Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 106

A Deal with Iran?

In the Middle East, Iran is on a roll, and the United States adrift. In the Syrian free-for-all, the Trump Administration has focused attention and fire power on ISIS while neglecting the methodical expansion of Russia and, above all, Iran. Now that ISIS, the most urgent threat, has been ejected from the game, what is the “Great Satan” to do—deal, raise, or fold?

Ten years ago, Henry Kissinger asked whether the Islamic Republic is “a nation or a cause.” If Iran “thinks of itself as a [normal] nation” hankering merely for a bigger pile of chips, he reasoned, we might be able to do business with the theocracy. “Do ut des,” as the Romans counseled: “I give, so that you shall give” until we reach an understanding.

Kissinger spoke in the conditional: “if…” In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, former State Department official Vali Nasr, now dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, believes the “if” can be scratched.

Iran’s “foreign policy is far more pragmatic than many in the West comprehend,” Nasr writes. It is quite willing to “engage with the United States” and “is driven by hardheaded calculations of national interest, not a desire to spread its Islamic Revolution abroad.” According to Nasr, “Working with Iran” is better than “confronting it.” Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria concurs, and heads around the capital must be nodding.

In this view, Iran is not a zealot out to overturn the table. It is driven not by heavenly visions, but plain old nationalism—plus fear of encirclement by the United States, Israel, and sundry Sunni rivals. Tehran is actually a status quo power trying to cash in its winnings and to get some respect. So the burden is on Washington: Alleviate the fear and accord Tehran its due. Once satisfied, Iran will act as a responsible citizen of the Middle East.

Such advice follows smoothly from the premise of normalcy. When offered a grand bargain, traditional states will wheel, deal, and seal. So let’s scrutinize the premise.

Revisionists vs. Revolutionaries

Half a lifetime ago, Henry Kissinger’s colleague at Harvard (and my teacher) Stanley Hoffmann came up with the critical distinction between “revisionist” and “revolutionary” powers. A revisionist—more for me, less for you—could be tamed by regard and reward. Alas, revolutionaries want more than just a bigger pile of chips. They want the entire casino so that they can rewrite the rules and instill proper behavior in the players. After all, they are the Chosen. They are on a mission from God or History.

Napoleon’s France was revolutionary; its secular god was democracy. That sacred task drove Napoleon all the way to Moscow, where he was finally stopped. Hitler, another revolutionary, was not appeased when the European powers allowed him to pocket Austria in March 1938 and the Sudetenland in September. It had to be all of Czechoslovakia, which he grabbed six months later. Nor was Hitler satisfied by the conquest of the rest of Europe. In the end, he took on the Soviet Union and the United States.

After the war, revolutionary Russia absorbed Eastern Europe with the consent of the Western allies, then struck out for the Middle East, Cuba, and Central Africa. Stalin’s heirs were only ready to deal after decades of unyielding containment.

Though they claim to serve History or Providence, revolutionary powers like today’s Iran always cloak their imperialism in self-defense. Look back. Yes, Europe’s great powers wanted to restore the French monarchy by force, and so the revolutionary regime fought back. But why did Napoleon have to go to Madrid and Cairo? True, the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet it takes a creative imagination to depict the Islamic Republic as the real target of the wars against Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Fear or Fervor?

Did the West really stoke Iran’s dread of encirclement? The nuclear deal—allowing for continued enrichment and the lifting of sanctions—was a major act of propitiation. The JCPOA did not keep Iran from grabbing a wide swath from Basra to Beirut and churning out ever longer-range missiles. If this is what the pious revolutionaries do out of fear, what will they do once the United States and its Sunni allies stand down?

Hezbollah will not send its 100,000 missiles arrayed against Israel to the shredder. Iran will not leave well enough alone in Iraq once the United States pulls out. Nor will it rescind its annihilationist threats against Israel.

The best way to illustrate the difference between revisionists and revolutionaries is to use the Shah’s Iran as a case in point. Modest his ambitions were not; in fact, it was Mohammad Reza who laid the groundwork for an Iranian bomb by buying four nuclear power reactors from Germany in the mid-1970s.

Yet he was also America’s and Israel’s best friend in the region. And why? Because his lodestar was calculated national interest, not Allah. Nor did he seek to harness the Shi‘a faithful all the way to the Mediterranean. To return to Kissinger’s distinction, the Shah ran a nation, not a cause.

In the end, it does not matter whether Iran’s theocrats act out of fear or fervor. Fear may have animated Bonaparte, Hitler, and Stalin. But angst does not explain their limitless ambitions; the key driver was their righteous cause. Alas, faith is not negotiable.

Whether it is angst or ambition may be debated sine die. The real issue of statecraft is a balance of power that inhibits expansion. Conversely, opportunity makes thieves. Eager to avoid entanglement, Barack Obama practically invited Tehran (and Moscow) in when he abandoned his “red line” in Syria and drew down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of pacifying Iran, retreat fueled desire. Why would retrenchment work this time?

Revolutionaries from Napoleon down always invoke encirclement to justify their conquests, inverting cause and effect. Expansionists create the counter-alliances they denounce as conspiracies. The American-Sunni-Israeli alliance did not cause, but reacted to, Iranian hegemonism. Of course, traditional great powers have not been immune to the lure of primacy. Yet countries with a cause would betray their mission and bargain away their soul if they commune with the enemy. This is why the United States will not succeed in recruiting today’s Iran as a regional police force, let alone as a “continental sword,” as in the Shah’s days.

To boot, Tehran’s theocrats need the Great and the Small Satan (Israel) to stay on top of an unhappy nation rendered more miserable by the cost of empire. The enemy at the gate is a life insurance policy for revolutionary regimes, with the added benefit of justifying sacrifice ranging from rampant inflation to double-digit unemployment. To deal with the Great and the Small Satan is to give away the regime’s raison d’être.

So what is the United States to do? Go back to the catechism of containment authored by George F. Kennan in 1946: The Soviets, he prescribed, “can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at … constantly shifting … points.” They “cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.” Instead, patient resolve will result in “either the break-up or gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”

It did just that—bringing first the mellowing and then the break-up. Given the sweep of Iran’s ideological and strategic ambitions, mellowing would be just fine. Once the revolutionary fires burn out, interests will dwarf dogma, and we can get down to business.

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A Kiss Always Tasted

Classic Lady Day

Verve Records

Box Set, 5 CD/Vinyl

My late college thesis adviser used to write on jazz for venues like The Atlantic, and one of the first things he told me was that there were two jazz artists, in two periods of their careers, that I should avoid, lest my exposure to those timeframes diminish my appreciation for their other work.

The lesser of the two transgressors was Charlie Parker during his strings phase. It was as if a molten blues bebop player had been plucked and deposited far from his natural setting, like an alligator that had been lowered into the ocean. My adviser was right.

Then there was late period Billie Holiday. “She should have stopped singing,” my adviser informed me. “I don’t know why she would have carried on. Her voice was gone. It was very sad.” This was spoken by a man who was actually around as an adult in the late 1950s, when Holiday made those final recordings prior to her death at only 44 years old in the summer of 1959, her liver and her heart having failed her—her heart, perhaps, in ways beyond the strictly physical.

It was not rebellion that led me to late-period Holiday, but more a desire to understand what motivated this wonderment of sound to keep going if her art had truly reached a nadir. I had heard the early sides first, with a special concentration on Holiday’s 1940s prime. She didn’t sing with the ease of Ella Fitzgerald, who made the process of owning a tune seem simpler than drawing one’s next breath. You could walk through the very notes that came from Fitzgerald’s mouth as if you were passing through a sheer, nearly transparent curtain. There was greater density in what Holiday was doing; with her vocals you passed down a river, but it could be a viscous one with soft waves of honey rolling up on the banks.

In today’s age, Holiday is often martyrized, used as an all-purpose symbol for black suffering. What this often means is that liberal white college women put up a Holiday poster on their dorm room walls, aspiring to some residual cultural cachet that they are “woke” because they know who this musician is and think they should like her music.

What they don’t do, mostly, is actually listen to Holiday’s music, save for those few songs that crop up in the background of the latest Netflix series, the ones where the writers have switched to autopilot and tapped Holiday in their cause to convey grave emotional meaning. For when you hear Billie Holiday, you always feel something emotionally significant—something emotionally crucial—is at hand, even if you can’t put your finger on what it is. You can look away, but you can’t listen away. You must ride with her; you have no choice.

Holiday, naturally, wouldn’t be able to stand such people, who are, in their way, every bit as patronizing as some of the members of upper-class society who thought “Strange Fruit” was a song about a bad crop in the arbor. You may be able to fix stupid, to a degree, but it’s awfully tough to give a shallow person depth, because whoever or whatever made them that way didn’t provide for added concavity. You need added concavity with Holiday’s later music. And if you have it, you will likely get more from what she did closer to the end than anything nearer the beginning or the middle.

Our world right now is very much about poses. Most people strike them constantly, and their pose, or their latest series of poses, becomes their stand-in for a natural unforced identity. Not only is maintaining a pose exhausting, but ultimately our once-strong impulses to connect, to move forward, shut down. We become perpetually stalled in our respective journeys, as though a tumbler of glue had been poured down the ignition keyhole. We hear but we don’t listen, we look but we don’t see, and we talk but we rarely say anything. We chirp, repeat, echo, while we are given pats on the back from people who do the same. It feels less scary to share an overcrowded boat than to row against the current in one alone.

That’s why late-period Billie Holiday is more vital than ever, and that is, in part, why a new box set called Classic Lady Day keeps calling me back for more. The nickname was one that her great partner in symbiosis, Lester Young, provided for her; she dubbed him Prez in sweet reprise. She was the singer with the worn voice that nonetheless imparted worlds, he was the tenor who didn’t muster the raw power so in vogue at the time, but who communicated levels of meaning that the heaviest of all blowers, with all the winds of the world in his lungs, couldn’t muster. Others thought them ramshackle. They knew better. They were jazz royalty—quite simply, the best.

I liked that the word “Classic” has been stuck on the front of the title for this set. Perhaps it means that the later recordings are starting to come up in the world. The box set contains four albums from 1956—Solitude, Recital, Velvet Mood, and Lady Sings the Blues—with a topper from 1958 in All or Nothing at All.

I turned to these six albums not long after receiving my adviser’s warnings, my curiosity having overcome me. Was Holiday really that bad?

There may be no two more famous Holiday recordings than “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child.” The versions we normally hear are from much earlier than this period, when Holiday’s voice possessed a fecundity that made you think it could never age. Lady Sings the Blues contains revisitations of these classics. Neither, in any form, requires an extended vocal range. What they best get by on is how much nuance a singer can wring from the lyrics, their voice partnering with the backing music, never becoming subsumed by it, so that everything feels monadic, focused and forceful, but in a manner that caresses, too. A caress in a singer’s voice always compels.

Right from my first hearing, I thought these late career versions worked as well qualitatively, but I liked them more; in part, because they risked more. They courted vulnerability, the possibility of failure was not a deterrent. If anything, both sound like Holiday going off on a mission, to continue owning something that some people, no doubt, thought she had lost. This is the sound of not caring about those people, though, of course, one always wishes to have backers. Combined, the two songs represent, to my ears, a prayer to the jazz-singing self, something sacrosanct. The way Holiday sings this version of “Strange Fruit,” she might as well be implying a double meaning, that it is her legacy that others would tragically have hanging from the poplar trees like the bodies of the those representing this horrible, horrible Southern “crop.” But no dice—we are dealing with the knife that cuts the rope before the rope can spirit away life.

How many listening experiences do we have in our life that change how we think sound can be made? One? Six? I’m not sure of the median number, but these albums signified one for me. The voice retained honeyed aspects, but now that once viscous, but still open-flowing river, was charged with effluvia. I say “charged” because there is something more emotionally electric in Holiday’s voice.

“How Deep Is the Ocean” from Recital epitomizes the level of art we’re talking about here. Holiday’s voice skims across the top surface of the beat, bobbing alongside a muted trumpet like some exotic fish come up to spend time with a passing gull. But it is the palpable emotion in the physicality of the voice, the Cartesian push-pull of mind and body that situates us in a kind of jazz Hadopelagic Zone—the very deepest of the deep, the darkest and most relaxed of trenches.

Great artists have an ability to be in multiple artistic places at once. They can entertain and enthuse us, just as they serve up sobering truths like a hotel barkeeper in hell. What I like about Holiday is that she—or the character she portrayed in her songs—wasn’t shy about her pain. This is as anti-pose as can be, and with the absence of a pose comes a form of liberation that is boundless. The people in that aforementioned boat must stick to one shipping lane; you, in your skiff, may row wherever you wish, in the direction that brings you the most meaning.

Holiday kept singing because her gifts had never lessened—they had just entered into a different stage of their maturation. Here is one of the great secrets of great singing: The actual quality of your voice—what comes out as pure sound when you open your mouth and sing some notes—really doesn’t mean much. This isn’t to say that great singing is about how much emotion you have, which is a line of comfort that people without technique in various art worlds like to tell themselves. The violinist without actual chops repeats a mantra that she plays with sublime feeling and channels her soul, and so forth, and it’s all nonsensical self-delusion.

Listen to Holiday on “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me” on All or Nothing at All. A syllable is a note, but in the way she sings the titular words of what is a directive, she essentially splits each single note/syllable into shimmering, shaking little component parts. Each block of sound—the note—becomes tendril-like. The directive remains in tact, but now it has been shaded to have a plea-like quality. The singer wants love on terms she deserves, but that desire is also an invocation of trust—as if to say, please rejoin my good faith and chose to love me like I have chosen to love you.

Anyone can have a nice voice. Some have a fine voice that projects. But great singing is so much more than that. With the very best singers, the standalone physical quality of their voice is almost irrelevant. When you listen to them sing you do not hear a song; you hear their soul riding the radiant mist of the song. That is how transcendent they are in their vocal artistry. That is also life artistry, for it is life and its mysteries, and its challenges, pains and bounties, that are distilled in a voice such as the one Billie Holiday had throughout her career, no less so near the end of her career.

As for that drink in hell, the one that sobers you with the truth—there is never anything to say after you have had your elixir, provided that it is the proper elixir, that it is one like this. Once the truth is finally out, for the last time, the soul can rest. That is, I think, the real story of Billie Holiday, but you have to follow it all the way to the end to know how the story turns out.

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China and Pakistan: Friends or Not?

Centaurus, Islamabad’s hustling and ear-splitting commercial mall, traditionally teems with crowds of hungry Pakistani shoppers, along with the occasional European soul. But over the past year, there has been a strikingly rapid change in its cosmopolitan façade, with a remarkable uptick in the number and frequency of Chinese shoppers. In fact, Centaurus is only a microcosm of a much wider trend: wherever you look in Pakistan these days, you are bound to encounter the Chinese.

There are dedicated Chinese settlements around the country, littered with restaurants selling strictly Chinese food, suitable for a strictly Chinese palate. There are a host of new Chinese cash and carry stores, frequented only by Chinese families and viewed with perplexity by Pakistani locals. Then there are the Chinese beauty salons and of course, Chinese undercover massage parlors, which objectively function as brothels. This is one area where the Chinese have become locally competitive: Pakistani men frequently patronize such establishments, especially the bearded, oversexed mullahs who pass as puritans in public but in private succumb all too easily to the temptations of a scantily clad foreign woman.

On the face of it, this sudden Chinese influx bears the promise of lasting commercial ties between the two countries. The Pakistanis however, seem faintly unsettled at the prospects of more Chinese swamping through their landscape, seeing them as more foreign and culturally remote than the British or even the Americans. Though separated only by the lofty and snow-draped Karakoram skyline, Pakistanis feel that they have nothing in common with the Chinese: Their respective tastes in music, in literature, in sports, and in art of all kinds are remarkably at odds.

By comparison, there is much common ground to celebrate with the British and the Americans. The urbane, English-speaking, passably well-to-do Pakistani households have, for years, had a fondness for American Hollywood. The British, for their part, on the strength of a 200-year colonial honeymoon in Hindustan can claim credit for Shakespeare, Dickens, Blake, Keats, and of course cricket—a sport treated across India and Pakistan with religious passion. English remains an indispensable official language of the subcontinent, and it is imperative for a prospective civil servant to master the language, before even hoping to make the grade in a government organization.

Such cultural closeness has never been apparent with China. Many Pakistanis genuinely believe that the Chinese are a nation devoid of the ability to blend in with new communities, hampered by poor interpersonal skills or a more basic lack of social trust. There is virtually no historical precedent for any meaningful cultural exchange between these two great countries.

So what is all this talk of a friendship that is “sweeter than honey” and “deeper than the deepest ocean” really about? If nothing else, it is the concoction of an India-obsessed Pakistani Foreign Ministry and the product of vacuous boardroom meetings, dominated by flashy PowerPoint presentations and statistically insignificant reports.

The recent economic collaboration between the two countries, labeled the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), has grabbed headlines around the globe. The announcements are irresistibly grand, adding up to an overinflated, $62 billion package of infrastructure projects, many of them along the mighty Indus River, over a span of more than 20 years. CPEC is widely predicted to be a game changer for Pakistan that will open up fresh trade routes with China and help to rapidly modernize and turn around Pakistan’s fledgling economy. Furthermore, plans to build a vast network of railway lines, energy pipelines, and special economic zones are said to be underway in Islamabad, with the assistance of Chinese engineers and policymakers.

At the heart of the CPEC ambition lies Gwadar, a promised money-spinning port modeled on Dubai. Once a small-time fishing village, Gwadar is located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and close to the point where the Makran Coastal Highway runs up to Iran. Gwadar was handed over to the Chinese Overseas Port Holding Company in November 2015 on a 40-year lease, with the enduring goal to convert this seemingly parched and uncultivable swathe of rural territory into a tax-free special economic zone, booming with manufacturing sites, extravagant residential palaces, and moneyed businessmen. The more they talk about developing Gwadar, the more uncomfortable Dubai is supposed to get.

Yet however pleasing these headline-making, big-ticket infrastructure projects may sound, the insiders—those tediously absorbed in these projects, and well versed in their finer details—reveal a completely different picture. And history, too, gives plenty of reason to believe that the China-Pakistan commercial and political association is more a publicity stunt than a serious partnership. Policy experts in Pakistan believe that these ambitious commercial pledges from China—stocked with promises of pipelines, ports, energy corridors, railway lines, and transport networks—will never fully materialize in the way they are presented in the media. The bilateral relationship is marred by a number of complexities and is driven mainly by strategic objectives and the persistent desire to contain India. Indeed, it is really the failure to handle India’s growing geo-strategic designs that brought Pakistan and China together in the first place, paving the way for a superficial collaboration that has never run deep.

China and Pakistan’s opportunistic partnership goes back to March 1959, when the Tibetan uprising grew to staggering proportions, forcing Mao Zedong to deploy the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to subdue the unrest in the region. Through credible intelligence, Mao soon discovered India’s hand in stirring the Tibetan guerillas, who had been armed with the help of the CIA. Tensions reached a boil in the early 1960s, when China built a 750-mile long military road linking Xinjiang province with Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet province. The road meandered through a flat plateau in the south of Tibet, 112 miles of which were claimed by Delhi. Mao initially fulminated but then proposed a settlement, which Nehru quite readily and without any reserve rejected. Worse, Nehru in November 1961 pursued a “forward policy” deploying Indian troops across the disputed landscape, which Mao and his senior generals found intolerable. An aggravated Mao then ordered the Chief of the PLA to launch a decisive blow, storming through Indian positions and devastating her army’s morale. A ceasefire was ordered in November 1962. Indian forces were terribly jolted, as they began their long retreat. Nehru was mentally spent.

Three years later, India’s war with Pakistan clearly defined the course that the region’s strategic politics were going to take. The deteriorating India–Pakistan relationship that followed the 1965 war created an atmosphere of great distrust in the region, at a time when Sino-Indian tensions still simmered after their border war. Thus began Pakistan’s long and convoluted alliance with China, based on a mutual recognition of India as their common adversary.

The Pakistanis, led by former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto for many years after the Indian conflict, used the Sino-Indian territorial bickering to their advantage. The development of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb was a direct result of this long strategic linkage. Dr. A. Q. Khan, the instigator of Pakistan’s nuclear research, teamed up with leading Chinese nuclear scientists, setting up a state-of-the-art nuclear plant and research center in Kahuta, a lovely green hamlet roughly 30 miles south of Islamabad. Chinese engineers lodged at Kahuta’s palatial guesthouse where together they studied American and Russian bomb designs. There were also regular Islamabad-bound flights from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, bringing in useful material for the bomb. The United States intelligence community knew about Pakistan’s camouflaged nuclear build-up and considered it an irritant, yet they tolerantly looked the other way, given the role of the Pakistan Army in the Cold War alliance forged to contain the Soviets.

Despite this Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation, though, China never declared or boasted of its military alliance with Pakistan, preferring to keep the association as incubated and indifferent as possible. That is why the Chinese have never subscribed to any joint defense pacts or treaties with Pakistan, and never committed its soldiers to Pakistani border brawls with India. When Bhutto proposed a defense agreement to the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in 1974, it was tactfully and gently brushed off. So although the Chinese have kept the supply of guns, tanks, small arms, rockets, and other ammunition flowing profusely to Pakistan, they’ve drawn a line by publicly declaring that they won’t extend any nuclear umbrella to any state, including Pakistan. This polite indifference towards Pakistan complicates the friendship narrative that the Islamic Republic intermittently brags about.

On the economic front, the relations between the two countries have historically been promising in theory but weak in reality. The great irony of this commercial relationship has been that despite a spate of free trade agreements over the past several decades, bilateral trade has never genuinely taken off. Moreover, Pakistan has never had any comparative advantage over China, as over 75 percent of their trade is composed of Pakistani imports, tipping the trade balance in China’s favor by a huge margin, and putting extra pressure on the Pakistani rupee.

Andrew Small, a leading expert on the Pakistan-China relationship, has argued that their economic ties are underwhelming. There is ample statistical evidence to make the case. Pakistani exports to China in the past fiscal year declined to $1.62 billion. By contrast, imports from China ballooned to a mammoth $10.53 billion, a 123 percent surge over the previous four years. This means that Pakistani bazaars are literally swamped with Chinese goods and a large majority of small and medium enterprises are rapidly going out of work. Worse, the actual financial assistance that China recurrently pledges to Pakistan has never been all that generous. A fact-finding RAND study found that of the $66 billion in aid pledged by China between 2001 and 2011, only 6 percent of it ever came through.

In the light of this history, then, the highly touted announcements about the transformative potential of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor should be treated with due skepticism. It is safe to say that the benefits of these projects to Chinese companies and China’s GNP are far greater than the benefits to Pakistan. Moreover, the actual picture on the ground is inauspicious, as the ability of the Pakistani state to provide a safe passage to Chinese money remains open to question. Scores of Chinese engineers attached to various infrastructure projects have been killed over the past few years by embittered Baloch tribes or by diehard religious zealots, both of whom view China’s expanding influence as another form of foreign occupation that guarantees little prosperity for the local public.

A growing Chinese presence can therefore be either a blessing or a curse for Pakistan. It may prove a blessing, provided Pakistan’s fickle, faithless and corruption-loving leaders can avoid being consumed by their crusade against inborn terrorists and seize the opportunities stemming from a growing Chinese commitment to the region. But it may yet prove a curse, if China continues to view Pakistan through a purely instrumental lens and average Pakistanis continue to resent and reject Beijing’s influence. For now, the future of this much advertised corridor remains deeply mired in uncertainty.

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Blue Said, Red Said

Once upon a time, liberals and conservatives used many of the same words and phrases to convey the same or similar meanings. Today, not so much. Like other aspects of our lives—where we live, who we befriend, and even what we eat and how we dress—how Americans speak increasingly reflects their political identities. Though we seldom fully realize it, not just our ideas, but the very words and phrases we use to express them typically come out of our mouths already distinctly colorized as red or blue, signaling to others our partisan political affiliation as clearly as if we were wearing ID badges.

The trend is almost entirely harmful. Shall we count the ways?  It reinforces stereotypes. It fosters tribalism. It makes accurate disagreement, the lifeblood of democratic discourse, harder to achieve. It contributes to mutual incomprehension. It permit us (wittingly or unwittingly) to use language for the dubious purposes of virtue-signaling and in-group bonding. It replaces authentic personal expression with stylized and formulaic expression. It instantly communicates to others a colorized persona in ways that we ourselves may not fully recognize, or recognize at all. Most of all, it wars against a shared language, thus making cross-party communication, the great imperative of our era, all but impossible.

So let’s reflect on this corrosive trend and ask ourselves what, if anything, we should try to do about it. How does language colorization work? Let’s examine the phenomenon at three levels.

The first and probably simplest level is rhetorical framing—which for our purposes can be defined as selecting and constantly repeating words and phrases that make your side look good and the other side look bad. Sometimes the technique is perfectly valid. After all, there’s nothing wrong with saying what you want to say, how you want to say it. I’d put the Left’s use of “common sense gun safety” in this category.

But often enough the technique is little more than describing your opponents’ views with loaded words that your opponents themselves would never dream of using. Thus “pro-life” becomes “anti-choice,” climate change skeptics become “deniers,” favoring gun control becomes “opposing the Second Amendment,” and favoring immigration becomes support for “open borders.”  In short, blues consciously select blue words and concepts to name red positions, and vice versa. A main result of this truly bipartisan technique is escalating mutual mistrust and resentment.

A second level of language colorization is rhetorical appropriation—which for our purposes can be defined as force-changing the meaning of your opponents’ words in order to attack your opponents. One highly visible current example is “fake news,” which was coined about five minutes ago mainly by liberals to mean “statements that are untrue,” but has already been almost entirely appropriated by conservatives to mean “statements that liberals like.”

Consider also “politically correct.” That infamous term emerged several decades ago on the political Left. As a young leftist myself at the time, I remember it well and used it often. Largely tongue-in-cheek, and in part a comic echo of the old Communist “party line,” “politically correct” essentially meant “consistent with our political philosophy.” But today the term is used almost exclusively by conservatives to mean in effect “crazy stuff liberals say.”

A third example is “family values.” The term emerged on the pro-family Right in the late 1970s to mean “supportive of the traditional family.” But within a decade the term had been largely (though not completely) appropriated by liberals as an epithet denoting basically “narrow-mindedness about sexuality.”

The third way in which we colorize our words today is the most subtle, interesting, and important way.  Let’s call it rhetorical intuition. It’s less about political spinning or even specific words and phrases than about ethically based styles of expression and, ultimately, ways of understanding the world.

As developed by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others, moral foundations theory suggests that liberals are strongly committed to the foundational values of fairness (reciprocity, justice, giving others their due) and care (doing the opposite of harm). For conservatives, the spectrum of desirable values is somewhat wider. While they do embrace the values of fairness and care, conservatives also tend to place important emphases on the values of loyalty (commitment to my group, patriotism), authority (respect for proper rules and guidance), and sacredness (sanctity, purity).  Moral foundations theory also suggests that both conservatives and liberals are strongly, albeit in somewhat differing ways, committed to the value of liberty (freedom, the opposite of oppression).

It seems plausible that, in this era of polarization, the political colorization of our language stems in part from these differences in moral foundations. Let’s try out several examples.

On fairness and care: Probably the most salient and ideologically coherent term on the political Left today is “social justice,” which unites in nearly perfect form these two values.
On loyalty: While the term “American exceptionalism” was coined by (I suspect mainly liberal) scholars seeking to understand what might be distinctive in U.S. history, today the term is used largely by conservatives as a litmus-test phrase to affirm their patriotism while implying that their liberal opponents do not sufficiently love their country.
On sacredness: Conservatives are far more likely than liberals to speak of the “sanctity of human life” and the “sanctity of marriage” and to view the body metaphorically as a temple.

More broadly, the conservative values template tends to produce a style of expression that the great sociologist David Riesman called “inner-directed.” I am what I am—let others think what they will. In contrast, the liberal values template tends to produce a style of expression that is more what Riesman called “other-directed.” I am what I am—in sensitivity to others.

This difference may help to explain why liberals frequently endorse “dialogue,” stress the importance of “diversity” and “inclusiveness,” and emphasize the importance of a “safe space” in which group members do not feel attacked or distressed. Their style often tends toward the invitational. Many of their sentences end with question marks. They see the value of sitting in a circle. I am what I am—in sensitivity to others.

Conservatives, by contrast, often mistrust such relationship-centered words and usually prefer alternative language. When it comes to speech, they tend to favor clear, formal, and comparatively fewer rules. They desire to speak their minds as freely as possible and are often wary of being coached on how to be more sensitive. They don’t particularly value sitting in a circle. To use an old religious term, they instead tend to respect the concept of “witness.” They explain themselves. Their style often tends toward the declarative. They often de-emphasize the emotional and the psychological aspects of conversation in favor of attempts at more formal rationalism. I am what I am—let others think what they will.

Finally, there’s the language-colorizing influence of each side’s basic attitude toward the other. I want to tread here as softly as I can, because I know I’m offering overly-broad generalizations, but I do believe that the great conservative sin in our public discourse today is anger, while the great liberal sin is condescension. I’m not sure which I think is worse, but I do see and dislike both, and each sin is reflected in its side’s style of expression. For conservatives, the sin is evidenced mainly in the harshness in the voice, the insistence, the heat. For liberals, it’s in the dulcet tone, the style that seeks graciously to educate those in need of it.

These less overt but more primary forms of colorization reveal themselves in tone, style, and body language as much or more than they do in specific words or phrases. In this sense, speaking red or blue is more dialect than lexicon. At the same time, the political messaging is clear enough. If you’re paying attention at all, the vibes can’t be missed.

A few wrinkles. The first is that, in my experience, reds tend to favor economics and religion as explanatory models of human conduct, whereas blues, particularly in recent decades, have become significantly more friendly than reds to explanatory models rooted in psychology and the other social sciences. Why this is so, and whether and how it’s connected to moral foundations, I’m not sure.

A second and likely related consideration is that, at least in my experience, blues speak bluer that reds speak red. By this I mean that blue vocabulary strikes me as more specialized, with a longer list of technical terms. Again, why this is so, I’m not sure.

A third addendum to the argument is that, as many have pointed out, both the partisan media complex and social media permit each of our political tribes to mainline intensely colorized words and phrases 24 hours a day, all of which is largely unmediated by the old journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, and striving (at least in theory) for some form of balance. Surely feeding on this meat all day every day deepens our problem.

To me the final wrinkle is the most surprising. All evidence notwithstanding, neither blues nor reds seem truly prepared to believe that they speak in dialect. In my experience, blues tend to understand their partisan dialect as mainly an expression of expertise, while reds tend to understand theirs as mainly a form of plain speaking.

What then, if anything, is to be done? Here’s a proposition. To get out of the mess we’re in, we don’t need to agree about politics and we don’t need a shared morality. But we do need a shared moral language. For this shared language constitutes our only pathway toward recognizing each other’s humanity and seeing what unites as well as what divides us. Today we see each other through a glass, darkly. Our aim must be to find those words which allow us to see each other face to face, in the light.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Random House, 2012).

Ibid, 174-175.

See also David Blankenhorn, “My Debate with ‘Dialogue,’” The American Interest Online, January 10, 2018.

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The Next Palestinian President?

If there is any dynamism within Palestinian politics today, it’s in the discussion about who will eventually replace the aging Mahmoud Abbas, the octogenarian President who has reigned for over a decade. That discussion reached a fever pitch recently after Abbas stayed overnight at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, a visit his advisers attempted to portray as routine. Yet nothing is routine in predicting what will happen once Abbas departs the stage, and behind the scenes, the various aspirants to the Palestinian presidency jockey to replace their 82-year-old leader in a constantly changing arena.

The dynamic in the West Bank is one of intense palace politics. Public speculation vacillates between those figures who are popular (the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti), those who have loyal security forces (Fatah leader Jibril Rajoub and Abbas’s intelligence chief Majed Faraj), and those who have money and regional favor (the exiled Muhammad Dahlan). Amid this political maneuvering—or perhaps because of it—Abbas introduced another name to the succession discussion earlier last year by making Mahmoud al-Aloul the first-ever vice president of his Fatah party.

Aloul, 68, was an interesting selection. For one, he doesn’t have much of a national profile. Modest and unassuming, he lacks the outsized personality that many of the other would-be heirs possess. At our meeting in his Fatah offices in December, he downplayed his appointment as vice president, a position he insists was always there but never filled: “The people gave it a lot of importance when it was assigned, but there is a precedent [for the position].”

Yet no one should doubt his ability to eventually lead the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas, too, was a virtual unknown to many Palestinians when the Palestinian Authority was created in 1994. By the time Yasser Arafat died a decade later, he was the clear heir apparent. Aloul has risen from peripheral figure to number two within the most dominant West Bank party. Perhaps his ceiling is higher.

Born in Nablus in 1950, Aloul was arrested by the Israeli army after the Six Day War and sent to Jordan. There he quickly joined Fatah and rose within the organization, relocating to Lebanon in the 1970s and commanding a military brigade that in 1983 kidnapped several Israeli soldiers and ransomed them for the release of nearly a thousand Palestinian prisoners. As one of Fatah’s foot-soldiers, he was attached to Khalil al-Wazir, Arafat’s famous deputy and head of military operations who was assassinated by Israeli commandos in the late 1980s.

When the Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords, many PLO officials returned from exile to the West Bank and Gaza. However, Israel refused to allow Aloul to return for a year due to his past militant activity. When he did return in 1995, he quickly ascended the ranks of the newly created Palestinian Authority, becoming Governor of Nablus in 1996. But for many Palestinians, their first introduction to Aloul was during the second intifada, when one of his sons was killed in the clashes. He gave a national address that garnered sympathy from everyday Palestinians, before retreating from politics for a while.

“I saw the reality of the intifada for the way it was, so I stepped back to mourn. I know that my objective is to reach independence for the Palestinian people, and I concluded the only way to do that is to create peace,” Aloul told me. Still, he admits his public rhetoric can be confrontational: “When I talk to the people I talk about the importance of holding on to our land, of sticking up to the occupation, but peace is what we believe in.”

In 2006 Aloul was elected to the PA’s parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), as Labor Minister. Three years later, he was elected to Fatah’s highest body, the Central Committee, where he was put in charge of mobilization. As head of that portfolio, Aloul was frequently spotted at rallies and protests. After an arson attack by Israeli extremists killed several members of the Dawabsheh family in Duma, Aloul led protests against the attack and set up local committees to guard other “friction points” with Israel.

In November of 2016, Mahmoud Abbas held a party conference to solidify his grip on power. Ahead of the summit, he purged rival factions within Fatah and rewarded loyalists, including Aloul, who was re-elected to the Central Committee. A few months later, Abbas and the Central Committee named him vice president. His appointment was widely seen as another safeguard for Abbas: By creating a nominal number two, Abbas was diluting the impact of the other centers of power in the Palestinian body politic—from the PLO to his rivals in Hamas—that seek to influence whoever comes after him. Yet Aloul is not just another yes-man loyalist; he has aspirations of his own.

Aloul has flourished in the role of vice president of Fatah, increasing his profile diplomatically and spearheading the Palestinian response to crises on the ground, such as the protests that roiled Jerusalem this past summer. Meanwhile, he is distinguishing himself from the reigning President.

Days after we met in his office, Aloul went on television to declare all forms of resistance—both violent and non-violent—to be legitimate responses to President Trump’s speech recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He has since walked back those comments, insisting that his preferred methods are non-violent, but that rhetoric sets him apart from the other Palestinian politicians who have risen in the court of Abbas. Indeed, as a former mobilizer for Fatah, Aloul, who never participated in peace talks, is more connected to the people than many in Ramallah.

Aloul is not nearly as wedded as the President to diplomacy, nor is he afraid to embrace positions that Abbas typically avoids. Most noticeably, he has long been a skeptical of the peace process. “With the current course of action that the U.S. has adopted, it’s not possible to create peace,” Aloul told me, yet the U.S. still has to be involved: “How can you reach a point where Israel feels obligated to provide something if you don’t have the U.S.?” In response to this impasse, Aloul has advocated a pressure campaign against Israel, both at home and in the international community. “We have to look at our options—they’re attached to the power dynamics here. It’s about how much you can mobilize to put pressure on Israel and the status quo.”

To that end, Aloul has urged Palestinians to take to the streets. This resonates with a majority of Palestinians, who are increasingly dissatisfied with Abbas for his prioritization of the security relationship with Israel over popular protests. At least part of Abbas’s wariness about public unrest is due to his fear that the Palestinian street may turn against the Ramallah leadership, a fear Aloul acknowledges: “We’ve adopted a policy that we need to be in total control of any public movement in the street, otherwise other parties could lead it against us.”

It’s these other movements that Aloul still views through a zero-sum lens, most noticeably the rival Islamist faction, Hamas. “I’ve pressed them before, and to be honest, I don’t believe them,” Aloul says. “I think they want power, that’s their only objective. They want to take control of the Palestinian Authority.”

Aloul’s distrust of Hamas is consistent with the views of the broader hardline Fatah leadership, Abbas very much included, who still harbor grudges from the 2007 civil war, in which Hamas violently expelled Fatah and the PA from Gaza. That war was the result of the previous year’s legislative contest, which according to many Palestinians produced an irreparable ideological cleavage. “You have to understand that political Islam by its nature does not share interests with other movements,” remarks Aloul. “Hamas has little room for inclusion. They will take whatever shape they need to survive, but there are still ideological divides between us.”

Perhaps Aloul’s biggest break with his leader is in his willingness to entertain, and even support, the one-state movement. An increasing amount of young Palestinians have called on their leadership to abandon the traditional Oslo peace process in favor of a binational state—a euphemism for the demographic destruction of the Jewish majority state in Israel. Even Abbas’s own son has endorsed this strategy. As the idea gains popularity, the Palestinian leadership has increasingly accepted it. Abbas himself broadly threatened to propose this solution during his UN General Assembly speech this past year, and mere minutes after Trump’s speech his top negotiator called on all Palestinians to formally embrace the one-state concept.

Aloul is less afraid to voice his support for the one-state movement, though he is still carefully diplomatic in his endorsement of this incendiary plan. He sees the pressure for a binational state—something that could throw Israel into an existential crisis—as a possible jump-start for the peace process: “Perhaps, in struggling for the one-state solution we will actually gain two-states.” In other words, Aloul is keeping his preferences open in order to play to the broadest swath of the Palestinian electorate.

Mahmoud Abbas turns 83 this month. In his 13-plus years as President, he has grown increasingly paranoid. Reports surfaced in February that the he had been wiretapping thousands of Palestinians—rivals and allies alike—with the CIA’s help. Among those wiretapped was Mahmoud al-Aloul. Abbas clearly sees Aloul as someone who could one day succeed him. Perhaps international observers should, too.

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The Impossibility of Italian Politics

Italy has the best claim of any Western state to be the nursery of the most consequential political movements of the 20th century. This week’s Europe-shaking election in the peninsula emphasized that remarkable creativity, with dozens of parties, many with only local existences, vying for a slice of the vote. But the outcome may also mean that for the immediate future, the country is, as the Turin-based daily La Stampa put it in a post-election headline, “ungovernable.”

Christian Democracy, Fascism, Eurocommunism (“communism with a human face”) and a Trump-anticipating rule by a randy property-and-media mogul, Silvio Berlusconi, were all wholly or largely developed in Italy. The two forces now vying for the country’s leadership, the Five Star Movement and the Lega (“League”) are, in turn, the first party formed and run on the internet with a comedian-turned political blogger in charge of its ideology; and a party which created a non-existent region—Padania—in the north of Italy as a base to first argue for separating from the impoverished south, before taking its message of an anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic illiberalism to the entire country.

This is an impressive list of successful groupings, whose rises and falls speak to the shallowness of Italy’s national democratic tradition: Italy, after all, only became a united state with Rome as its capital in 1871, fought an ultimately victorious war against Austria between 1915 and 1918 at huge human cost, and was under the dictatorship of the Fascist Party from 1922 to 1943. Italians, after the Christian and Communist pillars of the postwar decades crumbled or transformed themselves, have swung between a party coalition of the moderate Right created by commercial and media power, and leftist coalitions dominated by a former Communist Party which had abandoned its Soviet-inspired model, and in the process lost much of the devotion of the industrial working class, itself no longer secure in workplaces, union halls, or party gatherings.

The Christians and Communists had developed relatively efficient ruling groups and a disciplined approach to party organization, policy making and political activity—and even a civilized way of living together. The priest and the party secretary became stock political figures in Italian society, affectionately captured in the many stories by Giovannini Guareschi featuring a village priest, Don Camillo, and the party secretary Peppone—each determined to best the other; each, generally and tacitly, respecting the other’s sphere, in a village rendering of the Cold War.

It all came apart in the 1980s. The growing corruption in politics and business is often presented as the root cause, culminating in the “Clean Hands” trials in the early 1990s which helped sweep away stable Christian Democratic government. Yet Italy’s problems ran deeper than that. As strong economic growth faltered, the postwar constitution’s care to balance every power with another power, to avoid a second Mussolini, became an increasingly debilitating factor (the lower house of Parliament and the Senate, for example, have equal powers to this day).

“Intended as a delicate system of checks and balances,” writes Paul Ginsborg, the noted historian of 20th-century Italy, “the system rapidly revealed itself as the perpetrator of weak and ineffectual government.” It was further weakened by an electoral system of “pure” proportional representation, which usually ensured no clear majority—and, since all governments were coalitions, no clear program, with a clutch of coalition party leaders forever jostling for ministries, advantage, and their own policies, requiring the constant drain of a Prime Minister’s time to settle intra-coalition disputes.

There is no establishment, in the differing American, British, and French sense: No parties emerging over centuries, adapting to the exigencies of time and events; no grand families steeped in politics stretching back decades; no sternly educated cadres destined for high political, administrative, or corporate power; no strong attachment to ideals of freedom and independence; no monarchy or aristocracy with a residual leverage over public life with a large call (as in the UK) on public affection. The postwar pillars were themselves new. The Christian Democratic Party, though owing much to the pre-war Popular Party founded by the priest Don Sturzo, was created within the Vatican during the war by the man who would be Prime Minister, Alcide de Gaspari. The communists in the postwar coalition briefly took their cue from Moscow, even if Antonio Gramsci, the party leader who died from neglect of his illnesses in a fascist prison, sought to loosen the Stalinist bonds. The collapse of the Christian Democrats and the democratization of the communists ended a system which, for all its corruptions and silences, presided over decades of rapid growth (at least in the north), and extensive modernization of a relatively poor and war-ravaged state. Breaking from two of the world’s largest ideologies, Italian politics has inevitably become febrile and increasingly dominated by large figures, or figures striving to be large.

The era of the largest figure, Berlusconi, began officially when his political creation, “Forza Italia”—the name derived from a football chant and the party organization provided by the executives of Berlusconi’s advertising agency—won the 1992 election. Its rule was brief: A coalition partner deserted and brought the government down. For the next six years of rule by the former communists, now re-branded as democratic socialists, Berlusconi, who had made his first fortune in construction in the booming postwar years, built up his Mediaset communications company as by far the most dominant such group in Italy, enjoying a preeminent position in television, newspapers, magazines, books, advertising, and public relations.

Among the richest men in Europe, he honed a public style at once genial and polemical. Invariably sporting a wide grin in public, he invariably represented the Left as old communists beneath a new democratic skin, hostile to both liberty and the market—the opposite, he affirmed, of his own ideals. (The party even became Popolo della Liberta for a few years, then reverted to Forza Italia). His three broadcast channels were not uniformly propagandist—though Network Four was, its news division run and presented by Emilio Fede, a man of such spaniel-like devotion as to embarrass its object, who used him as a butt of jokes. But though carrying some dissenting voices, all channels swung behind him at election time.

His private life had adulterous scandals buzzing round it from the beginning; his wealth was displayed rather than veiled; his jokes—as that he could never deploy enough police and military to stop rapes because there were so many beautiful girls—were often in the worst taste. Constantly proving, with the aid of figures which he brought with him in sheaves to interviews, that Italy was getting richer, he was finally pushed out after two further and longer periods of government in the 2000s, largely by pressure from the European Union, which was worried by the effect of an Italian collapse. In his 2014 book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wrote that “At one point that fall (2011), a few European officials approached us with a scheme to try to force Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi out of power; they wanted us to refuse to support IMF loans to Italy until he was gone.” The United States refused, as Geithner wrote, to have the Italian Prime Minister’s “blood on our hands.” Berlusconi did resign, however, and the Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano, appointed an unelected government of experts, which then gave way to a center-Left government in 2013.

The arrival of the 39-year-old Matteo Renzi as Democratic Party leader and, from 2014, Prime Minister gave an initial strong boost to the party. He passed some liberalizing laws, but failed to make the constitutional change necessary for reducing the power of the senate, and resigned from the premiership, though not the party leadership.

Under the low-key guidance of Renzi’s successor, Paolo Gentiloni, the reforms began to bear fruit in modest growth in GDP and exports—but too late to avoid a humiliating collapse early this week. Gentiloni’s efforts, with his similarly low-key, responsible Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan, to confront Italians with the need to face their country’s pressing problems—huge public debt, low productivity, a weakened banking sector, hard-pressed medium-sized companies, a poverty-stricken and heavily mafia-ized south—and to undergo a period of further, often difficult reforms with slow growth, failed to catch the attention or support of at least half of its former electorate. In an election-eve interview with the former leftist senator Antonio Polito, Gentiloni said that “here we are deciding whether to continue on the road of a market economy, an open society and sustainable welfare, or whether to risk losing our way.”

For him and his party, the way is likely lost: likely rather than certainly, because the prevailing view in the party’s shocked ranks is to go into opposition and regroup, and there is little chance at present that it would, like the German Social Democrats, be persuaded into a coalition. Yet at this stage, since neither the Left nor the Right refuse to ally with the Five Stars and they will not ally with each other, a coalition appears impossible—thus pointing to a minority government, inherently unstable; or fresh elections, which may change little. “Italy Ungovernable”? Ungoverned, certainly, for the immediate future.

Two forces now claim victory, and the leadership of Italy: the Five Star Movement and the Lega. The first commands the largest vote for a single party, 32.7 percent, and thus has, democratically, a large claim to lead the coalition it will need to create a majority in the lower house and the Senate. The Lega, supposedly the junior partner in the right-wing coalition, surpassed Berlusconi’s Forza Italia by more than three percent: 17.4 percent to 14 percent, to be exact, allowing its leader, Matteo Salvini, to claim leadership of the Right which has a combined 37 percent of the vote.

Both the Movement and the Lega grew in the 2000s as the economy worsened and neither Left nor Right could find a steady footing in government, bedeviled as their coalitions were by internal feuds. The two “victors” have shallow roots, but strong reasons for their relative popularity. The Lega, then called Lega Nord, took its first support from northerners, mainly in the rich regions of Veneto and Lombardy, who professed themselves sick of paying taxes to pour into the sluggish, criminalized south and the “thieves of Rome.” The south—roughly, that part of Italy below Rome—lags on every measure far behind the north: more than 10 percent fewer people employed, a youth unemployment of over a third, productivity up to 30 percent lower. The south, with a third of the population, accounts for less than a quarter of GDP, and is home to most of the organized crime.

When, around Christmas 2013, I interviewed Elisabettta Tripodi, the brave woman who was elected mayor of Rosarno, a town under the thumb of Italy’s most powerful and richest mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, it was refreshing to meet a politician both straightforward and unblinkered, who sought to do something for the town in which she had been born (and had left, for a university education and a much safer career in the north). She survived about three years, having improved the town with leisure and other facilities, but resigned in 2015, the latest in a long list of unfinished elective terms, disheartened by what she called the “mean minded,” zero-sum infighting which defines politics in the area, and by the continued power of organized crime.

Immigration has been the vivid thread running through Italian politics for the past eight years. An estimated 700,000 immigrants have flowed into or through Italy since 2010. For some time, Milan’s grandiose central station had hundreds of migrants trying to sleep, or beg, in and around it. Italians’ twin attitudes toward them—the travelling public often reacting with distaste, the Red Cross and other volunteers providing food, care and advice—were on daily display. The League made immigration its main selling point, and its vote was the reward. Yet Forza Italia’s “moderation” was largely a fiction created by and round Berlusconi’s chosen image as the wise old bird: Roberto di Stefano, the Forza mayor of Sesto San Giovanni, near Milan, deported over 200 immigrants from his town, warning that “if they come back we’re ready for them.”

The south displayed as much horror of the flood as the north. In 2010, Rosarno itself was the scene of full-scale riots, as the mostly African fruit pickers, living in shacks on low wages, reacted to a non-fatal shooting of one of their number by gathering in the town and hurling rocks at police; the leftist daily La Repubblica invoked the Ku Klux Klan to describe the animosity of the locals to the African workers. But it did not swing to the Lega, which had insulted its people for years before turning away from “Padania,” as much as to the Five Stars, which had prioritized the area. The Movement’s very novelty, and the perceived uselessness of conventional politics, rewarded it with majorities of over 50 percent in some areas, its promise of a living wage for all proving widely popular.

Though by sheer numbers the most popular single party, the Five Star Movement is also the least experienced in governance. Even the Lega had periods in right-wing coalitions through the 2000s, and had ministerial posts (though not Salvini). The Movement, with Grillo in the van, prides itself—rightly, by electoral logic—on its distance from power, its distaste for parliamentary procedure, and its steady conviction that all but its own people are fatally corrupted. Its candidate for Prime Minister, Luigi di Maio, was a student militant, a university dropout (as was Salvini), a webmaster and a football ground steward. Astute and presentable, he has been able to transform himself into an effective stump orator and managed to develop a political and media presence distinct from that of Grillo.

But he knows next to nothing of substance about the economy, foreign affairs, social issues or security. The inability of Virginia Raggi, a lawyer and the Five Star mayor of Rome, to have any effect on the corruption and gross inefficiency of the capital’s administration has not seemed to damage the Movement—but may be a pointer to its possible ascent to supreme national power.

Russia, which has sought to cultivate both the Five Star Movement and the Lega, won big this week. The Movement’s foreign policy expert, Manlio di Stefano, spoke at a conference of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party in 2016, to call for an end to sanctions on Russia, blaming EU and U.S. meddling in Ukraine for the country’s crisis. Salvini has visited Moscow several times, and has openly expressed his deep admiration for Putin in Trumpian terms: The Lega has signed a cooperation deal with United Russia, and several of its leading members visited Crimea last year. Italy’s governments of both center-Right and center-Left have long been less convinced of the need and utility of sanctions, while protesting that they will not break ranks with the EU majority. Silvio Berlusconi became an apparently close friend of Putin’s and still visits him regularly, but even he remained within the European consensus. The next government, however, may well take its policy on Russia outside of it.

In any case, the victors have little respect for the European Union. Grillo has periodically proposed leaving the Eurozone and blames it—another popular stance—for abandoning Italy to the immigrant wave. Salvini has repeated several times that he expects the euro to collapse in the near future. From within the establishment, a former center-Left Finance Minister, Vincenzo Visco, who was influential in organizing the entry of Italy into the Eurozone in 2000, used an interview in La Stampa in December to excoriate Germany for “growing at our expense” and for running a “mercantilist, nationalist and isolationist” economic policy. Even Gentiloni, an enthusiast for the European Union, told Antonio Polito in a Corriere interview that he would never support the creation of a European Finance Minister with powers to override national governments—a rejection of the position taken by French President Emmanuel Macron.

A few days before the vote, the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, expressed (in a private conversation that was naturally leaked) his fear that Italy would have “no operational government,” a prescient remark. An unidentified Northern European diplomat told Politico that “I just don’t know how long the patience of financial markets will last…in the Netherlands or in Germany [coalition] talks have lasted a long time, but they don’t have that debt.” (Italy’s public debt stands at €2.2 trillion, the highest in the European Union).

Italy has been able to finance the debt because the quantitative easing program of the European Central Bank, purchasing large amounts of government debt, has kept the debt costs low, and Italy’s growth recovered as oil prices remained low and the United States and other European economies expanded. But quantitative easing is likely to be terminated soon, and present growth may falter: According to the economist Luigi Zingales, were the coincidence of easy debt and U.S. growth to end, Italy would be faced with the hardest of choices. “If the market perceives Italian debt to be unsustainable, there would either have to be a European bailout or Italy would be forced to exit the Eurozone,” Zingales has written. That is, it would be in the position of Greece—but with an economy many times larger and thus probably beyond Brussels’s capacity to save.

The largest question overhanging the beautiful peninsula is: Will its democracy survive? It’s no longer a subject for think tank seminars; it’s real. Juncker’s forebodings of an absent government have come to pass. If and when a real one is in place, it is likely to be populist, ignorant, and insecure.

Francis Fukuyama recently defined populism in these pages as a regime that promises what it can’t deliver; seeks to divide the “true” people from existing and incoming groups who don’t share the dominant national ethnicity; and promotes leaders who develop a cult of personality. The Five Star Movement and the Lega fall, in differing degrees, into all of these categories: they have made extravagant spending promises; have promised to repatriate thousands of migrants and stop others in order to preserve the identity of Italians; and have focused attention on their leaders, Beppe Grillo and Matteo Salvini. Trump, as Fukuyama noted, promised much in all these categories too, though has rowed back from several, especially the spending programs.

Whatever government emerges over the next weeks or months in Italy may also row back, perhaps further and more hastily than Trump. Its contempt for the European Union may be transformed into dependence. Its Russophilia may be put on the back burner: Vladimir Putin does not have the means to materially assist the Italian economy. It may even try to focus on and reform the social and economic problems which its parties have airily insisted were the fault of the left.

But if parties can wake up to realities, what happens to their millions of supporters? They have perhaps elected them ignorantly, but in good faith: They believed, or hoped, they could change the conditions which oppress them. When they can’t, what then takes the place of the jaunty populists, still in rejoicing mode this week? It will take more than creativity to get out of the black hole these elections have dug.

Paul Ginsborg, Italy and its Discontents, 1980-2001 (Allen Lane, 2001), p.139.

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Mosul on Their Minds

Noura

by Heather Raffo, directed by Joanna Settle

Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, DC

$44-$118, through March 11

Thanks to a moving new play at the Shakespeare Theatre, we in DC can check in on the Christians who escaped from ISIS-ravaged Mosul. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Noura, written by and starring Heather Raffo and directed by Joanna Settle, can be seen in its world premiere through March 11. Whereas A Doll’s House is about a housewife in 19th-century Norwegian society who is overwhelmed by the restrictions it places on women, Noura is about an Iraqi Christian woman who struggles to balance the societal burdens placed on Iraqi women as she tries to keep Mosul’s Christian heritage alive in today’s United States.

Noura lives in New York City with her husband Tareq and their son Yazen, where she is regularly visited by her Muslim childhood friend Rafa‘a. She is preparing for a special Christmas gathering, where Maryam, a Christian orphan she sponsored in Mosul who came to the United States as a refugee after ISIS’s takeover, will meet Noura’s family. As the play’s poster describes, Maryam’s visit has the effect of “forcing them [Noura’s family] to confront where they are, where they’ve been, and who they have become.” During the course of an hour and a half, theatergoers experience how this group of refugees struggles with mourning the death of an ancient community and transplanting their identities to the new world (or creating them entirely anew).

Overall, the play is executed well, utilizing a plain stage that keeps your focus on the powerful dialogue. Noura’s secret cigarette-smoking sessions, in which she ruminates silently on what has happened to her family and city, allow the audience to digest the past scene before transitioning to the next. The occasional use of Syriac and Arabic Christmas chants help set a solemn mood, filling the theater with audible remnants of the city that these characters may never see again, yet that haunts them wherever they go.

This powerful and emotional story is particularly relevant as Mosul faces a massive rebuilding campaign, which involves many questions of post-ISIS trauma and Mouslawi identity—and which will no doubt involve the diaspora community of Iraqis to some extent. Additionally, it revisits with acute sensitivity the age-old problems of immigrants in American society, while recognizing the particular twists to these Iraqis’ stories.

Noura gives a powerful dramatization of the immigrant’s dilemma, in which the need to settle into a new country and culture must be balanced against the desire to preserve one’s heritage. Raffo (whose father was from Mosul) made a canny decision in choosing a woman as her protagonist; in Iraqi culture women are expected to uphold their family’s honor and be the guardians of community (through traditional cooking, language teaching, and so forth). To wonderful dramatic effect, Raffo contrasts Noura’s desire for preservation with another immigrant woman’s opposite experience.

Not long after arriving from her school in California, Maryam (convincingly played by Dahlia Azama) is revealed to be the antithesis of the traditional Mouslawi woman. As Noura puts it, she “didn’t even complement me once”—a shock since traditionally Mouslawi women greet each other with a heaping of compliments. Noura had hoped Maryam would be the embodiment of Mosul, but she seems to want nothing to do with the city and tells Noura that she “wouldn’t recognize it anymore.” The audience witnesses Maryam deciding her post-school career one minute and later on casually retelling her ISIS survival story. In an entirely different way, she too deals with a special burden on account of her gender, as she fled Iraq with full knowledge of the sexual violence that ISIS was inflicting on minority women—enduring horrors on her way, though not that horror in particular.

The playwright never answers which approach is better or more justified—remembering the old country or forgetting it; accepting the cultural burdens of womanhood or abandoning them when they become wrapped up in trauma. Instead, Raffo leaves it up to the audience to make the decision themselves.

The contrast between the two women is the most dramatic of the play, but it is complemented by two others—those between Noura and the two men closest to her, husband Tareq and friend Rafa‘a. Like Maryam, Tareq wishes to forget everything that went before. In one conversation between husband and wife, Noura expresses frustration at the Iraqi people’s own self-inflicted wounds, to which Tareq retorts “These people are not us!” He is fed up with the whole thing, passionately asserting that “We came here to forget!” Unlike Noura, he wants to use the new names the family listed on their passports: He is now Tim, while their son Yazen has become Alex.

Yet the play softens Tareq by endowing him with some complexity; he too wants to keep some aspects of his homeland. He participates in dressing Yazen up as a “Chaldean king” for Christmas, and dreams of living in a group house with a garden alongside his many sisters, just as they would have in Iraq. Tareq seem to want to keep their Iraqi identities within the privacy of their home, while Noura is out seeking new recruits, in the form of Maryam—who of course rejects her. Tareq thus takes a sort of middle ground between the two women, an easier path for him, perhaps, because he has less of the cultural expectations placed on Noura or the trauma endured by Maryam. Raffo deals with him sympathetically, but again, she’ll never tell you who’s right.

The second male foil to Noura is the Muslim Rafa’a, whom the playwright uses to open up this drama to the wider tragedy of Iraq. Certainly, the Christian cataclysm is ever-present throughout the play, as the characters deal with the painful fact that Mosul’s ancient Christian community has gone extinct. In the years after 2008, when a wave of murders and kidnappings targeting Christians occurred in Mosul (including the murder of two nuns), 12,000 fled the city (approximately one-fourth to one-third of the population). Yet, as Raffo describes in the playbill, “[Before 2014] Christians still felt like they had a home in country and were part of an ancient melting pot of many ethnic and religious minorities. I’m not sure that is true today.”

For Iraq’s surviving Christians, the destruction of churches, graves, artifacts, and homes by ISIS severed a link many had with their country. This loss of identity, and Noura’s struggle to rebuild it in diaspora, is the central drama of the play. Yet Raffo does not tell a simple tale of Christians victimized by Muslims, but treats the destruction of Mosul as a tragedy for all, mainly through Noura’s heated arguments with Rafa‘a. At one point Noura lets her anger out with an impassioned reminder that ISIS burned their ancient books and buildings, to which Rafa‘a responds: “They burned our [Muslims’] books too!”

Rafa‘a (a powerful performance by Matthew David) continues to push back, telling her that Muslims around the world are ashamed of what has happened and feel the pressure to constantly disassociate themselves from extremism. During his lamentation over Iraq’s descent into tribalism and sectarianism, the audience is reminded that ISIS has not spared Muslims either. Whereas Maryam is trying to forget her past because she is a victim, Rafa’a wants to forget the brutalities perpetrated by other Muslims, despite his own innocence. The play does not force this contrast, making its point with admirable subtlety: The damage of Iraq’s tragedy carries over into the new world for all involved.

Indeed, Raffo is wise about how the Christian-Muslim interaction plays out in the diaspora. While living in the United States binds Christian and Muslim Iraqis more tightly together, as they share more with each other than the surrounding culture, they also have to struggle with social dynamics exclusive to diaspora life. We see Noura’s guilt in being treated a little better by immigration officials because of her religion, for example. In contrast, we also see Noura struggling to articulate to Rafa’a the pain she feels at Christians being uprooted from Iraq, to which Rafa’a reacts so strongly. Christians and Muslims face different challenges when dealing with each other outside of Iraq, but the cleansing power of American individualism doesn’t wash them away—even if some of the characters might like it to.

Noura is well worth your time. Its unique interpretation of the struggles of a middle-class Iraqi wife and mother is a rare and unexpected delight. Heather Raffo’s knowledge of Mosul, the Mouslawi Christian struggle, and the immigrant plight is clear. The individual parts of the play fit together harmoniously, balancing various themes and struggles within the life of a refugee family, without stooping to moralizing or easy answers.

To Raffo’s credit, the play does not signal how the characters should deal with the looming questions brought up within it. This, indeed, is the most genuine aspect of its depiction of the life of immigrants: Many people simply persist onward while carrying heavy burdens, some of which cannot be sufficiently resolved. It is difficult not to emerge from the play somewhat dispirited, since Iraq is still fractured, Mosul’s Christian community is gone, and anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise in the United States. Yet there are also reasons to be optimistic, because even though the play showcases the struggles of navigating between two cultures, it movingly portrays the love and perseverance of this family despite its hardships. I left reassured, too, that we have such sensitive artists as Raffo memorializing the immigrant experience for our enjoyment and reflection.

The post Mosul on Their Minds appeared first on The American Interest.

The Good Liberal

The People vs. Democracy

Yascha Mounk

Harvard University Press, 2018, 400 pp., $29.95

“Democracy” is one of the most misunderstood words in the English language. In popular usage, it has become shorthand for all that is good and positive. When it comes to our political or ideological opponents, we tend to think that they are less committed to democracy than we are—or, more recently, that they are outright anti-democratic.

The sloppy way we talk about populists is a case in point: “Populist” is too often used as an epithet, casually and interchangeably standing in for “authoritarian,” “despot,” or “dictator.” In most Western democracies (Portugal being the most notable exception) populist parties are contending for second place, and sometimes more. In at least two countries—Hungary and Poland—they have claimed victory. This magnifies the threat, but, as with all threats, it also magnifies the distortions. It’s easy to see why well-meaning analysts, seeing the future of their own democracies as far less than a sure thing, end up resorting to advocacy and alarmism. It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it right.

Many academics are able to write about things they don’t like—from odious individuals to extreme ideologies—in a dispassionate manner. The group today most associated with evil, the Islamic State, regularly manages to elicit balanced analyses from scholars—far more so than the kind of “analysis” that Donald Trump has provoked.

There are seemingly two types of Trump laments being published these days: end of democracy books and end of liberalism books. Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy is the latest entrant in the former category, and probably the most ambitious. It manages to avoid the overwrought alarmism, partisan attacks, and Hitler references that sullied Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die and Timothy Snyder’s occasionally silly pamphlet On Tyranny. Yet as with all books that speak to a present danger—its unsubtle subtitle is “Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It”—Mounk, like a good Paul Thomas Anderson film, struggles in the final third.

The problem with populists—or more precisely the problem with writing about them—isn’t that they’re anti-democratic but rather that they can be quite democratic, more democratic than their opponents, perhaps even too democratic. This is also one of the main reasons—besides racism or Russian meddling—that they seem to do quite well in elections. And not surprisingly, the better they do in elections, the more they seem to like democracy. Anyone who wishes to make sense of populist success, as well as learn from it, must start here. This is precisely what Mounk does, offering a much needed dose of conceptual clarity.

At the heart of Mounk’s inquiry is the notion that the two core components of liberal democracy—namely liberalism and democracy—are coming apart. For most of the modern era, these two concepts seemed to go hand-in-hand, at least in the West. The classical liberal tradition, emerging out of the Enlightenment after Europe exhausted itself with wars of belief, prioritized non-negotiable personal freedoms and individual autonomy, eloquently captured in documents like the Bill of Rights. Meanwhile, democracy, while requiring some basic protection of rights to allow for meaningful competition, was more concerned with popular sovereignty, popular will, and responsiveness to the voting public.

Mounk identifies how the disjunction has started to manifest:

On the one hand, the preferences of the people are increasingly illiberal: voters are growing impatient with independent institutions and less and less willing to tolerate the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. On the other hand, elites are taking hold of the political system and making it increasingly unresponsive: the powerful are less and less willing to cede to the views of the people. As a result, liberalism and democracy… are starting to come into conflict.

But is this such a new phenomenon? The story of politics is arguably a story of a struggle between these two impulses, founded as they are on different conceptions of human needs and wants. Once our current moment is cast in this historical context, it becomes easier to make sense of it.

American and European democracy might seem under threat today, but the fact that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, founding fathers of the Republic, nearly took up arms against each other adds some needed perspective. More important, though, is what they fought over. As Jason Willick recently noted, Adams was infatuated with monarchy, believed Jefferson and his allies were colluding with France, and infamously said that “democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization.” In a letter to the Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Jefferson had a rather different perspective:

The first principle of republicanism is that the lex majoris partis is the fundamental law of every society of individuals of equal rights; to consider the will of the society enounced by the majority of a single vote as sacred as if unanimous is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last which is thoroughly learnt. This law once disregarded, no other remains but that of force, which ends necessarily in military despotism.

Were the masses to be feared and constrained or were they to be empowered? Rather than simply sounding the warning on illiberal democrats—the Trumps, Le Pens, and Orbans—Mounk, to his credit, also pays considerable attention to “undemocratic liberalism.” He identifies, correctly, that the former are partly a response to the latter. Right-wing populists aren’t outsiders to history. They are products of their time; they represent something deep and deeply felt, if also inchoate; they eagerly meet a burgeoning demand. For their part, undemocratic liberals bear responsibility for allowing the frustration to build, producing what the political theorist Samuel Goldman calls “the peculiar mix of panic and inertia” that today seems endemic in Western civic life.

Born in the ashes of World War II but triumphant after the Cold War, undemocratic liberalism has increasingly asserted itself through guardian judiciaries, watchful central banks, and centralized bureaucracies, whether through expansive federal governments or supranational structures like the European Union. The term “deep state,” itself a Middle Eastern import, has lately been weaponized by American populist-nationalists, suggesting something hidden and nefarious. Except there’s nothing particularly hidden about it. As Mounk notes, “A broad field of academic study has found both that it is very hard for politicians to control the bureaucracy, and that the scope of decisions made by bureaucratic agencies has expanded over the years.”

The reach of technocratic policymaking—the “administrative state” in Bannonite parlance—would not have been possible a hundred years ago. Technological progress, scientific advancement, and the necessity of ambitious welfare states to maintain social order has since made it inevitable. At the same time, higher levels of educational attainment, expectations of egalitarianism, and the universal availability of information (false or otherwise) have made citizens more aware of all the things they were unaware of.

Unfortunately, these are problems without obvious solutions. Modern government is technocratic government. Most citizens do not understand the details of regulatory policy; but even if they did, there is little to suggest that arguments over legislative minutiae would successfully mobilize electoral coalitions. So Mounk, and the rest of us, are stuck: “The case,” he writes, “for taking so many policy decisions out of democratic contestation may be perfectly sound. But even if it is, this does not change the fact that the people no longer have a real say in all these policy areas. In other words, undemocratic liberalism may have great benefits—but that doesn’t give us a good reason to blind ourselves to its nature.”

Alienated from the details of tax policy, healthcare mandates, or the vagaries of environmental regulations, voters have instead focused their energy on questions of culture, identity, and race. But, even here, governing elites wished to make sensitive conversations—especially surrounding immigration and its consequences—off-limits for polite democratic deliberation. To make matters worse, it was done in a condescending way, with enlightened moral appeals to multi-culturalism and anti-racism juxtaposed to the untutored bigotry of the masses. There was an aesthetic component as well: It was in bad taste to question the liberal consensus.

Politicians mistook immigration as just another matter for policy wonks to fiddle with—a value-neutral problem for which there was an optimal solution. Voters didn’t see it that way and repeatedly tried to get politicians to listen. In a 2012 YouGov survey, only 8 percent of British citizens said current levels of immigration had “a positive effect” on Britain. 78 percent of respondents—96 percent from the Conservative Party and 63 percent from Labour—supported Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to reduce immigration from hundreds of thousands to “tens of thousands.” What’s perhaps most interesting, though, is that very few respondents had any faith immigration levels would, or even could, change: Only 15 percent said it was likely Cameron would live up to his pledge.

As the immigration opponent and Islam critic Douglas Murray remarked in his controversial book The Strange Death of Europe, even the allegedly Trumpist Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, wrote in 2012: “We need to stop moaning about the dam-burst. It’s happened. There is nothing we can now do except make the process of absorption as eupeptic as possible.” Murray writes:

Perhaps nothing was done to reverse the trend because no one in power believed anything could be done. If this was a political truth then it remained wholly unmentionable. Nobody could get elected on such a platform, and so a continent-wide tradition arose of politicians saying things and making promises that they knew to be unachievable.

Perhaps the rest of us believe that these sentiments are mere bigotry by another name, but they were there all the same, building in the body politic, claiming sometimes large majorities. Yet, politicians were unable or unwilling to take their concerns particularly seriously. That unwillingness could quickly turn into disdain.

Immigration was only one example of the de-politicization of politics in the self-congratulatory haze of the post-Cold War. As the Christian theologian Matthew Kaemingk observed in the Netherlands, “Dutch political debates had devolved into arguments over which party was better equipped to manage the liberal state, the liberal economy, and the liberal culture. No longer did the socialist or Christian leaders seriously argue that the government or the market rested under the sovereignty of either God or the workers’ collective.”

This was the “anti-politics” of undemocratic liberalism laid bare: a preference to narrow the range of political debate and prioritize technocratic “nudging,” by making marginal improvements within a consensus that would remain essentially unquestioned. It was, in its pristine ideal, a democracy without conflict, which soon revealed itself to be a contradiction in terms. Its search for consensus, however well-meaning, was self-defeating: Consensus is only possible when there is already consensus—and there rarely is. An artificial consensus, manufactured and nurtured by the powerful, is by definition exclusionary, pushing away anything that offers a whiff of radicalism, whether the “inclusive populism” of Bernie Sanders or the stylistic pomp-populism of Donald Trump.

Mounk is at his best when railing against the dangers of anti-politics and empty paeans to post-ideology. For it’s not just that managerial technocracy creates an opening for populists; The populists’ own politics end up so confounding to liberals that they become their own worst enemies. In discussing Venezuela’s descent into autocracy, Mounk points out how the opposition bore considerable responsibility for the resilience of Hugo Chavez. He quotes the Venezuelan economist Andrés Miguel Rondón: “We wouldn’t stop pontificating about how stupid Chavismo was. ‘Really, this guy? Are you nuts? You must be nuts,’ we’d say. The subtext was clear: Look, idiots—he will destroy the country.” Similarly, the Italian economist Luigi Zingales, writing after Trump’s victory, reminded Americans of Italy’s own vulgarian Silvio Berlusconi: The Italian opposition “was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared.”

We are far removed from the time, in 2009, when Barack Obama could have called for a “new declaration of independence…from ideology.” To limit populist inroads, Mounk suggests, requires more than mere resistance or the stopgap measure of a charismatic centrist who will lull us into thinking the storm has passed; it requires a fighting spirit, and perhaps even a fighting faith. It also requires more inward reflection on the part of an elite that still thinks it knows better (and sometimes seems to wish it could do away with the inconvenience of elections altogether). It requires bigger ideas that can absorb some populist anger—without the xenophobia—while putting forward a true political alternative.

This, though, is the hardest part. Like with many books that aspire for policy impact and relevance, Mounk’s book struggles to transition from a cutting analysis to a compelling plan of action. It’s not just that the pivot is unconvincing. It’s that in attempting to pull it off, Mounk sometimes falls into the very traps he himself so eloquently describes in the first two thirds of the book. There is a tendency to rely on a set of obvious, if vague institutional fixes. His goal is for the liberal state to live up to its stated ideals through a shared commitment to fairness and equal protections under the law. He is seeking to construct something he calls “inclusive nationalism,” a concept that sometimes overlaps with Jürgen Habermas’ idea of “constitutional patriotism.” Like Habermas, Mounk ultimately puts a lot of faith in people getting fired up about a rationally ordered and fair society.

Mounk’s policy chops are impressive—the section on housing policy has the virtue of being both interesting and plausible—but after an ambitious buildup, the recommendations seem anticlimactic, the sort of technocratic to-do list that would be well at home on the websites of well-studied Democratic politicians or, for that matter, the Center for American Progress. Like all anti-populists, Mounk is tempted by a narrow instrumentalism. Policy fixes serve no grander narrative and no greater cause; reform is primarily a means to keep populists at bay. To return to politics is to find new ways of ending it. There is little doubt that Mounk would prefer a world without populists. But without energetic challengers, one wonders why the parties of the center-Left and center-Right would so much as consider rethinking their aims.

There is nothing wrong with a failure of imagination per se, but it does illustrate, perhaps inadvertently, how difficult addressing the “problem” of populism will be. There may not, in fact, be a solution.

I am an ordinary liberal—my liberalism a product of convenience more than conviction. I’m a liberal largely because I’m a product of liberalism. Yascha Mounk, though, is a true believer. He doesn’t have a big idea, at least not a new one. His big idea is liberalism.  Whether or not that will be enough—or whether it can be—is a question his book cannot answer.

The post The Good Liberal appeared first on The American Interest.

Undoing China’s One-Child Policy

There is a reason why every major faith in history has been pro-natalist. In essence, the decision to raise children is a statement of belief in the future, affirming that society will essentially be fair and the world more or less rational. Bringing children into the world, no matter the burdens and costs, is not only based on hope; it also generates hope. It’s a psychological investment in the prospect of a better world.

So what happens in a society when the time horizons of natural family life are shattered and social norms are inverted? Welcome to China, which is currently trying to draw to a close what is perhaps the largest-scale social experiment in human history: the “one-child policy.”

The one-child policy was introduced in 1979, after three decades of political-economic turmoil, in hopes that smaller families would help China deal with the extreme poverty the nation faced. In 1980, the policy was given teeth as Communist Party members were directed to have only one child, and in 1982 it was made universal and enshrined in the constitution. By 2014, however, facing demographic shortfalls, the Chinese government started to relax the policies, allowing families to have two children if one of the parents was an only child. In 2015, the one-child policy was formally abolished.

A great deal has been written about China’s massive social experiment. Most of the literature focuses on two consequences of the policy, one economic and one social. As to the former, conventional wisdom holds that the policy, if successful, would lead fairly soon to a demographic derangement in which too few young workers would be needed to support too many retirees. That would leave much less money for investment, and consequently become a drag on economic growth. As to the latter, social consequence, many have remarked on the inversion of the traditional ratio between the number of grandchildren and grandparents in society. The phenomenon of only-child “princes/princesses” has also been widely discussed as being dissonant with traditional Chinese values.

What has not been widely discussed is whether the pro-natalist instincts largely snuffed out by state decree can also be reignited by state decree.

Some social policies are easier to turn on than to turn off. Government directives can ratchet down birth rates, but can they ratchet them up again? Particularly in times of affluence, raising birthrates means lowering self-indulgence. This challenge is hardly limited to China; across the developed world, birth rates are drifting down as income levels and education levels climb. China put the power of state coercion on top of that trend, turning what can arguably be considered natural into something that was anything but.

No society in recorded history has ever experimented in such a grandiose fashion, so there is no historical guide to what will happen. But it seems safe to say that China’s efforts to stabilize its birth rate and to manage its demographics will face unforeseen challenges.

Going forward, China will likely move from merely ending the one-child policy to adopting pro-natalist policies, initially with messaging and symbolism, but eventually to include tax credits and privileges (such as school preferences), and even bounties or direct stipends for families that have two or three children, as is done in many Western countries. These efforts will probably disappoint expectations, in part because it can take several years to recognize a trend and in part because a consensus must be built that does not flatly discredit the previous consensus.

The worst case, but also the most likely in my view, is that China will suffer a long-term population decline. A hint that this is already starting to happen is that demographers have noted that the Chinese government has ceased publishing certain statistical tables that would provide more accurate measures of total fertility rates.

The broader question is the “so what” question: What does this all mean? Let’s look at the possible political-economic and social implications.

In some core geopolitical respects, such as the national economy or military capabilities, a declining population probably means little, this despite the considerable shift in real numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that China’s population will peak at more than 1.4 billion around 2030, and by 2050 it will be down to 1.3 billion. This would be the greatest population drop in history in absolute terms, but it could be largely irrelevant to conventional calculations of national strength.

Increasing reliance on capital goods and technology means that China can continue to enjoy high rates of GDP growth even with a shrinking population. Similarly, military capabilities will increase as the PLA continues its shift to more technology-intense solutions. There are interesting second-order national security effects, because a smaller labor force will place a greater burden on China’s retirement system, and increased labor competition means that the PLA will have to decide whether to draw from the less capable elements of society, or significantly increase pay, or open certain military specialties to women.

These are largely manageable challenges. If China were an open society, perhaps a military comprised mainly of only-children would generate an anti-military war constituency in the form of very nervous parents. But in a closed society like China’s no mechanism for parents to complain about the risk posed to their only child exists. So a declining population need not presage major political implications. The social implications, on the other hand, could be extensive.

China is creating a nation in which the central mechanism of instruction, the chief means of transmitting information and social norms, has been degraded. A one-child policy means that siblings are rare, as are cousins, aunts, and uncles. Normal family social interactions and normal social skills are weakened. Negotiating skills, friendship skills, core learning channels, and corrective mechanisms are all diluted.

Has there ever in human history been such an extraordinarily atomized society? On matters large and small, this could be a major driver of future Chinese behavior. No one is more aware of this than the Chinese themselves, who now use the term “Giant Infants” more often than “princes” to describe the over-indulged single child. An examination of this phenomenon by a Chinese psychiatrist in a book entitled A Country of Giant Infants was a best seller until the government banned it.

A partial substitution for the more normal family structure is the electronic family. There might not be guidance from siblings, but there are online ratings and reviews. Crowd-sourced opinions matter. Conformity provides safety. Key opinion leaders drive consumer behavior. Smart-phone apps and social networking are powerful in China not just because it is a networked society, but because alternative channels are not as readily available.

Jean Twenge has identified the social implications of the smartphone on American millennials, calling them the iGen: “The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health.” The advent of the e-family at a moment of limited families suggests that a nation will rise to adulthood with less experience in dealing with normal disagreements, finding consensus, and developing leadership skills. Why not rely on the wisdom of electronic crowds?

And conformity has particular value in a closed society. Your smartphone becomes your reality check rather than other, flesh-and-blood people. We can see why China is an avidly digital nation and why celebrity culture is so powerful there. Apps are easier to deal with than people, and it is easier to mimic a celebrity than it is to develop a genuine friendship.

If a person has few if any immediate peer-cohort relatives—siblings and cousins—and if the world is on your smartphone, what is the point of going out? China is also the largest e-sport nation on earth. It offers the joy of competition with none of the friction or uncertainty of interaction. But as Twenge observes: “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.”

Smaller families also make it easier to live for oneself. Why not enjoy life? Why not enjoy the moment if there is no need to be prudent for the sake of others? What do attitudes that arise from such temptations mean for social trust building in the future?

One-child households also mean more men than women, not just in China but in most of East Asia, because of sex-selective abortions. This in turn means more unmarried men. Media attention on the misery of single men longing for companionship will rise. More important, the unsuccessful singles will be disproportionately in the less-educated and less-economically productive segments of society, making modern China perhaps the largest Social Darwinist experiment in history.

And will marriage decline in importance as well? Part of the value of a marriage is to provide a structure in which to raise a family, but if there is no family, does the marriage itself become less valued as an institution? Over the past decade, the divorce rate in China has more than doubled.

Beyond the gender and marriage implications, population decreases should also facilitate the greater participation of women and minorities in the economy. That, in turn, tends to correlate with lower live birth rates. So it is possible that demographic decline could in some respects become a self-reinforcing trend.

The ultimate irony of the One-Child Policy is particularly striking. The policy was adopted in 1979, just as Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms were being launched, perhaps making the initiative obsolete at its inception. But a re-examination of Mao’s economic policies could begin only after his death in 1976, and it took several years for Deng to consolidate power. Economic policies could not be adapted to meet national needs. Instead, the nation had to adapt to meet the needs of state-directed economic policies. That the One-Child Policy has transformed China is unarguable. That China ever really needed this transformation is doubtful. Whether it will manage to endure it without massive and still unpredictable burdens remains a very open question.

The post Undoing China’s One-Child Policy appeared first on The American Interest.

We All Play Our Parts

On February 20, six days after the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the following email was sent to a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times:

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The result was predictable. The reporter posted the email on his Twitter feed. The public responded with outrage. The email’s author, Benjamin Kelly, got fired. His boss, Florida State Representative Shawn Harrison, tweeted, “I am appalled at and strongly denounce [Kelley’s] comments about the Parkland students.” And finally, Kelly tweeted sheepishly that he had “made a mistake” and Harrison should not “be held responsible for my error in judgement.”

A mere blip in the 24/7 coverage of America’s latest mass shooting, this incident is nonetheless worth a second look, because it reveals five discomfiting aspects of the media spectacle that now accompanies these horrific events.

The first discomfiting aspect is the casual way in which an everyday political grunt like Kelly shares a deliberate falsehood. His goal was clearly to stoke opposition to a motion in the Florida House to debate a bill that would ban semi-automatic assault rifles like the AR-15 used in the attack. But this is Florida, folks, the state with the nation’s most powerful NRA lobby. The vote was not on the actual bill, because anti-gun bills never reach the voting stage in Florida. It was on a motion to consider the bill. And that motion was roundly defeated, with 71 Republicans, including Harrison, voting against it. Does such routine business really require Russian-style disinformation?

The second discomfiting aspect is the willingness, nay, eagerness, of many Americans to believe that the young people who stepped into the national limelight after the Parkland shooting are not students but “crisis actors” hired to trick the public into supporting gun control. This morsel of troll-bait has been circulating through pro-gun websites for a long time, swelling on occasion to a full-blown conspiracy theory claiming that no mass shootings have actually occurred in America—that they’ve all been staged by rabid anti-gun Democrats and their accomplices in the liberal media.

Not surprisingly, the students took umbrage at this lie. For example, 18-year-old Cameron Kasky is reported to have warned his classmates while boarding a bus to Tallahassee, “Over the next couple days, there are a lot of people who are being paid a lot of money to ruin what we are doing. A lot of the people with cameras here are here to help, and a lot of the people with cameras here are here to destroy us.” He was right, of course. But at the same time, an observer watching these poised, self-contained teenagers speak so confidently into those same cameras might be forgiven for thinking they are professionals.

As the 24/7 coverage rolled on, it was reported that some of these camera-ready students belonged to the Stoneman Douglas drama club. When asked about this on the “Ellen DeGeneres Show,” Kasky’s reply was worthy of a celebrity guest on late-night TV: “I’ve been acting since kindergarten. In Miss Blakely’s production of The Rainbow People, I was the Narrator. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to be in Little Shop of Horrors and Fiddler on the Roof. And if you’ve seen those, you’d know I am not somebody who deserves any money for acting.”

Here again, an observer watching Kasky deliver this punchline with perfect comic timing, then assume an expression of sweet humility while Ellen and the studio audience erupt in laughter and applause, might be forgiven for thinking he might very soon be offered a lot of money for performing. The Parkland students are not “crisis actors,” reciting their lines for propaganda purposes. But they are the children of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Telegram, Kik, and all the other social media that condition young people to communicate by selfie, video, and meme.

Of course, as every high school drama coach knows, some students communicate better than others. The third discomfiting aspect of this latest school shooting is the undertow of competition pulling at these teenagers just as they struggle to build solidarity. Their movement depends on the media, and the media must have its darlings. Right now, the movement is trying to be bipartisan, so the emerging stars are gay Latina Emma González, with her peach-fuzz scalp and intense dark eyes, paired with cool Caucasian Kasky, with his preppy charm and pro-gun policeman dad. The other students may be better organizers or thinkers, but already they are being edged out of the picture.

The fourth discomfiting aspect pertains to the rest of us. School shootings are now so commonplace that, when one occurs, most Americans instinctively know what to do—or more precisely, what to say and how to behave when the cameras arrive. I’m not suggesting that we confuse performance with reality. I’m simply noting that we, too, are conditioned to play our parts in a familiar scenario that starts with the shock of the first report, then continues with the waves of hysteria and panic; the suspense of the shooter killed or captured; the official body count bringing grief to some families and relief to others; the sorrowful aftermath of tears, hugs, and tributes; the memorial made of candles, hearts and flowers, pictures, toys, scrawled messages, and other fond paraphernalia; and finally the calls for “healing” that are ridiculously premature but get voiced anyway, because the drama must be concluded before the cameras leave town.

This ritual is discomfiting because it hides so much pain. The most devastated families cower in their houses, and behind the brave smiles and consoling embraces churn oceans of agony and despair. But isn’t this true of most rituals? We have rituals to tell us what to do when we are overwhelmed by events. If the media are providing Americans with a predictable path through these ugly ordeals, then more power to them. We can’t invent a new ritual every time somebody shoots up a school, any more than we can invent a new ceremony every time somebody gets married, gives birth, or dies. As Aristotle wrote 2500 years ago, “the instinct of Imitation is implanted in man from childhood.” We imitate what we know.

But aye, there’s the rub. Right after the Parkland shooting, a friend of mine—a conservative and a gun owner—wrote to me: “The AR-15 is a cultural fetish in this country thanks in large part to the entertainment industry, and they are getting off scot-free.” The fifth and most disconcerting aspect of the media spectacle is the way it ignores, or downplays, any connection between school shootings and the grotesque violence now pervading American entertainment, from comic books to action films to first-person-shooter video games.

That connection cannot be proven “scientifically,” meaning no one has yet conducted a laboratory experiment in which subjects are shown violent material and then found to have a measurable uptick in their propensity to commit mayhem. But surely the responses of human beings to expressive culture are more complex than that. Among serious researchers the consensus is that, rather than brainwash us instantly or roll off our backs like the proverbial water off a duck, the media condition us, gradually and incrementally, to accept—or at least consider normal—ways of thinking and acting that we otherwise would not. This is also common sense, as expressed by the long-time neighbor who told the Miami Herald that the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, spent hours playing violent video games: “It was kill, kill, kill, blow up something, and kill some more, all day.”

It would be nice to think that our political leaders are more mature than all those idle adolescents out there, blasting virtual enemies to smithereens with their keyboards, joysticks, and game controllers. But the word mature no longer means what it once did. According to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), the label “Mature” on a video game means “intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.” Watching the Republicans—and the President—loudly proclaim that video games, not guns, are to blame for the mayhem in Parkland, while on the other side of the looking glass, the Democrats are just as loudly proclaiming the opposite, it is tempting to wish a plague on both their houses.

But there’s no point in doing that. The plague is already here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/us/florida-shooting-benjamin-kelly-actors.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/the-nra-lobbyist-behind-floridas-pro-gun-policies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bzQ6sMFUb0

Poetics, IV:2, trans. Francis Ferguson (Hill and Wang, 1961).

See, for example, Stephen Prince, Screening Violence (Rutgers UP, 2000).

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article200754714.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaRb9uglUVw

http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp

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