Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 104

European Politics Is Turning French

Europe’s political landscape is undergoing profound and drastic changes. Recent votes in Italy and Germany, although very different in scope and format, are the latest proof of realignment. In Germany, following the collapse of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s negotiations to form a “Jamaica coalition” with smaller parties, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) voted to join the government once more, over the protests of its youth wing. A grand coalition of fundamentally centrist parties now governs in Berlin for the third time in four terms, but with a much-diminished parliamentary majority. Meanwhile in Italy, the idiosyncratic, Euroskeptic, and populist Five Star Movement (M5S) is now the biggest party in parliament, while the anti-immigrant League (formerly the Northern League) is the largest party in the “center-right” bloc.

Two related phenomena are happening at the same time: First, the old Left-Right divide is fading away, replaced by a chasm between centrifugal nationalist-populists (be they Left, Right, or, like M5S, neither in particular) and a pro-EU center. Second, the erosion is worse on the Left. These evolutions are not just native to Italy and Germany, as recent elections proved; they are unfolding across Europe. Indeed, they are actually une histoire française.

The 2017 French electoral cycle may be the textbook example of this overhaul of European politics. After knocking out the established Left and Right parties, the opposing forces of Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron clashed in a run-off between the extreme Right and the “extreme center”—with the extreme Left largely standing on the sidelines. The defining differences between the two second-round candidates emerged from their attitudes toward the European Union and all it entails. It was a debate between open and closed borders, free movement of people and goods and protectionism, power-sharing between member states and the EU and a return to national sovereignty. With Macron’s rise to power, French politics have gone through a process of “Macronification,” a unification of centrist constituencies around a pro-European agenda, leaving little air for anything but radical far-Left and far-Right parties adopting an anti-EU line. The mainstream right-wing Les Républicains, under new leader Laurent Wauquiez, find themselves in an uncomfortable position, as they are historically pro-European but are looking for a way to survive in opposition to Macron. Short of adopting the far-Right detestation of the European Union, they are now toying with vague “Eurolucid” ideas, which consist of defending French sovereignty at the EU level without advocating for a “Frexit” or other anti-EU measures.

While both of France’s mainstream parties were badly wounded by “Macronification,” the Socialist Party (PS) was obliterated. The last five years have been devastating for the French Left. From his first days in the Elysée, François Hollande’s Socialist ambitions were curtailed by the Eurozone’s economic and political constraints, forcing him to make tough choices to “save” the euro. The French government’s commitment to deficit reduction forced them to rein in public spending, much to the dissatisfaction of the PS base. Hollande and his lieutenants adopted a euphemistic vocabulary: Economic reforms were adopted under a “responsibility pact,” while they used the phrase “the governing Left” to describe themselves, drawing a contrast with the ideological but ultimately irresponsible Left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement and the rebellious PS faction les Frondeurs. Ultimately, the unpopular Hollande decided against a re-election campaign, and the Frondeur PS candidate, Benoît Hamon, was only able to attract 6.36 percent of the vote, an incredible low for the incumbent President’s party.

In contrast to Hollande, President Macron has been unapologetic in giving primacy to France’s European commitments. With such impeccable pro-European credentials, he can push ambitious reforms to EU policy that benefit France. His first policy victory was a resolution of the toxic issue of “posted workers,” whereas the previous Socialist government had failed to defend French labor from this source of unfair intra-European competition. He is now governing as a reformist center-Right leader, the position seemingly best adapted to today’s European Union.

Indeed, in France and elsewhere, commitment to Europe feels increasingly like the kiss of death for social democrats. Although the European project is, fundamentally, a politically liberal idea—designed to transcend the dark forces of nationalism—to which the European Left is deeply attached, the European Union of today hardly resembles the leftist ideal of a “United States of Europe.”

Over the decades, the European Union’s leaps forward have been the results of inter-governmental compromise and technocratic decision-making, which often disregarded popular calls for a different integration model (such as the 2005 French “no” to the European Constitution), and molded a union that resembles more the North European market-liberal model than the French/South European statist model. Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Nordic countries—whose credibility has been reinforced by their successful domestic economies—have popularized fiscal authority, free trade, deregulation, and free movement at the EU level, creating a Europe in which center-Right politicians feel at home. Membership in the common euro currency, which implies playing by the austerity rules imposed by German fiscal hawks, sharply limits economic policy options for leftwing parties, particularly in countries saddled with high levels of sovereign debt (as the 2015 U-turn by Greece’s Syriza-led government exemplifies). And while the center Left has been bleeding voters to the far Right for decades over immigration, the inadequate EU response to the refugee crisis of 2015 has only accelerated the trend.

The European Left finds itself in the paradoxical situation of defending the symbolic value of the European Union while deploring its current policies. Paying a high price for their European commitment, leftwing parties either accede to power as responsible stakeholders stripped of their ideology and identity, or watch from outside government as the Right chips away at what remains of the legacy of 20th-century social democracy.

In agreeing to yet another Merkel-led coalition government, the German Social Democrats did the responsible thing, though maybe not the politically smart thing. The SPD leadership rejected this route on election night back in September, after its worst postwar result (20.8 percent of the vote), seeing a path to a more defined identity and renewed success via a spell in opposition. Yet their commitment to Europe—and the attraction of power—has sucked them back into another “responsible” centrist coalition devoted to “a new departure for Europe.” In so doing, the SPD has granted the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) the opportunity to lead the opposition.

In Italy, five years of Democratic Party-led (PD) government under three Prime Ministers, Enrico Letta, Matteo Renzi, and Paolo Gentiloni—and the “technocratic” (interim) government led by Mario Monti before that—failed to solve the country’s manifold woes, from economic stagnation to the influx of migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean. While most of them were considered great European “team players”—as Macron’s shout-out to Gentiloni exemplifies—it does not change the fact that the European Union did not deliver for them on the migration crisis or the ongoing banking crisis. Italian voters noticed that pro-European leaders failed them and sought refuge in a protest vote. Today, a rumored possible coalition between the M5S and the PD would force both parties to choose between their mutual progressive priorities (such as M5S’s popular universal basic income proposal) and their antithetical views on Europe.

In the age of Brexit, support for the European Union is no longer an obvious choice for the UK Labour party. Jeremy Corbyn has led the party away from Tony Blair’s Third Way to an assertive hard-Left stance. But amid the May government’s bumbling approach toward Brexit, his Euroskeptic acceptance of withdrawal from the European Union is balanced by his promotion of a “soft Brexit” with as little change as possible from the pre-referendum situation. It is an effort to accommodate the deep contradictions within his camp, which passes muster with voters mainly thanks to his opponents’ incompetence.

Across Western Europe, politics are turning French: The old mainstream political forces on the Left and Right are coalescing around a pro-European agenda, imposed by the political reality of today’s Brussels (and Frankfurt), while the only forceful opposition comes from those who reject the EU. This “Macronification” comes with a higher price for the Left. The fine line that social democrats walked for years—being resolutely pro-European while trying to develop a social counterweight to Brussels’ free-market orientation, which the French Socialists called L’Europe sociale, or social Europe—is becoming increasingly thinner, at the risk of disappearance. Weakened, stuck in the position of junior partners or licking their wounds in opposition, European social democrats need to invent new policies to keep unhappy voters from the arms of the populists, and a new vision for Europe to take their continent back.

The post European Politics Is Turning French appeared first on The American Interest.

Hindutva à la Modi

When Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to victory in the Indian general elections in 2014, there was no shortage of speculation about what it all meant. On the one hand, Modi put himself across as a modernizer and an economic nationalist, and made efforts to assuage the concerns of those who feared he would rule as a religious ideologue. He claimed that Hinduism was more a way of life than a religion, and that Hindu was merely another way of saying “Indian.” On the other hand, Modi’s ties to a more exclusionary vision of Hinduism were unmistakable. The BJP and its mentor organization, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), have roots in Hindutva, a brand of ethno-nationalism that arose in the 1920s and which seeks to give political organization and direction to those who follow the Hindu religion.

Today, Hindutva functions through a family of organizations called the Sangh Parivar that were set up or inspired by the secretive RSS, which calls itself a cultural organization and runs various fronts. The most prominent of these is the BJP itself. But there is also the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), which advocates economic nationalism; the farmers’ organization, Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS); the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which mobilizes Hindu religious leaders at home and abroad; the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), one of the country’s largest trade unions; the BJP’s students’ front, known as the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP); and the Bajrang Dal, a youth organization through which the VHP exerts street power. Associated with these are a constellation of other organizations of lawyers, scientists, historians, and writers who support Hindutva causes. More important, perhaps, are loosely affiliated organizations of young men who provide muscle for causes like cow protection and the prevention of Hindu-Muslim intermarriage.

In attempting to assess whether Modi’s victory and the BJP’s advance across the country reflects an expansion of Hindu ethno-nationalism in India, we need to separate the political success of the BJP from the question of Hindutva itself. Politically speaking, the BJP under Modi has been undeniably ascendant, scoring a succession of victories in state assembly elections. Yet that political success does not necessarily reflect the success of the RSS’s Hindutva nationalist agenda as such.

In democracies, election outcomes can be assessed with reference to two questions: Does the result reflect a negative vote against the record of an incumbent party? Or is it a positive one in favor of a new and more exciting alternative?

The BJP victory in 2014 was a combination of the two. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was beaten even before the elections took place. It had been hammered by a succession of scandals that mobilized a massive anti-corruption movement in Delhi led by Anna Hazare. Narendra Modi, the BJP candidate, was an uncommonly gifted politician, a mesmerizing speaker, and a relentless and hard-working campaigner. He ran a carefully calibrated campaign that stitched up caste coalitions, effectively used social media, and presented himself as a forward-looking economic reformer to appeal to the widest possible segment of the populace.

That campaign was enough to garner the BJP 282 seats out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament. Even so, it only got 31.3 percent of the votes, compared to 19.5 percent for the main Opposition Congress Party, which earned 44 seats. The rest of the votes went to nearly 50 other smaller parties across the country.

The BJP’s victory could have been plausibly interpreted as an aspirational mandate for good governance and economic dynamism. But the Sangh Parivar has chosen to interpret it as an endorsement of its Hindutva agenda. The RSS views the victory as the opportunity of a lifetime. Hindutva has waxed and waned at the margins of India’s polity since the 1920s, and now its proponents find the dream of a “Hindu Rashtra,” a state with Hindu characteristics, within sight. Tellingly, the key slogan of Modi’s electoral campaigns, and one of his key political goals, is “Congress-mukt Bharat”: an India free of the Congress Party.

Modi belongs to the RSS. In much the same manner as the Communist Party, the RSS is organized around cadres deputed to front organizations. Its leader, Mohan Bhagwat, repeatedly declares that anybody living in India is a Hindu. In practice this means that minority communities, in particular Muslims, are expected to defer to the cultural and social primacy of the Hindu community, as defined by the Hindutva organizations. The RSS mission is to unite Hindus under its leadership which, of course, would provide an unassailable electoral majority for the BJP ad infinitum.

Four years after Modi’s victory, there is reason to worry that he is steering the country to that ideological position where nationalism is defined in anti-Muslim terms, with “Pakistan” and “Muslim” being used synonymously. India under Modi has featured new social restrictions banning the slaughter of cows and eating of beef, vigilante attacks on the Muslim community on various fabricated pretexts relating to cow smuggling and cow slaughter, a foreign policy hostile to Pakistan, and a global campaign against terrorism seeking to highlight the dangers of Islamism (read: Muslims and Pakistan).

Prime Minster Modi himself has avoided taking a firm stand on cow vigilantism, aside from a few unconvincing condemnations. But he has not hesitated to attack Pakistan and Islamist terrorism at every opportunity. He has also sought to promote social reform in the Muslim community, such as outlawing the pernicious social practice of “triple talaq” whereby a Muslim woman may be divorced simply by chanting “talaq” thrice. His call this month for Muslim youth to have a computer in one hand and the Quran in the other is part of the same piece, suggesting that backwardness is a Muslim trait that needs to be dealt with. One of the key items in the Hindutva agenda has been the need for a uniform civil code for all Indian citizens, instead of separate family laws for Muslims and other minorities.

For the present, the RSS views electoral success as important. An expansion of the BJP footprint comes with other assets, such as the ability to place personnel in key educational and cultural institutions, which aids in spreading its message. For the past two years, for example, a committee set up by the Ministry of Culture has explored ways and means to insert the Hindutva agenda into historical writing in India. This ambitious agenda is complimented by a dubious research effort to support the conclusions of the RSS’s long-held, but intellectually suspect revisionist history of India.

The RSS’s stated goal to wipe out the Congress Party—a disconcerting ambition in any democracy—is clearly more than just a political slogan. It also represents a larger legacy that the RSS and BJP would like to eliminate: namely, the Nehruvian polity that gives space to all religions to function on the basis of equality and that celebrates India’s diversity by promoting a truly federal state.

All of India suffered the trauma of Partition in 1947. Since the RSS stayed out of the freedom struggle, the BJP has simply appropriated its two luminaries: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who as the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister played a major role in unifying the country, and B.R. Ambedkar, the leader of the Dalit or erstwhile “untouchable” castes, who steered the Constituent Assembly. Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who shaped modern India as a liberal republic in his 16-year rule as Prime Minister, has emerged as the principal villain in the Hindutva cosmos.

Having avoided the freedom struggle, the Sangh Parivar has since had the luxury of attacking Partition’s baleful consequences and heaping the blame on the Congress Party, which had to take the key decisions at the time. Likewise, since it was not anywhere near political power in the 1950s and 1960s, the Sangh Parivar has opposed the policies of that era’s Congress Party, which sought to heal the wounds of Partition by promoting a federal, secular polity.

Instead, the BJP has attacked the Congress Party for policies that encouraged Jammu and Kashmir to have a distinct identity within the Indian Union, or moves that gave the minorities, including Muslims, social and cultural space by permitting them to live according to their personal laws. “Muslim appeasement” has been an important rallying cry of the Hindutva nationalists. That Nehruvian policies famously prevented the radicalization of Indian Muslims, even during the high tide of Islamic radicalism that began in the 1980s, is conveniently glossed over.

What the RSS/BJP seek is a state where the fact of the Hindus being a majority community in the country is manifest, Hindutva values are cherished, laws are tweaked to reflect their primacy, and history is re-written to reflect the Sangh Parivar worldview.

Modi’s relations with the Sangh Parivar were not ideal in the years he ran Gujarat. Though Mohan Bhagwat, who became chief in 2009, supported him strongly, others like Pravin Togadia, Kesubhai Patel, Madhu Kulkarni, and Pravin Maniyar felt sidelined by Modi.  One analyst characterized the dispute as a fight between the conservative wing of the RSS and Modi, who more effectively marketed their message for broader appeal.

On the other hand, these could be seen as mere personality clashes. In December 2005, Modi’s principal rival within the RSS and the party, Sanjay Joshi, had to resign from his position as General Secretary of the BJP when a CD with a sex tape allegedly featuring him surfaced at a key party meeting in Mumbai. Five years later, when the then-BJP President sought to rehabilitate Joshi, Modi, now much more powerful, objected and boycotted the meeting of the party’s national executive till the move was dropped.

In any case, after L.K. Advani’s failure in the 2009 general elections, Modi appeared to be the best option for the RSS. Since then, both have increasingly come to appreciate the mutual benefits of cooperation. In Modi, the RSS have a gifted politician who can push their agenda as no other BJP politician has managed since 1947. In turn, Modi has come to value the RSS cadres and network for the systematic groundwork they provide in an election.

Modi may be uncommonly attached to power, but he has no ideological differences with the RSS. He would have no problems with dismantling the Nehruvian state, a major agenda of the Hindutva nationalists. As long as they support his electoral project, he is willing to give them a free hand on these so-called cultural and social issues.

Foreign and security policies don’t usually change dramatically after an election, as they are supposed to be based on national interests rather than the whims of a particular government. Accordingly, Modi largely built on his predecessors when he invited all South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries to attend his inauguration, doubling down on a good neighbor policy. He declared that he would now pursue an “Act East” policy where previous governments had merely promised to “Look East.” Equally, he underscored India’s growing proximity to the United States by inviting President Barack Obama to be the chief guest for India’s 2015 Republic Day celebration.

But after a brief while, the Hindutva element came to the fore. Even now, it is not clear whether this was the result of electoral calculations—namely, Modi’s belief that he needed to take a tough line on Pakistan to win the crucial Uttar Pradesh State assembly election in early 2017—or an ideological change of heart brought about by attacks by Pakistani terrorists on Pathankot and Uri in 2016.

Blockading Nepal in 2015 was seen as a means of asserting India’s primacy in the subcontinent, although it has seriously damaged Indo-Nepal relations. Tough approaches toward China have meanwhile made India more reliant on the United States, but efforts are now on to undo some of the more extreme positions taken by New Delhi in the last two years.

Israel, a country that gives primacy to Judaism and adopts a tough posture against its Arab neighbors, is much admired in Sangh Parivar circles. But given significant Indian interests in the GCC countries and Iran, Modi has taken the precaution of enhancing ties with them even while embracing Israel.

The most pernicious aspect of Hindutva nationalism is its need to assert itself in opposition to Muslims and Pakistan. Sangh Parivar outfits have obsessively focused on the theme of insecurity, seeing personal and physical dangers both from Muslims within India and from those across the border in Pakistan. It is easy in this warp to weave the weft of hard nationalism which, in the average Indian mind, is associated with a posture emphasizing national security.

The RSS and its associated outfits amplify these themes by referencing a narrative of historical grievance that begins with the Muslim conquest of India in the 13th century, which destroyed the “Hindu Eden.” The alleged iniquities faced by the majority Hindu community, in this view, culminated in the Partition of the country in 1947, after which the ruling Congress Party coddled Muslims for electoral gain. Contemporary BJP leaders thus find it easy to assert the foreignness of Muslims and their need to assimilate with the Hindu majority or “go to Pakistan.” (Somehow, the really malignant period where Britain ruled India is glossed over in this history.)

This kind of rhetoric has serious implications for India’s stability and security. Some 14 percent of the country’s population are Muslims. They are set to grow to 18 percent and number some 300 million by 2050. This is not a population that can be easily dismissed or marginalized, and any attempt to do so will be fraught.

There are questions, too, about the electoral project of the BJP. The Hindus have never seen themselves as belonging to a unified faith. They are famously diverse, comprised of numerous sects and castes, which often translate into electoral divisions. In this sense, the RSS/BJP combination is some distance away from being able to rally the Hindus qua Hindus, under the banner of its moot Hindutva ideology.

Despite being an organization that seeks to build “character” as a path toward nation-building, the RSS has no hesitation in compromising on high principle when it comes to pushing the BJP’s electoral agenda. To that end, the BJP has accommodated defectors from other parties and consorted with politicians of dubious virtue. It has overlooked its commitment to ban beef when it comes to election activity in states where beef-eating is common.

But if Modi is afflicted by electoral or policy setbacks, the RSS may not be so accommodating. It will not hesitate to dump him in favor of its own Hindutva agenda. This could set up a clash between the two. Despite formally being a pracharak or full-time volunteer of the outfit and subject to its discipline, it’s clear that Modi sees himself as being above its disciplinary rules, where the Sarsanghchalak or head of the organization reigns supreme.

Recent election trends do not reflect the kind of dominance the Sangh Parivar has come to expect after its sterling election performance in the 2014 general elections and the state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Assam, and Tripura. In Delhi and Bihar, the party underperformed; indeed it was badly trounced in the national capital.

More recently, the BJP has suffered setbacks in a series of by-elections in states where it has been ruling, first in Rajasthan in 2017 and then in Uttar Pradesh in 2018. The scale of the losses suggests that there has been an erosion of support for the party in the Hindi-speaking heartland. Just why this has happened is not easy to say.

Some argue this is an outcome of the demonetization of India’s currency that Modi ordered in November 2016, a move that had widespread consequences in derailing India’s informal cash-based economy. Others argue that the ban on cow slaughter has devastated the rural economy. Aged cows were once routinely culled in rural areas, helping farmers make extra money; now, feral cattle are let loose after they do not yield milk and have been attacking their crops. Yet another argument holds that the caste combinations that the BJP employed in its victory have now come undone, with rivals like the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party forming better combinations. Perhaps the BJP’s problems in the heartland arise from a combination of these factors.

The Sangh Parivar’s ethno-nationalist agenda has its own problems, the foremost being its anti-modern edge. The SJM has long advocated national self-reliance and opposes policies seeking more foreign direct investment. Beliefs being promoted by the Sangh Parivar and its affiliates verge on the wacky and anti-scientific. Recently a BJP Union Minister, Harsh Vardhan, claimed with absolutely no evidence that the recently deceased Stephen Hawking had said that the ancient Vedas had a theory superior to Einstein’s famous mass and energy equation. Another Union Minister, Satyapal Singh, said in January that Darwin’s theory of evolution was scientifically wrong. Vardhan and Singh are no country yokels; the former is a medical doctor and the latter has been the police chief of Mumbai. Some of these beliefs are now being touted in prestigious institutions around the country. In 2015, the Indian Science Congress hosted that year by Mumbai University heard a paper claiming that interplanetary craft existed in ancient India. It is difficult to believe that such views will not hamper the policymaking of a country that is seeking to become an economic and military power.

Though the RSS worldview, with its exaggerated anti-Muslim stance, is the one that has most shaped Modi, he has sought to position himself while in office as a modernizer and social reformer. One of the first causes he took up was the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission. Later he launched the Beti Bachao, Beti Phadao (“Save the Women and Educate Them”) movement. Through his monthly radio broadcast, Mann Ki Baat (“The Mind’s Voice”), he has attacked corruption and promoted the digital economy, smart cities, solar energy, water conservation, and a slew of other unexceptionable causes.

But the Hindutva influence periodically surfaces, especially during election time. Most recently it was visible in the Gujarat Legislative Assembly elections in 2017. The Gujarati Muslim population is not electorally significant, so Modi used the device of attacking Pakistan in the campaign, while throwing in some incendiary innuendo against Indian Muslims.

However, he has displayed an agile, pragmatic, and even opportunistic bent of mind, as befits a successful politician. On December 25, 2015, Modi theatrically descended on Lahore on his way back from Kabul to wish Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif a happy birthday. More recently, in Tripura, he halted his victory speech to allow the recitation of the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer, to finish on a loud speaker adjacent to where his meeting was taking place. He did the same in Gujarat in the election campaign earlier in November.

No doubt the resourceful Modi is already thinking ahead to the 2019 general elections, which he remains the favorite to win. He could conceivably come up with new electoral strategies that are not fully aligned with the goals of the RSS; his governing record in Gujarat certainly shows a willingness to defy Sangh Parivar outfits when the political moment demands it. On the other hand, he could stick to tried-and-tested Hindutva, playing up the movement’s social and cultural priorities as a strategy to mobilize voters and win the electorally significant Hindi-speaking heartland. If so, Modi may decide to forcefully advocate for building a temple for Lord Rama in Ayodhya, at the site of a medieval mosque that was demolished by Hindutva forces in 1992. The Indian Supreme Court is in the final stages of a hearing on the issue and a verdict, for or against, could be grist for the Hindutva electoral mill.

As of now, Modi and the RSS remain happy with each other, and the symbiotic relationship is likely to last so long as it proves useful. Whatever the longer-term consequences for India, one thing is for sure: The RSS lacks any credible alternative to Modi—and Modi knows it.

The post Hindutva à la Modi appeared first on The American Interest.

The Reality of Russian Soft Power

Liberal democratic societies have, in the past few decades, undergone a series of revolutionary changes in their social and political life, which are not to the taste of all their citizens. For many of those, who might be called social conservatives, Russia has become a more agreeable society, at least in principle, than those they live in. Communist Westerners used to speak of the Soviet Union as the pioneer society of a brighter future for all. Now, the rightwing nationalists of Europe and North America admire Russia and its leader for cleaving to the past.

Social conservatives in the West believe, with some justice, that they are the objects of scorn on the part of progressive elites. Barrack Obama, in his first campaign for the presidency ten years ago, said of small-town Americans that “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” His competitor for the Democratic nomination, Hilary Clinton, criticised him for that: but in her campaign for the Presidency in September 2016, described half of Donald Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables”.

In Britain, Gordon Brown, campaigning in April 2010 for a second, full, term as Labour Prime Minister, said of an elderly woman, Gillian Duffy, whom he had encountered at a meet-the-public stop, that she was “just a bigoted woman” because she had said to him, during their brief talk, that “You can’t say anything about the immigrants… these eastern Europeans what (sic) are coming in, where are they flocking from?” He had not noticed, as he was driven away from the campaign stop, that a radio microphone, attached from a previous TV interview, was still on his lapel—and still live. These remarks were likely deeply damaging: Obama weathered the storm and won; both Clinton and Brown lost.

But if Western liberal leaders and elites see many millions of those whose votes they seek as reactionary, Vladimir Putin, now President of Russia for a fourth, six-year term with a higher vote than he achieved in 2012, appears to understand the “bitter” small towners, the “deplorables” and the “bigots.” In the his previous six-year term he brought in a raft of legislation and initiatives popular with many Russians—measures which also speak to many of the fears and preferences of Western social conservatives, especially those in the working and lower middle classes. Like his Soviet predecessors, he is inviting the workers of the world to cast off their chains—of political correctness.

Since the vanguard radicalism of the sixties, deeply felt attitudes in the West have changed; often, in recent decades, by law and by exhortation. Gays, especially gay men, were —even after discriminatory legislation was repealed—marginalised, bullied and at times assaulted, pressure which led many of them to disguise their orientation. Now, legislation in most democratic states penalise discrimination against gays and transsexuals. People of visibly different ethnic groups, as those of African or Asian heritage, many of them descendants of slaves, or immigrants, were denied jobs, housing and membership of many institutions, often with a blind eye turned by police and politicians. Now, once again, it is discrimination, or refusal of service, which leads to a fine, even to jail.

Liberalism has, over the past three decades, developed a muscular side as well as one which protects sexual and racial minorities. Since the 1980s, Western states have sought to turn their disapproval of brutal treatment by authoritarian leaders of their citizens into action, arguing for and effecting intervention in former Yugoslavia, in Sierra Leone, in Iraq and in Libya. Under a UN commitment made in 2005 under the rubric of “a Responsibility to Protect”, states commit to save populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. That has not been limited to rhetoric: savage wars have been fought under its aegis.

In the past two decades, Western states’ foreign aid budgets have increased substantially, and Western NGOs which dispense aid and act, with the United Nations, to provide aid to refugees from war or ethnic cleansing, or victims of natural disasters, has grown greatly. From 2013, the British government has spent 0.7 percent of its GDP on foreign aid, a commitment made legally binding in 2015, by some way proportionately more than any other major state.

These initiatives now find increasing opposition. Any large-scale interventions in foreign conflicts, or to stop the brutalising of sections of the population by the country’s ruler, are now hotly contested and more rarely attempted. The continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan is a partial exception, though the strength of the deployment has been drawn down from some 100,000 in Obama’s presidency to around 12,000 now. In the summer of  2013, an attempt by the Conservative-dominated UK coalition government to intervene in the Syrian conflict was voted down in the House of Commons—and celebrated as a triumph by the opposition Labour Party, and by many conservatives.

In a document leaked to Foreign Policy earlier this month, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, proposes to cut aid to those countries voting against America in the U.N.—a move towards an “American First” aid policy called for by the president, and a reflection of the suspicion with which the Trump administration views foreign aid – beyond its serving American interests. In 2016, an opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph showed that nearly two thirds of respondents disapproved of the relatively high British aid expenditure, most believing that the money—between £13 and £14 billion—should be spent at home.

In many white majority societies, it was largely accepted until the seventies that people from visibly different ethnic backgrounds would be in low-paid service or industrial jobs. At the same time, it was largely accepted that women would rarely be offered high paid, leadership roles; and that determined efforts by men to persuade them to have sex with them was—short of violent assault or rape—just a bit of fun. None of this is regarded as acceptable now: revelations that women’s pay is lower than men’s in comparable jobs are now regarded as scandalous, and widely reported and criticised.

In recent months, a movement in the U.S., #MeToo, which has spread quickly to many other countries, has drawn the limits of acceptability on sexual encounters tighter, to the extent that several prominent women, led by the French actor Catherine Deneuve, have protested that they risk making enjoyable flirting too much of a minefield for men to risk it.

These shifts of political, cultural and social-sexual behavior have been in a (broadly defined) liberal direction: they add up to a veritable revolution, one which the Western democracies are still digesting. Large numbers, however, are not digesting them; rather they wish to spit them out. They have increasingly rebelled through protests and via their elected representatives, through votes for Donald Trump, or for nationalist, anti-EU parties, whose leaders and many followers look to Russia as the most prominent state standing in opposition to the Western trends.

A common belief at the beginning of the nineties was that the end of communism, and in the same year of 1991 the formal end of apartheid in South Africa, dealt death blows to autocracy and political and social reaction. The European Union, which took in the central European, former communist, states, was at the high tide of its success. The British diplomat Robert Cooper, in an influential essay, posed the EU as a postmodern liberal empire, which allowed for “mutual interference in domestic affairs,” called for a rejection of force, saw borders as increasingly irrelevant, and security as best rooted in transparency and interdependence. Yet in the past few years, the trajectory of mainstream governments opposed to the populist-nationalists has been away from “mutual interference” and more power for the EU towards greater security and stronger borders.

Vladimir Putin is opposed to all of the liberal agenda. In the three terms of Presidential office and in his two terms (the first less than a year) as Prime Minister, he has been Russia’s dominant political force. He entered office as an apparent democrat, celebrating the liberalisations of the Yeltsin years, pledging to uphold the rule of law and freedom of speech, as well as a pluralistic media. Bit by bit these were whittled away, as his distrust of the West—accompanied by a recoil from liberal positions on race, sex, the family and warfare—came increasingly to the fore.

In Russia today, formal democracy remained (and remains) but genuinely independent candidates are frozen out: Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most outspoken critic who has since 2010 focussed on the corruption of the Russian elite, was denied an opportunity to run for the presidential office. The judiciary, which had shown some independence, has been brought to heel: on any matter important to the Kremlin, judges would be told, or would know, what judgement to make.

In his widely read The New Cold War (2008), The Economist writer Edward Lucas concluded that in Putin’s Russia, “Opposition is disloyalty at best, and outright treason if it is supported from abroad. The individual is a means to an end, not a bearer of inalienable rights: justice is a tool, not an ideal. The mass media are an instrument of state, not a constraint on its power. Civil society is an instrument for social consolidation, not diversity…foreign policy is solely about the promotion of national interest. Intervention is hypocrisy”.

It was in Putin’s third term—he had elongated the presidential period in office from four to six years—that the tracks have been laid for a properly conservative nationalist Russia. In his state of the nation address in 2012, soon after re-assuming the Presidency, Putin said that his aim was to ensure the state “support institutions that are the bearers of traditional values, passed on from generation to generation.” These included the Orthodox Church, a specific understanding of Russian (including Soviet) history, and the Kremlin itself, all of which were protected from criticism by increasingly draconian legislation.

The anti-Kremlin demonstrations of 2011 and 2012, mainly against corruption and ballot rigging in the 2012 elections, were a shock. Putin, apparently sincerely, believed they were provoked by interference on the part of the West, which the Russian President increasingly and somewhat contradictorily saw both a looming threat, and a collection of states lost in a desert of  decadence and perversion. He has seen, at least initially, in Donald Trump, and more securely in the far-Right nationalist parties of Europe, allies in this reassertion of  “civilised” values, and as opponents of mass immigration which would change the nature of their societies.

Russia, whose population continues to decline, needs immigrants at least as much as demographically-challenged European states: but it extends citizenship only to ethnic Russians, mostly living in the former Soviet states. Citizens of the Central Asian and Caucasian states, desperate for work unavailable in their still-devastated countries, can obtain permits, but are routinely accused, by police and public, of being terrorists, are frequently abused and beaten, on occasion murdered, with little apparent intervention from the state.

Minorities aren’t alone in being beaten. A law passed last January considerably relaxed penalties against wife-beating, to the point where any action against men roughing up their wives is unlikely. The law was commended by the head of the Orthodox Patriarchy’s family commission, Father Dmitry Smirnov, who said that the notion that the state should intervene in family matters was a Western imposition. Alena Popova, who led a lonely vigil outside of the parliament against the law, was accused by passers by of being a Western stooge. The popular tabloid, Komsomolskaya Pravda, ran an article claiming that beaten women often gave birth to boys, and had reason to be proud of their bruises.

In his 2013 State of the Nation address, Putin inveighed against Western decadence, or as he put it “so-called tolerance, sexless and infertile.” Western states were forcing their people “to accept good and bad as equal… but we know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position—defending traditional values that for thousands of years have remained the basis of civilisation: values of a traditional family, religious life.”

In the aftermath of prosecutions of the Pussy Riot punk band, who in 2012 had sung an anti-Putin song on the altar of the vast Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior—two of the three women who made up the band were sentenced to prison terms—any offence against religious believers was criminalised. A 2013 law threatened fines for “spreading propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” among minors, which effectively banned any public discussion of gay relationships, since it might be heard or read by a child.

All of these rearguard initiatives in defense of “traditional values” were attended by punchily presented, skilled propaganda in the media, especially on television. Putin, with his Kremlin colleagues and his skilled, richly rewarded TV propagandists, have successfully kept the bulk of the population in support of their policies. And the message has successfully gotten out beyond Russia’s borders.

Mainstream Western politicians and pundits, repeatedly flatfooted by the success of Russia’s “soft power,” have tended to instead focus on the harder-edged tools the Kremlin regularly employs: its funding of fellow-traveler parties, its aggressive hacking campaigns, and the existence of its propaganda TV and internet networks. The very concept of “disinformation,” so popular among analysts these days, at its heart is dismissive of the notion that the values Putin is expressing have any legitimate pull on their own, implying instead that those voters that share them are only lacking access to the “truth”. Yes, Sputnik and RT are not honest journalistic enterprises, and their stories are often riddled with falsehoods. But the worldview they espouse has broad, enduring, and even increasing appeal among disgruntled Western social conservatives.

And not just in the West. Many of the states to which Russia is reaching out—in the Middle and Far East, in Africa, in South America—share the “traditional values” Putin claims for Russia. They are their traditional values too. In an article in the Journal of Democracy in October of last year, the Berkley political scientist M. Stanley Fish wrote that “Putin aims to convey a clear message to the masses in developing societies:  ‘My people and I bear no strange moral agenda. We too are offended by Western governments and NGOs who tell us to embrace homosexuality and reject traditional gender roles and identities. Our churches and mosques and temples, like yours, reject imposed liberal immorality. Join us and together we will stand strong for our cultural sovereignty and right to live as we will’.”

Putin, in his time in office, has transformed Russia from an emerging democracy and a potential ally to an entrenched authoritarian, illiberal society with a hostile attitude to the West. The tracks Vladimir Putin has laid down with such care and thoroughness since 2012 are unlikely to be ripped up in his fourth term, in large part because they clearly resonate with a conservative-minded subset of the Russian public. Western liberals ignore this reality at their peril—and would do well to recognize that similar dynamics are at play in their own politics.

The post The Reality of Russian Soft Power appeared first on The American Interest.

The Corporate Conscience

If corporations are “persons,” do they have a soul? Can they be patriotic (or unpatriotic) citizens?

For a famously taciturn man whose nickname was “Silent Cal,” our 30th President has several famous lines to his credit—succinct, yet resonant.  The best known, of course, is the story told by President Calvin Coolidge’s wife, Grace. She recalled that a young woman at a dinner party told him she had made a bet she could get him to say at least three words—to which he quietly replied, “You lose.”

Another Coolidge catchphrase is “the chief business of the American people is business”—often cited as an overconfident ode to unfettered American capitalism, uttered at the height of the Roaring Twenties, shortly before the Great Depression brought said American capitalism to its knees.

Yet his larger message was, in fact, the very opposite of what most would infer from the “business of America” slogan. The line is found in a rather thoughtful speech Coolidge delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on January 17, 1925, an address devoted mainly to extolling the importance of a free press in preserving democracy against despotism and propaganda, in prescient anticipation of our present-day dilemma. And in a nifty juxtaposition to his remark about “business,” he also said, “The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I can not repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists.”

Coolidge argued that corporations and successful business people in our democracy need to do more than merely make money, that profit and wealth “can not be justified as the chief end of existence.” Rather,

[T]he accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture.

Nine decades later, in the most prosperous, most innovative, most entrepreneurial society the world has ever seen—one that is, coincidentally, the most privatized, decentralized, and unregulated economy in the contemporary world—we still wrestle still with the proper role that corporations should play in our democracy.

Two recent Supreme Court decisions, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (in 2010), and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (in 2014) have reframed some parts of this conversation by enhancing the status of profit-seeking corporations as “persons” and “citizens” with rights. The former ruling bolstered the freedom-of-expression rights of companies by exempting them from the general rule of transparency in the financing of federal political campaigns. The latter endowed certain companies with aspects of religious freedom by exempting them from the general application of the Affordable Care Act. Together, the two rulings more firmly embedded corporations in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. These remain fiercely contested propositions, ensuring that the nature of corporate personhood, or citizenship, will be continuously debated, legislated, and litigated in the years ahead.

Two recent episodes have further catalyzed the national debate about the role of businesses in our social and political affairs. This past summer, when white supremacists fatally clashed in Charlottesville, Virginia with peaceful counter-protesters, the President of the United States could not find it in himself to condemn the racists. In direct reply to that equivocation, several CEOs of major U.S. companies, led by Kenneth C. Frazier of Merck pharmaceuticals, resigned in protest from a presidential business advisory council. There were so many resignations, in fact, the council was soon disbanded altogether.

Recently, the murder of 17 students and teachers at a high school in Parkland, Florida, by a young man who legally purchased a powerful semi-automatic weapon developed for use in combat, prompted a series of corporate replies.  Some purveyors of firearms announced more restrictive policies, including raising the age for certain purchases or removing from their shelves the more dangerous weapons. A number of major corporations, including Delta Airlines, cancelled affinity arrangements with the National Rifle Association, a large membership organization and the leading political proponent of the widespread availability of such firearms. This quickly led to a mean-spirited political scrum as state legislators in Georgia punished Delta for its stance by cutting from a pending tax bill some $38 million in tax breaks for the airline.

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle writes that the social statements made by Delta Airlines and others in shunning the NRA—and, by extension, the gesture made by Ken Frazier and Merck last summer—are the wrong response to social or political controversy. She urges companies to stay out of these debates, else they will accelerate the mounting polarization in America. “If we decide to make every thing in our lives political, we risk becoming so estranged that we can no longer resolve our disputes through politics.” And, she warned, “slighting millions of NRA members isn’t good for business.” But is this only a matter of the bottom line?

When asked recently about managing tensions between obligations to shareholders and to the public interest, Mr. Frazier told The New York Times,

I actually don’t see that big a conflict between meeting the needs of shareholders and meeting the needs of society.… There are lots of companies that have lost their way because they’ve sort of lost their souls, which is a funny word to use, but companies do have souls.

Coincidentally (or not), the interview with Ken Frazier appeared in The New York Times business section alongside a long report about the French conglomerate Lafarge. Its leadership decided to continue to produce cement in Syria while ISIS descended on the area where its plant was located, and ended up paying millions of dollars in protection money to ISIS and other terrorist enterprises, violating UN Security Council sanctions against the group, French law, and common decency. So Frazier is right: A company can lose its soul. This amorality—Lafarge made an earlier bundle pouring concrete for the massive coastal wall of bunkers for the Nazis that we see in movies about the Normandy invasion (think Saving Private Ryan)—may end up costing the company more than they earned from the cement sales.

Should CEOs, on behalf of their boards, shareholders, employees, and customers, partake in the culture wars that abound in the United States today? Should they do anything more than manufacture and sell their wares? Eight months after his stand against the President, Mr. Frazier said recently that he had felt compelled to act. “In that moment, the president’s response was one that I felt was not in concordance with my views,” Mr. Frazier said. “And I didn’t think they were in concordance with the views that we claim to hold as a country.” This sounds different than choosing sides in an everyday political debate. He appears to be speaking to something larger, living the values we profess, defining American patriotism. But how can one discern when a firmly held viewpoint is about fundamental values and not “just” a policy question of tax rates or environmental regulation? And where does the gun-rights versus child-safety conundrum fall? Is this a difference of opinion, or right versus wrong? Dollars and cents, or something more?

In a fascinating historical review of the origins of the limited liability corporation, the legal scholar Yishai Schwartz reminds us that the corporation, as originally conceived in Roman law and later refined in English and U.S. law, was designed to serve public interests. So a legal fiction was developed that gave to an abstraction a kind of personhood, the ability to build, own, maintain, and sell major utilities (like stadiums, roads, and ports), as well as to sign contracts, hold money, and even commit to relationships (with employees and customers) and be sued in court for breach of promise.

Over time this changed, and most definitely in the United States. Corporations evolved from benevolent public interests, empowered by the governments to do big things, as in the case of the British East India Company, into avaricious enterprises. The pivotal 20th -century case in American corporate jurisprudence came in 1919 in Dodge v. Ford Motor Company. Then, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of minority shareholders in Henry Ford’s company, declaring that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders,”and ruled Mr. Ford could not use the proceeds of the company for the benefit of customers and workers at the expense of shareholders.

While this eventually prompted Ford and his son Edsel to create the Ford Foundation in 1936 with their considerable personal wealth, the decision had a chilling effect on corporations undertaking social welfare initiatives directly—that is, until the rise of social activism among shareholders who wanted their companies to take positions and spend money in pursuit of something other than profit maximization. Campaigns for “corporate social responsibility” have been waged over the past three decades, at shareholder meetings, in the media, through boycotts, and through the development of “Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives.” These MSIs draw corporations into partnerships with human rights groups or governments to monitor (in order to improve) specific aspects of corporate behavior, such as working conditions of those employed in the supply chain or the environmental impacts of extractive industries. These voluntary pacts seek to make corporations act as if they possess a moral sensibility, and to enforce their better instincts with positive publicity, along with the threat of negative publicity or shunning if they stray.

Much of the energy in these efforts has come from the progressive side of the U.S. political spectrum. What appears new is that the driving force in some of the recent high-profile cases that have enhanced the personification of corporations—so they may be accorded a conscience and even religious sensibilities—has come from the political Right. Thus it was Justice Samuel Alito who wrote in the majority opinion in Hobby Lobby: “While it is certainly true that the central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so.” According to Schwartz, this marks a “seismic shift” in the legal principles governing corporate identity and purpose since the Dodge decision:

Hobby Lobby announces a shift from a conception of the corporation as a single-minded pursuer of profit to an entity that—like any other person—can balance and aspire to multiple ends.

So, corporations are “like any other person…” They, too, can embody the “practical idealism” that Calvin Coolidge said characterizes our country. They can be good citizens, patriotic even. Then corporations can probably also, “like any other person,” be bad citizens—ungrateful, uncaring, or unpatriotic. Tim Cook’s Apple Corporation comes to mind—like many others, only more so, Apple hoards hundreds of billions of dollars offshore, to avoid paying taxes for the upkeep and defense of the country that gave birth to the company and its fortune (while also refusing to help the FBI investigate the San Bernardino killers’ iPhones). Compare this to what Jerome L. Dodson said about this month’s scuttling of Broadcom’s $117 billion hostile takeover bid for the chipmaker Qualcomm. Dodson is founder and CEO of the hedge fund Parnassus Investments, which owns 8.3 million shares of Qualcomm and would have profited handsomely from the buyout by Broadcom—that’s 8.3 million times the $24 premium being offered on the share price. As James B. Stewart of The New York Times recounts his conversation with Dodson:

“There is no doubt I would have made a quick profit if the Broadcom deal had gone through,” he said. “But as a shareholder, I voted against it.”

That’s partly because, “as a citizen, I didn’t like the deal,” he said. Broadcom typically slashes costs, especially research and development, and the company said it would do exactly that if it acquired Qualcomm. “In the long run, that’s not good for the country or for society,” Mr. Dodson said.

This view is shared by the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment, which persuaded the President to block Broadcom’s bid on grounds of “national security.” They concluded that Broadcom likely would curtail Qualcomm’s research and development efforts in building the next generation of cellular connectivity, the 5G technology that will enable driverless cars, virtual reality, and other innovations. This matters for national security because China is the main rival in this research area. Broadcom—based in Singapore but intertwined with Chinese enterprises—could be seeking to weaken American capacity in this area at the behest of (or at least to the benefit of) China and its own mega tech corporation, Huawei. Whether Broadcom would do this just for short-term profit-maximization, or to advance the strategic position of China, the result would be the same.  While some American investors and executives would simply take the money and run, Jerome Dodson thought something more important was in play here. One can believe in free trade, including cross border mergers, and still conclude that certain deals represent a danger to U.S. security, as appears to be the case here, and should be stopped. The action by the Administration, so rare that it has been taken only five times in three decades, does not seem to be motivated by protectionist instincts, but rather by a thorough review of technology, industrial capacity and investment, and national security. The brief letter the Treasury panel issued to explain the decision is compelling—and chilling.

The widening resentment of corporate (and other) elites is partly due to the evident ease with which multinational corporations glide across borders, moving facilities and jobs along with them. This animates the populism and nationalism that is driving the politics of so many democracies, and nudging governments (including our own) toward tariff wars that could imperil global prosperity. If the corporations that were born and bred in the United States, that benefited so clearly from the legal, educational, and entrepreneurial infrastructure of the United States, feel no loyalty to the country that gave rise to them, then why should we continue to give these corporations more and more aspects of the rights of American citizenship?

The answer, I suggest, depends on what kind of citizens they choose to be. And by “they” I mean the people who make decisions on behalf of these limited liability corporations. Companies are not bots or algorithms. They may create bots and algorithms, but they are run by women and men with discerning minds. So they should speak up, and act on principle when the moment calls for it. Not to fall into camps of Left and Right, but to demonstrate that they know right from wrong, that they are patriots, too, as well as business executives and investors.

Bravo, Ken Frazier. Bravo, Jerome Dodson.

The post The Corporate Conscience appeared first on The American Interest.

TerrorSpeak

The Terrorist Argument: Modern Advocacy and Propaganda

by Christopher C. Harmon and Randall G. Bowdish

Brookings Institution Press, 2018, 352 pp., $35.99

 

Digital World War: Islamists, Extremists, and the Fight for Cyber Supremacy

by Haroon K. Ullah

Yale University Press, 2017, 336 pp., $25

 

Words are Weapons: Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror

by Philippe-Joseph Salazar

Yale University Press, 2017, 256 pp., $30 

It usually takes time for mature thought and scholarship to catch up with galloping political realities, so it is no surprise that the recent appearance of three highly instructive books on the communications strategy of salafi terrorist organizations comes just as the territorial might of the Islamic State is about to be extinguished, mainly by force of arms. But we should not give in to temptations of irony, for the end of the Caliphate is not the same as the end of the Islamic State. And even if it were, it is not the end of salafi terrorism, which is likely to persist in several manifestations so long as the wider conditions propitious to it endure.

The appearance of not one or two, but three, insightful books on this subject within such a short time is also likely to strike genuine experts as a bit shocking, for the earlier literature on the communication strategies of terrorist organizations has been of limited quality. Previous works are narrowly descriptive; authors discovered many trees but saw no forest.

Contemporary terrorism is instantaneous and unpredictable, and it has become capable of instilling terror across the globe thanks to the power of modern media. The most recent manifestation of Middle Eastern/Islamist terrorism, namely the Islamic state—a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, Daesh—has exceeded even the reputation established by its predecessor, al-Qaeda, in part because the internet and social media enabled a global communication strategy far beyond anything that went before it. Therefore, since the proclamation of the Caliphate by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on June 29, 2014 in Mosul, rivers of ink have been consumed to describe, analyze, and dissect the Islamic State’s communication strategies.

Those analyses were stimulated by the sense that something new was afoot. But, as already suggested, they were mostly unfit for consumption because they ignored the historical background, social roots, and precedents that antedated the Daesh phenomenon. Part of the reason is that many ISIS media strategy groupies were either technologists narrowly focused on means but not ends, or journalists in search of marketable stories who simply lacked substantive knowledge of Islam and Muslim societies. For example, few analyses bothered to examine the initial publications of radical groups or individuals, who were experimenting with different media as early as the 1980s. A striking case is Sheikh Kishk (1933–96), known as the “Star of Islamic preaching,” whose sermons reverberated from Cairo to Casablanca and from Baghdad to the North African neighborhood of Marseilles, France.

From the mid-1990s on, the first radical websites were often dismissed because of their meager outreach; their early penetration of the net was far from pervasive due to a lack of technical mastery. Deeper studies commenced only in the early 2000s, when the first polished propaganda videos appeared online. But many of the strategies evolved long before then, and the thinking behind them long before that.

With the advent of social media in the 2010s, the situation changed dramatically: The complex links between terrorism, propaganda, and online recruitment became primary subjects of research. Nevertheless, the research still largely lacked depth and context. Scholars, analysts, and policymakers began to realize that nothing in terrorist communications is left to chance; but they often missed the fact that not everything is focused on reaching external audiences to establish brand and gain credibility. Reassuring, retaining, motivating, and controlling those already on the inside of the group is also a critical part of the communications strategy, largely because their membership was often spatially diffuse,  variable, and shrouded in secrecy. Western analysts grasped the aim of proselytizing among potential recruits and pre-terrifying potential targets; but they usually missed the larger picture formed by the multiple links between senders, message, medium, recipients—not to mention the wider context of the communicative act.

The three books under review here—Christopher C. Harmon and Randall G. Bowdish’s The Terrorist Argument, Modern Advocacy and Propaganda, Haroon Ullah’s Digital World War, and Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s Words are Weapons—succeed because they share a quality that most of their predecessors lacked: a sensitivity to the context in which these multiple links play out. Each book focuses on different components of the context and the relationship between terrorism and multiple kinds of media, ranging from social media platforms to encrypted messaging, from newspapers to television programs. Harmon and Bowdish focus on a broad selection of terrorist media; Ullah applies both qualitative and quantitative analysis to the ways in which Islamists and other extremists engage with social media; Salazar deals with ISIS’s rhetoric and the reasons for its relative persuasiveness. All three books either focus on or refer to historical precedents, most evince a broad appreciation of technology, and one concentrates on the nature of rhetoric itself as it manifests in Middle Eastern and Western languages. All get at pieces of the multi-layered nature of terrorist communications strategies, which both target a diverse audience and exploit diverse sets of techniques and media. For that reason, the three books complement one another, and are most usefully read together.

In their The Terrorist Argument, Modern Advocacy and Propaganda Christopher Harmon—a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies of Honolulu—and Randall Bowdish—a lecturer at the University of Nebraska and assistant professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy of Colorado Springs—examine how terrorist groups in recent history have used propaganda, adapting useful techniques from the past to new communications technologies. The book explores nine case studies of how armed groups have used communications techniques with varying degrees of success: radio, newspapers, song, television, books, e-magazines, advertising, the internet, and social media. Many analysts have attributed jihadi propaganda success solely to social media, thus excluding from their studies the fundamental historical background. While social media is undoubtedly a critical component today, it is only part of a much bigger media campaign that has historical precedents of primary relevance.

The nine case studies range from the role of Franz Fanon in the now-forgotten radio campaign of 1956­–62 carried out by the Algerian National Liberation Front, to the old-fashioned newspaper The Irish People, a New York weekly of the end of the 19th century. They also include Hezbollah’s television station Al-Manar, formed in June 1991 and now banned in many Western countries including the United States, and the Islamic State’s multi-messaging efforts, which can be defined as the exploitation of many sources while targeting many audiences. Every case study analyzed in The Terrorist Argument shows a different degree of success; some are shorter, or longer, in their expanse of years, but from all of them the authors draw several pivotal conclusions.In their The Terrorist Argument, Modern Advocacy and Propaganda Christopher Harmon—a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies of Honolulu—and Randall Bowdish—a lecturer at the University of Nebraska and assistant professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy of Colorado Springs—examine how terrorist groups in recent history have used propaganda, adapting useful techniques from the past to new communications technologies. The book explores nine case studies of how armed groups have used communications techniques with varying degrees of success: radio, newspapers, song, television, books, e-magazines, advertising, the internet, and social media. Many analysts have attributed jihadi propaganda success solely to social media, thus excluding from their studies the fundamental historical background. While social media is undoubtedly a critical component today, it is only part of a much bigger media campaign that has historical precedents of primary relevance.

First, terrorism is purposeful activity. It aims above all to score psychological impact, to unsettle the brain of the body politic.

Second, the ideas and arguments advanced in terrorist propaganda greatly matter. Terrorist entrepreneurs tend to see their organizations as constructive more than destructive, and this makes it possible for them to believe in their cause and maintain a strong sense of belonging. Communication is the realm in which both show most clearly.

Third, successful terrorist and insurgent groups have propaganda systems of scope and size, as well as multiple audiences.

A particularly original element in Harmon and Bowdish’s volume is their discussion of books that must be analyzed in order to understand the overall communications strategies that terrorist develop and deploy. They name a few, but their principal example is The Call to Global Islamic Resistance by Abu Musab al-Suri, the nome de guerre of the Syrian jihadi Mustafa Setmariam Nassar. This encyclopedic work of strategy and history, which is also a call to arms, still influences many Islamists the world over. Not many living jihadis have seen such extensive dissemination of their ideas as al-Suri, whose key ideas have been summarized in Inspire, the online magazine of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Indeed, over the past decade intelligence officers have found audio and video recordings of al-Suri’s lectures in terrorist safe houses in multiple countries: Syria, Jordan, Italy, Germany, and the United States. Al-Suri himself was captured in Pakistan in 2005, jailed in Syria soon thereafter—and apparently released in early 2012. As the authors shrewdly note: “One paradox in international terrorism is that one may both a fugitive and yet be ever-present in the media.” This Syrian ideologue is one of the globe’s known ghosts: He is probably still alive, though no one is sure if or where.

The sharpness of the description of al-Suri offered by Harmon and Bowdish is characteristic of the whole book, which provides an impressively detailed historical framework for each chapter, as well as clear pictures of diverse scenarios and settings. The Terrorist Argument’s main contribution to the scholarship is a new understanding of terrorist messages in the context of the media used to propagate them, and of how are separable action and public argument are in modern terrorism. As the authors warn in their introduction, even though Inspire has now seen the deaths of its two famous American-born editors, Samir Khan and Anwar al-Awlaki, there will always be other terrorist editors, and other ideologists, to take up the intellectual cudgels and fire rhetorical bullets to punctuate their arguments.

Whereas Harmon and Bowdish display their sensitivity to context in their reconstruction of diverse historical phases in different regions of the world, Digital World War provides an exhaustive overview of the least well-known social media used by Islamists and radicals. Written by the American diplomat Haroon Ullah, Digital World War focuses on social media and digital communication networks, applying both qualitative and quantitative analysis to the ways in which extremists engage with social media.

Ullah investigates the unprecedented impact of social media across the MENA region and Southeast Asia and demonstrates how it has profoundly changed relationships between regimes and peoples and among different social actors. The book is based on a unique data set and a large number of interviews with political elites, focus groups, and organizational and social media leaders across the Muslim-majority world, including Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Turkey. It also draws on primary and secondary archival and published sources.

Digital World War’s particular emphasis is on how extremist groups became “sophisticated sculptors” of their social media activities. Yet Ullah sees a positive side to the technological tsunami as well, stressing the role of social media in empowering citizens. In short, the new technology is a multiplier of social pluralization, which is a prerequisite for more pluralist political attitudes. He correctly notes that Muslim social networking is a major causal factor in the exponential increase of new voters in the Islamic world, for example. He also highlights “edutainment” as a new phenomenon in the political arena, referring to media designed to educate through entertainment, not excluding outright comedy and satire. It is slowly convincing young people in the region and beyond that taking part in politics is worth the trouble and, sometimes, the risk.

Ullah outlines what a proper understanding of social media can teach us about regional and international politics and diplomacy, showing deep knowledge of different global contexts and of Southeast Asia in particular. Nevertheless, he leans at times toward excessive optimism. Ullah credits the supposedly inherently “democratic,” anti-establishment impact of digital technologies, to wit: “Rather than needing deep pockets and years of work to organize and mobilize enough bodies to threaten a sitting government, now it takes only a few hours and a $20 per month internet connection to start a revolution.”

In so doing, Ullah underestimates several factors likely to disappoint his expectations, such as persisting censorship and the lack of a mature political culture. The latter is due, perhaps ironically, to the advent of ready-made opinions available everywhere thanks to technological flooding. The result is that few people have ideas; rather, half-baked ideas have them. He also fails to heed past cases of technology-driven enthusiasm that have been foiled by reality. “Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century; alas, things did not quite work out as he supposed.

Alas, now as then, things are more complicated. Revolutions may indeed now be easier to start than in the past, but they are still not easy. We all recognize the important role of the internet and social media during the so-called Arab Spring; but we also know how that turned out—not many happy endings to date, to put it mildly.

When it comes to specific uses of digital technologies by Islamists and extremists, Ullah applies a more prudent approach. He knows that social media does not offer a panacea, or a promise that Islamists will become more open-minded or democratic. There is nothing to indicate that even the most digitally literate Islamist leaders will embrace liberal democracy.

Here a word of caution is required: Ullah distinguishes Islamists from extremists, positioning them on a continuum. The term extremism indicates, in his usage, engagement in a specific set of behaviors that threaten democracy or seek to prevent its rise in authoritarian settings. Islamists believe that Islamic teaching should inform public policy and support calls for civil enforcement of some religious laws, but without necessarily promoting coercion or violence or seeking autocratic power arrangements. Though Islamic parties can be differentiated from extremist groups, in practice the distinctions have a way of blurring, or even disappearing.

Nevertheless, Ullah uses the distinction to highlight several interesting, often overlooked points. First, in terms of their use of social media, most media-wise Islamist parties attempt to play to a “mass market” with an eye toward competing and winning in the mainstream political arena. For most extremists, on the other hand, an electoral revolution is not of interest: They are geared instead toward attracting niche audiences, first of all local and foreign fighters, and fueling local fears in order to leverage security payments—otherwise known as extortion.

Second, a continuum exists between “a sacred state excluding human will” and “a secular state excluding divine will.” Ullah points out that religion-based political parties and extremist groups frequently move back and forth along this spectrum in order to gain tactical political advantage; they do not typically occupy a permanent position. Some prefer to strategically support an outright religious theocracy, others a more moderate, outward-looking government with secular trappings. The bottom line is that Islamist organizations become more extreme or more moderate depending on the political and social contexts in which they find themselves. They will do what is beneficial to maintaining political viability, and their use of social media is a means to that end.

Third, as most Western observers fail to fully realize, it is not only ISIS but also many other extremists, as well as more moderate Islamist groups, that are harnessing the power of social media. This is a crucial point, since both the academic and think-tank worlds have been hyper-focused on the Caliphate, failing to approach the broader spectrum of extremist communications strategies, targets, and media.

Fourth, by analyzing Islamists and extremists’ online presence, it is possible to detect the most important strategies they tend to select, which include the wide dissemination of facts (and propaganda) on government and military corruption, the exposure of the ruling party’s inability to deliver basic goods and services and neglect of certain ethnic regions and minorities, and even out-and-out gossip about the ill-gotten gains and “diseased inclinations” of individual politicians and elites.

Ullah’s list, however, neglects some of the most important strategies of both Islamist and extremist communications—especially those related to supposed Muslim victimhood and the widespread discourse of grievance and self-pity, be it individual or collective. This sensitive but central topic is worth a dedicated analysis, which is unfortunately missing from the scope of Ullah’s book.

Overall, however, Digital World War stands out for two reasons. First, its geographical and historical breadth is very wide, ranging from the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami that in 2006 began uploading anasheed (religious songs) on Youtube, to the exploitation of social media by the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah to increase their grassroots support under the umbrella of charity. Second is its superlative accuracy, not only in the historical reconstructions presented, but also in its descriptions of the Islamists and extremists’ use of less well-known online platforms. These include JustPaste and SoundCloud, which, while largely unfamiliar to the general public, represent crucial forums for radical recruitment and propaganda dissemination. That inclusiveness helps Ullah portray a cyber-savvy community that is much more complex and diverse than it appears in other analyses that focus exclusively on Twitter and few other platforms.

A similar analytical sharpness can be found in Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s Words are Weapons. Salazar, a distinguished professor of rhetoric at the Sorbonne, is mainly interested in rhetoric as a primary manifestation of power. This work is unquestionably one of the most elevated dissertations on terrorist communications we have. Throughout its two hundred pages, it elucidates with stunning acuity why the standard Western approach to ISIS and more broadly countering jihadi communication is doomed to failure.

The main reason is that the West keeps looking at jihadi communications strategy from a Western-centric point of view, projecting its own frames of reference onto the target of analysis without realizing it. So, with some exceptions, it focuses on leaderships and presumably coherent organizations, because Western organizations are assumed to have leaders and be coherent. In practice, it therefore rejects arguments stressing “leaderless jihad.”

Even more damaging, it manifests a rationalist fallacy in thinking that jihadi communications strategy is based on explicitly ideological arguments, ignoring the emotional, affective side of language and the roiled Middle Eastern cultural context in which it rests. Westerners presume, in effect, that ideas float around in the air unto themselves; in fact, ideas are invariably socially embedded, as analysts such as Scott Atran have been at pains to point out. Hence, while intellectual arguments are important to jihadi leaders, and leadership obviously matters in extremist organizations, emotional appeals work far better for rank-and-file members. Jihadi communications leaders know that their members are not motivated mainly by intellectual appeals; they know, too, that only a minority are well-educated enough to even understand such appeals. Most Western and especially American policy types seem somehow not to know this.

Hence, for example, what seems florid, exaggerated, and ostentatious to Westerners in the harangues of the Caliphate and online propaganda—and hence dismissible as “over the top”—does not appear that way to those who naturally speak in this manner. It certainly does not seem so to those who propagate the call to jihad and submission to the Caliphate via highly emotional appeals. Against the Caliphate’s rhetoric style Westerners are disarmed, since European and American political languages, in comparison, are sterile, rhetorically banal, and poetically deficient.

To get the point across, Salazar stresses the existence of a Strongspeak—the Caliphate’s rhetoric—as opposed to the West’s Weakspeak. So as far as Western counter-radicalization and de-radicalization initiatives are concerned, Salazar is justifiably pessimistic: “The counterpropaganda techniques and the de-radicalization assembly line make the pitiable but understandable mistake of thinking that these are precisely substitute values they are offering. But it is not possible to respond to the caliphal appeal with a homologue power unless values both precede and follow it, which is not the case.”

This is a brave perspective in the current Western context, and American policymakers in particular need to take it seriously. Erudite in both Western and Islamic traditions, Salazar demonstrates the power of the word at the core of Islam, something that has always been strong, that jihadism excels at exploiting, and that is incommensurate with the classical Greek principle of Logos, from which Western rhetoric stems. Salazar offers luminous examples of the role of the word and rhetoric in Islam and Islamic traditions. He emphasizes, for example, that Muslim identity itself is based on the utterance of faith, the shahada, which opens the doors of Islam for those who would convert.

In this respect, a reference to the Quranic concept implied by kun fayakun would have enhanced Salazar’s argument. Kun fayakun—“(God says) ‘Be’ and it is”—illustrates the power of God to create through a simple utterance. The phrase can be found in the Quran eight times. Of course, this passage in the Quran mirrors the opening paragraph of Genesis, for Islam derives from Judaism, but the similarities go deeper. Both Judaism and Islam emphasize the spiritual centrality of hearing over seeing. The Greeks, and hence the West, do the opposite, and the resulting failure of each to really understand the other is profound.

Consider an example Salazar brings. Westerners have long accused Islamic cultures of scriptural literalism—never mind the irony of Western literalism that litters premodern Western thinking. Salazar masterfully explains, in his section dedicated to the Caliphate and the literal reading of the Quran, that the reading must be literal in order for analogic reasoning to work, since analogical reasoning is always based on literal fact. That doesn’t mean, however, that Muslims take text literally, any more than Jews do. But Westerners tend to systematically reduce the issue to the alternative that is familiar to them: a literal, hence misleading, closed interpretation versus an interpretation open to debate. Westerners, Salazar suggests, fail to grasp the force of analogy and how it animates the Caliphate’s propaganda, which is something imagistic, not rational as such. It aims at seducing the imagination, not convincing the intellect. This is one way that Words are Weapon illustrates the Caliphate’s rhetorical power, showing us the ways in which we do not understand its persuasive oratory. In so doing Salazar shows that if we fail to acknowledge this essential characteristic of Islamic thought, every counter-narrative effort we concoct is doomed to fail.

To win the fight against Islamic radicalism at the level of propaganda and communications strategies, Western democracies must radically change their approach to their enemies’ rhetoric. Salazar does not play the banal and reductionist game of civilization versus radicalism, and he does not offer one-size-fits-all explanations or quick solutions. He urges serious people in the West to learn about others, to achieve discernment through genuine thought. Salazar’s is ultimately a passionate analysis that aims at practical ends.

We gain from Salazar an understanding that the main goal of the Caliphate’s propaganda is probably best summed up by the term “seduction”: The Caliphate has wanted and still wants, even in its reduced ambit of power, to attract and charm. It is here that one of the sharpest insights of Words Are Weapons aids our understanding. The Caliphate does not do “marketing” as Westerners understand the term. It is not a brand. Its products cannot be replaced by other products. The reason is that, according to its founding narratives, the values it offers and pursues are absolute, not relative and interchangeable. The absolutization of jihadi discourse cannot be further removed from contemporary Western categories of thought. And that is why Westerners have such a hard time understanding the “other”—in this case an other that is a deadly enemy.

We would be wise to contextualize our own efforts to counter what terrorists try to do by becoming more aware of our mental blocks and biases, which foil our efforts to grasp the challenge we face. No communications strategy gains power until users consume it, be they enemies or potential recruits. So to understand how jihadi communications strategy works, we have to understand not only those who fabricate messages but how recipients think about them within their social contexts.

All three of these books send a single warning: Our knowledge of terrorist communicative strategies, media, and goals is small and deficient. Greater awareness of context, a flexible perspective that enables us to look both backward and forward, and the analysis of leadership goals as well as the receptivity of a diffuse rank-and-file will improve our ability to contextualize properly the communications phenomena before us. We are very far from being able to do that now.

See Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); “The Reality of Grass-Roots Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2008); “The Next Generation of Terror,” Foreign Policy, October 8, 2009.

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The Beginning of the End of Work

From the cute little vacuum Roomba to Siri or Alexa and cars that drive themselves, we are at the beginning of the end of work. In 2013, a now-famous Oxford University analysis forecasted that 47 percent of all jobs are threatened in the United States. There are already signs from shuttered shopping malls to the fact that robots and artificial intelligence are taking over factories, offices, and cash registers. Clearly, they will win the job stakes because they don’t ask for raises or take sick days.

All of which is to say that winter is coming to America’s middle class.

The late physicist Stephen Hawking warned that this would result in income disparity and chaos. “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality,” he wrote.

Hawking’s warning may be regarded by some as hysterical, but it should be heeded. Deniers maintain that automation triggers “creative disruption” or a transition from lousy jobs to better ones. For instance, Silicon Valley types trot out the fact that in 1900, 40 percent of people slogged daily on farms, and now only 2 percent do. However, their example disproves their point: The transition in the United States from farm to city took generations and was grueling, scarred by social disruption, mass underemployment, unrest, sweatshops, urban slums, forced urbanization, poverty, crime, worker struggles, and enormous socioeconomic upheaval and strife. This time will be different, and possibly worse, unless brakes or policies are put in place as automation increases.

The automation trend clearly makes workers uneasy, but hard facts are unavailable because technological unemployment is not identified and highlighted in economic reports as it should be. This lapse lulls some into disbelief about dire predictions because, after all, unemployment levels are relatively low, (though so is labor force participation), and job creation growth appears respectable. But a glimpse into what’s underway was contained in a 2014 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics which measured hours of work (whether by self-employed, part-time or full-time workers) and not jobs over a 15-year period from 1998 to 2013.

During that time, economic output in the United States increased by 42 percent (or $3.5 trillion after inflation adjustments). But the number of hours worked remained exactly the same, at 194 billion hours in total. This is technological unemployment: Zero growth in the number of hours needed to create wealth despite a population increase of 40 million people. The study, not replicated since, proves that work itself is shrinking.

Robots and AI are going to cut an even deeper swath through the middle class, blue and white collar, and there are no replacement jobs. A landmark 2017 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found every industrial robot from 1993 to 2007 replaced 5.6 workers and lowered wages of remaining workers by 0.5 percent. During that time up to 670,000 jobs were erased, with no new jobs to replace them.

These figures are miniscule in a full-time job market of 127 million, but the wake-up call is nigh. Millions of truck drivers and retail workers are about to be automated out of their jobs. The driverless vehicle is the first shot fired in the political battle against automation, and the Teamsters Union is demanding a ban on autonomous trucks. The significance cannot be understated: The most common job held in 29 out of 50 states is as a truck driver, and an estimated one in eight workers drives a vehicle of some sort for a living. This means robot vehicles and drones will take jobs away from tens of millions of breadwinners and those who provide services for them. This carnage is being mimicked by Amazon’s voraciousness: Another one of America’s most common jobs is as a retail clerk or cashier.

As these disruptions take hold, technology will be increasingly demonized, which is why Silicon Valley’s billionaires are trying to get out in front of the issue. Some have proposed universal basic income (UBI), or cash for life from governments. But that amounts to a disingenuous attempt to get governments to socialize the costs they have created for society. The best idea so far has come from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.

“Right now,” he said in an interview with Quartz, “the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory has that income taxed. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

In February, European Union lawmakers considered a proposal to make robot owners to pay for worker retraining. But the backlash from technology companies led to its rejection on the basis that such a tax would be a competitive disadvantage and slow down innovation.

But Gates suggested that a slowdown was a good idea: “We ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed of that [technological] adoption to figure out … where this has a particularly big impact.”

Others rich guys have waded into the discussion but shouldn’t have. Alphabet co-founder Larry Page suggested a “French” solution of drastically cutting work hours and granting more vacations. In other words, workers would share the pain by making half as much money without affecting corporate bottom lines. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, devoted a chunk of his Harvard commencement speech to guaranteed income, paid for by government and not the likes of Facebook. Another Facebook billionaire, Chris Hughes, suggested a real non-starter in this Trump era: that workers making less than $50,000 a year get $500 a month from the government paid for by taxing the country’s wealthiest 1 percent.

Universal basic income is not a new idea and there are several pilot projects around the world. But to date, such a scheme has been politically dead on arrival. A recent Gallup poll revealed only 48 percent approval for a universal basic income for those displaced by AI or robots. Significantly, however, the same polled group overwhelmingly supported taxing tech companies and robots to pay displaced workers severance and retraining costs.

There’s also the Common Wealth argument that the tech sector owes the public huge dividends because all its underlying technologies are based on trillions of research dollars invested by the government and the military. The argument is that technology is a public good, much like an oil field in Alaska, and despite being captured and monetized by private entities, deserves to earn a royalty that should be passed along to taxpayers. It’s a valid point.

A separate issue is that tech companies should pay the public for the data they have monetized for years and which are the basis for the biggest fortunes in Silicon Valley.

Interestingly, Chinese billionaire Kai-Fu Lee, chairman of Sinovation Ventures in Beijing, has another view. He dislikes universal basic income but believes everyone should be guaranteed free health care, food, shelter and access to jobs that benefit society.  “UBI doesn’t address people’s loss of dignity or meet their need to feel useful,” Lee rightly notes. “It’s just a convenient way for a beneficiary of the AI revolution to sit back and do nothing.”

The post The Beginning of the End of Work appeared first on The American Interest.

How To Deal with Putin

In a result that should surprise no one, Vladimir Putin was elected to a fourth term as Russia’s President on Sunday, March 18. The Kremlin’s outrageous efforts to increase turnout—including reminders to show up at the polls posted on the mobile apps of major state-owned banks—combined with massive and well-documented electoral fraud sufficed to give Putin 76 percent of the vote with a reported 68 percent turnout, the highest for the past decade. With this, Vladimir Putin gets a broad mandate for continuing his hostile policies towards both his own people and other countries.

Last week, just two days ahead of this inevitable outcome, I attended PutinCon, a conference held in New York and devoted to exposing the threats posed by Putin’s governance. Organized by the Human Rights Foundation and led by the chess champion and prominent Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov, PutinCon took place in a Broadway theater and attracted more than a dozen remarkable speakers and hundreds of attendees. Among them were Bill Browder, the financier and architect of the Magnitsky Act; former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who oversaw the case against Prevezon that involved money laundering in the Magnitsky case, and who was fired two months before the case was settled; and even the Republican candidate Paul Martin, who is running for Congress in California’s 48th District against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and is building his campaign primarily on anti-Putin resentment.

I asked some of the speakers and attendees at PutinCon four questions about how to deal with Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the next six years.

Is cooperation with Putin’s Russia still possible and needed? If yes, in which areas?

Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017:

In some areas we have to cooperate with most countries. Outside of my expertise on matters of war and peace and dealing with problems in the Middle East, sure, there might be some things we can cooperate with him on. But we should also stand strong for our own country as well.

Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management:

I think that we need to understand, the people in the West need to understand, that Putin has no interest in negotiating or cooperating on any issue. He only understands raw power, and so all the interactions with him should be on the basis of raw power.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, vice chairman of Open Russia, chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom:

There are some areas in which Western governments must talk and maintain dialogue with the Kremlin regime. But while they do that, it is important to also stand on the position of proof. Major Western governments should be able to do more than one thing at a time. If Ronald Reagan was able to negotiate success with arms control with the Soviet government and at the same time begin every bilateral summit by putting down the list of Russian or Soviet political prisoners on the table, then so Western governments today, including the U.S. government, can discuss not just those issues that they feel are in their interests to discuss with the current regime in the Kremlin, but also raise issues that are relating to the rule of law, to democratic governments, and to the respect for human rights, which are, by their very nature and by the international obligations undertaken within the OSCE, supposed to be a matter of international concern.

Paul Martin, Candidate for U.S. House CA-48 Primary:

I would want to look at how Ronald Reagan dealt with Brezhnev. I would want to look at how JFK dealt with Khrushchev. There has to be [a] relationship to some extent, I’m assuming. But as long as they’re meddling in our elections, that brings the situation to a whole entirely different realm. And we have Donald Trump who has not given any orders to begin either a retaliatory or a preventative act.

Luke Harding, foreign correspondent for The Guardian, author of Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win:

It’s just not possible at the moment. Putin’s not interested in mutual solutions. He’s a zero-sum guy, and he really sees the world in quite simple terms that what’s bad for America is what’s good for Russia, and vice versa. He’s not interested in doing traditional cooperation, which is not to say that you shouldn’t engage with Russia. It’s good to talk. Everyone is pro-talking, but you have to talk with a goal in mind. Clearly, you need to talk with Russia over Syria, over the Middle East, over Iran, over Ukraine and so on, but I think it has to be done from a position of strength and also an understanding that Putin is pretty contemptuous of western politicians. He thinks they’re all hypocritical, they’re perishable, they never last very long. Whilst he lasts forever. He outlasted Brezhnev, closing in on Stalin. He will be there when Trump is gone and Theresa May is toast, and so on. I think we need to be absolutely clear-eyed about what the Russian state is in 2018, and it’s a pretty nasty revisionist, authoritarian government that uses all sorts of illegal methods to pursue its goals.

David Kramer, Senior Fellow in the Vaclav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy, Florida International University:

It’s not. They don’t share any values, obviously, and increasingly share fewer and fewer interests. So, trying to strike a cooperative relationship [with a country] that murders its owns people, interferes in other countries’ elections, and baits its neighbors, it’s pointless.

Garry Kasparov, former World Chess Champion, chairman of Human Rights Foundation:

I think it’s totally useless to keep looking for common ground with the Putin regime. He’s not looking for any compromises, and it’s unfortunately a one-way street. The sooner Putin’s regime goes down to the dustbin of history, the better for all of us.

Jamie Kirchick, journalist, visiting fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe and Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution:

I think on some discreet issues like implementing the New START treaty, arms reduction to the extent that de-conflicting in Syria and these very discreet issues, yes—but there’s no grand strategic commonalities that we have. We don’t see the world in the same way. We don’t want the same things in Syria. They’re not interested in counter-terrorism. So, no. I think aside from a handful of these discreet issues, there’s really no room for cooperation.

What should the United States do to better counter the Kremlin’s attacks on the U.S. and Western democracy?

Luke Harding: First of all, acknowledge them. Trump has been very equivocal about whether Russia attacked or maybe it was some guy sitting on a bed or whatever. I think there has to be an understanding that what Putin’s trying to do is use the openness of western society almost as a weapon against western society. The fact that it’s quite porous, that you can have freedom of opinion, that you can hire a bunch of people to try and subvert Facebook and Twitter. We need to be very clear about that.

Karina Orlova: What do you think the United Kingdom should do in response to the poisoning of Sergey Skripal?

Luke Harding: Beyond diplomatic expulsions, which we’ve seen from Theresa May, they need to do something about oligarchs. Every oligarch likes living in London. It’s a great place. I can’t afford to live there. You could de-visa the top 5,000 Kremlin officials and their families, so they can no longer have visas. You can enact the Magnitsky law against people who abuse human rights. Actually this sort of legislation can be used against all sorts of human rights violators. It’s not just the Russians. There are plenty of decent Russians out there. There’s all sorts of other countries as well. But at the moment, the UK, London in particular, is pretty much a kleptocrats’ playground.

Preet Bharara: I think at a minimum sanctions should be imposed. I think the President should speak strongly about it. I think he should support our allies like the United Kingdom when they are attacked on NATO soil, those would be good starts.

Paul Martin: Our agencies should be given permission by the President, and then from there we certainly have our own cyber experts. This is the land of Google and Apple, we certainly have the capacity to counter attack them through cyber means, but prevention is the big thing. There aren’t even preventative measures being taken. So I would say our hands are tied behind our back, because our Commander-in-Chief won’t allow it. Basically a leader should say, “We’re being attacked, our sacred democracy is being attacked. People have died for this form of government. I release all resources, financial and everything else to stop this from happening right now.” We don’t have that happening.

Garry Kasparov: First, the free world and the United States must recognize that we are at war. Whether it’s a cold war or hybrid war, you name it, but you can lose any war even being superior in forces to [the] enemy if you don’t admit that you’re at war. America has a variety of instruments to make Putin and his cronies pay the price, but so far, we can see the lack of political will on both sides of the Atlantic to start using these instruments. Hurt them where it hurts. Follow the money and make sure that the price that they will pay for following Putin’s orders will be unbearable.

Bill Browder: The main thing that the West, that America and other countries can do, is to freeze and seize money of Putin, Putin regime officials and well-connected oligarchs with the Magnitsky Act.

Thor Halvorssen, founder of Human Rights Foundation: I do not believe that democratic states should allow the propaganda vehicles of dictatorships to operate in their sphere. I would immediately shut down RT and all organs of the Russian state in democracies. They do not serve the purposes of media or well-informed citizenry. In fact, they do quite the opposite.

David Kramer: An active containment strategy, which means an increase in sanctions, going after the money, Putin and his regime, denying them and their families and their mistresses, daughters and sons, the privilege of coming here. It means increasing U.S. energy exports to Europe, it means increasing the military presence in the Baltic states and then the non-NATO countries, and it means pushing back on Russian corruption and cleaning up our own act, because otherwise we’re enablers of the regime.

Jamie Kirchick: I think there needs to be tougher response to their behavior. Whether that’s sanctions or whether that’s releasing compromising material that we have on them, on Putin and his cronies. On visa bans, we need to be implementing more. Sending home the children of oligarchs and government officials that are studying in Western universities. There’s a whole set of tools that we can be using.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: Better implement the Magnitsky Act and the Global Magnitsky Act, and really engage this individual, personal sanctions mechanism against those individuals in Putin’s regime who are engaged in abuses of international law, human rights violations, and corruption. And I want to stress, I’m not talking about sanctions on Russia, I’m talking about specific, individual, targeted measures against those people who are responsible for these abuses. Implement this law better.

How do you see the transition of power in Russia after Vladimir Putin?

Bill Browder: I don’t think Putin is going to leave power until he either dies of natural causes or is deposed. And so the transition will probably be unexpected and potentially violent. 

David Kramer: It’s hard to say how it will come about. I imagine that at some point, if Putin shows an unwillingness to lead, people around him will decide that he’s leading up to a dead end, or it’s possible that Russians will reach a point where they’ve had enough. We never know what the tipping point is in a country. But I’m not resigned to the likelihood of Putin being there for 10 more years.

Jamie Kirchick: I’m not hopeful it’s going to get any better. I think it’s not going to be democratic renewal after he’s gone. I think it will sadly be more of the same, but potentially, worse.

Garry Kasparov: There’s no guarantee that when the Putin regime collapses, Russia turns into a democracy, but there’s a guarantee it will never happen if Putin stays in power. There’s no way that regimes like Putin’s can evolve peacefully into a democracy because we’ve reached a point where the collapse of Putin’s dictatorship will be accompanied by violence. It’s in our interest to make sure this violence will be short-lived and not too damaging, but we should recognize that the future of Russia will not be secured unless we’ll be willing to investigate and properly evaluate the crimes committed both by Putin’s regime and also by his Communist predecessors.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: I’m a historian by education. If you look at the history of Russia going back a century or so, every time the Russian people had a free choice in a more or less free election between dictatorship and democracy, they always chose democracy. 1906, 1917, 1991. And so I have no doubt that when Russian citizens are given the opportunity to freely vote to elect their own government that they will vote responsibly. It is our task as a responsible opposition, and this is the main focus of our work at the Open Russia movement, is to already today be preparing for that post-Putin transition. Because as the history of Russia again shows us, big political changes in our country can start quickly and unexpectedly. We cannot afford not to be ready when that time of change comes. So we need to be thinking about and preparing for a post-Putin transition today.

Luke Harding: It’s not happening any time soon and there’s no succession plan. It’s a personalist regime, it’s basically a dictatorship, which is neo-Soviet in many respects, although not ideological as the USSR was. My fear is that you would get Putinism without Putin. I think that’s entirely possible. You can get someone like him, perhaps not quite as effective, but similar.

Which of Putin’s weaknesses should the West exploit?

Jamie Kirchick: Their money. Their money that they have parked in all sorts of Western financial institutions: City of London, offshore bank accounts. They’re much more economically integrated with the West than they were during the Soviet era. We can use those tools to squeeze them more than we are.

David Kramer: It’s a weakness that he and we share, and that’s corruption. His regime is so corrupt. It depends on feeding corruption to placate people, to address their needs, but it means he’s vulnerable, because the only way they enjoy the corruption that they engage in is by putting their money in safe places like the West. So if we go after it, they don’t have the opportunity to exploit their ill-gotten gains. But it also means we have to clean up our own house, too.

Garry Kasparov: As [with] every dictator, Putin is very sensitive to geopolitical defeats. Any chance to show that Putin is no longer [an] all-powerful demigod, who can call the shots in any part of the world, is going to help. You have many spots on the world map where it could be achieved, whether it’s Syria, North Korea, or [the] free world, if you want to use banks, not tanks. The key is psychology. Every dictator survives as long as he looks strong. He doesn’t have to be strong, I want to emphasize it, but he has to look strong. Putin knows the rules of the game and it seems to me the West is slowly recognizing that without making him look weak, we do not expect realistically any uprising in Russia that will overthrow him.

Vladimir Kara-Murza: A lot of people—the corrupt officials and the oligarchs around the Putin’s regime—have for years been using Western countries as havens for their money that they are stealing from the people of Russia. And for the same amount of time, these Western countries have been accepting this dirty money and these people on their soil and in their banks. It is long past time for countries to pride themselves on democratic governance and respect for the rule of law, [that] they stop this bad practice and that they finally shut their doors to those people in the Putin regime who use Western countries as havens for their looted wealth and send a message that they will no longer be able to do that.

Luke Harding: His money. He has a lot of money. He has more money probably than any other person in human history. He and his team are worth $300 billion. It’s a proxy system, so formally it doesn’t belong to him, but he can use it to buy whatever he wants. Billionaires don’t like being separated from their money very much. It’s what keeps them awake at night. They don’t really care about super patriotism and “Krym nash,” Crimea is ours, all this rhetorical stuff. What they care about are their yachts, their mistresses, their super planes, their villas, their Corsican holidays. If you separate them from the pleasures of being part of the international jet set, that really hurts.

Bill Browder: The weaknesses are that … Putin is a very rich man and he keeps of all of his money in the West. And that’s our leverage.

Paul Martin: Without any question, money. Without any question, travel. I mean, really this is a big party that these oligarchs are having. This is all about sex, drugs and rock and roll at the end of the day. I hate to say it, it’s all about exposure to nice toys, nice locations and money. And by freezing the assets, by restricting visas, suddenly, what’s the motive anymore? So sanctions on these oligarchs is the answer, and on Putin as well. And freezing accounts.

Thor Halvorssen: It’s not a question of his weaknesses, it’s a question of understanding how to address and deal with them. Vladimir Putin is a psychopath. Psychopaths do not respond to incentives. We have it all upside down. We shouldn’t be trying to see if he’s going to be good or nice. We should, in fact, be dealing with him the way a psychopath is dealt with, which is through punishment. Disincentives, not through incentives. Incentives is a game where the psychopath in power is able to gain a little bit more every day. Disincentives, punishment is what they answer to, because they believe in survival for themselves. And so what I believe is we’ve been approaching him the incorrect way. Unfortunately, the last government was all about “let’s reach out and extend our outstretched hand.” That didn’t turn out very well anywhere. In Cuba. In Venezuela. In Syria. In Russia. Everywhere that tactic was attempted, it failed miserably. It should not be that. The outstretched hands should be to the civil society groups, to the population of each country. To break the monopoly of information that the government has, to break the perception that we are against Russians. We’re not. We’re against Putin. There’s a huge difference between the two.

James Fallon, neuroscientist, professor in the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine: This is basically a mafia thug, right? […] He plays to people’s weaknesses. He is a predator. He finds out where you’re weak and how you can be had and then tries to offer you that or con you. Now that doesn’t work, a combination with just threats that he will be happy to carry out. And if you don’t play with him, he’ll kill you.

And this is basically a mafioso guy. If you want to know how to get to him, look throughout history of how they got mafioso on technicalities.

Karina Orlova: What personal weaknesses in Vladimir Putin’s character, his personality, can you see?

James Fallon: Nobody has really tested it, because he’s secretive. But he’s done such obvious things. And he does things that most psychopaths do. Now whether he’s a psychopath or a sociopath, it matters greatly. One of the key things is that if you’re a primary psychopath, that’s what [we] usually think of as a psychopath: They do not have emotional apathy, and they do not have moral reasoning, because that area of the brain that has to do with morality, [the] orbital cortex, is way underdeveloped early on, suppressed. Because of that they don’t understand morality, but they study other people’s morality. And they can learn by mirroring other people’s morality even though they don’t feel it.

Imagine being in a world where the worst thing you can do is take somebody’s parking space, that’s murder. We’d laugh at that, and he’d get mad. But he’s like somebody who thinks that stealing a parking place is the worst thing you can do, but in killing somebody there’s no problem. There’s no morality there. You see? Because they’re predators.

But a secondary psychopath, also known as a sociopath, is usually somebody abused later than two or three, four years old, who’s maybe bullied when they’re eight, nine, ten. In that case they understand morality. Because that part of the brain has already developed a full sense of morality, so they know what they’re doing is wrong. Also they have a normal sense of anxiety, whereas a primary psychopath does not feel anxiety. And when psychopaths are caught doing something, they can lie, they don’t have any tells of liars, because it doesn’t matter to them. So they have no neural responses that show nervousness. Since they don’t act guilty, they get away with everything.

And the question is whether you have moral reasoning, a sense of anxiety and remorse. If you have that, that’s a sociopath, not a psychopath. In that case, a sociopath can be cornered.

Whereas psychopaths till the end will just blow it off. The sociopaths, if you corner them, they’ll go crazy. Those are two different things. In the case of a primary psychopath, there is nothing you can do to intimidate them, to retrain them. They’re wired that way, and you basically have to eliminate them. You [have] either got to run, you go away from them, you don’t interact with them, or you have to kill them. There’s no rehabilitation, there’s no sense you can talk into them, there’s no way of talking him out of that trait. And that’s what makes them very unique. And so in one case you have to eliminate them.

With sociopaths, you corner them. So these are two fundamentals.

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Springtime for Autocrats

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union gave rise to an unprecedented wave of democratization around the globe. In the second decade of the 21st century, this wave has not only crested; it appears to be in retreat. Yet, what is emerging are not totalitarian regimes or full dictatorships but rather individual autocrats intent on reshaping their societies in their own image. These new caudillos have little respect for individual rights, the rule of law or constitutional norms. They see themselves as the embodiment of the nation. They also are the newest blight on the international system. Washington and Europe ignore them at their own risk.

What unites the likes of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and many others is that they have established one-person authoritarian systems in which their whimsical power over personnel extends well beyond the state bureaucracy and all the way into societal institutions. Wherever possible, they have their opponents arrested and jailed; more importantly they dismantle institutions one-by-one (even if some of those institutions were very flawed to begin with). The judiciary, the press, the universities, and electoral systems are all transformed into subservient artifacts at the disposal of the leader.

Having come to power through elections, or having had their elevation confirmed by elections, these leaders feel the need to show that they are still committed to a “democratic” system. In reality this increasingly amounts to the charade of meaningless elections whose results are preordained. In Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela, opposition leaders are routinely beaten, their access to the ballot box is prevented through the use of dubious legal tricks, or they are accused of being traitors to the nation or simply jailed. This is what Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele calls “autocratic legalism,” the dismantling of constitutional systems to remain in power permanently.

In every case, the legal system has been thoroughly compromised; anyone can be charged with heinous crimes or accused of lèse majéste. In Turkey, a lower court reversed the decision of the Constitutional Court, the highest authority of the land, within hours after the latter had ordered the release of two journalists incarcerated for more than a year. In Venezuela, the Constitutional Court banned the participation of the two leading opposition leaders in the upcoming elections, thereby ensuring the reelection of the unpopular President Maduro. Similarly, the Russian Constitutional Court refused opposition leader and activist Alexsei Navalny’s appeal, banning him from the ballot in presidential elections.

All this is accompanied by an onslaught of false information generated by a sycophantic press that lauds the authoritarian leaders’ great achievements. Press outlets have but one duty, and that is to make the leader look good and show how he is defeating the country’s foreign enemies (read: the United States). There is, therefore, little room at home to organize resistance or confront the institutionalization of authoritarianism.

The challenge these leaders pose, especially to the West and the liberal order, is that they are increasingly becoming the norm rather than the exception. While the Putins, Dutertes, Maduros, and Erdogans of the world can get along well with each other, they also present themselves as an alternative vision. That vision seems to suggest that you can co-exist and do business, plenty of it in fact, with the advanced Western countries without having to pay a serious live up to basic principles such as the rule of law.

In fact, the United States and the West in general have chosen to accommodate these leaders. To be sure, here and there leaders will offer occasional criticisms and reprimands for outrageous behavior. But Western leaders generally arrive at the conclusion that little can be done to prevent authoritarians from further consolidating their hold on power, much less reverse their gains. Having reduced the cost of pursuing authoritarian policies to almost zero, Western nations have indirectly become these leaders’ accomplices.

If we’re being fair, we should admit that this is not all President Donald Trump’s doing. Indeed, the Obama Administration was rather lackadaisical in its own approach to bullies. Often, it simply chose to ignore certain kinds of behavior if it thought it would be too difficult to change it.

At this moment in time, however, not doing anything is an invitation to authoritarians all over the world to flout all the rules. Would Putin have ordered an assassination of a former spy and dissident in broad daylight in Salisbury, if he thought there was a serious chance of a severe response? Similarly, would Erdogan have dared to imprison three Turkish citizens and long-time employees of the U.S. diplomatic service if he had he been worried about serious repercussions? Both of these cases have potentially disastrous consequences for the way we treat dissidents or do diplomacy. Why should anyone work for the State Department if the U.S. government cannot protect its own employees?

As in the post-Cold War era, when the demonstrative effect of expanding democratic developments created a kind of momentum, today a countervailing force is gathering momentum. To be sure, no one expects Western arguments to persuade Putin to allow more room for democracy, but abandoning the discourse on democracy elsewhere is another way of enhancing Russian influence.

Europe’s and America’s lack of credible response to the despots’ rise is likely to undermine their mutual interests in a peaceful liberal world order that privileges open societies and markets. If Erdogan today has the temerity to take ordinary Americans and Europeans as hostage because he thinks Turkey is too important for the West to ignore, then imagine a world order (or lack thereof) in which small and medium-sized tyrants, whose primary currency is intimidation, bullying, and blackmail, strut around. Yet, most of these authoritarian leaders are free riders. They depend on Western markets to finance their economies, to buy their exports, and, in short, to supply their well-being. The notion that other powers, Russia or China, represent alternative sources of support, political or economic, for them is fantasy.

What is to be done? At this stage it may be difficult to tackle every single would-be despot simultaneously. A more prudent policy would be for a selected group of influential European states and the United States to take the lead in coordinating effective strategies. These strategies may include everything from the symbolic—for example, byrefusing to host or visit autocratic leaders—to the economic, by refusing to provide the financial or other types guarantees that lubricate their economies. In the final analysis, it is the Western financial markets that call the shots when it comes to exchange rates, interest rates, and foreign exchange liquidity. Even as his policies have imposed hardships on the Venezuelan people, Maduro has made sure to religiously service his debt obligations to international financial centers. He knows that the moment he breaks from these “imperialist” institutions, it would be almost impossible to borrow another dime. And neither the Chinese nor the Russians are lining up at Maduro’s door to offer him substantial financial support.

The policy challenge of confronting the autocrats has been further compounded with the emergence of Trump, who has shown little concern for the traditional American interest of expanding democratic governance and the rule of law abroad. This attitude, in turn, weakens Europe’s own resolve and room to maneuver. And Europe’s plate is already full as it struggles with the likes of Poland and Hungary in its midst, as well as the rising electoral appeal of nativist populists in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Turkey is always there, ready to threaten to unleash its 2.5 million Syrian refugees.

Trump’s governing style, the firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the sudden focus on the Korean peninsula, and institutional weaknesses all have the Executive Branch in a state of disarray. Ironically, this leaves a lot of room for Congress to get involved. Members of both houses in Congress have demonstrated a great deal of unease with the Trump Administration’s lack of a serious response to growing authoritarianism among allies and countries of consequence for the United States. While it is difficult for legislators to construct coherent policies precisely because there are so many decision-makers and parochial interests involved, what the Hill can do is force the Administration’s hand. It can legislate and put in front of the President proposals that will force the Executive Branch at the very least to take public positions and defend itself. In some cases, this will not be pretty to watch.

Expecting the Trump Administration to seriously tackle this problem when it has not even defined it in the first place would be like waiting for Godot. In the meantime, our allies need to know that the United States will support them when they push back. Congress today is the only institution that can fill this policy vacuum.

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The West Must Step Up Russia Sanctions

Yesterday, the Trump Administration announced a new set of sanctions targeting the Russian individuals and entities involved with the Internet Research Agency that were indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February. The FSB and the GRU—the main Russian intelligence services—were also on the list. The move should have not surprised anyone. Those that were caught off guard should have been closely watching the Trump Administration’s actions on Russia rather than fretting over the President’s tweets. In a hearing on March 5, Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin announced his intention to move forward with new Russia sanctions in the next few weeks. Targeting the indicted individuals was the logical way to do it.

Though in the works for a while, the sanctions were announced yesterday to coincide with the United Kingdom’s expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats in retaliation for a breathtakingly reckless nerve gas attack on a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury that Downing Street has pinned on the Kremlin. It was accompanied by President Trump himself expressing solidarity and support for our allies as they stand up to Russia. “It certainly looks like the Russians were behind it,” the President told reporters. “Something that should never ever happen. We’re taking it very seriously, as are I think many others.”

Much more can and should be done to deter Moscow. But just because the response to Russian provocations may not have been as strong as we might have liked to have seen, it’s important to remember that the Trump Administration has been acting—baby steps, perhaps, but in the right direction. From providing weapons to Ukraine to increasing spending for European security, and most recently to striking a convoy of Russian mercenaries near Deir Ezzor, Syria—it all adds up to a stronger response than the dominant narrative implies. Still, one glaring gap in the Administration’s policy all along has been the lack of enthusiasm for implementing sanctions against Russia for its interference in the 2016 elections. This has led to accusations of complacency—and far worse.

Are the critics right? It is worth looking at exactly why the Trump Administration has proved reluctant until now to implement these new measures. To do so fairly, reviewing a little recent history is in order.

Last summer, the U.S. Congress, fearing that President Trump would remove Obama-era sanctions against Russia without just cause, passed a comprehensive set of legislation named the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). Under the threat of a veto override, President Trump reluctantly signed the legislation into law on August 2, 2017. Trump’s Treasury Department imposed additional sanctions on Russian entities for their connection to Ukraine on January 26, 2018, but three days later, it also announced that it would hold off on new CAATSA-specific sanctions on Russian defense and intelligence sectors. On that same day, the Administration also released a much-anticipated “Kremlin list”—a compilation of regime-connected oligarch billionaires and other political actors—in compliance with Section 241 of CAATSA. The list turned out to be a sloppy mash-up of a list of Russia’s most wealthy individuals as compiled by Forbes and the Russian government’s own official website. It quickly became a key piece of evidence for those accusing Trump of stalling on sanctions.

The “stalling” narrative, however, is not completely fair; reality, as it turns, is more complicated than it is portrayed to be in the media. For one, though the public roll-out of the “Kremlin list” was indeed mishandled, meaningful work was done in preparing it. Congress intended the report to “name and shame” a corrupt Kremlin elite, while also serving as a basis for future personal sanctions. The amateurishly-compiled public list was roundly mocked by the very people it was supposed to terrify, so by that measure it was a failure. But the public report was accompanied by a second classified version. In private conversations, those who have seen the “real” list have praised it for its professional, detailed analysis spanning over 100 pages. Why keep such good work a secret? The obvious answer is that the classified report contained sensitive intelligence. And if the intention was to keep the Kremlin elite nervous, keeping a “real” list out of view has certainly accomplished that.

Furthermore, the Trump Administration has legitimate concerns regarding CAATSA. Under the Obama Administration, Ukraine-related sanctions were imposed by executive order. Those sanctions are now legislation, which means that the President would need a waiver from Congress to remove any sanctions. Administration officials negotiating with Russians on Ukraine often raise this constraint as hampering their ability to convince their counterparts that they will be rewarded if they come to the negotiating table.

CAATSA, like almost any bill, is also far from perfect as written. Specifically, it poses potential risks for American and European companies alike. According to Ambassador Daniel Fried, who led sanctions coordination under the Obama Administration, “[t]he act includes several provisions so broadly scoped that careless implementation could damage American interests” and lead to “potentially damaging consequences.” Specifically, the legislation allows for new discretionary authority to impose sanctions on energy and arms-related deals with Russian companies and financial institutions. As CAATSA was being drafted, Europeans lobbied against the bill because of concerns surrounding the European energy market. And while the main European concerns on energy were addressed in the final version, the law, if implemented aggressively, could still have far-reaching effects, risking U.S.-EU unity on sanctions. For this reason, Fried and other experts have urged the Administration to avoid imposing sanctions mandated under some of the more broad reaching sections.

The Trump Administration’s decision to disband the sanctions coordination office once led by Fried was rightfully criticized. However, this does not mean that the State Department and Treasury have not been in constant contact with European allies, especially on clarifying how they would be approaching CAATSA. Many European diplomats have, in fact, remarked to us that communication with this Administration—on sanctions and other issues—has been consistent and effective. According to one Senate staffer, the State Department, together with European counterparts, has been tracking and blocking deals that would have violated CAATSA, effectively stopping “billions” in deals with Russian interests.

So the Trump Administration has finally used the Congressional mandate to impose sanctions on Russia for its meddling in the U.S. elections. Is it enough? Hardly. The measures announced yesterday by Treasury are a step in the right direction, to be sure, but we hope they are only a first step. As the Skripal case unfolds, the Trump Administration will have ample opportunity to stand beside a key U.S. ally as it formulates a muscular response. Doing so would not only be the right thing to do, but it would go a long way to dispel concerns among critics who say that it has been dragging its feet to retaliate. It would be wise to not squander this chance.

The Administration ought to consider using the secret “Kremlin list” to roll out personal sanctions against individuals close to Putin. Or if the Administration wanted to induce maximum panic among the Russian elite, it could sanctions individuals who were not listed in the unclassified version—just to keep them guessing. CAATSA authority could also be used to sanction propagandists associated with Russian state media as well as the Russian defense industry and individuals associated with support for Syrian president Bashar al Assad.

The United Kingdom for its part can also do much more to tackle Russian dirty money laundered through London real estate and British financial institutions. According to some reports, money laundered through the UK is estimated at £48bn. According to Transparency International, £4.4 billion worth of UK properties are bought with suspicious wealth and more than a fifth of these properties were purchased by Russian individuals. Restrictions on investment visas have already been put in place in 2015 but more could be done against anonymous companies and dubious real estate investments. The UK should also strongly consider passing its own version of the Magnitsky Act. Taken together, these measures would go at the heart of Putin’s power structure. If British authorities blink, however, they will have telegraphed enduring weakness to the Kremlin.

This isn’t your father’s Cold War: Russia has been very effective at leveraging and gaming the loopholes and contradictions of the liberal order to advance their interests. Building Western resilience demands that we have an honest look at our systems, and address the weaknesses that have been so flagrantly exploited. The same way Russian electoral interference depends on the very real grievances of voters, brazen Russian behavior on Western soil is ultimately possible because we haven’t closed the door to their kleptocratic elites. For Donald Trump and Theresa May, who both rode to power on a wave of populist anger, rooting out the rotten core of our system could even prove to be a political winner with their base.

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Are People Losing Faith in Democracy?

As the world faces a rising wave of illiberal populism, one aspect of this phenomenon that remains poorly understood is—ironically—what “the people” really think. Election results tell us whom the voters choose, and exit polls may begin to tell us why. Political journalists interview voters to try to understand what their votes are saying. But an important question remains: Are people merely punishing incumbent parties and politicians, or are they losing faith in democracy itself?

The short answer is a mixed one. Citizens in established democracies still overwhelmingly prefer democracy as the best form of government. But significant portions of the public in many advanced democracies are open to authoritarian alternatives. In recent years, at least a fifth of the public in many advanced democracies like the idea of having “a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections.” In the United States, a quarter of adults endorse that option, and 18 percent say that “having the army rule” would be a good or very good idea. In all, three in ten Americans embrace at least one of these two authoritarian options.

These were some of the findings from a July 2017 survey of 5,000 Americans released on Tuesday by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. The survey report, Follow the Leader, co-authored by New America Senior Fellow Lee Drutman, Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman, and myself, highlights some encouraging trends but also some deeply troubling ones.

First the good news: Things are not as bad as they could be, or as they were a few years ago. Through four rounds of surveys, running from 1995 to 2011, the World Values Survey observed a steady increase in the percentage of Americans backing the option of “a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections.” That sentiment rose from 24 percent of the public in 1995 to 29 percent in 1999, 32 percent in 2006, and 34 percent in 2011. Now it’s back down to exactly where it was in 1995—24 percent. That proportion is about the same as what a 2017 Pew Research Center survey found in the United Kingdom and Israel, and lower than in Japan (31 percent). But it is a lot higher than what Pew found in several other peer democracies, like Canada (17 percent), France (12 percent) and Germany (6 percent). More troubling has been the trend in support for “army rule.” That has steadily risen, from 8 percent in 1995 to 18 percent in our Voter Study Group survey last year. That is not only much higher than in Canada (10 percent) and Germany (4 percent), but also higher than in democracies that depend existentially on the army—namely Israel (10 percent) and South Korea (8 percent).

There is more encouraging news. The American public still backs democracy overwhelmingly as the best form of government. 86 percent say it’s a good or very good system. 82 percent say it’s very important to live in a democracy (by giving democracy at least an “8” on a 10-point scale of importance). And 78 percent say democracy is always “preferable to any other kind of government.” Moreover, in contrast to some analyses based on older data, we do not find that younger Americans are becoming more authoritarian or more likely than their older peers to embrace undemocratic options. In fact, those under 30 are the least likely age group to support a “strong leader” (“only” 20 percent do so). At the same time, however, younger voters (here including those between 30 and 44 years of age) are less likely to say that democracy is always preferable. Three in ten of these younger voters demur in this regard, compared to a fifth of those ages 45 to 64, and 15 percent of seniors.

Our findings closely track those of the Pew Research Center’s global survey on democracy, conducted in 2017 just a few months before our own. In that survey, 86 percent of Americans endorsed the idea of representative democracy (“where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law.”) That was about the same as in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel, only a little behind Germany (90 percent), and better than most others. Americans are not as disillusioned with their democracy as one might think, given our level of polarization and dysfunction. We found about six in ten Americans were at least somewhat satisfied with the way democracy is working in the United States. That is higher than what Pew found (46 percent), but satisfaction is a more volatile measure that moves with the state of politics and the economy. Aside from Canada and Germany, where 70 percent or more were satisfied with the way democracy functions, the American proportion compares well with other advanced democracies.

So what is there to worry about? We found several disturbing trends lurking beneath the surface. First, support for democracy is not as robust as we should hope for. We surveyed five measures of democratic commitment, asking respondents about their support for democracy, a strong leader, and army rule; the importance they attached to democracy on a 10-point scale; and whether they agreed that democracy is always preferable. As we note in the report, “Only a slim majority of Americans (54 percent) consistently express a pro-democratic position across all of our measures.” In fact, 28 percent of Americans give a nondemocratic response on at least two of our five items.

Second, and even more troubling, is the way that public ambivalence and hostility to democracy are interacting with the current highly polarized political context. We have had waves of illiberal sentiment in America before. In the absence of scientific survey data, we don’t know what proportions of the public doubted the efficacy of democracy or were willing to support an authoritarian strong leader in the 1930s, or during the anti-communist hysteria mobilized by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. Probably, the numbers then would have dwarfed those of today. But what we did not have back then was a President whose own commitment to democracy was fundamentally in doubt. Donald Trump represents something new and very dangerous in American democracy, and that danger is reflected in the deeper patterns of our data.

Among those Americans who supported a candidate in the presidential primaries, Trump supporters are substantially more supportive of a “strong leader” (32 percent) than are supporters of any other candidate from either major party (all of whom favored that option at levels of 20 percent or less). Voters for Trump in the general election are nearly twice as likely as Clinton voters to endorse this authoritarian option (29 to 16 percent). And those voters who switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 leaned the most authoritarian of all—45 percent of them support a “strong leader.”

Drill down further and we see more fully how authoritarian attitudes are interacting with partisan and ideological polarization. Reversing the partisan pattern from previous surveys, Republicans are now much more likely to endorse a “strong leader” than Democrats (by 31 to 21 percent). The gap between cultural conservatives and cultural liberals is even wider (20 percentage points). And the one in six Americans who embrace a racial, or arguably, racist, view of American identity—that being of European heritage is important to being an American—are four times as likely to favor a “strong leader” as those who think European heritage is “not important at all. “ (They are also much more likely to question democracy). A similar pattern holds with regard to people who favor increased surveillance of mosques or targeting Muslims at airport screenings. They are three times as likely to favor a “strong leader” as those who strongly oppose this form of religious profiling. These are the subterranean constituencies that Donald Trump continues to mobilize and signal to when he harps on hot-button culture war issues, declines to unequivocally condemn white supremacist mobilization, or dismisses an African-American congressional critic, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, as a “low IQ individual.”

This juxtaposition of the trends and the times should prompt serious concern. We note in our report five trends that make this moment different. First, it is not just Donald Trump who is testing or trashing democratic norms. A wave of illiberal, demagogic populism is sweeping across many advanced industrial democracies, targeting immigrants as well as racial and religious minorities. Our data suggest a close affinity between politicians who play the race and immigration cards and citizens, anxious about social and economic change, who opt to “follow the leader.” The dynamic is probably deeply iterative. A growing proportion of voters feel threatened by changes they feel unable to control—increasing immigration and cultural pluralism, deepening income inequality and insecurity, de-industrialization, and other challenges to national sovereignty posed by globalization. These represent the second trend. Illiberal populist leaders claim that they are merely responding to these anxieties, but they are also irresponsibly stoking them.

The third factor is more unique to the United States, with its entrenched two-party system. Our two parties are more ideologically sorted and distant from one another than they have been in a century, and they are also about as closely competitive with one another as they have ever been. This, we argue in our report, is an important factor eroding respect for democratic norms and driving an increasingly hyper-partisan and zero-sum style of politics. When party affiliation becomes “something akin to tribal identity,” the odds get stacked against political compromise and it becomes exceedingly hard for moderate elements to confront extremists and democratic norm-breakers in their ranks. As the last 14 months have shown, it is especially hard for Republicans in Congress to do so when the flame-throwing norm-buster is the leader of their party, the President.

Into this toxic mix flow the fourth and fifth factors that define the context. With every passing day—and virtually every new election, most recently in Italy—we see the corrosive effects of social media in facilitating the viral diffusion of hateful, extremist content and fake news. This is a medium made for demagogic populists, and they are exploiting it brilliantly. But they are also getting assistance—and this is the fifth factor—from foreign actors like Russia, who want to feed racial, religious, cultural, ideological, and partisan polarization. As James Comey said in congressional testimony last year about the Russian government’s information warfare, they intervened with purpose and precision in the 2016 U.S. campaign, and they are coming back at us again in 2018.

The key reason to worry about our findings, then, is not that levels of democratic defection are alarmingly high, but rather that levels of democratic commitment appear fragile and hitched to political alignments at precisely the time when our democratic politics are stressed and under assault. If a major crisis were to give Donald Trump a pretext to violate democratic norms in a much more audacious way, there is reason to believe that a large portion of his constituency would “follow the leader.”

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