ago, Poland was swept by a huge wave of student protests. It began with a rally at the University of Warsaw convoked by the so-called “commandos,” a group of oppositionist-minded students, on March 8, 1968. The demonstration, which in the light of the law was illegal (because not approved by the communist authorities), was a protest against the tightening of censorship and police repressions. Its main slogan, “We will not let the constitution be trampled upon,” would soon be heard at universities all over the country.

To understand the deeper cause of those events, however, one has to go a few years back. In the mid-1960s, the first postwar Baby Boomers entered Poland’s universities. These young people, born between 1945 and 1948, are sometimes referred to as the “generation of People’s Poland,” because they came into the world just as the communist system in Poland was being established. Socialist ideology, single-party governments and the command economy created the reality in which they matured—they did not know another system. Yet they were also too young to remember the times of Stalin’s terror in the first half of the 1950s; hence they did not experience the fear of repression that paralyzed their parents.

At the same time, sociological research from the mid-1960s drew a portrait of these young people that did not in any way foretell the upcoming revolution. The young were predominantly pragmatic: they believed that achieving a comfortable and peaceful life was more important than changing the world. They wanted to have a happy and healthy family, well-paid work, an apartment, a car, and all the usual comforts of middle-class life.

Be that as it may, an influential circle of politically engaged youth gradually developed at the University of Warsaw around Adam Michnik, Henryk Szlajfer, Józef Dajczgewand, and their older colleagues Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski. Together they organized discussion meetings devoted to sociology, economics, and history, where they talked openly about censorship, the injustices of the political system, and taboo “white spots” in Poland’s recent history. The students met in dorms and private flats, but also attended meetings of the Polish Socialist Youth Association (ZMS) as an organized group—and led the discussion into a zone of debate that was uncomfortable for the authorities.

These “commandos” immediately found themselves targeted by the Security Service. Initially the repressions were moderate, limited to penalties imposed by the university disciplinary commission. Only Kuroń and Modzelewski were sent to prison in 1965, for disseminating their “Open Letter to the Party.” With time, however, the activities of the “commandos” became more and more bold, which prompted the authorities to resort to harsher methods.

In January and February 1968, the youth organized protests against the decision to ban Adam Mickiewicz’s play Forefathers’ Eve, one of the most important works of Polish Romanticism. They organized a demonstration at the monument of Mickiewicz, distributed leaflets, and collected signatures for a letter to the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s parliament. The Minister of Education then made a decision, illegal even by the law in force at the time, to expel Michnik and Szlajfer from the university.

The “commandos” swiftly decided that they must defend their colleagues. Everyone agreed that the lack of a decisive and spectacular protest would only embolden the authorities to squelch any further independent activity. The activists had long considered organizing a major rally at the university, and the Minister of Education’s decision gave them the perfect time to put the idea into practice. The protest was set for March 8.

Although the rally had a peaceful character, it was brutally attacked by the militia and the aktyw robotniczy, the so-called “working-class activists” whom the Communist Party had deployed as a fighting squad to imitate the voice of a society outraged by the intelligentsia’s whims. The unexpected and unprovoked assault backfired: suddenly, the ideals of a narrow circle of “commandos” became the shared concern of the whole academic community. Students who were at the rally by sheer coincidence instantly felt themselves to be members of a great movement. Over the next few hours, stories about pacifying the rally spread like wildfire—mainly through Radio Free Europe broadcasts—and spawned new protests and demonstrations across the country.

The academic unrest reached its apogee over the first two weeks after the rally at the University of Warsaw. In several universities strikes were proclaimed; student rallies and marches were also held in all academic cities, brutally disrupted by the paramilitary ZOMO forces. Thousands of people were detained and hundreds were arrested as students began to demand respect for the constitution, real freedom of speech, and respect for the right to assembly.

Importantly, the young did not reject the system as such, but only demanded that it fulfill its assumptions. One of the songs most often sung at student rallies was “The Internationale.” Yet that fact did not make the authorities’ response any less severe. Within two weeks, the rulers managed to pacify the universities. The strikers were expelled from their courses; many were arrested and punished by conscription to the army. The most severely harassed was the “commando” circle. Between November 1968 and April 1969, based on the provisions of the small penal code proscribing “participation in a secret organization,” 14 people were convicted to prison, their sentences ranging from one-and-a-half to three-and-a-half years.

Party propagandists, along with militias and security agents, also joined the fight against the youth movement. The press presented the student protest as a result of a conspiracy conceived by the “Zionists,” the authorities’ preferred term for Poles of Jewish origin. It was eagerly emphasized that some of the “commandos” came from the families of Jewish communists who occupied prominent positions in the Stalinist period. Propaganda organs tried to win over society by referring to the myth of “Żydokomuna” (“Commie-Jews”), popular in the pre-war Polish nationalist movement.

The first stirrings of the anti-Semitic campaign had come in June 1967, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. The spectacular victory of Israel over the Soviet-backed Arab states upended the Cold War balance of forces. In a public speech soon thereafter, Władysław Gomułka, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), compared Polish Jews to a “fifth column,” suggesting that they were a hidden ally of Israel—a country with which the Polish Peoples’ Republic (PRL) had just broken diplomatic relations.

The words of the party leader were taken up by the informal faction in the PZPR gathered around the Interior Minister, Mieczysław Moczar. By the mid-1960s, Moczar had already become the most important player on the political scene by blending communist doctrine with nationalistic rhetoric. His base included mid-level party activists, military personnel, and Security Service officers. Their worldview, often referred to as national communism, combined chauvinism and anti-Semitism with an aversion to the intelligentsia and a contempt for civil liberties. They valued discipline, soldierly bluntness, and obedience.

Many of Moczar’s supporters were part of a generation of 40 year olds known as the generation of the Union of Polish Youth (ZMP), the Stalinist-era PZPR youth movement. When the system stabilized at the end of the 1940s, these ZMP members were too young to attain important places in the power structures. Later, the promotion channels were blocked; in the mid-1960s, the most important positions were still occupied by pre-war communists. Their younger colleagues waited with growing impatience for some significant political turmoil that would finally open the door to their longed-for careers. For their lack of success, they blamed a Jewish clique who allegedly filled all the lucrative positions.

For Moczar and his people, Gomułka’s speech became a pretext to launch an offensive. The Security Service proceeded with the preparation of lists of “Zionists” and put many Polish Jews under surveillance. By the summer of 1967, they had already begun to be removed from the army and some editorial offices, and aggressive articles with anti-Semitic undertones appeared in the press. However, the real purge was yet to come.

The rebellion of the youth in March 1968 was a shock that again activated “anti-Zionist” resentments in the party ranks. The event mobilizing the ranks of Moczarists was a speech by the head of the PZPR branch in Warsaw at a meeting with local party activists. The speaker stressed that “the organizers of the brawls were Polish citizens of Jewish descent” and painted a devious picture of conspiracy: the children of Stalinist dignitaries, alongside members of the Jewish youth club “Babel,” arousing street disturbances to bring their parents back to power.

Just two days after the authorities pacified the rally at the University of Warsaw, newspapers, radio, and television reported mass gatherings in workplaces, during which workers demanded to “ensure peace and take actions against the initiators of incidents,” “punish troublemakers and their instigators,” and “undertake determined action to put an end to all harmful activities, and to finally deal with irresponsible bankrupt politicians.” “If they cannot bring up their own children, then we cannot we let them lead our work,” proclaimed the resolutions.

The workers’ rallies, of course, had nothing to do with spontaneity—they were spectacles directed by PZPR activists from the party’s factory and district committees. Participants of the manifestation were given placards with slogans like “Clean the party of the Zionists”, “Zionists to Dayan,” and “More workers’ children to universities.” The events of the following weeks and months were to be accompanied by an unprecedented propaganda campaign aiming to foster hatred for Polish Jews and for the allegedly privileged intelligentsia.

The campaign to unmask hidden enemies was accompanied by ostentatious concern for the good name of Poland. The aim of the “Zionist conspiracy,” it was said, was to profane Poland’s national martyrdom and erase the memory of the Poles’ heroic past. The “anti-Zionist” propaganda devoted immense space to the “slanders” of the Western press about Polish-Jewish relations during the German occupation and condemned Western historians who wrote about cases of Poles informing on Jews who had been in hiding.

The denouncements signed by “honest citizens,” “plant activists” or “teaching staff” flowed into the Central Committee, radio, and television. The names of “cosmopolitans,” “Zionists,” “members of socio-literary salons” and “people to whom the good of the nation was an alien concept” were enumerated. It was demanded that “Poland be purged of damage-doers.”

Even the full opening of the archives does not allow us to estimate the size of the anti-Semitic purges of these few spring months. It is known that nearly 500 people were thrown out of central offices and institutions such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Polish Scientific Publishers, the Nuclear Research Institute, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and the State Reserves Office. To this number should be added dozens of lecturers expelled from universities. In spite of the myths accumulated over the years, the victims of the purge were mainly Polish Jews who were not connected with the communist power elite: scientists, doctors, lawyers, actors, engineers, teachers, and students.

By April, the party’s authorities had already decided “that the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should prepare an instruction on the matter of departure of Polish citizens of Jewish origin who would like to emigrate.” Thus began the last exodus of Jews from Poland.

The authorities wanted to create the appearance that “Zionists” left Poland voluntarily, which would confirm their propaganda about a fifth column in the country made up of disloyal citizens. In fact, the departures were more like deportations, albeit employing a more sophisticated form of coercion—both psychological and material—than physical compulsion.

Polish Jews—and those recognized as such by security apparatus officers—were losing their chance for a normal life in the People’s Republic of Poland. They were thrown out of work and deprived of retirement pensions. Anti-Semitic inscriptions appeared on their doorways, while their phones rang at night with threatening calls. Their individual motivations for emigration varied, but the most common included worries about their futures, the desire to pursue a chosen profession (especially important in the case of expelled students), and fear of physical assault.

When they said their farewells at Warsaw’s Gdański Railway Station—from which trains departed to Vienna, the first stop on the emigration route—it was clear that this was a permanent departure. Under the regulations in force at the time, Jews leaving Poland had to renounce their citizenship; in return they received a “travel document” allowing them a single crossing of the border of the PRL.

In total, 13,000 Polish Jews left the country between 1968 and 1971. March’s consequences for Polish science and culture were devastating: Nearly half a thousand academic lecturers, 200 journalists, 100 musicians, and dozens of actors and filmmakers emigrated.

In time, the events of 1968 came to take on a dual character in Poland. The year symbolized not only the rebellion of the young intelligentsia against the authoritarian order but also the marriage of the communist dictatorship with nationalism. In the underground press of the 1980s, “March language” became shorthand for the particular rhetorical blend of anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and national megalomania unleashed by the authorities.

After the fall of communism, the memory of 1968 became an arena of conflict—one of many—dividing the political elites who grew out of Solidarity. Most of the “commandos” as well as former dissidents from the March generation played a leading role in the opposition of the 1980s, participated in the political transformation of 1989, and for the next two decades shaped Poland’s political life and its major media. The most important rallying cries of the Left and center were strengthening liberal democracy, building a middle class, and integration with the European Union.

On the other hand, right-wing conservative circles questioned the shape of the Third Polish Republic, considering it the fruit of an immoral compromise between part of the opposition and the leadership of the Communist Party. In the narrative of this camp, the postulates of lustration and de-communization were essential, as was the necessity to defend the Christian, Catholic identity of Poland and “national tradition” against the Left and the secular influences of the European Union. The deracinated cosmopolitan elites were set against the patriotic people.

As early as the mid-1990s, there appeared arguments that “Michnik’s salon,” the circle around Gazeta Wyborcza, and several left-liberal parties “appropriated March,” allegedly exaggerating their merits shown in 1968 and imposing their own interpretation of this protest. While the liberal center wanted to see 1968 as a rebellion of the intelligentsia against censorship and anti-Semitism, the right wing viewed the March strikes and demonstrations as an anti-communist and anti-Soviet upsurge, a continuation of the centuries-long struggle by the Poles against their invaders. What for some was a student revolution, for others was a national uprising.

As the national conservative camp increasingly gained influence on the political scene, the conflict between contesting historical memories also sharpened. The double electoral victory of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in 2005’s parliamentary and presidential elections initiated the construction of a completely new narrative about the postwar history of Poland—with an altogether different set of historical heroes and anniversaries.

Right-wing journalists, and with time politicians, increasingly came to emphasize the important role played by the “cursed soldiers” who formed the anti-communist guerilla movement between 1944 and 1947. They stressed the armed struggle against the Soviet-imposed communist regime as a key experience in the history of the nation. In newspapers sympathetic to the PiS and in the texts of some historians, the phrase “anti-communist uprising” appeared more and more often. In this view, the activity of the opposition during the Polish People’s Republic came to lose its luster, seen as too soft and conciliatory. The “round table” of 1989 was presented as an act of national betrayal, allegedly committed by Michnik and Kuron, who (the PiS claimed) suspiciously colluded with the leadership of the PZPR. According to many right-wing journalists, the communists should have been tossed in prison rather than negotiated with. In the national pantheon the place of Solidarity leaders like Lech Wałęsa was to be taken by guerrilla commanders whose clandestine nicknames, pronounced with reverence, made the core of a new historical narrative.

While for leftist and liberal circles, March ’68 constituted the founding myth of Polish democracy, forged by the elites of the dissident movement, the national Right looked at it with increasing suspicion. The group of “commandos” was discredited as connected with the communist movement and thus alienated from the nation. It was emphasized that the real backbone of freedom was not the leftist intelligentsia, but the nation following the voice of the Church.

In addition, some journalists identified with the broadly understood right-wing community were inclined to believe that the youth rebellion was a result of communist provocation. According to this theory, protesting students were only pawns in the game for power between party Jews and party anti-Semites. In online discussions and niche newspapers, various conspiracy theories abounded, their common denominator being the conviction that the events of 1968 were entirely “Jewish intrigue,” and that the purge and emigration were concocted by Jewish Stalinists to deflect responsibility for crimes committed on the Poles. Although these mostly anonymous voices cannot be unambiguously equated with the position of any right-wing group, they remained a key part of the social memory of March.

Another double PiS electoral victory in 2015 even more closely linked the sphere of historical memory with current politics. Jarosław Kaczyński’s party included in its program a separate chapter devoted to “identity and historical policy,” which was to constitute “an extremely important dimension of foreign policy and the existence of our country in the world.”

It soon turned out that the so-called “historical policy” was indeed a priority for the new government. Under the slogan “regaining of memory,” public media and institutions (which were quickly filled by PiS appointees) conducted a large-scale campaign to commemorate the “cursed soldiers.” Characteristically, the boundaries between the past and the present became blurred. The story of heroic partisans fighting against communists—reproduced in speeches by politicians, art exhibitions, television programs, and schools—was treated by the rulers as part of the current policy. The government dressed up its struggle against the opposition in historical costumes.

Genealogical investigations have featured prominently in the “regaining of memory” advertised by PiS. In 2013, three leading right-wing journals published the book Resortowe dzieci (Ministerial Children), which the party has since embraced. The book argues that all the pathologies and iniquities of the Third Polish Republic stem from the fact that the elites—media, business, political and academic—were taken over by the descendants of the communist police and party apparatchiks. The authors devote disproportionate attention to the circle of “commandos” and others from the March generation, and eagerly point out the Jewish names (real or imaginary) of the parents of former dissidents and prominent figures of post-1989 public life. The similarities to the communist propaganda of 1968 are striking: once again, opponents of the ruling party were attacked by being reminded whose children they were. The authors of Ministerial Children even cite the same reports of the Security Service that were used in 1968 by Party journalists.

Ministerial Children has achieved record sales. The publication was enthusiastically received by PiS politicians as well as by right-wing columnists. They praised the “courage of the authors” who did not hesitate to “break the largest taboo of the Third Republic of Poland” and reveal the truth about the “red dynasties.”

Since then, the concept of “ministerial children” has become a permanent feature of Polish political discourse. The Law and Justice Party now openly disparages the “bad origin” of its opponents. The elite circles influencing the political, intellectual, and economic life of Poland are the “spiritual heirs” of communists, the party has argued, so they should be replaced, as one PiS deputy memorably put it, by “genetic patriots.” Conservatives and nationalists often referred to Poland from 1989 to 2015 as “Ubekistan,” a state ruled by descendants of “ubeks” (a derogatory term for Security Service officers). The PiS victory in the parliamentary elections was presented as the fulfillment of national history—the ultimate triumph of the descendants of the “cursed soldiers” over the descendants of traitors.

Jaroslaw Kaczyński, although including himself in the March generation, has accordingly sought to distance himself from the “commandos” circle. “It consisted of people who, in the vast majority—either personally or at least through close family ties—were involved in the support of communist rule,” Kaczyński wrote in his recently published autobiography. “They did not have much in common with the authentic Polish political traditions.”

The “identity-historical policy” exerted by the new government has also affected the sphere of diplomacy. PiS has undertaken a number of activities to popularize abroad their account of the “dramatic” and “heroic” history of Poland in the 20th century, and to fight against supposed slanders affecting its good name. The Polish government has categorically protested against the term “Polish concentration camps” being used in the press, seeing in it “an attempt to transfer on Poles the blame for German crimes,” as Kaczyński put it in a recent interview. PiS politicians equally resolutely reject all critical opinions about the attitude of Polish society towards the Holocaust. Contrary to the opinion of most historians, they stress that the cases of complicity in murdering Jews were few and limited to individuals from the “social margins.” The defense of the truth about the heroic attitude of the nation has been recognized as the essence of the Polish raison d’état. “Polish history should be the queen of world memory,” said Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki at a recent press conference.

In January, PiS deputies passed an amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, introducing a provision on a penalty of up to three years for anyone who “ascribes responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish Nation or the Polish State for the crimes committed by Third German Reich.” The provision outraged the academic community and part of the public, who feared the restriction of freedom of speech. The Israeli authorities also fiercely protested (seemingly to the surprise of PiS), seeing in the new law an attempt to gag the mouths of Holocaust survivors.

Celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the student rebellion have now been unexpectedly colored by the current context. In response to criticism from abroad and a large part of the Polish elite, PiS politicians and pro-government journalists have unwittingly reached for arguments heard in the communist propaganda of 1968.

“The [fifth] column in Poland, already unlimited, feeling external support, attacks falsely and extremely hatefully and brutal [sic] Your Country,” began one screed on Facebook by Krystyna Pawłowicz, one of the party’s leading politicians. “A state, which, in its goodness,” Pawłowicz continued, “allowed them to join the Sejm, to put together organisations and media, and yet allow [sic] their naivety to lie … on Polish state television…They are looking forward to the death of Poland.”

Similarly, journalists of public media have advised opposition politicians to “give up Polish citizenship and change it to citizenship of Israel.” The leading publicists of the conservative-right media have resorted to anti-Semitic insults, calling Israeli politicians “greedy scabs.” Activists of the opposition have been reprimanded for the (allegedly) Jewish names of their ancestors, and press caricatures have compared the Soviet red star to the Star of David.

Law and Justice activists have written about a “campaign of anti-Polish slanders,” engineered by secret agreement between Germany and Israel. They have attacked the “global Jewish milieu” which allegedly wants to blame Poland for the Holocaust, to humiliate it and enforce upon it staggering reparations. Internet forums and social networks have swarmed with anti-Semitic insults and appeals to “purify Poland from Jews.” Even in the official statements of the ruling politicians there have been implications that journalists critical of the PiS are “foreigners” by descent.

On the other hand, the convergence of the two press campaigns—the present one and that of 1968—was repeatedly pointed out during celebrations of the 50th anniversary of March organized by academic circles. Numerous quotes from the contemporary press were put on display at the anniversary exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and its curators wrote about the revival of “the rhetoric of hatred.” In response, the Minister of Culture, to whom the museum is subordinated, expressed his indignation at “its very deep political commitment” and suggested an imminent change in the management.

The March anniversary celebrations have been celebrated separately by the ruling elite and the former student leaders. Official ceremonies took place almost without the participation of the latter group. It is also telling that the Israeli ambassador, Anna Azari, did not attend the government’s celebration. On March 8 she participated (along with U.S. Ambassador Paul W. Jones) in independent celebrations organized at the Gdański Railway Station.

Attitudes towards the March anti-Zionist campaign have also overlapped with contemporary political loyalties. Opponents of the PiS were inclined to stress that the campaign against Jews in 1968 was supported by a significant part of the society and increased the PZPR’s popularity. Sympathizers and representatives of the government camp, on the contrary, presented the anti-Semitic purge as top-down, planned and imposed by a regime that was alienated from the nation.

This tone dominated in the anniversary speech of Prime Minister Morawiecki. His exceptionally long speech was devoted entirely to the “unjust March mythology.” The head of the government argued that “that country [the People’s Republic of Poland] was not an independent state,” and that the anti-Semitic purges were carried out “in the occupied homeland” and had nothing to do with the Poland that fought for its freedom. The Prime Minister also stressed that the fate of Jews expelled in 1968 must be “seen in the context of 13 million Poles murdered and expelled during World War II.” He finally admonished those gathered that while condemning anti-Semitism, they should “not forget about the anti-Polonism spreading in the world.”

Surprisingly, the tone of the majority of official addresses starkly contrasted with the speech of the President, also from PiS, who had until now sung the same tune as his party. Andrzej Duda paid homage to both the “commando” community and other participants of the student revolt, saying: “You are the heroes of our freedom… No matter what you think today, what kind of views you have and profess. For Polish freedom, for Polish independence, you are monumental characters.”

A significant part of his short but emotional speech was devoted to the victims of the 1968 purge. “I, as President, bow my head before those who were then expelled, before the families of those who were killed then. I want to tell them: please forgive, please forgive the Republic of Poland, please forgive the Poles, forgive Poland of the time, for having perpetrated such a shameful act.”

Andrzej Duda spoke these words in the courtyard of the University of Warsaw, in the very same place where the famous rally took place 50 years earlier. Now also a crowd gathered there, largely composed of former “commandos” and participants of the student protests. The speech of the head of the state was interrupted with whistles and shouts of “disgrace.” Despite the conciliatory content of his address, for those gathered at the University courtyard the President represented PiS, the party responsible for unleashing a nationalist campaign.

It was a telling scene. It clearly showed that March 1968 is not at all seen as part of Poland’s common national history, but as no other anniversary symbolizes the conflict currently dividing Polish society.

Z. Bauman, Wzory sukcesu życiowego młodzieży warszawskiej [in:] Młodzież epoki przemian, eds. R. Dyoniziak, Warszawa 1965.

For an example of how the government has conceived this new historical narrative around Polish heroism, see The Unconquered, an animated film commissioned by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q88AkN1hNYM.

See Aleksandra Rybińska, “Polska pod presją,” Sieci, 4/2018, p. 20-25.

The post March 1968 and the Contest of Memories appeared first on The American Interest.

What Economists Don’t Know About Manufacturing

Robert Solow developed the field of growth economics by demonstrating that what he termed technological and related innovation was the dominant causative factor in economic growth.1 He won the Nobel Prize in 1987 by finally identifying (only 211 years after the publication of the Wealth of Nations) the long-invisible behemoth in the classical economics parlor: a demonstrated theory of economic growth.

But there was a problem. Solow found that economic growth was “exogenous” to the approaches of his still-dominant school of neoclassical economics. The variables behind innovation were simply too complex to fit within 20th-century metrics-driven neoclassical theories. While mainstream economics focused on markets because they can be modeled, it was unable to model the complex of factors behind economic growth that lay outside the market system as such. The central concept of mainstream economics is dynamic equilibrium: Market signals drive meeting points between supply and demand, such that even as change is constant the net consequence remains equilibrium. Innovation-based growth, however, is a dynamic system that is not, cannot be, in equilibrium. Features like the organization of innovation systems simply did not fit with supply and demand curves. 

Of course, an economics school without a functioning theory of growth appeared entirely unacceptable to many, and a group of “New Growth Theory” economists, initially led by Paul Romer,2 worked to make growth theory “endogenous”; in other words, to somehow put it into an analytical, neoclassical box. But this has proven to be such a hard problem that many economists have sought more manageable and measurable projects like those of behavioral economics.

Its inability to grapple with innovation systems has left economics in a particularly difficult situation when it comes to analyzing the American manufacturing sector. Manufacturing, and especially the initial production of new technologies, must be seen as part of the innovation system. It is an autonomously creative stage in which a new product must evolve through prototyping, product definition, and production design from an idea into both a marketable and produce-able good. This often requires a re-examination of the underlying science behind the innovation. While the innovation leaders of other nations, including Germany, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now China, have focused on “manufacturing-led” innovation,3 those in the United States still mostly think that R&D is the only key to innovation, and that all the rest somehow takes care of itself. 

It used to, at least relatively speaking, but over time the delinking of innovation from production has put the United States increasingly at a competitive disadvantage. Many other better-known factors play into the problems of the American economy, but the drag that comes from ignoring the innovative power of manufacturing technique has been hugely important, too. Whatever the reasons for the oversight—the biases of classical economics, the path-dependency effects of the post-World War II “pipeline” model that emphasized federally funded research universities and basic research—if we want to recoup our leadership and ensure social comity and peace, we must stop ignoring this critical connection. 

Manufacturing’s Lost Decade

The U.S. manufacturing sector experienced a devastating decade between 2000 and 2010, from which it has only partially recovered. The decline is illustrated by five measures: employment, investment, output, productivity, and trade.

Employment: Over the past 50 years manufacturing’s share of gross domestic product (GDP) shrank from 27 percent to 12 percent. For most of this period (1965-2000), manufacturing employment remained constant at about 17 million; in the decade from 2000 to 2010 it fell by almost a third, to under 12 million, recovering by 2015 to only 12.3 million.4 All manufacturing sectors saw job losses between 2000 and 2010, with sectors most prone to globalization displacement, led by textiles and furniture, suffering massive losses.5

Investment: The fixed capital investment of manufacturing (plant, equipment, information technology, and so on), actually declined 1.8 percent in the 2000s when adjusted for cost—the first time this has occurred since data collection began in 1947. It declined in 15 of 19 industrial sectors and continues at low levels.6

Output: U.S. manufacturing output grew only 0.5 percent per year between 2000 and 2007, and during the Great Recession of 2007-09 fell by a dramatic 10.3 percent. Even as GDP began to slowly grow again (in what has been the slowest economic recovery in total GDP in 60 years), manufacturing output remained flat and has only recently returned to pre-recession levels.7

Productivity: Recent analysis shows that although the productivity growth rate in manufacturing ran at 3-4 percent per year between 1989 and 2000 while the sector was absorbing the gains of the IT revolution, it fell to only 1.7 percent per year between 2007 and 2014.8 Because productivity and output are tied together, the decline and stagnation in output tracks with the decline in productivity in this period. Assuming that our metrics are appropriate for a changing economic environment, compared with 19 other leading manufacturing nations, the United States was 10th in productivity growth and 17th in net output growth.9 Though still increasing, U.S. productivity growth remains at historically low levels; so productivity increases alone cannot account for the decline in manufacturing employment. 

Trade: The decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector is made clear by its manufacturing trade deficit. In 2015 the United States ran a trade deficit of $832 billion in manufactured goods. In 2017 the total included a $110 billion deficit in advanced technology products, a deficit that has been growing since 2002.10

Trading Places: China moved from 5.7 percent of global manufacturing output in 2000 to 19.8 percent in 2011, passing the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing power. Since then, the gap has widened further. Manufacturing value-added in China totaled $2.56 trillion in 2012 compared with $1.99 trillion for the United States.11 The U.S. share of world manufacturing value-added declined from 18.1 percent in 2010 to 17.4 percent in 2012, and the decline was primarily against China’s growing share. In the first half of 2016, China’s global exports in manufactured goods totaled $935 billion, 68 percent more than the $555 billion of U.S. exports; this is striking because in 2000, U.S. manufactured exports were three times larger than Chinese exports.12

The labor profile derangement caused by this economic shift has resulted in growing social disruption.13 While most Americans once assumed we were becoming one big middle class—defined socially in the popular imagination as opposed to economically—instead a working class that has been facing declining incomes is now in clear, angry view. For example, full-year employment of men with high school but not college degrees went from 76 percent in 1990 to 68 percent in 2013.14 The share of these men who did not work at all went from 11 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2013. Importantly, the median income for men without high school diplomas fell by 20 percent between 1990 and 2013; for men with high school diplomas or some college, it fell by 13 percent.15 

Because men dominated the production workforce, the decline of American manufacturing in the 2000s hit them particularly hard. Overall, real household income, measured both at the median and the mean, declined between 1999 and 2014.16 Importantly, there is a growing gap between median household income—the statistical center of the middle class—and average household income, which includes the higher gains going to the upper-middle and upper classes.17 This spells middle-class decline. 

It also spells growing income inequality. As labor economist Richard Freeman put it, “inequality is now at Third World levels.”18 It can be traced to the stagnation in college graduation rates since the mid-1970s: Workforce skill requirements kept growing but educational output, as state support of higher education waned, failed to keep up.19 Those who had the education captured a wage premium, those without it, the opposite. Meanwhile, the one-third decline in better-paying manufacturing jobs in the 2000s exacerbated the inequality split as the definition of the middle class shifted over time: In other words, employment in manufacturing has proven for many to be a downward way out of the middle class. The manufacturing decline curtailed what had been a critical pathway to the middle class for working-class families. This wasn’t just a white working-class problem: African-Americans make up 10 percent of the manufacturing workforce and Hispanics 16 percent; the decline restricted a pivotal middle-class route for those sub-communities.20  

The massive trade imbalance in manufacturing hit many industrial communities especially hard.21 Those areas that faced direct impacts from Chinese imports sustained an average income loss per adult per year of $549 between 1990 and 2007. This was offset by per capita Federal adjustment assistance of only $58. Job loss to trade with China was 2.4 million between 1999 and 2011. As Nobel economist Michael Spence has found, “Globalization hurts some subgroups within some countries, including in advanced economies. . . . The result is growing disparities in income and employment across the U.S. economy, with highly educated workers enjoying more opportunities and workers with less education facing declining employment prospects and stagnant incomes.”22

The Significance of Manufacturing Employment

Employment in the manufacturing sector can be viewed as an hourglass.23 At the center, the narrow point of the hourglass, is the production moment. But manufacturing employment is not subsumed by that moment. Pouring into the production moment is a much larger employment base that includes those working in resources, those employed by a range of suppliers and component makers, and the innovation workforce—the roughly 60 percent of scientists and engineers employed by industrial firms. Flowing out of the production moment is another, larger host of jobs, in distribution systems, retail and sales, and maintenance of the product over its life cycle both within and beyond the main production company. The employment base at the top and bottom of the hourglass is far larger than the production moment itself. 

Arranged throughout the hourglass are lengthy and complex value chains of firms involved in the production of the goods—from resources to suppliers of components to innovation, production, and finally distribution, retail, and life cycle—a great array of skills and firms, much of which we count as services. But these services are tied inextricably to manufacturing; if we removed the production element, the value chains of connected companies snap. While the lower base of the hourglass, the output end, may be partially restored if a foreign good is substituted for a domestic one, the firms involved will still be disrupted. The upper part of the hourglass, the input end, with its firms and employees, doesn’t get restored by import substitution. One major study of manufacturing value-added indicates that when the full hourglass effects are considered, manufacturing may amount to a third of the economy.24

When these complex value chains are disrupted, it is hard to put them back together. That’s why, historically, once the U.S. economy loses an economic sector it tends not to come back. It also loses the potential to innovate in the sector. This is a key reason why manufacturing decline is so consequential.

Produce There, Innovate There?

Following World War II, the U.S. economy was organized around world leadership in technology.25 It developed a comparative advantage over other nations in innovation and, as a result, led nearly all the significant innovation waves for the rest of the 20th century.26 The operating assumption was that U.S. industry would innovate and translate those innovations into products. By innovating here and producing here, it realized the full spectrum of economic gains at all stages, from research and development through production at scale, and in the follow-on life cycle of the product. It worked—the United States became the world’s richest economy.

The United States since 1940, then, has been playing out Solow’s economic growth theory—that the predominant factor in economic growth is technological and related innovation—and demonstrating that it works, with its model increasingly emulated abroad. But in recent years, with the advent of a more interconnected global economy, the innovate here/produce here model has broken down. In some industrial sectors, firms can now sever R&D and design from production. Code-able information-technology-based specifications for goods that can be sent to software-controlled production equipment have enabled “distributed” manufacturing.27 

The innovate here/produce there model appears to work well for many IT and commodity products. However, the distributed model does not work for all sectors, particularly those that still require a close connection between research, design, and production—for example, capital goods, aerospace products, energy equipment, and complex pharmaceuticals. Here, the production infrastructure provides constant feedback to the R&D and design phases. Product innovation is most efficient when tied to a close understanding of and linkage to manufacturing processes. 

However, if R&D/design and production are tightly linked, these innovation stages may have to follow production offshore if it indeed goes offshore. To the extent this is happening it is disastrous. The produce there/innovate there approach brings the very foundations of U.S. innovation-based economic success into question. If this approach grows in importance, the historic U.S. comparative advantage in innovation could be jeopardized, further hindering growth and stimulating social disruption.

What Mainstream Economics Got Wrong

Understanding how manufacturing is related to the economy as a whole is critical to all related policy processes concerning the economy. Alas, our understanding is fragile. Few U.S. leaders took the developments in manufacturing described above seriously in recent decades partly because a series of well-established economic views assured us that declines in manufacturing would be more than offset by gains elsewhere in the economy.28 

Economics has held an elevated position in national policymaking—the President has a Council of Economic Advisors, not a Council of Sociological Advisors. Mainstream economists have long told us a reassuring story about economic change and the role of manufacturing in it: 

The nation was losing manufacturing jobs because of major productivity gains;

The production economy would in the natural course of economics be replaced by a services economy;

Low-wage, low-cost producer nations must inevitably displace higher-cost ones;

Don’t worry about the loss of commodity production, since the country will retain a lead in producing high-value advanced technologies; 

The benefits of free trade always greatly outweigh any short-term adverse effects;

Innovation is distinct from production, so innovation capacity remains even if production is distributed worldwide; and 

A governmental role in the production system would constitute a dangerous “industrial policy.” 

Alas, each of these arguments has proved incorrect.

Productivity and job loss: Political economist Suzanne Berger has noted that mainstream economists thought manufacturing was like agriculture, where relentless productivity gains allowed an ever-smaller workforce to achieve ever-greater output. She found that the agriculture analogy was simply incorrect.29 This finding means that it is necessary to look at the overall decline in the sector itself for reasons why manufacturing lost nearly one-third of its workforce in a decade. The U.S. productivity growth rate is now at historic lows, again assuming that we are counting the right things; low productivity growth and related low investment levels signal that automation-driven productivity gains have not been the cause of manufacturing job decline. Instead, global competition, led by China’s entry as the leading manufacturing power, has been the largest factor—at least so far.30 Mainstream economists proffered a false dream about productivity gains while output fell; they diverted us from the reality of tough international competition with nations following mercantilist policies.

A service economy supersedes a production economy: Success in a highly competitive world rewards nations and regions that produce complex, value-added goods and sell them in international trade. Although world trade in services is growing, world trade in goods is four times as strong. Complex, high-value goods such as energy, communication, and medical technologies make up more than 80 percent of U.S. exports and a significant majority of imports. The currency of world trade is in such high-value goods and will remain so indefinitely. Gradual growth in the services trade surplus ($227 billion in 2015) is dwarfed by the size and continuing growth of the deficit in goods; the former will not offset the latter anytime in the foreseeable future. 

In addition, the production sector leads other sectors in the introduction of productivity gains, which lead to real gains in an economy, providing new wealth that can be distributed. Services are generally slow productivity adaptors. Production is also the most scalable factor in an economy, able to scale growth much more rapidly than services sectors that remain more face-to-face in nature. In other words, manufacturing appears to be indispensable to a modern economy and will not be superseded anytime soon by a services-only economy. Economists should stop pretending otherwise.

Manufacturing in low-wage, low-cost nations must surpass high-wage, high-cost ones: The American public, reflecting mainstream economic views, has long assumed that the U.S. economy must inevitably lose manufacturing to lower-wage nations in Asia and elsewhere. American economists forgot to send that memo to Germany, however. German companies pay much higher manufacturing wages than do U.S. companies, yet have lately been running the largest manufacturing trade surplus in history. The German experience demonstrates that there is no inherent and inevitable manufacturing employment or sectoral decline in advanced economies in competing with lower-wage ones. An advanced economy can keep climbing the value-added ladder in both capital input and human-capital input if its public policies are designed properly.

Developed nations can cede lower-end production and make it up in advanced technologies: Clayton Christensen has argued that established production firms, faced with disruptive innovation, typically cede low-margin production and work to retain leadership through incremental (“sustaining”) advances in high-margin production. But they end up ceding those as well, as the disruptive advances that allow capture of the low end (aided by lower costs and expanded customer bases) mature and enable the capture of the high end.31 

This also resembles what entire nations go through. As noted above, Chinese industry is not simply pursuing its low-cost production advantage but is innovating in rapid production scale-up. Chinese process advances are integrated across regional firms and accelerate production tempo and volume, which are tied to cost savings.32 In other words, Chinese leaders are pursuing an innovative production strategy using “manufacturing-led” innovation for competitive advantage. At the same time, U.S. industry has allowed its historic production leadership to slip, endangering its innovative capacity—again, because production cannot really be delinked from innovation—in important areas of technology. As noted, the U.S. economy, far from leading in advanced technologies, ran a $110 billion trade deficit in advanced technology goods in 2017—a deficit that has been growing.33 Developed nations aren’t necessarily assured of leading in advanced technologies when they cede commodity technologies.

Free trade advantages always outweigh any short-term adverse effects: The data cited above concerning social disruption and manufacturing decline is illustrative of the reality of adverse trade effects. As noted, trade was the leading cause of manufacturing decline in the 2000s.34 Manufacturing decline can be readily mapped; it tends to be regional with significant effects on particular industrial communities. As Amy Goldstein’s Janesville shows, most sectors in communities that lose a major industrial employer tend to contract, from suppliers to indirectly related services firms.35 The decline affects the community’s tax base as real estate values drop, affecting community services like education and health care. 

Homes are typically a family’s greatest asset; if their homes are devalued it is difficult financially for families to leave. Middle-aged workers often have extended families and generations of ties in these localities, with accompanying responsibilities that make it hard for them to bail out, even if they can acquire the skills to find other work. These market frictions exacerbate social disruption; it is very difficult for affected communities and individuals to climb back, so that decline is lasting rather than short term. The effects can be dramatic. Gains from increased trade are often offset, as David Autor and his colleagues have shown, by “deadweight losses” to the economy in affected regions, particularly through the rise in transfer payments for unemployment, health and disability insurance, and food stamps that are required to cope with declines in employment and real wages. These payments are compensatory; they do not reflect economically productive investments and indeed they make such investments harder to finance. 

Back in 2004 Paul Samuelson took on mainstream economics by asking how the United States could be an economic loser with a low-cost, low-wage competitor like China, despite the longstanding Ricardo-based economic theory of “comparative advantage” in trade.36 He noted that if Chinese industry begins to make productivity-enhancing gains, coupled with a low-wage advantage, it could capture some of the comparative advantage that previously belonged to the United States through its productivity dominance. Then, in a Ricardian analysis, he added that unemployment caused by trade never lasts forever, “so it is not that U.S. jobs are ever lost in the long run; it is that the new labor-market clearing real wages has been lowered by this vision of dynamic fair trade.” In other words, U.S. wages would fall to a point where China’s production price advantage is offset.  

That is correct: Wage stagnation in the United States is a growing problem below the upper-middle class, and growing numbers of the working class are moving from middle-class incomes to lower-end, lower-paying services jobs. The U.S. economy still benefits from lower-priced imported goods, but there are now “new net harmful U.S. terms of trade.” 

Dani Rodrik’s new work, Straight Talk on Trade, attacks the economics mainstream for its failure to alert the public that global trade was creating gaps in developed nations between the well-educated, who do well in global trade, and the less-educated, who tend to do badly.37 The academic mainstream, he suggests, continues to articulate a theory of free trade where the benefits are pervasive even when it is not reciprocal (where one side allows open trade and the other does not). He found that, 

[E]conomists can be counted on to parrot the wonders of comparative advantage and free trade whenever trade agreements come up. They have consistently minimalized distributional concerns. . . . [Yet] the standard models of trade . . . typically yield sharp distributional effects: income losses by certain groups of producers or workers are the flip side of the “gains from trade.”38

By holding to perspectives that assumed away such things as trade-related unemployment and income inequality, Rodrik argues, the mainstream favored theory over known realities, misled the public, and blocked a focus on more realistic policies for adapting to a global economy.  

Samuelson had warned years earlier that responding to trade disruption by imposing tariffs could result in economic “arterial sclerosis.” His alarm is reasonable; the economy, including the production supply chain, is now thoroughly globalized and retrenchment from trade (as opposed to pushing back against mercantile practices) would be very problematic. But we should stop systematically underestimating adverse trade effects and refusing to consider improved overall trade strategies and worker support.

The dangers of industrial policy: A debate over industrial policy has been going on for years, and for nearly all the time it has been going on the terms of the debate have been excessively simplified and distorted. Thus, when Japan’s innovations in quality manufacturing harmed U.S. auto and consumer electronic sectors in the 1980s, some in Congress proposed rescuing industrial losers through an industrial bank. Economist Charles Schultz, in a well-known attack on industrial policy, argued in response that the inevitable political forces driving government led it to be ill suited to carefully fashioned industrial interventions.39 

The same debate cropped up again in 2012 when Christina Romer, Chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors in 2009-10, wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Do Manufacturers Need Special Treatment?” Although the Obama Administration had been studying responses to the manufacturing decline of 2000-10, she suggested that Americans valued services like haircuts as much as manufactured goods, arguing that goods are not inherently more important than services. She insisted that “public policy needs to go beyond sentiment,” denigrating a policy focus on manufacturing. She was directly attacking her recent boss’s proposals in his State of the Union speech, ten days before, proposing advanced manufacturing institutes modeled on Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes to nurture new advanced production technologies. In an economy in distress (unemployment was still at 8.3 percent), her comments attracted the manufacturing sector’s ire.  

Rightly so. Romer’s argument that manufacturing jobs are economically equivalent to services jobs was and remains simply wrong. Manufacturing jobs have the highest job multiplier effect; that is, they lead to more jobs throughout the economy than do jobs in other sectors. Manufacturing is also an innovation driver, so it is critical to U.S. research and development and follow-on technological innovation—and therefore to growth. Stephen Ezell pointed out, as well, that manufacturing should be a preferred sector because it is still America’s largest “traded sector”—that is, much of its sales occur abroad, so it spurs exports and accompanying positive trade gains and national wealth. Since goods far outweigh services in trade, Ezell notes, manufacturing will be the leading traded sector “for a long time, and it is simply impossible to have a vibrant economy without a healthy traded sector.”40 

What to make of this eternal debate? The innovation system should certainly be spared the political pork barrel but, pace market fundamentalist dogma, many important governmental interventions can stop far short of that. As growth economist Richard Nelson states:

The conditions for a pure market organization to result in a “Pareto optimal” equilibrium never are fully met. This is recognized, implicitly, in serious policy discussion, where the argument about policy almost never is about whether the situation actually is “optimal,” but rather about whether the problems with the existing regime are sufficiently severe to warrant active new policy measures.41

Precisely in that spirit, the 2011 report issued by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)42 outlined manufacturing policies focused on R&D and workforce education, where government has long played a key role, not on an interventionist government picking industrial winners and losers.43 The advanced manufacturing institutes subsequently set up by the Defense, Energy, and Commerce Departments, which were led and cost-shared in most cases at a 2-to-1 ratio by industry, focused on R&D and training in technologies to increase productivity gains.

Mainstream economics has long seen the production function in terms of measurable inputs yielding measurable outputs; it has much more difficulty evaluating, to borrow a term from chemistry, significant phase changes in the production function. New technological-economic paradigms—innovation waves—are infrequent, but when they arrive they spite input/output formulations. Horses are not analogous to railroads just because both are transportation modes; printed books are not analogous to the internet either. Such phase changes have occurred in manufacturing, too: Interchangeable machine-made parts and mass production, along with quality manufacturing, are leading examples. 

Classical economics is not good at understanding these phase changes because they don’t fit equilibrium-biased input/output models. This is particularly important because these new paradigms are usually not implemented by the private sector alone: Railroad development was heavily supported and subsidized by state and Federal governments; the internet was developed through DARPA; interchangeable machine-made parts were nurtured by the War Department in the mid-19th century; and quality production was strongly backed in Japan by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in the 1970s and 1980s.44 Such paradigm changes cannot often be undertaken in the private sector alone because it cannot manage the high level of risk and lengthy development cycles. Advanced manufacturing technologies, and a corresponding phase change to the new production paradigms they could allow, fall squarely into this category.

Advanced Manufacturing

The beginning of wisdom when it comes to understanding advanced manufacturing is the simple but somehow elusive point that not all industries are created equal in generating growth. Regrettably, mainstream economists have typically been unable to differentiate between the potential of different sectors. The stories of Christina Romer’s equation of haircuts with manufacturing and Michael Boskin’s inability to differentiate between the production of potato chips and computer chips are embarrassing cases in point.45 These experts and others fail to understand that factors such as technological capacity and its ability to generate increasing returns make a real difference. Manufacturing is the classic sector for increasing returns, and, because it dominates technological development in the economy, it is at the core of technological capacity. Creating phase changes using new manufacturing paradigms, arguably then, carries major potential growth benefits. 

New production paradigms can transform the production sector.46 As noted, we have seen new production paradigms before, and we will doubtless see them again. We can, arguably, make them happen, too. So U.S. industry is competing with low-wage, low-cost producers, particularly in Asia: Could it develop new production paradigms to drive up efficiency and drive down costs so it could better compete? We can if we try, if in so doing we take pains to make sure that, as was once the case by accident more than by design, the relevant institutions that need to be involved cohere with one another.

Innovation carries its own rewards; production innovation is no exception. It can enable better products, create new markets, and, just as important, generate good jobs. Scientists and engineers now tell of breakthroughs—new phase changes and paradigms—in a series of technology fields that could significantly enhance the way we produce complex, high-value technologies and goods. These include digital production technologies (new systems of sensors and controls, big data and analytics, robotics, artificial intelligence, new simulation and modeling, and so on); advanced materials and composites; biofabrication; mass customization (the ability to produce small customized lots at mass-production costs, through 3D printing and computerized controls); nanofabrication; photonics; and new distribution efficiencies. These new advances, in turn, require new processes and business models to implement them. Hardware must be matched to “software,” so to speak, for the paradigm to work. Not only are new jobs inherent in these new “hourglasses” (not necessarily at the production moment), but some of the technologies, like 3D printing, have the potential to re-localize supply chains, generating additional jobs.

Developing such new integrative paradigms is the core concept behind advanced manufacturing. Advanced manufacturing institutes have been devised as a means to nurture such paradigms. They are young and few Americans know they exist, but they represent a major policy change for, as already noted, the disconnect in the United States between R&D and production has limited such thinking. Previously, the policy issues in manufacturing concerned tax, trade, currency, and regulatory policy; innovation was not on the table. Although these other policy areas remain important, improvements in them tend to be incremental and marginal. Gains from innovation can be more dynamic, as the advent of mass production and quality manufacturing indicate. This is the first time—at least since Sematech (Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology), a public-private DARPA-supported collaboration dating from 1986-87—that an innovation system approach to manufacturing has been considered. 

Based on recommendations from the industry-university Advanced Manufacturing Partnership collaboration,47 an effort began in 2012 to use new manufacturing institutes to create new production paradigms in 14 production areas, shared across the supply chains of large and small firms and across industry sectors. The costs of the institutes are shared among Federal agencies, industry, and state governments. 

Why institutes? One key reason is that the majority of the U.S. manufacturing sector consists of small and midsize firms that are risk-averse and thinly capitalized; they are not in a position to perform research or adopt new technologies and processes unless the costs and efficiency gains are demonstrated and understood. Although larger firms once assisted their supply chains in this role, providing a vertical integration function, in an era of intense global competition they have often cut back to their core competencies. They are therefore less able to assist suppliers and have their own competitive problems in adapting. As Suzanne Berger puts it, manufacturing firms are increasingly “home alone.”48 

Larger firms, too, need to collaborate to share the risks and costs of changing to new production paradigms. Taking a page from Germany’s Fraunhofer system, institutes act as test beds, providing a range of industries and firms with opportunities to collaborate on, test, and prove prototypes for advanced production technologies and processes. 

Another gap institutes can fill is talent. Technical workers must be trained to work with the advanced technologies and develop processes and routines necessary for introducing them into production systems. Otherwise they simply will go nowhere.

Advanced manufacturing policies are now hanging in the balance. Germany and China, as well as other competitors, are now making much larger investments than the United States has considered. But now manufacturing has had its “Sputnik moment”: the 2016 presidential election and the working-class backlash it illuminated. Yet the current Administration, although it embraced manufacturing during the campaign, appears to be merely tolerating the manufacturing institutes and related innovation policies rather than advancing them. 

Outside of government, much will depend on whether mainstream economists accept these ideas. While some—Rodrik, Autor, Samuelson, Spence, Freeman, and others—advocate a “rethink” of the labor market and trade aspects of these issues, this view is by no means pervasive. 

Meanwhile, neither of the two major U.S. political parties seems to get the basics of the growth economics that lies behind this new innovation focus on manufacturing. How did the parties miss growth economics? Simple: As John Maynard Keynes famously wrote, “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” 

Our political parties appear to have locked in long ago on classical economics. The politics of each is organized around one of the two dominant factors that classical economics thought was responsible for growth: capital supply and labor supply. Republicans have focused on capital supply, with its leaders returning again and again to the popular political well of lowering marginal tax rates. Democrats focus on labor supply—improving education, health, and income in labor markets. Both matter and remain significant, although Solow demonstrated many years ago that these factors are responsible for only some 20 percent of growth. But the American political class has missed almost entirely the critical role of technological innovation and its power to spur innovation-driven growth. Advanced manufacturing is now a key asset in such innovation. 

Economist Benjamin Friedman’s noted 2005 book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,49 showed that periods of higher economic growth tend to be accompanied historically by more tolerance, optimism, and egalitarian perspectives; declining economic growth periods are typically characterized by pessimism, nostalgia, xenophobia, and violence. While the American upper-middle class is doing fine, much of the remainder of the population has been less than fine. Productivity growth and related investment are at low levels despite their demonstrated role in driving growth. Unless growth agendas like advanced manufacturing policies are supported adequately and consistently, we are in for a difficult time ahead. 

We now are seeing what may prove to be an advanced wave of social externalities accompanying the economic decline affecting the American working class. If automation piles on new labor profile dislocations in the years ahead, things may get considerably worse unless we plan to offset its effects. Economists and the political system they influence need to get with the program. 

1Solow, Growth Theory: An Exposition (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. ix-xxvi. 

2Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change,” Journal of Political Economy, v. 98 (1990), pp. 72-102.

3William B. Bonvillian and Peter L. Singer, Advanced Manufacturing: The New American Innovation Policies (MIT Press, 2018), pp. 9, 52, 59, 143, 188. 

4“Manufacturing Employment,” Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Current Labor Statistics (CLS); Robert E. Scott, “Manufacturing Job Loss: Trade, Not Productivity, Is the Culprit,” Economic Policy Institute, August 11, 2015. See detailed review of manufacturing job loss in Robert D. Atkinson, Luke A. Stewart, Scott M. Andes, and Stephen Ezell, “Worse Than the Great Depression: What the Experts are Missing About American Manufacturing Decline,” The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) (March 2012).

5“Employment in Manufacturing Industries,” BLS, CLS.

6“Investments in Private Fixed Assets by Industry,” Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). See analysis in Atkinson et al., “Worse Than the Great Depression,” pp. 47-58; Luke A. Stewart & Robert D. Atkinson, “Restoring America’s Lagging Investment in Capital Goods,” ITIF (October 2013), p. 1. 

7Scott, “Manufacturing Job Loss”; Atkinson et al., “Worse Than the Great Depression,” pp. 30-42.

8“Labor Productivity and Costs: Productivity Change in the Manufacturing Sector,” BLS; Scott, “Manufacturing Job Loss.” See also Atkinson et al., “Worse than the Great Depression,” p. 39.

9Atkinson et al., “Worse than the Great Depression,” p. 42.

10“Foreign Trade, Exports, Imports and Balance of Goods by Selected NAICS-Based Product Code, Exhibit 1 in FT-900 Supplement for 12/15,” BEA, February 5, 2016; “Trade in Goods with Advanced Technology Products, 2015, Exhibit 16,” BEA.

11“China Has a Dominant Share, Citing estimates in the United Nation’s National Accounts Main Aggregates Database, Based on the International Classification of Manufacturing (ISIC D),” Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI).

12Ernie Preeg, “Farewell Report on U.S. Trade in Manufactures,” MAPI, August 15, 2016. 

13William B. Bonvillian, “Donald Trump Voters and the Decline of American Manufacturing,” Issues in Science and Technology (Summer 2016).

14Melissa S. Kearney, Brad Hershbein, and Elisa Jacome, “Profiles of Change: Employment, Earnings and Occupations from 1990-2013,” Brookings Institution, April 21, 2015. 

15Kearney et al., “Profiles of Change.”

16“Chart: Real Household Incomes: Cumulative Growth, based on Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics Data,” in Doug Short, “Household Incomes: The Decline of the Middle Class, Advisor Perspectives,” September 16, 2016.

17“Chart: Real Household Incomes: The Growing Gap between Median and Mean,” in Short, “Household Incomes.” 

18Freeman, America Works (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).  

19Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Harvard University Press, 2008).

20Andrew Stettner, Joel S. Yudken, and Michael McCormack, “Why Manufacturing Jobs are Worth Saving,” Century Foundation, June 13, 2017.

21See David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson, “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 21906 (January 2016).

22A. Michael Spence, “The Impact of Globalization on Income and Employment: The Downside of Integrating Markets,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2011), pp. 28-41.

23Bonvillian & Singer, Advanced Manufacturing, pp. 60-61.

24Dan Meckstroth, “The Manufacturing Value Chain Is Bigger than You Think,” MAPI, February 16, 2016. 

25Bonvillian & Singer, Advanced Manufacturing, pp. 57-8.

26See Nils Gilman, “Technoglobalism and Its Discontents,” The American Interest (November/December 2016).

27Suzanne Berger, How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make It in Today’s Global Economy (Doubleday Currency, 2005), pp. 251–77.

28Bonvillian, “Donald Trump’s Voters and the Decline of American Manufacturing,” p. 31.

29Berger, Making in America (MIT Press, 2013), pp. 28-33.

30Adams Nager, “Trade vs. Productivity: What Caused U.S. Manufacturing Decline and How to Revive it,” ITIF, February 13, 2017; Scott, “Manufacturing Job Loss.”

31Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997). 

32Jonas Nahm & Edward S. Steinfeld, “Scale-Up Nation: China’s Specialization in Innovative Manufacturing,” World Development No. 54 (2013), pp. 288-300. 

33“Foreign Trade Balance 2017,” U.S. Census Bureau.

34Nager, “Trade vs. Productivity”; Scott, “Manufacturing Job Loss.”

35Goldstein, Janesville, An American Story (Simon & Shuster, 2017). 

36Samuelson, “Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Summer 2004), pp. 135-37, 144-45. This work builds on his earlier Stolper-Samuelson theorem: Where there are two goods and two factors of production (capital and labor), and specialization remains incomplete, one of the two factors—the one that is more scarce—must end up worse off as a result of opening up to international trade in in absolute terms. This anticipated the effect of globalization on developed nation wages and income distribution. Wolfgang Stolper & Paul A. Samuelson, “Protection and Real Wages,” Review of Economic Studies Vol. 9 (1941), pp. 58-73. 

37Rodrik, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World (Princeton University Press, 2018).

38Rodrik, Straight Talk on Trade, p. x. See also Suzanne Berger, “Globalization Survived Populism Once Before—and It Can Again,” The Boston Review (February 2018).  

39Schultze, “Industrial Policy: A Dissent,” The Brookings Review (Fall 1983), pp. 3-12.

40Ezell, “Our Manufacturers Need a U.S. Competiveness Strategy, Not Special Treatment,” ITIF, February 9, 2016.

41Nelson, “Building Effective ‘Innovation Systems’ Versus Dealing with ‘Market Failures’ as Ways of Thinking about Technology Policy,” Manchester Business School Working Paper No. 548 (2008), p. 7.

42“Report to the President on Ensuring American Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing,” President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), June 24, 2011.

43For a discussion of appropriate governmental roles in technology development see Gregory Tassey, “Make America Great Again: Investing in Research, Technology Development, Workforce Education and Modern Technological Infrastructure Is the Only Prescription That Will Maintain the Health of the U.S. Economy,” Issues in Science and Technology (Winter 2018), pp. 72-8.

44Bonvillian & Singer, Advanced Manufacturing, pp. 18-21, 50.

45Compare Rob Atkinson, “Manufacturing Policy Is Not Industrial Policy,” ITIF, February 6, 2012, with Jagdish Bhagwati, “The Computer Chip vs. Potato Chip Debate,” Moscow Times, September 2, 2010.

46These issues, including the advanced manufacturing institutes, are discussed in detail in Bonvillian & Singer, Advanced Manufacturing, pp. 101-186.

47“Report to the President on Capturing Domestic Competitive Advantage in Advanced Manufacturing,” PCAST, July 2012; “Report to the President on Accelerating U.S. Advanced Manufacturing,” PCAST, October 2014. 

48Berger, Making in America, p. 20.

49Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Vintage Books, 2005).

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