Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 116

Iran’s Inroads into Christian Iraq

In the past few weeks, Iraqi federal forces and the militias who fight under the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) umbrella have taken back most of the disputed territory that the Kurdistan Region had hoped to incorporate into a future state. These disputed territories include the Nineveh Plains area, the heartland of Christianity in Iraq and a multiethnic series of farming villages bordering the city of Mosul. The forces crossed the Ba’ashiqa line and reached the town of Teleskuf, where Peshmerga forces began to fire on the advancing Iraqi forces. Hundreds of Christians who had recently moved back to the town rebuilt by the Hungarian government had to flee the crossfire with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Speedy intervention by the United States prevented the clashes from turning into a full-scale battle.

While the dust has not yet settled over the disputed territories in Iraq, a new reality is settling in for the residents of the Nineveh Plains. For the first time in more than a decade, the Iraqi Central Government instead of the Kurdistan Regional Government has control over most of the area—save the town of Alqosh in the north of the Plains. One militia whose role has greatly expanded in the Plains is the Babylon Brigades, whose presence extends from the nearly empty town of Tel Kayf to the populated towns of Batnaya and Ba’ashiqa. The militia, which has ties to Iran, has spread anxiety among civilians about growing Iranian expansion in Iraq’s north.

Iran’s bottom-up approach is why its foreign policy has been so successful in Iraq. Its leaders have been able to project a great deal of power, using the cracks in Iraqi stability to cement their own interests and bolster their allies among the Iraqi militias. This expansion threatens the embattled Christian community that has been struggling to recuperate since the fall of ISIS. Policymakers in Washington and Iraq should be mindful of this expansion before they wake up with a destabilizing Iranian canton in the Nineveh Plains, strategically wedged between Kurdistan and Mosul.

The Babylon Brigade

The 1,000-strong Babylon Brigade is operationally part of the PMU umbrella, the volunteer forces formed by fatwa when ISIS neared Baghdad. Although it is currently led by Christian quasi-celebrity and former Mahdi Army affiliate Rayan al-Kildani, the Babylon Brigade is composed mostly of Shi‘a Arabs and Shabak not native to the area, and is supported by the Iran-backed Badr Organization. The Brigade did not participate in the battle for the Nineveh Plains, and it was only during the battle for Mosul that they positioned themselves in the town of Tel Kayf, right outside of the city.

Very little is known about the origins or inner workings of the Brigade. The PMU touts Al-Kildani as an example of its diversity and of the willingness among Shi‘a to include Christians in the country’s post-ISIS makeup. However, for many Christians, the pictures of al-Kildani on social media receiving the Eucharist or praying in a church are disingenuous attempts to highlight his Christian heritage and therefore his legitimacy as a Christian leader.

Their distrust of him is reasonable. At the beginning of the battle for Mosul, the Brigade became embroiled in controversy when a video of al-Kildani was released in which he tells Brigade members that the battle will be revenge against “the descendants of Yezid [a historical figure reviled by Shi‘a],” exacted upon the citizens of Mosul. This led the Chaldean Patriarch, head of the largest Christian church in Iraq, to assert that al-Kildani “does not represent Christians in any way. His deplorable statements are aimed at creating abhorrent sectarian strife.” Al-Kildani’s reference to Yezid and other statements have fueled rumors that he is a crypto-Muslim or the son of a convert.

The Babylon Brigade’s actions on the Nineveh Plains are of serious concern as well. In July 2017, member of the Babylon Brigade were caught stealing ancient artifacts from the Mar Behnam Monastery and nearby homes. The Nineveh Plains Units (NPU), a 500-strong militia aligned with a pro-Baghdad Christian political party that runs security in the Al-Hamdaniya District of the Plains, arrested six members of the Brigade in response. The Brigade responded by teaming up with another local PMU force to attack the place where the prisoners were being held captive, stealing several of the NPU’s weapons and vehicles in the process. In response to the incident, the Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office and the PMU High Command expelled the Babylon Brigade from the entire district.

In addition, al-Kildani has reportedly hosted leading Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in the Nineveh Plains. Al-Kildani has also photographed himself with the pro-Iranian politician Hadi al-Ameri of the Badr Brigade and U.S.-designated terrorists Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis of Kataeb Hezbollah and Qais Khazali of the League of the Righteous. In April of 2017, al-Kildani was hosted in Tehran by Iran’s Ambassador to Iraq and Qods Force commander, Iraj Masjedi. Using its “Christian” identity as a pretext, Iranian leaders have been able to use the Babylon Brigade to guarantee that they will have a say in Northern Iraq.

The Shi‘a Shabak

The Iranian regime has also been working to empower Shabak PMU forces and populations. Traditionally concentrated in the district of Hamdaniya and Mosul city, the Shabak have been historically treated as a separate ethno-religious group with a unique language. However, the community has faced severe pressure to submit to either an Arab or Kurdish ethnic identity.

The Shabak leadership is divided into pro-KRG and pro-Baghdad parties, each with their own militias affiliated with the two major powers. Sunni Shabaks (around 30 percent) generally support the KRG, while Shi‘a Shabak (around 70 percent) remain aligned with the central government and PMU leadership, including the powerful Iran-backed Badr Organization. The Shabak Democratic Gathering party, which advocates the formation of a separate Nineveh Plains province, is led by Dr. Hunain al-Qaddo, a member of Iraq’s Council of Representatives and an ally of Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law block as well as the pro-Iranian Badr Organization.

Since the liberation of the Nineveh Plains from ISIS, Shabak have been buying homes and other properties with offers many desperately impoverished Christian refugees cannot refuse. The building of an Iranian-funded school in Bartella named after the Iranian Imam Khomeini further intensifies Christian fears of encroachment. Many Christians believe that the Shabak are being funded by an outside source, namely the Badr Organization, in a deliberate attempt to drive them out of their towns and change the ethnic makeup of the Nineveh Plains.

Lately, the Shabak PMU has been encroaching on Christian towns, with the encouragement of its Iranian backers. The operations of these fighters are not yet well understood, but Shabak militias based out of smaller Shabak towns and Bartella are viewed negatively by Christian forces. Their growing financial and military presence in traditionally Christian areas of the Nineveh Plains has complicated efforts to stabilize liberated communities. In much the same way as they made inroads into the Turkmen community, capitalizing on that relationship during recent events in Kirkuk and other disputed territories, Iran’s leaders are attempting to use the Shabak as their proxies in Northern Iraq.

Policy Recommendations for the United States and Iraq

By working with locals, creating proxy forces, and providing services, the Iranians are able to gain legitimacy with the local communities and advance their own policy agenda in the country. Both American and Iraqi leaders would be wise to slow the growing Iranian expansion on the Nineveh Plains in order to ensure that Iran does not have a say in the sensitive area of Northern Iraq.

Through the United Institute of Peace, the U.S. government can foster inter-communal relations between the Christians and Shabak of the Nineveh Plains, as well as between those communities and the Sunni populations in the greater Nineveh Province. Both U.S. and Iraqi officials can work to ensure that only federal forces and local militias, like the Nineveh Plains Units, the Shabak PMU, and other Christian forces, remain on the ground. Another useful measure would be the establishment of a joint training and operation center along with a new, unified local force composed of the existent local militias. This would ensure that non-local forces that have caused trouble and are seemingly beholden to Iran, like the Babylon Brigade, are pulled out of the Nineveh Plains.

Lastly, Iraq’s government must work to swiftly rebuild the towns on the Nineveh Plains and address the pre-ISIS grievances of the Shabak, including the lack of economic development and public services in their towns. These measures will ensure that Iran’s regime cannot take advantage of peoples desperate for help and sow further seeds for conflict. The encroachment of Iran in this region should alarm those who wish it to recover from the depredations of ISIS, but this encroachment can and should be reversed.

The post Iran’s Inroads into Christian Iraq appeared first on The American Interest.

Tax Reform for Donors

In the not so distant past, members of Congress never admitted in public that donors influenced their policy positions. But as often happens in the Trump era, inhibitions of this sort have weakened. When asked why Republicans were passing a seemingly unpopular tax reform bill, Representative Chris Collins candidly stated that “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again’.” Similarly, Senator Lindsay Graham warned fellow Republicans recently that if the Republican tax bill failed, “financial contributions would stop.”

There is of course nothing new about donors trying to affect policymaking. It is a deeply embedded feature of the U.S. political system. Corporations, unions and interest groups of all sorts have always donated money to support their allies and their causes. The reform community characterizes these transactions as institutionalized bribery. Donors say that it feels more like extortion to them since they have little choice but to contribute if they want access to members. Either way, a good deal of reform effort since the early 1970s has aimed to limit the influence of campaign donors.

While the problem is real, political scientists caution against overestimating the effects that donations have on policymaking. The purpose of most campaign contributions is to support longstanding allies, not to bribe members into doing what they would otherwise be disinclined to do. Moreover, campaign contributions are probably not the most important form of special interest influence. The fact that interest groups spend far more on lobbying than on campaign contributions reveals what they think matters the most. And because special interests are not all on the same page, competing campaign finance and lobbying efforts can often result in a status quo-preserving equilibrium of countervailing pressures.

That said, the problem of special interest influence is significant. Modern reforms have substantially reduced the amount of explicit quid pro quo corruption over time via enhanced conflict of interest regulation and disclosure rules. However, the heavy reform emphasis on reducing material corruption as opposed to enhancing political equality or lowering polarization has had some unintended negative consequences. Raising money in limited amounts while campaign costs are escalating means that candidates have to spend more time dialing for dollars. This makes uncapped and more weakly disclosed soft money options (for example, super PACs, 501(c)(4) organizations, and so on) attractive, ironically undercutting several decades of reform efforts.

Indeed, I would argue that modern campaign finance reforms have also unintentionally contributed to America’s political polarization problems. The implicit ideal in campaign finance has been to promote small donors and limit the influence of special interest groups. The latter are typically less interested than the former in ideology and more interested in protecting their bottom-line economic interests. Research shows that individual donors tend to be more ideological and partisan. The average citizen does not contribute to parties or candidates. Donors, like primary voters, tend to skew left and right more than the electorate as a whole. To the degree that the system prioritizes individual donors over special interest donors, it amplifies the same centrifugal pressures we see in low turnout primary elections.

The core problem is that for constitutional reasons American political campaigns are mostly privately financed. Mandatory caps on spending and a system of exclusive public financing are precluded by our strong First Amendment tradition. The individuals and people who step up to the plate and donate are a self-selected mix, either motivated by material interests or higher than average levels of partisanship and ideology. This is a pick-your-poison choice. Favor special interests and you get more material corruption. Favor small donors and you get more activist skew. We would prefer a more representative sample of donors, but most citizens will not take money out of their pockets to donate for candidates or political causes. And the more they find politics distasteful, the less inclined they will be to pay for the misery that it inflicts on them.

This brings us back to the Republican tax reform. Why pass corporate tax relief even though a majority of Americans are against it? Yes, it is certainly true that aspects of the Republican tax reform are motivated by material self-interest such as the repeal of the estate tax that would benefit a small number of very wealthy families. And yes, there is self-interest in the tax cut for corporations and the reduced rate for pass through businesses. The President himself will likely benefit from the latter.

But the donors that Representative Collins and Senator Graham are worried about are not just the ones looking out for their self-interest, but also the ones who care mostly about ideology and party loyalty. Conservatives truly believe that less government and lower taxes are better for prosperity and individual happiness, and party loyalists expect the Republican office holder to deliver on the promises they made during the 2016 campaign. Both could donate less in 2018 if they are disappointed. Collins and Hatch openly defer to donor influence because donors constitute a critical element of the party base, not some outside corrupting influence.

So why does this matter? First, it explains some unusual features of the tax bill. Politicians have always used the budget to reward their allies. However, both the initial House and Senate bills distinguished themselves by the degree to which they aspired to punish their partisan enemies—namely, blue states, the professional class, and universities. Blue states voted against them, so then guess who loses if state and local taxes are no longer deductible? The professional classes lean towards the Democratic Party, so then guess which groups are exempted from the tax reductions for pass through businesses? And since universities seemingly undermine traditional values and produce research that demonstrates uncomfortable facts about climate change, guess who will be taxed on endowment expenditures and graduate student tuition waivers? Tax policy has become a partisan weapon.

Lost in the well-meaning reform efforts to reduce material corruption is the role that money has played in hardening polarization. Groups that used to donate to both parties like the teachers, lawyers, and doctors have over time sorted primarily into one party camp or the other. Ideological super PACs and nonprofits use their donations to reward purity and punish defectors. Pressure from leaders and donors is so strong that many blue-state Republicans will likely vote for this tax bill even though it will put their states and alma maters in fiscal jeopardy.

The key to fixing the campaign finance system is seeing all these trade-offs more clearly. Reform should not be exclusively defined around reducing material corruption. Acknowledging this simple point would greatly improve our efforts at repairing our political system.

The post Tax Reform for Donors appeared first on The American Interest.

A Liberal Defense of Populism

Commentaries predicting the “end of liberalism” or the ascendancy of a “dark era” of illiberalism now constitute a growth industry. “Liberalism,” writes one pundit, “is now in trouble.”1 “Is this the beginning of the end of liberal democracy?” asks another.2 Others opine that “Liberalism Isn’t Working.”3 Laments about the fall of liberalism are often coupled with ominous warning about the rise of the dark forces of illiberalism. I have stopped counting the articles and essays that characterize the outcome of an election or referendum that they don’t like, as a “revolt against liberalism.”4

Nervousness about the precarious status of liberalism is invariably coupled these days with alarmist accounts about the supposed threat posed by hordes of authoritarian populist movements. Indeed, anti-populist political commentators appear to be obsessed with the inter-related issues of the crisis of liberalism and the threat posed by populism to the liberal world order. There is a veritable moral panic directed at the danger of populism and the threat it poses to free and open societies.

In Europe, in particular, anti-populist discourse often evokes memories of the final days of the Weimar Republic. Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission (EC), appears to believe that the fight against populism is akin to a holy war. When Juncker declared that “we have to fight nationalism” and “block the avenue of populism,” he frequently evokes memories associated with the good fight against fascism.5 Even religious figures have internalized the populism-as-fascism cultural script. Pope Francis has not yet issued a papal bull against populism, but he has warned that populism could lead to the election of “saviours” who are similar to Hitler.

Nor is the meme exclusive to Europe. Madeleine Albright is writing a book on “fascism,” which she sees rising against liberalism in the West. As with much of this narrative on both sides of the Atlantic, the words “populist,” “fascist,” “illiberal,” and “anti-democratic” are essentially interchangeable.

At times the invective hurled at so-called populist movements and governments exposes a palpable sense of incomprehension toward its target. Take some of the criticisms levelled at Hungary, which is arguably the European anti-populist’s worst nightmare. Writing in Prospect, Nick Cohen has no doubt that Hungary is run by a malevolent tyrant. But he is also aware that the reality of everyday life in Hungary contradicts his depiction of a populist nightmare:

Yet, unlike the dictatorships of the 20th century, the classic authoritarian regimes of the 21st do not feel like tyrannies. Budapest is a modern European capital. Environmentally conscious citizens can cycle, walk and run far easier than in London or Edinburgh. The tourist traps are full. Cruise boats sail the Danube. As for the oppressive state, I barely saw a police officer in two weeks.6

Cohen grudgingly concedes that the government of Victor Orbán is relatively popular and is likely to win the Hungarian general election to be held next year. This is so not because these elections will be unfairly fixed, but because “the left is divided” and “its factions appear to hate each other more than they hate Orbán and in any case have their own history of corruption and incompetence to live down.” It seems that Cohen’s problem with Orbán, as with some other so-called populist politicians, is that they are too popular.

The current form of the anti-populism narrative constitutes a sublimated critique of popular sovereignty and democratic decision-making. In recent years sections of the Western political class have been disconcerted by the outcome of elections and referenda. In some cases, these elites’ disappointment with their capacity to motivate and influence the electorate has crystallized into an anti-democratic sensibility toward public life. For example, James Traub, an American critic of the “illiberal democracy” prevailing in Hungary, sounds distinctly illiberal in his condemnation of the people who voted for causes he dislikes. In an essay titled, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” Traub asserts that developments such as Britain’s vote for Brexit indicate that the “political schism of our time” is not between the Left and the Right but between “the sane vs. the mindless angry.”7 He regards the “ignorant masses” as his moral inferiors who need to be re-educated by the enlightened elites:

Did I say “ignorant”? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them.8

The conviction that people who support the “wrong” kind of political movements are ignorant and stupid allows Traub to adopt the paternalistic tone typically associated with the authoritarian elitism he decries.

The intemperate language adopted by anti-populist polemicists is underwritten by a disturbing tendency to regard democracy as a mixed blessing. They don’t simply blame people for voting the wrong way or voting against their interests but also accuse sections of the electorate of lacking the moral and intellectual resources necessary for acting as responsible citizens. Such pessimistic assessments of the capacity of the people to vote the right way has led to the questioning of the value of democracy itself.9 It seems that some anti-populists are far more interested in de-legitimizing the moral status of their opponents than in attempting to understand their own responsibility for the setbacks liberalism has suffered.

What is more, there is a kind of parallax problem peeping through some of this criticism. In Western Europe there is a liberalism to defend, however anti-democratic and elitist it has become in some instances. But in most of central and Eastern Europe there isn’t. In Hungary, for example, there are almost no genuine liberals to revolt against. Nearly the same is true in Poland, and even in the Czech Republic. To greater or lesser degrees, these societies never produced the broad middle class bastions of liberal democracy, so their political economies have never exhibited the same structure as those of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and so on. As a result, it makes very little sense to use terms like populist and illiberal, as though they applied identically to all European societies.

Populism and Legitimacy

Many of the movements that are described as populist or as illiberal constitute a reaction to the anti-political, technocratic version of liberalism that emerged in recent decades, especially in Europe.10 This version of liberalism is characteristically illiberal in the original sense of the term, and it is certainly anti-democratic. The disdain of contemporary advocates of liberalism toward democracy—at least when it fails to produce the “right” results—is one of the most awkward yet rarely noted features of public life in 21st-century Western societies.

Not that this is new. Postwar European elites were fairly suspicious of “too much” democracy, because they feared that mob-driven, weak parliamentary democracies were capable of producing monsters like Mussolini and Hitler. The American Founders, not least James Madison, created a host of mediations between a plebiscitory form of democracy and the republican form they sought: the Federal system, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, whose members were originally elected by state legislatures.

So it really comes down to judgments about the most prudent balance between the means of popular sovereignty and checks on mob rule, and some believe, not without reason, that the scales have tipped too far in the latter direction. For example, though worried about the declining influence of liberalism, Sohrab Ahmari has drawn attention to the narrow-minded, counter-majoritarian, and instrumentalist orientation of many self-styled liberals toward democracy. After noting that the “liberal mainstream” often pursues its “own agenda rather than the interests of the voters they are supposed to serve,” Ahmari added that, “on both sides of the Atlantic, mainstream parties have been too ready to short circuit the democratic process when they fear it won’t produce the desired liberal outcomes.”11

Ahmari rightly observed that counter-majoritarian technocratic governance has provoked a significant “illiberal” backlash:

From Obama’s executive order on immigration, to the imposition of gay marriage by judicial fiat, to the EU’s attempts to punish voters in Poland and elsewhere for electing the wrong kind of government, to the efforts by European and American transnationalists to “download” liberal norms into national legal systems, liberal disdain for self-government is bolstering illiberals.12

Other observers share Ahmari’s diagnosis of the problem of “undemocratic liberalism,” and its responsibility for provoking a populist reaction. Though hostile toward contemporary populism, the political scientist Cas Mudde has recognized that it constitutes an “illiberal democratic” response to “undemocratic liberalism.” He wrote, quite accurately, that populism “criticizes the exclusion of important issues from the political agenda by the elites and calls for their repoliticization.”13 Indeed, the phenomenon that Mudde describes as “undemocratic liberalism” is no less illiberal than those accused of threatening liberal values.

Though there are many causes and issues that motivate citizens to support movements described as populist, their estrangement from non-responsive and unresponsive technocratic institutions is surely one of them. Writing of the “demotic source” of appeal of leaders like Orbán, the political scientist Jeffrey C. Isaac contends that a “great many right and left populists do ‘play on the register’ of democratic values, and challenge real deficiencies of liberal democracy.”14

This sentiment is particularly striking in Europe, where popular opinion is often sharply at odds with the attitudes of the so-called liberal political elites. A Chatham House study of ten European Union (EU) countries indicated that “there is simmering discontent within the public, large sections of whom view the EU in negative terms, want to see it return some powers to member states.” The report The Future of Europe: Comparing Public and Elite Attitudes pointed out that only 34 percent of the public believes that they have benefitted from the European Union, compared to 71 percent of the elites.15

In Europe, and particularly within the European Union, counter-majoritarian governance has become deeply entrenched. This development is not surprising since, as already noted, the legacy of two world wars had left the political classes of Western Europe apprehensive about the dynamics of mass politics. Such concerns led them to adopt institutional and constitutional arrangements designed to insulate them from the volatility of public opinion and the pressure of the masses. As Jan-Werner Müller observed, “insulation from popular pressures and, more broadly, a deep distrust of popular sovereignty, underlay not just the beginnings of European integration, but the political reconstruction of Western Europe after 1945 in general.”16 The architects of the European Union were not simply suspicious of popular sovereignty as a pragmatic matter, as Müller explained, but “also had deep reservations about the idea of parliamentary sovereignty.”17

The postwar constitutional settlements sought to limit the role of parliament through assigning significant power to the judiciary and newly constructed constitutional courts. Bureaucratic institutions also gained significant influence, especially through the medium of the European unification. The establishment of the European Economic Council (EEC) in 1958 followed by the launching of the European Union itself in 1993 continued with the tradition of depoliticizing contentious issues and adopting a form of technocratic governance.

In recent decades, the advocates of European unity have explicitly sought to depoliticize national sovereignty as well, and to constrain democracy as a means to that end. Their arguments were invariably conveyed through the claim that in a modern globalized world, national parliaments and constituencies are ill suited for dealing with the complex challenges of governance, many of which transcend borders and are global in character. From this perspective, pragmatic considerations inexorably led to the replacement of the demos with the wise counsel of the technocrat.

Distrust of the people and of parliamentary sovereignty was reinforced by the concern that, on its own, liberal democracy lacks the normative foundation to inspire the loyalty and affection of ordinary citizens. The transnational orientation of EU political culture is designed to avoid engagement with the electorate insofar as possible, and to convince citizens to adopt views that are generally unpopular in wider society. It relies on the authority of transnational or international institutions to side step having to win arguments on contentious issues.

One reason the West European political establishment is prepared to endow the European Court of Human Rights with a quasi-sacred authority is to ensure that fundamental questions touching on moral norms are taken out of the realm of politics. The outsourcing of moral and political authority to an apparently independent institution like the Court of Human Rights or the Constitutional Court is symptomatic of the difficulty that postwar liberal democracy has in dealing honestly within the realm of values.

The institutionalization of anti-majoritarian practices is accepted as sound practice by partisans of the European Union. In addition to depoliticizing decision-making through the use of courts, the supporters of the federalist project in Europe rely on expert technocratic authority to assume responsibility for policymaking. Andrew Moravcsik has outlined the justification for this procedure:

The apparently “counter-majoritarian” tendency of the EU political institutions insulated from direct democratic contestation arises out of factors that themselves have normative integrity, notably efforts to compensate for the ignorance and nonparticipation of citizens, to make terrible commitments to rights enforcement, and to offset the power of special interests.18

From this standpoint, the existence of popular sovereignty serves to distort the running of EU institutions and so counter-majoritarian institutions are deemed necessary to tame the electorate.

The anti-populist narrative—at least in the European context—constitutes a response to popular pressure. Since such pressure implicitly calls into question the accountability of the European Union’s institutions, they threaten to expose their shallow base of democratic legitimacy. As the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev observed, at the “heart of the conflict” is “the clash between liberal rationalism embodied by EU institutions and the populist revolt against the unaccountability of the elites.”19 In the context of European political life, hostility toward the unaccountability of the elites frequently assumes the form of Euroskepticism, and has earned over the years the sobriquet of “the democracy deficit.” The response of EU propagandists to Euroskepticism has been to condemn it as ipso facto xenophobic, racist, and a threat to peace and stability.

The European Union’s uncompromising anti-populism is at least in part stirred by an apprehension toward the reliability of national electorates. That is why Jürgen Habermas, one the most fervent intellectual advocates of the European Union, could so casually write off national electorates as “the preserve of right-wing nationalism” and condemn them as “the caricature of national macrosubjects shutting themselves off from each other.”20 This typically contemptuous reaction runs parallel to a deep reluctance to engage in a battle to win the hearts and minds of the public. They find it easier to blame the ignorance and prejudices of the people than to acknowledge their own difficulty in elaborating a compelling normative foundation for their political project.

The Two Faces of Illiberalism

Back in 1997, when Fareed Zakaria penned his influential essay, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” most commentators could not have known that, less than a decade later, some political leaders would self-consciously praise the virtues of illiberal democracy.21 The Western media was shocked when, in July 2014, Victor Orbán explicitly embraced illiberal democracy as his ideal. Since that moment, Orbán has been frequently cited as the exemplar of illiberal populism. Yet in the contemporary era, critics of illiberalism often evince attitudes that are very similar to those they attribute to their opponents. As Ahmari observed in response to conflicts surrounding cultural values and identity politics, “often various illiberalisms are locked in combat against one another.”22 Many critics of illiberal democracy appear to be unaware of the fact that some of their views have little in common with the tradition of classical liberalism.

Historically, liberalism has been in the forefront of expanding the domain of freedom and tolerance. As Steven Holmes observed in his important study, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, religious toleration and freedom of discussion are two of the “core practices” of liberalism.23 Yet in recent times self-declared liberals have found it difficult to be tolerant of religion and sometimes write off fellow citizens who espouse a strong sense of faith as prejudiced fundamentalists. Moreover, hostility to populism and illiberal democracy is rarely coupled with a positive affirmation of freedom and liberty.

As Holmes noted, “That public disagreement is a creative force may have been the most novel and radical principle of liberal politics.”24 Certainly on this point, self-described 21st-century liberals have often been found wanting. Throughout the Western world they have been actively engaged in lobbying for laws that limit freedom of speech and of expression. The new genre of European “hate laws,” which criminalizes the voicing of hate, is the outcome of political campaigning for such an expressive law by activists associated with leftist causes.

However, it is within the system of higher education that the paternalistic and authoritarian temper of 21st-century liberalism is most evident, even in the United States. In universities liberalism has developed authoritarian tendencies that express themselves in the policing of speech and through social engineering initiatives directed at pressurising people to alter their views and attitudes.25 Demonstrators in American universities carrying placards stating “Free Speech Is Hate Speech” illustrate the low regard sections of the academic community have for this precious freedom. It is a sign of the times that liberal commentators can depict free speech as a political weapon used by right-wing extremists.26 That the valuation of free speech is frequently called into question on the campuses of ostensibly liberal universities indicates that, almost imperceptibly, the liberal value of tolerance has mutated into the illiberal advocacy of censorship.

The main difference between the two faces of illiberalism is that, unlike the unacknowledged illiberalism of activists demanding that new undergraduates attend anti-bias or diversity workshops, Orbán explicitly justified his version. The concept of illiberal democracy he outlined in July 2014 is congruent with the Burkean version of conservative thought. An emphasis on the maintenance of an organic relationship with a community’s traditions was a central theme in Burke’s idealization of a contract linking the generations as well as the living community of the moment. Orbán nationalism is essentially conservative, communitarian, nationalist, and Christian, and it stands in explicit opposition to what, in his view, is liberalism’s failure to affirm the values that underpin family, community, and national life. His speech defined the objective of his government as a determination to

harmonize the relationship between the interests and achievement of individuals—that needs to be acknowledged—with interests and achievements of the community, and the nation. . . . The Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, of freedom, etc. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization, but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead.27

In other words, Orbán advocates a conservative communitarian conception of the state. By publicly flaunting his view he communicated the simple message that he was an unashamed nationalist in his cultural outlook and above all a Hungarian. If this view wins elections, what is there that is undemocratic about it? For that matter, what is populist about it? Are critics simply conflating the mean of “popular” with “populist” without bothering to define the latter?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “illiberal” can mean both an opposition to liberal opinions in politics and “not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberty of others; narrow-minded, bigoted.” Illiberalism in this latter sense can translate to ethnic chauvinism, but it can also accurately describe the attitudes of many anti-populist critics of illiberal democracy. This suggests, among other things, that some critics of populism and of Hungarian conservative nationalism are simply unaware of their own illiberal attitudes and assumptions. One of the most unattractive features such illiberal liberals are their frequent displays of paternalism. Without much reflection, they assume that they possess the right to impose their attitudes and views on those who do not share them.

Such paternalism, which used to go under the phrase “consciousness raising” during the heydays of Sixties protest culture, is all too visible in universities in the Anglo-American world. In some universities students are expected to participate in diversity awareness classes and to adopt the values these classes promote regardless of their own inclinations. Such illiberal paternalism is bad enough within the confines of a university. It becomes far more troublesome when similar arguments are used to instruct people in other societies—such as in Eastern Europe—about what values they must adopt if they are to be considered mature Europeans.

A Distorted View of Populism

Twenty-first century liberals often regard the “forces of populism” as their bitter foe. Yet, as already suggested, it is far from evident what they mean by the term. The application of a single term to account for movements of the far left, far right, those without any clear ideological attachments, the governments of Venezuela, Turkey, Russia, Poland, and Hungary all together, lacks even a hint of conceptual clarity. Populism is increasingly used as a moral category, not an analytic one, in order to condemn and devalue its targets. For all practical purposes, “populists” are bad people with wrong ideas. Krastev raises an important question when he asks, “Who decides which policies are ‘populist’ and which are ‘sound’?”28 He knows the answer: For the time being, at least, the decision rests entirely with a coterie of influential anti-populists.

It was not always so. In the past, populism served as a form of self-designation knowingly applied to describe themselves. During the 19th century, for example, the Narodniks in Russia, like the People’s Party in the United States, took pride in their populist outlook. In the 21st century, anti-populists define the term exclusively as one applied to their opponents. One sees this in the fact that the academic literature on populism is typically hostile to its subject matter and often projects values and attitudes on movements that its members would not recognize as their own. For example, Ruth Wodak’s The Politics of Fear associates “EU-scepticism” with a “chauvinist, nativist view of ‘the people’ and with an extreme right-wing orientation.”29 This coupling of extreme right-wing inclinations with Euroskepticism no doubt owes its origin to a genuine incomprehension of the phenomenon, but it also distorts a reality where the aspiration for democracy and solidarity has disillusioned millions of people with the European Union.

In the 21st century, the main distinguishing feature of movements labelled populist is their tendency to challenge the cultural values espoused by the political establishment. As the political theorist Margaret Canovan points out, unlike so-called social movements, populism does not merely challenge the holder of power but also “elite values.” Therefore, its hostility is also directed at “opinion formers and the media.”30 Often the challenge posed by populist movements to elite values is expressed through their reluctance to abandon customs and traditions that elites have discarded: sentiments described by the use of that confusing term “nostalgia.”

Many of the reactions and attitudes associated with populism constitute a common quest for gaining meaning through forging of pre-political solidarity can often express itself in affirming traditional family and community life, and in the solidarity that arises within faith communities. This attempt to re-appropriate the moral in this manner abrades directly against the grain of the cultural norms that prevail in the West.

Hungary and the Problem of Political Language

In reviewing the controversy surrounding populism, I found reliance on conventional political vocabulary more of a hindrance than a help.

In the setting of Hungary, political debate is often described as a clash between the right-wing populist government of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and his “Leftist” and “Liberal” opponents. Whatever these labels mean now in the Hungarian context has little in common with the classical usage of these terms.

The political outlook of Fidesz is best described as a synthesis of conservative nationalism and Christian-Democracy. Insofar as it seeks to address the people of Hungary, its politics contains an important plebeian dimension. However, it does not share the hostility and suspicion that classical populism directs toward elites. Fidesz criticizes neoliberal and EU elites, not native Hungarian ones. As one of Fidesz’s academic critics concedes, “even in its most populist phase the party refrained from condemning the entire elite and elements of elitist conservatism have never completely disappeared from the party’s discourse.”31 Within the Hungarian vernacular Fidesz is best described as a polgári party. In Hungarian the word polgári encompasses civil, citizen, and bourgeois; it is the middle-class bourgeois-citizen that constitutes the imagined audience of Fidesz.

One possible reason that foreign critics often fail to characterize the politics of the Hungarian government accurately is that they rarely encounter traditional conservatives in their own societies. Most parties associated with conservatism in Western Europe—British Tories or German Christian Democrats, for example—are estranged from the traditional values of their movement. In the 1970s they still self-consciously promoted traditional conservative values and frequently argued for going back to basics—meaning to uphold the traditional family, affirm religious morality and loyalty to nation. As a result of setbacks suffered in the Transatlantic culture wars, West European conservatives became hesitant to argue for traditional values.32 Periodic attempts to relaunch the conservative project have often concluded with the plea to get rid of the old ideological baggage and to “modernize.”

In contrast to Western conservatives, Hungary’s Fidesz party is unapologetically traditional. Its celebration of religion, the traditional family, and national patriotism echoes the narrative that West European conservative parties actively promoted as late as the 1970s. That is why—unlike Western conservative parties—they are unashamedly right of center.

The application of the terms Left and Liberal to capture the outlook of the Hungarian opposition is even more confusing. Liberalism has always been conspicuously weak in Eastern Europe. In Hungary, liberalism was confined to a relatively small coterie of Budapest-based publicists and activists. Both before and after the Soviet takeover of Hungary, parties of the Left and the Right tended to embrace state-directed social and economic policies. In the absence of a confident and economically secure middle class, the dominant forces of state socialism and conservative nationalism easily marginalized liberalism.

Ever since the transition from the Soviet client regime in Hungary to an independent sovereign nation during 1989-90, parties described as liberal or left wing have adopted policies and practices that in the British context could be described as a synthesis of Thatcherite and Blairite politics. Almost overnight, members of the previous governing Communist Party re-emerged as unapologetic free-marketeers. Socialist politicians and governments presided over economic shock therapy that led to the privatization of the economy, mass unemployment, and the dismantling of the old Hungarian welfare state. These can be reasonably described as leftists or liberals?

The defining feature of those who are described or self-identify as liberals in Hungary is their uncritical internalization of the technocratic and elitist worldview of mainstream EU politics. They often vent their anger and frustration with the Órbán government by sending petitions and open letters demanding help from EU leaders. Unable or unwilling to engage with their fellow citizens, they look to “international opinion” to put pressure on the government. Their weary sense of impotence often leads them to lash out at those whom they label “populists.” They find it easier to blame their opponents for manipulating the masses than to acknowledge their own failure to engage with the public.

A No-Fear Zone for Liberalism

What unites the different European movements labelled populist is their rejection of the transnational elite culture of our time. Despite the attempt to represent populist movements as a distinct political species, they have little in common other than their hostility to the ideals and the political practices of technocratic governance. Even the Brexit leave campaign was motivated by a variety of different ideals and political aspirations, only bound together by a shared rejection of the values of the EU oligarchy. If there is a common goal that unites a Brexit voter and a supporter of Podemos in Spain, it is an aspiration for organic community solidarity.

Throughout the Western world, many people feel alienated and estranged from their governments and institutions. They feel patronized by technocrats, and they have become skeptical toward putative truths communicated by professional politicians and experts. Many representatives of the cultural elite claim that the people no longer care about the truth, but the real truth is simpler: They don’t care about their version of the truth. So when the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy declared that people have “lost interest in whether politicians tell the truth,” he was really describing an electorate that no longer shares his values. The people whom Levy patronized feel that their habits, customs, and traditions are constantly being ridiculed by an oligarchy that acts as if it has a right to dictate how people should lead their lives and behave toward each other. Consequently, many people, uncertain about their capacity to conduct their everyday affairs in accordance with their own inclinations, are drawn to movements that promise to take them seriously.

Of course, the people speak with different voices, are motivated by diverse concerns, and are drawn toward a variety of heterogeneous solutions. Many of the reactions and attitudes associated with populism constitute what Hannah Arendt described as a search for pre-political authority.33 The common quest for gaining meaning through pre-political solidarity can express itself in many ways. That is why populist aspirations can lead people, in the quest for social solidarity, to embrace contradictory political standpoints—from a desire for more social justice and equality to anti-immigrant chauvinism.

In the long run, the relative authority of the competing cultural and political influences will determine the outcome of the anti-technocratic populist movement. In the short run, through its challenge to the values and the language of technocratic governance, populist sentiments can help to create the conditions for the re-politicization of public life, reviving a culture of political participation and democratic debate. Instead of perceiving this development as a problem, those of genuine liberal inclination should embrace it as an opportunity. They should be willing to create a no-fear zone to engage with those they label as populists.

The liberal ideals of freedom, tolerance, respect or the rule of law and democratic decision-making need to be expressed in language that resonates with the contemporary imagination. The liberal affirmation of the individual need not contradict the populist aspiration for solidarity. The cultural validation for individual rights and autonomy is a precondition for solidarity in a democratic society. This point needs to be emphasised in conversations between liberals and populists in search of their voice. Liberals need to encourage the crystallization of the current populist impulse into a political movement that infuses the aspiration for solidarity with the ideals of popular sovereignty, consent, and an uncompromising commitment to liberty. But to realize that objective, liberals must learn to empathize, articulate, and, when necessary, challenge the aspirations of the demos.

1Samuel Bowles “The End of Liberalism,” Boston Globe June 10, 2017.

2Toby Young, “Is this the beginning of the end of liberal democracy,” Spectator, November 21, 2015.

3James Traub, “Liberalism Isn’t Working,” Foreign Policy, July 7, 2016

4See, for example, “Brexit was a revolt against liberalism. We’ve entered a new political era,” Guardian, September 15, 2016.

5Cited in Michael Savage, “Borders are worst invention ever, declares Juncker,” The Times (London), August 23, 2016.

6Nick Cohen, “Tyranny’s new trick: in Hungary, a government wages war on liberalism,” Prospect, November 14, 2017.

7Traub, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” Foreign Policy, June 28, 2016.

8Traub, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses.”

9See, for example, Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016).

10This argument is further developed in Furedi, Populism and the European Culture Wars: The Conflict of Values Between Hungary and the EU (Routledge, 2017).

11Ahmari, “Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis,” Commentary, June, 16, 2016.

12Ahmari, “Illiberalism.”

13Cas Mudde, “The Problem with Populism,” Guardian, February 17, 2015,

14See Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Is There Illiberal Democracy?” Eurozine, August 9, 2017.

15See Thomas Raines, Matthew Goodwin, and David Cutts, “The Future of Europe: Comparing Public and Elite Attitudes,” Chatham House, June 20, 2017.

16Müller, “Beyond Militant Democracy,” New Left Review (January/February 2012).

17Müller, “Safeguarding Democracy Inside the EU Brussels and the Future of Liberal Order,” Transatlantic Academy Paper Series, February 20, 2013. Italics added.

18Cited in James Heartfield, The European Union and the End of Politics (Zero Books, 2012).

19Krastev, “The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus,” Journal of Democracy (October 2007).

20Habermas, “Europe’s Post-Democracy Era,” Guardian, November 10, 2011.

21Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs (November/December, 1997).

22Ahmari, “Illiberalism.”

23Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, (Harvard University Press, 1993), p.3.

24Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, p.4.

25For a discussion of these trends in higher education, see Furedi, What’s Happened to the University: A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilisation (Routledge, 2016).

26See Jennifer Delton, “When ‘Free Speech’ Becomes a Political Weapon,” Washington Post, August 22, 2017.

27Full text of Viktor Orbán’s speech at Băile Tuşnad (Tusnádfürdő) of July 26, 2014.

28Krastev, “The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus.”

29Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015), pp. 41–3, 54–5.

30Canovan, “Trust the people! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies (March 1999), pp. 2–16.

31Zsolt Enyedi, “Plebeians, Citoyens, and Aristocrats or Where Is the Bottom of Bottom-up? The Case of Hungary” in Hanspeter Kriesi and Takis Pappas, eds., European Populism in the Shadow of the Great Recession: Studies in European Political Science (ECPR Press 2015).

32I discuss the defeat of conservative values in the culture war in chapter six of Furedi, First World War: Still No End In Sight (Bloomsbury, 2014).

33Arendt, “What Is Authority?” in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Viking, 1961). “What Is Authority?” was written in 1954.

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Meanwhile in Jerusalem

The weekend before last marked the 30th anniversary of the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada. Thousands lost their lives in the fighting that ensued after four Palestinians were killed in a traffic collision with an Israeli truck in early December 1987. The death toll resulting from a second uprising in 2000 was even higher than the original.

The Hamas leadership is hankering for a rematch. After President Donald Trump conferred U.S. recognition upon Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s most senior political chief, called for a “day of rage” as a launch pad for an “intifada of freedom for Jerusalem and the West Bank.” A spokesman for the Gaza-based organization was even more dramatic. Trump’s decision “opens the gates of hell,” he declared.

But the response of the Palestinian public has been lukewarm. Jerusalem was decidedly calm on the morning following Trump’s pronouncement and it has largely stayed so. International opprobrium notwithstanding, clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian protestors have not escalated beyond the almost perfunctory. While casualties on either side should surely be mourned, there has been no widespread outbreak of hostilities toward Israel. There are good reasons for this.

Natural Causes: It’s winter in Jerusalem. Experience has shown that inclement weather tends to dampen Palestinian (and Israeli) appetites for conflict. The cold and rain have kept many would-be protestors at home, huddled around their warm radiators.

There’s also the fatigue factor. If fruitless peace negotiations have done little to improve the lot of Palestinians, countless rounds of violence have done even less. The security closures, checkpoints and searches with which Israel responds to Palestinian terrorism—stabbings, car rammings, missile attacks—act as a deterrent. No doubt many Palestinians have concluded that rioting actually sets back the cause of their independence.

All by Myself: The days of the Palestinians as the cause célèbre of Arabia appear to be ending. It’s not that the Saudis, Emiratis, and the rest of the Sunni world are indifferent to the plight of their Palestinian brothers and sisters. It’s that life is dynamic and the Palestinians have dropped a few notches on the hit parade.

With bigger ticket items like the Iranian nuclear threat and the fate of Syria hanging in the balance, erstwhile champions of the Palestinians have had to prioritize. And for many, limited bandwidth means that Palestine can wait. And if that isn’t demoralizing enough for the Palestinians, Israel, their nemesis, has even emerged as a key ally for the Arab nations seeking to beat back Shi‘a influence in the region. Taking on mighty Israel is a tall order for the Palestinians alone.

Much Ado About Nothing: All the enthusiasm in Israel aside, Trump’s words have little practical significance. Israelis are certainly pleased that their foremost ally has bestowed de jure acceptance of its de facto capital, but pretty much everything else remains the same as before. The chances of America’s new position on Jerusalem setting off an immediate, global avalanche of recognition are slim to none.

The U.S. Embassy will remain in Tel Aviv for the foreseeable future. The State Department’s point man on the Middle East has clarified that there has been “no change in [U.S.] policy with respect to consular practice or passport issuance,” and that the President’s decision “does not touch upon issues of boundaries, of sovereignty, or geographic borders.” And Trump himself reiterated his commitment to “support a two-state solution if agreed to by both sides.” Symbolism is obviously a big deal where Jerusalem is concerned, but smart Palestinian money isn’t getting worked up over mere rhetoric.

Where It Stops Nobody Knows: It’s comparatively easy to start an uprising, but much harder to ride the tiger’s back. Despite all the difficulties, the powers-that-be in the Palestinian Authority feel that they have a relatively good thing going. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas confessed back in 2009 that he was in no hurry to move forward. As he put it, “In the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life.”

A vicious cycle of Palestinian resistance and Israeli containment operations runs the risk of turning violent. It could spiral into the disintegration of vital security cooperation between the parties, cooperation which helps maintain a semblance of order within the P.A. and the continued control of its government. Abbas and his cohort are as unhappy with Trump’s move as the Palestinian rank-and-file, but will toil to keep the intifada genie in its bottle for the sake of preserving their rule.

Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop: Finally, the Palestinians have every cause to show restraint in the immediate term as events play out. An unpredictable administration in Washington might still pull more rabbits out of its hat—and these new ones could be friendlier to Palestinian aspirations.

Trump’s advisers are still at work on his “ultimate deal” for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. His UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley, said a little more than a week ago that the Jerusalem decision is even “going to move the ball forward for the peace process.” To the extent that this is true, the White House could yet try to level the playing field by making parallel gestures to the Palestinians, ones that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be hard-pressed to oppose. After praising Trump’s “courageous and just decision” on Jerusalem, Netanyahu can scarcely defy the man about whom he said “there is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.”

With the situation on the ground still fluid, anything can happen. The Palestinians could yet reevaluate their predicament, change tactics and resolve to overwhelm Jerusalem with demonstrations or even take up arms against Israelis. But for the time being, spectacles like Abbas’ diplomatic snub of Vice President Mike Pence are probably the theatrical fare we should expect to see more of. Jerusalem’s residents will be thankful to get on with their routines.

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An Eight-Year Jail Term Kicks Off Six More Years of Putin

Last week, Russia’s former Minister of Economic Development, Alexey Ulyukaev, was sentenced to eight years in a high security prison by the Moscow City Court. Unless he successfully appeals the verdict, which in Russia can only lead to a symbolic softening of the sentence but not to an acquittal, Minister Ulyukaev will be the highest ranked official ever sentenced in post-Soviet Russia. Apart from a prison term, the former minister will also have to pay a 130 million ruble fine, equivalent to the $2 million he was alleged to have taken as a bribe.

Alexey Ulyukaev’s conviction came a day after Vladimir Putin’s annual national press conference, and a week after Putin announced he would run for re-election. In theory, a high-profile national event like the press conference might be considered to be Putin’s campaign launch. But there were no real revelations at this year’s press conference; some opposition media outlets, fittingly enough, even refused to cover it. Ulyukaev’s conviction, by contrast, is a real national event, and a significant benchmark of what to expect from the next six years of Vladimir Putin’s governance.

I previously covered both the arrest of Ulyukaev and his trial. In short, the former Minister of Economic Development was arrested a year ago at Rosneft’s headquarters in Moscow, when a briefcase with $2 million was found in his car after a meeting with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. Ulyukaev refused to leave the car at first and tried to make phone calls, to no avail. He was immediately arrested by the FSB, charged with extortion and bribery, and subsequently placed under house arrest.

From the very beginning, law enforcement’s statements about the matter were riddled with inconsistencies. Back in 2015, Igor Sechin submitted a report to his long-time protégé at the FSB, General Oleg Feoktistov (who would later leave the FSB to head Rosneft’s security service two months before Ulyukayev’s arrest, only to leave the company and be fired by Putin from military service the next year). In that report, Sechin claimed that Ulyukaev had extorted money from him to approve the deal “privatizing” the oil company Bashneft by selling it to Rosneft. Initially, Sechin claimed that the extortion had happened in Moscow, but by the time the final accusation was presented to the court, the location had shifted to Goa, India, where the two officials had traveled on a government trip.

Sechin’s initial report to the FSB also stated that his fateful meeting with Ulyukaev had been arranged by Andrey Kostin, the CEO of VTB Bank. By the time of the trial, however, Kostin’s name had mysteriously disappeared from the indictment materials.

After he had submitted the report, Sechin and Feoktistov claim to have started a year-long operation against the minister, culminating in the sting with the briefcase this past November.

The biggest surprise at the trial was the appearance of tapes capturing a conversation between Sechin and Ulyukayev. The tapes contain not a word, not even a hint of a bribe. They do record, however, how Sechin gave the minister a basket of his homemade sausages. When asked about this by the FSB, Ulyukaev insisted that the basket contained nothing but wine and sausages, a statement he later confirmed in his court testimony. The prosecution, meanwhile, argued that 21 kilograms (46 pounds) was a little too heavy for a few bottles of wine and some sausages, implying that a bribe had taken place. Ulyukaev objected that Sechin squeezed the bag into his hands in a hurry, and it can indeed be heard on the tapes that Sechin rushed to hand off the basket to Ulyukayev, ensuring that he took the bag and left quickly.

Sechin was irritated by the leak and called it “cretinism.” Whoever leaked the tapes likely did so as a stand against the Rosneft CEO, and probably as an attempt to help Ulyukaev.

An even bigger surprise came when the court subpoenaed Igor Sechin to testify. Because there was not a single word about bribery on the tapes, and because Ulyukaev called the entire operation a set-up, the trial threatened to turn into a personal face-off, pitting Sechin’s word against Ulyukaev’s.

Alas, Sechin did not bother to show up. The court issued four subpoenas but all four were turned down by Rosneft, which implausibly claimed it could not reach Sechin. After the fourth subpoena attempt failed, the court proceeded without his testimony.

Apart from the fundamental absence of direct evidence implicating Ulyukayev, there was substantial circumstantial evidence suggesting his innocence. First of all, on the day Ulyukaev allegedly extorted money from Sechin in Goa, the Bashneft deal had already been closed. To make his charges sound more convincing, Sechin then claimed in the report to the FSB that Ulyukaev threatened to obstruct another Rosneft deal: namely, the privatization of 19.5 percent of the company.

But it is a simple fact that in Russia’s elite hierarchy, a small fish like the Minister of Economic Development would never be a player in a high-stakes deal like Rosneft’s privatization, as Ulyukaev himself argued at the trial. The deal in question, as I wrote at the time, saw a 19.5 percent share in Rosneft go to a consortium comprised of the Qatar Investment Authority and Glencore, with the financing coming from the state-owned VTB Bank. The consortium turned out to be a permanent buyer. Now, 14.6 percent of that share will be sold out to CEFC China Energy, a privately run Chinese conglomerate. That would allow the consortium to pay back the loan to VTB that, as Reuters reports, will finance the deal again, providing 60 to 70 percent of the funds to the Chinese.

When the deal was announced  Financial Times credulously called the Rosneft privatization a “triumph” for Putin. I called it a state-sponsored scam, a thinly disguised wealth transfer with Putin and Sechin the likely beneficiaries. The Russian government has not received any money from its “privatization” and the share is circling the world until it likely finds its home in a shell company in Panama or the British Virgin Islands. The whole case provides a thrilling insight into how billions of dollars are being stolen from the Russian budget in plain sight.

In any case, the moral of the story is that Vladimir Putin was the decider on Rosneft’s privatization. Ulyukaev would have been insane to threaten to obstruct the deal. Sechin would have been senseless to believe the threat. And while we have not seen any particular evidence of the Rosneft CEO’s intelligence, Alexey Ulyukaev has certainly not been found insane.

Finally, the money used for the bribery sting was not fronted by law enforcement, as happens in the rest of the world. Rather, as General Feoktistov testified at the trial, there was a private sponsor for the money: one Valery Mikhailov, an employee at a company affiliated with Rosneft. The name does not ring any bells among Russia’s ruling elite, and sounds somewhat like John Smith in English.

Notwithstanding all the obvious holes in Sechin’s version of events, the judge decided to convict Alexey Ulukaev and sentence him to eight years in prison. The former minister was taken into custody immediately. He will now wait in jail in Moscow until his appeal is heard.

Why would Igor Sechin go to such lengths to set up Ulyukayev in the first place? The only reasonable explanation lies in his longstanding feud with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev has lately been attacked from many sides, and the scandal of a corrupted minister counts as another good hit on Medvedev’s government.

Although many rational commentators in Russia realized that Ulyukaev could not have been acquitted because it would lead to a trial against Sechin for a criminal set-up, they nevertheless predicted the former minister would be found guilty and get time served. The calculation was that Putin would not let Sechin down, but also would not let him rise to power above the entire justice system.

It turned out, however, that not only was the operation against a federal minister privately sponsored and executed by Igor Sechin and his FSB helper, but the entire trial went according to Sechin’s scenario. Sechin decided not to go to court to testify, and he didn’t. And the court proceeded without him.

During his national press conference, Putin was asked by an Echo of Moscow journalist about Sechin’s no-show at the trial and selective justice in Russia. Russia’s President responded that “although Sechin could have gone to court,” there was no violation of the law in not doing so.

This was, in fact, the only real policy statement made by Vladimir Putin at the press conference, the one that will shape the development of the country for the next six years. It was, in many ways, an admission that the status quo no longer exists in Russia—that the Kremlin has lost its monopoly on law enforcement and the administration of justice. And the likely implications for Putin’s next term are dire.

The siloviki, having become the major power in Russia, will remain so and tighten their grip, replacing virtually all political institutions in Russia. The intra-elite fighting will intensify due to shrinking resources, thanks to sanctions against the Kremlin and the country’s steadily declining economy. The political survivors will be those in Putin’s inner circle, or those who share direct business interests with him, like Igor Sechin. The regime’s survival will depend on increasing repression; money will flee from Russia in vast quantities; the country will continue to destroy itself as it fails to finance infrastructure, health care, and education; and the number of people below the poverty line—already at 22 million people, or 15 percent of the population—will increase significantly. Metaphorically speaking, the country will become something of a high security prison itself.

In the past 15 years, Russia has gone from imprisoning a private individual, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and expropriating his assets—a case in which Sechin played a significant role and was a major beneficiary—to sentencing a federal minister, an operative of the system, in a process entirely staged by Sechin. When the book finally closes on Putin’s long reign of power, these two events will surely be seen as major milestones in Russia’s degradation under his rule.

Vladimir Putin’s policies have already led to Russia’s weakening from within, leaving the country standing on rotten wooden pillars. Another six years of Putin in power will only exacerbate the situation. It is likely just a matter of time before Russia’s shaky pillars collapse, taking the country down in the process. The West had better be prepared for that moment.

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The Grand Bargain to Give the West Back Its Mojo

It is fair to say that the attempts to confront authoritarian populism head on have been met with mixed success. Ostracizing, applying the ‘fascism’ label, looking for Kremlin connections, and invoking liberal democratic values do not seem to be doing the trick. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that the existing social model is seen by large groups of voters as rigged and incapable of delivering on its promise of shared prosperity. Here’s a modest proposal: let’s change that and make sure the system works. I suspect that much of the appeal of loud-mouthed demagogues will then go away.

Of course, “it’s not the economy, stupid” is a common refrain among political scientists who are studying the drivers of support for populist movements. Especially on the political Right, the fault lines are not over economic policy, but rather over immigration, culture—questions of what it means to be American or French, or how many asylum seekers we should let into our countries, if any.

Yet the answers to such questions are arguably different when voters see the economy as a zero-sum game or as a game that has been manipulated to benefit a few at the expense of everybody else. Alas, a zero-sum view of the world might not be a bad approximation of what we have seen in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Even in countries that superficially appear to be success stories, such as Denmark and Austria, real incomes have not yet returned to their pre-crisis levels.

In the United States, where the recovery has been more vigorous (though the post-2009 growth rate was roughly half of the 1947-2007 average), labor participation of men has seen a dramatic decline. Among men between 20 and 64 years of age, the labor participation rate is lower than during the Great Depression, with 78.4 percent in 2015 compared to 88.2 percent in 1930 and 81.3 percent in 1940. The toll, as Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed, is not just economic but goes hand in hand with alcohol and opioid abuse, and deaths of despair.

On top of a lackluster economic performance, consider the optics, justified or not, of the bailouts extended to ailing banks in the United States or to insolvent governments in the Eurozone. Privatizing profits and socializing losses would rub badly against the grain of democratic capitalism in normal times. That it lead to popular outrage at a time of economic hardship was inevitable.

The good news is that the West can do better and we know how. The recipe for Western prosperity boils down to upward mobility, ‘market-tested innovation’, and creative destruction through which new ideas are translated into commercially viable products and services. What is more, similar to the Depression era, we now seem to be living at the dawn of a new era with an entire cluster of new technologies—from artificial intelligence, through genetic engineering, to renewables—waiting to be successfully commercialized.

Oftentimes, the hurdles are regulatory, as we’ve seen recently with the EU’s ban on genetically modified organisms, or the FAA’s ban on supersonic flight over the United States. In many cases, such regulation has been put up by special interests in order to benefit from economic rents. Brink Lindsey’s and Steve Teles’ new book, The Captured Economy, provides a helpful overview of the key issues, from financial regulation that contributes to an outsized financial sector, to overly generous copyright patent and copyright protection, occupational licensing, and zoning restrictions that prevent economically thriving communities from expanding. All of those not only dampen growth but also contribute to inequality, making the economic game effectively rigged.

That is not to say that all regulation caters to special interest, nor that no regulation is necessary. But regulatory capture is a real problem, as is the progressive inkling to use government regulation to fix all social ills. Besides rent seeking (illustrated by the bootleggers and Baptists parable) the over-reliance on regulation leads to a proliferation of rules that either do not pass the cost-benefit test or that jointly add to an opaque, complex system of regulatory ‘kludges’ that is extremely difficult to navigate.

A regulatory shake-up thus seems to be a necessary condition of the West’s regaining of economic health. Again, the point is not to restore an imaginary libertarian Nirvana through a bonfire of regulations but to make sure that bringing new ideas to market is easy, that reallocation of resources to new uses—including most importantly of labor and human capital—is as frictionless as possible and that economic systems are not synonymous with the ability to take advantage of complex government rules.

But is such an agenda politically feasible? Not in isolation. After all, a ruthless review of existing and new government rules on both sides of the Atlantic would threaten the special interests that are benefiting from the status quo. There is, furthermore, a downside to having more creative destruction in our societies—namely the destructive part. No matter how flexible we make our economies, there are real costs associated with losing jobs, changing professions, or moving to different cities and states. The fact that many communities are woefully unprepared for economic change, particularly coming from automation, has been adding to the grievances behind the current populist wave.

Hence the other side of the grand ‘liberaltarian’ bargain: a strong and generous social safety net, which will not let anyone slip through the cracks. Universal basic income (UBI) is technically, though not necessarily politically, the simplest way of achieving that end, providing every adult, irrespective of their characteristics, with an inflation-adjusted income. At the present time, governments in Finland and Ontario are conducting small-scale experiments involving UBI, although they are targeting the unemployed and people in need, instead of extending the income to a random sample of the entire population.

Would UBI be expensive? Of course, though not necessarily more so than the existing hodgepodge of social assistance and welfare programs it would replace. Furthermore, one should not think about its fiscal cost in isolation. The burden of spending, taxes, and debt has to be compared to overall income. A political bargain that increases government welfare spending—while also boosting the growth rate of the economy—might very well be worth it.

One reason why some thinkers on the center Right, including my colleague Charles Murray, advocate the idea has to do with UBI’s ability to reduce the individual cost of economic failure. The only way out of our economically stagnant present is for more young Americans and Europeans to take on risks, instead of playing it safe. But taking risks is difficult for people bearing large debt burdens and staring down rising living costs. It is symptomatic, for example, that start-ups in Silicon Valley are largely a domain of the relatively well-off who are able to cope with the area’s housing prices and can absorb the financial cost of failure.

UBI would not mitigate the problem completely but would reduce its magnitude by providing a basic cushion to everyone. The welfare reform enacted by Emmanuel Macron in France, extending unemployment benefits to entrepreneurs and self-employed people who have suffered a loss of income, is a modest step in that same direction, following the same basic reasoning.

But even if UBI does not deliver fully on its promise of incentivizing risk-taking and entrepreneurship—for many people, goofing off is and always will be far more attractive—its main benefit lies in building support for the pro-growth regulatory agenda, which would otherwise encounter a lot of resistance not only from the rent-seekers living off the current regulatory ‘swamp’ but also from ordinary people worried about being left behind by the modern economy.

The modern history of the West should be seen as a source of optimism. At its heart is the ability of our political systems to reinvent themselves through grand bargains, similar to the one proposed here, preserving the engines of economic prosperity and extending its benefits to ever broader swaths of the population. The extension of suffrage in the second half of the 19th century can be viewed through that prism, as can the creation of America’s welfare state in the New Deal years.

Instead of recoiling at the idea of a redistributive state, a grand bargain that preserves democratic capitalism while providing its benefits to everybody can provide a new agenda for the center Right and an alternative both to cozying up to intolerant nationalism and to ineffectual attempts to confront it directly. The success of this agenda will require leadership, both intellectual and political, which seems absent now, in Europe as in the United States. Let us hope we can find it before it is too late.

The post The Grand Bargain to Give the West Back Its Mojo appeared first on The American Interest.

This Sputnik Moment

It takes a pretty big shock to the system to transform the way the United States engages the world. A spate of German submarine attacks on American merchant ships was the final trigger for American entry into World War I. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into World War II. The attacks on September 11 led the United States to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq.

More relevant to the current moment was the Soviet launch on October 4, 1957, of Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. The Soviet Union’s leap ahead in the space race—followed in November by the successful launch of Sputnik 2 and then a month later by the fiery failure of America’s first attempt to launch a satellite into orbit— stunned the American public. In response, the United States undertook one of the most concerted efforts in its history to expand its scientific, technical, and educational capacities. Legislative milestones soon followed, including the creation of NASA to establish American leadership in space and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to ensure American superiority in military technology. These enormous investments catalyzed striking innovations in the civilian economy as well, including the revolution in information technology. In 1958, the United States passed the National Defense Education Act, which poured federal money into supporting foreign language training, area studies centers, graduate fellowships, and advanced training in science, math, and engineering.

Today, if a major American university is looking for government support to promote study of the foreign language—Chinese—that will be most crucial to the future shape of global competition, it may well come instead from the Chinese government, in the form of the Confucius Institutes that provide funding, teachers, and curricula to study Chinese language and culture. The goal of these institutes, explains the website of Hanban (their coordinating headquarters within the Chinese Ministry of Education), is to help develop “multiculturalism” and build “a harmonious world.” But for the Chinese Communist Party, “harmony” means never being questioned by society. China’s vast global network of some 500 Confucius Institutes (most of them on university campuses) may be the most benign dimension of an increasingly visible and troubling Chinese government effort to penetrate and influence democratic cultures and societies.

The experience of New Zealand and Australia suggests that what begins with the cultural and social progresses to the political. In November, an Australian commercial publisher postponed its commitment to publish a book by a highly respected professor, Clive Hamilton, detailing China’s efforts to shape and censor public expression in Australia. The clumsy cave-in to China’s sensitivities, reflecting rising Chinese pressure on Australian publishers and media companies, outraged the Australian public and appeared to confirm the book’s title: Silent Invasion: How China is Turning Australia Into a Puppet State.

More recently, as reported in the Telegraph this week, “An Australian MP was forced to quit over revelations he adopted pro-China positions after accepting donations from a wealthy Chinese property developer with links to China’s Communist Party.” As accounts have piled up of Chinese government-linked donations to Australia’s two major parties, Australia’s government has proposed legislation that would ban foreign donations to political parties and groups that lobby the government and institute a public register for foreign lobbyists. The political scandal—coming amid years of accelerating Chinese influence activities—may represent a “Sputnik moment” for Australia.

But the situation in neighboring New Zealand is more urgent still. A recent analysis by that country’s most influential China watcher, University of Canterbury Professor Anne-Marie Brady, finds that “China’s covert, corrupting, and coercive political influence activities in New Zealand are now at a critical level.” China is eager to pull vulnerable New Zealand away from its military and intelligence alliance with Western democracies, and to get access to its unexplored oil and gas resources and its cheap and plentiful arable land (goals that China is also aggressively pursuing in Africa and Latin America). Over many patient years of work, Brady warns, China has been using “business opportunities and investments, honors, political hospitality, scholarships, party-to-party links and vanity projects” to compromise and win over New Zealand’s “business, political, and intellectual elite.” Reinforcing this campaign have been political donations from ethnic Chinese business figures “with strong links to the CCP”; “massive efforts” to extend CCP control over the media, community groups, and politicians of New Zealand’s ethnic Chinese; and the penetration, through “mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships,” of New Zealand’s businesses, universities, and research centers in order to capture critical technology and corporate secrets and to deepen influence ever more organically. The result has been direct and mounting threats not only to New Zealand’s national security, but to its freedom as well. These include: “curtailing [the] freedom of speech, religion, and association for the ethnic Chinese community, … silencing debates on China in the wider public sphere, and a corrupting influence on the political system.”

This is not the latest chapter in the long parade of global powers using “soft power” to win friends and extend influence. Soft power, Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig write in a new report for the National Endowment for Democracy, consists of open efforts to attract and persuade. The proliferating global influence activities of China and Russia diverge from traditional means of public diplomacy. Instead, they use wealth, stealth and coercion to coopt influential policy voices and players, control information flows, censor unfavorable reporting and analysis, and ultimately mold societal attitudes and government postures.

The methods vary. Each regime has relied heavily on the promotion of its state-controlled media abroad, such as Xinhua News Agency, CGTV, and RT (formerly Russia Today). Russia has been perfecting a new form of geopolitical warfare, using social media to intensify political polarization, inflame social divisions, sow doubt and cynicism about democracy, and promote pro-Russian politicians and parties. Through investments, partnership agreements, donations, exchanges, positions on boards of directors, and other “friendly” relations, China has fostered wider and deeper penetration into the vital tissues of democracies—media, publishing houses, entertainment industries, technology companies, universities, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations. These intrusions are rapidly expanding not only in the West but in Latin America, post-communist Europe, and Africa as well. In different but perhaps equally devastating ways, China and Russia are using the openness and pluralism of democracies to subvert and bend them to their strategic objectives—principally, the weakening of Western democratic alliances and the relentless expansion of their own economic and geopolitical power.

What these two resurgent authoritarian states are projecting, argue Walker and Ludwig, is power that is not “soft” but rather “sharp,” like the tip of a dagger: It enables them “to cut, razor-like, into the fabric of a society, stoking and amplifying existing divisions” (in the case of Russia) or to seek, especially in the case of China, “to monopolize ideas, suppress alternative narratives, and exploit partner institutions.”

There is also an alarming technological dimension to China’s sharp power: a relentless, multidimensional, and highly orchestrated campaign to capture, transfer, and innovate the technologies of the future, including artificial intelligence, supercomputing, drone vehicles, robotics, gene editing, and other advanced medical technology. Within a decade, China could well overtake the United States in the development of these critical technologies, which will increasingly drive the next generation of global economic growth and China’s continued rise to superpower status. China is now spending a much greater proportion of its GDP on research and development than is the United States, and because of these investments, it is starting to attract many of the world’s leading scientists, not only ethnic Chinese. If the challenge is not addressed, China will some day—possibly sooner than we want to think—neutralize or surpass the military superiority of the United States.

The United States may now finally be reaching a new Sputnik moment in realizing the dangers posed by authoritarian sharp power projection, not to mention the growing hard power projection of Russia (in Georgia, Ukraine, and the whole rim of NATO) and China (throughout East Asia and especially in the South China Sea). Members of Congress from both parties, spanning wide ideological divides, are concerned about Chinese sharp power activities that threaten both freedom of expression and American technological leadership.

Last month a bipartisan group of House and Senate members introduced legislation to broaden the authority of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews potential foreign investments in the United States for possible risks to national security. With China in mind, the lawmakers proposed giving the Committee broader authority to scrutinize joint ventures and minority shareholder investments, and to expand its jurisdiction over a wider array of critical technologies. Broadening the scope of CFIUS is vitally important to protecting U.S. national security. Congress should go further by empowering CFIUS to examine authoritarian country investments in our cultural capital, such as media, movie studios and publishing firms. Democracies should not allow dictatorships to control (even indirectly) these enterprises—which are part of our “critical infrastructure” of freedom. The burden of proof for supposedly “private” Chinese investors should be to demonstrate with a very high degree of confidence that they are not subject to control or manipulation by their own government.

Another step would be for administrative action or legislation to introduce a broad principle of reciprocity into the question of Chinese and Russian media access in the United States. It isn’t obvious why the Chinese and Russian governments should be able to sell their newspapers and transmit their television broadcasts freely in the United States when American media companies have no such rights inside China and Russia. When we weigh this gross asymmetry in access, which is the greater cost to freedom of information: the current denial to the Russian and Chinese publics of access to American news media, or the greater difficulty American consumers would face in needing to go to the Internet, rather than cable television or the street corner, to access Chinese and Russian media?

Most of all, we have a lot of work to do to research and document precisely what China’s Communist party-state is doing to insinuate itself into the deep tissues of our democracy. This requires not only professional academic research but also prudent government monitoring and investigation that remains respectful of basic American freedoms of information and association. American citizens, think tanks, and universities should have a right to forge partnerships and exchanges with Chinese and other foreign actors, but the constituencies they serve and engage also have a right to hold them accountable. Accountability requires disclosure of foreign donations and grants, thus giving observers a chance to assess what impact that funding may have on subsequent statements and publications. If sunlight is not the best disinfectant, as Justice Louis Brandeis suggested, it is surely a good and necessary one.

There are other things the U.S. government must do. True recognition that we are in a Sputnik moment would entail a dramatic increase in U.S. government investments in science and technology, including basic and applied research and development. Federal spending (including military spending) on R&D has declined sharply since the 2008 financial crisis. For our long-term security and economic health, we cannot afford to continue that trend. And if we don’t want the Chinese government funding Chinese language instruction and writing the curricula, how about a new National Defense and Education Act that makes the investments we need in Chinese language and area studies, from grammar school through graduate school?

The challenge before us now is urgent: to expose and safeguard against authoritarian sharp power, before it severely compromises our national security and even our freedom. Despite all of the polarization and division in our politics, this should be a challenge that can rally a broad bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill and between Congress and the Trump Administration. Part of the challenge involves confronting what can justifiably be termed unfair trade practices by China and Russia, something that should appeal to trade skeptics.

The bottom-line stakes are existential: Will the United States—and liberal democracies collectively—retain global leadership economically, technologically, morally, and politically, or are we entering a world in which we conspire in our own eclipse?

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Caught in the Web

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

Franklin Foer

 Penguin Press, 2017, 257 pp., $27

Franklin Foer’s title is something of a misnomer: His book isn’t about a world without mind so much as a United States with the wrong kinds of minds allegedly on the verge of devastating it. Withal, World Without Mind lays out a passionate, harrowing case that Americans are in danger of losing their democracy, their free will, their humanity to near-omnipotent technology companies, in particular, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet (the renamed Google; I’ll use “Google” in this review, because Foer, for the most part, uses it in his book). “The ascendant monopolies of today [the aforementioned tech companies] aspire to encompass all of existence….More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it.” An important, disquieting subject; how just is the author’s jeremiad?

Foer reaches way back in an attempt to trace how we arrived at where we are today, back to Descartes (a quester for pure mind), Gottfried Leibniz (“a prophet of the digital age” who originated the algorithm), and, in the 20th century, Alan Turing (in 1935 he “conceived of something he called the Logical Computing Machine. His vision, recorded on paper, became the blueprint for the digital revolution….Turing believed that the computer wasn’t just a machine, it was also a child, a being capable of learning”). Nearer to our own day, Foer, seemingly counterintuitively, cites Stewart Brand–he wrote the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture bible—as another technology oracle: “His gift was to channel the spiritual longings of his generation, and then to explain how they could be fulfilled by technology….Brand would come to inspire a revolution in computing. Engineers across Silicon Valley revered Brand for explaining the profound potential of their work….Where politics failed to transform humanity, computers just might.” But alas, “What began as a stirring dream—humanity tied together into a single transcendent network—has become the basis for monopoly. In the hands of Facebook and Google, Brand’s vision is a pretext for domination.”

Foer names other tech-titan precursors—Ray Kurzweil, for instance: For some important scientists and engineers working on artificial intelligence (AI), “it’s a theological pursuit. . . .the high priest of this religion is…Ray Kurzweil.” But space constraints compel me to get down to cases. One of Foer’s bêtes noires is Google (where since 2012 Kurzweil, I gather, has been the director of engineering). He asserts that “the company wants to create machines that replicate the human brain, and then advance beyond. This is the essence of its attempts to build an unabridged database of global knowledge and its efforts to train algorithms to become adept at finding patterns….” “AI,” he adds, is precisely the source of the company’s greatness.” What does Google ultimately desire? According to Foer, when Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and the current CEO of Alphabet, condemns competition and praises cooperation he is, effectively, making “a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.” If I understand Foer correctly, he is positing an imminent civilization in which Google controls our minds by dictating what our minds think about. If this is indeed Google’s goal then its one-time motto, “Don’t be evil,” is, in the breadth of its hypocrisy, evil.

Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder, chairman, and CEO of Facebook, is, like Larry Page, an idealist in a hurry; his credo is “Move Fast and Break Things.” But what does he want to break, and why? According to Foer, the answer to the first question is us; as for the second question, “Nobody,” he writes, “better articulates the modern faith in engineering’s power than Zuckerberg….The world will improve, if only Zuckerberg’s reason can prevail….” Of course the word improve can have different connotations for different people and unsurprisingly that is the case with Zuckerberg and Foer. Zuckerberg’s mighty algorithm, which determines what users see in their “news feed,” accounts for its extraordinary commercial success and serves as the proof of Zuckerberg’s worldview. But, Foer says, that redoubtable algorithm has its ominous aspects. It is, in effect, a people manipulator: Facebook’s “rules [are] devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation….While it creates the impression that it offers choice, Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly addicts them.” He sums up: “The company believes that it has unlocked social psychology and acquired a deeper understanding of its users than they possess themselves….” Zuckerberg presumably believes that Facebook’s data will allow the company to comprehend human motives and actions more thoroughly than they have ever been apprehended before. What this ultimately means, according to Foer, is, “Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will…” Foer also indicts Facebook for having disseminated “a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy….It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both.”

Once upon a time—well, in 1994—a young engineer named Jeff Bezos, “had arrived at a core truth: The world stood on the cusp of a knowledge boom….Indeed, this is what the Internet (and Bezos) has brought to pass….Bezos even had a vision, however underdeveloped, that this revolution would birth a new style of firm: the knowledge monopoly.” And so it came about: Amazon. Bezos, its founder, is now its chairman and CEO. He poses as an enemy of those old elitist fuddy-duddies, the rickety media enterprises that he believes were—are—hindrances to garnering every kind of knowledge: “Bezos sees his company as a platform—the world’s greatest bazaar, where anybody can sell their [sic] wares and anybody can buy them. No gatekeepers lurk in his domain, waiting to capriciously trample dreams.” Balderdash, Foer implies: A consumer—er, individual—confronting “the world’s digital trove of knowledge” is in an unnavigable labyrinth without the guidance techniques offered by Amazon (and “the other knowledge monopolists”). Also, those techniques remember: They know what you like, they befriend you, and they can gently steer and even influence your future desires. (It might be relevant at this point to mention that Amazon recently opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore on Manhattan’s West Side. A saleswoman told me that the books offered for sale are stocked on the basis of the company’s surveys of the literary tastes of the surrounding community. Perhaps Amazon’s version of realpolitik is why the store seems embarrassingly paltry.) Bezos’s ambition to dominate the knowledge industry seems, to Foer, to be inseparable from his contempt for those he would subdue.

[Amazon] deflated the prices of the books that it sells and made implicit arguments about their value….Bezos falsely implied that the cost of producing a book resided in printing and shipping, not in intellectual capital, creativity, and years of effort….What counts is addicting readers to [Amazon’s] devices and site, so that Amazon becomes a central fixture in their lives, an epicenter of leisure and consumption—exactly the same aspiration that Google and Facebook harbor.

Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 for approximately $250 million, pocket change for this multibillionaire. Foer acknowledges that there have been improvements—or at least a maintaining of standards—at the newspaper, but overall, he doesn’t seem sanguine about the relationship.

Foer summarizes his book’s thesis this way: “. . .the knowledge monopolists have unique power in our democracy. They don’t just have the ability to pick the fate of a book, they can influence the fate of the Republic. By sorting information, they shape our opinions of issues and politicians.”

Is there any hope for our bedeviled nation? Foer proffers some ideas for wresting our frail democracy from the techno-tyrants, but since the book is steeped in melancholy, I have the sense that even he is ultimately not too optimistic that it can be done. One suggestion is “a Data Protection Authority to protect privacy as the government protects the environment…. The point isn’t to prevent the collection or exploitation of data. What are needed, however, are constraints, about what can be collected and what can be exploited. Citizens should have the right to purge data that sits [sic] on servers.” Unfortunately, since a D.P.A. (as Foer implies) would have to be a government agency to carry out its agenda, it would most likely contravene  the First Amendment and be quashed by the courts. And even if it wasn’t, I suspect, skeptic that I am, that any bureaucracy that possesses the potential to impose censorship in all sorts of deplorable ways will eventually do so. Another of Foer’s proposals involves advertising. He believes that the giant tech companies are destroying—or have destroyed—the older (but still, he argues, vitally important) media institutions by seizing their advertising revenue. “Advertising has become an unwinnable battle [for long-established media]. Facebook and Google will always beat media….Money shifted because the tech monopolists simply do a much better job of steadily holding the attention of audiences.” His solution:

While media chase a fake audience, they consciously neglect their devoted readers. Subscribers to print editions are considered vestiges of a bygone era….That assumption requires reversing. The time has arrived to liberate media from their reliance on advertising. Media need to scale back their ambitions, to return to their niches, to reclaim the loyalty of core audiences—a move that will yield superior editorial and sustainable businesses….To rescue themselves, media will need to charge readers, and readers will need to pay.

One can only wish—but cynic that I am, I ponder the present and future of the august New York Times and wonder. (I have been a Times reader for decades, since I was a teenager, and cherish its news-gathering excellence.) For the past few years the paper has dedicated a reporter—the “Carpetbagger”—to follow filmdom’s long ditzy trail to the Academy Awards presentations. To be blunt, it’s an imprudent waste of manpower on a trite, inane subject. And while on the subject of the newspaper of record, it recently purged its copy editors, a ruthless assault on fact-checking and lucid writing. Foer insists that the Times “remains the most excellent paper in the world.” Maybe; but the Times still seems intent on chipping away at its news space, at least in its print version. I am currently peeved.

Foer, a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the former editor of the New Republic, is a good writer, and very intelligent and insightful. Because of those traits one must take World Without Mind seriously—and I do. But I can’t quite bring myself to assent to his bleak vision of our contemporary and possibly grave new world. Foer only briefly—very briefly—mentions the internet’s prevailing fake news crisis as well as the sinister Russian subversion of the 2016 presidential campaign (the two are intertwined, of course). But one could, I think, make a good case that fake news forays—and related phenomena like the sundry kinds of cybercrime—are aspects of the digital realm that are more pernicious than the still speculative (for the most part) iniquities that Foer dedicates his book to denouncing. (I suggest reading Charles Seife’s 2014 Virtual Unreality, which meticulously lays out the odious ways that the internet lies, cheats, and steals.) Also, Foer references Tim Wu’s The Master Switch (2010; it’s also worth reading), which proposes that thriving information technology companies invariably follow a life pattern that Wu (who has blurbed World Without Mind) calls “The Cycle”: Those companies start as someone’s brainstorm and metamorphose into behemoths. Foer draws on The Cycle to contend that Google, et al., “have reached the hardened end of Wu’s cycle. We need to entertain the possibility that the monopolies of our day may be even more firmly entrenched than the giants in whose path they stride.” What Foer fails to mention about Wu’s cycle is that in its final stage the “giants” become unimaginative, incapable of responding to changing times and opportunities—bureaucratically sclerotic. This should offer Foer some comfort, because if Wu’s argument is valid and if Google, et al., are indeed at their “hardened ends,” they will soon enough be vulnerable to new upstart technologies­, created to best and better Bezos and his counterparts.

There is a subtext in World Without Mind, an unexpected one that is surprisingly moving. I mentioned the book’s melancholia, which is only partly attributable to the dystopia the author foresees. It is also rooted in his experiences during his second stint—2012–14—as the editor of the New Republic. He tried, really—I believe him—to cooperate with his last publisher, an erstwhile Facebook VIP who had hit it really big and brought his Silicon Valley ethos to the respected journal, his new toy. And so Foer went along with the publisher’s tactics to draw eyeballs (which would attract ads and money) to the magazine’s website. Eventually—inevitably?—the publisher told Foer, “We’re a technology company,” and within a year Foer resigned right before he was to be fired; most of the editorial staff resigned with him. One feels how painful Foer’s recounting of this is for him. As he says, his “vision of the world [was] moralistic and romantic [I would add pragmatic to the list]”—not technocratic (though he’s not a technophobe). One of the things he is a romantic about is those reputedly archaic media businesses, large and small, businesses that he believes, for all their faults (his cognizance of these is his pragmatism working), are integral to a healthy, viable democracy. I too, who have gadded about on the fringes of that passé media world, think its loss would be a disaster for this country. I can’t prove it but I’m certain that I’m right.

Morality, pragmatism and, yes, romanticism are among the assets of a good editor. One of the things that World Without Mind did convince me of is that our society would benefit if Franklin Foer obtains another editor’s position.

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Terrorism on the Eastern Front

As the fight against ISIS on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria wanes, the threat of home-grown ISIS-inspired terror shows no sign of abating. With terrorist attacks a regular occurrence in the heart of Europe, EU member states have struggled to build a common resolve to confront the threat. In Kosovo, there are increasing signs that the problem may be growing on Europe’s own doorstep, as a combustible mix of poor governance, economic stagnation, and lingering identity crises have created a unique vulnerability to recruitment by violent extremists.

After decades of interethnic tension and failure to achieve its national aspirations within the now-defunct Yugoslavia, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008. In the nine years since then, increasing frustration with Kosovo’s lack of democratic progress and the perceived inability of nascent government institutions to deliver on the promise of independence has led to a “crisis of confidence” among Kosovars. Kosovo ranked 95th out of 176 countries in  Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, which noted that the public does not think that the government is not doing enough to fight endemic corruption.

This dissatisfaction came to a head in the recent parliamentary elections, in which the anti-establishment “Self-Determination” (Vetevendosje) Party emerged with the largest number of seats—just shy of winning an outright majority. It was then shunned in the post-election period by all other party coalitions, leading to a protracted period of political uncertainty. A government excluding Vetevendosje was finally formed after much wrangling months after the election. The tensions at the highest levels of governance reflect endemic frustration throughout the country—and a further political crisis cannot be ruled out.

Adding to Kosovo’s instability is the dire situation of its youth. With 53 percent of its population under 25, Kosovo is the youngest country in Europe. Yet thanks to the combination of economic and political problems, unemployment among 15 to 24 year olds has reached a whopping 57 percent. The challenges of democratization—including the establishment of strong transparent democratic institutions, a competent bureaucracy, and a trusted, representative legislative body—have marginalized young people disproportionately, due to the fact that the current governing elite is largely devoid of young leaders. This situation has led some young Kosovars to turn to nondemocratic means for expressing their frustration.

Violent extremist organizations have capitalized on this dynamic, as seen in the relatively high levels of recruitment and radicalization by organizations like ISIS. According to new research the International Republican Institute (IRI), while Kosovars think that democracy as a system is best-placed to tackle violent extremism, their faith is Kosovar democracy is wanting.

The explosive combination of disaffected young people and ineffectual institutions is made worse in all ways by the country’s identity problems. Although the majority of Kosovars are Muslim, their Albanian ethnic and linguistic identity has always been stronger than their religious identity. This sense of national cohesion served the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo well in their struggle against Serbian oppression throughout the 20th century.

However, radical extremists are increasingly exploiting the Muslim identity of Albanians to rally them to the defense of their coreligionists in foreign battlefields.  Among the segments of the population susceptible to radicalism, Muslim identity appears to be superseding Albanian identity: The findings of an IRI focus group indicate that many of the Kosovars who left the country to become foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq were motivated by a desire to defend Islam against the Assad regime.

The resonance of this call to arms for the global Islamic community speaks strongly to the dual nature of Kosovar identity. As both ethnic Albanians and (primarily) Muslims, Kosovars can draw upon grievances which spring from both experiences. The exploitation of this dynamic by violent extremist organizations presents perhaps the biggest challenge to security in the region.

The shifting character of Islam in Kosovo’s new democracy contrasts sharply with the historic practice of a moderate form of Islam suffused with Sufi mysticism. Religious observance suffered under socialist (and officially atheist) Yugoslavia, and although mosque attendance has rebounded, the official Islamic Community of Kosovo (BIK) is weak and beset by accusations of corruption, leaving a gap in religious guidance and instruction.  Since the BIK lacks any cohesive organizational or ideological framework, it has left many young Kosovars who have not received formal religious instruction confused about how to interpret their religion, and unaware of the strong tradition of moderate Islam practiced in the Western Balkans.

Kosovars fear that both home-grown and foreign violent extremist organizations are exploiting this religious illiteracy to convince their recruits that violence is justified by Islam. According to our research, Kosovars believe that a lack of moderate religious leaders has facilitated Kosovo’s susceptibility to imported extremism, brought in by foreign and foreign-educated imams and international “charities.”

It’s clear that government institutions at the national and local levels must better coordinate their efforts to engage young Kosovars, give them a stake in the political system, and prevent radicalization through better local detection mechanisms. One way forward could be through the National Strategy for Countering Violent Extremism, which would establish municipal security councils to act as early warning systems and customize the national strategy to suit unique local contexts. However, these councils have yet to be activated, and the central government is currently not receiving the vital information from localities it needs to counter and inhibit radicalization throughout the country.

In addition to these more targeted solutions, the large-scale problems driving young people to violent extremism must also be addressed. Endemic corruption at all levels must be tackled, and Kosovo must prevent the spread of violent extremism through cleaner and more responsive governance to bolster its struggling democracy. It’s also vital for Kosovo to be included in the regional networks in the Western Balkans, which are bringing together government officials, members of parliament, experts, and journalists to develop common solutions to a transnational problem. Such steps are not only crucial to ensuring the country’s path toward Euro-Atlantic integration, they are key to ensuring that Kosovo does not become a haven for Islamist extremists determined to undermine both Kosovar and European democracy.

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For Family Values and Gun Control

Well, my daddy left home when I was three

And he didn’t leave much to my mom and me

Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze

… I grew up quick and I grew up mean

And my fists got hard and my wits got keen

… He said, “Son, the world is rough

And if a man’s gonna make it he’s gotta be tough”

—Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue,” 1969

I’ve spent most of this year traveling around the country convening discussions between conservatives and liberals about American politics today. The goal is for red and blue Americans to talk with, rather than simply at or about, each other. There have been many fascinating moments, but for me one of the most fascinating occurred several weeks ago in Hendersonville, North Carolina, when the liberal side asked the conservative side this question: “What policies do you favor to reduce gun violence in society?”

The conservative side offered two main answers. The first was that, since the root cause of violence is the breakdown of basic social institutions, the most important of these being the family, the best way to reduce gun violence in the long run is to implement policies to reinvigorate those institutions, starting with marriage and the family.

The second answer was that, due to the continuing and by now dangerous levels of family and social breakdown, along with a terrifying rise in the number of mass shootings, it may be necessary for conservatives to rethink some of their strong anti-gun control positions. One conservative woman said, in essence: “Things in society have deteriorated so much that we [conservatives] may have to accept some gun policies we’d rather avoid.”

To abbreviate, let’s call the first of these proposed solutions “family values” and the second “gun control.” The task of the liberal side in that moment was to ask a sincere question and listen respectfully to the answers, without engaging in debate or rebuttal—so, I don’t know what the liberals that night in Hendersonville thought of those two ideas. Nor could I, as a neutral moderator, say at the time what I thought about them. But now it seems permissible for me to say that I like both of them quite a bit, especially when considered together.

I like the family values answer, with its emphasis on strengthening what some scholars call mediating institutions, or civil society, because of what I understand to be the likely causal links between gun violence and social trust. It seems that, in general, low trust and high gun violence are societal trends that hang together, with each both a cause and a result of the other.

A study of gun violence in a high-crime area of New Haven, Connecticut, finds that nearly everyone surveyed had heard gun shots at some point; that half had a family member hurt or killed by a violent act; and that more than two-thirds believed that they “could not trust their neighbors.” A national study from 1998 finds that both low social trust, as measured by agreeing that “most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance,” and greater social isolation, as measured by non-participation in voluntary groups, are associated with a greater likelihood of being involved in firearm violent crime. A 2001 study similarly finds that “states with heavily armed civilians are also states with low levels of social capital,” including low levels of trust (for example, agreeing that “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people”) and low levels of civic engagement.

Another study from 2001 finds that Americans who say they don’t trust the Federal government are significantly more likely to own guns than Americans who say they do.

And then there’s the recent presidential election. Several studies of last year’s Republican primaries have found that, as Michael Barone put it, “Trump’s support [came] disproportionately from those with low social connectedness,” while other analyses have shown that gun ownership may be the single most powerful predictor of support for Donald Trump.

And what does this story of the untrusting, socially isolated, and armed-and-ready American have to do with family breakdown? A lot, it would seem.

Trends in trust correlate at least partially with trends in family structure. As family structure deteriorates, so does trust—in one’s parents, and also in others. For example, as the family scholar Sara McLanahan puts it, the “first and most important” consequence of current family structure trends in the United States is the “weakening connection between the child and the father.” And as Judith Wallenstein and others have shown, a core aspect of this “weakening connection” is the child’s loss of trust in the father, which also appears to contribute to a loss of trust more generally, including in the possibility of loving and being loved.

For us humans, trusting others begins as a precious, fragile thing, first evidenced in me trusting my mother (who at first seems essentially a part of me), and then extending to my trust of a few intimate others, the first and most important of whom is my father. If this early, primary trust is weakened or betrayed, much is lost and much for me is likely to be at risk in the future, including my capacity to trust others.

Is it merely coincidental that, among the rich countries, the United States is an outlier regarding both the extent of our family disintegration and the frequency with which we resort to gun violence?  Perhaps; but I don’t think so.

America is a violent place. Always has been. Violence plays a seminal role in our national story. To establish the nation, the founders took up the gun to wage a revolutionary war—our founding Declaration is, among other things, a call to arms. Whatever else one can say about both the killing off and subjugation of Native Americans and the uses of chattel slavery to help found the country, it’s clear that both were deeply violent projects.

The constantly westward-moving American frontier, which for most of our history decisively influenced how Americans saw themselves, was a shockingly violent place, so often all but defined by young unmarried men with guns. The great sociologist Elijah Anderson, who studies African-American communities that today are dominated by guns and gangs, told me that the culture from American history most similar to the inner-city culture he studies is … the 19th century American frontier. These are deeply American templates.

Mark Twain in his masterwork more than a century ago helped the country understand itself by giving us Huckleberry Finn, the fatherless boy, who is eager most of all to “light out for the territory,” because “Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” A century later, Charles Portis in True Grit did the same thing by giving us Mattie Ross, the determined Christian girl who heads for the territory carrying her father’s gun, intent on killing or capturing for hanging the man who had shot and killed him.

Probably our most enduring and historically popular literary archetypes are the cowboy and the detective—both of whom stand consciously apart from civilization and its gentling ways, and both of whom carry and regularly use guns. Their modern-day successors, our movie and video-game action heroes, are typically cut from similar cloth – disconnected from society, self-sufficient, and on intimate terms with violence. These are deeply American templates.

I like the “family values” solution to gun violence because it points us toward first things, toward root causes. It focuses on institutions that “sivilize” us. It reminds us of the long-standing connections, going back to Durkheim and the beginnings of modern sociology, between the weakening of pro-social norms (Durkheim’s “anomie”) and socially deviant acts such as suicide and violent crime.

This proposed solution points out that the family is the seedbed of our social values. It further tells us that we need to become better throughout society at cooperating with one another – better at mutual trust, which makes possible what the social scientist Robert J. Sampson calls “collective efficacy.”  It tells us that the American archetype of the isolated person facing adversity with a code and a gun is not all that we can admire or aspire to, nor what we most need to become.

I also like the “gun control” solution of which the Hendersonville conservatives spoke. I grew up hunting with my father. I learned to shoot when I was ten years old. I enjoy it today. I would no more want to take guns away from legitimate hunters and shooting enthusiasts than fly to the moon, and if today I lived in a rural or semi-rural area where the nearest police car might be twenty minutes to an hour from my home, or even in an area where I might occasionally encounter a snake or similar varmint on my porch or in my yard, I’d almost certainly keep a gun in the house. Our Constitution does and should protect the individual’s right to own guns, while I also note with interest that the “Militia” of which the Second Amendment speaks should be “well regulated.”

Saying “well regulated” is another way of saying that no right is absolute. Every right carries with it a corresponding responsibility, just as every right carries with it a defined set of restrictions, in part because any right conceived as absolute, or carried by its proponents to an extreme, will endanger other rights. A stand-alone or unregulated right is a contradiction in terms.

I don’t know for certain whether tighter regulation of certain forms of gun ownership will reduce gun violence. I’m not very familiar with the research literature, and those who are tell me that the evidence is mixed. But I suspect and hope that some well-considered new restrictions would reduce the number of guns in ways that could have a small but measurable effect on the prevalence of gun violence in our society.

It also strikes me that we’ve gone so far in the direction of permissiveness that some rebalancing is in order. For example, while I may be missing something, I can’t see why even the most red-blooded, freedom-loving American civilians need the right to use automatic, military-style weapons, or the right to carry a concealed gun into a bar, or the right to visit my state with a weapon and/or a way of carrying it that isn’t permitted in my state. So, count me as supportive of the Hendersonville conservatives who said that some rethinking of this issue on the Right may be in order—particularly since, as they also noted, renewing our civil society is a tall order which government may be poorly equipped or even unable to do, whereas more regulation of guns is a shorter-term task that government can certainly achieve.

Does the current state our culture wars mean that, with respect to gun violence, liberals must be reflexively hostile to “family values” solutions and conservatives must be reflexively hostile to “gun control” solutions? I hope not. I’m even optimistic:  Based on the grass-roots conversations I’ve heard this year, in Hendersonville and elsewhere, I believe we can and will do better.

Our task is to make gentler a violent society. One plausible strategy is better regulation of guns.  Another is better regulation of ourselves, which in a free society starts with the trust-building institutions of civil society. Why not seek both?

Edmund Burke famously called them “little platoons”: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.)  Some scholars today favor the term “civil society,” which we can define as the web of relationships and associations that mediates between the person and the state—including families, civic and religious groups, economic organizations, and many others. Ernest Gellner describes civil society as “a total society within which the non-political institutions are not dominated by the political ones, and do not stifle individuals either.” (Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (New York: Allen Lane, 1994), 193.) Others have used terms such as “voluntary associations,” “intermediate associations,” and “social sector.”

A rich literature exists on this topic.  For introductions, see Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1977); A Call to Civil Society (New York: Institute for American Values, 1998); Don E. Eberly (ed.), The Essential Civil Society Reader (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2000); Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities (New York: Institute for American Values, 2003); and Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Michael W. Foley (eds.), The Civil Society Reader (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2003).

Carley Riley, et. al., “Community Resilience Teams: Leveraging Social Cohesion to Address Gun Violence in New Haven Neighborhoods,” Conference Paper (November 2014).

Bruce P. Kennedy, Ichiro Kawachi, Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Kimberly Lochner, and Vanita Gupta, “Social capital, income inequality, and firearm violent crime,” Social Science & Medicine 47, no. 1 (July 1998).  See also Richard Rosenfeld, Eric Baumer, and Steven F. Messner, “Social Trust, Firearm Prevalence, and Homicide,” Annals of Epidemiology 17, no. 2 (February 2007).

David Hemenway, Bruce P. Kennedy, Ichiro Kawachi, and Robert D. Putnam, “Firearm Prevalence and Social Capital,” Annals of Epidemiology 11, no. 7 (October 2001).

Robert M. Jiobu and Timothy J. Curry, “Lack of Confidence in the Federal Government and the Ownership of Firearms,” Social Science Quarterly (March 2001).

Michael Barone, “Does Social Connectedness Explain Trump’s Appeal?” National Review, March 29, 2016. See also W. Bradford Wilcox and Jon McEwan, “Marriage, Single Parenthood, and the 2016 Vote,” Institute for Family Studies, December 7, 2016.

Daniel Cox and Robert P. Jones, “Two-Thirds of Trump Supporters Say Nation Needs a Leader Willing to Break the Rules,” Public Religion Research Institute, April 6, 2016.  Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy, “Nothing Divides Voters Like Owning a Gun,” New York Times, October 5, 2017.

Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent (Harvard University Press, 1994), 3.

Judith Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (Hyperion, 2000). Judith S. Musick, Young, Poor, and Pregnant: The Psychology of Teenage Motherhood (Yale University Press, 1993. Susan E. Jacquet and Catherine A. Surra, “Parental Divorce and Premarital Couples: Commitment and Other Relationship Characteristics,” Journal of Marriage and Family 63 (2001). Valarie King, “Parental Divorce and Interpersonal Trust in Adult Offspring,” Journal of Marriage and Family 64, no 3 (August 2002). Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds (Crown Publishers, 2005). Tara K. Viitanen, “The divorce revolution and generalized trust: Evidence from the United States, 1973-2010,” International Review of Law and Economics 38 (June 2014).

Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 127, 151-153.

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