Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 119

The Corruption of Recep Tayyip Erdogan

While Americans were transfixed by General Flynn’s courtroom drama in Washington late last week, Turkish audiences were focusing on a courtroom drama of their own in New York. As Reuters reports:

A Turkish-Iranian gold trader on Thursday told jurors in a New York federal court that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan authorized a transaction in a scheme to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions.

Reza Zarrab is cooperating with U.S. prosecutors in the criminal trial of a Turkish bank executive accused of helping to launder money for Iran. At the time of the alleged conspiracy, Erdogan was Turkey’s prime minister.

Zarrab said he had learned from Zafer Caglayan, who was Turkey’s economy minister, that Erdogan and then-treasury minister Ali Babacan had authorized two Turkish banks, Ziraat Bank and VakifBank, to move funds for Iran. [….]

Over two days of testimony, Zarrab has told jurors that he helped Iran use funds deposited at Halkbank to buy gold, which was smuggled to Dubai and sold for cash. On Thursday, he said that he had to stop the gold trades and start moving money through fake food purchases instead in 2013, after U.S. sanctions changed. [….]

Zarrab has testified that in the course of his scheme, he bribed [Halkbank general manager Suleyman] Aslan and former Turkish economy minister Zafer Caglayan.

The scale of the money laundering and the bribery is enormous. Zarrab, who is cooperating as part of a plea deal, claims to have paid approximately $70 million in bribes to the Turkish economy minister. The bribes greased the wheels on a multi-billion dollar scheme to launder Iranian oil revenue into international markets in contravention of U.S. sanctions.

Unsurprisingly, the Turkish government has thrown a fit. They claim that seemingly everyone involved in the trial is a Gulenist—followers of Fethullah Gulen whom they accuse of plotting last year’s coup attempt. New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer and Preet Bharara, the former federal prosecutor who originally indicted Zarrab? Gulenist. The judge in the trial? Gulenist. The wiretaps that incriminated Zarrab? Gulenist. The Department of Justice and the current prosecution team? Gulenist. The entire American justice system? Gulenist. In Turkey today, rejecting your boyfriend’s marriage proposal can get you accused of being a Gulenist, but apparently the Turkish government has taken that same domestic witch hunt into the realm of foreign policy.

The Gulenist silliness aside, the trial has two major implications for U.S.-Turkish relations. The first is that it’s further evidence of Turkey’s move towards a more independent, more anti-American, more pro-Iranian foreign policy. Turkey’s help to Iran in evading sanctions—of which Zarrab and Halkbank were likely only a part—is one aspect of that but so are Erodgan’s claims that Turkey wasn’t bound by U.S. sanctions in the first place. At an AKP meeting on Thursday Erdogan claimed that:

“We have trade and energy ties with Iran. We did not breach the sanctions [on Iran]. Whatever the verdict is, we did the right thing. We have never made commitments to the U.S. [on our energy ties with Iran].”

He added: “We have not broken an embargo…The world does not consist of the U.S. alone.”

The breakup between Turkey and the United States is of course part of a long term trend. Aside from my own writing on the topic, Henri Barkey, Claire Berlinski, and other writers for The American Interest have catalogued Turkey’s divorce from the West, both in terms of its international relations and the growing illiberalism of its internal politics.

The ideological, political, and religious reasons for the political devolution of Turkey under Erdogan that we and others have cited remains critical to understanding what’s happening in Turkey. But the Zarrab trial suggests aside from whatever Erodgan’s neo-Ottomanist or Islamist ambitions might be, he’s also sitting on a veritable mountain of cash bribes.

Zarrab’s accusations include a $70 million dollar bribe to a former minister on a multi-billion dollar illegal fund. Last week, the opposition CHP published documents alleging that Erdogan’s associates received $15 million from the sale of an off-shore shell corporation.  Some of this has of course been known or suspected for years. The Zarrab trial itself stems in large part from a Turkish investigation into the same scheme in 2013 that was quashed when it threatened to implicate Erdogan’s sons. We now know about quite a lot of illegal money, but there’s every reason to believe that there’s an awful lot of money that we just don’t know about.

The collapse of anything resembling an independent Turkish judiciary in the wake of last year’s coup attempt and this year’s constitutional referendum means that we’re unlikely to get to the bottom of these allegations or discover the extent of Erdogan’s corruption any time soon. But on a range of issues from Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 missile system, their cooperation with Iran against Iraqi Kurdistan, or EU cuts to Turkey’s accession fund, the Zarrab trial makes clear that we should be just as focused on Erdogan’s pockets as his politics.

The post The Corruption of Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared first on The American Interest.

The Cold War and the Welfare State

During the Cold War, the choice facing ruling elites in Western countries was between perpetuating the interwar laissez faire system that had created working class misery, and which in turn threatened to create an opening for Communists, and building welfare states. Even for conservatives, that was an easy choice. Building North Atlantic welfare states in the postwar period was an explicitly counter-Communist political project shared by Christian and Social Democrats alike. Its explicit political goal was to marginalize the influences of the far Left.

In postwar Europe, Communist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere routinely polled as high as 30 percent of the vote, and parties of the Left were everywhere polling at all-time historic highs. While the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency worked assiduously to undermine such political organizations, there was also wide recognition even on the Right that the material grievances that underpinned the appeal of socialism had to be addressed though public housing, mass education, universal health care, and welfare programs. There was also a grudging acceptance that these programs would have to be funded via progressive income taxes. These postwar years saw top marginal tax rates ranging from 65 percent in countries like France to over 90 percent in Great Britain and the United States. Far from being a sign of creeping socialism, the high marginal tax rates were designed precisely to fend off political demands for more profound redistributions of control over the means of production.1

While the results varied from country to country, the overall impact was an unprecedented postwar economic boom and broad-based increases in prosperity. Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, pent-up demand plus technological innovation and adoption ensured high growth rates and productivity increases across the West, even as burgeoning welfare states ensured that the benefits of the growth and productivity were broadly distributed to the population as a whole. Never before in the history of any of these countries had so many been raised up from poverty so quickly.

It is no apology on behalf of Communism—which in practice immiserated and murdered millions—to observe that the presence of a live alternative form of political economy held Western economic elites’ feet to the fire, making them willing to accommodate demands (and sometimes actively push) for greater economic and social egalitarianism. In the United States, as Thomas Borstellman and Mary Dudziak have argued, perhaps the biggest effect that the Cold War had on domestic life was in pushing the United States to finally grant de jure civil rights to African-Americans. Undoubtedly, it also affected President Lyndon Johnson’s push to deliver on so-called Great Society programs, which aimed to provide a cradle-to-grave welfare system of the sort that socialists and communists were promising. If systems as inefficient and repressive as those could guarantee such benefits for their citizens, Johnson reasoned, then surely a country as rich and dynamic as the United States ought to be able to do so as well.

Although some U.S. conservatives never fully accepted the principle of redistribution, the Cold War context—that is, the threat posed by the alternative of Communism—meant that from the 1930s through the 1970s, even Republican Presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon basically accepted the Keynesian, mixed-economy framework and the support of welfare programs. President Nixon even went so far as to promote a Guaranteed Minimum Income—a program very similar to a Universal Basic Income (UBI), the darling idea of today’s Left. Legislation to introduce such a form of income guarantee was passed in the House of Representatives in 1971 only to die in the Senate, before being eventually abandoned by Nixon himself as the economy soured.

As the Communist alternative retreated, however, the choice in favor of building domestic welfare states in the West became less clear for many on the Right. This retreat did not take place all at once, but rather unfolded progressively in the face of the grim realities of the Communist system. Although the global Left’s political disenchantment with the Soviet Union had begun earlier, widespread disillusionment with the economic appeals of socialism began in earnest only in the 1970s, as the Soviet system’s economic stagnation and the immiseration of Mao’s China became increasingly stark. Even if conservatives and liberals never bought into the false economic promises of Communism, the brute fact of the existence of a socialist alternative meant than some effort had to be made to match the siren song of egalitarianism. As the bloom came off the rose of the centralized planning models, it became safer for conservatives to push further to the Right.

In addition to the decay of the ideological appeal of socialism, further slowing the redistributional drive in the United States was the decline in real economic growth during the 1970s. By the end of that decade, the country was mired in what had come to be called “stagflation”—the combination of low growth and high inflation that appeared impossible under orthodox Keynesian theory. Rather than redistribution, figuring out a way to reignite economic growth was the political order of the day.

This was the context for Ronald Reagan’s dramatic arrival in Washington in 1981. Reagan had campaigned explicitly on a plank of rolling back the welfare state, using the racially coded trope of the “welfare queen” to reprise the hoaried distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, and ridiculing the idea that the government could be an effective agent of positive change. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” Reagan famously liked to joke, “are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Such attitudes toward government provided ideological cover for cutting top marginal tax rates in the United States from 70 percent in 1981 to under 30 percent by the end of that decade. At the same time, however, Reagan was notably less successful in actually dismantling welfare institutions.

By the time growth returned in the late 1980s and 1990s, the slow retreat of the socialist alternative had turned into a rout, as Communist regimes collapsed across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself dissolved. Despite the return of domestic economic growth and rapidly increasing levels of inequality in the United States, the lack of a credible alternative form of political economy meant that the right-wing pushback against redistribution only intensified in the 1990s. Whereas Reagan in the 1980s had admitted that Social Security reform was the “third rail of American politics,” by the 1990s the GOP was making the roll back of Social Security an only semi-secret part of its long term plans. Likewise, with the collapse of the socialist alternative, the idea of flat income tax went from being a fringe idea to the central pillar of Republican Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign in 1996.

In the end, however, U.S. conservatives over the past generation have turned out to be much better at cutting taxes for the rich than at dismantling the U.S. welfare state for the poor. From the early 1980s down to the present day, taxes have been successfully cut on several occasions—usually just as soon as a new GOP administration takes office—but welfare programs have not been cut back much. The one major exception was Democratic President Bill Clinton’s dismantling of Aid for Families with Dependent Children—“the End of Welfare as We Know It,” in his notorious phrase—which reduced the number of people receiving cash assistance from the government from more than 13 million in 1995 to just 3 million today. But otherwise most welfare programs have been preserved and, in the case of health care, significantly extended, for example through the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which provided subsidies for the costs of prescription drugs and prescription drug insurance premiums for Medicare beneficiaries, and through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) of 2010.

The Tax Bill

This historical preamble brings us to the present tax bill, which as of this writing has just been passed by the Senate, and is now in the process of reconciliation with the House version of the bill.

On its face, the tax bill is not really an ideological document. In fact, it is almost entirely made up of special interest giveaways, as even its proponents have admitted. As Chris Collins (R-New York) memorably put it, “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again’.” The donor class has given to the GOP for a generation, and if the GOP couldn’t deliver the goodies now, when in control of both branches of Congress as well as the Oval Office, the prospects were dire. After the failure to enact any other significant legislation this year despite controlling both branches of Congress and the presidency, passing this tax bill became a political imperative of the highest order. The GOP Congress simply had to bring home the bacon.

And yet, what a breathtaking piece of pork-barrel tax expenditure this is. This is the most regressively redistributional tax bill in the modern history of the country. It transfers over a trillion dollars in revenues from regular people who work at regular jobs to a combination of around 5,500 people with estates, as well as to the largest and most profitable global corporations in human history. As Paul Krugman explained, in his usual blunt style, “The core of the bill is a huge redistribution of income from lower- and middle-income families to corporations and business owners. Corporate tax rates go down sharply, while ordinary families are nickel-and-dimed by a series of tax changes, no one of which is that big a deal in itself, but which add up to significant tax increases on almost two-thirds of middle-class taxpayers.” This law passed on a straight party-line vote, despite a public approval of well short of 40 percent. The people who voted for this law clearly had little fear of a left-wing class revolt.

The little details are particularly telling. This is a bill that only a plutocratic insurgent could love. Consider the tax deductions for private jet maintenance bills, for example, or Amendment 1715, which John Cornyn (R-Texas) inserted especially for his friends at Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR and Apollo, which states that income at Publicly Traded Partnerships (but not other sorts of financial services firms) gets a 23 percent pass-through deduction.

Likewise, there are the culture war-informed decisions about which tax loopholes to target for closure. The one that has gotten the most press includes ending the deduction for state and local taxes, effectively penalizing taxpayers in deep-blue states like New York, New Jersey, and California. Perhaps more wanton, however, was the decision to tax graduate student tuition waivers as income, in effect raising taxes on grad students (who typically earn $30,000 or less) by 400-600 percent. Since there can surely be no economic rationale for wishing to make it harder for our country to produce scientific experts, the only possible rationale for this is as an attack on an institution that is seen by the Right (not incorrectly) as largely hostile to their politics.

In the face of such substantive nightmares, it is perhaps pettifogging to point out that the procedure that led to the passage of the bill was also a farce. Even while boasting that this would be the most monumental piece of tax legislation in a generation, the GOP forced a vote on these plans without a score from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office—though to be fair, what was the point in waiting for such a score, given that whatever the so-called experts at CBO might have said was never going to be persuasive to a party now dedicated to a rejection of expertise as such? The same political party that had howled with fury when the Affordable Care Act was “rushed through” the second-longest consecutive session in Senate history passed a bill without any floor debate, giving Senators literally minutes to read a bill that still had handwritten amendments scribbled on it. At least no one will accuse the hobgoblins in the minds of the GOP leadership of imposing any foolish consistencies.

The Bill Always Comes

Some commentators point out that this shows that the usual Republican “deficit hawkishness” when faced with Democratic spending proposals was nothing other than self-serving nonsense (as if hypocrisy were a charge with any sting in today’s Washington). But this is a mistake. Rather, the ideological consistency will reappear in what comes next: in the claim that, now that we’ve given away all these revenues, we have to cut entitlements and other programs for poor people.

Literally before the scribbles in the margins of the tax bill were dry, the GOP was already declaring that the huge deficit to come would require gashing cuts to the welfare state. “You also have to bring spending under control. And not discretionary spending. That isn’t the driver of our debt. The driver of our debt is the structure of Social Security and Medicare for future beneficiaries,” said Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) even before the vote on the tax bill was final.

“We’re spending ourselves into bankruptcy,” declared Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) the same day. “Let’s just be honest about it: We’re in trouble. This country is in deep debt. You don’t help the poor by not solving the problems of debt, and you don’t help the poor by continually pushing more and more liberal programs through.”

For example, Congress has been stalling on extending the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) since October. On November 30, even as the Senate was debating the tax bill which would strip $1.5 trillion in revenues from the Federal government, Hatch announced that “the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore.” It’s worth noting that Hatch was one of the original sponsors of the CHIP legislation, but he now raises the specter of the underserving poor in demanding that funding be cut for the program: “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves—won’t lift a finger—and expect the Federal government to do everything.”

Indeed, the tax bill seems expressly designed to add to the debt in a manner that will then trigger automatic cuts to Medicare and other entitlement programs. From this perspective, the fact that the tax bill is going to create a huge new set of deficits, far from being a bug, may actually be a feature for the Republicans, as it will provide them with the lever they need to cut the entitlement programs they’ve had in their gun sights for a generation. Indeed, it could well be that this tax bill will finally provide the break of the fiscal camel’s back that will enable the rollback of the welfare state that the GOP has dreamed about since the 1980s.

Then again, it could also spell the return of a more radical politics of redistribution from the Left. What is almost certain is that unless a radical threat from the Left reappears, the push for the final dismantling of Cold War-era welfare systems will continue to be the primary agenda of a revanchist Right that is feeling its political oats.

1Such Cold War redistributionist projects were not limited to the Global North. Throughout the early postwar period, the United States encouraged or in some cases directly presided over numerous land reforms. In Asia such reforms took place in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand. Though less thorough-going, Latin America also saw Cold War-motivated land reforms in countries such as Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. These reforms were stirred by a desire to disempower old elites and improve agricultural productivity, but above all, as with the building of postwar European welfare states, the goal was political deradicalization.

The post The Cold War and the Welfare State appeared first on The American Interest.

Europe’s Wheel of Fortune Turns

Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

George Friedman

Anchor Books, 2016, 264 pp., $21
Slippery Slope: Europe’s Troubled Future

Giles Merritt

Oxford University Press, 2016, 320 pp., $29.95
Europe Since 1989: A History

Philipp Ther, trans. Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller

Princeton University Press, 2016, 440 pp., $35
Medieval Europe

Chris Wickham

Yale University Press, 2016, 352 pp., $35

Events in Europe over the past dozen years have been enough to give anyone world-historical whiplash. In 2004, the European Union brought ten new states into the fold, and its cheerleaders predicted that it would continue to expand, ushering in a geopolitical renaissance. Charles Kupchan, Mark Leonard, and others prophesied that the future would belong to Europe. During the “New European Century,” Leonard wrote, the Continent would dominate international affairs not by “run[ning] the world as an empire, but because the European way of doing things will have become the world’s.” Meanwhile, the veteran British diplomat Robert Cooper celebrated the Continent’s “postmodern system of security.” States did not even think of invading each other, but opened themselves to trade and the movement of people instead. The sooner borders became irrelevant, the better. For a region that had torn itself apart in war after war, this was as close to paradise as it got.

The Continent’s good fortune has since unraveled—as have the sunny predictions about its future.1 In 2008, the financial crisis plunged Europe into a morass of debt and unemployment, and Russia’s invasion of Georgia raised the possibility that war might return to the heart of the Continent. Since then, the bad news has accumulated so rapidly that it’s been difficult to keep up: the euro teeters; a hard Brexit looms; joblessness in Greece, Italy, and Spain threatens to alienate if not altogether ruin a generation of young people; populism is surging in Western Europe’s most stable democracies; the unceasing flow of refugees has provoked a backlash against the European Union’s cherished freedom of movement; the governments of Poland and Hungary are tearing down liberal democratic institutions; and Islamist terrorist attacks continue to kill civilians. The Europeans (to say nothing of the United States) have also failed to end Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukraine, and they struggle to counter the Kremlin’s information warfare campaigns. The sick man of Europe now seems to be Europe itself.

In the span of three FIFA World Cups, Europe has gone from being a case study in political enlightenment to an object lesson in political fecklessness. The natural impulse is to ask why things went so wrong. But a reversal this dramatic also forces us to consider how we form our geopolitical judgments in the first place. It raises painful questions about Europe’s identity, its capacity for progress, and our interpretation of its history.

If the Continent’s ostensible achievements can disintegrate so quickly, perhaps they were more fragile than most supposed. Were the successes of the past 25 years—or the past 70—the exception to some rule, or were they the rule itself? If the latter, Europe’s current travails will eventually pass, the EU project of building an ever-closer union will resume, and confidence in Kant’s project of perpetual peace will revive. If the former, Europe’s future may resemble its past more than anyone cares to admit. In different ways, the four books reviewed here suggest that finding a way out of the present crisis requires taking the Continent’s history seriously.

Despite years of grim headlines, Giles Merritt, who used to report from Brussels for the Financial Times, insists that Europeans still fail to grasp just how dire their situation is. They regard themselves as wealthy, technologically sophisticated, and influential. They believe that they stand on the cutting edge of civilization, and always will. In reality, however, Europe’s per capita income is only two-thirds that of the United States and will fall further behind as time goes on. In the race to develop new technologies, American and Asian companies are running circles around their European competitors. Spending cuts have hollowed out the military capacity of even the strongest countries, which can barely mount overseas operations without American support. The Continent is on the fast track to economic torpor, social degradation, and geopolitical irrelevance.

But all is not lost. Europeans can save themselves from this fate, and Merritt wants to show them how. By contrast with the populist firebrands who present the European Union as the source of the Continent’s problems, Merritt sees the European Union as the solution. Europe’s “salvation lies in economic and political integration,” he argues, but instead of a “master plan” he calls for piecemeal initiatives: invest in infrastructure; expand social programs; spend more on scientific research; work harder to coordinate members’ foreign policies; empower the European Union to tax citizens directly; make EU institutions more transparent.

No matter what leaders in Brussels, Paris, or Berlin do, however, Europe’s influence in the world will continue to wane. Asia’s ascent means that Europe cannot recapture its old position at the center of the international system. Greatness has slipped beyond its grasp. At best, Merritt concludes, if Europe gets its act together, it can remain an important player and preserve its high standard of living.

This muted optimism assumes that voters will support a more robust European Union and bolder action by national governments, but the experience of the past decade casts doubt on this premise. As the Eurozone crisis reached its peak, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker summed up the problem: “We all know what to do. What we don’t know is how to be re-elected when we’ve done it.” The European Union is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, and its leaders have few ideas about how to escape it. Perhaps the crisis will resolve itself if the European economy improves. Perhaps politicians will rally enough popular support to push through the major reforms that seem simultaneously urgent and impossible.

For this reason, there’s more at stake in Emmanuel Macron’s effort to change French labor laws than just the future of the French economy. This fight raises a broader question about whether European leaders, of whatever political stripe, can bring about meaningful change in any area of public life. If Macron and likeminded figures fail, the European Union and its member states may find themselves trapped between the immobilists who cling to the decaying status quo, and the reformers who want to shake things up but lack the wherewithal to act.

Until Juncker’s curse is lifted, even the most sophisticated policy recommendations will be of little avail. To his credit, Merritt acknowledges this problem, but he offers few ideas on how to solve it other than to educate Europeans about the challenges their societies face. He urges politicians to rebuild public legitimacy by “reaching out to Europeans and seizing their imaginations.”

This is easier said than done. Infrastructure spending and bureaucratic reorganization are unlikely to set anyone’s heart alight. The European Union long ago adopted a flag and an anthem in an attempt to replicate the emotional appeal of the nation-state, but when was the last time a group of drunken soccer fans (or anyone else) wrapped themselves in the blue-and-gold and belted out Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”? Whatever the arguments for closer integration, they may be doomed to appeal only to the head, not to the heart.

The European Union’s plight is only part of the problem. Some of Europe’s current maladies have roots that go deeper than the acquis communautaire. In his new book Europe since 1989, German historian Philipp Ther traces the genesis of the current crisis to the emergence of neoliberal capitalism, which Western Europe embraced in the 1970s and 1980s and which spread to Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Despite its title, the book does not attempt to cover the history of the whole Continent since 1989, but focuses on the economic development of the post-communist states in that period. Ther emphasizes that he uses neoliberalism as a “neutral, analytical” concept, but his definition is less neutral than he avers. In his view, it comprises a “blind belief in the market as an adjudicator in almost all human affairs, irrational reliance on the rationality of market participants, disdain for the state as expressed in the myth of ‘big government,’ and the uniform application of the economic recipes of the Washington Consensus.” The scope of the neoliberal worldview is just as universal and its content as theological as the claims of the medieval Catholic Church.

Eastern Europe’s first post-communist leaders adopted this approach to political economy partly because they believed in it, and partly because no rival ideologies were left standing after the turmoil of 1989-91. When neoliberalism’s votaries in Warsaw, Prague, and elsewhere adopted Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, “There is no alternative,” they weren’t far from the truth. For all the talk of democracy supplanting communism, however, little public debate accompanied the dramatic reconfiguration of the region’s economies. The new governments acted first and explained later, hoping to win popular support for the changes retrospectively, once citizens began to enjoy the fruits of the free market. Things did not work out exactly as planned.

In theory, a new era of growth should have followed the shock therapy and economic trauma of the 1990s. Indeed it did, but only in some places, and with different degrees of success. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary enjoyed the best results, partly because of a middle-class entrepreneurialism that the communist reforms of the 1980s had nurtured. Farther east, however, the process unfolded less smoothly. Because the Baltic States and Romania liberalized later than their neighbors, they took even more radical measures, such as flat taxation, in order to attract foreign investment. In Russia, privatization began while the new political and legal orders were still being built. In the absence of effective state institutions, an uncontrolled free-for-all resulted, unleashing a wave of “raider capitalism” that stripped the state bare and concentrated wealth in the hands of the new oligarchs. Average Russians suffered a more dramatic decline in their living standards during the 1990s than did Americans during the Great Depression.

As a consequence, economic inequality surged. Some citizens did well, but many ended up worse off than they had been under communism. Regional divides also emerged, as urban areas prospered and the countryside stagnated. In Poland, the effects have been so stark that commentators now speak of two countries: Polska A, the prosperous, relatively developed western half, and Polska B, its poor and backward eastern counterpart. Similar fault lines have appeared in Western Europe. For the better part of four decades, London, Paris, and other big cities have kept getting wealthier, but towns in the old industrial heartlands have foundered.

These cleavages suggest that the European nation-state itself might be cracking up. States can only hold together as political communities to the extent that their citizens have mutual interests, a common identity, and roughly similar experiences. If the residents of Warsaw share more—economically and culturally—with their counterparts in foreign capitals than with their rural cousins, then national bonds cannot mean what they did fifty or a hundred years ago. The ties of a common language, which used to provide the nation’s main foundation, can only do so much to counteract these pressures, especially when English increasingly serves as the Continent’s lingua franca.

A devout cosmopolitan might regard these developments as a sign of progress. According to this interpretation, the peoples of Europe have learned to transcend the borders that divided them for so long and are building a transnational polity based on communal interests and values. After two hundred years and immeasurable bloodshed, nationalism may have finally run its course, allowing new principles of political organization to take root. But this sunny interpretation ignores the dark side of these trends. The rise in economic inequality has spawned deep grievances among those on its losing side. Anyone whose livelihood has dried up or whose quality of life has declined since 1989—or since 2008, for that matter—may regard the prevailing orthodoxy of free markets and open borders as a way to enrich the few at the expense of the many. From their perspective, the familiar promises of future economic prosperity were broken years ago.

This sense of betrayal has fueled not just populist politics but an elemental fight over identity and values. When the residents of Polska B voted for Andrzej Duda, they asserted a worldview and a concept of political community that cannot easily be reconciled with those of their more liberal-minded compatriots. The same held true for residents of the Pas-de-Calais who voted for Marine Le Pen, those of Saxony who voted for Alternativ für Deutschland, or those of the West Midlands who voted for Brexit. The resentment also runs in the other direction. Secessionist movements have grown in Catalonia and Flanders, where incomes surpass the national average, in part because citizens disdain subsidizing their compatriots in poorer regions of the country.

Europe as a whole is suffering from similar strains, pitting countries that have struggled against those that have prospered. In light of Italy and Greece’s recent agonies, Ther suggests that the old division of the Continent into east and west is becoming less meaningful than the growing rift between north and south. Similarly, George Friedman, who founded the geopolitical consultancy Stratfor, argues that Europe has already fragmented into four distinct regions comprising the German-speaking countries; the rest of northern Europe; the Mediterranean states; and the eastern borderlands. Now these regions are fragmenting in turn, as countries find it easier to pursue their own interests rather than compromise for the sake of cooperation.

The project of European integration, like the project of nation-building, only works insofar as its participants feel a sense of solidarity with one another. When times were good, solidarity may have been easy to foster. More recently, it has eroded as countries’ economic records have diverged along with their foreign policies. “Brotherhood means shared fate. If all that binds you is peace and prosperity, then that must never depart,” Friedman writes. “If some become poor and others rich, if some go to war and others don’t, then where is the shared fate?”

The European Union’s architecture compounds this problem. From the organization’s inception, its supranational ambitions stood at odds with the prerogatives of sovereignty. In certain respects it is simply the creature of its member states. In others, it has a life of its own, dictating policy to those members in the name of removing barriers to the movement of goods and people. The Great Recession and the euro’s ongoing travails have laid these tensions bare. When the currency’s designers created a monetary union without a fiscal one, they all but guaranteed that a major economic downturn would snowball into a crisis that threatened the cohesion of the European Union itself.

These unresolved conflicts have given ammunition to critics. In every member state, populists vow to reclaim national sovereignty from the predations of the European Commission’s faceless technocrats. Their speeches practically write themselves, leavening appeals to xenophobia with encomiums to the sacred principles of democratic accountability. By comparison, the European Union’s defenders fight an uphill battle. Facts and reason may stand on their side, but abstractions about economic interdependence rarely tug on voters’ heartstrings.

This rhetorical asymmetry gives the populists a distinct advantage. Their proposed solutions may crumble under careful scrutiny and fly in the face of the maxims on which the European Union was built. Nonetheless, it’s easier to claim that immigrants are stealing jobs than to explain central bank policy on liquidity and interest rates. It’s easier to argue that national legislatures should reclaim full sovereignty from Brussels than to explain the baroque relationship between domestic legislation and the decisions of the European Commission, Council, and Parliament.

In Friedman’s view, the origins of these problems lie deep in European history. The fights between Europhiles and Euroskeptics, centrists and populists, which have thrown party politics into disarray in so many countries, represent nothing less than the latest chapter in the long-running struggle between Enlightenment universalism and Romantic nationalism. The European Union’s proponents may believe that they—and the partisans of the Enlightenment—won this fight long ago. Yet the conflict between Kant and Fichte, Smith and Rousseau continues to rage. Neither side has won a final victory.

On this basis, it’s tempting to conclude that Europe is fated to wrestle with the same demons in perpetuity. Reflecting on the Continent’s history at the outbreak of World War II, W.H. Auden took precisely this view. “The enlightenment driven away,/The habit-forming pain,/Mismanagement and grief:/We must suffer them all again,” he wrote in “September 1, 1939.” Friedman agrees. He recounts a conversation he had years ago with his father, who had survived the Holocaust and escaped from communist Hungary to make a new life in the United States: “When I was in college I asked him why he refused to recognize that Europe had changed. His answer was simple: Europe will never change. It will just act as if nothing happened.” Nationalism and violence are coming back today because, in Europe, they always come back. They are part of what it means to be European.

The trouble with the cyclical interpretation of history is deciding when and why the cycle began in the first place. Friedman focuses on the modern era, and insists that over the past 250 years the same patterns have kept repeating themselves. To be sure, Enlightenment values are under attack everywhere today, and not just by partisans of nationalism. But one can also point to other, far older patterns whose traces are still visible, whether the Romans’ failure to conquer Germany, the schism that divided Catholicism from Orthodoxy, or, more recently, the Reformation. These faultlines have done as much to define the contours of European politics over the centuries as the struggle between the Enlightenment and its enemies.

If the linear view of history is too glib and the cyclical view is too fatalistic, there is an alternative that understands the past neither as a highway nor a merry-go-round but as a kaleidoscope. Its patterns of light and color arise, dissolve, and give way to new configurations, which may resemble their predecessors but never repeat them. The classical era gave way to the medieval, which in turn gave way to the early modern and modern, each of which had its own structures, none of them preordained.

Although the fall of the western Roman Empire ended the classical period in Europe, it makes little sense to explain medieval Europe simply as a post-classical age, as if it were entirely defined by the absence of Roman institutions. Similarly, we can recognize early modern Europe’s innovations in science and government, for example, but must also acknowledge that older ideas—whether of alchemy or kingship—influenced them and persisted alongside them. Only a scholarly Procrustes could turn these developments into straightforward narratives of progress or decline, or could insist that the same problems have repeated themselves endlessly from one era to the next.

This long-term view of Europe’s history emphasizes that the institutions and concepts we sometimes regard as inherent and unchanging have not always been around. The state, as we understand it today, is only 300-400 years old, and the idea of the nation is even younger. When they emerged, they replaced older forms of political organization and notions of community. Now we take them so much for granted that we find it difficult to imagine how the world might operate (or could ever have operated) without them. But like all human creations, they are mortal. They were born, and one day they will die. This is not to say that moral progress is impossible, that all political institutions are equally just, or that daily life in one period was just as good as daily life in another. How many Europeans today would prefer to have lived in the seventh century, or the 17th? At the same time, however, there is no guarantee that life in the 22nd century will be better than today, or that its institutions will be more perfect versions of our own.

The evolution of political, economic, and social life is the central theme of Chris Wickham’s magisterial and engrossing Medieval Europe, which spans the epoch from 500 to 1500 CE. Wickham, who teaches at Oxford, ranges across every region of the Continent, demonstrating how some trends played out from Iberia to Hungary, Scandinavia to Italy, and beyond. Yet he insists that one must acknowledge the diversity of the period and understand it on its own terms, rather than giving in to the temptation to read it simply as the long, unbroken lull between the glories of Rome and those of the Renaissance. During this millennium, grand political projects rose and fell, and ideas of legitimacy and morality came and went. Some of these concepts sound alien to 21st-century ears, but to their medieval proponents they were natural, even obvious.

The Carolingians, for example, intertwined politics and religion so tightly that they could not distinguish where one ended and the other began. Although they presented themselves as the heirs of the Roman Empire, they brought forth a new understanding of government that adapted older models to fit their own ideas and circumstances. In collaboration with the Church, which had endorsed their overthrow of the Merovingians, they attempted simultaneously to govern the territories under their control and to secure the salvation of all their subjects. Because sinfulness posed not just a spiritual but also a political threat, the Emperor had to watch over his people’s every action much like God watched over humanity. Wickham emphasizes that Charlemagne and his successors interpreted events—and justified their policies—in zealously religious terms. Military setbacks testified to divine displeasure, for which the whole Frankish people had to repent.

When the empire cracked up, so did this approach to politics. The successor kingdoms tumbled into a period of instability, which swept away the Carolingians’ religious understanding of legitimacy. Some of the old institutions survived, notably the use of public assemblies to maintain popular consent for royal rule, but eventually this practice ended too. In the 11th and 12th centuries, a more local, personal approach to politics took its place. In turn, developments in jurisprudence and administration unleashed a fresh wave of political reconstruction in the 12th and 13th centuries. Kings (or, in Germany’s case, dukes and counts) exerted greater control over local lords, and power became more centralized. As those who wielded authority and those who wrote about it tried to make sense of these changing realities, one system of government gave way to another. One concept of legitimacy faded, but another took its place.

Contemplating the making and remaking of medieval Europe can give us some useful perspective on the Continent’s current troubles. European history has never moved in a straight line of progress from chaos to order, or from tyranny to liberty. If the Carolingians believed that their system of rule represented the ideal fusion of politics and morality, the experience of imperial disintegration must have been terrifying. But their successors did not share their assumptions, nor did they judge the political systems that they established by Carolingian standards. They developed new institutions—and new ideas of legitimacy—to suit the conditions in which they operated. The process was hardly painless, but what the last Carolingians perceived as collapse seems, in retrospect, more like transformation.

How might historians a thousand years hence make sense of our time? Newspaper columns fretting about the threats to globalization, the stagnation of the European Union, and the decay of the post-1945 international order appear by the day. Given how much is at stake, this anxiety is understandable, even necessary. But even if some institutions confront existential dangers, the changes afoot also present opportunities. If we treat contemporary events simply as a story of decline (or preservation), we will blind ourselves to this possibility.

Some Western political leaders—with a few glaring exceptions—have reacted by trying to defend the status quo. Given what they’re up against, it’s too early to say whether they will succeed. This uncertainty has done little to help the West’s deficit of self-confidence. Regardless, many of the structural factors that gave rise to the status quo are eroding. Within Western states, longstanding assumptions about politics, economics, and society are coming undone. Internationally, American pre-eminence is fading after 70 years. After 250 years, so too is the West’s unquestioned industrial and military superiority. We may be witnessing not a passing crisis but the end of the modern era itself. Whether a few years or a few decades from now, longstanding institutions will have to adapt to fit a new set of circumstances. Leaders will have to abandon the logic of defending the status quo and embrace the logic of transformation instead.

Transformation does not have to mean capitulation. Some important trends—whether the economic impact of new technologies or the rise of Asian power—may continue to gather momentum, but astute politicians can channel their effects in one direction or another. Modern history offers innumerable examples of adaptation that discarded old ways of doing things in order to solve new challenges. Beginning with the 1832 Reform Act, Britain overhauled its electoral system and dramatically expanded the franchise in response to a rising tide of democratic activism. The social consequences of the Industrial Revolution persuaded governments across Europe to change their labor laws and establish welfare states, jettisoning longstanding ideas about the free market and the relationship between the individual and the state in the process. For decades after the Napoleonic Wars, European monarchs regarded nationalist sentiment with suspicion, but some—notably in Italy and Germany—eventually embraced it. Despite nationalism’s strong affinities with liberalism, evident in the work of such thinkers as Giuseppe Mazzini and John Stuart Mill, conservative rulers in the 1860s and 1870s began to harness it to their own purposes. At the Congress of Vienna, the great powers broke with 18th-century notions of diplomacy and assumed joint responsibility for maintaining the political and territorial status quo. Over the course of the 19th century, as Vienna’s dynastic concept of legitimacy came under strain, a new concept rooted in national self-determination superseded it, fashioning a new basis for international order.

In the years ahead, the imperative of transformation will require European leaders to reexamine orthodoxies now taken for granted. Notions of state sovereignty, citizenship, work, and international governance will all require revision. Governments’ tools for maintaining popular legitimacy will change. In some areas, this process may yield entirely original and unforeseeable results. In others, it may revive older institutions, such as the city-state, or hybrid political-commercial organizations such as the Hanseatic League. Because the Chinese, for example, hew to an inflexible notion of sovereignty, and because their traditional hierarchical concept of international order cannot easily be reconciled with Western ideas, the international system itself may fragment, with different regions of the world operating according to different principles, much as they did before the 19th century. A long-range view of the past expands our notions of what is possible. No one can foresee exactly how these changes will play out, but it would be foolish to assume that, fifty years hence, any Western country will be able to operate as it does today. We may prefer the familiar, but as a broader historical perspective teaches us, sooner or later we will have to adapt.

1That unraveling was the cover theme of the July/August 2010 issue of The American Interest.

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The Future of Populism at Home and Abroad

This is part three of a three-part essay; part one can be found here, and part two here; a podcast version is available here.

New populist nationalist parties have appeared across the developed world, and threaten to undermine the liberal international order. What is the likelihood that they will succeed?

For better or worse, a lot depends on what will happen in the United States. American power was critical in establishing both the economic and political pillars of the liberal order, and if the United States retreats from that leadership role, the pendulum will swing quickly in favor of the nationalists. So we need to understand how populism is likely to unfold in the worlds leading liberal democracy.

The American Constitution’s system of checks and balances was designed to deal with the problem of “Caesarism,” that is, a populist demagogue who would accumulate power and misuse it. It is for this reason that vetocracy exists, and so far into the Trump Administration, it appears to be working. Trump’s attacks on various independent institutions—the intelligence community, the mainstream media, the courts, and his own Republican party—have only had modest success. In particular, he has not been able to get a significant part of his legislative agenda, like Obamacare repeal or the border wall, passed. So at the moment he looks like a weak and ineffective president.

However, things could change. The factor most in his favor is the economy: wages have been growing after stagnating for many years, and growth has reached 3 percent for two quarters now. It may move even higher if the Republicans succeed in passing a stimulative tax cut as they seem poised to do. All of this is bad policy in the long run: the United States is not overtaxed; the stimulus is coming at the exactly wrong point in the business cycle (after eight years of expansion); it is likely to tremendously widen fiscal deficits; and it will lay the ground for an eventual painful crash. Nonetheless, these consequences are not likely to play themselves out for several years, long enough to get the Republicans through the 2018 midterm elections and even the 2020 presidential contest. What matters to voters the most is the state of the economy, and that looks to be good despite the President’s undignified tweeting.

Foreign policy is another area where Trump’s critics could be surprised. It is entirely possible that he will take action on some of his threats—indeed, it is hard to see how he can avoid action with regard to North Korea’s nuclear ballistic missile program. Any U.S. move would be highly risky to its South Korean and Japanese allies, but it is also possible that the U.S. will call North Korea’s bluff and force a significant climbdown. If this happens, Trump will have lanced a boil in a manner that has eluded the last three presidents.

Finally, it is not possible to beat something with nothing. The Democrats, under a contant barrage of outrageous behavior from the Administration, have been moving steadily to the left. Opposition to Trump allows them to focus on the enemy and not to define long-term policies that will appeal to voters. As in Britain, the party itself in increasingly dominated by activists who are to the left of the general voter base. Finally, the Democrats have lost so much ground in statehouses and state legislatures that they do not have a strong cadre of appealing, experienced candidates available to replace the Clinton generation. Since American elections are not won in the popular vote but in the Electoral College (as Bruce Cain has recently pointed out in these pages), it does not matter how many outraged people vote in states like California, New York, or Illinois; unless the party can attract centrist voters in midwestern industrial states it will not win the Presidency.

All of this suggests that Trump could not just serve out the remainder of his term, but be re-elected in 2020 and last until 2024. Were the Republicans to experience a setback in the midterm elections in 2018 and then lose the presidency in 2020, Trump might go down in history has a fluke and aberration, and the party could return to the control of its elites. If this doesn’t happen, however, the country’s polarization will deepen even beyond the point it has reached at present. More importantly, the institutional checks may well experience much more significant damage, since their independence is, after all, simply a matter of politics in the end.

Beyond this, there is the structural factor of technological change. Job losses among low skill workers is fundamentally not driven by trade or immigration, but by technology. While the country can try to raise skill levels through better education, the U.S. has shown little ability or proclivity to do this. The Trump agenda is to seek to employ 20th century workers in their old jobs with no recognition of how the technological environment has changed. But it is not as if the Democrats or the progressive Left has much of an agenda in this regard either, beyond extending existing job training and social programs. How the U.S. will cope with this is not clear. But then, technological change is the ultimate political challenge that all advanced societies, and not just the democratic ones, will have to face.

Outside the United States, the populist surge has yet to play itself out. Eastern Europe never experienced the kind of cultural liberalization experienced by Germany and other Western European countries after World War II, and are now eagerly embracing populist politicians. Hungary and Poland have recently been joined by Serbia and the Czech Republic, which have elected leaders with many Trump-like characteristics. Germany’s consensus politics, which made the country a rock of EU stability over the past decade, appears to be fraying after its recent election, and the continuing threat in France should not be underestimated—Le Pen and the far-left candidate Melenchon between them received half the French vote in the last election.  Outside Europe, Brazil’s continuing crisis of elite legitimacy has given a boost to Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer who talks tough and promises to clean up the country’s politics.  All of this suggests that the world will be in for interesting times for some time to come.

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Once More, This Time with Feeling

The ontological status of the world and our place in it being as indeterminate as they are, it is no great surprise that wishful thinking has long been a popular human activity. Alas, what passes for reality is a many-splintered thing, and so can be shaped, subjectively at least, by our self-willed orientation to it.

Sometimes wishful thinking is pointed toward the future, which can be a good thing: We often cannot summon our potential nobility unless we can envision a use for it. Our happiness depends on it to no small degree, as well; as Lincoln supposedly said: “Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”

Sometimes, however, wishful thinking is pointed backward, where it works mainly as ego protection against the onslaught of contrary evidence. The most common manner of operation is well described by one of La Rochefoucauld’s most famous aphorisms: “We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones.”

I was reminded of all this when Jim Jeffrey suggested to me several weeks ago that I tag him to review the latest Ken Burns (with Lynn Novick) docufab of the Vietnam War for The American Interest. I told him that I had not seen any of the multipart series and did not wish to see it because I was thoroughly sick of the whole business. I had said what I had to say on various aspects of the Vietnam War era, felt myself cleansed for the toil, and then about a decade ago gave away all 200 or so of my books on the subject.1 But, I said, “If you want to do it, Mr. Ambassador, go right ahead—Godspeed.”

He went right ahead, and produced an excellent review essay, which as editor I titled “The War That Never Ends.” I knew he would produce a gem. Jeffrey is one of only two senior American diplomats I know to have served in uniform in Vietnam before joining the Foreign Service (the other being Ronald Neumann). So he was “there,” which, while not always a sturdy portcullis to inner wisdom, usually doesn’t hurt when combined with subsequent related experience and the normal blessings of maturity. Ambassador Jeffrey’s decades of pondering strategy and practicing diplomacy at high levels qualify in my book as related experience.

In his essay, Jeffrey pronounced the Burns-Novick effort basically fair-minded and accurate—with one exception, that being

. . . the series’s ninth episode, covering the 1970–73 period, in which Burns and Novick undercut the credibility of their more general, reasonably balanced observations. The narrative of that episode dryly describes the triumphs President Richard Nixon achieved in 1972, diplomatically with China, the USSR, and North Vietnam, politically in the presidential election, and militarily with the defeat of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in the Easter Offensive. But this comes only after 100 minutes of almost unceasing negatives on the war: from a Vietnam Veterans Against the War-heavy focus on the minority of veterans who bitterly opposed to it to Jane Fonda in Hanoi, John Kerry’s Senate testimony, drug-addicted U.S. soldiers, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, and extensive footage of South Vietnamese army (ARVN) troops retreating in Laos and initially in the Easter Offensive (although ARVN soldiers won that battle). The plurality of Americans still supporting the war, which in that period included most veterans, got little airtime. A viewer could easily ask whether Burns and Novick were describing the same country that gave Nixon an overwhelming victory in 49 states in the 1972 election.

Jeffrey’s criticism is spot on, but I admit to wondering at the time why this particular episode went off the guardrails of basic fairness when the others did not.

As it happens, around the time Jeffrey’s manuscript passed my editing block, into my office came a large, heavy book called The Vietnam War, written by Geoffrey C. Ward—a frequent Burns project collaborator over the years—which is one of two ancillary products to come from the decade-long project to produce the documentary’s 900 minutes of film (there is also a soundtrack album). The book is heavy laden with photographs, as well befits a text to a documentary based overwhelmingly, as it must be, on photos and archival video. But in addition to Ward’s text, a few of the chapters include short out-take essays by authors dubbed scholars. There is such an out-take essay accompanying Ward’s chapter nine, “Vietnam and the Movement,” written by Todd Gitlin. And so my wondering came to rest: I understood.

Like so many American protestors of the Vietnam War-era, Gitlin—a former national president of SDS—continues to insist that the antiwar movement was efficacious and noble. In his own words:

The movement helped bring down two war presidents, divide the political class, shatter its families, and upend public opinion. His polymorphous movement began on the fringes of American society, widened and deepened, and for all its frailties, contentions, and absurdities grew into a veto force that dampened the war and helped avert even more death and destruction. Such an achievement deserves not only understanding but awe.

I am in awe, but not the way Gitlin intends me to be. He speaks of bringing down two “war presidents,” but these men—Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—were fairly and freely elected in a democratic process, and aside from being “war” Presidents they were also Presidents over the rest of U.S. public policy. Gitlin sounds proud that the antiwar movement destroyed their political careers, which is something of an overstatement, but you get the point. He sounds similarly proud to have been part of a movement that divided the American political class, as if that sort of division were a good thing for its own sake—a remarkable comment to make in contemporary circumstances. He is proud, too, it seems, of shattering families, which is not an overstatement. He saves for last the achievement of which he is most proud: upending public opinion.

He later adds the claim that the movement “helped prevent several catastrophic escalations, and contributed to extricating American troops and stopping the bombers.” Perhaps it did prevent a few escalations, but not all, and as Jeffrey makes clear, it was a few well-timed Nixonian escalations that created the pressure for the negotiations that inflected the course of the war and allowed for the extrication of American troops. But at the time, and still now, Gitlin thinks that the escalations that happened and those that did not happen were “catastrophic,” and that it was the movement that got the troops home. Without those escalations the troops would have stayed in theater longer, and more of them (not to mention more Vietnamese) would have been killed, not fewer.

Gitlin knows that not everyone agrees with him. He tells of running into Roger Hilsman years later and being doubted in his claims by this former Kennedy and Johnson Administration high official. Hilsman’s case, as Gitlin reports it, was not very seriously put; it had the feel of a quick-witted elevator conversation, not a reasoned argument. Nevertheless, Gitlin concludes his reportage by writing: “I stand by my original claim. The American antiwar movement . . . helped contain the war. . . . Had the movement been more clearheaded and less desperate, it might have achieved the same mission more quickly. No one will ever know, although we can make educated guesses.”

We can guess what Gitlin’s guesses are, but they’re wrong. He rues the anti-patriotic tenor of the radical protests, the carrying of North Vietnamese flags, the obscenity, and the violence. He thinks that, had these tactics been avoided in a more centralized and controlled movement, the movement’s efficacy would have emerged sooner. “Still, for all its burdens,”—think La Rochefoucauld—“the movement did restrain the war. It moved policy, though never as much as it wanted. . . . A war that had been so popular at first . . . was brought to an end with an impressive boost from popular action.”

Alas, while one can grant the nobility of the motives involved, Gitlin’s account is so wrong in so many ways that one barely knows where to start. To show his basic error, let us do something a bit unusual: deploy a different error.

Gitlin rues the fact that the movement was not better organized, centralized, and controlled. But James C. Scott argues that,

As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward have convincingly shown for the Great Depression in the United States, protests by unemployed and workers in the 1930s, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the welfare rights movement, what success the movements enjoyed was at their most disruptive, most confrontational, least organized, and least hierarchical.2

If that is correct, then the tactics Gitlin rues most were the ones that were the most efficacious, essentially by moving the Overton Window of permissible thought. If that is true, then the consequences of the movement Gitlin condemns, such as the Weathermen offshoot of SDS, are the consequences that matter most, and Gitlin, as an SDS president fueling the movement’s outrage, has to think of himself as an enable of later events that included armed robbery and murder. But of course he doesn’t.

Pivin and Cloward may be correct about most of their “poor people’s movement” examples—my intuition tells me they are—but the antiwar movement was not a poor people’s movement, and they are flat wrong about it. Scott comes to the key point, but only a page and a half later: “Massive disruption and defiance can, under some conditions, lead directly to authoritarianism or fascism, rather than reform or revolution.”3

And that is exactly what happened, with a more temperate vocabulary, in the antiwar movement case. The more radical the tactics, the greater were what John Mueller called, way back in 1973, the “negative follower effect.”4 Just as the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so deeply off-putting protests tend to help the target of the protests in the wide but murky world of public opinion. In the case of the 1968 presidential election season, for example, it’s clear now as it was then that most people sided with the cops against the radical protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—a fact that even Gitlin has elsewhere acknowledged. So Hubert Humphrey got the nomination, not Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy, and he almost won. There is no way to prove it—another guess we must make—but it is likely that Humphrey did better than Bobby Kennedy would have and much better than McCarthy would have.

Of course, Nixon’s advantage in 1968 turned on more than just the tumultuous domestic politics of the Vietnam War; the backlash from desegregation, the rise of the black power movement, and the Black Panthers had plenty to do with it, as well—from whence his infamous dog-whistling “Southern strategy.” George Wallace ran for President on the same basis, and the anti-antiwar protests of the labor union-based “hard hats” had to choose between Nixon and Wallace. That turned out to be a lot of people, and a lot of voters.

Given all this, it is simply amazing that Gitlin et al. can still tell the story of American politics at the height of the antiwar movement and think that the movement, above all other factors, shoved public opinion into an antiwar tilt. The truth is that, especially at its most radical, the movement retarded the antiwar trajectory of public opinion thanks to the negative follower effect. Other factors were much more important: the plain reality that the war was not going well and that the military brass and the political class turned to lying about it; and the fact that President Johnson eventually lost faith in the war policy.

There can be no doubt that Johnson’s post-Tet Offensive, March 31, 1968 speech—in which he declared a partial halt in the bombing, expressed his willingness to negotiate with Hanoi, and took himself out of the coming presidential race—was the key turning point. As Mueller put it, even before the fall of Saigon in March 1975, basically the American people followed their leaders into war and, when those leaders changed their minds about the wisdom of what they were doing, followed them back out again. It was only after that great wave of reversal that the antiwar movement, when it had become far tamer and more organized, was able to constrain the war through its impact on Congress. This amounted to the piling on of an ant after more formidable life forms had already made the tackle.

As far as I know, Gitlin, in all his writings—especially his 1987 book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage—never refers to the public opinion data set in the 1973 Mueller book. He certainly has never noted my 1995 book, Telltale Hearts: The Origin and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, which set out this argument in detail. And as best I can tell, he has never acknowledged any of the mass of scholarship pointing in the same direction, some of it written early on, some of it written later: John P. Richardson’s “Balance Theory and Vietnam-Related Attitudes,” Social Science Quarterly (December 1970), and Richardson, “Public Reaction to Political Protest, Chicago 1968,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring 1970); E. M. Schreiber, “Antiwar Demonstrations and American Public Opinion on the War in Vietnam,” British Journal of Sociology (June 1976); Sidney Verba and Richard Brody, “Participation, Policy Preferences, and the War in Vietnam,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Fall 1970); William R. Berkowitz, “The Impact of Anti-Vietnam War Demonstrations upon National Public Opinion and Military Indicators,” Social Science Research (March 1973); Arthur H. Miller, “Political Issues and Trust in Government,” American Political Science Review (September 1974); Kenneth Heineman, “The Silent Majority Speaks: Antiwar Protest and the Backlash, 1965–1972,” Peace and Change, October 1992; and there is plenty more. Gitlin does cite in his Ward book essay Tom Wells’s 1994 volume The War Within, for which Gitlin wrote the forward, a book that itself cites none of this literature.

The Vietnam antiwar movement, regrettably, was counterproductive when in its most radical phase thanks to the much-documented negative follower effect, and fairly marginal to outcomes whilst in its less radical, more organizationally bound phase. The only argument for the movement’s policy efficacy that makes any sense is that by “shattering families,” President Johnson’s “wise men” exaggerated the influence of the antiwar movement because it most roiled their own social class and, indeed in some cases, their own families.5 But that is a far cry from claiming that the antiwar movement, above all else, determined the broad trends of public opinion on the war. Had that been true, as Ambassador Jeffrey implies, then George McGovern would have won 49 states in the 1972 election instead of losing 49 states. Gitlin—and so many others of his view—never comes to terms with this fact. Indeed, again so far as I am aware, he never even raises the question, except to inexplicably label McGovern “a sacrificial lamb” betrayed by the Democratic Party establishment in a curt remark on the last page of a chapter in his 1987 book.6 Had the antiwar movement actually accomplished what Gitlin claims it had, that label would make absolutely no sense.

Retro-wishful thinking cannot change anything about the world as it has actually been. At the same time, I know full well that nothing I or anyone else does can change the cherished youthful memories of the Sixties protest crowd, especially those who got started earlier in the genuinely heroic civil disobedience tactics of the Civil Rights movement. These para-religious efforts were personality-shapers for many, and so deeply entrenched in the bonds of personality do they remain that mere facts are helpless to generate even wisps of doubt, let alone serious reconsideration. As Walter Cronkite used to say, “and that’s the way it is,” still on November 30, 2017.

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Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Katherine Howe

Hyperion, 2009, 384 pp., $25.99 (hardcover)

Witches, hysteria, spectral evidence, and trials; cunning women, midwives, and misogyny; spells, magic, mediums, séances, psychics, and ghosts: These are the terms of Katherine Howe’s fictional world. Howe has so far published four novels on these and related themes, all of them historically rich and meticulously detailed. The first of the four became a New York Times bestseller: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009). Howe is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Witches (2014). And so what? These days, with the over-the-top success of J.K. Rowling now sprawled out over decades, and the making of knockoff British television series like The Worst Witch, what could possibly be notable about more fictional witchery?

Several things. Rowling et al. set out to write fantasy mainly for the younger set; Howe writes for young adults and adults in order to, as she has put it, explore “the contingent nature of reality and belief.” She also graduated from Columbia, has a graduate degree in New England studies, and teaches at Cornell University, and recently finished a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. This is a decidedly non-Rowling profile.

Howe will tell you herself that the witches of Salem and their 1692–93 trials are a “well-travelled territory,” but, magically it seems, she is a direct descendent of Elizabeth Procter and Elizabeth Howe, two women who were tried and convicted in the Salem trials. (Proctor was spared because she was pregnant at the time and her conviction was later overturned; Howe, her namesake, was executed.) There remains a family resemblance, too; when you hear Howe’s voice jump off the page, you sense that she is, like her famous witch-accused ancestors and non-ancestors, intuitive and unique—in her words, “out of step with culture in a profound way.”

While Howe was intrigued from an early age by her familial connection to executed witches, she was also inspired to illustrate how social hysteria and witch hunts can be sparked by a communal desire to exert authority over those who stand out for their differences. Witch hunt victims were usually women, and women who usually lived outside the common rhythms of the town, making them easy targets on the fringe of tight-knit religious- and fear-motivated Puritan societies then roiled by insecurities of many kinds: Indian attacks, reverberations of civil war in England, and consequent governmental instabilities all rolled together.

Conjuring historical parallels is a dangerous brew of its own, but it is also irresistible. Donald Trump got elected by leveraging ambient anxiety, hitching it to xenophobic energies pointed varyingly at those who also live on the outskirts of the general populace: immigrants; non-heterosexuals; transgenders; and people of color. In times gone by, infectious illnesses, mental disabilities with Physickal symptoms like epilepsy and Tourette’s, failed crops, and bad weather often led authorities to popular acts like casting blame on others to protect themselves from displeasure and censure brought about by their powerlessness to understand or deal with the problems. Today the terms are different but, arguably, the political dynamics are not as different as we might like or suppose. Hence the sense in Katherine Howe’s sojourn with an advanced institute for behavior studies in social science in Palo Alto. Howe’s witches may or may not be real, but her “evil” is real in a sense that Rowling’s Voldemort just isn’t.

Elizabeth Howe’s imprisonment, torture, and hanging has vividly informed the imagination of her descendant Katherine in the aforementioned The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (alternately known in the United Kingdom as The Lost Book of Salem), The Penguin Book of Witches, and Conversion (2014), all of which bring the maligned women of Salem justice and compassion in readers’ homes and hearts.

The Physick Book ofc Deliverance Dane was sparked when Howe rented an apartment while getting her graduate degree in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Salem’s next-door neighbor and a town noted for its expansive collection of 18th-century houses. With an undergraduate degree in art history and philosophy and working toward a career as a history professor, Howe not surprisingly loved old architecture. As she studied the original wide-pine floorboards of her home one day it occurred to her that someone from the witch trials might have stood exactly where she was standing, touched exactly what she touched, while considering the witch hunt and the accompanying trials. “People traveled to the trials from all the nearby towns,” Howe says. “It was easy for me to wipe out the power lines and cars and put in some pigs to see what early America must have looked like. I began to wonder what those people had felt and thought during the trials and how people can see the same event differently based on their own politics, class, gender, and race.” It was only a short leap for Howe to begin a series of what-if questions that ended in at least two bestsellers: What if Salem’s witches really had been practicing magic?

The heroine of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Connie Goodwin, represents what Howe believes most women deemed witches actually were: unique and strong women who were creative and intelligent, and who didn’t abide the fear-driven dogma of their time. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is actually a dual narrative, one story set in Salem Town beginning in 1682 and the other set in Cambridge and Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1991. Connie, a post-graduate doctoral student at Harvard, is startled by an oral exam question from her adviser Manning Chilton: “Have you not considered the distinct possibility that the accused were simply guilty of witchcraft?” Connie hadn’t and, as she struggles to collect words for a thoughtful academic answer, imagines the question to be more trick than truth. She responds with the usual colonial ontologies and epistemologies, but Chilton keeps her after the formal meeting to encourage her to open her mind to the possibility of magic. Connie resists such an angle for her dissertation until events in her personal life conspire to relocate her and her dog Arlo to her dead grandmother’s neglected house, hidden, as it is symbolic of Connie’s unknown heritage, in a tangle of overgrown gardens and woods. There Connie discovers an old key in a 17th-century Bible, accompanied by a strip of parchment possessing Deliverance Dane’s name. Connie soon begins to experience episodic hallucinations of her grandmother’s past.

Having been a postgraduate student herself scouring libraries for thesis material, Howe writes into life Connie as a credible and intelligent woman who captivates the reader with her search for a book of magic healing “recipes” and spells that would change everything she thought to be true. The setting of Connie’s grandmother’s home is done so meticulously that the reader can almost smell the old closed-up rooms, wooden shelves crammed with musty books, feel the square head nails in the floorboards snag stocking feet, and see the light reflected in the dusty herb bottles in the kitchen. Howe says, “I tend to be a ony visual person (my first real job was in an art museum, as it happens), which is one reason I love to wallow in setting.”

Wallow she does, bringing colonial New England, and all the fears and hardships of a struggling America, into focus. Readers responded to Howe’s fictional account of accused witches’ truths by putting her first book on the bestseller list. “Fiction is a cool way to explore a one hundred percent factually true subject that gives the stories of history power,” says Howe, who has recently completed the sequel, The Daughter of Deliverance Dane also set in Massachusetts. Howe’s family had settled in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the 1620s, and she had been aware of her eighth and ninth aunts Proctor and Howe since high school. But in a moment of surreal spookiness she discovered that Deliverance Dane was her eighth great grandmother after the 2009 publication of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.

To write historical fiction powerfully and credibly, an author must be master, or mistress, of the facts. Showing through fiction that she was, Penguin asked Howe to edit The Penguin Book of Witches, an academic foray into the documents of witch trials all over the world. Organized by era, each account begins with a brief historical and insightful introduction followed by letters, news, and court papers such as original depositions. In her introduction to the “Trial of Ursula Kemp” in 1582, Howe writes, “Another contributing factor to suspicions of witchcraft in the early modern period was the inexplicable sudden ailments in both persons and cattle. Sickness from unhygienic conditions made for high mortality rate, but those deaths were easier to bear if they could be blamed on someone else.” Ursula’s section includes several examinations of witnesses—witnesses in most trials were usually children—as well as several confessions by Ursula herself. “The said Ursula bursting out with weeping, fell upon her knees, and confessed that she had four spirits, whereof two of them were he’s, and the other two were she’s. The two he spirits were to punish and kill unto death, and the two she’s were to punish with lameness and other diseases of bodily harms, and also to destroy cattle.” As were most accused women who lived on the margins of society, Ursula was executed despite the promise of leniency if she confessed.

The Salem witch trials being the most famous, many of us think of witch-hunts as being mainly a Puritan and colonial New England phenomenon. But they occurred in the Old World, too, during the 16th and 18th centuries, reaching a peak in the 1580s with English witch hunting. Court documents show that witch trials made up 13 percent of all criminal cases. Readers see the fear and the physical pain of the condemned witches in The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, but they also see the children who are responsible for that fear and physical pain in Howe’s young adult novel Conversion.

Conversion was inspired by a story Howe heard on a local cable news channel while waiting for a brake light repair in a mechanic’s shop. “The cable news was on in the waiting room, and I wasn’t paying much attention until the news anchor said in passing that they’d figured out what was really wrong with the girls in Le Roy, New York. According to the newscast, the Le Roy mystery illness of 2012 was actually just an outbreak of conversion disorder.” Students had exhibited a range of odd symptoms from twitching to disordered speech to an inability to walk. Some blamed it on environmental pollution, others a reaction to the HPV vaccine or PANDAS, a pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcal infections. Medical professionals finally settled on conversion disorder, a mental condition in which a person has blindness, paralysis, or other unexplained neurological symptoms. They believed that the pressures of competing for the highest and best marks to get into the highest and best colleges had caused excessive stress that manifested in bizarre physical symptoms. This was not unlike Sigmund Freud’s early investigations of late-19th-century neurasthenia.

Howe set out in the context of a young-adult novel, blending science and the supernatural, to explain the symptoms that triggered a widespread panic. In her fictional version, the setting is St. Joan’s Academy, a private Catholic girls’ school. As with Deliverance Dane, Conversion is also a dual narrative. One narrator, Ann Putnam, a primary figure of the Salem witch trials, tells one story as she confesses to her pastor; and Colleen Rowley, a student at St. Joan’s, tells another and tries to solve what is happening to her friends while she is also under the stress of trying to achieve valedictorian status. Conversion appeals equally to adults as to teens. Howe is first and foremost an academic historian, and her ability to weave fiction in and out of historical and behavioral truth is nothing short of magical itself. She recreates the witch trials through rich language, precise and gradual character development, and background setting from the perspective of one of the girls responsible for them and from the perspective of an intelligent young woman who solves the medical mystery, partially by reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

Conversion’s dual narratives are set in Salem Village, although the reader doesn’t know this until the end of the book when Colleen discovers that Danvers used to be Salem Village. Colleen also discovers that people rarely want to hear a complex truth; the adults in positions of authority settle on explanations that benefit their own agendas, just as the magistrates and judges did in Salem’s widespread witch panic: “None on the Court be well disposed to the hearing of reason, I’m afraid. They are gripped with fear for their own reputations.”

Howe includes Tituba’s confessions, right out of The Crucible, just as she did Ann’s, changing nothing, bringing history alive in striking scenes. The court document is a fascinating historic portrayal of the destruction and madness that lies and panic created amid an uneducated and fearful community. Tituba fits the classic witch profile, an Indian woman from Barbados who lives in the margins of the community and without its protections. She was a servant to the white children who accused her of tormenting and casting spells on them.

Q: What did this man say to you when he took hold of you?

A: He say go into the other room and see the children and do hurt to them and pinch them. And then I went in and would not hurt them a good while. I would not hurt Betty. I loved Betty, but they haul me and make me pinch Betty and the next Abigail…

Tituba begins the examination by denying witchcraft and any knowledge of the Devil, but she ends her examination on that first day of trial not only by admitting to fantastical and impossible crimes, but also by naming two other women as her accomplices, thereby sealing their fate along with her own. During her physical, examiners found evidence of the witches’ teat they were searching for—her clitoris, which tells us even more about the uneducated nature and fearful temperaments of early Americans—and multiple bruises to indicate Tituba had been beaten, likely by Parris, her owner and the children’s father. Howe believes that “Tituba confessed for the same reason that people confess to crimes they did not commit today—because she had been hounded into it by people in a position of power. . . . These details are perfectly consistent with English witchcraft manuals—too consistent. For someone who could not read, this kind of knowledge could only have come from someone else.” (Penguin Book of Witches, p. 141)

Q: What other creatures have you seen?

A: A bird.

Q: What bird?

A: A yellow bird.

Q: Where doth it keep?

A: With the man who hath pretty things here besides.

Q: What other pretty things?

A: He hath not showed them yet unto me, but he said he would show them me tomorrow, and he told me if I would serve him, I should have the bird.

Q: What other creatures did you see?

A: I saw two cats, one red, another black as big as a little dog.

Q: What did these cats do?

A: I don’t know. I have seen them two times.

Q: What did they say to you?

A: They say serve them.

Tituba explains that she never let the cats suck her but they bid her to pinch and hurt the children Abigail and Betty Parris. She flew to their home by riding on a stick. Tituba gives the names of Good and Osborne and says they wanted her to kill somebody with a knife, but she wouldn’t. During the examination the children who named Tituba have fits screaming nonsense words and pointing their fingers at nothing, exclaiming that they see something vile and evil as they fling themselves about theatrically in front of their audience.

Howe uses the actual documents to show in Conversion how quickly the questions, ridiculous as they are, receive even more ridiculous answers. What begins as a ploy by adolescents to get out of their daily chores turns into fantastic skeins of what we call today fake news, but fake news that is taken as truth by neighbors of the accused who held personal grudges or jealousies. But even had they wanted to defend an accused friend, that alone would have led them to suspicion, trial, and possibly death by one of the damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t witch tests that led to the executioner. Meanwhile, the girls behind the hysteria, had they admitted to their own guilt when they saw the deadly results of their game, would not have been believed in the midst of the chaos and panic they had fed but themselves assumed to be bewitched. There were adults who saw through the playacting of the young teenagers. Howe shows young Ann Putnam exhibiting enormous guilt and misery—but short of telling the truth— even as she writhed on the floor screaming her torment by the witches’ menagerie of animals.

And then there is the ember of truth, what divides fiction from nonfiction, that Howe shows the reader in both The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and Conversion: that some of the women, the ones named things like Deliverance, Grace, Faith, Patience, and Constance, actually possessed powerful, if not supernatural, intuitive abilities and healing powers.

Howe occasionally ventures away from witches in her novels—but only semantically, so to speak. In The House of Velvet and Glass her heroine Sybil can descry the future. If Sybil had lived in colonial times, she too would have been accused of witchery if she had rankled a neighbor or made a grumpy adolescent do chores. Howe’s second young-adult novel, The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen (2015), could be said not to have witches either, as no character actually says the word “witch” or, for that matter, “ghost”—even though Annie is one. In The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, a clerk warns Connie with a variation of Einstein’s famous quote, “But remember. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” Howe illustrates this warning repeatedly in her plots, as well as demonstrating the flip-side of the warning when her male character Benton tells Sybil from In the House of Velvet and Glass, “Now I have certainty that you believe you’ve experienced something real, but your believing it doesn’t make it so.” Alas, Benton’s words, much like the precedent of hunting people down just because they are different and accusing them of crimes they didn’t commit, could all too readily be applied to xenophobia-wielding populist governments in several countries today.

The richness of Howe’s novels is that they all reflect life, rational and not, because life actually is both rational and sometimes not. Degrees in art, philosophy, and New England studies provided Howe the material and skill she needed to write her bestsellers, of which more may be in the offing. But to really appreciate what she is getting at by querying “the contingent nature of reality and belief,” we may need to open our minds, as Connie’s adviser Chilton Manning suggested, to the possibility of magic. At the end of the 17th century in New England, magic and supernatural phenomenon were bound up in then-powerful religious cosmologies, particularly Calvinist varieties of Protestantism that, unlike the earlier Lutheran and subsequently Episcopalian varieties, were not friendly to the full gamut of onrushing modernity. But whatever the cultural delivery system, there are still things that scientific rationality in our own time cannot assuredly explain. That gap is eternal fodder for opportunistic politicians in anxiety-ridden times. If we want to understand Donald Trump in context, perhaps we would be wise to read Howe’s novels as a study of our current political climate, reflecting on the cause of the witch hunts, the psychology and fear behind the trials, and the judgments of Cotton Mather.

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Why Populist Nationalism Now?

There are three reasons why we are seeing the rise of populist nationalism in the second half of the 2010s: economic, political, and cultural.

The economic sources of populism have been widely noted and discussed. The same trade theory that tells you that all countries participating in a free trade regime will be better off in the aggregate also tells you that not every individual in every country will be better off: Low-skill workers in rich countries are likely to lose out to similarly-skilled but lower-paid workers in poor ones. That is in fact what has been happening in many industrialized countries with the rise of China, Mexico, and the like. According to a recent IMF study, some 50 percent of Americans are no better off in terms of real income than they were in 2000; many more of those in the middle of the income distribution have lost ground than have moved up the economic ladder. In the United States, this relative economic decline of the middle or working class has been associated with a number of social ills, like increasing rates of family breakdown and an opioid epidemic that in 2015 claimed about 60,000 lives. At the same time, globalization’s gains have been heavily concentrated among the well-educated cognitive elite, who tend to set broader cultural trends.

The second source of populism is political. The traditional complaint against many liberal democracies, with their numerous checks and balances, is that they tend to produce weak government. When such political systems combine with polarized or otherwise severely divided electorates, the result is often political paralysis which makes ordinary governing very difficult. India under the previous Congress Party government was a striking example of this, where infrastructure projects and needed economic reforms seemed beyond the government’s ability to deliver. Something similar occurred in Japan and Italy, which often faced gridlock in the face of long-term economic stagnation. One of the most prominent cases is the United States, whose extensive set of constitutionally mandated checks and balances produce something that I elsewhere have labeled “vetocracy”: that is, the ability of small groups to veto action on the part of majorities. This is what has produced a yearly crisis in Congress over passing a budget, something that has not been accomplished under so-called “regular order” for at least a generation, and has blocked sensible reforms of health care, immigration, and financial regulation.

This perceived weakness in the ability of democratic governments to make decisions and get things done is one of the factors that set the stage for the rise of would-be strong men who can break through the miasma of normal politics and achieve results. This was one of the reasons that India elected Narendra Modi, and why Shinzo Abe has become one of Japan’s longest-serving Prime Ministers. Putin’s rise as a strong man came against the background of the chaotic Yeltsin years. And finally, one of Donald Trump’s selling points was that, as a successful businessman, he would be able to make the U.S. government functional again.

Moreover, there have been major policy failures by elites in both America and Europe. The United States embarked on two unsuccessful wars in the Middle East in the 2000s, and then experienced the biggest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Both of these were rooted in elite decisions that had terrible consequences for ordinary citizens.  The European Union created a monetary union around the euro without a corresponding way to unify fiscal policy, leading to the Greek debt crisis. And it created the Schengen Zone and a host of other rules liberalizing the movement of people within Europe without establishing a credible mechanism for controlling the European Union’s outer borders. While laudable from an economic and moral standpoint, internal freedom of movement became problematic in the absence of such controls. This turned into a legitimacy crisis in the wake of the mass migration triggered by the Syrian civil war in 2014.

The final driver of populist nationalism is cultural and has to do with identity. Many years ago, Samuel Huntington pointed out that the most dangerous socio-economic class was not the poor and marginalized, who often lacked the time and resources to mobilize, but rather middle classes who felt they had lost ground economically and were not being adequately recognized by the political system. Such people can make economic demands, but they tend to interpret their loss of status culturally as well: they used to constitute the group that defined national identity, but were now being displaced by newcomers who were being given unfair advantages over them. They are driven by a politics of resentment against elites who benefit from the system, and they tend to scapegoat immigrants and foreigners as agents of this loss of status. In this respect, economic motivation overlaps substantially with cultural concerns, and in many ways cannot be distinguished from them. It also distinguishes northern European or American populism from that of southern Europe or Latin America. The social basis of Brexit, Trump, and Le Pen voters lies in declining middle or working classes, whereas Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Chavez in Venezuela, or the Kirchners in Argentina are more traditional left-wing parties representing the poor.

This has what has made immigration such a powerful issue in driving populist nationalism in northern and eastern Europe and the United States. Rates of immigration and refugees have in fact become very high in Europe and the United States, and concerns over rapid cultural change have motivated many voters to support populist parties and leaders even if they have felt under direct economic threat. This is reflected in the oft-stated goal of populist parties to “take back our country.”  In many ways, questions of identity—language, ethnicity, religion, and historical tradition—have come to displace economic class as the defining characteristic of contemporary politics. This may explain the decline of traditional center-left and center-right parties in Europe, which have lost ground steadily to new parties and movements built around identity issues.

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The Middle East’s Next Big Challenge: Nuclear Security

Of all the calamities that have caused mass death and destruction in the Middle East in recent years­—including civil war, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, cholera, and famine—none is more potentially threatening to human life than the danger of nuclear power.

No, we’re not talking about nuclear war. Assuming Iran keeps the promises it made to the P5+1 in 2015 and doesn’t race to the bomb after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action expires in 2025, the risk of Middle Eastern antagonists acquiring nuclear weapons and using them against each other should remain small.

However, even if the region manages to avoid mushroom clouds, it still has to grapple with an enormous emerging nuclear challenge: the proliferation of civilian nuclear energy programs that lack adequate safety and security measures. It is no wonder why the European Union just donated €20 million to develop safe nuclear energy in Iran.

Several countries in the region, including Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, see nuclear energy as a long-term solution to their dependence on fossil fuel. In the UAE, the construction of the first nuclear power plant, the Barakah, is complete and will begin operating next year. In Turkey, the construction of the Akkuyu power plant, to be built, owned, and operated by Russia’s Rosatom, is ongoing despite political hiccups. Jordan also signed a deal with Rosatom to build the country’s first nuclear power plant by 2023. Egypt’s 2015 deal with Rosatom aims to build four nuclear reactors in the next twelve years. And Saudi Arabia has an ambitious plan to build sixteen reactors by 2040.

You can’t really blame the Middle East for thinking about and investing in nuclear energy. The demand for energy in the region continues to rise. From 1971 to 2014, energy use in the Middle East and North Africa grew 402 percent, and the trend continues apace today. And while the economics of nuclear power are not as clear-cut as many regional governments might think, they can be attractive. Nuclear power can also serve as an effective means to climate change mitigation and to sea water desalination, with a process that uses the excess heat from a nuclear power plant to evaporate sea water and to condense pure water. Both of these uses of nuclear power respond to important regional needs. In short, the Middle Eastern nuclear power train has departed— years ago, in fact—and nothing seems to be stopping it.

Its benefits notwithstanding, this expansion of nuclear power generation could also mean big trouble for the Middle East because of serious questions about the existing safety, safeguards, and security of nuclear power in the region. Consider Israeli concerns about Jordan’s nuclear plans, for example. Jordan had to reallocate the plans for its first nuclear power plant from Aqaba to Azraq, east of Amman, since Aqaba is in an active seismic zone. There’s no guarantee, however, that other regional governments will be as cooperative and responsible as Jordan, especially if they have adversarial relations with their neighbors.

The 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan have shown the world that major seismic events can disable reactor cooling systems and cause nuclear meltdown and contamination. Because the Middle East lacks cooling water and has seismic activity, any accident at a nuclear power plant could result in cross-border contamination. Emergency preparedness and response should be, in principle, a shared responsibility between regional states, but no such agreement exists today in the Middle East.

Our research indicates that the Middle East is not yet ready for a nuclear renaissance. From the real risks of radiological terrorism and theft to the lack of physical protection and local nuclear security expertise, there is no shortage of reasons to be deeply concerned about the future of nuclear power in the region. According to the 2016 Nuclear Security Index, an independent assessment conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and an international panel of experts, the Middle East and North Africa region ranks poorly in safeguarding nuclear materials from theft and is highly vulnerable to nuclear sabotage.

We have found that most governments in the region that have adopted nuclear energy programs do so based on economic analyses and financing considerations, as seen in the “Build-Own-Operate” model that Turkey is seeking from Russia. Nonmonetary elements such as the regulations for radioactive waste management are treated as afterthoughts to be taken care of later, as the nuclear power plant is being constructed.

Independent regulatory frameworks and national legislation on the accounting of and control of nuclear materials either don’t exist in the region or are underdeveloped. There are also no serious national plans for human resources development and trained personnel to support these emerging nuclear energy programs.

The introduction of new nuclear operators in the region without nuclear experience could be a recipe for disaster. While most militaries in the Middle East have chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) units, they are not geared toward the protection of civilian nuclear reactors, where private security companies need to be involved for on-site security.

Another big challenge is the dual-use nature of radioactive materials. Clearly, states have sovereign rights to use these materials for peaceful purposes. Since all radioactive sources emit energy, there is no infallible technical solution to distinguish between harmless and harmful sources without additional security measures. Even run-of-the-mill items like smoke detectors, fertilizers, cat litter, and food such as bananas typically produce false alarms.

All of the issues surrounding the security of nuclear materials point to the need for a coordinated effort that reaches across international borders to improve existing detection systems and oversight mechanisms in the Middle East. Yet there is no regional institution or organizational mechanism to discuss weapons of mass destruction or other regional security concerns by comprehensive representation from all states (although there is a CBRN Centers of Excellence network, which is funded by the European Commission and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute).

Governing elites in the region could choose one of three options. One, they could rely on current mechanisms against radiological and nuclear threats under existing international regimes. Or two, they could create an indigenous, regional security mechanism. The third option is to establish a hybrid framework. The region might need its own, tailor-made arrangements, but the process could be mentored by existing regimes and international organizations.

A key element in the success of the establishment of a regional radiological and nuclear security framework would be continued dialogue through an institutionalized process. While this framework would not be legally binding, a code of conduct would recognize the standards and recommendations.

At a minimum, the steps toward a regional framework would include setting up national registers of radiological and nuclear materials, identifying the gaps in individual countries’ legislation and criminal codes, developing measures to detect radioactive materials, establishing standards, and sharing best practices for securing these materials’ sources with a view toward regional capacity building.

International partners such as the European Union and the United States would be key players in building a region-wide, adaptive and robust infrastructure to detect and secure the materials. Operational measures would include acquiring advanced neutron and gamma detectors and network-based radiation detection systems, as well as the trained personnel to use them, and building regional emergency management centers. To this end, a Middle East action plan composed of prevention, detection, preparedness, and response could be inspired by the EU CBRN Action Plans.

Next steps might include encouraging states that have not yet done so to become party to the International Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, and to commit to the IAEA’s Code of Conduct on the Safety and Security of Radioactive Sources. Nuclear newcomers should be encouraged to take steps to counter illicit trafficking through export control arrangements such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group on nuclear-related exports, the Zangger Committee on fissionable materials, and the Australia Group for chemical and biological export controls. These multinational export control regimes regulate the trade of dual-use goods and nuclear-related technologies that could be weaponized. While these organizations are not legally binding, participating states voluntarily harmonize export controls and contribute to the global nonproliferation regimes.

The Middle East’s daily crises and tragedies have prevented regional and international policymakers from anticipating and planning for security, scientific, and technological trends that will profoundly impact the stability of the region. One such trend is nuclear energy, which is guaranteed to arrive to the region in full force. Can the Middle East be trusted to manage this massive opportunity? Join the club if you’re skeptical.

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The (Near) Future of Oil Lies in Moscow’s Hands

Tomorrow, a group of the world’s most important petrostates will sit down in Vienna to discuss a plan to extend production cuts. It’s now been a year since OPEC and a coalition of non-member petrostates (Russia being the most relevant nation among them) agreed to cut their collective production in an attempt to induce a price rebound. Before those cuts were announced, Brent crude (Europe’s benchmark) was trading at roughly $47 per barrel. Today, Brent is up above $63. That counts as a qualified success, but the work, it seems, is far from over.

Oil producers enjoyed many years of $100+ per barrel pricing, and nations that rely on crude exports for the bulk of their budgetary revenue grew fat on that sustained period of high prices. But now, even after a year of deliberately ceding market share in an attempt to curtail global supply, those petrostates are still earning only a fraction of what they were before U.S. shale producers burst onto the scene. And so, all eyes are turning once again to Vienna, where these major oil-producing states are coming together to hash out a potential extension to their cuts.

In many ways, tomorrow’s talks will boil down to just two parties: the Russians and the Saudis. Together the two countries account for the lion’s share of potential oil production in this coalition, and their cooperation is essential to the success of a coordinated production cut. But much of the power in this relationship has swung Moscow’s way, for the simple reason that high oil prices now seem to be more important to Riyadh than Moscow. As the FT reports, “Saudi Arabia…is preoccupied with a corruption crackdown in the kingdom and needs stronger prices to boost revenues as it embarks on sweeping political and economic reforms led by the powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”

Saudi oil minister Khalid al-Falih implored his counterparts in the coalition’s other states this week to stay the course, saying that “the job is not yet done…to succeed in the future it is crucial we have everyone on board.”

This petrostate coalition is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the more prices rise, the more they enable American shale producers to crank up their own production, much of which is pre-drilled. By its very nature fracking is much more capable of ramping up output over a short period of time than the more conventional crude operations being run by petrostates. As a result, the more success OPEC & co. enjoy in their attempt to produce an artificial supply shortage and run up prices, the more they’ll be enabling their biggest competitor to step into the gap they’ve created in the market.

But if this group does nothing this week, and fails to extend its current production cuts, there’s no doubt that global prices will drop dramatically. As liquid as it is, the global oil market is also deeply affected by psychology, and if the world’s biggest state producers of oil walk away from Vienna without any meaningful restrictions on their ability to pump crude, traders will lose their most important (and perhaps last) reason for remaining bullish on oil.

Years from now we may well view meetings like the one being held in Austria this week as analogous to shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, and over the long-term there’s little reason to expect that petrostates can do much to induce a sustained oil price rebound. We’re living in a new oil reality that’s characterized more by abundance than scarcity, and by choice more than the lack thereof. But if we restrict ourselves to a short-term outlook, tomorrow’s meeting—however it goes—is bound to have a large effect on the global oil market, and Russia’s role will be the one to watch. Imagine that: Putin using hydrocarbons as a geopolitical lever.

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Donald Trump: America’s First Post-White President

The resilience of Donald Trump’s base of support is an enduring mystery to liberals and establishment conservatives alike. For many, race relations seem to be the key to understanding Trump’s base: Virulent racism—always latent in the body politic—has triggered a fever of resentment and anger that has overwhelmed the electorate’s capacity for reasoned and civil political discourse.

But Trumpism is not a simple retread of the white supremacy of the past. Many Trump voters supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 over white candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney. Maybe eight years of a black President was more than they could take, inspiring a racist backlash in these formerly open-minded voters. But it’s more likely that those Obama-to-Trump supporters cast a ballot for Trump despite his racism, not because of it. Racial politics can tell us something about Trump’s popularity, but, ironically, the history of American race relations suggests that Trump’s mystifyingly loyal supporters are less like the recalcitrant white supremacists of the past and more like the beleaguered and desperate African-Americans who—against their better natures and better judgment—followed demagogues such as the Nation of Islam’s overtly anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan, who rose to prominence by organizing the Million Man March in 1995, and supported charlatans such as Washington DC’s “Mayor for Life” Marion Barry, who was reelected even after serving time for smoking crack cocaine.

In their embrace of the crass, bigoted, impulsive Trump, white working-class voters resemble no group more than the poor and working-class African-Americans who flocked to support Farrakhan in the 1990s. Like Trump, Farrakhan was a vulgar embarrassment to the mainstream: His rise to a leading role in black politics baffled and dismayed responsible political leaders, who initially shunned him for his sexism, corruption, and anti-Semitism. Farrakhan was, like Trump, a skillful demagogue who exploited the frustration of people who had been treated with contempt by the powerful and privileged. Like Trump, Farrakhan spoke in the unrefined cadence and style of the people and, like Trump, he traded in slanders and conspiracy theories that were alloyed with just enough truth to make them plausible to an uneducated and deeply suspicious audience. Farrakhan and Trump both spoke of a return to traditional values and old hierarchies—a message that resonated in communities plagued by joblessness, nihilism, addiction, and crime. Although many mainstream black politicians and opinion leaders shunned the Million Man March because of its defining sexism and the outspoken anti-Semitism of its organizer (#NeverFarrakhan!), many others joined in, gambling that they could harness the momentum of a reckless and self-serving bigot and turn it to their own purposes. Predictably the egotistical Farrakhan insisted that he himself was larger than the movement he had galvanized: “Today, whether you like it or not, God brought the idea . . . through me.” Similarly, after his list of exaggerated crises facing the nation, Trump declared at the Republican National Convention: “I am your voice. . . . I alone can fix it.”

Of course, unlike Farrakhan’s admirers, Trump’s hard-core supporters are white—members of a privileged class who have no need of the petty politics of ressentiment. Or are they? It’s now conventional wisdom in academia to insist that race is a “social construction.” A prominent account of race and racism describes a process of “racial formation” in which racial groups are constantly recreated through a host of social interactions and political decisions. Racial groups change over time—old races gradually atrophy and die and new ones slowly emerge to take their place: In the 18th century, Pennsylvania’s Germans (the Pennsylvania Dutch or Deutsche) were considered a “swarthy” distinct race; according to historian Noel Ignatiev, the Irish “became white” only in the late 19th century; fair-skinned Pakistanis are “black” in the United Kingdom; it’s not clear whether recent immigrants to the United States from Ethiopia or Ghana count as “African-American.” Like the 19th-century Irish, today some dark-skinned people are becoming more and more “white” in terms of privilege and socialization (think of South Asians in Silicon Valley). At the same time—and this is key to understanding Trump’s base—some whites are being pushed out of the privileged caste to which their parents belonged. The social and cultural divisions that separate gilded Wall Street from rust-belt Main Street and the Ivy League from the Appalachians are as great as those that separate Park Avenue from Harlem or Chevy Chase from inner city Baltimore.

The current pathologies of predominantly white rural and rust-belt communities resemble those of the predominantly black inner city communities that embraced Farrakhan: Job opportunities for whites without a college education are only slightly rosier than for similarly uneducated blacks, drug addiction in poor white communities is now endemic, the family structure is in collapse, out of wedlock births are on the rise (even as they are in decline among poor blacks), and aimless young people have turned to gangs and senseless violence. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family, which—controversially but by and large accurately—described the cultural decay of black inner-city communities in 1965 could be applied, almost word for word, to rural and rust-belt white communities in 2016.

As a consequence, whites left behind by the new high-tech economy and globalization are now treated by white elites with the kind of contempt once reserved for African-Americans. Mainstream conservatives, appalled at Trump’s success, derided his supporters as ignorant, belittling their complaints and attributing their marginalization and poverty to laziness, moral failure and lack of initiative. For instance, in the National Review, Kevin Williamson describes rust-belt and rural whites in terms historically reserved for inner-city blacks:

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or . . . West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy . . . the truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that . . . [t]he white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.

For their part, liberal elites attacked them as bigots and sexists—Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” These moralistic condemnations of troubled communities, while callous, contain some truth: Economic decline and lack of hope breed moral decay, nihilism, and social dysfunction. Struggling white rust-belt and rural communities are now trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty long associated with black ghettoes.

Viewed in this light, the reassertion of white racism that characterized Trump’s campaign looks like a pathetic act of desperation, a final, frantic bid to retain superordinate racial status in the face of cultural and economic forces that are making skin color and ancestry less and less relevant, just as black anti-Semitism seeks easy advantage by exploiting the vulnerability of other victims of prejudice. The real difference, of course, between Trump and Farrakhan is simply the size of their constituencies. Farrakhan’s faux populism got him on stage in front of the largest crowd up to then to march on Washington DC. Trump’s got him inside the Oval Office.

These cross-racial similarities suggest one hopeful observation and one worrisome one. There is reason to hope that some of the ugly bigotry on display since Trump’s election may be less than skin deep. Most members of Farrakhan’s audience during the Million Man March were not anti-Semites: They were desperate people who, neglected by mainstream institutions, went looking for salvation in the wrong place. Similarly, underlying the self-destructive ressentiment of many Trump voters is a valid anxiety: The American economy is leaving millions of them behind, and as they sink into poverty and desperation, they face an indifference and contempt remarkably similar to that long endured by poor racial minorities. This leads to the worry. The response of Trump’s base to its disfavored status also looks familiar to those who have observed poor black communities since the late 1960s: a belligerent and defensive assertion of racial and cultural pride which, almost inevitably, takes the form of an exaggeration of their most dysfunctional cultural traits. As in the case of inner city African-Americans, Trump’s supporters now see crude language, loud and obnoxious behavior, vulgar attire, blatant sexism, and bigotry as central to their identity. This makes their chances for success in the cosmopolitan mainstream slim and threatens to reinforce the destructive tribalism that increasingly defines our politics.

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