Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 113

Globalists Don’t Exist

One morning I woke up to realize I was the enemy. I had spent my life feeling largely outside of domestic political issues in Britain, Europe or America. I was always either an immigrant or an émigré: from leaving the USSR as a nine month old, to moving stateless around Europe as a toddler, then being naturalized by Britain as a child but leaving again as a teenager, in order to drop by as a student and then depart again heading to Berlin, Prague, Moscow, while most of my family were in the United States and Ukraine. I hardly ever voted because I felt it wasn’t my right to get so involved in my host countries’ affairs.

When I came back to London as a father, I was surprised to see it had changed. Part of the reason I had originally left was a sense that Britain was ultimately a closed sort of place. Now, suddenly, London was full of perpetual migrants of all walks of life.

Before I had been seen by the Brits as a harmless oddity. Now I was part of something coherent and threatening, especially in the context of Brexit. “The problem for people like you is…” a leading Brexiteer lectured me. “It must be hard for people like you…” a Brexit activist consoled me. “Can’t you tell Brexit happened because of people like you…” a philosopher scolded me. It was confusing. What “people” did they mean? Slowly it crystalized: they meant I was a “Globalist” rather than a “Localist.” I had been cast as one side in an increasingly popular political framework, both in Britain and the United States, which divvied up the landscape into a cultural clash between patriots and rootless cosmopolitans, communitarians and citizens of nowhere. A Globalist—that’s who I had been my whole life! I thought I had simply been Awkward.

But the closer I peered at the Localist versus Globalist divide, the more it started to dissolve.

Take the economic part of the portrayal, which purports to pit national economic priorities against the interests of international finance. But funders of Localist movements have a striking tendency to live or base their businesses in offshore tax havens, whether it is Brexit referendum campaign funder Arron Banks, the Brexit-backing newspaper moguls the Barclay brothers, or “nationalist heroes”  like Vladimir Putin. What patriots! It isn’t financial globalism these stalwart defenders of the Somewheres dislike; it’s the idea that there might be a global way to regulate their cash they find objectionable.

Then there was the math. Dividing up politics into Globalists versus Localists implies that they are somehow equal groups. But the majority of people still feel themselves as belonging to one nation or another. Unlike more evenly split Left versus Right fights over economics, or clashes over social issues like abortion, there will always be overwhelmingly more people on the “local” side. The frame is a spin doctor’s sleight of hand—a way of redefining a minuscule minority as a threatening majority to secure electoral victory for unrelated causes.

And then there was the way the local versus global story seemed to assume the existence of an abstract, Globalist identity. This hasn’t been my experience at all. As a child, I’d spent some time at an international school full of people from all sorts of countries. The result was everyone accentuated their national stereotypes in order to define themselves. When one moves from country to country, something similar happens: you become an expat—more of the native self you might have ever been. The only time I have been English is when I lived “abroad.”

What I’ve found, however, is that as one moves, one begins to see how random national identities are, how accidental it is to inherit one and not another. This can make it harder to be fanatical about identity. But whenever I have to do anything meaningful, whether write or raise a family, I find that I can only do so by acting through a language and its baggage. Even the mere act of speaking draws you into a tunnel of all that was said before in that language—all that is imprinted on it—and you realize you can express yourself through it only by giving yourself up to it, and then pushing away from it. To give a tiny example: Even though I have nothing at all personally linking me with the British Empire, whenever I speak British English, its history—or rather the history of how people talk about it, whether with pride or disgust—flows through my mouth, as if it were somehow part of my own past. This could lead to confusion. When I lived in Scotland I was frequently rebuked by Scots for all the sins of the English against them. It would take a while to explain that while I sounded English, I really wasn’t. But I still felt weirdly guilty nonetheless, as if the evils had been soaked up in the language.

Perhaps some sort of Globalist identity exists in corporate speak, or in the dryer bits of academia, but it’s not fulfilling—not something you could communicate to your children. When I (attempt to) raise my children, I speak to them in different languages. If I speak to them in English, there is always the imprint of English schools and universities I attended, with their hundreds of years of class games and self-loathing. And when I talk to them in Russian, out come all the hundreds of years of Russian children’s stories and poems I was weaned on by my parents, mixed with the lingering anxiety and verbal tremors of Jewish fears of pogroms.

As my children become more self-aware I see them toy with ways to define themselves. Are they English? Russian? Jewish? Ukrainian? European? How to be all and none at the same time—and thus true to themselves?

I started to wonder who else had shared this experience. How had they resolved it? I began to look around for a book for guidance. I searched among contemporaries, but it was when I received a copy of Gaito Gazdanov’s The Buddha’s Return that I found a clue.

For those not familiar, Gazdanov was one of the most intriguing of the Russian White émigré writers. He fought in the Russian Civil War, moved to Paris in his late teens, drove a cab, and lived in great poverty until he was discovered as a writer. He always wrote in Russian despite spending most of his life in France. Gazdanov has been rediscovered in English recently, thanks to Pushkin Press, where Borys Karetnyk’s translation captures his semi-quaver of sarcasm perfectly.

The Buddha’s Return is an unusually structured book. The main detective plot appears only halfway through the story when the narrator is accused of murder (only to be finally cleared utterly by chance). Its real subject is migration and identity. It plays out among the White Russian émigrés in Paris, whose differing fates reveal the randomness of social roles. The super-rich are left beggared, only to then become rich again by accident; criminals fake noble pasts; vagabonds take on the airs and graces of novelized aristocrats; and penniless writers provide fake biographies for those who want to recreate themselves.

The narrator is a student incapacitated by the relative nature of identity—“this aggregate of absurd, random conventions”:

I saw myself as a composer, a miner, an officer, a laborer, a diplomat, a tramp . . . so I began to believe I really had no idea who I might be the very next day.

These metamorphoses mean that he is ultimately unable to focus himself enough to feel or act, unable to suspend his own disbelief about any role he might inhabit. This has led to the destruction of an important love affair. In order to be in a relationship, you have to be prepared to take on the role of a lover.

In a nice little touch, Gazdanov has his hero endlessly working and unable to finish a paper about the Thirty Years War, the war that eventually lead to the emergence of clear national identities after the Peace of Westphalia—a paper the narrator is writing as a favor to a friend who is in turn ghost writing it for someone else.

As social roles and identities break down, so do the borders between waking and dreaming, and between reality and hallucination. Gazdanov manages all this so deftly that when the narrator is arrested for a crime he says he didn’t commit, the reader always has the aching sense he may have done the deed in a fit of delirium without realizing. Indeed the only times when the narrator stands up for who he is—clearly states what he did and didn’t do and defines where his own borders are—is when he is placed under arrest and imprisoned, first in an extended dream sequence, then in “real” life. Gazdanov is reversing Kafka’s formula. For Kafka, getting caught in the absurdities of bureaucracy, law and punishment means losing your identity. Gazdanov’s hero only affirms his identity when in prison and under interrogation, which in turn suggests that identity is itself a prison.

At the end of the book the narrator has some sort of epiphany where he glimpses everyone he has ever known in the book in a massive hallucination and, after the totality of the terrifying vision, is reborn to himself. Able to function again he can recommit to his love affair, “the only illusion for which, perhaps, it was truly worth defending myself.” But in a final twist, Gazdanov does not have his narrator becoming French or settling in Paris with his beloved. She has moved to Australia, and in the final scene the hero is again on the move. His period of not knowing who he was is only a prelude to a rebirth which in turn inspires another “long sea voyage.”

Trying to make sense of Gazdanov’s strange, slyly smiling little book, I’m tempted, or perhaps need to, interpret it as an attempt to find a way to capture a permanent migrant’s relationship with identity. What Gazdanov seems to be saying is that on the one hand identities are relative, constructed and theatrical—not “you”—but on the other hand, one has to enter into them in order to function, as there is no way to act without an identity. Ultimately however, the trick is to embrace them in order to then outstrip them, to be in a permanent process of inhabiting and then moving beyond an identity, with no final resting place.

This could all read sententious in a dead-handed, superficially “spiritual” sort of way, were it not for Gazdanov’s light, ironic tone throughout, as if what he is proposing is a game for the reader to engage with on the subject rather than some great “truth” to be preached. But irony is also the right mode for his central idea. Irony means saying something while moving beyond it at the same time, being both inside a meaning and outside it.

Which is why Globalists don’t exist. I would know, because I am one.

The post Globalists Don’t Exist appeared first on The American Interest.

IDEA, Ideas, and the New Generation

The past summer I worked in Washington alongside the offices of a new journal called IDEA. I was serving as Leon Wieseltier’s research assistant on a book project. In that capacity, I had the privilege of witnessing up-close the creation of what would likely have been a major new institution in American intellectual and cultural life. As is well known, it was not to be: Publication was called off when Wieseltier was accused of inappropriate workplace conduct that occurred a decade or more before I knew him. But I wish to testify that this embryonic institution meant a great deal to me, as an American, a woman, and a young thinker, and I want to explain why.

It is not easy to pursue an intellectual or cultural vocation in America today. The institutions that generated the ideas our parents and grandparents could take pride in have been brought low by a confluence of forces. Just as technology was “disrupting”—– that is, distorting and in some cases ruining—the universe of journals and magazines, partisan politics was setting fire to even the possibility of reasoned and independent expression. Everywhere you look, bubblegum has replaced Mozart: Jeff Koons in the art museum, Donald Trump in the White House, Buzzfeed in the newsroom. Some celebrate all of this as part of the populist revolt against a venal elite; who needs all those “snobs” anyway? But as Wieseltier put it in an introductory piece for IDEA that now will never be read, “Mobs, actual and digital, are now referred to as ‘the people’.”

Liberal and conservative journalists are still playing a necessary role when they oppose Trump. They are responding to his nastiness and his idiocy, in many cases diligently and sharply, and with alacrity. But it is, almost all of it, merely rapid response. They only deal with today’s outrages, and only those that burn hottest (and there are plenty to choose from). The most valued skill among political and cultural analysts in the mainstream media is speed. But how consistent is speed with seriousness? The pace, the vernacular, and the content of most of our public discourse is dictated by the segment of the media that is most outspoken on Twitter and Facebook. But volume and haste are poor substitutes for authority. It makes little sense to try to crowdsource truth, let alone wisdom. That is not a use of vox populi to which the Founders would have subscribed.

Compare this to the quality of publications only a few decades ago. Commentary and the New Republic and Partisan Review and Encounter and other journals challenged and educated readers at a high level. They made real intellectual demands on their readers. Today readers are not expected to be intellectually challenged, but only to be emotionally aroused—perpetually shocked and infuriated—and to respond with outrage and contempt. Yet even in those cases in which outrage and contempt are called for, they cannot be adequately or lastingly communicated in tiny digital outbursts. Feeling is not analysis.

There are perils in such tempests. We are no longer taught by example to think carefully and deliberately. We are being conditioned to devalue thoughtfulness itself. Journalists have never been more subordinated to the business needs of their institutions. And journalists, whose job is to report, are now treated with the prestige once accorded philosophers, writers, and critics. Journalism has never been more urgently needed than it is now, but more is required for the formation of intelligent public opinion. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish the zeal for justice from the lust for a Pulitzer. Readers increasingly judge a political position based on how many times it gets retweeted, not whether or not they believe it is true. But when we align ourselves with a political view, we are taking a position on how human life ought to be lived, even if all we mean to do is align ourselves with a particular social group. It requires thoughtfulness. The media maelstrom often obscures the fundamental principles that are at stake in—and the depth of historical knowledge that is a condition of—our interpretation of events.

Has careful and reflective intellectual leadership ever been more in need in this country, or ever in such short supply? It’s a commonplace to bemoan the millennials’ addiction to their devices. (I tend to think that, having grown up with it, we may be a bit more wary of its pitfalls.) But our elders seem just as prone to being sucked down into the Twitterverse; indeed they created that world and, along the way, deprived us of the pedagogy and the example that we need and they had.

Young people have been scouring the digital mediaspace with little luck for intellectual and cultural leaders with the wisdom to step back from the fray, but such leaders are few and far between in the pages of the journals and magazines that once published them. Nuance requires an attention span, but the trendiest and most powerful publications are measured by the volume of clickthroughs they generate. Public discourse has become a brawl. Slogans and pithy “snackable” formulations have replaced extended analysis and deep knowledge. Who wants to grow up to be that—a clickfarmer? And this failure is politically ecumenical. Trump has one sort of mob, and liberals another. Both swim in the digital shallows that surround us all.

This brings me back to IDEA. It was intended to be a place where real thinkers and real thought were given a platform. Four of its six staffers were women; no one, so far, has mentioned in published commentary that the office was overwhelmingly female. I noticed this because I had spent years surrounded by female professors and peers who were often visibly intimidated by their male counterparts. I had been searching for female role models with sharp minds and commanding postures. It was exhilarating to be surrounded by women who honored the values I thought had been all but lost in this country. There was nothing defensive about their integrity: They understood the power and seriousness of their project, and they happened to be women. It was both a relief and an honor to work near them and learn from them. Such was my experience in an office with Leon Wieseltier. Every young woman deserves the chance to work in such a context.

The whiteboard in the IDEA office showed names like Breyer, Kagan, Applebaum, Faust, Grossman, Wideman, Ozick, Wilentz, Wu, Snyder, Homans, Perl—I could go on. This was what I had been looking for: a political and cultural publication that honored thoughtfulness. IDEA maintained that, in order to be a decent citizen, one has to be trained as a humanist. That is why, for example, Jennifer Homans’s piece about Balanchine was laid out alongside Kassem Eid’s memoir of a sarin gas attack in Syria: Both dealt with serious and complex expressions of human life. High culture prepares our souls and minds to confront hard truths. Without learning from artistic and literary masterworks, we cannot be prepared to think about the content of politics and culture, which is the mess of human life.

Clinging with thoughtless desperation to tired, prepackaged political orientations will not bring us where we need to go as a society. If we forget the serious content of politics and culture, political and cultural conversation will become tools with which we signal team membership, and little more. We will continue to confuse journalists with scholars, and we will not recognize the dreadful price of this intellectual laziness. Political and cultural conversation does not need to be perfunctory. It should not be perfunctory. And for an inspiring and hopeful two months in the offices of IDEA, it was deliciously rigorous.

During that brief period, and for the first time since November 2016, I had substantive, grounded hope for my country. But it’s gone. IDEA was blown to the ground by the very forces from which it offered respite: a man accused of making women sexually uncomfortable has received the same punishment as the most monstrous assaulters and rapists. As a survivor of sexual assault myself, and as a citizen of this country, I find the fact that nuance is once again anathema, that “Wieseltier” now appears after “Weinstein” on certain kinds of lists, both appalling and dangerous. Leon Wieseltier was just one casualty of the emotional tempests we confront without the benefit of a thoughtful anchor, but he is the one I know best.

No matter: I persist in believing that the America I encountered in IDEA’s office has not been sunk once and for all. It is too formidable, too important, too virtuous. We need it too much. Its steady, serious dedication to the values that make life meaningful will outlast this storm. I look forward to its future.

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Ukraine’s Tunisia Moment

The year for Ukrainians began with the disturbing news that the naked body of a young activist lawyer was fished out of a river in Kyiv. Her name was Iryna Nozdrovsky, and her death came after she took on the country’s corrupt legal system, seeking justice after her sister was killed in 2015 by a drunk driver. The complicating factor was that the culprit was the nephew of a prominent judge, and thus able to manipulate the system, but she prevailed. This summer, he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.

But on December 29, he requested amnesty and Nozdrovsky appeared in court to have the sentence upheld. She won again, but that day, the killer’s father said to her, “You will end badly.” Days later, she was murdered. Police charged the father, but few in Ukraine believe he will ever go to jail, even if he is guilty.

Like Iryna, Ukrainians are captive to a corrupt system and efforts to get out from under this oppression are starting to “end badly” as the current government regresses and refuses to undertake substantive judicial or political reforms. In 2014, the Euromaidan protest pushed out the pro-Russia President, Russia invaded the east, and elections brought in a wealthy cabinet minister and the self-described “reformer” Petro Poroshenko.

His initial preoccupation was to prevent economic collapse and halt Russia’s aggression, with massive financial help from the West and other donors. Some reforms occurred along the way, but now his preoccupation, and the parliament’s, is to win re-election, likely in 2019. As a result, reforms are being clawed back or sabotaged and reformers are under attack.

The next few months will make or break Ukraine’s latest struggle for the rule of law and democracy. Independent polls show that the eradication of corruption is a bigger concern among the populace than the threat of further aggression by Russia. And as the nation prepares to head to the polls next year, Iryna’s tragedy may represent Ukraine’s “Tunisia” moment, a simple narrative illustrating the lack of social justice for all but a select few. In 2010, a young Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire when police took his wares away because he could not afford bribes. His story fuelled the Arab Spring. The significance of his death was not about politics but about the venality of systemic abuse.

The IMF is withholding its next tranche of money to Ukraine in protest against the recent degrading of Ukraine’s institutions and its faltering reform agenda. For instance, the head of the newly minted National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine is being threatened, and his investigators harassed and sabotaged, since the Bureau began arresting high-profile officials last year.

Likewise, a laudably transparent process of selecting a new Supreme Court was negated when one-quarter of the judges selected, rejected by a credible Public Integrity Council, were appointed by Poroshenko anyway. The President also spurned demands for months from the IMF, European Union, United States and others to create an independent Anti-Corruption Court, then proposed a court structure that is unacceptable to donor nations.

The core of this kleptocracy is parliament. In Ukraine, the principle of immunity from libel and slander for elected officials has been perverted into blanket immunity for its 450 deputies from criminal or civil prosecutions unless a majority of parliamentarians vote to allow charges to be laid. This is not immunity—an effort to protect free speech, as in the Westminster system—but impunity and a license to flout laws and loot the nation.

As a result, crooks and oligarchs pay fortunes for seats to acquire parliamentary protection so that every election cycle, the country is “sold” to the highest bidders. These days, insiders estimate that a seat goes for roughly $2 million in bribes, which means that, theoretically, the country can be “bought” for about $900 million—a bargain given that parliamentarians and their oligarch backers have total access to the national purse, courts, and government contracts.

As such, Ukraine is not a government. It is a criminal organization. Voter bribery with oligarch money is widespread, and the result is that oligarchs directly and indirectly control more than a majority of the seats in the parliament. By contrast, there are only three dozen reformers in Ukraine’s parliament, or about eight percent.

The removal of blanket parliamentary immunity, along with judicial reform, is essential. As Mohammad Zahoor, the Pakistani-born investor and publisher of the Kyiv Post has put it: “If [parliamentary] immunity is gone, the motivation or gold rush would be finished and the only people who will run for parliament will be those trying to pass laws that will do something for the country, rather than those who have business meetings and sell their votes by sitting there.”

As progress stalls, protesters are already hitting the streets. Following an October protest, Poroshenko announced he would remove parliamentary immunity. He proposed a draft law to do so, which the parliament approved overwhelmingly in days. But he claims this measure cannot be enacted until 2020—after the next elections—which means Ukrainians will be asked once again to vote for reforms that will likely never arrive.

This bobbing and weaving will lead to more protests. In 2014, the government ended up hiring goons and snipers to maim and murder hundreds of peaceful student protesters, and the nation rose up. Today, Ukrainians are armed to the teeth. With the second largest army in Europe now, Russia will be kept at bay, and there are also 100,000 battle-hardened veterans back home who will help to keep the peace. Most importantly, public opinion is more united than ever against corruption—and the murders of Iryna and her sister Svitlana remain a gruesome reminder of the injustice they endure.

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Nationalist Options

As the 20th anniversary of the end of the Northern Ireland “troubles” approaches, and one year after the collapse of the region’s devolved power-sharing government, the province continues to struggle with the legacy of the 30 years of low-level warfare that resulted in more than 3,500 deaths, and the prolonged period of social underperformance and dysfunction and the failure of governance to which it has given way.

Two events, occurring within the past few weeks, illustrate the fragility of the hopes for an inclusive future and the intransigence and political calculation of those who continue to play games with the horrors of the past.

The first of these events was the screening in Belfast of a documentary film that chronicles the efforts of John Hume, the civil rights campaigner, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), member of the Westminster and European Parliaments and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to influence the policy of successive British governments by developing relationships with key politicians and administrators in Washington. Maurice Fitzpatrick, the director of the and the author of John Hume in America, the book on which it is based, tells the story of how his subject, as a young civil rights campaigner, borrowed money to attend a meeting with Senator Ted Kennedy, who, in turn introduced Hume to Congressman Tip O’Neill, the future Speaker of the House. Captivated by Hume’s vision of a future in which the sectarian divisions of the province could be transcended, a vision that Hume had outlined in articles in the Irish Times as early as 1964, these key figures, and the administrations they influenced, from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton, bought into Hume’s goals and adopted his strategies to achieve them.

Hume’s achievement was to use his American contacts to influence British policy in Washington, DC, the environment in which its influence was most vulnerable. As Fitzpatrick tells the story, Hume’s triumph was to see the vision he had outlined in his Irish Times articles realized in the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and the power-sharing institutions that it established. Ten years after Thatcher bowed to the inevitable and granted the Irish Republic a voice in key decision-making institutions within the province, representatives of her successor’s government sat down with the leaders of the paramilitaries against whom it had fought to negotiate an end to the province’s civil war.

Two decades after the ceasefire, Northern Ireland’s divisions haven’t gone away, as the second of these events indicates. The announcement, earlier last week, of the resignation of a Sinn Fein Member of Parliament illustrates the endurance of sectarian feeling in Northern Ireland politics and the continuing significance of international contexts in surmounting local divisions.

The resignation of Barry McElduff, MP for West Tyrone, is linked to the legacy of one of the worst mass shootings of the “troubles.” On January 5, 1976, after a sequence of increasingly deadly tit-for-tat sectarian killings, a bus carrying 12 textile workers was stopped by a uniformed man near Kingsmill, a small town in County Armagh. A further 11 armed men stepped into view, separated the only Catholic worker from his colleagues, instructed him to leave the scene, and executed the remaining 11 Protestants. It took 38 years for a proper inquest to be conducted, and no one has ever been charged in connection with the murders. Nevertheless, on January 5, 2018, the 42nd anniversary of this massacre, McElduff tweeted a comic video of himself balancing on his head a loaf of bread carrying the branding of the Kingsmill Bakery.

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Former Sinn Fein MP Barry McElduff (YouTube screengrab)

Unionists could hardly believe what they were seeing. The sole survivor of the sectarian executions, Alan Black, who had been shot 18 times in the attack, expressed his horror that the massacre could become a subject for humor and accused the politician of dancing on the graves of the dead. But McElduff’s colleagues in Sinn Fein were slower to see any difficulty, and the video was retweeted by the former Lord Mayor of Belfast, a well-known advocate of progressive politics and social inclusion. Recognizing something of the significance of the perception problem, McElduff then denied that his prank had any relationship to the anniversary of the massacre—that his clowning with a Kingsmill loaf on the anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre was just a terrible coincidence—and deleted the video while expressing remorse and regret for the pain that he had caused. But it took his party three days to condemn the video and issue him with a three-month suspension.

It was at that point that, unusually, Sinn Fein lost control of the media narrative. On January 14, as unionist outrage intensified and after the nationalist-leaning Irish News noted the leniency of McElduff’s punishment, the state broadcaster in the Republic of Ireland brought Alan Black on to RTE One, where he recounted, in detail, how his ten workmates had died. The interview reminded southern voters of Sinn Fein’s long-standing connection with the largest republican terror group, the Irish Republican Army, a link that has been obscured in the party’s solid growth in recent elections in the Republic. The publicity was too much. On January 15, McElduff resigned.

It is certainly possible that McElduff’s excuses should be taken at face value. Perhaps the timing of the prank was just a horrible coincidence. But the slow speed at which his party addressed unionist concerns about the symbolism of his skylarking may be much less ambiguous. Unionist publications represented McElduff’s stunt as ridiculing the victims of an overtly sectarian massacre. The week-long delay between the offence and the resignation has contributed to the corrosion of trust that has been both a cause and consequence of the collapse of the devolved power-sharing government, and it has confirmed the fears (and prejudices) of many unionists that the largest nationalist party in the province does not care about the victims of republican terror and is insincere about building an inclusive future. But the incident also suggests that unionists may have stumbled upon their version of John Hume’s diplomatic strategy. For, if Sinn Fein’s belated response does reflect its indifference to the hesitations and fears of northern unionists, it has also highlighted its acute vulnerability to public opinion in the south. The Sinn Fein response may reveal a crucial pressure point: It is more sensitive to public opinion in the south than in the north. This suggests that unionist diplomacy should be developed in Dublin as much as in Westminster or Washington, DC.

The growth in support for Sinn Fein in recent elections in the Republic may, paradoxically, have provided unionists with an unanticipated opportunity. Unionist strategists must be calculating what they can learn from Hume’s legacy, wondering whether the best way to achieve their goals is through diplomacy rather than determined opposition, whether obstacles should be avoided rather than confronted. Unionism may need its own “southern strategy,” for, in the Republic’s traditional parties, Northern Ireland unionists may find allies—or at least co-belligerents—in their struggle against Sinn Fein. Unionist strategists may need to pick their way through the reconfiguration of Irish nationalism, realizing that the key to reconciliation in the north may first require alliances with constitutional nationalists in the south, where Sinn Fein has revealed its new weakness.

Nevertheless, as McElduff’s resignation triggers a by-election, the parties may not be planning for politics as normal. The West Tyrone constituency is overwhelmingly nationalist, and Sinn Fein won 50 percent of its votes in the last election. But there is some suggestion that in this election the traditional nationalist-unionist binary may be overturned. For unionist parties and the cross-community Alliance party appear to be uniting around the idea of a single non-partisan candidate. This candidate would have little prospect of victory, unless she or he were also to be endorsed by the SDLP. But the support of the SDLP cannot be taken for granted. After all, the West Tyrone by-election will also encourage unionists to ask why a children’s playpark in Newry, a town located about five miles from the site of the 1976 massacre, has been named after an IRA member who was arrested in possession of a gun that was used in the Kingsmill shootings—a decision that has been supported and defended by Sinn Fein as well as SDLP councillors. Recent news that Gerry Adams will be replaced as Sinn Fein president by Mary Lou McDonald will help to distance the party from the memory of the “troubles.” But, as the controversy about the naming of the children’s playground suggests, both Sinn Fein and the SDLP will need to decide how far to distance themselves from these painful memories of the past. Hume’s legacy haunts those who would build upon his achievements.

In Northern Ireland, the pantomime of politics continues, and intransigence is identified as leadership. As the two largest parties max out the sectarian headcount, and as their voter split equalizes, Sinn Fein and the DUP will win elections by motivating their base rather than by inspiring members of the “other community” with a compelling vision for a better future. Nevertheless, in West Tyrone and elsewhere in Northern Ireland, nationalists face a choice between John Hume’s legacy and that of the political representatives of the paramilitaries whom he brought to the negotiating table. McElduff’s prank illustrates the challenge—Northern Ireland’s nationalists need more than bread and circuses.

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Plebiscites Masquerading as Elections

On May 10, 1802, French voters decided in a completely free vote that Napoleon Bonaparte should be First Consul for life, and could also choose his successor.  The vote is said to have been 3,568,885 (or 99.76%) in favor of the new constitution containing these stipulations, while a mere 8,374 voted against. The sovereign will of the French nation was clear. Two-and-a-half years later, Napoleon’s wise stewardship of France was rewarded when the people—well, the 48% of eligible voters who came out to vote, at least—voted to make Napoleon Emperor by an even more impressive margin: 3,521,675 (99.93%) to 2,579 (or .07%).  Accounts differ slightly about the numbers. Electronic record keeping was in its pre-infancy and independent election monitors scarce. But the will of the people was clear. Napoleon ruled gloriously until all the rest of Europe’s rulers, and especially the Duke of Wellington, decided he had done too much conquering of other countries.

Two centuries on, there are many ways to fiddle with an election, and to do so even without international assistance. 2018 will see elections on every continent where a specific (newish) technique is already being used by incumbent authoritarians who want to pretend to be more democratic than they are: simply excluding the most viable alternative candidates from the ballot. Make the election as close to a Napoleonic plebiscite as you can!

An important and very readable paper, published last June by Arch Puddington of Freedom House, includes a chapter on “validating autocracy through the ballot,” wherein he reviews the menu of options for rigging elections in the 21st Century: intimidating the opposition; besmirching the opposition via thoroughly controlled media; fostering pseudo-opposition; criminalizing protest and dissent; discarding term limits.

But why go to the trouble of holding phony elections?  Former President George W. Bush put it succinctly in a speech he delivered in New York last October, wherein he described “a noteworthy hypocrisy:”

No democracy pretends to be a tyranny. Most tyrannies pretend they are democracies.  Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy.  This has not changed, and that will not change.

So they persist—authoritarians and worse—pretending to be democracies.

Here are some of the candidates who will not be on ballots this year.

Egypt will conduct presidential elections from March 26 to 28.  But the announcement in early January by Ahmed Shafik that he will after all not be a candidate for President, has pretty much settled the race. This is important, as the United States pretends that Egypt under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a reliable and useful partner in counter-terrorism efforts, when in fact its government is fragile and incompetent. The 76-year old Shafik is a retired Air Force general, and was the military establishment’s candidate in the only fair and transparent election ever held in Egypt—the 2012 contest he narrowly lost to Mohammed Morsi, who was backed by the Muslim Brotherhood (and some secular liberals at the time).  Morsi’s chaotic presidency was terminated after a year by a military takeover led by al-Sisi, a takeover the United States government decided would not be termed a “coup” because that would oblige the U.S. under long-standing law to terminate various kinds of assistance, including especially military aid, to Cairo. Now Sisi’s government has pulled out all the stops in the playbook described by Arch Puddington, threatening Shafik with trumped up prosecutions and vicious personal attacks in the regime-controlled media. Meanwhile, the chairman of the National Election Authority Lasheen Ibrahim says he will “run the election with integrity and keep an equal distance from all candidates.”

In Cambodia, where parliamentary elections will be held in July, Prime Minister Hun Sen is taking no chances after 32 years in power. Though the country’s economy is growing, unrest over official corruption is mounting. So after receiving a scare in the 2013 elections—when the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) received 44.5% of the vote to the government party’s 49%—he has taken steps to ensure there will be no more close calls. The CNRP’s two recent leaders—Sam Rainsy and Kem Sohka—have been taken off the playing field. Rainsy was driven into exile early last year by charges of “treason” and Sohka was arrested in September. Then the party was dissolved altogether in November by order of the Supreme Court that Hun Sen controls, and more than a hundred of its political activists were banned from politics. Expect a resounding electoral victory for Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party; it has already been made clear no international monitors will be permitted.

In Venezuela, meanwhile, presidential elections are slated for December 2018, though observers expect the vote to be called earlier in the year now that the main opposition parties have been excluded from presenting candidates. Embattled president Nicolas Maduro announced last month that the Justice First, Popular Will and Democratic Action parties may not participate, after they boycotted mayoral elections in December alleging the electoral system was rigged.

Maduro had already excluded the most likely presidential contenders for his office by criminalizing dissent and wielding a very heavy police truncheon. Leopoldo Lopez, a charismatic mayor of a district in Caracas, has been jailed since 2014 for “inciting violence” at nationwide protests against Maduro’s (mis)management of the economy and manipulation of the constitution. Henrique Capriles, governor of the state of Miranda until last October and runner-up in the two previous presidential contests was last year banned from political activity for 15 years for “administrative irregularities” alleged to have occurred during his time as governor. Antonio Ledezma, mayor of Caracas until his arrest in his office one quiet day in early 2015 —by scores of armed cops shooting their guns as they apprehended him—recently slipped out of detention and fled to Europe.

Vladimir Putin plans to be easily re-elected to a fourth term as president of Russia on March 18, and there will be at least three nominally opposition candidates on the ballot: the Alf Landon of Russian presidential elections, Vladimir Zhironovsky of the ironically named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and the new leader of the old Communist Party, Pavel Grudinin, who happens to be a recent member of Putin’s United Russia. As Putin has yet to debate an election opponent in any election, don’t expect much of an issues campaign from either of these two. Nor from Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of the former mayor of St Petersburg who gave Vladimir Putin his start in politics as deputy mayor, who herself is something of a cross between Ivanka Trump and Paris Hilton—famous for being famous, and for being related to someone.

The real opposition has been excluded or murdered. Boris Nemtsov, the former Deputy Prime Minister and critic of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, was shot dead on February 27, 2015, as he walked near his home close to the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader who captured almost 30% of the vote in the 2013 Moscow mayoral race and has shown a consistent ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people in cities across Russia, is being excluded on legalistic grounds, citing his numerous previous arrests and short-term incarcerations on various charges. The upshot for Russia and the forthcoming election?  “By refusing to allow any genuine political competition,” Navalny told Newsweek last year, “Putin is doing everything he can to ensure that he will be forced out by other means.”

Azerbaijan will hold a kind of presidential election on October 17.  If history is any guide, a scruffy assortment of European politicians, having had their palms greased by the largesse of the Azerbaijani state energy company will praise the exercise as legit. And there won’t have been any real contest at all, as genuine opposition politicians such as Ali Karimli, leader of the Popular Front Party, have been excluded from the country’s media and kept off the ballot repeatedly

And Rwanda, too, will hold parliamentary elections in 2018, but don’t expect much in terms of actual politics. Expect instead that some of the 12 seats (of 80) in the legislature now held by opposition parties will be lost, as President Paul Kagame’s victory in last year’s presidential election—a bracing and Napoleonic 98.79% of the vote—reflects the system’s intolerance for dissent and political pluralism.

These are just a few of the elections to not take very seriously this year. And there will be more in 2019, rest assured. After all, most tyrannies pretend to be democracies.

The post Plebiscites Masquerading as Elections appeared first on The American Interest.

The Great Transformer

What does a book written during World War II by a Jewish refugee from Austria-Hungary tell us about the 2016 election, the abiding threat of fascism, the retreat from globalization and how, in the past decade, the culture wars have been transformed into class wars? Quite a bit, as it turns out.

The book is The Great Transformation, subtitled The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, by Karl Polanyi; it was published in 1944, by which time the author, who had lost his job as an editor in Vienna when Hitler came to power, was safely ensconced at Bennington College in Vermont. He would be hounded from there to Canada by political forces not entirely unlike the ones he had known in Vienna, but that would come a decade later. He never published anything else of consequence, but The Great Transformation is still in print, adorned in its latest edition (2001) by lengthy forwards courtesy of Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and sociologist Fred Block. There is much obscure political and economic history here; the reader will learn more about the “Speenhamland laws” in 18th century Berkshire (a guaranteed-income scheme) than perhaps strictly necessary. But the book remains relevant—even timely—because of the explanation it offers for the persistent socio-political pathologies of our place and time—all traceable, Polanyi argues, to the socially destructive powers of unregulated market economies.

“Our thesis” the author announces on the first page of the first chapter, “is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of a society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.” Those who envisioned this “stark utopia”—early liberal economic theorists like Ricardo, Bentham, and Jeffrey Townsand—are the chief culprits in Polanyi’s narrative, but his criticism applies as well to more modern champions of unregulated markets like Lionel Robbins, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek, whose Road to Serfdom appeared in the same year as Polayni’s magnum opus.

From Polanyi’s perspective, all of them share a fundamental misapprehention of human nature, and as a result overestimate the benefits markets provide and underestimate the damage they cause—particularly the atomizing, radicalizing effects of sudden, market-driven social change. Human beings, he argues, are not driven primarily by economic motives, as the “liberal” market theorists assume; we are primarily social beings who value wealth only insofar as it ensures “social standing, social claims, social assets.” But markets erode institutions and transform “all the natural and human substance of society into commodities.” In modern terms, they create wealth while burning social capital. So the problem becomes one with which modern, free-market conservatives still struggle: how to maintain the institutions of society—family, community, law, religion, and human dignity—against enormous centrifugal forces that markets exert; how to prevent unregulated markets from devouring the social foundations upon which they and civilization itself depend.

This fundamental tension between rapid economic change and social stability is, Polanyi thinks, is the key dilemma of market economies. If left unaddressed it will loose the radical furies of both Left and Right—at all times and everywhere. He would have scoffed at the idea of American exceptionalism. No society that yields to the dogma of unregulated markets, he warns, will be immune.

Here, for example, is Polanyi’s description of how fascism arises out of disruptive, market-driven social change: Suddenly, without warning, political order, which seemed impervious, breaks down. The signs are “the spread of irrationalist philosophies, racialist aesthetics, anti-capitalistic demagogy, heterodox currency views, criticism of the party system, (and) widespread disparagement of the ‘regime’ or whatever was the name given the existing democratic setup.” This begins spontaneously but is soon usurped by organized fascist forces that “brush aside what seemed until then the overwhelming strength of democratic governments.” Political elites of the old order and their intellectual outriders are easily outmaneuvered.

Sound familiar? It would to Steve Bannon. It reads like a notional point paper for Trump’s 2016 campaign.

In Polanyi’s view, markets of the sort that arose to constitute the socio-economic expression of modernity were not, pace Rousseau and Marx, primeval. Premodern societies had been based on principles of reciprocity and redistribution. Survival demanded cooperation and the redistribution of such goods as a subsistence economy could produce, and customs evolved to reinforce these practices. With the coming of the machine, old communal structures and norms were destroyed, and with them the security and status of individuals suddenly immersed in a new disorder. Modern markets, then, arose from a coincidence of economic, technological, and historical factors, but once arisen were shaped by political energies designed to manage them. Modern markets, were hybrids of happenstance and design.

What could not be well managed was the social damage unregulated markets inflicted—damage great enough to be evident even to the dimmest Berkshire squire or London parliamentarian. The reaction was almost immediate, but attempts at mitigation—anti-union laws, restrictions on movement from country to city, work houses, guaranteed income schemes—often made the situation worse. Polanyi calls this process of action/reaction the “double movement,” and he argues that it best explains the vacillations of political history in the industrial age. Still, “human society would have been annihilated but for the protective countermoves which blunted the action of this self-destructive mechanism.”

Only later came the dogmatics and intellectual apologists to discover virtue in the “iron laws” which, as they supposed, governed these events. Confronted with a suffering and ravaged society, these rationalist champions of free markets steeled themselves against pity, much as their counterparts do in our time. Starvation, wrote Jeffrey Townsend, would cull the ranks of the poor, ensuring full employment for those who survived at whatever wages were offered. Hunger, according to Jeremy Bentham, would conduce to public order without need for the arbitrary power of the state. The inexorable logic that forced wages to subsistence levels could be mitigated, argued Ricardo, if the laboring classes redefined subsistence, or, as he put it, “raised their standard of wretchedness.”

These men weren’t monsters, Polanyi assures us, merely ideologues, although, of course, the monster and the ideologue are often indistinguishable in practice. If the fruits of markets were to be enjoyed, then the consequences must be borne—although not (and here again the contemporary echoes are obvious) by the intellectuals themselves. Thus, as the 19th century unfolded, the new “liberal” economic order with its hallmarks—free trade, the balance of power, and especially the Gold Standard—was destroying what individuals most valued and substituting nothing but a mad, soul-parching scramble for economic growth. The resulting discontent was controlled for a century, sometimes by persuasion, sometimes by compromise, and often enough by force. But the pressures were building, only to explode into two world wars.

Realism vs. Millennialism: Polanyi and Marx

There is a temptation to compare Polanyi to that great scourge of capitalist economies, Karl Marx, but the differences are crucial. Marx was a secular millennialist, very much in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He prophesied a corporal redemption—an end of days in the here and now—which would come about as the inevitable product of historical forces already at work. That gave his theory great appeal in an age that had ceased to believe in the consolation of a heavenly paradise, but it made Marx a poor guide to politics or, as it turned out, to the future.

Polanyi comes from a far different philosophical tradition. His antecedents are the classical political realists—Thucydides, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Madison—and he begins, as they did, with the premise that human nature is both immutable and flawed. For such defective creatures, the Millennium must remain forever out of reach. Still, we are not helpless before the “iron laws” of the classical (and many modern) economists. Nor are we adrift in the supposed currents of history being swept along toward grand Marxian culmination. We are political animals reacting to changing circumstances—and reacting well or badly depending on how in thrall we are to the economic dogma of the day. There are no ideal solutions, no “stark utopias”; the abolition of markets is as much a fantasy as their complete deregulation. We should aim toward a more modest goal: to retain most of the benefits markets provide, while mitigating the social damage they cause.

That in turn will require economic regulation and a government centralized, legimate, and powerful enough to impose it. Such a government would not abandon markets, but would intervene to cushion the impact of social disruption while carving out large areas of human autonomy. Industrial economies, Polanyi argues, “can afford to be free.” Wide areas of individual choice “must be upheld at all cost—even that of efficiency in production, economy in consumption or rationality in administration.” If this sounds like a template for what became after World War II “social democracy,” that’s because it was meant to be. Polanyi was certainly not the first to make this case, but he gave it by far its most sophisticated analytical basis to date, and at a pregnant moment in the history of Europe.

But it also begged the central questions: Who would uphold these wide areas of individual choice, and at how great a cost? And might this sudden end to restraint on individual choice be as socially destabilizing as the unregulated markets Polanyi was determined to curb?   The author appears to leave these dilemmas to the democratic process, which—at least in our country—has conspicuously failed to resolve them. Polanyi may have anticipated as much. There is a note of desperation in the final pages of The Great Transformation, as if the author doesn’t really trust the great mass of humanity to do what needs to be done. If so, his misgivings are more realistic than his recommendations. He admits that bureaucracies must grow in a regulatory state, and that this will threaten individual freedom. His solution is to create public tribunals to draw the boundaries between liberty and authority and “make rights effective”; but he doesn’t tell us how these tribunals would be chosen or empowered, or what freedoms specifically they would uphold. God and the devil keep company in the details, and these he leaves to our imagination. A proud realist about the past, when he looks to the future Polanyi seemingly takes council of his hopes rather than his expectations.

Still, compared to other, more recent contenders for the title of world-historic thinker, the predictive value of Polanyi’s darker vision stands up well. Marx’s inevitable triumph of the working class has been replaced by fears of the ultimate triumph of the machine. Capitalism hasn’t perished for a lack of entrepreneurship, as Shumpeter thought it would. Huntington’s final battle between the West and a potent Islamic monolith of his own invention became instead an Islamic civil war touched off by our blundering invasion of Iraq. The globalism that entranced liberal thinkers like Thomas Friedman in the 1990s is now everywhere in retreat. It’s an occupational hazard of punditry. To explain is to be admired; to predict is to be found out.

Not so much Polanyi. On the contrary, to the modern reader The Great Transformation can seem prescient—almost a description of recent American political history and the 2016 election. In that campaign the regulars of both parties were wedded to the “liberal” economic order: globalization, free trade, unimpeded movement of labor and capital, and maximum feasible deregulation. If the Democrats were more interventionist and Republicans more Darwinian, these were essentially glosses on the common wisdom of the day, including what now seems the naive assumption that whatever social dislocations might be caused (indeed, had been caused) by the rapid movement toward unregulated free markets would be more than offset by the vast wealth that such markets created.

Only the outliers grasped that something more profound was afoot. On the Left it was Bernie Sanders, which wasn’t surprising. He had spent a lifetime advocating for the losing side in the new economic order. Discontent and its exploitation had always been his stock-in-trade. On the opposite flank, those who pandered to the far Right felt the same dark energy; the more racist, xenophobic, and irrational they became, the faster their ratings climbed. But what explains the political metamophosis of Donald Trump? How did this shallowest of men intuit the existence of so fundamental an anger in the sort of Americans he didn’t know in places he’s never been? It seems those who had already struck gold mining the nether reaches of the America psyche whispered it in his ear. In any case, grasp it he did.

Polanyi would have seen it coming. He had hoped in the wake of World War II that societies would “transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.” But he recognized, too, that the outcome might be the renewed subordination of society to the market. Then came the end of the Cold War and the reemergence of the free-market dogmatics, culminating in the rush toward globalization, a movement both glorified and popularized by, among others, Tom Friedman and his bestseller The World is Flat. Friedman’s was the dogma of free-market economics on a universal scale, the ruthlessness of his vision partly disguised by the folksiness of his style. Nations that adopted free trade, abolished restrictions on the movement of capital, labor, and technology, and abandoned (as Friedman’s conservative critics pointed out) much of their political and cultural sovereignty would prosper. This was the “golden straightjacket”—the iron law of free markets. Those who tried to protect domestic industries, or maintain inefficient cultural norms, or prevent changes in existing hierarchies of power and status would sink into poverty and chaos. There was more than a hint of Calvinist justice about it: Both winners and losers would be getting precisely what they deserved.

But what if this zero-sum game played out domestically, too? And what if the losers did not go quietly? That was Polanyi’s point, and is the defining political problem of our age. What if actual human beings were not ready to abandon dying communities and older social mores? What if fanciful new norms of education, professional flexibility, and ethnic and gender inclusiveness did not arise, or arise quickly or broadly enough? What if working-class white men, in particular, reacted violently to the destruction of a status based largely on gender, something their fathers and grandfathers had taken for granted? And what if all this occurred in a constitutional system (ours) that amplified the power of voters in states where the benefits of the new economic order were less apparent, and the cultural disruptions more keenly felt. That our country might fracture under those circumstances seems never to have occurred to any of the internationalist elites who dominated policymaking for five decades after World War II—not to the pragmatic “wise men” who lay the foundations of the new international order and not to the triumphalist neo-Wilsonians who later pushed them aside. And since they only talked to themselves and to each other—the latter group especially so—the resounding cracks from a fracturing society went unheard.

At the head of her class in this—as she had always been in life—stood Hillary Clinton. It was easy in 2016 to portray her as the symbol and tool of the forces that were destroying the culture of the people in the heartland—the people left behind. In important respects, that’s exactly what she was.

The Goose-Stepping Elephant in the Room

Sweeping historical visions tend to simplify reality and The Great Transformation is no exception. Despite an anthropological excursion to the South Seas to find a society in which a sharing economy was the norm, and a brief nod later to the New Deal, Polanyi’s vision is almost entirely Eurocentric. He is blind to the impacts of geography, climate, gender, ethnicity, religion, slavery, and even history itself as seen from other cultural points of view. Astonishingly, he has nothing to say about the anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of fascism in Europe and shaped his own personal history. It’s a glaring omission and deserves a closer look.

By the time Polanyi was finishing The Great Transformation, the fate of the Jews in Europe was clear. Polanyi was in England by 1934, but he spent much of the next eight years trying to extricate his Jewish family members from the outcome that he and they knew awaited them. That same year, 1934, he wrote a monograph on “The Nature of Fascism,” but neither there nor in The Great Transformation is there any mention of anti-Semitism. Not only doesn’t he mention it, Polanyi seems at pains to invent euphemisms to avoid the subject—“haute finance” when he means the great Jewish banking houses of the 19th century, and “racial aesthetic” when referring to Hitler’s murderous campaign against the Jews. Polanyi knew from personal experience the primal forces at work in Vienna and Berlin in the years after the Great War. He must have realized the implications. He simply chose not to deal with them. Why?

Polanyi’s biographer suggests that his subject considered the relatively benign fascism of Mussolini’s Italy the philosophical prototype, and the Nazi’s version no more than a vicious offshoot. But it was Hitler’s vision that prevailed in Polanyi’s Vienna, a place that took to the new “racial aesthetic” with particular enthusiasm; the signs had been unmistakable as early as 1934, when Polanyi departed. Polanyi didn’t identify as a Jew; but he would have been all too aware that self-identification was not a luxury the Nazis were prepared to allow. By 1944, as The Great Transformation took shape, the Final Solution was in full operation and Mussolini, safe for the moment in his northern Italian satrapy, was shipping Jews to the death camps as quickly as they could be indentified.

A better answer, it seems to me, is these things simply didn’t fit into Polanyi’s broader theory. They pointed to a dark and persistent source of human behavior that had nothing to do with market economies, and had existed in Europe two millennia before anyone conceived of a gold standard or freedom of trade. Racial and ethnic hatred were invigorated by economic distress, but they weren’t created by it. They could exist in prosperous times as well—a depth of evil in the human psyche that the Enlightenment never reached and which no rationalist system could comprehend.

It might be said that Polanyi was as blinded by his own ideology as the liberal market apologists he criticizes had been by theirs. They had to believe that market economics were the natural destiny of mankind because nothing else could excuse the suffering they saw around them. He had to believe the murderous ethnic hatred of the Nazis was somehow an anomaly because otherwise his system broke down. Perhaps human nature was not as straightforward as he had portrayed it; it might be darker and more complicated than a theory of market economics could comprehend. In the face of implacable unreason, the rationalist Polanyi seems to have concluded that he had no choice but to avert his gaze.

It’s a problem of political obliviousness with which anyone of my generation—or the one that came just after—should sympathize. Many of us concluded that fascism, irrationalism, xenophobia, racism, and corporatism might linger in the less enlightened outcroppings of humanity, but not in the Free World, as we were pleased to call it, and certainly not in the United States. We had watched newsreels of Mussoleni—bloated, posturing, ridiculous—addressing his Blackshirts from his Piazza Venezia balcony content in the knowledge that these were artifacts of a less sophisticated and entirely discredited past. Certainly, we thought—and continued to think until the very recent past—America would never elevate to power such a posturing buffoon.

Obviously, not so. Sadly, the greatest insight for us in revisiting The Great Transformation is the realization that, in some ways at least, ours has been no less a millennialist fantasy than Marx’s triumph of the working class.

The post The Great Transformer appeared first on The American Interest.

The Trump Presidency, Year One

January 20th, 2018, marks the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States, and the passage of a year affords an appropriate occasion for assessing his term in office thus far. In his case, however, such an assessment involves a complication: the need to distinguish between Trump the President and the Trump presidency. The two are closely related, of course, but they are also distinct: the public personality of the President has a powerful effect on, but is not the whole of, the administration over which he or she presides.

Words, although important, are not deeds. The President is the head, but far from the totality, of the federal government. And the work the federal government performs does not determine everything important that happens in the United States. Trump the President emerges from a number of accounts, not all of them of undisputed accuracy, as an unattractive personality poorly suited to the job he holds: ignorant, impulsive, indolent, and intellectually out of his depth in the Oval Office. The Trump presidency after twelve months, however, has a record of governing that stands apart—or at least semi-detached—from the office-holder’s personality. The appraisal that follows, therefore, has as its focus the presidency rather than the President.

1. Donald Trump is conducting an unusual presidency. The most obviously unusual feature of his conduct of the office is his fondness for communicating with the world by Twitter. His tweets and the responses they evoke have dominated much of the political coverage of the print media and even more of the endless hours of broadcasting by the cable news channels. He has used his tweets for, among other purposes, waging personal vendettas, and what he has tweeted has sometimes strayed into nastiness, boorishness and mendacity.

The presidential Tweets have contributed to another, and ultimately more consequential, aspect of the Trump presidency. Unlike previous Presidents, this one has not tried to broaden his base of support. Those of his predecessors elected, like him, with less than a majority of the popular vote have been particularly attentive to this task. His public pronouncements, by contrast, along with his legislative program, have offered almost nothing to Democrats or Independents. To the extent that this approach harms Republican electoral fortunes in 2018 and 2020, it will have a major effect on the Trump presidency, although it did not in 2017.

The apparent lack of interest in broadening his coalition may help to account for another unusual feature of year one of the Trump presidency: the gap between the performance of the economy and the President’s approval rating. The public judges Presidents by the economic conditions over which they preside. In this the public is generally in error: Presidents ordinarily play only a minor role in creating the economic conditions that prevail during their terms. Still, an administration’s policies are not entirely irrelevant to the health of the American economy during its time in office and Trump’s predecessors have successfully taken credit for good conditions and unsuccessfully avoided blame for bad ones.

In 2017 the American economy performed impressively well. It enjoyed, by recent standards, robust economic growth. Unemployment declined. The stock market soared, attaining heights never before achieved. Yet the Trump approval rating remained low, and for most of the year was lower than that of Barack Obama’s over a comparable period, who inherited, and after a year in office presided over, considerably worse economic circumstances than did Donald Trump.

In addition, the 45th President has played an unusually modest role in his party’s legislative agenda. For its first major proposal, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, virtually all of his predecessors going back to the beginning of the last century would have taken command of the issue: farming out different parts of it to the relevant departments for analysis and drafting, assembling their work into a bill in the White House, summoning Congressional leaders to plan a legislative strategy, and then lobbying Members of Congress and speaking to the nation on behalf of the measure.

Trump did almost none of this, and reports suggested that he was not familiar with the details of the bill that Congress considered, which failed to gain the votes necessary for passage. For the other principal legislative initiative, the tax bill (which did pass), the President was not much more active. The first year of the 115th Congress more closely resembled the working of the federal government in the 19th century, when the legislative branch was more powerful and the executive less so, than any previous Congress in living memory. In this way Trump’s conduct of the presidency had more in common with constitutional monarchies, or the presidencies of Germany and Israel, whose occupant serves as the head of state but not the head of government, than with the way in which recent American Presidents have defined the job. The “energy in the executive” that Alexander Hamilton commended was occasionally in evidence in 2017, albeit mainly in the Twitterverse rather than in the service of passing laws.

2. Donald Trump has governed as a Republican President. The President’s capture of the Republican presidential nomination resembled a hostile takeover in the business world. As the Republican presidential candidate he took a number of positions on major issues that departed from the party’s orthodoxy. The principal accomplishments of his first year in office, however, fall well within the bounds of that orthodoxy. A tax bill that lowers corporate rates, the repeal of regulations that business considers counterproductive, the appointment of conservative judges to the federal bench (including one to the Supreme Court): these are all measures that any Republican President would have proposed.

In foreign policy the gap between the President and his presidency is perhaps widest. By most accounts Trump’s encounters with foreign leaders, especially those who rely on the United States and on whom the United States in turn relies for cooperation in promoting American interests around the world, have not gone well. The President’s international interlocutors have not, it seems, come away with an impression of him as a knowledgeable, dependable chief executive. On the other hand, he has conducted a more or less orthodox Republican foreign policy. He has not, at least thus far, withdrawn from NATO, NAFTA, or the World Trade Organization. His National Security Strategy, issued last month, differs from his predecessor’s view of the world in ways that most members of the Republican wing of the foreign policy community would endorse.

Almost no Republican elected office-holder or former public official or major financial contributor placed Donald Trump anywhere near the top of his or her list of preferred presidential candidates in 2016. Once he secured the party’s nomination, most of them supported him in the hope that he would turn out to be a vehicle for advancing their agenda. In 2017, at least, that hope was realized. Republicans have reason to be happy, and Democrats unhappy, with the political developments of the past year, as they almost surely would have been if any other Republican had been elected President in 2016.

3. Donald Trump is a populist—of a certain kind. The political analyst William Schneider has noted that populism, which expresses at its core a hostility to elites, comes in two varieties in the United States: hostility, located in recent years mainly in the Democratic Party, to economic elites, and hostility to cultural and educational elites, the bearers of which tend to gravitate to the Republicans. In his campaign Trump appealed to both, but his presidency has catered only to the second.

While it is intended to promote the creation of jobs, the 2017 tax law provides few direct benefits to Americans who are struggling economically. A large initiative to build and refurbish infrastructure, which would generate jobs and that candidate Trump promised, did not make an appearance during his first year in office. The 45th President has not produced, as he also promised, waves of fresh employment in coal mines and steel mills.

On the other hand, he has directed his ire at the cultural elites, including the universities, the entertainment world, and especially the mainstream media, which he has repeatedly accused of propagating what he calls “fake news.” He declared his distaste for professional football players—many of them from poor backgrounds but who are, by the standards of most Americans, highly paid and very well-known—who refused to stand for the pregame playing of the national anthem in order to protest racial injustice. This turned out to be, politically, one of Trump’s more successful positions. Polls showed that the majority of respondents agreed with him. His criticism made the players—or the players made themselves—seem unpatriotic, never a winning strategy in any country. Trump, by contrast, appeared to be defending the national honor and especially the honor of the country’s armed forces, which seldom if ever makes a politician less popular.

4. Donald Trump may—or may not—be threatened by the Mueller investigation. Because of the growing polarization of American public life, opposition to recent Presidents has become increasingly intense. Clinton Derangement Syndrome was succeeded by Bush Derangement Syndrome, which gave way to Obama Derangement Syndrome. This progression has continued into the Trump presidency. Prominent Democrats declared it illegitimate even before it began and a number have expressed the hope that he will be removed from office before the completion of his term. The legal, nonviolent method of doing so is impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction after a trial in the Senate, and in one House vote in late 2017 a total of 58 Democrats supported a call for impeachment. The proponents of such a course have invested their hopes for uncovering impeachable offenses in the investigation by the Special Counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller into the collusion—if any—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Nothing is known at this point about what, if anything, the investigation has discovered about the role of the President himself. What can be said is that Trump’s admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose policies attack American interests and American values, hardly advances either, which is what American foreign policy is supposed to do. By itself, however, that admiration breaks no law. It was, moreover, on full display during the presidential campaign, so that those who voted for Trump had ample opportunity to know of his attitude toward a militantly anti-American dictator. Furthermore, a President’s approach to foreign policy is properly a matter of policy, not law, and is therefore ordinarily determined by elections and congressional votes rather than by legal or quasi-judicial proceedings.

What can also be said is that impeachment and conviction are not exclusively legal matters: they are at heart political. The Constitution provides for the removal of the President from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors” but leaves to the Congress the responsibility for deciding what presidential activities may qualify. Moreover, whatever Mueller finds, this President can be removed only with Republican support: conviction requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate and Republicans will certainly hold more than one-third of the seats in that body for the next three years. For the Trump presidency to end prematurely, Republicans would have to take an active role in ending it. It is extremely unlikely that they will do so, but it’s also not entirely unthinkable.

If they fare badly in the midterm elections in 2018 and anticipate further severe losses in 2020, and if they impute their misfortunes to Donald Trump’s personal conduct, a Mike Pence presidency might well come to look increasingly attractive to Congressional Republicans. For the same reason, however, the Democrats, for all their loathing of the incumbent of the Oval Office, might conclude that their interests require his remaining there through the next presidential election in order to ensure their own success. Such political calculations could lead to the bizarre (and admittedly far-fetched) circumstance in 2019 in which the Republicans seek to remove Trump from the presidency and the Democrats work to keep him there.

5. Donald Trump helped make sexual harassment a major national issue. The most enduringly important development in the United States in 2017 was the rise of the #MeToo movement, a spontaneous expression of support for women who have suffered sexual harassment. It attracted wide attention, spread rapidly, ended the careers of prominent men accused of such misconduct and, one must hope, made harassment less likely in the future.

None of this involved the government doing anything. Rape and assault were already crimes and have been for centuries. The movement did, however, have something to do with the fact that Donald Trump was President. Before he won the office multiple women had accused him of such conduct and it seems safe to say that his denials did not persuade all of the American public. His election kept the accusations alive and lent greater credibility to, and generated greater indignation about, such charges in general.

Just as the Supreme Court follows the election returns, as the American humorist Finley Peter Dunne (writing as Mr. Dooley) observed, so the media follows the national zeitgeist. Two fervently anti-Trump publications, The New York Times and The New Yorker, published articles documenting the many sexual assaults of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, a generous patron of Democratic candidates and liberal organizations. The articles triggered an avalanche of similar accusations that powerfully reinforced the apparently not-sufficiently-powerful social norm against such predations by powerful men.

It is conceivable that none of this would have happened without the Trump presidency. The two publications are devoted to the Democratic cause and strongly supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Had she won, the articles they published would have targeted an important political friend of the President and would have led to the uncomfortable question of why her husband had not lost his job for comparable activities—as a female Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, ultimately said should have happened. The issue the two journalistic outlets brought to the forefront of public attention would have qualified as what the Clintons and their supporters have a habit of calling “distractions,” and the two publications might have been reluctant to distract the second President Clinton from her appointed rounds. It is therefore within the realm of possibility that, in the matter of sexual harassment, the election of a man widely accused of misogyny has accomplished more for women than the victory of the first female major-party candidate would have done.

Counterfactuals cannot, of course, be proven and it is perhaps unfair to the editors of The New York Times and The New Yorker to speculate that under different political circumstances they might not have published the articles that touched off the social avalanche. They are, after all, professionals in addition to—and, it is to be hoped, before—being partisans. Still, history can work in strange ways, and it is at least conceivable that if 39,000 votes (about three one-hundredths of one percent of the national total) had been cast for the Democratic rather than the Republican presidential candidate in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania on November 8, 2016, Harvey Weinstein would still be producing movies, Bill Clinton would still be a respected elder statesman, Matt Lauer would still be a weekday morning presence in millions of American homes, and Al Franken would still be a senator.

The post The Trump Presidency, Year One appeared first on The American Interest.

Israel’s Crisis of Leadership

Israel is a state facing significant “wicked” challenges, both as a result of developments in its region and in its internal arena. Addressing them will require deft, steady, and courageous political leadership. The problem is that, according to the Israeli public and to former Israeli Cabinet Ministers and senior officials I met with recently, this kind of leadership is in short supply.

This past month, the Israel Democracy Institute published its annual Israeli Democratic Index for 2017, based on a wide-ranging survey of public opinion in Israel. This year’s findings were mixed. A majority of Israelis continue to believe in democracy and Israelis rank high on the OECD scale for political involvement and do not appear to be disengaging from political discourse and activity. However, the survey shows deep distrust and disdain for politicians and political institutions. About 64 percent of the general public believes the government does not deal well with the country’s central problems. Some 65 percent of the general public believes politicians are out of sync with their constituents’ problems and needs, and 68 percent feel that members of Knesset do not work hard and do not perform their duties properly. Around 80 percent believe politicians are more concerned with their own personal interests than with the interests of their constituents. The level of trust in the government is only 29 percent, in the Knesset 26 percent, and in the political parties 15 percent (ranking first is the IDF with 81 percent, then the President with 65 percent). A majority of Israelis (both Jewish and Arab) believe that Israel is not a true democracy since the very rich influence government decisions in their favor and against the interests of ordinary people. A large majority feels that their ability to influence government policy is very low or nonexistent.

Israel’s politicians have to a large extent earned this disdain. A seemingly never-ending stream of corruption allegations, investigations, trials, and convictions involving local and national politicians pours forth. One former Prime Minister and one former President were recently released from prison. The most recent investigation engulfed the coalition chairman in the Knesset and a key ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, David Bitan, who resigned from his post, though not from the Knesset. These, added to ongoing investigations against the Prime Minister himself and his close associates (three at last count), have helped bring half of Israelis to see their leadership as corrupt (despite the fact that it fares relatively well in international comparisons, such as that of Transparency International).

My talks with the former senior officials showed that this sense of the debasement of the calling of politics in Israel is prevalent not only among the public, but also among elite members (not only from the opposition) as well. I wanted to talk about the structures and processes of the policymaking apparatus, but time and again my interlocutors returned to the point that these are much less important to the policy outputs than the quality of the people. “Process is not everything; you need leadership”, in the words of one former Minister. They kept returning to the point that, while the officials and officers who man the system are excellent, see themselves as servants of the state, and provide whatever stability the system has, the same cannot be said for most elected officials. As one former Minister said to me regarding the political level, “the human capital is limited.”

One reason for the current state of affairs is that over the past quarter century the two traditional major parties—Likud and Labor (now called the Zionist Union)—adopted “primaries,” or election by registered party members to the party list for Knesset rather by the party leadership. As in the United States, the primary system strengthened the prospects of colorful, populist figures, whose rhetoric and political positions appeal to the base rather than to the population as a whole. However, in Israel’s proportional representation system, the public only votes for the party as a whole, not for individual candidates, so the “bottom of the list” can get into the legislature if the top of the list enjoys wide support. Small constituencies with strong vested interests, as well as “bosses” who control blocs of votes, can control primary outcomes: Only about 5 percent of Likud and Zionist Union voters participate in their party’s primaries. The system thus militates against more moderate, experienced figures who tend to eschew populist or extremist positions. It has also encouraged Knesset members to submit “private member bills” (about 30,000 since 2000), only a tiny minority of which have been approved and passed into law, in order to satisfy their constituencies and gain wider recognition.1

In the ruling party, some of the most well-known, experienced, and respected political figures from Likud’s past “did not pass the screen test” of the primaries. As a result, Prime Minister Netanyahu is now to the left of his own party and his coalition. Primaries have pulled the Likud to the right, causing it to bring forth or support, often in the name of “governability” (Israeli shorthand for unalloyed majority rule), legislation that the majority of the people (including half of Jews and 75 percent of Arabs) see as undemocratic. As one former Minister told me, “the crux of the problem centers on the multiplicity of harmful statements and legislative proposals stemming from inter-party and intra-party competition, most of which were stillborn or ameliorated along the way. . . . in the current coalition, instead of the member parties functioning as a restraining influence on one another, they enable and encourage one another, and the Prime Minister does not stand in the breach.”

On the Left, primary elections brought to the fore a new group of young, idealistic politicians who are committed to activist parliamentarianism. Left-wing politicians who entered national politics in recent years understand that they may well spend a career in opposition, since the Left has not headed the government for 18 years and has been out of government for 12 of the past 20 years. This possibility undoubtedly deters many from the legislative adventure, but those who do run expect to be parliamentarians first and foremost. As a former Likud Minister told me, “there are some excellent, activist parliamentarians in the Knesset. Unfortunately, they are not from my party.”

The quest for a new, telegenic face, not tarred with the off-putting brush of “politician,” has also led to the election of Avi Gabbai to the leadership of the Zionist Union, a man who has never been a member of the party and who espouses some positions more characteristic of the political Center and even the Right. This is symptomatic of another, related dynamic of Israeli politics: its increasing personalization and the associated weakening of the party apparatuses. The Democracy Institute has found that this phenomenon is particularly prevalent in Israel, where the level of personalization was the highest among the 25 parliamentary and semi-parliamentary democracies examined.2

One former Minister told me: “Everything is shallow, everything is primaries. The primaries eat up the people [politicians].” Another explained: “They spend all their times looking at the polls. They are led by what the people want, rather than leading and educating them.” The public seems to understand this: A majority (62 percent) agreed with the statement “a good leader doesn’t do what the people want, but what he thinks they need.” This statement can, of course, also be interpreted as authoritarian in inspiration, but in my view it expresses a yearning for leadership that leads and forms, and doesn’t just follow, public opinion.

Many politicians, when they reach positions of ministerial power, are unable or unwilling to learn the difficult material of day-to-day governance or the minutiae of their ministries, and to make decisions that might be unpopular with their electorate. This is even true for members of the Ministerial Committee for National Security, known as the Security Cabinet. It has been for many years dominated by the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister, and most often sidelined or used as a rubber stamp. While some of the other members (especially those who are part of smaller informal, ministerial “kitchens,” where issues are discussed) are informed, engaged, and strive for influence, many of the dozen or so members are not. One former National Security Advisor said that in his experience, Cabinet members who are interested in being informed have access to all the information they required, “there is water in the trough; they need to go drink it.” He notes that many of the Cabinet members are quite busy with their own ministries or political activity, or have no knowledge in security and foreign affairs, and are little inclined to invest effort in their Cabinet membership. Similarly, while many of the 21 members and 15 alternate members of Knesset Foreign and Defense Committee are active and seek expertise and knowledge (one source said that the opposition members of the Knesset Foreign and Defense Committee are the more knowledgeable and active, since the Committee is one of the few channels of influence open to them), most do not.

It is not surprising that many Ministers are not knowledgeable and effective. The average term of a Minister in his ministry since 1996 has been less than two years. In the current government, which began serving in May 2015, ten Ministers out of 22 are serving for the first time (three other first-time Ministers have meanwhile left the government). Ten ministries have already changed hands (some, twice) since 2015. The Ministry of Economy is on its fourth Minister in 32 months, and its 14th in 20 years; the current Minister of Housing is the 13th in 20 years.

A key reason for the leadership malaise in Israel and low quality of many national politicians may be the long shadow of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, on the cusp of his 13th (and tenth consecutive) year as Prime Minister, is an experienced, largely effective statesman and leader, and stands to a large degree head and shoulders above his Ministers and fellow party leaders. The Netanyahu ascendancy has led other capable and ambitious politicians, especially within his own party, to desert the political realm, understanding that “their turn” will be too long a time coming. In addition, Netanyahu has systematically seen off his most significant political rivals (notably former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon; Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz came close to defenestration this past year). It is hard to imagine who might be the next Likud Prime Minister. Those who enter the Likud likely operate under the assumption that, if they toe Netanyahu’s line, they stand a good chance of being in positions of influence: Out of today’s coalition of 67 Knesset members, 22 are Ministers and nine are deputy Ministers.

One very experienced and highly respected former Minister and Cabinet member explained it to me thus: All over the world, and in Israel, the skills and attributes you need to get elected are becoming farther differentiated from those you need to manage the affairs of state, which are in their turn becoming more and more complicated, as well as much faster paced. “Elitism,” expertise, and education are under attack. There are three ways to cover this gap, said this former Minister:

Elect the right people. We need smart people, who have the knowledge and skillset to run the country. We don’t need average people, or those who brag that they don’t read books. But this requires educating the public to choose the right candidates, which is a difficult slog and may not be possible.
Those individuals who are elected need to be curious and to spend time learning. They should be thirsty for knowledge. If they do not invest time and effort to educate themselves in times of quiet, they will lack the ability to catch up in times of crisis, and their ability to judge and influence events will be diminished. In his view, the most dangerous individual is the one who thinks he knows or understands but doesn’t. There is an “illusion of knowledge” among politicians.
Utilize the civil servants. They are the real government, the nation’s institutional experience and memory. “A politician who doesn’t utilize what is available to him in knowledge and experience, is a criminal.”

The gap between this eminently reasonable advice and the political and electoral reality in Israel (and in other Western countries) does not bode well.

When the Israeli public feels that politics is no longer an honorable calling, and that the political sphere is one of corruption and detachment from the public, then all politicians, even the good ones, end up tarred with the same brush. Honorable, capable, and dedicated people will then think twice before entering the political arena. Israel has burgeoning high-tech industry, a robust civil society, and strong community-based and philanthropic sectors, where excellent people can go to do good. Many also end up in the defense establishment or the civil service, but stop short at making the jump to electoral politics. However, disdain for politicians, and for the calling of politics, will not lead to politics being done better.

1The parties that do not have primaries are often seen in Israel as being run in an undemocratic fashion, which in many cases is true. Parties such as the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox Shas, (Defense Minister) Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beteinu (Israel is Our Home), and (Finance Minister) Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu (All of Us)—to name only those in the current government coalition—when they did better than expected in different election cycles, brought to the Knesset, and occasionally to the Government, back-bench figures who were unknown and had never been tested politically. While some of these have been pleasant surprises, many have not.

2See Gideon Rahat, “Israel Exemplifies Rise of Personalized Politics”, Israel Democracy Institute, March 13, 2017.

The post Israel’s Crisis of Leadership appeared first on The American Interest.

Drawing the Line on Redistricting

The Supreme Court has decided to review three partisan redistricting cases this term. One case centers on an alleged Republican partisan gerrymander in Wisconsin (Gill v. Whitford), another on an alleged Democratic gerrymander in Maryland (Benisek v. Lamone) and the third, an alleged Texas racial gerrymander undertaken for partisan reasons (Perez v. Abbott). Taking these cases up in the same term suggests that the Supreme Court may have something meaningful in mind, but it is not at all clear what that something is.

Expectations are all over the map. The reform community hopes that Justice Kennedy will give them a parting gift in the form of a manageable judicial standard striking down partisan gerrymandering once and for all. That expectation could be wrong on two counts: first, that Justice Kennedy is leaving the Court any time soon, and second, that he will finally give them the ruling that they so desperately want. It is just as likely that this predominantly conservative Court could decide to put a stake in the heart of the anti-gerrymandering effort once and for all, or fail to find any clear consensus, leaving the whole matter in a continued state of ambiguity as it has done in the past.

As anyone who has taken high school civics knows, the United States has been grappling with the partisan line-drawing problem since Eldridge Gerry’s second term as Governor of Massachusetts. Despite numerous legal cases and decades of reform efforts, redistricting is as contentious as ever. In the 2010 cycle alone, there have been 223 redistricting cases so far, nine of which are still active in 2018, just two years before the whole contentious process begins anew.

So, one might ask, what is behind the new effort to resolve this very old problem? First, the political context of redistricting litigation has changed in several significant ways. The controlling cases—Davis v. Bandemer (1986) and Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004)—were decided just as the trend of rising partisan polarization was taking off. The political system now, including the Court, is more divided along party and ideological lines than it was several decades ago. Election administration generally has become a political battlefield, with both parties looking to gain a tactical edge that will help them attain or maintain political control.

The political advantage in the redistricting wars has shifted over time. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Democrats controlled more state redistricting efforts, whereas in 2021 the Republicans will have the upper hand, unless things change dramatically in the next two elections. The Democrats then were split between a good government faction that opposed gerrymandering in principle and pragmatists who defended it for political reasons. The Democrats now are a more united front, believing for both principled and pragmatic reasons that partisan redistricting must be curbed.

Perhaps the most important changed contemporary condition is the conjunction of race, ideology and party—what political scientists call party sorting. In the earlier period, there were more conservative Democrats (especially from the South) and liberal Republicans (especially from the Northeast), but the numbers of both have dwindled. The racial divide between the parties has also increased, which has important implications for the separate lines of reasoning the Court developed in recent decades for partisan and racial gerrymandering.

While racial and political line-drawing biases are both potentially justiciable violations under the Equal Protection Clause, the Court found a manageable standard for determining the racial but not the political cases. The racial bias problem could draw on the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination, the Reconstruction Amendments and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was also easier to identify unfairness when a group is systematically excluded from power than it is to determine fair allocation of seats between two groups that regularly rotate in and out of power no matter the particular redistricting circumstances.

The most intuitive standard of fairness is proportional representation: each party or group should get a share of seats equal to its share of votes. The problem is that the Anglo-American single member, simple plurality system does not usually yield proportional results. Moreover, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that even remotely suggests that principle. Consequently, the Supreme Court has clearly stated that there is no right to proportionality.

Political scientists attempted to come to the rescue several decades ago by proposing an equal treatment principle called partisan symmetry; that is, a party should get roughly the same number of seats as the other party if it were to achieve the same vote share as the other party. But this determination relied on lots of statistical conjecture and computational complexity. In the end, the Court did not bite.

A new generation of scholars is now trying to persuade the Court to adopt simpler measures (for example, the mean-median difference and the Efficiency Gap), but the Court still might not bite. The central problem is this: If you adopt any of these measures, you still need to determine the cutoff value between a fair and an unfair redistricting plan, and no one has suggested a good way to do that.

The plaintiffs in the Gil v. Whitford case recommended that the Court compare the results of their Efficiency Gap measure in a given state to the average score across all states. But critics rightly pointed out that demographic circumstances vary widely across the United States, and that a national average would fail to distinguish between natural gerrymanders (especially the high, inefficient concentration of minorities in urban areas) and artificial ones created by the line drawers. This problem may eventually be solved by advances in computer algorithms that will allow us to determine the degree to which any given redistricting plan is an outlier in partisan bias as compared to all possible plans that a state could have adopted.

But even with such a powerful tool, the critical question remains: how much partisan bias is too much? Should the standard be no worse than 95% of all possible plans? 90%? 80%? And how does the Court choose the standard? The process of figuring this out would draw the Court into a political thicket deeper and darker than the one they barely escaped from in Bush v. Gore.

The racial redistricting landscape is also more complex, and this might affect the Texas case, Perez v. Abbott. In the distant past, racial motives could be separated from political ones because most of the early racial discrimination cases involved the protection of white Democratic incumbents from minority challengers, and most of the evidence came from Democratic primary elections. Now, if minorities are cracked or packed along party lines, the hard question to answer will be whether it was primarily for racial or political reasons, or both.

In the end, as always, a political question requires a political answer. Every electoral system design involves political choices, whether the subject is voter eligibility, seat allocation rules, or redistricting. The Democrats can stop Republican gerrymanders very easily by winning at least one legislative house or the Governor’s office in as many states as possible. Blocking partisan gerrymanders is easier than getting enough power to pull one off. President Trump is certainly doing his part to help them with his many unforced errors. If the Democrats cannot achieve that, then maybe the country is sending them a policy signal that they should address instead.

Of course, the Democrats could do even better than that over the next four years and gain so-called “trifecta” control in many states. Will they then in office adopt the same political fairness standards they are pleading for out of office? Or is redistricting fairness between the parties really just a matter of political perspective, as the Court has long suspected?

The post Drawing the Line on Redistricting appeared first on The American Interest.

Why Harry Potter is a Tory

When I was ten years old I wrote a letter to J.K. Rowling. In big loopy and (at that point) probably illegible felt tipped pen I asked my favourite author to explain to me the rules of Quidditch. I never received a reply.

Five books later I had half-forgotten about Hogwarts until I went to Oxford—or up to Oxford, as they say, as if it was a cloud, or a magic castle on an outcrop. Only on the other side of the university Sorting Hat myself did I begin to realize that Harry Potter was in fact a Tory.

Few Americans realize this, but a lot of what reads like fantasy in J.K. Rowling is in fact the British class system with magic wands, house elves and the Order of the Phoenix.

The Hogwarts Express is instantly recognizable as the Flying Scotsman to the Queen’s Balmoral and the prize Highlands shooting estates. The Hogwarts Houses are the Oxford Colleges. Harry’s scholastic shopping trips to Diagon Alley (to get your owl and your magic wand) are so obviously the pricey ritual of stocking up for country boarding school. Platform 9¾ at Kings Cross is, surprise, surprise right next to Platform 10 that takes you “up” to Cambridge. And as for a game of Quidditch, it’s either cricket or the sui generisEton Wall Game.

Even fewer Americans realize Young Potter is in fact, as I grew to realise, a Tory. And I do appreciate, from across the Atlantic, this is at first hard to spot above all because J.K. Rowling has Twitterstormed herself into a John Oliver-style US Britcelebrity and 280 character Trump Owner-In-Chief. “Voldemort was nowhere near as bad,” apparently.

Yet when British readers pick up Harry Potter they instantly recognize it as that most Tory of genres. A piece of public school—and in Britain this of course means not only private but elite education—school days fiction, just with wizards on flying brooms.

Whereas in most postwar British public school fiction, such as the 1968 schoolboy insurrection movie If, the school was the enemy, administering senseless punishments and ridiculous demands, from the Philosopher’s Stone to the end, the real hero in Harry Potter is the school. The enemy, those who wish the institution harm.

But there is something deeply deferential—and utterly Tory—in how Harry takes on Hogwarts. The headmaster is practically the boy’s best friend, and he advances by doing exactly as he is told by the wise old Dumbledore. The order the school represents is nothing malevolent in the Potterverse—an enchanted Tom Brown’s School Days. There are no tie-loosening, headmaster-hating rebels for us to identify with at Hogwarts for J.K. Rowling. Only Dumbledore’s boys.

Right to the end—and this is one of the rare moments of dissatisfaction I can usually detect amongst Potterheads—Harry does the Establishment Thing and not marry Cho Chang, but Ginny Weasley, the youngest daughter of an aristocratic, but financially threadbare, noble line.

But is that enough to find Harry Potter inherently Tory?

Not until we enter the Ministry of Magic.

To me, perhaps the most blatantly Tory strain running through the Potterverse is the portrayal of Wizarding Whitehall. Nothing good can ever come of the Ministry of Magic, whose bureaucrats are badgering nincompoops with names like Cornelius Fudge and Pius Thicknesse, men who talk down to the befuddled Muggle Prime Minister, informing him how things are really run through a portrait and a fireplace in Number 10 Downing Street, like a voice of a Regency Palace emissary.

Not only are bureaucrats goofy and gluttonous, but every intervention by the Department of Mysteries and the Department for Magical Accidents and Catastrophes makes things worse. Problems, in Harry Potter’s world, can only be solved by the Wizards themselves—by the Tory Big Society of chipper public spirited Wizards. All that can be hoped for, even under Minister For Magic Hermione in J.K Rowling’s latest 2016 theatre spinoff Harry Potter And The Cursed Child is for government to be less corrupt. Magic will never come to the masses.  

There is something terribly Tory too, in what Potter is fighting for, and the way he goes about it. What does he do with that extraordinary Elder Wand? What does he do with with second chance at life?

There is no magical socialism in the epilogue “Nineteen Years Later” at the end of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. There is no life’s work (and clearly no interest) in bringing the magical and muggle worlds back together for all mankind. All we see at Platform 9¾ is Harry Potter cheerfully sending off his children on the Hogwarts Express to public school. Harry has protected a venerable institution and then has simply pottered off, to live out his days in some secluded wizarding Surrey.

But what about Lord Voldemort? The hole in Harry Potter is that there is no meaningful interrogation of the system that produced Voldemort—the system of segregation and secrecy between muggles and magicians. As long as Harry Potter shows no interest in opening Hogwarts, handing everyone in Britain a wand, and closing down the Ministry of Magic, the system that produced both Voldemort, Grindelwald and the Death Eaters, the political system of which Slytherin is an inherent part, will remain.

Because as long as there are muggles and magicians, as long as there is magical blood, there will be wizards who think they are racially superior to the muggle-born, meritocratically catapulted into Hogwarts, and wizards who dream of slavery. But Potter is perfectly happy sending his son up to Hogwarts, at Platform 9¾, next to a now-pater familias Draco Malfoy.

This is why the (non)politics of Harry Potter remind me so much of the politics of David Cameron, our former Prime Minister who proudly said his finest achievement was putting gay marriage into British law. Cameron to Britain was like Potter to Hogwarts: Eton, Oxford, the Royal Family: as long as it was race-, gender- and orientation-blind, it could all carry on as before. The only problem is prejudice. There is no problem in structures.

Just as Eton-run Britain was fine as long as it was no longer sexist, homophobic or racist, Hogwarts-run Britain is fine too, as long as it makes the same journey. J.K. Rowling makes this explicit with the Obama-like Kingsley Shacklebolt as Minister of Magic at the end of the original seven books. Pureblood laws will be dismantled, but not the magical ruling class.  

At the end of the day, Harry Potter is so truly a Tory because, like Cameron, he refuses to believe the ancient and venerable institutions that made him, bestowed him with magical powers, and allowed him to flounce into the Ministry of Magic at the drop of a hat could, in themselves, be inherently divisive and unfair. Is this a failure of intellect? Or a failure of empathy? The failure to see that that the lower middle class and mean-spirited Dursleys are that way because they live in a world without magic but full of mortgages?

The Toryism of J.K. Rowling, whose world repeats again and again its fierce belief in an elect, in ritual, in the rights of an elite so superior they must be educated far and away from the hoi polloi is what makes Harry Potter so oddly real, so British, and so urgent for children.

J.K. Rowling’s dark, almost reactionary, fairy tales reveal that in Britain the strings are pulled by an dazzling and hidden aristocracy. This is why I still love Harry Potter—as an enchanted adventure hiding a savage warning: Get into Oxbridge, the elite, or you’ll end up a muggle. In the same way that all fairy tales, from Cinderella to Little Red Riding Hood, contain within them brutal, terrifying lessons—don’t talk to strangers, run after the rich man at all costs—the secret of Harry Potter is that it does it, too. It is a magical mirror on the British class system.

It should come as no surprise that J.K. Rowling is, at least in Britain, now seen as someone on the anti-Left. Happily New Labour under the liberal regime of Tony Blair’s successor Gordon Brown, J.K. Rowling is now fiercely opposed to both Jeremy Corbyn’s socialism and the Scottish National Party’s promise of independence.

“Utterly deluded,” is her take on a Labour Party that now has almost 600,000 members, a number that has more than tripled—a party that went up 32 seats at the last elections and is polling not only ahead of the Conservatives, but in its best polls is higher than Tony Blair was ahead of his landslide election victory back in 1997. Now in her capacity as centrist-in-chief, J.K. Rowling appears only comfortable with a Labour which keeps schtum on nuclear disarmament and rail re-nationalization, tweeting—“THIS ISN’T BLOODY FUNNY.”

British millennial tribune—the majority of whom voted for Corbyn—she is not.

All this is why it feels so strange to me that millenial liberals in the U.S. (and a good many whom I can spot on Twitter are Rose Emoji socialists) are so keen to make Harry Potter one of their #resistance memes.

Strange, because Hogwarts appears to share few of the values of the American Left. For one, there is no moral relativism here—only absolute magical good and absolute evil. And not only is there nothing sharing, progressive or even particularly collaborative about Hogwarts, which, like any English public school is one never ending Triwizard Tournament where winning is never-ending point scoring to be prefect, or to get your hands on the House Cup.

In the wizarding world of J.K. Rowling you are explicitly not whatever you want to be. There is a belief deep in the Sorting Hat. You are what your birth says you are: a Gryffindor or a Hufflepuff—a muggle or a magician. Transwizarding is not allowed, nor it seems, is it even conceivable. Nor is there a sniff of egalitarianism in J.K. Rowling’s world. Muggles may sometimes be nice (like Hermione Granger’s parents) and capable of breeding a wizard. But every muggle character is plodding, boring or dim witted. Just like a Victorian novels of plebs and aristos.

It’s a weird fantasia for millenial liberals to project.

Or maybe not. One reading of millenial Harry Potter memes is that a certain reactionary Toryism is exactly what the #resistance is about: protecting the magic in Berkeley and Brooklyn from Voldemort, whilst offering nothing but a patronizing sigh for the muggles in Middle America. Not only unquestioningly trusting the Chamber of Secrets of the Dumbledores at the CIA on dark forces at work in Washington, but longing for wishful Avada Kedavras like the 25th Amendment to make it all go away. Magical thinking, in other words—not politics.

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