Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 12

The Double Life of Aaron Hernandez

Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez

Directed by Geno McDermott

2020, Netflix, 3 episodes, 202 minutes

In the moments before I began viewing Netflix’s three-part docu-series, Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, my behavior was likely similar to that of millions of other people, in that I sussed out reaction to the program online.

Something trends on a platform like Twitter, we tap the screen, we evaluate the gist, and I, personally, frequently feel unsettled, the early reaction to this program being a case in point. I read breathless reports from those who had stayed up late, hitting the refresh button continuously on their devices, so they could get their fix about what motivated a murderer—one living a double life, no less—as quickly as possible when the series dropped. “You need to watch this at night, the daytime does not set the right mood,” advised these most enthusiastic viewers—a tip we might have once reserved for a Bela Lugosi flick or a slasher movie.

We live in a world where our consumption habits so often center on what others are also experiencing. We go where what is trending takes us, which has less to do with what we, left on our own, might find most rewarding and edifying. Simultaneously we all sing a frenzied torch song of individuality, even as we shed identity, morphing into a larger, formless whole. In the internet age, that is, many of us lead double lives ourselves—with one persona we attempt to pass off as real to the world, and another that represents who we actually are in our personal lives.

Aaron Hernandez—star NFL player by day, closeted murderer by night—carried this logic to its brutal extremes. But to see Killer Inside as just another film about a uniquely vicious individual is to ignore what makes it truly unsettling. In showing how Hernandez could get away with his double life for so long, while others looked the other way, Killer Inside is less a portrait of a monster than a study of the human capacity for self-deception and moral passivity.

As a New Englander and die-hard Patriots fan, I watched the entirety of Aaron Hernandez’s career up close. As a player, he was mercurial, and defenses struggled to mitigate his versatility. He could line up as a tight end, his natural position, or as a slot receiver—he was perhaps the game’s ultimate hybrid player. He hailed from Connecticut, which is unusual for a player of his caliber, and, according to the documentary, a bad thing for Hernandez in that his eventual return to New England following his college career at the University of Florida meant he was more likely to fall prey to various hometown hangers-on.

Director Geno McDermott builds his film—which is what the three parts essentially comprise—via a collage approach, as is standard with the documentary style. Establishing shots—outside, for instance, Foxborough’s Gillette Stadium or Hernandez’s nearby McMansion—are intercut with game footage, grainy high school highlight reel tape, and court footage, with cutaways to interviews with beat writers, legal experts, and Hernandez’s ex-teammates, including his high school quarterback with whom he had a sexual relationship. But the real driver of the film is its sound—most notably the phone tapes McDermott managed to get access to in which Hernandez speaks to his mother, his fiancée, his toddler, an aunt dying of breast cancer who went to jail over her refusal to give up information on her nephew, even his personal assistant and his marketing guy. (The jokes with said marketing guy will make your stomach crawl.)

As for the criminal aspect of Hernandez’s double life, it was simple enough: His temper was such that, feeling he’d been disrespected, no matter the trifle—a spilled drink, in one instance—he’d lash out with violence. He empties bullets into a car while in Florida, executes semi-pro Boston native Odin Lloyd not far from his home, and seems perpetually on the edge of explosion when imagining a slight. It was the Lloyd murder for which he was convicted and jailed. But what is fascinating about many of the phone calls is how mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and sensitive Hernandez comes across. He doesn’t sound like a mastermind who can dupe people when need be; he’s not a conman, though the results are the same (and bloodier). He sounds all too human: clearly hurt when he talks to his estranged mother, wrenched into pieces when his fiancée hangs up on him because she cannot deal with what her own life has become.

Anyone watching the film will wonder why she stuck with him, all the more so considering that her sister was dating Lloyd (which sounds like a plot detail out of an opera). The heart wants what the heart wants, naturally, and a cynic will also cite money. But this is undoubtedly an articulate, intelligent woman. There may be a streak of Lady Macbeth in her, but we are never really sure. In fact, we are not sure, from moment to moment, that these are bad people, including Hernandez, until we remind ourselves, “Right, he killed people,” and “She had no problem standing by a killer.”

To what degree are we this way? To a pronounced one, I would say. We retrograde morally through passivity, by what we go along with. Under cover of darkness, as if cocooned in a protective world, the conscience part of Hernandez’s brain seems to have vacated its living quarters within Hernandez the man. It’s as though Hernandez had a burner account of a life to go along with his regular, standard-issue one.

Themes meant to double as an indictment of an age are legion in productions of this scope, and what we are to understand here is that Hernandez was a marionette of machismo. Societal expectations of masculinity precluded him from being true to his natural sexual self, while the NFL’s Satanic pact with the business of violence helped to make him a monster. In other words, the film nails societal truths, in one way, but not the way it purports to, because the theme it in fact arrives at is the subsuming theme of our age: the pandemic of shirking culpability.

As an elite physical talent, there was not a team in America that would have renounced the football services of Aaron Hernandez because of his alleged homosexuality or proclivity to violence. The culture of football among teammates is akin to a band of brothers; if you can play, if you can help the greater good, you are welcomed into the fold. This is the same reason that Hernandez, despite enough red flags to send a small community of bulls charging, was afforded his various opportunities, first in college, then the pros. The film argues that the NFL has the appeal it does because of our collective love of violence, but this is hogwash; even with our souped-up, high-def picture resolutions on our giant TVs, violence in football is rarely discernible to the naked eye on television. Violence, rather, is internalized, in the form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which hardened various lobes of Hernandez’s brain, as we learn near the end of the series. (Helmet-to-helmet hits have since been legislated out of the league, and now happen accidentally more often than not.)

People love the NFL not because of violence, but because in a society where so much happens for the wrong reasons that have nothing to do with reality, ability, or justice, the NFL is a meritocracy.

If you are good enough, you’ll have your shot, you won’t be buried as a third-stringer, you won’t fail to make a team, you won’t fail to earn your millions. Meritocracies create surprises, because they are the true free market system, in which the best among us get to reap our rewards; this makes success feel attainable, which ups competition, effort, and the time invested in becoming the best. Many of us wish our lives were centered around notions of merit, and even those who do not recognize how interesting a merit-based competition can be. Thus, the NFL is a form of escapism.

And we are drawn to productions like Killer Inside because we want to see how someone else pulls off their version—their more dramatically extreme version—of the double life. What techniques do they use? How do they fool people? And, perhaps more crucially, “Is there a way out?” The filmmakers don’t need to do anything more to humanize Hernandez than to show him having quiet, human moments familiar to everyone. He misses his family in prison, he craves physical intimacy. Not much is made of prison lovers, which is surprising, given our cultural predilection for the garish. By the time Hernandez is in prison, we know all about his sexuality, but that isn’t the point. The point is the fear of being who one really is. Many of us know that fear, and it need have nothing to do with sexual preference.

There is a moment in the film when Patriots owner Robert Kraft testifies in court. The camera catches Hernandez looking over his shoulder a half dozen times, furtively, sheepishly, in the direction of the door through which Kraft will be entering. Hernandez put a man on his knees and executed him (not to mention another victim he shot in the head, who survived), but there is something recognizably human in those looks.

They are the looks of conscience, the same looks I imagine an internet troll would have upon his or her face after being confronted with their behavior. Those suggestions to watch this film at night make a fair amount of sense, but not because Hernandez is a character straight out of a horror picture. As people, we trend to the covert, being creatures who lodge a lot of what we are in the shadows, hoping those shadows never experience the beam of a flashlight. This is but another journey into someone else’s darker shadows. Might as well have the right setting for our latest binge, one that this film reminds us isn’t just our home away from home—it’s fast becoming our prime residence.

The post The Double Life of Aaron Hernandez appeared first on The American Interest.

The Real Irishman

In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth

Jack Goldsmith

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, 368 pp., $28.00

In In Hoffa’s Shadow, Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School, tells the flabbergasting story of his relationship with his father—actually, his stepfather—who was a close associate of various mobsters and of Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, and who was long believed by law enforcement to have been involved in Hoffa’s murder and disappearance in 1975.

Goldsmith begins his narrative with his work in the Justice Department after 9/11, serving as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the pivotal unit that serves as counsel to the U.S. government as a whole, deciding what is lawful for the government to do and what is not. A critical task that fell to Goldsmith was reviewing decisions taken by his OLC predecessor, which had authorized warrantless mass surveillance and torture. Goldsmith found that the legal reasoning in these decisions was seriously flawed and he set out to withdraw them, with the effect of terminating programs that the Bush Administration believed were vital to the successful prosecution of the war on terror. Goldsmith told the story of his epic bureaucratic battles in a previous book, The Terror Presidency (which I reviewed in Commentary in 2008 when it came out). In Hoffa’s Shadow adds an entirely new and deeply personal universe to the story told in that volume.

It was in the course of reviewing the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program that Goldsmith, “incredulous,” came upon an obscure Supreme Court decision, O’Brien v. United States. The O’Brien in question was Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, his stepfather, who had been convicted of a minor theft—he stole a statue of St. Theresa from a U.S. customs warehouse—but had been the target of illicit FBI surveillance in the early 1960s, and whose conviction was later vacated by the Supreme Court. The discovery of this case set in motion a chain of thoughts and feelings that led Goldsmith to retrace his own life path.

O’Brien had come into Goldsmith’s life in 1975 when he was 12 years old, when his mother, a woman of “fragile mental health,” married him, her third husband, just weeks before Hoffa’s disappearance. Whatever his mobster affiliations, Chuckie had extraordinary personal qualities, and he “smothered” young Jack with love. “All I knew,” recollects Goldsmith, “was that a gregarious brown-eyed man with a potbelly, long dark sideburns, an inviting smile, and the biggest forearms I had ever seen had suddenly glommed on to me with love and attention.” Goldsmith came to idolize his new father, calling him a “large, stable, affectionate presence in my life,” and eventually took his name, becoming Jack O’Brien. “Chuckie was my third father,” writes Goldsmith, “and my best.”

Chuckie took me to professional sports events, where he seemed to know the players and coaches and, despite his perpetual money problems, always had great seats. He drove me to faraway comic bookstores so I could build up my fledgling collection. He gave me a car at age sixteen (a silver Mercury Zephyr), and rushed to the scene and wasn’t angry when I crashed it a few months later. And he was heavily involved in my high school sports life. He went to all my football and baseball games. He knew and hung out with my coaches. And he was famous among my teammates for his night-before-a-game feasts that featured thickly sliced prime rib and piles of his specialty, veal Milanese.

But as Goldsmith matured, hero worship turned into something else. In the middle of his junior year in high school, Chuckie, under microscopic scrutiny by law enforcement, was convicted and sent to prison on two minor charges, including inflating his income on a bank loan application. The experience left Jack “devastated.” By the time Goldsmith entered college, he began reading about Hoffa’s disappearance and the Mafia, including about figures in it that he had come to know personally through his relationship with Chuckie. Not only did he begin to question Chuckie’s associations, he became personally embarrassed by his uncouth and uneducated manner. “I soon began to show open disrespect to the man I once idolized,” writes Goldsmith.

It did not help that in going to law school and then embarking on a legal career, Goldsmith feared (not without reason) that Chuckie’s ties to the murdered Hoffa and the Mafia might prove to be an impediment to professional success. The distancing continued and culminated in an act of callous cruelty. Jack O’Brien turned his surname back to Goldsmith, wounding his stepfather to the quick. He then severed relations with him, having almost nothing to do with him for some 20 years.

The experience of having children of his own awakened in Jack a feeling of profound remorse about his treatment of the man he had loved as a boy. After leaving the Justice Department in 2004, Goldsmith managed to patch things up with Chuckie. Engaging in intense conversations with his now elderly stepfather about his past, Goldsmith set out to find out the truth about Hoffa’s disappearance, not only relentlessly probing the reluctant Chuckie, but also scouring all available (and many hitherto unavailable) documents and interviewing every living player involved in the case, including the FBI agents who failed to solve it.

Although Goldsmith does not crack the riddle of one of America’s greatest unsolved murders, he does illuminate in riveting detail the circumstances surrounding it. He goes a great distance to refuting the most common theory: that Chuckie had a hand in it. (Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is the most recent rendition of the incident.) Along the way, readers are given an education in the uses and abuses of the laws governing surveillance, in the intricate relationship between organized crime and the Teamsters Union, a portrait of Hoffa himself, and an account of the cruelty of the U.S. government in pursuing Chuckie, and of refusing to clear him of suspicion, even when the evidence became clear that he was uninvolved.

The most affecting part of the volume is Goldsmith’s checkered portrait of his stepfather, to whom the book is dedicated (and who, sadly, passed away yesterday, February 13, 2020). One feels Goldsmith’s pangs of regret about his own past conduct and his deep love for the man who adopted him. But at the same time, the book is unsparing in showing Chuckie’s outsized warts.

Thus, Chuckie is painted as a chronic liar, an “unreliable chronicler,” given to constant evasions and striving to adhere to the never-tell ethos of the mob: “The more Chuckie and I talked, the more I came to understand that his adversarial relationship with the truth was influenced by his commitment to Omertà, the Sicilian code of silence that he embraced at a young age.” Chuckie was also professionally incompetent. Though aspiring to play a bigger role in the Teamsters union, Hoffa never gave him the opportunity, in no small measure because Chuckie was seen by his Teamster associates as buffoonishly inept.

As Goldsmith neared completion of his volume, he gave the unpublished manuscript to Chuckie to read and to comment upon, even as it contained, in no small part, an unflattering portrait of the man. “I prayed,” writes Goldsmith, “that he would see the book as an act of love. I also hoped that he would think I portrayed him fairly and honorably, and would appreciate my efforts to clear his name. But I worried, and told him, that he might not like some things in the manuscript.”

“I read every word. You wrote a great book,” was Chuckie’s comment about the book. Goldsmith calls this a “noble lie,” writing, in one of the more poignant passages in a volume laden with powerfully understated emotion, “I doubt that Chuckie read every word. I saw him frown and then scowl two days earlier at about the place in the book where I described how others viewed him in the Teamsters. He barely dipped into the manuscript after that—at least when I was watching. I wonder if he even looked at the last half.”

Causing yet more pain to the man he loved, Goldsmith reveals himself to be a ruthless seeker and teller of the truth, which includes telling uncomfortable truths, including about himself and his past conduct. It is a deeply admirable quality that shines throughout the book, but the writerly courage on display inevitably exacts a human cost at the most personal level.

In Hoffa’s Shadow comes adorned with blurbs that extol it in extravagant terms. Amy Chua calls the book “a masterpiece and a page-turner. I couldn’t put it down. Brilliant, suspenseful, and deeply moving, it offers a personal view of one of the greatest unsolved crimes in American history.” Bill Buford writes that it is “A thrilling unputdownable story that takes on big subjects—injustice, love, loss, truth, power, murder—and addresses them in sentences of beauty and clarity informed by deep thought and feeling.”

I would subtract not a word from these glowing encomiums and add only that Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency, a tale of fearlessness in public service, was one of the very best non-fiction books I read in the first decade of this century. In Hoffa’s Shadow, a display of courage of a very different kind, is the single best non-fiction book I’ve read from the century’s second decade. Goldsmith has added a remarkable literary-autobiographical-historical achievement to his name.

The post The Real Irishman appeared first on The American Interest.

China Is Using You

On February 8, Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo warned the nation’s Governors that they are targets of an ambitious “subnational” influence agenda by the People’s Republic of China. Each of them, he said, had been evaluated by a Chinese government-linked think tank as “‘friendly,’ ‘hardline,’ or ‘ambiguous’” in order to advance China’s interests in matters including energy, trade, and Taiwan—and to sow divisions between the states and the Federal government. Even more uncomfortable for the Governors who were gathered at the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, Pompeo noted that the NGA itself had partnered with one of China’s top influence organizations, the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries in an investment summit held last year in Kentucky.

Most countries seek to polish their image and cultivate goodwill, conducting cultural exchanges, promoting tourism, and dispensing foreign aid. However, China’s influence activities are quantitatively and qualitatively different. Over the past few years, academic, government, and news reports have catalogued staggering efforts by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to project its influence into American society—at universities and think tanks, newspapers, radio and television, business, as well as national, state, and local governments.

As General Secretary Xi Jinping has put a priority on influence efforts, the role of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) has expanded. However, Americans who encounter the CPAFFC through “people-to-people” exchanges and delegations may not be fully aware of its character. From the PRC’s perspective, exchanges of the type carried out by the CPAFFC have “always been viewed as a practical political tool by Beijing,” according to a Hoover Institution report, “and all of China’s ‘exchange’ organizations have been assigned political missions.” For the PRC, Anne-Marie Brady writes in her book, Making the Foreign Serve China, the concept of foreign affairs goes beyond state-to-state relations to encompass “all matters related to foreigners and foreign things in China and abroad.” Furthermore, “‘people’s diplomacy’ does not mean ordinary Chinese citizens can become diplomats,” let alone promote relations and civic ties outside the Party’s control, “rather that the government makes use of a wide range of officially non-official contacts with other countries to expand its influence.”

In the service of the PRC’s foreign affairs, terms like “people,” “friendship,” “foreign,” and even “China” mean dramatically different things than they do in the United States. According to Laura Rosenberger and John Garnaut, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “patiently works to collapse the categories of ‘Chinese Communist Party’, ‘China,’ and ‘the Chinese people’ into a single organic whole—so that critics of the party’s activities can be readily caricatured and attacked as anti-Chinese or anti-China.” This construct had a profound impact on policy and discourse in the United States, undermining those who advocate greater support for Taiwan policy or attention to the PRC’s human rights abuses and Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Perhaps most important, “friendship,” in Chinese Communist parlance, “has the meaning of a strategic relationship; it does not have the meaning of good or intimate personal relations,” according to Brady. Rather, “friendship terminology is a means to neutralize opposition psychologically and to reorder reality.” China’s approach to its foreign affairs, and indeed to American private citizens, presents a challenge to American officials trying to combat PRC influence in our own society. Americans may not “understand the degree to which lines that we all revere and cherish in this country are blurred, if not entirely eliminated, in China,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2019.

Nor do Americans fully understand that, simply by participating in such exchanges or delegations sponsored by the CPAFFC, they unwittingly serve China’s propaganda interests. The CPAFFC’s website showcases visits by foreign officials, academics, and civic leaders. These show American visitors paying respect to China through visits and presentation of gifts. For a Chinese consumer of these posts, writes Peter Mattis, Western politicians “become propaganda fodder.” Official media coverage of events like the Governors’ investment summit serves to “broadcast back into China the message that Western politicians care about liberalism at home, but not for the Chinese people.”

For their part, America’s state and local officials may see the same interactions as valuable. Their constituents expect them to promote trade and investment. Some represent populations larger than many foreign countries. America’s Governors and Mayors sometimes consider themselves better able to serve their citizens than the Federal government. “We’re the level of government closest to the majority of the world’s people,” New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg told a conference on climate issues. “We’re directly responsible for their well-being and their futures. So, while nations talk but too often drag their heels, cities act.”

Unfettered by responsibilities for national security and foreign policy, they may be tempted to take advantage of tensions between the United States and China. At a Brookings Institution discussion in July 2019, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon said, “the good news about what’s happening nationally,” referring to the Trump Administration’s trade battles with China, is “it’s an opportunity for the states.” This message both shapes constituents’ attitudes about China and helps Beijing advance concrete goals. “The PRC is targeting states, trying to integrate their economies as closely as possible with China’s to make them dependent on the Chinese economy,” according to a U.S. government official, “so that the states have all their eggs in one basket.” Beijing is especially focused on states with energy resources, such as Alaska, and agricultural states hurt by tariffs, such as Iowa. In 2018, the China Daily bought an advertising supplement in the Des Moines Register that presented the PRC and the state as allied in the bilateral trade dispute.

One of the PRC’s top priorities in its subnational agenda is undermining support for Taiwan. In his speech, Pompeo cited a letter from the top Chinese diplomat in New York City that asked the speaker of a state legislature to

avoid engaging in any official contact with Taiwan, including sending congratulatory messages to the electeds [sic], introducing bills and proclamations for the election, sending officials and representatives to attend the inauguration ceremony, and inviting officials in Taiwan to visit the United States.

Chinese leaders hope that in a crisis, American public opinion will not support the use of force in defending Taiwan. China may also be taking the long view—cultivating local and state officials that may one day have a role in national policy toward China and Taiwan.

China’s long-term agenda also includes asserting equivalence between democracy and the PRC’s communist system as part of its challenge to the United States for global leadership. To hear some Governors, it is succeeding. At the NGA’s investment summit last year, Governor Matt Bevin of Kentucky presented the U.S.-China relationship this way:

When one side wins, the other side wins. When China is strong, it is good for America. When America is strong, it is good for China. . . . Look how much has happened in 40 years. We have made tremendous, tremendous progress.

Even after leaving office, Governors may reinforce these messages. Former Missouri Governor Bob Holden, CEO and chairman of the United States Heartland China Association, which cooperates with the CPAFFC, also spoke at the Brookings Institution event last year. “What we’ve got to do is find the good people in both cultures, build those relationships, and then the rest will take care of itself because the politics will react to what the people want done long term,” said Holden. “[M]ake no mistake about it, there are scoundrels, so to speak, in China; sadly, there’s also scoundrels in our own culture.” The issue of course is not whether “good people” exist in the PRC, but that citizens ruled by a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship do not elect their government; on the contrary, criticism of the Party can be met with punishment including prison and torture.

Despite Pompeo’s clear message at the NGA meeting, the Governors could be forgiven for being confused. From the outset of the United States-PRC relationship, Washington encouraged engagement with China. In 1972, Washington and Beijing signed the Shanghai Communiqué, the first of three joint statements that have guided as well as constrained U.S. policy. The 1972 communique is famous for signaling eventual normalization of relations and the “One China” language that has circumscribed America’s relationship with democratic Taiwan. It also committed both countries to carrying out “people-to-people contacts and exchanges.” At the time, Washington had not yet broken ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing; these activities seemed like a useful and necessary way to develop an unofficial relationship.

Like many aspects of China policy set out in the 1970s, this approach to the PRC has not been updated. In fact, “people-to-people” ties conducted with influence organizations like the CPAFFC were given a boost under the Obama Administration, propelled in part by Ambassador to Beijing Jon Huntsman, who had promoted them as Governor of Utah. If he hasn’t already, Secretary Pompeo should rescind the memorandum of understanding signed by his predecessor Hillary Clinton in 2011 to promote Governors’ Forums and the endorsement by President Obama and General Secretary Xi of state-provincial legislative exchanges, conducted by the CPAFFC, in 2015.

That is something Secretary Pompeo can easily do to signal that exchanges and delegations carried out by groups like the CPAFFC no longer have Washington’s imprimatur. Otherwise, Pompeo and his colleagues at the Federal level have to tread lightly, given the way America’s system works. But Governors and other state and local officials should not be shy about asking for the advice they need to resist the massive Chinese effort to build influence and sow division inside America’s borders.

The post China Is Using You appeared first on The American Interest.

Pompeo to Governors: China Is Using You

On February 8, Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo warned the nation’s Governors that they are targets of an ambitious “subnational” influence agenda by the People’s Republic of China. Each of them, he said, had been evaluated by a Chinese government-linked think tank as “‘friendly,’ ‘hardline,’ or ‘ambiguous’” in order to advance China’s interests in matters including energy, trade, and Taiwan—and to sow divisions between the states and the Federal government. Even more uncomfortable for the Governors who were gathered at the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, Pompeo noted that the NGA itself had partnered with one of China’s top influence organizations, the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries in an investment summit held last year in Kentucky.

Most countries seek to polish their image and cultivate goodwill, conducting cultural exchanges, promoting tourism, and dispensing foreign aid. However, China’s influence activities are quantitatively and qualitatively different. Over the past few years, academic, government, and news reports have catalogued staggering efforts by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to project its influence into American society—at universities and think tanks, newspapers, radio and television, business, as well as national, state, and local governments.

As General Secretary Xi Jinping has put a priority on influence efforts, the role of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) has expanded. However, Americans who encounter the CPAFFC through “people-to-people” exchanges and delegations may not be fully aware of its character. From the PRC’s perspective, exchanges of the type carried out by the CPAFFC have “always been viewed as a practical political tool by Beijing,” according to a Hoover Institution report, “and all of China’s ‘exchange’ organizations have been assigned political missions.” For the PRC, Anne-Marie Brady writes in her book, Making the Foreign Serve China, the concept of foreign affairs goes beyond state-to-state relations to encompass “all matters related to foreigners and foreign things in China and abroad.” Furthermore, “‘people’s diplomacy’ does not mean ordinary Chinese citizens can become diplomats,” let alone promote relations and civic ties outside the Party’s control, “rather that the government makes use of a wide range of officially non-official contacts with other countries to expand its influence.”

In the service of the PRC’s foreign affairs, terms like “people,” “friendship,” “foreign,” and even “China” mean dramatically different things than they do in the United States. According to Laura Rosenberger and John Garnaut, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “patiently works to collapse the categories of ‘Chinese Communist Party’, ‘China,’ and ‘the Chinese people’ into a single organic whole—so that critics of the party’s activities can be readily caricatured and attacked as anti-Chinese or anti-China.” This construct had a profound impact on policy and discourse in the United States, undermining those who advocate greater support for Taiwan policy or attention to the PRC’s human rights abuses and Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Perhaps most important, “friendship,” in Chinese Communist parlance, “has the meaning of a strategic relationship; it does not have the meaning of good or intimate personal relations,” according to Brady. Rather, “friendship terminology is a means to neutralize opposition psychologically and to reorder reality.” China’s approach to its foreign affairs, and indeed to American private citizens, presents a challenge to American officials trying to combat PRC influence in our own society. Americans may not “understand the degree to which lines that we all revere and cherish in this country are blurred, if not entirely eliminated, in China,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2019.

Nor do Americans fully understand that, simply by participating in such exchanges or delegations sponsored by the CPAFFC, they unwittingly serve China’s propaganda interests. The CPAFFC’s website showcases visits by foreign officials, academics, and civic leaders. These show American visitors paying respect to China through visits and presentation of gifts. For a Chinese consumer of these posts, writes Peter Mattis, Western politicians “become propaganda fodder.” Official media coverage of events like the Governors’ investment summit serves to “broadcast back into China the message that Western politicians care about liberalism at home, but not for the Chinese people.”

For their part, America’s state and local officials may see the same interactions as valuable. Their constituents expect them to promote trade and investment. Some represent populations larger than many foreign countries. America’s Governors and Mayors sometimes consider themselves better able to serve their citizens than the Federal government. “We’re the level of government closest to the majority of the world’s people,” New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg told a conference on climate issues. “We’re directly responsible for their well-being and their futures. So, while nations talk but too often drag their heels, cities act.”

Unfettered by responsibilities for national security and foreign policy, they may be tempted to take advantage of tensions between the United States and China. At a Brookings Institution discussion in July 2019, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon said, “the good news about what’s happening nationally,” referring to the Trump Administration’s trade battles with China, is “it’s an opportunity for the states.” This message both shapes constituents’ attitudes about China and helps Beijing advance concrete goals. “The PRC is targeting states, trying to integrate their economies as closely as possible with China’s to make them dependent on the Chinese economy,” according to a U.S. government official, “so that the states have all their eggs in one basket.” Beijing is especially focused on states with energy resources, such as Alaska, and agricultural states hurt by tariffs, such as Iowa. In 2018, the China Daily bought an advertising supplement in the Des Moines Register that presented the PRC and the state as allied in the bilateral trade dispute.

One of the PRC’s top priorities in its subnational agenda is undermining support for Taiwan. In his speech, Pompeo cited a letter from the top Chinese diplomat in New York City that asked the speaker of a state legislature to

avoid engaging in any official contact with Taiwan, including sending congratulatory messages to the electeds [sic], introducing bills and proclamations for the election, sending officials and representatives to attend the inauguration ceremony, and inviting officials in Taiwan to visit the United States.

Chinese leaders hope that in a crisis, American public opinion will not support the use of force in defending Taiwan. China may also be taking the long view—cultivating local and state officials that may one day have a role in national policy toward China and Taiwan.

China’s long-term agenda also includes asserting equivalence between democracy and the PRC’s communist system as part of its challenge to the United States for global leadership. To hear some Governors, it is succeeding. At the NGA’s investment summit last year, Governor Matt Bevin of Kentucky presented the U.S.-China relationship this way:

When one side wins, the other side wins. When China is strong, it is good for America. When America is strong, it is good for China. . . . Look how much has happened in 40 years. We have made tremendous, tremendous progress.

Even after leaving office, Governors may reinforce these messages. Former Missouri Governor Bob Holden, CEO and chairman of the United States Heartland China Association, which cooperates with the CPAFFC, also spoke at the Brookings Institution event last year. “What we’ve got to do is find the good people in both cultures, build those relationships, and then the rest will take care of itself because the politics will react to what the people want done long term,” said Holden. “[M]ake no mistake about it, there are scoundrels, so to speak, in China; sadly, there’s also scoundrels in our own culture.” The issue of course is not whether “good people” exist in the PRC, but that citizens ruled by a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship do not elect their government; on the contrary, criticism of the Party can be met with punishment including prison and torture.

Despite Pompeo’s clear message at the NGA meeting, the Governors could be forgiven for being confused. From the outset of the United States-PRC relationship, Washington encouraged engagement with China. In 1972, Washington and Beijing signed the Shanghai Communiqué, the first of three joint statements that have guided as well as constrained U.S. policy. The 1972 communique is famous for signaling eventual normalization of relations and the “One China” language that has circumscribed America’s relationship with democratic Taiwan. It also committed both countries to carrying out “people-to-people contacts and exchanges.” At the time, Washington had not yet broken ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing; these activities seemed like a useful and necessary way to develop an unofficial relationship.

Like many aspects of China policy set out in the 1970s, this approach to the PRC has not been updated. In fact, “people-to-people” ties conducted with influence organizations like the CPAFFC were given a boost under the Obama Administration, propelled in part by Ambassador to Beijing Jon Huntsman, who had promoted them as Governor of Utah. If he hasn’t already, Secretary Pompeo should rescind the memorandum of understanding signed by his predecessor in 2011 to promote Governors’ Forums and the endorsement by President Obama and General Secretary Xi of state-provincial legislative exchanges, conducted by the CPAFFC, in 2015.

That is something Secretary Pompeo can easily do to signal that exchanges and delegations carried out by groups like the CPAFFC no longer have Washington’s imprimatur. Otherwise, Pompeo and his colleagues at the Federal level have to tread lightly, given the way America’s system works. But Governors and other state and local officials should not be shy about asking for the advice they need to resist the massive Chinese effort to build influence and sow division inside America’s borders.

The post Pompeo to Governors: China Is Using You appeared first on The American Interest.

Sifting Through the Wreckage

It is no big revelation to recognize that the churning dysfunctions of American politics are bound to affect American foreign and national security policies, and with them the rest of the world in one way or another. This is because the United States is no ordinary country. It is very big, very wealthy, very powerful, and very attention-arresting as a model of public life—whether its core principles of Enlightenment-born liberalism, its tendency to anti-hierarchical egalitarianism, its secularism-nested multiculturalist reality, or all of the above as a package deal. These characteristics are indelible and irrepressible ideological lightning rods, taken separately or especially together—as aspirational to some, mortal threats to others. No one, however, knows how to ignore them.

As important, America’s imprimatur on the current global order, or what still passes for it, has been second-to-none since the end of World War II. It has not only affected nearly every aspect of global security through its grand strategy of providing common security goods and suppressing both regional security competitions and arms races, it has also been responsible as primus inter pares for shaping the global commercial/trading system and influencing, for better and probably also otherwise, the world’s emerging globe-spanning cultural mélange. The U.S. record over the past 75 years is hardly perfect, but by historical measure—history being Hegel’s “butcher’s block”—it’s arguably not that bad.

The great drama of Donald Trump’s impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and his summary acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate affects all of this, both by way of prospective policy outputs (or the lack thereof) and by means of images and optics. It’s not the only causal factor pressing on the future, and how significant an inflection point it turns out to be in its own right is for the fickle future to determine. To say that the matter is both complex and capacious, and therefore hard to predict, is an understatement—sort of like describing a California redwood as “kind of large.” Even so, several broad implications can already be discerned.

The beginning of wisdom here is to understand that nearly everyone involved in the impeachment affair and its several neuralgic outcroppings—the Republican and Democratic Parties, the mainstream media, the FBI, the Justice Department, and one could go on—has behaved badly. In some cases, very badly.

Republican Senators, without notable exception, knew privately that President Trump had done unconscionably bad things. Some even said so publicly. Most understood that a Senate impeachment trial is a political and not a strictly legal proceeding, as the Founders intended, and that “high crimes and misdemeanors” is a deliberately ambiguous, hence flexible, phrase that is not subsumed by all categories of technically criminal behavior. They also knew perfectly well that no previous Administration had accepted, let alone directly solicited, the assistance of a foreign power to interfere in American democratic processes in favor of one side.

And in the end, they didn’t care, partly because the mainstream media expended little to no effort to arm the people with these basic and damning facts. The mainstream commercial media still refuses to take responsibility for their clickbait-propelled aid to Trump from the get-go. They remain set on exploiting the culture’s spectacle-besotted, circus-like “believe it or not” febrility, all for the sake of gaining and holding market share. In that effort, bloodsport-worthy entertainment always takes pride of place over facts and analysis, as also increasingly befits a reading public whose literacy habits are fast eroding thanks to the rising specter of cyber-addiction. That facilitates officeholders, Democrats as well as Republicans, putting fables ahead of truth, banal slogans and sound-bytes ahead of substance, vitriol ahead of reason, partisan politics ahead of their oaths, and narrow self-interest ahead of any reasonable definition of patriotism—meaning only some sense, any sense, of responsibility to the commonweal.

That is also why all but a few Republican Senators voted against taking testimony in the Senate trial, because they knew such testimony would injure the President’s political position, and that theirs, in turn, would be assaulted by him. “The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear,” wrote Edmund Burke, and, added Elena Bonner, “Fear gives bad advice.” So it does. In this case, Senators’ concessions to the White House took the form of willful lying and lying and more lying, and the White House sought to make sure of the outcome by hiring Alan Dershowitz to knowingly lie as well, which to his everlasting shame he did.

Jonathan Chait aptly summed up the meaning of all this before the vote in a January 22 New York Magazine essay:

The impeachment trial is an exercise in displaying the Republican Party’s institutional culpability in Trump’s contempt for the rule of law. At some point they will have to decide to damn the president or to damn themselves.

We now know what all of them, save for Mitt Romney, decided. With the February 6 acquittal, the Republicans Senators have actively aligned themselves with—indeed, have imprisoned themselves in—Trump’s mafia ethos. Except for Romney, they have reduced themselves to political eunuchs who, having once crossed the red lines of constitutional corruption, will never find their way back. They will sooner or later be asked again to debase their office to allow, enable, endorse, or support the suborning of the rule of law, and most will comply. Each subsequent demand on them, no matter how outrageous, will evoke less and less resistance.

They have thus destroyed the GOP’s clinging claim to ethical legitimacy. With their vote, the Party of Lincoln, already deeply ill, is now no more. What will now follow it is clear only in its likely ugliness, as a newly buoyed movement for “national conservatism”—a frightening amalgam of partly justifiable anti-globalist realism doused heavily with delusional nostalgia and outright bigotry—vies to replace America’s decaying civic nationalism with a “dirty white” shade of heretofore highly marginal, pretender ethnonationalism.

Worse, the Republican Senate, and most of the rest of the Party with it, is also complicit in defining political deviancy down well into the future. Future Presidents will inherit a much lower bar for malfeasance in office. Meanwhile, Trump is now free to lie and cheat without fear of consequences as the November election approaches, and with his personal history, it would be strange if he did not avail himself of his new opportunities. He figures to become a very different kind of Prometheus unbound.

Finally, in this regard, the power of the presidency relative to the Legislative and Judicial Branches (Chief Justice John Roberts looked like a potted plant at the Senate trial rather than its master) will increase, harming the structural edifice of the separation of powers. Trump’s authoritarian instincts have mainly harmed liberalism up to now, but liberalism and democracy, while twinned in the American experience and mind, are not the same. They have different histories and separate ontologies. The Trump White House is now indeed seeking to envelop and sever key sinews of democracy, of which the increasing politicization of the Justice Department, at full gallop since February 5, is a darkening shadow.

It is a figment of childish innocence to think that if one side in a competition is bad, the other side must be good. Alas, the Democrats may be relatively less dangerous to American norms and principles, but their divisions and bad judgment do not render them admirable. Being merely incompetent as opposed to immoral doesn’t make them good any more than the proverbial two wrongs make a right.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried, starting in January 2019 as the current Congress began its tenure after the mid-term election, to fob off impeachment pressures. The daughter of a former Mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, no one had to teach her how street politics-cum-mud-fighting actually works. She sensed that an impeachment ordeal so close to the run-up of the November 2020 election could backfire when it predictably fell far short of ousting the President from office.

But she failed, partly because of the power of the Party’s left wing, which considered Pelosi et al. the near enemy, and Trump and the GOP the far enemy. She failed, too, perhaps because the President actually wanted to be impeached (but not convicted) for his political purposes. The President’s claim that the impeachment ordeal put him “through hell” is not persuasive, unless he was merely referring to an introductory trip through the neighborhood where he will spend eternity. Sure enough: Now, in the denouement of the impeachment affair, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is at a record high. As for the Democrats, they are attacking each other even as they awkwardly lurch to the left, ending up possibly beyond the ambit of electoral viability come November 3.

Certainly, the December 9 release of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the egregious malfeasance of the FBI in investigating the Trump campaign did not help, coming just nine days before the House impeached the President. The White House and its supporters spun the timely report in such a way as to vindicate claims that the investigation itself was politically motivated by the “deep state” and had no basis in reality. That is not so, of course. But as is generally the case in conspiracy-addled minds, that conclusion translated for many into the validation of other baseless, deliberately invented claims: that the Obama White House “spied” on the Trump campaign; that Ukraine hacked the November 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton instead of the Russians in favor of Trump; and so on.

The rattled Democrats are now making new mistakes in the aftermath—for example, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s call for investigating Trump’s dismissal of Col. Alex Vindman from the NSC and Gordon Sondland from his post as Ambassador to NATO. Again we see partisan politics placed above respect for law and norms, this time by the Democrats.

Vindman, like everyone at the NSC, works for the only two men who got elected to the Executive Branch: the President and the Vice-President (and the Vice-President doesn’t really count). That’s how American democracy works, and everyone involved knows it—or certainly ought to. So when Vindman decided to jeopardize the President’s office—whether for justifiable reasons or not is beside the point—he should have been prepared to resign his post within 24 hours of acquittal, it being clearer than an unmuddied lake that doing so would put him well beyond the President’s confidence. The same goes for Sondland, for all ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the President. Both men acted dishonorably for making the President fire them.

Claims that the President’s actions are illegal are, as Jeremy Bentham might have put it, nonsense on stilts. The 1946 APA (Administrative Procedures Act) does not apply to those personally working for the President, only to those working for Executive Branch departments and federally chartered agencies. Schumer’s feckless vindictiveness will ultimately play to Trump’s advantage. Indeed, it already is: His ploy draws attention away from Trump’s firing of Vindman’s blameless brother Eugene, which is about as vivid a display of Trump’s gangster mentality as one could ask for.

In sum, acquittal via a sham, summary trial has defined presidential deviancy down, harmed the structure of the separation of powers, and made a mockery of the rule of law. But the generic problem did not arise just yesterday or even three years ago. It has been metastasizing slowly, even before Donald Trump’s election as President. But the impeachment debacle lays the underlying dysfunction bare and threatens credibly to accelerate it, like a dam breaking before a storm surge invites the deluge.

But what does the impeachment episode mean for the world?

First, the U.S. brand, its “soft power” with it, has now been impaled for all to see on the boundless ego of a demagogic aspirant and his spineless sycophants who call him their “chosen one.” To the extent that America was ever, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope for mankind” or, as Governor Winthrop famously put it, “a city on a hill,” the hope is fading as the lights in the city go out one by one.

More practically and immediately, it means that the head-in-the-sand inward turn of America, away from the wider world and away from the responsibilities its power ordains, will now accelerate. So will the mindlessness of recent “debates.” Splenetic politics has so enveloped everything it touches that foreign and national security policy issues no longer even rate a mention—a clear sign of present-tense amnesia concerning the rest of the planet. All higher-level policy formulation is now likely to cease unless provoked by unexpected crises. Ongoing policy implementation, mostly at lower levels, is on autopilot wherever and whenever the White House avoids tampering with it. It loses energy daily without direction from above.

Case in point: All discussion of policy toward Ukraine is now drowned in the morass of the aid holdup affair and the infamous July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone call. No member of the political class, or the Fourth Estate, even bothers to ask whether the policy of supplying lethal aid to Ukraine is actually a good idea. Worse, no one ventures a public thought about what it would take for American diplomacy to help fix the problem that caused the Russo-Ukrainian mini-war in the first place. Gone are the days, not so long past, when Henry Kissinger and the late Zbigniew Brzezinski both warned against pursuing the policy currently in place and offered constructive suggestions for a deeper resolution.

Another case in point: The so-called Middle East peace “deal of the century” was promulgated when it was promulgated entirely for reasons of politics—Trump’s politics of diversion and pandering to American Jewish campaign largesse, and by extension Netanyahu’s politics of desperation. Not only is the plan a non-starter for any practical purpose, it erodes past partial Israeli-Palestinian understandings in escrow, jeopardizes Israeli-PA security cooperation, encourages irretrievably harmful Israeli overextension (read: annexation of the Jordan Valley, and maybe more), jeopardizes the Hashemite Kingdom and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, and at least marginally reduces Arab normalization energies with regard to Israel. No one involved in this toxic abortion seems to care, even assuming they understand any of this.

Yet another case in point: Former Senator Sam Brownback, now in charge of the Trump Administration’s Religious Freedom Alliance (RFA), met with the Taiwanese Vice-President-elect William Lai on February 5 in Washington. That made him the highest-ranking Taiwanese official to visit Washington in more than four decades. China’s response? A PLAAF run at Taiwan’s air-defense perimeter, causing the Taiwanese air force to scramble jet fighters. Were it not for the coronavirus problem, the Chinese government no doubt would have played this into a major international crisis in expectation of the U.S. side backing down. As it turned out, so acute is Trump’s risk-aversion that Beijing didn’t even need to do that. The State Department’s response to the jet feint? To exclude Taiwan from the RFA, in which it had been a planning partner from the start.

As this example illustrates, the Interagency-White House process nexus is in tatters. More generally, with Mike Pompeo having willingly entrapped himself in Trump’s gangster White House extravaganza, the budget-garroted State Department has now become almost completely dysfunctional. As a result, neither friend nor foe can tell anymore whether U.S. policy is coming or going, or whether it exists at all. This isn’t an entirely new condition, but the impeachment debacle has made it worse and so newly dangerous.

For people, parties, movements, and governments everywhere on this planet who sincerely care about human freedom, human rights, human dignity, and mutual toleration—and the basic decency and integrity of political life—this is not good news. Only magical thinkers believe that values and virtues can persist against opposition in the absence of sustaining power and resolve. In the absence of American power, resolve, and yes, even its example up on that hill, hyenas will ramble, and the wild dogs will sooner or later find their prey.

So it is really over? Is America over as the world’s beacon of liberty, protector of virtue, guardian of the weak? Is there no way back? No one knows, yet. But perhaps heed this description:

. . . . Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another. The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector. . . .having a mob entirely at his disposal . . . .

Recognize that language? No? You did not realize that Socrates, in Book VIII of The Republic, explicitly refers to impeachments and trials, and to what they portend for a decaying democracy? Now you do. Read it, go read it all—and then decide for yourself whether to weep or to see clear-eyed the peril for what it is. For now that impeachment is over and its proceedings rest in the archives, the worst of the peril is yet to come—for America, and not only for America.

The post Sifting Through the Wreckage appeared first on The American Interest.

Sifting Through The Wreckage

It is no big revelation to recognize that the churning dysfunctions of American politics are bound to affect American foreign and national security policies, and with them the rest of the world in one way or another. This is because the United States is no ordinary country. It is very big, very wealthy, very powerful, and very attention-arresting as a model of public life—whether its core principles of Enlightenment-born liberalism, its tendency to anti-hierarchical egalitarianism, its secularism-nested multiculturalist reality, or all of the above as a package deal. These characteristics are indelible and irrepressible ideological lightning rods, taken separately or especially together—as aspirational to some, mortal threats to others. No one, however, knows how to ignore them.

As important, America’s imprimatur on the current global order, or what still passes for it, has been second-to-none since the end of World War II. It has not only affected nearly every aspect of global security through its grand strategy of providing common security goods and suppressing both regional security competitions and arms races, it has also been responsible as primus inter pares for shaping the global commercial/trading system and influencing, for better and probably also otherwise, the world’s emerging globe-spanning cultural mélange. The U.S. record over the past 75 years is hardly perfect, but by historical measure—history being Hegel’s “butcher’s block”—it’s arguably not that bad.

The great drama of Donald Trump’s impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and his summary acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate affects all of this, both by way of prospective policy outputs (or the lack thereof) and by means of images and optics. It’s not the only causal factor pressing on the future, and how significant an inflection point it turns out to be in its own right is for the fickle future to determine. To say that the matter is both complex and capacious, and therefore hard to predict, is an understatement—sort of like describing a California redwood as “kind of large.” Even so, several broad implications can already be discerned.

The beginning of wisdom here is to understand that nearly everyone involved in the impeachment affair and its several neuralgic outcroppings—the Republican and Democratic Parties, the mainstream media, the FBI, the Justice Department, and one could go on—has behaved badly. In some cases, very badly.

Republican Senators, without notable exception, knew privately that President Trump had done unconscionably bad things. Some even said so publicly. Most understood that a Senate impeachment trial is a political and not a strictly legal proceeding, as the Founders intended, and that “high crimes and misdemeanors” is a deliberately ambiguous, hence flexible, phrase that is not subsumed by all categories of technically criminal behavior. They also knew perfectly well that no previous Administration had accepted, let alone directly solicited, the assistance of a foreign power to interfere in American democratic processes in favor of one side.

And in the end, they didn’t care, partly because the mainstream media expended little to no effort to arm the people with these basic and damning facts. The mainstream commercial media still refuses to take responsibility for their clickbait-propelled aid to Trump from the get-go. They remain set on exploiting the culture’s spectacle-besotted, circus-like “believe it or not” febrility, all for the sake of gaining and holding market share. In that effort, bloodsport-worthy entertainment always takes pride of place over facts and analysis, as also increasingly befits a reading public whose literacy habits are fast eroding thanks to the rising specter of cyber-addiction. That facilitates officeholders, Democrats as well as Republicans, putting fables ahead of truth, banal slogans and sound-bytes ahead of substance, vitriol ahead of reason, partisan politics ahead of their oaths, and narrow self-interest ahead of any reasonable definition of patriotism—meaning only some sense, any sense, of responsibility to the commonweal.

That is also why all but a few Republican Senators voted against taking testimony in the Senate trial, because they knew such testimony would injure the President’s political position, and that theirs, in turn, would be assaulted by him. “The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear,” wrote Edmund Burke, and, added Elena Bonner, “Fear gives bad advice.” So it does. In this case, Senators’ concessions to the White House took the form of willful lying and lying and more lying, and the White House sought to make sure of the outcome by hiring Alan Dershowitz to knowingly lie as well, which to his everlasting shame he did.

Jonathan Chait aptly summed up the meaning of all this before the vote in a January 22 New York Magazine essay:

The impeachment trial is an exercise in displaying the Republican Party’s institutional culpability in Trump’s contempt for the rule of law. At some point they will have to decide to damn the president or to damn themselves.

We now know what all of them, save for Mitt Romney, decided. With the February 6 acquittal, the Republicans Senators have actively aligned themselves with—indeed, have imprisoned themselves in—Trump’s mafia ethos. Except for Romney, they have reduced themselves to political eunuchs who, having once crossed the red lines of constitutional corruption, will never find their way back. They will sooner or later be asked again to debase their office to allow, enable, endorse, or support the suborning of the rule of law, and most will comply. Each subsequent demand on them, no matter how outrageous, will evoke less and less resistance.

They have thus destroyed the GOP’s clinging claim to ethical legitimacy. With their vote, the Party of Lincoln, already deeply ill, is now no more. What will now follow it is clear only in its likely ugliness, as a newly buoyed movement for “national conservatism”—a frightening amalgam of partly justifiable anti-globalist realism doused heavily with delusional nostalgia and outright bigotry—vies to replace America’s decaying civic nationalism with a “dirty white” shade of heretofore highly marginal, pretender ethnonationalism.

Worse, the Republican Senate, and most of the rest of the Party with it, is also complicit in defining political deviancy down well into the future. Future Presidents will inherit a much lower bar for malfeasance in office. Meanwhile, Trump is now free to lie and cheat without fear of consequences as the November election approaches, and with his personal history, it would be strange if he did not avail himself of his new opportunities. He figures to become a very different kind of Prometheus unbound.

Finally, in this regard, the power of the presidency relative to the Legislative and Judicial Branches (Chief Justice John Roberts looked like a potted plant at the Senate trial rather than its master) will increase, harming the structural edifice of the separation of powers. Trump’s authoritarian instincts have mainly harmed liberalism up to now, but liberalism and democracy, while twinned in the American experience and mind, are not the same. They have different histories and separate ontologies. The Trump White House is now indeed seeking to envelop and sever key sinews of democracy, of which the increasing politicization of the Justice Department, at full gallop since February 5, is a darkening shadow.

It is a figment of childish innocence to think that if one side in a competition is bad, the other side must be good. Alas, the Democrats may be relatively less dangerous to American norms and principles, but their divisions and bad judgment do not render them admirable. Being merely incompetent as opposed to immoral doesn’t make them good any more than the proverbial two wrongs make a right.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried, starting in January 2019 as the current Congress began its tenure after the mid-term election, to fob off impeachment pressures. The daughter of a former Mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, no one had to teach her how street politics-cum-mud-fighting actually works. She sensed that an impeachment ordeal so close to the run-up of the November 2020 election could backfire when it predictably fell far short of ousting the President from office.

But she failed, partly because of the power of the Party’s left wing, which considered Pelosi et al. the near enemy, and Trump and the GOP the far enemy. She failed, too, perhaps because the President actually wanted to be impeached (but not convicted) for his political purposes. The President’s claim that the impeachment ordeal put him “through hell” is not persuasive, unless he was merely referring to an introductory trip through the neighborhood where he will spend eternity. Sure enough: Now, in the denouement of the impeachment affair, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is at a record high. As for the Democrats, they are attacking each other even as they awkwardly lurch to the left, ending up possibly beyond the ambit of electoral viability come November 3.

Certainly, the December 9 release of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the egregious malfeasance of the FBI in investigating the Trump campaign did not help, coming just nine days before the House impeached the President. The White House and its supporters spun the timely report in such a way as to vindicate claims that the investigation itself was politically motivated by the “deep state” and had no basis in reality. That is not so, of course. But as is generally the case in conspiracy-addled minds, that conclusion translated for many into the validation of other baseless, deliberately invented claims: that the Obama White House “spied” on the Trump campaign; that Ukraine hacked the November 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton instead of the Russians in favor of Trump; and so on.

The rattled Democrats are now making new mistakes in the aftermath—for example, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s call for investigating Trump’s dismissal of Col. Alex Vindman from the NSC and Gordon Sondland from his post as Ambassador to NATO. Again we see partisan politics placed above respect for law and norms, this time by the Democrats.

Vindman, like everyone at the NSC, works for the only two men who got elected to the Executive Branch: the President and the Vice-President (and the Vice-President doesn’t really count). That’s how American democracy works, and everyone involved knows it—or certainly ought to. So when Vindman decided to jeopardize the President’s office—whether for justifiable reasons or not is beside the point—he should have been prepared to resign his post within 24 hours of acquittal, it being clearer than an unmuddied lake that doing so would put him well beyond the President’s confidence. The same goes for Sondland, for all ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the President. Both men acted dishonorably for making the President fire them.

Claims that the President’s actions are illegal are, as Jeremy Bentham might have put it, nonsense on stilts. The 1946 APA (Administrative Procedures Act) does not apply to those personally working for the President, only to those working for Executive Branch departments and federally chartered agencies. Schumer’s feckless vindictiveness will ultimately play to Trump’s advantage. Indeed, it already is: His ploy draws attention away from Trump’s firing of Vindman’s blameless brother Eugene, which is about as vivid a display of Trump’s gangster mentality as one could ask for.

In sum, acquittal via a sham, summary trial has defined presidential deviancy down, harmed the structure of the separation of powers, and made a mockery of the rule of law. But the generic problem did not arise just yesterday or even three years ago. It has been metastasizing slowly for years, even before Donald Trump’s election as President. But the impeachment debacle lays the underlying dysfunction bare and threatens credibly to accelerate it, like a dam breaking before a storm surge invites the deluge.

But what does the impeachment episode mean for the world?

First, the U.S. brand, its “soft power” with it, has now been impaled for all to see on the boundless egos of a demagogic aspirant and his spineless sycophants who call him their “chosen one.” To the extent that America was ever, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope for mankind” or, as Governor Winthrop famously put it, “a city on a hill,” the hope is fading as the lights in the city go out one by one.

More practically and immediately, it means that the head-in-the-sand inward turn of America, away from the wider world and away from the responsibilities its power ordains, will now accelerate. So will the mindlessness of recent “debates.” Splenetic politics has so enveloped everything it touches that foreign and national security policy issues no longer even rate a mention—a clear sign of present-tense amnesia concerning the rest of the planet. All higher-level policy formulation is now likely to cease unless provoked by unexpected crises. Ongoing policy implementation, mostly at lower levels, is on autopilot wherever and whenever the White House avoids tampering with it. It loses energy daily without direction from above.

Case in point: All discussion of policy toward Ukraine is now drowned in the morass of the aid holdup affair and the infamous July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone call. No member of the political class, or the Fourth Estate, even bothers to ask whether the policy of supplying lethal aid to Ukraine is actually a good idea. Worse, no one ventures a public thought about what it would take for American diplomacy to help fix the problem that caused the Russo-Ukrainian mini-war in the first place. Gone are the days, not so long past, when Henry Kissinger and the late Zbigniew Brzezinski both warned against pursuing the policy currently in place and offered constructive suggestions for a deeper resolution.

Another case in point: The so-called Middle East peace “deal of the century” was promulgated when it was promulgated entirely for reasons of politics—Trump’s politics of diversion and pandering to American Jewish campaign largesse, and by extension Netanyahu’s politics of desperation. Not only is the plan a non-starter for any practical purpose, it erodes past partial Israeli-Palestinian understandings in escrow, jeopardizes Israeli-PA security cooperation, encourages irretrievably harmful Israeli overextension (read: annexation of the Jordan Valley, and maybe more), jeopardizes the Hashemite Kingdom and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, and at least marginally reduces Arab normalization energies with regard to Israel. No one involved in this toxic abortion seems to care, even assuming they understand any of this.

Yet another case in point: Former Senator Sam Brownback, now in charge of the Trump Administration’s Religious Freedom Alliance (RFA), met with the Taiwanese Vice-President-elect William Lai on February 5 in Washington. That made him the highest-ranking Taiwanese official to visit Washington in more than four decades. China’s response? A PLAAF run at Taiwan’s air-defense perimeter, causing the Taiwanese air force to scramble jet fighters. Were it not for the coronavirus problem, the Chinese government no doubt would have played this into a major international crisis in expectation of the U.S. side backing down. As it turned out, so acute is Trump’s risk-aversion that Beijing didn’t even need to do that. The State Department’s response to the jet feint? To exclude Taiwan from the RFA, in which it had been a planning partner from the start.

As this example illustrates, the Interagency-White House process nexus is in tatters. More generally, with Mike Pompeo having willingly entrapped himself in Trump’s gangster White House extravaganza, the budget-garroted State Department has now become almost completely dysfunctional. As a result, neither friend nor foe can tell anymore whether U.S. policy is coming or going, or whether it exists at all. This isn’t an entirely new condition, but the impeachment debacle has made it worse and so newly dangerous.

For people, parties, movements, and governments everywhere on this planet who sincerely care about human freedom, human rights, human dignity, and mutual toleration—and the basic decency and integrity of political life—this is not good news. Only magical thinkers believe that values and virtues can persist against opposition in the absence of sustaining power and resolve. In the absence of American power, resolve, and yes, even its example up on that hill, hyenas will ramble, and the wild dogs will sooner or later find their prey.

So it is really over? Is America over as the world’s beacon of liberty, protector of virtue, guardian of the weak? Is there no way back? No one knows, yet. But perhaps heed this description:

. . . . Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another. The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector. . . .having a mob entirely at his disposal . . . .

Recognize that language? No? You did not realize that Socrates, in Book VIII of The Republic, explicitly refers to impeachments and trials, and to what they portend for a decaying democracy? Now you do. Read it, go read it all—and then decide for yourself whether to weep or to see clear-eyed the peril for what it is. For now that impeachment is over and its proceedings rest in the archives, the worst of the peril is yet to come—for America, and not only for America.

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It’s Not About Britain. It’s About Europe

“What’s in a name?” asked Juliet in a fit of despair. Names shape our world even if underlying truths are more important. She knew that Romeo being a Montague would inevitably determine the course of their romance, and force them into secrecy.

We should be careful with names. Take “Brexit,” the name for Britain’s exit from the European Union. It has disproportionately shaped how we have talked about what finally took place, both in the run-up to “Brexit Day” (January 31) and now in its aftermath. If what happened is thought of as “Britain’s exit,” then what transpired is a sovereign choice, a singular act in time. And since actions have consequences, the press has focused on analyzing what those repercussions might be for Britain itself.

These are not irrelevant questions, but they are not the most important ones. By framing what happened in terms of Britain leaving, we ignore the question of what Britain is leaving, and more important still, why. “Nationalism,” “sovereignty”—these clipped answers frequently bandied about by pundits and politicians are at best only partial.

Like Juliet, we should try to look beyond names in search of deeper truths. Because while Brexit was a sovereign democratic decision, it neither came out of nowhere nor was it necessarily irrational. The relationship between Britain and the EU has always been complicated (if not exactly star-crossed), but that fact should not be viewed in isolation, nor seen as overwhelmingly determinative of what ultimately happened.

The EU has rarely fared well when it has allowed itself to be voted on in simple referenda. Voters, while passively acquiescing to the emergence of the modern supranational EU, never developed the kind of enthusiasm for the project that its architects thought would naturally come to them with time. The French and Dutch decisively rejected the EU Constitution in 2005, and further votes around the continent, including in the UK, were quickly scuppered in order to avoid an embarrassing spectacle. Brussels learned a lesson, but arguably not the right one. The Treaty of Lisbon was passed in 2008, with much of the substance of the EU Constitution reworked as a series of amendments to existing treaties, thereby avoiding another popular rebuke.

Last year, France’s Emmanuel Macron admitted that had France also put the prospect of a French exit from the EU to its voters in a referendum, Frexit would have likely followed. A convinced Europhile, Macron is also perhaps the least sentimental and most clear-eyed European leader. He has consistently identified Brexit not as a destructive act of a foolish electorate, but rather as a symptom of a profound crisis of legitimacy of the European Union itself. Part of that legitimacy crisis is self-inflicted, the result of European leaders barreling on with further integration and enlargement despite obvious voter hesitation. And part of that is structural—the unhappy reality that Brussels’ rule-making bureaucracy dressed up in democratic clothes (the European Parliament, the European Commission) has never succeeded in convincing voters that it is accountable to them.

Luuk van Middelaar, a political theorist and former speechwriter to the President of the European Council, convincingly argued (in my pick for book of the year last year) that the structural problems were gravely exacerbated by four crises that have battered Europe since 2008. His first three are the euro debt crisis, the Ukraine crisis, and the migrant crisis. The fourth and current crisis, Brexit, is best understood as a product of the three that preceded it. His book tells the story of how Europe is managing to muddle through, and how it might be developing a kind of political legitimacy through this improvisation. But for Middelaar, that Brexit ultimately happened is evidence that Europe is not legitimating itself fast enough. Brexit should be a lesson and an impetus to serious structural reforms.

What about resurgent nationalism, that atavistic force that the European Union was itself designed to drown? Isn’t talk of “sovereignty” just cover for the politics of resentful nationalists like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Poland’s Jarosław Kaczynski—and Britain’s Nigel Farage? Isn’t Brexit, therefore, ultimately about values, about Britain’s flight from tolerance and cosmopolitanism?

Another recent book, by historian John Connelly, helps suggest a different perspective. It focuses on Central and Eastern Europe and grapples with the pervasive role that nationalism has played in the region for the past 200 years. But nationalism, in his telling, is less an ideology like liberalism or fascism, and more a language for politics—a “crisis frame” that emerges when societies feel threatened. Nationalism is not the only, or even the most authentic, language for politics, but it has remained ever-present since its “invention” in the middle of the 19th century.

Stalinism adapted to, incorporated, and even partially repressed nationalism after the turbulent interwar years and the cataclysms of World War II, but it never extinguished it. Nationalism played an important role in the Hungarian uprising of 1956, in the Prague Spring of 1968, and in Poland’s struggle to cast off the Soviet yoke through the 1980s. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, liberal democracy promised a better life for Europeans digging out from the catastrophe of communism, not just in terms of dignity but also in terms of material prosperity. And since 1992, the prospect of membership in the European Union has proven to be a powerful impetus for former communist countries to reform themselves. Through at least 2008, the pull on countries like Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey was still substantial. Even though electorates in the West were already tugging on the reins of the increasingly ambitious EU, measured by its attractive power in the East, the European project was still healthy.

As late as 2016, few people fully appreciated how much the “pull” of the EU had weakened. I remember I was as shocked as anyone when the Brexit results rolled in that June. Certainly, neither Prime Minister David Cameron nor Chancellor Angela Merkel fully understood what they were dealing with, since they failed to reach a sellable agreement on migration ahead of the referendum that could have tipped the scales. But neither Orban nor Kaczynski were as naive as the bunch of us. As attentive politicians, they had successfully anchored their appeals to voters who had well-established concerns about the EU. The euro crisis, the Ukraine crisis, and finally the migrant crisis convinced enough people that Brussels was neither accountable nor responsive to them. The “crisis frame” became available because the alternative had taken a beating: An appeal to nationalism only became possible because the larger institution of the EU became less credible.

Macron is rumored to have read Van Middelaar’s book and to have largely agreed with its analysis. One way to understand Macron’s European politics is to see them as a set of desperate measures undertaken to prevent something like Brexit from happening again, by addressing the issues of trust that have given political entrepreneurs like Farage, Orban, Kaczynski—and Marine Le Pen in France—running room. His decision this past October to hold up the opening of accession talks with Albania and North Macedonia (a move that will in practice likely put an end to European expansion) is an attempt to calm voter concerns. He had been giving speeches saying that an already ungovernable European Union won’t be made more governable with the admission of new members, nor would it be more economically sustainable admitting poor countries after a net creditor nation like the UK has left. He has been marketing the EU as une Europe qui protège—a Europe that protects. It is neither simply a regulatory body nor just an idealistic project for making the world a better place. It is there for the benefit of its members’ citizens, first and foremost.

Those, then, are the perils of thinking about Brexit as a story that’s mainly about Britain: You miss the forest for the trees. Of course, Brexit is about Britain and its exit—the ongoing negotiations with the EU, as well as with the United States and other important trading partners, will have outsize effects on the lives of British citizens for decades to come. But it is even more about Europe, and about how and why it failed to keep Britain in. The answers to those questions are much more difficult—and troubling—than simple morality plays about Brexiters and Remainers allow.

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What The Culture War Is Really About

From #Gamergate to Covington to Quillette, it’s tempting to reduce the current round of Internet culture wars to pure tribalism: an identity-fueled battleground between the reactionary right and social justice left. It is true, of course, that much of today’s Internet discourse arises from purely identitarian aims: the besieged protectiveness of the man who sees an all-female Ghostbusters as an encroachment on his cultural property; the ritualistic demand for “privilege-checking” that turns call-out culture into performative purgation. But this reductive impulse tends to obscure a more fundamental debate—one that gets to the heart of what it means to be human.

Both Reddit reactionaries and social justice activists are, in two very different ways, combatting the idea that human nature is ultimately rational and disembodied: that we are minds first, and bodies second. Each accuses the other of similar crimes: namely, belief in a naive, false conception of human freedom. Social justice culture is quick to dismiss (perhaps fairly) the kind of biological determinism common in atavistic circles: we can transcend our bodies and our chromosomes, this culture insists, but we cannot transcend our environment, the structures and hierarchies into which we were born. Atavists, by contrast, posit freedom in the social sphere—words like “privilege” or “oppression” or “structural” are immediately dismissed as valorizations of victimhood—but insist that we are bound by our biology to feel and act in certain ways, concordant with our gender or (in darker corners of the web) our race.

Each group, then, is accusing the other of a kind of hubris: an unwillingness to confront our own limitations. Yet despite the fact that transhumanism is most popular in Silicon Valley—among the techno-utopians and libertarians, with their vision of a hackable humanity unconstrained by nature or nurture—the atavists and activists can’t stop fighting one another.

In 2002, for example, Steven Pinker published The Blank Slate, in which he argued— with recourse to plenty of biology and neuroscience—that we are not simply Rational Minds, each identical in its capacity for reason and altruism. Our IQs, our work ethics, our propensities to commit crime are all shaped by genetic endowments that vary across individuals, and which (for now) lie beyond human control. So far, so fair.

But Pinker then took his argument further, in a more explicitly political direction. “Behavioral science is not for sissies,” The Blank Slate announces, before revealing its primary target: the social justice-minded “radical scientists” (the phrase appears 19 times in the book) whose commitment to progressive utopianism has blinded them to the uncomfortable truth that People Are Fundamentally Different From One Another. For Pinker, the image of a transcendent, unified human “we” is little more than leftist fantasy, a self-serving conceit that justifies radical change and anti-“bourgeois” hostility. If human beings are truly unfettered by biology, then it should be possible to carry out whatever program the “radical scientists” deem correct. But if “we” are an imperfect product of evolution—limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority—then we had better think twice before redesigning civilization from the ground up.

Almost 20 years later, Pinker’s conflation of blank-slate-ism with progressive “nurture”-ism has become a staple of reactionary and “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW) thought. Quillette, the de facto magazine of the IDW—basically a group of pundits who oppose identity politics—publishes routine jeremiads against the “new evolution deniers”: those woolly-minded progressives who assert that race, gender, and even sex are mere social constructs, or who assume that differences in outcomes between groups are linked to politics or class and education, rather than the cold, hard facts of blood. Increasingly implicit in this kind of  discourse is the idea that real scientists (not, mind you, those sissies in the social justice movement) are willing to reject the utopian eschatology of liberalism for the brutal truths of difference: those written, if not in blood and soil, then at least in our DNA.

“Forget Nature Versus Nurture,” one 2018 Quillette post crowed, “Nature Has Won.” Or, as Jordan Peterson put it in his 12 Rules For Life, celebrating the dominance hierarchy of the lobster as a blueprint for our experience of humanity: “The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism . . . . It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy . . . . it’s not even a human creation . . . . it is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment.”

There is, of course, a scientific question at the heart of this debate, albeit one whose resolution is more complex than either Quillette’s insidious “human biodiversity” advocates or their progressive opponents might have it. But there is also a vastly under-discussed moral and even metaphysical question—one that is at the heart of all culture wars, and indeed at the heart of culture itself: Who are we, anyway?

Or, to frame it even more precisely: What parts of us are us, and what parts of us are changeable, even will-able? Over what elements of our human condition do we retain power, either at the level of the individual—qualities we can choose or change on our own—or at the level of society—those that our hearths and homes and polises instill in us? What are we responsible for, as selves, as societies, as progenitors of a species, and what can we only ever adapt ourselves to? Are our born bodies (our chromosomes? our secondary-sex characteristics?) ontologically, really Us? Certainly, this is the argument made by, say, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who deny that transgender women are “really” women using a very particular, biologically determined definition of the Real.

Or should we think about Realness another way? Are we—as the language of progressive intersectionality might have it—really our social, if not biological identities, such that our epistemic capacities are inextricable from the social groups in and through and with which we have learned to think? Or are we—as in the techno-utopian anthropology—really nothing but lines of hackable mental code, tabula calculonis rasa, newly possessed with the technology to at last hack our insufficient wetware?

The question of who we really are is never far from the question of the Real more broadly. The term has been bastardized in contemporary culture war usage by self-described “race realists,” an ostensibly polite and “neutral” term that treats as Real, and sickeningly inviolable, a whole host of power relations and value judgments metastasizing out of the truism that human beings are visually distinct from one another. But I am speaking of realism in the philosophical and better sense: the idea that there are elements of our humanity—both those within our control and those that come to us as given, whether biologically or socially—that are not merely ancillary to who we are but rather at the ontological heart of it. There are elements of our makeup that are not simply qualities we have, but constituent parts of what make us really us. That we as a society—a philosophically fragmented, quasi-secular (or at least post-Christian) society—have not negotiated a common understanding of what these realities are, and what separates the Real in us from the merely incidental, does not make the question any less important. Rather, this uncertainty is at the heart of our politics and our culture wars alike. A coherent account of who we are is the first step towards a political vision of who we might become.

If the Intellectual Dark Web is right about one thing, it is that a libertarian vision of disembodied freedom—a self-making self completely unmoored from social or biological or physical or gravitational realities—is insufficient. In the age of the Internet avatar, it’s easy to succumb to a kind of cultural transhumanism, an assumption that our bodies, like operating systems, will soon become obsolete. This faith in human perfectibility—that given the right politics and the right perspectives and the right products and the right apps, we human beings can re-write the scripts for our social and animal lives, that we can reimagine the nuclear family as a chosen family, that the polyamorous revolution can help us re-map networks of love and desire and support, that we can mix and match our spiritual and ritualistic longings to provide us with bespoke philosophical and religious commitments to optimize our pursuit of the transcendent—is more dangerous than many of its progressive adherents will admit. While progressives are often willing to recognize social identities as Real insofar as it is impossible to will oneself out of them, outside the sphere of social influence they are too ready to dismiss what philosophers call “facticity:” elements of the human condition that no amount of reason or sheer stubbornness can overcome. Few outside of Silicon Valley, after all, would disagree that disease, death, and other doggedly biological elements of the human condition define the contours of our selves in ways that transcend personal experience alone. There is something, however poorly enumerated, about the human condition that prevents us from being totally free to self-define, whether on the Internet or off. Late capitalism, with its cornucopia of choice, has given us precious few tools with which to understand our facticity, and contemporary progressive culture has all too often confused liberalism with liberation.

But in its valorization of evolutionary psychology—and its unsettling essentialization of race and gender—the modern atavistic right has confused a respect for givenness with a Petersonian worship of Nature. The qualities that make us contingent human beings may, in part, be located in our bodies, as well as in our social identities, and in the complicated quasi-corporeal points of overlap between the two, but they are not limited to them. Our social contingency—our need for one another, for attention, for love—is no less constitutive of reality than the effect our chromosomes have upon our bodies, and the way in which our social lives and centuries’ worth of language build-up shape our interpretation of such effects. Our hunger for transcendence is as given as the enzymes that help us process meat.

It is telling that the IDW has chosen as its pet nemesis modern progressive social justice culture, rather than the far more extreme form of blank-slatism found among the tech-bros of Silicon Valley, whose veneration of free choice and faith in human miracle is much more absolute than their progressive brethren. (It’s a strange and intellectually incoherent irony that so many techno-utopians are sympathetic to the IDW, even as they claim to reject its deterministic premises).

Social justice activists may locate limits elsewhere—in a toxic society we cannot escape, rather than a body we cannot transcend—but they do, no less than their lobster-venerating rivals, understand that we are not totally free creatures. There is, for them as for the atavists, something Real about us that we do not choose. The robust libertarianism of Peter Thiel, by contrast—although it often allies itself with Petersonian paganism—rests entirely on the notion that, for the cleverest of men at least, human nature can be hacked and thus perfected. Progressives may spark atavists’ ire by evincing faith that gender is not Real—but Thielism dictates that there is no Reality at all. The very premise of Peter Thiel and Blake Masters’s Zero to One (ostensibly a business self-help book but actually a coded attack on the very idea of human contingency) is that savvy human beings can affect not merely historical or technological change but also transformations in the very laws of nature: that they can create, like God, ex nihilo. The progressive understanding of the tabula rasa is ultimately oriented toward a view of human responsibility—if experiences shape us, then we owe it to our fellow humans to give them experiences that will shape them well. Techno-utopianism, by contrast, celebrates moral as well as epistemic freedom.

It is the tech bros, not the social justice warriors, who need a little more lobster in their lives.

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A Letter Discovered, an Admonishment Delayed

“We hold that the theory and practice of the totalitarian state are the greatest challenge which man has been called on to meet in the course of civilized history.”

—Point 11 of the “Manifesto of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,”

Berlin, June 1950, drafted and presented by Arthur Koestler

In a life that stretched from 1911 to 2004, the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz experienced the twin traumas of Poland’s 20th century: first Nazi occupation, then communist dictatorship. A man of the democratic left, he was never enamored with Stalin and the Stalinists, yet in the aftermath of World War II he became a diplomat of the Polish People’s Republic and agreed to represent Stalin’s puppet regime as a cultural attaché at the embassy in Washington, DC, in the late 1940s.

Increasingly disenchanted with establishment of a police state in his country and its totalitarian controls over intellectual life, Milosz decided to defect while in France in 1951. His wife and two sons were at that moment in Washington, DC. Thus began a long separation between the poet and his closest relatives.

In France, Milosz joined the anti-totalitarian circle around the monthly magazine Kultura, led by Jerzy Giedroyc (1906-2000). This was a logical choice for someone who had lived through both the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianisms—Kultura was engaged in the defense of liberal institutions, political pluralism, and resistance to any attempts to stifle artistic creativity. At this point Milosz became involved in the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the organization that came into being in 1950 as a platform for debates about democracy and the threats to liberal values.

The Congress was founded by a circle of intellectuals and activists who, having nourished leftist leanings in the 1930s and a fascination with communism, realized that Stalin’s regime had committed countless crimes against humanity. Its founders and members were disenchanted ex-communists who understood the importance of ideology and the dangers of Stalinism. Among its luminaries we find Arthur Koestler, Manes Sperber, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Sidney Hook, to mention just a few prominent figures of the non-communist left. The Congress took place under the patronage of Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain.

Milosz became one of the keenest contributors to their activities, co-organizing meetings, symposia, and conferences. Years later, Milosz reminisced: “It was the sole counterweight to the propaganda on which the Soviets expended astronomical sums.” While critical of McCarthyism and political hysteria in America, the Congress published high-quality journals in major languages and confronted the well-organized propaganda of anti-Americanism in the West.

In the intensely polarized Cold War political arena, divided between communism and anti-communism, these small groups of intellectuals who sought a “third option” were unquestionably close to Milosz and played a key role in the writer’s life. When he found himself in France, he was labeled a deserter by the Stalinists and a traitor by the majority of Polish émigrés, who were not willing to gloss over what they denounced as his collaboration with the Stalinist regime. The Kultura intellectual family stood by Milosz in those vexing moments.

He started to contribute to the Congress’s publications, primarily, the French journal Preuves. At this time, in addition to writing poetry and essays, Milosz started to work on a book about intellectual abdication in the face of Marxism-Leninism. This project resulted in one of the most important anti-totalitarian texts of the Cold War period: The Captive Mind. It was in the early 1950s that Milosz became the target of venomous campaigns organized by Polish ultra-nationalist émigrés who lobbied against him being able to re-enter the United States in order to reunite with his family. Some of the American personalities involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom did their utmost to help him and intervene with the Department of State. They testified to Milosz’s moral integrity and intellectual honor. Among these, two of the most prominent advocates were political philosophers Sydney Hook (1902-1989) and James Burnham (1905-1987).

In the Hoover Institution’s archives, one of the authors of this article discovered in July 2017 a revealing document: a letter from Milosz to Burnham in the early 1970s. In it, Milosz mentions his recent conversation with a Polish visitor, who might plausibly have been Polish émigré poet Aleksander Wat (1900-67), whom Czeslaw Milosz interviewed at length at Berkeley. The result of this collaboration was Wat’s book My Century.

Be this as it may, the significance of the letter strikes us both—politically, philosophically, and morally. Politically, Czeslaw Milosz admits the value of Burnham’s pessimistic vision put forward in the 1948 book The Suicide of the West. Philosophically, Milosz takes issue and expresses deep worries regarding the leftist radicalism of the students’ counterculture as well as the conservatism of the Polish Roman Catholic Church. In other words, he remains skeptical of ideological certainties, be they of the left or the right. Morally, the letter is a warning and a cri de coeur regarding what he sees as civilizational decline in the West.

Below is the text of the letter Milosz addressed to Burnham, in the Burnham Collection at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution:

Twenty years ago we met in Maisons-Laffitte at “ Kultura’s” and during all those years I have been a faithful contributor to “Giedroyc’s” monthly. Giedroyć always speaks of you in warmest terms. This letter has a simple explanation: Berkeley + “The Suicide of the West” which, I am ashamed to confess, I read only recently.

I have been professor here for 10 years. As you may guess, to be an observer of Berkeley frolics is not a very edifying experience.

Your diagnosis has been confirmed by the whole “Movement” of the young generation. I agree with you on the “transfers” of guil—though never probably one could see such a display as today—perhaps only among the Russian intelligentsia—of the second half of the 19th century. A collection of essays on the Russian revolution, De Profundis, written by a team of Russian thinkers in 1918 and published a few years ago (in Russian) brings a diagnosis similar to yours.

My esteem for your work does not mean, however, I could become an American conservative. Of course I pay trust to the lines from the “Fairy Queen” may not come true—we have but one civilization and when it succumbs, nothing will be left. But let us consider a basic lack of communication. A visitor from Poland said to me, “what I found here is an enormous spiritual Munich.” The trouble is such a man could not find a common language with American conservatives either—perhaps with one or two exceptions. My loyalty towards those who represent in Poland the only possible core of resistance traces a line between my attitudes and the American conservative mind. “Conservatism” means of course something different here but the fact is conservative habits become, in the Soviet empire, an instrument of the rulers (tradition exploited for the sake of national communism).

What is the most serious today, it seems to me, is madness within the Christian churches, including the Roman Catholic church of which I am a member. This applies to the west—in Poland the Church is just a conservative force.

You don’t mind, I hope, these few words after 20 years.

Yours sincerely,

Czeslaw Milosz

To conclude: This letter is a synthesis of the poet’s deep worries regarding the direction of Western civilization. Milosz remained, until the end of his life, a skeptical humanist and a critic of all forms of ideological certainties. It sheds light on Milosz’s concerns about the role of religious institutions, in Poland and elsewhere. In today’s climate, when multiple strains of extremism—whether nationalist, clerical, or populist—have returned with a vengeance, Milosz’s warning is more timely than ever.

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Homage to a Slow Train

ZHENGZHOU, China—Chinese New Year has come and gone once again. This time of year, as businesses, factories and schools shut down and hundreds of millions of workers and students return to their hometowns, media outlets are usually obligated to dust off last year’s article and update it online with the latest incalculable statistics about “the largest human migration on earth.”

But what the world is watching, instead, is the outbreak of coronavirus as it overtakes the sanctity of this annual pilgrimage with its own grim statistics: more than 600 dead, more than 30,000 reported cases (as many as 100,000 total cases according to some estimates), and a city of 11 million cut off from the outside world. The virus has spread across all Chinese provinces and at least 24 other countries, including the United States. And like SARS in 2003, fear spreads with it, as public health experts question China’s ability to contain the outbreak.

What the world is not watching, then, is an unremarkable statistic on the China State Railway website: “The railway sector has opened 81 pairs of public-welfare ‘slow trains’ . . . thus providing convenience for people in old revolutionary base areas, poverty-stricken areas, and remote mountainous areas to travel in Spring Festival Transport.”

There is an artistic genre of sorts that portrays the real life drama of chunyun, what Chinese call the spring migration. Books and films depict sleepless multitudes at train stations, travelers desperately clambering through train windows to get a seat, and disheveled workers forced to stand for days-long journeys, all to be reunited with their families, to see their children they had to leave behind, and to get home. Last year, I was living in a remote village in southwestern China to research rural issues and decided to have my own “authentic chunyun experience.” I called Lü Baohong (pronounced bau-hoh-ng), my neighbor in the village, who was in eastern China working construction. “I want to take the train with you,” I told him, inviting myself along. “OK,” he said, a man of few words.

For my first chunyun, I took a slow train across the country with three migrant workers and hundreds of millions of others. Somewhere on the 36-hour journey I realized it would be my last. As China’s transportation networks such as high-speed rail and flights improve, the chunyun genre, as we know it—with all its struggle and triumph of the human spirit—is quickly going the way of the slow train.

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Migrant workers— Lü Baohong, Li Weihong (A Hong) and Dong Dawei (Old Dong)—warm themselves by a space heater in their dormitory on a construction site in Zhengzhou, January 13, 2019 (Photo by Matthew Chitwood).

Chunyun is also how I learned about the Russian prostitute.

“I heard there’s a white xiaojie near your village,” Dong Dawei tells me excitedly, flashing a toothy grin. “Have you seen her?” His eyes bulge. Old Dong, as they call him, sits cross-legged on a lower bunk, one of five in the cramped dormitory. Construction helmets, instant noodle cartons, and empty beer bottles litter the room.

“I’m the only white person I’ve seen,” I reply, more interested in the graffiti on the walls than in his question. Every end is a new beginning, someone has scrawled in black marker. Focus on achieving happiness. The walls of sheet metal are covered with inspiration but provide little insulation against the Zhengzhou winter outside. My hands glow orange as I hover over a space heater next to my friend and neighbor, Lü Baohong. “She’s 2,000 yuan per night,” Old Dong continues. “Must be Russian.”

Next to him on the bed sprawls 17-year old Li Weihong, or A Hong (pronounced ah-hoh-ng), who is chatting with a girl over Kuaishou, the SnapChat app of China (“She’s only my temporary girlfriend,” he insists coolly). He clutches a cigarette as he texts and I notice a stick-and-poke tattoo on the sides of his hands. With palms together, as if praying, the four-character couplets read:

Life and death are set by Fate, wealth and power by Heaven.

The Confucian wisdom has an odd sense of fatalism for someone determined to change the course of his life. Last year, A Hong dropped out of vocational school. “I’m not good at memorizing,” he told me, and his test scores didn’t earn him a place in high school. Vocational school is the alternative. After two years into his four-year vocational degree, he decided to go out (出去)—to join the migrant labor force—and start a new beginning building apartment towers. He’s been in Zhengzhou, Henan’s provincial capital, for the last year winding wire around rebar. Rebar makes reinforced concrete, which makes 20-story residentials. And residentials make someone other than A Hong a lot of money. “I won’t be able to sleep tonight,” he says excitedly thinking about our journey tomorrow. He hasn’t seen his family for almost a year.

In the village where A Hong is from, going out is the norm. For some it’s economic necessity, for others youthful curiosity. Oftentimes it’s both. China has an estimated 290 million migrant laborers, roughly 35 percent of the entire working population, and much of the country’s infrastructure development and economic growth are the fruits of their backbreaking labor.

But migrants face stigma and structural discrimination in the cities based on their hukou, a relic of the pre-1978 State-led economy. The residence permit classifies citizens as an urban or rural hukou, each with different rights. Rural hukou holders are allotted arable land—though it is still owned by the State—while those with urban hukou have access to education, healthcare and other social services in their city. Migrant workers, then, who usually work far from where they hold a hukou, have little or no access to these services. Last year, when rebar went through Baohong’s foot, he could only get treatment in Yunnan. In the same way, Old Dong’s son couldn’t go to school in the cities where his dad worked, so he grew up with his mom back in the village. Workers from Yunnan, China’s second poorest province, are even looked down on by other migrants, Old Dong tells me. “We have to look out for our own people,” he says, meaning the 26 Yunnanese on their construction site. “Everyone knows we’re tough though. They don’t dare mess with us.”

The conversation lulls and we crawl into our bunks. My mattress is cold and hard, just a piece of plywood with a thin blanket draped over it. But even this is better than the two nights to come. Baohong booked us hard seats, fully upright bench seats that are aptly named, and I feel both dread and anticipation as I think about the 36-hour journey. For now, I shiver, fully clothed, under two worn blankets and stare at the black scrawls on the bunk above me: It’s time to pursue a better life! Work hard! I lay in the darkness and wonder who wrote that, and why they came out to work, and who they left behind, and if they ever really found it.

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Lü Baohong in a hard seat on the K635 slow train from Zhengzhou to Kunming, January 15, 2019 (Photo by Matthew Chitwood).

The next day, no one clambers through the window for a seat on the slow train. Instead, we line up outside the K635 and wait as an attendant calmly checks tickets. The dark green cars stretch down the platform like a strand of cucumbers and we step aboard the last one. The four of us—myself, Baohong, A Hong, and another worker from Yunnan named Dong Qingzhi—plonk down on our hard seats as it lurches out of the station. 17:23 sharp. Other than a middle-aged woman in faux fur and pleather and another worker with a pile of peanuts, we have Car 16 almost to ourselves.

“Where is everybody?” I ask the attendant. He stiffly punches a hole in each of our tickets, unfazed by chunyun’s poor turnout. “No one takes the greenskins anymore,” he says matter-of-fact, using the slow train’s nickname. “Maybe they’re on faster trains.”

Baohong recounts how passengers used to squeeze anywhere they could fit. “You didn’t dare stand up cause you’d lose your seat,” he tells me. “We couldn’t use the bathrooms cause people were crammed in there.”

This is Baohong’s tenth chunyun. He grew up the youngest of three brothers—and the most expensive. Because of family planning restrictions, his parents had to pay a $200 fine, a significant sum for subsistence farmers. Ever since he was 14, he has been going out to work to help makes ends meet. “Everyone who can go out does,” he told me when I visited the village where he grew up. He is soft-spoken and his face is kind but seems as if it should smile more than it does. “There’s no work here.” Now, even his wife goes out to work in a café in the provincial capital while their three-year-old daughter lives with his in-laws next door to me. Baohong is glad no one has to cram into bathrooms anymore.

In recent years China has revolutionized its transportation system. In contrast to the 81 slow trains operating during Spring Festival this year, 5,275 pairs of high-speed bullet trains are also running—and at speeds of almost 200 miles per hour. With roughly 18,000 miles of track, China already has the world’s largest network of high-speed rail and plans to build another 6,000 miles by 2025. It is also expected to become the world’s largest air travel market by 2022, so it’s ramping up airport infrastructure like Beijing Daxing International Airport, which opened in September and is now the world’s largest air terminal. Logistics and services are also now easier than ever. I marveled as Baohong purchased our tickets online using a bot and cashless payment. So, as we sit stiffly on the hard seats, I am wondering if Baohong might take the bullet train next year. Then, in his soft-spoken way, he tells me: “Actually, if you hadn’t wanted to train, we all would have flown back.”

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Lü Baohong lays rebar for reinforced concrete in residential buildings in Zhengzhou, January 14, 2019 (Photo by Matthew Chitwood).

The Hawthorne effect is a cardinal sin for sociologists. If the subjects of a study know they’re being watched, they might alter their behavior and nullify the results. As I sat in Car 16 interviewing Baohong and scribbling observations in my notebook, I realized, too late, the error of my socially unscientific ways. “I want to take the train with you,” were my words. So now, instead of flying home—a journey of two hours—we are on a greenskin for two days so that I could have an “authentic chunyun experience.”

Just then, A Hong and Qingzhi return. “We’re going to upgrade to hard sleepers,” A Hong says, upbeat. “Want to join?” Like the hard seats, the bunk beds are aptly named. Baohong looks at me, hopeful, and I relinquish all self-righteous intentions of an authentic chunyun. We pay the attendant and wheel our luggage the entire length of the train—past the pleather lady and a guy with a pile of peanut shells—to Car 2.

The hard sleepers were an extra $25 and worth every yuan. There are six to a compartment—a bottom, middle and top bunk on each side—and though the mattresses are firm, they are softer than plywood. Overall comfort, though, depends mostly on who is sharing your compartment.

When we arrive, two men are lounging on the coveted bottom bunks in full-body long johns. They look up at us from their card game.

“What country are you from?” the fat one asks me. He’s genuinely friendly, and also doesn’t mind making me feel like a spectacle. I ignore the turquoise undies that glare through his gaping fly.

“America.”

“You’re small for an American,” the lady from the next compartment pipes in.

“How long have you been in our China?” the skinny one asks. He and his friend are from the outskirts of Beijing and his guttural mumble is familiar from my years in the capital.

“Over ten years.”

“That’s a long time,” the fat one says, rolling his shirt up over his belly. The Beijing bikini is common up north, but mid-winter sightings are rare. “Will you forget your language?”

The lady next door scoffs at the question. The skinny guy defends the fat man. A migrant from the Jingpo ethnic group says he forgets some of his dialect when he’s in the city working. A man in uniform rolls a narrow cart down the aisle selling fruit. “20 kuai!” he yells. Three bucks.

Meanwhile, Baohong gets a text from Old Dong. He stayed behind to collect everyone’s pay for the last year, allowing Baohong and the others to get home to their families. Their bonuses were smaller than expected, he says and suggests that maybe the head of their work crew, the one who contracted with the developer and recruited them, is skimming off the top. They calculate amongst themselves what they made, how much their boss likely contracted for the job, and how much he must be shortchanging them. They won’t work for him again.

“If you find a boss you can trust,” the Jingpo man says, “then stay with him.” For seven years he has followed the same boss around the country.

The fat man and skinny guy are on their way to Yunnan to weld a smelter. Their boss thinks they can do it in 15 days, but they say 20. What do bosses know?

Everyone agrees.

“How much does a welder in your country make?” the fat one turns attentions to me again.

“How much is one of your dollars in our money?”

“How much to take a wife?”

Amidst cards and instant noodles, the questions continue until I take refuge in my top bunk. The lights go out at 22:00 and, except for snoring from the bottom bunk, Car 2 is quiet.

We wake up surrounded by a thick fog. Winter fields and cinder block houses blur past like an ashen smudge as we plod through the Chinese equivalent of flyover states. Since the country’s economic reforms began in 1978, it has had a strong east-west economic divide. Cities along the eastern seaboard were opened up early to international trade while inland areas were relegated to agrarian production. That divide largely continues today, as China’s megacities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen grow wealthier and its hinterlands lag further behind.

At the same time, in absolute economic terms, China’s rural residents are largely better off now than ever before. After 40 years of economic growth, wealth on the east coast is trickling inland. Western provinces are on an infrastructure binge, building highways, bridges, waterways and hydropower projects across the region. And in 2015, the Chinese Communist Party declared a war on rural poverty, vowing to eliminate it by 2020. The abject poverty bar is low—roughly $500 annual income per person, plus basic education, healthcare, and housing—but the impact of the anti-poverty policies is high, especially where I lived. Baohong’s in-laws received around $7,000 from the government to build a new house and in 2018 the village’s dirt road, which passes between our houses, was paved for the first time. While official statistics should always be taken with a grain of salt, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reports that more than 80 million people were lifted out of poverty from 2013 to 2018, and at his customary New Year’s greeting last month, President Xi Jinping declared another ten million lifted out of poverty in 2019. About seven million remain in abject rural poverty; by the end of 2020, Xi predicts that such absolute poverty will be eliminated, though many are skeptical as to the accuracy of the figures and the sustainability of the efforts.

In the past, China’s economic growth gave Baohong opportunity to go out and send resources back. Now, for the first time he may have options closer to home, within his native province, or even in his wife’s village. “Maybe I can stay home next year and do tea,” he tells me with hopeful eyes. Middle class consumers on the east coast are paying a premium for pu’er tea and his wife’s village grows a passable crop. “Reinforced concrete is exhausting,” he explains, “and my in-laws are getting too old to take care of my daughter. Keep trying! New life from my own hands!” He speaks the last two phrases with determination, like something he read off a sheet metal wall.

But for A Hong, the vocational school dropout, there are no other options. I join him between Cars 2 and 3—a de facto smoking section—where we lumber back and forth with the train. Finally I work up the courage to ask: “Why did you decide to drop out of school?” I pray the compassion and condemnation at odds in my heart don’t come through in my voice.

“My father’s kidneys failed,” he says. “He had to have dialysis twice a week and it’s expensive.” Ninety-five percent of treatment is covered under national health insurance but for a rural household the other five percent adds up quickly. “My mom wanted me to stay in school, but I knew we needed the money. So I went out.” He was only 15 then but he speaks of it matter-of-fact, with detachment, as if deciding between Pepsi or Coke. He adds, “My dad has been gone over a year now.” The tracks rumble in the silence and it occurs to me, as his hand raises a cigarette to his lips, that sometimes our decisions are made for us.

Life and death are set by Fate, wealth and power by Heaven.

An attendant’s voice pierces my dreams: “We are arriving at Kunming Station.” It’s 4:30 in the morning, and Car 2 begins to stir. Soon, the slow train chugs unceremoniously into the station and wheezes to a stop, then hundreds of haggard passengers crowd out onto the platform and shuffle on to their destinations. We shuffle to McDonald’s. Baohong will stay in Kunming until his wife gets leave from the café, and I will take an eight-hour van ride with A Hong back to his village. For now, the city sleeps and so do we, along with 20 others snoozing at McTables.

It is the end of my slow train journey and, for the slow train itself, the end of an era. Next year, no one will clamber through train windows for a seat. And, thankfully, no one will have to ride in a lavatory to get back home. Will China State Railway even dispatch any public-welfare slow trains? The “authentic chunyun experience,” as we knew it, is finished. Patronizing sentimentalism might mourn its loss, even at the gain of hundreds of millions of lives improved, and well-intentioned naivety might claim to grasp the complexities of a migrant worker’s life after just two nights on a train. I will not. But I do celebrate that friends like Baohong, for the first time in life, have options. I must admire friends like A Hong who contend with the dictates of Fate and reveal the strength of the human spirit. And I am grateful for the example of friends like Old Dong. He flew from Zhengzhou that morning and, as we slept fitfully in McDonald’s, he texted: “I’ve arrived in Kunming.”

Maybe next year I’ll fly.

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