Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 11

Life in Singapore in the Time of Coronavirus

Living in a country not your own, you develop a sense of the cultural DNA that defines its people. Even before we completed our expat move to Singapore, it seemed to me that a sense of safety is a critical component of Singaporean DNA. When I mention an upcoming trip outside of Singapore to other expats, I’m met with “Have fun!” Mention that trip to a Singaporean, and I’m often met with “Be careful!”

The numbers bear this out. The World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness Report assesses each country’s competitiveness by measuring its security, among other factors. (“Security” is measured in terms of organized crime, homicide rate, terrorism incidence, and reliability of police services.) For 2019, Singapore was second in terms of criteria measuring how safe Singapore is. When it comes to how safe Singaporeans feel, however, they’re number one. In the 2019 Gallup Law and Order Index, Singapore scored 97 out of 100 possible points (the global average was 81), and 94 percent of Singaporeans reported that they feel safe walking alone in their area at night.

Looking around, Singaporeans also have good reason to feel safe when it comes to natural disasters. Tsunamis? Unlikely. Earthquakes? No. Volcanoes? Possibly ashfall, but otherwise no. Tropical cyclones? Very rare. No man is an island, but from a “sense of safety” perspective, being Singaporean is perhaps as close as you can get.

Singaporean “DNA” featured prominently in the recently concluded Singapore Bicentennial Experience, a multimedia exhibition that celebrated both the 200 years since Sir Stamford Raffles landed in Singapore in 1819 and the 500 years preceding that date. While I posit that “sense of safety” is a critical strand of Singapore’s DNA, the Bicentennial Experience emphasized three very different strands: openness (Singapore’s connectedness to Southeast Asia and the world), multiculturalism (the harmonious coexistence of Singapore’s Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian populations), and self-determination (Singaporeans’ determination to chart their own path through strength and resilience).

Bicentennial Experience attendees were invited to vote on which strand they most identified with. By the time the exhibition closed on December 31, 2019, more than 234,000 people had voted for self-determination, ahead of multiculturalism (around 176,500 votes) and openness (over 130,000).

Alongside the lingering trauma of the 2003 SARS outbreak, this sense of safety makes the current outbreak of COVID-19 particularly challenging for Singaporeans. SARS had a significant effect on Singapore’s economy and its sense of safety. Indeed, SARS was specifically mentioned in the Bicentennial Experience, which, as noted, covered 700 years of Singapore history. When a sense of safety is part of your DNA, the prospect of battling an invisible microbe is daunting.

To its credit, Singapore’s government has done a masterful job of distributing accurate information and debunking bad information being shared. Last week, it also distributed four masks per household, because that should be enough if you use a face mask only if you’re sick. It sounds like something a parent would say—and that’s no accident, because the Singapore government is very much like the parent we all aspire to be: caring but coolly competent, telling it like it is and clear on who’s in charge.

As serious as this all is—and it is serious—the most interesting thing is how close to normal everything remains. There is a constant low-level anxiety that we are one bad day away from completely abnormal, but we’re not there now. I guess this is what they mean by Keep Calm and Carry On. So, in the interest of carrying on, here is a glimpse into my current everyday life.

I was busy leaning over a sign-in sheet outside a friend’s condo recently when I felt something flitting around my hair. When I looked up, it was the security guard trying to take my temperature with a thermometer gun without me realizing he was trying to take my temperature with a thermometer gun.

Many of my organized activities have been canceled through February. Since these activities help me “Keep Calm,” I don’t find this helpful, even if I do find it understandable.

Despite news photos showing long lines in Singapore supermarkets, my neighborhood markets have been calm and fully stocked. Even so, when I realized I needed a half-cup of milk to make a frittata one recent afternoon, I searched “dairy-free frittata” before deciding I had no choice but to go to the store.

I sneezed in the supermarket checkout line and instantly felt guilty.

Fear of empty shelves, by the way, seems to have driven many Singaporeans to online shopping, making online grocery delivery slots potentially a scarcer commodity than hand sanitizer.

It seems no one is holding escalator railings anymore, which is an accident waiting to happen.

As of now, Singapore has 90 confirmed cases of COVID-19. An article published three years ago about interactions between Singaporeans and wild animals estimated that there were 1,500 long-tailed macaques and 500 wild boars on the island. I don’t love these animals, but I do feel better knowing I have a greater chance of encountering a long-tailed macaque or wild boar than I do a confirmed case of COVID-19.

When I checked my Chinese New Year’s horoscope in January, it actually read, “your luck will always be worse-than-expected. . . . Do not splurge on travels and luxury items as there will be unforeseen events unfolding.” We aren’t splurging much on travel these days. We are not alone. Expat friends who used to complain over coffee about spouses traveling too much now complain over wine about spouses being grounded.

For now, I’m out and about, walking, taking public transport (holding on, antibacterial wipes in hand). I can only hope that Singapore, in its exceedingly capable way, continues to balance its resilience with its commitment to multiculturalism and openness, because fear can throw that balance askew. I think I’ll go out and stare down a long-tailed macaque, just for good measure.

The post Life in Singapore in the Time of Coronavirus appeared first on The American Interest.

Have We Learned Any Lessons?

Thirty years ago, on February 21, 1990, the new president of Czechoslovakia addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress in Washington, DC. Less than four months before, in a remarkable contrast to the position he had assumed as leader of his country, Vaclav Havel had been under arrest as a “subversive element” in his country under a Communist regime that was soon to come to a spectacular end.

Havel was greeted enthusiastically by the House and Senate as a leader of the Velvet Revolution which terminated totalitarian rule in his country and set it back on the path toward democracy. One of us (Palous) joined him in the House chamber for this historic occasion. It was a moment few of us, Havel included, could have imagined just a few months before. Havel the playwright, poet, and intellectual was now speaking to a rapt audience in the United States Congress. For Czechs and Slovaks, there was no clearer indication that their fate had changed for the better.

In his speech, Havel spoke admiringly of democracy in the United States. “[Y]ou have one great advantage,” he declared. “You have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than 200 years, and your journey toward the horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system.”

The American Civil War in the 1860s, of course, stands as a kind of exception to Havel’s claim. But compared to the experience of Czechs and Slovaks, whom Havel argued had experienced democracy for a mere 20 years at that point—between the two world wars and for the three and a half months after the collapse of the Communist regime—Americans have enjoyed a much more peaceful, stable and prosperous system of government, especially in the second half of the 20th century.

By contrast, Havel described the toll decades of imposed Communist rule had had on his country and others in the region.

The communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs and Slovaks—as it has all the nations of the Soviet Union, and the other countries the Soviet Union subjugated in its time—a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and above all enormous human humiliation. It has brought us horrors that, fortunately, you have never known.

At the same time—unintentionally, of course—it has given us something positive: a special capacity to look, from time to time, somewhat further than those who have not undergone this bitter experience. Someone who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way.

What I am trying to say is this: we must all learn many things from you, from how to educate our offspring, how to elect our representatives, to how to organize our economic life so that it will lead to prosperity and not poverty. But this doesn’t have to be merely assistance from the well-educated, the powerful, and the wealthy to those who have nothing to offer in return.

We, too, can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come out from it.

Havel’s remarks raise the following questions: What is this “knowledge” that Czechs and Slovaks possess? What can we learn from Havel 30 years ago for today’s world? Given our current state of affairs, it does not seem that we have heeded Havel’s wise words very well. Nor have we maintained the positive momentum that emerged from the miraculous year of 1989. Instead, democracies seem to be lacking in the confidence that our system of government is the best. Havel would have been in no doubt about that.

Indeed, the deprivation of freedom and democracy Czechs and Slovaks endured thanks to the Soviet-imposed Communist regime deepened their aspirations to regain their liberty, and their appreciation for it once regained. Having had a brief taste of democracy between the wars, Czechs and Slovaks wanted to savor that freedom again, this time ensuring that they would sustain it and not take it for granted.

Havel’s experience with totalitarianism and the knowledge he derived from it three decades ago are relevant to all who struggle against totalitarian/authoritarian tendencies in today’s more globalized world. That experience also resonates to this day in Czech-U.S. relations. It is a reminder that we must remain steadfast in protecting human rights together, that we must recommit to the field of education, and especially the teaching of history, in order to properly preserve the memory of what we have collectively passed through before.

In his speech before Congress, Havel emphasized the importance of “human responsibility.”

Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success—responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where and only where they will be properly judged.

The interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred to as human conscience.

To appreciate the relevance of Havel’s words today, fast forward 30 years, especially in light of the wrenching impeachment process in the United States that largely broke down along partisan lines (with the exception of Mitt Romney in the Senate and several Democrats in the House). In these super-polarized times, finger-pointing and vicious attacks on one’s political opponents have become par for the course. Nastiness in politics is nothing new, but the spillover effects of our political leaders’ rhetoric and actions are rippling across society. The impact is felt not only within the borders of the United States, but also around the world. The model Havel extolled thirty years ago, the “shining city on a hill” that Reagan highlighted the year before in his farewell address, has lost its luster.

To state the obvious, America was far from perfect 30 years ago (or before) but it stood as an example to emulate for those who were suffering under the iron hand of Communism and totalitarianism. For all its flaws, the United States and the democratic way of life represented freedom, strength, and prosperity, especially compared to those countries living under Soviet influence and control. Czechs and Slovaks, as well as others in the region, realized that the propaganda and narratives they were endlessly force-fed by the Soviet apparatus about the United States were lies. As their countries opened up, America was looked upon as the world’s leader in freedom.

Recent surveys, alas, reveal that attitudes toward the United States have dimmed. Russia and China are competing for influence around the world and denigrating the very notion of democratic governance. The United States not only is failing to push back aggressively against such nefarious efforts but, through some disturbing actions and behavior of its own, is helping to narrow the gap between countries long known for their democratic system of government and those living under authoritarianism.

Were he still alive today, Havel undoubtedly would bemoan the loss of confidence among the democratic community of nations. He would despair over the nascent withdrawal of the United States from the global stage, a trend that did not just start under the current administration. He would view the rise of populism as a reflection of democracy’s failings to address the needs of all citizens and advance the greater good. And he would lament the shrinking sense of “human responsibility” on display among our leaders and average citizens.

Elites have come under frequent attack in the United States and elsewhere for being out of touch and leading their countries into situations of rampant inequality and corruption. They have become easy punching bags for demagogues and populists. In 1990, Havel defended elites, or the intellectual class, as he described them. “Wasn’t it the best minds of your country,” he asked rhetorically, “people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your bill of human rights, and your Constitution, and who, above all, took upon themselves practical responsibility for putting them into practice?” Havel’s words serve as a good reminder that we often remember things that fit with the narrative we want to advance and forget or deliberately leave out those aspects that run counter to our preconceived notions.

“When Thomas Jefferson wrote that ‘governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” Havel went on to say, “it was a simple and important act of the human spirit. What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words; it was his deeds as well.” We could certainly use more examples of that.

Havel’s speech is a reminder that we all bear responsibility for effecting change. Our words have consequences and our actions can have an impact—for better or worse. For the sake of democracy and freedom around the world, one hopes that Havel’s call resonates with all who care about the future. There is no linear path to democracy, nor is there automaticity to its sustainability. It requires hard work and a common sense of responsibility that seems increasingly in short supply these days. If we learn nothing else from Havel, we owe it to ourselves to remember that.

The post Have We Learned Any Lessons? appeared first on The American Interest.

The Other Third Rail in American Politics

“What’s past is prologue” may have originated as a Shakespearean bon mot, but it’s the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that lives it, the U.S. Military that frequently quotes it, and the U.S. Archives Building that bears it proudly etched on its façade—a handy metaphor for how history helps clarify the most obscure policy fights that occur again and again down the road on Capitol Hill.

The American public, along with many veterans, do not believe that the Federal government pays enough attention, or spends enough taxpayer money, on veterans. That assumption fuels the conclusion many politicians voice that helping veterans must equate with increasing public spending on veterans. Every Member of Congress could quip, as Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) did during the 2018 budget skirmishes, “You don’t go to a veterans assembly and say, ‘We’re not going to help the veterans.’” While the conflation of the two might make for superb PR, what the historical records show is that it’s hardly accurate. The Federal government has consistently set aside a hefty portion of its budget for veterans. In fact, more than 100 years of expanding Federal benefits for veterans have resulted in the VA’s current status as the second largest Federal agency overall. The most significant portion of that growth, however, has occurred in less than 30 years, with most of the period involving the Global War on Terror.

More intriguingly, that same historical record also reveals veterans’ policy to be among the most contentiously political, most resistant to independent analysis, policy field—that is, when outside scrutiny is even allowed.

Between 1980-2006—years spanning the height of the Cold War, the Balkans campaign, and the First and Second Iraq Wars, and the first years of the war in Afghanistan—the VA budget grew by 40 percent. It also saw the VA become a cabinet-level agency. Since 2006, and despite decreasing numbers of veterans nationwide, the VA’s budget has had stratospheric growth. Between 2006 and 2017 alone, VA’s budget had a 94 percent increase in real terms. (This compares with the Department of Defense’s actual 4 percent drop; Education’s 6 percent drop, and Labor’s 20 percent drop). For Fiscal Year 2020, President Trump proposed a 9.6 percent increase from FY 2019, for a total VA budget of $220.2 billion dollars.

On February 10, the Trump Administration submitted its Fiscal Year 2021 budget to Congress. With the new budget, VA receives a 13 percent increase in its top-line budget, making good on VA Secretary Robert Wilkie’s promise to the American Legion this past August, that 20 years of budget trends would hold true and that the VA wouldn’t see its funding decrease. The top-line budget request now stands at $243.3 billion, including a discretionary spending boost totaling $109 billion, making VA second only to the Department of Defense in discretionary spending. For a little context, the sum of the 2021 VA budget is now larger than each proposed budget of the separate branches of the Armed Forces (U.S. Army, $178 billion; U.S. Navy plus U.S. Marines, $207.1 billion; U.S. Air Force, $153.6 billion, and the new U.S. Space Force, $15.4 billion dollars).

Like President Trump’s 2020 budget, despite the 2021 top-line increase, the VA budget includes some modest cost-savings plans for a handful of programs within its three major administrations (Health, Benefits, and Cemeteries). These are to help offset the billion-dollar costs of implementing the 2018 Mission Act’s veteran community health care program and the 2019 Blue Water Navy Act. As in years past, these potential cuts will certainly invite controversy and condemnation: If there’s one reliable reaction to the flow of Federal monies for veterans, it’s characterizing any challenge to that flow, no matter how small, as playing (partisan) politics with veterans’ lives. Before we’re even able to delve into that dynamic, however, we have to grasp two truths: First, the VA does not serve all veterans. Second, the VA budget is hardly the only public money spent on veterans.

Contrary to public assumptions, the benefits and services that the VA’s budget enables it to provide are not meant for each individual who has worn the nation’s uniform. By law and by statute, not all active duty veterans (to say nothing of those who have served exclusively in the Reserves or National Guard) actually qualify to receive even VA health care benefits. Currently, there are an estimated 18 million living veterans in the United States. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) cares for about nine million veterans, while the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) pays disability benefits to about 4.7 million, education benefits to about 900,000, and home loan guarantees to about 600,000 veterans (according to 2018 numbers). Other Federal departments, such as the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Small Business Administration, also have veterans’ programs specified for particular groups and classifications of veterans. They pay for these benefits out of their departmental budgets, so VA’s $243 billion doesn’t actually equal the full amount designated for veterans in the Federal budget.

This issue of who qualifies, when, and for what Federal veterans services and benefits helps explain why, despite its growing size, the VA budget isn’t the only public money spent on veterans. Each of the 50 states also have their own separate state departments of veterans affairs, called DVAs, each with their own budget and programs for the veterans residing in their state. In 2019, the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University calculated that in addition to the $220 billion that the Federal government budgeted the states collectively spent about $3.3 billion on veterans. And as several reports from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have detailed, thousands of private organizations also provide funding and services to veterans every year.

There’s no question that there is a strong flow of government money for veterans. Is it enough money? Is it too much? Is it finally just right? The Goldilocks answer is unnervingly obscure. The VA doesn’t measure outcomes, and only sometimes outputs, rendering it difficult for anyone to know what the VA is doing well—or not well. The instinctive resistance to even superficial independent critiques that the legacy veterans’ organizations often voice, that the VA and even many veterans echo, further insulates the VA from serious accountability. A century-worth of this dynamic means that policy analysts and scholars pay little attention to veterans’ policy; that politicians use veterans-related legislation for purposes well beyond improving actual veterans’ lives; and that the public assumes Federal funding is shamefully neglectful of veterans.

But if there is a lack of serious, policy-backed challenges to the VA appropriations process and its many programs, and if funding is consistently increasing, what are all the VA budget controversies about?

The most recent slew of scandals—touched off by the Phoenix VA secret waitlist scandal and several veteran deaths in 2014—have focused the more intense VA budget fights on the administration of veterans’ health care. The issues have revolved around the question of how much money Congress should allocate to paying for (private) community care for veterans rather than—or in conjunction with—increasing funding for the VA’s internal, aging hospital system. This is a debate that has resonated nationwide. However, a little more time spent in the historical weeds shows that that’s not really because of a serious public demand for what’s best for veterans’ health (genuine as those demands may be). Rather, it’s resonated as a microcosm of the larger debate about the merits of private versus government-run health care, and about the size of government’s role in providing for the needs of each individual citizen.

Neither the 2018 VA Mission Act nor the original 2014 Veterans Choice Act, backlit by the Obamacare debates, actually initiated the present VA budget ruckus. The 1993 “Hillarycare” plan dredged up similar concerns, though from a slightly different angle: The Clinton plan for universalizing health insurance would have extended private insurance to half of veterans utilizing the VHA, meaning that the VHA would have faced the possibility of competing for and potentially “losing” these patients. This plan was actually leveraged as a way to save VHA, rather than see it shuttered in favor of a voucher system. At the time, VA was a poor caterer to either chronic or preventative health needs and had few primary care facilities, many of which were located too far away for many veterans to use. The VHA’s poor performance metrics, juxtaposed with its high cost, were well recognized and publicized, and made for a fair target for the newly elected Republican-controlled Congress in 1994, anxious to limit public expenditures.

But by the 1990s, VHA was also the nation’s largest trainer of health care professionals, providing at least some measure of financial support and clinical training to one-third of all medical residents in the United States. There were still substantial numbers of veterans in Congress, as well as many opportunities for constituent patronage across multiple sectors of society tied to the VA, such as the medical school partnership. Thus no one had stomach enough to gut the VHA. The threat did, however, prompt the Veterans Service Organizations to support the (truly groundbreaking) Clinton White House-backed VA reforms articulated by Kenneth Kizer in his 1995 plan, Vision for Change. The initial success of the Kizer reforms still resonates, prompting many even today to call VHA “the best care anywhere.”

Prior to the VA health care debates of the 1990s were the debates of the 1980s. These were partly responsible for President Reagan’s elevation of the VA to Cabinet status in 1988, as a counterbalancing measure emphasizing the public’s high valuation of veterans. And prior to those 1980s debates were some severely rancorous machinations of the post-Vietnam 1970s.

In 1973, Congress mandated the VA to contract with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to do an extensive study of the VA health care system. When NAS delivered its 300-plus page report to Congress in 1977, recommending the gradual integration of VA medical facilities with the private sector, VA’s feathers were intensely ruffled, despite its acknowledgment of the vast majority of the report’s 37 points. A handful of Congressmen, several of whom were themselves veterans, retaliated not just by publicly attacking the NAS study, but also by initiating an audit of its books by the General Accounting Office. The furor prompted more than one New England Journal of Medicine editorial about the futility of attacking patriotism-wrapped “sacred cows,” on the one hand, and about the report being full of policy “pabulum” and the NAS being a political meddler, on the other. That “the whole subject is so loaded with political emotion and vested interest that rational public discourse is hardly possible,” was a notable consensus—one that surely resonated beyond the pages of a single medical journal.

“In this political arena, it seems our arms are too short to box with God,” sighed Dr. Saul Farber, the lead NAS study author, in a postmortem editorial. What the NAS study and analytical attempts before and since have run into is politics, pure but not simple. It’s hard to find data on the VA, and harder still to find public policy analysts knowledgeable about it. Mere commentary has seemed the safer route, traditionally, and so from the safety of historical overviews, the occasional scholar will narrate the kerfuffles involving veterans’ and VA policy, to echo other authors’ opining that any rigorous analysis “trigger[s] a powerful, protective, conditioned reflex.”

Writing specifically about its health care system in her book Burdens of War, Jessica Adler offers some insight into why this is the case. She details how policymakers, veterans, caregivers, and advocacy organizations have continuously reimagined the U.S. veterans’ health system to reflect contemporaneous “ideals and apprehensions” about war, government, health care, and employment, ever since its formal inception after World War I. That is a heavy burden for the VA to shoulder, combining weighty notions of social justice with practical needs. At the same time, the VA is a proud creature of the legislative process. And because VA-delivered health care has a physical footprint, legislators and VA administrators, not to mention veterans’ advocates, have not hesitated to leverage the size, number, and location of VHA facilities as a means of projecting political and social power.

In 1965, for example, VA Administrator W. J. Driver knew that the shifting needs of the aging population of World War I veterans were not the same as those of the World War II veterans (nor of the remaining 3,000 Spanish-American War veterans) and that several medical facilities built in the 1920s couldn’t safely house patients and geographically no longer made sense. There were 168 VA hospitals then, treating 730,000 patients, 158 of which had research projects or partnerships involving more than 5,587 “investigators.” But in total, the inventory of VA-owned properties was 17,400. After extensive study, Driver proposed closing 11 hospital or domiciliary facilities as part of a total recommendation of 32 VA installation closures.

The outrage over these proposals was immediate. More than 75 Members of the House demanded to testify at a February 1965 hearing hosted by the Subcommittee on Hospitals of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, producing a published written record totaling more than 1,400 pages for “Part I” alone. Their overwhelming demand: The old hospitals must stay.

“[L]awmakers, veterans’ groups, and other interested citizens [are] angrily charging the VA with trying to do war heroes dirt and creating pockets of poverty at the same time,” wrote one individual in the New York Daily News in response. The author was conflicted though: “Anyone who knows anything about the operation of VA hospitals will agree that the legitimate heroes . . . are usually outnumbered by patients with ailments not even remotely service-connected.” The then-VFW commander in chief, John Jenkins, publicly wondered if veterans were to be the first victims in President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s newly declared War on Poverty. The pushback against VA Administrator Driver’s plan to close 32 properties was sufficiently powerful that he had to modify it, scaling it back.

In total, between 1950-1965, so intense was the opposing pressure that it appears VA successfully closed only 19 hospitals, even while it was offsetting those closures by building new ones. Most of the closed facilities had not been well suited to modern medicine, originally having been converted from schools or hotels, or had been designed for a specific type of medical care, such as treating tuberculosis. Partly because of VA’s research into tuberculosis, it successfully reduced the number of veteran tubercular patients from 17,000 in 1954 to 7,000 in 1964, reducing its need for those kinds of hospitals. Of the 11 VA hospitals Driver had proposed closing in 1965, five had been tuberculosis hospitals. But regardless of whether it was needed to treat veterans any longer or not, each of those physical buildings had created its own constituency, both in the local community and in the larger congressional district. Everyone understood that they were economic tools that could be leveraged politically. More than a decade later, President Carter found himself bowing to political pressure and reversing a decision not to award a VA hospital to Camden, New Jersey. He had originally argued that there were sufficient VA facilities in nearby Philadelphia. But Camden’s Mayor won out in 1978, in the process arguing that the hospital project would be “the cornerstone of a rebuilding program intended to restore the city’s economic viability,” the New York Times reported.

Is it the VA’s responsibility to be the economic cornerstone of any municipality? Given the intertwined opportunities and incentives that VA facilities and veterans benefits present for veterans and non-veterans alike, it’s not surprising that veterans’ policy and the VA budget should attract as many protectors as it does. Whether this dynamic is healthy, or actually beneficial to the veterans that public money is supposed to serve, is another question entirely.

It’s a question that the policy community and the American public should be asking, however, and one that Congress and the VA will be forced to reckon with alarmingly soon. Our national arguments about the role of government in financing and providing health care are hardly exhausted. Additionally, baked into the 2018 VA Mission Act is a mandated Asset and Infrastructure Review (AIR), tasked with compiling a list of facilities to “modernize or realign,” meaning to close down, consolidate, or be reconfigured. This is made necessary in part by the dramatically shrinking demographics of the veteran population, as World War II and Vietnam era veterans pass away, as much as by the sheer age and crumbling quality of many VA properties. It’s also vital because of the VA’s need to align its funding with the needs of actual veterans.

But the not-so-distant past is already prologue: Already, several U.S. Senators have called on the VA to “do what’s right for veterans,” and to abolish the AIR review.

The post The Other Third Rail in American Politics appeared first on The American Interest.

Will a Computer Replace Your Doctor?

Several years ago, I had a patient with a full stomach lose consciousness while under spinal anesthesia. Had the anesthetic spread to the patient’s brain, or had she just fallen deeply asleep, I wondered? If the patient was asleep, I could just let her sleep. But if the anesthetic had climbed toward her brain, she might have lost her cough reflex, which risked exposing her lungs to any food that might slip from her stomach into her windpipe. She would need a breathing tube to protect her airway. But she had a funny airway. Placing the tube would be difficult, and the struggle to do so might cause her to vomit and aspirate.

The BIS monitor that measures brainwaves to distinguish between natural sleep and general anesthesia read “borderline.” I carefully studied my patient’s face. Natural sleep often conveys an image of peace, while an anesthetic-induced sleep conveys an image of fear. In the latter, the cheeks are pale; the veins at the temples stick out repugnantly; the hair is busy and hectic, and dank with sweat; the nose is snotty, as if the owner were too harried to wipe it. When watching someone in real sleep, one has a sense of life reviving, that a tired spirit is putting forth fresh shoots. A person in an anesthetized sleep usually gives off an aura of despair. The difference is subtle, and yet I sensed my patient was naturally asleep. I decided to leave her be. It proved to be the right decision.

An artificially intelligent (AI) system might have decided otherwise, based on the patient’s gross appearance, BIS number, and aspiration risk. It might have tried to insert a breathing tube, causing the patient to vomit—and die. True, AI’s judgment may improve in the future. Many researchers think it will one day surpass natural intelligence, which would make my judgment as a doctor obsolete. At the 2006 “AI at Fifty” conference, 41 percent of attendees expected this to happen sometime after 2056. In a 2013 survey of the 100 most-cited authors in AI, respondents expected machines to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” around 2070. Only a small fraction of the survey’s respondents thought this would never happen.

But such optimism is a source of danger, as it builds up organizational bias toward replacing human professionals with AI. Such an event is already highly anticipated. In medicine, AI’s ability to analyze images threatens to push radiologists aside. In law, AI-judges in China already decide legal cases. In aviation, engineers expect ground-based AI to fly passenger planes. All professionals, no matter what their field, seem vulnerable to AI, while for AI enthusiasts, the belief in what AI might become is exciting, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious perfection. Business is also excited, since AI costs less than human personnel.

Yet the promise of AI is false. While AI is very useful, it will never provide a complete substitute for a professional’s natural intelligence. We are rushing headlong toward a luminous image of AI perfection, acquiescing in the possible mass replacement of professionals with AI, and risking people’s lives in the process.

Here follows a second anesthesia case to illustrate some of AI’s permanent limits—my effort to give pause to those who would lead us toward disaster.

Just a Regular Day in the Operating Room

My patient was a 65-year-old man going for an upper endoscopy and colonoscopy. Despite having a history of vascular disease, he was in good spirits and kept cracking jokes during the pre-op interview. At one point he said he had swallowed a quarter and that we could keep it if we found it during the operation. When I asked the gastroenterologist what this was all about, he rolled his eyes and told me to ignore the patient’s humor, as apparently the patient was always pushing gags of one kind or another.

Privately, I had another concern—about the gastroenterologist. I had seen him the day before combing through the empty brown boxes that sat as garbage in the hall. When doctors at my hospital left their spouses, they often came looking for these boxes to put their stuff in—hence, this area of the hospital was called the “marriage graveyard.” I had watched him inspect the boxes with bleary eyes and hunched shoulders, then pick up two boxes as though they were very heavy and leave with his head drooping.

We brought the patient into the operating room. I injected the drug Propofol into his intravenous. Before he fell asleep he reminded me to look for that quarter. I noticed his fingers were a little blue, most likely from vascular disease, or from cold.

At this point, perfect AI would face the same limitations I did. All information about patients comes through the five senses. Perfect AI would gather patient information in the same way—since human beings would build its sensors. During the 1990s, researchers decided that for AI to improve it needed to go beyond information processing and interact with the real world. AI had to be “embodied,” they said. Yet being embodied means obtaining real world information through a body’s five senses—same as for people.

Having analogs to these five senses does not keep perfect AI from “seeing” the world differently from how people do. Although first-generation AI visual systems arguably “saw” the world as we do, with precise borders between objects, new machine learning algorithms “see” the world as cloudy and vague. Images generated by advanced machine learning algorithms look quite peculiar. AI enthusiasts praise this digital activity as an example of AI transcending the limited categories of human thought.

Yet AI enthusiasts risk crossing over into the occult when they presume AI “sees” actual reality while humans see only a poor copy. For it implies that something more fundamental exists beyond what people can sense. Such thinking recalls that of 17th-century scholars who believed in an underlying substance called “matter” or “aether,” existing in the universe independent of the senses and pushing the planets around.

Eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley is useful in showing us the error in this. Nothing exists if it cannot be perceived through the senses, or through machines that magnify the range of the senses, he argued. A chair exists because it is seen and felt, and not because it is seen and felt and existing. To be seen and felt is the definition of existence. The imagination can play with the chair’s image and create new ones, but that is imagined perception and not images of something that exists beyond the senses, said Berkeley. To think otherwise is to dabble in the occult.

One would assume AI engineers would know that any new AI image generated through a machine is nothing more than an extension of a human being’s senses. But then the philosophers get involved. With their inflated rhetoric they get people to imagine the possibility of transcending the realm of sense. For example, University of Toronto philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, in his The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, writes:

AI systems need to be able to deal with reality as it actually is, [his italics] not with the way that we think it is—not with the way that our thoughts or language represent it as being. And our growing experience with constructing synthetic systems and deploying them in the world gives us every reason to suppose that “beneath the level of the concepts”—beneath the level of the objects and properties that the conceptual representations represent—the world itself is permeated by arbitrarily much more thickly integrative connective detail.

AI enthusiasts imagine that AI will one day “see” a more fundamental reality beyond what a person can see. They describe this reality with complex phrases—for example, “a vastly rich and likely ineffable web of statistical relatedness,” or “a plenum of surpassingly rich differentiation.” But these phrases serve the same purpose as those of 17th-century scholars who argued for the existence of a mysterious substance occupying all space, and called it “we know not what.” They try to make the unperceivable seem perceivable.

When perfect AI “sees” a patient in the operating room, it “sees” the patient as doctors see the patient. It “sees” all the patient’s colors, contours, and shapes that a doctor sees, and even a few more if it can penetrate cracks and crevices with a built-in microscope. Once AI passively receives the patient image it can break down that image into small lines and pixels, or create blobs to substitute for definite shapes, analogous to what a doctor’s natural intelligence can do with his or her imagination. But like a doctor, AI will never “see” something that doesn’t exist.

Back to my case. My patient’s airway obstructed whenever I deepened the anesthetic, causing his oxygen level to fall. To complicate matters, the oxygen monitor sometimes failed to register, as the man’s blood vessels were too diseased to send a continuous signal. When I finally got a signal, it read a normal “98.” I decided to inject just enough Propofol every few minutes to keep the man lightly anesthetized. Yet this also led him to open his eyes and move around at times. When the nurse dimmed the lights and the gastroenterologist put the scope in the man’s mouth, the man shook his head from side to side, frustrating the doctor. I could tell that the doctor was in a bad mood, the way he growled and muttered, “Damnit!” His facial expression reminded me of how my father used to look when he fought with my mother.

The man sputtered and gagged as the doctor pushed the scope further in—roughly. With my oxygen monitor on the blink once again, I stared at the man’s fingers in the dark. They seemed bluer than before. I sensed something was wrong. I told the doctor to remove the scope so I could give the man extra oxygen. “Come on!” the doctor cried impatiently. “He’s fine.” I repeated my demand, this time more firmly. The doctor grudgingly removed the scope while the nurse turned the lights back on.

I gave the man extra oxygen while waiting for the monitor to start working again. Two minutes later it flashed “90,” or the lowest level of normal. I looked at the man’s fingers. They had the same degree of blueness as when I had stopped the case, but somehow the color was less anxiety provoking—probably because now I could associate it with a normal number. Since an oxygen level of 90 can’t cause cyanosis, and since the bluishness had not really changed, I must have misread the color earlier and imagined more blue. That doesn’t mean the patient’s oxygen level had not dropped earlier. It had. Just not enough to cause cyanosis.

AI enthusiasts might argue that I had made a mistake that perfect AI would not have made. I had seen illusory data—deeply blue fingers. But AI enthusiasts also err here. “Seeing” wrongly does not mean creating illusory data, since seeing cannot create what does not exist. At the same time, seeing involves more than just a camera action, just as hearing involves more than just an audio action. It involves unconsciously expecting, remembering, interpreting, selecting, and understanding. The man’s finger color was a simple sensation, an abstraction from experience, which my mind then integrated into my lived experience. I knew the oxygen monitor was on the blink, which alarmed me. I knew the room’s darkness obscured my view of the patient. I sensed the gastroenterologist was thinking more about his failed marriage than the patient. I knew the patient had serious vascular disease. In my hypersensitive state I misread his blue fingers. I was wrong. Yet I saw what I saw. As Berkeley said, there are no illusory data; there are only true data taken in the wrong way.

I am not a camera. I am not a dead thing. I am a living, seeing, minding, imagining thing, in which sensory and psychological factors mix and become inseparable parts of a whole. This is what caused me to see wrongly. Yet my imagined perception was real to my mind. And it made a difference.

For what would perfect AI have done? First-generation AI was just a camera. It was a dead thing. Today’s AI is more than a camera, as it tracks correlations and makes predictions “underneath” the clear and precise images that people see. But it is still a dead thing. It has all the limitations that people have, for it “sees” only physical reality, yet it lacks the living mind to interpret that reality through emotion and imagination. When my patient sputtered and gagged, AI would have remained silent, for at that moment the oxygen monitor was on the blink, without a flashing number to alarm anyone. AI can be programmed to halt all cases in which an oxygen monitor misfires, but given the man’s bad blood vessels, his case would then be permanently halted, introducing a new risk.

Therefore, AI would let the case continue, as there was no other information about the patient’s oxygen level for AI to “see” besides the sputtering and gagging, which were more intense than usual, but not totally out of the ordinary for these kinds of procedures. The carbon dioxide monitor also suggested that the patient was still taking breaths. Meanwhile, AI’s camera would have correctly judged the man’s finger color to be unchanged. When correlating that color with the last known oxygen level— 98—AI would have experienced no sense of urgency to stop the case. As for the gastroenterologist’s bad mood, which added to my sense of urgency, it would have been too complex for AI to grasp.

This means perfect AI would never have responded as I had. It would have waited for the oxygen monitor to start up before sounding the alarm. Nor would perfect AI have exhibited my anxiety-induced pluck and pushed back against the gastroenterologist when he resisted removing the scope.

AI’s delay in stopping the procedure would have caused the patient’s oxygen level to fall even further. For it did fall. Even after giving the man oxygen for two minutes it only rose to 90—from what level I do not know. By the time perfect AI got involved it might have been too late. With his vascular disease, the man could have suffered a heart attack—and died.

The Quarter Appears

We flipped the patient onto his side to begin the colonoscopy. “What’s this?” I heard the gastroenterologist ask. I peered over the patient’s bottom and saw two dimes and a nickel stuck inside the crack between his butt cheeks. Now I got the patient’s joke. You put a quarter in the mouth; the body makes change; you get two dimes and a nickel out of the anus. Ha-ha. Very funny.

The gastroenterologist inserted the scope. To help him navigate the colon, he asked me to shift the patient’s position and for the nurse to press on the abdomen. In the process the blankets bunched up around the patient. Five minutes later, the patient’s heart rate and blood pressure increased. Half awake, he twitched his upper lip, which I interpreted to be a slight wince. I thought he might be in pain, so I told the nurse to stop pressing and for the doctor to stop advancing the scope. They complied, but the patient’s heart rate and blood pressure remained elevated. With the obvious reasons for pain eliminated, I entertained other diagnostic possibilities, such as fever or a heart attack, but then I saw the patient twitch his upper lip again, and an idea came to me.

“Where are the coins?” I asked.

We looked around and found the two dimes hidden in one of the blankets, but we couldn’t find the nickel. Eventually we did. The patient was lying on it, with the nickel propped up on its edge by a blanket, gouging his hip. The nurse plucked out the nickel and the patient’s heart rate and blood pressure returned to normal.

I had performed in a way that perfect AI could never have, because unlike AI, I am a living being who knows pain. Although both artificial intelligence and natural intelligence can passively perceive a nickel, pain is an active experience, as Berkeley observed. Take, for example, strong heat, which the mind senses through touch. Heat is not pain. It can be contemplated at a distance with indifference. Awareness of a hot flame and the air around it, and even the awareness of a burnt hand hovering over a flame, can be perceived without the mind doing anything more than receive information. Pain, on the other hand, is actively experienced in the mind. When one goes from heat to pain, one goes from passive to active, and from lifeless to life.

Because perfect AI is not a living thing, it cannot know pain. It can only passively perceive the physical evidence of pain through its sensors. For this reason it lacks a doctor’s sympathetic intelligence and intense vigilance in policing pain. Having felt pain myself and correlated thousands of facial twitches with the pain experience, my imagination refused to let go the possibility that the patient might be in pain, which led me to think about the coins.

Perfect AI would never have persisted in this line of action. Its data bank would have no history of a patient lying on a coin during a colonoscopy as a cause of pain. It would not have even known about the coins, since no one in the operating room had spoken about them, other than to say, “What’s this?” Since a blanket hid the coins, AI’s sensors would not have seen them, unless it routinely X-rayed all blankets for metal objects, which it would not do, since that would expose patients to unnecessary radiation. From my side of the room, the AI camera would have seen the patient’s upper lip twitch, but whether AI would have associated that twitch with pain, absent an obvious pain source, is unknown. Most plausibly, AI would have moved on to other diagnostic algorithms and treated the patient with a heart rate drug, which carries risk, more Propofol, with each additional dose causing more airway obstruction, or a narcotic to cover for general pain—while leaving the nickel pressing into the patient’s side.

The case dragged on for another 40 minutes while the gastroenterologist struggled. The patient’s heart rate and blood pressure rose again, suggesting he was in pain from all the pushing inside his intestines. At this point perfect AI might again have injected more Propofol and thus possibly caused more airway obstruction. I studied the patient’s face and reached a different conclusion.

In pain, time seems longer than it does in pleasure. Because time’s duration feels longer, its existence is longer. This is why the measure of time differs from person to person, and in the same person from moment to moment. I know this because of my experience as an anesthesiologist, but also because I am a person with a mind. Although perfect AI can chart time, it cannot perceive time as we do, as a series of sensations or a succession of ideas.

When my patient thrust his leg straight out in frustration, I suddenly recognized what was going on. He was in pain because he perceived time to be too long. He had grown sick and tired of lying on the gurney. The feeling had made him anxious—a kind of pain—which made time seem that much longer, making him even more anxious, thereby trapping him in a bad spiral. His increased heart rate and blood pressure had nothing to do with physical pain. I sensed this in the way he rolled his eyes and sighed heavily, for I, too, have experienced the perception of time gone on for too long. Rather than give the patient more Propofol, I gave him a drug that treated only his anxiety while leaving his airway intact. AI could never have made this subtle calculation, for AI cannot imagine time the way a person can.

A permanent defect thus haunts AI’s evaluation of all inner human experiences, including pain, time, unhappiness, and the feeling of warmth or cold. Again, Berkeley is useful here.

Berkeley found an error in Sir Isaac Newton’s physics. Newton had envisioned the concept of absolute motion in absolute space, which is inconceivable, Berkeley said. All motion is relative. Because a reference point must exist from which to measure a moving body’s direction and speed, no motion can be determined in a body that exists alone in absolute space. Without a reference point, a body moving a thousand miles an hour would seem no different from a body standing still. At the very least, a person must be watching the moving body, for how else would the body’s movement be perceived, Berkeley asked? The perceiver himself becomes the reference point, with the distance between the perceiver and the moving body measurable. Motion without a reference point is “the purest idea of nothing,” Berkeley said.

This is why AI motion detectors must judge motion according to a reference point. Many AI machines, for example, take pictures every second and infer motion from an object’s change of position in sequential images. Somehow there must be a reference point.

But inner feelings have no reference point—other than the mind that perceives them. Although temperature can be measured, the feeling of warmth or cold—a valuable symptom in medicine—depends on the mind perceiving it. And it is a complicated feeling. The feeling of cold, for example, is largely a surface, or skin, feeling. When our skin is kept warm but our inner body temperature is cooled with intravenous fluids, we still feel warm. In one study, an anesthesiologist lying on a warm mattress pushed cold fluid into his veins. His teeth began to chatter ferociously, and yet he didn’t feel cold. When I asked him what he felt, he said he wasn’t sure. It just felt “very weird,” he observed.

Our feelings, like motion, are always relative. Just as motion must have an “up” or “down,” a “left” or “right,” so must feeling have a “more” or “less.” There is no absolute state of feeling that can exist alone without reference to something. Even people who feel “just right” feel according to some scale of “more” and “less.” Since AI is not a mind, it cannot grade an inner feeling, even with a leap of empathy, for it has no empathy, as it has no mind. The ability to estimate people’s inner feelings will forever remain a blind spot for AI.

The Pink Mouse

The patient woke up after the operation. As we exited the room the patient drunkenly said, “What’s that funny pink mouse running around over there?” I paused for a moment. “Come on, let’s get going,” demanded the gastroenterologist. I looked around for a pink mouse. As I expected I didn’t see one. “It’s just another one of his stupid jokes,” insisted the gastroenterologist.

But I was suspicious. I once had a patient in obstetrics suffer a major blood pressure drop from an epidural. The first hint of a problem came when she asked me, “Can I have my red hat?” She had no hat, let alone a red one. A rapid drop in blood pressure can make some people dotty and hallucinate.

I decided we had to go back into the operating room and take the patient’s blood pressure. The gastroenterologist protested, but the blood pressure proved to be dangerously low, probably from a mixture of residual Propofol and a vascular system unusually sensitive to postural change. I treated it with medication and restarted our trek to the recovery room.

AI would never have caught this low blood pressure so quickly. It would have let the patient continue on to the recovery room, which would have exposed the patient to several more minutes of low blood pressure—another heart attack risk. Again, Berkeley helps to explain why.

According to Berkeley, when we imagine things, we use data gathered from our senses as building blocks. Even when patients hallucinate, they hallucinate using real sensory data they have gleaned from life. For example, pink things and the figure of a mouse are both perceivable in real life. Our minds work with these perceivable images to create new perceivable images—such as a pink mouse. Our minds cannot work with unperceivable material.

Curiously, contemporary neuroscience’s “cognitive binding” theory violates this rule. According to the theory, the eyes take in color, motion, and shape, while the brain supposedly binds these data to produce a unified image. The theory assumes the data are separable and in need of being bound. But they cannot be, as Berkeley observed. Color, motion, and shape are never separable; they can never be perceived individually, on their own. My patient’s brain did not combine the color pink and the shape of a mouse to see a pink mouse. He saw a pink mouse from the outset. The color pink can never exist without a shape, and the shape of a mouse can never exist apart from a color. As for motion, something cannot be judged moving fast without being a “something” in the first place. And to be a “something” it must have a shape and a color. The brain does not bind motion, color, and shape in preparation for serving them up to the mind as a single image. The mind sees the image whole.

Some neuroscientists claim that as consciousness fades, cognitive binding weakens and then disappears. Does this mean that as my patient fell back to sleep, his image of the fast, pink mouse began to break up into its components of fastness, pinkness, and mousiness? The whole notion is ridiculous, Berkeley would argue.

AI has assimilated this flawed theory. AI audio processing uses a variety of architectural models to represent sound—for example, spectrogram representations that convert sounds into visual spikes. Let’s say perfect AI heard my patient speak of seeing a fast, pink mouse. It would reduce the patient’s phrase to three words, which would then be broken down into three sets of spikes, representing the word “fast,” the word “pink,” and the word “mouse.” In adopting this method, AI assimilates neuroscience’s erroneous belief that visual images can be broken down into unperceivable building blocks—that fastness, pinkness, and mousiness can exist separately, and can be perceived separately.

In my case, perfect AI might first look with its camera for a fast, pink mouse in the operating room and not find one—although fast, pink mice do exist, in theory. (I have seen a mouse running around in an operating room, and baby mice occasionally do look pink.) AI would take no action. It would then erroneously think of fastness, pinkness, and mousiness as separate phenomena. It would conclude that these are all reasonable abstractions, at least when described linguistically, that are capable of being perceived separately. It would miss the irrationality in the totality of the image the patient claims to perceive. It would miss the fact that the patient is hallucinating. Again, AI would take no action.

As for AI correlating the patient’s speech with other risk factors, such as the residual Propofol in his system and his sensitive vasculature, this would also be impossible—for they are not risk factors. All patients after receiving Propofol have residual Propofol, and the fraction of people who drop their blood pressure post-operatively while lying on a gurney as a result is too small to make it a special risk factor. AI would have no reason to think this particular patient was different from every other patient moved to the recovery room on a gurney without event. As for the patient’s sensitive vasculature, only rarely is residual Propofol sufficient cause to drop blood pressure in this situation. Even patients with vascular disease, after receiving Propofol, are typically moved to the recovery room without any problem. There is no reason why AI would calculate in advance that my patient was at risk for a blood pressure drop. With no reason to suspect anything unusual, and unable to grasp the patient’s hallucination as a tip-off, AI would never have any reason to stop the patient from continuing on toward the recovery room—with dangerously low blood pressure.

The Limits of AI

An Indian philosopher once said that the world is supported by an elephant, the elephant by a tortoise, and the tortoise by…he knew not what. Something similar can be said about perfect AI. AI enthusiasts see artificial intelligence as a new kind of world. They imagine it surpassing humanity and becoming a creation on par with heaven itself. But they overlook the incoherent leaps in logic and humdrum inconsistencies that characterize perfect AI’s intellectual supports. Their AI heaven is held up by an elephant, then by a tortoise, and then, one realizes, by nothing at all.

How did things get so far? How did we allow ourselves to believe in the inconceivable fantasy of perfect AI? Again, Berkeley may have an answer.

The philosopher John Locke once imagined a triangle that was neither oblique nor equilateral nor scalene, but all of these and none of these at once. Berkeley, who was Locke’s contemporary, declared that such a triangle has never existed and can never exist. By abstracting from real triangles, Locke had created a ludicrous concept. The foolishness is not in the abstracting, which we do all the time, Berkeley said, but in continually abstracting to create abstract general ideas disconnected from any particulars of existence. Then we give those ideas names, which convince us that the ideas exist.

Locke’s triangle, absolute motion, and “aether” were misleading abstract general ideas in Berkeley’s time. We have misleading abstract general ideas in our own time.

For example, in my field of anesthesiology the peculiar mental effect caused by the drug Ketamine is called “dissociative anesthesia.” The fact that anesthesiologists give the drug effect a name suggests they have an idea of how the drug works. In fact, they have no idea. Labeling the phenomenon accomplishes nothing. When asked about Ketamine, many anesthesiologists reflexively parrot the phrase “dissociative anesthesia” to sound smart, but besides that phrase they know little more than a layperson does about how the drug actually works.

In consciousness studies, by using their powers of abstraction, some neuroscientists imagine “microtubules” and “entangled states” as the basis for consciousness. Because they evoke no precise image and yet have a name, these abstractions seem real. But they are not real. Other neuroscience philosophers abstract consciousness from our lived experience and imagine it to be a property of both animate and inanimate objects. They say tables and chairs have consciousness. Again, this is ridiculous.

Our bad habit of creating abstract general ideas has crept into the field of intelligence. To enlarge the compass of our minds, we have abstracted the idea of intelligence from the particular human activities that demonstrate intelligence and named it “intelligence.” Then we have applied the idea to machines, analogous to how some philosophers today apply the idea of “consciousness” to inanimate objects. We have created the phrase “AI.” And now we are being led on a futile chase for “perfect AI,” something will o’ the wisp, something just round the corner, over the hill, something we know not what.

That so many fields today are involved in the chase for perfect AI, including robotics, engineering, philosophy, adaptive systems, neuroinformatics, and bio-inspired systems, to name just a few, suggests that perfect AI is a credible goal, and that through collaboration we are closing in on its secret. In fact, it is just the opposite. By studying AI from so many different sides, researchers imagine one day seeing AI from all sides, and even from its interior. But every subject has as many sides as there are radii in a sphere; that is to say, they are innumerable. Thus it is impossible to study a subject from all sides. Therefore, we typically establish an order of succession, decide which sides are most important, and create fields out of each. For example, instead of all scientists studying the universe, physicists study light, chemists study gases and liquids, and geologists study rocks, with only the slightest crossover. That so many fields study AI is a testament to the fact that researchers cannot establish an order of succession in AI, and they cannot establish one because they cannot understand AI. AI is an abstract general idea. That AI cannot be confined to a specific field or to a few fields suggests weakness, not strength.

The products of AI research will continue to prove immensely useful. They will make our lives easier and safer. I applaud their coming. But the search for perfect AI is a futile activity that belongs, at most, in a center for theoretical knowledge—for there, no one gets hurt. In contrast, professionals must deal with real life, where people and nature are unpredictable, where machines go on the blink, where abstract general ideas are meaningless, and where a client’s well-being, even life, is at stake. The world of the professional is the world of the particular and the singular, not the world of the universal and the general. This is why AI is destined to remain a useful adjunct to a human professional, but a dangerous substitute for a human professional.

Steven Frank, MD, et al. “Relative Contribution of Core and Cutaneous Temperatures to Thermal Comfort and Autonomic Responses in Humans,” Journal of Applied Physiology, Vol. 86, Issue 5, May 1, 1999. Also conversation with the author.

For interviews with such neuroscientists, see John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind (The Free Press, 2000), chapter 1.

The post Will a Computer Replace Your Doctor? appeared first on The American Interest.

Ladan Boroumand: “The Shah Was Never as Hated as the Supreme Leader Is”

Ladan Boroumand, an historian by training, has spent the better part of her career in exile, promoting the cause of human rights in her native Iran. Inspired by the legacy of her father, a lawyer and democratic activist killed by agents of the regime, Ladan and her sister Roya launched the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center to catalog the many crimes and repressions of the Islamic Republic. TAI editor-in-chief Jeffrey Gedmin and associate editor Sean Keeley recently sat down with Ladan to discuss her views on changing social trends within Iran, and why she believes the regime is facing a fundamental test of legitimacy. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Keeley for TAI: Tell us about your organization, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. What is its mission? What are the main projects you’re engaged in?

Ladan Boroumand: The Center was founded in 2001 in memory of my father, Abdorrahman Boroumand, who was a pro-democracy activist and a lawyer assassinated in Paris in 1991 by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran. When there is no state seeking justice for a murder, the children feel obligated to seek justice one way or another. For my sister and me, that meant finding a peaceful way of pursuing his goals, which were the implementation of human rights, justice, the rule of law, and democracy in Iran. We created an online memorial in which every single victim of the Islamic Republic’s story would be documented and the universal human rights that had been violated in each case would be singled out, in both Farsi and English.

This is an ongoing project, obviously. We have nearly 25,000 cases. Many thousands have not been processed because we are a tiny organization, and the government has a 40-year history of crimes. But we also provide the victim’s family with a truth-telling platform, so that the victims do not feel completely helpless. They can at least fight back by providing a counter narrative about the story of their loved one. It’s a way of transforming a passive victim into an active agent of history.

We also run an online library. We have translated countless human rights documents, international human rights laws, democracy texts, even works like Vaclav Havel’s Power of the Powerless. We think these are important for Iranians to know and understand in order to build up a democratic political culture.

Jeff Gedmin for TAI: You’re not able to travel to Iran. How do you collect and verify the information you present?

LB: Well, we founded the center during the digital revolution. We realized that with cyberspace, our isolation from Iran could, in a way, be overcome. My sister and I, Roya, are historians by training. Our sources are, first, the government itself. For the first decades of the revolution, the authorities were not ashamed of announcing their victims in order to intimidate and terrorize the society.

And then we have a secure online form, through which families can send us information from inside Iran. Since we have a huge exile community, many of whom were either witnesses or relatives of people who have been killed, we have been reaching out and interviewing them too. Other human rights organizations—the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch—are also part of our sources.

TAI: You recently wrote an article in the Journal of Democracy, “Iranians Turn Away from the Islamic Republic,” which argues that the regime is losing legitimacy not just among the general populace, but even among many clerics. You write that there’s a high-level disagreement about the regime’s founding principle: “Most grand Ayatollahs have never accepted Khomeini’s absolutization of guardianship and still refuse to this day to accede to his claim that clerical authority extends to matters of political rule.” Can you explain this for us? And if these debates aren’t new, what makes us think that divisions are coming to a head right now?

LB: First of all, the principal cornerstone of the Islamic Republic of Iran is this principle of velayat-e faqih, the (supreme) guardianship of the Islamic jurisprudent. The implicit idea here is that God designates delegates who have absolute power over the whole community. Every other power emanates from this original source.

Khomeini’s absolutist interpretation of this principle was a perversion of a power that in Shi‘i tradition was given to the Islamic jurist for an orphan who had lost his parents or for a mentally handicapped person who didn’t have a guardian. It was really a civic power; it had nothing to do with politics. In the history of Iran’s religious establishment, we had different Ayatollahs who were independent from each other. Each one’s power was dependent on his financial resources and the number of followers he could amass, and we were free to choose the Ayatollah whom we followed. Each one had his own way of confronting modernity. Some of the clergy accepted democratic principles of representation as just and therefore religiously legitimate. That is how our first step towards constitutional monarchy was undertaken with the support of part of the clergy.

What is new right now is that the population is turning away from Islam. They are converting to other religions or are becoming completely agnostic, atheist, anti-religion. I’m working on finding reliable statistics, but there is a strong reaction against the state’s official religion and sharia law. Aware of this massive loss of believers, younger, university-educated clerics have started to question the epistemological underpinnings of the sharia injunctions, which they themselves consider to be indefensible. They have reached the conclusion that all of these sharia traditions compiled over the centuries are not necessarily or essentially Islamic. They were products of the people and worldviews that prevailed at the time of their compilation. According to these reformist clerics, the sharia is based on an obsolete Ptolemaic worldview; they say it has nothing to do with Islam.

In a nutshell, they are saying that even the prophet’s ruling his own community is not part of his prophetic mission. It belongs to political history. This is really new, and seems to have a great appeal in the younger generation of clerics inside the country.

TAI: Two presidential candidates from 2009—one a cleric, Mehdi Karroubi; the other a reformist politician, Mir-Hossein Mousavi—have now been under house arrest since 2011. In November, Mousavi likened Iran’s Supreme Leader to the Shah in the waning days of his rule. Can you tell us about these two individuals—what is their role and how are they seen? And when you hear Mousavi say that today looks like the Shah’s final days, is that accurate or just wishful thinking?

LB: There are several points to this question. The Supreme Leader starting to look like the Shah through loss of legitimacy—that much is true, although I would say the Shah was never as hated as the Supreme Leader is, except for his last few months in power and under the pressure of revolutionary propaganda. I think Mousavi sees what we all see, that the regime is clinging to power through pure terror. Then again, it could be wishful thinking to think the regime would give way, because Khamenei has learned his lesson from watching the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square, and the Shah giving in to the demonstrators. They have been discussing and meditating on these experiences for years.

We saw that in November, when people rose up against rising gas prices. In three days, the authorities shut down the internet and probably killed 1,500 people. Without warning, they implemented a policy of shoot to kill. This is a government that does not want to negotiate with civil society. Now, how long can they do that and keep paying off their mercenaries under such strong economic pressure? This is another question, and here we may allow ourselves a bit of wishful thinking.

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(Photo by Danielle Desjardins)

TAI: Help us understand the various ideological opponents of the regime. Your article discusses Shi‘i reformism—represented by figures like Abdolkarim Soroush and Moshen Kadivar, among others—as well as religious minorities like Sufi mysticism, Baha‘i, even a growing Christian population. What are the numbers of these movements, and can you envision a future pluralistic Iran where they can coexist peacefully?

LB: Yes. This is part of a tectonic cultural change that many policymakers don’t take into consideration. Let’s start with the newest phenomenon, which is conversion to Christianity. It’s important to remember that before the revolution in 1979, we had Anglican churches and Catholic churches. I myself went to a French Catholic school. They were obviously not free to proselytize, but they could whisper the message. In 1979, there were about 500 known Muslim converts to Christianity in Iran.

Now, it’s difficult to count them, because these are house churches and it’s completely clandestine, but it’s been estimated that there are a minimum of 100,000 and maybe up to 800,000 Christians in Iran. This shows that people are looking for a different spiritual message. Christianity comes with a message of love, peace, and tolerance, and of course Christ is a venerated prophet within the Quran. It’s not completely alien to Iranians, and the Evangelical churches that are promoting Christianity are very intelligent in how they try to integrate into the cultural background of the new converts.

Mysticism has always been a social reaction against bigotry and the sharia power of the clergy. After the first decade of the Islamic Republic, many of Khomeini’s enthusiastic young followers slowly became disillusioned and started to turn toward mystical schools. Mystics have always rejected sharia law as unimportant, and insisted on a message of love and unity. The intelligence officials are very worried about them because there are up to 14,000,000 people who have mystical tendencies, whether by choice or by tradition, as in Kurdistan and Baluchistan. If they had the capacity to organize, it would become a very important political force.

During the 2009 elections, actually, up to 4,000,000 followers of the Gonabadi Dervishes [Iranian Sufi Muslims – ed.] voted for Karroubi, because he was a cleric who had defended the rights of Baha‘is to live in peace and the right of Gonabadi mystics to worship the way they want. The regime’s officials were really angry at the Dervishes, because they had massively voted for this gentleman and also promoted the complete separation of religion and state.

Imagine those people, who are at least several million, and then imagine all the Sunnis that are not sympathetic to Shi‘a rule. Now imagine the Christians, between 100,000 and 800,000 of them, but imagine a moment where there is more freedom for Christians to proselytize—I think that those numbers could go much, much higher. Now imagine these new religious radical reformers who are saying sharia belongs to the history of Islam, that human rights and liberal democracy are the fairest mode of political organization. Imagine all of this together, and you can really envision an Iran with much more vibrant and religiously pluralistic society.

TAI: Apart from the question of religious minorities, there are also many ethnic minorities within Iran. The Azeri minority is almost a quarter of the population, and you also mentioned Baluchis and Kurds. Can you give us an overview of these groups and their grievances?

LB: Well, Iranian Azerbaijan remains a very important region of Iran. [Iranian Azerbaijan is a group of three provinces in northwestern Iran, not to be confused with the bordering Republic of Azerbaijan– ed.]  Its name is Persian. Azer means fire and Azerbaijan means “Protected by the Holy Fire” or “Land of the Holy Fire.” Several waves of Turkic tribes came to Iran, so many Iranians in the Azeri provinces speak Turkish. Obviously, with the transformation of Iran’s tribal monarchy into a modern nation-state in the early 20th century, Farsi was imposed upon the whole country as Iran’s national language and other languages and dialects were suppressed. This is the Azeris’ main grievance, that the Turkish language is eliminated and suppressed. Otherwise, they are oppressed as much as the Farsi-speaking population.

The Kurdish are a different story, because they are Sunni and because both Azerbaijan and Kurdistan were the site of separatist games played by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. [The Soviets backed two short-lived puppet states, the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad and the Azerbaijan People’s Government, in 1945-1946 –ed.] This background and historical propaganda makes many of them inclined to autonomy or separation. Regional grievances will be a major political challenge if we have the opportunity to build a democracy.

I’m really worried about that problem, because as Islamic legitimacy is fading away, nationalist values are taking root in Iran. There is a strain of nationalism that is extremely violent and doesn’t even want to allow a peaceful debate about this issue. For now, the Kurds and Azeris just want more regional autonomy, which in my opinion should be seriously discussed. We need to find intelligent and peaceful ways to keep these people, and we need to keep in mind that Russia, Turkey, and probably Saudi Arabia are preying on these discontents in their own strategic games with Iran.

TAI: Given all of these factors, then, what are some likely outcomes if the Iranian regime were to collapse? What scenarios seem plausible to you? One imagines that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and intelligence services, however despised by the population, would not go gently.

LB: Basically, the problem is the transition. The Revolutionary Guard are Iranian citizens and they are paid. Many of them try to join the Basij [a paramilitary group and one of the five forces of the IRGC –ed.] in order to gain privileges or make ends meet. To have a successful transition, we need first to have the opposition coalesce around a platform that is acceptable to all. For now there is still lots of distrust among them. We even have neo-monarchists now, because the population is comparing what the Pahlavis did for Iran with the way that the Islamic regime has destroyed the country.

Our strength, though, is that we have an organized civil society that is pro-human rights, pro-democracy, vibrant, and innovative. But the regime is trying to keep these people apart from each other, in prison, and under tremendous pressure. The diaspora has a role to play here. The worse it gets, the more opportunities we will have to appeal for people to quit the regime. But for that we need to offer them a viable alternative and a strong leadership of the opposition. We haven’t seen that yet.

TAI: What role, if any, can the United States play to support democracy in Iran? And how do you think of the role of sanctions?

LB: They are playing a role. When you see people demonstrate, they constantly say, “Our enemies are here; they lie to us when they say it’s America.” People know that the main cause of their economic hardship is the government’s corruption and mismanagement. The popular protests of December 2017 and January 2018 took place two years after sanctions had been lifted by the Obama Administration, and people had seen no economic improvement as a result. That is why, when they rose up again this past November, they didn’t mention the sanctions as their grievances, although the sanctions are certainly making life more difficult for the regime and for the population.

I support levying smart sanctions against human rights violators and sponsors of terrorism, such as the IRGC, and the United States has recently done this. But it’s one thing to impose sanctions; it’s another to actively pursue their implementation. We would like America, the European Union, and other countries to actively pursue the implementation of sanctions against those who promote terrorism and commit human rights violations inside Iran. A big part of this war between civil society and the regime is a psychological war. The more the population feels empowered and supported by the world, the more daring it becomes. In the past two years, we have even had leaks from inside the regime about human rights violations. This is new, and for me it’s a positive indication that people within the regime who are not happy are starting to act.

TAI: There are some in the Iranian exile community who oppose sanctions on the grounds that they hurt average people, not the regime, and may even push people into the arms of the regime. Can you tell us about that side of the argument?

LB: Most of the pro-democracy diaspora is favorable to seriously sanctioning human rights violators. But parts of the community, especially those who regularly go to Iran and come back, don’t like this strong pressure on the government. Among those who oppose sanctions, there are those who honestly think it’s harming the population more than the state (whether they are right or not), and there are those who are here on mission from the Iranian government.

The University of Maryland recently published polls that they had done inside Iran, which basically substantiate all of the Iranian government’s positions, and presented it as scientific. But obviously you can’t do any polling without the intelligence services spearheading it. People should be a little less naive. You have a discourse that is produced by the Iranian regime’s representatives in Washington, and they are well supported. When you repeat a lie 10,000 times, every journalist ends up accepting it as self-evident. That’s why I wrote this article because I thought, my God, things are radically changing inside Iran and nobody knows about it.

TAI: How do Iranians who oppose the regime feel about U.S. alliances with the Gulf states? Is there any reliable data on that?

LB: No, but I can talk about what I hear on social media. Those in opposition blame the regime for adventurist policies that have isolated Iran from the whole world and united everyone against Iran. Regarding the current government of the United States, people have mixed emotions. Many people love Trump. I think the only time President Trump talks about democracy and human rights is in his Farsi tweets, and probably because he doesn’t know what they say. But many also don’t trust the U.S. government because they have in mind what happened in North Korea. They think Trump is all about making deals. They know they have a window of opportunity right now and that’s it.

TAI: Many Americans form their impressions of Iran through culture—whether it’s Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Asgar Farhadi’s film A Separation, or Persepolis, the graphic novel-turned-film about a young girl growing up during the revolution. Are such works helpful as a gateway to understanding Iran?

LB: They are. These are the real indicators of a society’s life. Many don’t know it but there are so many plays ongoing in Tehran, both in the official and underground theaters, playing to full houses. Many art exhibits and concerts, too. People have turned to culture because their civic space is completely closed to them, politically speaking. Culture shows you what is really happening inside the country.

TAI: So what is the state of artistic freedom within Iran? You’re talking about a lively cultural scene, but I also remember the case of Jafar Panahi, the director who has been under house arrest since 2010 and was officially banned from filmmaking (an order he has repeatedly defied). What is allowed within the country and what crosses a line?

LB: Well, there’s a ministry of censorship, basically, called the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and every single book is subject to tedious negotiations with the censor about each word used. No, this is really a repressive country. Now, if you are lucky, or you have a censor who’s nice or has cultural ambitions, your book may come out. But if that book becomes controversial, it will be censored after publication. It’s the same with movies. It’s not a free country and they subject every artist, every writer, every screenwriter to a bizarre negotiation.

TAI: What about the status of women in Iran today? Any interesting trends there that you can speak to?

LB: One of the things that I have noticed since the 2017 elections is a new form of women’s activism. In 2017, when I was studying how civil society was taking part in the elections, I noticed that civil rights activists’ demands from the candidates were minimal; even those who had previously been radical regarding human rights were demanding the bare minimum. Or they were not even mentioning human rights.

But then, a few months later, in December 2017, we had this uprising in Iran, where more than 100 cities were taken over by demonstrators and the main slogan was: “reformist versus conservative: this game is over.”  People were simply saying they had had it with the Islamic Republic, all factions included. They were chanting:  “we want a free Iranian Republic.” “We want secularism.” “We want the king of Iran.” “The clergy has no place in political life.” And when you look at these slogans alongside the mild election demands, you realize what has happened inside the country: Society does not want to speak to or negotiate with the regime anymore. They don’t demand anything from the regime. They want it gone.

Now, the women’s rights protests follow the same pattern. Iranian women were actually the first segment of the population to resist the regime; on March 8, 1979, they were out demonstrating against mandatory veiling. Since then, they have individually exemplified passive civic resistance—putting on makeup, for example—while women’s rights activists collectively started to demand the end of discriminatory laws against women, and the right to divorce, the right to keep their children, and so on. They organized the tremendous “One Million Signatures” campaign to petition the parliament to change discriminatory laws. They were arrested, flogged, fined, banned, and placed under constant pressure.

And then in 2014, a London-based journalist named Masih Alinejadin started this Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” where she asked Iranian women to post photos and videos of themselves unveiled. Many such photos came out. That was civil society spontaneously taking the initiative to present another narrative on Iran, through the virtual world. “You have controlled the physical world,” they were saying. “We have a clandestine space where we are ourselves, and the world will see us.”

The regime went completely crazy because the women were not organized; they were not connected to each other at all. How could the regime counter this? Before becoming an exile, Masih was a well-known journalist in Iran, who came from a pro-Khomeini traditionalist family. She wore the veil all her life until she came to live in London. One day, after launching the Facebook page, she woke up to the news that she had been raped by three men in a London metro station. This was fake news, spread by Iranian state television; Iranian intelligence was insinuating that women taking off their veil are preyed upon in the free world. It was an insulting, disturbing campaign, and her relatives were really worried.

In reaction to this smear campaign, Iranian women continued to send Masih photos and videos of themselves. The virtual space became the mirror of their real selves. And then seeing their strength and their numbers, they took their struggle from the virtual world into the real world. This was the beginning of an individual and collective female resistance to mandatory veiling. Ordinary women started to challenge law enforcement officers in the streets. Girls started turning on their cameras when they were harassed by security forces. “My camera is my weapon” became their slogan. Here we see a completely different use of the digital world. Instead of a social phenomenon that started in the real world before being amplified in the virtual one, we had a virtually originated movement, which then was transferred to the physical world. I think this is an interesting case study not only for Iran, but for any closed society exposed to the virtual world.

Now women are individually taking off their veils. They are saying to security forces, “It’s my right to choose the way I get dressed, and you don’t have a right to tell me what to do.” This is secularism in action. And the government has been forced to legislate; there is now a law that makes sending photos and videos to Masih a crime.

TAI: When I hear you talk about women inside Iran risking lengthy prison sentences for taking off their veils, it seems illustrative of a larger yearning for autonomy and individual freedom. Meanwhile, there are trends in conservative circles in the West toward new forms of traditionalism. In Germany, some members of the right-wing populist party AfD say openly that women should retreat from public life and play a more traditional, family-centered role. In this country, there’s a belief in some conservative circles that liberalism has failed us, and that to find meaning one needs to turn to traditionalism and orthodox versions of religion. How does all this look to you, based on your experiences?

LB: Well, when I was very young in Paris many years ago, many of my fellow students were Maoists. They had willingly accepted a lot of constraints in their daily lives. I think there is always this totalitarian temptation within us. In times of identity crisis or ideological crisis, some people find comfort in ways of life that deny their autonomy and freedom. To me, this is a new form of something that we have always had. French communists wanted the dictatorship of the proletariat until 1971. That’s was almost 20 percent of the electorate, and they were playing with fire. I think it’s an indication that democracy is in ideological crisis in consolidated Western democracies, and we shouldn’t take this lightly.

TAI: Last question: what, in your view, is the single greatest misunderstanding that Americans have about Iran?

LB: Probably that we are all Muslims, and that most of us are in favor of the regime. The regime propaganda has been extremely successful in that regard. Just as an example, look at the way the assassination of General Soleimani was reflected in the mass media here. There were predictions that people would rally around the government, that people loved this man. That’s not true. The reality is much more complex. We saw it with the shooting of the Ukrainian airplane, too, how discontent burst out again and people were shouting, “Soleimani is a murderer, and his leader is a murderer.”

Where is the truth here? We saw the pro-Soleimani demonstrations, but we also know that all schools were closed, and that participation was mandatory in many cases. I’m sure that many people who do not agree with the regime did participate out of nationalism, but if they hadn’t killed 1,500 people in three days, how many people would have come out to demonstrate against the Revolutionary Guards or against the Islamic Republic? The propaganda has been successful in making people believe that this regime is popular. That’s the biggest misapprehension of Iran by the American people, and by many Western publics.

The post Ladan Boroumand: “The Shah Was Never as Hated as the Supreme Leader Is” appeared first on The American Interest.

How to Beat a Populist

The greatest threat confronting democracies around the world is not from without but from within. While we need vigilant and resolute responses to the escalating efforts of Russia, China, and other dictatorships to penetrate and subvert our democratic institutions, they cannot on their own reverse the extraordinary democratic progress of the last several decades. It takes homegrown autocrats to do that. And unfortunately, they are growing in number.

In my last column, I explained the twelve-step program illiberal populists pursue as they seek to drag democracies down to fit their authoritarian personalities and ambitions. Populists move in incremental fashion to gradually erode and then eviscerate democratic norms and checks and balances, reducing democracy to a hollow shell of majoritarian domination while running roughshod over the rights of political opposition and ethnic minorities. “Tyranny of the majority” is what the constitutional framers of American democracy feared when they crafted in the late 1780s an unprecedented governmental system of popular sovereignty. Hence, they leavened the purely democratic features of our constitutional system with liberal guarantees (such as the Bill of Rights) and republican constraints both on executive power (through legislative and judicial checks) and on popular passions (through the antiquated modes of indirect election of the Senate and the President). The result was what the framers called “a republic”—or, in the famous quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “a republic, if you can keep it.” Over time, this would mature into what we now call a liberal democracy (though still an imperfect one).

The web of institutional and normative checks on pure “majority rule” has come to be considered foundational to a liberal or “high quality” democracy. It is these formal and informal checks—the political independence of the courts, the parliament, auditors, inspectors general, the civil service, the media, universities, businesses, and other elements of civil society—that populist presidents and prime ministers attack in their quest for untrammeled power. Once they have leveled these sources of scrutiny and restraint, the populists’ final step is to take effective control of electoral administration, so that even the purely democratic aspect of the system is degraded and their reelection largely assured.

This is the process of creeping authoritarianism by which vibrant democracies have been ravaged in countries such as Venezuela, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bolivia, and now the Philippines.  It now seriously threatens the quality and even the survival of the world’s largest democracy, India. It has afflicted post-communist democracies such as Hungary and Poland, with the former descending into an electoral authoritarian regime. And, with the rise of xenophobic and illiberal parties like Alternative for Germany, the Sweden Democrats, the National Front (in France), and the League (in Italy), it now stalks the landscape of a number of advanced democracies in Western Europe.

Once in power, there is no self-imposed limit on how far populism will go to erode democracy. It starts by assaulting the liberal elements—tolerance, accountability, and the rule of law. Once it has gutted those, it seeks to rig the electoral component, until and unless it meets insuperable civic resistance or is defeated at the ballot box. Logic and history show that the safest and most decisive way to contain the threat that populists pose to democracy is to defeat them in an election—while elections remain democratic. But how can populism be defeated?

Defeating populism requires a clear analysis of its structure and logic. As the Greek political scientist Takis Pappas has observed in the Journal of Democracy, “Populism typically displays four interrelated—and mutually reinforcing—characteristics.”  These are, first, charismatic leadership; second, a strategy of bitter and incessant political polarization (separating the “good,” deserving majority from the corrupt ruling elite and their decadent and undeserving supporters); third, efforts to take control of the state and “emasculate liberal institutions;” and fourth, “the systemic use of patronage to reward supporters and crowd out the opposition.” In addition, contemporary populism mobilizes fear and resentment against ethnic, religious, or nationality minorities, and xenophobia about foreigners and global institutions. Through the demagogic distortion (and manufacturing) of “news” and images, it blames the declining social and economic status of traditional groups (and even the country at large) on dangerous “others”—immigrants, minorities, and foreign powers (or some conspiracy among them). Hence, it vows to purify the nation and make it “Great Again.”

This is a potent and combustible mix. People who are angry, frustrated, or afraid will rationalize a lot of bad behavior from a leader who they believe has their back. It may appear a formidable task to defeat an incumbent populist who is bullying critics in his party and the larger society while vitiating the rule of law. But diverse recent elections—from municipal contests in Istanbul, Budapest, and Prague, to the elections of anti-corruption activist Zuzana Čaputová as president of Slovakia and liberal centrist Kyriakos Mitsotakis as prime minister of Greece—show that liberal democrats can defeat populist parties and leaders if they have the right strategy. And the sooner this happens, the better—for the more time populism has to settle into power and reshape its institutional contours, the more that liberty and democracy are at risk.

Political learning must now move in the reverse direction from its normal “flow”—older, advanced democracies need to carefully study the experiences of younger and less stable ones. For it is the newer and more embattled democracies that have the greatest experience with illiberal populism, and who know its strengths and its vulnerabilities.

Here is what I have learned from the experience of democrats who have tried to turn the tide against populism in these countries, and from scholars who have analyzed their successes and failures.

Don’t try to out-polarize the charismatic “polarizer in chief,” either in style or program. If you do, you will be playing by his logic and rhetoric, and on his psychological turf. It’s likely to be a losing game, because he is better at it than real democrats are, and because a campaign strategy centered on strident denunciation of the populist and his misdeeds will harden and mobilize his base and alienate some swing voters. Therefore:
Pursue an inclusive electoral strategy that reaches out to doubting elements of the populist’s support base and mobilizes the broadest possible constituency for change. Don’t consign people who voted for the populist last time or who once “approved” of his performance to a “basket of deplorables.” Don’t question the morals or motives of his sympathizers, but rather appeal to their interests and positive values. And therefore:
Avoid tit-for-tat rhetorical slugfests that mimic the populist’s penchant for name-calling and the politics of personal destruction. Don’t descend into the muck of ridicule or invective; stick to principles and behavior. You can’t one-up a populist in verbal abuse. If you try, you look smaller. You descend to his moral level, and, by implying that his supporters were morally depraved to have ever supported him, you lose the ability to pry some of them away.
Show some humility, empathy, and even love to neutralize the populist’s poisonous politics of resentment and division. (In Turkey’s municipal elections last year, the opposition’s winning campaign was based on an electoral strategy called “radical love.”) To triumph at the ballot box, a populist must win over voters who are not racist or authoritarian but are angry and insecure. The populist connects with anxious voters on an emotional level. To connect on an emotional level with voters who are hurting, democrats do not need to exploit emotions, but they do need to understand them and show empathy for them, as the Polish scholars Jaroslaw Kuisz and Karolina Wigura argue in an incisive essay in the forthcoming (April) Journal of Democracy. What has unhinged these voters from their traditional political attachments and values? Why did they answer the siren song of illiberal populism in the last election? What populist critiques of “the establishment” (and its distance from ordinary people) might have a kernel of truth? What could be a better way of addressing these voters’ grievances—whether they be cultural (feeling disrespected for having more traditional social or religious values), political (not being heard by representatives), or economic, as they worry over the security of their jobs, their health insurance, their retirement savings, or their children’s economic futures? Therefore:
Craft a positive, issues-based campaign strategy focused on the policy failings and vulnerabilities of the incumbent populist administration. Offer substantive, practical, non-ideological policy proposals that not only rally the political opposition but also induce some supporters of the populist to defect to a broad-based campaign for the future.
Don’t let the populist hijack nationalism. Democracy requires “a sense of common belonging.” Offer a liberal, democratic version of unifying pride in the country as a democracy. To be effective, such a liberal nationalism has to be credible, and to be credible it has to be sincere. You don’t have to trash the United Nations, the Paris Climate Accords, or foreign aid and international trade in order to stand proud of your country, its people, culture, and accomplishments—and to firmly proclaim freedom, democracy, and the rule of law as cornerstones of what has made the country great.
Offer hope and an optimistic vision of a better future. A democratic alternative does not have to be charismatic or radical to motivate people. But it does need to articulate more than a rational appeal to interests or a technocratic future of smart government. It has to offer what Richard Nixon (of all people) called, in his first State of the Union address, “the lift of a driving dream.” Populists typically look backwards, divisively, to promise that lift. But a “driving dream” is more uplifting if it looks forward. The key—at both the emotional and programmatic levels—is to offer hope and even excitement. There is no reason why Democrats can’t offer an alternative vision for the country that is not only more inclusive and forward-looking but also more hopeful.
Don’t be boring. Kuisz and Wigura also urge liberal democrats not to ignore the stylistic element of electoral politics. Our era is saturated with constant streams of information, pulsating rapidly from multiple sources. Populists dominate this space through shock and awe: insult, outrage, derision, and disinformation—the politics of “infotainment.” In these ways, they rivet people to their social media sites and intensify their anger and commitment.  Democrats don’t need to peddle in falsehood or invective to find lively and creative ways to communicate their message of hope, inspiration, and concrete policy alternatives, and to do so with passion and conviction.

I wish these were merely lessons for the challenged democracies of Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. But unfortunately, they present an increasingly urgent imperative for the country that will matter most for the global future of democracy, the United States. With every passing day, the populist president of this country is escalating his assaults on accountability, civility, and the rule of law. If his recent acquittal in the Senate has unleashed such a tirade of abuse and retribution, what would his reelection bring? The future health of American democracy now depends on how well the Democratic Party can learn—with humility and savvy—the global lessons of how to beat a populist.

The post How to Beat a Populist appeared first on The American Interest.

How the Migration Industry Fuels the Extortion Industry

Mortal Doubt: Transnational Gangs and Social Order in Guatemala City

Anthony Fontes

University of California Press, 2018, 332 pp., $34.95

 

When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Shaylih Muehlmann

University of California Press, 2014, 240 pp., $29.05

 

Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Jeremy Slack

University of California Press, 2019, 280 pp., $29.95

 

The Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martínez, and Scott Whiteford

University of Arizona Press, 2018, 280 pp., $34.99

 

Lives in Transit: Violence and Intimacy on the Migrant Journey

Wendy Vogt

University of California Press, 2018, 272 pp., $85

With plentiful assistance from Donald Trump, immigrant-rights advocates are persuading many Americans that U.S. enforcement of the Mexican border is cruel and unjust. What exactly would constitute justice is not an easy question: The border was created by one republic’s invasion of another republic, both of which were seizing territory from indigenous groups who were also at war with each other.

Two centuries later, the wage gap between the United States and low-income countries fuels two lucrative industries, an underground migration industry and a taxpayer-financed deportation industry, whose interactions cause enormous suffering. Now that President Trump is getting tough with Central American asylum seekers, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is calling for decriminalizing unauthorized border-crossing and a temporary moratorium on deportations.

Don’t we need border enforcement and deportation to keep Americans safe? The question is unavoidable because the difference in homicide rates north and south of the border is astonishing. El Paso, Texas, is one of the safest cities in the United States, but its sister-city Ciudad Juárez has one of the highest homicide rates on the planet.  Whatever U.S. border authorities inflict on migrants, this is surpassed by what Mexican crime organizations, often referred to as cartels, do to their fellow Mexicans and anyone else who falls into their hands. Due largely to the cartels, 37,435 people were “disappeared” in Mexico between 2006 and 2018. But it wasn’t a cartel executioner who shot 46 people at an El Paso Walmart last year; it was an Anglo supremacist targeting Hispanics.

In this paranoid multi-threat environment, citizen-security has a way of trumping every other issue. Border-fortification is a reliable vote-getter on the American side. But nothing about the border is simple, because neither side can prosper without easy access to the other. Most Americans who live along the 1,260-mile boundary have Mexican heritage and relatives. Due to birthright citizenship, non-citizens give birth to citizens. Then there is the gravitational pull of the American economy and the American dollar. This includes the weaponry wielded by Mexican cartels, most of which comes from north of the border, and their profits, most of which come from selling heroin, cocaine, and marijuana to American customers.

Border violence goes back a long way, but in the 1980s the United States began to export its war on drugs to the foreign countries that produced the drugs. Interdiction in South America and the Caribbean failed to stop the flow, but it did push up drug prices and profits, giving the cartels enough cash to corrupt almost any government and security force. So destructive were the cartels that, in 2006, Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón declared war on them. That turned conflicts between rival cartels and state security forces into public killing sprees. Cartel assassins terrorized their opponents and the citizenry with staggering displays of cruelty, especially in Mexican border cities.

Into those same cities the U.S. government has never stopped deporting thousands of Mexican citizens who have been living in the United States. In the same border cities mingle thousands of Central Americans who hope to escape low-paying jobs and crime waves of their own by asking the United States for asylum. Now the Trump Administration is discouraging the Central Americans by returning them to Mexican soil until an immigration judge hears their case. The advocacy group Human Rights First has documented 636 attacks on applicants waiting in Mexican border cities.

This is such a miserable situation, with so many different authors, that Americans need to ask: Would dialing back border enforcement, and ending or at least reducing deportation, make much difference? Were there less U.S. border enforcement, would northern Mexico be significantly safer than it is at present? Answering “yes  are social researchers who compile the experiences of border victims.

What Happens to Deportees 

In 2010-12 a binational research team interviewed 1,100 deportees on the Mexican side of the border. Interestingly, 86 percent said that they had been treated respectfully by all or a majority of U.S. personnel who had been involved in deporting them. Only 14 percent said that they had been disrespected by all or a majority of U.S. personnel. Only 30 percent regarded the United States as their current home, and only 23 percent said they had U.S.-born American citizen children. The results corroborate the stereotype that the majority of deportees are male labor migrants with only limited attachments to the United States. But 55 percent of the deportees said they planned to return to the United States in the future. Some, with families in the U.S., were determined to rejoin them at any cost.

One of the researchers, University of Texas-El Paso geographer Jeremy Slack, has published an ethnography of conditions in Mexican border cities. Deported to Death focuses on deportees and other migrants in shelters and flophouses in Nuevo Laredo (on the Texas border), Nogales (on the Arizona border), and Tijuana (south of San Diego, California). Border cities have become so dangerous that Mexican authorities often try to move deportees farther south as soon as possible. But some deportees hang around hoping for a chance to return north.

This puts them at risk of kidnaping because their anglicized speech and clothing gives away the possibility that they have stateside relatives who can be extorted. In one nightmarish case, a group of deportees is offered half-price bus tickets by uniformed officers of Grupo Beta, the Mexican government agency that provides humanitarian aid to migrants. Once the deportees are on the bus and under way, the Grupo Beta officers reveal themselves to be Zetas, the most violent of the Mexican cartels.

Another high-risk category in Mexican border cities are migrants from the south. Currently these are mainly Central Americans, but they also include asylum seekers from Mexico and around the world. Those who do not hire “guides” have, by definition, failed to pay the tolls demanded by whatever cartel controls the city, so they too face a high risk of abduction. Merely by venturing around Nuevo Laredo with migrants, Slack learned that they were under constant surveillance from cartel look-outs on every block. When look-outs identified migrants who had not paid up, they demanded a hefty border-crossing toll ($429 in 2014).

That was only the least-bad thing that could happen. Slack collected numerous stories about women being raped and forced into prostitution. Other kidnapping targets are deportees who have served in the U.S. armed forces—not just for their military training but for their linguistic and cultural competence in dealing with U.S. officials.

Because Mexican criminal organizations inflict high losses on each other (including many of the country’s 200,000 homicide victims since 2006), they have a hard time recruiting replacements. And so Slack and other investigators have collected horrendous testimonies of forced recruitment. But he acknowledges that joining these organizations is not necessarily coerced. In fact, he points out, the drug trade is far more accessible to lower-class youth than migration to the United States because the latter requires capital to pay smugglers.

What Happens in Migrant Shelters

Migrant shelters, operated mainly by Catholic clergy on shoe-string budgets, often fail to protect migrants from the worst threats they face. Not all Central Americans use them: Migrants who borrow large sums to pay smugglers are whisked across Mexico. But shelters are where migrants end up if they try to negotiate a bargain price with smugglers, or if they try to get across Mexico on their own. That shelters often fail to screen out smugglers posing as migrants is not very surprising. Smugglers are proficient liars, and this is where they find customers. That shelters fail to protect their lodgers from extortion, assault, and murder is far more serious.

Casting light on the reasons for this is a more detailed shelter ethnography by the anthropologist Wendy Vogt, who has volunteered in southern Mexico since 2007. Whether shelters like it or not, Vogt reports, they have become an important non-profit node in the for-profit migration industry. The humanitarians who run shelters have no foolproof way to distinguish between migrants and smugglers. Small groups traveling together claim to be family units. Many family units now include small children who require generous treatment. But if the actual relationship holding together a group is mercenary, this encourages acrimony and retaliation.

Even actual family groups can be a façade for exploitation, hence a Guatemalan couple using their own small children to maximize sympathy as they take successive groups of migrants across Mexico. As one of their bitter relatives told Vogt, “money is thicker than blood.” Smugglers and their female clients often claim to be domestic partners, expedited by the fact that, when women are determined to reach the United States at any cost, some use transactional sex to protect themselves from being raped. Since shelter personnel include failed migrants, these can be vulnerable to financial temptations. For penniless female migrants, one temptation is to work in bars, which in this milieu can be hard to distinguish from brothels.

So treacherous is the migrant trail through Mexico, and so under siege are the shelters, that even inside them migrants are afraid to share personal information, for fear that an informer will betray them to kidnappers out on the street, with the result that they are seized to extract ransom from relatives. There are so many incentives for false identities, and it is so challenging to know who is who, that shelters are not popular with local residents, who assume that the lodgers are criminals. One shelter was shut down by a mob after three denizens allegedly raped a 13 year-old neighbor. By 2013 an Oaxaca shelter where Vogt volunteered had become a fortress protected by barbed wire and security cameras. Following death threats by the Zetas, its founder was assigned bodyguards by the Mexican government.

Under such conditions, Vogt and Slack acknowledge the challenges in evaluating the stories told by deportees and migrants. All the fear in a shelter skews a researcher’s sample in favor of talkative characters. When talkative characters trade accusations, who to believe? So many migrants pass through a shelter that it is hard to know what happened next. Did they finally make it across the border, are they languishing in some jail, or did they get murdered?

Still, story after story demonstrates that the “ubiquitous” danger in border towns and along the migrant trail is extortion—of the migrants themselves, and, if kidnappers can get their hands on personal information, of their relatives back home or in the United States. Thanks to cellphones, gangsters can transmit the cries, whimpers, and supplications of captives to the ears of horrified relatives.

How Extortion Rackets Stretch Back to Central America

How did extortion become such an industry, stretching all the way back to Central America? How do failed migrants coalesce into bands of predators? Democratization, unfortunately, is an important part of the story. In El Salvador and Guatemala, peace accords in the 1990s ended civil wars and strengthened civil liberties. In Mexico one-party rule by the Party of the Institutional Revolution ended in 2000. Longstanding partnerships between officials and mafias were destabilized by the new, more open regimes. There was more room for competition, and more civil liberties created more liberty to join gangs and attack other people without consequences.

Gang structures make sense for criminals because they fortify impunity—when a gangster is arrested, his cronies can intimidate or kill anyone who wants to help the police. Such organizations do not welcome enquiring minds, so they are quite a frontier for social researchers. One way of accessing gang killers is through prisons. In Latin America, prison authorities tend to have surprisingly little control over the daily lives of prisoners. And so outsiders are free to roam inside—if they entrust their safety to inmates who can protect them.

That was the entrée for Anthony Fontes, an American University geographer who got inside Guatemalan prisons through gang-rehab organizations. Some of the prisoners and ex-prisoners he befriended were so beset by predicaments that they did not live to see publication of his writerly but gritty Mortal Doubt: Transnational Gangs and Social Order in Guatemala City.

The fallen include Andy, whose parents belonged to Barrio 18. After a Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) clique captured his neighborhood and executed his mother and uncle, it became his new family and turned him into a child killer, supposedly at the age of nine. His stories for Fontes included improbable exploits. But he did participate in gruesome publicity stunts such as MS-13’s decapitation of four randomly chosen victims whose heads it placed around Guatemala’s capital. After a dismembered woman turned up in a trash bag outside his house, he was arrested and became an informer for the Guatemalan justice system, only to be executed by his own gang soon after Fontes met him.

Are U.S. deportations to blame for the growth of Central American gangs? Famously, both MS-13 and its rival Barrio 18 originated in southern California. MS-13 was started by youth whose parents brought them north to escape the economic devastation of the Salvadoran civil war. When the Rodney King riots led to widespread looting in 1992, half the arrestees turned out to be Latinos—mainly young Central Americans. A national crime wave was putting U.S. voters in the mood for law and order, so the Federal government deported thousands of non-citizens, either convicted or suspected gang members, back to their countries of birth.

Simultaneously—but also coincident with the end of the Salvadoran and Guatemalan civil wars—youth gangs in these two countries plus Honduras became far more lethal than before. Many of the murders were committed in the name of “13” and “18”—that is, the gang topography of south-central Los Angeles. Interestingly, Fontes cites Salvadoran research that “less than 17 percent of gang youth [in El Salvador] had ever been to the United States, and less than 11 percent had even been gangsters when they lived there.” In Guatemala, he believes, the proportions of gang members deported from the United States “would have been even less.”

Sadly, the U.S. contribution to Central American gangdom is far wider than any particular policy that could be revoked. American dollars, consumption levels, and status symbols have become the standard by which Central Americans measure their personal wellbeing. The deficits are felt with special intensity by youth. For those whose only prospects are poverty wages, Fontes notes, a California brand “of deathless brotherhood and barrio pride” is ennobling. Gang-style clothing, body language, tattoos, and boasting are accessible even to low-income youth, and these are so glamorized by screen media that Fontes sometimes caught his sources claiming exploits from their favorite gang movie.

Extortion is how local cliques support themselves. It has become easier to commit now that throw-away cellphones can penetrate walls with deadly threats, coercing victims into a cash payment or bank wire. At first extortionists targeted the upper classes; as these hired private security firms, cellphone threats shifted to lower social classes who cannot afford to protect themselves but who, thanks to small businesses or remittances from relatives in the United States, have bank accounts that can be drained. Demands for protection payments (renta) are backed up by threats to kidnap, rape, or murder a victim’s children.

Many extortionists recruit womenfolk—sisters, other relatives, neighbors—to hide weapons, collect payments and care for prisoners held for ransom. One Mother’s Day, in a courtroom, Fontes observed two dozen women in handcuffs for extorting a bus company; none seemed to be denying the allegations. Extortion has become such a profitable industry that many threats no longer come from MS-13 and Barrio 18 cliques, but from pretenders exploiting their fearsome reputation to do the “mara [gang] masquerade.”

The more credible threats require personal information of the kind that, if you did not carelessly post it to Facebook, only your relatives or neighbors are likely to know. And so extortion rackets undermine family as well as neighborhood relationships. As Fontes puts it:

the kin networks, neighbors and other gang associates through which the maras collect la renta make extortion far more than merely a brutal criminal business. . . . Rather, extortion constitutes a pivotal social relation in the communities where it has become entrenched. Residents survive by either taking part in or capitulating to the maras’ rules, by either preying upon their community or being preyed upon.

Residential streets have been forced to become gated enclaves or organize self-defense committees, which can degenerate into lynch mobs or protection rackets of their own.

Narco-Governmentality 

Border researchers seem to agree that tough-on-crime policies divert attention from what really drives extortion rackets and gang homicides—underlying structures of inequality that incentivize destructive behavior. In a collection called The Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Slack and his colleagues argue that U.S. border enforcement has become a major driver of violence against unauthorized crossers. Their target is a system of escalating penalties for repeat offenders that U.S. authorities call the Consequence Delivery System (CDS). Interestingly, CDS was set in motion not by Donald Trump, but by the preceding Obama Administration.

For Slack and company, treating undocumented migrants as if they were criminals is like spreading fertilizer on gang networks: It makes them grow. Thus, for example, jailing labor migrants together with criminals is like enrolling them in crime college; it teaches them more criminal ways to achieve their goals. The broader problem is that, the higher the border wall, the higher the price that criminal organizations can charge. The higher the price, the higher the revenues available to corrupt officials, and the more potential there is for violent competition over the spoils.

If U.S. border enforcement has increased the profitability of breaking the law, would less border enforcement decrease the profitability? Slack and his colleagues think so. They want to decriminalize unauthorized border crossing, by decreasing the penalties for doing so, and they want to minimize the number of immigrants who are deported. Their recommendations do not include decriminalizing drugs, but this would be a logical next step because it is the only way to deprive cartels of the profits that corrupt governments.

Such policies would invert law-and-order populism, and they would be more plausible if only labor migration and drug addiction were at issue. But now that extortion is such a profitable industry, how can U.S. authorities extend a generous welcome to all and sundry while maintaining constant vigilance against any sign of gang affiliation?

Migrant advocates want freedom of movement for migrants, and they also want strong protection for them. But if freedom of movement requires limiting the sovereign right of states to exclude outsiders, protecting migrants requires strong police authority, including the right to verify identity claims, detain suspects for careful investigation, and exclude anyone who shows signs of being involved in predation. Waving through ambiguous cases, on the grounds that any migrant is innocent until proven guilty, will increase the number of predators disguising their identity.

After nine members of a Mormon family were murdered in November, President Trump threatened to classify the cartels as terrorist organizations. He is not the first to notice parallels between the two. Like the Islamic State, cartels stage gruesome displays to intimidate opponents, assert control of disputed territories, and turn these into zones where they can do anything they want.

One reason not to designate gangsters as terrorists is that this justifies military rather than police responses, with a higher level of force that injures a wider population. The danger is illustrated by Shaylih Muehlmann’s ethnography of a Mexican village south of Tijuana and Mexicali. An anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, Muehlmann says that she wanted to avoid the drug wars by studying political ecology. Where she chose was a transportation corridor where the drug industry has become the most prestigious form of employment.

Traditional agriculture and ranching are in decline, with the main legal occupations being day-labor or border assembly plants. Not only does working as a narco pay better; it also incarnates the proud masculinity of northern Mexico. Muehlmann’s friends see defiant narcos as national heroes in the mold of Pancho Villa, that is, as defenders of their country against the Behemoth of the North. Once one narco boss is captured and photographed in a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, seven others are arrested with the same trademark look, and Ralph Lauren polo shirts became all the rage in street stalls. When children play narcos y federales (their version of Cowboys and Indians), younger kids are forced to play federales as the side that always loses.

Narco-machismo is toxic masculinity, but this does not prevent women from aspiring to the power and glory of becoming a narco-wife. Thus the 18 year-old Isabella’s attraction to the unremarkable Andrés, thanks to his new alligator boots and newly-minted status as a narco. Unfortunately for Andrés, after he disappears into prison, Isabella pursues other men, to the point of telling two different ones that she is carrying their baby when she’s not even pregnant. Having raised money from both, she takes up with a truck driver who transports drugs.

Muehlmann’s friends are not assassins—the men seem to be family-oriented even if, in their increasing absence, households are becoming matrifocal. So much of the population is involved in organized crime, or closely related to those who are, that it is challenging to define its boundaries. The narco trade has become so influential as a source of prosperity that, Muehlmann argues, there is really no way to escape it. Hence the trucker who is so afraid of being busted as a “blind mule” (for a drug shipment placed on his rig without his knowledge) that he decides he might as well become a smuggler and get paid for it.

Like Muehlmann, Slack and his colleagues agree that figuring out who is and is not part of a cartel is not the critical question for social researchers. Networks of smugglers, enablers, enforcers, and law-enforcers are loose, with the roles of each individual multiple and subject to change. In The Shadow of the Wall’s most interesting chapter, Slack and his colleague Howard Campbell suggest that we look at cartel power in places like Muehlmann’s village in terms of “narco-governmentality.”

What they mean, in a few words, is that controlling corridors and coopting (or outgunning) law enforcement leads to a system of illicit taxes and punishments in which cartels mimic some aspects of state governance. Unlike a revolutionary movement, Mexican cartels do not seek to overthrow the state or replace it with their own—all they want is lucrative co-existence. The result for the citizenry, Slack and Campbell conclude, is a “double jeopardy” in which they are beset by “two oppressive systems in collusion and conflict with each other,” and in which the illicit regime can become even more violent than the state it is mimicking.

Narco-governmentality is not the same as a narco-state. The cartels have been able to corrupt local, state, and federal officials, but they have never captured the Mexican state. Nor does narco-governmentality imply moral equivalence between the different contenders. Whatever the limitations of the Mexican, Guatemalan, and U.S. governments, and whatever abuses have been committed in their name, these are more accountable than a drug cartel. That is the silver lining when, for example, a gun battle between Guatemalan cops reveals that an elite police unit is extorting gang members for protection money. Thanks to successful blows against police corruption, as well as other less glamorous police and judicial reforms, Guatemala’s homicide rate has dropped from a high of 45 homicides per 100,000 people in 2009 to 22 per 100,000 in 2018.

If the Democrats win control of the U.S. government in the November election, should they decriminalize border-crossing and drug smuggling? That will deprive cartels of the revenues they need to corrupt Mexican and U.S. officials, and it will un-trap large numbers of deportees and other migrants who are currently stuck in high-risk borderlands. Most of these individuals will move north, to a wide array of less violent U.S. destinations, and among them will be past and future predators.

If migrants have some kind of legal status, temporary or permanent, they will be more willing to cooperate with American police than undocumented migrants are. That is a solid argument for decriminalizing unauthorized border-crossing. But some migrants will be manipulating more than one identity—the United States has long been a destination for Central American fugitives from justice. This will add to the already powerful pressures in U.S. society for higher levels of surveillance and security. If the Mexican border tells us anything beyond partisan dispute, it is that welcoming more migrants will require more policing.

The post How the Migration Industry Fuels the Extortion Industry appeared first on The American Interest.

The Center Does Not Hold

Unleash a little storm in German politics, and it is Weimar time in the Fatherland. The Weimar Republic, born after defeat in World War I and murdered in 1933, is the eternal hand-writing on the wall. This is when the first German democracy, poisoned by national humiliation in 1918 and million-fold misery during the Great Depression, was ground down by the extremes of the right and the left. After WWII, German Democracy 2.0 was the absolute counter-model, and this bulwark of centrism succeeded beyond the wildest of dreams.

For perspective, take these numbers. France has gone through some 40 prime ministers since World War II, and Italy has burned through 61 governments. The Federal Republic made do with 8 chancellors in 70 years, and “Longevity” was their middle name. Konrad Adenauer, the founder, held on for 13 years. Helmut Kohl ruled for 16, and Angela Merkel will have served 16 years by the time she leaves office in 2021.

It was stability and predictability über alles—plus a liberal state buttressed by almost unbroken economic growth. This wondrous edifice is now being shaken, though it remains rock-solid by comparison with the rest of Europe. Elsewhere, coalitions have been like kaleidoscopes, forming and re-forming almost as quickly as Donald Trump’s cabinet and staff since 2017. Yet nobody has cried “Weimar” while watching governments come and go all around Germany. In the Federal Republic, alas, “Weimar” is a standard invocation of doom. And no wonder. This is where democracy really did die at the age of 14. So, what happened in the current iteration?

Let’s go to Thuringia, a mini-state of 2.2 million in former East Germany—a bit more populous than Rhode Island and Delaware put together. Thuringia is the tail of a Schnauzer that has wagged a huge German Shepherd of 82 million. How odd. Why would the nation quake when a state legislature elects a new prime minister—normally a bread and butter affair, but now a trigger of unprecedented upheaval? The answer: because of the ghost of Weimar that inflated a humdrum event into a national crisis.

Why? The PM, who resigned under massive pressure after only 24 hours, had been anointed by the wrong people. He was elected by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in cahoots with the Alternative for Germany, the new far-right kid on the block. The AfD is made up of the usual populist suspects roaming Europe and America, but also of some folks with whom you would not want to be seen even in a beer tent—people who trade in barely masked Nazi shibboleths.

So, in Berlin, the centrist CDU, the senior partner in Merkel’s ruling coalition, convulsed in horror. A taboo of 70 years’ standing had been broken. It commands: Never, ever cohabit with the extreme right, even if it is only a one-night stand as in Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia! The local tail kept wagging—actually whipping—the national Hund. Its most prominent victim was Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, whose tongue-breaking name you won’t have to learn how to pronounce anymore. Handpicked by Angela Merkel as her successor and guarantor of continuity, she quit as CDU chair and heir-apparent in the chancellor’s office. Merkel’s succession is now a free-for-all.

AKK, as she is called for the sake of brevity, should have stopped her minions in Thuringia, roared the CDU’s grandees. But her failure was just the proximate cause of her deep fall. Given her previous missteps and Biden-like gaffes, she has been weighed and found wanting. A former prime minister of tiny Saarland on the French border, she was not ready for prime time. At least she was wise enough to realize it; hence her abrupt decision to ditch her national ambitions. AKK will remain defense minister for the time being, which is a nice consolation prize.

Now to forever-chancellor Angela Merkel. Having pulled the strings in the background, she proved again that she knows more about amassing and preserving power than any would-be usurper or a protegee like AKK. It is a safe bet that she will live out her fourth and final term until 2021. And then maybe go off to a high office at the EU or UN.

Was it really Weimar redivivus? Of course not. The AfD polls around 12 percent nationwide—more or less the average take for the far-right throughout Western Europe. Compare that to the real thing, when Nazis and Communists pocketed a majority of seats in the Reichstag during the last free elections of 1932.

So here is the good news: This tempest in a Thuringian teacup actually proves the potency of the taboo engraved in the German political soul. “Far from representing a genuine breakthrough for the AfD,” notes Tony Barber in the Financial Times, “the unsavory episode actually demonstrated that a majority of German society—at least in the West—wants the taboo on collaboration with the extreme right to be applied resolutely and unconditionally.”

Another bit of good news comes out of Austria and Italy, which, like Germany, had succumbed to Fascism after World War I. In Vienna, the far-right Freedom Party has been ousted from the government. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, a soft version of Mussolini, quit on his own (though he will be back).

Now to the not-so-good news: While the taboo did hold in Germany, the political system’s cast-in-concrete stability may not. For a lifetime, power in the Federal Republic used to alternate between the center-left and the center-right. It was Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Now, six parties—from the radical left via the rising Greens to the extreme right—are grabbing votes from the once-dominant Social and Christian Democrats, which will make a majority coalition ever more difficult.

Nor is Europe number 1 alone in this new game. The center is under assault almost everywhere. Think about the United States, where left and right have been radicalizing each other. Compared to Sanders or Warren, left-leaning Barack Obama was a stick-in-the-mud centrist. The party system is splintering throughout Europe. Since 2015, Spain has gone through three elections without generating a majority government. In the 2018 general election, Sweden, a bastion of placidity, found itself in a world where no grouping commanded an outright majority. It took more than four months to cobble together a shaky government.

Italy is now in the claws of the right-populist Lega and the left-populist Five Stars. So the kaleidoscope will keep turning in Rome, but after 61 postwar governments, the Italians are at least used to endemic turmoil. The age-old motto is arrangiarsi—making do. The Netherlands now has not only one, but two nationalist, anti-immigrant parties that muck up traditional coalition-politics. France: Yes, Emmanuel Macron did manage to beat back the challenge of the far-right National Front, garnering a huge majority in the National Assembly. But this great victory did not spell stability. What an irony! The deadly challenge to Macron now emanates not from traditional parties, from the radicalized street: the Yellow Vests and the mighty public sector unions.

So, the West has won the Cold War, but lost the political peace at home, with Germany—once order incarnate—playing a starring role in the creeping decay of the old dispensation. Europe’s party system, thy name is fragmentation. The established parties have circled the wagons to keep out the nativist-nationalist right. They confront a vexing dilemma. The more shots they loosen, the more they strengthen their populist enemies who speak the same language as the Trumpists: down with the “elites,” and “make our country great again.”

Yet the moderates cannot dispense with the taboo, as the Thuringia upset so vividly demonstrates. So, the deconstruction of the old power structure is likely to continue. In Germany, the center-right and center-left used to command up to 90 percent of the vote in their heyday. Now they barely manage to hold on to 40. And so it goes for the rest of Europe this side of Britain.

As the old international order wanes, so does its domestic counterpart. To vary Margaret Thatcher, Europe—with the world’s second-largest economy—is fated to punch below its weight. Say “hello” to the “Two-and-a-Half Power World” made up of the United States and China plus Russia, an economic waif, but a first-rate strategic disruptor.

The fragmentation of the European party system could not have come at a worse time.

The post The Center Does Not Hold appeared first on The American Interest.

Build Them Up, Don’t Let Them Down

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

Yuval Levin

Basic Books, 2020, 205 pp., $28

The very long subtitle of Yuval Levin’s new book, A Time to Build, states the book’s main program clearly enough: “From family and community to Congress and the campus, how recommitting to our institutions can revive the American dream.” In our age of populist cynicism about institutional self-dealing, Levin, the editor of National Affairs who now calls the American Enterprise Institute his institutional home, offers an eloquent brief for the virtues of institutions. By regularizing the pursuit of social goods, institutions instruct us on how we can accomplish worthwhile goals in our lives. By stabilizing our place in the social world, they give us the courage to take risks. By exposing us to institutional memories, they help us understand how our forebears wrought lasting, worthwhile change. Most important to Levin, institutions shape those people willing to humble themselves in service of causes greater than themselves. Institutions “allow us to substitute character for calculation” and, in so doing, make us better people.

This last function is brought out by the book’s central image: Well-functioning institutions are molds, but dysfunctional institutions hollow themselves out and become mere platforms on which their members perform for other audiences. Rather than inculcating the virtues needed to sustain a prolonged and far-sighted pursuit of their particular goods, today’s institutions take their members as they come and offer them a megaphone—with full knowledge that many so empowered will turn around and denounce the institution. Levin convincingly uses this metaphor to diagnose what ails Congress, journalism, and elite American universities, among other institutions.

But we shouldn’t get too hung up on the idea that molds are good and platforms are bad; Levin would not deny that some institutions are well-designed as platforms, or that some institutions mold people in malign ways. His primary fear is that the elites who occupy our national stage are increasingly homogenized and all equally adrift in the stormy seas of culture war. They have rejected the particularistic virtues their institutions once instilled in favor of the naked pursuit of attention. The problem isn’t so much that they are performing, but that they are putting on a truly rotten show.

A large part of the problem is the demise of private spaces in which an institution’s members can confer with each other, free of all pretext, about how best to accommodate their conflicting priorities. As Erving Goffman famously explained in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, every sort of enterprise needs a back stage to complement its public-facing front stage, a place where “the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character.”

Levin worries that the late 20th-century mania for transparency has effectively collapsed the distinction between front stage and back stage. This destroys the members’ ability to build trust with each other, since they must remain permanently vigilant in assuming that all of their actions will be made manifest to everyone. Less obviously, it saps the front-stage performances of their vitality. With no back stage, there can be no proper practice or scripting. Everything turns into one giant scrum.

As Levin explains, populist distrust of institutions arose in response to sins of “insiderism,” in which inside players corruptly use an institution’s powers to serve their own personal ends rather than the institution’s underlying purpose. To counteract such opportunism, the public demands access to all of the institution’s processes. Sunlight will disinfect, they hope, and there is little awareness of any downside.

But in a wide variety of institutions, such “reforms” have created a “less familiar form of institutional deformation,” which Levin calls “outsiderism.” When institutions come to see public display of their own members as their main purpose, they lose out on the chance to shape character and build relationships behind the scenes. They don’t so much abuse the public’s trust as give up on the effort to render their members trustworthy.

This process is especially vivid in Levin’s description of the contemporary Congress. Challengers hoping to dislodge incumbents have always run against Washington and its corrupt ways. What is novel and distressing today is that, even after winning re-election multiple times, many members proceed as if denouncing Washington’s corruption is their highest priority: “They act like outsiders commenting on Congress, rather than like insiders participating in it.” This need to hold themselves aloof from the institution pervades all of their interactions, such that they regard their colleagues’ dislike for them as a vindication of their integrity. Needless to say, this isn’t a viable way to govern. But for members thoroughly infected by outsiderism, that isn’t important. Instead, they value their office precisely because it gives them a platform to denounce the institution.

With the current occupant of the Oval Office, Levin explains, this attitude has even managed to infect the presidency, which would seem to be the surest imaginable bastion of insiders. Unformed by any experience in politics or governing, what Donald Trump knows how to do is grab attention, and he has seen the presidency as first and foremost an opportunity to do so. That leads to the spectacle of the President of the United States, singular head of the Executive Branch and most powerful man in the world, taking to Twitter to complain about actions taken by his own subordinates. By playing “commentator in chief,” Trump neglects many of the managerial and legal tools available to him. But he also delights his followers, who can share in his sense of embattlement on a visceral level.

The problem, then, isn’t that public-facing performances are happening. Especially in the political world, speaking to the public will always be a core institutional function. The problem is that the performances are more like tantrums—unbecoming, undignified, stultifying, and enflaming. Well-scripted politics sometimes takes on Shakespearian or operatic qualities; it can faithfully represent social struggles and thereby give us traction over them. But our politics today is as formulaic, boring, and juvenile as a bad reality television show.

Nor is it just politics. Levin’s deepest concern, which he registers repeatedly, is that nearly all of our most prominent national institutions have been homogenized into “interchangeable stages for the same kind of cultural psychodrama.” In one of the book’s best lines, he explains:

It isn’t quite that the culture of one institution has invaded others as that the boundaries and distinctions have broken down and everyone, inside and outside, is participating in the same obnoxious quarrel.

The problem with this quarrel isn’t just that it is obnoxious, but that it focuses people on just those questions that are impossible to resolve. Within the abstract realm of kulturkampf, citizens with radically different ideas of citizenship find it impossible to reconcile with each other. If we instead focus on how to best serve the particular missions of the legislature, the serious news outfit, the scientific community, the church, or the university, we can figure out practical accommodations and make our way. But because our current elite seems so insistent on litigating huge questions of identity and historic oppression through whatever institutional post they occupy, it can sometimes feel that there is no refuge for those who would simply prefer to focus on other matters. Corporate bureaucrats schooled in the peculiar manners of this elite by university administrators ensure that every enterprise pays obeisance. If once you could safely toil in relative obscurity as a county clerk or a sports writer, today there is no opting out.

That raises the specter of a monopolar social power—which political theorists have for centuries warned is the greatest danger to liberty. James Madison’s Federalist (No. 10) is the foremost American statement of the idea that social forces are least threatening when they are most plural. And Levin’s hero, Alexis de Tocqueville, issued a clear warning of the danger of a democratic culture that flattened all difference in the name of equality, leaving no space for dissent in its wake. But there is also a strong continental tradition of warning against the consolidation of elites rooted in the works of Machiavelli, and updated by the Italian elite theorist Gaetano Mosca. Mosca warned that, regardless of formal or constitutional rights, the only real protection for freedom comes from power clashing with opposing power.

Doesn’t the culture war, so clearly bipolar rather than monopolar, afford some such protection? As Levin tells it, the struggle itself has become our tyrant, and we ought to be capable of stepping far enough back from our own sympathies in that struggle to see how cruel a master it has become. The historian and critic Louis Menand observed that, while Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell saw themselves as implacable enemies, on a deeper level they were a kind of yin and yang whose prominence was inextricably interlinked. Whoever seems to have the upper hand in their struggle, and the broader one which they caricatured, the real losers are those of us who wish the show would go away.

Are things really so bad? Are the leaders in every field really so homogenized and culture-war obsessed? After all, a very different complaint we often hear about modern life is that too many endeavors are siloed and over-specialized, such that they become incomprehensible to outsiders. Levin periodically concedes that American civil society still has plenty of variety in it, that our institutional landscape is far from flattened out as yet. But he is concerned that as people make their way into our national-level conversation, they almost invariably give up whatever institutional values they may have brought with them and give themselves over to the insipid celebrity mud-fight. And so part of Levin’s purpose, which unfolds in the second half of the book, is to issue an indictment of Internet Age celebrity.

Levin cites Daniel Boorstin’s definition of celebrity as “a person known for being well-known.” That doesn’t seem entirely fair. I, too, have been exasperated at how readily fame has acquired currency in national politics, such that serious people give real thought to presidential bids by Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, or The Rock, while Kanye’s even-more-famous wife can seamlessly claim a share of the constitutional pardon power. But none of these people can be accused of being famous only for being famous. They’ve all acquired legions of fans because they are, each in their own way, talented entertainers. As is our President.

Chief among Levin’s institutionalist contributions, though, is to remind us that notoriety and prominence are not the same thing (notwithstanding the intentions of those who market “The Notorious RBG,” now available as an action figure). That is not obvious to many of the people flourishing in our current environment.

Levin quotes a telling example. When asked if he was worried about becoming known for the wrong sort of thing, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) candidly answered: “What’s the difference? People have to know who you are and what you’re doing if your opinions are going to matter.” This answer is rich in outsiderism; it is obvious to Gaetz that the “people” who need to know him in order for him to have real influence are those who book spots on Fox News, rather than his colleagues in the House of Representatives. In fairness, this is a mode of thinking that predates Twitter or Fox News. Newt Gingrich rose to power in part by pioneering the art of provocative minute-long speeches on C-SPAN. His trolling was virtuosic enough to provoke a direct confrontation with Speaker Tip O’Neill in 1984, which redounded very much to the backbencher’s advantage.

Back in 2000, the omnivorous Tyler Cowen managed a qualified endorsement of our mass culture’s fixation on fame. His What Price Fame? concedes that fame and merit will go their separate ways but argues that society nevertheless benefits, because the desire for fame elicits so many extraordinary efforts in nearly every field. At the same time, Cowen thought that fame would effectively hem in the famous, especially politicians, who are “held closely in thrall to the wishes of voters through the media.”

Two decades later, Levin would surely reply that the media’s ability to restrain rather than amplify the caprice of the famous looks doubtful. The New York Times is no longer, in the popular mind, an imposing Gray Lady; instead, it is a holding pen for a few hundred self-promoting Twitter personalities, few of whom shy away from ostentatiously choosing sides. Even if the news desk maintains high standards of care for its published articles, the institutional credibility that it once enjoyed is dead, incapable of surviving its writers’ incessant professions of righteous indignation on social media. The same is sometimes true of the scientific community. Peer-reviewed journals lose their mystique when all the writers and peer-reviewers are parading their biases in real time. Institutions used to carefully regulate how and when their members interfaced with the broader public, but now they can’t resist going after the clicks that controversialists alone can bring. Far from urging care in making public statements, many of them actively encourage a constant stream of attention-seeking. (“Reticent” is one of Levin’s favorite words of praise, and too few people earn it today.)

If absolute celebrity tends to corrupt absolutely, Levin fears that the semi-celebrity on offer from social media will semi-corrupt the rest of us. Sometimes it does so by pulling us into the main current of the culture war in pursuit of virality. But even if we avoid this, Levin worries:

Mediating our social lives through information and entertainment platforms suggests we understand our social lives as forms of mutual entertainment and information. And the more of our social lives that we launder through such platforms, the more this peculiar understanding of sociality becomes the truth.

Levin’s insistence on treating social networks as platforms rather than institutions is a bit frustrating here, since it seems clear that he is concerned precisely about the way they are molding their users. The problem isn’t that they leave us to simply present ourselves as we are, but rather that they train us to be click junkies, the better to keep our “friends” on their sites earning advertising dollars.

Levin thinks that the kind of reward that online “likes” offer is thin gruel indeed, but he recognizes that people are turning to it because they lack opportunities for more meaningful recognition. His paradigm of the right kind of prominence is the well-attended retirement party, where people are honored for their actual contributions to a particular institution, including their participation in the group’s social and moral life. When we feel ourselves making such contributions and getting appreciated for them, it bolsters our morale in ways that radiate throughout the other activities in our lives.

Levin is both depressed about the current state of things and hopeful about the potential for a correction. He can be hopeful because he believes there are as many ways to rebel against our current miserable national conversation as there are institutions. People must simply learn that the ideals pursued by particular institutions can be realized only through tending to the internal life of the institutions. Very Online Yelling about how important they are won’t do the trick.

Nor will assembling “the best people” and getting out of their way. Too many modern institutions “demand too little of the people they empower, because they expect too much of them,” Levin sagely observes. Institutions structure and constrain, which chafes at those meritocratic superstars who think that all they need to do to better the world is to shine their brilliance upon it. But, properly understood, it is exactly the structures and constraints that enable great deeds and great sustained enterprises.

What Levin’s book does not offer is a how-to manual for institutions that commit to fulfilling this structuring role. His aim is to induce a consciousness shift, so that his readers begin to think about repairing institutions that disappoint them rather than indulging their natural impulse to denounce them or tear them down. At that point, he must leave it to people who know the institutions to figure out what works. Such is the lot of the reformer who eschews “isms” and genuinely believes in decentralization. It remains to each of us to drop out of the celebrity circus, tune in to the institutions dedicated to the goods we care for, and build up.

The post Build Them Up, Don’t Let Them Down appeared first on The American Interest.

Lessons of the First Automation Crisis

Peering into the automated future that he saw quickly approaching in the early 1960s, sociologist David Riesman had one big worry: What would we do with all our leisure time? Riesman had been thinking about the problem ever since coauthoring The Lonely Crowd in 1950, the book that seemed to define a whole decade of American life. He proposed creating a federal Office of Recreation to help Americans cope with the coming banquet of free time and imagined that instead of a New Deal-like Works Progress Administration, a future recession might require a Play Progress Administration.

Riesman was not alone. “By 2000,” Time magazine promised, “the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy.” The pessimists shared with the optimists a certainty that the coming change would be nothing short of revolutionary. Francis B. Sayre, Dean of the Washington Cathedral, said that automation worried him more than the specter of nuclear war. “Scientists say that if they construct machines to run society, they must have theologians to tell them what kind of society we want,” and he wasn’t sure the nation’s religious institutions were up to the job. Marshall McLuhan, the prophet of the new age of media, didn’t seem to feel the need for the dean’s advice. “As unfallen Adam in the Garden of Eden was appointed the task of the contemplation and naming of creatures, so with automation. We have now only to name and program a process or a product in order for it to be accomplished,” he enthused in Understanding Media (1964). We were being freed to lead lives of artistic self-creation and “imaginative participation in society.”

It’s easy to poke fun at McLuhan and the others who pondered the automation “crisis” of his era. But as we experience a fresh wave of alarm over the rise of artificial intelligence and other new technologies, it’s important to ask why and how so many clear-eyed, serious people could have been so wrong, what we can learn from their mistakes—and how, in unexpected ways, they were at least partly right.

The importance of a certain modesty is an obvious lesson of the early debate. The mid-century thinkers got ahead of themselves. The first computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), which was rolled out in 1946 and remained in service until 1955, weighed 30 tons and occupied a footprint larger than two Levittown Cape Cods. When it appeared, it had only enough memory to store 20 ten-digit numbers. By the mid-1960s, when the automation debate suddenly ended, there were only about 16,000 computers in the United States, and the best of them could not come close to matching the performance of a modern $600 laptop.

Today, when Alexa fulfills the whims of toddlers, and employers can virtually eliminate a white-collar job by buying a robotic process automation bot with a few mouse clicks, we have a better purchase on the future, as well as more than half a century of experience to contemplate. Yet that hasn’t stopped us from falling prey to hyperbolic thinking and all the other pitfalls that plagued the mid-century prophets. They overestimated the speed of change even as they underestimated the difficulties it would encounter—or the way it would be shaped by humans. They extrapolated into the future from anecdotes and momentary phenomena. These mistakes are all being repeated today. But worse than any mistake the prophets themselves made was the fact that when automation began to take a heavy toll on American industry after the severe recession of 1973-74, the visions of apocalypse and utopia had dissolved, and there was no longer much debate at all. America had moved on to other preoccupations and taken its eye off the ball.

The tenor of the mid-century debate tended to follow the ups and downs of the economy. When times were good, many seers worried about the problems of abundance Americans would face 50 years in the future. When the economy slumped and unemployment spread, the future looked more like an automated nightmare. That pattern has not changed.

Pessimism struck early, in 1950, with Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Wiener was a brilliant, eccentric MIT mathematician and philosopher who had pioneered the field of information theory during World War II. Now he took up his pen to popularize the implications of what he called “cybernetics.” To vastly oversimplify, machines supplied with feedback from sensors (such as photoelectric cells and thermostats) that communicated and self-corrected without human intervention would eventually render humans largely superfluous in many settings.

The shape of the future could be seen in the handful of manufacturing processes that had already incorporated the new technologies, such as steel rolling and canning. The automatic machine is “the precise equivalent of slave labor,” Wiener wrote. “Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.”

“The machine,” he added ominously, “plays no favorites between manual labor and white-collar labor.” That warning was often repeated. Economist Herbert Simon, a future Nobel Prize winner, declared in 1956 that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.”

Cooler heads prevailed closer to the front lines of automation. Walter Reuther, the canny liberal president of the United Auto Workers of America, and other labor leaders saw automation as “more blessing than curse,” writes historian David Steigerwald, in part because it promised to erase industry’s dirtiest and most tedious jobs. They believed that automation would create new jobs, allowing workers to upgrade their skills and assume new roles as overseers of the machines, or perhaps rise into the white-collar ranks. The AFL-CIO campaigned for a 30-hour workweek (for 40 hours of pay), but Reuther was not enthusiastic about the idea, believing that Americans were not prepared to use leisure time “intelligently.” At the bargaining table, he pushed for a guaranteed annual wage that would reduce employers’ incentive to replace men with machines.

Opinion on automation split into two camps: Expansionists saw unemployment as a product of weak demand; structuralists argued that automation was the chief cause. Reuther came down squarely in the middle. But as manufacturing jobs continued to disappear, he shifted toward a more structuralist response, emphasizing an array of new federal policies, including job training and targeted aid for distressed communities, some of which were incorporated into President Lyndon B. Johnson’s short-lived Great Society.

It’s worth noting that industrial robots—machines that could be reprogrammed for various uses—first appeared at about this time, and utterly failed to gain traction. In 1961, the Unimate debuted without fanfare at a GM factory near Trenton, New Jersey, where it was put to work as a die-caster, plucking red-hot door handles from a line and dropping them in pools of cooling liquid. Workers were glad to be relieved of the task. A few years later, a Unimate opened and poured a can of beer for an astounded Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. But that was the height of its success. Labor was plentiful and manufacturers were reluctant to adopt the costly and unproven technology. The American robotics industry fizzled out, and the momentum shifted to Japan. Today, the United States ranks seventh in the world in robot density (robots per 1,000 workers).

Unlike in our own time, entrepreneurs and technologists were little heard-from during the first automation crisis. The new technologies were being born in the nurseries of staid corporate giants like IBM and Sperry-Rand, which didn’t owe their existence to swashbuckling founders like Steve Jobs or Salesforce’s Mark Benioff. One of the few seers to emerge from the world of business and technology was an entrepreneurial consultant named John Diebold, who was acclaimed (or scorned) as the chief evangelist of automation. Diebold, however, was relatively measured in his pronouncements. A classic science nerd, he had corresponded with scientists and curators as a boy, built his own rocket, and, at the age of 15, founded the Diebold Research Laboratory in the basement of his parents’ New Jersey home. While serving in the merchant marine during World War II, he became interested in the new radar-controlled anti-aircraft tracking and firing systems (just as Wiener had), and that led him to investigate automation. After the war, he went to Harvard Business School, where he wrote what would become a defining work, Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory (1952).

Diebold gave the word “automation” its modern meaning. An automated factory wasn’t one in which a few new machines or controls were plugged into the manufacturing process, he said. It meant redesigning the factory’s processes, machines, and sometimes its products around the concept of automation. Diebold built an international consulting firm on the rock of automation and became the chief publicist of the movement. He did not shrink from the charge that automation would increase unemployment, but he rejected the notion that computers would quickly sweep through all sectors of the economy. He regularly complained that critics were making arguments based on anecdotes and lamented the absence of hard facts about the spread of automation. In a refrain that sounds familiar today, Diebold argued that education and training would mute the human economic costs of technology (at a time when, astonishingly, a third of the unemployed had not gone beyond grade school). He did not share our present-day infatuation with STEM education, calling it “the easiest mistake one can make.” A degree of technical facility was needed, but learning to think was more important than specialized knowledge.

That is not to say that Diebold had 20/20 vision. He was a sober analyst when testifying before congressional committees but a bit of an arm-waver when giving a commencement address. Despite his soothing words about unemployment, Diebold believed that the three-day workweek was a distinct possibility—though not in the near future. Like everyone who dared to make specific predictions, he put his name to some howlers. He said that videophones would be commonplace by 1969, for example, and took it for granted that technology would soon allow humans to control the weather.

Yet Diebold’s upbeat perspective looks positively timid compared to those that emerged as the economy turned vigorously upward after the recession of 1958. In The Challenge of Abundance (1961), for example, futurist Robert Theobald asked, “Do we know how to deal with the revolution that will result by the year 2000 if we use our ability to multiply our standard of living by a factor of three or four, and decrease our hours of work to the same extent?”

Theobald was one of the 35 mostly leftwing intellectuals, activists, and technologists who formed the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, which sent a highly publicized open letter to President Johnson in 1964. The letter quickly passed over the “revolutions” in weaponry and human rights to the one that most excited the writers: the “cybernation revolution.” They held it responsible for a list of ills that sound as if it could have been written yesterday, including unemployment, inequality, and a growing number of people dropping out of a labor force that had “no place for them.” But not to worry. The “almost unlimited capacity” of the coming cybernetic economy would make all things possible. There is “no question,” they said, that “cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. . . . The economy of abundance can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic security, whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work.” Their reform agenda included a guaranteed national income and many other ambitious programs. Americans would need to invent a new way of life free of “meaningless and repetitive” toil and devoted to leisure and learning.

That a new day was dawning seemed obvious to the committee. Productivity growth had surged to a rate of more than 3.5 percent for three years running, and the writers assured the President that an even greater rate of increase “can be expected from now on.” At the same time, unemployment remained stubbornly high after the short but severe 1958 recession. The obvious explanation was that machines had displaced humans. The machines were already producing more than Americans could consume, they reasoned, and the surplus was only going to increase. It was time to shed traditional notions of economic policy and face Theobald’s challenge of abundance. “The major economic problem is not how to increase production but how to distribute the abundance that is the great potential of cybernation,” wrote the Triple Revolution authors.

A few years later, Herman Kahn, the polymath nuclear strategist who inspired Dr. Strangelove by thinking about the unthinkable, weighed in with an only slightly less audacious view of the future. In the table- and chart-laden The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-three Years (1967), he and coauthor Anthony Wiener allowed that the onrush of technology could bring authoritarian surveillance, environmental calamity, and other misfortunes, but their perspective was overwhelmingly hopeful. In their main “quantitative scenario,” members of the lower middle class would make between $82,000 and $164,000 (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in 2000 while working only two-thirds as many hours as they did in 1965. Kahn and Wiener speculated in great detail about the shape of work in this halcyon future. Perhaps the five-day workweek would endure, but the day would be reduced to seven hours, and vacations would be eight weeks long. They sketched out nine different scenarios for a four-day workweek, none involving more than 30 hours of labor.

The two writers worried that tomorrow’s leisured lower middle class would be prone to vulgar pastimes and “conservative national policies and political jingoism,” but they had little doubt that “70 or 80 percent of people [will] become gentlemen and put a great deal of effort into various types of self-development. . . . for example, a very serious emphasis on sports, on competitive ‘partner’ games (chess, bridge), on music, art, languages, or serious travel, or on the study of science, philosophy, and so on.”

Even before The Year 2000 saw print, however, the tide was turning against this brand of mid-century optimism. In response to the growing debate over technology, President Johnson had established the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, and in 1966 it delivered an un-commission-like blunt response to the notion that the United States was on the verge of economic transformation: “We dissent from this view.”

The puzzling stickiness of unemployment amid prosperity that had excited so much speculation had already vanished, the commission noted. Now, with the war in Vietnam growing, the worry was about tight labor supplies and inflation. The sudden jump in productivity that had inspired the Ad Hoc Committee’s dreams was not as significant as it had appeared and had other causes in addition to technology. Finally, a close survey of the nation’s 36 largest industries revealed that automation was not spreading nearly as quickly as anecdotal reports suggested. Sixteen of the sectors were not likely to experience any automation in the next decade.

The real problem, according to the commission and other in the expansionist camp, was that government had failed to use the fiscal techniques available to it to keep the economy expanding. They were confident that Keynesian economic tools gave government the means to this end. Daniel Bell, a commission member and a sociologist then at Columbia University, declared, “Full employment is no problem, without war, in any modern economy where the government is willing to use the fiscal powers available to it.”

Then, almost in an instant, the debate ended.

Thanks to LBJ’s war, unemployment dropped to 3.4 percent (a rate it would not approach again until last year). The Vietnam war, civil rights, and other issues now occupied center stage. America got a taste of the abundance that had excited so much speculation, but it didn’t seem so delicious. A distaste for materialism had been growing during the 1950s, and with the rise of counterculture and the New Left, it broke with full force. Automation and the computer, once viewed with a mixture of fear and hope, increasingly seemed instruments of the power structure. At the University of California at Berkeley, notes historian Steven Lubar, the Free Speech movement made the computer punch card a symbol of the depersonalization and regimentation the students felt all around them. Some burned their course registration punch cards along with their draft cards.

The pivot was complete by 1972, when the Club of Rome’s famous report, The Limits to Growth, decisively changed the terms of debate. In its quest for prosperity, the report warned, humankind was ravaging the planet and racing toward economic collapse. The abundance that had seemed so tantalizingly close only a few years before now looked like poisoned fruit. The computer and automation did not figure directly in this new drama, even though the book derived much of its authority from the fact that it was based entirely on a computer simulation. Population growth and resource depletion were the new threats. Industry, once the focus of so much concern, now became for many an agent of evil. Pollution and other ills needed to be heavily regulated and taxed, and if industry suffered and jobs were lost, so be it. Automation no longer seemed such a bad idea. When factory jobs slid away, politicians looked abroad for culprits, despite economists’ evidence of automation’s impact. It was easier to blame Japan. Today, it’s easier to blame China—or Europe or Mexico.

Four years after the publication of The Limits to Growth, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched a little startup in a garage in Cupertino, California, that would put the computer back on the side of the angels. As the debate that had lapsed in the mid-1960s revived, the computer and the internet emerged as instruments of liberation and creativity. Utopia beckoned once again.

Remember the Long Boom, cyber-utopianism, and the Twitter revolution? It was easy to see the new technologies of the late 20th century as benign world-changers in part because they didn’t immediately threaten jobs. McKinsey & Co. estimates that the PC created 16 million net new jobs in its first four decades, mostly in occupations outside of technology, from financial analysts to call center operators. Yet beneath the glittery surface, wages stagnated, workers left the labor force, and inequality grew. Obvious signs of the machines’ impact started to show in the wake of the severe 1973-74 recession, just a few years after the debate over automation was cut short. MIT economist David Autor called it labor market “polarization”: Wage gains were now going disproportionately to workers at the top and bottom of the “income and skill distribution,” while those in the middle, with jobs more subject to automation, suffered.

Today, the pendulum has swung back toward Norbert Wiener’s dire view. Despite an unemployment rate of 3.6 percent and a long stock market boom, there is a sense of things going wrong. Wages have been rising very slowly, inequality rankles, and segments of the population are in deep distress. And now, some say, robots are stealing our jobs. Nobody is safe. “Will We Still Need Novelists When AI Learns to Write?” a Financial Times headline recently asked. In 2018, Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang predicted that within a few years a million truck drivers would be thrown out of work by autonomous vehicles. “That one innovation,” he declared, “will be enough to create riots in the street.” There are still plenty of tech enthusiasts, such as Peter H. Diamandis, author of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (2014). And there are also Triple Revolution die-hards, now called “post-workists,” who argue that automation will bring down capitalism and clear the way for a beneficent socialism. From the far Left comes British writer Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019).

The academic world has also entered the fray. MIT economist Daron Acemoğlu, in research with a variety of collaborators, has done some of the foundational work on the impact of automation. Like his colleague David Autor, who argues that labor market polarization “is unlikely to continue very far” into the future, Acemoğlu takes a relatively optimistic view of automation. Other recent academic works include John Danaher’s Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work (2019) and Carl Benedikt Frey’s The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (2019).

Frey helped reignite the pessimistic case as the coauthor of a 2013 Oxford University study that concluded that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being automated away in the foreseeable future. Other well-publicized studies don’t offer much more comfort. In 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute gave a midpoint estimate of 23 percent by 2030, though it said that new jobs and occupation switching by workers would greatly reduce the impact, just as Reuther and others had hoped in the 1950s.

The best of the new books on the dark side are those whose authors don’t succumb to millenarian despair. In The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015), software entrepreneur Martin Ford makes a strong case that technology will eliminate many jobs. Nevertheless, he holds out hope that people with few attractive employment prospects, when provided with a guaranteed annual income, may be freed to pursue entrepreneurial ideas or a refined sort of leisure. Economist Tyler Cowen is more granular and imaginative—and therefore somewhat less encouraging—in Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (2013). Those who can collaborate adeptly with the new “genius machines” will prosper, he predicts, while the bulk of the population just manages to get by providing services to this growing affluent class, consoled by a declining cost of living and increasingly available “cheap fun.”

Today’s truest dystopians cite the specter of artificial intelligence run amok, with genetic engineering and other technologies sometimes stirred in. Elon Musk called artificial intelligence humanity’s “biggest existential threat” and other luminaries in science and technology have issued equally alarming warnings. Popular historian Yuval Noah Harari paints a vivid picture of civilizational collapse before the onslaught of algorithms in his bestselling Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017). Harari believes that liberal humanism and all other value systems may fall before the worship of data flow—something he calls “dataism.” “If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system. . . . Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.”

Is this time different? Or are we seeing only another turn in a cycle of speculation about the future?

Neither proposition is entirely on target. The seers of the 1950s and ’60s got a few things partly right, and we can learn from those successes, just as we can learn from the failures. They put their fingers on some of the right issues even if their predictions about how they would play out were badly flawed. As for today’s seers, there is every reason to think they will have the same mixed record.

The mid-century thinkers were partly correct about productivity. Overall, the U.S. economy has a dismal record on this score. Since the 1960s, labor productivity has generally grown at an anemic annual rate of two percent or less. However, productivity in the manufacturing sector, where automation is most easily implemented, rose at close to the three percent rate that caused so much excitement in the 1960s. The story of U.S. manufacturing since that time looks at least a little like what the Ad Hoc Committee and others suggested it would be for the whole economy. Output rose briskly, but manufacturing jobs shrank as a share of total employment; during the dot-com bust of 2000, the number of jobs began to drop in absolute terms (though there has been a slight increase in the past ten years). Yet even this partially successful forecast comes with an asterisk, because quite a few of those jobs—a majority of them, some economists say—were lost to outsourcing and trade, not automation.

Which brings us to leisure. On the face of it, the mid-century seers look like fools. Far from falling, the labor force participation rate rose, and today, at 61 percent, it stands five points above its mid-century rate. The length of the average workweek hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years, but because some groups are working a lot more hours and the number of two-worker families rose, the old visions of carefree Americans dabbling in philosophy between tennis matches sound like a bad joke.

Yet one group has seen a substantial increase in leisure: the elderly. They are retiring earlier, living longer, and are a growing share of the population. The 65-and-over demographic has nearly doubled in size, growing from nine percent of the total when the Triple Revolution was trumpeted to 16 percent today. A man who retired at age 65 in 1960 could expect to enjoy another 13 post-work years; today, most men have already hit their easy chairs by 65, and they can look forward to another 18 years of Social Security checks. This was a revolution that was barely talked about, even though the demographic future was one of the few things that could be discerned with reasonable clarity. Advances in medicine guarantee that the elderly will absorb a significant share of any new leisure that machines yield in the future.

Artificial intelligence poses a qualitatively different challenge, threatening finally to realize the dreams and nightmares of mid-century America. The automation that writers such as David Riesman saw sweeping through the white-collar workforce could finally be coming, along with the computer-dominated society some envisioned. But the chances are that our powers of foresight and imagination haven’t grown much in seven decades.

What lessons can we draw from the record of the mid-century prophets of automation? Here are a few:

Tomorrow will not look like today. For all their emphasis on radical future change, many seers conveniently assumed that a few key things would not change. The Ad Hoc Committee and other futurists thought that the robust productivity increases of their time were a permanent feature of the economy. It is a category of mistake that is often repeated. When unemployment remained high in the long hangover after the Great Recession, for example, even some of the more sober-minded futurists concluded that technological change would likely prevent it from ever falling significantly. Unemployment is now 3.6 percent, a rate not seen since the days of the mid-century prophets.

Everything takes longer than you think. Change is often slower than anticipated, and adjustment easier. The inroads of automation into white-collar employment predicted decades ago look more imminent today, but they largely remain over the horizon. Many new technologies take time to develop and integrate into the economy, and some never make it. Autonomous vehicles were supposed to own the roads by now, but their delivery date keeps receding into the future. Corporations, meanwhile, don’t seem to be pouring more money into technology. David Autor points out that after rising steadily as a percentage of gross domestic product, investment in information processing equipment and software dropped during the dot.com bust two decades ago and has not resumed its upward march.

Change is unevenly distributed. Technology enthusiasts like to quote science fiction writer William Gibson’s line, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” The assumption is that it will soon spread everywhere, but in the 70 years since the first automation crisis began, that has not been borne out.

“Acceleration” is a buzzword. People have been talking excitedly about the acceleration of technological change at least since the Industrial Revolution and the idea is liberally sprinkled throughout the current debate. While bursts of speed in particular technologies are often dramatically visible, and it is mandatory to genuflect before Moore’s Law, reliable metrics of long-term broad-based acceleration are hard to find. Has the world changed more rapidly in the 70 years since 1950 than it did in the seven decades from 1880 to 1950, which brought the automobile, electrification, and airplanes? Indeed, some economists argue that our rate of innovation has slowed. Talk of accelerating change is like the pop-ups on travel websites that tell you 36 people have booked rooms at this hotel today—usually meant to excite a reaction. It’s enough to know that change is occurring rapidly.

“Automation” is an abstraction. While it is important to talk about this thing called “automation,” it is also true that we deal with each manifestation of it separately, which makes the challenge more manageable. Artificial intelligence has the potential to eliminate many jobs, and it will raise many difficult questions. What kind of work should we hand over to machines, and which decisions should we empower them to make? How can moral and ethical questions be answered in algorithms? These are questions we will have to answer in deciding, for example, how to regulate facial recognition technology, program autonomous vehicles, and use artificial intelligence in medicine. Each case has its tradeoffs and dilemmas.

Technology is not destiny. This should be obvious but is often forgotten. Just because a technology exists doesn’t mean it will be widely or quickly embraced, or that it will be left unregulated. Civilian nuclear power has been stopped in its tracks. Many states do not allow speed cameras. While the broad power of technological change is undeniable, individual technologies can be shaped and redirected. Daron Acemoğlu and Pascual Restrepo write that artificial intelligence can be used to create technologies that enhance human productivity or that eliminate jobs. It is a market failure caused by the dominance of a handful of technology firms bent on labor-killing innovations, they argue, that the latter is currently favored. Why are both treated equally by our tax and legal systems?

A healthy skepticism about the rhetoric surrounding today’s automation debates should not prevent anyone from taking the questions posed by the rise of artificial intelligence and other technologies with great seriousness. Fast or slow, unevenly or not, they are coming. The grandiloquence of the mid-century Episcopal clergyman Francis Sayre may elicit a chuckle even today. Still, he was right when he said that technological change requires us to decide what kind of society we want.

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