Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 114

Old Wisdom, New Applications?

One need not be longwinded to get to the gist of recent news. Thus:

“When knaves fall out, true men come by their goods,” goes the old proverb. Trump and Bannon dissing each other may be good news, then. So we may hope.

Another, similarly: Les larrons s’entrebalent, lee larcins se descouvrent—“When highwaymen fall out, robberies are discovered.” Paul Manafort suing Robert S. Mueller because he’s “gone too far,” perhaps with the help of Michael Flynn? Maybe just one highwayman falling may suffice to bring good tidings, but two are a better bet. Again, one can hope.

One more: “There is honor among thieves.” Really? We’d never get a useful plea bargain if that were broadly true, but we do. So haply it’s not.

And last for now, some poetic solace for our times:

Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;

let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall;

who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree,

is more than all.

—John Greenleaf Whittier

 

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The New Greek Oligarchy

Ivan Ignatyevich Savvidis has played many unusual roles in his life—one of the great tobacco tycoons of Eurasia, a member of Russia’s Duma, a confidante of Vladimir Putin —but it is his latest one that is now sounding off alarm bells throughout Europe. Savvidis is the parvenu of Greece’s oligarchic scene. Since the onset of the economic crisis, he has effectively seized personal ownership over vast sectors of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city and its maritime gateway to the Balkans. The fire sale of old state assets—an auctioning process ordained by the European Union as part of its enforcement of economic austerity, but which has become overwhelmingly rigged by vested political interests within Greece—has given Savvidis a rare opportunity to invest hundreds of millions of euros into his ancestral homeland. A soccer team, a grand luxury hotel, a tobacco conglomerate, a water-bottling company, a fleet of beach resorts, a television station, a trio of newspapers, great stretches of coastline and blocs of Thessaloniki real estate, the port of Salonika and its industrial warehouses: these are but a few of the holdings that Savvidis has quietly acquired in the last eight years. The buying spree has lately given rise to a strange new coinage across the newspaper headlines and streets of his adopted city: Ivanaptiksi, “prosperity emanating from Ivan.”

This slow-motion conquest, taking place hundreds of kilometers from Athens in a city that makes few international headlines, has now begun to raise serious questions. How has a man worth $760 million on paper invested close to half of that amount in Greece in less than a decade? Allegations now being openly raised by the European press, along with concerns publicly voiced by the American ambassador in Athens, suggest that Ivan Savvidis is not what he appears to be: Masquerading as the financial savior of Thessaloniki, the theory runs, he is in fact a conduit of Putinist interests in the Aegean.

Seen in this light, virtually all of Savvidis’s business deals and public undertakings in Greece seem to serve Moscow’s agenda. His dealings with the center-right New Democracy party—marrying off his niece to its general secretary, pitting its various clans against one another, peeling off the loyalties of its elected constituents through purported bribery all across northern Greece—appear an effort to sow division within the party most bent on Greece’s continued membership in the European Union. His purchase of Thessaloniki’s port seems a move to stymy NATO’s naval access to the interior of the Balkans, a region at the convergence of Russian and American spheres of influence. The millions of euros Savvidis has donated to the monasteries of Mount Athos for the construction of new churches act simultaneously as a Russian investment of soft power in a no-man’s land of international authority and financial transparency.

These allegations may just as easily be false, the byproduct of geopolitical conspiracy mongering and Russia paranoia gone rogue. It would hardly be the first time the West’s cottage industry of anti-Putinism has the paradoxical effect of making Russia’s reach seem far greater than it actually is. But in any case, the remarkable rise of Ivan Savvidis to a place of political prominence exposes an uncomfortable truth about the present course of the Greek state. Born in Georgia, enriched in Russia, Savvidis is an uncanny personification of Greece’s regression from a Western European-style state—the type of country austerity was supposed to finally hammer into existence—into something much more familiar to observers of the post-Soviet terrain.

Since the onset of austerity, Greece’s political and economic system has increasingly given way to a network of regional godfather figures, which probably has its closest parallel in Ukraine or the Republic of Moldova. This new crop of oligarchs has used Greece’s economic downturn to sweep up entire economic sectors, accumulating privatized state assets in everything from airports to gambling conglomerates to energy utilities. They have then converted this booty into political influence by buying up newly-auctioned swathes of the Greek media. Together, these new oligarchs have succeeded in carving up the crippled Greek state between themselves. In so doing, they have inadvertently underscored how Brussels’s fumbling attempts at forging a common foreign policy have been undermined by its own monetary programs.

The most important thing to understand about Savvidis is that he is nothing like the oligarchs Greece has seen before. The typical Greek oligarch is not a self-made man. His family has been wealthy, or siphoning money from the state coffers, or both, for generations. He inherits a fleet of ships, invests minimally within Greece, then blackmails whatever government happens to be in power by threatening to pull all his capital out of the country if any attempt is made to audit his assets or tax him efficiently. The typical Greek oligarch plays both ends of the political spectrum slyly and opportunistically. He is Western-oriented. He is based in Athens or Piraeus or London or Zurich. He functions with the rest of the oligarchs as a class, strategically marrying his children off to other shipping and industrial families. He generally pieces together industries within Greece, then divests his profits outside of the country into a diversified mercantile empire spanning the Balkans and often stretching out to Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Savvidis is something else—to agnosto prosopo, “the unknown face.” A decade ago, almost no one in Greece had heard his name. He owns no ships. He made his fortune outside of Greece and is now investing it within the country at an unthinkably inauspicious time. He is politically obtuse. He makes no attempt to ingratiate himself with—and, indeed, has provoked a feud with—the leadership of New Democracy, the party that many expect will come to power in Greece within the next year. Savvidis has become the loyal instrument of a far-Left government that climbed to power on promises that it would rein in such figures, but which has instead given them renewed license to flourish. For Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Savvidis is what’s known as imeteroi — “one of our own,” a figurehead of vast capital a new government can use to outsource control of different sectors of the sprawling Greek state. In interviews, Savvidis has compared Tsipras favorably to Putin. He has warned Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of New Democracy and Tsipras’s political adversary, that he will never become Prime Minister. Curiously, Savvidis speaks only a gnarled dialect of ancient Greek, which has curtailed his ability to address his ambitions in the Greek media. Savvidis has left it up to others to speculate what he is up to in Thessaloniki.

Most critically, in a country whose oligarchic class has been unwaveringly loyal to Euro-Atlanticism and American interests since the Second World War, Savvidis is an upstart from the East. His is a typically shadowy story of post-Soviet self-enrichment. In 1959, he was born into a large Greek peasant family in the mountains of southern Georgia. The history of his people, the Pontic Greeks—the Greeks of the Pontos, or the “deep sea”—is one of generational displacement. The descendants of ancient Greek colonists to the Black Sea, for centuries they lived on the northern cusp of Turkey as citizens of the Ottoman Empire. During the great population exchanges following World War I, most Pontic Greeks were forced to leave the new nation-state of Turkey. Some “returned” to Greece; others, like the Savvidis clan, migrated up the shore of the Black Sea and became citizens of another multinational empire, the Soviet Union. In the late 1930s, Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of Pontic Greeks out to Central Asia, deeming them fifth columns of imperialism.

Savvidis belongs to those Pontic Greeks who never left the Black Sea. Historically bounded by empires, not unlike the Georgians and Armenians and Chechens in the mountains surrounding them, the Caucasus Greeks captured an economic niche through the cultivation of tobacco. At the age of 14, Savvidis left their company, heading further up the shore of the Black Sea to Rostov-on-Don, where he rolled cigarettes on the floor of the Don State Tobacco Factory, took night classes at a local technical university, performed his military service and earned a reputation as a highly religious man. “He had always attributed everything to God, ever since he was sleeping on his best man’s couch in Rostov,” Sonia Prokopidi, a Pontic Greek who knew Savvidis before he came to Greece, told me in Thessaloniki. (In 2016 in Prochoma, a village along the Vardar River, Savvidis made a display of his religious devotion in stone. The fresco on the Church of the Holy Spirit depicts its benefactor, in the supplicating kneel of a Byzantine saint, decked out in a black power suit, lifting a relic towards an enthroned Christ. He is flanked by his wife and two sons, all three of whom control various fiefs within his empire.)

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Savvidis and hundreds of thousands of other Pontic Greeks embarked on a mass odyssey back to Greece: the first nation-state they had known, and yet a place that was effectively foreign to them. (Along with them would eventually come many others from the ex-Soviet lands, among them Lasha Shushanashvili, the former treasurer of the Georgian mafia in Europe, born opposite the Tsalka Mountains from Savvidis in lower Georgia and still at large in Thessaloniki.) Known for harvesting tobacco in the USSR, in their ancestral homeland the Pontic Greeks gained a reputation for smuggling it in—first by fishing trawlers, later by cargo containers. It has never been clear to what extent Savvidis was involved in this trade, but by the time he returned to Russia just three years later, he had emerged through the distant end of a murky acquisition scheme as the owner of Donskoy Tabak, then a middling cigarette company wrangling for control of the regional market. Rostov, the city to which Savvidis had returned, had become the proverbial “father of mafias,” an epicenter of post-Soviet turf wars, many waged over the very commodity routes—out west to the Donbas and lower Ukraine, down to the Caucasus, on east to the Caspian Sea—that Savvidis would have certainly known well. A decade later, in 2003, he went to Moscow representing the Rostov Oblast in the Duma on Putin’s United Russia ticket.

Savvidis spent the decade in between his return to Russia and his debut in the Duma collecting a diverse constellation of companies, including a sausage manufacturer, a dairy packaging facility, and a supplier of industrial-grade farm equipment. But his biding occupation was always Donskoy, which he succeeded in overhauling into the largest cigarette producer in the former USSR. Some 30 billion cigarettes, or one in ten smoked in Russia, are annually produced by Donskoy, now under the formal management of Savvidis’s wife Kyriaki, a fellow Pontic Greek. A special contract forged with the new Russian state—a deal in which, to this day, the Savvidis family hands out a billion free cigarettes to the Russian army every year—granted Donskoy an outsized role in crafting Russia’s new tobacco legislation. On top of Donskoy, Savvidis acquired a handful of lesser assets, including an airport in Rostov and a fleet of Antonov cargo planes that pump cigarettes out across Central Asia and North Africa. Donskoy claims to send a disproportionate amount of its six billion exported cigarettes to three unrecognized statelets along the Black Sea—Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia—whose net populations amount to fewer than 800,000 people. Attributing profits to these unrecognized pseudo-states suggests either that Savvidis is earning his money by some other means—cigarette smuggling has been tepidly raised in the Greek press—or is being funneled it by an outside player. For the American and European Union officials who have objected to his acquisition of the port of Thessaloniki, the suspected culprit is Vladimir Putin.

By the mid-2000s, Savvidis had settled in Thessaloniki and, through a slew of Cypriot shell companies, begun his investments. He bought the PAOK soccer team, whose fan base has won him a maniacal personal following as well as a cheap form of insurance against significant investigations into his holdings. (In Greece, as in Italy and elsewhere, soccer crowds serve as extensions of political bases—a dangerous constituency for anyone in the press, the judiciary, or the political arena to provoke.) Savvidis then moved for SEKAP, a deeply-indebted state-owned tobacco producer out of Thrace whose commercial networks throughout Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean he has now integrated with the Black Sea networks commanded by Donskoy. (In June, a fishing trawler manned by Ukrainians was seized off the coast of Crete, en route from Montenegro, carrying millions of unregistered packets of Savvidis’s Thracian tobacco towards an unknown destination.) Next, Savvidis took over the Makedonia Pallas, a defunct former landmark hotel in northern Greece where he now regularly parks his black Mercedes. At the moment, he is currently attempting to buy Thessaloniki’s port, an extraordinary strategic asset, through a complicated bidding process that has raised eyebrows in Greece and drawn scrutiny from the State Department due to the curious precision of Savvidis’s bid, which managed to just edge out the bid put forth by the Dubai-based DP World.

The conduit between the crisis that first enriched Savvidis (the Soviet one) and the one through which he is currently divesting his wealth (the Greek one) is his ancient Pontic identity. He has become the figurehead for hundreds of thousands of Pontic Greeks who, to this day, have never felt properly assimilated into Greece. Savvidis himself has never learned the language. He fills out his companies with Russians and Armenians, rarely Greeks. But he has suddenly, improbably, burst into the ranks of the Greek oligarchy.

For these Greeks, Savvidis is a hero. This past May, I watched as he inaugurated a new Pontic Greek studies department at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. Hundreds of Pontic Greeks sat in attendance. They whipped out their camera phones en masse as Savvidis—a sturdy, bespectacled man with a trimmed grey beard and a compact gait—strutted onto a stage cluttered with priests and fuming with incense. Approaching the podium, he nodded to a clutch of generals and SYRIZA ministers who had come up from Athens for the ceremony. Savvidis delivered his speech in Russian through a translator before attempting a small conclusion in Greek.

“For a long time we were ashamed to be Pontic Greeks. In this place we were considered foreigners. We were made to feel unwelcome,” he said. “But you should never feel ashamed to be Pontic Greek again.” Loud applause followed. “His story is my story,” a woman named Sultana whispered, turning to me. “It’s all of our stories.”

This is Ivan Savvidis: a man who, through seemingly unlimited resources, has gained control of Greece’s second city and won a fervent following among a potential voting bloc of some 400,000 Pontic Greeks—enough, perhaps, to sway a national election. If the allegations of Savvidis’s connections to Putin are true, they would confirm in northern Greece what has recently been revealed in Serbia and Macedonia: namely, that the Kremlin is using expatriate Russian oligarchs and their obscure financial networks to buy up state assets and undermine the decision-making of pro-European governments. That Putin himself has taken at least some interest in this venture became evident in May 2016, when he and Savvidis made a highly-touted trip to Aghios Panteleimonas, Russia’s monastic outpost on Mount Athos which has, in the last two years, been outfitted with 500 new rooms and an assemblage of satellite systems.

Elsewhere in Greece, at the same time as Savvidis takes Thessaloniki, the consolidation of the state writ large by the new oligarchs proceeds apace, largely unquestioned. This generation of Greek elites is by no means dirtier than the previous one. But the crisis has given them extraordinarily free rein to take over, within the span of a few years and by European Union directive, what it typically took the previous generation of oligarchs decades to accumulate. With the exception of the port of Piraeus, which was sold off to the Chinese state last year for the equivalent of two weeks’ worth of debt relief, every major asset privatized since 2010 has fallen into their hands.

These vulture oligarchs, many of whom—Boris Mouzenidis, Victor Restis—were not even born in Greece, have exploited the crisis to pick off swathes of real estate and industrial sectors for pittances. The provenance of most of their capital is at best suspect, at worst blatantly illegal. Evangelos Marinakis, a Piraeus shipping magnate with suspected ties to the Greek underground, has now become a major media player. The family of Dimitris Melissanidis, an oil tycoon with roots in North Ossetia who has been caught up in allegations of smuggling gasoline and has provided the U.S. Mediterranean Naval Fleet with its oil since 2003, now lords over OPAP, the former state-owned gambling conglomerate. A handful of other barons—Dimitrios Copelouzos, Spiros Latsis—have taken over airports and huge chunks of coastline. Each of these figures presents exaggerated versions of what Greeks call diaploki, the nefarious intertwining of government and private interests that austerity has deepened, not dismantled. But only with Savvidis does a confrontation appear to be forthcoming. What will happen when SYRIZA is voted out of power? Some speculate that New Democracy will be forced to move against him. He will present a test—an opportunity, even—for Mitsotakis, the new party leader widely considered, even by those within his own party, to be a feeble technocrat.

Others claim that this is not how the Greek state works. Savvidis’s capital is too badly needed in a city that has been disproportionately ravaged by the crisis. New Democracy will be forced to accommodate him, just as they would any other oligarch. Under the guise of performing a house-cleaning of the Greek economy, Brussels will continue to push the relentless privatization of assets that has afforded oligarchs like Savvidis the cover for quiet state capture.

One can already imagine EU officials of the future puzzling over the rotted state of Greece, wondering how it could have ever happened again.

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Do the Palestinians Really Want Their Own State?

The year 2018 marks a forgotten anniversary. Eighty years ago, the first “peace process” between Arabs and Jews came to naught: the partition of Palestine. The Jews would get a modest plot stretching along the Mediterranean from Tel Aviv to the Galilee. The Arabs would get a much larger chunk, linked to what today is Jordan. This had been the recommendation of the British Peel Commission in 1937. The Jewish leadership, though bitterly divided, was ready to accept one-quarter of the loaf. The Arabs rejected partition unanimously. In March 1938, the British buried the Peel Plan.

Fast forward to the present. Last December, Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as capital of Israel. Yet nobody seemed to notice that he did not hand over all of Jerusalem to Israel, insisting: “We are not taking a position of any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.” That was “up to the parties involved.” So, go for it and start talking, he signaled to the Palestinian Authority.

Predictably, the United States was roundly condemned in the UN General Assembly. Just as predictably, the Palestinians were emboldened to revive their classic game, which has failed them regularly in the past. In so many words, the message has always read: “We will not deal directly with Israel; we want the world to force the Zionists to hand us our state on a silver platter.”

In Al-Monitor, a website covering Middle Eastern affairs, the Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab reported (December 29) that Palestinian leaders are going for the international option once more. The aim is to look for new great-power godfathers. Referring to the Trump move, PLO ExCom member Asaad Abdel Rahman announced: “We are now relatively free of the United States’ imposed conditions that have shackled our ability to approach international organizations”—for instance, by dragging Israelis before the International Criminal Court.

Another ExCom member wants to end the Oslo Process. In favor of what or whom? Nabil Shaath, a chief negotiator in the peace talks, was dispatched to Russia and China. Maybe they could replace the United States. He returned with the good news, as he saw it: Beijing and Moscow “enthusiastically support our efforts to create a new mechanism . . . that includes Europeans, Russians, and Chinese.” So, good-bye, America, and say “hello” to old Palestinian dreams.

The Arabs (there were no Palestinians then) rejected international sponsorship in 1937–38. On to Berlin in 1941, where the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem sought to enlist Hitler’s help against the Zionist usurpers “by the same method that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries,” as he so delicately put it.

The Arab and the Palestinian leadership defied the UN resolution of 1947 that took another stab at partition, relying instead on war to destroy Israel at birth. After the Six-Day War, when Israel offered to return conquered territories, the Arab world flung down the three no’s of Khartoum: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations.

In 2000, at Camp David, Bill Clinton actually did hold out the silver platter to Yassir Arafat. He refused, launching the second Intifada instead in hopes that it would bring Israel to its knees—which it did not, in spite of 1,000 dead. Clinton blew up at Arafat: He has “been here 14 days and said no to everything.”

In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the most generous offer ever to Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas: a territory equivalent to 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, with land swaps making up for what Israel would retain beyond the “Green Line” (6.3 percent). Jerusalem would be shared. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, recalls: “In the end, the Palestinian walked away from the negotiations.”

Trying his hand as all U.S. Presidents had done before him, Barack Obama did not even get the Palestinians to talk to the Israelis directly. American diplomats had to shuttle back and forth between the rooms, declaiming from notes on their yellow pads. So good luck to Mr. Shaath, who wants to bring in Europe, Russia, and China.

This seasoned negotiator surely knows two Big Things: a state can only be had from Israel, and it must embody a painful, dream-destroying compromise thrashed out by the two antagonists. Whence a harsh conclusion follows: If one party says no for 80 years, it isn’t interested. It is all or nothing, and “all” implies not only Hebron, but also Haifa. The Palestinians’ fondest dream is the “right of return” to Israel proper, and Abbas cannot bring himself to accept Israel as a “Jewish state.”

Not that the Israelis are innocent babes. They keep building settlements, signaling that they are digging in for the long haul. They make life miserable for the locals and throttle economic activity. But Shaath also knows that Israel’s army, the IDF, and its security services protect the lives of Abbas and his Fatah faithful against all comers from Hamas on down. It is no accident that the PA President has not stood for elections since 2009.

The lopsided UN vote on Jerusalem has not increased Palestinian realism. Symbolic victories are nothing to be sneezed at, but symbols do not buy land. In this case, the triumph at the United Nations must have blinded the Fatah leadership to an ever harsher strategic environment, which renders the silver platter gambit more barren by the day. How so?

During the UN partition vote in 1947, the Arab world acted as one. In the decades to follow, it stuck to refusal, convincing the rest of the world that Israel-Palestine was the root of all Mideast troubles, and Israel the culprit. Yet today, Israel is not the outcast, but a key player in a realigned regional system.

Israel has peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt that have held during its wars against the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Jerusalem enjoys a tacit alliance with Riyadh and the “Gulfies.” Putin’s Russia coordinates with the IDF in Syria. China and India buy arms from Israel. They will not trade high-tech Herzliya for the backwater of Ramallah.

The critical change is this: The Mideast stage has expanded from the Levant to Ankara in the west and Afghanistan in the East. Angling for hegemony, Iran is now the deadly enemy of the Sunni Arabs. In this new Great Game, Israel-Palestine has receded toward the wings. The “core conflict” is not at the center, but a nuisance, and the key Arab players will not soon sacrifice their Israeli ties on the altar of Palestinian self-deception.

The Palestinians should have their own state, but they will have to do better than in Gaza. This author went to Gaza with Yassir Arafat in 1994 after the fabled handshake with Yitzhak Rabin in the White House Rose Garden. He assumed that this coastal strip would gestate into a Palestinian proto-state, blessed with democracy and the rule of law. Today, Gaza is a corrupt Hamas fiefdom, a threat to itself and the neighborhood—a failed state.

No wonder Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has shrugged off the UN vote. He has the strategic upper hand that adds to his complacency. Why deal with people who want to haul Israeli officials into the International Criminal Court?

For sure, he should and must treat with the Palestinians if they stop misreading the “correlation of forces,” as the Soviets used to call it. Would that the post-Abbas leadership might exchange self-deception for sobriety. Eventually, realism will set in, as it has to between two peoples irrevocably chained to each other. Alas, the mismeasure of reality has been the hallmark of Palestinian policy for 80 years. In the Hobbesian world of the Middle East, there are no silver platters.

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Strictly Speaking, Populists Do Not Exist

Given how much has been written about populism during the past two years—and working at this magazine, I can anecdotally say that it’s been quite a lot given the number of submissions we have reviewed—it’s surprising how wooly and imperfectly defined the concept remains. Wooly thinking often leads to bad decisions. Well-meaning people, both in Europe and in the United States, shocked by electoral setbacks to their preferred agendas by upstart politicians and movements, have been struggling to make sense of the current political moment—and have let their panic get the better of them.

How we talk about populism suggests the means of dealing with populism. But what if we are asking the wrong questions? What if we misunderstand the problem? What if in dealing with this supposed threat from populism, we are helping undermine the very foundations of the democratic societies we seek to protect? For most of 2017, my intuition has been that this is precisely what is happening. But it wasn’t until I read a recent paper that recast how I thought about the whole concept that things finally clicked into place.

There is a solid consensus among political scientists as to the general outlines of what qualifies as populism. Populists target a country’s corrupt elites in the name of “the people”, an authentic core of the population whose interest are no longer adequately represented by said elites. By invoking an authentic “people” as their natural constituency, populists paint those who disagree with them as illegitimate—either as hopelessly corrupted by financial interests, or as elements in some way “foreign” to society, bent on undermining its health. And by calling into question the responsiveness of elites to the concerns of these “true” people (their natural constituency), populists question the legitimacy of the institutions that constitute liberal democracies. In other words, populists claim, democratic representation itself has been corrupted by out-of-touch elites, and only someone with a direct connection to the authentic people can properly speak for them. Though sometimes populist parties persist as collectives, often a charismatic leader who most clearly communes with the will of the people emerges. This can lead to the centralization of power within the government, and the repression of dissenting views in the broader society.

To sum up this consensus view in plainer English, a populist is a conspiracy-minded rabble-rousing politician, often racist, xenophobic, or nativist, with authoritarian instincts or tendencies.

On the one hand, this definition feels readily recognizable. The archetype is Adolf Hitler, and the consensus definition (consciously or unconsciously) seems to be patterned on him, with other populists representing lesser included examples that exhibit similar tendencies. Populists may not exhibit all the characteristics—and indeed many have very little in common with each other—but the category seems to describe a real-enough phenomenon. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, our own Donald Trump, or even something more broad like the Brexit campaign, all can be made to at least partially fit into the above rubric.

Still, if there’s one thing to be wary of, it’s reductio ad Hitleram. The odious memory of Nazism represents the ultimate unalloyed evil in Western consciousness, and its invocation, even indirectly, is almost always an attempt to play a moral trump card. In foreign policy, for example, advocates of intervention regularly invoke Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 in an attempt to paint their opponents as either naive or unserious. Similarly, a corollary of Godwin’s Law, the famous internet adage, states that invoking a Hitler analogy automatically ends whatever discussion is underway. The point is not that there are no permissible or productive ways to use Hitler or Hitlerism to help us understand the world. It’s that more often than not, invoking Hitler violently shifts any debate into moral territory, with the result that compromise becomes nearly impossible on the basis of any analytical assessment.

Here we begin to glimpse the fundamental problem with our current discussions of populism: Most attempts to come up with a rigorous definition imperceptibly shade into the realm of moral judgments. My “plain English” definition above is deliberately crafted to highlight this tendency. “Conspiracy-minded” implies being out of touch with reality, “rabble” has pejorative connotations, and “racism,” “xenophobia,” and even “nativism” are terms that imply profound moral shortcomings. I am of course not implying that we should avoid condemning Hitler and Nazism on moral grounds. I am, however, suggesting that a moralistic definition of populism that implicitly uses Hitler and Nazism as a kind of template is less a useful analytical tool and more a means of delegitimizing political opponents.

Well, politics ain’t beanbag, a determined enemy of populism might respond. Many populists are themselves trying to undermine democratic institutions on moral grounds, for example by claiming that rightfully elected leaders are somehow illegitimate. The only way to deal with this kind of threat, the thinking goes, is to fight like with like. When a populist seeks to circumvent legitimate institutions, he ought to be stigmatized as illegitimate and forbidden from participating in our democracy. Only then can “normal” politics resume.

People who throw the “populist” label around as a slur have fallen into a kind of cognitive trap that is the direct result of their flawed definition of populism itself. By defining all populists as some lesser included version of Hitler, or at minimum as a stepping stone to the sort of depravity that Nazism represents, an existential struggle over legitimacy seems not just wise, but imperative. It’s perpetually 1938 in Munich, and Hitler must be stopped.

The uncomfortable truth is that where they are succeeding, the populists are coming to power by legitimate democratic means. Their arguments may be inflammatory, but there is no bright line that distinguishes normal political mobilization from what we think of as populist harangue. Mobilizing consent is at the heart of our politics, and that involves politicians spouting a certain amount of necessarily polarizing rhetoric in order to get “their” voters to the polls. That rhetoric often includes insinuations that the other side is either in the pockets of shadowy elites, or is morally bankrupt.

The fact that this kind of moralistic offensive against populism, by questioning the very legitimacy of democratically elected “populists,” is itself fundamentally anti-democratic—a kind of distorted mirror image of populism itself—rarely dawns on anyone.

Are we doomed to fight this fight? Not necessarily—if we can adjust our definitions appropriately. A political sociologist at Harvard named Bart Bonikowski has done important work that gets us a good part of the way there.

His main insight is that thinking about populism as an ideology and populists as ideologues leads to a critical misunderstanding of the phenomenon. Populists, Bonikowski argues, strictly speaking don’t exist. Rather, he suggests, we should think of populism, defined as setting oneself up as a tribune of the people against an entrenched and corrupt elite, as a kind of rhetorical “frame”—a political technique.

“By treating populism as a speech-level phenomenon rather than an actor-level one,” Bonikowski explains, “it becomes possible to ask which political actors are more likely to rely on populist rhetoric in particular circumstances and why.” His research, which looks at rhetoric in American political campaigns from 1952 to 1996, found that there was nothing remarkable about politicians talking this way. Populist rhetoric is a normal feature of our politics. That said, he is careful to point out that not all democratic politicians are equally inclined to this rhetorical tic. “Dispelling the notion that populism is an essential attribute of certain political actors does not preclude the possibility that some politicians will rely on populist rhetoric more frequently than others,” he says. Political outsiders in American politics tended to resort to a populist rhetorical framing more so than established politicians. And these same politicians often relied on this framing to a steadily decreasing extent as their time in power dragged on and they were less credible as “outsiders.”

Apart from attempting to give a more reassuring historical context to the current political moment, Bonikowski’s approach has one other outstanding virtue: It decouples the concept of “populism” from the concepts of “authoritarianism” and “racism/xenophobia/nativism” that other definitions bundle in. This makes accurately talking about various recent political events much easier: If one puts the rhetorical framing to the side, one can have a productive discussion about the substance of the politics on the merits. The Brexit campaign, for example, did make appeals to nativism, but it was in no way authoritarian, whereas a distinguishing feature of the Orban and Kaczynski regimes has been their tendency to consolidate power through sharp-elbowed moves against civil society, the press, and more broadly the rule of law. The important thing to remember, Bonikowski stresses, is that none of these tendencies imply the other. “Even though a number of ethno-nationalist populist candidates . . . have gone on to subvert democratic institutions while in power, populism has also been employed by mainstream politicians who operate within the constraints of democratic institutions.”

This conceptual clarity gets us to the crux of the issue. Authoritarianism is inherently damaging to liberal democracy at a fundamental level. This is the root threat that people who claim to be worried about “populism” should be most concerned about. The norms that underpin democratic societies are fragile things, and attempts to undermine them, through assaults on both official institutions and civil society, ought to be resisted vigorously. This is a fight worth having, and in uncompromising terms at that.

But this tooth-and-nail approach, however, must not extend into other areas of political dispute. Take, for example, the question of immigration. Older definitions of populism see restrictionist attitudes as an ominous echo of Nazi ideology. But as Bonikowski notes, “Beliefs about the nation’s meaning—shaped in part by particular perceptions of the nation’s past and visions for its future—are central to people’s sense of self and their connections to others around them.” If there’s one question that is by definition political, it’s this one.

As I have argued before, a kind of liberal orthodoxy has tried to exclude these kinds of questions from democratic debate. As Robert Skidelsky recently observed, “Economic liberals view national frontiers as irrational obstacles to the global integration of markets. Many political liberals regard nation-states and the loyalties they inspire as obstacles to the wider political integration of humanity.” Both groups see their assertions as gospel truth, and the Hitlerization of dissenting views provided by the popular understanding of populism has only fed into liberals’ rigidity on these matters.

The paradox is that the moral rigidities that liberalism’s most religious adherents insist upon create exactly the kind of opportunities that outsider politicians reliant on the populist frame can most readily exploit. Orbán, for one, didn’t rise to power on an anti-migrant platform; rather, he styled himself a Hungarian traditionalist and economic protectionist. When the opportunity to weaponize the issue arose, created by Angela Merkel’s moral defense of the failure of the EU to control its external borders, Orbán did not hesitate. Eight years in, the wily Hungarian is seen as overwhelmingly likely to win another term this year, aided in no small part by the gift given to him by Berlin.

It’s vitally important to return these kinds of questions back to the realm of politics. As a recently naturalized American citizen myself, I’m emotionally predisposed to favor a more liberal immigration stance, both in Europe and in the United States. But I am no longer under any illusion that this is anything but a fundamentally political question, not a moral one—and that my preferences may well be rejected by my fellow citizens. Insisting otherwise only threatens to undermine the fundamental values that undergird our societies.

 Our own Frank Fukuyama sketched out a general typology of populist leaders in our pages (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) a few weeks ago. His typological approach slightly differs from the one I outline here, but is not fundamentally at odds with it. A fuller treatment of the recent academic approaches to populism can be found in Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

The post Strictly Speaking, Populists Do Not Exist appeared first on The American Interest.

Development with Chinese Characteristics

Barring some major crisis, China seems poised to expand its presence in international affairs, and, as part of that presence, to offer an alternative development model to that long promoted by the West. Making explicit what has for some years been simplistically referred to as the Beijing Consensus, General Secretary and “core leader” Xi Jinping asserted during the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 19th National Congress that China has “blaz[ed] a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization. It offers a new option for other countries and nationals who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.” China has the resources and experience, he declared, to offer “Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.”1

To the prospective supply of such wisdom there appears to be a rising demand. Before his death in 2012, Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s leader for 21 years, often expressed his desire for his country to emulate China’s economic strategy. He marked the limits of the free market, consistently praised the Chinese Communist Party’s economic stewardship, and sought China’s assistance in building up Ethiopia’s infrastructure and manufacturing base. His successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, has been even more enthusiastic about trying to create a developmental state modeled on East Asia. As one Ethiopian bureaucrat was quoted in a recent Guardian article, “We are 20 years behind China and we’re trying to do what they did to get where they are.”2

Ethiopia is not alone. States as disparate as Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kazakhstan, and Bolivia seek to replicate China’s economic transformation. High-ranking decision-makers visit China on study trips. National planning bodies issue ambitious documents modeled on China’s experience.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. If for historical reasons some societies prefer to adopt governance forms and economic policies that directly challenge Western orthodoxy, that is no reason for Western leaders to wish that they remained mired in poverty. A problem arises just for those jealous of the ideological insistence that only the Western historical path to affluence works, and its central codicil that democracy and free markets are the only pathways to stability and prosperity. But it isn’t really a problem, ideologically speaking: If this is true, then the Chinese approach—or alternatives that other states may develop—will fail those who adopt it, China included; if it isn’t true, we should want to know that.

China’s development model is too often misinterpreted or oversimplified. For many Western analysts, the so-called Beijing Consensus has come to denote a non-democratic challenge to liberal capitalism, constituting, as Minxin Pei explains, a combination of “authoritarian rule with pro-market economic policies.”3 This misunderstanding is not confined to the West. For many leaders in the developing world, such as the late Hugo Chávez, the China model has come to represent strong leadership, a centralized government, and an interventionist state.

These caricatures miss many of the important lessons China’s rise has for the developing world. And having an alternative model to the Western one is important, given the latter’s failure in many countries. Despite decades of aid and advice, too few developing countries have been able to transform their economies on anything approaching the scale achieved by China—which often followed a very different playbook from that promoted by Western development experts.

Every country has specific circumstances that require a unique governance and development path, as this article demonstrates below with a brief case study from Ethiopia. The best approach synthesizes ideas and models from countries around the world and takes into account a given country’s historical experience. Understanding the key elements of China’s success will help developing countries formulate their own strategies. It might even help the United States to genuinely make itself great again.

Chinese Lessons

Party leaders have never laid out the Chinese model in any one speech or document, so to discover it by those means requires some reverse engineering. When Deng Xiaoping started the country on its reform path in late 1978, he had only a vague notion of what might work. Despite its achievements under Mao Zedong in unifying the country and substantially enhancing the education and health of the population, the three-decade-old Communist regime had a weak economic record, especially compared to its neighbors. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, China suffered from chronic food shortages, huge inefficiencies, gross misallocation of investment capital, and technological backwardness.

After observing the rapid growth of neighbors such as South Korea and Taiwan, the pragmatic Deng and other Party leaders groped for a strategy to set their economy on a similarly successful path. As ensuing reforms produced unprecedented economic growth, several key principles emerged—some by design, some by accident. Although there are various ways to explain China’s success, the ten lessons that follow are chosen with an eye to providing ideas for leaders and policymakers across the developing world.

1) Start with small farmers and rural areas. Partly because of worries about an impending food crisis, China started its reform drive by breaking up farming collectives and empowering small-scale farmers. By linking effort to reward, productivity and output sharply increased. It also laid the groundwork for change throughout the economy.

But China’s leaders did not simply unleash agricultural markets, as Western development agencies often recommend developing countries do. Instead, they concentrated state policies on ensuring that peasant farmers had the resources, knowledge, and incentives necessary to maximize output. The state remained firmly in control of prices (increasing them to encourage extra effort), the distribution system, and the supply of fertilizer.4 Over time, improvements to extension services, better infrastructure, investments in agricultural research, and large-scale education and training programs paid huge dividends.5 Only after the agricultural sector strengthened did Chinese officials introduce more widespread market liberalization reforms in the 1990s and 2000s.

The gains from reconfiguring incentives were immediate and dramatic: the rural poverty rate fell from 76 percent to 23 percent between 1980 and 1985, as hundreds of millions escaped poverty for the first time.6 Higher incomes and productivity, in turn, prompted demand for new manufacturing products, produced household savings that could be funneled into investment in business, and created surplus labor for the new factories that sprouted up.

One of the chief beneficiaries of these developments was rural industry, one of the most underappreciated elements of the Chinese economic miracle. Benefitting from the land, labor, loans, and technical assistance that local governmental sponsors provided, township and village enterprises (TVE) became the most dynamic part of the Chinese economy in the 1980s and 1990s. Their share of GDP climbed from less than 6 percent in 1978 to 26 percent by 1996.7 Competition between localities spurred investment, pushing the whole country forward.

Today, many of China’s most successful private manufacturing firms are based in or got their start in relatively underdeveloped, predominantly agricultural areas. The New Hope Group, one of China’s largest private businesses, started as a breeding farm raising quail and chickens in rural Sichuan. Kelon, one of China’s largest white goods manufacturers, was founded in rural Shunde county in southern Guandong. And China’s most promising automobile exporter, Chery, is based not in Shanghai but in the agricultural hinterland of Anhui province. These rural enterprises have contributed significantly to China’s export prowess and produced tens of millions of jobs for people who might not have benefitted if growth had been concentrated in cities alone.8 And whereas 95 percent of Chinese villages have roads, electricity, running water, natural gas, and phone lines (compared with fewer than 50 percent of villages in India),9 many developing countries have ignored their rural areas, systematically underinvesting in rural agriculture and infrastructure.10

2) Invest heavily in knowledge infrastructure. China has invested heavily in education and innovation, producing the well-educated workforce and highly skilled specialists that have motored its economy forward. Whereas four-fifths of Chinese were illiterate in 1949, less than a tenth are today.11 Although few students attended college before the reform era, and fewer than a tenth of Chinese college-age students were enrolled in higher education in the late 1990s, today more than one-fourth (30 million) are. But educational gains were not merely a product of modernization.

Some of the most important gains—especially at the primary and secondary school levels—predate the reform era. China emphasized health and education throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, equipping its citizens (unintentionally, as it was the heyday of Maoist Communist ideology) to take advantage of Deng’s capitalist reforms when they were launched in the late 1970s. Although still very poor in 1978, the population had achieved relative healthiness and education—its human development index already approached that of more wealthy states.

China has prioritized its knowledge infrastructure in ways that extend beyond basic education. It has established advanced research centers for everything from agriculture to computers and sought to diffuse information about new technologies and production strategies. This has created what one British report called the “absorptive state,” increasingly able to harness global knowledge and innovation networks.12 Combining homegrown capabilities and infrastructure with foreign technologies and knowledge—frequently purloined, true enough—it has built the world’s fastest supercomputer, sent astronauts into space, and developed its own satellite navigation system.

China also has emphasized learning in policymaking, using experimentation and feedback mechanisms to refine and update ideas to maximize their effectiveness. The goal is to promote a dynamic learning process such that new concepts are systematically tested and, if proven successful, rapidly and widely implemented. While China often falls short of this ideal (and is held back at times by the authoritarian nature of the state), it has proven successful at spreading new ways of doing things across an immense and still relatively poor country.

An excellent explanation of this process appeared in a 2011 joint report from the International Poverty Reduction Center in China (IPRCC) and the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD):

What makes rapid transformation processes possible? Development as a learning process. . . . A dynamic learning process takes hold in a country via interactions with new ideas, products and organisational models that are increasingly abundant in the multipolar, connected, global economy of the 21st century. Business models that are found to work locally, become widely replicated and then progressively improved, in an endogenous process of continual upgrading, across the economy—agriculture, industry, infrastructure and services. . . . The experiment-evaluate-scale up success principle is widely applied and rapidly implemented. This has demanded the expansion of higher education and the development of research institutions linked to policy decision making and implementation. World expertise has been sought and attracted through incentive schemes, international partnerships and often via aid programmes.13

3) Prioritize cohesion over participation. Although China is often criticized for being authoritarian, many of its leaders feel more accountable to its people than those in many developing countries that hold regular elections. The primary explanation for this apparent paradox is the country’s high degree of social cohesion and strong sense of nationhood, which result from its ethnic homogeneity (China is 90 percent Han) and its long history as a unified state. In this regard, China differs from most developing countries that lack a strong national identity, many of which were carved into being by colonial powers and combining many ethnic, religious, caste, or clan groups. In disciplinary terms, to put it bluntly, China’s situation shows that sociology is more important than economics.

Despite the lack of elections, the affinitive power of a common cultural identity and group allegiance channels itself into economic development, yielding a state focused on building up national strength. For the most part, China’s leaders have been concerned with performance, staking their legitimacy on results, especially as Communist ideology has waned. The CCP has promoted officials who have delivered growth, and it has measured its own performance by how fast incomes rise, poverty declines, and public services improve.

This informal accountability has proven less effective, however, as China’s economy has become more sophisticated. The ruling CCP has consistently come up short in enacting reforms (especially since the early 2000s) that threatened to substantially weaken its control over important levers of power, leaving the country less prepared for the myriad challenges it faces today as a middle-income country. The legal system, for instance, continues to operate under the stamp of the Party, and is only allowed to hold CCP leaders accountable when higher ups have pushed for it. As a result, the judiciary remains beholden to CCP powerbrokers. Alas, history and culture remain dominant here as well, albeit in a negative sense: China has never developed true rule of law, only rule by law.

While many developing countries begin from a different starting point, the Chinese experience makes clear that social cohesion and an organic sense of elite accountability are critical ingredients for development—although the latter may not be sufficient at higher levels of development.

4) Build a competent government committed to inclusive development. The state has played a crucial role in the development of China, often by following a script that makes little sense to Western development specialists. It has energetically promoted business and owned tens of thousands of companies, even competing with itself at times. It has provided a welcoming environment for investors, even though the country has a weak legal regime and high levels of corruption. And it has often micromanaged markets with an eye to maintaining social stability and ensuring outcomes that align with its objectives.

Despite its authoritarian nature, there are three features of how the state operates in China that any development specialist would praise, and that help explain why China has outperformed almost all other developing countries.

First, China has a strong state—and by this I refer not to its authoritarian character but to its administrative function competence. Its government can formulate complex policies and ensure that they are (more or less) carried out. Building on millennia of experience with bureaucratic governance, China has far greater state organizational capacity across a much wider geographical and departmental range than any other developing country.

Partly as a result, Chinese leaders have been able to use decentralization to accommodate local needs and promote local ownership of policies and a high degree of legitimacy. Regional and local governments supported business early on, helping the more promising small enterprises gain access to funding when money was scarce and ensuring easy access to larger markets by providing contacts, infrastructure improvements, and resources such as land and training. This limited risk, lowered costs, and provided the internal competition that spurred foreign and local investment.

Second, China maintains a much more inclusive regime than most developing countries. The state has worked to ensure that all its citizens are able to participate and gain from economic growth; this is rarer in the developing world than is usually recognized. Despite China’s massive size and population, almost every child gets a basic education and almost every village has roads and electricity.

This emphasis owes much, again, to the country’s ethnic homogeneity and long history as a unified state. Socially heterogeneous countries with weak state apparatuses typically have leaders who seek to maintain power with ethnic, religious, or tribal support and consider those from other groups as threats to their control. However, China’s overwhelmingly ethnic Han composition has encouraged it to be assimilationist, disregarding unique cultures in its midst. China has provided Tibetans, Mongols, and Uighurs with economic opportunity while deliberately weakening their cultures and identities.

Third, China’s government has been consistently committed to promoting development, adopting aggressive policies to attract investment, promote growth, boost exports, and develop technology and human resources. Both domestic and foreign investors have shown confidence in these efforts, pouring trillions of dollars into China’s economy over the past three decades despite the fact that it performs badly on most indicators of governance. These indicators, however, are partly a figment of the Western imagination that exalts narrow political and economic factors and ignores social and cultural dynamics. According to the World Bank, China scores in the bottom half of all countries for the overall quality of its governance.14 According to Transparency International, it is highly corrupt, ranking just below places such as Brazil, Belarus, and Turkey.15 Yet it thrives, which ought to tell us more about the World Bank and Transparency International than it does about China.

The gist is that although Chinese state operations are riddled with inefficiencies and corruption, the state has played a much more positive role in China than in most developing countries, where the state is often the greatest barrier to progress. Complaints over intellectual property protection, the favoritism shown to state companies in some sectors, environmental issues, and growing inequalities pale in comparison to the insecurity, inconsistency, red tape, and incompetency that make the state the biggest barrier to development in many developing countries.

5) Invest heavily in infrastructure. China has invested vast sums in developing every aspect of its infrastructure, something that sounds basic but which few developing countries have achieved. This has had a profound effect on its attractiveness to investors and its economic growth.

Much as the United States saw investment in its national highway system as strategic for its security and economy during the 1950s, China believes that developing world-class transportation systems and export infrastructures are crucial to its future. By lowering the costs and risks of doing business within the country, China has taken advantage of its well-educated, inexpensive workforce to create the world’s most important manufacturing center. Export totals have climbed dramatically, from the 32nd-largest in the world in 1978 ($20 billion) to the largest in 2010 (more than $1.5 trillion).16

The transportation system has played an important role in integrating the vast country and reducing (to some extent) the great inequalities that sprouted up in the aftermath of reform. By enabling the population to travel easily and cheaply, the road and rail network has helped weave together the continent-sized country, integrating the population in a way that was unimaginable until recently. Hundreds of millions have seen their lives transformed by enhanced work opportunities, cheaper consumer goods, and options for travel. And large inequalities between regions are being reduced to some extent because companies can invest in inland regions once severely disadvantaged by higher transportation costs.

Investments in residential infrastructure—particularly in electricity, running water, and telephones—have also reduced inequality. As a result, the vast majority of families have benefitted from the country’s recirculation of economic gains into infrastructure spending.

Investment in infrastructure, combined with China’s emphasis on nurturing its homegrown capabilities, has spawned a set of globally competitive enterprises. Chinese companies build government complexes, airports, malls, homes, hotels, and highways from Algeria to Liberia to Pakistan, strengthening ties and gaining diplomatic influence in the process. Through initiatives such as One Belt, One Road (OBOR), they help knit China’s Southeast and Central Asian neighbors into its economy, increasing their dependence on it in the process. And they play a strategic role in helping China gain access to important natural resources. For example, in places such as Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chinese companies build infrastructure that either reaches remote sites or that helps develop the economy in a way that a royalty payment cannot.

6) Experiment with new policies first, then implement reforms gradually. Whereas governments elsewhere often introduce policies without testing them (either due to overconfidence or international pressure), China has consistently embraced a trial-and-error, evidence-based approach to test policy before rolling it out nationally. This approach partly reflected the leadership’s uncertainty—and to a certain extent lack of unity—about how to induce reform. Few had experience with capitalist ideas and modern economic systems. Resources were limited and poverty widespread. No country the size of China had ever modernized successfully by design. No one had anything approaching a blueprint (in 1979) for how to restructure a Communist state-run economy. There was no consensus on what the goal of reform ought to be, or what the process of change ought to look like.

But these uncertainties may have been an advantage. China has reformed in a piecemeal manner, working much more cautiously than Western aid agencies have when advising developing country governments around the world. This approach echoed Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, “Crossing the River While Feeling the Rocks.” The piecemeal approach both reduced risk and disarmed opponents. Initial successes converted many to back reform, sometimes because of the rich payoffs reform promised. One change led to the next in an evolutionary manner. The damage to the social fabric and government capacity that has often followed restructuring programs elsewhere was mostly avoided. Slow but steady change led to remarkable transformation.

State enterprises were restructured cautiously, but were eventually forced to dramatically change the way they operated. First, their monopoly was removed and prices were freed at the margins. New companies appeared, creating competition and forcing the managers of state enterprises to adapt to market needs. As profit margins declined, firms were forced to pay more attention to profits, leading them to hire better managers and offer better rewards to those who succeeded. This in turn produced better performance.17 Eventually, these state enterprises laid off millions of workers, but in a way that brought less disruption to the economy and to the lives involved because private-sector companies were able to hire most of them. Their share of industrial production declined from more than three-fourths in 1978 to less than one-sixth by 2005.18

Instead of introducing market prices across the board, China repeatedly introduced a dual-pricing system that kept most major commodities partially under a centrally controlled system. This unleashed incentives (for any production beyond a quota) but allowed the government to limit the disruptiveness of reform. As production expanded, more of the economy marketized.19

The decentralized and competitive nature of the Chinese government has played an important role here. Provincial and local governments have provided laboratories for new policies (much as states can do, if allowed, in the United States) and encouraged new ideas, even those clashing with Beijing’s orthodoxy. For example, local farmers in Anhui Province challenged the commune system, setting the stage for the introduction of more market-based methods first in agriculture, and then later in industry across the whole country. Local officials in Guangdong first proposed attracting foreign investment; special economic zones in Shenzhen and elsewhere followed soon thereafter. And in competing to outdo each other, provincial and local governments attracted investment, developed new industries, and expanded infrastructure at a furious pace—a sharp contrast to local governments in many developing countries, which often have no developmental role or behave in ways that hurt growth.

7) Focus on reworking incentives and removing obstacles to growth. As already noted, China eschewed the “big bang” approach to reform under which all prices and markets are freed simultaneously, as happened for example in Poland in 1990. Instead it focused on “big issues” such as “incentives, mobility, price flexibility, competition, and openness.”20 Enormous economic advances occurred although—and maybe because—institutional reforms were delayed. The gradualist approach seeks to rework incentives and remove obstacles by changing policies just enough to unleash pent-up energy that catalyzes progress.21 The idea is that the force with which newly unleashed energy meets remaining obstacles powers further reform.22

With China getting these “big issues” mostly right, institutional weaknesses, government malfeasance, a lack of democracy, and even gross distortions to some markets have mattered much less than Western models expected because initiative is rewarded at every level. Companies that manufacture inexpensive products can export them. Laborers willing to work long hours in difficult environments can send home previously unimaginably sums of money to their families. Resourceful families can open retail stores and enlarge their incomes. Farmers who boost yields can profitably sell their produce. In time, markets came to play a dominant role across the economy, producing intense competition and leading to huge expansions in the production, quality, variety, affordability, and price of goods. Few developing countries have created an environment as encouraging to initiative as China; indeed, most have overlapping political and economic elites who excel at rentier behaviors that raise barriers to entry and frustrate initiative.

Meanwhile, growing international ties produced an enormous transfer of knowledge and know-how into China, further shaping incentives for companies and individuals and boosting growth in the process. Chinese reforms also coincided with a new era in globalization, enabling companies to move goods less expensively, people to communicate more cheaply across great distances, and everyone to have access to greater amounts of information. Chinese worked for foreign companies, traveled overseas, accessed abundant translations, learned English, sought information on foreign products, and studied abroad. Many of these activities would have been far more difficult and less effective had reforms been carried out decades earlier. We know it’s true: Timing may not be everything, but it counts for a lot.

8) Use financial markets to promote development and stability. Instead of assuming that unattended financial markets, accompanied by a stable macroeconomic and legal framework, would produce optimal results (as Western policy often assumes), China has intervened repeatedly to ensure that financial markets promote development and stability. Like many of its East Asian neighbors, Chinese leaders have sought to use public policy to alter the supply and price of certain goods (including money) in ways that would “lead the market” and so encourage outcomes the government saw as critical.23

As in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan, China has emphasized the role of banks and a postal savings system, prudential regulation, and limits on financial market competition. It has always viewed Western-style unconstrained financial markets with suspicion. By reducing risk and increasing convenience for small and rural depositors, its policies boosted savings rates and accumulation of capital. Chinese households save about 40 percent of their incomes, the highest rate in the world (and about ten times the rate of Americans).

The large capital pool has enabled the country to generate and sustain one of the highest investment rates in the world: over 40 percent in recent years.24 Interest rates have been kept low to increase companies’ demand for capital. Investment in infrastructure has given the country world-class facilities that belie its middle-income status. The country has also tightly managed its capital controls and currency value, preventing wild flows of currency into or out of the country from undermining the economy, as they did in many Asian countries in 1997-98. These policies have also boosted export competitiveness by maintaining stability and ensuring the currency was reasonably priced.

Yet tight financial control has come with a cost. By never fully reforming its Soviet-style financial system, China misprices and misallocates enormous amounts of cash. As a result, China’s financial system poses problems absent in other rapidly developing Asian countries—which generally give the state a much smaller role in finance. Its debt problem, for example, poses unnecessary threats that could have been avoided if the government had pushed forward with institutional reform in the banking and finance sector.

Another cost is that it is possible to save and invest too much, leading to overproduction and excess capacity that have no normal outlets. This amounts to government-abetted sectoral bubbles and massive misallocation of capital. As China tries to stimulate more domestic consumption to deal with the problem, it is finding its institutions more of an impediment than a benefit, and anemic reform in other areas (like a social safety net) a complementary barrier to change.25

9) Use government policy to boost economic competitiveness. While most Western economic thinking lauds liberalized markets, China has employed various “illiberal” policy instruments to promote industrial development.

Just as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and to some extent even the United States once did, China’s government prioritized certain sectors and companies deemed likely to become globally competitive. It then ensured their access to cheap capital and land, technology, human resources, and regulatory assistance—advantages over their peers elsewhere. It has also used regulation to keep foreigners at bay (such as in restricted industries) or to diminish their influence. Yet it has also used Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to promote foreign investment at certain times, in certain places, and in certain sectors, giving them a larger share in its economy than many of its neighbors do. Protectionism has thus been selectively strategic.

Large state-owned enterprises continue to dominate crucial industries, and even many smaller ostensibly private firms exist with some form of state ownership. Meanwhile, local governments have actively promoted local champions such as Geely Automobile and China Yurun Food—even when the central government did not view them as national assets.

Like many before it, the Chinese state has recognized that “the dynamic process of moving from one stage [of economic development] to the next requires industrial diversification, upgrading, and corresponding improvements in hard and soft infrastructure,” as Justin Yifu Lin, the first Chinese Chief Economist of the World Bank, put it.26 Private firms sometimes lack the scale or incentives to overcome many externalities; in these cases, greater intervention is needed than Western policies typically prescribe. Although the large role of the state in business may yield greater problems in the future, on the whole the role of the state has been much more positive than negative in China’s case.

10) Promote self-reliance. In keeping with its strong sense of nationhood, China has strategically sought to use its reform to maintain self-reliance, viewing openness as critical to defending its interests and strengthening its economy. In contrast, most developing countries have adopted policies—often under Western influence—that undermine their ability to engage the world on their own terms.

Instead of deploying the laissez faire policies advocated by the international community, Chinese leaders have dictated the terms on which foreign companies can access its market in key sectors, invested heavily in new technologies (and sought them out clandestinely overseas), and built up national champions that can compete internationally. It invested heavily in its ability to govern (instead of laying off tens of thousands of government workers, as some states did in the name of “restructuring”) and prioritized wealth creation over poverty reduction (often the emphasis of foreign aid).

The IPRCC-OECD report summarizes,

Making economic transformation the central guiding objective of government . . . provides a basis for wide consensus and participation across society in a national project. . . . Self-reliance has been a fundamental principle of Chinese strategy. This principle is imbedded deeply in China’s strong ownership of its own development path while absorbing knowledge from a wide range of external actors. . . . External support, such as foreign investment and aid, is incorporated within those strategies and policies, which makes this external support more effective.27

With the right know-how, homegrown corporations, and a capable state apparatus, China sees globalization as a game it can win. Trade builds up its companies, benefits the great majority of its citizens, and enhances its international position.

A Case Study of Application: Chinese Lessons in Ethiopia

Though it is half a world away in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia bears some remarkable similarities to China. Both are ancient civilizations struggling to enter the modern world. Both were impressive regional powers for millennia and among the few countries never fully or enduringly colonized. Both were ruled by absolute monarchs for most of their histories but after a period of brutal conflict have been led by left-wing political parties that deployed the kind of power that comes from the barrel of a gun. Both have long depended on bureaucratic government to maintain control over their territory and people. Finally, both were desperately poor until recent spurts of economic growth.

As mentioned above, Ethiopia’s leaders have actively sought to emulate China at times, such that the country serves as a case study of the Chinese lessons outlined above. Ethiopia has aligned itself with China’s development model more closely than have other African countries. This is partly because Ethiopia’s leaders shared an ideological orientation with China’s leaders from early on, and their means of gaining power gave them an institutional basis many developing countries lack.

Ethiopia’s policies since 1995, when Zenawi became Prime Minister, have most resembled China’s in their emphasis on social cohesion (#3), competent government (#4), rural development (#1), basic education (a subset of #2), gradualism (#6), a central role for the state in promoting development (#9), and self-reliance (#10).

More recently, the government has placed a strong emphasis on manufacturing, which is leading to large investments in infrastructure (#5) and the removal of obstacles to growth (#7). The state is working directly with China on projects aimed at improving electricity generation, transportation, and customs management. Chinese firms are investing in railroads, hydroelectric plants, and industrial parks. Investors from China, Turkey, and Europe have started to invest in labor-intensive industries such as shoes, T-shirts, handbags, but the scale is still relatively small.

The results of Ethiopia’s policies have been, for the most part, exceptional, especially when compared to the country’s pre-1995 experience, other large countries in Africa (such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and most of the country’s neighbors (including Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan). Ethiopia’s economic growth rate of 8.4 percent between 2001 and 2010 was the fastest in Africa and third fastest in the world among countries without oil (and fifth overall). By making a sustained and systematic effort to expand access to public education, enrollment skyrocketed from about three million in 1994–95 to more than 15 million by 2008–09. The country recorded the third-best improvement worldwide in the Human Development Index (a measure of the health, education, and standard of living of a population) between 2000 and 2010.28 Whereas Ethiopia was once a byword for famine, today it is close to self-sufficient in food, and rural areas are noticeably better off.

Leaders in both China and Ethiopia see the Western emphasis on markets as too limited (and naive), and they have strategically supplemented how they work by giving the government a much stronger role in the economy. Mushtaq Khan summarized this “heterodox” approach:

Liberal economists have developed a framework of good governance as market-enhancing governance, focusing on governance capabilities that reduce transaction costs and enable markets to work more efficiently. In contrast, heterodox economists have stressed the role of growth-enhancing governance, which focuses on governance capacities to overcome entrenched market failures in allocating assets, acquiring productivity-enhancing technologies and maintaining political stability in contexts of rapid social transformation. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but current policy exclusively focuses on the former, and ignores the strong empirical and historical evidence supporting the latter to the detriment of the growth prospects of poor countries.29

Ethiopia’s heterodox governance is not, however, a replica of China’s. It started its reform era from a much lower base: Ethiopia in 1995 more closely resembled China in 1949 than China in 1979.

Given this background, Ethiopia has diverged significantly from China’s direction in several areas. One of the most notable is the degree to which the government is involved in markets. Whereas in China the state plays a significant role managing and participating in the economy, in Ethiopia the state often plays such a strong role that it limits the development of the private sector. The result is much less competition and slower gains in some crucial areas. In communications, for instance, China has many different carriers, all state-owned (by different arms of the government), who compete fiercely, driving down prices, ensuring the adoption of the latest technology, and limiting the problems typically associated with state ownership (for example, inefficiency). This has produced one of most dynamic cell phone and internet markets in the world. In contrast, Ethiopia’s market is dominated by a monopoly state-owned telecoms company, and it has one of Africa’s least developed markets as a result. Mobile-phone penetration, which is close to three-fourths elsewhere in Africa, is only about one-fourth in Ethiopia. A paltry one-fortieth of Ethiopians have access to the internet.30

Despite a strong emphasis on decentralization in service delivery, with positive results, Ethiopia has done far less to empower regional governments in the economic sphere than China. This has limited competition between different parts of the country, reduced experimentation in policymaking, and decreased incentives for officials to promote business development and investment. It may have also played a role in the ethnic protests that have plagued the country since 2016. As Ethiopia develops, each of these discrepancies will matter more, limiting its ability to replicate China’s success.

Interestingly, despite its heterodox approach, Ethiopia has also received substantial assistance from Western donors. It is, for instance, one of the biggest recipients of both British and American aid. This suggests that Ethiopia is not only not being penalized for diverging from standard Western policy orthodoxy, but that it is being rewarded for good performance. Other countries should take note: Western donors are looking for results, and unorthodox policies that succeed may garner attention despite the ideological challenges they pose.

Pragmatism and Flexibility

China’s success and Ethiopia’s progress show that every country has unique assets and challenges, and that building incrementally on what already works is far more likely to succeed than trying to import any particular model from overseas. There is no single formula for success, as a long string of failed models emanating from Washington and elsewhere attests. Countries may need free elections (but China did not), may need good governance as defined in the West (but China did not), may be cursed by natural resources (but Botswana was not), or may need lots of foreign investment (but South Korea did not). What developing countries do need is good leadership that can leverage a certain degree of cohesion, develop a reasonably competent government, and flexibly respond to local and national circumstances.

Deng Xiaoping famously said, “It doesn’t matter whether it is a white cat or a black cat, a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” More than anything else, China has been pragmatic throughout its reform era, adopting a results-based strategy rather than following a formulaic one, as it did prior to reform, and adopting ideas and know-how from multiple sources. Other countries would also likely profit from a heterodox approach, synthesizing ideas and models from both their own cultural experience and those abroad that suit them best. China’s rising influence combined with the weakening of Western hegemony and the Trump Administration’s profound lack of interest in the developing world makes it more likely that countries in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere will turn to it for ideas. Will it work? Well, the whole world is watching.

1Yu Tao, “Get Ready for an Even More Assertive China,” Diplomat, November 1, 2017.

2Elsje Fourie, “Africa Looks to Learn from East Asia’s Development Experiences,” Guardian (Poverty Matters blog), September 28, 2011.

3Minxin Pei, “How China Is Ruled,” The American Interest (March/April 2008).

4Loren Brandt and Thomas Rawski, “China’s Great Economic Transformation,” in China’s Great Economic Transformation, ed. Brandt and Rawski (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 9-10.

5Hauke Brankamp and Tobias Reichert, “China’s Agricultural Development: Lessons for Africa?” Worldwatch Institute (Nourishing the Planet blog), June 30, 2010.

6John Bruce and Zongmin Li, “‘Crossing the River While Feeling the Rocks’: Incremental Land Reform and Its Impact on Rural Welfare in China,” International Food Policy Research Institute Discussion Paper 926 (2009), p. 22.

7Pranab Bardhan, Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 19-21.

8Yasheng Huang, “China’s True Economic Miracle,” Globalist, January 6, 2009.

9Jamil Anderlini, “Rural Investment Pays Off in China,” Financial Times, September 11, 2012.

10Jan Kees van Donge, David Henley, and Peter Lewis, “Tracking Development in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa: The Primacy of Policy,” Development Policy Review 30, no. S1 (February 2012): s5-s24.

11People’s Republic of China, Ministry of Education, “Historic Achievements: 60 Years of Educational Reform and Development,” September 14, 2009.

12Kirsten Bound, Tom Saunders, James Wilsdon, and Jonathan Adam, China’s Absorptive State: Research, Innovation, and the Prospects for China-UK Collaboration (Nesta, 2013).

13China-DAC Study Group, “Economic Transformation and Poverty Reduction: How it Happened in China, Helping it Happen in Africa” (August 2011), pp. 8–10.

14World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators (2015).

15Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2016.

16Chinese Government Official Web Portal, “Full Text: China’s Foreign Trade” (December 2011).

17Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 5–13.

18Brandt and Rawski, “China’s Great Economic Transformation,” pp. 19–20.

19Brandt and Rawski, “China’s Great Economic Transformation,” p. 10.

20Brandt and Rawski, “China’s Great Economic Transformation,” p. 20.

21Justin Yifu Lin, Fang Cai, and Zhou Li, “The Lessons of China’s Transition to a Market Economy,” Cato Journal (Fall 1996).

22Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Princeton University Press, 2007).

23World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 1993).

24Les Picker, “The Return to Capital in China,” NBER Digest (National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2007).

25Keith Richburg, “Getting Chinese to Stop Saving and Start Spending Is a Hard Sell,” Washington Post, July 5, 2012.

26Lin, “New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development,” Policy Research Working Paper no. 5197 (World Bank, 2010), p. 3.

27China-DAC Study Group, “Economic Transformation and Poverty Reduction,” p. 9.

28Jakob Engel, “Ethiopia’s Progress on Education: A Rapid and Equitable Expansion of Access,” Development Progress—A Library of Stories (Overseas Development Institute, 2011).

29Khan, “Governance, Economic Growth and Development since the 1960s,” DESA Working Paper No. 54 (United Nations Department of Economics and Social Affairs, 2007), p. i.

30Economist, “Telecoms in Ethiopia: Out of Reach,” April 24, 2013.

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What’s in a Label?

A reporter once asked Franklin Delano Roosevelt where he would locate the New Deal on the linear spectrum. The President of the United States smiled reassuringly, took a long puff on his trademark cigarette holder and replied, “Just a little bit left of center.”1

Fast-forward 80 years to the current struggle for power within the Democratic Party, which pits supporters of former nominee Hillary Clinton against forces loyal to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. What would happen if Sanders, who is constantly quoting Roosevelt yet still describes himself as a “progressive” and a “Democratic socialist,” were to take one more leaf from FDR’s book and start labeling his own programs “centrist”?

That would be ridiculous, of course. Quoting FDR is one thing; trying to win acceptance as a centrist is quite another. The very word contradicts both Sanders’s other self-designations. Clinton supporters would scoff or be apoplectic, or both. Everyone knows she is of the center while he is of the left. That’s like two plus two equals four; axiomatic. Indeed, many of her most prominent supporters believe the key reason she lost the election is that he pulled the party “too far left.” They are outspoken in their insistence that the party “return to the center” in order to reestablish itself as the majority party.2 Having espoused that position, they would likely view any effort on Sanders’s part to claim centrist status as a transparent, cynical attempt at manipulation. She is the centrist, he the leftist, end of discussion. Or is it?

The problem with such axiomatic thinking is that political labels don’t have fixed, clear or “correct” definitions. They are weapons, and, like all forms of weaponry, they are constantly evolving. They may have popularly accepted meanings from one electoral cycle to the next, but those are never static. Moreover, politicians are constantly competing to make their definitions the popularly accepted ones.3 The 2016 primary campaigns included repeated accusations that one candidate or another wasn’t a “real conservative” or a “real progressive.” During the Democratic debates Clinton not only insisted that she, too, was a progressive, but faulted Sanders for supposedly making himself the “gatekeeper” with respect to who qualified as one. Competition over labels is ubiquitous.

Just as popularly accepted meanings change, so does the popularity of a label. Eighty years ago the liberal label was the most popular label in the country. It was the chosen self-designation not only of President Roosevelt but of the great majority of members of Congress. Today, it is hard to find any prominent political figure willing to identify as a liberal. Ever since Ronald Reagan called it “the dreaded L-word,” the term is far more widely used as an epithet than as a self-designation. Indeed, the word “progressive” has re-emerged in recent years as a politically acceptable alternative to it.

Again, labels are not static. Their only constant feature is their political importance. They are what social scientists call “condensation symbols,” in that they condense a lot of information, as well as values and emotions, into a small, easily digested package. They provide what cognitive scientist George Lakoff calls “frames” for political discourse. In so doing, labels can either confer or deny political legitimacy. That is why politicians put so much time and energy into controlling their popularly accepted meanings. And that is why the current struggle for control of the Democratic Party is so heavily bound up with the labeling process.4

Why is it so important to Clinton supporters that they control the labeling process? Their reasoning is not subtle. To them, as to FDR, centrist means safe, reasonable, mainstream. It’s reassuring. President Eisenhower, one of the most underrated of American political strategists, didn’t use the word itself; he used a synonym. He called himself “middle of the road.” The middle of the road, he said, is the widest part; it’s where most Americans live.5 That is exactly how Clinton supporters relate to the centrist label.

By the same token, their labeling Sanders “left” performs a complementary function. In America, that term has likewise had a changing history, popular in the 1930s but anathema during the Cold War. It still carries a connotation of unsafe, fringe, unpredictable, authoritarian, even un-American. Sanders himself doesn’t use it. Even while calling himself a “Democratic socialist,” and taking great pains in his Georgetown University address to explain what he means by that term, he has nonetheless consistently avoided identifying as “left.” He clearly understands the negative implications of that label. So do the Clinton forces, which is why they constantly throw it at him and will continue to do so for as long as he does not challenge them on it.

Could Sanders make a credible claim to the centrist label, and if he could, what would he gain by it? From the outset of his candidacy, he emphasized that all of his key policy proposals have deep roots in both American history and the Democratic Party. Single-payer health care, free college tuition, a livable minimum wage, and an abiding concern for the environment are in his view all consonant with, indeed outgrowths of, the New Deal tradition. On a picket line with striking Verizon workers in New York City, he went so far as to recycle FDR’s line about welcoming the hatred of organized money.6

Equally important, throughout the campaign and especially in the debates, he repeatedly emphasized Clinton’s connections with Wall Street bankers, taunting her for refusing to release the texts of her Goldman Sachs speeches. The implication was clear; it was her coziness with big corporations rather than his agenda that represented a break with long-standing party traditions. Sanders’s position all along has been that his views represent the historic New Deal tradition of the party while it was the Clinton takeover that led to abandonment of that tradition and transformation of the Democratic Party into the “other” Wall Street party.

Sometimes Sanders has expressed himself in negative terms, suggesting that single-payer health care is “not all that radical.” On the positive side, his campaign website enthusiastically endorsed political scientist Peter Dreier’s description of him as “mainstream.”7 Indeed, the latter term has become a synonym for centrist in the same way as was Eisenhower’s phrase “middle of the road.” That being the case, however, what would Sanders gain by competing for the centrist label itself? Why isn’t “mainstream” sufficient?

There are situations in which synonyms suffice; they did for Eisenhower. There are others in which they do not, and this is pre-eminently one of those times. The late Murray Edelman described politics in terms of “mass arousal and quiescence.”8 After the turbulence of the Korean War and the rise of McCarthyism, Eisenhower’s purpose was quiescence. The reassuring phrase “middle of the road” was perfectly suited to that purpose.

Sanders is in the opposite situation. Just as his entire presidential campaign was an exercise in mass arousal, so too is his present effort to restructure and reform the Democratic Party. It is the Clinton forces that require quiescence in order to retain control of the party. Just as reform requires arousal, arousal in turn requires confrontation. That has been true of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, and it is true of what Sanders calls his “political revolution.” The vocabulary must match the purpose.

The word mainstream, while powerfully descriptive, is not itself inherently confrontational in the current situation. Thus far the Clinton forces have essentially managed to ignore it. By contrast, the very fact that those same forces have relied so heavily on the linear spectrum would make a direct challenge to Clinton’s custody of the centrist label much harder to ignore.

It is in this context that Sanders has an enormous amount to gain by opening up a direct competition for the centrist label. It would reinforce and make far more confrontational his claim to represent the authentic, historic New Deal mainstream of the Democratic Party, thereby undercutting the Clinton camp’s efforts to delegitimize him as “fringe.” It would reframe American political discourse itself by making his definition of progressivism the safe, reasonable version with which he already claims most Americans identify.

Equally important, it would turn the tables politically by utilizing the Clinton camp’s own vocabulary against it. If Clinton’s identification as a centrist immediately makes Sanders non-centrist, the same logic would apply if the roles were reversed. If he were to win custody of the centrist label, that would immediately raise the question, “If Sanders is centrist, then what is Clinton?” And what are all those DNC officials and corporate donors who make up her support system, and who currently control the party machinery?

That is exactly the debate Clinton supporters wish to avoid, because it would put the spotlight right on the question of where their true allegiances lie and where their financial dependency has led them politically. And if that in turn were to cost them the centrist label, then their own credentials as representatives of the party mainstream would no longer be secure.

In short, Sanders’s winning custody of the centrist label would immediately re-label Clinton and her supporters as rightist—that is, as non-mainstream within the Democratic Party. It would shift their dependence on corporate financial support from a side issue to a major issue—indeed the central issue—with respect to their own political identity. It would likewise spotlight the fact that it was during Bill Clinton’s presidency that the Democratic Party changed from a New Deal party to the “other” Wall Street party. The current leadership cannot afford such a label, and they would fight fiercely to keep it from sticking.

Could Sanders win such a confrontation? Is there any precedent for such a challenge succeeding? There is; indeed it resulted in the most important change in American political discourse in the 20th century. So far-reaching was the outcome that the position of the loser has been long forgotten.

The result of the 1932 election was a foregone conclusion. The country was in the worst depression in its history. The Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover, had already lost control of the House of Representatives two years earlier. The Democratic challenger, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ran a vigorous campaign but could probably have stayed on his front porch, as did William McKinley in 1896, and done as well. So totally discredited were the Republicans that Roosevelt not only was elected four times; he enjoyed Democratic majorities in both houses for his entire 12 years in office.

Of what relevance is the 1932 election to the current struggle for control of the Democratic Party? The answer lies in the political vocabulary of the time. If you ask people today who was the liberal candidate in 1932 and who the conservative, the response is as much a foregone conclusion as was the election itself: Roosevelt was the liberal, Hoover the conservative. But now let us look at the actual rhetoric of the campaign:

True liberalism is found not in striving to spread bureaucracy, but in striving to set bounds to it. True liberalism seeks all legitimate freedom first in the confident belief that without such freedom the pursuit of other blessings is in vain.

That’s not Roosevelt; that’s Hoover. It is a little-known but nonetheless significant fact that throughout his public career Hoover never identified as a conservative. He identified as an individualist, a progressive, and a liberal. Indeed, throughout the 1930s he kept up a futile and increasingly bitter rear-guard action to retain his identification as a liberal, and did not identify with the conservative label until after Roosevelt’s death in 1945, by which time his own political career had long since ended.9

That in turn raises a further question. Given that Roosevelt would have won anyway, why did he find it necessary to compete with Hoover for control of the liberal label? The answer, again, is not subtle. He wanted to change American political consciousness. He wanted not only the legitimacy that went with the liberal label, but the freedom of action such legitimacy would give him. In Lakoff’s terms, he wanted to reframe American political discourse, and he did so with brilliant effectiveness.

This is not to say that Roosevelt was a fraud or a hypocrite. He, too, had identified as a liberal throughout his public career, but he defined the word very differently from Hoover. And in 1932, with the country’s future hanging in the balance in an election that Hoover accurately predicted would be “deciding the direction our Nation will take over a century to come,” winning control of the national political vocabulary was as important as winning the election. After 1932, it would be Roosevelt’s definition of liberalism rather than Hoover’s that would shape the future of the country.10

That is exactly what is at stake in the current struggle for control of the Democratic Party. One vocabulary or another will prevail, and the one that prevails will determine the parameters of American politics for decades to come. Clinton supporters know it, which is precisely why retaining control of the labeling process is so important to them.

In this context one might venture a hypothetical question: If Roosevelt were alive today, what would he advise Sanders to do? Would he tell him to accept being labeled left and let Clinton retain control of the centrist label? Or would he tell Sanders to do what he himself did—namely, to seize the most legitimizing label of the day, not hypocritically but as a key aspect of his struggle to change political consciousness and thereby advance what Sanders himself calls a “political revolution”?

The question answers itself. And therein lies the basis for what may, or may not, become the defining struggle not only for the Democratic Party but for the future of the nation.

1The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939 (Macmillan, 1941), p. 556.

2See, for example, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats,” New York Times, July 6, 2017.

3For a more extended treatment of this theme, see David Green, The Language of Politics in America: Shaping Political Consciousness from McKinley to Reagan (Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 1.

4On condensation symbols see Green, “A Call to Linguistic Disobedience,” The American Interest (July/August 2012). On “frames,” see Lakoff, The Political Mind (Viking, 2008), especially chapters 7, 8.

5On Eisenhower’s use of “middle of the road,” see Green, The Language of Politics in America, chapter 7.

6A video of the Georgetown speech can be found here.

7See Peter Dreier, “Bernie is Mainstream,” Huffington Post, March 11, 2016.

8Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (Markham, 1971).

9For Hoover’s 1932 defense of “true liberalism,” see Green, Language of Politics in America, pp. 109–10. For his efforts throughout the 1930s to retain identification with the liberal label and his belated, reluctant acceptance of the conservative label, see chapter 5, passim.

10For Hoover’s prediction, see Green, Language of Politics, p. 118.

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The Fading of the Idea of Central Europe

Europe today is riven by several urgent policy questions: How should its institutions evolve? How far and how fast should EU integration proceed? What should Europeans think about the concept increasingly referred to as “two-tiered” Europe? How should they think about common defense following the signing of the PESCO agreement by 23 European countries to develop a permanent framework for closer security cooperation? And how should they work out their differences over immigration, policy towards Russia, and relations with the United States?

Yet despite the need for answers to these urgent questions, throughout Europe’s capitals there seems to be a paucity of leadership capable of addressing the Continent’s deteriorating situation. Since last September, Germany has become more inward-looking, as Chancellor Angela Merkel has struggled to form a government after the electorate delivered a stunning blow to both the CDU/CSU and the SPD. Even if a Große Koalition of the CDU/CSU with the SPD comes to pass, the shrinking of the political center in Germany has called into question the German government’s durability and effectiveness going forward. Across the English Channel, Prime Minister Theresa May continues on the road to Brexit, even though the negotiations with the European Commission continue to sputter and aren’t offering much reason to be optimistic. In 2018, France is poised to test the public’s willingness and endurance when it comes to Emanuel Macron’s vision for reforming the country, and the jury is still out on whether the French electorate will support the President’s proposals (nor is Berlin likely buy into the common Eurozone budget idea). Italy’s political and economic problems are rearing their heads once again; amidst tensions in the run-up to the next election, these could end up being the trigger of the next major financial crisis. Both Italy and Austria are reeling from the impact of the immigration crisis, the latter having overturned in the last election many traditional assumptions about what drives the country’s politics. Meanwhile, Poland is locked in a bitter internal political fight over the recently passed law on the country’s judiciary, with the European Commission now having entered the fray by invoking the threat of sanctions against Warsaw under Article 7 of the EU Treaty. And in the Balkans continued political instability may lead to a new crisis in short order.

However, arguably the most powerful trend pulling Europe apart today is the growing acceptance of the idea that a bifurcated Europe will in fact happen, with the continent fragmenting in ways few thought possible in what was supposed to be an increasingly postmodern and globalist European project. Europe today is once again being split in half by its postmodern West and its modern East. In the process the idea of a new “Central Europe” geographically anchored along the German-Polish border, politically linking Berlin and Warsaw while cutting across Europe’s north and south—is fading fast.

Historically, the concept of Mitteleuropa rested on the notion of a common cultural space that is “Middle Europe,” one which amounts to more than simply nostalgia for the residual connectivity of the former German and Habsburg empires. It linked the cultural traditions of Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians but also of the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks—the western Slavic stateless nations of the 19th century—as well as Central European Jews. The golden age of the first Mitteleuropa ran from the mid-19th century up until the First World War, and was effectively snuffed out in 1918. The horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Iron Curtain completed the destruction, creating the political “West vs. East” divide across Europe, notwithstanding the bizarre fact that, for half a century, Prague, Warsaw, and Bratislava were in the “East” as part of the Soviet bloc, while, with Turkey in NATO, Istanbul found itself in the “West.” In 1989–90, as communism collapsed and Germany unified, the notion that post-communist Europe might find itself relegated to a peripheral “gray zone” of European security was fought—each for his own reasons—by statesmen as disparate as Germany’s Helmut Kohl and America’s Bill Clinton. Today, NATO and EU enlargement may seem like obvious and necessary consequences of the end of the Cold War, but at the time making them happen required both the vision and political will of leaders across the former West-East divide, thereby giving Europe its greatest chance yet for peace and prosperity. This was not to be achieved by asserting that a liberal global order had miraculously transformed humanity but by the willingness of the Europeans once more to take on the project of overcoming history in the name of a “Europe whole, free and at peace.” At the core of this common European project lay the notion of a “second grand reconciliation” between Germany and Poland—to mirror the Franco-German reconciliation after the Second World War—and the re-emergence of “Central Europe,” now rooted in shared markets and, through Schengen, also shared people. The EU institutional structures framed the historical project, in the process reconnecting the post-Cold War “West” and “East” while expanding democracy and markets, with the hope of eventually linking up with the new “Eastern Europe” of Belarus, Ukraine, and ultimately Russia.

The emergence after the Cold War of the idea of Central Europe as the place where “old” and “new” Europe met gave Europe its best chance since the end of the Cold War to overcome its historical geostrategic dilemmas. Central Europe is both a spatially defined entry point linking the West with the East as well as the embodiment of the idea that for Europe to be at peace it needs more than its Carolingian core—that only when it connects fully its West with its East can it in turn begin to bring Russia into a dialogue that will finally take Moscow beyond its fixation with the “Western vs. Eurasian” dichotomy.

The idea of Central Europe as a geostrategic space with the capacity to redefine and ultimately overcome the continent’s historical security dilemmas has always entailed more than the “Visegrad Four,” comprised of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Nor could Central Europe be some permutation of the V-4 plus the “Intermarium” linking the Baltic and the Black Sea, or the “Trimarium” with the Adriatic thrown into the mix. Most fundamentally, the idea of Central Europe held the greatest promise first and foremost because it was to include not just the post-communist democracies but also Germany and Austria, and possibly others. In today’s Europe, which has spent the last decade grappling with the aftershocks of the Greek crisis, the Russian seizure of Crimea, and war in eastern Ukraine, as well as the ramifications of MENA migration and Brexit, the early post-Cold War heady days of optimism seem to have long since passed. And yet the ingredients for success remain, provided Europe’s leaders can grasp the urgency of the hour.

Europe post-Cold War has always been more than the institutions it produced, or merely a collection of sovereign nation-states, “old” and “new.” The European project has never been a simple “either/or” proposition, for Europe remains a landscape of interconnected historical and cultural spaces that undergird both EU institutions and European nation states. There is still time to stop Europe’s fragmentation, and it is in the U.S. interest to work with our European allies to ensure that it does not come to pass; regardless of the rationale, both the “two-tier” approach and a full-bore re-nationalization would leave Europe weaker and diminished. Either vision would ultimately cause Europe to revert once more to a West vs. East formula, perhaps going so far as to offer a perverse “Yalta light” version of Vladimir Putin’s dream.

If nothing is done to reverse the process, the demise of the idea of Central Europe will constitute a singular failure of vision and leadership not only on both sides of the Oder-Neisse River, but also across Europe’s capitals and in Washington. As the idea of Europe’s bifurcation into a core and periphery continues to gain adherents, the idea of Central Europe is fast becoming an immediate casualty of this process, with the “West and East” framework returning to the fore of political discourse about Europe’s future, and ultimately threatening the decomposition of Western multilateral institutions, including NATO, as well as heralding the return of bilateralism as the modus vivendi in Europe. As we contemplate how to enhance the deterrence and defense of NATO’s eastern flank and how to reinvigorate the Transatlantic alliance, it is in the interest of the United States to do everything possible to prevent Europe’s second de facto political bifurcation from coming into being, lest a quarter century of successful post-Cold War transformation in Europe be undone at a time when multiplying threats to American interests in the Pacific are on the horizon.

Regardless of other United States priorities across the globe, Europe needs to be Washington’s focus in the coming year to ensure that our strategy includes a serious effort to work towards reconnecting Europe’s nascent Western and Eastern halves.

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Wanted: A Self-Draining Swamp

“Good government is the outcome of private virtue.”

—John Jay Chapman, Practical Agitation

When Christine Keeler died this past December 5 at age 75, a predictable welter of obituaries poured forth, most no doubt having been drafted in readiness decades ago when her fame was established. Central to that dubious fame was a series of lovers Keeler bedded 55 years ago, at age 19, including among others both Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché (and likely spy) in London and Baron John Profumo, the 46-year-old (and married) Conservative Secretary of State for War. This, it was averred, created a potential security risk.

Like all good scandals, this one burned slowly and climaxed dramatically. Profumo initially made a public denial to Parliament that he had engaged in any “impropriety,” threatening to sue for libel any newspapers that published rumors of the affair. But in a series of lurid twists and turns over the next two years, involving a high-class prostitution ring, lowlife beatings, some rare gunplay, and a high-profile suicide, the truth eventually dribbled out. Finally, Profumo was forced to admit the truth in June 1963.

Not only was Profumo himself compelled to resign, the drama soon toppled the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who was deemed to have been, in the words of the Spectator, “either ludicrously naive or incompetent or deceitful—or all three” for having maintained his confidence in Profumo as evidence mounted of his guilt. In what was commonly called the greatest political scandal in modern British history, the whole episode seemed to many both to symbolize the debauchery and hypocrisy of the British Establishment and to herald the coming of the sexual liberation of the so-called Swinging Sixties, for which Keeler became an odd but inevitable symbol. The Conservatives spent most of the next 15 years in the political wilderness.

But what happened after the scandal ran its course is in some ways the most interesting part of the whole story.

Profumo himself was genuinely contrite. After resigning from the government, the Baron volunteered to work as a toilet cleaner at Toynbee Hall, a charity based in the East End of London that aimed to bridge the class divide in Britain by encouraging rich and poor to live together. He continued to work there for the rest of his life, for forty years, though he later moved over to the fundraising department. His wife, likewise, dedicated her life to charity and good works.

In other words, Profumo took responsibility for his misbehavior. He agreed to abase himself from his class privileges in order to make amends for how he had wronged various people, as well as harmed the integrity of British political life.

Can anyone imagine one of today’s elites behaving in such a manner?

Perhaps the most insidious threat facing Western democracies has been the progressive decline of elite accountability and responsibility. “Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous),” David Brooks observed in 2012. “They have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends upon; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.” This “hollow elite,” as Charles Murray called it in Coming Apart, is doubtless one element of the rise of populisms across the Western world—nor are such observations restricted to right-of-center critics.1 Poll after poll shows a collapse of ruling-class credibility, particularly among the young, and an increasing inclination to embrace strongmen who promise accountability and results.

This collapsing support for democratic political culture is part of a larger collapse in trust in institutions. Data from Gallup shows that, over the past four decades, Americans have displayed ever less confidence in many of the major institutions in American life: churches (those expressing a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence dropped from the mid-60s in the early 1970s to the low 40s today), Congress (from the 40s to the single digits), public schools (from the 50s to the 30s), banks (from the 50s to the 20s). News organizations, medical organizations, big business, and the presidency have also seen drops, if not quite as dramatic.

The two major exceptions are the military and small businesses—tellingly, both institutions whose leaders are often seen as taking (or perhaps having no choice but to take) responsibility for failure. In other words, it’s not so much the failure to perform that costs institutions credibility as it is the failure to hold leaders accountable when their institutions fail. For better or worse, fair or not, we’ve seen more than a few military leaders get sacked for various improprieties, and everyone knows a small business owner who’s personally taken it in the chops when business declined. But a bank CEO jailed for massive fraud that ruined the lives of countless families? Too big to indict.

Where did this disastrous and growing lack of elite accountability come from? Certainly, U.S. elites during the postwar years (1940s-60s) made their share of mistakes. But for the most part, when they screwed up, they were held to account and paid a personal price. Consider the architects of the Vietnam War. After 1969, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow was drummed out of public life. General William Westmoreland was sent packing. (Secretary Robert McNamara, who was sent over to the World Bank from the Defense Department in 1968, was a partial exception—not that his performance improved there.) The only senior foreign policy officials from the Johnson Administration that President Jimmy Carter brought back in 1977 were Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance, both of whom had resigned from senior positions in the Johnson administration in protest over the escalation of the Vietnam War. For Carter, accountability mattered.

While anything as large and long a trend as the decline in elite accountability in general, and the attendant loss in confidence in institutions, necessarily entails complicated causal explanations,2 one important dimension to the story concerns political elites, the most visible form of the species, who in many respects set the moral tone within secular society.

Here, inevitably, the story must begin with Richard M. Nixon.

The Nixon Administration was famously felonious. More than forty administration officials ended up indicted, most in connection with the 1972 theft of documents from the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel and subsequent cover-up. Dozens were convicted and received jail time, including Attorney General John Mitchell and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. But the Criminal-in-Chief was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. This, I believe, is the political seed of the lack of elite accountability that has only sprouted and grown in ensuing decades.

Despite Nixon’s pardon, however, enough elite political accountability remained so that during the Abscam scandal of the early 1980s several members of Congress ended up doing jail time. But the next major blow to elite accountability, which took place in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal that unfolded under President Ronald Reagan, represented a further descent. In that case, fourteen administration officials were indicted, including former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, and though some of these were vacated on appeal. But the accountability disaster was that President George H.W. Bush, in his last few weeks in office in 1992, pardoned the entire crew—some already convicted, like former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, others before they had even gone to trial or been sentenced.

Bush’s move has been rightly heralded as a landmark in the failure to hold elites accountable for behavior that would get regular folk a nice long stretch in the joint. What had begun with the possibly reasonable principle that former heads of state should not be imprisoned—and, more important, that political judgment should not be readily criminalized—had now percolated to other upper elites. (At least something trickled down during the Reagan-Bush years!)

Of course, no account of the growing lack of elite accountability can omit the sordid case of President Bill Clinton, whose lying under oath did result in his impeachment and eventually in a $90,000 fine for contempt of court. But Clinton’s contribution to this history lies in his refusal to resign when the evidence of his affair with his intern became public knowledge. While the impeachment process itself was itself a political travesty pushed through a lame-duck Congress, in a decent political culture, Clinton would have resigned as soon as his shameful personal conduct became known. But no.

Nor is the lack of accountability just about outright criminality. It also concerns the lack of accountability for enormous foreign policy failures. For the debacle in Kosovo in 1999, exactly no one was fired. Nor did anyone lose a job over the failure to prevent 9/11, or for the intelligence-cum-political failure concerning non-existent WMD stocks that justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq (an event whose ongoing repercussions include hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees). Indeed, President George W. Bush declared his re-election in 2004 as the “accountability moment” regarding the Iraq disaster: no foul, no harm!

On the home front, the story is much the same time. Consider the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005: yes, FEMA director Michael “Heckuva job, Brownie!” Brown did eventually lose his job, but Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was allowed to continue on. Nor was anyone senior fired over the botched rollout of the Obamacare website in 2013; rather, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was allowed to resign on her own terms a year after the process unfolded. In sum, despite an unrelenting record of policy failures in both the domestic and foreign policy arenas, the idea of holding political leaders accountable seems to have almost entirely faded away.

Abetting this tolerance of elite malfeasance has been the Supreme Court’s incremental evisceration of the traditional concept of corruption. As V.O. Key observed in 1961, “The masses do not corrupt themselves; corruption comes from activists and elites. If a democracy tends toward indecision, decay, and disaster, it is their responsibility, not that of the masses.”3 Behavior that the American legal system once deemed clearly illegal has now been redefined as politics as usual. If we can’t keep William Jefferson in jail—he of the cash in the freezer—or convict sleazy Virginia Governors and New Jersey Senators of what was until recently regarded as obvious corruption, then what can political accountability possibly mean anymore?

And it’s not just governmental elites who have been progressively insulated from accountability for their institutional failures, but economic elites as well. When the financial system melted down in 2008, for example, a few individual companies at the center of trading system that failed paid the ultimate price (notably Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns), but for the most part, while millions of ordinary Americans lost their jobs and houses in the catastrophic recession and deflation that followed, the major banks and financial services firms received bailouts even as their top leaders and CEOs remained in place. Oh, yes, and neither president of New York Federal Reserve Timothy Geithner nor Chairman Ben Bernanke took responsibility either, despite ample evidence that the Fed badly missed the signals leading up to the crisis and arguably mishandled it as it unfolded. For his efforts, Geithner was promoted to Secretary of the Treasury before stepping down in 2013 and becoming president of private equity giant Warburg Pincus. In the long run, the failure to hold Wall Street bankers accountable after the 2008 financial crisis may well be deemed Obama’s greatest failure.

In sum, what has happened across the board is that elites have succeeded in insulating themselves from personal consequences when they fail. In the case of political elites, this is typically by avoiding getting fired when things screw up on their watch. In the case of corporate executives, it works by having secured such enormous pay packages for themselves (often including huge golden parachute clauses) that even if they lose their jobs, they face none of the life consequences that ordinary people do when they lose theirs. As Adam Garfinkle wrote in these pages last month, “When elites are perceived as being self-serving, corrupt, arrogant, detached, patronizing and condescending, it matters because it smashes accumulated bridging social capital between classes.” Can we imagine any disgraced former Fortune 500 CEO choosing to make amends by washing toilets in a charity dedicated to poor?

In the end, any complex society only performs as well as its elites; put another way, meritocracy only works if coupled to elite accountability. While the concept of meritocracy usually refers to the selection process for putting people into positions of power, authority, and responsibility, for the concept to have any serious meaning there must be an ongoing responsibility among those who hold the positions. As Chris Hayes has observed, “We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful.”4 That means, among other things, that the privileged must lose their jobs and privileges when the institutions they manage fail to perform.

The failure of accountability is both the proximate and the ultimate cause for the loss of fait in political institutions in the United States (and also in Europe, though that is a topic for another column5). It is impossible to understand the rise of Donald Trump, with his signature pledge to “drain the swamp,” apart from this long-term trend toward elite non-accountability and concomitant illegitimacy. The man who made his name as a “reality TV” star with the signature line of “You’re Fired!” seemed to many Americans to promise a reckoning for elites who for too long only ever seemed to fail upwards. Even the recently reported news that the Trump White House had the highest turnover of any first-year presidency since Jimmy Carter, which was widely seen in elite media circles as a sign of chaos and mismanagement, can from this perspective equally well be seen as him holding members of his team accountable for their performance.

Of course, that would be a misreading. While it is true that Trump has fired more people than anyone, it’s not because he’s a meritocrat bent on holding people accountable for performance, but rather because he is an incompetent who has assembled a team with little or no merit, either ethical or technical. What else can one conclude from a President who appoints a Secretary of Education who did not know the difference between proficiency and growth; who nominates for Federal judgeships people who lack an elementary concept of Federal rules of civil and criminal procedure; whose initial choice for National Security Advisor was on the payroll of at least one foreign entity; and whose Secretary of Health and Human Services has never managed a bureaucracy before, but on the upside believes that the biblical Joseph built the pyramids with help from God to serve as a grain silo. Trump is not the cure to the failure of meritocratic accountability, but rather the living embodiment of anti-meritocracy given free rein by the electorate—or enough of it to matter.

Restoring faith in American democracy and its institutions must entail reversing the long historical trend away from elites being held responsible for failure. Specifically, this means they must, like John Profumo, accept that failure bears a personal price. And not just for their personal failures, but for the failures of institutional performance that take place on their watch. So, here’s the mild takeaway: If you run a large organization and it screws up, do the right thing: Own the failure, and resign.

If the elites do not begin to hold themselves accountable, we as a polity will need to consider more directly coercive methods. Rather than purges and show trials of the sorts pursued in authoritarian regimes, however, it makes much better sense to consider reviving various largely forgotten practices that republics have traditionally used to enable popular control of both economic and political elites. University of Chicago political scientist John P. McCormick, for example, has pointed to three elite-accountability institutions common in pre-18th-century popular governments: magistrate appointment procedures combining lottery and election; offices or assemblies excluding the wealthy and political incumbents from eligibility; and political trials enlisting the entire citizenry in prosecutions and appeals. If elites cannot be relied on to police themselves, and the evidence that they can is not good, then bringing new/old methods to the fore to impose such accountability may be the only option remaining.

1From the same year as Murray and Brooks, see Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy (Random House, 2012).

2A major argument for the failures of post-1960s elites and institutions, as compared to earlier periods, is that the problems that earlier generations solved were “tame,” that is, relatively straightforward, with relatively uncontroversial solutions (like providing universal access to clean drinking water, paved roads, or basic education) whereas the remaining problems tend to be “wicked,” that is, ones for which there is no widely-shared objective definition of the correct policy response or optimal solution. The classic statement of this position is Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4:2 (1973).

3Valdimir Orlando Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 558.

4Hayes, Twilight of the Elites, p. 103.

5It is noteworthy that one developed democratic nation has largely avoided the current vogue for populism: Japan. While this may be partly because Japan has insulated itself from some of the effects of globalization, notably immigration, it is not a coincidence that Japan retains a culture in which elites take personal responsibility when their institutions fail.

The post Wanted: A Self-Draining Swamp appeared first on The American Interest.

That Was the (Sad) Year That Was

As we turn the calendar to a new page, we behold the specter of 2018 staring right back at us, as if to say: “If you have any idea what is about to happen, you best let me in on it—for my little blocks are stark-raving blank save for numbers, some standard holidays, and mostly Viking-origin terms for the days of the week.” I feel the calendar’s pain, but I care more about my own and that of other humans now that we are more or less one year into the age of Trump.

So what have we learned during the past year, and how does it hold up with our expectations as the calendar turned to 2017, post-election but pre-inauguration? Alas, the question begs a problem for most of us. Human cognitive gymnastics being what they are, our memory of what we really thought a year ago is not as reliable as we might suppose. All memories get edited in the interest of emotional self-protection, even in relatively disciplined minds. The urge to cognitive consistency, present in all of us to one degree or another, tends to work back on memory to efface the most embarrassing misprognostications we hatch. So unless we have a precise written record of what we thought, trusting our memories may calm our egos more than reveal our acumen, or the lack thereof.

As it happens, I’m a lucky guy: I have such a record thanks to a proprietary quick-reaction memo I was asked to write for a friendly allied government. Submitted on December 6, 2016, the memo consisted of two necessarily speculative but not entirely fanciful parts: a process analysis, followed by a substantive analysis. The latter I revised after a decent interval and placed in TAI.1 The former, after an even more decent interval, I offer here in mildly revised form. The revisions are of two limited sorts: I have deleted certain passages useful as background for non-U.S. national readers but that are superfluous for present purposes; and, more, important, I have lightly annotated the text with self-scrutiny a year on. Almost nothing else has been changed.

December 6, 2016:

Never before in post-18th-century American history has the prospective foreign policy of an anticipated Administration been festooned with so much uncertainty. As of this writing in early December, about six weeks from Inauguration Day, we know a good deal less than is typical for a transition period, and that is for four interlocking and mutually reinforcing reasons.

First, the President-Elect is an outsider to government like no poseur outsider has been in recent memory. Americans as an electorate have evinced an anti-authority, anti-Federal government bias since at least the 1786-87 Shays’ Rebellion, and except in times when perception of a national security emergency has persuaded voters of the need for experienced and sober souls to be in charge, they have often inclined to vote “against Washington.” In the postwar era, for example, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and even Barack Obama all sought to cultivate an anti-establishment veneer to one extent or another in order to get elected. Americans tend to admire individualist free thinkers who puncture the stale air of routine, and—reality being both forgiven and ignored as required—like to think of themselves as being among them.

But none of these or earlier “against Washington” candidates was remotely as innocent of political experience as is Donald Trump. This means that Trump cannot draw on a significant personal network of associates with experience in any aspect of governance. He is therefore reliant on Republican Party personalities to bring those people to him, and in this respect he can turn to only a limited fringe of such personalities because most of the GOP intellectual and political elite refused to support him during the campaign.2 In previous transitions going back at least ten election cycles, the coherence of the parties’ elite yielded a fairly short list of possible cabinet-level appointments even to self-styled “outsider” victors. Anyone familiar with the scene knew the list. That is not now the case. So we face a situation in which a few familiar names, like Rudy Guiliani and Mitt Romney, are mooted for Secretary of State despite the fact that neither one has the requisite relevant experience for the job.3

Second, and much related, the key appointments in the foreign policy/national security field are likely eventually to have outsized decisional authority in a Trump Administration. Trump’s knowledge of foreign affairs is so meager that even he, at some level, has to know that he cannot actively manage the job. At age 70, too, his energy level, proudly admitted lifelong lack of a reading habit, and hence any willingness or capacity to learn new and esoteric subjects is questionable.4 We should in time, if not at first, expect a decisional metabolism akin to that of the second Reagan Administration, where large numbers of consequential judgments were delegated to lesser officials, sometimes to the surprise and alarm of those officials.5 After all, Trump’s main concern is a realignment of domestic politics; most foreign policy issues, aside from trade, are liable to be mainly props used for signaling purposes.

This likely presidential decisional metabolism has several implications with respect to process. One is that the “permanent government,” the civil and foreign-service professionals who constitute the institutional policy memory of government and know “how to make the trains run on time,” are liable to be left alone to ensure some degree of continuity. That will certainly be the case for some months after the inauguration for the simple reason that the Senatorial confirmation process is so slow that key Schedule C appointments will not find their desks until late spring at the earliest. But it may be the case thereafter, too, depending on the disposition of their cabinet-level bosses—and again, we don’t yet know who they will be.6

This is good news in some respects, but not in others. Bureaucracies are good at ensuring basic competence and stability, but not at adapting to new circumstances. Decisions can and will get made at intermediate and lower levels, but even these decisions will be afflicted by an uncertainty drag. Bureaucracies are risk-averse, and the interagency process is inclined by nature to exude a certain amount of friction and stasis. These tendencies will be magnified by a general, if uneven, lack of direction from above.

There are, however, two conditions in which continuity cannot be expected: crises, and Oval Office initiatives in foreign/national security policy usually having to do with politics and sometimes with campaign promises. So by way of process we may expect a schizophrenic phenomenon: continuity most of the time in most issue areas, especially those with inherently low political profiles, punctuated randomly with “monkey-in-the-machine-room” interventions of mostly unpredictable provenance.

By their very nature, national security crises end up in the Oval Office, and no one can know how Donald Trump will react to them. No one knows, either, if the National Security Advisor-designate, Michael Flynn, possesses the chops or the tenured rationality to handle them wisely and safely. He was dismissed from his tenure at the Defense Intelligence Agency for erratic behavior, extreme views, and a tendency to suppress all opinions (and sometimes facts) with which he did not agree. His capacity to be a fair and effective convener of Departmental positions is much in doubt, and his inclination—born of his intelligence agency experience—to keep options and information at “close hold” at Departmental expense, especially in a crisis, may be assumed.7

As to Oval Office initiatives in foreign and national security policy, we do not yet know how seriously and with what level of confidence and sophistication candidate Trump made statements about the U.S. alliance structure, about the liberal international trade order, about Russia, about relations with Mexico as concerns U.S. immigration policy, and so on. It would be rash to dismiss everything he said as mere rhetoric, and to assume that he has never thought beyond the proverbial second paragraph about any of these things. On some of these matters he has a long history of consistent statements.8 But that could be the case, given Trump’s manifestly narcissistic personality, of which more in a moment.

In any event, if the campaign rhetoric’s bite turns out to be a lot less ferocious than its bark, it would not be the first time presidential candidates shifted gears and even direction once in office. Bill Clinton was against NAFTA as a candidate before he was for it as President; that was just image management or, as we may also put it, lying. Remember, too, that Barack Obama was determined to shut down the temporary prison at Guantánamo Bay, and said so volubly. But once in office he did not do so, not because he lied on the campaign trail and not because he lacked authority—as several apologists have since falsely claimed—but because he changed his mind about the wisdom of persisting in the face of congressional roadblocks once his considerable intellect had digested the relevant facts to hand.

In mid-November, while abroad, President Obama quipped several times that the realities of the office, and of the world it faces, have a way of limiting and disciplining what Presidents think they want to do before they actually come to sit in the President’s chair. That is true, and it could happen to President Trump as well. Even in the foreign and national security policy domain, where a President has more leeway as Commander-in-Chief than he does as chief executive in domestic policy, it is not easy to suddenly or dramatically change policy in the absence of a major external shock. We don’t know yet if he will really want to do that, or if he can.9

A third, again related, source of uncertainty has to do with Trump’s aforementioned personality. It is impossible to clinically assess anyone’s personality remotely, and medical professionals rightly frown on the hobby. Nevertheless, Donald Trump is a public personality who has been on the American scene for long enough that a reasonable consensus about what kind of person he is cannot be shunted aside. He is by one insightful assessment a typical American type: a “magnifico.”

Americans are spellbound by magnificos because they entertain us with their grand pretensions and larger-than-life ways. They are big dealers, gambling with abandon and a smile. They are permissive, spending freely and consuming lavishly. They eschew self-restraint, preferring instead to strut and swagger, brag and charm, display and self-promote. Not all magnificos involved in politics have been rich or nationally famous. But Trump is a special kind of magnifico, one who knows little about politics and whose family-business orientation has shielded him from the normal management education that business executives who run large corporations typically get. When you fail at managing a large corporation, especially one with vested shareholders, you’re out of that corporation; and if you fail repeatedly, you’re completely out of that line of work. But Trump went bankrupt at least five times and stayed in, because he refused to fire himself. There is no accountable management structure in his business, and there are no shareholders as such. There are only partners of various descriptions, some of which since the mid- to late-1990s have been Russian oligarchs up to all kinds of fraudulent activities.10

As such, instead of incubating the kind of experience that gives rise to humility, a penchant for planning, and caution, Trump has incubated a kind of natural narcissism in which no mistake is ever really punished. As much or more than most magnificos, therefore, Trump remains a present-oriented, seat-of-the-pants decision-maker. He appears to have no moral or intellectual center, only a transactional modus operandi. He does not appear to plan well and he does not look back with regret; he is ever in the moment.

Closely related, his assessment of other people appears to be based on first and superficial impressions, leading him to quickly trust people he has barely met, upon whom he heaps lavish and unreasonable praise, and to excoriate anyone who betrays or disappoints him with outsized emotional venom. He trusts himself to quickly flash on decision points with great confidence, and when things go wrong he inclines to blame others, upon whom he vents volcanic anger.11 It is safe to say that, at least since America became a great power at the end of the 19th century, no one of this description has ever gotten anywhere near the Oval Office.

What does this mean? It means, for one thing, that we do not know how deep Trump’s convictions about those foreign policy-related subjects he talked about during the campaign are. We do not know how much he really grasps about the issues, or from whom he got the policy sound bytes he used during the campaign. We therefore do not know how easily a briefing by a government expert, in the intelligence community or from inside the cabinet (say by General Mattis if he becomes Secretary of Defense), that runs contrary to his understanding could sway his view. Trump seems to agree with the last person he talked to about any given subject on which he does not have a firm conviction. The stability of his superficial views before being elected President may be owed to the fact that he did not tolerate let alone seek out the presence of anyone whose views differed from his own. He will find it harder to sustain that kind of intellectual isolation and shallowness in the Oval Office.

It is true, of course, that few Presidents come to office with what we could reasonably call a grand strategic concept. Few American politicians have ever thought that way, which aligns with the fact that the United States lacks the kind of formal grand strategy tradition common to many European and Asian polities. Some new Presidents have principles, some have certain instincts based on their accumulated if informal conclusions about human nature, and some have a bit of both. But only for those who have a mature strategic concept do the pieces and implications of the whole gain solid anchors. Absent some sort of conceptual framework, or enough of the right kind of education to derive such a framework upon necessity, convictions about policy become more or less a series of one-offs, each susceptible to different degrees to doubt and overthrow. Donald Trump evinces even less of a strategic concept than has Barack Obama, whose possession of one has from time to time been exaggerated, mostly by skeptics or partisan adversaries who invented a “doctrine” for him in order to have something coherent to criticize.

What happens to a non-systematic thinker when two (or more) views he holds turn out to conflict in practice? Trump wants to create American jobs, but he wants to curtail the liberal global trading order to do so. In the short term there may be no conflict here, but in the slightly longer term there will be—since the U.S. economy is structurally more dependent on exports than it used to be. So, for example, what if for herd-like reasons we need not examine now, huge flows of capital leave emerging markets (and other markets) to enter U.S. capital markets in anticipation of a boom?12 That will harm other economies and, eventually, harm export-dependent sectors of the U.S. economy as well. How does a non-systematic thinker make tradeoffs between policies that seem desirable but that have incommensurate outcomes? He does it unsystematically; he does it by taking a whiff of the political winds. This is an unpredictable process leading to inherently unpredictable outcomes. In other words, uncertainty and unpredictability inhere in Donald Trump’s very personality.

The fourth and final source of uncertainty has to do with the world, not with Donald Trump. We—the West broadly defined in a way not to exclude geographical/ethnic outliers like Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Israel—stand at an historical hinge. The main elements of Western civilizational modernity as a mode of thought are threefold: the rise of individual over communal agency; the emergence of secular space out of 16th-century sectarian arguments among Christians; and the Whig idea of progress as a union of science made practical with the moral betterment of humankind. These elements both made up and were subsequently shaped as they passed through the prism of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment in turn formed the conceptual basis for both the modern Western state and the modern state system erected by the West—both of which were radically distinct from their medieval predecessors that presumed communal agency, the unity of all forms of art and politics with religion, and the cyclical “chain-of-being” character of social time.

In other words, the post-Westphalian state’s legitimacy and the Western-hewn global order with it know only Enlightenment predicates upon which to base themselves. And in the more “advanced” states of the West—the United States and Western Europe—these predicates are weakening.13

First, a reaction has set in against exaggerations of individual agency—market fundamentalism from the Right and self-expressivism from the Left—such that the social/communal idea is again waxing strong. How else to explain how an avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders, could get as far as he did in the 2016 election campaign, or how the Democratic Party can preach “you didn’t build that” to general if not universal assent, or especially the rise of identity politics in which group rights and characteristics take pride of place over those of individuals? The mantra that human beings are “social animals”—which is and has always been true, of course—now resounds from the academy and spreads unevenly downward, but spreads nonetheless. Americans today feel more “social,” then, but also far more narrowly and fractionally social. So much, then, for e pluribus unum.14

Second, while the principle of secularism in Western politics remains strong, and while the percentage of traditionally religious people in “advanced”-country Western populations continues to decline, secular humanism as the dominant de facto faith of the elites has acquired over time creedal rigidities that have rendered it in effect a non-deistic religion. The arts are now on the whole more closely wedded to the neo-pantheist elements in this crypto-religion, especially as regards environmental beliefs. That goes for music, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and theater—all of which in ancient times were part and parcel of religious expression in the West. Indeed, the human urge to the monadic gathering of all forms of human emotional expression under the godhead remains strong; the individualistic tenor of the modern period, which gave rise to a modular arrangement between faith and art, is the only notable exception in recorded history—and that seems to be fading back toward the historic arc of cultural normality.

Third and most important, while scientists and public faith in science used to be the avatars of progress, now increasingly the dark sides of scientific innovation gain pride of place. New forms of determinism have replaced the core Enlightenment predicate of human freedom, the most recent being genetics. Western scientists are now in the forefront of warning of impending doom, whether because of anthropogenic climate change, superbug pandemics, genetically modified food, artificial intelligence, or other supposed human-enabled pending catastrophes. The image of Western science is increasingly encased in the political imagination as a Pandora’s Box of trouble, but without hope as the last particle to flee entrapment, as in the original Greek myth. The result is a reversal of the optimism that characterized the Age of Reason, an ambient optimism that helped people endure the great disruptions and transformations that modernity imposed on them.

The erosion of the underlying predicates of modernity within the core of Western civilization is uneven, incomplete, and perhaps not irreversible. Moreover, many other parts of the world are just entering modernity, defined specifically as we have defined it here. The world as a whole is therefore running ideationally at variable speeds.

That said, the West’s internal sense of drift derives from these erosions, even though liberal Western elites are, as a rule, unaware of these deeper sources of political discontent and social unease. They incline to place blame for all the domestic woes that ail their nations on wishfully temporary economic perturbations, which they associate with the churn of technological change all bundled into a convenient word whose aura usually masks its actual function: globalization. This is a category error, and a serious one.

When it comes to global order, again, the elites appear to be oblivious to the deeper sources of change within the West, and so instead point to the rise or revival of forces from outside that are not and have never been inured to Western Enlightenment thinking: China, radical Sunni Islam, and to a considerable extent Russia, which always lay at the fringe of the West historically.

These same elites therefore incline to blame all external, security challenges on changes in the balance of power; the inconstancy of American leadership (especially over the past eight years) and its poor prudential judgment (especially during the eight years before that) in the face of those changes is but a supplementary argument. It is true that the balance of power has shifted during the past quarter century, but the general tendency is to significantly exaggerate the extent to which those changes are to America’s disadvantage. Looking objectively at the sinews of power, the United States remains the world’s only multidimensional superpower. Even in military measure, U.S. advantages have arguably grown in qualitative aspects relative to all would-be peer competitors—at least for the time being.15

This common assessment also misses the main point in what has changed. What has changed has to do not mainly with American power but with the will of the American political elite, and, closely related, the willingness of the majority of the American people, to support the kind of international activism that has characterized the U.S. role in the world since the end of World War II. The collapse of will has three interlocking elements: the rising costs of maintaining the incumbent strategy set against perceptions of domestic economic weakness; a lack of clarity as to the huge benefits to the United States of providing common security goods to the world; and, above all, a deep erosion in the premise that as a virtuous, even “exceptional” society, the United States deserves morally to play such a leading, rule-making role.

This is not the place to detail American grand strategy in the 20th century, but the trajectory of change needs perspective if we are to see it clearly. Suffice it to say that the United States has had only one grand strategy since becoming a world power with the denouement of the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of (Hawaii and) the Philippines: to prevent a hegemon from monopolizing the resources of either peninsular Europe or East Asia.

Before World War II, the means of implementing the strategy consisted of staying out of all avoidable great power conflicts (we still argue about the wisdom of U.S. participation in World War I), riding the coattails of the Royal Navy, and increasing self-help (Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet and the oceanic toggle-switch of the Panama Canal). That method collapsed into hegemonic war. After World War II, successive U.S. administrations found themselves forward deployed on the brackets of a war-depleted Eurasia. U.S. wealth and military power—especially the U.S. Navy and Air Force—were the antes that enabled U.S. policy to engage the geopolitics of Europe and East Asia, in both cases with willing allied partners. The purpose of the forward deployment was not only to deter would-be hegemons (Germany and Japan were replaced after 1945 by the USSR and the PRC) but also to suppress regional security competitions that could provide wedges for Soviet and Chinese advancement.

It is critical to understand that, after World War II, the liberal internationalism that attended the shift in the implementation of the twin anti-hegemon grand strategy into the forward-deployment mode was indelibly linked to the normative change in American society expressed in and through the New Deal. American exceptionalism understood itself after 1945 as connecting liberalism at home with liberalism in the world at large. The open trade and anti-Communist elements of American policy were not mere add-ons to a core geopolitical concept, but functioned as the mobilizing and sustaining ideological ballast that allowed the strategy to go forward politically from one Administration to the next.

Indeed, if you went down to Capitol Hill in the years between around 1948 and 1988 and asked politicians and their senior staff aids to articulate American strategy, most could in fact do so. Not any more. Once the Cold War ended and China entered its post-Maoist incarnation, the proper nouns associated with the postwar grand strategy disappeared. Americans, elite and otherwise, began to take for granted the benefits of the U.S. role as provider of common security goods, and then to deploy the hegemony of the unipolar moment toward the secularized messianic task of conducting foreign policy as social work leading, ultimately, to a this-worldly eschaton.

It was not to be. The erosion of the tenants of modernity, particularly Americans’ gradual loss of faith in the idea of progress, helped undermine the premise that their government was virtuous and deserved rightfully to play such a role. Trust in institutions fell, starting really from the Vietnam/Watergate era, and it has never recovered. Then mounting cronyism in American capitalism, joined to political-institutional shifts that contributed inadvertently to greater political polarization, incubated a vast pall of alienation, cynicism, and political passivity on the part of American society toward its governmental elites. The technology-driven political economy disruptions of the post-Cold War era exacerbated these trends, which the elites of both parties tried very hard to ignore.

Donald Trump is not responsible for creating any of this. But he is responsible for harvesting it politically in a way that has deepened the inherited problems. The insurgent political revolution that Trump represents—and it is misleading to call it anything less—is at heart anti-liberal. And since the global vision the United States has pursued since 1945 is inextricably linked to the liberal value set that guided every Administration domestically—not to exclude the Republican Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Administrations—an anti-liberal impulse at home cannot but undermine the conceptual architecture of the American liberal project in the world.

If the Enlightenment in all its major forms (French, English, Scottish) has had a single animating conceptual center, it is the idea of the non-zero sum nature of human society. By nurturing the cooperative aspects of human nature, people can limit the destructive excesses of the competitive aspects. That belief is at the core of the liberal project. If the U.S. government, at its highest levels, joins a trend that sees zero-sum, “social Darwinist” competition as the only aspect of human nature that really matters, all bets are off, internationally as well as domestically.16

In this particular regard, Donald Trump seems unable to wrap his head around the fact that were it not for the role the United States has played as security competition suppressor of first resort for so many years, the world total of military spending would be vastly higher than it is, and the world would be bristling with nuclear weapons arsenals for lack of the security extended under the U.S. extended deterrence umbrella. The result would be, for the United States, a need to spend far more money than it does today on defense, and yet Americans and American allies would nonetheless be living in a far more dangerous world.

The American people as a whole do not know any better thanks to the lack of leadership in recent years, not least the confused and confusing Hamlet-like lassitude of the Obama period, which failed to articulate the basic points. Even Hillary Clinton, in the recent campaign, notably failed to articulate anything like a defense of the traditional rationale for the U.S global posture. For political reasons she even caved on the trade agenda, which, in Asia, represented the underlying political foundation for an overdue redirection U.S. strategic investment toward that part of the world. This illustrates that the nadir of the U.S. global internationalist role has multiple and deep sources. But Donald Trump may be the man who finally flips the status quo on its hind parts, breaking its back so that it cannot readily rise again.

In short, we are confronted with a perfect storm of uncertainty. The new President is an outsider with no government experience, a man of uncertain intellectual and moral depth who must rely far more than usual on a fringe remnant of experienced Republicans who did not abandon him during the campaign to staff his Administration. The foreign/national security policy staffing and the likely passive attitude of the President toward most policy issues present us with a likely process metabolism in which lower-level continuity will oscillate wildly and unpredictably with reactions to crises and the political whims of a seat-of-the-pants personality in the Oval Office. So the government will go on implementing from habit and bureaucratic inertia a grand strategy that the President and the nation do not really understand and, if pressed, do not really still support.17

And all this comes at a time when the underlying intellectual and moral foundations of American strategy within the political elite—and the understanding of and support for them within the American body politic—are dissolving in a world becoming ever less bound together by the Enlightenment inheritance that has defined the global system for the past four centuries. This is a formula not only for uncertainty, but possibly for a slow-motion policy train wreck with global implications.

We’re back now to December 31, 2017. I did not get everything right last year, but I think I got the gist. You decide—I know you will. Otherwise, it is true, as one variety of relative optimists said at the time, that the American institutional vortex would prevent Trump from pushing the country over the guardrails. But it has proved untrue, as other relative optimists said, that Trump would be a normal President once the campaign frenzy wore off.

In some areas where continuity marked foreign and national security policy, as in the campaign against ISIS, we have reaped both the benefits and liabilities of what had been normal before the inauguration. The military campaign far outran political thinking, so as would have been the case in a Hillary Clinton Administration, ISIS has been de-territorialized but Syria remains a dangerous mess that presents no good options—and the original reasons for the rise of ISIS remain partly unaddressed (Iranian-Shi‘i hegemonist pretentions) and partly unaddressable (the fawning weaknesses of the Sunni Arab states) by a foreign culture from across an ocean.

But when it comes to tending the core alliance structure of the postwar U.S. grand strategy, we have witnessed significant if not fundamental erosion—an abstention of leadership, really—all in the thin name (or under the pretext) of trade imbalance complaints. In Asia, the Administration has junked TTP, scared the crap out of the Japanese and the South Koreans over the Nork problem with a diplomatic-rhetorical “bedside manner” reminiscent of the Grim Reaper on crystal meth, and collapsed its own hard trade line on China without having gotten anything in return that the Chinese government would not have done anyway for sufficient reasons of its own.

In Europe, Trump’s rise whetted the prospects of illiberal populists far and wide—though yet to no decisive outcome. More important, all the gaffe-squad backtracking and reassurances notwithstanding, serious people in Europe no longer depend on American backing for Article 5 NATO guarantees, with the result that Germany has been further thrust into a default leadership role for which it is neither desirous nor prepared. The rigors of that role in time can only erode the domestic normative foundations of the Bundesrepublik as we have come to know it since 1949.

Finally for now, elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and more recently Alabama all went against Trump and the Republicans, and the one legislative achievement of the first year—the tax bill—is wildly unpopular for all the right reasons: It is a plutocratic outrage. My hunch, however, is that none of this will matter much. The turning screw of American politics is far more likely to be affected by the outcome of a major military operation in our future—also called a war. As the substantive part of my December 6, 2016 memo suggested, the policy trajectory of the Trump Administration would nod toward war both over Iran policy and Korea. That has proved true. Whatever one may think about the merits and alternatives of such possibilities, the perceived outcome of a war (or wars) tends to be politically decisive. That is what will likely shape Donald Trump’s political future.

Is the Trump Administration bound to go to war before another year has passed—indeed, before the 2018 midterm elections? If the White House forces the premature collapse of the Iran deal, even against the counsel of its own Secretaries of Defense and State, it will face Iran with no NATO allies on its side, and the collateral damage to the alliance will make the fiasco of the 1973–74 period look modest by comparison even if no war occurs, but especially if it does. But I rate the chances of that happening in calendar year 2018 as below 15 percent. That fuse for war is relatively long, all else (like the maintenance of regime stability in Saudi Arabia) equal.

Korea is another matter. The sanctions now operative against North Korea are about as tight as they are ever going to be. If they don’t work to constrain the Norks, as seems more likely than not, then the fuse to war there looks to be much shorter. Starting a war and collapsing the North Korean regime would be the easy, if very unpretty, part. It’s the morning after that would bring the real trouble.

Of course no one knows if there will be a war next year, or, if there is one (or two), how it would play out. If I’m still around in December 2018, we can review the bidding then. For now, what else is there to say but “Happy New Year”—hopefully.

1“Same World, Lonely World, Cold World,” The American Interest (March/April 2017), which was translated as “Les options stratégiques de Trump: continuité, solitude, ou réalisme,” for Commentaire, Numéro 158/Été 2017.

2As it happened, Trump turned to Wall Street for many senior appointments despite the virulent anti-fat-cat rhetoric of the campaign. Some non-fringe Republican hands accepted jobs in government for reasons anyone can guess, depending on the personality; but some who were willing (for example, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton) were spurned for highly unusual reasons as these things go: out-of-control White House vindictiveness and outsized mustaches. You cannot make these things up.

3As of early December 2016, Rex Tillerson’s name had yet to surface publicly.

4Trump does not write either. “His” book, The Art of the Deal, was written by Tony Schwartz, who later regretted his role. “I put lipstick on a pig,” he admitted. Some Trump supporters claim that his highly simple public vocabulary is a shrewd tactic in the arts of persuasion. If there were evidence that he spoke differently in private counsels one might credit the claim. But there is no such evidence.

5President Reagan sometimes trusted Frank Carlucci and Colin Powell so much that it made them uncomfortable. See Powell, My American Journey (Ballantine, 1995), p. 366. In several significant areas over the past year, this metabolism has yet to kick in. I still expect it to as Trump’s term proceeds.

6I underestimated the slowness of the appointments process, and did not anticipate the extent to which it would be deliberate in several cases—like that of the Sate Department—in order to paralyze the “administrative state” that formed the main target of Steve Bannon’s private strategy for government realignment. I sensed that Trump was unaware of how large the Prune Book was, but thought that the White House staff would find a way to pick up the slack. The result a year in has been a mixed bag: Schedule C slots are being filled, but many remain uncharacteristically empty.

7Gratefully, we’ll never know if Flynn had the chops. I do not have as high an opinion of H.R. McMaster as do some, but he at least is sane. See my review of Flynn’s book (with Michael Ledeen), “Field of Fright,” The American Review (FPRI), February 13, 2017.

8A useful record, compiled and published after I submitted my memo, is Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms, Donald Trump: The Making of a World View (Endeavor Press, 2017).

9My conclusion at this point is that in many policy areas Trump does want to change policy, but has encountered pushback, including from people he senses he needs for political reasons—particularly his Secretary of Defense and current White House Chief of Staff. The fact that people like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka have been sent packing does not mean, in my view, that Trump has been fully normalized as far as foreign and national security policy are concerned. My sense is rather that the pulling and pushing is not over, and outcomes may still be affected by decision points arising in ways impossible to anticipate.

10See here.

11It seems to me that the Anthony Scaramucci episode of July 2017 fit this description to a tee.

12That did not happen. 2016 marked a huge exit from emerging markets into the United States, but the trend during 2017 was more mildly the reverse owing in part to still very low interest rates in advanced country markets.

13Earlier in 2016 I had written of this theme in four related essays: “The Nadir of Modernity,” The American Interest, August 5, 2016 (subtitled “Framework Issues”), August 10 (subtitled “Liberalism and Modernity”), August 12 (subtitled “The State of the State”), and August 16 (subtitled “Anti-Modernity Within and Without”).

14I was speaking figuratively at the time, but it turns out that the motto “e pluribus unum” has now been removed from Donald Trump’s presidential “challenge coin.” This I could not have anticipated, since it’s not been my custom to give thought to the design of presidential coins.

15One year later I would add that this may be changing faster than before as “fast followers” find ways to erode U.S. technological advantages in a new IT/AI (information technology+artificial intelligence) environment in which innovation outpaces the lag times still required to field major military platforms.

16Just a week after I finished my memo, a Washington Post reporter revealed that Trump and several other likely senior Administration appointees were devotees of Ayn Rand. This was shocking, disheartening, and frightening news. Why the reporter chose to wait until after the election to reveal this was also disheartening.

17As far as predictions go, I think this sentence sums up well the essence of the past year.

The post That Was the (Sad) Year That Was appeared first on The American Interest.

The Top Books of 2017

The holidays are over, you’ve received your gift cards from Amazon and already returned your duplicate copies of Grant by Ron Chernow. So what books to buy now? Here are some of our favorites at the American Interest.

Actually, if you happen to be the one person who didn’t receive it, Grant (Penguin) isn’t a bad place to start. Grant has often been seen as an overrated general and a weak president. Here Chernow uses Grant’s private struggles with alcoholism, bankruptcy and depression to illustrate his broader struggles with strategy and public policy during the civil war and reconstruction. The result is a tale that emphasises the complexity and even agony of decision making at times of national crisis.

Similar themes also underpin Gordon Wood’s wonderful Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Penguin). The relationship between these two founding fathers seems to have it all: different leadership and personal styles, the contrast in complex visions for what the United States should be, and interests that sometimes aligned and at other times most definitely did not. In Wood’s graceful telling, it is Adams who emerges as the more principled player, the founder more in tune with our times. When Jefferson, famously a slaveholder himself, but often portrayed as a reluctant one, supports French attempts to overthrow the Haitian revolution and reintroduce slavery there, the scales fall from our eyes.

One of Ron Chernow’s earlier books, Hamilton, famously has been turned into a hip-hop musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Another of Miranda’s collaborators Jeremy McCarter echoed the theme of complexity this year in his highly entertaining Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals (Random House). Taking five World War One-era young writers and campaigners (Randolph Bourne, Alice Paul, Max Eastman, Walter Lippmann, and John Reed), he illustrates how bright, principled minds, politically in tune with each other, can arrive at profoundly different answers to those great questions of the day. As with Grant, failure as much as success is part of the story, but so too is getting up, dusting yourself off and resuming the battle. Walter Lippmann, arguably the most influential newspaper columnist of the twentieth century, understood that better than most. “Lippmann had come to think of his generation’s history as a record of democratic defeat, of possibilities foreclosed,” McCarter writes, “But Lippmann had made a defiant promise that he would still be fighting long after [others] had quit. … He felt a sense of resignation about American prospects, but he wrote those columns anyway.”

John Reed, one of McCarter’s characters, made his name with Ten Days That Shook the World, his personal account of the Russian Revolution. The centenary of that event was marked with a series of 1917 books, the most absorbing and original of which was The Russian Revolution: A New History (Basic Books), by my Bard colleague Sean McMeekin. Here the real villain of the piece is not Tsar Nicholas II, who was more competent than generally thought. Instead McMeekin nails the spineless Alexander Kerensky, who succeeded the Tsar, and Germany, which funded Lenin as the “catalyst of chaos, a one-man demolition crew sent to wreck Russia’s war effort.”

The aftermath of the revolution is brilliantly drawn out in two books we covered on the TAI podcast. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin) is a book of astounding depth and authority This second volume illustrates the brutalizing effect of power within a totalitarian regime, as Stalin maneuvers himself from dictator to despot. But the portrait is a subtle one, not least in showing that Stalin’s success came in part because he worked so much harder than anyone else, was brighter than anyone else (even Trotsky) and, surprisingly, because he was a true believer in Marxist-Leninism, not the ultra-pragmatist he often appears.

That sense of Stalin the zealot also comes out in Anne Applebaum’s gut-wrenching Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (Doubleday), which tells the story of the calculated starvation of the peasant class in Ukraine. The fact that her argument about these events is contradicted by Kotkin, and yet these two outstanding books remain must-reads, neatly illustrates McCarter’s point in Young Radicals: complex, controversial questions often demand that serious writers can and should disagree.

The difficulties for an American president confronting Stalin is at the heart of David Woolner’s elegant study The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace (Basic Books). The story is often a moving one as Roosevelt, his powers visibly waning, is outmaneuvered by Stalin at the Yalta conference. Woolner skilfully reminds us how limited were FDR’s options (although Truman in his first 100 days managed a different approach), and throws in surprises, not least of which is the suggestion tucked away that FDR, had he lived beyond the war, planned on resigning as president to become the first secretary-general of the United Nations.

The postwar era was covered in one of the best, and best-written, books of the year. John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee (Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain; Oxford University Press) is one of those lives that stays with you long after you’ve read it. Bew’s argument is that amid all the cacophony surrounding Churchill, the role of Attlee—deputy PM during the war, and creator of the National Health Service and, in large part, NATO after it—has been underappreciated both as a man and a leader. Bew does not try to claim that Attlee was greater than Churchill (“a claim that would have caused Attlee to guffaw.”) Instead he gracefully rounds out Attlee both as a man and a quiet revolutionary, making the case that Attlee was a man of luck and skill, taciturnity and depths. The result is as a fine a historical biography as you could hope to read.

The quiet triumph of Mr Attlee stands in marked contrast to more recent politics. Two books looking back at the tumultuous events of last year make compelling reading. The title of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (Crown), by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, tells you everything you need to know. Allen and Parnes had inside access, and with so many sources willing to pass the buck, the story of disfunction, strategic and tactical incompetence, and bitter in-fighting shows how Clinton’s campaign, hoping to shatter the glass ceiling, only succeeded in shattering itself. Whatever your own politics may be, it would difficult to read this book and conclude that Clinton is the greatest president America never had. Here she’s unable communicate to and inspire her own staff, or the wider country. She ducks big decisions and hides behind her court favorites. More important than any of this, she fails to articulate to anyone why she wants to be president, or what the big idea is. Faced with a choice between no idea and “Make America Great Again,” the election went to the candidate who at least seemed to know what he wanted to say.

The aftermath of another 2016 political earthquake—Brexit—is covered superbly in Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem (HarperCollins) by Tim Shipman. He looks at how the Conservative party threw away its parliamentary majority and a twenty point opinion poll lead in one of the most incompetent general election campaigns in modern memory. It’s real “inside baseball” stuff and might seem only to appeal to Westminster buffs. But this is a universal story of fear and loathing in political life. Shipman is wonderful, and unsparing, in revealing the levels of unpleasantness and stupidity of the operation inside 10 Downing Street. Yet for all that poison, Shipman’s portrait of the prime minister Theresa May herself is a subtle one: initially paralyzed by the election campaign and the subsequent diminitution of her own authority, she emerges eventually as a resilient and dutiful character, accepting of her fate to carry on, because no-one else wants the toxic job of negotiating Brexit with the EU. She may not be a Churchill, or even an Attlee, but May is at least following Winston’s mantra to “keep buggering on.”

Good leadership comes in many different forms, but we know it when we see it, wherever we find it. That’s the lesson of conductor John Mauceri’s revealing and amusing Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting (Knopf). Conductors play no instrument in the orchestra, but somehow they must convince a hundred or more highly-trained musicians to follow their lead in some vast complex symphony by the likes of Mahler or Bruckner. No wonder that charlatans abound. Traditionally, as Harvey Sachs shows in his fine and often uncomfortable Toscanini: Musician of Conscience (Liveright) brilliance has come through a personal reign of fear.

At other times, in other arenas, barely perceptible leadership can also produce stunning results. Bob Paisley is arguably the greatest club soccer coach of all time, winning 14 trophies in nine years with Liverpool FC in the 1970s and 1980s, including three European Cups (now the Champions League). Yet as Ian Herbert’s marvelous biography Quiet Genius: Bob Paisley, British Football’s Greatest Manager (Bloomsbury) illustrates, Paisley, like Attlee, is an underappreciated figure, because he rarely shouted about his own achievements, or indeed hardly raised his voice at all. But David Johnson, one of his charges, is quoted on how vividly the boss instilled his way of playing into the team. “Get the ball,” Paisley told them. “Pass the ball. Keep the ball. But if you overcomplicate it, you are going to meet yourself coming back.” It was the strategy that made Liverpool the best team in Europe. Had Hillary Clinton been able to communicate her vision with half as much clarity, perhaps she would have spent 2017 in the Oval Office rather than selling her own book.

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